Speaking the Truth Is Dangerous Today/More on Jimmy Akin and Sola Scriptura

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:43

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line from the AO Max studio today. My name is James White, along with Rich Pierce, who is looking a little frazzled today.

00:53

The computer was throwing him some curves, and then it started working in and of itself, which always makes anyone nervous, because if a computer just starts working and you don't know why, then that means it can stop working, and you still won't know why.

01:09

That's just the joy of—I've just discovered that's the joy of Windows, primarily, is what that's all about.

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But welcome to the program. Anyways, it is a beautiful day here in Phoenix.

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Honestly, it is. We've had just some really, really hot weather, as we always do this time of year.

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It's nothing unusual about that. But I think we're going to be 14 degrees cooler than we were about four or five days ago.

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I'll take 14 degrees any day of the year. In fact, I think we will not make our normal high today, which

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I am very, very thankful for personally, but we'll be well past that by the weekend. So, in fact, they're still saying there's a chance of rain today.

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It doesn't rain in Phoenix in June. No raindrop has ever been designed by God that can survive falling through the atmosphere onto the surface of Phoenix in June.

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They don't start off that big. Anyways, this morning, I very purposefully did what

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Jeff Durbin calls got myself into some godly trouble, making some godly trouble.

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I was thinking about some of the things that are happening in our culture, things that we're all seeing.

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And I was thinking specifically of three videos that, okay, not all of us have seen, but if you really pay attention to much social media,

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I think two of the three were shown on Fox News last night, and I had seen them during the day.

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So these aren't obscure videos. But three videos that came into my attention just over the past number of days.

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And I decided to say once again the same things that I said years ago that got me into trouble, and I'm sure with many people got me into trouble again.

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And you know what? I don't care, because there's only one answer to what's going on.

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People are dying, a genocide is taking place, and Christians who are politically correct are tiptoeing around, going, well, what will the world think of us?

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And I just can't go along with it. Sorry. So what am

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I referring to? The first, basically the thesis of a thread, and I'm probably going to, if I find the time,

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I'm going to take the time to pull the tweets down, put them into a Theology Matters post, and put it on the web, because who knows if they'll survive very long on Twitter.

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But I wrote a thread and basically said, look, here are these three videos, and they are fundamentally connected to one another.

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And if you don't see how they're connected to one another, then you're part of the problem, not part of the solution. What are the videos?

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First video last week was of a, I'd say, three -year -old black girl.

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And she is being videoed out in public.

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She may have been like two and a half. I mean, she was just that young. And she is being videotaped out in public, being taught by multiple other black women, mature women, you know, at least 18 years of age, how to twerk.

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Now, I'm not going to explain twerking. If you don't know what twerking is, it's probably better for you.

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But it's the simulation of the sex act, and it is very popular, not just amongst black women.

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But what was that girl that did it a number of years ago, the white girl? I'm sorry.

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I don't keep up with names of stars and starlets and people like that very much.

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But there was a woman on Young Girl.

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Well, not young, but, you know, 18 or something like that. You know, she was one of the Disney stars, so she had to be sort of less than raucous as a teenager.

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And then once she turned 18, and she's, you know, barely wearing clothes anymore and stuff like that.

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Anyways, she did the twerking thing. So twerking is not just a black phenomenon.

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But remember about two weeks ago, the, was it New York or Chicago police car?

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One of the two. Someone caught video of a police cruiser slowly moving through a neighborhood, and there are black women on the police car twerking.

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And to say that they are not modestly dressed, I mean, honestly, the video seemed to show women who were not dressed at all in the audience.

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If they're wearing any clothing, it was not visible. There was nothing covering anything.

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So this seems to have become a cultural phenomenon, because in the one where this young, this little child is being taught to twerk, all the adults are like, this is wonderful.

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This is great. Isn't that cute? Isn't that, this is awesome. Teaching a little girl around the age of three to simulate the sex act in public.

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Yeah, this is great. I think Matt Walsh had posted it and said if he were made president, his primary job would be to round up every one of those adults and throw them in jail.

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And I can agree with that particular understanding of things. So that's the first video. Adults going, this is great.

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This is wonderful. Let's teach all little ones how to do this kind of stuff. The second video was a couple of days ago.

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There was a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration. I think it was in Chicago. There were 54 people shot in Chicago over the weekend.

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Five died. And they're actually on track to beat last year as to the number of people who will die, the number of blacks who will be killed by blacks in Chicago.

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They're on track to beat last year's record on that. I don't see much in the media decrying this.

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I don't see BLM throwing any of its billions of dollars that it received last year when every corporation on the planet decided to send them money as a virtue signaling act on their part.

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Anyway, someone was shot. And so the paramedics arrived.

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And the video is of what happened to the paramedic vehicle ambulance combination thing, whatever you would call that particular vehicle.

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I assume the people inside had exited to assist the victim.

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And a crowd develops around the vehicle. And once again, almost naked black women begin twerking everywhere.

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They even get on top of the vehicle and start twerking in various states of undress.

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And everyone's got their cell phones out and are celebrating the twerk fest. And the guys are getting involved by doing what guys do when a woman is twerking.

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So you have just absolute complete public indecency, and everybody loves it.

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It's just like, this is great. This is awesome. This is wonderful. This is a shooting.

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Someone has been shot. And the community responds by twerking.

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Then the last video I saw when I got up yesterday morning.

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And it was of a couple who are dragged out of their vehicle.

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Now, their vehicle, it's a nice vehicle. Their vehicle has a

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Puerto Rican flag flying from it. Now, I've not been able to confirm this. But some of the sources said that they were attacked.

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They had gone to a Puerto Rican celebration and were leaving on the way home.

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I've heard there was a child in the car. I have not confirmed some of that. There's contradictory reports.

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But you can see the flag. And some of the reports said that they were attacked because some of the more brilliant people in the group attacking them thought it was the

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Stars and Bars, the flag of the Confederacy from 160 years ago.

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You'd really have to be exceptionally dull to make that mistake. But that's very, very, very possible.

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Anyway, what we saw, and this was played on Fox News. Of course, they fuzzed out the tough part to watch.

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But when I first saw it, that wasn't fuzzed out. A group of black men, and they seem to be associated with gangs.

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Most of them, their pants are around their thighs. And there's more meaning to that than you think.

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It's not a stylistic thing. That comes from the prisons. That has a meaning to it.

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Black men are beating on these people and then execute them on the street there in Chicago.

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The woman was shot in the neck. She went down first. The husband tries to cover her.

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And this thug, again with his pants around his thighs, shoots him at point -blank range in the head.

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And he falls dead on his wife's body. And then a couple seconds later, he sort of just falls off of her onto the ground.

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And no one, of course, is coming to help him. Everybody just stands there watching as the pools of blood spread out across the streets.

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This is happening on the streets in the failed state of Chicago. Let's call it what it is. It is safer to walk the streets in Honduras and El Salvador than it is in this failed state of Chicago.

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No question about it. And my argument was that if you don't see how the first video is connected to the third and is connected to the second, then you're not understanding what's going on, and you're not going to be a part of presenting what the solution to these situations actually is.

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Because that little girl who was being abused in the first video, and she was being abused,

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I understand that there are actually people on Twitter defending, twerking, and basically wearing no clothes, and basically simulating sex acts in public.

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It's just part of the culture, you see. Okay. There's part of the problem.

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A culture that is that evil and depraved needs to be called to repentance or it will be destroyed.

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How's that? Is that straightforward enough for you? Yes. I realize that for many of you who are graduates of public institutions,

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I just committed the greatest heresy. I actually said one culture is better than another. It's true.

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A culture that teaches three -year -olds to become sexualized is a culture that is doomed.

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It will be destroyed. It will destroy itself. It will destroy itself and the hundreds and hundreds of black men, women, and children in Chicago who will die this year violently at the hands of other black men, primarily.

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It is evidence of the fact that that culture will destroy itself. That little girl has a father somewhere.

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Whether she even knows who he is, the percentage of possibility on that is rather low.

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It's rather low that she actually even knows who her father is. And that's a horrific reality, but facts are facts.

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And I realize facts really anger people. And they get very, very angry when you raise these facts and you say, this is the fact.

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This is what is going on. And they don't want to hear that. And they don't want to hear that because of the brain -draining, thought -destroying worldview that is at the base of critical race theory, intersectionality, the whole woke movement, where what's going on with that young child, what's going on with the semi -naked women on top of ambulances, what's going on with the thug with his pants around his ankles shooting somebody at point -blank range.

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He doesn't even know, probably out of ignorance. What ties all that together is the utter and complete collapse of the human family within that community.

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That's what it is. This wasn't happening 100 years ago, but it's happening now.

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And it doesn't have anything to do with how many guns are on the street. It doesn't have anything to do with anything that the left is talking about.

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It has to do with the reality of the utter rejection of the biblical revelation of what a family is to be and how human beings are to be raised in the way that God intended it to be.

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So that little girl has a father who is not protecting her. He's not loving her.

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Don't look at me and tell me that a loving father will allow his three -year -old daughter to be videotaped on the sidewalk simulating sex acts.

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Don't tell me that. And if you have some kind of philosophy that tells you that that's not true, that, oh, yeah, you can love your children and do that to them.

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You are insanely evil and you need to repent of your evil or you will be destroyed.

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Is that clear? God has destroyed many a culture for much less than what we are seeing happening on the streets of America today.

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Much less. That young girl has no family structure.

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Those women who were twerking along with her to show her how to do it are abusing her.

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They may have been abused themselves in the same way. That doesn't change the fact that they're now passing that on to the next generation.

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And so you go from that video where fatherlessness is bringing about abuse and destruction of that young girl in that video, already in her community is three times more likely to seek an abortion than if she were in other communities where that is not considered to be a good thing and where there are more fathers present.

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And by the time she's 15, it may even be a higher percentage than that. Don't get angry with me for speaking the facts.

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Deal with the truth. Deal with the truth. So, second video.

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What do you have? You have an entire group not only showing utter disregard for violence that has taken place.

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It's like, well, that's every day. That's just how things are here. But then you have the group as a whole encouraging public immorality as means of celebration.

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The Greeks had festivals like that too. And we visit the remnants of their civilization every once in a while.

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But you have the whole community and the community together is saying this is good.

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And if you want to argue that one, go watch the Grammys. Because it was the same thing.

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Except in 4K. When Cardi B and some other woman, both of which were not really wearing any clothing, simulated sex acts for everybody on stage at the

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Grammys. And people applauded. And she's got millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars.

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What kind of privilege is that? I don't know. But I guess as long as you're willing to take your clothes off and do that kind of thing in public, you get some type of privilege out of it.

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And there are people who say, and she can do that because she's oppressed. No, it's immoral.

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It's absolutely immoral. It's shameful. Absolutely shameful. There is no excuse.

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Don't even start trying to argue that one. And so if you're going to tell me, well, that was just nicely.

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No, it's not. These are the people who are selling the records.

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And that's what they're doing. And so you see it being repeated after shootings. And so we look at the last video.

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And we see a cowardly thug. We see a group of cowardly young men acting out their sinful nature, which is what young men do when they have no restraint, when they have no fathers.

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And there is about 80 % chance that in that situation, much higher percent chance that there is never a meaningful male presence, disciplining, giving example, covenantally related to the mother, providing any kind of model, an example to be followed.

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And what's the result of that? Murder, mayhem, destruction. If some of the sources

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I read are correct, a young child left without a father.

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And I don't know if the mother is going to survive. She'll never be the same, but if she does or doesn't.

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And it has nothing to do whatsoever with what happened 160 years ago.

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And as long as you keep saying that it does, you're never going to be part of the solution because you can't change any of that.

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I saw another video, I didn't comment on it, but I saw another video in a Christian context that just illustrates this whole thing.

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It was from a CRU event. I've never liked that name. That's the new name for Campus Crusade, but a

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CRU event, C -R -U. And as you may know, CRU has absolutely, the leadership dove headfirst into the woke movement.

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Just, you're just not even welcome in there if you're not completely sold out to Neo -Marxism.

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And it was a brief clip. I was going to try to pull it up, but I wasn't able to.

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It was a brief clip of an older woman, probably my age, somewhere within five or six years either direction,

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I would say. And she was basically, there were two, there was a black woman and a black man who were the presenters.

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And basically what she said was, look, I've looked into my family history.

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I've traced my genealogy back. No one in my family was ever involved with slavery in any way.

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How long do I have to say, I'm sorry? Because it doesn't seem like there's any end.

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And the response that's given to her is, your ancestors didn't have to be involved with that.

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You simply have the advantage that comes from the privilege of being white to be able to accrue more wealth.

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And so that's what we're talking about. And so the answer for her was, you never get to stop saying,

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I'm sorry. And in January of 2019 at the

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G3 pre -conference during the Q &A, and I said it during my sermon as well, there is therefore now much condemnation in the woke church because there's no redemption.

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There's no forgiveness. The lady understood, you're just going to have to say,

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I'm sorry for the rest of your life. You're going to have to adopt the position of having been a part of the oppressor class and you can't get out of it.

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You will be a second class citizen for the rest of your life. And you should start paying reparations too.

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Now, what if she had said, one of the questions I'd like to ask is, I could easily pull up, well, not on this unit, but I could easily pull up on my

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Mac pictures of my ancestors and pictures of the rental homes that I lived in as a child.

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We weren't rich. We didn't miss food, but we did not have the world's wealth.

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I think back on the vehicles that my dad had, and I realize now he was just patching them together and keeping them going as best he could.

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And I look back at his parents, itinerant preachers in the

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Midwest and Kansas had nothing, absolutely nothing. I just recently visited

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Kinsley, Kansas, where we would go and visit my grandma each summer. And the little, teeny, tiny, the little house that we went and visited, and we even had

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Christmas there once, I remember it very clearly. But that little house is smaller than a garage.

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It's tiny. Where was this white privilege? And the oldest picture

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I have going back to 1889 is of my great, great grandparents on the wide open plains in Broken Bow, Nebraska, in a mud hut, scratching an existence out of the dirt.

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Oh, but you've got privilege. Oh, I see. And you're just going to have to get, because there's nothing you can do about it.

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That's just the way it is. And these divisions, they offer no way for these divisions to be healed.

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That's why there is only condemnation in the world church. There is never redemption. There is never any way of bringing the church together.

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So looking at those videos, the answer is to recognize that this community has been lied to and has been deceived into accepting absolute horrific examples like Cardi B of immorality.

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And we have to call all people of any race or ethnicity, but especially black

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Americans who have been lied to and told they need to think like everybody else and do like everybody else and do what they're told and embrace this massive immorality that is represented by how this behavior is being done in public and recognize that it is the rejection of the

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God ordained centrality of the family that is not only resulting in the genocide of black children by abortion, but of the genocide of born black people by other black people, which is taking place in Chicago and in other cities across the

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United States. You're not allowed to say that, but what else is a

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Christian supposed to say? Because when you buy into the woke stuff, you're actually buying into the idea that the message you have for black people is different than the message you have for anybody else.

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As if they are really not made in the image of God. Now there are black racists.

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There's black racist theology that actually turns that around and openly preaches it. But of course they're in a community that's been told you can't be racist.

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That's the best way in the world to create real actual sinful from the

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Bible racism is to tell you, you can never be racist. You can never engage in that kind of behavior.

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So 54 people shot, five dead, one weekend, and we haven't even gotten into July yet because it's the summers that are the worst in Chicago.

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It's just the way it is. The only way is repentance.

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The only way is calling people away from all of this. Well, it's just a culture.

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No, it's not. No, it's not. And if a people group embraces as part of their culture, that which is self -destructive, then if you love them, what will you do?

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Oh, you'll be quiet and just let them do whatever they want. No, that's not what you do.

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That's not what you do. Well, that sermon was free and will undoubtedly result in even more anger than the tweet thread did.

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But someday, if people look back and they see the genesis of what happened to this nation, if they can't find somebody that was saying, hey, people, the only thing that's down this road is destruction for everybody, doesn't matter what your color is, well, then we failed.

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We failed and failed big time. All right. I don't know if you've...

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It's sort of like hard to shift these gears, but there is a lot going on in Roman Catholicism these days.

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And part of it has to do with what's going on right here in the United States of America. Because it seems like the

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American bishops, the large majority of the American bishops, have all of a sudden developed a spine and they're sick and tired of, on the one hand, saying this is the church's teaching on life.

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This is the church's teaching on abortion. And then having all the high profile, well, let's be honest,

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Democrats, leftists, proto commies, in essence, say, oh,

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I'm a Catholic, but I am for abortion and partial birth abortion and infanticide and transgenderism and gay marriage, and I am for everything that the church that I go to and receive

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Mass at says is a mortal sin. Hmm.

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And so some bishops are like, you know, no one's going to take us seriously when we say that these are divine truths.

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When we then turn around and let these people come to the altar and we give them the transubstantiated body of Christ, that's what they believe.

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And so, and what's interesting here, the

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German bishops, only a matter of a few weeks ago, basically told

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Francis, we don't really care what you say, we are going to bless same -sex unions.

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So you have leftist German prelates in the Roman Catholic church who are saying to the

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Pope and saying to the magisterium, yeah, we know that you said that we can't do this, but we're going to do it anyways.

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And of course, what happens? The media is like, yay, German bishops, you're so open -minded and so wonderful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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So the American bishops get together, I guess it was a virtual getting together, and word gets out before they have this meeting that they are going to be putting forth a document of pastoral guidance that basically says, you know, if you have people in your congregation that are political leaders and they are promoting that which the church says is evil and is in fact murder, you don't have to give them the

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Eucharist. Now, I cannot imagine a

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Catholic Pope before the last century that would have for a second thought anything other than that.

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I mean, this was just like, well, duh. That's not to say that there have not been all sorts of bad political alignments within Roman Catholicism in the past that I have.

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But from the leadership of the church, you would think this would be a no -brainer. But in this situation,

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Francis has already made it very clear to the American bishops that he does not want them going this direction.

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So the German bishops are hanging a left, the American bishops are hanging a right, and Francis is left staying in the middle.

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And I'll be honest with you, he's got nobody to blame but himself. You know, I mean, he's not exactly the type of leader that inspires a tremendous amount of confidence in his steadfastness.

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Everybody knows where he's coming from. And all those German bishops know that he would never debate them on that topic, that he probably actually agrees with them, but he's just simply a part of the we can't change that fast crowd.

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And they want to change faster. I would personally think that Francis is probably more upset with the

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American bishops than the German bishops. I really think so, given his liberation theology and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And so you have this conflict going on.

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And it's a schism within the hierarchy of the church on very fundamental grounds, on very fundamental grounds.

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And where is that going to lead? I don't know. I don't know. But I've said for years, look, if you've got

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Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden coming into your church and you're blessing them and you're accepting it, don't talk to me about you being the one true church.

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You don't even take your own teaching seriously. You don't even take your own teaching seriously.

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So someone's finally saying we need to take our own teaching seriously. All right. More power to you.

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I just wonder where Francis is going to draw the line. It's a good question.

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It's a good question. Now, it has been over a month and I apologize.

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Things happen and you get going. It's been over a month since we last looked at Jimmy Akin's book and I apologize for this.

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I had to actually go back and look for where we were.

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Well, where did it go? I love when... There we go. I had to go back and I think,

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I could be wrong, but I think the last time that we looked at Jimmy Akin's The Bible is a

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Catholic Book was May 6th. And I don't know how things go so fast, but I think, when did

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I go back to... Might have been right before I went back to Oklahoma or something like that.

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So that's probably... And we've been a little bit busy since then and we'll be in the future as well.

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So my apologies for that. But what I'd like to do in the few minutes we have left is

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I want to at least get to the next paragraph of what we've got here because as I've mentioned to you, the reason we're looking at this is according to certain people,

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Jimmy Akin's presentation against Sola Scriptura contains some kind of new level of argumentation that no one's ever seen before.

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And I, having read the book, went, no, we've heard all of this for many, many years.

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And so I don't understand why it's so necessary that this has to be gone over again, but fine, let's take a look at it and then we can figure out where to go from there as far as debates and things like that go.

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And so we've been looking at, we've been reading it. I mean, we read all the way through.

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We let the other side speak and then here's the response. But here's a transitional paragraph and it's an important paragraph.

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And I think this is where we stopped last time. It reads, however, in recent centuries, members of the

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Protestant community have opposed a different model. Now the model, when I say different model, you go back here.

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According to the Catholic church, we should use the same model the first Christians did. We need to rely on scripture and tradition as the sources of publicly binding revelation.

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And we need to rely on the magisterium, the bishops teaching in union with the Pope to ensure that we have understood them correctly.

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Now, as we pointed out before, that is a massive anachronism, massive anachronism.

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And this is the fatal flaw of Roman Catholic apologetics is it requires a massive anachronism.

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And in fact, it dogmatically demands massive anachronism. That is reading back into earlier centuries, earlier sources, earlier writings, writers, viewpoints, understandings that took much longer to develop.

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And so the early church did not have scripture, tradition, magisterium,

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Pope. That is not what you'll find in Clement. That's not what you'll find in Didache.

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That's not what you'll find in Ignatius. And in fact, as we have pointed out many times, there's all sorts of evidence in those early centuries against that alleged model.

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But that's the assumption that Jimmy Akin is making. So when it says, however, in recent centuries, so in recent centuries, that is there's nothing similar to this in earlier centuries.

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Nobody, almost everything, any Roman Catholic that you encounter who has fundamentally been trained in how they believe by listening to Catholic answers is going to believe that no one before Martin Luther, maybe the well -read ones might know something about Jan Hus and John Wycliffe, but nobody before Martin Luther, except maybe those two, had any concept of solo scriptura whatsoever.

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And of course, we've demonstrated that that's just historically absurd. But it is repeated so often that even to present citations,

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I've seen many a Roman Catholic just going, well, this is not possible because I've been told by, and the list is long, that, you know, this is something that Martin Luther cooked up and it wasn't.

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So however, in recent centuries is the way of putting that, members of the Protestant community have proposed a different model.

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They say we should obtain doctrine sola scriptura, Latin by scripture alone. It refused to give tradition of the magisterium an authoritative role.

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So notice, this is trying to establish your position by the form of the argumentation and presentation that you're making.

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Because this is not what solo scriptura means. It is one of the results of solo scriptura, but it is not what solo scriptura actually means.

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And so what you do is you make your model, the primitive model. And then you say that the

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Protestants have come along just in the past few centuries with a new way of doing things. And they refuse to give the pre -existing tradition and magisterium an authoritative role.

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So they're being the novel ones. So you've already made the vast majority of your argument. Because that's fundamentally what the argument from Rome is.

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Is that we have this 2 ,000 year old tradition. And that's why they don't want to actually have to defend that.

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They always want to be attacking solo scriptura. They do not want to have to provide, they don't want to have to argue on the same grounds.

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Because from their perspective, that's, there are no common grounds to argue from.

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There is only one true church and the rest of us are all just pretenders anyways. And so I can see where some of that comes from.

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But they will never ever put themselves on that level. So is that what, now obviously solo scriptura by scripture alone,

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I mean scripture alone, that's true, that's what solo scriptura means. But is that what solo scriptura actually is?

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And of course, those of you who've read scripture alone, or the Roman Catholic controversy, or basically watched any of the 30 some odd debates that we've done with Roman Catholics down through the,

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I was going to say centuries. It's hard to feel that way. That works for Rich, but not quite yet for me.

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But if you've accessed any of that information, then you know that that's not what solo scriptura means.

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That's a horrifically shallow presentation of what solo scriptura is.

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And some people might say, well you don't expect a Catholic in one of their own books to give an accurate and full definition.

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I did for them. Read the Roman Catholic controversy. Read my presentation of their arguments.

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I took them straight from them. And let people know, here's the challenges.

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Here's the hard things to respond to. Rome doesn't tend to do that. Rome really does not tend to tell its people what the real objections are from the other side.

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So what is solo scriptura? Well yes, it is scripture alone. And one of the results of the doctrine is that you are to obtain divine revelation, what is binding on the

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Christian conscience, from scripture alone. But why?

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Because of the nature of scripture. Because of the nature of scripture.

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That scripture is theanoustos. It is

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God breathed. Tradition is not theanoustos. Magisterium is not theanoustos.

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The church is not theanoustos. Theanoustos is the Greek word for God breathed in 2

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Timothy 3 .16. All scripture is theanoustos. It's the only thing that the church possesses that is theanoustos.

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And so it's absolutely unique. It is God speaking. Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. That's how Peter described it. As the Lord himself said, have you not read what

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God spoke to you saying? Reading ancient scripture is having

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God speak to you. He held men accountable for what had been written 1400 years earlier as if God had spoken it directly to them.

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You see how that works? And so there is a foundation. There is a necessary foundation to sola scriptura.

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That is not here. And so it makes it sound as if while the

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Protestants just come along and they come up with something no one's ever heard of. So a friend of mine, a friend of mine, a dear friend of mine, and I know that he watches and let me say once again

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I pray for you regularly and miss you greatly. A dear friend of mine posted this and he posts things like this because he's a church history scholar.

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And he put a citation from John Chrysostom up I think yesterday or the day before yesterday.

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I think it was yesterday morning. Well, given where he lives it was a different time. It was about nine hours between us.

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It's from Homily 33 on the Acts of the Apostles. John Chrysostom, John the golden -tongued, golden -mouthed.

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And listen, just as I read this ask yourself a question.

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Today would a Protestant answer this way or would a Roman Catholic answer this way? Just honest question.

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Here's what John Chrysostom said, what he wrote. Along comes an unbeliever. I want to become a

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Christian but don't know which body of believers to join. There's so much quarreling among you, so many different groups, so much confusion.

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Which doctrine shall I choose? How shall we respond? Each of you, he says, claims to speak the truth.

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Now let's just stop for a second. Let's stop for a second. You already read all of it, didn't you? I know you did. You just couldn't wait.

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This is the exact argument that Roman Catholic apologists use. What year was it?

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I think it was, I think it was 1994. I attended the debate that took place, a three -on -three debate somewhere in California.

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And it was the White Horse Inn guys and one other dude that I'd never, no, no.

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It was White Horse Inn guys against Patrick Madrid, Robert St. Genes, and a Roman Catholic dude that I had never heard of before.

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I think I only heard of him once after that. And then sort of like Art Sippo, he just was beamed back up to the mothership after his mission was completed.

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And for Art Sippo, there's more to that, what I just said, than you actually know.

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Anyway, but it was a three -on -three debate on Sola Scriptura.

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This is exactly what the Catholics were saying. Patrick Madrid, Sola Scriptura, blueprint for anarchy.

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How are you supposed to know? Robert St. Genes, Tim Staples, Trent Horn, Carl Keating, Jimmy Akin, all of them.

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And back in those days, Jerry Madatix too. I keep reminding you guys that. I know you wish people would stop doing that, but I'm old enough to remember, so I'm going to keep reminding you.

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This is their argument. There's so much quarreling among you. See, if you had the

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Magisterium, if you had the infallible Pope, you wouldn't have all this quarreling.

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And I just go, have you seen what's going on within Roman Catholicism recently? You've got all sorts of quarreling, all sorts of it.

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I mean, you have just as wide a range of expressions of belief within the

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Roman Catholic communities as you have outside of it. You know that. Be honest, be honest. So many different groups, so much confusion.

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Which doctrine shall I choose? Each of you says, each of you, he says, claims to speak the truth.

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So, well, this is the argument against Sola Scriptura, right?

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So what does Chrysostom say? Quite so, Chrysostom says, but that's in our favor.

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If we told you to be convinced by mere arguments, you might well be bewildered.

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However, if we ask you to believe the scriptures, and if the scriptures are plain and true, the choice is easy for you.

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Whoever agrees with scripture, he is the Christian. Whoever fights against scripture, he is far from the rule of belief.

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Uh, what? How could someone writing at the beginning of the fifth century, end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century, how could someone say, well, the way to find out is to go to the scriptures?

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Because all my Roman Catholic friends say, but you can't. There's all this different interpretations. It seems like Chrysostom believes actually the scriptures are what?

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Plain and true. Hmm. I am, uh,

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I am reminded of a event in 1999 over in San Diego when

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I debated Father Mitchell Pacwa on the subject of Sola Scriptura.

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And I had planned to do this. This was, this was not something I just thought up during the debate itself.

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But at the end of the debate, when I had my closing statement, and I had even timed this out to know how long it would take.

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I had a large silver book bag. It's still in my office, actually.

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And I, I brought it out next to the podium and I started taking big, big books out of it.

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And so I got the Cans and Decrees of the Council of Trent and the Documents of Vatican II.

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And, uh, there's a, there's a book that gives you the, all the citations in the Documents of Vatican II that, you know, and the

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Code of Canon Law and all these official magisterial documents.

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And I piled them up next to the podium. And I said, so what

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Rome is telling us is that if all

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I have is my Bible, I can't really understand Romans 5 .1.

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Therefore, I haven't been justified by faith. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. But if I have these, then

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I have clarity about Romans 5 .1. But the clear and obvious reality is these obscure Romans 5 .1.

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They do not clarify Romans 5 .1. In fact, they introduce all sorts of things that no apostle ever dreamed of as a vitally important interpretational lens and everything else.

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That illustration remains absolutely true today. It remains absolutely true today.

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Nothing's changed. And so here you've got

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John Chrysostom. And it seems that he believed the scriptures are plain and true.

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Now he knew that there were heretics. He knew there were people that, that twisted scripture.

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But the reality is he recognized that it is fidelity, consistent fidelity to that which is theanoustos, that identifies the

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Christian church. And so when we, when we compare that with what

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Jimmy Akin is saying, we find a huge chasm because he goes on in the next paragraph to say, if this idea were true, now notice he has not actually told us what the idea is.

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He's mentioned one result of believing in solo scripture, that scripture is the only thing that we possess from God that is theanoustos.

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And well, the results of that is then you gain your doctrine from scripture alone. That's one result. That's not the doctrine.

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This man's a former Protestant. He knows this. He knows this.

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If this idea were true, if we had to prove every doctrine by scripture alone, then we would have to prove the doctrine of solo scriptura this way.

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In other words, solo scriptura would need to meet its own test. We would need to prove by appealing only to scripture that we are to exclude tradition and magisterium from having authoritative roles.

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Evidently, this is the big argument. This is the big gotcha moment. And I find this to be incredibly weak argumentation and it would not have any impact on anyone who actually understands the doctrine of solo scriptura is.

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Because what's being said here is let's assume what we have yet to prove.

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And that is the existence of this unchanging tradition and magisterium, which given today with Pope Francis is sort of like, you really want to go there?

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You really? Your guy, have you listened to your guy? Do you hear what your guy's teaching?

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He defines the magisterium for you. He defines tradition for you. Are you making the connection there?

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But you assume these things and then what the argument is, is I'm going to demand that one of the results of solo scriptura, which is that true doctrine comes from scripture, that you have to prove that to my satisfaction.

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And that's what the entirety of the doctrine is rather than what the argument would have to be.

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And that is, I as a Roman Catholic will say that scripture is theanustos, but I will then join that which is theanustos to that which is not theanustos and I will actually subject that which is theanustos to non -theanustos authority for interpretation and definition that is tradition and magisterium.

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That's what they are positively doing, but to not have to prove that because it's so obviously a false argument.

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You're taking that which is God breathed and subjecting it to that which is not God breathed.

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That's obviously an error. And that's what Rome does. But to hide that, what you do is you take a step back and you try to make this the central aspect.

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You prove solo scriptura from scripture. Well, once you recognize that solo scriptura is the teaching that scripture is theanustos and therefore is of ultimate authority, then that's pretty easy to prove in scripture, isn't it?

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But what they're doing is, well, I want you to prove one of the results without proving the foundation.

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And it's sad that it's effective with so many Protestants. All that tells us is that many people who are technically

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Protestants are not Protestants of conviction, not Protestants of reading, not

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Protestants of deep thought and haven't been challenged to be such. But we are challenging you to be such.

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So we'll pick up with that paragraph because I went through that fairly quickly, but that's important.

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That's important. As long as you understand what the doctrine is, you can see that Rome's arguments against it are always straw man.

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They always are. They can't actually argue the actual doctrine itself.

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They really can't. So anyways, we got back to it. It took us over a month, but we did get back to it.

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I noticed today, really quickly as we close up, I noticed that Jake, the

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Muslim metaphysician, was doing a program. I'm going to download it and listen to it on one of my rides this week with Dale Tuggy.

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And I'm just like, oh, this is going to be interesting. So I'm going to listen to it because Jake wants to get together, but I want to hear, this one will tell me a lot about what would be the best topics to address.

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And so Jake, I haven't forgotten about you. Somebody tell Jake that I haven't forgotten about you. We're going to get back together with him.

01:00:03

But I want to hear this Dale Tuggy thing first because, wow. Anyway, there's a long history behind that one too.

01:00:13

Anyways, thanks for watching the program today. Maybe, I cannot promise this, but I'm going to do my best to have a surprise for you on Thursday.

01:00:25

Watch our Twitter feed, Facebook, stuff like that as to when the program is going to launch.

01:00:32

That may be somewhat variable, but try to have what hopefully be an exciting surprise for you.

01:00:41

The only other way we could have a surprise is if it ends up being on Friday instead, which is a possibility too. Thanks for watching the program.