June 13, 2006

From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is

The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

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

James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line, a special time on this

Tuesday, just simply trying to make things work during the summer schedule, but first time in, well, it's been a while.

So, haven't done this for a while, so it's your opportunity, 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341.

The summer heat certainly has arrived here in Phoenix, Arizona, nothing surprising about that in the middle of June for it to be 108 degrees outside, but that's what it is.

And some interesting things going on, of course, in the world today.

Today, I just posted a few moments ago, I don't know, about half an hour ago, less than that actually, an email that I sent to Ergin Kanner and to Dr.

O'Donnell and to the group of folks that are involved in attempting anyway to put together the debate in October on the subject of Calvinism, especially since there really wasn't any debate as most of us expected.

Yesterday at the Pastors Conference Southern Baptist Convention, there was a nice little discussion about a few things, but not much in the way of debate as far as actually getting into the biblical text.

We are attempting to set up that debate at the New Thomas Road Baptist Church for October 16th, and as most of you know who have been following that particular saga, you know that once again, we have entered into the zone of silence where one side, for some odd reason, chooses not to respond to what the other side is asking for lengthy periods of time.

And then when the other side decides to start talking again, it's like it never happened. It's like it's just normative to ignore what people ask you.

I've honestly just, I don't remember ever running into this kind of behavior before.

It's just absolutely amazing. And so a month ago today, we started including

Dr. O'Donnell, who is the head of the debate program at Liberty, which won all three categories for the first time.

That's been done, three collegiate categories, a nationally known program. And so we assumed that someone in charge of that of a program would function as a unbiased moderator, not an unmoderated biased.

That doesn't make any sense, does it? Anyway, we have not been able to get a single response from Dr.

O'Donnell. It's been a month now. We've written a number of emails, asked a number of questions. We have many questions about this proposed format, which seems, the more we look at it, to be specifically designed to keep the

Canners from having to answer direct questions, from actually having to engage in cross -examination, which of course, as they know, and I know as well, is the heart and soul of debate.

And if all you have is bluster and soundbites, your wheels fall off during cross -examination.

That's just how it works. Many people who have listened to the debates that we have done, and I have frequently asked

Dr. Canner to provide us with tapes of his debates. He generally ignores those requests or then at one point said, well, you know, we've just done some junior college debates.

We're not in the big time. And that's all he's bothered to say about that. And I would love to listen to the debates that he has done, the formal debates, because in our debates, there have been a number of times where after the opening statements, you go, well, you know, you've got this side over here and you got that side over there.

They both have made, you know, good, strong presentations. And you know, maybe there's, we just don't, we can't figure out what the answer to this question is.

And then you get into cross -examination. And all of a sudden, the issues are very, very clear.

And that's what cross -examination is all about. And so we want to make sure that there is biblically based cross -examination.

There's one side that wants to spend a lot of time with an open

Bible, looking at the text of scripture. And there's one side that does not. That I think is extremely telling.

Very, very telling indeed. I think anyone who really wants to consider this issue should take a look at that.

And so what I'm doing from now on is I am sending, instead of this, do a bunch of correspondence, talk about a little bit and all of a sudden, oh,

I can't believe what's happened. Let's post it all at one time. I'm just going to post everything I write immediately to the blog.

Just at the same time, you hit send and you post to the blog. So that everybody can see exactly what it is that's going on.

And everybody can see who it is that wants to have a focused, fair, properly moderated, equal time, biblically based, let's get into the word of God, let it say what it needs to say type of debate.

And who doesn't? Now, I can't blame especially

Eric and Cantor. Would you like to be Eric and Cantor in a debate like this? Can you imagine this?

Dr. Cantor, the scriptures say that before the twins had done anything good or bad, so that God's elect a purpose and election might stand.

These things were said to Esau and to Jacob. So before they did anything good or bad, so could you explain your statement in your sermon at the

Tom's Row Baptist Church, that the reason God hated Esau is because of what Esau did? Could you could you explain

Eric and Cantor, Eric and Cantor, Esau is hated because of what he did.

Bible, Esau is not hated because of what he did. Could you explain that, sir?

You know, I wouldn't want to be in that position. That would be difficult. Now, the irony is, however, who has written on this subject?

I mean, from a simple debate perspective, who has the advantage here? Dr. Askew and I together have written probably thousands of pages you put all together, the founders journals and and all the stuff in the blogs and the books that we've put out on this subject.

There is there is a wealth of information that they could quote from and hold us to.

And you know what? We go, do so, do so. They, as far as I can tell, and I keep asking outside of the current article, which is nothing more than a rehash of the why

I'm predestined not to be a hyper -Calvinist sermon that just appeared in one of Liberty's publications and on the blog that I reviewed last week.

Apart from that, what do we have to go on? There are no books, to my knowledge, there are no scholarly articles.

There's nothing that we can that we can look at as far as holding somebody accountable for what they've said in the past on those those levels.

It has to be quotations from just a couple sermons and a few blog articles and things like that. So it would seem that they would have the advantage there, but for some odd reason, it's just, you know, hard.

And what's equally hard and what's equally frustrating is the the constant misrepresentations.

The I'm not a Calvinist and I'm not an Armenian, I'm a Baptist thing is not just the problem of Ergen Kanner.

I've heard that, and in fact I'll play you someone saying it again from the

Southern Baptist Convention that just is taking place right now. And some of you may know that Dr.

Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylor, South Carolina, was elected president of the

Southern Baptist Convention today. First ballot, 50 .48 percent, four thousand five hundred and forty six votes that were given to him.

And you might go, I haven't a clue who Frank Page is. Well, somewhere in my library, and I can't find it because it's in a box, but I have this book.

I have a book that came out, I believe, in 2000. I recognize that that cover.

It's a it's a short little book. It's it's about the length of like the first two, maybe three chapters of the

Potter's Freedom. And it's by Frank S. Page, who was just elected president of the

Southern Baptist Convention. And the title is Trouble with the Tulip, a closer examination of the five points of Calvinism.

And like I said, I wish I had the book in front of me at the moment.

I do own it. I have looked at it in the past. It is currently in a box somewhere or on a shelf, a shelf or a box.

But the shelf would not be where the boxes are, which is I'm where the boxes are anyway. To say that this is not a good book is to be kind simply because once again, it's for some odd reason, a reason

I cannot begin to understand. What I'm hearing at the Southern Baptist Convention, what

I'm reading, demonstrates to me that there is a broad spectrum of leaders in the

Southern Baptist Convention who simply have no interest whatsoever in doing their homework on this issue.

They've made up their minds. The soundbite theology refutations that they've heard in the past are good enough.

It was good enough for the preceding generation. It's good enough for me. The same mantra is repeated over and over again.

And I don't see any evidence that almost any of these individuals have taken the time to do any serious research on their own or to listen to what is being said about the key subject of monergism versus synergism.

Whether it's God alone who saves, whether it's God's grace that in its power is able to save perfectly and completely without human cooperation, or whether it is a synergistic system so that we are going to join all the world's religions.

We're going to stand against the reformers. We're going to join with Erasmus. We're going to do this synergism where God's grace becomes dependent upon the cooperation of the almighty human will.

And in fact, that the freedom of God is going to be circumscribed. It's going to be denied by the freedom of man's will himself.

The rebel sinner becomes the one who controls all things. And so in looking through, for example,

Dr. Askell does have an article that was just posted about a week ago on the book,

The Trouble with the Tulip by Dr. Page. And he has some quotes here.

For example, if one does follow the logic of Calvinism that a missionary or evangelistic spirit is unnecessary.

If irresistible grace is the truth, then there is no need to share Christ with anyone since those persons whom God has elected are irresistibly going to be drawn into his kingdom anyway.

If one studies the pages of history, one will see that Calvinistic theology, five point, has encouraged a slackening of the aggressive evangelistic and missionary heartbeat of the church.

Now, everybody knows that that entire paragraph is simply based upon ignorance.

You don't find that historically. It's untrue, easily refuted from any number of sources.

And it demonstrates an abysmal ignorance of what irresistible grace means. It shows no understanding whatsoever.

And, you know, at least I'm consistent here, because for many, many years, when we have encountered, we've encountered bad information being written against others.

We've put our necks on the chopping block. We have have offended people by daring to say, you know what, such and such a person's written a book about Mormonism.

And you know what, that's not a good book. It does not represent Mormonism accurately.

Or this book over here on Jehovah's Witnesses, there are problems here. There is an error here. There's an error there.

We've been consistent in doing that. And so I don't feel any guilt in looking at someone's book like this and saying, hey, where's the standard here?

Why? I mean, if we're going to take a look at books that are written against Roman Catholicism and say, you know what, obviously this person has never interacted with any

Roman Catholic sources at all. This person has never talked to a decent

Roman Catholic apologist or a priest who knows what he believes. It's just clear. It comes screaming through the language.

This person just simply doesn't care about what he's addressing. He's certainly not concerned about convincing the people who believe these things.

If we're going to say that, then here's the situation. Here's the new president of the

Southern Baptist Convention writing against Calvinism, and it's clear he has no idea what he's talking about.

He has not sat down and actually worked through these issues. He's presenting a synergistic perspective, which deeply impacts how we defend the faith, how we present the faith, and all the rest of the stuff, but he's doing it based solely upon traditions that he has imbibed in the past, and there's no fresh insight into what's going on here.

It was very disappointing to read the blog articles about the Patterson -Moller dialogue.

Again, Patterson's comments showing no meaningful interaction with any kind of apologetic materials produced by Calvinists.

It's just very, very, very disappointing. The same thing is true. We have an article here,

My Hope for Our Convention, by Morris Chapman, dated June 13, 2006, Executive Committee of the

Southern Baptist Convention, report. I'm assuming this is the written text that he delivered.

He says, Most Southern Baptist Calvinists are in the tradition of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who said, Divine sovereignty is a great and indisputable fact, but human responsibility is quite as indisputable.

Faith is God's gift. Spurgeon vs. Hyper -Calvinism, The Battle for Gospel Preaching, Ian Murray, page 86.

While there are Southern Baptists who believe in the doctrine of election, I'm not sure how you could not believe in the doctrine of election.

Isn't it in the Baptist faith and message? Most Southern Baptists are not strident

Calvinists or ardent Armenians. Now, I'm hoping maybe someone just doesn't know how to spell, but yes, it is misspelled.

A -R -M -E -N -I -A -N -S. There it is again. Armenian, that's an ethnic group.

Armenian, that's a theological position. At least we know what they're talking about, if that only demonstrates, again, no reading in the area.

I could just be a spellcheck someplace. Quite possible. Spellchecks don't like Armenians. So, they've never heard of them before.

You've got to add that in there. You've got to add in the proper spelling of Armenian to your dictionary program.

Everybody needs to know that. Anyway, they are biblical and they are

Baptist. There it is again. This utterly illogical category error that is part and parcel of this new movement.

It's almost like they all got together and they got each other's fax numbers and they sent this all out. What we need to start doing is we need to start emphasizing this phrase,

I'm not a Calvinist. I'm not an Armenian. I'm a Baptist. As if somehow that is a different category, because it isn't.

No one has been able to refute the statement that I made when Ergin Kanner used the same line with me.

And that is, that is as illogical, so lacking in critical thought, as to say,

I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I'm blue. That's the direct parallel.

Blue is a different category than Republican and Democrat. Baptist is a different category.

It's talking about something different than Calvinist or Armenian. Now, you could be a blue Democrat or you could be a blue Republican.

You could do the Wallace thing, you know, remember Braveheart? You know, you could pull that one off if you wanted to.

They're different things. They're not in the same category. It is a category error to make that statement, but it's happening constantly.

I'm not a Calvinist. Not an Armenian. I'm a Baptist and I'm biblical. We're going to hear some more of that.

They believe Jesus. Now, here you go. Now, this was stated by Jerry Falwell last year.

There are people in the Southern Baptist Convention that make it a part of the definition of to be a

Baptist. They say, they believe Jesus shed his precious blood for the sins of all mankind.

The Bible teaches whosoever will may come. Now, again, what do you mean by shed his precious blood for the sins of all mankind?

Do you mean all mankind as in every tribe, tongue, people, and nation? Jews and Gentiles alike?

Sure. Do you mean as every single human being? That's what they mean. But to say that is to simply ignore the reality that the

Baptists that come out of the Reformation, and that's where we came from, the Baptists came out of the

Reformation, there was two kinds. There were the particular Baptists that have never believed that. That's the whole point.

And the general Baptist that did. And both have always been the Southern Baptist Convention.

These people trying to rewrite history. Or, let's be more specific, they just probably don't know their history.

They just don't know these things and are not interested in finding out, evidently. Yes, whosoever will may come.

That's exactly right. The question is, who will? Jesus said, isn't it odd?

Whosoever will may come, but no one wants to preach upon, no one is able to come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I'll raise him up on the last day.

Let's preach all the Bible, not just the parts that fit with our traditions.

Salvation is the work of a sovereign God who extends his grace to us. My salvation was an instantaneous event the moment

I repented of my sins and trusted Jesus by faith as my personal Savior. That sounds wonderful, but what does it mean?

Does it mean he extends his grace to every single individual and with some people because you're better than others?

You accept his grace, you get saved. People who aren't as good as you don't accept his grace, don't get saved? Are you smarter?

What is it? You've got to answer that question. That if that grace extended to us equally, the peanut butter grace position, then what made the difference?

What made the difference? You had to have been better in some way. Where did that come from? I don't get answers to that.

Continuing with Morris Chapman here, if you wish, debate Calvinism. We should not fear theological debate as long as the participants understand they are brothers debating one another in a friendly environment.

Copy that one and send it over to Dr. Cantor. While Calvinism is a fair debate in the halls of academia, we do not need to bring the debate into our churches at the cost of dividing our congregations.

Now, right then and there you go. Whoa, Nelly, that doesn't sound very

Baptist to me. That does not sound very Baptist to me. I hope that doesn't sound

Baptist to you. Y 'all discuss that stuff out there in the halls of academia, but keep it out of the church because our folks, they can't handle that kind of thing.

That'll divide our churches. What do you mean? So what you're saying is what we believe about whether God is free in the matter of salvation, whether God is glorified in the perfection of salvation in Jesus Christ is something that should be kept out of the churches.

Let's not confuse our people with something like that. Wow, that is an amazing statement.

I mean, that is the only way you can make the kind of statement is if you believe that this the entire issue has really, it's really unimportant.

It really doesn't matter. It's not definitional of how we're going to preach the gospel.

And that's exactly what these folks are saying. In actuality, continue on. In actuality, the Bible contains a healthy and dynamic tension between the sovereignty of God, the responsibility of man.

Let's leave it where God left it in his holy word. Oh, that sounds so good to so many people.

That is so attractive to folks say, Hey, you know what? I like the idea about that. That's that holy tension.

I don't, you know, I don't think we can really come up with answers to all this stuff. So we should, we should just leave it there.

Folks, what you're saying there is that God's word is not clear enough to answer these questions.

Is that what you really want to say? I mean, it's obvious, sadly, that these folks think human responsibility equals free will.

I would, I would point out that given what the Bible teaches about Satan's interference with our wills, taking people captive, slavery to sin, that unless God is sovereign, there's no, there's no ground for talking about human responsibility.

Do you hold slaves responsible for doing what, uh, what they're forced to do by an evil captor? I mean, once you actually start asking questions about this stuff, the wheels fall off these positions, but the whole idea seems to be let's not ask these questions.

Let's just leave that to the academics and academia and they can have their debates over there.

You know, the irony is right after this, uh, right after basically saying, let's not worry about Calvinism.

This was interesting to me. Speaking of debate, the insistence by pastors to incorporate elder rule in churches that have practiced congregational rule from their inception will serve only to cripple the ministries of our churches, divide the people and ultimately destroy the witness of churches that have been lighthouses for the kingdom and their communities and cities.

It's already happening. Now, isn't it ironic that we have seen in the

Cantor correspondence as well, a connection between Calvinism and the biblical view of the church, which is a plurality of elders.

And I'd be happy to debate Dr. Cantor on that too. It's just amazing.

See, what happens is people start, once people start realizing, wow, that Arminianism I was raised in is, it's just a human tradition.

Their eyes get open. They start looking at the word of God and they start going, wow, you know, the apostles appointed elders in the churches, not an elder.

Where'd this kingship thing come from? Where'd this one pastor who rules over everything come from? I keep seeing elders.

And Paul says to Timothy, pass these things on to those men, plural, who have heard my commands in a public place, that they're trustworthy.

There's more than one. There's more than one in there. And so they start going,

I wonder if maybe some other things I've been taught are just traditions. And they start going to the word of God.

And the folks that are just happy with their traditions, they don't like when that happens. Now you're going to start splitting churches when you do stuff like that.

You know, you don't want to challenge anybody to do something they've never done before, even if it is, you know, very clearly found the word of God.

And so, so it says, the

Southern Baptist Convention originated in 1845. Our founders' vision was for Southern Baptist churches to network and evangelize in the world.

The convention was organized for the purpose of world missions. Unlike hierarchical denominations, our convention was not organized to be a governing body.

It was organized to facilitate the sending of missionaries and the peers of our churches. Then it says, the debate of Calvinism in our churches can distract us from fulfilling the

Great Commission. The debate of elder rule in our churches can distract us from leading the lost to Christ.

Now, how does that distract you from leading the lost to Christ? Are you just simply saying that the only thing that should ever be discussed is not what

God has revealed in his word concerning how the church is to be organized, but the only thing that should ever be discussed is sending missionaries?

You should never discuss anything else in the New Testament. All that other stuff in the New Testament about godliness and sanctification and the organization of the church and the ordinances and God's self -glorification.

Forget all that stuff. Just send missionaries with four spiritual laws in their hands. Is that what's really being suggested?

I'm simply left amazed by some of the stuff that I encounter here. So, I did pull down, by the way, some audio.

So, are we ready to play some audio here? The first one here started off, fell by the name of Dick Lincoln, sort of started off the annual meeting, the pastor's conference, and he had some interesting things to say.

Verse 19, you will believe that more is always possible. There is a theology that is coming up in the

Southern Baptist Convention. We're going to have a debate about it tomorrow night. I don't have a lot to say about it tonight. I'm not a theologian, but it's the idea that there is an elect group, and nobody can do anything to expand the size of the elect, and nobody can do anything to diminish it.

It's amazing that Paul didn't get the message. Paul says,

I'm doing this that I might win more. I don't know what more means where you come from, but I can tell you in the

Greek, it means I'm planning to do this so that the number will get bigger.

And if he had believed that there was a number that was fixed in eternity and that nothing could be done about it,

I think he would have said, I'm going to do whatever God wants me to do, but I want to make sure that I never step on the boundaries of that set number.

But he said, I'm going to keep working at a strategy, being a slave to others, that I might win more than I could win if I didn't do that.

What do you say? You just gently go to 2 Timothy 2 .10

and say, well, you know, Paul himself said, for this reason I endure all things for the sake of the elect, so that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus and with it eternal glory.

That's the same Paul, I think, and there he's specifically talking about the elect. He's not talking about that in 1

Corinthians 9. And so the idea is you have to have a certain number of, you have to be able to increase the number of, hopefully everyone listening to this recognizes that this gentleman, once again, does not understand the system that he is critiquing or rejecting.

There is nothing whatsoever inconsistent about a

Calvinist like Paul saying, I am going to do everything

I can to win as many people to Christ as I can. Because Paul recognized that there is none righteous, there's no not one, there's none that seeks after God.

That's Romans chapter 3 verses 10 -11. He knew that God had elected, chosen every single believer in Christ.

Ephesians chapter 1 had had the love of God placed upon them in eternity past.

The idea, he would have had to say he didn't want to go past the number of the elect. Excuse me,

Pastor Lincoln, we don't know who the elect are.

We are not given that information. What books have you ever read?

What reformed theologians have you ever spoken to that ever said to you, oh, well,

I know who the elect are, so I only preach to the elect. Name their names. Tell me who they are.

I want to go see them. I want to talk to them. But you can't because you haven't.

We don't know who the elect are. We proclaim the gospel to every creature.

There's no fear in running over the number of the elect. But look at what

Pastor Lincoln is willing to sacrifice. Look at what he's willing to sacrifice.

This is what bothers me, folks. Some people, hey, I shouldn't get all upset about what these guys are saying. Think about what he's sacrificing.

You cannot present a coherent view of God, his sovereignty, and his knowledge based upon what he just said.

You've got no means of protecting yourself against open theism, given what he just said. The only way that you could defend what

Pastor Lincoln just said would be to adopt open theism, which the Southern Baptist Convention in its

Baptist faith and message condemned a couple years ago. If the number of the elect has not been fixed in God's mind from eternity, then

God does not know the future. So why in the world was everybody sitting there clapping?

Who were those people out there going, I like that? They're not thinking.

They're not thinking. They're willing to chuck the theology of God and clap at this kind of teaching.

Folks, later on, I'm going to play another clip here in a moment. Later on, one of the folks we listened to, he talks about the fact that the

Southern Baptist Convention isn't really doing so well. I mean, you may be aware of the fact that their baptisms were down far below what their projections were.

And what the guy did is, it was Ed Young, by the way, he put eight mannequin -type things, two -dimensional mannequin -type things behind him on the stage.

And he started talking about Southern Baptist kids. And he said, you know what our numbers are?

You know how many of our kids, when they reach 18, we keep? He started knocking mannequins over to indicate how many of kids raised in Southern Baptist churches leave once they become adults.

You know how many he knocked over? It was quite a, it was actually a very good illustration. You know how many he knocked over?

Six out of eight. Six out of eight. Two left. Now that was, that was an interesting thing.

And he went on to say, you know, if we keep going like this within four generations, the Southern Baptist Convention is going to be a footnote in history.

That was, it was pretty strong. Now we're going to play some errors that he made, but it's pretty strong. So there's this almost,

I don't know, I would sense a panic. Our number's down.

We've got to get out there and save people. And of course, if you're an Arminian, if you, if you are a synergist, how's that?

If you don't like Arminius, if you're a synergist and God's done everything

God can do, it's up to us. We got to do the rest.

God's, we can't blame God. God's given a hundred percent and we're the ones that aren't given the rest of it.

So we just got to redouble our efforts. See, if that's the way you're coming from and your number's down, then you're going to find

Calvinism to be a bad thing. And you're going to attack it just like it's being attacked repeatedly in this particular situation.

That's what's going to happen. You want synergism? Here's synergism. Here's, here's Pastor Lincoln again.

I have never believed that salvation was all up to me. And if you do,

I frankly think you're crazy. Salvation is up to God.

Of course it is. But salvation also requires your faithfulness.

Paul says that I might save some. He doesn't mean that Jesus is not at work or the

Holy Spirit is not at work to convict of sin and righteousness and judgment. But he does say, I understand that unless I am faithful, more will not be won.

Unless I am faithful, some will not be saved. Unless I am creative, unless I am open, unless I am a servant, there are some that will not be won.

What you do in your church, what you do with your ministry, what you believe about people, how committed you are to people, is going to make a difference in the size of the population of heaven.

And you need to believe that that's what the Bible says, and that's what Paul says, and that's what God says.

Well, folks, that is pure, unadulterated synergism.

That's semi -Pelagianism right there. You heard, if you think it's all up to you, you're crazy. Well, that's called

Pelagianism. But obviously he doesn't believe it's all up to God either. And there isn't a

Roman Catholic on the planet that couldn't have said what he just said. Do you realize that?

Isn't that exactly what you hear Scott Hahn and others say? All the sacraments come from the grace of God.

God has given us all these things graciously. We couldn't do without him. But there's your part.

You've got to do your part. You've got to make your additions. What's the difference?

There is no difference. They're all synergists. That's always been the dividing line. That's always been what has separated the two sides.

You've got the Roman Catholics and the Arminians. That's why the early Calvinists, when they started encountering

Arminianism, it started growing and so on and so forth. Hey, this is this is popeless Catholicism. Because on the issue of the will of man, the grace of God, they're hand in hand.

They're synergists. God's grace tries. God's grace fails. And the deciding factor is the sinner man, not the grace of God.

So there you have it. Pure synergism. And by your activity, by your action, you will determine the population of heaven.

There it is. God doesn't know. I don't know how he puts those together.

I don't know if you went up to him, if someone runs into him at the Sun Baths convention tomorrow or something, says,

Pastor Lincoln, this crazed bald guy out in Phoenix, was talking about you and he was playing some clips on his webcast.

And he says, how does how does Pastor Lincoln put these together? How can you increase the number of the elect?

How could God not know from eternity who he himself had chosen? I'd like to find out if he believes

God does know infallibly. And if he does, then how can the number increase? I'd like to know.

And that's when you start getting, well, you know, we should let the academics debate about that stuff. We don't want to we don't want to split the church over this kind of thing.

And I go, you know what? We are moving into an ever more challenging anti -Christian culture.

And that kind of stick your head in the sand ism is going to lead to the end of every one of those kinds of churches.

That kind of thinking can not stand in the marketplace of ideas.

And we don't have to accept that the Bible's clear on these issues. We can be consistent.

One more human responsibility doesn't really matter in the long run. It's an insidious idea.

I understand all about the sovereignty of God. What else would you believe in? But oh, my friend, a theology that human responsibility in the long run doesn't really matter in the process of salvation will keep many from being one who could and should be.

Now, of course, another pure canard. There's there's nothing there's nothing meaningful there.

We believe in human responsibility. We just don't make the human will the decider of whether God's grace is able to save.

Light up that straw, man, burn it all you want, but it's not going to change the facts. And that's why you can tell these folks want

Calvinism just go away. They want folks to just stop talking about this stuff.

Our nice brief responses should be good enough for you. Stop asking these questions. But, folks, the next generation is encountering all this opposition out there in the world.

They are being challenged apologetically on the very foundations of their faith. And when you get challenged that way, you start realizing, you know what,

I need to be consistent myself. And once you start doing that and you start going to the Word of God and you start going to the

Word of God, you're studying about the nature of God and God's providence of the world, you start seeing stuff that just doesn't fit these traditions anymore.

It just doesn't fit these traditions anymore. And so this disbelief is going to keep popping back up no matter how hard you try to bury it.

It's going to keep coming up. Amazing stuff.

Well, as I said, Ed Young also spoke. And like I said, I liked what he had to say.

He was talking about, you know, we talk about there's 16 million Southern Baptists, and he doesn't believe that. As he said, we've got a whole lot of Southern Baptists the

FBI can't find. He's right. And I've said many times that my experience with Southern Baptists, when

I was at a very large Southern Baptist church, I had 20 ,000 plus members on the membership roll.

You could never find more than 7 ,000 of those folks at any one time. And we'd go out on outreach and we'd get a visitor card.

And let me tell you something. You could show up at somebody's door and they could come to the door and stick an

AK -47 in your face. That was not enough to drop that visit. You just needed to send somebody else out next time.

That's all there was to that. I mean, and to get off the rolls that church, you had to provide your own death certificate personally in triplicate to get off the membership rolls at church.

And so the 16 million number, it's a joke. If you can't find these people, if you have no idea where they are, you know, the baptism numbers are jokes.

I mean, when you're baptizing people who've already been baptized twice before, what does that mean? Do you go back and subtract them from the previous year?

No, you don't do that. I mean, it just, it does not make any sense whatsoever. So anyway, but at some point he did want to, you know, take his shots on the subject of Calvinism.

And so here's Ed Young's discussion from, this was I think last evening. Also, let me tell you that we believe in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

We believe in the perfect life of Jesus Christ. We believe in the substitutionary atoning death on the cross of Jesus Christ.

We believe three days he was in the grave and we believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We believe in the ascension of Jesus Christ and we believe in the soon coming of Jesus Christ.

That's who we are as Southern Baptists. Now, let me just interrupt it for a moment and just remind everybody, because we have new listeners all the time, if you use the term substitutionary atonement of Christ, you are using reformed theology.

Whether you want to admit it, whether you want to be consistent, if you talk about substitutionary atonement, you are talking about particular redemption.

The Arminians did not and do not believe in substitutionary atonement, because they recognize that if Christ substitutes for all people, there is no grounds for the condemnation of all people.

They recognize that, but inconsistent folks don't recognize that. I just wanted to point out in passing, you heard it, substitutionary atonement.

And there has never been a group of scholars who would come and put down upon our

Bible a scholarly, systematic understanding of theology, and we have bought into it.

We, our theology is biblical. It is not systematic.

Therefore, we as Baptists... Hold on a second. I got to play that one again, because I think some people are going, what?

What? What did he just say? ...to it. We, our theology is biblical. It is not systematic.

Okay. I'm just going to let that one sort of sink in for a second. All right. This just, think that one through a second.

Okay. Let that one, and we will go on. Therefore, we as Baptists, we are not

Calvinists, and we are not Arminian. We are Baptists. That's who we are.

I told you I was going to play that one again, because do

I have to repeat what I said before? Hopefully I don't. Do we have to repeat what I said before? No. That's a classic category error, but you can see what the systematic theology versus biblical theology was, and that's why, again,

I go, let's get into the text. Let's sit down with John 6. Let's sit down with Ephesians 1.

Let's go to Talmud or Romans 9, and that's what you can't get folks to do. And we've always come down somewhere in the middle, because that is where we believe the

Baptist comes down in our faith and in our doctrine. Now, that's who we are theologically.

So there you go. Evidently, by definition,

Baptist is supposed to be somewhere in the middle. I'm not sure what that means, but that's what the assertion is.

I don't understand it, but there you go. So there's Ed Young, and there's what's going on, and when the new president has written

The Trouble with Tulips, and what can

I say? There we go. So there's what's going on. Fascinating stuff. Need to get to our phone calls.

Let's start in the order in which they were received and talk with Tim up in Oregon. Hi, Tim.

How you doing? Hey, Dr. Wayne. How you doing? Doing good. I called a couple weeks ago and talking about Jehovah's Witnesses.

Yes, sir. Let's see here. I completely blanked on my questions.

I was so astonished by some of the clips you were playing there. Didn't you know?

I understand, in case someone wants to call up and take umbrage,

I understand the technical differentiation made between what's called biblical theology and systematic theology.

In fact, sadly, because of the degradation of the view of scripture in so much of Christian education today, systematic theology is no longer the queen of science, is no longer the central class that gives order to everything else.

It's basically been shuffled over the church history department, and because you look at folks and say, well, people used to believe that the

Bible was actually clear enough to provide a systematic theology, a coherent whole presentation, and very few people in academia believe that anymore.

And so it's been moved out of the way, and biblical theology is the idea that, well, you can look at, and you know, if you're really conservative, you can look at Paul's view, but if you're not very conservative, then you have to look at Galatians, and even then you might have contradictions in Galatians and all the rest of this stuff.

And so I'm fully aware of that differentiation of terminology. The problem is,

I don't think that's what he was saying. I think he was saying biblical as in, you guys aren't, you're embracing this overarching theological system that you're cramming down everybody's throats here, and we don't like it, and we just want to stick with the

Bible, and whosoever will, and blah, blah, blah. So I don't think he was using the terminology in the way that you could actually excuse it in that way, and so I don't know what to say either.

It's been pretty fascinating to listen to. Yeah, it almost makes you wonder if he's saying that you don't really need to be consistent.

That is not an uncommon thing for people to say. That's not an uncommon thing for people to say, in any way, shape, or form.

They don't mind, it's sort of, well, it's the mystery thing, see. You know,

I understand when people say, I want to preserve some mystery in God.

Okay, but you know what? Fundamentally, God's the one who set up the fences, shall we say, by what he's revealed in his word.

That which is revealed belongs to us and to our children, that the secret things belong to the Lord. If he's revealed it, then to ignore that is to really question the wisdom of the

Holy Spirit in his revelation. So anyways. Yeah, I've actually had someone quote from the story of Abraham, where he's going to sacrifice his son and stuff, and saying, see,

Abraham didn't know that that was going to happen, so you can't really, you know, you can't bet on God being consistent about what he's revealing.

I was like, are you kidding me? Yeah, I know. Anyway, so Joel's witnesses. Yeah, I'm just going through these various appendices in the back, and you know, these ones that talk about the divine name and stuff, and I have kind of a two -part question, two details.

One, they talk about the Soferim, Jewish Soferim, restoring, or rather replacing the divine name with Elohim.

Is there any truth to that, or what's the deal with that? Well, now, tell me, you're talking about in the back of the

NWT? Yeah, in the appendix 1b, it says, according to some reference, in some instances, the

Jewish Soferim substituted Elohim for the Tetragrammaton. Right. Well, they're referring both to the tradition that then becomes prevalent, and is reflected, of course, in the

Old Testament translations, most of which today, that do not use Jehovah or Yahweh, they use

LORD with all caps, and it became the tradition within Judaism to avoid the pronunciation of the divine name, and then that becomes part of the argumentation.

The Society has been a little careful on this. Some folks, especially recently, have gone beyond what the

Society has been willing to do. The Society is generally a little bit more hesitant to throw some of this stuff out, but many

Jehovah's Witnesses will argue that, in essence, the New Testament, when it was written, did, in fact, contain the

Tetragrammaton, and that it was corrupted, and they try to argue, on the basis of some rather unusual

Greek Septuagint manuscripts, that this is the proper way of reading it.

Some of them will even then run with that to try to say Jehovah is the best way of pronouncing the

Tetragrammaton, and all the rest of the stuff. So, we're starting to see the development of Watchtower -like material outside of the

Watchtower. It all goes back to the Greg Stafford thing, and the fact that they haven't kicked him out, and so, since he's survived, then other people are starting to do things on their own, and blah, blah.

So, you'll run into a lot of stuff on the internet, especially today, that cites from some pretty esoteric sources, in attempting to argue this kind of thing.

But basically, just keep in mind, there are no New Testament manuscripts that actually do contain the

Tetragrammaton in that form, and again, if they were consistent in their replacement of Kurios with the

Tetragrammaton, they would have to do it in places like Romans 10, that would identify Jesus as Jehovah, and they don't do so.

Right. Now, did you get a chance to talk about that with those folks yet? I have not yet, although soon

I will. Do you really expect that they're going to have any familiarity with some of that stuff?

No. Because you don't think so? Okay. Probably not. I mean, like I said, it's an old woman and stuff.

I would be absolutely shocked if she whips out a copy of the Septuagint or something like that.

Well, you never know. Yeah, you never know, but a lot of it's also for my own enrichment, because I'm actually going through these appendices, and I'm like, you know,

I don't know. There's so much stuff that looks like it could be maybe factual, and you just don't know what.

They're kind of spinning. Well, especially if you can't check out all the resources that they're citing, and some of them are not easy to track down at times.

We've caught them citing stuff with a little less than contextual sensitivity, shall we say, many times, so yeah, it's not too surprising.

You kind of touched on my second part, is the Septuagint and the

Divine Name. They claim that there's a few manuscripts that do contain that, and they try to make the case that, see, this is the original

Septuagint had the Divine Name in it, and therefore the New Testament must have also. Now, what's the credibility for those?

I know that there are a few, but aren't the majority of them just say

Koryos? Right, and they're post -Christian readings of the

Septuagint that do anyways, and hence that may be an anti -Christian polemic showing up in them, and they are not representative of the text of the

Septuagint that is not only testified to in the New Testament, but in the writings of Philo and people like that as well, so they're trying to create a broad rule on the basis of exceptions, and it's really a tremendous amount of special pleading on their part to try to make that kind of a case.

Okay, last part, and then that's it. Is there a single -volume resource that would be great on some of these issues?

Single -volume, when you say these issues, what do you mean? Well, Jehovah's Witnesses, basically, you mentioned it earlier, you want to make sure you're representing what they believe accurately, stuff like that.

I know there's a zillion books out there. I saw this one by Ron Rhodes, and I read some of his work on Calvinism, and I was like, well,

I'm not going to buy that book. Well, no, Ron's going to be pretty good on Jehovah's Witnesses, but specialists are going to be a little bit more likely to give you a lot of in -depth information, though specialists can also then be a little bit imbalanced as well, because it's like people who write just on Mormonism, they tend to see

Mormonism behind every Bush and Rock, or just about Jehovah's Witnesses, or whatever it might be. So you have to sort of balance the two, but people like Dwayne Mignogne, Randall Waters, these guys have been doing this stuff for a long, long, long, long time, and I haven't kept up as much as I would like to with Jehovah's Witnesses for a while, but Randall Waters had a set of books called

The Watchtower Files, and I don't know, I'm sorry, did I say Randall Waters? Dwayne Mignogne, that was The Watchtower Files, and zillions of photocopies, just really good stuff, and I would start there, and I mean, the problem is the best books are like on the 586 -604, the 1914 stuff, that started to sort of fade away, but I mean, there's entire books that were written on that that go very much in depth on those issues, and it can become somewhat confusing if you don't have a lot of the background issues covered, and trying to talk about Jehovah's Witnesses can be next to impossible, too, because they end up staring at you like, where are you getting this stuff?

You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. So, all righty, so I wish there was just one volume, but generally they tend to be plural volumes, and from different authors.

All right, well it sounds good. All right, well let us know what happens. All right, thanks a lot. All right, God bless. Take care.

All right, we're going to go a little bit long today, because calling from San Diego, we have

Jimmy Akin from Catholic Answers. Hi, Jimmy. Hey, how's it going? Going all right. How are you? I'm doing just fine.

I was calling because you and I have been having an interaction on our respective blogs, and I put up a piece yesterday, and I sent you an email about it, and I hadn't heard back from you.

I haven't gotten anything from you. Where did you send it? Oh, I sent it using your email form on your webpage.

I'm looking through it. The fellow gets the email, and he's looking at me going, I haven't seen anything, so.

Yeah, well there may have been a problem in cyberspace. Anyway, the reason I was calling, I'd heard that you might be on a kind of retreat or have limited access to the internet right now or something, and so I didn't know if you would have had a chance to see it.

I put up a post yesterday that said basically you'd written a response to one of my previous posts, and it seemed like you hadn't seen another post that I'd done, and before I interacted with your most recent reply,

I wanted to give you a chance to read the other post and see if you wanted to make any changes or not, and so I just wanted to either let you know about that if you hadn't seen it or just ask you what you preferred to do if you had.

I really have no idea what you're referring to. I have not gotten any emails from you. The response that I had written was to your response to a caller.

I'm sorry, not a caller, a reader who had asked about why do

I make such a big deal out of the Corban Rule, and in your response you had basically said, well,

I don't know what he's saying about it, but this is standard anti -Catholic apologetic stuff, and there was no reference to the fact that for about 10 years or so now, ever since David Palm had written the article he did for this

Rock Magazine, we had been discussing the issue of Tractate Aboth, the

Mishnah, issues concerning the view of those particular traditions by the

Jewish people and how that was relevant to the issue of, well, you've got divine traditions, you've got human traditions, and your response didn't address any of those types of issues, and so you responded to that, and I don't know if you wrote two responses to that.

Is that what you're saying? You wrote two responses. It seems that you only saw one of them, and that kind of shaped your answer naturally, and so I just wanted to make sure that you'd seen both before I responded further.

Okay, what I saw was the one entitled White on Korban and Sola Scriptura.

Right, that's the second of the two. Okay, and what's the...

okay, all right, You're So Vain. Okay. Bit of a cheeky title, but I'm sure you get the pop culture reference.

Well, yes, I've heard about it before, yes. Uh, no, that was marked as already read in Sage for some odd reason.

I don't know why that would be, but I would be glad to respond to that one as well.

It seems to be about as lengthy as... Oh, okay. Well, actually, why don't you look at the one that is...

let me get you the exact title of it here... the one called James White Responds.

Yes. Is where I'm hoping that you may want to make some changes in your response, or if not, that's fine,

I'll respond. Well, that's what I responded to was the James White Responds one. I didn't respond to the more personal one that concludes with stuff.

I'm sorry, James, but you're just not that big a fish in the overall scheme of things one, which is fine, but of course, the problem is we happen to be dealing with the same areas, and when you write...

every single time, to my knowledge, that this rock magazine has attempted to respond to the

Roman Catholic controversy, which was published by Bethany House Publishers, I have responded to that, and people have let me know about that.

And so, as I have lectured all over the U .S. on Dan Brown, just to badge

Shabir Ali at Biola University, and things like that, my request was not that individuals be hanging on my every word, but if you are writing in a particular area, especially as we do, and information has been available,

I've debated Patrick Madrid, Jerry Matitix, whose name may now be mud amongst most

Roman Catholics anyways, but... It has been for some time. Robert St. Genes... I don't know where he is these days on the

Roman Catholic apologetics radar screen, personally, but... and maybe you don't want to comment on that, but debated these individuals,

Mitch Pacwa, which of course I know would still be one of your favorite folks, on these issues, and these topics have come up.

I mean, unless I'm not recalling something correctly, I think Mitch and I had quite interesting conversation in cross -examination on this very topic, so it would be odd to me, anyway, in responding to Roman Catholicism, if you were debating six, seven of the published authors, and I didn't bother to know what you were saying about fundamental issues.

I mean, I have your books. Well, okay, I'm not wanting to make this into a personal who should know what thing here on the um...

I've explained myself on my blog. Folks can read it if they want. It's jimmyacon .org. What I'm more interested in is getting at the theological, biblical issue that we've been discussing, which is the implications of the

Corbin passage in Mark 7, and so I just wanted to let you know that there seemed to have been something that slipped through the cracks, and if you care to take a look at it, and you may want to reformulate your answer a little bit before I respond, that'd be fine.

If you want to let it stand, that'd be fine, too. Just let me know. Okay, I will be glad to do so.

I just am not certain, given that the post I responded to was the post that was specifically on the issue of your hypotheticals, for example, in regards to what could this have meant.

Does this mean, for example, I don't know how recognizing that you accused me of hubris, being simply hubristic, is going to be relevant to my pointing out that you still missed, in your second response, my whole point.

I've never, ever said, and in fact, as far back as my conversations with Karl Keating and Patrick Madrid in 1993, pointed out that it is not our position that all extra -biblical traditions have no authority.

The issue is equality of authority and source of authority, and so given that was your conclusion, even to the second one,

I'll read all of it and see if there's anything in there, but if this is a separation of the personal issues from the biblical issues,

I'm not sure that it's going to have a whole lot of impact on it, but I appreciate your pointing it out and be happy to respond to it.

Okay, by the way, could you clarify for me what you mean in saying that some extra -biblical traditions have authority?

What kind of authority do they have? Well, as I've explained for a long, long time,

I'm an elder in a Reformed Baptist church. We have something called the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, which we consider to be a sub -biblical authority.

It is a confession of faith, it functions and has authority within the church, it is in fact a basis upon which we would excommunicate if someone, you know, so on and so forth, but as an authority, it is subject to the correction of a higher authority.

We do not do what Roman Catholics tend to do, and that is say, well, we have tradition, we have sacred tradition, and Scripture is a written portion of sacred tradition, but you also have other sacred tradition that complicates the picture.

We would say that there are all sorts of traditions that can be godly, they can be useful, but they are always subject to that which is theanoustos, that which is

God -breathed, and so that was what I attempted to point out in my response. Yeah, I wasn't sure what examples you had in mind.

I remembered you saying that, though. Okay. By the way, I also wanted to say that I sympathize with some of the stuff,

I sympathize with you over some of the stuff you were playing earlier in the show. Some of those clips that you were playing really displayed some extraordinarily floppy thinking.

Well, and you would know that especially because weren't you a Presbyterian at one point? Oh yeah, oh certainly, I was a five -point

Calvinist. Yeah, yeah, so have you been keeping up with any of that? Is that the first you had heard of it?

I haven't really been following the discussion closely in the Southern Baptist Convention, but I've been aware,

I'm certainly aware of the streams of thought that you were showing, you were playing today, and they really are very, well, floppy,

I guess is about the most charitable way I can put it. I mean, you're right, if God knows the number of the elect who are out there, then we're not going to increase that number.

I know, but unfortunately that kind of discussion, I'm sure you're not aware of this, but we've been attempting to get a debate at the new

Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, Jerry Falwell's church with the president of Liberty Seminary, a fellow by the name of Ergin Kanner, and the hoops that we have been jumping through have been, shall we say, just a little bit frustrating, but we are attempting to get a debate there on that subject.

We can actually get some cross -examination going where these things will actually be discussed, but it's proving to be somewhat problematic and difficult in the process.

So, anyway, okay, well, thank you very much, sir. Okay. All right, thanks for calling.

Okay, bye. Bye -bye. All righty, thank you for calling, Mr. Aiken, maybe sometime.

I think I can call Catholic Answers now. I think I should probably be able to get in for at least a few minutes sometime, but they're not going to go late, because they can't.

They're stuck with hard breaks, and that's the joy of webcasting. We're not stuck with hard breaks, so we went seven minutes over.

Who cares? It's okay. That's the joy of the whole thing. Anyway, thanks for listening to The Dividing Line.

Should be back Tuesday, because I'm in California on Thursday, and so we'll be back

Tuesday. Maybe we'll have to do like a 90 -minute one, just sort of make up or something. I don't know. There should be plenty of stuff to talk about, because there's lots going on at the convention.

Thanks for listening. Talk to you later. God bless. ...been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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