A Multi-Faceted Dividing Line

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I think it was yesterday, may have been the day before yesterday, that I was informed by one of those troublemakers in Twitter about the release of a brand new book by Casey J.

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Chalk. I'd like to put the cover up if we could here.

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It seems Rome is saying the quiet things loudly now.

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The picture is one I recognize very well. I saw this picture, the original of it,

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I think, in Germany when I was there in 2017.

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Marburg Castle. That's Zwingli and Luther disputing

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Luther's pointing to SD written on the tablecloth there. And they're disputing over the one point they could not gain agreement on at the

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Marburg Colloquy. But notice forward by Scott Hahn, nothing exciting about that.

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Casey J. Chalk, evidently a convert to Roman Catholicism. But please notice the title,

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The Obscurity of Scripture, Disputing the Soul of Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity.

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And I can't help but think about the fact that the gentleman that I debated on the nature of marriage in Houston just a matter of weeks ago,

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Keith Giles. The one book of his that I read all of in preparation for our debate was called

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Sola Mysterion, The Uncertainty of All Things. So instead of Sola Scriptura, it was

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Sola Mystery, The Uncertainty of All Things. Now, he's into deconstruction and you know, sort of a postmodern, whatever, feel -good, feels -good type thing.

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But we need to understand that the battle for Scripture requires every generation's full attention.

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But it rarely gets every generation's full attention. There are times when the battle for Scripture is used by political forces for self -aggrandizement and self -enrichment.

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And sometimes there are people on the right side for the wrong reasons. That's a reality.

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That's happened. But we are facing a situation where this battle has taken on new, some very new importance.

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When we named this program,

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The Dividing Line, what was The Dividing Line? What were we talking about?

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Fundamentally, The Dividing Line was between those who believe that God has spoken with clarity in Scripture and those who do not.

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That's what it was about. So it's nothing new for us. And that meant we were using that because we used that as our program title and the name of our newsletter we used to do.

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Man, was that a lot of work. I still remember all the bulk mail stuff.

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Whew, a lot of work. Anyway, we've been using that for decades and decades and decades. Like I said, this is our 40th anniversary coming up here.

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By the way, testimonies at AOMin .org. Testimonies at AOMin .org if you'd like to bless us with some what?

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And that's testimonies I -E -S. Apparently some emails didn't get through and so the folks posted them on Facebook for me.

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Y -E -S. It's Testimony I -E -S. Maybe I need to make a backup.

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Actually, we should just simply put the other variant spellings out there and just have them all go into the same box.

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That's my personal opinion anyways. I think that would be... Okay, all right, good.

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Anyway, Testimonies at AOMin .org

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if you want to send in something for our 40th anniversary. We have been dealing with a wide range of attacks upon scriptural sufficiency and perspicuity for four decades now, and they come from religious and non -religious people and for lots of different reasons.

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Generally, you either have unbelieving attacks so as to substantiate the unbelief and the rebellion of the individual or a group of individuals.

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When they are religious attacks, it is always to make room for some other revelation or source of authority.

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So, initially, our response was to Mormonism, and the

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Mormon church used to put out a sort of a handbook for Mormon missionaries, and it would have lists of alleged contradictions in the

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Bible, because Mormonism says the Bible is the word of God as far as it's translated correctly. But they also have the

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Book of Mormon, Dr. Cummings, at a really great price, and so you have to attack scriptural sufficiency and the doctrine of Sola Scriptura to make room for other works of scripture.

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So, that was the initial thinking, and then the late

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Benidias was used to force us to recognize that Rome was doing something very similar to what was being done by Mormonism in attacking

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Sola Scriptura. Of course, the first debates that I heard that I listened to were generally on the subject of Sola Scriptura, and it would always come up in every debate.

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And so, we've been on this for a long time. In the olden days,

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Roman Catholic apologists would make this argument, but not quite this boldly.

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I think this title, The Obscurity of Scripture, is going to...

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I think they're going to regret this utilization of language because, you know,

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I'm not sure if the Jesuits, you know, they ran this one by the Jesuit leadership or not. But certainly, you could find, even in the

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Counter -Reformation, if you boil away the niceties, you boil away, you know, we've given you scripture and all the rest of this kind of stuff, what you're going to hear is that scripture is not enough without an infallible interpreter, without an external source.

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And you can try to just simply present the idea of the difference between material and formal sufficiency, and then try to just sort of crack the door open a little bit, enough room to sneak through to get your authority in there, or do what this does and just blow the and say, scripture is obscure.

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It's unclear. You have to have the traditions and the authority, the teaching magisterium, the

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Roman Catholic Church, you need the Pope. Now, these days, they want to really primarily focus upon less centralized interpretation in the sense of the teaching magisterium and things like that, because we all...

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Pope Francis. How many people, honestly, just really, really honestly, would think that the

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Bishop of Rome, the Pope, Pope Francis, should be our primary interpreter of scripture?

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Given the things he's said, given clearly what his, not only his politics, but his theology are, do you really think that the final authority, the interpretation of scripture has been given to that man, and you'd accept that?

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So, I'm hearing much more of a diffused, generalized teaching magisterium in the fogs of time type picture, to avoid the sola scriptura, the blueprint for anarchy type stuff.

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So, here we have the obscurity of scripture, and I just wonder how many

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Reformed men are ready to deal with something like this, especially today, when we have people within the

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Reformed community who are, in essence, saying that outside of...

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if you do the Craig Carter great tradition exegesis thing, you're going to struggle with a book like this, because you've already agreed to fundamental aspects of what's being argued here.

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And these people who are saying, well, you need to have these external traditions, whether you call it apostolic tradition, whatever, you need to have these to be able to even have a starting place in interpreting scripture.

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You're always going to end up having to answer the question of priority and origination of those external sources of authority.

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That's why I'm seeing all these former... these people who say,

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I was once a presuppositionalist, I was once Vantillian. Why? Because Vantill starts with the fact that God spoke, and you have to have a starting place, and the starting place is the priority and preeminence of scripture itself.

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But once you lose that, once you abandon that, once you abandon the nature of scripture...

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that's why we talked about the less -than -conservative source utilized by Trent Horne in the debate with Gavin Ortlin.

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Well, Paul didn't really write that, so you can't really compare that to other things that Paul said, and it's actually not apostolic.

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And in fact, the only way that you can get around that is to say, well, it doesn't matter whether Paul wrote it. Because see, from Rome's perspective, the authority of that text is based upon the authority of the church, which tells you it's scripture, rather than upon the fact that it's

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God -breathed revelation from God. That's a massive, huge difference. Huge, huge difference.

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And you've seen what it's done over the past number of centuries with the rise of ultra -liberal, progressivist interpretation within the

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Roman Catholic system itself, which will eat the heart out of it eventually. But anyway, so I just wanted to remind us of a few things.

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In fact, we're going to have a little story time with Uncle Jimmy today. It's been a long time since we had story time with Uncle Jimmy, and so we're going to have a little story time with Uncle Jimmy.

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I understand that Trent Horn has said, well, let's...

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He's written, I think on Twitter, he wrote to me. It'll have to be on Twitter, because I guess on Facebook, I never would have seen it.

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I'm becoming less and less and less enchanted with Facebook over the passage of time. But anyway, let's do a debate on Sola Scriptura.

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Oh, that would be like my fifth. And exactly how different would that be from what you just did with Gavin Hartland? How many times do you have to do the same thing over and over again?

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And then he said, then we'll do a second debate on apostolic succession. That's a nice, vague term, because it can mean all sorts of things.

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I mean, I certainly believe in an apostolic succession of truth. The only people who stand in apostolic succession to the apostles are those who teach the same things apostles taught.

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The reality is that the Roman Catholic system makes particular claims that it seems to me many of Rome's modern apologists simply don't want to defend them.

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They don't want to go there. So we're not going to debate um,

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Marian dogmas, even though they are the best example. I mean, the bodily assumption of Mary is the greatest example of a de fide dogma defined by Rome that's supposed to be that, isn't that supposed to be based upon scripture and tradition?

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Why wouldn't you want to debate that? Because you have to start with accepting

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Rome's authority to define such things, because you're not going find it in history. You're not going to find scripture, you're not going to find history, unless you are forced to by the authority of the magisterium of the church.

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You've got to start there. And so it's fascinating to see

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Roman Catholic apologists saying, you know, we're just not going to do any debates other than ones that allow us to assert our absolute primacy of epistemological knowledge.

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You have to start with us. You've got nothing else. So even

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I would, even apostolic succession, how about the papacy?

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How about the infallibility of the papacy? Because these are, these are the fundamental assertions.

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Oh, well, now you're arguing like an atheist. That one especially, um, when

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I, it's fascinating, because the reality is Rome's evidentialism actually borrows much more from the way that atheists argue than a

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Reformed person's presuppositional approach. When I listen to Roman Catholic apologists trying to take on atheists and debate atheists, it's just painful.

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Because y 'all have capitulated on some of the most fundamental foundational epistemological questions you can have with an unbeliever.

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But to, to assert we are the successors of the apostles, but we will not defend the consistency of our sources and our statements and our papal bulls and everything else.

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We won't defend it. And if you dare say this contradiction, you're acting like an atheist.

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That is, I think, one of the biggest indications of the fact that they know that those things are indefensible.

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They are making claims of consistency over time that cannot be substantiated. They cannot be substantiated.

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I want to give you an example. And we've, we've made reference in passing, um, to this, but I want to go through it so that everyone is up to speed.

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If you would like to either open on your computer, because I have it on my computer, but I want to use the book today.

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I, I like, there's a note in here. It's always interesting to find notes. That's interesting.

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I was staying at a Marriott. It's some sort of color coded interpretation of something.

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I don't know what that is, but anyway, sometimes you find some very fascinating things. I want to use the books.

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So the eight volume, um, history, uh, of the Christian church by Schaff volume four, beginning on page 500.

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If you have it, you can grab it, uh, or you can open it up in Lagos or Accordance.

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I have, I have it in both, but sometimes holding a book in the hands is, I want you,

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I want to take us back to the seventh century.

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Okay. Seventh century. So this is, um, interestingly enough, contemporaneous with right toward the end of Muhammad's life.

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So this is before the, this is right at the beginning of the rise of Islam. The rest of the world really wasn't aware of what was coming quite yet.

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So I read, want to reach you from Schaff on Pope Honorius the first, the connection of Pope Honorius with the monothelite, monothelitic heresy has a special interest in its bearing upon the dogma of papal infallibility, which stands or falls the single official error, according to this principle to the principle, see falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, false in one thing, false in all.

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It was fully discussed by Catholic scholars on both sides before and during the Vatican council of 1870, which proclaimed that dogma, but could not alter the facts of history.

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The following points are established by the best documentary evidence. Okay. Now, as I read this, keep something in mind.

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We have a pretty unusual Pope in office right now, right?

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I think everybody would agree with that. There are people who used to be with Catholic answers who have been red pilled and they recognize there's something going on here.

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Something's not, something not as all, not all as well in the Vatican. For a while, there were two

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Popes and that other Pope has now died and he's got a book out that quite interesting and the things that it says and looking forward to the

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English version of it should be available eventually. But the point is what mechanism exists for you to know right now what

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Pope Francis actually teaches quote unquote infallibly? What mechanism exists?

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Can you read his papal encyclicals? Can you read anything into the fact that he seems to be on very friendly grounds with pro -choicers, with pro -homosexuals, big time, very, very supportive of Catholic priests who are promoting a pro -homosexual agenda, has written in support of them.

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So how do you know what, what the Pope's actually saying? What if, what if a

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Pope, two or three Popes removed refers back to Francis say, remember when he said this?

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Well, this was the church speaking. What do you do then?

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How do you know even now? So here's the question.

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How could anyone in the seventh century, the early seventh century have known that Pope Honorius was a heretic?

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Now, obviously there's dispute as to whether he was a heretic or not. But the point is, if you want to talk about the obscurity of scripture, let's talk about the obscurity of Romanism.

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Shall we? Because the mental gymnastics that have to be accomplished by the defender of the claim that the modern

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Pope is the direct successor of St. Peter and that he, and you want to talk about apostolic succession, the fundamental claim that Rome is making is that Pope Francis represents the clearest continuation of the teaching of the apostles of Jesus Christ.

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If he doesn't, then apostolic succession is irrelevant. It's meaningless. It's words on a page, nothing more.

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But if Pope Francis is to rep, is to be the most accurate representation of the teaching of the apostles of Jesus Christ, that's fundamental to the claims of the

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Roman Catholic system. So, as we read about Honorius, ask yourself the question, how is this relevant to today and the situation that Roman Catholics find themselves in today?

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So, here are the following points that are established by the best documentary evidence. Number one, Honorius taught and favored in several letters to Sergius, Cyrus, and Sophronius, therefore, ex cathedra, the one will heresy, monothelitism.

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He fully agreed with Sergius, the monothelitic patriarch of Constantinople. In answer to his first letter in 634, he says, therefore, we confess one will, ethelema, of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. He viewed the will as an attribute of person, not of nature, and reasoned one willer, therefore, only one will.

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In a second letter to Sergius, he rejects both the orthodox phrase, two energies, and the heterodox phrase, one energy, energia.

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That's the more standard term that you will hear being used in the East, energia.

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And affirms that the Bible clearly teaches two natures, but that it is quite vain to ascribe to the mediator between God and man one or two energies for Christ by virtue of his one theandric will showed many modes of operation and activity.

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The first letter was decidedly heretical, the second was certainly not orthodox, and both occasioned and favored the imperial ecthesis in 638 and type in 648 in their vain attempt to reconcile the monophysites by suppressing the diathletic doctrine.

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Now, monothelitism, one will in Christ, diathletic, two wills in Christ.

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Monothelitism becomes established as a heresy, diathletic becomes the authoritative and orthodox.

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That has not been officially decided by a council at this point in time.

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But if this is supposedly some kind of apostolic belief, who's the one who's supposed to know it best?

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That would be the Bishop of Rome, at least according to Rome's current viewpoint. Anyway, the only thing which may and must be said in his excuse is that the question was then new and not yet properly understood.

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He was, so to say, an innocent heretic before the church had pronounced a decision. As soon as it appeared that the orthodox dogma of two natures required the doctrine of two wills and that Christ could not be a full man without a human will, the popes changed the position and Honorius would probably have done the same had he lived a few years earlier.

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I'm sorry, a few years longer. Various attempts have been made by papal historians and controversialists to save the orthodoxy of Honorius in order to save the dogma of papal infallibility.

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Some pronounce his letters to be a later Greek forgery. Others admit their genuineness, but distort them into an orthodox sense by a non -natural exegesis.

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Still others maintain, at the expense of his knowledge and logic, that Honorius was orthodox at heart, but heretical or at least very unguarded in his expressions.

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But we have no means to judge of his real sentiment except his own language, which is unmistakably monotheletic.

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And this is the verdict not only of Protestants, but also of Gallican and other liberal

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Catholic historians. I apologize, brother Pierce, but I left my green water thingy in the refrigerator.

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I have a feeling I will need it before the end of the program. Number two,

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Honorius was condemned by the sixth ecumenical council as the former pope of old

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Rome, who with the help of the old serpent had scattered deadly error.

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This anathema was repeated by the seventh ecumenical council in 787 and by the eighth in 869.

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The Greeks who were used to heretical patriarchs of New Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria felt no surprise and perhaps some secret satisfaction at the heresy of a pope of old

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Rome. Here again, the ultra montane historians have resorted to the impossible denial either of the genuineness of the act of condemnation, the sixth ecumenical council, or of the true meaning of that act.

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The only consistent way for papal infallibilists is to deny the infallibility of the ecumenical council as regards the dogmatic fact.

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In this case, it would involve at the same time a charge of gross injustice to Honorius. But this last theory, number three, is refuted by the popes who condemned

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Honorius as a heretic and thus bore testimony for papal fallibility.

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His first successor, Severinus, had a very brief pontificate of only three months.

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His second successor, John IV, apologized for him by putting a forced construction on his language.

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Agatho prudently ignored him. But his successor, Leo II, who translated the acts of the sixth council from Greek into Latin, saw that he could not save the honor of Honorius without contradicting the verdict of the council in which the papal delegates had taken part.

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And therefore, he expressly condemned him in the strongest language, both in a letter to the Greek emperor and in a letter to the bishops of Spain as a traitor to the

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Roman church for trying to subvert her immaculate fate. I have a feeling that's probably faith.

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But anyway, not only so, but the condemnation of the unfortunate Honorius was inserted in the confession of faith, which every newly elected pope had to sign down to the 11th century.

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That's four centuries. And which is embodied in the

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Liber Diurnus, i .e., the official book of formulas of the Roman church for the use of papal curia.

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In the editions of the Roman breviary, down to the 16th century, his name appears, yet without title and without explanation, along with the rest who had been condemned by the sixth council.

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But the precise facts were gradually forgotten, and the medieval chroniclers and lists of popes ignore them.

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After the middle of the 16th century, the case of Honorius again attracted attention and was urged as an irrefutable argument against the ultramontane theory, which ended up being the foundation for Vatican I.

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At first, the letter of Leo II was boldly rejected as a forgery, as well as those of Honorius, but this was made impossible when the

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Liber Diurnus came to light. The verdict of history, after the most thorough investigation from all sides and by all parties, remains unshaken.

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The whole church, east and west, as represented by the official acts of ecumenical popes and councils, for several hundred years believed that a

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Roman bishop may err ex cathedra in a question of faith and that one of them at least had so erred in fact.

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The Vatican Council of 1870 decreed papal infallibility in the face of this fact, thus overruling history by dogmatic authority.

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It's not the first time that's happened. The Protestant historian can, in conscience, only follow the opposite principle.

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If dogma contradicts facts, all the worse for the dogma. All of that is fascinating and in the centuries that came afterwards, people lost track of these things and stuff was lost and excuses were made, but as more and more material has come to light, it's very obvious.

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Now, it's interesting, when I debated Tim Staples and Robert St. Genes on this subject, one of them,

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Staples, attempted to defend the letters of Honorius.

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St. Genes just said, popes can be heretics, no problem. So, you have differing viewpoints.

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Put all that aside for the moment. If you had lived in the days of Honorius, it wasn't as long as John Paul II or something, but if it's pope for a few years and you live in that time period and you want to know the answer to the question that is now being discussed by people in reference to Christ's incarnate nature and the whole concept of whether he had one will with two natures or whether he had two wills with two natures, how would you have known one way or the other?

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If you look at a papal encyclical written by Pope Francis today, is that a sufficient way of understanding how you should believe on certain issues that might be addressed by the pope today?

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And if you had lived in Honorius' day, if you had read his letter to Sergius and believed what the pope said, what would be your standing?

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Well, eventually, you'd be condemned. Maybe long after you've died. And some might say, yeah, it wouldn't matter then because, you know, it doesn't matter.

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But the question is, how do you know? What can you appeal to?

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Just as there was no way of knowing during Honorius' life that he would be condemned as a heretic for the next 400 years by every single person who made the claim to the sea of Rome, and that includes the entire period of what's called the

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Roman pornocracy, when the papacy fell into its lowest depths of degradation, bought and sold, and brothels in Rome, and bad times.

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Even those guys condemned Honorius as a heretic. He couldn't know it.

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You couldn't know it. You couldn't know it during his lifetime. And you don't know what the future judgments of the

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Roman magisterium are going to be regarding Francis. If he's successful in implanting his acolytes, as he has been in the

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College of Cardinals, good chance you're going to get more Francis's in the future. And so we know that Pope Francis is not on the same page as popes only 100 years ago.

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That's just plain reality. As I've said, just go read something from 100, 150 years ago.

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Go read the papal syllabus of error or something like that. Compare it with where Francis is today. That was not written by people who believe the things that Francis believes today.

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So how do you know? And doesn't that give you a foundation for writing a book called

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The Obscurity of Rome? I have challenged people many times, show me a single person.

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Show me a single bishop at the Council of Nicaea that believed everything you believe Roman Catholic today.

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There weren't any. There weren't any. That's just a fact of history.

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So when you have this situation, it really makes me go, how do we even engage in meaningful debate if what the

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Roman Catholic apologists are saying is, we're not going to defend papal infallibility.

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We're not going to defend Pope Francis. It's almost like there was a big old meeting. I was supposed to debate

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Tim Staples on Francis in Sydney in about 2018, 19, 20, yeah, 2018 or 2019.

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I forget which one it was. And then they backed out of it. Didn't want to do it.

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And it just seems like somewhere around there, there was a big old confab or something. It's like, you know what? We really need to pivot here in light of Francis and change our approach to things.

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And I think we're seeing the manifestation of that. So back to the book,

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The Obscurity of Scripture. We're ready.

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There are the all -reformed biblicists are ready for an onslaught like this.

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What about the rest of you? In the past, you've, well, we'll just leave that to those people who deal with Roman Catholicism.

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Well, you've decided that we are bad folks. In fact, yeah,

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I'll be looking at this in just a moment. Rich gave me a fright before the program started.

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He misremembered the last name on this. I thought it was somebody else. And then when I looked, oh, phew, good.

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Had me panicked there for a second, but a fellow by the name of Paul Hess, who has a

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Ukraine flag in his thing, which I noticed as well. Paul Hess says, and this was written today, only a few hours ago, actually, let's be clear that it's my

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ID. So James White's attacks on divine simplicity and inseparable ops will make not more biblical

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Trinitarians, but more Unitarians and tritheists. So even if White is personally a

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Trinitarian, as I hope he is, he is thus a false teacher. Now, when

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I encounter something like this, this is, over the past couple of days, since I preached

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Sunday night, there have been a number of comments made. I was honestly looking to see what kind of response would be offered.

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I preached a sermon on the interrelationship of the divine persons revealed to us in Scripture, the tremendous, glorious fact that we are allowed to look into the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit in a number of passages in Scripture.

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God didn't have to reveal this stuff to us. It's an act of grace, but it's there. And so I looked at a number of texts, such as the

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Carmen Christi, and I was looking to see what kind of responses.

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My expectation was, first of all, my desire for the sermon was, first of all, for our church, that better be your first desire, to prepare our people and to explain to our people why we take the positions that we do, and why we are not following after the

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Thomistic renaissance and resourcement and things along those lines, and are standing firmly for scriptural sufficiency, perspicuity, and things like that, without subjection to external philosophical systems or great traditions or anything along those lines.

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But my expectation as to the response was, I expected that the responses would be primarily scholastic and philosophical, and that the vast majority of people would not even touch the substance of the sermon, which was biblical, and that the issues that I raised,

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I raised because of what the scriptures revealed to us. So, I go through Philippians 2, and I point out the reflexive pronoun, and I point out that Jesus did not regard, the

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Son did not regard the equality possessed with the Father as something to be grasped.

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So, these are actions of a person. Whatever you're going to define that to mean in regards to God, this is the action of a person in evaluating the importance of something, the nature of something, in comparison to something else, and this is the action of a person making himself of no reputation by taking on the form of a servant, by being made in the likes of men.

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And what I argued was, and what

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I would argue now, is that only the Son could act as He did in the

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Incarnation. Now, I point out someone untrue this morning.

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That does not mean the Father and the Spirit were not involved in the Incarnation, but they take different roles, and there are unique aspects of those roles that only a particular divine person could undertake.

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We're not talking here about – let's introduce a whole new layer of terminology, like appropriations.

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Let's recognize that the farther you go into that level of terminology, the farther you're getting away from anything the

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Apostles would have recognized as apostolic truth. And so, the

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Father did not make the Son nothing. The Spirit did not make the

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Son nothing. Now, this is definitely an add -extra activity. Incarnation is add -extra.

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And so, whatever you do – so, if you take a biblical definition of inseparable operations, which simply means perfect harmony, one will of God being accomplished without divergence, without disagreement, but without the necessity of identity in those actions.

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Because that's what comes from the philosophy. That's what comes from – eventually, you peel the layers back – that's what comes from Aristotle, is the necessity of that.

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That's not a biblical necessity. That's not a biblical teaching. The Apostles didn't teach that. And I would debate any single one of you, and you know it.

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You could never prove it. And you know it. You know you're deriving it from your philosophy.

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Don't lie to me, and don't lie to yourself. You know it. You could never prove that the

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Apostles taught those things. You could never prove that the Apostles were using Aristotelian categories.

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You know it. Admit it. Say it openly to your people. Say it openly.

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And so, you can have a biblical concept of inseparable operations that guards biblically the unity of the

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Godhead and the unity of God's purposes and everything else. You don't need the other stuff.

45:38

It complicates and obscures, and what's amazing is, as I was looking at the various criticisms, an advertisement came up.

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Twitter – I think it was Twitter – an advertisement came up for those orange, super -thin light – you can put them in your pocket – sleeping bags for emergency situations, you know?

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They reflect your body heat back to you and all the rest of this stuff, and you know, if you ever somehow, you know, fell out of an airplane and somehow managed to get down without dying, you know, they can find you because you're in your orange sleeping bag in the snow somewhere.

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I don't know. Anyways, one of those advertisers came up, and I couldn't help but think that these guys remind me of somebody trapped inside one of those things, and they can't get out.

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It's zipped up around their neck, and so you can see the arms and legs going, but they can't go anywhere because they're so confined by the system that they're in.

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You're only allowed so much movement in there, and it came across the same time that I was looking at this stuff, and I just couldn't help but think, this is what happens when instead of going, what is the biblical worldview?

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And see, a lot of people don't even believe there is such a thing as a biblical worldview. If you believe in the obscurity of Scripture, you don't believe that there can even be a biblical worldview.

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But these are ostensibly supposed to be Protestants that still ostensibly believe in things like Sola Scriptura and haven't bought into the infallibility of the papacy yet, and so it's like, okay, what happens when you encounter biblical revelation that's bigger than your categories?

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It's bigger than what you're allowed to say, because Aristotle didn't have

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Philippians, all right? All he had was what

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God gave him, and so he didn't have a divine revelation upon which to contemplate and to define things.

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And so if you take his ideas, and his God is not our

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God, I hope everyone will at least admit that, could we, hopefully? His God is not our

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God. The unmoved mover is not our God. There is so much of God's power and purpose and freedom that just doesn't fit into Aristotle's, I hate to even call it theology, but all right, we'll go there.

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So there's a lot in Scripture that goes beyond that. What are you going to do with it? If you're stuck inside that sleeping bag, you've got no place to go.

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You've got no place to go. You're stuck. And you end up truncating elements of divine truth so that can remain within your system.

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And I'm simply saying you can benefit from an insight here or an insight over there, but once you zip the thing up, you can't get out of it.

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And I see a bunch of people, the zipper's broken, and you can't get out of it.

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Well, you can. If you want to, you really, really can.

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But there you go. Okay. There are a bunch of other things

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I wanted to get to today. And it says 11 minutes. I'm not going to get done in 11 minutes.

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I hate to tell you that. All right, real quickly. I think the

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SBC's going to, is it New Orleans this year? I think it might be

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New Orleans. In any case, I find it fascinating that Saddleback, and I don't know why they're doing this, well,

50:21

I think I do know, that Saddleback is appealing the action of the

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SBC to disfellowship them because of their women pastors.

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And I have to admit, I'm just throwing this out there. In light of what has happened over the past few years and the number of years that quote -unquote progressivists have had control, is this purposeful?

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Is this the moment when Saddleback's going to say we need to recognize the gifting of God amongst our women to preach and teach?

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Because I mean, Warren's arguments, if you read them, were really bad.

51:23

But they have emotional impact. And sadly, the history of the mainline denominations in the

51:35

United States is that the overthrow of the biblical prohibition against female officeholders in the eldership has always had as its primary weapon some type of emotional appeal.

51:58

And just look at the mainline denominations that are now basically in museums, or their churches have become museums,

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I'm sorry? Yes. Look at what has happened to them historically.

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Where did it start? It started with a diminishment in the view of scripture, and then very early on, this is the next move.

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You get women into positions of leadership, pastors, elders, bishops, all these positions.

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You see it happening in the Church of England, United Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, the left wing and all that,

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Baptists, left wing, all that. And so the question really, really, really, really will be, is this the mechanism?

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Is this the way to say, the reality is, we already have all these women in leadership positions in Southern Baptist churches already.

53:15

We just need to recognize we've missed God's calling, and we need to alter the

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Baptist faith and message to represent what the

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Spirit is doing in our churches. I can sort of come up with the arguments here, as all the rest of you could do.

53:35

It doesn't take a whole lot of special insight. Is that what's coming? Who's going to stand firm?

53:44

What will that result in? You know, a lot of churches have already left, and I think a lot of the churches that haven't left yet, first of all, just for those that are just constantly harping on this thing, remember, there's a lot of people in churches that they've been

54:09

Southern Baptists their entire lives. It's all they've known. And it's going to take some real clear evidence of firm departure for a lot of those folks to leave.

54:24

I think this would be the issue that would do it. And the problem, of course, is, and this is exactly what's happened to all the other mainline denominations, by the time the conservatives just give up and get ready to leave, the liberals, the leftists, already can have control of all of the assets, the buildings, the seminaries, the schools.

54:46

They get to keep all of it, and the conservatives get to go and start all over again. That's not the first time it's happened.

54:55

It's not the first time it's happened. So there you go.

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I wonder if that isn't exactly what people have wanted to have happen, start the process.

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Because it would seem to me that there'd already be a real good undercurrent that you could ride into making that thing happen.

55:19

Okay. I do have this.

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This may be, this is the lieutenant governor of my home state.

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Home state as in my state of my birth, not my home state. State of my birth.

55:44

And I know Minnesota is trying to be California in the

55:50

Midwest. But the level of insanity is, sometimes you just want to turn it all off and move to the hills and build a bunker and hide.

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You really can't do that. It's not what we're called to do either. But man, the temptation's strong. Here is, this woman is twice married, does have at least one child, but it's only 29 seconds here.

56:28

I guess I should listen as well again. Here we go. Because let's be clear, this is life affirming and life saving healthcare.

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When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grownups to listen and to believe them.

56:57

That's what it means to be a good parent. Because let's.

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That's what it means to be a good parent. So when my son said he was

57:18

Spider -Man, then I should have believed him. I was a bad parent because he was really into like Wolverine and stuff like that.

57:32

I guess I should have had stuff implanted in his hands if I was a good parent. And I know lots of kids who are absolutely convinced that the only food that they need to eat is ice cream.

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And so I should have just bought gallons and gallons of ice cream. And that they believed that they were creatures of the night.

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So I should have just let them out at 11 o 'clock at night, let them just go do their thing. And because that's good parenting, according to the tenant governor of the state of Minnesota.

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This is idiocy. This woman is a child. She has the mental and moral capacity of a tiny child and everybody behind her.

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Oh, it's so wonderful. It's foolishness. And we all know it.

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Children need parents to protect them and guide them. Not to sit there and go, oh, do you think that you're a kangaroo?

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Well, great. We'll start feeding you kangaroo food and we'll have a surgical pouch put on you.

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And oh, we just want to be good parents. You're morons. You're ethical morons.

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It is astonishing how far this utter insanity is going.

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Now it's destructive. She's sitting here literally talking about Lupron, the drug, the devastating drug that they use called puberty blockers.

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This stuff, as soon as you put that into a child's body, they will be a medical patient the rest of their life.

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They will never know health. They will never know normality ever again.

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And you idiots are doing it to your children? I've given over, given over, given over, given over.

01:00:00

This is what happens to a society that hates God's ways, knows what

01:00:06

God's ways are, and hates them. And you see

01:00:11

Romans 1? What does Paul say at the end of Romans 1? They not only know God's commandment that those who practice things should experience death, but they encourage others as well.

01:00:21

They want others to come along. There they all are. No society can long last.

01:00:38

Seriously, the only reason this whole place hasn't fallen in, and it may well do so very soon financially, but the only reason this whole thing just hasn't collapsed is that our ancestors for the preceding 150 years put together a pretty darn good superstructure before their great -grandchildren said, we don't care.

01:01:06

We're going to burn it all down because that's what we're doing. We're just bringing it all down. It is embarrassing to see this kind of stuff.

01:01:15

It truly, truly is. Anyway, yes, sir?

01:01:22

I'm sorry. Well, I was going to say, this comes back to the fundamentals of child rearing.

01:01:30

When the kid reaches for the stove, you were bad to smack his hand. You're a bad parent for smacking his hand.

01:01:36

I remember when Matt was young, we encountered some parents at the school, and this was a fairly conservative group of people, and they were complaining to us because Matt used a bad word, and that word was stupid, and they objected.

01:01:55

They wanted us to make sure that he doesn't use that word out loud. We don't use that word in our house, and you know what

01:02:02

I told them? That's stupid. By the way, just real quickly in passing,

01:02:13

I forgot to do this. I was going to give you another example of the obscurity of Rome, but just a reminder,

01:02:25

Algo will be so excited about this because I think for some reason, I'm not sure why Algo thought this was such a big thing because he's mentioned it many times.

01:02:37

What? What? Oh, no, no, no, no. But if you really think you need

01:02:47

Rome to know everything, look up the 16 Vulgate.

01:02:53

That's not 16 T -E -E -N, 16 S -I -X -T -I -N -A. It's from 60th to 5th, and 60th to 5th put out in 1590 an edition of the

01:03:12

Vulgate, and it was accompanied by a papal introduction, a papal bull saying he had done the editing himself, and so he was saying this is the standard text.

01:03:35

All other texts are to be amended to fit this text.

01:03:46

Now, remember, that's 1590. This is after the Reformation, so this is right during that time where, again, at that period of time, the

01:03:53

Jesuits are trying to undercut belief in the Greek Scriptures and the sufficiency of Scripture.

01:04:01

I mean, again, the obscurity of Scripture is nothing new as far as Acts is concerned.

01:04:10

Problem is, it was out for three months before the

01:04:17

Pope then died. I'm not sure if it was just a whole lot of work, but remember, they didn't have modern medicine back then, and so people could die of all sorts of stuff that we take a single pill for and move on and never think, give it a second thought.

01:04:35

Anyway, three months, and very, very quickly, within two years, the

01:04:45

Church not only withdrew this edition, they came out with a different edition, and they destroyed the printed editions of Sixtus V's Vulgate because it was so filled with errors.

01:05:04

Again, during those three months, if you believed what the

01:05:10

Pope said, what are you going to do? Now, Rome's position has changed on this.

01:05:19

As on so many things, death penalty and everything else. It just seems to me that modern

01:05:26

Roman Catholic apologists are like, we're just getting rid of all that stuff by just simply saying, look, it's either us or nothing, and we're not going to defend our history.

01:05:35

We're not going to defend the current Pope or any previous Pope. We're just going to make the argument that without us, you've got nothing at all, and so you just have to accept this and go from there.

01:05:45

I was going to talk a little bit about Pope Sixtus V, but we ran out of time on that.

01:05:52

In fact, I think what we'll do, because I don't want to rush this, I do want to save this, leave this, because I think it would be worthwhile.

01:06:06

Soteriology 101 posted a video of a conversation between Derek Webb and some guy

01:06:16

I don't recognize. I recognize Derek, because Derek looks very much just older than last time

01:06:24

I saw him, because he's still wearing a t -shirt. I think that's all he wears. There is something going on right now, because Cateman's Call is having a 25th anniversary, and they're going to have him sing with them, which

01:06:38

I do find strange, personally, but be it as it may.

01:06:47

I knew Derek Webb before his apostasy, and his leaving of the faith, and his admitted marital infidelities, and that's what it was all about, by the way.

01:07:03

But he knew Reformed theology. Cateman's would watch my debates.

01:07:11

That's how they initially contacted me. Soteriology 101 posted a video, and I think it'd be worthwhile to walk through it.

01:07:22

It's a minute, and it's 90 seconds long, so it's not some big huge thing. But it does raise important issues.

01:07:31

I want to look at that. I just don't want to do it in some rushed fashion right now, having addressed so many other issues along the way.

01:07:39

I probably just wouldn't even be able to remember everything that we actually talked about in the program today. And today is

01:07:45

Thursday, so next time will be next week, but I'll try to remind me.

01:07:53

I'll try to remember to get to it. We'll do it then. So thanks for watching the program today. Very much appreciate it.

01:07:59

Hopefully it is useful to you, and even a little story time with Uncle Jimmy time there.

01:08:06

At least it wasn't a Gnostic gospel. That's probably an advantage. Thanks for watching.