Mormon Understanding of Predestination, Kenneth Copeland at 83, More on Manichaeism and Ken Wilson

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:32

Well, greetings, welcome to the Dividing Line. I should not just look at something right as the program starts.

00:38

It's too distracting. But did you see this Hulk Hogan thing? Yeah, I'm left going, what?

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I mean, if that's really him, I mean, I'll take any ray of light in the darkness.

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But wow, I mean, it's what do you mean?

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Did you read it? It's not what it says in the reading.

01:14

It's not what it says in the reading. So yeah, we'll see.

01:20

That's that's interesting. Welcome, folks. So much to get to today and glad to be back with you.

01:27

We got the family moved down from Las Vegas. They were at that's a it's normally seems to me like a fairly long drive, because there's some areas is just there's one straight section north of Kingman.

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It's just sort of like. But I had my 10 year old and seven year old granddaughters with me in the van.

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And that made the trip a lot shorter because I got to tell them all sorts of stories like about how

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I met Nani and oh, they thought that was great. They really, really did.

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And we had discussions about what's going on in the world and and made the time pass a whole lot faster.

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Of course, when the younger of them was about to die of needing to find a restroom, that made it go a whole lot faster because I'm excuse me,

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Rama 13, I need to bend a little bit for a moment. Just got an emergency here. We made it.

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Yeah. It was it was a bit of a challenge, but we we got it done and it was great to have them and and hear their questions and their precious little voices.

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So they're down here now and just in just in time for the summer, hey,

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Vegas isn't that much cooler. It's only about five to seven to five degrees average. I think there's maybe up to seven average cooler than we are here.

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But yeah, we've got that. We've got the heat coming. We have so much to get to today. Let me just mention our top of the hour and then

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I'll mention it hopefully at the end. We need your help and it won't cost you a dime.

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That's a pretty unusual thing to hear these days, isn't it? But the championship round of the

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Apologetics March Madness bracket ends, I think, in four hours.

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And up until this morning, it wasn't even a competition. And then the other side weighed in and it's neck and neck.

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So need everybody and their and their second cousin.

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And maybe if your cats have never actually tweeted before, maybe they'd like to get involved.

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Go to a apologetics, adherent apologetics and join in the fun. I'm up against Robbie Zacharias and I shouldn't even be close.

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I shouldn't even be close. This should be 95 to 5 for Robbie. He has 400 ,000 followers.

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I have 52 ,000 followers. So he's got right at eight times the number of Twitter followers.

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And this is pretty much a Twitter popularity contest. But what it does remind me of is the fact that this is a matchup between what would be classical or evidentialist apologetics.

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There are people that want to put a little bit of emphasis here, a little bit of an emphasis there versus a presuppositionalist who the purest presuppositionalist would say, well,

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I'm not sure about him that much because, you know, I believe all evidence is

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God's evidence. And I seek to practice the internal critique of the worldview of the person that I'm debating with.

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And I normally do much more debating with individuals who have a religious worldview.

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And so if you're already dealing with, say, a monotheist, but the promoter of a different God than the

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God of Christianity, then you have to modify your approach in a sense to take into consideration where the other side really is.

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But here's why it should be 95 to 5. We're a minority. And I think we need to keep this in mind.

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Those of you who are Reformed and are presuppositionalists, there are those who are Reformed who are not. R .C.

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Sproul was not a presuppositionalist, even though in his debate with Greg Bonson, I think they got closer than most

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Internet conversations do today. But I'm really concerned, to be honest with you, and that's why

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I wouldn't mind winning because I might have the opportunity of being able to explain this. I'm a little concerned that presuppositionalism could be viewed, and I'm not, you know, we've got people out there who have dedicated their lives to its destruction.

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That's just pathetic. I just, someone like that has just lost it. But on the other side,

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I am concerned that people will view presuppositionalism as a cool tool, as a debate tactic, and it's none of those things.

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I would submit that to be a consistent presuppositionalist requires a theological foundation that can only be found in the most conservative, historically grounded, believing forms of Reformed Christianity.

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Oh yeah, I know, I've encountered synergists who were arguing presuppositionally at a certain point, but they can't stay there.

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They can't take it to its final conclusion. It's just not possible. It's based upon a view of God, God's revelation, and His role as creator, and therefore a view of man, anthropology, a

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Christian anthropology, man created in the image of God. And therefore, it's just not for everybody.

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And presuppositionalists need to stop marketing it as if it is.

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I've never said to a synergist, well, you know, you gotta adopt presuppositionalism, because what's the one thing

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I've repeated over and over and over and over again over the decades is theology comes before apologetics.

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Theology determines your apologetics. If you're going the other direction, that's a problem. That's a serious problem.

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Now, has God used that backwards route to get some people to come to understand the truth?

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Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I've written a bunch of books, and I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the years and said, you know,

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I first heard about you by reading one of the controversy books, King James Only Controversy, Roman Catholic Controversy, and then you introduced me to Reform Theology.

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So the apologetics led to the theology at that point. That's cool. That's all right.

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That's not a problem at all. But we as individuals should see that what we want to be consistent with is our foundational confession, our

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Christian worldview, and then allow the way we defend that to flow naturally, organically, to use a very popular term these days, organically from our theology.

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So if, you know, the Reformed person believes God is the creator of all things, how do you believe that God foreordained whatsoever comes to pass?

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How do you believe that he is a God who works all things out of the counsel of his will, to use a specific terminology of Ephesians 111, and then not have him as the creator of all things?

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That's going to impact your apologetic. But it's a theological reality that you are confessing at that point.

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And so this should be 95 % to 5 % against me, because we are a small minority.

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It's just that, well, this is Twitter, and it's the internet, and the dividing line has been around forever.

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Okay, I'm not going to say forever, because, you know, I don't want to necessarily drag you into the old age home along with me, but you're actually getting there earlier than me.

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But we've been doing this a long time now, and when it comes to apologetics ministries, there aren't too many out there that have been doing what we've been doing for as long as we've been doing it.

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I mean, there's a few folks out there, sure. But, yeah,

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I think it was right at the turn of the century. Right after the last century, remember that?

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We had a lot of good stuff going on in the last century, too. Yeah, because originally it was real audio.

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But, hey, everybody always says, that James White guy, he's such a jerk.

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He's so arrogant. He's so nasty. We're not claiming to have revolutionized the landscape. We were just poor, okay?

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And we were doing a radio program on a local radio station, and it was only on a

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Saturday afternoon, which is the worst time to be on a radio station. I mean, who listens to radio on a

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Saturday? Well, right now, everybody does, because you've got nothing else to be doing. I'm sorry?

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It was the cheapest time slot we could get. But we still couldn't afford it. And one day, we noticed that most of our phone calls were coming from the

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Internet, because that station had started. They had a real audio server, as I recall. And they were live streaming it.

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Most of our calls were coming from the Internet. And it's like, well, if most of our calls are coming from the Internet, that means most of our listeners are coming from the

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Internet. So why are we paying all this money for a terrestrial station? And that's killed terrestrial stations in many ways.

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So no, we weren't wiser than anyone else. We were poorer than anyone else.

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We just happened to stumble into a good way of doing things. And we've been at it for a long time.

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And so that certainly has helped. But the reality is that this shouldn't even be close. So the fact that we are right now neck and neck, four hours to go, neck and neck.

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And so your assistance, your votes on Twitter, if you've been avoiding

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Twitter, this would be a good reason. Hey, you can also shut down the account once you're done. If you don't want it, don't like it, fine.

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That would help. That would help. But hey, we're willing to go democratic here, okay?

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So if you've got your late uncle's laptop, see if he had a Twitter account.

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Look at that. That hasn't posted since 2016, but all of a sudden got on to vote. How'd that happen?

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So, yeah. Anyways, a -adherent, a -apologetics, adherent apologetics.

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That would bring new meaning to raising the dead, yeah. I'm surprised Michael Brown didn't try that. Zing! Hey, did you see the stuff he was doing last night?

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He had Jewish ninjas. And, I mean, he was just pulling out all the stops last night going against Jeff and going after me because,

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I mean, the guy wants me to divide up the eldership of a local church. I mean, really,

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Michael, seriously, come on. Wow, that's just not right.

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So we need your help, folks. We need your help. Jump on in. Yeah. Oh, so now

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Michael Brown has come out for Ravi. For Ravi.

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Wow, look at that. I say we put Ravi over the top as a sign of love and support. There you go.

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Thanks, Michael. There you go. There you go. Again, hey, it's all supposed to be in fun, so there you go.

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Four hours to go. Need your assistance. Need your assistance, and let's just hope that the nasty people

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There are some nasty people out there, and there's some nasty stuff floating around the web. I just hope they stay out of it, and I could be wrong.

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They've already been trying to sort of dig into some things, but I don't know. All right, I'll mention that again toward the end of the program.

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We've got a lot to get to today. I want to start with a text that a fellow by the name of Peter on Facebook.

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I think it was Facebook this morning. Had a meme, and it got me thinking.

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I looked it up. In fact, let me maximize it here.

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I looked it up here, and Jeremiah 12, verse 11, but I want to back up just a little bit.

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Let's see. Jeremiah 12, 7. I have forsaken my house. I have abandoned my inheritance.

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I have given the beloved of my soul into the hand of her enemies. My inheritance has become to me like a lie in the forest.

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She has roared against me. Therefore, I have come to hate her. Is my inheritance like a speckled bird of prey to me?

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Are the birds of prey against her on every side? Go gather all the beasts of the field. Bring them to devour. Many shepherds have ruined my vineyard.

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They have trampled down my field. They have made my pleasant field a desolate wilderness. Now, so this is a portion of a judgment passage.

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Let's be honest. We tend to skip over judgment passages.

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They're not fun to read. To read them carefully requires us to look back at some of the history that would help us to understand what was going on, why the judgment was taking place, why the judgment was taking place in the way that it was.

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Sometimes names are used that we're not overly familiar with. So let's be honest.

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We normally skip over it because we don't want to hear about judgment. We'd much rather read John 3, even though there's judgment in John 3, too.

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It's just where we're coming from. But that's what this is about. And Jeremiah, as a prophet, can't be overly exciting to anyone who does not recognize that the themes that he evokes and he addresses become foundational to the

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New Testament understanding of sin and God's displeasure against sin. If there's anything we're missing in today's world, it's that.

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It's an understanding. Sin has been so minimized. The holiness of God has been so minimized.

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And especially since that element of holiness that is vitally important is his otherness, his completely different -from -us -ness.

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And so when you turn God into our boyfriend, and so much of our music is

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God -is -my -boyfriend music, and then you baptize humanism and you present a worldview where man is still pretty much in the center, it's understandable why books like Jeremiah would be so incredibly difficult for people to grasp hold of, let alone really attract them and speak to their hearts.

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So, the verse that I noticed this morning was verse 11. It has been made a desolation, desolate, it mourns before me.

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The whole land has been made desolate because no man lays it to heart. No man lays it to heart.

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Now, that was the phrase that I really started thinking about, so I'm going to blow the languages up here so we can see them.

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The specific phrase is used twice in the

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Old Testament Scriptures. It's right here in the Hebrew. So, because no man to lay up upon the heart.

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And in the Septuagint, because there is not a man who places in the heart.

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Fairly literal translation of the Hebrew.

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And it occurs also in Isaiah 57 -1, as I recall.

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Let me see if my memory is... Yes, the righteous man perishes and no man takes it to heart.

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There it is. The devout men are taken away while no one understands. The righteous man is taken away from evil. He enters into peace.

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They rest in their beds, so on and so forth. So, there you have, and no man takes it to heart.

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And so, it's a phrase that speaks of a lack of understanding and knowledge.

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To take something to heart is to observe it, to understand it, to ponder it, to seek wisdom from it, and to allow that meditation to impact a person's life.

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And what's being said is, the land's desolate. Because the men have become beasts.

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They don't look around them and see what's happening. And take it to heart, as any creature made in the image of God should.

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I mean, think about Romans 1. What's one of the key elements in Romans 1?

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Is that there's general revelation. And that revelation tells us that God exists, that we should be thankful to Him, and we should honor

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Him as God. It doesn't tell us about the Trinity or anything like that, but God exists, we know it, and we suppress that knowledge.

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Well, if you're made in the image of God, and if the very creation around us is supposed to communicate that element of God exists and we should be thankful to Him, then when we see

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God's judgments taking place, when we see God's blessings taking place, when we see that when we obey

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God's law, when we honor marriage as He has defined it, when we act in biblical justice, not confusing the justice of God that will be accomplished at the final judgment with the commands of His law here in this life, in this world, where there are going to be people who get away with things, but they will never get away with that before the judge of all the earth.

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That's a whole other area I'm not going to go into right now, but it's a very important area. When we see those things, we're supposed to take them to heart.

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If we're made in the image of God, we're supposed to take them to heart. And that means we're supposed to bring these things in and think about them and consider them and act upon them.

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And so, in light of that, what's being said here, the whole land has been made desolate because no man lays it to heart.

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So, even as the desolation takes place, man does not take the time to think and consider.

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We're literally watching desolation taking place. I mean, there are companies, businesses, large ones, that will not be reopening no matter when the governments decide to lift restrictions.

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You're going to be... I remember in 2008, 2009, driving down the road and seeing how many closed businesses, signs fading in the sun, strip malls abandoned, the anchor failed and so everybody else went down with it.

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And that has started to reverse. And in a lot of places, that wasn't the case any longer.

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It's going to be everywhere. It's going to be everywhere. Major companies which have been identified as non -essential and who gets to determine that one?

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The people who work for those companies and built them up certainly consider them essential. But anyway, the non -essential are not going to survive.

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And I don't know what the result of all that's going to be, but there has been desolation wrought in the land and a non -Christian worldview tells us to chalk this up to completely random things.

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There can't be any purpose in any of this. I was struck that, though certainly

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Star Trek now is about as woke as you can get, sadly, the old, old, old

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Star Trek back in the original series back in the 60s, in one of my favorite episodes where they first encounter the

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Romulans and see the Romulans and discover they're related to... Well, it was Spock's father who ends up being the

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Romulan, but that's... Let's not get into that. At the end, this one guy had died and he was supposed to have gotten married that morning in the thing.

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And Captain Kirk goes into the chapel. Hey, they had a chapel. Yay! And they were going to have a marriage ceremony between a man and a woman.

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Yay! I mean, anymore you're just like, let's be happy about anything we can get.

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And so she sort of breaks protocol and hugs him and he lets her.

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And then he says, we've got to know there was a reason.

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I know, she says. We've got to know. So that's a worldview that many people don't have anymore.

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The secular world doesn't have any basis for that. There is no reason. If you really read

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Richard Dawkins, then you know there is no reason for anything. There are pitiless, merciless rules that just determine everything.

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That's what we're dealing with. And so when man looks out at the world, what's there to take to heart?

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What's a heart to take to anyways? You're just the accidental, random result of these impersonal forces to begin with.

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And unfortunately, when we preach a gospel that does not challenge, calling men to repent and believe means to repent of their godless worldview as well.

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And we generally just don't emphasize that aspect of it. We don't want to scare somebody off.

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See, we want to get as many in as we can and not really trust the Holy Spirit to make a major change in their own worldview.

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And so we have a lot of baptized Christians who have just simply baptized their secularism with religion.

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And so they're very offended when you remind them that God's in the center and they're not.

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And that their worldview needs to be sanctified. Well, their worldview needs to be crucified and that a new worldview needs to be brought into their understanding.

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So the very fact that it says, no man lays it to heart.

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Desolation, no man lays it to heart. That doesn't mean that we have the ability to sit there and go, ah, this happened at that place because that happened over there.

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And as if we have that kind of supernatural knowledge, but what's happened is because we don't have that supernatural knowledge, we go, then there is no connection.

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There is no wrath of God that's being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness of man.

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Since we can't identify exactly what sin brought this judgment about, then we can't say anything about it.

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That's where we've lost the balance. We can look at our culture and say, here are the sins that we are committing and judgment is coming and is upon us.

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And there are, it almost seems to me like a minority of Christians any longer have a theology that's robust enough to go, and you know what?

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God's in control of it. He's in control of it. I can't tell you how many people

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I've seen, God doesn't have anything to do with this virus, and he didn't have anything to do with bringing it about. And you're just like, what

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Bible have you been reading? It's not the one I've been reading. There's lots of plagues in the

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Old Testament, and God wasn't caught by surprise by any of them. In fact, they all seem to be completely under his control. Completely.

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So what Bible are you reading? Well, you're reading the same Bible, but you've adopted a secular lens through which to filter out anything that is offensive to that secular worldview.

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That's unfortunately what we see all over the place. And so there you go.

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So, because no man lays it to heart. If you're wise, you will observe the times, you will observe the seasons, and you will understand that as an image bearer of God, that you should lay to heart what you see and see

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God's activities taking place therein. Okay, so it's a little bit of our devotional study there today.

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Yesterday, it's really sad. Very, very sad to me. Very, very sad indeed.

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That I was supposed to be today

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I had hoped that I would be riding a bicycle up a mountain in the area of Salt Lake City, having spent the preceding weekend in ministry at the

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General Conference of the Mormon Church, speaking at Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, and having done debates, and having had a dialogue with all the

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All Red, and all that stuff. And of course it didn't happen.

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And it's, you know, on one level, it's like this was the alleged 200th anniversary of the first vision of Joseph Smith.

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And we know that it's the 200th anniversary of absolutely nothing. Joseph Smith didn't live where he said he lived at that particular point in time.

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There was a revival that allegedly drove him out into the woods, wouldn't take place until 1824.

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There's about a four -year whoops in the chronology that messes everything up. It messes when the vision of Nephi and the

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Book of Mormon and all that stuff, it all gets thrown into the weeds.

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And so we were going to be really pushing on the issue of the first vision and the information that is much more generally available today than it was, oh goodness, back in the 80s when we first started dealing with Mormonism by a long shot.

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But it didn't happen in God's providence. And so the Mormons have been some of the first people, honestly, to dive for cover when it comes to the current situation.

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They canceled the conference a long time ago. And I guess they've just closed down all the meeting houses and the temples, everything just blew.

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Major move on their part very early on. And the fact that all of the leaders are like 85 and older has absolutely nothing to do with that at all.

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But, oh yeah, yeah, no two ways about it. But they've gone on with the conference online.

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And I'm not sure how well that's going to go for them, but Elder Holland, one of the apostles, one of the

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Twelve Apostles, gave a talk, and if you know the history of Mormonism, then you know what he's talking about right toward the beginning.

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And so we're going to pop in, listen to just a moment or two from the beginning of his talk and make some commentary about it.

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Keen and guiding as openly in the present as he did in the past, a true father in the most loving...

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Okay, I'm going to have to back this up. What he's saying, I need to give some of the context here.

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He said that he and his wife, they had been invited by one of the members of the

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First Presidency, as I recall, at the last conference to think about what it was like in 1820 before God restored the church.

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And so he's giving sort of a list of what would we have wanted God to do for us in the spring of 1820.

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And of course, that's a setup for First Vision and all the rest of that kind of fun stuff. But hopefully

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I backed it up here enough to get what we need. ...of the day, we would have looked for the parental character of God, which

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Channing considered the first great doctrine of Christianity. Such a doctrine would have recognized deity as a caring father in heaven rather than a harsh judge dispensing stern justice, or as an absentee landlord who had once been engaged in earthly matters but was now preoccupied somewhere else in the universe.

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Yes, our hopes in 1820 would have been to find God speaking and guiding as openly in the present as he did in the past, a true father in the most loving sense of that word.

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He certainly would not have been a cold, arbitrary autocrat who predestined a select few for salvation and then consigned the rest of the human family to damnation.

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No, he would be one whose every action, by divine declaration, would be for the benefit of the world, for he loveth the world and every inhabitant in it.

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Okay, so there was, right at only two minutes into the presentation, if you are familiar with the history, the background, and with Joseph Smith's story, at least as it was eventually codified, it's not how it initially started, but if you're familiar with the story, then you know that Joseph Smith had exposure to the

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Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians and that his family had involvement with both the

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Methodists and the Presbyterians specifically, and that there had been a particular encounter in regard to his brother's death that had soured many of the

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Smiths who did not have the highest reputation amongst the people.

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They were involved in somewhat nefarious schemes, money digging, and things along those lines, and so it had been evidently, or at least was understood by the family, to be suggested by the

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Presbyterian minister that the brotherhood died, had gone to hell, and so this obviously did not exactly push the family to become part of the

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Presbyterian Church, and I would imagine the Presbyterian Church was not overly disturbed by that reality either at that point in time, but you hear this in the echoes that, 196 years later, we hear from the leadership of the

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Mormon Church about a God who is cold and judgmental and predestines only a portion of his family to heaven and the rest of his family to hell, and again, when you start with a

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God who is an exalted man, which is not what Joseph Smith believed until the middle 1830s, middle to late 1830s, but which your modern

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Mormon does, and therefore places that as the context of his or her hearing of these things, then what you're hearing him saying is that in the spring of 1820,

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Elder Holland and his wife would have been looking for a fatherly deity figure to where we are all the children of God, which in Mormonism we literally are, just as God is the child of a preceding

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God, and that God's a child of a preceding God, and on back into eternity. And hence, anyone who would even use terms like predestination, remember,

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I've often put it this way, when God the

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Father called a council of the gods, which are his children, and Jesus presented the

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Father's plan of what was going to happen on this world that would be created, I'm sorry, organized, and then

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Lucifer comes along and presents his plan as well, when you look at it, in the mind of the

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Mormon, when they hear about the Arminian -Calvinist divide,

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Jesus is the Arminian, and Lucifer is the Calvinist, because Lucifer would force everyone, basically, to become a god.

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So, some of the most, I was going to say strenuous, that's not the right term, strident conversations that we had in Mesa and in Salt Lake, because when we were passing out tracts, it emphasized the freedom of God in the salvation of human beings, because it is simply baked into Mormon theology that man is completely autonomous, that man's the same nature as God, same species as God, is the specific terminology.

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And therefore, there is absolutely no divine decree, no divine decree at all, to be found in Mormon understanding.

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And therefore, when they hear someone, and this isn't so much the case now, only a number of decades ago, in the

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Mormon temple ceremony, there was a Christian minister that was mocked and ridiculed and presented in the temple ceremony, he's been removed, even though it was supposed to be divine revelation, but that's a whole other issue.

41:05

But it's the filter that is functioning that you have to address when speaking to a

41:14

Mormon. And their understanding of who God is, exalted man, we're the same species as God, there is no transcendent deity, there can be no predestination, there can be no sovereign decree, leaves them with a deity that cannot truly be sufficient to ground the

41:37

Christian concept of grace. This is why we've struggled with the reality over the years. What do you approach a

41:44

Mormon and talk with them about? Because eventually, it all has to come down to who

41:52

God is. You can't get to the gospel, their God is not big enough to have the Christian gospel. An exalted man just is not a

42:02

God. And the reality is, the Christian gospel is based upon a

42:07

God who is not like a man, who is different than man.

42:14

And the freedom that he has, in light of his just judgment of the sin of man, requires a biblical understanding of God.

42:26

And so, where do you have to go? What's the order that you have to approach things in?

42:32

You need to tell them about the one true God. And so you need to understand, when you're talking to Mormons, this guy represents, yes, he's in the modern leadership, but I can't imagine what's going to happen.

42:50

I cannot imagine what's going to happen when the 30 -year -olds today are in the general authorities of the church.

43:03

Because, I mean, this guy grew up on Bruce R. McConkie. And he may have liberalized some from McConkie, but it's still in the

43:14

DNA. Once you get into the generation after that, wow,

43:21

I don't know what's going to happen with Mormonism, but it's going to change. It's going to change radically.

43:27

It's changing right now. But right now, the vast majority of Mormons you talk to have this filter.

43:34

They have this understanding in regards to, as soon as you use the term predestination,

43:42

I've told the story, I guess I'll tell it again. I didn't bring it in here.

43:48

Well, I thought I did. But I even have the

43:55

Little New Testament somewhere. I thought I'd brought it in here. But I was talking to a sharp young Mormon fellow, the coroner of Maine and Hobson in Mesa, outside the

44:05

Easter pageant, which will never happen again. It was a great opportunity to witness while we had it. We just always thought it would always be there.

44:14

They'd always be doing it. Never expected them to shut all that down. It had nothing to do with coronavirus either, though they would have shut all of them down this year anyways.

44:23

For that to be certain. This just killed it. In fact, I bet you this killed

44:28

Palmyra too. And this was supposed to be Palmyra's last year. I bet it killed it too. Anyway, sharp young Mormon fellow, very quickly in talking about grace, he realized what we were really saying.

44:43

He said, are you saying that God chooses to whom he gives his grace?

44:48

Now that's an important point to get. Because if grace is just some weak little wimpy thing that one exalted deity gives to as yet unexalted deities, but they're still deities in embryo, that's a totally different concept than what you have in scripture.

45:12

And I opened my Bible up to Ephesians 1 .11, predestined according to the will of him who works all things out of the counsel of his will, and so on and so forth.

45:24

And eventually he reached over and he put his finger, tapped his finger on Ephesians 1 .11,

45:31

which I had marked in yellow. And he said, that's wrong, and I feel good saying that.

45:38

That's wrong, and I feel good saying that. The irony was that when he first came up to me, the conversation had started by his saying, why are there so many different Christian churches?

45:47

And my answer had not satisfied him. My answer had been, because people pick and choose what they will and will not believe out of the

45:54

Bible. And so after he did that, I zipped up my Bible, and I said, sir, when you first came up, you asked why are there so many different Christian churches, you didn't seem satisfied with my answer, but you just illustrated it better than anyone

46:07

I could ever imagine. Because I said, men will pick and choose what they will and will not believe out of the Bible.

46:12

You just did that. You just illustrated that. I'll never forget that evening.

46:18

I often wondered what happened to a lot of those people that we've had conversations with. I've always hoped and prayed that when they went home off their missions, or whatever the situation might be, this guy wasn't on a mission at the time.

46:30

I have a feeling he was a return missionary, actually. That they would encounter people who would give them a clear testimony, further testimony of the gospel.

46:41

But you never know. You never know. But this is a part. That was Jeffrey Holland. He's one of the

46:46

Twelve Apostles of the Church. Jesus Christ, Latter -day Saints, as they like to call themselves these days.

46:53

And he was speaking at the General Conference just yesterday, in fact, on that particular subject.

47:01

Now, I haven't done this for a while. But this,

47:12

I didn't get a clip. I actually had to download the whole huge thing.

47:21

Kenneth Copeland is 83 years old. He'll turn 84 in December. And I was wondering about that because I went to a high school.

47:36

I went to a junior high school. Where almost everybody from that junior high school went to one particular high school.

47:42

Greenway High School. And that's where I was expected to go. But they built a new high school way farther south.

47:50

And they just drew an arbitrary line. And they had to have enough students to come to this school.

47:57

It was out in the middle of fields. There really wasn't much out there. And so I was bused, forcibly bused.

48:06

It was a 40 -minute ride each direction. It was horrible.

48:13

To the high school that I went to, ended up graduating from. And starting my sophomore year,

48:22

I drove. I had a 1972 Buick LeSabre. It got between 10 and 12 miles to the gallon.

48:29

Thankfully, my dad managed a radio station. And we had what was called a trade -out at a gas station.

48:35

So I could pull that boat in. You remember that boat. That big brown, we called it the

48:41

Big Brown Bomb. I think my mom called it that initially. And I could pull that boat into this gas station in Sun City.

48:52

And it was back when the gas filler was underneath the license plate.

49:00

So you'd pull the license plate down, open the thing up, stick it in there. And so I drove starting pretty much in December of my sophomore year.

49:12

As soon as I had my license. I started driving to school. And so I had time, but I didn't have money.

49:23

So I think I did eventually install a stereo system in that car.

49:28

A really super cheap one, a little add -on type thing. Because for a long time, I just had a ready -for -this cassette tape recorder.

49:36

Sitting on the seat next to me. To listen to Christian music and stuff like that. But it had an

49:43

AM radio in it. And so I would listen to... Was that K...

49:51

Was it KG? No, no. What was the... Wow, I was starting to lose track of which...

49:58

You weren't even down here then, yeah. You were listening to 8 tracks. Well, I was listening to 8 tracks too.

50:06

I forget which station it was. There have been a few, and some of them have changed their names. It wasn't FLR or anything like that.

50:11

But it was sort of the standard where you had all the weird teachers stuff.

50:19

And so one of the people back then was

50:25

Daddy Hagen. Daddy Hagen. And then sort of his younger protege,

50:33

Kenneth Copeland. And they'd be on in the morning, drive time. Prime time as far as radio programs were concerned.

50:44

And they'd be on when I was driving to school in the mornings. And so I did not listen to them a lot.

50:53

But I listened to them enough to realize I didn't want to listen to them a lot. But sometimes

50:58

I just listen and just go, really? Now, I'm not an apologist at this point.

51:06

I've been raised pretty much in a fundamentalist context. So this stuff is just weird.

51:18

And Kenneth Copeland was at it a long time ago. He had actually a top 10 singing hit, I think, in 1962.

51:24

I saw it on YouTube yesterday. I almost reposted it, but decided not to. Well, this fella has been rebuking demons and sickness and all the rest of this stuff for a long, long time.

51:39

And I don't make a lot of memes, but a lot of people have been making a lot of memes about, where are all the divine healers?

51:49

And a lot of them are voluntarily quarantining. And I'm not sure it has anything to do with the

51:56

COVID -19 virus. I just think they're just like, let's duck under this one for a while.

52:04

But not all, not all. You gotta give Copeland his props. He's considered the richest preacher in the

52:11

United States, worth over $300 million. Three private jets.

52:21

He outdoes Benny Hinn. I haven't heard almost anything out of Benny Hinn for a long time, which is really interesting.

52:35

But old Copeland, he's out there spitting and sputtering at 83 years of age.

52:44

And so here is a, there's this Kenneth Copeland Ministries virtual victory campaign, and he's preaching to an empty room.

52:57

I find that ironic, that the guy who's made $300 million preaching and teaching, and all you gotta do is rebuke stuff, and we're little gods and all the rest of that kind of stuff, doesn't have anybody in the room.

53:17

And if you watch it, if you watch the whole thing, he's been preaching for a while. And every once in a while, in one camera angle, you'd see this one guy seated about 40 feet away.

53:29

But you can see all the empty chairs. There's nobody there. And then he calls these guys, there are four of them, to come down and stand with him.

53:39

And that's when things started getting just a little bit weird. Well, not just a little bit weird. Really majorly weird.

53:47

So here's Kenneth Copeland, and yeah, well, anyway. Come on, get on your feet.

53:54

Get on your feet. And just shout it.

54:04

My Father. The Almighty God.

54:13

The El Shaddai God. The God who is almighty.

54:25

He's more than enough. He is the miracle working

54:31

God. Today.

54:42

We speak to this atmosphere. From the state of Washington.

54:52

To the state of Maine. From Southern California.

55:01

To Brownsville, Texas. And the tip of Florida. And wherever else in the world it's needed.

55:14

Wind. Almighty. Strong. South wind.

55:26

Heat. Burn this thing. In the name of Jesus.

55:34

Satan, you bow your knees. You fall on your face.

55:48

COVID -19. Did the chorus just...

56:04

I don't even know what to say.

56:16

Yeah. Now. Okay, so.

56:33

Most everybody in this audience recognizes the fundamental problems with a

56:43

Kenneth Copeland and an incoherent theology of prosperity and all the rest of the stuff that comes along with it.

56:53

But we also, one of the greatest frustrations that we face is that the world around us doesn't see, doesn't make these differentiations, doesn't make these distinctions.

57:08

They don't care who's Orthodox and who isn't. They don't know what the definitions of Orthodox could possibly be.

57:17

In fact, from the world's perspective, there is no definition of Orthodox. It's all just a mishmash of competing, contradictory ideas to begin with.

57:28

And so they see something like this. And, and...

57:35

Do I even say it? Then they also recognize that a large portion, not every single one, but a large portion of the people who have surrounded the president look and sound like this guy.

57:56

Because there isn't, there isn't an anthill's worth of difference between Kenneth Copeland and Paula White.

58:07

Really isn't. Not as far as theology, practice, anything like that goes.

58:13

They're birds of a feather. And their television screens are filled with pictures of Paula White with President Trump.

58:24

And so this is what they see, this is what they hear. And here's a guy who claims to be a faith healer, staying in an empty room with four guys who happen to be social distancing.

58:41

And in fact, when they came up, I didn't play this, when they came up, Copeland joked with one of them,

58:47

Hey, you don't touch me now, you stay over there, type thing. And here they are calling for a hot south wind to burn this thing.

59:07

And then they call on it by name and go... And the guys, now

59:15

I know that, I can tell they did not practice this, okay? This, this was, life with Kenneth Copeland must be really, really, really interesting.

59:23

It must be just strange as can be. How did they know to repeat all this stuff?

59:41

I guess they just must know him well enough to know that, yeah, that's what he was wanting them to do.

59:46

Even though, I got the feeling he started, he wanted to start preaching a couple times, and he could only do it in short sentences because they're repeating all this stuff.

59:56

But then it was almost like he couldn't think of what he wanted to say, so he goes... And they do the same thing, which is not

01:00:02

CDC, that is not CDC approved, by the way. No, that was, is not, no, that's not a good thing to do at all.

01:00:14

And like I said, the people in the world look at this, and they watch this, and they go, this is, this is what, this is what

01:00:25

Christianity is about. This is what Christians are about. And it isn't.

01:00:31

It isn't. So they don't know what to believe, because they've got this guy calling for hot south winds to burn

01:00:42

COVID -19. And they can tell, you know, that's a little bit different than the Christians who are praying for God's grace and mercy, and clearly believe it's under God's control, and that, in fact, this has something to do with God's judgment.

01:01:00

Now, we don't like them either, because we don't want to hear about judgment at all. But there's obviously a difference between these two.

01:01:06

And there is. And then you've got the other Christians that are going, well, God really doesn't have anything to do with any of all this.

01:01:13

This is just part of the natural order. And he's really not in control of anything. And he's pretty much just there at the end to give you a nice soft pillow when you get to heaven.

01:01:23

Because everyone's going to get there. And that's pretty much all there is to that. So, when you, when you do have the opportunity of speaking the truth, always remember that the person you're talking to has probably heard so many lies and so much twisted falsehood that you, you have to be the most patient person on the planet.

01:01:47

That's not easy for me to do. But you have to, you might, you might be sitting there going, oh, come on.

01:01:54

I mean, how many times have we covered this? You haven't covered it with them. And they, they may have an aunt someplace that has given her entire life savings to Kenneth Copeland.

01:02:05

Because there's a lot of aunts who have. And that, that raises a huge barrier to the gospel.

01:02:15

Because they're going to identify the gospel with this type of stuff. And it's not. That's not what the gospel is. May I stretch the imagination.

01:02:23

So, all right. With that, I think we have, you know, we're going to try to do programs on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

01:02:37

Is that what we talked to? It's Tuesday, Thursday. So, back -to -back programs twice this week.

01:02:42

Hopefully, those of you who were complaining about having fallen behind will not become too angry with us for doing, doing a few extra programs.

01:02:54

But there are a lot of people who don't have a whole lot else going on. And so, there you go.

01:03:02

So, we're going to spend a few more minutes. I've got a few clips prepared here. I didn't get as far in my preparation as I wanted.

01:03:10

By the way, if what I need to do, what

01:03:16

I want to do, is find enough time to put together a keynote presentation.

01:03:26

I don't think I could really explain Manichaeism, Mani's theology, without some graphics.

01:03:41

Minimally, a flannel board. Oh, never mind. Far too few of you old folks in the audience to get the flannel board joke.

01:03:54

But a few of you will find it entertaining. It's complicated.

01:04:01

And it's so different. Well, the problem is, if you've been raised in a church, here's one of the challenges that we face.

01:04:10

If you've been raised in a church, then when you encounter something that is very, very, very different from what you are accustomed to, it's easy to just simply dismiss it because that's weird.

01:04:24

That's strange. It doesn't fit my guidelines. Okay, I get it.

01:04:31

But Manichaeism, starting in the middle of the 3rd century, so around 250, 240, 240, 250 -ish area, ends up spreading not only to the

01:04:49

West and into the Roman Empire, but to the East, and in some forms actually lasts until the 16th, 17th centuries.

01:04:59

That's a long time. Much longer than, for example, Mormonism has existed, which is only officially coming up on, well, 190 years.

01:05:16

Officially, April 6th, 1830, so we've got 10 more years to go for that particular aspect of things.

01:05:22

And look how big it's become, and how fast it's changed, too, which

01:05:28

I don't think would be possible in the ancient world without printing and the mechanism of spreading that change, to be honest with you.

01:05:37

Anyway, Manichaeism obviously underwent a tremendous amount of change and evolution, and there are lots and lots and lots of different perspectives.

01:05:46

But I found some material that would help me to at least explain to you what

01:05:54

Augustine would have experienced as Manichaeism in his day. You know, what

01:06:01

Manichaeism looked like in the 15th century in China is not all that relevant to our inquiry.

01:06:08

And I'm speaking, of course, in regards to the issue of Ken Wilson's dissertation and the assertion on his part that, in essence, what we have in Christianity, well, what we have in Reformed Christianity, what we have in Calvinism, is, well, let me read it to you again.

01:06:40

I've read it before, but you've got to hear this. It will explain why we're spending so much time on it. The famous Reformed theologian

01:06:46

Benjamin Warfield commented that the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace, and I will continue that, over Augustine's doctrine of the

01:06:55

Church. I think leaving that part out changes the balance of what

01:07:02

Dr. Warfield said. Warfield's statement is pinpoint accurate, but unfortunately, due to Luther's and Calvin's reliance upon Augustine, the unmerited grace of the

01:07:14

Christian God did not triumph. In Augustinian Calvinism, Reformed theology, it was the radicalized grace of the

01:07:22

Manichaean God that triumphed. So, this is, I think, a fair summary statement from Wilson as to what his assertion is, is that Reformed theology is the radicalized grace of the

01:07:42

Manichaean God triumphing. So, we need to know something about the

01:07:48

Manichaean God, and the vast majority of Christians, and I would say the vast majority of seminary graduates, have no idea who the

01:08:02

Manichaean God was. Even though I had excellent church history classes, mine was not a focus upon church history.

01:08:14

So, if you focused on church history, then you would probably have done at least a little reading in Manichaeism, and we have only discovered some

01:08:29

Manichaean documents over the past hundred years, and even less, which have helped to shed a little more light on the movement as a whole.

01:08:42

But the reality is, the vast majority of Christians have no idea who the

01:08:48

Manichaean God is. And so, since no one really knows, then how do you analyze this kind of a claim, especially when what

01:09:01

Wilson does is he defines Manichaean theology by using Christian theology, even though there is a massive chasm of definitional difference between the two.

01:09:10

It creates massive confusion and is highly misleading.

01:09:18

How then are people expected to judge? And so, what

01:09:23

I want to do is I want to put together a keynote with some of these facts, and one of the reasons you want to listen to this,

01:09:34

I have to actually give you reasons, because a lot of you are going, this is really not what I need during the pandemic.

01:09:44

One of, I think, the benefits, I mean, I always think there's a benefit from having a deeper, firmer understanding of church history, what took place in church history, and especially the challenges that the early church faced, and Manichaeism was one of them.

01:10:01

Because it's an expression of the greatest challenge that it faced externally, and that was

01:10:06

Gnosticism as a whole. And so, that's helpful. But what's been really helpful for me is to clarify key terms such as determinism.

01:10:23

Determinism is a term that's thrown around a great deal in regards to the sovereignty of God and the existence of his divine decree.

01:10:33

And so, Reformed theology is deterministic, but it is personally deterministic, and that person is the person of God, not the individual person as in the human being.

01:10:50

Much of the ancient discussion of determinism was focused upon man, and in Manichaeism, you don't have a monotheistic foundation from the

01:11:10

Old Testament prophets. So, even though people say, you know, well, Manny talked about Jesus and Manny had different scriptures, but he was influenced by Christianity.

01:11:21

Well, influenced by Christianity, what does that mean? He was influenced by Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Christianity.

01:11:29

Those are fundamentally contradictory concepts. So, he's doing the mishmash routine.

01:11:37

He's doing the, let's pull all this stuff together and cook it and see what comes out.

01:11:44

Just throw a bunch of ingredients in here and see what the result is. And so, when you talk about determinism, and you say

01:11:54

Manichaeism is deterministic, we're not talking about personally deterministic, as in the

01:12:04

Reformed understanding of God creating in such a fashion as to bring about his own glory, which includes as that mechanism, the incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, the

01:12:22

Messiah. That whole idea. I mean, in Manichaeism, the historical

01:12:30

Jesus who dies on the cross is a fake. He's a fraud. False God. There are multiple

01:12:36

Jesuses, but the Jesus of Orthodoxy is a false Jesus. Manichaeism is weirder than Mormonism is, as far as its theological expressions are concerned.

01:12:53

And as we'll see, it is the story of a battle between the light and the dark.

01:13:01

The invasions by dark into the light. The capturing of sparks.

01:13:10

Sparks. So, little pieces of the light. This is what comes from Gnosticism, because this was a

01:13:16

Gnostic concept amongst many Gnostics. Not all, but many Gnostics. That we as human beings are a little spark of the divine.

01:13:30

And that the darkness has used flesh to capture that spark.

01:13:37

And so, there's this battle going on to release these sparks. So, that spark can be, well, according to Manny, collected by the two light collector sources, the moon and the sun.

01:13:53

So, the moon and the sun are the sparks going to the moon or the sun, and that way they can go back to the realm of light.

01:14:03

And you're sitting here going, so this is supposed to be what Calvinism was based on.

01:14:10

Yeah, because, as I was saying, what it helps us to understand is...

01:14:17

And like I said, I'm going to put this into a keynote, so I'm just giving you the rundown right now.

01:14:23

What helps us to understand is that determinism, there are all sorts of different kinds of determinism.

01:14:32

There is mechanical determinism, or created determinism, where what is determined is just simply because there's cause and effect.

01:14:43

And you can't escape cause and effect, and therefore what is going to be is going to be because the universe runs on these immutable principles.

01:14:52

That is a world of difference, a Grand Canyon of difference, between that concept and what

01:15:04

Reformed Christians are talking about, when we talk about the decree of God, that is first and foremost about the revelation of God's character, and the accomplishment of his self -glorification in the joining of a particular people to himself in and through Jesus Christ.

01:15:24

If you can just sit back and say, see, Manichean determinism,

01:15:31

Calvinist determinism, same thing. No, not even close.

01:15:39

That's the point. But we need to understand a little bit more about the different Jesuses in Manichaeism, and the various stages of battle between light and darkness, and the fact that there simply isn't any personal

01:15:57

God. There really isn't a personal God. There's much more of a, well, it was influenced by Buddhism, right?

01:16:07

Zoroastrianism? It's a little bit more like the force. It's a little bit more like the force than anything close to the decree, or Ephesians 1 .11.

01:16:24

So, can you imagine how Manichaeists interpret Christian scriptures when you don't have the monotheistic personal

01:16:33

God of the Old Testament as the foundation of your interpretation? Yeah, to say that they interpreted it in the same way

01:16:44

Reformed people interpret it is absurd on a level that's pretty difficult to conceive that this wasn't caught.

01:16:51

And someone said, ah, that's really mixing up categories. That's really bad.

01:16:56

But anyway, we'll be illustrating all of this in time. But I did mark exactly where we finished last time.

01:17:05

Even though it looks differently now, but I'm going to assume this is where it was. So we'll get just a few little quotes in here before we run out of time.

01:17:13

But we are listening to a 2018 interview between Leighton Flowers and Ken Wilson on the subject of Wilson's gestation.

01:17:23

This was before the popular level book was written. And so that's why it's important.

01:17:30

So let's get back to it. He was a polemicist and a rhetorician more than a student of scripture.

01:17:37

He admitted that himself to Jerome. So this is a statement about Augustine that he wasn't really a student of scripture.

01:17:44

He was more of a rhetorician. Now, I have not yet found this citation as to whether it is in a meaningful context.

01:17:54

I will eventually and will try to remember to report to you. But the idea being presented here is that Augustine got away with this radical change in what people believed before him.

01:18:07

Basically, because he was such a good debater. And so people were afraid to contradict him because they didn't...

01:18:13

Well, basically, he's a big, mean bully is what he is. That's the idea.

01:18:19

Huh. Okay. Do you think that can impact? I mean, obviously, I believe it can impact when you don't know the original languages or the culture.

01:18:27

A lot of people don't realize 300 to 400 years after the writings of the New Testament, that's a long time.

01:18:32

Okay. So here we go again with the... Augustine did not know...

01:18:38

Augustine started learning Greek later in his life. He did not know Hebrew. We've pointed this out many times before.

01:18:47

It's true. And it is relevant. It was relevant to Augustine's errors in reference to the canon of scripture where he disagreed with Jerome.

01:19:01

Jerome had much more direct information as to what the Jews believed about the Old Testament scriptures.

01:19:07

And key, key issue is the fact that Augustine is looking at the

01:19:15

Doctrine of Justification from the Latin. And so he's looking...

01:19:20

He does not see the Dikaios, Dikaiosune word group. He's looking at Justificare in Latin, which does not necessarily have the same background, and therefore made errors.

01:19:33

So those are relevant things. But what's also being, by Leighton Flowers, what was just put in there for the fun of it is...

01:19:45

You know, they're so much closer. I mean, there's just been so much time that has passed. Well, again, that's actually not relevant.

01:19:55

And the fathers that lived in that time period in between them, very few of them were living in Israel.

01:20:02

And many of them were deeply influenced by Greek philosophy in their theological formulations.

01:20:15

And so you look at Justin Martyr, he's only living a matter of decades after the last apostle has died.

01:20:24

But the context that overwhelms is the context of Greek philosophy.

01:20:31

He was a Greek philosopher. That becomes the lens. And he doesn't even have all of the New Testament canon.

01:20:36

So who's going to be more influenced at that point? It's very, very obvious, very, very important in looking at this period of time in church history.

01:20:48

Now, what was unique and new is not most of the stuff that Ken Wilson says was unique and new.

01:21:09

What is unique and new is how he responds to Pelagianism, and basically it's his doctrine of grace.

01:21:20

And what's unique and new about it is its consistency. You can find elements of it in people before that, but bringing those elements together into a concerted whole.

01:21:34

Again, remember, this was not the area of argumentation and debate in the early church.

01:21:48

The ancient equivalent of Luther's bondage of the will and Erasmus' freedom of the will would be

01:21:56

Augustine and Pelagius. There's just nothing before that that would be the ancient equivalent.

01:22:03

If you don't have a full -length treatise, even on the atonement until the fourth century, then this is an area where, in essence, what you have to do, and this is what everybody has to do,

01:22:18

Wilson included, you have to look at early church fathers and look at who they were arguing against and then say, okay, they saw the

01:22:30

Gnostics saying this and they responded with this argument, which would mean if we applied this over here to our modern arguments that they would have believed this.

01:22:43

So you have to make a chain of implied arguments from what the actual debate was and then make application to where we are today.

01:22:55

And as a result, there's a lot of disagreement among scholars as to exactly where a particular person might have landed had they been faced with modern conflicts.

01:23:12

But none of that's fair because that's assuming they would have had read whom, how much background information would they have, how much they know about the original languages, how much they know about the completed canon of scripture.

01:23:24

It's all speculation. It's the best you can possibly do with it. You just can't do anything more than that.

01:23:33

So, again, the idea that, well, once you're 300, 400 years off, what can you do?

01:23:43

Apply that to Christology. Apply that to what they did debate. So you're saying, well,

01:23:50

Nicaea is 300 years after the birth of Jesus, so that can't be right. And the

01:23:55

Chalcedonian definition of the hypostatic union is another 125 years after that, so that can't be right.

01:24:06

That's just too long a period of time, right? Well, I actually have seen people end up right off into heresy because they went ahead and followed that line of reasoning and said, yeah, you know what?

01:24:23

We need to start rethinking everything. We need to get rid of all that tradition that accrued over time.

01:24:29

And there you go. That's, like I said, wouldn't be the first time that's happened. Yes, and not just Calvin, but most modern

01:24:36

Reformed theologians who are academic understand that. They understand that Augustine is the one who introduced that into Christianity.

01:24:45

It's very interesting that if you look at Patristics, there's a book on it. Okay, that Augustine was the one to introduce this into Christianity.

01:24:54

Well, no, I don't know of anybody who believes that, because I don't know of anybody who believes that Augustine was more powerful, more definitional, more authoritative than Scripture itself.

01:25:11

A Reformed theologian is going to say, yes, Augustine's response to the challenges of Pelagius caused him to pull together pre -existing threads.

01:25:24

Much of what Wilson says he invented, he did not. And there is strong documented evidence from Patristics that either

01:25:32

Wilson didn't read or didn't understand what he was reading that demonstrate this to be the case.

01:25:39

But, and I, there's going to be publications documenting these things in the future.

01:25:45

But he pulled things together into a form because of the challenge of Pelagianism on the subject of grace that had not been enunciated before.

01:25:59

Yes, that's true. In church history. The question is, is it consistent with a meaningful interpretation of Scripture itself?

01:26:10

Was this an apostolic belief? And you might say, well, why, why don't you find books in the immediate time period afterwards on this subject?

01:26:20

That's not how history works. First of all, there might've been one. We don't know. We don't possess it.

01:26:25

There are lots of books that were lost. But most importantly, what, what prompts the writing of most books?

01:26:33

It's conflict. And this is not what the conflict was focused upon. And we go, how could it not be?

01:26:40

Because that's what our conflict is. If that's our argument and that's what's important to us, then what's important to us needs to be equally important to everybody else.

01:26:50

When the reality is that what was important in the fourth century from,

01:26:57

I'd say 310 to 390, for about 80 years, about two generations.

01:27:04

You know what they were absolutely consumed with? Was the deity of Christ relationship between the father and son.

01:27:15

I mean, that's what the debates were about. And we just sit here today.

01:27:22

And unless you are, unless you've debated a bunch of the Unitarians or oneness people or whatever, for most people in the church, there's a huge disconnect there.

01:27:34

How could anyone, how could the church have spent 80 years talking about something that honestly

01:27:40

I've never talked about? It's never even interested me.

01:27:47

Well, that says more about us than it does about the church, in my opinion. It says more about us than it does about the church.

01:27:54

So, I'm going to do the little, this mark, just sort of marking this thing and then go and start here has worked pretty well.

01:28:05

So, hopefully it will keep working that way. So, we'll be back tomorrow afternoon.

01:28:13

And, oh, on Wednesday, I'm not doing a dividing line.

01:28:18

I'll be on with Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron for two hours. We'll be talking about purgatory because we're coming up on the 20th anniversary.

01:28:28

Believe it or not. 20th anniversary. The 20th anniversary of the pay me now or pay me later debate.

01:28:40

Yeah. Yeah. And so, that was a debate with Peter Stravinskas on the subject of purgatory.

01:28:51

And I don't know why Chris wanted to do that particular subject, but there you go.

01:28:59

If you haven't seen that debate, just look up James White, Peter Stravinskas. Peter Stravinskas is very unhappy that if you

01:29:07

Google his name, that is one of the very first things that comes up. He has not been a happy man since that night, to be very honest with you.

01:29:17

So, I'm going to be on Iron Sharpens Iron on Wednesday from 4 to 6 p .m.

01:29:23

Eastern Daylight Time to be discussing the subject of purgatory and Roman Catholicism, the debates we did for years there on Long Island and stuff like that.

01:29:33

And don't forget, if you have a Twitter account, you need to help us out.

01:29:43

Still on the right side? Okay. It is neck and neck. I mean, literally, this could be decided by ten votes one way or the other.

01:29:52

So, it's neck and neck. We talked about it at the beginning, but go to adherentapologetics, aapologetics, at a -a, then apologetics, if you want to find it that way.

01:30:04

There is the March Madness brackets there. All of the non -reformed evidentialists and classical apologists have banded together.

01:30:16

This should, like I said, this should not even be close. This should be, we should be down by 95%.

01:30:25

But we're hanging in there, need your help to take it through to the end, have the opportunity of talking about what presuppositional apologetics is all about and why it's important, and why it's important especially today as we live in a more and more and more secular world.