The Insufficiency of Scripture by Andy Stanley

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, good morning, it's Unusual Media. You know, we used to do this regularly. I think it was because of your schedule in taking

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Matt to school, wasn't it? Many, many, many, many, many, many, many moons ago, we would do

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Tuesday, Thursday, and it had to do with Rich's driving schedule, and that's where the times came from, and we just were just creatures of habit.

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So, but we used to do 11 o 'clock programs. Well, on Saturdays, yeah, but one of the two, one

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Tuesday or Thursday was a morning show. I don't remember. I don't know.

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I don't know. It's not 11 o 'clock either, so it's much earlier for us. I obviously was doing a program, a

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Zoom program for somebody else, and it's like, well, if I've got to be in here at 745, then let's get it done and get the program in, and just a quick reminder, two debates coming up on the trip that I'll be starting on February 4th, and one will be in Houston on what is marriage.

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The other will be in Tullahoma, Tennessee on the superiority of the

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Legacy Standard Bible to the King James Version. I'll defend that, and I'll say this as well.

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Every single one of the King James translators will agree with me. They're dead, but given what they wrote and given their standards, they would all be going, look, what year is this?

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2023? Okay, if y 'all haven't improved on us by now, y 'all got a problem.

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They wouldn't quite say it that way. They would say it however people in 1611 would say it, but yeah, they would definitely agree on that particular subject.

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Anyway, so with all the other speaking, and we're going to be in Louisiana, I haven't gotten...

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I've got to get a graphic from our folks in Louisiana. Yeah, well, look, dude, he's always...

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I got to put all this in the calendar. Okay, I know, he gets the phone calls. I'm the one sitting there making all the reservations at the campsites and trying to figure out...

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I've got this whole program where it draws a circle around where I've sort of defined this is about how many hours

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I want to sit in a vehicle in a day, okay? And so it draws a circle as to how far you can get in that time period, and so I'm trying to find where I can go, and then you look at another map that we've got.

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It's got churches that have called in and written in and stuff. So I'm doing all that stuff, and then

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I've got to contact them and say, you know, what about that? And then you got the guy on the other side of the glass going, come on, give me the information.

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Come on, come on, come on. It's like, okay, all right, you know, nobody else does what

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I'm doing. I can think of some of the big guys out there when

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I think... I'm thinking of one particular very popular speaker, and I'm thinking of him with a sewer hose in his hand.

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Ain't happening. Nope. Nope. I'm thinking about when I pulled into Grants, New Mexico last year, and while I was in checking in, a massive thunderstorm hit us.

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Flooded the place out, and there I am standing outside my unit, and there's three inches of water all around the power plug.

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So the power stanchion's coming up out of the ground, and there's three inches of water, and I need to plug in.

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It's like, Lord? Yeah, there are...

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Now, Josh Bice can do this, because Josh Bice has a bigger fifth wheel than mine, okay?

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And he's very proud of that, and he doesn't really have to say much about it, but there's just this look in his eye, you know, that, you know, he has a 3500 instead of a 2500 truck, you know?

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So he's got... And a 40 -plus foot fifth wheel, and, you know, people who have rigs that big, they just look at people like me, that only have a 30 -foot fifth wheel.

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We're just like, yeah, okay, fine, whatever, you know? Anyway, we do...

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Yeah, we're having fun. All right, so today, on special edition this morning, we all saw it.

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We all saw the clip from Andy Stanley, and look... Was it last year or the year before?

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I think it was 2021 when Andy Stanley did the unhitching from the

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Old Testament thing. And Jeff Durbin was on Unbelievable with Andy Stanley, so you can go and you can watch that and listen to the conversation that took place at that time.

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Andy Stanley obviously has been on a journey, as we like to say these days, and I want to say,

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I tend to be a little less strong than some of my friends.

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When I respond to Andy Stanley, why? Because... Well, first of all,

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I know what it's like to be a PK, all right? He was a PK, and I've seen a lot of PKs turn out bad, and I understand why.

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I understand why. And it's not all because Daddy was too involved with the church, so it might have been.

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Look at David. Absalom didn't turn out all that well, okay? And God has purposes in those things.

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But the fact of the matter is, when we're talking about biblical authority, which is what we're talking about, we're talking about the nature of the

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Bible as divine revelation, okay?

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I know this is just the New Testament, but it works. When we're talking about biblical authority, down south in the

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Bible Belt, we had for many, many decades, well, more than decades, we had a general consensus that the

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Bible has authority and is the Word of God. And that's a wonderful thing, and that's a blessing. But it's one thing to hold to the idea that the

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Bible has divine authority, because that's generally what everybody around you believes.

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And it's another thing to believe that because you see the centrality of Scripture in the entire purpose of God.

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In other words, what I'm suggesting is that an understanding and conviction of the nature of Scripture that is grounded in a fully -orbed

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Christian theology that includes God's absolute sovereignty, His decree, the lordship of Christ, and His accomplishment of His purposes in this world is different than a belief in the authority of Scripture that just that's one fact that's over here, and then you've got your doctrine of God up here, and it may be really, really underdeveloped, and the doctrine of the

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Trinity even less clearly seen, and your soteriology down here, and it's really weak and strong on free will and stuff like that.

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And they're all disconnected. There is no intimate connection and organic unity between all of this.

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That's what Andy Stanley grew up with, clearly, obviously.

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Now, look, his dad preached some great sermons and said a lot of true things, but I think what we're seeing in Andy is what happens when the pressure of secularism comes against the under -formed theology of Southern American evangelicalism, where from the pulpit, with regularity, you do not have the holistic understanding of the

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Christian faith for all of life. For all of life. So, maybe that's why, you know, you know, some people just dismiss him, but they don't show any understanding of why it is.

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Why is he saying these things? They're assuming that he once held to all these things and he's abandoning them.

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Well, yeah, of course, he does recognize that he's moving away from certain commitments of his past, but they were not commitments to a fully -formed theology that sees the nature of scripture as God speaking, and hence the unity from Genesis 1 -1 to Revelation 22 -13.

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Yes, the fundamentalist understanding of biblical authority would say that there is a unity in all of that, but it's not a unity that takes seriously the diversity of the literature.

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I mean, when you've got people running, and I'm not saying that Charles Stanley was into this, because I don't think that he was, but to give you an example, the independent fundamentalist

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Baptists still talk about the law of first mention. The idea that when a word first appears in scripture, that's where it's defined and it's always going to have that meaning for the rest of scripture.

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That is just utter absurdity. Nowhere does the

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Bible ever say that, obviously. It's a completely human tradition, and it results in utter gibberish.

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Now, there is an underlying idea of some type of supernatural unity to scripture underneath that idea, but it's untrue, and there is a much deeper concept of the unity, perspicuity, harmony of scripture that is to be found in the

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Reformed understanding. I think this is very relevant to some of the controversies right now in regards to great tradition exegesis, because the ideas, when you read

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Aquinas, when you read his interpretation of scripture, you are constantly running into, you know, you'll be tracking along going, okay, yeah, yeah, he's right about that.

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Okay, he's following along, and all of a sudden, boom! Out into the ozone layer, and you're going, what happened?

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And it's this, it's origin, it's allegory, it's the idea that, well, it's fascinating, because when you think about it, what

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Aquinas says over and over, and many of the medievals do over and over and over again, is because a word in their current text appears over here in the

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Psalter someplace, all of a sudden, you can pull that text in from the Psalter and say, it's about what this is talking about, all right?

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It's almost as bad as David Allen yesterday. How do we know what Romans 8 says? Because Hebrews 4 says this, bing!

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You know, well, it says faith over there, so we can just put it in here, and it's a little bit like the

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Independent Fundamentalist Baptist who's saying, well, when it's mentioned for the first time, then that's the meaning all the way through.

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Well, Aquinas goes, well, there's the word over there, over here. There's no connection between these two texts at all, what was being addressed, what the original audience is, what the original author is, but the

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Bible is this, you know, it's a spiritual book, so you can just pull stuff in and do stuff like that.

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And so it's a disordered interpretation, instead of starting where you have to start, with what the author intended for the audience it was written to, and then make application, fully understanding that sometimes you're reading historical narrative, sometimes you're reading apocalyptic, sometimes you're reading poetry, sometimes you're reading history, and you're going to read each of those types of literature differently.

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You take all that stuff together, and then you make the application. These types of interpretations, they will say, they do have an element to them where they're saying, yes, there's something spiritual about the

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Bible, but it's incoherent, it's disconnected. And so,

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I just firmly believe that the highest view of Scripture takes into consideration the way in which

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God chose to reveal Scripture to us. You ignore that, and you're going to end up making the

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Bible something other than what it has been historically. And that's not a good thing.

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So, back to Andy Stanley. I think what you see in him is he realizes the disjointed, disconnected high view of Scripture that he was raised with is not sufficient to deal with the modern challenges of secularism.

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He realizes that. And this disconnecting stuff he's doing, this insufficiency stuff he's doing, is because now the sources he's now reading, which are feeding into that, a lot of the progressive deconstructionism that we see today.

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What you have there is the desperate attempt of people to try to hold on to certain elements of their childhood faith while jumping off the foundation that made all that possible.

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And some people do that faster, some people do that more obviously. Andy Stanley's been on this track for a long time now, and I don't see the path back.

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I was about to say, I don't see the path back, but it's not a path back. What he needs to see is a different path that will take him to a new place of a higher confession in the nature of Scripture, its centrality in God's purposes for the church, and the fact that apart from God having spoken in this way, we don't have anything else.

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We got nothing to offer. We got nothing to offer. That's just the way it is. So what

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I'm gonna do, let's just watch it. Watch it, listen to it, and then we'll comment on it.

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Maybe I'll play back through part of it. It's four minutes long, and this is just simply what appeared.

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I know it's part of a whole sermon, but this is what was available in social media, so let's take a listen.

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Oh, you know, I reset. We did test? All right, okay, we'll find out here in a second.

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In fact, adults often need a brand new starting point for faith. So what we're gonna do in this series, what we're gonna do for the next few weeks, is we're gonna hit the restart button.

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We're gonna hit the restart button and ask the question, what if we didn't know anything, where would we start? What if we'd never heard any of those stories, where would we start?

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What if we'd never read the Bible, where would we start? What if we'd never gone to church, where would we start? Where would we start if we were starting all over as adults as it relates to faith, and specifically as it relates to the

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Christian faith? So we're gonna hit the restart button, and we're gonna all start over all together, and we're gonna learn some new things, and we're gonna hear some challenging things.

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You're gonna hear some things that you've heard before, but my hope is that for many of you, where there's been a gap, where you want to believe, you want to be able to reconcile the real world, your adult world, with your faith, that you'll find that they are easily reconcilable, but we're gonna have to approach this a little bit differently than perhaps you approached it as a child, because starting off with faith as a child is very different than starting off with faith as an adult.

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Now here's part of the problem. Part of the problem in Christianity is that when we grew up, we were taught the

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Bible, and that in and of itself is not a problem, but in some ways the way we were taught the Bible is problematic, because if you grew up in a home like I did, or a culture like I did, or a

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Christian tradition like I did, I heard that this was the Word of God, and I've always believed that. I've heard that it was infallible, and I've always believed that.

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I heard that it was inerrant. There were no mistakes, and I believe that. I heard that it was all inspired from Genesis to maps.

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That's the way the pastor used to say it, my pastor that used to come to our church, from Genesis to maps, from the table of end, you know, the table of contents all the way to maps, that the whole thing is inspired, and as a child you say, yes sir, and yes ma 'am, and you know,

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Adam and Eve, and Jesus, and Noah, and Moses, and Jesus coming back, it's all equal, it's all in equal terms, but unfortunately because the

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Bible was presented to us as a book, which it is not, because it was all presented as one holistic thing, which it is not, because we never even understood where this came from, it was a house of cards, so all someone had to do was come along and pull away a couple of the pieces, a couple of the foundational pieces, and suddenly the whole thing comes tumbling down, and so we went off to college, and we discovered that even though it was sacred, it wasn't scientific, and even though, you know, it was something to appreciate, it wasn't necessarily something that was factual, and even though there were stories in here that were inspirational, they weren't necessarily true, and then we experienced life, and there began to be more and more distance, and more and more daylight between what we experienced and what we grew up believing.

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Even if you grew up in a home where this book, the Bible, was so revered, perhaps you never saw anybody read it, a book that you never placed anything on on the coffee table, but you never learned to read it yourself, and you went to a church where somebody opened it up week after week, and you knew that what they were saying was important, but you didn't really understand it, and then you went into an environment that didn't respect it, and suddenly along with your childhood faith, that starting point that seemed so relevant way back then, suddenly it all went away.

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See, here's what I think, and here's where we're going for the next few weeks, and here's where I'm going to challenge you a bit, and here's where there may be some misunderstanding, and here's where you may be tempted to send me an email, so just hang on.

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The Bible says, end quotes, the Bible says is not an adequate starting point or returning point for many adults.

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For many adults, it's not enough for me to say to you, okay, now I'm going to restart your faith. Now, the Bible says, you're going to go, okay,

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I already did that. I already did the Bible says. I grew up with the Bible says, and I know what the Bible says, but let me tell you about my job.

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Let me tell you about my divorce. Let me tell you about my children. Let me tell you about my unanswered prayer.

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Andy, if we're going to try to restart my faith by starting with the Bible says, the Bible teaches not interested.

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So what I've come to believe, and what we've come to believe, and the reason we're doing this series, is that the Bible says for many adults is not an adequate place to start.

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And it cut off at that point, is not an adequate place to start, is what he was saying.

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Now, I want to go back, again, most of it was stuff that, you know,

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I sort of covered there at the beginning. I want to jump into it a ways, where he started going through certain aspects that I think will help us to understand where he is and where he is going.

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But fundamentally, what people were hearing, we can't start here.

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Now, if all that was being said, and this isn't all that's being said, that's the problem.

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If all that was being said was that we need to explain to a person who's never heard the

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Bible before what it is, and why we believe it, and what its story is, okay, fine.

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But that's not what he was saying, as we will see as we go through. That's not what he's saying.

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What you're hearing here is a form of soft deconstructionism, and it leads into a forest that has no exit.

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That's why I think that those who are following Andy Stanley into this perspective, the only way out is by helicopter, basically.

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We want to try to provide that kind of a perspective. So he pulls the

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Bible out from behind the monitor. I guess that was the altar of the unknown

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God over there at the beginning. Must be a large church when you can have folks doing props for you before Sunday service.

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It takes way too much preparation from my perspective to do that kind of thing. Let's see if I've remembered about where he started here, because he's holding the

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Bible. Let's see here. I think

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I know who that was, because I remember someone coming to North Phoenix. I think it was

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Bisagno, and I'm sure Bisagno did the whole speaking route thing, so I'm sure he ended up in Charles Stanley's church.

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From Genesis to the maps, yeah, that's not the first time I've heard that assertion. The whole thing is inspired, and as a child you say, yes sir, and yes ma 'am, and Adam and Eve and Jesus and Noah and Moses and Jesus coming back.

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It's all equal. It's all in equal terms, but unfortunately, to catch that, it's all of equal terms as a child.

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So what he's saying is, that's not right. That's what we were taught, but that can't stand up to anything.

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Now, of equal authority, was

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Paul lying when he said, all scripture, passo grafe, the anustos, all scripture is

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God -breathed, which includes not the maps, although what the maps represent is a part of the text of scripture.

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I mean, there's all sorts of stuff in scripture about going up and going down and going this direction, that direction.

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It's all happened in history, but the genealogies, that's

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God speaking. Now, does that mean that you read everything in the exact same way?

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No, of course not. That's not an authority issue. That's just simply recognition that there's different kinds of literature in scripture, and God chose different ways.

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I'm glad he chose different ways. I mean, I'm glad the Psalms are the Psalms. I'm going to be preaching from one of the

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Psalms on Sunday at Apologia. By the way, that is not the easiest thing in the world to do.

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It is easier to do topical stuff from a particular text, exchanging just one particular text and doing a topic out of that, than it is to do an entire

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Psalm. I really appreciate, and I did the same thing, but at PRBC for years and years and years, the tradition was on a

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Wednesday night, you just go through the Psalter. You just do one Psalm per night, obviously not the 119th, but you break that one up into its parts, but you do

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Psalter studies, and that's tough. That is challenging work.

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It really, really, really, really, really is. It's one thing to preach Romans.

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It's something else to preach the Psalter. It is. But anyways, I'm getting deflected from our purpose here.

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Certainly, because the Bible was presented to us as a book, which it is not. Because the Bible is presented to us as a book, which it is not.

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Okay. To be able to properly and with long -term benefit to others, correct error, you must admit the amount of truth that is in a statement before demonstrating the rest of the error in the statement.

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There are people who are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of doing that, of ever acknowledging...

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People have decided, Andy Stanley's a heretic, therefore, everything Andy Stanley says is a lie.

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That's not true. And if you buy that, you're going to put yourself in an impossible situation.

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This is a book, and it is a collection of books. All right. So, yes, on one level, this isn't just a book.

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Even the Hebrew language that was used to write the first five books of the

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Old Testament, the Torah, underwent development and change before you get to the last books of the

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Old Testament. Okay. So, world history developed.

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Things changed. The language of the New Testament didn't exist as the language of the

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New Testament when the Old Testament was being written. So, there are different kinds of literature, different periods in history.

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So, in one sense, yes, 66 books, but the message very clearly of those books...

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Now, not every book mentions this, but in the New Testament, the message is that there is a unified body of doctrine called the graphe, the scriptures.

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And so, though they recognize who Isaiah was, they recognize who Jeremiah was, they recognize

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Moses and different authors and things like that, yet there is a unity to be found in the

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Old Testament scriptures as seen in the New Testament. So, yeah, on one level, 66 books.

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But on a level presented in the text itself by Jesus, from Moses to the prophets that testified of me, that's a unity in multiple books.

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So, yes, it is one divine revelation that took place over time.

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Approximately a thousand years for the Old Testament, less than one century for the

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New. And yet, it produces one volume, one book that we can hold in our hands, put on our phones, and things like that.

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Because it was all presented as one holistic thing, which it is not. Again, it is one holistic thing.

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Not in the surface -level fundamentalist idea of we're not going to bother with backgrounds, we're not going to bother with the different emphases, different types of literature, so on and so forth.

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But again, if it is God speaking, then that is what gives unity.

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It is holistic in that sense. Whatever terminology he's using here as it's not holistic, you'd have to define, well, are you speaking about on a very simplistic level, same language, same level, same topic?

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Is that what you're talking about? Well, of course not. No one would say that. But he's saying that's how it was presented.

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And again, outside of an organic, consistent theology that can ground the highest view of Scripture, then yeah, that's just a claim over here.

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If you've got a God who has no sovereign decree over here, you don't really have a basis for the highest view of what the

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Scripture is over here. If man's in charge of what can happen in salvation over here, why can't man be in charge of what happens in the

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Bible over there? So, maybe that's what's in reference to what he's saying here.

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Because we never even understood where this came from. It was a house of cards. Because we didn't understand where it came from.

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Well, okay. There is a big chunk of truth in saying that the vast majority of Christians who grow up in Christian churches, for some reason, do not familiarize themselves with the history of their own book.

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And that does not make any sense. And I would think that even my worst critic would have to admit that I'm one person who's really tried to fight that trend and provide a lot of information about where the

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Bible came from, why we can trust it, what its history is. And we spend a lot of time on doing that kind of thing.

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But there's a large chunk of truth in saying we don't know its background, we don't know its history, we don't know how it came to have the form that it did.

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So, for example, big issue in there is the canon, right? Why do we have the canon that we have?

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Who has spent more time trying to help people understand the issue of the canon than people like me and Michael Kruger and a few odd strange folks running around like that, right?

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But yeah, there is a level of truth to that. But the problem is, it seems that for Andy Stanley, once he discovers, he's going to talk about going off to college and all the rest of that kind of stuff, once he discovers these areas of challenge, difficulty, background information, that yeah, most preachers do not include the development of the canon or the transmission of the text of scripture over time.

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Two things I've been beating the drum on for decades saying, folks, this is where the attack against the scripture is.

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We need to deal with these things in the context of faith, in the church, before our young people are running into it in the context of unbelief.

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So, I agree, obviously. But what you're seeing here is, well, what happens once you start buying into that and you don't go and don't believe you can go back to your youth and to the sources of your youth for real answers to the objections?

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And again, within a form of shallow fundamentalism, there aren't any answers.

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I mean, fundamentalists function on fear, and so what they tell you is, don't listen to any of that stuff.

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Don't listen to the objections. Don't listen to the unbelievers. But once you've listened, now you need answers.

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And if what you came from was this disjointed, nothing's connected together perspective, then this is what happens, is you abandon any kind of high view of scripture, and you start trying to put together some new kind of theology to fit, and it can't be done.

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Progressivist theology always ends up in despair and unbelief. So again, it's back to, you either had a holistic thing, or now you've got, as he puts it, a house of cards.

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A house of cards. And so look, Andy Stanley has seen people like himself who have abandoned the disconnected evangelicalism of his youth, and what he's trying to do, give him props, he's trying to give them something to grab, he's trying to throw a lifeline to him.

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The problem is, the lifeline is not attached to anything. It can't be, because there's no sure word from God anymore.

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It's unhitched from anything, Old Testament or anything else. And he would say, but it's attached to the only thing that it ever could be attached to, and that's the resurrection.

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And as we've talked before, he doesn't know anything about the resurrection without a sure word from God. He can talk about it all he wants, but he doesn't have anything.

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That's the issue. So all someone had to do was come along and pull away a couple of the pieces, a couple of the foundational pieces, and suddenly the whole thing comes tumbling down.

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I hope you realize you're listening to a very personal statement there. That's obviously happened for him.

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I wonder what the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners are like in the

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Stanley home when Andy goes home to his parents' house and has conversations.

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I don't know. But that's what he's saying, is he was given a house of cards and it fell down, and he's trying to give you something to take that place.

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He went off to college, and we discovered that even though it was sacred, it wasn't scientific.

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Sacred, but not scientific. Again, now, if your theology is not broad enough, deep enough, and full enough, it will allow you to make statements like that.

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That sounds sacred, but not scientific. If it's sacred, it comes from the mind of God, and God's the creator of all things, and therefore it is going to be in perfect harmony with what

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God has actually created in his own universe. But that kind of holistic

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Christian worldview type thing is not what you generally have outside of,

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I was going to say Reformed churches, but that's way too broad. There are churches today that seek to have a living faith and bring the

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Lordship of Christ to bear in all aspects of life. Everyone's going to make that claim.

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Well, some of the anti -Lordship people would break out in hives as they use the term Lordship.

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But then there's the people who really try to do this, and make challenging application, and teach their young people, and catechize their young people, and not just simply have them draw pictures of Noah and the

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Ark, but also talk about what Noah and the

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Ark meant in regards to the wrath of God against sin. So, sacred, not scientific.

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If you have a Christian worldview, you recognize that is an utterly irrational bifurcation that capitulates to secularism.

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Because you have things that are sacred, God gets to define that, and you have things that are scientific, man gets to decide that.

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You have now removed God as the Creator. There's not going to be a consistent

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Christian worldview that can be developed out of that. Even though it was something to appreciate, it wasn't necessarily something that was factual.

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So, you can appreciate something that's not factual? Now again, when reading apocalyptic language, the factual and proper way of interpreting apocalyptic is not in a literal fashion.

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So, you don't have to have a ten -headed beast, it's actually a ten -headed beast, for what's being said to be factual.

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So, that's at least one interpretational thing, but I think there's much broader than that.

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When you listen to these progressivists, who are actually regressivists, they're just old -time unbelievers with religious language.

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When you listen to them, and you hear them dealing with text or scripture, it becomes very clear very quickly.

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They don't believe the text actually has authority, and therefore, they can interpret it any way they want to, to make it fit with whatever system that they have.

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So, they appreciate it, but it's not factual. This is the language of deconstruction.

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And even though there were stories in here that were inspirational, they weren't necessarily true.

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Inspirational, but not true. So, they're fables. Fables and mythology.

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And if once you do that with certain supernatural stories, then inevitably, what that leads to, down the road, is what happened in the debate that we did on the ship with Marcus Borg and John Dominic Croson, where halfway through the debate,

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Dom Croson, who's a brilliant man, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man, it all of a sudden dawns on him that these men that he is debating, he says,

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So, you believe that Jesus' body was no longer in the tomb?

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Now, this is an hour into a debate on the resurrection, where we have laid it out as clearly as we possibly can.

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This is the end result. That is, in John Dominic Croson's world, this is all mythology.

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Everyone knows it's not.

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There's no stopping point. Once you go, you know, some of those Old Testament stories, but I'm still going to believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

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Why? How does that work? There is no way of making that work.

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And then we experienced life, and there began to be more and more distance and more and more daylight.

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More and more distance and more and more daylight in what? Again, I get what he's saying, and it all goes back to how the

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Word was presented to you in the first place, because I would hope for a vast majority of believers, when you experience life, you see more and more of the truthfulness of Scripture.

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You see, I mean, how many people do you see that just you turn almost anything on in the news today, that horrific story about the two homosexual men who pretend to be married that adopted these two children and then raped them and pimped them out to other people?

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I mean, it's amazing how many people who don't really even actually have a meaningful

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Christian worldview are all saying the same thing. There is only one proper punishment for what these guys did, and it's capital punishment.

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It's execution. We're made in the image of God. We know this is evil on a level that should not be allowed to breathe the air, and there should be a public hanging immediately.

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But it's fascinating because those same people six months ago, if you had asked them about the death penalty, would have said, of course not.

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You see the level of evil every single day, and how many times you've seen somebody say, well, there's

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Romans 1. Oh, so as you live life, you see scriptural principles and scriptural application being borne out in front of you over and over and over and over again.

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But he's saying, no, the distance gets wider and wider because what he was given was not a holistic view of scripture.

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It was a pigeonholed view of scripture, and that's what results in what we're talking about.

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Between what we experienced and what we grew up believing, even if you grew up in a home where this book, the

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Bible, was so revered, perhaps you never saw anybody read it. A book catch that?

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If it was revered but never read, was it actually revered? So that would be a hypocritical reverence,

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I guess. You placed anything on on the coffee table, but you never learned to read it yourself. And you went to a church where somebody opened it up week after week, and you knew that what they were saying was important, but you didn't really understand it.

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And then you went into an environment that didn't respect it. And suddenly, along with your childhood faith, that starting point that seemed so relevant way back then, suddenly it all went away.

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Well, that's an argument for not presenting the

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Bible as God speaking if you don't then recognize that therefore it refers to all of life.

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So you need the whole thing. Theology matters. Andy Stanley is a walking, talking example of theology matters, and what happens when it stops mattering.

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See, here's what I think, and here's where we're going for the next few weeks, and here's where I'm going to challenge you a bit, and here's where there may be some misunderstanding, and here's where you may be tempted to send me an email, so just hang on.

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The Bible says, in quotes, the Bible says is not an adequate starting point or returning point for many adults.

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Okay, so that's the screenshot that I captured pretty much right there, because this really is the issue.

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The Bible says it's not an adequate starting or returning point for many adults. I don't believe that if Andy Stanley continues to hold to the viewpoints he is currently enunciating and professing that he could ever confess the

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Bible's own view of itself, because when we say the

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Bible, now maybe he's going to say what we should say is God says rather than the

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Bible says. That's not what he's going to say. He's already said it's not a consistent whole.

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He's already said that it contains ahistorical mythology and things like that, so it's not literally

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God speaking, and so the starting, since his entire perspective now precludes the possibility of having any kind of starting point outside of the natural realm, outside of mankind's understanding, what mankind accepts, the starting point cannot be

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God speaking. The starting point has to be in human experience and human predication.

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You're never going to get back to Scripture being theanostos, if that's your starting point.

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You may think that, yeah, I'll eventually get back there, but if that's your starting point, you're not going to get any more basic than that.

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When I look at this screen, and I stopped it at a sort of fortuitous point, look at the expression on his face.

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I mean, I could read some sadness into that face, and I'm sad seeing it, to be honest with you.

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The Bible says, if the Bible is what the Bible claims to be and what Jesus taught it was,

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God speaking, then it's the only, it's not just an adequate starting point, it's the only starting point.

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Now, he says, or returning point, so he's talking about people who, like himself, have moved away from an inadequate, disconnected view of Scripture from their youth, okay.

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But starting or returning point, for him to, again,

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I don't want him to return to his youth at that point, because he wasn't given that full theology.

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Rather, we need to step back from this and say, if the Bible is not an adequate starting point, then what is?

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Well, I'm assuming, if he's going to be consistent with what he said in the past, then he's going to try to create some kind of a meta -narrative based upon the

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Resurrection. That would be my guess. At least,

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I hope he hasn't moved any farther away from some level of orthodoxy than that.

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Many, many people do who have been going down the road he's been going, so we could be surprised,

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I suppose. But that would be my gut feeling. The problem is, of course, that not only the historical fact of the

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Resurrection, but the meaning of the

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Resurrection cannot be discerned outside of the meaning of the death that resulted in the

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Resurrection. And the only way to understand what the meaning of the entire redemptive act of the

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Son of God is, is to be found in Scripture. That is not a part of, quote -unquote, natural revelation.

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You can't sit there and stare at the constellations and go, oh, three days, substitutionary term.

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Oh, no, it's not there. It's not a part of natural revelation. It's not a part of something outside of Scripture.

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You need to have a sure word of God to have a sure knowledge of what these things mean, and why they're relevant to you.

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Otherwise, all you've got is, wow, something really weird happened back then. That's all you've got.

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That's the best you can come up with. And so, the

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Bible says, is going to be necessary no matter what he tries to say. And it has to be the first thing.

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If I am dependent upon something else to know the truthfulness of what the

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Bible says, that something else will always be my ultimate authority. We used to have, in this nation, you would place your hand on a

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Bible and raise your other hand and swear to tell the truth. No one, almost nobody under 40 today has a clue why anyone would even do that.

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What's that supposed to mean? What does it mean to swear an oath? We're just, ugly bags of mostly water.

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What does that mean? The whole idea today of politicians swearing to uphold the constitution, they're not.

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They're doing everything they can to undo the constitution. And the reason they don't even feel any guilt about it is no one has any concept of oath.

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Because no one has a concept of what it means. I swear by a higher authority than myself, which includes the resultant penalties that would come from my dishonesty.

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It's a higher authority than me. Well, where does the Bible go to prove its authority?

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If you're going to say, well, my experience of Jesus becomes the basis for the authority of Scripture, who is to say your experience of Jesus is what is normative for all the rest of us?

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We all can come up with a completely different interpretation of that, and therefore there is no longer any gospel to be proclaimed.

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There is no unity of the faith. There is no once for all delivered to the saints faith. There's nothing like that. And that's exactly what progressivists mean.

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That's exactly what they believe. They don't believe that there's any once for all delivered to the saints faith.

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That's absurdity to them. And that's why they come up with the conclusions they do.

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But so right there, the Bible is not an adequate starting or returning point for many adults.

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Let's listen to the rest of what he said here. For many adults, it's not enough for me to say to you, okay, now

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I'm going to restart your faith. Now the Bible says, you're going to go, okay, I already did that. I already did the

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Bible says, I grew up with the Bible says, and I know what the Bible says, but let me tell you about my job.

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Let me tell you about my divorce. Let me tell you about my children. Let me tell you about my unanswered prayer.

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Andy, if we're going to try to restart my faith by starting with the Bible says, the Bible teaches not interested.

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So what I've come to believe and what we've come to believe, and the reason we're doing this series is that the Bible says for many adults is not an adequate place to start.

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I'm not sure why everything keeps getting cut off there at the end. He says, we have come to believe.

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So this is what his church as a whole has come to believe that this is not an adequate starting point.

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And so they're going to try to provide something else. Well, I can guarantee you, whatever foundation they try to provide will never be sufficient to actually ground the ones for all delivered to the saints faith.

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Can't do it. It'll always be sub -Christian. Now, you can come up with all sorts of ways of making modern secular people feel warm and gooey and squishy and maybe put some money in the offering plate and show up on Sundays just to one of your many, many different campuses,

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I suppose. But that's not going to be the Christian faith and it's not going to survive the onslaught of secularism.

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It's not going to survive the onslaught of persecution. I would just recommend anyone, if you've been listening to what

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Andy Stanley has to say and you find it attractive, read the 24th chapter of Luke. Look what happens when

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Jesus interacts with the disciples after the resurrection. And ask yourself the question, how central is scripture as the very revelation of God to Jesus's own apologetic for his own resurrection?

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And if it's central for him, if he's saying you should have believed what the apostles, the prophets and Moses said, if that's his argument to his disciples, the first thing that he's sharing with them is opening their minds to understand the scripture.

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You're not going to be standing in front of your people saying the Bible says it's not an adequate starting point. It was enough for Jesus when he rose from the dead, so you're going to be getting something a whole lot less than Jesus offered if you're going to be following what

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Andy Stanley has to say. But I hope also that we understand.

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I think it's helpful to know why he ended up where he ended up, because there's just a lot of churches that are producing future

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Andy Stanleys, because they won't proclaim the whole counsel of God. And that is a major, major problem.

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Well, thanks for catching us in the morning. It's not even 10 o 'clock.

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How can we be finishing up the dividing line at 10 o 'clock in the morning? That's astonishing. Yeah, gotta go home, make dinner, like I always do at this point in time.

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Thanks for listening to the program. Three programs this week. I don't know what next week's going to look like, because I will be moderating a debate.

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Gabe Wrench is coming down from Moscow to debate Oscar Dunlap, so a deacon from Moscow versus a deacon from Apologia on the subject of infant baptism a week from tomorrow night.

01:00:02

I'll be moderating that debate. But again, the next week, I think it's

01:00:08

Friday the next week, is when I head out for the next big long trip. And so that means lots and lots and lots of preparation, not only for my debates and speaking, but I need to put a tape disc to hold the

01:00:27

Garmin RV navigation system to the window, because suction cups just will eventually fail.

01:00:33

I don't know why they do that. They work for a little while, but it will fall off. It's gonna happen.

01:00:40

There's no way to avoid it. And if any of you listened to the driving line

01:00:45

I did recently, I'm driving along recording the thing, and all of a sudden, this big old thing falls off the window.

01:00:52

I was like, well, there's my directions down there. So preparation includes tape and cleaning insides of windows.

01:01:03

Yeah, getting the RV ready is not, that is a, I don't know, I don't know how many steps I get doing that.

01:01:09

And you might say, well, why don't you get volunteers to help? Because I'm the one that lives in the RV. So I need to know where I put whatever it is that needs to be in the

01:01:18

RV. That's why it's a lot of work. So anyways, so probably not three programs next week, but who knows, something might happen this weekend that requires that.

01:01:28

We will try to be ready to do whatever we need to do to be of assistance to you.