Art Sippo: Refuted, Exposed: Part 1

Art Sippo’s Personal Attacks and Debate History

This is the first time I've joined together video and audio on the blog, but I thought it was appropriate in light of the fact that I was responding to Art Sippo. Art Sippo is a medical doctor. He is not a theologian.

To my knowledge, he has never been to seminary or anything along those lines. But he is a vociferous promoter of Roman Catholicism, shall we say. A quick search of my blog will provide some amazingly bombastic statements, insulting statements from Art Sippo, but that's just his, that's the way he does things.

That's his modus operandi. I debated Sippo in 1991 in Toledo, Ohio. I truly wish the videos of that debate existed so you could see the man sitting on his table swinging his legs back and forth, making hand gestures to the audience, mocking hand gestures of me toward the audience.

It was, without a doubt, the most amazing behavior. I've never had anyone, Mormon, Muslim, King James only, I've never had anyone. Not even Nader Ahmed has behaved in the way that Art Sippo has behaved in that debate and then over the years since then.

And recently, he even accused me of doctoring the tapes we do have of that debate, which came from Catholic Answers. They're the ones who sent us the defective tapes. That's all they, they said that the recording went bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I've never believed that and I never will. But those tapes which we made available are the only tapes that are there. And the idea of them being doctored is, of course, as absurd as most everything else that Art Sippo has ever said.

The Aorist Participle in Romans 5:1

But yesterday, and this will appear in the blog for July 2nd, 2008 on aomin .org, yesterday, Art Sippo decided to once again provide me with a means of documenting. I've done this many times. His errors in Romans 9, I went through that.

And he has no way of responding to these because the man may be a wonderful medical doctor and he may love to mock me. The fact of the matter is, he doesn't have any expertise in this area, the area of theology, the area of the biblical languages.

And so he gave me a means by which I could document, yet again, another of his many areas right in the middle of his bombastic personal attacks. He said, he wrote on the Envoy Forums, quote, for example, the sad and confused Mr. White claimed in the 1980s and early 1990s that the aorist verb form in Greek referred to a past completed action that could not be repeated.

He wrote it in his silly little diatribes and said it openly during debates, end quote. That is a lie. It's a documentable lie. So I wrote to Mr. Sippo, Dr. Sippo, medical Dr. Sippo, and I demanded that he document this.

He sent me three URLs, two to my own blog and one to an article by Mark Brumley, a Roman Catholic, used to be on the staff with Catholic Answers back in the early 1990s. And clearly what Sippo's doing is he's just following Brumley and doesn't even understand what Brumley's saying.

And I predicted on my blog that what he was referring to was a misunderstanding on his part of comments that I've made in regards to Romans 5 .1 where you don't have just an aorist, you have an aorist participle together with a finite verb.

And I have pointed out that the aorist participle, having been justified, means that justification is something that takes place in the past and it provides the ground, the basis for the assertion that Paul makes in Romans 5 .1, therefore having been justified, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And I had never, ever made the statement whatsoever that, in fact, this indicates that justification is a once-for-all action. I believe justification is a once-for-all action. But that particular verb form does not prove it.

It does tell us that it's in the past. It does tell us that that's the basis of peace. But the reason I believe justification is a once-for-all action is because of the entire witness of Scripture. And in the debate that Mark Brumley was responding to in 1991, which was my debate with Father Mitchell Pacwa, recorded in San Diego, a debate that is available on video.

Mr. Scott Butler possesses that, but Mr. Scott Butler will not make it available. He will not distribute it. And so all you can do is hear the debate. You cannot see the debate. I call upon Scott Butler once again to do what we do with all of our Roman Catholic opponents.

We provide them the videotape for free, as we did with Mitchell Pacwa when we debated, for example, the priesthood. You can contact Mitchell Pacwa. He will confirm for you that we provided to him an unedited master tape of that to do with it as he pleased.

Scott Butler will not do that. And even though that debate was a long time ago, there would be a lot of people, I think, who would be very interested in seeing it. In that debate, I had asserted that justification is a once-for-all action.

But all I said about Romans 5 .1 is that, as Paul says in Romans 5 .1, we look back upon our justification, which, of course, is exactly what Romans 5 .1 states and the aorist participle in relationship to the finite verb indicates.

And as the vast majority, all translations that I know of, likewise indicate. And so I demanded that he document this. He went to one blog article where I discussed a completely different issue, that is, the aorist subjunctive strong denial in Romans chapter 4, verse 8, umela gitsetai, that is found there, and had nothing to do with his accusation.

And then where I had posted from my book, which was not in the 1980s or 1990s, the God Who Justifies, almost 400 pages on justification endorsed by numerous scholars that he cannot question their credentials of, on Romans 5 .1, where, again, I simply make the statement and quote Roman Catholic authority Fitzmyer on this subject, that in reality, Romans 5 .1 once again speaks to us of an action in the past.

I never confused the aorist participle of Romans 5 .1 with a perfect tense verb like Robert St. Genes did in his book, Not by Faith Alone, page 239. I have never said that that verb alone indicates a completed action in the past that cannot be undone in the future, et cetera, et cetera.

It is a gross misuse of all of my statements to say otherwise. Now to go to what Mark Brumley said, and this does seem to me to be the exact source from which Art Sipo took all of his understanding, he said in This Rock magazine in September of 1991, Romans 5 .1, therefore since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through Jesus Christ, is often cited in defense of the Reformed view that justification is a once for all declaration by God.

Justification can neither be increased nor lost. Paul's use of the aorist tense in Greek, we have been justified, supposedly, notice supposedly demonstrates that justification is exclusively a past completed act which confers a state of justification unalterable by a subsequent act of the believer.

Why won't this argument work? Because the aorist doesn't function the way the Reformed argument presupposes. Although the Bible speaks in Romans 5 .1 of justification as a past completed act, this doesn't mean it can't be altered for better or worse by what we do.

To say an act has been completed needn't imply that no further development or change is possible. Again, Mark Brumley, This Rock magazine, September of 1991. Now notice, even at this point, I get the strong feeling that Art Sipo was just blustering away at his keyboard, as he often does, once again forgetting that people might be watching, and he didn't even take the time to go back and look at what Brumley had actually said because he's not even giving Brumley's accurate argument.

He's not giving Brumley's argument accurately. Brumley's argument is not accurate, that's not what I said anyways, in the debate. Interestingly enough, Brumley doesn't bother to tell his readers who the Reformed person is.

This is another of the amazing tactics of Roman Catholic apologists. They won't even mention the names of people that they're criticizing, so you can't go and look at what they're actually saying. It's an act of cowardice, I'll be perfectly honest with you.

We name names when we respond to somebody, so you can go and look at what they said and make sure that what we're saying is truthful.