Post Debate Interview with Chris Date

Reformed Rookie

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Well, hello and welcome to the Reform Rookie Podcast. My name is Anthony Uvinio and I'm your Reform Rookie host, looking to bring you all things reformed today.

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The goal of this podcast is to take the rich truths of the reformed tradition and help you see the beauty and the biblical nature of them.

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Understanding these truths will help us to better know the God of the scriptures and help us to better magnify his glory.

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And to that we say Semper Reformanda. So today I have a special guest on the show,

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Chris Date, who just last week did a debate with a hyper -preterist on Long Island and he defended the future physical resurrection of believers in Christ.

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And he did an excellent job, by the way, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. This is going to be the post -debate interview and I'm going to link to it in the comments section.

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So if you do want to watch the debate, you could just click on it. I encourage you to do so because this is definitely one of the best preterist to hyper -preterist debates

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I've ever watched. Chris Date is also an excellent apologist with a great website.

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So Chris, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your website? Sure. So first of all,

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I certainly feel like a rookie, but in reality, I've been reformed for about the past 18 years of my 20 years as a

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Christian and became a Christian when I was 20. So you do the math. I'm 40 years old. It's hard to call myself a rookie, but I certainly feel like one.

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As I said, I became a Christian 20 years ago when I was 20 years old. My wife and I had gotten married.

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Actually, it was probably when I was 21. My dates all kind of blur together. But my wife and I got married in 2000, oh my gosh, yeah, in 2000 as atheists.

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In fact, we insisted upon having a justice of the peace marry us rather than a minister, which turned out to be a mistake because he showed up to our wedding drunk and forgot to have us kiss each other and read our vows.

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It was a mess. Memorable. What's that? Memorable. Memorable, exactly.

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It makes for a fun story to tell. And then about a year later, I became a believer and a few years later, my wife did too.

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You could imagine that things were a bit rough, especially for relative newlyweds to have a sudden transformation in one person and then another person not come around for a couple more years.

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But anyway, very soon after becoming a Christian, I encountered false

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Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and also atheists that had known me from before I was a

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Christian. And so I quickly developed a passion and a love for apologetics and also for sound theology and biblical exegesis.

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Fast forward another, you know, to about 2009, I think it was, and I got into the world of Christian blogging and podcasting, started a podcast called

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The Apologetics, which is sort of, it's the word, it's the first four letters of theology combined with all the letters but the first of apologetics, bang them together and you get

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The Apologetics. And developed something of a name for myself so much so that within a couple of years,

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I was invited to, I had just become convinced of a view that we won't discuss in this episode or this show, but a contributional view in another area of theology and I was invited to become a part of that ministry.

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And I'm not sure if that's the ministry that you said, tell me about your website. But is that the one you had in mind?

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Rethinking how? Okay, good. I just, I didn't want to scare anybody away. That's okay.

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That's okay. All right. So yeah, so I became invited to participate in a brand new ministry back in 2011 -ish called

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Rethinking Hell. We are conservative evangelicals who are committed to the authority and reliability of the scriptures and infallibility and I would even go so far as to say it's inerrant, but we have become convinced that it teaches something other than the traditional view of hell as eternal torment.

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And since then, I've gotten kind of popular for some reason or another and I've appeared on a number of podcasts and done a lot of debates and radio shows and things like that.

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So that's a whole nother thing we could be discussing. Academically or professionally, I should say, I'm a software engineer, have been my entire adult life, so 20 plus years.

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And I enjoy it and it makes a lot of money, but it's also not where my passions are.

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And so my dream is to one day teach full time at the seminary level, to which end

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I began an undergraduate in religion at Liberty University back in 2014.

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Graduated from there in 2017 and then later that year began a Master of Arts in Theology at Fuller. Not because I'm liberal, but because I wanted to go somewhere where I was going to be stretched and challenged while at the same time building an impressive

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CV so that I could teach full time one day. And I graduated from Fuller earlier this year and hope to go on to do an

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Old Testament PhD at Cambridge or Oxford or somewhere like that if they'll accept me. But that's probably about a year down the road.

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In the meantime, because I can't teach full time yet and can't afford to give up my software engineering salary just yet,

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I'm doing adjunct professor work at Trinity College of the Bible and Theological Seminary, which is the seminary that is led by Braxton Hunter and Jonathan Pritchett.

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And so there I'll be teaching undergrads, Hebrew, Greek, and a few other classes. So that's,

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I suppose, me in a nutshell. There's a whole lot more we could talk about, but those are probably the most relevant issues. Oh, and I must also say this, because it's particularly relevant to the topic we're discussing today.

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Even before, or the whole reason I got into Christian podcasting was because of the issue that I debated in this debate, the topic of resurrection.

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Back in 2009, I think it was, or maybe it was 2010, somewhere around there, I started my podcast with the very first episode being on this topic because it became clear to me that so many

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Christians, if they even were aware of the fact that they would rise bodily from the dead one day in the future, it was something they gave very little thought to.

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And this was a problem that I had felt at the time was contributing to the scourge of hyper -preterism.

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I was involved with a, who at the time was a conservative evangelical who went by the name

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Dee Dee Warren. She hosted a show called The Preterist Podcast, and she had a preterist blog, but preterist in the orthodox sense, not in the hyper -preterist sense.

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And so I was participating in that ministry, and that's where I, that combined with this problem that most

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Christians don't seem to think about the resurrection, got me into this world of Christian media in the first place.

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So I've been sort of thinking about and researching preterist -related details for over a decade.

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Wow. So you were, you were in tune to this and this is kind of like right up your alley. Yeah, I hadn't,

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I mean, it had been a number of years since I'd really given it much serious thought and research, but hopefully I've started to make up for that in preparing for that debate.

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You certainly did. You certainly did. And just as a, as a mention of full disclosure, you do believe in the existence of hell?

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Yes. Right. So. Well, the future existence of hell. I don't think God has created it yet. Okay. Right.

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Okay. People would go to hell. Your view would say that at a certain point in time, justice would be fulfilled and that person would basically be destroyed, correct?

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No, not quite. I mean, I'll let you decide how much you want to get into this topic in this episode, but, but no, my view is that the wages of sin is not torment, it's death.

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And so, you know, when, when somebody gets sentenced in this life to death by execution, they're not suffering on the electric chair or on the, or in the noose.

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And then once justice is completed, then they're, and then they die. In fact, that would be the opposite of justice because if they've paid their penalty, if justice has been done, why do they then go on to die?

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No, it is their death. They're not having life anymore that I think is what the Bible says is the punishment.

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So I think that on the day of judgment, when all of humankind has been raised from the dead to be judged, the saved will, as the

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Bible says, put on immortality and, you know, be declared innocent by virtue of being covered by the blood of the lamb.

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And they will go into everlasting life in the new heavens and new earth and in the presence of God and the community of his people.

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But the lost, when they rise from the dead, they will still be mortal. The Bible nowhere promises them immortality and their punishment will literally be execution.

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It will be dying a second time and forever. So it's not they pay a penalty and then once they've paid it, they die.

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It's that their lack of life is their penalty. Much like the penalty in a fine is not having the money anymore, right?

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If the penalty of a fine were just having money taken away from you, then they could give it right back immediately after and you've been punished, right?

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No, the penalty is not having that money anymore. And that's my view with regards to hell.

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Hell in hell, the wicked will be killed and they will never live again. And they're never living again is their everlasting punishment.

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All right. Thank you for that. Sorry, I was a little verbose. I apologize. No, no, no. I think that was a good encapsulation of what you believe.

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And that would be a terrific topic for a future show. I certainly

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I'm aware of your expertise and your debating skills. So I'm certainly not going to do that right now.

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Let's talk about how you annihilated a hyper -preterist before you annihilate me on the show.

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But actually, before that, I did want to ask you and you knew this was coming.

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How did you come to be a reformed Christian? I mean, were you an Arminian first or just evangelical?

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And then how did it happen? Yeah. So, you know, you can imagine that as an atheist, but not a particularly philosophically minded one.

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Meaning I had when I was when I was still an atheist, I didn't give any thought to things like free will.

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I didn't I was not one of these people who studied the new atheists. I don't even know if there were new atheists 20 plus years ago.

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You know, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens and stuff, I think started to become popular very shortly after that, or they were just starting to become popular, if I remember correctly.

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But anyway, I, you know, the atheist community that now many of them say, you know, we don't have free will or whatever.

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This was not something I was had thought about. So I was a freedom loving, individualistic,

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American atheist. And as such, when I became a Christian and sort of through the door of a mere

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Christianity kind of thing, it wasn't I wasn't evangelized or or offered good arguments into the kingdom from a particularly reformed perspective or anything like that.

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I just saw it's a whole other story. There's not a whole lot to it. But I became a Christian. And having brought with me this baggage of having been a individualistic, freedom loving

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American atheist, I just sort of assumed that I was free in the way that I had already thought that I was free.

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And so yeah, it was just sort of a standard vanilla evangelical. I wouldn't have at the time even known what

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Arminian means or libertarian versus compatibilistic free will. I didn't know what any of that meant.

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I just continued to believe I had freedom in the way that I thought that I had freedom prior to becoming a

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Christian. Well, as I mentioned a few moments ago, my wife didn't become a

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Christian for another few years. And you can imagine that as somebody who was not yet reformed,

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I was very concerned about my wife's eternal destiny. And of course, even as a reformed person,

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I would have been if I'd been a reformed person at this time. But because I still believed in the kind of freedom that I thought

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I had prior to becoming a Christian, I thought that it was sort of incumbent upon me to win my wife over.

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And so I spent a lot of time, things were really tough there for a while, because I was proverbially bashing her over the head with the

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Bible, and I was exposing her to all sorts of apologetics material and stuff like that. And so things were tough there.

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And it was right around that time when I was really experiencing a lot of anxiety and concern over the eternal destiny of my wife, that I started becoming best friends with somebody who remains my best friend to this day.

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He's a Jewish Christian, who is also reformed. And I quickly became best friends with him, and he became a disciple of mine.

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And very soon, he introduced me to Reformed Theology. And I fought it tooth and nail.

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Because the thought that God might have predetermined that my wife would never believe and not be saved was unconscionable to me.

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I just couldn't stand the thought that that might be the case. I couldn't overturn the arguments that my

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Reformed friend was making based on the Scriptures. I didn't have answers for those. But I just knew, gosh,

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I can't stand the possibility that God may have not foreordained my wife unto eternal life.

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But at some point, a realization hit me. And it was this realization that made me comfortable embracing

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Reformed Theology and continues to have me comfortable ever since. And that is,

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I would so much rather the choice of whether my wife will believe or not,

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I would so much rather that choice be in God's hands, ultimately, than in my wife's. Because I know my wife,

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I know me, I know myself, I know other human beings. And we're all pretty terrible people. And we're stupid, and we make foolish mistakes, and we ignore evidence, and we're stubborn, and we're obstinate.

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And I so much more trust God to make that decision for my wife, ultimately, through secondary means.

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So much prefer that choice be in God's hands than my wife's. And when I realized that, I became at ease with the reality that my wife's eternal destiny was ultimately in my

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God's hands. Because in whose hands could it, in what better hands could her fate possibly be?

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So that's how I became, that's how I was finally free and comfortable and at peace with accepting the biblical data on the topic.

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Do you ever get the feeling that you want to go back, or is there a tug in the opposite direction, some people nudging you?

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No, it's funny because there is an area of theology when it comes to human constitution, you know, what the nature of the immaterial soul is and stuff like that, where I do really feel like I want to go back to the view

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I once held, and I may even at some point. But when it comes to Reformed theology, I really don't.

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And the reason is because I've yet to see, I can't think of a single engagement between a

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Calvinist and non -Calvinist on any particular biblical text in support of at least meticulous divine providence or determinism and predestination.

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You know, we could talk about limited atonement, and we could talk about perseverance of the saints.

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Those debates become a little bit more challenging because you have some difficult texts to deal with, like Hebrews 6, you know.

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But when it comes on those two topics I mentioned, what we Reformed mean when we refer to the sovereignty of God, namely the meticulous divine providence of God is determining all things that take place in time.

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When it comes to that, and when it comes to predestination, I've not seen a single engagement between somebody on the

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Calvinist side and somebody on the non -Calvinist side in which the non -Calvinist can offer any reasonable sounding exegesis of the text.

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And so I remain convinced that this is clearly what the Bible is teaching.

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And, you know, frankly, even if I did, even if there was a part of me that shared some of the concerns that my non -Calvinist brothers and sisters have that caused them to push back against what seems to be the biblical data, even if I had some of those intuitions or thoughts,

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I frankly don't care about them anywhere nearly as much as I do about the clarity of the scriptures.

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So, you know, I might change my mind one day if somebody can make a better case from the texts that we

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Calvinists think teach our view, but I've yet to see it so far. So yeah, I'm perfectly fine staying where I'm at. It doesn't cause me any problems.

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And to be quite honest, being Reformed allows me to reach a lot of Christians on other topics that I wouldn't be able to if I were not

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Reformed. So I'm happy to be where I'm at. That's great. That's great. Yeah, look, understanding the scriptures and seeing

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God's sovereignty and all of them. And ultimately, salvation is for the glory of God and our salvation is a blessed benefit for us.

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But ultimately, His work and for His glory just makes me worship that God all the more, knowing that He shouldn't have chose me, you know, it wasn't anything in me, you know, because a lot of people say, well, why, why would

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God choose me? And I often tell them, if you knew the answer to that question, it wouldn't be grace.

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I'll take it a step further and I'll say I think there's a possibility that we

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Reformed are slightly being a little bit sloppy when we talk about God choosing us, because the way that that makes it sound is there was this mass of people that God created and then from this mass of people,

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He sort of took some of them and chose them to be believers and others of them and chose them to be reprobate. But that's not the way the

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Bible describes it. Yes, it uses the language of choosing, but consider that it uses a language of molding from a lump of clay, some for one purpose and some for another.

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So a better analogy would be, you've got, you know, this big ball of dirt or clay, and you rip off a piece and you shape it into a tool for glorious use, and you rip off another piece and you design it for inglorious use.

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And as such, it's not merely that God chose me, it's that this is what God has designed me to be, is among the elect.

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And you're right, that makes me praise God all the more. It doesn't cause me to struggle with it, you know, struggle with who

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God is. Yeah, that's an excellent illustration. Obviously comes out of Romans chapter 9, but the way you explained it, that adds more clarity and depth to what

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I just said. I appreciate that. Okay, one more question with regards to being reformed.

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Sure. What do you think is the most important thing about being reformed?

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Why does it matter to be reformed? What's the most important thing about that? Yeah, that's, that's tough.

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Because on the one hand, I am not as convinced as some other reformed people are that this is that this is an extremely vital position to hold and that anybody who doesn't is deficient in major ways.

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I'm not saying that people who think that way are wrong. It's just, I'm not quite as convinced of that. I've seen it just doesn't strike,

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I can't even make a really solid, airtight case for that.

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But what I can say is, I'll say, I'll offer two thoughts among many that I have as to why

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I think it is important, even if it's not maybe crucial or vital. Number one, it's, I'll talk about how it's been important to me.

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And namely, it's made me able to be at peace in my life. When, you know, my wife and I, I write about this at the beginning of this book right here on my camera.

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You got that, you know exactly where it is. I like that. Yeah, it's a two views debate book.

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People can find it if they go to amazon .com slash author slash Chris Date. And in it,

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I argue for predeterminism and predestination of opposite an

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Armenian co author. And I opened my contribution to the book with the fact that before my wife and I became

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Christians, we'd had a miscarriage. And then after becoming a

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Christian, we had three sons and then had another miscarriage. And both were difficult, both were painful.

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But there was a profound difference between the two. Namely, and the difference wasn't just having relationship and community with with the church.

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It wasn't just having relationship and community with the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Those are those things were certainly important.

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But what most enabled us to get through this really painful part.

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And you can imagine, by the way, now that we were believers, it was all the more significant than a human life died in my wife's womb, you know, all the more significant than when we were atheists.

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And we basically thought we were just highly evolved apes. The what was so what was most significant was that we knew that there was purpose in it, even if we couldn't detect it, even if we couldn't discern it.

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And, and I write in the book about how some of the glimpses that we've had into God's purpose, purposes in ordaining this tragedy in our lives, but it was precisely the knowledge that there was divine purpose in that tragedy that enabled us to get through it and has enabled us to get through all sorts of other difficult times in our lives ever since becoming

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Calvinists. So firstly, I think for the Calvinist, and for the person who is willing to give up autonomy, it can become incredibly freeing and comforting and peaceable to know that the worst imaginable things that happen in life, they're not

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God isn't merely permitting them to happen. God isn't merely letting standing back and letting people commit senseless acts of evil.

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No, those acts of evil, God himself is working for good. And that was really powerful for my wife and me, and continues to be to this day.

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The other area is something I've explored less, but it's something that I think should be discussed more and focused more on by Calvinists.

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And that's the issue of theodicy, in particular, when it comes to evangelism and apologetics.

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You see, I'm sure your viewers, some of them anyway, are aware that there are several, let me back up a second.

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Theodicy is a word that refers to an attempt to make sense of, or to justify, to show that God is just, despite the fact that there is evil in the world.

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And so the question often is asked by atheists, if God is all loving, all powerful, and all knowing, then why doesn't he stop all evil from happening?

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Why is there evil in the world? And I have discerned three basic types of answers,

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Christian answers to that question. One is what's called the free will theodicy. And the idea here is that God values libertarian human freedom so much, he sees it as being so worthwhile, so valuable, that he treats that as the greater good that justifies permitting people to commit evil, right?

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Now we can certainly, I don't see the argument for libertarian free will being so valuable in the first place, but even if I did,

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I think atheists can see through how nonsensical that theodicy is, because the

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Bible is replete with examples of God preventing people from doing evil. So really, the atheist is being told, yes,

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God can and has stepped in and intervened, interfered, and prevented many acts of evil in the past, but he lets all sorts of evils happen to you.

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You know, atheists are going to see through that, and it's not going to be an effective apologetic, not to mention the biblical data.

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Another theodicy is called the soul -making theodicy, and the idea is that God permits evil to happen in the world, or ordains it, if the

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Calvinist is making this particular theodicy. And the idea is that experiencing evil and emulating the character of God in the midst of such evil is training us, as it were, forming us, shaping our character in preparation for our eternal life upon being resurrected, and so forth.

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But it seems to me that the problem with this is the doctrine of glorification.

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You know, there are a number, a couple of places in the scriptures where our resurrection and glorification is described as a blink of an eye kind of transformation.

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And what's more, I think we will continue to learn and grow and develop even in eternity.

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And so I don't see there being any biblical justification for thinking that God somehow needed evil to be in this life in order to make us, to shape our character in the way that he might choose to do.

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So I don't think that theodicy works either. The only other theodicy I'm aware of, there may be others, but the only other one that I'm aware of is some variation or another of a reformed theodicy, which is that God hasn't merely permitted evil to happen.

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God has ordained evil to happen, which seems to be consistent with what the

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Bible says about it, and that gives evil purpose. Atheists, you know, when they encounter this, of course many of them are going to push back just like they would to those other two theodicies that I mentioned, but they're not going to be able to say, they're not going to, you know, the other ones, they're going to see through how deficient these theodicies are and how inconsistent they are with the biblical data.

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But with this one, their struggle is really just going to be, are they willing to give up autonomy or not? And that's something that I think the

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Holy Spirit is ultimately going to work in their hearts. So I think that if we reformed, embrace, and really run with this reformed theodicy,

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I think it's going to have a profound impact in evangelism and apologetics. And so for that reason, I think it's important as well.

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Now there are others as well, other areas of importance as well, but I've talked for long enough, so I'll end it at those two.

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Yeah, no, I think that was that was excellent. And one of the things that I love about the fact that God ordained evil in the world,

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I believe, is to also show his sovereignty over it in what he can do with the worst evil in the world.

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Obviously the worst evil that's ever happened in the world is the crucifixion of the only innocent man that ever walked the planet,

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Jesus. And God, out of that heinous, worst evil we've ever encountered, he brings about the greatest gift possible for mankind, our eternal salvation and communion with God.

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So if God can bring the greatest good out of the greatest evil, as we're walking through trials and as children of God, we recognize that all things work together for good, what can he do with the evil in my life?

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He can bring some good out of it. And then you get to these scriptures, like in Hebrews 5, where it says,

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Jesus learned obedience through suffering. You're like, wait a second,

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Jesus had to suffer to learn obedience? Well, yes, he was a man, fully man, truly man, truly

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God, but he learned obedience through suffering. So if the sinless, spotless son of God had to learn obedience through suffering, shouldn't

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I expect to go through some suffering? So it kind of turns the tables on this

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Santa Claus God that so many people have embraced and unfortunately created in their minds.

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It's idolatry. And to think that a God is just going to give you whatever you want is foolishness.

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In fact, last night in the study that I have at my house on Monday nights, we were talking about this topic because it comes up.

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And I told him, I said, could you imagine if God gave you everything that you prayed for?

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I mean, think about when a little kid, you see a little kid in the supermarket and he's basically demanding, mommy,

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I want that, mommy, I want that. And the kid and the mother is capitulating and giving the child everything that the child wants.

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What would you create? You could create a spoiled little brat. So I went on to say,

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I am so grateful that God did not answer. I shouldn't say did not answer. God said no to the prayers that I prayed that were not good for me.

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So no is an acceptable answer from God. And again, he knows best. He knows better than us.

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I do just want to say though, just for the sake of people watching who may have misunderstood, you're not, at least

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I don't think you are, characterizing our non -Calvinist brothers and sisters here, right?

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Armenians and even Obedeists, they don't necessarily have a Santa Claus God.

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I think you're talking more like nominal Christians and health and wealth, prosperity, gospel. Yes. Thank you for clarifying that because it needs to be said.

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Listen, I have dear brothers who are Armenians, who love

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God, I don't want to say more than I do, but are more gracious and loving towards others than I am.

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And just because you're reformed, it doesn't mean you've got a big S on your chest.

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In fact, it means there's a big T because the T is true. Don't mess with total depravity. It's the only doctrine

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I can live up to. So I just think as Calvinists who understand the doctrines of grace, we really and truly should be the most graceful people on the planet.

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And a lot of times, you go on Facebook, you see what happens. Sometimes Calvinists can be very, very condescending and arrogant and I just don't understand why.

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I don't understand why either. And this is something that I really am frustrated by because it does seem to me as if many of the most well -known and prominent reformed people,

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I won't name them on this show, but even people that I look up to and admire and listen to their shows regularly and agree with them theologically on so much and am so shaped by them over the years, and yet they are some of the biggest jerks that I've ever encountered amongst

31:25

Christians. And I just can't get it. I don't know why. Because like you just said, we reformed ought to be the most gracious because we're the ones who think that it wasn't our choice ultimately to believe it was

31:38

God working faith in us. So that continues to baffle me. I'm not sure what's going on there, to be perfectly honest.

31:44

Yeah, I think I know some of the people you're talking about.

31:51

When you're in the crosshairs constantly, and you've explained your position over and over and over again, and then people misconstrue it or twist it, it gets frustrating after a certain point in time.

32:06

So I think that's just part of the sanctification process. Sometimes your sweet spot is your weak spot.

32:13

I know that's true for me. What is my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness when used the wrong way.

32:21

So I think we're all a work in progress. He who began a good work in us is faithful to complete it. So we just got to pray for those brothers because those brothers are on the front line, and they're doing great work.

32:32

And like you, I learned a tremendous amount from them. So maybe it's just help for us to keep them in prayer on a regular basis, and just show that grace.

32:44

I think so. And the other thing I'll encourage viewers who are Christians and are

32:49

Calvinists to do is keep people close to you who are going to call you on your

32:56

BS. Excuse the foul letters. But I think the problem with a lot of these people, including the one

33:05

I have in mind who I've just been alluding to, I think one of the biggest problems is that they're surrounded by yes -men, sycophants.

33:14

I've got people in my life who will call me on my arrogance, on my stubbornness, on my jerkiness.

33:22

And as hard as it is to hear those things, nothing is more critical to my salvation apart from the

33:29

Holy Spirit's sanctifying work. I've got to have people in my life who will hold my feet to the fire and not let me become more prideful and arrogant than I already am.

33:39

So I would just encourage up -and -coming Christian Calvinists that are going to be doing podcasts and may have a bright future in terms of popularity and influence and stuff like that, be very intentional and proactive about keeping people, friends and family, close to you who you can trust to tell you, stop being a jerk, man.

34:03

You need to check your pride and humble yourself. We've got to have people like that in our lives because for one reason or another, it seems as if we were formed or particularly prone to giving into the temptation to be prideful.

34:16

So certainly. And just on a side note, that's one of the things I love about my church. There is nobody who is above criticism where I go.

34:25

And it's a wonderful thing because so many stupid things have come out of my mouth and had one of these brothers not pointed it out,

34:32

I would still be repeating those errors. So really it's an act of love to go to a brother and gently say, hey, listen, what you said, you either got to clarify it or you got to change your position because this is what

34:43

I'm seeing. So we're all there. Iron sharpens iron. We're all there to help one another. And it's truly the definition of love when you give yourself over to someone else for their benefit.

34:54

If you're afraid of offending somebody who's speaking, I don't want to say blasphemies, but who's taking heretical positions and teaching those things and then you don't correct them, boy, that's not loving at all.

35:09

So again, understanding the doctrines of grace, it's up to us who understand those things to go to them gracefully, gently, lovingly, and point these things out and try to win a brother over or be corrected yourself.

35:22

Maybe I misunderstood what that person says, or maybe I don't have the same depth of understanding as them and they're going to teach me.

35:30

So again, that's one of the things that I do love about my church because we all get along great. And there's a solid group of guys.

35:38

If I'm going to a theological war, those are the guys I want with me. And then

35:43

I bring you along for the hyperpreterism stuff. Hopefully I can cross swords with a few more opponents than just hyperpreterists.

35:52

You certainly can, but I do want to hone in on this because you did a phenomenal job.

36:01

Because the first thing I wanted to talk to you about, because when you address this with your opponent, you brought up the fact that this is a serious heresy.

36:11

In fact, you opened by getting him to admit that if he's right about, if he's wrong about this position, his position is gangrenous and ruinous to people's faiths.

36:25

So this is a serious issue. Could you expand upon that? Yeah, so what

36:30

I did in my opening presentation was I first pointed out that the earliest sort of proto -creeds, the things that were circulated and people recited even before they came together in the ecumenical creeds, things like Irenaeus's rule of faith said that the church believes in the resurrection of the flesh, not just resurrection of whatever a hyperpreterist wants to say, but the resurrection of the flesh.

37:00

So the earliest creeds that people recited said this. And then I pointed out that the early church fathers, or at least some of them, said that denial of the resurrection of the body is a heresy.

37:12

So Tertullian, I quoted, saying that it would be better for the heretic to acknowledge the resurrection of the flesh and that he will not be a

37:19

Christian who shall deny this doctrine. But of course, even more important than those earliest creeds and early church fathers is

37:27

Scripture itself. And I pointed out in 2 Timothy 2 that Paul speaks of these people named

37:32

Hymenaeus and Philetus and says that they were teaching something that was spreading like gangrene, a word that refers to not just severe inflammation and stuff like that, but also even a cancerous spread of ulcers that can eat away the flesh and bones.

37:47

And the teaching that was spreading like gangrene that Paul refers to is that the resurrection had already taken place, and that they were therefore ruining people's faiths.

37:57

And so in cross -examination, I asked my opponent, do you agree that if you are wrong by saying that the resurrection has already happened, then your teaching falls into this category?

38:10

And you said I got him to admit. I thought he pushed back and tried to get around it. But either way, it seems to me that if we

38:19

Christians believe that the resurrection has not yet taken place, which of course is true because the

38:25

Bible is very clear about that, then I don't think we have any choice but to rightly identify this view as gangrenous heresy, because it's what

38:31

Paul called it. Yeah, absolutely. And at first he did push back, but you pressed hard and you got him to admit the fact that yes, if he's wrong, this is a heresy, and he could be ruining people's faiths, which what could be more serious than that?

38:49

This is something that you have to be certain beyond certainty before you start teaching it, because you can really bring someone down from it.

38:59

So you also talked about something called the nefesh hayah, okay?

39:04

So could you define what the nefesh hayah is and why it's important?

39:11

Yeah, the phrase nefesh hayah in Hebrew is the phrase that older translations translated living soul in Genesis 2 -7 when it says

39:20

God formed Adam from dust to the earth and breathed his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul is how older translations translated it.

39:28

Newer translations recognize, however, that that's not really what it's saying. It's saying the man became a living person, a living creature.

39:36

In fact, that very phrase, nefesh hayah, is used earlier in Genesis 1, 20 and 24 to refer to creatures that swim around in the ocean, creatures that walk around on land, and even birds, and in Genesis 2 -19 as well.

39:52

So to be a living creature, to be a living being, at least for those kinds of beings that are material beings like humans and the other kinds of animals that I just mentioned, this wouldn't be true of angelic beings, for example, but if you're a creature, if you're a physical creature like humans and other creatures, then to be a living one, to be a living human being is to be what

40:14

Genesis 2 -7 says, to have a body of dust and to be breathing God -given breath.

40:21

And I pointed out that this connection between being a living person, a living being, or whatever, on the one hand, or the connection between that and breathing

40:29

God -given breath is all throughout the scriptures. In the flood narrative, everything that wasn't breathing the breath of life in its nostrils died in the flood.

40:39

In the narratives in which Israel is going into the promised land, or in 1 and 2

40:46

Kings, it talks about how people left no one breathing alive. Job and the

40:53

Psalms say that if God takes his breath back, all flesh will perish. Resurrection motifs in Ezekiel 37 and Revelation and others, they portray resurrection as God's breath coming back into a body and bringing it back to life.

41:11

So there's this intimate connection all throughout the scriptures between being living, on the one hand, and being embodied and breathing on the other.

41:20

The two things go hand in hand. And this is really critical because as I went on to argue, salvation is all throughout scripture cashed out in terms of receiving life, being rescued from death, and returning to enduring life.

41:37

Well, so if being a living person, if being a living creature means to be embodied and breathing the life -giving breath of God, then salvation must include the promise of returning to an embodied and breathing state of life, or else you wouldn't be a living person, you wouldn't be a living creature.

41:53

So that's why it's so important. And this he did admit, my opponent did admit in cross -examination that human beings are designed to be nefesh chayah, are designed to be living creature, but then he had to dismiss all the texts that I quoted as not being relevant and we shouldn't take them literally or whatever, and he wants to say somehow we can be a living creature, a living being, and not be embodied, and yet all the biblical language about living people has them embodied and breathing.

42:23

Would that point to the restoration of all things? In other words, I can't just be left a disembodied soul,

42:30

I would have to be brought back into a physical body in order to be restored, correct? Yeah, that's right.

42:36

In fact, there's this famous place in multiple of the synoptic gospels where Jesus is challenged by the

42:43

Sadducees on the resurrection. They come to him and they say, you know, there's this wife who was the widow of a succession of brothers, and then in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?

42:55

And one of the things that Jesus says is, don't you know that God is the God of the living? But he's also the

43:03

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Well, he's not saying that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living right now, disembodied, because if they were, it wouldn't be proof that there's going to be a resurrection, which is the whole reason that Jesus offered this.

43:19

So what Jesus is saying is that the reason we know there will be a resurrection is because God isn't the

43:26

God of the dead, he's the God of the living. But right now, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are dead, even though they're disembodied and presumably experiencing conscious bliss in the bosom of Abraham or whatever, right?

43:38

Nevertheless, they're not embodied and breathing again yet. And Jesus uses that as proof that they will one day come back to life because God isn't the

43:45

God of the dead, he's the God of the living. So in order to be what we are designed to be, in order for God to be

43:53

God of the living, those over whom he is God must one day come back to physical life.

43:58

That's the logic that Jesus is using there. Yeah, so a living creature would be both a body and spirit together, and that would be the restoration of all things.

44:10

In other words, God restored that person back to their original form, and then they're going to be resurrected and live on the new heavens and the new earth, correct?

44:19

Yeah, but what I want to say, I wouldn't say that restoration of all things is solely about the reunification of body and soul.

44:27

I think the restoration of all things is also about the restoration of the whole cosmos. Agree. And by that I don't mean,

44:33

I'm not talking about universal salvation. I don't think that the lost are going to raise and then suddenly be saved.

44:40

But I'm just saying that I think there will come a point in time where God's cosmos in its entirety is once again perfect and perfectly praising

44:49

God in all his glory. There won't be any pocket, any dark gloomy corner of the cosmos in which sin and evil and corruption and disease and pain and death continue to ravage anything.

45:02

So when we talk about the restoration of all things, we're not just talking about human persons, their bodies and souls coming back together.

45:07

We're talking about all of the physical creation being restored to the beautiful perfection it once exhibited and more.

45:14

Right. So would you say that that's the new heavens and the new earth? Yes, absolutely.

45:20

I would argue that new heavens there isn't a reference to heaven as in where God dwells.

45:26

It's, I think, a reference to what the Old Testament is typically talking about when it refers to the heavens. It's what's above you.

45:31

It's the sky. It's space. So the new heavens and new earth isn't just a physical globe on which we stand right now, although, or sit as the case may be with you and me, but it'll be more than that.

45:43

It'll be stars and galaxies and nebulae. And this is just speculation here, but I like talking about it because I think it's fun to think about.

45:51

Think about right now what prevents us from fully exploring the deepest reaches of the cosmos and the deepest depths of the ocean, doing all sorts of other scientific studies.

46:01

The things that most prevent us from that are our mortality and the lack of or how limited we are in technology.

46:09

But in eternity, when we can live forever and when we can forever without sin and imperfect wisdom continue to develop technology,

46:17

I don't see any reason for thinking that we won't be able to explore all over the cosmos. We'll be able to live as long as it is required to get there.

46:24

We'll have the technology eventually to be able to do it. And so God's beautiful, glorious creation that isn't just the earth, but it's also the heavens, the new earth and the new heavens.

46:33

I think it's something that is going to be, we're going to be able to explore it and enjoy it to its fullest extent in a way that we've never been able to so far.

46:42

All right. Just remind my listeners that you're not leaking Mormon on us.

46:48

No, definitely not. No, definitely not. There is only one God. There isn't an infinite number of gods as Mormons maintain.

46:55

And we're not going to rule and reign over our own planet. No, God is the one over the whole cosmos.

47:01

But, you know, if we are to be the kinds of like vice regents that God made

47:07

Adam and Eve, then I would think we'll continue to be subduing

47:12

God's creation as his representative in creation. Maybe that'll be part of taking dominion.

47:20

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Who knows? Right. Yeah. So interesting. He had a very unique definition of heavens and earth, right?

47:29

He said that the new heavens and the new earth was only with regards to Israel.

47:34

That's the only way it could be defined. And you called him out on that. So what are the different ways that the heavens and the earth can be defined?

47:43

Well, so at its root, the heavens and earth just refer to what they sound like the ground beneath our feet, the globe we're standing on, and the sky above us, and everything that's above that.

47:54

The reason why and so the new heavens and new earth is a reference to the fact that one day, it's not new in the sense that it will replace the old as if God's going to burn up the cosmos, destroy it, and replace it with a brand new one.

48:08

It's more like a renewed heavens and earth. It will be the physical cosmos as we know it, but restored to the perfection it once had and even more.

48:22

The challenge or the reason why hyper preterists can get away with what you just described is because there do appear to be a couple of places, or maybe one place where this new heavens or this phrase heavens and earth is used as a metaphor or as a symbol or placeholder or something for Israel.

48:43

And what hyper preterists do is they impose this handful of uses of that phrase onto all the other texts that use the phrase clearly to refer to the earth we're standing on and the skies above us.

48:56

And so then they say, well, so this always means it's always referenced to Israel, and the new heavens and new earth is the new people of God that replace the old people of God.

49:09

And yeah, that's just not going to stand up. If you look at how the heavens and the earth are used. In the beginning,

49:15

God created the heavens and the earth, and then it goes on to explain what that entails. It's the creation of the sun, moon, and stars. It's the creation of the seas and so forth.

49:21

That's not talking about the creation of Israel. So yeah, it's hermeneutically, it's what

49:28

Don Carson in his exegetical fallacies has called the fallacy of the unwarranted expansion of a semantic field or illegitimate totality transfer.

49:41

It's where you have a word or a phrase that can have multiple meanings depending upon the context. You find one of those meanings that the word has or phrase has in one of these other places, and then you just assume that can be read into every use of the word or phrase all throughout the scripture, but that's not how it works.

49:57

You've got to let context dictate what the phrase means, and nowhere with respect to the new heavens and new earth does the context suggest that it's referring to a people of God that replaces the old people of God or something like that.

50:10

Right. I think my listeners would be more in tune with hearing all means all, right?

50:18

We constantly hear all means all, world means entire world, you know, that God so loved the world, and you know, they pigeonholed that word world to mean just one thing.

50:29

Meanwhile, John used it in at least 10 different senses, you know, in his gospel alone.

50:34

So, you know, that's a question of hermeneutics. One of the things that he brought up was his interpretation of Genesis as poetic, right?

50:45

And that's one of the reasons why he interprets it and comes to the conclusions that he comes to. So, how would you seek to convince him of the fact that Genesis is literal and not poetic?

50:58

Well, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that I would. I am a young earth creationist, and I do think that Genesis 1 and 2 represent something of a fairly straightforward historical narrative.

51:10

But I'm open to the possibility that it's more poetic, or I don't know if poetic is quite the right word, but it's polemic.

51:17

It's a literary device, arguably. I'm saying I think it's a plausible reading of the text.

51:24

And, you know, you can read the works of Old Testament scholars that will explain why this seems like a plausible way to read the text.

51:31

So, I wouldn't necessarily try to argue that Genesis 1 and 2 are literal. But what

51:37

I would say is, I think the evidence is woefully lacking that it's poetic. It lacks a lot of the kinds of, it lacks a lot of the features that Hebrew poetry has, and it contains a lot of the features that narrative and prose have.

51:53

And so, even if it is some sort of literary device, it's still not poetry. It's something else, and his response there doesn't work against that.

52:01

But the other thing that I would add is that even if one is inclined to think that that's what's going on in Genesis 1 and 2,

52:07

I think that's much more difficult to argue is happening in Genesis 6 through 9 with the flood narrative, which is also where I pulled my evidence from.

52:15

It's, you know, this language of human beings being, breathing

52:20

God's breath, and God's breath returning to him when we die, and then

52:26

God giving that breath back in resurrection, all these various connections between being living and being breathing, they're all throughout the

52:35

Bible, in all sorts of genres, in all sorts of types of literature.

52:40

And so, to dismiss the entire line of evidence on the basis that Genesis 1 and 2 might be some kind of literary framework,

52:47

I think was definitely taking things a little bit too far. Certainly.

52:53

I mean, your hermeneutic on this particular issue is going to determine where you end up.

53:00

I mean, if you take it as poetic, gosh, I mean, think about how many people read poems and interpret them in many different ways.

53:07

Again, I just don't see that in the scriptures. I think the scriptures are specific. And like you said, once you get into the story of Noah, this certainly is not poetry.

53:17

So, I think his hermeneutic was off, and you rightly pointed him to the fact that, you know, it is a literal rendering.

53:26

I'll give you one more example really quickly before I forget. Take Ecclesiastes, for example, the

53:33

Jews refer to it as Kohelet, which is the word translated preacher or teacher or whatever in that book.

53:39

But anyway, Kohelet refers to the breath that people breathe, returning possibly even, he doesn't even say for sure, possibly returning to God who gave it.

53:51

He says, who knows if the breath of a man returns to God when he dies, or if it just goes to the ground along with the breath of the other beasts.

53:57

And this is important because Kohelet isn't poetry, it's wisdom literature. So, here's another example where you've got not just poetic genres in which this language of being, living and breathing are connected, but it's also in wisdom literature, and it's also in narrative, and it's also in prophetic literature and apocalyptic imagery.

54:16

Virtually every genre of scripture has this connection between being living and breathing. And yeah, you're just not able to dismiss the whole thing under the guise of it being poetic.

54:25

Yeah. And, you know, in listening to you say that, it's so important that you be a workman who need not be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

54:33

It takes work. This is not something that you just pick up and learn just by a cursive reading of the text.

54:40

You need to understand the background. You need to understand the type of literature that you're reading in order to mine out the deep truths.

54:47

And I think so many people are lacking that these days. And he even brought up the fact that most

54:53

Christians cannot defend the physical resurrection of the body. And you agreed, right?

54:59

Do you see that as a, I know it's a problem, but do you see that as something that obviously needs to change?

55:06

And how would you go about doing that? I do think it's something that needs to change. And I'll just point out that this was a case of my opponent wanting to sort of eat his cake and have it too, because what he argued was you ask the average

55:18

Joe on the street what resurrection is, and they'll be able to properly articulate it. And so therefore, and of course, spiritual things can only be understood by the people of God.

55:27

So obviously resurrection isn't what every ordinary person can tell you it means. But then on the other side of the equation, or on the other side of the coin, he wants to say that Christians are illiterate and can't articulate what things mean or whatever.

55:41

Well, you can't have it both ways. The reality is, the reason that virtually everybody can tell you what resurrection is, is because words have meaning.

55:49

And resurrection just means coming back to physical life. And what's more, we're a post -Christian culture in which historic

55:58

Christianity still permeates daily life. It's less and less so, arguably. But nevertheless, it's still an artifact of a time in our history where Americans were more

56:12

Christian and more literate. So his argument there just didn't work. And meanwhile, yes, some

56:18

Christians will be able to tell you that there's resurrection, or what the resurrection is going to be.

56:24

But many atheists can't. They mock the biblical concept of resurrection by saying that it's like zombies.

56:31

Well, it's nothing like zombies. So no, it's not something that the natural man perfectly graphs, even if they can tell you what resurrection is, they don't have a full understanding of it like we

56:41

Christians can. But as to how to overcome the problem that so many Christians are illiterate on this topic, the only answer

56:52

I can give is one that some of your listeners, maybe even many of your listeners might not like, which is that I think that, number one, it's going to take a lot of rethinking the nature of hell.

57:04

And I'm sorry to bring that up on a topic like this. I don't want to cross wires too much. But when you think that everybody's going to live physically forever in either the good place or the bad place, then salvation is just a matter of real estate, you know, and what really matters is getting out of the real estate we're in now and enjoying bliss right after death.

57:23

And so the focus becomes all about escaping the mess we're in now. Because who cares if we're living or dying, you know, we're eventually going to come back to life anyway, no matter what.

57:33

Let's just, you know, look forward to what happens to us immediately when we die. And we're escaping from this problematic life that we have right now.

57:41

When you think that everybody's going to be resurrected and given eternal life, and it's just in the good place or the bad place, and I think that life starts to become something, the value of life is diminished.

57:53

Anything that gets indiscriminately given to everybody is typically not going to be as valued as much as something that is a reward or a gift.

58:02

So that's the first thing. I think that the church is going to have to rethink the nature of hell. Less likely to turn off your listeners, probably, but still a little likely would be even if you don't want to rethink the nature of hell, even if you think that the

58:16

Bible does teach the doctrine of eternal torment, you still have to appreciate the focus that the

58:23

Bible has in terms of the hope that God's people express. It's not in what's going to happen when they die.

58:30

It's what's going to happen when they come back from death. And so even if we are conscious between death and resurrection, that's not what we were designed to be.

58:41

And even if everybody's eventually going to live forever, the biblical authors, the people of God, still had their hope not in escaping this life and being in bliss in heaven, but rather coming back to life and resurrection and remaining there forever.

58:55

And so take, for example, the story of Lazarus and the rich man, which is used not only by many people who believe in the traditional doctrine of hell, but also people who are adamant about there being a conscious disembodied state between death and resurrection, you've still got

59:09

Lazarus being comforted or consoled in the bosom of Abraham. That's a word that I think is referring to not bliss, but consolation and comfort in the midst of trouble and turmoil.

59:22

And, you know, the idea is even if we are conscious while we're dead, awaiting resurrection, that's still a subhuman half existence.

59:31

It's not the fullest that we're meant to be. And that's why Lazarus is being comforted or consoled in the bosom of Abraham, because one day,

59:39

Lazarus, you're going to rise from the dead and experience the fullness of life that you're intended to experience. So those are the two things

59:45

I think that we really, putting aside the rethinking hell, that was the first thing. But if people aren't willing to go that far with me, at least rediscover the preciousness of life and how much the biblical authors have their eyes set not on the intermediate state, but on the future state when they're resurrected from the dead.

01:00:06

And let's start placing our hope in that. That's what I think it's going to take, is getting people's eyes less focused on the intermediate state and more focused on the eternal one.

01:00:16

Right. In listening to what you say, and you're giving yourself a shameless plug for this rethinking hell, you prove to me that the tea is true,

01:00:25

Chris. You prove to me. Why is that? Total depravity. It's true. You had to bring up the rethinking hell.

01:00:31

Oh, yeah, that's right. Exactly. So what I think is happening in the modern

01:00:36

American church is there's been a de -emphasis on works. Okay. We demonize works and say, well, that's what

01:00:43

Catholics do when they're working their way towards heaven, when works are vital to the life of a believer.

01:00:51

One of the things I try to teach my kids is whenever we go out to eat, obviously,

01:00:56

I got two kids and the table is a mess. You got napkins and all that kind of stuff all over, forks, utensils.

01:01:04

So I look at them, I say, listen, how are you going to leave it? And now they know, they know the proper response better than we found it.

01:01:10

So I say, you make sure you clean up that table and you leave that table better than you found it.

01:01:16

And I think that's what we need to recognize with the earth. While we're here, we have to leave it better than we found it.

01:01:22

If we're not taking dominion and pushing forward and bringing heaven to earth, we're not doing our job, right?

01:01:29

Jesus is the last Adam. We're the bride of Christ, right? God created

01:01:34

Eve to be a suitable helpmate to Adam. God creates the church to be a suitable helpmate to Jesus, right?

01:01:41

And he's ruling and reigning until what? He makes his enemies a footstool for his feet. So we're not doing our job.

01:01:48

And like you said, we have this escapism attitude and, oh, you know, everybody's just going to live forever. And I think it's a de -emphasis on the role of works in the life of a

01:01:58

Christian. Remember our rewards in the future, heaven and earth are going to be based on what we do here now.

01:02:06

So, you know, before I die, I want to leave it all out on the field. I want to make sure that I've given my best.

01:02:12

I mean, I fail constantly, but I want to make sure that I leave it.

01:02:17

And then I hear those words from Jesus, well done, good and faithful servant. You know, I just, you know,

01:02:23

I think we really have to put a different emphasis on what, how works play a role in the life of believers.

01:02:32

And the fact that we are going to live in a renewed heavens and earth, it's not going to be this ethereal state that there's no physicality going on.

01:02:41

And so, you know, I appreciate you, you know, explaining to us what the nefesh hayah is and the fact that a living creature is one that's not just soul or spirit, but body and soul.

01:02:54

There's a physical nature to it. Okay. I'll just add, think about what

01:02:59

Jesus says in the Beatitudes. This actually, I'd never thought of this until the debate. You know, when Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth, not just theirs is the kingdom of heaven, but they will inherit the earth.

01:03:12

The hyper -preterists can't explain that, but if we're going to inherit it, then we probably should start taking care of it now.

01:03:19

Absolutely. Cultivating it for when we come back. All right, maybe we'll close with this because I know we're coming up a little bit over an hour, and I appreciate your time.

01:03:29

You mentioned three other beliefs that would be affected by a hyper -preterism, a hyper -preterist position.

01:03:37

One, physical bodies aren't essential to human nature, which I think we've covered. The other thing that we would have to abandon is the fact that Jesus is not a physical man right now, and evil, pain, sin, and death will last forever.

01:03:50

So maybe you can address those last two things. Why is it important to believe that Jesus is a physical man right now?

01:03:59

Yeah, that's a good question. To be perfectly honest,

01:04:06

I'm not sure that there's a concrete biblical answer to the question, why is it so important that he continue to be physically embodied now, apart from how is he going to perform the role of high priest when he is just a disembodied soul?

01:04:24

Intercession and the priestly work of the high priest, this was something that embodied people did, and Christ, think of it this way,

01:04:33

Christ's sacrifice as the high priest, as the quintessential high priest, was his physical body.

01:04:40

I would expect then, that body having come back out of the ground, for him to continue to be embodied with the sacrifice that he gave, because it's that which merits him to be able to be our, the intercessor, intercede on our behalf.

01:04:59

Also, you know, the author of Hebrews, which is where a lot of this high priest language about Christ comes from, it also says that it was how he died and having risen from the dead, that Jesus lives forever, won't die again.

01:05:13

Well, what does that even mean if at some point after, you know, the hyper -preterist position is that Jesus did come back physically from the grave, but only for a short few days, and then he shed his body.

01:05:26

Well, what does it even mean then to say he can't die anymore? Well, he doesn't even have the capacity of dying if he's just an immaterial spirit from now on, you know, it doesn't make any sense.

01:05:35

But apart from those sorts of extrapolations that I can draw, I'm not sure that I can offer a real concrete biblical reason why it's so important to continue to believe that Jesus has a physical body even now.

01:05:46

But this is something that the universal church in the first centuries of Christianity cemented in the creeds, you know, the

01:05:54

Chalcedonian Creed says it's not just that Jesus was a body and soul, but that he is a body and a soul.

01:06:03

And so not only do you start, not only does the doctrine of the high priestly work of Christ start to fall apart with his ongoing intercession and so forth, not only does that stuff start to fall apart, but you also, it's just yet one of many, many steps that the hyper -preterist takes out of the doors of Orthodox Christianity.

01:06:22

This was an argument, or this was a point that I made a number of times in the debate, when you accept these, the basics of hyper -preterism, your whole faith unravels, and it becomes in every imaginable way, unrecognizably

01:06:33

Christian. Right. So I think you hit on one of the answers that I was thinking about. Good, maybe you could say it better than I can.

01:06:40

No, I doubt that. I doubt that. In Romans chapter six, it says now, six verse eight, now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

01:06:49

We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Right. So if his soul is separated from his body, that is a form of death.

01:06:58

Correct? Yeah. I mean, I'd struggle to see how it would not be. Right. So that would necessitate

01:07:05

Christ dying again. I mean, you know that it says he will never die again.

01:07:10

If it happens to Christ, what could possibly happen to us? We could be raised from the dead and die again?

01:07:16

We could be separated from our physical bodies? Yeah, that's a good point.

01:07:22

Yeah. You know, so, okay, well, terrific. All right. So, you asked about the other one too, the evil pain and sin and death lasting forever.

01:07:30

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So why is that? I mean, that's crucial to their position.

01:07:38

So why is that an issue for us? It just, the biblical hope, if you look at the hope that God's people have expressed from Old to New Testament, you look at Job, you know, he anticipates dying, but then he says from his flesh, you'll see

01:07:56

God. His hope is not that he will die and then remain that way, but that he will come back to life.

01:08:02

Isaiah 25 and 26 is all about Yahweh swallowing up death forever, not just for Israel, but for all

01:08:10

Gentiles, all nations, using the word death, which he uses all elsewhere throughout the book of Isaiah to refer to physical death.

01:08:17

Isaiah 65 talks about the hope that God's people had that one day they would be able to enjoy the fruit of their labor.

01:08:25

You know, no longer will they toil and sow only for somebody to come after them and reap what they've sown.

01:08:33

No, they look forward to working and enjoying the fruit of their work. You know, and then you come into the

01:08:39

New Testament, and you've got the language of the new heavens and new earth, you've got 1 Corinthians 15 with the immortalization of the resurrected physical body, and so on and so forth.

01:08:46

The hope of God's people is that these things, evil, sin, pain, and death, will come to an end.

01:08:53

And I'll add think about how often biblical writers looked at judgment and the end of sinning against people and oppressing people as the vindication for all the people of God that have suffered under the thumbs of other oppressors in times past.

01:09:14

The author of Ecclesiastes talks about how people that are evil and wicked and don't follow

01:09:20

God, they rule, and they don't experience the kind of pain and oppression that God's people do.

01:09:30

And he expresses frustration that it doesn't seem like that's ever going to change. But at the end of his book, he ends with, but God is going to judge.

01:09:40

It's not enough that God might have judged in some sense that the hyperpreterist can't explain some 2 ,000 years ago, and yet sin, pain, evil, and death continues to go on.

01:09:50

Because in this world, if sin, evil, pain, and death continue to go on in this world, then

01:09:55

God's people are continuing to be oppressed. And not just God's people, but even people that aren't believers but are still nevertheless bearers of the divine image.

01:10:03

They are being oppressed and mistreated by those in power who are abusing that power and their greed.

01:10:10

And so the biblical authors see the future justification of that suffering that divine image bearers suffer under the oppression and sin of others.

01:10:20

The vindication of that's going to happen when those things come to an end. And that's something that the hyperpreterist can't offer.

01:10:27

So I think that those are some reasons why an eventual end to evil, pain, and sin, and death is so important, and hyperpreterists just can't offer that.

01:10:36

Right. And you know, something that you said earlier about the Beatitudes jogged my memory. If the meek shall inherit the earth, and we don't because we never come back to it, we're really no different than Old Testament Israel who never really gains the land.

01:10:56

Right. We never really reap the promise that God made to Israel if they obey the covenant.

01:11:04

So really, it would be Jesus keeping the covenant perfectly and never getting what the promise of keeping the covenant perfectly pointed to, which would be getting the whole earth.

01:11:16

So they have an incomplete Savior, a Savior who lived the perfect life, but doesn't reap the perfect rewards.

01:11:22

It's something that he'll never receive again. So I actually appreciate you bringing that up because it jogs some things in my mind.

01:11:31

All right, I'm going to just hit you with one more thing because you did a great job. You did a great job with this

01:11:37

Anastasios. Am I pronouncing it right? Well, there's some places where the word

01:11:46

Anastasios is inflected as Anastasios. But anyway, go ahead.

01:11:51

All right. You got to forgive me. I'm from Long Island, New York. That's okay. I got this little Bronx attitude, you know, dialect going on.

01:11:59

So that word that I mispronounced, and you can pronounce correctly, you brought that up in Acts 26, 23, and Romans 1, 4, saying that Jesus was first to rise from the dead.

01:12:10

He said it wasn't physical, right? You kept pressing the point that it is physical.

01:12:17

In fact, you went through Acts showing in two spots how it was physical in both of these spots.

01:12:22

And he said in between, well, no, you know, it was something different. So could you just go over that Acts 26, 23 verse again, or the one that you used primarily to explain what that means?

01:12:36

Yeah, well, I mean, it was Acts 26, 23. That was one of them. Paul is standing before King Agrippa at his trial, and he says, the

01:12:47

Christ must suffer, and by being first to rise from the dead, that's, this is where that word anastasios came into play.

01:12:55

The Greek is being the first from the rising of the dead.

01:13:02

The first from the resurrection of the dead, he would thereby proclaim light both to our people and to the

01:13:12

Gentiles. So what I was pointing out there was that this resurrection from the dead that Jesus experienced, his experience was just the first of it.

01:13:24

And I made the same argument from Romans 1, 4, but I think the one that I pressed into service the most was in 1

01:13:31

Corinthians 15. Because in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is connecting the resurrection of Christ with the resurrection of the dead.

01:13:41

He says, he's evidently encountering people in Corinth or hearing about people in Corinth who don't believe that there's going to be a resurrection of the dead, but they do believe that Christ was raised from the dead, and he's, and Paul is telling them, you're being inconsistent here.

01:13:58

And what he says is, if, he says, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, and the word firstfruits refers to the first of a large set.

01:14:12

It was the, going as far back as Cain and Abel. Abel brings the first fruit of his produce, of what he reaps from the field, he brings the first of it to God as a sacrifice, or not, sorry,

01:14:28

Cain was the farmer, Abel was the shepherd, you know, he was an animal person, and he offered the firstfruits of his flock, meaning the first of a larger group of animals.

01:14:41

Well, so likewise, then, Christ was the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep or died, the firstfruits from the dead, meaning that because he died, so too will everybody else that is united to him.

01:14:55

Now, the way that the hyper -preterist gets around this, or at least the way that the one I was debating gets around this, is by saying that when these texts that we've just looked at refer to Christ's rising from the dead, it's not actually talking about his physical resurrection.

01:15:12

And this is something that, you know, if you try to, it's sort of like trying to hold, push down on a mustard seed with your thumb, it's just going to zip, slip out one way and then out the next, no matter how many times you try to hold it down.

01:15:24

The hyper -preterist, at least the one I debated, will say, well, over here, this text, when it refers to Christ's resurrection, is talking about his coming physically out of the grave, but over here, this language of his resurrection is referring to him being resurrected from covenantal death, you know, fellowship death is the language he wanted to use.

01:15:40

And anybody who watches that debate will see that for my opponent, it was just a matter of picking which one of those two kinds of resurrections allows him to affirm what the text says, but regardless of what the context is, you know, so all throughout

01:15:55

Acts, this language of anastasis, this language of resurrection from the dead, is used to refer to Jesus's resurrection from the grave, you know, coming out of the tomb.

01:16:06

And I remember there was a part of the debate that really astonished some people. You remember where Peter, in Acts chapter 2, is talking, he's talking to his fellow

01:16:16

Jews, and he talks about how even David prophesied the death and resurrection of the Messiah. And he says, beginning in verse 25,

01:16:23

David says concerning the Messiah, I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken.

01:16:29

He's quoting here from Psalm 16. And he goes on to say, you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your

01:16:35

Holy One see corruption. And then he goes on to say in verse 29, the patriarch David said that the

01:16:42

Messiah both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us today, David's is, but he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the

01:16:50

Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. Now, this is the important, this is what

01:16:57

I'm trying to get at here. Peter here in Acts 2 is unmistakably talking about the physical resurrection of the

01:17:04

Messiah. There is no other resurrection. But even if we were to pretend for the sake of argument that the Bible knows of some other kind of resurrection that Jesus experienced, so he experienced two resurrections,

01:17:14

I mean, it's nonsense. But let's just pretend for a moment that that were, that there were some legitimate basis for that.

01:17:20

Peter is talking here about Christ coming out of the grave, and not, and his body not having decayed.

01:17:28

So it's clear he's talking about the physical resurrection of the dead, or the physical resurrection of Christ. And he's using that Greek word anastasis.

01:17:37

And that's what that word continues to refer to all throughout Acts. When Paul is at the

01:17:42

Areopagus, and this was a point that I made in my opening presentation, he talks about the anastasis from the dead, he talks about Christ's anastasis from the dead.

01:17:51

And, and, well, he's only talking there about Christ's anastasis from the dead. And the Greeks, many of them mock and laugh at Paul, because they believe that I explained this in my opening presentation that nobody can rise from the dead after they've died.

01:18:06

It was in fact, the myths, you know, the poet was named Aeschylus, and he had a poem called, it was either

01:18:15

Agamemnon, oh, I've got it, I'll probably have it right here in front of me. Yeah, well, anyway, one of his poems depicts the god

01:18:21

Apollo inaugurating the Areopagus. So this is from a few hundred years before Paul is standing at the

01:18:28

Areopagus. And in it, Apollo, the god Apollo says, one thing I can't do is raise the dead.

01:18:35

And it's all throughout the Greek literature leading up to the time of Christ. And so, so you've got here,

01:18:40

Acts 2, Peter talking about the physical resurrection of the Messiah, you've got Paul saying at the Areopagus, the physical resurrection of the

01:18:47

Messiah that the Greeks thought was so foolish, many of them anyway. So when he gets to King Agrippa, and he talks about him being the

01:18:54

Messiah being the first to experience the anastasis from the dead, we know he's talking about physical resurrection.

01:18:59

But going back to what I said earlier about my opponent, just picking and choosing which of these two concepts resurrections that he wants to plug into any given text that uses the word, that's what he tried to do here in Acts 2.

01:19:11

So even though Peter is quoting David, and saying you're not going to allow your

01:19:17

Holy One to see corruption, meaning decay, his body's not going to decay. And even though that's explicitly what Peter says in verse 31, that his flesh did not see corruption.

01:19:26

Nevertheless, my opponent had the gall, the unmitigated gall to suggest that what

01:19:32

Peter is actually talking about here was some other kind of resurrection of the Messiah. That's what hyper -preterism reduces you to, to just picking and choosing, and it becomes whatever you've got to do, anything but resurrection.

01:19:46

You can't have that. Anything else you can just play fast and loose with the text. And that was, and it just,

01:19:53

I've heard from a number of people who were astonished that he actually tried to argue that in Acts 2,

01:19:58

Peter's talking about something other than physical resurrection of Christ, it's just astonishing. Anyway, I rambled, I apologize. No, no, no, that was really good, and I think that's going to be edifying to the people who watch this particular interview.

01:20:11

Again, yeah, I would agree. How could you possibly refute the fact that Peter's talking about a physical resurrection,

01:20:17

Paul's talking about a physical resurrection at the Areopagus, physical resurrection, all these things are quite clear.

01:20:24

All right, real quick, I'm going to let you go. Aside from the Bible, what would be a good resource for more information about this topic?

01:20:31

So I'll offer two. Firstly, I think that this is an area, this is a topic that more preterist

01:20:37

Christians like me need to tackle, and I don't think that there are a lot of good books that address this specific issue.

01:20:47

One that I would encourage people to check out is a work by a hyper -preterist named Sam Frost called

01:20:54

Why I Left Full Preterism. And by the way, he didn't choose the phrase full preterism, that was the publisher's, which is, by the way, one of the reasons

01:21:01

I'm not a big fan of the ministry that published that book, because I think they take hyper -preterism too loosely, they don't take it as seriously as it ought to be taken.

01:21:10

So that's one place, but unfortunately I don't think there's a lot of other work apart from reading books on the topic of resurrection.

01:21:17

But again, you're not, most of those books, if any of them, are dealing with hyper -preterists, because they're still a fairly small, albeit vocal, movement.

01:21:26

So Sam Frost's How I, or Why I Left Full Preterism is one. But the other thing I would encourage people to do, if they have the resources to be able to do so, is to start to explore intertestamental

01:21:37

Jewish literature. Because one of the things that I was able to do in my opening presentation, is I was able to quote 1

01:21:43

Enoch, I was able to quote 2 Maccabees, I was able to quote from what's called the

01:21:51

Greek Apocalypse of Moses, or the Greek Life of Adam and Eve, these are all intertestamental Jewish works. And then also tradition that would have been extant in the intertestamental period, but was written down a couple hundred years after Christ in the

01:22:04

Talmud, I was able to quote from the Talmud as well, and show that there were certainly some

01:22:12

Jews that didn't believe that there would be resurrection. That's why you have the Sadducees. As the joke often goes, they didn't believe in an afterlife, so they were sad, you see.

01:22:21

Makes me want to vomit every time I hear somebody make that joke. But that's why there were Sadducees, is because there were some

01:22:26

Jews that didn't believe in resurrection. But crucially, the language of resurrection was universally used by them to refer to the kind of resurrection that the

01:22:35

Sadducees denied. So by being familiar with this intertestamental

01:22:40

Jewish literature, you can get an idea of what was going on in the minds of the

01:22:46

Jewish people when Christ and Paul and others come on the scene. When Michael and other hyperpreterists, they will argue that the reason why the

01:22:57

Church has, from very early on, believed in a physical resurrection from the dead is because early Church Fathers imposed

01:23:03

Greek thinking onto the Jewish scriptures, and they sort of neglected the Jewish mindset that produced the scriptures.

01:23:10

And I think there's actually some elements of truth to that in other areas of theology that we can talk about some of the time. But what

01:23:16

I demonstrated in my opening presentation is that hyperpreterists get this issue exactly backwards. When you familiarize yourself with the intertestamental

01:23:23

Jewish literature, you can see that they all believed that resurrection was coming back to physical life, even if some of them thought that wouldn't happen.

01:23:35

And moreover, when Paul says at his trial, when he says to King Agrippa, I'm believing in what the

01:23:42

Law and Prophets proclaimed, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, you know who said the exact same thing?

01:23:48

The people whose oral traditions are captured in the Talmuds. The Talmuds record people saying, how do we know that there's going to be a resurrection from the dead?

01:23:57

And you know what they said? From the Law and from the Prophets. And then they quoted Isaiah 25 and 26, and Daniel 12 too, and other texts.

01:24:05

Even the seed analogy that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15, when he likens resurrection to a seed goes into the ground, and then it's as if it comes back up out of the ground, but more glorious.

01:24:17

Even that analogy is in the Talmuds, which capture this tradition that preceded

01:24:24

Paul. So the point I'm getting at is, if Christians have the time, the resources to be able to start to familiarize themselves with what

01:24:32

Jews were thinking between the Testaments, that's going to help them to better understand what the authors of the

01:24:38

New Testament and people whose words are recorded, and what they meant by what they said. And when you familiarize yourself with that literature, there's no possibility, the hyperpreterism can't even get a foothold, because it is so antithetical and so foreign to everything that the intertestamental

01:24:55

Jewish literature reflects belief in. So Sam Frost's book, Why I Left Full Preterism, and Intertestamental Judaism, those are the two resources

01:25:03

I would encourage people to look into. Excellent. Yeah, Sam is a friend, and he's a friend to the ministry. I greatly appreciate the work he did, and I have that book, and I've gone through it, and he does a great job.

01:25:14

Well, brother, I just want to thank you once again for taking the time out to do this. Hey, before we go, who's your favorite apologist?

01:25:22

Or who most influenced you, let's say, put it that way. The one who's most influenced me is

01:25:27

James White from Alpha and Omega Ministries. But I wouldn't say he's necessarily my favorite.

01:25:34

It depends on the favorite, why favorite. So when it comes to being an apologist for Reformed theology, and to Roman Catholics, and to Muslims, I would say

01:25:43

James White. When it comes to apologetics to atheists,

01:25:49

I really like Braxton Hunter, and Jonathan Pritchett. I think they do great work. When it comes to, you know, so there are going to be a number of people.

01:25:56

I'm a big fan also of Greg Kokel, and the others there at Stand to Reason, including Alan Schlieman and Tim Barnett.

01:26:03

So those are some names I'll throw out there. But I wouldn't say I necessarily have a favorite, but definitely the one who's been most influential is

01:26:09

James White, which is one of the reasons I so badly want to debate him on the topic we have alluded to once or twice during the course of the show.

01:26:14

We're going to have to poke and prod him. Let's see if we can get that. We'll see what happens. Yeah. All right, brother.

01:26:20

So listen, I'm going to, again, once again, thank you for your time. It's been my pleasure. Great. I'm going to close the show, and then we'll just talk a little bit before we go.

01:26:28

Sounds good. So guys, thanks so much for joining us for the last hour and a half almost. If you want to get more information with regards to Reformed Theology, go to www .reformedrookie

01:26:40

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01:26:50

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01:26:56

The Basics of the Reformed Faith, so I would enjoy you listening to that. Remember, a life reformed is a life conformed to the

01:27:03

Jesus of the scriptures and to God be the glory. So semper reformanda, always be reforming.

01:27:09

we stand. We can do no other. I'm Anthony Avino, and thanks again for joining us on the Reformed Rookie podcast.