December 28, 2023 Show with Dr. James R. White on “Vital Issues Facing the Church & the World Today” (Part 1)

Opening Remarks and the Iron Sharpens Iron Mission

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you a whole happy Thursday on this 28th day of December, 2023.

I'm asking your prayers right now for my guest today, because he is feeling seriously under the weather, and you may wrongly detect from his voice that he has no interest in being on this program today, or that he is bored to death with me and my presence, and on and.

On.

Those things actually may be true, but the primary reason his voice is rather low key sounding today is because of the aforementioned sickness. But I am speaking of none other than my dear friend, dating back to the 1990s, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries.

This is day number one, God willing, of a two-day interview with him, and we are going to be discussing burning issues facing the church and the world today, and also giving an overview of all the many speaking engagements and debates that he has lined up for the new year.

And Dr. James R. White, if anyone in my audience is unfamiliar with him, which would be rather shocking, but you never know, we do have on occasion people who listen who are not even believers for that matter.

But Dr. White is the director and the apologist for Alpha and Omega Ministries, the author of numerous books, a seasoned debater, and he is a highly sought-after conference speaker, and he is the professor of apologetics and church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharp and Zion Radio for day number one of our two-day discussion.

Well, it's good to be with you, Chris, and no, I'm not bored yet. You haven't finished your introduction yet. Give yourself at least some credit there. No, it's good to be with you here at the end of 2023, and I'd like to say that I feel better than I sound, but actually at the moment, not really.

I thought I had made progress yesterday, but I guess I'm not the only one experiencing the ups and downs of this stuff. You know, it's funny when you think about it. If this was 2021, you know, we'd be thinking very differently than we're thinking even now, because, you know, I've been on the program when I've been sick in the past, and you know, it would happen very frequently.

I know that some of the debates we did, I remember trying to find, you know, cough medicine and stuff like that just to be able to make it through the debate, and nobody really thought too much about it, and then COVID hit, and, you know, two years ago, we would have been being told that I'm killing little old ladies by daring to, you know, do anything outside the house right now, so it's, you know, and I am still convinced it will return.

That worked way too well for the people that were behind it to let that go by the wayside, but honestly, the thing that I know I was thinking of before the program was I have scheduled this trip that we're going to be talking about today that will begin in early February and end in mid-March.

It's almost 40 days long, longest trip I've done, and I should mention to folks who don't know me, I used to fly all the time. In 2019, I flew 165 ,000 miles. I debated and taught in places like Samara, Russia, and Kiev, Ukraine, and Durban, South Africa, and Melbourne, Australia, and spent almost two months in London, and I don't fly anymore, and it's not because I've become afraid of airplanes or anything.

It's because we were giving, you know, over $100 ,000 a year to the airlines, and they decided that I could just go ahead and die because putting a mask on me puts me into something called supraventricular tachycardia, which is significantly more dangerous than COVID turned out to be, but they didn't care.

And so it's sort of like, you know what? And then they got rid of my wife, who had worked for the airlines for almost 25 years. They used that as an excuse to the airlines she worked for, which is the largest one in the United States, got rid of 40 ,000 people, their top end people, as a result of that stuff, too.

So anyways, I drive now, and so I'm limited to the U .S. And I have never, now you know this, because we had to talk about this a lot when we were doing the debates back on Long Island, there was, we did multiple, we did do trips with multiple debates.

Yes.

But very, I cannot, can you think of a time? I cannot think of a time where we ever did two debates back to back, so in other words, two nights in a row.

No, I don't think so.

Can you think of anything? No.

I can't, I can't think of one either. On this trip, I'm doing five major debates, and I know we never did, I don't think we ever did more than two debates in any one trip back there on Long Island, as I can recall anyways.

So five major debates. The first two are back to back with Trent Horn of Catholic Answers, and Trent is obviously a very challenging, you know, well-spoken individual, a very challenging individual to engage with.

And then, that's in Houston. And you've had, you've had Evan Clanahan on the program. Yes. And he, that guy, I'm going to tell you, he likes, I think he likes debates more than you do, because, I mean, you know how much work goes into setting debates up, and four of these five debates will be at First Lutheran there in Houston.

And so, you know, that means, it's a little bit different, it was a little bit different back in the late 90s, early 2000s when you were doing it, a little bit different how to set things up and doing the advertising and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

It's a little bit easier with the internet now and stuff like that to do ticket sales and things like that. There's entire websites you can use to do that kind of stuff. But still, it takes a lot of work.

And so, he is doing four of these five debates, two with Trent Horn, and then I leave Houston and I go to Tullahoma, Tennessee, where Jeffrey Rice is going to be having a conference that Tom Buck and Sam Walder and myself are speaking at called Why Calvinism?

And I'm doing a debate there with a fellow by the name of Jason Bretta, who is a former Calvinist, and I will be defending particular redemption in that debate, in that context. And then I'm going from speaking there, then the next weekend, I'm teaching an entire Baptist history class, intensive class, at the seminary in Conway, Arkansas.

And for those of your studio audience, I know you've, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 99 certain you've had Jeff Johnson.

Oh, of course. Yes.

A number of times. And if you haven't scheduled him coming up here soon, he has a new book called Revealed God that is now shipping, and I should get mine in a couple of days. I've read it twice already, actually.

And it will be highly controversial, I can assure you, but very, very important. Very good. And so I'll be teaching at the seminary on Baptist church history. And then, going from there, back to Houston, where we will have two debates, again, at First Lutheran Houston.

The first with Leighton Flowers on John 6, and then one night off, and Saturday I'll be debating Dr. Dale Tuggy, who is, most people don't know who Dale Tuggy is. Unless you are a part of one of the Unitarian groups in the United States.

And I don't mean the Universalist Unitarian groups, I mean the more conservative, anti-Trinitarian Unitarian groups.

Right.

And Dr. Tuggy and I will be defending the assertion that Jesus is Yahweh, that Jesus is Yahweh incarnate. And so that will be the fifth and final one of the debates. And so, I suppose you could say that the third and fourth are at least marginally related.

They're on the topic of Reformed theology, in essence. The first two are related. Oh, I didn't even mention the first two were. Trent Horn and I will be debating Sola Scriptura, and then Purgatory. Both topics that you have put debates on before, of course, on Long Island.

And I'm going to be interested in seeing his take on Purgatory. You would think it would be more logical, having done Sola Scriptura, to do something like the papacy. But right now, I can't find any Roman Catholic on the planet.

Nor can I.

That is to debate the assertion that Pope Francis is the infallible Vicar of Christ on earth today, for some odd, strange, actually rather obvious reason.

Yeah, all of a sudden, it's no longer a focus upon the papacy, but the magisterium.

Oh, yeah. You're seeing it. I'm seeing it. You and I both remember so clearly, back when we started doing these debates, that it was in the middle of John Paul II's pontificate. He was Pope for a long period of time.

There was stability. He was at least fairly conservative.

I've got to find out if Arnold Pilsner, who used to help draw the Catholics into the crowd. I wonder if he is still running an organization called Americans United for the Pope.

That would be interesting to find out, because there have been a lot of people who actually use the terminology red-pilled. They've been red-pilled about what's going on with the Vatican and the directions that things are going.

It's so obvious. It's so plain. It's so clear. I just don't know how anyone can even pretend any longer that the Pope of Rome today is in the same line of apostolic succession as pretty much any pope before him.

You have to turn apostolic succession into some nebulous, meaningless, contentless concept to make that kind of assertion. What had happened was Trent had offered, well, we could debate apostolic succession rather than the Pope.

It's like, but that doesn't make any sense. That becomes a vague concept that you can try to apply in all sorts of different ways, but the Roman Catholic claim is that you have the infallible vicar of Christ, the head of your church.

So to debate some type of vague concept rather than the specific, here he is, here's a man, he's changing doctrine, he's changing teaching. You cannot for a second tell me that what he's teaching on the blessing of same-sex unions and the doctrine of the Vatican, you can't tell me that he represents any kind of Roman Catholic position on these topics because he doesn't.

And so we ended up, we'll be doing Purgatory, and I personally think one of the most fascinating debates that we did on Long Island was in 2001 with Peter Stravinskis. And it was on the subject of Purgatory.

I thought it brought out the differences significantly more clearly than the debate we did with Bob St. Genes on justification because in that situation, Stravinskis is a lifelong Catholic and St. Genes had been all sorts of different things, but had been somewhat reformed at some point.

And in my opinion, a lot of these converts who were once reformed muddy the waters because they'll use our language and just fill the words with different meaning. Stravinskis didn't do that. And to this day, if you put Peter Stravinskis into Google, the very first things that come up are the cross-examination questions from that debate.

Well, I'm sure he loves that.

Oh, let me tell you something, I happen to know he does not.

Obviously, I was. Obviously I was reeking with sarcasm when I said that.

Believe me. Yeah. No, but I happen to know he that really, really, really angers him to no end. And you know, you may remember that Michael Fallon was there that night.

Yes.

And he told you, I'm sure you remember the story, but he he told of, you know, after it was all over, there'd normally be a solid hour of conversation and stuff like that as people are packing up and frequently will continue in the parking lot and stuff like.

That.

But he was standing there and he heard he heard a Roman Catholic talking and he was saying, oh, when Father Stravinskis was speaking, you could just you could just sense the spirit of God moving. And it was like there were angels in the room and then white and then and then white would get up and you could almost see the horns coming out of his head and the demons dancing on his shoulders.

And that was actually you. It had been it had been a long night. We need to forgive Chris. He was tired.

But.

Excuse me. Don't make me laugh now. But yes. No, seriously. That that is what happened.

And and he wouldn't even touch the video that Rich Pierce was attempting to hand him of the debate.

Now, that's interesting.

Now, he had no interest in it. Rich was was holding out his arm with the video and said, this is an unedited master. Father Stravinskis, here you go. And he was like he was totally ignoring Rich and didn't want anything to do with it.

So he knew that was just evidence of a massacre that had taken place.

Well, it did. But but and I think we should explain why. Remember his opening statement. Who did he talk about primarily in his opening statement? Do you remember? Jimmy Swaggart, Jimmy Swaggart. He talked about conversation, correspondence he had with Jimmy Swaggart on the subject of purgatory, which means he had never even taken the time.

He was just like so many of the people I've debated. They don't believe that someone who believes what I believe has anything meaningful to.

Say.

And so they don't think there's any reason to do any studying, any reading, anything like that at all. So he had he had never he had no idea he was about to take on someone who had taught Greek and Hebrew and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

He, you know, is like Barry Lynn. You know, we've been there, done that, got the T-shirt. We see exactly what happens when this type of stuff happens. And they are they're just not prepared. And so his opening statement was pretty much completely irrelevant.

And then I give a pretty focused opening statement dealing with biblical passages, church history, the development over time. Now he's behind the eight ball and he realizes that he oh, yeah, but he doesn't know what.

To do.

He doesn't know what to do about it.

He looked like he looked like a Nazi at the Nuremberg trials.

He did. And he was he was pulling on his collar. He wanted out of there so bad. And to be honest with you, there were times I thought he was just going to walk out. Just just, you know, especially during some of the late, late night Q &A, you know, the guy who asked, pay me now, pay me later, you know.

But yeah, those those videos are are classic and they they are amazing. So I don't know how Trent is going to approach this particular subject. It's sort of hard to it's hard to avoid the dogmatic definitions that that Rome has made on the subject.

But we we will see.

Well, I'm delighted. I'm delighted that he agreed to, at least on one of your debates with him, to defend a Roman Catholic dogma rather than have you always defending specific Protestant views over which Protestants are divided.

Right. Right. Right.

Yeah.

We wanted we did want to have something there that, you know, would make at least somewhat fair. But I still wish, honestly, that we were dealing with Pope Francis and same sex marriage blessings and the synod and synodality and things like that.

I just I just don't think the Catholic answers can can dodge this. You know, I mean, this guy's been Pope for 10 years. He has spoken against sheep stealing. He's been about as opposite to what Catholic answers used to be about, because I'm I'm old enough to know what Catholic answers was when it started and what the intentions of people like Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid and Mark Brumley and Jerry Matitix.

You know, I was around back then. And so it does show the the fact that these apostolates, these Roman Catholic ministries have had to really alter their their perspectives. And they just have to they they feel like they've got to feel like they're just walking through a minefield.

They must get up every morning and just go, OK, what has he said now? You know, what are we going to have to try to spin today? And it can't make it can't make things overly easy for them whatsoever. So it does make me wonder, like, for example, I've not heard almost anything about Tim Staples in quite some time.

And it makes me wonder, is is he, you know, looking at this whole situation and realizing I can't say a lot of stuff that I used to say?

Right.

I really don't know. I don't have any inside scoop information on Catholic answers and stuff like that. But it is it is going to be interesting. And so those will be the first the first two debates. But but I forgot to mention that we extended the trip by a day or so.

So I could go through Dallas. And before that, I think those debates are on Friday, Saturday. You're Thursday, Friday or Friday, Saturday. Right before that, I will be in Dallas. I may be on with Trent again, but I'm going to be on with Allie Beth Stuckey to talk about Roman Catholicism on her show with a Catholic apologist.

It may be Trent Horne. It may be somebody else. They're not sure yet. But so we actually tacked that on at the beginning just simply because that's a great opportunity. I don't know if you remember when, oh, when I'm sorry, the the black lady who has a program on the same network, Candace Owens, right, Candace, her husband, who's Roman Catholic, was on, I think, with Allie Beth to talk about Roman Catholicism.

And I thought she did a great job. And then I recorded about an hour and a half. It was one of the first things I recorded in our new studio, my mobile studio in the.

RV.

And a lot of people found that useful. Well, you know, she converted anyways. I don't know if she ever even listened to what I said.

Oh, Candace. Owen convert?

Yes.

Well, that's a shame.

Yeah, yeah. And I had I had responded to the stuff that her husband had said rather fully in a recorded not a dividing line, but a response to the stuff that was said. So I'm sure that's what's behind the desire to have a conversation about.

The issues that divide believing Protestants and believing Roman Catholics, but since Trent and I are doing Sola Scriptura, I don't see how. And I cannot imagine, though, well, I could imagine it happening, but it would seem obvious that we have to have some conversation in this debate about the current situation within Roman Catholicism.

If Trent does the oh, no, no, that's all we're debating. We're just we're only talking about Sola Scriptura. We we you and I both know that when Jerry and I debated Sola Scriptura long, long ago, which was, as I recall, the second debate we did first was on the Marian dogmas.

The reality of the papacy and the idea that the papacy provides this kind of stability was part of the Catholic answers apologetic. It was central to their, you know, I mean, one of the most famous lines that came out of that period from Catholic answers was from Patrick Madrid.

Sola Scriptura is the blueprint for anarchy. Right. Well, the problem is, where is the anarchy right now? Right. The anarchy is in Rome. The anarchy is in the Vatican. The anarchy is in the synod and synonality.

And so if it was, you know, good for the goose, it's good for the gander. And Trent Horne is a Roman Catholic apologist and he's representing a epistemological claim. He's representing an authority claim.

And that authority claim is wrapped up in the Bishop of Rome. So he cannot possibly complain if I use as an example of what happens when you abandon Sola Scriptura. Right. Your church ends up changing its doctrine on capital punishment, changing its doctrine on marriage and homosexuality and everything else.

And so I will see. Well, we'll see what develops there during the course of the of the debate itself. But I just I think eventually one of these better known Catholic apologists is just going to have to step up to the plate.

I don't know how. It's far too easy to demonstrate the inconsistencies and incoherences. But, you know, that's that's the way it's going to be going.

I am not giving up my search for that, by the way, for a yes, an opponent for you who will actually debate on is Pope Francis a safer guide for the church than Sola.

Scriptura? Yeah, well, Chris, you know, I've often said that you could you could sell sand to Arabs and ice to Eskimos, but I think you may have finally hit the wall.

Well, let's let's pick up where we left off here, because I have to go to our first commercial break. And if anybody wants to join the conversation, our email address is Chris Arnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name, at least city and state of residence and country of residence. If you live outside the USA, only remain anonymous if your question is a personal and private one, such as you are perhaps a Roman Catholic or maybe a Mormon or something else.

And you're starting to question your own religion and you don't want to identify yourself publicly. That's completely understandable. But if you're asking a general question, please, as always, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

We'll be right back. Don't go away.

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It's royaldiadem .com. And we're now back with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and we are giving an overview of a lot of his upcoming speaking engagements and debates. And one thing I wanted to ask you about before I forget, you had mentioned before that in Tullahoma, Tennessee, at the Open Air Theology Conference on the theme, Why Calvinism?

Part of that conference, you are debating Jason Breda or Breda. I don't know how to pronounce that.

I think it's Breda.

Breda. And you identified him as a former Calvinist.

Right.

In all my years being a Christian, and that is nearly the same amount of time that I've been a Reformed Baptist, I have only heard of one person who left the Reformed faith and became an evangelical Arminian.

Every single time I hear about and I've heard about a departure of a Reformed Christian from Calvinism, they either become Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, become absolutely nothing, perhaps atheist, agnostic.

I hardly have ever heard of anyone other than Michael Brown making that transition from Reformed to evangelical Arminian, and that's a specific emphasis I'm giving there. And so how long was this brother a professing Calvinist?

Well, I became familiar with him on one of my last trips. Someone sent me some videos he was posting, and I downloaded some of them, listened to them while I was driving on the next leg of my trip. And so on the next dividing line, I had heard some stuff about John 6, and so I'm just going to be like, okay, over the years, I have sort of made a practice of collecting methodologies for getting around John 6, and there are a lot of them out there.

And so at that point, I wasn't going to do anything more about it, but I guess you heard about my responses and stuff like that and recorded an extensive on John 6. And so when I listened to it, I realized that he was utilizing what's called the Blue Letter Bible, which I guess is associated with Calvary Chapel or something along those lines.

It's an online Bible program type website type thing, I guess. And it was a situation where you have someone who is using well, there's a lot of websites like that. There's open

You're breaking up there a little bit.

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. Well, hopefully it will clear up here in a second. And he was coming to conclusions based upon just he doesn't read Greek. And so it's a situation where you're referring to the Greek and you're putting the Greek up on the screen and you're saying this tense means this and this form of the verb means that, and it just doesn't mean any of those things.

It's sort of like when years and years ago before computers, we had these things called interlinears, and they still publish some of them out there. And I would tell people I said the interlinear is without a doubt the most worthless thing you could ever buy because if you don't read Greek, it's of no use to you.

And if you do read Greek, it's of no use to you. It's true. But I've met many a person who thinking that I can go on my phone and, oh, that's a present tense verb and that means this. Well, unfortunately, that has led to a lot of real serious problems, and it did there.

So to make a long story short, Jeffrey wanted to do a debate as a part of this conference, and there was someone else that we had talked with some about it. I did not want to follow through with that.

I've had an encounter with this individual before, and I just did not want to have to go through the same thing again. I did not find it useful or beneficial for anybody. And so I gave Jason Brett his number or email contact, and to my surprise, he's agreed to do so.

Now the topic is particular redemption. I forget the exact phraseology. I think something like particular redemption is biblical and important or some basic vanilla thing like that. But you know me. I am more than happy to make a positive presentation of the concept of what I call the Trinitarian harmony in the gospel, the harmony of father, son, and spirit, which is illustrated in particular redemption, the fact that the son dies for the exact same people the father has elected and that the spirit will come and make application to.

And so there's perfect harmony in the trinity in the accomplishment of that redemptive act, and I think the Bible is very clear on the subject. And so that's going to be the subject. My hat is off to Jason.

My understanding is he was a Calvinist for 10 years. And, of course, as I've listened to his and the main reason that I even did the response initially was it's sort of a study in converts. When when people leave a position, why is it that they can no longer accurately represent what they once believed?

Right. You know, when I when people become Roman Catholics or become Eastern Orthodox or become atheists or Mormons or whatever, all of a sudden their recollection and their understanding of what they allegedly once believed becomes extremely muddled.

And, you know, why is that? What is the what is the process that people go through?

Hank Hanegraaff was a classic example who was raised in the Christian Reformed Church when it was still conservative. His father, his father was an elder in the CRC. And when he spoke about Calvinism, it was as if he never ever set foot in a reformed church.

There were caricatures and slanders. And, of course, then he eventually became Eastern Orthodox.

Right. Right. Right. Well, that's that's a whole nother long story we could get into, because obviously I was a part of the inside conversations in that particular situation, too. But but, yeah, it's true.

And so that was that that's the origin. I cannot begin to tell you how it's going to turn out, because I would assume that this is Jason Breda's first debate. And I do hesitate about debates like that because I'm going into it disadvantaged from the start.

Pretty much everybody in the audience knows that'll be my let me see, 182, 183, 184. That'll be my hundred and eighty fifth. Wow. Moderated public debate.

And I can remember I can remember introducing you as he's had 10 debates.