April 25, 2006

Program Introduction and Upcoming Schedule Change

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

Yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation.

If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

And welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning. Quick programming note, not going to be able to be here Thursday. We'll move the program to Friday. I'm not sure whether it's going to be Friday morning or Friday afternoon.

Who knows, huh? Whatever. We'll blog it. Have a memorial service at 11, followed by a luncheon, followed by a graveside at 4. So you can sort of figure out if you do things at 11 and at 4. That makes it fairly difficult to do.

So we will move those things around, knowing that you all are the patient audience that you are. And besides, most of you can't figure out what time it is in Arizona anyways. So it really doesn't matter one way or the other.

Responding to the Sedalia Debate and Romans 5

I have a potpourri of things here to play for you today. Quick report on Sedalia. I have, you know, given you the information that is necessary on the blog. I am responding to particular elements of the debate, issues that I would have liked to have spent more time on in the debate.

So often things will come up, let's say, in the question and answer period, where, and especially in this debate, we had no closing statements. So, you know, something may come up that really technically shouldn't have come up.

I mean, in a formal, formal, formal, formal, formal type of debate, pretty much all the data is supposed to come out in the opening presentations, in essence. And then all you're supposed to do is discuss that stuff later on.

And that way you don't get hit by something down the road that you don't actually have an opportunity of responding to. The rest of the debate is supposed to be responding to only what was presented. Well, that informal debate is how it's supposed to work.

It doesn't really work that way in real life. And so, in essence, some things will come up. And there were some issues that came up, some texts that came up in, you know, later on in the debate that would have been nice to have been able to discuss a little bit more fully.

And I'm doing that in the Bible studies at PRBC. I started Sunday morning. I did a look at Romans Chapter 5 because my opponent, Dr. Wright, had really based a lot later in the debate on Romans Chapter 5.

And for all of you who are always looking for evidence that I am fallible and that I make mistakes, I'm telling you right now, if you'd like, you can hear me admitting that I made a mistake in the debate in Sedalia by not having the King James Version displaying on my tablet PC during the debate.

I should have. It is now. I also, by the way, and I hadn't admitted this one yet, I also had my little clock thingy down the bottom, which I was using to count down. I had forgotten to turn the seconds on.

And so I didn't have the second thing, and so I wasn't quite as sharp on time as I normally would be because I didn't have the seconds displaying. Normally, I'm within five seconds of stopping right where I'm supposed to.

What do you want to say?

That's going to make for a great soundbite for KJV people. They're going to grab that section off of ours, and they're going to go, I made a mistake by not having my King James Bible. And that's where it's going to stop, and everybody's going to be running around saying that.

That's what Dan Corner would do.

We already caught him doing that. So yeah, sure. Nothing you can do about folks who want to use digital editing devices. But the reason I say it was a mistake not to have the King James displaying, I knew I was debating someone's King James only.

Hello. That was the first thing. And then secondly, when you kept reading Romans 518, silly me kept looking at it in the Greek. I was looking at the Greek, and it's like, hey, what it says? Is there a textual variant here?

No, I don't remember any textual variant there, and blah, blah, blah. Finally, when I looked at King James later, I saw what they were trying to do, and they were inserting these phrases, and they were being let's just put it this way.

The King James translators were being very NIV-ish in that particular section, and he was basing his entire argument on an inserted italicized phrase, and it didn't work. But anyways, I addressed that issue in Sunday School on Sunday morning, and I've got the link at prbc .org.

And then next week I'm going to be looking at the use of John 20, 31, and John 1, 12 to attempt to establish an ordo salutis, and I'm going to be arguing that those texts do not establish an ordo salutis specifically.

But so I haven't received the tapes yet. I haven't I really, really, really hope they came out all right, because I tried to use a portable MP3 player as backup. Don't ask me what I did wrong. That was mistake number three.

I guess you have to move it do a little something to where you are defining what folders can go in or something, because when I tested it later, it worked fine. I had the thing going for three hours and nothing.

Recorded, zip, zero, nada. It's like, oh, well. So there's three mistakes right there that you all can say, see, he's admitted his imperfections, and that means in the logic of some that I'm right about nothing.

And if you can think that way, you know what? I'm not going to be able to help you out much anyways. You know, no really any reason to argue that. I have a clip here. Actually, I have four clips today, and they are completely disconnected from one another.

There's I mean, the very idea that I'm going to be able to put these things together and make it make any sense is pretty difficult. But, hey, you know what? Once you get phone calls, it breaks it all up anyways.

So it is an apologetic potpourri today on the dividing line, starting with a fairly lengthy little clip here from retired Bishop John Shelby Spong. And you say, we don't like listening to John Shelby Spong.

Well, you must learn to like to listen to John Shelby Spong, because, of course, I'm debating him. Yes, fingernails on the chalkboard. No one anymore knows what fingernails on a chalkboard means, because most kids today have never seen a chalkboard.

That's the scary thing. We are dating ourselves to do that. But you know that I will be debating John Shelby Spong in November. And some folks have never really listened to him. He actually is a rather entertaining speaker.

He's not a bad speaker at all. And he's a little bit like John Dominick crossing along those lines. He knows how to speak. He knows how to entertain the audience. And so one of the reasons I'm sharing these is so that you're prepared for that.

But also I'm sharing with you sections from this presentation on homosexuality, because that is the topic of our debate. He's written a book on the subject. I've co-authored a book on the subject. We should know what the other one believes and should be able to address the issue fairly clearly.

But I think you get a real sense of where he's coming from listening to these. There's a five-minute clip here. I'm not sure I'm going to play the whole thing. I might. But listen both to his ability to use humor and to be straightforward.

Now, it is interesting, by the way, if you listened to him on the White Horse Inn about six months or so ago, there was no humor. There was no inflection. It almost sounded like he just rolled out of bed.

Or he just didn't like being on with a conservative. He just didn't like all these talks that I have that I've downloaded from the web. He's in front of a liberal audience. He's in front of people who are he's in front of his people.

And most of us speak a little bit differently on the home court than we do someplace else and speak a little more freedom and a little bit less guarded manners, shall we say, in that type of context. But that's understandable.

No problems with that. But definitely sounds different in this clip than he did with Mike Horton on the White Horse Inn. The White Horse Inn was just like, you know, that type of thing. It was just, you believe in inerrancy, blah, that type of thing.

But here he's very lighthearted and, you know, telling funny stories and things like that. And they are rather funny. And it's okay if you want to laugh. Some people, some conservatives, especially Calvinists, have a problem laughing at a heretic.

A heretic shouldn't be funny. It's a sin to laugh at a heretic. I was actually fairly close to him. That was pretty good when I just did that New Jersey hit, you know, that type of thing. That's not bad.

I've been listening to too much of it. Anyways, let's listen to a little bit of a discussion here from John Shelby Spohn.

The reason it got to be quite as public as it was, and you always have to count on your enemies. They help far more than they imagine. So we had a bishop in Fort Worth whose name was Clarence Pope. It's always a wonderful name for a bishop.

He finally left our church and became a Roman Catholic. And the headline said, Pope becomes Roman Catholic. I thought it was sort of a nice thing to say. About a year later, he decided to leave the church and come back to being an Episcopalian.

The headline said, Pope leaves Catholic Church. And he did that a couple of times, and I don't know where he finally wound up. But anyway, I had sent out a letter, because as I say, we weren't doing this in the closet.

I'd sent out a letter to all the bishops of my church to tell them that on December 16, 1989, I was going to ordain Robert Williams to the priesthood. And Robert Williams sent a biography, not a whole biography, but a couple of pages that chronicled his journey into the priesthood of our church.

And he got his degree from the same seminary that gave Troy Perry an honorary doctorate just recently, Episcopal Divinity School up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so it was quite out front. Clarence Pope issued a statement calling upon me to cease and desist for the sake of the unity of the church.

But he didn't notify me. He sent it to the media. And I got a call from England. The BBC called me to ask me if I'd like to comment on Bishop Pope's statement. And so I said, well, I haven't seen it. Will you read it to me?

So on a transatlantic call, they read me Bishop Pope's statement, and I laughed out loud because this was a man who had refused to even consider women for ordination, despite the fact that we had changed all of our canons to make sure that women were included.

And so he was criticizing me for ordaining a gay man when there was no prohibition against doing it anywhere in the Episcopal church tradition. It was just nobody assumed that you would do that. But there's no prohibition.

But there was an absolute prohibition on prohibiting women. So here's a man violating the canons of the church and condemning me for violating what was an unstated tradition, which I thought was rather interesting.

In any event, that set up the dynamics that caused CBS, ABC, NBC, Ted Turner, the New York locals, if you live there, there's Channel 9, Channel 11, all there tripping over each other's wires with demonstrators out front led by a Baptist preacher from Edgewater, New Jersey, and protest in the service and a lot of interesting activity.

In any event, Robert Williams was ordained, and there were three bishops present. I ordained him. The retired bishop of Maine, a man named Fred Wolfe, was the preacher. And my assistant, a man named Walter Ryder, was present.

So there were actually three bishops gathered. After that was over, there was this enormous outpouring of wrath around the country. I was getting 5 ,000 letters a week, 99 of them really hostile, really angry.

The presiding bishop of my church, a man named Ed Browning, with whom I had discussed this, telling him that I was going to do it so it wouldn't come as a surprise. He's the one that recommended that I send a letter out to all the bishops.

So when they got asked by the press, they wouldn't be surprised either. And within, the press called him immediately to get his comment, and he said, Bishop Sprong has acted within the letter of the law of our church.

That's a pretty weak endorsement, but that was at least not negative. But about ten days later, the hostility had overwhelmed Ed Browning. He must have gotten more mail than I got. And then he called together a group of people that he called his council of advice, and they issued a statement called a statement of disassociation.

I heard he was going to do this, and I called him and said, Ed, if you're going to be talking about me, don't you think it'd be nice for me to be there? I mean, you might as well talk to me to my face.

And he didn't respond, but his assistant responded and said, we decided you should not be there because you are too powerful. I thought that was really interesting. You know, these people are going to react to me without me around because I'm too powerful.

I might convert them. Anyway, they issued this statement of disassociation, in which they said we hereby distance ourselves, we disassociate ourselves from this bishop and this diocese because he's done something that we as the church do not now approve.

Well, that was an interesting experience. I decided that the only way to battle that was to go above the heads of the bishops of my church. And so with my sweet and precious wife, during 1990, we accepted every invitation we got to speak on every radio station, every TV station, be interviewed by every newspaper.

And we crisscrossed this country to try to bring about a new understanding.

The Cultural Challenge of Biblical Authority and Christian Identity

Well, it is interesting to me a number of things. First of all, you know, again, he is able to speak in such a way as to hold the audience's interest. And there's a pretty strong presupposition concerning the nature of what is right and wrong, in his perspective, of course.

But there's also an almost there-at-the-end crusader mentality. You put that together with what came right before it, which I played for you last week, about the body of Christ. You can't be the body of Christ if you exclude anyone.

And I know most of the listeners to this program, you're immediately thinking of, but wait a minute, Paul said this. Remember, he doesn't believe that he is in any way, shape, or form constricted by the canon of Scripture.

He will accept any kind of modern scholarship that allows him to redefine these things. And so the idea that Paul did that, well, it doesn't matter what Paul did. We need to be able to go beyond Paul.

We need to be able to grow and so on and so forth. And so there is a crusader mentality, in essence, in that kind of way. We took every single opportunity, and we crisscrossed the nation trying to bring understanding.

In other words, trying to campaign against the historical stance of the Church. And when you read his books, and he is a voluminous author, one of them is, you know, why Christians must change or die.

The faith is defined primarily by cultural norms. There is no such thing as transcendent truth. There is no such thing as an objective truth that remains true and so on and so forth. It is all a matter of how we interact with things and things like that.

So it's going to be challenging. I've had a number of people who have asked a rather obvious question. And that is, how is he going to debate a thesis that he can't even begin to define? That is, is homosexuality compatible with Biblical Christianity?

There is no Biblical Christianity. And a lot of people said, how in the world, why would he agree to do that? Well, I can tell you why he agreed to do that. He agreed to do that for the very same reason that Hamza Abdel-Malik agreed to debate, does the New Testament teach the deity of Christ?

Remember that one? If you go back and listen to that debate from a number of years ago now, the whole reason that Mr. Malik took that debate was not because he wasn't going to admit the New Testament does teach the deity of Christ.

It does. But he was going to argue that it does so in a contradictory fashion, that the New Testament contradicts itself. And so he took one thesis and was willing to, in essence, lose that debate to try to establish to the Christians a different thesis.

And that is, it doesn't matter if the New Testament teaches the deity of Christ, since it's contradictory, therefore it's not a divine revelation. It doesn't matter. So in essence, the reason that Bishop Spong would be willing to debate this issue is not that he's going to go, well, yes, we can define Biblical Christianity.

No. He's taking this to be able to say, no, there is no such thing as Biblical Christianity. If Christianity wants to be relevant in our culture, it's going to have to change. And given our cultural norms and given where Western society is today and given what we've learned in science and learned in scholarship concerning the New Testament, how they didn't really understand homosexuality, blah, blah, blah, blah, we need to grow beyond this.

I know what's coming. People are going, are you sure you know where he's coming from? Yeah, I know where he's coming from here. And that's what we're going to have to be dealing with in the debate. And that's what you have to deal with in the debate.

I mean, I'm the one that gets to do the debate with this particular well-known guy in front of video cameras and microphones and things like that. You end up doing that debate all the time, don't you?

I mean, unless you're the silent Christian type who never says anything. I mean, if you're standing around the water cooler, if you're standing around the printer waiting for your print job to come out or whatever else it might be, and in those situations people start talking, you're the one who's going to have to do these debates.

You're the one that's going to have to address these things. And I really think that his perspective is becoming more and more popular in an ever less Christian society. There's a connection there, an ever less distinctly Christian society.

There's a direct connection there. And so I think that that kind of a debate will be helpful to you, Lord willing, that I provide a clear and biblical and concise response that will be useful to you. Then I'm not sure if I should play this next one because you can't listen to this yet, but it will put some pressure upon the powers that be to make this available as soon as we can.

Some of you have been asking, what happened to the debate on the ship where you and Jim Renahan discussed the resurrection with Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan? Well, it was recorded. Unfortunately, it was recorded by the folks on the ship.

And we didn't get to use our own equipment. We tried to, but it was tough sledding, okay, trying to get the stuff broken down and then figuring out what you're going to need on the ship and what you're not going to need on the ship and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Make a long story short, the quality of the audio is somewhat like this. It is super over-modulated. In fact, I am going to have to re-read my opening statement. It's just not usable. Thankfully, I have it and I read it word for word from my palm, and so I will be able to do that.

And it's just a matter of, you know, I'll probably just read it once, get as close to 10 minutes as I can, and then we'll just use the digital stuff to fit it into 10 minutes. Make this 10 minutes. Speed it up, slow it down, whatever it needs to do.

Put it in 10 minutes. Leave it on a wide shot or something like that, and you won't notice that my mouth is not quite where my words are. But at least you'll get the material, and certainly people listening on MP3 won't know the difference.

But you can tell just by listening to what I'm about to play for you. This is later on in the four of us sat down. Remember, if you looked at the blog, you saw the pictures. The four of us sat down, and we talked.

We just talked. And, you know, it was somewhat unusual for me. It certainly was unusual for Dr. Renahan, Jim Renahan, the head of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies, because this was the first time he had been involved in anything like this.

And it was unusual for me, too, because I've never just sat down with John Dominick Crossan and Marcus Borg and chatted about the resurrection, especially with people who are very well-known worldwide in this area but don't believe in the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And so we're discussing this, and we're trying to get to the biblical foundations and so on and so forth. And it was an interesting encounter. Now, at one point, I asked Dr. Crossan, because he does not believe in an afterlife, John 8, verse 24, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.

What does that mean if death is it? You die, you're gone. Who cares if you die in your sins? What's the relevance of this? I mean, it's hard for us to even start wrapping our minds around where Dom is coming from at that point, let alone for Roman Catholics to wrap their minds around where Dom is coming from at that point, given his background.

But he then went to John 18, and I believe it was the section, the only section that makes sense to me, is made the connection to John 18, 5 to 6, where Jesus uses agoi me. He uses agoi me in John 8, 24.

Unless you believe that agoi me, you will die in your sins. John 18, 5 to 6, who are you seeking? Jesus of Nazareth. Agoi me. They fall back upon the ground, etc., etc. And so as we pick this up, he has gone back there, but I'm trying to bring it back to my initial point, which was, why would Jesus say that?

What's the thinking here? So here's the first time, I think, publicly, outside of the ship, that a portion of the dialogue back and forth between John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, myself, and Jim Renahan.

Here's a minute and eight seconds of that someday-to-be-released DVD.

There's nothing clearer than that statement, which I think is a parable, of course. But that's ten chapters later. In John 8, Jesus is saying to them something about their needing to have a right relationship to him, a faith relationship that also seems to have something to do with who he is, and that if they refuse that, despite the signs and the testimony of God and Moses and so on and so forth, that they will die in their sins.

But if death is all there is to it, and sin is primarily destroying this world, then once you die, judgment's over, and that's it. Why was that a threat? Why would that have any meaning? Why would anyone find the destruction of this world a threat?

No, I'm saying... Because the destruction... Listen... It is a threat. But when Jesus says, you will, future, die in your sins, once they've died, what do their sins have to do with anything? It's all over with, isn't it?

Nothing at that point, unless you believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe in this one,.

And this one belongs to God. Now, if you also believe in an afterlife, then you've got a double whammy coming. You've got a double whammy coming. That was... I did experience a small level of frustration.

You could tell at that one point, when he says, don't you think the destruction of this world is a great threat? It's like, but that's not what he's talking about. He says to them, you will die in your sins.

He does not say you're going to destroy the environment. He says you're going to die in your sins. What would they have understood that to mean? I was going to look for... I didn't have time this morning, but there was a particular point toward the end of our interaction.

It's probably in this section. I'm looking at the waveform in front of me on the screen here. Marcus Borg sort of looked at me and said, well, if that's true, then from your perspective, we're not even holding to the gospel with our view of the resurrection.

It was like, yeah, that's where we started here. But it was so plain to me, even though the conversation was very civil, if anything proved that when people try to rip on me and say, he's just a mean, terrible, horrible Calvinist, and he just can't talk to anybody.

I'm sorry. We had a very excellent conversation here. I've demonstrated this. This is, you know, we've got recordings of how, yes, I can actually have good conversations with folks and it can go very well.

But still, in the midst of all that, it was difficult communication. Dr. Borg and Dr. Croson, you can tell my kind of Christian is unusual as far as these kinds of dialogues are concerned. Very clearly, they were reading or listening to what we were saying through a pretty thick lens.

I know that's the case. I'm talking with Mormons and so on and so forth, but here was a case where you have people who are very, very well published and yet it's very, very clear there is a certain aspect of the, quote-unquote, Christian spectrum, that is the one I live in, that really doesn't get much attention there.

Maybe it's because they're just used to running into, you know, sort of the King James-only fundamentalist type of response to what they're saying, and not a response from someone who, you know, actually listens to what they're saying, understands their worldview, and then interacts from a scholarly perspective.

Maybe that's what it was. I don't know. Well, anyway, I've got two more clips or I've got one phone call to go to. We'll go to our phone calls after the break. The number is 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341.

We're going to take our break and be right back right after this.

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Well, that may well be the last thing I ever hear is Steve Camp singing Here I Stand. It'll just echo in my ears after it blows them out. And I... Mmm... Ah... Mmm... Well, feeling better now. I'm not going to be able to listen to our phone callers now because I'm not going to be able to hear you.

877 -753 -3341 is the phone number that Bill called. Hi, Bill. Bill, how are you? Hi, Dr. White. Yes, sir. I'm doing all right. I hope you're doing well also. Yes, sir. What can I do for you? Well, I'm just sitting here.

Listening to your program so far. And I think you probably agree that from there... My question... Dr. Roy's comment going into it about not being concerned. Right. Right. I've never used that language.

But usually what comes... Mmm... Which. I am an engineer, so I... Well, yeah. So I guess my question is...

The Balance Between Head and Heart in Christian Life

Well, it depends on what you mean by cross the line. If you mean as in a process for a true believer, that's very different than the fact that there are many, many people, especially in what I would call formerly Christian areas like Europe today, in liberal denominations today, who have a very intellectual Christianity that there's no connection over that 18-inch space between the head and the heart.

And so I've known people who could cross the T's and dot the I's theologically, but it had no impact as far as their thoughts, their passions, their actions, their anything like that. So certainly we all recognize that there is the two extreme dangers, and that is you see all around us when you turn on that channel here in Phoenix between 20 and 22, I never mentioned the specific channel, but that specific one, and you see the one extreme where all you have is emotion and every service has to be this emotion-charged experiential thing because that gets them up and then they need to come back a little bit while later for another one and then another one.

It's like emotion junkies and there's no substance to the preaching. It's just all emotion, emotion, emotion, music, clapping, dancing, so on and so forth. And so you see that one extreme. But on the other extreme, yeah, there are those people who have absolutely no connection whatsoever between the head and the heart and it's all just a matter of propositions and those propositions don't impact.

And so there is a balance that the New Testament presents to us in everything. And just as we are told, for example, to examine ourselves and see whether we're in the faith, at the same time we're also told to rejoice in the forgiveness that is ours.

Now those are not easy things to necessarily balance and we're told that Paul came to the Corinthians with a simple message, simplicity, that Jesus Christ, Him crucified, and then he says, but amongst those who are mature, we speak of godly wisdom.

And so it's a matter of holding these things together. Now personally, I think that one of the reasons that there is a valid reason for the existence of differing local churches is that God has not made us cookie cutter Christians.

And there are people who by the way that they are created are more emotionally oriented than I am. I'm a Scotsman for crying out loud. When I go back to New York and all these Italians are everywhere, you know what Italians want to do?

I do, I'm one of them. They want to hug you! Exactly. You don't hug Scotsman for crying out loud. I've got a Claymore under my kilt and you hug me and it can kill me and you too. So you know, it's just unnatural for me to get hugged by people.

I need my space. And people have laughed many times that the best I can do, the equivalent of my Italian hug and kiss is the holy nod from across the room. You know, that's my holy kiss is the holy nod from across the room.

And hey, that's the way I am. That's the way I'm made. That's what I'm comfortable with. And I went to Italy and twice some guy kissed me, okay? So I survived it without screaming but it was not exactly something you'd ever catch me doing again.

So I recognize that there are differences like that and that means that we're not made out of cookie cutters and so on and so forth and we're not going to all be exactly the same along those lines. And I think that's perfectly fine.

I think that's acceptable. God works with all of us and there's going to be certain people, you know, they look at the worship of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and they go, that's not worship. There's no one standing, waving their hands.

There's no clapping. There's no dancing. That's not worship. And they're defining worship in a way. Obviously for me, the contemplation of the word of God and things along those lines, extremely important.

It provides to us, to me, a much deeper, quote unquote, experience than any waving of my arms would be or anything like that. And so, you know, people need to keep that in mind and need to recognize that.

But, you know, don't let somebody else judge that. You know, you know in your own heart whether what you're contemplating and what you're thinking about is impacting your life and impacting your prayer and so on and so forth.

You know that. No one else can stand in judgment over you along those lines. But, going back to what raised the question for you, one of the problems I have with the assertions that Dr. Wright made was, Calvinism complicates the gospel.

Look, I don't believe that people have thought through the kind of arguments they use very often. If you looked at the notes that I wrote on my tablet PC, there was one section I actually didn't get to.

And that is, I had specifically said, so did the Holy Spirit err in giving us these revelations and these insights? And what I was going to try to bring up was, look, you can sit there and say that, well, for example, I'm going to be playing a clip in a section in a moment from a Pastor Wilkes back I think in Alabama, Southern Baptist Church.