"Love Wins"

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Hey, good morning, welcome to the Dividing Line on a special Monday morning. Hey, we can do this any time we want to, and so we're doing it on a

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Monday today. Lots of stuff to cover today. I was directed over the weekend to a thread that has developed on the

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Catholic Answers Web Forum. I don't go over there myself, but James Swan does, and everyone's supposed to say, hey, you're still loved over there.

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So I went over and someone had posted something I had written a long, long time ago.

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It's not even linked to my blog, it's to somebody else's website. But the top ten questions for those considering conversion to Roman Catholicism.

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And what I appreciated was all top ten were there, they weren't edited, unlike certain Catholic forums,

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Roman Catholic forums, where, well, you can't even put aomin .org

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where it disappears and stuff like that, it's sort of funny. But anyhow, the whole thing was posted,

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I started reading through the comments, and I was just glad that it was there, and I expected pretty quickly that some people would throw up the

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Catholic legate stuff and some of the lame -o stuff that's out there. But I wondered, how long will it take before it just goes ad hominem?

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Because the people in the Catholic Answers forums, they're an amazing group of people, they really are.

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There's some interesting, interesting people in those forums. And I was scrolling through and wasn't getting a whole lot of stuff here,

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I was getting a few things, a few responses, I finally got down to the end of the first page, there's currently four pages of comments in the

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Catholic Answers web forum. And a guy named Mark A., regular member, joined in 2004, has posted just under 6 ,000 times.

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Okay, so I don't know who Mark A. is. But his sole response is a single line, and it says,

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Isn't this the guy who was so vile he drove his own sister into the Catholic Church?

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With triple question marks at the end. Now, some people, you know, they hear something like that.

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And they, I mean, obviously, the comment has to be, wow, here's a really ignorant person, here's someone who hasn't looked into things, here's someone who's obviously willing to believe whatever slander, libel is out there, as if that's somehow relevant.

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And that's, unfortunately, very much the kind of person that inhabits these particular forums in general.

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But a lot of people ask, doesn't that just make you angry? Don't you just get really upset by things like that?

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And I go, well, no, not really. And they go, why? Don't you care? Well, yeah, I care. But what you have to learn to do over time, and yesterday at church,

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I was talking to a fellow member at church, and we were talking, he was just commenting about how he's getting that point in life.

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He's older than I am. Not too much older than I am, but he's older than I am. He says, look, Brother White, I don't have a whole lot of time left, and I just want people to get to the point.

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When people start yammering on too long, he just sort of cuts them off and says, could you just summarize things?

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And you get to that point in life where you realize that you have to be able to give the amount of credibility to someone who's saying something about you that they deserve.

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And generally, that amount of credibility is absolutely zero. I mean, there are some people, they've just shot their own credibility in the head so many times that they may be out there, they may have even written some books, or they've done some speaking or something, but they've shot their own credibility so often that there's none of it left.

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You just can't believe a word they have to say. I mean, obviously, the name Eric and Kanner comes to mind. Then you have others that have just demonstrated that they have no interest in hearing anything you have to say, and so their credibility is gone.

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And you just have to give people the amount of credibility that they deserve.

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And here's a guy, he doesn't know me from Adam, clearly hasn't even bothered to check into things, and so he has zero credibility.

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And so when someone has zero credibility says something that is meant to be slanderous or libelous or whatever, you just go, you just start to chuckle and you move on from there.

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It just doesn't carry any weight whatsoever. And I think a lot of people need to eventually learn that kind of thinking.

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Because if you don't, you're going to get really sick and tired of this kind of work very, very, very quickly.

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It's not just you need to develop a rhinoceros skin, because there are going to be so many people doing everything in their power to try to hurt you and anger you and everything else.

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It's not just that. You also just simply have to think through the fact that there are some people you need to listen to what they have to say, and there are other people you just don't.

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That's just all there is to it. So there were some other interesting comments later on in the thread, but I was just glad to see those questions asked there and you say, yeah, but you don't interact and things like that.

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No, I don't. There's not enough time in the day. I mean, let me just mention what

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I've got coming, just an illustration of not enough time in the day. You all know that I am working on a couple of books right now.

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And I have to try to stay focused on that, but it's very difficult to do because I suppose

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I could run off to some friend's house up in Prescott or something and turn off all the internet and everything else, and then

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I would probably lose my mind very quickly. But I have in my hand, for example, a very snazzily printed book from Harper One, not exactly a friend to the

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Christian faith, by Rob Bell called Love Wins. Yes, I got my copy finally. And let me just mention very quickly, this is the

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Quintessential Puff Hardback. Puff Hardback. What's a

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Puff Hardback? It is a hardback that could have been printed as a paperback in about half the pages that it was printed in.

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I noticed when I kindled this, when I got the kindled version and recorded it, it was extremely short.

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And that's why I'm almost halfway done with it and I've hardly even had time to start listening to it. I'm going to have a little bit more to say about that, but likewise,

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I just got informed last evening that Bart Ehrman's newest book has just shipped called

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Forged. It will be available on Kindle tomorrow, so I'll have that. And I will get to it as quickly as I possibly can.

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Even maybe, I might actually risk my Kindle. I might risk my

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Kindle. Because see, I don't put my Kindle in my jersey pocket while I'm riding and listen to it.

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I record it to an iPad or to an iPod. But it won't release until tomorrow and I'm going to be spending many, many hours on a bicycle tomorrow and therefore,

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I could probably get through the whole book. That's how long I'm going to be riding.

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If I brought the Kindle with me. I might do it. I might have to stick it inside like a plastic bag or something to keep it somewhat protected.

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But I might go for it. We'll see. I don't know. I've got plenty. I've got nine hours of lecture on the

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Islamic doctrine of God from Hamza Yusuf and Dr. Abdallah to read.

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I've got a 14 -hour book, which at high speed will be about 11 hours, on the synoptic gospel controversy and issues and things like that.

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I've got plenty to keep me busy. I just don't have time to be playing on web forums and doing things like that.

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But it was interesting to see that that got posted there. And to see that the same kind of,

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I will believe anything anybody says, as long as it helps me to continue to believe what I'm believing, type mindset still very much exists out there.

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And I'm being told, don't do it. If you do, make sure you have a backup of the data. Arlen, it's a

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Kindle, dude. I've got Kindle on my Mac. I've got Kindle on my Droid. I've got Kindle on my iPad.

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And I've got Kindle on my Kindle. So you don't have to back it up, man. You can just always download it any time you want. That's what's nice about the

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Kindle. So anyway, just wanted to say,

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I'm going to go ahead and just do this really quickly. And then we'll start hitting our calls because we have a full bank of calls. We have all of our phone lines are taken up and the

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Skype is taken up. So we are full up. Evidently, Monday's a good day for doing a dividing line.

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Who knew? I figured it'd be really bad because doesn't everybody have to work on Monday? But I just had to I just had to comment on the the fulfillment of the enemy of my enemy is my friend saying, because I saw someone post it in channel again.

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I don't I don't check these things out winning. Thanks.

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We're winning. Yes. Great. I don't follow these things. If people don't post them in the in the channel, then

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I don't I don't even follow these things. But someone pointed out that that Lumpy, our beloved

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Lumpy, posted a review of Love Wins on his blog. Did you hear about this,

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Rich? Lumpy posted a review of Love Wins on his blog. Guess who the author of the review is?

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Paul Owen, former Presbyterian turned Anglican. Yes, I know.

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I know. I know. Does Peter Lemkins have any real idea what his theology is? I know he doesn't care.

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That's the whole point. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. So you I mean,

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I am so much closer to Lumpy's theology than Paul Owen could ever be. But it doesn't matter. No, no, no, no.

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And I did note a few things here. Owen says, let me just start out by saying that there is nothing particularly amazing about the theological contents of this book.

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His theology is evangelical, Arminian and Baptist. Now, if you go back to like 2004, you'll you'll get to find all sorts of things that people like, well,

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Paul Owen has said about Baptists and things like that. And that's just so long ago. And I don't I didn't even bother going back to look at these things.

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But I'm sure Lumpy didn't bother to do that either. But that's OK. But if if.

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This man, if Rob Bell is evangelical, Arminian and Baptist, I'm not sure any of those words other than Arminian still has any meaning.

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He is exactly right. The foundation of Rob Bell's neo universalism is

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Arminianism. There's no doubt about this man detests reformed theology.

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If you if you follow the line, theology matters and you read Rob Bell's book. Wow. You are you are blown away on the back, on the back of the book.

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God loves us. God offers us everlasting life by grace freely through no merit on our part.

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Unless you do not respond the right way, then God will torch you forever in hell. Huh? That's that's the back.

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The picture of Rob Bell and his superstar mode. That's that's what's on the back of the of the of the book.

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Now, of course, the whole point here and one of the things that that bothered me about Owen's review is he keeps saying that Bell's questions are fair.

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Now, the whole point is that Bell's questions aren't fair. Bell's questions are directed toward his own evangelical background, his own

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Arminian fundamentalist evangelical background. And hence are focused upon the inconsistencies thereof.

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There's no question about that. But his use of questions are not fair at all. And they do not lead to deep thought.

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It is it is a very specific way of non theological dialogue.

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But I'm going to skip over most of what I had, because we do have all these calls I need to get to. I just want to get this one one thing in the review, which

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I thought was very, very interesting. He did rightly criticize Bell on a number of points.

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He didn't bring out the the Luther thing. But just read this this little portion, because this is actually where it's serious.

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And there is we do need to be thinking seriously about some of the things that the book raises. Bell's discussion of Colossians one in chapter five is a helpful reminder of the cosmic scope of redemption.

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Colossians 120 states, the purpose of Jesus' death was reconciliation of all things to himself, and that would include all the invisible orders of angelic beings as well.

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The church is the center of that reconciliation and the means of entering into its subjective benefit. But the goal of this action moves beyond the church to embrace all things.

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This must be part of what Paul speaks of in Philippians 2, 10 through 11, how every knee will bow and every tongue will one day swear allegiance to the enthroned son of God.

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Now, you need to listen to that and you need to know what its background is, because if you're listening with conservative ears, you're not hearing what

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Owen's saying, because he's not a conservative, but at least as we would view these things. But anyways, then he says, listen to this, and remember, this is on Lumpy's blog,

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SBC tomorrow. Whatever eternal punishment means, it does not mean an ongoing state of hostility between God and his creation.

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Even those who remain forever outside of the new Jerusalem will nonetheless be subjectively reconciled to God, though without the blessing and reward that would belong to the elect in heaven.

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Now, think about that. You need to think about that. What does that mean? What does that mean?

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Colossians 1 .20 needs to be dealt with, but what does it mean that it does not mean an ongoing state of hostility between God and his creation?

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That would mean there really can't be any element of God's wrath in hell, if reconciliation means what

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Owen says it means, and that would also mean there's been a subjective change in the non -elect person who is undergoing eternal punishment, whatever that is, so that there is no longer any entity.

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Now, I would say that that act of reconciliation has to do with the foundation of God's judgment in the sacrifice of Christ, and it has nothing to do with the idea that the non -elect are somehow changed and now become friends of God or anything else.

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I mean, if the wrath of God has any meaning whatsoever, that meaning of reconciliation of ta panta, of all things, would by necessity result in universals, and there's no other meaning.

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You're left going, well, God's wrath is satisfied, but there's not actually a wholeness of relationship, but it's some type of other—you're just left with nothing but questions, and maybe that's all he has.

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I don't know. I don't know where Owen is theologically anymore. I gave up tracking him when he went

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Anglican at some point years and years ago. I don't care. It's irrelevant to me, but it is fascinating to find that kind of thing on Lumpy's blog, defending

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Ergon Kanner and posting follow -up. What can you say? It's an interesting world out there.

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Anyway, so we will have information on Forged coming up. We want to jump on that as quickly as we can.

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I sort of feel sorry for anybody that has released a book at this particular point in time because they've all just fallen flat because everybody's talking about one book, which is a—it's a puff piece.

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I mean, it really is. I mean, I'm looking at the font here, and it's just—it reminds me of Scott Hahn's book on Mary, which was, you know, again, could have been put out with—I mean, why doesn't—why don't the green people complain about this?

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I mean, look at all the trees that died. He could have made it a third of the size that it actually is, but that's not the way it worked.

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Anyway, that's just a few comments to get things started here on the program. Here on The Dividing Line, we have a bazillion phone calls to get to, and so we're going to start getting to them.

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And let's talk to—oh, my goodness. I'm sorry.

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Rology, please call back. We'll get to you immediately. I apologize for that.

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It's just a matter of the wrong button. And please call back, and we will get you right on the air.

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So we'll talk to our Skype caller and talk with Matt. Hi, Matt. Hello, Matt.

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Hello, Matt. Okay, we don't have a Matt. You said, hang on?

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Okay. All right, we're going to talk to George.

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Hello, George. Hello, George, are you with me? Is anybody with me? Is the soundboard working?

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Are we not taking calls? What's going on here? Hello, George. We had full calls, but we don't have full calls anymore.

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I will put George back on hold. You can figure out what's going on with George. Let's try Vincent. Hello, Vincent.

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Okay, obviously nothing is working. Hello, Vincent. Hello. Hey, I got one person.

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Ah, good to talk, Dr. Vice. Okay, all right. We'll try to get back to George.

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George is gone. And Rich is looking very confused. So anyway,

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Vincent, what can we do for you? Hey, Dr., long -time listener and first -time caller.

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Yes, sir. What a joy it is to talk to you. Yes, sir. There was, you recently had the

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Conducting Debate to the Glory of God conference. Well, I gave a talk titled that, although it wasn't a conference call, that or anything.

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Oh, my apologies. That's all right. And I was thinking, the question is, mine was, of your many debate opponents, who do you think has done the best job?

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And let me put it this way, you and I are both expert chess players. Well, I would not say that, but that's okay.

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Well, you're a... You might be, I am not. So, but I enjoy the game, just don't get to play it anymore.

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And we know what it's like to absolutely crush somebody in just a handful of moves, but a really good game requires a really good opponent who's really doing a good job.

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And so, along those same lines, which one of your opponents do you think has been best prepared, and his behavior has been impeccable, and did a really good job of presenting his position?

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Well, uh... That doesn't really stand out. Yeah, I get that question a lot.

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And unfortunately, given the wide variety of topics, you can't compare them to one another.

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It's apples and oranges. I really don't have an answer for that. There are people who have...

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There are very few people who have been prepared as far as doing any meaningful research on my position.

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Um... So the people that normally did the best in presenting their own position rarely were able to interact with mine because they didn't really look into my position.

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And if they weren't prepared to prepare their own, they certainly didn't look at mine.

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There were people who spent a lot of time rambling through my books to try to find some quotes to use against me, but they almost never...

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You know, I'm thinking of Robert St. Genes' just fail blog efforts to use the fatal flaw as if this has something to do with supporting

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Roman Catholicism. And so you've got that kind of thing. It's really hard to answer that question because it's apples and oranges, and I just don't know how to give a meaningful response to it.

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I mean, I can tell you which debates I enjoyed the most or which people I found, you know, everybody knows that I thought

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John Dominic Crossan was very, very enjoyable to debate and things like that.

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And then there are people who just weren't any fun to debate at all. But as far as, you know, sort of a standard like that,

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I really don't know how to answer the question. Sorry. Okay. There was one time I remember at the dividing line a number of years ago, you said that Gerry Madetich actually came to one of your debates fully prepared and it made for a good debate.

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Well, he came, yeah, somewhat. I mean, Gerry always uses cheap debating tricks.

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That's just his modus operandi. But what I was talking about there was we had, he had gotten into the rut of coming to every debate and saying, well, you know,

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I was just moving and all my books are in boxes someplace and I've only had a

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Diet Coke to drink. And all I have is this yellow notepad of paper and, you know, woe is me. And so before the debate,

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I believe on Sola Scriptura, I actually sent him a fax or something. Somehow I got in touch with him and I said,

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Gerry, I'd just like to very respectfully request that you don't talk about David and Goliath.

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You don't talk about how unprepared you are. You actually show up prepared. And he didn't use any of those excuses.

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And so I think it did help the debate sound along those lines to not have that.

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Wonderful. Yeah. Okay. Are your phone lines working now or?

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Well, I believe so. We've got the callers back that we had before and we'll see if they work.

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Well, I don't know. We'll find out pretty quickly. Hey, thanks for listening, Vincent. Absolutely.

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And drop a line when you're next in Michigan. Well, do you all have a functioning government there?

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Oh. I'm not sure if I want to show up, but the government doesn't work anymore. You know, I don't know.

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All right, man. Thanks a lot. Okay. Thank you, doctor. Bye -bye. I'm being told I have to go to our

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Skype call. I'd rather go to somebody else, but let's go to our Skype caller. Hi, Matt. Hello, Matt.

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Okay. You guys do not have Skype working. I do not know why you don't have Skype working, but you don't have Skype working.

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So Rology, how are you, sir? I'm doing well. How are you doing, Dr. Weiss? Sorry about that.

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I'm glad to hear it working. Yeah, good deal. Thanks so much for taking me again. My question is, in many debating settings and such things with a wide variety of people, kind of the

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Bartyrmanites and Muslims and Roman Catholics, they all allude to, you know, how do you know Matthew wrote

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Matthew? And then they'll talk about how the manuscript copies don't have the names of the evangelists written on them.

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And I was just wondering, my possibly flawed understanding was that all of the manuscript copies that we have of the various gospel books that are sizable actually do have those names on them.

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That's my understanding as well. Obviously, when someone like Bartyrman says that that was not an original part of the manuscript, they are asserting, and I think he'd probably have a large majority of both textual critics and New Testament scholars in his corner on this one, that what we have in a

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P46, for example, the earliest collection of Paul's writings, or what we would have in P66 or P75, which are coming from the end of the second century, that those manuscripts, that titling was not original.

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Now, how would you know that? Well, it's more of a conjecture based upon the idea that when

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Matthew wrote Matthew, he didn't put Kata Matthion at the top of each page of his original.

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And at the very least, that would have been what maybe someone did when they were copying that gospel decades later and they wanted to differentiate it from Kata Markon or Kata Lukas or something like that, and say, okay, this is that gospel, not that gospel.

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That's this gospel, not that gospel, or something like that. And so to my knowledge, I've never seen an early papyri manuscript that did not contain those.

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Obviously, some of the fragments you can't tell. For example, P52, you wouldn't really know if it was at the bottom of the page or if it was at the part that was broken or, you know.

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Yeah, it's too small a fragment, but those that we have enough of it, they do contain those names.

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So it's really when we get to issues like who really wrote Matthew, especially when we're talking about that particular question, since the

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Gospel of Matthew does not say this is the book written by Matthew, it's not a hill to die on, but it also raises the question of, well, look, taking away other considerations, if you had the kind of evidence that we have, the widespread tradition, the manuscripts, the early dates of manuscripts, if this was any other book than the

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New Testament, if it was something less important, would anyone really be arguing about this? Would there be really any question about it?

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Or would there be a real basis for this kind of agnosticism that you have amongst

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New Testament scholarship, and especially in the Ehrman version of New Testament scholarship today?

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And I don't think that there would be, especially given the early date. And, you know, remember that question that I asked

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Ehrman during our debate, where I challenged him on his talking about the immense, I'm sorry, the enormous time gap between Paul's writing of Galatians and the first manuscripts we have, and how

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I found that to be rather disingenuous in light of the fact that for any other work of antiquity, as he agreed, it's a ginormous time gap.

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So, you know, I thought that was one of the most important elements of that cross -examination, because people who know what the background is would have to have realized that when he talked about that enormous period of time, that he was really,

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I think, misleading his audience at that point, because he wasn't doing it to where it would have any meaning to secular writings and things like that.

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So it's going to be interesting, like I said, hopefully, you know, midnight tonight or something like that I'll have forged on my iPad, and certainly,

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Lord willing, by Thursday, I'll be able to have some sort of a report as to whether it's what I expect it to be, which, given his other books, he's already mentioned this a number of times, and it's probably just going to be your standard 1870s

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German liberal scholarship updated, and it's going to be the continuation of the apostasy tour by Bart Ehrman.

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But it certainly brings a lot of money in the door, I guess, to do this.

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But we'll see what he's coming up with. He came to the University of Oklahoma a few months ago and did a presentation about Forged, and it was exactly what you just said it was, so you won't find any surprises.

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I really don't, yeah, I don't expect it. But isn't it amazing, the free he's going to get, the,

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I bet you, how long, let's start a pool, how long until he's on fresh air, on NPR, talking about Forged and repeating what has been said by liberal scholarship since the 1870s.

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And basically indicating that those of us who are conservatives have been hiding this from our people all along.

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And those of us who are graduates of Fuller Seminary, we bang our heads on the desk over and over again, so. As a member of a

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Southern Baptist church, I cannot in good conscience participate in a pool. Well, what if it's at Disney?

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Oh, that's good, that's good then. The original question I was asking is, it's not that I'm proposing, and obviously you've never done this, to say, well,

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I mean, all the copies that we have say Cata, you know, one die on them. But they bring it up as a rebuttal to you, and it just seems like a naked assertion.

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It is. So why can't I just say, well, I just, I simply conjecture that the original did have it, so. Right. I guess we're done here, aren't we?

30:59

Well, unfortunately, yeah. But they get away with, and my email box is giving me many, many more examples of people writing to me saying, hey, you know,

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I listened to your debate with Ehrman, and I listened to your talking about this. And so I asked him a question after a public talk he gave, and his response was the same type of response he gave to the

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Infidel guy. It's all authority. Believe me, because I am the James A.

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Gray Distinguished Professor of Religion at such and such a school. You know, it's all the authority thing, not the, well, here's the logical, rational reasoning why this is the case.

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I asked him some challenging questions, too, and that was the exact same thing. Really? Yeah. Yeah, see, it's, there you go.

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There's the academy for you, believe me, because I believe my own press. Absolutely. Thanks very much for the call today.

31:51

Thanks, thanks, God bless. Good day. Okay, I'm being told to go to Matt.

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Hello, Matt. Hi, Dr. White, can you hear me? You had all of us just a little bit nervous there for about a third of a second.

32:08

We're starting to wonder what's going on with the phone lines here today. It's raining in Phoenix. So, you know, when stuff that is as dry as the desert in Phoenix gets wet, weird things happen.

32:18

So I guess that maybe that's what's going on. But what can we do for you, Matt? Well, before I make my comments here,

32:27

I just want to say I watched your video on Rob Bill and I almost got a little worried about you because you looked so skinny.

32:35

Well, thank you very much, but that is called healthy eating. And currently for this riding year, 6 ,400 miles on the back of a bike.

32:44

So that's exactly what I want to be. And I have learned that when you're pushing 50, there are other things that indicate health than what your bench press is, like resting heart rate, cholesterol, blood pressure,

33:03

VO2 max, and things like that. So I'm just focusing upon what really matters as far as health goes.

33:09

So I'm doing great. I appreciate your concern, but to continue to pray for me because I do sometimes end up out there playing with the cars and the trucks on the roads.

33:18

So I don't want to end up as a hood ornament on a Mac. I keep a close eye out, but I'll be honest with you.

33:25

I'll tell you what the scariest part is. I was riding up in Flagstaff last summer and I wear a rear view mirror.

33:31

It makes me look like a jerk, but I wear a rear view mirror on my glasses and it looks dumb, but I looked in it and I looked behind me and I'm on a wide open road.

33:42

It's, those of you who know Flagstaff, it's the Lake Mary Road and there's cyclists out there all the time.

33:48

And I see a guy in a pickup truck and he is halfway, he is taking up the entirety of the cycling lane and he's only got one tire in the regular lane.

33:58

You know what he's doing? Everybody knows what he was doing. He was texting. He was looking down and he would drifted right over and he's heading right for me.

34:07

Now, thankfully I didn't have to dive off the road because he looked up and whoa, you know, and he jerks over and almost into oncoming traffic and the whole nine yards because he was texting.

34:18

But I saw it and I saw him coming and I was sitting there going, okay, what do I do when it's time to bail off?

34:24

Which direction am I going? And so on and so forth. So I do keep my eyes open, but that's not why you called Matt, but thank you for your concern.

34:32

Yeah, well, I don't want you to turn out as a road pizza either, but yeah. What I wanted to call you about was that, yeah,

34:41

I'm going into a seminary called Covington Seminary in Aikens, South Carolina and I'm auditing a couple of classes.

34:49

I'm sitting in on a class on hermeneutics and one on the cult. Okay. And my, yeah, my professor is using

34:57

Ergon Kanner as a source of authority of information. Now we haven't studied his law, but we are studying

35:05

Buddhism and we have two videos that are on Gantube from a channel called

35:10

Liberty Online and they were called the story of Buddhism and the worldview of Buddhism. Now, before he gets up, before he turns the videos on, he gets up and he calls him, he's pretty much the greatest apologist in the world.

35:23

And I, of course, I'm totally familiar with everything that's happened in the past year and a half.

35:29

So I'm kind of like, okay, how do I go about bringing this up to my professor?

35:37

So I went ahead and I didn't ask anything in the middle of the class, of course. I waited till the end and then

35:43

I asked him, can I ask you some questions and he's a real nice guy. So he said, sure. So we talked about a variety of issues.

35:51

I asked him if he heard about the scandal that occurred here and he said, yes.

35:58

And I asked him, well, what do you think of that? I mean, this gentleman is somebody you're using as a source to teach your students.

36:06

What do you think when you have all these people saying that Erickson Cantor is an untrustworthy source for how many numerous reasons?

36:15

And he said, well, one of the first things he said was that, well, this information is on the internet.

36:22

So, I mean, I don't know how much you wanna trust the information on the internet. And I told him, well,

36:27

I mean, this information on the internet is from scholars, well -studied theologians, not just a bunch of white pizza -faced nerds on their mom's computer.

36:39

And so, in response to that, he said - Well, let me stop you there for a moment, Matt. It's not the scholarship of the people that are pointing things out as far as Cantor's concerned.

36:50

The fact of the matter is what we're talking about is either legal documents or audio and video recordings that no one has ever claimed were not the actual voice or likeness of Erickson Cantor.

37:02

So, the value of the documentation is that it is firsthand.

37:09

I mean, it is the best. What's the best kind of documentation you can have for anybody but audio and video recordings of the person themselves making the statements and then having legal documents that then back up what is said?

37:25

So, I think that none of this has had anything to do with who it is asking the questions.

37:31

That's always been a red herring, whether it's Mohammed Khan or myself or anybody else.

37:37

Who we are is only slightly relevant here. The point is, these are videotapes, and they have not been edited.

37:45

They have not been changed. Erickson Cantor made these claims, claimed to have been born in Istanbul, claimed to have been raised in Turkey, claimed to come here in 1979.

37:53

It was all lies. And it's been documented to be lies now. And that's the real issue that I think needs to be dealt with.

38:00

So, you pointed that out and continued on. Yeah, well,

38:05

I did bring up all those things. I brought up the video clips, the audio clips, the legal documentation. And he said, well, you know, there are people that will criticize any kind of popular

38:18

Christian speaker out there, including Ravi Zacharias and other people. So, in other words, basically his reason came down to, well, since there are people that will criticize anybody and everybody, everybody has their critics, then that means that he didn't have to worry about checking into what these people have to say.

38:40

Yeah, but nobody is saying that Ravi Zacharias' entire life story is a, which is, by the way, for Kanner, the whole basis upon which he is viewed as being an expert on anything.

38:55

I mean, if his material on Islam is as shallow as it is, how can it possibly be useful on Buddhism?

39:03

I mean, aside from, you know, going and reading some secondary sources, it is relevant at that point.

39:12

So, there's a vast difference between, you know, someone attacking Ravi Zacharias and saying, well, everything he said about his background is bogus.

39:23

No, I've never heard anyone say that. I would think that would be important. Well, see, the interesting thing, this is the really interesting thing.

39:31

I told our instructor that, hey, I recognize you don't feel like you need to check into that sort of thing, but I told him up front, since I am aware with that issue that occurs here,

39:45

I'm going to have to take everything he says with a grain of salt. And he acknowledged that. And so, later, a couple days later,

39:53

I sat down and I went back through the two videos that we watched in our class. And just about everything

40:01

Ergun Kanner said was true, as far as I can tell. Everything he said about Buddhism, it was verified by other sources

40:10

I found on the internet. It was verified in our textbook. And I was really sort of surprised.

40:19

I really sort of just expected him to cobble together a mishmash of false ideas, bogus claims, and things like that, but he didn't do that.

40:29

But see, Matt, I'd expect the exact opposite. And here's why. His Islamic stuff, that's what he's known for.

40:37

And so, he has to make that interesting. And he's had to couch it in terms of his personal experiences, or being trained in jihad, or raised in Turkey, and all the rest of this stuff, none of which was true.

40:53

When you start talking about other things, he's going to have to be using sources himself because he doesn't have any personal experience in it.

40:59

So, I would expect that, at least on a surface level, that you would have at least basic information that would be somewhat accurate about those groups.

41:09

But the issue is, he hasn't engaged those groups in meaningful debate.

41:16

He's claimed to, but no one can find any of these things. And when we do listen to the interviews that he has done at Liberty, and that's all they are, they're not debates, they're interviews.

41:30

I've not listened to the one he's had with the Buddhists. I think there is one with a Buddhist in there someplace. I listened to one he had with the

41:36

Oneness Pentecostal, and it was painful. But that wouldn't surprise me. I mean, if he's had to teach classes on this, sort of reminds me of the professor

41:45

I had when I was in college. And his expertise was limnology. Do you know what limnology is?

41:52

Limnology is a study of inland lakes and streams. And when it came to limnology, man, he could have written a book.

42:00

He knew it up one side and down the other. But because it was a small college, he had to teach other classes that were not a part of his field of expertise, and oh my, could you tell when he was doing that.

42:11

You could tell he was following the text very closely. When he'd ask questions, he would struggle to go beyond what the text itself said.

42:19

Not uncommon whatsoever. So that does not surprise me at all, because that's not the area that he has been interviewed as the great expert on and things like that.

42:29

So I would expect it to be at least somewhat accurate, because he's dependent upon secondary sources. Well, yes, that would make sense.

42:39

As far as his debates go, yeah, I know he hasn't done any debates or anything like that. I've pretty much become addicted to your show, so I've heard a lot of these things before.

42:50

But one of the other things that Eric and Kanner did in his video is that he said,

42:56

I'm going to present you an apologetic to Buddhism. And what he then went on to do was operate contrasts, like Jesus Christ doesn't have to exist for Buddhism to be true, but Jesus does have to exist for Christianity to be true.

43:12

And I'm wondering, could this possibly be one of the ways that he can say that he's done so many debates if he simply goes ahead and offers a contrast?

43:20

I really don't know. My understanding is that his claims of debates is a mixture of the interviews he's done with conversations he has had with students on college campuses as a student minister and as a speaker.

43:40

And so I honestly think that in his mind, if he talks with two Buddhist students on a campus after a talk that he's given at lunch hour, that he's included that as a debate.

43:53

That's my understanding. I don't see any other way of seeing it.

44:00

Well, we're going to be, at some point, I did ask my professor this, later on in our classes, we are going to be studying

44:08

Islam and Ergin Kaner will be at least one of the sources that he uses to give us some video information on what it is that Islam teaches.

44:20

And given what I've seen of those videos so far, they're the same kind of videos that Mohamed Khan has picked up on and has addressed and refuted.

44:30

And so I'm sort of wondering, I am only auditing these classes, but I feel like when that comes up and I, with my limited knowledge of Islam, can see those videos and see that Ergin Kaner is just making stuff.

44:46

Like, how am I supposed to go about telling my professor, look, you're using this source. I know you don't think you have to check it out, but I'm telling you, he's just, he's wrong.

44:55

He's lying. He's making things up. Yeah, well, I would direct him, we should have gotten by now the videotape, the

45:05

DVD of my debate with Basam Zawadi, haven't we, from London, from England? Because I know they've got it.

45:11

They have it over there. It was supposed to have been sent to us. We need to try to get that up as quickly as possible. I've got a lot of stuff on YouTube.

45:18

Some of the most recent stuff we haven't gotten to yet. We need to get to it. But I would just suggest to him, hey, why don't you compare what he has to say with listening to a debate?

45:29

You know, the debate that I did last year with Abdullah Al -Andalusi, the debate I just did with Basam Zawadi, and things like that, and you'll see much more information being presented, and you get both sides.

45:44

At least that way you know you're getting both sides of the picture, and you don't have to be worried about, you know, misleading your students at that point.

45:52

I think that's what my suggestion would be along those lines, or I would suggest to him, or provide him with the link.

45:57

Send him to him an email. He can look at it himself, something like that. But yeah, it's, well, this is the problem.

46:04

When you do apologetics, they're, you know, I would simply ask him one question. Then I'm going to need to run, Matt, because we've got a bunch of other callers here.

46:10

But I would ask him one question. If he's going to be using Ergen Kanner's material, then

46:16

I would direct him to the three questions that I asked Norman Geisler, and Ergen Kanner, and Ymir Kanner.

46:22

I have posted that YouTube video a number of times. It specifically asks, for example,

46:28

Norman Geisler to tell us what Hadith 2425 is, and what its relevance to the

46:33

Quran is, and point out to him, Kanner's own material uses citation methodologies of the

46:39

Hadith that no one could ever find this material. How are you going to present that to your class and say, here, look it up for yourself?

46:45

They can't. It's insufficient. It's not cited correctly, which means, obviously, the person who wrote it has never engaged that material at a deep enough level to even recognize that they were not citing it properly.

47:00

That's really one of the biggest questions I would ask at that point. But, hey, Matt, I appreciate your call.

47:07

All right, thank you for having me on. I'll certainly ask more questions. Thanks a lot. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, looking just at the times here, let's get to the folks who've been waiting the longest.

47:17

Let's talk with Ron in Phoenix. Thanks, Ron. Hello, Dr. White. Love your ministry. Yes, sir.

47:22

What can we do for you? I'm feeling a little under the weather, so I was wondering if I could take the,

47:28

I'm going to ask a couple questions and I'll listen to your response after you're off the phone. In dealing with Roman Catholics in the verse of Luke 128,

47:41

Ephesians 1 -6, get the Roman name. Right. I was presented with the one, the way they talk about the difference is they say one is an indicative, active heiress, and the other is a perfect, passive, part participle.

47:58

So they're two different forms of the verb. And the second part of my question is when they talk about Mary being full of grace, and then when you reference that to Stephen being full of grace in Acts 6 -8, they say the tense and usage of the

48:14

Greek indicates Stephen was full of grace in a particular moment of time, not since the beginning, like Mary was.

48:21

Whoever you're talking to cannot translate Greek. They are simply listening to other people who cannot translate

48:27

Greek, who are likewise just simply making things up as they go along. Serious Greek scholars recognize that that Rome's abuse of kakar temene at Luke 128 is just that, it is an abuse.

48:40

You're taking a greeting of an angel, and you're reading into it an amount of theology that is just absolutely breathtaking.

48:50

It was unknown to the early church. They did not find in these words what Rome has crammed into these words today.

48:57

And anyone who's making these arguments, for example, the Ephesians 1 -6, the whole point of the

49:03

Ephesians 1 -6 is that karatao is used of believers. And they're saying, well, karatao, which is the base form in kakar temene at Luke 128, well, that's something special about Mary.

49:18

Well, it's used of believers. Well, okay, it's used of believers, but it's used in a different tense there.

49:24

Oh, so it's the tense that makes a difference. So then when you go to other passages that use the same type of tense, well, it's the karatao that makes a difference.

49:33

Look, the fact of the matter is it's just an angelic greeting. The text never expands beyond that.

49:40

It never provides a foundation for anything beyond that. And you have to simply reject the ultimate authority of the written word and have to accept what pious people of some rank or another developed hundreds and frequently thousands of years later and read it back into these texts to come up with this kind of assertion.

50:05

To try to say, well, you need to find exact parallels to a vocative address of an angel in a participial form.

50:16

And that's the only way that you can dispute what we're saying. No, it's the Roman Catholic that has to prove from the text that their assertions are true.

50:26

They don't even try to. They don't even try to. They just simply make these grand assertions.

50:31

Well, it means this. Well, prove it. Show me that that's what the text means. Show me from the text, from the context, where does

50:38

Luke then expand out and show us that? Where did any of the New Testament writers see this? Where did anybody mention it?

50:44

Where has anybody in the first 200 years even having the idea that it means that? They can't do it and they know it because fundamentally

50:50

Rome's Marian dogmas are based upon modern Roman Catholic authority and nothing else.

50:55

It's a new revelation. And that's what it is. And it is an abuse of scripture to take these modern developments and cram them back into the beautiful words of the greeting of the angel to Mary.

51:14

Mary was called Kekar -te -mene because she was greatly blessed by God as being the one that he chose to be the mother of the

51:24

Messiah. That's all it means. It says nothing about her state. If you want to know something about her state, she called herself a sinner.

51:32

She said God was her savior. And when anybody says, oh, well, that's just a preemptive application of the merits of Christ.

51:39

Are you telling me Mary understood that? That is the height of eisegesis.

51:44

That's the height of the abuse of the text. And the vast majority of Roman Catholic exegetical scholars know that.

51:52

But the vast majority of apologists are stuck with the authority claims of Rome. So I'm sorry, but when you start taking apart what they say, it just simply doesn't work.

52:06

Okay, thank you very much. Okay, thank you, George, for your call. God bless, bye -bye. Looks like we need to go to, is

52:13

Jeff next? I believe Jeff in Philadelphia is next. Jeff, how you doing? Hello, Jeff.

52:21

Jeff in Philadelphia, one more time for Jeff. And, oh, there's Jeff. Hi.

52:28

Hi, how you doing? I'm doing well, good to talk to you again. Yes, sir. I just wanted to, it'll be a brief phone call.

52:35

I just wanted to kind of inform you that locally on a radio, which they've done to a podcast,

52:43

Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, Yes, uh -huh. called up.

52:48

And one of the things I know, not in the phone, but generally, he likes to attribute his father's behavior to his

52:58

Calvinistic belief. Oh, yes, uh -huh. So I called up and gave him your story about your confrontation with his father.

53:13

And that kind of set him back a little. Well, he actually said that was very interesting and had a few comments on it.

53:21

And I wasn't sure how to contact you and get your attention beyond calling you up and kind of,

53:29

I just wanted to point you that there is a podcast on the web and just wanted to talk to someone or email someone.

53:37

Yeah, yeah. Actually, the phone call was very, very interesting because I was telling him that it was super, superficially, very superficially, similar that he can't stomach anyone who kind of shows any differences whatsoever and kind of what the behavior.

53:56

So, but anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there too. Well, there's absolutely no question in my mind that Calvinism joined with the kind of cultic mentality and behavior of Fred Phelps would be very, very ugly.

54:13

But then again, anything joined with that kind of behavior is going to be very, very ugly. I mean -

54:19

Well, I feel very bad for Nate Phelps because he's kind of, he's become an atheist and he has a revulsion to Calvinism because of his father's behavior.

54:29

Of course. And Fred Phelps will be held accountable for that. But Nate Phelps needs to recognize that if he can see his own father's behavior and how irrational it is, then he should be the first one to recognize that the weight lays upon his father's behavior and that he could have used any religious system to do the same thing.

54:53

I mean, that's not going to be excused before God. My dad was a jerk. Oh, therefore I get to be a jerk as well?

55:02

No, I'm sorry, it doesn't follow. We live in a land where people say, well, if your parents were bad, then you're just excused for everything.

55:10

I'm sorry, I don't think that's going to fly. And the same thing in regards to issues of truth.

55:18

But I fully understand it on an emotional level, but we are human beings. We can control our emotions. That's what makes us human beings.

55:24

We're supposed to be able to make those types of decisions and differentiations. But Jeff, I appreciate it. And I appreciate you giving him a call and letting him know that that's not the direction to go.

55:35

All right, I know you have a full board, so God bless you. Talk to you again some other time. Thanks, Jeff. All right, God bless. I'll squeeze one more in here.

55:42

Jonathan. Hi, Jonathan. Hi, sir. How are you doing? Doing good. I've got another King James -only question for you.

55:48

I called a couple weeks ago, I think. Okay. I usually speak with King James -only to claim that the

55:54

King James Bible has never changed with the exception of the type studying, basically, and some minor punctuation spelling.

56:02

One thing I typically show them is a 1611 facsimile in the 1769 Blaney in a verse like 1

56:08

John 5, 12, where the 1611 says, "'Whoever hath not the

56:14

Son '," and the 1769 says, "'He that hath not the Son of God.'" Right. Which, this type of change, if it were in the

56:21

NIV or the NASD, would be a damnable, satanic omission or something like that. Of course it would be, of course. What I'm curious is, what actually led to this type of difference between the 1769 and the 1611?

56:34

Well, there is, real quickly, if you get Jack Lewis's book on the history of the

56:39

English Bible, 1 John 5, 12 is one of the, he lists as one of those texts, which was, see, the

56:48

King James didn't stop. The King James translators sort of kept working, and there were changes made in the early editions for a number of years.

56:58

And so, if my recollection is that that was one of the early edits that was made to the

57:06

King James during that first period of time, when you have the original translators who are still working on the changes that are being made in the official royal edition, as it would come out.

57:18

And so, I think that was made very, very early on. And the vast majority of them would have been done, as far as major changes like that, where you have an entire word, now some spelling issues and things like that might be done later on in other revisions that become more popular as even spelling was changing over time.

57:39

As you know, looking at the 1611 facsimile, it's very difficult to read. But the majority that would have a textual basis like that were done within the first few years of the 1611.

57:52

But it was a process. And even King James only folks, I mean, Peter Ruckman talks about a period of purification leading to the

58:02

Oxford edition of the Schofield Study Bible as the final perfect edition.

58:10

So, it did go through additions just like the new King James is going through additions and ESV goes through additions and so on and so forth.

58:17

Thank you, sir. Okay, all right. Thank you for your phone call. Thank you for your patience and sticking with us all the way to the end.

58:23

Sorry about the phone problems at the beginning, but we managed to get things worked out, except on Skype.

58:29

We didn't get Skype working today, but we'll figure it out. Thanks for listening to the program today. You're gonna have two full days off because we'll be here at our regular time,

58:37

Lord willing, on Thursday afternoon. We'll see you then. God bless. ♪ I believe we're standing at the crossroads ♪ ♪

58:53

Let this moment of suffering wait ♪ ♪ We must contend for the faith our fathers fought for ♪ ♪

58:59

We need a new Reformation day ♪ ♪ It's a sign of the times ♪ ♪

59:06

The truth is being trampled in and doing paradigms ♪ ♪ Won't you lift up your voice ♪ ♪

59:13

Are you tired of plain religion ♪ ♪ It's time to make some noise ♪ ♪ I'm not waiting for the truth ♪ ♪

59:19

I'm not waiting for the truth ♪ ♪ I'm not waiting for the truth ♪ ♪ I stand up for the truth ♪ ♪

59:26

Won't you live for the Lord ♪ ♪ Cause we're pounding, pounding on, waiting for the truth ♪

59:32

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59:40

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59:46

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