C
catholic1seeks
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** I think Mr. White has too much time on his hands… **Ok, so I listened to the first 25 minutes of White’s Monday show when he addresses this thread. Incidentally, he was not taking calls except maybe at the end. I called his show that day and went into the press 1 for this 2 for that thing and didn’t hear where I could get on the show. Just as well, though cuz here goes…
White started out by creating a belittled fictional caricature of me, MarcoPolo, who supposedly only listened to Tim’s side of the debate and not his, that Catholics don’t read or listen to his arguments out of some fear apparently. He also thinks I called Catholic Answers the following day and that my voice “sounded familiar.” What’s ironic is that I deliberately skipped a lot of Tim’s parts to hear what White had to say. Don’t know what he’s talking about. He also is under a delusion that Catholic Apologists don’t want to debate him out of fear and that they will lose. On White’s own website, I counted 27 debates he’s done with Catholics. From the many times I’ve heard White speak, this is an obsession with him—needing to be recognized as supreme debater and that Catholics are afraid to debate him because he is “too scholarly” or “too good.” But that whole opening was all polemics, neither here nor there.
Anyway, of some substance, White addressed only a small part of my post, which he misunderstood. He went on again about the Greek word for “suffer loss” and insisted, as I also admitted in this very thread, that the word can mean suffer loss or punish. He is under the impression that if the word is translated “suffer loss” (which for crying out loud, the Catholic translations of my RSV-CE and NAB translate it as) it can therefore have no connotations related to punishment. And he repeatedly asserted in the debate that there is no sign of purification in this passage. He says to get the true meaning of that one word, you have to examine the context of the word. Agreed. And that’s where he abandons the rest of my post.
He never addressed anything I said about the figure of fire, silver and gold, and the metaphor of smelting, purification, cleansing, etc. in the passage.
As I also wrote in that post (which he also did not mention): “Is a person inflicted with fire simply being deprived of a reward? It’s almost too stupid to translate the passage that way, but White does.” He just went on that I don’t know Greek—but the funny thing is, granting him 100% of his explanation of the Greek, he still admitted he is left to determine if the context warrants punishment or any kind of purification or not. And that’s where his argument breaks down.
The rest of the opening is just him saying Catholics are blind and are unscholarly and he is brilliant and we should buy his books and Catholic Answers raises a lot of money, and quotes like “[Catholic Answers] cannot afford to have their darling apologists getting their heads handed to them in a debate,” or “Tim melted down in our debate on Papal infallibility” etc…etc…the usual polemics. He mentioned Randy Carson briefly and his conversation with Apologist78. Of Apologist78, he said: “Finally to see someone on the Catholic Answers Forum who is not so completely blinded by prejudice.” He praised most everything Apologist78 wrote except for the end of post 36 because White thinks he is right to not go beyond any literal meaning in Scriptural exegesis—which is partly where White derailed in this debate. You all saw the ECFs who recognized the cleansing nature of fire in this passage I posted earlier. I hardly think they had a blind prejudice.
One final point of interest was this quote that he also made toward the end of the debate (which of course I somehow didn’t listen to because I’m afraid to listen to any of his debate or read any of his stuff you know):*Did you all notice? Tim never touched the Jerome Bible Commentary. Never touched it. Never even made reference to it. It gives the exact same interpretation I did. He doesn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.*Now, sifting through the usual polemical language here, consider this. First, if the JBC did agree completely with him, so what. It would be a rather isolated view from Catholic sources. But second, White said the JBC gives the “exact same interpretation” of 1 Cor 3:15 as him. You wonder if that was true, why James White argued against parts of that interpretation on his own website! The part of the JBC he argues against says, “Although the doctrine of purgatory is not taught in this passage, it does find support in it. The metaphor suggests an expiatory punishment–which is not damnation–for faults that, although not excluding salvation, merit punishment.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the current thread subscribers is White himself!
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