A Quick, (Audio Only), Dividing Line from the High Country

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White, recording the program for you today up here in Flagstaff, Arizona. I just didn't think that the wireless I have here at the lodges I'm staying at in the Flagstaff area was really up to trying to do a Skype thing.

Certainly not video. And if you're just going to do audio, then why worry about making Rich sit there and worry about Max Headroom stuff? Though I'm not sure how many people anymore even know what Max Headroom means.

But it's sort of the distortion you can sometimes get when you're doing things via Skype or the other methodologies. It's not just Skype. But anyways, I just figured it would be easier to record something for you.

Probably going to be a little bit of a shorter program. Got a lot of stuff going on. And you may hear some extraneous noises. Up here in Flagstaff, they don't have air conditioning in the rooms. So you have to have the windows open and there's a very unhappy child running around outside.

I'm not really sure what's going on there, but no, the parents are around. It's just not a not a good day for somebody. I remember as a kid, I memorized a poem called Alexander's No Good, Very Bad Day.

I don't have it memorized any longer, though I think I could probably get it back if I try it hard enough. Seems like that's the type of day that kid's having. Anyway, I'm up here. It's that time of the year when I head up toward Colorado.

In the past couple years, I've been adding Utah in. We've been going over to the OPC there, Christ Presbyterian in Magna, which is a suburb of Salt Lake City over on the west side of that valley there, over near the mountain on the other side from the Wasatch Range.

I've been doing this. It started, I think, about 2011. I started going up and doing these crazy rides in Colorado once I lost all that weight that I had gotten as a weightlifter. Those who have seen some of my older debates know that I was on bike from 93 to 98.

It was real skinny during that time that I bulked up. It wasn't because I was just sitting there eating chips. I was drinking protein shakes and doing a lot of weightlifting. I got pretty big. Then starting in 2004, 2005, I started to get back in biking shape.

It took a while to do that. Finally, in 2010, I lost the last of that weight, got back to riding weight, and started doing these crazy, crazy rides as high as 14 ,000 feet above sea level. I'm up here in Flagstaff riding at 7 ,000 feet.

That's about the best you can do in Arizona. You can get up to 9 ,000 feet when you climb the Snow Bowl Road, which is closed at the moment, unfortunately, due to fire dangers. Or up on Mount Lemmon, Mount Graham in the southern part of the state, you can get up to 9 ,000 feet, but you can't really ride around much up there.

It's just always good to get acclimated. I live at 1 ,200 feet above sea level. That is not enough to get you prepared to perform well at 7 ,500 to 14 ,000 feet above sea level. It's a wonderful time of the year.

I've got dear, dear friends up in Colorado that put up with me for lengthy periods of time during July. I've done some of the programs from my second home. I'm sure I'm going to hear somebody say, he's got two houses.

No, it's just that when you've got such good friends that you can call up and say, hey, I'm supposed to be there about 6. Well, we won't be there, but we left the door open for you to know where to go and what to do.

And you can just sort of pop on in and do your thing. That makes for a wonderful time. So that's where I'm headed right now. We'll try to do some programs from up there as well. But I just wanted to get a program in real quick, a couple things going on.

But just on a personal note, some of you may have, those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook, know that one of the things I want to do up here when you come up to Flagstaff is, well, you know, Pluto was discovered at Lowell Observatory in the Flagstaff area.

And last time I was up here, it was much, much colder. And I had gone out, found a spot out in the forest outside of the light zones. Jason Lyle sent me an overlay that you can put in Google Earth and it'll give you the light pollution zones.

And so you can sort of chart, well, if I want to get away from human-caused light pollution, you know, where do I need to go? So I had gone out, not very far from where I'm staying right now, and was just stunned at the beauty of the Milky Way and the clarity of the stars and stuff like that.

And so I was going, you know, you can't take a picture of this with your iPhone. It's just not possible. And I, you know, I've had pretty nice cameras in the past, but they were, you know, back in the 1980s and hence were film and just haven't had a.

Well, OK, I'll take that back. I had a 12 megapixel, 35 millimeter a few years ago. But in comparison to what's available today, you know, I've always had a stick and a rock. So Hasim, son of Ramallah King of Graphics, recommended to me a particular sort of mid-range mirrorless electronic camera.

And I have it with me. And so I got a chance to go out last night and into total darkness. Well, pretty much total darkness. It is interesting. There were a few clouds around. It wasn't perfectly clear and that sort of bummed me out, but it was amazing how much light just a few clouds on the horizon could reflect from the city of Flagstaff.

Many, many, many miles away. It was fascinating. And in some of the pictures I've posted, you can see the amber color of these clouds and these long exposures. And that's the reflection, even though this is a quote unquote dark sky city.

That is the the reflection of the amber lights, streetlights, many, many, many miles away. Made for really pretty pictures, though. But it was generally clear. And I set up my 10 inch Dobsonian reflector telescope and I set up the camera.

It's a Sony A6300, for those who are going to be asking, and went between the two. And shot all the Milky Way as it was rising. That was the main thing I wanted to do is I really wanted to get some good shots of the Milky Way.

I did. I think I'm going to be able to make a really decent panorama shot with what I did last night of the entire Milky Way, which will be really, really cool. And caught some some really neat stuff.

I was amazed looking at the pictures. You can't hardly even take a picture of the sky at night without having a satellite or an airliner showing up and photobombing. I was I was taking a shot of the Big Dipper, a number of shots, the Big Dipper, because you do what's called photo stacking.

You stack graphics on top of each other to increase the detail and stuff like that. And so I was taking about five or six shots of the of the Big Dipper. And you've got this airliner photobombing the whole thing.

And I've posted that so you can see it. This is this red dotted line as it goes slowly across the sky. So you just can't avoid it. In fact, what's really interesting is I just posted on on Facebook and Twitter.

One of the pictures I have of the rising of the Milky Way over the San Francisco Peaks, Mount Humphreys and Flagstaff, which is really beautiful, captures the region of space, which is the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

It's called and the very center we discovered just over the past decade or so is something called Sagittarius A star or Sag A. It depends on, you know, who you're talking to and how they pronounce it and stuff.

But it is the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy that we have discovered only, like I said, over the past 10, 15 years. And that region of space is is in the picture. And what's really cool is in one of the pictures, there's a satellite streak that points almost directly to it.

Sag A is just below and to the right of the left end of this satellite streak in the pictures. You couldn't plan that. That's that's pretty wild. And I also I also saw through the scope and I have yet to find a really efficient way of taking pictures through the scope.

The scopes that have attachments for fancy cameras and stuff are way beyond my price range. But I saw some just beautiful through the scope images of the Ring Nebula, Whirlpool Galaxy, Cigar Galaxy, Dumbbell Galaxy, Bode's Nebula.

And of course, I spent a lot of time looking at Albirio, which if you ever get a chance and you can do this with with astronomical binoculars, too. But Albirio is just one of the most beautiful things in the heavens.

It's just it's just glorious. It's just means a lot to me. That's really what hooked me in doing this stuff. And it was all Jason Lyle's fault. October of last year, he took me stargazing and showed me Albirio and things like that.

And it was like, oh, man. So having a great time doing that in the evenings and then out on bike for a few hours each day, getting the the lungs and and the blood supply acclimated to. Well, I think according to yeah, according to my watch anyways, my Garmin watch, there's only 75 percent of the oxygen here that there is at sea level.

So that's that's one of the reasons you go out and you work hard and you breathe hard and your body goes, oh, we need more red blood cells. And so you produce more red blood cells and you just don't you just don't.

I think the second time I did the triple bypass ride, we were starting off in Evergreen and I pulled up next to these two young guys. They're like 22 and I'm like 50. And but I hear him just breathing hard.

I'm saying, hey, you know, hey, guys, how you doing? Hey. So where are you all from? Oh, we're from Florida. Flew in yesterday. And I'm like, Florida. OK. Yeah, not much in the way of altitude training in Florida and flew in yesterday.

Going to be a long day for you boys. I didn't say it to them, obviously. I just have a nice day and kept on going and passed them. So so that's what I'm doing up here and looking forward to tomorrow night and then speaking on Saturday night and then Sunday morning and Sunday evening at Christ Presbyterian and then heading over to Evergreen from there.

So that's what we're up to. We'll try to do some programs from from Evergreen as well. Well, it's it started making the rounds first. The first thing I saw was Robert Gagnon linked to a video that was actually from 2017, just hadn't really gotten much in the way of of interest or or garnered a lot of a lot of retweet to whatever else.

But it was a Fuller Seminary. Now, to make sure everyone is on the same page. I am a graduate of Fuller Seminary, Master of Arts degree in theology 1989. Magna Cum Laude. But I did all my work in the Phoenix Extension, and hence had significantly more conservative, more conservative professors than you would have if you had been on the main campus in in Pasadena.

Now we did have professors from Pasadena to come over. And those are normally where I ended up in debates. I remember I remember the I took an ethics class right toward the end. I mean, the very last semester I was before I graduated.

And at one point during that class, the professor came out from behind the podium, sat down amongst the students, turned his desk toward mine. The rest of students circled us and we debated abortion because he was pro-choice.

And that was just the way it was. Fuller was in the 1980s, way to the left of me. And I referred to myself as a token fundamentalist there. And that was a long time ago for Fuller. Fuller has continued and rapidly accelerated its leftward pace, as is what happens with almost all seminaries, to be perfectly honest with you.

It is not unusual. But, yeah, Fuller has has has taken a hard left lurch over the past number of decades and is way out there in on our land anymore, unfortunately. I mean, I got to get an education there.

But again, like I said, the vast majority of my professors came from the local area. And in fact, I had the same Greek professor at Grand Canyon College that I then had at Fuller. So I had Dr. Barrett for seven years in a row, including the time there at Fuller.

Anyway, Dr. Gagnon, a couple of days ago, linked this video from Fuller and a presentation, Can White People Be Saved? And the speaker, of course, is black. And if I recall correctly, I think Bob Gagnon said that the speaker in the video had actually been put on the board of trustees of Fuller Seminary.

And then lo and behold, IVP, InterVarsity Press, has just put out a book. And of course, one of the primary contributors to said book is the same gentleman who was speaking in the presentation. And so, you know, that doesn't surprise me too much.

That was Willie James Jennings is the name. The book from IVP, Can White People Be Saved? Triangulating Race, Theology and Mission. Now, it's very, very difficult for the vast majority of us who read our Bibles and do our thing to follow what is being said in this kind of material.

It really, really is. And the categories are just so far outside of what we are accustomed to discussing, so far outside of our understandings of things that it's hard for us to even interact with what is being said.

But what you need to understand is whiteness in this terminology is a mindset. It's political. It's cultural. It does have a relationship to Eurocentrism and Anglocentrism. So there is a racial, ethnic element to it.

But it's more than just simply the idea of how much melanin you have in your skin. This has very, very deep, you know, it's got the same source and root as liberation theology and all the rest of that stuff.

Again, you know, people just automatically demonize anybody who says this. But it has very strongly neo-Marxist categories of thought behind it in the sense of dividing people along lines of ethnicity or dividing people along lines of the viewpoints they have of even basic things such as human rights or what are human rights, what's the origin of human rights, private property.

All sorts of issues like this. And the most important thing to see is that these categories are not N .O .T., not derived from any kind of serious, believing, respectful, historical understanding of Scripture as divine revelation.

These come from sociology. The categories come from anything but meaningful, exegetical work. And what they do is they derive these categories from other places and then cram it into the Bible. And that's what you've got going on.

This is cutting edge theology in so much of the modern, quote unquote, Protestant world. And so here's IVP charging 27 bucks for a new book can, quote, scare quotes, white scare quotes, closed, people be saved.

With numerous, numerous people contributing to this. And a lot of people are just going to see that and just automatically respond to it in one fashion. I think it's better to recognize what's being said so that you can refute it in a more, in a deeper, more fundamental fashion.

But that's what's going on out there. And people often ask me, wait a minute, how can such and such a person say something? Because they're a seminary graduate. You know, as I sit back here and think, I can't think of more than, I probably couldn't even list 10, but let's do Lot and Sodom here.

I could not list more than 10 seminaries. And if you add the word sort of major seminaries that you could go to today in the English speaking world, where you would receive an education that would, in all likelihood, include in the majority of the classes, a belief that Scripture is theanustos, that it is God's word.

That it is consistent with itself, that it's appropriate to harmonize, not in a simplistic fashion, but at a deep level, recognizing that the harmony that exists within divine Scripture, there's probably not 10 seminaries that would provide you with that kind of an education any longer.

And so you see these people coming out and they're saying things that to the rest of us, we just go, where did they get that? Didn't they learn their biblical languages? Well, they may have. That's certainly a de-emphasized element, a strongly de-emphasized element within all graduate education today.

The liberals are de-emphasizing it because of a lesser emphasis upon the divine nature of Scripture. Sadly, many of the conservatives are de-emphasizing it because of an emphasis upon classes on leadership and being trendy and all the rest of this stuff.

So that in many seminaries today, if they still even have a Greek and Hebrew requirement, you can fulfill them in a Jantern class and things like that. And this is not the way theological education was done in the past.

It just wasn't. And so anyway, maybe 10 seminaries like that any longer. And so people come out and we're confused as to why in the world they are holding to the views that they're holding to. And this is the reason why.

And so can white people be saved? University Press, you know, I remember my mom. I think my mom, I thought she worked for IVP at one point. She worked for one of the major publishers at some point. All I can remember is that years ago, she would lament the fact that she could see the major change taking place.

She could see the degradation, the fact that the major publishers used to have certain doctrinal standards and that was collapsing. And that certainly is the case with almost everybody these days. And so here's an example of it.

Now, I'm sure IVP would say, well, this is a major presentation at Fuller Seminary. Yeah, yeah, I know. Just change the term white to any other color and you'd get the idea of what's being said. But hey, you're not allowed to say anything about that these days in our society.

It's everything has changed. And so that's what's going on there. And we have so many extremely important things going on in the world today. And yet, what are we looking at? What are we struggling with?

What are we fighting with? Stuff like this. It truly, truly amazes me. You know, but should it really surprise us? I mean, I have yet to see and if someone has, I just haven't had time to go searching.

But if someone has a link to any uploaded audio of the ReVoice conference, I don't want to listen to it. But I don't want you to have to listen to it either. So as I said, over the next few weeks, I'm going to be spending a lot of time going uphill.

I'm probably going to climb. Oh, goodness. Thirty five, forty thousand feet. Oh, more than that. I think about a good grief. I'll do ten thousand five hundred a single ride. I'll probably do sixty thousand feet over the next few weeks.

You don't go very fast when you're going up that kind of steep, steep climbs at high altitude. And so lots of time to be listening to stuff. And so if anybody has links to that, if you could if you could contact Rich, have him pass it on to me or tweet it to me or whatever.

I would really like to try to get some of that stuff listened to because I think there needs to be an analysis of it. And looking at it, you might have seen a CNN story. I think it came out of the Philippines, a gay pride parade in the Philippines.

So that's that tells you a lot about what's going on right then and there. Gay pride. A thing in the Philippines. But it says a group of Christians attended a pride parade to apologize for how they've treated the LGBT community.

And you look at some of the signs. God loves you. So do we. I'm sorry. We're here to apologize the ways that we as Christians have harmed the LGBT community. Now, the problem today is, is if you push back on something like this, then people automatically say, oh, you're saying that the church has has handled the subject of homosexuality perfectly.

No, I'm not saying that. Certainly in the generations before ours, in my own generation, it just wasn't something you talked about. It just it was it was so taboo and anathema that you you didn't even you didn't even address the subject.

And because you didn't address the subject, then no one's going to going to pretend that, in fact, individuals, the small minority of individuals who claim repentance and faith and yet truly struggle with a same sex attraction.

This is a small minority of the homosexual movement. Those individuals have been completely marginalized because no one knew what to say. There was no discussion of it. No one even had an idea that it existed in the vast majority of instances because it's such a small, small, small group of people.

So on that, but we see that group of people is not the LGBT community. There is no LGBT community because LGBT are all different things. The only thing that holds them together is their rejection of biblical norms for sexual expression amongst human beings.

Don't tell me that L is the same as G, which is the same as B, and that any of those have almost anything to do logically or rationally with T. There is no community here. It's a it's a it's a fantasy.

It doesn't exist. You cannot create a community out of such disparate things. And so when I hear people talking about all this, we've just been so terrible. Well, first of all, the church must, on a biblical basis, respond to the LG.

OK, similar, similar issues there. So there's one response there. There's direct biblical teaching. You respond to that in a particular way. B, whole different can of worms take some from one area, take some from another area.

It still would be very clearly condemned in scripture. And so you deal with that as a sin and as a perversion of human sexuality. T, whole nother area, a complete rejection. Again, tiny, tiny number of people who actually experience what's called gender dysphoria.

And it is a mental illness. It is not natural. It is not to be accepted as something that you you no more. You should no more respect transgenderism than you respect body dysmorphia, where you don't believe that your left arm should be on your body and therefore you should cut it off.

We recognize that there's something seriously wrong with that person. That this is not something to be respected in the sense of put up on a pedestal. You say people like this need to be protected and to be given special rights, et cetera, et cetera.

No, you try to help these people because they have a serious problem. But you do not say this is a natural thing and that this makes a subgroup of people that need to be given special rights and legislation and all the rest of stuff.

They need medical therapy. They have a problem. And it is the same with transgenderism. And yet today we have entire nations elevating gender dysphoria, gender confusion to a something that is good and to be honored and and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

And that's that's the end of society as as as as we know it. It's it is cultural rot to be to be to be certain. So the whole idea that there could be a, you know, church wide response to such a diverse group is is ridiculous.

But beyond that, what you need to understand is what you're seeing here is the result of the rejection of lordship theology, which is this biblical theology that Jesus Christ is lord of all of life. That is that the law of God is good and just.

There is a moral and ethical element of that law. There's something called repentance. Because, you see, once you don't have that, then the gospel becomes a skewed thing and becomes it becomes much easier to see how it gets turned into this kind of a we're so sorry.

God loves you the way you are. Well, it's pretty much let's be honest, it's pretty much what Pope Francis said, or at least is alleged to have said in the Vatican did not deny that he said what Pope Francis said to that homosexual man.

God loves you the way you are. He made you the way you are. And the, the biblical call of the gospel is that God made you, and he calls you to live in light of the law that he has given he has given us a light for our feet.

He's given us a way for us to understand how we are to live. And the idea that we can lay that aside and just do as we please. And guys just go just I'll just love you no matter what you do, is a false gospel, it is not the biblical gospel, it is not the gospel that derives from the cross of Christ or the empty tomb.

And in fact it negates the that's that cross and that and that empty tomb. And so we see this here in the Philippines, we see it all over the United States, these misguided theologically debilitated Christians who think that there is no call for repentance in the gospel.

And therefore, hey, you know, it doesn't matter if you're living in direct contradiction to what scripture teaches. It doesn't matter if that's destructive of your own human flourishing. Hey, you're just fine where you are let's just all get together and have unity in Christ I'm not sure what that unity is supposed to look like or be, but there you go.

And so this kind of stuff is out there. And each one of us must have a mechanism, a means of giving a response to these types of things because you're going to be asked you're going to be asked well, why aren't you on board with this why aren't you one of the loving Christians, because our society is now defining loving, not in biblical parameters by any stretch of how can you define love.

Biblically in our society when you no longer have a biblical doctrine of man creator law, the view of man is so low in secular humanism is so low in a secular society we're merely accidents of nature we're just animals doing what animals do.

And so, love becomes an emotional feeling love becomes something that that you can fall in and fall out of how often do you hear that one. The high biblical doctrine of love requires a biblical doctrine of man and a biblical doctrine of God and our society once imbibed those things, not because everybody in the society had a regenerate heart by any stretch the imagination, but there was a period of great blessing.

And during that period of great blessing, our society and by many of these things, but that all changed, and that has changed very very quickly. That's why we feel like the ground is moving under our feet.

Because of, of that reality. And so even the definition of love, you're going to be told you're not a loving Christian well you, you should literally, if you want to be a Christian who's interacting with the world you literally should practice.

What you're going to say to people when they raise these issues to you, you should have a response ready not in a simplistic thing not a cookie cutter thing but but look, the objections are getting cookie cutter.

The objections that come from a secular society are cookie cutter objections. And so you shouldn't be every time you encounter it reinventing the wheel going oh yeah I talked about this once before let me let me see if I can remember what I said or something along those lines no, there should be a direct and and meaningful response that of course is intended to then open the door to further communication.

Not close the door to further communication. So you have to be careful about that because there's there's certain ways of responding. That'll sound really neat. But good luck, jumping the chasm you just created by your witty repartee.

The idea is to take the time to provide a response that will open avenues of communication to others open avenues of witness, and that's not always easy to do and it's going to obviously going to vary dependent upon the situation you find yourself in.

And so, these things be thinking about theology matters we've said it for a long long time, and you look at what these Christians are doing. If they are Christians, that's up to the Lord to decide but you look at what these Christians are doing.

And they have a deficient theological foundation and the result is a deficient theological practice. Next time we get together I'm not gonna be able to do it today need to wrap this up but the next time we get together I want to go over.

And it'd be easier once I'm set up up in evergreen. I want to go over Michael Brown's interview with Andy Stanley, I want to include with that. Looking at Frank Turek's article Christian is true, even if some of the Bible isn't.

And yeah it's same subject we've gone over before but it keeps coming up. And so, comes up, you got to keep addressing it and addressing it from different angles, because this has a tremendous impact upon how we engage our society and engage those, those around us.

So brief program today like I said, just a few things, catch up on, and Lord willing, fairly early next week, shooting for Tuesday, we will try to do a Skype program video program from from Evergreen, Colorado, assuming the Lord grants traveling mercies between, between now and then.

So appreciate you listening, even to this shortened broadcast look forward to talking to you again next time here on the dividing line.