Open Phones on the Dividing Line

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We're going to be getting to some Zoom calls a little bit later on, just a little bit, not too far down the road. So, Rich posted a how to get into the Zoom thing.

I think there's even a video on it somewhere, I think. Anyway, so we're going to try to get to some Zoom calls. If you're interested in jumping in, please try to make them calls that could be useful to maybe more folks than just you yourself, or that someone could meaningfully respond to.

I'm just looking at a topic right now, and it's like, it's so specific that it would require a tremendous amount of preparation to meaningfully comment on it. And there's no way for me to do that, obviously.

So, anyway, a couple things. First, since it's in front of everybody right now on social media, the video of the young woman in England who has violated these draconian, tyrannical, 1984, all over again, I guess you didn't actually read the book in school, laws that have been passed in a number of countries where you are not allowed to say anything about abortion within a certain distance of a place they murder babies.

I mean, it is the state's... Another way the state clearly sponsors the murder of unborn children. And so there's this woman and she's just standing there. She's standing off the road in some bushes, basically, totally silent.

And she's arrested because she was specifically asked, are you praying? And she said, I might be praying in my head. She was not praying out loud. She's just standing there silently. And she's arrested for violation.

And the cop actually talks about, we need to protect people. And I just asked on Twitter, I said, what happened to the souls of these people? What is it like to be the servant of the state and to have to do the things that this guy is doing?

I'm not saying I feel sorry for the guy, because I don't. But I am pointing out to him, who knows, maybe in God's providence, someone might point him to somebody who would say, do you realize, do you understand that there is a day of judgment coming?

The fundamental difference between Western culture today and Western culture only 70 years ago, is 70 years ago, everybody knew judgment was coming, that there would be a day of judgment. And that reality has been, now it takes 12 years, 13 years of public school and university, and the complicity of Hollywood and everything else, and of course, the destruction of the nuclear family, and everything goes with that, to silence that conscience that is a part of our created nature.

It's taken a lot of work, it's been very purposeful, very purposeful, very intentional, and very successful. Very. You see this happening in Western culture, and you know what's coming for us. There are places that want to do the exact same thing.

We just have this thing called the Constitution, that though it's got numerous holes blown through it already, and we'll have more unless God does something major in this nation, as far as revival is concerned.

These folks in the UK don't have that kind of thing. And so it is amazing to watch, it's sad to even consider what's going on there, and that you cannot stand within a certain distance of a place of the murder of unborn children and pray.

Can you imagine the British people of the 19th century, 18th century, 17th century, if you told them that someday this is what would be going on, the homosexuality, the profaning of marriage, the grooming of children, the murder of unborn children, just the level of public indecency that is now just...

I mean, I had a friend last night, he and his church did a protest outside of a drag queen story hour thing, and the Antifa communists showed up, and he just said it was just astonishing, the behavior, the language, the degradation, the human degradation that he, not only that they were there to protest, but that he saw amongst the people that were there to defend this kind of behavior that I can certainly remember when nobody defended it, and it wasn't that long ago.

It wasn't that long ago. The speed is astonishing. So, I can now tell you, and I should have brought this up, sorry, I was trying to get Accordance to put the right Bible translation where it needs to go.

I can now tell you some exciting stuff about February. By the way, tonight I'm going to be with Andrew Rappaport on his Apologetics webcast, starting three hours from now, I believe. Supposed to be. I hope.

Well, it's three o 'clock here, both starts, I think, I thought it was between six and eight. So, yeah, mine says 6 p .m. So, look up Andrew Rappaport's Apologetics thing, and I may have to double-check that.

I hate the stupidity of daylight savings time. It is just... Stop it. It's just... Stop it. Anyway, I'm going to be on... Evidently, there's a skeptic that called in when Jason Lyle was on, and so there's going to be some discussion along those lines this evening.

But, our next big trip... What? Was I right? Oh, I thought you were looking up Andrew Rappaport's thing. Okay. Our next... My next big trip, which, you know, I realize... Does anyone else do what we're doing right now?

I don't think so. No. No. As I think on everybody that, you know, I've spoken at large conferences with, yeah, no, they don't do this. No.

As usual, we're out here all by ourselves doing what we do.

Well, you know, once you have to have the right drugs in your body to be able to fly, I'm imagining a number of people would be contacting us. So, how do you do this again? Which end of the sewer hose goes where?

Yeah, okay. Anyway, we do our road trips, and I do the road trips. And like I said, the last time I was on a road trip, someone expressed sincere disappointment that Rich was not with me, and I explained to him that if Rich and I tried to stay in the same RV, the result would be the end of Alpha New England Ministries, and probably one of the two of us, because we're both armed.

So, anyway, we will be headed... Well, I can only go one direction. Man, the more California, there is that law they passed where you can now lose your medical license. I think it goes into effect in just a few weeks.

Lose your medical license in California for going against the narrative. So, if you said in 2021 the stuff that is now being proven by study after study after study after study about the dangers of certain medical activities, you can lose your license.

California is a communist state run by a mono party, and I have no interest in going there. There are some fine, wonderful Christian people there, but I also happen to know a lot of fine, wonderful Christian people that are fleeing there.

So, yeah, I can't go west, so I go east. I'm looking like I think I'm going to try to work out the summer trip where I normally go up to Colorado. I'm going to try to go up the middle of the country, all the way to North Dakota when it's not as cold as it is now.

Those of you that are experiencing 40, 50, 60 degrees below zero wind chills, yeah, not coming to that time of year. The walls on my RV are not that thick. It's got a good heater in it, but no, not doing that right now.

I feel sorry for all of you. It's 65 or so, 66 here today, something along those lines. And Rich is cold. Oh, and he turned on the heater on my end of the office. The funny thing is, he turned it off before I got here, but what he forgot was it hadn't been on since last year.

And what happens when you run the heater for the first time? It smells. And so I come walking in, you turn the heater on. It was 55 degrees down there.

I don't care. It stinketh.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Hey, I was showing my wife the travel map a couple of days ago.

Oh, the road trip map?

And she's just amazed at all of the dots that are on there all over the country.

But in a lot, and sadly, in a number of places where I'm never going.

For roads and tundra.

Yes.

So anyway, February, February, sorry, February. I can tell you right now that we are going to be having a debate in Houston. Same location as when was the debate last year? That was in February, wasn't it?

I think it was. I think it was. Yeah, yeah, I think it was. So it's going to be almost exact. Maybe we're starting a tradition here. The flyer isn't done yet, so I don't want to get into too much detail.

But we are going to have a debate on, I believe, the 7th? Or is it the 8th? I should have been more careful about this. Yeah. Might be the 8th. Wednesday the 8th. Either that or it's Tuesday the 7th. We'll have the specific details.

I can pull up the email and it'll be right there, but I'm not going to waste your time with that. Anyway, the subject is what is marriage? And I will be debating an individual who's widely published, but is, I would describe as fully deconstructed progressivist.

So issues of biblical authority and interpretation and all that type of stuff will be front and center. That's the kind of people we're dealing with a lot, so I'm hoping it will be useful and representational.

It'll be very early on in the trip. I think I leave that Saturday and head that direction. And then I'm going from there to Louisiana, where I will be speaking on Roman Catholicism. And then heading north in Louisiana, making a stop up toward Shreveport.

I think it's Shreveport. Anyway, and then heading over to Jeffrey Rice's church, and we will have a debate there. I know that one is on Saturday the 18th. I believe the conference actually starts on the 16th.

But on Saturday the 18th, I will have a debate. And what will be interesting about that is yesterday I watched a debate between the man I'll be debating, who's the King James Only representative, and Dan Barker.

So, who I've debated twice formally, but we had actually engaged a number of times on... Was Barker part of the Atheist series we did? I think he was. I think he was, because my first encounter with him was on the Tom Likas show on KFYI, and I was...

That one, too? Really? That's amazing. These go back to the 1980s. That's how long Dan Barker and I have gone at each other. And so it's fascinating to be on the King James Only guy's side, obviously, but to be about to debate him, having debated Dan Barker a number of times.

Though that's not something I would really be thinking about doing in the future for various reasons. So anyways, that will be on Saturday the 18th in, I believe it's Tullahoma, I think is the name, the location there in Tennessee.

And obviously, we'll be putting all this up on the website if you're in the area and you'd like to go to those debates. So, two debates coming up in February, and hoping for another debate in May. And then, of course, April 1st in Salt Lake City, Jeff Durbin and I will be debating two agnostics on whether morality is possible without God.

So that's a fair number of debates just for the spring this year. That's four. And that'll get us going again. We sort of stalled out there for a while on the formal debate scene during COVID. And who knows what's going to happen?

It's still only December. And remember, I started hearing about the COVID stuff in, what was that, January? Yeah, of 2020. And then all of a sudden, it blows up and goes everywhere. So there you go. So, exciting stuff.

Obviously, big prayer request is when you're traveling, you're meeting people and stuff like that. And my immune system's a good one, but nothing's perfect. So pray for continued health on a very lengthy trip.

Because I think it's going to be one, two, three and a half weeks or so on the roads. So pray for that. That will be exciting. I'm excited about it and looking forward to meeting all of you down there.

And so Houston, here we come again. And I'll be really interested to see how the new truck handles those Houston freeways. Because I don't know if you remember, it was called porpoising. That was the first time I really started using the bags on the other, really pumping them up.

But now we've got a much bigger vehicle. So we will find out how that's going to work. Wait, he said we should? Oh, who said? Someone just called you or something?

Oh.

Okay, yeah. Well, we can talk about it later. It's really not the issue right now. But I will admit that it is awfully nice to be able to raise the truck up. That saved me a number of times. But, yeah, we don't need to raise it up much.

That's not our problem. So, anyways. Oh, topics, yes. Oh, okay. All right. So we've got one, two, three, four, five, six.

Wow.

Okay. Well, that will probably get us through the rest of the hour. Oh, that's seven. If we start with Bruce, right? Bruce still there? All right. I think Bruce is the first one up. So I guess I need to find this thing here.

So, you know, this is like 1952 technology. And we're still, you know, it still works. But you would think we'd have something better now. All right. Let's talk to Bruce. Hello, Bruce.

Hi, Dr. White.

How are you?

First time, long time, all those things. It's a privilege to speak to you.

Yes, sir. What's up?

So I've had the opportunity to speak with Mr. J. Dyer. We debated for about half an hour. I sent that over to Rich, actually. I'm sure you're a busy man, but if you want to listen, you can. But I just wanted to bring this up.

So the thing that I really wanted to hammer him on, although he got into all sorts of things, as you can imagine, canon of scripture and historianism, heresy, et cetera. But the thing that was difficult for me to try and portray, and I thought maybe you could help me with this, was, in other words, they're presupposing an epistemology that is not based in the word.

It's based in some corporal authority of the church. And so they raise the question constantly as to where their epistemological standard even arises. And so to me, they're operating under an authority of scripture, but they're not acknowledging that truth.

So even if they were to say the bishops consenting, you know, under consensus dogmatize or create doctrine over the years, there's still a standard by which they have to be held to. And they won't admit that that standard is the standard of scripture, whether oral or written.

So I just wanted to know like how you would navigate that, you know, it's really, it's basically presuppositionalism, of course, but just wanted to get your take on that specifically.

Well, and again, for folks that aren't familiar with Eastern Orthodoxy, my perspective on especially the apologists, Eastern Orthodox apologists in the West, and Jay Dyer is a clear mixture of things because he's been different things at different times and has moved long ways.

And I'm not sure that he really recognizes how he's been influenced by each of the various stopping points he's had in his rather wide journey. But Western apologists for Eastern Orthodoxy are very different than the actual Eastern Orthodox people that I've interacted with.

And one of the things I've tried to explain to people, one of the reasons I don't think it would even really be helpful to even try to write a book on the subject is Eastern Orthodoxy involves a completely different way of thinking than most of us in the West are really even capable of doing.

And as a result, it's in the West, we end up arguing the same topics that we do with Roman Catholicism, but that doesn't really necessarily get to what is taught within countries that are Orthodox. So where you have cultural Orthodoxy and you have just widespread expression of Orthodoxy, which in most instances creates a nominalism, a cultural form, rather than a really lively spiritual form, but still.

So Russian Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, Ukrainian Orthodoxy now, and all the stuff that's going on with that, those are different things. And one of my criticisms all along, one of my observations has been that it seems to me that Orthodoxy is encased in a wall of, four walls of tradition frozen in time.

And so the obvious reality is that even, let's say, let's even push all the way back to 7th century, that 7th century tradition in the East is the bedrock, the foundation. There was a lot of development before that.

And there was a lot of diversity before that. And so there has to have been, over time, picking and choosing what was going to be allowed to define the liturgy and the understanding of what the liturgy meant and everything that comes from that.

And so there has been a process of development. And clearly, historically, there was a movement away from the acceptance of the true nature of scripture as the norma normata that had already begun by that period in time.

Now, it obviously goes much, much, much farther than that in Rome and all the things that happened there. And Orthodoxy, at least, has not had the kind of, in most areas, has not had the kind of development that Rome has as far as how far it goes.

But still, there was, in those centuries post-Nicene Orthodoxy and up into, like I said, let's go ahead and say 7th century, there is still traditional development at that point. And so when you say they're under the authority of scripture, well, everybody claims a place for the authority of scripture.

Rome does, Orthodoxy does, all the subgroups and sub-subgroups and flavors over here and flavors over there have to deal with the realities of scripture. But the fundamental question comes down to, and this is a question now taking place amongst Protestants as well, and that is what is the relationship between the nature of scripture as divine revelation and the nature of tradition as defined by an ecclesiastical body at some point in history?

Now, of course, we know that what's being defined by the Bishop of Constantinople today, that interpretation is very different than what would have been seen, say, in the 9th century or the 10th century.

So there are lenses even in the analysis of tradition. But when you say, well, they're under the authority of scripture, certainly because of the place it had in the liturgy of the church at the time, it can't exist apart from scripture.

But the real question for the Orthodox person, in their own understanding, is how necessary and thick is the lens of the liturgy and the tradition derived from the liturgy and the theology, for example, of the energies and things like, how central is that to being able to understand scripture?

And from what I have seen, what Orthodoxy lacks that it horribly needs is the ability for reformation.

Yeah, that's what I brought up to Jay as well. There's no position that they could even reform past the 8th century.

Right, they can't. Not without sacrificing what they believe to be their very identity, in essence. Now, I'll have to admit, some of the current disputes, the old calendar, new calendar, what's going on in regards to Ukraine, Russia, Moscow, Kiev, all that kind of stuff, I have to wonder if that couldn't be in some way used to break some of that stiffness.

I would love to see somebody stand up, sort of like, what was the guy's name after the Reformation? Names escaping me at the moment, but you had a Metropolitan, a Patriarch that read Luther and went, hey, there's some good stuff there, and that caused a huge scandal, but that's the only hope, really, is for there's some kind of light to break through the shadows of the traditions to allow for some kind of Reformation to take place.

Yeah, are you referring to John Huss or after that?

No, it was after that. It was actually after Luther. There was a letter written. Yeah, it starts with an L, Lucaris or something like that. He actually wrote a catechism that was clearly influenced by Reformational thinking, and the scandal of it was, it wasn't coming from, again, the liturgical tradition that everything has to come from.

So, anyway, all of that to get back to, you know, that is the apologetic issue with Eastern Orthodoxy is, can you get someone to recognize the nature of Scripture as Theotokos, and then distinguish that from the tradition, the liturgy?

That's exactly right, yeah. I have an ecumenical meetup pretty regularly. When I say ecumenical, you know, I have a cigar lounge and these guys come around, and there's four or five Orthodox guys in a small town where I live, you know, Reform guys, Catholic guys, and it's the constant issue.

It is the issue of the day.

It has to be.

Every time.

You can't. The attempt to get beyond this, sort of like, to be honest with you, take a look at the Lutheran-Catholic Accord in 99. Trying to pretend that we now have agreement by just simply skipping the word alone.

What does that actually do? It does not actually accomplish any kind of advancement as far as a meaningful discussion is concerned. And so, by now, we know what the issues are, and we can't go anyplace else.

As much as we'd like to, as much as we want to, the parameters have already been defined, and every generation has to lay that stuff out and recognize how important it is. And most people don't even discuss these things.

We've got the other Paul down in Australia does the same kind of thing you're talking about doing, and he's constantly meeting with Orthodox guys and stuff like that. And every time I just sort of look at it, I just go, yeah, that's the same stuff I was arguing before the internet on what was called Fidonet, okay?

And in the Bible echo of Fidonet in the late 1980s.

There's nothing more to the sun, right?

It's like, yeah, we're doing it again. And I'm not saying that to say it's irrelevant. It's not. But I'm just simply saying there are definitional things. You can't ignore them. You can't pretend they're not there.

Yeah, and Jay even claims to be a presuppositionalist, and so we have this debate regularly amongst the other acolytes of Jay Dyer. They just claim, well, we have a different presupposition, right? And so it's always to the authority of Scripture is the issue, and they've basically borrowed this strange version of Vantillian apologetic and presupposed the church as opposed to the authority of Scripture.

Well, it's fascinating because, again, years and years and years ago, one of the things that struck me was when Scott Hahn converted, he started using Presbyterian Reformed language to try to express specifically Tridentine soteriological concepts that led to him being viewed as this guy with these great insights when in reality he was just using language that he'd brought over from where he started and sort of tried to redefine these things.

And again, nothing new under the sun. It's same old, same old. So it still needs to be discussed and dealt with while we have the freedom to do so, I suppose. But yeah, it all ends up coming back to exactly what I'd identified, and whether we're talking with Rome or Orthodoxy, it comes down to that.

Though I have spoken with Orthodox people that would say that from their perspective, there is a clear distinction between the authority of that which is theanoustos and that which is not, and that that which is theanoustos is not dependent upon lesser authorities for its continuation or its proclamation.

So they see those as aids but not as necessary. But then again, those conversations were 40 years ago. I don't even know if those folks are still alive.

Well, I appreciate it, Dr. White. I don't want to jeopardize all the time here, but if you ever get a chance to speak to Jay, it would be an interesting conversation. I'd love to see it.

Yeah, it would be interesting. It would have to be on something that would not... I've looked at his YouTube channel, and I'll be honest with you, sometimes I'm just like, what? I mean, he addresses pretty much everything.

I think he's pretty much recording every day, and it's a wide variety of stuff. My only concern is... I want stuff that's done to have an audience wider than just simply one person who... Like, to give you an example, Jerry Matitox is no longer relevant to Roman Catholic apologetics.

He's just not. But thankfully, the topics that we debated years and years and years ago still are. If you get into stuff with certain people that just have a unique niche group, and then they go off five years later, how relevant is what you did?

That's the question. We'll see what will happen with that. But I appreciate it, Bruce.

Thanks, Dr. White. Have a good day.

All right. Thank you. God bless. Thank you. Okay. Let's talk to Quentin. I'm going to have to talk faster, or say less, I guess, than I was before. Because that took too much time. But it was an interesting subject.

Quentin.

Good afternoon, Dr. White. How are you?

Yes, sir. How are you?

Doing well. Doing well. I just wanted to ask a quick question regarding examining the claims of Roman Catholicism, historically speaking. What are some sources you would recommend for going in-depth on the history of the papacy or Mariology and things like that?

Or would you just recommend maybe in-depth church history more generically?

No, there are lots of useful works out there. The classic Protestant works are by Good, G-O-O-D-E, by Whitaker. And I think Whitaker is being published by Soledad Gloria, I think. It's out there. And George Salmon, which, actually, interestingly enough, Jeff Durbin mentioned to me just a few minutes ago that George Salmon is available on Kindle now, which is cool.

But Salmon's book, The Infallibility of the Church, you can sometimes grab a used copy someplace, but I don't think it's been in print since the 50s. But I was told, like I said a few minutes ago, that it is available on Kindle.

So that's going to, if you want a Lutheran source, Martin Chemnitz, C-H-E-M-N-I-T-Z. But then there's just excellent material out there. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Popes is really, really interesting because it is not attempting to defend the idea of a papacy or something like that.

So it's honest in, for example, mentioning what really is the reality, that there was no monarchical episcopate. There was no one bishop in Rome until around 140 A .D. And then talking about, probably not in quite the same graphic detail as Philip Schaaf does in his eight-volume History of the Christian Church, but talking about the pornography, the utter degradation of the papacy in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Well, 9th and 10th centuries, sorry. And the buying and selling of the papacy and really the low point in it. But also dealing with when it then reached the heights of its power, the degradation that brought.

The money and the women and the military and all the rest of that stuff. Stuff that even Luther observed with his own eyes when he visited Rome in 1510. So Oxford Encyclopedia of the Popes, things like that can be really helpful as well.

And yeah, so that's a place to start, depending on what you're focusing on. Because there's specific areas. Papacy is obviously one. The development of sacramental theology over time. The development of the priesthood over time.

The development of purgatory over time. There are entire books on that subject. You get a lot of Roman Catholic authors who are, these days, are brutally honest about the development of those things and that they were not actually apostolic, but they came about over time later on.

And certainly, the Marian dogmas are the weak point. They really, really are. It's just so abundantly clear that the early Church did not view Mary the way that modern Roman Catholicism does. That was a long and clearly obvious evolutionary process that was not based upon some type of apostolic tradition.

So yeah, that'll get you started, I would think.

Okay, yeah, I appreciate it. The majority of my background was more Pislops to Babylons kind of stuff.

Yeah, no.

More of a balanced kind of approach.

Yeah.

Yeah, I appreciate it very much.

Okay, thanks. Thanks for calling. All right, thank you. Thank you, Quentin. Okay, well, this will be interesting. And I have no idea how to pronounce the name, but Devonta? Devonta? Okay, all right.

Good evening, brother. Can you hear me?

I can.

Okay, it's Devonte.

Oh, Devonte, okay. But it's spelled D-E-V-O-N-T-E-A?

Right, so that usually throws people off because they think it's supposed to be like you pronounce it, a soft sound.

Yeah.

They think it's supposed to be an E.

Yeah.

It's an A. You're not incorrect. It has some sort of symbol on top of it. We grew up in different cultures, so I don't know if you're familiar, but there's an R &B group. There was a guy in it named Devonte, and my mom named me after this man she never met.

So that's where my name comes from.

Now you've got me going, yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, I think I do remember that.

Yeah, all right.

Well, there you go.

You're not alone in pronouncing it that way.

All right, what's up?

Yes, sir. So in my watching your videos, please don't ask me to say which one because I don't remember. You've done a lot. You remember that better than me. But there's a video where you were talking about how whenever people start studying Roman Catholicism, what you've often seen is somebody will say, oh, well, I see this church father that believe X. Rome teaches X. Rome must be true.

Right.

And you've said, well, not necessarily. That's not really the way that you're supposed to do history. So I've heard you say before, more specifically referring to transubstantiation, and if I misrepresent what you said, please correct me.

But you had essentially said like, it is true that in the fathers you see them talking about the real presence of Christ, but that is not the same as later medieval language with transubstantiation because they're not using, like you said, Aristotelian categories talking about accidents and substance.

Is that correct or am I misrepresenting?

Right. Okay.

Here was my question. And you've, brother, read more church history than me. So if I have a misunderstanding, correct me. As I've read like some fathers, like Ambrose of Milan and Cyril of Jerusalem, though they're not using the words accident and substance, I'm going to be honest, it sounds like they're describing transubstantiation, though they're not using those words.

So it's, I guess I'm just saying like, what is, they're not using those terms, but they seem to be describing that reality. So like, I don't know, what are we doing with that?

Give me an example because the, you know, both of those, when you look at, especially when you mentioned Ambrose, he's extremely influential for Augustine and it's Augustine who makes it very clear that the church has been deprived of the physical presence of Christ, that the body of Christ is in heaven and will not be on earth again until his second coming.

And he specifically uses this language and talks about he who has believed eats with the teeth and drinks with the mouth. And he puts those in the context, not of transubstantiation, but of faith and so on and so forth.

So if Ambrose is utilizing some type of categories that would differentiate between what is physically seen and what is spiritually present. Now, there's a difference between, you know, maybe what you're thinking of is the fact that what you have in earlier writers who do not have Aristotle's categories anywhere else is the discussion of the reality of spiritual presence that goes against what you see with the physical eyes.

So, I mean, that's just a part of, that's a part of really any discussion of the now and the not yet. We are seated in the heavenly places with Christ, but we don't yet see that. I mean, that's just sort of a discussion of the fact that what the eyes see and what is true spiritually are two different things.

And so maybe that's what you're making reference to, I don't know. But where would you, when you have people like Augustine and even Gregory after him utilizing language that is clearly not transubstantiation and that type of language doesn't come in until the 10th century, what kind of language are you saying speaks to you as if it was?

Right. And thank you for explaining that. So, like more specifically focusing on Ambrose and his book on the mysteries, there's a section where he's about to start talking about the Lord's Supper and he says, talking to the catechumens, and perhaps you will say to me, how do you assert that I see bread and wine?

I mean, how do you assert that this is the body of Christ? What I see is bread and wine. And Ambrose says, and that is what remains for us to prove. But let me remind you, I'm not talking about what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated.

Because even, he says, because the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because even by blessing, nature itself has changed. And he starts giving examples from the Old Testament, like with, and you're more biblically literate than me, so forgive me if I say the wrong prophet.

It's Elijah or Elijah with the accident, with the ax head where it falls into the water and the prophet makes it float back. And Ambrose is like, but the nature of the ax head is to be heavier than that of water, but the water, I mean, but the ax head floated to the top.

And he starts talking about examples in the Old Testament where the nature of something was changed. So that's, to be more specific, and thank you for asking. That's what I meant by, this sounds like he's talking about the nature of things being changed.

That's more specifically what I was referring to.

And he was specific, if you use an example like that, you're talking about a specific miracle that had a specific purpose. And again, the idea of the real presence of Christ is very much a part of the early church, that he's spiritually there, but the whole concept, because remember, transubstantiation is not just the idea that there is a spiritual reality under the physical, what can be seen with the physical, or sensed.