Jory Micah and El Shaddai; Spencer Toy and CrossExamined; Sola Scriptura Continued (Part 3)

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And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Tuesday here in Phoenix, the coldest morning since sometime in May this morning.

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I went out for a little 7k run and first 30 seconds was chilly.

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It only lasted about 30 seconds. So it was pretty nice after that and it's gonna warm up again.

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And hey, we've had over 100 all the way to this October 20th or 23rd.

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There's 103 on the 23rd. Yeah, so it could still... Well, we're gonna hope not.

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We'll hope it's just gonna keep right on sliding downward. Well, hush.

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So anyway, before we get back to Sola Scriptura and the presentation we're making on that, the discussion of the sufficiency of Scripture in response to an attack upon that concept from Catholic Answers, which we've been doing for two programs now, two things we need to do first.

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And one is going to be a response to a semi -response posted on crossexamined .org.

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I'm gonna try to be brief. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to be self -disciplined. But before we even do that,

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I want to explain a little something.

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Wikipedia is not the best place to get consistent believing biblical scholarship.

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I know some of you are shocked right now. I hope I didn't cause any of you to listening live, even on your phones, to drive off the road or something like that.

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But you can find pretty much anything online and on Wikipedia.

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I had never heard of certain individuals.

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This morning, if any of you were following my Twitter feed or my Facebook feed,

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I made reference to someone named Jory Micah. And I do not...

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There are certain conflicts. I figure there's plenty of folks involved in them. I don't necessarily need to get involved in every battle there is out there.

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I've got I've got plenty of them where I'm sort of taking a leadership role. And so let's just...

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You can only do so many things well, and some people would question whether I do that. So the

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Complementarian -Egalitarian thing, I think, is important. I think it goes to issues of liberalism, whether you really...

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Historically, you look at the denominations that have collapsed on these issues, and it hasn't been real good for them, and there's a reason for that.

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There has to be a degradation of the view of Scripture before you can start bringing in these outside sources and stuff.

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Well, I had seen... I first heard of Jory Micah from my daughter,

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Summer. She mentioned her on her own webcast, which I heard only last week.

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And I was like, not her, this person. So obviously, there's a whole realm of stuff out there that I don't have time to be looking at, and so it was news to me.

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But then this name started popping up on my Facebook feed. It's almost like It's almost like Facebook knows everything you're thinking and doing.

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It's scary at times. And I start seeing some weird, weird stuff, really weird stuff.

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And one of them was about the meaning of the Hebrew term

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El Shaddai, which is not, in fact, defined by Amy Grant.

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Though for many people, it's the only reason they've ever even heard of the phrase

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El Shaddai. And I've told the funny story before. It was... We had a brief stint at PRBC, where we used the

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Red Trinity Hymnal. And we were probably the only church on earth that, in using the

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Red Trinity Hymnal, still sang the Amens at the end of the hymns, because they had taken those out, the liberals.

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And we eventually got rid of them and got the Blue Trinity Baptist Hymnals. They have the 1689 in the back, so they've gone back to that.

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And we have the Amens. And yes, we do sing the Amens, which is... But the

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Red one had El Shaddai in it, had the song El Shaddai. And a number of the young people would request it during hymn sings.

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And I've told the story that I think we're the only congregation in the history of the world that sang the

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Amen at the end of El Shaddai. It was not intended.

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No, it was not intended to have the Amen at the end of El Shaddai. So anyway,

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I... This morning, my daughter sends me this screen capture of a

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Jory Mica tweet, where basically she's saying that all these trolls that are attacking her because of some woman named

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Summer White and her dad who run this cult that's like Doug Wilson or something.

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And I was like, yeah, well, this fits really well with the

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El Shaddai tweet that I saw from her, because she didn't check her facts real well. Summer and I go to different churches.

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Maybe she's thinking of of Jeff Durbin or something, but Jeff Durbin isn't

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Summer's dad. So I don't know. And maybe she hasn't seen... Certainly has not seen my debate with Doug Wilson, where we disagree with a number of things like that.

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Anyway, what I'm referring to, of course, is the claim that was made by by...

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Well, I didn't bring up the... I didn't bring up the tweet.

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I think someone actually tweeted it back to me somewhere, but where Jory Mica makes the claim that El Shaddai means many -breasted one.

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And this in the context of a form of egalitarian feminism type stuff that...

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Well, anyway. And I had someone later on tweet, well,

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I sort of like what she has to say. I said, so you think El Shaddai means many -breasted one?

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And I almost I almost said something, because I had looked. I said, you know, if someone

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Googles this, what do they come up with? Well, guess what? When you go to Wikipedia you will find, amongst all of the odd things that you find in Wikipedia, one scholar who theorizes, if you read

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Hebrew, you know that Hebrew is based upon what are called triliteral roots.

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And it has nothing to do with the Hebrew roots movement, by the way, but triliteral roots. And so, especially without vowel pointing, you can theorize about a lot of things.

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You can make connections that contextually, and especially within a worldview and body of literature, are utterly out there.

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But you need to understand that, especially when it comes to the Old Testament, the

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Old Testament field of scholarship was utterly invaded by liberal unbelievers a long time ago.

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And what do I mean by liberal unbelievers? Well, if you do not view the

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Old Testament the way that Jesus did, I figure you're at least a liberal, if not an unbeliever. I just asked someone on Twitter a question that I've mentioned on this program for at least 20 years.

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And that is, when I speak to someone who calls himself a liberal, I always ask, why do you claim to follow

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Jesus and trust Jesus for your salvation, but you think you're wiser than Jesus in your view of Scripture?

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Because Jesus' view of Scripture is the highest view of Scripture you can have. There's no question about this.

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No one could argue this. I've never had anyone take up a challenge to debate this. When Jesus says the

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Scriptures cannot be broken, when Jesus says that, have you not read what

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God spoke to you, saying, showing that he held men accountable to what

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God had written 1 ,400 years earlier, as if it had been spoken directly to them?

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He bases his entire argument upon the tense of a verb in the same passage, showing his belief that it had been accurately transmitted.

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And, of course, biblically speaking, he should know since, as the second person of the

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Trinity, he was intimately involved in the giving of Scripture in the first place. But liberals dominate in Old Testament faculties, except in the few believing seminaries that are actually left.

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And so there is a theory propounded by someone that you can make a connection with the triliteral roots to the word breast with the three root letters of Shaddai.

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And obviously, the standard approach that people take to the

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Old Testament today is, well, it's this incoherent, inconsistent collection of Bronze Age myths about God that primarily do not show much in the way of originality.

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They're just cobbled together from Assyrian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Sumerian, you name all the different possible religious sources of input.

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They just borrow from everything and cobbled it together into this mess. That's generally what you're going to get told almost anywhere you go, except for the few places where the last believing

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Old Testament scholars still hang out and do their thing.

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And so if you approach the text in that fashion, then you can go, oh, hey,

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I can make a connection to fertility gods here. This is great. I'll be able to publish on this and somebody will throw that out there.

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So you can find anything. You can find a scholar anywhere. The thing that a believer has to do, aside from the

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Jesus question, is that how Jesus viewed the scriptures? Well, no, it's not. But the other obvious thing is, if you look at the

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Old Testament as a whole and you recognize that Jesus taught very clearly that the

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Old Testament as a whole testified of him, wait a minute, from Moses all the way through the prophets?

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That means there's a consistency here. And if you have to look at the Old Testament as having consistency, all of a sudden you can't be wandering off to Akkadian gods of fertility as your background for how you interpret what the

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Old Testament text says. And there is nothing in the

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Old Testament text, the Old Testament God, Jesus said was his father, well, in some places he identified himself with that Old Testament God using the

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I am sayings himself and so on and so forth, but there's no place in that Old Testament that would even begin to suggest that the proper context, the interpretation of El Shaddai, is many -breasted one.

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I mean, in all probability, I mean, it's translated Almighty in most English translations.

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The Greek Septuagint translates it with Pantokrator, which is the

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Almighty One, the One having all power, as does the Vulgate. And some of the theories have been that it's connected with the

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Akkadian word for mountain, so God of the mountains, in other words, the heights, so the one that rules over all others.

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That's a possibility too. But the idea of fertility, now, does

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God bless one's crops and things like that? Was fertility important? Having children, you know, when infant mortality, maternal mortality, things like that, was that on people's minds?

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Well, that was a blessing from God, no two ways about it, but not in the pagan sense of deities that themselves were fertile and then communicated their fertility to someone else.

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This was completely a blessing from God. He didn't have to be, quote -unquote, fertile, or she, or it, or whatever.

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All this stuff is just completely outside the worldview that actually produced the

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Tanakh as interpreted by Jesus and really as interpreted by the ancient rabbis, at least up to the period where you have the development of the more mystical interpretations later on.

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And so when you see stuff like this on the internet and you see people saying, well, it says right there in Wikipedia that it means many -breasted ones, don't be, do not be quickly shaken by such things.

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Check your sources. So many of these sources are available to us today online and in the fine

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Bible software programs that are available, whether it be Accordance or Logos or BibleWorks or Olive Tree or whatever, all of them have a wide variety of meaningfully scholarly resources.

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And again, I say meaningfully scholarly, all of those, unfortunately, also tend to have some liberal resources available, but I've said many times

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I went to a seminary that was way to my left and learned to appreciate how to learn from liberals, filter out the silliness, and get the gems that sometimes are able to be found there, though there's sometimes it takes a lot of filtering to find anything like that.

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So just a little note about El Shaddai. I didn't want anyone completely, you know, throwing out that song because of oddities being posted on Twitter.

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Anyway, so let me see here. I don't even know who that person is.

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Yesterday I was directed by Sai Tenbruggenkate, actually, to a article that was posted on crossexamined .org,

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which is the same website from which we read in regards to Dr.

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Frank Turek's defenses of Andy Stanley and his comments.

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We listened a little bit to Turek and Dr. Howe talking about things, and we took a fair amount of umbrage at the things that were said.

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And so we did a fair amount of review and response from a reformed perspective and asked a number of questions.

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And I assumed there would be a response, and I assume there still will be. I don't think this is the response.

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I would be surprised by this. But at the same time, I would not be overly surprised if there was no response at all. None. The reason being that it is my experience that there has been a decision on the part of leading evidentialists and what

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I would call minimalists to pretty much ignore reformed criticism of their perspective, to treat it very lightly, to dismiss it as being fringe.

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And so I actually would not be surprised if there was no response other than this whatsoever.

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We'll see. Maybe there's just something being developed. I don't know. But the article that appeared by Spencer Toye.

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Now, I looked up Spencer Toye. He is a fairly recent graduate, I believe, from Annapolis, from the

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Naval Academy. Mechanical engineering with a minor in Chinese. I will not attempt to argue with Brother Toye in regards to Chinese or mechanical engineering for that matter.

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But it does seem a little strange that in light of the issues that have been raised, that the first response on the website that I've seen anyways comes from Spencer Toye, who, as far as his article indicates, has not done any debates, written anything, taught anywhere, have any degrees in theology, philosophy, apologetics, anything along those lines.

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And that sort of shows up in the fact that the title is an open question to presuppositionalists.

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And unfortunately, if you assume that this actually is about presuppositionalism, you're going to miss what it's actually about.

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And in fact, you have to read it a couple times to follow it and realize what it's really about.

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And really, the only way to understand this is to basically go to the end.

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I hope I remember to mention this, but we have had impact out there. I can see that in something

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I hope to remember to mention as we go through this. But you have to get to the end, see what the final paragraphs say, and then go, oh, this isn't about presuppositionalism.

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This is a frontal attack upon Reformed theology and our doctrine of God.

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And it's only secondarily has anything to do with presuppositionalism at all.

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What do I mean? Well, there is a discussion that is presented between presuppositional apologists and classical apologists.

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And by the way, I had one guy on Twitter just, oh, you can just tell his nose was stuck in the air register in the ceiling.

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Turek and others self -identify as classical and evidentialist.

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And this guy was like, no, they're not. Because I used the same terminology they were using.

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It's completely two different things. Totally misunderstands. Sorry. Anyway, he has a dialogue here between classical apologists and presuppositional apologists.

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And here's how it goes. Classical apologists, how do you know that the conclusions you've drawn about Reformed theology and presuppositional apologetics are correct?

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Presuppositionalist says, because a proper exegesis of scripture inevitably leads one to accept Reformed theology and its implications.

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I'm prepared to demonstrate this directly from the pages of God's word. But the classicalist says,

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I'm using the exact same scriptures as you are, and I don't draw the same conclusions as you. How do you know that your exegesis of scripture is correct?

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I just stop right here. We can't get these folks to debate this topic for love nor money.

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We can't get them to do it. I mean, I think they all know, you know,

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William Lane Craig knows, Frank Turek knows, Norm Geisler certainly knows. We would debate

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Reformed theology with them. In fact, I think logically it would make sense to do that before doing the apologetic methodology foundation, because we're the ones who say apologetics flows from theology, right?

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Not the other way around. But we can't get these folks to debate this subject for anything.

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I've had that challenge out there for a very, very, very, very long time. And I'll just be pretty honest with you.

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I think they won't debate it because they know they can't win it. They cannot win that debate. They know that their answers to direct biblical exegesis would not withstand cross -examination.

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They can only stand up in a monologue, not in a dialogue. I really am convinced of that.

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I really do believe it. Anyway, how do you know that your exegesis scripture is correct?

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Presuppositionalist says, like I said, I can demonstrate it. When you read the passage of scripture in context with the proper historical and grammatical understanding, you'll see that Reformed theology necessarily follows.

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Classicalist, in other words, you can reason in all capitals from the text. Why is that in all capitals?

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Why is there an exaltation of reason when we're talking about properly handling the text in its context, in its original languages, allowing the scriptures to speak for themselves?

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The words of scripture clearly do not interpret themselves. Ah, we need something outside of scripture.

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If that were the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Really? Where have we heard this before?

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Where have we heard this before, folks? You see why non -Reformed apologists struggle with Rome?

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Because they fundamentally agree with Rome on so many things, on so many things.

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They may not know it. That's why they so often end up converting. Oh, they have.

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Beck, Beck, Beck, Beck, Beckwith. Oh, yeah, Beckwith. There is an example. You and I disagree about what the implications of scripture are and therefore you have to attempt to demonstrate that your view is true by engaging in reasoning.

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Didn't you say that our reasoning capabilities are fallen and that we should never place human reasoning above God's divine revelation?

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Now, stop right there. Massive category errors already. Massive category errors already.

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He's trying to take the philosophical concept of man's Dialogus Mois from Romans 1 that has been darkened and made futile and transfer that over to the fact that God holds man accountable for what

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God has revealed to man. Remember Matthew chapter 22? Have you not read what God spoke to you?

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Do you really think that, Mr. Toye, do you really think that Jesus would have used, would have accepted as an excuse from the

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Sadducees? Well, Rabbi Jesus, we didn't finish our epistemology of language graduate seminar, and so we really can't be held accountable for what is said in the

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Tanakh. Do you think he would have accepted that? Do you think anyone's gonna be able to go before God someday with that kind of excuse?

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I don't think so either. So here's part of the major problem here is that, well, if man's reason is fallen, then man's reason can't be used to interpret scripture.

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As if the clarity of scripture and the words of scripture are dependent upon man having an unfallen nature.

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When did God give us all, well, when did God give us all of scripture? Now, Adam was given revelation from God.

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That's true. But even what we know, what was given to Adam was given after Adam, recorded for us after Adam.

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So the actual revelation itself that is recorded for us in scripture is all post -fall.

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So obviously, God does believe he can hold us accountable, even post -fall for the revelation he's given to us, doesn't he?

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Yes, clearly he does. So this is a, I'd call it ingenious, but it's not ingenious.

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It's, you know, I said a couple times on Facebook yesterday, pastorally, this is an incredibly troubling response.

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And it is so on many levels, in regards to Mr. Toye's understanding of what scripture is, revelation, nature of God, and it's just coming out in the apologetic responses that are being provided here.

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But it is, as I said, troubling here. It is not that, it says you and I disagree about what the implications of scripture are.

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No, the issue is actually the meaning of the words. And that's why you guys won't debate this, because when it comes down to the meaning of the words, you struggle, big time.

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Even the best of your people, the better your Arminian synergistic apologists become, the less conservative biblical they become.

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Look at Roger Olson. Look at Roger Olson. He's no biblical conservative. It's pretty tough to find the real conservatives.

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And when you do find them, they really have to struggle and come up with some pretty strained interpretations.

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They really, really do. And most of them, interestingly enough, only focus in that area.

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They almost never do apologetics outside of that area. And I think there's a reason for that. Because if you were to take their methodology in defending

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Arminianism, and then take it out to deal with the liberals or the Muslims or Aryans or whatever else, it would fall apart.

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It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Anyway, so we see where he's going here. Didn't you say our reasoning capabilities are falling?

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And by the way, there's a complete lack of understanding here, evidently, concerning regeneration, new nature.

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Why did Jesus have to open the minds of the disciples after his resurrection to understand the scriptures?

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Just some of the questions we would like to ask, Mr. Toy. Of course, our human reasoning is fallen.

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That's why the Holy Spirit has to reveal the truth to us. Well, presuppositionalists would say our human reasoning is fallen.

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None of us are perfect. However, there is such a thing as regeneration. And I have said many, many times a truly regenerate man or woman is going to find themselves subject to the

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Word of God, constantly being drawn to God's revelation. And I truly am concerned about a person when

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I see that they are constantly wandering away from that and looking for something else. They're not satisfied with what

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God has given to us. I can know that my exegesis is correct because I begin epistemologically with God.

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Well, I could see a context in which a statement like that might be correct, but I'm not sure this is necessarily the context.

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Having put my faith in God, thanks to the Holy Spirit's regeneration, I can be confident that God has revealed the truth to me.

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That's not how I would defend exegesis. I would defend exegesis by its consistency from Genesis to Revelation.

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I would say that the very same hermeneutical methodology by which I defend the resurrection is the same hermeneutic methodology by which

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I understand that there is a specific elect people of God. And that it is the synergist who uses one form of interpretation for the resurrection, same one

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I do, but another form in dismissing the existence of the elect of God.

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So there's an inconsistency there, and inconsistency is what? What did that guy say?

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Oh, a sign of a failed argument. Yeah. Yeah, that's what inconsistency is.

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The classicalist answers, but tell me this, hypothetically speaking, let's say God wanted you to be in error about some aspect of theology.

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Stop right there. This hypothetical is worthless, and it's worthless because it does it indulges the worst aspect of man's nature, his fallen nature.

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And that is it intrudes upon that which God has not revealed. The secret things belong to Lord our

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God, the things we've revealed belong to us and to our children forever. There are things that God has the right to keep to himself, and we are not put in a position of judging upon that, addicting upon that.

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It is always a fool's errand. It is a worthless thing to even begin to go that direction. It's not going to accomplish anything at all.

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And so the hypothetical stuff, which is just so common amongst modern individuals, hypothetically saying

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God wants you to be in error about some aspect of theology. Well, we are accountable to the revealed will of God, and it is our desire to honor

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God in totality, and therefore we do not want to be in error in any aspect.

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Now, theoretically, hypothetically, God can utilize, we've said many times, he can draw a straight line with a crooked stick, and we recognize in this world that none of us achieve perfect knowledge of everything there is to know about God's revelation.

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Not only are we fallen creatures, but we're creatures. And creatures are not going to know everything there is to know.

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But the theory that Mr. Toye doesn't seem to realize he's operating on here is that for the

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Word of God to actually be binding and the final authority in this way, the assumption is that mankind has to be perfect and have an unfallen reasoning capacity to be able to appreciate and know its truth.

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Earlier, he had given the example that while talking about Frank Turek, I had made the comment that when it comes to that acceptance of who

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God is and who we are, the tremendous distinction between the fallen creature and the

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Holy God, that especially when it comes to embracing

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God's sovereignty over one's life, this is something that the Holy Spirit of God brings to our understanding in various ways, and that there are people who, because of their traditions, reject biblical truths, even though they themselves are

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Christians. And he took that to mean, oh, well, see, that means God wants some people to be in the dark all the time, as if he can discern that that's

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God's desire in the sense that, again, all we can know is his prescriptive will, and that prescriptive will says that we are to grow in the grace and knowledge of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. We have every responsibility to be accurate in what we believe.

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We're to be always pursuing this, and we do not inquire as to why God does not bring every single believer to the exact same level of knowledge, but it's clearly not his will to do so.

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And you don't go beyond that without being absolutely impudent and arrogant in God's sight.

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And I do believe that this form of apologetics is impudent and arrogant in God's sight.

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I do believe that. I don't say that to just get emotions going. I believe there is a solid basis for arguing that this is a significantly less than humility -marked argument on Mr.

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Toye's part. And I would chalk it up to very young age and would hope that with maturity and growth and experience in life, might be a little bit of a change coming.

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But the point is, what I was saying was that it is a gift of grace on God's part for him to, in essence, reveal that aspect of his character and to reveal the depth of his condescension and the awesomeness of his grace and really the tremendous depth of our own repulsiveness in God's sight in our sin.

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That sinners -in -the -hands -of -an -angry -God moment that, for me, it was a

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Sharnock moment reading the existence and attributes of God and also Arthur W. Pink's book on the same subject that just crushed your self -righteous creatureliness.

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That's a gift of grace. And so what Mr. Toye doesn't seem to realize he's doing is he's saying, well,

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God must give that gift to everybody or no one can really know truth.

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That's the final argument that's going to be made here. And that's forcing

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God's hand and placing an external stricture upon what

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God's creative work is supposed to accomplish and be that has no biblical warrant.

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This is not a biblical argument. There was nothing biblical about this. This is what was so pastorally concerning.

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This is not a person who's drawing his thoughts from scripture. And unfortunately, it just keeps ringing in my mind when it was reported to me from an extremely reliable source that after speaking to a large group of people,

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William Lane Craig comes out. He's surrounded by all these young guys. They're all excited. And I know what that looks like.

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I've experienced that myself, but he says to them, and I hope if anyone ever listens to what

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I'm saying to people, they'll never hear me say something like this. He says to them, if you really want to be good and apologetic, you need to stop reading so much theology and read more philosophy.

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And you will never hear me say that. You will never hear me say that. God forbid, let me be run over by a truck before I say that.

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I do not want to be held accountable to ever, ever say that. Anyway, but tell me this, hypothetically speaking, let's say that God wanted you to be an error about some aspect of theology.

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He's still elected to save you, but he knew that if you believed and taught this theological error to others, somehow in the grand scheme of his divine decree, he would bring the most glory to himself.

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Would it be possible for you to reach the truth, assuming that God had decreed for you to remain in error? Again, doing what

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Calvin would never be willing to do, but Edwards sort of did and got in trouble for it, pretending to plumb the decrees of God.

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And then using that, that's what's so frightening about this, then using his brilliant argument as an argument against God's decree.

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That's what God's divine decree cannot be resisted. Everything that happens in the universe ultimately occurs according to God's decree in order that he might glorify himself.

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Classicalist, but if that's the case, how could you ever confidently know that anything you believe is true?

39:50

I suspect you'll say because God has revealed it to you, but that would just be arguing in a circle. You just admit that if God wants someone to be an error, then they will certainly be an error, including me and including you.

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How can you know that what God has revealed to you isn't an error so that he can bring more glory to himself by your being incorrect?

40:05

So in other words, what's the argument here? God cannot have a sovereign decree. God cannot send a spirit of error.

40:15

I know it's in the Bible. I'm not sure Mr. Toye is aware it's in the Bible, but yet God did do that. And I don't know how, again, there was nothing biblical about this.

40:25

It was arid, desert dry of biblical thought, biblical parameters.

40:31

That's what's so frightening about this. That's what's so repulsive to me about this form of apologetics is that it does not have a passion for Scripture.

40:43

That's only an add -on that you can have, have not. No, it does not flow from it. What do you do with the explicit teaching of Scripture that if you will not love the truth,

40:54

God will cause you to love a lie? That's exactly the opposite of what the classical apologist says here.

41:03

But Mr. Toye obviously believes this is good stuff. We've got him now because he goes on to say,

41:10

I have asked this question to Calvinists before and never received an answer with any more substance than, you just don't understand

41:15

Calvinism or it's more diamond shaped than that. Well, where did that come from? I have never heard anyone else.

41:23

Have you? Have you heard anybody else? Because I'm the one that, to my knowledge, has tried to use the illustration of when these folks try to squish

41:35

Reformed theology down to a two dimensional, it's three and four dimensional.

41:42

And it's much deeper than that. And you're ignoring so much. And what am I normally saying? You're ignoring so much biblical revelation.

41:48

And that's what this entire article does. I mean, it is just bereft of biblical categories of thought, anything like that.

42:01

It's unfortunately representative of a lot of modern day evangelicalism.

42:06

So here is the real issue. Here's the paragraph.

42:14

This, I think, truly exposes the fatal flaw of the Calvinist embrace of, not presuppositional apologetics, divine determinism.

42:25

This isn't about presuppositionalism. Evidently he does recognize a presuppositionalist to be consistent has to be

42:32

Reformed. To be consistent, to be Reformed is to believe what the Bible teaches.

42:40

And I gave a number of texts on Facebook last night. Straightforward didactic teaching about God's absolute right over his creation.

42:52

Psalm 33, Daniel chapter four, Psalm 135 verse six, Isaiah 40 through 48.

42:57

We can go through a whole bunch of passages in there. Ephesians 111. I mean, it's just, he works all things after the counsel of his will.

43:06

That is the God of the Bible. And that God is frightening to those people who think that somehow they are in charge of their salvation.

43:14

That is frightening to autonomous human creatures who are not in fact autonomous at all. I get that.

43:21

But you can't point to a debate where your side has presented almost any type of meaningful argument at all, where the other side hasn't been able to fully respond.

43:39

So you can't just simply dismiss this. So what's his final result? Well, as William Lane Craig has stated, it would be nice to have had at least one biblical citation, but next best thing,

43:56

I guess, as William Lane Craig has stated, once a person embraces determinism of any sort, a strange vertigo sets in.

44:04

Now remember, this is from the guy who promotes the celestial card dealer.

44:10

Not car dealer, card dealer. You know, Molinism and it's

44:17

God who's the supercomputer that runs all the possible worlds stuff, all based upon human freedom.

44:22

Yeah, that thing. As William Lane Craig has stated, once a person embraces determinism, any sort of strange vertigo sets in, one very well may believe true things, but only because they've already been determined to believe those things just as much as their opponents have been determined to believe false things.

44:38

In such a system, nothing can be rationally affirmed. Get it? Nothing can be rationally affirmed.

44:46

Now, what does that mean? Well, he may not recognize that what he's saying here is, but his system of epistemology is based upon the rational affirmation of autonomous human creatures as the highest authority that can be obtained in this world.

45:05

There's no revelation. There's no divine decree. It's all based upon the autonomous nature of human freedom.

45:16

That's it. That's all he's got. And that's not

45:21

Christian. There are many Christians who have a decrepit epistemology because they've embraced a tradition that overrides

45:30

Scripture, but it's not uniquely Christian. It's sub -biblical, sub -Christian, let's put it that way.

45:37

And so, I really doubt that Mr. Toye wants to attempt to defend the idea that there is no divine decree, because the statements are just so numerous and clear that it's pretty difficult.

45:57

But it wasn't an issue really about presuppositionalism, though, in a sense, it was a recognition on his part of how intimately connected and consistent presuppositionalism is with the theology determines apologetics paradigm rather than apologetics determining theology, which is really what's happening with him.

46:20

There's no theology here, but there is an apologetic methodology that's determining the theology.

46:26

And that's a shame. So, will that be all it appears?

46:34

I don't know. I don't know. But if it is, that's a statement in and of itself, personally.

46:40

That's a statement in and of itself. All right. There's a place to put a marker in and move on back to our presentation on Sola Scriptura and the relevant issues attended there, too.

47:00

We have so much to cover even yet, and we haven't even gotten to playing the material from the

47:11

Catholic Answers as yet. But I want to continue on if I can.

47:17

Unfortunately, I can't right now, because I need to show you something. And the other room is vacant.

47:24

I have been abandoned and left alone and don't know really what to do right now, because I can't put this up on the screen by myself.

47:38

So, I'm just going to have to read it to you and we'll catch up on it later or something. I don't know what happened.

47:45

I'm looking outside at the cameras and nothing's going on outside. So, I don't know what took place there.

47:51

But we do need to look. Oh, there he is.

47:57

Hi, nice to have you back. Everybody now knows you were gone, because I told everybody.

48:07

Word of advice, don't do one of these just before the show. Oh, yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha.

48:13

All right. Well, I'm sending you something that we want to put up on the screen.

48:21

What about this issue of traditions? Well, in Mark chapter 7, we have these words.

48:34

Jesus said, neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.

48:42

He was also saying to them, your experts is setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.

48:52

But I say to you, if a man says to his father, his mother, whatever, I'm sorry, should be put to death.

48:59

Verse 11, but you say, there you go. If a man says to his father or his mother, whatever

49:05

I have that would help us is Korban, that is to say, given to God, you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother, thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition, which you have handed down, and you do many things such as that.

49:21

Now, this is also found, I believe, in Matthew chapter 15 is the parallel text. Now, why would we bring a text like this up?

49:28

Well, I remember twice, I have attended

49:35

Catholic Answers presentations here in the

49:42

Valley of the Sun. One of them was with Mark Brumley, and the other was with Patrick Madrid.

49:50

One of them, I remember in the Q &A, I asked Patrick, I said, what do you think the chances would ever be of Carl Keating debating me on the subject of sola scriptura?

50:06

And I may have mentioned some other topics as well. And Patrick's response was that that was probably not likely to happen.

50:18

And up to that point, most people had just ignored me. This was back in the early 90s, and so a lot of people didn't have, you know, before YouTube, before the

50:30

Great Debate series, stuff like that. But Patrick was very complimentary.

50:37

He said, that's probably not going to happen because debating is not Carl's primary thing, and you're about the best person the other side has to offer.

50:45

Well, at that point, everybody turned around because they're sort of like, Satan is here, you know, just looking around to see who the weirdo was.

50:55

And then I asked Mark Brumley at another get -together about this text.

51:03

Because we've already looked at 2 Thessalonians seeing what it was actually talking about.

51:10

We're going to look at 1 Thessalonians 2 .13, and another text of Thessalonians where the term tradition is used.

51:19

But as I mentioned a couple programs ago, the vast majority of instances when tradition is used, when it is not contextually defined as the gospel message itself, there is a negative connotation to it.

51:42

And what's fascinating is this particular instance. And I should have done this, I apologize.

51:47

I believe, yeah, I'm pretty certain that I included this information in the

51:53

Roman Catholic Controversy if you want to look at it in the section on Sola Scriptura. I did not grab this, and I'm not going to take the time to look at it right now.

52:00

I could probably find it fairly quickly. But this particular text,

52:08

I think, is one that you should be familiar with so as to be able to share with your

52:15

Roman Catholic friends or anybody else who has an issue with Sola Scriptura, but especially your

52:21

Roman Catholic friends. Why? Well, the parallel between the

52:31

Jewish understanding of tradition, especially in the context of how it was passed down and its nature, the parallel between that and the

52:50

Roman Catholic perspective is amazing. It really is amazing. And what

52:57

I've done in the past is I've gone back to, well, it's important to recognize in the days of Jesus, you did not yet have the codification of Jewish tradition that you have about 200 -250 years after Jesus in what is called the

53:21

Mishnah. The Mishnah, you can buy it in Lagos.

53:27

I'm not sure if it's in Accordance. It might be. I haven't looked. I try not to duplicate too many things.

53:32

I have so many resources duplicated already anyways. But in hardback, my

53:39

Mishnah is about seven volumes, I think, Hebrew -English.

53:45

And that's around 250 years after Christ. And it certainly does shed a lot of light back into the first century, though you have to be really careful just because it's in the

53:58

Mishnah doesn't necessarily mean it was current in the days of Christ. Maybe, maybe not. There's other things, other factors that have to be brought in.

54:07

But the Mishnah then is commented upon for hundreds of years.

54:14

And the commentary, the Gemara on the Mishnah, once they're joined together, and if you've ever seen this, you'll have the

54:22

Mishnah in the center and the Gemara is written outside like this. That becomes what's known as the

54:29

Talmud. And there are actually different versions of the Talmud, too. But anyway, this is where you get the real codification of Jewish tradition then after the time of Christ.

54:45

Well, it just so happens that the tradition that Jesus makes reference to in verse 11, but you say, if a man says to his father or his mother, whatever

54:58

I have that would help you is korban, that is to say, given to God, you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother.

55:07

This is a tradition that we can find directly in the

55:13

Jewish sources. And I believe it's tractate aboth. Off the top of my head,

55:19

I think, I'm just going from memory here, but I think it's tractate aboth that contains the korban rule.

55:27

And what's going on here is there was the understanding that you were responsible for caring for your parents, for obvious reasons.

55:43

And if you did not care for your parents, then you were sinning in God's sight.

55:49

But they found a way around this by saying, well, but if you say korban, my living and my substance is dedicated to the worship of God, the temple.

56:02

So I give my substance, my earnings, my possessions to the support of the worship of God and the temple in Jerusalem.

56:12

Then no other claim, even that of your parents was equal to that. Now, of course, they also worked it out to where, well, the temple didn't need all that right away.

56:24

And so you could still use and invest and spend.

56:31

But no one else could make a claim upon your stuff, including your parents. I believe the government now calls that a set aside.

56:42

Yeah. So this tradition is found in the most important definitional

56:59

Jewish sources, the Mishnah. And here's the point.

57:05

It is said to have been passed down from Moses through the rabbis to the days of Jesus.

57:15

Well, to the days of the codification of Mishnah, which would include the days of Jesus since it was after the days of Jesus.

57:25

So Moses revealed this, but there isn't any written evidence of this until the codification of this in the

57:38

Mishnah. So what do you have then? You have an oral tradition that is said to be a divine tradition because it goes back to Moses.

57:53

But the point is, of course, it is a violation of scripture.

58:00

Jesus says, you're invalidating the word of God by your tradition, which you have handed down, and you do many such things as that.

58:11

Invalidating the word of God by an oral tradition. Oh, oh, oh, but Jesus, this came from Moses.

58:20

This is a divine tradition. It came from Moses. And Jesus says, I don't care.

58:28

Your ultimate authority is what God has said in his word. And he called them hypocrites, neglecting the commandment of God.

58:39

Now, what does Rome say about her traditions? Oh, well, we're not, we're not violating the word of God. In fact, you can't really even understand the word of God without our traditions.

58:51

Our traditions are divine. They were given to the apostles and the apostles taught them to the bishops and they were passed down outside of scripture until they need to be codified because there's a question about the subject.

59:07

It's a direct parallel. It's the exact same thing. And so if we ask, how did

59:14

Jesus deal with this issue? He didn't deal with it the way that Rome deals with it today.

59:24

He made a very strong case quoting directly from what they would have considered to be a divine tradition and saying, no, you're invalidating the word of God.

59:41

You're invalidating the word of God. That's rather important. That's really important.

59:48

Now, I want to look at two more things before we then go to the

59:56

Catholic answers thing. And we'll, listen to some of that. I'm not sure where you get that today. I said earlier that one of the problems that we have is that I'm going to take that down.

01:00:09

So need to drop that. There we go. One of the, one of the problems we have in dealing with Roman Catholicism at this point is they will never defend their own, their own perspective.

01:00:33

And so I want to, I want to give consideration to that. And I also want to look at just a couple of the many, many, many, many texts that we could read in regards to the subject of the authority of scripture from the early church fathers.

01:00:57

Let me just give you a couple. Now, any citation of patristic sources, patristic simply means from the word pater, fathers, the early writers of the

01:01:10

Christian faith. Most evangelicals ignore patristic studies completely.

01:01:19

I, I couldn't have named an early church father if my life depended on it until I went to, probably until I started dealing with Mormonism and a couple of them started bringing up some, some people and just wasn't a part of, of the tradition that I was raised in is to really look at early church fathers and things like that.

01:01:40

I mean, I think a lot of people could, could say the same thing. That's to our detriment.

01:01:49

There needs to be a balance. I think, I think I surprised a lot of people.

01:01:55

I'm teaching through church history right now, 15 lessons we've gone through, and we're just now, we're just now getting the

01:02:01

Donatist controversy and, and we're going real slow this time. It's good. Last time,

01:02:07

I think we did it in 52 weeks. This time I'm figuring 150 might be more like it. But anyway, when

01:02:16

I teach church history, I very strongly warn people, look, you cannot judge people in the past by the standards that we have today.

01:02:26

You have to judge them within the context in which they lived. And if, if history continues on and people look, look upon us, you're going to wish to be judged fairly by those who come after us.

01:02:40

So we have to do the same thing. It truly concerns me when I listen to the

01:02:46

Dave Hunt style folks of today, the

01:02:51

Jacob Proshes of today who just violate every possible can of meaningful historical investigation and fairness in their diatribes and things like that.

01:03:07

And I think it surprises people that I would do that. But I recognize the absolute necessity of it, absolute necessity of it.

01:03:17

And everybody that I quote from, like me, was imperfect and inconsistent on something.

01:03:27

In fact, when we get into Augustine in the church history series, and by the way, it's posted on the sermon audio, and you'll be able to listen to it there.

01:03:41

A number of people already are. Oh, and by the way, we started the P45 sermon series on Sunday.

01:03:48

I've already gotten a couple people are excited about it. I'm not sure how many others are, but where I'm doing a sermon series based upon the contents of Papyrus 45.

01:04:01

And P45 originally about 220 pages long, there's only 30 some odd pages left now, but contains portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, mainly

01:04:13

Acts. But there are others as well in there. And so we are actually going to preach the chapters.

01:04:22

If it's got a portion of a chapter, we'll do the whole chapter, but we're going to preach the chapters that in God's providence still remain from P45.

01:04:33

And some of you know why that is. I'm studying P45 as part of a textual critical project, a very important one in my opinion.

01:04:41

And so it seems to fit, put the two together. And I've got to be translating it.

01:04:46

Might as well preach it. It seems to make sense. Anyway, started that on Sunday.

01:04:52

That's also on sermon audio at PRBC. So look that up. But I'm inconsistent.

01:05:01

Augustine, who I'm about to read, when we get to him in the church history series,

01:05:09

I'm going to spend probably an entire class period because I gave this presentation, man,

01:05:15

I don't know how many years ago it was, out in Mesa on the fact that we can look at Augustine.

01:05:26

Arguably, no one outside of Paul has had the impact upon Western Christianity that Augustine did.

01:05:35

Nobody. And yet he was inconsistent.

01:05:41

And because of that, in the days of the Reformation, both Roman Catholics and Protestants cited

01:05:48

Augustine for their side. And properly so, without even taking him out of context. Why?

01:05:56

Because he was inconsistent. And we can look at why. And hopefully that's one of those few times when we can hold up a mirror to ourselves and go, huh,

01:06:04

I wonder why I'm doing the same type of thing. So I recognize that when it comes to citing these individuals, you can counter -cite.

01:06:14

However, I would argue that when it comes to Augustine, you have a hard time on this subject. Augustine's ecclesiology, definitely because the

01:06:25

Donatist controversy leans toward Rome. Later Roman. Roman Catholicism didn't exist in the days of Augustine.

01:06:32

I don't know how anybody could say that it did. But the later developments, yeah, definitely there.

01:06:39

But we're talking here about scriptural sufficiency and authority. And I put them away, but once again, the three -volume set,

01:06:50

Webster and King, Holy Scripture, we have it available through the bookstore.

01:06:57

Really tremendous resource to have available. Tremendous resource. And I understand, was it

01:07:03

Ligonier or is it Solideo Gloria that has this now? It's Ligonier still? Yes.

01:07:12

It was given back to him. Yes. So I'd be interested in knowing, don't we have this?

01:07:24

But does it look like this or look different? It does? Hmm. I thought they had given a new cover.

01:07:33

Anyway, Sola Scriptura, Prosoposition of the Bible. I have a number,

01:07:40

I'm actually going to look at a few citations when we get to the subject of apostolic tradition from my article in here, written back in the 90s on this subject.

01:07:54

Lots of resources available that would give you, what, does it look the same or are we out? No, we are out.

01:08:01

I just remembered that Ligonier had stopped producing it.

01:08:07

Right. So that's why we weren't carrying it. Oh, I think Solideo Gloria. So if they're back,

01:08:12

I'll try to reach out to them. I think so. That's my recollection. And get more of them. That's my recollection. Anyway, lots of resources that you can look at that will vastly increase the number of citations.

01:08:28

But just listen to what Augustine says here. The Lord Jesus himself, when he had risen from the dead, judged that his disciples were to be convinced by the testimonies of the law and the prophets and the

01:08:45

Psalms. These are the proofs. These, the foundations. These, the supports for our cause.

01:08:54

Reading the Acts of the Apostles of some who believed that they searched the scriptures daily where these things were so.

01:09:00

What scriptures but the canonical scriptures, the law and the prophets. Do these have been add the gospels, the apostolical epistles, the

01:09:06

Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse of John. Augustine de Unitate Ecclesiae, which means the unity of the church, interestingly enough.

01:09:16

And I've always found this to be a wonderful citation from Gregory of Nyssa.

01:09:26

We make the holy scriptures the canon and rule of every dogma.

01:09:32

We have necessity to look upon that and receive alone that which may be made conformable to the intention of those writings.

01:09:40

Now, look, I've been debating this subject for a long, long time with Roman Catholics.

01:09:51

And we played that clip with Jerry Matitox, where he specifically states, we have the same epistological warrant for believing in the bodily assumption of Mary as we have the resurrection.

01:10:08

What Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nyssa, there's absolutely zero evidence that he believed in the bodily assumption of Mary.

01:10:15

I'd never even heard of it. Same with Augustine.

01:10:22

Didn't believe these things. Later generations would create fake books to try to read these things back, but scholars recognize they're fake books now.

01:10:33

We make the holy scriptures the canon and the rule of every dogma. How do you make the holy scriptures the canon rule of papal infallibility, the bodily assumption of Mary, and the immaculate conception?

01:10:48

Those are the last three dogmas that have been defined by the

01:10:54

Roman Catholic Church on the basis of tradition. You can't do it.

01:11:00

It is not possible. Okay, Jonathan McCree tells us that he sends a picture and says it is

01:11:14

Reformation Trust, Ligonier, and there's the cover. So now you know what to look for.

01:11:21

And we'll get that back available. Thank you, Jonathan, on Twitter. We have necessity to look upon that and receive alone, alone, that which may be made conformable to the intention of those writings.

01:11:44

Alone. What about the oral traditions?

01:11:50

What about apostolic tradition? No, not what he says. Let's go back to Augustine for one more.

01:12:01

All things that are read from the holy scriptures, in order to our instruction in salvation, it behooves us to hear with earnest heed.

01:12:09

And yet, even in regard of them, a thing which you ought especially to observe and to commit to your memory, because that which shall make us strong against insidious errors,

01:12:19

God has been pleased to put in the scriptures, against which no man dares to speak, who in any sort wishes to seem a

01:12:26

Christian. When he had given himself to be handled by them, that did not suffice him, but he would also confirm by means of the scriptures, the heart of them that believe.

01:12:35

You know what he's talking about here? This is in regards to Christ's resurrection.

01:12:42

And even though when he had given himself to be handled by them, so his physical body, that did not suffice him, but he would also confirm by means of the scriptures, the heart of them that believe, for he looked forward to us who should be afterwards.

01:13:02

In other words, believers that were not in the upper room, seeing that in him we have nothing that we can handle, but have that which we may read.

01:13:14

Now, don't miss what Augustine says there on two levels.

01:13:20

On two levels. The first is relevant to what we're saying right now. He looked forward to us who should be afterwards, seeing that in him we have nothing that we can handle, but have that which we may read.

01:13:35

Not oral tradition, not something passed down that's going to take 1 ,500 years to be dogmatized or defined or anything like that.

01:13:48

That which we may read. But did you catch the other element of it?

01:13:57

There's something pretty important right there. Seeing that in him we have what?

01:14:06

Nothing that we can handle. Do you see the importance of that?

01:14:15

Let me just briefly add a little something to our study here. I didn't bring it in, but I was fumbling through my library a couple days ago, and I ran across a whole bunch of photocopied pages that I had put together for a number of the

01:14:40

Roman Catholic debates we've done on Long Island years and years ago. I was reading through section on Augustine and the concept of the body of Christ.

01:14:55

Augustine has numerous statements where he talks about the supper is a memorial. It's very clear where he was on this, and it was not where Rome is.

01:15:04

No concept of transubstantiation at all. But what is clear in Augustine is he teaches that until the second coming of Christ, the church has been deprived of the bodily presence of Christ.

01:15:20

That Christ's bodily presence is in heaven, not on earth. Now some of you may not know enough about Roman Catholic theology to realize how stunning that is, but you do realize that Rome actually does teach that Christ is on earth.

01:15:36

His body is on earth. It's in every single Roman Catholic church. That's why they genuflect, that's why they bow, is because if it's not up on the altar, over in the monstrance, the pyx, the saboreum, the tabernacle, you have consecrated hosts that have been turned into the body, soul, blood, and divinity of Jesus Christ.

01:16:00

We have the physical body of Christ on earth. You can go visit him at your local

01:16:06

Roman Catholic church, according to Rome. And so it's fascinating to seeing that in him we have nothing that we can handle.

01:16:22

But what about the Eucharist? Whatever real presence means, it doesn't mean physical presence.

01:16:29

Not for Augustine, not for Augustine, and for many others. See the debate that we had with Robert St.

01:16:36

Genes on the Mass. It's available on YouTube in very low definition, as all of them back then were.

01:16:48

That's just the way it is. So that's been taken down. Okay, good.

01:16:54

All right. Now, before we go to the Catholic Answers material, and I don't know that I'm going to get there today, depending on how long

01:17:05

I take to do this. I totally forgot to bring my water in here today. I'm dying.

01:17:12

I just don't know when I'd have a chance to grab a sip anyways. But if I had something,

01:17:18

I would drink it. Hint, hint, hint.

01:17:25

There you go. I didn't drink one of those big things. No, no, it's in the fridge, I'm pretty sure. Rome has its own position, but is loathe to be open about it.

01:17:41

We believe in sola scriptura. Rome believes in sola ecclesia. Now, Rome says we don't believe in sola ecclesia.

01:17:49

We believe in the three -legged stool. We believe in scripture and tradition, the magisterium, and even amongst those, there's an ontological supremacy of scripture over tradition, and the magisterium, and all the rest of that stuff.

01:18:08

Thank you very much. And all that blather.

01:18:14

It doesn't work out that way, though. It doesn't work out that way. Excuse me. Please, sir, could

01:18:24

I have some more water, please? Oh, I could actually, I really could use a bigger drink than that, but that'll get me through a little while here.

01:18:30

Anyway, I know about the three -legged stool, but I'm going to play some comments, interestingly enough, from Carlo Broussard, demonstrating that there is no equality between the legs.

01:18:51

And if you have a three -legged stool and the legs aren't all the same strength and length, it doesn't work real well.

01:18:58

In fact, it's a disaster. And when you look at how Rome has defined dogma, it doesn't work this way.

01:19:07

It doesn't work as if there's three equal legs. I believe that the accusation that I have made that Rome believes in sola ecclesia is fairly easily proven.

01:19:21

What do I mean by that? Well, here, Rome claims that the authority of the magisterium, headed by the pope, is balanced by that of scripture and tradition.

01:19:33

Sometimes tradition is defined as the written and oral tradition, subsuming scripture into the one category.

01:19:40

But in reality, Rome is the final authority, period. She cannot be corrected by either scripture nor tradition.

01:19:49

Why? Rome's own claims spell it out. Let's think about it. Who has the final and infallible authority to define the extent of scripture?

01:20:03

What is or what is not scripture? Well, it's the Roman magisterium.

01:20:08

What do I mean by this? Well, who has the final authority to determine the canon of scripture?

01:20:14

Who has the final authority to determine what scripture is and what is not? Rome does. Rome does.

01:20:21

Didn't exercise that until the mid -1500s, but still, the final authority is held by the

01:20:31

Roman magisterium. Okay. Who has the final and infallible authority to define the meaning of scripture, what scripture does and does not say?

01:20:44

Well, that would be the Roman magisterium. So, if you define the extent of scripture and you can infallibly determine the meaning of scripture, how can scripture ever correct you?

01:21:06

Now, I simply point out that Rome has almost never done what it says it can do.

01:21:17

It's never done what it says it can do. There are some Roman Catholics that say there are seven verses in the

01:21:22

Bible that have been infallibly defined. Some say there are none. Some Roman Catholic apologists will say

01:21:27

Rome has never dogmatically defined the meaning of a single text of scripture, and I think a lot of Rome's apologists today would agree with that.

01:21:39

Even when they would say that there is an infallibly defined meaning to a text,

01:21:47

I've heard them saying, but that may not be the only meaning to the text. I remember, I don't know why,

01:21:53

I was driving around in Pasadena, California, listening to Catholic Answers once, and it was

01:21:59

Tim Staples talking about Matthew 16 and saying, yes, it's been infallibly defined, but that's not the only thing it can mean.

01:22:10

You would think after 2 ,000 years, there would be an entire set of books called the Infallible Commentary on Scripture provided by the

01:22:16

Roman Magisterium, but there is no such thing, just as there is no listing anywhere to be found of what is tradition that exists outside of scripture.

01:22:27

You would think these would be fundamentally necessary things for Rome's authority claims to stand up, but they're not there.

01:22:35

No such thing. We'll listen to Carlo Broussard say, nope, there's no book that tells you what is and it makes you go, wonder why not?

01:22:47

After all this time, you would think that would be of highest priority, most important for the health of the church and the defense of faith.

01:22:56

So when it comes to scripture, Rome defines its extent and Rome defines its meaning.

01:23:05

Okay? So we go to the second one. Who has the final and infallible authority to define the extent of tradition?

01:23:14

What is and what is not tradition? Well, the folks at Catholic Answers, when they first started doing all their debates, pretty much had a lock on the use of early church fathers.

01:23:37

Like I said, they were primarily debating Calvary Chapel folks and they don't tend to be much for church history.

01:23:44

And then all of a sudden, we had a debate in Tempe, Arizona on the papacy.

01:23:52

And I hit, it was moderated by Scott Hahn, I hit Jerry Matitix with a buckshot full load, double -aught buck of early church fathers, which you can do.

01:24:05

It's rather easy. I have far more today than I had back then. But of evidence that the modern

01:24:13

Roman Catholic concept of the papacy was not history. And I remember, especially in debating with Jerry a few times,

01:24:24

I'd quote an early church father, well, that's not tradition. So when you quote an early church father, that is tradition.

01:24:33

When I quote an early church father, that isn't tradition. So who gets to say? Well, Rome does.

01:24:40

Rome gets to say. Now, she doesn't go through all the writings of an early church father and say, this is tradition, this isn't, this is tradition, this isn't.

01:24:47

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If it agrees with her, it's tradition. If it disagrees, it ain't. That's easy.

01:24:54

That's sort of simple. Once you give your mind to Rome, well, it's like when

01:25:03

I wrote to Bob Sagenis years ago, back when he was more mainline than he is anymore.

01:25:09

And John Paul II, one year he'd throw out a bone to the conservatives, and the next year to the liberals, and then to the conservatives and the liberals.

01:25:17

And I contrasted something he had said with what an earlier pope had said.

01:25:23

And it's really obvious they don't believe the same thing. There's a contradiction.

01:25:31

And Sagenis's response was a consistent papal response, and that is, who are you to interpret church history and church teaching?

01:25:39

Only the church can interpret her teaching. So she may have said something back then that in context, we know exactly what she meant.

01:25:48

Doesn't matter. If she decides today that it actually meant this, well, then it does because, well, sola ecclesia.

01:25:59

So Rome defines the extent of tradition, who has the final and fallible authority to define the meaning of tradition, what tradition does and does not say.

01:26:11

So even when you interpret the early church fathers, well, it's the Roman magisterium.

01:26:18

So the Roman magisterium defines the extent of scripture and the meaning of scripture, the extent of tradition and the meaning of tradition.

01:26:27

Therefore, the ultimate authority in Roman Catholicism is the Roman magisterium, sola ecclesia.

01:26:35

How can you get away from that? How can you get around that? You can sit there all day long and say, ah, well, the documents of Vatican II are not inspired the way the

01:26:42

Bible is. Okay, but you're not allowed to interpret the Bible outside of, quote unquote, sacred tradition, which is defined for you by the documents of Vatican II as interpreted by the current pope.

01:26:50

Well, maybe not this one. Yeah. You call this a consistent, meaningful, defensible epistemology?

01:27:00

I don't. It may explain why there's not nearly as many debates going on as there used to be.

01:27:08

I can understand why that is. I can understand why that is. But this is what I mean by sola ecclesia, and I cannot get anyone to come out and defend this.

01:27:19

Okay. Anyone who would actually represent Roman Catholicism, there's always these interesting fringe groups out there.

01:27:26

I mean, I'm going to take that down. Really interesting fringe groups that are always saying, well, you won't debate us and blah, blah, blah.

01:27:35

Look, if your position represents nobody else but you guys, why should

01:27:43

I invest my time in that when you don't actually represent? Because why debate

01:27:49

Roman Catholicism? It's real simple. On the one hand, I believe that Rome does not possess the gospel of Jesus Christ and therefore needs to be evangelized.

01:27:59

And so I want to see Roman Catholics come to know Christ. And I want anything, any debates

01:28:04

I do to have the widest possible audience. If the audience is only going to be a couple hundred people, in other words, not just at that night, but that's all the people in the world that believe that type of stuff, why bother?

01:28:16

I want to reach as many people as I can. Secondly, I want to be able to edify the saints, which not only includes preparing them to witness to individuals, and hence, if you're some little group they're never going to run into, again, that's not helping but also to strengthen their own faith, lest they be deceived.

01:28:37

But again, if they're only running into a couple of these people versus thousands of the other, this is why you want to represent

01:28:43

Orthodox representatives of Roman Catholicism. So it's tough to get folks to defend

01:28:53

Rome's real claims. They're much more willing to attack Sola Scriptura.

01:28:59

They're comfortable there actually defending their own positive authority claims.

01:29:05

Go listen to the debates. The debate with Mitch Pacwa on the papacy, the nearly seven -hour, well, over seven -hour debate with Jerry Matatix on the papacy.

01:29:16

Yeah, these were back in the 90s, but not much has changed other than the current Pope is considerably less

01:29:21

Orthodox than the since that time period.

01:29:29

Well, we will continue. Finally, next time around, I will not only finally play that Pacwa clip, but we'll finally get to start playing the

01:29:38

Carlo Broussard. Well, we already did start playing some of that, but I mean, more consistently play through the

01:29:43

Carlo Broussard material. Now, I think we've laid at least somewhat of a firm foundation defining

01:29:48

Sola Scriptura, know what the issues are, then we can listen, hopefully with more discernment and more value to the rest of that presentation.

01:29:57

So I thank you for listening, watching, however you accessed the program today.