Road Trip Dividing Line from Albuquerque!

Church History, Irenaeus, and the Misuse of Patristic Citations

Well, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line Road Trip Edition. I'm looking out the window here at the, I think they're called the Sandia Mountains, I think so, here in Albuquerque. And for you video purists, the color balances are going to be changing throughout the program because I'm looking out the back windows of our unit here and the sun is setting, but the sun's back there, thankfully, or I'd be frying in here.

And it will continue setting, and right now I'm just getting reflection off of a fifth wheel parked across the way here, and already the shadow of my unit is starting to climb up on that. So, everything's going to be changing during the course of the program, and if we go long, there won't be any sun out here anyways, and I'll just be watching people driving by and people walking their dogs and waving at people and stuff like that.

That's life in an RV park, is sort of what that is. So, we're coming to you from Albuquerque on our way to Lubbock, Texas. We'll be there this weekend. We've got details at aomin .org, even though I don't think we have the times.

I don't even know what the times are. I'll find out when I get there, basically. And then next week we will be in Las Cruces on Tuesday evening. And again, we just put this stuff together fairly quickly.

Didn't have a lot of time to be planning other stuff. It's a short trip. Basically, checking out the unit after the work that we had done on it, make sure everything's good for the rather longer trip in July-August up into the Colorado mountains, basically.

So, yeah. So far, everything is working perfectly. No issues, no problems. All my new pictures stayed. Russ Blyle. I hope Russ can see what he sent us. This is a wooden thing. It's got the Alpha Omega Ministry logo.

It says Mobile Command Center. And you can see that one. You see right here. Yeah, I could bring the other one up here. At least I thought I could. Where did the... Huh. I have that camera plugged in and it's nowhere.

Huh. That's interesting. It was working earlier and it's on and plugged in and Rich clearly did something to it. I'm going to blame Rich because Rich is playing around with stuff. I was going to show you the camera, but it's no longer working.

It worked 45 minutes ago, but no longer working now. Anyways, this is a new picture I put up. That's the picture from 2013 at the mosque in Erasmus, South Africa. I'm debating Shabir Ali. That was an amazing evening.

Those videos are online, so use them while you can. Uh-oh. What just happened there? No playing around. Stop playing around, whatever you're doing. There. All right. That's available online. That's one of my favorite debates.

I think it was one of the most important debates we ever did, actually, right there. So, too much stuff to get to here. A lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. I'll go ahead with this because I know that it looks like Peter's bark is listening.

I posted, I reposted, I guess would be the way to put it. I reposted a chart. Let's, yeah, okay, here it is. It's probably too small, but it says practice doctrine here, church circa 200 AD, Rome circa 1563 AD, which, by the way, is right at the end of the Council of Trent, Protestants circa 1563 AD.

So, you know, right at the end of Calvin's life, and, you know, Luther's gone, and you're starting at the second generation of the Reformers. And, man, this thing just created such a stink. But what it demonstrates is the, let me see if that works.

Yeah, okay. What it demonstrates is the constant, we're the early church, you were invented 1500 years later stuff, is just so blatantly dishonest and anachronistic as honestly all Roman Catholic history is, by definition.

When Rome claims to have the ability to tell its followers this is what has always been believed, don't look at history. Don't try to verify us. Believe what we tell you. They're forced into constant anachronism, and we'll see that a number of times.

And so, you know, I posted this, and I invited people who were, oh, it's just a bunch of lies. Which one? So, for example, papal supremacy over all churches. The church in AD 200? Of course not. Rome in 1563?

Yes. Protestants 1563? No. So it's accurate. And so people respond, well, but, you know, Irenaeus said this. That's what we're going to look at. Has nothing to do with the idea of papal supremacy over all churches.

There's nothing about a pope. The ability of Roman Catholics to look at history in the light of what they've been taught to find there should be something to warn all of us. We should all be like, wow, this is something we want to avoid doing.

Transubstantiation? Of course not. I would not have put it this way. Christ re-offered in the Eucharist? It would be Christ re-presented, if you want to use the specific terminology of Trent. Prayers to saints, the rosary, Mary as Mediatrix?

Didn't the pope just say? Shouldn't be using that term, anyway. Purgatorious formal doctrine, indulgences, veneration of icons? Could be debating that one. Apocrypha officially treated as scripture? Again, that's 1545.

Et cetera, et cetera. So almost everybody who responded to it just threw dust in the air and it was like, no, no, but they couldn't interact with it. So one guy who did interact with it posted a text.

And this was, and I had it in Evernote here, let me find it again. Yeah, Peter's Bark. Let me see if I can bring this one up again. Yeah, well, it has a little something at the bottom, but you'll be able to read it here anyways.

Here it is. Peter's Bark posted, quote, with this church, brackets, in Rome, brackets, all the churches must agree. Irenaeus, misspelled. James, I make more and more people Catholic every time I debate white.

Nuh-uh. Okay. So the guy's snarky and it does give me an opportunity. I have wanted to readdress this. I've addressed it many, many times. When people use this, oh, you just make people Catholics. First of all, when people say that online, I challenge them, 99 .5 of them either disappear or have nothing to say.

When I challenge them, when I, I'll throw, you know, 10 things out. Oh, was it, was it honorius being condemned by every person that took the chair of Peter for 400 years as a heretic? Is that what converted you to papal infallibility?

Something like that, you know, incapable of providing reason. I'm not going to debate you. But the just disappear because they're bots. They don't actually exist. So it's, you know, the Mormons do it and, uh, the Roman Catholics do it.

And it's such a childish thing. It's just, it does demonstrate the maturity level online is extremely low because no serious person would take that kind of argumentation seriously. Um, especially when the person can't back it up, but, um, I will say something.

I do want to say something before I get to this quote. Uh, in fact, I'll, we read it. Um, I am sure there are people who have joined the Roman Catholic church after watching one of my debates. And that's exactly what our theology would say will take place.

Why? Because if they're a false believer in the first place, if they're making a false profession of faith, then exposing them to false religion may well tickle their flesh. Um, when you expose, you know, like with Mormonism, I remember one of the first objections that was raised to us ministering to Mormons was you don't want to get people confused.

People might end up joining the Mormon church. And you think about, okay, so Christ sheep, hear Christ's voice, but they can end up, uh, what? Um, you know, there was no concept of election at that particular church really in any serious fashion.

Um, but the reality is that lost people change religions all the time. And so it is not at all surprising to me that false professors would make a new profession of faith and move from one religion to another.

And I may have had something to do with introducing them to our new religion. Not surprising at all. My theology says it will happen. Any kind of, you know, I'm, I'm sure that when Paul went, um, and we, we know this, we know this happened when Paul went preaching Jesus as the Messiah, what happened to unregenerate Jews?

They not only opposed him, they, they actually made a vow to not eat until they killed him. They became zealots, far more zealous for the traditions of the fathers than they had ever been before. Why?

Because they're exposed to the truth. And if you're unregenerate, you're going to, you're going to respond to the truth. You're gonna respond negatively. And some of that negative response may be very religious in nature.

It just is false religion. So think through these things when you hear them, you know, they're meant to have emotional impact and stuff like that. There's something I can do for emotional people. If, if you don't know the difference between feeling something and thinking about something, I'm not going to be able to be of any assistance to you at all.

And I'm not really going to try. I'm, I'm a human adult and try to have human adult interaction with other human adults. And that involves thinking rather than just emoting and feeling. So, so here's the quote with this, this is how it's given with this church bracket in Rome bracket, all of the churches must agree, Irenaeus.

All right. Did, now that was offered as a rebuttal to the first statement about papal supremacy in all churches. Those are not the same thing. Irenaeus says nothing about a Pope. He knows nothing about a Pope at all.

He knows nothing about a papacy, papal infallibility, none of that stuff. And Roman Catholic historians admit that. And the funny thing here, and this is what you, you, I need to communicate to you. If you want to deal with Roman Catholicism and you want to deal with these people online, you need to recognize that they experienced schizophrenia today and it's forced upon them by their own leaders.

You get this kind of assertion. Oh, you bet this, you bet it was around in AD 200. You bet. Yeah. This is the church of 2000 years. We've always believed this stuff. That's the one kind. All right. Heard it all the time when John Paul the second died.

Oh man, for two weeks, just on and on and on and on the church of 2000 years. Okay. That's old time Roman Catholicism. Okay. That's what Rome used to teach all the time. Here's the problem. Pope Leo the 14th elevated John Henry Cardinal Newman to the position of doctor of the church just a matter of weeks ago.

And anybody, and man, it's just amazing how many people, he didn't invent it. Other people that talked about, of course, of course people did, but not in the specific way that he did it. So as to be able to, I mean, he was then forced to accept papal infallibility, which he rejected, which historically he recognized simply wasn't true.

His kind of development allows for you to call the Pope infallible when Honorius was condemned for 400 years. He introduced what made Vatican II possible. Now, would even he have lived with Vatican II?

I don't know. I don't think he could have stomach that, but this was not quite a century later and his development hypothesis developed. That's the problem. You can start it walking down the road, but once you're dead, you can't do anything with that robot, that monster you just created.

And so you have when the confident, this is the church of 2 ,000 years, runs into the reality that this isn't what the church believed 2 ,000 years ago, then all of a sudden you slap some Newman on it.

Oh, it's development. It was there in seed form and then the Holy Spirit and apostolic tradition. And all of a sudden it's no longer the church of 2 ,000 years ago, but it is the church of 2 ,000 years ago.

But if we can't find it 2 ,000 years ago, it's because it was in seed form. But what we believe has been for 2 ,000 years, it is having your cake and eating it too. And most Roman Catholic academia is fully on with Newman now and recognize that when Ineffabellus Deus defined the Immaculate Conception and talked about the ancient faith, the church, that's just simply a lie.

It's just not true. But that's not the important part of the statement, you see. That's how you can have Roman Catholic apologists literally say, well, yeah, the council is infallible, but the arguments it used and even put into the council documents, those all can be errant and we don't have to agree with all that.

It's just a final thing you have to agree with. So the arguments you use to get there can be all wrong, but it's still going to be the truth. It's just, oh, anachronisms are us. Anyway, so back to Irenaeus.

We need to get to Irenaeus here. Now, what you need to understand, let me get my, the reason that Roman Catholics get away with the abuse of church history, like Peter's Bark does, is he probably doesn't know church history very well himself.

He may have the Jurgens set, if you're not familiar with what that is, that was really more popular back in my day when I was younger. You know, it's a quote book. It's a quote stripped out of their context and put together and, you know, you look this quote up and here's where you can find papacy and here's where you can find this and that kind of thing.

And so very few of these folks really understand, for example, Irenaeus' challenges in dealing with Gnosticism. And very few of them have ever read almost any of the Nag Hammadi library or the Apocryphon of John or any of this kind of stuff and probably couldn't explain to you, because it is very complex, very, very complex, couldn't explain to you the difference between sort of pre-Christian expressions of Gnosticism as it came out of the East, a very eclectic religion.

It's sort of like one person describes a Play-Doh and you roll Play-Doh in the dirt, it just picks everything up along the way and becomes something else by the time you get done. They probably couldn't explain the difference between that form of Gnosticism, highly complex, no connection to Christianity, just leaving a place open for Jesus, and the form of Gnosticism called Valentinian Gnosticism, which is what the biggest challenge that the church in Irenaeus' day had to deal with is Gnosticism that was specifically targeting Christianity and trying to look like Christianity while fundamentally changing the very essence of the faith itself.

And so not being familiar with that, then they're able to read Irenaeus' words in a completely different context than the context that he would have been saying those words in, and hence fill his words with a completely different meaning.

That's what happens here. The Gnostics, when confronted with Scripture, attack the Scriptures themselves, saying that they are ambiguous and that they're insufficient. Oh, I've heard people saying that before.

How many times have I heard even Roman Catholics saying you wouldn't be able to prove the Trinity without the church? Oh, well, anyway. And so they claim a secret apostolic tradition that comes from the apostles.

Well, some of it comes from the apostles and some of it just comes from sort of like an almost divine revelation to their own leaders. It depends on which group you're in. They sometimes advise each other.

Anyway, but they're denying Scriptural sufficiency, and they are claiming to have a special knowledge. And Irenaeus has to try to find some mechanism to protect his flock and to respond to the claims of the Gnostics.

And I can imagine, can you imagine what it was like back then? You have the Gnostics coming after your people right, left, and center. Meanwhile, you have Roman persecution flaring up here and flaring up there.

We think we've got it bad now. Those first 315 years or so, wow, well, okay, 300 years, were pretty amazing. They really were. Try to give folks a little credit back then for surviving. I'm not sure how well most of us would have done.

Anyway, so what's going on? The very chapter from which this quote comes from Against Heresies, the chapter concludes, it comes to this, therefore, that these men do not do now consent neither to Scripture nor to tradition.

And so, it's very important, I think, even before getting the immediate context, because you were given half a sentence. Now, does Peter Spark know he gave half a sentence? I don't know. Has he ever read Against Heresies?

Has he ever have a marked copy of it? Done any translating work from it? Problem is, we don't have the original language in which it was written. We only have a Latin translation of it, and not an overly good Latin translation.

And one of the issues is, well, there's a bunch of issues. This has been one of the most debated texts in Irenaeus. Lots of scholarship on the subject. Peter Spark doesn't show any familiarity with any of it.

Doesn't show familiarity with the translational issues. Doesn't show familiarity with the debates that have taken place. Going back to the Reformation, has he ever read Good, Whitaker, Salmon, any of these guys?

No. I don't get any feeling that he has at all. And I wouldn't expect that they would. This is just the kind of stuff that you get and need to be aware. It's out there. It's been responded to a thousand times over, but our people don't spend almost any time thinking about it.

And so tracking stuff down that's been written for hundreds and hundreds of years, well, honestly, it's not that difficult to do anymore. You know, go ask Claude. Claude will pull it out for you pretty quickly, too, honestly.

Anyway, you need to understand something here. And this is very, very, very important. That's not what I wanted. I have too many things on my screen here. There it is. And this screen resolution is getting worse and worse as I get older and older.

Irenaeus believes in apostolic tradition. Yep, you heard it here. Of course, anyone who has read my published scholarly material knows that back in 95, 96, no later than 97, there was a compilation of chapters that came out on solo scriptura.

And the longest, I think the longest chapter and certainly the most in-depth historical chapter in the book was mine. And there's an entire section on guess what? Irenaeus in apostolic tradition. And I explain exactly what Irenaeus meant by apostolic tradition, because he did believe in apostolic tradition.

And people go, see, end of solo scriptura right there. Well, if you want to remain ignorant, make a fool of yourself by not knowing what you're talking about, I can't stop you. But if you'd like to get stopped before you make a fool of yourself, you might want to listen, maybe read the chapter, you know, do something like that.

Do you want to know what Irenaeus believed apostolic tradition was? Because he, he believed that without this tradition, you would not be able to understand scripture. Now there are people today that say, see, unless you have the counsel of Nicaea, you can't really understand the Bible.

Well, let's listen to what apostolic tradition was for Irenaeus. Okay? I think it's important that we understand. Oh, the sun's hitting it. Well, I don't know what that sound is. Sounds like a cow is dying outside, but there aren't any cows around here.

Anyway, I'm going to have to hide my eyes from this reflection of the sun for a little bit. Here is what Irenaeus defined as apostolic tradition. Ready? This is, this is the big refutation of the Sola Scriptura here.

This is from the, Schaff edited the A &F, Ananising Fathers, volume one, pages 414 to 415. If you'd like to look it up, that's the easiest way to find it. That's available online, CCDL, stuff like that.

These have all declared to us that there is one God, creator of heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets, and one Christ, the Son of God. If anyone do not agree to these truths, he despises the companions of the Lord.

Nay, more, he despises Christ himself, the Lord. Yea, he despises the Father also, and stands self-condemned, resisting and opposing his own salvation, as is the case with all heretics. There it is. There's apostolic tradition.

No popes, no transubstantiation, no purgatory, no Marian dogmas, none of that. What is it? Um, there's one God, creator of heaven and earth, and one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. Um, is that extra-biblical or sub-biblical?

Is that, are those statements that exist, that aren't found in Scripture? I'll let you think about that one for a second. Yeah, they're found in Scripture. Everything that Irenaeus said was apostolic tradition is plainly witnessed in Scripture itself, and completely defensible from Scripture.

So, this isn't some external revelation. This isn't the denial of sola scriptura, if you understand what sola scriptura is, and it's laughable to think that it is. But, you run into a lot of laughable stuff on the internet.

So, this is tradition for Irenaeus. One God, creator of heaven and earth, one Lord Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's what the Bible says, and that's what Irenaeus says you need to start with. If you start with polytheism, you'll never understand what the Bible says.

And I have to say that to Mormons every single day. How do you think they come up with the wild and wacky stuff they come up with? Because they're not starting where they need to start, with one God, creator of all things.

And once you start at the wrong place with the Bible, and the Bible tells you where to start, in the beginning, you know, God. It tells you where to start, but if you choose to start someplace else, you can't blame the Bible for being unclear.

You're the one that's being unclear. There's the issue. So, there's Irenaeus' tradition, all right? And so, here is what was actually said. The Roberts Donaldson translation, or rendering of it, reads as follows.

For it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church, and it is referring to Rome, on account of its preeminent authority, poteriorum principalitatum. That is, that is, see, that's where the sentence cuts off.

You know, given Rome's long history of forged documents, the Nation of Constantine, the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on. The number of fraudulent, fake statements from church fathers that have been used in defense of the papacy is legion, and every credentialed Roman Catholic historian admits it.

Anybody who says otherwise is just simply an ignoramus of history. That's all there is to it. Whenever a Roman Catholic gives you a dot, dot, dot, you better go find the original. I've even had, I've had a debate with a Roman Catholic attorney 20 years ago on the perpetual virginity of Mary, I think, might have been the Immaculate Conception, but I think it was the perpetual virginity of Mary.

He threw a fake Augustine quote at me. Now, did he know it was fake? I don't know. But the use of forgeries and altered quotations, long history of it, very long history of it. So you just have to, you have to check sources.

And sometimes that's hard to do. Sometimes that's expensive to do, but it can be done. So here's what it actually says. That is, the sentence continues, the faithful everywhere in as much as the apostolical tradition, and what's that?

One God, one Lord Jesus Christ. The apostolic tradition has been preserved continuously by those faithful men who exist everywhere. I can't find the papacy there. It's because it's not there. And nobody, nobody with a scintilla of honesty can read this section and go, oh, yeah, there's the papacy.

But why do Roman Catholics do it? Because they're told to. Look up the status cognitum. Talking about papal authority, as has always been believed by the church from the beginning. Dogmatic authority.

It's a lie, but you accept the dogmatic authority and you lie along with the dogmatic authority. So what was actually being said here is understandable to anybody who will read the paragraphs before and the paragraphs after.

What's being said is that so many Christians resort to Rome. Come to Rome. That the agreement that exists on the apostolic tradition, there's one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, represents the faithful everywhere.

And that because Rome is the center of the empire, and what's the old saying? All roads lead to Rome. This is why the church at Rome developed the authority that it did. Not because of some theory of the bishop.

In fact, it has been well stated that the authority of Rome early on is of the church, not the bishop. That came later. And why did Rome have that authority? It was undoubtedly one of the wealthiest churches and supported many others.

But the main thing was it had communication all across the empire by nature. People had to go to the capital. And so the Roman church had contact with the entire empire. And so Irenaeus' argument is this apostolic tradition, not the papacy, that's why Peter's bark, sir, you were wrong.

You abused history. Now you're doing what you were told to do. You're doing what your leaders do. I get it. You probably didn't know. But will you stop now? Will you go read it? Will you go read it for yourself and recognize what the real argument is?

The real argument is the apostolic tradition of monotheism, God the creator of all things. And if you know anything about Gnosticism, you know why that's so important. That apostolic tradition is testified to there in Rome and hence represents the faithful everywhere.

Nothing about a papacy. Nothing about the bishop of Rome. It's simply not there. It's been made up. It's been made up. This is how you abuse history. This is how Rome abuses history every single day. Has to, by definition.

Because see, really, when you think about it, when you look at how Aquinas, for example, defended the papacy, and you see his reliance upon the pseudo-Isidorean decretals, which were filled with fake forgeries that he didn't know.

And we'll be talking a little bit about that if we get to some pseudo-Dionysius today. He was not a critical thinker and he did not use sources critically. Nobody at the time did. Really. So, the point is that modern historiography has wiped the foundations of the papacy out.

But the papacy just stands there. It just hovers. The foundation gone. The foundation upon which it was built has been washed away. But there it is, by tradition. Almost like tradition is a hovercraft.

It just keeps it floating there. So, when you see people quoting patristic sources online, do not be as, was it Jimenez or Kaizen, who just before the Council of Trent ended up contradicting him, said don't be like a raw scholar when you hear someone talking about the apocryphal books being canonical.

They need to be corrected by Drome. So, people are like raw scholars. They see a quote, it's like, oh, that must mean that. No, not necessarily. Got to look into it. It's not that the material isn't there.

The material is there if you want to just go look for it and find it. Okay. Man, I do have a lot of stuff here. Notifications and, yeah, okay. Yeah, I've got a King James thing. I may hold that one off until later.

It's, you know, we've, how many times can you beat that one to death? And yet, it does explain why these guys, no matter how often we try to get these guys to debate, you know, at least give that one fellow, you know, two years ago credit.

He was willing to debate. He lost extremely badly, but he was at least willing to debate. But there was some more guys talking about my King James Bible corrects the Greek and Hebrew and all the rest of that stuff.

Then we had a guy named Ojike Uzoma posts purgatory is real, purgatory is real, purgatory is real. Father Mark Beard explains it perfectly. And this is a type of guy I would love to get to debate because, you know, there he is in his long purple robes and marching around in front of people.

And I would love love to get him to debate. But do I want? Yeah, let's see. Wow, it's already 738. How did I get there? I'm going to hold on to this. I'm going to I'm going to hold on to it. I want to do some reading.

So I'm going to do one other thing. And then we'll we'll get get to that one. Maybe somebody can get me in touch with this guy, this Father Mark Beard, if anybody knows it's on TikTok. AMA .Catholic .co.

I'm not sure what that is, but it'd be interesting to see if he'd be willing to do something. Instead, what I'm going to do, looking at the time, I know I've still got Jacob Hansen queued up and priesthood stuff, and I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere near.

Once you get into church history, what do you want? Let me just talk about one thing here. Dale Partridge on May 10th posted, you want, quote, religious freedom, end quote. I want to outlaw Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and every high thing that stands against Jesus Christ.

We are not the same. OK. Here again is the Christless nationalism of this movement. And I again, simply have to point out that once you do this, you have to ask the question, who's doing it and why are they doing it?

Why why do you outlaw Islam? Well, in a Christian nation, OK, Christian nation. So that means you're establishing Jesus Christ and his word and his law as the law word of this nation, right? Well, yeah.

OK, so that would actually be going beyond how the nation was originally founded because Jefferson and and others would not have, they certainly wouldn't have been as, you know, pain certainly was. But some of those founding fathers would not have used kingship terminology of Jesus, things like that, obviously, while they would have been very respectful of his words.

And certainly the Supreme Court quotes from scripture for many, many, many decades after the founding and stuff like that. But how do you deal with the reality? An admitted reality of the fact that we're talking about a tiny minority in the United States that actually acknowledges the kingship of Jesus in their own lives.

Well, you go you go with that minority because I mean, look at look at what the homosexuals have done with a small minority. Homosexuals, the small minority have perverted our culture, lied and deceived and used useful idiots.

So that's what you want to do? That's how you establish Christ as king? The same way that homosexuals have used emotionalism and lies and falsehood? No, I thought if you're going to establish Jesus Christ as king, you have to use, well, he's the way, the truth.

Oh, the truth. How do you do that? How do you do that, Dale, with that small minority? And once you give the government that kind of power, you realize what happens in history, right? You realize that they don't stop with just Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, because unless you've changed the magistrate's heart, then that power becomes a dangerous thing, doesn't it?

And historically, when Christians wielded that power, they used that power not only against Hindus and Jews and Muslims, but against each other, right? Now, you used to be a Baptist, and you're not one of them no more.

It's amazing how quickly people will abandon their so-called convictions without being able to answer the objections to those things. But anyway, so what do you do when you have Baptists who are just genetically predisposed to question governmental authority, especially in matters of religion?

They might stand in your way. So, we had lots of good Reformed men who felt it was perfectly fine to outlaw them, too. Remember how many times you may have quoted back in your Baptist days, Bunyan, John Bunyan, you know, Pilgrim's Progress?

Remember what happened to him? How long he spent in prison, in a cell, for believing in, oh, the kingship of Jesus over his church, so that the government couldn't tell the church what to do. Oh, but that's what you're doing.

Huh. It's amazing how fast people's perspectives can change when it clicks and things like that. Yeah, we are not the same, Dale. We're really not. I don't know what you've turned into, but you're a ship without a rudder, and you're just spinning in circles, and the rocks are close by.

Better figure out what you're doing, dude. Okay, we're going to finish up the program. Look, when I put these on, I'm going to be reading something, and normally the fonts way too stinking small anymore.

We all know that. You know what? I don't know that I... Here's what I want to do. I want to read this to you, but I'm not going to tell you what it is. And it might take a little bit to read all this.

What I want you to do is, I just want you to listen to it, and I don't want you to be prejudiced against it. It's going to sound different. I would imagine, even with our audience, and we have a very apologetically oriented and hence more historically aware audience than most, I still think maybe one out of 100 of you will recognize at least where it came from, if you don't recognize what it is itself.

I just want you to listen, and because it sounds different than normal evangelical discourse and dialogue, the tendency is to tune it out and not hear it. And it would be useful to you in the long run to try to hear and understand what it's about.

It will make sense to you later on when we do some more stuff in the future, but it uses some terminology that may be challenging, but try to get past that. Okay, so I'm going to hope that, yeah, I don't think you saw the book there.

All right, here we go. Trinity, higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness, guide of Christians in the wisdom of heaven, lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mystery of God's word lies simple, absolute, and unchangeable, in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

Amid the deepest shadow, they pour overwhelming light on what is most manifest. Amid the wholly uncensed and unseen, they completely fill our sightless minds with treasures beyond all beauty. For this, I pray, and Timothy, my friend, my advice to you as you look for a sight of the mysterious things, is to leave behind you everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and with your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge.

By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is. But see to it that none of this comes to the hearing of the uninformed, that is to say to those caught up with the things of the world who imagine there is nothing beyond instances of individual being, and who think that by their own intellectual resources they can have a direct knowledge of him who has made the shadows his hiding place.

And if initiation into the divine is beyond such people, what is to be said of those others, still more uninformed, who describe the transcendent cause of all things in terms derived from the lowest orders of being, and who claim that it is in no way superior to the godless multi-formed shapes they themselves have made?

What is actually to be said about the cause of everything is this, since it is the cause of all beings, we should posit and describe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being.

Now, we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion.

This, at least, is what was taught by the blessed Bartholomew. He says that the word of God is vast and minuscule, that the gospel is wide-ranging and yet restricted. To me it seems that in this he is extraordinarily shrewd, for he has grasped that the good cause of all is both eloquent and taciturn, indeed wordless.