Pre-Debate Show: The MIEs versus the Old Apostles and Prophets of Mormonism, then Debate Overview

An issue. So welcome to The Dividing Line. Here we go. Last Dividing Line before the debate on Saturday with Craig Trulia. I'll be talking about that. I have the Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea sitting right here.

I actually have two copies of that book and that is an expensive book. So anyway, thankfully I have it electronically as well. There are a couple of other things I want to get to. I'm just going to have to hold on to them.

I had mentioned to a guy named Noelito that I was going to respond to his statement. And I'll just read the statement real quick. We'll get to it next week. Lord willing. If Sola Scriptura is true, then you can give me proof from scripture as to who wrote the New Testament book of Hebrews, why it is divinely inspired, and why is it included in your Bible who told you it belongs there.

So you have to have exhaustive knowledge of history and the authorship of the books of the Bible for Sola Scriptura to be true. Why? Jesus quoted from books that didn't have an author. So why do you think Sola Scriptura requires that?

There's so much ignorance. I almost brought it in, but I have Good's work on Sola Scriptura. I've got the two-volume William Whitaker, Disputations in the Holy Scripture. You've got the big work that David King and William Webster put out.

None of these people read any of that stuff. There are just so many people who are just so happy just to not even worry about it, but proclaim everything wrong. We're going to be talking a little bit about that in just a second.

But what we do in this program is we answer stuff like this, so that you can then answer stuff like that, because you're the ones that are out there in the world doing the thing. I'm only going to run into so many people, and so there's only so much that I can do, but I want to try to help you.

Mormon Skepticism and the Reliability of Scripture

So there's all sorts of things to be looking at along those lines. But this morning, two things on Mormonism. I mentioned this on Twitter. The first thing I saw when I got up this morning, and it's not a good way to start your day, to be perfectly honest with you.

But the first thing I saw was Hayden Carroll doing his standard hyper-skepticism stuff. The stuff that Mormonism could never survive, but asking him to use the same standards on both sides is of course impossible.

He's not going to do that. That would destroy his entire position. And right around the same time, someone in our chat channel posted Jason Lyle's current argument. He does a cartoon each month. I don't think he does it.

At least I don't think he does it. I wouldn't put it past him. There's not much that Jason Lyle can't do. So it wouldn't shock me if he was some great artist or something like that too. But it was talking about the Noah's Ark thing, and it was sort of going, so if we find Noah's Ark, that's going to make the Bible more true than it was before?

I thought it was already true. It was a good point that he was making. And then I loved the text that he cited. He cited Psalm 119 -162 in the English Bible, in the Hebrew. Psalm 118 in the Greek Septuagint.

Oh no, he didn't. Hold on a second, hold on a second. Where did it go? Well, I misremembered that. Look at that. No, no, no, no, it is. It's 160. Okay. Just scrolled too far. There you go. Psalm 119 -160.

The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous judgments is everlasting. That was what Jason had used in his comic today. And it's interesting, someone on X saw the same thing that I did.

I was going to comment. There's some really cool textual stuff we could do. If I wanted to throw this up on the screen, we had time to do that. It'd be fun to look at Rosh in the Hebrew, Arkay in the Greek Septuagint as the sum or the total or the head of your word is truth.

But you could render the Septuagint the origin of your word is truth, because Arkay is used in that way too. But Rosh, head, yeah, well, with what some people are coming up these days amongst the Christless nationalists, maybe they will be changing how we do hermeneutics.

Not how I do it, how they do it. We're staying the same. But when you do look at the Hebrew, Rosh Devrakah, the head of your word, the Hebrew semantic domain needs to inform the Greek translation, not the other way around.

And when I say the Christless nationalists, there's a bunch of those wackos that are trying to get rid of anything Jewish. And so they want to get rid of the Septuagint. Well, they might get rid of the Greek, I'm sorry, and just go with the Septuagint.

And historically anyways, translators and scholars have recognized that and should recognize the fact that the Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew, and hence is secondary. And even though it was the Bible of the early church, it is still a second language translation from the original.

Psalm 119 is written in Hebrew, it was not written in Greek. So while looking at Arkay in the Septuagint is interesting, Rosh needs to be the the head determining the semantic domain of how you translate that.

Anyways, I was going to talk about some of this stuff, but the whole point was the very sum of your word is truth. The first thing I see is a Mormon trying to get evangelicals to question the scriptures.

And not so much so they would just implicitly trust the Book of Mormon, which is just so pitiful in comparison to the Bible. Historically, linguistically, there is no linguistic for the Book of Mormon, right?

All you've got is the Joseph Smith's Urim and Thummim, the seer stone, hats, money digging, it's just amazing. So I posted Psalm 119, 160, I thought it was 162, but 160 this morning, and it caught my attention.

And right around the same time, I saw a friend had sent me something on Facebook, and it was, I guess, Ward Radio. Remember the Ward Radio guys who tried to do that program and discovered that their maturity level is insufficient for meaningful dialogue?

That they had Jackson on. Yeah, the Jackson who called here last week. And the whole thing, the whole setup, I knew it when he was on. It was obvious at the time, but it was even more of a setup than you would think.

And so they're having lots of fun with it. Again, the kids are playing, the children are doing their thing. One of the things was in the graphic they made, they put the Kingdom of the Cults in the graphic.

And I asked on Facebook, the one question I asked was, why? Why did you put Kingdom of the Cults on the graphic? I've never cited from it. The only thing I've ever said about Kingdom of the Cults is I edited one edition of it, it's sections on Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and I felt greatly improved the accuracy of those sections.

Those edits were taken out by the Martin family later on, so they're not as accurate as they once were. But I'm just like, why would you put the King of the Cults on this graphic of something? And I haven't gotten a response.

Are we having issues? Oh, because I can't get through to X anymore. It just disappeared, and so I'm not sure why that is. I suppose X could be down, or remember I had problems getting into X on this unit at one point, so who knows?

But it ain't working for me no more. I had to reboot this one just before the show, that's what really threw things off. Yeah, I know. Could be just reconnect, I don't know. I do not know. So anyway, one of the things that was said in one of the comments, and I asked that question, and then they had posted something where I was asking somebody who had, if I recall correctly, they had made certain disparaging remarks about Reformed theology, and I was just asking them, okay, so what have you read?

So they're like, see, you don't read modern. I've called them the MIEs, the Mormon Intellectual Elite, and that's what Jackson was representing. We go to the big schools, and I'm just sort of like, any of you apostles?

Any of you hold any particular positions in the church? You don't? Oh, well, see, I'm a lot older than all you guys, and I was talking to your fathers and your grandfathers, and they didn't believe like you believe.

No, they, in fact, they eschewed intellectualism and scholarship. They felt that we were unspiritual when we would bring up issues such as the original languages of the Bible, and so I see where the changes are taking place, and like I said in the last program, Mormonism will not be able to survive you guys.

In fact, I did see something. We were wondering, so what big discoveries have you come up with? Well, I happened to see something. Believe it or not, I spent more than 10 minutes on Facebook this morning, and I found some buttons to click that allowed me to find my last reply to someone.

I didn't know you could do that. You don't even know that you can do that, do you? That's surprised me. Yeah, yeah, I probably couldn't do it again, but I found a button that allowed me to do that, and one of the papers, someone had recommended a paper on the first vision stuff, and as soon as I saw it, I started chuckling.

This is what they're talking about. It was a paper about how modern studies in the formation of memory help to explain why the many different accounts of the first vision are not contradictory, so how memory is formed can explain why the early accounts of Joseph Smith don't have the Father and the Son as gods, but the later ones do.

No, here, it's real simple, guys. The reason there's a difference is because his theology evolved. It changed. He didn't see two persons at the beginning because he didn't believe that, but he believed it later, and that's why it's there, and see what they're doing is, we will come up with deep, long, lots of citations, ways of excusing every dumb thing Joseph Smith ever did, because I want to ask them, okay, if you guys are so out there, then have you figured out why Joseph Smith couldn't get the biblical languages right?

Have you figured out why he couldn't read Revelation 1, 5, and 6 right? I'd like to see what you come up with. Does that have something to do with memory too? Maybe repressed memory syndrome? If you just throw a thousand footnotes at it, is that what it's going to take?

I was sitting there, I was going, oh, memory formation. I know someone who's done that, and used that as a criticism against the Synoptic Gospels. His name is Bart Ehrman, and you see, once you start going down that road, guys, you don't seem to understand.

You guys, you are the poison that will kill Mormonism. I've said, when they sent everybody out to go get their PhDs at Ivy League schools, and then they come back to BYU, they injected into the very bloodstream of Mormonism a poison that would kill it.

And that's exactly what's happening. It's exactly what's happening. And you guys, you guys don't even seem to notice it. But let me, let me explain something to you. I have a stack of books here. I went into the library and grabbed some of my old books.

And some of you guys, you, you know, you want me reading all this, all the new stuff. Here's the problem. These are the books that I read when I started studying Mormonism. This is the first volume. I thought I'd lost this.

It lost the cover. Boy, I didn't even put the date in it. But this would be 82. Doctrine of Salvation, Joseph Fielding Smith. Ever heard of Joseph Fielding Smith? Oh yeah. You know, prophet, apostle, Joseph Fielding Smith.

Three volumes set. A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, LeGrand Richards, also an apostle of Jesus Christ, right? And in my day, every missionary, when they went on their mission, was given this book. In fact, LeGrand Richards made it possible that these books were given away free.

Now I bought mine. I remember the day I bought it at the LDS bookstore. But, and you'll notice it's very widely marked in yellow and stuff like that. This is one of the very first books that I read. Because the missionaries said, this is what we believe.

And of course, you know, Mormon Doctrine, Bruce R. McConkie, an apostle of Jesus Christ. Probably one of the least popular apostles of Jesus Christ in the modern period. But man, when I first started studying Mormonism, the Mormons told me they were apostles like Paul or Peter.

That they were really apostles and that they had the authority of the apostles. And in fact, that's why I should, I should believe what the church says, is because there are still apostles and prophets on the earth.

And they didn't say that in the sense that, well, the ancient apostles and prophets, they were up here and, you know, the new apostles and prophets are down here and our BYU professors are in the middle here.

No, no. Back then, they actually believed that these people were actually apostles. And we've got James Talmadge. Now he was, he was a Mormon intellectual in, in a sense. Articles of faith. Yeah. I mean, I was told this is another one of those.

You give it to all the missionaries. Teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith. Spent a lot of time with this. And yeah, the King Follett funeral discourse is in there. The, you know, mixed together with the Sermon in the Grove.

And since it's in chronological order, the evolution of Smith's theology. But this is the founding prophet. I mean, the other, Joseph Fielding Smith down there said, if Joseph Smith was a fraud, the restoration never happened.

He was either a prophet divinely called or he was the greatest fraud this world has ever seen. There is no middle ground. That's what he said. And, and he was a prophet, wasn't he? The promised Messiah, Bruce R. McConkie.

Again, up until the early nineties, man, you didn't, you didn't question anything McConkie had to say. And achieving a celestial marriage. This was the very book that was used to prepare people for the eternal marriage ceremony.

And I quote from Celestial Marriage, Key to Man's Destiny, beginning on page four, in all my presentations on Mormonism, this is copyright First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

You cannot get more official than this. If this isn't official, there is no official. If this isn't official, then every Mormon is his own prophet. And there's no way to know what Mormonism teaches. And I also, back in those benighted days, got hold of these.

Joseph Smith begins his work, volumes one and two. This is the 1833 Book of Mormon. I'm sorry, 1830 Book of Mormon. This is the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, second volume.

My cover got something on it and I've got to keep it covered or it gets all icky. So this is the stuff that I started with. And here's the problem. What you're telling me now is that's old. That's out of date.

And I go, they're apostles of Jesus Christ. You claim they were apostles and prophets and it's out of date. So we need to go to Yale now, Harvard, Oxford. That's where the leadership of Mormonism is now.

When did that happen? How did that happen? It's happened over the past couple of decades. See, here's my problem, guys. I actually believed you. I believed your dads. I believed your grandfathers when they said, we have continuing revelation.

We have apostles and prophets. And so you look at the founding documents and here's the point, guys. If your religion is true, it's not going to change in 20 years. I can still judge it based on this.

And if all you're coming up with now is, well, you know, we've discovered that the way that memories are formed, that would actually explain the contradictions. Really? Cool. Great. Yeah. I've seen that elsewhere.

And here's the problem. You may really think it's fun right now. It will destroy your religion. I've seen it happen. I can give you names. I'm not going to, but I can give you names of Mormon scholars trained in the critical methodology, and they're not Mormon anymore.

And there's a reason why they're not Mormon anymore, because Mormonism cannot survive it. The Book of Mormon is a 19th century work of historical fiction. The New Testament is not. The Old Testament is not.

So you guys keep making, I'm not going to waste the time listening to that thing. It's not interesting to me at all. Significantly more important things we're doing, I mean, between the debate Saturday, and then two weeks later, the debate with the atheist, and then two debates in March on penal substitutionary atonement, one with an East Orthodox, one with non-Eastern Orthodox opponents of penal substitutionary atonement, one of whom has written a horrific book on the subject.

I'm not looking forward to having to go back through that thing again. But anyway, I'll be honest with you guys, it's far more important. If you don't believe this stuff, fine, whatever. Go believe whatever you want to believe.

But it's not Mormonism anymore if you don't believe this. If they weren't apostles and prophets, you have no authority today. And I think that's why we're seeing a diminishment in emphasis upon the priesthood concept, is they recognize that ties them to people they're not sure they really want to be tied to.

I mean, when Blake Osler can say that Brigham Young's theology was a disaster for the Mormon church, that's like saying the Apostle Paul's theology was a disaster for the Christian church. Well, what are you going to have left after that?

It's going to just be you. You're going to have a million little prophets running around, and it's still calling itself Mormonism. So is this a new perspective on Joseph? Yeah, you're exactly right. Kind of makes me wonder, Joseph's Egyptian alphabet, was that a memory thing?

Well, Alzheimer's? But let's remember, what was that guy's name? He was with Fair. And he came up with the idea that the book of Abraham is actually a mnemonic device to trigger genetic memory. Yeah, I think that's sort of how it was phrased, was it was a mnemonic device to trigger a genetic memory, and so that's why it takes the form that it does, and it used Egyptian funerary papyrus and stuff like that.

Yeah, I'm getting the impression that, you know, as I think about this, Elizabeth Warren actually spins better than that. Let's not get into Elizabeth Warren. That's not a good direction to go. All right, okay, so with that, let me tell you what is going to be happening on Saturday.

The Debate on Icon Veneration and the Second Council of Nicaea

Lord willing, the creek don't rise, nine o 'clock in the morning, Craig Truly and I will be debating icon veneration as defined by the Second Nicene Council in 787 as apostolic. Now, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen, okay?

You know, it'll be live-streamed at AOMN .org, there's a landing page already there. Lord willing, all that will work real well, but here's what's going to happen. Craig goes first because he's defending the thesis, and I've already told you, I've talked to one Roman Catholic apologist, as soon as I gave him the thesis, he was like, I'd never defend that, and that's because Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy approach this topic from different perspectives.

Rome has the development hypothesis, and Eastern Orthodoxy does not. Now, will that change? You know, the Eastern Orthodox answer is no, it can't, because we can't change, but that's not really true, and you can see development over time, and there are different perspectives within Eastern Orthodoxy, whether they want to admit it or not, there are.

So, anyway, some of the big issues, from Craig's perspective, are going to be the definition of veneration. There are questions as to exactly how Nicaea II even didn't define veneration. You could easily make the argument that Nicaea II was significantly more concerned about reversing iconoclasm and allowing for the veneration of icons than it was to actually establish a theology of what the veneration of icons involves.

There will be a bunch of references, in all probability, to the very small number, very small number, of references in the early church that, if read at a certain time during the summer solstice, can seem to support the idea of some kind of veneration of images or something.

If you're familiar with Garten's book and the stuff that's being put out right now by some of the ortho bros, any reference to imagery, art, signet rings, a chalice, anything like that, is automatically taken as evidence of veneration of icons or veneration of images.

There's no reason to do that historically. What's interesting, and I will go through this on one of my slides, is there are a number of aniconic versus the icon statements in the early church, and they're basically just dismissed because, well, Eusebius said that Eusebius was a heretic.

Well, Eusebius was also a valuable source for a tremendous amount of information, but it's just, well, he was a heretic, he's out of here. They're not consistent, and one of my concerns is, I mean, I've got a lot of stuff where there's evidence of inconsistency on Mr. Trulia's part and the stuff that he cites, and my concern is that we're gonna end up out in the weeds, just going back and forth on stuff like that forever, and nobody in the audience is gonna be able to follow it, especially because most everyone will not have something like Price or the various works on icons that are out there, Kinzinger and stuff like that, at their hand, or even know where to find them if they want to go looking for them.

So I'm going to do my best to try to make sure that when people walk out of the room, they'll have some idea what it was we were talking about, but there could be instances where we do have to get into weeds for a few minutes, but I'm going to do my best to keep that brief.

So he's going to present a plausibility argument, and he's going to recognize there's a difference between historical plausibility and dogmatic certainty, and he will say you can only have dogmatic certainty with an ecumenical council such as Nicaea II, but if you don't accept that, then the best you can do is a plausibility argument based on historical information.

So obviously the big issue is, what does apostolic mean? And if you've done much interaction with either Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholics, you know that apostolic fundamentally means what we say it means by our authority.

So the bodily assumption is apostolic tradition, not because it's historically traceable to the apostles at all. It's because it's been defined by us, and we have apostolic authority, therefore what we say is apostolic.

Well, you know, that would make everything the Mormons say apostolic, and whatever, because we have apostolic authority. Get me off of that shot. I do not want to be staring over my shoulder. Thank you very much.

That's really creepy. I don't know if you didn't see that, but it's sort of like... Twilight zone stuff going on there. Anyway, so what am I going to say? I'll go ahead and say. I would assume that Craig Trulia knows what I'm going to say.

He's had plenty of time to prepare for this, as have I, and this time has gone by very quickly, I'll have to admit. But my argument is going to be that if something is apostolic, it came from the apostles.

My argument is going to be this is the only certain apostolic deposit of faith known to the church. Period. End of discussion. My argument is going to be there's nothing in here about icon veneration.

There's everything in here about how the Hebrew term for bow down worship, Hebrew terms, there's a whole family of terms, rendered the Greek Septuagint, decimates the distinctions made between Latruo, Diluo, Proskuneo in the verbal forms, and Proskenesis, the big thing at the council at Nicaea too.

So there's plenty in here that contradicts that, and I will make that claim, make that argument. But this is the apostolic tradition. This is the apostolic deposit of faith. The ones for all delivered to the saints faith.

Jude 4. Here it is. And there's nothing that would allow a church to do what Eastern Orthodoxy has done, because you need to understand Eastern Orthodoxy anathematizes you if you will not kiss the icon.

So you have to do it. So in other words, it's not a freedom thing. It's not we insist on the freedom to venerate icons. No. You have to do it. And if you don't, off to hell with you. Seriously. You cannot have salvation.

You are anathema. You are separated from the church. Very, very clearly indicated. So then there's going to be, I'm going to talk some, I only have 25 minutes. It goes very, very fast. When you're speaking, it's time just slips away.

When the other guy is speaking, it drags like anything. I will point out that Nicaea 2, there's significant problems with viewing that as an ecumenical council. The funny thing is it took Rome a hundred years to recognize Nicaea 2 as an ecumenical council.

And the only reason Rome did it was Rome was hoping by doing so to get their papal lands back that the Byzantine, the Byzantines had stolen from them and they didn't get them back. It was all political.

Hieria had been political. Everything after Chalcedon was political. I will mention Empress Irene. I will make the assertion that the only reason an Eastern Orthodox man today venerates icons is because Irene tells him to.

Irene brought this council. Irene raised Tarasius to ecumenical patriarch in one week from being one of her politicians. He ran the council. I will point out that in the first session, before they got to the arguments, in the first session, they anathematized the other side.

There was only one side at the council. If you did not believe in Iconidulea, you were anathematized in the first session. You're out of here. There was no serious debate. The Horus, the Florilegium, the authoritative teachings and the Florilegium are the citations from preceding centuries that supposedly substantiate the teaching of that council.

Well, Hieria in 754 had produced their own. Most would argue a much better, more accurate set than Nicaea II did. This is what you find in the documents. This has only been out. Richard Price did us all a massive favor here.

In 2020, as far as that kind of thing is concerned, having access to the entire works of the council like that, what a massive amount of work that was congratulations to him. There's all sorts of problems with Nicaea II.

It truly wasn't ecumenical and it was extremely political. It would be like Donald Trump calling a council of the church and saying everybody has to agree with what I want. Honestly, there are some parallels between Irene and the Donald as far as their love of power.

There really are. Anyway, but then there's going to be this and I suppose I need to get to this lest we run out of time. It's 20 minutes till. I threw this up here just before the program started. The font's a little bit small and I'm not sure why.

Makes it a little bit bigger, but not much. Much of the conversation needs to be focused upon this aspect. The reason that the references that Craig Trulia uses before the 4th and 5th centuries are not relevant to his thesis is this.

As with so many other developments of doctrine over time, like I've used an example in the past, Purgatory. Purgatory developed. There are streams of development that moved into Purgatory. You couldn't have the final 15th century doctrine of Purgatory without all these other streams developing.

They didn't develop at the same time and in the same way and the same speed. They eventually come together into a finalized doctrine. That's why I've said so many times when you see these tracts or booklets that say, you know, this doctrine developed in this year and this doctrine in that year.

Forget them. That's not how it works. It may get defined formally in such and such a year, but that doesn't mean that somebody woke up that morning and said, hey, let's come up with indulgences. That's not how it works.

The reason that the references that Mr. Trulia uses to the earlier sources, the reason that they can't mean what he thinks they mean is that he's using a certain lens to look at them and the lens that they use is this phrase, the honor paid to the image passes over to the archetype.

The honor paid to the image passes over to the architect. This is the language, I guess I might as well, I mean, I don't think it's going to mess things up here. Without that language, this phrase right here, because the honor paid to the image passes over to the architect.

What is this? You could go online right now, anywhere on YouTube, find one of the ortho bros, find one of their YouTube videos on icon veneration. They will quote this. They can't not quote it. This is the key patristic text that was utilized by Nicaea II via John of Damascus.

He pulled it from Basil. The honor paid to the image, so you've got your icon, the honor paid to the icon passes over to the archetype. If I have an image of a martyr, then the honor I'm paying to this passes to the martyr themselves, and that's why they're worthy of that.

To the apostle, to Jesus, to Mary, the Theotokos. This is it. Without this, you don't have the argumentation of Nicaea II. You don't have it. I will show you how that is in just a moment, but quick background here.

The sentence comes from two places in the corpus attributed to Basil, both read out and both cited in Nicaea II's fourth session. The fourth session is really where one through three was one, they were kicking all the iconoclasts out, and two and three had to do with some more of that.

Session four is when they finally get to the issue of icon veneration. This is all available online. CCEL, if you put in on the Holy Spirit Basil, or De Spiritu Sanctu, this is a letter addressed to Amphilochius of Iconium around 375 AD.

So let's put that in history. That's 50 years after Nicaea I. It's before Constantinople, so it's before 381, where Arianism is going to be finally defeated. But remember, 375, they're still coming out of the period of Arian ascendancy.

It's crashing, but Constantinople hasn't taken place yet. So Basil is writing in defense of using equative and equalitive language of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son, which had not been used at Nicaea I in 325.

So here's what he says, and read 1844 and then 1845. Again, it's all over the net. Anybody wants to find it, if you've got ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, whoever, they can pull this for you too. Here's what he says, the image of the emperor is also called the emperor and not two emperors, for his power is not divided and his glory is not partitioned, for just as the rule and authority that controls us is one, so the glorification we utter is one and not multiple, because the honor paid to the image passes over to the archetype.

So his argument is this, if you read 1844, in 1844 he talks about mathematics and arithmetic and how the people who were opposing this equative and exaltative language of the Holy Spirit, the Pneumaticoi, the people fighting against the Spirit, they were saying that to use this would divide the godhead based on math, and of course Unitarians continue to say that today in different contexts, and the example he's using here is he's saying, so the glorification we utter, so the praise of the Spirit, is one and not multiple, because the honor paid to the image passes over the archetype.

So when we worship Jesus, since he is consubstantial with the Father, we are not worshiping two, but one, because of consubstantiality, because of the fact that the Son is the image of the Father in the most divine and full sense, then there is no division of the worship into multiple deities.

Basil’s “Image and Archetype” Argument in Context

All right, so also another homily transmitted under Basil's name, against the Sabellians, Arius, and the Onomians, for where the origin is one, and that which proceeds from it is one, and where the archetype is one, and the image is one, so there's the image, Christ, the image of the Father, the principle of unity is not destroyed, therefore the Son, being generated from the Father, and in his own nature representing the Father, is indistinguishable as his image.

Now image is language used in the New Testament of Christ as well. Neither does he who in the marketplace gazes at the imperial image giving the name of the emperor to the one on the panel acknowledge two emperors, instead he confirms the honor paid to the latter by acknowledging the former.

So they're using an example, and you could argue, well that may not have been the best example to use, especially in light of, if it had only been, what, 60 -70 years since Christians had died by the thousands for not honoring the emperor in that way, so I could see that, but here's the issue, and this is a, both passages sit inside a specific identifiable argument, and neither is about religious art.

Richard Price, that's the book over here, the one who translated all the stuff, Richard Price, his own footnote on the Athanasian and Basilian citations read at session four, states the point as cleanly as a modern scholar can, quote, the context is that the Son, as the image of the Father, according to scripture, such as in Colossians 115, is truly consubstantial with the Father and not inferior to him.

The topic is not religious images. The man who translated the Acts, who is himself a Roman Catholic, I understand, the topic is not religious images, and the point is that for the only way for Basil's, the honor paid to the image passed over the archetype to be true, is if the image and the archetype are consubstantial, share the same being, and icons made of wood, a martyr is not, a saint is not, the Theotokos is not, Jesus is not, there is no consubstantiality.

The utilization of this, which started with John of Damascus, primarily, I mean he certainly popularized it, and then the establishment of this at the very council itself, this is the fundamental error.

Without this, and this is 375, so anything before 375 would not have had this to utilize, even in the twisted way it's utilized by Eastern Orthodoxy today. So anything earlier than that, you can't have the honor paid to the image passed over the archetype as an excuse, as a mechanism to say, oh that's not idolatry.

They weren't thinking that. That had not come up yet. Basil's the first one to say it, and it didn't have anything to do with religious art. It took a long time for someone to take that, take it out of its context, change it, and make it usable in this context.

And that's what happened. Nicea II bought it, didn't correct it. How is that apostolic? Even if Basil was inspired, that's still not what he meant. That's still not what the context says. And honest readers of Basil will admit it.

So that's going to come up. Trust me. I'm raising it. I'm going to tell you right now. I think I have this. This price quote is in my screen, in my slides, so it's going to be there. So yeah, that is going to come up.

Very much so. And so what's going to happen, oh goodness, uh, what's going to happen after that? Well, that's when it gets a little hazy, because I don't know exactly how Craig's going to respond to that.