Road Trip Dividing Line: Gay Mirage, Mass, Biblicism

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line from Little Rock, Arkansas, this evening.

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On my way back across the United States from Tullahoma, and I'm going to admit a mistake today.

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I spent six and a half hours on the road. That's too long. I know you guys with CDLs, and they're professional truckers that drive longer.

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I'm not a professional trucker. And yeah, that was a little bit long today.

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I was trying, as you may recall, to get all the way back to Salt Lake City. I wanted very much to be at the debate that my son -in -law,

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Eric Yeager, is doing with Zach Lautenschlager in Salt Lake City on Friday, the 24th, on who is in the new covenant.

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Really wanted to be there, but I knew that weather would be against me getting back across the

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U .S. But you know, you never know. Strange things happen. You could have beautiful weather for a week, and I could make it.

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I realize now that there were a couple days that were going to be like two hours longer than today.

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That's just not safe for me to do that. And I just need to remind myself of that.

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Maybe Rich can remind me of that when looking at the plans that I put together for these trips.

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But I had already called, and I had called that.

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It wasn't going to happen because I was looking at the weather, and aside from a road that I guess

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Rich has been on that I haven't, a two -lane road that sort of goes the back way into Salt Lake City.

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They're calling for seven inches of snow between the day before and the day of. But the real kicker was

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I saw that they were calling for more than 40 mile per hour winds in eastern

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New Mexico when I would be going into that area. And so when I called to cancel my reservation, the guy said, oh, that was yesterday.

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Now they're calling for 70 mile per hour winds. And Rich just told me they're talking 50 mile per hour winds in Phoenix.

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So yeah, we will be, this was where I was supposed to be tonight, one way or the other.

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But I'll be heading south tomorrow to dodge as much of this storm as I can and the wind, which is not a lot of fun.

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Because when you think about it, even with a 40 mile per hour wind, if I'm doing 60 miles per hour into a 40 mile per hour wind, that's a 100 mile per hour wind force on the unit.

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And I've got a little secret for everybody. Not all roads are perfectly straight. So all you got to do is turn and all of a sudden you're getting 80 miles per hour hitting you sideways.

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And it's not just you, it's everybody else on the road too. So yeah, I'm not interested in playing bumper cars with the semi tractor trailers with 40 to 70 mile per hour winds.

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That's not fun. That's not really enjoyable or safe. So on the bright side,

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I'm definitely going to miss seeing the debate. I think it's going to be very useful.

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I think it's going to be very respectful. I'll just state right up front publicly,

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I love Zach. Zach Lautenschlager is a great guy. He's a member at Brother Wallace's OPC church there in Magna.

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I've preached there a million times. But we're Reformed Baptists and are

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Presbyterians, and so we're going to have this conversation. And so Zach's a great guy, and I just couldn't be prouder of my son -in -law.

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He's done so much more reading on covenant theology than I have that it's not even funny.

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So I think it'll be great, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I would love to have been there in person, and I was going to preach at Apologia on Sunday too.

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But we'll be up in Salt Lake City, Lord willing, for General Conference and for the debate that Jeff and I are doing.

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I did decide today that I'm going to really try to leave plenty of time to get to Salt Lake City.

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I may need to talk to Jason about that because I'm going to be stopping in Cedar City along the way. And I'm just wondering if it wouldn't be wise to leave even a little more time just in case.

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Because I got hit with a blizzard the very same time, beginning of April, in Salt Lake City last year.

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So who knows? But one of the things that you've got to be able to do when you live the

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RV life is you've got to be able to change your route and your plans and adjust.

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And I'm learning how to do that. You know, when you fly all the time, you hope that never happens because that means you're going to be staying in line for hours and hours and hours and hours and flying standby and doing all that sort of stuff.

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It's just a little bit more of a natural part of this way of traveling. Speaking of which, real quickly,

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I want to get to some important stuff on homosexual mirage and adoption of children or creation of designer babies.

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And I want to talk about some issues relating to biblicism. I need to make a comment about Roman Catholicism.

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But I want to mention and put this in here.

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Just remind yourself, you know, you never know. I had a wonderful time in Tullahoma at the

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Reformed Baptist Church there. Jeffrey Rice is elder and pastor there.

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I met some great guys, great preaching. I didn't get to be there as much as I wanted to for a number of different reasons.

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But it was great to have Keith Foskey there and other folks that were recording things.

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But it's a small church and it's a small town. And it was really encouraging in the sense that, you know, if all you did was look at the big names and the big churches,

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I'm not sure we'd have a whole lot of reason to be overly encouraged these days. But there are a lot of men who are willing to work hard and work day in, day out in the places where the kingdom of God needs to grow, the places where the foundations will be laid when this mess of a culture is wiped away.

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And so it was very, very encouraging to be there, to see how serious everyone took everything.

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And yesterday, it was really enjoyable. I had the opportunity to enroll playing a

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Mormon again. I hadn't done that in ages. But the young man that moderated the debate is a former

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Mormon. And so he was going to be talking about Mormonism in Sunday school. And so I was like, hey, what would you think about doing this?

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And I'm trying to think the last time I got to do that. We used to do it all the time.

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That was a regular way of training people for going to Salt Lake City and stuff like that. It's been a long, long time.

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And it was very, very enjoyable. People love to watch that kind of thing. And they tune into it big time.

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They really do. I'll just mention one thing. About the debate, it was my 180th debate.

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It's very disappointing to me. Because there are debates that you go, well,

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I sort of feel like a waste of my time. And the reason for that is if the two sides together, if one of the sides decides to do the debate for a completely different reason than the other side, it can end up being pretty much a waste of time for everybody.

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And as soon as Thomas Ross began his presentation, I became concerned.

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Because he was doing the machine gun thing. And I've mentioned this to other people that I've debated.

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I remember a young Muslim man. I said, look, dude, people can't listen to someone doing.

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Remember the old FedEx commercials? Just trying to speak as fast as you possibly can.

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In fact, the funny thing was I had taken Thomas Ross and his wife out to dinner the night before.

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And one of the things that I had said was you have to bring the audience along with you.

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That's why you're there. That's why they're there. As soon as he started speaking,

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I knew that that was not what he was intending to do. Instead, I had 18 slides, 25 -minute opening statements.

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I thought it was 20. I filled up my whole 25. I only had a few seconds left at the end. But I had only 18 slides.

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And they were very large print. Everybody could read them. They were easily understandable.

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It put the issue out there where everyone could get to it.

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Because that's why you do debates. You are doing it because you believe what you're saying is true.

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You want to glorify God and his truth. But you're there for that audience.

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You have a responsibility to them. I had mentioned to him that when

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I did my debate with Jerry Matitix at Denver Seminary in 1993, someone came up to me.

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I would love it if you're still out there. It was a long time ago. You may not be out there any longer.

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But someone came up to me. I don't know who it was. Basically, very gently said, you need to bring the audience with you.

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You're trying to get so much information in. But you're not necessarily bringing the audience along.

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Your sinful pride wants to go, who are you to tell me type of a situation.

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But I did not respond that way. The Spirit of God was using that individual to communicate something to me.

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And I learned from it. Hopefully, I've put that into play.

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170 debates or so that have taken place since then. What is astonishing is, like I said,

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I had 18 slides. 25 -minute opening statements. We needed to provide my keynote slides or PowerPoint slides or whatever.

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Normally, you convert them into PDF. And there was a very kind videographer that came out to do a professional recording of the debate.

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And so I think the day after, Thomas Ross sent an email with a link to the slides that he used in his presentation.

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Now, I sat there, and I'm watching, folks, as he is just speaking at about three to four times the rate that I did.

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I'd say about three or four times faster than I do. And I eventually looked over, and I'm watching the screen.

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And a friend of mine mentioned that, I think he said, when he worked for IBM, if you were using a presentation, you were not allowed to have more than 17 words on a slide.

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These, now I had a couple slides, I had more than that. But these slides that he's presenting are filled with text.

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And they're just going through. You couldn't read them. You couldn't take notes.

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You had no idea. And I'm watching the audience. They're all just sort of sitting there going. And the whole point was, this could have been done in an empty room.

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In fact, I wouldn't have even needed to be there. It certainly didn't have to have an audience there. Because Ross didn't care about any of us.

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He wasn't debating for us. He was debating. I discovered later that he is a landmark

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Baptist. Trail of blood, all that historically absurd stuff.

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And I wish I had known that. I wish I had known the landmark connection. Because it explains something he kept saying during the debate.

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That God's word, he had, well, not even a standard, but this theory of preservation.

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And God's words could be available to the church in every generation. And I was like, I even mentioned at one point, well,

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Athanasius. And I guess someone has thrown at Keith Foskey. A lot of these guys do not understand the concept of text types or anything like that at all.

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And they misuse a lot of the scholarly information. And so if they can find a single

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Byzantine reading, they think, oh, they had a Byzantine manuscript. That's not what makes something a

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Byzantine manuscript or an Alexandrian manuscript. And it is self -evident that the text that Athanasius had was not a

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Byzantine text. Doesn't mean he didn't have a Byzantine reading here or there. That's not what makes a text type. And again, people who don't do textual criticism can get really confused about these things.

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And as a result, misrepresent stuff. Anyway, now

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I understand that when he was talking about the church, he was talking about this secret church, the landmark

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Baptist have always been the one true church, et cetera, et cetera type idea.

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And that would have helped me to ask better questions. Because I'm like, but Athanasius. And he's like, Athanasius is a

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Catholic. We don't care. I was like, oh, OK. That would have helped. But there was just so many things.

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And I may take the time to look at certain things that I don't have it with me.

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When I get back, if there's interest or I remember to do it, he was making claims about using

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Swanson's materials. I'm not even certain if Swanson may not even be in the background of the maybe part of what's behind me in the dividing line studio.

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But I have Swanson. And maybe it would be educational maybe to go through some of these things and to explain what was actually being said, because it even took me a while to figure out what he was talking about, partly because he was talking so fast.

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You could barely write down references, let alone have any idea of what the point was about the reference.

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You don't have time to look at it. There was just a really, really deep disrespect for the audience.

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And so that was really disappointing. In fact, I think the marriage debate was more useful as far as the two debates on this trip because of just that.

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Oh, but I forgot to finish. You know how many slides he had? You know how many slides are in his presentation?

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You can go to his website right now and download it. 256, 256 slides.

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That's just so absurd. I don't even know how to comment on it. I don't care if anyone understands what

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I'm saying. I'm just showing off. I don't even know. So anyways, there you go.

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It was, yeah, it was. So there's 180 down and we move on from there.

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So, but again, sincere thanks. Oh man, I wish I had it there.

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Where did I put it? Anyways, the one thing that I asked for and received from Jeffrey Rice was just the most gorgeous

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LSV you'll ever see. And he's doing another project for me for G3.

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He's got some new leather that he is just really jazzed about. That it's just some of the best stuff he's ever found.

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And so the Hebrew text that I want to preach from at G3, he's going to be doing that for me.

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So I'm really excited about that. But anyways, there's a quick report on all that.

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Thanks to all the people who came up to me. Oh, I just got to tell one story. Got to tell one story. There was a gentleman there, and I think

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I've seen him on Facebook just a few minutes ago. I was looking at stuff. And he had very strongly expressed to me how much my ministry throughout the ministries and also

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Jeff and Apologia and what I do with Apologia and so on and so forth has meant to him in his life and in his walk.

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And so I was preaching on Romans chapter four, and I got to where the beginning of the chapter

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Paul quotes from Genesis 15, six, which is one of the most cited texts from the

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Old Testament in the New Testament. And so just for the fun of it, I said, now, this isn't this isn't

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God's favorite Bible verse. God's and I said, does anybody know what

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God's favorite Bible verse is? Now, a lot of people would go, that's what are you talking about?

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At Apologia, Jeff has said many times that God's favorite

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Bible verse is Psalm 1101, because it's the most often cited in the New Testament.

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So that must be God's favorite Bible verse. So I figured the only people who know that are the people in Apologia. So I go, so does anybody know what

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God's favorite Bible verse is? And that guy just smiles and says, Psalm 1101, of course.

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And I said, somebody listens to Apologia sermons. And he goes, yep. And it's so neat.

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It's hard for us to realize how completely unique that is in the history of the church.

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I mean, really, when you think about how utterly unique it is for us to be able to be preaching in Mesa, Arizona, and somebody 1 ,500 miles away knows what we're saying so clearly that they can answer a question like that.

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It's great. It's awesome. I don't know how much longer we're going to have it in our particular context, because there are, believe me, as I will point out later on when

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I talk about other things, there are people out there that want to silence us. They really do.

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In fact, let's go ahead and talk about that. I could not help, but we all saw the video.

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Well, we all, okay. Many of us saw the video that was posted in social media of two flaming homosexuals.

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I mean, you know the exaggerated actions of the very effeminate type of homosexuals.

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They're both that way. And they're holding a baby, and they're telling the story of having designed this baby, going through egg donors, and looking for the perfect match so they can make themselves a baby.

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Now, one of the things that I was asked when I did comment on this was, so are you okay with that when it's heterosexuals?

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And I'm like, no, I'm not. But at least if they're heterosexuals, the child will end up with a mother and a father.

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Um, so there's at least not an extra added level of evil to it.

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But they're just going on and on about egg donors and all the rest of this stuff.

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And here's this child who will never have a mother, will never have a normal home situation, will never have the examples that God designed in marriage, and having a father and a mother and siblings.

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Will have a mother that the child will probably never know or have to go try to track down, but never really have that youthful relationship with.

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And all to fulfill the selfish, self -centered, because homosexuality is a narcissistic, self -centered concept.

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Um, there is no etzer k 'negdo, etzer k 'negdo, one who is like, but different in corresponding to.

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That's the description of scripture. What is a woman? She's etzer k 'negdo to man. There is, that's all rejected.

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It's a rejection of God's created order. It's rebellion. It's rebellion, period, end of discussion.

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And then to add to that the sin of creating a child, ripping it from its mother, and forcing it to be raised by two narcissistic men.

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The moral evil is astonishing. The moral evil is astonishing. And so,

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I, like many others, commented on the video, and I'm not sure, maybe it's just, maybe it's just the way

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I have things set up on Twitter. I don't know. But I don't see a lot of the responses that my tweets get.

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I think it's because, I think I only see stuff from people I follow or something. I don't know. But something caused me to run into that thread and actually start following the comments.

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There were like 56 comments when I looked at it. Vile, profane, just, you know, most of it you just, you said, you skip past or you just block, block, block, block, block.

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But I did respond to a number and just basically said, you, you, you're sitting here and you're making moral conclusions.

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You're talking about good and evil. You don't even have a foundation to start to define such things.

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Your morality is so misformed, has no foundation, no basis.

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There's no objectivity to whatsoever. And it's like most of these people have never been challenged to even think about that.

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Our entire nation is now filled with people who think that they are the final moral decider of all things.

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The cultural consensus is not only gone, it was purposefully destroyed. And here you've got people who call themselves

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Christians going, at least they're giving the child a home and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And you're just, there's the temptation to just go,

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I think I'm going to try to find someplace in a bunker somewhere, because this whole place is going to be turned to ash and properly so.

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There is that, you, you, you get that feeling. You really do.

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The Sunday night sermon that Jeff preached, Apologia, I think he was sort of feeling somewhat the same way from a different perspective, but sort of just seemed to be feeling that same, same way as well.

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And it was just truly amazing to see the, the moral pygmy -ish -ness of so many people.

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They are, you challenge them on morality and ethics and they simply collapse.

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They're just, it's all emotion. It's just feelings. And my feelings determine what's good and evil.

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It's no wonder that the left has been able to co -opt terms like justice and equity and equality and stuff like that, and just turn them into, or racism for that matter, and just turn all of that into empty, empty words that have no meaning at all.

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But it really was troubling to see that, to see what, what came from that.

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It really was. Anyway, I, I would normally say more about that, but I'm pretty wiped out.

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I only got in a little while ago. So I, I do want to get to this last thing. I need to leave a few brain cells left.

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Had a conversation with a dear friend today who brought a few things to my attention.

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And I, I want to not really clarify something, didn't need to clarify it.

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It's been perfectly clear in what I have taught and said for a long, long time, but, but to maybe by addressing this, help other people think things through.

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And it's certainly caused me to think things through too. My first book was called

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The Fatal Flaw. And the focus of The Fatal Flaw was on the

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Roman Catholic doctrine of the mass, as derived from the dogmatic teachings of the

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Roman Catholic Church. Um, from, from Trent and Vatican II.

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And to focus, I focused my attention on the atonement from a biblical perspective as the necessary antidote to Rome's teaching.

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And I pointed out that this is not how the vast majority of Protestants address

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Roman Catholicism. They do the jack chick thing, or they do sort of a fundamentalist thing where it's, well, they look different than us, they dress different than us, therefore they must be wrong.

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That's not why they're wrong. And they'll focus on whether you're crossing yourself or the, the central act of worship in Roman Catholic theology is the

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Eucharistic sacrifice, the mass. I don't think anyone would argue that. And so I focused on the beauty of Scripture and its teaching of the harmony of the

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Father, the Son, the Spirit, in the provision of perfect salvation for God's people in Jesus Christ, through union with him.

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His death becomes their death, his resurrection, their resurrection, their sins are imputed to him, his righteousness is imputed to them, the beauty of having true peace with God, true acceptance with God.

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Because completely of what another one said, so that it's, as Ephesians 1 says, it's all the praise of his glorious grace.

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And so I made a comment in regards to Matthew Barrett and his new fascination with Thomas Aquinas and people drawing pictures of Aquinas and putting pictures of Aquinas up in your office, and every other tweet is about, well actually about all, all, but two or three tweets are about Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas.

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And so I made the comment, and it was a fairly innocuous comment, but it evidently got picked up by a whole bunch of people, that amongst the

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Baptist Thomists, the idea is that you can take Thomas' metaphysics in regards to the doctrine of God, simplicity, inseparable operations, and all the rest of that fun stuff, and you can just divorce it from the rest of Thomas' theology.

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And play with this over here and leave the other stuff off. And I simply made the comment that the central act of Catholic worship is the perpetuatory sacrifice of the

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Mass, and the person invited to the

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Roman Catholic Church, the metaphysical categories whereby they can teach that even though it is an unbloody sacrifice, that it is still a propitiatory sacrifice, through the doctrine of transubstantiation, was none other than Thomas Aquinas.

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He was deeply, deeply dedicated to the

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Eucharistic sacrifice. And so I pointed this out, and it had a context, context being

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Protestants who are just going all googly -eyed over Thomas Aquinas, thinking that they can chop him up and leave the

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Catholic Aquinas over here, and then create a pseudo -Protestant Aquinas over there.

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There is no Protestant Aquinas, sorry, no such thing. Neither would he be a

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Tridentine Catholic either. Fairly close, certainly close, it's closer to being a

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Protestant. But there were differences, there have been developments, and I'm not going to get into all the rest of that right now.

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Well, for some reason, even though I've done debates on the Mass, Mitch Packwin and I did a debate on the

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Mass, I debated Robert St. Janis on the Mass, I believe. Yes, I did. Even though I've addressed all this stuff, evidently what has happened amongst

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Catholic apologists and stuff like that, is they've taken my words, and they've decided that what I've said is that the concept of a sacrifice started with Thomas.

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I never even suggested that. I've discussed the difference between transubstantiation and Real Presence, I've discussed in my early church classes where concepts of Real Presence come in, and what that meant, and what it didn't mean, and how

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Real Presence could be understood without Aristotle and without Thomas.

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For example, I've pointed out, I'm pretty sure I pointed out in both the debates and the

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Masses, a number of years ago now, but I would point out now, that in the earliest context, when the

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Mass was celebrated, when the elements were taken, for example, to the sick, they were not carried in procession, there was no worship of them, and any excess was destroyed.

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The idea of the Real Presence was in the actual supper itself, not in a changed nature of the elements.

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So I've talked about this, and I'm well aware, and we have talked over and over again, of the use of sacrificial language long before Thomas.

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That's not what I was talking about. What I was saying is that the language that gave to Trent the mechanism whereby to answer the question, how can it be a propitiatory sacrifice when it's not the bloody sacrifice of the cross, came from Thomas Aquinas.

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Oh, but the Eastern Orthodox, they believe, and they don't follow Thomas Aquinas, but they're not saying what

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Rome is saying about it either. In fact, they loathe to be as dogmatic about the mechanisms.

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In fact, that's one of their criticisms of Rome, and the West in general. So it's not a criticism of Rome, the criticism of Protestants as well.

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You all and your forensic definitions of justification, all the rest of that kind of stuff. That's one of their issues.

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So just for anybody out there who's running around saying,

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James White says that Thomas Aquinas was the first reference to sacrifice, you totally blew it.

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You ignored everything I've ever said about it. You weren't following the context of the tweet, and I'd just like to say, stop it.

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Just stop it and deal with the real issues. They're important issues, they're vital issues, let's be honest.

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They should be the things that Catholics and Protestants are actually talking about, and 99 % of the time they're not. You all have got your problems within your areas, and we do too, and it's just the way it is.

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But I wanted to clarify that, and again, my sincere thanks to my dear friend that brought that to my attention, so that we would have that opportunity.

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So one last thing here. I mentioned in a tweet about Christian Smith.

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Christian Smith is a sociologist.

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He now teaches at Notre Dame. And back in 2018, when the woke stuff exploded with the

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MLK 50 stuff, remember that? It seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?

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Because that was not only a long time ago, as far as all the disputes go, but almost anything prior to COVID sort of feels like pre -COVID, post -COVID, different life.

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And Christian Smith is co -author of Divided by Faith, which

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I had to read. I read it in 2018. It was from, I think, 2010, if I recall correctly.

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So it wasn't overly new. But it was a sociologically -derived discussion of how race divides the church in the

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United States and stuff like that. So I heard some criticisms of it, because it was being pushed by all the folks who decided to become woke at that point in time.

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And I didn't do much other than just look at who the authors were, where they taught as to what their backgrounds were, things like that, because they're sociologists.

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So what? Then a discussion started on Twitter a few days ago, where Christian Smith is being cited again.

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And I had not seen this book before. It would actually be worthwhile spending some time on it.

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It's called The Bible Made Impossible. The Bible Made Impossible came out in 2012 by Christian Smith.

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And here from the introduction, let me read you a section. By biblicalism, I mean a theory about the

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Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self -sufficiency, internal consistency, self -evident meaning, and universal applicability.

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That sounds almost, though I would reject self -evident meaning, because that's that's freighted with way too much stuff.

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It sounds like the first chapter of the Westminster or the London Baptist Confession, doesn't it?

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It does. Different communities within American evangelicalism emphasize various combinations of these points differently, but all together they form a constellation of assumptions and beliefs that define a particular theory and practice.

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My argument as follows does not question the doctrine of the divine inspiration of the Bible, nor am I here discovering the crucially important role that the

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Bible must play in the life of the Church and lives of individual Christians. I'm not suggesting the Bible is just a set of historical writings set in particular cultures, or the record of human subjective experiences, the divine that has little to say to contemporary people without being translated in terms that modern people can accept.

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Instead, what I say here is simply that the biblicism that in much of American evangelicalism is presupposed to be the cornerstone to Christian truth and faithfulness is misguided and impossible.

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It does not and cannot live up to its own claims. This is a book against sola scriptura.

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It is a book against scriptural sufficiency, perspicuity. It is a book screaming there needs to be an external authority outside of the

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Bible. That's what it's about. Here are the definitions that he gives, and this was what the conversation on Twitter was about.

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By biblicism, I mean a particular theory about and style of using the

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Bible that is defined by a constellation of related assumptions and beliefs about the Bible's nature, purpose, and function.

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That constellation is represented by 10 assumptions or beliefs. Number one, divine writing.

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The Bible down to the details of its words consists of is identical with God's very own words written inherently in human language.

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It is self -evident both in Divide by Faith and in this book that Smith is not a theologian.

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He is a sociologist, and therefore a lot of this stuff is very stilted. It sort of stumbles around a good bit.

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Anyway, number two, total representation. The Bible represents the totality of God's communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and being the exclusive mode of God's true communication.

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Self -evidently false because the Bible teaches something called general revelation, though the range and scope of general revelation is extremely limited.

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Number three, complete coverage. The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief in life are contained in the

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Bible. Okay, in precept.

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Needs to be application, but okay. Democratic perspicuity. Number four, any reasonably intelligent person can read the

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Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text. That's way too simplistic.

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Way too simplistic. Do use of ordinary means, but God has placed us in the church with teachers as well.

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So, you know, there's almost a solo scriptural element to that one, but anyway.

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Five, common sense hermeneutics. The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical context.

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Okay, that's silly. Of course, you have to have literary, cultural, and historical context, or you can't know what the author was intending to communicate in the first place.

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This kind of thing just makes you go, it's sort of hard to take this seriously as a scholarly work, but anyway.

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Solo scriptura. Not sola. There's an o there. Solo scriptura.

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The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that the theological formulations can be built up directly out of the

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Bible from scratch. Okay, this is probably what the whole conversation on Twitter started with,

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I would assume, and this gets us into solo scriptura versus sola scriptura.

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We were discussing that before the archives of The Dividing Line even began in 1998, because I think that book

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I contributed to on solo scriptura came out in earlier 90s, 96 maybe, 95, probably 96.

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And so there's so much that would need to be said here. There's a vast difference between saying that our theological formulations must be derived from that which is

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God -breathed, and that that makes the scripture the norma normata, the norm that norms all norms, and putting it this way, when it says without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks.

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We all have them. We all use them. The point is they have to be tested by scripture.

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He's saying that's impossible. That's part of this whole thing, is that's impossible. And I'm starting to wonder about a number of people in our own camp.

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They seem to think that's impossible as well, but this is probably where it came up, and then can be built up directly out of the

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Bible from scratch, as if we have to start over with each generation, which of course is not true. Internal harmony, all related passages, this is number seven by the way, all related passages of the

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Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single unified internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors.

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This is a simplistic mockery of what independent fundamentalists do that do have a very simplistic way of doing this, unfortunately, that you simply really can't do, because it's speaking a truth, but it's not speaking it accurately.

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It's not puzzle pieces, and the consistency of scripture in addressing divine realities is found in the myriad of ways in which divine truth is communicated.

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So you can have the Psalter, you can have poetic representation, then you can have that taken into direct didactic teaching on the part of Paul, for example.

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There's lots of different ways. It's much more nuanced than this almost mocking simplistic way that he's going.

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Universal applicability, what the biblical authors taught God's people at any point in history remains universally valid for all

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Christians at every other time unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching.

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Well, I'm glad that many sound theologians have down through the ages dug into this very issue as to how we make application of God's law, and the fact that it is the principles that need to be applied, not in this type of simplistic way, but it's principles that we then need to make application of.

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And finally, inductive method, all matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear biblical truths that it teaches.

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Again, I can just sense, and I know why this is, I'll explain it to you in a moment, the simplistic element here.

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What you need to understand is this man was a Wheaton grad, and Wheaton has become, just to be honest, the number of people that Wheaton has expelled out of either evangelicalism and into other traditions or simply out of the faith itself is,

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I mean, Irvin went to Wheaton. I remember hearing

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Wheaton being spoken of in positive terms by my parents, but that was 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago.

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Wheaton has just become a mess. Here's what makes all this fascinating.

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When I listen to this, I am hearing Patrick Madrid, Jerry Matitix, Jimmy Akin, Trent Horn.

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I'm hearing Roman Catholic apologists. These are the standard arguments against solo scriptura, scriptural sufficiency, and hence are considered to be default arguments for Roman Catholic tradition.

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I would point out they're actually equally valid in the other direction. I started trying to find out, well, what does

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Christian Smith believe? What church is he a member of? First, I ran into an article by Roger Olson, of all people.

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According to Roger Olson, after this book came out in 2012, within a few months,

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Christian Smith converted to Roman Catholicism. I then found a review of this book which said that the book came out after his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

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I'm not sure which one it is, but they're within one year. It was obvious to me as I started to read this, because you get to when

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I read the afterword and he says,

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I did not write the book as a consensus building exercise, at least in the short run. As the book itself argues, before any consensus around a better theory of scripture can be realized, a lot of deconstructive work is needed on the currently influential

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Biblicism. This is a man who is an enemy of Biblicism. That was central, obviously, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

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It just seems to me that I don't remember how many debates now we've done in Sola Scriptura, or how many times

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I've failed to get Roman Catholics to stand up and defend the other side, but I've come to the conclusion that a lot of, for example, my

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Reformed Baptist peers, elders, ministers, professors, who said, hey, go get them,

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James. You're doing great work on the Roman Catholics. Well, that was a great debate on the

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Sola Scriptura. I'm not sure how many people really understood what was being said, because, and I think this is one of the issues in debates.

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We hear what we want to hear. We hear what we want to hear. That means a lot of people are not hearing what the other side is saying.

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It really seems to me that a lot of Reformed folks don't really understand what

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Rome is saying on these subjects. As a result, if they're forced to actually deal with it,

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I think they really struggle to come up with meaningful responses, because they just haven't.

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They don't have the foundation, and I've certainly tried to give it. I've tried to explain and express it.

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It doesn't look like necessarily I've been successful in so doing.

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I've been in an RV park, and I just saw a two guys come riding up on bicycles.

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So, immediately, I started wondering, could they be more missionaries? Because they'll put more missionaries in some pretty weird places, but they somehow got those bicycles into a small car and just drove off.

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I'm not sure what was just going on there. You see really interesting things in RV parks.

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You really do. Oh, I imagine if I put a...

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I mean, I do have a camera on the back, but it's only for when I'm driving. I suppose if I had one that actually ran all the time, well, you could see some strange things going on in RV parks.

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Anyhow, speaking of which, I need to be...

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Please forgive me, but I am tremendously excited about what we're doing.

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I've got some great trips lined out this year. I'm looking forward to the debate with Jeff and I versus two people up in Salt Lake on is ethics and morality possible without God?

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Building a studio instead of sitting at a kitchen table.

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I try not to do that, but having a studio that direction, sleeping that direction,

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I'll make it work. I'm excited about it. I truly, truly am.

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I've never enjoyed being out in churches as much. I think it's just because I've gotten to that age where I was joking with some people.

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I've joked with a bunch of people recently because people come up and say, I've been listening to you forever.

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I'm like, I found you in 2017? I'm sitting here thinking about KXEG radio in the 1980s.

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We've been doing this a long time. We were so in that seed. What's exciting is we're seeing it springing up.

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There's a couple that came up to me. The mother especially is saying, he listens to you all the time.

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He's listened to all your debates. He listens to the dividing line all the time. There's a teenage young lady, beautiful young lady staying there.

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With that, because I couldn't help but think of Summer. When I debated

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Doug Wilson in 2004, the first time when Doug and I first met, Summer was in those teen years, that 14, 15 -year -old age where they know everything and are so sarcastic.

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Just some of the comments she made at that conference we had in Los Angeles, it stuck into my mind.

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The young lady looks at me and goes, your voice is one of my earliest memories.

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I've heard you my entire life. Now, I think that's awesome.

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I think that is absolutely fantastic. When I think of how we started with absolutely nothing and to run into folks you've never met before, but you're part of the family.

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I just think that is fantastic. We just want to keep doing that.

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Need your help? We've found the unit that we need.

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You can help us get it. Go to the donate page at aomin .org. I know this is like the second program in a row

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I've talked about a money thing. Well, it's a fundraiser. Got to do it. That's how we got this and we're trading this one in.

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That's why I'm taking very, very good care of it on this trip. Rich has threatened me to within an inch of my life.

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By the way, Rich, one of the last things a guy said as he was walking out the door in Tullahoma yesterday was, be nicer to Rich.

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I keep trying. That's not what it is. I don't need to be. We're trading this in, but we need everyone's help to put all this together so we can continue doing what we're doing here.

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Go to the donate page drop down menu. The bottom one is the

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AL Mobile Studio fundraising project, whatever it is we're calling it. That's how you can help us to start having an actual studio when we're doing the dividing line here and be able to have a screen here and show stuff and do all sorts of neat, fun, wonderful things without doing it at the kitchen table.

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When we first get it, I don't know how long it's going to take to make that studio.

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I don't know what we're going to run into because I don't know anyone has ever done anything like this before.

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Has anyone ever heard? I've never heard of it. It's pretty unique to come up with an idea like that.

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The first run I make with it, I may be sitting at kitchen table again, just in a different part of the

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RV. Who knows? It may bounce even more.

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Eventually, that's the goal is to have that studio put in there. We should definitely be able to do that by the

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May trip where we're going all over the place in Texas and all the way back to Georgia and stuff like that.

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Really appreciate everyone who's already donated to that. Thank you very, very much. We need to keep pressing forward.

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I need to mention that. Thank you very much for watching the program. I thought I might get done early and look what time it is.

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Nope, right at an hour. That's how it works. I may be asleep within about 35 minutes.

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It's quite possible. We'll see. Prayers for safe travel, keeping me awake.

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I'm going to be with Tom Buck tomorrow night in Lindale, Texas. Church there in Lindale tomorrow night on Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses.

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I'm not sure where I'll be Wednesday night or if I'll be anywhere at all, but I'm going to be in the Lindale area. Hopefully, I get to do something.

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Tomorrow night, Lindale, Texas. Make sure that get that in there right there at the end.

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Thanks for watching the program. Thanks, Rich, for making it possible. I will try to be nicer to you in the future. We'll talk to you next time.