March 18, 2004

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.

Opening Banter and Schedule Chatter

And good morning and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We are sort of live this morning, just flying in at the seat of our pants. I was running late, but somebody else was running later, so we just barely made it.

That's the fun of webcasts. That's why I was just mentioning a channel. There's some folks who want to, we've been contacted by some folks. Hey, you know, it'd be great to broadcast that thing. And I'm like, yeah, right.

That means we'd actually have to, you know, do it regularly all the time at the same time. Anyways, hey, you know, last week, or Tuesday, and we're thinking about changing the times again because too many of you have been figuring out when it actually is again.

That's how you keep the servers from ever getting overloaded is you just keep changing the time and you keep people confused, and so people have to listen to the archive, and that way your live servers don't get overwritten that way.

Well, one of the reasons is I've never really liked the time schedule we're on. We were forced to it by other reasons because Tuesday night, Thursday morning, there's only one day in between, basically.

And so, you know, there's five days on the other side, basically, of the dividing line, and so you've got, you know, intense period and then nothing for like five days,.

And that's just not the way to do it.

So we may end up eventually going back to where we were before, which was 11 o 'clock on Tuesdays and 5 o 'clock on Thursdays, which gives you, you know, at least a day and a half in between, sort of spreads out a little bit more, and it's a whole lot easier on me, and so on and so forth.

So, ah, but we're just talking about that. We'll see what develops, but four on Thursday, whatever. But we haven't decided to do that quite yet, so we'll figure that out. On Tuesday evening, we responded to Dave Hunt, and there's been a lot of reaction to that, but there was, I had, I think I mentioned, I had like 12 cuts I didn't even get to, or 10 cuts, or 8 cuts, or whatever.

And, um, so one of them I really wanted to get to, I had sort of forgotten about it in responding to all the stuff about how I allegedly don't want debating Calvinism in print, which is why we are selling it for, how much, isn't Brian Kahl still selling it for like $16, or something along those lines?

I think they are. That's why we're selling it for $10, and encouraging people to buy multiple copies. Yeah, that's, sure, I don't want this in print.

We call it the world's biggest track.

Ah, it's the world's biggest track.

Oh, and by the way, let me remind you, Calvinists cannot possibly be evangelistic.

Of course, no, no, that's why Dave Hunt's been in Salt Lake City, the General Conference, since 1980-something, I'm sure. And out in Mesa, I see Dave out there in Mesa all the time. Sarcasm, folks, nope, never seen him out there.

But, well, of course, I was being told last night that I need to be more Irenic on the program. I should do a politically correct, or a theologically correct program sometimes, sort of like Lydia and Hill do here locally, the politically correct theology.

That would be so fun.

How are you feeling today, Dr. White? I feel really good.

I am very much in the spirit today. How are you?

I'm doing very well.

Did you see the beautiful picture of the Pope in the newspaper today?

Oh, it wasn't that special.

Oh, I felt so warm, didn't you? Oh, stop! Listerine, help, help! Oh, good grief. What in the world was I talking about? Oh, yeah, Dave, Dave. Anyway, I just got so into responding to all that stuff that I forgot this one.

It's really weird to watch the channel because the responses to it are always like 30 seconds to 60 seconds after whatever it is he said. So it's just, it's fun to watch it. Hey, folks, you know, some of you Calvinists have no sense of humor whatsoever and you just figure we're a bunch of nuts and we shouldn't.

We should always just be completely serious about everything and you should look like those pictures of the Puritans. Well, the Puritans actually had fun. You know, we've really had them grossly misrepresented to us.

Even us Calvinists have had them grossly misrepresented to us. They actually liked color and they danced. Yes, and they did, they enjoyed life and we try to do the same thing. Anyway, back to the subject.

Dave Hunt was doing his thing and I had recorded this one. I just forgot about it. And so after the program I went, oh, I forgot this one. So we're going to need to crank this baby up. I think I've got the volume up to pretty much where it was on Tuesday.

But this one is in the section on John 3 .16 where he's discussing John 3 .16, which, of course, is one of his favorite passages. Not really to engage the subject, but if you have read my open letter to Dave Hunt, you know that I, that's about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through this long open letter.

Very large file. I go into all sorts of issues on John 3. In the book, oh, by the way, by the way, by the way, don't forget, I think, did I post this afterwards before? I think I posted it, I think I posted it before.

At least I hope I posted it before. There is a scripture index now on the website. If you go to my blog, you will see that there is a connection there. It's down under the A True Advil Experience. And if you go to that, you can scroll down and find whatever you're looking for.

You can print it out, do with whatever you wish, put it in the back of the book so you can find stuff. You'll notice there's a lot of discussion of John 3, verses 16, 17, 18. Actually, start back at 14, there's a whole section here of discussion.

If you read in the book, you will see that it was in this period, in this discussion on John 3, that Dave Hunt made another one of his many, many, many errors. And one of his many, many, many errors had to do with the subjunctive.

He doesn't understand the purpose of the subjunctive in the Greek language. But that doesn't stop him from making comments on it. And so I caught him on this. It's one of the many issues that if we were to do an actual debate during cross-examination, he would actually have to answer to.

But he won't do that, and he knows he can't do that, and that's why he won't do the debate. It's as simple as that. This isn't an issue of, I've said everything I need to say. No, he's said everything he can say, but he knows that he'd have to say a whole lot more than that if he were to actually do a debate.

Let's just be honest. That's what it's all about. And so, you know, he will talk about Greek, but when he does, since he doesn't know it, and admits it, but then talks about it, he makes horrific mistakes.

And we put an excellent quote up that was provided by Michael Navar sent me a quote from Spurgeon. Let me read it to you.

It says,.

Because sometimes a learned minister ventures in all honesty and discretion to give a more correct translation of the original, can this justify a foolish, unlettered man in altering the original itself and perverting the sense of a passage?

There is an end to Scripture altogether if license be given to alter its teachings according to our will. To teach perfect wisdom how to speak is too great a task to be ventured upon by any but the presumptuous and foolish.

When our version is incorrect, then it is a duty to present the proper rendering if one be able to find it out. But to give translations out of our whimsied heads without having been taught in the original tongue is impertinence indeed.

One can only think of Mr. Hunt's supporting of the New World Translation in Acts 13 -48 at a point like that. Well, all of this goes back to the fact that Dave Hunt has called me an elitist for daring to discuss the original languages and all the rest of that stuff.

Now, you want to hear what Dave Hunt says when he is talking to quote-unquote his folks, his audience? Here's Dave Hunt. Listen, and listen to the audience. And listen to his mocking tone here from Springfield, Illinois.

This was February 22nd, just a few weeks ago.

John 3 -15, they said, you know all the Greek. Well, I said, you know, if it depends upon knowing the Greek, then I think the Wycliffe Bible Translators have been wasting their time for decades. They're going around studying these obscure languages and trying to translate the Bible into this obscure language of each of these tribes.

And when they get the Bible in their own language, they still don't understand it because they don't know the Greek. I think what we ought to do is teach all these tribes Greek and Hebrew and then give them a Greek and Hebrew Bible.

Come on, guys. Well, Jesus explains John 3 -16, doesn't he? How does he explain it? How does he explain everything else from the Old Testament? How does it begin? I haven't found a Calvinist who admits that verse 16 is preceded by verses 14 and 15.

He hasn't found a Calvinist who admits, Oh, put me under the glare of the lights. Oh, Chinese water torture. Okay, I admit. Verse 16 follows 14 and 15. I give up.

What is this?

Why doesn't someone in that audience stand up and go, Excuse me, but what are you talking about? You mean your assertion is, Mr. Hunt, that Calvinists ignore the context of John 3? Is that what you're talking about?

Is that your assertion? Why don't you say that? And then why don't you demonstrate that? Not, I can't find a Calvinist that admits that verse 16 follows verses 14 through 15. Oh, goodness gracious. And then, of course, he goes on to say, Well, the serpent was lifted up and anybody who looked was healed.

That's true. Anybody was within Israel. His whole Old Testament thing is this offering. It wasn't just for an elect within Israel. No, it was just for Israel. And even he would have to admit, Then only the remnant actually benefited thereby.

Who's the remnant today, Dave? It's a good question for a lot of folks. Anyway, did you hear the laughter of the people? Well, you've got to look at the Greeks. That's how he avoids dealing with the biblical text.

He discovered that trying to discuss the subjunctive when you don't know what the subjunctive is doesn't really help a lot. And so, instead of even trying that when he's out on the road, when he's out amongst his own people, we won't even bother.

I don't know if any of you noticed, but in debating Calvinism, there's none of this elitist stuff. Instead, there's a number of attempts on the part of a man that I have heard with my own ears quoted in the book.

I think someone in channel right now, Eric Nielsen, was there, so he could verify this. I hope he doesn't mind my mentioning him. At a conference in Indianapolis, I listened, as Dave Hunt said, straight out, without equivocation.

Well, of course, the term equivocal can be redefined by Dave too, but without equivocation, he says, I do not read Greek. It might as well be Chinese, but I can read English. That's what he said. And so, if you look at debating Calvinism, however, there's a number of places where he tries, you know, he parses it, and well, hey, you know, there it is.

Eric just put it on there. No, we don't have Montaigne saying that. That was a quote that I wrote down in my Palm Pilot, and that's actually gone two units now. That was in, I wrote that down in my Handspring, it went to the Palm Tungsten, now the Tungsten T3, so it just keeps moving along.

Anyway, in the book, he's using a computer program, obviously, or someone that he contacted, to throw out some parsing things and make it look like he actually knows what he's talking about. He doesn't have any idea what it means, but he throws it out there anyways.

Nothing about elitism, nothing about that kind of stuff, and yet, if you go back and read his initial response to my open letter, that's all it was, was all this elitist stuff and what you just heard here.

So, which one is it? Speak with one mind. If you're going to say that studying the biblical languages is elitist, and it's not relevant, and you don't need to do it, and it's not relevant to the interpretation of the text of scripture, then just say that consistently.

Yeah, Pete just put into the channel something from the book. The Greek word translated ordained, I bet you that's M-E-N-O-I. Is that how it's spelled in the book? Pete, give me the page on that, because I want to check that, because if that's how it's spelled in the book, it's spelled incorrectly.

Tetugmenoi, a nominative case, perfect tense, passive voice, participle of Tasso, ordained to eternal life's translation, found in all major translations, yet none of the seven other usages of Tasso. In the New Testament, it connotes a divine decree from eternity past.

Had that been what Luke meant, he would have used pra or ridzo, predestinated. As if Dave knows anything about that. Anything at all? Page 103, thank you, sir.

Musical interlude.

I'll return to page 103, because I'm not going to sit here and shake paper like certain well-known people do. Ah, you typed it up, Pete. You typed it up wrong. I'm sorry.

It's correct.

In the book, Tetugmenoi, he does mention in his book, White devotes four pages to it,.

Which I did,.

Because I was responding to Norman Geisler at that point. Anyway, so I just found it absolutely fascinating that he would mock... Let's listen to that section again.

For decades, they're going around studying these obscure languages and trying to translate the Bible into this obscure language of each of these tribes. And when they get the Bible in their own language, they still don't understand it because they don't know the Greek.

I think...

Yeah, there you go.

You know,.

Am I being unfair to say that this is a mocking voice?

In their own language, they still don't understand it because they don't know the Greek. I think what we ought to do is teach all these tribes Greek and Hebrew, and then give them a Greek and Hebrew Bible.

Come on, guys.

Come on, guys. Where have we heard, come on, guys, before?

Oh, goodness.

877 -753 -3341.

Hey, you know,.

If you happen to think that Dave Hunt's right, feel free to call in. I don't know why it is. For some reason,.

Folks don't call in,.

Other than Pierre, anyways. And he's not defending Dave Hunt so much as Dave Hunt's theology,.

Which, let's face it,.

Synergists defend synergists. And Dave Hunt and Mormons and Roman Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and a whole wide group of evangelicals all agree against me on the subject of synergism versus monergism.

That's the issue. And if you'd like to address that, that's great. 877 -753, I didn't mean Pierre specifically, but Pierre calls all the time. Thank you, Pierre, for calling, but I'm not saying Pierre needs to call in.

I'm simply saying, if you'd like to defend Dave Hunt, I mean, we know that we have people listening to this program who would not exactly agree with what we're saying, and therefore, if you would like to call in and voice your opinion, hey, there's the number.

Give us a call, and we'll be glad to put you on the air and discuss, you know, if you'd like to defend what Dave Hunt has had to say, defend his performance in debating Calvinism, defend the idea that I don't want the book in print.

All the lines are open at 877 -753 -3341. Now, two quick things, and I'd like to talk about some Mormonism today. We now are putting out working DVDs. Yes. I think we've beaten the DVD problem, and I've mentioned in the past that we're, you know, videotapes get eaten, videotapes do stuff that videotapes shouldn't do, and videotapes are going the way of cassette tapes and of LPs and all the rest of that stuff, and so we now have the DVDs of the Greg Stafford debate, and we're not talking just raw material here.

We're talking DVDs with menus. You can go from section to section and the whole nine yards. Now, we haven't quite gotten to the making of stuff yet,.

But hey, do you think we should.

Start doing some outtakes? That'd be so funny. Do some outtakes, and we could do some very humorous stuff. We've actually been thinking about putting together some humorous stuff, but then again, we have people who, actually, I don't think any of them support us anyways, but we have people who don't think that you should ever smile or be happy or do anything like that at all.

Life's bad.

It's always bad, and we should always be sad. Anyway, we have the Stafford DVDs out. Those are on the website. The Bryson debate is being copied even as we speak right now. We're doing all this in-house, by the way.

This isn't where you're going off and we're not spending money on having other people do this. This is stuff that that disembodied voice that you hear once in a while in the program does when he's not a disembodied voice.

In the program,.

And so the Bryson debate.

And the Stafford debate.

Are on DVD, and then as time, the October married debate is next. Okay, so the debate with Jerry Matatix from back in October, remember the program we had in November as a result of that, is going to be out.

Maybe we ought to package that, Mr. AOMN person, with the dividing line that we did with Eric Svensson.

And Jerry Matatix.

Wouldn't that be a good idea? I think that would be an excellent idea. Put the CD of the dividing line in with the video debate. I think that would be an excellent idea,.

Personally.

Actually, I could get real magical and actually just do like a freeze frame at the end of the DVD.

And then just do the whole thing.

Jerry and then you and then a picture of Eric and going on and on and on and just put it at the end of the DVD.

Could we put angels cartoon?

I don't think Angel has done a cartoon of Eric yet, though.

No, but he did. No, I'm talking about the one he did of Jerry.

From that very debate.

I think that should be on the cover.

We'll do the cartoon of Jerry and the cartoon of you and then a cartoon of Eric.

Yeah, well, maybe if Angel's listening, he can do a cartoon of Eric.

Get that pen going, Angel.

There you go. You all are right now listening in on the inside discussions of the very leadership of Alpha Omega Ministries. And it rarely gets a whole lot deeper than that.

Yes, the conspiracies are beginning as we speak.

Oh, yes.

Oh, speaking of conspiracies, I don't see the phones ringing off the hook, so I think people are pretty much giving up on us on this trip. Dr. William Hamblin of Brigham Young University was one of two BYU professors that I did a radio program with.

I wasn't aware we were doing a debate, but hey, some people are very, very loose with their use of terminology. Many years ago, I don't even remember what it was. This was back in the late 90s, I don't know, 98, 97, somewhere around there.

I don't know.

We did a...

It may have even been before that. I can't remember. I know that that disembodied voice was with me that night. We did a radio program on KTKK Radio in Salt Lake City, sort of the south side of Salt Lake City down there, out in the middle of nowhere, really is where it was.

We were in studio, a very tiny, hot studio, and it was three Mormons and Mormon callers versus me, which is one of the reasons that you don't put the term debate on this because there was no thesis. We were supposed to be discussing their book.

It ended up being a discussion of my book, but never got to anything more than that. There was no moderator because the quote-unquote moderator, the host of the program, was just as much a participant as anybody else, and you're right, Mr. Aleman, man.

Of the people that were there, including people who weren't on the program but who were very much involved...

Read my book.

Oops.

Thank you, George. Sound off. Sorry about that. Though that actually is somewhat relevant to what happened during the debate.

There were people there.

Who weren't on the radio program, but one of whom, for example, had written the first nasty review of Letters to a Mormon Elder for the Farm's Review of Books, and they were there as well. So it was just massive numbers of other folks and just me.

I was the only one who spoke for my side. Anyway, it was a good program. We still make it available. I think the MP3 is available, or it's available on Straygate,.

One of the two.

I didn't take the time to look. And as Mr. Aleman, man, says, Dr. Hamblin, of the ones we spoke to, the host of the program, by the way, was the man I debated... Was that last year or the year before last?

I think it was October of 2002, maybe. Anyway, Martin Tanner was the host, and he was very much a participant. He was not moderating anything. But we had this discussion, and that was where Dr. Hamblin pulled out a book that he had written, co-authored, I believe, and said that they did have swords in Mesoamerica.

I had said that they had not, and I had never seen this book, and so after the program was over, I started looking through this stuff and discovered that what Dr. Hamblin was saying is that the ancient inhabitants of this hemisphere had wooden war clubs with obsidian rocks.

Embedded in them,.

And that this somehow is what the Book of Mormon is talking about when it talks about a sword made of precious steel with a hilt that you pull out of a scabbard, out of a sheath, with which you can run people through.

Try running somebody through with a war club.

Hello!

That you can scout people with it. I mean, it was just so... To this day, all you've got to do is you can go to the CRI website. I wrote an article at the request of CRI on these kinds of tactics that were used by farms.

It got me into a lot of trouble with some other folks because I actually did what the publisher requested me to do, and they felt I should have done something else, and now these particular folks make it their mission in life, in essence, to make my life miserable.

But anyways, it's equip .org. That's capital. Dm755 .htm is the article. Thank you, Brando. I was looking at that just today, in fact. And so that led to that CRI article, and ever since then, remember, Dr. Hamblin is the one who did the Metcalf is Butthead joke, spelled out by putting the letters at the beginning of each paragraph of review of a book by Brent Metcalf, that message, and it actually got to the point of printing before they pulled it, and there was a big brouhaha about that.

It's illustrative of the attitude of farms, Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, out of BYU. So every once in a while, I get love letters out of these folks, and every once in a while, for some reason, some of these BYU scholars just want to send me some kind little note.

Well, I got one yesterday. On the blog, I had mentioned, I had talked about the Dave Hunt situation, and I had put on there this little note about a true Advil experience. Listening to a couple of hours of Dave Hunt railing on Calvinism gave me a royal headache last evening, but you will benefit when you listen to the DL this afternoon.

I was simply grieved to hear Dave repeat falsehoods upon which he has been corrected over and over again without even trying to get it right. It is simply sad, very sad. Well, he sent that to me, took Dave Hunt's name out, put mine in, and changed Calvinism to Mormonism.

And so it started, I think, about a five-round correspondence yesterday. And the irony of this is that Dr. Hamblin was challenged to debate me on the subject of temples. Do New Testament Christians build temples and practice temple ceremonies?

He had responded to a little tract that I had written called Temples Made with Hands that we wrote for the rededication of the Salt Lake City Temple. And he had declined. In fact, we had two Mormons decline to debate that subject.

We will be debating it against Richard Hopkins in just a couple of weeks up there in Salt Lake City. But he had declined to do so. And so it began this correspondence, and when we get a chance, I'll fill you in on some of that.

I even contacted a publisher, though, and said, what would be the interest in a published debate similar to debating Calvinism between myself and a BYU professor? But since then, for some odd reason, once we really start getting down to actually seeing if Dr. Hamblin will put something more behind his words than just bluster and emails, it doesn't seem like he's really interested in doing that.

But we'll find out, see what develops out of it. But I was going to, as we have time, to make some comments on what he... He feels that he's asked me some questions that I cannot answer. He has just refuted me on the subject of temples, and I was going to take a look at some of the things he said and just give you a sample of the kind of, quote-unquote, exegesis, or lack thereof, that BYU professors promote and that they put out there.

However, when we come back, we'll be going with a phone call. Someone would like to defend Mr. Hunt, and so we'd like to talk about that and take your phone calls at 877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back.

Book Announcements and Sponsor Reads

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You can order your copy of James White's book The King James Only Controversy by going to our website at www .aomin .org. What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book Chosen But Free?

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The Sufficiency of Scripture in English and the Role of the Original Languages

Welcome back to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and we are talking about, well, about a bunch of stuff today. And I had just been playing Dave Hunt's comments that evidently the Wycliffe Bible translators just are wasting their time by providing translations into vulgar tongues.

And I pointed out that that's a convenient way of getting around Mr. Hunt's misapprehensions and misapplications of the Bible, especially when those particular misapplications run directly contrary to the grammar of the original text.

We had an interesting conversation in channel a couple of days ago with someone who actually, let me scroll back up here, hasn't come back since then, but in essence was misunderstanding 1 John 5 .1 and understanding the English in a way that is directly contradictory to the underlying Greek grammar.

And so we pointed out to him that that's an inappropriate thing to do, that when the English translation can be understood in more than one way, that what you have to do is you have to look at the translation.

What is it translating? What does the original say? And if the original gives you a clear indication, then you go with it. So he didn't seem to accept that particular argumentation.

But anyway, we're going to go ahead.

And start taking our phone calls. And let's go ahead and head back to a place. Well, I didn't live in this particular place, but I lived in Harrisburg in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania for six years. And so let's talk with Diana.

Hi, Diana.

Hello.

Hi.

Hi, how are you?

Pretty good.

So what's up?

Well, Dave Hunt seems to be saying that the English version or any translation from the original language should be sufficient. And I would agree with that.

Well, actually, what he's saying in the context is he was dealing with John 3 .16. And I have pointed out to him that his understanding of the English translation is in error. He understands the English word might as carrying a particular meaning that the original language does not substantiate.

And instead of dealing with that, he chooses instead to mock the learning of the original languages and to end up defending a misunderstanding of the translation that is contradictory to the original language.

And so it is one thing to say that a person who simply wants to know the truth has adequate resources in the English translations to do so. But it is something completely different to say that an English translation without reference to the original is the final court of arbitration because it isn't.

The English translation didn't exist when Jesus said the words of John 3. There was no English language. There wasn't English language for another thousand years. And hence, obviously, any English translation has to be subservient to and under the final authority of the original that it is a translation of.

Wouldn't that be the case?

Of course. I completely agree with that. In addition, Dave Hunt was, in his mocking way, was discussing, was talking about not translating the originals into all sorts of other languages. And said we should be teaching them Hebrew and Greek.