What the Celebration of Perversity Tells Us, Then, Trent Horn and the Trajectory of Rome

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:32

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. I forgot to close the door. That's probably not a good thing.

00:37

I'm going to be hearing myself echoing back at me for this whole program. But since I'm here alone, much better.

00:53

Yeah, Rich is remote today. Won't have any distractions through the window. I'm thinking about having a shirt made that'll say,

01:03

I'm trying to be nicer to Rich. I'm not sure if I'll actually do that, because I'm not sure if I really am.

01:10

But it would be a fun thing. I just was, I just happened to be looking at Twitter and Michael Fallon had posted,

01:20

Includable O is the very first debate that I ever put together and sponsored from way back in 2000. The subject is papal infallibility.

01:27

There is a reason why I chose this subject. For yours truly, and Robert St. Janice to debate. And my response was, ah, yes, the self -moderated debate.

01:39

Because the pastor of the church had assured us, oh, I know how to moderate a debate. I've done it over and over.

01:44

I'm good at this. He just gets up, says, OK, boys, go to it.

01:52

And I just sort of had to, St. Janice and I just sort of looked at each other like, ah. And got to give

01:58

Bob credit. He could have taken advantage of that, but he didn't. And we just self -moderated, just sort of kept time ourselves and behaved and did it.

02:13

But yes, the self -moderated debate, it was great. And in fact, it's interesting, because we are actually going to be talking about a subject similar to that in just a few minutes.

02:24

I did want to, I grabbed these, and so I wanted to say thanks to Stephen DeYoung.

02:31

Stephen DeYoung, ancient, store .ancientfaith .com.

02:38

So Ancient Faith Radio, bringing you orthodox Christian music, readings, prayers, teachings, and so on and so forth.

02:45

So notice it's signed to Dr. James White. And this is directly relevant to our subject today, but I didn't even think about it.

02:57

This book is not Theanostos by Stephen DeYoung. Stephen walked into the last night that I was, of the three nights

03:09

I was speaking in Louisiana. We've published, well, I don't know. I don't know if we've put him on our website or linked him ourselves yet.

03:19

But I did tweet them out from Louisiana, the series that I did on Roman Catholicism.

03:30

And so the last night that I'm speaking on the subject, it was Super Bowl night. And Ian walks this, he is a big guy.

03:41

I mean, he's a giant of a man. And he is in a flowing orthodox gown and a mondo -sized cross and not able to hide at all in a

04:00

Baptist church in Louisiana. And I didn't know who he was.

04:05

I wondered during the course of my presentation. But he was sort of off to the right, so I really couldn't, without obviously looking that direction, sort of look over that direction much.

04:19

Anyway, after he came up, gave me some of his books, introduced himself, really nice guy. And I'd imagine he disagreed with the majority of what

04:28

I was saying. But there would be some things he would have agreed with as well. So I just wanted to say thank you.

04:36

He gave me three of his books, Stephen DeYoung. And so I wanted to say thanks to him for coming and listening and hearing the other side.

04:45

And evidently, he says, at one point, he said, you always say on the dividing line. So I'm sort of like, hi, how y 'all doing?

04:55

And we had a good conversation. Anyway, just a reminder, real quick,

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Lord willing, on that we're doing this, we're doing the program today on a

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Monday instead of Tuesday. Because tomorrow at 3 o 'clock, our time, which will be 5 o 'clock

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Eastern, so an hour later, my fellow pastor

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Jeff Durbin and I will be doing Apology Radio with Brandon Robertson. Now, I've responded to much of Brandon Robertson's material.

05:31

Jeff did a couple weeks ago. Jeff and Luke and Zach Conover did an

05:37

Apology Radio responding to some of the things that he had said. And we had tried to arrange a debate last year at ReformCon.

05:46

But then that got moved back. And then my understanding is, I could be wrong about this.

05:54

But I think he is now a student at Trinity College in Dublin. And as I would say, getting a

06:01

PhD in unbelief, you may be familiar with him.

06:08

I don't remember what year it was. I don't know why I remember so clearly exactly where I was riding my bike in North Phoenix as I listened to the first clip of him speaking.

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And I just remember doing a program. I remember doing a dividing line program very shortly after that. Maybe that day, maybe the next day, somewhere along those lines.

06:31

But I played some material from him. And I remember saying, this man will not remain orthodox.

06:39

He was making a profession to be. But I could tell he's not going to remain orthodox.

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And he's primarily famous today for, you know, Gias was a racist. And his trajectory way out into the left field is exactly what

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I predicted. Number of years ago, 2015, 2016, somewhere around there.

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And I do clearly remember listening to him as part of the panel that Michael Brown was on many, many years ago.

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Again, I think that was 2016, somewhere around in there. And he has definitely gone way, way, way out there.

07:20

So we only have an hour tomorrow, but be praying for that encounter tomorrow afternoon.

07:27

It's going to be a busy day because Rich and I are going to be working on the new unit, which we picked up over the weekend.

07:35

And so there's much, much to be done. And some safety stuff, but also stuff, you know, we were just a few moments ago talking about internet access issues and just a lot of details to work out.

07:54

But Lord willing, on Thursday, then, when we do the next dividing line, it will be from a remote location from the new unit, not from AA Studio yet.

08:06

We haven't even gotten to the point of measuring. But we have the unit because we need to have the unit because April 1st,

08:18

Jeff and I will be doing our debate in Salt Lake City. Please pray that the Lord will open the way.

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Through any weird Utah weather to be able to get there. And I think we'll be fine.

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But the challenge could be there even at the end of March and April.

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It's happened before. Last year, I got caught by a blizzard there. So pray for our preparation there.

08:45

By the way, one other item. We had, in my experience, the longest

08:51

Sunday night service that I've ever seen on the air.

09:05

The longest Sunday night service that we've ever had at Apologia Church last night.

09:12

Two hours and 50 minutes. Just missed three hours. Part of that was because of 12 baptisms in a baptistry that Jeff described as being just under scaldingly hot.

09:28

The church is a Presbyterian church now. But when it was built, it was a Baptist church. So it has an actual baptistry instead of just a little dipping thing.

09:38

So for all the years we've rented, the hot water heater didn't work. And so during the summer, it didn't matter.

09:46

Because in Phoenix, literally by August, you don't have to use hot water. The groundwater is over 90 degrees.

09:53

You just can jump right in. And that means you can never really cool off either. But that's just Arizona.

09:59

But in December, it can get pretty bad. So we had actually purchased one of these heater things you can put down in it.

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Well, lo and behold, yesterday, they fixed the water heater. And the theory that we have is they're trying to boil us into paedo -baptism.

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Because Jeff said he was about ready to pass out by the time he got out of that thing. He was so hot and so sweaty.

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And everyone will remember their baptism with fire water after that particular baptism.

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So we had about a dozen people or so. So it took a while. Lord's Supper, that.

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And then Jeff did, I think, a really important sermon that I would...

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I've already linked to it, I think, on Twitter, that I would highly recommend that you put on your list of things to listen to.

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In regards to our responsibility to be a mechanism of communicating

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God's wisdom to the rulers of this age. And rulers, not in the sense of spiritual rulers, but people, presidents, and senators, and governors, and school board members, and things like that.

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It was an hour and 20 some odd minutes long. But I think it'd be very, very useful to you.

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It is hard not today to go online and not see some astonishingly disgusting video pop up on your screen of a grown male, dressed as a female, spreading his legs.

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And showing his genitals to babies, infants, and young people, young children.

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Calling themselves drag queens. We used to call these people transvestites and things like this.

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Crossdressers, whatever. And I was thinking recently, as I saw one of these horrific videos,

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I was thinking 40 years ago, pretty much everybody in our entire culture would have agreed that someone who does something like that to a child minimally needs to be locked up.

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And execution might be a really proper way of dealing with such behavior. 40 years later, we are supposed to celebrate this?

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We are supposed to think this is wonderful? And if you dare think there is anything unnatural about a grown man wearing fake breasts and a wig in a dress, spreading his legs in front of three -year -olds, you're a bigot.

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40 years. And it's really easy to focus upon the individuals who do this, the perverts themselves.

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But there's many other people in that video. There was a horrific one yesterday of a little girl, probably three, doing, you know, imitating the adults, being given money and twerking around and a three -year -old being sexualized.

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It's just, it's perverse. It's evil on a level that's really, really difficult to understand.

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But what's astonishing is if you stop and you read the comments and you realize that the majority of adults in our nation today look at that and they don't understand why it's evil, they are so morally undeveloped.

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They are mentally infantile in their thinking.

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They have been through a system, I won't call it an educational system because it's not doing any education.

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They've been through a system that has solidified them in an infantile state as far as emotional and moral development is concerned.

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They certainly haven't been given critical thinking skills. They don't think about the future.

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They don't think about worldview issues. And so you see them commenting, what is it to you?

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Someone wants to, what does it matter to you? They're not hurting you. Pure utilitarianism.

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There's not even a thought is given to why they're saying the things they're saying.

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And so the commentary is what really just makes you go, these are the people voting.

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What's the future going to be? But then most of us sit back and we go, look at these parents.

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These children's parents are there. I suppose we should just call them the child's progenitors because the idea of being a parent, of understanding the importance of being a parent and your duties as a parent has disappeared from this generation.

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I mean, that's why you can have designer babies. That's why you can have two gay guys or two lesbians or something, designing babies and putting infants in a situation where they'll never have a father and a mother.

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Automatically just, you know, we used to understand during World War II when so many men lost their lives in war, when a boy would lose his dad, the community would come together to seek to fill that void.

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Because we knew back then, we understood back then, that a boy needs a dad because if he doesn't have a dad, he's going to turn out.

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Well, like the vast majority of young people in Chicago were turning out, killing each other and breaking law right, left and center and everything else.

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We just understood. We don't understand it anymore. And so when you have the video from last week of a man sitting there taking time to load his gun and then just aiming it right the head of a homeless guy on the street and then blowing his head off, we sit there and go, oh, we have to get rid of guns.

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Instead of going, what dehumanized that man?

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What caused him to become an agent of death? Where did his humanity go?

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Did he have a father? Did he have a mother? Were they married? Was there a family?

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Or is this, or is the real issue here, the utter collapse of the family in so many major cities, right, left and center?

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Um, so we see all these things. And we, as Christians, we should have an understanding of why this stuff happens.

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And we look at those drag queen perversities, abominations, and we look at the parents, and they, they have, they have no compunction about the destruction of their children's innocence, the sexualization of their children, because they have no understanding of what, of what would be good for that child in the first place.

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The process of secularization has reached the point where we now have a fully secularized generation coming forward that Bible, morality, ethics, what?

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We're cosmic accidents. We don't have any purpose. What are you talking about? It's just eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow you die.

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That's all there is to it. We literally have made

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Sodom and Gomorrah look like a place of morality, and it, it cannot last.

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It will come to an end. Now, how many people will die in its death is the issue.

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All we can do is pray for, for God's mercy. But it will not, it cannot last.

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It cannot last. And the only thing to keep in mind is, you know, we, we look at this, the United States, I mean, the

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United States has been taken from within. Our enemies are in control of our nation. The moral fight, it's, it's

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Rome all over again. And the collapse will be great. But that's not good for the rest of the world.

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And there are major, major problems in China. And there are major, major problems in Russia. These are societies that are collapsing from within as well, for different reasons.

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It's all, but it's all due to a love of the culture of death. He who hates me, he who hates destruction, hates his own soul, loves death.

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It's, it's not that, you know, the answer is right there. They're in there, if we'd look. None of these nations can, can survive that.

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And so, which one's going to fall first and how? I don't know, but the answers are right in front of us, if we would just be willing to look for them.

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If we'd just be willing to look for them. Okay, switching gears to something completely different now.

20:55

I listened to the opening statements and rebuttals in the

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Gavin Ortlund, Trent Horn debate. Once again, it's on solo scripture.

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What else would it be on? It just still continues to amaze me how

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Roman Catholics are not the ones standing up going, Hey, how come our side won't defend our central claims of authority?

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We're always just saying, well, it can't be that. So it must be us. I would think that there'd be a lot of Roman Catholics that would go, that doesn't, that doesn't bode well for our claims.

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But then again, this is 2023. This is another year of Francis, and literally stepping up to defend him as the infallible

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Vicar of Christ. Tough job, tough job.

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Too easy to demonstrate the inconsistencies between him and those who've gone before him.

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And so it's much easier to do the smoke bomb thing and just hope that by the time the smoke clears from all the smoke bombs you're throwing, somebody other than Francis, who actually still believes the large majority of Roman Catholic historical teaching.

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Because I'm sorry, if you're a liberal, if you're a liberation theologian, that is such a fundamental paradigm shift that to say that when they use the same words, it's the same faith as what was believed in the papal syllabus of errors or anything like that.

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You've just disconnected epistemologically from anything that makes any sense. You've turned even the

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Roman Catholic faith into something that can just be redefined depending upon which generation you happen to be living in.

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And so it's tough days to be a Catholic apologist, I get it. But we're back on solo scriptura.

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15 -minute opening statements, that was really brief. Especially given how many debates we've done on this subject, you would think we'd be starting to get a little bit more specific, maybe build on what's happened in the past, but that's not really what's happening.

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As I listened to Trenhorn, I was listening at high speed, so both men sounded incredibly intelligent because they're speaking very, very fast.

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But as I was listening to Trent, now Trent and I have debated, and so it's not like we're buds or something and know a lot about each other.

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But as I was listening to the rapid fire stuff, the first thing

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I recognized is I said back in the 90s that somewhere in the late 80s,

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Carl Keating, Patrick Madrid, maybe Mark Brumley, some of those early, early, early

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Catholic answers guys, they had some meeting, and they laid out how to approach debates, especially on this subject.

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And they basically have continued to follow that line all these decades.

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I was really taken aback by, as I was listening,

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I was sitting there going, yeah,

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I think it was around 1994 -ish, I forget,

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I'm not exactly certain. 93, 94, famous bike ride

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I've told you about many times before, where I went out, I was listening to a cassette tape.

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Do I have to define that for our younger audience? This is not an MP3, we didn't have

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MP3s. This was a cassette tape, so it was a heavy cassette tape player, you stuck it in your jersey pocket and, you know, used batteries, tape goes around, eventually gets eaten, inevitably.

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But I was listening to a presentation made by Jerry Matitix. Now I know,

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I know today, oh, Matitix, he's... Back then he was the darling, the absolute darling of Catholic answers.

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I need to find, I think I know which box it might be in, but I need to find the old, old edition of This Rock magazine where Jerry is,

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I can still see it, it's a nice black and white full page thing, right inside the cover, I think it was right inside the front cover of This Rock magazine, where Jerry's sitting there and they've taken a picture with the

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Catholic church in the background, he's inside. And it says something along the lines of,

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I was the man who took your loved ones away from the Roman Catholic church. Something along those lines.

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He was the celebrity. He and Scott Hahn, man, they were buds. And I was listening to a presentation by Jerry Matitix on Mary, and I'm on this ride, and there is this flow, there is this confidence, and there is a speed of presentation, where Jerry's saying, and the word here is the same word found in the

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Greek septuagint that ties into what Luke says here, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There were never any references, you weren't given a lot of that kind of stuff, but it, wow, it sounded so confidently crafted, that when

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I got back, first thing I did, I mean, I probably showered, but I sat down with a tape recorder as a stop and start button, stop and pause button.

27:40

The pause button could cause problems with the tape, too. And I fired up my, probably,

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I'm not sure, I wasn't even a Pentium back then, might have been a 46, I don't remember.

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I fired up my computer, but I didn't have a computer program yet.

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So I got out, well, Greek attestment,

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I'm not sure where the septuagint I used back then is. Might be in the other room, but you had to get out paper books.

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And so I fired up a document, probably in WordStar or something, and might have been

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Ventura Publisher, I don't know. And I started going through point by point. But instead of rapid fire, it's stop, look up the reference.

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He says it's the same term, the septuagint, as Luke uses over here. So you get out your Greek New Testament, you get your septuagint here.

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You do this a lot faster with Accordance Today, I can guarantee you that. And, huh, nope, that ain't true.

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Sounded good, but nope, it wasn't true. And so I started finding that kind of stuff.

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And then it's like, and then you'll notice he says this here, and you're going, yeah, but the very next verse, it says this, which completely changes what you're talking about.

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Went through the whole presentation, and that's when I realized that you can make something sound good that's full of holes if you just say it with enough confidence and enough speed.

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Likewise, I recognized in Trenthorne's opening, I was very disappointed because, and this is, nothing new about this one.

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Roman Catholics will assume the continuity of their communion, and then utilize the discontinuity of anybody else's.

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But they won't deal with why I could go to Boston College today and get every wacko leftist view on the planet presented to me by the people there.

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But they will not be put out of the church by Francis. But if Protestants, just big general term

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Protestants, non -Roman Catholics, have all sorts of different viewpoints, well, that's an argument against solo scriptura.

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So in other words, what they ignore is the fact that amongst

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Roman Catholics, conservatives who believe in the dogmas of the

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Roman Catholic Church and seek to function within the context of that, historically so, will have a much closer unanimity of perspective than they will have with Roman Catholics who, again, aren't in really any danger of being put out, but who purposefully don't believe in papal infallibility or the infallibility of the church or anything like that along those lines at all.

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They're very much modernists, and they're willing to interpret even their own historical documents in wildly divergent fashions.

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So they may all walk into the same Roman Catholic Church, but they don't they don't mean the same things by what they're saying.

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And so that kind of unity to me is very, very surface level. It's not a meaningful unity.

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The reality is that the vast majority of Protestants do not seek to practice solo scriptura.

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I've got solo scriptura right there on my Jeffrey Rice rebound. It's my

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LSB, by the way. They don't seek to practice solo scriptura. The theological range expressed by people who purposefully and in a committed fashion seek to practice solo scriptura is so much narrower and so much closer than anything that Rome has ever produced, except maybe during, you know, in a particular town because there were 30 inquisitors and all their soldiers along the way.

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It's amazing. You look at, you take the perspectives on the

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Bible that have found expression within the papal biblical commission over the past 250 years.

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Look at that range, and then look at the range that would be expressed by Protestants who believingly seek to practice solo scriptura.

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We will have far more unity, far more unity than Roman Catholicism.

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Far more unity. No question about it. No question about it. And so to hear a

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Roman Catholic apologist going, well, this Protestant scholar says this. Well, yeah, does that Protestant scholar actually seek to practice solo scriptura?

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Is their view of scripture itself high enough?

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Do they believe in inspiration? What do they understand inspiration to even mean?

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This doesn't come out in the debate, but it has to if you're going to actually analyze the value of the argumentation.

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And so at one point, an argument popped up that I went, whoa, what?

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What? So Trenthorne threw out an argument, and it really seemed to me in many ways it was sort of like, let's just throw as many out here and see what sticks.

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But in passing, and he did expand upon it a little bit later on, he mentioned the argument of John C.

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Poirier, P -O -I -R -I -E -R. If you want to look it up, you need to know the spelling.

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A book titled The Invention of the Inspired Text, Philological Windows on the Theanustia of Scripture, T.

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and T. Clarke, which means not cheap. Doesn't necessarily mean it's high quality, but it does mean it's not cheap.

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And basically the argument that he just threw out there was, and by the way, as has been argued by John C.

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Poirier, Theanustas at Sanctum 316 should not be

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God -breathed, it should be life -giving. Okay, so I just want you to join with me here, and let's sit back for a second.

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I did my first soul scripture debate with Jerry Medetich in August of 1990, so we're talking almost 33 years ago.

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And he and I did that again on Long Island, Mitch Pacqua and I did it in 1999,

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Patrick Madrid and I did it in 1993 in San Diego, and it's also

36:14

San Diego where we did the one in 1999, interestingly enough. And in all these debates, in all these discussions, this was the first time a

36:31

Roman Catholic apologist had ever questioned the meaning of Theanustas. They had all agreed before, which makes me go, uh,

36:45

Trent Horne, to my knowledge, is not a cleric, he's not part of the magisterium.

36:57

I looked at the title page here, and I don't see a

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Nihil Abstadt on the book, and most people don't even know what Nihil Abstadt is, without objection.

37:14

Um, it used to be meaningful, in the sense that it was sort of a way that the church would say, this has been reviewed as to its theological content has been found to be unobjectionable to the church's teachings.

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I don't see a Nihil Abstadt on it. And I started looking at it,

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I haven't had a whole lot of time, um, to really dig deeply into it.

37:42

Um, the author used, the author used the databases that I used for my doctoral work, which most people didn't even have access to back then, uh, called the

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TLG, back then it was TLG CD -ROM, now it's online, it's a subscription thing, of course.

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In fact, my subscription is about to be renewed, um, it's not cheap. But anyway, it used the

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TLG databases. There have only been a few additional uses of a related term, theanus, theanustos, since the days of Warfield.

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So, 125 years ago, Warfield published his article on the meaning of theanustos, and he came to the conclusion that it refers to origination, where something comes from in its utilization in Paul.

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Now, the argument being made, um, by Poirier in, uh, the invention of the inspired text is that it's better understood as life -giving.

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Now, given that only God gives life, I'm not sure that it's necessarily massively important, but the idea is to move it away from an idea of inspiration, the technical

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Latin phrase, and connect it to a more vague concept than God breathed, than it being divine revelation, the very breath of God as he speaks.

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And so, uh, it's gonna take some time to, like I said, I've got access to TLG, been using it forever, to check out those references, and like I said, there aren't that many of them.

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But I just found it fascinating, because is this

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Rome's position? I don't think, I don't think the author is

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Roman Catholic. I've not found any evidence one way or the other. I've seen very, very little information. Where he went to school didn't seem to indicate any of that, but it wouldn't necessarily matter.

40:00

It is. Has there been an infallible statement from the Roman Catholic Church as to the meaning of theanustos? And if this guy's not a

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Roman Catholic, why are you making reference to non -Roman Catholic academic material?

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Why can't Rome tell us? I mean, we've all been sort of sitting around for a long time going, well, you know, if you all get to determine not only the meaning of scripture, but also what is and what is not tradition, and what tradition does and does not actually mean, why don't we have an exhaustive catalog of what is apostolic oral tradition as it becomes expressed in the teaching of the

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Church, and what isn't? Why don't we have an inspired commentary on the

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New Testament? You've had 2 ,000 years to work on it, according to your own claims, anyways. And so, has

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Rome spoken with infallible certainty as to the meaning of theanustos at that particular text?

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Now, when I look at the conclusions that this author's coming to, what I discover is he doesn't believe that Paul wrote these words.

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He doesn't believe that the pastoral epistles are Pauline. Well, that makes him part of mainstream scholarship today.

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But I have to think back, and so I just have to—I want everybody to ask a question of Trenthorne, because I'd be interested in knowing what his answer is.

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Does Trenthorne believe that Matthew wrote Matthew? Now, only you old folks, or people, or Algo—well, Algo's an old folks, too—are smiling with me.

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Because you think back to 1993, and in 1993 the

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Pope came to Denver for World Youth Day, and during that time period

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I had challenged Patrick Madrid and Carl Keating to debate me on the papacy, and they said, you know, we don't think that's the proper time to be doing debates.

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And so I said, you should debate Jerry Matatix. And so Jerry and I set up two debates, one at Denver Seminary, the other at a

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Presbyterian church that would become famous two years later as being where John Denver's funeral was held.

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And so we did two nights in a row, seven and a half hours on the papacy. And as soon as we were scheduled, then

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Carl and Patrick decided that it was a good time to debate, and they debated

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Bill Jackson and Ron Nemec, two fundamentalists on solo scriptura. What else?

43:00

And it was a slaughter. It was an embarrassing slaughter. But everybody knows that back then, one of the default questions from Catholic answers was, how do you know

43:17

Matthew wrote Matthew? So they want to bring it into the issue of canon without really being honest about how they would claim to know that Matthew wrote

43:27

Matthew. But the fact is, if you look at the papal biblical commission today, especially looking at the people that Pope Francis is putting on all of the papal commissions,

43:40

I mean, just a few months ago, he scandalized everybody by putting two people with a lengthy pro -choice perspective on key panels under the control of the

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Vatican. And you look at his understanding of theology and where he is in those areas and the people that he's putting on those,

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I would be very surprised, to be honest with you, if there's anybody on the papal biblical commission that believes

44:17

Matthew wrote Matthew. Minimally, absolutely minimally, we can find lots of people that the

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Vatican utilizes and promotes and puts on that don't believe that Matthew wrote Matthew because that's quote unquote mainstream.

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Ah, it's written decades later and Matthew's just a traditional name attached to it and all the rest of that kind of fun stuff.

44:39

Is that where Trenthorne is? So would Trenthorne have stood up in 1993 in Denver and said, wait,

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Carl, Pat, wait a minute, we don't know that Matthew wrote Matthew. So don't ask these guys how they know

44:57

Matthew wrote Matthew. That's not fair. I sort of doubt that would have happened.

45:03

First, I'm not sure how old Trent was in 1993, but probably not very old. The author of the work that Trent's throwing out there doesn't believe

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Paul wrote these words. They're not apostolic. And so to interpret the context in which

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Theanostas would be being used for Warfield, Paul is writing to Timothy.

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And Timothy is a first century convert who is involved with Paul's work.

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For this guy, whoever is writing this epistle is probably writing around 130.

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So he's writing 100 years after Jesus. And he's writing 80 years after Paul.

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And so you don't, you can't really know what that context is going to be.

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Not only that, but this author doesn't believe that John wrote John. Because in his discussion, he tries to draw parallels between the view of Scripture in the

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Gospel of John with what's found in 2 Timothy. Different authors, but all writing long after the apostolic period.

46:34

None of this is apostolic. You think that might impact his interpretation of things?

46:39

Just a little bit. Just somewhat. Is this now? I mean, I know that this has been mainstream at Boston College forever, and in all the liberal, leftist, progressivist,

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Jesuit, Roman Catholic institutions. Sure, you bet. But you see,

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Roman Catholic apologists generally don't come from those areas. That's why Mitch Pack was so different.

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You know, the most conservative Jesuit on the planet. Progressivists don't do apologetics because they don't feel the need to.

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And so is that where Catholic Answers is now? Because, I mean, John Horne represents

47:23

Catholic Answers. Well, they're primary individuals. So is this a repudiation of where Catholic Answers has been in the past?

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Can we expect, at the very least, to never hear the, why do you think

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Matthew, how do you know Matthew wrote Matthew argument? Because it seems like you all don't believe

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Matthew wrote Matthew. You don't read, you don't think Paul wrote Paul. And you don't think

47:56

John wrote John. So I'm not sure why you'd think Matthew wrote Matthew. The consistent, that spectrum of theology.

48:07

Which has been around for a long time. We've talked about this kind of stuff for decades on this program.

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You know, I've said that's why God forced me to go to Fuller. Because that's what, you know, in the classes on the

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Gospels and things like that, the whole class on the historical, the quest for the historical

48:30

Jesus and all the rest of that kind of stuff. It's just standard fare. But they were never involved in apologetics because there wasn't anything for them to defend.

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But is that where Catholic Answers is now? I'd be really interested in knowing.

48:48

Because if you're going to present this stuff, then there's some sense in which you're saying, I find validity in this.

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I find validity in arguing against the meaning God breathed on the basis of the rejection of apostolic origination of the terminology in the first place.

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Doesn't come from Paul. Doesn't come from John. If we're looking at the

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Scriptures cannot be broken, for example, in John chapter 10. That was written a hundred years after, according to these guys.

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Now, I reject all of that. But it doesn't sound like Catholic Answers does. So, I'm really interested in finding out, you know, because there were a couple of citations of Donne by Trenthorne as well.

49:48

Well, there's a lot of implications here. That's not historic, conservative

49:55

Roman Catholic theology. But that is the progressivist left wing.

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But I don't see how the progressivist left wing fits with apologetics at all.

50:11

Why would any of these folks do apologetics? I don't see that.

50:17

And again, that's what brings us back to this day, right now, seeking to defend

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Roman Catholicism in the context of Francis.

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And let's say, let's just hypothetically for a moment, let's hypothetically think about what may well happen when

50:44

Francis either retires or dies. In light of his filling the

50:53

College of Cardinals with his own acolytes, with people who think like him, who have theology like him, can we all admit that the theology that he has?

51:05

Now, again, I've talked with Roman Catholics who would say, no,

51:15

I think Francis is much more orthodox than you think.

51:21

And I just go, look, on our side of the fence, anybody influenced by and driven by liberation theology on a basic epistemological level does not believe what

51:46

Christians believed only 100 years ago about the coherence of the

51:52

Christian message with the created order around us. In other words, once you embrace certain elements of liberalism,

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I don't like that term, leftism, the result is a redefinition of language and a fundamental shift in the epistemological foundations of any system.

52:16

So that I think we can, with a decent level of certainty and confidence, understand what the council fathers at Trent were seeking to communicate in regards to, well, a lot of people know the initial draft of the

52:46

Constitution on Divine Revelation contained the partum partum language, partly in the oral, partly in the written, that was then removed and expressed differently in the final form.

53:02

But when you look at where Rome was at that time, when you look at the writings of the people that were there, when you look at the defenders of that that come later,

53:13

Bellarmine and others, we have an idea of the worldview, we have a very clear and confident idea of the worldview, and hence the necessary meaning of the theology.

53:30

Once you embrace the worldview skepticism, a liberation thought, call it liberation theology, it's very much connected to critical concepts as well.

53:51

Once you embrace that, there is an epistemological shift, and I would simply argue that you may use the same words, but you don't mean the same things by them any longer.

54:02

You don't believe the same things. There's been a shift, there's been a change. We're seeing that culturally, and I think we're seeing it in Roman Catholicism.

54:13

I just suggest to some of my Roman Catholic friends, you might be too close to it to see it, but it's happening.

54:22

I think it's right there in front of us. And so, I look at Francis, and it just seems absolutely certain to me that his predecessors, only a hundred years removed, would listen to him speak and go, who is this usurper?

54:49

This man's not a bishop of Rome. That's not what we believe. And if you could sit

54:58

Francis down, present to him the papal syllabus of errors, and present it in its context, and say, look, we cannot interpret this in light of the developments that we would like to see happen.

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We need to honestly say, what was meant back then when this was promulgated?

55:29

There's no way that Francis could sign that, agree with that. There's no way that he would teach that.

55:37

It's not the case. So, if any of that's true, then what if his successor continues on the same trajectory, which means a trajectory far away from any kind of, and I don't want to use the term traditional, because traditionalist has become its own thing, but any kind of historically consistent reading of Roman Catholic theology?

56:09

Well, one thing that's obvious is you have to have a different form of apologetics, because you're presenting a different form of the faith.

56:20

And so, I guess the apologists have to adjust. And is that what we're seeing here? Are we seeing in Trent Horne and his utilization of material that puts the analysis of a biblical term in a completely different context than it used to have between conservative

56:44

Catholics and conservative Protestants, where we all, at least we all, still believed in divine revelation?

56:51

But if you start doing lexical studies that fundamentally start by saying no to consistency, no to Pauline authorship, no to Johannine authorship, no to first century origination, where do you go from there?

57:16

Where do you go from there? I don't know. But these are some of the questions that automatically come to our mind as I was listening to all this stuff being thrown out, and done being thrown out here, and this being thrown out there.

57:33

And immediately, I mean, you've at least got to give me credit. I've heard a few debates in my life.

57:42

Most of them I was in, but I've heard lots of others, too. And I can very quickly identify the realm of the sources being utilized, and whether there's consistency in those sources or massive inconsistency in those sources.

58:04

And I'm hearing this, and I'm going, are we seeing something new?

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Are we seeing a fundamental shift in perspectives that we've not seen before?

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I don't know. I'm hoping that someone out there, even right now, is writing a tweet.

58:29

Problem is, if I do it, then you end up with so much noise in all the threads and stuff.

58:40

So maybe somebody else that already is involved in the conversation might want to go, so,

58:48

Trent, do you think it's important to think that John wrote John? Do you think it's important in defining what

58:55

Theodosauus means to know who wrote it? Because the sources you used, and you threw this out as one of your arguments, the source you used doesn't believe that.

59:06

It says it right in the book. Look at Chapter 5, Inspirationism and the

59:12

New Testament, specifically 1 .1

59:17

and 1 .2. Salvation is vivification and Theodosauus in the setting of 2nd

59:22

Timothy. Read it for yourself. Is that important?

59:29

Is that relevant? I think that's a question worth asking. So I don't want to go much over time here, but why spend all this time on this?

59:39

It's real simple. I almost brought up, and I may still do so later, but I am seeing, again, men who claim to be

59:52

Reformed Baptists making statements about tradition, the great tradition, in opposition to Biblicism, whether they understand it or not, whether I have just been the wrong one to explain it to them or not.

01:00:11

Maybe they just never listened to debates when they said that they had. Maybe they didn't get the points during the debates when they did listen to them.

01:00:18

I don't know, but I hear them making statements that draw from the same realm of argumentation that you have to deal with when you're defending

01:00:35

Sola Scriptura. None of these guys that I know of have ever defended

01:00:40

Sola Scriptura against a knowledgeable Roman Catholic.

01:00:46

I really wonder, I'll be honest, I'm just being absolutely honest, I really wonder how many of these professors at the

01:00:53

Reformed Baptist seminaries, at other seminaries, that are just so gung -ho about Thomas and the great tradition, and so deaf on whatever it is they define as Biblicism, could they debate

01:01:15

Trenthorne? Without looking everything up right now, this instant, how do you define the difference between material and formal sufficiency?

01:01:27

How do you respond to Rome's arguments against those things? Against formal sufficiency, but material, formal, you know, well, implicit, what does implicit mean?

01:01:39

Have they ever taken the time to read the arguments Rome puts forth for such things as the

01:01:47

Immaculate Conception, the Bodily Assumption, the implicit argumentation that they use? Have they?

01:01:55

If they haven't, maybe they're treading in waters that have sharks in them and they don't realize it.

01:02:05

And when the people on the shore are yelling, sharks! They're going, don't be such a scaredy

01:02:10

Biblicist! Maybe? Possibly? All I know is, the

01:02:19

Roman Catholics I've talked to, when they hear what the Neo -Thomas are doing, and what they're saying, they're like, hmm, come on in, the water of the

01:02:30

Tiber is fine, it's wonderful. They know. They're like, mm -hmm,

01:02:37

I like that language you're using. Thumbs up. Yeah, so anyway. Much more to say about that, because like I said, there's some material in Poirier that I want to delve into more deeply, because hey, if this is where Catholic apologists are going, let's be prepared to respond to it.

01:03:07

Let's do it. When the wheels fall off of everything, and our ability to communicate around the world and stuff is interrupted if not ended, we end up back like in the medieval period, as far as cultural advancement is concerned.

01:03:32

People are going to need to have a foundation, and this is what it's all about.

01:03:40

Everything that people are saying about having hope in Christ and everything else is dependent upon this being something far greater than what is envisioned by quote -unquote the mainstream academy, whether it's

01:03:56

Roman Catholic or Protestant. If this doesn't have the

01:04:03

Theanostas consistency that Christian theology has always taught that it has, even though, man,

01:04:12

I literally was stunned that Trent Horne was arguing.

01:04:19

Early church fathers didn't really view the New Testament as scripture, and I'm like, well, which book's the

01:04:27

New Testament? What are you talking about? There's a whole issue of the historical development of the canon.

01:04:33

I realize that that's actually against your position. You thought there was somebody in Rome that had all that figured out from the beginning, and that just simply wasn't the case.

01:04:44

That wasn't the case. But still, the people being cited,

01:04:51

I'm going, I know those people. I'm used to dealing with them from the progressivist perspective, but not from Roman Catholic apologists, because Roman Catholic apologists have to be so conservative to accept the dogmas of Rome that are so clearly ahistorical.

01:05:11

So it just left me going, wow, what's going on here? There's a lot to look at here.

01:05:19

But this isn't just about Roman Catholicism. I hope you understand that. This has to do with everything that's going on that seeks to, in some way, shape, or form, subvert the consistency and authority of God's revelation.

01:05:36

See, Rome has done that for a long time. They did that. That was part of the Jesuit counter -reformation.

01:05:43

Undercut scriptural sufficiency, so that you have to default back to something, must be

01:05:49

Rome. Well, I'm not sure how well that's going to work today, given how much other stuff out there there is that will offer itself.

01:05:57

Someone actually sent me, and I didn't follow up on it. I'm going to have to look for it. Somebody actually sent me a link to a thing from Catholic to Mormon, I think is what it was.

01:06:06

That might be interesting to listen to. But anyway, that's why we're talking about this stuff, and I think it's super important.

01:06:16

Anyway, thanks for listening to the program today. Thanks to Rich for making it possible for us to do it remotely. Like I said,

01:06:22

Lord willing, on Thursday, hopefully from the new unit.