Prayer of Jabez, Harold Camping, Calls on Paedobaptism and Roman Catholic Apologetics

This is 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. Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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 United States. It's 1 -866 -854 -6763. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Opening Remarks on Email, Roman Catholic Responses, and Upcoming Resources

Good afternoon and welcome to the Dividing Line. My name is James White and you know we get a lot of interesting email around here. We put a new website, a main website article up this past week and in the process of doing so you get all sorts of interesting responses from folks and those of you who haven't seen it or thought that we were going to have the same website article, main webpage article up for another six months or something like that, we did change it and I'm very thankful.

There's an excellent article up there that is actually put together by Colin Smith. He put together the work of himself, Eric Nielsen, and Mike Porter. All of them had commented on some of the things that Robert St. Genes had said in response to the ever-growing dialogue that we had had and we had promised to post that eventually.

We finally got around to doing it. Just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff we experience in cyber ministry, I guess you might say, we got a response from a fellow, a Roman Catholic fellow, and here's what he said.

He said, quote, I read your featured article on John 6 on your website. Pretty lame, guys. Mike Porter is saying that Robert St. Genes couldn't admit that he is wrong, yet James White is having others answer for him.

Sounds like an admission of defeat to me. Mr. St. Genes won the argument, argument is misspelled, on grammar, grammar is misspelled, and on context where the best you could do is try to argue possible grammatic interpretations.

If you want others to start admitting when they are wrong, why don't you lead by example and start admitting when you got it wrong? This fellow, Josh Morrison is his name, and interestingly enough, we took the time to respond.

In fact, Mr. Porter took the time to do a very lengthy response and a very full response explaining in tremendous detail the issues concerning the grammatical discussion and so on and so forth, and so I took the time to read Mr. Porter's response, and I went down to the bottom of it and I saw this message, and I thought, why is it that if I allow other people to become involved and to respond to these issues, why is that an admission of defeat on my part?

Why do I have to respond to everything, or that means I'm defeated? What if, in point of fact, the point is so clear and so obvious that it's a waste of my time to continue to address it, and there are others that are perfectly capable of dealing with these issues and responding to them and so on and so forth.

So I took the time to write back. Well, this is the interesting part. As both Mr. Porter and I discovered fairly quickly, our responses bounced. The address given to us was a bogus address. So you've got this guy who writes in on the subject and says, you're all wrong, and you couldn't answer this, and then gives a bogus email address.

Now let me ask you, if you're going to write to somebody and tell them they're wrong and then give them a bogus email address, are you really convinced that you're right and they are wrong, or maybe are you hedging your bets, or what's really going on here?

It happens more than once, and it's sad because obviously Mr. Porter spent quite some time writing back to this individual and put together an excellent response, but seemingly he'll never see it because he gave us a bogus email address to respond back to.

That doesn't really speak of a whole lot of confidence, though I'll have to admit I remember very clearly last week listening to EWTN, and it was... Half the time I'd turn it on, I'd hear the rosary, and then the next part of time I'd hear some priest talking, and I'm not sure why it is that when priests go to seminary they lose all emotion in their voice, but basically that's what happens.

I'm not sure if it's surgically removed or just what happens, but it's just sort of like But then most of the rest of the time they have the journey home on or something like that. Some convert who has absolutely positively no idea what in the world they're talking about, but they stick them on the stage and they stick a microphone in front of them and a TV camera in their face, and you discover very quickly the most effective apologetic arguments that are out there, and discover that the weakest apologetic arguments are actually the ones that work, and so the ones that are constantly being repeated are the ones that are actually the easiest to answer, which basically tells me that these people converted without ever having seriously interacted with anyone who could really respond to what they were saying.

And of course that's been my experience with everybody that I know of who has gone into the Roman Catholic Church. Of course I'm the last person on the planet they want to talk to, and they just want to...

Why would that be? I mean, if the arguments are so overwhelming, why would there be anything to fear from anything I would have to say? Well, it's pretty obvious the reason they don't want to talk to me is because they know that their arguments really do have responses and answers to them.

So there's something more going on. There's something more that is involved in the reasoning and in the psychology of conversion, and sometime we will have to do a program on the psychology of conversion, because it is fascinating.

I've talked to many, many converts, and talked to people who were going to convert, and mainly with people who would only talk to me after the fact. And so I've gotten some insights as to what causes people to convert, so on and so forth.

So anyways, that was interesting, and I have to admit, last Monday evening, I tuned in to Scripture Matters, which is the program that Scott Hahn has live on 6 o 'clock Pacific, so it's 9 o 'clock Eastern.

And it was fascinating to listen to Dr. Hahn speaking. He was talking about presenting a paper at some meeting in Rome, where there was mainly Protestant scholars. I'm not sure what in the world they were doing in Rome, but anyways.

And it was fascinating to listen to Dr. Hahn. I remember very clearly speaking with him after the debate against gerimatotics at Northwest Community Church in December of 1990. He and gerimatotics together.

And just an incredible ability to speak, incredible confidence when he speaks. He was quoting from memory from John Owen and Jonathan Edwards. Brilliant fellow. And it just made me more and more angry that someone with such intelligence could write a book like Hail Holy Queen that we reviewed a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago now.

That truly just makes it all the more inexcusable that someone who has such great capacities in that area could write something that is just so patently false. People say, well, maybe he doesn't know.

There's no way. There is absolutely positively no way. I don't understand it. It truly is something that catches my attention every time I see it. Excuse me. Ah, being struck down for that one. I was going to mention that we're going to be covering a number of topics today, but you can throw your issue into the hopper if you would like.

866 -854 -6763, 866 -854 -6763 is the toll-free, please notice that word, toll-free phone number. Some of you, many have been asking, I've gotten a lot of people asking me in the chat room or by email or whatever it might be, have you heard from Dave Hunt?

And the answer to that question is no, we have not heard from Dave Hunt as yet. I believe that he would have had the materials, hmm, he should have had the tapes and materials now for about two weeks at least, I would say.

And at that point, I think that maybe it's taken some time to listen, maybe it's taken some time to formulate a response, maybe asking some people what should we do, I don't know. But we have not received a response as yet and we still look forward to that opportunity.

I still want to see if the possibility exists to schedule the debate on the Doctrines of Grace for December, early December is what I would like to do. I'm supposed to be going to Israel in January and of course with things as they are in Israel right now, who knows, but I would like to see if we could get that done beforehand because I think this book against the Doctrines of Grace and against the Potter's Freedom as well is supposed to be coming out in August.

In fact, August is going to be a very interesting month as we have mentioned, a little bit of updates on the upcoming books. First of all, the new David King and William Webster books, I have an early copy, it's going to be edited further, but I have an early copy of the third volume sitting here in my hand.

Bill Webster has done a tremendous job in putting this material together on the publishing end. He does a lot of his own publishing, Christian Resources, and I'm very excited to see this work given especially the constant drumbeat about the subject of Sola Scriptura and things like that on EWTN and things like that.

It is very soothing to my soul in hearing about the constant attack upon Sola Scriptura and things like that, that to see this material coming out and knowing that the answers are going to be there available is very, very helpful to me anyways.

I know that that is going to help. Now, obviously, I know, I know, half of you are going, yeah, it doesn't mean those people are going to read it, it doesn't mean those people would even care if they read it.

You're right, not two ways about it, but there's just something good about speaking the truth and knowing the truth has been spoken, and that's what bothers me. I am not bothered really anymore by people who simply ignore the truth.

It's when the truth doesn't get a chance to even be expressed, that's when I get a little bit crazy and really wish there was an opportunity to do that. And so, hopefully this week we'll get the information from Bill Webster, I had written to him this week, and be able to put together an entire webpage so you can order this material.

Also, I should let you know, I think David and Bill have made a good decision, the three volumes to the work will be available separately. In other words, you can order Volume 1, you can order Volume 2, you can order Volume 3, you can order them all together.

In fact, looking at them here, Volume 1 by David T. King, Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, a Biblical Defense of the Reformation Principle of Sola Scriptura. Volume 2 by William Webster, a Historical Defense of the Reformation Principle of Sola Scriptura.

And then Volume 3, a Patristicatina on the Material and Formal Sufficiency of Scripture, which, as David King has pointed out, quite rightly is going to cause Roman Catholic apologists to have a cow, in essence, when they see that.

Of course, any historical work does. I discovered that a decade ago when I dared cite early Church Fathers in some of my debates. Catholics responded like, how dare you toot that? Those are our guys, you can't use our guys.

And just the constant refrain, even on EWTN, I started reading the early Church Fathers and that's what made me Catholic. And I sit there and go, what early Church Fathers were you reading anyways? Was it the ones who didn't believe all the stuff you believe in, or were you just reading citations out of This Rock or Envoy magazine or something like that?

I don't know. But the third volume, as I said, I have it here. And I was just going to share a quotation from this that I found, I've always just found it fascinating. In fact, I found it fascinating when David and I spoke at a conference at Grace Reformed Baptist Church on Long Island, America, Long Island.

And we, at that particular time, David was going to be doing a presentation on the early church in Sola Scriptura. And I was sitting there going, man, are you going to use any audio-visual stuff? No, I was just going to read them.

And I'm like, that's pretty tough on folks just to hear them read. How about we put it on PowerPoint, and I'll use my computer to project them so that people can read along. And so he gave me the material, and one of them, one of the quotations that I found just absolutely fascinating is basically due to the fact that those of you who are familiar with apologetic methodologies are familiar with the name Cornelius Van Til and the subject of presuppositional apologetics.

And a lot of folks, even quote-unquote classical apologists, would make the argument that presuppositional apologetics is the newcomer, the new kid on the block. It doesn't have historical basis and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And so it was just fascinating to me to read this quotation from the writings of Salvian the Presbyter. Now, I'll admit, I studied church history and I read a lot of stuff, and the simple fact of the matter is, Salvian is not exactly the most quoted individual in the various works of church history.

But here you have a work from Salvian the Presbyter, 5th century. And listen to what he says here. This is found on pages 131 through 132, for those of you who are salivating to get hold of this. But, When we read that he rules all things he has created, we prove thereby that he rules since he testifies that he rules.

When we read that he ordains all things by his immediate judgment, it becomes evident by this very fact since he confirms that he passes judgment. All other statements said by men require proofs and witnesses.

God's word is his own witness because whatever uncorrupted truth says must be the undefiled testimony to truth. Now that's a, those who are familiar with the arguments concerning presuppositionalism and so on and so forth recognize that that's absolutely in line with what Van Til says and what presuppositionalism is saying and that is God in his word can give no higher evidence of his word because it partakes of divine authority.

And since it does partake of divine authority, God cannot swear by anything greater than himself and that must be taken as an absolute authority. Anything that you would bring to prove the truthfulness of that is a lesser thing and therefore cannot, in point of fact, address the issue of proving the truthfulness of God's word.

There can be no higher authority. And so obviously the relevance of that for its citation in Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of our Faith, Volume 3, is that the very foundational viewpoint of Scripture that I have pressed over and over again against my Roman Catholic apologist opponents, who of course always say they believe in inerrancy and so on and so forth, even though the vast majority of Roman Catholic scholars today do not, they just say they're not Roman Catholics, but every time I've pressed the issue I've said, look, Scripture is theanoustos.

It is God-breathed. That is its nature. We have to start there in answering questions about, well, how can you prove that it's sufficient and so on and so forth. And so the relevance of the citation of the passages, obviously there were those, and here's the 5th century, as late as the 5th century, who still understood the nature of Scripture and understood the foundation and basis that it had.

And therefore to argue that, well, no one could have held the position you hold because they didn't have that view of Scripture simply isn't true. Obviously Salvi and the Presbyter did, and that's significant both for the Sola Scriptura debate as well as for the debate regarding presuppositional apologetics, classical methodology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So that work is going to be, keep your eye very closely peeled on the website because as soon as we get the information and the permission to basically go for it and make the book available, we will be making it available.

There is also another book coming out, and actually there's someone in the chat channel that might be able to tell me exactly when it's going to be out, but Calvary Press is going to be releasing Eric Svensson's book, Who Is My Mother? I think is the title of the book.

I've been, it's excellent work. I really enjoy reading from this work. There's just a tremendous amount of material that's gone into it, and that book, I believe, is supposed to be coming out fairly soon along with the Webster and King book, and of course I think we've already mentioned to you more than once that The God Who Justifies will be out August 23rd, and therefore when you put all those together, in the month of August now, we thought it was going to be July, I know, but in the month of August we're looking at about 1 ,750 pages of material that the Roman Catholic apologists are going to be very interested in and going to be very, I think, taken back by.

I was just told Fall 2001, so what is that, September, October maybe for the Svensson book, so maybe it'll be spread out over a couple months there before those books are all out, but it's going to be an excellent opportunity for people to gather those books together and to find a tremendous amount of information and response to the stuff that is out there.

By the way, someone did ask the question regarding the Barry Lynn situation, the Barry Lynn tapes. We have absolutely positively no developments, which I'll be perfectly honest with you, since I have not heard a word from anyone, I'm personally starting to wonder if there ever will be any developments, which may mean that evil wins one on this one, I don't know, but I would think if there was going to be a real interest on the part of conservative attorneys to help us with this, that we wouldn't just be sitting here experiencing absolutely nothing at all.

And so since I really haven't heard anything, I'll have to admit that from the perspective I'm looking at it, I'm not overly confident at the moment that we're going to be able to get around this issue.

We live in a fallen world, and unfortunately sometimes evil wins, not in the long run, but in the short run. So that's the current situation as far as that goes. There were 600 people or so there that did get to hear it, and I hope that that is reversed, and I hope that other people will get to hear it, but as I said, I haven't heard a word from anybody, and so right now it just doesn't look like that's going to be happening.

And that's very disappointing. But that's how things happen. The evil people do evil things. That's exactly what you expect evil people to do. 866 -854 -6763 is the phone number, the toll-free phone number.

I don't see anybody online yet. That's probably because I haven't pushed any hot buttons yet. Not sure exactly how I couldn't have been, but 866 -854 -6763 is the phone number. By the way, someone has pointed out to me, and in fact I listened carefully yesterday to a phone call on the Open Forum program with Harold Camping.

Harold Camping seems to have the seven-year itch. The seven-year itch is basically the idea that he needs to come up with a new heresy every seven years. 1994 was the last time we had the end of the world right around the corner, sort of doing the Jehovah's Witness thing, and that was seven years ago.

So now it's 2001, and what's Harold Camping up to now? Well, Harold Camping has decided in his infinite wisdom to study the Scriptures. Me and my kids listened to a phone call yesterday on Open Forum asking him about this.

If you've ever listened to Harold Camping, you know that if you ask, Harold, what time is it? You need to sit back and, in essence, get ready for, I don't know, a 20-minute response? At least a 20-minute response to what time it is.

And that's what happened yesterday. In essence, the question was asked, and Harold just goes on and on and on. It is just interminable. And most of the time, it has basically nothing whatsoever to do with the actual question, except I think we do need to listen to be able to understand the thinking process that Harold Camping goes through.

If it can be understood, I don't really think that it can be. I was trying to think how I would respond to some of the things he was saying yesterday, and I just sit there going, what do you say? It reminds me, without the shrill part and some of the goofiness of Gail Ripplinger.

It really does. But he was just, well, here's the thing. God's done with the Church. God's done with the Church. And the Church has been so infected with false teaching and stuff that you can barely find anyone who's faithful in churches anymore and is teaching sound doctrine.

Of course, I think Harold Camping thinks he's the determiner of what sound doctrine is. And so God's done with the Church, and now he's going to press forward with parachurch ministries that seemingly, interestingly enough, look just like family radio.

And so that's what he's doing now. Now, he did say yesterday that he's not done studying this. And he's not really come to his final conclusions yet. But he was bopping all over the scriptures, looking for this, that, and the other thing.

And the final presentation was truly goofy. But we'll talk a little bit more about Harold Camping and take the millions of phone calls coming in right now at 866 -854 -6763. We'll be right back. And welcome back to The Dividing Line.

My name is James White, and we're taking your phone calls today at 866 -854 -6763. I've been multitasking a little bit here. One of the internet Jehovah's Witness apologists, Rick Stamp, has been banned from our channel many, many times.

And he just came back in. And even while I was talking to you, normally when you hear me sort of slow down and go, uh, it's because I'm doing something in the channel and nailing somebody, and I did. And so he's now complaining about, well, you know, you just can't debate anyone, you can't defeat easily, and, you know, all the rest of this stuff.

And so he's whining about it in the channel right now. Actually in message right now, not in the channel, because I banned yet another host mask. We just keep adding those host masks to the various lists as we take care of folks who sneak in under the radar screen, shall we say.

But anyways, we were talking about Harold Camping. Cultists everywhere today, but Harold Camping's new heresy. And as I listened to him going on and on yesterday, I just... Well, every time you listen to Harold Camping, you can't help but sit there, and when you listen to a response, go, How does he see these scripture references that he's quoting?

How does he see them connected to one another? I mean, it really is on the level of sort of the Bible codes thing where you just, you know, basically you just go looking for verses that have some words in them that maybe, if you ignore their original context and say, well, it's, you know, this word actually meant this in this context, and it sort of sounds like this, and all the rest of that stuff.

You know, that kind of a situation. Maybe that's how we can, you know, put all this stuff together. And I'm listening to Camping going on and on, and he's jumping, oh, to Revelation. Of course, Revelation's always a wonderfully easy book to go jump and grab things for.

But then he'd run over to Jeremiah, and then over to Isaiah, and then over to here, and over to there, just all over the place, and trying to put together this argument that God's done with the church.

And the thing that I'm sitting there listening and listening, and the thing that I was waiting to hear is, if you were going to talk about the church, it's similar to how, for example, Roman Catholic apologists deal with the doctrine of justification.

You know, they'll run over to a reference in Matthew, or they'll run over here and over there, and they'll try to tie these things together, none of which actually comes from the main, plain passages in the Bible where justification is discussed.

Well, if you're going to talk about the church, the nature of the church, and the future of the church, the glory of the church, where are you going to go? You're going to go to Ephesians, right? Ephesians, you're going to go to the pastoral epistles, but especially you're going to go to Ephesians.

And of course, did I hear anything from Harold Camping from Ephesians? No, because there's nothing in Ephesians that's going to help him to come up with this new idea that God is done with the church, and the church is supposed to parallel Israel, and since he rejected Israel, well, now he's rejected the church, and all the rest of this stuff.

And so you're supposed to fellowship together around the radio, and da-da-da-da-da, just unbelievable stuff. We've got a new cult leader out there, and unfortunately he's playing pretty music, and there's going to be a lot of folks that sit there and go, you know, he predicted 1994, now he's getting rid of the church, and I'm really not sure why anyone like Robertson Jennis puts in his biography, or in his bio, that he used to work for Harold Camping.

I really don't think that that is really relevant. Anyways, speaking of things that demonstrate that the church is royally a mess, I'm going to get you all involved here, and I'm going to take some phone calls with some other subjects.

But first, I'm just going to let you know that I am going to make some comments, you know, just unless the phones just go nutsy. I am going to make some comments on the prayer of Jabez today. And I remember a few weeks ago, before I knew anything about this, well, it was actually a couple months ago now, I remember a call coming in to a national talk program, and there being some real hesitancy to address the subject, and I can see why.

I mean, this book has been at the top of the Amazon .com bestseller list for I don't know how long now. It's just going all over the place. It's all over churches. It's everywhere. And so I have it sitting right here, and I want to make some comments on the prayer of Jabez coming up a little bit later on.

But let's go ahead and start taking some phone calls. The number again, 866 -854 -6763. And let's talk first with one of our regulars, Johnny on line one.

Roman Catholic Historical Anachronisms and the Keys of the Kingdom

Hi, Johnny. How are you doing, James? It's a pleasure to talk to you again. How are you doing? All right. I did want to say this. I have taken your advice, yours and Pastor David King's advice, to try to stay away from the Roman Catholic apologists, at least on a one-on-one level, until I'm ready for it.

That is wisdom. Yeah. I'll try to learn from the men that know a lot better than I do. I'm only 23, going to be on 24 next month.

I remember those years. I really do. I had hair and everything. It was cool.

But my question is, you know, one of the comments I did receive from men like Jesse Romero, of course I told you about that. Jesse Romero has consistently spoken to me about how, well, you know, I'm setting up this litmus test for finding out what the truth is, and what about the person that lived, say, 1 ,000 or 1 ,500 years ago, and didn't know how to read, and such and so forth.

And in doing that, he's quoted the Protestant scholars, such as J. N. D. Kelly and D. A. Carson or J. I. Packer. I told you about J. I. Packer, and how they said such and such, and how they admit as historians that the Roman Catholic Church did exist in the early centuries of the Church.

But my question particularly, and I'm trying to give you the full context on it, is that they keep, what I hear from Roman Catholic apologists, you know, Scott Hahn, Robertson Jennings, even Peter Stravinskas in the last debate that you had, they keep painting Church history with an incredibly broad brush.

I remember in, I got this, I don't know if you're familiar with the Jim Burnham set of beginning apologetics, these folders? Uh, no. This is for students that want a general introduction to Roman Catholic apologetics to witness the Protestants.

And it's nothing that you haven't heard before, but it's very simplistic for those that are really trying to get an introduction to it. Right. And one of the points that they make is that, you know, did the Roman Catholic Church add seven books to the Old Testament, or did Martin Luther throw them out?

Things like that. Right. And my question is dealing with the papacy in this respect. I've read some quotations from guys like St. Augustine, St. Jerome, where they have explained that the keys of the kingdom were not given only to Peter, but to all of the apostles.

Right. Which is in direct contradiction of the First Vatican Council. And you know why that is?

Could you explain? Well, really quickly, the reason for that is because of the fact that the distinction between the power of the keys and the power of binding and loosing only developed under papal authority and directive long after the time of Augustine.

And so Augustine and the early fathers see the power of the keys and the power of binding and loosing as being the same thing, because obviously it is. I mean, it is in the New Testament, it is in the Jewish sense of what the keys were meant to do, and binding and loosing are in Matthew 18, 18, Matthew 16.

It obviously is the same concept that is involved there. And so it took time and it became, in essence, it was under Rome's own self-interest that it became popular to differentiate between the power of the keys and the power of binding and loosing.

So that's another of the many historical anachronisms. I mean, you can go back and say, all right, if you think that these people were believed in a papacy, don't you find it a little bit strange that A, their interpretation of Matthew 16, 18, by the vast majority, is not what Rome offers today, and B, their very understanding of the concepts of the keys versus binding and loosing was not the same as what you have today?

Well, my question in particular was, because only in the quotations that I have seen, and I'm sure there's a lot out there that I haven't read, is that the three most dominant Church Fathers, at least to my knowledge, were Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine.

And they did not see a distinction between the power of the keys and the power of binding and loosing. Is this the overall view of the Church Fathers within the first five or six centuries, or was there a diversity of view, or was there any Church Father that distinguished between the keys of the kingdom and the power of binding and loosing?

I can't answer the question, was there any? I've never seen one. The reason being, again, that to my knowledge, that distinction came out of Roman apologetics later on. And so it was understood by anyone who read the New Testament that the keys and binding and loosing were the same thing, and it is more of an apologetic technique to attempt to differentiate between them.

It comes much later down the road. That's why I was attempting to say earlier that really that's an anachronistic interpretation. That is, it inserts back into Church history something that simply did not exist at the time of the original writings, which without anachronism, there would be no Roman Catholic historical apologetics.

I mean, other than just immediately going to the Newman stuff and saying, development, development, development, if you attempt to defend modern Roman Catholic theology historically, you just simply can't do it without engaging in anachronism.

It's just how it works.

So you're saying that because of the development, you're saying that you don't know of a Church Father with any kind of certainty, that you personally do not know of any Church Father inside the first 500 or 600 years of Christianity.

That said, the keys of the Canaan were given to Peter alone, but the power of binding and loosing is something else that was given to everyone or something like that.

Right. No, I'm not aware of that, and I think that actually starts to develop in the Roman area probably after that period of time, certainly after the time of Augustine, and whatever you do, it's going to come out of Rome.

It's going to be a Roman innovation.

Was the development before or after the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretos?

It would probably be around the same time period, maybe a little bit earlier. The possibility exists. I've not looked at it at all personally, but it is possible that that actually is where it came from.

I mean, I cannot rule that out as a possibility, but I've not looked into the specific interpretation of that issue as to find out exactly who initially started it.

Okay. Well, how do Roman Catholic apologists, and you know, I got the book by Mr. Eric Benson, I don't know if he's a doctor. It is. Oh, he's Dr. Eric Benson. He wrote a book called Evangelical Answers, which you recommend highly, where he talks about transubstantiation in his book, and he says that there are some church fathers that could be argued that did believe in it.

However, there are others, and he does cite at least two or three of them off the top of my head, I don't remember, where they explain that there was a variety of views among the early church fathers as to how they viewed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

And I think he lists a discussion between these men where one of them said that the body and blood become transformed into the body and blood of Christ, and the other one said, no, the likeness of the bread and wine remained the same.

Well, yeah, the debate that I had with Robert St. Genes, we went through a number of citations on that, and I would not agree that you could insert transubstantiation in the early church for the simple reason that the whole concept requires an Aristotelian background that simply would not be present for anyone and was not present for anyone until the 10th century as far as the whole concept.

And as I argued against Robert St. Genes, if that's what they believed, then they did not treat the elements in the only logical way that you would have to treat them if you actually believed in transubstantiation.

Real presence and transubstantiation are two different things. And they just gloss over that and just, again, engage in anachronism and just shove into church history what they have to find there, not recognizing that if, in point of fact, they want to try to put transubstantiation into an early father, then they're creating far more questions than they can possibly answer.

So, no, I don't think that's... but again...

But what about the church fathers that actually do... I think that clearly, as an honest person that reads church history, you as a historian can actually read certain church fathers and say, if, let's say, such and such a church father did believe in it, which is arguable, but let's just say he did, we cannot say the same for this other church father over here.

Well, obviously... well, of course, there's no such thing as... you know, Rome engages in pick-and-choose methodology in determining what of the early church fathers she's going to accept and what she's going to reject.

Even Peter Stravinskis said in the debate on Purgatory a few weeks ago, he said, well, we all know that any individual church father does not speak of the church, it's the body of the church fathers. Well, what's that supposed to mean?

I mean, Rome continues to get to choose what of the early church fathers she'll accept and how she'll interpret what the early church fathers said. It's sola ecclesia all over the place, and there is no united viewpoint on the subject in any way, shape, or form.

And so, certainly, it is well known, if you actually let Augustine speak for Augustine, if you allow for his viewpoint to be fully expressed, that he believed that a particular individual, that the particular physical body of Jesus Christ went to heaven and that we are deprived of his physical presence until he comes again.

Do you have that citation? I'd like to get my hands on it.