The Calvinist Club, Sola Scriptura, Purgatory

The Calvinist Club and the Charge of “New Calvinism”

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon. We're hoping to get as much of the program in as we can before we get hit by a thunderstorm. And it has been so long, in fact, I installed a weather station at my house.

I've always wanted one of those little things. So I installed a weather station, and ever since I put it up sometime in May, I think, the one line that has just been empty, zero, never, was precipitation.

It hasn't rained in I don't know how long here in the Valley of the Sun, but it is raining right now. I guess it's raining out around Rich's Place right now, and we've got some big orange blobs heading our direction, which is good, but we'll see, because because all the wires around here are really dried out.

So you all of a sudden, you all of a sudden, you know, get them real wet and they tend to start doing weird things. And the Max Headroom thing starts happening, I guess. So no one knows what Max Headroom is anymore.

I mean, what was that in the 80s, somewhere in there? Oh, good grief. So the Lord gives us so many warnings that we only have so long on Earth. And one of them is when you sit back and remember stuff and going, wait a minute, that was 40 years ago.

Never mind. Okay, want to start off? I forgot that this would have fit in so perfectly with some of what I was talking about last time that I kicked myself literally within a few moments after the program was done on Tuesday going, well, I forgot that screenshot that I have.

We don't need to put it up. But a comment from Facebook, I believe, yeah, it was Facebook, from one of my Reformed Brothers. And so we're going to be talking a good bit about Roman Catholicism Day, Eastern Orthodox Day today.

We'll be providing responses to claims, we're going to be looking at some video from a video we started looking at before about seven Catholic things Protestants can start doing, which is just, it's nothing more than a non-Catholic apologist who just clearly doesn't know anything about Roman Catholicism or the history of the Church and the history of the Reformation and stuff like that.

Providing a platform for a Roman Catholic apologist to present the most de-Romanized, friendly presentation of Roman Catholicism through his channels. It's great. But anyway, we're going to take a look at those things a little bit later on.

But since we're talking about Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, let's start off talking about the Reformed, shall we? It is very, very important to differentiate between Reformed theology and the Reformed as a group.

Right now, I could point you in last week to materials from people who identify themselves as Reformed, actions, activities, teachings that are just so far removed from the spirit and intention of Reformed theology that it leaves a lot of people going, well, why do they call themselves Reformed?

Now remember, there are quote-unquote Reformed denominations that use the term Reformed that without a doubt now, hopefully you're sitting down, most of you have listened to this program before, but you might be new.

We get new folks all the time. I totally shocked everybody in the group that we took to Germany for the Reformation tour that we did in 2017. The first night in Berlin, when I did the opening presentation, I pointed out what to me anyways is sort of a given, something that's just been a part of my church history studies for a very, very long time, and that is that most of the people we would be studying, specifically Martin Luther, but also John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, that these great men of the Reformation would not have extended the hand of fellowship to me at all.

Almost all of them would have had me kicked out of town, and some of them would have been willing to see me imprisoned and even executed, and I know that. And if you can't become a mature enough student of church history to get past that, you're never going to want to study church history, and you're not going to want to see yourself in the stream of church history.

And you're really going to struggle to see how the Holy Spirit of God has been working at all down through the entire period of the Christian church. So, the reality is that we all today have positions that many of the Reformers would not have appreciated.

The term Reformed has come to be attached to an exceptionally wide range of viewpoints and teachings and beliefs and things like that. So, there are some very, very liberal denominations that are called Reformed.

Schuller's denomination was called Reformed, but Schuller is totally unrecognizable to the Reformers as far as his theology was concerned. So, when we talk about Reformed today, generally, I'm either talking about theology, which I will defend as biblical, which I was brought to through the exegesis of the text of the Old and New Testaments in the original languages.

That's the foundation. That's the ground. I came to appreciate its history. I came to appreciate its development, its historical setting through my studies of church history, but I did not come to Reformed theology on the basis of the authority of particular individuals.

I had already embraced the fundamentals of Reformed soteriology before I read Calvin. So, these are the theology is biblical, and nothing that I say about the Reformed should ever be taken as indication that I have any questions about that.

But being orthodox in your Reformed theology doesn't mean that you will be balanced in how you apply that in life or even how you treat other Christians, let alone other Reformed people. And I'll tell you quite honestly, some of the nastiest slander and attack and vituperative language that I've ever experienced comes from people who call themselves Reformed.

The Reformed can have incredible, not just necessary argumentation amongst themselves. There are issues for us to discuss. We Reformed Baptists do debates with Presbyterians on baptism all the time. And we, I think, demonstrate better than almost anybody else the ability to appreciate the other side and to look past disagreements.

Many of my forebearers were executed by Paedo-Baptists in the past for their views on the subject of baptism. And today, you still have a situation where there are many who will not even begin to grant to me or to my fellow church members the term Reformed.

We are not Reformed at all. This is absolutely definitional of what it means to be Reformed. Ironically, they will accept as Reformed people who have significantly less orthodox views than I have of scripture, the nature of God, the atonement, and everything else.

But you've got to be a Paedo-Baptist. It's just written in stone. So you can believe all the rest of it. You can believe everything about the sovereignty of God and God's grace and salvation and predestination election and all the rest of that stuff.

But no, you got to have these, you got to dot these, dot these I's, cross these T's to be in the club. So anyway, Reformed people can be some of the nastiest people online. Now, I obviously don't really end up crossing paths with a lot of confessionally non-Reformed people as far as having interaction with them about theological issues.

That's not my tribe. And so I'm sure that there's all sorts of things that create nastiness online amongst other groups, amongst Pentecostals and amongst Charismatics and amongst Wesleyans and stuff like that, that I don't know anything about.

It's just not a part of what I deal with. My conservative Anglican brothers down in Sydney have to deal with just all sorts of stuff. That I'm not, you know, it doesn't really end up, other than when I managed to get down to Australia, if I ever get down to Australia again, then I sort of tune in on it, but it's just not a normal part of my normal experience.

Well, so we have made note of some of these things in the past, and it does seem that our Reformed brethren in Scotland and Ireland especially, now British Reformed folks have their own really interesting ways of doing things, okay?

The British Reformed are the only people I know of that can literally take up swords against each other as to the form of hymnal they use. Really do.

Believe me.

2005, first time I went to London, and that's when I learned all about the hymnal wars. And given that they don't even have music in their hymnals, it's just words. You have to know the tunes, which is fascinating.

But given that, I've just always been amazed at, let's just be honest, the cliquishness that can exist amongst people who would identify in some way, shape, or form as Reformed. But my Scottish and Irish, especially in Ireland, some of the Reformed there can just be nasty, and I mean really nasty.

Just not willing to extend any level of grace at all, especially toward people who would claim to be Reformed. Well, there was a comment that was posted, I think it was on the weekend, so it's been a little while, by William Samuel Bruce.

Now, if that doesn't sound like a warrior chieftain, I don't know what does. But William Samuel Bruce, a group there, evidently in Ireland, started jumping on me. I guess somebody posted something from Apologia Church.

And so, the accusation of New Calvinism came up, whatever in the world that is. I've never understood what young, restless, and Reformed was. I wasn't young enough, I'm restless. I sleep real well. As I'm getting older, once in a while you have a problem, but I'm training for something called an Everesting attempt.

If you don't know what that is, that's climbing the altitude of Mount Everest on a bike in a certain period of time. The pros are doing it now in one day. That would pretty much probably end every joint in my, at least my knees would be gone forever if I did that.

So it won't be in one day. But it's over 29 ,000 feet of climbing, and I'm having to diet, I'm having to train, I'm having, I'm doing, that's what I'm doing all my listening to stuff right now, and lining books up, and stuff like that, because I didn't get to do all my Colorado rides this year.

So I'm going to be doing that in September, Lord willing. Anyway, I beat myself up, so I sleep well. I've never understood what that terminology was meant to refer to, especially when someone tries to apply it to me.

My guess is that young, restless, and reformed, and now new Calvinism is just what more traditional type people try to label someone who doesn't do it the way they do it. And man, I'm going to tell you something, if there is one massive weakness in the Reformed Baptist movement, which remember, when I first heard of my first Reformed Baptist church, I had to go to a bookstore as a seminarian and get out the handbook of denominations, because I had never even heard of Reformed Baptist.

I mean, for a long time, when people would say that, people would go, Deformed Baptist? What's a Deformed Baptist? And then when you tell them, they'd say, Yeah, it's a Deformed Baptist, because what?

So we've come a long ways, but we've pretty much been our own worst enemies, because Reformed Baptists tend to be very narrow, very, very narrow. On the one hand, it can be good, in that we are not going to be blown about by every wind of doctrine, every little trend, everything else that comes along.

On the other hand, it can be bad, in that you do it our way, the way we do it, what we're familiar with, or you're just not a part of our club, in essence. There can be a real narrowness, and sometimes the appreciation for the confession becomes idolatry of the confession.

I'll just be honest with you, that's just the reality. And so I think we've been our own worst enemies along those lines. But the idea of New Calvinism basically, I think, came about when you started seeing what looked like a mixture.

Now look, there's been a bunch of people that have come along that have gone, Hey, those doctrines of grace sound really cool, they make sense, I'll go with that. But years ago, in fact, I remember when 9 -11 took place, I was supposed to have gone back east to give a presentation, five points are not enough.

And it got scrapped for a few months before travel began to happen again. I forget how long that was after 9 -11. But I remember that first trip, the soldiers with guns and the long, long, long, long lines.

And all that sort of stuff.

And I was going to give a presentation, five points are not enough. I was talking about Reformed worship, I was talking about... It is true that when you simply join, or try to join, the five points of Calvinism to a non-Reformed worldview, you end up with real problems.

And as we've seen people leaving, apostatizing, they were the people that did that. They never had the root. Five points is not enough, five points is a part of Reformed worldview, and that worldview impacts what you think about the Church and about all of life.

If you're not Reformed in the emergency room, at the hospital, then you're not really Reformed.

Period.

So, in other words, if what you believe about the real first point of the six points of Stulip, or Srucep, or whatever you want to call it, but if you claim to believe in the absolute sovereignty of God, that has to transfer and translate into how you deal with death in the hospital room, too.

See what I mean? And what is the purpose of the Church? Why is Church discipline important? Why is holiness important? And holiness cannot be defined on the basis of your grandparents' predilections. That holiness has to be defined in light of what it means to stand for the Lordship of Christ and under His Lordship and the application of His law in your life where you are now, not by wearing the same clothes that your great-great-grandparents wore.

So just a few points about what it means to actually be Reformed. So this idea of New Calvinism gets thrown about. So I guess I should get to this. William Samuel Bruce wrote to Raymond Stewart and said, perhaps the charge of New Calvinism was too generous.

This is about me. It's definitely a valid charge given the mixture of ostensibly sound doctrine with worldly living. But in James White's case, the rot goes much further. Again, he promotes sound doctrine, but also, and so here's where the rot is.

Number one, vigorously defends a false view of Scripture and promotes corrupted Bible versions, often attempting to dazzle his hearers with apparently deep knowledge of the issues and of the Greek in an attempt to belittle and silence his critics.

So this would be clearly either a King James-only-ist or a TR-only-ist. And so knowing that the Reformers were none of those things, these people are more Calvinistic than Calvin, who was none of those things, but so the first thing you say is it's a false view of Scripture.

Now remember, I'm the guy that defends inerrancy. I'm the guy that defends the fact that we continue to possess all the original readings in the manuscripts of the New Testament today. I have defended this in mosques and against atheists, have debated Bart Ehrman, etc., etc., etc.

But I have a false view, vigorously defends a false view. Well, I will vigorously defend the view of Scripture the vast majority of Reform scholarship today holds over against these folks who do not hold the perspective that the vast majority of Reform scholarship hold, that present a view of Scripture that they translate as the King James version did not hold.

They're the ones with the oddities when it comes to their view of Scripture. But that's number one. Number two, platforms people like Michael Brown, who is a friend and defender of extreme charismatics and word-of-faith heretics, well, boy, we've gone over this one before.

Once again, ignoring the reality that while Michael and I have done a tremendous number of things together, such as, I still think, one of the longest, most in-depth, exegetical discussions of the Hebrew text of Isaiah 53, which, interestingly enough, was so long ago, was not on video.

It's only on audio. That was before we started recording video. I had to look it up recently. It's only on sermon audio. It's not on YouTube. That's why I kept looking for it on YouTube, but I could not find it, and I found out why.

It's on sermon audio, but it's only audio. We weren't doing video back then. A long time ago. Anyway, one of the most in-depth discussions of Isaiah 53, Michael Brown and I, one of the most in-depth defenses of the doctrine of the Trinity against Unitarians, Michael Brown and I, a startlingly clear refutation, far clearer than anything I've ever heard from these guys, anything I've ever heard from these guys, of homosexuality in the Church.

Michael and I did that, the debate in Florida, which went so very, very well. But despite all of that, I am also the person that Michael has debated more than anyone else other than Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

So I am the second most debated person by Michael Brown, where we are debating each.

Other.

So we have done programs on this program where we have disagreed, where we have dialogued about the things we disagree about. None of that has ever been just swept under the rug. It's been brought out there and debated on the basis of Scripture.

And so if, you know, these folks, whether they would have the will to engage in that kind of meaningful interaction, do the homework that's necessary, rather than just simply repeating the same pious platitudes that was involved in the first point or not, I don't.

Know.

But the reality is that when it comes to issues such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the Messiahship of Jesus, reliability of Scripture, especially knowledge of Hebrew and the Hebrew text, homosexuality, the entire field, who do we have that I would rather be doing those debates with than Michael?

And he just drives you nuts because you don't like what he believes about the other things. Well, I don't either. That's why we debate them. That's why we debate those issues. But we do so as brothers, and you can't do that because if you're honest with yourself, you don't think he is.

You don't think he is. There's the issue. Then number three, had to deal with this one, goes to mosques to, quote, debate, end quote,.

Muslims.

They're formal, moderated debates. Why put quotes around it? Are you seriously suggesting they weren't debates? Bringing the gospel down to the level of being some way comparable to the satanic lies of Islam.

Meanwhile, the Muslim debaters love him because he gives them ammunition for their claims the Bible is corrupted. Now, this was just a flat out lie that I just simply had to expose, and I simply have to call this gentleman to repent and repent sincerely for this kind of slanderous lie because that's what it is.

And again, the gentleman's name is William Samuel Bruce. William Samuel Bruce goes to mosques to debate Muslims, bringing the gospel down to the level of being in some way comparable to the satanic lies of Islam.

I wonder if all of those Calvinist missionaries that first brought the gospel to Muslims are not turning over in their graves at what has happened to the people that are left back at home that have become this cold to mission's work.

What would you do, Samuel, if you had the opportunity to stand in a mosque and proclaim Jesus? Do you really think that's bringing the gospel down?

Why?

On what level? Give me some kind of meaningful argumentation from scripture. Was Paul bringing the gospel down to the level of Jewish mythology to proclaim the gospel in synagogues? How about Roman mythology for proclaiming it in Roman cities in the marketplaces?

Is that what they were doing? Of course not. This is just pure, pure slander. It's just absurd. I do not understand what motivates someone's heart to look at opportunities. I would like to think that my Reformed brethren would rejoice that we have actually had the opportunity of walking into places like that, and we got to go in those places not because those people think that we're compromisers.

There's not a one of those people out there that think I'm a compromiser. You name me a single Muslim apologist that I've debated that thinks that I compromised in anything whatsoever in my encountering of them in the mosques.

Not a one of them thinks that. Not a one of them thinks that. And you take this, the second part, because you hold to this indefensible view of textual critical theory, this indefensible view of history, and say, see, they love him because he gives them ammunition for their claims the Bible is corrupted.

Not when they're debating me. Not when they're debating me. Maybe you haven't watched some of the debates about allegations of biblical corruption, but you're not even close to a semblance of reality in dealing with those debates.

Look at the debates I've done with Adnan Rashid on the subject. Look at the debates I've done with Yusuf Ismail in South Africa on that subject at Northwest University, Pachisarum. You couldn't do that, and you know that, and yet you sit behind your computer screen and take shots as a reformed, a truly reformed person.

Stunning.

Shame on you. Just shame on you.

Wow.

White, like so many other new Calvinists, probably been a Calvinist longer than he has, is unafraid to resort to dishonesty and mockery in support of his position. Well, no examples were given, of course.

That's just the way that slander works, is just throw it out there. But this is the kind of stuff that you're dealing with when you encounter the crusty Calvinists, the Calvinism that is traditional, the Calvinism that very often does not result in a... there is a way of being bold in evangelism that will communicate that your heart is passionate for the salvation of the people to whom you are reaching out, and then there is a way of being bold in evangelism that says the exact opposite of that, that says I'm doing this to prove something to God, and I really don't care about you.

That's not what we've ever wanted to communicate to the Muslim people, or to anybody else for that matter, or to anyone else for that matter. But there is, sadly, an element in Reformed theology that can lead to that kind of crusty hardness that truly brings disrepute to the gospel.

So there you go. You go out there, you seek to bring the gospel to the Muslim people, and that's what you get from the folks back home, is something like that. There you go. Well, that's one of the reasons I've said it before, I'll say it again, I don't care about the Calvinist club.

I don't care if people want to say, well, he's not Reformed because he doesn't dress like me, and he doesn't sing the songs I sing, or he doesn't tie his shoes the way I do, or whatever else. Reformed theology is biblical theology.

I'm not moving from that. I'm defending that. But I'm going to tell you, it's far too easy for me to point to example after example after example of people who get their theology straight and lose their heart in the process.

Not interested in it. Don't want it. There's a good example. Next screenshot. It's amazing. The only thing, screenshots are cool. Screenshots are extremely useful. The only thing I don't like about screenshots is you can't search them, because it's a graphic.

So you can't search the graphic for the text, unless I suppose there would be a way to turn them into PDFs. That would be a really neat program. Would be a program that would tie into, like on Mac, I just do Command Control or Command Shift 5, I think is what it is.

And you just select what you want, save. It goes right into my Dropbox, and that way I've got it here. And wouldn't it be cool to have a utility that would take that and then OCR the screenshot? And save it as a PDF.

I wonder if there is such a thing. Because if I'm slow enough to come up with it, someone thought it would be faster than I did. Because then you could search it. Then you could search text, and you could find stuff, and that would be really useful.

No, because you can't search the audio. Anyway, so a couple days ago, I'm not sure when it was, 7 -20, so what is that? Two days ago? Three days ago. James Fox Higgins, now somebody's told me that James Fox Higgins has a webcast.

Who doesn't? We do too. We just started it before anybody else did, that's all. And that he is a new Christian. Well, okay. Don't know anything about him. But someone posted this from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, so maybe that's where it's coming.

From.

I don't know.

But here's what it says. It says, I think it's weird that Sola Scriptura apologists, case in point, Dr. James White, so often use secondary texts like dictionaries and Greek lexicons to show you that what the Bible really means is that it is totally sufficient in and of itself.

It seems like insanity to me.

Okay?

Now, most folks who are familiar with the historical discussion of Sola Scriptura recognize immediately what the problem is here. But so many... You got to understand that. For me it's a little frustrating when you've been seeking to communicate what Sola Scriptura means, literally, from the first time you defended that belief, coming up next month, 30 years ago, August of 1990, was my first moderated public debate.

I wish I had a date to place. I wonder... Do we still have the cassette tapes anywhere?

Yeah.

It might be in some of those old dividing line newsletters that we have somewhere. But I would be really... I'd be interested in knowing. I mean, I could just scroll the calendar back to August of 1990 and sort of take a wild guess, I suppose.

But I'd like to know when that was. Which day. It'd be fun to... We just stink at this self-promotion stuff. And it would be fun to go, hey, you know, 30 years ago was when we began doing moderated public debates.

Jerry Matitix and I, Long Beach, California, I don't remember the name of the Roman Catholic.

Church.

I remember what it looked like. That'll be burned into my memory forever, from up front, what that Catholic Church looked like from inside. But that was in Sola Scriptura. And so literally for 30 years, and of course, I was doing this before then.

It wasn't the first time I dealt with Sola Scriptura. But literally for 30 years, I've been trying to communicate to folks. In fact, I just looked over here. This was the tract that we were passing out during the papal visit 1993 up in Denver, Colorado.

And the pillar and foundation of the truth is a tract dealing with the doctrine of Sola Scriptura and defending it against the various Roman Catholic argumentations against it and things like that. So yeah, that was only three years after that debate, now that I think about it.

So that's 27 years ago. And it was... Yeah, it was... When was the World Youth Day? I think it was like in July or something.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it was about 27 years ago this month that we were doing that. So James Fox Higgins is correct that I would be called a Sola Scriptura apologist, a person who defends that doctrine. But to defend it, you have to define it.

And I have done that repeatedly. And the opponents of Sola Scriptura, almost to a man, refuse to accurately represent it. When I first read Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Carl Keating's book, first thing I recognized was the misrepresentation of the doctrine.

Now, the vast majority of Protestants could not define Sola Scriptura accurately. So certainly Carl should know better today than he did back then. But it's at least understandable that there would be some level of confusion because so many Protestants don't know what it means or don't apply it, don't live it, or have a pitifully narrow understanding of what it actually means as well.

So this objection, this is an objection to the fact that I will use secondary text. Now, immediately, secondary text raises a number of issues that have to be addressed. A secondary text implies a primary text.

Primary text would be Scripture. Secondary texts are not of the same nature as Scripture. And the key to understanding what the doctrine of Sola Scriptura means is to recognize that it is a statement about the nature of Scripture that implies an exclusivity to the nature of Scripture, that Scripture is unlike anything else.

No Greek lexicon, no work of historical study of Greek grammar or Hebrew grammar or Ugaritic or Aramaic or anything else exists on the same level as Scripture, which is theanoustos, the Greek term God-breathed that Paul used in writing to Timothy.

All Scripture is theanoustos, badly translated in most English translations as inspired, better translated as God-breathed or breathed out by God. Nothing else is theanoustos. The Church isn't theanoustos.

Tradition is not theanoustos. The only thing that's theanoustos is Holy Scripture, what God has revealed in Holy Scripture. And part of the definition of Sola Scriptura is the assertion of and recognition of that reality that if Scripture is God speaking, if it is the very breath of God, which is what breathed out by God, put your hand from your mouth as you're speaking, you will feel those puffs of breath that you have to produce to be able to produce sound.

That's the intimate level of what Scripture is. If Scripture is God speaking, then Scripture has an epistemological authority that is unique in and of itself. This is why liberalism, its first target is a denomination's view of Scripture.

You must debilitate the highest view of Scripture to then bring in false doctrine because as long as you have the highest view of Scripture, then you have a view that this is meant to be taken as a whole.

It does not mean that you can't look at what John believed or Paul believed or James believed and compare them with one another and recognize the differences in language or any of those types of things.

But what it does do is it goes beyond the individual authors and books to a concept of what Scripture is. Scripture is something that took 1 ,500 years to bring into existence in a unique fashion, in multiple languages, in different historical contexts, 1 ,500 years.

And it was the intention of God to give us this as a whole and that it has a coherent and consistent message. That belief, I keep having to emphasize this, but that belief is a small minority belief amongst those who call themselves Christians, both in academia as well as in the Church in the West today.

That is a sad thing to have to say, but I have to keep repeating it so that you recognize that if you believe that, you are in the minority. So you will not be shocked when you encounter many people who do not have that kind of belief.

Without that foundation, then all of Christian theology becomes matters of individual opinion. Well, I go with this early Church Father, I go with that early Church Father, well, I don't go with any early Church Fathers at all, I just come up with my own thing.

There can be no message of the Christian faith to the world today without the highest view.

Of Scripture.

So that involves understanding that Scripture is theanustos, that it is God-breathed, that it has that nature, that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit is how Peter put it.

As Jesus himself expressed it when refuting the Sadducees, have you not read what God spoke to you saying? Have you not read what God spoke to you saying? And then he quotes from something that was written 1400 years earlier.

You put those together and you start understanding the tremendous gift that we have in Scripture. And so, in light of that, sola Scriptura begins by saying this and only this is theanustos. There is nothing else that is theanustos, nothing else.

So it's unique. You cannot make this a lower part of a bigger thing, as Rome does, and as some Eastern Orthodox do, not in quite as dogmatic a fashion, but they do functionally. That is, in Roman Catholicism, this is written tradition.

Then you have oral tradition. I point to nothing because they can never tell you what the oral tradition is. It's whatever Rome defines it dogmatically to be when Rome gets around to doing something like that, but it's this nebulous, undefined body that's been passed along since the Apostles, but we don't really know what's in it.

So then you have written tradition, oral tradition together become capital S, capital T, sacred tradition within Roman Catholicism. So, the problem with that, of course, is that makes the undefined oral tradition theanustos as well.

So there is something theanustos outside of Scripture. So when Rome defines, for example, the last two dogmas that she did define over the past 150 years, that being the bodily assumption of Mary and papal infallibility, when she claims she's drawing from oral tradition, that functionally becomes a claim to new revelation except that it is the idea that this oral tradition was passed down through the centuries.

Can't give any evidence of it for hundreds and hundreds of years, especially for those dogmas. Nobody happened to mention it. So we're not sure how it was passed down, but it's still from the Apostles and therefore you can dogmatize it.

You can make it something that you have to believe it to enter into the presence of God, to have forgiveness of sins. It's part of the gospel. You can dogmatize it by the authority of the church. That's modern day revelation.

When you can say that in 1954 you have to believe something that no one for the first thousand years of the church taught as dogma, that's new revelation. You don't want to call it that. I get it, but that's what it is.

So in Rome then, you have other things. They don't want to claim this. I remember when I asked Mitchell Pacwa in our debate in 1999 in Soul Scripture in San Diego, I said, can you give me a single word that Jesus ever said that has been defined infallibly by the Roman Catholic Church of him having said it that's not found in Scripture?

No.

Anything the Apostles ever said that has been defined by Rome infallibly that is not found.

In Scripture?

No.

Scripture is theanostos. It is therefore unique in its character. And because it is unique in its character, then sola scriptura means that Scripture is the sole, because it's unique, infallible rule of faith for the church.

It does not mean that the church will not have other rules of faith. It does not mean that the church cannot learn from and be blessed by natural theology, general revelation. We've certainly been blessed by mankind's growth and understanding of the natural world around us in the sense of medicines and technology, and we're being blessed right now to be able to speak to you in this fashion live around the world.