October 22, 2024 Show with with Dr. James R. White on “The Presidential Election & More”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Intro and Proverbs 27:17

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own.

Questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland.

County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 22nd day of October 2024, and this is the first live broadcast in weeks here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

I think the last live show we did was a week before the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon, which featured Dr. Joe Boot, founder and president of the Ezra Institute, which was an overwhelming success and blessing.

I continue to get praise reports from pastors who attended that event, just ecstatic over their whole experience, not only just being there and sharing fellowship, but also hearing Dr. Boot, and it was great to see how many men stuck around past the hour that we had advertised for the conclusion of the event to be involved in a Q &A, and there were a lot of good questions.

A very mixed audience within evangelicalism, of course, from dispensational to Amill to probably a minority of postmill, which is the position that Dr. Boot takes, but it was just a really wonderful time together, and the video of that message by Dr. Boot is available on YouTube, and I have posted it on Facebook, and if you need a link for it, just send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and I'll send that out to you, but the reason for the delay in having a live show was because of the perfect storm, as they say, of several factors.

Number one, the extremely busy schedule I had arranging for the free biannual pastors luncheon with Dr. Boot, but also getting hit really big time once again with the coronavirus, and not only that, but even when the virus itself dissipated, I have still been left with some residual effects that are so debilitating that I've gone to the doctor, my brother in Christ, Dr. Joel Yeager of Heritage Family Health, one of the few physicians I trust, a man who stood against the mask mandates and still stands against taking the coronavirus vaccines and warns about them or warns against them, but I will keep you all updated on these test results.

Hopefully, my congestive heart failure has not returned, but some of the symptoms I'm experiencing are reminiscent of that very frightening time in my life, having to deal with that. But today, we have a returning guest, one of my closest friends and one of my favorite people on the planet Earth to interview, Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and he is going to be discussing the election that we are all riveted to our TV screens and computers, trying to see what is developing about this, and if we have time, we may switch topics before the end of the program, perhaps even for the whole latter half of the show.

But it's such an honor, Dr. White, that you have squeezed into your extremely busy schedule while you are traveling, you know, jumping on board here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio when you could be doing other better things, and I appreciate it more than you know.

Well, you know, Chris, I.

Was going to say, I got up at 4 .30 this morning to drive hundreds of miles through construction zones and everything else just to be on Iron Sharpens Iron because, look, it's sort of a rare thing in life to have the opportunity to be interviewed by Chris Arntzen, who is well known.

I mean, no one's going to argue with this, but you are, without a question, the best known Christian journalist and interviewer in all of Central Pennsylvania.

And all of Cumberland County.

Cumberland County. There is no one walking around the Gettysburg battlefield today that could even hold a candle to you. And so, you know, that's why I got up at 4 .30 in the morning, dodged semi-tractor trailers and the whole nine yards.

And so here we are with Chris Arntzen, and it's truly exciting to have this opportunity. By the way, you know, I make you laugh now, but I didn't when we first met. Well, I may have made you laugh, but it was sort of a laugh derision.

And it's all your fault, because when we first met, I was a straight-laced, boring, dark-tie wearing, trinity hymnal singing, Reformed Baptist. My first words to you were, where did you get, how did you get this number?

And you persevered, despite my cold shoulder initially. And I just think people should know that, you know, you started the process of breaking me down and making me what I am today. Picking me up at the airport there in New York, and we went to dinner at a diner, I think.

And that was scary enough as it was. But then to just really make it all work out real well, you then took me to a crack hotel and left me over there.

Well, that crack hotel, which I did not know was a crack hotel, was highly recommended me by the owner of the Coral House, who at the time was actually a member of the church where I was a member.

Well, it was a kickback from the people who stayed there.

Yes, I have often wondered what kind of kickbacks he got from that place. But anyway, we better rush by that topic. Yes, Dr. White has developed a wonderful habit now that has even increased in his skill of encouraging me with wonderful words that energize me and give me confidence before a radio show like today.

And he happens to look at me through the Microsoft Teams link, which you cannot see us, but we can see each other. And the first thing, the very first thing out of his mouth is, you're wearing an old man's shirt.

And I said, why is this an old man's shirt? He said, because you're wearing it and you're old.

Yeah, well, we're pretty much very close to the same age.

So you're a year behind me.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think I've ridden one hundred and sixty nine thousand miles on a bike now, so I think that's probably put me ahead of you as far as where on the old body is concerned. But yeah, you know, we were.

How old were we when we first started? That was ninety eight.

Yeah, yes, in fact, by the way, I hope that Pastor Claude Ramsey of Reformata Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, is listening because he actually already submitted a question that you're answering.

Would you and Dr. White care to talk about the formative years of your relationship together? I greatly appreciate both of your steadfast walks with the Lord and your faithfulness to the gospel. While we're doing that, Claude, I hope you're listening live.

Right now. Yeah, sort of in a humorous fashion, but yeah, no, we were we were a lot younger back then. I happened to see a picture that someone snapped of me and Mitch Pacwa at our first debate there on Long Island.

And I hadn't shaved. You know, I didn't I didn't get rid of the last remnants off the dome until right after the Stravinskis debate. And, you know, if you look up Peter Stravinskis on the Internet, that's the first thing that comes up these many decades later.

That just must make him so unhappy. That's the first thing that pops up, but it's what it is. And so, yeah, we were we were much, much younger. I had no idea what we were getting into. You were scared to death, didn't really know where I was going to be coming from.

You had put yourself out there to make all this happen.

And that was the very first debate I ever arranged or any major event of any kind where we were in a facility that held 500 people, which we filled. And that would be the Coral House, and it was quite a quite an answer to prayer, because as I've learned from these events, people can keep you waiting and you can have less than half of the seats filled with five minutes before the show to begin or before the event to begin.

And sure enough, that place was jam packed.

Yeah, yeah, you were you were a bit nervous about it, and I think you're a little bit nervous about how the debate was going to go right up until my prophecy was fulfilled.

That's right.

And it was, I mean, you had asked me, what do I when I expected from Jerry Hermantics, and I told you, well, if he's like he's always been in the debates we've done before, and I don't remember how many we had done, we had done at least one, two, three, four, five, five or six by that time, two of which, interestingly enough, I filled in for Dr. Greg Bonson, who was supposed to debate Jerry in Omaha, Nebraska.

And Dr. Bonson asked me to take his place, which is why Dr. Bonson then had the ability to do the two debates he did on homosexuality, which are very valuable. So that was that was neat. But, you know, I told you what I expected Jerry to say.

I expected him to show up just before the debate was supposed to start, that he would be very disheveled, that he'd be talking about how his books were still packed up after his last move and all he'd had to eat today was a Diet Coke.

I'm not sure you'd call that eating, but and that he felt like he was taking on, you know, he was David taking on Goliath because I'm such a good debater. And and you were looking at me fairly strangely when I was telling you all this.

You were like, really? OK, you know, and so, you know, five minutes before the debate was supposed to start in strides, Jerry, and he's got his tattered books and his yellow pad of paper and he's disheveled.

And and the first thing he does when he gets up and I was watching you, you're in the back of the room. I can see. And he basically I almost quoted him. I mean, everything I just said is what he said at the beginning of the debate.

And the look on your face was just like I can remember when when you were looking at.

Me across a crowded room of hundreds of people, you our eyes did lock as you saw my stunned reaction to this.

And after that, you trusted me.

Yes. And I can't even remember how long after this. This occurred. But somehow I had a tape back then, I don't even know how many of our listeners know what a tape is, an audio cassette, but I'm in my office for WMCA radio before I had Iron Trip and Zirin.

And I wanted to listen to something in the background while I was working, and I had this tape of a debate between Jerry Maditax and Eric Svensson. And I said, I'll pop this in the. The cassette player and I'm working away and all sudden Jerry's introduced, he ascends to the podium and says, by the way, folks, I feel like David biting Goliath today as I am matched up with Eric Svensson, who is a formidable opponent.

And please forgive me for arriving a little late and looking a little out of breath and disheveled. I was I couldn't believe it. I said, does this man not know. That these things are filmed and recorded, I mean, mind boggling, just like Ergen.

Kaner. I was about that's exactly what I was about to say. I'm not sure how many people even know who Ergen Kaner was, but, yeah, he's still out there. Someone sent me some some video of a church thing he spoke at just a few months ago.

And he's still still claiming to have been raised as a Muslim and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And it's it's it's sad. But yeah, that was always my thought with him was, doesn't he know he's going to.

You know, when you sit in front of a microphone, don't you know you're going to get caught.

Making up Arabic?

Yeah, making up Arabic. Yeah. It never crosses his mind that there might be some Arabic speakers who have access to microphones, too. I mean, who knows? But anyway, yeah. So it's been, you know. Coming up on, let's see, 98, yeah, we're we're over.

We're. Wow, yeah, we're definitely over a quarter of a century of doing crazy, wild things like that, so I've got I've got five grandchildren now and the mom of those grandchildren, those children came out of all those years and loved to hear your Long Island accents.

And wasn't just one of those years she came, I think it was not just one of those years. She came as a little kid when she would sit in the backseat of my car and say, Mr. Arnson, can you say coffee again?

And I would just split her and Josh up, crack them up by saying coffee and chocolate. But also she came out as an older teenager at the Huntington townhouse. I can't remember which. I think it was the Peter Stravinsky's debate.

Well, yeah, and then she better go with, oh, you know, she'd come to Tuscarora and I don't know if you remember when Josh and her and I did the Matrix thing where we, you know, we we did the same time you did comedy stuff.

It wasn't the same year you did the Martin, Marty, Marty, Marty, Marty Luther stuff. But yeah, yeah, we had a lot of that stuff. But, you know, here you and I are sitting on the front porch in our rocking chairs.

I think everybody else is going, get to the top. I think like all the time, you know, begin the dividing line. I'll talk about what's going on. It's like everybody's like, Josh, get to the topic. We're crying out loud.

Well, thanks, Claude, for actually asking the question and James began answering it before he even knew you asked it. And I do highly recommend Reformata Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Claude Ramsey is a superb preacher and also one of the most humble and gracious brothers in Christ I've ever met, especially in the pastorate.

And that is not an exaggeration. And I hope to see you face to face again for fellowship at some point, Claude. Before we get into the topic, since let's see how many questions I've got. One, two. We've got two questions, two more questions that have nothing to do with the show.

Yeah, that's all right.

OK, we have Alexander from Boca Raton, Florida. I still wasn't sure of the topic of today's show, but I'm hoping you could ask the question either way. I'm writing a polemics paper for Reformed Baptist Seminary.

Dr. White's lectures for the class were very helpful and I appreciated them a lot. My question to him is this. What are some good primary Catholic sources, either written or in video format, that explain the Eucharist in the Catholic Church as a re-presentation of the sacrifice of the cross during their mass?

Also, for the other listeners, can you have Dr. White explain how this undermines the atonement of Jesus Christ?

Well, that's the topic of the debate next Saturday in Mobile, Alabama. I'm debating, and you'll find this interesting, I'm debating my second ordained PCA minister who became a Roman Catholic. And you remember the first one.

That was, in fact, Jerry Matitix. And so this fellow has become Roman Catholic. He works for the Archdiocese, for the Diocese of Birmingham, not Archdiocese. But anyway, and our specific topic that we'll be debating, this is the thesis.

And this is the thesis he came up with. I didn't suggest he came up with it. Be it resolved, the true worship of God is nothing less than the self-offering of Christ, which is only offered in the Catholic liturgy.

So that's a pretty bold statement. And in fact, I'll be honest with you, I don't think Francis believes that. Given the stuff he said recently, I don't think he believes that at all. And so that sort of addresses the question is asking for primary sources.

Well, you can go from the Fourth Lateran Council, the Council of Trent. There's lots of stuff found in Denzinger's Enchiridion, which is a collection of official dogmatic teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, all the way through Vatican II that is consistently presented at that point.

But here's the point. Who gets to interpret that? Who gets to interpret what that means? Right now, you have the synod and synodality taking place and wrapping up. And what that has demonstrated is Francis wants a, how shall we say it? More inclusive kind of Roman Catholicism in the future.

And who's the final authority? You know, you had Bob's in Genesaum last year, I think, after I debated for my thing earlier this year. See, we're sold. We don't remember anymore. But you had Bob's in Genesaum and years and years ago, Bob and I had crossed swords in email over something he heard me say where I had presented a conflict between what John Paul II had said and what had been said by an earlier council or pope or something like that about religious freedom and stuff like that.

And he was basically saying to me, well, who are you to pretend to interpret these things? Only the church can interpret these things. And once you buy that, then the church can say, oh, we've always interpreted this way, that way, whatever way we are doing it now.

There's no more objective truth left to be able to hold Roman Catholicism to. So there isn't any question what the post-Reformation, counter-Reformation Jesuit theologians were teaching about the sacrifice of the mass.

But if you allow popes over years and years and years to keep putting people into positions of leadership, who are going to give you a different perspective on this thing, on these things, you can change the teaching of the church without ever having to come out and go, we're changing the teaching of the church.

That's what's so problematic about Roman Catholic authority claims, is that they can change it at any point in time. And I'm not sure how much that's going to come up in the debate next week or what. We'll see.

My concern about the debate next Saturday, this coming Saturday, is that I've never heard this gentleman speak on anything. I asked and he said he hadn't recorded anything on it. And so he can go back and listen to hours and hours of what I've said on the topic.

I can't do that in preparation for him. And so that is a little uncomfortable for me.

And as far as how this undermines the biblical teaching of the Atonement Christ provided on the cross, I can recall years ago, while sitting at the debates that you do, someone who was a friend, I think, I can't even remember now for certain if it was a friend, but somebody who was not Reformed, who said to me, hey, why don't you ever get somebody that isn't a Calvinist to debate the Catholics in these debates that you're arranging?

And I said, because there is a certain topic, there are certain topics specifically hinged to the divide between Rome and the Reformation, between Rome and the Scriptures, that only a logically consistent, thoroughgoing Calvinist can properly answer.

And this is one of those issues, I think, and also the whole issue of purgatory.

Yeah, especially, I've said many times that the majority of evangelicals, non-Reformed in particular, though these days I'm not sure how many Reformed people really know a whole lot about their own history or are consistent about it, but most evangelicals, their view of the Atonement, their view of the cross has been formed much more by hymns, and hey, there are some good hymns on the subject, but much more by technology and by tradition and by emotion than by a biblical examination of the issue.

And the problem with that is the most important book to address the subject of the Atonement is the book of Hebrews, and Hebrews is a closed book for a lot of modern Christians because Hebrews assumes a foundational knowledge in the Tanakh, the Torah, the Leviticus, the Ketuvim, what we call the Hebrew Scripture.

And if you don't have that, then a lot of people are just left going, I just never understood that book, it just seems so strange to me. Because it's constantly making references to passages from Leviticus, and look, most people try to read through the Bible, they make it through Exodus and then hit Leviticus and give up till next year, and so it's a bit of a problem.

And to consistently respond to Rome's argumentation does require a thoroughly biblical doctrine of Atonement, and in my opinion, the vast majority of evangelicals have never even been challenged to think through that particular subject.

And so most of the evangelical responses to Roman Catholicism are not overly weighty, and the better Roman Catholic apologists can get around them, and in fact can sort of anticipate them, they already have their answers ready, and they can just go for it.

And by the way, I don't mean by that to say that all Roman Catholic apologists are going to give overly weighty responses to our arguments. I think we saw a good illustration earlier this year when I attempted to do two debates with Jimmy Akin, and his response after I'd sit down would be, well, I'm not gonna argue about words.

Yeah, right. It's just like, what are you doing here?

Even his fellow Roman Catholic, Bob St. Genes, thought that was absolutely ludicrous.

Yeah, well, and say what you will about Bob, at least he would debate. He wouldn't stand up there and say, well, I'm not gonna respond to anything there, because it's amazing. So anyhow, yes, I hope that on Saturday I will have sufficient time to really give a very clear presentation of what the Bible teaches about the tonic sacrifice of Christ, but you've got to recognize I'm not the one who gets to chart the direction we're gonna go.

He goes first, he's debating the thesis, we'll sort of see what type of emphasis he's gonna give. But it'll be interesting. I think that'll be 193 or 194. I've actually got to go look which one that is.

I'm just hoping to live long enough to get to 200. And at that point, maybe we'll just put me out to pasture. My mom used to just shoot me and give my body to the glue factory or something like that. She was looking a bit less careful.

So we'll see.

It reminds me of an episode of All in the Family when Archie said, when I die, just wheel me out to the curb and put my hat on. But we're gonna go to our first commercial break. And Kevin from Wading River, Long Island, we will get to you when we return.

And then we hope to concentrate on the election that we are all anticipating. And if you have questions, we're not going to absolutely require that they be about the election, but we would prefer that the majority of them be about that.

But obviously, Kevin, you've already sent in your question that has nothing to do with that. So we will ask your question. But send in your questions to chrisorensen at gmail .com. Give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

Don't go away. We are going to be right back with more.

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So thank you, Eric, for all you do for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Okay, for those of you who just tuned in, our guest today is my dear friend, going back to 1996, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and we are going to be shortly discussing the upcoming election, and if we have time, we're going to switch topics before the end of the show.

But before we get to that topic, we promised Kevin from Wading River— by the way, James, Kevin is one of the original Whiteheads. I don't know if you remember a group that identified as the Whiteheads that used to get to the debates like two hours early so that they could get the front row, and they were always enthusiastic supporters of you in these debates.

And Kevin was one of these self-identified Whiteheads from Long Island, a retired Suffolk County police officer, in fact, a captain of Suffolk County Police, and I have known Kevin for many years and owe him a debt of gratitude for his being such a wonderful brother in Christ to me personally.

But Kevin asks, unfortunately or surprisingly, it seems that hyper-preterism is gaining ground and being adopted by many former evangelicals who have been persuaded by the carefully crafted arguments and proof texts of the hyper-preterist apologists.

They seem to persuade people of the truth of orthodox preterism, aka partial preterism, and then lead them down an interpretive trail that all prophecy is a time text related to 70 AD, including the second coming, general resurrection, and judgment.

I say all of this for the sake of the listeners. I know you are already aware of this heresy and its danger. Maybe you can comment on your own knowledge and experience with hyper-preterism and hyper-preterists.

How much is this a growing problem, and have you ever considered debating.

This issue? Yeah. I know that Doug Wilson has addressed this a few times last year. There was some major conversations about it in regards to well-known names of individuals who have adopted that perspective as well.

Asking if I'm going to do debates on eschatology is sort of like asking if Kamala Harris is going to do a number of more in-depth interviews with people who ask her serious questions about the election.

In fact, I just got a notification that she declined actually to go on Joe Rogan. Trump's going to go on, but she won't. When I first heard that that was even being discussed, I was sort of like, I can't imagine Joe Rogan backing off.

Brett Baier didn't back off, and Rogan wouldn't back off. And so I can't imagine that happening, and so it's not. So that's not surprising. Point being, I don't believe that I have the energy to become the expert on eschatology that I would have to have to engage this stuff.

My fellow elder Jeff Durbin has done stuff on this.

Yeah, I've actually interviewed him on the show on that very issue because he is a former.

Hyper-preterist. Right. So there are people that do this a whole lot better than I would. So no, I would consider that. I don't know how big it's getting. I mean, there are some names of people that you could name that are going that direction.

But I think most people recognize that once people go down that path, it becomes all-consuming. Everything else just becomes sort of an ancillary sideshow. And that's one of the things that I think I would suggest to everybody.

When you see people getting on to new things, does it consume them? Or can they maintain a balance in their teaching and in what they address? Things like that. And when it comes to hyper-preterism, all of them that I've seen, I get notes from them all the time.

You need to debate me. You need to debate me. If you make any comment whatsoever about eschatology or you criticize this perspective or that perspective, it's got to be them, them, them. They have their own particular perspective, their own particular view.

And I don't know that a lot of those guys actually get along real well with each other, to be honest with you.

It's definitely not monolithic at all.

No, no. There seems to be a little fighting, infighting. When you've got that small of a group to begin with, there's only so much of the pie that you can cut off for yourself. But no, I don't see it being a big, huge movement.