HRC Promotes Hatred/Walid Shoebat's Roman Canon Argument/Zahndian Jesus

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:35

Greetings! Welcome to The Dividing Line. It's a Thursday afternoon, and we have a lot to get to in the one hour that we have today.

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I was directed to a... I posted on Facebook...

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It is truly amazing to see the vitriol of the homosexualist movement.

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I don't know how else to describe it. It's not the homosexual movement, it's the homosexualist movement.

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Because it's made up not just of homosexuals, but of people using homosexuality as a mechanism for promoting their own secular worldview.

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The Human Rights Campaign. Love the grossly misleading titles that these folks use.

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Which has nothing to do with human rights at all. It has everything to do with promoting homosexuality.

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You may recall that Michael Brown debated the head of the HRC. I don't know if he still is.

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Doubtful. But the head of the HRC a number of years ago, and we've reviewed portions of that debate here on the program, have put out a

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PDF called the Export of Hate. I put this on my

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Facebook page. It is a snazzy...

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I don't know, the way it looks almost... They're trying to imitate some kind of comic book type thing.

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It's yellow and black and white. There exists a network of American extremists who are working tirelessly to undercut

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LGBT people around the world at every turn. You bunch of bigots. It's LGBTQ2RN or something, isn't it?

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What about the Q and the double Q? Because there's queer and there's questioning.

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You bunch of bigots. I know that's all it takes to call somebody a bigot anymore. As you would expect, it is wildly imbalanced.

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But what they've done is they've provided these pictures.

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I guess I should have provided you with this. Sorry about that. Because then you could actually show what

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I'm looking at here. Yeah, did you get that?

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Yeah, look at that. That's what it actually looks like. That's Scott Lively. There's Scott Lively and resources, activity, so on and so forth.

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But look at the pictures they're providing. They're sort of like artist sketches. Check this out.

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You'll like this one, Rich. Guess who number two is? Recognize the name?

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Yeah! Scott's still... Isn't that great?

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They make everybody look like... And remember, there are people who have walked into organizations with bags of Chick -fil -A and guns.

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Remember? You want to talk about inciting hate? That's exactly what these folks are doing.

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They are telling right where these people are. You just go through here and they provide any quotation where you disagree with them.

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Here's Jordan Seculo. These are almost dehumanizing cartoon stuff.

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And how much money and access they've got. And then down toward the bottom, one of the...

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Unfortunately, he only got a dishonorable mention down toward the bottom here.

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A dishonorable mention. There he is, Michael Brown. And I am nowhere to be found.

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And that ain't even close. That is really bad. They got him looking like he's got one foot in the grave.

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It's not even close. It's really bad. It's just, wow.

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But hey, he made it on the list. And I'm just obviously doing something wrong.

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And I know it's easy to draw caricatures of me. Anyway, quite seriously, this kind of stuff is just grossly irresponsible.

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But if any of us did this to them, people would be all over us.

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And YouTube would be shutting us down and all the rest of this stuff. But these folks, they can...

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Again, how did I put it on Facebook? Homosexualism is the only protected bigotry in our land today.

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And it truly is. It is an amazing thing. It really is.

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Why is this weird? I'm looking at the parking lot, and there's a shadow halfway across it.

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And it's been there for quite some time. I'm starting to wonder if my feet has gotten stuck or something.

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Or is there a huge column of smoke outside?

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I don't know what's going on out there. It's weird. Anyway, yeah, sometimes I'm distracted by a lot of...

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Oh, that's right. You can't see that because the cameras are weird. Anyway, I put that on Facebook.

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You want to go to my personal Facebook page? I guess it's my personal Facebook page. I don't know.

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I'm doing more with Facebook. You've got to admit, I'm doing more. I do a lot of stuff on Facebook and Twitter now.

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But I guess there's the Alpha Omega Facebook page and my Facebook page, and somehow they're connected. And I guess you can get from one to the other fairly easily.

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I don't know. But I did post it there if you want to look at the whole thing. And it's incredibly irresponsible.

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The funny thing is, if you listen to Michael Brown's debate with the head of the HRC, you can tell which one's gracious and which one isn't.

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And yet they're the ones that put this out. So who knows? Maybe I'll make the next one.

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But I didn't make that one. That's a shame. One other thing before we get back to Brian Zond.

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Again, this was someone on Facebook threw this at me just a little while ago.

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And I'm like, okay, all right, all right. I'll mention it.

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It's been a couple of months, but Waleed Shobat's back. Hadn't mentioned anything about me, but he just,

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September 17th, so yesterday, posted an article. It's titled,

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The Prophecy I Never Knew. And I mention this not because I'm interested in any more spitting back and forth with Waleed Shobat.

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It's just a further example of just how bad the

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Shobats are at accurately representing things, being balanced, scholarly, anything at all.

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I mean, just grab everything, put it together, and don't worry about consistency of sources and worldviews and stuff like that.

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And the other thing is, look, you just need to get the word out to folks that if you're looking for reliable information in regards to Islam and stuff, these are not the guys to be going for.

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And while they still may be showing up in non -Catholic churches, you got to realize they're going to be promoting

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Catholicism or a form thereof. And unfortunately, many of the more charismatic churches that they might be appearing in wouldn't care about that, especially in light of Pope Francis's overtures to Kenneth Copeland and people like that, which still has me shaking my head.

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The Pope's doing some interesting things. I didn't put the material together to talk about this stuff, about the wedding ceremony that he presided over, but Al Mohler's been talking about it.

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And I think Al's figuring, excuse me,

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Dr. Mohler is thinking, well, I'm sorry, I think he's going, mm -hmm, mm -hmm, we know where this is going with Rome.

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I feel sorry for the Roman Catholic apologists out there who are just, they're having to stay up late at night coming up with cool ways of explaining the obvious liberalization of perspectives.

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And will that lead, in light of this synod, to a change in Rome's views in regards to marriage, sacraments, homosexuality?

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It's going to be real hard to push that infallibility, same church for 2 ,000 years thing, if any of that happens.

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Yes, sir? Are you suspecting that there might be some kind of, oh, all you priests can come out of the closet now kind of approach?

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No, no, no, but no, I don't think so. But, you know, he's already given special dispensations, he's clearly,

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I mean, the statements that he's made about homosexuality are clearly out of line with the heart and sentiment of the historic

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Christian faith. And, you know, Mohler's perspective has been very clear. We're going to be in a small minority in the very near future.

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And if your convictions on the nature of marriage are not grounded in a firm conviction that Scripture teaches

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X, Y, and Z, you're going to be just washed away in the flood, just washed away in the flood.

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It'll be so much easier. We'll be able to do so much for Jesus if we just don't worry about this stuff.

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You're going to hear that over and over and over and over again. Simple fact that you will not be able to escape from, and some of you are going to curse me for telling you this, but I'm going to tell you right now.

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Doug Wilson said this, and Doug Wilson was right. I don't know that Doug Wilson thought of this originally.

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I think all of us have thought of this on our own and just haven't put it.

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Doug Wilson is a wordsmith of tremendous capacity and ability.

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But this was a simplistic statement, and sometimes he's very good at identifying those things. I've expanded on it, but I remember him first saying this somewhere out on the road to a certain

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Bartlett Lake. But anyway, when you use a verb, the meaning of the verb is often colored and determined by its direct object.

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That's easy. When you say, I ate it, you could be responding to someone.

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I don't have my phone with me, but I could show you.

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I sent my wife a confessional text message with a picture attached.

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It was of an opened and empty Ghirardelli dark chocolate mint filled package.

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She left some in the fridge, and she's out of town. She's on a business trip. I ate it, and then

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I put it on the counter, and I took a picture. I sent it to her. Confession is good for the soul.

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Today, I went by the store, and I replenished her supplies. When she comes back, she'll have many more of them than she had before, which she'll probably not be happy about.

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Anyway, what? If I say to my wife,

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I ate it, I'm confessing that yes, I found your Ghirardelli dark chocolate squares with mint in them.

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When they're in the refrigerator, is it possible not to eat that?

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I don't think so. I don't think it's physically possible to do that. But, if I was talking to Pastor Eric from up at Flatirons Baptist Church, and talking about my last bike ride, and I said

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I ate it. All of a sudden, ate and it are completely the same verb, but what am

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I talking about now? I'm talking about crashing. I didn't, thankfully. But, all of a sudden, everything changes, depending upon the direct object.

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It goes from chocolate to the pavement, and that changes the verb. Now, what does this have to do with any of this?

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Well, what it has to do with is the fact that we use the term marry, and the direct object of that verb determines the meaning of the word.

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So, I married my wife 32 years ago.

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More than 32 years ago now. And, the direct object completely changes the meaning.

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I cannot marry a man. It's not possible. It's impossible. A husband cannot have a husband.

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A wife cannot have a wife. We are utterly redefining language, and ripping the very meaning out of words.

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The same thing is true with the word marry. The same thing is true with the term marry.

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You have to recognize that when a man marries a woman, that is fundamentally different.

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That is understandable. Husband, wife. Mother, father. Makes sense.

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We are required to deny the basic meaning of language and our created experience to talk about a man marrying a man, because it totally changes the meaning of that verb.

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The direct object changes it. Now, that was a long way around, to get back to where we're going here.

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But the reality is, we are going to be a small minority.

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And, if you're going to experience the, well, you're not going to be able to advance in your job, limitations economically, that's just the start.

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You've got to have a basis for your conviction. And, as I've said many times before, there is an obvious basis that we need to be able to explain to people.

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Because people say, why does it matter to you if somebody else does this? Well, because it changes the meaning of what marriage is.

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That doesn't affect your marriage, you better believe it does. And if you can't see it, that's exactly what's happening already. If you can't see that this is utterly destroying marriage, that marriage is becoming little more, and will be very soon, once polygamy is, by necessity, going to be allowed in Western culture, what you've got is a corporation of any number of people, of any gender.

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And that's what marriage is going to be. It's just a corporation. No more sacred bond, no more sacred duty, no more foundation of the society, all that stuff.

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Just throw it out the window, and it's exactly what they wanted, because fundamentally, whether they know it or not, whether they even know they're a part of it, they are a part of a fundamental desire to destroy human life.

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They're a part of the culture of death, not a part of the culture of life. And that's where they are.

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So, anyway, all that comes back to Walid Shoebat. How did he get there?

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Well, we mentioned something about the Pope. And we mentioned the fact that, obviously,

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Walid Shoebat, though he's primarily in the circles within non -Catholic churches that are charismatic, and hence, sorry

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Michael, but lacking in discernment, especially people like Copeland and people like that.

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There's still some charismatic churches that recognize Rome's a real problem. And these guys, if you have them in, you need to know where they're coming from.

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And here's an article. That's one of the weirdest circular rabbit trails I've ever taken to get back.

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Because this article has nothing to do with that at all. It's just the Roman Catholic connection.

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The prophecy I never knew. When I first read, All Scripture is Inspired by God, 2 Timothy 3, 15 -17, I had thought this meant the new

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King James Bible in my hand I purchased in 1993 for $10. Well, it just means that Walid Shoebat was not well -grounded as a disciple.

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Because if you've read the text, if you've thought about it in context, you know that the immediate fulfillment of the statement that currently existed at that time would have been the

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Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim. And you would know, which Walid Shoebat does not know to this day, that for a

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Jewish person of the 1st century, it would not have included the Apocryphal Books. Never include the

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Apocryphal Books. They were never laid up in the Temple. He's just not researching it. This whole article is promoting the

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Apocrypha and the Roman Catholic Canon. That's the thing about the

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Shoebats. There's any fact they will grab and cobble it together into this incoherent, inconsistent thing, but they don't listen to the side.

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They don't even try. So for Paul, writing to Timothy, it would not have included the

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Book of Wisdom. But I digress. Then two decades later,

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I was perusing the web. I read the following. And then we have a quotation of Wisdom 2, 12 -20. It was from the

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Book of Wisdom, which I never heard of. It was not easy for me to refute. Why would you try to refute it?

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You don't have to refute it. But it would have been good if you had had some training so as to know why the

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Jews and Protestants have the same Old Testament Canon and why there were two streams of belief in regards to the

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Apocryphal Books and why Pope Gregory the Great rejected, for example,

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Maccabees and all the time the Reformation and Jerome's view.

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Isn't one of the debates that's being worked on right now the one with the

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Judah? Okay. Within a matter of days, probably, we'll be posting the

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Machuda debate to YouTube. We've been posting a bunch of new debates. They're not new debates. They're old debates. But I just debate faster than Rich renders.

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That's a fact. And we're going to be doing that again starting in about ten days. Hey, if I do six debates, that's going to put me at 142.

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Our hope is to have all the original great debates, the ten, up by the end of next week.

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Cool. So they'll all be up in the Roman Catholic section, and we are feverishly working on trying to get them all.

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Got to try to get them out on social media so people don't see things anymore.

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Put it on Facebook, put it on Twitter, get it out there. But the debate, we've done a couple debates.

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We never got video. No, we only got audio from Boston College, right? Yeah, I think, yeah.

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It's a shame. And still the first two debates I did with Mitch Pacwa, hiding in a vault someplace,

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Scott Butler suppressing him. All of you who know the Roman Catholic, Scott Butler, tell him, hey,

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Scott, it's been years. Put him out, make him available. Quit hiding stuff.

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Justification of the Mass. Would love to see the videos of those, but it wouldn't surprise me if he's destroyed the tapes just to do that.

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It's a shame. But anyway, we've debated the subject of the

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Apocrypha. No evidence that I can see in this article at all. These folks know almost anything about the other side.

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But anyhow, here's the scary part. It was from the

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Book of Wisdom, which I never heard of and was not easy for me to refute. And here, in one verse, Wisdom was speaking of the Son of God being delivered into the hands of His enemies to be killed.

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I know the prophecy of Isaiah 53, which speaks of the suffering servant. But this prophecy, written way prior to the

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New Testament, has it all in one verse. That besides a reference to a suffering servant, whom we debate constantly about with the

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Jew, claiming that the suffering servant was Israel, yet here we have a single verse in which it clearly states it was the

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Son of God who will be tortured and killed. Which began my quest, what then is all Scripture and why is this not in my

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Bible? So you undercut Isaiah 53 to promote a text that isn't even a prophecy in a book that no

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Jewish person believes is Scripture in the first place. And that no

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New Testament writer ever cites as Scripture. You don't think Paul knew about this? Might be a reason why he didn't cite it.

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What do you think, Wally? Okay, again, just a word.

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And then, of course, he goes on to the Septuagint. Doesn't seem to understand much about the background of the Septuagint, history of the Septuagint. Makes all sorts of wild and crazy claims.

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The Septuagint is extremely important, but again, it needs to be used in a scholarly sense. Just a warning to everyone.

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Get the word out, especially because a lot of people in this audience are people that are concerned about Islam, and therefore you're going to be running into, what do you think about Wally Chobot, and stuff like that.

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Get the word out. Not a reliable source of information.

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Just a good thing to keep in mind. All right. Brian Zond.

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We return. We finally get to it. We didn't get to it last time, we're going to get to it now. Don't need much introduction here.

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We listened to this in the last program. Now we're going to work through it. I'm going to go to 1 .2

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a little bit faster. Don't worry about it. It's not as fast as I started last time. And let's this time stop and start and respond.

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At the heart of the Christian faith, there stands a cross and the crucified

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God whom we worship. The cross is the defining moment of the

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Christian faith. So far so good, but I would simply point out that the crucified God that we worship, believe me, to be able to demonstrate that that statement does accurately represent what

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Christianity is about, requires a view of Scripture substantially higher than that which

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Brian Zond is going to function on in the totality of this debate with Michael Brown. It really is.

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In fact, right now, in the book with Shabir Ali, we're going back and forth and this issue is coming up.

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And so we've decided to actually add a chapter on our views of Scripture because it's just part and parcel of things.

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And the Muslim perspective, and there's a lot of connections between the

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Muslim perspective and Brian Zond's perspective. His view of the Atonement is, his detestation of the biblical concept of penal substitution, not just a theory, but the biblical concept, is very similar to what the

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Muslims say. And as I said last time, I have to say to Brian Zond the very same things

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I said to the Muslims in the mosque in Erasmus, Pretoria, last year, because he separates the law of God and the holiness of God from the character of God.

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And you can just simply, you know, God can just wink at sin and forgive it and His law can go unfulfilled.

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It's exactly what the Muslims believe. Identical. So the view of Scripture, the doctrine of Scripture that would be required to establish the concept of Jesus as the crucified

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God is far beyond what Brian Zond actually holds to.

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So this is what happens when you have somebody who has moved away from orthodoxy. What these folks will often do is they will continue to borrow bits and pieces, but they can never engage in apologetics because it falls apart once you start cross -examination.

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You start saying, see that part there that's holding stuff up? Oh, it just fell down.

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Because you can't have that because you've already said you don't really believe this stuff and so it just sort of falls apart.

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For being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who

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God is. When we look at the cross, we do... Now by the way, how many times have

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I said if you truly want to see the fullness of the triune

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God, you look to the cross. But wow, you have to look at the cross in its biblical context, not in the context that you create based upon your desires, what you find attractive.

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If you do not see the wrath of God in the cross, you're not seeing the cross. You don't see the love of God.

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You don't see the grace of God. You don't see the condescension of God. The cross is that multifaceted diamond and what people always want to do is squish that down into one dimension.

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That's what Arminians do when they're trying to get around particular redemption. That's what Zond is doing when he's trying to get around the consistent application of particular redemption, which is penal substitutionary atonement.

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They don't want to see the deep relationship that all these things have.

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They just can't see it. Do not say, this is what God does. When we look at the cross, we say, this is who

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God is. That sounds wonderful. But what God does and who he is, one thing, consistency.

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Consistency. It's not either or. It's both. This is what God does. He's going to say, he finds it absolutely horrific.

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Well, he didn't say it in the opening. He said it, he said when Michael Brown said he's deeply offended by the monster

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God stuff, his response is, well, I'm deeply offended by anybody who says that God put Jesus to death. Well, tell the early church that in Acts 4 when they specifically said that what

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Herod and Pilate and the Jews and the Romans did was what God's hand predestined to occur.

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Tell it to the church. Well, that's just their understanding. That's an inspired record of their understanding.

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Might as well start moving into the New Testament with that baloney because that's all you got.

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Now, in our scriptures and in our creeds, we confess that Christ died for our sins.

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I want to be very clear about that. I confess that Jesus Christ died for our sins.

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But what do we mean by that? This is the seductive lure of atonement theories, attempts to explain what we mean when we make the seminal

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Christian confession that Christ died for our sins. Now, one of the things that he's going to do is he's going to try to say, you know what?

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All we really have here are theories. If all we have are theories and there are some aspects of theology where you have different theories and it's valid to recognize that.

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But when you're talking about the central aspect of the gospel itself, what God the

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Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have done to glorify themselves and bring about the redemption of mankind, which is found in the cross, once you get to that point, if you start saying, you know, we don't really know.

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That's how you open the door for you to stand as judge over scripture and say, well, I don't like this aspect of things because that's not really

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God speaking in all those Old Testament texts. And that's what he's going to do with the

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Old Testament and sacrifice. He's going to say, well, you know, you had the law, but there's no univocal testimony because once you get to the prophets and Jesus lines up the prophets, you don't have to worry about that stuff.

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And he's just wrong about that. It's just a gross misreading. But it's the best they've got.

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You know, when you're trying to present something that is radically unbiblical as biblical, you've got to pick and choose.

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I am aware of at least eight different atonement theories. I could talk about Christ as victor, ransom, recapitulation, moral influence, nonviolent identification, anti -sacrificial, satisfaction, and penal substitution.

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Most of those could not possibly begin to survive any meaningful exegetical analysis.

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Ransom to Satan? Were there people who believed it? Yeah. Did all of those people even have a complete canon?

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Don't know. Others who held it, did they live in a period of time where allegorical interpretation pretty much destroyed any meaningful biblical exegesis?

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Yeah. But to even put them all together on an equal plane is ridiculous.

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And not all of them are completely self -contradictory. Christ as victor, there are elements of Christ as victor over death that are perfectly commensurate with penal substitutionary atonement.

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But the sales point here is to, in essence, put them all on the same level and say, you got your view,

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I got my view, doesn't really matter, and we don't want to be exclusive.

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We want to allow for freedom amongst the brethren. That kind of thing.

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So there are numerous theories on what we mean when we say that Christ died for our sins, these tidy little explanations.

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Some I'm sympathetic toward, others I have problems with, I think some are quite crude, and that the ugliest of these theories goes by the somewhat clumsy name of penal substitutionary atonement theory.

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So, penal substitutionary atonement is ugly and crude.

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Now, if I thought that what Brian Zahn presents as penal substitutionary atonement was actually penal substitutionary atonement, then

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I'd have to agree with him because the straw man absurdity that he presents is pretty ugly and crude.

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Cosmic gods being propitiated by throwing virgins in volcanoes and the father going to the slave house and beating the heck out of a servant.

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You know, that kind of just grossly dishonest absurdities is pretty crude.

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I don't know anybody who believes that. He never believed that. And I don't understand why people who leave a system think they have the right to just completely misrepresent it, but hopefully we all caught that and just went, why?

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You want to communicate with us? Then represent the best.

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Represent something accurate. Recognize that Jesus gives his life freely.

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That there is the eternal covenant of redemption. That you have father, son, and spirit. That this is exactly what the father decrees and the son obeys and desires to do this because of the people,

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God's elect people who are united to him and his love for them and the spirit is the one who then unites

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God's people to Jesus. Why not represent all that? Don't know.

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It's amazing to me that you would even address such a thing in public and make this kind of statement and then straw man it so badly.

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Penal substitutionary atonement theory claims that God required the killing of his son in order to satisfy his wrath, appease justice, and gain the necessary capital to forgive our sins.

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Wow. There are ways in which each element of that speaks to a portion of the truth, but by completely ignoring the fulfillment of law, by completely ignoring the necessity of God's holiness being vindicated, ignoring the concept of justice, of the voluntariness of Christ's self -sacrifice, by just leaving all that stuff off to the side, and of course, again, the reason we're looking at this now before going back to the

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Calvinism debate is this man hates Calvinism and therefore he has no basis for having an overarching purpose of the

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Trinity in decreeing the

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Incarnation in the first place. In fact, I really wonder, maybe somebody in channel can find out,

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I don't know that it exists online, but I really have to wonder, where does

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Zahn's church stand on issues such as open theism? And, because we know in the

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Calvinism debate, I think in the Calvinism debate he said he wasn't one, but he didn't say why.

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I could be wrong about that. Where does he stand on open theism? And where does he stand on homosexuality?

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I'd be really interested in light of his, well, the Old Testament is this.

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It's an accurate representation of what the Hebrews were thinking, but it's not really what God wanted them to do.

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In light of that, I hope we all can see that Olsen -Zahn perspective utterly destroys any meaningful foundation for dealing with the current issue.

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Because you, it's painfully obvious that Romans 1, 1

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Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1, are based upon that Old Testament law, and if you've already defined that Old Testament law as just being what the

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Hebrews thought God wanted them to do because they didn't really know God yet, and given what he says here, that the sacrifices of the law are superseded by the prophets.

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I wonder what his church's position is. Is it an affirming, welcoming congregation? I would be...

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It's Brian Zahn, Z -A -H -N -D, for those of you who are Googling right now.

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There are some who are better at Googling than others, actually. I just thought

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I'd mention them. Penal substitutionary atonement theory was first developed by John Calvin, and is an essential aspect of Calvinism.

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We demonstrated in the last program that though the issues and the terminology that would come to define our current debate are primarily related to issues that come out of the medieval period, scholasticism, and hence that's the background for the

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Reformation discussion. And though certainly in its modern orientation, the concept is

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Calvinistic. It is a Reformed doctrine. In its fullest biblical expression, as it has been presented to us, and really as it has come into modern evangelicalism, it's definitely a

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Calvinistic doctrine. There's no question about it. But that's not the first time it came into existence.

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It's not like Calvin was sitting around one day and went, Hey, I think I'll come up with this. No. There may have been one thing that Calvin did that with, but that's another issue.

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This isn't one of them. And we demonstrated in the last program that that concept

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I think is very fairly seen in Clement, and especially in Mathetis, and I read

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Mathetis to Diognetus to you on the last program. Now it did first appear in a different form in the 11th century from Anselm as he was working from his medieval concept of the offended honor of God.

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Well, sort of. If you really want a serious scholarly discussion of the development of the doctrine over time,

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Louis Burkhoff's book on the development of Christian doctrine would be where you would want to go and get a nice summary.

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And not to turn this into a lecture on church history, although that might not be a bad thing entirely, it should be pointed out that the early church fathers and the early

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Christians taught nothing like penal substitutionary atonement theory. What they taught is generally described as Christus victor, or Christ the victor, where in the, not just the death, but in the incarnation, life, death, burial, resurrection of Jesus Christ, we see

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Christ victorious over sin and death. Well, and of course there is nothing contradictory in the

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Christus victor. Christus victor is just simply one aspect of biblical teaching that doesn't really even address the primary issue in regards to the meaning of propitiation, substitution, what is

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Huppert doing in there, how does this deal with the wrath of God, etc.,

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etc., etc., etc. Christus victor is true as far as it goes.

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It becomes false when it becomes the entirety of the perspective and the entirety of the answer to the question, why did

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Christ die? It's just insufficient. It's a part of the answer. And I think he said most, we could argue about numbers, but there are certain early church fathers, it's next to impossible to know exactly what they taught because they didn't address the subject.

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And others were rather muddled on it. And we can understand why. I mean, it was not until the fourth century that you have the first complete book written on the subject of the atonement.

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The church was focused on different issues. And it's at least understandable to this point and that is that when you think about it, it's difficult to address the subject of the atonement until you have thoroughly addressed the subject of the person who makes the atonement.

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In other words, an atonement made by a mere human being or a demigod or someone who's not truly human is going to differ from an atonement that is made of the

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Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the God Man, the Theanthropos. So yeah, those issues did sort of have to come first.

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That's certainly understandable at that point, but just keep that in mind as we think about that.

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But if you've grown up with penal substitutionary atonement, which you most likely have if you have grown up in an evangelical world in North America, I understand.

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I'm very sympathetic that that can become the sole lens at which you look at understanding the cross and you can confuse it for the gospel itself.

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I remember how strange it was when I first began to encounter people who did not subscribe to penal substitutionary atonement theories.

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Interestingly enough, the first person I ever heard of that rejected that theory of the cross was none other than Charles Grandison Finney, which ought to make the point that he was hardly some emergent

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Christian hipster that was afraid to be hard on sin. So if the idea is you have to believe in penal substitutionary atonement theory to really preach against sin, well, tell that to Charles Finney because he rejected that.

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Now, for those of us, in this context, that probably worked because I'm sure

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Finney's big at IHOP, but for the rest of us, we're all sitting there going, what?

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We're supposed to find this surprising? If you consider Finney the heretic that he was, it's like, yeah, you really want to associate with that?

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But again, Zond really is not concerned about us. Zond's probably going,

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I don't care if you folks review this or do whatever.

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He's not seeking to talk to us. We're pretty much irrelevant to him at this particular point in time.

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So that's why he can probably go there and go, eh, whatever. Now, reducing the mystery of the cross to a theory is problematic to begin with, because first of all, it's not the gospel.

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The gospel is the story of Jesus culminating in the announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord. Now, you will hear that, and again, it is a partial truth.

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But a partial truth masquerading as a whole truth becomes completely untrue at all.

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The proclamation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ is, in fact, extremely important, and it is central to a proper understanding of the gospel.

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I will agree with that. But to separate that proclamation from the biblical definition of the gospel is the error that many liberals make.

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Because when Paul defined the gospel, he wasn't denying that the

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Lordship of Christ was central to that, and the proclamation of the Lordship of Christ was central to that. But when he defined it, he focused upon the cross, the burial, and the resurrection.

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And hence, what was accomplished in that is definitional of the gospel.

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To try to separate this out so that it's something new, it's something secondary, it's just a theory, that's extremely problematic.

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That's one of the major areas of disagreement, because we would say, yes, this is the gospel, it is part and parcel of the gospel, and that is defined for us biblically.

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The Bible defines it as part of the gospel. But particularly abhorrent is the penal substitutionary atonement theory that turns the

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Father of Jesus into a pagan deity, who can only be placated by the barbarism of child sacrifice, and this will not do.

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No, it will not do, because that is purely meant to create emotion.

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It's a lie, and Brian Zond knows it's a lie. He knows it's a lie.

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He knows that's not accurate. He's not a stupid man. I would imagine he's dread -pierced for our transgressions, and so he knows that the idea of describing the loving self -giving of the

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Son in perfect union with the Father as pagan deity satisfied by child abuse is not even a straw man.

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It's just desperately dishonest. It's a lie. And so there he sits in his leather jacket lying about theology to these people.

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Why? Well, I don't know. I don't know the man. But there is amongst the emergent crowd, the hipster crowd, the

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I used to be a fundie crowd, there is, in my experience, an element of self -vindication and self -justification that allows for gross exaggeration and dishonesty in the representation of your former belief.

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Now you've seen probably, you've probably experienced, sadly, this when you talk with someone, maybe even someone in your own fellowship, who used to be a part of another church.

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It always worries me when people come to your church and they become a part of the fellowship and they've just got a lot of nasty things to say about their former church.

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Their former church may have been bad. But it just concerns me when there just wasn't anything good there at all.

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Why were you there for as long as you were? Makes me wonder a little bit. But sometimes you encounter people and they leave a church and you can just sort of sense that there's a little imbalance in their representation of where that church was actually coming from and things like that.

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And so it just seems to me that maybe the motivation here is you've got a

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I used to be here and I'm vindicating I'm justifying why

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I am so far from here now by strawmanning it by exaggerating it by making it just so reprehensible that I had to leave because it's just and you're obviously at that point only concerned about your own group.

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You're concerned about your own cadre of followers because you're clearly not even thinking about people who are still in that perspective.

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Because if they're in that perspective and they actually know what that perspective teaches, they're going to sit back and go what are you babbling about?

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Pagan deity? Child sacrifice? What? You're not trying to talk to me.

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You're not trying to speak truth to me. And no, he actually actually isn't.

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In other words, the God who is mollified by throwing the virgin in the volcano or the

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God who is mollified by his son being nailed to a tree is not the Abba of Jesus. And neither is the death of Jesus a kind of quid pro quo by which

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God gains the necessary capital to forgive. In other words, Calvin's economic model for the cross simply won't do.

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Do reformed people talk about economics that area as part of their understanding of the atonement?

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Yes, they do. Is it the central definitional aspect? No, it is not.

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Well, what are we talking about? Generally, it's within the context of the mechanism whereby

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God's justice is demonstrated and His holiness is protected.

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Well, why would we talk about that? Because the Bible does. Oh, there you go once again.

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Yeah, well, we actually are concerned about all that the Bible teaches. And these folks simply are not.

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When it comes to those texts about, you know, God being justified in Romans chapter 3, let

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God be true and every man a liar, well, they just come up with a different interpretation. Well, the problem is they can spiritualize anything they want away.

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We have to utilize the same standard of exegesis all the way through and that greatly limits our options.

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And so we actually have to address issues such as how can

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God bring His wrath against unbelievers because of His broken law in hell and yet this person over here who's an even greater sinner than this person over here gets eternal life.

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What's the mechanism here? We have to actually answer those questions consistently. It makes me wonder if Brian Zahn believes in eternal punishment.

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Probably doesn't. Probably some type of conditionalist or something along those lines, my guess.

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Or if he's not, don't know what basis he would have to not be.

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Again, it just all starts coming apart pretty quickly. And it just leaves someone utterly incapable of engaging in meaningful apologetics.

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I mean, I can just imagine what a sharp Muslim or somebody would do with this kind of presentation.

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I mean, how would it work? The idea is that a payment is being made. So how does this work? Does God say, well, look,

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I want to forgive sins, but I'm going to get paid and I want an innocent life. That's a given. Okay, this portion as we watched it was extremely uncomfortable because it's just mockery.

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It's just mockery. The payment was prescribed by God's holy law.

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You break the law, he who sins shall die. So the death aspect was obvious.

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The necessity of a the god man is obvious because of the fact that there is a people united to him in his death.

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This is where the Reformed theology stuff is sort of important. But to sit back like this and mock the idea without ever really touching on what the real answer would be is just, again, offensive because it's just so untruthful.

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When you stand in front of people and say, I'm a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ and then you engage in this kind of just ridiculous straw manning,

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I can't begin to understand it. And let's see, I want his death to be painful. Crucifixion, that'll do.

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But I want some torture beforehand. I want there to be some lashes. You know, a crown of thorns, that would be nice. I want a crown of thorns.

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And we might say, how many thorns will be enough to pay the price? Oh no, there must be a minimum of 19 thorns in the crown for me to...

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And you say, well, no, it can't quite be like that. Some of that was just, you know, human gratuitous violence.

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Then I'll ask the question, well, how does this division of labor work? Some of it is required by God and some of it's just people being gratuitously wicked and violent.

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I don't understand this. So that when we say Christ died for our sins, do we mean that God required the murder of his son in order to forgive?

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No. That maligns the character of God. I will suggest it means something more like this. It maligns the character of God that the second person of the

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Trinity would voluntarily take on human flesh, give his life as a ransom for many so that those who are united to him in his death, burial, and resurrection can have eternal life and forgiveness of sins that does not require the abandonment of the holiness of God.

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That there will be a consummation of all things to where justice is completely served.

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Every aspect of God's character that he desires to demonstrate will be demonstrated.

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His mercy, his love, his kindness, his grace, yes, as well as his holiness and his wrath and his power and his justice.

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And this is a slight upon his character. What it is, is a slight upon the character of God that Brian Zond and his fellow emergent hipsters have decided is the only

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God they will worship. That's what it's a slight on. I don't want the

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God that is made up by Brian Zond or whoever else.

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I don't want the Jesus that's made up by liberal theologians of the

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Jesus Seminar. And I don't want the hipster Jesus of Brian Zond.

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I want the Jesus who actually existed. And the only way I can know who that is, I go to the Inspired Scriptures and the

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Inspired Scriptures don't give me a Zondian Jesus. A Zondian Jesus.

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I think we know what we're going to call this edition of the Dividing Line. Or at least a part of it. Last part will be the

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Zondian Jesus. It almost sounds like Buddhist. Zondian.

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Well, you know what? Zondianism. According to my clock, we'd be out of time.

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So, we will pick up I will mark right there with a different color this time.

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How's that? Love Audio Notetaker. And we will pick up with that next week.

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Should be fairly normal, though stressful for me. And then, I don't know what's happening after that, because off we go to South Africa.

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We'll talk some more about that next week as well. Thanks for listening to the Dividing Line. We'll be back. Lord willing, see you then.