Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 1B

Roman Catholicism, Tradition, and the Development of the Papacy

Now, what about the issue with Roman Catholicism and its incipient forms in the ancient world? There is no single start date of Romanism. And I know the Roman Catholics are somewhat offended to use the term Romanism.

The problem is, I can't think of a better term for a religion that is focused upon one bishop in one city, especially when nothing in the New Testament, in any way, shape, or form, demonstrates that that city was somehow supposed to be the be-all and end-all of all things.

And when you speak with Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic apologists, and every time you raise the issue of scripture, it comes down to Rome's authority and the Bishop of Rome's authority, I think it's an accurate term.

Today's Roman Catholicism is the end product of many, many, many centuries of development. And the way things have changed, even since the days of Vatican II, and the speed with which it's changing, really makes me wonder what Roman Catholicism is gonna look like in the not-too-distant future.

As it is today, I think the greatest challenge to any Bishop of Rome is holding together what is, in fact, an extremely wide variety of viewpoints. I mean, you talk to a Roman Catholic in southern Mexico, and Mary's right next to the deity.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, you know what I mean? And everybody's going, yeah, I know what you mean. But you go up to Boston College and talk to some of the professors there, and to even try to say that the religion of the priests in southern Mexico, and that of the professor at Boston College is on the same planet, is difficult to assert, let alone to say it's the same religion.

Roman Catholics love to talk about how unified they are, but get three of them in a room, and they'll have a fight over at least 10 different perspectives. So it's very difficult to identify. I mean, you can identify the historic Roman Catholic position on many things, but whether that continues to be the position today is very much dependent upon who you're talking to, and where you're talking to them at.

And basically, what John Paul II did was if he sort of stepped back and looked at his pontificate, one year, he sent out a very conservative apostolic letter, and all of the liberals would just be screaming from high heaven and thinking that the world would come to an end, and the Inquisition was about to start, and they were going to be burned to the stake, and blah, blah, blah.

And the next year, out comes a much more moderate or even liberal, and the conservatives are going, what happened? This is not what the apostolic church is, and the next year, something very conservative.

So he keeps throwing something to the conservatives and throws something to the liberals, and that's how he kept them all together. I don't know how long you can keep doing that, to be perfectly honest with you, especially when the conservatives are remaining just as conservative as they are, and the liberals are getting more and more and more liberal as they're going in that direction.

How far can that rubber band stretch before it breaks is the question that I would have to ask. And it's interesting that the movement to define Mary, it's called the Fifth Mary Endogamous. And if you're familiar with what the Mary Endogamous are, the Fifth Mary Endogamous, the idea that Mary is co-redemptrix, co-mediatrix, and advocate for the people of God.

Rome already teaches that no grace approves to anyone except through Mary. Mary is the neck that turns the head that is God's grace, and all grace flows through her to humankind. The exaltation of Mary over the past couple of hundred years has been truly an incredible thing to observe, especially when Rome tries to say that she's the ancient church, and yet she believes his dogma, things that nobody in the first 500 years of the church had ever even heard of.

And yet now it's allegedly a part of the gospel. It's an amazing thing. But where she's going, hard to say. Many people saw the election of Benedict as a turn to the right, because Benedict was known as Der Panzer Cardinal.

He was the head of what is the modern incarnation of what is called the Inquisition. And you thought that was gone. No, it still exists. It's not called the Inquisition, Sacred Doctrine, it's a congregation of Sacred Doctrine, but he is known as a fairly conservative-minded individual.

But still, there are many bishops, many cardinals, many in the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church that are, in essence, universalists, that are inclusivists at the very least. The ideas that were very clearly present in the papal syllabus of Arius in the middle 1850s, just not really popular amongst many in Roman Catholicism today.

So even defining it, you have to define it on the basis of the person that you're talking to today. In history then, over and over again, do you have EWTN on your cable? I've got one person saying yes.

The Eternal Word Television Network, Mitch Pacwa has sort of taken over from Mother Angelica on that. And Mitch Pacwa and I have done five debates together. He's truly a Roman Catholic apologist for whom I respect.

He's never engaged in personal attacks. He's never dodged things. The debates I've had with him on the mass justification of the Solus Fractura, the papacy, and the priesthood, I think are some of the best that we've done because they were only on the subjects we were debating, rather than on me or him or whatever else it might be.

And I appreciate that. But he's the primary person you see on EWTN. If you watch that at all, and I don't, but once in a while I have to watch something, they will have, and I don't mean something as in TV, I just sometimes some of those say, if someone's on, you might wanna see what they're gonna have to say.

They have a coming home network program. And when you listen to converts to Roman Catholicism over and over and over, it is a broken record. They say, I read the early church fathers and they made me come home to Rome.

Well, I'm not sure what early church fathers they're reading. But if you actually read the patristic sources, and they're readily available to us. They're online at ccel .org. The Erdman's set now published, I think Henderson's now published a 38 volume set, is generally available and sometimes actually on sale.

You can get it, it looks great on your bookshelf. It looks very good, it's called. Do you have that, Pastor? You do have it. I was gonna say, you know, it'd be a great gift for your elders and your pastor and things like that.

I'm trying to help you out though. We'll come up with something on it later on. But if you, the material's there. And if you take the time to read the early church fathers, and you will discover that it's sort of like going to a modern Christian bookstore.

A modern Christian bookstore can be one of the most dangerous places spiritually you can ever go. Because you let your guard down when you walk through the front door. And what you need to think of is that as you're walking down those aisles, there are coiled cobras waiting to strike at every corner.

Let's face it, unless that bookstore has some doctrinal standard, which some do, but let's face it, most don't. The big chain stores, you know, the old Berean Christian bookstore, for example,.

You'll find anything in there.

You will find such a wide variety that it's absolutely amazing. I mean, it would be sort of like archeologists, 2 ,000 years from now, finding a Berean Christian bookstore in a state of great preservation, buried under something.

What in the world would they think we as Christians believed when you dig out of the ground and you find one of Hodge's systematic theology next to Benny Hinn's Good Mornings. And you try to put them together into a coherent whole.

Good, what? And that's what so many people end up doing with the early church writers, is when they want to talk about, well, the early church believed this. Who's to say that? Could you be specific as to who you're talking about?

Because the fact of the matter is, just as you're gonna have good books in a Christian bookstore, and you're gonna have some really bad books, and you're gonna have some in the middle, and you're gonna have some very learned people, and you're gonna have some people who have a clue what they're talking about, but they self-published anyways and made some money.

The same thing was happening at that time as well. And so even in the apostolic fathers, you're gonna find some that are eminently orthodox, and then you're gonna find others that just... Justin Martyr, for example.

Justin Martyr's an apologist in the second century. He was a martyr, and you've got to give somebody credit who's looked at time for their faith, but there are Muslims who were able to die for their faith too, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're right, but he died for his faith.

But there can be no question whatsoever that Justin Martyr was far more influenced by Plato than he was by Paul. And especially in that early period of time, this is a period of persecution. You can't start a seminary, you know?

Getting trained and even having the entirety of the New Testament. There are many churches that didn't have all the books of Paul, or they might be missing something from John or something along those lines.

And so you get a real wide variety of perspectives being expressed during that time period. And so to try to take all that stuff and synthesize and say, oh, this has been a universal position of the church.

I will honestly tell you about the only thing that I think you might be able to make somewhat of a case was a universal belief, was monotheism, that was about it. I think on any other issue, you can find all sorts of folks who disagree about all sorts of things.

And many of them simply out of ignorance. Many of them, we want the early church to answer every question we have today. Well, folks, the fact of the matter is they weren't thinking about all the same questions that you and I are.

And when we read them talking about questions that don't even bother us, we sort of wonder, what was wrong with these people? But we need to have a better perspective about these particular subjects and be careful about these things.

And unfortunately, Rome has not been careful. Rome's own dogmatic statements, for example, about the papacy, talk about universally held positions, now, modern Roman Catholic. Well, they didn't really mean that.

Well, I'm not really sure they didn't. I've heard, for example, most Roman Catholic apologists, not all of them, but most of them, are former Protestants, and they love to give their Pauline, Damascus Road conversion stories.

They're all Paul, and they all know how to do it, and they all end up disagreeing a lot with her about how to do it. One fellow by the name of Tim Staples, who's now one of the primary apologists for Catholic answers in California, he and I had two debates, one on Sola Scriptura and one on papal infallibility.

Well, I was debating papal infallibility. He was debating something else, and so both of them. Anyway, watch it. Well, I wish you could watch it. They did videotape it, but they won't give us the videotape, so.

But it's available in MP3 format, and it was an interesting evening. I've heard him say that all the early church fathers interpret Matthew 16, 18 the way the modern Roman Catholicism does. That's just bogus.

I mean, it's so easily documented that that's not the case, but these are the folks that are just repeating this over and over again, and how many people are actually checking it out? That's the problem we come up with.

The Rise of Non-Biblical Tradition and the Loss of Biblical Authority

So, speaking in generalities here, keeping those issues about church history in mind here, as non-biblical traditions gained popularity, and this took place faster in some areas than it did in others, the centrality of biblical authority, by necessity, had to be denied, because if your traditions really are not biblical, but you want to hold onto them, what you need to do is to begin lowering the ultimate authority of what scripture really says.

And many times, those traditions developed out of someone who thought they were trying to do something good. They saw a particular problem in their area, they tried to address it, and instead of being patient, letting the Holy Spirit of God work through the church until the proclamation was approved, they sort of tried to fix things on their own.

And we may say that they started off with the right idea, but very quickly it turned negative. For example, Ignatius of Antioch, what a, you could read all of his genuine letters in just a matter of minutes, you really could, and I would highly recommend them to you.

There's an excellent works out containing the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, and Ignatius writes seven letters as he's going to Rome to be martyred in either 107 or 108 AD, so very, very early on.

And what you're writing as you're going someplace to die is probably pretty clear to the point, you know what I mean? You're gonna be focused on stuff that's important. All the fluffy stuff when death is facing you just sort of goes out the window.

And I've been to the Colosseum in Rome, and some traditions say that's where he died, not everyone's absolutely certain of that, but to see that place and to think about the faithfulness of that man, and yet Ignatius is coming from Antioch, and when he writes to the church in Rome, Ignatius never mentions the bishop of the church in Rome, and the reason he never mentions the bishop, when he writes to other churches that have a single bishop, he writes, he specifically mentions them, but he doesn't to the church in Rome, why?

Because Roman Catholic and Protestant historians all agree, there was no one bishop of Rome until about 140 AD. The church in Rome didn't think it needed what's called a monarchical episcopate, that is a one bishop leader that you make a distinction between bishop and presbyters, presbyters becomes a lower office, biblically there is no distinction between those two offices, they are one, and in Rome, that's how it was up until 140 AD.

So for over a century at the time of Christ, there in Rome, the church, once it was founded, did not believe they needed to have one bishop. I'm not sure if they believed in something called papacy if they didn't think they needed to have one bishop.

And what Ignatius writes to them, he recognizes this, and he doesn't address, in a particular bishop, he addresses the church as a whole, and there are multiple elders. Well, I would argue that the multiplicity of elders is the biblical perspective.

I have defended that, in fact, Robin Holman has a book, Five Perspectives on Church Government, and I wrote the section on the plurality of elders. Now, that viewpoint ends up basically being erased over time in the West.

But here's Ignatius, Ignatius believed in only one bishop. He held the monarchical position. But he didn't tell the Romans they were wrong. But over time, his position superseded the other. So you can see both of them existing side by side in church history.

You don't try to change one into the other just to try to protect your particular perspective. You go, you let Ignatius be Ignatius, this is what he believed. Can you disagree with Ignatius and honor his death?

Yes. I think it's one of the problems we have with dealing with church history, is if you find one thing that you disagree with, man, that guy was a rascal, probably wouldn't even be a Christian. Well, you're not gonna find very many people who've been Christians before you, you know.

I sort of feel sorry for those folks, because they keep drawing the circle smaller and smaller and smaller, and eventually, they're the ones standing in it. They got to get on one foot. That's a small, small world to live in.

I feel sorry for those folks. When you look at church history, let the people of church history be who they were. I don't know about you, but 50 years from now, 100 years from now, if someone's looking back on my life, I hope they're gonna be fair in evaluating me.

I want them to allow me to be who I was and say what I said, and if they disagree, fine. Hopefully, they'll still see something of value in the life that I led in service to Christ. So, I think we need to do the same thing when it comes to church history, and unfortunately, a lot of folks don't do that.

Just one illustration is the way that Dave Hunt deals with church history. Oh, my goodness. Just sort of the same way Sherman marched in the South, about the same level of kindness for the subject being addressed.

You just gotta, you just can't let that get in the way. So, we can see the progression of these non-biblical traditions over time, and at the same time, there's all sorts of statements. I highly recommend to you a three-volume set of books called Holy Scripture by David King and Bill Webster, three volumes, 1 ,100 pages, on the subject of soul scriptura in the scriptures in the early church.

I know both the gentlemen. I watched that set being written over the course of six years because David King is a regular on my chat channel, so I had most of those 1 ,100 pages posted on my chat channel at some point in time while the book was being written.

Very, very useful work. You can still find people affirming the ultimate sufficiency and authority of scripture even when they themselves are not overly consistent in doing so, and isn't that the case with us today?

It's not every generation called to examine its own traditions in the light of scripture. I mean, speaking of Dave Hunt, the scariest thing Dave Hunt ever said to me as we were doing a radio discussion, I was actually hosting it on a radio station in Phoenix, and he made some comment about John 6, and it was an eisegetical comment.

It wasn't substantiated by the text, and I said, Dave, that's just your tradition speaking, and Dave Hunt said to me, and you can listen to this that he makes it available and so do we, he said to me, James, I have no traditions, and I said to him, Dave, the man who thinks he has no traditions is the man who is the most enslaved to his traditions.

We all have our traditions. Believe it or not, I'm, thankfully, all you can throw at me here are chairs. You can't throw pillows. Baptists have traditions. Baptists have traditions, and if you don't realize that, then those traditions can end up taking the place of the word of God, and I think that's one of the most serious things I can say about Brother Dave is that in his experience, his traditions have become equal with the word of God.

He can't even see where the tradition stops and the word of God ends any longer, and that's a dangerous position to be in. Well, that happened over time. It didn't happen overnight. There wasn't some church council that came along and said, okay, here's tradition.

Even today, Roman Catholicism cannot really even define for us what tradition is. They can give you nebulous concepts. They can talk about the early church being the vehicle of communicating these things, but the fact of the matter is, if you ask the Roman Catholic Church today, can you tell us what the non-inspired, non-inscripturated traditions are, upon which you have defined papal infallibility, the bodily assumption of marriage, the immaculate conception, these things like that, where can we find this?

They can't tell you, because it doesn't really exist. They get to choose what is and what is not tradition out of this vast amount of writing from the early centuries and even later centuries of the Christian church.

Scripture Alone and the Sufficiency of the Bible

And so that leaves us in the amount of time we have left. Let me see what I have here. Let me just give you this one quote, just as an example of this, by the way. I had mentioned to you that you will find people continuing to affirm very clearly the ultimate authority of Scripture.

Here's Gregory of Nyssa. He's writing at the end of the fourth century. We make the Holy Scriptures the canon and the rule of every dogma. We have necessarily looked upon that and receive alone that which may be made conformable to the intention of those writers.

This is not the voice of modern Rome. This is not the voice of the person who says the Scriptures alone will lead you astray. You need to have the magisterium to interpret these four things for you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The Holy Scriptures are seen to be the canon, the standard, the rule of every dogma. And a dogma that is not consistent with that inspired text cannot be accepted. Now, of course, Romans say, well, every dogma we have is consistent Scripture.

But what they mean by that is that you can look at Luke 1 .28 and you can take a greeting of an angel who says to Mary, peccatum enne, you who are greatly favored, you have received grace from God. And you can build a mountain of theology based upon just that one angelic greeting.

And that's what Rome, of course, has done and continues to do. And if she ever defines the fifth Marian dogma and the pressure continues to exist, millions of petitions have been turned in to define Mary, fifth Marian dogma, as the co-redactress, co-mediatrix, an advocate for the people of God.

Co-redactrix, co-redeemer, co-mediatrix, co-mediator. Co does not mean equal. They will very quickly point that out. But the idea being that she is involved in the work of mediation. She is involved in the work of redemption.

She is an advocate for the people of God. It would be the final step in the perfect parallel of Jesus by Mary in modern Roman Catholic theology. There's a book back in 1998 or 99 called Mary, Another Redeemer?

That lays all of that out and goes through what that particular movement is. You might find that to be, I think, an excellent example of what happens when you deny solus patera. This is what you are open to when you deny solus patera.

Modern Rome is a mishmash of old traditional beliefs and post-modern concepts. It is the Vatican's greatest task to hold together the massively disparate viewpoints represented by Roman Catholicism today.

There is no question of that. Let's take a look. Oh, I did need to do this. Oh, man. Well, that one hasn't been done. So let me just quickly throw these in here because I was asked to do so. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Jehovah's Witnesses, by the way, have fallen at hard times.

Do you know that? Their growth rate is negative. They are struggling. Their baptisms are pretty much down to what would be called natural growth, which means you baptize your kids. They are really hurting, and that's because they don't fit well in post-modern society.

But they're still out there, and they're still very dangerous because there are very few people. An act of Jehovah's Witnesses would be spending five hours a week preparing to deal with you. How many hours a week are you preparing to deal with them?

Your average Jehovah's Witness who goes door to door is more than enough for your seminary-trained pastor. And so I say to you, if you are not memorizing the Scripture, and you could not give me a decent definition of the doctrine that's really right now, and you could not give me off the top of your head a minimum of 10 passages that teach the deity of Christ, do not invite them in.

Now, that should not be a positive thing. We should be willing to invite them in. We should be willing to give the gospel to them, but do not expose you and your family to spiritual danger if you're not prepared to do it.

Take that as a challenge. Be prepared. It's easily done if the juniors at NCA can do it after reading that. Did I get that right? Yes, I did. If the juniors can do it after reading the Torah in Trinity, you should be able to as well.

But they can be very challenging. These people know their Scriptures, and their Scriptures are a perverted Scripture. The New World Translation, Jehovah's Witnesses, I have a whole presentation here on that too, is I consider to be the most dangerous anti-Christian literature I've ever produced because you change the Bible, you change the faith, and most of us can't deal with the fact that they've changed the Bible and be able to point those things out to the average Jehovah's Witness.

I'll never forget the first time I spoke to Jehovah's Witnesses for a lengthy period of time. I was a second-year Greek student, and I had a Jehovah's Witness lady who was a housewife give me a five-minute pre-memorized presentation on the significance of the lack of the definite article of the third clause of John 1 .1.

Five-minute pre-memorized statement. I carried with me the Nesialon Greek text. No English in the Nesialon Greek text. And so I handed it across the room to her and asked her to show me a Greek article.

She didn't even know which way to hold the text. Now, we may laugh at that, but the fact of the matter is, she had taken the time to memorize what her religious authority had presented to her and how many homes that she walked into where that had never once been challenged.

Not once. Dangerous group. They claimed to believe the Holy Scripture. But, as in so many groups, not only through the perversion of the Scriptures in New World Translation, but through the exaltation of the authority of the government body of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York, they have effectively created an authority system, even more authoritarian in its control over the interpretation of Scripture than Rome itself.

You cannot even begin to question the government authority, the government body. You can never raise alternative viewpoints in the congregation or you're in deep trouble. You will be disfellowshipped at the drop of a hat.

Now, the Watchtower is struggling these days because her people, especially because of the internet and cable TV and things like that, they used to be able to really control access of information to their people.

That's very difficult for them to do now. And the future of that organization is very much up in the air as to how they're going to maintain their particular positions. But, while they claim souls for the throne, through the belief in what's called the governing authority that God has and organization that speaks for them, then they deny that authority and then even to the point of being able to pervert the Scriptures, to mistranslate them and to change their message.

Obviously, the Mormon Church does not believe in the ultimate authority of the Bible. They do believe, of course, in Scripture, but they have four canonical works, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Prophetic Rites, and the King James Version of the Bible.

And they are taken in that order, in essence. They believe that the Book of Mormon is the most perfect book of any other. And that Doctrine and Covenants and Prophetic Rites came through the prophethood of Joseph Smith.

In the Eighth Article of Faith, the Mormon Church says we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly, whatever in the world that means the individual Mormon you're talking to.

For some Mormons, that has basically meant that they could dismiss anything that the Bible said. Other Mormons are a little more well-read and not quite as quick to dismiss the Scriptures. But Mormonism is no friend to the conservative view of the inspiration of the text of Scripture, for many, many reasons.

The most obvious of being that they are polytheists. They believe in many gods, at least three gods on this planet, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And there are many gods before them. The faithful Mormon man believes, and I'm speaking of the traditional beliefs.

I realize that even Mormonism is developing its liberal branch these days. But the traditional Mormon believes that the Mormon male who was sealed to his wife for time and eternity in the Mormon temple, upon death and resurrection, will become a god and populate his own planet.

That is how God, the god of this planet, became the god of this planet. He once lived on the planet and was married and had children and so on and so forth. And so when you are a polytheist, that's about as far as you can be removed from Christianity.

In fact, I have many times said, and listen to what I'm saying here carefully, Islam is closer to Christianity than Mormonism is. Islam is closer to Christianity than Mormonism because the most fundamental definitional level of religion is whether you believe there is one true God, self-existent creator of all things, or whether you do not.

Islam and Christianity both believe that. Joseph Smith said in the King Paul funeral discourse in June of 1844, we have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil associated with Islam.

He also said the same King Paul discourse, and I posted all this on my blog last year and Nehemiah was writing. So if Nehemiah ends up as a vice president of Japan, he might want to read it again. That it is the most basic principle of the gospel to know that God is a man like you and I.

And so keep those things in mind since you start at that very foundational level of difference than clearly how you view scripture. For example, Mormonism has never produced a critical, meaningful commentary on the Book of Romans.

How can they? How can they? It's not that they lack scholarship. They have lots of scholars. BYU is cranking them out all the time. They can know the biblical language from the whole nine yards. But when you're a polytheist, you can't deal with a monotheistic scripture.

And I don't believe they ever will produce that kind of scholarship. They simply can't. So from their perspective, not only do you have an expanded canon, but you also have the concept of laudatory revelation.

And even though that has become very unpopular, Mormons still believe in it. They just don't do it. It is very important for Joseph Smith to be able to have laudatory revelation, bring all these revelations out and things like that.

But now the church is deafened. And it almost never happens anymore. So again, Mormonism likewise is in trouble. Her growth rate is, again, down to the natural growth rate. There was a time back in the late 70s, early 80s, when Mormonism was growing so fast.

When I first started studying it, there was about 3 .4 million. Now it's over 12. But there was a time around 1980 when the average Southern Baptist church had 274 members. In an average week, 273 Mormons became, Southern Baptists became Mormons.

That's one church every week converting Mormons. That's not the case anymore. Again, they're struggling with post-modernism, and they're struggling with the way that they present themselves. Very quickly, neo-orthodoxy and liberalism I've already addressed.

We live in a day where the idea that God has spoken in one way and not another way, the idea that there is one revelation that's true and another revelation that's false is simply dismissed as wishful thinking.

The idea that you can examine a revelation for consistency, the idea that you can look at the entire canon scripture, you can see the voice of God in all the scripture, even though Isaiah's addressing one issue, Jeremiah's addressing another issue, and Paul's doing his thing.

Even though we can detect their own context and all that, the idea that God is bigger than that and he can use that orchestra to create a symphony of truth. No, today, everybody has to be a soloist. You can't have a Beethoven orchestra anymore, a symphony.

You have to look at everyone and tear it apart, and you even have to look at each individual and tear him apart. You have to set Paul against Paul. That's what liberalism has done. It is so sad, and you do need to realize that, for example, the brother mentioned the potter's freedom, which is that on the table there.

That whole issue of whether God is sovereign in the matter of salvation is utterly irrelevant if you don't believe God has spoken with enough clarity to know one way or the other. In other words, in many seminaries, the whole reason that subject is not even addressed is that they don't even have a high enough view of scripture anymore to care.

You all do realize that in the vast majority of seminaries, systematic theology is no longer the central course. Systematic theology has moved out of the theology department to the history department.

It's a history discussion now because they don't any longer believe that the Bible is sufficient to give you a systematic theology. And you wonder why many of those coming out of seminaries have no authority in their preaching and their teaching because this is what they're being exposed to.

I saw, of course I don't fool, but I would see people come into the campus, and I did it through Phoenix, and it's more conservative in the extension campuses than the main campus by a long shot, thankfully.

Mainly because we have people who are in ministry, so they're a little bit, they're not into the puffy cloud, ooh, let's speculate about things that happens on a main campus. But anyway, I saw people come into Fuller during my years there who came in actively involved and conservative.

And when they left, they had a master's degree in confusion. They did, they had a master's degree in confusion. They had not had a proper foundation when they went in, and when they went out, it was sad to see.

It was sad to see. For me, it was great, like I said, because it was a training ground. I was fighting all the time. But for most people, that's not really an overly good thing. So, with just a, ah. This is very rigorously.

It makes me disgusted, absolutely disgusted, to watch on the internet a man named Todd Bentley mocking the gospel of Jesus Christ. That man will answer before a holy God. If you don't know who I'm talking about, it's some guy in Lakeland, Florida, who kicks people for Jesus.

And it's just a, talk about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Ooh. Amazing stuff going on there, but what is the constant refrain of what he's saying? God spoke to me and said, well, if you really believe that, then you'd better expand the leather on your body and make that knee the book of the New Testament.

Because if God said that, is it theia mustos? Is it God breathed, or is it not? You tell me. And the fact that there are so many who allow for that terminology all the time, and who, in essence, compromise soul scripture, and say, well, God hasn't given us enough in scripture.

We need to have all this other stuff. The fact that that continues on and is allowed has led to, well, just think over the past decade. All the wacky movies, you know, the Laughing Revival, and the Toronto stuff, and now Todd Bentley running around.

And how much dishonor has been done to Jesus Christ? You wanna see how this works? Go to my Muslim opponents on YouTube and watch their videos where they say, you better be careful when the Christians come along, because they wanna give you the Holy Spirit, and watch what the Holy Spirit does.

And all of God do is switch to TVM. And here's people running around rooms and doing this themselves. Todd Bentley's running across stages and meeting people with colon cancer, and all the rest of this stuff, all in the name of the Spirit of God.