Latria, Dulia and Robert Sungenis

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

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

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

James White. Good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line. As I noted on the blog just a little while ago, actually, for those of you who are net savvy, and of course, if you're listening to this, you probably are at least somewhat net savvy.

I thought about writing out my response, and I thought, you know what, it's a whole lot easier to do this on The Dividing Line, and it is illustrative,

I think, once again, of the vast difference between those who derive their theology from the text of Scripture and those who force their theology onto the text of Scripture.

Received an email from a Roman Catholic, says, again, regarding the issue, it's been going on for a few weeks now, simply, once again, repeating the discussion of Latria and Dulia.

Now, let me make sure that everyone is up to speed here. I don't want to make anyone feel like this is not a program for them.

I think even if your interests are not specifically in the Roman Catholic area, but your interests include biblical theology and the like, that this is something that would be worthwhile to you, especially in regards to how you do exegesis and from whence you derive your religious authority.

Roman Catholicism promotes religious veneration of saints, angels, you will, if you've ever been to a

Roman Catholic church, see Roman Catholics bowing before a statue and on their knees rocking back and forth, fingering a rosary, lighting candles in intense religious devotion.

And Rome says this is not a violation of biblical commands against worshiping an idol.

We're not worshiping the idol. We only worship God. And they substantiate this by differentiating between two terms.

They say that God alone is given Latria. God alone is given Latria, and that Latria, however, is given to God and is also given to the transubstantiated host representing

Christ's body in the tabernacle. But even

Mary is not given Latria. Mary is given Hyperdulia while the saints and angels are given

Dulia. So the distinction is made between Dulia and Latria.

And since I'm only giving Latria to God and I'm giving Dulia to these other things, then

I'm not violating biblical commands. And of course, historically, Protestants have rejected this distinction and Roman Catholics have sought to defend it.

I've made the simple observation that if you are a consistent Roman Catholic and you don't derive your beliefs from the

Bible, fundamentally, you may accept the Bible as the word of God. You may say you believe it very highly, but the fact of the matter is it's not your ultimate authority.

The church is your ultimate authority because the church, you say, is infallible and the church, you say, defines the extent of the canon of Scripture and the meaning of Scripture.

The extent of what is tradition and what is not tradition, what tradition means. And so I submit to you that on any logical or rational basis, you cannot say that the scriptures are your ultimate authority.

The church is your ultimate authority and therefore you believe what you believe. And it is accepting the church's definition.

You have to be so confident that the church is what the church claims to be, that you would be willing to stand before a holy

God, having engaged in that activity throughout your life with absolute confidence that the church is right in making this distinction.

And that distinction will stand up before the very throne of God itself on the judgment day.

The Protestant says the church is not infallible. That the church's authority comes from her fidelity to the message that has been entrusted to her in the proclamation of that message.

And while that gives true authority, it does not mean that we have to be infallible to pronounce infallible words from God's scriptures.

And so it is rather appropriate that I had a person write to me over the past,

I guess, probably 24 hours at some point, I received the message this morning. And it says, simply dismiss any philosophical, logical distinction between Lottery and Contra Dulia.

I guess that your Contra Dulia Lottery argument would work if you could first prove the novel, anti -Orthodox, anti -scriptural, heretical position of Sola Scriptura.

And what I appreciate about that is it illustrates really what the division is.

All the citations of scripture I can give and all the argumentation demonstrating that the distinction that Rome is absolutely dependent upon and asserts does not come from the

Bible, but is artificial, it's external. All of that is irrelevant to the person who doesn't have any concern about being submitted to the authority of God's word.

And once you've accepted Rome's claims, you don't have to worry about being submitted to the authority of God's word, because in your thinking, by being submitted to the church, you are being submitted to God's word, because God's word becomes mediated to you through the church.

And so the church has allegedly struggled with all these things. The Second Nicene Council allegedly struggled with all these things.

They didn't. But that's the reality that you are told. And so by your submission to the church, then you believe that you're submitted to the word of God.

And of course, our argument for a long time has been, well, this actually demonstrates just how far from being submitted to the word of God Rome actually is.

It is so obvious to us that the argumentation used by Rome would never suffice in any meaningful context.

We've used the illustration many times, and it's a proper illustration. I've never seen any refutation of it.

But if a person were found bowing down before an idol of Baal in their tent in the days of Moses, and they were brought before Moses, would the argumentation that a

Roman Catholic uses today to bow down before a statue of Mary, to bow down before an angel, to bow down before any kind of statue or representation of a departed believer, would the argumentation that they use today avail before Moses?

Or are they saying, no, but there's something things have changed since then. Are they sort of throwing a dispensational style argument in there?

I don't think so. And so this issue really does illustrate, just as all the

Marian dogmas do, what happens when you reject sola scriptura. You're left with no scriptura at all.

The message of the scriptura is thoroughly and completely denigrated when you allow some other authority to stand as your ultimate authority when it comes to these issues.

Well, I have presented this, we've debated this issue on Long Island.

We heard there from Patrick Madrid that, you know, those commandments against idolatry were just for people who have problems with idolatry.

And if that's true, then that means they're perfectly valid for all people at all times because all people in all times have problems with idolatry.

But recently, I have raised these issues in a blog article, and this is what

I guess started all of this, a blog article. Let's see here, the date was 21st of August.

And I was talking about the issues of Latria and Dulia, and I was talking about someone calling into the program, and I made the following statement that this person should call in and prove me wrong, and here's the quote, that the central semantic core of Dulia and Latria intersect smack dab in the middle of avad,

Hebrew term meaning to serve, to work, so that any person seeking to give pure avadah, to God, service, cannot in any way, shape or form pretend to be serving an image while only worshiping

God. Okay, there's the assertion, that's 21st August, and there was the assertion that I made, and what is all that saying?

Well, obviously, I was utilizing a certain amount of language there that would demonstrate the person

I was challenged to call in doesn't have any training in those areas and wouldn't be able to engage those subjects, and when that person called in, that's exactly what happened and was demonstrated.

But let me explain what was being said, because this email, which I've posted on the blog, if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to take a look at it, this email that's floating around that allegedly

I have not written to Robert St. Genes to say, is this your writing, so I'm going to, right up front here, say this email was allegedly written by Robert St.

Genes, I don't know that, I don't have any reason to accuse the person on the Envoy Forums of lying in saying this came from Robert St.

Genes, I'm assuming that that probably did, but since I have not actually taken the time to contact

Robert St. Genes to find out, I'm going to say that it is claimed to have been written by Robert St.

Genes. There is an email that seeks to respond, seemingly, only to that portion of that sentence on my blog, that the central semantic core of Dulya and Latria intersect smack dab in the middle of avad, so that any person seeking to give pure avodah to God cannot in any way, shape or form, pretend to be serving an image while only worshipping

God. That is going right back to those two terms,

Latria and Dulya. Now, Latria and Dulya come from Latin, but they're actually loan words straight from the Greek, and here is where we find the difference between consistent biblical

Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. When I stand before God, I want to be able to do so with a clean conscience, and I want to be able to answer any questions about my worship based upon what

God has said in his word. I'm not going to look to somebody else and say, well, he told me I could. I don't think that's going to work.

And so I want to derive my definition of worship not from the

Second Council of Nicaea. The Second Council of Nicaea was far removed from the apostolic period.

The Second Council of Nicaea was not dealing with these biblical issues, was not engaging in the kind of exegetical study that would give it any kind of authority to the person who, like the psalmist, contemplates the word of God, not contemplating the traditions of men.

And so I want to make sure that my worship is in accordance with the word of God.

And so I'm going to go to the scriptures to define worship, and I'm going to go to the scriptures to define

Latria and Dulya. In fact, I'm going to hold

Rome to a biblical standard, even though Rome, if you really think about it, rejects that she can be held to a biblical standard.

She rejects that constraint upon her. And a consistent

Roman Catholic would start, as my correspondent did, by attacking sola scriptura and calling it heretical.

But since I believe in sola scriptura and have defended it, I think, successfully a number of times against Roman Catholic apologists, when we go to the scriptures, what

I'm saying, the claim that I was making in that article, is that when you look at the semantic core of Dulya and Latria, now what in the world is a semantic core?

Well, words have what are called a semantic domain.

Some words have very wide semantic domains. The term logos in Greek, for example, very wide semantic domain.

What does that mean? It's used in a lot of different ways. And if you were to draw a circle representing the range of its meanings, it would be a pretty broad circle that would allow a lot of sub meanings and a lot of sub uses in particular contexts within that semantic domain.

I love having live people listening right now. Never mind about the alleged part.

Sam Shamoon is listening and he says that question 13 on Robert Syngenis' site is the exact email that I've received.

So drop all the alleged part. We are definitely going to demonstrate that Robert Syngenis doesn't know the basics of these issues either, as we look at this subject today.

Thank you very much, Mr. Shamoon. So you can tell this is a live webcast, and that's what makes it better than a dead webcast.

So anyway, as we look at the subject of words, some words are very, very specific and therefore they have a very narrow semantic domain.

And you will only find them being used in contexts where that narrow semantic domain is going to fit.

There are very technical terms, for example, especially today in science, in computers, electronics, and things like that, where you have a very narrow meaning to a word.

It can only be used in certain contexts. And of course, then you have all sorts of words that fall in the middle that have wider and wider context to them.

When we look at Lottery and Dulia, as used in the discussion of what worship is, we discover that terms can overlap one another.

Their semantic domains can overlap one another to where they can become, in a sense, synonymous with one another or can be used in parallel with one another.

If you're familiar with the Hebrew language, you know, reading Hebrew poetry, you will encounter what's called parallelism.

And that is the Hebrew language's way of repeating something. And by repeating it and using other terminology to express it, you're filling that meaning out.

That doesn't mean that in every single instance, the two terms that you're going to parallel always mean the same thing, but that there is a place where their semantic domains cross over one another.

All right. So, what I said was that when you look at the semantic core of Dulia and Lottery, not the

Latin because there is no Latin in the New Testament, but as they come into Duluo, Latruo, the two verbal forms of service and worship in the

New Testament. And then, remember, if you're talking about New Testament terminology, what is the single greatest impact?

What's the single greatest resource, the single source that has the biggest impact on how

New Testament writers are going to define words? It's called the

Greek Septuagint. And anyone who especially reads

Paul, but all of the New Testament writers, anyone who ignores the usage of the

Septuagint, the fact that in the New Testament, the vast majority of citations from the

Old Testament are not from the Hebrew. They are from the Greek Septuagint. The Greek translation of the

Old Testament, when you then follow Latruo and Duluo and their substantival forms into the

Greek Septuagint, you can then see what Hebrew terms are translated by them.

And when you do that, you are brought back to a certain text that we have looked at before.

And what is that text? Exodus chapter 20, the 10 sayings, which we call the 10 commandments.

But the 10 sayings, the first rendition thereof,

Exodus chapter 20, verse 5, you will also find this in the Deuteronomy rendering of this, in speaking against idolatry and false gods.

You shall not worship them or serve them, Exodus 20, verse 5 says, for I, Yahweh your

God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.

Now, there are two Greek terms and two

Hebrew terms that appear at the beginning of Exodus chapter 20, verse 5. And when you go to Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 9, you find the exact same terms being used there as well.

In the Hebrew, the first which is rendered to worship means to bow down.

Now, one of the amazing things that I'm seeing in reading Roman Catholics who are desperately trying to find some way around this argumentation, and it, sorry, does smack of pure desperation, is the argument that if you can find any exception to the statement that you've succeeded in defeating the argument.

The problem is the exceptions to the statement they keep finding are not in a religious context. We're talking about worship here.

We're talking about God defining for us what worship is. We're not talking about the fact that in Oriental cultures, people would bow down before a superior.

Now, there are places in Daniel, for example, where Daniel will not bow down. Why? Because it was placed in the context of worship.

And yet Daniel will then allow Nebuchadnezzar to bow down before him because it wasn't in the context of worship.

See? Simple contextual stuff. Very basic. Very, very basic. But again,

Rome's apologists really struggle on the biblical level. They really do. Let's just face it. Their biblical argumentation is normally exceptionally shallow.

And they don't seek to try to get their people to go deeply into these issues because they discover the contradictions.

And so the first Hebrew term that is utilized refers to bowing down.

The second term is the term that I used, avad, in the blog article.

And it is a term, just as in English, our word work has a wide semantic domain.

It can be used as a noun. It can be used as a verb. That doesn't work. You didn't show up to work.

There's a lot of different ways that we can utilize this term. All right? And of course, in Hebrew, the same way.

And so if you do a search on avad, you're going to find it used many, many times in many different ways.

But you're also going to find that it is consistently used in context of worship, both true and false worship.

And that's what's appearing here. You shall not worship them, that is, bow down to them, or serve them.

Now, when this concept comes into Greek, you can translate avad by two different Greek words easily.

And guess what they come into as Latin, dulia and latria, duluo, latruo.

In fact, when this text is used in the New Testament, ironically, the verb that is used to render it is latruo, which is the higher form in Greek.

It is more often connected, certainly in the New Testament, it's always connected. And then in secular writings, more often connected with religious worship.

And yet it means to serve, to do work, which is exactly what dulia means. And so the whole point of my statement on the blog was that the semantic domains where these two terms cross over is right where avad is here in Exodus 20.

And anyone who's studied the text and studied the uses, they know that. They knew what I was saying.

It doesn't seem, however, that many of the Catholic apologists who have tried to respond to this understood that.

It's interesting, when we go to the New Testament, for example, the very final book, in the canon anyways, Revelation chapter 22, in describing the new heavens and earth, there will no longer be any curse and the throne of God and of the

Lamb will be in it. And his bondservants will, his douloi, which is the plural substantival form of a servant from dulia, doulos, douloi, his bondservants will latruo him.

If you want sparkling evidence that these words go hand in hand with one another in regards to what worship is.

My point has always been, it is an artificial, unbiblical distinction to say that latria and dulia can be disconnected from one another.

I'm not giving dulia, I'm giving latria. Or I'm not giving latria, I'm only giving dulia.

What you serve is what you worship and what you worship is what you serve. And if you're not serving what you claim to worship, you're not worshiping it.

In fact, I would argue what you serve is far more what you worship than what you say you worship.

There's a lot of Christians running around saying, I worship God, I love God, but they won't be in the house of worship on a

Sunday because they got to be out on the lake in their boat. I'm telling you something, you're serving your boat and that's your

God. Your actions demonstrate it. You can't divide these things up.

It's not biblical. But again, a lot of these folks just open and say,

I don't care if it's biblical or not. Rome says otherwise. That's why I can get away with it.

That's what Rome says. So with that as a background, then, let's look at this claim by Robertson Jennings.

In fact, I'm going to go ahead and just click on that and bring it up since it's number 13.

There's number 12. There's number 13. All right. Okay.

Interesting. A little mention about Art Sippo there. At least he put the, he's in Art Sippo's camp and anyone who has experienced the blast furnace charity of Sippo knows what that means.

I love it. All right. Mistress and Janice says, White is barking up the wrong tree. First of all, there is no central semantic core of Dulia and Latria.

There are two distinct words in Greek and there is no middle ground between them. If there was a middle ground, the Greeks would have assigned that to another word, as they usually did in such cases.

Second, it is erroneous to then claim that a Hebrew word would be in the middle of two Greek words, whatever that means. This is a conflation of languages that has no linguistic or biblical support, just an ipsodic set of whites.

Hence, the concluding argument that is that any person seeking to give pure service to God cannot pretend to be serving an image while only worshiping

God cannot be based on white's artificial and unproven linguistic premise. Whether white's concluding argument is true or not must be sought after on other grounds.

As it stands, there is a great enough distinction between Dulia and Latria in Greek to say that an individual can give honor or service,

Dulia, to a being that is not divine, at the same time reserve worship, Latria, to God alone. Of the four nouns and 21 verb forms of Latria in the

New Testament, they all refer to worship of God, with the only exception being of those who erroneously direct their worship to false gods.

In no instance is Latria ever assigned as honor or service to a human being. The same is true with the use of Latria in the

Septuagint. Dulia, on the other hand, can be used of service toward God or man, but when it is directed toward man, it is never coupled with the word

Latria. That is where the argument should rest, and that is the Catholic argument. As such, we can argue that one can venerate an image, yet direct worship to God alone that stands behind that image.

Let's respond to this. First of all, there is no central semantic core of Dulia and Latria. Either Robertson -Genis doesn't understand what a semantic core would be, or he is being deceptive, one of the two.

That's the only possibilities I can see here. As I've explained it, which the only thing

I can see here is that he doesn't understand this. As I've explained it, there are places, obviously, where the two terms, semantic ranges, overlap and they do so right where avad is, and avad's meaning is in Exodus 20,

Deuteronomy 5, and so on and so forth. And so, when he says, they are two distinct words in Greek, that's a given, but there was nothing in what

I said, at least to a person who understood what I said, that would cause there to be a problem with that.

They are two distinct words in Greek, and there is no middle ground between them. What do you mean there is no middle ground between them?

Obviously, we have places, I just cited a place, where you have the substantival form used as a description, servants, duloi, and latruo used in the context of worship in Revelation 22.

We have in Galatians, Paul saying that the Galatians, when they were engaged in idolatry, served those which by nature are no gods.

Now, is Paul actually saying that they were to be excused because they were only giving dulia?

That's duluo there. I mean, again, it just almost seems that Mr.

St. Genes is completely unfamiliar with what the arguments here are, or he has never looked at what I've said about it, which is quite possible.

Or he's only seen what he wants to see about it. How many times has he misquoted the fatal flaw, trying to say, I teach

Roman Catholic views of the mass? We've caught him on that over and over and over again. So, he evidently is too busy with these other theories of his about Jews and geocentrism and stuff like that to keep up with what we're actually talking about.

He says there's no middle ground between them. If there was a middle ground, the Greeks would have assigned that to another word, as they usually did in such cases.

You can't even respond to such a vague statement, because give me an example. What do you mean? And besides, it's based upon, evidently, a misunderstanding in his part of what

I was saying. So, his first point is dismissed and is an error. Second, it is erroneous to then claim that a

Hebrew word would be in the middle of two Greek words, whatever that means. Well, again, if Mistress and Janice had read the

Roman Catholic controversy, if he had listened to the debates, if he would go back and read Calvin's discussion of such things, or if he'd even looked at the blog article itself,

I mean, it's possible. And again, this will just demonstrate that Mistress and Janice doesn't check his sources, but it is possible that what happened.

And I'm going to go this direction, even though it wouldn't be unusual for Bob Stranis to do something like this.

But I think what happened was, is somebody quoted, they cut and pasted that section of the blog article and sent it to him for comment, because they don't know enough of the languages to be able to respond to it.

The problem is, you have to have the right fonts. And if the fonts, if even

St. Janice doesn't have the right fonts of the Hebrew, it wouldn't come across to him. And that's why he doesn't comment on it. Now, I thought

I saw, when this first appeared on the

Envoy forums, I thought I saw a transliterated, and it was what would be the transliterated form of the font for Hebrew, still in it there.

And maybe it got cleaned up before it was put on the website. But I think it was at least mentioned one way or the other.

But the point is, he doesn't deal with Avad. He doesn't deal with the fact that what you do in biblical theology is you look at Hebrew terms, you look at what they're saying, and then you look at the

Greek translations thereof and how those come in the New Testament. He's not doing that.

He's dismissing that and ignoring the fact that that is the core of my argumentations.

No wonder that these folks don't call up with a reputation, because evidently they don't understand what the core of this stuff is.

So, it is erroneous to then claim that a Hebrew word would be in the middle of two Greek words, whatever that means. No, it's not.

What I'm saying is that the semantic domain of Latria and Dulia, of Latruo and Duluo, in regards to religious worship, come together and are used synonymously within the context of what

Avad means in Exodus chapter 20 and Deuteronomy chapter 5, and it comes in the New Testament that way. Disprove that.

You can't. The text is right there. It's not disputable. This is a conflation of languages and has no linguistic or biblical support.

No, it is a demonstration that either St. Genes didn't have the blog article or has not read enough of the background to know what we're talking about.

So, he's just giving a response off the top of his head that has no meaning to it. Just an ipsodixit of whites.

Well, we can dismiss that as well. Hence, the concluding argument that is that any person seeking to give pure service to God cannot pretend to be serving an image while only worshiping

God cannot be based on white's artificial and unproven linguistic premise. Well, we've blown away everything he said to this point.

We have substantiated everything I've said to this point. And so, we have provided the substantiation.

You cannot say, I am serving this, not worshiping this, in the context of worship.

It can't be done. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them. That's what the

Bible says. And the excuses that Rome's apologists are coming up with are often contradictory to one another.

I mean, notice he's not doing the Patrick Madrid thing here and saying, well, that was only relevant back then when people had problems with idolatry.

You know, we don't have problems with idolatry anymore. Well, I just looked at the clock and we're going long on the break here.

It's going to take a quick break. Going to finish up this email. And then, if there are any phone calls relevant to this subject or to the second subject, we'll go ahead and take those at 877 -753 -3341 and then come back with the seven steps defense on Romans 1 that homosexuals use.

We'll be looking at that as well. We'll be right back. this foundational doctrine.

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And welcome back to The Dividing Line.

We are looking at, uh, you know, the nice thing about doing the program live, and also a nice thing about not having it necessarily scripted out way, way, way ahead of time is you can, you can do stuff that's, that's, it's fresh.

It's, it's what's going on right now, apologetically. But that does remind me that a week from Thursday, we will be doing a special program.

I will have as my guest, Dr. Jim Renahan of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies, Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California.

And, uh, we are going to be discussing his work over there. Some of you may know that Jim Renahan was the, uh, uh, fine gentleman with whom

I, uh, teamed up to debate John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg on the subject of the resurrection last year.

And, uh, we're gonna be talking a little bit about John Owen and Owen's influence upon, uh, the

English Baptist of the 17th century and the 1689

London Baptist Confession of Faith. Of course, the Savoy Declaration, very important to the 1689 and things like that.

And, uh, you will find, I think, uh, Jim Renahan to just be a, a tremendous resource, uh, for, um, uh, things scholarly and historical.

And so we will have him on the program next, uh, Thursday, uh, here on The Dividing Lines.

So, uh, make sure to be with us at that, uh, point in time. Um, so we are looking at Robert St.

Genesis' claims regarding basically a sentence. Was it a, I don't even know if it was a full sentence.

I'd have to look back at it here. Let me, uh, there it is. Was it even a full sentence? Um, yeah, one, one full sentence from my, my blog article of August 21st.

And, uh, that was posted on Envoy and then was sent to me by email. And, uh, then, uh,

Sam Shamoon, uh, founded on, uh, uh, Robert St. Genesis' website. And so we're looking at it as it is found there.

But you will notice that until I knew that, until it appeared on, saw it on St.

Genesis' website, I said, allegedly, supposedly, uh, that's how it should be done.

I wish other people would return that favor. I can't believe how many times I've seen people ripping my lips off for things

I never, ever would have said. Um, uh, and then when you ask them, well, how do you know

I said that? Well, somebody told me. And when you actually go and look at it, you discover they'd even, they either changed something or were completely ignoring the context or whatever else as it was.

But you can't expect that. You can't expect to be treated in that, uh, in that fashion.

If you're going to engage in apologetics, that's the nature of the beast. Um, so he says that, uh, uh, we can only determine whether my argument, that any person seeking to give pure service to God cannot pretend to be serving an image while only worshiping

God, cannot be based on White's artificial and proven linguistic premise. Whether White's concluding argument is true or not must be sought after on other grounds.

Well, no, it has been firmly grounded in the language itself. And again, if Mr.

St. Genesis would like to defend the idea that he would be willing to stand before Moses, uh, have him been caught, uh, bowing down before a statue of Mary in his tent.

I know I'm being anachronistic there, but let's, let's make it real. I don't think that the, the Jews would have accepted that.

And, uh, that, that he would try to introduce this very distinction that his entire soul depends upon, uh, to Moses, it wouldn't have worked.

Um, that's just all there is to it. Um, then he says, as it stands, there is great enough distinction between Dulya and Latria in Greek to say that an individual can give honor or service,

Dulya, to a being that is not divine. At the same time, reserve worship Latria to God alone. And, and that's not

Robert St. Genesis' Ipse Dixit. Uh, have we, have we not seen that, that Latruo is used to translate

Avad, which means service, which is also used, which is also translated by Dulyuo.

I mean, he doesn't show any knowledge of that background or any concern about that background.

And so he simply ignores that background, goes to seemingly secular usage of those terms and says, well, that's enough for Rome.

And you know what? For a person who rejects the Bible as the final authority, um, that is enough.

There's, there's no question about it. Uh, they don't, you know, they don't have to care about this. Uh, then he, he mentions, uh, the uses of Latria in the

New Testament and Dulyuo in the New Testament and says that that is where the argument should rest.

And that is the Catholic argument as such, we can argue that one can venerate an image and yet direct worship to God alone that stands behind that image.

Again, if you want to ignore, uh, the Old Testament backgrounds, if you want to ignore that which gave the greatest, uh, amount of definitional input to utilization of words in the

New Testament, hey, go for it. But just be very open and tell folks, look, this only works if you reject

Sola Scriptura. If you actually want to define what worship is from the Bible, don't use this argument.

And I hope that they'll be really honest and upfront with everybody and say, and when you stand before God, make sure that your final and ultimate trust is not in the

Bible, it's in the Church of Rome. Because really to be consistent, that's what your final authority has to be.

You have to trust implicitly because you're going against what the Bible says.

So Rome must be right. Same thing. Remember, it's, it's,

I'll never, ever, ever forget. When Jerry Matatick said that we have the same epistemological foundation or grounding for believing in the bodily assumption of Mary as we have the resurrection of Christ, and it's the

Church. And it's the Church. And, uh, that's, hey, that's consistent

Roman Catholicism. Now, ironically, that's led him to be a Sedevacantist. There is no valid Pope in Rome.

Uh, and, you know, some, I, I just, I can just see all those Roman Catholics, you shouldn't bring up Jerry.

Why not? You, you guys certainly didn't have any problem plastering his face all over Catholic answers materials when he was a convert and the first PCA minister to become a

Roman Catholic, did you? Oh, no, you were distributing his tapes all over the place. Why don't you distribute them now?

Because he says there's no Pope in Rome, basically. Well, anyway, that's, uh, there's a response to, uh, to that particular material.

And, uh, we do so right off of the bat here on the program. And so in the last few minutes, uh,

I want to, uh, to completely change gears. Uh, but not completely.

The subject's completely different. The people are completely different. But we're still going back to the authority of God's word and how we can illustrate and not illustrate how we can respond to the false utilization of the word of God.

And utilizing bad argumentation to get around its plain meaning, because some of the plainest things the

Bible teaches are there is only one true God and you're to worship him and worship him only. And Rome gets around that one with her false distinctions between Lottery and Julia.

Uh, and then we have the metropolitan churches, the homosexual churches, and their arguments on the subject of Romans chapter one.

Now, I, I raised this particular subject, uh, having listened this morning while I was writing to a, uh, a presentation by one of the leaders of the, uh, of those particular churches.

And in fact, uh, I'm, I'm sort of expecting shortly after this, uh, this program, uh, ends to receive this man's book in the, uh, in the mail, actually.

At least I hope that that's going to be the case. And I want to sort of go back a little bit to, um, uh, a story that some of you may be aware of.

And that is the genesis of the book that I coauthored with Jeff Neal on the same sex controversy.

Went back a number of years ago to a gentleman who was a part of, uh, who was on, uh,

KXEG radio. Was it KXEG? No, KPXQ. KPXQ radio here in Phoenix, a fellow by the name of Marty Minto.

And a couple of times he would do a week on the subject of homosexuality and he was doing such a week once and he was going to have a homosexual pastor on from a local,

I'm not sure if it's actually directly associated with the Metropolitan Church or not. And I, I knew that, but I really hadn't planned on listening.

I, I, I had a lot of other things going on and I woke up the morning, it was a

Thursday morning with one of the worst migraine headaches of my life.

It was one of those that wakes you up before you're supposed to wake up. Um, light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, motion sensitivity.

It was a hum dinger, uh, just really bad.

And I'm just sort of laying around because I'm, I'm the only thing that gets rid of this kind of headache for me is a trip to my chiropractor.

My C1 and C2 go the opposite directions and, and once I get an adjustment, I'll be fine.

But unfortunately they didn't open on Thursdays until three o 'clock in the afternoon. So I was just going to have to suffer for a while.

You can take all the Advil and, uh, all the, um, Tylenol and all the aspirin and all the caffeine and everything else you want.

It's, it's only dulls this and makes you feel icky. So anyway,

I get a phone call about 10 o 'clock in the morning from Marty Minto's producer. Would you please come on the program and debate these, uh, a homosexual pastor and one of his parishioners?

Now, this was not an area of my expertise to begin with. Um, I immediately called

Jeff Neal because Jeff had just done a series of sermons in his church on that subject and he had actually gone down and interviewed some of these people.

And so he said he'd go. My chiropractor opened at three, the program started at five.

So I figured I hit the chiropractor at three and Lord willing, there'll be something of me there by, by five o 'clock.

So we sit down at five o 'clock. Yes. Within 10 minutes, the, uh, the headache was gone. I thank the

Lord. And that was a program that I really, really, really, really wish had been recorded.

But while the station recorded it, they, somebody grabbed the wrong mini disc and whatever it was, mini tape, whatever they used and overrode it.

And we've never been able to find a tape of that particular two, two or three hour program.

I forget how long it was, but it was, uh, this homosexual minister and one of his parishioners versus, uh,

Jeff Neal and myself, Marty Minto was doing the moderation. And the part that I remember other than the conversations between segments on the air, which were interesting, but the part that I remember most explicitly was toward the end of the program, though,

Jeff and I had a number of times raised Romans one, the folks on the other side had never addressed it.

And so once again, the issue came up and the minister presented what was clearly not his own material.

It was clearly a pre -memorized or at least something that, that there was an outline that he had used over and over and over and over again.

You could just tell by the way he spoke and the speed with which he was able to do this.

This was, this was not something new and this was not his. And now I know where it came from because I listened to it again this morning.

In essence, this is a, a standard metropolitan community church argument.

And it is something that obviously it's been recorded many times and they pass it around to one another.

And this is how they get around Romans chapter one. And in case you're wondering, just one more time, beginning at verse 26, for this reason,

God gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

And the same way, also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons, the due penalty of their error.

Now, the Christian church down through the, the history of the church has seen in verses 26 to 27, a description of adult homosexuality, both lesbianism and male homosexuality, that this is not just a pederasty or anything like that.

Because this is women and men burning in their desire toward one another.

This is reciprocal. It is very descriptive of the kind of standard homosexual behavior and orientation that exists in our society today.

Well, his argument was that there are seven steps in Romans chapter one.

And these seven steps, you have to take each one of them for the argument relevant to you.

And let me see how many of these, let me, let me, I can repeat this for you, but that's never quite the same as letting them say it.

Here is the head of the Metropolitan Church, a former fundamentalist

Baptist, actually, preaching on this subject in regards to one of the, what they call the clobber passages,

Romans chapter one. At revelation. And that begins the downward spiral that the apostle

Paul is going to tell us about. Step one in his downward spiral is articulated in verse number 21.

For though they knew God, they did not honor God or give thanks, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.

In other words, here is step one people. The people Paul is talking about are people who refuse to acknowledge or glorify

God. And once they take that step, Paul says it will often lead to step number two, which is described in Romans 122, claiming to be wise.

They became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal human beings or birds or four -footed animals or reptiles.

Are you following what's being said here? As step two, these people who have initially refused to acknowledge the invisible, infinite, immortal

God now begin to worship idols, graven images made with human hands set up in pagan temples.

That leads to step number three, as recorded in Romans 124 and 25.

Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

That last phrase traces out for us step number three. These people

Paul is talking about become so focused on the creature, on earthly things, they don't care about the creator, about heavenly things.

Which leads to step number four, recorded in verses 26 and 27. For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions.

Their women exchanged the natural intercourse for unnatural and in the same way also the men.

Now, note the precise words of this verse. It's going to be very important for the discussion that follows.

Paul says the women he's referring to in this second sentence exchanged intercourse that was natural for them for a form of intercourse.

In this case, homosexual intercourse that was unnatural for them. That word exchange is important because it means he's beginning with the factual presumption that they were heterosexual and that they began engaging in a form of intercourse that was unnatural for them.

We'll come back to that in a second. This then is step four, giving up sex that was natural for them, which then leads to his fifth and final step in verse 29 and following.

They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, full of envy, murders, strife, deceit, craftiness.

They are gossip, slanderers, God haters, and the list goes on and on. Step five is these people that Paul is describing end up living lives overflowing with wickedness.

So there you have it. Paul lays out for us five key facts that comprise the case that was presented to him for decision.

Paul took those facts, that case, consulted the Holy Spirit and reached a conclusion, issued a ruling, if you will.

And it's clear from this passage that the ruling that Paul is issuing could be summarized as something like no homosexual sex.

Now, centuries later, 21 centuries later, along comes people like myself asking a question.

Does Paul's ruling apply to my situation?

There are some Christians who would say the ruling is so clear, you don't even need to know anything else.

Of course it does. Beware of butt dust conclusions.

Remember what we spent the whole first half of this sermon talking about? Words take their meaning from their context.

A ruling ripped out of its context is apt to be misapplied. And so if we really care about the authoritative text and applying it in a way that is faithful to its original intent, we have to pause and take time to compare the facts of the case that Paul was considering to the facts of the case that we are now bringing to the scriptures.

And if the facts are quite similar, the ruling applies. End of case. If the facts are radically different, then the ruling doesn't apply.

So let's trace it back through comparing Paul's case to the case we are bringing to scriptures.

Unfortunately, our time is fleeing. So let me summarize what most of you have already figured out.

What he's going to say is the facts are different because God made me homosexual. And it's natural for me.

This is only about people who are naturally heterosexuals engaging in homosexuality. He's actually going to finish the entire section by saying that Romans chapter 1 is that God wants us to live naturally.

And so if God made you to be a heterosexual, then you should live as a heterosexual. If God made you be a homosexual, he actually goes screaming at one point that in the name of Jesus Christ in Romans 1, then don't try to be a heterosexual.

And that's going to be the argumentation he's going to make. However, notice the argumentation. He's then going to say, you see,

I never started down this path. I want to glorify

God. I have not suppressed the truth of God. Each one of these steps. He had five steps. The other guy had seven.

So I'm not sure exactly how they split those up. But there's these five steps. And I haven't gone down these steps.

This isn't me. I do honor God. And I do give thanks.

And so this is not descriptive of me. And so how do you respond to that?

That's what I wanted to ask the audience today is not so much respond for you. But how would you respond to that?

If I were going to say, I'm not going to answer this until the next dividing line. And you run into a homosexual that uses this argument.

And since it's on all their websites, you're going to, if you're going to have this discussion, you're going to run into this steps argument from Romans chapter one.

How would you respond to it? So I sit here in the silence for a moment.

How would you respond to it? Do you have to go down all these things? Do you have to go down all these steps? Is this, you see, the whole argument is to so narrow down who

Paul's talking about, that it could only apply to a very small group of people. And folks, the logical ramification of that would be.

That you can, you can be disobedient to parents. As long as you say you honor

God, because that's not me. I didn't go down that road. I didn't take those steps.

All that stuff in 29 following, it can't apply to me because I want to honor God. It turns the text on its head.

That is more than enough in of itself to refute that utilization. But you see all of their arguments, even when they disagree with one of them, all of their arguments try to so narrow down what the apostle is speaking of, that they can then dodge it and say, it doesn't apply to me.

Doesn't apply to me. I eventually stopped and turned it off because the sermon ended with this man singing a solo of have thine own way,

Lord. I couldn't finish listening to it, but that's what's going on, folks. That's what's out there.

You need to be prepared. Thanks for listening. God bless. Brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602. Or write us at P .O.

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World Wide Web at aomin .org. That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G. Where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.