June 29, 2018 Show with Dr. James R. White on “Mormonism’s Claim of Being the Only True & Living Church Upon the Face of the Earth” AND “When Perceived Racism is Combated With Racism: A Current Crisis Plaguing the Body of Christ”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 29th day of June 2018, and I'm so delighted that after a very long absence, my guest today,

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Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and I are back together again.

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Yeah, back together again. James White is director of Alpha Omega Ministries, a

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Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona, and he is a professor having taught

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Greek systematic theology and various topics in the field of apologetics. He has authored and contributed to more than 24 books, including

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The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, and The God Who Justifies.

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He is an accomplished debater, having engaged in more than 160 moderated public debates around the world with leading proponents of Roman Catholicism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormonism, as well as critics such as Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and John Shelby Spahn.

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And it is my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Radio, James R.

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White. Well, I'm not sure if anybody heard a word you said over the music.

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I certainly couldn't. Like I said, I was just calling to get some help with Swedenborgianism.

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Most people don't realize you are one of the greatest living experts on the subject.

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Swedenborgianism, of course. You are the only living expert. But you don't need to bring that particular point up.

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I just like saying the word. I have no expertise. Evidently. Evidently. You've been saying it for decades.

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I can attest to that. Well, if you may recall, I used to say nearly every day on the old

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Iron Trip and Zion Radio in New York, I used to say, so give us a call whether you are a

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Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, even a Swedenborgianist. That's right. But it is so great to have you back on the program.

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We are going to be discussing today, for the first hour, Mormonism's claim of being the one true and living church upon the face of the earth, which is the theme of an event where you will be speaking.

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Actually, it's going to be the theme of a LDS Protestant dialogue at Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah, which is an

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Orthodox Presbyterian congregation pastored by a mutually dear friend of ours, Jason Wallace.

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Then the second half of the program, we're going to be addressing when perceived racism is combated with racism, a current crisis plaguing the body of Christ.

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And I'd like to also introduce my co -host today, Simon O'Maney.

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Simon O'Maney is one of the more recently elected pastors at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where, much to the dismay of the leaders and congregation,

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I am a member. And it's great to have you on the program again as a co -host,

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Simon O'Maney. This time, you're a co -host, whereas the last time you were actually a guest. That's right. This time

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I get to ask the hard questions. One thing, to start off the program on Mormonism, I was actually really surprised,

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James, that you got a Mormon in the 21st century, especially in 2018, to be defending that the

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Mormon Church is the only true and living church upon the face of the earth. And that seems to be antithetical to their public relations policy in this day and age, where they're just, for the most part, from what

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I have heard from Mormons, even local Mormon missionaries in the Carlisle area.

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Hey, we're just one of you guys. We're just a different denomination. Yeah, that has sort of become the default message, but Alred and I have known each other for a while.

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I think we ran into each other at the General Conference in Salt Lake, outside the—I remember the encounter, actually, outside the

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South Gate. Oh, goodness, it was sometime in the mid to late 80s, so it's been quite a while now, probably about 30 years.

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And I jokingly identify him as one of the three Nephites, so he sort of goes back to an older form of Mormonism.

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And very, very well -read man, and obviously, you know, he—in defending that kind of a proposition, what he's basically saying is,

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I accept what the Mormon Church teaches about itself, but I would imagine, especially in light of the conversation we had a couple years ago up there in Utah, that he would recognize there has been a major shift in the emphasis of the

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Church. When I first ran into Mormon missionaries, which is what began Alvin and Megan Ministries in the early 1980s, it was a very strong message that there is only one true

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Church on Earth, and that's because that's what the older scriptures say, and that all the

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Churches are abomination, and that was part of the message of the first couple of missionary lessons back then, as you go over Joseph Smith's testimony and his first vision and stuff like that.

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Now they hold that off for quite some time, and they've de -emphasized the uniqueness, and you would think someone in Salt Lake would have figured out that the fact that the back door of Mormonism has become as large as the front door may have something to do with the fact that they really have sort of lost their way as far as that goes.

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When Mormonism was growing very, very, very quickly in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, especially in the late 70s, early 80s, the average

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Southern Baptist Church had 274 members, and an average week, 273 Southern Baptists became

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Mormons. So it was a Church wholesale each week, that's just not the case anymore, and when you ask why, you know, it's sort of hard to avoid recognizing that, well, the culture's changed a lot, secularization, post -modernism, and Mormonism is especially subject to that because of its very highly subjective testimony and so on and so forth, but it's also due to the fact that leadership of the

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Church has really lost direction. There used to be people like Bruce R.

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McConkie who were straightforward in saying, this is the one true Church, etc., etc., and starting in the mid -90s, there was a muting of these things, and that also is in conjunction with the fact that the

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Mormons had started sending some of their best and brightest from BYU out to get their PhDs in other schools, so as to give them more credibility.

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Well, what they hoped, well, I imagine didn't realize, is that they would come back and would inject into the very bloodstream of, at the very heart of Mormonism, a form of skepticism or liberalism that Mormonism simply could not survive without having to radically alter its perspective and its understandings of itself, and given that the vast majority of the

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Quorum, the 12, the 70, come from our graduates of Brigham Young University, that's where a lot of this impact is starting to hit, and so it's, you know,

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I remember talking to a guy outside the Temple years and years ago, and he pointed up the

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Salt Lake Temple, and anyone who's seen the

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Temple knows that there are no crosses or anything like that on the steeple, you have the angel of Moroni, and he says, you mark my words, 20 years from now, there'll be a cross up there.

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Now, he wasn't right, it's been 20 years since I talked to him, but the general direction that he was charting out and the trends that he was seeing have been borne out, and it's interesting that he saw that as early as he did.

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Wow. One thing that I wanted to have my co -host do is, first of all, formally greet you now that he,

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I believe, has a working pair of headphones and a microphone. I think I can hear you a lot, in fact, I could tell by that little chuckle that I hear you better.

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Oh yeah? Yeah, oh yeah, there you go. Simon O'Maney, who, as I said before, is one of the new pastors at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and I'm sure once he gets to know me better, he's going to leave abruptly, but he holds you in very high regard,

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Dr. White. In fact, you play a central role in his life in coming to the Doctrines of Grace, and if you could tell us about that,

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Simon. Yeah, well, hello listeners, hello Dr. White. Yeah, so, you know, at one point,

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Dr. White, you've mentioned that Calvary Chapel are the best producers of Calvinists, because they tell people to read their

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Bible, and I am certainly a testimony to that. So, while I was in Calvary Chapel, the

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Calvary Chapel pastor, he had kind of a strange relationship with Calvinism. He kind of promoted a lot of kind of Calvinist gospel coalition type pastors, writers, that sort of a thing, and yet he warned men like me to stay away from Calvinists, because when you become a

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Calvinist, somehow you end up cheating on your wife and becoming a drug addict, etc., etc.,

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just a lot of horror stories that, yeah. But, and of course, you know, he told me to particularly stay away from you, that you were...

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Yeah, but Calvinists even say that. But, of course, that only made me more curious, and so, you know, began to listen to the dividing line and particularly picking up Potter's Freedom and reading through that, and, you know, that really caused me to wrestle through Scripture, and something

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I noticed as I was wrestling through Scripture is that as I would have conversations with my friends and family and other people, a lot of the argumentation that they would use was often very emotive, appealing to emotions, and also ad hominems, you know,

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Calvinists are these, you know, bad, scary guys, rather than really wrestling with Scripture. So, that's something that I really appreciated about your book and even the dividing line, the pointing to Scripture, and I would say for myself that whole

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Sola Scriptura and high view of Scripture in worship, in theology, and just how we do theology is really what attracted me to a

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Reformed understanding of the faith. So, yeah, I very much appreciate your ministry for that. Well, thank you very much.

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That's great to hear, and, you know, Potter's Freedom, it certainly wasn't

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Norm Geisler's intention that that book would be written or that it would have the kind of impact that it did have and continues to have, but that's what happens when you approach the subject, you know,

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I spent quite some time tracking down Norm's old books and making, you know, even multiple editions of the same book to try to be very accurate and careful in what

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I was saying about what he had taught, so on and so forth, and I'm very convinced that to this day he has never read the

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Potter's Freedom. I think he would feel that that would be an utter violation of his own understanding of how this is supposed to work.

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I'm way too young to be taken seriously by him. In fact, he told me in the car once that he had just turned 65, and so he was old enough now to write a systematic theology, and I said, so, and so you're 65, you can't write a systematic theology?

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Nope, nope, can't do it. So I said, so, Grudem's, this is not waste paper, and so he lives that out, and therefore

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I still have another almost, I've got full nine years before I can say anything worthwhile theologically as far as Dark Geisler is concerned.

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So I didn't take that as a green light to treat him badly. I was very careful in how

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I argued my case there. So yeah, that's been good grief. We're coming up on 20 years for that book.

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Wow, that time flies, because I remember when I was working part -time for Calvary Press when that book was not even in print yet, and I was the one primarily in charge of getting the endorsements for the book, which

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I got a ton of, as you full well know, and it's amazing how quickly time flies.

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In fact, when I was reading the introduction from your bio on your website, well,

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I wouldn't read your bio anywhere else, because it would sure to be outdated. I've embarrassed myself too many times by giving a way low number, way too low number for different things that you've accomplished, but I can remember when

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I was actually accurate in saying things like, he's had 15 public moderated debates.

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That's 160 what? 162 at the moment, yeah. Wow, incredible.

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And also, Simon was in the audience, was it in Belfast?

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No, it was in Dublin in 2013. Yeah, so living in Cork, but I had the opportunity to travel up to Dublin on the train one day and managed to catch

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Dr. White debating Adnan Rashid in February. Was that UCD or Trinity?

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I don't even remember now. Okay. Yeah, we had the back -to -back debates, one at University College Dublin and the other at Trinity, and between the two, we had lunch, and that was the first time that he and I had ever sat down in a non -combative situation, and that's changed every debate since then.

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Really, really, really did. I was able to really explain to him why I do what I do, and he came to understand that there are

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Christians who actually do what they do for reasons different than he had always assumed, because he came out of the speaker's corner type, yell, scream, throw verbal bombs at each other type thing, and I don't do that kind of thing, and so he wasn't exactly sure why, and so yeah, that was great.

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That was a great trip. Well, anyway, going back to the event you're having on Friday, January, July 6th, the same night that I'm having an event.

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Thankfully, they're on opposite sides of the country, so we're not really competing here geographically, but you are having an event in Magna, Utah, as we have already stated, which is a suburb of Salt Lake City, this

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LDS Protestant dialogue, and there's a dash there, folks. I don't mean LDS Protestant.

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I mean LDS and Protestant dialogue, and what is the reason why dialogues have been more frequently participated in than debates, especially with someone like a representative of the

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LDS? Why is that? Well, you know, the last time that we got together, we called it a dialogue. We actually have time limits and stuff on this, so I've actually been calling it a debate.

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The difference might be that the format's a little bit different. I'm presenting three points why

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I feel, I think, the three strongest points about Mormonism being untrue. He's going to present three points that he thinks

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Mormonism is just wonderful and great about, and we'll have a discussion on those issues, but that would be a somewhat unusual format for a debate,

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I guess. So it's just the terminology, but we have equal time limits and stuff like that, so you know, it can be described in lots of different ways.

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So Alma would not be the type of guy that would shy away from that. Like I said, when

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I first started encountering Alma outside the temple, in that first conversation,

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I felt a very strong leading to be very, very biblical in everything

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I said to this man. Didn't know him from Adam, and turned out to be the sharpest, most well -read Mormon I'd ever run into, and if I had not been careful,

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I would have started off on the wrong foot with someone with whom I would end up writing long, long letters that were actually sent through the mail, if you can believe that.

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That's how long ago this was. Pony Express, the whole nine yards. So someone like him, who has had access to the leadership of the church, and he's got a lot of connections at the very highest level, he knows stuff, shall we say.

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And Allred, of course, his great -great -great -grandfather had, well, back in the 1990s, had 65 ,000 descendants at that point in time.

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And half of those were wives. But his uncles were all polygamists.

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So when they came to his wedding, he told me about how he's introducing his family, and this is my uncle, duh, and his wife, and his wife, and his wife, and his wife's mom had to sit down because she was blown away by what she was seeing.

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So yeah, Allred, he has a lot of connections in the polygamist groups up there, and a lot of knowledge of them, too.

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So anyway, but it'll be a pointed, straightforward thing.

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And I just saw someone on Facebook just a couple days ago post a little thing when he and I had done our dialogue about two, three years ago.

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I think it was two years ago. They had watched that, and that was the thing that got them out of Mormonism.

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They're already having lots of questions. They're already having lots of problems. And so to hear that kind of a dialogue just cast a kind of high -level light on the issue that allowed him to go, you know what, that Mormon knows

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Mormonism really well, and yet the questions are still there, and that's what got him out the door.

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So, you know, just allow truth to do what truth does.

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Sometimes it has the opposite effect. Sometimes truth goes out for judgment. I'm well aware of that, but while we have the freedom to be doing it, then we should take advantage of it, and that's certainly what we've been doing the past, well, 30, 35 years.

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Kelly and I just had our 36th wedding anniversary. Wow. Yeah, Alpha Omega 35 this October.

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Yeah, and I cannot believe, I still cannot believe whenever I see or hear anything from your daughter, who is now

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Summer Yeager, I just can't believe it, that it seems like just a year ago when this little girl was chuckling in the back seat of the car saying,

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Mr. Arntzen, can you say coffee again? I mean, it's just amazing to me, utterly amazing.

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Did you see the clip where she and Joy were on with Ali? They're talking about the 19th

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Amendment and stuff like that? No, I haven't seen that. Yeah, I thought I reposted it on my Facebook thing, and I don't care if it's two o 'clock in the morning.

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If I post something on Facebook, you like it within 15 seconds, so I realize you don't sleep.

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It's a little bit scary. I mean, when you set an alarm to get up in the morning to see, can

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I post something on my Facebook feed, and Chris will not be the first one to like it. Let's see when we can do it.

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This is sort of creepy, but anyway, yeah, it's there. I'm your friendly

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Reform Baptist stalker. That's right, that's right. Or as some people call me, your sycophant.

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I was in Lusaka, Zambia. Conrad and Bayway's hometown.

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That's correct. I was at the African Christian University there, had just had dinner the night before at Bodhi Balcombe's home, and I was being interviewed by some of the students for a webcast, and I was talking about my kids, and I mentioned

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Summer. I said, she has this webcast called One of the guys goes, wait, Summer's your daughter? I listen to her all the time.

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You know, so I started saying, yeah, I'm just Summer's dad, because she already has really a global audience.

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When I was in Belfast lecturing on Islam, I asked the question, I said, hey, how many of you listen to Sheologians?

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There was a good dozen people. There was only about 50 people in the room, so there's a good dozen that put their hands up, they listen to Sheologians.

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So yeah, it is amazing what's happened there.

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But anyway, and I'm not just doing the dialogue on Friday night, then on Saturday and Sunday.

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I'll also be speaking in the evenings, well, Saturday evening and then Sunday morning and Sunday evening at the

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OPC there in Magna. And so we've been doing this for a few years now.

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Rich and I decided it was something that we wanted to do. Jason has been such an important part of our work up there.

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He's done in Salt Lake what you did in New York for so long. And I can't even keep track of all the debates we did.

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The last debate, though, the last formal debate that we did years ago was with Dr.

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Dennis Potter. And it was at University of Utah. And I remember seeing this guy come in, and I just remember looking over at Jason, and Jason looks over at me in the inimitable style of Jason Wallace.

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He's carrying a backpack. This is supposed to be a Mormon professor of philosophy, a

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PhD in philosophy. He's carrying a backpack that says, no war in Iraq, and he has an earring.

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Yeah, I remember seeing that. Yeah, and he and I are both looking at each other, and it wasn't much of a challenge as far as the debate.

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Well, one of the great secrets of the debates up there in Salt Lake City is that Dennis Potter, I think, is now

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Denise Potter. Oh, boy. Yeah. And I'm still a

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Mormon? Well, that would be pretty tough to do. But that's the amazing thing is that Mormonism is seemingly lost.

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You would think that of all groups, Mormonism would have some clarity on its sexual ethics perspective.

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But I'm seeing all sorts of stuff being posted where the church is being supportive of various LGBTQ causes and stuff like this.

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And it is truly amazing. The church is rudderless in Salt Lake City. And that's why

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I say, if a truly charismatic prophet -type guy stepped forward, especially in central to southern

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Utah, I think someone like that could split the church. Because I know that there are many

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Mormons today who are still the old -style Joseph Smith is a prophet,

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First Vision is true -type Mormons. And they feel betrayed by the leadership in Salt Lake, but they don't know what to do.

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And if someone came along and made a claim, look, you know, a couple years ago, for example,

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I know I'm rambling, but just tell me when you need to take a break. A couple years ago, well, back in the 80s,

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I remember the fear and the nervousness I had when I went into the church historical department in Salt Lake City and requested a certain microfilm to photocopy.

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And it was the earliest edition of Joseph Smith's First Vision. And I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

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And I carried that in a notebook for years afterwards. Back then, we would show

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Mormons stuff about the seer stone and about Joseph Smith's wives and na -na -na -na -na -na -na -na -na -na.

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All that stuff is now available in beautiful bound volumes from the church historian's department on the shelves of the

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Deseret Bookstore. It's all there. Just last year, they came out with a full -color picture of the seer stone, the stone that Joseph Smith put in his hat to translate the

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Book of Mormon and to search for buried treasure, which had been denied for decades and decades. It was sitting in the church historian's department, and the leadership of the church knew all about it.

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So there has been so much of this stuff coming out that, you know, there's a lot of Mormons that just feel like they've been betrayed.

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So they've got a choice. Either that forces them out of the church, and then they very frequently become part of the great religiously abused.

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If the church betrayed them and lied to them, then why should they believe any other church?

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Why should they believe anything about this religion at all, this religion stuff? Or it pushes them more into it, and they're wondering why the leadership won't fight back and push back and things like that.

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And that's why I say if a real charismatic type guy came along,

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I think you could see them really start a big movement and split the church.

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Of course, the LDS Church in Salt Lake is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, just in property, possession, and investments.

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I mean, they've got bucko bucks. They really, really do. So they'd be up against that.

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But still, Mormonism is in a major state of flux right now, and the rudder has fallen off.

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And I don't know. It just seems to be spinning in circles right now, and I don't know what the end result of that is going to be.

28:43

We're going to go to our first break right now. If you have a question for Dr. White on either

28:48

Mormonism or on our second topic—of course, we won't read your question on the second topic of racial reconciliation and all the other kinds of things that are going on under that umbrella today that amount to racialist hysteria—you can ask a question about either, but we won't address the second topic until the second hour.

29:08

But our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

29:16

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

29:24

Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back with Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministry and more on Mormonism.

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Tired of box store Christianity, of doing church in a warehouse with all the trappings of a rock concert?

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This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with 90 minutes to go is

32:59

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. We are addressing during the first hour Mormonism's claim of being the one true and living church upon the face of the earth, and that is actually also the theme of the

33:12

LDS and Protestant Dialogue at Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah, that Dr.

33:18

White will be participating in on Friday, July 6th. And for more information on that event, and we'll be repeating this later, hopefully, but the website is gospelutah .org.

33:32

Gospelutah .org, that is the website of Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah, where our mutual friend

33:37

Jason Wallace is the pastor. Before we go on to my co -host

33:43

Simon O'Maney's question, I just wanted to get as much more background in regard to this representative of Mormonism with whom you'll be having this dialogue with.

33:53

We heard some of his ancestry and so on, but what is he actually doing today? Is he an author?

34:00

Is he a faculty member at one of the LDS? No, Alma, for as long as I've known him, ran the parking structures at the

34:08

University of Utah. But he, like I said, had very close connections because of his family to the leadership of the

34:17

Church. He's sort of an expert in the polygamist groups and things like that. And of course he was, in fact, the last time we debated was a little bit difficult for him because he thought he was going to be released from being a bishop the weekend before, and he wasn't.

34:32

And that sort of constrained what he could and could not say as he was still actively a bishop at that particular point in time.

34:40

So he's held a number of church offices, but he's not in the leadership in that sense.

34:46

He just has a lot of connection with them. And well, for example, when we first started talking back in the late 80s, he presented to me the argument that, you know, most books, most

35:01

Christian books on Mormonism will point out that 17 chapters of the

35:08

Book of Isaiah appear in the Book of Mormon pretty much verbatim, and that this is an argument against the originality of the

35:16

Book of Mormon and stuff like that. He was the first person to ever point out to me that some of the differences seem to reflect readings in the

35:25

Greek Septuagint. Now think about that for a second. In fact, to be honest with you, there's only been two

35:32

Mormons that I've encountered in the 10 ,000 -15 ,000 dialogues that I've had with Mormons standing on street corners and everything else down through the years.

35:42

There's only been two that have ever raised that issue, and Elmo is one of them. So he's very well read and very well spoken, and so if you haven't seen the dialogue we had a couple years ago up at the

35:54

University of Utah, then I'd recommend that to folks. And as I said, I'm really hoping that this will be a very useful discussion as well.

36:03

Well, Simon O'Maney, who, if you just tuned us in, Simon O'Maney is one of the new pastors at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I'm a member, and Simon is a native of Cork, Ireland, in the

36:16

Republic of Ireland. And I was just curious, Simon, how prominent is Mormonism there in Ireland, where, at least in your experience, in the

36:24

Cork area? Yeah, Chris. So the Mormon church in Ireland is present, but quite small.

36:31

From what I understand, they don't have a temple in Ireland. The closest temple is in Scotland.

36:38

So they're small, but they are present. Before coming out to the States, actually, I had the opportunity to meet with two young Mormon men who were out doing their mission, and I met up with them once a week for several months.

36:53

And kind of how I got them hooked to keep meeting me is that I told them that I would read through the Book of Mormon with them, and I'd come back with questions.

37:00

And so I had questions for them. I found, though, that as I was building a relationship with one of these young guys, that often it was a case of one step forward, two steps back, or two steps forward, one step back, in terms of just getting them to admit to things that I knew that they believed, but they didn't want to disclose to me.

37:19

And so I found that difficult. Unfortunately then, all of a sudden, the one guy that I had gotten kind of close to was just moved to some other location.

37:28

I don't know if that was a result of me meeting up with him or if that was just a standard procedure. And I know that you had some actual questions for James about the levels of—if there was any distinguishing characteristic from one temple to the other or something like that.

37:44

Yeah. So from what I understand, there are different levels. So over just this last summer, actually,

37:51

I was doing chaplain training with the army, and I had some exposure to Mormonism.

37:57

We had to attend different religious denominations and religions, their worship services.

38:04

And so I attended a Mormon worship service. And to be honest, their service in form was not terribly different from some quote -unquote generic kind of Christian service.

38:16

And I got the impression that they were presenting themselves not so much as we're the only true church, but like you mentioned, a shift in emphasis, more of a, you know, we're just one of you.

38:26

We're just another brand of Protestantism. Would that be fair to say, Dr. Weiss?

38:32

Well, that certainly has become significantly more the case, and that is,

38:38

I think, what has resulted in a major diminishment in the growth of Mormonism.

38:45

The theology specifically hasn't changed in the sense of, well, we no longer believe

38:51

X, Y, or Z, or we're going to remove the First Vision, which says that all our churches are corrupt and their creeds are abomination.

38:58

We're going to remove that from our scriptures, which they could do, given that they claim Latter -day Revelation. They could go there if they wanted to.

39:05

But they haven't done any of that, and a lot of this stuff is still discussed in the temple amongst the more hardcore believers.

39:15

Certainly the missionaries themselves tend to be much less aware of what they really believe than, oh goodness, than they did back in the olden days when

39:29

I first started talking to them. That's for certain. That's been something we saw happening even as early as the 90s, and now it's just become extremely, extremely pronounced that those young guys just, to run into one of them that's actually read any meaningful

39:45

LDS literature is a true rarity, and that was sort of the opposite back in the 80s.

39:52

But yeah, the meeting in the ward chapel, though, isn't really meant to be secretive, or you wouldn't expect that to be overly different.

40:05

I mean, if you attended on the first Sunday of the month, that's when they have a fasting testimony meeting, and so you'd have people getting up and giving their testimonies to the

40:13

Church and Joseph Smith and telling their stories and their missions and stuff like that. But you have the priesthood meeting, and you know, if you know what those sayings are, the priesthood meeting, if you understand what they believe about the

40:26

Melchizedek and Aaronic priesthoods and how they function and how you can't baptize without the

40:34

Aaronic priesthood, you can't lay hands upon someone to receive the Holy Spirit without the Melchizedek priesthood, and that all of the baptisms are invalid if they are not performed by someone holding that proper priesthood.

40:47

Are you there, Brother James? James has been cut off somehow.

40:53

James, please call back. There he goes. I have no idea what happened, brother.

41:02

I have no idea either. The line never hung up on my end, so I don't know what happened. Yeah, well, that is not the first time that that has happened.

41:09

And you know what makes me feel better is when I see stuff like that happening on Fox News and other things. Even these multi -million dollar corporations, they can't get it right all the time.

41:17

That's just an excuse, Chris. Don't even try that with me.

41:25

I have known your level of technological expertise for far too long.

41:32

I'm sure your foot took something out underneath. I don't know. Well, at least you said

41:40

I had some level of expertise. You mean there is a chance?

41:47

Yeah. But as you were saying before you got cut off, we were talking...

41:53

I have no idea what I was saying. I think you were talking, from what I remember, about the difference between a chapel ward or ward chapel and a temple.

42:03

There is a difference between a temple and a ward chapel. Well, yeah. I mean, whatever you would have attended as part of your chaplain training would have been just simply the meeting in the ward chapel.

42:16

And that's not open for anybody. That's not. You know, if you really want to see

42:22

Mormonism, then go on YouTube and look up LDS Endowment Ceremony. And you can watch it, the

42:29

Mormons wish you couldn't. But the reality is, starting back in the 80s, one guy decided to sneak through the endowment ceremony while he still had his temple recommended.

42:42

He had come to feel that Mormonism is wrong. And so back when those little teeny tiny micro cassette recorders first came out, he'd strap one to his leg and he'd start it before he went in.

42:53

And it would only last a certain amount of time. And so he'd have to remember where that was. And he'd go through again. And eventually we had an audio recording.

43:01

Well, they actually changed the endowment ceremonies rather extensively in the early 90s.

43:07

And since then, these little spy cameras have come out. And so there is now at least one full recording of the

43:15

LDS Endowment Ceremony on YouTube from someone who put one of those little spy cameras in their temple garments and went through and recorded all of it.

43:26

And obviously the audio quality isn't so hot, et cetera, et cetera. But it really would give you a significantly better insight into the temple ceremonies and the

43:39

Masonic history and the real theology. I even played a section on the dividing line yesterday, because I wanted to demonstrate that in Mormonism, Elohim and Jehovah are separate, distinct gods, and that Elohim sends

43:54

Jehovah and Michael down to organize the earth, not to create the earth. The Mormon God cannot create anything.

44:00

He can only organize. And so I played a portion from the endowment ceremony that has

44:06

Elohim and Jehovah and Michael speaking to one another as separate physical, or at least separate, in that case, separate beings.

44:16

And so it's available. And that would give you a much better insight into things, even though that's the modern version of the endowment ceremony, which has been really cleaned up from what it used to be.

44:29

It's much, much shorter than it used to be. And there used to be death oaths taken in the temple.

44:37

You still draw your finger across your neck, across your chest, and across your bowels.

44:44

But you used to, while doing that, say, I will suffer to have my throat slit, my heart torn out, my bowels cast upon the ground.

44:52

That's been taken out. But you still make the motions. You know what you're doing. So all that stuff is still there.

45:00

So that's available if people want to really know what's going on there. In fact, a lot of people may not know this, but you and I took a guided tour of the

45:09

New York City temple before it was officially opened and blessed.

45:16

Tell us about that. Yeah, the Manhattan Temple, it's one of only two, well, I don't know if this has changed since then, but at the time it was one of only two non -freestanding temples in the world, mainly because Manhattan, where are you supposed to find land to build something new in Manhattan?

45:31

So they used a few floors of a building there. And remember the awesome food they offered at the end?

45:43

Cups of water with chocolate chip cookies. I remember the plastic booties that we had to wear.

45:51

That's right, that's right. And that was so they wouldn't have to rip up the carpet after the Gentiles left, which is what they used to do.

45:57

And they told us it was because they didn't want it to get dirty, but they really meant something much more significant theologically.

46:04

Yes, yes, they did. And remember, the missionaries came over and sat down and talked to us and admitted a bunch of stuff once they realized that, okay,

46:12

I'm talking to somebody here who knows Mormonism, and so they admitted a bunch of stuff that hadn't been said during the actual presentation itself.

46:20

But yeah, I've only been through two temples, that one and when they opened the Phoenix North Temple here in Phoenix a few years ago, which has got to be the smallest temple

46:33

I've ever seen. And that was because the neighbors complained about it, and they had to keep getting it smaller and smaller.

46:40

But yeah, they continue building temples, though what

46:45

I've heard is temple activity and temple attendance is down. And that's understandable.

46:53

But the Mormons believe that the ceremonies performed there are sacred, not secret, but they're also secret as well.

47:02

And they do give us real insight. If you have a copy of my book,

47:08

Is the Mormon My Brother?, there's a whole section on the ceremonies, not in an expose -type fashion, but this is a level of divine revelation within Mormonism.

47:21

And therefore what it says about God needs to be examined if we're trying to figure out exactly what Mormonism does teach on the nature of God.

47:28

I remember you were excited about, oh I'm sorry Simon, I'll get to you in a second. I remember you were excited about this tour, and I just felt like I was walking through a new furniture store.

47:38

The only thing that was different was the baptismal tank that the oxen were holding up.

47:44

Right, right, that all the baptismal tanks are built on the back of 12 oxen. Until the Atlanta temple, they had all been below ground too, which is an interesting symbology that was built into the temples, which obviously they couldn't do there given the nature of what they were doing.

47:58

But I also pointed out to you the network cabling of ports. Well you've got a good memory, because I remember that too.

48:06

Yeah, and the carpet, because that's where the recorder would sit. And so you bring your 50 names, the people you're doing endowments for, and it runs to the computer, and that's how they do all that kind of stuff.

48:17

So yeah, it was fascinating, especially when you know exactly what's going on in there, you've listened to the endowment ceremony, seen the endowment ceremony, you know what's going on.

48:25

And then to compare what you're being told with what you know in reality, and see how it's all been cleaned up a good bit.

48:33

Sorry about that, Simon, I had interrupted you. Yeah, now the Sunday that I was there, that I was visiting, it was a time of testimony.

48:40

There were perhaps 10 people got up, gave a two to three minute testimony of how the church had helped them over the years.

48:47

Then we, well I didn't take part, but they sang a number of hymns, and hymnals that can only be described as ones that looked like the

48:53

Trinity hymnal, the blue one. Yeah. And then at the end of the the service, they had a quote -unquote supper, where it was water and bread.

49:04

What's the significance or what's the reasoning behind that? Well that's just a change

49:10

Joseph Smith made and... You're talking about the actual Communion meal, right?

49:15

Yes, yeah, yeah. It's a change Joseph Smith made probably because of drunkenness amongst the Saints, and it stuck.

49:24

You know, Joseph Smith's connection to what everything had meant in the New Testament is very tenuous.

49:30

His knowledge of things was very, very, very limited. And so it is interesting that you were there for fasting and testimony, that means you didn't really get the sermon and stuff like that, it would have been really generic then.

49:43

Yeah. But you know, one of my fondest memories was the first time

49:48

I attended an LDS service back in 1982,

49:54

I'd say, with my wife Kelly. And we happened to show up on fasting and testimony

50:03

Sunday, and when they invited people to come up, no one got up.

50:08

And I remember turning my head and looking at Kelly, and she's already staring at me going, don't you dare.

50:14

Don't you dare. Well, we went back the next month, and I did dare.

50:22

And I had memorized a bunch of scriptures on justification by faith. And so I got up to go up there, because they don't say members only, they say anyone who wants to give a testimony.

50:32

And unfortunately, somebody beat me to the pulpit, and so I had to sit next to the bishop while this other guy gave his testimony.

50:39

That was nerve -wracking, and he was looking at me like, I don't recognize this guy. So I get up there, and if you've ever been to a war chapel, there's a lot of moving around, there's lots of little kids crawling underneath pews and stuff like that.

50:56

And I said, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity of bearing my testimony, especially since I'm not a member of the

51:02

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. And as soon as I said that, even the little kids crawling underneath the pews froze in place.

51:09

I mean, it was just silence. You could hear a pin drop in this place.

51:16

A mosquito froze in mid -flight. They did, they did. It was really amazing.

51:23

I had their attention, and I got through about three or four verses, and this folded up.

51:28

To give you an idea of how long ago this was, the bulletins for the service then were mimeographed.

51:35

Remember the old mimeograph machine? Love the smell. Love the smell. I was going to say, remember that smell? That may explain a lot of things about you.

51:45

We all know a mimeographed smell has long -lasting damaging effects upon you.

51:58

This folded -up bulletin flies over my shoulder, onto the pulpit, and written on it is,

52:04

Brother White, our time is up. Now, I knew when the time was supposed to be up, and it wasn't time yet.

52:10

But I hurried up. I got down. I sat down, and a line formed on the right for all the missionaries and everybody to start bearing their testimony right at me.

52:18

And then, when the service was over, immediately, the first counselor to the bishop was right on our doorstep, and, you know, the bishop would like to speak with you, and we ended up having a long conversation with him, which was really, really interesting.

52:32

But yeah, that was, yeah, I decided to go ahead and give my testimony during fasting and testimony meetings.

52:38

So, did you? Oh no, I didn't. I wasn't as bold as you.

52:46

We are going now to our midway break, and this is a longer break than normal, because Grace Life Radio and 90 .1

52:53

FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us an elongated break so that they can air their own commercials and public services announcements.

53:00

So, please be patient as we go to this break. Write down the information that our advertisers provide so that you can patronize them, and also write down questions for Dr.

53:08

White, and I know that some of you are already waiting to have your questions asked and answered, so please be patient.

53:14

We will get to you as soon as possible. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you'd like to join those who are already in line, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

53:23

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

53:29

USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages with more of Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. Have you been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron Radio?

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55:43

Hi, I'm Buzz Taylor, frequent co -host with Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

55:49

I would like to introduce you to my good friends Todd and Patty Jennings at CVBBS, which stands for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

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56:23

That means you can get to the good stuff faster. It also means that you don't have to worry about being assaulted by the pornographic, heretical, and otherwise faith -insulting material promoted by the secular book vendors.

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Their website is CVBBS .com. Browse the pages at ease, shop at your leisure, and purchase with confidence as Todd and Patty work in service to you, the

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57:36

And we have to make some very important announcements about upcoming events. First of all,

57:42

God willing, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio will be live on the 4th of July. We're not running a rerun.

57:49

And who better to do a 4th of July program with than a Brit. So I'm going to be having an interview for the very first time ever with Morris Roberts.

58:00

Anybody who loves the Banner of Truth will immediately recognize that name. Morris Roberts not only used to be,

58:06

I believe, the chief editor of the Banner of Truth magazine, and everybody who knows Banner of Truth knows

58:11

Morris Roberts. But he is also an author, an international conference speaker, an emeritus minister in the

58:17

Free Church of Scotland, continuing denomination. So make sure that you tune in on the 4th of July to hear

58:24

Morris Roberts discuss his new booklet, How Do I Develop Heavenly -Mindedness and Spiritual Conversation.

58:31

That definitely sounds like a booklet I need to read many times over. But hope you tune in on the 4th of July.

58:37

And then coming up on Sunday, actually before what

58:42

I just mentioned, this Sunday, July 1st, Tony Costa, the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, will be preaching at Hope Reform Baptist Church of Long Island, New York in Medford, Long Island, a church that is no stranger to James R.

59:00

White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. And he has preached there many times. And I fondly remember our

59:06

Tuscarora youth retreats where we would both attend and James White would speak, and I would do comedy routines for the kids.

59:14

And in fact, that's where the great reformer was born, party, party,

59:19

Marty, and the protesters was born there. But if you want to attend this event with Dr.

59:25

Tony Costa, go to hopereformedli .net, hopereformedli .net, and all the information that you'll need will be there.

59:33

If you want to call them, call 631 -696 -5711, 631 -696 -5711.

59:40

Then that following Friday, July 6th, I will be hosting the first ever

59:46

Iron Sharpens Iron radio event in New York City. That's a free seminar with Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary, who

59:54

I just mentioned. He will be speaking on defending the faith in a postmodern society.

59:59

Then he'll be speaking on the dangers of cultural Marxism's impact on society and the church.

01:00:05

And then that will be followed by a question and answer session with the audience. If you want more details about this free seminar in New York City, you can call me, actually, you can call 631 -291 -7002, 631 -291 -7002, or you can email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:00:24

chrisarnson at gmail .com. I'm actually hosting this event with my friends at New Covenant Church, NYC, which is a new church plant in Manhattan, New Covenant Church, NYC.

01:00:36

And for more details about this church, go to ncc .nyc, that's ncc .nyc,

01:00:43

that's New Covenant Church, New York City. And that same date, the aforementioned

01:00:50

LDS versus Protestant, or should I say LDSN Protestant dialogue at the

01:00:56

Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah, and there's also other events happening that weekend.

01:01:02

Go to Christ Presbyterian Church's website for more details, gospelutah .org,

01:01:08

gospelutah .org. Our guest today, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, is the key figure there speaking at these events.

01:01:18

And then, coming up in August, the 2nd through the 4th, my friends at the

01:01:24

Fellowship Conference New England are having their event, and I hope that you attend there, especially if you live in New England, and especially if you live in Portland, Maine.

01:01:35

They will be held, this conference will be held, I should say, at the Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine, and the speakers include a mutual friend of Dr.

01:01:43

White's and mine, Pastor Mac Tomlinson of Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas, also a very generous financial supporter of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Tim Conway of Grace Community Church in San Antonio, Texas, Pastor Jesse Barrington of Grace Life Church in Dallas, Texas, and Pastor Nate Pikowitz of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmanton, Ironworks, New Hampshire.

01:02:07

If you'd like to go to that conference, go to fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, fellowshipconferencenewengland .com. Then, coming up in November, another one of our sponsors is having an event, the

01:02:18

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, not to be confused with the

01:02:24

Reform Town Conference on Quaker Theology. This is the Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, and that's going to be held

01:02:30

November 9th through the 10th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quaker Town, Pennsylvania. Speakers include

01:02:36

David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Winn. Go to alliancenet .org,

01:02:43

alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on the Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology.

01:02:48

The theme this year is the Glory of the Cross. Last but not least, the

01:02:53

G3 Conference is being held in January, and I will be manning an exhibitor's booth there once again from Thursday, January 17th through Saturday, January 19th at the

01:03:03

Georgia International Convention Center in College Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, and I hope that you greet me at the

01:03:10

Iron Sherpins Iron Radio booth if you attend this. Speakers include Paul Washer, John Piper, Stephen Lawson, Votie Baucom, Conrad M.

01:03:20

Bayway, Phil Johnson of Grace to You Ministries, and the list goes on and on and on.

01:03:26

That's only about a fifth of the speakers there. If you'd like to attend, go to g3conference .com

01:03:33

to register, g3conference .com, and tell the folks there that you heard about the event from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sherpins Iron Radio.

01:03:40

And last but not least, it's my least favorite portion of the program is where I rattle my tin cup and beg you for money.

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click support, then click, click to donate now if you do not want us to go off the air. And I'd love to hear from more of you with your questions for Dr.

01:05:09

White. If you want to get in line, we will get to as many of you as we can before we run out of time today. If you have a question for Dr.

01:05:15

White, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. We are going to be moving into the second phase of the interview today.

01:05:25

We are going to be discussing racial reconciliation, and we are also going to be discussing when perceived racism is combated with racism, a current crisis plaguing the body of Christ.

01:05:37

So send us your question about that at chrisarnson at gmail .com. But I do want to have at least one of our audience questions about Mormonism addressed since our listener has been waiting so long to have that question asked.

01:05:52

This is Gary in New York, New York, and Gary is a first -time questioner on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I'm enlargening or enlarging,

01:06:05

I should say, Gary's email because the font is microscopic. Okay, here we go.

01:06:10

Even though Mormonism is false, what is the strongest point a Mormon has ever made either for Mormonism or against Christianity that you've faced in a debate?

01:06:25

Oh, that's hard to say because, you know, the most difficult issues are actually topics that they've gotten from other sources where they're arguing against the

01:06:41

Trinity or something like that, and they're inconsistent because they're drawing from atheism or secularism or something like that, and they're using that to attack biblical

01:06:51

Christianity as if that somehow would create a default back to Mormonism in some ways.

01:06:58

So I really don't know how to answer that. You know, Mormonism has so many historical problems that we didn't even touch on.

01:07:07

The book of Abraham, the book of Mormon, and this is what is causing a lot of the liberalization in Mormonism is because these realities, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, you could protect your people from a lot of this information.

01:07:23

There wasn't something called the internet, and certainly with just a couple television stations, they weren't going to be addressing things like this.

01:07:30

So people actually had to go read books to find out about things like this. Well, now you've got the net, and so people are surrounded by YouTube videos and everything else, and so they have to acknowledge these issues and how they respond to these issues.

01:07:48

Well, it's put them in a really tough position. It used to be a group called

01:07:55

FARMS, Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. It was sort of absorbed into other things, but that was their primary apologetics branch, and you know, you can go back and listen to the brouhahas we used to have with FARMS guys on radio stations up in Utah, and if you listen to their defenses, you know, when they were really giving a defense, they were also attacking biblical

01:08:17

Christianity, but with more and more information coming out about the holes in their own system, it just puts them in a really logical bind as to how they can attack the one without likewise at the same time recognizing the problems in their own system.

01:08:33

So after that Dennis Potter debate, I had a

01:08:38

Mormon come up to me afterwards. He says, look, I've attended every debate you've done up here, and I'm still a

01:08:45

Mormon, but you've always won, and I want to ask you to stop doing debates because we don't have anybody who can debate you.

01:08:54

And that was the last time that we had something specifically like that. It was a formal, really formal debate like that.

01:09:02

So maybe we're getting something started again here. I don't know. I don't know, but anyway.

01:09:08

You know, you just reminded me of the Catholic debates on Long Island. I don't know if you remember this, but there was a young Catholic gentleman, and I can't remember, what do you call a person who's in the training to be a priest and they actually still wear the clerical garb?

01:09:24

Acolyte? Yes, there you go. There was a guy, a young guy, really nice guy, his name was

01:09:29

Chris as well, Christopher, and he had a Greek name. That's all I remember about his last name. And he thought that you won every debate that he attended there, and he actually wrote a letter of rebuke to one of your

01:09:43

Catholic opponents because he said Dr. White has represented Christ in a much more humble and godly way than you did.

01:09:52

You must repent and apologize. Okay, and I can imagine which of a handful that would have been.

01:10:02

And it wasn't Mitch Packley either. He didn't send that to Mitch. Oh, of course not. Mitch is always a gentleman.

01:10:11

And I always wondered what happened to that interesting fellow. I hope that if he's listening that he contacts me because I'd love to see if he is still a

01:10:20

Roman Catholic and if he ever became a priest because he was really intrigued by you. In fact, remember those

01:10:26

Catholic ladies that would follow you everywhere? Oh yeah, yeah, they showed up at the debate with Hamza Abdul -Malik, right down, right down front.

01:10:33

Well, we don't have anybody that debates Muslims, so it's like... Yeah, I said before the event started and I was sitting next to them,

01:10:41

I said, so where are you ladies from? And they leaned over, one of the ladies leaned over and said, St.

01:10:46

Agnes. But, well, thank you

01:10:52

Gary. By the way, Gary in New York City, you have won a free New American Standard Bible since it is your first time sending in a question.

01:10:59

So please give us your full mailing address so that cvbbs .com can ship that out to you.

01:11:04

And we thank the publishers of the NASB for providing these Bibles and also for renewing their contract to advertise on Iron Radio.

01:11:14

Now we are beginning our second phase of the show. We are talking about the hysteria that is going on in the name of rebuking

01:11:26

Christians allegedly for being guilty of the sin of racism and, of course, this unfortunately has spiraled into something that is insane in many ways.

01:11:40

You have unfortunately a violation of the commandment not to bear false witness against your neighbor frequently occurring where people are being accused of racism just because they happen to be white or just because they happen to phrase or parse words in a way that are not acceptable in a politically correct culture.

01:12:04

Why don't you give at least your initial comments of your own in regard to what is going on under the banner of racial reconciliation and why you are so troubled by it?

01:12:15

Well, that phrase itself is troubling because theologically speaking there is only one truly meaningful use of the term reconciliation within Christian theology, and when you understand the means by which that took place, when you understand the unity that resulted in the early church between all sorts of ethnicities, all sorts of groups that had deep and abiding animosities toward other groups that would end up in the same church, this was the nature of the

01:12:46

Roman Empire at the time of the ministry of the apostles, when you realize the ground upon which those people sat at the

01:12:55

Lord's table in unity with one another and then you listen to what's going on today, you see where the problem really lies.

01:13:05

It sounds, you know, racial reconciliation sounds like a wonderful phrase, but within the

01:13:10

Christian faith there is, first of all, there's one blood, and so the idea of multiple races has to be translated into something really which is much weaker ethnicities.

01:13:23

And then reconciliation is not something that we sit around doing and have conferences about over and over and over again and never actually accomplish anything.

01:13:33

Sadly, in many instances, what is being called racial reconciliation is actually putting one group of people in the church in a permanent position of penance, not repentance, but penance toward another group of people in the church without there being any end game in view.

01:13:56

It's extremely problematic to me. What you really have going on is the influx of what's called critical race theory, which is being repackaged and put into a

01:14:09

Christian context, utilization of Christian terminology, and it's coming along with a bunch of other items.

01:14:17

I think a lot of people have been somewhat, well, they've been very surprised that after the

01:14:23

MLK 50 event and then the T4G right afterwards, that it was almost like that event kicked open a door, and we thought, okay, now we really need to deal with the key issues here in regards to ethnicities and what the unity in the body of Christ looks like, and here in the

01:14:44

United States you've got all sorts of people that are talking about stuff that happened 160 years ago in the

01:14:53

Civil War, Jim Crow laws, stuff in the South, so people start throwing books like Divide by Faith our direction, we start throwing

01:15:02

Thomas Sowell books or John McWhorter books back at them, and in the midst of this, while we're thinking that's the next thing, along with this kicked open door comes the

01:15:14

Revoice Conference and a bunch of what's called soft complementarianism, which is basically a form of egalitarianism, and all this stuff is coming in, gender roles and women and homosexuality and transgenderism and all, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we thought the

01:15:39

Reformed Church was safe from all this because we have this necessity of an exegetical foundation for anything you're going to be promoting within the church, and so my thought always was, you know, as long as we stay true to our convictions about scripture, you know, that's going to be stuff that we get to watch the liberals running around with their hair on fire about, but it's not going to be something that is going to be impacting us.

01:16:09

Well, we were wrong about that, and now in major Reformed theological seminaries and denominations and major Reformed leaders, you have this movement taking place, and it is going to cause major divisions.

01:16:32

There are going to be stands that have already been taken, and there are going to be stands taken over the next couple of months by major leaders on both sides, where you're going to see the people that were once all up on the stage at major Reformed conferences staring each other down across this divide.

01:17:00

That's just, that's what's going to happen. I can tell you that's what's going to happen, and the reason being that you can't stick your head in the sand about this one, because when you have people saying, well, you need to repent, you're promoting sinfulness, you're bringing error into the church, if you do not buy into this category and that category, if you do not see the necessity that is incumbent upon you to be engaged in social justice issues.

01:17:40

And so, I don't have to be honest with you.

01:17:47

Our church doesn't have an issue with this. The church of which I'm an elder, we have a very mixed congregation, and we believe very firmly that when you preach the word of God, God brings the people that he wants there.

01:17:59

The idea that any of us would ever engage in some kind of racial quotas -style analysis, whereby we say, hey, we need more of these people, or let's go try targeting this audience.

01:18:13

No, you preach the word of God. We're pretty simple folks. You preach the word of God, God brings the people that are going to long for that kind of consistent handling of the word of God, and that we've ended up with this very mixed group as a result, because that's how the

01:18:29

Holy Spirit of God works. But I recognize that the elder amongst us is 21 years older than I am, the next elder is 10 years older than I am, and I ain't no spring chicken anymore.

01:18:42

So you put all that together, and there's going to have to be another generation of leadership coming up very quickly, and they're going to be dealing with these things.

01:18:50

And if they're coming out of many of our seminaries anymore, seminaries that you would be surprised if I named them, they may well have studied under men who have actually been deeply influenced by critical race theory, which has deep connections conceptually and in worldview with neo -Marxism, and yet you can put it in very, very religious language.

01:19:17

And so because of that, you know, over the years I've made comments as I have seen things happening.

01:19:27

It has never been a central focus of my work by any stretch of the imagination. The few books

01:19:33

I've read on the subject I've been forced to over time. I was just sitting here during your long break, for example, trying to get a file downloaded so that I have a long trip, a three -week trip ahead of me coming up next week, and I'm doing all the driving.

01:19:48

So I've got, that's time to get a lot of studying done. And I was trying to download a book relevant to this subject so that that'll be one of the things that I'll be investing my time in.

01:19:59

But I'm a full -time PhD student. I'm doing my third doctorate in coherence -based genealogical methodologies interface with the early papyri which has nothing to do with it.

01:20:09

We have so much in common. I mean, our schedules are identical. Yes, yes, and I'm sure,

01:20:16

I'm looking forward to seeing you in the amount of first -time bike race toward the end of July.

01:20:22

I'm sure you've been training as hard as I am because I'm going to tell you that you get up above 12 ,000 feet in that bike race, and it's pretty tough from 12 to 14 ,000 feet when you're going all out.

01:20:33

Well, actually something very similar to that happened when I was riding a bike, and somehow my tie got caught in the cab door while it was moving.

01:20:43

All right, that's great, Chris. Appreciate that. Let me get back to the actual topic here.

01:20:52

So the point is, I am a very unwilling participant in this situation.

01:21:02

I don't find it to be an overly encouraging situation to be involved in.

01:21:08

I'm constantly under attack for having said anything about it, and of course, I have the world's worst last name for engagement.

01:21:16

I mean, let's face it. It's a plethora of problems, but I've been in contact recently with a lot of very major names in this area, and we're very concerned about what is going on, and there needs to be a response to the stuff that was preached at T4G and is being promoted, and there will be a response.

01:21:43

By the way, a black brother in Christ who I had on this program recently, and I hate to have to say things like that.

01:21:50

Yeah, I know, I hate it too. But Hensworth Jonas sends his greetings to you.

01:21:56

He remembers you fondly when you both participated in an event. I think it might have been a cruise. He is a

01:22:02

Caribbean pastor and author, and when I brought up this stuff that was going on, and I specifically mentioned that there is this idea where someone who happens to be black or part of an ethnic minority that has never had a position of authority or that kind of a thing, they cannot be guilty of the sin of racism.

01:22:30

Right. He said in his very distinct accent, that is moronic! That is moronic!

01:22:37

It is interesting when I speak to black brothers of Caribbean descent, universally, they are not a part of this.

01:22:48

They are like, this is nuts. They just don't buy it. It is a subgroup within that broader category.

01:22:57

It really, really is. There is a lot of cultural stuff that is a part of this, and they just don't buy it.

01:23:05

But that idea, the very fact that when you introduced this section, you talked about the sin of racism, well, you can't have it both ways.

01:23:13

Either racism is a sin, or it is not. And yet, when you have people promoting, as they have recently, the idea that blacks cannot be racist because they don't have sufficient power, well then, are you literally saying that the color of your skin can protect you from certain sins?

01:23:34

You cannot commit certain sins. You are either going to have to dump racism as a sinful category and make it something that is completely sociological, or you are going to have to recognize that there is just as great a danger of racism in a person who has much melanin as a person who has little melanin.

01:23:54

It doesn't matter. You can be a person who has no power and have tremendous animus in your heart towards someone else based upon their history, their ethnicity, their background, whatever else it might be.

01:24:09

And so, yes, we have heard that expressed within evangelical and, in fact, even allegedly reformed circles just over the past number of weeks, saying that that can't be.

01:24:23

You cannot have black racism. And then there have been others who have said, oh, yes, yes, you can.

01:24:28

So there are differences of opinion there. I don't know if you have started listening to Daryl Harrison yet, but...

01:24:36

Oh yeah, Daryl has been a guest on the show. Okay, good. I'm glad you've had him on, because there are, you know, these brothers pay a large price to take a biblical stand.

01:24:50

They really, really do. They are outcasts in many ways, because they would dare to have an authority other than a cultural construct that is involved there.

01:25:08

So anyway, my participation has been very much unwilling in the sense that I just see these things happening.

01:25:17

When I heard the presentations at the MLK50 celebration, there were just simply things that were said that exegetically would lead to, and theologically would lead to, extremely dangerous conclusions.

01:25:35

And so, being the simple guy that I am, generally what I did is I would go, you know, someone said

01:25:42

X, but when we go to Colossians chapter 3, we read these words. And then I will go through it, and I'll exegete it, and I'll lay it all out, and that's what gets you into trouble.

01:25:52

And that's what's gotten me into trouble, is I've dared to say, no, we need to, as Christians, I don't care what your ethnic background is, we need to approach this from a biblical perspective.

01:26:05

And I also, I do have somewhat of a unique perspective on this, for two reasons. First of all,

01:26:12

I have been going to South Africa for a number of years now, and in fact, I was asked by the elders of a large, solid, leading church in South Africa to preach from Colossians chapter 3 just a few weeks ago when

01:26:27

I was down there. And, you know, if you think we have it bad with the

01:26:35

U .S. Civil War 160 some odd years ago, what about South Africa, which is 24 years out of apartheid?

01:26:46

Unfortunately, we Americans export our poison, and exporting a unbiblical neo -Marxist mindset into a context such as South Africa through TGC or something like that could result in horrific damage to the church in those areas, because much of what is being said is very

01:27:11

America -centric. It's very much centered upon the American experience and a very slanted view of the

01:27:19

American experience. And so when we export that out to others, wow, that can have tremendous damaging effects.

01:27:30

And then the other reason is, even though this is utterly dismissed, just mocked and laughed at by people on the other side, my own personal experience, and they literally say this is impossible,

01:27:45

I've been told I'm basically lying, I'm just making this up, but I have said for years, I've pointed out for years, that my first best friend was named

01:27:54

Kevin. He's the first person that I remember outside my family. And Kevin lived down County Road 15 in Minneapolis.

01:28:03

And I met his mommy and daddy. And his dad was the biggest, blackest man

01:28:11

I'd ever seen. I mean, he was a Minnesota cop. And he was huge.

01:28:17

And he was deep, deep black. And his mom looked like she had never seen a ray of sun.

01:28:23

She was the most albino white woman I had ever seen. And so the first married couple that I knew outside of my mommy and daddy were a black man and a white woman.

01:28:35

And my best friend was their son, and he was brown. And so I'm like, okay, fine.

01:28:43

And so for me, those types of experiences determine the categories in which you think the rest of your life.

01:28:52

And I've told people, I met with a brother in London a year before last.

01:28:58

We met at the Sherlock Holmes pub down near the Thames, and we had a grand conversation and found out that our ministry had been very much involved in his conversion to Christ, and it was very exciting and everything else.

01:29:11

And then sort of halfway through, you know, sort of just in my thought process, this brother's black.

01:29:18

You know, okay. I hadn't really even noticed it when we sat down. It's not something that I look at.

01:29:23

It's not something you think about. We were talking about Christian things, and that's just the way it is.

01:29:29

And that kind of colorblindness is one of the reasons that I put a meme up.

01:29:39

I'm not sure you do Twitter, but I think I put it on Facebook. You probably saw it, where I put a meme out.

01:29:45

Am I still here? Yeah. Okay, because it's real quiet. And this was last time.

01:29:51

And I was sitting here looking at my phone going, you know, I hope Chris gets hold of me if the line drops.

01:29:58

By the way, I do tweet. I just tweet only to promote the show that I'm hosting.

01:30:04

Okay, yeah. Well, I did put it on Facebook too, but I put a, you know, someone had been talking about white spaces and black spaces in the church.

01:30:11

And I said, there's not supposed to be white spaces and black spaces in the church. What are you talking about? And so I gave an illustration that the

01:30:18

Lord's table is a Christ space. It's a mediator space. It's a redeemer space.

01:30:23

It's all about him. And if you bring your ethnicity into that space, you've completely misunderstood what it's all about in the first place.

01:30:29

I had a very well -known leader in the evangelical church who is black respond to that by saying, we must bring ethnicity into the ordinance of the church.

01:30:44

It's a matter of survival for us. And then another guy called for an ecumenical council in Philadelphia to declare that kind of theology as heresy for the church.

01:30:56

That is lunacy. Absolutely amazing. We have to go to our final break. It's gonna be much briefer.

01:31:03

And by the way, I forwarded to you a question from Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He has a question that's very lengthy.

01:31:12

So I wanted to forward it to you so you could look it over during the break. And then when we come back, we will address

01:31:18

Ted's question. And we have some other questions as well from listeners. Don't go away, everybody. We will be right back,

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that's chefexclusive .com. Welcome back, this is the final 25 minutes or so of our interview with Dr.

01:37:23

James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and by the way Dr. White, that Lindbrook Baptist Church ad reminded me of when you saw from about a hundred yards away a couple of young guys standing in front of a building and you knew immediately that they were

01:37:38

Mormons. I did not know this was a a ward chapel across the street from Lindbrook Baptist Church.

01:37:45

Yeah. And then later that night after I went over there as soon as you said those are Mormons, I went over there I said you guys got to come over here tonight to hear the speaker there speak on Mormonism, and they came and they hung out for at least an hour after the event was over.

01:38:00

Yeah, yeah, I do remember that, and I'm not sure how we get 25 minutes into 19 minutes, but it must be a time warp thing.

01:38:09

I just realized that when I looked at the clock. Although we are going to go a minute at least over because of the issue with you getting dropped, but anyway.

01:38:17

Oh, Eric Nielsen will do wonders later on with that. Anyway, before the break

01:38:23

I forwarded you a question from Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He says, I'd like to ask Dr.

01:38:28

White why he thinks there isn't more pushback on the current definition of racism that excuses blacks from ever being racist because they supposedly don't have the requisite power that racism presumably requires.

01:38:42

Many who are familiar with the social science literature know that this definition was never bandied about until about the mid -90s and that it originated with a 1978 book titled

01:38:55

White Awareness Handbook for Anti -Racism Training, yet I never see any conservatives, black or white,

01:39:01

Christian or otherwise, challenge this definition. Well, you just heard it before, but anyway. Yeah, yeah, I did challenge it in my comments earlier, and I certainly do.

01:39:12

It may be that when people like a Daryl Harrison or a

01:39:18

Votie Balcombe speak on these subjects, they get marginalized. Certainly there has been a lot of pushback on that, not necessarily in the sense of a book -length type thing, because from a

01:39:31

Christian perspective, the idea that your skin color could either force you to commit a sin or keep you from committing a certain kind of sin just has no biblical basis whatsoever.

01:39:43

So it's, you know, I remember back in the late 90s, listening to a

01:39:49

Michael Medved episode where he was going back and forth with a guest, and that was their thesis, that blacks can't be racist because they don't have power.

01:40:00

And I was just thinking back then, wow, this is just, this is amazing stuff, and it's just so completely outside the realm of anything that could be expressed as Christian.

01:40:09

And yet now there are many Christians who are expressing this, and not just black, but white as well.

01:40:14

There are all sorts of folks that are buying into these categories of critical race theory and bringing it right in.

01:40:24

And it's not that we didn't know that this was in other denominations, it's that the fact that it is now in Reformed denominations, in Reformed seminaries, that we just never expected it to be in.

01:40:38

When you have seminars being done by New Testament professors from Southern seminary that are 100 % full -on critical race theory, then you know that it has arrived, and it's no longer something that you can hide from, you need to understand what it's saying, and have a biblical response.

01:41:03

And I would recommend, if folks want to hear a deeper discussion of the biblical foundation of unity within the body, as I said earlier,

01:41:15

I was asked by the elders of Antioch Bible Church in Randberg, South Africa, to address that very issue, and so I preached from Colossians chapter 3 about three weeks, a month ago,

01:41:29

I forget how long ago it was now, before I headed back to other places in Europe to speak.

01:41:36

But that's available if you look up Antioch Bible Church, look up the sermons, and you'll find that sermon from about a month ago.

01:41:45

Well, thank you, Ted, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And we have someone, I usually don't mention people's full names, but since this person is a colleague in the airwaves,

01:41:56

I thought I'd give him a plug, Dwayne Atkinson from The Bar, which is biblical and Reformed, and he always gets upset when people automatically assume it means

01:42:08

Black and Reformed, because he happens to be a Black brother. He is writing...

01:42:15

I thought he was a connoisseur of fine wines. I was completely lost. He's writing from Greenville, South Carolina, and he says,

01:42:24

Thank you, Chris Arnzen, aka The Legend, for taking my question.

01:42:32

Wow, I didn't think you'd have the money to pay him off to do that. And he says, We at The Bar podcast love your work,

01:42:39

Dr. White, and thank you for shouting out Just Thinking Podcast and Daryl Harrison. It means a lot.

01:42:45

First question, given your geographical location, have you had any interactions with Hebrew Israelites in person?

01:42:54

I'd love when you covered them. It was so helpful. And then he has another question, but we'll wait for you to answer that.

01:43:01

Yeah, no, actually, my son has. They are here in Phoenix, down at the train station and I've not gone down there just to go back and forth with them.

01:43:13

My understanding is that they're not really interacting much with people anymore. Most interactions

01:43:19

I've had have been the debates that I've done and stuff like that that really got a lot of stuff going. But yeah, my son has done some of that, and he even did a little online interaction on Facebook with some guys recently.

01:43:31

They got me into trouble because I made a comment about it. But I'm not sure if you're aware of this,

01:43:37

Chris, but Josh is in a better position these days to do that kind of thing, because you know what

01:43:43

Josh's full -time job is, right? Is he a martial arts instructor with the Israeli...

01:43:49

Yeah, Krav Maga, Black Belt full -time instructor in Krav Maga. So I don't mess with him no more.

01:43:57

So yeah, I'll leave the direct encounters to Josh.

01:44:04

Yeah, well I've got to get him on the program sometime to talk about the Krav Maga or whatever you call it.

01:44:10

Whatever you call it. And let's see here, Dwayne says for his second question, what has been the most disheartening thing you've witnessed or observed since the whole racial, social justice issue intensified?

01:44:27

What claim, idea, or comment that when you heard it just made you scratch your head?

01:44:33

Oh, not to scratch my head. It was people calling for an ecumenical council to declare me a heretic like Arius, or having dared to say that the

01:44:44

Lord's Supper is a place that's focused upon Christ, and because of that is not a place for white spaces or black spaces.

01:44:53

No, are these people actually advocating that the different ethnic groups or skin colors have the

01:45:00

Lord's Supper separately? No, but what they were saying is that there needs to be black spaces in the church.

01:45:13

Well, I would think that at least this guy would say that if the black members of a local church wanted to have the

01:45:21

Lord's Supper by themselves, that would be good. That would be okay. And I think that's horrible. That's Paul and Peter in Antioch, and they don't see it.

01:45:33

They don't recognize it. And what you just said actually touches on an important fact.

01:45:39

The nonsense about blacks having the capability of being guilty of the sin of racism, where you have racism or bigotry, if you will, being most prominently condemned in the

01:45:53

New Testament is when the Jews, who were a persecuted people, are demonstrating their hatred towards the

01:46:00

Gentiles, and yet they are, the Jews, are being rebuked very severely for this sin, and so it completely abolishes this idea that you need to be an authority or something like that to have the ability to have guilt over this sin.

01:46:16

Well, the whole argument is based upon, again, the categories of critical race theory, the ideas of systemic racism, power structures.

01:46:27

It's all neo -Marxism in a new garb, in a religious garb, is what it's really about.

01:46:34

And so it's just that in that particular instance, the contradiction between having neo -Marxist categories as your authority and having biblical categories as your authority is seen with striking clarity, because the very idea that a person's heart could be incapable of this sin, based upon the skin of the person, is utterly absurd.

01:47:04

Now, they would say, well, okay, certainly people can have prejudice, or people can have animus, but they can't have racism.

01:47:13

And so they want to completely redefine the term in these other categories and try to control the conversation that way.

01:47:22

And it just seems that, you know, to me, that was the most disappointing thing, was that I could make a statement that I assumed every

01:47:30

Orthodox, especially every Reformed individual, would fully understand, that what

01:47:37

I'm saying is that, especially at the supper where the focus is upon the anamnesis, the remembrance of Christ, that the idea that there would be spaces that are ethnically defined at that point should be abhorrent to everyone.

01:47:58

And the response was, no, that's a good thing, it's a proper thing, and that's when

01:48:04

I really knew, and we're going to condemn you as a heretic if you say otherwise, that's when I really knew how deep -seated this is and how fundamentally divisive it has to be.

01:48:18

And I recognize that those who are responding to it and going, no, no, no, wait, what are you all talking about?

01:48:27

We don't think in these categories, and therefore we're just now recognizing what's going on and being told, well, you need to get woke, you need to join the woke

01:48:39

Church, and to be woke is to accept the utilization of these categories within the

01:48:46

Church, and I can't do that, because they're derived from outside and they're in fundamental conflict with what the

01:48:53

Bible teaches about how it is we have unity with one another. The thing that's crazy is sometimes when

01:49:00

I hear these guys speak, they actually, and I'm not exaggerating, they sound like they're quoting from the

01:49:05

Ku Klux Klan handbook, because of their, it almost seems like they're segregationists, it sounds like they're quoting

01:49:11

George Wallace or something. Well, there are some who are promoting the idea, like I said, of black spaces, but you can't, see, you can't even make statements like that today.

01:49:27

You know, for example, I was attacked vociferously for having reviewed some of the thing that Josh did with the black

01:49:36

Hebrew Israelites. During his conversation with black Hebrew Israelites, they would not call him

01:49:41

Josh, they would only call him devil or white devil. That was all they would refer to him as.

01:49:46

That's what my grandmother called me, but anyway. Oh, man.

01:49:57

Sorry. So, I made the statement that the black

01:50:02

Hebrew Israelites today, in their religious racism, make the

01:50:08

Ku Klux Klan look like amateurs. Well, I was talking about the Ku Klux Klan today, because the

01:50:14

KKK today obviously is not standing at railroad stations yelling at people as they walk by, promoting their hatred of blacks, whereas black

01:50:28

Hebrew Israelites are doing that openly in major cities across the United States. Well, the walls came tumbling down.

01:50:37

I mean, I was, it doesn't matter what the context was, to even suggest that there could be anything, even, well, anything equal to, let alone worse than the

01:50:50

KKK, or that it could be being performed by someone who is black. Oh, my goodness.

01:50:57

The attacks were pretty steady there for a while, and will continue into the future.

01:51:02

So, there are just certain categories you just can't even bring up, you can't even mention without the entire conversation completely coming off the rails into pure emotionalism.

01:51:16

And that's the other thing, is that I've been deeply disappointed by, for example, how

01:51:23

Bodhi Balcombe was thrown on the bus at the MLK -50.

01:51:28

Wow, I didn't know that. A young man got up and did a spoken word presentation quoted directly from Bodhi's article that he wrote about the

01:51:38

Michael Brown situation in St. Louis, and completely threw him under the bus.

01:51:45

Wow. And to see how, and I know others, Daryl Harrison is constantly being called names, and Uncle Tom, and I actually saw a, again, a well -known black pastor.

01:52:01

I did not know that you could turn the term coon into a verb, but now there's cooning.

01:52:08

So, if you don't stand right with their perspective, then you're cooning. I've never even heard of it before, but I think it is extremely sad to see the willingness to treat these gentlemen who will, and this isn't all they do, they're not just running around going,

01:52:27

I'm going to oppose this stuff, but they have a biblical backbone and a biblical spine, and so they have to say what's right.

01:52:35

They don't want to have to do it all the time, but when they do, oh my goodness, they get attacked vociferously.

01:52:41

So, it's one thing for me to get attacked vociferously. Again, I have the world's worst last name for talking about any of this, but to see these other brothers get treated in this way definitely is extremely problematic as well.

01:52:58

And Duane says, again, we love both you guys at The Bar Podcast. God bless you. Duane did not know

01:53:04

I was going to do this, but you can look up The Bar Podcast at thebarpodcast .com,

01:53:11

thebarpodcast .com. Thank you so much, Duane. We have an anonymous listener who wants you to define neo -Marxism.

01:53:20

Well, obviously Marx, the fundamental element of Marx's mechanism of bringing about revolution was the division of the people into the proletariats and the bourgeoisie and the creation of division that can break a society down to where something else can take the fundamental place of what used to hold that society together.

01:53:47

Well, you can take those same concepts and transfer them out of merely economic categories into other categories, and in this case, the category of race, which was not an issue for Marx initially.

01:54:00

It was much more effective for him to focus upon the economic aspects.

01:54:07

But you can do it with race, you can do it with gender. This raises the issues of intersectionality.

01:54:13

I mean, this is why Jordan Peterson has become so popular and Ben Shapiro and others, because they're addressing these things from different perspectives, but we see this stuff being promoted.

01:54:25

We just didn't expect to see it being promoted within the church. And our anonymous listener says, so enjoying your guests

01:54:33

Dr. White and Pastor Simon. No mention of me in that. Simon has that lovely

01:54:41

Irish lilt, and it sounds so much more intelligent than the rest of us. Thank you. Well, on that note,

01:54:49

Dr. White, how do you suggest for your listeners who might be pastors in dealing with this issue?

01:54:56

Because on the one hand, it is a contemporary issue that needs to be addressed, but at the same time, we don't want to become so focused on it that we become like them, who were weakly in their pulpits pounding this issue.

01:55:10

What is the best way for pastors to teach their local people that are under their care? Well, I think we do need to, just Wednesday evening, when

01:55:20

I spoke at PRBC, I did do a very quick run -through in Colossians chapter 3. I think it's important for people to understand what the basis of our unity in Christ is.

01:55:29

It would be good to do maybe a sermon series that goes through Colossians 3 and a few other things like that, maybe put it into a church historical context, because that early church was extremely, you know,

01:55:42

I mean, there was just every kind of ethnic tension you could imagine was created by the

01:55:49

Roman Empire, by its conquering of all those different peoples. So, you know, from my perspective, inoculate ahead of time.

01:55:58

It's a whole lot better than having to deal with it once the disease is actually there. Lay the foundations that people will automatically be wary of hearing these things.

01:56:08

And, you know, you may have to introduce some terminology and say, hey, you know, when you hear people talking about intersectionality, be aware where these things are coming from.

01:56:19

When you hear this type of terminology that is not biblically derived and is not faithful to the biblical text, then be very, very careful.

01:56:30

Well, I want to let our listeners know that stay tuned in the future for updates on a debate that I am helping

01:56:40

Dr. White to orchestrate with Dr. Michael Brown, where they are going to be on the same team opposing two professedly

01:56:50

Christian ministers who are homosexual advocates. And this is going to be taking place on the campus of Gordon -Conwell

01:56:59

Theological Seminary, God willing, on September 7th. So keep your ears open for that, and I will continue to keep you updated as I receive updates on that.

01:57:11

So I'm very enthusiastic about that event. I think it's a very important event. And do you have anything further to say about that,

01:57:17

Dr. White, before we go off the air? No, I'm really excited about that, obviously very thankful for the work you're putting out on that.

01:57:24

Michael and I have debated each other so often, but we've always wanted to be on the same side.

01:57:30

We were, I'm sure you've seen the debate we did against Anthony Buzzard and Joseph Goode on the

01:57:35

Trinity, and obviously Michael and I were hand in glove. I mean, we were finishing each other's sentences, we're very close friends, and so yeah,

01:57:47

I think we'll do a really good job in presenting a biblical case for a biblical sexual ethic, and obviously this particular subject is very much in Michael's wheelhouse.

01:57:58

He's written a tremendous amount on it, and if you haven't seen his books, Can You Be Gay and Christian? A Queer Thing Happened to America?,

01:58:05

I would highly recommend them. Okay, well, if you folks are interested in finding out more about Dr.

01:58:11

James R. White, go to AOMIN .org, AOMIN .org.

01:58:17

You can also go to GospelUtah .org, GospelUtah .org to find out more about the dialogue, the

01:58:24

LDS Protestant dialogue coming up on Friday, July 6th.

01:58:30

And don't forget about Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Pastor Simon O'Maney is one of the pastors, that's

01:58:39

GraceBaptistCarlisle .org, and Carlisle is spelled C -A -R -L -I -S -L -E, GraceBaptistCarlisle .org.

01:58:45

Dr. White, if you could just hold on for a moment, because I'd like to say a proper goodbye to you off the air. I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater