Responding to a Roman Catholic Convert

So, the microphone wasn't on, is that what's going on? Huh?

It's, it's on now, okay. Well, welcome to the

Dividing Line again! Rich just had to run in and plug the microphone in. Not sure who had unplugged it, but it's because Rich decided that he likes these cameras so much that he moves them from studio to studio.

Instead of using the three pre -installed cameras in the other studio. And so, that's why you couldn't hear me, is because somebody didn't connect things up.

Anyway, why is there someone staying outside of our unit with a, well, oh, they're leaving, never mind, it's just the plumbers.

Anyway, great start to the program today, ain't it? I was trying to tell you that my wife had just texted me a request for me to order something, an outdoor fishing flap hat,

UPF 50 sun cap, and it's got, I mean, the only thing you can see is the eyes.

And it's a hat, and it's got the things on the side, covers the face a whole nine yards, and my response to her was, joining

Antifa to do some protesting? I guess she wants to keep the sun off of her face.

So anyways, and then, literally less than half an hour ago,

I would not have seen this because he didn't bother to tag me on it.

But Jamar Tisby's back, hey, it's been a while since we've heard about old Jamar. Remember Jamar Tisby?

You know, the guy that, well, anyway, it's been, I think, seven years, more than seven years since we had to do some interaction with stuff that he was saying on Pass the

Mic. Well, 28 minutes ago, at least from when I clicked on this, it says, do y 'all remember when a self -styled apologist went after a black teenager he saw littering and did a whole post on how this boy had probably never met his father and would have a bunch of baby mamas?

Well, you can relive the moment and our response here. I know.

Now, I had somebody else on Twitter tell me recently, just last night or this morning, that I'm getting old and I need to retire.

So yeah, I suppose I'm getting up there. But Jamar must be aging much faster than me because I remember that incident.

It was a 530 word Facebook post. And what it was is my little video thing that I'd installed in my car caught a black kid with his pants down around his knees, waddling across the, in front of me at a thing.

And what it was is a cop drove by and once the cop got by, he flipped him off.

He was flipping the cop off. Now he did then go over to the other side of the street and litter, but that wasn't what it was about.

I mean, man, I just think about how things have changed since 2016 in Arizona, in Phoenix, with a

George Soros mayor and how bad this city has become.

We have a park near our home that normally is nothing but homeless drug addicts and there was a murder there.

I don't know how many murders there's been there of late, but you'll see it all roped off and command center and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And you'll hear the gunshots and everything. So Phoenix has gotten pretty bad.

So littering, that wasn't the issue. The issue was what, what leads to this kind of an attitude where you're walking across street with your butt hanging out in the air and you're flipping the cops off as you're walking along.

And I made comment about the breakdown of the, of the black family because of all the various ethnic groups, that is the group that has the highest amount of broken families.

It's just fathers, fathering children with many different women, women having babies with many different men.

All the statistics say the same thing, not even a question. And that was the one that just exploded.

You're not allowed to say things like that. It doesn't matter how blatant the documentation is, the facts are, the numbers are, we can't talk about the fact that it's the sin of the broken family that is leading to the black on black crime, the blacks murdering blacks, which is by far the largest number.

You're not allowed to talk about any of that because that doesn't fit the narrative. And Jamar Tisby is a part of that.

He was once, you know, quote unquote reformed. Now he sells his soul to people who just peddle racism.

And it's a sad, sad thing, but that's what it is. But I, you know, you must be really scraping the bottom of the barrel, um, to dig something out about a 530 word

Facebook post from 2016 must really be bored. Must not be getting the attention that he needs or something.

I don't know. Yeah. And I'm a self -styled apologist, Jamar. Yeah. Okay. Uh, that self -styled apologist, um, who's been doing it longer than you've been alive.

We gotcha. We gotcha Jamar. Yeah. All right. Anyway. Shouldn't look at Twitter right before you start the program because we have,

I could not, I cannot possibly get to everything I'd like to get to today. Um, we're going to do another program on Wednesday.

I leave the day after Thanksgiving, so I leave Friday. And so we'll have some opportunities, um, next week as I'm traveling to, uh,

St. Charles. And then maybe some opportunities after that. I've really booked the week after that so heavily.

I've got something pretty much every night, um, that, um, that next week.

So we'll see, should, I don't have to travel very far. I'm only going from St.

Charles to Sedalia to Kansas city. That's barely like two and a half hours per at most.

Assuming the weather, assuming I was looking at the weather and the first two nights that I'm out, uh, the highs are in the low forties and the lows are in the low twenties.

So it's, it's going to be a bit of a shift for me. Uh, but, um, we'll get to all this eventually, unless I forget some of it.

So for example, I have a video. I was gonna look at a video from Layton Flowers asking if I'm choice meats, tried to bring it up and the file was corrupted.

So I need to go track that back down and redownload it and see why the file got corrupted or whatever.

Though I've seen some of his comments, so I think I know where that one's going. Uh, so we'll probably comment on that in just a moment.

Um, in fact, I have a, a, um, tweet here that I'll look at. And then

I've got a video from Trent Horn on Intercession of the Saints. That's fairly short.

We'll, we'll, we'll get to that. But hopefully what you're seeing and what you're, again, it depends on, you may not even be actively involved in social media and believe me, that probably is good for your heart and soul.

Um, but there is a lot going on in regards to Roman Catholicism Day, a lot, uh, far more than what was going on when we first started dealing with that subject in the late 1980s, early 1990s, that led to all of those debates, all the great debates on Long Island.

And, and, uh, places elsewhere. And one thing is very, very clear as I, as I listened to people engaging the subject

Roman Catholicism once again, uh, first of all, nothing has changed since the 1990s.

The issues are the same. And as far as the defining issues, now, what has changed is the difference between John Paul II and Francis.

And that is massive. That's huge. I mean,

I'll be honest with you. Every exchange that I'm having right now, and man, for a while last night, it was like me against the entire

Roman Catholic world, it was, it was, it was going fast. Um, the, the reality is when you get down to the authority claim, which is always what you end up getting to,

Rome's in a much tougher situation now than back in the 1990s because it is perfectly legitimate.

It's absolutely necessary that we point out the reality of what

Francis means to the authority claims there on the Catholic church. You have to, you just simply have to adopt the idea that he's a, he's just a bad

Pope. It's just a, it's just a little hiccup. Uh, we'll get, we'll get over it.

We're fine down here. Everything's fine. How are you? Uh, and that, that's, that's, it's gotta be the only hope that they have.

But the reality is, as you, as you look at what's happening in Rome, you look at, uh, the word that, that, and Francis can do this.

This is, this is the problem in elevating a single human being to an absolutely infallible position of authority.

You can't stop him. And word is that he is going to be changing how his successor is chosen and including lay people and women in the selection process.

And of course that still leaves three quarters of the votes in the College of Cardinals. And he gets to choose the lay people and the women.

And he has packed the College of Cardinals with his own acolytes, his people who think and act like he does.

He is, he is blatantly not putting a thumb on the scales. He's putting his hand on the scales to make sure that the quote unquote progressivist direction that he is charting in changing the teaching on the subject of capital punishment, and then you have a bishop, maybe an archbishop, but you have a bishop utilizing that as the example when asked, could the

Pope change the church's view on homosexuality, transgenderism, marriage, and his response is, well, look what happened with capital punishment.

Now, when I say something like that, Roman Catholic, oh, he can't do that. This is a bishop saying the same thing, okay?

You can, you can pretend this isn't happening if you want, but it's right here in front of you.

There are a lot of people in the Roman Catholic Church that are calling it a crisis.

The sacking of Bishop Strickland down in Tyler, Texas, and I go through Tyler regularly.

It's right, right next to where Tom Buck is. The sacking of Strickland tells you everything you really need to know.

Strickland's a pretty strong conservative. He's more of what a

Roman Catholic was like back in the olden days than what you have now, and so it's amazing that you can have a pope who will send kind, encouraging words to a

Jesuit who's pushing LGBTQ acceptance amongst

Roman Catholics, but then he gets rid of someone like Strickland. If that doesn't tell you what's going on, if that doesn't make you go, huh, that's sort of how the

Biden DOJ works, you know, and we know the Biden DOJ is as corrupt as the day is long, so, so every time the conversations would get down to the issue of authority,

I'm like, wait a minute, you're, you're going to tell me you've got some type of binding infallible authority?

Could I remind you of your pope for just a moment? And so last night, that's what

I'm going to have to do. That's the way I'm going to have to do this. Let me see if I can, if I can find this.

Like I said, last night, I was typing as fast as my little fingers would go, and I was going back and forth,

I started going back and forth with Joshua T. Charles, Catholic convert from Protestantism, not even a capitalized

P for Protestantism, former White House speechwriter, I'm not sure if I would put that on any of my bios, number one

New York Times author, I wouldn't do the same thing again, historian, okay, concert pianist and JD.

Well, okay, so we've got an attorney and a concert pianist, then again,

Dan Barker is a concert pianist too, and a historian, good, all right, so I have been asking a question for a long time of people, why didn't it allow me just to go back?

There it is, I've been asking the question of people a long time, when they do the, we are the church of the past 2000 years, the early church was

Catholic, and the medieval church was Catholic, and the church will always be Catholic, has always been Catholic, and we are the church, and la, la, la, la, la, and I've gone, okay, answer me this, point me to one of the bishops, just one would do, at the

Council of Nicaea, who believe dogmatically everything you believe is a Roman Catholic, because even

Joshua Charles admitted there were none, there were none.

Now, he thinks there's a proper reason for that, but my point is that if you're going to claim that there is an apostolic tradition, a divine revelation given to the apostles from the apostles, it's given to the church, it's given to the bishops, then you have to deal with the reality that for centuries, and centuries, and centuries, and centuries, and centuries, there is no evidence, to any fair -minded person anyways,

I mean, there are some real wackos out there that can find entire doctrines in half of a word, but those wackos aside, there is no evidence to the honest -minded person, to the serious historian, that the early church had any knowledge whatsoever, any consciousness whatsoever, of what now is dogmatically necessary to be believed within Roman Catholicism, and so Rome has taken two perspectives, and I wrote a lengthy little thing last night about this, it was the last thing

I wrote last night on Twitter, the John Henry Cardinal Newman perspective, the development of theology perspective, as George Salmon recognized in the 1900s,

I'm sorry, in the 19th century, late 19th century, is an abandonment of the historical field of battle, it is a saying, you know what, it's obvious that Irenaeus is a testimony against our modern papal ideas of the papacy and papal supremacy, and there's nothing in Clement whatsoever that would, in fact,

Ignatius doesn't even address the Bishop of Rome, because there's really strong evidence there was no monarchical episcopate in Rome until like 140, yeah, all that stuff is true, but once you put some

Newman on it, I should have pulled up that great YouTube video that someone did, they took that thing where the guy is stopping all these leaks with this kind of patch type stuff, and they just put some something on it, well, they take the audio and put some

Newman on it, so any historical problem you have, you just hit it with some

Newman, some doctrinal development, and all is well, you can prove anything that way, yeah, it's true, you can, but that's an abandonment of the claim that we are the church of 2 ,000 years, we're the church of 2 ,000 years, but we don't look like it, but that's because doctrine develops, and that means you really wouldn't expect these things that we now are just so central to our dogmatic stance,

I mean, there's been all these people, there was a, and I did save that,

I don't know why I didn't put it up, some of you saw it, Taylor Marshall posted this picture of Mary and Jesus, and she is this white, blue -eyed beauty, and Jesus is a blonde, blue -eyed kid, okay, and I'm just like,

I wasn't the only one to point out the fact that, yeah, it's not even close, okay, that's not even close to being the truth, apart from all the doctrinal issues, and people are responding like, you stupid idiot, you moron, don't you realize that Mary appears in different cultures looking like that culture?

Really? And here I thought she was a real woman who existed in time, now it sounds like she's some type of Gnostic deity, or some type of divine being that just changes form here and changes form there, what?

Oh, yeah, she appears in Mesoamerica, she looks like a

Mesoamerican, and in Japan, she looks Japanese, and all the rest of this stuff, and I'm just like, okay, and this is the same religion as this here, the

Bible stuff, because there ain't nothing about this in the Bible, there's nothing that even hints at it, suggests it, and they're perfectly serious, perfectly serious, and the centrality of the

Marian dogmas, and the Marian dogmas, remember, don't buy a paperback, they're ridiculously expensive, if you find it in a used bookstore, you can become rich, just buy it for $5, then sell it for $89, but we put this out a couple years before 2000, and it's not huge, it's a quick read, it's available on Kindle, on Amazon, and this, it's dated, because what

I'm dealing with here was the theory, the movement, the speculation, that John Paul II was going to define

Mary, and turn it over, thank you very much,

Mr. Federal Agent Lady, that John Paul II was going to define

Jesus, was going to define Mary, sorry, as co -redemptrix and co -mediatrix with Christ.

Now, in the book, I document the fact that from the, I think the earliest was in the 1890s,

Roman Catholic leaders, popes, have taught this as doctrine.

Doctrine is not dogma. Dogma is de fide, it is to be defined as, okay, that's interesting,

I have a meeting, oh yes,

I did say so, oh wow, okay, well,

I'm going to be busy here for a while, I'm going to be on cross -politic in an hour and 35 minutes, so yay, um,

I had forgotten, sorry, I must have put it in my, glad I looked over there, glad, see, this is a live program, um, yay, um,

I was planning on getting done at the regular time today anyway, so, um, it should still work.

Anyway, let's get back to this. Doctrine is one thing, dogma is de fide, which means it's by faith, and that means it's definitional of the faith, and once you deny it, so if you look at the

Immaculate Conception, you look at the Bible Assumption, with those pronouncements, 1854 and 1950 respectively, there is an anathema attached.

If you deny this, you are separated from the fellowship of the church, which in the medieval period normally separated you from your physical body too.

Anyway, um, but the idea of Mary as co -redemptrix and co -mediatrix hasn't been defined on that level, there was a lot of speculation at the time that John Paul II was going to do that,

John Paul II's personal model was, uh, totus tuus sum

Maria, totally yours addressed to Mary, Mary I am totally yours, um, and so I wrote this book, we went through the various Marian dogmas, talked about where they came from,

I also wrote an entire chapter on the subject of, uh, the veneration and worship of Mary, uh, the, the book,

The Glories of Mary by Alphonsus de Liguri, really, really hard stuff to read.

If anyone has any questions about the fact that Mary is the object of worship, and believe me,

I know what Latria is, I know what Dulia is, I know what

Hyperdulia is, I have linked over and again my presentation in my debate with Patrick Madrid on the fact that those distinctions are not biblical, they are not substantiated in scripture, they are contradicted by scripture,

I believe in scripture, not in the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and you will find out someday when you stand before the author of scripture that you should have done the same thing.

And so if, if anyone questions that Mary is truly worshipped in Roman Catholicism, all you have to do is read

The Glories of Mary by Alphonsus de Liguri. At the time I wrote this book, that book had been through 800 editions,

I'm sure it's probably a thousand by now. Liguri is a doctor of the church, just like Thomas Aquinas is a doctor of the church, there are only a few, and just buy it,

I'm sure it's available on Kindle for free, maybe even, and you won't go five pages before you give up and go, okay,

I get it, yep, she's being treated as a deity, oh no we're not, oh yes you are, read it!

When you commit your soul to her for your salvation, don't tell me that, that a billion people on the planet praying to her all at the same time, pleading for mercy and grace, her appearing all over the place, yeah, that's what human beings do all the time, uh -huh, right.

In fact, I've read it to you many, many times, but we'll go ahead and read it again, shall we?

Read it to you many, many times, shown the picture of me debating gerrymatics, here's what chapter one says in my book, a small booklet tucked in the fold of a chair in the corner caught my eye, it was sticking out just enough, or I may not have seen it, intrigued

I pulled it out, the blue and white cover bore the title, Devotions in Honor of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, I have this booklet in the other room, it's still in my library,

I scanned through a few of the prayers, in one of them I spot the words, my eternal salvation, so I backed up and started from the beginning, here it is,

O Mother of Perpetual Help, thou art the dispenser of all the goods which God grants to us miserable sinners, if this reason has made thee so powerful, so rich, and so bountiful, thou mayst help us in our misery, thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to thee, come then to my help, dearest mother, for I recommend myself to thee, in thy hands

I place my eternal salvation, and to thee do I entrust my soul, count me among thy most devoted servants, take me under thy protection, and it is enough for me, for if thou protect me, dear mother,

I fear nothing, not from my sins, because thou wilt obtain for me the pardon of them, nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all hell together, nor even from Jesus, my judge himself, because by one prayer from thee he will be appeased, but one thing

I fear, that in the hour of temptation I may neglect to call on thee, and thus perish miserably, obtain for me then the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance, and the grace always to have recourse to thee,

O Mother of Perpetual Help. Now I then went on to tell the story that I pulled that very booklet out of my bag when

I was in the radio studio debating Jerry Matitix on WEZE in Boston in 1993.

I read it to him fully expecting him to go, oh that's just, you know, that's just overboard, that's just pious blather.

When I read that on the air to Jerry, his response was, James, my sincere prayer for you is that someday you will be able to say that prayer with me.

So it's not some kind of wild one -off type thing.

Liguori's book is filled, and that prayer is in Liguori's book, so that book is filled with this kind of exaltation of Mary, and when you start pressing

Roman Catholics on it, they rush to her defense. There are memes being posted about what it's going to be like when you stand before Jesus, and Jesus says, why did you say those things about my mom?

Seriously. And again, if you're not a former Roman Catholic, and if you haven't spent a lot of time studying

Roman Catholicism, even if you spent time studying the Reformation, you got to understand two of the major Marian dogmas were defined long after the

Reformation. Rome was already deeply infected with Mariolotry and Marian tradition at the time of the

Reformation, but not to the point she is today. But most

Protestants just don't have a background in it, and so they're taken aback. They don't even know what to do with it.

They don't even know how to respond to it. And so I've been watching this, and like I said, nothing's changed since the 90s.

The people are different. The mechanism of arguing is now different. We used to argue on bulletin board systems, and now it's on Twitter.

But the arguments are the same. They all go back to the same issues. They all go back to the same claims. And what

I'm reminded of, once again, is that most Protestants are

Protestants for the same reason most Roman Catholics are Roman Catholics, because mom and dad were. It's a matter of taste.

I like this better than something else. And so I'm not overly shocked that the level of conversation that I've been seeing hasn't been overly high.

Most of the Protestants have not listened to any of the debates we did long ago, and most of the

Roman Catholics are in the same boat. And the firestorm continues on.

But if we're going to reach out to these people with a gospel message that they will be able to understand, we really do need to start thinking these things through.

So this takes us back to Joshua Charles. Sorry, been a little bit of a ways there.

And he had... Let's see here.

Here we go. He said that my...

This is Joshua Charles. Your Nicaea point is not only poor but incoherent. I explained in great detail with quotes from the fathers yesterday below.

By the way, as a Catholic in 2023, I can read virtually everything the fourth century fathers wrote without qualifying anything.

They're Catholic. Well, that's just simply not. That's just so bogus. It's pretty hard to...

I respond to that and said, I'm sorry, but you must assuredly... You assuredly must qualify all sorts of things in reading the fourth century fathers.

For they did not have your belief in papalism, fallibility, the entire monarchical ecclesiology, etc.

In such dogmas as the immaculate conception, bodily assumption, a fully developed concept of dogma purgatory, surely not indulgences, etc.

And they continued many practices no longer allowed in Rome either. So please, let's be honest with history.

And there's just all sorts of stuff after this. Again, people who love to quote mine without worrying about context.

For example, whenever you find a Roman Catholic saying Ignatius taught transubstantiation, you know you're talking to someone who doesn't read the early church fathers themselves.

They are reading secondary sources. And boy, this really looks good, because no one's ever refuted me for that on this one.

That's a real common one. You'll see it over and over and over again. So here's what

Joshua Charles was referring to when he said that he'd... And it's a small book. And I don't even know how far I'm going to get now that I know that I have another program to have this and didn't even realize that I did.

So let's try to get to it. First, to your question about demonstrating the Marian dogmas,

I do not accept your premise, and neither did the early church fathers, that all we know that came from the apostles is only in Scripture.

Scripture itself denies this. Well, so you have to go here.

But what is hidden in this denial is a positive assertion, and that is that there is material given to the apostles that is not found in Scripture.

And that's why I asked Mitch Pacwa so long ago, has Rome dogmatically defined a single word that Jesus ever said that's not found in Scripture?

And he said no. And I said, has the Roman Catholic Church dogmatically defined a single word the apostles ever said that is not found in Scripture?

And he said no. And that's true. So again, when we're talking about authority, he's saying, well, all we know that came from the apostles is only in Scripture.

Show me another word they ever said. If you're going to say, well, they pass this on orally, then document it.

See, here's the problem. Let's talk about the most recent Marian definition, 73 years ago, the bodily assumption of Mary.

You will not find a single Christian in the first 500 years of the

Christian church functioning on a belief in the bodily assumption of Mary. You can stand in your head and spin in circles about, well, you know,

Dormition might mean this. The reality is 500 years after Christ, the

Bishop of Rome is identifying as heretical the first documents that even suggest such an idea.

He doesn't single that out, but the documents themselves. It is not a part of the faith of the early church.

So you have to sit there and say, well, but it is apostolic tradition.

It was being passed on and nobody said a word about it until it was dogmatically defined.

Well, certainly not then, but it truly is a side belief for the first millennium.

If it's, it's not in the first 500 years. And then as it starts to have a few, most people like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Because everyone recognized bodily assumption, you're paralleling Jesus and Mary.

Immaculate conception, you're paralleling Jesus and Mary. Yeah. Okay. Co -redemptrix, you're paralleling.

That's the whole point, isn't it? Yeah. So there is absolutely positively nothing at all to substantiate the hidden assertion being made by the

Roman Catholic when they say, well, you know, the early church fathers denied this too.

Okay. So the earliest place that I know of where the early church and early church father claimed an apostolic tradition not found in scripture is

Irenaeus. And it's Irenaeus' claim that Jesus was more than 50 years old when he died.

Now you don't believe that. I don't believe that. Rome doesn't believe that. But if the very first time that someone makes reference to a tradition from the apostles, we can all agree was wrong and bogus.

You're telling us that stuff that you can define 1900 years after Christ actually came from the apostles.

That's a pretty wild claim. You may want to believe it, but there's no evidence for it.

You say scripture itself denies this. Where? You don't say where. I'd love to see where you think the scripture actually says this.

I could guess there's only as few places to go. But since that is your belief,

I will only refer to the scriptures. Okay. I can confidently say, yes, each Catholic dogma can be demonstrated from scripture, especially when you read scripture like Christ and the apostles read it typologically.

Ah, yes. So, you know, you've got the Ark of the Covenant and you've got

Solomon's mom and the antechamber and no end.

Marian speculation in the Bible is never ending.

It is astonishing what they can come up with. And again, we've dealt with that not only in Marian of the

Redeemer, but there's a chapter in their own Catholic controversy as well, going through a number of these things.

In fact, I am Catholic today after having spent the first 31 years of my life as a

Protestant, don't know what kind of Protestant, largely because of the biblical explication of these doctrines to me by various Catholic scholars.

In light of typology, we can show many reasons to believe Mary is the new Eve, the new queen of the fulfilled

Davidic kingdom, the new Ark of the Covenant, etc, etc. I've linked a number of times, no one's bothered to respond to it, but I've linked a number of times to the debate with Jerry Matitix on the

Marian dogmas. I wish the audio was better. I think we've cleaned it up as much as we possibly could over the years.

But if you want to hear how that kind of argumentation survives cross -examination,

I've said a number of times, I've never overly enjoyed debating Bobson Jennis, but you at least have to give him credit.

He's one of the few that was actually willing to try to defend the bodily assumption in a debate in Santa Fe, as I recall.

Most of the other ones won't even touch it because they know. They know that when you try to bring out this typology, it is so easy to tear holes because they have to pick and choose which elements of the story they want to try to create their typology with.

All you gotta do is go, well, what does this refer to? And why are you skipping this? And why are you skipping that? It's a kind of interpretation that can be used to prove anything whatsoever.

Anything you want to find, you can find using typological interpretation.

Many great Catholic theologians and biblical scholars have explained this in great detail. As for living scholars,

I especially appreciate the work of Dr. Brant Petrie and Dr. Scott Hahn, a convert from Reformed Protestantism, who we have refuted over and over and over again, challenged the debate for decades, and he won't.

Yeah. And so, sorry, Reddit, and find it horrifically out of date, first of all, because something else that needs to be added to this is that the initial

Marian doctrines, unbiblical Marian doctrines, such as perpetual virginity, those beliefs had their origin in proto -Gnostic sources.

The Protevangelium of James, remember, we've done story time with Uncle Jimmy on this program, and I've read you these stories in their completeness, and they are embarrassing, but they are your earliest sources.

So when people are talking about, they've been known since the earliest days of the church, yes, amongst the

Gnostics, not amongst those that followed Jesus Christ. So, first point, utterly empty.

We have people who have written books about typology. So have the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and everybody else.

So the Gnostics, nothing there. Zip, zero, not a second. To your doctrinal development question, yes, undoubtedly, the church's understanding grew over time.

That does not mean it is not part of the same deposit of the faith. There is the issue. There is a deposit of faith.

Don't ask us to show it to you. We can't. We can't give it to you in any one person.

This was the frustration, again, if you watch it, this was the frustration in dealing with Jerry in that initial great debate on Long Island.

I would quote an early church father, well, that's not church tradition. And then he'd quote the same early church father, and now it was church tradition.

Well, which is it going to be? And we got to bodily assumption, he's saying, well, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, there was this deposit of faith, and there was all these people who believed these things, and I kept pushing, give me a name, someone in the second century, someone in the third century, someone in the fourth century.

And that's when he said, well, James, you know, it's not like every single early church father had to mention this.

I said, Jerry, I'll take just one. And the place exploded, because everybody was at the same point of frustration, because he couldn't give you anybody, because there isn't anybody.

There is no deposit of the faith that can be defined by Roman Catholics. It's whatever

Rome today says it is. And the pontiff today seemingly thinks it's different than the pontiff 20 years ago did, which means it's fictional, my friends, fictional, completely so.

Is there a deposit of faith? Yep. Got it right here. Got it right there.

You can't define a single word that any of the authors of these inspired texts uttered that has been passed down orally in your church.

You can't do it. And you know it. You know it.

Let's take you or really an individual as an example. You accepted Christ as Lord and Savior many years ago. From that moment forward, you believed yourself to be saved.

But surely now in your 60s, you have a greater and more precise understanding of the same faith you accepted when you were younger. And yet you would no doubt never call your greater understanding today a different faith than what you initially accepted.

You would and do call it the same faith. Now, let's compare this with what it's being, with what the parallel is supposed to be.

Take 1 Clement, take the

Didache, take Ignatius, and take the

Epistle of Diognetus. Probably the four earliest extra canonical

Christian works we have. Put them together and ask yourself a simple question.

If that faith developed for a thousand years, would you have anything like an infallible papacy?

Would you have any of the Marian dogmas at all? Would you have purgatorian indulgences?

Would you have a sacramental priesthood? Nope. They're not there.

So when you define as De Fide, those beliefs that are not represented in the

New Testament or in the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament, that's what we're talking about.

Did it take time to develop? Certainly did. Certainly did. I mean, I'm so thankful that you've got people all the way up into the 5th and 6th centuries that are remaining faithful even though they've accepted traditional beliefs that are not thoroughly biblical.

They're still holding to a biblical gospel despite all of those things. But once again, this is one of the reasons you see

Trent Horne going, well, you know, scripture isn't really ontologically different.

Yeah, it is. And that's why it can function to be the restraint on where so -called tradition can go.

The same is true of the church, which unlike you is given multiple promises to Christ, that he would remain with her until the end, guide her into all truth, etc.,

and that she would be listening to the words of Christ. The deposit of the faith remains the same.

Can't tell you what it is. Can't show it to you. You just have to believe on faith that we're the ones that define it and nobody else knows what it is.

As her understanding grows and develops. Newman is back! Hello, Newman! As her understanding grows and develops, truth that was clear before is never lost.

Oh, really? Huh. But always strengthened and expanded. The acorn becomes a tree.

There's Newman for you. While losing none of what it had as an acorn, any more than a full -grown man can be said to have lost something because he is no longer a fetus.

This is Newman to the max. This is doctrinal development and it is an abandonment of the historical field of battle.

As George Salmon pointed out, again, I highly recommend to you his book, The Infallibility of the

Church, written contemporaneously with Newman, by the way, so it makes it all that much more interesting. I can explain this in much more detail in answer to your next question about Nicaea.

Third, your Nicaea question. No bishop of Nicaea had a fully fleshed out Trinitarian dogmatic theology.

Many of them didn't even have a finalized biblical canon. Trinity appears in no ancient document until almost two centuries after Christ's ascension, but I don't believe, therefore, the

Christian faith changed. It simply expressed itself with greater precision and depth. Well, that's all very nice and we can talk about how the gospel is to be sent out into the world and how it answers questions from cultures it hasn't even encountered yet and what the actual source of the doctrine of the

Trinity is, which is very different between us and Rome. Well, at least between me and Rome.

I'm afraid some of us these days are welching on stuff like that. But anyways, he goes on to say, this is why there were multiple other ecumenical councils in the ensuing centuries, including the

Arian resurgence, including the collapse of Bishop Liberius, including the fact that it was the

Bishop of Alexandria that stood firm and Rome did not. There's all sorts of things to be talked about there.

It expressed the same faith with greater precision and depth. The faith was ultimately the same, but the terminology and understanding was worked out and increased over time, similar to the process described above.

Again, more development hypothesis. We don't have to find our dogmatic beliefs in scripture and we don't have to have them necessarily rooted in scripture either, except by typological argumentation, which can be used to prove absolutely anything.

For example, we have a few examples of the term consubstantial prior to Nicaea. In fact, it was rejected in the east. This was a new term, a fact the

Arians exploited, claiming it wasn't scripture. A bit ironic, I must say, except that the eastern church had argued against it.

That's why they had problems with the utilization of it in a different context. But it became the defining point of orthodoxy.

One had to subscribe to it to be considered a Catholic Christian. So did Saint Athanasius and Nicene Fathers believe a different faith than what came before?

No, they did not. No, of course not. You can look at Ignatius's Christology and you see it's the same thing that Athanasius is doing and it's the same thing that Paul was doing.

There's the issue. The reason the Trinity is true is because it's part of divine revelation, not because Nicaea said it was true, not because Athanasius said it was true, not because a council said it was true.

Just like it was true even when Ariminans said it was false. A council with more bishops at it met and said that it wasn't true.

Following this line of reasoning, you should have followed that council at that time. Athanasius was a

Protestant on that level. You can't get around it. But they did subscribe to the church's infallible definition of that same faith in Nicaea because it refuted the then current heresy of the day

Arianism. Again, a very popular but errant understanding of what actually happened.

It's ignoring the Arian resurgence. It's ignoring the basis upon which Athanasius defended the

Nicene definition, the fact that he goes to scripture to do so. You can't go to scripture and you cannot use the interpretive methodology that Athanasius used on Philippians chapter 2 or Colossians chapter 1 or John chapter 1 or John chapter 8 or John chapter 20 or any of the others.

He did not use typological interpretation of those texts. Typological interpretation can be used by anybody who proves anything.

That's precisely what happens with the church except she is the beneficiary of divine promises and guarantees while you are not, nor I, etc.

Well, there is no guarantee whatsoever to any organization that calls itself the church that has unbiblical offices, that claims unbiblical prerogatives and unbiblical priorities to define what the

Bible actually says. It is Jesus taught us that when you have a religious authority that says these are our traditions, therefore you should understand the scripture in these ways, you are to apply the scripture to them and find them to be wanting.

That's what happens in Matthew chapter 15. In fact, many of the church fathers explicitly said that the reason

God allowed heretics and heresies was to provide an opportunity for the church to dig into the faith even more deeply, understand even more clearly, and articulate it more precisely.

But actually, again, and I'm sure that he hasn't read anything like this, but there is an entire chapter in this book called

Sola Scriptura, The Prophetic Position of the Bible beginning on page 27 called Sola Scriptura and the

Early Church wherein I discuss the issue of what the rule of faith was, what is apostolic tradition in the early centuries, etc.

And there is an understanding, obviously, every time that we have had to deal with a new heresy such as, let's say,

Darwinian evolution, which by the way, Rome has collapsed on. Mention your Pope is a

Darwinist. Just thought I'd throw that in there. It does give us opportunity to dig more deeply into the deposit of faith, which is this.

Okay, this. That's where so many of my, I thought, fellow

Protestant brothers are marching off into quicksand right now. And we're seeing people leaving our ranks as a result of this.

Like no one warned it. If you don't believe this is enough, and you believe that this needs to be placed in the context of the great tradition, whatever that is, you have no place in this debate.

In fact, in this debate with Roman Catholicism, you're on their side, not my side. Oh, no, no, no, no, that's not true.

Methodologically and ultimate authority -wise, you are. You just haven't admitted it to yourself yet.

The sooner you admit it, the better off you will be. But this deposit of faith is this vague, nebulous, it's whatever

Rome says that it is. And these Roman Catholics who look backwards into church history do so anachronistically.

Remember, status cognitum used the terminology of the venerable and ancient faith of the church. So you have to, this is what the church has always taught.

This is what you're told. You don't have the freedom to say otherwise on that.

That's not proper to do. Then there are a number of citations given from Augustine, and I knew this was going to take a whole lot of time.

Even reading all this. Oh, then we got Pope Gregory the Great, who, by the way, rejected the Deuterocanonical books.

Oh, well. Let me just get down to this, because it would be enjoyable to counter every

Augustine citation with another Augustine citation, which you can do. Let me just mention, everybody, I cited these last night.

Three volumes, Holy Scripture, Grounded Pill of Our Faith, William Webster, David King. This is just a single volume of just patristic citations that you want to read through.

The other two are filled with close argumentation on these subjects, ultimate authorities, things like that.

Available on Amazon. We used to carry them back when Rich spent half his life filling boxes and going to the post office and doing stuff like that.

Check those things out there. So, did any Bishop of Nicaea...

Now, I'm trying to find something here. Hold on. Everybody, give me a second here, because like I said...

I'm scrolling back here. I want to double check. I don't want to miss anything. 3 p .m.

Pacific is 4 p .m. our time, right? Okay, so I've got enough time to do a couple of these things here, because I still haven't gotten to the provisionist stuff yet.

So, we've got enough time to go a little bit past this and move on from there.

It's bad timing, because you can't really see it from here. You can almost see it, because it's right there.

But the video screen there is showing the fifth wheel parked out in the office.

There's too much bad stuff to see out there. Look at all that stuff on the desk! Well, it's actually fairly clean at the moment.

So yeah, my fifth wheel is our fifth wheel. The ministry's fifth wheel is parked out front, and Rich was changing out the lock on it.

Boy, I hope that works. Did you see the door flapping open as I turned the corner? Oh yeah, it's great.

We changed the lock on the door, and for some reason, I've lost track of how many times

I had to pull over in freeway traffic. And I'm running around outside this thing trying to get that door closed and locked, and I don't know.

Anyway, so we'll find out soon enough whether changing the lockout has done anything.

But the point is, I brought the unit home today. I'm going to be prepping for a three -week trip, and so we've got a lot of stuff going on here.

So did any bishop in Icea believe, as dogma, everything you believe that is Roman Catholic? No, of course not, because the

Church had not worked out every possible issue or addressed every possible challenge.

So the idea behind this is the deposit of faith contained these dogmas, and then there have been these great challenges.

Oh, what a challenge it was in the 20th century that we had to define the bodily assumption of Mary, that bulwark of belief that everyone has always held.

No, they didn't. There wasn't anyone at the Council of Nicaea that believed in it, ever heard of it, functioned on it, or anything else.

And you know it, sir. You know it. Well, they just hadn't really thought about it yet.

Really? I mean, you've got Darwinism rising in the same century, and instead of Rome using her infallible authority to define the biblical doctrine of creation, which is so vital in the fight against secularism.

You guys have been absent in that one, by the way, because your Pope is a

Darwinist. Instead of using this infallible authority to find something important like that, you have to define something that nobody at Nicaea had ever heard of, believed, wouldn't even have a foundation to be able to understand what world you were talking about.

But this is just a further study of the deposit of faith. No, it's not. It's perverse heresy.

It is an abuse of history on an amazing scale. On an amazing scale.

So, to address every possible challenge, the same was true for Saint Isidore, Saint Gregor the

Great, Saint Vincent, Saint Augustine, etc., and Saint Athanasius himself in 325 Nicaea. For the church prior to that time, the church had worked out quite a few details such that in each of their times they believed as dogma a more refined explication of faith than what previous generations possessed, but it was the same faith.

So, how do you know it's the same faith? For a believing

Christian, you know it's the same faith because God has given us a standard. Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said, the scriptures cannot be broken.

He did not say that people in the church will not lead you astray. Our Lord Jesus Christ held the

Jews to the standard of inspired scripture when they claimed to have traditions that came from God, and Jesus said, no, that contradicts this standard.

Okay? So, we stand with the apostles this is apostolic teaching.

All right? Now, at Nicaea, there is a question, and the question is not what is the infallible bishop of Rome going to do because he had nothing to do with what was going on.

He only had two representatives there. He wasn't the one who defended Nicaea. It was the bishop of Alexandria who did that.

Well, eventually he became the bishop. He wasn't bishop at Nicaea. He was a deacon at Nicaea, but the point is it wasn't

Rome that did any of that. Rome did not hold firm.

Alexandria did under Athanasius, and how did he defend it?

Read his contra arianos. Read his argumentation. One of the things

I love about reading Athanasius is when we get into the specifics, so often we're on the exact same text that I'm using in debating

Unitarians today with the same exegesis. Isn't that weird?

How could I do that? Well, I could do that because we have the scriptures. So, how do you know it's the same faith?

How do you know you are teaching and believing what the apostles taught and believed? You go to what they left us.

There's all sorts of people who claim that the apostles gave them something supernaturally.

You say it was over time. You can't show it to us. You can't show us anybody at Nicaea who believed what you believe.

Not one, but they had the same deposit of faith from which we then later take out these treasures of the

Immaculate Conception. Even though there were seven popes that taught that only Jesus had not sinned, but we don't have to worry about that.

Pope Gregory, great. Yeah, he rejected the apocryphal books and even Cardinal Jimenez did and Jerome did, but we don't worry about any of these things because we're the church.

So, we can redefine all this stuff. Just believe what we say. See how it works? It's great.

It's fantastic. But it's the same faith. Tell me, what would make it a different faith?

I say to you that if you had walked into the council of Nicaea and you had said, and let's get an early start here.

Not only are we going to anathematize the Arians for denying that Jesus is truly

God in the fullest sense, which again, Athanasius wasn't overly fond of homoousius.

He defended the concept from scripture, not by saying the bishop of Rome defined it.

And by the way, they had no concept of what an ecumenical council was at that time. That's a later development.

Athanasius getting kicked out of his church five times afterwards for defending it sort of obviously proved. But if you had walked in and you had said, let's get an early start here.

We also need to define as part of the faith, the dogmatic belief that upon the completion of her days,

Mary was bodily assumed into heaven. We won't decide whether she died or not.

We'll leave that open. But that she was bodily assumed into heaven. Every single one of those bishops would have stood there staring at you going, what religion are you a part of?

What are you talking about? What? All the bishops.

Are you telling me that there was some bishop that didn't get invited, maybe, who's over there going, oh, I've got this tradition from the apostles about the bodily assumption of Mary, but I can't tell anybody about it.

Really? How convenient. Did any bishop of Trent believe as dogma, everything you believe today as Roman Catholic?

No, more issues have been settled since then and none in a way that contradicted what came before. Think about that. Trent. Trent.

Even at the Council of Trent, you didn't have the bodily assumption of Mary. I mean, there were people doing the

Immaculate Conception stuff by that point in time, but even that had not been dogmatized. When does development become evolution or de -evolution or mutation?

So, this is an admission that the faith that was proclaimed at Nicaea is not the faith proclaimed at Trent and not the faith proclaimed today, but they all have what?

The same deposit from which they were derived? And these new definitions, well, they don't contradict what came before.

There is no end to this. And here's the point. Here's the point. And this is what I'm hoping someone like Joshua Charles will understand.

In light of what is happening, and I may live long enough, I may not. I may live long enough to see this, but my children and my children's children certainly will.

The trajectory that Francis has charted will demonstrate that this defense that Joshua Charles has offered can be used to defend any belief at any point in time.

It cannot give you objective truth. It cannot give you an unchanging standard. The 1592

Catechism to Council of Trent said X. Francis has now said not X.

Roman Catholic tradition, sexual tradition, marriage tradition has said X. He is promoting people who say, not only not

X, but let's try Y, Z, and a few other things that we haven't even figured out yet. And you can't stop him.

You can't stop him. What you think is the strength of your system is its fatal flaw.

It is its fatal flaw. I am so thankful for an unchanging standard.

So thankful for an unchanging standard. Man, I'm gonna have to think about...

Yeah, but we've done it before. I'll have to search and see if I've done my solo presentation on the program.

I'm pretty sure I have at some point. But we've got just all sorts of wonderful citations, excellent quotes out there that you might find useful.

I don't know, maybe I should just start posting now that Twitter allows you to do this, just posting some of these citations on Twitter over and over again and provide them to people.

Maybe that would be helpful. I don't know. All right. Did not expect to spend...

Should have expected to spend that much time on that.

But hey, wait a minute. I'm looking at Twitter.

Rich Pierce Biblicist. Let me take the other end of this discussion.

In Galatians 3, Paul asserts Abraham's relationship with God was by faith. Abraham's true heir is Christ. All of Abraham's descendants are so by faith in Christ.

Was Paul wrong? That says nine minutes ago. And you all sit there.

You can't do the rich cam. The rich cam is in the RV now. Ha ha ha.

You all sit there and tell me I'm supposed to be so much nicer. You don't know what's going...

I'm sitting here pouring my heart out. And what's he doing? He's tweeting in the other room.

He's tweeting in the other room. Just so you... I caught him. I caught him.

It says, it says, I didn't get one of those brownies.

Good. There better be one when I'm done here because I'm going to need it. Okay. One more thing.

Don't even start the music. There's one more thing I got to do. I told you I was going to do this.

There is a... I'm assuming, like I said, there's a video.

Now I'm going to have to track it back down again and redownload it and see what happened in the conversion or something. I don't know. QuickTime just said it couldn't read it.

There's a video from Layton Flowers about, am I a choice meat thing?

And I'm going to assume that it is tracking along the lines of this tweet.

People don't trust in Christ because they're better. They become better because they trust in Christ.

Only on Calvinism must someone be made better by a prior work of regeneration in order to put their trust in Christ.

Provisionism teaches that God created all with the capacity to respond willingly to his appeals for reconciliation and any better quality evident in someone is worthless apart from the imputed righteousness of Christ.

Okay. So I saw some going back and forth and it seemed like what was being suggested by Soteriology 101 is that Calvinism is saying that it's better people who have been regenerated.

So we're actually the ones that are introducing this semi -Pelagian idea that there are people who are intrinsically more humble, more spiritually minded.

Because the question always is, if God is trying to save everyone equally, then why is any one person saved and another person not?

And no matter what you have to do, if you have this equal idea that there is just God's trying to save everybody.

He's trying to save the Amorite high priest. He's trying to save, you know, everybody in the Nazi SS. Everybody's equal.

Then if someone responds to that gospel call, they had that ability in and of themselves.

They had that capacity in and of themselves. And that makes them, in some sense, more spiritually sensitive, something.

And the decision is all in man. And that is what the system is about. The difference must be found in man.

God's not big enough to handle being responsible for that part of it. So somewhere, and I forget where it was, and I'd have to pull it up now to take too much time.

I simply pointed out the categorical problems here. Being raised to spiritual life is not a work that we do.

It is a sovereign act of God. It does not make us better than anyone else, but it does make us spiritually alive rather than spiritually dead.

And so the problems with provisionism, and I'm seeing a lot of discussions on Calvinism and stuff right now.

I could have done an entire Radio Free Geneva easily on the various screenshots and there was something else.

What was the other one? Maybe not.

I was looking in Evernote here. I could have done an entire

Radio Free Geneva just on what's going on right now, just on the expression of, well,

Calvinist derangement syndrome, just an utter unwillingness. There's this fundamentalist Baptist pastor.

We agree on a lot of things, but every time he says something about Calvins, he just calls us

Calvins. It's a challenge. Every time I challenge him, I get monosyllabic answers.

He will not engage, but he has no problem whatsoever just ravaging

Reformed theology. He doesn't understand it for love nor money, and he won't answer biblical questions.

It's really frustrating. There seems to be a lot of it going on right now. It sort of comes in waves, I guess.

It shouldn't surprise us too much, but there's so much of it out there right now.

It does impact how we, for example, evangelize Roman Catholics. I'm just going to say it straight up.

There is only one consistent position that can truly challenge the

Roman Catholic system, and it's the Reformed because everybody else has given in on key elements of the issue.

Luther was right. He and Erasmus, first written debate, it's on the central issue, the hinge upon which it all turns.

A provisionist, an Arminian, any of these people have already said, yeah,

Rome's actually right about that. So you see, they're not the ones that can mount serious challenges to Roman Catholic teaching at all.

They just can't because they're compromised on key issues. They really are.

Anyway, all right, like I said, went longer than I expected to, and very thankful.

See, I got that text from Gabe Wrench after the phone did its

Siri thing, and so I turned it over because when you, allegedly, when you turn over the phone, it stops listening.

I'm not sure if it stops listening, but at least it stops responding to those commands.

And about 10 seconds later, when I get something, the light flashes.

I might not have seen that if I hadn't turned it over when that happened. I might've gotten the text and not even noticed it in time.

So Providence! All right, so the plan right now is we're going to be back on Wednesday, and we're going to try to arrange things so that we'll do a dividing line, and then afterwards,

I'm doing a Thanksgiving sweater vest dialogue with not just Doug, but some other guys up there in Moscow, and I guess it's going to be on giving of thanks because, well, actually, the next program, the program we're about to do, we're talking about Thanksgiving because I preached on it two weeks ago to Paula Gia, and Chocolate Knox was there, and I guess he liked the sermon, and so we're going to be talking about that.

I suppose I should pull those notes up. That'd probably be a good idea. Yes, yes, he'll be saying, well,

I said at the beginning of the sermon, I don't know if you saw it, I said we have certain guests here today who have me very strongly tempted to say, go get married, have children, instruct your children the way of the

Lord, baptize them upon profession of faith in Lord Jesus Christ the way the apostles did. He's sitting in like the back row, and he's just sitting back there looking at me.

Come on down, brother, come on down. As long as we're in here, this is a

Baptist church, so you can come down the front, shake my hand. Yeah, that would have been good.

Anyway, alright, thanks for watching the program. We'll see you on Wednesday. We'll let you know exactly when, how we're going to put that, make that go before the sweater vest dialogue and stuff, and we'll see you next time.