Slick/Sungenis Dialogue

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.
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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.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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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
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And welcome to Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning. Thank you for joining us.
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I know that, you know, the best laid plans of mice and men, my plans for today were washed out by quite a weather event here in the
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Arizona area. We are, we have lots and lots of these big black fluffy things up in the sky pouring down water upon us along with, actually,
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I got hit with hail yesterday, which was pretty unusual. And so you change your plans to fit things as they go along.
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So here we are. I have promised for quite some time and never gotten around to it to continue on in responding to some of the comments and the dialogue that took place between Robert St.
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Genis and Matt Slick back in June or July on the radio program,
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Matt Slick's radio program. We did not finish doing that, so I'm going to continue on with some of that today. And then maybe in the last half hour, if we have some relevant phone calls, we can go there as well, or even
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Dividing .Line via Skype. But let's get back to what I wanted to get to is
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I wanted to skip past some of the banter that was going on in regards to sola scriptura and the papacy and things like that.
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Remember, we went over a lot of that. And then on another Dividing .Line, we went over some of the comments that Robert St.
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Genis made in regards to James 2 .14. We may have to cover a little bit of that again.
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Then we vindicated, demonstrated that very clearly the best translation of James 2 .14,
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can that kind of or can that faith save him, is talking about a particular kind of faith.
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And we went through the grammar and cited numerous scholars on that subject, all to set up the discussion of James 2.
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I believe that sort of started at the end of the first conversation and continued later on in the second conversation.
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I've tried to get to those particular points in those sound files. So I'll be starting off here with the final section of the initial encounter between Matt Slick and Robert St.
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Genis. Then we'll move on to the second one. So let's listen to the conversation.
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Now here, of course, is where we encounter the very, very important necessary element of apologetics from the
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Catholics that is missing in much of our minionism today, but is still very much a part of Reformed theology.
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When we say sola gratia, when we say grace alone, we actually mean that grace fully accomplishes the intentions that God has in salvation of his elect people.
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Once you buy into the Arminian kind of God is trying to do something, but he can't actually accomplish what he wants to try to do, and so you've got this prevenient grace, you have grace that actually doesn't save, even though it's trying to save.
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You have grace that's trying to do something that it actually cannot accomplish. Then you open the door to all these types of distinctions and often qualifications that really don't have anything to do with reality, and you have
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Roman Catholics who will tell you that they believe that salvation is totally by grace. But again, what they mean by that is grace is absolutely necessary, that without grace none of these other things could happen, but that grace is insufficient in and of itself to accomplish what
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God is intending it to accomplish. And without that distinction, without having that very clearly in your mind, you can end up in a forest of qualifications and, you know,
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Romans had a long time to come up with all sorts of ways of confusing even the gospel itself, and that's what you get in that type of a context, and that's what you're hearing here.
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Well, we're talking about merit there that, as the Council of Trent uses, it's talking about condign merit in which we do work, we don't deserve to be paid for it, but out of the benevolence of the giver, he gives us a reward for our work, but it's not earned.
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So one kind of grace you do earn and the other kind of grace you don't? No, we don't earn any grace if you're using the word earn in the strict sense of earning it by your own work and not by the beneficence of the giver.
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Well, what does it mean when it says in the Catholic Catechism, 2010, that you merit for ourselves and for others the greatest graces needed for us?
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How are they meriting it? It's talking about the same merit I just told you about, condign merit, which is the merit that we get when we work, but that's what is owed to us.
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God does not owe us anything for our work. He gives it to us out of his grace. We sometimes call that merit in the sense that we are meriting
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God's grace. Now, I understand what's being said here, in essence, is this concept that he has set up conditions.
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I mean, just compare this with—just go read a manual on indulgences, how indulgences are gained.
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Go read Indulgentiarum Doctrina, the Apostolic Constitution and Division of Indulgences, post -Vatican
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II document. You have these conditions that are laid out, and the idea is, well,
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God didn't have to do this, so he's graciously done so. But that doesn't change the reality that it is a system that is dependent upon the human accomplishment, even if motivated by grace, for its completion, for its success.
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And so, again, if you already agree with Rome on a synergistic system, well then, fine, you really don't have much to say at this point.
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But if you're consistent, and you're coming from a Reformed perspective, you have a lot to say. So, if it's owed to you—
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It is not owed to us. You said— I said, it is not owed to us. So, there's no grace, so you can't merit it?
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Right. You have to be careful to use the word merit in the proper sense. Yeah, which sense?
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The sense that I just described to you. And the sense is— Three kinds of merit—congruent, strict merit. Strict merit was dogmatically condemned by the
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Council of Trent, Canon 1, saying that we cannot work for our salvation. We cannot work to do anything to get paid by God, because He owes us nothing.
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Okay. That's strict merit, right? Strict merit, yeah. So, you wouldn't agree, then, that an eternal reward is for good works accomplished with the grace of Christ, and that heaven is a good work for that?
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Wait a minute. Now, you lost me there. Say it again. In every circumstance, each one of us should hope, with the grace of God, to persevere to the end and to obtain the joy of heaven as God's eternal reward for the good works accomplished with the grace of Christ.
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Yeah. Reward, Matt, is the key word there. Reward does not mean that God owes us anything for what we do.
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He gives it to us out of His grace. So it's a reward for the good works? Yeah. I have no problem receiving a reward for good works, because God doesn't owe me anything for my good works.
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He gives it to me out of His grace. So let me get this straight. You're saying, then, that the eternal reward for good works is what's not earned?
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Right. So, it's the eternal reward for good works, but the good works don't do anything?
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No. The good works please God. That's what Scripture continually says. Please God with your good works.
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So, God, in turn, because He's just and honest, will give you a reward for your work, but it's not because He owes you anything.
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The problem is when you make eternal life itself the result of these good works.
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And remember, and there's all sorts of different perspectives in Roman Catholicism, and there are some who emphasize grace more than others and things like that.
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I fully understand that. But we're talking about a system with indulgences, penances.
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We're talking about a system that for hundreds of years attached amounts of time in purgatory.
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Oh, I know. We don't do that now. Well, but you did, and you keep telling us that you're the same 2 ,000 -year -old church.
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And what you believe now is obviously the development of what you once believed. You can't get away from these things.
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It's there. It's part and parcel of what we're talking about. And you do have a situation here where you can't enter into the presence of God because you still have, what, temporal punishments upon your soul.
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What are those? If they are not forensic or legal, then are you saying that it's just an experiential thing?
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You have to look at the whole system as a whole. And when you try—and I appreciate when
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Roman Catholics try to do this. I really, really do. But when you try to exalt grace within a man -centered system, it turns grace inside out.
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It turns it upside down. It makes it something other than what we have in Scripture.
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You just can't get away with it. So it's not because— It's very simple, Matt. I mean—
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I got you. It's very complicated here. It's very simple. We don't owe—God does not owe us anything for our work.
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What He gives us is out of a reward because He's a giver. He likes to give.
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So He gives us things for our work. That's all there is to it. So it says that you obtain the joy of heaven as God's eternal reward for the good works accomplished in the grace of Christ.
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Yeah, that's what it says. Yeah. And I just explained to you what that means. Wow. So you can stop misrepresenting the
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Catholic Church now. I don't know if that's what—I mean,
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I hear the same thing— Read the Canon, Canon 1 of the Council of Trent, and then you'll find out exactly what
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I just told you. I'll do that. I'll do that. All right. All right. I haven't read all of Trent. Session 6, by the way. Session 6? Council 1,
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Session 6? Okay. I'll do that. I appreciate that. Okay. That's fine. But when I read the
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Catechism, it says the same thing the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses say. You know, a red flag goes up.
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You know, God's eternal reward for the good works accomplished with the grace of Christ. That's what Mormons say. The exact same thing. Now, earlier in this conversation, there had been a section where it sort of degenerated about the
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Mormonism stuff. And you know, you have to be very, very careful in drawing these parallels.
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Sometimes it's worthwhile. Sometimes there is a direct parallel. Sometimes there is a reason to point out that another group is making the same type of statement.
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But a lot of other times, there isn't any reason to do it. It just simply raises emotional temperature without actually accomplishing anything.
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And certainly, the Mormon understanding of merit and grace and salvation is so utterly disconnected.
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It's not even a monotheistic system. It's so utterly disconnected from Rome's that you can certainly make the case that there is a similarity based upon its anthropocentrism, based upon its focus upon man and human accomplishment.
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And it's not theocentric. Both of them, certainly. I mean, but that's the case of all of man's religions.
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But Rome has a significantly more complex soteriological system.
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Mormonism has never really developed a meaningfully consistent and in -depth soteriological system.
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I mean, that's why, at least a few years ago, I looked recently, but a few years ago,
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I could not find a single full commentary of any scholastic depth whatsoever in the
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Book of Romans written from an LDS perspective. Now, maybe that's changed. I don't know how it could change.
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I don't know how you can write an exegetically meaningful scholarly commentary on the
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Book of Romans when you're a polytheist. I don't see how that works, especially since you'd have to be bringing in the
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Joseph Smith translation and all this kind of silliness along the way. So there's a vast difference between the two.
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And we, I think, need to be careful about being very straightforward about that.
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You just redefined the words. Matt, you know, I don't really care what the Mormons teach, okay?
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I'm just telling you what Scripture teaches, what the Church teaches. Take it or leave it. Okay. You are misrepresenting what we taught.
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We earned our salvation. We earned our return to life with God. I'm telling you, no. You are misrepresenting us.
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Okay, then how about this one? Catechism of the Catholic Church 2068. So that all men may attain salvation through faith, baptism, and the observance of the commandments.
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Yeah. So you attain salvation through faith, baptism, and observing the commandments. Sure. Because if I don't observe the commandments, it means
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I really don't love God. It means I really don't, you know, care about Him or anything. I'm just, you know, sort of passing the time, and I'm a nominal
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Christian. Okay? So I have no problem with obeying the commandments. No, no, no. But the moment
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God rewards me for obeying the commandments, He's not paying me. He doesn't owe me anything.
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He's just giving me a reward for obeying the commandments. It doesn't say that. It said, all men may attain salvation. It doesn't even get into the issue, but I'm telling you what it means.
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Well, you're telling me what you say it means. No, I'm a Catholic apologist. I know what it means, because I know what Canon 1 of the
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Council of Trent teaches. Now there is, I could be wrong about this, but I am unaware of the official position of Catholic apologist.
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I don't think that the Vatican and Rome has assigned that position to anyone. And so I'm not really certain that that was purely an argument from authority, from Doctress and Janice at that point.
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However, again, what's happening here is Bob's and Janice is interpreting, as a private theologian, the writings of the
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Roman Catholic Church. Now, just on a basic level here, folks, just think about this for a moment.
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Roman Catholic apologists, the folks over at Call to Communion and the folks at Catholic Answers and Envoy and all these
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Catholic apologists run about talking about how all this confusion that exists amongst
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Protestants is because of sola scriptura. If we just had the church, there would be no confusion.
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We'd all be wonderfully unified as everyone is Rome is unified. Well, of course, the last part, they don't, they leave that one unspoken, hoping that maybe you don't recognize just how ununified
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Rome really is. But anyway, it's all due to the fact that we make the
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Bible something it was never intended to be. We make it the sole infallible rule of faith for the church. And, you know, there are things in the
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Bible, they love to quote that section from Peter where he says, there are, even in the writings of Paul, there are things that are difficult to understand and untaught and unstable men distort them to their own destruction.
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And they just want you to just assume that must mean the Protestants, of course, it couldn't be them, but, you know, it's just, it's just the
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Protestants, not seemingly recognizing that that would mean that taught and stable men could actually handle those things appropriately.
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But anyway, the problem is, what has
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Rome done? I mean, we saw in the debate just a few weeks ago with Roberts and Jennus, where this leads.
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You can take a doctrine unknown to the Lord Jesus Christ, unknown to the apostles, unknown to the first generation after them, second generation after them, third generation after them, fourth generation after them, hundreds of years pass before it's finally mentioned by heretics.
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And then slowly the tradition starts infiltrating into the external church and hundreds of even thousands of years down the road, eventually people start promoting stuff.
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And now Rome has turned it into a dogma of the faith and how they defend that. Well, you know,
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Peter gets up at Acts chapter 15 and he doesn't need scripture or tradition. Now, neither one of those happens to be true, but he doesn't need scripture or tradition.
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The church can define anything, just, just anything. And you just have to believe it.
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Now, that is as bald a claim of absolute revelational authority as anything
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Joseph Smith ever said or anybody else. Believe me, because I tell you to believe it.
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That's all it is. It's a claim from authority. Now, there are a number of Catholic apologists that are just loathe to go that far.
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They don't want to say that. They don't want to push it that hard.
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That is where I think there's a consistency there, but they want to try to maintain some kind of pretense that the church is actually seriously concerned about scripture and tradition.
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And so I just simply look at someone like that and I say, okay, so you're telling me the
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New Testament or, okay, the whole Bible. There's just too much there to really grasp and people twist it and they misunderstand it and so we need the church.
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So what does the church do? The church gives us a ton of new stuff we have to interpret.
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The vast majority of Roman Catholics have never even read everything that Rome has to say that could be relevant.
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How many Roman Catholics do you know that have actually read all the Cairns Decrees of the Council of Trent? Okay, keep that number in mind.
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How many of them have read all the Cairns Decrees of the Council of Florence? How many of them have read all the Cairns Decrees of Vatican I?
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How many of them have read all the Cairns Decrees of Vatican II? How about the supporting documents for Vatican II?
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Is the number getting really small right now? Yeah, it is. And yet here you have
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Bob St. Genes and he says, well, I'm a Catholic apologist and I know what one of those sections means.
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But you can go to Boston College and find someone who's a priest who has a much higher position in the
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Roman Catholic Church than Bob St. Genes, but oh, but he's forgetting about this over here or he's not thinking about this over there, who might promote to you some type of universalism or inclusivism or anything else.
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Now, I'm not arguing that Bob St. Genes is not at least more consistent than most liberals are. Bob St.
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Genes is at least more consistent with the older Catholicism up through, say, the papal syllabus of errors, but he's not consistent with the modern
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Roman Catholic papacy. There's no question about that. And so who do we believe?
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The Catholic apologist, as James Swan has been doing on the blog, hasn't done it for a little while, but he does this thing where he will compare and contrast
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Martignoni and Aiken and Sippo and Madrid and St.
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Genes and all these people and demonstrate how many times they disagree with one another. When I debated
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Bob St. Genes on papal infallibility in Florida, only a few months earlier, I had debated
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Tim Staples on papal infallibility, and when it came to Honorius, they used completely different answers to excuse the issue of Honorius's clear heresy.
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They contradicted each other. So how are we supposed to know that Bob St.
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Genes is interpreting that particular canon of the Council of Trent appropriately? See, if you're going to argue, well, the
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Bible's not clear enough, are you seriously arguing that the Bible plus every council and every dogmatic decree over the past 1700 years since Nicaea is clearer?
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That there is more unanimity of opinion as to what all of that says? All you've got to do is go read the multitude of interpretations of Vatican II, and you will see immediately that that hasn't accomplished absolutely anything other than to create even more confusion.
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And so it is just such, it's such an empty lie when
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Rome says to people, oh, are you tired of the confusion? And how much of that confusion is actually due to sola scriptura?
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Almost none. Almost none. The vast majority is due to an abandonment of sola scriptura, not the sola scriptura itself, but you know, they don't want to talk about that.
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Are you tired of all the confusion in the Protestant churches? Don't you need that one voice will come home to Rome?
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And that's the call. But if you dig past the surface level stuff and you ask the question, what are you going to offer me?
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Well, we're going to offer you 1700 years worth of dogmatic canons and decrees that there is no possible way on earth that you'll either read all of them or understand all of them and could know enough about the context of all of them to make sense of all of them.
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And there's actually self -contradiction between them. And certainly popes have contradicted other popes and councils have contradicted other councils.
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And you've got to pick and choose, you know, because ariminum contradicted Nicaea. And as Augustine said,
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I can't quote Nicaea against you. You can't quote ariminum against me. Let's go to the inspired words of scripture. But you have to forget about what
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Augustine said about that. And you just have to believe what we tell you to believe. That's what it is. It reminds me of that Carfax commercial that's on right now.
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I've seen the car. Show me a Carfax. Well, isn't this a nice rearview mirror? Show me the
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Carfax. Well, look at this horn. It's wonderful. And that's exactly... Rome is a used car salesman.
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It's a used theology. And that's what they're trying to sell you. And they don't want you to read the
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Carfax. They don't want you to read the church facts. They just want you to just believe whatever it is they have to say.
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Um, it's and it's it's sad to observe. I'm applying that to this 2068 that you're reading in the catechism.
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Yeah, that says that you attain salvation things out of out of out of the catechism and make a conclusion out of the map.
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I'm just reading what it says. It says salvation, faith and observance of the commandments, the whole theology behind it before you start criticizing.
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Why would you teach? You have to observe the commandments in order to get salvation. Oh, well, the same thing James says in James 224.
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Come on. But Abraham was justified by works, not by faith alone. What kind of faith you teach is that you a difference in ascension of fiducia, right?
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Yeah, I know the difference. That's what R .C. Sproul used, but it's fallacious. I seem to recall having played that one earlier.
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Um, I'm sorry, R .C., just as I invented monergism and synergism,
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R .C. Sproul invented fiducia and ascension and the various aspects of saving faith.
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I can assure you that those those concepts did pre -exist, both the venerable
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Dr. Sproul and myself, actually. I just had to chuckle at that.
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It's it's it's sort of funny, but I'm not sure that's how I would respond to someone who quotes James 224, however, but that's what we're doing.
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It's not fallacious because in verse 14 of James 2, he talks about the dead kind of faith. 24 says he was justified by works and not by faith alone.
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I don't know what kind of faith it can be. It's clear in context. In context. So what's the context?
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Tell me. The context is really simple. If you read it, you start at verse 14. He talks about dead faith.
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What use is it? My brother says he has faith. Can that faith save him? No, it doesn't say that.
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That's I've been reading the American Standard. That's what it says. No, the American Standard is wrong. Go read the Greek translation of that passage.
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Now, again, we we did this a couple months ago. In fact, I can
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I can prove that I did a few months ago because I haven't returned one of the commentaries from my library.
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It's still sitting in here. And in fact, I'll just open it up again.
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This is Douglas Moo. Certainly no slouch in the Greek department and significantly more credentialed as a
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Greek scholar than Dr. Genesis. Page 123 of his pillar commentary on James, what the
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King James Version misses and what almost all modern English translations recognize is that the Greek article used with faith has an anaphoric significance.
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That is, it refers back to a previous use of the same word. Note that faith in NASB, NRSV, REB, TEV, and JB.
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What James is contesting then is that the particular faith he has just mentioned can save. This faith is what a man who does not have works claims to have.
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James's main point is that this faith is in biblical terms no faith at all.
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Just one of the many citations that could be provided to demonstrate that the anaphoric use of the article in James 214 is well established.
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I gave you quotations from Daniel Wallace's syntax of the New Testament and numerous other sources just a number of weeks ago.
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I don't remember the date, sorry. Only Algo remembers those things. But we did go over that and demonstrate that Dr.
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Syngenis's position is thoroughly refutable by someone with a knowledge of the
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Greek language. You know America's standard is written by Protestants, translated by Protestants.
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And so if the Roman Catholic does it, it's okay. ...adjective out of that phrase in order to say that it's the faith that's being qualified.
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That's not what the verse says. You can read all about it in my book, Not by Faith Alone. Wow. So there's a lot you don't know,
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Matt. There's a lot of misconceptions and misrepresentations lying around here. Look, James tells us what kind of faith he's talking about because he says in verse 19, you believe that God is one, you do well.
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The demons believe also in shudder. He is... Let me just stop right there. It's interesting. The NRSV even includes this, and the
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NRSV is about the most ecumenical translation around there. So it's funny when
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Roman Catholics will criticize, quote unquote, Protestant translations. But at the same time, the translations that have been produced by Rome are horrific, and the majority of Catholic apologists will admit that the translations produced by Rome are horrific.
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I mean, if this claim about Rome having all authority and the final authority as far as faith and morals and all this stuff, if it can interpret...
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And in fact, St. Genesis said that if the church wanted to, they could answer every text -critical question out there.
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They could do away with the need for a critical text. The church could do that. Well, then why haven't they?
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Why don't we have the final perfect translation at all the absolute readings?
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I mean, that would be the greatest service the church could ever do if that church had that capacity.
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I obviously don't believe that the church does. We're going to take our break, come back with Meg up in Canada, and maybe continue on with your calls as well, 877 -753 -3341.
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We'll be right back. What is
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Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book, Chosen But Free? A New Cult? Secularism?
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False Prophecy Scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called
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Calvinism. He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant.
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In his book, The Potter's Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler, But The Potter's Freedom is much more than just a reply.
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It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself.
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In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so -called extreme
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Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the gospel preached by the
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Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture. The Potter's Freedom, a defense of the
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Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at aomin .org.
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This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the gospel of the grace of God.
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The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of his worship in his church. The elders and people of the
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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day. The morning
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Bible study begins at 9 .30 a .m., and the worship service is at 10 .45. Evening services are at 6 .30
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p .m. on Sunday, and the Wednesday night prayer meeting is at 7. The Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church is located at 3805
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North 12th Street in Phoenix. You can call for further information at 602 -26 -GRACE.
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If you're unable to attend, you can still participate with your computer and real audio at prbc .org,
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where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.
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Hello everyone, this is Rich Pierce. In a day and age where the gospel is being twisted into a man -centered self -help program, the need for a no -nonsense presentation of the gospel has never been greater.
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I am convinced that a great many go to church every Sunday, yet they have never been confronted with their sin.
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Alpha Omega Ministries is dedicated to presenting the gospel in a clear and concise manner, making no excuses.
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Man is sinful and God is holy. That sinful man is in need of a perfect Savior, and Jesus Christ is that perfect Savior.
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We are to come before the holy God with an empty hand of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Alpha and Omega takes that message to every group that we deal with, while equipping the body of Christ as well.
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Support Alpha and Omega Ministries and help us to reach even more with the pure message of God's glorious grace.
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Thank you. On a
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Tuesday morning, let's go to our phone calls and talk to Meg in Canada.
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Hi Meg. Hello Dr. White. How are you? I'm all right, thank you.
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It's very good to talk with you. Wanted to call the show for a long time.
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I'm fairly new to you, having been sort of out of the mainstream for a long time, but I came across your name because I worked on Dave Hunt's book,
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What Love Is This. I was one of those people who begged him not to publish it.
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Well, you know, that didn't go over too well. No, no, it didn't.
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It's a sort of measure of how little I knew, really, about the passionate nature of Arminianism.
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I really thought it was just a small little book that would kind of disappear, and didn't understand why he took so many words to say, and rather silly things.
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But of course, I learned a lot since then. And Matt, who published it,
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I worked for him as a book's editor. Oh, I see. I begged him not to. Yes.
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Maybe he knew it. I said, you know, this goes against everything I believe. And he said, well, that's why I want you to do it.
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But it was all to no avail anyway. He said, damn, and be published. I really enjoyed listening to your comments and many others about it.
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Well, and then we had, of course, the debate book, where I told that same publisher, which is where that book started, and that was picked up by Multnomah.
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Yeah, well, obviously, yeah. I told him from the very first time I had a conversation with him.
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I said, Dave Hunt has never finished a talk on the subject that he started on.
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So it is not going to be possible to do a book like this and have him stick to the subject parameters in any one chapter.
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And the result is going to be very choppy. It's going to go from topic to topic topic. And it's going to be very hard to follow.
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Oh, no, no. We'll make sure that he does that. Well, anyway, that didn't quite quite happen either.
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So anyway, my only sort of claim is that it at least grammatically was better than it would have been.
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Although Matt hired, bless him, great brother in the Lord, but very misguided on this subject.
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Well, and what's odd, and I'm not sure if you have any insight in this, but what was very odd is that once Dave took the book over himself, he made some very interesting changes in it, which included inserting material that we discovered had come from a
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Yahwist cult site saying that the first 15 chapters of the book of Acts had been written in Hebrew and stuff like this.
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And once we discovered that and pointed it out, we were told by the folks up at Dave's ministry that, well, that's just speculation and we're going to take it out of future editions.
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And as far as I know, it's still in the edition that they are providing through the ministry.
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So it's interesting, but that's not why you were calling anyhow. No, no, that was just sort of background.
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But having thus learned of your existence and your very wonderful ministry,
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I've been trying to catch up and listening to your debates. And the one with one of,
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I suppose you've done more than one, but with Bart Ehrman where he banged on and on and on and on at you about there not being any original writings at all.
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Why don't we have anything directly from the pen of Paul himself? Why don't we have anything from Jesus himself?
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If God really wanted to preserve his word, why didn't he do that?
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Why did he leave us floundering to summit up? And while, of course,
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I'm always just amazed as somebody who doesn't speak very well myself. I'm a writer, you know, in my little back room.
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I don't do well in public forum, but the way you responded to him.
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But I did sort of wonder my foundational belief and I came,
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I was saved, you know, when I was 20. So I was raised a total pagan, as anyone would define it.
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He made a big deal about that, didn't he, in that debate. But no, that was Dan Barker. Much of a muchness.
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But my great strong belief and my early thoughts not having much mentoring in my early days as a
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Christian was that it was obvious to me that God would not have preserved original writings in that sense, because if he had, we would worship them.
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And that's what we do. We worship everything. That's why there's so many pieces of the original cross that people have hidden under their pillows.
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I was listening with fascination to this conversation previously with the
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Roman Catholic and thinking I still have a scar on my head from a woman who stomped on me with her high heeled shoes in a private audience
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I had with the Pope, private with about a thousand people, to get her rosary beads touched by him.
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This is the same woman who a week before had stomped on my head to get on the stage with Kenny Rogers in a private show that we had with him in Dallas.
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So a passion, sort of, on the same level. But the worship of these tinsy china made rosary beads that she bought in the square outside the
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Vatican just before our quote unquote private audience, and she was frantic to get them touched, to touch his garment with them as he walked out the hall.
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I've always thought that the reason that we have copies, not copies of copies of copies as Erwin would have it, but copies is because God didn't want us to have something that we would venerate in an idolatrous way, but that we had to struggle to preserve his word.
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We have to struggle, as you've often said in every age, to argue for the fundamental doctrines of the faith.
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You've often said it's a good thing. Yeah, well let me just interject just a couple things here.
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I think Bart Ehrman's argument wouldn't be so much that we need to have the originals because he recognizes that we don't have the originals of anything from antiquity.
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His argument is primarily that we have variation in the earliest manuscripts, and therefore since we don't have manuscripts to go back to within, from his perspective, a generation of the originals, then if God were to inspire something, then he would extend a tremendous amount of effort to make sure that there was no variation in what was passed down.
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I wanted that to be the subject of the debate. He refused to allow that to happen.
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In fact, what had happened was he had agreed to the subject of the debate, does the presence of textual variation preclude the possibility of inspiration, and then only a matter of weeks prior to the debate, objected to that and insisted that we switch the title to the title of his book, misquoting
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Jesus. And I remember very well the phone conversation that those of us involved in putting the debate on had on that.
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It was quite interesting where Dr. Ehrman laughed at me for thinking that the scriptures were inspired and things like that.
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So his argument, in essence, is if it's inspired, there's going to be no variation.
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And yet there's variation in the earliest manuscripts, therefore it can't be inspired. Well, I wanted to really develop that because it's a theological argument.
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He doesn't want to touch with a 10 -foot pole. He wants it to be taken as a given. And I think the audience would have been much better served had he allowed for that kind of discussion.
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But unfortunately, he did not. So I think you're right that the tendency of mankind is to worship things like that.
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But personally, I believe that, historically anyways, the reason that we don't have originals is because of the attitude of the early
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Christians. And the attitude of the early Christians was, this is a message that needs to be gotten out to the whole world, therefore they were more than happy to allow for not only the repetitive reading of, let's say, the original manuscript that was sent to the
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Church of Philippi. We'll use that as an example. There was an original of that letter, and it was delivered to the
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Church of Philippi, and it was read repeatedly. And they didn't stick it inside of a stone box and put light candles in front of it or anything else.
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It was delivered as a letter from the apostle. It was read over and over again. It was shared with others.
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When people would come in to visit, they'd be allowed to make copies of it. And it simply wore out.
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I mean, it was made of papyri, and papyri can only be handled so many times before papyri starts to break down.
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Already many copies of it had been made, and so no one gave a second thought, in that pure apostolic period anyways, to the ideas of relics and any kind of special grace that would be attached to it or anything like that.
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The reality is, they wanted these materials to get out. Now, there's another aspect too, and that is the persecution.
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And what you can't see—I'm not sure how you heard the Ehrman debate, whether you listened to that MP3 or you watched it on MP4 or DVD or something like that—but even if you did, you didn't necessarily catch what was reported to me by many people in the audience.
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And that was that every time I raised the issue—and I think it's a very important historical issue—of the persecution of the early
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Church and the fact that we have evidence, for example, of the
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Romans destroying hundreds of manuscripts just in one period of time in Egypt toward the end of that period of persecution, you multiply that out over the 200 years plus of persecution, and that's thousands of manuscripts that were destroyed, which would probably have included the originals as well.
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They could have—some of the originals could have simply been destroyed under the persecution that the Church began to experience by the middle of the first century.
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So you combine it all together, and there isn't any conspiracy, there isn't anything, oh, wow, isn't this weird that we don't have the originals?
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Ehrman knows that we don't have the originals of anything from antiquity, and therefore, to say anything otherwise would put him in a difficult position.
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Most people don't realize—and this didn't come out so much in the debate, but it has in the programs that I've done about him since then, and Lord willing, if I get a chance to write in regards to him, this will come out as well—but
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I did ask him a question. A lot of people wonder why I asked him the cross -examination questions that I did.
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One of the questions you may recall I asked him was, is it not true, sir, that if you were to edit your own edition of the
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Greek New Testament, that it would differ less from the current
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Nestialan 27th edition of the Greek New Testament than the Textus Receptus differs from the
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Nestialan? In other words, there'd be less difference. And he struggled to understand even what I was asking, which is interesting to me.
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There were a number of times I was really taken aback by how I had to explain things, because he's so used to just dealing in one particular area that even, it's clear some of the ramifications of his own position, he doesn't seem to understand and see how relevant they are.
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But the point was that his New Testament would be closer to the standard
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New Testament that's used today than the King James is to the New American Standard.
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And I was told—and I would like to track this down—someone was listening to an interview that he had done. I've listened to a lot of his interviews, but I can't keep up with all of them, where a real radical skeptic was trying to get him to basically say that, you know, he had heard his standard presentation about the changes in the
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New Testament, blah, blah, blah. He says, so what do you think the New Testament originally said? And Ehrman's like, well, what do you mean?
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Well, if there's been all these changes, then what do you think it was originally talking about? And Barth goes, well, it said pretty much what we have today.
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Yes, I heard that. And you're like—and you can tell the guy was really, really disappointed, because—and
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Barth's primarily responsible for this. He's the one that so emphasizes the variations that he doesn't emphasize the fact that, well, okay, yeah, there's some variations here.
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But in reality, we know what the New Testament was about. I mean, he's actually said all we're doing is tinkering, as far as the original text of the
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New Testament is concerned. And so, you know, he's explaining to this guy, well, no, the New Testament manuscripts, you know, pretty much tell us exactly what the
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New Testament was about. We know what Paul believed, and so on and so forth. And you can just tell the guy was utterly disappointed that he was saying this.
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But that's why I asked the question, is I wanted this stuff on record, because, you know,
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I don't know that I'll ever have the opportunity. I would love to debate him on a lot of the claims he makes, and Jesus Interrupted, and stuff like that.
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But the fact of the matter is, he and people like him are incredibly expensive to get involved in debates.
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I mean, they walk out of that room with a very large check in their pocket. And so it's pretty difficult to arrange things like that with any type of regularity.
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But, you know, that's the situation with that particular encounter that we had.
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I thought it was quite useful. Yeah, well, I mean, he showed the paucity, really, of his ability to defend his position when you asked him about textual inundation.
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And he could only come up with that one pathetic example. And not only that, it was an example where there's no textual variation.
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All the manuscripts say the same thing. But, you know, Metzger agreed with me that this is probably—and you're like, man, if what you have been selling to people, if what is behind all the sales of your
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New York Times bestsellers is actually true, don't you think you could fill up the rest of our time this evening with example after example after example of this?
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But no. And unfortunately, even Christians who've watched that debate have missed a lot of what
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I was really doing there and why I was doing it. But, you know, there's not much I can do about that.
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Well, this has been very, very enlightening. And the videos you've posted on YouTube examining that particular issue and his comments on the
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Fresh Air program and all that, just very edifying.
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I love your patience. I love the comment you made when somebody asked you how you could be so patient and polite with these people.
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And you said it's because of the reason you do the debates. I was particularly thinking of that in that recent sort of discussion with that, well,
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Mr. Gulam or somebody. Ektasham Gulam, yes. The poor man, earnest but ignorant.
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That was—let's not even mention that one again, shall we? Hey, Meg, I've got a call from Sweden coming in.
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I want to try to sneak in here toward the end. It should be quite interesting. But thank you very, very much for your phone call. It's been enjoyable.
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Thank you. Thank you. All right, God bless. Bye -bye. All right, let's head over to Sweden and talk to Magnus.
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Hello, Magnus. Hello, Magnus. Can you hear me? We don't have
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Magnus. We should have Magnus, but we don't have Magnus. Rich has that everything's -where -it's -supposed -to -be look on his face.
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The sort of frozen deer in the headlights look, except he's staring at big computer screens and not giving me any information whatsoever.
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Magnus? I don't hear anything at all. The pot's up, the channel's up, everything's on.
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Hello, hello, Magnus. Okay, well, we'll let you keep working on Magnus there. And can you pull him up on your laptop?
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Uh, see if he's still hiding somewhere there? Because I saw you playing with a plug earlier.
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So I'm -I'm -I'm nothing at all. Okay, well, um, if -if we get indication that Magnus is -is back or connected or available, then we'll -we'll go to Magnus.
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Because we -we -I like these European phone calls. Uh, I -I cannot say a word of Swedish, but I can do that.
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Uh, which is probably, uh, as bad as doing something, uh, in my
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Scottish accent. But, uh, hopefully we'll, uh, we'll get Magnus back here in a little while. Uh, till then, uh, let's just go ahead and -and go back to where we were before we talked with, uh,
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Meg about, uh, Bart Ehrman. And, uh, let's, uh, continue listening to Bob St.
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Janis and, uh, Matt Slick. And, uh, hopefully that will work. He is talking about a dead kind of faith.
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That's what he is talking about. No, but he - Yes, he is. You have to add faith. I mean, you have to add works to faith.
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That's what he says. You don't add works to faith because - No, you don't have to add works to faith. James's point, of course, is that a faith that truly exists will demonstrate its existence by the changed life.
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But you see, the idea of adding, that -that's -that's a -that's a major, major problem there, is asserting that you are adding good works to faith and that that makes faith complete.
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The reality is, uh, that what you actually have going on is that faith is considered to be dead, unusual, un -uh, un -uh, inappropriate, just -just as the -the well out of which fresh water comes should not also give bitter water.
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Uh, in the same way, and that's in James as well, the tongue that blesses
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God should not at the same time curse those made in the image of God. In the same way, he who says he has faith, there should be evidence of that that's beyond the mere flapping of the jaws, the mere movement of the lips.
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And that is why, uh, Bob St. Janus will never understand James chapter 2 until he allows for the proper interpretation of verse 14, because that does become the foundation upon which, uh, you interpret the rest of the passage, which makes sense, obviously.
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I mean, it's just like trying to interpret the Gospel of John without beginning with the prologue of John, and, uh, just jumping in someplace and ignoring the fact that when you write a book, you expect people to start at the beginning and go to the end.
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If you -if you lay out your purpose as the beginning, and someone jumps in later and they misunderstand you, that's not your fault.
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You -you -you communicated clearly. It's not your fault if they, uh, if they do not follow, uh, your own presentation.
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Because Paul teaches us we're not justified. Look, let me ask you a question.
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Would you go to heaven? I mean, we've only got a few minutes left on the show here. Would you dare go to heaven and actually say before God, he says, you know, hypothetically, why should
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I let you in? Are you going to say because of your faith in your works? Yeah, because that's what scripture says.
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That's what tradition says, and that's what the church taught me. Matthew 7, 22 and 23. Did you catch that? That was important.
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That was -that was a very good, uh, a very good question, and -and a very, very important response on Bob St.
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Janus' part. Are you going to say your faith and your works? And St.
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Janus' response was, yes, because that's what the church taught me. And that gives you,
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I think, one of the clearest contrasts between the gospel, which is focused upon the accomplishment of Christ, and Roman Catholicism, which is focused upon you.
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I don't think I have it in here right now. I need to have a second copy of that just laying around the office here, or in the studio here.
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But I have a citation, as I recall. I think I did include it in the Roman Catholic controversy from, uh,
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Carl Keating. And I -I mentioned this within the context of the
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Luther's dunghill example. Roman Catholics love to pick on Luther's dunghill, because as they see it, it makes justification a fiction, it's not real, etc.,
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etc. That's taking -taking his illustration too far. But as Keating said in his book, the reality is that infused grace makes us pleasing to God.
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The reason you go to heaven is because you are pleasing to God, because your soul has been changed to something that is pleasing in God's sight.
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And here's the problem, obviously. And no one who is ever going to appear before God based upon is ever going to enter into his presence.
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Rome does not have a holy enough God. If you stand before God clothed in a garment made up of the righteousness, the merit of Christ, Mary, the saints, and your own cobbled together merit, which you get based on grace, if that kind of garment is sufficient, then you don't have a holy enough
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God. And I truly believe that one of the messages that -I think one of the reasons that so much of the preaching of churches today does not impact
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Roman Catholics the way that it once did is because we don't preach the holiness of God the way that we once did.
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It is when a soul is by the Spirit made aware of the true holiness of God, they see their own sin, and that's when they see that the sacramental system of Rome is insufficient to bring them peace with God.
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But when you have a fluffy, surface -level gospel, and you don't have both the sovereignty of God and the holiness of God, and you have this man -centeredness that is so much a part of modern evangelicalism today,
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I can see why that kind of proclamation will not make inroads amongst Roman Catholics. But when you proclaim the truth of who
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God is, that's the most important thing. Well, we're out of time for the dividing line today, so we will be back with you,
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Lord willing, on Thursday afternoon on The Dividing Line and continuing with your phone calls, and we will try to finish up this discussion with Matt Slick and Bob St.
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Janis. There's the music! I knew it was in there someplace. My clock said it was anyways. So we'll continue this on the next edition of The Dividing Line.
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Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Thursday. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.
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Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the
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World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N -dot -O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.