A Non-Road Trip Road Trip DL

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. You know what? You gotta be able to see me. What in the world am

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I doing in here? I told everybody that I don't pull out until Friday, and we're doing

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The Dividing Line on Monday and Wednesday, Thursday with our family for Thanksgiving, grandkids, so nice to live where the grandkids are and stuff like that.

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And we're not going to do a program on Friday, we've got a long, long travel day on Friday.

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So what in the world am I doing in here? Well, I'm parked in front of my house, and in an hour and a half, we are going to be recording a sweater vest dialogue with Doug Wilson.

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I think Jared Longshore might be coming along. They literally asked if I had an

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Indian headdress. I don't know if you saw what appeared on Twitter. It's been a really busy day.

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You gotta understand, I sort of made the goal that by Wednesday night, I want to have everything in the unit, I want to have it all packed, you know, my clothes are over there.

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You can't ever, have you noticed, you just, you can't do all your toiletries until you're walking out the door.

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You know, you can't. But I got most everything in here, and the refrigerator is cold and filled with food, and all my clothes in the back, stuff to sleep in.

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So I want everything done by tonight, if I possibly can. So tomorrow we can just enjoy the family,

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Friday morning get up and hit the road and head for Amarillo, not on Friday, it's going to take two days to get to Amarillo.

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But I'll be in New Mexico tomorrow, or Friday, I'm sorry, and we'll be speaking in Amarillo.

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We've got everything on the calendar now. I'll be preaching Sunday morning at 10am, and the information is there, so if you're in the area,

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I look forward to seeing you. On my way to St. Charles, our regular St. Charles weekend, and then this time coming back,

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I've filled the week after St. Charles. We're going to be in Sedalia, two nights events there, and then three days in the

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Kansas City area, and again, that's on the calendar.

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And then I get home just in time, Lord willing, Lord willing, it's all Lord willing, get home just in time for taking my granddaughters, my lovely granddaughters, my wife's going to take my granddaughters out the weekend before, and buy pretty dresses for them, and then on the 16th, we are going to the

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Phoenix Symphony Orchestra's end choir's presentation of Handel's Messiah, which, by the way, has been in continuous production since it was first performed in 1741.

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That's called longevity, that's called quality, that's called, wow, good stuff, excuse me.

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So that's what's coming up, and so we had to try to figure out, with me trying to go pick up certain foods,

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I need to thank Carolina's, Carolina's Mexican Food, for once again providing me with machaca chimichangas, which freeze wonderfully, and they cook wonderfully in an air fryer, and they are a regular staple of my trips.

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I had to go get those today. So when you put it all together, it wasn't going to work to do the dividing line in the regular studio, and then do sort of a dialogue at 5 30 at night.

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And so I'm like, well, I've got a fully functional studio sitting outside my house, why not?

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And so here we are. The nice thing about this is this, now you don't have any idea what this is, but if you walked into my home right now, you would be assaulted by the glorious smell of nuts and bolts.

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Now, I don't know what your family may call it, maybe your family doesn't do this, but my mom, years and years ago, and Rich has had nuts and bolts.

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Rich had some nuts and bolts that my mom made a long, long ago. That's not my dad's dressing, or stuffing.

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I've seen debates on YouTube right now, the dressing or stuffing? It's both.

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And my dad's dressing, untouched, world champion, greatest dressing ever made.

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We're going to see if my son -in -law can get close. I came close once. And it's tough.

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It's a challenge. There's no twist about it. Anyway, this is different. This is Czech's party mix, basically.

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And you can buy that in a bag at the store. Okay. But there's a way to make it at home that involves big pans and enough butter to, you know, just a lot of butter, and seasonings, and every 15 minutes, getting it out of the oven and stirring it, and then putting it back in, and for a certain amount of time, covered.

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A certain amount of time, not covered. I don't remember things. My wife's doing it. That's what's going on right now.

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And that's what's in here. Now, I will admit, she brought some out to me, and I'm very thankful for that.

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But if you've ever made this stuff, you know, the first day, it's not all that seasoning.

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I don't know why. But the first day, it just needs to set for a while.

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And so it'll be best tomorrow. Wow. So we're off the air?

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Great. How did that happen? Do I have to hit on the air again or something like that?

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Oh, well. I guess this is going to be a dead cast. I should have known. It's been a tough day.

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It's been a tough day. So we got started, and everything stopped,

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I guess. And I'm not being told to hit record, or to hit on air, or anything like that, or start all over again.

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Anything like that at all? Yes? No? Maybe? I guess Rich can't see me, or hear me, or know what's going on anymore anyways.

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So we are now on a dead cast. I'm sorry. I'll find out from Rich at another point in time.

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See, he stuck this computer in here, and he's really proud of it, because he can watch what

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I'm doing, and do stuff like that, I guess. But he was telling me,

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I never even have to worry about this computer. It's just going to be all him, and he can do all this stuff. But actually, to allow him to do anything,

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I have to reach down and hit something. So I have no idea why it kicked us off the air, or it looks like we're back on the air, according to this.

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I don't know. But I'm just going to press on and go, hey, it's the day before Thanksgiving.

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Let's just be thankful for what we've got. I've got a lot to cover anyways, and not a lot of time to cover it. I've already wasted eight minutes.

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So if any of that got recorded, for those of you who do Thanksgiving stuff, nuts and bolts, great stuff.

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Maybe I'll post my mom's recipe for it. It's great to take to people, and give people at church, and stuff like that.

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Is it healthy? I don't know. If you're really into lots and lots of butter and seasoning,

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I suppose it is. But other than that, probably not. So let's press on from there.

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So my daughter just posted a picture of a double yolked egg.

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I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, but we'll go on from there. What are we going to do today? There's so much.

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There's so many things we could be talking about. But there's so much going on in culture.

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There's so much going on in the... What's the term they're using now?

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Rapid, unscheduled disassembly? Yeah, rapid, unscheduled, a rud.

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So when the SpaceX thing, the booster, was turning around, it's supposed to come back down, and all the rest of that stuff, it just blew into smithereens.

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And they said, we've had a rapid, rapid, unscheduled disassembly. And that's what our society is doing.

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Our society is in the midst of a rapid, scheduled disassembly. The people who want this, the progressivist left, they want the end of Western culture and society.

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So they can mold a global society based upon their predilections and their power that will, of course, destroy human life.

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These people, the scriptural line, when wisdom is speaking and says, those who hate me love death.

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Absolutely true. Absolutely, completely true. There's so many things going on.

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And so why would we take the time to be dealing with what, from the world's perspective, is intermural argumentation?

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And what I mean by that is, this ministry, not from the first, not from its founding.

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I would say within seven to eight years, maybe a little less than that, we became involved in dealing with the subject of Roman Catholicism.

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If you want to mark yourself off as unpopular, never going to have a seat at the table, dangerous, all the rest of that stuff, then be reformed, deal with Roman Catholicism and Islam.

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I've said many times, that's how you keep your ministry nice and small and compact. Lean, maybe putting it.

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And my first two books were on the subject of Roman Catholicism.

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No one expected that. Everybody expected my first book to be on Mormonism. That was my third. And once we sent those books to Catholic Answers, within a very short period of time, we got a phone call from Jerry Matitix and that first debate in August of 1990 in Long Beach, which began quite a saga of debates that have taken place since then.

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And we have dealt with so many, we've dealt with all the primary topics.

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We really, really have. And I see people saying, yeah, but that was back in the 1990s, early 2000s, everything's different now.

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And I'm like, no, it's not. If you read the Reformers and you read the

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Roman Catholics responding to the Reformers, the arguments are the same. Sure, social media and Bible programs on computer allow you to have a like that,

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I suppose. But the reality is the key fundamental issues are still the key fundamental issues.

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And unfortunately, every time the wave comes in of Catholic Protestant debate, you discover that people have either forgotten the previous wave or they really didn't understand it in the first place on both sides.

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And I can only be concerned about one side of that equation. And it is frustrating to me, to be sure, to see just how surface level the objections are that many

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Protestants will have to Roman Catholicism because it sets them up to the practiced

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Roman Catholic apologists to just knock it right out of the park.

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And so you may have noticed in social media that I've been writing some pretty long posts because I've been going back and forth with a guy named

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Joshua Charles, who is a former presidential speechwriter. He's an attorney, he's a convert to Roman Catholicism, and he identifies himself as a historian.

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I don't know what that means in his particular context. For me, it means that I've taught history on the undergraduate and graduate levels since 1990, not continuously.

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But I started, that was the first class I taught once I graduated in seminary was church history. And so I've taught early church history, medieval reformation church history, a number of different contexts along those lines.

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And I am in a live RV and there's strange people outside in the road.

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Anyway, so I'm not sure what historian means for Joshua Charles, but he started responding to some things that I was saying and in length with a number of citations that while interesting, as I'll explain here in a while, were not exactly conclusive in their argumentation.

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And I tried to remain focused on particular topics and he started complaining, well, you're not dealing with this, you're not dealing with that.

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So I think it was last night or yesterday morning, I provided him with a, well, it was almost too long for Twitter.

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So it was probably 3 ,400, 3 ,500 word series of citations because he kept on, well,

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I'm doing all these citations. Okay, here, I can do citation dumps too. It's not all that difficult to do, especially if you've been doing this for a long time.

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And I'm sure I was dealing with the subject of Roman Catholicism before he converted to Roman Catholicism. So I've got my files lined up too.

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I can do the document dumps too, but how about we focus upon the real issues? And so we've gone back and forth and a lot of people are reading this back and forth and, well, you all need to debate and that's fine.

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I saw that he said, I haven't invited him on the dividing line yet, so he's just going to go do his thing. Let me address that one first real quickly.

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I have five major debates in February, two of them with Trent Horn of Catholic Answers, one with one of the leading

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Unitarian scholars in the United States. I'm speaking, I'm teaching an intensive class in the middle of that trip.

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This is all in one road trip, about a 35 -day road trip.

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And I don't fly, so I'm driving. So 35 days, pulling the RV, not every day obviously, over 5 ,000 miles at five debates, teaching a class, teaching at a conference.

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And that's my priority right now. I mean, aside from the fact that I am a pastor of a church and have regular preaching duties and a grandfather and the other things that I do in life.

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So I just have to go, well, if Mr. Charles would like to talk about doing a formal debate,

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I can think of a number of places around the United States that have expressed interest over the years in hosting such things.

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And so we should talk about a particular subject and schedule a debate maybe next summer or something along those lines.

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So I take debates seriously. When I debated people like Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, John Shelby Spong, I spent months in preparation for those debates.

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I read everything Ehrman had written, including his doctoral dissertation. These things are important.

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You don't just, well, let's do it next week. Well, we can have an interesting conversation next week.

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Off the top of my head, I can hold my own with him on any of these issues.

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Sure. But it's just off top of our head. If we want to do a serious topic, then we should make it a worthwhile topic and invite people to be there.

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I think online debates are okay. I think there is a dynamic that is present in live debates in person that is sometimes missing when you're staring at that little...

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I'm staring at a nice little 4K camera mounted to the wall on the other side of the bathroom.

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Okay. That's how I look at you. That's how you do it when you're doing things online.

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By the way, he seemed to complain. He seems to be upset that we don't allow comments on our videos. Never allowed.

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The instant I became monetized on Google, which I've since said, thank you, years and years and years and years ago, as YouTube was starting,

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I discovered very quickly that the comments were going to be completely unmoderatable.

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And I would have that much interest in the never ending back and forth in those comm boxes.

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Everybody knows what terminology I've used of them over the years. Internet ignorance aggregators.

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So yeah, no, I'm not even going to begin to apologize for not having comments on those things.

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Develop your own audience. If you want to respond, great. Respond to your own audience.

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That's what I'm doing. So do the same thing. Yeah, we've been podcasting since 2000 before there were pods.

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We've pioneered in it, but okay, that's the way it is. Anyway, so if we if we want to do something like that, like next summer or something like that.

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Great. Super. Let's talk about it. But for right now, there's a great deal of conversation going on about Roman Catholicism.

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And one of the primary reasons is. The Roman Catholic Church is in crisis. It's in crisis.

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Because you have a progressivist pope. Who is fundamentally changing the direction and perspective of the

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Roman Catholic Church and the way he's doing it is he is. Laying a foundation, an article came out.

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Just I think today or maybe yesterday. About the pope writing to some people in Germany and basically saying why he disagrees with what certain

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German proletariats are doing. They're doing it locally rather than globally.

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They're going the same direction. They're just doing it too fast. And he's basically saying, you know, do it my way.

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So you've got you've got this pope. Who has opened up the possibility for blessings of same sex unions.

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He is clearly very supportive of, for example,

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Father Martin and the LGBTQ plus stuff. He just met with a whole room full of transgender.

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Well, they're biological males that act that live as prostitutes. You can't get more obvious as to where he's going and what he's doing.

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And yet, at the same time, he just got rid of Bishop Strickland. And we all can recognize this because that's how the

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Department of Injustice works. That's how that's what's happening in the United States. You know, yeah.

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You walk between the ropes into the into the Capitol January 6th and you're going to be thrown into prison for 10 years in solitary confinement on bread and water.

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But if you firebomb federal buildings, they'll give you $100 ,000 for having insulted you once or something like that.

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We see it's pretty obvious when you have a double standard. That's what you got in Rome.

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That's what you got in your pope. And so there is a crisis going on right now.

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And it's a crisis of authority. It's a crisis of consistency. It's a crisis of tradition. What is tradition?

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Who gets to define it? These are important and vital issues that we have been discussing and talking about for a very, very, very long time.

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And you might say, well, you know, you've done it in the past. Why do it again? Well, because each generation, you know, it's it's it's been a long time.

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Sure, I've debated Sol Scriptura many times. Does that mean I never get to have to talk about it again? No, you don't have to talk about it.

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You don't have to talk about it. So what happened was a

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Twitter account called Pray the Rosary. Pray the at Pray the

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Rosary 12 posted. And here's I'm just going to read it.

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Direct quote. Protestants don't have any authority to interpret the Bible. Authority is given to the 12 apostles and subsequently passed down to the

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Catholic bishops of today in an unbroken line. Protestants are trying to pull themselves out from being under the authority of the magisterium and sacred tradition, claiming the

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Bible is the only valid source of authority, all while forgetting that it was under the authority of the magisterium, consistent also with sacred tradition, that the

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Bible was compiled in 32 AD, Council of Rome under Pope Damasus. It's not like our

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Lord tossed a Bible down as he ascended. He obviously had the power to do so, but rather chose to entrust it to the authority of the church.

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Okay. So there's the claim. And let's be honest.

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The vast majority of, and when I say Protestants, I'm not even including the mainline denominations.

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And they should recognize as well, if they're going to be honest, the majority of people that would be classified as Protestants are not historically

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Protestants. They're not. I see people, and the number just keeps getting bigger.

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I saw someone saying, there's 62 ,500 denominations. And I'm just like, oh, inflation, it's by dynamics.

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No, there's not. You look up the original numbers, look at AOMN .org, look up 32 ,000 denominations.

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And we've done numerous articles on it. We've gone through it over and over again. They're including Mormons and Gnostics and just all sorts of wild and crazy stuff.

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98 % of the groups, of the numbers they include, do not seek to affirm or practice

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Sola Scriptura. They don't. So let's leave all those people aside.

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Let's focus down upon believing Protestants, people who believe that the

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Bible is the Word of God, people believe that it's, try to purposefully hold

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Jesus's view of the Bible. I think that's a pretty good definition right there when it comes to Scripture.

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These individuals, it said, Protestants don't have any authority to interpret the Bible. Really? Where do you get that?

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When the apostles themselves came preaching the gospel in Berea, the

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Scriptures commend the Bereans for doing what? For submitting to a magisterium?

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There is no magisterium in the book of Acts. Even in Acts 15, there is no quote -unquote magisterium.

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The apostles gather, and by the way, I saw someone making the argument that this was clearly an infallible council and therefore we can have infallible councils.

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It's in Scripture. These are apostles. This is inspired revelation.

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How does, I suppose you can, if you want to pretend that the council fathers at Nicaea believed they were apostles and that their words were inspired in the same way that Paul was, or Acts is, or something like that, you can believe that if you want, but they didn't believe that.

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When Athanasius defends the council of Nicaea, he doesn't make that claim. So what you start seeing in this kind of rhetoric, this kind of overbaked papalism, because that's what it is, overbaked papalism, what you start seeing is the key element of how

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Roman Catholics, by necessity, have to deal with church history by means of anachronism.

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Anachronism, you've probably heard the term before, and when we talk about history, one of the ways in which we have recognized, for example, the

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Muslims are always, well, not all Muslims, but many

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Muslims are known for quoting from the

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Gospel of Barnabas, not the Epistle of Barnabas, that's a different thing, Gospel of Barnabas. And they think that this was the

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Barnabas from the New Testament, and here's his Gospel, and wow, it's talking about Muhammad. It is a study in anachronism, in asserting things about first century

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Israel that never existed there and could never exist. And this is how you detect frauds, which, by the way,

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Roman Catholicism in particular has a long history of the utilization of fraudulent sources to establish her authority.

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The Donation of Constantine's, the most famous one, the Pseudo -Isidorean Decretals, equally famous.

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I did a debate with a Catholic attorney a number of years ago, and he was on the

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Immaculate Conception, he produced fraudulent quotations from Augustine on the subject.

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So it's not unusual any of that takes place.

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But you detect anachronisms by finding things in the past that weren't actually a part of the context of the person that's allegedly speaking.

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And when I say that Roman Catholics have to deal with church history anachronistically, it's because Rome tells them what church history will contain dogmatically.

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So for example, in the official document Satis Cognitum, we are told that the

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Roman Catholic view on the papacy enunciated by the

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First Vatican Council was the constant faith of the ancient church. Now, John Henry Cardinal Newman knew that wasn't the case, and anybody who's read the early church knows that's not the case.

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Anyone who has, for example, read about Honorius knows that wasn't the case, and the fact that for 400 years every one of his successors upon becoming

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Pope had to anathematize him as a heretic. So the whole idea that this is the ancient and constant faith of the church is a fiction.

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It's a pious fiction, but it's dogmatically defined by Rome. This is what you're supposed to believe.

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And so people today, not taught in how to do history and how to analyze history in any meaningful fashion, just simply believe what they're told.

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And so there was no magisterium in the early church that said we and we alone can interpret scripture.

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The Bereans, as I said, were commended by scripture itself for testing the apostolic message on the basis of scripture.

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Jesus taught us in Matthew chapter 15 that even when the Jews come along and say, we have tradition, it comes from God, it comes from Moses, it was passed down outside of written scripture, and Jesus says you examine these things by scripture.

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We have all of these things right in front of us. And so this idea that things have always been like they are,

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Rome tries to have their cake and eat it at the same time. And so when

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I first responded to Joshua Charles, I had pointed out that what he was enunciating about the

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Council of Nicaea was the concept of the development of doctrine, which

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I talked about in the last program from John Henry Cardinal Newman. But at the same time, they want to be able to say, and that deposit of faith, that apostolic tradition comes from the apostles themselves.

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And the reality is it doesn't. It's just simply not true. And so they look back, and when

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Joshua Charles reads Augustine, he sees in Augustine what Roman Catholic dogma tells him to.

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I see in Augustine, I see, I recognize, and I doubt that Joshua Charles will listen to this, but I see what

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B .B. Warfield correctly identified, a phrase, a quote that I've given to you many, many times before.

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The Reformation inwardly considered was nothing more than the victory of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.

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What does that mean? That Augustine contradicted himself. That both sides could accurately quote Augustine in the

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Reformation. And it's fascinating and helpful and edifying to know why, how that happened, the

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Donatist controversy, the Blagin controversy, very different controversies in very different contexts, led him to, you know, even in his later years, retract, you know, retract some of the things he had said before, but still it led to contradictions in his theology, and that's why both sides can quote him and quote him accurately.

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And so when Joshua Charles is quoting a bunch of Augustine, I responded with pages of Augustine quotes, and I can read his, and I can go, yeah,

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Augustine believed that, and Augustine said high things about the church, but Augustine also said these things about the church in regards to scripture, and Augustine also in the

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Sermon 131 issue, and I would highly recommend to Joshua Charles that he look up Sermon 131 at aomin .org.

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Use the transcripts page. It'll give you all sorts of stuff. It's really neat. So it's a pretty much complete index of everything we've done in this program since 1998, plus my debates, church history teachings, sermons.

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It's scary. Anyway, given what happened in regards to Pelagius and Zosimus and that whole thing, don't have time to go into right now.

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You can read about it at aomin .org, just look in Sermon 131. It's very clear that Augustine could say high things about the church, but that does not mean that he held to Rome's view of the papacy, because the

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North African bishops told the Bishop of Rome to take a proverbial hike, and the

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Bishop of Rome backed down, and any of the other stuff that has developed in the centuries since then.

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So I can let Augustine be Augustine. I don't have this dogmatic demand to find, you know, because he asked who at the

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Council of Nicaea reformed Baptists, and I said nobody, and nor should I expect them. That stuff's fizzy.

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That's not how you do church history, but the Roman Catholic has to, because he's been told, and the system by definition demands that.

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That's where you find what's supposed to be consistent over the decades, centuries, and millennia, is in the authority of the

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Magisterium. For us, what is consistent and unchanging is what is found in Scripture.

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That's what's unchanged, and then Christ builds his church, and his spirit draws his people to the voice of Christ, which is what you find in Scripture.

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So anyways, I'm not gonna get very far, but so much of this is so foundational, and it's so important that, you know,

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I have limited time today, because as I said, we're gonna be recording a sweater vest dialogue right after this, but I will continue with this.

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I'm not just gonna rush through it, and you know, Mr. Charles was nice to wish me a happy Thanksgiving.

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I do the same thing for he and his family, but I'm not going to be cowered into going through this stuff so quickly that it doesn't actually benefit folks.

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Again, we've been doing this stuff for decades, and we're just standing on the shoulders of giants.

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If you want to, you know, I think it's probably because it was the first book of this nature that I read, but George Salmon's The Infallibility of the

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Church. Grab it, read it. If you're a Lutheran, Martin Chemnitz, his examination of the

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Council of Trent. Goode's work, there's just Whittaker, Goode and Whittaker, from the

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Reformed perspective. Masterful works, classic works, but hard to get hold of anymore, sadly.

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They should be available everywhere, but they aren't necessarily. This is important stuff.

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So, when it says that there's this authority passed down to Catholic bishops of today in an unbroken line,

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I just go unbroken line. I mean, that's just wishful thinking. Ignore the pornocracy, ignore the papal schism, ignore the

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Babylonian captivity of the church, ignore the Council of Pisa, ignore the three popes anathematizing each other.

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Go ahead, ignore all that stuff. Reality is, this person probably doesn't even know about that stuff.

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Probably doesn't even know that Irenaeus had to tell Victor to cool his jets. If you don't know what

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I was just talking about, you shouldn't be talking about unbroken lines of succession. You really shouldn't. I mean, these are just basic things.

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There's a lot of church history that people will make comments about without really, really, really, really knowing what they're talking about.

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It goes on, Protestants are trying to pull themselves out from being under the authority of the magisterium and sacred tradition. No, if you're going to say that your magisterium has authority over us, you have to prove it.

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If you're going to claim sacred tradition, you need to show it to us. And this is something you all are struggling with, because the fact of the matter is, your current pope is the biggest problem you've got.

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Things were a little different back in the 90s. John Paul II, he was pope for a long, long time.

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That does not mean that there weren't differences between him and the popes from 100 years earlier. There were, clearly.

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But it's become real obvious now that if you want to pretend to talk about things like sacred tradition, you have to realize the system that you have developed over time puts the definition of that sacred tradition fundamentally and finally in the hands of one man.

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And if that one man decides that, you know, yeah, the

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Catechism of the Council of Trent in 1592 said that capital punishment is given to the state for the good of mankind.

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And now Pope Francis says it's always a sin. Now, you can't put those two things together, but Francis believes what capital punishment is different than what was produced in the

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Catechism of the Council of Trent. And all the popes at that time agreed with it.

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You can't dodge that one. This is a change in dogmatic moral theology and the

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Catechism of the Catholic Church. And I'm not the one to have pointed out that the current synod on synodality that just finished, but isn't really finished because we'll be meeting again in the future, that the purpose and intention here by people who were in attendance at it is to fundamentally change the perspective of the church on issues related to homosexuality, transgenderism, etc.

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And that's what's coming at you. You cannot look at me and keep a straight face and say that there is anything in apostolic tradition about the acceptability of same -sex marriage.

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Okay? Please don't even bother. Please don't try. I mean, have enough respect for yourself to go, yes, he's changing everything.

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Okay? And then deal with that from there. But don't try to. And there will be people that will.

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I know there will be people that will. And I feel sorry for you. There is a way out.

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There really is. We've been trying to tell you about it for a while. But this idea of sacred tradition, who gets to define it?

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Who gets to define it? Claiming that the Bible is the only valid source of authority. Well, it'd be nice if you'd at least know what you were denying.

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What we say is that the Bible is ontologically unique because it is the only thing that is theanous.

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It is God -breathed. And as such, it is absolutely unique.

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It is not a subset of tradition. Sacred tradition, capital S, capital T, is not an overarching category with written tradition, scripture, and oral tradition, which is never defined until something is defined on the basis of it, which no one can ever show you.

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It is absolutely unique. And since it is absolutely unique, it is the sole infallible authority.

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There are authorities beneath it. But they, and this is key to many of the controversies we're having right now on our side, it is the origin and source of any other authority.

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It is not under any authority. And I have argued, and I have never seen any reason to stop arguing, that Roman Catholicism makes the exact same claim for itself.

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And what I mean by that is Roman Catholicism, we believe in sola scriptura,

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Rome believes in sola ecclesia. And the demonstration is simple.

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If you want to talk about a three -legged stool, here's the problem. Which leg of the stool gets to define the canon of scripture?

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Which leg of the stool gets to interpret scripture infallibly? Which leg of the stool gets to define what is and is not sacred tradition?

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And which leg of the stool gets to interpret that tradition? That's the magisterium.

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The magisterium gets to do all those things, and therefore the magisterium cannot be under the authority of the very things that it claims to be able to define and to interpret.

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So this is sola ecclesia. And no matter how hard the other side tries, every effort they make only proves.

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That's what we believe. So we're not trying to pull ourselves out from being under the authority of the magisterium.

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We're saying there is no magisterium. Sacred tradition is definable only by Rome in its own context.

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That's circular. And yes, the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith for the church.

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All while forgetting that it was under the authority of the magisterium, consistent also with sacred tradition, that the

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Bible was compiled in 382 AD at the Council of Rome under Pope Demasus. And that's what

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I focus in upon. Because again, how many people on Twitter do you think have a clue about anything about the

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Council of Rome at all? Who was there? Who participated? Where are the council documents?

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Was anyone there that had the knowledge that Melito of Sardis had?

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Or that Rufinus had? Origin? Jerome? That's early on in Jerome's career.

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In other words, was there anybody there that had taken the time that could read

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Hebrew? That knew anything about Jewish history?

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Knew anything about which books had been laid up in the temple in the intertestamental period?

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Which books made the hands unclean by touching them because they were holy? Was anyone at this council knowledgeable of these things?

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It's sort of like asking, okay, April of 1546, Rome finally defines the canon infallibly.

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Council of Trent, April of 1546. April 26th, if I recall. 26, 28.

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Anyway, who was there? Did they take seriously

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Jerome's rejection of these books? Did they even have access to Melito of Sardis?

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His writings fell out of use for a long period of time, not because of his views on this, but because of the

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Quartodeciman controversy. So did they know what he had said? Or was this a reaction to the

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Reformation? Is that how you define truth? These are all rather important questions that we don't have answers to.

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And the Roman Catholic doesn't seem to be concerned about having or not having the answer to these particular issues.

48:09

So saying all the while forgetting is just not true. There were two different streams of understanding in regards specifically to the apocryphal books, not to the canon as a whole, but just to those books that the

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Jews never accepted. The Jews did not view as scripture. They were not laid up in the temple.

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And so I made reference to two things just in passing. I said, well,

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Jerome is doing his work after this

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Council of Rome, but he doesn't think that Damasus has defined the canon of scripture.

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He includes the books because Damasus has said so, but that doesn't change his perspective that they are not part of the canon of scripture.

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And then you've got Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, a century later, more than a century later, when he quotes a story from 1st

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Maccabees, says, though not canonical. So this was the thing that I was responding to.

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I hope Twitter doesn't mess me up here. Good. Sometimes it refreshes and you don't want to refresh.

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It's like, it's gone. And then it takes you 15 minutes to find it again, if you can ever find it again at all.

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So I wrote all that up and Joshua Charles responded.

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And he says, unfortunately, overstatements by one party, well, I guess that means he at least admits that the

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Roman Catholic claim was an overstatement, were greeted by misstatements about Gregory and Jerome by Dr.

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White, even while he is claiming to correct an abuse of church history. Quotes and sources at the bottom. It is true.

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The Council of Rome in 382 did not settle the canon for the whole church. Well, that was the whole point of what the person said, right?

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So let's start there and say, yep, yeah, I was right about that. It's not clear it was ever intended to do so.

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I most definitely, that's why Jerome didn't take it that way and nobody else did either. However, pray the rosary only claimed the

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Bible was compiled by by Danisus, which is in fact true. What do you mean compiled?

50:51

The whole point of their assertion was not that, well, there's a difference between compiling and canonizing.

50:59

No, it's not. That's exactly what they were saying. They're saying it's the authority of the Roman Catholic Church to do this, and the books you have, you only have because of us.

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If that's not what they were saying, that's an argument I've heard 10 ,000 times in my life.

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It's untrue. It's untrue on every level it can be untrue at.

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But there you go. The same canon is affirmed multiple other times down the centuries, and again, only difference being the

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Apocryphal Books affirmed against that multiple other times down through the centuries.

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And finally dogmatically recognized at Florence and Trent. But to the extent Dr. White is simply claiming

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Rome 32 didn't sell the issue of the whole church for all forthcoming time, Dr. White is correct.

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However, there are problems what Dr. White said about St. Pope Gregory the Great and St. Jerome. The only book

52:00

St. Pope Gregory the Great actually says is non -canonical is 1st Maccabees. As far as I know, he does not reject any of the other deuterocanonical books which he elsewhere cites as scripture in various places.

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Now, okay, so here's... I don't have it here, and I was going to, when

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I initially, yesterday before we decided to do the program here, I was definitely going to grab it and have it.

52:27

Let me strongly suggest to everyone. Okay, everyone.

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To everyone that has a serious, sincere interest in this subject and a desire to know,

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I've read a lot of material on this subject.

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I could link you to, and I should link you to the presentation that was made at G3, I think 2018, on the subject of canon that would help you understand canon theologically,

53:15

Dr. Michael Kruger. Referring to Kruger's books on these very, very important and vital subjects.

53:23

But of all the books that I've read on both sides, the one that is the most in -depth, the most insightful, is by the now late, as of last month,

53:39

I believe, Dr. Roger Beckwith. It's called The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church.

53:45

It is not fun reading. It is not meant to be fun reading. But it is,

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I think, just absolutely devastating. And I just say to anyone who wants to seriously examine this, you will discover that there is a tremendous amount of evidence demonstrating that the true source of the idea that the apocryphal books are to be considered canonical in the

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Tanakh, when you even use the term Tanakh, Torah, Nevi 'im, Ketuvim, those books were never included, even in the

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Ketuvim. They weren't included. They are written in the intertestamental period.

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They're written during a period where the Jews themselves said the bath kol, the voice of God, had ceased.

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They recognized there was no prophet in Israel. Some of the books recognize the tripartite form of the

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Tanakh as already existing in their day. There is just so much internal evidence.

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Watch the debate I did with Gary Machuda, because I pointed out laughable geographical and historical errors in those books, laughable.

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And he defended them. Well, you know, I believe in inerrancy. Oh, really? I believe in inerrancy too, which means

55:24

I can provide meaningful responses to accusations. But when you've got just face -plantingly false assertions, saying you believe in inerrancy isn't an answer to that.

55:36

Go watch the debate for yourself. It was one of the last of the great debates we did. Anyway, these books, basically, let's put it this way, the more that people knew about the

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Hebrew language, the Old Testament as a whole, and the Jewish people and their beliefs, the more people knew about that, the less likely they were to believe the

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Depocrital Books of Scripture and vice versa. The more ignorant, the more likely. Why?

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Because they're included in the manuscripts of the

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Greek Septuagint that we have that are almost all produced by Christians. And so since that was the

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Bible in New Testament church, and they're included, well, then that must mean something, right?

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Well, it gave them familiarity, but did not mean that they were part of the oracles of God that had been entrusted to the people of Israel.

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And that was one of the problems when Jerome is arguing with Augustine about this. Augustine thought they were a part of the

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Hebrew canon. They weren't. He was in error. He was wrong. He didn't have access to the same kind of materials that Jerome had access to.

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And so by the time you get to the period of St. Gregory the Great, you must understand what the

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Apocrypha is as a body is well known. And so the idea that's being propounded here,

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I suppose, is, well, if he said 1

57:25

Maccabees, which is a major portion of the Apocrypha, 1 Maccabees is not canonical, but the rest of it is.

57:35

On what basis do you say that? I mean, that is an assertion that he is making a distinction where does he say,

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I accept the canonical authority does. It's an assumption on Joshua Charles's part that goes against the idea that people knew what the

57:58

Apocrypha was. They knew that there was this body of books. Even calling them Apocrypha, hidden, or deuterocanonical of a second canonical authority is indicative of the fact that people recognize these don't speak like the rest.

58:15

So where did he make that distinction? When you look anachronistically backwards in light of Trent, then you have, well, they had to.

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They had to because a Pope can't contradict Council of Trent like Francis already has.

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But this is where the anachronism comes in. It assumes that Gregory wouldn't even know what

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Apocrypha is. That does not speak well of him, if that was the case. And that he made this distinction.

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Now he says, well, he quotes from other books as Scripture. Well, the fact of the matter is, if you look at a lot of the early church fathers, when you talk about quotation, one of the key issues is, are we talking about quotation, allusion?

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There's a huge field of study in regards to what's called intertextuality when you look at the

59:15

New Testament's use of the Old Testament. When is it a quotation? When is it just an allusion? When is it whatever?

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But when it comes to Gregory, when you talk about quoting it as Scripture, by what formula, in what fashion?

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And I gave a citation, and we're out of time, but I gave a citation from Cardinal Cajetan, who interviewed

59:48

Luther at the time of the Reformation. And I gave a citation on Twitter where he said, do not be upset like a raw scholar when people of the past make reference to these books of Scripture.

01:00:05

Their views must be subsumed to that of Jerome. And this is a guy that interviewed Luther. This was still a valid viewpoint all the way up to 1546.

01:00:18

And again, the more people knew about the background, the more likely it was they were going to reject those apocryphal books.

01:00:27

Well, I went on and on and on. I'm going to try to save these posts or something so we can continue this, because if anything, the current conversations, hopefully for at least some small number of people,

01:00:45

I see a lot of folks, oh, I wish you were talking about, let's do some Radio Free Geneva or do something like this.

01:00:50

And there's stuff I want to talk about. I want to talk about, someone asked, please respond to the posting of stuff about why we should still use the

01:01:00

King James by a highly respected scholar that we all have respect for. We'll do those things. We'll continue to mix things up and talk about stuff.

01:01:08

But hopefully for at least a few people, there's a recognition that, wow, these issues in regards to Roman Catholicism are fundamental and foundational, and they are not stuff that we are ever talking about.

01:01:19

We're not prepared to deal with this stuff. And we want to help you to be prepared to deal with this.

01:01:26

So we will continue to do so. Like I said, pull out on Friday.

01:01:33

So that means next week should have a full schedule, maybe even sneak an extra program in early on, because the weekend after is when we're doing the conference.

01:01:45

And once you get into that, it gets pretty hairy for me as far as time goes. But we'll try to make sure to get a full slate of programs in next week as well.

01:01:58

So with that, we will thank you very much for listening to the program today.

01:02:06

And we will ask that you pray for traveling mercies, because there's a lot of big trucks out there that are bigger than me.