Thinking Presuppositionally, Brandan Robertson and Chris Fisher

Thinking Presuppositionally in a World of Perpetual Infancy

Along to the dividing line. My name is James White. It is a blustery, another blustery Tuesday afternoon here in Phoenix, Arizona. That means all the pollen is just blowing all over the place, but that's COVID too, because it doesn't matter what it is.

It's all COVID. Anyways, yeah, it's been a year now that we've been playing this game, but not going to be talking about that today. Let's take a break from that. Actually, I haven't talked about that for a little while specifically, but anyway, let's get focused on what we need to do today.

I want to present a couple examples of why it is that all of us, I mean, everybody in this audience, I mean, young people, I mean, old retired plumbers, I mean, professors, I mean, homeschool moms who can change diapers with one hand and grade homeschool papers with the other hand and cook with the other hand.

That's how talented those folks are. All of you, everybody needs to cultivate the capacity and ability to think presuppositionally. Our society is no longer functioning in a rational fashion in the sense that reason and the control of human emotion, the subjection of human emotion to factuality and analysis, logic, a recognition that the world has been created by God in a particular fashion.

There are certain rules of reasoning that correspond to reality around us. All of that is disappearing, just going out the door. Instead, we now are living in a world of perpetual infancy. I mentioned on Twitter that when I was young, we had a child's limerick that we all know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

The whole purpose of this limerick was to encourage maturity, was to encourage the recognition that words cannot hurt you, that you can only allow words to hurt you. You are in control of your emotions.

That is now a cultural heresy. In fact, I looked on YouTube to see if I could find, and I didn't scroll too very far, I might've been able to find if I had wanted to spend enough time looking, but everything that came up for sticks and stones would break my bones was about bullying and how wrong that limerick is.

That was everything that I, at least in the first page that I saw on YouTube. We now live in a society of perpetual children, maturity, discipline, the control of emotion, the ability to think through difficult issues that have many emotional components without allowing the emotional components to warp and twist the logic.

That is not only a skill that has been lost, it is a skill that is now considered dangerous and hateful. As Christians, we should be people who honor truth. We should be disciplined. It's very, we should be sober minded.

Sophronismos in Greek. We should be disciplined in our thinking. This is a way of glorifying God. People are like, I'm not sure what to do. My job's really boring. What do I do to honor God? Well, there's lots and lots of ways in everyday life, but one thing that all of us can do is we can think his thoughts after him.

We can think in the way he has designed us to think, which now is incredibly counter-cultural. It's the exact opposite of what the world would have us to do. We have to think presuppositionally. We have to think within a functioning Christian worldview.

People will often say, when you're in a debate, especially during the cross-examination period, you seem to really get focused and you're able to pick apart people's arguments and leave them stuttering and stammering at times.

What is that? It's thinking presuppositionally. I've said many times, for me, it's almost a graphic thing. It's a visual thing. When I'm listening to someone's argument, it's like I see how the various assertions fit together.

I see where they're at the foundation, there's no consistency. If they're arguing against the Christian worldview, that's always going to be there. You may have to do some digging to find it. There are some very, very sharp rebels against God, but it's going to be there.

You can bet you're going to be able to find it. Thinking presuppositionally. When you hear right now, so much of the cultural dialogue is done in sound bytes. You need to train your mind to recognize the fundamental foundational presuppositional errors in brief snippets as they are presented.

We're going to look at an example of that, and then we're going to also look at the fact that when you're dealing with false teachings within the church, you have to think in the exact same way. It's one thing to deal with secularism, it's another thing to deal with heresies within the church specifically.

Again, being able to recognize what is at the foundation of a certain kind of argument. Identify those foundational things, deal with that, because that's going to be where you can go to the biblical text and attack that foundational error.

That's extremely important. This is something that young people can learn. This is not rocket science. I think if you're made in the image of God, God has made your mind to work this way. The world will seek to warp your capacity to do this.

The world will teach you that it's best to allow your emotions to determine your thinking. But that's why you need constant exposure to the Word of God, that's why you need constant exposure to good teaching, and that's why you need to be constantly disciplining yourself.

In these particular areas. This can be done a lot of different ways. There's practical ways, obviously memorization of scripture, but just on a mental level, it's just a practical thing. One thing I've always been thankful for is that there was a period in time in my life, and I actually got imbalanced about it, but there was a period of time in life when I was immersed in playing chess, and that experience helped.

It was at a time when we know that the mind is really developing, and there are foundational presuppositions in how chess is played that really have helped me the entirety of my life. Parents, homeschool parents, if you want to teach your kids a game, staring at a glowing screen isn't, I don't think, the best way to go.

I mean, obviously you can play chess on a glowing screen too, but not just the spatial perception of a board in front of you, but the rules and the ability to see how your one action then changes a situation and reasoning down a line of moves is a mental discipline that I have transferred from that board game to all of life, and especially to theology and especially apologetics.

If he's going to go there, I'm going to go here. In my junior high years, I got to the point where I could play without a board, so I could keep the entirety. Years later, when we were driving up Salt Lake City, we had two cars, we had a CB, and they had a chessboard in the rear car, and I was driving, mind you, the front car.

Now, thinking back, this wasn't the safest thing. No, I wasn't in the bug. No, that wasn't. I hope I wasn't in the bug. You think that was the bug? Oh, you think so? Wow. He's thinking I was driving my Volkswagen bug.

I just didn't think it'd go that fast. But anyway, we were driving to Salt Lake City, the general conference, and we were using CB radios. We finally got rid of those things after all these years, I imagine.

Probably the batteries went bad and ate the insides out, I'd imagine. But oh, man, we've been at this a long, long time. But it was fun. Anyways, they had a chessboard in the back. What? What's a CB? People go, what?

What are you talking about? Breaker 19, rubber ducky, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, I played the guys in the car behind me while I was driving, and I didn't have a chessboard. So I really got into it.

No, what happened was I was winning. But then I had a real close pass. I had to pass somebody, and somebody came around the corner. And it was a little close. And there went that. Kevin Johnson was involved.

Yes, I do remember that. I think he may have been the one playing in the other. Yeah, Kevin was the one. Yep. Yep. Anyway, sorry, we chased that rabbit and it fell off a cliff. Anyway, I'm just saying there are certain things we can do to help that can be enjoyable.

I'm thinking homeschool a lot these days. You know, I've had my kids, my grandkids over this weekend. And so you know, you think about stuff like that. And chess is a great thing. Why? Because there are certain presuppositions, foundational issues, that if you're going to be successful in chess, you got to control the center.

You have to memorize openings, you have to know what the possibilities are, and you have to be able to think ahead along multiple lines. Just a practical thing there. All right, let's get into a video that has been that went viral yesterday.

It went viral. This is Brandon Robertson, Reverend Brandon Robertson. I remember, again, illustrating the mind. I remember where I was on bike years ago. Now, the last time I mentioned Brandon Robertson and it made it into the searchable stuff on the blog was in 2018, when he declared same-sex marriage as holy.

But I had listened to him before then. I think it was back in 2016, maybe 2015. If I recall correctly, he was in the panel that had a dialogue with Michael Brown at the Christian Booksellers Association meeting, or maybe it was the Religious Broadcasters.

I think it was Religious Broadcasters, now that I think about it. I think that was 2016. Anyway, I know I had already listened to him speaking before that happened, because I was familiar with him. And I remember where I was on the road, this is just how my mind works, when I thought to myself, now remember, I'm the guy these days that can sit down at the computer and open a browser to do something that I just walked into the room to do and I can no longer remember what it was.

But I remember years ago, which direction I was riding a bike, listening to Brandon Robertson speaking, and he was seeking to try to be orthodox in his expressions. And I said to myself, this young man will not remain orthodox.

No, not going to happen. It may take a few years, but you just, you mark it down. And I was just thinking to myself, well, so when this video pops up off of TikTok, I'm not shocked. This is the inevitable result of the LGBTQ, what do you even call it?

I don't believe there is such a community. The T destroys any community. But that the LGBTQ movements attempt to create a Christianized version. So here is the video. Again, think presuppositionally. Don't let, see, what I've seen happening is people watch this and they've been infected by the culture.

Their immediate response while rejecting it is emotional, rather than biblical and consistently flowing from a Christian worldview. So here's Brandon Robertson.

Did you know that there's a part of the Gospel of Mark where Jesus uses a racial slur? In Mark chapter seven, there's the account of the Seraphim woman, a woman who is Syrian and Greek, both of which there were strong biases against within the Jewish community.

And she comes to ask Jesus to heal her daughter who's possessed by a demon. And what is Jesus' response? He says, it's not good for me to give the children's food, meaning the children of Israel's food to dogs.

He calls her a dog. What's amazing about this account is that the woman doesn't back down. She speaks truth to power. She confronts Jesus and says, well, you can think that about me, but even dogs deserve the crumbs from the table.

Her boldness and bravery to speak truth to power actually changes Jesus' mind. Jesus repents of his racism and extends healing to this woman's daughter. I love this story because it's a reminder that Jesus is human.

He had prejudices and bias, and when confronted with it, he was willing to do his work. And this woman was willing to stand up and speak truth.

Now, people saw that, and immediately they're like, okay, he just said Jesus was a racist and had to repent of his racism because this woman was wiser and better than him. And so he changed his mind and then healed her daughter in the process as a result.

Now, the immediate response is, on the emotional level, this guy's a heretic. How does he not know these things? Brandon Robertson's not stupid. He knows what the orthodox position on this is, and he abandoned orthodoxy a long time ago.

What he just said would not even raise an eyebrow at Union Theological Seminary. That's why I call it the Walker Seminary. It apostatized 130 years ago, but it's still walking around, doing its thing.

And I said this morning, again, on social media, and you've heard me say as many times on this program, you need to realize that if you believe that the scriptures are a consistent revelation of the truth of God, in other words, if you view the scriptures the way Jesus did and the apostles did, the way the early church did, you are in a tiny minority in what calls itself Christianity.

We all want to think we're in the majority, and there have been a lot of evangelicals that have grown up thinking that, either because you take sort of the fundamentalist mindset and say, well, everybody else is not a Christian at all, that doesn't look like me and think like me about everything, or you've bought the arguments that say, well, the majority of scholars say this, the majority of scholars say that, as if the majority of scholars somehow means something.

If you don't realize that today, the majority of people who are being granted the status of scholar by our society can only be granted that status by being enemies of God, and therefore, the whole majoritarian thing is worthless.

You're going to be, you'll learn it eventually. We are a small minority, and that means nothing. When you live in a world of rebels against truth, it's best to be in the small minority. But that's where we are.

And what Brandon Roberts is saying here, this is necessary for homosexuals, because the Bible's teaching on the subject of sexuality and gender is too obvious. It's too clear. And in fact, the strongest argument against homosexuality is found in the consistency of scripture on the subject.

That is, one of the beautiful things is when Paul, if Paul was the one that termed Ars Innocoites, or if he took that from maybe one of his rabbis that he learned from, or whatever else it might be, the point is that he is using it consistently with what it meant 1400 years earlier.

And as Robert Gagnon has pointed out, you can go 200 years before Jesus, 200 years after Jesus, you can actually go a whole lot farther than that. Let's just stay within a time range that allow you to actually examine the literature.

There is no shred of evidence anywhere amongst the people of God that there is the slightest possibility that anyone thought that anything like homosexuality or transgenderism or any of those things was in accordance with God's revealed will.

Not the slightest bit of evidence at all. So you have the consistency of scripture, the consistency of history. So you can't remain orthodox and embrace these things. And so as the woke movement pulls more and more people into the same deconstruction of Christianity, that term's becoming, again, I didn't think in my lifetime that I would be seeing Marxism marching through the streets of United States, but it started its march in our classrooms.

And we have talked about such things as intersectionality within critical theory, the breaking down of any accepted norms through the utilization of critical theory, resulting in intersectionality where you have everyone is defined by their victim group and how many victimhoods they can claim for themselves.

This breaks down any type of social cohesion, anything that would hold us together as a people because mature people in the past could look over differences because the things that held us together were more important than the things that divide us.

Critical theory says the things that divide us are more important than anything that could possibly hold us together. See, the difference? See why what's happening to our nation is happening to our nation?

And why our nation is already pretty much incapable of self-defense against any nation that is unified. We will collapse from within in an incredibly effective way. So the point is, this deconstruction is the inevitable result of the application of critical theory.

And so last year, you had those two guys, the super popular YouTube guys. I mean, they literally make... Do you have any idea how many... They've made millions of dollars off YouTube. That's how many subscribers they have.

And they're super, super popular, and they left the faith. They had a shallow evangelical upbringing that did not prepare them to deal with challenges. A number of people responded. I mentioned it at the time.

I actually did listen to their stories on a long bike ride. And by the time I had listened to it, half a dozen people were already responding to it. I just listened to it. I just sort of basically said, wow, that was not really in depth.

And it's a shame to listen to someone saying these things, really thinking they've figured all this stuff out when it's obvious they didn't bother to actually ask people. Or maybe they just didn't figure there was anybody they could ask that could provide meaningful responses to the objections that they raised.

Anyhow, they talked about that as their deconstruction. Well, that's what we're facing within the church. This is just simply the end result. Once you start down the road, and I heard this in Brandon from the start.

So when I heard years ago, the language that was being used, I'm like, I see where that trajectory is going. And that trajectory goes here. He'll still call himself reverend. And they'll still use the external activities of religiosity.

But what this man just said was that Jesus is not a savior, can't be a savior. He's a sinner. He's a racist. He's not as good as a Syrophoenician woman. She had to speak truth to power. He's not the truth.

He's not the way. He's not the life. He's not the savior. He was a lie from the beginning. But he'll still call himself a Christian. When I first heard him, he would have just recoiled from that. But the process is inevitable, because the foundation was gone.

He had embraced a lifestyle and an identity that necessitated the incoherence of the biblical revelation that brought conviction to his heart. So once he got rid of that, the rest of it's going to fall by the wayside.

There is no reason to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity if the Bible is not a divine revelation from God. There isn't any. There is no reason to believe that Jesus Christ was the sinless son of God.

There is no reason to believe that Jesus wasn't a racist. Because what Christians have done down through the history, if they looked at that, and they know what the Syrophoenician woman is going to be expecting from a Jewish man, and she gets that from Jesus, but she presses on.

She doesn't change his mind. He says, so many times when people came to him from outside, he said, I haven't seen such faith within Israel. He was testing her faith. He was bringing that out. Same thing when the woman touched his garment and Jesus turned around and said, who touched me?

Do you really think Jesus is going, who touched me? Really? He's bringing forth her confession so that he can minister to her. That's how it's been understood down through the ages. But once you're woke, then you're going to put those lenses on and go, oh, look, Jesus was a racist.

One of the things I forgot to do, sorry, I forgot to cue up a section. You know what? Hold on a second here, because tweets and replies, I might have this. I mentioned to someone pretty recently, there it is.

Look at that. All right, let me get rid of this. And let's bring this up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's go to YouTube. Okay. Stop there. Stop playing that. And this was, I was in, I was in the audience.

I rarely get to attend debates, but this was in 2015. I had just gotten back from South Africa and Bob Gagnon was debating Daniel Kirk at a Presbyterian church over in Scottsdale, Arizona. I think I had gotten home the day before.

I was just sort of still jet lagged, but I got to attend this debate and I got to listen to this. Now, Daniel Kirk at the time was an adjunct Fuller. Fuller has since parted ways. And I don't know where Kirk is now, but let me, let me just play this section.

This is a seminary professor in a debate on homosexuality and the church.

Now, and respond appropriately. What I'm saying is this, that God is doing something now. That to say we have gay and lesbian, bisexual sisters, brothers, and other siblings is to say, God is giving his spirit in a way that we have to see, recognize, and respond to.

God is doing this now in the 21st century. It's the time that was given to us.

Now, let me just explain so you understand where Kirk's coming from. I'm still gonna play something more. His argument, his thesis was, yeah, the New Testament's fairly clear on this subject, but the spirit led the early church to understand the Gentiles were to be included in the people of God.

And that was the work of the spirit. And today the spirit's doing something new and the new revelation from God is that homosexuals are to be included in the church. Now, I would assume if he's being consistent since then, he would add transgenderism, homosexual marriage, because it's 2015.

And so that was right around the Obergefell decision, transgenderism, and consistency will eventually have to lead to polyamory, pederasty, the whole nine yards. There's no end to these things because there's no objective revelation anymore.

But the idea is the spirit can move in this new way, you see. So that's what's being argued, but listen to how he makes application.

The flip side of that coin is this isn't what God did in the first century. And I might wish, as somebody who's now open and affirming, that God had done so, so that the New Testament evidence might be more explicit.

But I would also say it was no more wrong for Paul to be a first century Jew than it's wrong for us to be 21st century Christians. But it might be wrong for us to continue saying the things that Paul had to say as a first century Jew.

And it might be wrong for us to say even the things that Jesus probably thought as a first century Jew, because it was not in their day that the church was given the gift and the responsibility of responding to the fact that there are gay and lesbian sisters and brothers, children of God right here alongside us.

Okay, so there you go. When I heard that, I'm like, okay, so we shouldn't talk like Paul talked because he was a first century Jew. And maybe not even think as Jesus thought because he was a first century Jew.

So during the break, I went up to Dr. Kirk and I said, um, did I understand you to say, and then I repeated what he said. And he said, yeah, yeah. I said, so do you do not believe that Jesus was God in human flesh?

And Daniel Kirk's response to me was, you don't think the apostles believe Jesus was God, do you? To which I said, I most certainly do. It says, yeah, I probably too quickly challenged him to debate that point.

Anyway, this is the academy. These are the people teaching the people coming into the pulpits. So when you wonder why all these mainline denominations have just collapsed into a goo of boiling apostasy, this is why.

This is why. It's foundational. Yesterday, Doug Wilson, blog of May blog, uh, the dogs ate Jezebel. I guess Doug decided he needed to get into the Jezebel, uh, food fest. Um, Jezebel really wasn't an important part of the, of the blog article, but he made the argument, um, that we've been making for decades here.

And that is, if you do not believe that this, sorry about that, as a whole, yes, it's Jeffrey Rice Rebind, just thought I'd point that out. Once again, it says solo scripture on the front. That's why I like to see there.

There you go. There's solo scripture. Okay. Um, and the rest of the solos around the spine, just, uh, just to say, you know, and it's the 1977 NASV. Oh yes. And this, this is a new printing by the way.

Okay. Anyway, what was I talking about? If you do not believe that this as a whole is a consistent divine revelation. And again, I'm, I'm, I'm telling you, if you do, you're in a very small minority amongst people who call themselves Christians.

Okay. But if you do not, you really don't have any basis to be criticizing Brandon Robertson or Daniel Kirk or any of these other folks, because it's all just a matter of opinion. Anyways, it's all just a matter of opinion because we don't have a divine revelation from God.

Yeah. I know Jesus said, have you not read what God spoke to you saying that Jesus, Jesus thought this is the word of God. No question about it. The early church sufficient for teaching all things. Yep.

No question about it. But that was back then. We're so much smarter now, right? If this is not consistent with itself, you can't do theology. If this is not consistent with itself, then you can simply say that, well, yeah, it does seem that Paul, um, understood the Levitical law in a certain way.

And, and the applications in Romans one, first Corinthians six, first Timothy one. Yeah. But, but that assumes consistency from beginning to end. And that's a lot of hard work. And that requires harmonization.

We don't do harmonization anymore. That's old school. So all depends on what you believe about this. All depends on what you believe about it. Brandon Robertson's abandoned that. And so he can say, Jesus repented of his racism.

Was there a, you're just moving that out of the way, just coughing so much. You just didn't want to get too much Rona on that side of the, of the microphone. Oh, oh, okay. All right. All right. Well, when, when you, when you move that microphone, I just don't know if the rich cam's going to pop on or just what I've got to be.

I've got to be prepared for whatever comes up. Cause you know, there you go. Okay. Now I suppose I should be straightforward on this before we, we go to, I want to I want to give an example of how clear biblical truths can be subjugated presuppositionally to a false narrative in theology by looking at a debate that took place between a Calvinist who won the debate on any meaningful level and an open theist.

But I want to lay two foundations first. The first foundation is to look at the scriptures with you fairly briefly so that you have a good idea of exactly what it is that we are looking at here, because this is, this is amazing.

I think I forgot to look, but somewhere on our blog, there is an article, I believe titled Isaiah and the trial, the false gods, or something. It was one of our old, we called them information sheets back in the day.

And a lot of the first ones were papers that I wrote in seminary, basically. And one of the topics that I addressed was the trial of the false gods in Isaiah 40 through 48. And if you've seen my debate with Dr. John Sanders at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando from, I think it was 2001-ish, around that time period.

And if you've listened to my presentation against open theism, I focused upon the fact that in Isaiah 40 through 48, sense what God does there through the prophet Isaiah. And of course, if you go read most standard modern commentaries, they're going to call this Deutero-Isaiah.

They're going to say that the actual prophet Isaiah only went through chapter 39, then there is a 38 -39, then there's a switch. The fundamental issue is that since Cyrus is mentioned by name, and if you apply naturalistic tendencies to your interpretation, then that has to have been written after Cyrus, which means it could have been written by Isaiah.

So it can't be prophecy that is that specific. The fact that Jesus then uses those things as prophetic basis for himself, we don't have to worry about that. Again, modern quote-unquote Christian scholarship doesn't worry about keeping this together.

There are people today that will call themselves Christians that will then say, I'm wiser than Jesus. I mean, Brandon Robertson did that. He's less racist than Jesus was. And so there you go. What? Yes, I think so.

The theology of God and Isaiah. Okay. All right. Yeah, that's Isaiah 40 to 48. When did I do that? I could read Hebrew when I did it. So that was toward the end of my seminary period, probably 88, 89, somewhere around there.

Before a lot of the people in our audience were born back when Moses was still writing Hebrew. That's what Pastor Luke likes to say. He says, you know so much about church history because you lived most of it.

I was reading the first copy. And in fact, one of the textual variants in the Pentateuch was because I smudged Moses' original. I still got some of the ink on my thumb. I'm going to start talking about Geritol here in a second.

Anyway, so when I was in seminary and I did learn Hebrew, I was captivated by Isaiah 40 through 48. It's beautiful. It's deep. It's satisfying. It is so awesomely theological. In the specific meaning of the term theological, about the doctrine of God.

It's about God. And the reason is God is putting the false gods on trial. God's not putting himself on trial. God's not saying to mankind, I'm going to sit in the dock and you judge me. It's amazing how many people think that's what's going on.

No. God is cross-examining the false gods and demonstrating they're false gods because they can't do what he can do. And so what you get is the unique aspects of God's attributes that the false gods cannot even begin to mimic because they're false gods.

They can't do it. And so it's a beautiful, beautiful section. I've recommended it to people's reading for years and years and years. And of course, in dealing with the Mormons, many of our key texts, when you think about it, come out of Isaiah 40 through 48, 43, 10, 44, 5, and 6, 44, 24.

All those texts are right there in that section. But you also have the great rhetorical sections in the trial where God says, who's like me? You also have that incredibly scathing sarcasm about how a man can cut down a tree and he can cut it in half.

And with half of it, he cooks his food and the other half, he builds an idol and then bows down and worships it for providing his food. It's just scathing sarcasm. It's awesome. It really is. But most people are familiar with, for example, what you have in Isaiah chapter 40.

And by the way, we're going to do some more work in this later on. I'm just using this as an example right now. But remember, there are a number of passages in Isaiah 40 through 48 that are cited as fulfillment passages in the ministry of Jesus.

So the fundamental failure of open theism, the reason it is a heresy, is that it undercuts the Bible, the entire Bible's own understanding. And what's the first thing Jesus does when he rises from the dead?

He gives the apostles a Bible study lesson about how the prophets had prophesied of him from Moses onward. What is the primary apologetic of open theists to say that there can be all sorts of false prophecy in the Bible?

So much for Jesus proving he was the Messiah. They have to do this because if God can give specific, accurate, and unfailing prophecy from the past, then God's knowledge of future events, including the actions of free creatures, cannot be falsified.

The issue with open theism, of course, if you've not heard of it, I would highly recommend the debate with John Sanders. John Sanders was one of the first formulators of open theology. There are many open theologies as radical as what's called process theology to much less radical attempts to formulate the idea that God only knows infallibly what he himself is going to do in the future.

But he cannot know what free creatures are going to do in the future. And so the future has to be at least partially open. And then there are differing levels as to how much openness there is. Once you get to process theology, everything's open.

God himself is developing and growing and changing and getting better and better and better. But the reality is all open theists are really stuck with a God who learns. Because if there's going to be any meaning to it, any room for serious autonomy on the part of mankind, then God has to learn things.

God has to experience new things, which means God is growing. God is getting better or worse, I suppose. I guess that would be a possibility. Process theology wouldn't. Process theology says God absorbs the good and sloughs off the bad in this every moment in time, not necessarily the moment that we measure moments in, but every moment in time comes into existence.

And then it goes out of existence and God absorbs the good and sloughs off the bad, so he grows. He's in process. So then a new moment comes into existence. And so we help God to get better by doing good ourselves, you see.

Whitehead and all that stuff. I'm not getting into that right now. But open theism and its various and sundry children, its primary focus is upon allowing for truly autonomous free will. And I've said many times, the only consistent Arminian is an open theist.

Because if you just simply have simple foreknowledge, you're not really answering the key questions. So John Sanders, for example, affirmed in our debate that when God created, he did not know that John Sanders would ever exist.

Well, why not? Because John Sanders is the result of many free will choices of free creatures, which is the very thing that God cannot have knowledge of. I mean, think about any person, including Cyrus in the book of Isaiah, is the result of many free choices of free creatures.

And if they're going to be free, then they can't be known to God. So God cannot have knowledge that someone named Cyrus is going to exist. He can predict, but things like that would be unpredictable until you're very close to that time period, especially things like names, let alone 700 years down the road.

So in Isaiah 40, you have the prophecy of John the Baptist, well, you got a problem. How many free will choices of who would marry who, of just simply in the genealogy that leads to John's parents, how many times were there free will choices as to whether someone would live or die?

Over and over and over again, people made choices that led to the reality that these two human beings brought about John the Baptist, who's the forerunner, who is prophesied in Isaiah chapter 40. If you say that all God can know is what he's going to do, and even then that doesn't really make much sense because if he is interacting with man, and if man is messing stuff up, because I mean, the consistent open theist is going to say, yes, Paul could have refused on the Damascus road.