More of the Lynn/Spong Interview then Martignoni

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the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded

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Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line.

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I was just trying to, real quickly before the program, listen to what Greg Cockel said about the

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Berean Call on his program on Sunday. So I signed up a few weeks ago for the ambassador thingy, you know, so I can listen to the program.

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So I go on there and I see the program and it says you must log in. And so I have spent the past 10 minutes looking for how you log in.

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I've tried it in Firefox. I've tried it in Internet Explorer. You can't log in. I guess, the only thing

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I can figure out is they put a cookie on your system and if you clean your cookies, which my system does, you got to re -register every time.

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It's like, I'm not re -registering every time, just simply to do that. So it's like, ah, oh, that's frustrating.

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Anyway, so I don't know what Greg Cockel said about the Berean Call, but I would like to know, but I probably will never know if that's what it is.

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Sorry, there is no ambassador login on my screen. It ain't there. It just doesn't appear in Internet Explorer or Firefox or anything else.

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It's just gone. Nothing there. Everybody says, oh, my screen. Well, it's not mine. So anyway, yes, somebody sent me the file.

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Well, you're probably not supposed to do that. So I'll never know until they fix why that's supposed to not work that way.

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Anyhow, so we have other things to do, I guess. I have a few things to play this morning. As you know, we began listening to a conversation between Barry Lynn and John Shelby Spong.

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That doesn't sound too good, does it? Let's try it now. There you go. See, we've got a short. This is week number two.

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We've got a short in this. We've got a short in this little...

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You'll get right on it. Yeah, uh -huh. Yeah, right after you finish another set of DVDs and a few sets of shelves and a few things like that.

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Yeah. And anyways, hey, the Shabir Ali DVDs are available. I blogged about that this morning.

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Hopefully, you all are ordering yours even as we speak to show in your Sunday school classes and give to your elders.

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And what a great Christmas present. You know, the holidays are right around the corner.

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You're probably going to walk into Target pretty soon and hear jingle bells and White Christmas playing sometime around September 15th or so, which out here in Phoenix is really, really weird.

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You just don't get used to that very, very easily. But hey, did you know that those palm trees at Fry's are real inside?

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Those palm trees inside the building, they're real. I was walking through Fry's Electronics.

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And those of you who do not have a Fry's Electronics, it is a geek's superstore, okay?

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And I was walking through the store this morning, and I walked past a palm tree.

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And it's like, okay, that's not too unusual. But then I looked, it's got a greater on the bottom. I looked up, and it looks just like my palm tree looks like right now.

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And hopefully, they're not the kind with seeds because that would be a real royal mess. Can you imagine that during the day? But they have real palm trees.

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That's how big that place is inside the thing. But no one really cares about that. I'm not exactly sure why I started down that line.

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And you're not really certain either. What are you eating, trail mix in there? Is that healthy trail mix?

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Yeah. It's healthy trail mix with M &M's. I was about to say, yeah, sure, mm -hmm.

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Yeah. Well, it's mostly healthy. It's mostly healthy, but the M &M's help with the taste, though. Oh, sure do.

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Oh, boy, let me tell you. You know, I haven't had M &M in probably three months. Wow. That is absolutely amazing.

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Yeah. Thank you for being amazed by that. You know that if fries, I didn't realize those were actually alive.

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They're real trees. They're amazing. I almost ran into them, which is why I was looking at them more closely. They're going to have trouble with those eventually because they just keep going and going and going.

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Yeah, eventually, they do run out of room. So we need to get that Rush Limbaugh sound effect with the chainsaw.

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Now, what is that? Oh, that's his environmentalist

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Waco update. Yes. And then the guy laughs. You're really too good at that.

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Okay. You scare me. Turn that microphone off. Thank you. Okay. We have a sound for him, though, by the way.

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This is here is Rich's sound in channel. Oh, oh, oh.

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If you don't recognize that, then you wouldn't get the joke anyways. I thought that was my old impression of Peter Lorre, where we've tied you up and we've got you in the basement and we're not going to let you out.

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No, no. You're Tim Taylor. We've tied Dr. White up and we've got him in the basement and we're never going to let him out.

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That's pretty good, too. Just keep your day job. But anyway, yes, the heat is getting to us.

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Actually, you all are cooking more than we are today. What are we sitting at here?

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90 degrees. 90 degrees out here hasn't been over 100 in what?

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The news yesterday had Minneapolis at 101 and we were at 99. That's amazing.

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And they had storms like we had. So they're at 101 with the high humidity to boot.

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No, thank you. Yesterday I think it said in Detroit it felt like 110. 110 for us, okay, we're used to that because we've got all the air conditioning in the world.

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They don't have that in Detroit. So we feel sorry for you all, but there really isn't much we can do about it.

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I've never gotten a whole lot of sympathy out of folks when we're at 117 or at 118 where we were at just two weeks ago.

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But I'm not complaining about our sub -100 degree week here. So that's pretty nice.

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Anyhow, I'm not sure, like I said, how we got on to all that, but I am very easily distracted by things anyways.

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Oh, shiny thing, and just went off on a tangent there. So we were listening to John Shelby Spong and Barry Lynn.

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And you put two of them together and you're going to really hear what they really think. That's for certain. So we're going to continue with that.

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We've got some Martin Joni stuff, and your phone call is 877 -753 -3341.

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Let us press on with Spong and Lynn. I base my ethics on whether humanity is enhanced or oppressed or denigrated.

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And I think we've got to begin to understand that. I think Christian humanism is a very powerful combination of ideas.

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I was once given an award by a humanist organization in New York as the humanist of the year, and some of my religious critics said,

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Aha, we knew all the time you weren't a Christian, you were really a humanist. Well, I said, No, you really don't understand.

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The opposite of being a humanist is to be inhumane. It's not to be non -Christian.

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I think the Christian faith is deeply life -centered. And if that's an accurate remembrance of Jesus, that his purpose is to give life and to give it abundantly,

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I think that's the ultimate value. Now, let me just stop right there and just listen once again.

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Put your thinking caps on, as we were last time, and try to understand not only what is being said, why it's being said.

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And then once you really understand where it's coming from, then you'll be able to critique it properly until we really understand what's being said.

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And until we acknowledge any truth elements in what's being said.

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We just don't get anywhere with a knee -jerk reaction to this kind of stuff. There's everything wonderful about talking about affirming life.

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But from a Christian perspective, the first life we affirm is life defined by God, not life defined by man.

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And see, one of the biggest problems here is that Lin and Spong, while they might want to talk about life, are speaking of life from a naturalistic perspective.

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They might want to talk about God, but God's just sort of out there, he's just doing his thing, and he's sort of here to serve us, in essence.

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And it's not God as the creator that he's talking about here. It's not God as the creator, hence as the lawgiver by nature.

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He is created, therefore he knows how man is to function, and he gives law to man, not to restrict man's life, but to enrich man's life.

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When you violate God's law, you are violating your very life, you're violating yourself, you're going against what

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God has created you to be. None of that is a part of this worldview. Instead, this is all man -centered.

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Very much man -centered. This is, well, humanism. It is secular humanism with a religious veneer.

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And that's why the non -religious humanists really don't get this stuff.

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In fact, to be honest, they don't really respect these people. Do you remember, oh, when was it? I think it was

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February, when I was in the UK. I got to see half, and I think later

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I got to see the rest of this program, where they had Dawkins on, the evolutionary biologist.

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And he's just attacking religion. He just hates religion. He hates Christianity.

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He hates religion as much as Muslims hate Jews. I mean, he's just frothing at the mouth filled with it.

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He doesn't see it. He's so blind to it. It's just absolutely amazing. But the level of spiritual blindness and intellectual blindness in that particular individual is shocking.

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But he's just frothing at the mouth against Christianity, and then all of a sudden he starts talking about religious liberals.

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People like Spong and Lin, even though Spong and Lin would be way over on the left side of that spectrum.

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And he says, I don't understand these people. At least if you're a real Christian, you know, you've got a worldview that's consistent with what you're saying.

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These folks try to sort of borrow our worldview and then slap a veneer of religion on it, and what is there to respect about that?

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And he's right at that point. What is there to respect about that? It doesn't make any sense. And if you listen carefully there, you heard

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Spong saying, now if this is an accurate reflection of something that Jesus thought or said, now think about that for a moment.

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What kind of foundation is that? Well, it's possible that maybe

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Jesus at some point said something somewhere along these lines. And in point of fact, in all these documents that we're relying upon here, we actually don't believe any of these are inspired of God.

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We don't believe that they've necessarily been transmitted to us accurately. They've been redacted. We really don't know. But maybe some of the things reflect

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Jesus, and other things we just completely reject out of hand, and we get to decide one way or the other.

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But maybe this is somewhat of a reflection of something Jesus said, and if it is, isn't that nice?

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Well, there's a foundation for a strong proclamation. Man, that's going to hold up real well in debate in a clash of world views.

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That's going to work real well against Al -Qaeda. You've got a real strong message to proclaim to the

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Muslims there. Well, we're not really certain Jesus ever said anything even remotely like this, but if he did, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all just affirm one another?

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You listen to that, and you go, well, okay, yeah, that isn't really overly compelling, but that's all they're left with.

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They don't have a revelation from God. Isn't it sort of sad to listen to this? You've got religious people with no word from God.

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The heavens have been silent. There's no knowledge from God.

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Isn't that sad? Most of us go, why do you keep calling yourself a bishop?

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I mean, other than to sell books, you know, a bishop rethinks this, and a bishop rethinks that. Other than that, why do you call yourself a bishop?

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Why not just jettison this stuff? Just, you know, this halfway point most of us don't understand how it's overly relevant.

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But anyway, so there you have the foundation for ethics is, maybe Jesus might have said something like this, and we can ignore what he said before and after.

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We can ignore stuff that we don't like. All we're doing is we're filtering the New Testament through our humanistic lens.

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We filter out all the stuff that is offensive to our natural inclinations, and what's left we call

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Christianity. That's what you've got going on. Fascinating. As a child of the South, the religious

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Bible belt, we call it, the most overtly religious section of the country. But why is it that the most overtly religious section of the country has practiced slavery until they were forced to give it up by a war?

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Now, what you're about to listen to is the hatred of the left for conservatism as a whole, but now you're going to have this broad brush.

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I mean, it's almost like the South is this one homogenous group of people, as if that were the case anywhere in the

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United States today. But you're just going to get this, and Lynn can't stay out of it. He's going to jump in about divorce and hypocrisy, and you've got the slavery stuff as if you could really simplify things quite that easily.

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I like pointing out to folks who just want to throw that one out there. I'm thinking of two generals in the

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Civil War. One freed his slaves in 18, I think it was 54 or 56.

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It was 1856, and the other in, I think, 1866. Which one's which?

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And the earlier one, before the war started, was Robert E. Lee, and the later one was

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Grant. People go, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't quite fit. Well, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't quite fit when you actually start reading history books.

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But anyway, they're just going to throw this stuff out there, just sort of broad brush, paint things here, there, and everywhere, and it's all just a, you know, let's all get together and blast the

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South here. It's sort of sad. They practiced segregation until they were forced to give it up by the Supreme Court's declaration.

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Why is it that they execute more convicts in the South than all the other states put together? Why is it that they're today the most overtly anti -homophobic, anti -homosexual part of the country?

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And the women in the South have also never been treated with equality. And if you go back and look at the states that refused to pass the

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Equal Rights Amendment, you'll find it's the same old religious right. You got it. And indeed, in fact, even on those so -called traditional moral issues, like the question of divorce, you find higher divorce rates in places in the deep

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South, the old South, than you find in places like Massachusetts, allegedly the most liberal state in the nation.

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We've got to take a little break. Okay. When we come right back, we'll be back with our guest for the hour, the author of The Sins of Scripture, Bishop John Shelby Spong.

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The book's out from Harper's San Francisco, and we will be right back on Culture Shocks for more conversation with Bishop Spong.

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We're talking to the former bishop of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong, the author of the new book,

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The Sins of Scripture. You know, Bishop, you were talking about how you got a humanist award.

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Actually, we have one thing in common. I also, as you may or may not know, am, among other things, a minister in the

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United Church of Christ. I'm well aware of you, Barry. Well, I'll tell you, I was at a humanist convention last summer in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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I had just done what I thought was a rousing speech about church -state separation, and people seemed to really enjoy it.

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And then comes the question -and -answer period, and a gentleman stood up in the front row and said, Do you know

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Bishop Spong? And I said, Well, I've read many of his books, but I really have never had the chance to actually meet him.

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And this gentleman said, Well, I have a follow -up question. He said, You know, Bishop Spong seems to be a very, very bright man, and you appear to be a very, very bright man.

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And I said, Thank you. And then he said, But I've got to ask you, and I'd ask

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Bishop Spong the same thing, If you're this smart, how can you be stupid enough to believe in God?

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I told him I'd have to give him a lengthy answer after the meeting was over. Well, I don't know about you, but I would love to hear what his response to that is.

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But I suspect you've heard a few words like that before. Yeah, it is interesting. There are two things going on in our world today religiously.

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One is a fearful rush back to the right, to yesterday's not just value system, but yesterday's way of understanding reality.

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And that's very appealing because people are buffeted by great forces of change today, and they want to feel like they're in touch with something that's unchanging and eternally true.

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And that's the public face that people see of organized religion. Sure. The other face that they do not see is the absolute erosion of people's religious faith.

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The fastest growing organization in the Christian West today is the Church Alumni Association. Now let's dive right there.

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I can understand why he thinks that way, especially given that he was a bishop in the

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Episcopalian Church, which has been rupturing members for generations now.

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But isn't it odd that he doesn't realize that the denominations that are truly rupturing members, right and left, are the denominations that refuse to stand for anything, that have embraced his way of thinking.

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It's the Episcopalians. It's the United Methodists. It's the liberal Presbyterians. It's the United Church of Christ. It's all of these organizations that stand for nothing other than opposing biblical truth.

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People know that these groups have gone into apostasy. They know that they once believed one thing.

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Many of them still have these creedal statements. And everybody knows that what's in those creedal statements is no longer what is taught.

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And that means you're a hypocrite. It's sort of like when you encounter certain judges who allegedly are supposed to be interpreting the

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Constitution of the United States, and you know they don't believe in the Constitution of the United States. You know that they don't care about what it says.

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They don't care what its original intention was. And everybody knows they're hypocrites. Now some people consider that to be a positive thing, and therefore it's a good thing to do that.

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But the fact of the matter is you don't respect people like that. And that's what liberalism does. That's the essence of liberalism, is to seek to erode what has been believed in the past.

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And so here you have this going on, and sure there's all sorts of church alumni, but what churches were they alumni of?

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I'm not saying that you don't have former members of conservative denominations, but by far the massive defections have primarily been from those denominations.

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Now if there was persecution beginning next week, would we not have massive defections from all over the place?

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Yes, I think that we would. I have often asked people to think about the fact that if it meant that your annual taxes would double to walk through the front door of the church, what would you do?

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What would happen to the attendance of churches across our land? Because that's normally how persecution begins.

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It's not normally the gunshots and people being run through with a sword or something, or executed or imprisoned.

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The most effective means that the Muslims found in North Africa, for example, to suppress

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Christianity was not to run somebody through with a sword, but to make it a long -term burden to be a

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Christian. You never get ahead. You're going to struggle to provide for your family. And you really weed out the light converts in that situation.

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And that's what they found to be the most effective. I think that's what people would find as well in this particular context as well.

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So anyway, we continue on. We drop out of organized religion every day into no religion because it no longer makes sense.

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We still assume things in the way we tell the Christian story that modern people, if they think about it, can't assume.

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The earth is not the center of the universe. God does not live just above the sky. Human beings were not created perfect only to fall into sin.

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Human beings emerged out of the evolutionary soup like everything else. And our problem is not that we're fallen sinners.

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Our problem is that we haven't yet become fully human. Now, there is

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Bishop Spong's worldview. There is Bishop Spong's religion. And it's not a Christian religion.

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I don't know why he calls it Christianity. It has no connection with what Christians have believed down through the ages.

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It has no connection with biblical revelation. It has no connection with the teachings of Christ. It's not

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Christianity, but that's what he calls it. And it is not that we are fallen sinners.

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Hence, there's no need for a sacrifice. There's no need for the cross. There's no need for the resurrection. It's not that we're fallen sinners.

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It's not that we are creating the image of God. We are nothing more than the random result of the evolutionary process.

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But what we need to do is to become fully human. And I guess that's what Jesus was trying to show us how to do, was to be fully human.

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Of course, he never said that. And evidently, God doesn't have enough power to overcome the corruptions of those nasty, terrible first Christians to get us that message, that clarity, which again makes me wonder why in the world someone like him would worship anything at all.

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But there you have it. There you have an understanding of really his fundamental anthropology.

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Man is the result of evolutionary change over time.

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And what we need to do is make man more man. We need to make him more human.

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And we don't need to bring about redemption. We don't need to bring about forgiveness of sin. We don't need to bring about conformance, the image of Christ, death to self.

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Death to self? No, no, certainly not. You need more self. This is simply humanism with a light frosting, shall we say, of religion laid on top of it.

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And so we've got to turn the whole Christian story away from rescuing the fallen to empowering people to become more human.

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And when you're seeking to find security in your fragile humanity, you wrap yourself inside security symbols like tribe, like prejudice, like gender superiority, like finding somebody you can look down on so that you don't have to look down on yourself.

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And these are the things that have fostered the great negativities throughout human history.

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And they've not escaped Christianity. We are the ones that gave the world anti -Semitism overwhelmingly.

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That's a Christian disease. And we are the ones that have treated women as second -class citizens.

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Women had to fight to become equal in our society, and they didn't really do it until, first of all, the

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Protestant Reformation opened up the religious enterprise, and then secularism grew out of the

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Protestant Reformation. And that's when women finally began to make progress in this world. Now let me stop right there before Barry Lynn dives in.

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Anti -Semitism is not a Christian disease. It was, again, here you have the problem that you have when people whitewash anything that has the name

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Jesus attached to it. And here again, people go, wait a minute, don't blame us for that. Well, see, the secular world just lumps everything that calls itself

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Christian together. I mean, remember we go back to Bart Ehrman and his stuff where he makes the Gnostics into Christians.

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As long as you're a heretic, you're still a Christian, that type of thing. You need to realize that's how these folks think as well.

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So Rome and Rome's anti -Semitism and Rome's bigotry against Jews, that gets laid at our feet.

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And it doesn't matter what the Bible says. It doesn't matter what the consistent exegesis of the text of Scripture says.

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As long as you've got that out there, then that's a Christian thing. And, of course, for him, equal treatment of women means treating women as men, not a biblical treatment of women, not the biblical view that women are created in the image of God and that they share the image of God.

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As long as there's differentiation between man and woman, as long as there are different roles, that's where the problem lies.

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As far as Spong and Lin are concerned. And so that's where they're coming from.

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And we will continue examining that. But I wanted to mix things up a little bit.

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I wanted to play other things for us. So we're not just looking at one thing. So as you listen to the program, if this doesn't happen to be your big thing, you might be able to find something else along with it.

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And so I was listening to Mr. Martin Joni, who we're going to go back to his One Saved, Always Saved discussion.

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But he was on Catholic Answers. And remember, Catholic Answers touts itself as the leading

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Catholic apologetics organization in the United States and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, it's amazing what they'll allow on their program as if it's representational of sound argumentation.

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I'd like to play a clip here for you. My timing really stinks because we're coming up on a break here, but we may have to be a little bit late with it if we can be.

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Listen to this kind of argumentation in support of the concept of the bodily assumption of Mary from Mr.

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Martin Joni from a recent Catholic Answers radio program. At times I'll say, okay, is it against Scripture to say that someone can be assumed body and soul into heaven?

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And if they're a Christian who knows their Scripture at least fairly well, they'll have to say no because in the

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Old Testament we see examples of Elijah being carried up into heaven in a whirlwind of fire, basically.

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He was alive. Enoch, basically it says in Genesis and then again in Hebrews that Enoch walked with the

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Lord. And in other words, he didn't die either. He was carried into heaven. In the New Testament, in Revelation, there's the two witnesses that come from God and they're killed at one point and their bodies lie in the street for three days.

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And at the end of three days, they're made alive again and scares the bejeebers out of everybody.

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And they're taken up into heaven, body and soul. So the assumption of a human being into heaven, body and soul, before the end of time is not counter to Scripture.

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So let's say, okay, fine. So basically what I do is I say, well, that's a Catholic principle, a

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Catholic biblical principle that we've established. Now we've established that people can be assumed body and soul into heaven and it wouldn't be contrary to Scripture.

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So my question is, where in the Bible does it say Mary was not assumed into heaven, body and soul?

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And they can't give you an answer. So then you say, well, listen, the witness of the early church, we have these traditions in the church from the earliest of times.

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It says Mary was assumed into heaven, body and soul, and the

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Bible doesn't say she wasn't, and it doesn't go against Scripture to say that a human being can be assumed body and soul into heaven.

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So why can I not believe what I believe? Well, everybody is sitting back going, wow.

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And let's face it, folks. I've said this many, many times. Until you've denied sola scriptura and embraced the absolute authority of the

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Roman Catholic Church, you will never believe in the Marian doctrines. The only reason anybody believes in the Marian doctrines is because you've already abandoned the idea that the

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Bible is the sole infallible rule of faith. You've already embraced the idea that the Bishop of Rome and the

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Church of Rome is the continuation of Christ's church, and that's the only reason to ever believe these things, because that kind of argumentation is so vacuous.

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Well, it never says she wasn't. Well, of course, it never says Paul wasn't, and it never says

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Peter wasn't, and, man, why not just about everybody? We can just assume them all into heaven on that basis.

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And then you have the ancient tradition. Sorry, Mr. Martinoni. No, you don't. That's just a lie.

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I'm sorry, but how can this stuff get on the air? I don't understand how this stuff can be put on the air.

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There is no ancient tradition about that. In fact, there are many, many, many who rejected that.

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The assumption was rejected for a long, long, long, long time. The first place it even shows up is in material that was condemned by the

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Bishop of Rome around 500 years after Christ, for crying out loud. How can you say we have these ancient traditions?

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And doesn't the host of the program know this? Certainly he's heard this.

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I mean, he's the guy that moderated, ha, ha, ha, the debate that I had with Tim Staples, and he's heard this stuff.

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Why doesn't he stop and say, now, well, wait a minute. What do you mean we have ancient traditions? He can't do this.

30:59

This guy, because he knows he would be left dumbfounded. He'd have nothing to say. If that's solid argumentation, folks,

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I don't know what to say. Well, we're going to take a break, come back with a little bit more of Mr. Martignoni on a different subject, though not all that much better argumentation.

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And your phone calls too, 877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back. No, we won't be right back.

31:25

Ha, ha, ha. Let me start singing the theme song. Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.

31:31

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. You know, when you look through the window, and the guy is supposed to be running things, his head's going back and forth, and he's looking at the screen, and he's got this look of utter shock on his face, sort of like back when we all used to have

31:46

Windows 98, and the blue screen of death popped up, you know, that kind of thing. Because you can tell in his heart of hearts, he thought he was ready for the break, and he knew the break was coming.

31:57

But in reality, all of a sudden he realizes he's not ready for the break, and he's not going to be at any time soon.

32:04

And so he's madly hitting keys and clicking things, and doing his best to get there, and then when he thinks he's there, the screen says,

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I'm not going to do it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Am I interpreting things fairly correctly,

32:19

Mr. Pierce? Well, you know what? That means that we're not going to have a break today. So that means we have more time for your phone calls.

32:29

Hey, listen to that. We'll be right back. A Godly man

32:48

Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.

32:54

Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.

33:01

In their book, The Same -Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the

33:07

Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including

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Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law.

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In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.

33:34

The Same -Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at almen .org.

33:42

This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the gospel of the grace of God.

33:54

The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of His worship in His church. The elders and people of the

34:00

Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day. The morning

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Bible study begins at 9 .30 a .m. and the worship service is at 10 .45. Evening services are at 6 .30

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34:28

If you're unable to attend, you can still participate with your computer and real audio at prbc .org,

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where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.

34:42

Welcome back to The Dividing Line after that scintillating break.

35:16

How long ago do you think we made those? Could it be that the commercials are getting so old that they don't want to play?

35:26

We haven't given them their social security benefits yet? Something along those lines. That might be the...

35:33

What's that? I remember... Now Rich has found old...

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Is this an old startup to the program? This is how it started before Run to the Battle. Oh, wow.

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I can't hear you because I have this stuff in my headset. That was a bumper. Oh, this is a bumper. Oh, okay.

35:52

All right, well, thanks. That's great. The only thing that scares me is that, you know, it's not quite like the music they have for the

36:01

Catholic Answers Program where they use that one Yanni song over and over and over and over again.

36:07

Someone in the channel thought that was Starsky and Hutch. That's John Tesh, by the way, in case anyone is wondering. That's John Tesh.

36:14

Anyhow, we started a while ago listening to Mr. Martin Yanni discussing eternal security.

36:24

And it's been long enough. I need to go back just a little bit here so that you can get the context. Remember, his primary definition of this doctrine, he gets from, well, from who?

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Was it from Warfield, Hodge, Calvin? Who does he cite?

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Was it from Westminster, from the London Baptist Confession of 1689? No, he got it from the

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Internet. I'm supposed to be on right now. It's an evangelical Protestant writing.

36:54

Let's try that one more time. Playing with the bumper music, huh? Yeah. Too many switches in there, huh,

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Rich? Okay. I pulled this off the Internet. It's an evangelical

37:07

Protestant writing to a Catholic. Oh. Quote, however, it is not merely from the

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Levitical laws that we were discharged, but also from the moral ones.

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God only has one law. Does that mean we can sin freely? No, for God hates sin, and if we love

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God, we will live according to his commandments. However, however, it does mean that no sin will be held against us.

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Once we receive Christ for upon receiving Christ, we are discharged from the very law against which our sins would have been reckoned, unquote.

37:51

Okay. Now, in a certain context, with certain caveats and explanations, okay, we can understand what the evangelical was saying.

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We might disagree with exactly how he states his view of the law, but it sounds to me, putting the best spin on things we possibly can and assuming that there's probably stuff that Mr.

38:15

Martignoni didn't understand of what he was saying or didn't feel it was relevant to repeat, that he was attempting to say, attempting to discuss the grounds of our justification, the grounds of our staying before God, that it's not our fulfillment of any aspect of the law, it's

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Christ's fulfillment of the law in our place. Now, I've listened to everything

38:38

Mr. Martignoni has to say in this particular discussion, and I can assure you he does not understand that.

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He does not understand or does not grasp or at least does not represent to his audience a full -orbed understanding of the concept of imputation and non -imputation.

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He does not understand the Christocentric nature of that, and I can understand why.

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He's a Roman Catholic, for crying out loud, and Roman Catholicism is very much focused upon accomplishment, sacrament, me, free will, etc.,

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etc. So, it's easy to understand how that ends up working out.

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But, I would not, again, I said this before, but I would not be allowed to get away with this kind of thing.

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If I tried to make my representation of the

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Roman Catholic position in my debates something I downloaded from the Internet.

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Now, there's lots of good stuff on the Internet, but if it's going to be representational of an entire position, you might want to at least give a

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URL, give the guy's name, give some reason why we should think that we should listen to this with some level of respect.

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I couldn't get away with that, but Mr. Marzignani does. So, we continue on. That, in a nutshell, is the doctrine of once saved, always saved.

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No sin will be held against us once we receive Christ. Or, no sin is held against us because it has been held against our substitute.

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And therefore, as Paul says in Colossians chapter 2, those writings which were against us were nailed to the cross.

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Now, what does that mean for a Roman Catholic? They have to limit that solely to things in the past.

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And then we get new writings against us, and they're not nailed to the cross. They're things we have to get rid of through sacramental penance, and the temporal punishments still cling to our soul.

40:47

In fact, just in passing, I haven't had a chance to do any work on it yet, but I was taking a quick gander.

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It had been quite some time since I'd looked at the Envoy magazine web boards, and there really wasn't much going on there.

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But I saw a link to something from Patrick Madrid on Purgatory, and it was so old that half the graphics didn't come up in it.

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It's from a number of years ago, but for some reason it was still stuck over in the column. I don't know if it just has been there all that time or just what.

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But I clicked on it, and at one point he's talking about how in Purgatory it's nothing but the blood of Jesus being applied to us and all that stuff.

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I'm going, wait a minute. That's not where, and of course there were no references or anything like that. There wasn't any footnotes.

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There were lots of other footnotes, some of which were blank for some reason. But there were no footnotes to this because that's not what

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Ludwig Ott understood. I saw no citations from Trent. That's not what satispatio is or anything like that.

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So there is clearly amongst Roman Catholic apologists a willingness to, shall we say, massage things.

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It's sort of like when Eastern religion comes into the West, and you've got the doctrine of reincarnation.

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What do they do up in Sedona? And they want to sell all sorts of stuff at their various sundry little rock shops up there in Sedona.

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They don't bring the whole Eastern doctrine in where you can be reincarnated as a cricket. You can be reincarnated as a sledge worm.

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They want to have you just reincarnated as a human, and that means you may have once been royalty and all the silliness that they bring in.

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If you want to have a real good example of this, look at how

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Rome has handled the doctrine of purgatory over the past 300 years, and especially over the past 50 or 60 years in the

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West. Your older Roman Catholics today well know that what is being discussed as purgatory today isn't even close to what was in fact taught with regularity from the pulpits of the

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Roman Catholic churches for a long period of time and in history itself. Even if we sin after receiving

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Christ. Now did you hear what this guy was saying or writing? We are discharged from the moral laws as well as the

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Levitical laws. In other words, not only do we not have to pay attention to the dietary laws of the

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Old Covenant, like not eating pork, and not only do we not have to pay attention to the

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Old Covenant sacrificial laws, but we don't have to pay attention to the Old Covenant moral laws either.

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Now what does he mean by pay attention to? Seek to find our standing before God through the fulfillment of these things?

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Or recognize that these things represent God's character and God's guidance for how we can live a life that is holy unto

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Him? I mean, you've got to make the distinctions that we ourselves make, and if you don't make those distinctions, then you're not honestly addressing your audience and honestly helping them to understand what the issues are.

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Things like, thou shall not commit adultery. You don't have to think about thou shall not commit adultery?

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Is that what he really thinks this means? Evidently he's taking the full libertarian viewpoint here, that a person gets their ticket punched, and then they can go do whatever they want to do.

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And maybe, maybe he's run into some Robert Wilkin, Zane Hodges fans, and if that's who he's responding to, great, fine,

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I hope he realizes that's a small minority of folks that the rest of us recognize aren't even in the ballpark.

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They're way out in the middle of nowhere, and the Bible talks to us about those folks and warns us about those folks, and every generation has them, who turn the grace of God into lasciviousness, and that's a bad direction to go, but he's not making that kind of distinction, which, again, if I were to be addressing, say,

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Pheneites, if I were to be addressing Lefebvrites, if I were to be addressing

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Gerrymantics today, I would have to, if I'm going to have any integrity, differentiate between what they're saying, and what has been said historically, and what is being said today.

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I mean, it is getting, let's face it, it's getting harder and harder and harder to define

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Rome's position, because it's becoming so diluted, not

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D -E -L and D -I -L -U -T, D -E -L -U -T -E -D and D -I -L -U -T -E -D, there's so much change going on, and you've got so many priests who are now universalists, and inclusivists at best, and all these different spins on things, it's becoming harder and harder, it was a whole lot easier after Trent, at least you knew what

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Rome taught and what it was saying, and certainly up through Vatican I you knew that, but starting in the early 1900s, you get this dilution of things, and it's becoming harder and harder, so you have to try to define who it is you're talking about, and when you're talking with a

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Roman Catholic, you've got to find out where they're coming from. Are they a conservative Roman Catholic? Are they a modernist? Are they what?

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It's difficult to say. Thou shalt not commit murder. Honor thy father and mother.

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Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, and so on. In other words,

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I can be an absolute moral reprobate, and it doesn't matter, because I am saved.

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Now, of course, again, the only people that that is an objection to are a small group of individuals that have been repudiated by almost every doctrinal statement that I know of, going all the way back to the time of the

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Reformation, and so to take them and make them relevant to everybody else, take them and say, well, isn't that what you're saying?

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You can just go and do whatever you want to do. And we've only got one perspective to blame for this, and it is

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Arminianism. It is an anti -reformed, non -reformed perspective. Why do I say that? It's real simple. When you take faith alone out of God's purpose in self -glorification, it will lead to antinomianism.

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It will lead to that kind of perspective. Why? Because faith alone, the word faith has to be defined, and if it is a part of what

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God does, and if it has a purpose within God's economy, and if it is a work of God's Spirit, and if we see that Jesus is redeeming for himself a people zealous for good deeds, and that he is capable of doing this, and that he is not dependent in a synergistic sense upon the cooperation of mankind to make himself a successful savior, then we have a foundation and a balance upon which we can see all of what the

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New Testament is saying about these things. But if you don't have that, if you have synergism, if you abandon that foundational truth that was so powerful against Rome at the time of the

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Reformation, you go back to that human -centered viewpoint with a libertarian free will and God's trying but failing and everything else.

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Once you go back there, you don't have a foundation upon which to stand and talk about sola fide.

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The fide is no longer the result of the work of the Spirit of God, and hence it fits within God's purposes.

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It is now an autonomous fide that can be short -lived. It's not necessarily a part of God's eternal purpose, and you've lost the balance.

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And that's what this guy is addressing, and that's what he's illustrating. No matter what a person does after they have been saved is of no consequence.

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It simply doesn't matter. No matter what kind of sin you commit, no matter how many times you commit it, that doesn't matter.

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You've been saved. You are hid in Christ. God doesn't see your sins.

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You've already been declared innocent by God. Sounds pretty good, huh?

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But notice, after he says in that statement, we have been discharged from the moral laws, he tries to qualify what he says with the statement, does that mean that we can sin freely?

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And the answer is no. For God hates sin, and if we love God, we will live according to his commandments.

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See, right here is the crux of the problem for all those that believe in this doctrine. The problem of sin.

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Well, and again, since Mr. Martignoni does not understand how we deal with sin, since he somehow thinks that there are things that he can do through the sacraments of the church to deal with sin, then we can understand why he's coming to these conclusions.

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But he's, again, not going to be dealing with our understanding. I'm going to respond to it from our perspective.

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Maybe at the very least he might be able to improve his presentations in the future and be more fair with them. But the issue of how sin has been dealt with, again, this will illustrate the difference between those who hold to a redemption that is particular and perfect over against a redemption that is universal but only theoretical.

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This will point out the differences that exist between us and how they're relevant apologetically to giving the strongest response to Rome.

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And that is one of the things that I will be taking a closer look at in a minute. But suffice it to say that under the doctrine of once saved, always saved, there is no consequence for sin that the individual has to pay.

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But that doesn't make sense, given all of the scripture passages speaking against sin. So those who believe this have to add the disclaimer, well, that doesn't mean that we can sin freely, for God hates sin.

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So if you love God, you'll live according to his commandments. But in truth, if there is no price to be paid for sin, or rather, if Jesus has already paid the price for me, and I can, in theory, go out and sin as much as I want to without any consequences whatsoever, how long do you think it will take for theory to become practice?

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Now, of course, it is a little bit difficult to sit here and listen to this when you yourself know the rampant nature of nominal

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Catholicism in our land and in the world today. We all know, and Roman Catholics well know, the reality of nominal

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Catholicism, of those people who go to Mass every once in a while, they go in and they get absolution for their sins, they confess, and then they go out and their mouth is filled with cursing, and they're sexually immoral, and they just keep going back, and they get their alleged sacramental forgiveness.

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And this, of course, makes a mockery of the grace of God. And a mockery of the real

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Christian faith. And so it's hard to listen to this and hear someone saying, well, if Jesus paid all the price, well, what's that mean?

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That means he's saying he didn't pay all the price. That's saying that there are things that he has to do, that we have to do, that somehow can have some kind of relevance to the redemption of our sins.

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That would be the only way that this would make any sense, and that is exactly where he's coming from in regards to the concept of the

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Mass as a perpetuatory sacrifice and things relevant thereto. What restraint do

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I have on me to keep me from sinning? Well, these folks say if you love God, you live according to his commandments.

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How about regeneration and taking out a heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh and the indwelling presence of the

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Holy Spirit and being raised to spiritual life and being justified and adopted, whereas the

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Holy Spirit comes into our lives and cries out, Abba, Father, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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How about that being the foundation rather than this man -centered how -do -I -get -myself -up -the -ladder -to -heaven type idea?

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Maybe, but I don't have to, and you know what? I don't even have to love

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God to be saved. As if your loving God is going to save you.

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Do you love God perfectly, Mr. Martignone? God doesn't grade on a curve, Mr. Martignone.

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Do you love God perfectly? If you don't, you're lost. Well, that certainly reminds me a little bit of Moroni 10 .32,

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the Mormons, and he ought to get together on that one. Think about it. In order to be saved,

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I have to believe, as it says in John 3 .16, that God so loved the world that he gave his only

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Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

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I have to believe that God loved me. I have to believe in Jesus Christ.

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It doesn't say in John 3 .16 that I have to love God. All it says, according to those who believe this doctrine, is that I have to believe that God loves me so much that he sent his only begotten

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Son to die for me on the cross and that it is by his blood, not my love, but his blood, that I am saved.

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Well, it's certainly true that we are not saved on the basis of our love because that would require a perfection of love that none of us ever have.

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But why does any one of us love God? Because he first loved us. And what is the source of our love?

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Do we work it up out of ourselves? Is it something that we grow by attending sacraments? Or is it the result of regeneration, the changing of that heart, that taking out of that heart of stone, that giving that heart of flesh?

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Notice over and over again, from Mr. Martignoni's perspective, what he's critiquing and all he can seem to understand.

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And the only answers he can give are all based upon man -centered, anthropocentric, humanistic religion, not a supernatural religion where God is the one who saves and he saves perfectly.

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Remember, we are discharged from the moral law as well as the Levitical law.

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So not only does thou shalt not commit adultery apply, but I am the

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Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me, doesn't apply either. We've been discharged from the law.

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And you can see why I don't even think he was accurately representing what he was quoting at that point or doesn't understand it, one of the two.

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But you can see, again, what happens when your primary knowledge of the other side is from web boards on the

56:31

Internet. Sure, there are some things you can learn, but there's all sorts of imbalances that then can result as well, according to this doctrine.

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So, all I have to do is believe and I am free to sin as much as I darn well please.

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And don't talk to me about loving God because loving God doesn't save me. Loving God is a work that I do, and we know that works are of no consequence when it comes to the business of salvation.

57:02

Yeah, again, you might want to make that criticism of Zane Hodges and Bob Wilkin, but you can't make that criticism of any of the churches that come out of the

57:13

Reformation, because they all recognized Titus chapter 2 was Scripture, and they all recognized that Ephesians 2 .10

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was Scripture, and they just have the right relationship between those things. It is not my loving

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God that provides the foundation of my salvation. It is not my loving

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God that draws His grace. It's not my loving God that fulfills something, because the best love

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I have for God is still impure in this life. Again, Mr.

57:44

Martignoni, a Roman Catholic apologist, a guest on, this is not from, by the way, this is not from the

57:52

Catholic Answers Radio Program. I guess I need to make sure you all understand. This is actually a CD produced by Mr.

57:59

Martignoni's ministry, and it was sent to us by a Mr. Jay Lee, who said

58:04

I should listen to this one first, because he eats my lunch and refutes me and things like that.

58:10

He actually never mentions me, but obviously he's very, very, very impressed with that particular viewpoint.

58:20

The music was supposed to start 25 seconds ago, but, oh yes, it was. Excuse me?

58:32

You should know by now. Things ain't going real well on that side of the glass today, brothers. No, no, actually it's not supposed to be that way.

58:42

We're going a little long today, because it's just like we couldn't get the brake to work overly well. Rich, punching the monitor does not make the computer go any faster.

58:54

Let me assure you. Folks, we are setting standards today for live webcasting and professionalism.

59:02

There it is. Here we go. Had five minutes to go, huh? All right, well, hey, we had fun today, and maybe

59:13

Rich will get everything working by Thursday again. And Thursday is like two days from now,

59:19

Rich. This is Tuesday, and then Wednesday, then Thursday. Bring a baseball bat on Thursday.

59:28

We'll continue with Barry Lynn, Bishop Spong, Merton Yoney. Boy, we have the guests on this program, don't we?

59:34

We'll see you Thursday. God bless. Brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

01:00:30

If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602, or write us at P .O.

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Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

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