Mormonism, Marian Devotion, Acts 2:23, and Caller Q&A

Well, greetings, welcome to the dividing line. We are taking Zoom calls. We only have two in right now, and I was trying to find the link. I don't know how you do it. I've never called in. Is it at the Alpha and Omega thing or something?

It's at the almanorgx address, as well as on the Facebook page. Ah, well, I don't do Facebook.

Yeah, I was looking for that, and nothing came up. It never shows me anything from us on notifications anyways on X, so I don't see anything. But a couple people have found us, so hopefully some more folks will join in.

Mormonism, Critical Methods, and Fragmentation

I invited folks to, especially those who would like to defend Hayden Carroll and Jacob Hanson and their recent escapades. I still find it absolutely astonishing that anyone could watch the video we played on the last program and go, what's wrong with that?

Yeah, so he's promoting his book.

You know, the book that he says somebody else wrote that he just ran into and needed some help answering. It's just the level of self-deception. It's pretty astonishing. It really is. But what's interesting is, before we go to our first caller, which will be Caleb, this just popped up and I just want to make a comment on it, because I'll forget it and we'll never get back to it in the future.

But you have this fascinating statement here, and I was going to go find it, and I couldn't find it. But I know that's Dan McClellan's ID, so I would assume Jacob Hanson isn't spoofing it. Anyway, Dan McClellan, the sort of Mormon guy who basically thinks he defines all of scholarship, we've responded to a bunch of stuff that he's done before.

And on October 19th, that can't be October, that was last year, October 19th, last year, I agreed with your claim that data supports the conclusion Smith was a false prophet. Why would I have an argument against a claim I agree with?

What part of this are you having trouble wrapping your mind around? Evidently, at some point in the past, Dan McClellan has agreed that Smith was a false prophet. I can't imagine that's anybody other than Joseph Smith.

And of course, yeah, you'd have to, given the standards he uses, the criticisms he makes of the Bible, this is what I've said all along. If you embrace that type of critical methodology, Mormonism is significantly more susceptible to that criticism than Christianity is.

Sorry, but Joseph Smith's history, his wild evolution in theology between 1829 and 1844, the Book of Mormon just as a whole, there is just no way that you can embrace the kind of historical, critical rejection of the Bible, and then sit there and go, but the Book of Mormon's great!

Maybe that's what it was about, I don't know. Here's Jacob Hanson. I think Dan's interview is a win overall, but they really should do a follow-up with someone who actually is a Latter-day Saint. The only reason I wanted to show this is we are heading toward the wild, wild west when it comes to Mormonism.

These guys are once the central control that used to be exercised by someone like Bruce R. McConkie that kept some kind of doctrinal order, I guess you'd say, once that is gone, you're going to have three million little prophets running around.

Who can complain about it? Because we've got Latter-day Revelation. They're all going to have their own little views and their own little perspectives. I think we even see some of it in Jacob Hanson and Hayden Carroll not really working together anymore, because one's a neomorm, the other isn't.

No religious movement can survive that without breaking up into all sorts of splinter groups. American church history is filled with splinter groups all over the place. There are splinter groups all over Roman Catholicism.

All the groups that claim to be unified and we all have the same perspectives, they all have. They all have splinter groups. There's a pope. I forget what his name is, but there's an antipope who says he's the pope.

He wears all the papal clothing and all the rest of that kind of stuff. He has followers too. But Mormonism, because of its inherent subjectivity, is much more susceptible to this. It's just going to shatter into a thousand pieces.

We'll get to watch all of it right on social media, to be honest with you. Who knows where that's going to go. Let's start taking our calls. That's the first time we've ever done this in what is evidently becoming the studio.

I sort of feel sorry for the old studio and the stuff in the background and my swords and the warp core and stuff like that. I will be using it. I'm going to be on with needgod .net this afternoon. I'll be using it for that.

You can always bring a sword in here. No, I don't think so. I don't think it would really fit over there. Anyway. Let's go to Caleb. See how this is going to work.

Hello, Caleb. You definitely do need the sword or Jeff's going to chop you into pieces. You need the sword. The context of my question is that my friend was on Catholic Answers yesterday and he was asking specifically about the litany of Loretta.

The Litany of Loreto and Marian Devotion

The answer he got, I noticed two key things about it. He didn't say anything about the historical view of what the church believed when they wrote that. He also said you have to keep in mind the poetic context and said Mary was the highest cause of our joy than any other creature, which I thought was kind of unmerited.

Where can I find what the Roman Catholic historical belief about this prayer is and why do you think, because he uses this in the prayers of Alfonso de Muder, whatever his name is, sorry, in debates. Why do you think it has so much rhetorical power?

Well, there's a couple things. For people who are wondering, the litany of Loretta is a Roman Catholic Marian litany. It's primarily a long list of titles from Mary. There's a little bit at the beginning about the Trinity and a little bit at the end, but it's about Mary.

I think we brought it up six months or so ago. It came up online, just someone using it as an example, of the absolute wild imbalance in Marian devotion. Every time Rome says well, no, no, Mary only receives hyper-veneration, hyper-dulia, and never lotteria.

It's just so painfully obvious, especially with the advent of social media. We see videos constantly that aren't faked of the processions. A lot of American Protestants didn't see that, because that didn't happen as much in the United States.

When you go to Europe, especially to nations that are still heavily Catholic, and you see these processions, and you see these massive statues of Mary being carried through the streets, and people wearing these strange garments and beating drums, and how everything comes to a halt and everything else, it becomes real obvious where the emphasis is in the daily devotion of the Roman Catholics in that community.

It's not focused on the Trinity. It's focused on Mary. Mary is central to their entire religious experience. I think I also brought up at that time the experience I had with Jerry Matitix on WEZE in Boston in 1993, I think it was, when I read that Marian prayer that includes the line that the person is praying for her protection from the devil, their sins, and Jesus.

Matitix's response was, I truly hope you pray that prayer with me someday. The whole reason to bring it up is that 85 of the prayer is in praise of Mary, not in praise of the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit.

The prayer itself has developed over the centuries. In fact, it starts one of the reasons I think it became as popular as it did is it starts post-Reformationally. It starts right at the real upswing of the Counter-Reformation.

The Jesuits, they're successful in reconverting certain nations in Europe. They have that strong, at that time anyways, the Jesuits would become the leftist, wild-eyed nutcases of Roman Catholicism today.

Back then, if the Pope says it, it's the Word of God type stuff, so the Marian devotion had a huge upswing along with that at that period of time. And of course, the House of Loreto, literally this idea that this little house in Italy was carried there from the Holy Land during the Crusades by angels, and that this was literally the house the Holy Family lived in.

And people coming to it, and as I understand it, over a million people still come in pilgrimages to this little house, even to this day. And so, the whole reason is to you cannot cause someone to become balanced in their thinking.

Anyone who is devoted to that kind of thing is going to remain devoted to it until something spiritual happens in their life, and their sources of authority change. Because their sources of authority are primarily their emotions, their traditions.

My mommy believed this, my grandmommy believed this, my great-grandmommy believed in this, and therefore I'm going to believe in this until the day I die. It's hard to argue with that kind of a mindset.

But what's interesting is, in 2020, well, here, I looked at some stuff. Some of the popes kept adding titles to it. So it's much longer today than it was then. So, Queen conceived without original sin became widespread after the 1854 Immaculate Conception definition.

So it grows as Marian devotion grows. Queen assumed into Heaven was added by Pius XII in 1950, the same year he defined the Assumption. And, interestingly, you've got Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Leo XIII, 1883, Queen of Peace Benedict XV, 1917.

1917 being what? Toward the end of World War I. Queen of Families John Paul II in 1995 and Mother of the Church Pope Francis in 2018. And in 2020 we got the real woke update additions. We have Mother of Mercy, Mother of Hope, and Solace of Migrants.

Yes, Solace of Migrants was added in 2020. So, when you look at the current version of it, you sort of have to go back and go, how much of this actually does represent the 1580s that time period when it first really makes an appearance and how much of it has been added to, even in the modern period, to make it Solace of Migrants.

What might that refer to? Who knows, right? You have socialist popes with communist leanings and they're leftists. Even though there are walls around the Vatican, they don't want walls anyplace else. The hypocrisy is pretty rank when you think about it, but that's the modern Vatican.

That's what it is. I think it's quite useful to say it's just poetry. It shouldn't be taken super seriously. All you've got to do is watch those faithful Roman Catholics in processions chanting this prayer.

See the tears. See the devotion. Somebody on Catholic Answers sounds pretty silly if they're saying, well, you know, we shouldn't take this too seriously. No, millions and millions and millions of people do, and Rome's dogmatic exaltation of Mary, especially since the Reformation with the advent of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption, the huge movement that still exists despite what Francis did, to have her defined as Mediatrix, Chorodemptrix, so on and so forth, demonstrates that this is one part of Roman Catholicism that's not going away anytime soon.

Sorry about that. I was taking notes. Yes, sir. I appreciate that answer. I ordered two of your books. Do you cover a lot of this in Mary and Other Redeemer?

Well, I didn't cover the Litany of Loretto, but I cover the development of Marian dogmas down through history. The focus at that point was on Mary as Chorodemptrix, Comediatrix, Advocate for the People of God.

But there's plenty of material there from the Glories of Mary, which is if you don't have it, if that's an area that you're having dialogue with someone with, the thing's gone through... the edition I had 25 years ago had gone through 800 editions, it's probably 900 by now, and written by a doctor of the Church.

You can't get much more weighty than that. But the Glories of Mary would be a good book to grab. Sounds good. Thanks, Caleb. Appreciate it. I don't know how to pronounce Adrono, but I'll say Adrono. You were pretty close, Dr. White.

Adrono. How are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for doing this. It's very much appreciated. I created a verse-by-verse Bible study for my wife and I. We were going through it the other night, and we were curious about John 12, where John says that but to all who do receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name.

Receiving Christ and Becoming Children of God in John 1

And she brought up a question that I wasn't sure how to answer, so I said I'd research it. I haven't had a chance to look at my commentaries yet, but I wanted to ask, it seems like those who are receiving him are different from to those who believe in his name at the end of verse 12.

Because historically, I've always interpreted that to those who receive him as believing in him. But it seems like after those who receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God to those who believe in his name, and it's more of an expectation of who's receiving Jesus.

So I was wondering if you had any thoughts or any additions to that.

Well, context is always king, and verse 11 says he came to his own, and his own did not receive him, so it's referring there to the Jewish people. And so you have received there at the end of verse 11, Par-Eleban, and then, but as many as did Eleban him, receive him, same root, to them he gave authority to become Technothayu, children of God.

The Jews would have claimed to be the children of God, but to be truly a child of God, you have to be given that authority. It's amazing how many of the world religions assume that everyone is children of God.

They take the creative element rather than the New Testament concept that there are children of the devil and children of God. Receive authority to be children of God, and then the last phrase to those believing in his name is called in exegesis it's called apposition, so you have a phrase that is restating or renaming something that came before that, so the whoever, as many in verse 12 is simply being identified as the ones believing in his name.

It's not some different group, it's just to receive him is to believe in his name, it's just a phrase in apposition, and it's also contrasting the fact that the Jews did not believe in his name. The only ones who can be called children of God are those who are believing in his name, and then the sentence doesn't end there.

You can't just do verse 12 because the verse 12 starts with chasoi as many, and then verse 13 begins with hoi, which is continuing the same group. So those who believe in his name were those not of bloods, neither of the will of flesh, neither of the will of man, but of God having been born.

Now, in English we put the action first, but it's interesting that in Greek, what I gave you there is the literal rendering. The ones, and then that's the first word of the verse, and then the verb is the last word of the verse, having been born, who were born.

So everything else is descriptive. The, not from bloods, bloodlines, genealogies, things like that, neither from thelematos sarkos, the will of flesh, fleshly willing and deciding, like, you know, free will.

Uda ek thelematos andros, and thelematos andros is almost always the will of man that could just be, you know, the will of man in a general sense, but it also could be referring to natural descent. That term is used in English literature of a man's desire for a woman, for example.

The point is that those who are believing and who are born of God and are called children of God, are born by the agency of God, ek theou, they are not born by anything that they do. I mean, it, you know, not of bloods, not of the will of flesh, nor the will of man.

All those are put aside and they are born of God. So this is actually a pretty important text in looking at the relationship of election and faith and things like that too. So, yeah, that's a good illustration also of having verse numeration helps us find stuff nice and fast, but it can also break up lines of thought and, you know, I'm sure that I memorized John 1 .12 before I memorized John 1 .13 and probably therefore interpreted John 1 .12 before I had any idea what John 1 .13 was talking about because that really wouldn't have been a big issue in the circles that I was traveling in as a young person.

So, yeah, it's always good to make sure that the entire sentence is included in your verse study.

Yes, of course. Thank you so much. I really do appreciate that. Just to clarify, or making sure I'm understanding you correctly for verse 12, obviously don't isolate it and I'll be done after this, and you can correct my clarification or any misunderstandings I might have.

Please, I'd appreciate that. Not to isolate verse 12, but in verse 12 the reason why those who are receiving him versus those who believe in his name at the end are not different is because of a hermeneutical principle that then flows into verse 13, emphasizing the fact that these people who are believing are not born of the flesh or of anything done, but of God and his will.

Notice it says, he gave to them authority. And so, who's the them? Well, the use of the article, to those believing in his name. So, there's no way to break that up. There's no way to say this is a different group.

There's nothing in the text that indicates that. In fact, the natural reading of the text would be exactly opposite to that. That there is simply apposition here. This is a phrase that is renaming those to whom authority to be the children of God has been given.

They are described as those who are believing. And then, when that action of believing is noted, then there is the immediate addition, but that believing is not flowing from genealogy, human will, it's from God.

That's why they are born from God. And I think you can, very rightly, make a direct connection to 1 John 2, 1 John 4, and 1 John 5. Same author, some people would dispute that, but the vast majority would say same author, using the same language, talking about the same thing.

And in those instances, the act of God in causing regeneration is what precedes all the Christian activities, such as loving God and faith, believing that Jesus is the Son of God. So, there is a strong consistency there.

We spent quite some time, I don't know, about a year, year and a half ago, dealing with 1 John 5 1, and David Allen's attempts to get around the testimony of that text. And there are a number of articles up on the website about that, too.

Alright, there you go. Thank you for the call, Adrono. Now, here's the problem, is when you put this stuff up here, is it going in order? Oh, no, Zoom has a mind of its own. It seems to be putting it in alphabetical order or something.

Oh, okay. Alright, so, do you happen to know who was next? Come on, use your words. I think it was Dylan. Alright, Dylan, you have won the lottery,.

The Rich Pierce lottery. Thank you, Dr. Wink,.

An honor to win this lottery. So, myself and my church, we're here in upstate New York. We've had an interesting opportunity to do ministry to some different Mormon missionaries. We've had a couple that have come through the area.

Sharing the Gospel with LDS Missionaries

There's a pretty good sized Mormon church around us, and so they house missionaries there. They're very friendly people. They'll come to our church. They'll come to our Bible studies and stuff like that.

They'll come to anything we invite them to. We preach the Bible. We're very deep in our Bible studies and everything. We don't really go around any hard scriptures. We preach Orthodox Christianity, and I'll go out and grab lunch with them afterwards, and we'll dispute our beliefs and whatnot.

At one point, just to keep it brief, they had asked me to do some research on some passages and cross-reference it between 2 Nephi and Isaiah and these prophecies and the history of Joseph Smith. So I did that, and I found several contradictions in that prophecy between Scripture and between the Book of Mormon.

So we had a really good conversation about that, and I pointed out these inconsistencies. I pointed out these issues with their text, and it essentially came down to, we trust Joseph Smith over the prophet Isaiah.

Was it we trust Joseph Smith over the prophet Isaiah, or we trust Joseph Smith over the transmission of the text of Isaiah? In other words, it's been changed, or what?

Yeah, so it was more towards the latter excuse there. I had brought up the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are the scriptures that Jesus had. These weren't just transmitted for thousands of years.

These are preserved since before the time of Jesus, and so these are likely the scriptures Jesus had. So I asked them, did Jesus and the apostles, do they have the wrong text? Do they have the wrong Book of Isaiah?

And so they didn't really have an answer to that, and after that question, they pretty much were like, hey, we can't meet anymore. We can't talk anymore. We're not going to come to your church or your Bible studies anymore.

That kind of broke my heart, because I actually grew to really like these guys. Very nice people, very loving people, and really enjoyed having them around. I told them I'm praying for them. They're always welcome at my church.

Our church is putting together care packages for them. We're going to drop them off at their church and give them Bibles and everything, but.

I was just curious. Well, just be aware of the fact, if you actually develop any kind of personal relationship with them, if they start asking questions that you are prompting, the standard procedure of every mission president and every LDS mission in the world is to get them away from you.

That's what they do not want happening. They want them only out there doing their thing, getting their message out, and I've told the story before, but we befriended missionaries and they started calling me.

We'd have long conversations and two of them got rid of their partners, sent them out to do some shopping or something, and invited Rich and I over to their... it was you and I, right? It was a long time ago.

Over to their apartment and, man, was that a Spartan place. It was one of those couches that once you sit in it, you're going to need a ladder to get back out of it type of thing. Anyway, we have this conversation and this guy's sitting in a folding chair in front of us and I keep asking him questions and he cannot answer them.

Finally, you've got to picture this. He's sitting there and he's in his white shirt, dark tie back then. They can wear much more colorful ties than they could back when I first started witnessing the Mormons 35 years ago or more.

Actually, 40 years ago or more. He has his name badge on and he reaches down and he grabs his name badge and he pulls it out and flips it over his shoulder and throws it across the room. That was his way of saying I'm done.

They sent him home. I never heard from him again, sadly, but they sent him home. He asked questions that they didn't want to answer and figured he couldn't handle this anymore. I don't know what happened to his partner.

He might have been sent home too. I don't remember. They are very afraid of that happening and it has happened enough times that the reason you got the cold shoulder is probably not because they wanted to do it.

They were told to do it. They were probably given a choice. I wouldn't be surprised, honestly, if you do try to drop a care package off someplace, I'd say there's a 90 chance that at some point, pretty quickly, early on, you'll knock on that door, say hi, we're from such and such a place, we want to drop this off for elders, blah, blah, blah.

They're not here anymore and they will not tell you where they've gone. I'd say there's a 90 chance of that happening.

We had something happen like that to us recently, actually, before this pair of missionaries were here. There was another group of missionaries that me and my wife invited over our home. We took them a meal and we had a long discussion and then the next week they were shipped out.

We've had that happen now. They got shipped out. These ones gave us the cold shoulder. I was just wondering if you knew of or any way that how to make those opportunities like where you had with that young man where you were able to just talk to him and allow him to ask his questions and make that decision.

It's heartbreaking because they're lost and they say they love Jesus and they love the scriptures but they're so lost.

I've told the story before about a foreign missionary who was a member of the church where Rich and I first met and he brought the Bible that he carried while he was a missionary one night and showed it to us.

He said, look at this. I think he turned to John chapter 5 and he said, look at all the stuff I marked. I skipped over all the important stuff. It's like I couldn't even see it. It's like it just didn't register with me.

Now I see it. Back then I didn't. You just have to remember something. Being a missionary is not an easy life. These young guys, a lot of them have never been away from home. They are under a tremendous amount of pressure.

They are constantly surrounded. That's why they send them out two by two, not one by one. So that they don't develop relationships, so they don't get close to people. There is a certain standard that is expected of each and every one of them.

I don't know what the statistics are now but a number of years ago, if I recall correctly, it was 75 or was it 80 of returned LDS missionaries go inactive when they come home for a period of at least six months.

They just stop going. They are burned out. They are done with it. That is when the questions come bubbling up. When they are on their mission they are kept in such a pressure cooker that you can ask the questions, but they don't really have the time to even think about them.

They could never, when they are riding, when they get back to their apartment after that good conversation you had and when you showed them how everything from Isaiah 40 -48 says there is only one true God, the creator of heavens and earth and there are no other gods before me and all the rest of that stuff.

They don't have the freedom to think about it. They can't tell the other guy, wow, I have no idea how to answer any of that. They can't say that. In fact, they have to put on a smiley face and say, I know how to handle this.

It is when they get off their mission that is when all those issues start bubbling up. I remember that one missionary that had gotten in my face out in Mesa, Elder Hollywood, who was poking his finger in my chest and going, someday I am going to be a god and you are going to worship me.

He said it really loudly. Everybody was standing around going, wow, he said the quiet part out loud. Then he apologized the next night and stuff like that. I met him at least 10 -15 years later in Salt Lake City and he wasn't even a Mormon anymore.

Which is not really what you are looking for. You would like them to come to know the truth. It is that time period when those well-planted seeds can bear fruit. Don't give up on it. It can be heartbreaking.

Especially when you really start communicating with somebody. Somebody has got to plant that seed. You may not get to be the one to see it sprout, but there you go.

Thank you Dr. White. I appreciate it. We are going to keep up and keep praying for them. Thank you for all your work and your apologetics. A lot of the helpful things have come through your ministry and our apologetic work in our church.

I just want to say thank you for that.

Keep it up. They will eventually warn their people about you. They will warn their missionaries about you. They have distributed my picture in decades past. I would love to see that picture now. It wouldn't look anything like me anymore.

I was once waiting for some missionaries at someone's apartment. It was a second story apartment. I was looking out the window waiting for them to come. They rode by looked up, saw me, and kept going.

They went to a Circle K and called the guy and said, we can't come by, not while he is there. They will warn their people, warn their missionaries, if you are actively involved in reaching out to them.

You will be identified as anti-Mormons and all the rest of that kind of stuff. That will take place if you stay there. Let's go ahead and talk with Dan Chapa the Armenian man. Well known for having spent 147 ,000 hours on YouTube with none other than TurretinFan himself.

If anyone can remain an Armenian after that amount of time with TurretinFan, I have no hopes whatsoever. We got to meet in Arkansas. I think that was February of 25. I think that's when it was. Nice guy.

I think we are going to be talking a little bit about the new interesting idea that people like Dinesh D'Souza are playing with, that you can predestine acts, but not the people that commit them. Is that what we are talking about?

Predestination, Foreknowledge, and Acts 2:23

Right. The predestination of an outcome, but not the means. Specifically the crucifixion. By the way, the pleasure was mine. It was nice to meet you and have that opportunity. The text I have in mind, obviously Acts 4 is going to be the key one, but just getting to the lead up to it, because there's two precedent passages.

In Acts 2 .23 it says this Jesus delivered up according to the definitive plan and foreknowledge of God. He crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. The things I note here, a lot of things. There's obviously a definitive plan and Jesus is delivered over to death.

But there's this divide that he's got where he's got the definitive plan and foreknowledge of God. That's one thing where it doesn't seem like everything is necessarily the definitive plan. It's both the definitive plan and foreknowledge.

Then in Acts 3 .17... So you don't think that.

God's foreknowledge is related to his definitive plan?

Yeah, they go hand in hand. What I would say is that he doesn't just say the definitive plan. He says the definitive plan and foreknowledge. It seems to me the idea might be something to the effect of God determined to hand Christ over knowing what was about to happen.

Knowing that they would crucify him. So it allows for a distinction between predestination and what I would call permission. I think it's interesting that he's not using just the one term, definitive plan.

He's using two terms, definitive plan and foreknowledge.

So that foreknowledge, though, fixes the reality of the deliverance and the crucifixion. So in other words, it couldn't not happen. If God has foreknowledge of it, then it could not not happen. So there is no possibility from your perspective that the time of the crucifixion might have had to be bypassed and there had to be a plan B for a future time or something like that.

So I would say that God was certain that that was going to happen, but it doesn't make the event necessary because God's foreknowledge isn't something that causes it to happen or settles it from a causal standpoint.

So the example I'd give, the classic example from going back to the Reformers and probably long before that is the bones of Christ's legs. And what they would say is, well, the soldier could have broken his legs but didn't, instead stabbed him with a spear.

But he was prophesied that the bones wouldn't be broken. So from a prophecy standpoint, God wasn't uncertain that that's what the outcome would be. But the means wasn't like the legs became steel and unbreakable, nor was the means that the soldiers turned into robots.

Rather, the means was persuasion. God knew that the soldiers would be persuaded that it's useless to break his legs because he's already dead, so just stab him with a spear.

So God persuaded them? Is that what you're saying?

In essence, yeah. By arranging circumstances the way God does. I don't know if he popped a thought into their head directly or just based on the circumstances, he knew that that was the outcome.

What if in Acts 2 .23 Te horismene bulle kai prognosi tu theu. Kai is not disjunctive but it is copulative. Horismene is very specific. Bulle in of itself probably would be enough, but determinate, definite, it's a strong term.

So the bulle that brings about the deliverance of Jesus to these godless men who put him to death is not nebulous. It is specific, which would fit very carefully with the early church's testimony that what happened to Christ was prophesied from Moses throughout David and through the prophets.

Luke 24, what's Jesus saying? Why were you so slow to believe? Look at what the constant testimony of Scripture has been concerning me. If you have a determinate bulle, a council, a decree and prognosi, the kai is copulative, not disjunctive.

If you interpret a kai as disjunctive, you have to provide contextual reason for it because its normative function is copulative.

It's and, it means and, yeah.

Right, but kai can function in two different ways. It can function copulatively which is joining the two terms that it appears between and disjunctively. It almost sounded to me like you start off with a disjunctive idea which you would have to substantiate because that's not the normative use of the term.

And if it is copulative, then this foreknowledge has to be interpreted in the light of a determinate decree, right? So wouldn't that mean that foreknowledge here is not just simply observance of things in the future, but it does.

It flows from God's creative decree which creates the very essence.

Of time itself? So I guess the way I read it is that he's delivered by basically the determinative council and the foreknowledge. So the means by which he's delivered over is two things. One is the council, the other is the foreknowledge.

But I guess my question to you is what's the foreknowledge doing there at all. If it's not to me it serves a strong apologetic use because it's not God determining the sin. He's foreknowing and permitting the sin.