John 3:16 Again, Racialism, CBGM, Peterson/Shapiro Dialogue

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. A ton of things to get to today. It's always scary when

I actually announce on Twitter what I'm planning on trying to get to, because as somebody said, let's see, what was it here?

Yeah, your Twitter profile is making promises your wall clock can't keep. Reminds me of Top Gun, writing checks, you know, whatever.

But anyway, and it's possible, because one of the videos I want to cover is 20 minutes long.

That would normally take, you know, an hour in of itself. So who knows? Too much to get to today.

I did just get a message on Facebook from Ed Kamazuski.

Ed, we're praying for you. You might follow him on Facebook. You know that he's a mystery man.

The doctors can't figure out what's wrong with that guy. And unfortunately, he gets to visit the hospital way too often.

But we'll continue to pray for him. He saw my mention of CBGM. So we will get to that in just a moment.

But I wanted to encourage everybody to pray for Ed in his continuing health issues.

Paul Washer, too, continue, you know, we've sort of forgotten it's been so long. But Paul Washer is still in a mode of recovery from his issues, too.

So pray for, continue to pray for Brother Paul. There are many in the body that need

God's healing touch and his sustaining grace in many, many ways.

So many things to get to today. The first, you all may recall that,

I don't know, what was it? Two, three months ago. The busier I get, the less, honestly,

I can keep track of the time stuff. But we responded to a philosophical attempt to attack

Reformed theology from the Tyndale philosophy guys and pointed out that it was based upon a tremendous number of straw men, misrepresentations, and just not overly useful when you're not accurately defining the other side.

And one of the issues that came up was the assumptions that were made regarding John chapter 3.

And that, you know, now someone just totally and completely distracted me.

Make sure the volume's down because I'm going to click on something here and see what the date on it is.

Wow, okay, well, so since I mentioned

Ed and Paul, evidently yesterday,

Votie Balcom posted a video that I had not seen and it was just now posted in the chat channel regarding his kidney issues and asking for prayer.

So my timing going down there may not be the best, or it may be.

Who knows? We will see. But certainly be praying for Brother Votie and goodness, just so many.

So I'll throw him on the list there. We had only exchanged a few emails recently in regards to the fact that I'll be teaching there in Zambia in, let's see, let's say the 24th.

Yeah, right a month from now. I think I arrived the 25th, so a month from tomorrow, approximately.

And so we need to be praying for the work there in Zambia and for Brother Votie and the whole family.

And I'll be looking at that video when we get done here.

Anyway, back to the issues here. We had addressed what you may recall, it was an attempted philosophical argument against Reformed theology based upon a misreading of John 3, verse 16.

Well, some others have attempted to come to the philosopher's defense, shall we say.

And one of those, Brian Abashiano on evangelicalerminions .org posted a brief article again yesterday.

Whoever reads John 3, verse 16 can know that whoever is really there.

And so I wanted to respond to this because this is an open shut case. This is Arminians misrepresenting us.

Again, I'm sorry, we'll document it. There's no way around this. There is no concept in John 3, verse 16 that is contrary to divine election.

There just isn't. You're reading it into it. The Greek doesn't support it. That's completely provable.

This is not even a debate. You've got to go someplace else to find this.

And when people sit there and preach, whosoever, whosoever, as if that is an indefinite concept that contradicts the idea of election, that is not in Pascha Pistuan.

It just isn't there. That's a fact. That's a black and white fact. That's just all there is to it.

Can I say black and white anymore? Because that used to just be about paper and ink. But anymore, did

I just microaggress someone? You see, that's why we can't have meaningful conversations anymore, because then you have to stop and go, oh, no, who did

I offend? Anyway, that's another subject we'll get to later on. So here's what's in the article.

There is an untenable grammatical argument containing that John 3, verse 16 supports limited atonement that has recently received some attention.

Uh, the argument is what John 3, 16 exegetically says.

And since John 3, 16 does not contain anything that opposes election, then it's consistent with particular redemption.

It's not contradictory to it, but it's not teaching it. Notice how, and I don't know why, I don't know why they have to do it, but Armenians, whether it's

Leighton Flowers or here Brian Abashiano or whoever does, why can't you just represent the real issue?

Is your case so weak that you always have to put this spin into what's being said?

Where have I said that John 3, 16 supports limited atonement, that it's actually teaching limited atonement?

It's not even addressing the issue. It's addressing the issue of what God has done to bring about salvation.

But when I go to teach on particular redemption, where do I go? I go to the texts that specifically teach it because it is specifically taught in other places.

The fact is John 3, 16 is specifically stating in its context that those who believe in the

Son receive salvation. Those who do not believe in the Son receive condemnation.

But there's nothing in the text that says, and it's all up to your free will, which one you are, which was the problem, the error that was made by the

Tyndale philosophy guys who focused upon whosoever and read into it something that Pasapestuon does not substantiate.

That's what the issue is. Keep your eye on the ball, folks, because man, I'll tell you, people like to spin stuff.

James White has made the argument for some time. No, I haven't. No, I haven't. Show me where I've made the argument.

I have said John 3, 16 teaches what John 3, 16 says. Go back. How long ago was that?

Uh, 2000? When did, when did Dave Hunt? Yeah, it was about 2001,

I think, is when I published my open letter to Dave Hunt regarding John 3, 16.

And that eventually led to our, our debate book. And it's on our, it's on our website someplace. I think it's been what, 17 years, something along those lines.

And you go back and when you see me teaching on particular redemption, I go to Hebrews. I go to Romans 8.

I go to the specific sections that are on the subject of the atonement. What I've said is

John 3, 16 is not contradictory because what John 3, 16 is specifically stating is that there is a specificity to faith.

There are certain people who believe. There are certain people who do not believe. It's perfectly consistent with God's electing grace.

There's nothing contradictory. And the common misreading of the text in emphasizing the whoever, as in that means every human being has the ability to believe, therefore there is no sovereign decree and therefore there is no decree of election is a massive overreach and it's not supported by the text itself.

So the first two sentences complete misrepresentations. Why? Why do this? I don't understand this.

Why would you do this? It's, it's destructive to your, to your, to your whole position, your credibility.

I mean, come on, everybody on our side knows what I've argued. There's, I've got entire books out on it.

So why misrepresent? I don't know. But his use of it in response to Arminian philosopher

Rich Davis's argument against limits and atonement from John 3, 16 has now surprisingly received some approval from two respectable

Calvinist philosophers, Guillaume Bignon and James A. Gibson, who approvingly referenced

White in his argument in their own response to Davis. Interestingly, and again, surprisingly, another respectable

Calvinist philosopher, James Anderson, made the same argument just days earlier without referencing White. That argument is basically that in the

Greek text of John 3, 16, the paricipial phrase pas hapistion is best rendered everyone believing,

Bignon and Gibson, emphasis original, rather than whoever believes or whoever is believing, meaning that there is no whoever in the text and therefore, as Anderson argues, no note of indefiniteness or conditionality.

Now, when you say indefiniteness or conditionality, what they want you to hear there is, it's conditioned upon free will, your abilities, capacities, things that are nowhere at all in the text.

That's not even what the text is focused upon. Hey, if you want to talk about those issues, human capacity, things like that, why not go to where John specifically addresses it?

John 6. Because there it's laid out clear as a bell. Some of us think you might want to interpret

John 3 and John 6 in a consistent fashion. Same author, same book, might be a good thing to do.

But this argument shows a misunderstanding of the Greek of John 3, 16. There is a very slight kernel of truth in it, in that there is no single word in John 3, 16 that in itself means whoever.

Well, that is exactly one of the points that we've made. And it is a interpretation of pas hapistuon, which means all the ones engaging in the action of the substantival participle, which in this case is believing.

That's where the whoever comes from. It means everyone, pas, doing this action.

The whole group of this, which in English we would say whoever of this defined group of believers.

So that pas does not refer to unbelievers, does it? No, it's definite. It's specific.

In fact, in this context, John 3, 17, you have the unbelievers mentioned. So in the immediate context, you have those two different groups right there.

Definiteness, no question about it. No one who teaches Greek is going to dismiss this. Nobody.

Very, very clear. But this is wholly irrelevant.

No, it is wholly central to its solid understanding of John 3. For there is a construction in John 3, 16 that conveys the meaning of whoever, yes, whoever of a group, yielding the accompanying notions of indefiniteness and conditionality that Anderson notes it would have.

The conditionality is believing. The indefinite is it's not identifying who in the group specifically.

Let's say there are 10 billion who believe. It's not saying we are talking about number 876 ,142.

No. So if you want to create some idea of indefiniteness and conditionality to try to smuggle your human philosophies and teachings into the

Bible, well, we can't stop you. We can point it out, shine a really bright light on it. But the point is that what is being said is every single one of the definite group of believers.

That's what posthapistion means. Okay? The construction in question is the

Greek phrase mentioned above, posthapistion, which can be reasonably translated as everyone who believes. That's right.

Or whoever believes. Whoever as in in that group. Not whoever as in any human being who therefore we are going to assume has the capacity to engage in the activity.

The text isn't referring to that. It's not even addressing that. Not even addressing that. But even if one translated as everyone who believes or if one prefers everyone believing, the sense of whoever is still there in the

Greek text. Only in the sense of every single one in the definite specific group performing the action of the substantival participle.

The meaning of whoever is actually quite strong in the construction used in John 3 .16. First, it utilizes a substantival participle, which itself can convey conditionality.

Yeah, the condition is believing. So everyone believing. There's really no argument here.

This is just really an attempt to say, well, we have a response. Just don't look too closely at it because it's really not a refutation.

But it sounds like we're talking about the same thing. And for people who want to not believe what

Reformed theology says, you got to have something to try to sort of back it up or at least make you feel better.

And this is the type of context in which substantival participles do typically convey conditionality, generic statements.

The conditional sense that yields to the sentence carries a generic idea that conveys that if anyone believes, that's the action, believes, whoever it might be, yep, then that person will not perish but have eternal life.

Exactly. It's specifically related to what action? Believing. It has nothing to do with an emphasis upon whoever can believe.

The condition is believing and it's the specific people who do believe in contrast to those who do not, the very next verse.

Right? Very clear. Very clear. So, so far, there's nothing here. Second, the addition of the adjective pos, every all, which modifies substantival participles strengthens the generic conditional.

As Daniel Wallace observes, the pos ha -akuon, agapon, poion, formula is always or almost always generic.

As such, it is expected to involve a idea. Most of these instances involve the present participle.

Exactly right. That's what we're saying. They, you know, by quoting all this stuff, but not actually refuting what we're saying or accurately representing what we're saying, it makes it sound like they've got a reply, but there isn't any substance to it.

I mean, in a debate where cross -examination be taking place, this is where the wheels would fall off badly, badly, as long as someone was forced to actually respond to what was being said.

Wallace goes on to specifically identify pos hapistulon in John 3 .16 as nomic, and elsewhere notes that his substantival participle with pos, which is what we have in John 3 .16,

is especially indicative of a generic subject. No question about it. Everyone believing is a nomic truth.

That does not take away the specificity of the action, the object of the action, its belief in the son.

And in this context, the contrast of that specific group versus another group, which is the ones that are not believing.

Nothing here at all relevant, nothing so far. And every person who's had at least third year

Greek, who's heard what I've said and is reading this is going, yeah, someone's blowing smoke here because they're not even dealing with what's actually been said.

There's nothing here that's relevant to what I've said in the past. I've taught Dan Wallace's grammar before.

I'm sort of familiar with what he's saying there. This is such an obvious aspect of Greek grammar that Greek scholar

William Mounce declares that it is a fact that whoever is in John 3 .16. Now, that was interesting because I wanted to go, you know,

I'm using Mounce's grammar. I want to read you the reference that is given.

And listen carefully to this section. I really appreciate the feedback you have given me so far.

Last week's blog was especially helpful as one of the comments emphasized that in some cultures, the uniqueness of Christ does need to be emphasized.

We are still working through John 3 .16 in an attempt to clarify how we present conversion, making sure that we say enough but not too much.

And so, we come to the that whoever believes on him. Isn't whoever a wonderful word? I've been in many conversations where this word is, in essence, being debated.

Some of the debate is theological, and I have no desire to enter that particular debate other than to emphasize this fact, and it is a fact.

Jesus says, whoever. Any theology that denies that word of God is simply wrong. We may have different understandings, but each of us must ask ourselves if we can truly stand the pulpit and cry out, whosoever will may come.

Now, can I stop right now? There hasn't been a stitch of grammar or anything else said here.

This is an Arminian preaching Arminianism. Bill Mounce is an Arminian. No question about it.

But does he establish the Arminian concept grammatically in this reference?

The fact is, he does not. Let me finish reading it to you. When I was writing my commentary on the pastoralists,

I read material from the antebellum south on the church's defense of slavery. Disgusting. For them, the whoever was racially limited.

I remember a story of a church in San Francisco that was praying for the hippies, but when the long -haired, unshaven recipients of their prayers started coming, they had to rethink whether whoever really included smelly people.

As the story goes, a hippie walked down the aisle and sat down cross -legged on the floor in front of the preacher. Many of the people were aghast, but one wise and compassionate man dressed in a suit walked down the aisle and sat down next to the hippie, showing that by whoever,

Jesus meant whoever. But perhaps one of the, perhaps should be one of the largest groups of people who do not feel whoever means whoever, are those who see their past sins clearly, and the horrificness of what they have done seems bigger than God's love and the cross.

They can't imagine that God would or could actually forgive them. If you feel this way, then you need to hear clearly the good news of this verse.

As we say in older English, whosoever will may come. If you cry out for forgiveness, if you believe in Jesus, then no matter what you have done, you will be forgiven.

Jesus' death on the cross is sufficient to cover the sins of all who come. The gate will swing open for every repentant and believing traveler who stands before it, no matter what they have done.

This is the good news of the cross and of God's love. A. This is not a scholarly article.

It is a devotional. B. We all agree with that. Whoever believes in Jesus Christ finds him to be a perfect Savior.

That isn't the issue, and Brian Basciano knows it. And he knows that he's misusing

Malice here. Not that Malice wouldn't disagree with him, but he's misusing it to present the idea, the concept that Malice is saying that it should be whoever in the sense of no election.

And he doesn't even try to make that argument. In fact, it's interesting, he even says that if you cry out for forgiveness, if you believe in Jesus, there's the conditionality that is in John chapter 3.

This is specifically about believers. And so, the question is, who has the capacity and ability to believe?

John 3 .16 does not address that. John 6 does. John 6 does. But John 3 does not.

And so, if you're going to sit here and try to say, oh, see, there it is. We go, I'm sorry. This is simply saying every single one believing in Jesus Christ has eternal life.

That's all you can prove from John chapter 3. You can try to read stuff into it if you want to. You can try to go beyond it.

But don't pretend that that's actually what was being communicated in these words in John chapter 3.

And if you don't have any problem making John chapter 3 contradictory to John chapter 6, well, that's up to you.

But those of us who want to allow the word to speak for itself can't really go there.

When challenged on this in the comment section on his post by someone who seemed to be taking the same position as Bignon, Gibson, Anderson, and White, Mounce replied the translation, whoever believes, is a translation of apostrophe stion, which is an indefinite construction.

Of course, it's indefinite. It's not identifying the specific person. It's identifying the specific action of believing.

I think you're missing that the past means any and every, any and every person doing the action.

That is the function of the indefinite use of the word. Irrelevant to this issue. Irrelevant to this issue.

Everyone agrees we're talking about every single person who does, who fulfills the condition of the substantival participle, which is believing.

There's no question about that. Let's identify the irrelevancies and get to the issue.

None of this has been contradictory, not a word so far, to what has been asserted regarding the

Greek grammar. And that is a simple statement of why John 3, 16 really does include the sense of whoever. While there may not be one single word in the

Greek text or whoever, the Greek construction used, pas plus ha plus present participle is an indefinite construction that conveys the meaning of whoever.

Yes, whoever does the thing, not whoever can do the thing. See what would have to be proven here by Brian Abbasciano and the

Arminians is that what this actually presents is an ability statement that the pas has the, that the pas means everyone, all of humanity, has the ability to do the action of the verb.

And nothing has been quoted, nor everything, nor will anything ever be quoted that actually substantiates that because that's the actual

Armenian argument. Don't let them, don't let them skip that. That's what they have to substantiate. Nothing here even comes close to substantiating that.

And they know it. They know it. Brian Abbasciano knows that. They know that. Such an embarrassing mistake, hasn't been any, could have been avoided simply by checking the standard

Greek lexicon for the New Testament studies, abbreviated BDAG, which suggests in its entry on pas that when the word is used as an adjective with the article and a participle in the singular as we have

John 3, 16 pas in the article together are properly translated as whoever or equivalently everyone who, not as an alternative meaning, but as another way to express the same generic and indefinite idea.

Remember, generic and indefinite has nothing to do with the reality of the fact that this is a specific group and a specific action.

It's simply meaning that it's anyone in that group that is in view.

That's the indefiniteness. See how they're smuggling a true grammatical concept and they're smuggling into that a completely foreign meaning as if that's what the text is saying.

Shame on you all. Shame on you. I'm sorry, but this is, this is a black and white issue. This is not even a debatable issue.

This is straightforward and you've been caught. You have been caught. The light is on you. Even John Calvin recognized

John 3, 16 uses the term whoever commenting and he has employed the universal term whoever both to invite all discriminately to partake of life and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers.

And we do not disagree. That has nothing to do with it because Calvin would have recognized the utilization of whoever does not bear the idea of ability of all human beings to undertake the action of the substantival participle to believe.

Amen. Now we have just got to get these Calvinist scholars to get on board with Calvin or at least

Greek grammar. Well, you sir, are the one who just had your Greek grammar handed to you on a plate.

You have misrepresented me. You've misrepresented the text. You've misrepresented the issue and you have now been refuted, sir.

We will stand by and wait for your apology for the misrepresentation. Okay.

What? What about it? Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. 2002, 2001. Yeah. Goes all the way back to then and you can find that on, it's on the website, isn't it?

Yeah. 16 years ago. Yeah. There's absolutely positively no question about this one.

This is not even a disputable issue. Not even a disputable issue. Okay.

What's the next thing? Ah, yes. Okay. Totally switching gears here.

Completely and totally shifting gears, switching gears, et cetera, et cetera. I started reading a book yesterday.

I was told that, hey, you know, this is what you got to read.

This'll, this'll clear up your thinking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I purchased and began listening to a book called

Divided by Faith. And it is a sociological book. It's not written by overt

Christians as far as I can tell. And if it was, they've got some major misunderstandings of what the Christian faith is.

I think they're primarily scholarly sociologists. And it is a, um, a book that I, that I've been told anyways, uh,

David Platt recommended a T4G and they had for sale in the bookstore at a

T4G. It's old. What was it? 2001, 2002, somewhere around there.

So it's, it's not super up to date. Um, but it is a pretty fair presentation of the systemic racialism, um, uh, presentation.

Um, it doesn't try to present, uh, any other sides to be perfectly honest with you.

Um, they did a lot of interviews with people. It's funny, uh, since it's an audible book, um, you can, you can sometimes tell the, uh, biases of the person doing the reading because when they get into what some people said in response to some of their questions, um, the more unenlightened the response is supposed to sound to a modern audience, the, the reader couldn't help but adopt a hick sounding, uh, less than urbane, uh, accent when, when reading the responses of these individuals.

Um, it was, it was pretty obvious, uh, throughout all of it. It's not a balanced book.

It doesn't attempt to be a balanced book. It's very clearly meant to present one particular perspective. Um, it's not also not balanced because it really does not take into consideration the very multi -ethnic, uh, condition, uh, that we face in, in the

United States. And so I got through five eighths of it. I'll, I'll, I'm going to try to finish up tomorrow.

Um, but there was, um, it is wholly insufficient from a

Christian perspective because it's man's wisdom. It's, um, it's man's perspective and it does not leave any room for the, the, well, it doesn't even, it doesn't even show a proper understanding of, um, the nature of the will in Christianity, anything like that.

Um, it's just, it's just so far, unless it turns around in the last few chapters, um, hasn't been overly, overly useful, although it's certainly nice to know what other people think has been extremely helpful, but, uh, didn't found it, find it to be overly helpful.

What I did find to be overly, uh, very, very helpful, uh, was a video that I was linked to, um, this morning in our chat channel.

I think Taco posted it and it was a fascinating, uh, video.

I don't think I still have it up here, but if you look up Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter, uh,

W -H -O -R -T -E -R, M -C -W -H, capital W -H -O -R -T -E -R, um,

I, I don't believe John McWhorter is a Christian. I don't know if Glenn Lowry is or not.

Um, in what I listened to, which was about an hour and 20 minutes in length or so is a discussion at a university, um,

McWhorter dropped a few profane remarks and, uh, but I didn't think, I don't think

Glenn Lowry did. So I don't know if, if he claims faith or anything like that. But anyways, uh, both black men, both discussing issues like white privilege and just to quote

John McWhorter, uh, when he was defining the black problem, he says, uh, we have been taught to fetishize racism.

Fetishize, make it a fetish. It's something we're absolutely focused upon. We look around for it. And when you look around for something, shockingly, you find it.

These guys will say the things that if I say I'm simply dismissed as a backwards racist, whatever it is, because the melanin count in my skin is such a lens for so many people that whether it's logical or rational, it just thrown out the window.

Um, these guys have the proper melanin count to address it. And while they don't agree a hundred percent with each other, um, to hear them talking about personal responsibility, the fatherlessness, uh, situation in the black community, um, just item after item, after item, after item, um, far more, let's put it this way.

I mean, I spent four hours or four hours listening to the

Divided by Faith book. I got much more out of an hour and 20 minutes listening to this video, which is available for free on, uh, on YouTube.

So I would highly recommend you, uh, look that up and, um, uh, you might find it to be very, uh, very useful.

Um, some people saw, uh, the tweet that was put out by Kyle J.

Howard yesterday. I'll read it for you. Uh, the Protestant Reformation was a response to the

Roman Catholic Church's apostasy. The black church was a Reformation response to the white

American church's apostasy. The former statement will anger many

Catholics and the latter will anger many evangelicals, both still true. That was yesterday, uh, yesterday afternoon when that was, was posted.

Now, I think we need to understand that if you follow this through with Kyle J.

Howard's statement, that he is more, uh, he has, he has more confidence in Martin Luther King's conversion before his death than the conversion of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, then you understand what's being said here.

Um, from this perspective, the term apostasy is being used of anyone who would support or engage in slaveholding in America.

So it seems that the idea is if you were a slaveholder, you were not a

Christian, period. It is an absolutely disqualifying sin as if there was an absolutely united understanding.

The funny thing is that book that I mentioned to you blows that away. It blows that away.

It takes the time to go through the history and even talk about some of the early abolitionists and the fact that their reasons for abolition were not really good reasons.

And in fact, I, I did learn some things, by the way. One of the things I learned is that, uh, uh,

Abraham Lincoln asked, I'd never heard this before, but he asked his military people, um, what we did or what would be possible, um, could it be possible to ship all the

Negroes back to Africa? Do we have the shipping in our merchant

Marine and our military fleet to transport all the

Negroes back to Africa once we have freed them in the war? Didn't know that, huh?

I never saw that. I visited the Lincoln Memorial many times. I didn't see any discussion of that.

Um, when abolitionism began, it began very moderately.

Um, and it, it only became more radical in the 1830s and 1840s.

And that's what resulted in the various splits. There had been, there had been many in the South that were members of abolitionist movements, but for gradualism rather than instant abolishment.

Sound familiar? Believe me, the abolish human abortion guys go all over this stuff. This is part of their, their thing, their shtick.

And so immediately issues like interracial marriage started coming up and all sorts of stuff like this that we look back upon.

And from a biblical perspective, ask why were these traditions regarding race?

Because there is no such thing. There's one regarding race and marriage.

You know, you've got kinism today. Kinism is a disgusting movement, but there are kinists out there.

There are kinists watching this right now. I find your, your beliefs disgusting. Um, always have by the way.

Um, and I've told the reasons why no one cares about my experience along those lines, but if you don't care about my experience and I'm sorry, it's gonna be really tough for me to care about yours, but be it as it may, um, these traditions that developed

Whitefield's belief that if Georgia doesn't have, uh, slavery, there's no way that they're going to be able to develop the land that they're, they're, they're going to be invaded from other forces.

And they're not gonna be able to defend themselves and I can be able to build cities. They saw this as an absolutely necessary thing for the survival of the infant nation.

Okay. You can take all of that, put it on the plate. For some people today, the idea is that it was clearly known by everyone that the church has spoken.

It was in the statements of faith. This is how you are to view all of mankind.

And there is no White or Black or, or, or Asian or, or anything. We're all one in Christ Jesus.

This was already an understanding. And these people rebelling against that, like, like, like knowing what the doctrine of the

Trinity is with clarity and, you know, like being the Sassanians by a time of Sassanus and the

Sassanian movement, the doctrine of the Trinity is, has been established for a millennium.

It's well known. It's, it's been defended. It's been defined. And they come along and say, don't think so. Oh, that's apostasy.

That is heresy. That is rejecting the once for all delivered to the saints faith as definitional thing.

So it seems like people are saying that Whitefield and Edwards and everybody else who owned slaves, and no matter how they treated them, and there's, they themselves,

Whitefield, for example, well, both of them addressed the necessity for humanity and humane treatment and, and, and all the rest of that stuff in regards to masters and slaves.

Well, who cares? Well, you have to care historically. You, I mean, if you, if you read the testimonies of slaves at that time, they talk about the difference between good masters and bad masters.

They recognize the difference, but today we're not allowed to because it's just, you know, you just have to throw it all into one pile so that you can build your narrative and stuff like that.

But anyway, that's not what the case was. That's not what the case was.

Even, you know, they point to Charles Finney. Oh, one of the early abolitionists, except he withdrew from that when they started getting too radical and had his own views in regards to, for example, no interracial marriage.

So the unwillingness and I've, man, I got attacked for just daring to do what

I've done with every other single person in church history consistently since I started teaching church history in 1990.

I mean, I've, I've had people that were not even alive when I started teaching church history coming after me because I say, you need to be consistent and look at people in the context in which they lived in light of what they knew.

If you want to go after Tertullian for not using Nicene language, that is anachronistic.

It doesn't make sense historically. He lived before Nicaea, not after Nicaea. You can't hold him accountable to stuff that comes afterwards.

Oh, but we can evidently when it comes to people like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, who while holding to the absolute definitional aspects of the faith would have held to positions, which

I certainly believe that today they would not have held to, but in their day held to positions that people today would find to be in error.

Now turn that around, turn that around and ask the same question about the standards that were applied to Martin Luther King.

Is there any less clarity in the 1950s and 60s regarding the doctrine of the

Trinity, person of Jesus Christ, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, physically, bodily from the grave, as there was in the days of Edwards and Whitefield?

No, nothing's changed. Edwards and Whitefield believe that, MLK does not.

Then when you come to the issue of the sin of Edwards and Whitefield, was there the same level of clarity and knowledge concerning slavery in America in their day as in the 1950s and 60s as to the requirement that you be a one woman man as a pastor of a church, that you do not engage in adultery, you not engage in sex with multiple women at the same time repeatedly over and over and over and over again?

Yeah, there was a whole lot more clarity in the 1950s and 60s about that. There wasn't any argument in our society about that.

So you try to draw that parallel and you are demonstrating that you are not thinking logically. Something else is in the way.

Something else is in the way. Same thing that's in the way with this tweet. You're going to try to parallel.

First of all, you're going to try to talk about the white American church. There was no single white

American church. There was a single Roman Catholic church with a Pope. And so the

Reformation could be very specifically targeted in regards to the very nature of the gospel in regards to that issue.

You do not have a parallel to that in regards to the quote -unquote white

American church's apostasy. So everybody was? There wasn't anybody that had even a clue?

They were all lost. Joseph Smith was right. Who knew? There you go.

It's just been proven for us by Kyle Howard that Joseph Smith got it right.

That there had been a massive apostasy and there had to be a reestablishment of the church

April 6, 1830. Yay. Let's all start reading the Book of Mormon. Or not.

Yeah. So it goes on and on and on and on and on and on.

Two more things and I've been, can you tell? You're saying you're too excited. No, I'm trying to get this stuff done because the video

I've got is really neat. It's 20 minutes long. If you play a 20 -minute video and I comment on that video, that's an hour in and of itself.

So the reason I'm going fast is I'm trying to get done in some reasonable time today.

Anyway, let me see here. Yeah, it went and warmed back up again.

Okay. We turn it back down. It's pretty cool to be able to do that on your, why do we call these phones?

They're not phones. It's a shame that we called PDAs PDAs and then we stopped using them.

And so now you can't use that. But personal digital assistant was actually about the only thing you should be able to refer to someone because that's what it is.

But I just turned the air conditioning down in the studio here with my phone, which is,

I didn't have to go, Alexa, please make it cooler in here. I didn't have to do that.

But we should put an Alexa in here just so that we can make sure that the NSA guys get a full shot of gospel teaching.

Try to convert them. Oh man. All right.

One more. I can't talk about this briefly, but I can try.

Let me see here. What did I do with that? Oh, it is on this. Okay. Where'd it go?

Oh, did I close it? I hope I didn't close it. No, there it is. Good. All right. Let's put this over here.

If you could make that ready when you want, it's going to look weird if I do that.

Yeah, it does. See, it doesn't get any bigger. Okay. Yeah, it's the same size one way or the other.

Quick geek segment that's important. Okay. Don't tune it out. We're going to get to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro here in a second.

So hopefully that'll be enough for you to hold on for that commentary when we do a geek section.

I think what we'll have to do is we'll just plan on doing open phones on Thursday so that we can, so if you've got questions about what we're talking about this time around, all this stuff, write them down so you don't forget them.

And we will try to cover them on Thursday and give you the opportunity of calling them.

I happen to note a comment made by a

Christian apologist. He's not an individual who's actually trained in biblical languages and has adopted non -mainline views of the history of the

Bible and text criticism, but made reference to CBGM and made this comment.

What this basically means, folks, is that nearly 300 years of textual scholarship is about to be tossed into the waste bin.

Now, is that a fair summary statement regarding what we have of CBGM?

Well, what can fairly be said is that if we are doing our jobs as textual critics and if we are keeping our nose to the grindstone, as they used to say,

I'm not sure anyone knows that means anymore, but and if we are keeping our eye on the ball, what is our goal?

Our goal is to establish the Ausgang's text, that original text, that authorial text.

There's arguments. Oh, by the way, oh, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Tonight is the only night if you want to see in a theater,

Fragments of Truth, the video on the movie with Dan Wallace and all sorts of other guys.

Craig Evans is the primary guy that they focus on about the the papyri manuscripts. Tonight's the only night, and I don't know why it's just one night.

I don't know how that stuff works. I teach Greek tonight anyway, so it's sort of irrelevant, but tonight's the night.

Now, obviously, they're going to be making this available. I saw it pre -release and for no other reason than some of the best high quality video you'll ever see of some of these papyri.

I mean, I've shown you P66, but in the video, you get to see P66 from all sorts of different angles, and you can see what it looks like, and how big it is, and all sorts of stuff like that.

It's well worth seeing. Now, Peter Gurry at Phoenix Seminary has posted a review of it.

I wanted to do the same thing, but all this race stuff came up, and it sort of delayed me from being able to do that.

Really, ethnicity stuff. I hate that term race. Anyway, but that's tonight, and it's well worth going to see.

So, if you've got freedom tonight, go see the film. You can look it up and see where it's showing locally and check it out, and it's well worth seeing.

Obviously, there are a couple issues I have some reservations on, similar to Dr. Gurry's reservations.

Mine come primarily from viewing it as an individual that's going to go, okay, how's

Bart Ehrman going to respond to this? What about our Muslim friends? How are they going to respond to this?

What would be some of the chinks in the armor, or some unguarded statements that were made, or some inconsistencies?

I was a little taken aback by some of the comments on John 118 that were made, and a few issues like that.

Those are the things that caught my attention. But overall, it is well worth going to see, and maybe if some of those issues come up, we can address them.

I'm glad I've forgotten to put that on the list. So anyway, we go back to the issue of CBGM.

Is it true that basically everything since the

Reformation, almost, or at least since translation of the King James, or anything beyond that, is going to be tossed in the waste bin?

Well, that is simply not true. That is only a statement that can be made by someone who doesn't understand CBGM, which is the vast majority of the human family at the moment.

What we're seeing with CBGM is actually, by and large, a major verification of the textual decisions that have been made in the modern period.

And this is easily seen by the fact that there were just over 30 places in the

Catholic epistles, the general epistles, where the consistent application of CBGM resulted in a change from the

Nessiolan 27th edition to the Nessiolan 28th edition. Now, that's over,

I think, off the top of my head, 3 ,400 places of variation that were examined in those books.

So think about that. Thirty out of 3 ,400? That's not exactly chucking something in the waste bin, is it?

No. It's a relatively small amount of change. And though some of the changes, like Jude 1 -5, will preach, that's what

I addressed. I talked about this at the G3 conference. That was my solo presentation after Dr.

Kruger and I did the canon thing. The vast majority, vast majority of these differences, you would have a hard time even recognizing them in your translations.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't some that are important. One that comes to mind,

CBGM caused them to adopt a reading that is not found in any manuscript for 900 years. That's concerning to me.

And there is one conjectural emendation at that one extremely, same, it's the same extremely difficult passage in Peter that Bart Ehrman made reference to in our debate in 2009.

But the vast majority of the text is absolutely the same in light of modern textual critical analysis of the manuscripts.

You go over to Acts over here. This was one of the reasons why I had all four volumes of Acts piled up over here.

You go over there and in all of Acts, you have about a little over 50 changes that have been made, the vast majority of which you would not even notice in your

English translations. They're just that minor. And I don't remember exactly how many places of variation.

I could pop it up here on the screen here, actually, because I have it up. But let me just give you an example of how

CBGM not only is not going to cause everything that's been done.

Now, what will it change? Well, what it will change is the terminology we use.

And I don't think we can as yet know what the final set of terminological, of terms we're going to be using is going to be.

Once all of the ECM is out, which could be many years from now, we might be in a position then to address the issue of textual families.

CBGM has pretty much done away with the Alexandrian text or with the

Cesarean was going bye -bye anyways, Western text, so on and so forth.

Those designations have not yet been replaced with anything because we've only done

Acts and the General Epistles. Once Paul and the

Gospels are done, then we're going to have a lot more basis upon which to say, hey, especially in the

Gospels, have we been able to identify other streams and what are we going to call them?

And will the Alexandrian text be identified in the

Gospels where you have many more papyri that are going to be at play there with P75 and P66?

What's going to happen when you run CBGM on the relationship between P75 and Vaticanus?

Is there going to be a group that is able to be identified from that?

Right now, nobody knows. That work is being done. There's one group in working on John.

There's Marx being worked on in Munster, etc., etc. And so, at this point in time, we don't know what terms are going to be used.

But one thing we do know is that one thing that CBGM has already shown us is that people who say that the

New Testament text has been radically altered have now been completely refuted without question.

And how can I say that? Well, over here, let me show you something. I showed you a couple weeks ago when we did the first introduction and maybe next week at some point or the week after, at least before I head up my trip to Colorado and Salt Lake and stuff, we'll try to get another section on CBGM and look at what's called pre -genealogical coherence.

We're just doing it one little step at a time. That's the only way to do it, believe me.

But I showed you some stuff, a comparison at, what was it, Act 1632,

I think. I just sort of scrolled some stuff up on the screen. Here on the screen, we have another part of the, these are online resources.

These resources are available online. We have another part. This is where you can compare two witnesses.

This is in the Book of Acts. And so, you'll see what I'm comparing is P45. That's my manuscript.

I call it mine. That's okay. It doesn't care. It's scribe is long dead, so it's irrelevant.

With 03, and if you know your unseal designators, that is

Codex Vaticanus. And so, here you have a comparison of the two.

And you'll notice that it only goes from Chapter 4 to Chapter 17 because that's all of P45 that we have in Acts.

That's why when I began, that's why on Sunday, I began preaching in Acts at Acts 4, because we're doing the

P45 series. We finished what was in John. Now, we've gone to Acts. And so, I started, actually,

I started in Acts Chapter 3, just sort of get a running start. But as far as Real Exegesis, we limited it to 4.

So, here you have, and this is amazing stuff. We live in an incredible day.

If I click on this little thingy bobby right there, it slides open. And here are the places of variation between P45 and Vaticanus in Acts Chapter 4, where both are existent.

Now, you need to realize, you go, oh, it's only three places. That's because P45 doesn't really start till Acts 430.

So, you do have a couple of places here, exactly what they are.

And then, and let me, I'll just define this really quickly. I can't go into it right now, because this is actually a more advanced element of CBGM.

It's called textual flow. This is something that is decided by the editors.

This is not something decided by the computer.

It's something that eventually, eventually, there needs to be for textual critics, a

CBGM program that we can manually alter, because you'll notice these arrows like this here.

This is the decision of editors that the reading in Vaticanus, ude, ais, ti.

The text flow goes from that to the reading in P45, ude, ais, tis.

Now, you'll notice there's only one letter difference between the two. Now, this raises all sorts of questions we can't get into right now.

This is where coherence is going to come in and the construction of stemmas and all the rest of that stuff.

Um, what manuscripts, what texts, not manuscripts, but what texts are related to other texts and how they're related is all do the text flow stuff.

And that's based on, on editorial decisions, but that's all been programmed into the computer here.

The point is, and you could just click on all and, uh, and all the, uh, all the variants between the two of them would, would, uh, would eventually pop open there, but it takes the database a while to, there it goes, uh, to do that.

And you can see, look at the amount of information here. It's just, it's just one thing's for certain.

We ain't hiding anything, you know? Uh, it's, it's there for anybody to, anybody to find.

Um, there's all the places where P45 exists and Vaticanus exists, and there's a difference between them in the

Book of Acts. Uh, that's pretty amazing. But what you have here is in, oops, why'd

I do that? Uh, I don't know. Uh, there we go.

Uh, Oh, I just messed up. Sorry about that. And go, let's go back to the other one.

There we go. Um, in all of the places in, uh, and now why did it put chapter six up there?

Huh? Well, uh, I wish I had the original, uh, there because it had the numbers.

There we go. I just had to, just had to reset it. All right. Here are, uh, the total number of passages where Witness 1 and Witness 2 are both existent.

So where P45 and Vaticanus, there, there is total of 1 ,099 places.

All right. And the number of agreements of these two at the variant passages attested by both.

So that's a different, that's different number. There are 951 variant passages that both contain out of 1 ,099.

In other words, where there are differences P45 and Vaticanus agree 86 .533

% of the time. That's where there are differences. That's not where they are identical.

You put those numbers in as in word for word, and they're going to be 98 to 99 % identical to one another.

And now it's not us just saying that you can show it from the computer materials themselves.

So the idea that the New Testament, we can go back. The, the idea that the New Testament has somehow been radically altered and every manuscript's wildly different than ever.

It's just verifiably via computer analysis able to be shown to be a bogus claim.

It's made by atheists all the time. There are a few Muslims that make things like that too.

But the, the evidence is just overwhelming against that.

So no, 300 years of scholarship is not going to be thrown in the waste bin.

What we are going to get and what we should get is a further clarification and deepening of our knowledge and the accuracy of what we're saying.

And that's exactly what we should want. Some people don't like that, but that's the way it is. All right.

Now, I guess I have to go big on this, huh? And I am going to need this and it's working good.

All right. I'm just going to jump into this. We all know what this is. Well, you might not know what it is. This is a video that I was directed to where Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are talking religion.

And I figured that's pretty relevant to listen in, comment, because Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, I see them quoted every single day in my

Facebook and Twitter feeds. And they say a lot of things that we all agree with.

But then there are those times when we go, well, and it is good to think about why we go, well, and clarify those things.

And so, you know, Jordan Peterson has identified himself as a Christian. I think he means that in a psychological fashion, certainly not in a baptized, following Jesus, believing everything

Jesus said in the scriptures fashion. And Ben Shapiro is Jewish. And evidently is writing a book on religion.

Well, I hope he can talk to some folks that can help clarify some things for him because he makes some statements here that are rather intriguing.

So let's listen. I'm not going to, I'm going to try not to interrupt a whole lot, but obviously the whole reason to play this is interact with it.

That's what Fair Use is about. And to make some comments. So let's dive in. Do you think there's any difference, or do you both think there's any difference?

Ben's belief in, or Ben's Jewish and your belief is Christian, comes from the

Christian tradition. Does that matter at all? Whatever differences there are in that little place where you're both saying, you know, we see the reasons why our morals and ethics and all that come from this, we're also acknowledging, you know, the real world and biology and all of those things.

Whatever differences you may have, which I don't even know that we, that any of the three of us know what those differences are, do they even matter?

They might. That would be a lovely thing to have a discussion about. I'd love to figure out if there are, if there are. I mean, it depends.

For me, it depends on the brand of religion that a person is espousing. So let's just do this with...

Now listen carefully to what Ben says here, because it's interesting.

Don't do. I mean... I mean, so my feeling, and I'm writing a book on this right now, actually. So there are certain principles that obviously undergird

Christianity that are from the Judaic tradition. I mean, it clearly... It's like a manifestation of the prophetic tradition.

Exactly. I mean, it's essentially an attempt to merge Jerusalem with Athens, as I think the

Book of John is the most obvious example, using the logos as sort of the unifying feature and writing the whole thing in Greek, right?

I mean, that was not the lingua franca of the time. That was not... Now, yeah.

For all you Ben Shapiro fans, you're now sitting there going, huh?

Obviously, the materials that Ben is accessing probably wouldn't come from our perspective, because we need to recognize

Bible -believing, historical Trinitarians, Jesus really rose from the dead.

It's not just a metaphor. It actually happened. The stone was rolled away.

The body came out the whole nine yards. People who believe that God spoke, that the scriptures are theanoustas, we are a minority.

You need to understand that. We often act like we are the majority, because we believe those things are definitional.

But when it comes to someone outside the faith looking at Christians, we're a small group.

And that can be very confusing to people, and it won't help us if we don't realize that in our trying to talk to people.

We need to be aware of the fact that they're going to hear from others things very, very, very different than what we're saying, and we need to be quick to recognize that and be able to respond and explain.

So, what you just heard isn't all that uncommon, though the entire

New Testament was written in Greek. It was the lingua franca of the day, and so there's nothing unusual that a book written probably after the destruction of Jerusalem would be written in the lingua franca of the day, which is

Koine Greek. But the point was that he points to the Logos, and he assumes, as much literature you're going to read will assume, that the

Logos is being simply borrowed lock, stock, and barrel from Greek philosophy.

And certainly, the concept of Logos is found before John, duh, but what that misses is the deep rootage of John in the

Hebrew scriptures and in Hebrew thought and in the Memra and the Devar and the

Hebrew concepts of word and revelation and the fact that the

Logos is impersonal in Greek philosophy, whereas in John, the Logos is intensely personal and the fulfillment of the prophecies and so on and so forth.

So, you know, when you listen to men like this who are not

Christians, they may, by common grace, have an understanding of categories of morality because why?

From our perspective, the reason these two men share so much in common is why?

They're both made in the image of God. Now, Ben Shapiro has his lens. Jordan Peterson has a

Jungian psychological lens we're going to hear, maybe, at the rate

I'm going. I think Rich needs to go home at some point today. And so do

I, for that matter. But they are made in the image of God, and so they can see these things, and they can see through the foolishness of the human systems that deny these things, but they're not going to agree, and they cannot create a consistent system while not believing what

God has done in Jesus Christ. That's, it's not going to be able to, you're not going to be able to put that together.

People were speaking, except in educated circles. So, all the Judaic principles, things like a

God involved in history, a God who cares about individuals, the notion that you have a choice between good and evil, so choose good, and that, and so that you will live long on the earth, right?

All these things were taken forward into Christianity. The major distinctions in terms of Christianity versus Judaism.

Well, let me just stop right there real quickly. There's all sorts of other things that were taken forward. The entire prophetic emphasis upon the

Messiah, the blessing of the nations, Genesis 12, Genesis 15, and, of course,

God's self -revelation, his personal nature, and the fact that he is the one that is accomplishing history itself, is, you know, that whole monotheism,

God's revelation in nature, that man is creating the image of God, all of this stuff, which

I would think would need to be mentioned, are quote -unquote brought forward and continue within the

Christian faith. Are the idea that, and again, it depends on your interpretation of Christianity, early Christianity sort of suggested that history had ended with Christ, and then in later kind of iterations of Christianity, that was moved beyond, right?

It wasn't that history had ended, it was that Christ would come back when history had reached its logical progression. The question of history didn't end, but original messianism was, this is the

Messiah, we're done, right? History's over. It was a millennialist religion. Right, that's what, very few people think that now. That's right, so this is why

I'm trying to distinguish, you know, brands of Christianity, because obviously they're... Yeah, this is going to be an interesting book.

I suppose what he's referring to is, at least in, you know, when the

Messiah comes, you know, the total wrapping up of all things, and so maybe the idea is because, as Jesus himself taught, you've got, you know, suffering

Messiah, and those, as the New Testament teaches, those before Christ had not seen the mystery, the mystery being the

Jews and Gentiles coming together in the one body, the church, the gathering together of the elect, the fulfillment of God's purposes now for 2 ,000 years, the gospel going to the ends of the world, so on and so forth.

From his perspective, and again, you know, the best that you've got, if you are not a true supernaturalist, is to sort of cobble together ways of viewing what's clearly meant to be a supernatural religion in a somewhat naturalistic way.

So, well, you know, the earlier version was this, and the later version was that, so it's all developmental, you know, it's, you're stuck going, well, you know, you've got similarities with this religion over there, and that religion over there, and that's why it never gets anywhere, and that kind of stuff, and it's what they've got.

That's the problem in not having a truly biblical faith, but I think that's probably what he's referring to.

Serious differences, even in basic root level, between Catholicism and Calvinism and Lutheranism, and all these things have different iterations, so, you know, my very strong belief in free will and my actual building of a moral system, and Judaism's building a moral system on the notion of free will obviously runs directly counter to, for example,

Calvinism, right? Calvinism suggests that free will is comerical, and there's no basis for it, and that God grants you grace based on what he wants to do, so it depends on the brand of Christianity, but...

So, obviously, Ben doesn't have much interest in Calvinism, though I don't think he understands what we mean when we use the term free will, especially in morals and ethics, in comparison to man's inability, but the idea of a sovereign decree of God obviously is immediately dismissed by Ben Shapiro at that point, so those of you who are constantly posting

Ben Shapiro videos, when the book comes out where he addresses these things, you're going to be just a tad bit on the disappointed side with what's going to be said,

I'm afraid. I think that overall the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, in large measure, is, especially in the early conflict, was political rather than ideological in a lot of ways.

It was a new religion attempting to establish its own footing and was angry that Jews would not join this new religion.

Not even close. Okay, let's just be clear there. Ben could use a little time with the book of Acts and things like that.

No, was there politics involved? Well, the Sadducees were deeply involved in political alliances with Rome and stuff like that, but no, this was significantly more than primarily political alliances or Christianity being angry that the

Jews just don't get on board and accept Jesus as the Messiah. A little off base there in its balance in his understanding.

Yeah, we don't want to do the persecution stuff at all. And leave behind tradition. I think there are certain ways in which

Christianity, you know, like, for example, the main distinction between Christianity and Judaism that people usually make is that Christianity is a grace -based religion and Judaism is an acts -based religion.

Now notice, they're going to be focused upon man's role, man's salvation, the idea of the revelation of Yahweh himself in human flesh, the revelation of the triune

God, God's purposes, all that stuff. There isn't any place in that in Ben's understanding.

And to be honest with you, there really isn't. Jungian psychology isn't big enough to hold it either.

So you sort of have to filter out what we recognize as the highest transcendent messages of the

New Testament, because the human traditions that you're using, whether they're Ben's Jewish human traditions in a modern garb, or Jordan Peterson's human traditions from psychology, are just not big enough to be able to contain the awesome power of the message of the incarnation, the message of the empty tomb.

Just not big enough that doesn't have categories big enough to be able to express those things.

Meaning that Judaism says you sort of earn your way into heaven, right? You earn your way toward a better life. And Christianity says if you believe, right,

I'm the way, the truth, and the life, if you believe, then you're good. But the truth is that— Now, that's not accurate either direction.

I mean, hopefully at least one thing that we've learned from the

New Perspective argument is at least to recognize that there have been times when there were elements of grace within Jewish thought.

And he may be representing, you know, the current modern, you know, Orthodox movement, which is really removed a long way from Tanaitic Judaism, Second Temple Judaism, the

Judaism of the New Testament time period. But still, and then what you're going to hear here is just a classic example of a—and this is not meant—I'm not putting anybody down, but a very shallow understanding of the

Christian message on the parts of both men in regards to relationship of works and grace.

And look, if you've already put the Calvinists out the door, that's about all you've got left. Because the fullest, deepest explication of the relationship between faith alone and the necessity to walk in obedience to Christ is found in the concept of divine election, regeneration, and the nature of saving faith and ministry of the

Holy Spirit of God in conforming a people to the image of Christ. If you don't have all of that sovereign work of God, it becomes a mishmash.

That's why the synergistic systems have never been able to give a coherent answer on these things.

And if folks like Ben Shapiro are looking for a human autonomous synergistic foundation in Christianity to latch onto, you know, they're going to reject the biblical perspective because they're approaching it from below rather than from the biblical revelation above.

And there's always going to be misunderstanding as a result. Christianity sort of backdoors the

Judaic view by saying, if you really do believe, then you're going to act in these particular ways to demonstrate your belief.

Yeah, well, there's this weird paradoxical relationship between the idea of belief in Christianity, the belief that Christ came to save everyone from their sins, and that all you have to do is admit that and you're redeemed.

Like, there's symbolic truth to that that would take a long time to unpack. But there's also an injunction that goes along with that.

If I could just mention, just real quickly, here's what happens when belief is separated from repentance.

You know, you just admit that, and it's not just an admission, because it involves your own sin and your turning from your own sin, your recognition of Christ as sin bearer, the justice of God in bringing punishment against sinners.

And if you try to sanitize the gospel to make it more appealing and more acceptable within scholarly circles, it doesn't make much sense.

You've got to have the whole thing. It's got to be there. Imitate Christ in your life. Exactly. So it's like, well,

I feel like a lot of these distinctions are almost, some of them are almost a little false. I mean, meaning that they're either

Christian misreads of Judaism or Jewish misreads of Christianity. And that when you get to the root of it, I mean, this is what

Maimonides says, that there are significant differences between Judaism and Christianity. But his view of Christianity from a Jewish historical point of view is that Judaism was never bound to convert billions of people around the world.

But Christianity was, specifically because we have a lot of crap we got to do. I mean, Jews have, we have 613 commandments.

You know, we got to, we have to keep kosher. We have to do all of these things. I appreciate you doing a lot of them for me. Yeah, no problem.

I'm taking care of it. Yeah, I'll transfer over the points. I assume someone's keeping track of it. I'll give you one of my afterlives.

Yeah, exactly. But I think that Christianity ends up doing a lot of those same things that, you know, there were supposed to be stark distinctions just under different guys.

So when it comes to, this is why in the modern world, when the discrimination between, you know, from Christians toward Jews largely has ended,

I think that what you're seeing is this tremendous confluence between particularly Orthodox Jews and observant Christians on matters of values.

Because once Christianity in the late 20th century, in the mid 20th century, and in America more broadly with Christianity, because American Christianity is very different than European Christianity.

Once there was the idea that Jews were not the enemy to be converted, but were, maybe you still want to convert me, but we're not going to come at you with a knife.

We're going to come at you with a book. Yeah. And that we share a common framework for how the world is supposed to work.

You just may not agree with the second half of the book, right? And then I think that that's created a pretty good working relationship.

This is why I'm struggling to come up with what are the significant differences. And so I -

It's interesting that there would be a struggle to come up with the significant differences.

And I don't blame that. I don't place that primarily on Ben Shapiro.

Jordan Peterson is not a believing Christian. He may use Christian categories, but the idea of Jesus as Lord and that, you know, if you want one of the major differences, there it is.

What is the Christian proclamation? That Jesus is Lord of all, of all nations, of all peoples.

He's the risen Lord. He's the coming Lord. He's the reigning Lord. He's, he's building his kingdom upon earth.

And so when he uses illustration, we've got 613 commandments. We don't have time to be converting the world. That's your job. That flows naturally for the

Christian because we're going out into Jesus's world. And every nation that stands against him, the people in the

California state legislature that are standing against him, and that's, that was another issue

I was going to comment on and I didn't, and I guess it's because I got to preach a little bit on Sunday, so I let off some of that steam.

Maybe before we take calls on Thursday, I can address some of those things, but the insanity going on in California.

But when they stand against Christ, which is what they are doing, by the way, that they are rebels and that we have a message of turn, repent from your rebellion.

There has been this grace that has been granted, but there will come a day of judgment and God will judge the world by the one he raised from the dead.

That was Paul's message in Acts chapter 17 and it remains our message as well. This is one of the fundamental differences and that will impact your moral and ethical system, uh, big time.

I need a Christian to tell me what is the significant difference. I can argue with my question because I know my own religion better than I know. My question is that you catch it.

I need a Christian. Tell me, well, in all these times, in all this rubbing shoulders with political conservatives, he's not encountered a

Christian that could tell him or was willing to do so? Um, that's, that's scary.

I mean, I don't know if the role that the state plays in Judaism and Christianity is the same because now

I'm sorry, that's not the first thing I'm going to think of. I mean, yes, what he's talking about is nation of Israel, national promises versus gospel proclamation to all nations.

It's no longer a national concept, which is I think what he's trying to express here. That is a difference, but it's a difference that pales in insignificance in comparison to the very clear and obvious reality of prophecy, fulfillment,

Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. He's the risen King, Lord of Lords. There's where the issue is.

Either he was who he claimed to be or he wasn't. And that's the fundamental issue. I'm not sure what to make of the, like what

I would say is the Jews put a tremendous amount of emphasis on the state as a mechanism for salvation, something like that.

That might be the symbolic idea that underlies the establishment of Israel. And I would say that in Christianity, I mean the nation, or you mean like the government,

I mean the nation, but then it gets tangled up with the government, right? So, so, so right.

This is a distinction that Christianity is universal, universalistic religion, right? The idea is that in the kingdom of God, everyone is

Christian, basically. And Judaism is not in one sense, but it is another, which is that God identifies a nation that he treasures as his own.

And he has a special relationship with that nation, but Judaism is not exclusivist with regard to who gets into heaven. So there's this, there's this basic idea in Genesis that there are commandments that are given prior to the giving of the

Torah, right? That there's the, what we call the Sheva Mitzvot B 'Noach, the seven commandments that are given to the sons of Noah, meaning all mankind.

And these are things like no murder, no idolatry, no adultery. They basically mirror a lot of the 10 commandments.

And so the idea in Judaism is that God, it's almost like a priestly caste. God shows the specific group of people to be a light unto the nations by demonstrating what a godly lifestyle looks like if you dedicate every aspect of your life to God.

And then he said to everybody else, I know not everybody else is up to this. And I, and in fact, Jews are supposed to try and turn away converts, but if you, but you can still get into heaven.

The idea that we are trying to force anyone into, into being Jewish, that that's not a thing.

So nationalism without conversion, think about that psychologically as an attempt to both manage the preservation of group identity.

So that would be culture, a cultural identity, which has some utility and also to be able to coexist with others who are doing things in a different way.

And again, Judaism has had a long history of, of just like every other religion. You know, what you're going to hear as Dr.

Peterson finally gets an opportunity to talk, you'll notice that Ben talks a lot more than he does. What you're going to, what you're going to hear is you're going to hear a professional psychologist and he runs everything through that lens, everything through that lens.

And so you may ask, well, then why does he get so much stuff right? Because if you really observe man closely, you're observing what?

A creature made in the image of God. And if God grants you some light to be able to see those things, then you're going to be able to consistently, to a point anyways, observe how human beings behave.

That's why Romans one can be true in any culture is the reality of man being made in the image of God.

But that's not, you can't start down here and try to climb up to the truth.

You're, you're just not going to get very high when you start at the wrong point. Sort of evolution on this stuff, right?

Like when you read the book of Joshua, there's actual forced conversion that happens in the book of Joshua. But by the time you get to mid early

Christianity and mid point Judaism, because Judaism is a lot older in Christianity, then you're already talking about Jews who are not looking to convert people.

They sort of want to live in their own state. They don't want to bother anyone else for the most part. So the idea of like a tidal wave of conquering

Jews going out, I mean, even to think about it now is hilarious, right? Nobody thinks about it that way, except if you're a conspiratorial mutt bag, but it's.

Inquisitions usually work the other way. That's right. So, but so, so any, anything that you might've heard

Ben just say, would any thing jive with a fundamental belief that you have that would cause a problem?

You know what I mean? Like cause a problem in society. Well, I think that one potential problem that's, that's worth discussing, but it would take forever to discuss it is the relative role of the individual versus the state.

I mean, you see this argued out in the prophetic books in the old Testament.

I mean, there's the Jewish state and it's, it's sort of the central player in some sense, but there's clear evidence that it can become corrupt.

It can fall away. And that a prophet who's an individual has to step forward and we revivify it.

Right. And so there's tremendous emphasis on the utility of the individual. You see that. And of course, both in old and new

Testament, it's God who sends the prophet. It's God who brings about the, the, uh, repentance of Israel and stuff like that.

It's, it's divine initiative taking place. Judaism, I would say overall, it's, it's a, it's a very cohesive.

It, it, it promotes in group cohesion, let's say, but it also allows for individual expression in a very interesting ways, because there's tremendous emphasis in Jewish culture on learning and articulation and mastery of ideas.

And so that provides this space for the individual to flourish with Christianity. You see more of a move away,

I would say from the idea of the state. Now that's not necessarily without its troubles.

One of the things you pointed out was, well, as Christianity becomes more about the individual, the religion itself tends to fragment like it did with Protestantism until just fragments right to the point where every individual is their own church.

And then you have no. Wow. Where have we heard that before? And you know, if that was

Jung's criticism, then Jung didn't understand the centrality of scripture and, uh, the work of the spirit of God and amongst the people of God and all, all, all that kind of stuff.

Or he was just simply saying, you know, you've either got a total atomization or you have either in Judaism or in Roman Catholicism, ultimate authority found in one person rather than in many people.

I don't know. I'm, I haven't read Jung and have no intention of doing so in the future either, but maybe that's where it's coming from.

Continuity and no tradition. And the Catholics were kind of a bulwark against that. But I do think that there's a discussion to be had about the relative role of the individual in redeeming the world, let's say versus the state in redeeming the world.

And I would say the Christians come down more strongly on the side of the individual and the Jews come down more strongly on the side of the state.

Now, like I'm willing to be corrected about that because I've never actually been able to have a discussion with anyone about that.

So I don't know. I think there's some truth to that. I mean, I think the idea of, you know, in, in Hebrew Am Israel, like the idea of the nation of Israel being paramount.

And when you pray, you pray in collective terms. You don't pray in individual terms. Everything is, is done in terms of anachnon, in terms of we praying as a group, right?

You're supposed to pray in a minion. So how do you both square that away in your own ways? How do you square that away? Because there's a lot of play in the joints.

There's a lot of play in the joints, meaning that, so for example, to take the most, to take the most obvious example, if you, if you want to talk about the power of the

Jewish state in, in sort of biblical context, there's tremendous argument between whether a kingship is a good thing or a kingship is a bad thing in the old

Testament, right? I mean, it says, it says like Samuel warns the Jewish people, if you take a king, here's what's going to happen.

It's all going to suck. Right. And then they form a kingship and things suck. And so there's a strong case to be made that kingship was not actually what was wanted because you have an entire period of just judges and the judges are legitimately just individuals who are trusted by the people, but then can be supplanted at any time by another judge who's not from the lineage.

So, you know, Judaism, it matters to the extent that you're following God's law. But if you stray away from that, the idea,

I think Judaism has always said that what you do is what makes you part of the group, not what you are. So Judaism has a weird dichotomy in it.

That's largely driven by exigent circumstances, which is the idea of biological Judaism versus the idea of religious

Judaism. So I care very little about biological Judaism. Not all who are of Israel are

Israel. That might be one way of putting it. Like when somebody says, you know, somebody is such and such as Jewish, Noam Chomsky is

Jewish. Like, so what? I really don't care. And I think that most Orthodox Jews, we basically biological

Judaism or your mom was Jewish, which is the way that it works in Orthodox Judaism is the sort of the entry ticket to being

Jewish, meaning you have to either have converted in or your mom has to be Jewish in order for you to become fully Jewish.

But the practice is what matters to me more than anything else. And that's where you get back into grace based versus acts based a little bit.

Right. Well, it's also that's another place where the group identity issue becomes paramount.

It's like, well, there's this group. Well, how is membership defined? Well, let's say it's it's defined by ethnicity.

Something that would be related to the descent through the mother. It's like, well, that's a problem.

I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it's a demarcates a group. You say, well, this is a group that only we can belong to.

What's weird is you can convert in. So this is why I say when there's play in the joints, a lot of the problems are solvable through the idea that you can convert in.

So Judaism says you can't convert out, but then we don't punish people who leave. Right. But is it which is different than Islam?

Yes. But it's actually a relatively important point. But but I mean, one of the people who

I work with at my company, Andrew Clavin, is a guy who was born Jewish and now is Christian. So in my view, he's Jewish. But am

I going to drag him down to my synagogue? It's not a thing. So it's but I think that when when did our language change?

And what you say now is that's not a thing. It's pretty recent. It's with been within the past couple months.

That's not a thing. My daughter does that. That's not a thing. And but it is a thing.

But it's not a thing. I can't keep up with it. The group identity. The one thing

I will say for group identity is that what we have seen is that if there is lack of group identity, that group identity is filled usually by nefarious groups, meaning that people do have a necessity.

The idea of existing that you find your meaning or you find your purpose or you find your identity just in yourself as an individual is not only wrong, it's belied by virtually all of human history.

Carefully, you're going to make an argument for identity politics. But the point that but what

Judaism does, what America does, it says, find your identity in the ideas. Yeah, right. That's the difference is what

I'm saying. This is why I don't care about biological Judaism, particularly that I care much more about the ideas that you hold.

So I'm in favor of group identity. If group identity is built around a set of ideas that are worth preserving, I'm not in favor of group identity.

Like I am a conservative. That's a group identity, right? That's an identifier more than it's an identity, meaning it's a way of identifying me as a person who thinks this way.

And because I think there are differences in modes of thought, then those group identities do matter.

I mean, this is why we get together. This is why we have discussions. This is why we have families, families. Yeah, but I'm glad you

I'm glad you said that the way you did, because I try to challenge myself on that all the time because I talk about the individual,

I believe in the individual, and I want to make sure that I'm not occasionally going back. If we can find commonality, if we can, and this is what

I think is one of the things that's broken down, is we used to have a common purpose. Like I have this framework that I'm working on in the book that I'm writing, where I basically say that in order for an individual to be happy, you need four things.

You need individual purpose, you need individual capacity, the feeling that you can accomplish that purpose, or at least make moves in that direction.

You need a communal purpose. You do need to feel like you're a part of a group that's moving in the right direction and you need communal capacity, which both allows the community to activate together and also protects your rights as an individual to do what you want to do in pursuit of your individual purpose.

And that's the apotheosis of happiness. And that's what I think the founding fathers were trying to do in the United States, for example, set up a framework where you could fulfill all of these things.

But you do need the idea of communal purpose. And one of the things that's happened post enlightenment is that people don't even think in terms of they either think purely in terms of communal purpose or not at all in terms of communal purpose.

They think either purely in terms of communal purpose, and that's identity politics, meaning I'm black, therefore the black community should do

X, or I'm Jewish, therefore the Jewish community should do X. And then there are people who think not in terms of communal purpose at all, meaning full -on libertarian,

I make my own meaning. We don't have to have anything in common. And that's a lie. Even libertarians believe we have to have an idea of liberty in common.

And they have to live with other people. Right, exactly. Harmoniously. And when we don't have any sort of communal purpose, and we live with a bunch of people with whom we share nothing, then it falls apart incredibly quickly.

Okay, so here's how the Christian drama looks to me. It addresses this issue, right?

So Christ is presented as a figure who's an absolute master of his tradition, right?

He's debating with the Jewish elders when he's 12. So think about it psychologically.

First, you're a child, and you're dependent on your parents. And then you have to make the move from being a child dependent into the world.

But you don't move from child to individual. You move from child to group. That's your teenage gang.

That's your adolescence. You have to catalyze your group identity. If you don't have a group identity, it's actually a developmental failure, right?

But then you might think, well, wait a second. Group identity is necessary, but is it the highest?

Does it represent the highest plane of moral achievement? The answer to that is no. You have to emerge from your group as an individual.

Okay, so now this is how I read the Christian story symbolically. And this is a consequence mostly of having studied

Jung. He said, let's catch that. Because if you're sitting there going, what?

You've got to understand the lens. You know, we've been talking about lenses recently. Well, Jordan Peterson has his lens.

And that lens is Carl Jung. And it is psychology. And it is a certain psychological perspective.

It has not come from the scriptures themselves. And so you end up with, well, illustration.

I live in Phoenix, and this is a very bright valley, lots of lights.

And so, you know, I do a little astronomy. And, you know, I'll set my scope up in the backyard.

It stinks to do this in Phoenix. We're low, there's dust everywhere, and there's light everywhere.

And it's really hard to see anything. But I can put a filter on my lens, an

O3 filter, that will primarily allow a certain range of light through, that will make it easier to see things like nebula.

But if I then turn the scope to something that it's not meant to be looking at with that filter,

I won't even be able to see it. So a filter will determine what's going to get through and what you're going to see based upon the constituent makeup of that filter on a telescope.

Same thing here. If your primary filter is Jungian psychology, then you're going to see

Jesus symbolically representing these categories of human experience as Carl Jung has laid them out.

What that means is a whole bunch of the revelations just gone. And what does get through will not be in the proper relationship to all the rest of the stuff, because the intermediate stuff that holds it all together consistently has been filtered out.

And whether you're Ben Shapiro, and that filter is a

Judaism that rejects the messianic claims of Jesus, or Jordan Peterson, the filter is going to function as the filter.

Look, you need group identity. That's the persona that you wear. You have to have a persona, you have to be able to wear a suit, you have to simplify yourself for other people, you have to be able to play the game.

Otherwise, you just have failed developmentally. But if you're only a persona, then that's a big problem, partly because when the group goes insane, so do you.

Okay, now you got to emerge out of the group. Okay, so now you need a symbol for what emerges out of the group.

Okay, so Christ is the symbol of what should emerge out of the group, speaking psychologically. Bear the tragedy of life, speak the truth, be willing to transform through death.

That's the rules. Now, I'm speaking purely psychologically. You learn something new, you learn it, it makes you suffer.

The part of you that's wrong has to die. You have to let go of that. And it's hard, especially maybe you learn something profound.

It's like you have to regrow an arm. It's really painful, you know. But you identify with the part of yourself that transforms through voluntary acceptance of suffering.

And that's what Christ represents as a symbol. And I think that that's correct symbolically.

This is what actually severed the relationship between Jung and Freud, by the way, because Jung laid out his understanding of Christianity in those terms.

And Freud, it wasn't a Jewish Christian thing, you know, because Freud was really, he was

Jewish by ethnicity, but not practiced. No, not at all. He just didn't want to have anything to do with religious ideation at all.

He thought that that would introduce, he called it like a black tidal wave of occultism back into what he regarded as a science.

He had his point. But I think Jung got the symbolic structure right. And so what does that mean in relationship to Christianity and Judaism?

Just by the way, unfortunately, you can take biblical parameters, biblical stories, and fit them into almost any structure, as long as you're not trying to drive that structure from the scriptures themselves.

So liberation theology has done that. Neo -Marxism has done that. But it's all dependent upon the filter you put on as to what you're going to get rid of and what you're not going to see.

Because your authority is your observations of humanity rather than the clear revelation that God has given, which should then become the lens through which we see everything else.

So this is someone looking from the outside in through a lens, and they're seeing some good stuff, but it's not the gospel.

Rather than being regenerated, having that lens that is then provided as the new man being renewed by the

Spirit of God, and now the lens you have is what you look outward on the world and make sense of the world around you in relationship to the one who made it and created it in the first place.

That's a big difference. That's really a big difference. It's really complicated because you have the prophetic tradition in Judaism, and the prophets are also symbols of people who emerge from the pathological group, who step forward courageously, and who reconstitute the group.

You believe these people could exist right now? Which people? The prophets.

I think prophets of sorts exist always. I think Dostoevsky was a prophet. Nietzsche was clearly a prophet.

I mean, he predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century. Can you imagine predicting what's going to happen in the 21st century?

The reason I asked it like that was… In case you're wondering who Nietzsche was, Nietzsche was the knee -heel, the nothing, the philosopher of emptiness, and God is dead, and he was a prophet.

Obviously, we're using the words prophet in very, very, very different categories here.

You just got to keep that in mind. If you're going to appreciate Jordan Peterson, you're not going to appreciate him if you are not cognizant of the filters that are being applied and how they're functioning.

Because I think when you say prophets, I think people think of someone coming down from heaven, and they're going to have a halo on, or some crazy thing, but you think that's what

I'm trying to get to, the realism, which is what you're talking about. I actually fully agree with this. In fact, so does Maimonides. I mean, Maimonides has an entire section in Guide for the

Perplexed about prophecy, and what he says is there's Moses -level prophecy, the legislating prophet, and he says he's the only legislating prophet in the

Jewish view, but all the other prophets are just people who see things incredibly clearly, essentially. They're people who've studied philosophy, and who have studied human morality, and have studied -

Which is not a biblical view of the prophets. God sends the prophets. God gives the message to the prophets.

Maimonides is far removed from the Old Testament and even from the

Judaism of the days of Jesus. The human being, and then that's what - And they're way down on the iceberg. That's right. That's the thing that makes them different.

Exactly, and so in that sense, people who - The thing about providing a certain level of stability for folks, and I think there are levels of prophecy, is what

I'll say, and I think that the better you are at recognizing human behavior and the interplay of forces, the better you are at saying, okay, here's what's going to happen next week.

I think it's very difficult for anybody to say, here's what's going to happen in 100 years, because if you could predict that, you'd make a lot in the stock market, but I think you can certainly -

Well, you can also get a sense of plate tectonics. Right. The details rub out, and I think that's where we're at now.

I believe we are in a war of ideas. We're at a point where we're debating the validity of postmodernism.

And that was the end. Hey, look at that. That was one of the earlier videos that for some reason, this particular player just keeps track of everything.

I haven't figured this video player out very well yet, obviously. That was one I had problems with before.

Anyway, so a lot to cogitate upon there.

I hope just a few interruptions, a few interactions gives you some context to sort of look at what's being said and why it's being said.

And I realize we can really appreciate, it's enjoyable to watch

Ben Shapiro take apart a pro -lifer at an event or something like that.

It's wonderful to see Jordan Peterson make leftist media types drool.

It's enjoyable, but we need to pray for both of them. And what would be wonderful is if they would have more interaction with serious

Christians that can fill in the obvious gaps that exist in their understanding of the faith and challenge them with the claims of Christ.

That's what's really needed. Well, there you go. So I do want to,

I'm going to make a note, I do want to look at what's going on in California next time.

Very, very important, I think, that we recognize very dangerous moves taking place right now in our society around us.

What's going on in California, what's going on in other places, just a demonstration of how far the totalitarianism has moved in our culture that will eventually make it impossible for us to do what we're doing right now.

Right now we have the freedom to do this, but we already know that YouTube's censoring things.

The big thing you hear about on YouTube is demonetization. They demonetized this video, they demonetized that video.

We've never said that because we stopped monetizing a long time ago. We recognized this was coming and said we're just not going to go there.

Yes? We monetized for maybe three weeks to a month when we first went on YouTube, and then

I read the rules and I went, oh my, they can do anything they want with our stuff.

We could be years down the road with all of this media out there and it could just vanish in a flash and there'd be nothing we could do about it.

Which is what's happened to a lot of people. Their power is in monetization. If you don't monetize as a participant in YouTube, it may affect your wallet a little bit.

It's not worth it. It affects the wallet of a lot of people if that's what they have chosen as one of their primary income streams.

It's not worth it. If you are monetizing with YouTube and you're saying truthful things, you need to have backups of everything.

When I started doing it first, this was back when you had to prove you had a certain number of followers and views and all this stuff.

I'd get little checks from Google. I haven't gotten one for a long time. I think they demonetized everything of mine and didn't even inform me of it.

Since I didn't even keep track of stuff like that, who's going to complain if you don't even notice it?

Yeah, this stuff is coming. It's coming fast.

We'll talk about some of that on Thursday and then open the phones and go from there.

We have almost gone two full hours today on a lot of different topics.

I hope there's been something that has been useful to you. We'll see you, Lord willing, on Thursday.