Reviewing the Jacob Hansen/Joe Heschmeyer Debate

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, but we still got all this junk on the desk is now fully visible.

I gotta zoom that in a little bit at some point. Anyways, yes, there is junk on the desk.

And I just put a book over there and it's visible now. So anyways, welcome to the program.

We got lots of stuff going on this week. On the website at aomin .org, we do have the graphic up for the debate at Berean Presbyterian Church, Friday, April 3rd, 7pm, debating

LDS apologist Jacob Hansen, is the God of Calvinism morally reprehensible? And I have made sure that, and I specifically said, as long as that includes the counterpoint that the

God of Mormonism is morally reprehensible. That's central to the reason for doing this.

But if you're in the area, Friday, April 3rd, now it's been a pretty warm winter in the

West. We're going to be running out of water here in Phoenix during the summer, no question about it.

Lake Powell's almost gone. It's just disappearing. I mean, all the docks are up in the air and it's just, it's bad, really, really bad.

So it's been pretty warm. But the last,

I think it was the last time I was in Utah. Yeah, I think it was, was two years ago this coming

April. And that's when Jeff and I did the debate with those guys at University of Utah.

And that was the first time I got a real honest to goodness snowstorm in an

RV. It was in the Jacob. And so who knows what could happen between now and then.

You know, you get winter storms and they just decide to come in and do their thing. So we will see.

But Friday, April 3rd, we will be doing that debate. That will be live in person up there in Ogden, Utah.

And what we don't have on the website yet, and I just forwarded the graphic to Rich.

So we will get it up there as soon as we can. Is the debate that I will be doing online.

And it will certainly be the first debate we do in the new mobile command studio, which will be premiering this next trip.

This will be a good trip to break it in to, you know, it's only a little over two weeks in length.

Well, yeah, right. Two weeks in length. And the roads aren't bad. So a good, a good route to do to break the thing in and to learn about it.

But Rich and I are both very excited about the new unit for the fact that it has a office in the back.

And so the studio will be pretty much set up all the time. I mean, not completely because it is in the back and that moves a lot.

This unit shouldn't bounce around as much as some of the others. But still, but still setting up should be really fast, which means

I'll probably be doing a lot of stuff on the road. Maybe some short deals, things like that, as well as the regular ones.

No fancy backgrounds. Sorry. No more rainbow colored background things.

I could still do it. I have thought about it because they still have the original one in my office from the

Jayco. And if I put that right along the bottom of the wall, it would probably still work. Probably still work.

But Rich is like, yeah, you'll forget that. But I'm just going to have some nice pictures on the wall behind me.

But we're going to do a debate with Shabbir Ali. And I haven't debated Shabbir. My goodness, when was the last time I debated

Shabbir Ali? Wow, I forgot to look it up. Oh, Georgia.

In Georgia. Georgia Tech. Yeah, 2018, I think.

Yeah, so it's been about eight years. Yeah, that was the last time we debated. And so we are going to be debating a topic that we've sort of done before.

Paul or Muhammad, who continued the teaching of Jesus? That was similar. It's connected to the debates we did in London in 2008, 18 years ago, on whether Muhammad was prophesied in the

Bible. And so, because for some reason,

Shabbir believes that the John 14 through 16.

OK, let me just explain this. Many Muslims, not all, many Muslims believe that Muhammad is prophesied in the

Bible, mentioned in the Bible, and that the paracletos, the paraclete of John 14 and 16 is a human prophet who is yet to come.

And so what Shabbir does is he grabs fringe scholarship.

And it's always liberal scholarship. He never, ever, ever even tries to be consistent in using the same kind of scholarship in defense of the

Quran that he uses to attack the New Testament. So the farther left it is, the better it is for attacking the

New Testament. The farther right it is, the better it is for defending the Quran. That's just, that's why in 2006, in our first debate,

I coined the phrase, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument. And he has remained consistently inconsistent for all these 20 years, and before then.

So he debated both of these topics with David Wood on ABN in studio in 2015,

I think it was, so about 11 years ago. And the presentations that he made in those debates have been consistent.

And so I'm pretty sure I know where these are going to go. But I just pray that all the tech works. I did,

I've done some debates like this in the past. During COVID, we did the debate on the

TR -only stuff online. They worked pretty well. And what's it called?

Legacy, not Legacy Box. I forget what the name of the program they use. It's similar to Zoom, but it's one

I've used before. These platforms are getting better. But things can go wrong.

I wouldn't want them to go wrong. I really hope that this is going to work real well. But I'm really looking forward to doing it.

Already pretty much prepared for that one. And the date on that is the 28th.

I believe it's March 28th. It's the Saturday, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, because I'm preaching on the 29th at Apologia up there. And so, yeah,

Saturday, March 28th will be the date on that. And so two debates coming up on the same trip.

So there you go. Should be of interest to a number of you. And so I want to make sure you are aware of what's going on there.

The temptation always is to be distracted from what I said I was going to talk about.

With all the stuff going on, I often think to myself, we might be wise to limit the amount of time we even look at news and feeds and things like that, just simply because it just comes so fast.

And you can just be overwhelmed. I was seeing a

Canadian father who's trying to save his 10 -year -old son from being neutered because the government's taking him away because he won't affirm gender transition stuff, which always comes from the mother.

Let's just be honest. That's where it comes from. They're the ones that...

Anyway, and you just think about stuff like that. You just think of the absolute moral insanity of transgenderism today.

I mean, if you can't figure out that this is utter rebellion and mental disease by now,

I don't know what's ever going to... Evidently, all those gender studies,

PhDs have just ruined the entire country. And so it's easy to just become completely overwhelmed with all that kind of stuff and stop thinking about other important things, to be prepared for whatever the

Lord calls us to do. So I want to try to put all that stuff aside, not go that direction, and do what we said we were going to do.

And that is going to look at and listen to some of the cross -examination.

Yes, I am aware, by the way. I'm not sure if you saw this. You've been busy with that stuff.

But Jeremiah Nortier sent me a link to Leighton Flower's two -and -a -half -hour, always, two -and -a -half -hour response to the comments that I made on the program last week.

When I was talking about... He says, look at my work on this. Well, Leighton doesn't do work on the text.

Leighton does work on commentaries on texts, sort of in a secondary way.

And he can't even really engage them critically because he just doesn't have the academic skills and the language training.

And I guess he wasn't happy about that. And I guess he made numerous comments to Jeremiah about, you don't have to be like your mentor,

James White, and all the rest of this stuff. And he also just rather gratuitously added that I didn't do well in my debate.

And I'll be honest with you, when Leighton Flowers starts judging debates, it's hard not to really cackle and laugh a little bit because...

Yeah, anyway. Could you imagine if Leighton Flowers debated the guy I did? Yeah, that would have been...

El Disastro. Yeah, right.

He would have to put a string on the banjo. And that wouldn't ever work out. So, anyway.

I was just looking at someone who sent me something there. I was sent a video of a traditional

Catholic. He converted about seven years ago from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.

And he's traditional. So, Latin mass, very conservative. And at the end of the video, he's just...

And it is relevant to what we're going to do here. He's just... I don't know what to do. Because he sees all the stuff that I'm talking about.

He sees how Francis and Leo are leaving the tradition, even of Rome, and charting a new course.

And he sees that this is a fundamental contradiction of the very essence of Roman Catholic claims of authority, which he's already accepted.

And he sees that the Roman Catholic Church does not engage in church discipline except against conservative

Catholics. The liberals, the leftists, the James Martens of the world?

Go for it! No problem! Traditional Latin mass guy?

Oh, we're getting rid of you. He sees all this stuff.

And I feel for him. I really do feel for him. Because once you accept some of the fundamental errors of the insufficiency of scripture, the anachronistic interpretation of church history that's forced upon you by the church itself, it's hard to find your way back out.

It really is. And I don't know much about what his background was.

It didn't sound like it was overly solid as far as understanding of church history and things like that.

But I feel for the guy. And I feel for a number of the people who are just recognizing the real problems.

And some of that comes up in this conversation. So, what we're going to do... I've already gone 15 minutes in and haven't gotten to it.

So, this debate... Joe Heschmeier and Jacob Hansen same

Jacob Hansen I'll be debating April 3rd at a

Roman Catholic church in Salt Lake City. And there's been a lot of going back and forth afterwards.

They've done programs and all the rest of this stuff primarily about, did Jacob hijack the debate?

Because the stated topic was, did the great apostasy take place?

Okay, the great apostasy is a LDS teaching. Anybody familiar with Mormonism knows that the church teaches...

And this was the weird thing. The church teaches that the priesthood authority was lost. If Joe Heschmeier failed anywhere, he failed right here.

I even downloaded and transcribed it. Everybody's got a program now where you can just download it, you throw it into this program, it gives you a transcription that's normally very, very good.

And I looked up priesthood. There was almost no reference at all. And you can't really define the

LDS doctrine of the great apostasy without talking about priesthood authority because that's what was lost.

Everything else flows from that. And so that was a weak part on Joe Heschmeier's part.

I think the weird thing about this debate is I agreed with both sides at key issues.

And so I agreed with what Heschmeier was saying on a number of topics. But I really think that that was one of the weaknesses of his presentation, is that the

LDS dogma really cannot be discussed or defined without talking about priesthood authority, specifically

Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods. And if you want one of the weakest Achilles heels of LDS theology, it is their doctrine of priesthood.

I mean, most Mormons just accept it sort of as a given and they know almost nothing whatsoever about what the

Aaronic priesthood involved in the Bible, the Book of Hebrews, the discussion of the

Aaronic priesthood, the passing away of the Aaronic priesthood, Melchizedek priesthood, you got to be in Hebrews again, all this kind of stuff.

So it's an extremely weak point in LDS theology.

But Heschmeier didn't go after it. So the point is, what

Jacob Hansen did, and you could just call this a tactical decision, whatever, he even during the debate says, hey, the

Mormon view could be wrong. But the point is that the Roman Catholic claim about the papacy being from the apostles and ancient is untrue.

Well, he's right. It is untrue. But is that what the debate was about? You can make a point that that was a sort of cutesy little way around things on Jacob Hansen's part.

You could make an argument that that's how that worked. So that's where you get this fascinating thing where you're sitting there and you're listening to the

Mormon going, well, yeah, the Mormons are right. And a lot of the argumentation he uses, argumentation that I've used since the 90s in debating that topic.

And then when you listen to Joe Heschmeier, you're going, yep, those are the texts that I cite against the

Mormons on this very topic, but coming to a different conclusion as to what church, therefore, is that which was founded by Christ.

So I want to listen to some of the cross acts and break in and make comments as we're going along.

But I thought it'd be really interesting to do this. So that's what we're going to do. What? Oh, no, it is.

Almost all the way. That is, look at that. Yeah.

There we go. All right. Okay, so hopefully the sound will work.

Hopefully the video is going to work. Here's how the cross act starts. Joe, is the

Orthodox Church the true church? I would say no, but I think you could believe that's the only question

I had. Just yes or no. It's part of the true church. I would say that.

It's part of the true church. So the true church doesn't require the papacy? The papacy is at the head of the church.

The Orthodox, by means of valid episode succession, are in a fractured union with the Pope. And I think they would even acknowledge that.

Okay, fractured union with the Pope. Now look, I'm one of those folks that's sitting here going,

Have y 'all thought about what year is coming up? It's 2026, right?

So what major anniversary is heading our direction?

And I wasn't even really thinking much about it. I saw some reference to it in some articles.

Most people, and there's no way of knowing this for certain, and there's reasons to actually question this, but generally it is considered that Christ died in 33

AD. It could be anywhere from 29 to 34. It all depends.

There's calendar changes. Anyway, let's say it's 33.

So 2033 is coming up. 2 ,000 year anniversary. And we're all sitting around going,

Boy, that Filioque Claus stuff, a couple months ago from Rome, sort of saying that we can talk about this, and it's an area of discussion, and stuff like that.

And this is after centuries and centuries of hurling anathemas from Constantinople at Rome and from Rome to Constantinople.

It's like, I wonder if something's going on, back channel, back rooms.

Maybe there'll be some big, huge ecumenical announcement in 2033 about sort of a reunification of the

East and West. And ask yourself a real simple question. How many

Protestant pastors are ready to even intelligently discuss such a development were it to happen?

Not many. Not many. So if that's heading in our direction, that's going to throw a royal loop into everything, if something like that takes place.

In regards to the authority claims of both groups. Now, man, I can see traditional

Catholics on the one side going, You can't compromise on papal supremacy. And I can see traditional ortho -bros on the orthodox side going,

Are you kidding me? Because they'd have to meet someplace in between. Which would also have to deal with Marian dogmas, and the filioque clause.

And man, my gut feeling is the traditional people on both sides, up in arms.

As in warfare type stuff. I got the

Joel Webb and stuff right about the end of 2025. Little bit of a different level here. Little bit of a different level.

So what do you mean, let's get that on the site? I thought I was going to see something here. There isn't anything there?

In the signal? I was just, I just, I happened to see something pop up, and I didn't know if the

Paul or Mohammed thing had been put on the website, or something like that. But if it is, let me know, and I'll let you know that, before the end of the program.

So, anyway. So, stuff going on. But the point is, here,

Hansen's saying, So, is the papacy definitional or not? If it's not definitional, then why has

Rome said the things that Rome said at Vatican I? And so Hansen knows about doctrinal development.

He knows about John Henry Cardinal Newman. He probably understands the significance of Pope Leo making

John Henry Cardinal Newman a doctor of the church. That is, I think, part of opening the door to further development, which actually is called change, in the normal usage of the

English language. And that's what he's pressing here. He's pressing

Heshmeyer on how consistent he'll be. And that guy I was talking about in the video, that's part of the issue there.

Roman Catholic apologists, it's a tough time to be a Catholic apologist. To be trying to defend an allegedly unchanging system that is clearly changing right in front of your eyes.

They should get extra pay for that. Do you have the church if you don't have the papacy? You have the fullness of the church in the

Catholic church. We would say they are true churches. We would not say that of Protestant denominations. So, the church is the body of believers?

No. What do you mean by the church, then? Ignatius talked about this in 107. The church at the local level involves the bishop.

If you don't have the trifold structure, bishop, presbyter, deacon, you don't have a true church. That's what he says to the Ephesians. Okay, that's not what he said to the

Ephesians. Heshmeyer is guilty of anachronism again. I challenged him on this in our debate.

He is confusing presbyters with priests. Those are different words. And the

New Testament does not distinguish between them. Paul does not distinguish between them. And so,

Ignatius' view of the church may be a step toward a final distinction that takes place between presbyters who become priests and bishops, but the

New Testament does not substantiate that. And again, this is what happens when you do church history anachronistically.

You look backwards at it through the lens of what Rome tells you to see.

So, he's throwing Ignatius out, and he's then interpreting it in the light of modern definitions.

But even then, he says, on the local level. Yeah, why? Because when Ignatius writes to Rome, he doesn't even address the bishop of Rome, because Rome didn't have a single bishop at this point in time.

If he's going to be honest with the historical information, there is no monarchical episcopate at Rome, yet it develops around 140.

So, I mean, it sounds good, but it doesn't pass muster.

So, because they have valid apostolic succession, the Orthodox, and also the Coptics, have true churches at the local level.

At the universal level, the papacy is necessary. So, to have the fullness of the church, you have to have the ultimate, infallible, adjudicating authority for the church to have the fullness?

Well, you have to have the Pope. You can get into questions of jurisdiction and all of that. So, if that was lost, you wouldn't have the fullness of the church?

The jurisdiction or the papacy? The universal jurisdiction that the

Pope holds. If you didn't have the Pope, would you have the fullness of the church? If you didn't have the papacy, you wouldn't have the fullness of the church, from a

Catholic perspective. Okay. The reality is, of course, that there was no functioning universal papacy in the early church.

John Henry Cardinal Newman understood that. Anybody who studies church history, anybody who knows about Victor, Irenaeus, Stephen, Cyprian, anybody who reads what's called

First Clement, which never identifies the author, but it's the church at Rome, writing the Church of Corinth, there is no one bishop, there is no functioning papacy there.

This is honest dealing with history versus Roman dealing with history, which has to be dishonest because Rome has lied about history and even when

Rome becomes embarrassed by that, the ghosts remain and you're still stuck with listening to Joe Heschmeier making all these distinctions that anybody in the early church would be going, what is he talking about?

Not worth the idea, but hey, there you go. You said this, quote, if the papacy isn't of apostolic origin, then we should reject the

Catholic church. Do you still hold to that view? If the papacy isn't of apostolic origin? Yeah. Okay, so then if that were the case, could you point me to the true church?

I would go Orthodox or maybe Coptic, but probably Orthodox. Very cool. So, would you have the fullness of the church?

If I didn't believe in the papacy? I'm sorry, it sounds like you're posing a counterfactual where I'm not a Catholic. Yeah, yeah, so you wouldn't have, you had said that you didn't, you don't have the fullness of the church without the papacy, which to me sounds like essentially what

Latter -day Saints are claiming when we claim that the fullness of the church was lost but that there still was a body of believers.

This was an interesting approach. Give him credit where credit is due.

But he knows that what the fullness that was lost according to the

General Authorities of the Mormon Church is that of the priesthood. So, if I was a

Mormon and I was in this situation, it would be really hard for me to not just be open and say, you all don't even claim to hold the

Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood. I mean, you believe John the Baptist came back and Peter, James, and John came back to lay hands on Joseph Smith and unless you moved it, or unless it fell over during the earthquake, my recollection is, man, it's been a lot of years since I've been on Temple Square, just going, nyah, nyah, nyah.

But, my recollection is, and see if this is what you remember, if you're standing on the south side of the

Salt Lake Temple and you're facing east, so toward the east gate that is never opened, so toward the church office building over there, it was over along the wall on that side that you have the statue of John the

Baptist, and remember, his feet are up in the air, he ain't touching the ground, restoring the

Aaronic priesthood to Joseph Smith and, was it Oliver Cowdery? I forget who it was, but there's actually a statue there.

Now, again, it may not have survived the earthquake, I haven't been there since then, at least on Temple Square, but, that's

LDS theology, you can't, when you made statues to it, you can't go, well, you know, that was just this general authority, that general authority, which is what's happening in the new

Mormonism, by the way. The new Mormonism is not old Mormonism, and it's not really

Mormonism, and it can never survive because it's completely subjective, but what it does is it gives

Mormons the ability to just basically ignore what apostles and prophets of the

LDS church have said. So if you want to get rid of Bruce R. McConkie, okay, yeah, he was an apostle of Jesus Christ, they're not necessarily to the point of dumping that yet, but what he said just, you know, doesn't really matter, and in fact,

Jacob Hanson has this epistemology of majority opinion, where the majority, so you can sort of go with the majority opinion.

Well, you know, in the days of Bruce R. McConkie, you didn't generally publicly disagree with him.

So how would you have determined? Are you looking for that statue? Oh, there's a photo over here.

Okay, so that's, that's the Melchizedek priesthood, that's Peter, James, and John. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, so this is an interesting approach by Hanson, but if I was a, if I was a

Mormon, I just don't know that I could take this perspective without just being right out there and saying what was really lost was priesthood authority that we claim was restored in 1829.

Now that's a problem, maybe he knows it's a problem, because David Whitmer pointed out that's an anachronism itself.

That's what's so weird about this. Okay? I was just criticizing Heshmeyer for his anachronistic use of Ignatius, right?

Now I've got to criticize Hanson because, as David Whitmer pointed out, there was no priesthood claim on April 6, 1830 when the

LDS Church was re -founded, was founded. That developed over the next couple of years, and that's clearly seen in the edits and changes in the 1833

Book of Commandments, 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. So isn't it fascinating how going back to the original sources, some in antiquity and some in 1833, gives you an opportunity to go, yeah, neither side here is actually giving us the whole story.

How is that different from what I'm saying? Yeah, so we would say you wouldn't need to have a new prophet come along and restart Jesus' church if you were orthodox and didn't believe in the papacy.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question, but I was saying before, you were asking if I believe in the papacy as a Catholic, and I said yes.

Yeah, but no, no, I'm saying is it essential to have the fullness of the church? Because if you don't have the fullness of the church, you need something to be restored, correct?

If you don't have the fullness of the church, you should be in full communion with the church. But we would say there's still...

But if it was missing, just real quick, if there was no pope, would we need a pope to have the fullness of the church?

Yeah, that's why we have a conclave. We had that happen recently. I know, but I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about in general, if you don't have a pope, don't you need to have to have the fullness of the church?

You don't have the fullness of the church. So if a Latter -day Saint makes the argument that there was an apostasy, meaning that there was a loss of apostolic authority, and we believe that it needed to be restored to have the fullness of the church,

I don't understand how that's different from what... Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Literally, when a pope dies, we have a conclave to elect a new pope.

So if you're just literally asking... But if you're saying, would the Catholic claim be true if the papacy was false?

No. Is it possible for the papacy to just go away forever? No. So I don't know if that's answering your question.

So what would convince you that there was an institutional apostasy?

If the pope infallibly taught something clearly erroneous... Okay, let's just go with that.

Let's just stay with that one for a moment. If the pope infallibly taught. Infallibly taught.

So Honorius, as the Bishop of Rome, can write to Sergius and promote monothelitism, but...

And then, for 400 years, his successors, upon taking the throne of Peter in Rome, condemned him as a heretic.

Okay? That's not enough to be infallible. Just remember, folks, the pope is infallible except when he isn't.

But he's always infallible except when he isn't. It doesn't work.

No one ever knows when the pope is being infallible. You've got to understand, the pope infallibly defined the bodily assumption of Mary.

You don't think that modern Roman Catholic theologians, the guy, you know, Tucho Fernandez, could not find a way to even get around that?

I mean, did you see what they did with Mary as co -redemptrix and co -mediatrix? Plainly taught by popes, but, you know, this pope said this, and they'll put...

There's a way around everything, folks. Papal infallibility is the most worthless, empty proclamation ever made.

It has no meaning whatsoever. Are all of the dogmas of the

Catholic faith apostolic in origin? Yes. Can you provide me with a specific quote from the apostles or anyone in the first five...

Okay, did you catch that? And I shouldn't have interrupted him there because he's asking a good question.

Are all the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church apostolic in origin? Now, for a

Roman Catholic to say yes, like Joe Henschmeier just did, he has to completely buy into the idea of John Henry Cardinal Newman, development of doctrine, that a dogma unknown in the early church, unknown, completely in the early church, like the bodily assumption of Mary, is still apostolic in origin simply because the organization that they claim the apostles start continues and then develops this belief by the reflection under the guidance of the

Holy Spirit and the doctors of the church and the oral tradition and it gets defined 1950 years after the birth of Christ.

So, that does not mean for a second that the apostles ever even dreamed of such a concept.

So you've got to understand the definition, the definitional use of language and it's not clear.

It's very confusing and it's meant to be. It's meant to be. 500 years of the church unambiguously teaching the substance of the

Catholic dogma that Mary was assumed into heaven in bodily form. Okay, see? That's the exact point.

Alright? I may ask him, so, Jacob, did you listen to some of my debates before this debate?

Did you, you know? But, again, I'm not unique in my arguments in any way, shape, or form.

Shouldn't be anyways. Because that's the point. There is a dogma. It's the most recent dogma, 1950.

The full weight of Rome behind it it is unambiguously non -apostolic.

If apostolic has anything to do with the apostles. But in Roman Catholicism, it doesn't.

It doesn't. It has to do with the organization you claim they founded teaching it today.

Not that the actual content of the belief was known by the apostles, taught by the apostles, taught to anybody by the apostles.

Once you get that, then you start realizing, man, they say apostolic tradition all the time, and all they mean is, it's what we teach.

They want the authority of the apostles. But it's just what we teach. You mentioned Revelation 12 before, and there are early

Christians who look to that as evidence of Mary's bodily assumptions. But that's not what I asked. Okay, but no.

The wide view on Revelation 12 and the woman there was not that it was

Mary. It was Israel or the church. That was the two perspectives that were primarily taken. And we're talking the first 500 years.

He put something on that. Notice this is just thrown out there. Well, Revelation 12, that's honestly all you've got.

Yes, it is all you've got. I mean, after Pentecost, Mary disappears.

She's sort of mentioned in Galatians, the woman. And then you've got

Revelation 12, which, again, is susceptible to numerous interpretations that are stronger than the idea that it's

Mary. And that is absolutely, positively it. That's all you've got. There's nothing else there.

So you've got to use what you've got, even if it is just so patently obvious. This has nothing to do with a bodily assumption.

Well, she's in heaven, so she must have been assumed into heaven. And all the rest is kind of stuff.

That so plainly in history required a whole set of beliefs to develop along the same time.

It had to come together to form the foundations for these things. Yeah. Fascinating.

Is there anyone who unambiguously teaches the substance? I don't know. I'm trying to answer the question as I understand it.

If you're asking like, where's the word Trinity in the Bible kind of question, then you're right. You can always do that.

Really? Really? Those of you who know me well, Algo is sitting there going, uh -oh, look out!

Because Algo knows, and anybody who knows me knows, when the Roman Catholics pull the Trinity card,

I get more than just a tad bit on the upset side. The biblical evidence of the doctrine of the

Trinity is wide, deep, and unambiguous, and to compare it to something as absurd and unapostolic as the bodily assumption of Mary is simply disgusting to me.

And should cause Joe Heschmeier absolute shame to even make that kind of argumentation.

And remember, remember folks, I was sitting right there on the debate stage in Baldwin, Long Island, when

Jerry Matitix, who was once a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, just like Joe Heschmeier, in fact one of their key guys in those early years, when

Jerry Matitix said that we have the same epistemological warrant for believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as we have for believing in the bodily assumption of Mary.

Think about that. He said they're the same. The same epistemological warrant.

Which means he's reducing the epistemological warrant for belief in the resurrection to the authority of Rome.

And since Rome has told you to believe in the bodily assumption, therefore there you go. You believe in the resurrection because Rome tells you to.

You believe in the bodily assumption of Mary because Rome tells you to. So if Rome tells you black is white and white is black, you just believe it.

That's what Loyola, Ignatius Loyola said. Our acceptance of the authority of the church should be that if it tells us that black is white, then we believe that black is white.

Same thing. End of history, end of the faith. Okay? But again, it should be offensive to anyone that anyone would suggest that the evidence of the doctrine of the

Trinity in the New Testament is parallel to the evidence of the bodily assumption of Mary in the

New Testament. Now, Joe would probably go, ah, it really wasn't what I was saying. I was just simply saying the word's not there.

Yeah, no. Joe, your second, third generation Catholic answers

I've been dealing with you all since the 80s. Okay? And I've heard this one way too many times.

That's not how we do theology. So I think that may be just kind of talking past one another. Okay, so can you provide me with a specific quote from someone in the first 300 years of Christianity explicitly teaching the substance of the

Vatican I dogma of papal infallibility? If you believe in doctrinal development, you're going to go, that's not how we do theology.

We don't need that. Which just exposes that the Roman Catholic claim that this is actually apostolic, and this is what

Hanson is demonstrating. This is not apostolic. That does not actually prove the

LDS position, which he is then going to later state when he's being asked questions.

He's going to say, well, yeah, look, the LDS position could be wrong.

But that still means that the Roman Catholic Church can't be the one that you'd look to as the one true church when asked about what the one true church is.

So, that's what's prompted all the later programs and discussions and stuff like that, which

I guess I understand. It is necessary for every church to agree with his church on account of his preeminent authority.

That quote is from Irenaeus, and it is again, anachronistic and acontextual.

I think, if I recall correctly, Hanson had already addressed that. In fact, look at the look on his face.

The look on his face is going, aha! I gotcha! I gotcha! Irenaeus, that is a misuse of Irenaeus.

Look, Irenaeus is having to struggle with Gnosticism, tremendous challenges.

I cannot imagine how difficult it was in the early church at that particular point in time to deal with these types of things.

But, what he's doing when he makes that statement is that it is useful because of Rome's centrality, because Rome has communication.

Remember the old saying? If you were educated in the American educational system in the past 30 years, you wouldn't.

All roads lead to Rome. What that meant was Rome was the hub of the empire, the hub of commerce, the hub of military, and that is why the church at Rome gained such notoriety.

It was because everybody knew who was there. Churches that were farther away, which may have had far better claims to having had an apostle as the founder or whatever else, did not rise to that same level.

And so, Irenaeus is not saying that that church has been chosen by God and its bishop chosen by God as the final infallible authority and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

That is a gross misuse of Irenaeus, and there are plenty of Roman Catholic historians and scholars that recognize that.

So, again, just to throw that out is to assume that the people listening have never read this stuff before, have never dealt with this issue before.

And that's to ignore tens of thousands of pages that have been printed since the

Reformation dealing with these issues, but it's safe to do in the vast majority of instances, it's safe to do.

And you're going to go with that, that that proves the papacy, that that is an explicit teaching of the substance of the

Vatican? I wanted to follow up with that question. I just want to clarify that you're saying that that statement explicitly teaches the substance of the

Vatican I dogma of papal infallibility? Logically, yes. If you say it is a matter of necessity that every

Christian agrees with the Church of Rome and the Church of Rome teaches that the Pope is infallible, then it is major premise, minor premise, draw a conclusion.

Okay, now think about that for just a second. Historically, again, outside of if you take the glasses off that Rome forces you to put on by her own self -proclaimed authority, the authority of the

Roman Church arose before the authority of the Roman bishop. For a number of reasons.

Again, the more apostolic New Testament form of the Church with a plurality of elders, bishops, same office, existed in Rome until about 140.

And so you didn't have a monarchical episcopate, a single bishop. You had elders.

And so that's what you see in Clement's letter. It's not Clement, but it's attached to it.

You don't see a single person saying, I am the bishop of Rome, therefore do what I say. It's not there.

Read it for yourself. So it's the authority of the

Church that eventually led to the exaltation of the authority of the bishop once that monarchical episcopate developed.

That's the honest historical perspective which you can't really hold as a Roman Catholic faithfully.

Though there are many Roman Catholics historians who will because they are more interested in truth than they are in following the dogmas of Rome.

But that is antithetical to the actual statements of the

Roman Catholic Church about its own authority in the person of the bishop of Rome. So again, this is you're seeing the anachronism in Heschmeyer's responses that he's forced to by the dogmas that he's accepted as ultimate in authority.

So, why do you disagree with Robert Eno, the professor of Church History at Catholic University of America, hold on a moment, when he says the context, okay, well then let's go to another one.

Let's go to William Ledoux, another Catholic scholar. In his book, The Chair of St. Peter, he says for Irenaeus, it is those churches of apostolic origin that have the greater claim to authentic teaching and doctrine.

Among those, Rome, with its two apostolic founders, certainly holds an important place.

However, all of the apostolic churches enjoy what he terms preeminent authority in doctrinal matters.

Now, let me just again, the only person who knows this will be

Algo again. Is Algo in channel? You haven't seen him? Oh, bummer. He'd be enjoying all his references today.

I'd be making him very happy. Algo would remember that when I debated Robert Fastigi in Austin, Texas, long, long ago, and they're on Sermon Audio, yes they are, that I cited

Eno at that time. And I remember that Fastigi, this is stuff you don't get unless you listen to the program.

Fastigi, during one of the breaks between, because we did I think three or four debates in a

TV studio. I forget why he came over to my desk.

I was showing him a quote or something. I don't remember what it was. And I mentioned one of these

Catholic historians, and he says, yeah, that's the unfortunate part.

That's the unfortunate part of having ended the Inquisition. So in other words, yeah, we've got people who say stuff like that now because we don't kill them anymore.

They can keep on doing things like that. So, yeah. Yeah. I've seen how apologists respond to the citation of their own historians.

Well, he's not wrong in the fact that all of the apostolic churches have an authority and matters of doctrine.

But the church that he singles out, the most glorious church of Rome, is for a reason. He gives that reason.

It says on account of its preeminent authority. He doesn't say every church has the same preeminent authority. So the category he's given, he says we can trace the lineage of all of the apostolic churches.

So apostolic church is important. And then within that list... Okay, remember, why is he tracing this authority?

It's because the Gnostics are making claims of apostolic authority as well.

That's what the focus here is. There's a specific context. The Gnostics are claiming to have special knowledge that came from the apostles and it's only in their group.

So Irenaeus is going, no, it's only in our group. And here's the churches that can claim that kind of apostolic authority.

The fact of the matter is, you cannot prove that Peter had anything to do with the founding of the church at Rome.

In fact, the New Testament argues against it. He's the apostle of the Jews, not the Gentiles. We know

Paul was there. There's no question about that. Only later tradition coming from much later puts

Peter there. And you can see why. It's necessary for the anti -Gnostic polemic.

It doesn't make it true. What should be the standard? The standard should be the

New Testament, not stuff 150 years later. Within that genus, he singles one out,

Rome, and says the reason he singles it out is on account of its primitive authority. So he's saying there's a specific difference within this genus.

Among the absolute churches, this one is better. Which, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with Vatican I.

I mean, to try to say, well, you know, hey, if the church at Rome says that the

Pope's infallible and Irenaeus said to follow the church at Rome, therefore that's the same thing as Vatican I?

John Henry Cardinal Newman would be having a conniption fit about there. He says it would be very tedious in such a volume as this to reckon up the successions of all the churches.

We do indicate that we do indicate that tradition derived from the apostles organized at Rome.

So he is saying that he's essentially doing this for brevity's sake in his own words. And I encourage... Oh, I'm sorry.

No, no, no. I would agree with that. He's telling you we had the record, and Tertullian mentions this in about the year 200 as well, that every church founded by the apostles could list every bishop they'd had.

And obviously, if you've ever read Against Heresies, the book has lengthy, very boring passages.

But are you claiming that, because I don't doubt that local jurisdiction was given to these bishops by apostles.

I don't deny that. I'm asking, though, where is the evidence that universal jurisdiction was given from the apostles, not just local jurisdiction?

I don't think the question of universal jurisdiction is what we need to prove in a debate about the great apostasy. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Okay. Look, I understand why he's trying to dodge that one.

Because there are no such claims. In fact, he knows that the sixth canon of the

Council of Nicaea, still, you know, 150 years in the future, is going to demonstrate that at that first ecumenical council, they recognize a limitation of the authority of the bishop of Rome.

He has authority over the churches in his area, not over those in Alexandria or someplace else.

So the limitation's there. He's going to have to deal with Cyprian. He's going to have to deal with Augustine and Zosimus.

There's just all this church history that stands in the way. And so, yeah, no, there is no

Vatican 1. And trying to pretend that there is gets you into a real mess.

It is, well, I'm sorry. You could be wrong about universal jurisdiction from a Catholic perspective and still say the church on earth existed.

In fact, the whole question of what the nature of the Pope's immediate jurisdiction is, is a question that's really way more nuanced.

Because, for instance, in the East, we let patriarchs choose their... But wouldn't that mean that there was an institutionally something was lost if we didn't have the papacy?

I'm not saying the papacy's lost. No, no, I'm not saying that either. I'm asking if the papacy didn't exist, that would mean that the fullness of the church was lost and something would need to be restored because the apostolic office would be gone, correct?

Okay, so, we're running out of time here. Well, no one's holding a gun to their head saying we have to get done right now.

Again, this is a very interesting approach. But I'm not sure it's a fully honest approach.

If Heschmeier's thesis was that the

LDS doctrine of the great apostasy is false because of the overwhelming historical testimony to the papacy, okay, that's not really what his argument was.

And, so, I agree with Hansen. There is no papacy in the early church.

But, what I disagree with Hansen about is that what he should be saying if he's going to really be honest with the historical

James Talmadge level discussion of LDS dogma is that what was lost was not a papacy.

What was lost was priesthood authority. I mean, that's the

LDS perspective. Now, am I sort of sensing in modern

Mormonism in the 40 years that have passed since I've been witnessing the

Mormons somewhat of a diminishment of emphasis upon priesthood authority?

Yeah. Yeah. I've told a story about the, you know, two years ago at the it was either

Easter pageant or the Christmas lights, had a young Mormon guy come up and, you know,

I just don't know why you all are doing this, and then he said, you know, we accept your baptism, you should accept our baptism, we should all just be

Christians together. And I was talking to this other Mormon and I glanced over at him, and he glanced over at me, and after the young guy left, he said, yeah, we're not necessarily teaching our young people real well anymore.

Because he knew, they don't accept our baptism, my baptism is completely invalid from the

LDS perspective. Why? Because the person who baptized me, Cass F. Santos Jr.,

of Bible Baptist Church in Charlemontown, Pennsylvania, did not claim to have the

Aaronic priesthood. Because there's two priesthoods, Aaronic and Melchizedek. Aaronic is necessary for baptism,

Melchizedek is necessary for laying out of hands to receive the Holy Ghost. That's LDS dogma, that's

LDS teaching. So that's what he should be talking about, not the papacy.

So he started doing this general, yeah, but if something was lost, but the something that was lost is very specifically stated in LDS theology.

See? So, yeah. In this hypothetical, just to clarify, are you asking if just the

Pope is gone, or if any mechanism of ever having a Pope is gone? No, I think I've clarified. I want to ask you about the

Chieti statement in 2016. If we're going to assume that the fullness of the institution of the

Church existed throughout all time, within the Roman Bishop, why did the

Vatican's theologians in the Chieti statement say, in the West, the primacy of Rome was understood from the 4th century onwards.

The primacy of the Bishop of Rome among the Bishop was gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his, and this understanding was not adopted in the

East. Why would they say that if the Church always had the fullness of its structure? Not only that, Satis Cognitum, Jacob Hansen could have used this,

Satis Cognitum says this has always been the faith of the

Church. Just straightforward. There's no question about it. So, what you have here is one of the many instances where you have honest historians, and they're doing the ecumenical stuff with the

East. And the folks on the East, Craig Trulia, the guy that I'm debating in October, he's got a whole book about the papacy.

Knows all about this development stuff. And the folks in the East know that stuff. And so they have to be honest.

But to be honest, is to have to demonstrate that your dogmatic statements of only 150 years ago were lies.

Included lies. And you might go, yeah, that's right. Isn't it great that we're starting to admit it?

And just continue on. There are some that try to take that perspective. I don't know how you do that, but there are some that do that.

First of all, this is a statement by a panel of theologians. It has no binding weight as a Catholic document.

I want to be very clear about that. Why would you disagree with them, though? It has no binding weight as a

Catholic document. It's way too honest. Let's just be honest.

That's what it is. It has no binding weight. It's just a bunch of theologians.

What happens when Tuchel Fernandez puts it into the next papal statement? Well, then he's stuck with it.

Now what's he going to do? He's going to be defending a system that is changing, and yet claiming that it's not.

That is the burden of the current Roman Catholic apologists. You're having to defend the indefensible.

I feel for you, but I'd like to suggest to you, maybe you might want to abandon that stuff and try the true stuff.

It would help a lot. I'm not sure how much longer this goes, and I want to get to where Joe is doing.

We will. Not today, obviously. Let me just give it a couple more minutes and see if there's a nice, easy spot we can take a break and pick up with it next time.

The particular delegate who was representing the Catholic side there has a kind of idiosyncratic vision of history that was critiqued even by other

Catholic scholars as being not a very precise way. This is part of the issue. Very precise way.

Throw him under the bus, why don't you? Why was he on the panel? Who chose it? Did Francis choose him?

Did Francis make an error to do that? I mean, come on. Look at the papal biblical commission.

Look at everybody that the pope put into positions of authority all across the curia. There's a consistency.

There's a perspective. It's changing. They're admitting this stuff.

Come on. You got to get with the program. I know it's actually impossible to defend.

I wouldn't want to be in your shoes for nothing. I got one thing to defend. There it is.

It ain't going to change over the next decade. You don't have that.

Just to be honest, you do not have that kind of consistency in what you're trying to defend.

Alright, so look. We'll continue with this. I will try to make sure to make a note because I'm enjoying this personally because I'm getting to talk about both

Roman Catholicism and Mormonism and church history all at the same time.

And letting the Mormons and the Roman Catholics guide the conversation. I think it's useful.

Hopefully helpful. You're not going to get this anyplace else. Sure, there's been people that have discussed this stuff.

But where else are you going to go for an in -depth analysis of this stuff and go,

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let's remember this. And throw that kind of stuff in there.

I think it's a lot of fun. Anyway, one thing

I will mention as we get started to wrap up here. One of the things

I want to do and especially I'm looking forward to doing this in the mobile unit once we get on the road.

One of the things I want to do is I want to take the screenshots from Dr.

Smith's presentation and demonstrate the fundamental reality of what

I said on the last program. And that is he has an answer to every text

I will cite and I have an answer to every text he will cite and the question is who will be consistent? Who will be consistent?

And gish galloping through a hundred references will accomplish nothing in a short debate and it really doesn't accomplish anything in an even long debate.

But for the edification of the saints and the edification of the audience of the dividing line what we can do is we've grabbed already those high quality screenshots and we can simply walk through them.

And remember when I got up to do my rebuttal my first statement was 90 % of what we just saw has nothing to do with the doctrine of the trinity.

It's based upon false straw man argumentation. It's based upon demonstrating that Jesus isn't the father which of course we believe.

It's based upon the overriding presuppositional assertion that of Unitarianism.

If the father is God then only he can be God. That's it. The being of God is absolutely limited,

Unitarian you cannot have Trinitarian. It's just a given and then you just spin in a tight circle after that.

And by walking through that stuff we can demonstrate it. And at the same time help to prepare the saints to give an answer for the hope that's within them.

So that's what we'll do. We'll start throwing that in there. I don't know how long it'll take to go through it.

It'll be sort of something that I'll just keep on the computer and pull it up once in a while. I won't necessarily do it every program but we'll see.

I might not spend a whole lot of time on it each time but that's something we'll be doing. So anyways alright, there we go.

We got through the whole thing without the lights going out or anything else. That's always good. Remember back in COVID we got through it without getting shut down by YouTube for having dared say something we shouldn't have said.

Remember how that was a real, real, real, real, real threat? And how today the documentation's out there did you know the government was literally paying

Facebook Twitter, all these people to censor? To ban people, get rid of people?

That's probably how we got our strike. Was I dared quote somebody? Who said something that is now absolutely fully accepted in the scientific literature.

Absolutely fully accepted. The number of studies now demonstrating the dangers of mRNA astronomical.

I've given up even trying to collect them. You can't keep up with it. But that's where we lived.

And folks it only takes one major election and we'll be right back there again.

Just keep that in mind. With that said, let's press on and see you next time.