Presupp Applied to Canonical Studies with Dr. Michael Kruger

Revealed Apologetics

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host Elias Ayala, and today I'm super excited to have with me Dr. Michael Kruger, who is a professor, are you still a professor over there?

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Okay, at RTS, Reformed Theological Seminary, right? And he's very well known for his work in canonicity issues, you know, the canon of scripture, how the canon was developed, and a bunch of questions related to that specific area.

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And so I'm very, very excited to have Dr. Kruger with us today, and we're going to try and see if we could apply some presuppositional application to that specific area, and then hopefully we can see where the conversation goes from there.

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So before we officially start, and I welcome Dr. Kruger officially, and give him an opportunity to say hello to everyone, and to maybe give a brief summary of what he does over there at RTS, I'm just going to make a few announcements, some upcoming interviews.

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I have Doug Wilson coming on the 24th, Jeff Durbin on the 29th, Dr. James Anderson on May 9th, we've got

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Dr. Gary Habermas on May 12th, and Dr. Douglas, I keep on messing up his last name, but Gruthius, I think it's

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Gruthius, probably on May 15th, but we're working out that date. So we got a bunch of great interviews, and in between there,

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I'll be shooting out some videos on some different applications of presuppositional methodology, so I know folks are really enjoying that content there.

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Well, if you are enjoying the past episodes, please press the subscribe button on YouTube, and you could also check out the podcast on iTunes as well.

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Typically, if you don't catch the live stream, I try my best to rip the audio from the live stream and make it a podcast so that folks could avail themselves through that route, kind of if they don't want to watch the video and see our wonderful faces, and you just want to listen to our soothing voices in your iPhone, you can do that.

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So with that being said, Dr. Kruger, or how would you like me to call you? You know, some doctors, don't call me doctor, just call me

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Mikey. I don't know if you're more informal, formal. What would you like me to call you? Whatever you want is fine.

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Mike is fine. Dr. Kruger is fine. It can be however you want to set it up. Okay, sounds good. So why don't you take a few moments and tell folks a little bit about yourself?

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Yeah, well, as you noted, I'm at Reform Theological Seminary. I'm in the Charlotte campus, been here almost 20 years as professor of New Testament and early

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Christianity. Now I'm the president of the campus and been president of the campus for about the last eight years. And my area of research and writing, as many of your listeners may know, is on the origins and development of the

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New Testament canon. Some dealing with manuscripts and textual criticism, but mainly canonical studies is of interest of mine.

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And it's going to be largely on the New Testament side. Of course, I'm interested in the Old Testament too in a broad sense, but most of my research has been on New Testament and particularly

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New Testament in the second century. Yeah, great. Well, what is it specifically that got you into this specific area of study?

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I mean, you've written a bunch of books and this is obviously a focus of yours. What was the main thing that kind of pushed you into this area?

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Because there's a vast array of topics one could cover with regards to New Testament studies and apologetics and things like that.

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Was your reasoning because of its apologetic import or just generally you were interested in the question, you wanted to explore it a little more?

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Well, a little bit of both. I mean, it certainly has a lot of apologetic implications just based on the implications of canon on the doctrine of scripture.

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What we think about the canon really affects what we think about the Bible. And you don't have a coherent answer for the problem of canon, you don't really have a coherent defense of scripture.

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So yes, there's apologetic value to it, but I have interest in it in its own right. I'm fascinated by the role these books played in the early development of the

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Christian faith, the discussion of lost books, apocryphal gospels. My research with Larry Hurtado at the

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An Apocryphal Gospel Fragment from Oxyrhynchus, Oxyrhynchus 840. So I think there's a lot of fascinating things about this in its own right aside from its apologetic value.

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And for me, manuscripts, text, and canon have just been front and center from the start. Okay. Now, would it be your estimation just on the popular level, do you think that the average

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Christian is lacking greatly in the knowledge of this area? And how do you think that affects our ability to present a powerful apologetic with regards to the different objections that are raised against the

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Christian position? Yeah. My experience is, I mentioned a couple of things in that regard. My experience is that most

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Christians are fascinated with this area. They're very interested in it. I go and speak at a lot of churches and Christian organizations, college groups, and I always find that people are really wanting to talk about things like lost gospels and canon and text and how we got the books of our

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Bible. So there's no doubt there's an interest. And by the way, that interest spans Christians. I think it's true collectively.

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Just people in general want to know about our Bibles, even if they're not even in a church or even Christians at all.

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That said, I think most Christians, even though they're fascinated by the subject, probably don't know all that much about it.

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I think they probably not had anybody in their midst that knows a lot that can tell them. And I think there's a certain level of vulnerability there.

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It's pretty common that every Christmas and Easter, there's an article that'll come out on the web or on a newspaper or magazine saying, hey, you can't trust what your

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Bible says about the birth of Jesus or about the resurrection of Jesus. And there's all kinds of attacks on the New Testament.

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And I think most people just don't know what to do with that. So when you talk about text and canon and reliability issues, it's really important, but the average believer just doesn't have much knowledge because they've never been taught.

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And truthfully, their pastors probably haven't been taught either. Most seminaries don't address these issues at really any depth, and so there's not really any place for them to turn.

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Sure. Now, okay, so let's jump right into the conversation here. Now, with regards to apologetics,

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I know folks over there at Reformed Theological Seminary, a place like Westminster, very much heavily influenced by presuppositional thought, people like Van Til, Frame, Bonson.

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Would you say that you hold to the presuppositional methodology with regards to how you do apologetics, or are you kind of not so much wanting to put yourself in kind of the camp?

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I know there's a lot of this camp mentality. We want to avoid that, but how would you, if you could, identify your own perspective, and then we can kind of go from there.

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Sure, yeah. Well, I was a student of John Frame's. He's both a colleague at RTS, he just is emeritus professor at our

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Orlando campus. So he's a friend and a colleague, but also a former professor and mentor of mine, and I've been very influenced by his thinking.

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And of course, he would definitely put himself on the presuppositional camp, along with his mentor, effectively

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Van Til himself, and so I would be comfortable with those categories. Now, several things are worth saying as soon as you say that.

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Say that you're presuppositional can mean a lot of different things, meaning that there's different versions of it, there's different perspectives on it.

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I think Frame did a good job of nuancing Van Til, pointing out where Van Til may have been able to do better, some places where he thinks

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Van Til was just mistaken, and can improve his methodology. Van Til obviously is not infallible, nor are any of us.

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Some people seem to think so. Really? And so I appreciate Frame's willingness to say, hey, look,

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I'm a presuppositionalist, but I think there's ways we can articulate this argument more effectively.

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And he's done a good job. And then I would put myself largely in the Framian camp, if we can say that, although,

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I mean, there's lots of nuances there that could be added, but I'm comfortable by saying that. So yeah, I'm a presuppositionalist.

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You'll notice my work on canon, I rarely actually use the term, not because I don't believe in it, but because I think most people don't understand it, and it raises questions about methodology, and apologetics,

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I'm not really that concerned to raise at that point. So I usually try to scoot around the terminology and just get to the heart of the matter in the way

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I address canon. Yeah, that's what I like about your work, specifically, it's very easy to pick a side, and then have to justify the side so that you can then apply the specific methodology to the specific area that you're addressing.

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And that's kind of annoying. I like how you just employ and lay out the perspective within how you address the area without having to get bogged down with justifying the methodology, and then kind of moving from there.

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It's kind of seeped into what you're doing. I think at this point, within apologetic history, if we say,

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I think we're past the point of always just having to lay out the entire method, defend every aspect of the method, and then kind of apply it to these other areas.

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I think, you know, it's good to kind of just begin to make those applications and weave them into what we're doing.

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What do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the tiring things about these debates and apologetics,

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I'm sure you've experienced this too, is that the debates never get past methodology. And so you spend all your time debating methodology rather than actually doing apologetics.

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That's right. Yeah. And that's unfortunate. And I guess there's some inevitability to that. I mean, we do need to address method, and method matters.

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But what I've hoped to have accomplished in my work on canon is actually just doing the work. And what it hopefully demonstrates to people is that you can actually have a reformed epistemology and a presuppositional approach and not have that negate good historical work.

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I mean, the honest truth is most presuppositionalists who are worried about arguing over methodology don't necessarily, or haven't necessarily been the same ones that have done the hard historical work.

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And there's a caricature out there that's unfortunate, because it's been debunked so many times, that presuppositionalists don't care about evidence, or don't think evidence matters, or that historical facts are irrelevant, or that almost this fideistic approach.

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And of course, that's been shown to be mistaken on so many levels. But hopefully, you know, if you start dealing with stuff like canon, well, you know, obviously, historical evidences do matter.

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And I deal a lot with those. The question isn't whether you use them, or whether they matter, but how you use them, and the way they sit within the larger structure of your argument.

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And I think that's a very important point that you made, because you're right, I hear this all the time online. I'm not sure within the scholarly realm, if that's an application that people try to hoist upon the presuppositional method.

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But just from a popular level, people just assume presuppositionalists don't use evidence. And I mean, reading

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Van Til, reading Bantz, and I just haven't found that myself. And so I'm not sure where that comes from.

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Where do you think, in your opinion, where do you think that perception originates?

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You know, why do you think people make that mistake? Because you're a living embodiment that contradicts that.

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You appeal to evidence for the positions that you take with regards to canonicity and things like that.

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Where do you think that comes from, in your estimation? Well, I think it stems from many different things. One thing it stems from, as I hinted at, was that most presuppositionalists are not the ones doing the major historical work.

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And so you sort of, on the surface, already think, well, they must not care, right? And so there's already a sort of inherent sense that they're not that interested.

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Secondly, some presuppositionalists have probably overstated their case a little bit, and maybe make it sound like the only way to argue is argue in a presuppositional fashion that almost makes it look like evidence doesn't have a role.

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And certain more strident versions of presuppositionalism can come off like that, and they're not very nuanced.

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And then I think the third reason people misunderstand this is because presuppositionalists are often talking about the limitations of historical evidence, that just dumping the facts on somebody doesn't actually accomplish as much as we think it does, and that evidence requires a grid through which it's interpreted.

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And this is ironic to say, because most people don't think of it this way, there's a certain subjectivism to historical evidences.

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People think it's the way to go objective, and presuppositionalists are saying, well, depends what you mean.

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I mean, historical evidences can be very subjective, too, because it depends how you interpret the historical evidences. And so as soon as you start talking like that, people think, oh, well, they don't like historical evidences.

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They think they're bad. They think if you use evidence, you're a bad Christian, and that you should sort of repent of it. And they just don't understand the larger -

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So let's get this out of the way. So you're a presuppositionalist. You believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.

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You do acknowledge the truth of the Christian worldview as a system. Sure. Would you use historical arguments to demonstrate the resurrection of Jesus?

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Let's just put the myth to bed. We'll hear from the man himself, right? Would you use historical evidence to establish the resurrection of Jesus?

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Yeah, absolutely. I don't have any problem with that at all. Yeah, I know. Maybe a lightning bolt will come down from someone who's a presuppositionalist in heaven on high who's upset with my answer.

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Dr. Kruger, but if you appeal to historical evidence, aren't you putting God in the dock?

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Aren't you subjecting the God of all the universe to the independent reasoning of the natural man?

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These are the sorts of things that us presuppositionalists hear all the time. Yeah, well - Wouldn't you admit that in light of what you just - Of course, yeah.

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Well, I mean, this is where the rest of my discussion would have to come. I say, of course, I'll use historical evidences, but - Well, I think

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I lost you there. Am I back? You were here the whole time. Okay. I had a flicker on my screen.

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I think a bolt of lightning actually just hit close to my house. There we go. Maybe there really was a bolt of lightning from heaven from some upset presuppositionalist.

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Sorry, my screen blanked and - That's okay. That you still had me. So, yeah, what I would round that out by saying is, of course,

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I use historical evidences, but I'd make a few caveats. One is, I think a lot of the historical evidences I would appeal to are actually warranted by scripture itself.

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Why would I mention 500 eyewitnesses? Well, because the scripture mentions 500 eyewitnesses. Why would I mention the grave clothes or the empty tomb or any of the things that we typically appeal to, or the fact that it was guarded by the

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Jewish leaders who wanted to make sure no one stole the body? Why would I mention all these things? Well, those are historical evidences, but actually get them from the

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Bible. And so I would say there's an inherent circularity there that's inevitable. The second thing I would say is that, as I use the historical evidences,

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I'm not pretending that I'm interpreting them neutrally. In fact, I'm looking at the historical evidences through the larger

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Christian worldview. And so what will inevitably happen after I present the historical evidences to my non -Christian friend is that he won't accept them.

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He'll find them unpersuasive. He says, well, they don't work for me. I'm not convinced. And then as soon as you start asking why he's not convinced, you're going to end up at worldview discussions.

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So eventually, you're going to have to deal with worldview issues. Eventually, you're going to have to deal with larger, deeper epistemological commitments.

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But there's no rule that says you have to start with those things. Why not start with historical evidences and then work your way back to those things?

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Here's what's amazing. Some people will accept the historical evidences. And the reason they will is either A, the spirit's at work already, or B, they're actually operating on a

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Christian system and don't realize it. They're actually borrowing from the Christian worldview and thinking Christianly without actually recognizing they are.

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And so when they hear the evidences, it actually makes sense to them. And so what you realize is that evidences have a role, but they are not absolute.

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They're not neutral, and they're not the kind of thing that you can look at as if worldviews don't matter.

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All right, well, so let's go through some questions here. And these are questions off the top of my head that I think people are interested in.

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With regards to the presuppositional method, oftentimes, people speak of the certainty of God's existence, that it is transcendentally necessary that the triune

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God exists. However, when you're dealing with historical evidences for the resurrection, when you're dealing with history, inevitably, you're dealing with kind of forms of induction and inferences that history by its very nature does not get you a kind of certainty that a lot of Christians speak about.

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How would you kind of explain for us the relationship between the certainty that we have of the

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Christian worldview as a system and the non -certain nature of the historical method in general?

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How do we bring those things together if the knowledge of Jesus being raised from the dead comes through Scripture, but as we're investigating

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Scripture, the very nature of the investigation of history is that you don't work with certainties? How would you tie those two together?

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Yeah, well, I mean, I think you would make a distinction between the certainty of the Christian worldview and the certainty of individual arguments. Those aren't the same things.

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And in fact, Van Til pointed this out, and others since have made this point, which is even if Christianity is certain, it doesn't mean individual arguments themselves are equally certain as other individual arguments.

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It doesn't mean that we have a sufficient amount of evidence for everything we believe in terms of an external corroboration of it.

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But that doesn't change the overall certainty of the Christian worldview. And so part of the discussion is just making those kinds of nuances in the debate.

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The other thing I would push back on here is what people mean by certainty. There's a certain level of certainty that people think you need in order to have knowledge.

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And this is where I appreciate the work of Alvin Plantinga and some of the reformed epistemologists. You can have sufficient warrant for a belief without having absolute certainty over it.

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And I think people overplay the certainty card that my certainty has to be the kind of infallible certainty before I can say

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I know something. Well, we don't have the space here to reenter into all those discussions that Plantinga raises, but I think there's important nuances there.

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I don't have to have the kind of absolute omniscient godlike certainty to know things. I can have sufficient grounds for knowing that would count as knowledge, even if I don't have the kind of absolute certainty that rules out every other possibility.

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And so I think there is an overreach there. And I think this is the favorite card that skeptics like to play.

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They set a bar that no one can reach, right? It's like, no, unless you have knock down, drag out, infallible, absolute, unassailable certainty about every aspect, well, then you can't know anything.

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And of course, our pushback is, well, did you apply that same standard to everything you claim to know? And did you even apply that standard to your own methodology?

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I mean, it doesn't work. So it's self -defeating in the end. When you talk about not necessarily having to have that kind of certainty, would you say with regards to the existence of God, we have that kind of certainty of God is our ultimate foundation?

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It's something, and He's transcendentally necessary. We'd say that that's one fact that we can't be wrong about, that the

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God of Scripture exists. But there are some other facts that we're not claiming absolute certainty with regards to.

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So, Ken, are you saying that from our perspective, thinking in presuppositional? Well, I think, yeah, you're thinking on two different levels here.

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In terms of the certainty of the Christian worldview, I think it's absolute. I mean, I think without it, we end up having an incoherent.

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Such that you cannot be wrong about. Yeah, I mean, this is Bonson, you know, impossibility of the contrary kind of argument.

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But from a historical perspective, we can still marshal evidences. And this is the pathway I was running down, that it can still give us knowledge.

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And we can know certain things by not only using those historical evidences, but using them within the context of a

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Christian worldview that don't necessarily provide the kind of certainty that the skeptic is going to require.

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But we would push back and say, why is that level of certainty necessary for us to say that we have knowledge?

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Now, real quick, and I don't want to get too much on the certainty thing, because I do know that it is an interesting rabbit trail that gets into the whole other issue.

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But let's say if someone did push it. If you're saying you know something, and we're defining knowledge, for example, as a justified true belief, we have a belief, we have justification for it, and it's true, all of the ingredients so that it counts for knowledge.

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But if you have a belief that's true, it's actually true, then how could we not be certain in the sense that we can't be wrong about it if it's knowledge?

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So if there's a possibility, if we're not talking about an epistemic certainty about it, then wouldn't it seem to follow that there's a chance that we could be wrong about it, and then in which case is it really knowledge?

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So I guess that sounds a little confusing. Yeah, and this is a rabbit trail. It depends what you mean by a lot of that.

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So for example, even with Plantinga's work, where he talks about warranted belief, it's only warranted in absent of defeaters.

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And so even if you say you have epistemic grounds for what you say is true, there's still the next step of the work, which is, well, what about all the defeaters?

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So I've got to enter into defeater, defeaters. And so just because you have an epistemically warranted argument doesn't necessarily produce in itself knowledge because it's warranted absent defeaters that are valid.

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In fact, I've done this in my book, Canon Revisited, where the whole second half of my volume is actually on defeaters and what

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Plantinga calls defeater, defeaters. And I walked through the potential defeater.

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So I hear what you're saying there, but there's also layers here that you peel back in terms of levels of certainty.

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Okay, great. Well, folks, real quick, if you have any questions, Dr. Kruger is more than happy to take them throughout the discussion.

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If I see some questions coming in on the live chat, we can stop and take a few moments and have

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Dr. Kruger address those. If not, we will keep on moving. I want to make this as applicable and useful for people as possible.

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And so the questions that I'm about to ask, I don't have a list of anything. I'm kind of going off the top of my head based on questions that really just come up in popular discussion.

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So within the scholarly realm, you probably don't hear a lot of the questions that I might be asking, but at least within the popular level, a lot of Christians have to deal with these sorts of questions.

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And so I'm really interested to see how Dr. Kruger answers some of these. So let's jump into some questions.

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So Dr. Kruger, you're out to Applebee's prior to quarantine, right?

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And you are not engaging in social distancing and you're sitting at the table and you're having a really good conversation with a friend and eventually you get onto the topic of religion.

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And someone says, well, I understand that you believe the Bible, but I don't think there is any good reason to believe that the

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Bible is true. I mean, how do you even know? Who wrote those books? Where did they come from? How do you know that the

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Bible is the word of God? Now, notice what I just asked Dr. Kruger. I just asked a bunch of questions in there very sloppily.

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And I did that on purpose because that's how it's usually presented in a popular, you know, normal conversation.

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No one goes out like a premise one, premise 2 .1. How would you address that question that I just asked while sitting at the dinner table or at an

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Applebee's or something like that? Yeah, well, I mean, at the core of it is it's an epistemological question.

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It's the how you know question. I mean, you did throw out numerous questions there, but the essence of it was, well, how do you know you have the right books?

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You Christians say you do, but we all know that you just kind of stumbled in the dark here is the implied answer.

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And so, you know, hidden behind the question is a challenge. Do you Christians have adequate grounds for how you know that it's this book and not that book?

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I mean, what are those grounds? And the non -Christian will say, well, see, I don't see any grounds. I think you guys just say it's these books and you don't really know for sure.

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And it's that kind of epistemological question that I think is exactly why I wrote Canon Revisited and some other things

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I've written, too, which is dealing with the question of how you know. Now, notice how you don't answer that question. You can't answer that question just by saying, well, you know, the canon was formed and finalized in the fourth century and the

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Council of this, that and the other. And everyone's like, well, OK, but you don't answer my question, right? Which is why reception history, as interesting as it is in terms of canonical studies, is not going to answer that question, which is always what's frustrating me about most canonical studies.

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So what I've argued in my book and sitting in your hypothetical scenario in Applebee's, this would be hard to fully unpack, but I would say, well, actually,

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I think God has given us good grounds for knowing what books are from him. And I think he's given us three different angles to look at.

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One is the self -authenticating qualities of the books themselves. We'd have to unpack what that means. Secondly, the fact we have good grounds historically for thinking they come from the apostles.

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And those are people who have the ability to speak for Christ as his mouthpiece and worth listening to.

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And then thirdly, we have a uniform testimony of the church over the centuries that would suggest that they responded to these books and recognized

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Christ's voice in them. Now, at that point, you're not Christian friends going to say, yeah, I'm not buying it. Well, OK, then you got to peel back the layers.

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Well, what would you buy? What are you looking for here? What is it that you think is going to be persuasive to you? And then now you're into the worldview discussion.

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OK. And I like how you're asking these questions and you're getting into the, well, what would you say is something that would be acceptable to you?

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Notice that this kind of language we're often criticized from our classical brothers, like, well, you know, presuppositionalists don't engage in those kind of in -depth discussions, but it's all about, you know, worldviews in the broad sense.

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But you're right there the way you've just addressed that specific issue. You're willing to engage in the conversation with the other person and get into some of the details.

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There's nothing wrong with asking. This is where, of course, I'm always confused by the characters of presuppositionalists not engaging in the conversation.

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I'm like, well, no, it's the presuppositionalists that are actually asking the questions and unpack the non -Christian's worldview most aptly, because usually presuppositionalists are looking to do a reductive ad absurdum on the non -Christian worldview.

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So we're trying to learn more about their worldview. We want to know more about what makes it tick so we can show its inconsistencies.

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And, you know, think about Keller's book, Reason for God, which was so popular a number of years ago and still pretty popular.

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Most people don't know that he was just using presuppositional methodology in that book, talking about worldviews and so forth.

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He doesn't use all the terminology that presuppositionalists sometimes use, which is to his credit. People didn't really pick up on it.

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But if they find that persuasive, that's presuppositionalism. But yet it still is very engaging. Yeah, very good.

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All right. Well, well, I don't know if I can trust the Bible because, I mean, have you read the Bible, man? I mean, there's, you know, obviously you've read the

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Bible. Have you read the Bible? It's filled with so much contradictions. I mean, I look at the resurrection accounts.

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You know, they're completely and hopelessly contradictory. You have all these different things. One author says one thing, another author says another.

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You know, why should we put our trust in a book written by, you know, sheepherders, you know, ignorant people from the

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Bronze Age, and they didn't even get all their facts straight? How would you address that question to help folks listening out who maybe hear things like that?

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Yeah, well, again, you know, you piled a lot of questions into that one supposed question. There's like four or five in there.

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But, you know, the heart of it, I think, was this idea of contradictions, which is, well, you've got one thing that says in one place and one another.

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And, of course, I hear this a lot. I'm sure you do. People bring it up a lot. You know, usually when

26:10

I talk to someone, you know, if we're thinking about hypothetical scenarios, I get in a lot of pictures on airplanes with people, right?

26:16

So I'm on an airplane with somebody, they ask me what I do, and pretty soon we're off and running about these sorts of things. And they'll often say, you know, what do you do with the fact that the

26:24

Bible contradicts itself? And here's my first response, usually, which is always interesting to see how people respond, is I ask them, so tell me that one contradiction you've really struggled with and studied and tried to solve and haven't been able to solve.

26:36

Maybe I can help you with it. Now, as soon as I ask that question, usually, not always, but usually the response is almost identical, which is,

26:44

A, I don't really have a particular example. I'm just saying it generally. Or secondly, even if I do,

26:49

I haven't really studied it that much. And what you realize is actually people aren't that interested in solving apparent contradictions.

26:55

They just want to have them in their hip pocket to toss out for an easy, quick reason they don't trust the Bible. And what

27:00

I point out to them at that point is that don't think for a moment these supposed contradictions are catching anybody off guard, as if we've never seen these before.

27:07

No one's ever thought about these before. Even back in as early as the second century, you know, Celsus is bringing up these sort of things to the early

27:13

Christians, and early Christians are responding to these things. So there's been answers, good answers. Scholars have explained these things.

27:19

Part of the idea of a contradiction, particularly in the Gospels, is a misunderstanding of historical genres, what you expect, putting modern day expectations on ancient historiography and so on.

27:28

We could talk about those sorts of things, but in essence, pressing them on their own worldview there, their own lack of study and awareness.

27:35

And most people just wouldn't even know where to begin. I'm going to try to simplify the question.

27:41

You're familiar with this question, but I'm not going to try to layer the questions on. Again, I think that's a fun way to present some of the questions, because that's just the sloppiness of conversation.

27:49

You know, you're going to find yourself having to address a whole host of issues and knowing how to narrow it down to kind of the heart of what they're saying, which is basically what

27:56

I just asked there with regard. It was really the issue of contradictions and things like that. I think you nailed that, which

28:02

I expected you to. But OK, so if someone were to ask you, how do you know that the

28:08

Bible we hold in our hands is what was written by the supposedly the apparent original authors?

28:14

We don't have the originals. And if you appeal to early copies, you just have early copies.

28:21

We don't know how far removed specifically those are from the originals. How do you deal with that question where we don't have the autographs?

28:30

So you really can't know for sure that what we have is the genuine article.

28:36

That's an important question. I think people need to hear the answer to this. Yeah, well, this is a different category, different topic, but it's still an important one.

28:44

This is the field of textual criticism and textual transmission, which is often confused with canon, although they're related, they're not the same.

28:50

Canon is which books and text criticism is which text. So you're asking, well, how do I know that what

28:55

I have in my hand is the text that was originally written by, say, Luke or Paul or whoever? And those are really important questions.

29:02

And what they raise, actually, is what I was bringing up a little while ago is an unattainable level of certainty that the skeptic expects us to have before we can affirm anything historically.

29:12

And the perfect example of this sort of setting up a false standard that no one could ever possibly meet is

29:17

Bart Ehrman, who's spent his whole career using text criticism as a reason to go after the Bible. And he did this, of course, in misquoting

29:23

Jesus, most famously, but he's done it his whole career. And Ehrman basically sets up this exact dynamic. Well, if you don't have the autographs, then we're done.

29:31

If you don't have the autographs, you are not going to have a conversation because you can't know with absolutely 100 percent infallible certainty without any shadow of a doubt that the text you're reading in the second century is the text that was written in the first century.

29:43

And on one level, he's right. If you're looking at just the text critical data, we can't know what the kind of certainty he's setting up.

29:48

But why is that the standard? You know, we don't use that for any other types of historical discussions, and we have actually excellent grounds for thinking the text has been stable prior to as far back as we can get into it.

29:59

And, you know, we can talk about that in this conversation if you want to. We can get into grounds for thinking textual stability was part of the early

30:06

Christian sort of ethos and so on. But the point of the matter is that we do have access to the text at a very early time, as early as the second century.

30:14

The text was written probably in the first century and up to the end of the first century. And so we have a very narrow gap in the world of textual criticism.

30:21

So narrow, in fact, it's almost negligible when you compare it to other documents of antiquity. And so if you can't know what the

30:26

New Testament says at any reasonable level, you can't know what any historical document says. If you can't know what any historical document says and all of all of world history is thrown into the into the dustbin of uncertainty.

30:35

And of course, I don't know many other historians are willing to go down that path with any level of consistency. So once again, the skeptic has a different standard for the

30:43

Bible than he does for anything else. Yeah. And so would you say the certainty that we

30:48

I mean, we can't have 100 percent certainty with when we're considering these historical questions, but we have good grounds to believing that we're on solid ground and affirming the things that we're affirming.

30:59

And you also say that the certainty that we do have, that kind of irrefutable certainty is really at the more worldview issue.

31:06

Yeah, yeah. So think about it this way. So in my book, Canary Visited, I talk about the self -authentication of the scriptures, right?

31:12

So when I read a book of the Bible that by God's Holy Spirit helping me see the objective qualities of scripture,

31:18

I can I can hear the voice of Christ there. I can know that it's from God. Now, do I need to have knowledge of textual criticism to know that?

31:23

Do I have to know how many manuscripts there are to know that? No, I'm arguing in my book and theologians have argued this for generations, that there is a sort of an immediate intuitive sort of awareness and recognition of God's voice in scripture as a way we know, not the only way we know, but a way we know.

31:37

So with that sort of level of certainty, which is in one sense, you could arguably divinely given certainty if you want to think of it that way, then that helps me have more comfort about my manuscript question, right?

31:50

Which is if I can know this is the voice of Christ I'm hearing on the grounds of the internal qualities of scripture, then even though I don't have manuscripts to go back to the first century,

32:00

I can still be fairly certain that I'm still hearing God's voice there that must be reliable. And so my second century manuscripts therefore are sufficient to give me the level of certainty

32:08

I need combined with what I know from the self -authenticating qualities of the Bible that I'm hearing God's real voice.

32:13

So this is actually part of the model I put together in Canon Revisited is that there's a multi -pronged approach here.

32:20

You're not just relying on historical evidences, you're also relying on other things. And it's the combined nature of the system that gives you the certainty you have.

32:26

Yeah, I like what you said there. So we're not relying solely on the historical issues, but also the revelation of the personal

32:32

God that exists. And we're not, I wouldn't, I don't think you would say that we're using that existential subjective kind of experience of God impressing himself upon us, giving us that assurance.

32:45

We're not using that necessarily as an argument, right? But personally as Christians, we can have a firm ground in our faith even if the certainty doesn't come from a mere looking at the historical data, right?

33:00

Yeah, well, I mean, it depends what you mean by use it as an argument. I mean, I actually am not opposed to using the internal qualities of the Bible as an argument. I think, you know, without the help of the spirit, our non -Christian friend isn't going to get there.

33:08

Sure. That's okay. I think another way to say this is lots of times our use of historical evidence is defeater defeaters.

33:18

And so what that means is that, think of it this way, is that we don't necessarily use historical evidence as the ultimate grounds for why we think

33:25

Christianity is true. But I do use historical evidence to answer objections. And there's nothing wrong with that.

33:32

Remember, the objection is you don't have good enough manuscripts to know that Jesus wrote these things. Well, actually, we have really good manuscripts.

33:37

Second century, I can give them all my historical evidences. And so am I using those historical evidences as the ultimate ground for why

33:42

I know Christianity is true? No, but it is a defeater defeater. I'm using those evidence to shoot down the defeater that the non -Christian is throwing up.

33:49

And so this is where I think confusion happens. Evidentialists look at that and go, aha, I got you.

33:54

Look, you're using historical evidences. Oh, yeah, I am. But I'm actually using them as defeater defeaters. I'm not using them as the ultimate grounds for why

34:01

I believe in them. Well, that's a very good, important point. All right. So let's take a couple of questions here.

34:06

Someone's saying in passing, but I think it's good for you to clarify. We have Daniel asking or rhetorically saying,

34:13

I'm guessing he's an advocate of Sola Scriptura. Do you hold to Sola Scriptura, Dr. Kruger? Yeah, of course

34:18

I do. Yeah, I mean, I teach at Reform Theological Seminary. So if Reform is your name, then you better hold to the distinctives of the

34:25

Reformation. And of course, one of the distinctives of the Reformation amongst the five Solas, arguably the primary one is

34:32

Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide obviously being at the top of the list as well. So yeah, absolutely affirm that.

34:37

I think there's a lot of misunderstandings of Sola Scriptura. Now, particularly in the evangelical world, there's a misunderstanding that Sola Scriptura means that the

34:45

Bible is my only authority, which is not what it means. The Sola Scriptura means the Bible is the highest authority in the

34:52

Christian life. Or you could say it this way, the only infallible authority in the Christian life, but not the only authority and certainly not the only consideration.

35:01

Sola Scriptura does not mean it's just me and my Bible under some tree somewhere figuring out everything. No, I can use church history.

35:07

I can use historical evidences. I can, you know, look at the church fathers. I can take into account all kinds of things.

35:13

Obviously, Scripture is the ultimate authority. It's the only infallible authority, but certainly not the only authority and not the only consideration in my worldview.

35:20

Yeah. Well, you said you could appeal to the church fathers. I mean, hey, man, you're a Protestant. You're not supposed to do that. That's what

35:25

Catholics and Greek Orthodox do. Why don't you expound on that a little bit? Yeah, well, actually not true.

35:31

First of all, when you look at the actual Reformation authors and, you know, just plucking the two most obvious characters, both in Luther and Calvin, they were immensely involved with the patristic writings and often would cite the patristic writings in their favor and were quite content looking back to the early church fathers as supportive of their own views and thought that the

35:52

Bible should be read in light of the collective witness of the church. Their claim was not to be inventing anything.

35:57

Their claim was not to be innovators. Their claim was to be excavators. They were uncovering something that had always been there.

36:04

And this is what an excavator is doing. An excavator is not creating something that wasn't there. They're uncovering something that has been covered up that's always been there.

36:12

And so, yes, the patristic sources were very important to Calvin, Luther, and the Reformers, and they appealed to them often. And Protestants should continue to appeal to them.

36:20

There's, of course, even a resurgence now within Protestantism in terms of this sort of, you know,

36:27

Reformed Catholicism, if you want to think of it that way, this sort of recovering of the patristic sources so that we let those inform our reading of Scripture.

36:35

And I think that's entirely valid as long as the church fathers and as long as the church is seen as still subordinate to Scripture as the highest authority.

36:43

Would you say that someone who holds to Sola Scriptura, that there is warrant in the Bible itself for the use of external sources?

36:53

Absolutely. Okay. It depends what you mean by external sources, but there's warrant in the Bible for all kinds of considerations.

36:58

In fact, you can't really interpret the Bible rightly without looking at external data. You even need to know how to, you know, if you're going to use the

37:07

Bible, you need to know things as basic as the human language in order to, I mean, you have to have some external data in order to...

37:14

And that's not giving up, therefore, the idea that the Bible is the highest authority, is it?

37:19

Absolutely not, no. And Frame actually writes a lot about this, about proper understandings of what Sola Scriptura means.

37:24

That doesn't mean you don't use external data. It doesn't mean you don't use external considerations. In fact, he argues that if you're going to apply the

37:30

Bible to the world, of course you need to know a lot about the world. How do you apply the Bible to the world if you don't know a lot about the world? But that's not a violation of Sola Scriptura.

37:37

Sure. Great. Someone is asking here, why do you reject traditional Orthodox Christian worldview?

37:42

They are also precept and use tag. I guess, I'm not sure if you're aware, there's a growth of Greek Orthodox Christians employing a presuppositional approach.

37:54

I guess some people might have in mind a gentleman by the name of Jay Dyer, who debates

38:00

Protestants. He also debates atheists and uses a very, if you don't know his background, it sounds like he's very, very reformed and presuppositional in his approach, although obviously he's a

38:12

Greek Orthodox guy. How would you address that if it's something you're able to address?

38:19

Yeah, I'm actually a little confused on the question. What I mean by confused is, okay, good for him. He's using a good methodology.

38:26

I think it's the right apologetic methodology. If they ask him what I think of Eastern Orthodoxy, well, that's a larger question.

38:31

Sure. I don't have to agree with every theological distinction of Eastern Orthodoxy to appreciate the fact that he's using a presuppositional methodology.

38:38

Why do you reject traditional Orthodox Christian worldview? Well, I just happen to disagree with some

38:44

Eastern Orthodox or Greek Orthodox teachings. I'm not up to speed on that whole system to be fair, but I don't think

38:51

I have to be in order to appreciate the fact that I would be glad they're using a presuppositional method.

38:57

Now, maybe lurking behind the question is, how do you use your presuppositional method if you're not reformed?

39:05

In other words, if you're Eastern Orthodox, can you still get away with it? Well, if it's still a coherent version of Christianity, yes. If it becomes an incoherent version of Christianity, well, then it's not going to work, and we'd have to talk about that.

39:14

But you can't have an incoherent worldview and make a presuppositional approach work. Obviously, it only works if your worldview fits together.

39:20

Yeah. In my opinion, I think the issue of Greek Orthodoxy, and there's a huge resurgence of Greek Orthodoxy, at least at this kind of the internet level, there's a lot of stuff being put out there.

39:30

Maybe in a future episode, I could have someone on to address the issue of Greek Orthodoxy whether or not those apologetic issues are consistent with their broader theological perspective.

39:40

I think that's a very interesting topic to pursue. All right. We have here from Edward, we know that God's word is clear in its entirety and in places where it's not clear.

39:48

They are clear in other places. How do you respond to people, and I've met many, who say you are not the author of scripture and hence it's based on your interpretation?

39:57

How can we know if we are right in our interpretation? Yeah, well,

40:03

I mean, there's a lot of layers to that question, and it looks like people love asking one question sort of in five parts, which is fine.

40:10

They're all tied together. So, a few things I would say. First of all, I think the person acknowledges at the front end that not every part of scripture is equally clear.

40:18

In fact, the Westminster Confession and other confessions acknowledge this, is that to say the word of God is clear, and this is a caricature, right?

40:24

To say the word of God is clear is not to say it's equally clear in all its affirmations. And so we have to distinguish between is it clear on sort of mode of baptism versus is it clear that Jesus is the son of God?

40:36

Those are not the same levels of epistemic certainty, nor does the Bible's worldview require the same level of epistemic certainty to have a coherent worldview where you assume that everything is equally certain.

40:45

No, there can be certain things about the Bible that we don't know with the same level of certainty about other things, and I think that's totally appropriate and fine.

40:53

What I think is the real question is, can you be certain about the core things, the main things? And this is really gets into sort of hermeneutical issues.

41:00

How do we rightly interpret the Bible? The reformers were keen to say, well, look, the first place you start with interpreting scripture is other scriptures.

41:06

So how do you know you're reading a passage rightly? Well, you compare with other passages in the Bible and see if there's any sort of uniform witness across the pages of scripture.

41:15

And then here's where I think it's also appropriate to look at the flow of church history. I think it is appropriate to look at the swath of God's people over time and consider the historic witness of God's people throughout the different generations of the church.

41:30

So there's a large, complex, layered intersection of things that go into our interpretive practices.

41:36

I think what I would reject is this idea because interpretation may require some effort or because there's someone somewhere who disagrees with me.

41:45

Therefore, we can never know what the Bible says. I think that's a poor argument. I think it's a nonsensical argument. It's an argument we don't use in any other categories.

41:52

We don't say in other discussions out there, Oh, I found someone in the world who disagrees. Therefore, it must not be clear. Right? No, that's not true.

41:59

We don't use that for any other types of documents we interpret. Yeah. And I usually think of kind of just giving like my kids a math test that people give a different answer to a math question doesn't mean like,

42:08

Oh, I guess we can't know what the right answer is. So yeah, great point. We have Matt Yester asking question.

42:13

What is the pivotal ground or grounds for why the apocryphal books were never considered canon?

42:20

Yeah, great question. So the word apocryphal books or the phrase apocryphal can mean two different things.

42:27

And I'll probably mention something about both of them. Probably the writer of this question is referring to what's known as the

42:33

Old Testament apocrypha, which is the books that were included later in Roman Catholic Bibles at the Council of Trent.

42:38

This would be 1st, 2nd Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, and so on. Those what we really call intertestamental books.

42:44

So this is a common question. Why were those not included in our Bibles, Protestant Bibles? And the answer to that is actually quite simple, and there's multiple layers to it.

42:54

But the real reason is because these were not the books used by Jesus and the apostles. It's that simple.

43:00

When Jesus and the apostles, and I would actually broaden that out to say 1st century Jews, when 1st century Jews were using their canon, their

43:07

Old Testament Bibles, for all we can tell, these were not the books in it, these apocryphal books. How do we know this?

43:14

Just one tidbit for you. We don't have a single example anywhere in the entire New Testament of a New Testament author, and this includes

43:21

Jesus himself, citing a book of the apocrypha as scripture, not a single time anywhere. I like what you just said there.

43:27

You said that we don't have a single example of them citing these apocryphal books as scripture, which means that they can quote other books that are not biblical, but they're asserting that they're scripture.

43:39

Yeah, they do that all the time. Paul quotes Greek philosophers, so it doesn't mean he thinks they're scripture. But quote it as scripture.

43:45

So here's a remarkable thing. Jesus held his audience accountable for what the Bible said. How could he do that if there was no agreement on the

43:51

Bible? And remarkably, with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they disagreed over everything you could imagine.

43:57

Not one time did they ever disagree over what was in the Bible. And then you add to this even the 2nd century, Justin Martyr and his dialogue with Triumph of the

44:03

Jew. Here's a Christian and a Jew debating over doctrine and theology, even over the text of the Bible, even the transmission of the text of the

44:08

Bible is being debated. What's the one thing they never discussed? Which books are in the Bible? Because they didn't have any reason to disagree about that. So what you realize is that the

44:16

Apocrypha was a later edition, and the Protestants were doing what I said a minute ago. They were excavating. They were going back to what it had always been at the very beginning.

44:26

And so to affirm just the Hebrew books of the Old Testament as the canon is just affirming the Bible that Jesus and the apostles had.

44:32

All right. One more question, then we'll get back to the main part of our discussion here. Here's another question by Daniel.

44:37

He asks, how do we know that Hebrews and James should be part of the canon when we don't even know who wrote them?

44:45

Maybe you could address the question with regards to those two books, but also address the question of whether or not it is even important that we know who wrote a particular book in order to be justified in thinking it's inspired.

44:57

Yeah, well, I understand this question with Hebrews. I'm not so sure why James is lumped in here. We actually have a good reason to know who wrote

45:04

James. James's name is included in the very opening line of the book. Now, if they're like, well, yeah, but we don't know which

45:09

James, but that's true for other books, too, where they just mentioned the name of the author. We don't know which John wrote Revelation theoretically on those grounds.

45:15

It just says John. And so what you have then is great reasons to think that a famous James wrote the book of James and without going into historical evidences here is almost certainly going to be

45:28

James, the Lord's brother, who was part of the apostolic circle, whether he was an apostle or not is a debate I won't get into here.

45:33

But no doubt he got his material from the apostolic orbit and from the fact that his brother was Jesus and he was revered in early

45:40

Christianity. Now, as far as Hebrews, now the guy who's asking the question is right. Hebrews is anonymous, both in the title and in the text.

45:46

And there's a large debate within early Christianity about who wrote it. The listeners today shouldn't think that I will finally reveal who wrote it because I don't know who wrote it either.

45:54

No one knows who wrote it. Origin was correct, I think, when he said only God knows who wrote it. But does that negate its place in the canon?

46:00

And here's my answer. No, I've argued elsewhere that one of the things that makes a book canonical is whether it contains authoritative apostolic tradition.

46:09

The apostles had the ability to speak for Jesus. So we just need to ask that of a book.

46:14

Does this book contain authoritative apostolic tradition? Now, you can get that in multiple ways. One way you can get that is if an apostle actually wrote the book.

46:20

OK, that's fine. We have numerous examples in the New Testament of that. In fact, most of our books are written directly by apostles.

46:25

But you can also get it by books. You would have gotten information directly from the apostles. Think about Luke as an example of this.

46:31

Luke was not an apostle. But the prologue of Luke make it very clear that he was what we call an apostolic man who got his information from the apostles.

46:38

Interestingly, Hebrews 2, the author of Hebrews sets himself up very much like Luke as an apostolic person who got his information from the apostles.

46:47

And so we have every reason to consider Hebrews to be apostolic. And by apostolic, I don't mean that an apostle wrote it directly.

46:53

It contains authoritative apostolic tradition. It's dated to the first century. And I think we have every good reasons to receive it in the canon for those grounds.

46:59

In other words, you don't have to have the name of the person to receive a book in the canon. If that was the standard, we'd have a lot of Old Testament books that we couldn't know.

47:08

We don't know the name of who wrote those. We wouldn't invite those into the Bible. But the issue isn't actually knowing the name, but whether this book has reason.

47:16

Do we have reason to think this book contains authoritative teaching? And in this case of Hebrews, we do. All right, very good.

47:22

Let's hold the questions for a little bit later. Someone's making a correction on my part here. Jay Dyer, who

47:28

I mentioned earlier, is a Russian Orthodox, not Greek Orthodox. Thank you for that. I'm not sure. But if that's true, good.

47:34

Thank you. Want to make sure we're accurate. Okay. So now getting back to kind of the development of the canon.

47:40

Now, how did early Christians recognize or I guess, how did the canon get created?

47:50

Can you go into some of like the theological answers to that question, as well as kind of the historical aspects, you know, the reception of the canon and how all those things work together?

48:00

Well, if your question is, how did the canon get created? Is that another way of asking, why do we have a canon at all? Like, where did it kind of lead to its development?

48:09

Yeah, and I'm thinking in terms of the theological answer. Obviously, we believe that God has spoken. Perhaps you can answer that question from the theological perspective, along with answering how that worked out in history, as such, you know, this is how the books got into the canon and how they were received and why we hold them to be authoritative in the way that we do.

48:29

And then we'll take it from there. Because I have, I do have a question. I want to lump onto that with regards to the different models, where you have the

48:35

Roman Catholic view, the Orthodox view, and how are they different from our views as Protestants?

48:40

So we'll get there. But perhaps you can kind of answer that question from theologically and historically. How did we get a canon?

48:48

And how is that connected to the historical reception of it and the acceptance of it as we have it today, the 27 books in the

48:55

New Testament? Yeah, once again, you've got a lot of questions in one question there. So that's like my whole class you just asked right there.

49:02

He's never going to come back on here. He's like, is that 50 questions in one question? Yeah, so let me try to narrow that down to the essence of it, which

49:09

I think I tried to get at a moment ago, which is, you know, do we have a, what caused there to be a

49:15

New Testament canon? Why don't we have one at all? It's probably a good way to start. I've actually written extensively on this in my book,

49:22

The Question of Canon. So we've been talking mostly about canon revisited here. But with IVP Academic a few years ago,

49:28

I wrote, well now, quite a few years ago, I wrote a book called The Question of Canon, where I talked about, in one of the chapters there, the theological sort of foundations for canon.

49:37

What did early Christians believe that would have led naturally to development of a new collection of writings?

49:44

And the answer to that is numerous things. One of the things, for example, is that they believe there was a new covenant. You know, the idea that God had come in Jesus and inaugurated a new epic, so to speak, a new covenant arrangement would have been very formative in their expectations for having new books.

50:02

I can't unpack this fully here, but the essence of the argument is covenants are effectively written texts.

50:09

We think of covenants as pie -in -the -sky ideas, and there's a certain sense in which it's an abstract idea. But in the ancient world, if you said there's a covenant, you mean there was a written document.

50:19

And so when Jesus says, basically, I'm inaugurating a new covenant, we have every reason to think that early

50:24

Christians would have thought about that in a similar fashion. They thought about the old covenants, they would expect a new written document to express the terms of the new covenant.

50:32

So that's one theological reason. Another theological reason, I just mentioned a second ago, is just the existence of the apostolic office.

50:39

As soon as Jesus appoints the apostles to speak for him with his authority, and he sends them out to tell his story, that's effectively what he did.

50:47

And I call these his authorized biographers. So he sends out Jesus to tell his story.

50:54

Well, okay, fair enough that most of the time, they did that verbally, orally in preaching and teaching. But what would happen if one of those apostles wrote down the story?

51:01

Well, now you have a written text, it's already authoritative from the very start, not because a church ever received it, probably some council voted, but just by virtue of the fact that someone wrote it who

51:13

Jesus commissioned to speak for him. And so I think there was a canon just by virtue of the fact that you had apostles. And as soon as those apostles started putting pen to paper, you effectively had a preto -canon from the very get -go.

51:24

So those are a couple theological, there's more I could say. Those are a couple theological pillars that I think, and I argue this in the question of canon, made the canon basically inevitable.

51:33

Now, once that's happening and the canon is starting to expand and grow, now there's the question of the recognition process or what you might call the reception process.

51:42

And this took time. And I acknowledge this in my books, it didn't happen overnight, but it did at a core level happen remarkably fast.

51:49

By the middle of the second century, there's a core canon already recognized across the empire. About 22 out of 27 books are already in place by the middle of the second century.

51:57

That's amazing. Wow. All right, now there's often this question posited that how did people recognize the books to be the inspired word of God?

52:11

And there's often this talk of the church, the true church that has been guided by the

52:18

Holy Spirit. And of course, depending on who's talking, that's usually the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church.

52:24

How would you address that issue? Because this is an apologetical question too, as us

52:29

Protestants are interacting with Roman Catholics and Orthodox on this specific issue.

52:34

How would you address that as a Protestant with regards to the recognition? Obviously your answer would probably be tied up with, you know, my sheep hear my voice.

52:42

You know, we are indwelled with the spirit of God. How does that work with regards to the Protestant view and some of these other views that posit their church, their specific institution being guided by the spirit?

52:54

I hope that's not too many questions. I'm trying to - All right, all right. I think I got it. So, I mean, this is common fodder for Catholic apologists, right?

53:03

So in the world of Catholic apologetics, I mean, canon is like their favorite subject. And the argument is well -known, which is that, look, you can't know which books are in the canon without the mother church to tell you.

53:15

And if you don't have an infallible declaration from the church to tell you which books are in the canon, you're flying blind here.

53:20

And it's, yeah, you Protestants think you know, but you really don't know. And that argument's persuaded many people.

53:26

I find that argument deeply problematic on all kinds of levels. And I'll just mention a few here.

53:34

One is, is that apparently when it came to the Old Testament canon, they did know. So how is it in the first century that the

53:40

Pharisees, the Sadducees, the apostles and the Jews in general did know what books were in the Old Testament? Was there an official infallible church declaration to tell them which books were in the canon?

53:49

No, there was never any sort of council or committee that told them. In other words, it seems to be at least in the case of the

53:55

Old Testament, some way to know short of an official infallible declaration from some governing body. So I don't buy that argument in the first place.

54:01

Secondly, the idea that you need the church to tell you, well, the church didn't even make any statements about the canon until like the fourth century.

54:07

And even when they did, it wasn't the universal church as regional councils. So if we're waiting for the church to make some big statement about the canon, you could argue didn't happen until Trent in the 16th century.

54:16

But yet long before the fourth century, the church was already operating with the canon. How do they know those books are from God? As I said a moment ago, 22, at least out of the 27 books are well -established by the middle of the second century.

54:26

Well, who told these people? In other words, there has to be some way to know short of a declaration from the church.

54:31

So what is that way? Well, I've spent a lot of time on this. And again, in a forum like this, we can't repeat it all.

54:37

But part of it is what I call the self -authenticating attributes of the canon, which is a larger discussion.

54:43

In fact, I argued in a recent lecture at Midwestern Seminary, was a guest lecturer there that I've argued that this was the patristic methodology.

54:50

They argued for self -authenticating books. But on top of that, you can know which books are from God by which books are apostolic.

54:55

We already talked about that too. And I think you can also argue which books are from God by the consensus of the church. And when I'm talking about consensus of the church,

55:01

I don't mean some infallible Roman Catholic church declaration, but the informal consensus of the church over time,

55:08

I think is a guide to which books are from God. So the idea that you can't know without Mother Church, I just,

55:13

I don't find it convincing either historically or theologically. And they often bring up, Orthodox and Catholic deal with this issue of interpretation.

55:22

How do you know your interpretation is correct without the light of Mother Church guiding? Would I be correct in saying that positing an infallible church doesn't fix that issue, given that one has to interpret the declarations of Mother Church?

55:38

Don't you just - Yeah, it just backs it up a notch. It's an endless regress. Okay. And so now of course their response is, yeah, isn't it great?

55:43

You always have Mother Church there to tell you. Right? Their response is, yeah, we'll see. You still got the papal office still today.

55:51

Isn't that great? We can still interpret all those church declarations and so forth for you.

55:57

So, you know, there is a sense in which I say, look, the two different systems of thought here are really sola scriptura on the reform side.

56:07

And my Catholic friends don't like this caricature, but I don't think it's a caricature, I think it's accurate, or sola ecclesia.

56:13

Sure. On the other side. Is church alone as the highest authority or scripture alone as the highest authority?

56:18

Right. That's not what they would say, but you - That's not what they say, but I think functionally that is exactly their view. And I don't think there's any way around that.

56:24

And so, you know, I tell people all the time, you know, you're going to have to throw your lot in here with either the Bible is the highest authority or the church is high authority, you know, which would you pick?

56:32

Yeah. And I would say, and which is most self -evidencingly authoritative? You have an infallible

56:38

Bible, I think pretty self -evidently. Do you have self -evidently an infallible church?

56:44

Well, that is extremely difficult to show because the history of the church is by no means good evidence for that.

56:51

And you can't argue the Bible proves it either because I think the Bible gives you very little reason to think the church could be, should be regarded as infallible in its declarations.

56:57

So once again, you're just at an impasse there. Let's throw a little curve ball and bring it back to some presuppositionalism here.

57:04

Yeah. What if a Catholic argues presuppositionally that the truth of the

57:09

Roman Catholic church is that if it's not true, you couldn't prove anything at all. And so you have to take a whole system of Roman Catholicism, scripture, and the church together in tradition, and it's part of their system.

57:22

So that if you were to say, we cannot demonstrate, it would be very difficult to demonstrate that the church is infallible.

57:29

Well, they can just take that as kind of their ultimate presupposition as the package deal of the Roman Catholic. Yeah, this objection has been made though against presuppositionalism from other ends.

57:38

Couldn't a Muslim use the transcendental argument? Couldn't a Catholic use the transcendental argument? They could try.

57:44

They could try. Sure, they'd go for it. But the transcendental argument only works if you actually have a coherent worldview.

57:50

So the issue isn't whether someone can try it. Of course they can try it. The people who look from the outside and think, they almost act like it's just a game, like anybody can use the argument, but no, anybody can try to use argument.

58:01

It doesn't mean the argument works. For the argument to actually have to work, you actually have to have a worldview that if you denied it, you deny all knowledge.

58:09

That's true for traditional Christian worldview. Is it true for the Muslim worldview? I would argue no.

58:14

And of course the Catholic worldview is a little bit complicated because there is many true parts to it. So it's a little bit more of a difficult thing to assess.

58:21

But certainly it's not true. You can just take the transcendental argument, just move it around to different worldviews and have it equally valued.

58:27

That just doesn't work that way. All right, very good. Because that's a very common objection. There was an interview recently done on Capturing Christianity, which is another apologetics

58:36

YouTube channel. They had Dr. Richard Howe, who is a very outspoken critic of presuppositionalism.

58:42

And they brought up that very point that the problem with the transcendental argument as presuppositionalists use it is that you can substitute that with the

58:49

Muslim God. And I was - That's just not true though. And in fact, what's frustrating about it is it's an old argument. It's an argument that keeps getting trotted out and it's been refuted.

58:58

Bonson actually has an extensive refutation of this. And it's just not the case.

59:05

You can just pluck it over and add it to a different worldview. Again, you can try that, but it doesn't mean it's successful.

59:12

Right. All right, great. So let's take a couple more questions here. And let's see here. Someone is asking

59:18

Daniel. Daniel's our, he's our question guy. He always comes in with some questions here as these live streams come.

59:24

And he's asking, how should Christians respond to a large amount of people denying inerrancy nowadays? And why do you think that is?

59:31

And in other words, why do you think people are coming out and rejecting inerrancy? How would you answer that? Well, I assume he means by people, other

59:39

Christians. Sure. I mean, the idea that non -Christians deny inerrancy is - It's not news.

59:44

I'm assuming what he means is, why does it seem like many normal, maybe even evangelical

59:49

Christians don't like the word inerrancy and they avoid it? Yeah, this is not new, actually. This has been going on for quite a while.

59:56

I mean, even back in the 1970s, when they did the original, sort of forum on biblical inerrancy, the

01:00:03

Chicago Statement, this was a problem then too, whereas it looked like the concern over inerrancy was slipping. I mean, it's a multifaceted reason why it's happening.

01:00:10

Some Christians are being persuaded of critical views that make them think inerrancy is impossible, that the

01:00:16

Bible's just wrong on certain things. They're like, why just can't hold inerrancy anymore? I think some evangelicals are embarrassed by the term.

01:00:23

They think it's intellectually silly, and therefore they're going to pick a different word.

01:00:30

Others hold the inerrancy in principle, but prefer different terminology.

01:00:35

And this is particularly true sort of in the British, European world. They think inerrancy is an American idea, and they think, well, we're more sophisticated than that, so we're going to have a different word.

01:00:45

Like, what do you make of the N .T. Wright statement that inerrancy of scripture is a silly

01:00:50

American doctrine? Yeah, I mean, I think that's been shown to be false so many times over, but I mean, it gets said.

01:00:57

So yeah, I mean, I think part, and I think I'll mention a fourth reason why I think people reject inerrancy because they see bad versions of it.

01:01:04

There's some people who claim to hold inerrancy that are just hold this very wooden, rigid, non -nuanced, flat, two -dimensional version of inerrancy that looks ridiculous, and actually is.

01:01:14

But if you talk to somebody who actually understands the complications of inerrancy, the nuances of it, and can talk about what it means and doesn't mean,

01:01:22

I think you'll find that it's just another way of talking about the fact that the Bible's true, which is an historical

01:01:28

Christian position. Yeah. Here's another question, same person. I often wonder, since the scriptures are to be understood through the illumination of the

01:01:35

Holy Ghost only, why is the church still divided in so many areas?

01:01:41

Yeah, well, that assumes, the question assumes that if the Holy Spirit's involved in interpretation, that suddenly there's, you know, everybody agrees if you snap your fingers and we're all on the same page, otherwise the

01:01:50

Spirit's not involved. But that doesn't work as an argument. It's not, we all agree, therefore the

01:01:56

Spirit's involved, or we're all disagreeing, and therefore the Spirit's not involved. And it's not that simple.

01:02:01

For one, the involvement of the Spirit doesn't create automatic unity. And think about it for a moment, you know, think about, you know, we talk about the church divided now as if there's false teachers and problems, and therefore how can

01:02:13

I believe the Spirit's at work? But in the early church, it was the same way. If you look at any of the early epistles, they're all, they've got, there are all kinds of fragmented groups and groups that are spread out fighting with one another.

01:02:23

And think about even the opinions in Jesus' day about who Jesus was. There's a hundred of opinions about who Jesus was. Does that mean the

01:02:29

Spirit wasn't around doing anything? No, the idea that there's disagreement and fragmentation is not evidence that the

01:02:36

Spirit is not at work. Some people resist the Spirit. The other thing is that some people don't have the Spirit.

01:02:41

There's a lot of people who claim to be Christians who aren't. There's a lot of Christian sort of groups that claim to be Christian groups that aren't Christian groups at all.

01:02:47

And so the fact that they are fragmented doesn't mean anything at all. And then the last thing I would say on that is that across the spectrum of evangelicalism, even though there is disagreement on many things, the core actually is remarkably intact across evangelicalism, and that I think is heartening.

01:03:02

This question, I think, is for me. Have you or would you debate the current Catholic apologist arguing that the

01:03:08

Church is needed for canon to be known because it's so common argument? To be perfectly honest, one of the things

01:03:14

I'm trying to do personally is to develop on the popular level, whether that's being done in the scholarly realm,

01:03:19

I'm not so sure, is to kind of popularize presuppositional methodology and to address common misconceptions, one of which includes the whole issue of the conflation between ontology and epistemology, which often comes up.

01:03:34

And so I'm working towards clarifying those common misconceptions. An area that I am going to be working on more specifically is how does the presuppositional method apply in more detail and with more in -depth analysis to some of these other religious perspectives like Roman Catholicism and their view of tradition and think, how can we apply presuppositionalism to that?

01:03:54

I really wanna work. So I'm not sure I would jump into a debate, but I definitely want to explore that area more so that eventually maybe we could do something like that to see how that plays out.

01:04:05

So thanks for the question, guys. We're gonna move back into our main conversation and then we're going to wrap things up.

01:04:10

I don't want to keep Dr. Kruger too long and he's probably not enjoying himself because of all of the 50 questions

01:04:18

I asked all at once. I'm gonna really try my best to keep them succinct.

01:04:24

I feel so bad, my goodness. No, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. Just trying to narrow it down, that's all. All right.

01:04:30

Okay, so this issue of textual criticism is super important within these discussions.

01:04:36

Now let's throw a bone to the people who are listening who might not have a big background on this. What is textual criticism and why is it important to this whole area with regards to how we can trust what we have in the

01:04:51

Bible? Yeah, textual criticism is, first of all, a discipline, a field that doesn't pertain just to scripture, it pertains to any historical document.

01:05:04

The reason the field exists is because in the ancient world, when you wrote an historical document or wrote a letter or whatever you wrote, you couldn't just take that down to the local printing press and run off a bunch of copies and sell it in the local store.

01:05:15

You had to have copies made. And every time a copy made, it was made by hand by a scribe, which means over time the scribal errors and scribal mistakes and problems that seep into the text.

01:05:24

And this is true not just for the New Testament, it's true for anything in the ancient world. So most books that we have access in the ancient world, we don't have the original of that.

01:05:32

I think that's pretty obvious. It'd be very hard to imagine the original surviving that long when we have our copies. And sometimes we even have copies of copies of copies.

01:05:39

And so when you ever have a copy of something, you may not have the original. And so the art of textual criticism is simply reconstructing the document as close as we can to what it probably said originally.

01:05:50

And this again, is something that everybody has to do in the ancient world, not just New Testament studies. And so it has to do with, do we have the right text or the right words?

01:05:58

Do we have in our version of Luke today, for example, what Luke wrote then? Or is we just have a bunch of changes over time?

01:06:05

Okay, very good. So textual criticism is super important because, well,

01:06:11

I guess one important aspect of textual criticism you would say is the multiplicity of manuscripts that we do have, right?

01:06:16

I heard one person say that the more manuscripts you have, the worse it is for you to get at what was originally said.

01:06:25

I actually heard someone say that. Why don't you address that? Because these are some of the bad arguments that people hear. Why is it important that we have a multiplicity of manuscripts when we're trying to get back to the historical core of what that most likely originally said?

01:06:39

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's about resources at your disposal. So think about the Gospel of Luke for a moment. Let's imagine that we just had one or two copies of Luke.

01:06:47

All right, and they disagreed. Let's imagine you had two copies of Luke. You had one that said one thing and one that said another thing. You're like, hmm, well,

01:06:53

I mean, one of them's right and one of them's wrong. We don't know which. Obviously, it'd be really great if we had, say, 10 copies of Luke.

01:06:59

And then we could see, well, what if nine of them had one reading and one of them had the other reading? Well, then that would give us at least some indications of what is possibly the right reading.

01:07:06

Although textual criticism isn't that simple. Not always the majority reading is the correct one, but still stick with the argument for a moment.

01:07:14

What generally is the case is that the more manuscripts, the better. You can trace the text over time.

01:07:19

You can see whether it's changed. You can see how stable the text was across different parts of the realm and different copies.

01:07:26

So in the world of the text critic, it's on your wishlist. Of course, you want more copies. Now, what this person probably means when he says the more copies, the worse it gets, what they mean is each copy is an opportunity to learn about more variants, which is true.

01:07:40

So if you'd like to live with your fingers and your ears like, la, la, la, there's no variants out there, you'd only want one copy and you can just live ignorance is bliss.

01:07:49

But if you actually want to know the state of the New Testament text, the more copies, the better. Even if you have to deal with new variants each time around, it doesn't make the text less reliable.

01:07:58

It just gives you more information to assess its reliability. Now you may mention there of textual variants.

01:08:03

Why don't you explain for folks what textual variants are and address the issue where people say, did you know, and Dr.

01:08:09

Ehrman says this, did you know that there are more textual variants in, how can they pronounce, there's so many textual variants more than there actually are words in the

01:08:21

New Testament itself. And you've heard this and I've heard you in different contexts address it. Why don't you address that question for folks and kind of put people at ease that that's kind of really intimidating for a lot of people.

01:08:31

You're trying to tell me that there are more textual variants in the New Testament than there are words combined in the

01:08:36

New Testament. This is a hopelessly, you know, unreliable document that we're basing our entire lives on.

01:08:42

How would you respond to that? Yeah, that is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the New Testament text to argue that way.

01:08:49

So a textual variant, there's different ways to measure this, by the way, and it can get very complicated, but in essence, it's just the differences between manuscripts, right?

01:08:56

You have one author, or sorry, you have one manuscript that uses a certain word and another manuscript uses a different word in the same place, or one leads a word out or one leaves a section out or includes a section.

01:09:06

And some of the most famous textual variants are, for example, the story of the adulterous woman end of John 7, beginning of John 8, and what's called the long ending of Mark at the end of Mark are the two most famous textual variants because not all the manuscripts have those texts.

01:09:20

So whenever you have a variant, you know, you can start counting them. Well, how many differences are there? Well, Ehrman is famous for this.

01:09:26

He argues that there's probably between 200 and 400 ,000 textual variants that we're aware of. In other words, differences between our manuscripts.

01:09:33

We don't know the exact number. I think the number might even be higher than that. And that's probably shocking to some of your listeners.

01:09:40

There are some recent studies that I think try to nail down the number more specifically. But let's just say it's 400 ,000 for the sake of this discussion.

01:09:48

Is that a problem? Well, it's only a problem if you don't know what kind of variants we're talking about here. And this is the thing that's often left out of the discussion is the quality of the variants, the kind of variants we're talking about.

01:09:59

The vast, vast majority of the variants are spelling mistakes. And the other vast majority of the variants are what we call sort of, you know, changes that don't affect the meaning of the text.

01:10:08

They're changes that either, you know, word order changes, which in Greek don't have the same significance. These are the definite article, which doesn't change a lot in Greek and so on.

01:10:15

And we'll get into all of it here. So you're talking 90 % of changes either don't affect the meaning or spelling changes.

01:10:21

So you're only talking about a very small number of changes that actually can affect the meaning of the text. And once you know that, then the specter of this bad sort of boogeyman of textual criticism evaporates rather quickly.

01:10:32

And the other thing I'll add is that the high number of textual variants in the New Testament, 400 ,000, is really because of how many manuscripts we have.

01:10:38

Back to the earlier conversation. We're actually victims of our own success here. If we didn't have so many copies, we wouldn't know about so many variants.

01:10:45

It's the only reason that Ehrman can give that number is because we actually have really good evidence for the state of the New Testament text. So it's really an unfortunate flipping of the situation.

01:10:54

We ought to say, look what good evidence we have. We have so many manuscripts. We know so much more about the text than any other documents of antiquity.

01:11:00

Yes, that exposes us to more changes, but that doesn't change the actual reliability of the New Testament text. It just gives us another manuscript to evaluate.

01:11:06

So in that sense, it's not reasonable to say 400 ,000 really means anything. Now, with regards to how the books of the

01:11:15

Bible kind of spread, like for example, from when it was originally written to then it was kind of spread to other churches and they copied it and kind of held it within their congregations.

01:11:24

Why don't you address the issue of multifocality and this idea that it was never kind of just in this one under control, like this one congregation is one group.

01:11:33

Why don't you define for us what multifocality is and why that's important with regards to how the books of the

01:11:40

Bible develop, where they did and how they were accepted? Well, I think what you're getting at, if I'm understanding you correctly here, is that we kind of think of some official body somewhere controlling the text and putting a manuscript in some vault and then you get it out later and you're like, that's the official text.

01:11:56

What did Paul always say? Let's open the book. But that's not the way it worked in the ancient world. In fact, the way it seems that God has preserved the text is by preserving it across the manuscript tradition, not in one single manuscript that's in some safe somewhere, but across the totality of the manuscript tradition.

01:12:14

And so when we piece that together, that sounds more ominous than it sounds, but when we look at them all as totality, we can see pretty clearly what the original text most likely would have been.

01:12:24

And so the security and stability of the text is achieved in a way that people may not expect. And it's not achieved, like I said, by having a singular manuscript that's the right one, by looking at how

01:12:34

God has made so many copies that it's preserved over the totality of the manuscript. And here's the trick.

01:12:39

When you have that many copies, it's very hard to change the text. You can't just insert one bad manuscript into a world where there's thousands of them and think that's gonna change the text meaningfully because you have all the other thousands telling you the right text.

01:12:51

And so the more copies you have, actually the more stable the text is. Sounds counterintuitive, but that's the way it works.

01:12:58

And providentially, we can look back and see that God has done a great job preserving the text across those thousands of manuscripts over time.

01:13:05

Very good. Okay, now this is my last question. And then we'll give some of the live questions there.

01:13:11

And I don't wanna take too much of your time. I do appreciate very much that you came on. And even though I've layered question upon questions and questions within questions,

01:13:19

I think people will still find this very helpful and useful. So I guess kind of bringing it back to the issue of methodology.

01:13:27

How can someone, because you're speaking a lot about, really is the evidence that we have the ground for this, how we would explain a canon and how it's developed.

01:13:36

These are all kind of very much evidential things, argumentative, we can present arguments. How would you encourage people who want to engage with the evidence with regards to some of the specific meaty topics in a way that's consistent with honoring

01:13:49

Christ as Lord, not putting him to the test and not presenting these things in a way that is not consistent with our broader worldview framework.

01:13:59

So basically, how would you present these issues or encourage someone who wants to get into the details of these issues in a way that's consistently presuppositional while keeping

01:14:08

God on the throne of our minds and our hearts? Yeah, well, I mean, there's multiple layers to that.

01:14:14

I'll start with this. Yeah, I wasn't trying to critique the question. It is like, there are multiple layers to that question.

01:14:22

I'm just messing around. I'll start with this. I mean, this sounds strange to say, but it really is an attitude of the heart.

01:14:29

And John Frame does a good job of pointing this out. Presuppositionalism of the heart is what he calls it about. Am I looking at this evidence?

01:14:35

Am I dealing with this evidence, presenting this evidence in a submissive posture to the authority of God's word?

01:14:42

Or am I looking at this evidence as if it's some external standard that stands over the

01:14:48

Bible and that is some neutral arbiter of whether the Bible is true? Now, what's interesting is that on the outside, someone can present evidence you not know which version that is, right?

01:14:56

It can be the same evidence. And you can't tell whether someone is positioning it as in a posture of submission to scripture or something that stands over scripture.

01:15:03

And so my advice to your listeners is start first with your own heart. Are you a person who's submitting yourself, your thinking, all your thinking, including your evidential study to the authority of God's word?

01:15:14

And then the other thing I think, if someone really wants to go further than that, they just need to start doing some reading in presuppositional apologetics. Good. I would start with John Frame's book on apologetics is a good place to start, but there's many others.

01:15:24

And I think they'll find that they can learn more that way. Very good. All right. So let's take some questions and then we'll wrap things up.

01:15:30

Thank you so much. I think you did an excellent job. I didn't expect anything less. Guys, if you're for the first time ever hearing of Dr.

01:15:38

Michael Kruger, definitely pick up his book, Canon Revisited. And what was that other one you mentioned here?

01:15:44

The meaning of canon or something? The question of canon. Question of canon. His books on the canon, top notch, especially for those who like James White.

01:15:52

James White always highly recommends Dr. Kruger's work as well. So definitely should check that out and avail yourself of that material.

01:16:00

All right. Now here's a question. And I do apologize if the questions don't directly relate to what we're talking about. These are just kind of the things that are on people's minds.

01:16:07

And so maybe you can share your thoughts. Here's a question here. What part of Eastern Orthodox worldview is incoherent according to Protestants?

01:16:14

And we can skip that last part since we're not going to have you come on with Jay Dyer. I don't even know how to reach Jay Dyer and I'm just happy you're giving an hour and a half of your time now.

01:16:23

So why don't you address that first part as you understand it? Yeah, I'm not even really the guy to address that first part.

01:16:29

I'm not up to speed on Eastern Orthodox thought. You know, I'd want to really turn that over to someone

01:16:35

I think is more up to speed so they can accurately represent Eastern Orthodoxy. I mean, I think on the surface, there's some things that are quite obviously different with the

01:16:42

Reform worldview, but given my limited study of those theologians, I don't want to misrepresent anybody.

01:16:47

So we'll probably just go to the next question. Yeah. And I just want to stay on that question for two seconds because I think there's a good apologetic application that can be learned from the way you just answered that.

01:16:57

And especially when you have very confident presuppositionalists who are arguing and putting forth their case, there is nothing inconsistent with a presuppositional approach to say,

01:17:06

I don't know, to a question. And I hope not because we're not infallible. There's a lot of things we don't know.

01:17:11

And if you are infallible, then you are automatically not doing a presuppositional approach. Exactly. You're not honoring Christ.

01:17:17

So to say I don't know is honest and I think it shows a lot about your character and it's a way that we can show that we really care about the unbelievers questions.

01:17:27

We want to address them honestly. And maybe that provides another avenue of study so we can look into it and things like that.

01:17:33

So I actually thought that was a very helpful way that you answered it there. Here's not a question, but I think it's still important here.

01:17:39

The early church disagreed just as much as denominations today, but they didn't have such a name as denominations, but were unified.

01:17:46

Now, let me kind of extract something from that and maybe form my own question.

01:17:53

There's a lot of people, especially from Muslims who are criticizing the belief of the early church, that there was just this so much disagreement and disarray at the early church that how can we really know what the early church believed?

01:18:07

There's so many different beliefs out there. You had Gnostics. You had Dacitists.

01:18:12

You had the Christian side that won out, the ones that the traditions that we hold to. How would you address that issue or that assertion rather, that there was just so much division that it was just kind of a big hot mess in the first century?

01:18:24

Yeah, well, I've written on this extensively, actually. My book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy with Andreas Kastenberger addresses this whole idea of diversity within early

01:18:31

Christianity. It's a longstanding argument that was made famous by Walter Bauer in the early 20th century, decided that Christianity was in disarray.

01:18:39

No one knew what they believed. And Bart Ehrman has actually been a big fan of Bauer. So yeah, well, first thing

01:18:45

I would say is there was diversity, meaning there were disagreements and there were factions, no doubt about that. There's also a deep foundational core that most

01:18:52

Christians believed in that time period, leaving out the heretics, obviously. What you might call sort of the great church held to core beliefs that we can see outlined in what we know as the rule of faith in the early church.

01:19:04

And so there was a great deal of harmony and unity around the core, but then also some disagreement around minor things.

01:19:09

And then of course you had the heretics that were all over the place. That phenomenon is actually pretty similar to today.

01:19:16

You've got a core that's pretty unified around, you've got disagreements on non -core stuff, and then you have French heretical groups that are saying all kinds of crazy stuff.

01:19:23

So yeah, it doesn't look that different at the end of the day as it did in the early church. And I think the key point is there is that unity on the essentials, right?

01:19:31

Right, because when we look at all the differences they had, really those differences are non -essential.

01:19:36

And if they are essential, then you're not dealing with disunity within the church. You're dealing with Christianity and groups that are heretical that shouldn't be lumped into the

01:19:46

Christian group, so to speak. Yeah, if someone wants to do more work on diversity and early Christianity, they ought to read my most recent book called

01:19:52

Christianity at the Crossroads, which is a look at the second century. I have two chapters on diversity there, and that might be helpful for folks.

01:20:00

Very good. And people should definitely check out your blog as well. What's the name of your blog again? Well, the URL is just my name,

01:20:06

Michael J. Kruger, but the name of my blog is Canon Fodder, but it's Canon with one N, right? So there's the pun.

01:20:12

Otherwise, you'll... Okay, and there's really... I mean, if you guys don't have time to look into one of his books in their entirety, he's got great articles that address specific issues there.

01:20:22

So you definitely want to check that out. All right, let's see here. Nick asks a question.

01:20:28

A lot of Roman Catholics seem to be objecting to your work, specifically Canon Revisited and Christianity at the

01:20:33

Crossroads. You just mentioned there. Will you be writing something dealing strictly with Roman Catholicism? I've got no plans to deal with Roman Catholicism directly.

01:20:44

I've been invited to do different projects that speak directly to Roman Catholicism. I just haven't had the time to participate.

01:20:49

I do know I've kicked a hornet's nest with my Roman Catholic friends on some of these things. That's okay. I will say this one thing about it though that I think is interesting is that the

01:20:59

Roman Catholic folks that I've been talking to actually end up making, and I think they don't realize this, the same arguments as Bart Ehrman.

01:21:06

Okay. And what they're arguing is that Christianity was so divided and such disarray, so disorganized, and so much diversity that you could never know what the right books were in early

01:21:17

Christianity. And you have to have mother church come in to save the day. And what I tell them is other than that last part, that's basically

01:21:24

Ehrman's argument, which is everything was so divided, so chaotic, so out of control that you shouldn't know possibly what books to read.

01:21:30

So Ehrman has exactly the same view. It's just that he doesn't think there's an infallible church to save the day. And I disagree with both

01:21:36

Ehrman and the Roman Catholics on that. I think the church wasn't nearly as in chaos as they maintain, and you could know which books are from God.

01:21:42

So my disagreement with Roman Catholics is obvious, but I think it's ironic that there's more in common than you might think between Roman Catholics and Ehrman on these points.

01:21:50

Yeah. And from an apologetics perspective with regards to many of the cults, many of the cults who try to piggyback on the

01:21:56

Bible and reinterpret certain things, they will appeal to the disunity and why you need their perspective to unify and to give you the truth.

01:22:03

So there's a common thread there and application there as well. Saints Edified asks, if we found the first letter of Paul to the

01:22:10

Corinthians, should we recognize it as scripture? Wow. We almost made it through the whole show without that question.

01:22:19

Wow. We almost did. We should just cut it off right here. I get that every time. I'm surprised it took this long. My answer is

01:22:25

I go back and forth. In Canon Revisited, I argued, no, we shouldn't put it in the canon. Okay. And part of that is the foundational nature of the canonical books.

01:22:34

By definition, they were the books the church used in its foundation. And if it wasn't there for the foundation, it wasn't there.

01:22:41

But then on the flip side, I think there's a case you made if it's actually from Paul, assuming we could corroborate that, which is its own discussion, then it ought to belong in our canon.

01:22:49

So it's a complicated question. I wish I had a nice, simple, clear answer. I don't. I go back and forth and I'll probably give a different answer next week if you find me next week.

01:22:58

Okay. All right. Very good. Just in case you're wondering if people are learning, boom, learning a lot. Thanks.

01:23:03

Okay. So that's good. So all is not lost with my convoluted questions, but I'm glad you're learning and I'm learning as well.

01:23:12

So thank you for listening in. Here's another question. What is Dr. Kruger's favorite book of the canon?

01:23:18

In other words, I guess not your favorite book that you have written on the canon, but perhaps maybe your favorite book in the

01:23:24

New Testament. So notice they spelled canon with two Ns there. So that's kind of back to my earlier point.

01:23:30

One N for canon. What's your favorite canon? More like the Civil War model. Yeah. So is it my boom, boom canon, light a cannonball?

01:23:39

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's hard not to love Romans. If I was stranded on a desert Island, it's certainly a fantastic core book for everything you believe.

01:23:47

And the gospels, I really love the gospel of Mark, which is it's the shortest gospel that I think really wonderful.

01:23:54

And many other great books in the New Testament, obviously, but those would be two that I really like. All right.

01:23:59

Very good. We're almost done. You're doing good. I was going to end it with a couple of questions back. I'm like, you know what? I have them now.

01:24:05

Let me milk them for the last couple of minutes. I hope you don't mind. Here we go. So someone asks, why was paganism so similar to Christianity and was some aspects of Christianity copied from pagan culture?

01:24:19

Well, I take issue with the first question, which already presumes the answer. I don't think paganism and Christianity were similar at all.

01:24:25

In fact, depends on what you mean by paganism. If you mean by pagan religions, Christianity is radically different than pagan religions almost at every turn.

01:24:31

And again, I point the reader to my book on second century Christianity, where I outline actually what is so different about early

01:24:37

Christianity from all the pagan religions. So the answer is it was radically different. In fact, it's radical difference is why it succeeded.

01:24:43

It wasn't just yet another offering in the normal Greco -Roman world. It stood out as distinctive in almost every way, which is why it was so radical in its time.

01:24:53

Did it ever copy anything from pagan culture? This is a common skeptical argument that Christianity has borrowed this and borrowed that. Certainly there's always echoes of the world you live in.

01:25:02

So the idea that there's echoes of Greco -Roman things within Christianity should not surprise us. But the idea of borrowing as in like taking over and just sort of piggybacking on Greco -Roman ideas,

01:25:12

I disagree 100%. I think Christianity was unique in all kinds of ways because it wasn't Greco -Roman, it was Jewish. It started with the

01:25:18

Old Testament itself. And so it was the opposite of pagan in almost every possible way.

01:25:25

Last one here, I think it's funny. Someone's laughing out loud. Well, I erased my other questions because he doesn't like layered questions.

01:25:32

I'm even training your audience. One simple question. That's right. So we got to simplify.

01:25:38

So I'm gonna stop it here, except the last question is the easy one. And you can just answer yes or no and make a quick qualification.

01:25:45

But if I don't stop it here, then questions will keep coming in. And so we don't wanna keep you longer.

01:25:51

So someone is asking, would you ever debate a Roman Catholic on the issue of canon and church authority? Yeah, I mean,

01:25:59

I don't know. I'm open to all kinds of things. Debates are complicated things.

01:26:05

It would depend on lots of factors. But certainly I interact and debate with Roman Catholics in print all the time. And I'm sure that'll continue.

01:26:12

Sure. And I think it's important to people to recognize when people are online, everyone's kind of arguing about something and be like, oh,

01:26:18

I wanna see this debate happen or that debate happen. I mean, you are, I'm sure you engage in debates with regards to your books.

01:26:24

I mean, you're debating issues there. Sure. Debates don't always have to be in the form of, there's this huge event where people get on stage and it's this big kind of power confrontation or this online discussion.

01:26:34

You're doing much broader work than that. And I would imagine that you don't feel as though that has to be done by you since you're already doing it so much in the other area that you're focused on.

01:26:46

Would that be a good summary of the issue? Yeah, the world of debating is a very distinctive niche. And I appreciate those who are in it.

01:26:54

And I'm not opposed to being involved in debates, but it's not at least at this point, my niche is more in the scholarly world and that's fine.

01:27:02

But we'll see, I'm open to whatever the Lord brings my way. Awesome. Well, thank you so much,

01:27:07

Dr. Kruger for being on. This was super helpful and informative. I have to revisit, Canon revisited.

01:27:14

I have it on Kindle and I have it on hardback. It's just for some reason, it always intrigues me.

01:27:21

I have friends who are Greek Orthodox. We're always talking about issues of Canon. For some reason, when I'm about to pick it up,

01:27:26

I get sidetracked and there's something else going on. But these questions keep coming up over and over again. After I do some of my,

01:27:33

I have a couple of debates coming up and some other things going on. Once I'm done, I wanna focus more on the

01:27:38

Canon because this is a recurring question all the time, no matter what the context is. So if guys, if you have not read

01:27:46

Canon revisited, I have read enough of it to know that it is most definitely worth the read and there's a lot of great stuff in there that people really need to get their hands on.

01:27:54

Are there any last words for you, Dr. Kruger, before we officially end? No, great to be with you.

01:28:00

Enjoy being on the show. I'm glad there's so much interest out there in Canon and I trust your readers will dive deeper in.

01:28:07

That's the best way to learn, to not just trust in a few blog articles, but really go deep. Awesome, well, thank you so much.

01:28:12

I'm going to end the broadcast in like two seconds and we'll still be connected and then we'll just officially say our goodbyes. Thank you so much for coming on and thank you very much for listening and watching

01:28:21

Revealed Apologetics. Stay tuned for those upcoming interviews that we have this month and next month.

01:28:27

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