June 27, 2006

1 Peter 3:15 and the Aim of Christian Apologetics

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program, and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 1 -800 -602 -973 -4602 or toll-free across the United States.

It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Upcoming Travel, Debate with John Shelby Spong, and the Day's Topics

And good afternoon. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning, back to our regular schedule for, well, one week. In fact, it's a little less than a week now till I will be speaking in the School of Theology at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.

Two of our English listeners are in studio right now, and they were mentioning the fact that they are they are reporting to me that the Metropolitan Tabernacle has excellent air conditioning in the main studio, and I am thankful for that.

I've never been over there when it was even slightly warm, but they're talking about highs in the 80s, and I sort of chuckle when I got up yesterday morning to ride. I started riding about five minutes till 5 a .m. while it was still dark.

It was about 86 degrees at that time at the low, so I'm not really certain that folks in London really have a concept of heat the way that we experience it out here. But anyway, that's neither here nor there.

We will be there next week, and so obviously that means we have The Dividing Line today, and then we will have it on Thursday, and then I will be at the Metropolitan Tabernacle for a couple days, and then I'll be speaking up in Glasgow on Friday night on Homosexuality and the Bible, which of course is the topic of my debate with John Shelby Spong in November, and then I will be preaching at Edmonton Baptist Chapel and my dear friend Roger Brazier and his family there at the church, and then coming home on Monday, I have a feeling that since I'm flying in and out of Gatwick this time instead of Heathrow, that Roger's probably just going to stick me in a cab with a guy who doesn't speak English after the service Sunday night and say Gatwick, bye!

Hasta la vista! We'll see you later, and that'll be that'll be the end of that. Speaking of the debate in in November, I have a clip I want to start off the program with today. 877 -753 -3341. I can't possibly get in everything that I would like to get in today.

I have Paige Patterson's comments in the Patterson-Moller discussion from the Sun Maps Convention. I have this clip. I have an article from Roger Olson at the George W. Truitt Theological Seminary at Baylor University.

Once again, basically promoting the same thing that Patterson is same old, same old, but it just keeps getting retreaded. And of course, there's this little thing about trying to arrange some debate with some other Baptist someplace that we probably should talk about a little bit, too.

So lots to get to on the program today. So let's get started with a It's about a four-minute clip here from John Shelby Spong. Now, I think that people need to understand that the debate that is coming up, I know that people get all excited about debates on the doctrines of grace because the doctrines of grace are very important.

But we need to be engaging our culture and especially our children, our young people, are encountering a tremendously aggressive strain of anti-Christian thought in the educational system today. And that anti-Christian thought also has people who wear clerical collars supporting it and presenting it themselves.

John Shelby Spong calls himself a Christian, but if you listen to his his beliefs, he says Christianity must change or die. And what he means by that is that the supernatural Christianity of the scriptures, the Christianity of the Bible, the Christianity of history, is no longer relevant and is not what he believes.

And that's what causes people problems. They see a man wearing a collar and they would expect that at some level there would be some acceptance of biblical authority. The ultimate authority in in John Shelby Spong's theology, if we can call it that, is Darwin and the current cosmological viewpoints of the world.

It is pure and on a level fundamentalist secularism. Now those are pretty strong words, but I'd like to back them up and I think anything we listen to will back that up. But he often uses, because he recognizes the minority status of his viewpoints, he often uses the analogy of the church in exile.

And he really does view his as the true church and and the rest of this supernatural stuff as something it just simply needs to pass away. And he confidently tells his followers that it is and it will pass away in a very short period of time in the future.

And so in this particular clip, he's being asked, you know, if the church is in exile, are there parameters for what we can identify as the church? Let's just listen in and see what he has to say.

Biblical Exile, Darwin, Freud, and the Collapse of Supernatural Christianity

And it may be useful to ask in view of the theme for the conference, Faith on the Margins, and Bishop Spong's address, I Believe in Exile. If there are margins, where is the center? And if we are in exile, then where are we in exile from?

What is the home from which we are in exile? I use the the image of exile because it's a biblical image. Somewhere between 596 and 586 before the Common Era, the Jewish nation was forced into Babylonian exile.

When they went into exile, they had to leave everything they knew, everything they trusted, the concepts in which they had understood God. They had to leave all of the presuppositions of their faith. They had to learn, in the words of the psalmist, how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land.

Their understanding of God was very much connected to the land, to the law, to the interpretation of the law by the priesthood in the temple in the city of Jerusalem. They suddenly lost all of that. One of the interesting things that came out of that was the development of synagogues to sort of replace the temple that they had lost.

What I've tried to do, and what I'm trying to do at this moment, is to say that Christianity is similarly in an exile. That is, we have been forced to walk away from all of the presuppositions of the faith tradition in which we have lived.

What has taken us into exile, however, is not an identifiable enemy called the Babylonians. What has taken us into exile is an enormous intellectual revolution in the way we perceive reality. And you can trace that very simply from the writings of Copernicus and Galileo, who took the earth out of the center of the universe and diminished the incredible anthropocentric claims that human beings had had up until that time as the crown of creation, living under the direct gaze of the God who is just above the sky, keeping record books and writing in those record books and ready to judge everybody at every moment.

And then, you know, we hadn't adjusted to that before Isaac Newton came along, and what we had once called miracle and magic, Newton made a different way of understanding those causations that we did not understand.

And we had hardly adjusted to that before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, in which he related human life very significantly to the to the world of nature, and in a more profound way that I don't think Christians recognized at first because we were so busy defending the seven-day creation story, Darwin destroyed the basic Christian myth.

That myth is that there was a perfect creation from which we fell away into sin in the primal act of disobedience by our primal parents, Adam and Eve, necessitating God's divine rescue operation, which took place through the law, through the covenant people, through the law, through the prophets, and ultimately in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who was interpreted as the divine rescuer.

There is no perfect creation because the world is still being formed. We are still evolving. Galaxies are still being expanded. So the idea that we have fallen from perfection is an idea that is, as opposed to Darwinian, makes absolutely no sense.

And so the basic Christian myth, which we have interpreted the acts of God through the ages, also makes no sense. And it wasn't as if Darwin was the end of the rule, of the road. We had then to deal with Sigmund Freud, who caused us to see all of the immature, neurotic, maybe even oedipal aspects that are present in most people's religious situations.

And after Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein came along to to relativize the concepts of time and space so that we don't know much about who we are in this vast world. And relativity is a fact of our life.

And after Einstein, and even Einstein was not able to embrace it, we entered into the world of astrophysics and subatomic physics, where even the laws of Newton no longer seem to be determinative of the way behavior takes place in the universe.

So is the center from which we are departed, is this an illusory center? Well, I think it always was. I think the center of life is wherever a person says he or she is standing.

Well, you don't get much more anthropocentric than that, I would say. More man-centered, naturalistic, secular, non-biblical. And so, you know, the question that everyone is having is how can he even begin to debate is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical Christianity when he doesn't believe there is such a thing as authentic biblical Christianity?

And that's the point. And that's what's going to make this a challenge on my part. And that is his attack is two-pronged. Spong's attack is two-pronged. Spong will attack on two prongs. There we go.

The first is he does address issues regarding... He does make the argument that we have misunderstood the Bible in regards to what it says. He does the standard stuff in regards to arsonic coitus and the key terms about homosexuality in the Bible.

So that's a part of the apologetic. But even if you deal with that, you're still dealing with a secular mindset that does not believe that God has spoken. That's very similar to, of course, Barry Lynn.

I don't think that Bishop Spong is going to go quite so far as Barry Lynn did to claim that he has revelation and that he has revelation the same level as Paul's letter to the Galatians. Or in fact, he said Paul's letter to the Galatians was over the top.

So I guess it would be a higher level of revelation than what Paul had. But he's not going to go there. But he certainly does not believe that there is any way of knowing, even if there was a divine revelation, what that divine revelation is supposed to mean in our context today.

And so it's going to be very much, I think, to be very useful, especially to young people who are going into seminary training or struggling with the secularism of their friends and their cohorts in the university setting, because he's going to be approaching it from both directions.

And he's very much representative of the kind of material that the vast majority of their professors would be presenting to them. I've been contacted by a number of people who have said that in their educational experience that they were exposed to, they were instructed to read materials by John Shelby Spong.

And of course, the reason that he's so popular is he's wearing that backwards collar. And so you can always say, oh, well, we're not being biased against Christianity or anything here. Here's a Christian saying this.

And if you want to definitely have an idea of just how elastic the term Christian is in the context of the modern context, that is going to be seen very, very clearly in the debate with John Shelby Spong.

Liberty Seminary, the Kanner Debate, and the Problem of Unbiblical Moderation

So I mentioned on the blog the day before yesterday that in light of the current standing and situation, in light of the fact, and I speak now to those of you who actually have put yourself through the unenjoyable task of reading through the correspondence that has been going back and forth between myself, Tom Askell on the one side, and primarily Ergen Kanner.

Emir Kanner, I think, has written one or two emails a number of months ago. Dr. Bren O'Donnell of Liberty wrote one that pretty much destroyed any hopes of his being able to function as a unbiased moderator.

But it's primarily been Ergen Kanner of Liberty Seminary, Liberty University and the president of the seminary there. And I will confess, it's been extremely, you know, if you think it's unpleasant for you to read through this stuff, you ought to be in my shoes.

You aren't seeing everything that's going on. You don't see what's going on in the background. You don't see all of the rest of the stuff. And I'm not talking about correspondence. We have posted all of that publicly, at least as far as the main people are concerned.

I don't think anything that we've discussed before has generated this level of email response. And if you're wondering, I think I've certainly gotten enough that I could actually make a statistical analysis of how many people are for and how many people are against.

I'd say it's about 70 -30. I think it's pretty much stayed right around there. That out of 10 emails, seven of them will be saying you have to hold the course here. You know, as much as it may be disgusting and as much as there may be many unknowns, you know, you can't, for this reason, everybody has different reasons and so on and so forth.

And about 30 are saying these guys aren't serious. They don't want this to take place. You cannot know how they're going to behave. It could be a complete debacle. They could act like complete buffoons.

Don't go there. And I understand both sides completely. Both Tom and I have expressed the fact that if we had our druthers, we would rather not have anything to do with ErgenKanner ever again. I'm sorry.

I think that if I can be blamed for lots of things in this situation, one of them is the fact that I bent over backwards repeatedly for months to respond to vitriolic or dismissive, unkind, most would say insolent and arrogant would be good terms, responses by trying to reason with the man as a brother, by trying to appeal to him as a fellow believer, by trying to get him, for example, to talk to me about other issues that we could build some sort of a basis upon for having other dialogue.

Specifically, my debate with Shabir Ali. The man's a former Muslim and I kept bringing it up. Again, the documentation shows this. You can go back and look at it. I kept bringing it up. He never would even comment on it.

He wouldn't say, you know, we're going to be praying for you. And we're thankful that you're engaging. This man could care less. And in fact, I think if anyone sat down and just looked at the amount of material that I have sent to him, the number of points I've made to him, if he has responded to five percent of what I've sent to him in a meaningful fashion, I would be shocked.

He just he chooses what he wants to respond to and the rest of it just disappears. It just doesn't exist. And and it's it's really easy in hindsight to look at that and go, well, you should have known.

You just should have known that that this guy, you know, shouldn't have the position he has. He's I can't tell you how many people from former students at Liberty, current students at Liberty, have contacted me just and apologized for the outrageous behavior of the dean of their school and the president of their seminary.

They just are absolutely mortified that this man would behave the way he behaves. It's it's it's unbelievable. But I just you know, I obviously had to a high view of Christian education as a whole, I guess, to think that anyone could ever truly behave this way.

I mean, this isn't the first time I've encountered outrageous behavior. As I said, Dr. Cantor is the the art simple of Baptist apologetics. He he's acting the same way it is. But I I expect that from someone like art simple.

I don't expect it from the president of Liberty Seminary. I just it still can completely Buffalo's me that some will behave in this fashion. And so it's it's not been a pleasant experience. And I have been I said on my blog.

We do not know what's going to happen if anything's going to happen on October 16th. Obviously, the idea that one side can come along and just say, well, if we're going to do this, this is how we're going to do it and and to simply dishonestly say, well, we want an even level.

We want an even surface. And you don't let's let's baloney anyone who will read the documentation knows that we're the ones trying to get a meaningful debate. We're the ones trying to get a debate that the audience will be blessed by.

Any other side is doing everything they can to throw roadblocks in the midst of that, all the while dishonestly saying otherwise. That's that there's not even I can't see how anyone could possibly even argue that point.

The only people who would disagree with that are people who have not bothered to read the documentation that that's just all there is to it. And so I have I know Rich has been saying this. I said on my blog and I need you to hear this.

You have no way of knowing that you're let's say that something works out, Ergen can or all of a sudden starts acting his age rather than his shoe size. And we work something out to where we can actually debate a thesis statement that makes sense rather than a heretical one.

That's like I said, only makes sense when it's translated into Tongan. And we have a meaningful period of time in which to to debate. Something happens, whether it's a one on one debate or a two on two debate.

Something happens on October 16th. You have no reason to think that you're gonna be able to get to the doors that we cannot. No one can guarantee that if all the Liberty students and we've been told that the whole plan is to to pack that place out with Liberty students.

I got an email last night from a Liberty alumni saying that he was concerned that we need to we need to watch our back. He said, I have seen incredible behavior at Liberty Universities. I would not be surprised if you had people catcalling.

I would not be surprised. We had people throwing things. I would not be surprised if you if you had stuff thrown at you from the bushes as you're walking in. And I'm like, wow, I've never heard this before.

But that's what somebody said. You know, you have to evaluate all that stuff as it comes in. There's no way there's there's absolutely no reason. And I said this on my blog. And so make it clear, do not make plans for October 16th, 2006 in Lynchburg.

First of all, we can't guarantee you get in. Second, we don't know that the last minute everything just comes flying apart and nothing's going to happen. We, of course, can prove from our side that we've never done that.

We can prove we can we can plop down stacks of DVDs and CDs in front of anybody who wants to know how we can do debates. We have nothing to prove here. We have proven our ability to debate difficult issues with difficult people.

So we got nothing to prove here. It's the Canners who have everything to prove, because even though Ergen Canner promotes himself on his own personal Glamour Shots website, as the veteran of 60 some odd debates, he won't tell you what any of them are.

He won't show them to you. Oh, well, there's some of some, you know, local community colleges, but nothing big. Well, show us that you, Ergen Canner, can engage in debates with people with whom you have severe differences in a respectful fashion and hold to your word.

Show us that you've done it. We can do it. You need to show that you can do it. Since we don't have that kind of assurance, then what we're telling everybody is don't even plan to be there. Don't even, you know, we've heard people, I'm going to come from California, man.

I'm going to be there. No, no, don't. Don't. If it happens, pray for us. We're going to we're going to make sure this thing's videotaped. I think I think no matter what, we'd have to bring our own cameras one way or the other, because I don't think we can trust what's going to happen one way or the other.

Let's let's just be perfectly honest about it. I can if let's say a debate took place and we do actually have the opportunity of speaking in a meaningful fashion. You all have listened to what Ergen Canner says.

I mean, this guy cannot defend the idea that Esau was hated by God because what he did, you can't defend that kind of upside down eisegesis. And so it would be very ugly as far as the outcome goes. Boy, all of a sudden, the entire television system could just go completely whack there and the entire digital tape and everything else explode.

Aliens beam it up to the mothership. Who knows what happened in that situation? We're going to have to do all this stuff. Don't make plans. If it's going to happen, we're going to get it recorded and you're going to be able to listen to it and you're going to be able to see it at another point in time.

But you can't guarantee you're ever going to walk that door. So make no plans to be there. I don't need to have. I've debated in places. I remember debating once up in Omaha, Nebraska. Some of you have heard those two debates.

I did the gerrymantics. And one night, the only Protestant, the only non-Catholic I knew was in that room was an Episcopalian on the front row that only barely qualifies as a non-Catholic. OK, so I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

That part of it does not bother me in any way, shape or form. I have said that I will walk into every single one of Ergin Kanner's classes on Tuesday, October 17th, if he wants me to, with nothing but a Greek New Testament.

And I will take on all comers. I'll discuss this with anybody as long as we're allowed to actually have a conversation. That part doesn't intimidate me. No issues on that level at all. When you've done the types of debates that we've done, the places we've done them, that's not an issue.

So we don't, you know, don't be going, oh, we want to be there to support you. If you want to support what we're trying to do here, then what you need to realize is your support is needed in this, the debate with John Shelby Sponge.

It's only two weeks later. It's in a place we can actually guarantee you can walk through the door. It's in a place we can guarantee you that it's going to be done in a meaningful fashion. It's going to be the place where we can tell you that the debate's actually going to mean something.

It's going to be recorded. It's going to be recorded for future generations to look at. And the subject is going to be handled in such a way that you're actually going to be able to be benefited when you walk out.

There's no going to, there's not going to be anybody from our side anyway, screaming or yelling or throwing things. And it's going to be done the way that we've proved it can be done with with John Dominick Crossan and with Douglas Wilson and with Greg Stafford and so on and so forth, because we're the ones in control of it.

And it's been easy to set up. I mean, comparison to this, this circus, it has been, it is absolutely simplistic, simplistic to set this stuff up. And so what I'm saying is, if you want to support what Alpha Omega Ministries is doing in general, and if you want to support what we're trying to do in the Cantor situation, Tom Askell is going to be in the conference that we're having in Orlando.

I'm doing the debate there. That's where your support is needed. Vote with your support. It's one thing to say, oh, go get them, you know. But if you want to demonstrate that you really do support what we're doing, if you want to, you want to make a tangible contribution, then be there in Orlando.

Or if you can't be there in Orlando, then send something in and say, this is for Orlando. This is for what you're doing there. Do something along, let us know of your support in that way, that it's within two weeks of that taking place.

It's going to be a very stressful time for me because I'm in September. I'm was going to be in Fort Worth. I'm not gonna be there anymore, but been disinvited for that. But I'm gonna be up in Toronto.

And then right after that, I'm still planning on going to Lynchburg. I don't want to go into details on this right now for the sad reason that we need to make sure we have all our ducks in a row. And there's the concern about reprisals against people who would actually say they know me in Lynchburg right now.

But we want we do want to go to Lynchburg. But I'm gonna be on my way to Long Island where we're going to do a debate that is going to demonstrate the exact opposite attitude of what we have gotten from Ergen Kanner and Ymir Kanner and the people at Liberty.

And that is I'm going to be debating Bill Shishko on the subject of baptism, the objects of baptism. He's a Presbyterian brother in the Lord, and he believes in what he calls oikobaptism, which most people call pedobaptism.

But the idea is household baptisms. And the Presbyterian viewpoint is an Orthodox Presbyterian. And I'm a Credo Baptist. I believe in the baptism of disciples alone. And we are going to be debating that subject.

And we're going to be debating a subject that for many people raises just as strong an emotional level as whatever omnibenevolence means to Ergen Kanner. But amazingly enough, we're able to do this in the bonds of Christian unity.

And that's why, again, I'd like to challenge Ergen Kanner. Where have you ever engaged in a debate on a subject like this and demonstrated that you're able to do so in a meaningful fashion? I can demonstrate.

I've debated pedobaptism before, and it was done in the bonds of Christian unity. It'll be done again October 19th, three days after October 16th on Long Island. And that's the way it's going to be done because that's the way it needs to be done.

And then I barely get back home before I turn around and head to Orlando for the Pulpit Crimes Conference, the release of the book at that time. Obviously, we need to try to make it so that anybody who's at the conference or debate, if they want a signed copy of Pulpit Crimes, my right hand will fall off as I try to sign all those things.

But we'll try to make that a reality as well. And that's going to be a really, really challenging period of time. But if you want to support what we're doing, then that's where you need to be. And that's how you need to demonstrate your support for it.

And so what's the situation on the Kanner debate? Well, we're sort of back to square one. We need to find out if these men can actually discuss with us rather than just simply acting as if they are, you know, the divine dictators on high who are able to just say, well, we're going to we're going to do it in this format.

And we're gonna do it this way. And here's a time frame and and here's the subject. And if you don't like it, then you're a big chicken and you're running away, which is in essence what they want to try to say.

And that's why about 70 percent of everybody is saying you can't let them get away with that. And so that situation, I'm personally not interested in discussing it for a while. You know, these folks have have ignored us for as long as a month at a time without even the courtesy of response.

So I don't see any particular reason why, you know, I can can't take this week to be preparing to speak next week in the UK and I'm speaking on Sunday, both sermons and and that does take time to do so and to prepare.

And so that's what I'm going to be doing. And so, you know, John Shelby Spong is going to be a considerably more challenging both of the debates I'm doing. I mean, to be honest with you, the toughest debate I'm doing to now at the end of the year is with Bill Shishko.

There's no question about that. I mean, preparation wise, that's the toughest one. Spong is going to be the one that has a much wider audience as far as relevance goes. And that's not going to be an easy debate.

This this man, if you've listened to him speak, he is able to speak clearly. He is able to address the issue clearly. He's he knows the other side. He is able to use humor. And the easiest debate, to be perfectly honest with you, as far as preparation goes, is anything that that Ergon Kanner is going to come up with because he doesn't even know the difference between a hyper Calvinist and a Calvinist.

So if you want to support us to support us and the ones that are really going to have the long term value along those lines, pray that we have wisdom. I just closing before we take our break. I hear you, those of you who are saying just give up on these folks.

I hear you. I'd love to. I would love to. There's no question I would love to. But the fact the matter is, you also need to recognize that my purpose in debating here is primarily for those students who are going to be there.

I have had so many people who have listened to me on the Bible Answer Man broadcast, for example, in other contexts that were angry with me when they first heard me presenting the doctrines of grace. But that was the beginning of their struggling with those things because they couldn't answer the biblical presentation was made.

And as long as we're given equal time and you don't have the just outrageous behavior that even precludes that, then we are going to be able to present those truths in a context where unfortunately they're not being heard.

And given the last email that I posted from Eric and Cantor that he wrote to Centurion and this was and we ended up seeing that this was a template type email that he's sending out to a bunch of folks assuming that it's all over with and we're running away and we don't want to debate desperately dishonest, desperately self-deceptive.

And people need to know that's just simply not the case. That it's pretty amazing when you can say a man who is willing to walk into every one of your classes with nothing in the Greek New Testament and defend his position is running away.

When you can say that, you're a pretty self-deceived person. You truly are. So that situation there, we're going to take our break, come back with your phone calls and lots more on all sorts of interesting topics here on The Dividing Line.

We'll be right back.

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A Better Debate Format and Why Orlando Matters

And welcome back to The Dividing Line. We were just having a little chat during the break. Good idea. If something does take place, if by some miracle of God, intervention takes place and we are able to work something out for the 16th, it would actually be worthwhile.

One of the things that was suggested was since both Tom and I will be in Orlando at the Pulpit Crimes Conference, then we could arrange to rip the videos out as quickly as is humanly possible. That would not be easy to do, but it could be possible.

And then bring those videos with us. We can make them available at the conference. And Tom and I could have a session where we do audience questions in regards to the presentations, could even show segments of it.

I'm sure there would be some interesting segments that we could show. And you would actually end up having more direct contact with Tom and I and an ability to interact in that context than you ever could that night in Lynchburg, when you then would have to try to drive 40 miles to the nearest Motel 6 afterwards.

And so another good reason to make sure that if you are desirous of showing support for us, that make it Orlando, not Lynchburg, as far as your plans are concerned. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number that was called quite some time ago.

In fact, right at the beginning of the program. And that was from Jim in Nashville. Hi, Jim. Hey, how are you doing, James?

Doing good. Good. First off, I know that I'm running a risk by calling you at this particular point in time. I risk being called one of your minions.

Oh, well, you know, the cadre of minions, I think, is the terminology that is now being used. Well, I was working singularly.

I find it ironic, by the way, that somebody who works for the guy who headed up the moral majority. Yeah, call someone else minions. I mean, the moral majority worked because they operated as a voting bloc who all worked in lockstep.

So I guess Ergen knows what minions are.

I have no earthly idea. Every time I see this stuff, I sit here and go, no, no, he didn't. He said he did. And every day just gets weirder and weirder.