A Few Pope Francis Stories, A Bit on Ken Wilson and Augustine, and Open Phones

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:36

And greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I have a program on my phone called Word of the

00:41

Day. And it just did its... And maybe it's at 11 o 'clock in the morning, that's when it does it.

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But this one's one that you and I should know. Rich, it's Xeric. Xeric.

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Having dry or desert -like conditions containing little moisture. So this is a word very appropriate for Arizonans.

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All Arizonans, before they can become Arizonans, should know the word Xeric. X -E -R -I -C.

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So we're all very Xeric today. We are generally Xeric. Xeric. Until the second week of July.

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We're all dry here now. How are you? Yeah, that's true.

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We're all Xeric here now. We're all Xeric here now. How are you? So this fella,

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Taylor Locke, right? Is that the name? As soon as I saw this this morning,

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I started writing a tweet that said, this one wins the internet or Twitterverse for all of 2020.

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We need to give this man... And then I said, wait, stop. Yeah, okay, yeah.

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Give him that. Give him the... That reflects badly. Yeah, give him the

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CDs of the audio book. There you go. The Forgotten Trinity. And so he saw it and has already called, right?

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Already called. That's in the pipe. So we're going to get to him. But there's so much nastiness out there on Twitter and social media that once in a while something happens.

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So here is Donald Trump after a single day in seminary.

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Here's Donald Trump. Speaking of the Apostle Paul, we're hearing many great things about the Apostle Paul from Rome. And he's doing a great job for our movement.

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But I understand a lot more about Pauline theology, quite frankly, than some of these ivory tower types.

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The whole F .C. Bauer school and the Hegelian philosophies. Albert Schweitzer always going on and on about the eschaton.

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He can't get over the eschaton. And we're being very firm with him there. The new perspective on Paul. Anti -right, right?

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Anti -wrong, more like it. Always talking about covenantal gnomism. Stole it from Sanders.

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He did. But I understand a lot more about Sanders and really all the new perspective. We've got to get justification back because they're taking it from us quickly.

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It's a federal transaction, okay? Righteousness has got to be credited to our accounts.

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And we're going to get righteousness back. We're going to make righteousness great again. We're going to make righteousness great again.

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This is what happens when you're a seminary student. Well, no, no, no.

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As soon as you get too much time on your hands, you don't have enough time to do everything. And, you know, when

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I was in seminary... See, Josh, Summer was born my last year in seminary.

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And so I had, like, advanced Hebrew. And, you know, couldn't sleep at night.

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And, you know, yeah. So you sit in your car and you do impersonations of Donald Trump.

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Having attended his first day of seminary. Covenantal gnomism. Stolen from Sanders.

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That was good. That was just... Let's make righteous...

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Yeah, let's make justification great again. I can get behind that one. I can get behind, let's make justification great again.

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Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah, so anyway. A couple things, then we'll be opening the phones.

04:43

I noticed... Well, this morning, if you listened to the briefing with Dr. Moeller, the last story

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I don't want to have... Because there was so much politics. There's a lot of stuff going on today.

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Today is Super Tuesday. And I'm not going to get into it.

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You can turn on any channel you want right now. And there will be an extensive discussion of what's going on.

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And the fix is in. And I'll just say, if this goes the way it could go...

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I mean, it's real obvious to me. When three people drop out just a few days for Super Tuesday... I mean, why not just...

05:25

Your name's already on the ballot. I mean, it's not going to cost you anything. Just go through Super Tuesday, see how it goes.

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Well, no. So you know there were massive backroom deals and promises of either future runs for the presidency or cabinet positions.

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If you think this is the last you've seen of Pete Buttigieg, this was just Act One.

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Same with Klobuchar, Beto O 'Rourke. This whole socialist crew is going to be back four years from now, no matter what happens.

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But it's just really obvious that the Democrats are just...

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Well, and you can't blame them. Bernie's not a Democrat. I mean, when you think about it, he ain't a

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Democrat. He's an independent. He's actually a commie. So they're sitting there going, do you realize what this will do to all the downline, all the

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House and Senate races and everything else to have him at the top of the ticket? I mean, in certain places, you're dead.

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It's just, well, we're not even going to waste the money to run if this is what happens. But I'm sitting here going...

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You listen to Joe Biden and the declaration thing was the...

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That thing you all know. And you just know that the entire press is just sitting there waiting.

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You know, like everybody waits for Trump's tweets, but he just does that because he's out of control, not because he's just not there.

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Joe just ain't there anymore. But did you see the video

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I posted from like 30 years ago where he's just lying through his teeth about his education and the whole nine yards and where he graduated in his class?

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And it's just like, I guess if you do that for enough decades, it just becomes natural.

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But then when the mind goes, then it's just all over the place. This could be a really interesting summer and fall.

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But the point is, if Sanders doesn't get the nomination, if Biden pulls it out because the

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Democrats have so plainly circled the wagons, it could get rid of him.

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Sanders' supporters are not going to support Biden. They're just not going to do it.

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And it's just like, it's going to be Dukakis all over again. Which, I was alive during Dukakis.

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Remember him in the tank? Oh yeah. That would be Bloomberg in the tank.

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Just stop it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder who is shorter, Dukakis or Bloomberg.

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That's pretty tight. That's a pretty tight competition there. Some of you have no idea who

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Dukakis is. Is he even alive? I haven't heard that he died. But then again, would anyone mention it is the question.

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I have no idea. Anyhow, I said I wasn't going to talk about that. Yeah, yeah.

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It was neither endorsement, denial, or anything else. It's just, this is going to be really interesting.

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I actually have a lot of very serious thoughts about 2020, but we'll get to it eventually in other contexts.

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But back to the briefing. The last story on the briefing today, I think a lot of people may have missed, about Ernesto Cardinal, Nicaraguan priest and proponent of liberation theology.

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Dies at 95. Dr. Moeller really does a lot with obituaries, because they are fascinating.

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Sobering. It's wise to look at obituaries. Because someday, someone's going to write yours.

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And it does make you go, I wonder what's going to be in that. And I wonder if I'll finish well.

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That's the big, you know, once you get past 50, you start wondering, will I finish well? Is the question.

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Anyway, Ernesto Cardinal was a Marxist. He said

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God led him to Marxism. All the Gospels are Marxist. He was a communist. He's a commie from beginning to end.

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And he joined the Nicaraguan government, the communist

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Nicaraguan government. And as such, John Paul and Benedict, so the non -Pope who was

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Pope, who's still alive, and the guy who had been Pope for a long, long time before that, basically defrocked him.

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Now, in Roman Catholicism, sacramentally, when you are ordained as a priest, your soul is marked.

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You always have the capacity and power to work the miracle of transubstantiation, even if you're kicked out of the church.

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That's a weird, very strange... And that one really strikes me as odd, in light of the ex -opera operato, ex -opera operante controversy.

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But anyway, we digress. But basically, John Paul and Benedict said, mm -mm, you're out of here.

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Guess who allowed him to go back into clerical functions?

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Francis. Francis. So here is a full -blown

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Marxist. I mean, no questions asked, nothing.

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And what does Francis do? He restores him when he becomes Pope. And that, to me,

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I think, says everything that needs to be said as far as Francis is concerned.

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The guy is as far -left Marxist as you can possibly come up with, and that's where the

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Roman Catholic Church is today. And if you are a Roman Catholic and you're not a

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Marxist, well, how's that working for you? And speaking of that, speaking about Rome, you may have seen the article about Father James Martin.

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Now Martin, again, ultra -leftist Jesuit. All the

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Jesuits are ultra -leftists anymore, except Mitch Packway, he's the only one left. But ultra -leftist, and he says

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Pope Francis supports LGBT and wants to move on from abortion.

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Now, obviously the conservative defenders of Roman Catholicism are going to say this isn't a reliable source.

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You get all sorts of stuff. People who said that they've been talking with Francis and you can't necessarily prove that one way or the other.

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The problem is that Martin comes from the same genre, the same worldview as Francis.

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And was it within the first year? I'm thinking it was within the first year of Francis's pontificate that on the plane he said to that reporter about a homosexual, who am

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I to judge? It's very, very obvious when you look at who the man is, where he came from, that that's his thing.

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That's where he is. And so I guess the theory would be on the part of some people that since he is the infallible vicar of Christ, he may believe these things, but he will never teach these things infallibly.

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That's the idea. The problem is in this life you can never know what infallible teaching is.

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You can only know till long after the person is dead. So it's irrelevant. But the point is that there is plainly on the part of many an encouragement of people like James Martin who would view what

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I would see as historic, tridentine Roman Catholics as fundamentalists. And this once again demonstrates the range of expression within Roman Catholicism is just as wide as within Protestantism.

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If you don't see that, it's just because you're not watching. So much for the idea of solo scriptura being the blueprint for anarchy.

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I suppose I should show you this. Some of you saw the pictures on Facebook, but this is my newest installment in the

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Jeffrey Rice saga. Now notice, this is non -foil.

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See the stamping there? Non -foil stamping. So there's no gold or silver or whatever other color you use.

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So on the spine you have the solas, and they're just stamped into the leather rather than having a foil on it, and it's got solo scriptura on the front with the

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Cairo, the Alpha and Omega on the sides. This is a 1977

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NASB giant print, and it's a brand new

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Bible. It's brand new. AMG Publishers. I had never heard of them.

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I looked. Literally what I did is I went on eBay looking for a 1977

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NASB, because the last one that I had

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Jeffrey do was a 1977 NASB, which I've had for years and years and years. So it's an old Bible, and I just loved the layout, the size of the font.

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This isn't a big Bible. It's not like this and this and this and this, like some giant prints are.

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It's thick. That's a pretty thick text there. And lo and behold,

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I run into AMG Publishers, and they are printing 1977

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NASBs. Now you go, what's, well, it would be based on, was it 26th, 25th, 26th,

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I think. Might have been even earlier than that, but it's based on an SEL in Greek text.

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So there's been some, there are some differences between the, these, between that and the 95, and then now the 2020 is coming out.

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But the main thing is that the NASB in the Psalter uses the old

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English these and thous. And I think, is it only in regards to deity?

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I'd have to, I'd have to look at the specifics, but, but the 77 NASB is, is once I moved from the

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King James, that's what I was using as an English translation. And I really like it. I really enjoy it.

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And for my older eyes, this is an even nicer printing font wise than the one

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I had before. And so now to have it in this. And so I asked for the solo scripture on the front, because Jeffrey had made one for G3 that had solo scripture on the front.

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I was like, you know, it'd be awesome to do a debate on solo scriptura with that Bible, you know, and just, even if you never held it up or anything like that, just having your solo scriptura

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PTL rewind there would be, would be great. So, yeah, there you go.

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This advertisement was, was free. Next thing.

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Oh, we can go ahead and, and I won't take too long on these things. I don't think so. We can line up the calls if you want at eight, seven, seven, seven, five, three, three, three, four, one.

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We're only going to the top of the hour. So eight, seven, seven, seven, five, three, three, three, four, one on Saturday, Saturday, Saturday.

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I read through most of this book, didn't get through all of it on my ride. But I got through enough of it to get a real clear idea of where it's going.

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And lo and behold, I come in today and someone had been kind of semi one. I started seeing this from the provisionist camp, formerly the traditional

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Southern Baptist camp, whatever they call themselves. They're the folks that, well,

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I didn't market, well, I just got this one, so I couldn't have marked it. And I just realized there's really no index in this.

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But there is a quotation here, and I could probably remember which chapter it was in, but basically said, we're really not sure what

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Pelagius, actually believed. you know, he probably wasn't nearly as bad as la, la, la, la.

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This is Ken Wilson, the foundation of Augustinian Calvinism.

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And so he's written this dissertation from Oxford, and this is his distillation of it, basically.

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And it's being promoted by those who are opposed to Calvinism as just beyond and all of all things.

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And so I wanted to, I had heard some things from it and sort of gone. And a couple weeks ago, maybe last week, the week before last,

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I talked a little bit about Augustine and about Augustine's change of perspectives.

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The fact that he's contradictory in his theology because of what happened in his life with the two major controversies.

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It's not, it's not those were the only controversies he engaged in, obviously, but definitionally, there were two major controversies, the

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Donatus controversy, the beginning of his life, and then the Pelagian controversy at the end of his life.

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And that's why Augustine could be quoted by both Roman Catholics and Protestants during the period of the

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Reformation, is because there were differences. It's just the way it is. So I was under the impression this was a work of scholarship in the sense of being focused upon, see, when

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I say a work of scholarship, what you're doing is you're looking at if you're looking at Augustine, then you're going to interpret

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Augustine within Augustine's context. You're not going to be importing into Augustine later doctrinal terminology and formulations.

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And you're also not going to be doing the history of religions type thing that a lot of people do, that, well, if Augustine believed this, then that's why

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Calvin believed this. Calvin never saw one of these, and he never read one of these.

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Or when he did, he was just so dull that all he did was, oh, I don't understand.

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What did Augustine say? I can't read Greek. I can't read Hebrew. Well, actually,

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Calvin could read both, and Augustine could read neither. Well, a little bit of Greek, but not much. So I've been around long enough that I have seen so many people from so many different perspectives.

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Do the Dave Hunt connect

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Augustine to this, to this, to this, and totally ignore the vast, huge differences in context and language and historical setting and meaning and everything else that makes the connection extremely tenuous?

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There is no question that all of Western theology has been deeply influenced by Augustine and by Augustine's writings.

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No question about that. But especially once you get into Calvin, Calvin showed himself more than willing to critically interact with the opinions of those who've gone before him.

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And so he will accept what previous writers have said and reject what they say on other things, all based on what?

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On the consistency with biblical exegesis. And when you look at his commentaries, the man dove deep into the text of Scripture, as deep as you could, given the amount of information he had in the middle of the 16th century.

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Anyway, so I started reading this book and I'm immediately struck by what he says just in the introduction that is basically saying this is not, he may call this a work of scholarship in history, this is a polemic this is an anti -Calvinist polemic.

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And from a historical perspective, make a long story short, when he says that basically if you're reformed and you believe in the sovereign decree of God, well, that came to you through Calvin, through Augustine, through Manichaeanism and Gnosticism.

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And I just go, time out. Both Manichaeanism and Gnosticism have such a fundamentally different worldview and different theological foundation that how can you make that,

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I mean, to make that connection would require a massive, it would require the demonstration that every exegetical insight, every grammatical insight offered by Reformed theologians from Calvin onward was a brainless, simplistic,

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I have to say this because I believe Augustine. And the vast majority of us today became

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Reformed before we read Calvin and before we had heard of Augustine.

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Well, not necessarily heard of Augustine, but never read any of Augustine. And we did so on the basis of exegesis.

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We did so walking through John 6. We did so walking through Romans 8 and 9. We did so walking through Ephesians 1.

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And I think their response would be, yes, but the people who were telling you to read these texts, they were the ones that they were influencing and all this stuff.

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And of course, especially when you do the Gnostics believed in specific divine predestination and decrees.

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I've read enough Gnosticism to know that to try to parallel that with what we're talking about is absurd on a level that's...

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It's hard not to chuckle. It's hard not to laugh. But yeah, there it is. So lots and lots of people try to do the connect stuff together.

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Well, let me see. So, for example, although it may appear to be an impressively constructed building, its systematic theology is only as good as its foundation.

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Protestant Reformed theology in the 16th century was built on Augustine's foundation through Martin Luther and Calvin.

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All right, stop right there. How many differences could we meaningfully trace between Calvin and Luther?

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Both highly indebted to Augustine, but not coming to the same conclusions, did they?

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No, not even close. So you immediately go, okay, influenced by, yeah, foundation of?

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The prestige of Augustine as a theologian and philosopher may be unsurpassed in Western Christianity, yet Eastern Christianity does not revere him.

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That's true. He is not a father of the Eastern Orthodox Church, as he is in the Roman Catholic Church. That's true.

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Nor does Eastern Christianity quote him as an important authority as occurs in Protestant writings.

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That's true, too. And what that says to me, in light of the imbalances of Eastern anthropology especially, says a lot.

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Because it was Augustine's emphasis upon the deadness of man's sin. And where are the provisionists going?

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Toward Augustine's greatest enemy, Pelagius. Hmm. Oh, okay. All right,

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I get it. This book explores Augustine's conversion, now listen to this, conversion from the traditional

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Christian view of free choice in salvation battling

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Stoic and Gnostic determinism, major differences even between those two, back to his prior

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Manichean view of divine unilateral determinism of eternal destinies, heaven or hell.

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There's a lot packed in there, and there's a lot of assumptions packed in there, and there's a lot of assumptions that I don't know of almost any serious historian who's going to want to carry that freight.

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Within Christianity, theological truth is not primarily measured by its antiquity, but by its conformity to Scripture, logic, and then with a consideration of tradition.

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That's an interesting... Scripture, logic, and then tradition. Interesting methodology of interpretation there.

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The 500 -year -old theology of John Calvin was directly derived from Augustine, so he agreed with Augustine on everything, right?

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Well, except on justification and... Anyway. "...who strayed from the foundation of traditional patristic theology over a thousand years prior to Calvin."

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So, immediately, I'm like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, okay. Let's remember that there is a primary focus of the attention of the early church, and it's not on soteriology.

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It's on theology proper, Christology, Trinity, fighting modalism, subordinationism, et cetera, et cetera.

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You don't even have a full treatise on the Doctrine of the Atonement until the middle of the fourth century, until only 50 years before Augustine.

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So, the very... And then, given the fragmentary nature of what we have, to assume a absolutely universal perspective on this,

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I think, is wildly out of there, but we need to explore the novel foundation which

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Augustine laid his later Christian theology. In other words, once he began battling Pelagius. This will expose the fact that Augustinian Calvinism's impressively logical skyscraper has been built upon an unstable foundation of pagan syncretism sand.

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Pagan syncretistic, parentheses, mixing pagan and Christian ideas, parentheses, sand.

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So, this is an anti -Tulip book masquerading as a work of history.

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Lots and lots of quotes, but it has a goal in mind.

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And so, what it does, it takes the later controversies, takes their terminology, and reads it's massively anachronistic, horribly anachronistic, in trying to draw parallels and connections that just simply aren't there.

31:07

And so, I was going to use the Kindle version when

31:12

I came in. This was here, so I wanted to read that portion. I'm going to be spending some time on that in the future.

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I mentioned that I was going to be listening to it, but I was really disappointed to find out that it's a polemic.

31:30

It was being misrepresented. It's a, oh, here's a novel polemic against Calvinism.

31:35

That's not what was represented to me. It was, here's this scholarly work that demonstrates that Calvin did this and that.

31:43

Okay, so Calvin, or that Augustine did this and that. And so, this is about Augustine and his changes in theology and dealing with Pelagius.

31:54

Yeah, I've been talking about that for a couple of decades, and so has everybody else I know. I mean,

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Warfield, nothing new there, but okay, fine, whatever. So, there you go.

32:05

One last thing, we'll go to our calls. Just got this too, and I picked this up from a

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Muslim friend that I follow online. This is Bridges' translation of the 10

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Kiraat of the Noble Quran, and what's really neat, and I just started looking at it, is in dealing with the

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Quran, what? Oh, in dealing with the Quran, you, we obviously have parallels to dealing with the

32:41

New Testament as far as, it's a work written in the past, and it has a certain manuscript history up until the time of printing.

32:48

It's a much shorter manuscript history than the New Testament, much, much shorter than the Old Testament. So, there are parallels, but there are also differences, because you don't have a free transmission, you have a controlled transmission of the

33:02

Quran. So, there's governmental, there's an established version. So, when you look at the

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Quran, we do have textual variations between Mus 'haf, between the manuscripts. We do not yet have a critical edition of the

33:19

Quran on that level that will give us the variant readings in the manuscripts, which manuscripts read what, and then an attempted critical text just doesn't exist yet.

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Will there be someday? Yeah, it'll probably be produced by non -Muslims, but yeah. But then, you have the various printings of the

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Quran that have different qiraat, different readings. Now, these go back, evidently, to textual variants, but they are found in the foundational versions of the

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Arabic that are popular in different parts of the world. And so, interestingly enough, you have hadith,

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I think they're late hadith, that basically say all of these are inspired, which is interesting when you think about it, when you think through.

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But what this does is, it places in different, well, it's not different colored font, but grayed out font.

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So, I'm here in Surah 5. Oh, this is interesting.

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I hadn't chosen to check that particular section. I just happened, you saw me just turn to it.

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But, for example, there's a phrase in Ayah 69.

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Indeed, those who have attained faith and those who have Judaized and the Sabians and the Christians, whoever has attained faith and the law in the last day and has acted righteously, then, and then insertion, no fear shall be, insertion close, upon them, nor shall they grieve.

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So, you've got different, then down at the bottom, you've got the different Kiraat as to how they read these particular passages.

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And so, it's not, and like here, I'm noticing there's one, two, two of the different things, and then you have some smaller font stuff and really interesting.

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Let not the hatred of any people provoke you to be unjust. Just the hatred of any is in a different font.

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And then you've got down at the bottom all except for Nafi ibn Amir Hafs al -Kessai and Yaqub read it as wash your faces and your hands up to the elbows and wipe your hands and your, different font color, feet to the ankles.

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So, it's giving the variant readings from the Kiraat all in one volume.

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At the very, very least, this is something that if you are doing any type of Quran, I would have loved to have had that when

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I was writing my book. So, that's going to be something you want in your library if you're going to be doing studies on Islam.

36:35

So, take a look at that. It's Fidel Saliman, Bridges Translation of the

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Ten Kiraat of the Noble Quran. So, we got that on Amazon, didn't we?

36:48

Yeah, I think we got it on Amazon. Huh? No, no, no. Not this. This.

36:54

Yeah, that was something I asked you to get. Yeah, I think it's available on Amazon. So, just look up Bridges Translation of the

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Ten Kiraat of the Noble Quran. All right. Before you jump into the calls, I cheated and did something that I don't know that I've ever actually done before and I invited folks on Twitter.

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If you can ask a question in one tweet, I might read it.

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And so, I have a number of questions here and the one that I am... Why isn't mine working that way?

37:27

I don't know. Twitter just drives me insane at times. It's got us both shadow -blocked against each other,

37:32

I guess. I think so. So, this one... I'm torn between two at the moment, but this is the one

37:39

I'm going to pick. Why is the Trail of Blood fake church history? That is the first question before the call.

37:47

Yeah, well, see, I could have gone and grabbed my copy. I have it somewhere. Because it...

37:56

Anything is fake church history that is attempting to create a narrative.

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And hence, we'll quote facts of church history, but then we'll not quote contexts and counter -facts to the narrative you're attempting to create.

38:15

So, the whole idea of the Trail of Blood is that there is this pure stream of, basically,

38:24

Fundamentalist Baptists. All the way back to the first Baptist, John the

38:29

Baptist. And that they were never... It was never part of the Church of Rome, and it almost always grants to Rome a much earlier origination than Rome actually had.

38:43

The Church of Rome, historically, very, very early. Paul was very much...

38:49

He was writing to the Church of Rome. We know it's early. But the idea of Roman Catholicism and the associated doctrines...

38:58

Fundamentalist Baptists figure that you basically had a Pope, just like today, by 200 or something like that.

39:05

Which simply isn't true. So, you end up bringing together the

39:11

Waldensians and all these other people, and you sort of ignore some of the problems they had theologically, and you put together a bunch of groups that never would have gotten together historically because of their beliefs were very different from one another, and they weren't really good at getting along with other people very well anyways.

39:28

And you come up with this idea. It's not that there is not fascinating information about the

39:35

Albigensians and Waldensians and things like that. And it's also quite true that most of their history was written by other people, and hence it's not fair.

39:44

So I think it is appropriate to read good books by good scholars like Leonard Verdine and recognize that there are going to be some people that are going to want to nuance some of the things he said.

39:58

Other people are just going to disagree. Read widely. Don't just stick with necessarily what the lectures were in your church history class.

40:07

But the trail of blood just isn't scholarly on that level. It just doesn't deal with all the history that would in any way militate against the narrative that you have this very clear group that just never was a part of quote -unquote

40:24

Rome. That's the primary thing they're going for. Oh, that's it?

40:32

Yeah, but there weren't any other questions on Twitter? Well, okay, so we'll grab a call here and then you come up with another one.

40:41

I think the first one was Joseph in Michigan. Hi, Joseph. Hi, Dr. White.

40:47

Good, how are you? Been listening to you for a while. Love your work.

40:52

I was looking to introduce various youth in my area in my church to Christian apologetics, but I'm not really sure what subjects would be central.

41:08

Is there something to start with and then kind of take it from there?

41:15

Or kind of to phrase it another way, if you had a chance with youth that didn't really know what apologetics were but were

41:24

Christian, what subjects would you focus on? Well, what you want to do in a situation like that is probably utilize whatever is the biggest challenge in your area as a stepping stone to do the first thing you have to do.

41:39

Apologetics is determined by your theology, and unfortunately a lot of our young people do not have a sound theology.

41:46

And so, if you live in Utah, then you use the fact that all of your kids' friends are

41:52

Mormon to give you the excuse to go deep into the doctrine of God as the first step to being able to then contrast that with the

42:03

LDS perspective. You don't just start with the LDS perspective. If you know that your kids are already well grounded, which is unfortunately a sad rarity, but if they are, then obviously you can delve into important issues of worldview subjects.

42:24

Are these kids expecting to be going to a major state university?

42:30

Theology, issues like that. Then you can be dealing with the worldview issues that they're going to be encountering in that type of a context.

42:40

If you're a block down from the Jehovah's Witness headquarters in New York, then you know what you need to be focusing upon there.

42:47

But the real thing that any teacher needs to do is to honestly evaluate where their kids are, and spend 80 % of your time grounding them in truth, and 20 % of your time talking about what the error might be.

43:05

In fact, use the error as the springboard. Use the error as the light to get that opportunity to ground them.

43:15

Because that's, in my opinion, that's what the vast majority of apologetics is. The reason that people struggle there is because we don't know our faith.

43:24

We don't know the truth, and hence end up being forced into a defense of untruth over and over and over again, because we don't recognize the errors in the type of argumentation that is being presented to us.

43:39

So wherever you are, you said Michigan, so you've got a lot of atheism and secularism up there and stuff like that.

43:47

You use those challenges and the questions that are being thrown at them as the way of getting to the foundations and grounding them in that.

43:57

Spend much more time in the truth than you do in the error. Unless this just happens to be a weird church where they've been exposed to this their entire lives and hence already have a deep foundation, then you can spend more time on the error.

44:13

But that's not where a lot of churches are. Okay? Yes, thank you for that.

44:24

I have to apologize to Rich, but is it possible I can ask a quick second question?

44:30

As long as it's okay to give a really quick response, because we've got three other people we still need to get to, and I need to get out of here at the top of the hour, so make it quick.

44:38

I met recently with two Mormon elders just trying to figure out where they are, because it's really hard seeing where different faiths are at these days just by reading their literature, just because people aren't people of the

44:54

Book anymore. But a lot of what came through during the conversation when it went to the history of things and how countless pieces of Mormon history has been disproven, they always appeal to faith as, oh, pray about it.

45:17

And kind of just disregard the evidence if the Spirit says it's true.

45:26

Is there a bridge, is there any way to bridge that between faith and facts and truth?

45:37

Well, that's a really big question and not going to be able to give a brief answer to it.

45:43

The fact is, the vast majority of Mormons today don't know a lot about their history, and we are living in a period of time where the historical teachings of the

45:53

LDS Church are being downplayed. There's always been an element of that within Mormonism because of the fact you have

45:59

Latter -day Revelation, but at least in decades past, there was some concept of a necessity of some type of consistency between what was taught in one generation was taught in the next generation.

46:11

That's breaking down all over the place. I think the best that you can do is recognize that a lot of Mormons today will take a very subjective approach to the study of their religion and say, well, basically there's a conflict between claiming to be the one true

46:29

Church on Earth and then turning around and saying but there's truth everywhere. So if you're the one true

46:35

Church on Earth, then what's been taught by that one Church through the priesthood authority is going to be consistent over time.

46:41

And it's not. Therefore, you might want to reconsider the idea that it's one true Church. The problem is you're dealing with people who already have an extremely incapacitated epistemology.

46:54

There's already a level of subjectivism within Mormon epistemology that is devastating to any type of logic or reason and certainly devastating to any type of gospel presentation which says this is the gospel and what you've been given isn't.

47:12

And so that's always a challenge to deal with the subjectivism. You can only do what we've always done and that is you go to the

47:21

Word of God and the Word of God says don't trust your own feelings. The Word of God exalts those who test by the scriptures.

47:30

You need to have an objective reality. And then you can use an example, and this used to work a lot better, but I used to use

47:36

Jehovah's Witnesses because Mormons were into Jehovah's Witnesses all the time. They were sort of their competitors and so I'd say, here's this

47:43

Jehovah's Witness, he has a really strong feeling that Jesus is Michael the Archangel, but you and I would agree that that's completely wrong.

47:51

So does their strong feeling change the fact that what they're saying about Jesus is in error?

47:57

I can just see a lot of Mormons today going, well, I don't know if I'd call it in error, you know? But, you know, now you're simply dealing with how do you deal with anybody who has just completely abandoned all concepts of objective truth.

48:11

Mormonism can't survive that and won't survive that. That's where it's struggling right now. So that's just to start, but Joseph, I gotta get to the other calls.

48:20

Thank you for your phone call today from Michigan, and let's talk to Ian in, looks like Rhode Island.

48:28

Hi, Ian. Hey, what's up, Dr. White? Yes, sir. I'll make it quick. So, in your debate with Wyatt Ehrman, you guys kind of went back and forth about the different streams of the

48:41

New Testament that were coming out of the first century, and you talked about that there's different streams, and he said, yeah, but they're virtually cousins.

48:51

Kind of like, so you were saying that they're similar but different, and that's really important.

48:56

He was saying they're similar, they're so similar that your point doesn't matter.

49:02

I was wondering if you could kind of explain that a little bit. I was a little surprised because Bart didn't understand what I was saying, and I think that's because Bart did not feel that anybody coming from my perspective had anything to say that would be relevant.

49:15

So he didn't even engage his mind to understand what I was saying. What I was saying is there are multiple lines of transmission, and he operates, he knows this scholastically, but his popular presentation conflates things.

49:31

He goes on the phone tag, a phone game type idea that you've got one witness that has errors, it's then copied by another witness that has errors, so you just have this one single line, it just keeps getting more and more and more errors in it, is how he talks about this.

49:48

And generally what he's done now, since then, in his books, has gone after the whole issue of memory and those very, very, very, very, very earliest decades of the transmission of the gospel stories and stuff like that.

50:01

What I was saying is that we don't have a single line, and therefore since we have multiple lines coming from multiple places, the idea of a single line just becoming corrupted, corrupted, corrupted, we have other lines to compare it with, which are not going to have the same corruptions.

50:19

And I think that's a generally accepted reality, but like I said, it was very obvious to me, especially as to how

50:28

Bart treated not only me, but the audience as well. You know, he gets up in his first rebuttal, and that was a very intelligent presentation, not sure how many people understood it.

50:37

Wow, okay, thanks Bart. Yeah, we are all a bunch of dolts. So, there you go.

50:43

Cool. Also, on Boy Ermin, you told Omar already that Boy Ermin would kind of, you know, criticize the

50:51

Book of Mormon as far as textual variance and stuff, and then he said something really weird I didn't understand.

50:57

He said, yes, but I would tell him he doesn't understand inspiration, and Omar immediately said, yeah, but how can you have variance in golden plates?

51:07

I didn't understand that. Maybe if you could quickly explain that, and I'm all done. Yeah, real quick, I would say my understanding of what

51:14

Omar was saying at that point was that the changes in the Book of Mormon that were made during Joseph Smith's lifetime would be inspired changes.

51:23

Now, I don't know how that works. If it was inspired the first time, it doesn't need to be re -inspired later on and edited.

51:31

But the idea in Mormon epistemology is that you have the capacity with a living prophet for there to be a living, breathing organism of revelation,

51:46

I guess. That's the only way I could understand what it is that he was saying at that point.

51:52

And I think what we're seeing happening right now in Mormonism is a breaking down of a belief in an actual historical background of the text of the

52:02

Book of Mormon. If that's true, why would he have said that the

52:08

Mormon Church will never approve homosexuality? Because if they could, if they have a living apostle, right? Yes.

52:16

My response is let's see how I mean, Alma and I are going to do another dialogue in a few weeks in Salt Lake.

52:26

And look at what BYU just did. And BYU did that at the instigation of the elders of the

52:35

LDS Church. And Alma says, it's always been this way. And I'm like, hmm, okay.

52:42

But yeah, these are the pressures that I think will eventually change the face of Mormonism.

52:49

I think they really will. So, hey, thanks for your phone call, brother. All right, bye -bye. All right.

52:56

The same name? Twice? Really? That's interesting. This is the other

53:01

Ian from South Carolina. How are you doing? Hello?

53:09

Yes, sir. Hi, Dr. White. First of all, I just wanted to say I have been aware of your stuff for about a year now, but I've been taking in a lot of it.

53:18

And I especially appreciate your older Roman Catholic debates. But getting to my question in the same time, the

53:25

Net Bible. I recently was listening to a textual criticism class by Dr.

53:31

Daniel Wallace, and he mentioned that it had a lot of notes that referred to specific manuscripts, and so I was interested.

53:40

And a study Bible might be something I wanted, but I wanted to know your assessment as a Reformed person of the translation.

53:47

Was it a good, reliable translation? Well, yeah, it is. It's not my favorite.

53:53

I would criticize its handling of verbs of authority in the

53:59

New Testament. Its Old Testament translation seems a little bit weird to me.

54:05

But it's certainly within the realm, and it is extremely useful because I think it's 86 ,000?

54:12

Was that the number? It's a huge number of translational and textual notes. It's just massive.

54:18

Which makes it hard to carry because basically it's like taking your

54:23

New Testament and then Comfort's textual commentary and binding them together, but putting

54:29

Comfort in small print, I guess is how you do it. But it does have, if that's something you're looking for, they used to make an

54:38

NA -27 NET diglot that we actually made available, didn't we? Yeah, we made it available for a long time.

54:43

We had it for sale. Which is still really nice and useful, and I think

54:49

I had a leather -bound one of those or something like that. Anyways, you might still be able to grab something like that off of eBay.

54:56

But that's really nice to have, the parallel between the NA -27 and its

55:03

Greek textual notes, and then the notes from the NET Bible. I don't know how well the

55:09

NET would function as a church pew translation, but I used it as my base translation in my book on Justification, so it's certainly usable along those lines.

55:24

I would say it's definitely something you'd want to have available. I would highly recommend that everyone have the

55:32

NET in their library, especially on your phone or something, because as long as you can click on that little note thing, yeah, it's super valuable to have.

55:43

But maybe not as a primary reading translation is what you're saying? Yeah, I mean, obviously someone could.

55:53

It certainly could function that way. I just think that NESV, ESV, probably CSB would be a little bit more smoother reading along those lines, possibly.

56:05

Okay, well, thank you for taking my call. Okay, thanks for calling. Bye -bye. Thanks who?

56:11

Not thanks who! Let's get our last call in here. Let's talk to Christian.

56:17

Hi, Christian. Hi, thank you for taking my call, sir. Yes, sir. So I had a question about a certain passage in the

56:28

Book of Mormon. Mormon 7 -9 says, For behold, this, this being the

56:33

Book of Mormon, is written for the intent that ye may believe that, and that is described in verse 8 as being the record from the

56:40

Jews, which 1 Nephi establishes as being the Bible. And I always kind of thought that was interesting because it would seem to me like if the

56:49

Book of Mormon is saying it was written for the intent of us believing the

56:55

Bible, that you could kind of get Mormon apologetics in a little bit of a conundrum there, where either the

57:01

Book of Mormon is, or either the Bible rather, is correct, in which case the Book of Mormon is false because it contradicts it, or the

57:07

Bible is incorrect, in which case the Book of Mormon is false because it endorses it. And I was wondering what you would think about an argument like that.

57:13

Well, it shares characteristics with the argument that I make from the Quran in regards to the issue of the

57:23

Bible, the Torah and the Injil, the fact that the people of the Gospel are to judge by what's contained within the

57:29

Injil. You have to have the Injil to be able to judge by it, therefore Islamic claims about the corruption of the

57:35

Injil are questionable. And so, you do have that, and I think that would be an appropriate issue to raise.

57:42

However, if you're going to quote from that, then you're going to have to also deal with the fact that it says many plain and precious truths have been removed from the

57:48

Bible, and the source of the quote -unquote supernatural translation of the

57:55

Book of Mormon is the same source for the Doctrine and Covenants of Progress and Price, which contains all this stuff that is not only directly contradictory to the

58:03

Bible, but in the Mormon mind, demonstrates the corruption of Scripture in and of itself. And so, it is that whole idea of latter -day revelation that becomes the filter, and the

58:16

Book of Mormon—honestly, the Book of Mormon doesn't contain the vast majority of Mormon doctrine. Justice Smith hadn't come up with any of that stuff at that particular point in time.

58:25

And so, it's not that that's the major issue, it's that it connects you to the authority.

58:33

If it's supernatural, then its author was supernaturally inspired, and that author also produced these other books and this religious system, and that's where the problem comes in.

58:43

So, yeah, I mean, it's a valid observation, but the problem is, the

58:51

Mormon who reads that is going to read that within the context of all the rest of the stuff that comes from the same authority.

58:59

And all the rest of that stuff says, we're the Living Church, we have the priesthood, and you have all these other statements in regards to plain and precious truths being removed from the

59:09

Bible, and look at the Pearl of Great Price, it's got entire sections of the Bible that show that the

59:16

Bible itself has been changed, because these are the inspired versions of it, etc., etc. So, that's where the complication comes in, is it sort of comes in as a package.

59:24

You'd have to sort of separate the Book of Mormon out from the others to make much more of an argument there. Okay, Christian?

59:31

Thank you very much, sir. Okay, thanks for waiting, and thanks for the phone call. Bye -bye. All right, folks, thank you for listening to the program today, hope that was useful to you.

59:41

Like I said, I hope to have time to get some of the other quotes on this. Right now, really quick,

59:47

I'm responding to David Allen, so my real focus this week is in Romans 8, because David Allen tweeted out that there's no way to respond to his exegesis of Romans 8.

59:58

It's like, oh, really? Okay, that's why you included it in your first two books?

01:00:04

No, you didn't include it in the first two books. Well, why not? Well, anyway, that's another issue.

01:00:10

We're going to be working on that, so I'm not sure exactly when I'm going to get to this, but we'll try to throw it all in there together.