July 8, 2004

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. Welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday afternoon.

I was going to try to get a picture of it, but the wind has sort of kicked up, so it's sort of not as visible as it was, but if you look out to the northwest from the valley,

I could really see it clearly yesterday. I had to ride way out to the northwest, actually sort of outside the valley, out toward Cave Creek on my motorcycle in the middle of the afternoon, about fried to death.

But anyway, the Willow Fire out here in Arizona, I haven't looked today, but I think it's around 120 ,000 acres.

We had a 470 ,000 acre fire two years ago, but we've got one going now and it looks like a nuclear blast.

It really is. I was going to try to get a picture of it, but like I said, the wind sort of blew it down a little bit.

And you can see it very clearly from the valley. And if all of a sudden we disappear today, it's because there is an actual real possibility of rolling blackouts here in Phoenix.

And why would there be rolling blackouts? Because two things, there are transmission lines that go through the

Payson area, which is where the fire is, that are threatened by the fire right now. And then

Sunday night, we had a transformer, a huge transformer fire in north, actually that's northwest, it's northeast we were looking.

If you're confused about that, you're supposed to look northeast, not northwest. But anyway, the northwest part of the valley had a huge transformer fire.

And so that's causing a problem. And the thing that's sort of scary is, yeah, there's only five of these substations like this in the whole state and one of them is down.

And the thing that's so scary to me is they just now found a transformer that might fit in its place in the northwestern

United States someplace. And it's like, you know, I sort of thought maybe possibly that, you know, they had like backups for things like that, you know, something other than a battery.

And when it's currently 108 degrees outside, the high has been at least here has been 109 so far today.

A lot of folks have air conditioning running. In fact, we all do. And so if all of a sudden we just go and we're gone and we pop out of the channel and everything else, that's what happened.

It just went black. And actually, we'd probably stay on for a little while. Well, no, we wouldn't because the computers would stay on.

But we, well, I don't know. Would we lose the Internet? I don't know. It's possible. I don't know. Does it really matter?

I don't know. Anyway, 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341.

I've had a bunch of folks saying they're going to be calling in today and, you know, talking about this idea of things.

So now's your chance to call in today, 877 -753 -3341.

I'm sitting here writing a blog entry. It's more of an article, actually. And it is in response.

I'll just read a couple of these comments to some things that I read in Mark Seyfried's book,

Christ, Our Righteousness, which is a lot of people think that it's a response to the new perspective.

In a way, it is. We really should call it new perspectives because there's more than one.

But there's some troubling stuff right at the end of the book. And let me just read you just one section of it that I'm going to be sort of commenting on the blog.

The common Protestant formulation of justification as the non -imputation of sin and the imputation of Christ's righteousness is understandable as a way of setting forth justification as a forensic reality in distinction from the

Tridentine claim that an infused, imparted, or inherent righteousness had to be added to the grace of forgiveness.

It nevertheless, and listen to this, it nevertheless treats the justifying verdict of God as an immediate and isolated gift.

The justification of the believer is thereby separated from the justification of God in his wrath against us.

Salvation is then portioned out so that one possesses it piecemeal. It is held together as a series of ideas, justification, sanctification, glorification, excuse me, but I thought that was

Romans 8 personally, rather than being grasped by faith as the comprehensive act of God in Christ.

The insistence that the sanctification of the believer always accompanies justification does not fully overcome this deficiency.

Indeed, Protestant confessions sometimes take on the appearance of unreality at this point because they speak of believers in themselves.

And what is this picture of reality, unreality? The citation that is given, the

Heidelberg Catechism, answer to question 60, quote, God imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ as if I had never committed nor had any sin and had myself accomplished all the obedience which

Christ has fulfilled for me. So I guess that's the unreality part,

I guess. I don't know. Be that as it may, I find that kind of commentary quite troubling.

I find it quite troubling because it seems to be based upon an almost postmodern rejection of the ability to do systematic theology or the relevance of systematic theology or things like that.

And that's what I'm commenting on currently in preparation for posting to the blog.

And then I also, right as we were getting ready for the program, received an email.

It is the Berean Call newsletter, which we always love to review here on the program. And I'm sorry.

Um, here is a letter from HH in Australia.

And it says, Dear Brothers Hunt McMahon and staff, what love is this?

Talk about going from one extreme to another. I just realized that smell you smell is the clutch burning on the program.

Because I gotta admit, going from Seyfried's Christ, Our Righteousness, Paul's Theology of Justification, the

New Studies in Biblical Theology series, to Dave Hunt's What Love Is This, I don't know if any of the rest of you realize how funny that is.

But anyway, HH in Australia. What love is this is highly appreciated and a valuable tool for those who are confused.

May the Lord bless you abundantly, knowing the price you all had to pay to print the truth.

We know people whose faith has been shipwrecked by Calvinism's misrepresentation of God. As we preach and hand out tracts, it is a wonderful thing to be able to say with clear consciences, whosoever will, may come,

HH in Australia. And I hadn't really thought as I first started reading it that this is, what love is this is highly appreciated and a valuable tool for those who are confused.

That sounds a lot like the Surprise By Truth series, you know. Exactly who are you talking about,

Surprise By Truth? Now or then, you know. I'm sorry. I'm being told by an elder in a

Reformed Baptist Church in California to stop laughing. It's a distraction. I'm sorry.

It just struck me as funny. But then we scroll down here a little bit to another letter.

This is from RH in Tennessee. RH in Tennessee. And RH says,

Dear Mr. Hunt, I had looked forward to reading debating Calvinism. I knew of Calvinism's claim that non -Calvinists do not understand real

Calvinism. I had hoped Mr. White would enlighten me, but I was disappointed. His shallow...

I love this. When you're in the middle of reading something and you get an email, it just throws you right back to whatever just came in.

So his shallow... His shallow arguments only strengthen my opinion that real

Calvinism is indeed a damnable heresy. White's handling of what is probably the most straightforward, simple, and probably the best -known passage in the entire

Bible, John 3, 16, is twisted to mean something different than what it says.

But I thank God that whosoever means whatever person, no matter who, and that includes me.

That's RH in Tennessee. Well, we can see that RH took the time to very closely read the discussion and to discover that there is no freestanding word that is translated whosoever in John 3, 16.

But hey, you know, there you go. I've been sort of watching the

Marine Call a little bit. You know, I subscribed to it, the electronic version. And there hasn't been a lot of discussion.

This is one of the first times that that's even been addressed. And there just hasn't been a lot of discussion.

If you want to see some really weird stuff, go online and look at some of the reviews that have been written online.

There is some truly odd, strange things out there. Big, big, big time.

It's just making me go, all righty, some really strange folks, read books.

That's just, it's a good thing, I guess. 877 -753 -3341,

I'm not sure why I'm chuckling. That's just some of those. It's a very useful tool for those of us who are confused.

OK, 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number that Matthew called. And hello,

Matthew, how are you? Good day. I'm doing all right, how are you? Yeah, I'm pretty good over here, too.

OK, what can we do for you today? Well, I've got a laundry list of things I'm sort of wading through, but I'll stick with the topic

I talked to with your call screener, which is Darwin's Theory of Evolution. I'm a

Reformed Baptist myself, but I'm not exactly sure what the

Church's teaching is with respect. I know in general, the

Reformed Baptist Church would adopt a literal seven -day creation. You know, the

Hebrew word yom is consistently used to mean one 24 -hour period throughout

Scripture, as far as I know. And I know that's one reason why we would look at the creation account as that type of event.

Well, no, there's two different issues there, though. There's the issue of the days of creation and yom and everything in Hebrew.

But I think there's a significantly more important issue when we talk about the doctrine, and really it is within secularism, the doctrine of evolution and the doctrine of creation.

And it's not so much just creationism. I mean, I've written a little youth book on that. Unfortunately, it's no longer available, but it was once.

And I've commented on that a number of times. But on a theological level, I think the real issue that most

Reformed Baptists would raise, aside from the recognition that God is the creator of all things and that the only meaningful epistemologies you could develop would have to have

God at the starting point and so on and so forth, is that you cannot build the biblical anthropology, a biblical anthropology, a biblical doctrine of man without man being the creation of God.

He bears the imago Dei, not as something that was added in at another time, but it is a constituent element of his nature.

And everything that flows from that in regards to God's purpose, God's purpose in redemption in Christ, God's purpose in redeeming fallen mankind, all goes back to that.

And I think that would be considerably more central to the London Confession to face understanding of what

God is doing and who man is and all the rest of that stuff than sometimes some of the arguments that we end up getting into in regards to those issues.

And so I know, for example, when I went to a Christian college,

I went through high school in the public educational system and I fought the battle there.

I remember as a sophomore writing a 52 -page paper in advanced biology class on the subject of creation evolution.

And so I would sit during lunch periods with my biology teachers and I learned the evolutionary theory very, very, very well.

And I learned it from the inside on that level. And I thought when I went to a Christian school that the battle would be over even as a biology major.

But I was wrong. I was the only creationist at the Christian school. Everybody else was, at best, a theistic evolutionist.

And so I had to continue the battle there. And really at that point, because I was also working on my

Bible degree and a biology degree both, finished both majors, I had to think a lot about it.

And to me, outside of the creation issues in regards to the fact that that is absolutely central to all of Christian theology is that God is our creator and we are created and the epistemology and everything else.

You also have the issue of the fact of death and the fact of redemption from that and the nature of the curse.

There really isn't any room there. When I would speak with theistic evolutionists,

I would really find that what was driving them and the development of their worldview was not biblical revelation, but whatever the current cosmology was.

And obviously the cosmology that is popular today is different than it was when

I was in college only 15 years ago. And it'll be different five years from now. And so trying to come up with all that stuff, you can never end up with a consistent basis at that point.

Because there really isn't, in an atheistic worldview, any basis for those things. So there are a lot of different directions that I, as a

Reformed Baptist, would look at our confession and say, well, actually it's relevant to this, this, this, and this.

And it's not just an argument over the meaning of Yom. I mean,

I don't have any problem whatsoever in seeing the scientific evidence that is interpreted as indicative of an ancient creation and say, well, look, you know, for God to accomplish the purposes that he had for all of creation, creation would have had to have come into existence functional.

And if I look at the evidence from a theistic standpoint, and from a specifically a theistic standpoint where God has a purpose for everything to exist,

I'm not going to interpret the evidence in such a way as to have any problem with it.

I don't have to bend the speed of light and do all sorts of that kind of stuff like that. I mean, if the stars are going to exist for a purpose, then they have to be existed to be visible on Earth for the purpose that they were created to exist for in the first place.

So that's all a whole other area. But I really think sometimes we miss the central aspect of the argument.

And that is that we need to focus upon what is death? What is, where did it come from?

All this theistic evolutionary stuff seems to have a problem in those specific areas. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I've actually done some amount of research in this a few years back, and I was a little bit more well -versed on it then than I am now.

It's just recently, one of my studies in graduate school, I'm basically bombarded with Darwin's theory, even though I'm a computer scientist.

There's a lot of research going on where you attempt to use, quote -unquote, observed evolutionary patterns to solve problems with different machines.

So all this terminology, you just hear it so much and so much. And so it's as though everyone around you just accepts it, just on blind faith.

And I feel like I'm the only person there that doesn't. Well, believe me, like I said, it is the only way to accurately describe it in academia today, in secular academia, and sadly in a lot of what calls itself

Christian academia. It is religious orthodoxy. To believe otherwise is to, in essence, commit the sin of epistemological heresy.

And that is so true that just look at what happens to someone when they seek to try to challenge the foundations of, and I don't know anybody today who holds to Darwinian evolutionary theory.

It's a neo -Darwinian perspective that has been altered tremendously from the days of Darwin.

But just dare to try to raise the issue, and you know what's going to happen. And that is,

I think, the clearest proof of the fact this has become, in essence, a religious dogma within the secular world.

And it is odd, though, given the fact that so many are confessing today that, you know what, there are lots of issues.

There are lots of problems in regards to irreducible complexity and to the complexity of biochemical systems that were completely unknown to Darwin in his day.

That it's funny to hear people screaming that they need to have freedom to be able to examine anything outside of a theistic system, but you cannot have freedom to examine the possibility the theistic system actually gives best answers to the facts as we know them.

Right. Yeah, and you use the term theistic evolutionist. I guess that's more along the lines of what

I'm investigating right now, because I've always just seen evolution as just being completely incompatible with the creation account.

And I know there's a lot of organizations out there that find ways to basically weld it back into the creation story by using, like we were saying earlier with Jung, you use the word to mean an age.

So this one period of evolution occurred and then God had another period of evolution occur.

And if I'm not mistaken, I think it might be Hugh Ross who's done a lot of work on that. And I'm just really, it seems to me that if I accepted evolution,

I would basically have to renounce my belief in the

Bible as a whole, because if I accepted evolution and I looked at the creation account and said, well, that's not really true, then you would have a hole in your belief system.

And who's to say there wouldn't be holes in other places as well? I know that when I was there, the argument that was used in response to that is, no, we're not throwing out the

Gospels or something like that. In essence, they would argue that, well, no, we're just simply recognizing different kinds of literature.

And there's a whole lot that goes into this discussion that I'm really not prepared to go into today, but there are numerous works available.

And I know that Hugh Ross's stuff, I know it's very popular among some people, but the fact of the matter is pre -Adamic races and the sufficiency of general revelation to actually communicate the

Gospel without special revelation and things like that, that have been a part of the debate with Hugh Ross in the past, caused me a lot of problems.

There was an interesting program Hank Hanegraaff had him on a number of years.

Well, a year and a half, two years ago, I've forgotten now. I bet you they still make it available.

And Hank asked him a lot of tough questions, the direct questions. I'm not sure that he answered them really overly well.

So you might want to track down that resource. I thought it was a very interesting interview personally. Yeah, I know too.

I think Greg Cockel with Stand to Reason had him on there a few times. Even John Ankerberg, he's had, you know...

He's been all over the place, yeah. Yeah, he really has. He probably feels like a dartboard. Yeah, he's been here and there.

I guess there's one last thing. Are you familiar with a guy by the name of Kent Hovind? Yeah, I know some of the names.

I'm not sure what's going on with my microphone in there. I know I'm familiar with him. I couldn't tell you that I've read much about his stuff.

Anyhow, he did a big series, basically, I think, Refuting Evolutions, basically his life's work.

And he has something like a nine DVD set out, really cheap. And he lets people copy it for free, you know, if they want to.

And just for those listeners out there, he has a lot of really good information, just counter examples to most things you would see in your elementary science textbooks today.

And, you know, things that would really just make the Smithsonian feel really uneasy, you know, if the public knew, because it would kind of cut a hole in a lot of their...

Well, there's a lot of information out there like that. It's sort of like what I had in the blog recently about the 3D dimensional imaging they're doing of children in the womb now.

If it had been said a long time ago, if the womb was transparent, there would be no abortion. But, you know, the folks who have a vested interest try to keep the information away from other folks.

On this issue, there's a great deal of that kind of stuff.

So, hey, we need to keep running on here. Thank you, Matthew, for your phone call. I appreciate it. God bless you and your studies.

877 -753 -3341. Let's get up to Minnesota.

That's up where the people are in Minnesota, where there's 10 ,000 lakes and 100 billion mosquitoes.

And let's talk to Bill. Hi, Bill. Hello, Dwight. Am I right about this?

You're a southerner in Minnesota? Yes, sir. Do you sort of feel like you're on another planet?

Sometimes, yes. Well, actually, I was born in Minnesota, so I'm a native Minnesotan.

And that's why I can make fun of them, because I was born there. But anyway, I escaped after about five years and I'm still thawing out here in Arizona.

It takes quite some time. Should I go to the Ludafest festival at the Lutheran Church in the fall?

How does anyone put that in their mouth? Oh, I'm sorry.

I was hungry, but I'm not anymore. Anyways, Bill, you have a completely different question than about the

Lutherans in Minnesota. Right, yeah. Well, I appreciate your ministry and your books have been super.

Also, let me mention that I can't. I would have probably gotten the answer off the archives of your show, but I haven't been able to access that for two or three months now.

Well, let me just mention in passing, I honestly don't know exactly what the situation is right now myself.

The last I knew, Pete, who also makes this whole thing available for us, was going to be posting some archives there.

And I haven't actually talked with the powers that be as to what we're doing there. But we've just completely lost all contact with straightgate .com.

So up until April of this year, it's all there. But past that, there's nothing we can do.

And I guess we're just going to have to make sure they're all available in the MP3 section of the website.

Yeah, I would like you to comment just real quickly there, Rich. What is the situation?

Well, what we're going to be doing is essentially the most recent program will be archived on Pete's website for public listening through real audio for free.

And anything that goes beyond that will have to be acquired through either Straightgate April 15th or earlier as long as Straightgate lasts or through the

MP3 archives that we'll be storing up there. And a lot of folks need to understand that Stephen, for whatever has occurred here in the situation,

Stephen was putting out a pretty good chunk of change every year. And he had supporters or his church taking care of those needs, et cetera.

So we're not really able to absorb those costs. So we're going to have to make other arrangements.

But we want to make sure that those archives are available, at least in the

MP3 form. And then the other side of that coin is I've got to really get it in gear and get all the archives all the way back to the beginning of the series of this program archived and up there the first,

I think, two years I have yet to get into MP3. So that is what's the plan for the future.

What about over the past couple, since April? Are those available on our site? On MP3. On MP3.

Okay, that's what I wanted to know. Yes, yes, absolutely. Positively without a doubt. Thank you. We've had a lot of people ask. So thanks,

Bill, for mentioning that because a lot of people keep asking, hey, what's going on there? And a lot of folks were not aware of what the relationship between ourselves and Straightgate was.

And I hope we hear from Stephen again. I hope he's all right. My understanding is he was getting a job and some other stuff going on.

And that's where he, hopefully, that's where he is. I don't know. So anyway, go ahead, sir.

Again, you probably, I know you've addressed it sometimes, but a friend gave me something from John Armstrong.

And it sounds to me postmodern and also his view of scripture could almost be classified as a neo -Orthodox in terms of one has an encounter with scripture at the time that appears possibly very subjective.

So could you just comment on that briefly? Yeah, yeah, there's been quite a shift over the past six or seven years in John Armstrong's position.

There is a couple of articles that he has written in his viewpoint newsletter talking about his change in theology, his change in how he does theology and how he views things.

And yeah, he has adopted, he's been deeply influenced by N .T.

Wright and by N .T. Wright's understanding of how to read

Paul. And that has then led to his criticism of what he calls, and what is called by others as foundationalism.

And yeah, it does bear a postmodern tint to the view of scripture.

But actually those of us who, if you go to seminary almost anywhere, you will have been exposed to this view of scripture for quite some time, for a long, long time.

And there's really nothing new about it, but it is probably new, especially to the people who once looked to John Armstrong for guidance and for Reformation and Revival Ministries.

And we have talked about it. In fact, I'm pretty certain that we talked about it last year.

And so those archives should be there at straightgate .com still, if they're available.

And so there has been a, let me see if I can explain it.

Someone who has been in a conservative, evangelical movement, especially in apologetics type movements.

I mean, John Armstrong responded to Roman Catholicism. He edited a book on that subject.

So he was involved in apologetics. Individuals like that, sometimes if something happens, and I honestly don't know what situation was, but something happens that is troubling, that causes one discouragement in the ministry.

And in that type of a situation, sometimes what happens is if you become disillusioned with the context in which you have been ministering for a long period of time, all of a sudden you may start discovering these other perspectives and these people who hold these other perspectives who are much more, shall we say, open -minded, so much more willing to view things in a new fashion.

And it is very easy, and I've seen it a number of times, sadly, much more recently than over the years before that, but it almost becomes a quest to see just how broad -minded you can become.

And I'm going to avoid any of the jokes about being broad -minded, so broad -minded everything just sort of falls out.

But the idea really becomes, I was once there, and it almost becomes the

Paul conversion type thing is I know what it's like to be so narrow -minded.

In fact, in some of the articles John Armstrong has talked about asking forgiveness for things that he did back when he held those particular views.

And I really think that if it was at N .T. Wright that came first, these other things that led to N .T.

Wright, I don't know which the chicken and the egg is, but once you start reading in that area and then you want to expand more and more, it's very easy to move into other areas.

And yes, the view of Scripture becomes deeply impacted, and hence your view of what the Gospel is becomes deeply impacted.

I've said for a long, long time that once your view of Scripture is compromised, once you no longer believe that God has spoken with perspicuity, with clarity, with a force to where a man can be held accountable before God for what he knows and for what the

Word of God says, once you no longer believe that Scripture is theanustas, it is

God -breathed, Katie, bar the door. You can go any direction from that point.

It doesn't mean you're going to go any one particular direction, but you can't stay where you were.

You're not going to be comfortable where you've been all that period of time. You're going to go somewhere. And that's, in essence, what has taken place there.

As I understand it, in the last seminar that he had, he had a Roman Catholic speaker, an

Eastern Orthodox speaker, some of the Auburn Avenue folks were involved, some of the New Perspectivist folks.

And it's sort of, can we all just sort of get together? Well, the problem is when you engage in that kind of ecumenical perspective, ecumenical activity, the only agreement you can end up coming up with has to, in some essence, be the lowest common denominator.

And the issues of the gospel that you end up having to say, well, we're just going to have to disagree about that, are definitional of how you're going to proclaim it and what it means.

And so that's why when we see these ecumenical gatherings in our nation, you end up with Father, Mother, Gods, and no mention of Christ, and no mention of Atonement and Redemption, because you just can't get to that.

You can't get to that level of specificity. If you don't have a robust, high doctrine of scripture to begin with, and the ecumenical movement simply can't bear that level of authority for the word of God, and so it always goes another direction.

So we have discussed it, and what I've done in the past is I've actually read those articles, the viewpoint articles, and responded to them on the air.

But I would imagine they'd probably be back in October, November of last year. And so they should be there for you.

And so I don't have the articles right here next to me, or I'd read some quotes from it, but yeah, we have noted it and responded to it briefly, certainly not to all of it, but to it briefly we have.

Okay. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, sir. Watch those mosquitoes. Okay. All right. Thanks a lot. God bless.

Do they have West Nile up there in Minnesota? We've got it here in Phoenix now. I heard they mentioned,

I think like the third person to die of West Nile virus. So that's not good.

So and given up there, you have to live with off, you know, get out of the shower and spray with off.

That's what happens during the summers up there. I'm not going to go into anything more about what I know about Minnesota, because I'd have to tell you about the bats we had that lived in our farmhouse.

They'd come out and eat up the mosquitoes and stuff. And you don't want to hear that because we've got Brett in North Carolina and Jason in the

United Kingdom. Jason's in the United Kingdom. Oh, good. Sorry.

But let's talk to Brett, North Carolina. Hi, Brett. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing good.

Good to hear. Hey, I hear y 'all senators trying to become the vice president. Yeah, that's what it looks like.

You know, he's got pretty hair. I'm sorry.

I should not make political comments. I just hope you were never sued by him when he was a lawyer, because I heard he was quite, quite good at that.

But anyhow, how you doing, Brett? Doing good. I'm doing all right. Uh -oh, you've got one of those big bomb questions here.

I just looked at it. So that's not a good thing. Oh, I suppose. I don't know that I'll answer anything, but if we can take a look at it, what's up?

All right, well, looking at Matthew 19, 9, the exception clause for divorce and remarriage and all the debate that goes on around that.

Just curious as to how you understood the exception clause in Matthew 19, 9 and 532.

I was wondering if you held the Erasmian view or if you took the view of, like, Gordon Wynnham or William Heft that look at it in a different way.

I can honestly say that I haven't a clue what any of them said other than the

Erasmian view. I don't get into reading on this particular subject, so the specific views of specific scholars,

I haven't a clue. I can only tell you that as an elder in the church where you're always having to deal with this, it strikes us as elders in our fellowship that the range of pornia that would be found in Matthew 19, 9 should not be viewed solely in a

Greek context, but recognizing Jesus' continuous reference to and usage of the

Old Testament and the Old Testament law, we need to recognize that there were all sorts of things that provided for what we might call a virtual divorce.

For example, if your spouse were to be found to engage in homosexuality, that individual would be cut off.

And as such, when anyone would commit a sin that would involve, for example, capital punishment, this would provide, in essence, a virtual divorce.

And so I'm afraid of those folks who simplify things down to the point where issues such as that get lost in the shuffle.

There are those who say, look, there's just never, ever, ever, ever a possibility. People even deny that this is inspired scripture on textual grounds, though they don't really have a basis for doing so.

So I don't know what all those folks that you just quoted, I haven't a clue what they said, and maybe you could define them for us, but I would not take a super, super narrow view of pornaya.

I think there are violations of the marriage covenant that the Old Testament law contained that I don't think

Jesus is getting rid of them in limiting it just to an act of sexual immorality.

One of the things that was hard for me to understand is when

I was looking at the parallelism like Mark and Luke, and especially in 1 Corinthians 7 -11, where Paul speaks on it, and he basically is addressing where Jesus taught on it, and he doesn't include the exception clause in it whenever I read it, like in 1

Corinthians 7 -11, but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband, and then the husband should not divorce his wife.

And that seems to be what Paul's understanding of the Lord's teaching was in that, and taking that into consideration.

And the argument that Jesus has in 19, when they ask him the question, his immediate response is he goes to the creation account, and he says in verse 6 in chapter 19, so then they are no longer two flesh, so then they're no longer two, but one flesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. And that's his response to it. And it's interesting that he doesn't just say, well, yeah, well, actually it's not for any reason at all.

There's just a couple of reasons over here and I'll define this for you. He seems to give an answer, let no man separate it, and then they press it and say, what is

Moses commanded? And then I've been trying to do a study on that section of Deuteronomy 24, and it didn't seem like Moses actually did command it.

It seems that he's saying, if this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, then you can't go back and do this.

It's okay to divorce your wife in that case. And so I've read some people who say that the very fact that you give a case law like that condones it.

So if Moses says, if this happens, then this is the case. And that if this happens is condoned in the case law.

I don't know if that's a valid argument or if you had considered that or thought about that.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by makes what valid. Well, the argument is that Moses wasn't condoning divorce.

He was just saying, if divorce happens, and the wife goes off and marries another, then there's a defilement and she can't return to the first.

That's all he's saying, not he's condoning divorce and saying, okay, yeah, we can divorce. And it's all right, given the indecency exception in Deuteronomy 24.

Okay, I'm just gonna have to say, you're reading a whole lot more than I have. I've lost you. Honestly, I'm not sure what you mean by what you're asking right now.

I apologize. All I can tell you is that there's no textual reason for Matthew 19, 9 to be rejected.

It needs to be given its place. Why isn't it in the other parallel passages?

Well, I think there is a way to understand those things outside of it being there.

You don't have a fully orbed understanding of, as I mentioned before, the virtual divorces that were granted in the

Old Testament in regards to serious sins that put a person outside of the covenant community of Israel.

So that may be the reason that it's there. But as far as these other argumentations go,

I confess, I do not make any claims whatsoever to being an expert on the issue of divorce at that point.

And that's not an issue that we have addressed at all. Let's continue on.

We have lots more callers. Let's run to Jason in the

United Kingdom real quickly. We have two more callers after him. So we're going to have to keep moving. Hi, Jason, how are you doing? Hi, I'm fine.

How are you? I'm doing all right. I was going to talk about common grace.

Yes, sir. I know I've spoken to you about that before. It's just that I've been invited to go to a conference by a friend of mine run by the

Protestant Reformed Church, and very much looking forward to it. But I'm a little bit concerned about their denial of common grace.

They deny common grace? What type of conference is that? It's a conference.

It's not on common grace, but it's run by the Protestant Reformed Church, and it's on the covenant.

But I've received all the material from them, from a friend of mine, about their denial of common grace.

I was just wondering if you would mind commenting on the doctrine. Well, I don't know the particular group as it exists in England.

It's probably different than it exists elsewhere, or what their specifics are. It sounds like they have some sort of a tendency toward some form of hyper -Calvinism, or something along those lines.

As far as the argument over common grace, I think people are splitting hairs when they say, well, it's not really grace if it's not redemptive grace.

I think you have to be careful to define what you're talking about. On the one hand, the one extreme on the one hand is you define grace in such a general wide range that, in essence, you end up denying that there is any kind of particularity, that there is any kind of redeeming love, or redeeming grace involved in God's actions, that God is just simply equally drawing each person and just sort of sitting back and hoping someone takes him up on it.

That's the one extreme on one end. And then the other extreme on the other end, you end up with those people who are saying that there is absolutely no demonstration of patience, or kindness, or grace, or love, or even the proper use of love in regards to those who will end up in hell.

And so you have, in essence, just an unwillingness to allow for there being different kinds. And on both sides,

I think you have the same error being made, and that is an unwillingness to allow for definition to take place when you see that definition in Scripture.

I mean, there is clearly patience and longsuffering that is extended. That God makes his sun to shine, and his rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

And if God did not have that kind of mercy toward individuals, you would have their immediate destruction upon the days of their birth.

The only response I've heard to that argument is that God's goodness towards the non -elect is for the benefit of believers.

Well, I'm sure the non -elect are sort of appreciative of it, too, at least during the time of their life.

But, you know, the one thing that I would say, the one thing I would say probably negatively toward attendants is just this, that those groups that get into that stuff tend to pretty much just bang away on that one drum.

They tend to bang away on that, you know, pick at that one string in the banjo. And they never go on to other stuff.

Since that is what defines their particular group, then they just pick on that one string, and they always end up coming back to it as if it is the defining factor in all else.

And unfortunately, that's been my experience in talking with folks that come from that perspective.

Now, obviously, they can say, oh, boy, we don't have to do that. We can be very balanced. It's just been my experience.

You know, my experience is only, I don't go to a whole lot of conferences, to be perfectly honest with you, unless I'm speaking at them, and they wouldn't be having me speak at one anyways.

So, you know, that really wouldn't matter a whole lot. But it's going to be up to you, Jason. I mean, you know, it's totally up to you as to what you want to handle as far as where you want to go and stuff like that.

And unfortunately, I know it's late there, but we have a bunch of more callers. We're going to try to get in here real quickly.

So let me know how the conference goes, if you decide to go or if you don't. Thanks for calling today.

God bless. Bye -bye. Bye -bye. All right. Let's talk to Steve in San Antonio, Texas, where you don't mess with Texas.

Hi, Steve. How are you doing? Hi, Dr. O. How are you? I'm doing all right. Listen, it's been a while since I called in, and I have a question.

I listen to a lot of your debates, particularly the ones with Jerry Matitex and a couple of the minor ones with Fastigi, as far as the

Marian doctrines go. And one of the things that you really have me thinking on is

Sola Scriptura, and how that should be the highest standard. A couple of doubts I have in my mind are, like, when

Paul says to hold on to the traditions, written or oral, and the line in the Bible where it says that all the books in the world couldn't contain all the stuff that Jesus did.

Things like that, okay? And in particular to this question, in going back to the

Marian doctrines, as far as perpetual virginity goes of Mary, because I know you take it straight from Scripture that there's brothers and sisters of the

Lord. But then you go back to the early fathers, the ones I took, just a short list,

Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Ephraim, Basil, the two

Gregory's, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazanthian. I'm pronouncing it right.

And they all hold to that doctrine. Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you mean they all hold to that doctrine? I mean, which

Clement are you talking about? Clement of Alexandria.

Oh, okay, the deeply Gnostic -influenced one. Okay, I just want to make sure, because there's Clement who wrote from Rome to Corinth, and there's absolutely no reference to any such thing in that Clement.

So you just mentioned Clement, and I was going to define which one you're talking about. So the question would be, would

Scripture be wrong? Would the early fathers, you know, as you mentioned, were they fooled by the

Gnosticism? Okay, or does it go back to where the Catholic apologists say that brothers means relatives, because the people back then were very clannish?

Well, a couple things. First of all, I find it interesting, if you've listened to the geromatics debates, we have addressed

Paul's writing to the Thessalonians in 2 Thessalonians 2 .15 and demonstrated the context of the

Gospel, that there is one body of traditions delivered in two ways, and that the idea that there is some sort of apostolic tradition that is separate from Scripture being passed on here would mean that everyone at Thessalonica, for example, would have known about the perpetual virginity of Mary, and there isn't a

Roman Catholic apologist on the planet that would even try to debate that, because they know that it could not possibly be documented.

The entirety, whenever you find any Catholic apologist utilizing, for example, Newman's development hypothesis, they've given up trying to do what their interpretation of 2

Thessalonians 2 .15 would demand that they should be able to do, and they cannot do it. And as far as John 21,

I've, to be honest with you, identified in my book, The Roman Catholic Controversy, that's probably the single worst verse,

I know that Carl Keating uses it, but it shows a real misunderstanding of what

Sola Scriptura is about, because while it says that Jesus said and did many things, it nowhere even begins to intimate that those things that he said and did were meant to be included in Scripture, were necessary for us to know.

The idea that the Scripture needs to be exhaustive, to be sufficient as the sole rule of faith, would mean we would have to have every element of the apostolic meals, what each of the apostles wore each day, what their middle names were, what their favorite sports were,

I mean, it would just be ridiculous. There's nothing in that that even begins to indicate that because Jesus did many of the things, that any of those things are contained in the alleged apostolic authority that Rome claims.

And in fact, I remember asking Father Mitchell Pacwa in our debate on Sola Scriptura in San Diego in 1999,

I said, can you name for me a single word uttered by the Lord Jesus that has been dogmatically defined as having been uttered by the

Lord Jesus by the Roman Catholic Church? And evidently, I don't know if it's something he hadn't thought about before, but he paused a moment and then he said, well, no.

So the same thing with Gerimatotix. When Gerimatotix pointed to 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, in response to my pen illustration, he said, show us those things that are inspired, these external traditions.

And he says, well, the words of Jesus. Well, okay, where are they? Show us a single thing that Jesus said or the apostles said that Rome has defined outside of the canon of scripture.

And Rome hasn't given a single thing. So as far as that stuff goes,

I guess I can see the relevance here because when you simply exegete the text of scripture, you never come up with the perpetual virginity of Mary.

If you just allow scripture, did you hear the last debate that I did with Gerimatotix on the subject of the perpetual virginity of Mary?

And then the follow -up, was it an hour and a half or did we do two hours? I've forgotten how - On the dividing line.

On the dividing line, the follow -up program with Gerimatotix. Yes. But did you hear the debate itself?

Yes. Okay. So we went into all of the issues in regards to the meaning of Adelphos and Adelphi.

We went into the historical materials. You mentioned Basel. Basel specifically says it is not a dogma.

Basel is a witness to the fact that there were people who disagreed. Now, where did that disagreement come from?

I would argue that that disagreement comes from the fact that there are some people who read the scriptures directly as to what they said and allowed the word to have their native meaning.

And there were others who were very, very deeply influenced by the rise of the monastic movement, especially with the

Desert Fathers in the middle of the second century and growing from that point, and that there was an unhealthy, unbiblical view of sexuality that eventually became absolutely epidemic in the

Middle Ages in the Roman Catholic Church that led to debates by monks as to whether women had souls.

I think that it is significantly easier to understand the influence of external sources because we know that the idea of virginity and asceticism and things like that was very much a part of the various religions of the day.

The Montanists did that. Marcion was into that. All these various sundry groups that people have been in contact with, that was an element of what allegedly demonstrated a higher spirituality.

The carnality, especially within dualism, the connection with the flesh and the flesh being the realm of evil and all the rest of that stuff.

It is just very, very easy to understand why those would have influenced people rather than the exegesis of the text of scripture.

I don't find those folks. I know Roman Catholics, and I don't have this in front of me right now, we've only got a few minutes left in the program, but we cited, if I recall correctly, we cited two geromantic

Roman Catholic scholars who say Jerome was wrong when Jerome said X, Y, and Z. But you've got to remember,

Jerome was in a controversy. There was disagreement within the early church at that time.

There wasn't, and nobody could go back to some allegedly apostolic tradition and say, oh, here's where the apostles told us about the perpetual virginity of Mary.

Which, if that interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2 .15 was correct, they should have been able to do that because everybody at Thessalonica should have known that, but they weren't able to do so.

Okay, but the fathers that I had mentioned, and I'm not even up to, you know, the

Middle Ages. Well, who would care what the Middle Ages had to say about an allegedly apostolic thing?

I mean, that's like looking at the bodily assumption of Mary and saying, well, I can find it the first time in AD 495 when

Galatius condemns the transness beati Maria literature, but I can find lots of folks in the

Middle Ages that at least believed it, but not necessarily as a dogma, is that supposed to mean something?

I mean, once you get past maybe 500 years after Christ, unless you're actually going to try to make an argument that this is some apostolic tradition that just didn't get recorded, what's the relevance of that?

I mean, have you ever read what the Pope said about the devil appearing as a frog in Germany? No, no.

Okay, well, that's from the medieval period too, and I would look at the hammer against witchcraft in some of the books that were really relevant during the medieval period, and then you'll start going, well, you know what?

What specific people believe on particular issues here really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the exegesis of the text of scripture or anything you call self -apostolic.

What year was Augustine? Augustine dies in the third decade of the 5th century.

Okay, okay. So from the 5th century back down to the 1st, because I'm up to the chapter of Augustine right now, okay, but I really haven't fully researched him.

As far as this issue. But the other ones, they did have the scriptures, did they not? Sure. So why would they blatantly hold to a doctrine or even give it credence when the scriptures would tend to say otherwise?

Steve, did the Judaizers have... I'm sorry, did

I get that right? Yes, Steve. Did the Judaizers have the scriptures? Yes. Did the

Pharisees have the scriptures? Yes. Did Arius have the scriptures? Yes. Did Pelagius have the scriptures?

I'm not familiar with him. The Pelagian controversy, the greatest controversy in Augustine, well,

Donatist and Pelagian controversies, the two major controversies. You never heard of Pelagianism? I have heard of it, but...

Okay, well, Pelagius was a British monk, so we can probably guess he probably had the scriptures. You see the point that I'm making?

All these folks had the scriptures. Simply having the scriptures does not mean that you are going to... The Mormons have the scriptures,

Steve. The Jehovah's Witnesses have the scriptures, but they also have external authorities, and sometimes those external authorities don't have to be a whole other book of scriptures.

Sometimes, and really, here's where we come back to the original question, the biggest problem is if you have the scriptures, but you have a tradition above the scriptures, do you really have the scriptures?

Are you really allowing the scriptures to speak for themselves if you have a tradition that tells you this is what you must see in the scriptures?

So where do you, as a Calvinist, trace your roots back to?

Because you consider yourself a true Christian. Your next debate is how Catholics are not your brothers in Christ.

Where do you trace back your lineage to people that were in charge of the church and handing it on?

I don't view the church the way you do. The church is not made up of a genealogical line traced back to somebody.

The church is made up of those who, by the Spirit of God, bow the knee to the truth of God in the gospel.

It's not a historical lineage type thing, and that's why I'm not one of those folks that runs around with those little date things that say, well, you know, here's where this developed and here's where this developed.

It's not that clean. It's not that simple. There were people who believed a lot of different things within and without what eventually calls itself the

Roman communion down to the history of the church. And my authority to deal with the issue of whether a Roman Catholic is my brother in Christ or not has to do with what the scriptures teach concerning the nature of the gospel, not some alleged connection to somebody who lived, you know, at some point in time.

Because, Steve, you go that direction and you're never, ever, ever going to get to any conclusions. I mean, you in your own position, that forces you to try to somehow defend the historicity of the papacy, and now you're stuck with the

Babylonian captivity. Do you know that there were once three popes? Do you know that for many years there were two popes who were anathematizing one another?

That a council had to be called to heal that papacy? I mean, if you put yourself in that position, you've got a really hard road to hoe, especially when you start getting into the pornocracy, the period in the 9th and 10th centuries, and all the rest of that stuff.

That's not where the Christian church is defined. The Christian church is defined by God's revelation in the scripture of what the gospel is, and the

Spirit's work in drawing a person to believe and to bow the knee to that gospel and to embrace

Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. And God's been doing that in nations all across this world from the very beginning, and that's why

He builds His church. He's not dependent upon our genealogies and the things that go along with it.

Well, let me ask you a question. I was reading, and I can't name the early fathers right now, but they were giving the assertion that Mary had sinned, and it was proof that she sinned, because at the cross she had doubt.

That was very common in a number of, especially the Eastern writers. Okay, and they trace that back to Simeon saying that the sword would pierce her heart.

Do you believe that? I don't know that Mary was doubting at the cross.

There's no question to me that Mary was a sinful person who was redeemed, just like any of the rest of us.

There is nothing in Ciccara to Mene in Luke 128 to lay a foundation for all the wild things that are said by Roman Catholic apologists about her being graced from the beginning, all the rest of that stuff.

But I don't necessarily believe that there's any evidence, to me anyways, that the cross,

Mary's sins in any way, shape, or form. But the fact of the matter is, they didn't have any problem saying that, and that means there was no apostolic tradition saying otherwise at that point in time.

Steve, thank you very much for your call. Thanks for all of you listening to Dividing Line today. We'll be back with Lord... Well, I'm not sure about next

Tuesday. Got to think about that one, because I'll be in California. Maybe two... It is two weeks. It's two weeks from now, we'll be back.

The office is closed next week. We'll see you in two weeks on Dividing Line. God bless. Brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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