Post-Debate Thoughts on Liberalism and Islam

And what it has given me the opportunity of doing is addressing the topic of, well, why I am not in the mainstream of what much of Christian theology or Christian scholarship not Christian theology, but Christian scholarship would say today concerning the history of the biblical text and why I am in the mainstream of the historic views of Christians, but stand outside of that mainstream today, as we must, I think, to be faithful in many ways.

I started addressing some of these things in the blog article that I posted last evening, but I wanted to say a few things in the first half hour of the program today and then we will take your calls if you were maybe at the debate or have some relevant questions in regards to certain things relating to the Bible, its history, and why we can trust it, so on and so forth.

877 -753 -3341 is the phone number on that. We won't be getting to that until the bottom of the hour. Now, during the course of our debate, over and over again, Shabir Ali and I discussed issues relating to Shabir's constant reliance upon modern form-critical methodologies.

Textual Criticism, Form Criticism, and Redaction Criticism

And let's face it, most folks sitting in the pew don't know what form criticism is or redaction criticism is or what textual criticism is or what the difference between them are. And there are major differences.

I engage in textual criticism, and yet you'll find a lot of fundamentalists. Well, for example, we saw in the video that Sam Gitt posted. He talked about someone being a textual critic, and that should tell you something that's wrong right away.

Well, no, it shouldn't if you know the difference between a textual critic and a form critic or a redaction critic and what all those things are. And a lot of folks just throw their hands up in the air and say, I'm just not interested or I can't learn all this stuff, which of course you actually can.

It's not that difficult to do. But the reality is that what you hear in classrooms across America and across the Western world today and what you hear from pulpits in liberal churches is very different than what you hear from the pulpits in most conservative churches.

And the argument of the world is conservatives are just holding on to something that's been thoroughly disproven. You just need to get with the program and recognize the Bible isn't what you Christians always thought that it was.

That's the message that is being pronounced with strength and clarity on NPR and by Bart Ehrman and by all of Bart Ehrman's followers in philosophy of religion classes all across the Western world. And I don't sit around just reading this stuff all the time.

I don't really have an interest in that. But I am pretty well aware of the stream and the spectrum of argumentation that is utilized from those way to my left in regards to where the Bible came from and from their perspective why it cannot be trusted in the way I trust it.

Now they may come up with they may be religious people. They may come up with ways of saying well you know what despite the fact that I think Paul contradicted Paul and Paul contradicted James and Peter is out and doing his own thing and Luke's over there.

There is no singular message and the Old Testament is actually a compilation of all sorts of disparate documents and it doesn't have there are no themes that flow through all of it or it's all just up to me to determine what those are.

I don't buy into any and all of that stuff but I am familiar very very familiar with the scholars who promote these things. Why? Because I'm a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and a graduate with honors by the way and that was well coming up on on 30 years ago now.

Wow that's a frightening thing to think about but yeah you know well actually I graduated in college 1985 so we'll be coming up on 30 years before long. It'll be here before we know it and things have changed and Fuller has changed a lot in the 25 or so years since I was there but the reality is that the large majority of the reading that I had to do at Fuller Theological Seminary introduced me to a wide range of theological perspectives.

At the time I didn't know why that was and at the time it was somewhat frustrating I'll be I'll be honest but now in hindsight it's one of those situations where you wonder about God's providence at the time and then you give it 20 years 25 years you start figuring out what God's providence was up to and so I had to read for example I've used the illustration many times but it's it's applicable here.

I took a class in a Pentateuch and and my professor a professor I liked a lot by the way and learned much from you see I learned how to appreciate the solid information and get rid of the fluff and the rest of stuff that that was inconsistent with what I see as a consistent Christian worldview and a consistent supernatural worldview and I I learned to learn from people who do not walk my line.

That's one of the difference between me and a King James only fundamentalist Baptist is that a King James only fundamentalist Baptist does not believe you can learn anything from anybody who holds a view other than your own and that you shouldn't have anything to do with them and you should run away walk run however get away from that person and so on and so forth.

I don't hold that perspective and my professors at Fuller will tell you that I was respectful even when I had to express my disagreement and so I had a class in a Pentateuch and I had an excellent professor and I actually had this professor for I think six classes as I recall which is a fair number that's a lot and he held up a commentary on Deuteronomy by Gerhard von Rath.

Now one of the things that obviously I had to learn a lot about and since I was already involved in apologetics I really focused upon was the especially in the Old Testament even more so than new the rather radical theories that had become predominant.

I mean I've said many times conservatives gave up the Old Testament to the to the liberals a long time ago. You can hardly buy today a commentary on the Old Testament that goes into any depth at all. In other words it would discuss textual relationships between Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and would provide you information concerning Ugaritic parallels and brings in information from the ancient Near Eastern texts from Pritchard and things like that.

You can hardly buy a commentary like that anymore that is actually written from a perspective of belief that this is in fact a divine text. That this is well how Jesus described it as being God speaking.

You can't hardly buy it. You can't hardly find scholars like that. There's still some left but they will admit I mean if you go to SBL and you attend any of the Old Testament stuff you're just going to be hearing just the wildest and craziest stuff out there from from the way way out to the left and that's where most everybody is.

And I he held up that commentary from Von Rotz that is the best commentary on Deuteronomy in in the English language. And we had to write a review of it. And if you read Von Rotz it's thoroughly based upon you have this source over here and this source over there and you've got you've got the the Deuteronomous source you got the priestly source got the Yahweh source you got stuff coming in here from the Ugaritic and you got this coming up and it's it's all just cobbled together and and not really edited well and and it's it's just this this evolutionary process that puts this together and and even once you get the final form of Deuteronomy which you don't even have till well after the days of of of David and Solomon and so on and so forth almost into the into the intertestamental period before you even have the final form of Deuteronomy it's going to be different than what you have in Leviticus this could be different what you have in Exodus you got all this you know there's there's no way to even begin to come to the conclusion that any of this stuff actually is is overly relevant because it's just this cobbled together stuff and I guess really for a lot of people the only real relevance from their perspective is that since people have have used this stuff in religious contexts for many many centuries that's what its relevance is.

That's that's all there is to it and I had to write a review of it and and when I wrote the review of it you had to you had to mention your positives and negatives and the only positive thing I can say about Gerhard von Roth's commentary on Deuteronomy was that it had a very nice binding and then I started into the negatives and I still have that in my library.

I haven't gotten rid of it. I haven't they didn't burn it but and I read it you can go in there today there will be under things underlined and marked I read it I I entered into the mindset of that perspective so that I can understand it and so I'm not unfamiliar with these things.

Like I said I don't sit around all day long reading that stuff but I am familiar with where it's coming from. In the debate with Shabir Ali I once again had to raise the issue of the fact that he relies upon scholarship that in its fundamental presuppositions if it were applied to his own faith would refute his own faith but he won't do that he will not make the same application.

And he seems to be very confused by this because he mentioned some some names to me specifically mentioned two names dr. Richard Balcombe and FF Bruce. And he gave me FF Bruce's book on New Testament history which I used as a textbook in seminary and have used when teaching relevant subjects to that myself so I certainly had read that that work many many years ago and but I appreciate him giving me a copy.

I also gave him a copy of some some books as well. But we normally do that when we debate anyway he raised these two scholars. Now FF Bruce and Richard Balcombe would come out at very different points would come out differently on different points.

I would say Bruce would be more conservative in general than Balcombe. However Richard Balcombe has shown a willingness to buck the trends. He's obviously a a tremendous scholar and I really appreciated Jesus and the eyewitnesses.

I've really appreciated other works he's written. He goes against the the grain in many ways. The problem was when when Shabir turns around says what do you think of Richard Balcombe while he's doing his opening statement how can you even give a meaningful response to a question like that.

There are just so many issues that that would have to be addressed as to where we would have presupposition Lee different starting points and concluding points. And so I mean I'm like ah you know because I have some areas where we would have disagreement other areas where I've learned a lot other areas or where well for example he presents in Jesus and the eyewitnesses the idea that the John of the Gospel of John is the disciple John not the Apostle John.

Okay you know that's a theory from the early church. He makes that argument. Okay I would consider that adiaphora something that's not. You know you know you can debate it. The Bible doesn't say one way or the other so you can debate those things.

And I was I was concerned that in light of how short the debate was that my some of my comments might be misconstrued in leading someone astray as to well you just you know unless somebody agrees with you you just disagree with everybody.

That's this is not true. I mean I brought up Balcombe later and pointed out that his work in Jesus and the eyewitnesses goes directly against the rather simplistic redaction perspective that Shabir Ali utilizes when he quotes from Raymond Brown and people like that.

And he doesn't always just go to the assumption that as soon as you see a text that it's secondary it's the result of editing the result of redaction. And really that's the whole issue here is that is that Shabir and many of his compatriots on the Islamic side of things who actually start studying these things are far too quick to embrace writers and authors who begin with one simple assumption and that is whatever this text is about it can't be it cannot be what the Christian Church has always thought it was about.

It must be we we must look for. Well you know James DG Dunn wrote unity and diversity in New Testament. And the problem is the unity got lost in all the diversity. And of course that was a big term back when I was in summary diversity.

That's a nice way of saying contradiction teaching and saying different things. There is no unity there is no commonality. And in there's there's lots of scholars out there who will not even give consideration to anyone who would say well let's start by asking is it would would Paul and James actually be saying the same thing.

No no you're not. You're not even allowed to go there. That doesn't even come up in the class discussion. That's what Christians used to believe. We've gotten past that. And if you want to get it if you want to get anywhere in the theological realm you've just got to stop thinking about that.

You don't even go there. That's artificial. That's that's where the Christians were a long time ago we're past that you just simply have to accept as a given fact that this diversity is well completely human in origin that we are not examining divine documents here.

And therefore we should not be looking for any divine consistency. We should look at these as solely human productions and hence there's going to be human foibles and human errors. And there's going to be contradiction.

And we need to plumb the contradictions. This has become so much of a part of the thinking of the vast majority of critical scholarship in New Testament circles and I in the speaking of the broad range of things I mean Raymond Brown.

I mean you're really getting getting way out of a conservative zone when you get to someone like Raymond Brown. But you you read these folks and the the discussions that took place in Calvin or someone like that don't even appear here.

It's just it's just not even relevant anymore other than to maybe quote it just to sort of laugh at and say can you believe that people actually took time to try to harmonize these things and and and to try to see how possibly you know you might want to give the benefit of the doubt to the author that maybe we don't know everything about what was going on in that context that kind of stuff.

Just it's just not even allowed. It is not allowed in the vast majority of schoolrooms and so many what's what's happened is I you you get certain perspectives that become popular and they just start to propagate themselves.

One person quotes it another person quotes him quoting that and eventually it has the look as if well everybody recognizes this. I mean all the big names believe this and it creates a foundation that really isn't there.

Because when you start probing you say so why do you come to that conclusion. You discover that it really goes back to certain presuppositions that you bring to the text itself. And of course we live in a very secular age and that secular age has deeply influenced the practice of scholarship even in what is called Christianity.

And as a result you have a large number of individuals who hold advanced degrees and yet they are approaching a text that was written by men with a supernatural worldview but they approach it as philosophical and theological naturalists.

And the result is what you see in the wide variety of teachings available out there on both the Old and the New Testament. So for example Richard Balcombe I loved you know I've listened to he's not a scintillating teacher.

I will give you that as far as his as his speaking style goes. But I listened to a lecture to sound like he was reading it a lecture that he gave and and someone brought up the text in Mark 2. What I really appreciated was was he just sort of like I don't.

It just seems so obvious what is going on in in Mark chapter 2 in that the what's what's what's happening here does display the deity of Christ. And then he was talking about the the rich young ruler and the saying that saying to Jesus you know Jesus saying why do you call me good.

And and even he took the interpretation of that that I have and that is the young man needed to know who he was dealing with that Jesus wasn't denying his own goodness that that he was attempting to get the young man to recognize what the nature of real goodness is.

And and so there are a lot of places where we would be in perfect agreement on things. But when it comes to the consistency of the text as a whole and how it came to have the form that it had I simply see no reason to assume the things that many scholars today do assume.

Obviously FF Bruce I would think would be likewise very very conservative. I have utilized FF Bruce's commentary in Hebrews in my preaching through Hebrews a number of times I found it very very useful.

Do I always agree with everything FF Bruce says. No I don't. There's no one that I can say always agree with everything. And it bothers me that that Shabir keeps saying what you've. You've put these people on on a list of recommended reading.

And you know why would you put them on a list of recommended reading if if you don't. Well conservatives actually read the other side we read people we don't necessarily agree with. So put him up putting him on a list and he's brought this up twice now and I've corrected it every single time.

Putting him on a list has absolutely nothing to do with that being an endorsement of everything that person says or the perspectives that they take on everything. It just that's just simply not the case.

And I think that needs to be needs to be kept in mind. Now all of this comes back to the the real of how we approach the text of Scripture itself and why I take a fundamentally different perspective than than many other people do.

Part of it is because when I was in seminary when I would start to challenge what was being said it became very clear to me. And again I was already involved in apologetics. This was something that I was already thinking about.

There's something I was already having to deal with. I discovered that many of my professors had imbibed their perspectives in a rather shall we say non-critical way. And so just because a perspective becomes popular just because well so-and-so says it and so-and-so over there says it so well you just have to follow along.

Well you know I know enough about church history to know there have been times in the not too distant past when the assured results of scholarship have collapsed in the the dating of mark and things like that.

And so I don't just follow along in that way and in the same way you have to learn how to appreciate what a scholar says in one area and recognize where you might have differences. Another one that one of the confusions that Shabir seemed to have was well look at all these people who believe mark was written first.

Well look and as NT Wright said we don't know when the Gospels were written. We don't know what order they were written in. Yes mark and priority is the popular theory. Today it hasn't always been. And in fact if you look at the history of the church it would be a very small minority of the time period where mark has been considered to be first primary gospel and that it was just simply being used in a in an editorial fashion by mark and Luke.

I buy it Matthew and Luke the early church thought Matthew was written first. That's why why it's first in the canon. Do we know do we have any way of finding out. I don't think we do. There are many people are absolutely convinced today.

Well but you see if you start with mark and then you theorize something called Q and then you then you know we could put this together. And of course John's out in the woods someplace we don't have to worry about him and so we can we can come up with this theory and it seems to work pretty well.

But you have to assume so many things. You know one of the assumptions that is assumed that that doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me is that Matthew let's let's say Matthew's sitting there and somehow he's gotten a hold of mark.

Now how do you get a hold. How do you even know about mark. There seems to be this assumption in the back of people's minds that that well you know because they're all involved in Christian leadership you know they had each other's cell phone numbers or something like that.

But but people don't realize how slowly information moved in those ages. And and and you know you had to get on ships and cross seas and get into storms and wreck on islands and hear that or walk for months on end and things didn't just happen overnight.

And so if Matthew actually got hold of a written copy of mark in those early decades and I do believe that these were written prior to 80 70 it just makes no sense unless you're a theological naturalist and then you can't have prophecy.

But it just makes no sense that even if they were written after 80 70 did you you'd you'd talk about 80 70 and in the way that the Gospels do it makes no sense. And I'm not the only person even liberals have recognized that.

That's not something I made up. But let's say he gets hold of a copy of a mark somehow where'd he get it from. He got it from the community. He got it from the Christian community. And that Christian community would already be aware of what was in the Gospel of Mark.

Wouldn't they. They certainly would. They certainly would. They certainly would be aware of that. And so if Matthew is sitting there and he's already got mark he already knows mark is well known in the community and he's sitting there is he gonna be changing mark.

And in fact contradicting mark. He's doing that. Who's he gonna send his book out to is gonna be the same community that's already reading mark. So do you really think Matthew is sitting there and he already knows that the community he got this book from already has it.

And he's actually gonna write something that's contradictory to it. I mean isn't it. Wouldn't it just be a given that at least you'd have to start just on a logical basis everything else aside on a logical basis.

If you're assuming literary dependence of Matthew upon mark wouldn't Matthew be trying to be consistent with mark. And maybe shouldn't you possibly give consideration to maybe the idea that Matthew isn't trying to contradict mark but he's just he's just using mark and he wants to communicate to a different group.

And so he's not trying to contradict mark. So he's actually saying the same things but just in different words to different people. I mean just on a naturalistic basis. Doesn't that make sense. And yet if it if it could in any way shape or form tend toward Christian Orthodoxy.

Oh no can't go there. You're not gonna get published if you write something like that. No no no no you got to go a different direction. So there's just so many there's just so many issues that come up.

And it became very clear to me that basically those types of those types of questions were not really the questions that we were looking for in the in the seminary classes. It's that that wasn't really what they were what they were looking for.

And so there's this is this is a complicated area this is an area that we need to do a lot of thought in. I recognize that I know my one of the only concerns I had after the debate was that someone would think that I had in a simplistic fashion dismiss things.

But what concerned me was that Shabir seemingly had the idea that well if somebody had the idea of Markham priority then you disagree with them. And I agree with them. No I don't know of almost anybody.

Well I don't know of anybody who takes the conclusions that that Shabir comes to. I don't know of anybody even in the redaction criticism community where that is just the be all and end all of all things have come to the same conclusions.

He has not so much just in the general. Well there is this development over time stuff this snowball thing. But you know in regards to Muhammad and in in John 14 and 16 even even Raymond Brown who he relies upon there doesn't come to that conclusion.

And just because someone believes in Markham priority doesn't mean they necessarily believe in literary dependence. Even if they believe in literary dependence it doesn't necessarily mean that they then have a theory that John developed over a period of time.

There are a number of texts in the Old Testament for example in the Pentateuch in the writings of Moses one of them that just off top my head makes the statement that this was before any Kings had ruled over the people of Israel.

Now think about that. I mean that's even that's even more obvious than someone putting up a monument that is there to this day or writing about Moses's death. Okay there isn't any there isn't any problem in recognizing that the writings of Moses were compiled by someone after Moses died.

That's not an issue. I mean I I know that in my upbringing there are people like oh no it had to be all prophetic and Moses saw his death and he had written. Where does where does that come from. Because clearly Jesus believed that Moses wrote these things.

That doesn't mean that Moses wrote the introduction or the conclusion or a transitional statement or anything like that. But that these writings give to us what was given to Moses. Now what happens is Shabir Ali will say well you know you there were these stages in the writing of Mark and there were these stages in the writing of John.

And he can't tell us anything about these stages. But I don't care if there were stages because you know what what I have done on the Muslim book right now is not in any order. I'm not done with the introduction but I'm done with the chapter later.

And as I think about my books I can sort of I think there are a couple of my books that I wrote the introduction and then I wrote chapter 1 and I wrote chapter 2 and then I wrote all the way through to the end.

I think there are a couple that I wrote like that but I know there are a bunch of them that that is not how it worked that they were written in stages. The fatal flaw. The fatal flaw initially had an appendix on it the size of a house which is why we knocked it off and turned it into answers to Catholic claims.

Okay but originally answers Catholic claims was a part of the fatal flaw. And so you know people look at John chapter 21 and go this is clearly this is not John. And the point is that the claim of inspiration the claim of supernatural authority is invested in what is written.

It's not invested in the person and it's not invested in the process. Whether Paul wrote Romans in one long night of dictation or over a week or over a month does not change its inspired status. And you can theorize all you want about.

Well you know I think in this particular letter that Paul wrote these chapters first and then he thought you know I need to insert this and so he inserts something later on. Okay interesting interesting theory.

But what does it actually mean. Does it actually end up impacting what it was that the Apostle Paul sent to the church at Corinth. Because that's the issue. And so many people will assume that because there are these issues that can be raised that that means that you approach this solely from a naturalistic perspective.

And all the only answers you can come up with are answers that are based upon a naturalistic assumption that well you know this author because of his ignorance of this or because of his ignorance of that this is a this this resultant text comes from natural sources.

That's the difference between approaching these texts from a supernatural perspective and from a naturalistic perspective is a super naturalist doesn't have to do what the King James only fundamentalist does.

And say I won't even I won't even think about the possibility that that there were stages in the writing of a gospel. Folks think about how long it would take to handwrite something. There had to be stages.

I don't think Mark sat down and just kept writing till his hand cramped up. That's why it was only 16 chapters. There had to be something like that. But what they're theorizing is is it because there are these chapters.

Then what you actually have is the opportunity for major changing to be done. And that introduces contradiction. And it's not one author. It's many authors. And so you're introducing contradiction between the authors and and all the rest of stuff.

And that's where I go. No I don't think. So you don't have to have that. And so just the illustration from my own experience my own writing of books I think helps to illustrate that we need to be careful.

We need to be careful. We don't have a knee-jerk reaction to everything that we hear. That's somewhat different than the way we've ever thought about it before. Because you know what we I see that all the time when I explain to folks how the New Testament came into existence you mean it didn't always look like it looks right now.

And and and in fact that there was a time when books in the New Testament were just letters that that were carried in a leather pouch by somebody that didn't have deodorant and wrote on a on a donkey.

Or maybe just walk through the dusty streets of these cities. Yeah that's right. That's how the letters got there. I mean they weren't in a leather binding with with gold edges and thumb indexing. Yeah and since they never thought about that they're all freaked out like I'm challenging the reality of the Bible and I'm not.

And so we need to be careful. I think sometimes we conservatives can have a knee-jerk reaction to something that's different and so we willing to listen but that's a completely different world than well we all know there can't be prophecy and so that means the Gospels had to be written after 80 70 and and you just have to assume that that Paul contradicts Paul and Paul contradicts James.

And and you can't even allow people who actually see a deep harmony between these these writings to even have a place at the table. And that unfortunately is is is what's going on. And so in the rest of the article that I've yet to finish writing and put up what I'm going to point out is that once again that's not how Shabir Ali approaches the Quran now to be honest with you he did say something in the in the in the debate that I did find very interesting and I hope there's gonna be some follow-up on and you know where I hope the follow-up comes from.

I hope it comes from Muslims not from us. But Tony Costa asked a very good question because he had made a statement in his I think it was the rebuttal period. I'd have to go back and look at the at the video to be exactly certain about that.

But I had raised the issue of the Quran's utilization of pre-existing written materials and it does. There's stuff from the Mishnah there is there Abraham being thrown in the fire and and the stuff about the Queen of Sheba coming and certainly Jesus speaking from the cradle comes in the Arabic infancy gospel and the little birds comes comes from the infancy gospel of Thomas and and all of these in the period between the completion of the New Testament and the writing of Quran at 500 year period.

It's borrowing from other stuff. But the Quran says no there's nothing that we've borrowed. It's all been sent down by Allah. Well you know Shabir said some interesting things. He seemed to admit that there was a utilization on the part of the author of the Quran of pre-existing material but he explained it as being all under the sovereignty of God.

Well okay then how come we can't look at the synoptic Gospels in that way. How come we can't look at the differences that exist between Matthew Mark and Luke as means of enriching our understanding of these situations rather than just blatant deceptive editing because that in essence is what Shabir is saying is that these writers were editing the view of Jesus to make Jesus something he wasn't.

Well that's deceptive. That's wrong. And Muslims have often said we're defending the real Jesus and we're defending his honor and all the rest that stuff. Really if you can do that with the Quran why can't you see that possibility with the synoptic Gospels.

Or in how you're dealing with the New Testament.