February 2, 2006

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From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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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.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll -free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now, with today's topic, here is
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James White. Good afternoon. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon, one of the last two
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Dividing Lines for a little while. Well, I'm not sure yet when we'll be doing The Dividing Line when we are over in the
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United Kingdom. But we'll be doing an all -English Dividing Line and we'll be doing an all -Scottish
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Dividing Line while we're over there, Lord willing. And so we will be doing a few things like that.
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I hope to be doing some blogging. I have a wonderful laptop I'll be taking with me. But obviously, the key issue is access when you are on the road.
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I have a dial -up service, but you know how all that is. It costs money and things like that.
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And so we'll be doing the best we can to sort of keep up with things, but I'm also speaking on an average of once a day.
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So that doesn't leave you a whole lot of time to be doing other things like that.
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But looking forward to the time we'll be over there. Yes, complete with accents. Yes, Mutato.
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We will be able to, of course, once we get there and I get to spend some time with Raja, very quickly the accent will come back and we'll be able to do a fine job for you, especially from London, because I'll be speaking at the
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Metropolitan Tabernacle and therefore we'll need to be able to speak the native tongue. I don't know if you can hear that in the background, but there's someone just hit themselves with a hammer or something.
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I'm not completely sure what it is in the background. But anyhow, this is going to be really weird when we get into the new offices and there's a window there and we can see each other, because right now there's just books.
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Some books like the three -volume Webster King Holy Scripture series. That's sort of the general direction where Rich is right now, see?
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But there's going to be a window and I've done radio with windows before and it's interesting, but it'll sort of change the character of things.
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I'll be able to see when he's reaching for the microphone, too, so I'll be able to handle things like that. But anyway...
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Yeah, but you won't have a switch. That's true, but I'll have a switch for mine and if it goes completely quiet, everybody will blame you.
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So that's the problem in being in the control chair. I learned that when
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I ran sound at a very, very, very, very, very large church, is if you do it perfectly, no one cares, no one says thank you.
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If you mess up once, everybody knows where to look. It is the world's most thankless job. I always thank the sound men wherever I go for what they do.
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Anyhow, that's neither here nor there, I suppose. But anyway, I did put some very interesting stuff on the blog this morning and next week, as soon as the same person we were just talking to gets around to getting this listed in our bookstore,
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I'm going to have a neat new resource to list on the blog, so be watching next week and be kind to your credit card over the weekend because you're going to need to use it next week.
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And I'm really excited about it because it finally got here. I had hoped to have it even before Christmas, but it's here and we need to let you know about it and I'm looking forward to that.
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So all the sound men in the channel are going, yeah, you're right, man. That's where you did run sound, didn't you?
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Yeah, I know. I know. This morning, I put some neat stuff on the blog, just basically references to other folks.
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Just in passing, I suppose I could even update because I've seen more things in the news in regards to Palestinians threatening to take people hostage in retribution for cartoons of Mohammed being published in Europe.
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What an amazing thing. Where are, I haven't seen him yet, but there's got to be some
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Muslims out there that are going, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. This isn't how you respond to this.
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I mean, think about the quote unquote art that has appeared blaspheming
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Christ and the cross movies, television programs all over the place.
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And if Christians respond like Muslims do, we'd be running around with M16s taking people hostage at the local
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NBC studios. I mean, it's just unbelievable how people respond to this kind of utter irrationality.
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I'm sorry, but as far as I can tell, down in the trenches, Islam does not produce people who are really people you can talk to.
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When they start losing the argument, they get a gun out. It's amazing to watch this stuff.
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People breaking into offices, they, over what? Over what? Don't tell me that there's not a near deification of Mohammed when you've got this kind of reaction.
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You know, they talk about us deifying someone who wasn't deity in Christ. Well, they're wrong about that, but don't tell me that you're not deifying
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Mohammed when you respond like this. I mean, if someone wrote, if someone drew a cartoon about Isaiah, okay,
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I'm going to take the opportunity of refuting what they're saying, but I'm not going to take people hostage at gunpoint. I mean, it's just unbelievable, absolutely, positively unbelievable.
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Yeah, and as someone just pointed out in channel, the LA Times will then just, they aren't even noticing the difference between the fact that Christianity and Islam respond to things very differently from one another.
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You know, they're just all fundies, they're all fundamentalists. Yeah, that's how it works. Amazing stuff.
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But aside from that, and then the incredible discussion of NBC putting
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Britney Spears on Will & Grace to play a conservative Christian cooking person, a person with a cooking show called
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Crucifixions. I guess they're trying to take over ABC's spot as the primary people who insult
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Christians left and right. But aside from all that, I then linked to a really neat resource, the
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Counter Cult journal that Jeff Downs has been working on. I knew that he was working on this.
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He had asked me if there was something I wanted to submit, and I just, I would love to.
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I mean, there is so much stuff I wish I had time to be working on. You know, but when you're running all over the place, you don't have as much time to be doing things.
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And the blog takes up a lot of time. I mean, this last series I did on John 2028, I know if you just type it all out, it's not that big.
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But the difference is, you can produce lots and lots and lots and lots of material if you're not checking things out and crossing your
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Ts and dotting your Is. But I had to check some stuff out. I mean, there was a reference to Theodore of Mopsustia that I had never seen before.
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And most of my resources, Theodore is not in any of my resources. In fact,
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I eventually discovered that the source that was being cited is a translation of a Syriac work.
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And so it wouldn't even be, I've got Latin and Greek resources, early church writings, all the way into the medieval period, et cetera, et cetera.
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But I didn't have that. So I had to check things out. I had to order one resource in and it took a lot of time.
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And that keeps you from writing some of the other stuff that you want to do. I've wanted to do a blog series in response to Jimmy Akin, The Priesthood, and I've still got that there.
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You know, keeping all this stuff on the computer is just finding the time to bring it up and do a good job on it.
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I mean, it would be easy to do a hack job. It's easy to throw stuff out there. And you know what?
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You'd get away with it with most people. You'd get away with the most. That's just not how we do things, though. So we can't do that.
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But there are some really neat articles. And on, you know, on Islam, the
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Koran and the word of God. And Eddie Dalcor had an article up there on Colossians chapter one and so on and so forth.
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A couple of them that really caught my attention that I would encourage you to read. And the nice thing about this is what
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I'm doing is I've downloaded all of them that I linked on my blog. I've downloaded them and then I printed them to RepliGo.
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And those of you have the Palm devices, no, probably no RepliGo for me.
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RepliGo has just been the best one of the best investments I've ever made. It installs itself as a printer.
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Anything you put up there, you print it. It appears on your on your palm and it appears both formatted.
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But of course, it's going to be pretty small. Or then you can hit a button and it takes it down to the text level.
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So PDFs, HTMLs, Word documents, text files, whatever, it can print it to a format that will be fully readable for you on your on your palm.
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And so I put all that stuff on my palm already so that I can when I have the opportunity. Normally, since I'm sitting back in the economy class someplace,
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I can't exactly set up my laptop, especially as laptops are getting bigger and bigger. I couldn't even open my current laptop in a coach chair.
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Unless my seat was all the way back and the guy in front of me seat was all the way forward, I might be able to sort of squeeze it open at that point.
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But if the guy in front of me moves his seat back, I'm history. So what's nice is to be able to use the the
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Palm Pilot at that point and read these types of things. One of them, especially I've got open in front of me, it came in PDF format.
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We had we set up a little Yahoo discussion group, a moderate
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Yahoo discussion group prior to months and months, months prior to my debate with Greg Stafford. And one of the folks that joined that group was
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Don Hartley, Dr. Hartley. He presented to us at that time, this is a couple of years ago now.
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A discussion of Second Corinthians, four, four, then the relevance of Second Corinthians, four, four, let me back up a little bit and give you some of the some of the context here from the
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New American Standard Bible. Therefore, since we have this ministry as we received mercy, we do not lose heart.
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But we have renounced the things hidden because of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God, but by the manifestation of truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.
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And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the
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God of this world has blinded the mind of the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
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For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ is Lord and ourselves as your bondservants for Jesus's sake.
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Now, the phrase in Second Corinthians, four, four, the phrase in the case in whose case the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving.
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The vast majority of modern commentators take that as a reference to Satan, as a reference to the enemy of our souls, blinding the minds of unbelievers.
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Well, in this Yahoo group, Dr. Hartley presented to us because the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses will make references, as I see here is the use, the term
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God, Theos with the article, and it is being used of a created being.
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And they like to point to that as as one of their proofs that Jesus is less than the one true
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God, even if Hotheos is used of him in various contexts. And he presented to us an interesting alternative interpretation.
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Now, I think that most of us that looked at it, you know, were impressed the amount of work he had put in it.
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And this particular paper, which is linked off of the countercult apologetics journal website, was given, was presented at the 57th annual meeting of the
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Evangelical Theological Society, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. This was just November of last year.
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So this is really, really recent as far as that goes. But he had been working on this for quite some time because it was relevant to his doctoral thesis as well.
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And I just want to read you the conclusion. It's a rather full, it's 22 pages long. Some of the articles are very short.
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This one is very, very long and very, very in -depth, very, very well researched, reflects very well on Dr.
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Hartley. And let me just read you the conclusion. I'm not I'm not suggesting you don't read it yourself, but obviously we're doing a radio program or not a radio program, a webcast or whatever you call these types of things.
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And so just saying read it isn't going to do you a whole lot of good. Here's basically what he's what he's saying.
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Paul advances the notion that Yahweh is the cause behind the lack of success in his own ministry, especially as it pertains to the presence or absence of evangelical faith.
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He also perceives a threat to the gospel underlying his opponent's accusations, namely that is in some way deficient.
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If the interpretation above is correct and that's the one he puts forward, then Paul explains unbelief in terms of God withholding the internal light necessary to embrace the external light of the gospel.
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His explanation reaches back to an old tradition that begins in Deuteronomy 29 3 and is reformulated in Isaiah 6, chapter 6, verses 9 through 10.
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It is neither Paul's lack of success nor the gospel's deficiency, but man's inability to exercise salvific wisdom that defines the problem.
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Paul's opponents, who no doubt viewed themselves as wise, would not have received his explanation without rancor.
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Now, what he's saying is, is that the God of this world is not Satan, but it is
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Yahweh. The term world there, by the way, is not cosmos. It is aionos, age.
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And so at this particular point, then his idea is that this is tied in with what we see in John 12 and Isaiah, chapter 6, where you have a judicial hardening.
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You have. Well, I'll take that back. Not judicial hardening in the sense of, well, you are sinful.
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Therefore, I'm going to harden you as a result of that. But instead, a a sovereign hardening that is a not giving of the necessary grace, salvific grace resulting in the hardening of an individual.
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Over against that is the devil Satan view. And that's what he's referring to here. That's the danger in reading conclusions.
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But still, just to give you an idea, the devil Satan view is unrelated to and find scant support for it within this tradition.
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Moreover, it diverts attention from the condition of the human heart, blames the arch enemy of God for unbelief and seeks a human contingency for the divine action that is either direct or via an intermediary.
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That the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers to say that the true God reserves the right to pass over those not destined for salvation by withholding salvific wisdom leads leading to repentance.
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This interpretation avoids a celestial scapegoat that is the devil Satan and identifies the focal culprits of unbelief left to his own wisdom.
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And apart from the divine initiative, man will always freely reject divine revelation.
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There may be some practical applications to note as well. Number one, the mark of success should not be gauged by the number of converts, but faithfulness to God's calling.
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Boy, how many times have I said that? That was an inserted statement there. No one understood this more than Isaiah, except perhaps
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Jesus and Paul. The success of Isaiah's message was marked by unrepentance and the devastation of Israel's towns and cities.
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This debacle would hardly stand out as an achievement on his curriculum vitae. Frustration in the face of unmet expectations or what some might label ministerial failure often leads to supplementing or truncating the gospel, adopting a seeker friendly approach to ministry or shifting blame to God and others.
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But this evidence is a kind of unbelief reminiscent of the fat heart. Not all failure is human.
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It may be by divine design. Number two, a constant temptation facing pastors and teachers is the desire to dumb down the gospel.
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Behind this minimalism lies the notion that only the simplistic gospel is true, driven partly by the misguided assumption that a child must be able to understand it.
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As a result, significant doctrines are never addressed or the same passages are explained with little depth or insight for fear of losing someone.
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But the problem is not intellectual. The gospel may be presented in its true simplicity or wonderful complexity without avail.
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The simple minded and the wise alike will always treat divine revelation as foolishness, not because it is intrinsically, but because they are fools inherently.
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A wrong theological diagnosis leads to a misguided pastoral prescription. This passage sets the teacher and pastor free to present the whole counsel of God, depending all the while on the spirit to give wisdom with God's wisdom.
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The child and the savant alike will salvificly perceive, understand and know in such a way that solicits repentance.
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And number three. Finally, the interpretation offered here strikes a blow to cults that use this passage to deny the deity of Christ.
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Since this passage does not refer to the devil Satan, but the true God, it may not be argued that Satan is a god in any sense similar to Christ.
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So that's pages 21 and 22, the conclusion of this article.
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Now, when you first hear this. There is you know, and when
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I first heard it, I'm sort of like, I don't know, you know, this age, this present evil age, you know, you've got that in Paul.
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And so we had a discussion about it and it was an open discussion, but I think it was right and proper for there to be, you know, when someone comes up and they say.
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Something completely new that you've never seen before. The proper response is not to just immediately go, oh, yeah,
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I'm grabbing that at the same time, the proper response is not that that can't be right because I'm not going to listen to that.
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Instead, you go, OK, you understand that most folks don't view it this way, right?
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And he does. He starts off saying most folks don't view it this way. But let's look at why. Let's let's look at, you know, the reasons for this.
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And I've been in the same boat. I, for example, the the Lord's words from the cross,
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Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthanai, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I realize that I'm up against a large number of interpreters when
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I say this is not Jesus saying that the father has just abandoned him. This isn't
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Jesus saying the father has just turned his back on him because he can't look at sin as popular as that might be.
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And as often as that's preached, I don't see any evidence of that in the in the teaching of the book of Hebrews on the atoning work of Christ.
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This is the point of Christ's ultimate obedience. This is the citation from Psalm twenty to one. So. I understand what it is to sort of be in the minority on how you view a particular passage, but still you exercise care when someone suggests something like that.
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There's a there's a larger I think there's a larger weight upon the shoulders of the person in the minority than in the majority when they're presenting their perspective.
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And so I've looked at this and I'm not. I'm not saying I've come down 100 percent on this and say, you know, wow, but as I've been reading it,
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I took it with me to lunch, like I said, I had it on my palm. So you're waiting for your lunch to arrive. You whip out the palm.
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You start reading. And I was especially interested in the patristic section at the beginning, the early church writers who touched on this.
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And I found it very interesting to see the parallels in their dealing with this that I had just seen in briefly, once again, getting an opportunity to wet my feet in church history and looking at Theodore of Mapsustia and why he was condemned by the
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Fifth Ecumenical Council and Nestorianism and the and the anti -Achaean view versus the
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Alexandrian view and all that neat, wonderful, fun stuff that you get into, especially when you start dealing with Christological debates in regards to the nature of the human and the divine and Christ and and all that kind of stuff.
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And it was interesting, once again, to see just how deeply influenced by our our conflicts.
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The interpretation of scripture normally is, especially in the patristic period, which is why
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I have said over and over again, you can't simply throw out there the idea that as long as an early church father said it, somehow that makes it right or that makes it, you know, gives it a special amount of authority and all the rest of this type of stuff.
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Because in looking at the various views of 2 Corinthians 4 .4, it was very clear that individuals responded to that text primarily depending upon who they were arguing against.
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If Marcion is arguing for multiple gods and Yahweh is a different god than the God of the Bible and so on and so forth, the
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God of the New Testament, I'm sorry, he's the God of the Old Testament, that's different, the God of the New Testament, then, you know, they have their apologetic concerns that they're bringing in and so on and so forth.
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And beyond that, I had to admit that in my seminary experience, whenever you'd run across these passages that refer to divine judgment, and especially and particularly
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Isaiah chapter 6 being quoted in John chapter 12, it's also quoted in the
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Synoptic Gospels, hardening of hearts and things like that, there was such a, you know, there was such a tremendous response to those types of things in seminary that I just automatically have to sit back and go, man, that's not a popular subject.
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That is a topic that people just are not going to want to touch upon fairly.
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It's not going to be the first thing they're thinking about when they start looking at the passage. So, has this viewpoint really been given a fair shake, is really what you have to wonder about.
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And so, with all of that, I'm certainly, I want to work through all the rest of this presentation.
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There's all sorts of neat stuff on syntax and grammar, and yeah, I admit the whole section of it that really would require a knowledge of the
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Greek language, but it also, there's all sorts of sections that you're not going to need that.
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There is so much material, especially in the footnotes here, that really will be useful.
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I want to spend some more time with it, and I'm very, very appreciative to Dr. Hartley for making this material available, and it's available to everybody now right from those links on the main page right now.
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And these aren't the only ones. There's also, there's a whole discussion of mass and count nouns.
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I have a much larger discussion of mass and count nouns saved on my hard drive as well, but this one is a little bit, shall we say, more understandable than the one that I have, and it might give you more of an idea of what that stuff is all about.
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I noted on the blog, this is where Greg Stafford wanted to go. He, as I saw it, he basically wanted to completely lose the audience at that point, and that to me,
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I felt that would really ruin the debate in the sense of the audience needed to stay focused upon what the key issues were, and so rather than getting off, and I knew where he wanted to go.
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I had read this material before. I knew what he wanted to argue about, and I knew that basically he and I would probably be the only people in the room that were going to be following that argument at that point in time, and hence the whole presentation
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I've made would no longer really be at the forefront of what people were thinking, and so I wanted to stay in something where there was a contextual basis upon which we could address the issue that was being raised in John 1 -1 without basically just just abandoning the entire audience in the process, and so I mentioned that as well.
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So that's there. You might want to take a look at that and avail yourself of all the wonderful information that is out there.
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There is a tremendous amount that is that is available. It truly, truly is. 877 -753 -3341.
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877 -753 -3341. We have a very long -distance phone call from Down Under in Australia, which must be about, what, one o 'clock in the morning or something back there?
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Hello, Peter. Hi, James. It's actually 1026 a .m.
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in the morning. Okay, there we go. Yes, sir, what can I do for you? Not a bad time at all. Well, I've just, you know,
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I've been interested in the problems with the Islamic understanding of not just the scriptures but of the
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Qur 'an and everything, and I've been reading very interested in the stuff you've had on your blog and the cartoons that have come out recently that caused all the trouble.
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Right. I just wanted to point out a couple of things. I've been reading a few other books, one by Mark Gabriel, or was that his pseudonym anyway?
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He used to be a professor of Islamic history at Al -Azhar University in Cairo in Egypt, which is supposed to be the center of all their learning, and his book called
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Islam and Terrorism, and he makes some very interesting points in there about the way that Muhammad started his teaching and how the early surahs are teaching peace and love because he's not in control.
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He's just a mad prophet in the streets. Right. And when he goes from there to become a leader of an army and ruling the area, he then turns everything around.
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So he doesn't go for peace and love anymore, and he starts preaching and writing surahs which say, you know, like, kill the infidels.
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Cut off their hands and legs and their heads and all that sort of stuff. Well, not only that,
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Peter, but you might want to just add to that the fact that some surahs are a mixture of both periods, and hence the amount of confusion is even greater than that, and that's why a lot of folks don't understand why there is all these different schools of thought in Islam and why you've got
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Sunnis and Shiites and why they blow each other up and things like that. Part of the reason that they do so is because the
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Quran itself is incapable of dealing with these issues. It's incapable of answering these questions.
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The Quran is dependent upon the hadith for interpretation, and you have to choose what collection of hadith and what elements of the hadith you're going to emphasize, and blah blah blah blah, and so when people give these simplistic readings of Islam, they're just ignoring all this background material that we see the results of it on the news, but we don't know what's what's all behind it.
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Wouldn't you agree? Well, that's where Mark's book on Islam and terrorism is very, very insightful, because being a history professor of not just the
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Quran, but the hadith and the history of Muhammad and his wars and everything, all the way down through their history, he understands where each verse is coming from.
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Each, well, what do I call it? I don't know, but each surah and section of it, and he points out that the way that they interpret is this way, that the later verses override and supersede the earlier verses.
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So all the ones about love and peace, they're all superseded by the ones about war and beheading.
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So love and peace is no longer what Islam is about. Yeah, well, obviously, within the context of militant
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Islam, that's exactly how they do it. Obviously, when Islam is in the minority, they want to emphasize those other surahs that came from an earlier period of time, and they de -emphasize that idea that what comes later is superior to what came earlier, so on and so forth.
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Islam tends to morph and change once it becomes the majority. I mean, let's just face it, you will get a different kind of response from an
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Islamic scholar in the United States or in Canada than you'll get from an
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Islamic scholar in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. That's just the way it is, and that, to me, is an indication of the faults of the religious system, and that's one of the reasons why we
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Christians must hold to Sola Scriptura and practice Sola Scriptura, because you should be able to ask a
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Christian scholar in a majority nation or a minority nation and get the same answers to the same questions, but you can't with Islam, because it morphs and changes depending upon what the situation is.
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Well, yeah, but Muhammad said exactly the same thing. He said, first of all, that the scriptures were the unchangeable word of God, that God would preserve them himself, and then later on he says they're corrupt, and it's the same sort of thing about the
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Jews. He says they're the people of God, the people of the book, they're the people that Moses led into the
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Promised Land, and that's their land, and then later on he says that, you know, we should kill the
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Jews. He said, look, they'll be hiding behind the rock, and the rock will say, come here and kill this Jew. Well, let's keep just a couple things in mind here.
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I think you can argue fairly strongly that Muhammad in his lifetime did not say the
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Christian scriptures were corrupt. The Hadith might contain some traditions that could be read that way, but the
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Hadith also records Muhammad having the Torah brought and placed upon a pillow, and he says,
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I believe this book, and the only Torah that would be available to him at that particular point in time is the same Torah that we have today.
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So, yeah, the Hadith and the
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Koran, we have to keep those distinct from one another, even though at that point the transmission history of both is very, very complex.
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It's overly simplified by Islamic apologists, by a major deal.
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But anyways, you know, you're exactly right. I think the Christians are going to be learning more and more, but you know what,
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Peter, we've had folks who have actually contacted us and stopped supporting this ministry because I've taken time to be addressing
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Islam. They want me to spend all my time only talking about Calvinism.
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So, you know, what can I say? The truth. You just try to do what the
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Lord calls you to do and go from there, I guess. The other very important thing about their understanding of how to do things is from their history and the
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Hadith and the history of the prophets of Muhammad and their leaders, is that one of their leaders, when he was caught by their opposition, the
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Christians or somebody, he denied the Koran, denied Muhammad was a prophet and everything, and then later on he slit the throat of his leader, of the people that he was captured by.
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He pretended to be converted and then he killed them and he came back to Muhammad and confessed all he'd done and Muhammad said, oh, that's fine.
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I'm not familiar with that particular story. I am familiar with a Hadith that talked about a man that had killed 99 or more people and how he was allegedly forgiven of that, but I'm not familiar with that particular story.
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I might be getting a bit mixed up with the Koran and the Hadith there again. That sounds like a
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Hadith story. It's all in that book, Islam and Terrorism by Mark Gabriel, and coming from where he does and being a convert, his conversion is amazing too, and the things that he had to go through.
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His father tried to shoot him and kill him. He was put in jail. He had to flee for his life.
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They chased him all over the world. Did you hear the interview that we did with the fellow who had come to know
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Christ by reading the New Testament many years ago? This is about two years ago. Did you hear that one we did on the
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Dividing Line? I think so, yeah. Yeah, it was quite an interesting program, really, really was.
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I couldn't mention his name. Right, exactly. We had to call him Peter. That's right.
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Well, thank you, Peter. I appreciate you pointing that out to us. Is that book generally available?
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That's one book I don't have. I got it off the internet. Okay, all right. It's just sad when people think the only way to defend their religion and their proper honor is by saying, when you make a cartoon of someone, we've got to go and kill a few people.
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Oh yeah, it's an amazing, amazing thing. There should be such an outcry on the part of all leaders of Islam, but there won't be.
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You won't hear it. No, there won't be, because they're backed up by the Quran and the Hadith, and they can lie, and they can kill, and they can do whatever they like, and yet they can say that they're a religion that follows the true
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God. Well, we're seeing it happening in Palestine right now. It's a real mess. Thanks for calling,
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Peter. I think I want to encourage you, James, because people think that it's not about Calvinism, but it's true.
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It is about the truth, and people are accepting these Muslims as being a genuine and a faithful religion, and they ought to be pointed out for what they really are.
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Well, we heard just recently someone referring to radical Islam hijacking a noble faith, and I really have a hard time with the noble faith part, because I think you can make a pretty good argument that these folks are being pretty faithful to the original founding perspective.
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All right, thanks, man. Thanks for calling. All right, thanks very much. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.
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Not sure what string of numbers Peter had to dial. I bet you it was a few more numbers than that to get through on the program today, but those are probably the numbers, however, that Chris dialed.
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Hi, Chris, how are you? Hi, James. It's always a pleasure to speak with you, and I really appreciate the writing you do on your blog.
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I got, actually, the first news about John Piper's problem with cancer off your website.
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That's really the reason I was calling you, even though it's quite interesting listening to you talk to your
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Aussie friend there. I heard that same quote that you mentioned, and you just want to kind of shake your head.
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Well, it's politics. Let's face it. You have to say it. You have to throw that bone out there, or you're going to spend the next hour deflecting all the criticism from the mindless zombies on the left about being a mean, terrible, horrible, nasty person, even though, in reality, the words don't mean anything.
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I don't know. I throw my hands up in the air and go, look, someday someone's going to have to step up and speak the truth.
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I remember Michael Medved, a number of months ago, saying, you know, for a long time, I've been trying to say that the problem is radical
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Islam, and I'm wrong. The problem is Islam. It's not radical Islam. It's just Islam.
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It's the whole religious system itself and what it says and how it says it and what its sources of authority are.
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He just had to come straight out and say it. The West has got to figure this out, or there's not going to be any
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West left to figure it out. It's funny you say that. I was watching a fellow one night on C -SPAN.
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Maybe you've heard of him. His name is Sam Harris. He's got a book out. Basically, he's an anti -Christian, atheistic individual.
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But, you know, some of the things he was saying were true. He made the same statement that you just did and said, you know, you never hear of a
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Buddhist terrorist. Anyway, the guy's lost and very misguided, but some of the things that he was saying in his atheism were quite true.
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I mean, of course, he's against anything defied or religious. What I wanted to ask you about is, you know,
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I get a copy of Dave Hunt's newsletter, and I think you know John Piper personally, don't you?
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Only in that we've communicated a small amount. I have not had the opportunity of speaking face -to -face with Dr.
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Piper. I don't know that he would recognize me if I walked past him on the street, to be honest with you. Well, I'm going to get a chance here, hopefully, if his surgery goes well and it doesn't interfere with his itinerary.
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I don't live too far from Louisville, Kentucky, and I'm sure that you're familiar with the Together for the
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Gospel conference that they're going to have coming up in April. So I hope that he's in good enough of a shape that he can be there.
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He's supposed to be. Anyway, a writer had wrote in to Hunt and asked him if he had heard of Piper's philosophy of Christian hedonism.
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Did you happen to see that? Yeah, I actually blogged about it. I just mentioned it in passing.
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Right after the newsletter came out and that little portion was in it,
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I made reference to the fact that that particular portion of the newsletter struck me as almost incoherent in its writing style.
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It was extremely poor and gave great evidence that whoever wrote it had never read more than a page or two or maybe a couple paragraphs of John Piper's work.
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Quite simply, and this is where I'm going to offend folks, but listen to what I'm saying. Whoever wrote that lacks the intellectual capacity to understand what was being said.
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Whoever wrote it, and I doubt it was Dave Hunt. I have a feeling I know who else writes for The Breeding Call who's probably behind this.
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The simple fact of the matter is the criticism was so juvenile and so shallow and utterly lacking in any understanding of what it was pretending to talk about.
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It's embarrassing that someone would put their name to it or would allow that to be distributed out to the public.
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Did it upset you? I mean, it upset me when I read this. Well, it upsets me not in the sense that any of his readers are probably going to care one way or the other what
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I say. They're probably not going to be reading Piper in the first place, so I don't know it's doing much damage along those lines.
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He has so marginalized himself over the past number of years that most of the decent folks that were on his list have already been removed anyway.
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So I don't know about that, but I hope I always remain upset when
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I see people like this pretending to have abilities and knowledge in a particular area when they very, very clearly do not.
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And pretending to be teachers of the word and have insight when they don't even bother to do their homework.
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And when they do express themselves and they're refuted over and over and over again, they refuse to accept correction and just continue on pandering their traditions to other people.
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So that's what bothers me is that I obviously have been on the short end of the
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Bree and Calls stick just as John Piper has been. And it doesn't bother me on the personal level.
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It bothers me that these people call themselves Christians, and yet they continuously violate a Christian standard of truth.
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That's what should bother, I think, pretty much everybody. Yeah, well, I think too what disturbs me is
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I've been on biblicalpreaching .com and listened to John Piper's sermons. And he's definitely a servant of God and a very fine preacher.
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And what struck me as so offensive was almost an attack on his character.
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And that's what upset me about it. It's just troubling because it seems like anything that has to do with Reformed theology or any person whose name ends up in Hunt's Bree and Call is going to be criticized just for the simple fact of Dave's and his cohort's hatred for Reformed theology.
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Well, I didn't mention on the program, but I received an email from a gentleman about two weeks ago now.
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And he was telling me an incident. He was at a conference, and he saw a balding, gray -haired gentleman sitting across from him.
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And he started talking to him and said, Are you Dave Hunt? And yes, I'm Dave Hunt. And they started talking. And this man is
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Reformed, but he never raised that issue. No one else even raised it, but Dave kept bringing it up himself and just ravaging what the mistake he made was.
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Some discussion had been offered about Roman Catholicism, and this fellow made the mistake of mentioning me in one of my debates against Roman Catholics.
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Well, he's an arrogant Calvinist, and he was off to the races. One of the things that really, really bothers me is that Dave hides behind this silly excuse that he's said everything he needs to say about Calvinism.
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That's why he won't defend himself and debate against me on this subject. That's not why he won't, and he knows that.
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He hasn't said everything he wants to say. That's why he keeps saying everything he's saying. That's why he's written another book on it, and that's why he talks about this all the time.
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And he goes around giving conferences on it and everything else. And so he has plenty more to say.
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There is only one reason Dave Hunt won't debate me. He knows he would lose, and he would lose so badly that no one could possibly defend him on it.
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He knows that. And so to make up these excuses, I just don't know how he can look at himself in the mirror anymore.
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I just don't understand the thought process that's involved there. If you know that you can't defend your position against someone, just be honest enough to say, you know what,
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I can't do it. And, of course, that then raises the issue of why, and you might have to deal with that.
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But that's what really bothers me about it. So, yeah, there is an irrational element to a lot of this stuff.
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When we've done Radio Free Geneva and you've listened to these sermons, no one finds them to be overly coherent in their presentations and things like that, and very much based upon appealing to people's emotions.
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You listened to George Bryson and the debate we did in Los Angeles, and what's he doing?
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Is he providing meaningful exegesis, or is he saying, well, if this is true, then maybe your mother's going to go to hell and there's nothing you can do about it.
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I mean, this kind of just amazing kind of argumentation that marks so much of this stuff.
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I think I've heard you mention one of Dave's friends, Ed Newby. Does that name sound familiar?
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No. Well, anyway, back when Dave wrote this thing about the whole
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Calvinist not being saved thing, I wrote him an email, and I normally don't do this.
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I usually keep to myself, but I thought that was pretty outrageous. And, of course, Mr. Newby responded for him.
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In the email, I told him, I said, you know, I know for a fact James White has challenged you to debate these issues several times, and you've declined.
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Listen, I'll read just a short paragraph of what Mr. Newby sent me back. He said, if Dave, and I'm quoting him, if Dave were afraid to have his views examined by Mr.
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White, why did he invest months in a book debating Calvinism that preserves his views, thoughts, and position for anyone to examine at length, repeatedly at their leisure?
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The reader can examine the statements. Their sources go back and forth between the two positions and examined with greater depth and allowed in a live debate format.
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It is not reasonable, therefore, to state that the book debating Calvinism is not a valid, helpful exchange.
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And then he says, due to its very nature, a live debate may often give only a snapshot analysis of the issues involved.
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While it may prove a partisan crowd -pleaser, it is simply incorrect to deem it a superior forum.
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For these reasons, Mr. Hunt has decided that the book will stand as his response. Well, and as I have pointed out over and over and over again,
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Dave does not want to be asked direct questions. Even when I would ask direct questions in my material, he didn't have to answer it.
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He didn't have to answer these things. He never gave meaningful responses on John 6. I would love to ask him about Acts 13, 48 and which of the four or five different explanations he's offered, which he's eventually had to withdraw, he now stands on.
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He doesn't want to have to deal with Hebrew originals of Acts. He doesn't want to have to deal with citing the
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New World Translation. He skipped all that in the book, and I guess he's just hoping that his followers are so benighted that they're not going to notice the footnotes or the refutation of his position.
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The fact of the matter is, he knows, and if he's listened to any of our debates, he knows the debate takes place in cross -examination.
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The cross -examination is what he would not allow himself to be exposed to. We just tried to set up another debate with an
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Arminian that I've debated before, and the one thing he wanted to do is he wanted to cut out cross -examination.
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He did not want to have that period of time where I have a Greek text open in front of me, and I'm asking, okay, what did
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Jesus mean when he said these words? That's what these anti -reformed folks don't want to have to do.
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Evidently, it's because people don't put them in the position of having to do that in their own churches, and they want to have to avoid doing that in front of a camera, too.
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The fact is, to Mr. Newby or whoever, I now recognize the person who writes back, the correspondence secretary, he's decided to let that stand because he doesn't have to engage in actually providing answers to the many questions that would be asked to him directly that he cannot answer, and he knows he cannot answer.
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That's just a fact. That stands. I think any rational person recognizes that, and if Dave Hunt says otherwise, then let's debate it and prove me wrong.
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It's unfortunate. I think it's a shame because just like other people that have platforms to express their viewpoints from and the countless numbers of people they affect,
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I mean, Dave Hunt obviously has a platform and a listening audience, and it is a shame that people can make these expressions of their views, but then when they're challenged, they do seem to hide behind books and other things and won't stand up to it like a man.
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Oh, well, let me tell you. I could give you the names and addresses of some people who have attempted to arrange debates on this subject with some of the most outspoken people in the
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United States, and their rejection list is very long. These are people who will stand up there, and they will very boldly proclaim the heresy that Calvinism allegedly is, but then when you say, well, how about we get together?
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We'll even come to your hometown. You won't have to travel. We'll come to your own church, for that matter.
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It doesn't matter to us. All of a sudden, no, no, no, we don't need to do that.
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We don't want to be giving a platform to heretics and so on and so forth. It is truly an amazing thing, and the only
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Arminians you can really get to debate, basically, are the philosophically -oriented ones that aren't going to have any interest whatsoever in getting into the biblical text.
50:31
You remember when I debated John Sanders on inclusivism, if you ever heard that debate, we get into the cross -examination period, and I start asking you about John 6, and it's like, well, you know, the
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Calvinists have their view, and the Arminians have their view. We're not going to solve that tonight, and I said, well, but could you tell me what
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Jesus meant in these words? And he's sitting there opening his Bible, turning slowly to the section, and he says, well, it's been many years since I've looked at this passage, and you're just like, the people in the audience are staring with these dumbfounded looks going, you've got to be kidding me.
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Yeah, it's almost silly. You just throw your hands up in the air and go, whoa, what is going on here?
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I don't know. But anyways, I think that's very, very clear to folks. I can't worry too much about the people who can't see this.
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If they won't listen to what I have to say, if they won't examine the information themselves, what can I say? I'm not here for those folks.
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I can't help them. I really, really can't. I simply have to leave that up to the
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Lord. They may be brothers and sisters in the Lord, but I'm not the one who's ever going to reach them.
51:37
That's all there is to it. Well, Dr. White, you're very much appreciated by many people, and I'm very thankful for your website, especially since I live all the way out here in the
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Midwest, and with all the apologetic material that you have on there and the streaming audio,
51:53
I can hear things that I'd never get to hear otherwise. Well, Doug, keep in mind, I should have this up by now.
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I should have it up fairly soon. But 21st of April in Sedalia, I think that's
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Missouri, isn't it? Sedalia, Missouri? Sedalia, Missouri. That sounds right. I will be doing a debate at a high school.
52:18
It's a high school group. I think it's a Christian high school. And they've had 800 people show up for their debates the past two years on creation and evolution.
52:27
This year they want to do Calvinism and Arminianism. Wow. And they contacted me, and when they first contacted me, they said, would you be willing to debate
52:35
Norman Geisel? And I'm like, yeah, but let me take a wild guess.
52:40
You actually haven't heard back from Norman Geisel yet, have you? And they wrote back, well, no, we haven't.
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I said, well, let me tell you what's coming your direction. And I think when I first started telling them, they were like, ah, come on.
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But then the rejection letters started coming in. And can't be there that weekend,
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I've got to floss my cat's teeth. And, you know, this kind of stuff. And the list,
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I mean, he contacted Hunt, and he contacted pretty much the entire staff of Liberty University, Falwell and the
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Urgen -Kainer and all these people. And all we ended up with was I had this
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DVD that I had been playing some sections out of Why I'm Not a Five -Point Calvinist from a
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King James -only fundamentalist Baptist preacher. And finally he was about to give up.
53:27
The organizer was about to give up and say, there's no one who's going to do this. And he contacted that guy, and while the preacher wouldn't do it, there's an attorney in his congregation who's going to do it.
53:40
That's what the debate's going to be. So I think it's April 21st. I'll have it on the blog, obviously, and the calendar once I've got all the details.
53:49
But it wouldn't be too far away, I would imagine, comparatively to Orlando or L .A.,
53:55
the debate with Shabir Ali and so on and so forth. So you might want to keep that in mind and get a chance to say hi. Yeah, it'd be a pleasure.
54:01
All righty. Well, thanks for calling. Good talk to you, Jay. All right. God bless. Bye. Yeah, that one, I didn't bring my poem with me, amazingly enough.
54:09
It's coming over, and I thought, I need to have that. It's either the 21st or the 22nd of April. It's a daily up, and I've asked that the gentleman, because it was very clear.
54:19
Some of you will remember, it was a Radio Free Geneva episode where basically what I was saying was, here's what happens when you take
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Dave Hunt's material and you have someone who can actually speak well, because the pastor of the church is a very good speaker, a far, far better speaker than Dave Hunt is.
54:34
Here's what happens when you take Dave Hunt's material and you present it in a better way of speaking.
54:42
And unfortunately, I've forgotten the gentleman's name off the top of my head. He would not debate me, but he's real big in the homeschooling movement.
54:52
He would not engage in the debate, but for some reason felt it would be okay to have a layperson in the church.
54:59
And the only thing I've requested is, could I please ask that the gentleman read both debating
55:05
Calvinism and the potter's freedom. I don't want to have to spend the entire debate slashing away at all the straw men that are going to be put up if all we have being thrown out there is
55:19
Dave Hunt stuff. Dave Hunt stuff has been refuted. It's bad. Here's the refutation, and would you please at least represent the actual position that I would be representing as far as Reformed Theology is concerned.
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So, that's coming up in April. We may, Lord willing,
55:39
Lord willing, we're trying to work on this. I may have to take two trips to do it,
55:44
I'm not sure, but we are still attempting to get two debates in March. Now, if you're thinking with me, if I leave next week for the
55:53
UK, I'm gone for two weeks. I come back right at the end of February, so March is right there, and so this is pretty unusual to still be trying to arrange something this close.
56:06
But that situation we find ourselves in, the possibility of one or two debates in March in regards to one on homosexuality and one with an atheist,
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I really, really, really hope that that comes together, especially the individual who is a homosexual.
56:26
I have referenced him in the same -sex controversy and would be very, very desirous of having an opportunity of once again addressing that issue, which, of course, will also be the issue we'll be addressing in November with John Shelby Spong, and that, of course, is a part of our conference and cruise, and I hope that that does not slip under your radar screen just because November sounds like it's a long ways away.
56:54
Let me tell you something, it isn't. For me, it isn't. I mean, I got so much stuff going this year.
57:03
November is right around the corner, and with everything we've got going on with the move of the offices and things like that, it's going to come down on us at a speed that's unbelievable.
57:18
But like I've said before, don't put yourself in the position of getting close and all of a sudden realizing, man,
57:24
I want to be there. I want to hear Tom Askew. I want to hear Phil Johnson. I want to hear Pulpit Crimes.
57:30
That's such a neat subject, and then to have John Shelby Spong there in the debate on homosexuality, wow,
57:38
I really want to be there, and all of a sudden all the discounts are gone. No, now's the time to do it.
57:45
Now's the time to plan ahead. The links are on the website. Please don't put it off. It helps us in our planning too as well, and it, in fact, takes a lot of pressure off of us.
57:55
When we know there's going to be enough folks there to support what we're doing, it makes differences as to who we are looking at debating and things we're doing down the road.
58:06
I mean, seriously, when you participate in the conference, when you participate in the cruise, you are supporting this ministry, and you are saying, keep doing this kind of thing.
58:18
And when the interest falls off, then you go, well, then we need to stretch these things out.
58:24
We don't do it as often, that type of thing. It's very, very important for us in our planning and things like that. So keep that in mind.
58:30
We will be back Tuesday, next Tuesday, our last American dividing line for a couple of weeks, and then we head over to the
58:38
U .K. We'll see you then. God bless. We've been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
59:35
If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.
59:40
Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the
59:46
World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.