Alpha and Omega Ministries

Every time we open the phones we get such excellent questions! A huge thank you to everyone who joined the Zoom and called in today—all of your questions were truly great. Today we tackled tough questions like the canon of Scripture and its relationship to epistemology as well as how believers need to view politics, voting, etc. We got calls from Ireland and Hungary as well! Went in depth in our responses as well. Remember, Rich is out of town for a bit, so we will be back, Deo volente, next week.

After some comments on a variety of topics at the top of the program, we dove deep into the following citation from Basil the Great, "because the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype." We looked at the original context and meaning, and then how it was plucked out of that context and used by John of Damascus, and how that then became central to the arguments of the iconophiles at Nicea II, and hence became the basis of "infallible dogma" for both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Not an entertaining program, to be sure, but hopefully a helpful one. Tomorrow we will be doing a Zoom call "open phones" program, so join us then!

Covered the waterfront today to be sure! Talked about Trump's healing meme, the Pope and the Muslims, and Joel Webbon playing footsie with Catholics on the Reformation, all because...the Jews!

Was joined by Aaron Shafovaloff of Mormonism Research Ministry (mrm.org) to discuss developments in Mormonism and to review a clip of a recent LDS discussion wherein the historic view of God is questioned by Blake Ostler, an ostensibly LDS philosopher and attorney, and others in the "New Mormonism" movement. If you have LDS friends and neighbors, you will want to listen to this one!

In light of the resurrection of a particularly bad parable by Jacob Hansen we went over the lengthy rebuttal of the story of the "boys in the pond" parable (Hansen made it girls in a lake), showing that it fails on every level to correspond to biblical truth. We also touched on a good bit of LDS theology as well today.