April 25, 2006

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. I 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 anyway, so it really doesn't matter one way or the other.

I have a potpourri of things here to play for you today.

Quick report on Sedalia. I have 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, not yesterday morning,

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 when 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 Korner 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 something that was 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 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. 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.

The very idea that I'm going to be able to put these things together and make any sense is pretty difficult.

But hey, you know what? Once you get phone calls, it breaks 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 Dominic Cross 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.

We speak a little more freedom and a little bit less guarded manners, shall we say, in that type of a 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. That was actually fairly close to him. That was pretty good what I just did, that New Jersey, you know, that type of thing.

That's not bad. I've been listening to too much of it. But anyways, let's listen to a little bit of a discussion here from John Shelby Spock.

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. 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 at the

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 Spong 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 would 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.

Well, it is interesting to me a number of things. First of all, 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's 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

Christianity must change or die. The faith is defined primarily by cultural norms.

There's no such thing as transcendent truth. There's 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 Dominick 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 overmodulated. In fact,

I am going to have to reread 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, 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 Cross and 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.

Right. 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 was that... Why the hell do we need... Why do we 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?

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.

And 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, you know, try to rip on me and say, he's just a mean, terrible, horrible

Calvinist. And he just, he 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, it was difficult communication.

These, Dr. Borg and Dr. Croson, you can tell, my kind of Christian is unusual as far as these kinds of dialogues are concerned.

and there was, very clearly, they were reading or listening to what we were saying through a pretty thick lens.

And, you know, 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, 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 here. 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. The Trinity is a basic teaching of the

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One is a phone number that Bill called. Hi, 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, just sitting here listening to your program so far, listening to the

Shelby Spahn quotes and a couple of the other things, kind of left a scratch on my head at some of it.

And I think you probably agree that from their perspective they would look at somebody like yourself or somebody who doesn't take the

Bible at its word and probably scratch their head looking at us, too. My question, actually, is based on something that came out of your debate the other night.

I wasn't there. I haven't heard it, but I read up on it on your blog. Dr. Rice commented going into it about not being concerned about the specifics of Greek grammar or participles or whatever he said.

Right. And that led somebody in the audience to ask him whether he was willfully ignorant of the details.

Right. I've never used that language. I guess I've never been that blunt towards somebody, but I definitely understand what they were asking.

Again, I've been left scratching my head sometimes. But usually what comes back in response toward me and toward other people who are like -minded is an accusation of being too caught up in the details, too intellectual, too rational.

I've been told that I've completely lost the forest and the trees. I'm missing the big picture and all of that. Right. And that I'm reducing my faith, my belief to nothing more than a set of propositions and logic.

And I'm trying to approach God like he's a math problem. Which I am an engineer, so I'm guilty of doing that.

So I guess my question for you is whether you think is it possible to ever cross the line beyond which you really are too rational and you really have reduced

Christianity to being nothing more than a set of propositions and take the emotion right out of it?

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, 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, and so on and so forth.

And so you see that one extreme. But now 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

Scotsmen for crying out loud. I've got a claymore under my kilt and you hug me and it can kill me and you too.

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. 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. I went to Italy and twice some guy kissed me.

I survived it without screaming but it was not exactly something you'd ever catch me doing again.

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.

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 are extremely important.

It provides to us, to me, a much deeper experience than any waving of my arms would be or anything like that.

And so people need to keep that in mind and need to recognize that. But don't let somebody else judge that.

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, well, 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 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.

And he's preaching against Calvinism back in January this year. And one of the things he's going to talk about is that, well, these

Calvinists, they base their entire interpretation on one of the toughest texts in all of Scripture to exegete and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so many times I'll hear people saying, well, you know, that's in Paul, and just show it to me in Jesus, which, of course,

I go to John 6 and do. But anyway, and they basically, in essence, exercise sort of a hyper -red -letterism.

And they're basically saying, ah, you know, some of this stuff, we just shouldn't put much weight on it. It's like, wait a minute.

Is all Scripture Theanistos if it is all God breathed, if it all came to us from the Holy Spirit of God? You're, in essence, questioning the wisdom of the

Holy Spirit in giving to us this material and providing us with a means of honestly handling it and allowing it to speak for itself, which is what exegesis is all about.

And what they don't realize is, you know, in one of the contexts, Dr. Wright was referring to Romans 5, when he says, look,

I just let the plain meaning speak. Whenever I hear someone say plain meaning, I want to be able to take half an hour and explain to folks, look, the only way you can claim the plain meaning is to do the very work you're saying we shouldn't have to do.

The only way you can know what the plain meaning of a particular text is is if you've honestly handled it and allowed it to speak within its own original context.

And it's not the plain meaning of Romans 5 to take it the way he did. And in point of fact, when you dig into it, you discover that he's got all these traditions and all these conclusions that he's sneaking in under the phrase plain meaning.

And so when people do that, lots of thoughts cross my mind, but one of them is, this is not someone who should ever engage in apologetic defense of their position against those who oppose the

Christian faith in toto, because they will be defenseless. They will have no capacity to defend the faith against a

Shabir Ali or against an atheist or against a sharp Mormon or any of these other folks who are going after the biblical faith.

They will be torn to shreds, and I hope they don't ever do that, because it would be a bad and embarrassing thing.

So it's a matter of balance, and certain people are made, I think, in such a way as to worship in a more inward fashion than outward fashion, but I don't think it's something you can let somebody judge you on.

Okay? Okay. All righty, sir. Thanks for calling, Bill. All right. Thanks for having me. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. Bye.

877 -753 -3341. I had just mentioned a few moments ago a sermon that I started listening to.

Actually, this is in the second sermon. It's just something I grabbed very quickly this morning.

There's a lot of stuff to deal with here if we wanted to delve into it, but I've written to Dr. Wilkes, who preached this sermon, and basically what

I've done is I've asked him, Dr. Wilkes, what Reformed works did you read before preaching these sermons?

Because he's a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is Paige Patterson's school now, and it's also where Emir Kantner teaches.

And so I'm sort of wondering, what Reformed works did you read that would lead you to describe

Calvinism in this fashion? And at the beginning of the second sermon, this is all on, I think, January 8, 2006.

This is the PM service. We have a description of the five points. It always gives you an idea when you listen to what these folks are saying.

It gives you an idea of where the sermon's going to go to hear how the five points are presented.

Are they presented in our language? Are they presented with balance? Are they presented in such a way that the distinctions that we make that are very important to our definitions are clearly made?

Or are you given a description that shows no concern whatsoever for balance, and is specifically designed to poison the minds of your average evangelical to what those crazed, wacky

Calvinists could ever believe? And there's a spectrum there, obviously.

Let's listen to this section to see basically where this fell in the spectrum.

Of those that have this philosophy that it's called Calvinism, and there are five points of Calvinism that is referred to as the tulip.

And let me review the five points that people hold this view hold to. Let's review them very quickly.

Number one, the letter T stands for total depravity. They believe that man has no free will to choose

God at all. That man is totally depraved in sin, which I agree that we are totally depraved.

We can't save ourselves. It's only by faith in God that we can be saved. But they believe that you can't even have faith.

That you cannot choose to exercise faith in God. That you have absolutely no free will.

Now, I stop right there, and I suppose you could argue in some context the accuracy of most of the statement, but not overly balanced, is it?

Why can a person not choose to submit himself to the law of God, Romans 8, 7 -8?

Why did Jesus say, no man is able to come to me unless the Father sent me to draw us in? What are these statements of inability?

What is it? It almost sounds, again, like a person has no will. But in point of fact, what we're saying is the will is enslaved to sin and needs to be freed from outside of itself, etc.,

etc., etc. So, not a real good start there, and not a whole lot of background there.

Let's press on here. Number two, they believe in unconditional election. That God chooses who will be lost and who will be saved.

Now, immediately, I stop right there, and how often have we had to stop and say, excuse me, excuse me, election is unto salvation.

There is no election unto damnation. That's called reprobation. That's different.

It's not a category of grace. It's not a category of the exertion of God's power. They're not equal things.

Let's be consistent here. Let's at least try to represent what we're saying properly, okay?

And unconditional election, of course, the whole point of that is that there is no condition that we have to fulfill that determines

God's choice of us. That is, no previewed faith, not

God looking down the tunnels of time, railroad tracks that meet in eternity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, looking down and seeing what we're going to do, and because we fulfill a condition, whether it just be faith, whether it be baptism, whether it be sacraments, etc.,

etc., that because of that, he chooses us. That's the emphasis of unconditional election, having listened to this sermon.

That doesn't come up, unfortunately. Now, you might say, why pick on some poor boy from Alabama?

Listen toward the end, and he's going to say, I'm not a Calvinist because I understand what

Calvinists believe. All right? So he's going to make the statement, I understand where these folks are coming from.

I've done my homework. Well, once somebody says, I've done my homework, then I think it's fair game, shall we say, to interact with what they're saying.

Based on nothing that we would do, that we have no choice, that God unconditionally elects who is lost and who is saved.

That we have no choice. No, that our choice is always the wrong choice. That's why it has to be unconditional election, because since we fell on Adam, we love our sin, we're enemies of God, we're always going in a direction, and God has to extend that miraculous work in changing that heart of stone, the heart of flesh, so on and so forth.

I gave you this morning a thing that if you had a child that was born and it died a couple of months after it was born, a

Calvinist would say to you, you have no assurance whether that child is in heaven or in hell. It all depends on the election of God.

And here we go again with the babies in hell argument, which seems to be the new Southern Baptist way of arguing about this.

And again, there are non -reformed people who address this issue, and this is not a

Calvinist -Arminian, Calvinist -non -Calvinist argument. It isn't. I just cannot begin to conceive of this, and I have yet to encounter one of these people that uses this kind of argument that shows the first bit of evidence of ever having thought about this.

To any depth whatsoever. So, you want to take the every baby who dies is automatically ushered in the presence of God perspective.

God has no freedom, nothing at all. That's where you want to go. Okay, so, that means you must think abortion is a wonderful thing.

You must think the Chinese government today is one of the greatest evangelistic tools ever designed by God, right?

Because they're aborting babies right and left, millions of them. It's a holocaust of babies, but they're all going to heaven, right?

Where's your moral indignation? How can you have moral indignation? And then, you know, when

I have time, and of course in debates you never do, but when I have time, I love to tell the story, and I think we have this on, yeah,

I think we still have this on tape. I was having a dialogue on an early, early, early, early, early dividing line broadcast back on KHEP, which doesn't exist anymore, does it?

Or is it a country station? It's country, something that's gone. Anyways, we were on a station long, long, long, long, long ago, 1980s sometime, and I was having an in -studio debate with an atheist, and he was asking, you know, the

God and evil question again, and basically what he said was, look, if you think

God, yeah, I remember who it was, Jim Lippard, if you think

God knows the future, and he's omnibenevolent, then he knew what Adolf Hitler was going to do.

He knew that he was going to kill six million Jews, and who knows how many millions of gypsies, and all the rest of this stuff, and all the millions of people who died, and millions of people who were maimed in World War II, and why couldn't he have just had

Adolf Hitler have a heart attack before he came to power, and save the world, all this evil and this suffering?

And then later on he presented another argument against the goodness of God, and he says, how can you call

God good? If you saw, if there was a man walking by a house, and he sees the house is caught on fire, and he looks at the window, and he sees there's a baby in a crib, and the window's open, and the fire's getting close, and the smoke's pouring out, and the baby's crying, we would not call a man good who would not try to get to that window, and get the baby out of there.

And yet you tell us that God has all power, and therefore he could save that baby. He could bring it about where that baby could be saved.

You're using different standards for God than you do for mankind. And I looked at him across the table, and I remember the studio.

It was sort of like this, actually. Now think about it. The window's over on that side, and I was facing this direction, a little bit like the padded cell that I'm in right now.

And I looked at him, and I said, how do you know that baby wasn't Hitler?

He used his own illustration, and he was completely taken aback. He was like, you just said, why couldn't

God have gotten rid of Hitler before he did all that stuff? And now you're complaining about the baby. How do you know that baby wasn't

Hitler? How do you know that God hasn't gotten rid of tens of thousands of Hitlers? Or that it would have been worse than Hitler?

You can't second guess an omnipotent being. You can't do that. But the point that I bring it back to is the very same folks that are making this kind of argument that we're listening to right now.

They don't trust God's freedom in the salvation of the elect. They don't trust

God's freedom in the salvation of adults. So they really don't have any basis whatsoever to trust

God's freedom in the salvation of infants. So I can at least understand they don't trust

God to do right in the salvation of adults. So how could they possibly trust God?

They have to handcuff God because we don't want them to be free in that matter. Oh no. No freedom for God there.

And of course, really, you have to wonder, do these folks actually believe in original sin? Do they actually believe Romans 5? Do they actually believe that we fell on Adam?

That we are guilty sinners from the womb? Is that not why infants die? Is because of that?

I mean, this came up with Dr. Cantor's comments in his sermon. I guess he doesn't believe in original sin.

I guess he's heterodox in that subject because he came up with this whole weird thing about conscious life and all the rest of this stuff and don't have the foggiest deal.

That stuff was coming from. And have pretty much failed to get much of a conversation from him on it.

But anyhow, it's the Calvinists are mean, heartless, baby haters argument.

Right off the bat, just nothing like giving your people a fair chance to actually go back and read

Spurgeon and read Edwards and read James Pettigrew Boyce and all these people from the past and actually find out why they believe what they believe.

Your child may very well be in hell if that child was not one of the elect. That's the view of a

Calvinist. Number three, the letter L stands for limited atonement. They believe that Christ only died for the elect.

And the Bible tells us that very clearly that broad is the road that leads to destruction and many are on it.

That narrow is the road that leads to life and few find it. So the belief of the Calvinists is that Christ only died for the few, the elect, and that the many others,

Christ did not die for them. Now I still don't understand why and I tried to bring this out in the debate in Sedalia.

I don't understand why these folks have to keep trying to limit how successful God is going to be in salvation.

What I mean by that is Dr. Davis did it and I refuted it when Dr. Wright made the comment but the

Bible says that the elector is the sand of the sea. That there is a great multitude around the throne.

Why do they keep saying the few? Okay, in comparison to in most situations, okay, but it doesn't mean there's just that I think

I'm in the few, the proud, the elect. No, I don't get that emphasis.

We're trying to say, you know what, God's mercy is great and wide and undeserved if there's one but there's a whole lot more than that.

And of course the real issue in regards to particular redemption is the perfection of the atonement of Christ which really wasn't presented there.

Calvinists believe in, fourthly, irresistible grace. That God gives people and what they call an effectual call that when

God calls you have no choice but you are saved by that call. Now let me back up here.

Here's where, again, this is Dr. Wilkes, he's a seminary graduate and so if you're going to put that up there then my suggestion is demonstrate an understanding of theological terminology.

All the time these folks will confuse regeneration with the entirety of salvation.

Regeneration, let's understand what conversion is, regeneration is, let's understand what the call is, the effectual call, general call, let's be consistent on these issues.

And when I am converted, when my heart of stone is taken out and a heart of flesh is given to me,

I am changed from being a God -hater to being a God -lover, I choose to follow

Christ. I believe. Now I have been enabled to believe, that is the slavery to sin has been removed, the effect of the fall and the sense of that incapacity has been removed from me by grace.

It didn't have to be, God would be just to leave it there, but he graciously removes it in that work within my heart.

But I have believed in Christ. Unfortunately in the first part of this sermon, the first sermon, he goes on and on and on.

See? You're saved by faith. The Calvinists don't believe that. Who has been in the forefront of defending sola fide, justification by grace alone through faith, all along, but us reformed folks.

And it's just very sad to hear that going on. And then, because of the salvation of that call, then you have faith, that salvation precedes your belief and your faith in God.

Salvation? How about regeneration? Regeneration does bring about those capacities.

They're connected together. The Word and the Spirit together. That's why I wrote and said, what books did you get this from?

What Calvinists were you reading? You're not saved by faith, by believing in God, choosing to believe.

You are saved by God's call, then you believe. False dichotomy.

Calvinists believe, fifthly, in the perseverance of the saints, that the elect will persevere. So, in other words, to put it in a nutshell, according to Calvinism, a person will either be saved or damned for all eternity because they were saved or damned from all eternity.

If you were saved or damned from all eternity by God's choice, then you have no hope.

Well, because I understand what Calvinism teaches, I reject Calvinism. I'm not a

Calvinist in any way, is what is said there. Well, I'm afraid Brother Wilkes does not understand

Calvinism. I'm sure that sadly that may be what has been presented to him.

But certainly if that was what was presented to him, it was an unbalanced presentation at the very, very least.

And we will take time to be looking at that at another point. So, well, thank you very much for listening to Violent Night.

Remember, I'll put on the blog when we're going to be doing the program on Friday, whether in the morning or the afternoon, because I'm not available on Thursday.

I've got a memorial service to be a part of at that point. Thanks for listening to the program today.

God bless. ...been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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