A Response To Trent Horn's Comments In His Recent Sola Scriptura Debate With James White

In his debate with James White on sola scriptura last week, Trent Horn repeated some sentiments he's expressed before about the alleged lateness of the recognition of the New Testament documents as scripture, their lack of prominence before the time when Irenaeus wrote, etc. I've responded to him on the subject before, in the post here. What I documented there is also relevant to something else Trent said during the debate, when he referred to how Jesus didn't tell anybody to write anything before he ascended to heaven. As my post linked above argues, Jesus' comments on the work of the Holy Spirit in John 14-16 likely anticipate the New Testament. What he said isn't limited to what the apostles would write, but it does include their writings. That's probably why John's comments about his gospel toward the end of the document parallel what Jesus said in those earlier chapters. John seems to have considered his gospel a fulfillment of what Jesus anticipated. Again, see my post linked above for further details. That post also addresses other problems with Trent's view of the New Testament.

Gaining Interest For My Master

"When I ever hear a young person say 'I'm bored', my response to them was always 'I haven't been bored since 1978.' There is no reason to be bored in this world as a Christian. You have so much that you can and should be doing." (James White)

"We should all have work to do for our divine Master. True, our everyday labor ought to be so done as to render honor to his name, but in addition to that, every Christian should be laboring in the Lord in some sphere of holy service. I shall not enlarge, but I shall pass the question round to each one. 'What are you doing for Jesus Christ?' I pray each one here who makes a profession of faith in Jesus to answer the question, 'What am I doing in the work and service of the Lord?' If you are doing nothing, I pray you bewail your slothfulness and escape from it, for talents wrapped in napkins will be terrible witnesses against you….I do not think a man is doing all he can do if he is not attempting more than he will complete. Our vessels are never full till they run over. The little over proves our zeal, tries our faith, casts us upon God and wins his help. That which we cannot do of ourselves, leads us to call in divine strength, and then wonders are wrought….What is there worth living for, I say, beneath yon stars? But there is a something that makes it worth while existing and makes life grand and noble. It is this: if I may crown with praise that head which for my sake was crowned with thorns, if I may honor him who was dishonored for my sake, if to the manifestation of the glories of Jehovah I may have contributed a share, if at the reading of the records of all time it may be found that I put out my talent as a faithful servant, and gained interest for my Master, it shall be well." (Charles Spurgeon)

A Good Discussion Of First Clement

James White recently had a good discussion with Stephen Boyce about First Clement. They talk about the letter's significance with regard to Trinitarianism, the canon of scripture, justification, church government, and other subjects.

White Syeclone alert

James White

@DrOakley1689

Let's give Sye some love!

Adherent Apologetics

@AApologetics

 · Mar 8

The 2020 Christian Apologist March Madness Tournament! Round of 128! Josh Rasmussen vs Sye Ten Bruggencate (@SyeTenB)

Show this poll

https://twitter.com/DrOakley1689/status/1236775061819756544

I'm curious: has James White always been a member of SyeTenB's booster club, or is that another consequence of White hitching his caboose to Durbin's steam engine? 

It's unfortunate that White is plugging him. SyeTenB is such a hack. He brings presuppositionalism into disrepute. It deflects attention away from the best exponents–like James Anderson, Greg Welty, and Vern Poythress. Thanks to SyeTenB, his enablers and groupies, presuppositionalism now suffers from poisonous default association with an empty suit. 

Text & Canon Conference

https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/2019/11/03/text-and-canon-conference-initial-thoughts/

Atheists behaving badly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMcV9f68Dz0

Clement Of Rome Wasn't Roman Catholic

There was a good discussion of the doctrine of justification in First Cement on one of James White's recent webcasts. If you do a Ctrl F search for "Clement" in the thread here, including in the comments section, you'll find a lot of additional information on the subject, such as responses to some popular counterarguments. But James White made some good points that didn't come up in the thread linked above, so listen to his webcast as well. And here's a collection of links to other material on inconsistencies between First Clement and Roman Catholicism.

The big squeeze

The Founders trailer has generated a lot of fallout, including:

https://founders.org/2019/08/01/resignations-from-founders-ministries-board/

To an outside observer, it looks like the squeeze was put on board members by power brokers in the SBC. If so, that ironically demonstrates the need for the very documentary at issue. 

I'm also puzzled by James White throwing Ascol and his colleagues over the back of the sled (on the DL). 

What do Planned Parenthood and Islam have in common?

Non-Muslim enablers of Islam frequently defend Islam by claiming that most Muslims aren't terrorists. There are problems with that defense. For one thing, many Muslims who aren't terrorists support terrorism. In addition, the social pathologies of Islam are hardly limited to terrorism. Consider honor killings, virulent misogyny, the rape culture, female genital mutilation, pedophilia and pederasty, widespread anal sex, &c.

However, let's draw a comparison. Planned Parenthood defends itself by claiming that only 3% of its services are abortion services. That's a parallel to the defense of Islam. 

Of course, even if we grant that stat, critics of Planned Parenthood don't think the 97% of non-abortion services offsets committing massive moral atrocities every year.  From a Christian perspective, be consistent. Don't use an argument in support of Islam that you'd never use in support of Planned Parenthood. 

Satirical apologetics

The immediate occasion for this post is James White's attack on the Muhammad's Boom-Boom Room video. I've commented on White's professed philosophy of apologetic engagement in detail. I'll try not to repeat myself. 

1. Is it wrong to ridicule something that really is ridiculous? If we treat something that's ridiculous as if it's not ridiculous, we misrepresent it. Truth and honesty require us to treat things the way they are. 

Does White think it's wrong to mock drag queens at public libraries who are grooming little boys? Take White's statement that:

I've sadly spoken to many Muslims. All they knew of the Christian response to their beliefs was either ignorance or mockery. And they were shocked when they discovered there were Christians who knew what they believed and were able to interact with them on a respectful basis and not just simply mock them…I lament the attitude Christians have towards the Muslim people.

Let's swap out Muslims and swap in drag queens:

I've sadly spoken to many drag queens. All they knew of the Christian response to their beliefs was either ignorance or mockery. And they were shocked when they discovered there were Christians who knew what they believed and were able to interact with them on a respectful basis and not just simply mock them…I lament the attitude Christians have towards the predatory drag queens at public libraries and gay pride parades.

Maybe I missed it, but has White every spoken up on behalf of drag queens the way he speaks up on behalf of Muslims? He bandies the word "consistency", but in my experience he carves out an exception for Muslims that's conspicuously absent in his treatment of other groups he disapproves of. He doesn't pander to members of the LGBT "community" the way he panders to Muslims. 

2. There are different kinds of satire, viz. Horatian, Juvenalian, Menippean. Does White regard all forms of satire as unacceptable in Christian apologetics? 

3. People may not realize how absurd their position is until you show them how absurd it is. They must be made to see it. And that can have an impact that dry analysis does not.

White makes right

I just watched the section of James White's Dividing Line where he talks about David Wood and Vocab Malone's satirical series "Muhammad's Boom Boom Room". White begins his remarks about Wood and Vocab's series shortly after 1 hour 16 minutes and ends around 1 hour 24 minutes. Respectfully:

What is race?

Just for context: The wider context for this post is what James White recently said about black people. However, I don't discuss White or his remarks in this post. Steve Hays and Peter Pike have already done so: Black abortion, Identity politics for me but not for thee, Victim mentality, Feedback loop, and As Huxley is to Darwin. Instead I thought I'd try to tackle a more basic question - what is race?

---

1. To my knowledge, the two major positions regarding race are (a) race is fundamentally a social construct or (b) race is fundamentally a biological (genetic) concept. I presume each of these could be further delineated.

A third position is race doesn't exist, but I'll leave that aside since it seems most believe race exists.

2. However:

a. If race is fundamentally a social construct, then (prima facie) that doesn't seem to explain group-distinctive physical features which are hereditary, from generation to generation.

b. If race is fundamentally a biological concept, then (prima facie) that doesn't seem to explain how there's typically more genetic variation within races than there is between races.

3. There are few higher authorities on human genetics than Francis Collins. I think Collins makes a sensible case for what race is from the perspective of a medical geneticist, though I'm not suggesting it's the final word or anything like that:

Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins of an individual, at least if that individual's grandparents all came from the same part of the world. As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry because of multiple other nongenetic connotations of race, the lack of defined boundaries between populations, and the fact that many individuals have ancestors from multiple regions of the world...On the genetic side of the diagram, race is an imperfect surrogate for ancestral geographic origin, which in turn is a surrogate for genetic variation across an individual's genome.

4. Suppose (arguendo) race is fundamentally a biological (genetic) concept. Nevertheless that still doesn't get us to the inference that races necessarily share similar mental, psychological, behavioral, and/or moral traits due to their genetics (e.g. IQ, work ethic). A further connecting argument would be needed.

Moreover, such similarities could be due to cultural and/or other factors.

As Huxley is to Darwin...

In his recent Dividing Line broadcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_X9QuJGvgs), the Honorable Doc James White informs us (at the 11:08 mark) that he is "the most active English-speaking Christian apologist in the current day."  Which surprised me a little.  But you know, I can let him have Thursdays.  There's six more days to go around.

Although maybe he's talking about active on his bike.

White also informs us (earlier at the 10 minute mark) that he's been consistently careful and charitable.  I am actually quite grateful that he told us this, because otherwise no one would be able to tell.

I mean, just look at what White says at the 40 minute mark: "It is absolutely time to work through a basic outline on something called logic. Formal fallacies. Bad argumentation. What's modus ponens, what's modus tollens?  What's the law of the excluded middle?  What are these things? ...They are the laws of thought.  And, what happened last week?"

And yes, so far I'm with White.  But then, without a hint of irony, in the very next breath (literally--queue it up and listen), White proves how rational, logical, consistent, charitable, and reasonable he is: "Now, there have been various people who've attacked me.  People like Steve Hays.  Oh my gosh.  Steve, dude, um, that was one of the worst things that ever appeared on Triablogue.  I mean, you can't even pretend any longer to be even slightly unbiased.  At all.  I mean, you missed the forest for the trees so badly on that it was just shameful.  I'm sorry dude you've lost it."

This is his entire response to Hays.

It takes a special kind of mind to go off on a complete abusive ad hominem WHILE IN THE MIDDLE OF SAYING YOU WANT TO TEACH LOGIC all whilst never examining even a single argument Steve Hays wrote.

And it's easy to see why White did this.  The good doc is going after the people who responded to him from the side of critical theory and, as is wont the case when an ugly fact destroys a beautiful theory, Hays didn't attack White on that basis.  He agreed with White's view on critical theory.  Thus, Hays doesn't fit White's narrative.

Just to make it even more ironic, I happened to see some interaction that Hays had with some members on Facebook who were discussing this, and one of them literally said to Hays, "This might come as a shock, but White's Dividing Line show was not a response to your (far more reasonable) criticisms."

Far more reasonable.

Hmm.  So White spends a ton of time going after the people who were far less reasonable, and he completely ignores Hays's arguments, instead substituting verbal abuse for argumentation.  Yes, I'm sure that's the way to win hearts and minds.  Even better, while doing that he should demand that people be calm and reasonable toward him, and that DeWitt provide logical arguments and reasons for treating White the way DeWitt did.

Oh wait.  That is what he did?

Well then.

Is White consistently careful and consistently charitable?  Well, he's consistently something.  I'm thinking the word is "hypocritical."

Wait a second.  Hypo...CRITICAL!

Critical Theory adherent confirmed!

Feedback loop

Another reason why, though the other writers at Triablogue are useful and helpful, Steve Hays is not. Compare the reality of the conversation and documentation on the DL yesterday with this prejudiced review:https://t.co/tTawumyUuC

— James White (@DrOakley1689) June 26, 2019

I guess this means White will scratch me off his Christmas card list. On a serious note:

1. White's comment is a diversionary tactic. I didn't take issue with his documentation. White is doing his customary bait-n-switch. 

2. However, since he brings it up, let's say something about the documentation. It's good documentation about a dysfunctional segment of the black community. That's fine as far as it goes.

But there's the danger of sample selection bias by comparing the worst examples of the black community with the white community. If you constantly rehearse a one-sided narrative, lots of folks begin to think the ghetto culture is the black community. Endless repetition creates a feedback loop. It fosters a culture of fear by cementing in popular imagination the default association of young black men with pimps, thugs, dope-dealers, and gang-bangers. No longer are they judged as individuals, but prejudged as statistics. Every young black man is viewed with suspicion. That's a good way to get innocent black men killed or falsely convicted. 

A one-sided narrative is an overgeneralization. It needs to be counterbalanced by documenting the positive side of the black community. 

Yes, segments of the black community are in crisis. The same could be said for segments of the white, Latino, and Asian-American communities. 

But James White won't be dissuaded because he's the hero in his own movie. So he stays on script. 

Victim mentality

1. This is my wrapup on the latest White imbroglio. A black Christian friend asked me what my opinion was of his tweet, which is why I originally commented. I did two posts:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/06/black-abortion.html

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/06/identity-politics-for-me-but-not-for.html

2. Today I watched the DL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv0D0Zufy7M

In my deliberately limited experience of the DL, it was typical White: a self-adulation fest. Half-baked. Disorganized. Larded with layers of condescension and sneering. Defending the most defensible aspects of his position while ducking the indefensible aspects of his position. Responding to the weakest objections while ignoring the strongest objections. 

It's painful to watch these performances. Some incidental observations before getting to the main point:

3. He played a video by Taleeb Starkes, who begins by noting the victim mental: everything is someone else's fault.

The irony is lost on White. That's White's M.O. He's the voice of reason. He's the adult in the room. All his critics are immature. In my experience, White never takes takes personal responsibility for what he says or does. He always shifts the blame to someone else. And that's a mark of immaturity. 

4.He indicated that the first heard he heard "soft bigotry of lowered expectations" was a few months ago from Voddie Baucham. That's odd since George W. Bush used to say it.

5. In a truly strange turn of events, he compared light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks. He say Samuel Sey is "fully black"–unlike Jason L. Rily, who is "black, too, but not as black as Samuel". Why on earth is a white Baptist elder commenting on something like that? How is that appropriate? Why does he care? 

He also noted how good Samuel Sey looks in a Coogi sweater. You have to wonder what's going on in White's head. 

6. He said 33% of prison inmates are black. While that does point to a serious problem with black criminality (among younger black men), it's a somewhat misleading comparison because a lot of that is due to incarceration on drug offenses. And it's disputable whether so many men should be behind bars for drug possession. 

7. He spent a lot of time inveighing against social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory. That's fine since I don't support that. That's not the basis of my criticism.

8. He said there's a direct connection between the abortion rate and marital status. A disparity between unmarried women who become pregnant and married women who become pregnant.

But he didn't make that correlation in his tweet. His correlation was based on race rather than marital status. I was the one who suggested we should use marital status rather than race as the basis of comparison. He doesn't get retroactive credit for belatedly appealing to a different variable. 

9. He tardily admitted that one of the factors spiking the abortion rate in the black community is Planned Parenthood, with its white eugenicist past. But once again, that's an issue which I raised in my response to him, not something he originally volunteered. 

Having said that, he denies that it's the "'central cause" of the high abortion rate among black mothers. But that's the framing fallacy. Why assume the abortion rate is reducible to a "central cause"? 

10. He whined about how Twitter only allows you to express yourself in 280 characters. I suspect some people deliberately use Twitter for plausible deniability. If they say something indefensible on Twitter, their loophole is to complain that Twitter is a poor medium for complex analysis. You can't expect a tweet to have detailed qualifications.

But no one is forcing White to use Twitter to discuss the abortion rate in the black community. He could easily write a longer, more qualified statement on Facebook or the Alpha  & Omega blog. So that's a lame excuse. 

11. Now let's get to the nub of the issue. He acted like his tweet was unassailable because the statistic is demonstrably accurate or approximately accurate. He citied articles to back up his claim. 

i) But that's an evasion of the real issue. Speaking for myself, it's not the statistic itself that's controversial, but the statistic in combination with White's explanation for the statistic. What he posits to be the "central cause". He attributes that to "fatherlessness, sexual license, and rebellious sexual ethics". Moreover, fatherlessness isn't really a separate category or variable but reducible to "sexual license and rebellious sexual ethics" since he goes on to say, in the DL, that "Planned Parenthood doesn't force black man and women to fornicate". So according to him, fatherlessness reflects sexually active irresponsible men. 

ii) The logical implication of his statistic in conjunction with his "central cause" is that black men and women are sexually libertine/rebellious at upwards of 3.5x the rate of white men and women. 

iii) In addition, that plays into the old, damaging, defamatory stereotype of black men as oversexed animals. As a recall, that was a justification of antebellum slavery and postbellum Jim Crow laws. Black men had to be kept under heel. 

Furthermore, I believe that stereotype fueled lynchings. If you think black men have a raging, out-of-control libido, then that makes black men presumptive racists. That was the thinking of the lynch mobs, was it not? And that dangerous prejudice continues right up through Dylann Roof  ("Y’all are raping our white women!"). 

It's striking that James White has such a tin-ear for what his explanation entails. And he's impervious to correction by layers of smug impenetrable superiority. 

Identity politics for me but not for thee

I posted on this once before:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/06/black-abortion.html

But now I'd like to make some additional, related observations:

i) James White is a critic of identity politics. And that's fine. Identity politics should be opposed. The problem is when he unconsciously uses identity politics to further his own argument. 

ii) Now a critic of identity politics could use identity politics in a tu quoque argument. Let's assume identity politics for the sake of argument, then draw some conclusions or parallels that should make proponents of identity politics balk. But that's not what White is doing where. 

iii) Likewise, judging individuals by group association isn't fallacious if particular beliefs or behavior are intrinsically related to that affiliation. For instance, it's proper to make assumptions about a Klansman, since that's what the KKK stands for. It's proper to judge a Democrat politician by the party he represents, since his party has official ideological positions.  

iv) It is, however, fallacious and unjust to associate individuals with group membership behavior when that's an adventitious association or incidental feature of their affiliation. Since there's no intrinsic relationship between abortion and race/ethnicity, making invidious comparisons between black mothers in general and white mothers in general vis-a-vis abortion unthinkingly buys into the tactics and assumptions of identity politics. 

v) Moreover, that's not an isolated example. James White seems to have a blind spot in that regard. Remember this incident?

http://razorskiss.net/2016/03/james-white-dashcam-post-archive/

Once again, that's a classic example of White's subconscious identity politics. He stereotypes the black teenager by reducing him to a statistic. He slots the teenager into a standard narrative. What could be more prejudicial? Typecasting the teenager based on a single fleeting encounter, backfilled by statistics. 

Perhaps White would say he's not making assumptions about the teenager just because he's black but because he flipped off the police. Well, I daresay lots of teenage boys of all different racial or ethnic backgrounds are antagonistic towards the police. Would White posit the same backstory for all of them? 

vi) It's especially ironic because it reveals a subliminal double standard. On the one hand, White bends over backwards to disassociate Muslims in general from support for jihad, honor killings, a rape culture, &c. On the other hand, he has the opposite reaction when it comes to black Americans. 

Black abortion

Which is more likely to be the central cause for the fact that black women are 3.5x more likely to kill their unborn children?

1) Fundamentally rebellious sexual ethics, fatherlessness and sexual license.

2) Slavery from 160 years ago.

— James White (@DrOakley1689) June 22, 2019

I was asked to comment on this. I'm not a statistician or sociologist (neither is James White). So these are considerations I have, as a nonspecialist:

1. Seems to me there are different ways of drawing the comparison. For instance, instead of comparing black mothers to white mothers, we might ask if unwed mothers abort their babies at higher rates than married mothers. If that's the case, then the "cause" might be that black mothers abort their babies at higher rates because more black mothers are pregnant out-of-wedlock than white mothers (although I believe the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies for white mothers is on the uptick). If so, the direct comparison wouldn't be between black mothers and white mothers, but between unwed mothers and wives, while the racial variable would be indirectly related.

2. Perhaps James would respond that this simply puts the "central cause" back a step because out-of-wedlock pregnancy is caused by "fundamentally rebellious sexual ethics". 

i) Strictly speaking, most folks who indulge in premarital sex aren't consciously rebelling against biblical sexual ethics because they are too theologically illiterate to have any idea what biblical sexual ethics represent. 

ii) Perhaps, though, it may be said that that's a side-effect of a general rebellion against natural revelation (Rom 1) rather than biblical sexual norms in particular. 

iii) Conversely, not all or most whites who conceive children within marriage are doing so in conscious obedience to biblical sexual ethics. Many people get married for romantic, economic, or customary reasons. In addition, some couples who conceive children within marriage aborted children conceived through premarital sex. So I'm not at all sure we can say the motivation is rebellious black mothers in contrast to white mothers. 

3. Furthermore, many conservative analysts attribute high rates of black single motherhood to Democrat social policies, viz. dysfunctional schools with high dropout rates; welfare–which eliminates the need for a male breadwinner. Democrats deliberately create a culture of dependence on gov't handouts to keep Democrats in power. Isn't that a factor? 

4. Finally, I believe it's a well-established fact that white eugenicists like Margaret Sanger targeted the black community for genocide. That raises the question of whether organizations like Planned Parenthood made "abortion services" more widely available in the black community than the white community. That would certainly be consistent with the white eugenicist program. If that were the case, it might be another factor in higher abortion rates among black mothers. 

P.S. Although he didn't explicitly compare black mothers to white mothers in the original tweet, in a subsequent tweet, he said "Black women average 3.5x the number of abortions compared to white women in the US." 

The modern-day imperial cult

I've been getting some inquiries about Gene Bridges. I believe that's prompted by James White's 5/21 DL riposte. A few preliminaries before I talk specifics:

i) I don't have the original statement by Gene. A friend of mine transcribed what White read on the DL. So I'm going to be commenting on (most of) the excerpts from the DL. Some of Gene's remarks seem to be directed at White in particular. I don't know the original context. I'm guessing that he's miffed by White's role in The Statement on the Gospel and Social Justice–among other things. 

ii) Gene used to be a guest blogger at Triablogue. His posts are still up. He stopped posting 10 years ago. He wasn't asked to leave. He just dropped out, of his own accord, for whatever reason. I never asked. Somewhat later, for reasons I won't discuss, his connections with Triablogue were formally severed. That was a team decision. 

iii) If memory serves, Gene used to work at a gay health hotline. If so, I think his background in the gay community is skewering his analysis of the culture wars.

James White Confronts City Council

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUtaUg1sJQs

Tinted lenses

No, no, a thousand times, NO.

The faithful interpreter of Scripture is the one with a deep commitment to the Lordship of Christ, a love for the Word, and an obedient heart.

SOCIAL STATUS, ETHNICITY, OR “OPPRESSED STATUS” IS UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. pic.twitter.com/DqPWZQmZUZ

— James White (@DrOakley1689) March 15, 2019

That's an overreaction. Although there's a sense in which biblical exegesis ought to be disinterested, the fact is that readers can bring vested interests to the sacred text which blind them to the message of Scripture when it cuts against the grain of their vested interests. For instance, under slavery and Jim Crow, black Americans were able to recognize some biblical themes about justice, oppression, and liberation which the ruling class turned a blind eye to. In general, Southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians had a filter that screened out those biblical themes, in their application to the contemporary situation. I expect Victorian Christians suffered from the same blinders in relation to British imperialism in India. 

And within the Bible itself, the Apocalypse reflects the outlook of persecuted Christians in relation to oppressive elites. The Book of Daniel is an analogous example. For that matter, the social status of the Jewish establishment had a prejudicial effect on how most elite Jews in Jerusalem viewed Jesus. Having a personal stake in the message if the message poses a threat to your dominance can distort the interpretive process.

So there's a grain of truth to what Mika says. The problem isn't with the general principle. Rather, the problem is due in part to self-anointed victim groups who've deluded themselves into believing that they are oppressed. Moreover, casting whites as the villains in their self-flattering psychodrama. Not only is this harmful to innocent white Americans, but harmful to some minority groups by conditioning them to believe they can't succeed. Ironically, Mika is oblivious to his own tinted lenses. He's the mirror image of what he decries.