Calls on Instruments in Church and More

From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is

The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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

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

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

James White. Hi, good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line.

I'm reading from a blog article on the World News blog.

Columnist Mark Stein notes that conversions to avoid death seem meaningless to many Western journalists, but that's not how the

Al -Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers.

Rather, it confirms the central truth, Osama and the mullahs have been peddling that the West is weak, that there's nothing, no core, no bedrock, nothing.

It's not willing to trade. And I have given some thought to that.

Many of you have seen the video from last week where the two journalists are reading clearly a prepared statement filled with inshallah and other terms that would be meaningless to them.

It was clear that they had not written this. It does not reflect anything relevant to themselves. It does not reflect anything relevant to their actual faith or belief or anything like that.

And that's why they're stumbling through it. And for many people in the West, it was a bit of a comedy, really, that – and a commentary on Islam – that someone would so obviously place these individuals in front of video cameras and in front of an

AK -47 just off camera and think that this is somehow relevant. But I think they have struck on something here.

And that is, if you get inside their mindset and recognize what they are saying about the

West, and that they view the West as being Christian, but in reality it isn't, obviously from our perspective, but they view it that way.

And that this is indicative, from their perspective, of weakness, that these individuals have no core values in regards to their – any type of profession of faith, as secularists, as individuals who are very – in fact, ironically, from the commentaries

I've heard since then, very sympathetic toward the Palestinians, yet still they represent the West.

And if you look at what these people believe, they see this as a holy war, but they see it as a holy war, and that one of the greatest evils of the

West is the separation of church and state. And that is considered to be a fatal flaw, that is considered to be the great error, that is considered to be one of the evil things that the

West has forced upon Islamic nations, and they look upon Islamic nations, that allow that distinction, that division to exist as being weak and as enemies of the

Islamic ummah, the entire world communion of Muslims.

Now, we have the same problems that they have, that is, they look at Christianity as a whole. You may remember a number of months ago we played a clip from,

I was about to say Osama bin Laden, but no, we don't have anything from Osama, it was

Hakeem Adidat, and he was making the case to what seemed like a

King James only fundamentalist pastor, that he had been in the very holy of holies of Christendom, and that was

Rome. Now, of course, King James only fundamentalists are going to go, that's not the center of Christianity, that's the center of hell itself, and you know, but he doesn't, he didn't seem to recognize that, and most

Muslims do not. We certainly are getting an idea, at least, of the deep divisions that exist within the context of Islam, by the willingness that Shiites have to kill

Sunnis, and Sunnis have to kill Shiites, and Wahhabists to look down their nose at both of those as being not spiritual enough, and all the other divisions that exist on those levels.

So we're seeing that, though I don't think most of us have hardly any meaningful understanding of exactly why these individuals, you know, believe the way they do, or what the specifics are, and things like that.

But at least we're getting an idea, looking at the war taking place in Iraq, and most of that fighting is between Sunnis and Shiites, and not even al -Qaeda.

They just can sort of sit back and let the rest of people take care of things right now. So we are looking at a situation where, once again, as I mentioned in the

Sunni school lesson I did a week ago, Sunday, theology does matter, and in this instance we can go back and we can look at Islam's denial of fundamental

Christian truths being definitional to the very definition of Islam itself, and see where theology definitely matters, and that's where we've got a major problem in the

West, is that you don't have many theologians in the government and in the military who have a mind that would allow them to understand those particular issues and things like that.

And so we see once again, and in fact, looking at the comments on this blog, just look at the first comment, and then we've already got a bunch of phone calls we need to get to.

Far be it for me, the first comment says, far be it for me to try to explain the Muslim mind, but my guess would be many people don't understand the

West is a melange of beliefs, including scores of people who have no religious beliefs at all. See, there's the classic westerner.

Everybody has, and I disagree with that person, everybody, this is Michelle, everybody has religious beliefs.

And that's the whole point. And the Muslims recognize that something that we don't recognize, and that is that secularists have a religious belief.

See, they see it, our society has turned a blind eye to it so that that can become the default religion of the

West. It's see all this stuff, it's all connected together, isn't it?

It most it most certainly is. But anyhow, 877 -753 -3341 didn't even get a chance to to mention the phone number before the phone calls started coming in.

And that's that's OK. It's better than some days when we need the phone calls and can't get them. So let's we'll take them as as they're coming.

So let's start down Texas way with Jonathan. Hi, Jonathan. Hi, Dr.

White. How are you doing? Doing good. The reason I was calling, I'm often in channel and there's only a couple of things

I talk about when I'm in channel. It's usually the apologetics of the non -instrumental Church of Christ.

And our comic books. So but today I wanted to run something by you dealing with the

Church of Christ. I know you've dealt with them before. I have your your debate with with Paul Barber, which

I thought was was really good. Yeah, on the subject of election, primarily not so much their distinctive doctrines in regards to baptism or instruments of worship, which is what your question's about.

But we'll we'll do what we can. Right. Well, their argument basically is it's based on their on their hermeneutic, which is that you have to have a command or an example or you can necessarily infer from the

New Testament that that's what the New Testament church did. And their argument is, is that there's the only examples that you have of New Testament worship is without the instrument, that there are commands to to sing and like Colossians 316 and Ephesians 529, they use those two instances over and over and over again.

And so my question is, is they ask me, well, where do I get where do

I get the authority from Scripture to include the instrument? Well, you know, it's it's ironic, the issue of the relationship in the

Old Testament, New Testament is central to to many disputes that have existed in the history of the of the church.

And it's it's interesting in in preparing for the debate coming up in October on the 19th on the subject of baptism, you will find it is interesting that there are some reformed folks who are also against instruments, even though it would seem to be extremely contradictory to the argumentation is frequently used in regards to pato baptism.

And that is, well, you have this established example from the

Old Testament. And unless that is overthrown and clearly reversed in the new, then that has the the weight of precedence upon it.

And hence they will say, well, you know, here you're talking about this radical change, just radical change in the in the administration, the covenants, and there's not enough evidence, this radical change.

Well, ironically, you look at the Psalter and very clearly this is not only the hymn book of the people of God, but it was sung to music.

There's there's no question of that. Historically, there's a question that biblically, exegetically, on any level, clearly instruments were involved in temple worship.

We found all sorts of evidence of that. It'd be wonderful to find the music someday, but I'm not sure they use the same notation we do, obviously, today.

So as it may, the people of God were accustomed to the utilization of musical instruments and worship from the

Old Testament. And so when you look at the commands to sing and with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, you would have to find some some command that says, and by the way, where there's a new stricture, even though even though the very psalms that I just made reference to psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, one of the reasons

I'm not a exclusive psalmist is it's psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. And I think we have examples of non

Psalter hymns in the church, for example, the Carmen Christian Philippians two, five, eleven, possibly some sections of Colossians one, all in reference to Christ.

But and it would be natural that people of God would want to sing about their savior and sing his name and things like that. That's a whole nother issue.

But yeah, psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, those psalms would have been psalms that people would have known the the tunes to from temple worship.

And and certainly you look at, for example, the Day of Pentecost, those people had just been observing worship that included the utilization of musical instruments in that worship.

And it was clearly accepted by God. It was commanded, in essence, by God in the

Psalter. And so the real question is, where do you get the idea? Now, I would say that if a local church, for whatever reason, let's say they live in a cultural situation or in a context where the utilization of whatever instruments would be available to them would would automatically cause stumbling in their culture.

Okay. I would say that the local church has the right to sing a cappella if they choose to sing a cappella.

We sing a cappella mainly because we only have one pianist and and he's an attorney and is frequently traveling.

So we sing a cappella, but it's because we're forced to, not because we're looking to do so. But there would be situations where I would see freedom on the part of a local church.

If they didn't want to do that, it's fine. The problem is most of time when people start saying you can't do something, this is not right.

What they'll then turn around and do is instead of simply saying it's not right for us, they always want to absolutize it and say it's not right for everybody else.

You have to look like us. You have to be like us. It's very, very rare that you find those types of folks who will, as a local body, make a decision that we're not going to do

X, Y or Z. Here's our reasons, but we are not going to look down our noses at somebody who does.

We're not going to get, you know, start a league promoting our viewpoint to everybody else. These are our reasons.

If you agree with our reasons in your context, great. If our reasons don't make sense in your context, that's great, too.

But it takes a lot of maturity to do that. And so just simply saying, singing to yourselves in Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, you'll find the exact same term.

Now, I could look it up here on my computer, but something tells me that the same command to sing and the same verbal forms used in the

New Testament will translate back into the Septuagint in the Old Testament, and the singing there will clearly have been accompanied by musical instruments.

And so while I'm sure that someone can dig up some arcane argument from some direction, if we're just looking at it from a fair and unbiased viewpoint, it just doesn't seem to carry.

Now, there have been lots of folks in the history of the church who have detested the utilization of musical instruments for one reason or another.

Frequently in Reformed circles after Reformation, it was because of association between musical education and the old

Roman Catholic system and the connections that were a part of that. Well, again, I can understand that within a certain context, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn these into legalistic requirements, which is what many, many people do.

Not only with the I mean, we can start down the list here, but let's just throw holidays in for as a as a as a fun example of of where people will cross that line between what is for them a bit of personal conviction and making their personal conviction normative for everybody else.

And that's that's where the that's where the the problem comes in, I think, especially on an issue like this.

The fact is, there just isn't any rule book that you can look to.

It says, OK, these are the acceptable instruments or these are not acceptable instruments or or you can't use any instruments at all. You can use all instruments, whatever you want and blah, blah, blah.

People want to find that kind of stuff. But generally in the process, they end up undercutting the wisdom of the spirit of God who is supposed to be working with the elders of a congregation, providing them with wisdom.

And then they look at their situation and they decide in light of the liberty given to the people of God, what is best in their context for the ministry of the word of God and the worship of the people of God and things like that.

Yeah. And with this group, it's it's it's it is a salvational issue.

Oh, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. It's part of, you know, if you're not doing this and if you don't have the right things checked off on your list, you know, you're not in the club.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's some real problems with obviously the Church of Christ, the old time anti -instrumental baptismal regeneration

Church of Christ is got got a got a gospel that's all messed up.

And it certainly needs to be something that we evangelize those folks just as we evangelize Roman Catholics, to be quite honest with you.

Certainly. Certainly. All right. Thank you very much, Dr. White. OK, thanks for calling. All right. God bless.

Bye bye. 877 -753 -3341. Let's talk to still down by Texas, can't get out of Texas, the great nation of Texas and talk with Shane.

Hi, Shane. Hey, James, how's it going, man? Going pretty well. Oh, this is a pleasure. If there's anyone

I'd want to talk to about this subject matter, it would be you. OK, what's what can we do for you today?

The other day I was challenged on the apostleship of Paul and the inspiration of his epistles. And I was like,

I didn't even know that position existed. Haven't run into too many liberals down there in Texas.

Do you all just chase them out or what? Actually, this guy's from California. Well, there you go. There are a little

PDF book in my. Bless his soul, my brother, my heretical brother picked it up.

I had basically been. Regurgitating everything he's read out of this book to me, so I figured, well, who's who's the author?

His name is Douglas J. Del Tondo. He is Q. I don't know what that abbreviation stands for.

Esquire. Esquire. That's that's must be a night. Let's just say, well, let's let's not go there.

OK, never heard of him. So the title of his book is Jesus words only, or was the apostle

Jesus condemns in Revelation two to. Or I'm sorry, or was that that didn't make any sense, what was the last of the title is

Jesus words only. And then I guess the question he poses on the cover of his book is, or was

Paul the apostle Jesus condemns in Revelations to. Oh, OK, OK. Does it actually say

Revelations? No, I'm sorry. Revelation. That was my. OK, I was just. I grabbed me.

Well, that's one of my my pet pet peeves. There is Revelations and Psalms one thirty nine.

It's Psalm one thirty nine. That's I will always correct someone, even when it makes me look like a complete jerk to do so at all, man.

So here's the guys. Here's this. I mean, the book really chops about, you know, nine tenths of the

New Testament is being uninspired and should have not been included in the canon.

So he believes Matthew and John are the only two inspired apostolic gospels.

And he cuts Paul out and he also cuts out. I'm not sure if he cuts out second

Peter, chapter four or Peter, period. And like,

I'll just I don't even know where to start, man, because it's just so frustrating to even try to reason with these people.

Well, yeah, especially since he has no historical foundation upon which to stand. You're going to you got to realize when when the printing press was first invented, the

Roman Catholics referred to as a tool of Satan because anybody with a printing press could now have their their ideas disseminated.

Well, the Internet makes the printing press look like like a small fry, anybody, and they can be completely whacked out.

They could not have gotten the book published 50 years ago if their life depended upon it because they they have no foundation.

They couldn't reason to have a paper bag. But now you said this is a PDF book. That means anybody with a computer and open office can can can bang away long enough to put together a quote unquote book and put it out there.

Whether they have any basis for even being being heard outside the walls, their own bedroom or not.

And that's what we face today, is that people will look at the volume of verbiage that someone puts out.

And, well, you know, they must have some some basis for what they're saying. And that just lends itself to the well, there are so many different opinions.

No one could possibly really know what's going on. So let's just not even think that anyone really does know what's happening.

And there's all this doubt. And and that's I think that's part of the disintegration of Western culture in light of its detestation of God's truth.

And until that that truth is honored again, repentance takes place. That's what we're going to be facing. So I totally agree.

And I can think I can I can think Satan and his devices through the

Internet for leading my brother into apostasy. You know, it gets dangerous, man, when you forsake the gathering of God's people and you have no one to shepherd over you and protect you from the wolves.

And you just hop around on the Internet and, you know, you're convinced by proof texting and these speculative arguments.

Man, it's I just I just pray that God will always keep me.

Well, yeah, there's me from all that. Well, yeah, there is that statement on Jesus's part that refers to to the fact that were it possible that even the elect themselves could be deceived, a deception, evil men go from worst to worst, deceiving and being deceived.

There's tremendous amount of deception out there and outside of the work of the spirit of God grounding us in his truth and giving us a passion for his truth.

We're not going to we're not we're going to be easily deceived. There's no question about those who think that somehow we are above that outside of God's grace.

Just just don't understand the ease by which our minds are deceived. But as it may, the idea that this guy is promoting

Matthew and Matthew and John, no, no, Matthew and John, that one's weird.

I mean, I I you'll hear folks who will who will limit things to, say, Mark or you'll have some of the

Gnostics who the old Gnostics, Marcion, for example, that cut out everything about the Jews or whatever else it might be.

And in fact, it was Marcion's activity in the early church that prompted much of the canonical discussion because he started promulgating a different canon.

And so that resulted in in people having to start listing what were the canonical books and what were not.

So but this idea has no historical foundation to it whatsoever.

And, you know, what basis upon which is I really don't I can all

I can do is kind of tell you his I haven't read his book yet.

I've just read pieces of chapters that my brother sent me. But mostly it's been my my brother representing his position through email.

And, you know, how hard that and frustrating that can be going back and forth. But basically, here's here's the guy's premise.

He looks at what Paul teaches and it his position is it contradicts

Jesus's gospel. And so every every passage of my brother sent me,

I've responded to it and explained the context of the passage and how I mean, the man was the man was sending like when

Paul was in First Corinthians chapter six. I think it's nine through eleven when he says that fornicators and swindlers and nor the nor homosexuals and all these other perverse, perverse wickedness, they will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And then I can't remember how he ends that, he says. But such were some of you.

But you were washed, you were justified, you were sanctified in the name of Jesus Christ. That's right. You're right. I was thinking of Galatians is where he doesn't really ended up that way.

But anyway, in chapter in verse twelve, then he goes, all things are lawful for me,

I think is how he says it, but not all things are profitable. Well, you know, the guy attached verse twelve to be in unison with eleven through or nine through eleven, when verse twelve is a completely different idea that Paul's now dealing with, which which it seems to be the

Corinthians are in their wickedness or fornication in their adultery, you know, their sexual morality.

And he's basically using the argument that they're giving him, you know, namely, all things are lawful.

And Paul's like, yes, in the right context when you're dealing with things like food, but not when you're dealing with things like, you know, sexual morality and the body is not made for immorality.

It's made for the Lord, you know. Well, looking at this website now, it seems to me that what you've got here is just your classic little cult.

You've got was the Greek version of Matthew in Hebrew. Yes, this is confirmed by many first century sources, as well as by Jerome, blah, blah, blah.

So it's the old original Matthew silliness, which is that the thing you refer to a while back?

Well, no. But what happened was when when Dave Hunt and it was probably actually one of Dave Hunt's editors.

They inserted that paragraph into the book, possibly even without Dave Hunt's knowledge.

But hey, it's under your name that you get to be responsible for it. They tried to defend it for a couple of weeks by going out to a

Yahwist website and stealing a list of references to Aramaic.

But all of those were in reference to Papias's statement that Matthew had written his gospel in Aramaic.

And or and then they say, well, or it could be Hebrew, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it was a cultic website that they pulled it off of.

And before they finally just threw their hands up near and said, oh, we shouldn't be defending this at all because they didn't even know what they were talking about.

That's what the brain called it. So that's that's what I was referring to there. But, yeah, that's that's the that's the idea here.

But it it looks like what you've got here is just the same type of thing you get from these.

The Bible says that they're going to be those who are going to be ravenous wolves who enter into the flock and they do not spare the sheep and they they teach perversion, perversions.

And and these guys come along and they can they can write a little something. And and, you know,

I'm looking here and he's, you know, tries to pretend like he's an expert in Greek and stuff like that.

And and they use that kind of stuff to make people go, oh, that guy is smart. He must know something.

And it's really easy to find people who are looking for a reason to leave their churches, looking for a reason to not obey the command to to love one another and to do the things you have to do when you're in a local church with people.

And they they'll gather a little flock of followers around themselves and they get a little, you know, religious authority over others.

And they're even willing to put money out to do it if if that's what it takes, because they're not so concerned about money as they are concerned about having control over the people being looked up to as some some expert and stuff like that.

And they they start their little cult and do their thing. And, you know, because this is like the seventh time this the same kind of scenario has happened with my brother and I.

And it's truly sad. And every time we get into this, I challenge the man who he's learning from to debate.

And this guy bit. And so we're going to we're going to hash out the details.

I'm hoping Pastor Gene will moderate it on his show. But my my basic my basic questions are some of the things that he that he uses as evidence.

It's mostly mostly extra biblical evidence.

But there is some biblical evidence. But like his arguments are, here's one of them.

He says that Tertullian referenced Ephesians, deeming Paul as a heretic.

But I guess somewhere he read that Tertullian, you know, made a reference of some

Ephesians claiming that Paul was heretical. And where is this found? I have no idea. I'm just I'm just giving you his his basic arguments.

You don't you don't know what chapter this is in or what? I'm sure he cites it in his in his book, but it hasn't been cited to me yet.

But well, you're going to find that before. No, I have absolutely no idea what it would be referring to.

You have to you have to have original sources to be able to look things up.

And he does give sources on other things. Here's a reference. It's probably the index to the book says

Tertullian on Paul's inferior status to the 12. And then it gives the page numbers.

But those page numbers aren't referenced here. There's nothing. Here's the growth there, because, you know,

I thank God for guys like you and Pastor Gene that teach us unlearned men.

But like when you guys teach us about what like what the qualifications were of an inspired writing, like when

I run into when I run into this guy's work, it's like it's clear he doesn't seem to understand what the what the

I guess qualifications were for whether you could, you know, a writing got included into the canon or not.

I guess this guy's under the assumption that only if you're one of the 12, which was the work inspired, but I understood it as if you if you if you had seen the risen

Lord or walked with Christ or you were giving the testimony of someone who had is it aren't those two qualifications?

And then well, nothing that contradicts the whole of Scripture. Well, that that's if you haven't looked at my book,

Scripture Alone, you might want to look at the issue of the of the canon of Scripture and the the issues that that that there's there isn't some list that somebody came up with and said,

OK, this is this is what makes something canonical. And this is what doesn't make something canonical. The the list that you read in Bruce or something like that are are us looking back and looking at the arguments that were used by certain people and saying,

OK, if it's apostolic, that's one thing. If it has direct connection to an apostle, Mark, for example, connected to Peter, Hebrews connected to Paul, even thought to be

Paul, things like that. Luke's connection with Paul. Those were those were issues. What you're talking about now is is what acts introduces as who was an apostle, whether and what the qualifications of an apostle were and and so on and so forth.

So those, you know, I honestly don't know what good it would be to debate someone like this.

To be honest with you, anybody who can just simply pull things out of the air and that doesn't have to substantiate it.

I just looked up Tertullian's points about Paul. What Tertullian wrote about Paul's validity has all the earmarks of what one would expect would be a judicial decision at emphasis involving

Paul. I stop immediately go, what? That's called fabrication out of out of midair.

That's just let's just make stuff up as we go and build things up. Tertullian makes following sobering points about Paul.

Jesus never made Paul an apostle from the records that we can read. No reference is given. Paul's what about acts like three times?

It gives the testimony. Obviously, he's rejecting Luke's Luke's testimony as having any relevance. What they would say is, well, no one else.

What my brother has said is it was a vision. You can't test a vision. I said, well,

Cliff, if you consider Luke to be an inspired writer or what he wrote was inspired, then the account that he gave based on Paul's testimony, as well as the others who were there that saw the flash of light.

He's also got to reject Peter's epistles because Peter makes reference to Paul.

He has to reject anything Luke had to write. With Second Peter, Chapter four, this guy, here's what he does.

He says, well, Calvin actually considered Second Peter, Chapter four to not be.

He didn't think it was authentic. And I don't think he thought it was a variant, but I don't think he thought

Chapter four was actually written by Peter. And like the it seems like the.

The citation they gave was to his commentary. Yeah, I can dig it up.

I've got this. I'm pulling stuff up here on the Web. Let me just give you the points that he gives here. It says if if Paul's claim to possibly solely relies upon Paul's veracity, if Paul were a true apostle, he is still inferior, possibly because Paul in Acts 15 submitted his doctrine to the twelve.

If we could argue that one. If Paul later varied from the twelve, we must regard the twelve as more authoritative than Paul because he became he came later.

Paul's story of being selected as an apostle later by Jesus seems implausible. That story asks us to believe Jesus had not planned things adequately with the twelve.

That's that's that's inane argumentation. Lastly, Jesus warned us of false prophets who would come doing miracles in his name and signs and wonders.

And Paul perfectly matches that prophesied type of profit, which, again, this guy needed some real basic training in logic because this kind of argumentation could be could be turned against his own position just as easily.

But he gives he says the passage from Tertullian is quoted verbatim later in this book at page 390.

So I'm going to find going to try to find page 390 if I possibly can here.

And let me see. It's only 20 pages long because this is all available on the in PDF format.

But obviously, you can't tell which pages are which. So there's 380. OK, here we are. Page 390.

Let's see what the sum of these things here. All right. Tertullian says Paul is inferior.

So, in fact, Tertullian, a well -respected Christian lawyer and apologist of the faith. Actually, he became a entered into a montanist.

Yes, he entered into the montanist movement and was actually considered heretical even by the mainline church of his day at the end of his life.

But, yeah, it is one that Pentecostals use as their big. They like to quote from him on various issues.

Yes. Let's see here. Well, it said page 390, but maybe things have changed.

I'm still looking for the actual citation here. He makes

Tertullian was the voice of orthodoxy. Yeah, there you go. That's that's that's good.

The presupposition seems to be Paul took a big poo on his doctrine.

And so in order to maintain his position, he's got to toss out Paul. And so the presupposition is

I'll take a man who certainly wasn't, you know, a man's writings who certainly weren't inspired, i .e.

Tertullian or Calvin or whoever he acts like agrees with his position. The Calvin thing was laughable to me.

Well, here we go. It's it's actually the citation is on page 396 of this this 395, 396.

Sorry about that. And I lay it down again with the documents of the gospel have the apostles for their authors and this task of promulgating the gospel was imposed upon them by our

Lord himself. If they also have for their authors, apostolic men, Luke and Mark, yet these stand not alone, but as companions or of apostles or followers of apostles, because the preaching of the disciples,

Luke or Mark might be made suspect of the desire of vainglory unless they're stood by the authority of their teachers, i .e.

the twelve apostles or rather the authority of Christ, which made the apostles teachers. In short, from among the apostles, the faith is introduced to us by John and by Matthew, while from among apostolic men,

Luke and Mark give it renewal. OK, there's his there's his Matthew John argument is that Luke and Mark are secondary.

And so even though Tertullian is not dismissing them, that's where the the Matthew John distinction comes from that you that you mentioned earlier.

While from among apostolic men, Luke and Mark gave it renewal, all of them beginning with the same rules of belief as far as relates to the one one only

God, the creator into his Christ, born of a virgin, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Then there's a three or four asterisks.

I'm not sure why those are there. It'd be interesting to look this up in the original to see what's there.

Marcion seems to have singled out Luke for his mutilating process, i .e. writing a gospel apparently based on Luke, but altering it.

Yes, he altered both Luke and Acts because of the references to the Jews. And Marcion was a

Gnostic who believed that Yahweh was a was a demiurge. That's can't get into that right now.

Anyway, Luke, however, was not an apostle, but only an apostolic man, not a master, but a disciple and so inferior to a master.

And then dot, dot, dot, dot. Then it says this unquestionably puts Luke below. This is not no longer

Tertullian. This is now his commentary. This unquestionably puts Luke below the other gospels of Matthew and John.

There's no evidence of that from Tertullian. He's simply recognizing the differences between where these gospels came from and who was directly an apostle and who was not.

He's just reading into Tertullian things that aren't even there. Thus, Tertullian was saying that, A, to the extent

Marcion is using Luke legitimately, then B, Luke is still inferior to the gospel accounts of Matthew and John, which, of course, is not what

Tertullian said at all. I still don't have anything here in regards to.

Paul, so I'm the second Peter chapter for a variant or has there been debate over whether that's authentic or not?

Second Peter, the entire chapter, there's no there's there's no such thing as a chapter variant.

So I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm saying this guy said that Calvin did not think that chapter four was an authentic writing of Peter, second

Peter, chapter four, where Peter goes into saying that Paul is a beloved brother and with the wisdom him with the wisdom given him wrote to you as also in all his letters.

And then he goes in to say that his writings are hard to understand and untaught and unstable men twist basically what he says to their destruction.

You know, I find it so convenient that Peter, who certainly was an apostle, says that Paul's a beloved brother and that what he writes is inspired by the wisdom given him.

Well, again, the only way I can answer questions is I'm given is I'm given references

I can look up. I can't comment on stuff that I can't read.

There's I certainly have never heard of anything even remotely like that. If I had time on this website,

I could look up everything it says about Calvin and look up the original and and stuff like that. But you can't do that live on the air in any way.

So I don't see anything in this that is that would be even begin to be worthwhile debating this fellow.

I think I'm going to stick to I think my the angle I'm going to take is not getting into all the extra biblical information, because, number one, it's speculative.

And if the guy's not going to hone in around, you know, I'm not

I'm not I'm not a church history historian, and I don't have a clue historically how the canon was put together and all that.

So I think I'm going to stay away from that and just say, what is it about what is it that Paul teaches that contradicts supposedly the whole of Scripture and then deal with those things?

And there was one actual text I was going to ask you about that I can't I have an opinion on what it means, but I'm not positive where Paul condones sacrifice foods to idols, being that there's no such thing as a false

God and that there is one true God. So if you give thanks to the one true

God, then we're free in Christ to do that so far as we do not cause a brother to stumble.

Now, this guy references Revelation 2, where Jesus says,

I have one thing against you. And then he says that basically they've put up with meat offering, meat offering,

Jezebel or whatever, the prophetess, and that she's leading them into immorality and eating sacrifice foods to idols.

So there's not much. I mean, that's pretty much what it says.

So all I can think of is that she was leading them into the actual idol worship as well as eating the sacrifice foods to idols rather than just eating while giving thanks to the one true

God. How do I reconcile those two? Because from the surface, if you're not being reasonable and you don't look at context and stuff.

Well, that's just it. I don't see any evidence that any kind of encounter with this kind of false teacher is going to allow you to maintain anything of a context.

That's the whole problem. Paul is talking about the fact that our conscience is such that we do not have to worry about the origination of our food.

I mean, not a one of us today has a clue where our food came from. We buy it at the grocery store and it could have come from almost anywhere and we don't know.

And his point is that food is to be received with thanks and it is sanctified by that giving of thanks and so on and so forth.

The context of the discussion in Corinth was the fact that Corinth is so filled with idol worship that the people would know, especially those who just come out of idol worship, where the meat came from.

And therefore, if you were eating food that was specifically from the worship that the person sitting across from you had just ceased from doing, that you could cause them problems because they, of course, would be very sensitive to anything that was still associated with the worship they had come out of.

And anybody who cites those passages, if they can't make that connection to worship that people were once involved in idolatrous worship, now they've removed themselves from idolatrous worship, that's really a misapplication of the text.

So obviously Jezebel is a false prophetess who is, in fact, involving people in that kind of idol worship.

And the contexts are very different. But just looking at the uses of Tertullian so far, context is irrelevant to this guy.

And once he has set himself up as the canonical expert, any text of Scripture, it doesn't matter where it comes from, is going to be irrelevant to him.

He can dismiss anything. He can dismiss any context. He can dismiss any passage. I'm looking here at the material again on the website, and there are three references under Calvin to reject 2

Peter in canon. One is from page 33, and that's chapter 2 of the stuff that's available here.

So isn't it nice? Remember, back in the days of dial -up, we couldn't have done this. But I'm going to zoom on down here to page 33 real quick and see if we can dig something up here on the slide.

I don't know if he's in that same section, but he also says that Calvin and Luther rejected Revelation as being...

Likewise, Calvin insists that 2 Peter was wrongfully included in canon. How about in the canon?

The second epistle of Peter has a verse that troubled Calvin's doctrine of predestination. This probably motivated

Calvin's antagonistic viewpoint. It says, see infra page 36 of appendix

B. Uh, so let's see appendix B and, uh, see if we can find how many pages.

This only says, uh, let's see what the, uh, okay. 36 in Roman numerals.

This is, uh, really scintillating stuff. I know for people, 30. Okay, here we go. Uh, Hebrew, Matthew.

No, that ain't it. Origins list. No, that ain't it. Oh, that's 26. Okay. I just love, uh, uh, these numbers.

32, 33, and there's 35. There we go.

This says a special question of 2 Peter. I need to hurry up here because we've got another caller online here. Let's see.

Uh, this recommendation is not the product of radical liberal insight. The flaws of 2 Peter are self -evident that even

Calvin provides support for it being a pseudograph. As Metzger explains, quote, Calvin applies philological tests as to authorship of various books.

The style of 2 Peter differs from that of 1 Peter and was therefore probably not written by the apostle himself.

That doesn't even look like it was something Calvin said. That looks like it is, I know Metzger would say that because that's the standard viewpoint of, of scholarship today, but that's given, uh, the reference that is given there is a

New Testament origin, development, and significance. Uh, looking over at my stuff here.

That's in my, uh, in my office someplace and I can find it eventually. And we'll try to remember to look at that and see if that is even a semi meaningful representation.

That's all he says. There's nothing more. There is, is one site. Why not cite Calvin for crying out loud?

I mean, that's, that's the kind of thing here. These people, you got to remember in a debate, it takes five seconds to say a falsehood that can sometimes take five minutes to unravel.

Oh yeah. And that's the problem of what you're facing is you just, you can't, you can't do anything with someone who would be willing to just simply willy nilly throw out all sorts of pure garbage.

And that's the problem is, is it looks like he sets up all these qualifications, which if anything is outside the bounds of that, then it's not scripture.

And so, you know, he'll, he'll, he'll say things like prophecy is how, you know, whether something's inspired or not.

And I mean, it's just amazing. It's amazing to me that he would go after second Peter and yet quote from, from revelation.

I mean, revelation had probably the hardest time canonically in the early church. And rightfully so, the early church was not a bunch of wide eyed fanatics that just accept anything that came running down the pike and revelation struggled greatly.

And again, if you're going to apply this kind of, of argumentation to second Peter, then you're going to have to apply the same thing to John and the very same people who would accept this kind of argumentation about second

Peter would reject revelation. So can't second Peter be trusted the whole book? Well, I don't see, again, the, the idea that people look at in first and second

Peter is that the language of second Peter is very different than first Peter. And it is. But it also says it was written through somebody else.

It specifically says he used an Emanuensis. Silvanus is the one, I think it was a Silvanus that in one, there is no

Emanuensis or a scribe who is, who is listed. And in the other, it is, there is a name that is listed.

I think it's just off the top of my head, Silvanus or is that Paul? I forget which one it was. But what a pseudograph is written by somebody.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Pseudopigrapha or a pseudograph is someone writing under somebody else's name.

No, this is, this is someone, this is Peter dictated this letter. He didn't write it himself. So when here is

Mark, is it kind of like Mark? No, Mark doesn't make any reference to anything like that.

So I don't know. Mark wasn't, wasn't based on Peter's testimony? But no, no, there's no parallel there.

No, there's no, there's no parallel there at all. So my, my personal opinion would be to, to leave this guy alone.

There's, I don't see any, you can, you can take apart what he says. You can point by point, demonstrate an error here, an error there.

But in a debate, you have to have an opponent that you can trust is going to at least attempt to produce citations that will actually survive examination post -debate.

But I've debated people and they've been the least worthy debates where they don't care about that.

All they care about is the right here and the right now. They'll throw anything out. And you can demonstrate later that everything they said was garbage.

They don't care about that. All they care about is their little group and things like that. And there's just even doing it for the sake of my brother.

Well, if your brother's already buying into this guy, I hate that.

I hate to tell you this, but that's all the argumentation in the world.

There's another reason why your brother wants to believe this silliness. I know, I know. And that's, you, you can, you can rip and shred somebody.

But as long as they want to believe something against what the word of God says, they're going to continue to believe it.

They're not functioning on a, on a level of, of, you know, any meaningful thinking in the first place.

So, yeah, that's, that's not going to, that's not going to help you whole, out a whole lot there. But anyways, maybe it's a first Peter that has the name.

And I was just looking at it real quickly, quickly here. But anyways, I've got another phone call I got to get to before we run out of time. All right, brother

James, I appreciate your time, man. I'll, I'll look up that citation of Calvin and see what we can come up with on that as well.

Okay. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks a lot. God bless you, man. All right. Let's quickly run down to Arturo.

Hi, Arturo. Hey, Dr. White. How you doing? You know, it's, it's a little challenging to listen to someone, talk to someone, surf the net, check the citations all at the same time.

We are multitasking today. And so anyways, let's talk. We picked the wrong day to call because there's not much time left here.

I'm sorry about that. Well, we do, we do our best. Yeah. Well, and I've also found ironic how you're debating Bill Shisco.

You mentioned October 19th on the pedo -baptism being that he has moderated your debates against the

Catholics. Oh, yeah. Well, and he's the one that because of that has wanted to do that. I think he'd be the first one to tell folks that, that he's the one who has, has very strongly emphasized that.

And by the way, since I'm still multitasking here, Sylvanus was the right word, but it's the first Peter that Sylvanus was the one was the

Emanuensis, not second Peter. So anyways, for those who are looking, looking that up. So he's the one who's wanted to do this as a demonstration of how

Reformed brothers can engage in, in debate over issues upon which they strongly disagree and they can do so within the bonds of love and they can do so meaningfully.

So, you know, he's taken the time to, to read Reformed Baptist on the subject. I've certainly taken the time to do the same in reverse.

And so hopefully it will be useful to folks. Right. Well, I think you got my email because I said I had planned on calling during my time off from work because I'm on vacation right now.

And one of my, one of my many questions that I have for you, unfortunately, I don't know how much time I have left, but what's on the wine and the

Bible and the fermentation, I don't completely understand what the fermentation means and the wine, like in John chapter two, when

Jesus turned the water into wine, the, what if he's a Cana, was that like alcoholic wine where you get drunk?

Or was that just right after crushing grapes that the wine hadn't began fermenting yet?

Or I don't understand clearly because I had a friend of mine saying that it couldn't have been alcoholic wine where they would get drunk because that would go against the principle of Jesus.

Then I think St. Paul talks about drunkenness and first Corinthians also six and things like that.

So I'm not quite understanding what the wine was in the New Testament at the Last Supper, the fermentation, what that definition of that is.

If you could kind of explain it to me. Well, I do not claim any expertise in this particular field.

There are all sorts of books that have been written one way or the other. It is currently a big, huge argument in the

Southern Baptist Convention because of a motion that was made at the last resolution.

In fact, it was passed at the last Southern Baptist Convention in regards to the drinking of alcoholic beverages and whether you could have certain positions of leadership if you were to ever drink a glass of wine and things like that.

And to me, the saddest thing about what happened at the

Southern Baptist Convention is not a discussion about the issue of alcohol. It is the fact that they can have such absolute certainty about the issue of alcohol, but can't figure out whether God elects a specific people into salvation or not.

I mean, if you actually get to the point where you can have just absolute dogmatic certainty about the level of alcohol in grape juice in the first century, but you can't figure out what

Ephesians one Romans nine and John six is talking about. That to me is far more troubling than any other aspect of this entire thing.

As to that issue, first of all, let me preface this very briefly by saying anyone who wants to write and argue with me about what

I'm about to say, you're wasting your keystrokes. I'm not going to respond to a single one of your emails.

Rich, don't even forward them to me. I don't want to see them. Chuck them the instant they come in.

I am not engaging in this debate. It is irrelevant to me not going there. That's the first thing to say.

B, obviously there was not the same technological level that we have today to be able to measure amounts of alcohol or anything else.

All I know is there's a difference between wine and grape juice. And if Jesus made wine, whatever it was, it was really good.

And it seems to me that you have a really, really, really, really, really hard time building a consistent hermeneutic whereby you get around basically this statement.

That is that people drank wine and alcoholic beverages in the olden days like they do today.

Some people did so with moderation. Paul told Timothy to do so for his stomach ailments.

And some people abused it and became drunk. And I think that's pretty much the way things are today.

And there are people who have a predilection toward alcoholism and the abuse of alcohol.

And those people shouldn't touch it with a 10 -foot pole and should stay far, far away from it. And I think

Christians who do have freedom to drink that should be very, very, very, very careful about getting in the face of those who don't and flaunting their quote -unquote freedom.

I'm afraid there's some reformed folks who do that. And they flaunt their freedom. And as a result, they cause their brothers to stumble.

And that's wrong. So I think that once again, we have a situation here where balance is what is required.

And on this subject, you generally don't find it. You either got folks on the one side who will stick their wine glass in your face and say, don't you dare raise an eyebrow toward me, bucko, or you're a legalist.

And on the other end, you've got those who will kick you right into the gates of hell if you ever tip over a

Smirnoff's ice. So you've got people on both ends who basically want to use this in a way to justify either their legalism or their libertarianism, one of the two.

And balance should be the issue. And love for one's brethren and recognition of the fact that there are clearly inappropriate times to be engaged in the consumption of alcoholic beverages, even if you feel free to do so.

And that our overarching concern should be the promulgation of the gospel and the honoring of the

Lord. And that should be far more important to us than anything else.

And so I personally, again, sit back and look at this whole thing and go, man, what a mess that this is even this big issue.

There's been entire books published about, well, it couldn't have been fermented because this wasn't present and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry, but if you're going to warn against drunkenness, there had to be fermented stuff around.

And the utilization of a really twisted hermeneutic on the part of some to try to come up with something.

That's a real problem there. But now you mentioned very quickly as the music comes up, your email, the only person

I've gotten an email from actually was, I would assume, would be asking questions about Roman Catholicism.

Is that the connection here? That's me. Okay. Well, fortunately, it looks like I'm going to be out of time.

Well, okay. Next time, all I saw was someone asking about wine in the Bible, so that didn't strike me as being relevant to the gospel.

But we'll be back on Thursday. And hey, let's talk about something like transubstantiation or something at that point.

Okay. Oh, Thursday at four o 'clock? Four o 'clock on Thursday. All right. All right. Thank you for your comments.

Okay. God bless. Bye -bye. Wow. Did not even get to a single sound file today.

But hey, you know, we surfed the web at high speed looking for this idea. I'm going to look that Calvin thing up.

I'll throw it up on the blog or something like that because I have those references available to me. We try to do the best we can multitasking, but sometimes you got to be careful what you say.

We'll be back on Thursday afternoon four o 'clock here on the Dividing Line. See you then. God bless. on the

Dividing Line.