Road Trip Dividing Line: Debate Review

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:34

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, coming to you live from Lafayette, Louisiana.

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Close enough to throw rocks at the trucks going by.

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Oh, I know, I know, I've said it before. I'm sorry, but it's the song of the

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KOA campground. I literally can see them, you know. I could describe the colors of the trucks and the cars and stuff, and I'd have to work really hard to throw that far, but it would hit on the bounce at least.

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Yes, so to be able to live the RV life on the road, you have to be able to sleep to the sound of semi -trucks, which is a little dangerous because you have to drive the sound of semi -trucks, too.

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I got behind one today, got pretty good gas mileage, got up to 11 miles to the gallon for a while there following that one.

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Anyways, we're back on the road, as you can tell, as in moving each day, on my way to Tullahoma, Tennessee.

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I'm only going there to see Keith Foskey do a WrestleMania thing with Leighton Flowers.

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I've heard other things are going on, like I'm supposed to be doing a debate, I'm supposed to be speaking on Calvinism and Paul's theology.

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That's all of Paul's theology, but anyway, I'm just there for what's going to go down between Keith and Leighton.

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That's going to be all the reason I'm going, but that's the Why Calvinism Conference.

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Sam Waldron's going to be there, and Tom Buck's going to be there, and Leighton Flowers is going to be there, though he's not speaking.

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And yes, I'm debating on the subject of the atonement. I think it's on Saturday, as I recall, and I'm very much looking forward to that.

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I mean, it's a beautiful subject and a beautiful topic, and I'm looking forward to doing that. But I just realized

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I don't have these balanced. There, that'll make Rich happier. Anyway, an uneventful trip today, and I've got a long one tomorrow.

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Let me just say, I can't, I'm not going to say anything about this right now, but the way it looks right now, we have the debate this coming weekend.

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That'll make three debates in February. We have two debates in March, and as it stands right now, currently unannounced, but probably announced by the end of the week, two more in April.

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And you're going to be really, really, really interested, especially in light of what I'm going to be talking about today, as to what they're going to be, but I can't give you those details quite yet.

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But we keep going like this, and I might live to make 200 debates.

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We're at 184 now, end of this trip 187, and that would give us 189.

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So yeah, might make it, might make it. Obviously, that's a relatively unimportant number, unless you're talking to Ergen Kanner, then it's an important number, very important number.

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Obviously, if Ergen had done all these things, he would have had like 4 ,000 debates, at least that's what he'd be claiming.

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And the amazing thing is today, folks, I can make that comment in live audiences, and they all sit there staring, they have no earthly idea what

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I'm talking about. And I guess I, you know, I get it, I suppose. But just put

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James White, Ergen Kanner, Ergen, E -R -G -U -N, into the YouTube search bar and be amazed, as all of us were about 14 years ago, when all that stuff was going down.

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So anyway, and then heading to Conway, Arkansas, teach at the seminary the next weekend, and then the weekend after that back in Houston.

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Let me just say thank you very much. I said it to him personally today on the phone, but Evan McClanahan is the pastor at First Lutheran there in pretty much downtown

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Houston. And people don't understand the amount of work that goes into arranging these debates, and the patience that's needed to deal with all the people that come to these debates, and stuff like that.

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So just my sincere thanks. There's a level of trust that you have to have in the people you invite to speak at your church.

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Now you've got to remember, I'm still surprised that Pastor McClanahan is doing debates at his church, given how the first one went.

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And some of you are wondering why I'm laughing. I'm just happy today. No, I am feeling fairly good today.

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I feel a whole lot better than I did on Saturday, let me tell you that much. The first debate was that one with Leighton Flowers and those two wild, wacky

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Calvinists that were, I mean, it was a flamethrower debate, big time. And I don't think that's what he was expecting to take place at that particular point in time.

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So hopefully we have provided debates, since we've done four now, they're a little more substantive, and a little less riot producing than that first one.

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But my sincere thanks to Evan McClanahan. Also, Grace Family Baptist Church has had me speak there pretty much every time

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I've gone to Houston. And I spoke there yesterday morning on Ephesians 1. If you're interested in that, the people seem to really be encouraged by it.

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Because I was asked to emphasize verse 14, which

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I barely did because I started at verse 3, and there's just so much to say before I got there.

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But it went well. And also, tremendous thanks go out to Rudy Jabori and his family.

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Now, Rudy used to be at PRBC years ago when I was there as well. And he lives in Houston now.

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And Rudy's sort of my Assyrian bouncer and grocery runner, all those things.

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And of course, this summer when my house, my home is nice and cool, it was because Rudy installed our air conditioner,

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I don't know, coming up on 10 years ago now or something like that. And so anyway, tremendous thanks to Rudy for their willingness, he and his family's willingness to do anything that I need.

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And also to put up with the fact that this time around, I didn't have time to be able to do anything with them.

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Basically, I'd love to go to, you know where I love to go when I'm in Texas?

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Chewy's, C -H -U -Y apostrophe S, Chewy's Mexican restaurant. Their chips and salsa are really good.

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And their chicken chimneys are great. And yeah, I really, really love going to Chewy's.

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But anyway, so thanks to all those folks that made all those things possible.

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And thanks to everybody giving to the travel fund and, you know, couldn't be out here doing what we're doing.

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By the way, the unit's running great. The truck's running great. No issues, no problems. I'm very thankful for everything working properly.

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Even the leak in the hot water heater, it's been healed. I saw a guy running away, looked a little bit like Benny Hinn once.

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So maybe somebody paid him off. Anyways, can't say things like that.

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It'll end up on the internet somewhere. So, I, man, there's so much stuff going on in the world.

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I recognize that. But there's lots of people commenting on things and lots of people commenting on...

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I'll just make, I'll just say one thing. As you watch our justice system become inverted, become the injustice system.

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I remember, you know, when I was a teenager, I would, I remember reading about Brother Andrew and the

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Iron Curtain and going into these communist nations and bringing people Bibles. And the perversion of justice that everybody knew is a perversion of justice.

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Everybody knew if you're a party member, you could get away with anything. If you weren't a party member, you wouldn't get away with anything. If you were accused of something, you were innocent.

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You were guilty until proven innocent. And we were all like, man, isn't it wonderful?

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That could never happen here in the United States. We've got the constitution. We've got justice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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Well, the constitution is a piece of paper and it is the concepts, primarily

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Christian concepts, enunciated in the constitution that have given us our liberties and our freedoms and all the things we've enjoyed for so long.

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And once judgment comes upon a nation, once we love our sin, we love our rebellion, we turn against the things that made this country great, the justice system becomes the injustice system.

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And we're seeing this two -tiered level. It's not a quotation of the

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Bible, but Calvin was right. When God wants to judge a nation, he gives them unrighteous judges. And that's been seen all down through history, but especially it's seen in the

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West because we have that Christian heritage. We have a standard by which to recognize it.

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You need to understand that the nations around Israel didn't have anything like that.

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And so the very idea of justice just didn't really make much sense to them in the first place. So anyway, when we see this stuff happening around us, it is only our understanding.

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And I'm sorry, it's a trite phrase, but it's a phrase that has tremendous meaning.

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And it's a phrase that sadly Christians didn't think enough about in the past to have the proper appropriate foundation now.

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By what standard? By what standard? Is it the standard that man's made in the image of God and therefore has rights, duties, liberties?

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Or do we embrace the nihilism of secularism that destroys everything?

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That truly is the question. By what standard? And the reason that we recoil against the perversion of justice that we see around us right now, we see judges just doing the...

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Prosecutors that are just so plainly corrupt and have no interest in justice at all.

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Why does this bother us? Because we're made in the image of God. It's not just because we've grown up with blessings, which we did, but the violation of these fundamental aspects of how

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God has created his world to exist properly bother us. And we can only pray that God would bring conviction to the hearts of those engaging in these absurdities all around us.

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But that's what we're facing. The utter rebellion against God's creative order in sexuality, this amazing...

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I mean, do you remember almost anything about transgenderism prior to 2015?

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Oh, I know there were drag queens and stuff like that out there, but entire states threatening to...

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Passing laws to take children away from parents, little children away from parents, who will not mutilate them, inject them with dangerous drugs that will destroy their lives.

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I remember the day that came down in June of 2015, the Bergefell decision, and it was like a switch was hit.

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But even then, we could not even begin to imagine. We could not even pretend to imagine what was going to happen after all of that.

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It's amazing. So we ask to be light, salt and light, salt and light.

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When judgment is coming, that can be unpleasant. Okay, two debates this past weekend, and I normally do not do debate reviews.

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I like to let the debate speak for themselves. But what's really interesting is I was actually talking with Jason Wallace on the way.

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I called him on the phone. We're going to have him on. He has a video out on the

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Calvinist ecumenical patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy, and he did a lot of work on this.

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And I really think, you know, I love church history, and this is a subject I think you really should know about, and it has lots of relevance.

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But I want to have some shirts and hats made before we do it, and you'll see why. You'll see why. Anyways, I was talking with Jason Wallace, and he reminded me that there were a number of times that I did do back -to -back debates up in Utah.

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That's, of course, Jason's tried to kill me for a long time. Just a few years ago, he had me do three or four debates in one trip.

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And yeah, he's been trying to end my pathetic little life for quite some time.

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I had sort of forgotten some of that, and I was trying to think back, have I done back -to -back debates before?

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And I remembered that I had, I'm pretty certain, and Rich might be able to confirm this,

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I think when Scott Hahn and Jerry Matityx came to Phoenix in December of 1990, and we debated the perseverance of the saints at Northwest Community Church one night.

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I think it was the next night at the City of the Lord that I debated

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Jerry on the papacy. So that would have been a back -to -back episode.

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There may have been a day in between where they spoke someplace or something. I, you know, that was almost a quarter, well, it was almost 35 years ago, over a third of a century ago.

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And, but it's unusual. And I hear, I hear, correct.

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I got it correct on that one. Okay, good. So it was the next night.

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And yeah, it was crosstown. Oh yeah, it definitely was. It was very different context.

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Anyway, so I was a little nervous about this. I've been nervous about the entire trip, just simply time for preparation and the wide variety of subjects that I'm addressing over 35 days.

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It doesn't make anything easier. Anyway, I was a little nervous about this.

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And, you know, I've mentioned I have not been 100 % for quite some time now.

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And I'll be honest, Saturday night before the purgatory debate, I wasn't sure

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I was gonna make it. I was sitting there, had my stuff set up. I was lightheaded.

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I was nauseous. I wasn't sure what was going on. And I texted some folks and said, man, please pray for me.

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I feel horrible. But once things started, I was fine.

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Hopefully no one could see that I was struggling with anything. And so all of that to say, when we arranged these debates, there was a, uh,

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Trenhorn said, Sola Scriptura just has to be one of the debates. And then he suggested apostolic succession for the other.

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And I reject that because apostolic succession is a vague concept that is understood completely differently by different groups.

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And in Roman Catholicism, apostolic succession is fundamentally embodied in the

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Pope himself. And I had said, let's do his Pope Francis, the infallible

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Vicar of Christ on earth today. And we've, we tried to do a debate on that with Tim Staples, backed out.

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I don't think right now any mainline Roman Catholic apologists on the planet are willing to defend that assertion.

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Because you don't, if you started prepping today, you don't know what next week's going to bring.

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What's the synod and synodality going to bring? What if you, what if you make a defense in April of 2024 and is it

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October? When, when's that supposed to wrap up? It's a weird, weird thing they're doing.

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But what if the synod meets shortly after the debate and whole new changes are introduced that go beyond fiduciary supplicants and that level of change can happen.

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And I think people know it. And that's why they're like, I'm not sure I want to even go there.

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So I suggested purgatory so that he would at least have to, so that Trenhorn would at least have to do one positive presentation and we could touch on the gospel because I think that was my third purgatory debate.

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I'm pretty certain that's the third one. And in fact, I haven't gone back and looked, but these two debates might have tipped the scales back because for a while I had done more debates on Islam than on Roman Catholicism.

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These two may have put it back the other direction. In fact, I'm sort of thinking they might've.

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But who knows? Anyway, that's why I chose purgatory was it would be a gospel opportunity, be able to talk about, you know, it's, it's, it's an excellent example of how

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Roman Catholicism misses the gospel. What I didn't realize until after the debates were over and really until yesterday when

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I started talking with some folks and most of the response you see online isn't overly helpful.

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I'm looking for the people who are actually deeply thinking about things, you know, people who are influenced by looks or schnazz or whatever.

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I'm, I've never been debating for those folks, so it doesn't really matter to me, but the people who are thinking clearly and coherently and seriously and deeply,

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I all of a sudden realized that God had worked providentially. Now, I know he always, he obviously always worked providentially, but in a special way in how these back to back,

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I mean, one night, next night, with the best that Catholic Answers has to offer, what they ended up doing, because you might think, well, they're really sort of different topics, and they are, but what a lot of people started to see, the serious thinking people, was the contrast between the two debates, and there was quite a contrast between the two debates.

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What people heard in the first debate was this constant emphasis upon the deposit of faith, apostolic tradition, and then, you know, this

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Protestants can't agree about this, and they can't agree about that, and you have to have specific terminology in Scripture for soul scripture to be true.

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You need to, it needs to say soul and fallible rule of faith, and that's why I started my opening statement, by the way, in that debate the way that I did.

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If you've, and again, if you've not watched them, then this program may be one you just want to pause and come back to after you've had the opportunity of doing so, because that's what

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I'm going to be talking about, the debates, and how they relate to one another. I started the debate by telling the story about how, when you debate

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Muslims, especially in South Africa, and this is mainly due to Akhmeddida, they, and dealing with the deity of Christ, they will say, where did

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Jesus say, I am God, worship me? They got that directly from Akhmeddida, and we respond,

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I need to stop talking so loudly. I'm alone in this place. There's a microphone right there.

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Why am I yelling so loud? I don't know. Rich gets mad at me every time I do this in the big studio.

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I wouldn't be coughing if I wasn't talking so loud.

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Anyway, but of course, Rich can't adjust the volume where he is, and I'm not,

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I think I can, but it's, in fact, can

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I? Oh, this is dangerous. Yes, you can, but don't do it. It's just like, yeah,

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I don't know which one of those is, oh, wait a minute. Nope, no, I ain't touching that.

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No, no, no, no, no. We're gonna, we're gonna leave all that alone and just hope for the best.

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Anyway, I explained the fact that you can show the

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Muslims that Jesus is worshiped, that He's the creator, that He's eternal, that He's identified as Yahweh.

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You can go through all this biblical testimony that demonstrates the deity of Christ, and their response is, but where did

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He say, I am God, worship me? But the whole realm of Scripture testifies to His unique character as deity, but where did

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He say, I am God, worship me? But He didn't have to. Yes, He has to use these words, and I said, and that's what we're gonna hear tonight, is where does

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Scripture say it's the sole infallible rule of faith? Well, it's the only thing that's God -breathed, and Jesus said it's

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God -speaking, and Jesus didn't say anything else is God -speaking, and men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit, and it's the anustos. Yeah, but where does it say it's the sole infallible rule of it?

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It doesn't have to use those words because to understand these other things, but where does it say, and that's what we get.

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That's what we get, and of course, in the situation with Rome, they are making a positive statement in the form of a negation.

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They're saying it's not the sole infallible rule of faith because here is our infallible rule of faith, and you go, where?

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Well, we found out, so there's that, that's the whole situation in the first debate, but then again, the second debate, and now

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Trenthorne is having to give a positive presentation on why purgatory is true, and all of a sudden, all the standards from the night before are gone.

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You don't need to have those specific words. You don't need to have a statement in the Bible, purgatory is true.

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You have to have a specific statement in the Bible that says Scripture's sole infallible rule of faith, but you don't have to have that purgatory, and then when we got into 1

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Corinthians chapter 3, and into other texts of Scripture, well, it might be this, it might be that, you know, there's a scholar over here that said this, there's a scholar over here that said, and it's like, so there's no infallible interpretation of that.

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No, no, no, and in fact, the church has never really defined if purgatory is a place, or if it's a state, and they've never defined what the fire is, they've never said it's actually really fire, and, you know, it might just be, you know, an instantaneous thing.

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He actually said it might just be instantaneous. I mean, I, it's still down there.

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Yeah, just a second, please. I could have, I keep showing this to folks.

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FX Shoop, did you notice he never said a word about it? Never attacked it.

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In fact, he didn't even acknowledge, pretty much every single time that I mentioned

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Pope Francis, Tucho Fernandez, the head of the Inquisition, these books.

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It's like, whatever, you know, maybe just hoping that you won't pick these things up, and read them for yourself, because if you do, you will know, and every older Catholic in the audience that has been

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Catholic most of their lives, and knows their, you know, their parents were Roman Catholics, they know what purgatory is about.

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They know what indulgences are, and they know that for hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of years, the church has functioned on the idea, read

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Bellarmine's book on purgatory. It's very, there's entire discussions on where is purgatory?

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Well, it's probably in the earth somewhere, and that's what Thomas Aquinas said. It's probably near hell, the fires, the same fires of hell are the fires of purgatory, but they're just temporary.

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You get to go out, but all sorts of visions of saints, and holy people who see popes in purgatory that died hundreds of years earlier, and they're still suffering in purgatory.

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I didn't have the time to get into it, and that's one of the things I'll say to all of my critics who just think they all can do so much better than I've done.

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You don't understand what a clock is, and you don't understand that if you're going to start to tell a story, you have to have the time to make it understandable to your audience, and so I didn't get a chance, but there's this fascinating story, and you can look it up online, and I wonder, yeah, you know what?

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It might be here. Let me, boy, this should open right back up to that, we hope.

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Yeah, here you go. Purgatory, no, there's a number of books in here.

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Maybe it's this other one. Nope, drat.

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Anyway, there was a story that I read in one of these books about a very holy sister in a monastery that died rather young, and like a,

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I don't know, a month later, one of the other sisters hears this moaning, this tremendous sighing of agony and the smell of smoke, and she comes into the sacristy or whatever it was, and there's smoke, and she sees this sister, and she says,

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I will give you a sign of God's mercy, and she puts her hand on this wooden thing and then disappears, and you can look it up online if I remember the specific name.

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There are pictures on Google to this day, this was hundreds of years ago, of this hand burned into this wood, allegedly burned into this wood, but this hand burned into this wood of this holy nun who was suffering in the fires of purgatory long after, long, at least a month after her death, and it scared them all to death because she was, they consider her the most holy amongst them all, and if she's suffering like that in purgatory, what's going to happen to the rest of them?

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And so these stories, there are thousands of them extending over hundreds of years.

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The church raised the money to build St. Peter's Basilica selling indulgences.

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Folks, if you think that purgatory might be instantaneous, you're not buying indulgences, and that was on a sliding scale, so the more money you had, the more it cost you.

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You're not doing that. You ain't doing that, and the indulgences, and it wasn't just the buying of indulgences, but you could go to Rome, and by having masses set in this place, and by crawling up these stairs on your knees, you could get hundreds and even a thousand years out of purgatory.

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It was so plainly and so obviously temporal. The whole reality that it has to happen before the day of the

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Lord is temporality. It's a progression of time, and it's a suffering of atonement, satis passio.

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Every Roman Catholic in that room that's been a Catholic all their lives knows their parents, they were

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Catholics, they know that that's what's been taught for a long, long time, and so they're sitting there, and they know, yeah, these guys are soft -selling, and you know, it was amazing.

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You can find all of these statements from popes, and doctors of the church, and stuff like that, but then did you notice that all you gotta do is quote one phrase from Pope Benedict, that the fire, the consuming fire is

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Christ himself, and all of a sudden, boom, there's a whole theology. How many popes said the fire was a purifying fire that causes suffering?

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Way more, but as long as Benedict said it, we're gonna buy that one now, because it sounds so much better. There's no standard.

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There's no standard. So, you had such a massive difference between the two debates that what

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I want to do is, I want to focus in upon those differences and see what they illustrate.

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They illustrate the fact that there is no deposit of faith. There is no apostolic tradition.

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There is no infallible rule of faith. It's astonishing that Rome's best apologists today are dependent upon progressive or left -leaning

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Protestants for their arguments on so many issues. I mean, the whole thing in 1

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Corinthians 3, the reason I stop is he was dependent. His argumentation was dependent upon a book called

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Saved Through Fire, The Fire Ordeal in New Testament Eschatology, and I guess

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I can go ahead and go to the, because I've already looked at this, by Daniel Freyer Griggs, Saved Through Fire, The Fire Ordeal in New Testament Eschatology, Daniel Freyer Griggs, and it's this, as far as I know, never seen from a

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Roman Catholic exegete, never taught by a pope, never taught by a council, interpretation.

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It's not how 1 Corinthians 3 was understood by Bellarmine or any of the rest of these folks, that the works are the converts of these individuals.

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And then, and this is the main, I really hope people will catch this. I don't think a lot of people will, but during the cross -examination, when we got to the day we'll reveal it,

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I'm like, so now I read Trent's book, so I knew where he was going on this. I knew he was going to be using

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Daniel Freyer Griggs and all the rest of that stuff, but when we got to the day, I'm like, so what is that day?

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Well, that would be the day of the Lord, but that's still future, and purgatory is ongoing right now.

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And then he evidently borrowed an argument from Jimmy Akin, and this is what's really interesting, and I hope people caught this.

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I've mentioned a few people and they hadn't. Borrowed an argument from Jimmy Akin that when

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Paul says the day will reveal it, at that point in his life,

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Paul thought that the day of the Lord would happen during his lifetime, but later on in his life, he came to realize that wasn't the case.

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Now, I'm well aware that there are all sorts of New Testament people,

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New Testament scholars and stuff, whose view of inspiration is such that Paul contradicted

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Paul, Paul contradicted Peter, Paul contradicted James, there's all sorts of errors in the

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Bible, it's incoherent, it's been edited, it's been redacted, you can choose what you want, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And Trent Horne, interestingly enough, did not go the

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Poirier route in the first debate that he did with Gavin Ortlin. He didn't do the life -giving thing.

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He sort of mentioned it, but I had already mentioned it in my opening, and I was right,

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I had a book sitting there, I was ready to go, because the fundamental issue is Poirier is defining that term as a non -apostolic term.

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Paul didn't write it. And so the background of Paul, and that's why

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I spent the time in my opening statement talking about arsenicoites and logos, and how we define those terms as they're found in Scripture.

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That's not how a lot of New Testament people do it, because they don't believe Scripture is consistent, and that there are forgeries, and that 2nd

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Timothy is one of them. And so here in 1

38:49

Corinthians 3, not only do you have this admitted by Frederick Riggs to be a way out of the mainstream reading,

39:00

I mean, he defends it, great, fine, wonderful, but it's a way out of the mainstream reading of 1 Corinthians 3.

39:06

But then you combine it with Jimmy Akin saying, well, Paul was wrong. And then you compare that with what's being demanded in the first debate.

39:19

You've got to have these words. And we have this apostolic tradition, except we can't define a single verse of Scripture based on it.

39:32

We've used 1 Corinthians 3. We've talked about the fire, but we can't give you an infallible interpretation of it.

39:41

In fact, we'll cobble together an interpretation that no pope's ever used, no council's ever referred to, and we'll get it mainly from Protestants and hope it sounds good.

39:55

And I'm just like, wow, really? This is astonishing.

40:02

So there's a lot I could say, but there were a couple really interesting things.

40:07

At one point in the first debate, Trent said that Jesus never identified the

40:19

Old Testament. And I'm like, from the blood of righteous

40:26

Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berechiah, who slew between the altars,

40:32

Matthew 23, 35. No, no, that's not an identification. And I'm not sure if he said he proved that or I made reference to that in my book, in his book.

40:45

And so I looked it up, and it's just a footnote, footnote number 39.

40:59

And here's what it says, that some apologists also claim, now it's interesting because right across it in number 34, he's referring to Roger Beckwith.

41:08

So did he read Beckwith on this? I don't know.

41:15

Some apologists also claim Jesus' reference to the blood of Abel and the blood of Zechariah, Luke 11, 50, well 23 would be better, is describing a prophet from the first book of the

41:27

Bible, Genesis, and the last book, 2 Chronicles, of what is now the current Hebrew canon.

41:32

Well, just in case you're wondering, the more relevant text is

41:40

Matthew 23, 34, and 35. On account of this, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous

41:56

Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Now, a

42:04

Jew hearing that phrase would hear the exact same thing as if I were to say,

42:15

I'm trying to give you God's truth as it's found from Genesis to Revelation.

42:22

Now, why would I say Genesis to Revelation? Well, because in the

42:28

Protestant canon, well, actually, in the Roman Catholic canon for that matter,

42:34

Genesis is the first book and Revelation is the last, and so that would be a way of saying, I'm trying to give you all biblical truth, a pan -canonically accurate teaching, and we'd all understand that.

42:47

We all understand what the last book of the Bible is. We all understand the first book of the Bible is, and any Jew hearing

42:53

Jesus in Matthew 23, which is where he is rip -snorting, I mean, that is the judgment text on the

43:02

Jewish leadership that leads into Matthew 24 and the prophecy of the coming and destruction of Jerusalem, that's what they would have heard because they know that the first book of the

43:16

Jewish canon is Genesis. That's where the story of Abel is, and the Jewish canon has a different order.

43:24

So, you buy the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia, one of the first things you got to do, I remember back in Hebrew class, you know, one of the quizzes we had was, what's the

43:33

Hebrew, the order of the Hebrew canon? And it doesn't end with Malachi.

43:39

In fact, the Minor Prophets are considered one book, and they occur earlier.

43:45

So, the organization of the Old Testament canon is different in, and of course, that even that's a tradition developed over time.

43:54

But, 2 Chronicles is where the story of Zechariah is, and that's the last book of the

44:04

Old Testament canon. So, every Jew who would have heard what Jesus said would have gotten it.

44:15

And so, he says, but the assumptions this argument requires, like the identity of the

44:23

Zechariah being mentioned, or the position of 2 Chronicles among the Old Testament scrolls in Jesus' time, are far too tenuous to allow any conclusions to be drawn from a reference

44:32

Jesus made that was not about the canon of Scripture, but about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Well, actually, it was about the judgment that God was going to be bringing upon these individuals who had killed the prophets.

44:46

He's talking about Luke 11. This is Matthew chapter 23. But, it's just so obvious.

44:53

It's just so plain that you go, why would you say that? Sometimes Trenthorne makes arguments where I just go, why?

45:04

I mean, the only thing I can think of is, obviously, at the time of Jesus, the

45:14

Jews, there's no evidence at all that they viewed the Deuterocanonical books, the

45:20

Apocrypha, as Scripture. So, there's no mention of that. I guess that's the idea, because he did say at one point, as I recall,

45:33

Luther took out books from the Bible. Again, that's begging the question. Cardinal Cayetan was contemporaneous with Luther.

45:44

And, well, yeah, that's because he had an over -dependence upon Jerome. John Cawson listed 52 major ecclesiastical writers from the early church up to the

45:58

Reformation within what he would call the Roman Catholic Church that rejected the

46:04

Apocryphal books. And, in fact, look it up yourself. The more a person knew of Hebrew and the

46:13

Old Testament, the less likely they were to accept those books. They weren't written in Hebrew. They were written in other languages.

46:20

The Jews even understood that. And some of those books are just so filled with silly errors, it's astonishing.

46:27

Look at the debate with Gary Machuda on that one, where he literally defended absurd statements in a completely circular fashion.

46:36

It's amazing stuff. So, I don't even know why the argument. Same thing happened when a couple of things.

46:49

Ignatius of Antioch never cites the New Testament. You don't have to believe me.

46:57

Get hold of Michael Holmes or Lightfoot or any critical edition of the

47:05

Apostolic Fathers. Read Ignatius' epistles and look at the references in the columns.

47:14

It's filled with references to the New Testament. So, I'm sitting here going, does he mean that he doesn't refer to the

47:24

New Testament in contrast to the Old Testament, maybe? Because anybody knows it's just not true.

47:31

There's clearly a familiarity with all New Testament books. No, no one's making a claim that he had access to 3

47:38

John at this point or Philemon or something along those lines.

47:44

It took time, especially for those smaller books, and especially the books that were personal letters, Titus for 2

47:49

Timothy, for 2 Peter, things like that. So, I just didn't get it because it was just like, why even make an argument that's just so out there?

48:03

I don't get it. In my notes,

48:09

I had mentioned Clement, same thing. We don't know who wrote what's called 1

48:15

Clement. The tradition assigned it to Clement, but it's a letter from the church at Rome to the church of Corinth.

48:23

And the letter is thoroughly familiar with gospel sayings, certainly knows

48:31

Romans and 1 and 2 Corinthians real well, too. And there's just all sorts of citations, as well as all sorts of citations from the

48:42

Old Testament, too. And so, it was just like, wow,

48:48

I don't understand that. Let me see. Oh, okay.

48:55

Then he has a strange argument that in Mark 7, Jesus isn't talking about scripture.

49:01

He says, you invalidate the word of God. He just quoted from Isaiah, from the scrolls of Isaiah.

49:14

And of course, in the synagogues of those days, you had different scrolls.

49:20

And that's one of the reasons, for example, there's a text of Mark 1 about Isaiah versus the prophets because you'd have a major prophet at the beginning, maybe minor prophets included inside.

49:30

And so, you'd have to scroll through the one to get the other. So, you'd identify the scroll by the name of the major prophet and not by the minor prophets.

49:36

And there's all sorts of background stuff like that. But still, none of it makes any sense at all.

49:45

It just, why would you even try to argue that what

49:51

Jesus is, what is Jesus saying? You invalidate what? He's contrasted the commands of scripture about father and mother.

50:03

And he's talked about the prophecy of Isaiah about these people. Their lips are, you know, they say certain things, but their hearts are far from me.

50:12

And they invalidate the word of God. Now, he's even pointed out that the same parallel passage in Matthew 15 has a variant.

50:22

Well, Mark doesn't. Mark doesn't because we're the law.

50:28

There's a variant. And it was the same thing. Let me see where it was here.

50:37

Yeah, right as we went into cross X, same type of thing here.

50:45

He was trying to say, there are two things that he said right as we went into cross X in the first night.

50:56

One of the arguments was, someone would have said something when scripture became the norm.

51:06

Someone would have said something. And I'm like, what? What do you mean?

51:15

Someone would have said, oh, we're now transitioning from multiple rules of faith to just one.

51:23

Is that what you're saying? What do you mean? What would they have said? I don't, it's just an assertion.

51:33

And it begs the question. And the second debate demonstrated that.

51:39

So I guess I could have said, so when did someone say something about purgatory now becoming true?

51:47

Because it's not, you admit the term's not in the New Testament. And the passages that you've alluded to are just absolutely non -foundational.

52:00

You have to say Paul was wrong about something in 1 Corinthians 3 to even make it slightly relevant.

52:05

And even then, it's not about temporal punishments or sins. And you've got to get rid of the phraseology of temporal punishments, even though you read it for yourself from there.

52:12

But now it's attachments to sin and we're soft -selling this stuff, all the rest of this kind of stuff. And so you admit it's not there.

52:21

So where's, would someone have said something once the apostolic deposit of faith had been interpreted to use this new term, purgatory?

52:37

Shouldn't somebody say something? Well, yeah, you know, he used, people use purge and it's like, yeah, but not for purgatory.

52:49

I mean, there's a ski place called purgatory. That doesn't mean anything either, does it? No, of course not. So someone would have said that it didn't make any sense.

53:00

And then I haven't looked, I haven't looked at the video yet, but he said, well,

53:07

I'm going to flip these around. Let me, let me, okay. Then he said,

53:16

Protestants can't even agree with one another on whether the story of the woman taken in adultery should or should not be in the

53:26

Bible. And I'm like, okay, all right, let's remember something.

53:39

Pope Sixtus, I think it was the fifth, might've been the sixth. I remember, I remember when

53:44

I mentioned this long ago, that there was some argument about which Sixtus it was, because there've been a number of six, what's the plural of Sixtus?

53:54

Sixty? Who knows? Anyway, a Roman Catholic Pope, by the name of Sixtus, fourth or fifth, somewhere around fourth, fifth, sixth, one of them, thought that his being

54:10

Pope gave him special power to determine the final accurate text of the

54:19

Bible. Now, we need to understand that in the days of this Pope, the

54:24

Roman Catholic Church rejected what is used today by both

54:31

Protestants and Catholics. This is the Nessean 28th edition of the Greek New Testament.

54:40

And in fact, you could get in grave danger for emphasizing supremacy of the original language of the

54:50

New Testament, because that Greek is the language of the heretics, the

54:55

Eastern Orthodox. God had demonstrated that the official text of the

55:03

Bible is the Latin, the Latin Vulgate, which of course wasn't even translated until Jerome produced it at the beginning of the fifth century, but it had been used for a thousand years.

55:18

And so that obviously demonstrated that that was the final text. And so Sixtus came up with the infallible

55:24

Vulgate, because the problem was Latin manuscripts, just like the Greek manuscripts have textual variants.

55:30

And so, hey, I'm the Pope, I'm the Vicar of Christ, so I've come up with an infallible reading of the

55:36

Vulgate. Well, the problem was he did this shortly before he died.

55:44

And very briefly after he died, the church retracted that and tried to get all those copies of his

55:52

Vulgate back, because it was horrible. It was filled with errors.

55:57

He didn't know what he was doing. But still, during the Counter -Reformation period,

56:03

Council of Trent onward, Rome attacked the Greek manuscripts. They pushed forward the

56:11

Latin. Now that's changed. A lot has changed in Rome. But it was official, and you could die for questioning

56:20

Rome's teachings on the supremacy of and the official nature of the

56:25

Latin Vulgate. But they don't use that anymore. Well, sure, they still use

56:30

Latin, and they still use Vulgate. But the

56:36

Messiaen text, United Bible Society text, is the official original language text within Roman Catholicism as well.

56:47

And Roman Catholic theology and scholarship recognizes the supremacy of the original languages now, just as we do.

56:54

There's been a major, major change over the past 500 years. And Rome has not produced its own critical edition of the

57:04

Greek New Testament, where the Pope goes, that's the reading of that variant, and that's the reading... I guess they think he could.

57:12

I don't know about you, but the Francis Tuccio New Testament is not one that's gonna sell real good.

57:20

No, no, no. The very idea that Francis could open this text and go, okay, in Galatians 521, is it

57:41

Fanoi or Thanoi? It's Thanoi.

57:48

I, the infallible vicar of Christ, have spoken. Can you do that?

57:53

I don't know. We have, like, what, six verses that have supposedly been infallibly interpreted, but even then, they'll tell you...

58:07

that infallible interpretation only tells you what you have to believe the verse can say, not necessarily what it does say.

58:15

You have 2 ,000 years. And so, on the one hand, they'll tell you in one debate, oh man, because of us, you can have certainty.

58:25

And then you get into the specifics in the next debate, and it's like, well, we've never really defined that. Well, we don't know.

58:31

Well, there's only about six verses that have been infallibly interpreted. This isn't one of them, so I'm gonna go with the

58:36

Protestant interpretation of it. And it's like, what happened? When you take the theory over here, and then you made application in the second debate, and that's why it's amazing that this has worked out the way it worked out.

58:52

It wasn't my plan, but it falls apart, collapses. And so, the story of a woman taking adultery,

59:02

I'm like, what did you just, are you telling me that Rome can, has

59:08

Rome infallibly defined that text, which is not found in any

59:13

Greek manuscripts until the 5th century? And the first Greek manuscript it's found in,

59:18

Codex Vesae Canterburgiensis, is the living Bible of the early church. It's one of the least reliable manuscripts we possess.

59:28

So, are you telling me that the church has infallibly decided on that?

59:34

And of course, they never will. So, on the one hand, we could, but we won't.

59:43

But you should join us because we could, even though we won't. It's, yeah.

59:54

So, I hit him with that immediately. But then, right before that, he had said that Ignatius said that the church should have bishop, priest, and deacon.

01:00:09

And so, I'm like, that's all I say. I haven't watched the video, but I wonder if the camera was wide enough when he was saying that, or if it was zoomed in on him, because I'm sure

01:00:22

I went like this. I know Ignatius pretty well.

01:00:30

I taught Development of Patristic Theology, and we translated a lot of Ignatius.

01:00:39

And I know that he never said that. So, I challenged him. And he immediately said, well, it was presbyter.

01:00:49

And in his book, he says, from which we get the word priest from presbyter. No, we don't.

01:00:55

There's a perfectly good Greek word here for priest in the New Testament. Presbyter does not mean priest.

01:01:03

The high priest is not the high presbyter. And so, what he means by that is that, in church history, what happened early on, you can see it in Ignatius, is a distinction between episkopos, bishop, and presbyteros, elder.

01:01:32

And eventually, over time, one was elevated above the other, so that the bishop was above the elder.

01:01:42

The episkopos, the episkopoi would be above the presbyteroi.

01:01:50

Now, that's not what you have in the New Testament. That's not what you have in the

01:01:57

New Testament. In fact, if you, oops, I didn't mean to open up keynote. If you go to Titus chapter 1.

01:02:12

I know I'm going over the hour. I hope no one minds. And as long as Rich tells me the stream is at least acceptable, there's stuff

01:02:21

I just wanted to get to here. In Titus chapter 1, verse 5, we have, for this reason

01:02:30

I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you.

01:02:42

Kata, polon, presbyteros, plural of presbyteros, elders, as I directed you, as I commanded you.

01:02:55

Namely, if any man is above, beyond reproach, the husband of one wife having faithful children who are not accused of dissipation or rebellious.

01:03:06

For the episkopon, overseer, must be beyond reproach as God's steward.

01:03:16

So here, in two sentences, the apostle uses presbyteros and episkopos interchangeably.

01:03:28

They're the same office. Same qualifications. It's the same office.

01:03:36

And so over time, tradition distinguishes between the two offices and eventually presbyteros is transformed into priest.

01:03:52

But again, there's nothing of that in the New Testament. There's nothing in the order of the church established by the

01:04:02

Holy Spirit, by the apostles, that distinguishes between presbyteros and episkopos.

01:04:09

And certainly nothing from the apostles that establishes a sacramental priesthood.

01:04:16

Nothing. And honest Roman Catholic historians admit this is development.

01:04:24

And so what you see in Roman Catholicism is whenever there's a change, it's just development.

01:04:34

It's never mutation. It's never degradation. It's never rebellion. It's just development.

01:04:41

And so you have all these different threads that develop at different times, in different places, from different people.

01:04:53

Clement and Origen, down in Alexandria, with a lot of highly questionable external sources in their theology, start talking about post -mortal cleansing.

01:05:11

They don't have a place. They don't have a name. They don't have the distinctions to worry saints and non -saints and all that kind of stuff.

01:05:22

Because for hundreds of years, you've still got John Chrysostom. This person died.

01:05:28

They went directly in the presence of God. But there was nothing about sainthood or merit or anything like that.

01:05:37

But you start getting threads. And as you get farther and farther away from the

01:05:44

New Testament, with more and more tradition building up that covers over the distinctions the

01:05:49

New Testament makes, but gives rise to these other things, then you start getting the development that over time leads to...

01:05:59

And even Gregory the Great. Gregory the Great's dialogues were very important in the eventual development of purgatory, but not so much during his life.

01:06:09

His writings seem to indicate he believed that you die and you go in the presence of Christ. But he records these visions and he gives credence to these visions that other people have had about post -mortem experiences.

01:06:22

And it's during the medieval period that that book becomes extremely important, not so much during his own life.

01:06:29

But at a later period of time, it gets read in light of these other developments. And this all comes together until you finally get, over time, 1400 years after the birth of Christ, the dogmatic definition of purgatory.

01:06:45

And yet he actually, in his closing statement, said this was the universal faith of the

01:06:50

Church. And I don't think the vast majority of Roman Catholic scholars would even dare to make that kind of a statement.

01:06:59

But there you go. So, you have...

01:07:07

When you dig into the text, when you have the time to...

01:07:12

And that's... Look, debates should be a mechanism to allow you to hear both sides so as to be able to do your own research with a knowledge of what the key issues are.

01:07:30

The debates that took place in the Reformation, such as the one that Luther was involved with with Eck, took place over days.

01:07:41

And I was thinking recently, maybe it would be really helpful to plan a debate where we go back to the old ways, in a sense.

01:08:01

And instead of two and a half hours, three hours, I've done some that were three and a half hours long.

01:08:09

But in history, when

01:08:18

Luther took on Eck at Leipzig, 1518, during the break, because these things lasted all day, you had to go eat, you'd eat lunch, you go take a walk, you'd come back, you do it again.

01:08:41

And you had long periods of time and tremendous amount of interaction. Luther went to the library.

01:08:47

He had just been accused by Johann Eck of being a Hussite. And at the time, all

01:08:53

Luther knew about Jan Hus was that he had been burned by the Council of Constance in the century before.

01:09:02

And so he took that accusation very seriously, because it can have real...

01:09:08

If you're saying the same things of a guy who was burned to the stake, you might want to think about that.

01:09:17

And so he went to the library. He had time between sessions to go to the library, and he looked up everything he could find by Jan Hus, which is sort of surprising there was much in there, and realized

01:09:30

Jan Hus said a tremendous amount of evangelical and true things. And he risked his own life when the debate continued to say

01:09:42

Jan Hus said many true and evangelical things. And on any standard judgment of debate, he lost the debate at that point.

01:09:55

In fact, it was the Leipzig Disputation, 1518, that caused Luther to start thinking about epistemology and eventually

01:10:03

Sola Scriptura. He had already come to understand Sola Fide. But Eck, who became his lifelong enemy, and the big irony is both

01:10:12

Luther and Eck wrote horrible books against the Jews. Eck's was much worse than Luther's, but they both did.

01:10:22

Eck forced Luther to think through the foundation of his theology.

01:10:32

I'm sitting here going, what if we did a debate? It wouldn't necessarily have to, given what we can do online, what if we did a debate where you have two opening statements of plenty of time?

01:10:52

Let's say a full half hour. I've done debates with 40 -minute opening statements, actually.

01:11:00

So 40 -minute opening statements. And then you put up a splash screen and everybody can go use the restroom and get a drink of water, maybe eat half a donut.

01:11:17

And the debaters can look up references. And instead of the format that we use now, where, for example, the format that we used in Houston is 15 -minute opening statements, seven -minute rebuttals, four -minute rebuttals, cross

01:11:40

X, five -minute closing statements. In the modern context with people in a room, okay,

01:11:46

I get it. But think about it, that means you have half the time to respond in each cycle.

01:11:56

And what frustrates a lot of people, it certainly frustrates me as a debater, is you have to choose what you're going to respond to.

01:12:05

And you also have to choose how in -depth you're going to respond to it. So there are people saying, you should have done this, or you should have done that, or you should have gone after that.

01:12:15

Until you're sitting there and that clock is flying by, you don't understand what it's like to have to prioritize and go, man,

01:12:27

I'd love to talk about what so -and -so said. There's this great quote, but it has to be set up.

01:12:34

And that's going to take that amount of time. That means I'm not going to be able to touch that at all and that at all. And he really emphasized that.

01:12:39

And so I really need to get to that, but that's all happening at one time. And so 40 -minute opening statements break enough time, say 20 minutes, to look up a number of things, to prepare notes, to check references.

01:13:00

And then instead of half that time or even less, do another 40 minutes.

01:13:09

That takes a lot of work. And then take another break. And make it so that when you come back, not only can you check out what the other person had just said, but when you challenge it, you can give references.

01:13:32

I mean, nobody has all knowledge at their fingertips. So have it extend during the day or maybe have it happen over two days, where you do the presentations one day and then you start having interaction.

01:13:50

Do presentations, a long rebuttal, medium rebuttal, something like that.

01:13:57

And then the next day, cross -examination questions. But again, in the way that we do it now, you literally have to have all the information in your mind and at your fingertips.

01:14:13

Because when Trenthorne finished his opening presentation on Purgatory, there is no time between that and when

01:14:27

I have to stand up and give mine. And same with rebuttals. You have only enough time to pick your notes up and maybe some books or something like that.

01:14:38

Try not to fall off the stage to get up to the podium. Put your stuff there and hopefully start your timer in the right way.

01:14:46

You don't have time to be looking up anything at all. You can't go, I'd like five or something like that.

01:14:51

You can't do that. There are huge advantages to that and huge disadvantages to that.

01:15:01

It would be exhausting. And I would think that this would be...

01:15:08

And when Luther debated at Leipzig, he was one of a couple debaters from Wittenberg.

01:15:16

And there are other debaters with Eck as well. And so you might have a group of people working with you to look up references.

01:15:28

And you might, if we did it electronically, you might say, okay, you go get this one, you go get that one, you get this one, get references back while I'm looking this one up.

01:15:36

And we have 25 minutes to do it or something along those lines. It's just something

01:15:45

I've thought about because one of the great frustrations is always there's so much that you want to get to and you can't.

01:15:53

You have to prioritize things and you're always getting less and less and less time. So no matter what you do, there's always going to be stuff that can be left off.

01:16:04

You never in a debate feel like you've actually given the case as clearly as you could because you have to try to get into a certain timeframe.

01:16:17

So that's just something I've been thinking about that might be really interesting to... I don't know exactly how all the details will work out, but I think it could be worked on.

01:16:27

I think it would be helpful. I really do think it would be helpful. So anyway, there was so much more here.

01:16:39

Let's see here. Let me just look at a couple things.

01:16:48

Yeah, mortal and venial sins. Yeah, Bauer, Dunker, Arndt, and Gingrich.

01:16:54

I don't know if you caught that, but it was amazing during the purgatory debate.

01:17:03

He says, well, BDAG gives us the meaning at 1 Corinthians 3 .15 is punishment.

01:17:10

And my response was, well, first of all, we don't know who put it there. There's no argumentation giving.

01:17:16

We can't cross -examine it. We don't know who went...

01:17:23

I guess I could show you it, but BDAG is really the standard. It used to be

01:17:29

B -A -G -D. That was second edition. Third edition is BDAG. It's the standard

01:17:35

Greek lexicon in use today. It's not the only one. You know, you got

01:17:40

Lo and Nida and others that are very useful. But when you use a resource like that, and when you see where it places a particular verse, all that's giving you is whoever did this entry, that's what they think is the best translation.

01:18:01

But you can't cross -examine it. There's not going to be any arguments given. And my response was, the problem is, what's

01:18:09

Paul's usage? And that's why that was important to the Poirier thing, because what's Paul's usage of the adversars?

01:18:15

Well, Paul didn't write it. At least we agree that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians chapter 3.

01:18:20

He wrote Zemiao. And when

01:18:26

Paul said, I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them to be dung in comparison to the high calling of Jesus Christ in Philippians, he uses

01:18:36

Zemiao. Every time he uses it, he's using it in a sense of suffering loss.

01:18:43

That's the key as to what Paul's utilization would be.

01:18:49

And you'd have to argue against that given context. You don't just simply cite

01:18:55

BDAG. You have to deal with, well, why would this be so different for Paul?

01:19:02

What in the context gives you that? That's where doing real exegesis is concerned.

01:19:12

So there's so much more that we can look at, but let me just summarize and wrap things up.

01:19:24

It's been a long day and I'm probably pushing it. I didn't get anything from,

01:19:29

I think I put Rich to sleep. Yeah, I didn't get anything about, yeah, the feed's fine or anything like that.

01:19:35

So I think Rich is gone. So I'm just sitting here talking to myself now. Anyway, here's the summary.

01:19:49

The two debates providentially back to back demonstrated the incoherence of the

01:19:59

Roman Catholic system. It's fine. Solid.

01:20:06

Good. I'm glad you caught a little nap there too. In the first, you have this mythical apostolic tradition.

01:20:21

It's asserted, it's never proven. This deposit of faith, and there are certain things assumed about it, that it contains information not found in the

01:20:36

New Testament or, and then the wonderful term, or if it's found in the Bible, it's found implicitly, not explicitly, which means whatever

01:20:48

Rome wants to make it mean. And then in the second debate, you get into a specific dogmatic teaching of Roman Catholicism.

01:21:01

And all of a sudden, might be this, might be that.

01:21:07

We're not sure. We don't know. And the church has never defined it.

01:21:12

After 2000 years in possession of this deposit of faith, you're dependent on running off to finding obscure books by Protestant scholars someplace to come up with your arguments and your exegesis?

01:21:30

Really? Why? Why the lack of clarity? Why the lack of assurance?

01:21:37

On the one hand, you tell us in the first debate, hey, you can't know, you guys can't even know whether the

01:21:44

Percupaean adultery is in Scripture without us. And you turn around and go, oh, so you've officially, oh, well, we actually haven't officially defined that.

01:21:51

Then why bring it up? When you make these claims and then you push on it, and it comes apart.

01:22:04

And so we point out, purgatory's changed. All you gotta do, read it.

01:22:13

Go read Bellarmine. Read them. What they believe about purgatory is very clear.

01:22:20

And now everything that was of the essence of what they taught, well, the church never formally defined that.

01:22:29

Oh, so popes for hundreds of years functioned on it, but Benedict can write one letter where he says the fire is

01:22:38

Christ himself, and oh, there it is. The inconsistency is astonishing and should be obvious to anybody.

01:22:49

It really should be, but for a lot of people, it's not.

01:22:57

And so the vacuous claim of this deposit of faith and this oral tradition that contains stuff that's only implicitly found in scripture or something like that.

01:23:14

Folks, you need to understand, okay, we're talking about purgatory, and yes, purgatory has changed, but so has capital punishment, right?

01:23:23

And over the past 10 years. The Catholicism has changed just over the past 10 years.

01:23:30

And you have an entire synod going on right now. Synod and synodality.

01:23:38

And if you read what the people making the presentations at the pope's behest are saying, they're lecturing the bishops on the necessity of being inclusive toward LGBTQ individuals.

01:23:54

And here's the problem. Once you deny sola scriptura, you don't have an objective foundation any longer.

01:24:03

So the changes we've seen in purgatory, indulgences, capital punishment, when you can go back and you can read the papal syllabus of errors, look it up, papal syllabus of errors, go look it up and read it.

01:24:21

It is a modern, relatively modern document, 1800s. In comparison to church history, that's fairly modern.

01:24:30

You read that and then you listen to Francis today and you go, and I'm not joking when

01:24:38

I say that Teuto Fernandez and Pope Francis would be burned at the stake in the year 1600 by the

01:24:44

Roman inquisition. I don't think there's a question about it.

01:24:49

What that means is any mutation, not development.

01:24:57

That's how you hide stuff. That's how you keep stuff hidden. That's how you keep the faithful sort of going the same direction.

01:25:07

Well, there's been development. You mean there's been change. There's been evidence that there is no body of faith.

01:25:15

There is no deposit of faith. Sorry. There is no apostolic tradition that has any content to it at all.

01:25:23

You're making it up as you go along and you're blaming the Holy Spirit. And I have seen what were once conservative

01:25:33

Protestant denominations eviscerated by the LGBTQ movement.

01:25:39

And how did they do it? Same process, same process.

01:25:45

When Daniel Kirk debated Bob Gagnon on whether Presbyterians should become affirming, his argument was the

01:25:53

Holy Spirit of God led the church to recognize in the early years that God was opening up the gospel to the

01:26:04

Gentiles. And that was scandalous to many people. In our day, the

01:26:10

Holy Spirit is saying to us that we need to recognize God's LGBTQ children.

01:26:17

That's the argument Kirk made in that debate. That's the argument being made at the Synod. If you can't see it, you're blind.

01:26:25

If you can't see it, that's what these people want, you're blind. You're willfully closing your eyes.

01:26:35

The Pope supports the people who are supporting this movement.

01:26:41

It can't happen overnight, but it takes time and it's happening. And without Sola Scriptura, you can't stop it.

01:26:49

It's just development. Because development allows you to recognize, well, the church misunderstood in the past.

01:26:58

It misunderstood in the past. And now we're getting a deeper understanding.

01:27:05

It's always development. And there's no objective foundation to stop it because you've abandoned

01:27:13

Sola Scriptura. And the purgatory debate showed it. I never, when

01:27:20

I suggested the topic, ask Evan MacLennan. I'm like, well, we have to have one.

01:27:27

They're not going to defend the Pope. So haven't done purgatory for a long time. It's a gospel subject.

01:27:32

We want to do a gospel subject. Let's do it. And only in hindsight that I can then sit back and go, wow, what an illustration, what a demonstration of what we were saying in the first debate, in the second debate.

01:27:49

So I'm thankful to the Lord. I'm thankful that he gave me the strength to get through it. I'm still not a hundred percent, by the way.

01:27:56

So please continue to pray along those lines. But, and there's so much, there are so many other things that I was looking at this afternoon and stuff like,

01:28:04

I knew I wouldn't get to all of them. But hopefully you're seeing, you know, when you have to literally sit there while doing

01:28:12

First Corinthians chapter three and say, well, Paul was, Paul was, Paul made a mistake or Paul didn't write the

01:28:19

Anastos. Where is Catholic apologetics going? That's, that is not what

01:28:28

Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid were about in the 1990s. I don't remember them ever going there.

01:28:34

Is this what's going to be in the future? That doesn't give you a foundation for apologetics.

01:28:43

Really doesn't, really doesn't. So I don't know. I, it, yeah, it's, it's interesting.

01:28:50

So hopefully that has been challenging to you and useful to you.

01:28:57

And if you haven't, I'm sorry if you hadn't actually caught the debates yet that, and now you're going to go listen to them.

01:29:07

I don't know how it's going to affect your listening to it. At the very least, I would hope that you'd be listening for some of those things where, yeah,

01:29:15

Paul was wrong about that or this type of stuff. Maybe you'll hear some stuff that for most people just went by so fast that you have to go back and listen to it a second time.

01:29:27

And by the way, I know the volume was low, but there is a audio recording that's perfectly good.

01:29:37

And the church is going to provide that to us and to Catholic Answers. And it should just simply be a matter of dropping that audio in.

01:29:46

You know how, if you know how to use video editing software, you can separate out the soundtrack, remove that one, insert the other one.

01:29:54

They should sync up pretty, pretty perfectly and it'll be a higher quality sound.

01:30:01

So, and the ones in March, I'm sure that'll already be taken care of.

01:30:06

So it should be all ready to go at that point in time. So there you go. Okay. Thanks for listening to the program today.

01:30:15

I'm not sure when we're going to be able to get back together again. Watch the app. We'll let you know there.