White & Durbin Respond to a Mormon

Apologia Studios

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Hey, guys. Welcome to a special edition of Apologia Radio slash TV. I'm here with Dr.

00:05

White, and this is becoming like a tradition for us now. It should be.

00:11

It should be because of what it says about us. That's right. I will leave it to the audience to determine exactly what it says about us, but yeah.

00:20

People clicked it and immediately try to figure out how to turn the... Turn the contrast down. Yeah, that's right.

00:26

So, last year we did a show, and we did it in your studio at The Dividing Line, and we wore the

00:33

Coogees, this special Coogee that you gave me for Christmas, which is amazing. It means a lot to me.

00:39

Last year we did it, and we did it in response to an atheist slash agnostic -ish kind of guy, and so we did a response to a video he had done against presuppositional apologetics, and now it's

00:54

Christmas time again, and we're doing another Coogee Christmas special, and this one's a little different.

01:01

This one is on Mormonism, and so just to bring everyone into it, I did a video, and we labeled it

01:08

The Gospel for Mormons. The story behind the video, I think, is pretty interesting. We were heading out to do something in Idaho, and our plane got canceled, and so we ended up that night in Salt Lake City, and we had to spend a night in Salt Lake City, and I think it was around one in the morning or so, and we figured, hey, we're in Salt Lake City, let's make a video, and so we were tired.

01:32

I would have slept. Yeah, we had to be up at four or five in the morning, and so I was like, let's just go do it, so the video itself was...

01:40

See, I wouldn't have trusted what I was going to say at that time in the morning. Well, I was almost not trusting what I was going to say.

01:46

I was so tired, but no, we turned the heat on up in the car, and got me warmed up, and then we jumped out of the car, and we filmed this thing in front of the temple just straight through one time, and it wasn't meant to be a book on countering

02:00

Mormon apologetics. It wasn't meant to be an episode on countering

02:05

Mormon apologetics. It was really a video to speak directly to Latter -day Saints, to give them the gospel, and to explain some of the fundamental differences, and praise

02:14

God, this video. We put it up, and it's been seen around the world by tens of thousands of people.

02:22

Mormons have come to Christ. God has used this to give them truth, and they've come out of Mormonism to Christ, and that's just really, really amazing, and so Christians are sharing this.

02:32

Mormons are sharing this, so I noticed that it was being shared a bunch, and people started sharing an article along with it.

02:40

Mormons were sharing an article along with it, and the place you can go to see this is scripturalmormonism .blogspot .com.

02:47

The author of the book, it's a small book.

02:56

The article is Robert Boylan, and he responds to the video. He calls it refuting

03:02

Jeff Durbin on, quote, Mormonism, and so we're going to talk about that today, and it's directly responding to some of the quotations that I make in the video.

03:13

It's a short video, only about 12 minutes long, but before I do that... Oh, it would take you much longer to read the response.

03:19

Absolutely, absolutely. This is a lot of copy and pasting, a lot of work to go through this, so today we're actually going to respond to a few critical points of the article, and try to address it with Scripture, and try to unravel some of these things, but before I get into that,

03:34

I actually wanted to just let everyone hear kind of a cool story. So when

03:39

I moved to Arizona, I didn't know there was a lot of Mormons here, and it was really amazing.

03:45

I came out here to basically do consulting for karate schools out here, and to be closer to LA, because at the time

03:52

I was doing a lot of work with like just martial arts stuff, and so my first day, the guy

03:58

I'm with gives me his car keys and says, go ahead, go ahead and take a look around town. So I start driving down the street, and I'm in Gilbert, and it's

04:05

Ward. Oh, there's a Mormon ward. You don't see a lot of that where I'm from in Washington D .C., and so drive another mile, another ward, turn a corner, drive a little while, another ward.

04:15

I'm like, whoa, there's a lot of Mormon churches out here. So then I see a billboard on the side of the road, and it talks about the

04:23

Mesa Easter pageant, and I didn't know anybody out here, and so I wanted to go, so I packed up my

04:28

Bible and a bunch of information for Mormons, and I went out to the Mormon Easter pageant, and the first time

04:35

I met Dr. White was at the Easter pageant in 1996, and I pulled up to the

04:42

Easter pageant. I get on the sidewalk, and this was when Mormons were really engaging us, and I see the sidewalk is littered with a few

04:51

Christians that are surrounded by Latter -day Saints, and in particular right at the light at the intersection of Main and whatever that street is right by the temple.

05:01

Thompson. There you go. So I see that's where the old Arby's was. That's right. Didn't you get hit in the head with an Arby's sandwich?

05:06

No, I got hit in the chest with an Arby's sandwich. I still remember. I can still see it floating over, slowly rotating.

05:14

No, I got hit in the head with a slushie that had been squished down into it. It was like rock hard. Oh, no.

05:20

Oh, soft stars. Right in the back. At the Mormon temple. Okay. Wow.

05:25

That's intense. So I see a man. You look different then.

05:33

Oh, yeah. Is he 96? Yeah. I think when you were wearing your scholar glasses, and I think you might have been.

05:40

You might have been wearing... Yeah, 98 is when I started lifting, so yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you went through that phase where you just got buff, this is right before then.

05:49

This is like sort of like you would look hipster. I was still riding. This is when you would look like if you were to put you in today, you would look kind of hipster.

05:55

Yeah. Okay. Hair was thinning. Yeah, that's right. And you decided to go all the way. 2001.

06:01

That's right. So you're surrounded by a bunch of return missionaries,

06:06

I think maybe even some missionaries and young Mormon teenagers, and you were answering questions just in a circle, just boom, boom, boom, boom.

06:14

And I'm just watching this and I'm like, oh, this is amazing. This is such a blessing. Christians and Mormons talking.

06:19

It's just awesome. So I ended up talking to Rich that night, and I was like, who is this guy?

06:25

And he was like, oh, that's James White. I was like, James White, James White. Not the James White from the King James only controversy, because it was the first book

06:31

I ever read as a Christian. And he was like, yeah, I was like, oh my goodness, this is amazing. So from that time, started seeing you every year out there, got a chance to interact with you a bit and watch you do some evangelism.

06:43

Of course, I was always learning from all the stuff that you're putting out, the books and everything. So you've been involved in ministry to Mormons since?

06:53

Elders Reed and Reese. That was probably July of 1982.

07:01

Yeah. And since that time, you have written a book on Mormonism.

07:07

Actually more than one. More than one. Letters to a Mormon Elder and Is the Mormon My Brother. Yes. So Letters to a

07:12

Mormon Elder is actually really, really, I think, important for Christians to get, I think, because there's lots of great books on Mormonism.

07:19

And people ask me sometimes, they say, are you ever going to write a book on Mormonism? My answer is no. There's too much great stuff out there.

07:25

I don't think there's any reason to do any more. What we need now as Christians is to go out on the mission field. And use what's out there.

07:31

That's right. But I think that there's books out there with great information on Mormonism, the history,

07:37

One Nation Under Gods. Richard Avanos is fantastic as an overview of some of the history.

07:43

Mormonism, Shadow Reality, of course, is the grandfather of them all. Yeah. So Gerald and Sandra Tanner's ministry has put out a lot of detailed information on Mormonism and its history.

07:52

And there's Compare and Contrast. But Letters to a Mormon Elder, I think, is important for Christians because these are imaginary conversations, but they are based upon conversations that you've had with Mormons over the years, hundreds.

08:09

And they represented, really, a little bit more of the traditional

08:15

Mormon belief. I suppose if I were to do it today,

08:20

I'd have to include some letters to some missionary who had become the subjectivist that we now deal with all the time, where you've got your truth,

08:30

I've got my truth. It's a lot easier to deal with the old -time Mormons who would say, hey, there's the

08:35

Church of the Lamb, the Church of the Devil, but save two churches, and go to Joseph Smith's testimony, and hey,

08:42

God the Father, Jesus Christ, they appeared, those churches are false, this is the one true church.

08:48

It's easier to deal with someone like that than what you're dealing with today. Yes. And that is the difficult thing today is oftentimes you have to convert someone to Mormonism to get them out of it.

09:01

Early on, a lot of the engagements, they would actually tell me, no, you're not Christian, we are the true church, they would call us

09:09

Gentiles, things like that. Well, and the patriarchal blessing, actually, that used to be important to people.

09:16

Those were things that would come up. Mormons used to be significantly more theologically -minded than they are today.

09:23

Today, there is so much more of a subjective, emotional mindset than there was back in the 80s that it really has changed the, well, as you pointed out, you almost have to trip

09:38

Mormons to get them into conversations today, whereas the first time we ever went to the General Conference of Mormon Church in Salt Lake, we had a line of people waiting to talk to us.

09:47

By the end of the day, we were hoarse because there was no breaks.

09:53

It was just constant the whole time. But I saw over the decades that decreasing and decreasing, and it just reflected the change that I have seen in Mormonism, which is now causing them tremendous difficulties.

10:08

Right. And so that point, actually, something that was brought up in this article here in the opening comments, he says that Durbin claims that Latter -day

10:18

Saints he engages with claims that the LDS Church to be just another denomination. However, any informed

10:24

Latter -day Saint, I do wonder if Durbin would ever debate someone of the caliber of Blake Osler or Daniel Peterson.

10:32

By the way, we've had a standing challenge to Daniel Peterson for about 15, 20 years now. I was going to ask you about that.

10:38

Yeah, then targeting unexpected Latter -day Saints as he is wont to do. He says he wonders if he will know that Mormonism does not claim to be just another denomination within the broad

10:52

Christian spectrum. It is the only true church therein. I was actually encouraged to see him say that.

10:59

Oh yeah, this definitely represents the old style. Yes. Farms type of material that back in the old

11:08

BBS days, before the internet. Yes. Before the internet, I would spend hours and hours and hours dialoguing with Mormons via what was called the

11:17

BBS system, the old PhytoNet. Yeah. And that really was what was behind Letters to a Mormon Elder as well.

11:22

I mean, a lot of the research and stuff like that came from that time period. These are the kinds of Mormons that...

11:28

They're believing Mormons, and believing Mormons are still out there. They, however, are in the same position that conservative believing

11:36

Roman Catholics are today, in that they're realizing their leadership is not really with them anymore.

11:42

They can look back at... They can read Bruce R. McConkie. They can read these guys and go, that's where I am.

11:50

But as I listen to the leadership today, I've been left behind. And it really does...

11:57

I think some of... As I read this article, it seemed very shrill to me.

12:03

And I think a lot of that comes from, I think, a sense of desperation on their part to realize that what they were brought up believing really isn't what is being taught by the leadership of the church anymore.

12:15

Right. They're becoming a minority. And that would be a frightening thing to be facing. Absolutely. So the reason

12:21

I think it's encouraging is it actually creates a more meaningful opportunity to get somewhere in conversation.

12:30

Because you talk to a lot of the modern Mormons outside the temple, people I interact with all the time online, and they do say to me...

12:37

And I know you've had your experiences. We're Christians like you. You have your truth. We just have different viewpoints.

12:43

Oh, it's constant. We're Christians too. That's the... I think the thing we hear the most is, but we're Christians too.

12:49

I'm a Christian. I just put a video out this week of a conversation

12:54

I had outside the temple with a guy who was a missionary and older guy married now. And the fundamental assertion he was making is, no,

13:04

I'm a Christian. You're a Christian. We believe in the same Jesus. He was fighting for that.

13:09

So when this gentleman, Robert Boylan, makes this first opening comment, essentially saying, you know,

13:16

Jeff doesn't know what he's talking about. No Mormons believe that. You're just not on the street. No, evidently not.

13:21

Yeah, evidently. So, but I am encouraged. And I also noticed you took a few insults for having had anything to do with me.

13:27

And that is what I wanted to go to next is people might ask and say, well, why is Dr. White? And why is he on the show today?

13:33

Well, for one thing, because he's my friend. Because it's Christmas. Because we hang out. And it's time to wear

13:40

Coogees. That's right. And it's our Christmas Coogee tradition. And so it's time to interact with somebody.

13:45

And I guess we'll do that at Christmas time. But he says in the article, and one of the reasons why

13:50

I thought it'd be good for us to do this together, he says, this article will be a response to some of Durbin's misinformed, quote, arguments.

13:58

As a background, Durbin is a Reformed Protestant and is buddies with James White. Such alone explains his multitudinous theological errors and inability to engage in exegesis.

14:11

Oh, yes. Yes. Instead, he just throws out a text and hopes that his audience will accept what he says about it, hook, line, and sinker.

14:17

The irony is, to be perfectly honest with you, with all due respect, as I read through this, the article is internet scholarship.

14:26

And what I mean by internet scholarship, it's when someone takes disconnected sources that are actually not consistent with one another, if you actually know the backgrounds, and you pull long citations and throw them all together, not even bothering to create transitionary statements that actually connect these things together in any meaningful fashion, but just simply an attempt to demonstrate, well, look at what

14:54

I've found and look at the argument I can make here. And it's really difficult to follow.

15:00

It wanders all over the planet. A good editor would have gotten rid of about 87 % of it as being utterly irrelevant, no foundation offered, not relevant to the thesis, so on and so forth.

15:14

And so the actuality is the lack of exegesis is actually on the part of Mr.

15:22

Boylan, not the other way around. So it's a projection thing. He doesn't do exegesis because, well,

15:28

I actually know I can't so I'm going to say somebody else can't. That's a problem, as we'll see, both exegeting the text of Scripture as well as some historical stuff, because I was really surprised at how the article started out.

15:44

To be honest with you, I think it would have lost most people, because if you start out the article with a string of disconnected patristic citations,

15:53

I can't think of a better way of getting people to move on to the next thing on Facebook than to throw out a bunch of disconnected...

16:02

I'm looking here, 1 Clement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 quotations from 1

16:07

Clement, then a quotation from Didache. No discussion of, well, what's 1 Clement?

16:13

Why is this relevant to me? What does it represent? I'm teaching church history right now at PRBC.

16:19

We went through whole sections of this epistle, but in obviously significantly more fair fashion in attempting to place in its context and historical relevance and things like that, as well as the

16:32

Didache and things that came afterwards. But I was really surprised that you'd start there, because unless I missed something,

16:40

I don't remember a tremendous amount of emphasis upon patristics in your video. So why would you start?

16:51

He says, well, I guess you made some historic Christian belief. I'm going to show you what historic

16:56

Christian belief is. It wasn't Trinitarian, and yet the reality is the quotations. He gives 1

17:02

Clement 46 .6, have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit of grace that was shed upon us, and is there not one calling in Christ?

17:10

How is that not Trinitarian? I was really surprised, because if I were to go to Clement and say, here are some significant

17:21

Christological and theological statements that would reflect, as we have in the New Testament so many places, where the ease of association of Father, Son, and Spirit, or for example, how

17:32

Paul will talk about in just a couple of verses, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, same Spirit, and there's an interchange of terminology that indicates that in his mind he's not even seeing that as an issue, which if you're a subordinationist, if you do not believe in the full deity of Christ, this would raise all sorts of issues.

17:52

Since we have that New Testament, we have it in Clement as well, which could be as early as A .D. 95. And by the way, it's called

17:59

Clement, but that's a traditional identification. This is a letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, because the

18:08

Corinthians had kicked out their elders, and this is, what, about 30, 40, about 40 years after Paul.

18:15

So they still had problems. Even four decades later, there were still problems at the church in Corinth, but there's no single bishop writing.

18:24

This isn't the pope writing to the Corinthians and saying, bad boys. What you've got is a plurality of elders in Corinth, and you have a plurality of elders in Rome.

18:35

And so you have two churches equal with one another, and one is remonstrating with the other saying, what you've done is wrong.

18:43

Reinstate the elders. Come back to a proper form of discipline. I think you can see how relevant that is in regards to the

18:50

Roman Catholic situation. But the point is that Clement speaks often of the elect.

18:56

These are passages that in no way deny a Trinitarian understanding. They're perfectly consistent with Trinitarian understanding, as is the quotation from the

19:05

Didache and everything else that's brought up. But I'm just wondering, especially, I was really confused with the quotation from Justin Martyr, because Justin Martyr actually is one of the early fathers that makes the argument that Jesus is identified as Jehovah in his dialogue with Trifo.

19:21

But if you're going to bring those types of things up, then why not deal with some of the, what

19:30

I would call the monuments from that time period that cannot even begin to be understood from a

19:37

Mormon perspective? Because nothing from Clement is talking about God living on another planet, exaltation to Godhood, any of the fundamental places where Mormon soteriology and Mormon theology is so completely disconnected.

19:56

And it used to be that the argument was, well, they had already gone into apostasy, so why would you expect them to be talking about truthful things?

20:02

Well, then why is he quoting these things? And out of context, without any explanation. The only explanation that comes to my mind is,

20:10

I'm trying to impress you with how much cutting and pasting I can do, because otherwise there's nothing relevant here. But why ignore these monuments of statements?

20:18

My favorite is when Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, he's on his way to his death.

20:24

He writes seven genuine epistles to individuals and churches. And when he writes to the

20:29

Ephesians, and this is one I've actually memorized, and I've almost got it memorized in Greek now.

20:35

I haven't reviewed it for a couple weeks, and so it's probably rusty again. But I think this is probably one of the most important texts outside the

20:44

New Testament in the first hundred years. Because just think about what it means that a soon -to -be -martyr bishop on his way to his death, in writing to one of the churches, to the church in Ephesus, of course, what you say as you're going to your death is important.

21:06

You're not wasting your time talking about trivialities, okay? And so this is about 107 or 108

21:15

AD. So you're talking 200 and almost 220 years before Nicaea.

21:22

And what do we hear all the time? Ah, the Trinity was invented, the Council of Nicaea, Constantine forced it on everybody's throat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

21:29

Listen to what Ignatius says two full centuries before that. There is one physician of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate,

21:41

God in man, true life and death, both from Mary and from God, first passable and then impassable,

21:51

Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, when we talk about Christology and the definition of Christ and the two natures and the hypostatic union and all the rest of that stuff, that's normally pushed all the way back to the period of the

22:07

Council of Chalcedon and Chalcedonian Christology and Orthodoxy and stuff like that in the middle of the 5th century. Here at the beginning of the 2nd century, people who knew the last of the apostles have very clearly a thoroughly developed

22:23

Christology. And when you read something like it, it is absolutely amazing.

22:29

Why not mention that or why not mention Melito of Sardis? Melito, I'll make this brief, but Melito sort of fell out of favor because he was on the wrong side of an early church controversy called the

22:43

Court of Deciman Controversy. It was an argument about when you determine the proper date of the celebration of Easter, which back then was obviously considerably far more important than it is to most people today.

22:57

We argue about much lesser things. But he was on the wrong side of that, so his writing sort of fell out of favor, but he was actually a brilliant writer.

23:07

He's very important, for example, because he inquired into Palestine as to the canon, and so he rejected the apocryphal books just like Jerome did and many other people did down through history.

23:18

But listen to what he says. This is my translation of his Passover sermon, well, a portion of his

23:24

Passover sermon. He who hung the earth in place is hanged. He who fixed the heavens in place is fixed in place.

23:32

He who made all things fast is made fast on a tree. The sovereign is insulted. God is murdered.

23:39

The king of Israel is destroyed by an Israelite hand. This is the one who made the heavens and the earth and formed mankind in the beginning, the one proclaimed by the law and the prophets, the one enfleshed, sarkothys, made, put into flesh, in a virgin, the one hanged on the tree, the one buried in the earth.

23:56

Now, that kind of, again, this is before the end of the second century.

24:03

There's no way to understand this type of theology outside of the Trinitarian matrix of the

24:08

New Testament. And so to pretend that you're actually meaningfully addressing whether you can find evidence of Trinitarian belief in patristic sources by cutting and pasting a couple of texts without even giving a modicum of an attempt to establish context, things like that.

24:33

I'm sorry. That's, like I said, I've been dealing with this style of Mormon apologetics since the 1980s.

24:40

And it's becoming less. It used to be the norm. This is becoming much more of the minority.

24:47

There's no question about that. But it has been around for a while. And it's still not convincing by any stretch of the imagination.

24:53

Right. And so that's one of the things I wanted to point out that I've said in response to this article.

24:59

And people have asked me before we've done this today. I said, look, this is good and bad when articles like this come out.

25:06

It's good and bad. The bad is that there are

25:11

Latter -day Saints who will think because there is an answer. An answer. It's a good answer.

25:17

Then we don't have to do anything else. And there are people who will see this and not understand these issues.

25:23

They'll get to the first three or four paragraphs and start seeing church fathers being quoted. And they'll say,

25:28

I don't even know the context. But that's impressive. But hey, man, we got something. Yep. And they'll have the mistaken notion that this has been fully answered.

25:38

That this is a good response to what's been said in the video, which was just really just me preaching to Mormons.

25:44

So that's bad. The good is when things like this happen, it leaves behind a record, which

25:51

I think is very useful. It leaves behind a record to demonstrate just what a particular author might engage in, in order to make their point.

26:02

And that's, they'll engage in sloppy handling of history, sloppy exegesis, just whatever it takes to try to provide some solace to Latter -day

26:11

Saints who are looking for answers. But it's not an answer. It's not a good answer. And I want to say, just in case somebody's maybe new to this, maybe a

26:18

Latter -day Saint is watching this, first and foremost, we care for you. And it'd be good for you to understand what

26:25

Christians have believed historically in regard to the Godhead, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

26:31

There's a great book written by a guy called The Forgotten Trinity. And that's not his name. His name is

26:37

Dr. White. The name of the book is The Forgotten Trinity. It's a little book, so it's not overwhelming. But the

26:45

Bible teaches from cover to cover that there is only one God, eternal, and none before, none after,

26:52

Isaiah 43 .10. He's the first to last. He doesn't even know of any other gods. He's God alone in the heavens above and on the earth below,

27:00

Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 35 and 39. And that there is a fundamental ontological chasm that exists between the uncreated eternal

27:11

God and everything else which is made, which includes mankind. We are not in a spectrum.

27:18

He is not simply exalted farther down the eternal law of progression. This kind of belief, absolutely, utterly unknown amongst anyone before Joseph Smith who claimed to be a

27:31

Christian. There was no one in the early church who believed these things. And don't try going to theosis amongst the

27:37

Eastern Fathers and the idea of becoming little gods, so on and so forth. They did not deny that chasm.

27:44

They saw man definitely being exalted and joined the divine nature, but it was not a change of the human nature.

27:53

It did not make man eternal. It did not say that... What does LDS scripture say? Man was in the beginning with God.

27:59

That was never taught by anyone who claimed to be a Christian before Joseph Smith, never. That's a fact.

28:05

No one can dispute that fact. If you try to find anything back there and say that's what

28:11

Joseph Smith was saying, you have to do one of two things. You either have to totally disregard and ignore the context of what was being said back there or, and this is happening today, you have to try to ameliorate, weaken, change

28:25

Joseph Smith's statements by starting to pick and choose and only put together a certain spectrum of his statements rather than listening to everything he actually said.

28:34

I mean, if you really honestly deal with the King Follett discourse in its context, you will find no one before Joseph Smith that said the things that he said in that context.

28:43

Right. No question. So the fundamental part of what the

28:50

Bible says about God is that He is the only God. It is strictly monotheistic, cover to cover.

28:57

There's just no denying that. And the Bible also teaches that the Father is

29:02

God, that the Son is God, that the Holy Spirit is God, and that the Bible always makes a distinction wherever you're at between the

29:10

Father and the Son, the Son and the Spirit, and the Spirit and the Father and the Son. There are distinct persons and yet one being of God.

29:18

This is the clear testimony of the Scriptures. And the interesting point I want to make about that is that even early on in the history of the church, while you don't have the benefit that we have today of these debates that have happened and having to put down heresy and respond to people who have tried to pervert the teaching of the

29:35

Scripture, so we have the ability now because of the history behind us and what God has granted to us in His providence through debate and false teachings, we have the ability now to respond in,

29:44

I think, a very efficient way. But you see in the early church, even the early church fathers, the early Christians had a very well established and developed

29:52

Christology and Trinitarian theology. They had their debates and you had people like Origen and others who certainly wouldn't be as thoroughly biblical as we would like to have been, but especially in dealing with Mormonism.

30:08

And that's what was interesting about this article is the willingness of the author to try to pull in people as if they're supportive of a

30:15

Mormon position, when in reality, I couldn't think of anyone that he was quoting other than fellow

30:21

Mormons that would ever accept the utilization of their assertions about Christology as being relevant to a

30:27

Mormon understanding of Jesus as the first begotten spirit child of an exalted man from another planet and one of his many wives.

30:36

The idea of, well, I can find support for these things in these other sources is really, really difficult to understand.

30:44

And it really challenges, I think, people to take a look at what this stuff is saying and put it into its own context.

30:51

I just don't think most Mormons, for example, are looking up Jimmy Dunn and have an idea of where he's really coming from on these things.

30:59

And when we get into some of the biblical texts, like you wanted to look at, you had quoted from the

31:06

Shema, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad, hero Israel, Yahweh is our

31:12

God, Yahweh is one. And this was the fundamental creedal statement of the

31:21

Jewish people. And it underlies so much of the prophets, it underlies what we have in Isaiah, what we have in Jeremiah, it underlies the apologetic against the false gods, especially during the period of the exile when the people are no longer in Israel, they're now in a pagan culture and they're being invited to worship these false gods.

31:46

Well, what does it mean to say that Yahweh is Echad? What about these other gods? What about these apologetic arguments being given to them?

31:56

So, for example, in Jeremiah chapter 10, you're given the actual words that you're to say in response when someone invites you to idolatry, you're to say that the gods who did not make this world will pass away from this world.

32:12

There's only one God who made this world. It even switches from Hebrew to Aramaic so you can actually speak it in the language that the people who are inviting you to idolatry would understand.

32:20

Oh, wow. It's the only Aramaic in Jeremiah. Yeah. Jeremiah chapter 10, verse 10 -11, it switches over to Aramaic, here's what you say, then goes back to Hebrew.

32:28

It's fascinating. Powerful. It's really powerful. And so we have this stuff given to us, and the response from the former

32:38

Farms Shields -style apologists is generally to just do the core dump quotation thing.

32:49

I think there was an almost page -long quotation from a lexicon on Echad.

32:58

And whenever I see someone do that, I realize they can't read the language. Right. You don't need to dump the entire definition because the entire definition is not dealing with the semantic domain that you're dealing with in regards to any particular use of that word.

33:16

And so when you just throw all of that out there, I guess it's just supposed to be impressive to people that have just grown up doing internet research, but it doesn't really actually answer anything.

33:28

When you look at how the Shema functioned in the Old Testament, and when you look at the argumentation that is found in the

33:34

Old Testament concerning monotheism, the argument is these are the characteristics of the one true

33:39

God, and no other gods possess these things. Nowhere is there the beginning of any idea that what you actually have in what's being taught in the

33:50

Old Testament is, well, you've got God the Father is Elohim, and Jehovah is

33:56

Jesus the Son, and all the rest of this kind of stuff. No one that they're quoting would actually believe what

34:04

Joseph Smith taught about the nature of God. That's right. And so it's almost deceptive in the sense that, well,

34:16

I'm going to use these sources, but I'm not going to let you know that the people that produce these sources would find my interpretation of them to be utter laughable.

34:23

And that's the point. Yeah. When you have to use different standards, I think it shows the collapse of your argument.

34:30

He brings that up, the number and nature of God, because in the video I give a few quotations from Scripture that I stand by, by the way.

34:37

Deuteronomy 6 -4, I quoted the Shema, Isaiah 43 -10, I think I gave, Isaiah 44 -6 and 8, just a few texts.

34:44

We could go on almost for days unpacking these texts. There is only one God. Now, he attempts to go after Deuteronomy 6 -4, hero

34:54

Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone is what he quotes there. He says this, the Shema is often cited as evidence of strict monotheism.

35:02

However, most biblical scholars agree that the Shema is not about the number of God, but instead is about how

35:09

Yahweh is the only God with whom Israel is to have a covenantal relationship with. Yeah, it's interesting how you define biblical scholars.

35:17

When it comes to Old Testament scholarship today, in the majority of seminaries,

35:23

I would say the vast majority of them no longer believe in biblical monotheism because of their view of the

35:29

Old Testament. Because they view it as a much later document, it is not written by who it says it was written by, or there really wasn't a

35:38

Moses, etc., etc. Again, these are things that Joseph Smith never would have believed either, but we can skip over that part, evidently, if you're a

35:46

Mormon. But sadly, we do need to recognize that if you go to the place that I warn people about is the most dangerous place for a

35:57

Christian spiritually, it's called a Christian bookstore. If you don't realize as you walk down those aisles, you need to view those aisles as filled with coiled snakes, especially not just when you're walking down the

36:11

Joel Osteen aisle, not when you're walking down the shack aisle. It will be an entire aisle after the movie comes out.

36:17

It will be a shack aisle. It will be. That's a whole other topic. But when you go to the biblical commentary section, that's when they are really poisonous vipers.

36:29

Because once they strike, the poison may be slow, but it is almost always fatal.

36:34

Because the point is that much of what is published on the Old Testament today, not all of it, but much of what is published in the

36:41

Old Testament today accepts the idea of a fundamentally evolutionary nature of the

36:48

Old Testament. It doesn't take Jesus' view of the Old Testament. That's the point. You're not allowed to have Jesus' view of the Old Testament anymore.

36:54

You've got to accept, well, you've got the Yahwists and the Elohists and the Deuteronomists and the priestly sources, and it's all been redacted, and it's really a post -exilic, almost all of it, blah, blah, blah.

37:04

And once you buy that, there is no Old Testament theology. There is no Old Testament view of God.

37:10

And you can accept the idea that the earliest Jews were completely polytheistic, and at that point, you just throw your hands up in the air, and you go, wait a minute, the

37:21

Jesus that I believe in used the Old Testament and viewed the

37:27

Old Testament and honored the Old Testament in a way that none of these people can even begin to understand anymore.

37:34

So, what can I learn from them? How is this helpful? But very, very quickly, once the

37:46

Mormons at BYU and up in Salt Lake and Provo started realizing that they could use liberal

37:55

Christianity against those who were evangelizing Muslims, what they did not realize is that they put directly into the vein of Mormonism a straight track to its own destruction, and we're seeing this today.

38:13

Once they started sending people out to get degrees outside of Provo and Salt Lake City, outside the

38:19

U of U and BYU, so that they could be more mainstream, what they didn't realize was you start buying into the liberal

38:27

Christianity stuff to argue against Christianity, guess what? Those people are going to come back, and they're going to start applying the same things to Mormonism, and Mormonism can't even begin to defend itself.

38:39

So, once you start trying to apply redaction criticism and text criticism to the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Gregory of Christ, you start finding all sorts of things that you simply cannot defend.

38:52

You start seeing that archaeology in the Book of Mormon and all of the textual issues and the revisions that are done, you start looking at the 1833 commandments and the 1835

39:03

Doctrine and Covenants and the changes between them, and everything just starts falling apart, and that's what's going on right now.

39:10

Mormonism is...the Mormon leadership is now publishing books about stuff that back in the late 1980s,

39:19

I was carrying big old photocopies around with me going, see? Here's Joseph Smith and the seer stone.

39:26

Well, now they've published pictures of the seer stone. They had it in their archives the whole time. I have arthritis in my spine now.

39:32

From carrying around those things? I'm convinced it's from carrying around my big backpacks out doing evangelism.

39:38

I am really convinced. Oh, I tell you, it's true. It's just amazing. What's now being put out by the church, and the people are looking at this and going, wait a minute,

39:47

Joseph Smith did this, Joseph Smith did that, and now the church is admitting this? They didn't realize. They just simply didn't realize that by sending their people out to try to do the mainstreaming, to try to use liberal

39:58

Christianity in defense of Mormonism, it was drinking cyanide, and the changes that we're seeing are directly related to that.

40:07

It's funny. The view, men like this are finding themselves more and more and more in the minority, and this is why, and this is why.

40:16

Two points I wanted to make. All of that was excellent, but when someone does what he does to say, most scholarship says such and such.

40:25

We need to start talking about that in the way that you just did, and we need to ask the deeper question is, what was Jesus' view of Scripture?

40:30

What was his view of Scripture? When you look at Jesus' view of Scripture in terms of addressing these scholars who would deny much of the monotheism in the

40:38

Old Testament, and they would deny authorship, those sorts of things,

40:43

Jesus said that Moses wrote. So when he quotes Moses, or the law, he quotes in Mark 7 and refers to a commandment and compares it and contrasts it to what they were teaching as part of their tradition that day.

40:57

He says, Moses said, but you say, and he makes a comparison between essentially the words of God through Moses and their tradition, and he says, and thus you invalidate the word of God for the sake of your tradition.

41:10

So Jesus, I mean, do we believe Jesus and who wrote the Scriptures? He says, Moses said. That's from Moses.

41:17

Now what I want to point to is that when he gives this long write -up here, and he quotes a copy and paste, a lexicon, and all that he does here just to make a point about compound unity and everything else, and it gets very muddy, very confusing, and honestly,

41:35

I was bored to tears reading it. I apologize. I don't mean to be insulting. I'm just being honest.

41:40

If I was bored reading it and trying to see what you're saying and trying to provide a response, I can't imagine how a

41:46

Latter -day Saint feels reading this. But here's the point. What I quoted in the video as part of our outreach to Latter -day

41:53

Saints was to point to the fact that the Bible teaches there is only one God, none before, none after, and I gave a few quotations of that point, and the point

42:02

I was making is that the Bible says there is only one God, none before, none after. He's the first and last. He doesn't even know of any other gods.

42:08

He's God alone in the heavens above and on the earth below. Now if you're a Latter -day Saint and you believe what Joseph wrote in the

42:14

King Follett discourse, if you believe what he said, and it's recorded for us in the history of the church, the three gods of this earth, if you believe all of that, then you cannot embrace what the

42:24

Scriptures say about God. There's an antithesis. It doesn't come together.

42:31

But the point I'd say in response to Deuteronomy 6 and all that he writes up here and all the copy and pasting and all of this elaborate argument,

42:41

I think we should look at how Jesus viewed the Shema, and that's actually recorded for us, and he quotes it in the article, which is interesting.

42:49

In Mark 12, verse 28, and one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he had answered them well, asked him, which commandment is the most important of all?

43:02

Jesus answered, the most important is, and here's the Shema, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

43:07

And he goes on to quote, the second greatest commandment, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Now this is what's interesting. Jesus is asked by this scribe, what's the greatest commandment?

43:15

And then Jesus responds with the two, but he quotes the Shema. Now all of this discussion, all of this argumentation about compound unity and the lexicon source and all that stuff, we need to look at how

43:26

Jesus viewed it and how the Jews of Jesus' day viewed it. And when Jesus quotes the Shema, the scribe says to him in verse 32, you are right, teacher, you have truly said that he is one and there is no other besides him.

43:41

Now he listens to Deuteronomy. He knows the Shema. He hears it and he says, you're right, there is no other

43:49

God. One God. That's how he hears Deuteronomy 6. And that's how they understood it.

43:56

Now the question is, does Jesus chastise him here? You know, does Jesus say, no, no, no, you misunderstood me.

44:03

I wasn't talking about compound unity and all the rest. He quotes it, you're right, there is only one God.

44:08

Jesus says to him in response that he had answered wisely. And he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.

44:15

So he hears the Shema and understands there's only one God. That was their pledge of allegiance.

44:21

There's only one God. And that was his understanding. So all of this discussion about compound unity and all these difficult things can't ultimately address the way that Jesus interprets scripture, the way that they heard it, what the scriptures actually say.

44:36

Within the context of believing Christianity or even historical

44:41

Mormonism that took these things seriously. The way around that for the liberal, just so people understand, when the liberal looks at that, the liberal says that's just simply

44:51

Mark's understanding. He's putting words in Jesus' mouth and Mark was a first century person. That's all they understood.

44:56

That's how they get it. And if you go that direction, then you have no foundation left for any scripture whatsoever, whether it be

45:03

Mormon or anything else. And so if they try to go that direction, once again, the result is the destruction of their own scriptures and their own system.

45:12

In defense of that system, it's a self -destructive action. So just a quick point, we'll finish on this.

45:18

This could take months to go through all these and honestly offer refutation of every single point, but we're going to go for some critical areas here.

45:25

I may do something on Colossians on the dividing line. Okay. So we can address some of that here too, but I want to...

45:33

Okay. So the question about the person of Christ, he brings up John 1, he brings up Colossians.

45:41

Mormons teach that Jesus Christ is a literal offspring of Heavenly Father and one of his goddess wives.

45:48

And they teach that Jesus and Lucifer are brothers, spirit brothers, and so are we all. Yep. That's their teaching.

45:54

Now, what I had pointed to, I think I quoted John 1 in the video, in the beginning was the word, the word is with God, the word was

46:01

God. You can unpack John 1, 1a, b, and c, and you can't get anything other than the eternal existence of Jesus Christ that he is in.

46:12

He is in an intimate relationship with the Father, but there's distinction. And he puts theos in the emphatic position and c, essentially shouting that, and Jesus is by very nature

46:26

God. He eternally existed. He was with the Father. He was God. He created all things.

46:32

That's in John 1. Now, the point he tries to make is that, well, it's not so far -fetched to think that Jesus and Lucifer are spirit offspring and that Jesus is a, you know, one

46:42

God among many. Just, I'd like to hear you speak to that just for a moment. Well, what I saw in the article was a bunch of mismatched citations on completely different issues.

46:55

He quotes Anthony Buzzard, a Sasanian Unitarian, and throws that together with quotations from people as far away as Jimmy Dunn and everything else.

47:07

And there's no evidence of an understanding of what the background of any of these citations actually is.

47:14

There's no coherent attempt to be looking at John and saying, what was

47:19

John actually trying to communicate? Instead, what you've got here is, I have my system, which is Mormonism, and I'm trying to find a way to keep

47:26

John from being utterly contradictory to it. I need to find a way to give to the smaller and smaller number of believing

47:35

Muslims who are looking to me for assurance. I need to give them a way around these texts.

47:43

It's totally different when you're actually attempting to exegete a text and bring its meaning out than when you're trying to just find a way to make the text bland enough or unclear enough to not be contradictory to the system you're trying to promote.

48:01

Those are two very different things. And when you realize that and you start reading much of what's on the internet, very quickly you'll come to understand and be able to recognize when someone's actually trying to go,

48:15

I want to know what John was communicating to his audience in his context, which is consistent throughout the book of John.

48:23

And when someone is simply saying, well, in reality, what we've got here is, we can't really know.

48:30

We can't really put enough weight on this to say that it's contradicting what our system is already saying.

48:37

And I'm afraid that in our modern day, the way that education is done for most people, they're not taught to think.

48:48

That's called thinking critically. That's applying critical standards, and that's not common in the public educational system.

48:56

It certainly needs to be much more common within Christian schools or Christian homeschooling.

49:02

There needs to be an emphasis upon that kind of literary critical thought to where you're examining things in that way.

49:08

Right. Final point I'll make on it is that you can say that I think that we have some examples in Scripture about how we can make it look like Jesus and Lucifer are brothers, and when you get to those texts, just know they're absolutely not.

49:27

But when you get to clear texts like John chapter one and Colossians chapter one, there is just no way around the fact that the

49:34

Bible teaches that Jesus is the creator of all things in the heavens and on earth, visible or invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, or authorities, all things.

49:43

Well, he would say that there is, and that you're being too fundamentalist and literalistic in your interpretation.

49:49

Right. But to do that, he has to embrace the interpretive methodology of a

49:55

Jimmy Dunn or of these other individuals who are not, again, they'll take an overarching concept and say, well, it's sort of like N .T.

50:06

Wright does. You need to understand that the primary means through which we should be interpreting the

50:11

New Testament and Paul's writings is the exile motif, and so everything has to fit that.

50:19

That's strain. Everything has to fit that. Right. Well, Dunn's saying, well, this is the wisdom motif, and so it's not like anyone, it's not like Jesus' apostles actually believed that he was the creator of all things.

50:32

It's just sort of an analogy type of thing. Well, the result of that is that the historical application of the

50:39

Book of Colossians, which was to a church that had the beginnings of proto -Gnosticism coming into it, the argument that Paul is offering against that becomes vapor.

50:49

There's nothing left to it. And that's one of the real problems I have with Dunn and people like him is that the result is that the actual apostolic interaction in their days, in their time just becomes worthless.

51:04

That's right. It doesn't have any meaning anymore. That's what happens when you sort of get stuck in the ivory tower rather than being out and actually defending

51:13

Christianity against world religions, which I think gives you the balance that sometimes the academy loses. But that's how they would respond to that.

51:20

They'd be saying, oh, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, you're being so simplistic in saying there's anything that's clear.

51:26

Nothing is clear. You have to adopt a real high level of skepticism, and that becomes an apologetic methodology.

51:36

Or the epistemological humility of the academy. Oh, yes. We need to be epistemological, right? Yes, that's right. Okay, so I want to give people some resources.

51:44

I already named Letters to a Mormon Elder. Is the Mormon My Brother is another one.

51:50

Forgotten Trinity. Forgotten Trinity would be important to get. Now, you also, I'm going to ask you this.

51:57

Your old website, I mean, just all the MP3s and all the articles, is there still access to all that old stuff on Mormonism?

52:05

Well, yeah, everything. All the old articles and stuff are in the blog. It's fully searchable on the blog, and all the

52:12

MP3s that used to be available are on Sermon Audio. The debates with Van Hale and all the

52:21

BYU professors and all that stuff is still there. Good, good. So tons of resources, aomen .org,

52:29

Alpha Omega Ministries, aomin .org. Get the books, get the MP3s, get the resources.

52:35

Just many, many years of your life dedicated to reaching the Latter -day Saints and to equipping

52:40

God's people, and so tons of resources. 100 -verse memorization system. That's exactly right.

52:46

So 100 -verse memorization system. It's on the site. You can just google 100 -verse memorization system

52:52

Mormonism. That I have found to be one of the most important and helpful resources of anything that you've put out, because it arms

53:01

Christians to go out and actually start engaging Mormons. And what it is, is it's just Bible verses over important issues in dialogue with Mormons, and it even gives their particular belief and even some interaction maybe with some of their resources.

53:14

So I would say if you love Latter -day Saints, if you want to reach them, I would actually print that out first as you begin to study all these other things and to interact with this material and start memorizing

53:25

Scripture. I think we can end on this. It is so vitally important that you understand what they believe.

53:33

Oftentimes you have to know it better than them. These days, yeah. These days, because they don't even understand sometimes what their own prophets and apostles have taught.

53:42

So like we say, you have to convert them to Mormonism to convert them to Christ. Help them to understand what they believe.

53:47

Now, if you go and interact with them and you haven't studied what they believe, if you haven't read the Book of Mormon, they may not have any respect for what you're doing.

53:55

I mean, the first thing they ask me often is to say, have you read the Book of Mormon? Now, if I say, no, I'm not reading that.

54:01

Like that's like an atheist debating with me. And I say, well, have you ever read in my materials?

54:07

Have you ever listened to a Christian debate? An atheist? Have you ever tried to at least hear our side? He's like, I'm not listening to that mythology.

54:13

I'd say, well, I know how serious you are about this. So definitely engage with their material. I mean, if you love them, sacrifice for them.

54:21

Sacrifice by learning. Well, reading the Book of Mormon could be interpreted as a sacrifice at times.

54:28

Mark Twain said, but seriously, if you don't have time, you don't want to read,

54:34

I've read the Book of Mormon many times, but if you minimally, my suggestion has been to people read

54:39

Third Nephi because there's a couple other places you can look it up, but read the section about Jesus is coming to America.

54:48

So at least you can say, well, I haven't read all of it, but I did read the part about Jesus and it raised some really interesting questions and that allows you to get to the subject of Jesus by contrasting.

54:59

Now, what Joseph Smith believed about Jesus when he wrote the Book of Mormon and what he believed when he died, two very different things, huge amount of evolution in between, but still it can give you a way to get into the important things because as I've always said in witnessing

55:14

Mormons, who is God? Who is Christ? What is salvation? Those are the issues you need to get to. Everything else is an off -ramp and an on -ramp to get back to that particular subject.

55:22

Excellent. All right. Thanks, brother. Another Christmas Coogee special. Thank you guys.

55:28

I'm sure maybe we'll do some more interaction in the future or I will, he will in dividing line. We'll try to address some of these subjects, but hopefully this is a blessing to you guys.

55:34

If you go to aomen .org, support the work of Dr. White there and to get all those resources, you can also check out this channel,

55:41

Apologia Studios on YouTube, hundreds of videos, I think maybe a hundred of those, actual interaction with Latter -day