Responses to Online Interactions, More on the LDS Priesthood and Authority Claims

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We're back here in Phoenix, Arizona, where it's going to be 105 degrees on Monday, which is pretty normal for this time of year.

Finally, it was 105 degrees a month and a half ago. That was what was weird. That set all new records in March, but it's cooled off since then.

Man, the past few days have just been gorgeous. Really has been. Doors open and, you know, just, just beautiful, but it's starting to warm up and that's absolutely natural.

Has to happen when you live in the Sonoran Desert, where we are going to have a massive drought and water shortage all summer.

I personally predict the closure of pools and of golf courses. There's no way.

There is absolutely no way to keep those golf, those, those things are unnatural.

Okay, they do not belong in the desert. All right. They're unnatural. They may be pretty, but not, they're going to be gone.

Maybe, maybe the one they play, some of the big tournaments on out there in Scottsdale. Maybe they'll keep that one going, but I think pools are going to close everything.

It's going to be ugly here in the desert Southwest, unless we get a massive amount of rain, unless we have a huge monsoon season.

It's, it's going to be bad. But anyway, want to get to a few things here.

Just a reminder, the next program, Lord willing, on Tuesday, will be coming to you from,

I think, where am

I going to be? Am I going to be in Albuquerque? I think I might be in Albuquerque. Yeah, that sounds about right. I think that's where I'll be.

No, no. I might already be in Lubbock by then. Anyways, I won't be here. We will be in the mobile studio on the road,

Lord willing, and looking forward to that. Got some new pictures to hang up in the background. No, no flashy lights, and Rich really appreciates there are no flashy lights in the background.

He's very, very happy about that. But we will be in the mobile studio and on the road,

Lord willing, I've got a, I think, yeah, this will be the first time.

Yeah, this will be the first run with the new RV up to Flagstaff. And if you've driven

I -17 northbound from Phoenix, you know that there are some very, very long hills between here and there.

You climb from 1 ,200 feet to over 7 ,000 feet. And you do half the climb.

Then you dive back down. And then you climb back up. So you do a lot of climbing on that route.

No two ways about it. And so that'll be a little bit of a test for the new unit and the new truck.

But I don't think it's going to have any problems with it at all. It's an amazing vehicle and an amazing

RV. So looking forward to that. And then we'll be in Lubbock, Texas.

And then Las Cruces, New Mexico. And getting to meet some new folks.

And then just got confirmation that we will be sort of changing our route just a slight bit in July up in Colorado to visit

Grand Junction. Haven't visited there before. Haven't done anything in Grand Junction in the past. And got connected up with a church there.

Love getting connected up with new churches. Get to get to know folks. At the very least, encourage them. One of the most exciting things for me is when

I go back to a place I've been before and I meet people who came to that church for the first time because I came through,

I visited, and now they're members of the church. So that meant the church grew. There you go.

I can speak English. And I've heard that story over and over and over again.

And it's just exciting to see. So we're going to be going up through Delores and then

Grand Junction and then over to Denver, then down to Colorado Springs. It'll be a clockwise loop through Colorado, basically, coming this summer.

So that'll be it. And then this trip and then that trip, that's all. Because after that is truly a debate.

And then we'll see what we put together for probably November. Before it gets super, super, super cold, we'll put something together.

Not doing St. Charles anymore. So those of you who are accustomed to that, that first weekend in December, don't show up at their doorstep.

Because after 25 years, I decided to put them out of their misery and help them to find out that there are far better speakers out there that know a whole lot more than I do.

And we'll go from there. Okay, a couple things here to get to before we get back to Ali Bestaki and Jacob Hansen.

First, in response to Dale Partridge, I responded to some of his

Christless nationalism stuff. And again, for those of you saying, Oh, you just shouldn't be so mean.

No, when you promote what you call Christian nationalism, while abandoning what we call the

Puritan hope, which is the outpouring of the Spirit of God, that changes a nation or a culture through the conversion of a large portion of its population, so that they're seeking

God's Torah, as Isaiah put it. We've talked about the text before.

When you abandon that part, which has been abandoned in the

Christless nationalism, that's sacralism. That is the sacral state.

That is top -down. That's nominalism. We've already done that in Christendom 1 .0.

It's what led to the necessity of the Reformation, because it always ends up with the degradation of the

Gospel, the subjection of the Gospel to higher authorities, primarily political authorities, traditions, things like that.

And so, that is the kind of stuff that Dale Partridge and his ilk are promoting.

And so, I responded here on the program, and he responded on May 2nd, so five days ago,

Since James is talking about me, I figured I would debunk his argument in one sentence. Now, did he engage my argument at all?

No, of course not. He can't, and he knows that. Dale knows better than...

He'll pretend he can get in over his head, but he knows he can't. Here's the one -sentence debunking of me.

Organized minorities always overthrow disorganized majorities. We don't need 75 % to make

America Christian. We need about 10%. We have that now. Let's get organized. So, here is

Christless nationalism. He doesn't realize he's proving my points for me. That's the thing about these guys.

They don't really know what they're doing. Cigarette smoke doesn't help you understand these things, and Partridge has been doing the same thing.

So, lower oxygen levels. Anyway, they don't realize they're making our points for us.

So, listen to what that means. Always, there's an element of truth.

Look at what the LGBTQ stuff has done in the United States. It's always a small minority, but they wield tremendous power.

So, there's no question that small minorities can wield tremendous power. But do these guys realize what they're saying if they cite that?

If they go, Oh, well, organized minorities. That's what we need.

We're only about 10%. We just need to get organized, and then we'll be able to do our thing. We'll be able to get rid of the

Muslims. We'll be able to get rid of the Hindus, and we'll be able to repeal the 19th. We'll be able to do all this stuff, but just with 10%.

See, they've got to do this, because they know. They're a tiny little group. They're an itsy -bitsy, tiny little group.

And so, they've got to think this way. But the whole point is, the

LGBTQ movement convinced people to act in a certain way.

But we've seen, for example, after 2024, what's happened to the transgender stuff.

Now, you've still got your zealots. You've still got Washington State. You've still got Oregon. You've still got California. You've still got those places where 98 % of everybody is all on the same page.

But there's been tremendous walking back. Why? Because that small minority never really convinced even a small other minority, let alone the majority of people, that boys are girls and girls are boys.

Every dad knows that that guy over there who shaves, and who's a foot taller than my daughter, should not be playing basketball against her.

And I don't want him touching her anyways. Every guy knows that. Every father knows that.

And so, they didn't change hearts and minds. And what these guys are admitting, we're not going to change hearts and minds either.

We just need to get organized. Will us leave the hearts and minds the way they are? That's nominalism.

That's Christendom 1 .0. Tried it, failed. Let's do it again. Let's get our

Christian Franco, right? They're just making our point for us. They can't reason past it.

And it's sad to see. But yeah, we don't need 75 % to make

America Christian, but we need 75 % to have a Christian nation. See the difference?

They don't want a Christian nation. They want nominalism. They want the name. They want the externals.

Not the changed hearts. Christless nationalism. They just prove it for us. Every single time they open their mouths, that's what they're about.

So there's Dale Partridge for you. Next thing, Bishop Jacksy. I talked about this a little bit.

This was around the same time period, around May 1st. Had an interesting exchange.

We've talked about Bishop Jacksy before. One of the lower -level Catholic posters on X.

How many followers does he have? 12 .7k. That's better than 500, but way too many, given the quality of the stuff that he produces.

Anyway, he responded to Sola Chad, who quoted from Ephesians 2.

And here's what Bishop Jacksy says. He says, Why do Protestants always add alone to Ephesians 2 .8

-9 and completely skip verse 10? Now, just stop for a second.

If you're a Protestant with any knowledge whatsoever of any

Protestant apologetics to Roman Catholicism, is it a true or false statement that Protestants completely skip verse 10?

No, it's a lie. It's a bald -faced lie. He's either ignorant on a level that should make him close his account and leave, or it's just a bald -faced lie.

And these guys lie. Why? For engagement. That you make money on X with engagement.

That's how you do it. So they're willing to lie. Just bald -faced lie.

Because cha -ching, cha -ching, cha -ching, cha -ching, with everyone who responds and says, That's absurd and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There are 58 responses to this. And as I understand it, again, I've not done the monetization stuff, so I could be wrong.

But as I understand it, the larger following that someone has that responds to you, the more money you make.

So if I respond, I've got just under 180 ,000 followers. And I realize probably 20 ,000 of them are bots.

I don't know. And another 20 ,000 of them aren't even on X anymore. They've been around for a while.

Started in 2010, as I recall. But look, for an individual,

I've got a decent following. So evidently, if I respond to that, he gets a cha -ching, cha -ching, for something like that.

Maybe they've changed that. XAI changes stuff every other day, so who can keep up with it?

But the point is that this kind of statement, that it's just simply, it's dishonest.

The monetization of X encourages dishonest statements.

That's why that other guy, Catholicism, Anthony, says the stuff about Mary and the thief on the cross, because it's going to get engagement.

It's absurd, but it's going to get engagement. And they're more than happy to be absurd.

That's perfectly fine with them. But the point is, every meaningful exegesis

I've ever seen from Protestants, and by the way, there's far more meaningful exegesis in the Greek New Testament from Protestants today than there is from Roman Catholics.

By a long shot. I mean, when you start talking about the best critical commentaries, from a believing perspective, on Romans, do you list

Roman Catholics? No. In fact, the biggest Roman Catholic names are going to be known for how far to the left they are.

Brown, for example. Raymond Brown. Big name! Great scholar!

Two left wings! That's what you think of. Somebody name for me modern, conservative,

Roman Catholic intellectual scholars who are writing conservative, exegetical commentary on Scripture.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't have Douglas Moos. You don't have the commentaries that I can go grab off my shelf on Romans, and Galatians, and John.

They're not coming from Rome. Because Rome is always going to be having all this external stuff that they're tying in, and they're going to be doing all the tradition, and Thomas Aquinas said, and of course now we've got

Protestants doing the same thing. Look, you know that whole series that they're talking about doing,

Thomas Aquinas for Protestants, all the rest of that stuff? That is going to sit on bookshelves and be one of the best dust collectors ever.

I'm just telling the publishers right now. Okay? God's people aren't going to be interested in it.

Oh, they may buy a volume, and if that's all you want, cool. But long -term positive impact?

It ain't happening. Christ's sheep hear what? Christ's voice.

Not Thomas Aquinas'. Did Thomas Aquinas say good things? Of course he did. But was

Thomas Aquinas deeply influenced by deeply negative sources? That deeply influenced what he said on so many things?

Yeah. We're going to be doing a presentation on pseudo -Dionysius here pretty soon on the program.

And I could even do that on the trip, because I can throw that up on the screen just as easily from the mobile studio as I can here.

And I was showing Rich some of it before the program started, and he actually feigned interest, which was pretty cool.

Okay, well, all right. Look, you've never heard of pseudo -Dionysius before I started talking about it recently.

Oh, hey, it was all brand spanking new to me. I never heard anything like that before, and I'm sitting here going, you've got to be kidding me, man.

We'll make it sound interesting. You may have to dumb it down just a little bit better than that for me.

Well, yeah, so apathetic theology isn't a big deal. But we'll explain it.

We'll talk about the negation and the darkness and all that kind of fun stuff.

We'll spend time on it because it is so far outside of the normal evangelical

Christian's experience that, yeah, you can't just throw that stuff out there and expect somebody to follow it.

But he actually did look interested. And what I was showing him was the massive influence on Thomas Aquinas that pseudo -Dionysius had, and how that then had this massive influence on Western mysticism,

Master Eichert and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, what am I talking about here? Oh, yeah, back to Bishop Jackson.

So the point is, any commentary from a

Protestant that I have in my library, an exegetical commentary based upon the original text, will go in depth on verse 10.

Every apologetic presentation I've ever heard on Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 has included verse 10. I've preached entire sermons.

You can find in my works, in my published works on various topics, including The God Who Justifies, entire exegetical stuff that Bishop Jackson could not even begin to respond to.

He doesn't read original languages. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He couldn't even begin to respond to it, but he doesn't care.

That's the thing we're facing today, is these people who will say this kind of stuff, and they don't care that they're lying through their teeth.

We deal with verse 10. We emphasize verse 10. We preach verse 10.

You can find—go to Sermon Audio. Go to Sermon Audio. I don't know how many sermons I have in Sermon Audio, but there are hundreds of them.

You will find plenty of evidence of that discussion.

Why do they ignore Galatians 5, 6, where Paul says that what counts is faith working through love? Again, every single meaningful

Protestant response to Roman Catholicism deals with Galatians 5, 6. Every single one.

I mean, that's how bad these lies are. Why do they ignore Romans 2, 6, through 7, where Paul says

God will render to each one according to his works an eternal life for those who preserve and do him good? Do you think Bishop Jackson could respond to my exegesis of Romans 2 in The God Who Justifies?

Of course not. And does he care? Of course not. No interest whatsoever to know what the context is.

He's talking to the Jews about their claim to possess God's law, and he's moved from universal sinfulness, the

Jews going, yes, yes, yes, and now let me address you, in Romans chapter 2. Has he ever read that?

Does he care? No, not in the least. And it goes on with why do they ignore? Why do they ignore? Why do they ignore

Philippians 2, 12, where Paul says to work out your salvation with fear and trembling? Again, is it possible this man is that ignorant?

No. No, it's not possible he's that ignorant. He is that desperately dishonest.

But here's the thing, I'm not going to go through the rest of it. Because then he quotes James 2, 24. Again, could he even begin to provide a response to the lengthy chapter on James 2 in the

God Who Justifies? No, no, he does not possess the knowledge, the ability, let alone the honesty or integrity to even make the effort.

But here's the thing. That should be obvious to a whole lot of Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

What was stunning to me is that when I responded to that and pointed out just the abysmal lies, the vast majority of the responses were completely negative and defended his statements without ever once engaging, without ever once even giving the interest to know.

There was one guy who said, show me, what are you talking about? And I'm like, I've been dealing with this for years.

We're talking about thousands of pages. He said, no, I really mean that. I said, okay,

DM me. I followed him. I think it was Catholic Maximus. I followed him.

Sent me a personal message. We'll send you the books. We'll send them to you. I haven't heard back from him.

Let me look at... Yeah, Catholic Maximus said 31 seconds ago, tuning in.

So, Catholic Maximus, why haven't you contacted me? Give me a mailing address. Here.

Now, we don't have any hardbacks anymore. The hardbacks haven't been published for a long, long time. But we have,

I know we have some of these in the front office. You want to see where every one of those verses is addressed?

You want to read the chapter on James chapter 2? I have never had...

I've never had anyone write a response. To the material on James chapter 2.

Which chapter was that? This is Romans. Nope, nope, nope. It's got to be farther back than that.

Yeah, James attacks empty faith. Here it is. So, it starts on page...

You go, don't you know? No, I don't know. Wrote this 20 years ago or something like that.

It's chapter 20. Begins on page 300. Let's see,

I don't have my glasses on. It looks like 328. Eights and sixes look very much alike as you get older.

So, 328 to 354. So, that's what? 28 pages? 26 pages?

Yeah, 26 pages. 26 page long exegesis of James chapter 2.

That cites all sorts of... It steel mans the other side.

Here's what the other side says. Here's what they're saying about James and Paul and their loggerheads.

Here's what this source says. There's quotations from scholars. All sorts of stuff like that. And then tears it apart.

I've never had anybody respond to it. It's been out there for... What's the...

I remember... Wow, 2001. It's been 25 years.

Quarter century. Quarter century. And it's like, well, we don't need to read all this stuff.

See, there you go. No interest. None. In truthfulness. So, Catholic Maximus.

DM me. I followed you. You should be able to send me a private message. I know they don't call it DMs anymore. I guess it's called chat or something.

DM me. And I don't have that up right now. Not here in my office machine.

But I'll look it up. And we'll send it to you. And I would challenge you.

Honestly. Catholic Maximus. I would challenge you. Respond to chapter 20.

Well, there's lots of other stuff to respond to as well. You'll find that after chapter 8, you do have to read

Greek to be able to respond to it. That's just... It's an exegetical work. First chapters are the theology behind it.

Stuff like that. History. Things like that. And then we dive into the text. And that's when the critics get strangely silent.

Strangely silent. At that point. So, yeah. So, get in touch.

We'll be happy to send it to you for free. Nobody's going to show up at your doorstep.

Or anything like that. That's not how we work. So, yeah. Do that. Okay. Then.

Pope Respecter. There's a guy named Pope Respecter. And this is April 13th. This has been a while.

And I keep saying I'm going to respond to this. And since I saw it, I need to do it. I converted to Protestantism after reading the

Roman Catholic controversy. Now, that makes me sound like he was Roman Catholic. And he left

Roman Catholicism after reading my book, The Roman Catholic Controversy. Then I read McGrath's Eustachia Dei.

And realized that if you were right, then there must have been a great apostasy for 1400 years because no one believed what you teach is the gospel during that time.

Now, you need to understand this is a common argument. McGrath made certain comments.

He basically makes the assertion that the forensic nature of justification is a modern formulation and doesn't really reflect, certainly doesn't reflect medieval understandings.

Though there were places where medieval writers did use that language. But we don't need to belabor the point right now.

Let's just say for a moment that the predominant view of justification was not forensic.

It was not an imputed righteousness. It was sacramental. It produced nominalism.

And that in the Reformation, you have a fundamental break from most of medieval theology on the nature of justification.

Now, the question is, is medieval theology on justification apostolic?

And the whole point of the Reformation was, no, it wasn't. And so it's interesting that in The Roman Catholic Controversy, my argument was not that justification was a new creation.

It was that this is the biblical teaching. This is how it's opposed to the natural man.

This is how it exalts the grace of God. This is why people resist it, because it destroys the boasting of man.

And so what had happened was that gospel became encrusted with tradition that allowed man to control the grace of God.

So the real issue, if you had converted for the right reason, would have been, what did the apostles teach?

Is this the teaching of Paul? Oh, well, there's this thing today, and there's the new perspective on Paul.

Yeah, but what is the actual teaching of Paul? Are you going to embrace

N .T. Wright's contextual reorientation of the New Testament? Are you going to do E .P. Sanders? Those are

Protestants. Well, sort of Protestants. Neoprotestants of some kind. They're not Roman Catholic. Has Roman Catholicism said that the new perspective on Paul is correct?

There are certainly Roman Catholic scholars that play with it. There's no question about that. But that's the point. Roman Catholic scholarship plays with everything.

You don't have a specific position. It was laid out in Trent and has been redefined ever since then.

Ever since then. So, for you to sit there and say, well, 1 ,400 years, this is the amazing thing when people reason like this.

There must have been an apostasy of 1 ,400 years. How many of your doctrines that you define as a dogma today did not even exist for 1 ,400 years?

And therefore, you must think there had been an apostasy for 1 ,400 years. No, as Cardinal Newman said, oh, development hypothesis.

That's convenient. I'm not doing the development hypothesis. I'm doing the opposite of that.

I'm doing the de -evolution hypothesis. That you start with the high revelation of God in Scripture and the tendency of man is to drag that down and to control the grace of God by his own activities.

And that's what you see in church history. So, even if you accept

McGrath's thesis and ignore a lot of people that said things that don't quite fit with that, but admit the predominant perspective became degraded.

That was the reason for the Reformation. Even if you accept all that, it doesn't change what the Apostles taught.

And so, here's an example of someone, someone might convert after reading one of my books for all the wrong reasons.

For all the wrong reasons. If you can be converted by argumentation and then get de -converted by argumentation, then you haven't actually been touched by the

Spirit of God. So, there you go. Slowly I realized that great pre -Reformation thinkers like Augustine, John Chrysostom, etc.

simply didn't read the same text on justification the same way. Why not? Why not?

Is it because they were closer? They had a special knowledge? You do realize

Augustine was primarily dealing with Latin. Augustine did not understand justificare in the same way as the

Greek uses to kaiosune? His Greek was poor, his

Latin was far better, his Hebrew was non -existent. So, okay, yes. Augustine did have,

I've talked about this many times, Augustine's view of a temporary justification made zero sense.

But I've also explained why. The Donatist controversy. It was ecclesiology overriding the inevitable conclusion of his doctrine of grace.

He was inconsistent. Yep, we've said that. What does that change about Romans 3, 4, and 5?

How does that change the fact that if you're a Christian, you're the blessed man of Romans 4, 8, but if you're a

Catholic, you're not? How does that change? Hard to say.

Then I realized that even modern Protestants such as N .T. Wright and E .P. Sanders don't read the same text and justification in the same way.

Why? Why don't they? What's the context? What do they believe about the consistency of Scripture?

Remember, N .T. Wright calls inerrancy that silly American doctrine. So, the question is, why don't they read it the same way?

It's not a matter of how I read it or how anybody else reads it. It's how it must be consistently read, pan -canonically, across all of the texts of Scripture.

Literally, both the historic church and modern -day Protestant scholarship all disagree with the classic Protestant understanding of justification and salvation.

Well, that's far overreach. You just jumped. You just made

N .T. Wright and E .P. Sanders the definition of modern -day Protestant scholarship, which is simply not true.

Are they important in what would be called modern? Yeah. Are they definitional? No. So, then

I realized that I could either trust that Christ protected the church and there was not a great apostasy in that church fathers and some modern

Protestant scholars got the interpretation right and your view of the Gospel is wrong, or I could believe that somehow no one could understand the

Gospel until Martin Luther. Now, that's twisted thinking, because I never said no one understood the

Gospel until Martin Luther, and if you read my book and came up with that, then you're twisting my words, and you probably know that.

This is, again, the convert syndrome. Converts have this deep desire to justify their actions.

So, you had made a certain profession, now you deny that profession, and so there is this deep drive to in some way delegitimize what you had once believed.

And if you have to be dishonest about it, then you have to be dishonest about it. That's what Stephen Boyce is doing with me right now, that I've seen this for 40 years.

It's not uncommon. But I've never said Martin Luther was the first in any way, shape, or form.

So why say that? Why? I pointed to people in the early church that had the same

New Testament view and there were many Christians during the medieval period who had less than fully biblical views.

There are many Christians today who have less than fully biblical views of the Trinity, for example.

I mean, I could talk to people I believe are heirs of eternal life and ask them intricate Trinitarian questions and they would fail the test.

That doesn't make them heretics. They'd need to be willing to be corrected. But ignorance is not the issue.

So why did you come up with this type of conclusion? I don't know. It justifies your actions. That's why it does so.

Obviously, I return to the church. I know a lot of people who have done the same. My experience has been that a lot of people follow my path.

That's not been my experience at all. That's not been my experience. That's not what the audience

I talk to. The numbers, the actual numbers, not the numbers you guys quote to each other, 8 to 1.

For every one convert to the Roman Catholic Church in 2024, as I recall, there were 8 people who left.

I don't remember what percentage went to Protestantism, but it was a fair amount. Of course, I hate the term

Protestantism. It's really descriptive of nothing. But every time I talk to a group and ask,

How many of you are former Roman Catholics? A quarter to a third. If I'm in heavily

Roman Catholic areas, it can be two thirds. Most of those folks have found the piece of Romans 5 .1

which is denied you. They've discovered they're the blessed man of Romans 4 .8 which has been denied to you.

And which you've given up. In ignorance, leave the church over some passages superficially look

Protestant and then return when they get the full story. But you didn't give me the full story. There are differences between E .P.

Sanders and N .T. Wright. Do you know what they are? Have you ever dialogued with either one of them? I have. Have you ever lectured on either one?

I have. Recognize that neither one of them would be consistent with Roman Catholic soteriology?

Did you even think about that? None of that explains

Romans 4 .8, does it? Oh, it just seems Protestant. Well, then answer it! Explain how you're the blessed man.

Tell me how you can commit a mortal sin and it not be imputed to you. Tell me how you commit a venial sin and it's not imputed to you.

If you can't answer that, then just admit you don't believe what Paul wrote. You believe what

Trent taught. The problem is, your current pope doesn't. Neither did the previous one.

So what do you believe now? There's the problem. That's a difficulty.

Oh yeah, that's exactly right. Peter Stravinskis, a two

PhD from Ivy League schools, Catholic priest, could not answer the question of Romans 4 .8

because there is no answer that makes any kind of consistent sense from the

Roman Catholic perspective. It's just not there. Alright, go back to making sure the audio feeds go in the right direction.

Got a few minutes left. Let's get back to Neo -Mormonism while we're at it.

The New Mormonism of Jacob Hansen. For those of you that haven't seen the previous programs, we've been looking at some of the comments on an appearance that Ali Bestaki's Relatable program had him on.

I have mentioned that it would have been good to have someone on to oppose him that understands

Mormonism better. Ali Bestaki has a decent understanding of general outlines, but certainly insufficient to dialogue with a

Mormon apologist who is specifically seeking to make Mormons look as good as possible to as wide an audience as possible.

I'm not sitting here trying to do damage control. I think there was some damage. I think there was a lack of wisdom in going into this like this.

I mean, she obviously did some reading, but as I pointed out before, when he starts throwing out stuff like Michael Heiser, she has no idea what he's talking about.

You don't take on modern Mormons who are trained in doing their apologetics without knowing they're going to use

Heiser. They're going to use that stuff. We've been dealing with this stuff for decades. There was a part of me that would like to go, what were you thinking?

I mean, for a lay woman, you did okay.

But your program was used to present a very sanitized view of Mormonism.

And since you didn't know it well enough, you simply could not nail his feet to the floor. And maybe the debate video wasn't out yet between he and I because he said they had just done the debate.

But yeah, that's what we're facing. So I left it running.

I left it sitting here. So hopefully it'll work. Ever had a program do that? You leave it for a couple days, you come back and you're just like,

I'm not playing that anymore. What are you doing? Let's hope it picks up. Let's see.

Is there any other sect out there that has the priesthood ordinance? The fullness of the priesthood? No. Okay, so it is just through the

LDS Church. Well, it would be through the fullness of the priesthood that has been restored in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. Do Baptists have that, or Presbyterians, or the

Catholics? No, those were churches, ultimately, that were not started fundamentally by God. They broke away from the

Roman Catholic Church, started their own movements, and basically denied even the need for priesthood structure and authority.

Now, again, this is what's useful. This is why I have said. And someone has mentioned someone that we need to get in touch with to possibly do the debate that I'd like to do.

I would really like to sort of lock in an April 2027

Utah trip. Either Provo, Salt Lake City, somewhere in between.

I've got to admit, the Salt Lake City KOA is really nice. The folks there are great. Of all the

KOAs, that's top five. Excellent staff, store, everything's clean, everything's well taken care of.

Location is perfect. Really is. It's central down there, right near the airport.

Anyway, I want to go up there, and we need to put together a debate on the claims of the

Mormon Church on the priesthood, because I don't have it in here right now.

I should have all of our tracks. Well, we're redoing all of our tracks. When I think of this track on the

Aaronic Priesthood, it definitely needs to be updated. It needs to be brought up to a new version.

But the topic of the priesthood is unfortunately one of the topics that most

Christians who deal with Mormons don't know much about. They don't know much about what the book of Hebrews says about priesthood stuff.

That's not preached on very often. Hebrews, most people, is not their favorite book.

So, he got away with murder here. All she could do is say, you're saying it's just through the

Mormon Church. And he's saying, well, it's just through the church that's been given the priesthood. Well, there are so many historical and theological problems with the claims of the eldest priesthood.

It would have been good if she had known that David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon, had, in later years, written an address to all believers in Christ where he points out that the priesthood claim that Joseph Smith made was a later development after the founding of the church.

That the claim that John the Baptist had returned in 1829 and that Peter, James, and John had returned in 1829 and had given the

Aaronic priesthood, John the Baptist, the Melchizedek priesthood, and restored these things, that this is a later development.

That the 1833 Book of Commandments doesn't reflect it. And that the changes between the 1833 Book of Commandments and 1835

Doctrine and Covenants shows the evolution of it. So, there are major historical problems with the claim.

And we're talking about the 1830s are not ancient history. We have documentation.

You've got E .D. Howe's work contemporaneous with this from an outside source.

The closest thing you get to anything like that in ancient Christian history is when

Celsus starts attacking the Christian faith. And that's long after the founding.

So, we have documentary evidence. But then, the whole point is the

Melchizedek priesthood is held by Jesus Christ. Aparabiton. Without successor. Completely.

The Melchizedek priest is able to save to the uttermost those who draw nigh unto God by him since he ever lives to make intercession for them.

I actually did amazingly have a young Mormon elder who

I really hope has repented of this blasphemy say he could do the same thing. All the rest of them are just normally left stunned in silence when you point out to them what the

Melchizedek priest is capable of doing. Because the nature of that priesthood.

They don't know. I remember talking to this one guy. Knew him early on in our ministry.

Came to the church we were part of. Former missionary. Had left the Mormon church. And he talked about how they would...

Yeah, I'd read my Bible every day. It didn't make a lick of sense to me. There wasn't any...

You don't walk into Mormon ward chapel on a Sunday morning and get an exegesis of a biblical text.

That's not what you get. In fact, when you go to an

LDS bookstore now... There used to be a whole lot more of them than there are now. There used to be a whole lot more

Christian bookstores than there are now. When we would go to LDS...

I've told you, there used to be this big Deseret bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City. We'd always go there during conference, during the lunch break.

Books galore on theology and the apostles and all this kind of stuff. The version of it that exists today is just a paltry precious moments shop.

The section of scriptures that they had available then in comparison to now.

It's just amazing. What you wouldn't find were commentaries on biblical books.

Mormonism just didn't do that. For years, I talked about you can't even get the

Mormons to write a commentary on Romans. Well, they started. Once they sent their people out to get

PhDs someplace else other than BYU and they came back, they've started writing this stuff.

The problem is, when they apply critical thought and critical methodology to their own theology, that's why you have

Blake Osler. That's why you have Oslerism. That's why you have all this liberalism breaking out at BYU.

They can't touch the New Testament scriptures critically without fundamentally abandoning their own.

Redefining their own. They have to redefine their own. It's just beyond question that Joseph Smith was clueless.

He had no idea what he was babbling about. Like I said, somebody posted a picture of the murder of Joseph Smith.

There's a painting of the murder of Joseph Smith. He's being shot as he jumps out the window giving them a sonic distress signal.

Which tells me we know who was actually killing him. They weren't Indians. I thought about that.

Somebody had actually posted it and said, as James White always says, if this hadn't happened, if he had been given just a few more years, there would be no

Mormonism today. His theology was evolving and changing so fast that within a few years, no one would be able to make heads or tails out of what in the world he was talking about.

I really believe those men that murdered Joseph Smith really helped to make sure the

Mormon church would exist. They really did. Anyway, there are important issues to talk about when you talk about the priesthood.

I think it is one of the many Achilles heels of Mormonism.

I am very confident, not because of my abilities as a debater, but because of the fundamental nature of the subject, that a debate on that topic would be extremely revealing and extremely helpful.

I really want to try to make that happen and work with our friends up there in Provo and Salt Lake to bring that about.

I know our guys up there at Apology of Utah would love to be involved.

They did the recording of the debates this time around. I'm sure they'd be on board real fast. We just need to find a good, solid, orthodox

Mormon opponent. Like I said, if Hanson is the only guy willing to step up, my biggest concern about that is he's just not an orthodox

Mormon. He does not hold to the Mormon doctrine of God. Orthodox Mormons are going to go like,

I don't really care what he says about the priesthood. Here, he's at least being pretty orthodox about the

LDS claims of the priesthood that she's pushing on. I'm glad she pushed on it. Heshmeyer didn't.

Should have. But he didn't. And so these were churches that fundamentally were organized by men.

But you don't believe that Catholics have the right apostolic succession either. See, the Catholics, and my whole debate with Joe Heshmeyer was about that, is if they do.

I believe that the Catholic Church is the remnants of the original Church, along with the Orthodox, by the way, who don't have the fullness of that authority because the apostolic authority that actually belonged to the original apostles wasn't passed on into those traditions.

So why wasn't it passed on into those traditions? Because the priesthood was not passed on.

And when you think about it, you know, the early Christians did not build temples.

They did not have temple rituals. And there's nothing in the early

Church about Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods in the LDS concept of ordination to a priesthood.

I mean, the priesthood concept within Roman Catholicism, well, not within Roman Catholicism, within Catholicism historically, before there was a

Roman element to it, is first really seen in Cyprian, so you're talking in middle 250s.

It's really not before that in any overt fashion.

But the point is the LDS understanding of priesthood is completely unknown until about 1834 or something like that.

Completely unknown. I mean, again, if we debate this, whoever, show me where the early

Church spoke of an Aaronic priesthood that has the power of baptism and a

Melchizedek priesthood that has the power of laying out of hands to receive the Holy Ghost. They're not even going to try.

They're going to say, well, it's been lost. Well, apostasy. Well, again, you're playing with history.

And that's what he's trying to do. And, you know, I've never seen in all the thousands of pages of LDS material that I've had to read through over the years,

I've never seen this, yeah, you know, the Catholics have got it right type thing. They just didn't continue that stuff on.

And, you know, in the Eastern Orthodox, Joseph Smith didn't even know what an Eastern Orthodox was. So it's sort of strange that modern defenders of these very human religions,

I mean, he's sitting here saying, oh, your church was started by men. Yours was started by a gold digger with a seer stone.

What are you talking about? And you hid the seer stone up until just recently. And you know it.

I know he knows about the seer stone. I mean, your founding prophet was brought up on charges.

Yeah, and had to deal with the result of those charges. You're talking,

I mean, maybe he'd like to do the First Vision story. Maybe that would be, you know, we didn't,

I'm still bummed this day that we didn't get to deal with the

First Vision on its anniversary. You know, because of COVID.

That would have been, you know, spring of 1820, 200th anniversary.

You know, I still think our tract on that subject is spectacular. And, you know, if we redid that tract, we could now use

LDS published sources exclusively. We could provide URLs to the

Joseph Smith papers collection for every graphic. We wouldn't even have to pull them from any place else.

But, yeah, I'm bummed we didn't really get to set up a good debate on the

First Vision because it all got thrown out the window by the pandemic.

And yes, I said pandemic. Looks like they're trying to pull another one, by the way.

I'm sorry? I can't hear you. We actually have that tract on our website.

Yeah, I know. So it's like, you know what, I really should update those graphics and link them over, or at least link over to them.

That'd be a little bit of work. But yeah, that Joseph Smith papers collection is exhaustive. I mean, it's all the stuff that the

Tanners had to dig and dig and dig for. And it's all right there on your cell phone. When I started digging through some of that stuff last year,

I was astonished at how complete it is. And it's high quality stuff, too. That'll make for a great, hey, you don't believe this image is real?

Here's a link to it. Yeah, I don't know how you put that in a printed tract unless we actually just simply put a link.

Actually put one of those, what do they call those things you can scan little square things? Oh yeah, that would work.

You put a little square thing, they scan it with their cell phone, and it opens it up on their phone. I was going to say, because there are so many people in the current generation that if you put a

URL in the tract, they'd be standing there poking at it. No, what do they call those things?

I forget what it's called. It's real popular. As soon as you ask that question, it's like, what's your name?

Bob, Tom. I will search for it.

You're watching the chat channel to see when someone's going to tell you. Someone's going to tell you in the chat channel here real quick what they're called.

We just put that in the tract, they scan it with their cell phone, the website pops up, and all the links are live.

They can go see each one of the graphics. We can do that with the

Book of Abraham one. There's a lot of cool ways to do it anymore.

How did we get on to all this? I don't know. See? QR code.

QR code. What does QR stand for? I have no idea. I've heard it called

QR2, but I would assume it's something like Quick Read or something like that. You just put a

QR code and they can pop it up and run with it from there. We could do it with the

Book of Abraham tract. There's lots of stuff that we could do with things like that. Get up to speed in the modern world.

Stuff we never would have thought of when we published those tracts the first time and passed them out in Salt Lake City.

I'm watching Rich. He's watching people in there. We're having a mega boomer moment apparently at the moment.

Oh, a mega boomer moment. Is this being said by people who were in diapers when we first started witnessing the

Mormons outside the temple? I was actually going to say they weren't a gleam in their daddy's eye yet. That's right. Let's just listen a little bit more and we'll wrap up for the day.

He does have to go through LDS Church in order to reach the highest level of heaven according to your theology.

To reach the fullness of their potential they have to have a covenant relationship with Jesus Christ and to do that on earth requires that you make that covenant through the priesthood ordinances.

Through the priesthood ordinances. In other words, you've got to go to the temple.

You've got to get your temple recommend. You have to submit to the rules and regulations of the

LDS priesthood and the LDS leadership. Reaching the highest level, exaltation to godhood.

What he does, what Neo -Mormonism does is it borrows Christian terminology and tries to redefine the heretical

LDS theology of becoming gods. Mormons believe this is how god became a god.

He doesn't want to say that. He doesn't actually believe that anymore. Evidently. That means he's not a

Mormon. Whatever else he is, he ain't a Mormon. Quick response. Quick read, quick response, close enough.

That's a brilliant idea. We need to just do that and put it in the track. Now we'd have to have the website that it would link to and we'd have to make it so that it would work on a phone and so we'd have the graphic.

Click here. Graphic, click here. If this goes too much further, we could actually just print entire tracks, one page.

There's the title and then the QR code. No. I don't think that would work.

I'm not thinking that would work. Anyways, I'm not sure how far we got. I think it was three minutes maybe worth.

But again, I don't care. We're not on a network. We've covered a bunch of topics again today that would have interest to a lot of different people.

Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, Church history. Even threw a little pseudo -Dionysius in for the fun of it, which is relevant to anybody who is interested in Eastern Orthodoxy especially.

And you'll see more as we move along from there. So I actually have an article to write tonight.

I finished writing tonight. Thoughts on Eastern Orthodoxy for a group that had contacted me.

And it's a short one. But that's one of the things I need to get finished up.

Aside from applying whatever that stuff is to my tonneau cover on my truck. So I've got regular life things to do before the sun goes down as well.

Just a quick reminder. It's four o 'clock so we're wrapping up. Lord willing, and I don't drive off a cliff on the way to Flagstaff.

We will be coming to you from the Mobile Command Center and I'll have some new stuff in the background and that will make me happy.

Rich will have cleaned up the wiring he's bought some stuff to make it all look nice and professional and stuff like that.

So we'll be traveling over to Lubbock, Texas and then down to Las Cruces.

I was hoping for some rain there was some in the forecast but now it's diminishing. You might say, why?

I want to test that seal on the unit. We had some leaking. So I want to make sure it got fully taken care of because I love the sound of rain on the roof of an

RV. You want to sleep like the dead. That's the way to do it. Alright, so with that Tuesday prayers appreciated support appreciated for the trip we don't bang away on that we don't try to make you feel guilty and I'm not going to be able to feed my kitties so I can pay for diesel.

No, that's not true. We'll be fine, but if you want to partner with us and be a part of that then the travel fund is there at aleman .org

or just the general fund that's how we get to do these things, get to these churches try to be an encouragement that's what we've always been all along.