2 John 11 Abused by Imbalanced Calvinists, Death of LDS President, Further Response to Ijaz Ahmad

Well, good afternoon. Welcome to The Dividing Line. No special guests today, but we have a lot of stuff to get to. And I hope you find what we cover today to be useful and helpful. We are hunkered down in the bunker here as the bombs fly overhead.

It's always good to start off the year with something interesting, I suppose. Want to start off and make sure I'm sending the right thing here. I've got so many things to show, it's going to be challenging today.

The Proper Context of 2 John 7-11 Against Misuse

Most of you will recall that during the May, June period of time, we dealt a number of times with biblical texts that were utilized to attempt to argue that you should not engage in meaningful interaction, especially respectful interaction with non-Christians, specifically non-Christians who have a theological belief of their own that is different than your own or denies your own, specifically in regards to the dialogues with Dr. Yasir Kadi.

And there are only a few texts that were put forward. We've examined every single one of them rather fully and demonstrated the misapplication that was being made. This was done by Brandon House and his folks.

And a lot of folks on the Reform side recognize that that particular group of people are not exactly known for their exegetical prowess, shall we say. That's not really their thing. They're more into conspiracy theories, politics, things like that than doing the exegesis of the text of scripture.

But one of the texts that was presented, of course, was from the little book of 2 John. And we specifically examined the phraseology beginning at verse 7. I'm going to go ahead and read through this once again because now we have a new application, this time being done by ostensibly Reformed individuals.

And we want to document this scripture twisting on the part of Jordan Hall, Pulpit and Pen, and people like that, Mr. Haas, and the others, a small but very vocal group of individuals. 2 John 7, because many planoid deceivers have gone out into the world.

And let me just stop immediately, point out that terminology immediately connects us back to 1 John and to the deceivers that are found there. And when we examine the specifics of what they were deceiving about, we discover that they were denying that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh.

And that's exactly what we have here. When he talks about who these deceivers are, he then identifies them. And you'll notice planoid here is functioning positively. Well, I should say the participle here is functioning positively, identifying who these deceivers are that have gone out of the world, the ones not confessing Jesus Christ having come in the flesh.

And so it's very important to recognize that the New Testament writers were interacting with an early form of what is later to be fully identified as Gnosticism. It is one of the most important issues of New Testament exegesis and background to recognize how important this is.

Because in the first 150, 250 years of the Church, Gnosticism, in its many forms, it always took— there was never a systematic theology of the Gnostic movement. But it was really the greatest challenge outside of the Church's own response to persecution that the primitive Church faced.

And from a number of different directions as well, it was a real challenge. And it is extremely relevant to us today and to doing meaningful apologetics across the board because one of the primary means that is being used by enemies of the faith today to destroy faith in Christianity is to resurrect the Gnostics.

Nag Hammadi, the Oxyrhynchus papyri find, these have been extremely important to give us background and information, but the enemies of the faith have utilized this information to raise the Gnostics from the dead, basically.

And to utilize them in the context of saying there were all these different perspectives and beliefs back then, and orthodoxy was just one of many, many voices that just happened to win out. The idea being that there was no apostolic deposit of faith in the early Church.

So it's important to recognize that the New Testament does specifically address this movement. And the ones not confessing that particular term, acknowledging, confessing, that means that the Christians are described as the confessors, the professors, the acknowledgers of the incarnation, of Jesus Christ having come in the flesh.

Now, what did Gnostics believe? Well, the Docetic Gnostics specifically believed that Jesus was a spirit, but the idea of him having a fleshly body would be against their Docetic understanding of the flesh is evil, the spirit is good.

And so they were the ones that would present a truly unenfleshed Jesus. He only appeared. Dockhine, that's why they're called the Docetics, Dockhine only appeared to have a physical body because otherwise he could not be one of the eons, he would not be one of the good guys, he'd be one of the bad guys.

Salvation is getting out of the physical body, not having a physical body. And so Christians here would be identified as the ones confessing, the ones adhering to the doctrine of Jesus Christ having come in the flesh.

This is the deceiver and the Antichristos, the Antichrist, singular in this particular context, but it's the idea that to stand against Christ is to stand against the reality of the physical incarnation.

And before we can make, before we can even ask the question, is there a proper modern application to a text like this? We have to understand what it meant in the original context itself. If you skip that part, then your modern application is automatically suspect.

It's automatically questionable. And so the deceiver, these are the main deceivers that have gone out into the world. The deceiver is the one denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. And so this specific group that John is having to struggle against in the early church are the Protonostics who, while proclaiming themselves to be Christians, deny the reality of the physical incarnation of Jesus Christ.

This is the meaning of this text. And so any further application has to explain, okay, if you're gonna apply the deceiver phraseology or nomenclature here to someone else, then you have to, the burden is upon any serious exegete to demonstrate that the original author would have agreed with your application as well.

And that's frequently extremely difficult to do. Extremely difficult. It doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Unfortunately, people will make those extended applications all the time. But that's what you have to do.

And so there's the context. The Protonostic incarnation denying physical reality of Jesus denying deceivers, the antichrists. This is the background. And so in light of that, we are to look to ourselves, watch yourselves in order that you do not lose what we have accomplished, but that you may, a full misthos, a full reward you might receive.

And so he's saying to the early Christians, if you fall into this kind of a camp, you're fundamentally destroying the work that has been invested in the production of your churches, your local churches and everything else, because this is a fundamental denial of a central aspect of the faith.

So he goes on to say, so everyone, pra agon, going beyond, going beyond limits, going too far, and not abiding in the teaching of Christ. Now, some might argue, well, you have the possibility, exegetically, of at least a minor contextual break between eight and nine.

You don't have to necessarily limit the application of what comes after to the main subject of both 1 John and 2 John. Well, you could argue that, but once again, the serious, fair-minded exegete is going to say, well, again, even if I see some kind of a minor break between eight and nine, if I am going to read into, for example, here, te dedicate tu Christu, the teaching of Christ, something beyond what has already been enunciated in 1 John and in 2 John.

So, central aspect of 1 John's teaching, love for the brethren, keeping the commandments of Christ, walking in the light as he is in the light, confessing our sins. If you want to take all of that, because these are the things that John has emphasized in 1 John, and add that in to the teaching of Christ, beyond the teaching about Christ, specifically of the reality of his physical incarnation.

I think that would be appropriate, but I would think that you would specifically, what would be inappropriate would be to assume that in John's usage here, and then you run off to something that Paul mentions to the Galatians and something like that.

I'm gonna take teaching of Christ here as the entirety of my understanding of Christian theology would be to go way beyond what John is indicating here. And you would have to provide some, at that point, you'd almost have to argue some type of disjunction between eight and nine, because now you've left what he was talking about, and now you've expanded way, way, way, way beyond that.

And then you have the problem of it saying, the one going beyond and not abiding in the teaching of Christ does not have God. The one abiding in the doctrine or the teaching, this one has the Father and the Son.

Now, what's important there is that in 1 John, you had had the argument that if you deny the Son, if you deny who the Son is, the essential nature of the Son, then you don't have the Father. So these deceivers that have gone out were not confessing the full deity of the Son.

And as a result, while they were claiming to still be true worshipers of the Father, John is saying, in light of the revelation of God in Christ Jesus, you can't say that. You cannot go to that point.

Now that the Son has entered into flesh, now that the Father has testified of the Son by raising him from the dead and by exalting him to his right hand, you can no longer in any way make the argument that a unitarian worship of the Father alone is going to suffice.

In light of the incarnation, you must honor the Son even as you honor the Father. If you go beyond the teaching of Christ, if you don't abide in that teaching of Christ, then you don't have God. You do not have the Father and the Son.

But if you are in that doctrine, in that teaching, then you have both the Father and the Son. And we might just point out in passing that once again, you have one of those many, many texts in the New Testament where it doesn't make a lick of sense outside of a Trinitarian understanding of God.

That is, it doesn't make any sense to speak of the Son in this way if the Son is just an angelic messenger or anything along these lines. So the one remaining in the doctrine, in the teaching, this one has both the Father and the Son.

So if anyone comes to you, and humas is plural, so this would be coming to the church in probability, so this would probably be a prophet, a traveling teacher in the early church, comes to the Christian congregation and is not bearing this teaching.

So this teaching goes back to the teaching of Christ, abiding in that teaching, having the Father and the Son. If one comes to you and he's not bearing this teaching, the very teaching that's referenced up here, do not receive him into your house and do not give him greetings.

And as we've pointed out before, there were no Christian churches in the sense of a building in that day. There were Christian congregations, but there were not Christian buildings as we would identify them today.

And so there's a couple of ways. One says, do not receive him ice oikion, that could be into your house in the sense of the necessary extension of hospitality that in this culture especially was considered to be a given.

When a traveling preacher would come, the people of the congregation would provide for that person's needs, food and shelter. And what John is saying is, don't do that. Do not give of the generosity of the Christian people to an individual who comes to you not bearing the fundamental doctrine of Christ that was referred to in the preceding verse, verse nine.

It could also in light of the fact that you had house churches at this time. The New Testament is filled with references to churches in his household, the church that meets in his household, et cetera, et cetera.

It could likewise have as its application receiving that individual into the fellowship of the church in the house. That's a possibility as well. And you don't have to necessarily pit those two against each other because they'd sort of go together.

And then it says, kairain alto mei legate. So the giving of Christian greetings, for us, it's just simply, hey, greetings are not any big thing. I mean, we have Walmart greeters today. That's not what we're talking about here.

There is a, just as names carried more meaning, there was much more in the consideration of greetings. There would be a Christian greeting, the kiss of fellowship, the holy kiss as Paul referred to it as.

And it was something you only gave fellow Christians. So it was an acknowledgement of this individual's Christianity. And so what is being said is do not give to him that specifically Christian greeting that acknowledges him, that anyone observing it would go, oh, there are two Christians.

So when a Mormon missionary, if the Mormon missionaries knock on my door, people said, why this? Well, I can't have him in my house. I don't think that's what this is about. I've had many a Mormon missionary in my house.

And I can say, hey, Elder Smith, Elder Jones, or whatever else it might be, Elders Reed and Reese, the first two missionaries I ever talked to, good grief, 19, 82 now. Yeah, 20, yeah, 2022 is not far down the road, man.

We're coming up on the big four-oh since my first encounter with LDS missionaries. I posted a picture on Facebook a couple of days ago that I ran across as I was cleaning some stuff out. And there I am.

And do I, no, I put it back in the other. I did remember UBS Third. Somebody on Twitter actually reminded me, hey, grab your UBS Third. So there it is up there. See that Jesus said, I am the Alpha and Omega.

That's actually UBS Third instead of UBS Fifth. I'm actually starting to think I don't have a UBS Fifth except on electronically. So anyway, but I was looking back there for the little red King James because it's clearly visible.

And I remember those gray corduroy pants. Remember corduroy? Does anyone remember corduroy? I remember corduroy. I liked corduroy. I thought corduroy looked great. It's gonna come back, I promise you, right after I die.

But you can see it in my left rear pocket, that very, and the spine on that King James is sort of bent that direction from all those years ago. Anyways, I'm staying there talking to two missionaries. They're trying to lock up their bikes at the North Temple entrance.

And I imagine it was Mike Beliveau that took the picture. And beyond us is the old parking lot that is now the big meeting house across the street. And that meeting house looks bigger than that parking lot did.

Because it's a pretty imposing structure, but parking lots are actually normally fairly large. You think they did? Yeah, yeah. So anyway, how did I get on that? Oh, the idea being, someone will say, well, you can't even say hi to them.

I don't think that's what this is talking about. I don't say to them, hello, brother and sister in the Lord. The Lord's blessings be upon you this day. May Christ's peace be yours. And no, I'm not saying that to them because I'm seeking to witness to them and to bring them to the knowledge of the true Jesus.

And so no one listening to what I'm saying is gonna go, oh, he thinks you're all on the same page and you're a Mormon and they're a Mormon and so on and so forth. Just last time I was down in South Africa, Rudolph and I were sitting at Spur where I eat a lot.

I think Rudolph gets tired of Spur when I'm down there, poor guy. Though he seems to like the food too, and I do too. Their quesadillas are really good. There's just no two ways about it. We're sitting at Spur and these missionaries come in and I see him sitting over there and it's like, okay, we were done.

We had just gotten done. And it's like, okay, Rudolph, I got to. And so when we got up, we started talking to him and there was no confusion on their part about where I was coming from, very quickly. And no, I'm not a member of the LDS Church, but I've certainly spent a lot of time studying what you believe and recommended to them that they take a look at the, debates we've done and stuff like that.

That's one of the neat things. You know, one of the best long-term tracks I've ever found is, get somebody interested in one of the debates you've got on YouTube. Because they can't lose it. Somebody else can't tear it up.

They're already interested. And especially missionaries, they may not look while they're on their mission, but it's amazing what they'll think about after they get off their mission. Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind. So I'll come back to, so the point is verse 10 is about Christian greetings to someone. And it's not about having someone come into your house because when the missionaries come into my house, I'm not feeding them.

I'm not giving them a location from which they can then evangelize my neighborhood. In fact, the entire time they're in my house, they're not going after anybody else. They're hearing the truth. We've had missionaries sent home after spending time with us, or as I can remember the one time that, well, it wasn't the only time, but the time that I went to a missionary's apartment.

And one of those two missionaries was sent home very briefly after that. I didn't finish his mission. The idea here is do not give these false teachers a location in your area from which to preach something other than the truth of Christ, okay?

I was just sent a, I'm gonna forget this as we continue on. So I just wanted to just send this. Someone asked someone else on Facebook, what's your objection to James White? Isn't he a Calvinist? That individual's response was, so is the devil.

So is the devil. The devil's a Calvinist. Okay. I just love my fellow Calvinist brethren that have acid as the blood in their veins. It's great. We'll be talking about them later. Anyway, so with that in mind, we come to verse 11.

The one, for the one saying to him, Chiron, greetings. That's the Christian greetings. The one's giving to him Christian greetings, Koinai. Now, New American Services participates. We know, you know what koinonia means, to have fellowship with, to have, you know, participation, meaning, purposeful participation.

Fellowships with his evil deeds. So what are his evil deeds? The false teachings, denial of the incarnation, et cetera, et cetera. By, if you know who these people are, and then you give them Christian greetings, you are participating in their denial of the central doctrines of the Christian faith.

So when we look at 2 John in its context and consider the situation in the early church, this is a text that is meant to help avoid confusion. It is a text meant to protect, at the time, the house churches from the traveling, miscreants who were denying the incarnation and not abiding in the teaching of Christ, so on and so forth.

Now, with that in mind, again, if we're wanting to honor the text, then we have to be very, very careful when we make extended application of any particular text. I won't get to it today, but I need to make note of it.

I have an article in my Evernote setup from an Eastern Orthodox guy taking aim at, wow, what year, I don't even remember what year the debate with Patrick Madrid was on saints and images, like 2003-ish, something like that.

It's been nearly 15 years. Well, it would be 15 years, a decade and a half ago, but attempting, once again, to revive the Latria-Dulia distinction. We're gonna respond to that because, again, there just isn't a Latria-Dulia distinction.

If you understand the concept of semantic domain, if you have ever done studies of subdugent translations of Semitic terms and how they handle these things, the idea that you can say, hey, as long as you're giving a statue Dulia and not Latria, you're good, would have meant nothing to Moses whatsoever.

So we're gonna be taking a look at that, but the point being, if you're gonna make extended application as this individual does in that article, then you have to be very, very careful about what kind of application you're gonna be making.

And once you leave the original application of the original text, you have to have a tremendous care to make sure that as you leave that and go someplace else, that you are not misrepresenting what the purpose of the original author would have been.

There's a large amount of weight upon your shoulders if you are concerned about rightly handling the Word of God. If you simply wanna use it as a bludgeon, if you just simply wanna attack somebody, then none of this, none of what I'm saying is gonna be relevant to you.

It's gonna be irrelevant to you. Now, the reason we're going back over this is prior to the last program, an ostensibly Reformed group said that I was in sin, even before it happened, but then during and afterwards, for having Michael Brown on the program because from their perspective, 2 John 11 would apply to him.

First, what that means is they are judging him to be a non-Christian. And so he is a false teacher, false prophet, non-Christian. And therefore, to greet him as a brother is to violate 2 John 11. Now, what that would require, of course, is that that initial conversation that Michael and I had about the Trinity, the deity of Christ, Christology, justification, resurrection of Christ, they have lied on their website recently, trying to say that, well, as long as they're a Trinitarian, I'm fine with that.

Anybody who's listened to this program knows that's just, it's hard to understand how people can lie so boldly that way. But once your zealotry overtakes your love of truth, then you can do whatever you want to do.

And this group is certainly doing that. But we talked about who God is, who Christ is, what Christ accomplished on the cross, death, burial, and resurrection, substitutionary atonement, justification, and went through all of that.

But what you have to say is, okay, all right, on the subjects that John specifically enunciates, incarnation of Jesus Christ, came in the flesh. Yep, that's what Michael Brown believes. There's no question about that.

The only way around that is to go, well, he's lying. And there's no reasoning with people like that. Once you have someone on, you ask them direct questions that say, this is what I believe. And the only response is, lying.

All false teachers do it, lying. Well, I can't reason with you. There's no reason for Michael to try to reason with you. I can't reason with you. You've made up your mind. Facts are not relevant to you.

And I bid you adieu, have a nice time. Go do whatever you do. You'll have to answer to God for your unwillingness to listen to what people say. There's nothing I can do about that. But for the people who aren't willing to just simply completely flush any hope of rationality down the tubes, you have to go, okay, yeah, what John was talking about, loving the brethren, walking in the light, okay.

But there's other stuff. And I'm gonna read into the doctrine of Christ the other stuff. And it's all my particular theological specifics, the things that I want to emphasize most strongly. And so I'm gonna read that into that.

And therefore, they go beyond that. They go beyond what I define as the doctrine of Christ. This morning on Twitter, somebody else other than who I was just referring to actually picked up on a conversation with those people and basically made the assertion that, yeah, I don't think you should greet anyone who isn't a five-point Calvinist as a Christian.

And so I said, so you think that te dedicate tu Christu in verse nine is all of Christian theology, including all of Reformed Christian theology? Yeah. And so I said, what about, would you greet as a Christian brother a Lutheran, a Bible-believing Anglican, anybody, for example, that doesn't hold to particular redemption?

No, no. I was, when I was regenerated, I believed all of this. And so I put the two and two together, and you have to believe all of it. And this coincides then with what we talked about last week when I mentioned the incident that was relayed to me by a pastor from a church that had, in listening to some gentlemen speaking, had heard one of the men saying, well, I sure hope R .C. Sproul went to be with the Lord, but it doesn't look good.

And when he asked the question, what do you mean? Well, he was a moderate Calvinist, like James White. And what was it? Tolerant, was it tolerant? Okay. Huh? Oh, okay. Some word. These concepts go together, and I'll be honest, I didn't think these folks seriously existed.

My entire experience amongst the Reformed for decades has been that, well, the vast majority of the people that I knew were individuals who had come out of non-Reformed churches and recognized that they had been saved, that the Lord had worked in their life, had guided them prior to their coming to understand the full realm of Reformed theology, and most recognized that they did not yet understand the full realm of Reformed theology.

I mean, I sit down with some of Mueller's works on the history of Reformed thought, and I realize there's nobody alive that has actually mastered all of this. There's always something more. I mean, how do you develop this idea?

You must have an incredibly stunted view of Reformed theology if you don't understand Semper Reformanda, always reforming. If you've arrived, you don't need to be Semper Reformanda, do you? You've reformed.

You, by regeneration, you've got it all. Got a perfect grasp, the whole thing. Well, it doesn't have to be a perfect grasp. You just, when it's presented to you, you must always accept it. That's the idea that this group has now come up with, is, oh, there's never gonna be a struggle.

There's never gonna be even a period of resistance. And in fact, it is God's intention that every single one of His children, it is absolute demand. They are going to walk lockstep on everything. There's gonna be no disagreements on anything.

Now, we know this is not what Reformed people believe in the past. We know this. But once you point out that they didn't believe these things, then they get labeled as tolerant Calvinists. And their salvation becomes questionable too, I guess.

I can only guess that this is the result of a, yeah, I'm not sure what it's the result of. I mean, I've got theories. And if we see it continuing to develop, then maybe some more data can come forward to help us understand and formulate these theories more.

But just sitting here thinking about it, it reminds me a lot of internet theology. We read so little and what we read on the net, we read so shallowly. I look over at the Edwards volumes over there and I see some pieces of paper sticking out from them.

And if you open up to those, there's gonna be yellow markings for pages every direction. I still have those magnifying glasses that you can actually lay on the page and do a whole line. Cause these are, this is in columns, of course, teeny tiny print.

I remember maybe why my eyes went so badly and I needed to have Lasik. I was trying to read that crazy collection of Jonathan Edwards stuff. That takes a lot of time. And maybe that's what's changed, is that many, quote unquote, Calvinist today didn't get their training in that fashion and hence are able to, in some way, imbibe this wild imbalance.

But it is wildly imbalanced. Let me give you some examples. Gotta switch over here. One of the examples and can make a little bit of a, oh, this is gonna be fun. That's probably it. Yeah, that's actually the right one, I think.

You've got the whole, got the whole thing? Last, late last year, strange to say last year, late last year, we started interacting with the Reforming America Ministries guys, Sonny Hernandez and Theodore Zacariades.

And I'd never, I didn't even realize at the time, like I said, that I knew who Sonny Hernandez was because of his quotation by Christian News back in 2016. That's the first time I'd ever heard of him.

And then I had never heard of Theodore Zacariades, just never heard of him, hadn't seen anything that he had done. And they did the, quote unquote, free will debate at a Lutheran church. And we played it and I critiqued it.

Most of my critique was aimed actually at Layton Flowers and the positions that he was presenting, but I most definitely did criticize Hernandez and Zacariades for the basic reason of their approach and the reality of the fact that they made it very, very clear, we will not acknowledge these men as our brothers.

So we are viewing this as a evangelism situation. We are evangelizing Armenians because we do not believe that the Armenian gospel saves. And so we've gone back and forth, especially with Dr. Zacariades, on his challenge to debate.

And as we have documented, the first few things that he wrote completely misrepresented what I believe. He wanted to debate issues that we don't disagree on. And toward the end of the year, we sort of got down to, well, I suppose it sounds like there could be a thesis here in regards to the necessity of the reality of man's will in the demonstration of God's justice.

And that was sort of the last I made comment about it because I didn't see any response specifically to what I had said about that. Could have missed it, I suppose. Like I said, I had never heard about him before and I find them incredibly distasteful in the way that they treat Christians and non-Christians and other people like that.

So it's not something I do to be sitting there reading them regularly. But then in December, I did some traveling and then we had the holidays. And I have grandkids and I just figured at the end of the year here, it's a good time to focus on some other things and we'll get back to it in January.

Well, I guess you're not allowed to do that. And so some of you have seen that some absolutely incredible articles were put up by these guys. And it just leaves me... It's very hard to understand how you can expect someone to actually want to invest time and effort and money, contacting churches and arranging locations and everything else to debate you when you behave the way these men behave.

I mean, they're just not nice people. And so you can see the things that they posted. Actually, well, okay, we'll look at some of the public stuff, but they would send me private messages in Facebook almost begging me to post them.

I guess they realized I've got a little bit more of an audience than they have. And so they're begging me, challenging me to post what they're saying. And so here's one and it starts at the top, it says Sonny, so I guess this is Sonny Hernandez.

Mr. James R. White, of course, you did exactly what we said you would do, appeal to emotions by running to your social media diary to play victim. Great job, you're very predictable. Your response that you will happily respond to our claims at the appropriate time is comical.

Translation, you will run to your DL so you can tell your audience that you refuted us without anyone debating. Again, you are debating you. Again, you are predictable. Prove us wrong. Just remember, Mr. White, your social media immaturity does not bother us in the least.

Other than we feel that you are a bad example for younger men to follow, and we will continue to teach this. Your question-begging epithets, appeal to emotions, mocking or ridiculing us to the public means very little to us.

Therefore, snapshot these comments and then do what I have perpetually said and will continue to say that you will do next. Run to your social media diary to incite others by either mocking, ridiculing, or playing victim.

After all, that is what mature men do according to your worldview. And you're supposed to take this seriously, that these are serious individuals that you want to invest time in arranging a debate with, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'm not even sure how to respond to someone like this because online you run into folks like this a lot. But the last time I really had to interact with people like this on a personal level was probably sixth grade playground.

You know, the bullies going, you know, are you a chicken, McFly? You know, that kind of thing. That's sort of the level of maturity here. It's just, and I didn't respond to it because, I mean, how do you reason with someone who's going to be using this kind of language?

And so let me, yeah. Well, actually I have the better version of this. Oh no, this is, yeah, okay. Here's one of, okay. Eight, five, there we go. Starting to learn how to use these identifiers. Is that able to, are you able to get that one?

Okay. So here's the two of them. Senator Hernandez, Theodore Zacariades. December 22nd, so three days before Christmas. Three days before Christmas. James White's hypocrisy and cowardice. Hernandez and Zacariades offer a third challenge.

Mr. James White, your conduct is not only disconcerting in so many ways, but by your own standard is also cowardly. You call the Halcyon group cowards for not putting the theological interpretation on the line for examination, yet you ridicule our position on Arminianism as heresy and our view on determinism, yet you have clearly ignored our debate request to put your theological interpretations on the line.

This is hypocrisy and cowardice and you know it. And then you've got, let's do the graphics. Let's get all the weird faces we can and stuff like that. And then make the man look as weird as possible. I mean, this is so childish.

It is really hard to overlook it and take these guys seriously. And ask a church, what church can I ask? What conference can I ask? To give these men a platform when we've already saw, we already saw how they behaved in the debate.

Now we're seeing how they're debating online, behaving online. We see how they behave in private. How can I ask any church to open itself up to this kind of behavior? I think the only thing that could possibly be done would be some kind of online thing.

And then I have to ask myself the question, where in my priority list in the coming year would a face slashing battle with nasty Calvinists come? I mean, I do think there would be benefit from a moderated discussion of whether the reality of compatibilism is vitally important to the demonstration of God's justice.

I think that has value. I'm not sure these guys are the ones to do it with because that is a subject that should be addressed with a certain level of respect and scholarly acumen. And I'm sorry, but that's just online childish bullying.

That's all, that's all that is. I have interacted very carefully with what they have written, pointed out that their challenges were not challenges to me. We've actually thought I was making a little progress.

And then I start getting all this kind of stuff. It's like, since there wasn't an immediate, we'll do it right now. Well, I don't think it's that important. Sorry, I know it's all the world to you. I really do.

I get that, but it's not real high on my priority list. So it is something to consider doing. And so it's something you go, well, I'm going to such and such a place. Maybe you could tie it into something like that or something looked at down the line, but I'll be honest with you, with this kind of immaturity on their part, it's sort of like, yeah.

But I'd really have to find some kind of, after some context where I'm just not asking a church to bring somebody in, that's just going to spew venom all over the place or behave in a completely inappropriate fashion.

I mean, you can have a moderator and I suppose the moderator could just shut someone down and say, shut up, sit down, turn his microphone off. But those types of things are just so, yeah, they want a food fight.

And yeah, the reformed version of Brother John Mary. Yeah, you're right. There isn't much of a difference between the mindset of the wild-eyed crazed Sedevagantist and the wild-eyed crazed Calvinist.

I mean, I'm sorry, but you guys, where do you, hypocrisy, cowardice, you're afraid of me. I am not afraid of either one of you. I'm sorry, you have not produced anything that would cause me to go, I really need to rethink what I've always taught about that.