Apologetics, Debating Atheists, and Church History | Dr. James White Interview
In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to James White, best known for debating Atheists, Catholics, and Muslims. He is the host of The Dividing Line Webcast, and Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. He is the author of more than twenty books and an accomplished debater on subjects ranging from the King James Only controversy, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Calvinism and Mormonism. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Apologetics ministry Jeffery Durbin Keeping church open during Covid Abigail Shrier America is heading toward Leftism Muslim debates Preaching from Luther's pulpit Learning from the past Islam belief systems Start of the King James only controversy Greatest gifts to young people before college Gale Riplringner cultism James' White favorite Bible translation Sweater Vest Dialogues James White 2nd best selling book Grief after death Calvinism and the problem of Evil Defining Arminianism and Free Will Subscriber Portion Hanging out with Skillet Worse debate stories Atheists trying to own James White Disasters of debate Memes of James White Western culture doesn't understand debates Youtube debates G.K. Chesterton eternal destiny Roman Catholic question Beetle Dung hills Why most protestants would agree with Catholics 10 questions Good fight story
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show, a show where we interview people.
We talk to a lot of interesting people on the Babylon Bee Interview Show, because that's what we do on the Babylon Bee interview show.
Yeah, that's because we're not very interesting.
No, I'm Kyle Ethan.
Hi.
I'm not Kyle Ethan.
I'm Kyle.
I'm Kyle.
And today we're talking to James White, who's an apologist.
He runs Alpha and Omega Ministries.
He's written a bunch of books on a lot of different topics.
He kind of interests.
He treats a lot of people.
I am a Calvinist, and he kind of introduced me to Calvinism, or at least reinforced the Calvinism that I had discovered in more shallow sources.
So I had kind of like been introduced.
Shallow sources?
Well, I had been kind of introduced to Calvinism through like Christian pop music.
Yeah, sure.
Through movies like Final Destination.
That's shallow, yeah.
No, no, through like John MacArthur.
Not saying that he's shallow, but like I had just heard some sermons.
And shallow John MacArthur.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, he's doing that.
Well, he is more on a pop level, right?
Like, he's a pop.
He's a pop star.
And we were, we came around in different worlds.
Well, I guess when you go to his school, he's a pop star.
He's a pastor, not a scholar and an apologist.
Okay.
So he's going to, he's going to, he's going to put things out.
What are you doing?
Are you cracking him?
It just seems like you got defensive about that.
It's weird.
Get defensive about what?
He's defensive.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
Anyway, yeah, so Kyle knew a lot about this guy.
It's a lot more than me.
I think he's read more of his books.
I haven't read any of them, but I see that.
You know the difference between like a scholar and like a pastor that's just like pre like pastoring a congregation.
Like this guy's one shallow.
What is this?
What is that?
Do we need to start again?
No, it's fine.
It's good.
Go.
Roll it.
So we're talking.
We're talking to James White, and it's a good conversation.
Yeah.
He debates Catholics.
He debates King James Onlyists.
He debates people who think you don't need scripture or just other stuff too besides scripture.
He debates people that forgot all about the Trinity.
And he debates Islamists.
Muslims.
What do you say?
Muslims like Muslims.
Like some guy with a MAGA hat would say Muslim.
Yeah, Muslim.
Now that we've thoroughly destroyed this podcast, we're going to talk to James White.
He's coming on via the digital airwaves right now.
Here he comes.
All right.
Well, Dr. James White, thanks for coming on.
Do we call you Doctor like Dr. Jill Biden or Pastor?
As you insist.
Or a master or leader.
James will probably work best, I think.
Probably.
Okay.
Jimmy.
No.
No.
Whitey?
No, don't do that either.
Don't do that either.
How long is this going again?
That's it.
We're done.
Five minutes.
That's good.
Rough start.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I don't even know where to begin.
Your ministry and your apologetics work has spanned so much.
Just in front of us, we have Dan's much loved book collection.
Can you see that?
Yeah, I don't know if there's a camera zoomed in on this or not.
I was introduced to your work through the dividing line.
Reform theology was kind of the primary area, but then I ended up reading your book on Mormonism, the King James Only controversy, and you've really zeroed in on these specific areas of study.
I don't know how would you, what would you think is your main area of work?
You just say apologetics or reform theology?
Yeah, I would say apologetics, but we've always emphasized the need to have apologetics placed within the context of a healthy theology within the church, for example.
I think one of the greatest dangers to apologists is they tend to get disconnected from the church.
And so they end up being Lone Rangers out there, you know, on their own, sort of.
And so we've always avoided that.
I've always been a churchman.
So I've been an elder in a church for many, many years now.
And so I preach.
I just preached last evening at Apologia Church.
Y'all had Jeff Durbin on my fellow pastor there just recently.
And he actually had a real rough week.
So literally on Friday night, he's like, James, dude, it's been a rough week.
Do you think maybe possibly of like, okay, I'll do something fun.
And so I actually preached through John 9 and I just used the Greek text.
I just live translated it and commented on it as we went through it and then made application.
And so I do that regularly.
So I think there's a balance that is necessary to stay in apologetics for as long as we've done it because Alpha Namegas coming up will be 40 years in 2023 that the ministry has been in existence.
And most apologetics ministries don't last that long.
And so I think the longevity has been because we don't just do that.
I've got to teach a wide variety of types of people, ages, things like that.
And we're doing all of theology, not just one particular group or things like that.
So yeah, so I'm an apologist, but I'm also a pastor in a church and I've done a lot of other things as well.
So just try to be well-rounded.
Do you have a bunch of tats all over your arms or something?
I've never seen anybody without a bunch of tats at that church.
Yep.
Yep.
Actually, actually, I have an entire left arm sleeve.
If you really, really want to know.
But yeah.
A bunch of Star Wars stuff.
That is not a prerequisite.
That just by chance.
There's no examination or anything along those lines.
But yeah.
A teardrop for every Mormon you've converted.
A little bicycle.
A little bicycle, yeah.
Yeah, I guess Jeff Durbin would probably beat you up, huh?
Um, yeah.
Yes, if he could catch me.
Johnny Kane.
That's the important part.
But, well, yeah, actually, if you've seen the other pastors, Luke, who we call the bear, is much bigger than all of us combined, I think.
And so I'm not overly concerned about anybody rushing the pulpit at Apologia.
I don't think they get very far in that situation.
But yeah, obviously, Jeff, former world karate champion and in his weight group and all that, that's that kind of stuff.
And he's still training.
So, yeah, I don't want to mess him.
He can do all that stuff where he grabs your hand and does all sorts of things to your fingers and die immediately and that kind of thing.
And I'm not, no, I'm not, I'm not into that.
That's that's, I know he was Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat.
I'm thinking you could be Baraka.
I don't know if you've ever seen Baraka.
He's like a bald guy with sharp teeth and claws.
We'll get a picture.
The fatality would be pretty quick on me, I'm afraid.
What would your fatality be if you were in Mortal Kombat?
Well, I don't know because I only watched my son play it.
And so I mean, you got to understand.
I'm so old that the first video game I remember seeing really, well, other than Pong, which I did play, Pong, but real video game was Wolfenstein 3D.
On like a 386 with VGA monitor, if that gives you an idea of what that was all about.
But yeah, I didn't really follow it past Descent 3.
If you know what Descent was, that was great.
But other than that, I sort of gave up on all that.
You can pound the guy's head into his body with the King James Bible.
Yeah.
Well, he's the contillic, but he's against the King James.
I mean, you're not against the King James per se.
He could pound, he could use the forgotten Trinity to cut his head off.
Sorry, I let Kyle ask the questions.
Yeah, I mean, let's stick on Apologia for a second and then we'll kind of dig into each of these areas.
I think there's a lot to talk about and a lot of like common misconceptions that people have about all these areas.
Because that's one of the things that interests me when I start reading about the King James only controversy.
Is like, if you actually talk to a King James-only person, it's like you have no idea how to respond to the things that they say because they sound good, you know, on some level.
Oh, apologia.
Yeah, you guys never shut down during the COVID lockdown, right?
Right.
Yeah, we were convinced from the start that it was very important.
You needed to minister to all the sheep, including those who feel the need to continue to observe the Lord's Supper and to be instructed in the word of God.
And thankfully, we live in Arizona and our governor always left an opening in essence for us to be able to do that.
It's really easy for us to do that in Arizona.
It's not so easy to do it if you have a church in Sacramento, California, for example.
I understand that.
And so we've never been amongst those trying to say, well, everybody else is wrong and we're right and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
But we have taken a strong stance on that.
And I think that everyone's going to have to be taking a strong stance after January 20th of next year.
The way things are going right now, I have a strong feeling that we have not seen the last of these types of issues.
And for all the need to laugh and to use satire and everything else, I think honestly, the church in Western countries, as I'm observing this in Australia, in Germany, places I used to travel, and I don't think I'll ever be able to travel there again, but places I used to go all the time.
I flew 169,000 miles in 2019, and I don't believe I'll fly any miles in 2021.
So that'll give you an idea.
But in those places, they're already facing so many difficulties and so many challenges to being the church and to having the freedom to speak out and to speak out on vitally important issues.
I'm not sure if any of you guys saw the book Irreversible Damage by Abigail Schreier.
Yeah, I really'm having her on tomorrow.
Okay.
Well, I hope so, because if you're a father and you have daughters, that book will make you viscerally angry when you realize what's really going on.
That's a subject that people say, well, that's politics.
No, it's not.
Jesus addressed the fact that God made us male and female, that that's a good thing.
It's an important thing.
It's a creative thing.
It's a life thing.
And since he did that, we have to be very clear in speaking his words.
And right now, that's very costly in our society.
Very, very costly.
And so this is all heading our direction.
We need to have a strong foundation.
And I can only hope that already we have been laying that foundation for our people at our church, people through Alpha Mega Ministries, give them that kind of foundation to be prepared to deal with what's coming up in the challenges that will be facing us.
So you don't believe that they're going to release the kraken and Trump's going to be declared president?
Well, let's just this morning I tweeted out basically that the framers of the Constitution never envisioned a situation where a very large portion of the society would want to undo the reality of the Constitution.
And that's what we're facing today.
And so the system really isn't designed to survive being overthrown internally.
And so I've seen some of the scenarios, martial law, calling for a new election, et cetera, et cetera.
I'll be perfectly honest with you.
If that happened, I think Trump would lose the election.
So I don't see what can be done, to be perfectly honest with you.
But who knows?
I don't know what's going to happen between now and January 21st.
It seems to me that we're going to have a very leftist administration.
And I said, you may have seen this, I tweeted back in May of 2020, May of this year.
I said, if this election is primarily done by mail-in balloting, the left will own this country for the next 40 years.
And because I knew this type of elective process is just subject to tremendous amounts of fraud.
So I do think that that has taken place.
The statistics just don't work.
The numbers don't work.
But can you prove it?
Well, if we had a free press, we might be able to.
There's no evidence of widespread fraud, voter fraud.
Yeah, you just triggered the little effect.
You just got to speck off YouTube.
I'm sure.
There you go.
Sorry.
There you go.
Little message.
And that's the point.
And that's the point, isn't it?
It gets you kicked off YouTube.
It gets you kicked off Twitter.
It's not going to be picked up.
There's no press anymore.
And there was the assumption that there would be a free press and the worldview desire to speak the truth in the design of the Constitution.
You know the quote from John Adams.
He said, the Constitution is sufficient only to the governing of a moral and religious people.
It is wholly insufficient for the governance of any other.
That's what John Adams said.
And I think John Adams was right.
And since he was right, then what does that mean in the future?
Well, that depends a lot on your eschatology, doesn't it?
And never before, you know, eschatology has always been the football you throw around and play games with and stuff like that.
Now, all of a sudden, it has real meaning as to how you're going to move forward in a very challenging period of time.
So, waiting for the rapture.
Sorry to be so serious, guys.
We're waiting for the rapture.
Yeah.
I was about to Google eschatology.
You're going to move to eschatology?
James is just outside of our league here.
I was thinking because he was talking about how he can't get to these other countries.
They need to invent a sea bike.
And they might in the next, you know, he'd be all over the world.
True.
Yeah, no, right on the ocean.
I know.
My daughter would like that because she loves the oceans and things like that.
But I wouldn't, I'm not, I'm not really that into that type of thing.
Know my daughter, yeah, yep, you bet.
Oh, yeah, okay.
So, the look, the look on the one guy is who?
And the look that's just my normal look, it's like who's his daughter?
I don't know, educate yourself, Ethan.
Sorry, so uh, well, you got all these books, you got Roman Catholic controversy.
Should we talk about Roman Catholics?
That's real popular, isn't it?
You'll make me a real popular or the Muslims.
Yes, yes, pick your pick your meeting.
I was trying to watch some, I watched one of your Muslim debates.
Which one?
I can't remember.
I mean, I don't know the name of the guy, I can't remember the name.
It was a, it was a Muslim.
It was like, is the Quran something about the Quran?
Yeah, that normally comes up.
Yes, yes.
If you want to see the best, the best debate that I would recommend to you is the debate that I did with a young man by the name of Abdullah Kunda down in Australia in 2011.
Can God become man?
That was the best debate we've had so far because Abdullah is one of the only Muslims that I know who read the Forgotten Trinity and then tried to present his objections in a way that Christians would understand.
That is extremely unusual for a Muslim to do.
And so that made it a really, really, really good debate.
But if you want to watch, I think the one that was most amazing, watch the debate that I did with Shabir Ali in the Abu Bakr Siddiq Mosque in Arasmia, South Africa.
And I stood where the Imam leads the prayers and proclaimed the gospel, and the camera panned around the room.
And the Muslims are sitting on the floor six feet in front of me.
And to be able to talk about grace and atonement and my unworthiness to even be standing before them.
And to do that in that context, in that place, was just one of the more amazing memories that I'm very thankful that I have of being able to travel around the world.
Incredible opportunities.
Right up there with September of 2017.
You can look this one up when I preached in the castle church in Wittenberg from Luther's pulpit.
And I'm one of only two evangelicals we know of that have preached from that pulpit.
And Luther is buried.
So you and Luther?
Luther was eight feet down below me, maybe about 12 feet down below me, buried there in the castle church.
And the funny thing is, when I first started, there was a little bit of a buzz in the speaker, in the sound system.
And I joked later, it did quit, but I joked later that that was Luther spinning his grave because a Baptist was preaching in his pulpit.
And because believe you me, he would have.
That was a real illustration of something that's real important to me.
I've taught church history.
The first class I taught when I graduated in seminary was church history.
And I've taught it ever since then.
And one of the things I've tried to teach people is you need to learn how to respect people in the past who probably would have burned you.
It's true.
It's true.
Because Luther would have driven me out of town.
Calvin would have had me imprisoned and driven out of town.
Zwingli would have drowned me from the bridge in Zurich because he did numerous Anabaptists.
And yet I can respect all of those men.
I can look at the dialogue that Zwingli and Luther had at Marburg in 1529, and I can appreciate both sides.
And you just have to put things in context.
Otherwise, you'll never learn from the voices of the past.
I think it's one of the things that has really robbed the modern church of a lot of its depth: that evangelicals know nothing about their past.
They know nothing about the, you know, Christ said he'd build his church.
He has been building his church for 2,000 years.
And so if we can't listen to the voices of the past and learn from them, then we're living in an echo chamber.
And guess what?
We're not the first Christians who will ever be persecuted.
And there's much that we can learn from those who came before us.
Don't get me started on church history stuff because you won't get a word in edgewise if I start going down that road.
You really won't.
So how did you get to preach at Wittenberg?
Did you like sneak in?
Did you disguise yourself?
Oh, no, no.
No.
We did an entire cruise, not cruise, a tour, Reformation tour.
And the fellow that put that on, Michael Fallon from Sovereign Experiences, has contacts, shall we say.
And he had arranged for Al Martin, Al Al Martin, Albert Moeller to preach there.
And then he arranged for me to preach there as well.
Now, Moeller did a lecture on Luther.
I actually preached a sermon.
And you can find it on YouTube.
I felt it was appropriate that when I quoted Luther, that I would quote Luther in German, which I did.
And so that was very, very enjoyable.
I've studied a lot of German.
I don't get to speak it very often because I don't have anybody to speak it with, but I did that.
And so we preached a whole sermon on truth in a changing age.
And it was a lot of fun.
It's only half an hour, but you might find it interesting on YouTube.
Well, it's still there anyways.
So, okay, here's a question that's going to be impossible to not make controversial.
So you've interviewed or you've actually debated Muslims.
I'm curious for your presentation because I assume that that's something I saw in an interview with you.
You're talking about how, you know, you didn't just go read what apologists have said about these religions.
You've studied these other religions.
Right.
And so you studied the Quran.
You know, and I'll often see people say that the terrorism and these sects of Muslims of Islam come out and they say it's a natural outpouring of what's in the Quran.
Then there's who say it's the origin of peace.
Those people are just crazies, kind of like our guys that blow up abortion clinics or whatever.
They're not real Christians.
And so what's your perspective on that, having studied that and interacted with many Muslims on your own?
Do you think that there's any truth to that?
Right.
Well, here's the problem.
The Muslim sources are not consistent with themselves.
And that is why you have divisions amongst Muslims, not just the Sunni Shia thing.
That really was a historical development that took place later on, but even amongst the Sunnis who are looking at the Quran and then they're looking at what are called the Hadith.
The Hadith are the stories and sayings of Muhammad and his companions that were collected about 250, 300 years after the death of Muhammad.
The Hadith collections become the lens through which you read the Quran and then Sharia law is determined by how you put all that stuff together, basically.
And the problem is there are numerous collections of Hadith.
Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim are the two most authoritative collections.
They're eight and nine volumes, respectively.
I've read all of Muslim and Bukhari.
There aren't many Christians who have, but I have.
And I can tell you right now, they are not, they do not present a consistent body of thought and belief.
And so you have different groups that interpret this wide body of material in different ways.
And so you can have people who interpret this material in one way that leads them to do the acts that have been done over the past 15, 20 years, especially in regards to jihad.
But then if you look historically, for the Muslim civilization to come into existence, it had to find a way of controlling that kind of behavior.
And so Sharia developed to limit what could be done in regards to the expression of jihad.
So the one side says you're ignoring the development of our law over time.
The other side is saying that law and development and tradition has taken you away from the Salafi, the early followers of Muhammad.
And so actually, a number of Muslims interpret this along the lines of the Catholic Protestant Reformation.
They would say that the peaceful traditionalists are the Catholics and the Salafi Wahhabi terrorists are the Protestants, basically.
And they would say that just as some Muslims are saying Quran only or at least Quran in the early Hadith and getting rid of the later traditions, they would parallel that to our situation historically in Christianity.
I think there's some real problems with that application, but that's the mindset that many Muslims develop in the West when they study our own history.
Few of them, as there might be.
So yeah, so the answer is not an easy answer to the question that you ask because the sources, and that's the big problem.
People say, well, could Islam have a reformation like took place in Christianity that leads to the final banishment of these things?
And the problem is the sources that they have are not consistent enough to provide for that reformation.
That's my biggest concern in that way.
Have you ever debated one of the austere scholars?
One of the what?
Yes.
Austere scholars of austere religious scholars.
Austere religious scholars that are on that side of the debate?
They're the Catholics of, or no, the Protestants.
Protestants.
Yeah, sort of.
But all my debates have been in Western countries.
And so the really strong folks like that generally wouldn't be English speakers and they probably would not survive in English-speaking countries.
Drones would take them out or something.
So yeah, that's fairly unusual.
And I'm not debating anyone who has a drone strike warrant out on them.
I think that would collateral damage might take me out too.
Yeah.
Well, I ask questions.
Now you get to ask.
Well, I mean, one thing I appreciate about your debate style and any analysis you do on the podcast is that you do have that nuance and you tend to provide like your opponent the best version of their argument before you respond to it.
And I've watched too many debates.
Just like the Babylon B gives the worst side.
That's what it's funny.
Exactly.
It takes all kinds.
It takes a village.
I grew up, I don't know how specific I want to be, but I grew up listening.
I guess I'll be specific.
I grew up Ken Hovind.
I couldn't remember his name.
I grew up watching his videos, you know.
And is that all I need to say?
I don't know.
It is because once he got sprung from jail, he almost made it.
He almost made a beeline to Gail Ripplinger's house to record videos with her.
And if you know who Gail Ripplinger was, I just discovered, I mean, Gail Ripplinger was the Babylon B before the Babylon B, except she didn't intend to be.
That was the really scary thing about it.
She was original.
And so when he got out of prison and went straight to her place and starts recording King James Only videos with her, I'm just like, oh my goodness.
And I just found today somebody this past summer had taken the time to take some commentary that I made about her talking about the relationship between the King James Version and the sinking of the Titanic.
And they added all sorts of visual effects and sound effects.
And oh, it was great.
I linked to it on Twitter today.
It was really well done.
But yeah, that was what started the King James Only controversy was a volunteer called me up one day and said, there's this really weird lady on the radio.
You need to tune in and hear what she's saying.
And I did.
And so I ended up, the radio station said, would you be willing to debate her?
Because she says no one will debate her.
And I'm like, oh, good grief.
Okay.
And so I read her book, that entire New Age Bible Versions book.
And that resulted in the two half-hour programs, which were the last times Gail Ripplinger ever debated anyone on the radio.
She never did it again.
She never did it again.
So those are still available.
If anybody wants to dig back into 1994, that's when that was.
But oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, let's talk about the King James Only controversy because it's interesting to me in that I respect the desire to not have things change.
Like that's a natural, I think that's a natural thing for the Christian.
Like that's a natural response for us is to be like, wait, they're changing the Bible?
Like they have a new version out?
And I think to us, we have this instinct to be like, oh, well, the old way is better.
And I think that's a good instinct, but it kind of falls apart upon examination.
I don't know.
What's the real, what do you think the real like motivation is or the foundation of like the King James only people that you've encountered?
Well, the best case scenario is a real belief that modern translations are corrupting the church and that the King James Version is the word of God and the Word of God does not change.
That's the best case scenario in that situation.
But the fact of the matter is the King James translators would not be King James onlyists.
Their entire translation procedure, they were scholars, they understood.
They recognized the King James, in fact, was a new version of the English Bible.
The English Bible already existed.
You already had Tyndale's work.
In fact, they basically borrowed 85% of Tyndale's Greek New Testament or New Testament translation in the King James Version of the Bible.
And they already had the Bishop's Bible and they had Wycliffe and they had all these other things.
And so they were making a revision.
And so the whole idea of we can't change anything just doesn't fly when you put it into context because it wasn't the first English translation.
But they themselves talked about the need for revision.
And they knew that there would be need to be for revision of their own translation.
And so it was a venerable translation.
It's the word of God.
It can be utilized today.
The first time I read through the Bible, I read through the King James Version of the Bible as a teenager.
So there There isn't a question along those lines, but let's face it, we live in a day of barderman.
We live in a day of social media.
We live in a day when the tax upon the scripture are all over the place.
And the vast majority of Christians do not know where the Bible came from.
They think that it came down from heaven with a leather cover and thumb indexing, and it did not.
And so when you encounter people that can demonstrate that it didn't, and they point you to major textual variants, they point you to the longer ending of Mark, 12 verses at the end of Mark, that are not in the two earliest manuscripts of Mark.
They point you to, of course, the favorite story in the Gospel of John that actually isn't in the Gospel of John, John 7, 53 through 8, 11, the woman taken in adultery, and point out that that doesn't appear until one of the most unreliable manuscripts that we have in the history of the New Testament, Codex Beze Canderbrigansis in the fifth century.
That's where it first appears.
And they take you to those.
And if you've not discussed those things in the context of faith in your church, then you're blown away.
You don't know how to respond to this.
You don't understand these things.
And if you do evangelism to Muslims, for example, they're constantly raising all of these issues.
They well know where the textual variants are and things like that.
And so I have for years been trying to tell people that one of the greatest gifts we can give to our young people before we send them off to university is to teach them the foundation of why we can believe in the reliability of the transmission of the text of scripture over time.
And King James Onlyism fundamentally says, ignore that, stick your head in the sand, take this as your standard, and don't even think about its history.
Don't even think about where it came from.
Don't think about any of the manuscripts that have been discovered since then, since that period of time, which include papyri that take us back closer to the originals of the New Testament than any other work of antiquity.
We have been given a treasure trove of information.
And they're basically saying, ignore all that.
And we can't.
It's been given to us by God.
We can't do that.
So there are lots of problems to King James Onlyism, but that's really the real issue to me is that it fundamentally destroys any possibility of doing meaningful apologetics, which is what we need to be doing in the timeframe in which we have been called to be faithful.
What's the absolute wackiest King James-only argument you've ever encountered?
There is a cultic King James Onlyism that really is beyond all rationality.
And when you can listen, I don't know if you've ever heard it, but if you ever listen to the clip that I've played many times of Gail Ripplinger and the sinking of the Titanic and that there were six small slits that sunk the Titanic and it was from the white star line and the white star and Isaiah 14,
12 and the new translations and the NIV says that that's Jesus rather than Lucifer and there were 64,000 words taken out of the NIV and she puts it all together to make 666.
And it's just, you sit there listening to it, just going, oh my goodness, how in the world can someone come up with this kind of stuff?
Or even her acrostic algebra.
Do you know her acrostic algebra?
I remember from the book, I think, but you really have to tell me.
Where you take NASV plus NIV, and then you, and she said God revealed this to her, by the way, so you can't question it.
And then you subtract out the common letters and what's left over is sin.
And so I asked her two questions on the radio program.
I said, first of all, where did you get acrostic algebra?
And she said, the Lord revealed it to me.
And I said, everywhere else in your Bible, you called it the NASB, New American Standard Bible, because that's its official designation.
But only for that one thing, you called it NASV, because without the V, it doesn't work.
The acrostic algebra doesn't give you sin.
It would give you some like bin, which isn't really going to do much of anything.
Bin Laden.
And so, well, and so her answer, her answer, honestly, you can listen to the program.
Her answer was, that's what the Lord calls it.
So he calls it the NASV, whereas everybody else calls it the NASB, and that's why acrostic algebra works.
And there is no reasoning with anything like that.
You can't do it.
Did she ever do the message?
I don't think she had to.
I mean, you know, she, but I'm sure she would have included it in there someplace.
I mean, she did a whole book about me and she made up all the, you would love this because she made up all these limericks and rhymes and stuff based on white.
And so it's, it's just, it's great.
It's, it's, it's awesome.
She's, she's something else.
She's something else.
So when President Biden throws you in the gulag, what, um, and you're allowed to bring one Bible translation with you, one English Bible translation.
Which one do you bring?
Well, I have two 1977 NASBs that have been rebound by Jeffrey Rice of Post Enderbus Lux Bible Rebinding.
If you've seen PTL rebinds, you know they're the they're the cat's meow.
So I'd grab one of my NASBs if I could only bring one English translation.
But I'd rather bring my Nesphial in 28th edition that he did for me because then we can make all sorts of English translations from that.
So that's the better way to do it.
Gotcha.
Sorry, I was trying to Google to find that book and find a James White limerick.
But I tried to think it was called Blind Leaders of the Blind or something like that.
I've got it at the office.
I've forgotten what it was.
But yeah, it was great.
He's very talented.
Very, very talented.
Well, where we go from here, I thought where you move on from limericks.
Do you like cut out the silent parts?
No, it's the it's part of the charm.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
We interviewed a girl last week and people said, have you ever talked to a girl before?
So it was fun.
Oh, by the way, yeah, we don't watch.
We interviewed, when we interviewed Doug Wilson, we attracted, it was like turning on a moth thing and it was just like, so are we going to get that here?
Like, who are the usual?
Who's more problematic?
No, Doug, the Doug Wilson derangement syndrome is even worse than James White derangement syndrome.
I don't get, I don't, I've got, I've got people like that, but Doug has legions.
And so he and I have been doing a series called the Sweater Vest Dialogues.
We just recorded another one a couple days ago.
It should shouldn't come out this weekend.
I didn't see it, but maybe it'll come out today where we were talking about Christmas and stuff like that.
So yeah, you'll get some of that, but it won't be nearly as bad as the Doug Wilson stuff.
So yeah, that's good.
Did you notice I wore a cooji for you, though, today?
I did.
Yeah, we haven't even asked you about those yet.
Just want to make sure you saw them.
Oh, you don't even want to know.
I don't even know.
I've never counted them, but eBay is very happy with me.
That's where you get them, eBay.
Oh, there's really no other way to do.
Oh, well, yeah.
Unfortunately, they've stopped making them in Australia.
What made them gorgeous and special was that they were made in Australia.
Each one was unique.
And now they're made in China.
So I don't even, I don't even bother so.
IOG China or Australian.
No.
So I get them off of eBay.
Man, this year they've become really absurdly expensive.
So I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.
it may be the end of the world apocalypse i don't know but uh it's 2020 what do you want you just mean like someone who knits make you some no they're they're made in a special way they are very very nice they really are unfortunately they're originally made popular as you know by bill cosby which has sort of damaged uh the uh the brand but um you can't blame the sweaters for that so so there you go So there you go.
Got it.
Got it.
You do have my best-selling book sitting there in front of you.
I wonder if you can guess which one it is.
Scripture alone?
Not even close.
What every Christian needs to know about the Koran?
No.
Yep.
You only got a few more books to go.
Roman Catholic.
There you go.
No, it's the King James only controversy.
And the reason for that is primarily because it's used as a textbook to introduce people to textual criticism and things like that.
So it's been used in schools and seminaries and stuff since came out in, what, 1995?
Yeah, 95.
So that's my best-selling book.
But what's interesting is there's no way on God's Green Earth you could know what my second best-selling book is.
You don't have it there.
And I bet you've never heard of it.
Bet you've never heard of it.
Is it your book of goth poetry?
Yeah, well, that one is known to me and to no one else.
So it has not sold well at all.
No.
No, it's a little book called Grieving, Our Path Back to Peace.
And you've never heard of it.
It's a small little book on the subject of grieving.
I was a hospital chaplain for a number of years at a major hospital in the Phoenix area.
And I had to do loss, grief support as part of that work.
It was the hardest work I ever did.
I would much rather debate Muslims at a mosque in South Africa than to walk into someone's room at a hospital and I'm a Scotsman for crying out loud.
How am I supposed to be friendly?
You know, what are you doing here?
You know, I mean, that's the best we can pull off.
And so it was very, very hard work.
But I wrote it when an acquaintance of mine's 29-day old granddaughter died when her mom had an epileptic seizure, rolled over on her and suffocated her.
And I went to the funeral and afterwards, I just sat down, I just cleared everything off my desk and I wrote everything I had learned about loss and grief and things like that for this acquaintance of mine.
And it turned into a small book, which, like I said, is my second best-selling book.
They were passing that book out by the curtain responders on the 13th of September in New York City, who were working at the site of the Twin Towers.
And so I say all of this because reform theology is what was behind that too.
Because when I first started, when I first got the job to work at the hospital, because I had a family and the ministry was not making enough for us to even eat, when I took that job and I knew I was going to be having to talk with, deal with people about death, I bought a bunch of books on the subject and they all were written from a non-reformed perspective and were basically saying God really didn't have anything to do with the loss of your loved one, but he'll help you out now.
And I was like, I can't do this.
I can't, I can't, that's not, I can't talk to people that way.
And so I really had to struggle with, is God, does God have a sovereign decree?
Is there such a thing as meaningless evil in the world?
Or is there a sovereign decree?
And is God big enough to answer for everything?
And I think that's really what's behind what Paul says in Romans 3 when he talks about the justification of God and things like that.
So reform theology isn't just something out here that I debate about.
Not only have I been preaching it, but I've been in the pastoral level applying it for many, many years now.
So it's important along those lines.
So when people say, I love your apologetic story, I just ignore all your Calvinism.
I just go, how?
Because all of my apologetic work, when I debate Roman Catholics, I'm debating them as a Reformed theologian.
When I'm presenting the gospel to Muslims, I'm presenting as a Reformed theologian.
It's the foundation for everything.
So I don't know how in scripture alone, my view of scripture is consistent with the way that the Reformers understood it.
And I think going back well before them.
And so it's a part of everything.
So it's important, really, really important.
One hangup when I talk with Armenians is kind of what you're talking about, that they say that it makes us robots, that Calvinism makes us robots, and it makes God the author of evil.
And they say that, you know, there's no way around that, that if God decrees everything, then he has decreed evil.
For me, I kind of, I go to the scripture and the scripture just says it.
So I kind of just accept it.
Like, well, it says he's sovereign.
And, you know, I kind of learned to embrace that tension between, you know, God decreeing things and yet there's evil.
And I don't really feel the need to respond to that from a philosophical perspective because I just go back to the scripture.
But I know that you tend to think through these things much more deeply.
So what is your response to that kind of an argument?
Well, actually, my initial response, if the person I'm talking to claims to be a Christian, is to go to scripture.
I mean, I'm reformed not because of philosophical considerations, but because of scriptural considerations, the philosophy flows from that.
But there are three texts of scripture that I just simply go to.
We don't have to go through them today, but I go through Joseph and his brothers, Genesis chapter 50.
I go through Isaiah chapter 10 and God's use of the Assyrians to punish Israel and what he says about them punishing the Assyrians for punishing Israel.
And then I go to Acts chapter 4.
I go to the early church and the prayer of the early church.
And that is when the apostles were threatened, beaten, and threatened.
When the church prayed and they talked about the crucifixion, they talked about Herod, Pontius Pilate, and the Jews gathering together against your holy servant Jesus to do what your hand and your will predestined to occur.
So here in the greatest act of evil in human history, the crucifixion of the sinless son of God, the only innocent person to ever die.
The greatest act of evil, you have differing motivations on the part of each of the individuals.
So Herod's motivations are different than Pilate's, different than the Jewish people, different than the Roman soldiers.
They all have different motivations, but they all play a role in bringing about what God determined to happen at that point, at that time, in that way, including even the acts of Judas.
All of these things are a part of prophetically inspired scripture.
And yet the early church says that is what God predestined and willed to take place.
And so whatever you do, you have to recognize that what Herod did was sinful.
What Pilate did was sinful.
What the Jewish leaders did was sinful.
What the Roman soldiers did was sinful.
And yet God predestined it to occur.
And it was the greatest act of good in all of creation.
It brought about redemption.
It'll bring about in the end the fundamental glorification of the triune God.
So whatever you got to do, you've got to recognize that there is a reality that is God's absolute sovereign decree and that events in time are real.
Jesus did not become a puppet when he took on human flesh.
What he did in time was real and meaningful, and we are held accountable by God for doing what we desire in our hearts.
And that's scriptural teaching.
You've got to deal with it.
And once you deny it, you end up having serious problems all across the board when it comes to the theology of what is taught in scripture regarding the gospel, sin, punishment, and everything else.
So I go to scripture first.
You know, if we want to talk about primary and secondary causes, we can go into all that type of stuff, but it needs to have a biblical foundation.
And if the person I'm talking to is really committed to scripture, then that's why I'm going to go there first.
We talk about like Calvinism versus Arminianism, but are there like actual like five-point Arminians out there today?
Because most of the time people say they're Arminian.
It's like they believe in some kind of one saved, always saved or perseverance of the saints.
But do you deal with people that are like hardcore Arminian or bordering on open theism?
Well, see, we need to define that.
A lot of people have no earthly idea what open theism means.
And I have often said that the only consistent Arminian is an open theist because an open theist is a person who believes that God knows all natural knowledge.
That is what he's going to do and what's going to happen in his creation in the sense of earthquakes, fires, whatever.
But he does not know what free creatures will choose to do.
So if you guys are getting ready to have lunch after this, he doesn't know what you're going to have for lunch.
He can guess in light of what the circumstances are and what your normative things are.
But look, sometimes people do weird things.
And so he doesn't know what free creatures will do.
So when he created, he did not know that you would exist because you are the result of hundreds of thousands of free will choices by generations and generations before you.
And so I have said that's the only consistent Arminian position, because if you say that God does know the identity of the elect from eternity past, then I really think the Arminian position falls apart.
The simple foreknowledge view just simply doesn't work.
And so it really is an issue of how does God know the future?
Do you confess that God has knowledge of the future?
And this is what becomes sort of scary because Arminianism then does undercut the foundation for, for example, messianic prophecy.
Because every messianic prophecy, again, is the result of numerous people doing certain things, free will choices, tens of thousands of them.
And if you can prophesy what that is, it's either God looking down corridors of time and just guessing correctly and doing this passively, or there is a sovereign decree involved.
And that really does become the issue.
But are there five-point Arminians?
You bet there are.
And that goes straight into full-on Pelagianism, to be honest with you.
And so I have my blessedly inconsistent Arminian brothers and sisters in Christ.
A lot of people pick on me for having a great relationship with Michael Brown, for example.
He and I have debated these issues, but we do so as brothers.
There are certain reform folks that wouldn't do that, but I think that's a major mistake on their part.
But it can be done in a proper way.
It can be done in a respectful way, and it needs to be done.
That debate needs to be done.
You need us to back up, define any terms, Ethan.
Oh, no.
Do the Arminians have a flower?
Yeah.
It's called a daisy.
He loves me.
He loves me not.
He loves me.
He loves me not.
Wow, you had that ready.
I didn't make that up, by the way.
That's an old one.
That's an old one.
Pretty good.
All right.
Do we want to move into subscriber portion?
Sure.
We're going to get some juicy stories.
Hardcore.
Yeah, I want to hear about like bombing and a debate.
Getting all the debates you've lost.
We're going to hear all your craziest debate stories.
Short one.
And crazy things.
So, yeah, James White, the ministry is Alpha and Omega Ministries and myriad books.
A plethora of books, you might say.
Plethora of books.
We'll get goatee grooming tips, too.
Yeah.
I think that's great, but I feel like it's growing and getting wider and more oval shaped as we're going along.
I am growing it out this year.
As we speak, you're going to go for the long, the gandalf?
Cool.
All right, let's go.
Goodbye, freeloaders.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Okay, now the big, the big stories.
Yeah, we want big, crazy stories.
But did you see the debate that Jeff Durbin and I did with two atheists in Salt Lake City this last year?
Father Peter Stravinskis, two PhDs from Ivy League Schools.
Look it up.
Hear him specifically say when I ask him, who is the blessed man of Romans chapter 4, verse 8?
His first answer, two PhDs, Ivy League schools.
His first answer was.
Wondering what they'll say next?
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Until next time, this is Dave D'Andrea, the voice of the Babylon Babylon B.