6th Canon of Nicea, MBTS’s Triggering Book Display Examined

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We're back in the big studio, at least for today, and I'm not sure I'll be walking over there and drawing on anything, but we will be using the big board to show a few things.

In fact, we'll start off with what's up there now, which is what we finished with on the last program, and so you can get a shot of it there if you missed it when we re-uploaded things. The book display that I was triggered by, and some people said I was triggered by reading widely.

They know that wasn't true. They know that's not true. I was triggered not by reading widely, but by the specific perspectives being promoted by the authors of the books that are being demonstrated there, and the question as to whether a meaningful response is being given to that perspective there at the school, which is Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

We will get into that, and we will be looking at Dr. Levering and Dr. Boersma and Dr. Carter and all sorts of stuff that has happened just today. In fact, I would say honestly that I have seen Reformed Baptists saying things in social media today that if you had told me 10 years ago would be said by these individuals or just by people in the group as a whole, I would have said that's utterly impossible.

Could not possibly happen, but it's happening, and there's a reason why it's happening, and I think it's important to understand those reasons, but before we jump into those things, I wanted to take a look.

That keeps shrinking.

I'm not putting the video out.

The Papacy, the Council of Nicaea, and Historical Claims

Greetings. Welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We're going to try to make this.

Work. We're back in the big studio. Just had computer freezes and stuff, and hopefully that's not going to happen again, but I never did trust Bill Gates, and I trust him less today than ever have before, though I know he really doesn't have anything to do with any of that.

Anyway, yesterday on the program—not yesterday, the day before yesterday on the program—we had an opportunity to talk about the subject of the Roman Catholic papacy, and we were covering a lot of different topics, and I wanted to start off the program today just noting the amazing responses.

You've got to understand something. The discussion between non-Roman Catholics and Roman Catholics—and non-Roman Catholics would include Eastern Orthodox, actually—on the subject of the papacy has been going on for a very, very long time.

In regards to the East-West split, you're coming up on a thousand years, and as far as the Reformation, you're talking 500 years, and it's not overly—I don't think it should be a big shock to anyone—that non-Roman Catholics do not accept the claims of Roman Catholic papacy.

And, of course, we've been doing debates on this. I think the first—oh, what was that? Ninety-nine-ish, maybe? Okay, that's true. That's true. Yeah, yeah, it's true. So, in 93, with Jerry Matitick's Denver Seminary and a Presbyterian Church in Denver, and then Mitch Pacla and I, somewhere in the 90s, did a debate on the papacy, as well, back on Long Island.

But it's not like—the only big development in regards to papacy is the obvious degradation of the modern Roman Catholic papacy, as far as it being Orthodox, Roman Catholic, anything like that. And I'm not talking about Benedict or even John Paul II, even though I think you can make strong arguments, especially with John Paul, that there were differences between the things that he was saying and things that had been said by popes only 50 years earlier.

But Francis has—I mean, there are Roman Catholics who put out videos about being red-pilled in regards to papacy and Francis, and there's a tremendous amount of discussion of what his amazing pontificate has indicated.

These are not easy days for Roman Catholic apologists, because, obviously, the defense of the papacy today is either, we're just not going to talk about anything that Francis is saying. Francis hasn't said anything infallible, and we just don't want to talk about those things, seems to be the way that people are handling things.

Anyway, the responses were truly amazing, because, like I said, nothing much has changed. But I was directed first to some comments, and I'm not sure that—yeah, let me see here real quickly. Yeah, I was directed to this comment by Michael Lofton, who I am told has recently, in some way, joined Catholic Answers.

I'm not sure if that means as a contributor, staff person, I don't know. I haven't found anything specifically on that. But he's done something called Reason and Theology for quite some time. Here's what he wrote.

He said, So much misinformation and softball arguments from James White today in his discussion with Cameron Bertuzzi. I imagine most educated Catholics are shaking their heads at this moment. For example, the claim made about Canon 6 from Nicaea.

With all due respect, Dr. White, an educated Catholic can offer better arguments than this against Catholicism and don't utilize straw men and misinformation. Wow. Okay. So, so bad was I that evidently he couldn't sleep, this Michael Lofton, and so he ended up putting out an over-an-hour-long video that night on the subject of the 6th Canon, the Council of Nicaea.

And for those of you who didn't catch the discussion, I mentioned it to Cameron as an example—I bet you I know exactly what's going on there—as an example of the fact that, yeah, I knew that was going to happen.

I'm sorry. That at the time of the Council of Nicaea, why was there a Council of Nicaea? Why, if the Church believed that the Bishop of Rome was the infallible Vicar of Christ on earth, then why do you need councils at all?

And especially on a specific doctrinal issue, because, let's see, less than 200 years later, the Bishop of Rome, Honorius, is going to have discussions with, as I recall, Sergius, his counterpart in the East, on the subject of whether Christ had one or two wills.

Now, let's be honest, the vast majority of Christians have never even given it a thought and wouldn't know how to answer the question with any sense of confidence of getting it right by whoever's standard you're going to be going with, let alone have a discussion of it from a biblical perspective.

But this was the monothelitism-duothelitism debate, and Honorius was clearly a monothelite. And he communicated that in his letters as the Bishop of Rome. Well, for hundreds of years later, after that time period, every man who became—unless you accept the theory of Pope Joan, but that's a whole different topic, which is not one that I would get into—but every person that became—we just live in such a weird—every non-birthing person that became—isn't it sad?

I mean, that would have never crossed my mind only a few years ago, but here we are. Anyway, every person who ascended the papal throne had to, as part of the swearing-in, anathematize Honorius as a heretic, the Bishop of Rome as a heretic for his monothelitism.

So these are facts. This is reality. The point is there is a minor point, a relatively minor point of theology at a later point in church history, but the Bishop of Rome was held accountable for it. Why didn't you just go to the Bishop of Rome in 325 and go, hey, there's this big controversy going on.

You know, you go over the history and you tell what Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, has done and the actions of councils in Egypt and just have him make a decision because he knows, right, he's the infallible Vicar of Christ, but that's not what happened.

And in fact, as all even semi-unbiased church history records would tell you, the Bishop of Rome had basically nothing to do with the proceedings at the Council of Nicaea. And it was the council that made the decision in regards to the creedal statement concerning the nature of Christ and whether he is homoousius of the same substance, heteroousius of a different substance, or homoiousius, the middle of the road position that was presented there, as well as the fact that the council of about 318 mainly eastern bishops, there were two representatives, history says anyways, from Rome.

Concerning other issues relating to church order, polity, all the councils did that kind of thing. There were canons and decrees that all these councils promulgated. And in some later situations, especially when it had to do, again, with the growing papal power, some of those canons were disputed and, you know, 28th canon, calcedon, stuff like that.

Anyway, so I just raised the simple historical reality. Now, it's funny because I remember back in the 90s, and by the way, nothing has changed since the 90s. Nothing. According to Michael Lofton, people in the 90s, whether Catholic or Protestant, didn't have a clue what they were talking about.

Evidently, it's only his generation that has understood and has had a grasp on the issues related to the papacy and the magisterium of the church and the sixth canon, the council of Nicaea. Those of us from earlier decades, we just, evidently, we didn't have access to the same information.

Don't know. Don't know. Go listen to his video. The first 10 minutes of the most condescending display of papal arrogance I've ever seen. I've ever seen. It's just astonishing. I mean, it just drips with, we are so superior, and we know so much, and nobody, this is just so simple.

So, anyway, the whole point in making reference to this is there's so much that when, and remember what the overarching point I was making to Cameron was, Rome has a dogmatic position. Whether the current pope believes this or not, I don't know.

He hasn't commented directly on it. I would not be shocked or surprised at all if many of the dogmatic statements of the Roman Catholic Church in the past that Roman Catholic apologists at Catholic Answers defended in the 1990s, early 2000s.

I wouldn't be surprised if Francis does not believe them, but he's probably not going to comment about it. But as I had pointed out in the documents that I read, the quotations that I read to Cameron from Vatican I and various other sources, including Vatican II, in fact, I wanted to read this one, but I didn't, but let me throw this one in just for the fun of it.

Cardinal Gibbons had, in the faith of our fathers, which is not a dogmatic source, obviously, but at the same time, when people simply dismiss someone like a cardinal, it gives you some idea. Anyways, he said in the faith of our fathers, page 78, the Catholic Church teaches that our Lord conferred on St. Peter the first place of honor and jurisdiction in the government of his whole church, and that same spiritual authority has always resided.

And this was the point, because Cameron was saying, well, you know, you could believe in the papacy, but not necessarily believe in a perfect succession and stuff like that. No, it says, and that same spiritual authority has always resided in the popes or bishops of Rome as being the successors of St. Peter.

Consequently, to be true followers of Christ, all Christians, both among the clergy and laity, must be in communion with the See of Rome, where Peter rules in the person of his successor. Now, again, modern Catholics don't have the spine that Gibbons had.

They just don't. Modern Catholics will do the, that was excessive, or that was too much, or that was what was being taught in those days. And in 1896, there was a document promulgated called Satis Cognitum, Satis Cognitum.

Let me read you just this one line from it. Wherefore, in the decree of the Vatican council, as to the nature and authority of the primacy of the Roman pontiff, that was newly conceived opinion is set forth, but the venerable and constant belief of every age.

End quote. Your quotation, no newly conceived opinion set forth, but the venerable and constant belief of every age. Now, for anyone familiar with John Henry Cardinal Newman, and what he wrote about the infallibility of the Pope before Vatican one, and what he did afterwards, you know that this was a massive issue.

And to be an honest historian is to recognize how fictitious this claim is on the part of the Roman magisterium. But here's the problem. If you therefore are going to be faithful to the Roman magisterium, then you have to do history in light of the dogmatic claims of Rome, because Rome is not saying you must interpret this Bible verse this way.

We would think by now there would be an entire infallible commentary on the New Testament. They've had plenty of time to do it, but there isn't. And in fact, you'll hear Roman Catholic apologists today say, well, there's been seven verses that have been infallibly interpreted.

Others say none have been infallibly interpreted. A true interpretation has been given of a small number of verses, and you have to accept that true interpretation, but that may not be the only interpretation.

And it's a mess, but this is in their model of history. And some of these claims that Rome has made dogmatically, they are historical claims. And central to the, and I think it's because the papacy is self-conscious of its own ahistoricity.

As more and more of the documents that were vital, definitionally vital to the establishment of the papacy have been shown to have been forgeries, it's almost like the papacy is like, well, you need to say we've, this is what we've always believed.

And some of you may not remember back when John Paul II died, his pontificate had been a very long pontificate. And so for a week or more, all the Roman Catholic apologists were getting their 15 seconds of fame on Fox News, basically, talking about how wonderful John Paul was.

And all of them said the same thing, the faith of the church for 2 ,000 years. Now I can see myself back here. And right now, the way Rich has things, it looks like I have never seen the sun. And I live in Phoenix.

I am not even close to as white and washed out as Rich currently. I don't know what he's trying to, I don't know if he's trying to get sympathy for me. Look at the poor old man. We never let him out. He's pale and dying.

Well, now it's like, now it looks like me trying to read a book up close because you just lost the focus. You can't see that you lost the focus there? Because I can, I can, well, you just messed the whole thing up good, didn't you?

I didn't do that. Do not, do not, do not throw a curveball at Rich. Look, he hasn't been in here for, you know, a month and two weeks or so. And I just see him sitting back there looking at all the buttons and stuff like that going, what is that?

He's just like, what does it do? Well, okay. Yeah. So what were we talking about? Moses was in the bulrushes. And yes. So the point is that I did lose where I was, but sadis cognitum. The point is that Rome tells you what you're supposed to find in history.

Oh, that's right. I was talking about when John Paul II died. I looked back at you to see if you remembered what it was like when John Paul II died. And every Catholic apologist I'd ever debated or had interactions with, they're all on Fox news talking about how the 2000-year-old church, continuity, sameness, this had been the argument for the papacy for years when I was debating Catholic answers and doing things like that.

I can tell that things have changed. I know that you all know that Francis is Francis and he's very different. I get it. And I think all of you, when you, when the lights are turned off and you lay your head down to sleep each night, I think, you know, in your heart of hearts that things have changed.

Point is this. I don't know how you all fit together, what sadis cognitum says with the development hypothesis. I really don't. It doesn't make any sense. I highly recommend to everybody, how in the world did I just get a bunch of black stuff on my hands from up here?

I'm just, we're having lots of fun today. It is always live. How could you record it dead? I'm not really sure how that would work. But anyway, I don't know how you all put it together because as George Salmon documented, and I highly recommend anyone track down infallibility of the church by, oh, but that was written so long ago.

If it hasn't been since 2015, I mean, nobody knew what they were talking about before 2015. Okay. Anyway, he just argues very cogently that the development hypothesis as posited by John Henry Cardinal Newman and utilized by Roman Catholic apologists constantly in the modern period is a fundamental abandonment of the historical field of battle.

And it is. It's literally saying, yeah, we're not going to find in the early, we're not going to, Nicaea? Yeah, the papacy is still developing. It's the acorn into the tree. You'd expect that there would, there wouldn't be a recognition of these things and so on and so forth.

And so you've got that approach, but it does seem to me that there are others that don't want to go the Newman direction until they're pushed into a corner. Some of you saw the really funny video last year, just slap some Newman on it, which was where they, you know, where the guy had that stuff that you can slap on something and it seals the flex seal.

Is that what it's called? The flex seal thing. And they changed it to slap some Newman on it. And that's how you fix any Roman Catholic argument is you just slap some Newman on it. Obviously to me, if you accept Newman's development hypothesis, you don't even have to worry about arguing about this stuff.

You can look at the Sixth Canon Council of Nicaea and you can look at it in its context. You can recognize that it's coming out of a council that was not under the single auspices of the Bishop of Rome.

You can recognize that the people at the council did not dogmatically believe the vast majority of the things you dogmatically believe about Mary and the papacy and purgatory and the canon of scripture and just all sorts of stuff like that.

And just go, yeah, the acorn is still developing all as well. It's cool. No problem. It's only the people who want to go, no, Sotus Cognitum says, this is no newly conceived opinion, but the venerable and constant belief of every age.

You can't put this and Newman together. It's just not possible. I mean, you can pretend that you're doing it, I suppose, if you want to, but it's pounding squares into round circles. It just ain't going to go in.

It doesn't work. So this is what I was talking about, was that when you look at the Council of Nicaea and you do not have a dogmatic authority telling you what you need to find. So you see, the Roman Catholic apologists looking at the fourth century has already been told, this is the constant belief of every age.

Therefore, that's the lens through which you look, and therefore, you look at everything through that lens. You have to do that to be dogmatically faithful to your own church. And that's why I say to you, from a religious dogmatic position, Roman Catholic apologists cannot do church history because their church history has already been defined for them by the dogmatic statements of the Roman Catholic Church.

It's not that, hey, if you examine fairly each age of the church, you're going to find that this is the true belief. No, it's the exact opposite. This is the true belief, and therefore, you need to find it in every age of the church.

And that's how you can get these amazing explanations. So I'm going longer on this than I want to, but when we look at the Council of Nicaea, given its context, we have nothing here about the supremacy of the teaching authority or jurisdictional authority of the Bishop of Rome.

It wasn't called because he said it should be called. It didn't originate from him. No one was going, well, we're going to come up with a creed, and then we'll submit it to the Bishop of Rome to see if it's okay.

That comes along a lot later. None of that's true. The very fact that the council is called demonstrates that at this point in time, even though the Bishop of Rome has been making big claims for a long time, starting with Victor, certainly Cyprian has to tell the Bishop of Rome to cool his jets and succeeds in doing that.

And North African bishops specifically repudiate the claims of Rome to have some kind of special authority over them, despite wanting to have unity. I mean, it's always been the context of trying to maintain some kind of unity.

This is the context. And so we see the sixth canon, and in that context, it has a plain, really non-controversial meaning. Loftin tried to make it look like, this disproves Catholicism. This is simply a fair, honest analysis of a historical fact in regards to the nature of the Council of Nicaea that is one of an entire massive cumulative case that demonstrates that the papacy is a modern innovation that developed over time.

They always want to try to say, he thinks he's disproving Catholicism. And look, the only people that are going to be impressed by that video are the people who are desperate to continue believing what they've already always believed.

I get that. It was just embarrassing. He was like, it's just so embarrassing. Okay, well, I think what you did was embarrassing. But I can sit here and talk about it on a significantly more grounded historical basis than you possibly can, because you've already been told what to find.

You are not an unbiased person. You're not doing church history. You're doing Catholic dogma, which defines your history. So when we read the sixth canon, it simply says that there are spheres of ultimate authority of these major patriarchates, Rome, Alexandria, and church history shows this.

I mean, the whole difference, for example, in ecclesiology at the highest levels between the West and the East, think about it. I've used this illustration many times, but think about the map of the Mediterranean.

I wish I had one I could throw up. But anyway, think of the map of the Mediterranean, draw a line right down the middle, and mark the seas that claim to be apostolic. Mark the apostolic seas. It doesn't mean they necessarily were, but what's an apostolic sea?

A bishopric that claims to have been founded by an apostle. They were given special authority, primarily in the second century, starting in the second century. Anyway, to the West, there's one, Rome. To the East, there are many.

Eventually, you've got Antioch and Alexandria, and those ones mentioned, but eventually Byzantium gets in the game, and so on and so forth. And what do you have in East Orthodoxy? You've got collegiality, ostensibly, of equals with one another.

And it just has a rather obvious historical background to it, why it developed the way that it did. And so what you have at Nicaea is simply a recognition that we will continue these delimitations of the areas of authority of these major bishoprics.

So there's nothing about differing levels of authority. There's nothing about bishops versus patriarchs versus the pope, the infallible vicar of Christ on earth with universal jurisdiction. There's nothing about any of that.

These bishops, patriarchs, are mentioned in equality with one another, and that's the problem, of course. But at the time, once you look at what the council was doing, why it was called, what it does, that makes perfect sense.

That's the honest historical way of looking at it. That's the, we're going to let history define what's going on here, way of looking at it. But the Roman Catholic can't go there, can't allow that. So what you do, and the, oh, it's so obvious, this is so simple, I can't believe anybody doesn't know this.

Michael Loftin's response was, well, this is just talking about a certain kind of authority that the patriarch of Rome had. So the bishop of Rome has powers of bishop in Rome and then powers of patriarch over this area, but then he has the universal jurisdiction over all the church.

Whereas the bishop of Alexandria, he has bishop powers in Alexandria and patriarch powers over Egypt, but he is not the universal head of the church. And everybody knows that's what they meant. No, that is called anachronism, that's called abusing history, and that's called being a Roman Catholic apologist, not a historian.

So this almost, I mean, he was talking about how laughable it was to bring it up. And I think going, being a sophist, being a historical sophist, and going, well, it's just talking about the authority of patriarchs, and therefore it's not even addressing the ultimate jurisdictional authority of the pope.

Okay, and prove that from the documents of the Council of Nicaea, the existence of the Council of Nicaea, anything like that, you can't. You're just assuming it, because you've been told to assume it.

I'm sorry, there's no reason for anyone to take you seriously when you do history. Your documents tell you what to find, and when you find them, oh golly bob, there it is. How impressive is that? It's not.

It's not impressive at all. There is also some discussion that, again, missed the point, happens a lot, but I mentioned in passing that who was the one, the one person who stood for the deity of Christ, for the Council of Nicaea, during what's called the Arian Ascendancy.

I didn't go into the history of this. I wrote an article years ago that really got an interesting, this is before social media, but it got quite the interesting response out of Catholic Answers about Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea, and I discussed in there the reality of the fact that it wasn't the Bishop of Rome that stood firm and led the charge in defense of Nicaea.

No one can make that argument. No one can make that argument. Now, they say, well, there's dispute about whether Liberius signed the Arianized Sirmium Creed, and we're not really sure whether it was really Arianized.

Oh, please, guys, seriously? You have a creed being promulgated after Nicaea, specifically seeking to get rid of Nicaea's authority, that refuses to use that language, and it's not Arianized while the Arians are in control?

Really? I was like, oh, guys, stop embarrassing yourselves. This is really bad. You got to stop. Just stop. But even if he did, he was under pressure. I know that. Duh. Duh. But Athanasius was under pressure, too, and he didn't give in.

That's the point. That was the whole point, and since you missed that point, I understand what you're doing. When you're refuting points that it wasn't what I was making, that makes you sound better to, again, you're trying to keep your audience, you're trying to give them reasons to believe, because they heard a lot of stuff that you would rather deal with one at a time, just once at a time.

It's been a long time since we've discussed this type of stuff, but keep this in mind. When talking about something like the papacy, the facts do not come one fact at a time. It's a cumulative case. So theoretically, if you're ever caught in the avalanche, theoretically, you can dodge every rock.

I mean, you know, if you see that rock coming and you can plot its trajectory, you can dodge every rock in an avalanche. There's only one problem. Avalanches do not come one rock at a time. They all come at once.

It's a cumulative issue, and that's why you can't dodge it. You might dodge the first one, the second one's gonna take you out. Might dodge the second one, third one's gonna take you out. Doesn't matter.

That's the whole point. That's the whole point. You gotta take them all together, and the modern doctrine of the papacy was unknown in the early church. Fact. Just a fact. I know you can't deal with it.

You've got a really good chance right now. I mean, just think how many of you could go, you know, I have been led astray, but then Francis shone the light. We just, we have now learned to get past all that stuff.

So there's just a little bit of a discussion in regards to a discussion of Roman Catholicism that we had on the last program. Now, I want to try to, this is not easy to do, but I want to try to transition into a discussion of modern Roman Catholic concepts of tradition and scripture that are appearing in resources being recommended within Reformed Baptist and Reformed Protestant Presbyterian circles in reference to so-called classical theism, the great tradition, the Ressourcement of Thomas Aquinas, the call for the establishment of Christian Platonism, the need to adopt Thomas' metaphysics, and what all this means, and why all of this explains why it is that Reformed Baptist professors can now use the phrase sola scriptura as a punchline and a joke, and do it repeatedly, and in fact, double down to make sure that everybody knows I'm still going to do this because I think it's okay to mock people who are saying, hey, you seem to be moving away from sola scriptura.

You are redefining it. You are men that I know personally 15 years ago did not believe the things you believe now. You did not speak as you believe now, and you've admitted it. You've said it. Oh, but we've learned.

Well, what you've learned means that you are redefining the application and meaning of sola scriptura within Reformed community, and there are still a few of us who are going to pay the price of being called cesspools of negativity, as I was today, to say, no, we're not going there when we stood in front of your churches and your schools in the past, and defined and defended sola scriptura.

We still believe it. We have seen absolutely, positively nothing. Mockery is not the best form of apologetic argumentation. I can assure you of that, but we have seen no reason to embrace the new great tradition understanding, and so what I want to try to do is I want to try to explain to everyone, I don't want to lose everybody.

I don't want you going, ah, that's just all the Reformed folks are having an argument. I really believe this is important to everyone when it comes to, for example, just apologetics as a whole. Let me give an example.

The people who are embracing the great tradition, Christian Platonism, so-called classical theism, I reject that terminology. That's advertising, not description, but these positions and promoting them with great zeal today, just really great zeal.

Many of them are also writing articles, even books, in the case of one on the Presbyterian side, about how they used to be presuppositionalists and they're apologetic, and now they're not. Hmm, that's interesting.

It has an impact on doing apologetics. Now, I don't see most of these people doing apologetics, to be perfectly honest with you. That's not their focus, and I really don't know that they would be doing apologetics in regards to Roman Catholicism, and I'd like you to think about that.

Some of you older guys once thought that, yeah, that's an important thing to do, and you saw the danger of it, and got a different viewpoint now. Why? Who changed? What's changed? Oh, we've learned. Learned what?

How's it impacted? Those are important things. All of this was prompted by what's up on the screen. The picture that I showed at the end of the last program that got sort of bonked on the live feed, and then we uploaded it later, from the bookstore of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I pointed out that five of the ten books, staff recommendations, sword and trowel, I could guarantee you Spurgeon would never.

No, Spurgeon, no, wouldn't have done that, but five of the seven are by Roman Catholic authors. You can see the Summa of the Summa, reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas, and Richard Braselis, in his normal cheeky way, tweeted about how we shouldn't be triggered by reading widely, and I had said on the program that has absolutely nothing to do with being triggered about this display, and by the way, numerous people, Scott Swain and others, have come to the defense, saying, that's great, that's wonderful.

Scott Swain is president of RTS Orlando, for the Presbyterian side of these things. That's great, that's wonderful. It's great to have this stuff here. One of the authors, and I mentioned this author, I think in December of last year, and there was a lot of pushback that I mentioned him, but the more I'm reading these folks, and the more I'm reading the books, which frequently cite each other, the more I see the centrality of Dr. Levering to Roman Catholic, brilliant man, writes on a wide range of topics.

I'll be honest that most of what I've read of his, it's a quote from a person over here, quote from a person over there, quote from a person over here, some comments. It's not the most compelling form of argumentation, especially when I know that there are really fundamental foundational differences between these various people that should have an impact on how we're reading what they're saying, but anyways, I was immediately cognizant upon starting to read anything by Levering of what the real problem with this is.

You've got a Roman Catholic, and by the way, some of these Roman Catholics are being cited, they are reacting against the liberalization of Roman Catholic biblical scholarship, which continues on without any slowing down, and it continues on with papal approval.

I don't know why they remain Roman Catholic, to be honest with you. They recognize that ever since Vatican II, the papal biblical commission, even the people John Paul II put on it, and certainly the people that Francis has, just two left wings, no two ways about it.

I agree, and they recognize that liberal biblical interpretation, Catholic or Protestant, is pretty worthless. I've said that for a long time. There is a deadness to liberalism. I mean, again, these are things that, you know, I don't care if you guys don't listen to me, but if you're going to then come out and say that my type of Christianity needs to die, and we'll look at that one here in a moment, then you might want to familiarize yourself with what I've been saying over the years.

Maybe. Either that or just keep your trap shut. There's the other option. How many times have I said in this program, I can't understand teaching theology when you don't actually believe it's divinely true.

I don't understand why liberals do what liberals do. I don't get it. I remember when I came back after the Daniel Kirk debate on homosexuality a couple years ago, on a number of different programs, I was talking about, I just don't know why these people do what they do.

Why continue to believe the things you believe? I don't get it. And so there are lots of true things being said, even by these Roman Catholics, in recognizing the dead end of, you know, I went to Fuller.

I remember sitting there in a class where we spent hours and hours and hours on the quest for the historical Jesus, and yeah, you got to understand that to know 20th century stuff, but it was just like, it was just so painful because the one source that would answer all your questions, you don't believe anymore.

So when I read Levering, Boersma, and they're talking about scripture, and they're talking about what kind of person needs to be reading scripture. Hey, I get it. So let me very quickly, because I'm going way over time.

I'm limited time here. We've got stuff going on around here. In Levering's book, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation, I'm not, we could look at Boersma's book on scripture as divine presence, as real presence, sorry, sorry, sorry, real presence, and there's a meaning to real presence, okay?

I've spent a little time with Roman Catholic theology and theological writings, and there's, it has a meaning, and good luck trying to divorce it from that meaning, but Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation by Levering.

In a recent essay, John Webster, that's another name that comes up a lot because Carter is a student of John Webster. John Webster distances his own Reformed ecclesiology, which he roots in a deep sense of the perfection of Christ, that is the utter uniqueness, integrity, and sufficiency of the Word made flesh from, quote, those styles of Christian historiography, which regard the history of the church as simply one long decline from apostolic purity.

Such a reading of the Christian past is the denial of credo in spiritum sanctum, I believe in the Holy Spirit, end quote. Webster is right to bemoan those approaches that read the history of the church as simply one long decline from apostolic purity.