Called to Confusion

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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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.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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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

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line on a

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Tuesday afternoon, doing the afternoon program today because I am going to be joined by the inimitable, the indubitable, and I should have written down some other in things to go along with that, a

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Turretin fan. And we are going to be continuing our response to Jason Stellman's appearance on the

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Called to Confusion podcast. And so, uh -oh, what does it say here?

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Everyone's saying dead air. Hopefully you can hear me. I can hear you.

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You can hear me. Well, Turretin fan is here. Apparently the other in is invisible, apparently, or inaudible.

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We're back now? We lost the feed briefly. We didn't lose the feed briefly. You forgot to do something.

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Okay, we've got the rookie in charge today. And so, uh, it's gone again?

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Oh, okay. All right. We're just going to go on because hopefully the tape's running and worst comes to worst, we can record things there.

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Upcoming this week is, of course, Thanksgiving. And I'm giving thanks that I'm joined today by Turretin fan.

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Thank you, brother, for being with me again today. Thank you for having me on. And you are, of course, calling from an unknown location that will be undisclosed and so on and so forth.

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But we began, and in fact, looking at my program here, we got approximately 36 minutes into the

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Jason Stellman interview. But of course, we didn't play all of that. So actually, we didn't cover much, which means we're probably doing more talking than we should.

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But that is the whole reason for doing all of this. And we are responding to Jason Stellman's appearance on the podcast that, in essence, was hosted by Brian Cross.

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And it's the story of his conversion from, well, from Calvary Chapel to Reformed Theology to Roman Catholicism of some sort.

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Someone did, since we were on last, suggest to me that someone needs to talk to Jason and ask him the same question that the little lady asked

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Frank Beckwith. Roger Beckwith. No, Frank Beckwith. It's one of the Beckwiths. Frank Beckwith, yes.

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On the Catholic Answers broadcast a couple of years ago,

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I don't know, about six months or so after he converted, and she called in.

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I don't know if you remember this, but she goes, Have you started praying to Mary yet? And you could just tell he was like, and didn't want to touch that one with a ten -foot pole.

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I would personally be very, very interested in what Jason Stellman's response to that would be and to pursue the theological ramifications of that, because I just think it takes quite some time for people to really, really buy into papal authority enough to even buy into that.

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Then there's a transition into actually that impacting one's piety, but I doubt that anyone has gotten around to asking that question yet.

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But I certainly would like to ask that question personally, because, as I said when we met,

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I said to him, If you're going to go that direction, go all the way and be willing to debate me on the Marian dogmas.

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I don't really expect that to happen, but you never, ever know. So with that, let's dive back into exactly where we were.

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This was a section that Brian Cross had asked Jason Stellman what kind of objections were being directed his direction via mainly

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Reformed people. The dividing line will begin in 25 minutes. The dividing line will begin in 25 minutes.

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Thank you very much. Ah, this is a professional outfit today.

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Actually, it is supposed to start in 25 minutes. We just started a few minutes early, is why the software is a little bit confused and is therefore doing that to us.

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Let's just get into this before the wheels just completely fall off here. Is either an unwillingness or an unawareness of this issue of broader interpretive paradigms.

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And so most of the objections that have come up from the lips or the keyboards of Protestants and Reform people in particular are objections that presuppose the very, the very paradigmatic axioms that make their theology work.

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Now, I find it funny. There are a lot of times I was going et tu

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Brute during this particular thing. It just strikes me as a person who has unfortunately had to read through a few threads on the

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Catholic Answers web board that there are very few people who are more enslaved to their paradigms than Roman Catholics, especially when it comes to the issue of authority.

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And it just seems to me that for Jason Stelman to complain that his Reformed interlocutors can't step out of their paradigmatic realm doesn't really bode well for how closely he has examined the centrality of the presuppositions of the

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Roman system as to the construction of their system of authority either. Wouldn't you agree?

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Yes, yes. And it's a little bit of it sounded almost postmodern in the sense somehow we can't look through.

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We can't look at this through Roman Catholic eyes because we're not Roman Catholic. But at least in theory, the

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Roman Catholic religion is one that's whose doctrines are written down, can be read. It doesn't you don't have to experience it to know what the teachings are.

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You don't have to have spent 30 years inside the religion. And obviously, Stelman hasn't. So it's a little bit unclear to me sort of where where he's where he thinks that that's the case, that you can't understand these paradigms unless you hold the paradigms or something like that.

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Well, I could understand how maybe a real true Eastern Orthodox person could make that kind of criticism because you can't go to books necessarily and really get the flavor of things.

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That's not the case with Rome. And especially in my experience, the vast majority of Roman Catholic apologists are just not people who are overly concerned about looking at the paradigms from any other perspective other than their own.

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I mean, that's one of the biggest criticisms I've had over and over again, is the most popular ones, the ones that you find on Catholic Answers and, you know, people like Patrick Madrid and Mark Shea and and all these others, they just keep repeating the same old same old without any critical reflection whatsoever.

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I mean, it's just it's just amazing there. I was thinking about I saw something that James Swan posted just a couple of days ago where he went over something where Mark Shea had repeated the same false information about Martin Luther that everybody, they just quote each other.

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And this has been documented for I don't know how long, and yet they just keep repeating it. There just doesn't seem to be much in the way of serious interaction at that point.

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But anyways, I stopped him in the middle of a sentence, so I apologize. And so they'll say, well, since God, you know, since God demands absolute perfection from us, how on earth do you expect to get to heaven as a

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Catholic? You know, if you know, if you've still got venial sins on your on your on your account when you die or things like this that sort of presuppose the need for the demand for absolute perfection.

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Now, again, we just have to stop and point out we did last time. Yeah, that's what Rome teaches. At this point,

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I want to I want to just yell out, then why do you have purgatory? Why do you have indulgences?

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I mean, if it wasn't for that element of teaching, there would be no St. Peter's Basilica because that's how they raise the money to build the crazy thing.

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I mean, I don't at this part, I don't get it because he even uses

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Roman Catholic categories of venial sin. And obviously, it's mortal sin that would keep you from getting to heaven, not venial sin.

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But still, the very idea of purgatory is that there is the need for purgation before entering into the presence of God.

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That's the whole thing, isn't it? Yes, that's that. The point is, you have venial sin, therefore you can't get into heaven yet.

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It's not that it permanently blocks you. It's unclear if he got the idea that, to go back to his example we discussed last week, that these

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Old Testament saints who were described as living righteous lives, if he thinks that means that they didn't have any mortal sins.

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But if he does think that's what it means, then you should look and see, does anywhere in the

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Old Testament give him these categories of mortal and venial sins to verify his paradigm instead of just trying to impose this paradigm on the text?

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Yeah, it's very difficult for me to understand this, and I just have to wonder what, you know, a couple times,

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I'm listening to this obviously as a person who talked to him and as a convinced Protestant who's obviously done,

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I don't know, 40 some odd debates at least against some of the leading Roman Catholic apologists, so I've got a little experience in the field, but at the same time

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I also tried to think, what would a believing Roman Catholic be thinking in listening to this?

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What would Robert Syngenis be thinking if he heard these statements?

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And I just can't help but again remember the number of times

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I've heard cradle Catholics who are theologically aware criticizing converts because they bring so much of their paradigms right into a place where they don't belong.

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And I just have to wonder what some Roman Catholics are thinking when they hear this kind of thing, especially those who go, yeah, venial sin, purgatory, indulgences, necessary.

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What are you talking about? How does this result in your conversion? Hard to say. According to the law, again, for Reformed people, there's a very forensic and letter of the law sort of way of understanding

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God's demands. And just about every objection that I've come across is assuming the very thing that needs to be proven.

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It's often very, very circular and it's really hard. Let me just point out that one of the biggest difficulties we face in dealing with Roman Catholics is that very issue, that they assume the infallible authority of Rome.

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They assume the authority structure of Rome even though their theologians admit it is a development over time.

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The whole point of Newman's development hypothesis was a recognition that you cannot look back into primitive history and see a functioning papacy.

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I mean, the very fact he had to do the acorn and the tree thing is clear indication that this was a gradual development over time.

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And it's a development that over time we recognize was based upon numerous falsehoods. The donation of Constantine, the pseudo -Isidorean decretals, all these other things were vitally important in the development of this structure.

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And yet, here we have it being turned the other direction by someone who's just gone that way.

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And I was never given any reason in listening to this as to why you would embrace the presuppositions of Rome.

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And when I tried to challenge him on those things, he said, I'm not here to argue about Roman Catholicism. I'm not here to argue about Roman Catholicism.

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Well, I had told him in the very first email that I sent back once he told me what he wanted to talk about.

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Both sides have to be on the table. I'm not going to do this. No, we're only going to examine your viewpoint.

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We're not going to examine the Roman Catholic perspective type of thing. So one of the things

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I've pointed out when we've had this kind of dialogue before, and I don't recall whether it was with him or with one of the other cult of communion people, they all have a similar line on this.

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But the point is these views that we have, what they're calling our presuppositions, aren't actually presuppositions.

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They're things we derive from Scripture, and we can show them from Scripture. And so he keeps on talking about this issue about perfection being demanded.

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And just as an example, you could see, you know, be perfect, even as your heavenly father is perfect, as one example of a place where that's explicitly taught.

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There's a discussion of how our righteousness is like filthy rags is one of the euphemisms describing mere human righteousness.

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When Jesus tells his disciples how righteous they have to be, he says, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the

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Pharisees, these are the people who at least outwardly are the most zealous and observant people.

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Unless your righteousness exceeds their righteousness, you can't enter into the heaven. And even for a rich man, you know, the people who have all the advantages in life, it's easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to be saved.

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And the disciples response, which is exactly correct, which is then who can be saved. And that points us back to the need for grace, a need that is it's not explicitly denied by Stoneman.

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And if he's pressed on this, he'll say he'll go back to what Trent has to say. But it's certainly you're starting to see the problem with the theology, which is now pushing out the grace, the role of grace and pushing in the cooperation that Trent insists has to be there in connection with the grace.

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So it has to be grace plus human cooperation in order for the person to be saved. Which once again gets us to the the key differentiation of the

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Reformation, the necessity of grace versus the sufficiency of grace.

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That is the key issue and will always be the key issue. To get people to step back for a moment and say, look, as long as you're operating under these assumptions here, everything you're saying is internally consistent and makes sense.

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But it's those assumptions that you're operating with that are just so basic that you don't feel like you need to argue for them.

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It's those assumptions that I'm trying to call into question because I'm working from a different set of assumptions.

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And so let's, as much as it's possible to do, step back from those assumptions and examine the broader paradigms to see which one of them provides the most explanatory value for the actual biblical data.

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Now, notice the standard there is explanatory value for the actual biblical data.

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But how does Stellman know what the biblical data is as a Roman Catholic? Because as far as I understand,

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Rome defines not only what is scripture, but what scripture says. So Rome gets to determine what is and what is not biblical data.

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So Romans 5 .1, the fact that being justified is past tense, that it is the condition upon which we have peace, evidently that isn't biblical data.

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But Ciccara to Mene in Luke 1 .28 all of a sudden becomes not only biblical data, but biblical data of such a size that you can build entire mountains of theology upon it.

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And no reading of the text in the light of the original context and intent of the authors would ever lead you to that conclusion.

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But that's what Rome has dogmatically done. So how do you know what the biblical data is?

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And isn't Jason Stellman again demonstrating that he made a fallible decision to step out of his paradigm and to then make this kind of test?

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And given the conclusions he's come to and the statements he's made, not overly consistently.

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So how does that provide him with infallible certainty? I don't see how it can. Did you want to continue on or make a comment?

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If you don't mind, this whole way of looking at things, of saying that we're trying to find something that explains the biblical data, it has this patina of being scientific.

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In other words, it sounds like somebody might talk about, well, your scientific hypothesis has to fit the temperature readout data or something like that.

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But that isn't the way scripture is written. It's not a bunch of data points on a chart that we have to figure out the trend line for.

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Instead, it's teaching. There's various genres, but one of the key things is that it's a teaching and we're trying to learn from it and we're trying to—it's teaching us.

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We're listening to it and being taught, not coming to this data and trying to impose our own framework on the data and trying to read behind the data or something like that.

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There may be certain issues of theology where you end up not getting a clear answer to the question that you're asking because it's just not something that's clearly taught.

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And you may have to dig behind and say, OK, well, if this is true, then how does that fit with these other texts?

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But that's not our starting place. Our starting place is what does the text actually say? And when we try to learn from what it says and then build a theology from the text, from God's Word, from revelation into theology, as opposed to from theology back onto revelation.

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It certainly is a vast difference to view Scripture as a revelation given by God that has the specific purpose of communicating to His people for the purpose of their edification, their guidance, their being conformed to the image of Christ, and viewing it as this potentially massively confusing body of disparate writings that require some external source to make heads or tails out of them.

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So there is a fundamental difference at that point, no two ways about it. Would you say that that particular problem right there, failing to see the paradigmatic quality of the disagreement, would you say that that lies at the heart of the

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Catholic and Protestant disagreement concerning justification? Yes, it's not the only thing, because there are there are texts that need to be exegeted.

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There are definitions of words like, you know, Dikaiao and Dikaiosune, justify and justification.

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I just as soon as I heard that, I just wanted to go, OK, in your paradigm,

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Rome has the dogmatic power to end that argument for you by actually saying, this is what these things say.

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But every time Rome's come close to doing that, she's ended up backing away, providing infallible translations, etc.,

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etc. And it just seems so inconsistent to me to claim to on the one side, trumpet this idea that we can provide this absolute certainty.

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And yet he's still saying, well, you know, there's still a lot of exegesis. You've got 2000 years. You'd think you could have done it by now.

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I mean, I, you know, Calvin managed to get through most of the Bible in his lifetime with fairly decent exegetical depth.

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You'd think with 2000 years, we'd have this wonderful set of infallible commentaries, which we do not.

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Why that's the case, you get different answers from different Catholic apologists, but that's just how it works.

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Righteousness that need to be, you know, need to be hashed out and discussed. But even even even in those discussions, paradigms are in play because there's an assumption on the part of of most

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Protestants that we get to the meaning of words. And you've talked a lot about this,

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Brian, simply by way of the lexicon that all we have to do is is figure out what

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Greek, Koine Greek speakers and readers in the first century thought a word meant. And and that is just simply how you get at what

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Paul meant when he used it. And that's not. Now, by the way, that is a extremely simplistic semantic approach that I can guarantee you is not taught in the

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Greek classes at Westminster Seminary in Escondido. Anyone who's read Moises Silva's works on lexical semantics and semantic domains and that has you're just you're not going to get that.

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I know that there are people like that. In fact, I don't have it up right now. But someone either in channel or on Twitter, I forget when it was,

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I think it was in channel, mentioned the Legitimize Challenge website where this guy is offering a hundred bucks to anybody who can show him that Legitimize has a certain meaning.

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He's a Roman Catholic. And you can just tell the depth of it because his listing of it is based on Strong's number.

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And then the Strong's number is there. And so there you got somebody doing it in reverse. OK, so I know there are

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Protestants that have a simplistic view. You know, you look up a Strong's number and you just follow a basic meaning through scripture and you don't look at at at context, don't look at at semantic domains and stuff like that.

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I understand all of that. But that's not what he would have been taught. That's not what he would have been taught at Westminster Seminary.

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I know that. So I don't I don't get this presentation.

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This next section, I'm sure you found to be interesting as well, Turgeon fan, was this inside jokes of the family perspective that he's going to present.

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And I'm sure you'll have some comments on it after he presents it as I as I will, too. Not a theologically neutral assumption either.

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But and so even when you're dealing with not with the macro, but with the micro and you're looking at individual texts and what they mean, there are still hermeneutical paradigm issues in play.

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And they're so hard to they're so hard to see if you've not been forced to look at them.

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I remember reading your article on the tradition in the lexicon in which you kind of say, look at their the church is like a family and you might be able to sit at my dinner table as a fly on the wall and listen to the discussion between my wife and kids and understand the words, but not know what we're talking about.

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And if you don't know what we're talking about, it's not because you don't know English. It's because you're just not privy to the years and years of inside jokes and all that that make up our family and the way we speak and the church is like that.

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But it's been around for 2000 years. Um, but when I first like when

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I first heard that argument, I just thought, huh, like I would never in a million years have have have considered that because I remember personally going toe to toe with you saying, look, words have meanings.

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Brian justification has a meaning. It's not you can't just it's not a wax nose. You can't just make it mean whatever you want.

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Um, the word had a meaning in the ears of the people who heard Paul preach and the eyes of the people who read his words when he wrote

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Romans and what it meant to them is what it means. And the job of the exegete and the theologian is to determine as best as possible using all the data and lexicography at our disposal.

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Um, what, what, what he meant when he said it and I had, it never would have occurred to me in a million years that I was making anything but an obvious and neutral statement in saying that.

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But then when I'm told that's actually not a neutral statement, you're presupposing certain things that are, you know, in dispute, you know, it's like, oh wow, okay, um, so now

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I need to step back from that claim and examine the, the, the major premise that led to that conclusion and whether or not that's, uh, that's a good premise, but no one, no one thinks this way unless they're forced to.

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That's why they're, that's why they're presuppositions. That's why they're properly basic because we just don't think to question them until someone comes along and does.

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Okay, so, uh, the idea, I, I, I guess that is a, a folksy homesy way of saying what the magisterium of the

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Roman church has said. And that is that we, we must read scripture in the light of tradition and the light of the church that becomes the family with the inside jokes.

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Um, I'll let you take the first shot at it cause I have a number of thoughts and you may say it better than me. So how do you respond to that?

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Okay, so the very first point is yes, the, there are, there is 2000 almost years of tradition and discussion that has taken place, not in the

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Roman Catholic church because I wouldn't date the Roman Catholic church back that far, but there, there is this period of time but who in their right minds would assume that anything said a hundred years after the text was written is somehow an inside joke context to statements in written at the beginning.

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This, this is the kind of thing that makes sense only the other way around. So let me give you an example.

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We, you, you like to point out that when Jesus was on the cross and he says, that people know the rest of the song, right?

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Because that's the historical context and cultural context in which he's living.

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People know the Psalms, they know what the rest of the Psalm is and they can fill in all that without having, without the dying man having to say the whole song.

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But the other way around doesn't work unless you're talking about prophecy or something like that, of course.

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But, but generally speaking, inside jokes only work about the context that's developed beforehand, not some context that comes later.

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So the idea of reading back 2000 years of subsequent tradition into the text is just bizarre.

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It doesn't make any sense. And, you know, it would go even farther and say there's, there isn't a reason aside from things like the cultural context and the

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Old Testament, which, which forms a dominant background to the New Testament. But aside from that context and that those, if you want to call them inside jokes, inside jokes, that there isn't a reason to suppose that things like the bodily assumption of Mary or the papacy or anything like that serve as inside jokes, that we can just see the word

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Peter in the text and assume papacy or do any of these other sorts of, uh, eisegetical ploys that we see in Roman Catholic apologetics and, and to a lesser degree,

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Roman Catholic theology. Exactly. And, uh, of course, let me, let me demonstrate that I can step out of my paradigm and I can enter into the role of others.

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That's one of the reasons I like doing role plays is, uh, and that's obviously something I have to do when

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I do debates. Uh, I think it's one of the reasons that I've had many Roman Catholics say that I have won the majority of my debates with Roman Catholics is because I can enter into their perspective and you just said, who in their right mind?

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Well, of course, if you would, but recognize Turretin fan, that scripture is just a part of tradition.

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It is a part of the living voice of the church. Then you would understand that what you really have today is this greater body of living tradition of which scripture remains a vital part.

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But there has been so much growth. There has been so much development that we can see things so much more deeply.

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And that's what the family conversation is all about. And of course, really what I'm saying now is the whole reason why you can have things like the immaculate conception, the bodily assumption, which are clearly not a part of scripture and clearly not a part of the original, uh, quote unquote, deposit of faith.

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But this is the foundation upon which Rome builds. These things is that there is this living voice.

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There is this, this continuation of the guidance of the Holy Spirit, even in the dogmatic definitions being guided by, led by the

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Holy Spirit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is where it comes from. This is why we sit back and go,

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I think you all are talking about further revelation. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Canon's closed. Canon's closed, but closed in what way?

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Well, as far as, as absolutely objective revelation, maybe. But once you open the door to this idea of a living church and growing insights and, and you don't have to worry about what words once meant, that's how, you know, a couple of years ago during John Paul II's pontificate, um,

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I saw once again, it seemed like under John Paul II, one year he threw out something conservative and the next year he threw out something liberal and the next year something conservative, just to keep both sides, you know, happy and keep this big, huge tent, one big, huge tent.

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And so I remember sending to, to Bob St. Janice contradictory statements from the past that spoke of the absolute necessity of submission to the

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Pope and, and submission to the Roman Catholic understanding of the gospel with specific content, content saying that heretics and schismatics and, and all these other people are specifically excluded from eternal life.

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And then I can provide all sorts of modern commentary. You know, the Muslims adore the one true

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God with us and separated brethren and all the rest of this, uh, this kind of stuff where you can demonstrate a clear shift in perspective.

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His response was very, very enlightening. It was, James, who do you think you are to interpret what the church once said in the past?

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You see, only the living church can interpret what is said in the past. And I don't know that he'd say that now, because he seems to be at odds with a lot of the modern interpretation.

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But the idea was, it doesn't matter what, uh, innocent the third or innocent the 10th or, or Leo the 10th.

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It doesn't matter what they meant when they said these things. It doesn't matter what their contemporaries thought they meant.

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It doesn't matter what words meant at that point in time. The modern church gets to interpret that. And if the church interprets it differently, then it would have been interpreted by the original author.

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Well, so what? The church is the final authority. And that means the church becomes completely outside of any kind of reformation, correction or anything else, because she is the final authority in all things.

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If she says it's true, it's true. Period. End of discussion. Um, so it was, it is fascinating to listen to someone who, uh, you know, comes up with this, you know, this, this type of a story and well, obviously he's borrowing it from Brian Cross, but this whole concept of, you know, the inside jokes of the family, it becomes the necessary context.

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Uh, the reality is that if I started at, at Thanksgiving dinner, if I started talking to my dad about stuff that we had said back when

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I was young with my kids at the table, they wouldn't know what was talking that we're talking about unless we filled them in.

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So it, it, it's just a really bad illustration and it certainly explains how you can get some of the really in, in inane exegesis that has become foundational to especially the

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Marian doctrines and things like that. So it's very interesting. Now, this next section is not very long, but it's going to take us a while to get through because we're, we're entering into,

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I think one of the most important sections here. Um, because, well, this is just very, very interesting to me.

33:53

We may have to go back and replay a couple of these things, but the question comes up here from Brian Cross.

33:58

What was the role of the early church fathers? Now, let me just give some background here as to how I heard this.

34:04

Um, until Alpha Omega Ministries began debating

34:10

Catholic answers in August of 1990, they were going around just beating people up right and left.

34:22

And I heard most of the debates they did. No one ever challenged them historically.

34:28

No one ever challenged them historically. But you got to realize when I first debated them, um, church history had been something

34:37

I had loved in seminary. I loved it so much that not only did

34:43

I take all the church history I could take, but since once you took a class, you could then audit it for free.

34:50

When it was offered again, before I graduated, I took the same classes a second time.

35:00

Because I had a great church history teacher who made it alive and I knew, thanks to the fact that I started doing serious apologetics in college, really between my freshman and sophomore years in college, when

35:17

I started studying Mormonism, I immediately knew that church history was a vital, vital, vital element of being a properly prepared

35:29

Christian apologist because there's nothing that's more twisted in the claims of these various groups than their view of church history and things like that.

35:38

It's so easy to pick and choose from the patristic sources what you want to quote. And so I have always been fascinated by church history.

35:46

I've gotten to teach church history. I'd love to have more time, but I do way too much as it is and too broad a field probably already as it is.

35:57

Just yesterday, on a 40 -mile ride, I listened to half of Chadwick's Reformation Church History, just because it's good to review these things and things like that.

36:10

So as a seminary student, I was fascinated by church history and had excellent teachers.

36:19

Now contrast that with what you're about to hear from Jason Stellman. Speaking of the church as a family and the tradition, did reading the

36:29

Church Fathers have a role in your transition from Reformed to Catholic? Yes, not,

36:35

I think, as much as they did for other guys I've talked to and stories I've heard. I was never into the patristic writers at all, especially in seminary.

36:47

I remember being so bored in ancient church with Dr. Godfrey. It's because I thought, these guys are kind of idiots.

36:54

They don't know anything, and they have these wacky ideas, and they didn't even understand imputation of alien righteousness.

37:04

So I kind of don't care. Let's skip ahead to the 16th century when things start really rolling.

37:11

But then, when I started reading Catholic claims about the Fathers, because the big

37:19

Protestant take on the Fathers is, and I think it's a very convenient tactic, maybe

37:25

I'm being too cynical because I don't want to question the motives of the people who say this, but the standard line is, look, the Fathers are a mixed bag.

37:31

They're not some monolithic, univocal group of people who just all said the same thing, that all agrees with Rome, but they were all over the place.

37:39

Sometimes they were right on. Sometimes they were completely out to lunch. But you can't lump them all together and turn the word tradition into a word with a capital

37:48

T at the beginning and somehow make it all sound alike. Now, I'll stop there for a couple reasons.

37:56

First of all, that last section was a direct quote of yours truly. I mean, I don't know how many times

38:02

I have said that, and if he's quoting somebody else, then all that means is I'm not the only one that has come to that conclusion.

38:09

But I can't see how anybody can do something more than read

38:15

Jurgens, which is the most in -depth many Roman Catholics ever get in church history, and I'm talking about Catholic apologists here.

38:25

Anybody who can read more than just that cannot see the fact that the patristic sources are a mixed bag on every level.

38:38

That they are not monolithic. They would not have understood the term Roman Catholic.

38:45

That there were many who said things and interpreted Scripture in ways that are utterly foreign to the modern

38:55

Roman Catholic paradigm. The church fathers were the church fathers, and I can let them be the church fathers.

39:03

I don't have to turn them into reformed Baptists because there is no dogmatic statement in my statement of faith that demands that I turn them into reformed

39:15

Baptists. But there are statements in Roman Catholic dogmatic terms that do,

39:23

I think, force Roman Catholics to mistreat in a great way the patristic sources.

39:33

But there can be no question in just letting them speak for themselves that they had many disagreements with one another, and that they were not speaking with one voice.

39:49

Just read Cyprian and Firmilian as they rebuke with the sharpest words the pretensions of the

40:02

Bishop of Rome. And I'll never forget challenging, I mean, I should have queued it up, but one of my favorite debate moments of all time is when

40:13

I kept coming back to gerrymatitics in our first debate on the Marian dogmas on Long Island.

40:20

What early church fathers believe this? What early? Where do you have you? Well, the church is always, well, if the church is always taught it, then you should be able to show this to us from the very beginning, etc, etc, etc, etc.

40:32

And finally, Jerry says, well, Mr. White, you can't expect them all to have talked about this.

40:40

I said, Jerry, I'll take just one. And that the place just, you know, all the frustration of the people in the audience came overflowing and they were all clapping.

40:54

Excuse me. And so this kind of perspective that he just said is a convenient thing is simply a fact.

41:09

And if Jason listens to this, Jason, you would never debate me or anybody else on that, because you know, you know, you could not win that for Lovner money.

41:20

It's not possible. But it does remind me of listening to Tim Staples years ago, when he was a wide eyed new convert, saying that every single church father, every single one interpreted

41:36

Matthew 16, 18, the way Rome does every single one of that is just a lie. It is a whopper.

41:43

But he was ignorant and has stayed that way in many ways. It's so easy to demonstrate that these things are untrue.

41:51

And yet here it's being presented in this context that, well, this is a convenient way around things.

41:57

And he's going to say here in just a moment, all the fathers were Catholics. And that just reminds me of my when

42:05

I when I would quote early church fathers that contradicted Jerry Matitix, what was his response? Well, he's not an early church father.

42:13

So you quote Tertullian, well, he wasn't an early church father. Or that's not tradition. See, the quotes that I give you, they're tradition.

42:22

But the quotes that Protestant guy gives you, they're not tradition. And what does that prove? Sola ecclesia.

42:27

The church gets to determine what Scripture is and what it says, what tradition is and what tradition says. And therefore, there's nothing left by which you can argue against the church.

42:37

Isn't that incredibly convenient? Anyways, Tertullian, please, your thoughts. Yeah, so it's nothing new to you, of course.

42:48

You're not the one who came up with this idea that the fathers often contradict one another. One of the famous medieval people is

42:55

Peter Abelard, who had his sick at non, yes and no, where he went through the works of the fathers that were available at that time.

43:04

And, you know, maybe a different body of works than we have now. But he went through and he pointed out a bunch of cases where there was a parent contradictions where one on one particular question, the fathers say yes, and the fathers say no.

43:18

And he did that on lots of different ones. And his one of the points that he raises was, basically, when it comes to Scripture, you're not allowed to say that the author of the book didn't know the truth, because the authors, of course, the author is

43:32

God. But instead, maybe there's a if there seems to be a contradiction, maybe you're not correctly understanding it, or maybe the codex, maybe there's a textual transmission problem here.

43:42

And some, you know, a knot has been left out somewhere in the in the transmission. But if you find contradictions in later authors, like the fathers, then what you do is you go back and either prove it deductively or, or go to the authority of scriptures and prove the truth from the scriptures.

44:00

So that's the 1100s, you know, long before Calvin or Luther were born, long before we in this generation were born.

44:12

And if he recognized that the fathers weren't monolithic, and that they weren't a sufficient guy, then it shouldn't be any surprise that we hold the same position today, given the fact that we've had more time to study and to, you know, look into what the father said.

44:30

And it's, of course, it's, I'm sure, Professor, the professors at Westminster in general are probably thankful for him saying that he wasn't paying much attention in their class.

44:41

And I don't think that that review of the class as boring is is something that everyone would agree with.

44:46

Oh, no, no, no, no, I, I've actually, I'm sure Dr. Godfrey actually probably listens to that and says, well, that explains a lot of what's going on.

44:57

Because I'll be honest with you, I think one of the main reasons that not only that I became involved in dealing with Roman Catholicism, but that I have never found

45:08

Roman Catholicism to be at all attractive, is because the fact that I did study church history, and I do know enough about it to recognize pretentious claims about it.

45:20

And that's the best way to describe Rome's claims, is that they are pretentious.

45:26

They are not serious. And serious Roman Catholic historians end up being modernists because they have to undercut the very claims that were made in documents like Satis Cognitum and things like that, that make these far way overreaches about the unanimity of patristic sources that just simply cannot be substantiated by any meaningful reading of those materials.

45:55

So you clearly had more to say there. No, no, no. I think we've hit on it, and I think there's going to be more to say just in a minute.

46:04

Well, I know that he did make a statement here, and I wanted to make reference to, I'm not sure if you have posted it yet, but to a blog article you will be posting, in regards to this issue of, well, they're all just a bunch of idiots because they didn't talk about the imputation of alien righteousness.

46:22

He did make that statement. Did you want to mention something about what you're going to be putting up?

46:28

Oh, sure, yes. Thanks to a number of different sources, primarily Pastor David King and Bruce McCormick's book,

46:36

Justification and Perspective, and there's a few patristic sources and other sources we could point to which talk about the imputation of righteousness to the believer.

46:48

And as McCormick points out, there's many aspects of justification. This is just one of them.

46:54

And this one isn't as widespread as the discussion of the non -imputation of sin to the believer.

47:01

Right. But you have fathers, and Ambrosiaster is usually treated as a father, although he's kind of anonymous or pseudonymous,

47:12

I guess. But this he says, that without the works of the law, to an impious person, that is, a

47:21

Gentile, believing in Christ, his faith is imputed for righteousness, as it was to Abraham.

47:27

How then can the Jews imagine that through the works of the law, they are justified with Abraham's justification, when they see that Abraham was justified not from the works of the law, but by faith alone?

47:40

Therefore, there is no need of the law, since an impious person is justified with God through faith alone.

47:46

So that connects the justification by faith alone with imputed righteousness.

47:52

That's one of his commentaries on Scripture at Romans 4 -5, if I'm not mistaken.

47:59

Well, evidently, he was just an idiot. Well, I mean, like—

48:05

It goes both ways. You know, you can play a game more than one direction. And there were other statements.

48:13

But obviously, this was not the central element of the debate at the time.

48:21

And so the idea that, well, this should be the constant drumbeat of discussion, shows a real—

48:28

Well, it shows he wasn't paying attention very well in Dr. Godfrey's Church History class. But how can that fit well within a

48:36

Roman Catholic paradigm, and not paying attention in Dr. Godfrey's Church History class? That's a statement in and of itself.

48:43

Right. And if we're allowed to look at the development of doctrine, and we need—and they're allowed to import huge doctrines using this technique, but we can't work out the nuances of justification with this technique, that's a strange sort of double standard.

49:00

I mean, if we look—I mentioned Abelard from the 1100s. Bernard of Clairvaux is another writer from the same period.

49:07

I think you're maybe a slightly younger person, but also 1100s.

49:12

He talks about, in his works, he talks about the—here's a quotation from him.

49:19

He says, For what could man, the slave of sin, fast bound by the devil, do of himself to recover that righteousness which he had formerly lost?

49:30

Therefore he who lacked righteousness had another's imputed to him. And in this way the prince of this world came and found nothing in the

49:40

Savior, and because he notwithstanding laid hands on the innocent, he lost most justly those whom he held captive.

49:47

Since he who owed nothing to death, lawfully freed him who was subject to it, both from the debt of death and the dominion of the devil, by accepting the injustice of death.

49:56

For with what justice could that be exacted from a man a second time? It was a man who owed the debt.

50:01

It was a man who paid it. For if one, says St. Paul, died for all, then all were dead, so that as one bore the sins of all, the satisfaction of one is imputed to all.

50:11

So this is Bernard of Clairvaux, 1100s, and he's talking about the imputed satisfaction of Christ.

50:20

And I would fully agree if someone's going to jump in and say Bernard of Clairvaux didn't have a fully

50:26

Reformed understanding of justification, or even of the atonement more broadly.

50:31

I would agree. That isn't my contention. My contention is if you're really saying, I want to see imputed the imputation of alien righteousness in the fathers or before the

50:41

Reformation, it's there in some of the writers, not in all of them, and we don't claim that it is in all of them.

50:48

No, and it's amazing for me to think that someone who will embrace such dogmas as the bodily assumption will then turn around and make an argument like this.

51:01

Because the fact that they will accept things, now they're saying, well, yeah, but that's because I have a different source of authority.

51:07

So what does that mean? You are admitting, if you're going to take that stance, if Stelman's going to take the stance, then he has to admit that the only basis upon which to believe in the modern dogmas of Rome, which were unknown to the scriptural writers and unknown to the early church for the first at least half millennium, if not longer, then to do that means that you are in essence winking when you say the canon is closed and winking when you say revelation has ceased.

51:42

And you are indeed giving to the church the ability to not so much receive new revelation, but to define new things as revelation from God.

51:53

And so to sit there and say, well, you know, they weren't talking about the things that really excited me. Well, you know, you should have listened to the things they were talking about.

52:01

Because if you had, Jason, been listening, then you would have not have fallen for the pretentious claims of Rome.

52:09

And you would know that many in the early church resisted the growing influence of the

52:16

Bishop of Rome. You would know that the authority of the Bishop of Rome came from the nature of the church of Rome and not vice versa.

52:23

In modern Romanism, the authority of the church of Rome is based upon the person of the

52:29

Bishop of Rome. That's not history. That's not the way it was. The reason that Rome had a preeminence in the

52:36

West was because it was Rome. Because it was the head of the empire. Because it was the largest and richest church.

52:45

And because people frequently had to go there. And therefore, it had communication with other churches. There were all sorts of reasons.

52:51

And one of the main reasons was it was the only apostolic see in the West. There were other in the

52:57

East. It's fascinating. It's always fascinating to me. Just draw a line right down between Greece and Italy, right down to North Africa.

53:05

And then look at the cities that claim to be apostolic sees founded by an apostle of Jesus Christ.

53:11

And what you'll see is modern Roman Catholicism versus Eastern Orthodoxy in their ecclesiology.

53:19

That is, you have multiples in the East. And that's why you have multiple bishops in the

53:24

Eastern Orthodox concept of the hierarchy of the church. And you have one in the

53:30

West. Because you have just Rome. And so, I mean, there's just all this stuff in history that if he hadn't thought all these people were idiots and had entered into their...

53:42

If he had entered into the way they really did think back then, there's no way he could ever buy the anachronistic forcing of them into the paradigm of Roman Catholicism, which now, evidently, he has accepted.

53:57

And in fact, that's what's going to come up in the next about one minute of conversation. Want to move on to that? Yes, let's go.

54:05

Okay. But nevertheless, you know, hearing Catholic claims about the fathers that they...

54:11

While there was diversity on certain things, there is a pretty significant host of issues about which they were unanimous.

54:19

And they were always unanimous in favor of what is now the fully orbed

54:25

Catholic position as opposed to a Protestant one. Now, catch that. The early... There's the claim.

54:31

There's another debate challenge for Jason Stelman that he'll never take up because he knows in his heart of hearts and Brian Cross knows and everybody at Call to Confusion knows they could never win this debate.

54:46

You could never win this debate. Let's listen to it again so you can hear what's actually being said.

54:54

But nevertheless, you know, hearing Catholic claims about the fathers that they... While there was diversity on certain things, there is a pretty significant host of issues about which they were unanimous.

55:06

And they were always unanimous in favor of what is now the fully orbed

55:12

Catholic position as opposed to a Protestant one. So on Mary, Mary's sinfulness,

55:19

Mary's immaculate conception, bodily assumption, papacy, papal infallibility, purgatory, indulgences.

55:30

Well, I realize I'm talking about some things they didn't even know about, wasn't even a part of their experience.

55:36

But on all these issues, evidently I can't find any other church fathers that thought

55:43

Mary was sinner. Oh, actually I can. But there's the assertion when it's a

55:50

Roman Catholic versus Protestant issue, the church fathers are always on Rome's side.

55:57

That is absolute deception. Jason, if you believe that, you have absolutely deceived yourself and been deceived.

56:07

Absolutely. It's amazing to me that, okay, it's not amazing to me.

56:12

If you slept through church history, all right, I'm just telling you right now, we stood 10 feet from where I'm sitting right now, stood in front of my church history section, and I don't know how many volumes could have pulled down and proved that that's a deception.

56:26

You didn't ask. You didn't ask. You want to comment on that? Yes, of course. He loves these audacious claims that Rome provides, but the problem with them is not that they lack audacity.

56:39

The problem is they lack truth. They lack verity. You can point out that the

56:47

Protestant, Roman Catholic distinctive doctrines are areas where there is not unanimity.

56:53

There's not a uniformity of teaching among the fathers. In fact, in some cases, it's quite the opposite, that initially the unanimous consent is in favor of the reformed position, like Sola Scriptura, for example.

57:08

There's not absolute unanimity, of course, but the vast consensus is always appealing to Scripture to resolve disputes, and always treating

57:17

Scripture as the only infallible guide that they have. They don't talk about the infallibility of any popes, any councils, anything else except Scripture.

57:28

There's not absolute unanimity even on those things, and those aren't our guide. Even if there was lots of fracturing over that point, that wouldn't decide the matter for us.

57:38

But even going beyond the things that divide Roman Catholics and Protestants, look at the artificial nature of the way that they've posed the question.

57:47

Look at things like the Aryan controversy. Now, they're not going to include any of the

57:53

Aryans as church fathers because they're heretics, right? But that, in a sense, begs the question by saying, well, we're just going to exclude all the ancient people who disagreed with us from being church fathers.

58:07

And so, naturally, on lots of points, the church fathers have this remarkably unanimity because they've selected only the people who agree with them.

58:15

So, I mean, that's kind of a— it's just a game and a gimmick. And if we want to seriously investigate questions and say, well,

58:23

Christians have always held such and such a view, and then we say, well, you know,

58:29

I don't know. An easier example might be the iconoclasm controversy. Before the

58:34

Seventh Ecumenical Council is held, 30 years or so prior, there's another council about the same size, about the same number of bishops, that decides the opposite direction, that can't have icons of Christ because that's contrary to Scripture, and the only icon you can have is the

58:50

Lord's Supper itself. That's the body and blood of Christ. That's what images it to us, and there's no other image allowed.

58:57

So, you have this exact opposite position by a similar number of bishops in the same general geographic area, and yet all the fathers on all these distinctive

59:09

Roman positions have the same view. I mean, I guess you're saying that only by eliminating all the ones who don't.

59:16

Well, that guy's not a church father. I mean, I had listed from this earlier part of the discussion, I had listed the

59:21

Adorate of Cyrus and Tertullian as some other examples of people who talked about this, but while we were talking,

59:28

I thought, well, maybe I'd better not mention them because people will point out that for a time the Adorate was kind of condemned as being too favorable towards Nestorius, although he was revitalized, but then some of his writings were condemned, or perhaps, and maybe not this one that I'm quoting, but anyway, that gets complicated in Tertullian.

59:46

He went off into modernism, so we have some trouble with Tertullian, even if the book

59:51

I'm quoting from is not from that period. This is against Marcion. It's viewed as an orthodox book, but there's all this type of thing, and yes, it's nice to say that the fathers are unanimous about things, but at some point, we should go through Daly's right use of the fathers and explain every one of the numerous gates that they have to screen the fathers through before they get to a unanimity of any kind in the process, but primarily the fundamental problem is in a lot of questions that we're asking, the fathers didn't think of the question, and there isn't an answer at all from the fathers, so on the issue of imputed righteousness of Christ, for example, even if there aren't a lot of fathers who actually talk about this topic, it's not because they had the debate and Ambrosiaster lost, and the rest of the fathers said, oh, no, we're denying the imputed righteousness.

01:00:51

Instead, the other ones just pretty much don't talk about the subject. Maybe some of them hold positions that are inconsistent with it.

01:00:57

That's possible, but primarily on many of these types of issues, they just didn't address the topic at all.

01:01:06

Exactly, and it is an incredibly naive view of church history that allows the

01:01:14

Roman Catholic apologists to make these kind of incredible statements. It's just naive.

01:01:20

It's simplistic. It's not honest, but it's forced on many of them by the dogmatic claims of the church itself, and when we look at how, especially documents that were fraudulent, that we know that everyone today admits were fraudulent, the centrality of those documents, the development of the modern

01:01:44

Roman Catholic papacy especially, is amazing, and the documents have now been swept away by historical research, but the edifice built upon their testimony stands.

01:01:56

It is truly, truly amazing. Well, I stopped it. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I don't want to extend this, but this ties back in well with your earlier insight, this family where you kind of role -play to the

01:02:07

Roman Catholic. This family that supposedly is preserving the apostolic doctrines pure from the original source, down through this family conversation, they can't keep their tradition straight so they know which things are really written by Augustine or not, and we have to use later historical techniques to figure that out.

01:02:26

They can't even get the text of Scripture right in the Clementine Vulgate, and the new

01:02:33

Vulgate has to change the text, so the whole idea that they correctly maintained not just all the correct doctrines, but also the correct interpretation of Scripture somehow in this process is totally incredible.

01:02:50

Well, and that's coming up in the next section where he's going to make that claim, and we will expand upon that, so let's press forward.

01:02:58

So that was kind of jarring, and then hearing that none of them taught the

01:03:03

Reformed understanding of imputation was a problem. I remember having beers with a friend of mine, an old seminary friend, and asking him, he's a pastor too, hey, if the early church fathers, if none of them taught the imputation of alien righteousness, would that bother you?

01:03:22

And he said, oh, yes. And I said, can you name any that did? And he said, no. And I said, so are you going to go home and just scour the 37 volumes of whatever it is of the fathers to find that?

01:03:35

Doesn't that, like, are you going to lose sleep over that? And he said, not really. But to me, it was significantly troublesome.

01:03:46

But it wasn't, because I've never been a historian, and I've always just been more interested in systematics and exegetical theology, the role the fathers played was just like, oh, great.

01:03:56

It's like, you've been hitting me from all these other angles, and now you're going to pull out this, you know, this silver bullet thing over here.

01:04:03

It's like, oh, great. So now the fathers were all Catholics. Well, that's wonderful. Thanks a lot. So the fathers were all

01:04:10

Catholic. Now, you had pointed out something that you noticed in the statement that he made there.

01:04:18

Did you want to comment on that? Well, sure. He mentions 37 volumes. So I'm assuming that that's some part or that in general, the

01:04:28

Schaff collection, the Erdsmann set of patristics translated into English, which isn't the whole, it's not even most of the, you know, the most popular patrology has something like,

01:04:42

I think, 86 lines of Greek, not counting the Latin translations. Right. And then

01:04:47

I guess around 200 volumes of Latin fathers. And those don't include any of the writings that were not in Greek or Latin.

01:04:56

So any of the Syriac fathers, any fathers outside of the Greek and Latin speaking world, any

01:05:03

Coptic writings, for example, wouldn't be included in there. Any Ethiopic writings, any Armenian writings, any

01:05:10

Georgian writings, any anything outside of Greek and Latin. And that's, we're talking now, hundreds of volumes.

01:05:19

And that's only the material that survived that survived time. And not all of that is authentic.

01:05:26

But yeah. And not only that, but not all of that has appeared in English as yet either. That's true, too.

01:05:31

Yeah, they keep coming out with new translations of previously untranslated works, in English anyway, even to this day.

01:05:38

French has some things that English doesn't. Spanish has a few other languages that have been more popular.

01:05:44

But yeah, it's amazing. A few of these writings may not have been very well preserved outside of manuscript until now.

01:05:52

And there's not necessarily a printed text you can go to for a few of the works that we're discovering even now.

01:06:00

So this is a little bit, I would say that's a very small percentage of what we're likely to find.

01:06:07

But to suggest that we can that you only have to scour 37 volumes is a gross understatement.

01:06:14

And it just, I don't get the sense that he went and scoured those.

01:06:19

No, he didn't. Because the Tertullian example I was going to mention is found in that set. So you would find it if you searched even that limited set.

01:06:28

Yeah, I did not get the feeling that he did that and probably isn't going to be doing that given that from his perspective, it really wasn't a matter of what they were saying.

01:06:40

Anyways, it's just that was just a silver bullet type thing. It's just another thing, another nail in the coffin, so to speak at that particular point in time.

01:06:48

All right, let's press on. So you finally made the decision to become Catholic at some point and or made it in a way that's at least leaning in that direction.

01:06:58

And before you officially announced anything, apparently you traveled to visit some well -known Reformed figures to discuss the

01:07:03

Catholic question. Why don't you tell us about that? Yeah, I approached the session of my church, which means that the elders, the

01:07:13

Council of Elders, along with the associate pastor back in December of last year and said, hold on, and said, you know, look,

01:07:28

I'm asking for a sabbatical. You've expressed openness to the idea of sabbaticals for ministers in the past.

01:07:36

You know, it's time for if, you know, it makes sense to do it now because I've been doing this for a while. But I said, but one of the reasons why, in addition to finishing a book that I was trying to write, one of the reasons why

01:07:47

I'm asking for this is because I've been struggling with the claims of the Catholic church and I'd like to take some time to really dedicate, you know, period of study because I've been trying to figure this stuff out on my own, on my own time.

01:08:01

And it's been at that time it had been three and a half years or so, and I'm not getting anywhere.

01:08:07

And so I'd like to really spend some time and maybe even travel around and talk to some people, you know, and so they were, you know, obviously very surprised and concerned.

01:08:18

And they said, yes, you know, we will pay for you to go anywhere you need to go and talk to anybody you need to talk to.

01:08:26

And so I flew down twice to California to spend time with Mike Horton, David Van Droon and Steve Baugh, who was my

01:08:35

Greek professor. And I don't think I spoke with anyone else down there, but that was,

01:08:42

I went down for two different trips to speak with those guys. And of course, this was, you know, just horrible because, you know, these are guys who mentored me.

01:08:52

Mike wrote the forward for my first book and, you know, I've written for Modern Reformation and, you know, we've just, he was one of the key witnesses in my case against Peter Lightheart up here in the

01:09:04

Northwest. So he was not only, basically disappointing him was one of the things

01:09:10

I was dreading because, and I had other people, you know, fellow seminarians, you know, alumni of Westminster who would tell me, you got to talk to Horton, you got to talk to Horton.

01:09:21

And my response was always, I'm not going to talk to him unless I really have to. If I can figure this out on my own before that,

01:09:29

I'd rather not just commit professional suicide by disclosing to him that I'm, you know, seriously considering Catholicism.

01:09:38

But, you know, and maybe that was a bad tactic on my part. I don't know. Maybe I should have talked to him earlier. I don't know. But spoke with him at great length, flew out to Jackson, Mississippi and spent the day with Ligon Duncan, who's a wonderful man, did his

01:09:53

PhD at Edinburgh in patristics. Wonderful minister and he's been a good friend and ally helping me plant this church up here.

01:10:04

Spent the day with him talking and went over to visit a good friend of mine from seminary in Annapolis on that same trip who's a real good historian and a good systematician and a good friend.

01:10:18

And then I think the last trip I took was to Phoenix to speak with James White, who

01:10:23

I had not met before, but he is sort of the kind of the guy, you know, in Calvinistic circles, at least, that you go to to find answers about Rome.

01:10:35

And so I flew out to Phoenix and spent a few hours in his office kind of going back and forth.

01:10:43

But you weren't convinced? No. Now, it seems to me that rather than taking

01:10:56

Brian Cross's statement as weren't convinced by Horton and Baugh and Van Droenen and J.

01:11:03

Ligon Duncan and his pastor friend and me, he focuses primarily just upon me in the next portion of his comments.

01:11:14

You know, what's frustrating is that... Long pause, very long pause.

01:11:21

Try as you might. It's really hard to get people to stop talking about all the reasons why the

01:11:31

Catholic Church is false. Now, remember, he wrote to the ministry through the website, said,

01:11:41

I need to contact James White. A lot of people do that and Rich is my firewall.

01:11:46

And, you know, everybody and their uncle wants me to become their personal Bible answer man at times and look things up for them and things like that.

01:11:53

And obviously, I'd never get anything done if I did that. But this came through to me. And so I wrote to him and asked, what can

01:11:59

I do for you? And when he wrote back and told me about his situation, the first thing

01:12:10

I said when I responded was Rome's claims must be on the table and examined on the same basis.

01:12:21

I can pull up the email. I read it just last week, pulled it up.

01:12:28

I keep all my emails and I could read exactly what I said because I am so used to this.

01:12:36

Been here, done that, got the T -shirt. I mean, I had done my first debate against Roman Catholics 11 years before Jason Stelman started seminary.

01:12:47

All right. So I knew what this could turn into. And I know the mindset of these folks that are dipping their toes in the

01:13:01

Tiber River and getting the green slime all over themselves. And they're in the honeymoon phase and Rome can do no wrong and they don't want to apply the same standard.

01:13:13

And hence, when the main question that Jason asked me during our time in my office was couched in the context of right after the death of the

01:13:28

Apostle John, how could someone know what was the true church and what wasn't?

01:13:37

And I pressed him. How does Rome answer that?

01:13:43

There was no Pope. Nowhere do you find the Apostle Paul.

01:13:49

And I went through the text, folks. I went to Acts 20 and I went through what

01:13:57

Paul said to the Ephesian elders. I went to 2 Timothy and said, here, you've got the same situation.

01:14:06

The Apostle knows they're going to be those who are going to come in and they are going to draw disciples away after themselves.

01:14:13

Paul's in a situation where there are people who are denying his apostolic authority.

01:14:19

There's division, there's schism in the church. This is where Paul would have to have said, go to the successors of Peter.

01:14:27

He doesn't do that. He doesn't say that.

01:14:34

In both instances, he commits those people to the word of God.

01:14:41

Read Acts 20. Read 2 Timothy. Both times. And so I challenged him.

01:14:49

I said, if you think that this is the silver bullet against Sola Scriptura, well, then it's equally effective against Sola Ecclesia.

01:15:00

It's equally effective against the Bishop of Rome. He would have none of it.

01:15:07

He would not engage that. He would not defend that. Well, you're just going to make me a diagnostic.

01:15:12

Well, better than that than a heretic, I guess. Because evidently you don't have any trust that the spirit of God can use the word of God.

01:15:21

You don't even trust him that Jesus said his sheep will hear his voice. And you've bought into the idea that there's supposed to be this, you know, that God has decreed that all heretics will glow green when you apply, you know, spray them with a certain thing and you've got this, you know, easy way of doing things.

01:15:37

And that's not how it works. So the rest of this comment you know, is pretty much aimed just at me.

01:15:48

Not so much at the others, though I think he sort of widens it out a little bit after that. And start talking about why

01:15:56

Protestantism is true. By the way, I did give him.

01:16:04

Jason, you know, sir, you know, I said to you that the regenerate man's heart is drawn in obedience to that, which is the

01:16:16

Anustos. And don't you dare tell me, sir, that it's necessary to have an external authority to know what is the

01:16:25

Anustos, because according to the paradigm that you have now accepted and put your faith in, nobody dogmatically knew that until April of 1546.

01:16:36

So don't give me that. It ain't going to fly. You can get away with that on call to confusion.

01:16:42

You don't get away with that with me. Ain't going to happen. So you know that I directed you to exactly what the

01:16:53

Scriptures themselves say. Now, I cannot change your heart and mind, and I cannot cause you to find confidence in the voice of Christ.

01:17:06

But that does not mean that I did not make a positive case for what

01:17:12

I believed. Because, and I even, you know, I even made this clear to James at the beginning of our discussion.

01:17:19

I said, look, if all we're going to do is you sit here and tell me this general counsel contradicted that general counsel, or this pope did that, or there was a break in the succession line, you know, in the year 1400, then you're just going to convince me to become

01:17:35

Eastern Orthodox. And I'm assuming that that would be also considered failure. By the way, in the very next section, this interview, he's going to say that Rome is his only choice.

01:17:48

So evidently that was dishonest to say I'll just become Eastern Orthodox, because from what he says later on, that was never an issue anyways.

01:17:54

And so I'd rather, rather than talking about all the reasons why you think Rome's historical claims are spacious,

01:18:01

I want you to make a positive case for how the Protestant paradigm, and especially Sola Scriptura, emerged in the immediately post -apostolic church.

01:18:09

I want to know, I want to know how it is that all the stuff that Paul taught the

01:18:17

Corinthians by word of mouth about the Lord's table, because he wrote a couple chapters about it in 1

01:18:23

Corinthians 10 and 11, but he also spent some significant time in Corinth, and, you know, obviously went into much greater detail teaching them about the

01:18:33

Eucharist. I want to know how it is that all of that oral teaching that Paul and all the rest of the apostles gave that was considered during their lifetime to be authoritative, because Paul says, and all

01:18:43

Reformed people agree, that during the time of the apostles, Sola Scriptura wasn't operative because the word of God came by word of mouth and epistle.

01:18:51

But somehow, everybody knew, maybe through some microchip in the neck that went off the minute

01:18:59

John the apostle died, that now we have to forget everything that the apostles taught us and just go by what they wrote.

01:19:06

All right. There's going to be more, but there's much to be said right now. George and Fan, I've been preaching for a while.

01:19:14

What do you have to say in response to that? — Right. So that microchip argument is the— he's just quoting from William Whittaker's 16th century defense of Sola Scriptura there, where he claims that we all have microchips.

01:19:26

I don't even know where he gets this nonsense from. I'm certain he never thought that everybody had microchips, and it's just a caricature.

01:19:36

And I get that, you know, of course, this is, you know, from his standpoint, it's kind of a friendly crowd, and you can make jokes about it and so forth.

01:19:44

But that isn't the position that we actually hold. Our position is that Revelation came from Jesus Christ.

01:19:50

It preceded the church. It founded the church. It was inscripturated by the apostles. And it may be obvious to him— he says it obviously,

01:19:59

Paul went into more detail with Corinth. Well, why does he think that Paul went into more detail in Corinth?

01:20:04

Doesn't he realize that Paul's primary mission in a lot of places was evangelism?

01:20:11

In fact, what we know about Paul is that on every Saturday, on every Sabbath, he was in the synagogue debating the

01:20:19

Jews from the Scriptures. That was his approach. And then he was also reaching out to the others.

01:20:28

But when he would evangelize, even then, he was not out there baptizing people.

01:20:34

So if he hasn't come to the stage of baptizing people, but yet he is there preaching, do you suppose that what he's doing is giving them all the theological nuances before he gets around to initiating them into discipleship with Christ through baptism?

01:20:53

I don't see that as a very probable scenario that Paul spent all these times in theological lectures, but it's just not in there.

01:21:04

But for some, it's obvious that this is the case. Then he caricatures it as though we're supposed to forget all those things.

01:21:13

Now, of course, we don't say that you forget anything that Paul taught you. But of course, all those people who heard anything that Paul taught them orally all died.

01:21:23

Every one of those people died, including the mother of the Lord, if she ever heard him preach, which we don't know.

01:21:30

But if all these people died, including the apostles, including everyone who heard them, and now there are some people out there, people like Papias and others who try to go around to people who heard the apostles preach and try to figure out what they preached by these secondhand reports.

01:21:48

But there's a number of factors why that's difficult, especially because the apostles spread far and wide, and because just the general nature of oral tradition isn't as reliable as written tradition.

01:22:02

So very quickly, whether or not the people in the first century had any reason to forget things that they were taught, we had

01:22:12

Scripture. It was already written down before the end of the last apostle. And before John died, he wrote

01:22:18

Revelation, he wrote—all these books are written. It's all there.

01:22:24

So we do have some oral tradition that exists, but Scripture is consistently given the preeminence of place, even in that time.

01:22:34

If you remember, even during Jesus' own ministry, he constantly appeals to the authority of Scripture. The apostles themselves, when they're deciding things, they appeal to the authority of Scripture.

01:22:43

Look at the very first thing after the Ascension that they do. They go back to the upper room,

01:22:49

I believe it is, and there Peter points out that we need to replace Judas, and he appeals to the authority of Scripture for that principle.

01:22:58

When it comes time for the question of whether or not the Gentiles are to be circumcised, which had come up in this discussion, what do they do?

01:23:07

They look at the historical evidence, the outworking of the Spirit, and so forth, but they judge that evidence using the authority of the

01:23:16

Old Testament Scriptures. So to say that Sola Scriptura isn't operative because there was ongoing oral revelation is misleading at best.

01:23:31

Quite frankly, the idea that the Gospel of John, as soon as it was written, wasn't sufficient for the purpose for which it was written, namely that people read, believe, and have eternal life, is to contradict what the text says.

01:23:45

The text says that it was written for this purpose, and the only understandable inference is that if you read it and you believe it, you will have eternal life, which presupposes that the fundamental sufficiency of Scripture is there in John's Gospel.

01:24:04

Anyway, I could probably ramble on about this for a while, but it's to me a sort of a bizarre set of claims, and ones that just seem to reflect a lack of study of the issues, at least a lack of study of what

01:24:20

Reformed scholars have to say about the development of Sola Scriptura, how it came out. It would be nice to hear him say, well, when

01:24:26

I read Dr. White's books you're the guy in Calvinist circles to go to, that when he read your book, he was struck by this argument you tried to present, and here's why he thought it was wrong.

01:24:38

But he doesn't do anything like that. It's very high level in caricatures of the position, which obviously your book,

01:24:44

I'm sure, doesn't mention anything about microchips or... Forgetting everything that Paul taught.

01:24:50

No, but it does point out that, again, the claim that is made here, the implicit claim, is that we do know what

01:25:03

Paul taught the Corinthians on this subject as a Roman Catholic. And I say, really?

01:25:11

Quote it. And I just point him to my debate with Mitch Pacwa, where I asked

01:25:17

Mitch Pacwa, again, this was two years before Jason started seminary. I asked

01:25:23

Mitch Pacwa, has Rome dogmatically defined a single word that Jesus said outside of what's accorded in Scripture?

01:25:34

And of course, I could have explained that to the Apostle Paul as well. And the answer, of course, is no.

01:25:41

They haven't. And they can't. They don't know what Paul said to the Corinthians. They don't know what

01:25:47

Paul said to the Thessalonians. And claiming that, well, there's this tradition passed down through the bishops and so on.

01:25:56

That's the secret Gnostic knowledge that Tertullian spoke against. That's exactly what the

01:26:02

Jews claim for the Korban rule, that it had come from Moses and was passed down orally through these great rabbis.

01:26:08

And that means it came from God. And Jesus rejected that in Matthew 15.

01:26:15

And we should reject it as well. It is always what people use to get around what the

01:26:21

Scriptures say. So it's amazing. I felt like we needed to know what Paul said to the

01:26:27

Corinthians. You don't know, Jason, and Rome can't tell you. That's just too obvious, isn't it?

01:26:34

It is truly amazing. It is truly amazing. Well, look, we are almost, we are within a minute and a half or two minutes of the end of what you had said in your notes was really what needed to be addressed.

01:26:48

So we're pretty close. We're pretty close. There's still a few more things that I want to get to in this, and we'll figure out how to do that.

01:26:58

But once again, my sincerest thanks, Trojan fan, for taking this hour and a half out of your day to talk with us and deal with these issues.

01:27:07

And we'll see how we finish this off, maybe just in a brief period of time on a future dividing line of how we do it.

01:27:13

But thanks again for your assistance on this. Thanks for having me on again. All right. Thank you. God bless.

01:27:18

And thank you for listening. Obviously not a program on Thursday. I hope you will be having a great day.

01:27:25

We might, we might sneak one in on Friday. If so, I will definitely tweet that.

01:27:32

And sometimes when I tweet things, I forget to blog things. So you might want to follow me on Twitter.

01:27:38

But if you don't do that, we'll try to remember to blog things as well. Let you know. Might have one on Friday. We'll see.

01:27:44

But thanks for listening today. God bless. At the crossroads.

01:27:59

We must contend for the faith. We need a new reformation day.

01:28:08

It's a sign of the times. Won't you lift up your voice?

01:28:18

It's time to make some noise. Oh, the dividing line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

01:28:39

If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

01:28:44

Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

01:28:50

World Wide Web at AOMIN .org. That's A -O -M -I -N .org where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates and tracks.