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How's that? Well, thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen, for this busy midday debate. The start, really, of the 2010 DECERN Conference, and I hope you'll stay with us through the weekend. I would like to get started right away.
These gentlemen have been traveling and have two debates ahead of them, so let's get right to it. Dr. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Dr. White is a professor, having taught Greek, systematic theology, and various topics in the field of apologetics. He has authored or contributed to more than 20 books and is an accomplished debater, having engaged in more than 100 moderated public debates.
He's an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, has been married to Kelly for more than 28 years, and has two children, Joshua and Summer. And Dr. Robert St. Genes is the president of Catholic Apologetics International, an international evangelistic organization dedicated to teaching and defending the Catholic faith.
Since 1993, Dr. St. Genes has authored 12 books and hundreds of articles. He has appeared on various television programs and radio programs, including CNN, EWTN, and the BBC. He has advanced degrees in religion and theology and is presently enrolled for a second doctorate at Liverpool Hope University in England.
His master's degree comes from Westminster Theological Seminary and Philadelphia PA, making him very familiar with the positions of Dr. White and all Reformed thinkers. Now, the topic of this debate will not be everything you've ever wanted to know about soteriology.
This debate is specifically on predestination, and the resolution which Dr. White will defend is, the Bible does not teach that man has a free will to accept or reject the Christian faith. Now I'd like to lay out the debate format for you.
Each debater will give a 20-minute opening statement, back to back, then a 10-minute rebuttal each, back to back, followed by a 5-minute rebuttal to the rebuttal, back to back, followed by 15 minutes of Q &A, 15 minutes each asking, 15 minutes answering, then a 10-minute closing statement by each.
So the debater's task tonight is to keep the debate civil and on topic, mine is to keep it on time, and audience members, lend me your ears, I swear I'll give them back. Yours is to comply, please. We will not have questions from the audience, which is why we're giving them a half hour to question each other, and we implore you to not applaud until the very, very end of the debate, no amening, no heckling, no calling out, nothing of the sort, as that will be occasioned to be escorted out, so please heed the warning.
And with that, Dr. White, you're up.
I turned on my microphone so you could hear me perfectly, thank you very much. And that's even much better, I thought that was going to hit me. Good afternoon, it is good to be with you, this is an extremely important topic that we are addressing today, specifically the subject of salvation and the role of God's sovereignty and man's will therein.
I don't have time in 20 minutes to get into all of the issues we could get into. We need to recognize that fundamentally what we're going to be hearing today is a discussion of the contrast between monergism and synergism, the idea of one force that accomplishes God's will in salvation versus a synergistic cooperation of wills that brings about salvation.
I truly believe there is a vast difference between a theocentric reading of the scriptures and a theocentric understanding of the gospel, and that which is anthropocentric. If we start with God and His purposes, then our reading of the New Testament text, the biblical text, will lead us to an understanding of this truth.
There's also a difference between an accomplished view of redemption and a theoretical one. Did Jesus Christ simply die to make us savable, or did He actually save a particular people in union with Himself upon the cross?
These are some of the issues. Now you, the audience, we have to assume that you're already aware of what many of these issues are. We do not have time in 20 minutes to lay a groundwork. There's no time to outline Reformed versus Roman Catholic theology and soteriology.
Much of that will come out in the comments themselves. Our task is to debate the foundations this afternoon and hopefully bring you along with that. The thesis of the debate, the Bible does not teach that man has a free will to accept or reject the Christian faith.
That's a little bit of an odd statement because I am defending a negative. So let me express it as a positive. The Bible teaches that man's will is enslaved to sin, incapable of submitting to God's law, and dependent upon God's regenerating grace.
I believe that man is dead in sin, a slave to sin, until God by His Spirit frees him from that slavery as a part of the process of drawing his elect into Himself. But even that's a problem for me. Why?
Because it's focused on man. And I believe the Gospel is theocentric. I believe it's about what God is doing to glorify Himself. And so let me put it another way. The Bible teaches that God's will is free and perfect and is always accomplished to His honor and glory.
Now there are many, many people who will confess the divine truth of God's sovereignty. But that truth of God's sovereignty is no less true when it comes to man's salvation than the governance of the universe.
Many people are happy to have God in control of wars and nations and floods and tsunamis and earthquakes and things like that. But when it comes to the chief means by which He glorifies Himself and the salvation of a specific people, well, that's where we say, no, not that far.
God's will cannot overrule my will in that situation. And that's where the issue lies. The problem is the Bible is very, very clear. Look at Psalm 135 .6. Whatever Yahweh pleases, He does in heaven and on earth and the seas and all deeps.
Whatever Yahweh pleases, He does, not what we allow Him to do. And in Psalm 33, look at the contrast here. Yahweh brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of Yahweh stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations.
Notice, man intends to do things. Man plans things. God frustrates those. But the plans and intentions of His heart, He accomplishes those things. Even Nebuchadnezzar, the pagan king, understood that in Daniel chapter 4.
For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and He does according to His will among the hosts of the heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.
Notice, amongst the inhabitants of the earth. And none can stay His hand or say to Him, what have You done? Now, that's the exact same concept that Paul announced to the Ephesians when talking about the wrapping up of all things.
He talked about the God who, according to His purpose, who works all things after the counsel of His will, Ephesians 1 .11. That is the God of the Bible. What does all this have to do with man's will?
Well, it lays the foundation for our understanding of why salvation must be monergistic, why it has to be accomplished solely by God, not as something where He tries to cooperate with man's will. Because you see, man has a problem.
As Jesus Himself said in John 8 .34, Jesus answered them, truly, truly I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. Now slaves are not free. We have creaturely will. But even our creaturely will, not a autonomy, only God has a truly free will, but even our creaturely will is enslaved to sin.
Slaves do not have freedom. They have to be set free, which is what had offended the Jews when Jesus said these words in John chapter 8. He said, we've never been enslaved to anyone. And Jesus is explaining, well, most certainly you are.
You're enslaved to your own sin. This is exactly what Paul also taught in Romans chapter 8. Notice the words for those who are according to the flesh, that their minds and the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the spirit, the things of the spirit.
For the mindset on the flesh is death, but the mindset on the spirit is life and peace. Because the mindset on the flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.
And those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Now look very carefully at what it says. We're going to look at the text fairly closely. Notice what it says here. The minding or the thinking of the flesh is enmity, enemies of God, not neutral agents that can go one way or the other.
Anyone who is according to the flesh is the enemy of God, for they do not subject themselves to the law of God. Doesn't the law of God say, believe and repent? But those who are in the flesh can't do those things.
They will not subject themselves to that law, for they are not able to do so. Those who are in the flesh are not able to please God. They're not able to do what is pleasing to God. Now those are stark words, but those are the biblical words, and so much for the concept of the autonomy of the human will.
When the scriptures plainly say, those who are in the flesh are not able to please God. Well, what's the result then? Well, as the Apostle Paul said to the Ephesians, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working, and the sons of disobedience.
Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. That's where we all were at one point in time.
And what happened? Did we by our free will get ourselves out? No. What does it say? But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.
Notice, God is the one who has to bring us to spiritual life. By grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. These wonderful truths are then explicated in that great passage that we all know so well.
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. But think about it for a moment. When the apostle Paul said, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, what does that refer to?
Well, as you can see on the screen, the word that is in the neuter, tuta, and there is no neuter word in the preceding phrase. Chorus is feminine, sessus menoi is a masculine participle, pistos is feminine.
So what's it referring to? Well, that's a common way to use the neuter to wrap up the entirety of the preceding phrase. Everything, the grace, the salvation, and the faith, are the gifts of God. Well, why would faith have to be a gift of God if we have some autonomous free will?
Well, as Paul had already said in other places, in Ephesians 2, Romans 8, we are dead in sin. We do not have autonomous free will. That explains then why verse 10 says, for we are his poiema, his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God before ordained in order that we might walk in them.
There's the relationship. Good works flow from the fact that it is God who has created us in Christ Jesus unto good works that we might walk in them. Jesus couldn't have made it any plainer. In John chapter 6, he said, Jesus answered and said to them, do not grumble among yourselves.
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up on the last day. Now these words are so plain and yet many people because of their traditions do not hear what Jesus is saying or because their traditions turn upside down what Jesus is saying.
Let's look again very closely at the text. No one is able to come to me. The words are plain. No one has the ability, the capacity to come to me unless something happens. No one has the ability to come to me unless something happens.
And what is that? Unless the Father who sent me draws him and I will raise him on the last day. Please note, man does not have the natural capacity because he's a slave of sin of coming to Christ on his own.
He is dependent upon the drawing of the Father. But whom does the Father draw? Well, whoever is drawn is the one raised up on the last day. And to be raised up on the last day is to have eternal life.
If we had time to go through John chapter 6 and just walk through the text, you would see this repeated over and over and over again. Eternal life being raised up on the last day. And who is it then that is drawn by the Father to the Son?
Well, Jesus had already told us in verse 37 of the same chapter. All that the Father gives me will come to me. And the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out. Now listen to what Jesus says.
All which the Father gives me will come to me. Coming to Christ is an act of the human will. I have believed in Christ, but the question is why? And how can Jesus say all that the Father gives me will come to me?
If my will is autonomous, Jesus could never make these statements. But my will is not autonomous, the Father's is. All that the Father gives me will come to me. Which action comes first? The giving of the Father determines who comes to the Son.
And if coming to the Son is an act on the part of the human will, then clearly we have here the sovereignty of God and His will, man's creaturely will, freed from slavery to sin, made a new creature, comes to the one who has formed him.
The one he now loves, he comes in faith to Jesus Christ. The scriptures have so many testimonies to this. Luke just mentions it in passing in Acts 13 .48. When the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord.
And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed. It doesn't say as many as had appointed themselves. That would be a misunderstanding of the periphrastic construction. As many as had been appointed believed.
Not by their belief, they appointed themselves. And yet so many people's traditions turn that upside down. I truly believe if we will just listen to this beautiful passage from Titus chapter 2, we have a summary statement of what God is doing in the gospel.
Christians are described as those looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.
Do you hear how Paul summarized the gospel to Titus? We as believers are looking for something. We are looking for the appearing of the glory of the great God and Savior Christ Jesus. Both terms referring to Jesus Christ.
This is one of the early references, of course, in the New Testament to the deity of Christ. But listen to what Jesus has done. He gave himself for us, for a specific people, to redeem us from every lawless deed.
Not to make our redemption from every lawless deed a possibility. Not to put us in a situation where we might have to undergo suffering of atonement after death so as to bring about our own redemption from the punishments of lawless deeds.
He gave himself for us substitutionarily to redeem us, that was his purpose, from every lawless deed and to purify for what? For himself. You see folks, the gospel is theocentric. It's Christocentric because Christ is, of course, the incarnate God.
It is focused upon what the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has done in bringing about the glory of the Trinity. We are the very blessed people recipients of that work, but we are not the ones that determine whether that work is going to be accomplished or not.
God is the one who works in us both to will and to do according to his good pleasure, is the biblical phrase. And so he is working to purify for himself a people for his own possession and then notice when he's working within us, what's the result?
He's changed our nature. We are made new creatures in Christ and that new creature in Christ wants to do what? Wants to live consistently. Wants to live consistently with the one who has created him, redeemed him, loved him, and that is Jesus Christ.
So that's why we're zealous for good deeds, not to try to earn something, not to try to add to what Christ has done. The zeal that we have for doing what is good is due to what Christ has done within us.
And so hence we see clear and compelling biblical testimony that answers the question of the debate plainly. It is God, not the rebel sinner man, who has freedom in the matter of salvation. I believe in an autonomous free will.
It just happens to be free will. God's. I do not believe that rebel sinners who are at enmity with God, who are in rebellion against their creator, who with their every breath express their unwillingness to be submissive to him.
I do not believe that such a person can be described in any other words than spiritually dead, incapable, in able, slave to sin. If those words have any meaning, if those words they describe the joy that fills the redeemed's heart in recognizing, I did not choose him.
He chose me. And when, like Lazarus, we heard the voice, the son of God, calling us to spiritual life, we had no choice but to come forward. We weren't forced out of the grave. I hope we don't hear any use of the term force this evening.
It's very common. But can you imagine someone saying, ah, that Jesus, he was pretty mean to that Lazarus guy. He forced him out of his grave. That's an amazing thing, isn't it? But can you imagine if the son of God had stood before Lazarus's grave and said, Lazarus, come forth.
And Lazarus had said, no thanks. You don't know what it's like to live with those two sisters. Could the son of God have failed to glorify the father in the giving of life that day? I have actually had people who are so committed to the autonomy of the human will, the creaturely will, over God's will, that they've said yes.
Lazarus could have said no. Well, my friends, if you have been the recipient of the grace of God, there was a day when, by God's spirit, you were raised to spiritual life. You were given the gifts of faith and repentance.
As a result of your new nature, you ran to Christ. You believed in Christ. And the reason you continue to this day is because of what the spirit has done in you, because the faith that you have doesn't come from yourself.
It is the gift of God, as all of salvation is. So my friends, the gospel is thoroughly God-centered. The triune majesty is being glorified in the salvation of the elect. It is all about God, and those who are saved are the gracious recipients of unmerited favor.
That is the testimony of the scriptures. That is the testimony I desire to present this afternoon to you. Jesus Christ was entrusted by God the Father with the elect people. They were given to him. As Jesus said in John chapter 6, I've come down out of heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.
And this is the will of him who sent me, that of all that he has given me, I lose nothing but raise it up on the last day. My friends, I submit to you that for Jesus to be able to do the will of the Father for him, he must be a powerful and perfect Savior.
And it is my joy this afternoon to proclaim to you that Savior who is able to save. That is why he is called Emmanuel. That is why he is called Jesus. He will save his people from their sins. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. St. Janice, your 20-minute opening, please.
Thank you for inviting me to this debate today. I'm glad to be here. James and I have tussled about this topic for many years, as some of you probably know. We've had many debates together, and I always enjoy debating Dr. White.
And I want to thank you for your presentation, Dr. White. With that presentation, I'm tempted to actually skip my opening remarks because I have so many things I'd like to say about what Dr. White presented to you, but I will try to save that for my rebuttal.
So what I'm going to do is give you my version of the topic today, 20 minutes. What I want to do, first of all, is say what this debate is not about. I don't think this debate is about predestination per se, even though that's the title of it, since we both believe in predestination.
The doctrines of predestination did not start with John Calvin. They started with Jesus, Paul, the fathers of the church, and were confirmed at the Council of Orange of the Catholic Church by Pope St. Felix III in 529 A .D., specifically condemning the semi-Pelagians who believed that free will was not a product of or prompted by God's grace.
Canon 3 of the Council of Orange says, if anyone says that the grace of God can be bestowed by human invocation, but that the grace itself does not bring it to pass that it be invoked by us, let him be anathema.
Canon 4 of Orange says this, if anyone contends that in order that we may be cleansed from sin, God waits for our goodwill, but does not acknowledge that even the wish to be purged is produced in us through the infusion and operation of the Holy Spirit, he opposes the Holy Spirit.
Let him be anathema. These canons from Council of Orange are more or less repeated a thousand years later at the Council of Trent in 1563, another Catholic Council. So what is the difference between Calvin's brand of predestination and the Catholic Church's?
Calvin follows a long line of teachings that sought to make predestination absolute, that is, without including man's free will or even the grace to prompt the free will. The first to do so was Lucidus in the 5th century, then Gottschalk in the 9th century, then Wycliffe in the 14th century, then Luther and Calvin and Jensen and Zwingli in the 16th century.
Common to all these views was denial, the denial of a free will of man to accept or reject God, while the church still held on to the doctrines of predestination. Incidentally, Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church not because he taught against indulgences, but because he taught absolute predestination, that predestination did not include the free will of man to accept or reject God.
This debate, as all the others fought about the subject in the last 2 ,000 years, boils down to one issue, that is, in conjunction with predestination, does man have a free will to accept or reject God?
If man does have a free will, it denies the T of TULIP, total depravity, since total depravity claims man had no free will to choose for God after Adam sinned. It denies the U of TULIP, since the free will of man makes Calvin's unconditional election conditional on whether man uses his free will to choose for God.
It denies the L of TULIP, since free will opens salvation up to anyone in the world who chooses for God, not just a limited few that God selects arbitrarily. It denies the I of TULIP, since free will allows man to resist God's grace and choose not to be saved.
It denies the P of TULIP, since the free will of man allows him to fall away from God's grace if he so chooses to do. So, this debate is about whether the Bible teaches that man after Adam has a free will to accept or reject God for salvation, a free will that works in conjunction with predestination, not against it, not a free will that works against predestination.
Why? Because the Bible teaches both, that's why. The Bible teaches both predestination and free will. And it all leads back to the essence of who God is, which is very complicated and hard to understand and is virtually incomprehensible.
Is God free or determined? Is He a unity or a diversity? Is He one or many? Is He moved or unmoved? These are all questions philosophers and theologians have struggled with for thousands of years. Or, are all of these divergent categories some way all in God that we don't understand?
Well, I'm here to tell you that predestination and free will work together. We may not understand how they do, but the Bible insists that they do. Dr. White believes predestination can, indeed, work with man's free will because he believes Adam, before he sinned, had a free will to accept or reject God, even though God obviously had the salvation program predestined before Adam made his choice.
What this debate is not about, this debate is not about making it appear that those who believe in free will think that it is because of something special in them, that they chose God or that they were better or smarter than other people who didn't choose for God.
It is simply about obeying God by using the power of grace that God gives us to decide to obey God by avoiding sin and helping others to do the same. If not, then the same I think I'm special argument can be used against the Calvinist, since he thinks God picked him to be saved over the rest of the human race and that nothing he does here on earth, no matter how heinous his sin, could ever jeopardize his election.
This debate is not about a personal view of predestination versus an impersonal view, wherein the personal view claims that because it sees God as choosing people, whereas the impersonal view sees Him choosing only a plan of salvation.
No, the correct view of predestination is both individual and universal. That is, God picks each person individually and He also decrees the universal plan and execution of how His choosing will be manifested.
The main difference between me and Dr. White, however, is that Dr. White believes God does the choosing without regard to man's free will. This debate is not about monergism versus synergism, one of Dr. White's favorite ways of characterizing his opponents.
Since the word synergism usually carries with it the picture of a hodgepodge of ideas all mixed together. This debate is about whether man has a free will to accept or reject God, period. If you want to talk about synergistic ideas, one only need look at the details of Calvinism itself.
There are supralapsarians, infralapsarians, intralapsarians, those who believe in the permissive will or the secret will or the revealed will or the general call versus the special call or the general election versus the special election.
On and on and on, the distinctions go. And this is what happens when you don't have the truth. You begin to make distinctions ad infinitum to cover your tracks. This debate is not about theopocentric versus anthropocentric views of salvation, although Dr. White has often cast the debate in those terms to give the impression that his view is about God and what He desires, whereas his opponent's view is about man who ignores what God desires.
No, the view that is theopocentric, if we want to use that term, is only the correct view, not the view that says that any participation of man's free will in salvation somehow taints the purity of either God or salvation.
If the view that says only God determines and man's free will has no participation in salvation is not correct, is not in Scripture, then it doesn't matter how we may advertise it as theopocentric. It is either anthropocentric or possibly even diabolopocentric.
If God Himself commands that man participate in salvation by exercising his free will to accept or reject God, then any view of salvation that excludes man's free will is heretical, pure, and simple, and thus it is not honoring God in the slightest, but dishonoring Him.
I submit to you that it is also a dishonor to God by the way in which Dr. White and fellow Reformed theologians defend their view of absolute predestination when they say that God elects certain people to salvation because He wants to display His merciful qualities, but He decides to bypass others and judge them for their sins because He wants to display His justice against evil.
This is a highly insecure and arbitrary God, is He not? What kind of God would choose to save some and allow others to remain damned just to show how merciful and just He is? Doesn't He already know how merciful and just He is?
What does He need to decide to save some purely from an arbitrary decision since all of them are equally guilty for their sins just to show that He is just? This is not the God of Scripture, a God who needs human beings to prove who He is.
No, the God of Scripture damns humans because the humans refuse to use their free will that God gave them to accept God for who He is, and then God has no choice but to damn them because He is just. Since the debate is about whether the Bible teaches whether man has a free will in accepting or rejecting Christ, let's look at some of those passages.
There are passages that teach that God wants to save all men. 1 Timothy 2, verses 3 and 4 says, God our Savior who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. The Greek for all men here is pathanthropos and literally means all men.
This is supported by the context in verse 1 which tells us to pray for all men. Paul says, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings be made on behalf of all men. This is the same Greek word, pathanthropos.
Notice it doesn't say, I want you to pray for all kinds of men. He says, I want you to pray for all men. Why would we not pray for all men? Do we select individuals whom we want to pray for? Are we going to determine who is worthy of our prayers and who is not?
This whole thing is also supported in verse 6 of the same passage which says, Christ Jesus who gave himself as a ransom for all. Where in the words for all are the Greek huperpanton and referred to all the people in view with no limitation.
Or are we going to say that Christ did not die for all people? Here is where Calvinism has a severe problem. Since the only way they can fit all men into their belief of absolute predestination with no free will is to say that all men does not mean all men in the world, but only those who are predestined.
So Dr. White and John Calvin would retranslate 1 Timothy 2 .4 in the Calvinistic paraphrased Bible to say God desires all kinds of men to be saved. In other words, the God of Calvinism doesn't want all men to be saved.
He doesn't want them to repent of their sins. And he really doesn't want them to stop their evil because God intends on using their evil to glorify himself when he judges them at the end of time. By the same token, Dr. White and John Calvin would also have a severe problem with verse 6 referenced to Christ being the ransom for all since their theology says that Christ is only a ransom for a limited few, hence a limited atonement.
In spite of what Paul explicitly teaches, Dr. White is forced to say that Christ cannot be a ransom for all because Dr. White believes in his view of absolute predestination without free will that Christ neither wanted to save all men nor became a ransom for all men and did this precisely because he wanted to display how just he was.
Tell me, how fair and just is it to arbitrarily bypass saving the rest of the needy human race when it is no more work to save them than it is for the ones already saved? We would call a man who had the power to save all the people from a sinking ship quite a monster if he arbitrarily decided to save only a small portion of them and deliberately allowed the majority to drown simply because he wanted to show he had the power to be merciful to some but not merciful to others.
Who would want to live with such a capricious self-centered and unfeeling being? And that's why Martin Luther said, yes, it takes a great amount of faith to believe that God chooses some and damns others for reasons only he knows and nothing to do with what the man has done.
Wouldn't God get the same or possibly even more glory if he saved the whole human race rather than just a small portion of it, if we want to be logical here? On Dr. White's homepage of his website, in bold letters, his banner says, the gospel is ours to proclaim not to edit.
But that's exactly what he does with 1 Timothy 2 .4. He edits it by injecting the word kinds to make it say God desires to save all kinds of men so that it fits with his preconceived theology. Dr. White is fond of taking passages that speak of predestination at face value and in meticulous literal detail.
But when it comes to passages that speak about free will or God's desire to save all men, suddenly Dr. White refuses to take those passages at face value and seeks to add or take away words or concepts so that they fit into his preconceived theology about God's sovereignty or theopocentric salvation or all kinds of words that he uses.
But the Catholic Church says no. We interpret each scripture at face value and do not try to force it into a preconceived idea. That's why paragraph 600 of the Catholic Catechism says this, to God all moments of time are present in their immediacy.
When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of predestination he includes in it each person's free response to his grace. That's why I came back to the Roman Catholic Church after being a Protestant for 18 years because I saw that the Roman Catholic Church was the only church that would look at all of the scripture and not choose a set of scriptures to overwhelm another set of scriptures but try to balance all of the scriptures to give one solid truth.
So when the Catholic Church reads 1 Timothy 2, 4 -6 or even 1 John 2, verse 1, which says Christ is a propitiation not only for our sins but for the sins of the whole world, we take it literally and hold that Christ did propitiate God for the sins of the whole world just as the passage says.
And so apparently when Paul in Ephesians 1 .11 said these words, also we have obtained an inheritance being predestined according to his purpose who works all things after the counsel of his will. The counsel of God includes the free will of man and how man will use it both before Adam and after Adam.
It can work no other way. Otherwise we divest scripture of all the passages that say each man has the power to accept or reject God by the mere invitation that God gives him. There are other passages that talk about free will as well.
Matthew 23 .37, Jesus says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling.
John 5 .39 says, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. It is these that testify about me and you are unwilling to come to me so that you may have life. And as a matter of fact, this verse I just read prefaces the chapter in verse or the verses in chapter six in which Jesus says, all that the Father gives to me will come to me.
Well, previous to that, Jesus had already told us that they were the ones who refused. That's why God was not going to give them to Jesus, obviously. Of course, we can isolate that from chapter five, but that's not how we are to exegete scripture.
And the last passage I'll give you is 2 Timothy chapter two, verses 10 to 13. Paul says, for this reason, I endure all things for the sake of those who are chosen. Those are the predestined, the elect.
I do these things for their sake, that they also may obtain the salvation, which is in Christ Jesus and with an eternal glory. But notice the caveat. It is a trustworthy statement. For if we died with him, we shall also live with him.
If we endure, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he also will deny us. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. So here we have Paul talking about the very elect, and yet he says about those very elect, if we deny him, he will also deny us.
So we see how the Bible consistently joins the elect, the predestined, and never opposes that to man's free will. Never are they made mutually exclusive. They are always joined together. And it takes careful exegesis to do that.
And let's hope that we can do that the remainder of this evening.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. St. Genes. Dr. White, your ten-minute rebuttal, please.
Predestination is definitely personal. God's choice is of us. Ephesians chapter 1 makes it very clear. He chose us, not an impersonal group. It is personal pronouns that are the direct object of what he does there.
It is personal. Upon what basis does God choose individuals? Ephesians chapter 1 says it's on the basis of the good purpose of his will. We can trust that God's purpose is always good. This isn't about synergism.
Yes, my friends, it is about synergism. It is about the idea that God makes salvation possible if we will cooperate. He wants to have it happen, but unless we cooperate, it won't happen. That is synergism.
That is the difference between theocentric and anthropocentric views. One view is that God is glorifying himself, and you just heard that view denied. The other view is that God is making salvation possible to man.
We are told that it's a highly insecure and arbitrary God who would desire to display all of his attributes. Why? We are told this is not the God of Scripture, and yet how many people were delivered through the sea, the Red Sea?
Was it only the people of Israel? Who died in the Red Sea? Wasn't it the Egyptians? When the offerings were made of sacrifice in the temple, who were they for? Were they for the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians?
No, they were only for those who drew near to worship, didn't even include all the Jewish people who didn't draw near to worship. Clearly, that is the God of Scripture if we will just look at that. 1 Timothy 2 .4, one of the big three.
1 Timothy 2 .4, I was surprised we didn't get 2 Peter 3 .9. Entire chapter on the subject in the Potter's Freedom I would direct you to, but what was fascinating is that the exact point in the context that tells us that Paul is talking about all kinds of men didn't get read.
You got a point in front of it and behind it. Notice what was said. Yes, we are to give prayers for all men, dash, dash, dash, though kings and those in authority. What are those? Those are kinds of men.
The very context defines it and goes on, of course, talking about ransom for all men. Who does Jesus Christ intercede for? Did the high priest intercede for the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and others?
No, he only interceded for those for whom he made the sacrifice. Who does Jesus Christ intercede for in heaven today according to the book of Hebrews? Those for whom he made his sacrifice. There is a vast difference between God's revealed will, which says, do not kill, do not murder, in his law, and his decree.
We see this, for example, in Genesis chapter 50 when Joseph recognizes that the sins that his brothers did in selling him into slavery were a part of God's purpose. He can look at his brothers and say, you intended it for evil, God intended it for good.
Same action, evil on the part of the men who did it because that's what's in their heart, pure on the part of God because that's what is in his heart, the same action. How fair, we were asked, is it? How fair and just is it for God to bypass anyone?
Folks, salvation is not a matter of fairness and justice. Any person who knows your own heart, you don't want fairness and justice because you know what you're going to get if you get fairness and justice.
Mercy and grace is free. It cannot be demanded. Think about it. How could God have had any freedom whatsoever? If God saves everyone, that's one option. God saves no one is another option, or God saves some.
In which one is God free? In which one can God demonstrate his wrath? Evidently, Dr. St. Genes does not believe that God would want to do that, except in Romans chapter 9 in the inspired scriptures, it is specifically said that God desires to demonstrate his holiness and justice and power.
It's right there in the pages of scripture. How fair and just is it? It is absolutely fair and just that God would judge any fallen son or daughter of Adam. What is not fair or just is that he, in the person of the second person of the trinity, his son, would give his life so as to redeem a particular undeserving people?
And they're not just undeserving, they are deserving of his wrath. Did you notice the example that was used? And most of you are going, well, it sounds just like what the Arminians argue. Well, it is.
The sinking ship. What about someone who wouldn't save people from a sinking ship? Folks, that's not biblical. Did you hear Romans 8? Romans 8 says those who are according to the flesh are what? Innocent people who just want to get saved?
No, they are the enemies of God. The real picture, if you want to see the real picture, would be for a king who comes to his castle and he finds that his rebel servants have taken over. They're burning the castle down.
They've killed his servants. And yet he sends his son into the burning castle to save some of those rebel sinners. And he has to give his life in the process of so doing. Now you have an idea. But the idea of some poor, innocent people, wouldn't it be best if God saved them too?
They don't want to be saved. They love their sin and will continue in their sin. And when they end up in hell, will continue to love their sin even there. So completely different perspective. And I would say not a biblical perspective at all.
We were told that we Catholics take all verses at face value. Um, we will see a little bit later on in a second debate, is that verses like Luke 1 28 and Kekar to Mene? Uh, or maybe the face value that Jesus Christ's death is once for all, and that it actually perfects those for whom it is made.
I don't think that that is the case at all. And as we've seen in first Timothy 2, that's not taking it at face value to ignore when the context itself tells you we're talking about kinds of men. That's not adding to scripture.
Look at first Timothy, look at Titus through both of those texts. You have older men, younger men, slaves. You have all sorts of groups addressed. That's just simply allowing context to speak for itself.
We had Matthew 23 37 quoted. Matthew 23 37 has nothing to do about God's desiring to save everybody. Matthew 23 37 is a judgment passage on the Jewish leaders. And if you'll just read it in its context, you will see that what Jesus is saying is how often would I have gathered your children together?
Jewish leaders, how often I've gathered your children, you're in authority over them, but you would not. What he's saying is you've stood in the way of God's purpose, and that's why God's judgment is going to come upon you.
There is nothing here about the people that God was trying to gather somehow successfully resisting him. That is a misuse and a very common, unfortunately, misuse of the text. The same with John 5 39.
Yes, men do not desire to follow after God's truth until God by his grace changes their hearts. But there is nothing in this that changes the context of John chapter 6. There is nowhere you can go, well, John 5 39, you see, that tells you that the ones that the father gives the son or those that he's foreseen will come to him.
That's turning the text on its head. We believe what John 5 39 says. You will not until that miracle of regeneration takes place. You will not. But you'll notice how many texts I brought forward that talked about the inability of man.
You cannot do these things. So why are we reading other texts and ignoring the cannot texts? That's not treating scripture as a whole. Then we had 1 Timothy 2, and I love 1 Timothy 2 9. Paul says he endures all things for the sake of the elect.
He knew there was an elect. He didn't know their identity. But he knew that wherever he preached the gospel, he was never wasting his time because God has his people everywhere. That's what gives boldness and proclamation.
But it was emphasized, if you endure, yes, indeed, if you endure, I believe what Jesus said, he who endures the end shall be saved. No question about it. But it's not my endurance that saves me. You see, this is where the whole debate this evening is.
I want to slow down and make sure you hear this. Hear those words, he who endures to the end shall be saved. There's two ways of understanding that. Sadly, the way of the world, the way of the man's religions, the way of the traditions of men is to read that by your endurance, you guarantee your salvation.
That's the prescriptive way. Here is a prescription. Here's something you need to do. I suggest to you, I proclaim to you that the only consistent way to read such texts is to see them as descriptive.
I will endure to the end because the faith I have is a divine faith granted as a gift from God. It's describing the people of God, not creating the people of God. Notice Jesus or Paul even says the only time that there is an issue in 1 Timothy 2, if we deny him, and I say to you, none of God's elect can ever deny him.
But even if we are faithless, he remains faithful. My endurance is due to the fact that God is glorifying himself. Jesus never fails to bring about the salvation of his people. That's the will of the Father for him, and he never fails to do it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. St. Janus, 10-minute rebuttal, please.
Well, James, let me comment on a few assertions you made. You were talking about the sinking ship, and you said God won't save the whole sinking ship because they are rebel sinners who don't want to be saved.
But according to you, Dr. White, that's the condition of everyone in the world. No one wants to be saved, and that's why God needs to move them. So how is this rationale that you've created here that God's not going to save most of these sinners on the ship because they don't want to be saved if the ones he's already saved from the ship also didn't want to be saved, and God moved them to be saved?
Your explanation doesn't make any sense. I think you heard it here yourself, folks. He says that he who endures to the end shall be saved is a demonstrative. It's not a warning. And so what Dr. White has essentially done is empty the Scripture of all its warnings, all its admonitions, all its pleadings with men not to fall.
As a matter of fact, the very passage that he had pointed to earlier in Romans 8, Paul gives a pleading right there in Romans 8, verse 13. He says, for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die, but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Is that not a warning to the very people in the context of this passage that Dr. White used for his predestination? This is what happens when you go off the track and you make predestination absolute, then you empty the Scripture of all admonition.
It just becomes statements of fact now. I'm going to go back to the original statements that Dr. White made. He says, man is dependent on God's regenerative spirit in the opening remarks that he made.
Well, of course. Who would disagree with that? I don't disagree with that. I do not believe in Mr. White's title called the autonomous free will. No one who believes in free will, who at least believes it from the Scripture, believes that it's autonomous.
Autonomous means it works by itself without the power of God. No, we can't have the power of even free will unless God gives it to us as a gift and gives us the power to use that free will. This is what the Council of Orange was all about.
This is why I condemn semi-Pelagianism because they said, no, our free will is autonomous. He says God's will is always perfect and always accomplished. Well, I agree. When did I ever say or the Catholic Church ever say that God's will was imperfect or that things that he has planned will not be accomplished?
No. We're just saying that in order to make it perfect, to see it accomplished, he includes man's free will. He pointed to Psalm 135 verse 6 and he says that, yes, God can override anything about man.
But does the passage there talk about overriding man's free will? No, not at all. It just makes a general statement that God can override. But God's going to use his discretion about what he's going to override.
If he has given man a free will, obviously, he's not going to override that. Otherwise, he'd be contradicting himself. This is how you can pick out passages of Scripture totally out of context and give the impression to people that, oh, this supports my truth without really examining what the passage is saying.
It's saying nothing about this topic we're talking about tonight. Of course, God can override things. Nobody's arguing about that. What we're arguing about is whether man has a free will or not. And if Dr. Wake can show us a passage of Scripture that says man has no free will, then he wins the argument.
But unless he does so, he fails. He says, you know, God doesn't, you know, God plans all things out and if he just won 11, counsel of his will, of course he does. But where does that deny man's free will as part of God's counsel?
Nowhere. He talks about us being slaves and not free. And Dr. Wake continually does this. He distorts these metaphors in Scripture and makes doctrine out of metaphors. And what he does is he takes the slave metaphor or the dead in sin metaphor or many other metaphors and he says, well, this means that we have no choice for God.
We don't have an autonomous free will, but it's not talking about that. And you look up Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 6, it doesn't say anything about free will or man not having the power to choose. It just talks about him being dead in his sins.
He's dead in his sins. Everybody agrees with that. He's dead in sins. Well, he doesn't tell him how he's going to get out of that. It doesn't say that, well, it means that he can't use his free will. Yes, God uses his grace.
The passage talks about God's grace. But where does it deny that man has a free will to work with God's grace? Nowhere. So, Dr. Way constantly distorts these metaphors in his own favor. And he talks about all these things in Ephesians 2 being gifts of God.
Faith is a gift of God. The works are a gift of God. Well, of course they are. Who would disagree with that? But where does that deny free will? We're the ones that are saying that my free will is a gift of God.
My faith is a gift of God. And it's a gift of God because it allows me to take the responsibility for my sin. God has prompted me to answer yes to Him. And if I answer no, it's not God's fault. And besides the impression that's been given to you tonight, it doesn't mean that God has somehow failed.
No, God has already taken into account the people that will not accept Him. He's already made that a part of His perfect plan. So, He's not failing because someone decides they're not going to come to Him.
No, God has it all planned out. He knows the end from the beginning. But that end from the beginning also includes man's free will. In John 6 .44, Dr. Way talked about man does not have the natural capacity to come to Christ.
Well, I don't disagree with that. But neither I nor the Catholic Church have ever talked about a natural capacity of man to do that. No, we've talked about God giving man a free will as a gift and prompting him, as the Council of Orange said, to use his free will to come.
Pay very attention to the words that Dr. White is using. Autonomous free will, natural capacity. No, we don't believe these things either. He talked about John 6 .37, all that the Father gives to me. He says, if my will is autonomous, Jesus could never make that statement.
That's right. That's right. I agree with him. Well, who's talking about an autonomous will? No, we're talking about a will as a gift of God that's given to us by God to respond by the power of God. And does Jesus say how these people come to Jesus?
All He says is, all that the Father gives to me will come to me. That's all He says. He doesn't talk about predestination. He doesn't talk about free will. He just says, all that the Father gives to me will come to me.
Dr. White, because he's programmed by his Calvinistic theology to see it in this verse, thinks that Jesus is saying that it's only the Father's choice. Nobody has a free will. Nobody's deciding. It's all the Father.
Just because Jesus says, all that the Father gives to me shall come to me. That's called reading into Scripture what you want to see, because it doesn't say that. All it says is that all that the Father gives.
Does it say how the Father obtained these people? No. But Dr. White assumes that it's all God's choice and nothing to do with man. Let's say that I asked you people, who here wants to come to me with a trip to Europe and I'll pay all your expenses?
Who would like to do that? Anybody? Okay. Yeah, we have a few hands here. Okay. Will all of you please come up on the stage? Don't please, don't come up. But if you did come up, then I'd have maybe a group of 10 people.
Okay. And then I'd say, okay, Dr. White, I'm going to give all these people to you. All 10 of you. You can have them all. Okay. But how did I get you? I asked you if you wanted to go. Same thing. That's very possible here in John 6, 37.
You see, but Dr. White has already excluded that from the text, because that's the way his theology has forced him to read the passage. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, Dr. St. Genes. Dr. White, five-minute rebuttal, please.
Okay. Five minutes. Not a lot of time. I think what I was saying about the ship analogy was fairly straightforward. And that is the problem with the ship analogy is that you have people who want to be saved, and God's a big, mean, bad God if He doesn't save them.
The ship analogy is not biblical. There is no one splashing around the water saying, save me. They are rebels against God going against God, spitting in His face. That's the whole point. There is nothing unjust about God allowing rebels who hate Him to remain in their sin.
The wonder is that He took any of us and changed us. He says He's emptied the Scripture of all warnings. No, the warnings are the method that God used for us to hear His voice. That's what they're there for.
We hear them. Since we have spiritual life, we obey. They do, however, also increase the guiltiness of those who spit in God's face. Just take a little trip over to San Francisco or, sadly, in our own area around here to see how people like to spit in the face of God's warnings in the Scripture.
There is a misunderstanding of the term autonomous here. When I'm talking about an autonomous free will, I'm talking about a free will that acts outside of God's decree determining its action. And I think that's what Dr. St. Janus was talking about.
He needs to clarify that. He said, if Dr. White can show us a verse that says that no man, that a man does not have free will, he wins. I gave you a just one of them, and that is Romans chapter 8. Once again, listen to the words, because the mind, son, and the flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.
There it is. It is not able to do so. There you go. You can talk about prevenient grace all you want. You can have a good time trying to find that term in the New Testament. It's not there, but the fact of the matter is that outside of God's grace, and it's the salvific grace, man is not able to subject himself to the law of God.
Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Now, it's being said, well, yes, but God's grace comes along and makes you able to do so, and then you can get to choose one way or the other. Where does Paul say that?
Where does the Scripture say that? I'd like to see that. Very, very common. It just simply isn't a biblical teaching. He said that I've read into John 644 because of my Calvinistic programming. Well, there are two backgrounds up here right now, and obviously, from my perspective, what we're seeing is the eisegesis that results from fidelity to Roman Catholicism and its claims.
I just simply let you choose to see that. I let you see that by the argumentation. The fact of the matter is, though, that what Dr. St. Genes has ignored in his comments on John 6 is that Jesus is explaining the unbelief of people.
He's looking at Jews and saying, yet you are unbelievers, and then he explains why they're unbelievers, because they have not been given to him by the Father. That's why they will not come to him. And remember, at the end of John 6, everybody but the 12 walk away, and Jesus doesn't go after them and say, oh, you misunderstood.
No, Jesus knows what's in the hearts of men. And so I'm not reading anything into John 644 because he says, well, it's just simply saying this. Folks, think about something. What does John 644 say? No man is able to come unto me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and what?
I will raise him up on the last day. What does that mean? That's receiving salvation. We are talking about who is and who is not going to receive salvation here. And the one who receives salvation is the individual who is given by the Father to the Son.
The action of giving precedes that of coming. The position being said here, well, we don't know what the basis of this giving is. Yes, we do. Ephesians 1 .6, the good intention of his own will. It's right there.
But the point is that our action flows from that divine sovereignty. And so I'm not reading anything into John 644. May I suggest that Dr. Stogenes is reading out of John 644 the tremendous meaning that it carries when we follow the argument through point by point and allow the terms to define themselves.
And so once again, what does Romans 8 tell us? It tells us that no man is able to do what is pleasing to God. Any meaningful definition of free will would say that man is capable of doing so. Therefore, on the basis of Dr. Stogenes' own statement, the debate is decided by that text.
Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. Stogenes, five-minute rebuttal, please.
Okay, let's go back to the ship analogy. Dr. White, I never said that there are some who want to be saved. That was the whole point of the ship analogy is nobody's saying on the ship, I want to be saved.
The whole reason I brought up the analogy of the ship was to put the onus on the God that you believe in who is looking at all these people on the ship and says, okay, I'll take these people. They haven't given me any indication they want to be saved.
I am not going to take these people. And the reason I'm going to do so is because I want to show that I am merciful by saving these people. And I want to show that I'm just by not saving these people.
It had nothing to do with what anybody on the ship was saying. Nobody was raising their hand saying, I want to be saved. I want to be saved. No. The whole reason I gave the analogy was to show the absurdity of the position you're presenting that God in His sovereignty who decides I'm going to save them and not save them out of some arbitrary decision that has nothing to do with what the people are saying or who they are.
They're all sinners. They're all equally guilty. Now, he says that some people in San Francisco spit at God. Well, of course they do. People have been spitting at God in every city of the world. But does that mean that God is going to take away their free will or that God doesn't desire that they be saved or He doesn't want them to repent of their sin anymore?
No. Who hasn't spat in God's face to one degree or another? What does that have to do with anything? And he says that, he keeps referring to Romans 8 and he says that these people don't have the ability to do so.
Well, I've already agreed to that. I've already said that man by himself has no power unless prompted by God's grace. That was the whole reason I brought up the Council of Orange. It was a big heresy in the church because there were a lot of men saying that, that they had their own ability and the church said no.
But where do I get that from? He asked me for a passage of scripture. Well, I'll use the same one he used, Philippians 2 .13. It is God who works in us to do His will and His good pleasure. It tells us right there that God gives us the power.
And if you read the rest of that chapter, it'll also tell you all the things that you're required to do after God works in you to do His good will and pleasure. It doesn't stop there as if the button is pushed that God's going to now work and all we have to do is sit back and watch God move us.
No. The whole chapter there, the whole book of Philippians is about what you're going to do now, what's your responsibility now that you know God's giving you the power to do it, now that you know that if you try to do something good, it's not futile because God's going to help you to do it.
You see, Dr. White's theology empties half of Philippians of those admonitions, those warnings, those encouragements because to him it's just automatic. Salvation is just automatic. And so now no matter what he does in his life or anybody else who's of the Reformed theology, it doesn't matter anymore.
The button's already been pushed. What do you have to worry about? Well, I'm sorry, that's not the God of Scripture. You know in your own reading of Scripture that's not true. I've read Scripture for 35 years and I just don't get that message, not at all.
What I get is a God who warns me constantly. I may think I'm floating real high, but he constantly warns me, brother, you can fall. Every book in the New Testament warns us that we can fall from our salvation.
Do not get high and mighty, he says. I just read that to you in 2 Timothy 2, verses 10 to 13. He talks to the elect and then he says if you deny him, he will deny you. You see, Dr. White doesn't like to deal with those passages, you see.
Only those ones that talk about predestination that he reads into, like Ephesians 1, 6, he says, well, that's the basis for how Jesus is saying that they're going to come to me. Well, where does Ephesians 1, 6 deny free will?
All it talks about is God's predestination, his counsel. Where does it say that God did not include free will in that counsel? Nowhere. I've already agreed to the fact that God predestinates, that God has all things all planned out.
What I'm waiting for from Dr. White is to show us where scripture says that there is no free will. And metaphors about being dead in sin are not going to prove it because the context doesn't show it. The time is up.
Thank you, Dr. St. Janus. We now come to the cross-examination portion of the debate. We will begin with Dr. White posing a one-minute question to which Dr. St. Janus will answer for two minutes, followed by another question from Dr. White, which will continue that way for 15 minutes.
My first question then, since I need to make them fairly long questions, because you have two minutes to respond to, is based on Romans chapter 9. When the apostle Paul says, what shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there?
May it never be. For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I'll have compassion on whom I have compassion. Could you explain what the apostle is saying in verse 15 of Romans chapter 9, in light of your statement, in your opening statement, where you, in essence, accused Reformed people of having an insecure God who you would not want to be around.
You expressed a real strong dislike for the freedom of choice that God has. Could you explain Romans 9 .15 in light of your statements?
Sure. Romans 9 .15, which says, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion, is a quote taken from Exodus 33 .19. So if you go back, you'll read that passage, Exodus 33 .19, God says to Moses, I myself will make all my goodness pass before you and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.
And then he goes on to tell Moses that you cannot see my face and live, so I'm going to put you in the cleft of the rock and I'm going to pass by, you can see my back parts. If you look at the context of Exodus 33, and actually you can go back to Exodus 32, it's a story about the Israelites who worship the golden calf and God is just about to destroy them and Moses pleads with God in Exodus 32 and asks him not to destroy Israel and he says, you know, what are we going to do to explain to all the Egyptians?
You took them out here in the desert and you destroy them right away and what about your promise to Abraham? And he's pleading and Deuteronomy 9 .5 tells us that Moses actually fasted for 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain to appease God.
And then in verse 14 it says God changed his mind and decided not to destroy the Israelites. Then in Exodus 33, how much time do I have? A minute, a minute and a half. Exodus 33, God says he's not going to go with the Israelites through the desert and Moses pleads with him again.
He says, will you please go with us? And God says, okay, for you, Moses, because I love you and you are my friend, I will go with you. He changed his mind again. And in verse 11 it says that Moses was the friend of God, saw God face to face, you see.
So what the passage is telling us here is that God does not just arbitrarily have mercy on someone just to have mercy, not some just Joe off the street here, well I'll have mercy on you but I'm. And God had mercy on the Israelites because Moses appeased him and Moses was a very humble, righteous man that God listened to as he did with Job and Noah and all kinds of people like that.
And that's why God had mercy. I will have mercy because I decide to have mercy because you appeased me, you asked me out of your humility to accept these people again and I did. So it was not arbitrary at all.
It was because Moses did what was necessary to appease the wrath of God.
In light of the interpretation you just gave of the Exodus 33 text as being used here by Paul in Romans 9 .15, could you explain why it is that what you just said, and that is that this was based upon Moses' appeasing of God, why it is that Paul interprets that text in verse 16 as, so then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs but on God who has mercy.
Because he had.
Mercy on the Israelites because of what Moses did. It's not because of what the Israelites did. It's not how they ran. It's not what they will. They were all in sin. They were worshiping a golden calf.
It was because God had mercy because Moses appeased him. So if that's the case, then why does.
Paul then conclude by saying in verse 18, so then he has mercy on whom he desires and he hardens whom he desires. Does this all go back to Moses' act of appeasing God? Well, you've entered into.
Another phase of Paul's argument. Now he's talking about Pharaoh. And this passage in Pharaoh that talks about hardening comes from Exodus chapter 9 and Exodus chapter 10. And if you read those passages, what you'll find is in Exodus 9 verse 35, it says, and Pharaoh's heart was hardened and he did not let the sons of Israel go just as the Lord had spoken through Moses.
Okay. The verse before that says, but when Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned again and hardened his heart, he and his servants. So you have a double action here.
First you have Pharaoh hardening his heart. Then God is reacting to Pharaoh hardening his heart and God hardens his heart even more. Then in verse 10 or chapter 10 verse 1, it says, then the Lord said to Moses, go to Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may perform these signs of mine among them.
But the fact is in 934, Moses or Pharaoh himself had already hardened his heart. So you have to read these things in context to know what Paul is saying.
So if those interpretations are true to where you have this constant emphasis upon, well, it's what Moses did. It's what Pharaoh did and God's responding to them. Why then does Paul raise the objection in verse 19, you will say to me then, why does he still find fault for who resists his will?
And then he provides the answer. On the contrary, who are you, oh man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say the mold or why did you make me like this, will it?
Because the natural reaction would be, well, why is God hardening Pharaoh's heart? Why is God taking the prerogative after Pharaoh hardened his own heart to God to harden his heart also? Well, that's God's prerogative.
That's not the question though. The question is, did God harden Pharaoh's heart arbitrarily because God just says, well, you know, I'm going to harden your heart, Pharaoh. No, the context tells us that Pharaoh hardened his heart first, then God came in and hardened his heart.
So the question would be, well, does God have the right to do that? Does God have the right to reaffirm the hardening of Pharaoh's heart once Pharaoh hardened his own heart? Well, apparently it does. God does.
I have no argument with that. God can do that and he has every right to do that because Pharaoh hardened his heart in the first place. So it seems like the entirety.
Of your answer is based on this idea that will Pharaoh harden his heart first, therefore God can do anything after that. Why is it that before Moses stepped foot in Egypt, as he was going there, God told Moses, I will harden Pharaoh's heart.
He said he would harden Pharaoh's heart before Pharaoh ever saw Moses standing in front of him. Because God can predict the future.
He's just prophesying to Moses what's going to happen. And then it finally happened. And then we have the explanation of what happened in Exodus 9 and 10. So when he said, I will harden.
Pharaoh's heart, he was acting on his foreknowledge that what he was really saying is Pharaoh will harden his own heart and therefore I will harden his heart afterward. That's what the text says. That's what the text says.
Okay. Specifically, before I go to Romans 8, all of this interpretation in Romans 9 was based on what Moses did, what Pharaoh did, mankind's activities being prior and God's responding to them. Yet, if we start back at Romans 9, beginning at verse 10, it says, and not only this, but there was Rebecca also when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac, for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad so that God's purpose according to his choice would stand, not because of works, but because of him who calls, it was said to her, the older will serve the younger.
Isn't that the context that then determines that it's not man's actions, it's not man's running, it's not man's will, it's God's calling and God's choice that is primary?
Well, you have to first interpret the passage you just quoted before you go on and use that as a basis for interpreting the rest of the passage that we've already looked at. So in my answer, what I'm going to do is exegete that passage for you.
The Jews throughout Paul's discourse in Romans have been shown to be people that want to get to God by their works. And already in verse 32 of chapter 9, it says that, well, verse 31, but Israel pursuing a law of righteousness did not arrive at that law.
Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone. So they were working for their salvation, okay? So in order to prove to them that you can't work for your salvation, he has to take them back to a situation where it's impossible for two people to work, namely Jacob and Esau in the womb.
This is going to prove Paul's argument. It proves this argument because God chose Esau to serve Jacob before they could do anything good or bad. What does that tell us? Does it say that God predestined Esau to hell and predestined Jacob to heaven?
No, it doesn't say that. All it says is that the older will serve the younger. It doesn't say anything about who's being chosen to heaven or hell here. And as it turned out, Esau did serve Jacob. Jacob was given the inheritance and Esau was not.
So that's the context of the passage here. It's talking about Paul's teaching about the fact that we cannot work for our salvation, uses Jacob and Esau, and then he goes on to develop the decisions of God based on what certain men have done to show that God's in complete control.
But this control does not mean that man is not making decisions as God is in control. That's the whole reason we're having this debate today.
Is it, well in light of what you just said, I was about to go to another text, but is it your belief that the Reformed position is that men don't make decisions?
No. My position is that the Reformed faith says that after Adam sinned, man does not have a free will to accept or reject God. And they will not accept that stipulation even if you say that the free will of man after Adam is given the power to make the decision by the power of God, by God's grace.
They still won't accept it. And this is the reason I'm complaining about absolute predestination because it absolutely precludes any kind of rationale for man making a decision, whether it's by grace or whatever.
Autonomous, you know, you just take the whole category and you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I would agree with you that, you know, I don't want an autonomous free will either because we're not semi-Pelagian.
We're not Pelagian or semi-Pelagian. But we're certainly not going to get ourselves in deep water with the rest of Scripture and find ourselves contorting all these passages that He who endures to the end shall be saved is just a demonstrative and all the other passages talk about warning and admonition and say, well, they really don't mean what you think they mean, even though they sound like they mean that because we've already decided that man can't have a free will.
You see, you solve one problem, but you create a whole other set of problems when you do that.
When the Apostle Paul said, those who are in the flesh cannot please God, why is this not a statement? Well, let me back up. It says, speaking of the mind, the flesh is hostile toward God for it does not subject itself to the law of God for it's not even able to do so.
And those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Why does Paul talk about the inability of the fleshly mind by saying it is not able to subject itself to the law of God if, in fact, every human being does have the capacity due to, however you define free will, to turn and repent?
Would that not be subjecting itself to the law of God which says to turn and repent?
No. What he's talking about here is if you, using your free will, decide I am going to go against God and I'm going to do things my way, like the Jews were doing. We just read in the next chapter, chapter nine, where the Jews are living by the flesh.
They are saying to God, well, you know, I really don't need to go through what God says, let me just try to do it by my own flesh. And that's why Paul complains in verse 32 about them trying to get to heaven by their works, because that's flesh.
That's saying to God, I can do something for myself to attain my salvation. Paul says, no, you can't do that. You're in bondage if you do that. Same thing he says in Galatians, chapter five, when he talks about the Jews using circumcision.
He says, if you do that, you're condemned. You're anathema. You can't get to God by the flesh. You can only get to him by grace. If you try to get to heaven by the circumcision, let me just read that because I think it's apropos here.
Galatians chapter five, verse one, it was for freedom, is my time up? It was for freedom that Christ set us free. Therefore, keep standing firm and do not subject again to the yoke of slavery. There you have it.
Behold, I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, he is under obligation to keep the whole law.
You have been severed from Christ. You are seeking to be justified by law. You have fallen from grace. But we through the spirit by faith are waiting for the hope of righteousness. And this is the same spirit that Paul talks about Romans chapter eight.
Okay. Dr. St. Genes, 15 minutes. Dr. White, my questions are going to be rather short, so you can answer as long as you want, but I didn't plan on having one minute questions. Dr. White, do you believe Adam had a free will to accept or reject God?
Well, the problem with Adam's will is that we don't know anything about it. He is created and he falls in the very next chapter. There is no discussion of the nature of his will. There's no discussion of anything.
Theologians have obviously recognized that there would not be a sin nature involved, but the nature of Adam's will is a matter of speculation that the scriptures themselves never ever raise, never make as a foundation for any argumentation about God's justice or anything along those lines.
And so the distinction I think that is somewhat useful that Augustine introduced is the difference between someone who has the possibility of sin and someone who does not have the possibility of sin to differentiate between Adam who is made perfectly, but in a state where it is possible for him to sin in comparison with the glorified saints in heaven who will be in a position where they are no longer in a…they will be perfected, but they will not be in a position where it would be possible for them to sin.
That's where a distinction has been raised, but the fact of the matter is we have almost no biblical revelation whatsoever to go on to give any meaningful answer as to the nature of Adam's will.
Okay, if I said to you that Augustine says this in the Admonition and Grace, but because Adam was of his free choice untrue to God, he experienced the just judgment of God so that he was condemned with his whole progeny.
Would you agree with that statement or not? Sure. Okay, so here he uses free choice. So let me ask you again. Do you believe Adam had a free will.
To accept or reject God or not? Well, since Augustine himself makes differentiation between free choice and the different natures of will in regards to an unfallen man or redeemed man, the term free will has to be defined.
We've not had any biblical texts that use the term free will because it's not a biblical phrase other than the phrase free will offerings, which just mean offerings under the law that are not demanded for sin.
And so as I have from the beginning, I have been functioning on the definition of free will for mankind being a creaturely will, and Adam would be the only one, Eve as well, who for a brief period of time was not a slave to sin.
Everyone else who is born of the lineage of Adam outside, of course, the person of Jesus Christ who is himself free of original sin. Anyone else who comes from his lineage is a slave of sin from the time of their conception.
And so I believe in a creaturely will, but that man's creaturely will is enslaved to sin. Adam's will would not have been enslaved to sin at the point of the time of his fall in the way that ours is. That's not the same as an autonomous will, which is possessed.
Only by God. All right. Augustine says this also, certain angels, the leader of whom is he that is called the devil, have by their own free choice been made outcast from the Lord God. And then I want to read this one again to you.
But because Adam was of his free choice, untrue to God, he experienced the just judgment of God. So do you believe Adam had a free choice to accept.
Or reject God? If you mean free choice as in Adam was not forced by external forces against his desire, then yes. But as Edwards, I think, was quite right to point out in his treatise on the freedom of the will, the will decides based upon the desires that are presented to it by a person's nature.
We can't tell what Adam's nature was outside of saying that there was no sin, but there was no perfection in him that would keep him from having an evil desire, which evidently he did, which led to his fall.
I do affirm and have to affirm, and I think everyone has to affirm unless you're an open theist, that not only did God have knowledge of what Adam was going to do, but if God's knowledge of the future is based upon his decree, then it was a part of God's decree.
So are you saying then that God decreed that Adam sinned? God decreed the fall as well as everything else takes place in time, yes. Okay, so you're saying God decreed the fall. Could you explain what you mean by decreed?
What does that mean for us? Well, as I said at the beginning of.
My presentation, Yahweh does whatever he pleases in the heavens and the earth. As the creator of all things, he determines the very shape of time itself, as in the book of Isaiah, where he very strongly emphasizes that his creatorship and his sovereignty are related to one another.
He knows the beginning from the end, not passively. It's not like God is standing outside the realm of time, and he goes, oh, wow, that's really interesting what happens in creation, and now he has perfect knowledge.
I do not believe that that is the nature of God's knowledge. The reason God's knowledge is certain of all future events is because he has decreed all of creation, which includes all of time and what takes place in time.
God is not subject to time, but he does not passively take in knowledge of future events. He does so actively on the basis of his decree.
Okay, what I'm trying to get at here, and bear with me, is what you mean by decree, and I'm not done with my question yet. I believe that God decrees things also. I'm just trying to figure out what you believe by the word decree.
You've put the adjective or the adverb actively decrees into the formula as opposed to passively waiting. So my question then would be, are you saying to us that God actively decreed that Adam sin such that Adam really has no free choice, as we understand that term normally, but that Adam was, things were set up such that Adam was going to sin?
Can you explain that to us? I mean, I'm just trying to figure out where you're.
Coming from. God's decree includes the means by which he accomplishes his decree, which includes the decisions of men. We have three clear indications of this, well we have many more, but three that I will very briefly mention.
Genesis chapter 50, which I mentioned to you, Joseph recognizes that in the actions of his brothers there was hatred on their part and evil on their part, but good on God's part. One action, God decreed it happen, and yet the brothers are justly judged for acting upon the basis of their desires.
Isaiah chapter 10 describes the destruction of the Assyrian people, and God says he brings Assyria against Israel to judge them, that he's bringing them, and yet he then turns around and judges the haughty heart of the Assyrian king because of what fills his heart.
And of course we have the clearest indication, and that is the prayer of the early church in Acts chapter 4, where they confess, they know that Pontius Pilate, Herod, the Romans, and the Jewish people had gathered together against his holy servant Jesus.
Now there's four different groups with four different completely different sets of motivations. Herod's a nut, Pilate's a coward, the Jews hate Jesus because he's exposed them, and the Romans just kill people for the fun of it at times.
And so you have four different groups, and yet what does Acts 4 .28 say? To do what your hand predestined to occur. And so very clearly the means by which God's decree is accomplished, which includes the decisions that men make, are included in the decree, or you'd have to say that the cross itself could not have been something that was certain, and yet Jesus is described, at least in one translation, it's an appropriate translation, as the lamb slain from the foundation of the earth.
How could that be, if there was uncertainty as to what was going to happen in the future? There isn't uncertainty, not because God passively takes in knowledge, but because God's decree includes even the actions of men in time, which would include Adam as well.
Okay, so you have said, correct me if I got this wrong, but you have said God's decree includes the decisions of men. Yes. Okay, so you then principally would have no objection saying that God's decree and free choice of men can work together.
Would that be correct? Well, when you.
Say free choice, I refer, of course, to creaturely will. And yes, man's creaturely will, this is what's called compatibilism. It is compatible that God has a decree and that man is held accountable for.
His decisions. Yes. Okay, all right, thank you. Does God call the whole human race to repentance?
Yes, God calls all men everywhere to repent. That's Acts chapter 17. Okay, does God give.
Only certain people the ability to repent? Yes, his elect. Okay. Dr. White, just talking to you as a man, a man who I hope in your life as well as mine, we try to be fair and honest and as best we can with human beings and with God and ourselves.
Does it seem odd to you that God would call people to repentance without giving them the ability to repent? No, sir, it does not. Why not? Because we're.
Talking about people who are condemned sinners and the extension of mercy and grace to rebels who hate God, who are at enmity with him, who are called God haters, who spit upon his law, whose hearts are filled with every kind of venom.
I feel like reading Romans 1 and 3 just simply to remind us of the true nature of man. The extension of mercy and grace to those individuals has to be absolutely free on God's part. It cannot be demanded.
And so the command of God to all men everywhere to repent is a part of his revealed will. God's will in the law says, thou shalt not kill. And yet God's decree was that Jesus should die upon the cross.
We have to allow all of those texts to stand together and to recognize the difference between his revealed will and that of his decree. And so, no, it does not strike me at odd at all that God would use his law, as he has so many times in the past, to curb men's evil, to control men's evil.
And yet the only ones in whose ears those commands become alive are those in whose heart the spirit of God brings spiritual life. Otherwise, as Romans 8 says, they do not subject themselves to the law of God because they are not even able to do so.
I desire to subject myself to the law of God. Why? Solely one word,.
Grace. Okay, thank you. Dr. White, you said that, I said, doesn't it strike you as odd that God would not give certain people the ability to repent? You said no. And then you went on to explain, and correct me if I get this wrong, but you said something to the effect of them being these dirty, rotten, scoundrel people who hate God, who spit on God, who all kinds of adjectives like that.
I think I got the gist of what you said. But isn't that the case of everyone in the world? I mean, you've made a distinction between certain kinds of people, which you said that these people, the dirty, rotten scoundrels, God's not going to save.
Okay, but then that leaves this other group, which, by the implication of what you just said, implies that these are somehow not dirty, rotten scoundrels. And yet scripture says that there is none righteous, no, not one.
So my question to you again is, if all of these people are dirty, rotten scoundrels, none righteous, no, not one, doesn't it seem odd to you that God would only give a certain amount of these dirty, rotten scoundrels the ability to repent and not the others?
I have been very,.
Very clear for decades in all of my writing on this subject. All men are described in Romans 1 and Romans 3 as haters of God. Grace must be free. You're asking why don't I feel that it's odd that God, in His freedom, regenerates and gives the gift of faith and repentance to certain people.
And I say the only thing that's odd about that is that God would save anybody. But the fact that He does save is not odd at all. He has revealed that He will have mercy upon whom He has mercy, and He will harden whom He will harden.
Those who are hardened are simply receiving justice from God. Those that He mercies are receiving from Him something that they not only don't deserve, they de-deserve it. They deserve punishment. They get grace.
They get mercy. That's what's amazing. So no, I would in no way, shape, or form, and have fought for a long time against anyone who would say that the reason that some are given the gifts of faith and repentance is because they're better than others.
No. The sole basis upon which God's choice is made is the good pleasure of His own will, Ephesians chapter 1. That's why some are predestined. That's why some receive the grace of Christ even before eternity itself God chooses to do this.
Why does He do this? He does this solely on the basis of His own will, not on the basis of anything found in the creature. That's what unconditional election is all about. And while Dr. Syngenis in the opening statement said, see, this is against unconditional election, I'm not sure that this shows an understanding of.
What unconditional election actually is. We have how long? One more question. Okay. Does he have time to answer my question? Actually, 15 minutes is up, but that's okay. Yeah, and my clock says 32 seconds.
Okay, let's cut it here then. What? Let's cut it here then. Cut it here? Well, I wanted to ask him one more question. Go ahead. That's why I was asking you how much more time we have. Go ahead. All right.
We've covered it. That's fine. He's stated his position. I stated mine.
That's fine. All right, thank you. Okay, Dr. White will now present a 10-minute closing statement.
Thank you all very much for being here this afternoon. I am somewhat concerned that terminology has become somewhat muddled in the course of our conversation. So let me try to just clarify and make sure that we understand where the issues are here.
I believe that God has an autonomous will. Autonomous means self-law. And so an autonomous will is one that is not under any controlling influences. I believe that God was absolutely free in his choice to create, and I believe he's absolutely free in his choice to save.
And I believe that he chose an eternity to glorify himself as the salvation of a specific elect people. And I have given you numerous texts that have noted this, even though the focus was supposed to be upon the nature of free will.
And I have then demonstrated that the Bible is very, very clear and says that man does not have the capacity in and of himself to choose God because he is a rebel sinner. He hates God. And therefore, if he is going to believe and repent, God must move first.
Now what has happened is we've had an unbiblical, we've had two unbiblical phrases put in. First of all, we've not seen a single word, a single verse that talks about free will because there aren't any.
The only verses that talk about free will talk about a free will offering, which just simply means an offering you can choose to offer that is not demanded by the sins that you've committed. But there is no text that talks about man's free will anywhere.
That's why you haven't heard it. What you have heard are numerous texts about the enslavement of man's will, man's incapacities and abilities in comparison to Christ and God's abilities. Christ is able to save the uttermost, Hebrews chapter 7.
He is able to do the Father's will, while man is not able to come to Him unless the Father who sent Him draws him. Now here's where the terminology problem has come in. It's because we've had a concept introduced, it's not biblical, it's called prevenient grace.
You won't find that either. It's a theological term that comes along later in church history. But it's the idea that God, by His grace, removes at least some of the corruption of sin and brings you to a moral neutral point where now you can choose freely.
Nothing in the scripture has been pointed to that actually teaches this, of course, because the drawing of the Father in John 6 .44 results infallibly in the resurrection to eternal life of those who are drawn.
All who are drawn in John 6 .44 are raised up to eternal life. So that can't be prevenient grace. And if prevenient grace does exist, then why do you have to have the kind of saving grace found in John 6 .44 where the Father draws people to the Son and they are the ones who are raised up on the last day?
No, there is no such thing as a grace that tries but fails. God's grace is always powerful. And so while we have had discussions about, well, yes, we all believe in the necessity of grace, folks, the Reformation was not about the necessity of grace.
I join with Dr. St. Genes in being somewhat amazed at how many people on both sides of the Tiber River are ignorant about what in the world was going on in the past. A lot of people on his side don't know what's going on.
A lot of people on my side don't either. And I hear evangelicals getting all excited. I've heard evangelical leaders get all excited because they go, wow, I just read that the Council of Trent said that if you say you could be saved apart from God's grace, you're anathema.
Well, duh. I thought we all knew about that. The issue of the Reformation has never been the necessity of grace. Both sides agree grace is necessary. Folks, even the Mormons think grace is necessary, for crying out loud.
The Reformation was about a different word. And this debate was about a different word, sufficiency. Is God's grace sufficient in and of itself to save? Or can God, by His grace, try to save and fail to save?
That's the question. I say God's grace is absolutely sufficient. Sola gratia. Not just that grace is necessary, but that grace alone saves. That's why I started talking about monergism, God-centeredness, et cetera, et cetera.
That God has decreed from eternity to save a specific people, and He does so. That explains why I said what I said about Jesus' words. And I just don't get any evidence. The Doctress and Genesis, though he is a very intelligent man, though he went to Westminster Seminary, though I might point out in his own statement, his own testimony, he said he didn't believe what they were teaching him there on these things.
He fought against his professors there. It's not like he once held these things. He fought against them at that point. But I don't get the feeling that he understands the difference between prescriptive and descriptive.
Because he says, well, you just turn them into statements. No, they're descriptions of God's effective work by His Spirit amongst His people. God's people persevere. Their faith endures to the end. But I cannot look at...
I found out about someone who was once someone I would consider a good friend who has now completely abandoned the faith. Do I have any basis to look at that person and say, well, I'm sure glad that I've persevered.
My faith must have been better than yours. No. The reason that I persevere in the faith is because the faith that is mine is a gift from God. It is His work in me. This is why Jesus does not fail to save any of those the Father has given to Him.
He has the ability to make my faith persevere. That's why it's a description, because God's glorifying Himself in it. And did you notice that text in Timothy? If we are faithless, He remains faithful still for He cannot deny Himself.
How can that be? Because He's bringing about our salvation. So, oh, but if we deny Him, I say to you, no person indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God who says, Jesus is Lord, will ever deny Him. The great sin of 1 John 2 that drove the people out, they went out to show they were not truly of us was what?
Deny who Jesus Christ was. To deny who Jesus Christ was is to demonstrate you have never ever been in Him. That's the point of Hebrews 6, Hebrews 10, and all sorts of those other texts as well. And so, the thesis that I was to defend is that man does not have free will to accept or reject Christianity.
And the reason I believe that is because it is God who is glorifying Himself in the salvation of a specific people. And if He leaves that up to us, He is not going to be glorified in the perfect work of His Son in our behalf.
Basically, I believe this because I'm a Trinitarian. And you might go, well, wait a minute, Dr. St. Janus is a Trinitarian too. Yes, that's true. We believe the Trinity for different reasons. The source is different for the two of us.
However, I believe the gospel is Trinitarian. It flows from the decree of the Father. It's established in the perfect work of the Son. Incarnation, perfect life and obedience to the Father, death, burial, resurrection, ascension.
Now at the right hand of the Father as an intercessor, a mediator. His one work representing those that are united with Him and from the Holy Spirit who comes and makes these things real in our lives, in our hearts, at the time that God decrees to do so.
It's Trinitarian. And the Spirit and the Son and the Father, their work cannot be destroyed by the almighty will of man. So here's the question that needs to be asked this evening. I would ask Dr. St. Janus this question, maybe he can answer in his closing statement.
Does God, given that he quoted 1 Timothy 2 .4, is it his perspective that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit desire to save every single individual and have put out equal effort to save every individual, but the reason that a large portion of those individuals are not saved is because their will prevented the triune God from glorifying himself in their salvation?
There's the question. I wish I had asked it, but I don't get to ask it now. But maybe we'll get an answer anyways. Because to me, that illustrates what the whole thing is about. Is God trying to save?
Has the Father decreed to save every person? The Son died to save every person? The Spirit's trying to save every person equally? And yet the thing that makes the difference is the will of man? There's the issue between synergism and monergism, God-centeredness and man-centeredness.
And that's what we've been discussing this evening. Thank you.
For your attention. Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. St. Janus, 10-minute closing please.
All right, let me see if I can answer that last question first. If I remember correctly, if I wrote it down correctly, Dr. White's conclusion from 1 Timothy 2 .4 was, is it possible that their will, the Trinitarian will, will be prevented, or their will be prevented, the triune God from glorifying himself, if some of these people decide not to respond to God's willing of them?
Well, Dr. White, aren't you the one who says that God is glorified in people that are unsaved? Isn't that the position of the Reformed faith, that God is glorified in both the people that he saves and the people that he damns arbitrarily?
So why do you begrudge me the same, that God is still glorified when men refuse to accept the call of God with the free will he's given them? God is glorified. The triune God is not unglorified by the unrepentance of man.
He's glorified in all things because God's not dependent on us for his glory. That's the whole point I was trying to make earlier. You see, God doesn't have to create human beings and say, well, I'm going to save some and damn others just to show how merciful and how just I am.
As I said in the beginning, doesn't God already know how merciful and just he is? Is this the reason why he's created us, so he can advertise to us, I'm merciful and just? This is absurd. When you get right down to it, it's absurd.
Now, let me have my closing statements here. As I said before, the history of this debate is nothing new. It's been going on for 2 ,000 years. I've mentioned Lucidus, Gottschalk, Wycliffe, Luther. The church shot these down because they became too extreme.
Yes, the Bible talks about predestination. Yes, the Bible talks about free will. But if you go too far to one side, too far to the other, you've gone off the track. Yes, we know it's hard to understand.
Who can understand it? Who can understand the Trinity? Who can understand the incarnation that Jesus is 100 God and 100 man? Who can understand that? Likewise, we can't understand how you can have predestination and free will at the same time.
I don't. I don't pretend to understand it. All I know is if I'm going to be faithful to Scripture and tradition and what other men have said before in councils, this is what I accept because that's what it tells me.
We find that Luther disagreed with Calvin. Calvin disagreed with Luther. One said that Luther said that faith came before regeneration. Calvin said, no, regeneration comes before faith. So they had a big split right from the get-go.
Melanchthon came along, the protege of Luther, and rejected Luther's absolute predestination and re-injected free will into the salvation program. And so did the formula of Concord. One generation, hardly one generation, he was actually not that much older, or Luther was not that much older than Melanchthon, and they already had problems with it.
Then Jacob Arminius comes along and he rejects outright, within a few years, the five points of Calvinism. And then we have divisions within them. We have one-point Calvinists, two-point Calvinists, three points, four points, and five-point Calvinists, all disagreeing with one another.
Then we have Huldrych Zwingli going the total opposite direction and now becoming more extreme than Calvin ever was, and saying, yes, I know that my doctrine ends up making God the sinless, quote, sinless author of sin, unquote.
That's where you end up. If you take everything to its logical conclusion, you end up there. Then we have all the moderns, Hodge, Murray, Sproul, MacArthur, Carson, Geisler, Bonson, you go on and on and on, and they each have their different wrinkles.
They each have their different facets of how they're going to explain this dilemma for us. And you know what ends up to be? It ends up to be a total mess. That's what it ends up to be. Everybody fighting one another, nobody knowing what the exact truth is.
Everybody takes their favorite verses. Here's a whole set of verses that talk about this and a whole set of verses that seem to talk about the opposite. And I'll be the first to admit that scripture is like that, at least on the surface, at least on a cursory view, but it's like that.
And so we have men taking a whole set of verses and making a whole denomination of it. And then the verses that disagree with them, they put them on the shelf or ignore them or minimize them or, you know, whatever they do with them.
And then we have somebody else come along and take those whole set of verses that they minimize and make them the pinnacle of their denomination. And they make these other ones that talk about something opposite, not their favorite.
Well, let me quote from a famous Protestant. His name is Sinclair Ferguson. He says, the genius of Rome, unlike that of Wittenberg in Geneva. And when he says Wittenberg in Geneva, he's talking about Luther and Calvin.
The genius of Rome, unlike that of Wittenberg in Geneva, has always been its ability to hold opposite tendencies together. Unquote. That comes from Sola Scriptura, the Protestant position on the Bible, page 191.
Yes, that's exactly the truth. He's got it. He nailed it. They hold opposite things from the Bible in tension. Why? Because they know the Bible teaches both. They don't know how to explain it to you. They can tell you what you can't say because they don't want you to go off the track.
When they dealt with the Trinity, for example, you know, we had Sibyllians, we had Modalists, we had Tritarians, we had Patropassianism, we had all kinds of people who were trying to understand this complicated being three in one and one in three.
And the church really didn't know how to explain it to you. And they still don't today. But they can tell you what you can't say, you see. And the same thing with predestination and free will. They can tell you what you can't say.
You can't take the predestination passages and say, well, there's no free will of man. And they will disagree with Jacob Arminius just as strongly and say you can't take the free will passages and say there's no predestination.
Yes, Dr. White is correct. There's no text that uses the word free will. But there are texts that say choose, repent, stop sinning, don't fall away. You know, the Bible doesn't use the word Trinity either.
We've all heard that argument, right? Okay. So I mean, I don't have to use the word free will to get the concept across. I mean, when you read Hebrews chapter six, and it says, you know, those who have tasted the heavenly gift of God, you know, they've walked the pathway with us.
They've done all this for them to fall away. It's impossible to renew them to repentance. What are we going to do with that passage? We're just going to say, oh, well, that's just a statement. That's just a sort of after the fact kind of thing.
No, this is a warning. This is a warning. Use your free will. Okay. Yes, God's giving you the grace, but use your free will. And we can't base our theology on metaphors. Okay. We can't say that because Paul says we're dead in sins, that means we have no free will.
No, it's a metaphor. Look at the context of what he's saying there. He says being dead in sins means you're sinful and you're on your way to hell. That's what it means dead in sins. You know, Dr. White talked about using Lazarus as an example.
Lazarus, you know, wasn't forced. Yeah, he wasn't forced, but I could use the example of the prodigal son. You know, in that parable, Jesus uses the word dead also because the father says, here, my son was dead and now he's alive.
But wasn't it the prodigal son that walked his way back the pathway to the father and the father came and embraced him? Yeah. Well, he used his free will, didn't he? Okay. So, I could use that passage too to prove my doctrine if I wanted to, but I'm not going to because it's a parable.
It's like I'm not going to use Lazarus to prove the fact that, you know, man has no free will. Lazarus, that story is talking about physical death. It's not talking about spiritual death. Granted, the man's dead in a tomb.
You see, the only way it can be brought out is if Jesus raises him from the dead, but that's not how the Bible talks about our spiritual plight. Okay. Dr. White also had another question. He says, is God's grace sufficient?
Implying that if we hold a view that denies man has the free choice to accept or reject God, somehow God's grace isn't sufficient. You see what Dr. White has done? He's asked the question the Bible doesn't ask.
Does the Bible ask that question? Is God's grace sufficient? See, what Dr. White is trying to imply to you by the question, it's called leading the witness. If you were in a trial, it would be called leading the witness, making you believe that if you believe a certain way, well, you're making the grace of God insufficient.
No, not at all. Sufficient for what would be the question. Okay. Sufficient for what? Well, Dr. Whitestream of mine is sufficient for how he believes things should turn out, how he believes the Bible should be interpreted.
If it doesn't reach that level, then it's insufficient for him. See, my time is up.
Thank you. Well done, gentlemen. Thank you very much.
