April 28, 2005

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Casting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.
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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. I was just looking at my blog feed here and this one just popped up, it was quite interesting.
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It says, those waiting to see whether Pope Benedict XVI will be an attack dog or a puppy dog may be getting an answer.
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The once deeply Catholic Spain is on the verge of passing a bill legalizing gay marriage and gay adoption.
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What's new about that? You heard about Elton John getting married, right? Oh, I'm sorry, civil unions, as if that really means anything.
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Anyway, the measure has passed the lower house of parliament and is expected to breeze through the Senate, but a Vatican official, the head of the
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Pontifical Council in the family, has issued a statement that if the law passes, civil officials in Spain must refuse to carry out the law, to the point of civil disobedience.
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Under the last Pope, similar measures in Belgium and the Netherlands were merely strongly denounced.
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Telling Catholics to disobey their own governments on such issues is an aggressive position that would be in line with the
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Pope's stated desire to reassert the Christian foundations of European culture and his explanation of why he took the name
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Benedict after the saint known for evangelizing Europe. Well, boy, a lot you could go after there.
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Evangelizing Europe? Well, if you don't actually change people's hearts and you don't have the evangel, it's sort of hard to evangelize anybody, isn't it?
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And simply telling people to do this without changing the heart isn't going to accomplish anything.
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So who knows what's going to happen there? I certainly don't know. But that is rather interesting little note that just popped up right as we were getting the program started.
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Not what I plan on talking about today. Actually I have in my hand here, oh, by the way, just in passing,
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I noted on the blog today the no -compromise wristbands are in. They are here.
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And so if you have been waiting because it was a pre -order situation, they are here. And I've got one right here.
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See, I'm holding it up to the microphone. And I like it.
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And it's nice to see it. And of course you can help support the ministry with that. And well, it's all on the blog.
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I have in my hand, not around my wrist, I have in my hand the uncorrected proof.
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I wish I had, and it'll come tomorrow. That's how it always works.
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I have ordered a different Jesus by Robert Millet. It probably will come tomorrow, maybe on Saturday, depending on how it was shipped.
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But it is now out from Erdman's. But what I have in my hand is the uncorrected proof copy.
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The reason I wish I had the real thing, I doubt the text has changed, honestly. But the pages aren't the same.
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I can tell the paperback published edition, 244 pages, this has 214.
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And so there's how it works. And so, but I have it in my hand.
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And what I'm going to do is I am going to be looking at what this book is about, reading some of the sections.
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We can go into a little bit more depth on the program than we can even on the blog simply because it takes so much time to write that kind of stuff up.
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And I think it's a vitally important issue. We have an LDS work of apologetics being published by Erdman's.
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I think the founders of Erdman's honestly would be absolutely positively spinning in their graves.
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They would be just mortified at the fact that their company is doing this.
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But that's just where we are today. That's just the way things are now. It doesn't hurt as much if you just simply recognize that quote unquote
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Christian publishers aren't really Christian publishers. They're just publishers. They might publish religious works, but the idea of having any type of theological standards is just, it's an old hat.
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It's just, you know, that's just the way it is. So it's a sad situation to look at.
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But before we take a look at that book, we're going to go ahead and take a quick call and then take a look at the book.
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Let's go to St. Paul and talk to Gary. Hi, Gary. Hello, Dr. White. How are you?
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Good, how are you? I'm doing all right. Hey, before I ask my question, could I greet all the toadies, minions, and lackeys in the channel?
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Sure, that would be fine. Just realize that they will all kick you and ban you when you come back in tomorrow.
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Oh, okay. But you're used to that, aren't you? Hello, toadies, minions, and lackeys in the channel. But you're accustomed to that.
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How many times do you think you were kicked or banned today? Only twice. It was a slow day.
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No, no, no, you're wrong, because I saw Spidey nail you, Hobster nailed you, and then immediately
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I sent you to purgatory. So that was three in one shot. Oh, okay. Like you said, I'm getting used to it.
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What can we do for you, brother? Well, if you start to talk to Catholics and say that they don't have the
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Gospel, their question is often, well, when did we, if that's your claim, that we don't have the
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Gospel? So where would you say in the history of the Church that the Catholic Church lost the
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Gospel? And can you identify some writers who were writing maybe before that point and after that point that kind of straddled that time?
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Yeah, that's a good question. It sort of raises one of the important points I try to make fairly regularly, and that is when you see these lists of dates, and frequently they're put into a pamphlet form, things like that, people say this is when such and such came into existence, and this is when such and such.
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The problem is history doesn't work that way. It's not like people wake up one morning and go, hey, let's believe in transubstantiation today.
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It takes place over time, and so folks want to have specific dates when such and such took place.
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You can do that only as far as dealing with something like dogmatic definitions of, for example, the dogma of transubstantiation, the fourth ladder in Council 1215.
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You can look at specifics regarding justification at the Council of Trent in the middle of the 16th century.
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But before that, the problem is you can find, for example, really, really, really bad theology in any particular writer in any particular century, but at the same time, that doesn't necessarily mean that he represents a good writer, or maybe even a good preacher who wasn't writing in the same century.
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And given the way things were in the olden days, you could have wide variances of opinion in different geographical areas.
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I mean, we're so connected to one another. I mean, as anybody can tell from what you said when you called in, during the day, we are chatting, and you're up in Minnesota, and I'm in Phoenix, and it sort of makes the world a little bit of a smaller place.
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That didn't happen. I mean, people just a couple hundred years ago could not even have begun to imagine such a thing prior to something like a telegraph or something like that.
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So that also introduces a whole other issue here. Basically, especially when you talk about the
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Gospel, what you're dealing with there, from my perspective, I really try,
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I believe it or not, I actually have some levels of optimism hiding somewhere in my character someplace, and when
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I look at the history of the Church, I recognize that there's all sorts of people, even in the earliest days, for example, in some of the earliest writings, we will find some people who call themselves
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Christians, or at least identify with the Christian movement, who seem to have almost no knowledge whatsoever of the
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New Testament, and as such, their theology is just really, really, really bad. At the same time, at the very same period in history, you can have individuals who have brilliant insights into elements of the
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Gospel and justification. That shouldn't surprise us, because that's what we see in the New Testament. I mean, obviously, if the
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Judaizers were writing in the same period of time as Paul's writing
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Galatians, you're going to have two different viewpoints being expressed at the exact same period of time.
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And so it shouldn't surprise us that if that's what's going on, even when the Apostles are on the earth, then it's going to happen afterwards as well.
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And you really don't get the dogmatic definition of certain beliefs until you have a church that is organized enough to create such dogmatic definitions.
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And even then, the Church, for example, the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, could not have even begun to understand your question.
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And the reason being that they would have understood Catholic Church in a very different way than you and I are using that term today, because I was assuming, as you asked your question, that you were using it of the
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Roman Catholic Church, which in reality is an oxymoron. It is two contradictory terms brought together.
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No one at the Council of Nicaea, for example, would ever use that terminology. They wouldn't have understood what it meant, for that matter, what
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Roman Catholic would have meant, because the simple fact of the matter is they did not believe that Rome defined the
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Catholic Church, or the Bishop of Rome defined the Catholic Church, for that matter. And so you've got the difference in those early years, those early councils in the first number of centuries, focused upon very different issues than you have in regards to the questions that we would like to ask.
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And so, as I look at history, certainly we have to look at, when people ask, when do you think the
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Roman Catholic Church started? Well, again, I don't think it started at any particular point in time.
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You can find, for example, Stephen, the Bishop of Rome, at the same time that Cyprian is the
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Bishop in Carthage, in the middle of the third century, you can see him starting to make claims like modern
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Roman Catholic popes and bishops. But no one really believed him. No one really gave in to him.
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Cyprian fought him, and councils did as well, and it was just a matter of a rather arrogant fellow up in Rome.
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And so, but is that something that demonstrates a beginning?
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Well, yeah. And then when the Western portion of the Roman Empire falls, the
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Bishop of Rome picks up a whole lot more authority, but still, he's not to that point either.
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And it is a lengthy process, where all sorts of different elements come together over time, that brings together the final form of the
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Roman Catholic Church we have today. Well, when in all that mess do you have an official repudiation of the
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Gospel of Grace? Well, those were not the primary issues. I would look at 1215, and I would look at the
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Doctrine of Transubstantiation as a very important point, no question about it. And without any doubt at all, the
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Council of Trent does so as well. What about before then? Well, you know, you see
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Gottschalk being chucked in jail for believing what Augustine believed about salvation in the 9th century.
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And so there's obviously people who are still around that don't feel that they are out of step with the quote -unquote institutional church to believe truths about the
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Gospel. But you also have a whole lot of really, really, really, really bad theology at that period of time as well.
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And you have to pick and choose. Is it easy to find people who are still holding on to important elements?
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Not really. It's not easy to find them after, you know, just a couple hundred years after Augustine.
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But somebody was being picked on by innocents and his armies during the beginnings of the
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Inquisition and things like that. There's somebody running around at that period of time. And they, at least if we can trust almost anything that is recorded about why those people were attacked and literally slaughtered by the
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Inquisition, by the papal armies, they believed some odd things about baptism or about the sufficiency of Scripture or they rejected certain traditions that had developed in Rome.
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So that makes you go, hmm, at that particular point in time. But a lot of what they wrote hasn't come down to us.
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The churches in Piedmont Valley, for example, only fragments of what they believed have come down to us.
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So that's what makes the identification of a particular time rather problematic because it's not going to be representative of everybody.
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We don't have a complete history in written form that we can say, ah, here's this, here's that, here's the other thing.
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So it really takes, you need to look at a particular individual in his context when he was writing and, you know, ask the question and take it back to the only standard we can take it back to.
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And that is to take it back to Scripture. And that's what we try to do today, too. Unfortunately, so many people get caught up in the other elements of it that they don't allow it to come back to really an examination of what the
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Scripture is all about. A Catholic in general just said, didn't Augustine also come up with purgatory?
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No. He had a purgation kind of concept, but he did not have purgatory as a development.
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In fact, it was Gregory the Great who really made a large move that direction around 600.
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And even then, his doctrine is not what eventually becomes the doctrine of the 13th century when it's finally officially defined on a conciliar basis.
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So each one of those, there's another example of, you know, the doctrine of purgatory develops over time.
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And you see a little bit here and you see a little bit there, but it's certainly not something that went back to the apostles and can be traced in that way.
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So church history, it defies the nice, simple ways that people try to fit it into a particular category, and it's especially true as far as individuals are concerned in the history of the church.
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And so I certainly, obviously since Trent, you can look at a dogmatic assertion, but you can go back to the 2nd century and find folks that had a false gospel, but at the same time, you can find folks that had a true gospel.
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And the thing that bothers a lot of folks is you find a lot of people in between. If you don't have a touchstone in the scriptures that you apply to everyone equally at that point, you're really not going to be able to come up with any type of meaningful conclusions from merely an examination of history itself.
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But can you not say that the council of Nicaea had a grasp of the entire gospel?
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Therefore, can you not say things like that? But they don't address it. See, those, especially when you're talking about issues like justification, it's just that is not the subject of the day.
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They don't answer our questions. We wish that they would answer our questions, but since they don't, there would have been probably a fairly wide variety of perspectives on the part of the participants at Nicaea, but we don't really have any way of determining that outside of looking at maybe the scraps of literature that survive.
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I mean, even if we take the number like 318 bishops, for the vast majority of them, we don't have anything that they ever wrote.
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So we just can't answer that question as far as the council is concerned. That was not an issue that they were addressing in any way, shape, or form.
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So was there no real organized catechism or gathering of a coherent doctrine at that point or not?
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No, remember, for the first five centuries, up until the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius on the issue of the nature of grace and the nature of the will, until that took place, the vast majority of the controversies have been
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Christological and Trinitarian in content, some canonical in regards to Martian and Gnosticism, but the issue of justification and things like that, no, and then, even when they do come up, look at what happens with Augustine.
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Augustine is no longer dealing with the scriptures in their original languages. He can't read Hebrew. He's not good with Greek, and as a result, his doctrine of justification is deeply influenced by the fact that he's looking at it in Latin, and the
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Latin term for justification indicates something that the Greek does not, and so that ends up coming into his theology as well, and so that's why
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I say the touchstone for all of these, whether it's someone as great as Augustine or someone who's hardly even known at all, the touchstone for all of them has to come back to the inspired scriptures themselves.
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Okay, well, that's a very helpful answer. All right, Gary, I appreciate your calling. Thank you, Dr. White. All right, God bless you.
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All right, bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341, I guess we're taking a few phone calls today.
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Let's go ahead and talk with Jason over in the UK. Hello, Jason. Hi there. How are you doing? I'm fine.
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I'm going to ask a very quick question, and then I'm going to hang up because my credit will probably run out. Okay, I'm sorry.
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That's fine. I sometimes talk to Roman Catholics, and sometimes one of the things they say is that they object to the term
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Roman Catholics. They think that the proper term is Catholic, and they say that you should call this by a proper name.
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I was just wondering if you would comment on that. Would you like to just hang up, and I'll comment on it and let you save your credit?
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Well, thank you for ringing us up. All right, thank you, Jason. Bye -bye. Well, you know,
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I have seen that, and I'm sorry. I'm not doing a good job on my phones today.
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Part of it's because I did a massive arm workout this afternoon, and man,
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I'm going to tell you something. If you hear me all of a sudden go, ah, and scream, it's because my arms are cramping.
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I'm glad I don't have to comb my hair, because if I did, I would be in a lot of trouble right now.
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There's nothing to comb up there, thankfully, so I'm all right. Anyhow, in regards to Jason's question, I've never understood this objection, given the fact that I hear the use from Roman Catholics constantly.
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It's in their writings. It's in their books. It's in their apologetics. It's all over the place.
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I mean, if you were listening during the death of the Pope and the election of a new Pope, you heard
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Roman Catholics talking about the Roman Catholic Church all the time, and so it really seems to me in the vast majority of instances to be a means to just simply sidetrack the conversation.
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Obviously, the term Catholic means universal or of all people, and Roman Catholic would be that universal church focused in Rome, and it is useful to identify those who are in communion with the
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Bishop of Rome over against those who are not, but the fact of the matter is there's no reason to object to it in any way, shape, or form.
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So those who do, generally I have discovered, are doing so for less than useful reasons, shall we say, and so anyway.
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All right, with that, I go back to, let me give you some background here. For those of you who may be new to the program, this ministry really began out of a meeting that took place in,
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I believe, 1982. Yes, it was 1982. I had been married for about three months, maybe four months at that particular point in time.
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I was 19 years of age, and two more missionaries,
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Elders Reed and Reese, came to my sister -in -law's home. Now, my wife is an identical twin, and so they were visiting with my sister -in -law, who is the identical twin of my wife, and I know why they wanted to come by, because my wife and her identical twin are very pretty, still are, very,
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I was going to say pretty young ladies, but this was 1982, so you can sort of start figuring things out, but they're still very pretty, and so these young Mormon missionaries liked making visits like this, and she called us up and mentioned that the missionaries are coming by, and I think about two years earlier,
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I had read a single book on the subject of Mormonism, a book that even today I would not say was really the best, and so I came over on a
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Monday and spoke with these two missionaries for about two and a half, three hours.
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We got together again on Thursday. Between Monday and Thursday, I read at least three, maybe four more books on the subject of Mormonism, and that began what then came into existence only about six months later as Alpha Omega Ministries.
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I was all of 20 years of age when this ministry began, and for a while there, our sole focus was upon evangelizing the
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LDS people. We started with one little photocopied tract and a copy of the Journal of Discourses.
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That was about the extent of what we had, and we have gone up to the
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General Conference, the Mormon Church. We had been doing that for many, many years until stopped by the
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King James only street abusers. We have been going out to the Easter pageant of the
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LDS Church in Salt Lake City. In fact, for those of you in the Phoenix area, the first time
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I ever went out to that, I took my blushing bride with me on the back of a
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Kawasaki 440, and what we call the Superstition Freeway ended at Mesa, no, not even
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Mesa, Country Club Drive, Country Club Drive at that point. For those of you who know Phoenix are going, wow, that was a while back.
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That was 1983, I believe, because in 84 we began really passing out tracts and witnessing to folks, and 85 was the big, big year where we had the tracts that were printed up and everything else.
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Anyway, we've been very focused upon Mormonism for a long, long time. I've written two books on the subject.
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Unfortunately, neither of them are any longer in print. We need to get them back in print in some way, shape, or form, and I've just been slow in doing that, and I need to change that.
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I've thought about rewriting them and sort of combining them, but anyway, for those of you who are on the
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East Coast, those of you who are outside the United States, Mormonism may strike you as something that is sort of odd.
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You see the missionaries once in a while, but it's not a major thing in your area. Believe me, here in the
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Valley of the Sun, in Phoenix, it is a very major thing. In the Intermountain West, especially
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Northern Arizona, Utah, Idaho, these are heavily LDS areas, and so it's much more of a current issue, and especially during that period of time,
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Mormonism was growing at an incredible rate. Its growth rate has slowed tremendously.
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There was a time in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when
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Mormonism is growing so quickly, and especially through conversions, that you would have...
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I remember one of the statistics was that your average Southern Baptist Church had 274 members, and an average week, 273
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Southern Baptists became Mormons. That's a church wholesale per week, 52 churches per year becoming
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LDS. And another statistic back from the 80s was that for every one
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Mormon that left the Mormon Church and became some type of Baptist, 24
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Baptists became Mormons. And that is no longer the case, thankfully. Mormonism's growth has slowed.
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They recognize this. They see the weakness in their numbers, and I can tell you why it is, by the way, just in passing for a number of different reasons, but one of the reasons for this was mentioned on a secular radio program today, and that is a man was mentioning a religious study that noted that the religions that demand something of their followers, that demand a change in life, that demand a belief in a clear set of doctrinal truths, are the religions that are doing well.
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The religions that are dropping those requirements are the religions that are dying, and Mormonism is at a crossroads.
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It really, really is. They have much to decide as to what the shape of Mormonism is going to be down the road.
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They really do, and right now it does not look like they're going to make the decision to remain unique, but that they are going to continue the course that they've charted over the past about 20 years now, 15 -20 years, and that is of seeking to mainstream, seeking to break into the mainstream
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Christian denominational scene, in essence. And we see that type of thing developing, and this book,
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I think, is just a part of it. And so, I have a tremendous amount of experience in dealing with Mormonism.
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I have a huge LDS library. I've read a tremendous amount of LDS material, spent innumerable hours in dialogue with LDS people,
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LDS missionaries, and as such, to see Erdman's, William Erdman's publishers, producing a book that is nothing but a
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Trojan apologetic. It is clearly meant, even though, and Erdman's has, you can see it on their website if you want to see it, it was sent out with the book.
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This is their description of it. It says, a leading Mormon scholar who has spent much of his career in conversation with traditional
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Christians in their writings, were traditional Christians by the way, Robert Millett discusses what constitutes
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Christianity, examines how the Latter -day Saints fit or do not fit within that rubric. Intended to, and here's the line, intended to inform rather than to convince or persuade, a different Jesus clears away misconceptions and doctrinal distortions that characterize more polemical works about Mormonism.
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Millett points out the many beliefs Latter -day Saints hold in common with traditional Christians, yet he also emphasizes differences where they exist.
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Now, I'm sorry, I don't know who wrote this. You really can't hold
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Robert Millett accountable for this, though I would think that he would probably agree with it, but when it says, intended to inform rather than to convince or persuade, that simply is not true.
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That is a false statement. I don't know who wrote it. Somebody in the publicity department, probably at Eerdmans, wrote this, but they're wrong.
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It is plainly, clearly intended to convince and to persuade.
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It is laid out in an apologetic fashion. The fact that the key issue that separates
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Mormonism from Christianity is buried in the last quarter of the book and barely touched, while the beginning of the book seeks to utilize all sorts of citations from C .S.
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Lewis and evangelical writers to demonstrate these connections between Mormonism and quote -unquote historic
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Christianity, the fact that it is laid out in that fashion clearly indicates to me that they can get away with this because very, very, very few evangelicals, and I use that term broadly these days, have read as much
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Mormonism as I have. Very, very, very few people have read thousands of pages of LDS writing.
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I have. I know where Farms is coming from. I know where Millet's coming from, and so I can recognize this, but the vast majority of other folks just going, wow, that's really interesting.
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I hadn't thought about that. Well, you know, Lewis seems to have had that idea, too, and maybe
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I have been misled. It is a clear apologetic. There is absolutely no question about it, and so I find it really, really deceptive, maybe not on Millet's part, but at least on Eerdman's part, to not be open about what the purpose this book is.
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Now, is it really all that shocking that this book is being put out by Eerdman's?
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I mean, InterVarsity Press puts out stuff by John Sanders and Gregory Boyd and Clark Pinnock that is basically on the same level of pure heresy as Mormonism, and they put it out because to be a publisher means you're to embrace academic freedom, and you're to embrace all this other stuff, and, you know, you want to be out there on the bleeding edge.
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Well, they're definitely bleeding. There's no two ways about it, and so should we really be surprised?
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Should we be overly surprised, for example, that I mentioned just a few weeks ago,
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I was staying in line at Berean Christian Bookstore to look over, and here's a bunch of stuff on Pope John Paul II, Pope John Paul picture books, right there next to the checkout counter for everybody to pick up, you know?
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I mean, you can't walk into a quote -unquote
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Christian bookstore today and actually functionally think that it's a Christian bookstore. You really can't do that.
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If you do that, you are very, very naive. There's no two ways about it, and you're going to get in trouble.
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So should we really be overly shocked that Eerdman's has opened this door through the publication of a book that's intention is to convert people to Mormonism?
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I can guarantee you that is what it's going to do. Should we really be shocked? I don't think so.
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We'll continue with that, and we have another phone call to handle, but we're going to take our break first, and be right back.
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Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.
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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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In their book The Same -Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the
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Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including
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Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law.
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In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.
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The Same -Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at AOMIN .org.
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Alaska, the unspoiled land of nature and immensity, both in its realities and its possibilities,
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Alaska can stir our hearts and minds like no other place on earth. Join us this summer for the 2005
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Alfred Omega Ministries Alaskan cruise as we cruise the inside passage to the great land of Alaska with Dr.
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James White and Christian recording artist Steve Camp as they explore the great doctrine of Sola Scriptura.
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For our guests, the journey north is an odyssey of glorious landscapes and majestic wildlife as we sail on the luxury five -star
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Contact us today at AOMIN .org or at 877 -SOV -CRUISE.
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Millions of petitioners from around the world are employing Pope John Paul II to recognize the Virgin Mary as co -redeemer with Christ, elevating the topic of Roman Catholic views of Mary to national headlines and widespread discussion.
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In his book, Mary, Another Redeemer, James White sidesteps hostile rhetoric and cites directly from Roman Catholic sources to explore this volatile topic.
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He traces how Mary of the Bible, esteemed mother of the Lord, obedient servant and chosen vessel of God, has become the immaculately conceived bodily assumed
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Queen of Heaven, viewed as co -mediator with Christ and now recognized as co -redeemer by many in the
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Roman Catholic Church. Mary, Another Redeemer is fresh insight into the woman the
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Bible calls blessed among women and an invitation to single -minded devotion to God's truth.
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You can order your copy of James White's book, Mary, Another Redeemer at AOMIN .org.
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This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the gospel of the grace of God. The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of his worship in his church.
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The elders and people of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day.
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Wow, it's already 23 minutes till.
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How do we do that? I guess I went late. Anyway, we're going to take a quick phone call and then get back to looking at a different Jesus book.
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We're going to go down to Tucson here in Arizona. Hello Brian. Hello Dr. White.
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How are you? I'm doing well, thank you. The reason I'm calling is I've got a good friend of mine.
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You know him by Silly Brit 2. Yes, uh -huh. And anyways, he emailed me a copy of your blog that you did.
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I think it was on either Monday or Tuesday, a little study on the passage in John 6.
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Mm -hmm. And specifically dealing with verse 44. Right, in regards to the Wilkins debate.
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Yes, exactly. And I had a, I just had a couple of questions regarding that. I really enjoyed it.
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I thought it was very well done and I wholeheartedly agree with you. But I had a question towards the end and I just, at the end of the article, you had mentioned, let me find it,
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I'm referencing here. I'm sorry, I lost it. You begin,
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I think it's the last paragraph, with, it is simply not natural to read the text so that the him who is raised up at the end of the verse is to be defined by the phrase, no one is able to come to me.
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And then you go on to say the natural flow in the grammar and the syntax is to define him who was raised up in light of the him who was drawn by the father.
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Mm -hmm. Can you expound on that just a little bit? Yeah, what I was saying is, is right afterwards
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I wrote, this is clear the sense of passage, and I gave the Greek, and when you look at the Greek, helkousai is, is draw and then altan is him.
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Right. So you have draw him and then the comma, of course, is inserted by an editor and then it's kago, kai and ago, it's a crassus, and I, anastaso,
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I will raise him, altan. And so what I had argued previous to this paragraph was, in essence, the, really, whether it is the one coming or the one drawn in the theology as presented by Jesus, that's not going to really make any difference as to who it is that's doing this.
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But. It's the same group. It's the same group, exactly. But the more natural way to understand the, the identity of the altan is that there is no difference between the altan who is the subject of the father's drawing, helkousai, and the altan that is the subject of the future verb, anastaso,
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I will raise him up. In fact, the, to, to try to say that those are two different altans without anything in the context to, to explain that or to, to base that on is something
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I've challenged a number of people on in the past because for the vast majority of Arminians, that is the only way around John chapter 6, verse 44.
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They see the group who are drawn as being a larger group than those who come.
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And then a larger group than those who are raised up. Right. In other words, the action that Jesus undertakes in raising him up on the last day, because in their theology, that is dependent upon whether he has, in essence, allowed
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Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has, in essence, allowed Jesus to do that. He has enabled Jesus to do that. He has done what he needs to do to get into that group to be raised up by Jesus, then that outon must be someone different than the one who is drawn by the
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Father in John 6, verse 44. And I just keep saying, look, if you're going to say that these two outons are referring to different people, then what in the grammar, the context, the syntax, what in the argument of Jesus, what in this text tells you that?
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And most of them will admit, nothing in this text, but if I jump over here, or if I go over here, they don't want to stay in this particular passage.
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They want to go someplace else. Okay, let me throw something out at you, and tell me what you think of this, just going back to the phrase, the conditional sentence there, that begins with Eon, Meo Pater?
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Yes. Okay. When I just sat down and tried to do my own translation of this verse,
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I translated it this way. I started off with, No one is able to come to me, and then
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I translated Eon, If, and then I went, Not the Father who sent me draws him.
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Now, would it be improper for me to translate it that way? Yeah, because the Eon, Meo, is idiomatic.
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It is idiomatic, so it's such a literal translation, and making that a conditional? It is a conditional, and it's accept.
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Okay. When you've got the infinitival phrase before that, the genital sign,
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No one is able to do action X, unless this is fulfilled.
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So, the Eon, Meo, is really providing to you there the transition into what is necessary for the fulfillment of that action that is mentioned at the beginning of the phrase.
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All right, so let's go with that. So, in essence, the Father drawing him is the antecedent to the one who's coming.
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No one has the ability to do the first portion, which is
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Elphine, unless the drawing takes place. Exactly. Okay, so, in other words, you could, in a sense, say that unless the
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Father who sent me draws him, no one is able to come to me. And that's really the force of that, if you just put it in a craft conditional way, like an implication would be,
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If, then. If not the Father who sent me draws him, no one can come to me. Right, and the reason, though, that you have probably the form that it has in John 6, 43, and this is one of the problems with breaking things up into verses anyways, to be perfectly honest with you.
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We'd probably be better off without it, is we tend not to see the connection with what came before, and that is
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Jesus is saying to them, Stop gunga -smoohing amongst yourselves. Stop grumbling amongst yourselves, and what are they grumbling about?
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Well, who is this man, and don't we know his father, and his sisters, and brothers, and yada, yada, yada.
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And they're grumbling about him, and so when he, when you have udais dunatai elfain at the beginning, that is where the emphasis is.
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No one can come to me unless the Father sent me draws him. But you're correct, you could translate it that way, but I'm not sure that it would actually smooth it out as to its original context, in the way it was being used.
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Yeah, it's certainly not smooth, but let me ask you, if an Arminian pushes you on this, and says,
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Look, this is how I want to translate this, and that what we have here is we have a conditional sentence, with the antecedent being the
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Father drawing, the consequence being the person coming, then could they make a case...
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Well, hold on, let me stop you there for just a second, because that would be true in 37, that would not necessarily be true here.
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It's possible. Because if we do render it the way you're talking about it, if we switch around our translation, unless the
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Father who sent me draws someone, they are not able to come to me. Now the
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Arminian might want to argue, but it does not necessarily follow, that everyone who is drawn is going to be raised up.
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Precisely. But the problem is, 637 has already said, All the Father gives me will come to me.
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No, you're exactly right. I thought your argument from context there was brilliant.
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And clearly by the time we get to John 644, all those who are drawn are all those who come.
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And my question is, which you can't do, but if you take 644 completely out of context, and just sit it down, and you just analyze the grammar of the sentence itself, it seems there is some wiggle room there, where they can argue that that sentence in and of itself is ambiguous as to who is drawn and who is not.
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But I think it's only in the English translation that it is. Because once again, a person reading that is going to see that Auton, and there is only
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Kago and Anastaso between those two Autons. They're right next to each other.
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Right, so you're saying because of the closeness of Auton there, and the two
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Autons, then they would understand them to be the same. Well, there's nothing in the text.
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You have a direct object of a power verb.
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Helcuso is a power verb. And then you have the direct object, and by the way, that there is by the
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Father. And then you have the direct object of another power verb, Anastaso, in the future form.
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Cause to rise. Cause to raise up. Also a power verb. Also singular. Now it's the Son. You have the
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Father and the Son both operative here. The Son's action is going to be different in audience or the same in audience as the
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Father's. I mean, remember, John 6 comes right after John 5. What's John 5 all about? The unity of the Father and the
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Son in doing the very same things. So there's nothing at all in the context that would lead a person to think that if you've got two singular power verbs, you've got singular
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Auton as the direct object, that there's somehow two completely different groups.
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Even though they may argue that the Eon, Mi, O, Pater, that is the beginning or is the antecedent of a conditional statement?
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The conditional statement still ends with Halkousai Auton. Right, Auton. But that's the antecedent, though, that goes all the way back to the very beginning of the verse.
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Which isn't all that far as far as Greek is concerned. Right, no, I understand. But you don't think that that's a legitimate...
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No, I see absolutely no basis for looking at the...
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I mean, anybody can come up with anything. I have seen some of the most amazing ways around John chapter 6, and I'm trying to keep track of all of them and document them, because I really want to write on that subject someday.
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But the fact of the matter is, if you're just listening to the text and allowing the text to speak for itself, even the fact that you have a singular
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Auton here is somewhat unusual. Notice he's not using a plural here.
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Right, it's him. It is a singular direct object. And so, that in and of itself, the fact that that then is repeated as the direct object of Anastasio as well.
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Rather than saying, and I will raise up them, whoever does this. He doesn't do that.
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He just sticks with the exact same direct object. There simply isn't any reason to think there's a difference between those two.
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You can do what you want with the infinitival phrase. The fact remains that under the inspiration of the
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Holy Spirit, that verb and its direct object is put right before Jesus saying, and I will power verb direct object.
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It is really, I think, very, very clear in what it's communicating. There's kind of a parallel you see there. Oh yeah, very definitely.
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Dr. White, thank you so much. And by the way, that continues in 45. As I mentioned, it's not like it's just here and then it moves off into something else.
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It's restated in 45. So I've asked people for a long, long time now to give me some kind of, to show me that their beliefs recognize what these texts are saying.
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And to this very day, I just haven't found anybody who's really done that. And I say it with all honesty.
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So anyway, thanks for your call, brother. Thank you, Dr. White. All right, God bless. Thanks for coming. Bye -bye. Hey, I managed to do it right that time.
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The controls of the phone are behind where the microphone is sitting in front of me. The phone is underneath that.
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I cannot see the phone from just the way we've got things set up here. So I've got to sort of sit up and peer over the top of the phone to find the things.
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And you don't want to start reaching over there and hitting buttons. That could be a rather disastrous thing. Anyway, I was going to really spend the whole time on this particular book, and I didn't get a chance to.
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But nothing against calls. Calls were very, very good. I hope that was very useful to everybody. We have time in the future, and who knows?
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Maybe certainly by the next dividing line I will have the actual text itself, so I'll be able to double -check page numbers, stuff like that.
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But I doubt I'm going to go through that one and transfer all the markings that I have in this particular manuscript over.
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But I've marked a number of things in this book that I would like to go over. There is an attempted defense of the
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Book of Abraham. There is an attempted defense of the Mormon Gospel, an attempted attack upon Sola Scriptura, and the sufficiency of Scripture in the canon.
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And one of the things that really, really bothers me, and I recognize that God has a purpose in everything.
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And some people say, you know, don't you just get tremendously frustrated about things like this? Yeah, and I don't ever want to stop being frustrated by things like this, because once you do, you've lost your passion, you've lost your drive.
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But at the same time, people say, how can you keep doing this over the years without burning out? And I can, well, it's the grace of God, first and foremost.
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But more than that, someone may say, well, how would you respond if a
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Mormon comes up to you someday and says, oh, hey, you know what? My neighbors become LDS because of the millet book that they picked up in a
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Christian bookstore that Richard Mao made possible. What do you think of that, White? And I can believe me, that kind of thing happens more often than you know.
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And someone will say, well, wouldn't that just really, really bother you? Well, not really. And I'll tell you why.
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I know that when I do debates, there are some people who are in Christian churches right now who, as a result of that debate, may end up in a false church.
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But they're in no different position than they're in right now. They're still in Regenerate. In other words, if someone is in a church and they don't know
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Christ, they're just religious hypocrites, does it really matter if they end up in another church, even if it's a false church, at that particular point in time?
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I don't think it does. When you speak the truth, you're going to offend people. And there are lots of folks who are very comfortable in today's churches.
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And they're not challenged in those churches. They don't hear the truth. They don't hear a call to holiness. They don't hear about the holiness of God and the justice of God and any of the rest of that stuff.
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And so when they listen to a debate, I better be speaking the truth. I better be speaking it boldly.
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And they may be offended by that. And, in fact, they may be so offended by what I'm saying that they end up going the other direction, out of anger toward what
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I've said. And I understand that. The natural man is not going to like my message.
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The natural man is not going to like the gospel. The natural man is not going to find the gospel of Christ comforting to him.
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It is something that breaks someone. It is something that grinds them to powder.
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Are those not biblical terms? Does not Paul describe us as a scent of life to those who are being saved, but, on the other hand, the scent of death to those who are perishing?
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And so I recognize that unless I am actually betraying the gospel, when I proclaim it with clarity and with power, it's going to have an effect.
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And one of those effects can be people running from it and embracing even worse error than they currently hold.
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I understand that. No question about it. And so could there be people, they're going to read this book and they're going to become
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Mormons? Yep, that's true. There's no two ways about it. That is what's going to happen.
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I recognize that. And it's going to be used by LDS apologists in that way, and I'm sure they're just as happy as the day is long.
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I mean, this would be like our getting Letters to a Mormon Elder published by Deseret Book, and distributed all through the
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LDS bookstore chain. That would be the same thing in reverse. If I could find, say, a general authority or a
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BYU professor to write the foreword and the afterword to Letters to a Mormon Elder, and we get it published by Deseret Book and distribute it in the
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LDS book world, that would be the reverse of this.
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I recognize that. But at the same time, I also recognize that what this is allowing us to do is, once again, it is shining a light upon what calls itself evangelicalism.
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What calls itself what is in reality pseudo -evangelicalism or post -evangelicalism.
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It shines a light, and it has caused all of us, I think all of us, if you've been following the discussions in regards to such things as quote -unquote reformed
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Catholicism or the emergent church movement or open theism or inclusivism, if you've been following the discussions since the death of John Paul II and the nature of the gospel and the fact that so many people are willing to trade the gospel in, trade the very heart of the gospel in, for something that is much less, so as to fit in, so as to gain the friendship of the world, maybe attract a few more people on Sunday morning.
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We've seen that happening, and what it's done is we're seeing this, and maybe some of us,
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I know I was, I do try to be, like I said, a bit of an optimist, and so maybe it has just struck us as being amazing that people that we thought maybe were a little bit closer to us, we thought maybe they had a little more commitment, a little more knowledge, maybe they really understood what we talked about in regards to being passionate about justification, passionate about why
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I can stand before a holy and a just God, and we knew in the back of our mind there was a possibility that we were being way too optimistic, and now we've discovered, well, we were, we were, and that's a little bit disconcerting.
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It sort of calls for a reorientation, but that's what we needed. We recognize now that in essence we need to be very, very clear about what we are saying, and we need to differentiate ourselves from those who call themselves evangelicals, but there's no evangel left.
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They're just Coles. The evangel part fell off, so they're just Coles, and they don't have a message.
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They don't have a gospel. They can't, even if they talk about the gospel, they can't define it anymore. The gospel has become saying the name
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Jesus. Anything beyond that, we don't know anything about it. Imputation, way too big a word.
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Justification, even longer, that's worse. Let's not go there. Let's just say that as long as you love
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Jesus, all is well, and that's what people believe. Well, we're going to have to be very, very clear in saying that is not our message, and we do not have fellowship with those who are going to strip the gospel down to that level because that's not the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that requires us to examine our priorities.
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I understand. Well, we're out of time. Thanks for listening to The Undivided Line. We will be back on Tuesday morning.
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I should have the book by then. Maybe we'll spend some more time with that. Who knows what's going to happen between now and then. We've only got next week on The Dividing Line, and then like two and a half, three weeks off.
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Now, I'm not sure if Rich is going to run some best ofs, but I sort of doubt it. Maybe once in a while.
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I don't know, but I'm going to be sort of busy for a while, so we'll talk about that on Tuesday morning at, well, it's 11 o 'clock my time.
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It's 2 p .m. on the East Coast. Whatever it is, you know it is. We'll see you then. God bless. It's been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602, or write us at P .O.
59:39
Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the
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World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's a -o -m -i -n .org, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.