“White Nature,” the 1946 Lie, Jimmy Akin

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. My name's James White. We're in the big studio again today. Not totally certain why, but I do want to do some stuff with Jimmy Akin's book.

And so maybe we'll put that up on the screen. And maybe there will be something I want to circle or something. I don't know. That's a possibility.

We'll see. But I want to start off with a video that actually came across my radar screen a couple of months ago.

But it popped up again today. And I don't know if it was because I saw a portion of it typed out.

Because woke preacher clips will transcribe portions.

And maybe it was seeing it in written form that made me stop and go.

But it was Danny Akin from recording something for the ERLC.

And of course, the Silly Maps Convention is coming up in just a matter of weeks. And there's going to be a lot of important discussion going on.

And right now, it looks like a whole lot of polarization, which is what critical theory is designed to do, one way or the other.

I don't see people coming together very much.

Because I don't see a willingness. There can't be a willingness on either side, really.

Because what you're really talking about is whether you can bring in external sources of authority and still maintain the sufficiency of scripture.

And certainly, that's how critical theory is functioning for many of these folks. But be it as it may, as I listened to Danny Akin, who is president of the

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. So you have the president of the convention. And then obviously, the presidents of the seminaries are hugely important.

And one thing I've certainly noticed, and many other people have noticed as well, is the

Southern Baptist seminaries as a whole, as well as other formerly very conservative seminaries.

Whether it would be Reformed seminaries, whether they are

Baptist seminaries, Dallas Theological Seminary, just a huge openness to social justice movements, critical theory, and all the stuff that comes from that.

Identity, not just identity politics, but identity theology.

If there could even be, that's actually a contradiction in terms, isn't it? I mean, theology is the study of the knowledge of God.

And God is the one who gives us all of our identity by his being our creator. So the whole idea of identity politics, the whole idea of being identified by your skin color, by your ethnicity, by what you claim to be your gender or various forms of gender or whatever else, all of that really never had its origin and source within the

Christian faith for the simple reason that within Christian theology, your identity is defined by the fact that you're a creature and that God has made you.

And God has the right to place you in a particular context. And so anyway, going back to what's going on here in the

Semester Convention, this division, I am not the only one to easily see it leading to schism into the creation of new denominations.

I don't know why it is that the conservatives always lose the institutions and the buildings and have to start from scratch for all that stuff.

But that seems to be the direction that things are going. Anyway, it's been very obvious with the

Kingdom Diversity Initiative at Southeastern and just the number of people, just the students coming out of Southeastern, extremely woke in their preaching and their teaching, their understanding, and so on and so forth.

Had to come from someplace, but for a long time, it's been, well, it's not coming from our teachers.

Then you listen to the videos and go, well, yeah, actually it was pretty obviously there.

But anyway, this video, like I said, is not new, but maybe it was just the fact that there was a portion of it that was transcribed that made me go, because here's what, this is the portion of the video.

Let me just play you the audio of it so you can hear what I'm referring to.

I understand more and more that my perspective is not the perspective of my

African -American brothers and sisters or my Hispanic brothers and sisters, my Asian brothers and sisters.

By the way, let me just mention something. When I think back on the history of this ministry, let me take two of those groups there.

We had a Hispanic vice president for a long time.

He's no longer with us. But he was instrumental in pushing me into dealing with Roman Catholicism.

And it wasn't because that was a quote -unquote Hispanic issue.

It wasn't because he had a quote -unquote Hispanic way of looking at things. We just never thought like this in those days.

You did it because it was gospel. You did it because there were people that needed to be reached. And the whole idea of there being a

Hispanic way of thinking or a black way of thinking or an

Asian way of thinking, we had a couple of Asian guys that were involved with us and very actively involved.

And it wasn't like ... No one's saying that there aren't ...

You know, that some people probably on some of our cruises were like, wow, he really does have a kilt.

Wow, you know? And I even wore my kilt for one of the classes we did.

Where did we ... It was an inside passage cruise that we did, I think, before the debate with Shabbir Ali.

And I remember teaching one of the classes because it was going to be right before formal night on the cruise.

Boy, those were fun. I'm going to miss doing that kind of stuff. But anyway, and I wore my kilt to teach the class because we were going straight from there to formal night, and I wasn't going to have time.

Not exactly something you ... You don't get into a kilt as quickly as you get into a pair of jeans, okay?

So it takes a little time. And so there were probably some people that were like, okay, yeah, you know.

So that's totally different, though. There are Scotsmen who don't wear kilt.

There are Scotsmen who could care less about kilt. It's not definitional. It's just part of the culture.

But it wasn't an idea. It wasn't like, well, I'm teaching on the issue of the atonement here, and I'm going to be giving you the

Scottish identity idea of the atonement, and this guy over here is going to do the Irish, and then we've got the

English over here, and then we're going to have a big war because we've frequently did that. And then we've got the French, and man, they are way out there.

And then, of course, the Germans are going to wipe us both out. And none of that, it never even crossed our mind that that was how you were supposed to do things.

But now that's what you've got, is you've got the Asian group is all one group.

And as you know, the whole problem with one of the many problems, many, many, many problems with critical theory is that it treats you not as an individual, but as simply a member of a group.

And if you break the parameters of that group, then you're to be brought back into line because that sort of messes everything up.

Why would you do that? You should stick with whatever your group is told, it's supposed to believe.

Well, it doesn't work that way. And so I just, when I hear this, especially within the context of the church, when

I hear somebody saying, there's the black way of thinking, my black brothers don't think like me.

Well, if what you mean is there could be cultural emphases that I might have to come to understand and vice versa.

Okay, but when it comes to theology, that's disaster. That's absolute disaster.

It's the end of any meaningfully unified church, which is the whole point of critical theory.

I mean, if you just trace it back far enough, its purpose is to destroy unifying themes and concepts.

And the whole purpose of the spirit is to unify.

So it doesn't fit real well, but a useful tool is what we've been told.

Anyway. You do see life differently. They're operating out of a different paradigm, a different context.

See life differently, operating out of a different paradigm. Well, if it's as surface level as what you might wear for special events, okay.

But no, that's not how it should be in the church. That's not, that's no.

What do you mean a different paradigm? The paradigm that unifies, that is based upon the imputed righteousness of Christ and the presence of the

Holy Spirit should overrun, override any kind of difference in paradigm.

It should be the ultimate paradigm that forms all the sub -paradigms. At least that's how the early church viewed it.

Next, that's very different than mine. And I didn't really realize that until I stopped talking and began to listen.

So I think one of the things that white evangelicals in particular have got to do is become better listeners. In addition to that, we've got to be willing to surrender power, which is again, not indigenous to our nature as I -

There, there's white evangelicals need to learn to share power.

It would be really nice to see where this comes from in the New Testament, this concept of the power structures.

And I mean, there's a lot of discussion in the New Testament about power, but it's not this kind of power. Share power.

Well, if the power comes from the spirit of God, we all have the spirit of God, then what? What's this all about?

This is clearly not being derived from biblical categories. This comes from someplace else. But what is a white evangelical nature?

He says it's not our nature, which is not share - being willing to surrender power is not indigenous to our nature.

Now, if the intention was to say that for all human beings, humility of mind, that is laying aside your own rights in the service of others, is not indigenous to our fallen nature, great, but that's not what was said.

It sounded like what was being said is that there is something specific about white evangelical nature.

That's what caught me. I'm like, what is the white evangelical nature? I'm sorry,

I spent a lot of time in school and seminaries and stuff like that. It's just demonstration of how old

I am. We skipped that part. We missed it. And some people say, right, you did miss it.

You should have been talking about that. No, we somehow managed to do a rather complete theological education without ever hearing anything about this because there is no white evangelical nature.

What does that even mean? That is a denial of God's creation of individuals and our personal responsibility before God.

What do you mean white nature? I mean, most of the people that I have done theological battle with have been, not all of them, but a lot of them have been of the same, they're white like me, but we had massive differences in theology.

So what's the point? I don't, what is a white theological nature?

And what is a black theological nature? What's a black nature and a white nature? I mean, this is critical theory speaking.

These are categories that are coming from outside of scripture. I cannot believe that Jimmy Akin, James, Jimmy Akin, Danny Akin, sorry, doing

Jimmy Akin later on. Too many Akins. I don't believe that Danny Akin could ever make a biblical case for the idea there's such a thing as a white nature and that it's not indigenous to white nature to surrender power.

Show, take up the Bible and give me some idea of what in the world you're talking about here because I can't even begin to understand it.

I mean, I have so many black brothers and I would never, ever, ever, ever insult them to talk about the black nature and just simply throw everybody into the same pile and say, this is what black people do because that's not the case.

It's just not true. I know that doesn't matter much today. I mean, in most of the things we're dealing with in our society, the numbers and the facts, numbers and facts don't matter anymore.

There's no question about that. But I just wondered what is a white evangelical nature?

How do you even start to explain something like that? I don't know. I just don't know.

But it's dangerous, very, very dangerous to have to try to deal with something like that.

It's bad stuff. Okay. I ran into this yesterday.

Is everybody else, it started about six months ago, but instead of spam calls, now

I've finally, I've got enough programs installed on my phone now that most of the spam calls get silenced, thrown away, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Pretty much, if you're not in my contacts, you're not getting through to me anyways. That's just what I've had to do.

It's what happens when you've had the same number for ever and a day. But now it's text messages. You know.

I haven't even looked, but yeah, I try to block the phone number and it's irrelevant.

But all sorts of, here's one wanting me to do a survey, and I could have lost 500 pounds from all the stuff.

If I had bought all the stuff that's been advertised, you could lose 40 pounds. Here's another 40 pounds. I could have disappeared from all the diet stuff that's been sent to me and everything else.

And it just seems like it was just the past six months. It's just exploded how many you get.

And it's like, oh, please stop. There's a special, I do believe there's a special place of punishment for people who do that job.

I'm sorry. You may be stuck doing it, but I hope and pray that you'll apply at McDonald's or something, anything other than doing that.

McDonald's isn't hiring, because they're replacing everybody with robots because they can't pay the minimum wage.

Gotcha. See how that works. Yesterday, the folks over at Stand to Reason, I don't know how,

I don't remember who tweeted what to whom, when, et cetera, but a fellow over at Stand to Reason had an article about a movie that is being funded right now, but they've already been doing shooting, obviously, as we're gonna look at the trailer, called 1946, the mistranslation that shifted culture.

And as soon as I saw it, I knew exactly what it was about. And if you've watched this program, well, it was one of the first programs we did in here.

We had done a program the week before in the smaller studio where Dear Friend had written in and we had the

TikTok theologian lady. Remember, we played this TikTok video where this chick claims to have an

MDiv and read Greek and all the rest of this stuff. And then the next week, it was another woman, but it was the same argument, but we now had this to work with.

And so we did a longer program and we walked through 1 Corinthians 6, 1

Timothy 1. We went back to the Greek Septuagint, Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, tie it all together and demonstrated that the argument, that the idea is, is that arsenikoites, arsenikoitae in the plural, in 1

Corinthians 6, 9, has been mistranslated by the Revised Standard Version Translation Committee in 1946.

And therefore, this is why all evangelicals think homosexuality is a sin, is because of a mistranslation in 1946.

And the Christians didn't believe it was a sin before then. And it's just, it's such a bad argument.

It's just so obviously fallacious. No one who can actually read more than one language and actually takes just a few moments to step back, lay their prejudice aside and go, okay, you're saying this, this, and this?

You don't get it, do you? And so for me, it's really hard because it's one thing when you have folks who maybe are just ignorant or something, this argument is so transparently fallacious, so transparently bad, that I just,

I can't begin to understand how anyone could ever promote it. And now they're going to make a movie out of it?

Yep, that's what they're doing. They're going to make a movie out of it. And so I want to look at the trailer.

And by the way, YouTube censors, all the rest of you folks, this is called Fair Use. This is,

I'm going to start and stop it. I'm going to point out what's going on in it. This is for critical review.

If you ding it for that, you're demonstrating that you don't care about law and that you're a tyrant, okay?

Just so you know, you are convicting yourself of that if you do that, just so you know. But let's be honest.

One of the reasons to respond to this as soon as possible, this might come out, let's say the

Equality Act passes. If this comes out after the Equality Act passes, we won't have the freedom to respond to it anyway.

Even if it's one big, long pile of lies, we won't have the freedom to do so.

You dare say something in response, you're going to be censored out of there. And honestly, got to remember, that's just government.

Right now, this is a corporate tyranny that's taking place. So Google and Facebook and those folks, they don't care whether the

Equality Act passes or not. They've already passed it in their own mind. And their own censors already act upon it.

So who knows, we may never be able to have the freedom to do so. But as I looked at this thing and as I saw what they were doing, and recognized the methodology that is being used, at first, it's like, oh, this is good.

We saw how even badly made TikTok videos can go viral.

This is so much like what you see on the History Channel. This is

History Channel type stuff. This is where Gnostic Gospel type stuff.

I mean, these are a dime, a dozen. This is the tomb of Jesus stuff that I wrote an entire book in response to years ago.

This is how to use media to promote a horrifically bad argument.

And the reason you get away with it is because the majority of your audience is simply not educated to think critically.

And of course, that's what they say about Christians, is we don't do critical thought. Actually, these days, it's the exact opposite.

It's Christians are doing the critical thought and the secularists who are stuck in infant mode when it comes to a level of thought.

But anyway, I want you to watch this to see what they're doing and to recognize that as long as people are ignorant about what's going on in the background, as long as people don't understand background issues, then they're going to be like, well, you know, okay, fine, no problem, whatever.

But if they understand what's back there, oh, okay, trying to get it to duplicate here.

And it decided not just try it again, duplicate. There we go.

Uh -oh, but it's not full size. So I'll have to go over there and fix that. Anyway, if you understand what's going on in the background, then, oh, thank you very much.

Then you'll see what kind of argumentation is being used. So I'll stop and start it and make some comments, but listen and watch and realize the first thing you think of is, oh, people that are going to be deceived and things like that.

But my immediate thought, and this goes back 21 years now, goes back almost a quarter of a century, when

Norm Geisler put his book out, Chosen But Free. You know, the first thing crossed my mind, oh, there's going to be so many people that are confused.

I need to respond to this. And now in hindsight, it's like, man, that book produced more

Reformed believers than Norm could have ever, ever, ever guessed it would.

And so the point is that what this reveals is that the church in the

English -speaking world needs to know what these arguments are, know why they are so horribly bad, know what the

Bible actually says in these texts, and use this film as a means of opening doors.

Because I have a feeling it could be just like the Zeitgeist movie was and stuff like that.

I'll just go watch this movie. I did, and let's talk about it. I did, and let's talk about it.

I mean, let's get the tracks printed up. Was 1946 is not when homosexuality became a sin in the

Bible. That was with a guy named Moses. That's what we need to have ready to go.

And I don't believe there's any Christian who has the spirit of God, who cannot know the word of God well enough to respond to these things.

Really true. So let's look at the trailer. It's two minutes, 23 seconds long.

1946, the mistranslation that shifted culture. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals shall inherit the kingdom of God.

I went into this research wanting the answer, no matter what it revealed. If God said you are such a horrible abomination that I needed to rid this planet of myself,

I was willing to do that because I love. I, from what

I can tell at looking at the website trailer, this individual speaking right now,

I think is a graduate of Talbot Seminary who claims to be a celibate homosexual.

I think, I think, because he just said, rid the world of myself, which is such a strange way of putting it.

So very odd. To say it that way. But it also illustrates a deep identity crisis in the sense that he identifies himself by his sexual desires, which is a major problem right there.

That's a whole issue from the beginning. But notice we're looking, you've got commentaries on Job, and you hear the music in the background.

And I'm getting ready to do this research. Okay, all right. So let's keep following it.

God that much. But when I dug in, that's not what I found. We didn't know what we were going to find when we dug into the

RSV notes. There's a letter written by a 21 -year -old seminary student to the translation team saying, hey,

I think you chose the wrong word when you put the word homosexual in here. He says, I write this after many months of serious thought and hard work to point out that which to me is a -

Okay, now just looking at this. Okay, so one of the big things here evidently is some 21 -year -old wrote a letter to the

RSV translation committee disagreeing with their use of the term homosexual for arsonic coy tie at 1

Corinthians 6 .9. And the guy's still alive and we're gonna interview him. So?

I mean, the ESV translation committee is still active and Lockman still has the

NSB folks working. And I think the NKJV folks still meet once in a while.

And so? The issue is not what term is chosen today, first of all.

It's the meaning of arsonic coy tie in Paul's day and what origins we can ascribe to his use of that term which is the

Greek septuagint at this particular place. But notice in the background here,

I can read because this is a shot of a microfilm. Meant by arsonic coy tie was two men unnaturally participating with each other in sexual relations.

I submit the word homosexual is an inaccurate and incorrect translation of mollicoy and arsonic coy tie.

Even more accurate, the translation of the two Greek words together. That's interesting, because that's all

I could see in that particular point of this. But as you might be aware, or you will be made aware in the future when we do full responses to this kind of stuff, again, in a more formal fashion.

Because when we did the response in here, we had some sound issues. There was breakup with the microphone.

And so there's words missing and stuff like that. So it's well worth doing it. And we're probably gonna do it and have our first live studio audience in the new studio when we do it.

So maybe we can have some Q &A and stuff like that with the audience as well.

But we went through all this stuff. We talked about how the ESV interprets arsonic coy tie and mollicoy as referring to the active and passive partners in homosexual behavior.

While others say, no, arsonic coy tie is just homosexual. Mollicoy is effeminate. Though you can see that drawing super strict boundaries there is difficult.

But anyway, so there's this super secret that someone wrote a letter.

Trust me, every single Bible translation since letters were invented, the translators have gotten letters from people saying, you blew it here, or you blew it there.

Every modern translation has files full of these things. Just like the

RSV does. There's nothing secret or anything special about that at all.

But you gotta make this sound interesting because if it was just, hey, we're gonna make a movie where we're gonna argue that homosexual is not the best translation of the

Greek term arsonic coy tie, well, good luck marketing that one or getting much in the way of funding for that.

So you gotta make it sound a little bit more exciting. Serious weakness in translation. Misinformed and misguided people may use the

RSV translation of 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10 as a sacred weapon. He wrote the letter as David S.

Okay, so there's the term that obviously, when

I read the press release and some other things on the website, sacred weapon. Sacred weapon.

So you might say, well, this is not the first English translation of the

Bible. Did Christianity think that homosexuality was good and wholesome and right and wonderful up until 1946?

Well, of course not. Well, what terms do they use? Sodomite. Oh, you can't say that.

Well, okay. Abusers of mankind with themselves.

That's why they were looking for a better way of describing arsonos, male, coitus, sexual intercourse in bed, men with men doing what you do in bed.

What terminology? And by that point in time, homosexual was a term that was developing.

And certainly it is amazing that there are people literally who go, well, terms like homosexual are modern.

So are you thinking the behavior is modern? The issue is what terminology you use to describe it.

And so it's real common for people to say, well, you know, this term that Luther used just meant something about boys.

Well, that's not what it means today. The term that is used in Luther's translation is understood as being in reference to homosexual behavior.

So I guess people get away with this because you can go through public education today.

You can go through the vast majority of education today and never, ever, ever be challenged to learn anything about the development of language, linguistics, translation, and sadly, most people are monolingual.

Most people in the United States only read or speak a single language.

And because of that, you can tell them all sorts of things and they don't really have a easy, natural way of detecting whether what you're saying is overly true or not.

And I think that's why people get away with things that they do. We found him and he's still alive.

So I wrote a letter and to my amazement, I got a reply back about three weeks later.

I received your letter and there may be something to what you say. The domino had already fallen and that word followed through to all the other mainline translations that we have today.

So the domino had already fallen. So one translation, let me tell you something.

Let me give you a little history here. My upbringing was very much in the fundamentalist realm of things.

And so General Association of Regular Baptists and then my teenage years, Southern Baptists, but especially back in the 60s and 70s, very much in the

Baptist fundamentalist camp. And there was a strong dislike of the

RSV. The RSV came from the World Council of Churches and that meant the

RSV was compromised. And so the idea that that compromised liberal translation, because that's how it was viewed, was the domino and all the conservative fundamentalists go, oh, okay, sure, we'll just go there.

That's not why modern translations do not opt for phraseology such as abusers of mankind with themselves.

That doesn't communicate today. And so this kind of, well, the dominoes had already fallen.

No, anybody who is fairly, now remember, my understanding is the person doing this research is a homosexual.

Anyone who is fairly analyzing the information knows that there is a compellingly strong argument to be derived from consistent exegesis of the

Apostle Paul and his intimate knowledge of the phraseology of the

Greek septuagint that informs the meaning of arsenokoitai at 1

Corinthians 6, 9 and 1 Timothy 1, 10. That is just a fact.

So you don't have to go looking. These other videos, and you can't tell from this, but these other videos were responded to, in the background is, these are just all a bunch of white conservative evangelicals, which wasn't the case with the

RSV at all, but this is where they're coming from. It's the 1950s and it's

Ozzie and Harriet and so on and so forth and leave it to Beaver. And so they're just homophobes.

And this was a homophobic error in the Bible. That's what they want to say.

Rather than dealing with any of the modern, meaningful argumentation from both sides, there is so much material from homosexual scholars going, yeah, of course that's what it means.

Like, duh. What? Yeah, there are people, we get letters.

Oh yeah, there are people who much prefer stronger terminology than homosexual. But I think the thesis of this film is going to be if they hadn't done that, then you wouldn't have homophobia.

You would not have the rejection of homosexuality. The reality is that has been the church's stance all along.

Don't tell me, don't go grab bad, bad sourced material.

There are the authors out there. I know, I've read their books. Don't grab the bad material and say, well, but there was a lot of homosexuality.

Yeah, there was. Why? Was that consistent or inconsistent with even the formal teachings of, say, the

Roman Catholic Church? Well, it was inconsistent. Was there homosexuality amongst the leadership? Yes. Was there homosexuality amongst priests?

Yes. Was that consistent or inconsistent? It was inconsistent. So don't go for the inconsistency and go, ah, see, there it is.

So anyway, 53 seconds left to go. I started weeping because I was thinking about all the damage that had been done over the last 60 years.

Lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic. The Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin.

Why did they put the word homosexual into the Bible? What were they thinking? The church is doubling down on this issue.

Did you catch that? Why did they put the word homosexual into the

Bible? Whoever says that does not understand where the Bible came from.

No one can put anything into the Bible. Okay, you can't put anything into the

Bible without changing the Bible. Now, the Chinese want to come up with a Chinese version of the

Bible. Well, it won't be a Bible because it will involve changing the fundamental meanings of words, taking passages out, inserting new passages, whatever it might be.

No one put homosexual in the Bible. Moses talked about what men do with men rather than doing it with women in the context of sexual sins and said it was an abomination and that the land spewed the inhabitants out because they engaged in such behavior.

And that was approximately 3 ,400 years ago. No one can change that.

These folks want to change that. And they want to change the fact that 1 ,400 years later, the man that God uses to write a major portion of the

New Testament and especially that which informs the church as to the church's theology and morality and ethics was consistent with what

Moses had said 1 ,400 years earlier because he was a follower of Jesus. And of course, Jesus was the one who gave those words to Moses in the first place.

So all of this revisionism, and that's what it is, it is revisionism. We want to revise

Christianity to fit into the new world. No one put something in the

Bible. That's just simply sheer ignorance. It's just ignorance. Because they've so politicized it.

♪ Oh, my Savior, how great

Thou art ♪ We're gonna do the work to make this thing right. ♪ How great

Thou art ♪ This shows that there was a mistake, and it's an honest mistake, and we have an opportunity to change it.

There was a mistake. Ars Inquietes doesn't mean that. So there was a mistake, and we can change it.

We can change it. We can fix it. You see? Which means we can accept homosexuality.

So the affirming churches are right, and all the rest of this stuff, that's where we are. That's what this is about.

So I have written, I have not heard back anything from anybody, but I've asked, so is there any type of a schedule?

Is there any projected release? I understand a book is being written to go along with it.

Et cetera, et cetera. Well, here's the thing, folks. We can sit back and complain.

We can sit back and say, oh, more falsehood, more error. Whoa, Rich is playing with cameras in the back again.

We can do all that kind of stuff. Or we can go, all right, this is coming.

We know what the arguments are. Let's arm everyone with the truth.

Because this is one of the more shallow, bad approaches of trying to defend homosexuality.

It's not anywhere near front end.

This is bad stuff. This is not good. It's easy to refute if you simply have the facts, if you simply know a little something about the history, a little something about the meaning of the languages, a little something about how you translate them, and anybody can get that information.

And we're gonna be making sure that everyone has it because I think it's extremely, extremely important.

So it's coming. We're warning you ahead of time, it's coming.

So, all right. Now, on the last program, we, toward the end,

I mentioned that, you know, I responded to a little bit more from Trent Horn.

As we discuss key issues, he had done a brief response and I had pointed out where some of the problems were.

And I think most people who have heard the depth to which we have gone in analyzing

Trent Horn's claims knows that we have been doing far more than just simply, well,

I don't like what he said. We've been really trying to do the same thing we did last year in looking at Ken Wilson's horrific dissertation,

Oxford dissertation, Manichaeanism and dupied, remember all that stuff? Yeah, hadn't had to say that for a while.

And, you know, how Calvin actually got his theology from Manichaeans eating plants and passing gas and stuff like that.

So it's still really hard to not to just go, wow, there's people are really promoting that.

But anyway, so when we did that and when we've been responding to Trent Horn, what are we trying to do?

We are trying to model how to do church history in a meaningful fashion.

And we are demonstrating that there is a fundamental difference between how we do church history and how

Roman Catholics do church history. Because of the fact the Roman Catholic church tells people dogmatically what they are to find in church history.

And we can simply let the early church fathers be the early church fathers. And when we encounter them saying things that are clearly not consistent with the apostolic witness, we'd go disagree.

And we don't like the Roman Catholic have to go, how did they come up with that? Because everything they believe is just simply what came from the apostles.

And I've pointed out that so many times in my debates over the years with people like Jerry Matic and others,

I'll quote from early church sources. And well, that was just his personal opinion.

So when Augustine says things that substantiate

Roman Catholic beliefs, then he's presenting apostolic tradition. When he contradicts

Roman Catholic beliefs, it's just his personal opinion. So you have an overriding interpretive grid that just simply says, well, whatever the church says, the tradition is tradition, we follow it.

And if we find it in certain sources, great. And if it's something that says something otherwise, okay, so when you find all the early church fathers that did not interpret the

Petrine promise of Matthew 16, the way we do, they weren't reflecting apostolic tradition.

But when we find someone who does, that's apostolic tradition and you should bow to it. And most people stand back and go, wait a minute, that's assuming that you're right to begin with.

That's a pretty bad argument. And it's like, yeah, yeah, it is, it is. So in the middle of all that, oh,

I wondered why that had happened like that. In the middle of all that, I also mentioned the fact that we were going to be looking at the

Bible as a Catholic book by Jimmy Akin, who is not the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, just has the same pronunciation as last name.

And the reason being that it was communicated to me in some fashion, through some means, that one of the reasons that Jimmy Akin wants to debate sola scriptura is because Jimmy Akin has developed new arguments against sola scriptura.

And so I'm like, okay, where? Well, here's the book. Okay, so I read the book.

And I go, nothing new there. There is nothing that I have not dealt with before.

Doesn't mean we won't deal with it again, that's fine. But as I've said, what

I've learned starting in 1990, so what I've known for 31 years now is that Roman Catholic apologists want, have agreed to have some kind of a secret, super secret handbook, code book, whatever, that says never debate

Protestants on an even playing field. Always have them on the defensive.

Attack sola scriptura. Never, ever defend your ultimate authority.

So you would think that in a debate on ultimate authorities,

I would be saying, my assertion would be that the only

Theanistos revelation in possession of believers today is the scriptures.

That's all we have. We have nothing that Jesus said.

We have nothing any apostle ever said outside of scripture. And Mitch Paco admitted that.

And I would think that most Roman Catholic apologists would have to admit that that's true.

Nothing has been dogmatically defined outside of what is found in the pages of scripture. So my assertion is, if it is to be binding, it has to be divine in origin.

It must be Theanistos so that you can have a consistency, the consistency that flows from sola scriptura and tota scriptura.

And if you violate either of those two, you will never have consistency. And the evidence of that is, look at all the religions that claim to be

Christian that rejects sola scriptura. How consistent are they with one another?

Well, there is not a shred of consistency amongst them. They all, the realm of beliefs and teachings represented by churches that claim to be

Christian that deny sola scriptura is 10 ,000 times wider than the realm of belief in theology that is presented by Christian churches that accept sola scriptura and seek to function on the basis of sola scriptura.

At the same time, the Roman Catholic does not come into this conversation without a positive position that they must defend on the same level, but they won't do it.

Why? Why? Because that ultimate claim of authority has a name.

I'm not, I don't mean sola ecclesia, that's a true descriptor. It has a name,

Pope Francis. And a few years ago, it was

Pope Benedict. Then a few years before that, it was Pope John Paul. And anybody knows that you can put those three next to each other, shake them up, drop a

Mentos into it, and it'll explode because they ain't saying the same thing.

Benedict and John Paul, whole lot closer, definitely. Francis, who knows?

Who knows? Ask your red -pilled compatriots. Guys, you know who

I'm talking about. There are many on the Roman Catholic side who've recognized just how variant

Francis is from those who've come before him.

And so they don't want to, there's, somebody sent a memo out, and it was probably two days after Francis was, after the white smoke came out of the chimney, that said, whatever we do, we will not defend

Francis. We will distract. We will spin.

We need to practice doing the MSNBC, CNN thing. But whatever you do, don't defend

Francis because we can't, because if you defend him one day, who knows what he's gonna say the next day that turns you into a very foolish -looking person.

And so if we were to debate ultimate authorities, I'm like, okay, I will take that which is

Theanostas over that which is Francis any day. And you may say, well, we have both.

No, you don't. You do not have both. Because once you start talking about the magisterium being the mechanism of interpreting and determining what is and what is not scripture and interpreting and determining what is and what is not tradition, that's all you've got.

You cannot go to a source of authority that you have already said must be submitted to Pope Francis or whoever else and say, it's actually a higher authority.

It doesn't work. That's incoherent. So I want to look at what

Jimmy Akin says and say, okay, I looked for the new stuff. I didn't find the new stuff.

Let's examine what was said. And hopefully that'll be of benefit to folks. And maybe there'll be some way having then pointed everybody to it and said, okay, here's what he says.

Here's what we say to arrange something from there. So I read some of the section.

This is from the writing of the New Testament. And then you have the apostolic age.

Then after the apostles go, and there's discussion of some of the other books that are written later on and things like that.

But here's a section. This is says page 102 of 149, but that's in Kindle.

So sometimes that follows through perfectly and sometimes it doesn't, it all depends.

It's just the way things are today. Doctrine in the apostolic age. Before discussing later periods, we should consider how

Christians in the apostolic age formed their beliefs like us. They couldn't simply make things up. They were bound to heed the revelation that God had provided.

That revelation was found both in the books of scripture and in the, please notice, capital S, capital

T, sacred tradition handed down by Jesus and the apostles. And so here we have sacred tradition.

We have no definition. We have no references given. What is this sacred tradition?

We know what capital S, capital T, sacred tradition means in Roman Catholicism today, but it's not what the term tradition meant then.

And so is this an anachronism or is it just simply assuming what it is yet to prove?

I think that's what it's most definitely doing. That revelation was found both in the books of scripture.

Yes, the early church was a scripture quoting people.

Anybody who, and that's one of the things I like about, for example, the old edition of the

Apostolic Fathers by Lightfoot. They italicized Old Testament citations as you're reading.

And so you can go, well, they're quoting from the Old Testament. Look at that, there's that. And then even quoting from New Testament books as well, showing how quickly they became accepted as authoritative.

But I don't find them using this phrase sacred tradition in this way.

So let's keep an eye out for anachronism. Let's keep an eye out for reading things in when we haven't actually proven anything yet.

Christians in this period thus used a scripture plus tradition model. We haven't been given any examples of this yet, but there's the assertion, scripture plus tradition model.

Now it's capitalized tradition. So this isn't just, well, before the

New Testament books were written, the proclamation of the gospel has to be oral because it hasn't been written down yet.

Just as when Isaiah preached, he preached orally first and then you have the written documents, but we don't know what he preached orally, but all we have is the written documents.

And that's all that men are held accountable to. They're not held accountable to stuff that they don't have access to. Now what's interesting is we read last time,

Rome says no more revelation. Revelation ends with the death of the apostles.

Remember, read that from the universal Catholic catechism. So if no more revelation is being given, then this early period is parallel to the period right before Jesus in regards to the

Old Testament, right? In other words, you had revelation being given by God in the

Old Testament and that revelation ended prior to Christ.

Now we disagree as to when prior to Christ, even the Jews said that the bath coal, the voice of God had ended with Malachi.

The Roman Catholics reject the Jewish testimony as to in regards to the canon of scripture and accept books that the

Jewish canon excluded and that they did not lay up in the temple. It's another issue and go into that as we might, but everyone agrees that prior to Christ, revelation had ended in the sense that there aren't more

Old Testament books being written after the time of Jesus. So there is a transitionary period in the

Old Testament. And as I have asked many times in the past, that means the

Roman Catholic has to give us a consistent answer as to how a believing Jew, 50 years before Christ, knew that Isaiah and second

Chronicles were actually scripture because Jesus held them accountable to that. Have you not read what was written?

Jesus held them accountable to those things. And so how'd they know? What was the methodology that they knew?

And if you use any arguments about the early church period, that would result in the necessity of some kind of infallible magisterium in the

Old Testament, then you need to identify what the infallible magisterium was in the Old Testament. Who was it?

And why don't you accept the conclusions they came to about the apocryphal books?

So just trying to keep things consistent. That's an important thing to do.

So Christians this period thus used a scripture plus tradition model also to make sure they understood the contents of scripture and tradition correctly.

They relied on the church's divinely guided and authoritative teachers, the group we now refer to as the magisterium, magister, teacher.

This group originally consisted of the apostles, but when they passed from the scene, it was inherited by their successors, the bishops.

Now, again, magisterium, not a biblical term, but if that's how the old church did it, why didn't the, why isn't the parallel existing in the

Old Testament? Who were the, what was the Old Testament magisterium? Did they have canonical authority?

And if so, why don't you accept their canonical authority? And if you have to have it, but you don't say they had it under the

Old Testament, then why not? Why is there an inconsistency? According to the Catholic church, we should use the same model the first Christians did.

We need to rely on scripture and tradition as the sources of publicly binding revelation, and we need to rely on the magisterium, the bishops teaching in union with the

Pope. Okay, now, this is so anachronistic that it's astonishing, but this really is how a lot of Roman Catholics think.

They just anachronistically take their modern developed concepts and just cram them back in.

And that's why you'll find Trent Horne and others reading these texts the way they do.

And you go, but wait a minute, there's nothing else in this letter that tells you that, but it has to be because we're the church that existed for 2 ,000 years.

And so this has always been the way it is, and so this has to be there. But you know something else? We need to rely on scripture and tradition as the sources, sources, plural, of publicly binding revelation.

Now, a couple months ago, I commented on a debate that Chris Date did with a

Roman Catholic fellow, who I guess did like a three -hour video about just a few minutes of commentary on what he said.

But his big thing, Roman Catholic's big thing, and this started, it was still in the early 90s, really, when

Catholic Answers grabbed hold of and started utilizing the formal material sufficiency distinction before 93.

So somewhere around 92 is when they started really pushing this in their public talks.

And so what they do is, and we'll see this in Trent Horne's stuff, because it's in his video.

They will say that all of revelation is materially present in scripture, but it is not formally discernible there without the magisterium, without tradition, the magisterium of the church.

So scripture is materially sufficient, but not formally sufficient. And when you point out, well, the

Council of Trent, in its original draft of the,

Canons and Decrees on Divine Revelation in 1546, in the original draft, they used the phraseology partum partum, partly in scripture, partly in tradition.

But that's not what ended up in the final draft, which is the only thing that's dogmatically binding.

But obviously, it is important in the interpretation of historical documents to go, well, that's not what ended up in the final draft, but it was in the initial draft, and therefore, that raises the question, who amongst these council fathers viewed it in the partum partum way?

Who viewed it in another way? Why, and how did it end up the way that it was? Those are all important things, because we're looking at human documents here, right?

Even from the Roman Catholic perspective, you can talk about the guidance of the Holy Spirit all you want, it's not theanustas.

Even from your perspective, Trent is not theanustas. And so, this looks like Jimmy Akin tripped into partum partum.

Isn't that what it says? We need to rely on scripture and tradition as the sources of publicly binding revelation.

That's plural, isn't it? So, isn't that partum partum?

Could just be a poorly phrased thing, I suppose. Or it could be the

Catholic apologists utilized the formal material thing to get around the reality that when you really think about it, when you look at stuff like Immaculate Conception, none of the apostles, that is not materially present in scripture.

Bodily assumption is not materially present in scripture. So, if you're going to have dogmatically binding statements and there's nothing in scripture that teaches it, do you really believe in material sufficiency?

Or do you believe partum partum? I think you function on partum partum while only defending material sufficiency.

I think that's what happens. But the bishops teaching in union with the

Pope, of course, papacy summit develops over time later on, ensure we have understood them correctly.

Well, I don't know if you've all noticed, but there's a little bit of a distinction between all sorts of the bishops and cardinals and the

Pope these days. And whether you want to admit this or not, there are a lot of us out here that can look at the

College of Cardinals or can look at the Papal Biblical Commission.

And can tell that there is no, let me put it this way, take the modern denominations,

Protestant denominations that seriously seek to be consistent with their founding statements of faith.

Presbyterians, the Westminster Confession of Faith, Foreign Baptist, London Baptist Confession of Faith, who have not gotten woke.

And to be honest with you, once you go woke, you don't care about that kind of stuff anymore. You just redefine the words anyways. So once your epistemology falls apart and wokeism does that, then you're stuck.

But you all know this. You have your woke bishops who read

Trent and they completely redefine every word in it and you know it.

They don't care what the original context was. They don't care what the history was. They redefine it.

So you take our denominations that seek to practice solo scriptura and there's far more unity between us than there is between the bishops of the

Roman Catholic Church today globally. Far more. I know you all, you love to talk about the unity that comes from your system.

It doesn't exist and you know it. You know it. You know you have bishops and archbishops and cardinals who have significantly different views of scripture and the real role of Mary and the interpretation of dogmas like the bodily assumption and all sorts of things like that.

And I'm not even talking about going to Boston College and listening to professors there. I mean, they are so far on another planet in their beliefs that it's astounding.

But when you talk about, and sure, we have understood them correctly. Okay, so you really think you can go to Francis to ensure that you have understood correctly what the

Bible says about homosexuality? Do you think

Francis is going to give you, since who is he to judge, right?

You think Francis is going to give you the same answer that a

Pope 100 years earlier gave? Now 100 years sounds like a long time to us, but it's not. I mean, people lived to be 100 years old.

That's one lifetime. So if you want to talk about this kind of unity and consistency, sorry, you got to take that red pill and go, yeah, it's not really there.

And that's a problem. And that's why the red -pilled people are talking about the universal, consistent consent of the church.

And all of a sudden stuff is getting real nebulous because you can't really count on the Pope. Didn't have to do that before because you sort of could count on the

Pope to be a little bit more consistent, especially when you had the same Pope for a long period of time, but that's not what you got now.

So can you be sure that you've understood them correctly? Because you know the big argument on your side of the fence right now is, well, what weight do you give to papal statements?

I noticed a number of times Jimmy Akin quoted from Popes in regards to the nature of scriptural books, but he wasn't always quoting from quote unquote infallible statements.

So if you can quote from Popes who weren't making allegedly infallible dogmatic statements, and Popes generally don't do that kind of thing, at least not in the modern definition, they used to, but if you can do it, why can't we do it?

If you can do it, why can't we quote from Pope Francis? It seems to be somewhat of a problem.

But anyways, we now, this next section starts off, however, in recent centuries, members of the

Protestant community have opposed a different model. Notice, recent centuries. We might spend a little time demonstrating that those recent centuries go back to the first century, but anyway, but here's the beginning of a discussion of solo scriptura.

And so we will do some advertising for Jimmy Akin and talk about these things and continue on in the future as well.

We appreciate your watching The Dividing Line today. Hope it has been helpful to you. And Lord willing, we will be back if we are allowed to be back and continue these studies and others.