May 4, 2004

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

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll-free across the United States.

It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Opening Banter and Program Setup

And good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and I feel fine. I just don't sound overly good. About an hour into my class last evening, five hours worth of teaching, all of a sudden I started sounding like Kermit the Frog and lo and behold, start listening to the radio this morning and there is this stuff going around all over the place.

And then I start thinking back and, oh yeah, my daughter had something and my wife had something and so I guess it's time. It's probably actually a grand governmental conspiracy, but I didn't see any black helicopters flying over, so that's just sort of how it works.

Anyway, just before we get started today, I mentioned last Thursday we're going to try to get hold of Scott Klusendorf to be on the program today. We were unable to get together. He's traveling all over the place and I know exactly how that works.

I can't tell you how many times I've gotten some kind of a phone call as I'm leaving an airport someplace and somebody wants to do X, Y, or Z and, you know, with everything else you've got going on, you don't even remember to return the phone call from the message.

And, you know, 28 days later, the system notifies you about this message that you saved. And so you just sort of go from there. So that's how it is. So we will be live today and, in fact, we are live with our high humidity East Coast representative.

Michael Fallon joins me this morning for just a few moments. I understand that we need to inform our adoring public of some issues regarding the upcoming debate and conference in L .A. How are you doing today, Mike?

Good afternoon, Dr. White. How are you?

I'm actually doing just fine. I just sound terrible, but other than that, I'm doing just fine.

Well, this sounds like the Dr. White that was visiting me in Florida.

Oh?

Well, yeah, once we got on the ship.

But...

Actually, it sounds like you're doing one of those, like, midnight programs like Fishing.

Radio.

Yeah, well, you know, I used to play those on KWAO and Sun City. We had...

What was it?

Night Watch? Was that what it was called? And, you know, you'd have this guy that would talk like this, and he would talk about how wonderful the Lord is. And I could do that now, but I can't do it normally, so I better not get a job doing.

That.

National Conference, Debate, and Cruise Plans

So what's going on with the conference?

Well, Mr. Pierce and I just put up a few changes on the website. A number of people have been emailing me and calling me for information about the conference that we're going to be having coming up, and this year we're going to be doing the 2004 National Conference for Alpha and Omega Ministries.

It's going to be a two-day event, November 5th and 6th. Day number one, starting at 7 p .m., is really a very important and historical time. If you're followers of the ministry here at Alpha and Omega Ministries and have been reading Dr. White's books, you're very concerned about the things of God, about the truth of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, Christ alone, then certainly this is something that you want to make sure that you're at.

If you're familiar at all about New Perspectivism or Auburnism and some of the issues surrounding these sorts of new theological ideas, certainly one of the most vocal proponents of some of the tenets of Auburnism, I don't want to say all of them, but the majority of the tenets of Auburnism is Douglas Wilson, and it was our desire to try to bring Doug and Jim together.

And if you find the desire to call me right now, that probably would be a very good idea.

That sounded very pretty.

You can PM me in Merck if you don't mind, but right now we have an opportunity to have really the first, I believe, has there been a debate on Auburnism so far, James?

No, there have been, you know, Knox Seminary has done a colloquium and things like that, but it was behind closed doors resulting in a book, so as far as an actual debate, it's all been done, to my knowledge so far, in writing, not in person.

Well, this will be the first, I guess, formal debate then in public of some of the issues surrounding Auburnism, and certainly the issues that will be discussed, and if you see kind of our first title, Our Roman Catholics, Part of the Covenant People, is a title, but more specifically what's going to be discussed is does Trinitarian baptism make one a member of the new covenant?

And this is really the crux of the entire issue and what will be pretty importantly debated between Doug and James. This is something you really don't want to miss, and also some of the conclusions that Doug comes to are quite different than, let's say, what so far are formed Presbyterian brothers, who we very much love and call brothers and sisters in Christ, his conclusions are quite a bit different.

So this is an opportunity to come, be a part of this event, to be able to ask some questions at the end and so forth. Hopefully, James will have his voice back by then, but then the next day, we have our national conference, and this will be at the Sheraton LAX, so let's say that if you're flying in from another town, let's say you can get a cheap flight from San Diego, or if you want to drive up, you want to fly from Phoenix or from Texas or someplace else, those flights are actually pretty cheap if you're coming from Oregon, Seattle, wherever, and even myself from Tampa, I can get a flight for about $170 to LA.

You come, stay at the LAX Sheraton there. The next day, we're going to be having a conference, a full-day conference, on the new challenges to justification. Some of our speakers will be Philip Johnson, who is affiliated with Grace to You, you might know him from the Spurgeon Archive and from the Hall of Church History, Sky Man from the Chat Channel, and author of Holy Scripture, Our Pillar and Foundation of Truth, Steve Camp.

Steve Camp is, of course, well-known to all of us in the reformed circles as far as his great music that he's produced over the past few years, and is right now, I believe, celebrating his sixth anniversary of the 107th thesis, if I'm not mistaken.

And he's going to sing his entire presentation.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't blame him, he actually does a great job doing that sort of thing.

In Gregorian chant.

Well, yeah, actually, that'll be you and I. Then, Eric Spenson, actually from New Testament Research Ministries, will be sharing with us, and Dr. White at the end. We're probably going to let him sleep in a little bit, he usually works himself up quite a bit during the debate, so let him sleep in a little bit, come up and be fresh.

But we are going to hit a lot of the issues to do with justification, not just New Perspectivism, but many of the other issues with Roman Catholicism and others that really need to be discussed. And we're going to be sending out a lot of flyers to the area seminaries and colleges that are in the LA area and California area, and try to bring them in and really get folks involved in learning about some of the answers that we have towards some of our new challenges.

Not only that, but also for the crews. Folks, if you go on the cruise, all this is free for you. You don't have to worry about admission prices into the debate or the conference that's taken.

Care of.

Our staff will then be going on a seven-day cruise, and you don't want to miss it. It's just absolutely fantastic. It'll be Jim's chance to unwind and dress down, if you will, a little bit. And really, this is a great opportunity for you to be able to come in a teaching environment with all these folks, in a discussion environment as well, like we had at night, where we can sit around and discuss some things that maybe are troubling you, or some touchy issues and so forth.

Theologically, the folks have always been concerned about, but always afraid to ask in other situations. It's a good time to do it, because I think we handle all of the issues that we discussed last time.

Except for the gospel, to start with, with a lot of craze, just one caveat there. But we really would encourage all you folks, we've made the price so low and so available to you folks. We really hope you take advantage of that.

I also want to add that if you do come and stay at the LAX Sheraton for two days, you'll get the entire conference and debate for free. And that's double occupancy per room. So if that's a deal you just can't beat.

We're trying to make this an event that all the folks that have been following the ministry can come and be a part of, rub shoulders with some of the folks that you've always heard on the dividing line, and also get a chance to meet Dr. White.

And Mike, you might want to also mention that the special rate that we've got with the Sheraton there, if folks need to come in a day early, or be able to stay over, say, Sunday night, they're going to be able to get that rate there as well for those extra days.

I believe, what, Thursday night through Sunday night, we're able to have those rates?

Yes, Zucchini. If you come in on Thursday, or Wednesday, or on a shoulder day afterwards, let's say that you would like to stay Sunday as well, you can still get that same rate. Let's say that you want to stay over a day and go to John MacArthur's church the next day.

You can still get the same rate of $89 per night.

However, you have to then tithe to John MacArthur's church.

Or I guess we can just hand that to you.

Tithe to MacArthur? I think he wrote a book about that.

Anyway, that's what's going on. Folks, I really hope you take advantage of that, and we really hope to see you there. I know that Sola Scriptura will be coming up about then, right?

Yes, it comes out in October.

We're all looking forward to that.

And the Ecclesiology book comes out in July.

Yes, sir.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, they moved it up.

Fantastic.

Well, James, I hope you feel better.

I feel fine, just don't have much of a voice.

Okay, well, I'll look forward to hearing the rest of the program, and I'll turn it back to you, sir.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mike. And so that information is available on the website. We've had a lot of folks asking questions about that, and we needed to get that taken care of because it's easier to do it this way, since a lot of our folks listen to the program.

That is to answer each one over and over and over again. I was just going to mention, on Douglas Wilson's blog, I don't know who this is aimed at, to be perfectly honest with you, but yesterday I read on his blog site, if I may speak in a Hebraic mode for just a moment, for two things I give thanks, and for three I am extremely grateful.

First, I am very thankful for the godly character of my wife and family. Second, I am grateful for the integrity of my friends and co-laborers in the gospel. And of course, I can echo all of that. But third, after careful consideration of the subject, I have to say that I am profoundly grateful for the caliber of my enemies.

And I can second that one as well. I think I can hear all of that in a way that I can accept and go, yep, I fully understand exactly what you're saying there. Just not sure who the definitions of all those things would be.

As far as the application goes, the blog is fairly new, and of course it's humorous. It's called Blog and Mayblog, and I first saw that, I didn't get it. And then the old premillennialist in me kicked in, and I went, oh, oh, yes, that's Gog and Maygog.

Okay, I'll figure it out. It was sort of funny. But anyway, I'm forwarding over. I multitask while we're on here. I'm forwarding over a smaller picture that we can put on our main site so we're not kicking out a 1 .6 megabyte graphic every time somebody hits our site, and we end up owing our ISP $47 ,000 this month or some outrageous thing like that.

So I'm sort of multitasking here, and that's okay. 877 -753 -3341. A couple things that I wanted to mention, there was some very interesting things on.

The blogs.

Last week, I mentioned, was it last, yeah, it had to have been last week. I sort of mentioned at the beginning of one of the programs that the American Association of Christian Counselors was having a Breaking Free Council Fest 2004.

This was taking place at David Jeremiah's church, and that one of the speakers was T .D. Jakes. And I just sort of mentioned this in passing. This morning, someone sent me an update, and if I go to the same webpage I went to just last week, there used to be, let's see, two, four, there used to be 10 speakers, special Saturday speakers listed.

Now there are nine, and Mr. Jakes is missing. And so I am assuming that either the American Association of Christian Counselors or David Jeremiah, one of the two. So we have a call on that very issue.

Is that what you're indicating to me? I was just going to mention this because someone had sent it to me, and actually it was Tim Oliver over in California that sent me the email this morning that mentioned that he's no longer there.

He has an update on it. Okay, well, let's just go with that since that's what I was going to be mentioning anyways. Let's talk with Mike in Florida. Hi, Mike.

Hey, Dr. White. How are you?

I'm doing pretty good.

Excellent.

Hey, look, I got your book, The God Who Justifies, not too long ago, and a total thumbs up on.

That work.

I don't know how long it took you to put that thing together, but I'll tell you that is.

No measure.

It was one of the hardest books I've ever written, not because of the subject, but because it used to be easy to write books because that's all you were doing, and now you're doing so many different things that it's very hard to get that feeling of consistency and.

Flow.

Mike O 'Fallon, who's also in Florida, who was just on, will tell you that they tried to get me off the boat. I forget which cruise it was we were on, but I was sitting in my cabin tapping away on that very book.

That's good.

Anyway, so what's going on with the T .D. Jake situation?

Well, yeah, I called you a couple of weeks ago, got some info from you pertaining to, I guess, there was an older dividing line program which you had addressed to my attention.

Did you track that down?

I did.

Thank you very much. What happened was I did bring it to the attention of my pastor, and needless to say, he did listen to it, and we had about a three-day discussion on it. And well, things didn't go over so well at first, so I had further discussions with him on that point.

One of the things that I wanted to, well, it actually was brought to my attention from my pastor was, how do I know T .D. Jakes was not taken out of context regarding the clips that were aired? I said, well, I can see you're concerned about that.

I think it's legitimate. So the gist of the whole thing was, I said, well, let me see if anybody at the A &O has any way of finding out when that program was aired with T .D. Jakes, and see if they have the entire clip of that sermon available.

Right.

So that's pretty much where I'm at with it. He did think some things were taken out of context.

Well, if you've ever listened to a T .D. Jakes sermon, I'm not really certain that you can establish a context. I was watching him just briefly last night, and you get to a certain point in his style, and it really becomes random emotional outbursts, because everybody's staying on their feet, and they're weeping, and they're crying, and so on and so forth.

But to my recollection, I did not do that program. I've heard it, but I didn't do that program. My recollection is that I think that entire program is available, and I think it was given to the folks at CRI at one point, because they frequently will take clips and play things.

Like that.

And so I think it would be possible to get the information, and Eddie Dalkour is the gentleman who was on the program, and my assumption is he would still have that tape. And so I'm trying to remember, Department of Christian Defense, Google Department of Christian Defense.

I'm trying to get his email off of that, and see if he could give you the entirety of the date and the tape itself, because I sort of have to ask the question, why would we want to do that? I mean, if there was something in the context that somehow ameliorated this, why would we

That's just not what we do. I suppose if we had a track record of constantly doing things where you use ellipses and draw things together from 47 different pages that are separated from one another, that I could understand that.

But we don't have any reason to do that.

I did mention that to him. I said, you know, I was telling my pastor, I said, look, A &O Ministries is a pretty solid.

Ministry.

These guys obviously know that Obviously, they don't want to get involved in a flim-flam, lest, of course, they get themselves in trouble.

Right.

Obviously, they don't purposely set out to misrepresent people. I said, look, I have a lot of Dr. White's books, and I said, look, the guy is totally.

Solid.

As a matter of fact, I've turned him on to your Forgotten Trinity book, which I suggest to him that, of course, you do some more reading on the subject with.

Right.

But, yeah, as a matter of fact, you guys, actually, Simon Escobedo and Eddie did a great job.

Yeah, they did.

They went very much into detail on it, and again, it's, you know, the only reason to do that, it's not like we don't get anything from doing that. It's very, very much the kind of thing that keeps you a nice, small ministry, and in fact, I just brought up ChristianDefense .org is Eddie's website if you want to jot that down.

I'm pretty with Eddie.

He's done a pretty good job with regard to his, I can tell he's dedicated a lot of time to the subject.

Right, and he does spend a lot of time on it, and he just recorded that program straight off the air. He wasn't looking for anything. He was just recording it, and you heard what, you know, and the thing was, they played multiple.

Minutes.

I mean, it's not like it was, you know, 20 seconds. You know, it's one thing to just take one little clip, and then they go on and talk about all sorts of other things, and so on and so forth, but that's not what they did,.

So.

Yeah, the dividing line, actually, where Simon, Eddie had, you know, been with each other, you guys did a far greater job than CRI did. It was far more probing.

Well, that's because, yes, because Simon and Eddie tend to be that way.

Hey, thumbs up on that one.

There you go.

That's what it's about.

Yeah, well, I hope that helps, you know, you get to a point where, you know, if someone doesn't want to believe that that's what Jake's is about, they're going to find a way not to believe that that's what Jake's is about, and I don't know why that would be, but, you know, you just put the information out there, and basically, the fact is that what we're dealing with in much of evangelicalism today is a real downgrade in the central doctrines of the faith and their relevance, and you can see this in the preaching.

I mean, if you were to take, if you were to somehow, if there was some database of the substance of all the sermons preached in evangelical churches, however in the world you define that, this coming Lord's Day, I think you would find that those that actually address the doctrine of the Trinity and identify it as a definitional doctrine would be in the .01 range of application, and so, you know, that's what we're up against.

Hey, just a quick finishing thought. There's a young pastor in this area here in Fort Myers, Florida, who is the grandson of the former general superintendent of UPCI, Nathaniel Urshan III, I think Urshan II, I can't remember anyway.

I actually met with him here personally last year, a buddy of myself, and he's a young pastor, and he's gaining quite a bit of prominence in this area because he's, well, he's highly influential, and he's used the UPCI to his advantage, basically to get his name out there.

I bet.

And anyway, I had emailed him here because he's local, and I asked him what he knew about Mr. T .D. Jakes. He is familiar with him. One thing he did mention was how T .D. Jakes dances around oneness in Trinitarian terms.

Right.

I was trying to appeal to both parties, but not yet taking a firm stand one way or the other to avoid being divisive.

And that's the biggest problem for me. I would much more respect a man who would just simply come straight out and say, this is my belief, and I am passionate about it. What really concerns me about the Jakes situation and the response to it from evangelicals is it is all based upon the idea that, you know what, we can all get along, and we can sell books, and we can make lots of money, and we can be very, very popular, as long as we just simply don't let this silly theological stuff divide us.

And as the late Dr. Walter Martin called out, the non-Rockabodish mentality.

That's exactly what's going on, and it's only getting worse, not any better. And when you come down to issues like the Trinity and things like that, it's similar to what happened with the K-Love Radio Network out here in Phoenix when letters came in to them concerning issues regarding modalistic oneness singers.

They said, well, we want to agree on the 90 that really, you know, it's like, oh, okay, so the Trinity's in the 10 doesn't really define things. Yahoo, what a day we live in. Well, hopefully, Eddie can track down the specifics for you, and if he does, I'd like to hear about it.

Absolutely. Dr. White, thank you for your time.

Thank you, sir.

Have a good one.

Take care.

All right, God bless.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877 -753 -3341. There's the update on that. I don't have any information as to exactly why TD Jakes' name is not appearing on that particular piece of literature now, but I suppose that's a positive thing.

What I would like to see, you know, would be some interest on someone's part in regards to a defense of the Trinity, but, hey, you know, what can I say? 877 -753 -3341. Let's now talk with Stephen in Toronto.

Hi, Stephen.

Hello, Dr. O.

How are you?

Doing good.

You don't sound too good today.

Well, that's okay.

Anyways, I just have two questions. The primary one is I've been talking to this Roman Catholic fellow, and he was talking about that none of the early church fathers spoke about people being justified by faith.

Alone.

And I was wondering whether or not there are some early church fathers that I could point him to and just show him that they did talk about that.

Justification by Faith Alone in Church History

Well, there's a section on this in The God Who Justifies. Let me get it out here for you.

Okay, I'm reading that book right now, and it's an excellent book. I really appreciate your effort, and my pastor wants to borrow that book.

Well, no, no, no. He needs to buy that book. Let me see here. Let's see. I know it's in here someplace. There is a section on the subject of church history, and that particular subject, it's within the first eight chapters.

I'm just sort of thumbing through it here. Yeah, here we go. It starts on page 129, if you've got the book. And so I won't repeat all of that. But you can look at particular individuals. You can come up with particular citations.

Certainly, you can look at the epistle to Diognetius, which we don't really know the exact date on, but it's very, very early on. Where you have presentations on that, you have a section in Clement, 1 Clement, the actual genuine letter from the Church of Rome to the Church of Corinth that some people date is even earlier than the Book of Revelation, but I don't necessarily agree with that.

But the fact of the matter is, you're talking, you're asking, this is one of those many, many places. In fact, we just finished a class just last night on development of patristic theology, and one of the constant themes that I repeated to the students was the need to deal with church history in a fair fashion, and that is to not ask of these individuals questions that they themselves were not addressing.

That is what, and this is especially a grievous activity of Roman Catholic apologists, they're sort of forced into it, actually, by the beliefs of their faith. That is, they're told that the early church believed what they believed, and so therefore they are given a matrix, a context in which they are to read the early church fathers.

And so they then look back upon these early church fathers in an anachronistic fashion. They read their modern theology back into them and say, oh, see, they were talking about these things, when in point of fact they weren't.

And so I have said many times to my students, do not force the early church fathers out of their context. Drag them into our modern context. Sit them down and say, answer the questions that we are wrestling with today.

And that's what we're doing when we ask them to address issues regarding justification and the like, which they were not addressing in the context in which we are addressing.

Them.

And so to say, well, you need to find such and such a phraseology or terminology. You know, you can look at some passages from Ambrosiaster. You can look at some passages here, there, and everywhere. But that wasn't the debate at the time.

That wasn't the issue at the time. And so even if they used that terminology, were they using that terminology in the same way that would be relevant to the modern debate, so on and so forth. So the unfortunate part in dealing with many Roman Catholics is they have been modeled a completely backwards mechanism of fairly studying the early fathers by their apologist leaders, the people they're reading, whether it's from Catholic Answers or Envoy magazine or these other various and sundry people that are out there.

And all they've ever seen are just these lists of statements, and they don't know anything about context. They don't know anything about looking at an early church father and saying how much, if it's a real primitive father, how much even of the New Testament does this person.

Have?

How stable is this person? How consistent is this person? How much of the person's writing do we even have to be able to develop any kind of meaningful understanding of what they believed about things?

Many early church fathers didn't even address the subject. And so to even ask, well, what is a consistent theology during a period of time when that's not even part of the debate is completely unfair.

So the problem is they don't know that, and so they've been given this wrong way of doing history, and so they come to the wrong conclusions based upon not having all the facts available to them. And so it's really a matter of just trying to do some education there.

And the problem is, of course, there's just not a whole lot of people from the Protestant perspective who are in a position of being able to give that education anyways. If you want to hold on just one second, we're going to take our break, and I'll take your second question.

When we get back from this break, 877 -753 -3341, we'll be right back.

The Church as Pillar of the Truth and Roman Catholic Authority

Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality. Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.

In their book, The Same-Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including Genesis, Leviticus,.

And Romans.

Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law. In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.

The Same-Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at almen .org.

Answering those who claim that only the King James Version is the Word of God, James White in his book, The King James Only Controversy, examines allegations that modern translators conspired to corrupt scripture and lead believers away from true Christian faith.

In a readable and responsible style, author James White traces the development of Bible translations, old and new, and investigates the differences between new versions and the authorized version of 1611.

You can order your copy of James White's book, The King James Only Controversy, by going to our website at www .aomen .org.

What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book, Chosen But Free? A New Cult? Secularism? False Prophecy Scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called Calvinism.

He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant. In his book, The Pottish Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler,. But the Pottish Freedom is much more than just a reply.

It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very Gospel itself. In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so-called extreme Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the Gospel preached by the Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture.

The Pottish Freedom, a defense of the Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at www .aomen .org.

And welcome back to the Dividing Line. Let's go back to Stephen and your second question.

Hi, Stephen.

The second question has sort of a follow-up on the first. It has to do with authority. The fellow again was saying that the Church is authoritative over the Word of God. He wasn't too sure on exactly how to address that one in a meaningful way that he can relate to.

He was quoting about that the Church is the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.

Well, of course it doesn't say that the Church is the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. The only passage that might be referred to there is the local church is described in 1 Timothy 3 .15 as the pillar and foundation of the truth.