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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.
The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll -free across the
United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
James White. Good morning, welcome to the Dividing Line, the only Dividing Line of this particular week, though of course it will be my intention to live stream the debate
Friday evening, 7 p .m. Pacific, still daylight time, isn't it?
That's coming up pretty quick though, when is it? No, no, no, they moved that back,
I know they moved that back, they extended it, so it's coming up pretty quick here. I would assume, well somebody in channel will know when it is, but it's 7 p .m.
Pacific Standard Time, so when, somebody in channel let me know when that's going to,
November 7th, really? I thought they moved it back to October, well anyway, oh that's right, they move it later in the year, later in the year, and earlier, earlier in the year, they expanded the time period so it would be later, that's right, it used to be in October, that's right, anyways, 7 p .m.
and nothing will, the time won't have changed, so it's just 7 p .m. Pacific time, so, goodness, that's 10 p .m.
in East, so only the late nighters are going to be listening to that one, but anyways, I will do my best to have that live streaming with our little live streaming
PC, and should work out pretty well, it worked out real well with the
Silverman debate, but you never know what's going to happen, you know, when you miss a setting or if you get there late or whatever, but we'll do our best to have that running live, 7 o 'clock
Friday night, debating Robert St. Genes on the subject of Purgatory, then the next day, this is going to be interesting, from noon to four, each speaker will give a lecture on the presuppositions of their debate topic, that includes
St. Genes, and since my flight is that afternoon, I'm one of the first two speakers, hopefully the first one, and so I'm not even going to get to hear that, and then
Doug Padgett and Chris Ro -Rose -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro -Bro
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And so I am looking forward to getting back there, though it's going to be a little bit different, you know, a little bit difficult to make that kind of a switch.
It will mean that I will not be able to travel quite as much, and it will mean that if you desire me to come and speak, it would be good if I was speaking on the same subjects as I will be writing on.
It is, you know, spreading the field that makes things so difficult. So, very excited about that, excited about how the weekend went, and excited about going up to Newburgh, Oregon this coming
Thursday. The debate is Friday night, 7 to 10 p .m., and you can get the information from the beautiful banner ad at www .aomin
.org. I guess I don't need to give that to you, because if you are listening right now live, you already know that.
That's the only way you can be listening live anyways. So, be praying for that encounter this weekend.
As I said, I got back from Minnesota, and being the cycling addict that I am,
I immediately got on the bike yesterday morning, did an 80 -miler, and that gives you a lot of time to be listening to stuff.
And what I had done is I had purchased the book called Purgatory Explained by the
Lives and Legends of the Saints by F .X. Shoup. F .X. Shoup.
This is a tan publication I've had for many years. My particular edition here, looking past the
Nihil Abstatten Imprimatur, is from about 1986. So, it's a little bit yellowed, but I decided to find out if it was available on Kindle.
It was, so I grabbed it and MP3'd it and listened for a number of hours.
I listened to two and a half hours, or was it two hours? Well, I listened to two hours of Purgatory stuff and two and a half hours of Sahih Al Bukhari.
So, that was the mixture on the 80 -mile ride yesterday. And it was fascinating because some of you might recall that during the debate back in January with Tim Staples, Tim was so very kind to make the assertion that I just don't understand
Roman Catholicism, obviously. I didn't understand what Rome teaches because I didn't understand what the current
Pope has said. Now, of course, what was actually going on is he, as a modern
Roman Catholic apologist, is scared to death of dealing with what the
Roman Church has actually taught over the years on these particular subjects. And he goes with his particular interpretation of the current
Pope's writings. And one of the issues that came up was the issue of the fire.
Now, obviously, you can find saint after saint after saint who saw in the fire of 1
Corinthians 3 a reference to Purgatory. But Tim wanted to make sure that the fire is actually the judgment of Christ.
Okay, great. I don't have any question about the fact that the fire tests the quality of men's works in regards to leadership in the
Church. We established that rather clearly. But he wanted to make sure we understood that Purgatory is not a place.
And it's a state of mind. And, you know, the only thing about fire and all the rest of that stuff.
And I suggested at that time that folks take a look at Shoop's book. He didn't say a word about it.
I don't remember Tim Staples saying anything about that book whatsoever. But it's interesting that my opponent this weekend,
Robert St. Genes, is very much associated with Robert Bellarmine.
Cardinal Bellarmine, a great name of Rome's past, quite the controversialist.
And I think he has the Bellarmine Forum on his website and various sundry things like that. And so when
I ran across this quote, I found it rather interesting. I want to read it to you.
This is from page 8 of the book. "...that the souls in Purgatory and the reprobate are in the same subterranean space in the deep abyss, which the
Scripture calls hell." Catechism, Romanum, chapter 6, number 1.
So they don't have any problem. Bellarmine has no problem in talking about the theologians being almost unanimous that Purgatory is a place and can be spatially located in time and space, similar to hell, which is in the bowels of the earth, as was said at that point, which
I found very, very interesting. But all the way through, there is such a discussion in almost every one of the visions and every one of the, you know, the saints saw this person and they were in purgatorial flames.
And over and over again, they're surrounded by fire. There's one guy who's wearing a collar of fire.
They've been given a partial garment which protects them from some of the fire, but not all the fire. Fire, fire, fire, fire, all over the place, fire.
I don't know wherever I got the idea it had something to do with Purgatory. But you've got saint after saint after saint after saint.
It was just as confused as me. And we just needed Tim Staples to come along and give us infallible guidance at that point.
But fire is a constant theme in all of these visions, as is, and this is what's interesting, as is the concept of time.
Yes, time in Purgatory, a period of time of suffering. There is absolutely no question at all that for hundreds of years, the concept was that your loved ones were going into a place where they experienced the passage of time.
And that the duration of time that you're going to be in Purgatory is all dependent upon what temporal punishments you bring with you into the fires of Purgatory.
Now you're going to get to heaven eventually, but you might be in time in Purgatory for literally hundreds of years, suffering an agony exactly like those of the damned, except this is to purge you and prepare you for entrance into the presence of God.
It is found over and over and over again. They keep talking about time.
Now again, I want to ask our modern Roman Catholic apologists who just poop with this idea, Oh, you just don't understand.
Are you a saint? Have you been canonized by the Church? So what about all these saints?
Were they just ignorant of the basic things that you are not ignorant of?
Or is this new revelation? What is this? I'd like to know. So there's all these discussions like Chapter 22 on the duration of Purgatory.
Now check this out. I found this interesting. And again, this is really weird because here I've got the print copy in my hand, but I know exactly where I was on the road when this was playing.
It's so weird. The way I study, I was on the Carefree Highway climbing the hill east of I -17.
And this is exactly where this was on my headset. Anyway, Faith does not teach us the precise duration of the pains of Purgatory.
We know in general that they are measured by divine justice, and that for each one they are a proportion to the number and gravity of the faults which he has not yet expiated.
God may, however, without prejudice to his justice, abridge these sufferings by augmenting their intensity. The Church militant also may obtain their remission by the holy sacrifice of the
Mass and other suffrages offered for the departed. According to the common opinion of the doctors, the expiratory pains are of long duration.
There is no doubt, says Bellarmine, I like how Bellarmine is always being quoted here, that the pains of Purgatory are not limited to 10 and 20 years, and that they last in some cases entire centuries.
But allowing it to be true that their duration did not exceed 10 or 20 years, can we account it as nothing to have to endure for 10 or 20 years the most excruciating sufferings without the least alleviation?
If a man was assured that he should suffer some violent pain in his feet or his head, or teeth in the space of 20 years, and that without ever sleeping or taking the least repose, would he not a thousand times rather die than live in such a state?
And if the choice were given to him between a life thus miserable and the loss of all his temporal goods, would he hesitate to make the sacrifice of his fortune to be delivered from such a torment?
Shall we then find any difficulty in embracing labor and penance to free ourselves from the sufferings of Purgatory?
Shall we fear to practice the most painful exercises, vigils, fasts, almsgivings, long prayers, and especially contrition accompanied with sighs and tears?
I stop here to say that earlier, was there something you wanted to throw in there? Because you've got the microphone in the position of speech.
Well, I'm suddenly doing this off the top of my head. Am I remembering some reference to Tetzel when he was selling indulgences?
Wasn't there an amount you could give to take a certain period of time off of your dead relative's time in Purgatory?
Well, yeah. Well, in fact, they were plenary indulgences. So they would immediately be removed from Purgatory, yes.
What I'm thinking I'm remembering here, correct me if I'm wrong, was that you could knock 1 ,000 years off of your dead relative's time in Purgatory.
Well, 1 ,000 years is a little excessive. What you're remembering is that if you added up all of the time that you could get in indulgences by, say, visiting the relics in Wittenberg, it would add up to just this huge amount of time.
That's probably what you're remembering. There's a difference between partial and plenary indulgences and remission of time and stuff like that.
So, yeah, there is different ways of doing it. But what I was going to say was, before I continue on with this particular reading, before this, there was discussion, and it reoccurs many, many times, of people who went to Purgatory briefly and then came back.
And they would see souls that were in fire that would then leap out of the fire into ice and snow.
And then they'd be there as long as they could stand that, and then they'd leap back into the fire. And then they'd leap back and forth between the two.
And that the saints, upon seeing visions of that kind of suffering, obviously couldn't throw yourself into fire and last very long, but would immerse themselves in frozen rivers.
One even said, one story was this one saint would actually stay in frozen rivers for weeks at a time.
Yeah, right. But anyway, that's the story. And, you know, like I said, it's just a story. But to prepare themselves in this life for what was coming next.
Anyways, these words comprise the whole doctrine of the saints and theologians. Father Mumford, of the company of Jesus, in his treatise on charity towards the departed, bases the long duration of Purgatory on a calculation of probability, which we shall give in substance.
He goes out on the principle that, according to the words of the Holy Ghost, the just man falls seven times a day. That is to say that even those who apply themselves most perfectly to the service of God, notwithstanding their goodwill, commit a great number of faults in the infinitely pure eyes of God.
We have but to enter into our own conscience, and there analyze before God our thoughts, our words, our works, to be convinced of the sad effect of human misery.
Oh, how easy it is to lack respect in prayer, to prefer our ease to the accomplishment of duty, to sin by vanity, by impatience, by sensuality, by uncharitable thoughts and words, by want of conformity to the will of God.
The day is long, and it is very difficult for even a virtuous person to commit, I do not say seven, but twenty or thirty of this kind of faults and imperfections.
Let us take a moderate estimate, and suppose that you commit about ten faults a day. At the end of 365 days, you will have a sum of 3 ,650 faults.
Let us diminish, and to facilitate the calculation, place it at 3 ,000 per year. At the end of ten years, this will amount to 30 ,000.
At the end of 20 years, to 60 ,000. Suppose that of these 60 ,000 faults, you have expiated one half by penance and good works.
There will still remain 30 ,000 to be atoned for. Let us continue our hypothesis. You die after these 20 years of virtuous life and appear before God with a debt of 30 ,000 faults, which you must discharge in purgatory.
How much time will you need to accomplish this expiation? Suppose, on average, each fault requires one hour of purgatory.
This measure is very moderate if we judge by the revelations of the saints, but at any rate, this will give you a purgatory of 30 ,000 hours.
Now, do you know how many years these 30 ,000 hours represent? Three years, three months, and 15 days.
Thus, a good Christian who watches over himself, who applies himself to penance and good works, finds himself liable to three years, three months, and 15 days of purgatory.
The preceding calculation is based on an estimate, which is lenient in the extreme. Now, if you extend the duration of the pain, and instead of an hour, you take a day for the expiation of a fault.
If, instead of having nothing but venial sins, you bring before God a debt resulting from mortal sins, more or less numerous, which you formally committed, if you assign, on the average, as St.
Francis of Rome says, seven years for the expiation of one mortal sin, remitted as to the guilt, who does not see that we arrive at an appalling duration, that the expiation may easily be prolonged for many years, and even for centuries?
Years and centuries of torments. Oh, if we only thought of it! With what care should we not avoid the least faults?
With what fervor should we not practice penance to make satisfaction? In this world, pages 91 and 92.
Folks, do you hear that? The thing that kept striking me, in two hours,
I could only listen to it for about two hours. I just had to turn it off after that. I mean, when it's a relief to go listen to Sahih al -Bukhari, you can tell just how bad that stuff is.
What you do not ever hear, you never hear anything, about the all -sufficient merits of Christ.
This system knows nothing of it. It's all what you do, you do, you do, you do, you did this, and you do that, and you suffer this, and you suffer that, and merit for this, and merit for that, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So far removed from the Christian faith, that it's really hard to even imagine.
It really, really is. Well, one more thing from this, and we'll get to our calls, which are on the same subjects, interestingly. Some of you will remember,
I listened this morning, on a 41 -mile ride, to my debate with Peter Stravinskis on Purgatory.
That's still one of the classics. There's no two ways about it. And I was listening to the cross -examination period, where I asked
Peter Stravinskis, and you could just tell, by the tepid nature and the slowness of his response, he did not want to go here at all.
But I asked him about what's called the Sabatine Privilege. Appendix 2 in this book by Shoup.
It's called The Brown Scapular, Promises of the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Two wonderful promises of Our Lady are available to those who have been enrolled in the
Brown Scapular. Enrollment is a simple process. One should ask a priest to make this enrollment. I'm sorry, procedure.
The great promise of the Blessed Virgin Mary given to St. Simon Stock on July 16th, 1251 is as follows.
Whoever dies wearing the scapular shall not suffer eternal fire. Now think about that for just a moment.
Wearing a piece of clothing, and what it represents in your promises, blah, blah, blah. If you die wearing the scapular, you shall not suffer eternal fire.
Again, as far removed from Christian theology and apostolic practice and belief as you could possibly be.
Our Lady's second scapular promise known as the Sabatine Privilege, the word sabatine meaning Saturday, was given by the
Blessed Virgin Mary to Pope John XXII in the year 1322 and is as follows. I, the
Mother of Grace, shall descend on the Saturday after their death and whomsoever
I shall find in purgatory, I shall free. There are three conditions for obtaining this privilege.
One, wearing of the scapular. Two, the practice of chastity according to one's state of life.
And number three, the daily recitation of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Those who cannot read can abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays instead of reciting the
Little Office. Also, any priest who has diocesan faculties, this includes most priests, has the additional faculty to commute, change, the third requirement of another pious work, for example, the daily rosary.
Because of the greatness of the Sabatine Privilege, the Carmelite Order suggests the third requirement not be commuted into anything less than the daily recitation of seven
Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys, and seven Glory be to the Fathers. Now, the question that I asked of Peter Stravinskas was, how can you say there's no time in purgatory when
Mary descends into purgatory on Saturday? She doesn't descend on Friday or on Tuesday.
She only descends on Saturday. That means there's a calendar on the wall someplace.
That's just all there is to it. There just isn't any question that the people of that day believed that there was time in purgatory.
Or the entire Sabatine Privilege, which hundreds of thousands of faithful Roman Catholics, including popes, cardinals, priests, nuns, have lived and died by, all thinking that Mary had promised to descend into purgatory on the
Saturday after their death, which I guess would mean you'd want to die on a Friday. You know,
I mean, I'm going to hold on until Friday. That's the last thing I do. What's that? Yeah, late
Friday. Yeah, about 1155 would be good. Because you don't want to miss Saturday. Then you've got a whole week coming up.
But lived and died believing that Mary was going to descend into purgatory on Saturday and free them because they're wearing a brown scapular.
And they recited certain words every single day. And this is, again, it's what was believed.
Is it believed by many Roman Catholics today? No, not really. But it was believed.
Now, I hope I don't have to say to anybody, Mary never told anybody any such thing.
There is no such place as purgatory. This is all a gross violation of scriptural teaching concerning the gospel.
The apostles never said a word about such things. And as we will demonstrate, the couple of little texts that are used,
Matthew 12, 1 Corinthians 3, each and every one of them, there's real problems with Rome's abuse of these texts.
And we will, of course, get into that in the debate on Friday night. But it is interesting.
I'm seeing all sorts of... Mike has gone crazy looking up every website on scapulars. FreeBrownScapular .com.
There you go. Thank you very much, Hasim, son of Ramallah, who evidently is home today sick.
And so we hope he feels better. But thank you very much for that picture of Mary with her blue robe and the light shining behind her.
And she's offering brown scapulars to people. That's great. Thank you for that. That's a real blessing.
All right. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number.
Dividing .line on Skype is the phone number as well. And are we in a position to just go ahead and take our break and then go back to our phones?
We'll start taking the phone calls after a quick break. And you can join us. 877 -753 -3341.
We'll be right back. Such a rarity today.
So many stars, strong and true, quickly fall away.
More than any time in the past, Roman Catholics and evangelicals are working together. They are standing shoulder to shoulder against social evils.
They are joining across denominational boundaries in renewal movements. And many evangelicals are finding the history, tradition, and grandeur of the
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And welcome back to The Divine Line. Let's go to our phone calls and talk with Ron.
Hi, Ron. Hey, how are you doing? I got an opportunity to talk to you a couple weeks ago. I just wanted to follow that up.
I had asked a question about one of the Roman Catholics that I'm discussing. The Eucharist always comes back and says,
Show me an early Church writing where one of the Fathers said a physical presence was wrong teaching.
And then you mentioned, well, that's because it didn't exist. And I came back with, well, you know, you're asking a question that's sort of like asking me a question, show me where one of the early
Church Fathers said nuclear energy wouldn't be something that should be used. I said it didn't exist.
And then, you know, I started reading a little bit about William Webster, and he claims that, you know, it was one of three views that existed.
So my thought process was, yes, people may have believed in a physical presence, but they didn't believe in the transubstantiation like they do now because they didn't worship the
Eucharist. What is the earliest—where is the earliest in the early
Christian Church that we can see that they actually worshipped the Eucharist like they do right now at the
Catholic Church? Well, the term itself doesn't appear until about a thousand years after the birth of Christ, and then as far as reservation of hosts and worship of hosts, the articles that were used to reserve hosts and to carry hosts, for example, in processions and things like that, again began to be created at the same time as the doctrine itself developed, which is the same time as Aristotelian philosophy was coming into the
West and into the beginnings of the foundings of universities and things like that at the end of what we call the
Medieval or the Dark Ages, under pressure from the Turks coming from the
East. So that's when the first ciborium and picks and monstrance and tabernacles and things like that began to be built once you had this concept that the body of Jesus as a divine being was present, then you naturally would seek to show reverence to that, etc.,
etc. And so that, again, comes at a much later period of time. The early Church did not reserve these things.
They would take the Lord's Supper to the sick or to the imprisoned, but then again that's hardly unusual.
We all would do things like that because those people can't come to the fellowship then bringing the fellowship of the
Church to them. But again, it's all just a matter of even meaningful
Roman Catholic scholarship recognizes that this was something that developed over time. And the
Roman Catholic apologist reads Church history anachronistically rather than reading it in a meaningful order and bearing the burden of saying, well, this is a belief that was there and here's the evidence it was there.
What they do is they take modern beliefs, they read them back, and say, well, prove me wrong. And that can be used to prove anything whatsoever.
It's not for people of truth. It's for people of dogma. And that's the problem.
And until a person recognizes that, and sometimes they're just not willing to recognize that, there's really not much you can do for them.
You can point it out to them. You can say, you know, the Mormons can go back and assume that the early believers were like them and then find their quote here, their quote there.
They can assume that the early writers believed that men became gods and here's a quote here and here's a quote there.
You wouldn't accept any of that, but the only reason is because your ultimate authority says not to accept it.
It's not a matter of what the early Church writers actually said. When you've discussed this with Roman Catholics before in your debates, have you ever brought up, you know, because they claim this is from the early
Church, they've always believed in the Eucharist and the physical presence of Jesus in it, have you ever brought up that the
Pope, John of Galatias, I believe, actually said that the bread and wine doesn't cease being bread and wine and how that wouldn't be a contradiction based on supposedly the infallibility of their popes?
Sure. Of course. You know, I debated Robert St. Genesis on that subject in 1999 and I quoted the
Galatians' statement. And again, Rome has a way around anything.
Any pope that said something wrong just wasn't speaking as a pope. That's the easiest way around anything.
The whole concept of the infallibility of the papacy is an utterly irrelevant paper tiger because you can demonstrate that Honorius and Galatius and others said things directly contradictory to modern
Roman teaching. It doesn't matter because all you have to do is just simply say, well, you know, he just wasn't speaking as a pope at that time, so how do you know when he is?
Well, they can't answer questions like that because it's a circular system. It's just believe what we say because we tell you to believe it.
That's just all there is to it. And that's fundamentally how the system works.
But yeah, of course, I raised that citation and numerous others. And if you cite anyone from the early
Church, that contradicts their position. And I would look at the citations that Bill Webster provides, that I provided in the debate with Robert St.
Genesis in 1999. It's available on the website. All they do is what Jerry Matatix did when
I provided numerous patristic citations contradictory to Roman claims about the papacy. They're speaking as private theologians there.
Well, they go to earlychristianwritings .com, which is a Roman Catholic site. It does have some of the early
Church Fathers' letters, but I did notice some of the ones that disagreed with them. I couldn't find them on the site, so I don't know if they pick and choose what they post or what have you.
Well, certainly the most commonly used source by Roman Catholic apologists is the
Juergens set. And Juergens is extremely selective in what is cited. And it is the reading of those materials in their broad context that demonstrates the fallacious nature of Rome's claims, not reading little books like that.
And I understand Jimmy Akin's coming out with a book, again, of selected citations. That's easy to do.
But the fact is, since we can go toe -to -toe with any Roman Catholic on the early Church Fathers, what does that tell you?
And fundamentally, from their perspective, that doesn't matter either, because it's sola ecclesia all the way down. So when you ask, well, why should
I accept what an early Church Father said when he said something a Roman Catholic would say and not when he said something a
Protestant would say, it's because the Church gets to decide. And so, you know, it's a circular argument, and there's no way out of it.
And unless you can stand outside and point out the spinning that the person's doing, you're not going to get anywhere.
But I saw a quote a couple weeks ago, and I wish I had saved it, but it was
C .S. Lewis explaining why he didn't become a Roman Catholic. He said, it's not so much disagreement with the doctrines you already hold, but the fact that given your system,
I would have to believe any doctrine that you might proclaim in the future. And that's the point.
That's sola ecclesia, that's the problem, is that fundamentally, Scripture and tradition are irrelevant.
All the arguments you're doing about early Church writings right now is really irrelevant, because even when shown that in something such as the dogma of the bodily assumption, that there's nobody in the early
Church who believes this at all, it doesn't matter. The Church teaches it, and therefore it's true.
One of the things, and I'll take this off if you have time to answer this, one of the things he's coming back with now as well, how come the
Protestant Churches celebrate it far less often as the early Church Fathers did? And he goes, tell me, why do we use the
Eucharist? Why do we celebrate it every single time we meet, like the early Christians did? If you don't, my comeback was, well, you know, because we don't believe it's propitiatory in nature.
You believe it's part of your salvation, so of course you partake of every opportunity you get, because you have to expatiate the sins that you've just committed in the last time you took it.
That could be the main reason. And they say, no, that's not the case, because we follow the biblical model, and they believe it was physically present.
And if you don't believe it was physically present, well, why do you think Jesus uses the bread and wine? And he goes, well, the best thing
I ever hear is the reason from Protestants as to why they use bread and wine is because that's what their pastor uses. Okay.
Well, it doesn't sound like you're having a real deep conversation with someone. That kind of argumentation is just silly to me.
They're not doing what they're doing because of some early Church example, because there's so many things they do at the early
Church that I've never even thought of. That's just bogus reasoning. But Paul said, as often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me.
So he did not prescribe a specific time period that it had to be done in or anything like that.
So the idea that, well, we're doing what the early Church did. Well, how come the early Church didn't have popes? How come the early
Church didn't have all your Marian dogmas? How come the early Church didn't have purgatory? How come the early Church didn't have indulgence? How come the early Church didn't have priests?
How come the early Church didn't have the bishops like you have bishops? I mean, we can go down the entire Roman system. And so it just makes me laugh when a
Roman Catholic starts arguing like that, because they're just so grossly inconsistent on the point that it's hard to take it seriously.
But anyways, Ron, we've got other calls to get to. Thanks for the phone call today. And we continue on here on The Dividing Line.
Let's talk with Kendall. Hi, Kendall. Hi, James. Hi. I've got a St. Joseph Daily Missal.
Now, for people who are not familiar with that, that does not fly through the air and land on things and blow them up, right? Right. It's a little black book, the
Catholics use. This one's printed 1963. Thankfully, we have like five ex -Catholics that are involved in our
Church. And this guy, one of the guys gave this book to me. It's interesting, because you're talking about the time in Purgatory, and you're saying they don't really hold to that idea.
Well, the modern Roman Catholic apologists want to explain to us that that's a misunderstanding.
The Church has never formally defined that. And as far as formal definition, maybe so.
But the reality is, if the practice and teaching of the Church for hundreds of years is consistent,
I think that's enough to say that's what Rome teaches. How would they explain this? Like, on prayers it says, making the sign of the cross, an indulgence of three years, with holy water, an indulgence of seven years.
Over and over they give things like that. If you pray this, you get three years' indulgences.
Or if you do the Apostles' Creed, you get so many indulgences. There really isn't any question about what was understood by that during the medieval period and all the way up to only a century ago.
Or 1963. Yeah. They don't use that terminology now because Rome's changed, quite simply.
But they say, oh, no, no, no, we haven't changed. What that was is that was meant to be sort of an example, not to be taken literally, but to help us to understand the gravity of sin.
The best thing to do would be to listen to Stravinskas' response when
I asked him about the Sabbatean privilege. He launched into this thing about why they use time language.
I have to go back because I have all your debates with Roman Catholics on DVD. Okay. But are you going to talk about this
Friday? Oh, I'm sure it's going to. Well, I don't know. I would assume it's going to come up. I could be wrong.
It depends on the cross -ex questions and how much time we have. But I would assume it will probably come up.
My assumption is he'd probably make some type of a statement about it. But then again, Robert's very, very conservative.
And like I said, if Bellarmine is one of his heroes, he might be much more conservative and might be willing to say, yeah, sure, you bet, long time.
I don't know. We'll find out in the debate. But I'm thinking of Jimmy Akin and Tim Staples and the people in Catholic Answers who dismiss that kind of thing pretty much offhand as just a demonstration of how little the rest of us really understand anything about Roman Catholicism.
James, I downloaded your sermon on Hebrews 7 and 9 that you did last
Sunday. I haven't listened to it yet, but I plan to this week. And just a scripture that I always keep in mind is
Colossians 1, 22, where it talks about Christ. We've been reconciled through his bodily death in order to present us before him holy and blameless.
How in the world do they get around those verses that talk about the death of Christ, I'm going to be presented before him holy and blameless?
I mean, none of this talk about purging of my own sin, etc., and another spear.
I mean, it's after from the body, present with the Lord. Well, it's interesting to note that it's only two verses later is one of the primary texts
Roman Catholics use to say that you do need to suffer. In Colossians 1, 24, they utilize that in the exact same context to say, well, see, now
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the
Church. Now, Stravinskis brought that up, and I said, well, Philipsis is never used of the sufferings of Christ for atonement.
This is about the sufferings of his people and the body and so on and so forth. Which is all true, but again, if you do not allow the word to define its own context and you enforce some external tradition upon it, which
Rome does, nothing can be clear. I mean, if Roman Catholic apologists can over and over again, and every single one
I've encountered has done this, Stravinskis and St.
Genes and all of them, they've all done the same thing. They'll say, well, how can you complain that this doctrine we're debating isn't all that clear in Scripture?
Even the Trinity is not clear in Scripture. They can parallel these mythical dogmas, many of which came from pagan religions, with the very matrix and substance and form of the
New Testament revelation itself, the very belief that makes sense out of the
New Testament. You couldn't even understand much of what's going on if you didn't understand the relationship of the Father and the Son and so on and so forth.
And that just demonstrates what happens when you raise an external authority to the position of becoming the very means by which you interpret the
Scriptures. And that's what they do. They can read over 122, and their mind just translates that into categories of, well, okay, yes,
Christ. It's only because of Christ's work that I can be purified. However, it's through the sacraments that I'm purified.
And all the works, treasury of works and all that, right? Uh -huh, yeah. And once you've abandoned the solas, both sola scriptura as well as sola fide and sola gratia, and you just open that slightest bit of a door, then you can smuggle entire elephants, like the sacramental system, in by saying, oh, we grieve grace alone and by faith.
And as long as you don't have the alone part, in comes the truckload of human works and merit and everything else.
And it's an amazing thing to see. Would you go with Catholics, then, and talk about purgatory, mainly using the passages in Hebrews that talk about the all -sufficiency of Christ's death?
Well, I'm going to follow the same outline I followed in the Stravinskas debate. I thought my opening presentation, he never even tried to touch it.
So I think it's very clear, and I don't have any problem saying that's where I'm going. I'm going to talk about its history.
I'm going to talk about Pope Gregory the Great and his wacky interpretations of Scripture and the sources from which this came.
Then I'm going to go through the key text, Matthew 12, which is explained by Mark 3, 1 Corinthians chapter 3, put that baby to bed.
I know exactly where Bob's going to go on it, and I'm going to go to Zemiao and demonstrate that even
Catholic translators agree with me on the meaning of Zemiao in 1 Corinthians chapter 3.
And then wrap it up by saying all of this is relevant to the Gospel, because if you believe in this, then you do not believe that Jesus Christ is able to save the uttermost of those who draw an eye unto
God by him. He does not possess that capacity in and of himself. So yeah,
I will go there. I look forward to getting the DVD, because... Well, and we'll be streaming it live if you can catch it.
It's Friday? What time? Friday night, 7 o 'clock Pacific Time. We'll be streaming it live.
All right, I look forward to it. All right. All right, thanks, James. Thanks, Andrew. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number, and we go to,
I believe, a Skype call. Hi, David, how are you? Hey, doing good. Can you hear me? Just barely.
Rich needs to turn you up there. All right, how about now? That sounds good. Okay, yeah, my quick question real quick.
2 Corinthians 5 .10, where we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
Now, I don't know about what Catholics would do with this, if they would use it for purgatory or not, but my question was more in the
Protestant churches. This text is used a lot to argue for rewards in heaven, and I just wonder, what's your view of that?
Does this text teach that when we get to heaven, like I'll be in a mansion and you might be in a shack because you didn't do as many works as me?
Or is this a different context? Well, I don't think that it has anything to do with shacks or mansions or anything else.
I do think that this is similar to what we have in 1
Corinthians 3, though this is more a general judgment.
In 1 Corinthians 3, there's a revelation of the motivations of those who worked in the church, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, and straw.
And here, this says, we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ. This, however, I would say is only in reference to Christians, to bematos, to Christu, the bema seat, as people have said.
And I hesitate to use terms such as rewards.
People get the idea of, well, I'm going to get a bag of gold this big and you're going to get a truckload of gold, or I'm going to have really cool clothes and you're not, or something else.
I don't think that we can even begin to cogitate upon what life is going to be in the presence of Christ.
I think the reason that Paul says what he says here is really brought up in 5 .11,
where it says, therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. In other words, knowing the fear of the
Lord, well, what does that mean? That means that, unfortunately, many people today don't have any fear of the
Lord. They don't have any respect of the Lord. They don't have any concern about living a godly life.
They don't have any concern about pleasing God. That's up above verse 9.
So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him.
And what's going to be, that's going to be judged. That's going to be brought out.
It's not something that's just, well, once death has taken place, that's the end of that. There is going to be a revelation of who was pleasing to Him.
And what we receive for that, I have no idea what that is.
But I do know that once we see Him as He is, and once we are freed from the corruption of our nature, our greatest desire will be to be pleasing to Him, and the idea of the demonstration of how often we did what we did simply to please ourselves should be extremely sobering in this life, and should be a motivation for every one of us to examine our hearts and to examine why we do what we do.
And it should be a motivation for us to press forward in holiness, to press forward in difficulty, to not be complainers, but to be content with what
God provides for us, and to truly find pleasure in what He does, in what
He gives to us in our lives. All of these things, this idea of pleasing Him, there's a Sproles book, Pleasing God.
That's a far too little -emphasized emphasis in the
Christian life, to be pleasing to Him. Because if we've been pleasing to Him, then the judgment seat of Christ will not be a place of fear for us, but it'll be a place of vindication for us.
But if we are hypocritically going through the motions, as we so often do, it will be a place of revelation.
And notice none of this here is about sufferings and removal of sin or anything else, but that doesn't change the fact.
Roman Catholics will argue that we are missing some deep, meaningful element in our theology because we just take it in such a surface -level way that we're not concerned about these things.
No, we should be concerned about being pleasing to Him, knowing the fear of the Lord, remembering the deep, insightful statement of my
Greek professor, long, long ago at Grand Canyon College, when everybody else in the class had pretty much fallen asleep, but I was still there, and his famous statement that I've repeated many times on this program, fear in the
New Testament means fear. I remember writing it down and sort of chuckling because I think he looked around the room and I was the only one conscious at the time, but he was exactly right.
There should be a fear. I mean, you know, I don't know what it was, and I don't want to turn off the track here, but hopefully this will be helpful in illustrating it.
I asked my dad, when Kelly and I found out 20, my goodness, almost a quarter century ago now, eek!
When my wife and I found out we were having our first kid, I went to my dad and I asked him a very honest question.
I said, dad, what did you do to instill in me such a deep fear of doing what would displease you?
Because there were so many times in my young life where my friends said, hey, let's go do this or hey, let's do that, and I wouldn't go and I wouldn't do it.
And the primary reason was because I did not want to see the look on my parents' face if they found out that I did such a thing.
And I wanted to know, all right, I got my first kid coming. What did you do to instill that in me?
Because I'm awful glad you did. Yeah, I got my spankings. You know, man, I remember clear as day one day
I did something and my mom said, I called your dad, and when he gets home, you're getting a spanking. And man, that was purgatory.
There was a whole day of, that was the longest, that was 24 hours right there. Jack Bauer had nothing on me.
And thankfully, when my dad got home, I got my spanking. Because if I hadn't, the next time
I probably wouldn't have feared that in any way. And so if you'd like to know what he said, and there's lots of people in the audience, you know, have kids coming or something like that, and they want to know what my dad said.
You know what my dad said? Son, I don't have any earthly idea. I have no idea, unfortunately.
But obviously it's just raising your children to fear and admonition of the Lord and exposing them to godliness and things like that,
I guess is the only way you can answer that question. But they did something, and I did not want to see that look of disappointment on my parents' face.
Well, if that's the case with my earthly parents, how much more, in light of the fact that every one of us who is a parent knows how many times we failed our children and we were not as good of parents as we should have been and everything else, how much more he who gave himself for us should the fact that we will appear, notice it says, it doesn't say the judgment seat of God.
It says the judgment seat of Christ. To face the one who gave his all for me.
And that should be more than enough motivation, not out of legal extraction of punishments, but out of love.
That should be more than enough to be always seeking to be pleasing to him and to know the fear of the
Lord. So that's my exhortation that I would take from that text in 2
Corinthians 5. Alrighty, thanks a lot. Yeah, thanks a lot. And like you said, in 11, we persuade men.
It seems like the context there, if you keep reading, is he ends up saying we persuade men to be reconciled to God through Christ, not we persuade you to try to do enough works before the judgment seat.
The persuasion he's calling people to is, listen, this is what you're going to face, judgment, but you need to come to Christ.
He is your righteousness. You're not something else. Hey, thank you very much for your phone call,
David. We're out of time. Thank you for the call today. Thanks for all the callers today. Please be praying for the debate on Friday night.
Like I said, the stream normally gets started fairly early. You get to listen to, well, people milling around in an auditorium for a while, but I want to get that thing done working and get it out of my mind so I can concentrate on other things.
But the stream should be up before 7 o 'clock for the live debate there in Oregon between myself and Robert St.
Janis on the subject of purgatory. Be praying for that, and we'll be back, Lord willing, next week. See you then.
God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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