The Work After Dobbs, Lots of Church History, Nicea, and More

Dobbs, Abortion, and the Pro-Life Response

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. It is a big day here in the United States and really globally. I think that probably people all over the world are paying very close attention to what has taken place here in the United States and obviously we're going to be paying attention to what happens tonight and over the coming weekend.

There have of course been threats of large amounts of violence, nights of rage, which demons do that. The culture of death, that's sort of what you would expect from such people. But I was thinking back to the weekend of my daughter's birth in 1989.

I don't think she's old enough yet to be upset that I would mention the year of her birth, but anyway. I mean, tomorrow's my 40th wedding anniversary, so you know, you don't even think about stuff like that.

Once you get to my age, you just sort of don't worry about stuff like that anymore. You just go ahead and say things and it's okay. You're old now anyways. I remember that weekend. It was an incredible weekend.

I was arrested outside an abortion clinic that weekend. We shut down Brian Finkel. Was it Brian Finkel? I think so, yeah. It's a long time ago now. And you know, he eventually ended up in prison, if I recall correctly.

In fact, I'm not even sure he's still around anymore. I'm not 100 certain about that, but anyway, he was late term. Just the stuff that you would hear, the stuff that I heard him saying as we were outside his clinic to people was surely demonic, absolutely demonic.

And that was the same weekend that Summer was born. And I think the day before that, I was on KFYI radio here in Phoenix as the media representative for Operation Rescue. Now, I eventually had to end my association with Operation Rescue because they made it very clear that the work I was doing, because that was 89 and the fatal flaw, I think, came out in 90?

Yeah, yeah. So there was a lack of clarity as to the centrality of the gospel at that point in time. But I had the opportunity of taking on representatives of the other side. I've done that a number of times, taking on especially religious defenders of abortion.

And in those situations, I have absolutely positively not a shred of mercy. The position is so self-evidently contradictory, absurd, unbiblical, un-Christian, that it's quite easy to take apart. And that is no place for—what's the term that's being used right now?

It was being used a lot today about being attractive, whatever. No, that's not the time for that. You take those folks apart. I don't think we have a recording of the radio debate that I did. I could be wrong.

And I—okay, yeah, all right. Yeah, Brian Finkel. Is he still alive? See if you can find out about that if you got a chance. And also listen to what I'm saying right now. I did a radio debate with a United Methodist minister somewhere around that time period, maybe early 90s.

And it was knock-down, drag-out. I mean, okay, it was—he couldn't defend himself. It was just all emotion as normal. But I don't think we have a recording of that. I'm not sure if we ever listed it anywhere or anything like that.

Someday when someone writes the history of Alpha-Beta Ministries, maybe they'll find that. But anyway, watching the Twitter feed and listening to the simple insanity of the left—it is insanity. That is the incapacity to observe categories, to recognize the centrality of the unborn child, their genetic uniqueness, their human nature, the fact that every single one of us, that's how we got here, too.

And that everything that makes you you on a unique genetic basis, you received at conception, not when you took your first breath or anything else like that. To see the mind-numbed zombie man called Joe Biden standing in front of cameras, just repeating mindless drivel that, of course, he's contradicted the past.

The most dishonest man I think I've ever seen in history. I mean, we know that he—I remember back when he was running for president years and years and years ago, and he kept getting knocked out because people would just come up with video of him lying about his education and lying about what he did.

The man wouldn't know how to tell the truth if his life depended upon it. And now he just doesn't even know he's doing it because he's completely senile. It is just disgusting to see this regime using this senile old man as their teleprompter reader.

It's elder abuse. It's just disgusting how we have fallen in so many ways. Anyway, the argumentation that is being used is hopefully all of you in the audience are ready to absolutely take it apart. And it hasn't changed.

Well, OK, it's gotten worse in the sense that now it is completely dependent upon new terminology that they didn't have back when I was doing stuff in 1989. Women's health care, reproductive rights. People would have laughed at that terminology back then because it's just so self-evidently absurd.

But not today. Not today. It's enough to make you just sit here and just want to turn it all off, even on a day of rejoicing. I mean, I said this morning on Twitter, look, I'm Scottish. We are realists.

And we know what's coming over this weekend. And we know we can see the leaders on the left saying, let's just tear this government apart. Let's just tear it down. Let's burn it down. Let's burn this nation down.

Talk about citing insurrection. They're all over the place. They don't care because they know that's the whole thing with the left. They can do whatever they want and nothing will be said or done about it for the obvious reason that they're in charge.

And that's what tyranny is all about. Once you lose the rule of law and become a nation of men, that's what you're going to get. And history's filled with it. That's why I don't teach history in schools anymore.

Then you might understand why it was so good that we once had a strong dedication to being a nation of law rather than a nation of men. But how many people honestly, especially in the younger generations, do you know that have ever even heard the phrase, let alone have any idea what it means?

Not many, not many at all, not many at all. I did want to mention, since we're all thinking about it, I just retweeted a picture of the Supreme Court. He's serving a 35-year sentence. Yes. Okay, good.

Believe you me, it's going to be a lot longer in the future. 35 years will seem like a twinkling of an eye in comparison to eternity for Brian Finkel. It started in 2004. Like I said, I had to endure being near him that day when we closed him down.

It was like being with the Gadarian demoniac. It really was. Just a man's demonic, no question. But in the decision, like I said, I tweeted a picture of the Supreme Court, and it had the three liberals in their face, and it had the five with the Thug Life sunglasses on, and then Justice Thomas's eyes are glowing.

Justice Thomas, Substantive Due Process, and the Future of Obergefell

Okay, but speaking of Justice Thomas, most people have made reference to the fact that there is a section in his part of the decision that he wrote or opinion that he wrote. This is what it says. For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

Because any substantive due process decision is demonstrably erroneous, we have a duty to correct the error established in those precedents. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.

For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this court's substantive due process cases are privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States protected by the 14th Amendment.

So he went ahead and said what needs to be said, and it would take a miracle of grace, but I believe that God can do it. I don't know whether he will, but it would take an outpouring of grace for there to be sufficient worldview change in this land for us to finally recognize how absolutely insane, childish, absurd Obergefell was.

And I say that as one who's read the decision. On any level, it is worse than Roe in its forms of argumentation, and that's saying a lot given how bad Roe was. Obergefell was written in crayon, and the man who wrote it should be ashamed of himself and will be in eternity, I can assure you of that.

But he went ahead and said it, and now Alito, I think specifically in the opinion itself, said otherwise. But Thomas said it, and we need about six more Thomases if we're going to get anywhere. And just in passing, I had already clipped this yesterday, but there was a major case yesterday, as you know, well you might know, regarding concealed carry in New York.

Then again, the governor of New York, the unelected governor of New York who became governor when the other guy had to head for the hills, she's worse than he was. She's just a mindless zealot, IQ of a wet shoelace, it's just incredible.

But they're just going nuts, we can't protect people, and what they're really doing is we don't want people to protect themselves, we want them to be completely dependent upon us, and we're not going to defend them anyways, but we want all the power, we're totalitarians and that's how we are.

I think it was Thomas again, in that opinion, that wrote this, a short prologue is in order, even before the Civil War commenced in 1861, this court indirectly affirmed the importance of the right to keep and bear arms in public.

Writing for the court in Dred Scott v. Sanford, Chief Justice Taney offered what he thought was a parade of horribles that would result from recognizing that free blacks were citizens of the United States.

If blacks were citizens, Taney fretted, they would be entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, including the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went. Thus, even Chief Justice Taney recognized, albeit unenthusiastically in the case of blacks, that public carry was a component of the right to keep and bear arms, a right free blacks were often denied in antebellum America.

Yep, you have the right to protect yourself, and the left does not want any of that taking place. So, we pray for God's restraint upon evil with the coming darkness, and I mean night time, and we pray for the protection of churches, crisis pregnancy centers, pro-life organizations.

My own church is the home base of End Abortion Now, and I know on Sunday we are going to be well aware of what day it is. Many churches need to be aware of what day it is, I think, but we pray for God's hand of restraint, though I'll be honest with you, I look around our nation and I see very little evidence that hand of restraint, because that's an act of grace, that's a gift.

We can beg for it, but it's not that we don't deserve it. All of us need patience because what we're hearing from the leaders, from senators, representatives, oh good grief, from the injustice department, because that's what we need to start calling it.

Justice isn't their thing, Joe Biden's personal police force that does his thing. What we're hearing from all these people is such a blather of insane, childish rhetoric that it can truly cause us to lose our minds as far as recognizing just how foolish these people are and the deception that they live in.

But we have a lot of work cut, we have a lot of work cut out for us. It's funny, a lot of people are like, okay, now we've got to, you know, we have to be really careful how we respond to this because we need to keep, we need to keep getting people on our side.

No, you need to have changed hearts, need to have changed hearts. That's what, that's the only hope this nation has, and I am very, very encouraged to see that there are, I think, two states already that have said that's it, no more abortions in the state.

Missouri and, was it Alabama or Arkansas? I think it was Alabama. It started with an A, it was in the south. Abortion had been illegal here in Arizona until the pro-life folks fixed that last year. So we've got a sort of a heartbeat type thing, but we don't have, as far as I know, any type of real trigger thing.

It's now a battle locally, from state to state, and please make note of the large companies that, the real insertion of corporatism into our society in a very negative fashion. You know, Dick's Sporting Goods put out, you know, we will provide up to $4 ,000 for our employees to go out of state to kill their babies.

And someone else, their company, $5 ,000 for baby killing. And mark them out, see who they are, and if you can, let them know, I'm not gonna give you my money anymore. Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

But when you can, great. But what really needs to change is the worldview of the people around us. And that only changes with hearts. And if you think that that's, you change hearts, not by the ministry of the gospel, that's been the big downfall of the pro-life movement, is once they kick the gospel out, and like I said, I experienced that in 1989.

Once you kick the gospel out, you kicked out the only thing that can actually change hearts, change hearts and minds. And that's an issue. But there you go. What an amazing day. I was certainly praying about it because when it was leaked, and isn't it amazing that we don't know who leaked that yet?

You don't think they don't know? Of course they know. Of course they know. But anyway, with people showing up on your front lawn with knives and guns and threatening your family and everything else, the possibility really existed that somebody would say, no, I'm gonna go the other direction.

I'm gonna make a change. Because until they come out with the order and all the rest of it, there's a specific process and everything, they could have changed it. And it's technically 6 -3, but it's sort of 5 -1 -1, 3 -1 -1 -1.

Roberts is sort of there, sort of not there, but technically it's 6 -3. But again, unless we have free elections, all that can change. Because the left is saying we need to codify Roe and Casey. Really, they're codifying Casey, but we need to put all this into law so it's no longer up to the Supreme Court.

And they will do that by hook or by crook. The regime has no concern for constitutionality, has no concern about being treasonous to the United States, none. Don't care at all. They're out there screaming in cameras that they want to end the Supreme Court, they want to end the Constitution.

They're doing it right now. There are people saying things right now that when I got married 40 years ago tomorrow, I can guarantee you those people would not have been in office a week after they said them.

But it's a different world today. Very, very, very, very, very different world today. No toys about it. Okay, cancel that. Okay, a couple other things. You might actually want to think about something other than Roe v. Wade.

That seems to be sort of hard to do right now, I confess, I admit. But if you would like to spend a few moments thinking about some other things, then we will be talking about some other things now. I was sent a screenshot from the Confessional Bibliology Facebook group, which I am not a part of.

But it will sort of, I think, help to bring us into the historical discussion that we need to have in light of what happened really over the past couple of days in regards to the Council of Nicaea. A fellow by the name of Josh Dills wrote the following, I've wrestled with textual issues to the point of exhaustion, and I honestly wish I'd never heard of textual criticism.

It makes me wonder if the CT, which I assume he's using it to mean critical text, advocates don't realize all they've done is bring confusion and division to the body of Christ, or do they just not care?

And a fellow by the name of Scott Teran, T-A-R-A-N, responded, they've been duped by worldliness. It's like the people who profess the Christian faith and then say they believe in evolution. Now, I want you to hear the mindset.

Confessional Bibliology, TR-only-ism, the Texas Receptus, and the current movement with Dr. Riddle and some folks in the OPC as well as the primary proponents, it's a very small group, does not represent, to my knowledge, any influential schools, scholarship doing translational work, or anything else.

It just doesn't. It's a very small idiosyncratic group. But unfortunately, they're in my group. If I have a group anymore. I guess we sort of define our own these days. But this is the group that is basically saying if you're going to truly be confessional, then you have to use the same Greek text that existed when your confession was written.

You know, I just thought of something. I wonder if we could come up with a great tradition textual theory. Because the big thing these days is Nicaea. This is Ayer's book. I've noticed a bunch of people going, oh, I've got to read this book.

I had this book in my library for years. I have a lot of books on Nicaea. Nicaea has been something I've worked on for many, many, many years. This one's 18 years old. But what if we, since Nicaea is the big topic right now, how about we do confessional bibliology where you use the text that is clearly predominant in the fourth century?

That'd be fun because the only way you could reconstruct that as far as manuscripts would be the papyri. Well, not all the papyri, but the second, third, and fourth century papyri and the great unseals, primarily Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.

Now, you really couldn't throw Alexandrinus in there. That's just outside the bounds. But anyway, maybe we could squish all that stuff together and say to be truly confessional, you have to use these guys.

That's not the Cron. Remember these? Oh, I put my back out. This is from CSNTM. It's a two-volume set. I like the... These are the reproductions of P45, P46, and P47. And they're in white and black. And that's the background color for the photograph.

And I don't know why I've just always found the black to look so much better. I don't know why it is. The contrast just... This is, of course, P46 because it has Hebrews. But here's from the Chester Beattie Library, my...

Well, look familiar? That's what's in the background there. P45 in John chapter 10. And very, very, very readable. But the point is, you would have to, if you're going to be truly confessional with the Nicene Creed, use this.

You don't want to use that. Because that wouldn't have the Comma Iohannium, and it wouldn't have the Prick of Pei Delta A, and probably wouldn't have the Long Riding of Moroc. So those are the big deals.

And so why not? Why not go that direction? I don't know. I'll put all that back together again when I'm done here. Knowing me, I'll trip over that one. Short-term memory, it goes after a while. But anyway, I'm sorry.

We sort of wandered off there and started playing. Let's show all our cool stuff here. I'm noticing, Rich, that I'm really getting a lot of sound coming back from the other side there. I'm not sure if that's something you have control over or if I just need to say, hold on a second, folks.

I need to close the door. That may be the only way I can fix things. But otherwise, I have to talk very quietly. But I can still hear myself rather clearly coming from the other way. Rich is MIA. He's at home doing this, and we appreciate that.

And that's the only way we can do things right now. We can run a commercial. No, this is how you do it. Watch this. And if anybody cares that we had a moment, it just doesn't mean diddly. Now, back to what we were saying.

Confessional Bibliology and the Circularity of TR-Onlyism

The statements from Josh Dills and Scott Teran, especially Josh Dills, give us an insight into the mindset of this. It's not a form of textual criticism. They do not do textual criticism. They could not produce their own text.

They are not producing arguments about manuscripts or text. No, they already have their text. They have their text right here. Okay, this is it right here. Trinitarian Bible Society. And any argument that substantiates this is a good argument, even if they're all contradictory arguments.

So they're not doing text criticism. They're not concerned about any new manuscripts that would be found. They're not concerned about CBGM. None of these things. They already have their text, and that's the end of that.

It's a very tight circular argument. And so it's not a form of textual criticism, but this gives you insight into the mindset of these folks. I've wrestled with textual issues to the point of exhaustion.

What does that mean? Which ones? And I honestly wish I'd never heard of textual criticism. You do realize that we have the first references to textual variation in the second century. I'd probably say Justin Martyr and his responses to the accusation that Christians had changed things in the Greek Septuagint and things like that.

But it starts early on, second century. And every single century after that, you have Christians talking about variations in manuscripts. Because until the printing press made printed books quite common, which wasn't with Gutenberg, it took a good 150 years, 200 years before they became quite common, you had handwritten manuscripts.

And there would be errors, and there would be things that were difficult to read, and there'd be smudged pages. And that was how humanity moved along in life. And so here's somebody in 2022 who is to the point of exhaustion, who has more information readily at hand concerning the manuscripts of New Testament any generation before them, but he's exhausted.

So we're going to stop talking about it? Because you're exhausted? It makes me wonder if the critical text advocates don't realize all they've done, all they've done, all those people down through the years.

And you got to realize Erasmus was a critical text advocate in the sense that he did textual criticism. He analyzed manuscripts. Now he analyzed very few of them. He didn't have nearly what we have today, but he did.

Stephanos did that. Beza did that. The people who created your text did the things that you now say exhaust you. And so the self-contradiction of this position, I just don't understand how these guys can't see it.

It makes me wonder if the critical text advocates don't realize all they've done is bring confusion and division to the body of Christ, or do they just not care? So here's a guy. And so he grabs this.

This is created by doing critical analysis of manuscripts. But once it's in print, then we just forget about that, de-historicize it, rip it out of history and go, oh, finally, we don't have to worry about any of that stuff anymore.

So it is. So it is. You guys can't get out of it. You can't get away from it. Those are the facts. That's just what it is. Wow. It will eventually just flop in upon itself. It will. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about what happened over the past couple of days before the Roe decision came down this morning.

And we knew it was going to come today, but anyway. I've got a bunch of quotes here. I'm not sure exactly. Let me start with this one because I wanted to make a comment about this and it has come up from some other folks.

And so let me read you a few words from Augustine. Okay. Augustine is writing less than a century to all the way out to a century after Nicaea. So still fairly close in time. Augustine said in his epistle on epistle on Johannes Tractus 2, if you want to look it up, you ought to notice particularly and store in your memory that God wanted to lay a firm foundation in the scriptures against treacherous errors, a foundation against which no one dares to speak who would in any way be considered a Christian.

I haven't been to too many of our seminaries these days. For when he offered himself to them to touch, this did not suffice him unless he also confirmed the heart of the believers from the scriptures.

For he foresaw that the time would come when we would not have anything to touch, but have something to read. Augustine De Bono Viduitatis 2, what more shall I teach you than what we read in the apostle?

For holy scripture fixes the rule for our doctrine. I think, I think, another translation is canon. Now, of course, he'd be writing in Latin anyways, but lest we dare to be wiser than we ought, therefore, I should not teach you anything, anything else except to expound to you the words of the teacher.

Now, did Augustine always do what he himself said? Well, no. There are times when Augustine will depend upon traditions or some of his interpretations of scripture will leave you going, what did you say?

But I really appreciate the sentiment for holy scripture fixes the rule for our doctrine. He said in De Unitate Ecclesiae, the unity of the church, three, let us not hear this I say, this you say, but thus says the Lord.

Surely it is the books of the Lord on whose authority we seek the church. There, let us discuss our case. Sadly, if, and it didn't really cross my mind to do it, but I could have, I could have used a number of these quotations in Twitter, Facebook, whatever, and not given attribution to Augustine and use them as my own words.

And you know what, you know what the response of many would have been from the, let's call it the dovinant perspective, the great tradition Baptists or the Christian Platonists or whatever terminology you want to use.

You know what the response would have been? You know what I would have been accused of if I had said these things? You're a biblicist because now that's a bad word. It's a bad word. And it will never be a bad word for me because no matter how much you straw man it, no matter how much you redefine it, turn it into a, the same terminology as solo scriptura or nuda scriptura.

That's not what it means. There is something about scripture that makes it absolutely unique and therefore invests in it and authority that precludes your submitting it to a higher authority, requiring an external authority for its interpretation or an addition of an authority to it because there's nothing else that is theanustas.

Okay. It's an on, I guess I've always given an ontological foundation for solo scriptura that ends up having epistemological ramifications if you want to use big terms. The form of reformed biblicism that I documented in Calvin in his response to Sadaletto.

It's interesting. I don't, I spend hours making these presentations, doing reading, putting the material together, and I get zip nada in response. There is one exception. Oh, drat. And I don't think I can bring that up.

Let me see if I can get it from Rich. Let's see if Rich can send it to me and signal because I can't find it in Element on this computer. It just won't work and something I forgot to grab. Let's see if I can find it.

When I went to the second Nicaea, one person, I'm going to try to get around to that, one person tried to sort of respond. Again, never going to the original sources. Nobody went to Calvin's response to Sadaletto and said, no, you're wrong about that.

No one went to second Nicaea and said, no, you're wrong about that. It is a little frustrating. You just get all this dismissive stuff out there and it's troubling. But if I had said these things that Augustus said, but here's the quote, I'm trying to get around to this.

After the Council of Nicaea, people today tend to think that when the Council of Nicaea met, it was recognized as an ecumenical council and therefore it had this authority, all the rest of this. You need to realize that is a completely anachronistic perspective.

It's us looking back in time and we have invested in Nicaea the title of the first ecumenical council, ecumenical, worldwide. It wasn't really worldwide. It was mainly the Eastern churches, but that's what we call it.

And what 99 .5 of Christians in the world don't know is that after Nicaea, it had to struggle to survive and not be overthrown. It was called the period of the Arian resurgence. Jerome in the next century, terminology he used off top of my head was the world awoke and was astonished to find itself Arian.

And for decades, the Arians had political and ecclesiastical power. Athanasius became bishop, I think in 326. I think Alexander died and he became bishop of Alexandria in 326, again, off top of my head, right after the Council of Nicaea.

He was not one of the bishops at Nicaea. He was at Nicaea, but he was an assistant to Alexander. Anyways, Athanasius is driven out of his church, thank you. Athanasius is driven out of his church five times by the, not the ecclesiastical authorities, but five times by Roman authorities, political authorities over the course of the next number of years, five times.

Hence the phrase Athanasius Contramundum. So Nicaea only gained the kind of doctrinal authority that it possesses today over time. The people that were even there had no dream that because, by tradition, a little over 300, 318 bishops met with the emperor, that that somehow gave them some kind of special insight into scripture or anything along those lines.

That's something that develops much, much, much later. And so Augustine, writing years later, is writing to an Arian named Maximian. And in writing to Maximian the Arian, Augustine says these words, I must not press the authority of Nicaea against you, nor you that of Ariminum against me.

I do not acknowledge the one as you do not the other, but let us come to ground that is common to both the testimony of the holy scriptures. Now, I would say that 99 .988 of all Christians have never heard of Ariminum.

I don't even know where it is. Northern Italy. 359 September. Again, I don't have my church history notes in front of me, but I have, in fact, what's really funny, some of you long time folks, you know what I was reading it from?

My IRC scripts. Yeah, my old Merck IRC scripts. Remember how I'd be able to post this stuff, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Had these IRC scripts probably from the early 2000s, maybe even the late 90s.

I don't remember now. But probably the early 2000s, I put these together and used them in the IRC chat channel. That's what I've got up here. I don't have that program anymore, but the IRC scripts are still very valuable.

So anyway, Ariminum, I'm thinking September 359. So this is 24 years, 24 years? No, 359. It's after 359, 34 years after Nicaea. And too many numbers going on here. And it sought to, it was an Arianized creed.

So it was an attempt to subvert Nicaea. And so Augustine is writing to an Arian who quotes a council that was probably more recent, by number of years, than Nicaea. And Augustine says, I cannot press the authority of Nicaea against you.

There's so many people in Twitter and Facebook over the past couple of days that if you didn't tell them who said this, they would be going, but he says, I must not press the authority of Nicaea against you.

Why? Because he knew, nor you that have Ariminum against me. We both have contradictory councils. Huh. I wonder if that's where Luther got some of his idea. Remember what he said? Councils have erred and, oh, contradicted each other, which is, which eventually led to him saying, ah, here stay it.

Isis, Kanye, Andres, God help him here. Remember that? Yeah. That was back when we were still Protestants. Anyway. I do not acknowledge the one, Ariminum, as you not the other, Nicaea, but let us come to ground that is common to both the testimony of the Holy Scriptures.

But aren't we hearing some people today saying and quoting Ayers' foundation that you need to have Nicaea. You need to have Christian Platonism to be able to prove the Trinity, to be able to back that up.

Guston didn't seem to think so. He seemed to believe the testimony of the Holy Scriptures was sufficient. And let me tell you something, as someone who's been defending the deity of Christ for many decades now, they are sufficient.

I have never, not once, had to look a Jehovah's Witness in the eye and say, let me introduce you to Plato. Not once. Not a single time. And if you ever do that, I'm telling you right now, you missed the boat and you're not helping that person at all.

So is Augustine's, is this quotation to be understood as saying that, well, Nicaea is irrelevant? Do I accept the authority of the Council of Nicaea? I accept that the statements of the creed regarding the person of Jesus Christ being homoousius with the Father is perfectly and accurately representative of what Scripture teaches on that subject.

And therefore, it has authority because it is biblical, because it accurately represents the whole Council of God in Scripture. Nicaea is not theionistos. And of course, we have to define Nicaea, don't we?

There's been a lot of confusion about this. There's a lot of people just haven't done much reading and don't understand that councils didn't just produce symbols or creeds. They also produced canons. And today, it is very common to see people going, well, we don't have to worry about the canons.

See, up until recently, it was a, I thought it was a given. I had always functioned and functioned just fine in Reformed Baptist circles as a professor, as a teacher, as a fellow in various organizations and scholastic organizations and as an author, a whole nine yards.

I had functioned just fine, assuming everybody else was on the same page. And that is that when we talked about, for example, the first seven ecumenical councils, Leo Donald Davis's book, he's a Roman Catholic.

And people are like, well, you don't want to have Roman Catholic books in your library. My library is filled with them. And I just recognize what that means and recognize the prejudices that are, that may be present when it comes to Roman Catholic scholarship today.

To be honest with you, you can't necessarily even assume theism for some of them. Boston College? Woo. Anyway, Jesuits? Woo hoo. It can get pretty crazy. Anyway, when you look at those councils, I would say that when you look at Chalcedon, which comes 125, 126 years after Nicaea, you're now dealing with Christological issues.

And once again, the validity of the formulations must be determined not by the authority of a council, but by the accuracy of its argumentation. That's why I can look at Nicaea and Chalcedon and say, yeah, look, here's where we're dealing with what the scripture says.

And there is accuracy in the definition that is given. But I can look at second Nicaea and go, really? There's nothing magical about seven other than, well, it's when the East and West are still united before 1054, which is what made the call by one particular individual a few years ago for an ecumenical council to excommunicate me.

Just sort of hard not to chuckle about because it's just doesn't show a real deep knowledge of history. But anyway, I functioned on the foundation that we were all in the same boat, recognizing that the ultimate authority by which you would say a creed is correct is its fidelity to scripture and that we all recognized that there was a historical context to these councils where they were dealing with other issues that we as reformed biblicists would say, no, most of the canons we would not accept.

They represent an ecclesiology that we do not believe in. And why don't we believe in it? Because it's not biblical. It represented a traditional development on biblical teaching. If you want to see how that works out, go listen to my debate with Mitch Pacwa.

It was a really good debate on the priesthood. And you'll see what happens when you press and the guy reads 12 languages, a Roman Catholic scholar on the issue of where the priesthood comes from. And he has to admit it's a matter of development.

And that's the whole issue, isn't it? Isn't the whole issue of what we're dealing with here, the concept of development, the idea that there is an appropriate development of theology and tradition? And how do you draw the lines on these things?

I've been trying to point this out for a long time. But again, maybe it's helping other folks along those lines. So, what is Nicaea? When we say the Council of Nicaea, do we include everything the council did?

Well, there's another problem. And the problem is the ice cube got caught in the air hole. And when that happens, you don't get anything. That time it didn't, and I almost drowned. Here's the problem.

Which Nicene Creed? Oh, what do you mean which Nicene Creed? The Nicene Creed that you may have memorized when you were a kid, which wouldn't mean you were a Baptist, is not what was promulgated at Nicaea in 325.