Lynn Interviews Spong Then a Call about Jehovah's Witnesses

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From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll -free across the
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good afternoon. We continue with our examination of an interview that took place a little while ago, and if we don't hurry up with the examination, it will be an ancient interview that took place so long ago that no one will care any longer.
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And really, given the topic, we probably need to hurry up with this before it is illegal here in the
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United States for us to discuss this issue on the air, and that is in reference to subjects of homosexuality and things related to it, this being the interview between those two stalwarts of conservative theology,
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Barry Lynn and John Shelby Spong. Sorry about that, it happens every time
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I lie, but anyway, we have been listening to them for an understanding of the liberal mindset, the mindset of the humanistic religious person, which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but you know, we're doing our best, and so we've been listening to their discussion and had them all queued up last week and they didn't get a chance to say anything at all, so we're going to press on with what they had to say.
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The disciples had forsaken him and fled, Jesus died alone, they had to go back and recreate the story, and they did it out of Psalm 22.
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That's right, to retell it as a fulfillment of what was considered an earlier prophecy.
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More with Bishop John Shelby. Now you remember, that's pretty much where we had stopped, I need to somehow skip past the commercial here, we don't want to be promoting the commercials, that being the backwards view of prophecy required of those who are secular humanists, we saw that in John Dominic Crossand, we mentioned it last time, and that is the individuals who, beginning with the presupposition that there cannot be such a thing as prophecy, there cannot be such a thing as God revealing future events for his own purposes, not willy -nilly,
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I was looking at a website just a few moments ago, and it is one of these word faithers, he's got some books out like You Can Know the
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Future and Deliverance from Demons and stuff like this, and the reason I was looking at it is he had an article on Calvinism, it was horrific, just horrible, and I couldn't help but thinking about the fact that if this guy is so close to the
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Spirit of God, it's amazing he can't make heads or tails out of the Bible, but anyway, looking at his stuff like You Can Know the
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Future and You Can Engage in Prophecy and all the rest of this stuff, I can see why, if people think that that's what prophecy is all about, that it's this personal thing where you can somehow look into the future and stuff like that, even though, ironically,
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I had to wonder a little bit why anyone in that camp would think that God can know the future.
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Again, some major gross inconsistencies there, but hey, we shouldn't be surprised at the gross inconsistencies in that stuff.
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But anyhow, it's the backwards way of interpreting prophecy is what we've got going on here, and that is, since there cannot be any prophecy, then all the
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New Testament writers were doing is they were looking back at the Old Testament text, creating the prophetic matrix, and then writing the
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New Testament story to fulfill it. Purely dishonest, but they would generally try to soften that blow by referring to it as a technique of writing, as a literary mechanism is basically what they would try to argue there.
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Let's see where the commercial ends here. Questions about what the Bible means and what it ought to mean to people as we kind of recapture what he's characterized as Christian humanism.
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Bishop, in one of the texts that we've hinted at before in the last few minutes on the program,
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John 14, 6, no one comes to the Father but by me. I've been saying all along, eventually
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Lynn's going to get to a verse that you can just tell he doesn't like. It's taken us,
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I don't know how many weeks now to get here, but here's John 14, 6. In your judgment as a theologian, what does coming to the
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Father mean? That is to say, do you believe that there is a heaven as described again in one gospel in the formula of my
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Father's mansion has many rooms? Are you a believer in bodily resurrection as is clearly another strain of the message of what it is to come to the
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Father and be with him? How do you sort out those images from the
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Bible? You've asked a whole bunch of questions altogether. I know, but we're running out of time. Let me say first of all, just to begin to unpack that, no one comes to the
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Father but by me is the last half of a verse that says I am the way, the truth, and the life.
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And as such, it's one of what we call the I am sayings that appear only in the fourth gospel. You need to understand that the fourth gospel is written after the
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Christian church has been excommunicated from the synagogue and the Jewish, Orthodox Jewish leaders are saying to the
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Christians you are no longer part of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let me just make an observation.
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I don't know that we would identify the specific statement the
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I am. Yeah, it uses ego I me. It uses that emphatic form, but generally the
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I am sayings are where ego I me is used without an expressed fulfillment or object.
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It's not where I am the and then he goes on to say the door, the life, the bread, or whatever.
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Certainly those particular verses do use I am, but the
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I am sayings are more John 13, 19, John 8, 58, 8, 24, 18, 5, through 6, where you have
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I am used in a more of an absolute sense. Unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.
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When he said I am, the soldiers fell back on the ground before Abraham was I am. Same terminology,
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I am the way, the truth, and the life, but you have the fulfillment. You have the description of what the I am is in those other passages.
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So it's a little bit confusing to just lump them all together there. But secondly, all the
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Gospels were written after the church had been quote unquote excommunicated. In fact, John makes reference to this at the time of Jesus.
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That probably would have only been in Judea itself, maybe even in the environs of Jerusalem only at that point.
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I mean, I'm sure it didn't happen just overnight. But all the Gospels were written at that point. So I'm not, you know, after this excommunication had taken place, so I'm not sure what the relevance of that specifically was there.
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No longer part of the God of your fathers and mothers. We have the true faith. You are now separate from that.
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And the Christians are shouting back. The very God that Moses met in the burning bush, who revealed himself as the great
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I am, is the same God we believe we've met in Jesus. So we make Jesus say the I am word over and over and over again.
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Now, notice again, since you have to go at this backwards, since you can't allow the authors to have their beliefs and you can't believe what the authors believe, then you have to go at it backwards.
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And you have to rip out the supernatural element of it. You have to make it solely a human product.
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And so now you have these authors who are actually putting words into Jesus' mouth.
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And of course, this is another reason why you have to shove this so far down the road, is they can get away with this because the people who were actually there are no longer around to catch them.
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See, that's another reason why you have to throw all this stuff way, way, way down the road.
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So you don't have any eyewitnesses left. You don't have anybody who can say, no, no, no, that's not what happened.
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So you go at it backwards and you say, all right, there's no inspiration. And so we want to put words into Jesus' mouth.
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And the words that he puts into Jesus' mouth are the I am sayings, back from the burning bush.
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And this is the Christians screaming back at the Jews. So you can always find whatever, and I think a lot of people saw this in the
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John Dominick Crossan debate, whatever your ideal view of what
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Jesus was supposed to be like, you can find a way to read that back into some passages and then get rid of everything else.
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So that Jesus ends up being, well, exactly what Jesus should be, from your perspective anyway.
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And that's the glory of liberal exegesis, is you can just simply form
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Jesus into your own pattern of thought. You don't have to be challenged by this guy, because if you run across stuff that you simply will not accept, then you just dismiss it as having never actually been said by Jesus anyway.
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Part of a polemic, but not to move on from that. I believe in life after death, but I don't believe in any of the images that have traditionally come down to us.
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I believe in life after death because I believe that God is not just real, but that God is eternal. And I believe that I am in a living relationship with that eternal
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God, so that I share somehow in God's eternity. And I don't want to go beyond that and paint pictures.
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Most of the pictures that we've painted in Christian history have been fulfillment pictures. A land flowing with milk and honey comes out of the wilderness years of the
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Jewish wandering, where they didn't know where the next meal was coming from, and so they pictured heaven as the fulfillment of their needs for regular food.
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A place where there's no more death or separation comes out of the early persecution of the Christian church, where loyalty to Christ meant they might be put to death and families were cut apart.
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And the idea of heaven as an eternal Sabbath of rest comes out of the peasants of the feudal ages, who only got to rest from back -breaking labor on what they call
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God's day, which they mistakenly continue to call the Sabbath and made heaven the eternal
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Sabbath. Fulfillment to me is... Now, I'm not sure how that ends up in Hebrews.
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The medieval feudal system ends up in Hebrews, but whatever. For all that I am to become fully alive, and I think
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I can only do that in a response to an infinite love of God, and that's what the
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God -human relationship is all about. And I think that's an eternal relationship, and I don't know how to make any other statements about it, but does that mean that...
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I don't know how to make any other statements about it, because God has not made any statements about it to which I can refer. I can talk about this.
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Of course, I'm not sure how he can even talk about God being eternal. What if someone comes along and says, well,
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God isn't eternal, and all those texts that you relied upon and everything else just simply is pictures that need to be reinterpreted as well.
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I mean, it's all pick and choose. It's all, okay, this is what I'm comfortable with. This is the kind of God that I'm comfortable with, and this
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God's eternal, but this God really can't talk the way we can, and he can't reveal anything, and in fact, he's really sort of a mishmash of things, because he'll accept all kinds of worship from...
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And in fact, he'll not only accept all kinds of worship, he'll accept all kinds of contradictory worship, and so he's very different than we are, and I'm not really sure where we came from, and for some reason,
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God developed all this stuff, this random process of natural selection and things like that, but that's, again, that's just where you're coming from, and so you interpret the scriptures in light of that.
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No one comes to God except through my religious tradition? Oh, I think that's to misunderstand Jesus and God totally.
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Jesus is quoted as having said in Mark's Gospel that if you're not against me, you're for me.
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It's interesting that Matthew turned that around when he wrote it in his book, and he said if you're not against me, if you're not for me, you're against me.
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That's very different, and so we've... Now notice, again, what happens when you just simply start with the assumption and just make it a mechanical thing.
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Well, you know, Matthew has got Mark here, and he disagrees. He disagrees, and remember, this is, folks, this is what
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I would call the majority viewpoint of most of the seminaries in the world today, maybe slightly less of a majority viewpoint in the
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United States, where you still have a few conservative seminaries left, but in the vast majority, even in the
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United States, they would say, oh, yes. Now, they might allow for some discussion of why, or if maybe there is some way of harmonizing, even though that is considered to be, since that's what people did in the past, we don't want to do that anymore, so we don't really allow for harmonization any longer, but they might at least allow for a small amount of discussion of, can we get something out of both statements?
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You know, they don't want to look back at Proverbs and see the conjunction there of the two statements, not to respond to a fool and to respond to a fool, which, of course, would demonstrate that there are times when we have to apply godly wisdom to know how to respond in particular situations, and that sometimes it is better not to respond to a fool, lest he be wise in his own eyes, and sometimes it is best to respond to a fool, and the means by which we do so and all these things require a recognition that you don't have a cookie -cutter way of saying you just never do this, you always do that type of thing.
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The same thing is in reference to what Matthew and Mark are referring to in regards to what
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Jesus said about those who were engaging in miracles. What does it mean in each context to be for Jesus or against Jesus, and how do the disciples respond to these things?
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That kind of discussion is only allowed within conservative seminaries. In conservative seminaries you actually get to talk about what the liberals are saying or what the moderates are saying, and you actually get to be challenged by it and discuss it.
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It's only in the liberal seminaries they won't talk about that kind of thing. They won't even allow it. There's just such a disdain for any type of conservative thought that it's just dismissed, and that is really the hallmark,
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I think, of extremists on both ends at that point is an unthinking dismissal without even the possibility of pondering things to a deeper level.
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That's something that definitely needs to be avoided. It's as if the great religions of the world are somehow against us because they're not for us, where Jesus says, if you're not actively working against me, you're on my side.
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Now let's just think for a moment how this application simply doesn't work when you talk about religions.
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As if even in Mark's statement Jesus is saying, ah, all the world religions are, you know, hey, as long as you don't say anything bad about me.
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It's sort of like I heard, I didn't actually hear the phone call, but when
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I was writing Wednesday morning, I think it was, Bill Bennett had a fellow on and he was a former
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Palestinian, well, I guess you're always Palestinian, but a former Palestinian jihadist, a terrorist who was converted.
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I don't know much about him, but he definitely sounded like he knew what he was talking about in listening to the interview. And one of the questions that Bill Bennett asked him was, we had a caller yesterday, he said, that said there is nothing in the
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Koran that is contrary to Christianity. And I started chuckling, and so did the
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Palestinian fellow. He could tell immediately that whoever was saying this didn't have a clue what they were talking about.
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And I felt like, you know, I probably said it out loud on the radio since I was low on the card and didn't have to worry about it, that, you know, what
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Koran is that guy reading? Because you have, and this was the substance of the presentation
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I made on the morning of the 19th over in Los Angeles, Islam cannot define itself without denying the
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Christian faith. It is a part of, it's the very substance of its self -definition.
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I went to Surah 112 and the third verse of the 112th
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Surah, which in describing God, in giving the very foundation of Tawheed, the purity of God's monotheism in Islamic theology, that he is neither begotten nor does he beget.
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Now, what's the background of that? What is that a reaction against? It's a reaction against quite possibly a misunderstanding, but still it's a reaction against Christianity.
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It's against the concept of the relationship of the father and the son.
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Now, the vast majority of Muslims have a completely false view of what that relationship is supposed to be.
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There's no question about that, but it's there. It is self -definitional. So you can't apply this type of a statement because the
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Koran is opposed to Jesus Christ. There's no question about it. And then as you start getting into the other religions and you start talking about what they teach about God and what they teach about salvation, there's just no way to create this little wonderfully ecumenical, pluralistic world that Bishop Spong seems to think is actually out there, especially by being nice and let's all sit down and talk about it together.
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That's not going to work talking to the Palestinian jihadists. I cannot possibly say to my
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Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish friends, whom I know to be holy people, that the
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God that they have met in their traditions is somehow not a holy God. I just think that's arrogance.
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It's not up to me to tell God what path people can walk. Ah, but it's also not up to God to tell people the paths that they should walk within this perspective.
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That's what needs to be understood, is that very frequently it's framed backwards.
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It's framed as if we somehow are arrogantly saying that we get to determine the only way that's proper to come to God.
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What's the presupposition to this argument that we've heard a number of times already in this interview? And that is
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God has not spoken. Isn't it exactly what you get back in Genesis?
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Isn't this, yay, half God said? Isn't this, apologetically, what we always come back to?
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Is if God has spoken in his word, then there are certain clear results from that.
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If he has not, then there's really no way to answer any of these questions and the entire discussion is inane and worthless.
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But it all comes back to that particular issue. To come into the presence of God. Now finally let me say that because I walk the
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Christ path, because Christ is the center of my life. How does he know anything about Christ?
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If God has not spoken, then the Christ path becomes whatever the mind of John Shelby Spong wants it to be.
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And if there is a challenge in it, if there is something in it that is repulsive to him, such as its exclusivicity, then you just simply reinterpret it and reject it and get rid of it.
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Because that's my religious tradition. I have no difficulty saying that in my life, the only way
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I know to go to the Father is through this Christ figure who shows me something of what the face of God is all about.
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But that's an expression of my religious pilgrimage. It's not a rule that God's got to apply to all the other people of the world.
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And right there you have, and I'm sure that Barry Lindsay will expand upon it here, right there you have the man -centeredness of humanistic
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Christianity. There you have the focus upon,
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I determine, this is my pilgrimage, this is my experience, and that's all that anyone can have.
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And we need to realize that our Muslim friends over there are not ignorant to these things.
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They know these people exist and they laugh that these people are given the kind of exposure that they're given.
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And that they are given the kinds of positions that they are given. Because they recognize this has no meaning.
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They recognize it has no validity to it. That it cannot survive anything, any challenge.
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It's all just simply man -centered. They see that. It's a shame that Christians can't see that.
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I think that's an extraordinarily important point. That it is out of the culture, the very cultural traditions out of which the
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Bible was itself written, and the assumptions that people like the first theologian of the church,
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Paul, had. He was a man who expected, I think, in all of his writings, that not only was this in -breaking of God's kingdom already occurring, but that it was going to be completed in his lifetime.
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Thus why should one change the relationship between men and women or masters and slaves? But that was a time -centered statement.
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Just as the statements of a Jerry Falwell, or for that matter, a more progressive religious leader, today is a part and parcel of our culture in the
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United States. And now, it's amazing to hear a warped eschatology becoming the basis upon which you then somehow understand, hey, we don't need to worry about changing the relationships of masters and slaves.
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Evidently, I suppose, Jesus should have fermented revolution rather than what he said, or Paul should have fermented revolution in the
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Roman Empire. I guess that's what he was saying, and if Paul hadn't had the expectation of the soon coming of Christ, the imminent return of Christ, that meant that he would have done things differently.
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I think that's what was just said. But again, remember, this is the same man who a few years before this particular encounter with Bishop Spong, in our encounter together, had dismissed
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Galatians as being over the top and had claimed to have revelational capacity equal to that of the
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Apostle Paul. That is, that he could obtain revelation from God too. So keeping that in mind might give you some sense of recognizing what's really going on here.
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Absolutely true. That's why I keep wanting people to make a distinction between the experience of God, which is real.
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That might be just experience of transcendence or otherness or love, however people would experience it.
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But when you explain it, it always is time -bound and time -warped. The way I illustrate that is that epilepsy hasn't changed from the 1st century to the 21st century.
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It's the same identical experience, but the way we explained epilepsy in the 1st century is very different from the way you explained it in the 21st century.
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In other words, every spiritual thing mentioned in the New Testament has to be naturalized and turned into a natural experience that had no spiritual connotations to it whatsoever.
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And, of course, that again comes, you know, if you approach the Word of God as a humanistic naturalist, then you're going to read it backwards.
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You're going to immediately reject the honesty of those reporting it, or at least their intelligence or their context.
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And Jesus as well. And you're left with absolutely, honestly, no way of knowing anything about what
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Jesus actually taught or said or did. So why, you know, I just have to ask the question, why the backwards caller?
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Why the Reverend Lynn? Why even bother, since none of this is actually true?
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You could function even better, it would seem to me, without these things, but they continue on with their religiosity.
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And so is every other phenomenon. Experience is eternal. Explanation is always time -bound and time -warped.
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And when you literalize explanations in the service of religion, you create idolatry. Indeed, and why there...
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So when you literalize, hope you heard that, what he's...
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He honestly does believe, and I think this is back behind of... You can hear a major difference in the way that he speaks and the way that he interacts when he's talking with a burial inn or someone he considers to be a non -fundamentalist, a non -conservative.
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And when he's talking to conservatives, have you ever listened to the program he did with Whitehorse Inn? Totally different person.
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Because he really has a deep -seated animosity. And there he described it as idolatry, to literalize these religious statements.
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Well, let's skip past the guitar music. We are back to wrap up today's conversation on Culture Shocks with the author of The Sins of Scripture, Bishop John Shelby Spong.
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Bishop, we just have a few minutes here, but let me go back to this question of women in the church. You, for example, talk about Mary, of course, the sister of Martha, anointing
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Jesus' feet, something that would rarely have been done within the cultural context, except possibly in a spousal relationship.
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There are at most two verses in the Bible that discuss this incident.
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Is it possible that some draw too many conclusions from that, that therefore, obviously,
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Jesus was married, for example? Well, I don't think we really know. There was certainly, by the time the gospel was written, there was a pressure to make sure that he was presented as the role model for an unmarried kind of ministry.
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Now, let's back up the track of that one. Isn't it amazing? The levels of certainty that these individuals can obtain, even though we haven't a clue what
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Jesus actually said, when it comes to all of a sudden we have this knowledge of the early church, we can come to a clear conclusion about things like that, but we can't know almost anything else.
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So here, because Paul, he's going to say, makes reference to a, not a superiority of, but a propriety of those who would serve
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God in a particular fashion, that that means there is a pressure, and therefore this again reflects the dishonesty of the gospel writers, in essence.
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Let's face it, that's what he's saying, is the dishonesty of those writers.
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Paul had started that tradition, and as the Christian church grew, the idea of celibacy in the priesthood grew, and Jesus was a powerful role model for that.
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But that has nothing to do with the writing in the New Testament. In any way, shape, or form, you would have to push the
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New Testament writings back for centuries before that would even become an issue. I'm sorry, to try to connect the two there is so grossly historically anachronistic.
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It's not even funny. Looking at the time here, there is less than three minutes left in the interview, and so we're definitely going to get that wrapped up today.
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But first, we're going to take our break, and your phone calls at 877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341.
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We'll be right back. A godly man is such a rarity today.
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Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.
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Welcome back to The Dividing Line.
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We're going to finish this up. I'm not sure how many weeks it's taken us to get through a 38 -minute interview, but we're going to wrap it up here because I think we've gotten enough testimony from Bishop Spong as to his perspective on Scripture, but let's get the last few minutes in here.
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But there are a lot of things in the Bible that would suggest. The first thing that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say that they had female disciples who followed them all the way from Galilee.
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You need to know that in that culture, for a group of women to follow a wandering group of men, they had to be either their wives or prostitutes.
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There was no other possibility. With such certainty! We know these things, don't we?
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Oh, goodness. We can't know much about what Jesus actually said or did, but we can have such tremendous certainty about what could or could not have taken place.
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I'm reminded of John Dominic Crossan's being absolutely certain that Jesus could not possibly have read, so he could not possibly have written in the sand, or he could not possibly have taken up the scroll in the synagogue and read from the scroll and things like that.
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In that society. And when people understand that, they begin to hope that they were wives. That's just the way it works.
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The female disciples, whenever they're identified, Mary Magdalene is always named first, as if she is the honored one.
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And the way a woman got status in the first century was that she was the man to whom she was primarily related.
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So it sounds like someone's trying to sort of cash in a little bit here on the Da Vinci Code stuff.
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Isn't that what it sounds like to you? When you get to John's Gospel, Magdalene, Mary, is portrayed as the only mourner at the tomb.
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She's portrayed as demanding access to the deceased body of Jesus, which is totally unacceptable.
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It's the nearest of kin. And there are a number of places that it looks like there's a possibility.
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Now, Don Brown in the Da Vinci Code is... It's Dan. Dan Brown. He's got more money than you have.
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Dan Brown. This is a very popular idea to discuss. And his book is fun.
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Fun? I don't know. That's going to be one of those questions I'll ask when I get to the kingdom of heaven.
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But I suspect that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were partnered people in a husband and wife relationship.
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There you go. There's John Shelby Spong. Jesus was married. I've got to admit, when the early
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Mormons did that, people had a cow about it. But when John Shelby Spong does it, it's just become more ho -hum, same thing.
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And to me, I hope it's true. Because I just think that the most sacred relationship one has is the intimacy of a faithful commitment to the primary person of your life.
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And I would like to think that his humanity was so full that he lived inside the glory and wonder of that kind of relationship.
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Is it full enough, by the way, to even express doubts about his belief about himself and about God?
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I always kind of like the fact that on the cross, reportedly again, he repeats an old prayer,
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Why hast thou forsaken me? If you don't have doubts, it seems to me you can't be human. Let's just stop that for a second.
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I like that. Did you hear that? We are listening to unbelievers, gross, heretical unbelievers, handling the sacred text.
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And the result cannot help but make you just go, What? What? I like that.
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I like this doubting Jesus thing. Why? Because he doesn't want the
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Jesus of the Gospels. He detests the Jesus of the Gospels. He detests the
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Christian Jesus. He detests the Jesus who dies so as to redeem man who is under the curse of the law.
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He detests all of that stuff. And so we want to emphasize something, the doubting
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Jesus. And I've said many times, I know that I'm in a minority here, but it's a minority that I think is at least an informed minority.
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I have said many times that when Jesus says what he says in regards to the 22nd
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Psalm, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, that this is the beginning of a song.
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It is the beginning of one of the hymns of the people of God that the people would have understood. And if any one of us today starts going amazing grace, how sweet the sound, and then can no longer continue because you are dying, you're not going to sit there and just analyze those words and go,
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Hmm, I wonder what that meant. No, you're going to think of the entire song including the last verse when we've been there 10 ,000 years.
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You're not going to just take those few words and go, Hmm, he must have been feeling bad at that point or something.
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Any of the great hymns, when peace like a river, you don't have to finish the whole thing off to communicate what the song is about, do you?
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It is well with my soul. It's just all there. And that's how this song would have communicated as well.
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And I do have some really major problems with folks who, and there have been some great, great, great folks, some great preachers who have taken that text and have developed some really odd ideas about what was going on here, about how
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God the Father turns his back on Jesus at this very point of his greatest obedience. He can't look upon sin.
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He looks upon sin every day. Put it in context. That's not what's going on here. This is not some abandonment.
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Even Jesus' own words are in the second person, and the very next words he says are directly addressed to God the
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Father. It's missing the context. The context is found in the 22nd
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Psalm, the fact that the 22nd Psalm ends with the servant being vindicated. And this was the message that was being communicated in the citation as well.
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But that's somewhat of a sidelight there. Or it records that as the only thing that Jesus says on the cross.
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And Matthew, the second writer, repeats that, but it disappears in Luke and John. Because by that time, the idea that Jesus might scream out that he and God are now separated in this moment becomes unacceptable.
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So you see, once again, here's exactly what we heard when we encounter the debate with John Adamic Croson.
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Well, you know, Mark's got this thing, and Mark Jesus is out of control, and in John he's in control.
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And all he had to do was go to the text and demonstrate where the text contradicted this. But of course, once you are using jigsaw interpretation, you don't have to worry about context.
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You don't have to worry about things like that. You just pick out the things that are supportive of your position, ignore all the rest of them, and all is well.
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Because the divinity of Jesus is clearly growing. You see, I have no problem with divinity as a concept for Jesus.
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Because in my opinion, divinity and humanity are two sides of the same coin. That's right. There you go.
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Divinity and humanity are two sides of the same coin. So you've got some little
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New Age mysticism, union with God stuff going down here.
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You heard that earlier with the God is eternal and I'm in a relationship with him. And then again, so is everybody else type of a stuff going on here in Spong.
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And that's very much what you've got in a lot of this liberalism, which again, if you can't get enough out of the
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Bible to know what idolatry actually is, it's not overly surprising. That's a parade where we've got to end it, Bishop Spong.
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But I thank you. And there's the end of the interview. So we managed to get through it today and that's helpful.
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And once again, I do this. Yeah, partly it helps me to hear what the man is saying because I'm going to be hearing it.
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I'm going to be hearing it in not a long period of time from now, less than two months from now.
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Now, now, now, now. It's coming on fast. And it helps me to hear it, not only to listen to it while studying, but also it helps me a good bit to have to try to explain it because I'm going to be hearing it again, not these exact words, maybe some of them, but the mindset that comes behind it.
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And so for me, as far as debate prep goes, it is extremely helpful to be able to understand the worldview of the person that I am debating so that I can hear their words and I can phrase my response in such a way that will be the most communicative to them and to their followers, but also so that I can recognize the foundational presubstantial errors of the questions that will be asked and the objections that will be raised, both during the course of the debate, as well as for those of you who will be in the audience in the conversations that will take place afterwards, because I can tell you there were lots of conversations in the audience after the
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Barry Lynn debate. I think there will be more conversations in the audience after the
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John Shelby Spong debate, mainly because I really believe that there will be a larger audience of those who disagree with me and who are supporters of John Shelby Spong in this particular encounter.
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And so you may well have the opportunity of engaging in dialogue and discussion with those who hold these perspectives.
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And so it is very helpful to be able to understand where the people are coming from and therefore be able to encounter them and communicate with them in an effective manner.
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Someone in channel just challenged us all to say foundational presubstantial errors ten times fast, but I am not going to do that because that would be silly to do that, even though it would also be somewhat difficult to do that.
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Foundational presubstantial errors. That is difficult. The difficult term is presubstantial because it's just presubstantial.
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You know why I'm sort of pausing here is because we've got a phone call that's being screened.
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And so this is a high -powered professional webcaster's way of without letting the audience know what's going on in the background, coming up with a way of waiting to be able to take the phone call.
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And it worked. And you all just didn't even notice it. You thought this was a perfect segue and that it all had to do with the one subject.
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And that's not how you spell segue. That's how you spell the thing that you get on and run around on.
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But it's not how you spell segue. Sorry. In fact, I'm watching lots of folks misspelling segue in channel.
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But we will continue on from there because people in channel can't spell, especially people in Canada.
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And we will talk with Mike down in sunny Florida.
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Hi, Mike. Hey, Dr. White. How are you doing today? Doing good. All right. I appreciated your clips there on poor
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Spong and Lynn. But I'm definitely looking forward to your upcoming debate in November.
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And I think it's just going to be fantastic. Yeah. I hope you're going to be able to be there. Amen. I'll be there. Okay. Good. So I'm looking forward to the good stuff.
44:40
Good. At any rate, on a totally separate note, all those plenty of comments I could address with regard to your going through that series of clips.
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But I'll just hold that for later on. Anyway, there's an Awake magazine, as you know, from the
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Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. This was the April 22nd of 2005 edition.
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And it's entitled Jesus Christ God. I'm not sure if you've seen that. No, I haven't.
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I wanted to renew my subscriptions, but I just haven't gotten around to it.
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And, unfortunately, I don't really have anyone here locally in the ministry anymore that's super focused on the
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J -dubs. So it's been a little bit difficult. So what were they revisiting this time?
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Well, you know, I'll tell you. It's the typical or classical stuff, you know, more of the same fallacies.
45:35
But I'll just call and distill a few quick ones here for you. You'll get the point. Like, for instance, they have here on page 5, they have a paragraph captioned,
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Jesus's position in heaven. And one of the glaring goofs here is this.
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They have here, a few hours, and it reads this way. A few hours after this prayer, Jesus was executed, but he was not dead for long.
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Only from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. And, of course, they quote the passage, Matthew 27.
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Matthew 27, verse 57, and 28, verse 6. It goes on to say, This Jesus God resurrected, the
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Apostle Paul reports, of which we were all witnesses. And they go on to say,
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Could Jesus have resurrected himself? No. According to the Bible, the dead are conscious of nothing at all.
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Of course, you know, that citation, Ecclesiastes 9 and 5. Yeah, Ecclesiastes 9 and 5. They have here,
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The only true God, Jesus's heavenly father, resurrected his son. They don't have any reference to John 2 here?
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No, nothing at all. Well, they've addressed it in the past. I don't have the, actually,
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I do have the Watchtower CD -ROM on this system. But, yeah, obviously, that's one instance where you actually see two of their false teachings intersecting with one another is their denial of the spiritual nature of man then leads them to a complete redefinition of what resurrection is, and then a denial of Jesus's own statement in John chapter 2, that he would raise his body in resurrection.
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It's ironic. I was struggling mightily and continue struggling mightily today to try to resurrect my tablet
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PC. I've replaced the unit, but we're having just a horrible time getting the backup to function because we've discovered you have to boot to a
47:29
CD -ROM, and on a tablet that's pretty tough since there is no CD -ROM on a tablet to boot to in the first place to make the restoration.
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So I'm sitting here beating my head into a bloody pulp on the desk this morning when the phone rings, and it's
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Kirk Cameron. Oh, okay. And Kirk and his crew are in Brooklyn today.
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In fact, he's in Times Square, and they're shooting on the Jehovah's Witnesses, and I've already done some shooting with them on the
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Witnesses, Mormons, Roman Catholicism, Islam, blah, blah, blah, for the next season. And he was,
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I love Kirk. He is a, he's filled with questions. He asks great questions, and he will not let you get away with cheap answers.
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Wow. I've probably spent about an hour, hour 15 minutes past week on the phone with Kirk on a number of different things, mainly, interestingly enough, to do with Jehovah's Witnesses and their theology.
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And he was double -checking the script that they were just about to shoot, and he just wanted to make sure that I saw a
48:33
Canadian in Channel saying, Kirk Cameron is in Times Square shooting Jehovah's Witnesses? No, he's not shooting
48:38
Jehovah's Witnesses. He's shooting video about Jehovah's Witnesses. Somebody quiet that Canadian woman.
48:44
Well, she's not really Canadian, but anyway, that's a whole other story. Anyway, he was actually wanting to make sure that he was right, and this is something a lot of evangelicals don't know.
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He was talking about the fact that God stopped calling the anointed class in 1935, which is true, but they're phasing that out.
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And so he wanted to make sure that he was expressing the idea that the only way you could get into the anointed class today if you weren't born back then is through the apostasy of members of the anointed class, which, while rare, is still held open as a possibility.
49:18
And so he just wanted to check the phraseology on that statement. And I really appreciate the desire to be accurate about that, but I also think he's realizing why this is now, and that is he's getting emails and letters from these folks.
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And it's when you really start working with them and dealing with them and having to answer them that you start realizing, man, you've got to be exceptionally careful, especially with the witnesses, because they'll trip you up real fast.
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And one of the things I mentioned to him was, yeah, right now, this is the teaching, but they're trying to get rid of that stuff in regards to the anointed class and stuff like that.
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I don't see any evidence that there is any desire whatsoever on the current leadership to get rid of their foundational doctrines, especially in regards to the deity of Christ, and in this case, their teaching on the nature of man and the issue of the resurrection.
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But as I had mentioned to Kirk in a conversation, because we were trying to hash through what the nature of the resurrection was, they don't have a true resurrection.
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To simply have someone come to life again based upon a memory of what they were is not what anastasis means.
50:33
It's not that which died coming to life again. There is really no Jewish person listening to the words of Jesus and the apostles that would have interpreted the proclamation of resurrection the way that Jehovah's Witnesses do today.
50:47
And so to make the argument that they're making there, that, well, Jesus could not possibly have been involved here because he was unconscious, because there's no spiritual nature to man, etc.,
50:56
etc., is not only inaccurate because you have to jump back to Ecclesiastes.
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When you have to prove your anthropology in Ecclesiastes, you've missed the boat. And it also leaves us without any means of dealing with John chapter 2 and what
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Jesus plainly stated in that text. Right, right. Yeah, this is just one of many examples, just a few more here just for the sake of brevity.
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They go on to, of course, you know, the standard. They talk about how Jesus is the firstborn of every creature.
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You're familiar with that. Oh, yes. Prototokos, Galatians 115. That whole bit. And that Jehovah is greater than Jesus.
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And, of course, you know, Jesus himself taught. John 14, 28. The whole routine all over again. Oh, yeah, yeah.
51:37
And this is kind of interesting. Moving along here, they quote, let's see, there's a magazine called
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The Christian Century. Yes. And they have here a 1998 issue from May, actually
51:51
May 20th through 27th, through the 27th of 1998. And they don't quote the pastor, but just as the comment here quotes a pastor who acknowledges that the
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Trinity is a teaching of the church rather than a teaching of Jesus. Yet even though the
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Trinity is not a teaching of Jesus, is it consistent with what he taught? Yeah. They obviously want to do everything they can to continue to hammer away on the allegedly extra -biblical, ecclesiastical nature of the doctrine of the
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Trinity. Easy to find lots of folks who will make that kind of a statement, even semi -conservative folks.
52:30
Very easy to track stuff like that down because it communicates to the Jehovah's Witness who believes that all of Christendom is
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Babylon mystery religion, the whore of Babylon. They don't even have to repeat that since that's part and parcel of what the
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Jehovah's Witness thinks about Christendom. Then all they have to do is make the connection, well, this doctrine came from Christendom.
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And they have yet again strengthened the natural bias in the mind of the person you might be attempting to speak to.
52:57
And sometimes when people and Christians talk to Jehovah's Witnesses and they go, man, you know, I thought I was very clear.
53:02
And I thought I was making some fairly compelling arguments from scripture. And yet it just didn't seem to go anywhere. Well, part of the reason for that is that there is more going on there.
53:12
There's such a deep prejudice and really a fear, quite honestly, on their part.
53:18
To me, it's very similar to the same kind of fear that comes up in the mind of a
53:23
Muslim when you start talking about the deity of Christ. Because they interpret that to mean you're inviting them to engage in shirk, the sin of idolatry.
53:30
In the same way, the Jehovah's Witness thinks that all the Christian religions are part of Babylon mystery religion.
53:36
And to believe any of this means that when Armageddon takes place, I'm going to be destroyed, annihilated, and have no opportunity of resurrection.
53:42
You put all that together and you can see why you have a huge uphill battle to attempt to climb to get where you want to go.
53:51
Right, right. Yeah, you'll appreciate this next one here too. Of course, they go on to cite John 1 .1
53:57
from the King James Version. And the following remark reads this way. Some argue that this means that the word, who was born on earth as the baby
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Jesus, is almighty God himself. Is this true? If this verse were interpreted to mean
54:13
Jesus was himself God almighty, it would contradict the preceding statement. The word was with God.
54:20
Someone who is with another person cannot be the same as that other person.
54:27
So, yeah, they go on here. They say many Bible translations thus draw a distinction making clear that the word was not
54:34
God almighty. For example, a sampling of Bible translations say the following. The word was a
54:40
God, a God was the word, and the word was divine. And, of course, they do cite the translations which, you know.
54:46
Which translations are they using right now? Yeah, they have here, they have here, see the New Testament by James L.
54:53
Tominic. Sound familiar? Yeah, that one's really widespread, isn't it?
55:00
Yeah, they have, of course, the emphatic diaglot. That's the one you're reading by, of course, Benjamin Wilson. And the
55:06
Bible in American translation by J. M. P. Smith and E. J. Goodspeed. Yeah, Goodspeed, yeah. Yeah, they haven't come up with much new there over the years.
55:17
We've dealt with those many, many times before. But, again, just as they had in the old, the main study book that they used for about 20 years was
55:25
You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. It was the red picture book, and they're using something different now. And on the infamous black page of that particular study book, they, within two paragraphs, correctly define the doctrine of the
55:37
Trinity, then incorrectly define the doctrine of the Trinity. And no one can convince me that it was not absolutely, completely purposeful on their part to do so.
55:45
And, of course, in what you just read, they're presenting a modalistic understanding, an interpretation of John 1 .1,
55:52
attempting to say the Father and the Son are the same person. And that's not ignorance on their part.
55:58
Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. That is purposeful on their part. And they will, at times, accurately, normally, when they're quoting from, like, the
56:08
Nicene Creed or an Athanasian Creed, something like that, they will accurately define the doctrine of the
56:15
Trinity, the distinction of the persons. But then they will almost immediately redefine it in a modalistic sense, because it's much easier to deny modalism than it is to deny the actual doctrine of the
56:25
Trinity. And this has been one of, and we're running out of time here, but this has been one of the interesting things is that some of their apologists, like Greg Stafford, know better, and they try to address the reality.
56:37
And there has clearly been a reticence on the part of the governing body and the leadership of the
56:45
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society to actually start to do that themselves, even though it's clear they're under pressure to do so, because what has changed over the past 20 years is the availability of information to Jehovah's Witnesses.
56:58
20 years ago, you could control that. Because what are they going to encounter even on cable TV at that point in time?
57:04
But now there's this thing called a computer, and there's this thing called the internet, and there just isn't any way that they can truly control the input of information to their people.
57:15
And so they're having to make changes, but they're also struggling mightily to know what to do.
57:21
And I think people need to recognize that the baptismal rates of both the Mormons and the
57:26
Jehovah's Witnesses have slipped greatly. Then again, same with Southern Baptists. So I think that just reflects
57:32
Western society as a whole. But still, they are struggling with those issues, and they really don't know how to handle those people who are starting to go, hey, why is...
57:43
I mean, they've got Jehovah's Witnesses. I mean, if Greg Stafford reads that, which I'm sure that he did, he has to go, wait a minute, that is not what the doctrine of the
57:53
Trinity is. And I know that, so why does the leadership have to keep doing this? I mean, they're not responding to, one, this
58:00
Pentecostals all the time. Come on, you know. Astonishingly enough, on page six, they do cite the
58:07
Athanasian Creed. So there it is right there. Yeah, and that's purposeful on their part. Put the two together to increase the confusion of their actual readers.
58:15
Hey, Mike, thanks very much for your time today. God bless. Have a good day. Bye -bye. All right, thanks for listening to Dividing Line today.
58:21
By the way, on the 21st of September, two weeks from today, my special guest will be
58:27
Dr. Jim Renahan of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies, Westminster Theological Seminary, Escondido, California.
58:33
We'll be talking about his work with the Institute over there. And we'll also be discussing John Owen and his impact upon the writing of the 1689
58:42
London Baptist Confession of Faith. Interesting stuff. Savoy Declaration, all that stuff. Be listening.
58:48
God bless. We'll see you later. We need a new
59:03
Reformation day. Brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
59:38
If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.
59:43
Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the
59:48
World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.