Transcript

James White is an apologist for reformed Baptist theology who's well-known for his many public debates.

He and I have had three formal debates over the years, and in my study of apologetics, I've reviewed many of his debates.

Most of these debates are pretty standard fare, but a few have some strange moments that I need to talk about, including one recent debate that counts as probably the weirdest James White debate I've ever seen.

First, let's start with some honorable mentions.

Recently, White debated my colleague, Joe Heschmeyer, on the sacrifice of the mass, which took an interesting turn when the subject of the early second century father, Ignatius of Antioch, came up.

There has been a tremendous amount of scholarly skepticism expressed as to whether Ignatius even existed-

.

and which letters are actually 'Cause there's a Latin and there's a shorter, and there's a I was not taught that, but I'm-

Okay.

sort of catching up with that.

So, if S- so that I hope Ignatius y-

Yeah, Henry de Vos-

I hope-

and people like that are, are kind of taking the view, but it is a fringe-

I hope, I hope-

view in scholarship.

I hope Well, it's becoming the central view.

I hope Ignatius existed and wrote the things we have, but-

So, you're saying the central view in scholarship is Ignatius didn't exist?

But, but, but, but, but I'm sorry?

You're saying the central view in scholarship is Ignatius didn't exist?

I'm saying, I'm saying that the expression that, uh, that, that there are people going, Did these letters actually have an original form?

There are so many forms of it.

Why?

That's not relevant to our debate right now.

Okay.

I'm simply saying-

Okay.

he, he may have written in 107 or 108.

I hope he did, but, but maybe not.

Now, to be fair to White, I don't think he was outright claiming Ignatius of Antioch never existed.

He seems to be saying that all of Ignatius' letters were once considered authentic, but we now know that some of the letters attributed to Ignatius are forgeries, and a few scholars today think that all of the letters are forgeries.

All right.

Well, some scholars think that Jesus never existed, but James White, along with basically every expert on the planet, doesn't take that seriously.

Some crank scholars go even further and think that Paul never existed.

This kind of approach White is taking here reminds me of a problem I see in a lot of Protestant apologetics.

When they criticize Catholicism, they'll cite modernist critical scholarship of things like the papacy, but then Protestants will ignore that same critical scholarship when it goes against what they believe.

Like how scholars who say the Ignatian letters are forgeries, those same scholars would almost certainly say most of Saint Paul's letters are forgeries.

I call this tactic scholars for me but not for thee in my book, When Protestants Argue Like Atheists.

I also covered this in an episode a few years ago when I compared how James White criticized Muslims that he debates when they cite liberal scholarship like the Jerome Biblical Commentary, but White uses that same scholarship, including the Jerome Biblical Commentary, to criticize Catholics.

Check out that episode in the link below.

And while you're checking out that link, be sure to hit the subscribe button, and also don't forget to support us at trenthornpodcast.com, where for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content and you help our channel to grow.

In other debates, however, the weird moment comes not from James White, but his opponent.

In 2009, White debated atheist Dan Barker, someone I've also debated, on the question of Jesus: myth or messiah?

However, Barker interrupted White's opening statement to object to James White citing, well, Dan Barker.

So with this first, I will be responding to his published work.

Then the rebuttal will go to what he has presented, uh, this morning.

Can I make a point of order here?

We're not debating my book.

We're debating

Yes.

the I may have changed my mind in the book.

I may not have I may not have thought it was important, so we are not debating my book.

Can I, can I respond then?

Uh, when you're in a scholarly debate and you've published a book, what you've published in the public realm is fair game.

It is what you yourself have presented.

Now, if you want to say, if you want to say after I'm done here, I repudiate the book that's for sale in the back, that would be fine.

But I'm asking No.

Again, I don't have my little-

Oh, is it not true that's found in sermon 131?

All right.

Have you ever looked at sermon 131, sir?

Yes, I have.

I taught a course on Augustine.

Okay.

And are you aware that that phrase that you just quoted never appears in any text of sermon 131?

I

I can provide you with the actual Latin text if you want me to look it up.

That does not appear anywhere in, uh, sermon 131.

Did I Do you think I care about the number of it?

It doesn't No, no sir.

The, I'm sorry, uh, the, the, the point I was making is you seem You, you just made a quotation from Augustine.

Yeah.

And I'm challenging you that, uh, while that is said to appear in sermon 131, uh, that is a, one of the most common apologetic errors of Roman Catholic apologists.

White is correct that Augustine never said the exact words, Rome has spoken.

The case is closed.

But Augustine did say something very similar regarding the Pelagian controversy, noting that the cause is finished and referencing the authority of the Holy See.

For more on the actual rendering of this quote, see my book, What the Saints Never Said, or my discussion of it about 10 minutes into my talk at the 2019 Catholic Answers Conference.

Link below.

In White's previous debates on purgatory, he came out with a robust biblical and historical case that absolutely slammed his opponents.

That's why I studied those debates intensely to prepare for our 2021 debate on purgatory.

But I was disappointed because while in those past debates James White was like 1986 Mike Tyson versus Jose Ribalta Seriously, it's an awesome fight.

Go watch it In my debate with him on purgatory, it felt more like Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul.

White simply did not bring the rigor that I had seen in previous debates.

However, in one of his recent debates, James White came out in full force against an absurd position that deserved all the rhetorical blows against it.

In a word, Tyson was back.

That was the 2025 debate with ex-Lutheran Corey Mahler on the question, Can the Holy Spirit sanctify Black people as much as white people?

Yes.

That's what they actually debated.

And all I could think in my mind when I heard that topic was every bruh meme ever posted on the internet.

Bruh.

Now, in my previous episode on what I will and won't debate, I said there are some topics I'm not going to debate because they're so fringe and stupid, they don't deserve the attention.

It would be a waste of time when I could be engaging people on more serious questions.

So, for example, I'm not going to debate people on whether the earth is flat or if the earth goes around the sun, even though some Catholics are flat-earthers and geocentrists and try to use scripture and church teaching to defend those views.

Bruh.

I restrict my debates to widely accepted grave evils and errors, not niche stupidity.

Now, that's my standard.

And other people have different standards, and that's fine.

The claim that Black people are not as human as white people, or not human at all, is a fringe view.

But I've seen significant numbers of people on the internet defend this view and mock the idea that Black people and people of color belong to the human race.

Now, part of this is due to what I mentioned in a previous episode on anonymity, that when you can make public statements under an anonymous avatar, there's no way to hold you accountable for your absurd views, and so it's easy to give in to the temptation to be a horrible human being.

And if you do that, you risk your eternal soul in the process.

I may not debate people on these errors, but I will create content that refutes them and calls these people to repentance from these sins.

Why I chose to debate Mahler on this subject, and it was worthwhile to show how Mahler's position is based on faulty exegesis and faulty logic.

Mahler used to be a Lutheran, but he would post the most horrible antisemitic and racist content online, like this post where he notes that people tell him that Blacks have been in the US for centuries, to which Mahler responds, So have pigs, but that doesn't make them human.

Rolling Stone magazine reported on Mahler's attempts to make the Lutheran Church a fascist stronghold.

And in 2023, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod excommunicated Mahler.

In order to show the seriousness of his impenitence and as a last effort to win him back to our Lord, I announce that Corey Mahler is now excommunicated from the holy Christian Church until he repents.

Corey may not come to this or any other Christian altar for the Lord's supper.

He is not permitted to serve as a sponsor at holy baptism nor engage in any other rites or privileges of the church, except to hear the preaching of God's word.

May Almighty God mercifully grant him grace to confess his sin so that he might receive the Lord's forgiveness and be restored to communion with God in His Church.

So that's a little backstory on Mahler.

And I gotta say, right on to the Lutherans for properly wielding the medicinal penalty of excommunication.

Frankly, the Catholic Church needs to use that more for so-called Catholics who promote grave public evils, things like abortion, sodomy, as well as evils like racism.

So a few months ago, White and Mahler faced off on this question, and White brought a ton of biblical evidence to show that God makes all people holy in Christ, regardless of their ethnic background.

This is especially evident in White's use of Colossians 3:8-11, which should strike fear into any self-described Christian who thinks it's okay to verbally abuse a person with profane language or mock them or their marriage because of their race.

Paul says, Put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth.

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all and in all.

The Bible and church teaching are clear that all people are equal in Christ regardless of their ethnic backgrounds.

The idea that the Bible teaches the inferiority of Black people is a late development in church history which a few Catholics unfortunately accepted.

But it was far more common among 19th-century Protestants who tried to say that the curse of Ham in Genesis 9 justified enslaving Blacks.

And it was used to justify depriving Blacks of the priesthood and temple ordinances in early Mormonism.

The Mormon church's official website says, Given the long history of withholding the priesthood from men of Black African descent, church leaders believe that a revelation from God was needed to alter the policy, and they made ongoing efforts to understand what should be done.After praying for guidance, President McKay did not feel impressed to lift the ban.

Then in 1978, the Mormons released Official Declaration 2, which said in part, A revelation had been received by President Spencer W. Kimball extending priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy male members of the church.

Using the Curse of Cain or the Curse of Ham to mistreat Blacks is a baseless rendering of scripture, and it's no wonder that Mahler didn't even use it in his debate with White.

In fact, Mahler's opening was even worse than Jerry Matatich's in showing how to waste your time in giving an opening statement by not saying anything.

He spent the whole time quibbling about the nature of what God can do and not citing any evidence from scripture, tradition, or even logic for his view that God is incapable of sanctifying Black people.

Instead, Mahler waited until his rebuttal to use cherry-picked crime statistics to try and show that Blacks are morally inferior to Whites because they're overrepresented in some crime statistics, and he claimed that Blacks have a lower IQ. But as White noted earlier in the debate, these are cultural artifacts, not intrinsic properties of people.

2,000 years ago, White barbarian tribes in the British Isles were less intelligent and more wicked than Middle Eastern and African Christians.

It was fair-skinned Europeans who were, according to Roman sources, burning people alive in wicker man statues, a practice depicted in the 1973 film, The Wicker Man.

Even today, it's majority White countries that endorse evils like abortion, so-called same-sex marriage, and transgenderism.

But in Africa, same-sex marriage is basically rejected.

And as White pointed out, Matt Walsh's great film, What Is a Woman?

shows African tribes who Mahler would probably say God cannot fully sanctify easily rejecting the nonsense of transgenderism that many White academics proudly accept.

Mahler's methodology doesn't work because you can use it to reach any racist conclusion that you want.

For example, Whites make up 60% of the US population, but they account for 82% of DUI arrests and 91% of arrests for possession of pornography involving children.

Historically, Whites accounted for 82% of serial killers, until the definition of serial killing was changed to include gang violence.

Does this mean that Whites are uniquely evil?

Of course not.

It just means there are complex social and cultural reasons for why certain crimes are more prevalent among certain demographic groups.

Every group has their saints and their sinners, but it's racist to say that God's grace cannot transform someone because they belong to a particular race that is supposedly so inferior or inhuman that not even God can fully save them.

In fact, Mahler shot himself in the foot when he admitted that some very mentally handicapped people were still staunch Christians.

The Gospel is the message of what God has done in Jesus Christ, and He communicates it to people on every level, to the incredibly intelligent, uh, person with a 160 IQ, and I've seen Him communicate it to the person, uh, with Down syndrome.

Uh, how, how that works functionally, uh, in the brain, I can't even begin to understand, but I've seen it happen, and, um, I trust the word of God at that point.

I'm glad that we actually agree on that one because I've also known some severely mentally handicapped individuals who were nevertheless very staunch Christians, so that's certainly a, a great gift of God.

So according to Mahler, God is powerful enough to overcome a biological limit to fully sanctify a mentally handicapped person, but God is not powerful enough to overcome whatever racist limit Mahler has placed upon Black people.

All this shows is that Mahler and people like him have turned race into a kind of god to be worshiped, that not even the true God can overcome, which reinforces the importance of the words of Pope Pius XI that he wrote to those in Nazi Germany in 1937 when he said of race or the people or the state that, quote, Whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.

He is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Now, you might think all of this is silly and I or James White should not give these kinds of views attention, but I can assure you this sin is prevalent among tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of young men who claim to be Christian or claim to be Catholic.

You can see this, for example, in the case of Pop Culture Schwa, a Black man who posted an innocuous picture of himself being received into the Catholic Church with his White wife and their children.

The post ended up being viewed over one million times because hundreds of abusive trolls called him evil and a sinner for daring to marry a woman of another race.

The Protestant channel Cleave to Antiquity has a good interview with Schwa where he talks about what happened, and it's absolutely shameful.

Demeaning anyone who isn't a White Christian man is becoming a big problem among some terminally online Christians, and I appreciate that James White has taken a stand against it, including in the Mahler debate.

White has also publicly opposed those who belittle Holocaust victims, and one account seems to think that James White and I must be friends because we both stand against the nonsense of Holocaust denial.

Well, I would say James White and I are friendly when our paths cross, and I'm glad we've been able to civilly engage important theological issues over the years.

And I'm happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with James White or Gavin Ortlund or any other Protestant of goodwill who is looking for an ally to stand against cultural insanity, whether it's from the left who defend sodomy and abortion or the far right who defend malice and bigotry.

Sin is not the domain of one political school of thought.

It resides in the hearts of all people, and the only hope we have that can save us from sin is our savior, Jesus Christ.

So if James White continues to help people see the necessity of believing in Jesus Christ, I'm all for that.

And if he continues to criticize the Catholic Church, I'll be there to engage those criticisms as well.

Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.