Open Phones with Great Questions (Except for One)!

Well, greetings and welcome. Whoa, OK. No, it's echoing.

I, well, I guess I'll have to turn the sound off.

I don't know how to turn the signal off. We're having problems, folks. I've got no monitor, so I don't know what's going on there.

Rich didn't have the card in. We're starting off just really, really well here.

Not especially doing something like this. I didn't have that problem with Zoom last time. I don't know.

All right, welcome. You can you can trust the answers we're going to give today.

Taking Zoom calls, seeing some seeing a bunch of questions that I'm going to have to go.

I don't have a clue. I have no earthly idea. Yeah, one of the one of the questions

I'll just tell you right now, I don't have a clue about Jesuits in Japan. Never heard of it.

Never read about it. Can't give you a single comment that would be other than, oh, so sorry.

No. I'm just wondering what to make of the convert. I don't know what converts talk about.

I'm sorry. I'm not going to be of any assistance to you at all on that. I am not the

Bible answer man. There's lots of stuff I know nothing about. I've never heard of any of that stuff. Sorry. And there are some other questions.

East Orthodox and Vantil. Oh, OK. That's interesting.

That's interesting. And back to Matthew 24 again or 23. But we've covered that one about 47 ,000 hours worth.

I may just refer you to the extensive long entire programs we've done on that, honestly.

If you go to transcripts at AOMN .org, hit the transcripts thing, put in that text, you'll find hours.

Not going to repeat that today. Don't need to. Been there, done that. Got into the controversies before.

Unless it's something new. We'll see. Before we get to our calls. There is a tweet,

X post, whatever we call them now. I'm still calling them tweets on Twitter slash

X slash whatever it is. That I'm really hoping is going to get an answer.

Namor responded to Steve Meister. Now, my understanding is Steve Meister has Namor blocked, so he'd probably never see it.

But Steve Meister, a Reformed Baptist guy over in California, in the

Sacramento area, last time I knew anyways, posted a series of texts about Robert Lethem on the hubris inherent to rejecting

Christianity's creedal consensus on mortified spin. In the sense you've got false ideas of what the post -Reformation slogan,

Sola Scriptura means, the whole slogan is the Bible alone. Well, no one comes to the

Bible alone. Now, that's equivocation. I would just say to Dr. Lethem, that's equivocation. Yes, Sola Scriptura means

Bible alone. That's not what was meant then. And of course, Sola Scriptura means Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith of the church.

So, it has a context, and it's not coming to the

Bible alone. I don't know anybody that, again, believes that kind of stuff. And to assert that everything must be grounded upon current biblical exegesis is to assume that my exegesis of Scripture is superior to the cumulative exegesis of the entire

Christian church for the last two millennia. On what? When I hear people say that,

I think back upon the first time I read Augustine's On the Trinity and was struck with the number of places where his exegesis was inconsistent and incoherent.

I mean, it was a great work. There was lots of good stuff, but it was like the push to be consistent exegetically and to base that exegesis on the original languages.

You know, Augustine was working primarily with Latin. His knowledge of Greek was, and Hebrew, non -existent or extremely rudimentary.

And what you have in history is you have a lot of the early writers who are building on people who came before them that had less knowledge than they had of the original languages or even having a complete

New Testament. So what do you do when you have, someone makes an error in their interpretation of a passage of Scripture, but they have a big name and they didn't make errors in a number of other passages.

And then you build on that and you get a big name and then someone builds on that.

Soon you have a consensus, but it's still an error. How do you correct that if consensus becomes the standard, not the actual exegesis of the text of Scripture?

And I'm not sure what my exegesis of Scripture is. I don't claim to own exegesis of Scripture.

I mean, if in all the years that I've laid out John chapter six, I've never claimed this is mine in the sense that I possess this.

When you show your work, when you do your homework, you put it out there, you're inviting others to scrutinize it.

And what you're saying is there is an exegesis of this text that is consistent with the entirety of the chapter and then the gospel of John and then the

New Testament and all the gospels and the New Testament and so on and so forth. And you're not claiming it's yours.

You're claiming that you are seeking to allow the text to speak for itself and that would say the same thing at any time in history.

Now, the fact that there have been different interpretations in history might demonstrate to us that at certain periods of time, tradition overruled the objective meaning of the text.

It became popular to overlay the text and that happens in our day too.

Okay, that's why exegesis has to be the ultimate authority because if it isn't, then you just have one generation overlaying their traditions and next generation, next generation, and it can just wander anywhere.

And there's nothing objective left as far as having a revelation from God. But here's the key one.

And indeed to say that the ecumenical councils therefore are to be regarded as up for grabs in their conclusions is to overlook the fact that they are the consequence of the biblical exegesis of the church up to and including that time.

And so this is a Reformed Baptist posting this, okay? I don't think

Robert Lethem's Reformed Baptist, so. But which ecumenical councils?

This may have been discussed beforehand and if so, I'd like to know that. There are a lot who will say, well, we only accept the first three or the first four.

Okay, I'd like to know that. That would provide a very different context there are seven ecumenical councils that are accepted by both

East and West and by East and West, I mean, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. And if we're talking all seven, where do you draw the line?

In fact, upon what basis would you draw the line between say accepting the first three and rejecting the last four?

Or accepting the first four, rejecting last three? What's the standard? What's the line?

Because I know people who do and I'm doing a deep dive on the seventh, the second

Nicene Council, 787. We've been talking about for a long time. There's lots of documentation out there, lots of material.

So there are tremendous problems with Nicaea too.

All sorts of claims, they're just simply ahistorical, exegesis that is indefensible.

This is a council that fundamentally represents the imperial theology of the

Byzantine Empire in the year 800. Well, 787 specifically, but let's...

And that's what Eastern Orthodoxy became. That's when tradition became crystallized, fossilized, you might say too.

I don't know of any Protestant that actually accepts the anathemas of Nicaea too, because then you would have to kiss and venerate the icon.

Otherwise you're anathematized. So I just think

Reformed Baptists especially have to answer this question. Where do you draw the line on what basis?

When it says, to say that the ecumenical councils therefore are to be regarded as up for grabs.

Well, if we're talking about Nicaea and we're talking about the Nicene symbol, we're not even getting into the details of the filioque clause and stuff like that in the later editions and all that kind of thing.

That's one thing. But that wasn't distinguished in the quote.

Maybe in the sentence before or the paragraph before there was a distinction as to what ecumenical councils were being even referred to.

Maybe there was something there. I just hope that Steve Meister will respond to this. And maybe because I added my response in, he'll actually see it now, because my understanding is he has blocked

Namor and therefore may not see his questions, but he can unblock him long enough to find out,

I suppose. Not sure why he would block him in the first place, but there you go. Okay, let's get to our calls and let's talk to Julian.

Hi, Julian. Hi, are you able to hear me? I am. All right.

First, I just wanna say thank you so much for having me on. I know this is kind of a controversial question.

So I wanna kind of just set up some clarifications just to make sure I'm not misunderstood.

I'm not a Holocaust denier or a Nazi or anything at all like that. I just kind of had a bit of a clarifying question about something

Joel Webben had been saying the other day that you had responded to about kind of like Holocaustianity. Yeah.

I think there may have been a little bit of miscommunication there, where I think what

Joel Webben was primarily talking about was how, not that like people literally worship the

Holocaust, but more that it's just kind of used to justify or rather to suppress any sort of like European national identities.

So for example, like if somebody says, hey, I'm Indian, I'm from India, and I think

India should remain majority Indian, people generally are okay with that. But if an

Englishman were to say the same thing, I want England to remain majority English, or if an

American were to say like America has historically been Anglo -Protestant, and so I think it should remain that way, people tend to get very, very offended by that.

And oftentimes what they do, and I've experienced this myself, is they will kind of punt to the

Holocaust. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There is no logical or rational connection between what you're saying.

I've never heard that, not any time in my life. Who says that? I mean,

I know the secularists in Europe who are trying to destroy Europe from within and hate the native

French or the native English. I get that. I've never heard them ever say a word about the

Holocaust. What's the logical connection? Well, the logical connection, at least for me, is

I've had people say this to me. Like I have in real life people that I talk to when

I went to public school, people would say this, where if somebody were to say, America is for Americans, the common response online, in the comments, in posts and whatnot is, well, hey,

Hitler said Germany was for the Germans, so you're sounding kind of like a Nazi, and don't you know that the

Nazis did the Holocaust? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Wait, wait, wait, wait. So there are idiots online. Has, there's no logical or rational connection.

None. You haven't explained it to me. Just because somebody online said stupid things to you and demonstrated they can't think logically or rationally doesn't mean there's a logical or rational connection.

Joel Webben said this is a religion, a satanically inspired religion and a worldview.

It's none of those things. It was a historical reality that people are questioning because they hate

Jews. That's all. That's all it is. And to say that it's a worldview is insanity.

Okay, what does it say about the existence of God? What does it say about the origin of creation? What does it say about the foundation of ethics and morals?

Nothing. That's what a worldview has to do. So - Well, I agree.

I think Joel should have been more precise with his language. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Joel was being perfectly precise with his language.

Joel was doing exactly what Joel wants to do now. This is his thing. He's tapping in to the anger of people, but he's connecting things that no one could ever defend in a logical or rational fashion.

We cannot descend into the gutter of insanity. And that's what I'm trying to say.

No one has come up with any connection whatsoever between the historical event of Nazi Germany imprisoning and killing

Jews, no matter how many millions or if you say hundreds of thousands, it doesn't matter.

They did it. Auschwitz is there. Buchenwald's there. I've visited all these places.

That happened historically, but it's not a worldview. And it has nothing to do whatsoever.

There is no such thing as holocaustianity. It's all being made up. Well, I agree that holocaustianity is certainly not a worldview in itself.

And that's where I would say, yes, I think Joel should have been more precise. But I think kind of what he's saying is that the secular globalist worldview that exists now where Western nations are kind of expected to not view themselves as having a national identity in themselves, but rather -

I'm done, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. Has nothing to do with the holocaust. Sorry, brother.

You're trying to defend the indefensible. It doesn't make any sense. Sorry. I've already said there's no logical connection.

It's irrational. To present, to push it is just simply to try to get clicks. I'm not gonna waste any more time on the fact that there are a lot of idiots online that say stupid things, okay?

If we descend to that level, it's done. Okay, let's talk to Matthew.

Hi, Matthew. Hi, Dr. White. First of all, Merry Christmas to you and your family.

And thanks to Rich for helping me with my technical issues getting here today. Well, Rich had his own technical issues getting you here today.

So, you know, there's that too. That's fair. You can just chalk it up all to me,

Rich. I'll take the hit for this one. But anyway, my question is, my family and I, we're going through history right now, and I've been really grateful for all of the content you've shared,

Dr. White, over the years on this. One thing you brought up recently, and I wanna just see if I can get some further detail on, when we learn about the

Reformation and the early church, there's kind of this gap between, say, the fifth century and 1517 on what happened to the church.

How should we look at the church in that intermediate period as far as, was there a true enough understanding of the gospel for there to be what we would call true saints?

And would you recommend any resources for me to kind of look into this more, outside of the individuals like Hus, for example.

Was there a remnant of the church that we would see in, say, the 13th or 14th centuries? Well, yeah,

I mean, the Reformers did not believe that they were starting something new. They did not believe that there were no

Christians before them. When Candace Owens did her, I'm thinking about converting to theologism thing, and said, yeah, my husband asked me a question that I really couldn't answer, and that was, how was

Martin Luther the first Christian that had lived since the apostles died? And you're like, you really believe that?

And maybe I guess there are some people who believe that. I really cannot begin to understand that, but there you go.

So no, they did not have that perspective. They believed that there were many Christians in their day that were still in the

Roman Catholic communion. They were seeking to undo the cumulative effect of century after century after century of the accretion of unbiblical tradition, specifically, initially anyways, on the subject of the gospel and ecclesiology in general, specifically papal power, the supremacy of scripture, obviously justification, the sacraments, things like that.

There was a lot of tradition to go through, so there was a bunch of traditions that they were not addressing. And so, for example, they did not address

Mariolatry. That was not an issue in the

Reformation. That was not one of the debates. None of the reformers wrote freestanding books on the subject.

Most of them started off, like Luther, with very strong commitments to Marian holidays and things like that that diminished over the course of their life.

But Rome hadn't defined the last two Marian dogmas by that point in time anyways, and Calvin specifically rejected them very clearly.

Anyway, so they didn't get to everything in the first generation or even the second generation.

But since they did demand a consistent application of scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith, then the duty of each generation was to continue the process of Reformation.

That's why Semper Reformanda is not something that Karl Barth made up. It is the necessity of the church to continue the process of Reformation because no one generation is gonna get it all right.

And the tendency over time is for the church to go back into basically muffling the voice of Christ through the use of tradition.

It's just a different kind of tradition. So they looked back and quoted from all sorts of people, not just Augustine, with whom they had disagreements, especially in ecclesiology, but Bernard of Clairvaux, who had horrific

Marian dogma problems, but had great theology elsewhere. And the

Gregories, the Cappadocian fathers, you can find all sorts of problems.

There's universalism in there. There's all sorts of theological stuff. They were not sitting there saying, everybody in the early church was a theological paragon and all we gotta do is go back to them.

They recognized there was inconsistency all the way back to the beginning.

You look at the apostolic fathers and you have an entire range of quality, even in them.

I mean, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, these are not deep theological works. They may not have even had enough time to understand, for example,

Paul's understanding of the gospel and things like that. So, they're not something that you're gonna get a whole lot of insight from, but Clement's Epistle to the

Corinthians and the Epistle to Diognetus, and you can get all sorts of cool and wonderful stuff there because they're much higher quality.

That's always been the way it is. And so, no, there were believers all through that time period.

I mean, some who were even bishops. And that means that they were a mixture.

All they're calling for is we need to examine tradition and be able to get rid of tradition that develops century after century, layer after layer.

We've gotta get down to what is apostolic in its actual nature, rather than what is claimed for it.

Okay, and so, would we say then that, like in the Middle Ages, that soteriology was robust enough that even the common person could accept the gospel?

And the reason I ask this is that I've gone through university courses and secular schools and church teaching classes, and that kind of presentation is that, well, the church kind of went absent for a few centuries and then came back in the 16th century is kind of the way that things are positioned.

So, that's what my question is. Well, again, just like today, I've said more than once,

I want to hope and trust that there are Roman Catholics who have a simple faith in Christ that is not washed away by the

Judaizing Galatianism of the official teachings of Rome and the same thing in other groups, and man, the same thing in Protestant groups.

It's just every generation faces the same thing. I mean, there's apostasy abounds in our day despite the prevalence of light and the ability to access truth, there is a tremendous amount of suppression of those things.

And so, I would say that you would see shining lights. When Wycliffe studies scripture, he doesn't think he's coming up with something that no one's ever seen before.

He's coming up with that which was there the whole time, but he's seeing it without the corruption of the traditional lenses bending and distorting.

Now, what's the exact... I mean, he, for example, recognized that transubstantiation was a modern innovation.

He recognized that it was not the ancient view of the church. It had become dogmatized only a few hundred years earlier in 1215.

So, he could see those things. Were there others that could see those things? Well, a lot of people during that time period were illiterate.

So, what did they have access to? Were there priests who, because they were illiterate too, only delivered an extremely basic gospel message that the

Lord used to save his people? The promise is Christ would build his church, not build a huge ecclesiastical structure.

And the church is made up of the elect of God. And so, God can save his elect people as he sees fit.

I hesitate to talk about... You used the term a sufficiently robust soteriology.

For whom and in what context? I mean, you had... Remember, you did not have the level of communication that we have today.

And so, you had people in different areas that had very different views than people in other areas.

And since there wasn't widespread communication, you didn't have the internet, it was before the inventing of the printing press.

You could have a great deal of variation. And so, I think that's where you find that simple gospel being used.

But even into the sixth century, you can find individuals who are in positions of leadership in the church.

Yeah, there's all sorts of bad theology that has become extremely popular and being promoted and things like that.

But they still have a strong understanding of the core principles.

And only people who think you have to have perfect theology are going to say, well, there just weren't any

Christians. And of course, those people end up saying there aren't any real Christians today either, because they end up being the only people that have good enough theology for their own standards.

So, it's the difference between looking at the broad picture and the need for the church to be listening to the voice of Christ in the form that Christ gives his voice, and that is in scripture.

And those who have promoted another voice that very frequently ends up obscuring to the point of becoming a false gospel, obscuring the message of the cross and adding things in that would definitely fall under the condemnation of Galatians.

So, there's a much higher standard for judging a doctrine than we can apply to judging anyone's heart.

Because we can look at the doctrine and we can analyze the doctrine in light of scripture, but I can't look into somebody else's heart.

And I only know them for a brief period of time, I only know them in a very shallow fashion, and I can hope and pray for the best for them and leave the rest to God.

I'm not called to judge that kind of stuff, we're called to judge teaching, not somebody else's heart.

So, I know people like to go, well, what about the peasant who only went to mass?

Well, I don't know what his priest was teaching. I don't know what his priest knew. Would there be enough gospel in a stained glass window to bring someone to Christ?

Yeah, I think there could be. And the vast majority of Christians up until the time of the

Reformation never possessed scripture. All they ever heard was what was read to them if someone could even read them.

There were entire places in Europe where illiteracy was so high that how could anybody have anything else other than that?

Which is one of the major objections people make to Sola Scriptura. Well, it's not functional because people weren't literate, but there were a lot of people who were illiterate in the days of Christ, and yet he held them accountable to the scriptures.

So, that's the standard you have to go with. No, thank you very much. This is very helpful.

And is there like maybe one book that would kind of delve into this a little bit more that my family could use as a resource?

Well, you know, I'm sure there are some books out there that address this subject.

I don't know what they are. I'm simply deriving all of this from reading widely in church history and having to go, yeah, that guy was way out there, but he had some good insights on this, that, and the other thing.

A number of the Reformation histories like D 'Albinier and stuff like that do attempt to wrestle with these things, but since they are right at the time of the

Reformation, they can tend to be rather polemical, and you have to sort of recognize that and recognize that just because someone was on the right side of the

Reformation doesn't mean they were necessarily balanced, but they were struggling with this very issue.

And even Calvin wrestled with it a little bit in his response to Sataletto. If you've never read the back and forth between Bishop Sataletto and Calvin, that's really a classic of Reformation theology and history as well.

But honestly, I don't know of a book on the subject. Maybe somebody will pop something up and inform me if there's something that's been written that I haven't seen.

Okay, no, thank you again, and hope that you guys have a great morning over there, and again, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. All right, thank you.

God bless. All right. I'm gonna go ahead with Ian, and then

Ryan, look, if you've got something new on the day and the hour, then

I'll come to you. But if it's just more, we need to go back over the text of Matthew and Mark, I'll just direct you to the lengthy, entire episode -long discussions we had on this just a couple of years ago, where all the controversy blew up about it, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Oh, by the way, hey, yesterday was my birthday, and EK, I'll just go with EK, this came in the mail for me, and I don't know if he knew it was my birthday, but he said,

I know you love Native American artwork and crosses, and man, this thing is gorgeous.

Thank you, EK. And I might as well just go ahead and say this before we go to the next caller. I just wanna say to certain individuals,

I'm not gonna give names, but especially one particular individual, here at the end of the year,

I'm not expecting to get almost, this is all I got for my birthday. Okay, that was all

I got for my birthday. Once you get to my, first of all, I'm 63 now, who cares?

I mean, well, yes, true, you sent me an Amazon gift certificate. We send each other

Amazon gift certificates for our birthdays, it just goes back, it's the same one, it just goes back and forth. I don't know.

But I don't need anything this year because of the fact that,

I'll just put it this way. You know how I travel now? And I spend a lot of time on the road, and I spend a lot of time in a truck.

And we have had for, how long did we have that, two years? Two and a half years? 38 months.

Just over two, just over three years. Three years, two months, okay, all right. So a little over three years ago,

Rich and I made the decision, after I got back from the trip, I was coming back into the valley, there's some hills you gotta go down to get down here.

And we were driving a gas, a 2018 1500 GMC. Wonderful truck, but we had been told when we started

RVing, get a diesel. And we didn't initially. And if you don't know this, a diesel truck has braking power in its engine, okay?

A gas -powered engine just can't do it. But if you've ever heard a diesel truck going by, it's going brrrr, that's an engine brake.

They're using their engine to slow themselves down. We decided for safety reasons that it's time to go to a diesel.

We found one, I flew to Louisiana, one of the few times I've flown, only time really

I've flown, since I decided not to, to pick it up. Beautiful truck, it performed great for us.

It's been wonderful, but it had zero tech. The only tech it had was a backup camera.

And that's because it was mainly meant to be an off -road vehicle. It really wasn't meant to be a long haul vehicle. It performed perfectly doing that.

I put, what was it, 87 ,000, 90 ,000, somewhere around there, about 90 ,000 miles on it.

But it did not have any of the safety stuff that modern vehicles can have.

The cameras, lane change stuff, the adaptive cruise control, where it keeps you at distance from other vehicles, heads -up display.

And the main thing is, look, I drive alone. And sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I have to do extra long rides.

And I have knotted off. And the rumble strips saved me. But it shouldn't be that way.

And so, as of a couple days ago, we traded in that wonderful truck.

And thanks to the individuals that made this possible. My next trip to Dallas in January is gonna be the shakedown tour of a new truck.

That has all the bells and whistles. And so, I mean, you know,

I'm really hoping, honestly, and we're hoping this is the way it's gonna work.

We'll be putting a camera on the back of the RV. There's already one there. A Bluetooth camera that I use in backing up.

This stuff will interface with the truck. And my gut feeling is that, not just in backing up, but my gut feeling is, this is how

I think it's gonna work, Rach. I think that's gonna show up in the rear -view mirror. So that it's, because the stuff

I've read says it sees through the RV. So instead of just having a rear -view mirror blocked out by the front end of that massive fifth wheel, when

I look at the rear -view mirror, I'll see what's behind the RV. I'll see who's behind me.

That's just, freaks me out. It really, really does. But the thing is,

I'm gonna feel a whole lot safer in this beastie because of its incredible capacity and stuff.

And you all made it possible. Thank you very, very much. I don't need anything else for Christmas now.

I got a really nice thing here, and if you see me glancing over here, it's because I'm watching.

Because that thing does not go to Mexico, okay? We're way too close to the border there.

And that would really sell for a lot of money down in Mexico. We don't want that to happen. So I keep an eye out on it.

So I'm really excited about that. And I wanna thank the people that made that possible. And to everybody who, at the end of the year, is thinking about us and wants to have us around for another year, not sure why.

Maybe it's because we're not jumping on the clicks to like us and make us money bandwagon.

You know what you get with us. We don't have a bunch of sound effects and stuff like that.

I've already warned you that next year, I'm gonna be diving into a topic that, like when

I did Islam, bored a number of people, but proved to be really important.

I mean, maybe on the next program, I'll tell you about an email

I got recently about how our debates on Islam led to the conversion to Christ of a woman and family members and everything that's come from there.

We got two copies of my grieving book translated into Arabic.

And again, it was this ministry's consistency over time that was central in that person's spiritual life conversion to Christ and everything else.

So, you know, the Lord does what he's gonna do and he uses people like us to get it done.

And the topic I'm gonna be delving into is gonna be a little bit on the obscure side, but it's really important.

We don't, yeah, I address cultural stuff, but we're not trying to ride a wave and ooh, you know, sticking our finger in the wind, but where do we go now?

That's just not who we are. And if that's the kind of thing you wanna support, we appreciate it.

We appreciate those of you who are doing that even now. We don't badger you. You have them getting 47 email or e -texts from us every day saying, hey,

December 31st is coming, da -da -da -da. We don't do that. Even if we wanted to do that,

I don't think we have the smarts to do it, but we'd never do it anyways. So my thanks to all of you who have made all this possible, really, really so.

Okay, let's talk to Ian real quick. Hi, Ian. Rich is messing up again.

Go ahead. Well, I still muted on this end. Hey, can you hear me?

Okay, got you now. Rich is just a little slow on the uptake today. Well, first of all, happy late birthday, sir.

Yes, sir. So my weirdly, what seemingly unconnected question is as you know, the biggest online proponent of Eastern Orthodoxy is

Jay Dyer, unfortunately. And I was watching one of his interviews on the

Ruslan podcast, and Jay was talking about his upbringing.

And what's so fascinating is he actually mentioned that one of his personal heroes was

Dr. Greg Bonson. Right. And he mentioned that the reason why he went on this spiral of different perspectives is he listened to Dr.

Bonson's debate with Jerry Mattofix, and he thought Bonson lost. Yeah, I don't think he did.

I think he just got talked over and it was a two -on -one debate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the reason why

I bring this up is Jay is still using the transcendental argument against atheists and he presses the kind of same questions against Protestants.

And so I'm curious your thoughts on if it's consistent with their paradigm to even be using that argument to begin with.

Interesting question. Takes us into some pretty obscure stuff, honestly.

As I'm studying Eastern Orthodoxy, that gives you an idea of where we're going next year and what the debate's gonna be about.

As I'm studying Eastern Orthodoxy, I am recognizing that it is a mixture of Neoplatonism with hundreds of years of traditional development in one particular spectrum of the early church and has been deeply, deeply influenced by Pseudo -Dionysius.

And the impact of Pseudo -Dionysius, both East and West, is really hard to summarize once it came into existence around the year 500.

And the Eastern Orthodox actually believe that Pseudo -Dionysius is just Dionysius, that this is actually from the first century.

They've actually canonized him as the Dionysius of Acts chapter 17. 99 .95

% of all church historians of whatever stripe today recognize the anachronism of that, that the teachings of Pseudo -Dionysius are very plainly from many hundreds of years after the time of Christ, but there are

Eastern Orthodox that actually defend of Pseudo -Dionysius as being that first century character, which completely changes the nature of the

Christian faith. Anyway, Pseudo -Dionysius is presenting a worldview that has, because of Neoplatonism, has elements of a transcendental flavor to it but I think

Van Til would have said, well, okay, it has a transcendental, or Bonson for that matter.

And I don't know that Greg ever addressed this. I ought to ask somebody, an apology to studios, since we have

Bonson Yu, I wonder if there's a way, I don't know that we've transcripted it all.

Man, that would be so worthwhile to have for Bonson Yu what we have at AOMN .org,

where you can just throw a term at it and all the transcripts of everything that Dr.

Bonson taught would be pulled up that have that term in it. Yeah, one of the reasons it may not exist is because man, the quality of some of those recordings is not overly good.

Record on the moon. Oh yeah, I mean, it was like somebody had a ghetto blaster in the back of the room.

They just hit record. And it can be really hard to transcribe that stuff even with AI doing it.

That may be why, I don't know. But anyway, I'm unaware of either

Bonson or Van Til addressing, for example, pseudo -Dionysius and neoplatonism.

I'm sure that Bonson did in some of his philosophy classes address neoplatonism, but whether he addressed specifically its presence in pseudo -Dionysius and hence in Eastern Orthodoxy, I've never heard it.

That doesn't mean he didn't. I'm not claiming to have listened to everything that Bonson said, but I've never heard it.

It would be fascinating to see if something like that actually would pull up. But my gut response to the question, and it is a good question, would be that both

Van Til and Bonson would ground the reality of the transcendentals not in an overarching neoplatonic sense of the one or things like that, but in the revelation of scripture itself.

And that's just simply not where Eastern Orthodoxy is. That's certainly not where Jay Dyer is, though, to be honest with you, after my brief encounter with him, what, about sometime at the beginning of this year,

I think, I have so little respect left for him that, you know, you look at his website and what he does outside of, quote -unquote, religion seems to be tied in with how he deals with religion, too.

So it's pretty wacky and crazy stuff. I don't know if you saw when I broached the idea of a debate with him.

Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? Yeah. Okay, so you're familiar with it, all right. It was truly insanity.

So, and I don't know how much he knows about that. You know, I'm sure he was probably a good student when he was younger at some point, but the instability that he has demonstrated for the majority of his adult life now makes me go, yeah, nevermind.

So other than him, I don't know who amongst the Eastern Orthodox would have any knowledge of Vantil that would have come from that direction.

So the guy that actually joins Jay on his streams is a man,

Dr. Deacon Ananias. I don't know his full name, but he's actually written papers on revelational knowledge and the transcendental argument.

And I've read them, and at least from what I can tell, it kind of sounds like he would lay out a similar presentation as Bonson or Vantil would, but he substitutes revelation, meaning scripture and general revelation with the church.

Like he kind of adds the church into that equation. Yeah, and Ananias is, he admires

Bonson. He admires Vantil. He admires Dr. Anderson. He admires RTS. But funny enough that you say that,

I've actually thought about calling into Jay's show and asking him this question, but I feel like I would just be, you know, insulted and then kicked from the show.

You can call me an idiot, but... That is the problem. It does make it really hard.

It really does. And I will tell you at least this much, because we need to announce this pretty soon.

We've been teasing it too long. But the fellow I'm debating next year is so unlike Jay Dyer that it's not even funny.

And that's why I have real serious hope that The Encounter and hopefully what

I hope to produce afterwards in published works will be much longer lasting than a food fight with Jay.

It won't be nearly as popular. But I'm looking at long -term stuff, not clicks now and then forgotten a year later.

And so that's what we're thinking about. But yeah, look there, once you start talking, you know,

I think even Vantil would say that transcendental realities are a part of the created order that gets through.

And that it's suppressed by the natural man in more or less consistent ways, but that it gets through.

And so it wouldn't be overly surprising that any type of Christian theistic system, even if it's inconsistent on other areas, could at least adopt that.

Now, will it be consistent in application? I mean, can the

Eastern Orthodox Church function in the way that it sounds like this particular gentleman is attempting to make it function?

I think Vantil and Bonson would go, yeah, no, but trying to call their spirits up from the dead to testify now is probably not a good thing to do.

So I think just consistently they would go, that's not what we're talking about. Even if we can see the parallels that we would have a real problem with the less than objective nature of how you even define what church teaching is, because there are obviously disagreements at the highest levels.

If you remember Cyril Lacaris and some of the stuff we've done there, there's differences there.

So interesting question. I'm glad folks - Yeah, super nuanced.

Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah, I'm actually, I'm an aspiring seminarian, and my goal is to actually study the

Transcendental Argument in seminary, hopefully under Dr. Anderson at RTS. Okay, all right. If I ever write anything about this,

I'll send you a book. Yeah, I would like that. And you are talking to someone who filled in for Dr.

Anderson in one of his classes once. So there you go. The only time I've ever taught on the campus at RTS was when he was on sabbatical, and so I taught his apologetics class.

So that's one of my few claims to fame. Right. Well, thank you, sir.

God bless you. All right, thank you. Great question, thank you. All right. Wow, that was cool. Okay, so Ryan is asking a question that we'll go ahead and touch on here.

So let's go to that. Ryan, if you're there.

Hi, Kurt. Yes, sir. Hi, first -time caller, long -time listener.

All righty. Huge fan. Yeah, I actually became a Calvinist because of you, so that's cool.

For a long time, I was a latent fanboy and watched one of your debates and I was just like, oh, yeah, no, this doesn't make sense.

Anyways. So I am really interested in apologetics with Muslims.

I have a heart for them, for sure. And while watching debates with Christians and Muslims, that question obviously comes up a lot.

Does Jesus know the day and the hour? And specifically, this new answer has been getting really popularized, which is that the word, oy -day or oy -den, however you pronounce it, is in reference to making known or to reveal.

It's not necessarily knowing. Jesus knows it. He isn't the one who reveals it, though.

That's the Father. Is that something that actually works with the Greek or is that just like a bit of an innovation that doesn't really apply?

Uh, well, hold on a second here. As normal, the text entry thing in accordance.

Okay. I was just making sure that Mark 13, 32 and Matthew 24 are in parallel to one another in the use of Matthew 24, 36 and Mark 13, 32 are the texts we're looking at.

But on that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven or the sun, but the Father alone. Okay.

So there's been two interpretations that I've been hearing popping up.

And my concern is your concern. If I'm hearing your concern, I could be reading, I could be giving you more credit than I should.

I don't know. My concern is when you have a super challenging text like this that has been considered super challenging down through church history, and all of a sudden we get into the internet age and all of a sudden there's a simple answer that no one has ever seen before.

That makes me go, hmm, just a little bit, you know, right from the start. Yeah, that was exactly my concern.

I've never heard it before. I'm like, oh, wow, that's cool if it's true, but how come no one has ever said it? So have you heard this one?

This is the first one I'll talk about. Um, the first answer that I've been hearing recently that is interesting is that the context is of a wedding.

It's a wedding context. And that, um, it is the, that has something to do with the who announces the time of the wedding.

And that's, that's not the bride groom, but the bride's father, or they put it in some type of wedding context and say the whole, the whole conversation's irrelevant.

It simply has to do with a Jewish understanding of when weddings were scheduled or something along those lines.

And I'm just sort of like, um, well, um, I guess you could find something about weddings.

It was marrying and giving a marriage a few verses later or something, but, uh, wow.

All right, fine, whatever. Um, oida is just the standard word for knowledge.

The idea that you can limit it to making known. Look, I've, I've even said that it would see the, the simplest way to deal with this in a non -apologetic context would be that Jesus is, is talking about the father's right to establish the time over against his being the, the submitted son who is sent to accomplish, and hence not the one that established the time himself.

If I was just, if I was just sitting around shooting the breeze theologically, that would be a nice way of saying, yeah, it's sort of that, that's sort of how

I like to understand it, but I don't get that kind of, um, I don't get that kind of easy peasy way of having discussions.

I have to take this into the debate and people who are not only

Muslim, but Unitarians, you know, I'll be debating a Unitarian, uh, in, uh, uh,

Dr. Smith in, uh, Dallas in just a matter of weeks. And they use the same text and their arguments the same.

This means he's a creature, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so I don't see how you can avoid dealing with, uh, the incarnate state when

Christ is saying this in the context of functioning as a, as a prophet, um, prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem.

The early church understood this as a clear example of his prophethood because it took place as he prophesied that it would.

Uh, people don't do that today because they have a different eschatology and they don't, they don't see that Matthew 24 is primarily talking about the destruction of Jerusalem.

So they don't see that as the way the early church did. Anyway, um,

I've never done a complete word study of every use of oiden, oida, um, in Matthew and Mark.

And so what you'd to, to substantiate that argument, you would have to look at all the terms in Matthew and usage and Mark and usage, cause they're not necessarily identical that are used to the term.

No, you know, sco, oida, look at the nouns and the verbs and this can done fairly easily today.

In fact, honestly, it's astonishing. Grok does it really well. Um, I've discovered

Grok actually has access to the TLG databases and can do, for example, um, can tell you how many times any of the, uh, ancient writers in a certain century use a certain term in a certain form.

It's like, I've been paying, yeah, I've been paying TLG. In fact, we need to re up my

TLG subscription, uh, at the end of the year. I've been paying for that for a long time. And now Grok can do it for free.

So that's pretty wild, but you can do that in accordance. You can do it in Lagos and you could, you need to establish the range of uses of oida, gnosko, the various other terms that could translate yada from the old

Testament and see if there's any difference between Matthew and Mark, first of all, and then see if there is a consistent, um, utilization in Matthew where oida would have that specific meaning, making known rather than simply having, um, intellectual knowledge.

Yeah. If you can establish it in Matthew and Mark, um, that's where you'd have to start.

They'd have to deal with outside texts that would not have that.

So if I give you a parallel, um, when we look at Matthew 1, 25 and Heos who, he did not know her until she brought forth her firstborn son.

Um, Calvin, for example, uh, says you shouldn't put much weight on until in denying the perpetual virginity of Mary, whether he believed it or not up for grabs.

But, uh, he, like the Roman Catholics said, you know, until it can be used a lot of different ways. He did not look at it as a phrase.

He just looked at Heos. He did not look at Heos who, or the other constructions. When you look at the construction in Matthew, it's very consistent that Matthew only uses it one way and that you can put that weight on it.

But Calvin didn't look at it that way. And most people haven't until modern times when you can do searches with computers and stuff like that and go,

Oh, look at that. Hadn't seen that before. So could you do that with Oida in Matthew?

I don't know. I've never done the search. Um, now you get to do it. Ha ha ha. Um, you, you get to do it and send in a message to Rich telling him,

Hey, it actually works. Um, but that's where you'd have to start. And you'd have to have that kind of foundation to be able to then make the argument apologetically, uh, to anybody else.

If you don't have that foundation, then it just sounds like a cutesy little response. That's getting you out of a tough, a tough situation.

Yeah. Cause that, that is what it feels like. And again, you mentioned, uh, Matthean usage and marking usage.

Um, they'll bring up Pauline usage, like in first, um, first, uh, Corinthians, where he says,

I knew nothing but the Christ, but Christ and Christ crucified. And he says, no, as in revealing.

Cause like, obviously Paul knew more than that, but that you wouldn't say that that's a proper way of doing a

Greek because that's not the same author. You know what I mean? Well, look, if you can, if you can, you do want to be able to give examples where your understanding of it does appear in other passages, either in the

New Testament or even outside the New Testament. I mean, if it's a super rare usage, then you're, you're, you're barking up the wrong tree, but to really establish it, you have to be able to, to handle counterexamples.

And without doing the study, I can't even comment on counterexamples and how many that there might be, but I can guarantee you, uh, you'll eventually run into a debate opponent that has done that.

And so, so you've got to, you've got to do it yourself. So it sounds interesting to me, but right now,

I certainly wouldn't suggest it to anybody. Um, and I would ask anyone who does suggest it, did you do your homework to actually be able to establish this in a, in a proper fashion?

Unfortunately, there are Christians who do apologetics and their, their idea is, um, if it works, use it.

Whether I've substantiated or not is a different thing. And I, I can't go there. Well, when you're arguing with Muslims who tend to just use lies as their main arguments, like you don't want to come back with them with something that's not true either.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. That answers my question. I'll look into that and I'll let you know what comes up.

Okay. I'd appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hey, Wesley, Tony, Bruce, Dylan.

Thank you for listening online today. We're, uh, we are, I've gone over time and, uh, we'll, we'll do this again.

And, um, maybe Rich, you could do like a screenshot and that way.

Yeah. Good idea. Isn't it that way when you guys call in next time, uh, he can look at that screenshot when you go,

Hey, I was waiting last time and you get, you get priority next time. How does that sound? So let's do a screenshot and, and that way he can verify that and you get first up next time around.

So, so, because honestly, the questions we had today were just brilliant.

All you guys, um, man, uh, our, our audience is a whole lot smarter than I am, or I would like to think our audience has been educated over the years by this program and other means.

I think that's, that's what we try to do. We're not here to entertain. We're here to edify, educate.

That's why we do what we do. So that's cool. Great questions today. Really, really good. Um, oh, uh, one last thing

I, I have, I commented last week briefly on the conditional mortality and I hate

ECT, eternal conscious torment. I don't talk about torment.

I mean, it's a biblical term. Okay. But I talk about punishment. Uh, there's, there's reasons for that.

And, uh, Kirk Cameron has made some brief comments.

He's going the Edward fudge direction. Um, things like that. Um, Wes Huff has gotten in there.

I may be jumping the gun here. Uh, so, so I'm going to, I'm going to back off and telling you more about this, but I've said for a long time,

I don't want to be the apologist for hell with the project that I have going on right now.

There's just, I just simply have to say no. Um, the older I get, the less, the faster days go by.

Um, and so I've said more than once someone younger needs to take this on.

And my understanding is the, um, parameters are being put together for a debate on this topic, um, fairly early next year.

I've been trying to say, make sure to give yourself enough time because this is a, this is an important subject.

It needs to be done. Well, that would, I think, get to the real issues, uh, with the reformed presentation of conditionalism.

Um, and so once we've gotten, once the specifics on that are hammered out,

I'll be happy to share them with you. And, uh, you might want to attend that debate.

Um, when it takes place right now, it's, they're talking March. Um, I don't,

I don't want to see it pushed. I want to see it done right and properly. Um, but, uh,

I have great confidence in the younger man who will be taking this, this topic on.

I certainly want to be, and already have tried to be a, um, resource and a help for him because the majority of the conversation that I'm seeing from the non -conditionalist side is missing a lot of the important points.

And I just repeat what I've said before. This is a extremely challenging topic that from both sides ends up being dealt with emotionally and traditionally and trying to turn that stuff off is really hard to do.

And the other side will say, oh yeah, that's all we want people to do is just, uh, you've got your own traditions and your own emotions involved in this too.

You need to be straight up honest about that. But, um, I can speak as one who does not accept conditionalism.

I could wish it were true. Like I said last time, it would make things a lot easier. I mean, if you're not a conditionalist, you need to have a good reason other than I was raised on hellfire preaching.

You need to have something more than that. Um, I mean, you really do.

And I don't see many people who do. I don't see many people who hold to eternal conscious punishment or torment that have any idea what the other side has to say.

Now, obviously there's all sorts of liberals over there that hold to conditionalism and things like that, that I've never listened to the other side either.

I get that it goes both ways, but most of our listeners are coming from a much more conservative perspective and it's all you've ever heard is eternal conscious punishment.

Um, and my concern is you're going to listen to the other side and go, man, I never even thought about it. And you can read lots of the classic text either way.

For me, it's theology proper and anthropology that determines the issue.

Uh, because you can read a lot of the different texts in a, in a different way. And when people see it, they get really uncomfortable.

So I didn't mean to say all that anyway. So there, hopefully there will be a really useful debate coming up on that early next year that we'll, we'll be letting you know about.

So that should be really, really neat. Was there something that you were looking at me about?

No. Okay. All right. Um, don't know what tomorrow, what,

I don't know what tomorrow will bring James chapter four. Um, but, uh, don't know what the schedule is going to look like.

Um, I hopefully will be out in Mesa Friday night and Saturday night at the

Christmas light stuff. Um, Lord willing anyways, uh, health permitting and everything else. Um, so I'm not sure what next week's going to look like.

Uh, but we'll, cause I think Christmas is what? Thursday? Yeah, it's Thursday. So probably only gonna get one program snuck in next week.

We'll see. Um, but we'll, we'll let you know in the app and, um, and online and stuff like that.

So follow us on Twitter and we'll announce all kinds of stuff. All right. Thank you very much for listening today.