August 3, 2005

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From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll -free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line. I might as well stop saying good morning because the
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Congress has now passed an extension of this silly playing with your clock stuff. So we'll only be in the, now we'll only be in the mountain time zone, like what, three months out of the year or some dumb thing like that.
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You know, freedoms are always in the greatest danger when those people are meeting.
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When those people get together back there, it's, and it's a wacky city. It really is.
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Have you ever driven in Washington, D .C.? My dad is a saint, but I remember Washington, D .C.
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pretty much put him over the edge. I remember him yelling very loudly, going,
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I can see where I want to go. The roads just don't let you go where you want to go.
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He made some comment about whoever laid out Washington, D .C. was clearly on some early form of narcotic addiction or something like that.
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Anyway, what did that have to, oh, it's my constant complaint about people who are playing with time and clocks and stuff like that.
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So for most of you, it's afternoon unless you're in California or something. And then most people in California don't know what time it is anyway.
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So anyhow, welcome to the Dividing Line. Got some clips to play today on various and sundry subjects.
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I was, I found, I used to have a program called
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Streambox Ripper, which would convert between the various codecs, you know,
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MP3, and it would convert real audio. Well, I guess real audio got upset about that, and so they stopped being able to make that.
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And then they changed the codec and stuff, and so, you know, converting real audio files over to MP3 or WAV can be a very long process.
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Well, last night, somebody in channel put a URL into, what was it called, DB, what was it called?
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DB amp something. Anyway, I downloaded the thing, and I think it's going to be like $14 eventually.
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But it converts real audio, and so that made it a whole lot easier to pull down Catholic Answers stuff again and open it up and utilize it in that fashion and convert it to MP3 and stuff like that.
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So I've got two clips here from Catholic Answers, and then we also have material to look at from Brother Davis.
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You may recall we were looking at Dr. Davis's comments on the subject of Calvinism, and we had some more material to look at there, plenty of it to look at, in fact.
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And so starting, though, with Tim Staples. Tim Staples has started to do, sort of take over some of the
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Catholic Answers live responsibilities. Jimmy Akin had been doing almost all of that, and now they're sort of splitting it up.
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And you know, Tim's just, people, people, Tim's still got a lot of Pentecostal in him, and he's always excited about what he says.
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What amazes me, though, about, you know, folks, folks, you know, folks, listen. What amazes me, though, is the fact that I don't see, especially
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Catholic Answers, this seems to be endemic to them primarily. They don't seem to think that there can be any challenge to what they're saying.
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And so they don't take the time to listen to what anybody else is saying, and they don't take the time to improve their apologetic presentation in light of the responses that are offered to them.
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And so they just keep repeating the same old things over and over and over again without any indication that they are listening to what others are saying, and that they are improving their apologetic methodology by providing meaningful, in -depth responses to those objections.
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And so listening to Catholic Answers, you basically, if you listen to a call -in program today, you're hearing the same program that you heard 10 years ago.
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Now, we may be talking about the same things we were talking about 10 years ago, but hopefully with a much broader spectrum of experience, the debates we've done,
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I mean, look at the breadth of the topics that we have addressed, and certainly knowing what people have said in response when they even bother.
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The odd thing is most people don't even bother to even attempt to provide a response. You know,
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Catholic Answers for a while, how many articles did they do in this rock magazine? Maybe three, attempting to respond to,
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I think, maybe grand total a page and a half of the Roman Catholic controversy. I think they responded to about a page and a half, and they didn't do those well.
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We responded to them on our own website and demonstrated where they were in error. So I don't understand that.
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I would think that if you're, you know, again, really focused upon the issues of truth and honoring truth, that it would just be natural to be constantly, you know, honing your skills, studying new things, reading new things and listening to what people are saying in response.
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That doesn't seem to be the case there, everybody, I guess I'm I'm pretty odd. This first caller asks
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Tim Staples about tradition, and I don't know about you.
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I, you know, I know that, you know, I've discussed this issue with Tim Staples. We debated solo scripture in Fullerton.
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And what was that? Ninety six, I think it was. That's where the guy standing there in line just yelled out the
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Eucharist, as if that was somehow everybody starts clapping. Oh, yeah. It's just like, oh,
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I'm refuted. That does it. There you go. And so anyways, we've gone over this stuff and I just get the feeling that when this guy calls, you just hear something in Tim's voice.
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And the response is, well, the response is just classic circular argumentation and and the the absolute demonstration of the fact that I have been right from the beginning and I continue to be right to this day that Roman Catholics who are consistent with their own epistemology, with their own claims of infallibility,
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Roman Catholics believe in sola ecclesia. Now, Tim Staples says no.
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But listen to this response and you tell me. That this isn't sola ecclesia, clearly demonstrated it into it.
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All right. First up, we are going to start with David in Pelham, New York today. Hello, David. I don't.
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Yeah. Hi, Tim. Hey, how are you, David? I'm pretty good. Yeah, it's great to speak with you because when
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I'm done with you, I'll probably listen to Hank Tenegraff. OK, great.
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Well, tell Hank that I'm waiting for the invitation to be back on the broadcaster. It's been a while after the
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Apostle tradition. Well, let me stop that just for a moment. Tim Staples has only been on the
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Bible Answer Man twice and both times he was on with me. So I didn't hear him saying
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I'm waiting to be invited back on the Bible Answer Man with James White. I am certain that Tim Staples would love to be on BAM by himself.
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He would he would truly, truly enjoy that. No clue what I meant. Gotcha. And I told
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James Hanken that and he didn't laugh, but it's like, right.
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My question is, what are the components of the Catholic tradition? Where could
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I find it? Right. Well, here's a good rule of thumb to use and a quick way you can respond to folks who ask this question, because I had a fellow say one time, you know, give me
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Catholic Church, I want it all written out, every bit of Catholic tradition. Right.
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Well, actually, tradition is that which was not written. So obviously, you're not going to have everything written out in our tradition.
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But here's the quick thing that will help folks to clarify things. When we're speaking of scripture and tradition with a big
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P, we are talking about the revelation of Almighty God that he gave us once and for all, as Jude chapter 1, verse 3 says, that the gospel has been once for all declared to the saints.
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There, St. Jude exhorts us to defend that faith, to contend or to earnestly contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.
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So the tradition, the word of God has once for all been delivered to us in the first century.
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There are no new traditions in that sense with a, you know, some will say with the big
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P. That is part of the revelation or the word of God that is unchangeable given once for all.
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Now, tradition is also used in the sense of the development of our understanding of the revelation that we have.
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So in that sense, you know, you will hear referred to developments in our understanding as our
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Catholic tradition. And that's certainly valid. But that doesn't mean a new revelation.
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It means a penetration into the revelation that we have. Now, when you say, OK, how do I know where do
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I get the components of? Well, the same way we know what the written tradition is, and I like to use written tradition and the oral tradition, because that's really how
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St. Paul does it in 2 Thessalonians 2 15. He says, stand fast in the tradition you have been taught either by word or written epistle.
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So according to St. Paul, the tradition has these two components, the written and the oral.
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So let me just stop it right there and just once again point out. If you've read the second book that I wrote, the first actually was originally
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The Fatal Flaw was one book that had all these appendices in the back that dealt with particular issues and the appendices got as big as the actual text of the book.
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And so it became a separate book called Answers to Catholic Claims. That was the book that came out. The Fatal Flaw came out.
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We sent the Catholic answers. Gerry Mattox contacted us, arranged the first debate in Long Beach in August of 1990,
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I believe, was when we had that first debate. Then right at that time, in fact, we brought some of the first ones with us to the debate there.
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My wife and I had this little corner of a table. You know, Catholic answers had all these tables laid out.
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We had this little corner of a table and the two of us called Answers to Catholic Claims.
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And if you've read that or if you've read the Roman Catholic controversy or if you've listened to the debates going back who knows how far now, you have heard these issues addressed, responded to, the exegesis of 2
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Thessalonians 2 .15, addressed repeatedly. And yet, you know, if if if I was in their shoes and I had only certain texts and I knew that clear exegetical argumentation had been presented that demonstrates that my use of those texts is completely and totally inaccurate,
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I could not open my mouth about it any longer without providing a response.
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But that isn't the case when listening to Roman Catholic apologists. You saw on the blog just what, last month,
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I wrote a series in response to Apollonio Lattar. I've addressed, for example, the fact that Roman Catholic, the
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Roman Catholic apologetics, the pop apologists demonstrate their utter bankruptcy in meaningful material by posting 15 second clips of one question in a cross -examination on the internet as if that somehow means something.
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And I pointed out, and you want to see just a complete self -destruction, look at what
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Apollonio Lattar does with 2 Thessalonians 2 .15. He just makes these wild assertions and then says, and we don't have to show you what tradition is.
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Nah, you know, that kind of stuff. And so here we go again.
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Tim Staples has heard responses to this passage that he's not addressing here.
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And if I knew that there is a strong response based upon the text to a text that I kept using over and over and over again,
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I'd have to say something about it. But they don't somehow have the same compunctions that I do in regards to that.
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So the same way we know what the components of the written tradition are, how, through the church, there, there's sola ecclesia, how do you know what the components of the written tradition are?
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Well, the church canonized scripture. So how do you know what the oral, the unwritten elements of the tradition are?
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Through the church. So what have I said over and over and over again? If Rome says we infallibly determine the extent, the content, the table of contents of the written tradition, and we infallibly interpret what it means when we want to.
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And if we determine the extent, the definition, the table of contents of the oral tradition and what it means, which is how you get the dogmatic definitions of papal infallibility and the
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Marian dogmas in these past centuries. If you define all that stuff, what does that mean?
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How can the one that defines the extent and meaning of the written scriptures and the extent and meaning of the oral tradition be under the authority of those things?
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It's not possible. It can't be done. If you define those things, you can't be corrected by those things, can you?
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If you say that you're infallible in your definition, interpretation of them, how can they then correct you?
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Logically, it can't be done. It's not possible. That's sola ecclesia.
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Now, when these folks try to respond to that statement, what do they do? They they don't respond to what
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I said. They don't respond to the argumentation. That's just misrepresenting us. We've never said that.
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I haven't said that you said that. I said it is the logical, necessary conclusion of your claims.
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And I just don't get folks that are going to respond to that on any meaningful level. It's just let's try to ignore that.
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Let's let's let's move on and ignore that man over there. Synods of Rome, Hippo, Carthage, finally,
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Florence, and of course, Trent. It is only through these councils that we know what the written tradition is or what the components of sacred scripture are.
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Well, in the same way, the only way we know what the tradition is, that is, the word of God that was given once for all in the first century is by that same church.
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The same way we know what the written tradition is, is the way we know what the oral tradition is as well.
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And that's by tuning in to the magisterium of the church, which is that gift given by Jesus Christ in the first century to safeguard the written and oral traditions.
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Now, of course, as soon as as soon as you hear someone say that someone like myself goes, wow, first century church didn't have any popes.
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There was a plurality of elders in Rome. There wasn't just one person. It didn't look to the bishop of Rome as the final authority in all things.
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And so you don't have popes. You don't have archbishops. You don't have cardinals. You don't even have a either celibate or sacramental or ordained priesthood class as Rome has today.
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And so how can you have this magisterium? I had a Roman Catholic right to the
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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. You've seemed for some reason somewhat out of sorts at first anyways, that I responded.
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If you write to the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, I might end up, I might not. I don't know if it's something that's relevant to me.
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It might might happen. I don't know. But it was given to me to respond to. And so I responded to it. And it was on this issue of of priesthood and the offices of the church, because on our website, it gives our understanding of the two offices of the church, the elder and the deacon and so on and so forth.
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And so. I just in in dealing with this, this particular issue,
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I just pointed out, let's look at the biblical materials. And I was referred to a article by James Aiken.
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I'm going to Jimmy Aiken. Sorry, I don't know if it was Jimmy or James when he wrote it. He did some debate with someone.
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I don't know who it was on the subject of the priesthood. And having debated the priesthood against Mitch Pacwa, I was very interested to read
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Aiken's comments, and I was just amazed at his use of English dictionaries to try to come up with presbyter, meaning priest.
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There was a perfectly good Greek term in the Greek New Testament for priest, and it's not presbyter.
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And that's not what they talked about. And instead of allowing the Pauline usage where he uses presbyter and episkopos in interchangeable formats and demonstrating that they're they're the same thing in his thinking, rather than define the term that way, you go to an
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English dictionary. The old English presbyter became priest. This somehow does something.
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This proves something as to what the Bible means. Just horrific argumentation.
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Very similar to the to the argumentation you get when you point out that there is no difference between Latria and Dulia functionally in the old, in the basic, the foundations of the original languages of the
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Old and New Testaments. And we'll get to that in a second because that's the second clip we're going to play from Tim Staples here.
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So, you know, there was no magisterium the way that the vast majority of Staples' audience is going to hear him.
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They think of what they saw just a few months ago, you know, the doors opening and all the all the cardinals come out and all that didn't exist, wasn't there.
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So this alleged gift developed over time, too. But if it's the means by which to protect this oral tradition that they refuse to show us, they can't show it to us.
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They, you know, at least Latria is open enough to say we don't have to show it to you and we're not going to.
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If it developed over time, then who was protecting this alleged stuff before it actually developed to the point where it could do anything?
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That's a question you'd like to ask. And so when you read your catechism, you are reading the components of our
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Catholic tradition as it is authoritatively interpreted by the church.
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So when you read about the hypostatic union or about the Trinity and the developments in our understanding of the
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Trinity, the nature of God as he revealed himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are reading components of our tradition that comes from both
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Scripture and the oral tradition. All right. Hopefully that'll be helpful for you.
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That's something else I could ask James. I'll just go ahead and stop it there because time is going by here and we have some some others.
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Moving down just later on in the program. To a question on Latria and Dulia.
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Not everywhere I go. Hey Tim, I need your help with a simple apologetics one on one question that I'm not sure
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I handled very well recently. Talking with one of my Protestant friends and he was trotting Catholics for worshiping
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Mary. And I said, look, we don't worship Mary. You know, we honor her. We pray to her. We ask her intercession with our
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Lord Jesus Christ. He said, oh, there you go again. You're praying to Mary. You said you're putting her on the same level as Jesus.
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And so I was struggling a little bit with, you know, the correct interpretation or what our definition of what we mean by saying that we pray to.
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Right. Right. Looking for your help on that. Sure. I think a good start.
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You can you can direct your friend. Now, let me stop it right there. Now, Tim Staples now works at Catholic Answers.
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OK, I would assume. I could be wrong about this, but but I would assume that part of what you do when you work in an apologetics ministry, because I I work at one.
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Is. You are trying as best you can to pay attention to developments in your field.
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That's one of the reasons I spend as much time as I do in our chat channel is I get a lot of information from from people who are surfing the net and they're saying, hey, did you see this?
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And they'll post a URL and I go, I didn't. Wow, that's interesting. This morning, someone sent me a
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URL to a. A book by an evangelical scholar called
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Is the Reformation Over? Well, I'm getting the book and we're going to review it and we're going to discuss it.
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Why? Because that's directly relevant to what we do. And I have an entire
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John Dominic Crossan library now and a Marcus Borg section and and because you're going to be dealing with those folks, you're going to be debating those folks, you've got to know what they're saying.
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Right. And so a debate took place between myself and Patrick Madrid.
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Now, Patrick Madrid is not unknown at Catholic Answers. He's done programs at Catholic Answers.
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He was the vice president there for many, many years. And so you would think that what took place in that debate and the argumentation that was put forward and the discussions and the fact that there were some responses that Patrick Madrid gave that were very, very troubling.
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Every time he was pressed. On the biblical commands regarding idolatry, he would come up with this relativistic answer.
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Well, the reason that the people of Israel were told not to do that with images is because they were prone to idolatry in a way that we aren't today.
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And you just go, eh, what? We're not prone to idolatry in the way they were back then.
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Where did that come from? And when you quote from an early counsel, a long before Nicaea, too, that said the same things about images.
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Well, in that area, they had this this proclivity to to idolatry, and so that was good at the time.
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But that doesn't mean anything for us today. And you just go, but but how can you say that?
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Because if you follow the same logic, then you can say that the law against homosexuality was only because they had a proclivity toward it at that time.
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And if we don't have a proclivity toward it now, then it's no longer relevant, right?
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I mean, it just it completely shreds the moral law of God. And so you would think that they would listen to that and go, that that might not be the best way to go.
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Let's come up with something else. Let's come up with a new way of doing this. And so here comes a question.
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We've addressed this question. We've addressed it numerous times. Has there been any development?
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Has there been any improvement? Has there been any even time invested in finding out what other people are saying and how to respond?
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The answer, you probably can guess for yourself, is nope. To look at a Webster's dictionary, the word pray.
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In fact, I have at home in my office anyway, a massive one of those big old dictionaries on a bridge that you can hit somebody over the head and kill them.
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You know, those those huge things. And if you look up the word prayer, you discover that prayer does not have one meaning.
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In other words, prayer does not only mean communication with God. Now, let's let's stop right there.
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Hopefully everybody in this audience is sitting there going, you've got to be kidding.
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You've got to be kidding. The objection raised this Roman Catholic was from a
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Protestant, probably an evangelical Protestant, let's hope a conservative evangelical Protestant. And that would mean his objection is based upon what?
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It's based upon the biblical definition of prayer.
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Not Webster's definition of prayer. However, when you hear someone responding to a biblical definition by running to Webster's, you just ran to someone who hasn't a clue how to do exegesis.
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They are completely out of the ballpark on this one. And yet how many times do
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I hear the leading Roman Catholic apologists utilizing this kind of horrific argumentation?
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It's just amazing. That involves the worship of God. The word prayer also means making an entreaty between rational persons, for example.
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Now, listen to how this works. I've discovered this over the years. This is how Catholic Answers works.
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This is how the Catholic apologists work. When you are making a really bad point, when you really don't have anything, you've got no ammunition in your gun.
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You're just pulling the trigger and it's going click, click, click, click, click, because there's nothing in there. What you need to do is tell a nice story.
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That really works. Let's face it, folks. It really, really works to try for a lot of folks.
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All you got to do is tell a story. And they'll let you slide on it, they'll let you go.
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And that's what happens here. You know, when for years, even before we did the first debate,
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Catholic Answers would be talking about this back when when Karl Keating was still very involved in going around speaking and stuff.
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They would do the on the intercession thing that when you'd make the objection that you don't need an intercessor with Christ and so on, so G is their only intercessor.
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Well, well, would you pray for me? You still see this and I saw it just recently, just a couple weeks ago on the
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Catholic Answers forums. Would you pray for me? And then you go, well, yeah, well, you just said that you shouldn't have anyone intercede, but you're praying for me.
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See this horrific argument as if my praying for somebody is is parallel to Christ's intercession for someone.
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They'll use they'll they'll do these little ploys. And tell a story, we'll tell a story, then we'll take a break right after I use this,
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I think I've done this before with you, Jerry, here on the broadcast that when I was in my teen years, you know,
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I wasn't always the nicest kid and we won't talk about that. But if you get a summons to appear in court, it actually reads, at least in Fairfax County, Virginia, it reads on the top that the county of Fairfax prays thee to appear in court on such and such day.
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Now, I don't think anybody would say that the county of Fairfax in Virginia was worshiping Tim Staples and say, we worship you,
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Tim. Absolutely amazing. So you use an old
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English usage of the term and then you read it back into something that was written in Greek in a completely different culture 2000 years earlier, as if somehow you're going to fool enough people into thinking that you actually are making a cogent argument.
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We'll come back with the rest of Tim Staples answer right after this. To save your soul from death, it's all works righteousness, you know, and I'm manufactured grace myself to die in some religious place by weeping hard on your face, saying prayers to some dead saints, you know, is the
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Bible true? Never before in history has the authority and inspiration of the
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Holy Scriptures been so viciously attacked by those outside the pale of orthodoxy and within the walls of traditional evangelicalism itself.
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Attempting to save my eardrums. I was sitting there.
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It's really loud in my headphones. It's really loud. And then it's candid and I am now permanently damaged.
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Oh, well, I'm not sure what part of too loud is is that I misspell it.
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I don't understand. Anyways, we're trying to listen to now. I'm going to have to have someone come in and sign language what
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Staples is saying here, because I can't hear it anymore. Listen, it's Tim Staples, who is is well, well,
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Steve Camp brought it back up. Let me tell you that. Yeah, we're trying to listen to what
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Tim Staples saying here about veneration of Mary and the saints. And here comes the
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Latria Julia distinction. Come to know they were saying, get over here or we're going to arrest you.
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You know, the point is, we used to say it in old English, you know, pray tell or I pray thee, my
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Lord, the British will still use that kind of language. So when we talk about prayer to Mary and prayer to God, we are talking about essentially different contexts, because when we pray to God, we attach to that prayer, what we call as Catholics Latria, or worship that is due
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God alone. When we pray to Mary, we attach to that prayer, Julia or honor, the honor that is due to great men and women in the body of Christ.
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Of course, Mary deserves a unique honor. Why? Well, Luke chapter one, verse 48, we have a prophecy from the lips of Mary herself.
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All generations shall call me blessed. And by the way, some biblical scholars believe that Mary may well have been referring back to Psalm 45, 17.
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Now let's stop right there, because first of all, we've documented in print, it's in the
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Roman Catholic controversy, it's in answers to Catholic claims, it's in debates that we've done, that the distinction made between Latria and Julia founders upon an examination of the underlying terms used in both the old and new testaments.
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That when you trace them back to the commandments, the very commandments that this distinction is used to get around in the old
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Testament, that the underlying Hebrew terms that are used do not substantiate the distinction that is made in formal
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Roman Catholic dogmatics, demonstrating that it is Roman Catholic dogma that is superior to the words, the scriptures themselves for Roman Catholics.
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But as my argument was against Patrick Madrid, God is going to judge what is and what is not idolatry based upon what his word says, not based upon what the magisterium of the
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Roman Catholic Church says. And when the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church contradicts what God's word says, so much the worse for the magisterium of the
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Roman Catholic Church and for those who follow the magisterium of the
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Roman Catholic Church. That's a very bad thing. But now we have a situation here where Tim is going to present very briefly this concept of a citation from Psalm 45 and apply it to Mary.
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Now what's interesting here is Psalm 45 is quoted in the New Testament. It's quoted in Hebrews chapter 1, and this is the marriage psalm.
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It's a psalm about the marriage of the king of Israel to a foreign queen.
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If you read the entirety of the section, you will see that it's talking to this queen and how she's come from a far land and she's brought her maids with her and all the rest of these things.
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And it's about this queen that is marrying the king. And you would think if the king is, in Hebrews 1, identified with Christ, that if you're going to find any fulfillment for Isaiah 45, what would it be?
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Who is Christ's spouse? Well, the church. And that was picked up in early centuries as a parallel to Isaiah 45 and the queen that is there.
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But what has happened since then? Well, the development of Marian dogma.
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Which, and you might want to take a look at this, Psalm 45, of course, is a famous messianic text that is actually quoted in Hebrews chapter 1, verses 8 and 9.
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The early part of Psalm 45 refers to Christ. But the second part of Psalm 45 is a less known half of this psalm that refers over and over again to Mary prophetically.
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And in verse 17, it says, I will cause your name to be celebrated in all generations.
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Does that sound familiar? I will cause your name to be celebrated in all generations. Therefore, the peoples will praise you forever and ever.
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Amen. Now, that's referring to a woman and saying the people will praise you.
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Actually, it's referring to a queen marrying the king. Let's keep things straight here.
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I know in the Pentecostal church I came from, if somebody said, we're going to praise Mary, they would have called me a heretic and you, that's of the devil, brother.
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And as they, well, probably should have. But when we talk about this particular text, the numeric status is, therefore, the peoples will give you thanks forever and ever.
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And, but it can be translated to praise. And in what context? The context of the queen and the king and the honor that was given to them as the royal court in that particular context, that isn't using the terms that are related to, of course, worship and to honor
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Latria, Dulia, and things like that. It'd be nice if they could track down some references that are actually relevant there.
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But anyway. You don't praise anybody, but God, well, guess what the scripture says? Mary will be praised in all generations.
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Does that mean she'll be prayed to? Notice the huge gaps in logic.
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They're just part and parcel of the Marian dogmas. They've just been covered over primarily with emotional filler.
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Sort of like the stuff that slipped on the shuttle, you know, the little, the stuff that they, between the tiles, the silicone stuff, that you just sort of hope that all the dedication and the emotion will fill in these massive gaps that exist in the actual argumentation.
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There's nothing wrong with that if we understand we're using that language in the context of which
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Psalms uses it. We are praising a great woman of faith, just as, you know,
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St. Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 5 .17 to give double honor to the teaching elders or...
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Which you guys don't have, do you? Give double honor to the teaching elders.
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We just don't have those. We turned them into priests, didn't we? 1 Thessalonians 5 .12, the scripture says to honor those who are over you in the
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Lord. And that term honor does not mean worship, does it?
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Is that the argumentation that is being made here? Is that, well, these are parallels here and, you know, we're to, you know, utilize this particular terminology as parallel to the giving of hyperdulia to Mary or something along those lines.
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No one's questioning that it's proper to honor people. The problem is we're not praying to elders.
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Prayer is an act of worship, all the Webster silliness aside. Prayer in scripture is an act of worship.
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You are praying and asking for grace. Listen to those prayers. Listen to the prayers of Roman Catholicism.
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Into your hands I commit my spirit. Into your hands I commit my eternal salvation. I'm sorry, that is not even slightly parallel to honoring elders who teach well.
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That's what we're doing. We are absolutely biblical when we honor the saints and pray to them.
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Does that help at all? Oh, that helps tremendously. And just one other quick question. Tim, is there any section in the catechism that would, you know, go into what you just laid out in terms of understanding the different contexts of prayer?
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Absolutely. And I wish I could remember one off the cuff. But I'll tell you what I could do if you'd like.
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I can drop you an email if you want to leave your information. Notice he doesn't give him a scripture reference.
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Because he can't. Here with our screener. Do you have an email address?
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Sure do. That would be terrific. Yes, because I don't have it at my fingertips, but I have it right over there on my computer in my office.
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And I'll zip it over to you. All right. It's Pat in ScaldingHumidJacksonville .com.
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No. Pat, hang in there. Stay cool and refreshed there. And our call screener will get your email address.
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And Tim will send that out right out to you. By the way, for Mary, we use the, you mentioned dhulia.
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For her, isn't it hyper dhulia, right? Exactly. In fact, it's the same idea, right? That's right.
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It's a matter of, and that's a very good point. We give unique honor to Mary because of the unique gifts she was given.
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And we call it hyper dhulia. We give proto dhulia in the tradition to her husband,
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St. Joseph. We give everyone dhulia, all the saints that is. But here's the key.
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The difference between the honor we give Mary and we give to St. Francis of Assisi is a matter of degree.
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We give more. It's a matter of degree. The honor we give to Jesus is a difference in essence.
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It is essentially difference. I mean, as radically, when I say essentially difference, I mean it's like the difference between a monkey and a human being.
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So there you have this, what was all that based on? The idea that latria and dhulia are substantially different from one another.
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Biblically, they are not. You cannot worship someone without serving them. You cannot serve someone without engaging in worship in the sense of serving
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God. Look at the uses of the terms. Like I said, we've addressed all this many, many times in the past.
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But there is such a belief in tradition that you have this kind of ability to just simply say, see, we are being completely biblical.
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Everything I just gave you isn't even slightly in its proper context, and I have jumped huge chasms of logic in doing so.
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But I'm going to tell you that I'm being biblical because that's what we think.
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See. And sadly, how many people are are taken in by that?
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A large, a large portion, a large portion of them, indeed. Well, we've got one phone call.
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I've got some other clips I want to get to, but the the topic transitions a little bit.
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So we'll go ahead and take this call and go back to some of the other clips. Let's talk with Brandon in Indiana.
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Hi, Brandon. Hey, James, how's it going? Doing good. Good. Hey, I really appreciate your ministry.
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And it means a lot to me. I used to be a moderate Calvinist, but thanks to your ministry, you know,
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I've come to be a five pointer. But my question is about kind of the nature of Christ.
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And I was curious, was his nature like Adam's in the sense that he had the ability to to choose to sin and to not wait a minute, let me rephrase that.
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Did Christ was Christ's nature like Adam's and that Adam was created perfect and he had the ability to not sin and the ability to sin?
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Was that how Christ's nature was? Well, it sounds like you're asking about the impeccability of Christ and people disagree on whether that was the case or not.
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Obviously, Christ is different from Adam in the sense that he the hypostatic union, the relationship of the divine, the human in him is obviously not the case with Adam.
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And so while there is a parallel created between them in that neither is under the curse of the law, of course, until Adam falls and then
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Christ bears it voluntarily. And while there are parallels between them in their offspring, that is, in Adam's offspring, which is all of mankind in the humanity that is joined to Christ for those who are in him, those parallels are made by Paul.
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As far as the as the as the human nature of Christ is concerned, I do not believe when we look at Christ as a person, as as one person with two natures, that it is as definitional of the human nature to be able to sin as it is definitional of the divine nature to not be able to sin.
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And people say, well, you know, he couldn't have been tempted in all ways as we are if he was not able to sin.
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But that phrase always actually just simply means in all the kinds of ways.
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It's not you know, we are tempted in many ways by our previous sins. We are tempted by the experience of sin in the past.
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Christ was not tempted in that way. So it is not appropriate to say that every single temptation that mankind has ever faced,
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Christ faced himself. He never faced the temptation to relapse into drug use or to relapse into adultery or whatever other kind of situation we can we can raise there.
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So I do not believe that that the that the definition of humanity is such that you have to include has to be able to sin and hence to say that Christ had to be able to sin because I believe that that capacity is less definitional of humanity than the inability to sin is definitional of deity.
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What would have I mean, when you consider what would have happened in that particular situation, you know, the universe would have ceased to exist in a moment,
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I guess, if God were to send. So, no, I don't I don't I believe in the impeccability of Christ.
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I believe that he as the God man, as I just explained, that was his nature.
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And so he would have been different from Adam in that particular way as far as due to the nature that was his and an absolutely unique nature.
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And that's that's why we need to be careful when we address these issues, simply because the fact that we are talking about something that's absolutely unique and making comparisons, you have to be very careful how far you take comparisons or you'll end up destroying the uniqueness of the person being discussed.
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Right. OK. All right. All righty. All right. Well, thank you very much, Brandon. God bless.
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All right. Bye bye. All right. Another clip I wanted to play for you a couple of weeks ago.
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Oh, by the way, need to make an announcement. I will be somewhere. I don't even know where I forget where it is
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I'm flying into before I get to where I need to go in in Georgia someplace.
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I will be someplace else on Thursday, either in the air or landing or sitting at a boarding gate or something.
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I don't know. And so I will not be around. On Thursday, so this will be the only dividing line for the week and Lord willing, then back on our regular schedule for a couple of weeks and then get the last week in August, and that's when the wheels fall off, because obviously the first week of September, last week of August, first week of September, that combined week there, we will be up in Seattle for the debate and the conference and the cruise.
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And it's going to be very exciting. And I hope all of you who have been planning to attend have already made your your plans to do so and have gotten your tickets and hotel rooms and all sorts of wonderful, fun stuff like that.
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Anyway, last week sometime we did a radio free Geneva. Episode and we were listening to Dr.
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Davis going after Calvinism and one of the clips I didn't play that I wanted to get to was
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Dr. Davis addressing Acts 1348. Now, given that he held up Dave Hunt's What Love Is This in front of everybody.
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I sort of wondered if he would follow Hunt into one of his, you know, depends on which incarnation of Dave Hunt's excuses on Acts 1348 we're talking about.
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Since he held up the paperback, I'd assume it would be the first citation of the New World translation and all the rest of that stuff.
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But here you have a text. And you get a 52 second response to it.
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Let's listen to what Dr. Davis had to say. Some ask about Acts 1348, that says as many as were ordained to eternal life, believed the
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Calvinist assumes that the word ordained means those particular Gentiles were sovereignly chosen to be given eternal life completely apart from knowledge of their response.
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And then they were irresistibly drawn to salvation. But that thought is not consistent with the use of the word ordained in other places in the scripture.
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For instance, in John 15, 16, Jesus said, I've ordained you that you should go and bring forth fruit.
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Ephesians 2 .10 says believers are created and ordained to do good works. Does that mean that you and I are irresistibly forced to bear fruit and to do good works?
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And that's it. That's all that was said. And there's a little problem. Now, you see, that kind of preaching works for folks who don't want to dig into the materials.
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But, you know, I have to wonder if maybe just maybe the distribution and prevalence of good
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Bible software might start causing some problems for this kind of preaching. I'd like to think that.
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I know just having the information there doesn't change the heart, but because, you see, if you were to go to Acts 13 .48
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and let's say you had Bible works, OK, and you were to find the
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Greek term that is translated as ordained in the text and you were to utilize its tasso, by the way, tetagmenoi in this particular passage, and it's in a periphrastic construction.
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And if you were to click on that. And do a search on the lemma on the on the the basic form of the word, you would discover that none of the two passages that were cited.
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By Dr. Davis, use that word. Dr. Davis was doing what so many people do.
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He was using the Strong's method of interpretation. And that's where you go to the
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King James translation and you look up the word ordain. And you assume, wrongly, that the underlying words are the same.
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They're not. They are not the same. There are only eight verses in the
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New Testament that utilize this particular term. And even if you do that, even if you just at least accurately look only at tasso, you would also have to recognize that this particular form.
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Is a participle and it has a finite verb in front of it, and that's what's called a periphrastic.
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I went into all this in The Potter's Freedom and I went into it in debating Calvinism. And if you want to see
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Dave Hunt run down the road, read my sections on Acts 1348 and debating
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Calvinism and see if he ever responds. And then compare it with what he says in his other books where he can put anything out he wants without having to worry about somebody responding to him.
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That's that was very, very sadly illustrative of what is really going on there.
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You'd still have to deal with the periphrastic construction and what that means and what that does to tenses and how the understanding is.
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And then you'd have to go, well, OK, there's there's three uses outside of Luke.
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So you start with Luke's uses and then you look at the uses in Matthew.
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You have one in Matthew. I've got two in Paul and Romans and First Corinthians. See if they shed any light on. You see, most of these folks, when they come to this passage, here's here's a big red flag, folks.
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People ask, you know, how can I recognize when someone is allowing their tradition to interrupt the exegesis of the scriptures?
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Here's the big red flag, A, using Strong's Exhaustive Concordance and B, even if they start doing it right, do they first allow the meaning of the term as used by the author?
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So when you're studying Paul, you start with Pauline usage. When you're studying Luke, you look at Luke and usage, especially
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Luke, because he has a very unique style, a very unique usage of language, a very unique usage of syntactical relationships such as the periphrastic construction.
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You look at how Luke uses it first, then expand out. Many people will will go, well, it's used over here in a different way.
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It doesn't have to mean what you think it means. That is exegesis. That's not exegesis.
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That's someone defending a tradition. That's someone who doesn't want
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Acts 1348 to say what Acts 1348 is saying.
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See. And I see this all the time. I had somebody come and channel just last week and I said, hey, look at this over theology web.
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This guy is throwing all this stuff out about Acts 1348 and this is what it's supposed to mean.
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And frequently they'll try to go with the middle or or they'll say, well, it means they appointed themselves and they'll do all this incredible stuff just to get around the plain meaning of the text.
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And as I said, the person who came in and said, you know, when you've got someone who is probably a first or second year
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Greek student at the best and they confidently assume that the understanding of ordained eternal life is just based upon surface level interpretation and translation.
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You know, you've got a problem when someone like that comes up and in reality, what they're doing is they're saying every single
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English translation done by scholarly committee is wrong. It's wrong.
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That's what they're saying. Now, they're not going to admit that they're not even going to bring that up, but that's what they're saying.
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They're saying, I know more about this than all of the scholars involved in all of the committee done translations.
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And you know what, when they when they make that kind of a statement, you really want to sort of ask them, do you do you really apply that kind of thinking to to the rest of the text?
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And the answer is no, they don't. As long as that text isn't bothering their translations, they're not going to go to that depth.
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They're not going to even care. Not even going to look at it. But oh, when you come across a passage where God's sovereign freedom to act as king over his own creation is presented, isn't it?
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Just like Spurgeon said, then men gnash their teeth. That's when they get upset.
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That's exactly what happens. Well, there's another example, folks, the clarity of God's truth and the ability of man to love his traditions more than God's truth.
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Well, like I said, no dividing line this Thursday, but Lord willing, unless something really goes really wacky down there in Georgia, where I'll be over the weekend, we will be back on Tuesday morning, back on the dividing line.
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Hope you'll be there. Thanks for listening. God bless. We've been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.
59:40
Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the
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World Wide Web at AOMIN .org, that's A -O -M -I -N .org, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates and tracks.