Another Open Phones Dividing Line

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line when we turn the microphones on. Rich is just not multitasking well today.

Hey! There we go. Gotta find those buttons. And the music's going and alright.

The YouTubes ran away from us right at the top of the hour and so he was trying to get things working again and we'll give him a little break for, you know, not getting the transitions right and stuff, but hey, it's okay.

Doing a Zoom call program again today. I should have put that out on my feed and I forgot to do so.

That is my fault. Well, or did I? I don't know. I probably thought about it. Went so well last week.

Why not? Before we get to the calls real quick, I just got this in the mail.

This is Pro Pastor, a Journal of Grace Bible Theological Seminary, Volume 4,

Number 1, Fall of 2025. Titled, The Victorious Church. And put my old man reading glasses on here.

Some of you recognize these reading glasses from... Was it NCIS? No, NCIS.

The guy that... No. No, the old doctor guy was with, what's his face, with NCIS.

We disagree on this particular... CSI Miami, folks. Look it up. That's the guy.

Do I have to go to Grok right now? I remember this guy. Anyway, they are useful.

So we have victory through the chief shepherd, victory through the word, victory through the ordinances, that's mine, victory through prayer, victory through under shepherds, and victory through worship.

Victory through worship is Scott Anuel, victory through under shepherds, Sam Waldron, Jeff Johnson did through prayer,

Rob Davis, victory through the chief shepherd, and Jeff Moore on victory through the word. So, GBTS is focused on pastors, encouragement of them.

You can go to the website and get hold of these publications, get on the list, stuff like that.

Just came out. Hopefully you'll find that to be useful and helpful and all that kind of fun stuff.

I'm going to let the callers direct where we go. I do have some stuff floating through the mind.

Yes, sir. I do need to remind the callers, actually the ones who are in the waiting room can't hear me right now, but if you are in the waiting room and listening on YouTube, I don't let you in unless I have your first name and the topic you want to talk about, so you need to rename to do that.

You may have to exit Zoom to do that and fix that, and then I'll let you in. All of them that I can see have a name and a topic, so I can't see the waiting room.

I don't know what I'm seeing, but okay, that's fine. Oh, it's different than the waiting room.

Okay, all right. Let's go ahead and talk to Noah, because I sent

Noah a paper and we'll try to keep this one brief. I'm not going to reread the paper anyways.

Noah, go for it. Hey, Dr. Wyatt, appreciate you taking my call. My question is about the eldership qualification,

Titus 1 -6, that a man must have faithful children. Are these faithful children, are they

Christians? Are they simply in submission to the father while they're at home?

What's your take on that? Yeah, and I sent you a paper. I wrote a paper back in the late 1990s, as I recall.

At the time, the elders of the Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church, which was right before I became an elder there, actually. And I went through the translation of –

I just realized what got sent to you is probably not the best version I have. I apologize. I'm looking at it now.

At least I think I'm looking at it now. I have a bunch of different versions of it. And I may find a better one, because this did not handle the

Greek properly at all, and so that's not good. But I focused on the parallel passage in 1

Timothy 3, 4 -5. And when you put the two of them together, you see that it's not upon the salvific condition of the children, but that they're under control.

And I think that's the only way that you can look at the fact that we are given two versions of this qualification, and the only way to read the two of them together is to read it in that way.

And so that's the position that I've always held on that. That's opposite to John MacArthur's position.

MacArthur's position was that all of an elder's children had to be professing believers.

And I just always found that odd, in the sense that that would mean that part of the qualification of being an elder is that in God's sovereignty,

God elected all your children. And that's a mighty big claim in light of the fact that the parallel passage in 1

Timothy uses a different descriptor. Faithful can mean under control, as it is in Timothy.

So that's definitely the position I take. I don't take the position that it is a requirement of the eldership.

And it really would have been strange in the first century for that to,

I mean, especially that early on, trying to ordain elders, and you wouldn't have yet had consistent

Christian families. You'd literally have to say that the pastoral epistles could only become relevant at a later point in time.

That they couldn't have been relevant in the early, you know, I mean, when the apostles went about, as Paul did, ordaining elders in the churches.

And this was, you know, within a year of the church being formed in that area, within a year of when the gospel first came to that area, his children already had to have been converted in that time.

What if they didn't live in that area? What if they lived in an area where the gospel hadn't come to yet? What if they had no way of knowing?

Did you not ordain someone unless you knew that all their children had accepted the gospel?

Or had, you know, it just seems, it seems the simplest way to read

Titus 1 .6 and 1 Timothy 3 .4 -5 together is that the children are under control.

That doesn't mean, that means they're not running about burning town down at night.

But I don't think that it means that they have been examined and have been found to be professing believers and live a proper life that represents that and all the rest of that kind of stuff that you can try to throw in there.

And I know there are people who disagree. I just, I think it really stretches credulity.

And by the way, I will, if you want to hang in the room, now that I've gotten the font size big enough on this to see that it did not handle the

Greek, because this was written so long ago, Unicode Greek stuff hadn't developed yet.

Seriously. And I think I have somewhere in here a, well, maybe

I'm looking at something different. Did you open up the file? He's muted.

Noah, yeah. So Noah, if, if... Yes, I was able to open it.

Okay. Looks fine to me. The Greek displays? Yes, sir. Oh, okay.

All right, well, what I had on the screen had a bunch of English characters in place of Greek and it looked, it was a total mess.

So if your Greek displays, you're good. Then we're on it.

Okay, I appreciate it. Thanks. Hopefully that'll be helpful for you. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, God bless. All right, let's talk to Caesar.

Church history and the Bible. Caesar is still muted. There we go.

Hello? Yes, sir. Can you hear me? I can now. Hi, Dr. White. Sorry, I have a sore throat.

It's that time of year, I'm afraid. I woke up this morning and had a little coughing going on.

I'm like, oh, come on, not now. Yeah, especially up here in Boston. Boston?

There are still Christians in Boston? We are far, I think, far and few, but we're still here.

So my question has to do with church history and I guess on how we received our

Bibles. I was speaking with an Eastern Orthodox, and I'm trying to understand the sort of argument that he has regarding the fact that he would, so he would claim that in order for us to know which, what is

Scripture, like which books are considered Scripture, we would have to go back to the church to make, for the church to make the pronouncement on what books are

Scripture. But if we do that, he says that we would discover that the true, quote unquote, the true church would be the

Eastern Orthodox Church. And I wanted to ask you, how would you navigate in trying to answer this sort of argument?

Because when I read the early church, I don't necessarily see denominational differences, but more like core beliefs that are in the early church.

Yeah. Well, yeah, a lot. There's so many things here. It's interesting.

Right before the program started, one of my projects next year is going to require me to be spending a very extensive amount of time on Eastern Orthodoxy.

I've been mentioning this, and I'll just go ahead and mention that we'll be doing debate in October of next year that will be on the subject of Eastern Orthodoxy, well, specifically on the subject of Nicaea 2.

We're working on location, and we've pretty much got a lot of the details worked out, but right now

I've got to read Rich into the email list, or email series that just started last night, so he can be involved with all the stuff you've got to do about recording everything and all that kind of stuff.

Anyway, and one of the primary areas of inquiry that I will be pursuing has to do with an early writer, relatively early writer called

Pseudo -Dionysius. Now, that's what he's called by pretty much everybody today, the entire scholarly consensus,

I'd say 99 .9 % views what's called the

Dionysian corpus as having been written around the year 500 AD, so half a millennium after the birth of Christ.

Now, what's interesting is the Eastern Orthodox have sainted

Dionysius, and there is a long historical belief amongst both

Roman Catholics and Orthodox, though it's certainly not big amongst Roman Catholics anymore, that these books, which the vast majority of scholarship recognize were written half a millennium after Christ, were actually written by the

Dionysius who is mentioned in Acts chapter 17 in Athens. Dionysius the

Areopagite. And so they sainted this man, and the whole story that, again, historically only developed half a millennium later, they have made him a saint just like they did with Thecla.

And the vast majority of church historians would say neither of these people, Thecla didn't exist, and the

Dionysius who wrote these materials was 500 years after Christ, he's not the Dionysius who's mentioned, just in passing, in Acts chapter 17.

But since they have sainted him and his story, they're rather wedded to it. And the reason

I mention this is there is a movement right now, and I'm going to be writing in response to it, to overthrow the entire scholarly consensus and to say that these books, which are filled with,

I mean, they're just Greek philosophical works. They are so far removed from the apostolic worldview and teaching that it's astonishing.

But they did really influence the church after they were written. They influenced

Thomas Aquinas, for example. Because they didn't recognize that they were written by someone long after the claimed person.

This movement is to say this is the actual pristine apostolic

Christianity when it actually represents Greek philosophical

Christianity in the 6th century. And when you're talking to an Eastern Orthodox person,

Eastern Orthodoxy is Byzantine Greek religion that was codified in the 7th and 8th centuries.

And so that's where the connection is. And that's why they want to say you're going to be dependent upon us.

Now the Roman Catholics are going to say, no, you're going to be dependent upon us. They get to argue these things. The thing is,

Eastern Orthodoxy does not have the same level of dogmatic clarity, especially when it comes to canonical issues and things like that, that you have with Roman Catholicism.

But even Roman Catholicism doesn't have that dogmatic clarity until 1546 when the dogmatic, infallible definition of the canon is made at the

Council of Trent, April of 1546. So that's one of the problems with Eastern Orthodoxy is you're directed to the

Church, but you're not given the kind of firm dogmatic answers that you would expect for Western thinking people because Eastern Orthodox don't think like Western thinking people.

And the problem is, once you accept that, well, okay, the only way I can know is to accept the authority of the

Eastern Orthodox Church, now you're stuck accepting the sainthood of people that never even existed, or that the sainthood of people whose names were borrowed by someone 500 years later to write

Greek philosophical works, but now they've been sainted, and so you have to accept that. It's similar to the problems that Roman Catholics have today.

Okay, you want to accept the papacy as your final authority? Well, now you've got to deal with the fact that the most recently passed

Pope, Pope Francis, quite simply would have been burned as a heretic by the

Roman Catholic Church in the year 1600. So what do you do with that? And when they make these changes, and there are changes coming, for hundreds of years the

Roman Catholic Church had, for example, in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, capital punishment given by God for use in extreme circumstances, but necessary for the maintenance of civil order, etc.,

etc. And now it's always been sinful. Well, was it sinful when the popes taught it before?

Well, you're not allowed to ask those types of questions. And your ultimate authority keeps moving back one step, moving back one step, and the objectivity that Scripture gives you is lost.

So the same question is valid for the Eastern Orthodox as it is for the Roman Catholics.

How did the believing Jewish man, 50 years before Christ, know that Isaiah and 2

Chronicles were Scripture? And how they answer that, there was no

Eastern Orthodox Church. If they say it was the Jewish Magisterium, the

Jewish Magisterium never accepted the Apocryphal Books, for example, as being Scripture, so that causes a problem for the

Roman Catholic perspective. I have met Eastern Orthodox that have told me with great confidence that they do and do not accept the

Apocryphal Books as canonical. And part of the problem for that is that historically those books have held a middle ground.

That's why they're called deuterocanonical, even by Rome. Secondarily canonical. There were lots and lots and lots of people in history that saw them as containing valuable insights and valuable stories and stuff like that, but they then made a differentiation between them and the canonical books that had full authority.

So it depends on who you're reading and who you give more weight to.

Since Orthodox theology is so often defined on the basis of the prayers and the liturgy, then prayers and liturgy that come from one certain person might lead you to one conclusion, but prayers and liturgy from another person might lead you to another conclusion and that's why you do get variances of opinion and they end up arguing with each other about certain things.

So it's a different type of situation. So you have to remember when you're talking to an

Eastern Orthodox person who is primarily raised in a Western milieu, they're going to respond to you differently than Eastern Orthodox folks who are from Eastern Orthodox countries and where Eastern Orthodox, you know,

Ukraine, Russia, Greek Orthodox, things like that. They think differently than we do and they respond differently and that can sometimes cause us no end of consternation to be quite honest with you.

Okay. I think I understand. Thank you, Dr. White.

Would that be then true to say that the early church is more of a lower case

Orthodox than an upper case Orthodox in order to just differentiate between the denomination and the beliefs?

Because some of the denominations carry other traditions that they assume are Orthodox?

Yeah, I don't think the term denomination is overly useful.

I mean, certainly anybody can see the differences between a Tertullian pre -Montanist years and a

Justin or you can see differences but those aren't denominational differences.

A lot of them have to do with how much of the New Testament they even had available to them at a particular point in time.

That certainly makes an impact and you start seeing and again,

I wouldn't use the term denominational but you start seeing differences between East and West pretty early on and Western theology tends to be more forensic and legal and Eastern more mystical.

Eastern is in Greek Western after Tertullian is in Latin and those differences in practice and things build up over the years until you finally have the schism of 1054 but really functionally that had taken place earlier than that in the way that people think and then of course you have the rise of Islam which has a huge impact on Eastern religious expression the

Byzantine Empire and stuff like that. So I wouldn't use the term denominations but you do see differences and you have to remember the ancient church did not have the speed and level of communication that we have so we need to be careful not to translate their activities into our context and make assumptions based upon that.

It happens all the time. So if that sounds somewhat complex because it is.

Don't worry, I'll rewind the video in order to make sure I fully understand just in case.

Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Wright. Someone just tried to FaceTime me during the program.

That's interesting. I have no idea what that was about. We'll have to get to that later.

FaceTime? Yeah, car warranty? I don't think so. FaceTime, I rarely get that.

Oh, okay. Well, they're trying again. Interesting.

Hey, I was just informed and I just verified this.

This isn't a news program or something but we have Christians listening and what

I've been told by two different sources here is that Matt Slick's wife is pretty much passing away as we're speaking.

They're removing her from life support and I had not heard anything about this at all and so I just checked with someone who's close to Matt and so hey, just call on the saints to pray for Matt, pray for that situation and grace and mercy and peace that only

Christ can provide. That's a hard, hard situation.

It truly is to be facing. Pray for Matt Slick and for his wife and that the

Lord be glorified in all that takes place there. Okay, I have someone with their hand up.

Okay, that's what I figured. Let's go ahead and talk to Wesley. Hi, Wesley. Hi, Dr.

Wyatt. You can hear me, right?

I can. Hi, I tried to go on last time but missed it but I'm here now, so that's pretty cool.

I was going to ask about, as you can see, Catholicism slash Sola Fide. Lately I've been getting a lot into research of Catholicism and stuff like that because I just get into arguments with everyone about Catholics being

Christians or not. I was going to ask you about some stuff. It's technically a few things but the main thing is, a lot of people keep not agreeing that Sola Fide is an essential doctrine to Christianity and saying you don't need to believe it.

My question is, what is the best way to defend that? Because it's an area I haven't been able to do well convincing people on.

Wow. Big, big questions and big, big topics.

You need to understand that that is a question that is only relevant to sadly, a small portion of people who call themselves

Christians. Why do I say that? Globally speaking, the largest portion of people who call themselves

Christians so the state churches in Europe and state religions in various countries where people call themselves

Christians but they don't live a Christian life, they never open a Bible, they don't attend services or if they do, it's once or twice a year and nothing is preached to them about scripture.

The number of people that are really concerned about something like how a person is made right before God is sadly relatively small.

The other reason that it's relatively small is that it is assuming that we have a sure word from God in the first place.

It's assuming that scripture is sufficient to answer such questions and unfortunately a large portion of the world's population that calls itself

Christian does not believe that the Bible is actually capable of answering that question with any certainty.

And so the majority of people who would even know what sola fide means come self -consciously as the offspring of the

Reformation. Sola fide is one of the five solas of the

Reformation. It was what's called the material principle of the

Reformation. It was the substance of the preaching. Justification by faith alone, by grace alone was the substance of the preaching of the

Reformation. The formal principle of the Reformation was sola scriptura that you define and answer these questions first and foremost by reference to the sole infallible rule of faith of the church which is the scriptures.

This is a conversation that you can't have with a

Mormon because the Mormon and you don't believe in the same God. You can't have this conversation really outside of the children of the

Reformation and people who claim that as their history, as their pedigree.

And so you can't argue the priority of a belief with someone who doesn't have the same foundation that you have.

It will always end up just going in circles and accomplishing nothing and giving you carpal tunnel syndrome from typing on your computer while you're angry.

You have to be aware of that. The Reformed believe that justification by faith is definitional to the church and that without that, you're either talking about a falling church, that is a church that is falling into a sub -biblical view of the gospel and hence eventually that message of peace will be so covered over with human tradition that the people who are part of that church will no longer have peace with God.

That was the fundamental message at the time of the Reformation was that it wasn't that they were saying that everybody within Roman Catholicism was lost, they didn't believe that.

But what they did believe was that the church of Rome had moved so far from the apostolic witness of what the gospel was and had encrusted the gospel with so many man -made traditions that you couldn't dig your way down through it.

Now they still believe there are people who found it and they still believe there are people who had that peace but their focus was to get rid of all that had accrued over centuries and centuries and centuries and go back to the apostolic witness which is found in scripture.

And so the thesis of my book The Roman Catholic Controversy that I wrote a number of years ago now

I actually bought that book for this So I will address this,

I will talk about this subject in the book if you haven't had a chance to look at it yet and the final thesis of the book is that all these other things, sola scriptura, the

Marian dogmas, the papacy all the rest of this kind of stuff their primary relevance is that they stand in the way of a

Roman Catholic from having peace with God. And how do you have peace with God? Romans 5 .1,

therefore having been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And so everything else that you're debating, when

I debated Mitch Pacwa on sola scriptura in 1999 what did I say at the end of the debate?

I piled all these books of dogmatic theology and canon law and everything else up on a table next to me and I said, what you're being told is you need this to be able to understand the words of Romans 5 .1

and I say to you when you believe all this you will no longer hear the words of Romans 5 .1

they will bury that simple truth, they will not clarify it and that really is what it all ends up coming down to is who is the blessed man of just a few sentences before that to whom the

Lord would not impute sin? Well, the traditions of Rome have stolen that peace from someone who's in the

Roman Catholic Church. They can't believe that they are the one to whom sin will not be imputed because the traditions of men have overridden the apostolic teaching.

So, sadly even amongst Protestant evangelicals who most of the time don't know where they came from they won't say that that's the central doctrine and look, you need to be careful you'll find all sorts of discussions that would say that the

Trinity is the central doctrine and I would actually agree with that in the sense of definition.

The reason we emphasize Sola Fide the way that we do is that we are talking about defining the church in history regarding the gospel and that's what led to the

Reformation. There are obviously more basic issues than Sola Fide because that's a higher level doctrine but without it that is a divide that very clearly defines where a church stands and unfortunately, in my opinion the majority of people living today in the

United States go to churches that if they ever mention it or define it, it's certainly not considered to be central and definitional in their experience and so all these churches may trace themselves back to the

Reformation but that doesn't mean that they are still actually focused upon what the Reformation was focused upon.

Okay. That makes sense, I think. Well, sometimes online arguments can drive you further into study and that's great and sometimes they can just become a distraction and it takes wisdom to know which one's which.

Okay, good. It's like people from my church that do it with.

Also, one more quick thing. I keep hearing you mention this one prayer to Mary but I can't remember where it's from because you mention it and you use it when talking about Mary stuff but I don't remember what you said it is called.

I don't know if you're watching right now but I'm holding the book up. It's called The Glories of Mary by St. Alphonsus de

Liguri and the specific version of it that I have read repeatedly came from The Redemptorists, One Liguri Drive, Liguri, Missouri I didn't know there was

Liguri, Missouri but anyway, this was the very little booklet that I took with me to Boston when

I met with Jerry Matitix and WEZE radio program there and this is what

I read to him. It's in the book but this is the very little booklet

I found in the chair in the chapel at Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital. A mother of perpetual help, thou art the dispenser of all the goods which

God grants to us miserable sinners and for this reason he has made thee so powerful, so rich and so bountiful that thou mayest help us in our misery.

Thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to thee. Come then to my help, dearest mother, for I recommend myself to thee.

In thy hands I place my eternal salvation and to thee do I entrust my soul. Count me among thy most devoted servants, take me under thy protection and it is enough for me.

For if thou protect me, dear mother, I fear nothing, not from my sins, because thou wilt obtain for me the pardon of them, nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all hell together, nor even from Jesus, my judge himself, because by one prayer from thee he will be appeased.

But one thing I fear, that in the hour of temptation I may neglect to call on thee and thus perish miserably.

Obtain for me then the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance, and the grace always to have recourse to thee,

O mother of perpetual health. And that was the prayer that I read to Jerry Matitix.

I expected him to say, Oh, James, James, James, that's just piety. He looked across that radio studio at me and he said,

James, my honest prayer is that someday you will be able to pray that prayer with me. So, that is

Orthodox Roman Catholic piety and I think for anyone who knows the scriptures, it is astonishing.

It truly is. But you need to know that's what's there and that's just one of hundreds and thousands of such prayers that you'll find in De Montfort, in Liguri.

Liguri is a doctor of the church. This book was in over 800 editions and this was years ago.

It's probably 900 by now, I don't know. Yeah, that's where it comes from.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for that. I'm going to make sure to write that down. So yeah, thank you. Okay, alright, thanks a lot.

God bless. Okay, there's another hand up. Okay, alright.

So, Austin, yes sir. Hi, Dr. White. Thanks for taking my call.

Yes sir. So basically, recently I was trying to discern the kind of how we figure out which sort of issues are sort of necessary for salvation and which aren't because I always sort of assumed that Protestants who accept the basic doctrines are saved but I spoke to a guy and he said basically well, the

Lutherans can't be saved because they think that baptism saves and Paul says that if you trust in circumcision

Christ is of no avail to you and so in the same way if you think baptism saves then Christ is of no avail.

So I was sort of figuring, thinking to myself how can we sort of figure out which kind of issues you need to believe to be saved and what kind of doctrines can get you into hell because after I heard that I wasn't too sure who

I can think is saved, which of my friends are and which of my friends kind of aren't. Well, first of all it's not your job so you can take that weight off of your shoulders it's not your job to make those decisions it's your job to discern truth and error but it's not your job to read hearts and to determine who is trusting and who is not.

That's a burden that unfortunately many people online like to take every day and decide to send people off to hell and they will someday discover that was massive foolishness on their part.

What we are called is to be discerning about teachings, not reading somebody else's heart and so someone may say to me yes,

I believe this false doctrine thoroughly that probably is an indication of a lack of the spirit of God in their life but I have seen people who said things like that, who changed who later

I discovered didn't really believe that. I like to try to hope for the best and just be thankful that I am not the

Holy Spirit fruit inspector instead I am called to call balls and strikes when it comes to what is taught in the

New Testament and what is taught in the New Testament tells me that there are fundamental, foundational doctrinal beliefs.

There is only one true God. There is no way you can read the Bible and come to the conclusion that polytheism is a valid belief for a follower of God.

There is only one true God. That one God has revealed himself as Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

You read 1 Corinthians 8 the early prayers of the church. They take the Shema they add Jesus to it.

It is very clear, the deity of Christ, the personality of the Holy Spirit. Who God is in that sense?

Then Paul anathematizes the pseudodelphoi, the false brethren who say you have to engage in these particular activities before you can actually have faith in Jesus Christ and believe in him and receive salvation.

The complex of ideas that come with that, the fallenness of man and sin the fact that God is just to punish sin the centrality of the cross the resurrection of Christ, these all become foundational issues.

Yes, the task of the mature

Christian is to grow in their lives to such an extent that they are able to make decisions about the rings of divine truth what is absolutely core and central what is vitally important and the rings keep going out until you finally get to what are called adiaphora things that don't make a difference things that maybe we are studying discussing, debating but they don't change the central core and that of course is where you have the great debates.

The independent fundamentalist Baptist like I was raised had a very small amount of adiaphora and everything else was absolutely definitional so I was raised at the same but you just said,

Lutherans are lost because they believe baptism saves. I've met Lutherans that didn't believe that I've met

Lutherans that interpreted baptism as a work of the

Holy Spirit under the sovereignty of God and had a completely different view and Presbyterians, historically their view of baptism is not ex opera operato that it's just baptism does it but I've known

Lutherans that have slipped off the road on the wrong side of that one too and so look let's say you're in a

Presbyterian church where the truth is being proclaimed regularly but then imbalances develop and does that mean you're going to lose your salvation does that mean

I'm very thankful that I can leave all that to God and I can stay focused on what the doctrinal issues are and I'm going to try to extend as best

I can a willingness to a wide variety of folks we've got all sorts of disputes and debates

I was told by the pastor of a church this past weekend that I'm engaged in wicked deeds that I'm evil and need to repent and it's all because I've dared to criticize a brand new movement that he and his church are a part of and he won't give specifics but just throw it out there you know what,

I have to go there's a guy, there's a church and there's a movement I cannot recommend when they make foolish statements

I have to point them out but I'm not going to sit here and say and I therefore know that man's heart and he will never be an heir of grace that's where we need to stop and go, no, no, no

I'm going to focus on issues I'm going to respond to specific matters but it's not my job to do that it's not my job to make those decisions and the fundamentalist in me or in other people immediately pushes back and goes well, but Paul did, yeah,

Paul was an apostle Paul had an authority I don't have and I'm not going to pretend to it and whenever people try to do that I just think of certain people who would go, well look at how the prophets they railed at people and all the rest of that stuff and I just go, you know what,

I know my heart and if I go there

I'm going to be so consumed with self -importance and all the rest of this stuff people think, oh you're already like that no, folks, if I get hit by a truck on this next trip and that's it

I'm gone, the kingdom's going to keep on going Rich is going to have to get a different job but he ain't going to be doing no legacy ministry replaying dividing lines but the kingdom's going to go on and I am in no way shape or form necessary to it if I have been able to promote it over the course of 40 some odd years great, fine, wonderful,

I'm the recipient of that grace but I'm I'm just a small little footnote in church history as we all are and I just know that if I adopted the idea that a lot of these people have that I'm the fruit inspector and that I get to make these decisions

I'm going to be doing a lot of foolish stuff and so focus upon what is core in the biblical revelation and especially in the new testament revelation who is

God, what is salvation who is Jesus Christ and allow for the fact that on how you apply such things as baptismal theology or things like that there might be differences of opinion and I'm going to let

God judge that. I'm going to teach the truth that there's nothing I can do to add to the work of Jesus Christ there's nothing

I can do to effectuate that work in my life outside of the spirit of God making that happen and if someone says well

I think God does that through baptism okay I'm going to look at it and go I think that theology developed long after the apostles and here's my evidence but I'm not going to then you know,

Chris Rosebaugh is a Lutheran and I think I've seen him make certain statements about baptism and I would go well that's why

I can't go to his church and I can't affirm what he's saying here but I'm also just loath to say and that means he's not a

Christian that's the step that people want to take that I don't think the new testament gives us a right to do but it seems to be the soup du jour every day on twitter and facebook and everything else and I think all of our collective blood pressures would be a whole lot lower if we just didn't take that job on ourselves okay yeah thanks so just really quickly one other thing

I know you had a debate with Doug Wilson about whether we can call Roman Catholics our brothers in Christ do you think that the

Catholics take an extra step that the Lutherans don't take which is why we can talk about the

Lutherans as Christians but not the Roman Catholics well again notice the difference there do you think

Roman Catholics take that extra step what we should say is does Roman Catholicism take that extra step because yes it does

Roman Catholicism has anathematized the gospel to council Trent and so the gospel of Rome is not a saving gospel so my thesis with Doug is that my brothers and sisters are those who embrace the gospel of grace do

I hope and pray that there are Roman Catholics who they may not understand they may be using different language but they too are trusting in the gospel of grace despite all the things around them in their church

I hope and pray that that's the case that argument was more about Trinitarian baptism and things like that from his perspective when they are baptized in the name of the

Trinity they are basically placed under a covenantal situation that has requirements of them that Rome doesn't even teach them it's sort of a rough situation to be in that was a little bit of a different topic but I'm differentiating between Roman Catholicism knowing and hoping and praying that there are

Roman Catholics who have a simple faith in Christ so as I've said many times there are

Roman Catholics who will be saved it will be in spite of the church not because of the church and of course their perspective is just the opposite their perspective is anyone who will be saved will be because of the church and so there are

Roman Catholics that believe that I will be saved and they'll say it will be because of the church even though I'm outside of that church they would say that in a sense

I'm not because of my profession of faith so it gets rather complicated at times but yeah

I would emphasize saying that it's about Roman Catholicism not

Roman Catholics because that changes it from something you can identify to something you can't ok thank you very much

God bless you too ok let's wow only a few minutes left here you know we spent a lot of time

Andre on First John 5 I don't know if there's a whole lot more we can say about that I think some folks are burned out about that let's talk with Kyle real quick here on Icons Hi Dr.

William thanks for having me on I've recently read True and False Religions by Zwingli and a book about idolatry by William Perkins you had mentioned some time ago that there were councils before Nicaea that forbid the use of images, icons, etc and I was curious what those councils are and why there was a change from forbidding to allowing

I think the Bible is pretty clear well wow there's a lot there sorry a lot of folks don't know what icons are first of all and the centrality that they hold especially in Eastern Orthodoxy just again to give because I mentioned this earlier in the program and always keep in mind whatever council you can quote against a position all they have to say is it wasn't ecumenical there were no ecumenical councils before Nicaea they were all local councils and therefore they can be disagreed with so yeah you did have that type of thing but it's irrelevant because the 7th ecumenical council is all that matters does that involve anachronism ignoring of history, development yeah it ignores all of it but that's what you're dealing with but what people need to understand is this whole concept of authority ecumenical councils developed over time when the first what is now called ecumenical council the council of Nicaea in 325 met nobody knew what an ecumenical council was that phrase had no meaning in the

Christian church people weren't sitting around going oh man I can't wait until we have our first ecumenical council it didn't mean anything to anybody the phraseology came from Constantine who called it but all it meant was a council of bishops from across the world now ecumenical council has a specific meaning that grants infallibility ultimate authority to the actions of that particular council nobody in 325 dreamed of that they didn't have that as a concept they didn't defend

Nicaea on the basis of that and so it's so easy and I mentioned this in regards to Joshua Charles it's so easy for modern people to grab these definitions put the glasses on the face and then look back in history and go oh it's so clear now but that wasn't clear at all and so the issue of icons

I'm not sure there were early references yes but the most important ones is the 7th ecumenical council in 787 is where iconidulia the service of or veneration of icons was established as dogma the problem is in 754 you have the council of hieria which said the opposite that was an iconoclastic council that council claimed to be ecumenical too and then after 787 early in the next century you have a council meeting in Germany and they take a mediating position they reject the conclusions of Nicaea 2 and they're not as strident as the 754 council but their arguments are tighter in regards to images and worship and things like that and so they clearly did not think that the 787

Nicaea 2 council this is the frankfurt council they certainly didn't think that they had decided the issue now today eastern orthodoxy looks back and says well of course they did so these other councils no matter how learned they were they're just rejected and of course the 7th ecumenical council anathematized everybody who had been at the 754 council so there's no compromising here amongst these various groups but the reality is these were not issues in the early church the eastern orthodox attempt to read various texts in such a way as to come up with veneration of icons is honestly and we're going to be reviewing one of the books i think it was published last year or the year before making this type of argumentation from my perspective the argumentation they're using now is so strained and so stretched and so pushed that it is one of the best arguments against the position if the position had historical validity you would not have to be making this kind of argumentation you would not have to be stretching things to the absolute breaking point of language and engaging in the most obvious forms of equivocation you wouldn't have to be doing that if it was that clear so we'll be obviously expanding on stuff like this as we get more into this type of stuff starting not necessarily early next year probably

March -April as my reading progresses and I'm putting notes together but it is important not only if you have eastern orthodox friends, relatives, converts there's a rush of converts right now that I think after a while they're going to go, what did

I get myself involved with if you're talking with people like that then yeah, this is very very important that seventh ecumenical council is considered infallible by both

Roman Catholics and eastern orthodox and therefore if that council was really nothing more than the exercise of Byzantine state religion and if it made simply false statements especially in saying that the creation and veneration of icons was apostolic which is simply historically untrue then both systems are fatally wounded in their authority structure at that point most people don't understand that the vast majority of Protestants wouldn't know what an ecumenical council was if we walked up and hit them in the face there's a lot of people running around saying that I'm trying to protect my brand and expand our cliques you look at the stuff

I've addressed in my lifetime and it's been the opposite from the beginning you want to get a big ministry, don't be reformed you want to be a big ministry, don't talk about Roman Catholicism you want to be a big ministry, don't talk about Islam what are you talking about, what are you doing and now here,

I'm sitting here going, yeah so I'm going to be really putting a whole lot of effort into stuff that most people have never even heard of pseudo -Dionysius, what

Greek philosophy 500 years after Christ and angelic realms and icons and the 7th ecumenical what are you talking about again,

I've just made the decision you do what you need to do to leave the most lasting benefit for the church and that's not building an empire on Twitter or social media what can

I say that's the direction we're going and we'll be doing a whole lot more on icons and what icons are and all that kind of stuff as we get into the new year that took us to right at an hour

I think because we got a little bit of a late start I know they want to know that and I'm not announcing that yet it should really be obvious to be honest with you when you think about American solid sharp eastern orthodox representatives it should be pretty obvious, but we'll be getting to it we're getting closer

Jay Dyer no, it is not Jay Dyer look folks, I tried

I put that name out there that is not a solid man that is an 11 year old in an adult body and nothing more than that he's a sugared up nutcase so no, it is not

Jay Dyer we tried that, his response go look up Jay Dyer on our website and you'll see how his response was they also want a kitty update

I actually need to go by the vet on the way home I hope, I haven't heard from him

I'm hoping that wasn't the FaceTime stuff but we need some more meds

I have become an expert since last Thursday my wife and I, we've got this down and these sweet little kittens we're going to have to give one of them up for adoption, and it's going to be tough but these little girls we wrapped them in this kitty thing a little papoose type thing and I have to walk up to them and take this syringe three syringes, three different things and sort of get it into their mouth and then they're doing this type of thing as you're squirting it in there and they're so patient, you put them down and they're still purring they literally appreciate it they seem to be getting a lot better their appetite is back you should have seen them going after food this morning that's the first time in a long time but a fourth kitten has gotten it the vet actually called this morning

I was going to call them and I told them, so I need to go by and see if I can buy some more drugs for the fourth kitten that's come down with it too they're not really even sure what it is but the meds seem to be helping so, you know

I don't know, I'll have to admit I leave Friday for this trip and if they start going downhill my poor wife's going to be alone without anybody to help her if she has to take the kittens to the vet or whatever, may need to find some help for stuff like that but right now, little

Tank and Tiger and Sadie they all ate this morning and they're not just pooping all over the place like they were, poor thing and they love us and they purr and they're wonderful and we hope to get them through this this difficulty and like I said,

Buddy has now gotten it doesn't seem to be as bad as the others but we'll see you gotta love these little things most people would not be investing the kind of time and energy that Kelly and I have been investing let alone the money you go by the vets you better have your credit card with you it ain't cheap and I appreciate the fact they're there and I appreciate the fact of having these drugs antibiotics and stuff like that one of them

I know is amoxicillin that's stuff we take obviously a different formulation they're still alive they're not out of the woods yet and it would be pretty devastating because they're sweeties the idea right now is to do this again on Wednesday and then call it for the week because Thursday is

Thanksgiving and then next week I'm on the road so you have to be using the app to find out when we're going to try to do on the road dividing lines so you're thinking another

Zoom show on Wednesday? I'm enjoying it we have some catching up to do certainly we're not running out of callers what