June 30, 2011

Webcasting around the world 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. And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line from I think in, what was it, it's not

Eagle River. Chugiak. Chugiak. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Pyromaniac. So Chugiak, Alaska, where we have taken over,

I guess they call this the sun room. If this is the sun room, where is the sun? This is a rather cloudy day up here in Alaska.

I am up here for a conference that actually I'll be speaking at in just a number of hours.

I hope I can wake up between now and then. And in fact, I hope you'll help me out, 877 -753 -3341.

I'm not sure that we can do The Dividing Line, Dividing .Line

at Skype because we're using me for Skype. So I don't think we can do Skype calls, if I recall correctly.

I'm sure Rich will let me know one way or another. But please feel free to get on the phone and join with us today.

And I might, at some point in time, convince one of the folks that's lurking in the background taking pictures of me right now, a certain

Phil Johnson, to join with me. He's up here with me. And we are, there he is, see?

Come on. Aren't you glad you talked me into a Mac at some point in time? I am. I am. Absolutely.

Yeah. You told me a long time ago I needed those things. And of course, you recognize this over here.

This is the chat channel, which is the means by which Rich is communicating with me right now.

Yeah, I'm on my Mac, but I'm actually in Windows running a virtual machine.

And I still use MIRC, so I don't know how to make sense of that. That's Merc as well, but that's running under Wine or Crossover.

So it is a Windows program that we're both running on. Colloquy is nice, but it's not

MIRC. So anyways, most of you know Phil Johnson, Executive Director, I believe.

That's right. Grace to you. What most of you don't know is that if you hear me talking about the channel all the time when

I'm on the dividing line, that is our IRC channel. And I didn't know what

IRC was until 1996. And I came over to Southern California, and I think

I was just, if I recall, I was just speaking in your Bible study class, wasn't I? I think that's right, yeah. And you had learned of me because, well, you get a lot of correspondence at Grace to you.

Right, right. And I had gotten some email from a, or maybe it was even white mail in those days, from an angry

Roman Catholic. White mail. Do we still talk about that? I'm not sure. Can you talk about white mails?

No, no. That's what we used to call mail that came on white paper, white mail.

And this angry Roman Catholic was furious about something we had broadcast on Grace to you.

And he sent me some tapes from Scott Hahn. And so I was in the process of responding to this.

And somehow, doing research, I came across your debates with Jerry Matitix.

Oh, goodness. And I listened to those, and I thought, who is this guy? And why have I never heard of him before?

So I wrote you and said, who are you? Where did you come from? And how is it I've never heard of you?

And we began to correspond. And at that time, our good friend, I would say he would consider himself a good friend of both of ours.

Doug McMasters. That's right. What was Doug doing for Grace? He worked at Grace to You, and he answered a lot of our listener mail.

He did a lot of the correspondence for folks and things like that. That was his backup job while he was going to seminary at the

Masters Seminary. So he was at Masters at the time. Yeah. And he is now, for those of you who are wondering who

Doug McMasters is, you've probably heard me. Because I've done The Dividing Line from London, and specifically the last two debates that I've done there have been at Trinity Road Chapel in,

I like to say Wandsworth because it sounds so much better than upper tooting. Yeah, or lower tooting is even worse.

Your wife is shaking her head. We've got through going, oh, I knew he was going to say that. But yes, and Doug's going to hear this too, and we're both going to get an email about it.

He's right down the road from Wimbledon. He says he can see Wimbledon from his house.

I've been to his house, and I've never noticed Wimbledon, but I've just never looked that far down the street. You have to have a good clear day, and if you're staying at the front porch, you'll look right.

And it's sort of the hill down there. The way he describes it to me is on a good day, you can hear them cheering during the tournament.

So Doug was over there, and I came over. Man, I remember that first time in your class, and I don't remember what it was you had me speak on.

It had to have been some kind of Roman Catholic. I'm sure it was, yeah. It had something to do with apologetics and Roman Catholicism.

Yeah, and that started it. While I was over there, I don't know. I guess you fired it up on your computer in your office or something.

You said, hey, this is called IRC. At the time,

Carus was the channel that we were on. Yeah, that's right. So I went back, and I installed

Merc, and I started coming in. Were you an op in Carus at the time? I may have been. You know, that was what?

1996. 15 years ago, and it's been probably 13 years since I was active on Carus.

Oh, yeah, you dragged me in, addicted me, and then left. It's been so long that I've forgotten all the commands on Merc.

I think I accidentally deopt John Mark a few minutes ago. I've just forgotten how it works.

Honestly, it's the same protocol they used in the 1980s. It really has not changed at all. Yeah, I've just forgotten it.

A lot of these folks I've gotten to know real well. It is a family. But this channel started as a side channel to Carus initially, and then it sort of took on its own life.

What was it? Undernet? Was it on Undernet at the time? Yeah, that sounds right. Believe it or not, this is our own network.

Yeah, in fact, this is my first time on your network. While you were napping in the other room, I got on.

Look, I've had a pretty busy time since I got here. I'm going to tell you,

I'm not going to go into all the details, but I guess you've outed me already. I did.

In fact, I would have posted the picture had I had it, but I have to say

I am deeply impressed with Dr. O's machismo. You know what

I did yesterday was eat some moose roadkill. What you did was kill a bear.

I did. I did. I'm going to tell you something. When you come up to Alaska, what do you do when you go to Alaska?

I mean, you can do the road trip type thing, and every corner you turn around, you stop and take pictures and stuff like that.

But two years ago, I had come up and had tried to go bear hunting, but Biff, who is the fellow who's sort of running things for our conference this weekend, and I went out, but it wasn't really organized.

We were just wandering through the woods hoping for the chance encounter when

I happened to have my gun ready. But this time, Ben from Faith Bible Fellowship out in Big Lake, this guy, he's taken,

I think he said he's seen taken around 35 or 40 bear, and he's only 30, so he started when he was eight.

Yeah, in fact, he seems like he's bored with it now. He takes other people bear hunting and doesn't shoot them himself.

He's just looking for the… But he skinned your bear. He certainly did, and I was very thankful for that because it was 10 .40

last night. We're up in a tree stand, and for people who don't know me, I have massive acrophobia.

If I can fall off of it, I don't like it. Now, planes don't bother me a bit, but if you were in a…

What did you call this, a sunroom or something? There's a deck over here, and what would you say? It's about, I don't know, 10, 15,

I don't know, 20 feet off the ground or something like that. If you were to go over there and lean over the deck or lean over the railing, that would make my knees wobble.

Not only if I fall off of something, but if somebody else falls off of something. For example, when

I was a kid, my parents took me up the Washington Monument, and my back was plastered against the inside wall, and I would not move the whole time

I was up there. I could not even go over to the window to look out. That's what I'm talking about. Over the past couple of weeks,

I have done two things that absolutely… I've done a number of things that have absolutely amazed me. The one was climbing

Loveland Pass on my bike, playing with the very large trucks. Then the other was when

Ben takes me out to one of his two bait stations, and I look up this tree, and there are these spikes driven into both sides of the tree.

Thirty feet up is a platform made out of plywood stretched between two trees, and that's where we're supposed to go.

I'm supposed to climb this thing with a rifle on my back and sit up there and wait for a bear. Let me tell you something.

I did get up there. You were telling me this story earlier, and what your listeners need to know is that while you were up there, two massive grizzly bears came by, and I asked if you were frightened by that, if that was a terrifying experience.

You said actually the height frightened you more than the grizzly bears. Much more. Much more. That's how they relate to you. My concern was if they started coming up the tree,

I didn't know if I could move enough to shoot down the tree to take them out. My dad was a roofing contractor.

I worked roofs in the summer all through junior high and high school. I love heights.

I absolutely love it. That is not my thing, let me tell you something. Good old

Ben, he realized after that experience, and what it looked like after I got down out of that tree, that he needed to do something other.

He had two bait sites he had set up. He was asked to do this. He's been sort of preparing this for me.

It's really, really nice for somebody to do that. For those of you who don't know, Alaska has a real predator problem.

The moose population is dwindling because there are too many bears. There are some areas,

I don't know which direction it was, but within a few miles of where we were hunting, basically there is no limit.

You can go out every day and shoot a bear if you want in those areas. How many people live in Alaska?

Is it like a population of a million or something? It's less than that even. Just slightly less than a million.

It's tiny, and they can't control the predator population. Ben goes, all right,

I've got a friend. It's literally a kit. It was a metal kit that he and I put together at his uncle's house yesterday afternoon and stuck it on one of these six -wheel

ATVs. I had never even driven an ATV before in my life.

I'm out there in the woods going through rivers and streams and all the rest of this stuff, and we put this thing up on this tree.

I've never seen anybody do this. Can you imagine? This is a metal thing that two people can sit in.

He took that and just pushed it up against that tree. It must be nice to be 30.

Remember that? No, not really. It's been a while, but it must be nice to be 30.

He gets it up there. We strap it to the tree, and then we sit up there. Now, what do you think we were talking about?

Now, of course, we couldn't use our voice. Once we're up there, got the gun.

My good friend Brian back east gave me a beautiful Ruger .338 Winchester Magnum, which is a cannon, which

I had fired exactly five times sighting it in out there. What do you think?

We sit up on a bench, me and a guy who's a youth pastor out there in Big Lake, Alaska.

What do you talk about when you're sitting for hours? Ergen Kaner, Norm Geisler. I already told you.

Yeah, I had narrated the whole Ergen Kaner stuff, and I was going through the origins of the

Potter's Freedom, various books and stuff like that. I told my favorite story about Norm.

Have I ever told you the story about Norm Geisler and Marty Minto? I don't think so.

Marty Minto was the afternoon drive guy on KPXQ in Phoenix.

I think I have told this story on The Dividing Line at least once. After the Potter's Freedom came out, publishers want to get you on talk programs.

Bethany House would arrange these meetings. You'd go on to somebody's program.

Yes, Rich, I am seeing your PMs. I'm going to have to scroll back to find all of them. In fact,

I'm going to have to open up a window here. If you would send me everything you've already sent me before for our callers so I know who's on and who wants to get on and what the topic is,

I apologize. If you can send those to me again, then I've got a window open now. It won't scroll by. Thank you very much.

We've got Ian, Ron, and Thaddeus. We'll get to you all in just a second. Bethany House would contact stations and would say, here's an author and we'll make him available to you and arrange stuff.

I know Jon probably doesn't have time to do that kind of thing, but if he did, he'd probably be able to do it all day long constantly.

He occasionally does do that all day long. He tries to pile them all together in one day, and I've seen him do it for eight hours straight.

Yes, it's amazing. It's free advertising. I heard that Marty Minto was going to have

Norman Geisser on to talk about Chosen But Free. Look, you can fully understand this.

I wasn't even going to call the program because when you're the caller, the other guy has the control.

You might be able to get one question in, but then he's going to get all the response. He's going to control the horizontal and the vertical.

I was just going to listen, listen to what he has to say. I tuned in that day. I'll never forget this.

I was in my office. I tuned in, and I can immediately tell because I had filled in for Marty. I had done his program for him when he was on vacation and stuff.

I grew up doing radio. I know what stretching is. I know he's coming up with stuff he hasn't thought of in 25 years to try to fill the time because Norman Geisser isn't on the phone line yet.

He had the old AOL Messenger thing he'd throw out there. He was cutting edge back then.

Text me at the AOL Messenger thing. I got on with him, and he said, we can't find him.

He's not answering the phone. Finally, after about 10, 15 minutes, he finally just gave up. We were going to have

Dr. Geisser on, but we couldn't get hold of him. I thought that was interesting, but I didn't give it a whole lot of thought. I think the next week

I went up to Golden Gate to teach a summer class up in Mill Valley. Everybody on the campus at Golden Gate and Mill Valley?

No. Beautiful, beautiful campus. Right across the bay, you can see.

If it wasn't Northern California, it would be great. It's just awesome. On a

Saturday, I recall it was, Rich called me on my cell phone. This was back when cell phones were these. Remember that they were like in 2000?

They were not like your iPhone that was in there, or my Droid over there, for that matter. He said,

Marty Minto needs to talk to you. He gave him the number, and I called him up. He said,

I had a conversation with Norman Geisser, and I think you need to know about it. He says,

I called Bethany House, and I said, where do you go? They would do an email thing where you confirm the time, the date, the

Hawaiian hours. We were here. He wasn't. What happened? About 20 minutes later,

Marty's phone rings, and it's Norman Geisser. Now, remember, this is for free advertising for a book.

Dr. Geisser, great to hear from you. First words out of his mouth, why do you want me on your show? Why do you want me on your show?

To talk about your book, Chosen But Free. Do you know James White? Well, yeah, he's been on my program.

He said, James, the next 20 minutes, he didn't stop. You're a snot -nosed apologist.

You're a young buck. You're out of control, all the rest of this stuff. I don't know if you remember the

Potter's Freedom. Well, we did a new edition of it, but there were like 27 endorsements on it. Somebody was really stinging from the endorsements.

I think it's the endorsements. I believe to this day, Norman Geisser has never read the Potter's Freedom. I don't believe he did it.

That would show me too much respect to actually have read it, because he doesn't believe anyone as young as I am could ever interact with him.

One of the comments that he made that I found fascinating, and you would have some insight into this,

I think. He said, this is between me and R .C.

Sproul. Now, can you imagine writing a book on the nature of the gospel and thinking that the whole discussion of Reformed theology or moderate

Calvinism versus radical Calvinism or whatever is between you and anybody?

I can't even begin to comprehend that kind of thinking.

It blew me away. He could tell that he was winding down.

He said, Dr. Geisser, are you going to come on the program? What's Norman known as?

Storm and Norman Geisser, the apologists, the great defender of the Christian faith. He says, well, if you want me on your program, here are my conditions.

Now, he's not getting paid to do this. This is for free advertisement. Here are my conditions. You will have

James White on first. You'll record the program and send me the tapes. This was back in the days of tapes.

CDs had come out, but it was still the standard thing to send somebody a cassette tape or something. And you will send me.

I will not be on any closer than two weeks to when he's on. You will never use the names

James White or the Potter's Freedom during the interview. You will use a delay on your callers so that you can make sure no one else uses the names

James White or the Potter's Freedom in their phone calls. If anyone does, I will hang up immediately.

If you will meet these conditions, I will be on your program. And he never had him on the program.

Never had him on the program. So that was, yeah, that's what we were talking about.

We were chatting, whispering to one another very, very quietly up there in this tree stand on the side of a tree somewhere out in the middle of nowhere that you have to get to on ATVs just to get close to it and then hike in from there.

And at one point we heard a pack of wolves nearby. And Ben says to me, if you see a wolf, shoot it on sight immediately.

And I was like, Ben's this really nice guy, but it was sort of like said with venom. That strikes me as an irony right there that you would have to tell

James White, if you see a wolf, shoot it immediately. That's what you do for a living, isn't it?

I generally don't use a Ruger Mark 4338 Winchester Magnum to do it. Although I know a few wolves who might have benefited.

Yeah, you're right, you're right. But I guess around here, wolves are just ultra nastiness.

They are a plague. And sorry, Tucson mom, shoot the wolf. Her son's name is

Wolf. Sorry about that, but they're not liked up here, Tucson mom. Sorry about that. So anyway, at one point, though, both of us just stopped.

And it's amazing how hypersensitive you become when you're out there in the woods.

And you literally hear a twig break. And it's amazing how these large animals can be so silent.

The first day out, we saw the two grizzlies, which I couldn't shoot because I'm not from Alaska. I mean, he could have if he had wanted to.

But we looked at them, and they were at this time of year, they're trying to get rid of their old fur to grow new fur before hibernating for the winter.

And so they're called, they rub. They rub up against stuff, and they end up. Remember Scar in that Disney film?

Yes, Fragley. That's exactly what these guys looked like. Their faces looked pretty cool.

But as far as the rest, it was like, hey, dude, you forgot to dress this morning, huh?

And they're big, huge animals. But when they came into the bait, it's like they beamed in from the

Enterprise or something. It's just amazing. By the way, what do they use for bear bait?

Oh, this is fun. Almost anything. Smelly fish parts. The primary thing was dog food.

Literally, dog food. It just has to be smelly. They happen to love donuts.

So I actually literally like it at some of the bakeries. Ben was telling me today that at some of the bakeries, when they make food, and it's past their sell -by date, but still edible, that's great bear bait to put out because they have a massive sweet tooth.

And in fact, he said he sat in a blind once and watched a bear come in, and there was a bunch of donuts.

The bear picked through and ate only the chocolate donuts. He left everything else sitting there and wandered off, and another bear came in and just scarfed everything up.

So I guess there are picky eater bears. That's my kind of bear right there. Connoisseurs.

So we're sitting there, and we hear something. But they move so slowly that we could tell it was a distance off.

And then all of a sudden, right in the middle of my story about teaching Hebrew for Golden Gate once, we saw movement, and we see a black bear, and that's what

I need to go for is a black bear. And as I sat there,

Phil, honestly, the thought crossed my mind, he's going to hear my heart because it is pounding so loudly in my chest.

And I'm just sitting there going, how in the world am I going to slowly and quietly?

I mean, you can even hear your jacket rustling, and they can too, so you have to be very, very careful.

How am I going to get a gun up to my eyes and sight this thing in?

And they didn't just come running. They weren't like the grizzlies. Grizzlies are the king of the forest.

They really don't fear much of anything. And black bears get eaten by grizzly bears, so they're much more cautious than the grizzlies were.

And so they're circling. They're sort of going back and forth, circling in toward the bait, which is a pile of dog food, some fish parts, and some other sweet thing or something.

And we can see them behind the trees. We can see one of them behind the trees. All of a sudden I look up, and in the open is another one.

So there's now two. So we know they're coming in. And it's about 10, 20 in the evening, which in most places it's getting dark.

Not up here. It got dark around 1 o 'clock and started getting undark around 2 o 'clock.

It's pretty weird this time of year. And so I'm just sitting there, and we're trying to sort of listen to them.

And they're in some trees down to our left. And actually we saw one just lay down for a while. And they're just checking stuff out before they go into the food.

They're being very, very careful. And we're wondering, are we too low? Is my deodorant going to get smelled?

I mean, because they can smell like anything. I mean, look at those noses. They're just incredible. And so finally

I see one moving over to my left. And I get the gun ready.

And all of a sudden, just almost out of nothingness, appears this incredibly gorgeous black bear.

And it looks like it's looking right at me. I'm 20 feet up a tree. But it's actually probably just sniffing.

It puts its nose up. And sometimes you can hear them. There was just this big, big, you know. And I put the crosshairs right between the eyes.

And I go, I don't want to go there. So I'm sitting there going through my bear anatomy and my mind.

And everything else in the world disappeared. I mean, the aches and pains from riding the

ATVs or sitting in the, you've been sitting and you can only move so far in a tree stand, you know.

So stuff's hurting and all of that just disappears. You don't hear anything else.

All you see is what's in that sight. And I picked a really good spot.

And Ben had been telling me about some of the people he had taken out who had had great shots and missed.

And the last thing in the world I wanted to do was either miss or hit this bear someplace where I only wounded.

I don't want to make this thing suffer. And you don't want to have to chase it too much. And don't want to chase it either, especially as it's getting darker and darker and darker.

So I picked a good spot. And if you rush the shot, if you pull the trigger, you can move the gun.

There's all sorts of things. I've done a lot of shooting in my life, not recently. But when I was younger,

I had a lot of guns. And all I can say is when I squeezed that shot off,

I held so solid to the target that I could see the muzzle blast in my scope.

And I actually saw the bear go down. It was one shot. It simply collapsed like a balloon just to the ground, never moved.

It's a perfect metaphor for some of your debates that I listen to. I've seen you do the same thing in debates.

Only during cross -examination. Only during cross -examination. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So I was so glad to have Ben with me because he gets down there first.

I don't go up tree stands quickly, and I don't come down tree stands quickly. Let's just say it's a very careful process.

But he says, you're not going to believe this. Because when someone had asked the guys up here initially, would you take

James White out to do some bear hunting? The response from everybody up here is, when?

End of June? Do you know what bears look like at the end of June? They've been rubbing up against trees. They look like the old worn carpet in the hallway.

They just look terrible. Well, what actually happened was this bear had no rub marks at all.

Long, deep, black hair. Just incredible. Sometime before next summer, my wife did inform me two years ago when

I came up, that if I got a bear and I saved the pelt and made a bear rug, that it was going to be staying at my office.

This does not fit with her decorative decor ideas.

That would be okay with me. Unless the bear had very pretty shoes on. Then it might make it, but not going to be happening.

So it's already at the taxidermy. You're going to stuff it and make it into a giant teddy bear for her. That might work, but it was a full -size adult, so that would be a little bit larger than what you'd really expect.

But I'm listening to some of the comments in the channel here.

It's sort of funny. But yes, I did. Then driving out in the dark on these.

These are trails that are just for any wheeled vehicle. I've done some stuff recently that honestly, if my mom had lived to see it, she would have just laughed because she couldn't believe that I would be able to pull that kind of stuff off.

So when are you going out deer hunting, Phil? Next time I'm here, probably. Not this trip.

I'm still recovering from my back surgery. Well, I'll tell you, physically it was very, very demanding.

It's the vehicle that tears me off from it.

I remember I was the one piloting it. Ben was on a different one. He was on one of the three -wheelers.

I actually had to drive this thing myself, and I had never done that before. So that was quite the experience as well.

There are other ways of doing it. There's making blinds and shooting distance and stuff.

There's lots of ways to do it. I'll just stick with the roadkill moose. Roadkill moose.

You really actually ate roadkill moose? Yeah. You eat everything. Yeah. But I have to say, roadkill moose was actually pretty tasty.

It made great tacos. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. That's, yeah. All right.

I actually had bear sausage morning before last.

I had some reindeer sausage yesterday. You get all that kind of stuff up here. Oh, you do. All these people. It's just life up here.

In fact, I've heard people say it's been years since we cooked any beef. Who cares about a cow?

They have meat sources walking through their backyards. It is a different world up here.

I said last time when I was up, I had my .50 caliber magnum strapped across my chest, and I walked into a grocery store.

People either ignored me completely or said, cool. Can you imagine California if you walked into a grocery store?

You'd be on your face and a floor. Oh, man, in a pico second. It would be amazing.

Before we take our phone calls, talk to us a little bit about the

Pyromaniacs blog. You started it. I did. Then you decided that it had gotten too big for one person.

The big question that I get all across the world, literally, when people find out that I know

Phil Johnson, why did you pick Frank Turk? Hey, that's the question

I get too. Why Frank Turk? No, I love Frank. The fact is,

I had only met him once when I asked him to start writing for Pyromaniacs.

If you had asked me, I could have warned you off. I had read enough of Frank's blog.

I just admired his wit and his courage. Cartoons? Well, not the cartoons.

Although, that's clever and cute. It's part of his persona. It is. It's part of what I love about him. I just thought, when he tackles an issue, a serious issue even, he can do it with grace and good humor in a way and say things that I could never get by with.

You have to be the straight man. Sometimes, yeah. Come on, you've got to be careful.

He can get away with some things that he does to your position. He doesn't always get away with them. He cracked me up, and he made me think, and he often has perspectives on things that I've never even considered.

It's just his mind is creative and impressive in many ways. Same thing with Dan Phillips, whom

I had never met prior to asking him to write for the blog, but I had read his blog. It's funny.

He sent me an email one day and said, This was before I had invited him to come and write.

He said, You never link to anything on my blog. Do you not read it? Do you not like it? What's the deal? I wrote him back and said,

On the contrary, I read it all the time, and I think it's great. How would you like to write for this group blog?

It was pretty much the next day we started the group blog. I remember when you did that because I think you and I had talked about, at some point

I was over there, and you were thinking about starting a blog. It was during that first year where it sort of exploded.

Yeah, lots of people were blogging, and I had been more or less pilloried by Michael Spencer, the iMonk.

Oh, yeah. For an article. Actually, it was a lecture I delivered in London on NT Wright and a

New Perspective. He wrote a little piece about it where he basically said, Who is this guy to criticize a scholar like NT Wright?

I wrote what I thought was a pretty well -reasoned. It wasn't a nasty comment or an emotional comment or whatever, but I answered his blog post with a comment, and he deleted it.

He deleted my reply, and then he closed the comments on his group blog.

They don't allow comments to this day. I thought, that's just not very fair.

That's what prompted me to begin thinking about blogging more or less in self -defense. People can attack you online and then not even let you give an answer.

I thought, I want to do some blogging myself. Well, your thoughts. 1996, an

IRC channel was social media. Now, I don't have

TweetDeck open right now because I don't have enough space. I have it up, but I don't have it open on the screen.

Twitter, Facebook, blogs, has it changed, for example, how

Grace To You advertises, gets the word out? Is it a good thing or a bad thing, in your opinion?

Both. It's both. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages. It's good in the sense that it definitely is a more efficient and effective way to get the word out.

When we were doing tapes, cassette tapes, the year I came to Grace To You, the year prior to my coming was the first year they actually produced and distributed a million cassette tapes in one year.

That was unheard of and remarkable. It's huge. It set a benchmark that we often looked at.

A million tapes a year, a million sermons a year just blew everybody's mind. Well, as media has changed and the availability of quick and easy media is different, last year, two years ago,

I guess, we offered all of John MacArthur's sermons perpetually now for free downloads.

It doesn't cost anybody anything. Just get on the Internet and download them for free. Now, we typically deliver a million and a half tapes per month.

They're not tapes anymore, but we still say tapes. Isn't that amazing? We can't get away from that. I know.

Recorded sermons, what do you call them? Sound bites, tracks, whatever. But they're the full sermons downloaded a million and a half every month.

It's just as remarkable to me to see how it's opened the field for… Do you still do tapes?

No, we don't. We'll do very few for special orders, but we don't advertise it.

We don't encourage it. We don't encourage it. We got rid of all of our… Tape duplication machines?

Oh, yeah. You must have had huge ones. We did. We had those big… They were called king loaders, and they were the size of a refrigerator.

And they would load… They would take prerecorded tape, the size of cassette tape, and load it into a cassette in 11 seconds.

And so every 11 seconds, it would come out. Oh, my goodness. So you could do very high -speed duplicating that way.

It was impressive to watch. Well, I bet it was. Our first tape duplicator was a ghetto blaster.

It had two… And you could just do one -to -one. I mean, that's… And literally, and file folder label.

We didn't even have labels. We had file folder labels. That's how we started. That's how it started. Yeah, the first James White tape

I got was like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, file folder label. With a dot matrix printer.

Yeah, I think I still have it, actually. You might want to keep it. I have nothing to play it on anymore. That's right.

You can't even get to it anymore. Yeah, it is amazing how fast stuff happens. For example, you undoubtedly observed the

Rob Bell… I don't even know what you would call the…

Perfuffle? You know, I was actually thinking about that, but I was trying to avoid using that. But since you used it, it's okay.

Yeah, all right. It's kind of an effeminate word. Yeah, well, all the argument over his book, how fast it happened, and yet also how fast it passes.

It's almost like the media and the computerized age intensifies the reaction but shortens the attention span.

And that's the bad side, because something of that magnitude can happen, and three weeks later, it's old news, and people have forgotten about it.

And not just willfully set it aside, because that's what we talked about three weeks ago.

They literally forget about it. And all of the great work that was done to refute that and everything,

I think, is forgotten. And now evangelicals are sort of engaging in a kind of hand -wringing about, did we say too much?

Did we react too harshly? I saw your article on that. Yeah, I just honestly don't get that. I mean, we're in a war here over the truth.

Why do all this internal and non -stop sort of self -criticism about whether we handled it rightly or not?

Let's just defend the truth and acknowledge we don't always do everything rightly, but we have to do the best we can under the circumstances, but we also have to keep doing it.

You can't be more concerned about what people think about you than you are about what people think about the truth.

Oh, yeah. Believe me, I go through that all the time in thinking about how we've handled stuff.

And it just seems like, for example, what would have been the chances of my having a mini -debate dialogue with Brian McLaren before the advent of Internet and the

Internet, the capacities? I mean, that thing I did on Unbelievable, I had like five days' notice.

But I was able to do it because I was able to download his books on Kindle, listen to them immediately, and be on the program via our studio in our offices across the world, probably by satellite.

I mean, that changes fundamentally the theological dynamic of heresy, false teaching, how the

Church responds to things. It used to be that somebody would come out with something, and it might be, who knows how much longer, before someone would write a full response to it.

But it could be a year, it could be longer than that before there would be a response. Now, if you don't have a response within a week or even less, you're behind the curve.

And people are saying, oh, you must not have any way to respond because you haven't responded yet. That seems to sort of cheapen things a little bit.

And I know you see it, I think, the same way I do, that because of the way things are changing that way, the speed with which communication takes place, the speed with which heresy can easily disseminate, become popular, faddish, and all of that, the stakes are higher than ever.

And therefore, the battle is more serious than ever. And yet people, because things move by so quickly, people actually have begun to treat the most serious issues as if they were trivialities.

And that's the downside of it. It seems like we talk about really important stuff via – it's almost like if you discuss it via Twitter, then since everything is discussed via Twitter, including shoe color, it makes it all –

And yet you have to talk about it on Twitter. You can't say, well, because people misuse Twitter and because Twitter is destroying the way we think, and it is, then we shouldn't use it.

You have to use it. You have to be in there and be a voice for the truth. I don't know what the future holds.

It's going to be very, very interesting. We've got some folks on the phone here, and I'm not sure if you can just sit there,

Phil, and if you have something to add in, that'd be great. But let's go ahead and see if we can take some of our phone calls and let's talk to Ian in Utah.

Hi, Ian. Can you hear me and can I hear you? I can barely hear you.

Can you hear me? I can hear you just fine. Okay, so I'll ask my question, then I'll take the answer off the air.

I get something a little bit above my pay grade, I'm hoping you can help me with. In Isaiah chapter 40, verse 22,

God has described the setting of the circle of the earth. Now, I've heard before from some pretty prominent apologists that that term circle in the

Hebrew literally means sphere, and I've actually used that myself. However, when

I went and looked it up, just, you know, one of those things you just kind of do one day, you just kind of look things up because you're bored.

It didn't say circle. It said either vaulted or horizon. And I'm wondering, you know, is this the way the

Hebrew is used? Am I missing something? Or have these apologists just simply overstated the case?

Well, the term itself, chug, simply means circle, and it would have been common to understand in that time period, you know, there's all sorts of arguments as to how the

Biblical writers understood the nature of the earth and the firmament and so on and so forth. But one thing has been pretty obvious for a long time, and that is you get far enough away from the largest mountain, you can't see it anymore.

There might be a reason for that, and people are not necessarily stupid, and there's obviously some mention of the circle of the earth.

I'm confused as to what it is that the question is focused upon.

Is it simply the meaning of the term or what it would be referring to?

Because this is obviously poetic because it says its inhabitants are like grasshoppers who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.

And so the emphasis is upon the transcendence of God and the fact that the creation is subject to him and is, in comparison to him and his power, infinitesimal.

So is there a particular application of this that you're looking at? Okay, I guess we still don't have

Ian on the line, but I wasn't sure what the application is.

Okay, he's disconnected. Well, hopefully that's helpful to you, the term mean circle. But I think, especially in Hebrew poetry, you look at the rest of the verse, and it talks about spreading out the heavens like a curtain, like a tent to dwell in.

And so I think that's the context in which circle has to be taken at that particular time.

Okay, let's talk to Ron in Phoenix. Hello, gentlemen. Good evening.

Hello, how are you? I'm doing good, thank you. I have a question, and I've got your books and done a lot of studies, and it's pertaining to the

Roman Catholic belief of communion in the saints, and I understand the argument why we shouldn't pray to Mary or to the saints or what have you.

My one thing is that I haven't been able to find anything on online or through the books is when debating with them and they pose the question, that this isn't something that was always believed.

Why is the prayer and the intercession of the saints in the early church liturgies, and why were all the

Christian altars built over the tombs of the saints, obviously referring that, referencing that they were praying to them?

Well, when you say praying to them, you have to differentiate between the concept of praying to them and asking for their intercession and merits and things like that, which is a later development, and the concept of the fact that these individuals are still alive, and hence in the church martyrs were considered especially to be particularly holy individuals, to be remembered, not in the sense of seeking some kind of sacramental, meritorious intercession before God on our part or something like that.

When you're talking about, even when you start talking about altars, now you're talking about 3rd, 4th century, because building of churches, especially during periods of Roman persecution, that's a completely different context, and most of the early churches were in homes and things like that, so you wouldn't know what the primitive church was doing along those lines.

And you have to be really careful. Sometimes you'll encounter claims about primitive churches that actually it's in reference to changes that were made to those churches in later centuries.

You've got to be really careful of the archaeological data as it is presented by people and things like that.

Be very, very careful along those lines. But obviously, fundamentally, we assert that the issue has to do with what the

Bible says concerning the nature of departed saints and our relationship to them, and then a recognition that during periods of persecution and things like that, people did things that were not necessarily biblically correct, and you don't necessarily have to follow their example in that, but at the same time, you can learn from that.

You don't have to necessarily throw them out of the kingdom of God for that, but there needs to be a balance.

What happened, unfortunately, is in the early church, once a particularly holy person of the past, or at least as viewed by people in the past, did something, all of a sudden that becomes the standard, and we somehow are called to emulate that.

Well, that's where you run into the problem, is making that kind of an expansion, and so you have to be careful along those lines.

Okay. One of the things they were saying is that saints, according to the Roman Catholic Church, includes prayers for those in purgatory, and they were saying, well, how do you know the apostles didn't teach it?

Well, obviously, we know purgatory was a later innovation. It wasn't something at the apostles' time, but I'm still seeing some 3rd century, 4th century, what would you use as a good time period when the purgatory infected the

Church? What would you say would be a good time to state, you know, pretty much right on that that was the time it started?

Well, I direct you for a fuller response to that to the two debates

I've done on the subject, one with Peter Stravinskis from 2001, which is sort of a classic debate that we did, and then

Robert St. Genes and I did a debate on purgatory only last year in Oregon, so both of those would be,

I go into more detail on that in my presentation as to the historical development, but the concept of purgatory as it is believed in Roman Catholicism today did not come into the form that it has today until at least the

Council of Florence, so you're talking well over a thousand years after the apostles. There were great strides made.

Some of the comments of Augustine taken by later centuries, especially in Gregory the

Great, the great pope at the beginning of the 6th century, very, very important for his adding to the concept, but even then he didn't have what

Rome has today as to a full -fledged doctrine of purgatory, and so purgatory is an excellent example of a theology that developed, and it's based upon foundational ideas that had to take literally centuries to come together to build the next level and then the next level and then the next level.

That's why you don't want to trust those lists of times and dates you see where someone says, ah, you know, 1414 purgatory or something like that, because the foundations of purgatory go way earlier than that, but at the same time the

Roman Catholic needs to be kept honest to admit, yeah, but the dogmatic form that it has today you can't really find until much, much, much later.

So if the apostles taught it, then why is it that the dogma itself cannot be found until a much later time?

And the Roman Catholics say, oh, but this part can be found fairly early, or this part can be found fairly early, but if the dogma that you must believe

De Fide cannot be found back then, why can't you recognize the evolutionary nature of this and then as a result admit, well, okay, the apostles didn't teach any of this, but maybe the apostles taught a part of it over here and a part of it over there, and therefore the church becomes the mechanism that takes all that and puts it together.

That's really what Rome is saying, and that is fundamentally a claim to a form of latter -day revelation that they just don't want to have to make very openly.

Okay, thank you very much. Okay, thank you, sir. All right, let's go now to Daniel in Denton, Texas.

Maybe we can get Phil in on this one because this is an interesting one. Daniel. Hi there, how's it going?

It's going well. I was afraid you were going to take this call because I wasn't sure. Well, it's quite an apologetic question, but my situation is

I'm a member at a good -standing Orthodox church in Denton, Texas, and our church has a ministry that I'm a part of where we minister to senior citizens in the area.

We'll go to nursing homes and hold church services, and for the past couple of months, actually,

I've been preaching at a Good Samaritan Society every Friday morning. And one of the concerns

I've had is how do I pick? It's an odd thing to ask.

How do I go about preaching? I mean, normally I would say, okay, I'll pick a book and go through it, but the people

I'm preaching to might not even remember everything I've preached on before in that book, and a lot of things, if I get to a section on tithing, aren't really going to be relevant to a senior citizen.

I know it's an apologetic question, but do you have any advice for me? Well, does

Grace do anything with senior citizens and stuff like that?

Not really. It's a very challenging thing, first of all, hopefully a very rewarding thing for you.

Definitely, definitely. It's not a matter of how much data these older folks are remembering from what you've been saying.

It's the fact that they still want to hear the Word of God and they have a hunger for the Word of God and you get to help meet that, that obviously is the greatest reward.

I guess I don't have a lot of experience there. I don't want to disappoint you, but I would say that that might be a really good place where thematic preaching, and especially centered upon the cross, upon the rewards that God gives to faithful servants, maybe lives of saints who had long service to Christ.

You look at their situation, many of them are very lonely, many might feel abandoned and things like that.

Focusing upon those things might just be more important than making sure you get to every single possible topic, because you're in a very specific situation at that point in time.

It's sort of like if you're talking to kids, you try to cover the things that the kids need to know, and there are certain things that aren't necessarily going to be the first thing up in your priority list when you're talking to kids.

Exactly, yeah. I think there's everything appropriate in tailoring your messages so that you're having maximum impact upon that particular audience, especially one that you may be some of the only serious human contact they get during the week.

Gotcha. Thank you very much, appreciate it. Okay, thank you very much. I've got one more phone call in here real quick.

Let's talk to Thaddeus. Hi, Thaddeus. Hello, Dr. White. Yes, sir. Thank you for taking my phone call.

My question is about how we should go about interpreting the

Old Testament law and how it applies to us today. This question is inspired by a

Facebook disagreement that I got into recently. People get into disagreements on Facebook?

I've never heard that happening before. Yeah, I'm convinced no one ever wins debates on Facebook.

Nonetheless, I posted a comment after New York had legalized gay marriage, sort of denouncing the entire thing.

And then a friend of mine commented on my post, and he called me out for being inconsistent with my interpretation of Scripture.

And he brought up Leviticus Chapter 18 and how it denounces homosexuality. But he also brought up different laws throughout the

Old Testament, such as the kosher laws and sowing your field with two different kinds of seeds, etc.

And we had a conversation that went on for a little bit, but I guess my question is how would you respond to that?

Okay, we're really close to the end of the program, but let me just mention that about a month ago

I had on the program Dr. Michael Brown, who just put out a new book titled

A Queer Thing Happened to America. And it's 700 pages long. It blew my mind when

I read it or listened to it, in this case. And it's available on Kindle now, and there's extensive discussions of these issues, and he and I discussed some of these things.

Also, please note that I did two debates. Right, the

Michael Brown book is available at Amazon .aomin .org. And I've done two debates, one with Bishop John Shelby Spong, the other with Barry Lynn, and we went over these things.

But it is very important, I think, for us to think about the nature of the Mosaic Law and especially the

Holiness Code in Leviticus 18 through 20, and to recognize that we do need to understand the applications at that time.

We do need to understand the backgrounds, because it is very common for people to use the argument, well, you mix different types of threads together and you're not supposed to do that.

And we need to understand what the principles were in each of the laws and to be able to seriously interact with what they meant at the time and what we then can make application to today.

Because while there were some that were specifically for the people of Israel, even when they marked the people of Israel out in a special way, there was a reason for it, and that reason can remain important for us today.

But some were simply based upon God's creative mandate in regards to his right to define human sexuality, etc.,

etc., and those remain utterly unquestioned in the rest of the

Old Testament and in the New Testament as well. And so this is an area that, unfortunately, because many people just have the idea, oh, we're not under the law anymore, they just ignore all of that, not even seemingly recognizing that Jesus quoted more from Leviticus than he did from any place else.

And especially in regards to the command to love the Lord your God. And so we tend to ignore those books.

We give surface -level answers in regards to the issue of the law and what we can learn from the law and the moral applications.

You know, for example, the Israelites were to put borders on their roofs. Well, we don't get up on our roofs very much.

I certainly do not want to, even if I had the opportunity to do so. But the reason they did so was in regards to safety.

It was a matter of honoring human life. And the morals regarding sexuality, and especially the condemnation of homosexuality, likewise are issues of life.

And all we have to do is look at what homosexuality brings into a person's life to see that those things remain valid to this day.

So I'm trying to remember where it was. I did a discussion of this on the dividing line.

I'd have to look at the descriptions to see where it was. But I went through some of these laws and expanded upon some of this stuff.

So you might look up Leviticus on my blog to see if maybe, or Levitical to catch that.

But a number of resources there that might be available for you, okay? Well, thank you very much. Okay, Thad, thank you very much.

God bless. All right. Well, hey, Phil, thank you much for sitting there and bringing your

MacBook Pro over. You have a dent in your MacBook Pro here. Do you realize that? Yeah, I know. I'm terrible at how

I heat them up. Oh, boy. Well, thank you for bringing it over. I don't know. It almost feels like a family when we have our

Macs sitting next to it. And thanks for being on the program today and just chatting with us. Coming up next, this is a new thing.

But we are now 24 -7 with The Dividing Line. The Wayback Machine will be on.

If you haven't caught that, you might want to start listening to that. Anytime you want to listen to The Dividing Line, just click on that link, and we're on 24 -7.

So, Rich has been doing that. I appreciate that. We'll be back with you next week at our regular time. Thanks for listening to The Dividing Line today.

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