Beyond Mega Length Edition of the DL: Textual Critical Topics, Islamic Topics & More

Greetings and welcome to the Binding Line only program for this week. So we're going to have to get a lot of stuff in here and I'm just going to sort of look in between the two cameras since, oh, there we go.

Oh, just slow, huh? Okay. All right. I understand. Lots of turkey dressing. Probably just not quite recovered from all that yet.

So got a lot to get to. So, uh, it's, it's, it dropped into the seventies as a high.

So I could, you know, you live in the desert when you're, when you're, you know, that over the weekend, the highs are going to drop into the sixties.

So, uh, you can finally get your coogies out and, uh, do stuff like that.

Um, you know, I don't have my pros purgatory scripts, uh, here.

So, um, hmm. I'll have to, I'll, I'll get those installed later on so I can take care of the guy in channel that's, uh, that's going to need to, uh, to do that.

Um, lots and lots of stuff to get to, and no, not everyone is safe, uh, cause

I can either use kick or ban. I just don't have the thing. Uh, someone just directed me to Brandon House's, uh, uh,

Facebook page. Report Linda Sarsour is Time Magazine's most likely pick for person of the year.

Remember her. She is best friends with James White's buddy, mentor and kindred spirit Yasir Qadhi. You, you know, you know, you cannot possibly have a meaningful argument when you have to twist the truth this badly.

Um, even, even twist the truth in regards to Linda Sarsour and Yasir Qadhi. Yasir Qadhi very clearly has numerous differences with Linda Sarsour.

The only reason he supports her is because of all the people that attack her, uh, the same people that attack him. So enemy of my enemy, friend of my friend, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Uh, but, uh, you know, the mentor and kindred spirit thing, let's not worry about context. We don't have to be truthful, even though we claim to be

Christians. There you go. That's, that's just Brandon House. That's just the way things are over at the, in the Halcyon compound.

Um, uh, we do hope to make it through the program today, by the way, without getting hit by a North Korean missile.

Uh, they just launched one over Japan and, uh, yeah, yahoo. Um, people are absolutely nuts.

Uh, run by, well, that's not the people. It's not the poor North Korean people. Did you see that? That guy, uh, shot five times, uh, and still, still managed to get out of there.

Um, what an, what an amazing thing. And to realize they're actually Christians in that country is, uh, is astounding.

Um, anyway, oh, I'm glad someone mentioned this. Um, cause

I forgot to put on my list, but, uh, please, I don't think we have it up on our website yet, uh, but we need to, uh,

I've announced it on Facebook and Twitter, uh, but we are having a, uh, pre, uh, debate, uh, pre -conference debate at G3 again this year.

Last year we debated, uh, Trent Horne and, uh, this year, uh, we are bringing, uh,

Adnan Rashid in from London. Uh, Adnan and I have debated primarily in London and in Dublin, Ireland actually.

And so we are going to bring, uh, Adnan into Atlanta and, um, we were talking about possible topics and, uh, he came up with a real nice, concise way.

It was, it was more concise than the way I had expressed it. Uh, and that is, can we be saved without the cross?

Because obviously from the Islamic perspective, uh, the cross never took place. Well, it didn't take place with Jesus.

Well, it depends on if you're Shabir Ali or not, but, um, Jesus didn't die upon the cross is the

Islamic position of Surah 4, 157. And so you can have peace with God, a proper relationship with God in Islamic theology, uh, without the work of Jesus Christ.

And that truly is the, um, soteriological focus of the difference between Islam and Christianity.

It's not the most fundamental difference because obviously who Jesus was is,

I think, even more fundamental at that point. You can't, you know, I mean, in a, in a sense we're sort of, and Adnan and I have debated this before we debated it at Trinity College in Dublin, but, um, you, you, you can't necessarily fully address the topic we're going to be addressing without the background of the deity of Christ, but we have addressed it before.

And, and so I think that, um, that will be an excellent opportunity. I, I've already asked that those who are going to be going to G3, coming to the debate there in Atlanta, um, to please be praying for Adnan.

Uh, I would, I would like us to, um, break the mold of the, um, so many sadly who have, uh, given the gospel a bad name by how they approach

Muslims and how they treat Muslims, how they think of Muslims. Uh, I would, I would love to see, uh, believers, um, just loving all over Adnan and, uh, showing him the, the grace of Christ and complimenting the message with the behavior and the attitude and, and, um, uh, just, just really, uh,

I, I, I want Adnan to, to see once again, uh, what true believing

Christians are like, not the politicized make the gospel

American, uh, type, uh, stuff, but people who really honestly, uh, you know, if that room is filled with people who've actually been praying for Adnan Rashid by name and their

Muslim neighbors and Muslim friends changes everything about the night.

So if you're planning on coming, I ask that you would come having prayed for both of those speaking clarity of thought and presentation on my part, uh, and praying that, um, that if we believe that it is the sovereign

God who reveals to us our need for the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ, well, then that's what, that's what needs to be prayed.

So, um, I, I put the stuff on Facebook, I put stuff on Twitter.

We hopefully I'll have a banner at it up soon, uh, with the information, uh, on the debate and how you can be a part of it.

Obviously, you know, we're flying him in, so it's not a freebie. We wish we could do things freebie like that.

But, um, if you've priced out tickets from London to America, it's, um, it's not

Southwest doesn't fly that route, if you know what I mean. Um, you know, so what's that?

You just laughed. Yeah. Okay. Uh, yeah, Southwest doesn't fly that route. So, uh, it, it takes a, it takes a little, little bit, a little bit of funding to be able to put all this together.

And then of course, you've got a rather large room, uh, and the cameras and everything else and, uh, hotel rooms and food and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

So, uh, I'm sure you understand the necessity of, uh, of those things. So that will be the pre -debate.

What's the date on that? I don't even, I don't even have it, have it in front of me. It's, um, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dah.

Uh, hopefully I don't care what's new in calendar. Um, uh, should be the 18th.

Is that the Thursday? I think if it's, if it's the Thursday, if it's the

Thursday night and the conference is Friday, Saturday, then yeah, it should be a

Thursday night, the 18th. Yeah, the, the, uh, the announcement I'm seeing, uh, just simply says join us in January.

So yeah, if it's, if for some reason I'm off on that, then the 17th, but, uh, I think it's the, uh,

I think it's the 18th, uh, for, for the debate. So we'll eventually have, uh, the banner add up.

Yes. I was going to say out of all of your Muslim opponents that you've debated over the years, Adnan is by far and away my favorite.

I know that you may have a different favorite, but I just have really enjoyed every debate

I've ever seen him do with you. And well, look, let's just real, real, real quickly. When, when

Adnan and I first debated, he was used to Speaker's Corner and he was very aggressive the first time we debated at that Baptist church in London.

Um, is that the one where you had the young men in the audience who were? No, that, no, that was, that was later on when we did the transmission of the

Quran transmission in the New Testament. And we had, we had the men, the audience and stuff like that, or they were doing their, their thing.

Um, but the, the change, the, the, the, the shifting point was up in Dublin when between the two debates we had, uh, we had lunch together.

And since then it's been different because once the two people know each other, uh, you know,

Adnan knows Jay Smith, for example, that changes the dynamic, uh, and things like that. So I think that's where, where part of it comes from.

Um, but, uh, yeah, Adnan, um, and of course down in Australia, Abdullah Kunda, pretty hard to, uh, top the kind of, uh, appropriate relationship that we have, uh, we have, uh, exhibited in our, in our debates.

Is there something you're pointing at? There are some people in the chat channel who are posting the, uh, links. Uh, so yeah, the date and time is

January 17th at 7 p .m. Just sit there and read links. So, um, January 17th, uh, it says.

So it, isn't that the Wednesday night? Yeah, that's Wednesday night, if that's correct.

So that's interesting. I didn't know G3, well it does say G3, 18th and so on.

Yeah, day one of the conference is actually the 18th, Thursday night. So, yep.

Okay. So there you go. Let's hope we don't have snowmageddon. Well, it's Atlanta. So almost any snow is snowmageddon in Atlanta.

So they, they, they're not used to that anymore than we are. So yes, that's coming up.

That's exciting. Uh, let's keep that in, in our prayers and, uh, and things like that.

I was going to mention this to Rich beforehand, but I forgot to, um, we have,

I guess, a ministry resource list fund somewhere.

Yes, we, we have a ministry resource list fund. It's a revolving account.

So as you tell me to go buy things, uh, that we need for your research and ministry resources as well, we go into that account and we go buy things and, uh, people donate to it.

Well, I don't know, I don't know where that is. All I can tell you. It's on the donations page. If you ever actually,

I don't know what the, the, the amount in it. Oh, well there is that too. That's what I meant. I know where it's found at.

Um, um, but I, I know that I'm going to be hitting it up for about four or five volumes that are not cheap, but really important.

I caught up on the, um, Evangelical Theological Society's, uh, audio from their meeting a couple of weeks ago, the textual criticism area where they specifically addressed apologetics and textual criticism, which

I wish I had known about, but I probably still wouldn't have been able to make it anyways, one way or the other, but obviously very, very, um, interesting to me, especially because they were criticizing some apologetic errors in misuse of scholarly material, which, you know, a lot of things they said was stuff that we've pointed out a number of times, uh, here, but they had some great information, some good stuff, but I was,

I was very encouraged, um, to basically hear echoes from the leading scholars dealing with advancement in the area of textual criticism, and they're tracking where I'm going in my

PhD studies, where my stuff is taking me, and I haven't had any interaction with them. This is just, as I'm looking at what's coming out and looking at the materials, seem to be headed in the right direction, and unfortunately

I'm doing this program right as, um, computerized tools, computerized databases are becoming available, but are not completely available yet, and so for some areas, you simply need to have these very expensive volumes available to you, and a lot of them are not in libraries, they, they, they come from overseas and stuff like that, and so we just got one, it's the primary one that I'm going to need, but there are some other ones, so all

I'm saying is, if you'd like to, we're going to be talking about text criticism today, it's going to be one of the primary things we're talking about, though it's going to be a long program, we've got a lot of things to cover.

Um, if that's particularly an area, and, and I've, I've, I do know a number of you have commented, uh, on Twitter and places like that, encouraging me to press forward on that work, uh, we're going to have some needs in that area, so, uh, you know, the

Travel Fund always needs, uh, uh, support, and then the Ministry Resource List as well, uh, so just letting you know, uh, about those things.

So let's get into it, um, what's the dress code for this weekend in St.

Charles? Uh, today's Cooj in the DL is setting a high standard. Well, thank you very much. Uh, I normally do, uh, you should see what, you know, you all, you all jump on me, but you don't see what happens behind this mirror.

It's not a mirror, it's a window. Uh, if you saw what Rich just did, you would, you all would, would feel for me because of what

I have to put up with and what I frequently just ignore, because I have to ignore it, you know, because I don't have that many friends left in the world anyways.

Um, so, uh, I, I normally wear a

Cooj for the first night of the conference. It's sort of a, it's sort of a tradition that we do and sometimes on Saturday too.

So, uh, we're, we're pretty laid back. We're pretty laid back. So we've got the Friday night, the Saturday sessions and I, I preach

Sunday morning and then have to catch a flight out and they canceled the nice flight that I used to get back on.

So I'm having to go through Dallas, but anyways, let's get to it. Finally came, uh, since I wasn't at SBL or ETS and all the rest of that stuff, um, finally came, uh, it's being called the

THGNT, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. It says Tyndale House Cambridge, produced Tyndale House Cambridge.

And it's from Crossway. Crossway does a really good job with stuff. And even the, even the box is nice, uh,

I'll have to admit. And it is a, it's the new Greek New Testament. Um, and of course it's in the, they've, they've put it in the nice leather, leatherette binding type thing though.

I'll have to admit if you leave it sitting for a long, very long, the, it tends to, the cover tends to come up a little bit, but still it's a nice, it's called the

True Tone. Uh, so I don't think it is really leather, but it's feels like it's leather.

Anyways, it's not the case bound like you have with the, with the, with the Nessie Olymp. Um, long time working on this.

Uh, boy, what do I say? On a real practical level, you know, it's a nice size, decent font size, and it's, um, it's very clean in the sense that, uh, the

Nessie Olymp especially, the, the, the page seems cluttered because of all the textual notes and all the symbols in the text that your eye is sort of eventually gets used to sort of skipping over, uh, not really seeing while you're just trying to read the text.

So if, if you're a person who, for example, has had enough Greek to where you want to use it in the pulpit, if you're, if you're a preacher and you've, you want to actually read the text in the pulpit and you're like some people a little bit too afraid to do that from like an iPad, which is how

I do it. Uh, though that probably means you're younger because I just love,

I got one of those iPad pros and it's so huge. It's so massive that I can make the font size and that thing so big that, uh, you can read that Greek from halfway across the room.

It's awesome. But this would be a real nice text along those lines because it's a very, very clean, uh, text to read from.

So nicely bound, nicely laid out, but extremely idiosyncratic.

If you are accustomed, um, to the, to the Nestle Island and, or, or the

UBS, uh, probably more to the UBS, um, then what you're used to, you know, you can, you can get to the books of the

Bible. You can, you can go through it cause this uses standard canonical order. This does not, um, for some reason, the, um, the whole, one of the primary things they're trying to do is to produce a, an ancient

Greek text. And so a couple of things they do is they don't follow the standard order of the books.

Uh, so you, you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts.

Then you have James. Yeah. Uh, you have James and, uh, then first, second

Peter. And, uh, then you've got, uh, uh, where Jude is.

Nope. Nope. First, second Peter, then, uh, first, second, third John, uh, and then

Romans. Um, and then you go through the, the Pauline stuff and, uh, you get to Hebrews and that's,

Jude's gotta be in here someplace. They didn't decanonize Jude. Um, but, uh, it's, it's a very different order, uh, than what you would be expecting.

Uh, and so if you're wanting to try to find something, uh, you may end up having to look up front and, and, and find it that way.

Where did, um, uh, James, Peter, John.

Oh, there's Jude. Jude, Jude's right after third John. Okay. It's just so small. I, I skipped it going to, uh, to Romans.

Um, so it's a bit of, I'm sorry. Yeah. Poor Jude. Hey Jude. Uh, that's right.

And then the introductory material is in the back. So there's a fairly lengthy introduction in the back.

They're going to be putting a book out on the methodology they used for making the decisions that they did. As far as the text is concerned, there are textual notes and, uh, but they are very, very minimal at the bottom of, uh, of the page.

And in fact, here's one page. There's no, no textual notes on it whatsoever. You, you won't find any page in the

Nessie Island without text notes at the bottom. I suppose there are a few in the, in the UBS, but, uh, again, this is, this is definitely meant to be very clean and, uh, and readable from reading.

The other thing is going to throw you off if you want to use this, or if you want to, you know, if you're thinking about getting your pastor something for Christmas or something like that, the other thing that's going to throw you off is, um, they also utilize non -standard spelling conventions.

So for example, in the manuscript that I'm focusing upon in my

PhD studies, P45, um, genet, genetai would be spelled gynetai with a epsilon iota.

Um, there are a number of interesting antiquated, uh, spelling conventions in the early papyri or even some of the early, uh, unseals and they follow that.

And so book order, spelling conventions, um, uh, paragraph division stuff, they're trying to follow some of the earliest witnesses in reproducing that, which is interesting if your focus is the earliest text, but could be not disturbing, but distracting if you are just trying to read the text in the pulpit or for, for things like, things like that.

Um, and if your, your Greek really isn't all that strong, it could totally throw you off, uh, because of the nature of that.

You do realize that I have the channel up. Yeah, I do have the channel up.

People are, are, are, are demonstrating a disinterest in the current topic of discussion.

Because even people in control of the program are having childish conversations about the sweater, uh, in, uh, in the chat channel.

And, um, uh, you know, you know, maybe you could, uh, take that over.

Maybe you could start your own little bunker someplace and have private conversations about that kind of stuff. Uh, that's the best place to express childish type things.

So you might want to think about, think about doing that. So anyway, um, so one of the things that struck me is

I get the feeling, but I can't document it yet because they, they said they're going to come out with a book within hopefully a year on all the methodology issues.

I mean, all the readings in here have to appear in at least two witnesses in the first five centuries.

Well, okay. Um, that means it's not a primarily

Byzantine oriented text, but, um, all right.

But, but for example, it does read Jesus at Jude 5,

Jesus saved the people out of Egypt, uh, which is what's in the Nessie Island 28th, what's in the

ESV, uh, which comes to us, uh, partly through the application of the methodology that eventually

I want to share with everybody once I understand it well enough to be able to explain it.

Uh, it is, it is extremely complex and very difficult.

It's called CBGM, the coherence -based genealogical method. And part of the problem is the newness of the vocabulary, pre -genealogical coherence and, and coherence and, and local stomata and global stomata.

And it's so new, relatively speaking, that the language is very idiosyncratic and can be very difficult to explain to folks.

And one of the things I like doing is making textual critical issues understandable, hopefully accurately, uh, to, to folks.

I'm not like Bart Ehrman, who in our debate, uh, insulted the entire audience by basically saying that they weren't smart enough to understand what we were talking about.

Um, I don't believe that to be the case. And so, uh, we try to, we try to do that kind of stuff.

So anyway, um, it seems so, so you've got, you've got the, the reading in Jude 5, but at John 1, 18, they have monogamous huios, rather monogamous theos.

And I'm sitting here going, well, I can think of at least four incredibly important, the earliest witnesses to the gospel of John, all long before the fifth century that, that have the os.

I'll be interested, uh, in reading their reasoning as to why they, they went with huios rather than theos at John 1, 18.

But of course the, the, you know, there's a note at the bottom of the page gives you that, that information.

And so you can make those decisions for yourself. So I definitely think that it's, you know, it's a, it's a valuable addition to, and it's interestingly enough,

I have not found it electronically. I think they have made the decision, um, to try to make as many of us buy the physical book first, uh, before they make it available to Logos and Accordance and Olive Tree and BibleWorks and all the rest of the, the major Bible program providers.

But I'm sure it will be eventually made, made, made available eventually, like the

Greek New Testament was and, and, uh, and things like that. And so you might say, well, did, did we really need something like this?

Well, I think it's, I think it's extremely encouraging to be honest with you, listening to these

ETS discussions, um, listening to young men who are becoming scholars in the textual critical field, who've grown up in the

Ehrman era, um, who's, who were in Bible college when

Ehrman's books were coming out and things like that. It's the next generation. It was interesting to see how young the voices were.

And so it's good to see that there is a, a healthy, um, interest in these things and a recognition of how important these things, uh, really are.

And so, yeah, I, I would encourage, uh, that, uh, it's good to be able to compare and contrast them, but I think it's really, really important, uh, and I'm speaking primarily to my, my fellow believers here.

You have to keep something in mind. If you apply,

I know I've said this before. I'm going to say it again because it's absolutely necessary that people hear it.

If you apply the same methodology of interpretation and hermeneutics to this text as you would to this text, and, and by the way, the editors of this were saying, hey, we're not trying to replace this.

We are simply supplementing it and, and giving another perspective, another view. This is a Nessie Allen text.

This is the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. If you apply the same method of interpretation to this as to this or to this, this is the

New Testament, the original Greek Byzantine text form. This is Robinson Pierpont text. Okay. Um, I'm not sure if it's available and it's, it's nice clean text too.

It's, it's, it's, you know, got nice wide margins and it's, it's pretty readable as well.

I really liked the font by the way, in the Tyndale House, but interpretation of a particular text.

I mean, obviously if you take, uh, monogamous, we asked the only gotten son at John 1 18, you're not going to be making the same applications that you would if you have monogamous

John 1 18, but there is no central doctrine of the

Christian faith that is dependent upon any single text.

And so if you consistently, fairly, honestly,

I realize, I realize my King James only friends, some of my ecclesiastical text friends can always find a way around this if they want to become imbalanced.

But for those of us who don't have that kind of a, uh, uh, bias, uh, playing in our minds, if you utilize these texts, you're going to come up with the same faith.

There's not, it's not like, well, one of them has a higher view of Jesus. No, I don't think that's true.

Well, one of them has a clearer testimony of the gospel. No, I don't think that's true. And so you have to keep that in mind.

One of the things that's been, uh, certainly, uh, striking me yet again in my studies is in looking at, even, even listening to the, uh,

ETS audio, which by the way, I, if you go to the evangelical textual critical blog, even evangelical text criticism blog, there's a link on there to the, um, audio.

There's like $4 per audio or something. It's not all that expensive. Um, and if you listen to the presentations, you'll be struck once again by the fact that our

New Testament manuscripts are incredibly alike. We, we tend to talk about the, um, 400 ,000, 500 ,000 textual variants.

And we, we emphasize that big, big, big, big number. But when you start breaking those numbers down, what you really discover is that the vast bulk of these manuscripts throughout the history of the transmission of the text, they're communicating the same thing.

Uh, there's, there's the, the idea that, well, you know, you've got these manuscripts and they have a savior named

Jesus. And then in these manuscripts, they have a savior named somebody else who doesn't. No, it completely and totally bogus.

Uh, it's the same message, the same, same thing. And it's, um, really a testimony to the bankruptcy of the argumentation that says the

New Testament has been corrupted and changed and altered and, and all the rest of this kind of stuff. It just really does give a, give a lie to, to all of that kind of stuff.

So there's, um, what I was going to say, I, I can't confirm this yet, but I get the distinct feeling that there's sort of a pushback in the

Tyndale house, Greek New Testament against CBGM, against Munster's use of the, that methodology in really giving it a lot of weight in making decisions.

Um, so far in the General Epistles and the

Book of Acts, those are the, uh, parts of what's called the ECM, the Editio Critica Maiori, uh,

Maior, actually, um, the new mega

Greek New Testament. Uh, I mean, I don't know how many volumes it's going to be, but if Acts was four volumes and the

General Epistles were two volumes, you can sort of figure out from there, um, each of the gospels

I'm going to predict is going to be a, a minimum of two volumes, maybe three a piece.

And then Paul, oh, good grief, uh, who knows? And Revelation, I don't know, that could end up being this big or that big.

I, it's hard to say because the text of Revelation, you really honestly could separate that out as its own field of study.

I mean, I don't have it in here anymore. I used to have behind me, um, the complete collation, at least of the manuscripts that existed then of the entirety of the book of Revelation.

It took someone over 30 years to do it. That was just one book. It's a completely different history than the rest of the

New Testament. I mean, just the book of Revelation had a completely different transmission history to it.

And you might say, why are you telling me this? Well, you know, if, if we don't do it in the context of faith, when you get hit with that from the context of unbelief, it can be twisted.

And in light of the internet, you've got to understand there are sharp, sharp opponents of the faith that will grab anything.

And if you don't have a background, if you don't have a foundation, they will grab anything to throw at you and take an out of its context saying, well, you don't really know what the book of Revelation said.

I mean, so many, so few manuscripts in the first 900 years of the book of Revelation in comparison to, uh, you know, most of our people never hear that.

And I realize most of our people don't necessarily need to hear that, but those who, uh, you know,

I think fathers who want to prepare their sons and daughters for going into the setting and things like that,

I think there's every reason, uh, to prepare yourself on the highest level, uh, to be able to communicate these things to others.

And so I think that's, uh, I think it's important. So there's a little bit of stuff about the Tyndale house,

Greek New Testament, but let's stay in the, uh, stay in that field and see if I can find, uh, there we go.

Uh, yesterday, uh, Michael Brown tweeted back at me.

Someone had, um, um, much of the chagrin, I'm sure of the, uh, more voracious of my critics.

Um, someone had tweeted about how encouraged they were in listening to my debates against Michael Brown, uh, about the, the standard of conduct and respect and, and things that we managed to maintain in our debates.

And that certainly is one of the things that I'm most thankful for, for, for those encounters that we've had.

And so I, I mentioned something about it to Michael and, and, uh, he wrote back and, and cause

I said something about, you know, if we can do this when we're on opposite sides, how much more fun would it be if we were on the same side?

Like we were when we did the debate with the two Unitarians. And, uh, he said, well, what we really need to do is we need to get, um, a couple of Black Hebrew Israelites, uh, to debate

Michael and I. And, um, uh, cause that would be especially interesting, uh, given

Michael's, uh, Jewish background. Um, but, uh, yeah, that's definitely something we want to do.

And, uh, it would be a very interesting, uh, encounter. No, no two ways about it.

Um, but speaking of Black Hebrew Israelites, um, a little over, uh, well, right at a week ago, there is a fellow who actually called in when vocab

Malone was on the program when we were taking calls. Um, he goes by the name of Divine Prospect, but his name, at least in, uh, in Facebook is

Ron Shields. And I happened to see a link in vocab stuff where he was asking questions of this

Ron Shields fellow, Divine Prospect. And listening to the answers just left me more confused than ever, to be honest with you.

But obviously the gentleman has done a lot of reading. Um, I, I, I don't get the feeling it's in the classical sense of a classical education.

It's seems somewhat disjointed in how it's related to one another. I mean,

I think it's one of the advantages of a good education is that you can, you're challenged to be consistent in how you handle data and information rather than, uh, well,

I'm just going to collect as much information I can and then how I handle it is up to me.

When you get to be with people who have dedicated themselves to handling information properly, it sort of rubs off on you and you sort of learn that attitude.

I think that's an important part of education. Anyway, one of the things that came up is that Ron Shields asserts something that is very common in, uh,

Unitarian argumentation. At least I've encountered it many times over the, well, coming up on, uh, well, in the fourth decade.

Do you have some Geritol in there? We need to start putting a little, little Geritol dispenser in here.

Most people don't even remember, do they make Geritol anymore? I have no earthly idea, but haven't had the need yet.

Oh yeah, sure. Um, given your advanced age, uh, you just forgot you needed it. Um, but, uh, we're, we're dating ourselves, uh, here by, by that, that particular, uh, comment.

Um, yeah, and what's worse is that, you know, when I try to hear what they're saying on the other side of that allegedly soundproof window, which really isn't allegedly all that soundproof, 35 years, uh, fourth decade, you know, this, this next year will be the 35th year for Alpha and Omega Ministries.

And, um, I think for 30 or was it 25, we had that, uh, testimonies at aomin .org.

Remember we had that email address. Was it 25? I think it's been a long time. We got to do something.

Uh, cause it was enjoyable reading and posting some of that stuff from people that, um, certainly would be, um, very encouraging to us.

I think if we put something like that up and, and people could write in and cause we've been around for a while, there's, there aren't too many of the ministries that, uh, you know, there are some, but there aren't too many of the ministries that have been around for, and pretty much doing the same thing, uh, for 35 years, uh, like we will be this next, uh, this next year.

But I've certainly heard this argumentation many times over that period of time.

And that is when you're encountering Unitarians, one of the ways to deal with Trinitarian texts in the

New Testament, especially explicitly Trinitarian texts, such as Matthew 28, 19 through 20, uh, where you have baptism, uh, into the name singular of the

Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We've read in years past the very insightful commentary of B .B.

Warfield on this particular text and the balance that's found there, uh, singular use of name and yet the distinction

Father, Son, and Spirit. And, and obviously even those who don't try to get rid of it, um, some

Unitarians who are, for example, modalists, uh, the modalists, the oneness Pentecostals will try to say, ah, but what we really have here, um, you know, who just posted that?

Because I just, I found, I found a, uh, I found a thing in Textual and I need to,

I need to fix it on my one in there. But if you post images in Textual now, it'll display in the, in the channel.

It's really cool. So someone just, uh, posted a Geritol commercial, uh, a

Geritol, if you feel run down because of tired blood, take fast acting Geritol.

And it's got a woman about to stick her finger on a iron. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Um, but, um, I, yeah, it's, yeah, it's pretty cool.

And she's smiling. It looks like it's 1952. Uh, I'm gonna have to turn that on on my other Textual 7 thing.

That's, that's pretty cool. We can now post graphics and channel if everybody can get a modern thing going.

So anyway, see, there's, they're still back, they're still stuck on Geritol. I completely lost them, uh, when

I started talking about Unitarianism. But the, uh, the one that's Pentecostals will say, see, it's name.

And that, that, that name is Jesus, uh, that type of thing. And well, this, or they'll say, this can't be original because all the baptisms in the book of Acts were in the name of Jesus.

And all the book of Acts is saying is it was specifically Christian baptism. Only Matthew 28, 19 through 20 gives us a formula, whereas Acts is giving us the distinction, the distinctiveness of what the baptism was.

It wasn't John's baptism. It's Christian baptism. Yes, it's in the name of Jesus, but that's not the formula.

What you have in Matthew 20. So what, what do people do? Well, one of the ways around it, uh, yes, uh,

Summer just said, of course, a woman in 1952 could only be reaching for an iron. Well, if you saw it, that's what she's doing.

Uh, and then we have such amazingly in -depth commentary as do Unitarians use

Geritol? I, um, I have no, but you did say the thing before about the

Coogees. I saw that. Well, look, dude,

I know, I know you have some jealousy issues. If I can get you one, uh, I'll, I'll get you one.

Uh, you know, so, so you can, you can wear one too. I bet they'd go over real well up where you live now.

I think they would. I think they would. I really do. Anyways, I should stop looking at the other screen over here, uh, because, uh, it's really, it's really distracting me.

What were we talking about? Moses was in the bulrushes and, uh, uh, something along those lines. So anyway,

Ron Shields claims that Matthew 28, 19 through 20 is not original to the gospel of Matthew.

And so this is, this is one of the ways it's very common for this claim to be made.

And it's, it's one of those textual critical, uh, myths that sort of like, um, it's sort of like the issues regarding, uh, the council of Nicaea sort of grows its own life, you know?

And so you, you get people quoting other people, quoting other people who then go back and quote the first person, but none of them have any idea what they're talking about.

It just sounds good. So for example, on November 20th, Ron Shields, who evidently is back in, uh, summer's old stomping grounds,

Marietta, Georgia. We'll have to get Red together with, uh, with Ron Shields and Red will take care of everything.

Um, or at least we'll confuse him enough to keep him busy for a while. Um, on, uh,

November 20th says, what do we have here, ladies and gentlemen? Well, it looks like a New Testament codex without Matthew 28, 8 through 20.

Now notice how big that is. 8 through 20, not 28, but 8 through 20. Uh, meaning no

Matthew 28, 19 baptismal formula. Hmm. What you are looking at is derived from the

Syriac Sinaiticus Palimpsest dated the early part of the fourth century

CE. Interesting, huh? More to come. Textual criticism. I'm not finished. Let's keep going. The plot thickens.

So you have a printed text here in Syriac. And it stops at the end of verse seven and it says,

Deist ad Finem. Now Deist ad Finem in Latin means the ending portion is missing.

Well, that's not shocking. There are anyone who knows anything about textual criticism knows that unless you have a completely fragmentary text that has been torn apart over the years, a text that holds together and yet only contained one book.

What, where is the damage of time most likely to take place with a book like that?

The beginning and even more so the end of the manuscript.

Those are the exposed pages. And so it's a little bit like last year, we, or maybe the year before,

I don't remember what it was, but not too long ago, we did that response to Ijaz Ahmed regarding John 2028 and the fragmentary nature of P66 and the fact that once you get into the last portion of the

Gospel of John, the manuscript's in bad shape and it's fragmentary.

It's just made up of pieces and there's stuff missing. And so anyone familiar with textual criticism knows that, well, for example,

I'm working with P45 and P45 does not contain, it initially contained

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, but everything that we have today is from the interior portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.

Nothing from the beginning, first earlier chapters or later chapters of any of those books.

We don't have Mark 1 -1, that would be great to have because of the variant there. We don't have

John 2028, that would be great to have, or John 21 and the issues there.

No, we have interior portions because those are going to be the pages in a book that are going to be the most protected.

Now, if it was all bound together, we could have, in P45, we could have had

Acts 1 because if it was all bound together, that would have been part of the internal material.

But if it's bound as a, if it is transmitted as a single volume, it's the earlier and later portions that are most likely to be damaged in just simply the handling of the text.

And this, you know, one of the most famous stories of textual criticism, its history illustrates this, and that is why did

Erasmus have to back translate from the Latin in his initial first edition in the

Book of Revelation when he gets to the end? Well, because the commentary that he borrowed from a friend, a

Latin commentary at that, the last few pages had fallen off that contained that particular portion of the

Book of Revelation. And so, this is a common, common issue.

The reality is that we don't have any manuscript of the

Gospel of Matthew that is a complete manuscript. So, in other words, it goes to the end of Matthew, says, the end, moves on to Mark, that does not have

Matthew 28, 19 through 20. None. And so, you'll notice that even here,

Mr. Shields went to a translation. Now, translations are secondary sources.

They're important secondary sources. Sometimes they can't help us if the variant involves an element of the

Greek language that would not necessarily impact translation into whatever that language is.

But especially with whether the text existed in what was being translated.

So, did the Greek manuscript of Matthew that was used for the translation into Syriac or Coptic or Sehitic or Beharic or whatever, did it contain this entire text?

For example, the Percopaea Adultery, John 7, 53 through 8, 11. Translations, early translations, are relevant at that point because they can at least tell you whether something was there or where it was, given that we have so many manuscripts that have that particular story at different places, whether it's in Luke or other places in John or things like that.

So, translational evidence can be useful, but I strongly assert it can never overthrow, especially the united testimony of the original language manuscripts, which would be

Greek. And the united testimony of the original language manuscripts is that Matthew 28, 19 through 20, has always been a part of the

Gospel of Matthew. It is pure speculation to try to dismiss that.

And even when you have, for example, when we discussed the John 20, 28 issue, even when you have a fragmentary manuscript, if all the other manuscripts you have that go back to the ancient period have the same thing and one is fragmentary there, there is no reason, no practicing, unbiased textual critic would say, well, if it's fragmentary in one place, but it's consistent in other places, well, then we shouldn't have it.

They're not going to go there. You would not be able to recreate any ancient text on that foundation.

They're all going to go with what has consistently been transmitted down through the centuries through as many lines of textual transmission as possible.

And the fact is, there is no textual critical reason to reject

Matthew 28, 19 through 20. There's all sorts of theological reasons if you're a Unitarian. But all you're doing at that point is proving that your theology actually isn't derived from the text, you're trying to enforce it on the text.

And so the fact is that when you have manuscript evidence, not just simply a manuscript that ends many verses beforehand, as is here,

Matthew 28, 19 through 20 is a part of the original gospel, and we should not accept questions about it.

We should certainly examine any evidence that is brought forward. But here's a painfully obvious example of someone who has a theological reason, and it results in a misuse of textual critical material.

I have some video on textual critical issues that I only got yesterday, and given we're already an hour in and I've still got a number of other things to get to, it's probably best that I wouldn't have time to get to it.

But I do want to interact with some statements from Ijaz Ahmed, and I just want to mention that it really seems to me that, looking back at my exchanges and interchanges with people,

Ijaz and I have got to know each other, and it changes how we speak to one another.

And I think it actually makes both of our presentations better, because I personally believe that unnecessary invective, insult, nastiness is actually disrespectful to whatever truth it is we're attempting to communicate.

And it's interesting that I'm being challenged to debate right now by another

Muslim that I've never met, and it reminds me a little bit of some of the back and forth between Ijaz and I before we actually started talking directly to one another.

And I just have to wonder, and I would have to hope, that if we can set up a debate with this other gentleman, which we have tried to do in the past, his was a name that I had been given that I have included in my desire when going to England, because I believe he's located in the

United Kingdom as his central base of operation. He travels like I do. I have included that name.

But one of the things I want to do, I try to do, is to meet with these individuals before those debates, even if it's just, you know,

Abdullah Al -Andalusi and I met at a Turkish meat shop restaurant type place in London before we went to Kensington Temple last year.

And even if it's just something brief like that, just to get to know someone, put a human being into the equation rather than just a name or a person, changes everything.

Because this fellow, his name is John Fontaine, sort of coming after me rather aggressively and impugning my motives and character and things like that.

The older I get, the less I'm interested in that kind of thing. But I would hope that maybe if he could meet me, he might find out that I'm not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes or any of those types of things.

So, for example, John Fontaine wrote two days ago,

The Old and New Testament are not the Torah and Injil that was revealed from Allah. James R. White, a famous Christian apologist, constantly conflates the two.

If anyone knows James, let him know. I would be interested to debate him in his church. I don't mind traveling to the

USA if he suffers from flight sickness. Tag him if you know him.

I'm Executive Platinum on American. I don't think I suffer from flight sickness. I've spent more time overseas this year than ever before.

I've done numerous debates in London recently. It almost seems like he's not really paying attention here.

Believe me, my church is not set up for debates. It's not a location for debates.

I do intend on coming to the United Kingdom at least once, possibly twice next year, once part of a literally worldwide tour from London to South Africa, Zambia, hopefully

Australia, New Zealand, and back that way.

So it literally goes around the world. And then possibly later in the year, if we get to do the

Reformation tour in Switzerland, if that ends up working out for next year. So there are opportunities, and I would like to do that.

But I'm just a little saddened by the fact that...

Oh, I was going to show you that Ron Shields thing. I had it up. Sorry about that. I apologize for that.

I'm not even sure what I'm sending you right now. You got the whole thing?

Yeah, I'm a little disturbed that some of the

Muslims that are seeing to respond to me don't seem to read what

I'm writing or listen to what I'm saying very carefully. Because, for example, he made a comment elsewhere,

I don't have it in front of me right now, about how I was trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, being inconsistent.

And the reality is what I've told people consistently, what's in my book, what's in the lectures that I do, is that modern

Muslims will interpret the Quran in such a way that they will say that the

Torah and the Injil that we possess today were not the Torah and Injil that were revealed by God.

I recognize that. I also insist that if you try to insert that reading into the

Quran, you turn the Quran into a mishmash of incomprehensible words that could not have had any meaning in its original context.

In other words, I believe you all need to start doing meaningful exegesis of the

Quranic text in the way we've been doing for a long time, for the Old and New Testament texts, and not just simply go, well, you need to interpret it in light of the

Sunnah. And so whatever our traditional interpretation has been, that's what it needs to be.

It's a little bit, to be honest with you, like the Roman Catholic -Protestant divide in the sense that for many

Roman Catholics, the traditions that have developed, derived from later sources, become the primary interpretive grid for the reading of the

Scriptures. And the Protestants come along and say, nope, I want to know what the apostles said. And in the same way, if you recognize, if you actually hold the idea that the nature of the

Quranic revelation is unlike the nature of anything else, so that the Sunnah, the

Hadith, everything, whatever else you might use as an interpretive grid is epistemologically of a lower level than the actual words of the

Quran itself, then you have to start dealing with the questions we've been dealing with for a long, long time.

And that is, what would the original audience have understood? What did it mean originally, not as it's been interpreted and recast into different contexts by later generations?

And when you do that, it's painfully obvious that at least in portions of the Quran, the author is seeking to bring

Christians and Jews to his aid and to his side and remonstrating with them and saying, mine is the consistent perspective.

And we're all monotheists here and there's only one God. And therefore, you

Christians don't go into excess in your beliefs. Well, okay,

I've told many an audience, the Quran says to you and I, we've gone into excess in our beliefs.

But for that message of the Quran to be relevant, there has to be an accuracy to the words as they're addressed to the

Christians. There has to be a level of understanding given that the

Quran comes after the Torah and Injil. Surah 5 connects the authority of Muhammad and the

Quran to the preceding revelations. Since that is the case, there needs to be accuracy, guys, in what the

Quran says about those preceding religions.

And so if the Quran was meant to be relevant to the

Christians of Muhammad's day, then its words have to have been meaningful to them.

And so what would they have understood? What did the author of the Quran understand as the

Injil? How much knowledge did the author of the Quran have? You believe the author of the

Quran is Allah himself. Well, then there should be no misrepresentation.

There should be no misunderstanding. It does not have to be a point by point refutation of every book, but at least it has to show some familiarity with the actual content of the book.

But it doesn't. And you know it doesn't. And so you're coming up with these excuses. Well, Allah doesn't have to address all these errors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The fact is the author of the Quran does not know nearly as much about the content of the

New Testament and the doctrine of the Christian people as you, the

Muslim engaging in dawah do today. And that says a lot to me.

And I know you have to find a way around that, but that just that says a lot to me.

And so I do not conflate these things. What I do say is that for the

Quran to be making any sense, it has to be able to communicate. Let me,

I've actually got a thing here from Abu Ayyub that addresses the same thing.

And so I want to address that. And then we've got still a lot of stuff to get to. So a lot of stuff to get to.

Here is a comment. It says, James, my friend, even though unlike many other Christian apologies, you do tend to try your best to remain consistent.

Here you simply missed the mark. How? You might ask. Let's break down the simple terms your contention with the Quranic approach to Christianity.

What I've taken from your DL show and your numerous writings, you believe that any religious text from God that addresses another so -called heretical group, in this instance,

Christians, should then go into intricate detail about their beliefs and theology. No, no.

That's not what I've said. What I've said is, if it's going to say you're going to hell for what you believe, it better be accurate in what it's saying.

It doesn't have to go into detail. It just needs to be truthful. It has to be accurate in what it's saying.

It doesn't have to be a multi -book refutation. But if you're going to say, do not say three, but you never can identify what the three is.

You don't show any understanding of the relationship of the three. The one time you mentioned three, it's not even the three that the people you're talking about actually believe in.

That's a problem. So you've misunderstood me. I'm not, should then go into intricate detail about their beliefs and theology.

That's not what I'm saying. I can accurately dispute the

Quranic denial of the crucifixion in three sentences. I don't have to go into detail.

If I accurately understand what the Islamic position is, you have in the

Quran, you have all of surah, let's just limit it to surahs three, four, and five. Because as you know, that's where the primary interactive material is.

You look at surah three, which your own writers will identify as, what did

I do with that? You know, I rearranged everything. And now I can't find.

Well, I'm gonna have to start putting things where I can actually grab it and remember where it went.

Oh, there it is. Just have to remember where it is. Study Quran, okay?

I didn't make this up. I didn't have anything to do. I did not influence it. But in the study Quran, surah three, background to the key texts, disputation with the

Christians from Najran, right? Okay. So, I look at the screen and in all capital letters, there's someone in channel says, would

Geritol help you to remember? Maybe.

I'll try it if it, I understand that tastes horrible though.

But maybe they've improved it. I'm gonna have to find out. Have you looked on Amazon yet to find out where they sell

Geritol? What? But do it for me. Do it for me.

I realize that your genetics are so much better than mine. And so you don't need to worry about it.

But do it for me. See if they have it. It could at least make a good prop for the future. I could just keep a bottle of it back here with the straw man.

And the straw man and the play -doh. We have the straw man and the play -doh here hiding in the...

Do you see the straw man? When we want to light up the straw man, I don't have my lighter in here. So what?

You brought up the microphone. What? I can't see anything.

No, it's not up there. What are you doing? It's on Amazon.

You can buy Geritol on Amazon. That's good. That's good. All right. We'll have to get some and see if it helps memory.

Because now I don't remember what I was talking about. Thanks a lot, people in channel. It's like squirrel.

You know, that's what happened. Your mind sees it and it's like squirrel. Yeah. Geritol multivitamin formally called complete.

Thank you very much. They've got new stuff. That's good. That's probably good.

That's probably good. Oh boy. All right. So whatever

I was saying, in Surah 3, you can just cut all of that out when you make your response.

In Surah 3, you have

Muhammad engaging with Christians. So you would expect that the resultant conversation would show an accurate understanding of what the other side is saying.

Even though Surah 3 may come after 4 and 5. So this isn't what

I'm saying. Let's hear it. So the question I posed to you is, where in the Bible does it ever do this for heretical and pagan groups?

Okay. Be happy to point out where it does that. In dealing, for example, with the

Old Testament law, I pointed out numerous times that many of the prohibitions and laws that we have that are some of the most difficult for people to wrap their minds around today actually had a background in the

Canaanite religion of the day. And so, for example, Tohu Wabohu in Genesis 1, the void and the uncreatedness there, that has parallels in the religions of the day.

So much of what the prophet said, if you understand, and we've only come to understand some of them recently, but if you understand the religious views of the people today, you'll see that they're actually making apologetic argumentation.

The book of Colossians filled with proto -Gnostic terminology that Paul is turning around and using against them.

For example, in Colossians 2, when he says, Hati enato katoikai panta pleromatai steatitas somaticos, for in him is dwelling all the fullness of deity in bodily form.

No proto -Gnostic could ever use the term somaticos in that way for the true deity.

It would be like pulling fingernails down the chalkboard, which doesn't make any sense to anybody today, unless you're as old as I am, but it would be extremely offensive to the proto -Gnostic for you to use that type of terminology.

Even in the book of Hebrews, where you have the apologetic against their, not another world religion, but against the

Jews that were seeking to cause Christians to come back to Judaism, you have in -depth knowledge, constant citation of the

Old Testament texts and scriptures. So yeah, when you're dealing with what someone else is saying, what you have is accurate representation in the pages of scripture.

You don't have inaccurate. What you don't have is what you have in the

Quran. You don't have the identification of the three as Allah, Jesus, and Mary.

You don't have the inspired writers accusing someone of being polytheist that are actually monotheists.

You don't have that. Goes on to say the God of the Old Testament describes all worship on a number of occasions very vaguely, but never goes into detail as to what exactly they believe.

Again, when dealing with Baal worship and the high places, there is actually an intimate knowledge that is demonstrated by the, not only the consistency, but the argumentation is provided against Baal worship.

What's different here and what you're missing, Abu Ayyub, is the

Quran claims to be in the line of Torah, Injil, Quran.

The original author, you're assuming, taught you that what we have today is not the

Torah and the Injil. That makes his words to the

Jews and to the Christians irrelevant because he directs them to the

Torah, which they possess, to the Injil, which they possess. And so, it's your modern interpretation that I'm trying to point out to you, you've had to adopt because of the inconsistency of your inspired text that I don't believe is actually inspired because of its own claims.

So, I appreciate your statement, but you've missed the reality of what it is that I'm attempting to communicate.

There was another quote. Why don't you bring that down while I look for it? Because the only problem with doing it this way is that I get all these screens up here and it's next to impossible to find which one's which because they all sit on top of each other.

Well, we'll just have to leave that there because I've got a bunch of other things to try to get to. But let me just say this.

I would love to, the next time

I, especially individuals like this, I want to meet

Mr. Fontaine. I want to meet these gentlemen in London.

In fact, I'd like to ask if folks like, and I realize you guys have your divisions too.

You guys got your politics. We know you've got your politics just like we have ours. Got it. But I would love to set up an opportunity to meet with the primary people doing

DAWA in London the next time I'm there without the cameras and the recordings and stuff.

Just get to know who you are, have the opportunity to explain to you why

I do what I do and have an evening of real good conversation to try to figure out, especially if we continue doing debates in London while we still have the opportunity of doing debates in London, we still have the freedom of gathering to do that kind of thing, how we could push the ball forward, so to speak, and not just keep revisiting the same topics, and to do it at a higher level, to do it at a level that really honors the truth, because that's what

I want to do. If that's what you want to do, then hopefully that's something that you'll want to do together with me.

Okay, keep these two brief if I can find them here.

I was asked a question and I wanted to cover it real quick because it connects with something that we did just a few weeks ago when

I walked through James chapter 2. It's a question about James 2 .24.

There are some Roman Catholic apologists who are claiming because monon only is an adverb, it modifies the verb dicaeutai, not pistaos, because pistaos is a noun.

Hence, James 2 .24 is denying the justification is by faith alone. Ironically, if consistently applied, this seems to be arguing that we are saved by works alone and not by faith.

What are your thoughts on this claim by Roman Catholic apologists? Is there something else going on with the grammar that is causing these

Roman Catholics to interpret 2 .24 in this fashion? And later on, the individual asking this question pointed out that one of the primary people pushing this is one of the apostates from SES, from Southern Evangelical Seminary.

I think indicated might be one of the editors or contributors to that book that we dealt with earlier sometime last year.

I think it was just over about a year and a half ago now where we dealt with that book from all the people who've left

SES and become Roman Catholics. My response initially, and I said

I wanted to talk about it in the program because other people might have the same question, but my response to this individual, this brother in the

Lord, initially was this is a good illustration of why we need to bring back sentence diagramming.

Because if you were to diagram James 2 .24, you would see,

I don't know what's going on. My phone is hopping here. It's a

WhatsApp thing. My son and my son -in -law are going back and forth and it's making my wrist vibrate repeatedly during the program.

Clearly they ain't listening to me, but that's okay. They may do so at another time. If you were to do a sentence diagram of James 2 .24,

and it's interesting, I did that. I'm willing to bet that my handwritten sentence diagram of James 2 is in one of those boxes in the other room that will only ever see the light of day after I die.

Somebody, I don't know who, has to go through all that stuff or maybe just throw it out and they'll never see the light of day again.

It's possible. You'll let your wife do it, which means it'll never see the light of day. Just throw it out and it's done.

Yeah, there are some people that might actually find some stuff in there to be of some significance and some helpfulness.

Anyway, one of my assignments in second year Greek many, many, many moons ago, and this we had to do.

This we did with paper and a ruler and a pen and cellophane tape because sentence diagrams can go all over the place.

And so you literally would take pieces of paper, and once you got to the edge of the paper, you would tape another piece of paper to the other piece that you were using.

And sometimes it had to go down because sentence diagrams can go down a long ways. And we had to do

James chapter 2. That was it. And so I've already had to do this many, many, many years ago.

I know that BibleWorks does this. Accordance does this. Logos does this. Pretty much all the major Bible programs will have diagramming modules in them.

I'm not sure how many people are actually taught any longer what any of that means.

But obviously, is a phrase unto itself, and it is the negation of what has come before.

So we see that and you have exergon de caeutai.

And then the modification of that is caeuc ecpistaos mona.

Now, pistaos is an action noun. And that's where the individual has missed.

Well, it's an adverb. Well, yeah, but if it's in a clause with an action noun,

Greek adverbs can function in that way. The idea that, well, it can only. No, there's no possibility that it could ever modify anything but a verb and blah, blah, blah.

And it's even, even ecpistaos is, you've got exergon and ecpistaos.

Ex and ec are the same thing. The only reason that it's ex is because for a vowel and it's ec because it's before a consonant.

So they are parallel to one another. And so they're both, they're both phrases that are modifying de caeutai.

But the monon is specifically dealing with faith.

What faith? Well, that's what we talked about last time. The faith back in verse 14 that has no works.

And so when the Roman Catholic tries to create this contradiction between Paul and James, well, they're not even trying to do that.

When they're just trying to take their dogmatic theology they've derived from other sources and cram it into the New Testament, they're trying to, they're stuck with a desperate situation and they have to misrepresent

James. And so what they're, I guess what they're trying to do here, I don't know why, but I guess what they're trying to do here is, is to say that it's somehow even stronger argument for their side.

I, I don't know, but it's plainly what's being contrasted here is the pistos going back to verse 14.

It's not by said faith, true saving faith demonstrates itself as it did in the life of Abraham.

Not a contrast between James and Paul, if you follow James to beginning at verse 14 onwards.

If you want to jump in, play around with things and not really concern yourself about the consistency of reading

James chapter two, then you can come up with anything you want. But one of those places where sentence diagramming would be helpful because it would help you see the relationship of these terms.

And especially the two, you would have ex -ergon coming off of the verb and you'd have uc -ec -pisto -os -monon coming off from the verb.

And those are the two things that are being contrasted to, to one another.

And even then you'd still be left with the interpretive question of, well, has pisto -os been defined earlier in the text?

And it has been. Further illustration, there's no reason to even try dealing with this text if you do not have the opportunity to sit down and go back and follow the context.

It's sort of like, it's sort of like when Norman Geisler, I guess, mentioning

SES brings that to mind. It's sort of like when Norman Geisler jumps to John 640 to try to overthrow

John 637. You got to follow the flow of the argument.

If you want, if you don't, if you're not concerned about that, if you're willing to jump up, down, all over the place, nothing,

I can't help anybody like that. You know, if people want to go there, that's great. I'm not sure if you saw this,

Rich, but there was a talk given by, this was actually over a year ago, but it's interesting.

This is from MRM, but it's just,

I only saw it today and it's illustrative of how bad things are getting in the

Mormon church. LDS Apostle Jeffrey Holland addressed a Mormon congregation in Tempe, Arizona.

This was April of last year. The theme of his talk was God loves broken things, making it clear that everyone and everything is broken.

Mr. Holland urges his followers to hang on, persevere, stay with the church, assuring that eventually every promise will be honored.

Don't cut and run, he said. This is the church of the happy endings. Sounding severe at times,

Mr. Holland reprimanded his audience for feeling sorry for themselves for being unwilling to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of their eternal future.

He hammered home the edict. Now, don't you cave in now. Hang on, hold on, persevere, endure and save yourself.

Don't bail out. Don't you dare bail. He explained that, quote, don't you dare bail.

I'm so furious with people who leave this church. I don't know whether furious is a good apostolic word, but I am.

What on earth kind of conviction is that? What kind of patty cake, taffy pole experience is that? As if none of this ever mattered, as if nothing in our contemporary life mattered, as if this is all just supposed to be just exactly the way

I want it and answer every one of my questions and pursue this and occupy that and defy this, and then maybe

I'll be a Latter -day Saint. Well, there's too much Irish in me for that. This church means everything to me.

Everything. This church means everything to me, and I'm not going to leave it, and I'm not going to let you leave it, end quote.

And those are desperate words, man. That ain't, I've sensed the theme here.

Yeah, that is not Bruce R. McConkie. No, no, no. Man, I'll tell you, it's hard to explain this to other people, and Mormonism isn't our main focus anymore.

I realize that, but, you know, we've got three and a half decades of perspective now.

Man, has that church changed. Man, have the apostles changed. Man, has the entire tenor of the general authorities of that church changed massively in the past 35 years.

Really has. I mean, I can remember back when the

Godmakers came out, back when the Godmakers came out, back in the late 70s, early 80s, really early 80s, there is a statistic that I shared many times.

It is no longer true by any stretch of the imagination. But back then, on the average,

Southern Baptist Church had 273 members, and in an average week, 274

Southern Baptists became Mormons. So that was one average church wholesale per week.

52 churches over the course of a year converting to Mormonism. That is not the case anymore by any stretch of the imagination.

The back door has become as big as the front door. And as the article says here, this is again from MRM, great, great folks up there,

Sharon Lindblom, she writes such good stuff. Mr. Holland was referring to some of the problems the Mormon church is experiencing right now regarding membership retention.

Many members of the church have recently called for answers to their doctrinal and historical questions such as Joseph Smith's polygamy, polyandry.

Some have pursued efforts to see changes made to certain aspects of Mormonism, membership inclusion of children of same -sex couples.

They're caving on that. Many have attempted to occupy areas of Temple Square and elsewhere in order to take a public stand of perceived inequality in the church, such as priesthood for women.

Some have defied Mormon tradition, the wearing of pants to church by women. Many of these people have been leaving the

LDS church when their concerns go opposed, minimized, ignored, or unanswered by LDS leadership. Now, don't get me wrong.

The growing feminist movement is not a reason to leave

Mormonism, okay? That kind of stuff, the liberalism, that's not a reason to leave

Mormonism. That's just leaving one error for another error. But those who have serious questions about the theology and history of Mormonism are just getting themselves slapped silly.

And so much stuff is coming out. I mean, last year, we showed you the picture of the seer stone that was finally released.

Can you imagine if the church had done that back in 1990? I've stood and talked with people and I've had more missionaries just deny right, center, and left that any of this stuff was true.

And now they walk into their own bookstores and this stuff is sitting on the shelves.

The stuff we were telling them decades ago is now being confirmed by their own scholars.

And that's why you now are into some Mormons. Man, we had that one Mormon that came into channel a while back. And everything we'd mentioned.

Yep, yep. Oh yeah, Joseph Smith did that. Oh yeah, false prophecies.

Yeah, but he's the best we've got. It's just like, I don't even know how to deal with someone like that.

You know, give me the old Eldon Watsons, you know. It's tough to be a

Mormon these days. Remember Pierre would call in, you know. And those guys that used to really believe, they're looking at this church now going, what happened?

Because it's happened fairly quickly. And the leadership of the Mormon church seems to be collapsing, especially on the

LGBTQ stuff. I don't know how far to take the letters anymore. LGBTQI, I don't know,

I lose track. But yeah, here's Jeff, furious.

Furious with people who, look, let's just be honest, he's furious with people who would question his authority, basically.

That's what he's really furious about. Okay, now, shifting gears.

I asked for a clarification last week or the week before from Dr.

Theodore Zaccariades as to what in the world it is he's challenging me to debate.

Because I have affirmed in absolutely no uncertain terms, strong determinism.

But I've also affirmed with the vast majority of Reform theologians that I'm familiar with, something called compatibilism.

And that is that the created will of man is compatible, not equal to, but compatible with the sovereign decree of God.

And that the Bible teaches this, and it does so in such texts as Isaiah chapter 10,

Genesis chapter 50, Acts chapter 4, and that the actions of man in time are meaningful because it is

God's sovereign decree that creates time and makes the actions of man in time meaningful.

That it's not the simplistic, we're just living out a script concept, but that there is a much deeper meaning to the actions of man in time.

Man's actions do not determine God's. I've never even suggested such a thing.

And the only way that anyone can come to that conclusion is if they buy into the same truncated, squished down, evacuated shell of a perspective that Leighton Flowers presents in regards to a strong view of compatibilism and the exegesis that underlies it.

And as we'll see later on, if they likewise share the same view of another famous person that we'll look at if we have time to get to, even though time is passing me by here.

So on November 22nd, at Reforming America Ministries, a response from Theodore Zachariades was given to me.

But I just want to point a few things out. It is difficult for me,

I'll be honest with you, to respond to some of these things as graciously as I would like to because it is so painfully obvious that Dr.

Hernandez, Dr. Zachariades, and obviously the folks at Pulpit and Pen want to couch all of this in the most disrespectful, in -your -face type of polemic acid throwing that they possibly can.

So even on the Reforming American Ministries website, if you go look, what picture do they use to introduce the clarification?

It's a picture of me and Yasir Qadhi. Why? That would be like me taking screenshots from the debate, which would be very easy to do.

Honestly, it's very childish to do. It's immature. But I could freeze

Theodore Zachariades in positions of just looking like a wild man.

Yelling, screaming. It's easy to do. Why do that?

How does that assist or push forward the conversation?

Why all the childish behavior?

Maybe you consider this to be godly. Maybe you consider this to be, this is the way to do it. We just need to make those, you know, these namby -pamby

Calvinists just need to be slapped around a bit. It's all tone police and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, maybe that's what it is.

I don't know. It's not, you know, I look at this and this was after the thing at the end of our second dialogue where I had tied a bow tie on Yasir Qadhi.

And I know that certain people up in Montana just think this is terrible. That he and I had actually decided to do something humorous at the end of our conversation there in the mosque.

And I realized none of those folks are ever going to be in a mosque witnessing to Muslims and testifying of who

Christ is and the necessity. No, they're never going to be invited to do that.

I get that. And so I'm not offended by that, but I know what you're trying to do.

I get it. I hear it. And it's sad. And this is part of the issue.

I don't think this is a subject. This is a subject that needs to be discussed in a meaningful fashion.

It doesn't need to be discussed with this childish attitude and behavior. I don't think

Dr. Zachariadis is any younger or older. I think we're about the same age.

Were you raised to behave this way? I don't I don't get it. I don't understand.

Anyway, so evidently, this is the argument that he offers against compatibilism.

Like I said, this is the argument that would be offered against the large majority of Reformed theologians, as far as I can tell.

But I guess we're namby -pamby cowardly Calvinists, as it is being said in various places.

Dr. White transitioned from his talk on Thanksgiving to the question of free will expressed in the London Baptist Confession, chapter 19.

White exposes his position. White notes that some have twisted God's truth and thereby implies that I have done so by my use of the following language.

At the end of the day, we live out a script that God has decreed. Actually, I was talking about Leighton Flowers at that point.

But hey, if you want to apply it to yourself, I can't stop you. But anyway, in various instances,

White says that I have flattened out God's decree. Well, Leighton Flowers has, and I think you are as well, if you're saying that there is no compatibilism.

My position does not ascribe meaning to the outworking of God's decree and that I am a hyper -Calvinist because I deny compatibilism and that I claim that Arminians are heretics.

What you're saying is that the basis of your refusal to acknowledge the

Christian confession of the men you debated is this position. I don't see how that cannot lead to hyper -Calvinism.

Now, I've seen no evidence as of yet that Dr. Zachariades, I don't know about Sonny Hernandez, but I have not seen anything where they say that you should specifically seek evidence of regeneration before presenting the gospel.

So that is encouraging to me. I hope that they will come straight out and say that you should, in fact, present the gospel to every creature at every opportunity without any seeking for signs of regeneration.

I would like to hear that. But I am concerned when you add a perfect understanding of Reformed theology to the gospel.

Now, maybe what you're saying is, well, look, we've decided that Leighton Flowers, since he's a former

Calvinist, is sinning against sufficient light that we can determine that he actually is reprobate.

Well, congratulations on your spiritual gifts. I don't remember that one in the Bible. I fully recognize that there are going to be those who have made profession of faith, who at the judgment,

God's going to say, depart from me. But then the words he's going to say are, for I never knew you, not you didn't get it exactly right.

Now, not knowing him may result in someone opposing divine truths.

But folks, there are people who oppose divine truths in Scripture because they honestly think they're not divine truths and that the result of those truths would be a fundamental overthrow of God's character and the gospel that they are actually trusting in.

They're inconsistent at that. They're in error at that. But the willingness to dismiss them as unbelievers ungraciously, to me, does smack of hyper -Calvinism.

Now, that's not an actual definition of hyper -Calvinism, but I've met enough of them that they all sort of shared that in common and I'm concerned about it.

So I'd like to find out. So anyways, maybe

I've been guilty of more clarification than Mr. White gives me credit for, as he has deduced so many issues to question from my convoluted

Clarkian thinking—understanding, sorry. Thus, one may be baffled at how much Mr. White was able to say about things he did not understand.

I have not said anywhere that the choices—okay, here's, this is where it gets hopefully helpful. I have not said anywhere that the choices that are made in the outworking of God's decree have no significance.

All that I have said is that they are not free. Now, we need to—free in the creaturely sense or autonomous?

Free in the sense of flowing from the desires of my heart or autonomous in the sense of being of existing outside of the realm of God's decree.

I don't believe anything exists outside the realm of God's decree, but I believe God's decree creates the realm in which my creaturely decisions are meaningful according to God's purpose.

I do not believe my decisions overthrow God's. I'm not bringing anything new into existence.

God's never surprised by anything. I'm not a Molinist. I'm not an open theist.

None of these things. That should be fairly straightforward, I think. So, free in what way?

In the creaturely realm? Do you act on the desires of your heart?

Or does God's decree force you to do what you don't want to do?

Or do you do what you want to do and that is compatible and in harmony with God's decree?

And that freedom is not the criterion for God's judgment.

So, here's where one of the things that he's going to be saying here is,

God judges you on the basis of his decree, not for doing what you wanted to do.

I maintain this because I believe that God's decree is eternal and unconditional. In contrast,

I believe it's eternal and unconditional. In contrast, Mr. White, there was a Dr. White before.

I guess I lost my doctorate somewhere. In contrast, Mr. White has accused me of a view that renders us as puppets, that our choices do not have meaning, and that what

Herod, Pilate, the Jewish leaders, and Romans did, indeed the entire universe itself, does not matter.

Forgive me if I mention these things are the very types of arguments that Armenians have made against Calvinist theology.

At one point, White misstated that I said people are responsible because of their knowledge of God's decree.

I did not say this. Maybe it was a mistake. With all due respect, sir, you are not a good writer.

I'm sorry. With all due respect, you are confusing things, not clarifying things.

This is a subject... Like I said, over there, there's Edwards. And it's too small a print for me to read anymore.

But there was someone who was very careful with his choice of words. Very careful, indeed.

And on this subject, I'm sorry, but you ain't helping. Not so far.

I don't get almost any of this. White appeared to understand some of what I wrote.

As he said, it seems man will be judged not based on the desires of his heart. I don't see how he grounds the judgment of God.

Also, from my unclear expressions, White has derived the conclusions that my approach is simplistic, rationalistic, and sub -biblical.

Stop with the offense, sir. Stop being offended and just get to the issues.

I mean, there's lots of... I'm offended by all the stuff where you guys are trying to be purposefully offensive, but not...

Let's just... This conversation could be handled so well if it was done with a different attitude than was displayed in the free will debate.

This discussion could be done properly. Brother, are you... How do you understand exactly what it means when talking about the king of Assyria?

His will is involved. His desire is involved. He's promoting himself.

He's acting on the very desires that we would expect the king of Assyria to have.

And yet then you have God saying, but I'm using him as the instrument in my hand, and I'm going to judge him from saying,

I, I, I, I. This is why God judged him. Brother, how do you understand that?

And then you could come back and say, well, are you saying that his actions determine God's decree?

And I would say, no, not at all. But there is this... The beauty of this is that God's decree created a real human environment where those attitudes and actions of the king's heart are meaningful.

And they're meaningful as to the judgment that God brings upon him and the justice, the demonstration of God's justice.

You see, we could have that conversation. I wish we had had that conversation.

We can still have it. At least from my perspective, we can. He asserts that what it boils down to is that it's simply a script.

This does not include the wisdom of God. Evidently, my position that the eternal decree is a script means that I do not take into account the creation of time and space, and that I somehow make light of the incarnation.

I simply asked a question. For me, the incarnation demonstrates that the temporal creation of God, the creation of time and all the actions therein is fully meaningful in the demonstration of God's wisdom.

Jesus was not simply following a script. His actions had meaning.

When he wept over Jerusalem, it wasn't an act. There has to be meaning here.

Your mistake in mixing categories is evident. If you are arguing that Jesus had free will and that therefore we also have it, you're simply mistaken.

I never said that. Again, what do you mean by free will? As a unfallen human being,

Jesus did have free will. That doesn't mean that we have unfallen free will.

If he was a true man, he had creaturely free will, which clearly means that the events in time and Jesus's obedience to the

Father were meaningful and not merely a script. I think this is vitally important to the very nature of the atonement itself because the obedience that Jesus gave was absolutely free obedience.

And it was meaningful, which is why he was able as the God -man to give himself.

None of this means that God's decree was contingent. I'm not an open theist.

I'm not going to say that there is some possibility that the Godhead could have imploded. But that the obedience that Jesus gave was free as it flowed from his perfect submission to the

Father. And I think that's absolutely relevant. Absolutely relevant in God's creative decree to the judgment that he was the spotless lamb of God.

Not just, well, I mean, otherwise he could have just beamed in right before the crucifixion, done the deed and left.

Accomplish the same thing, right? No, there's a whole life to be lived. There's a positive righteousness that needs to be given.

Christ did not have a fallen human nature. He had a sinless nature that was susceptible to the results of the fall, such as.

But OK, Christ did not have a fallen human nature. He had a sinless nature that was susceptible to the results of the fall, such as illness and physical death.

OK, to deny that Christ worked according to his father's timetable and that he did not merely follow a script is to imply what precisely?

Well, see, there it is again. To deny that Christ worked according to his father's timetable.

I never denied that. Compatibilism says that there is perfect harmony between God's decree and actions in time.

That's the whole point. So I never denied that. And that he did not merely follow a script.

Well, again, it's that term merely. I believe the second person of the

Trinity entered into time. That means what happens here has much more meaning than simply merely following a script.

It's demonstrating God's wisdom for all ages and to all the heavenly powers observing, whatever they might be compromised of, that that's what gives actions in time their meaning is to imply what precisely?

Jesus did not say, did Jesus not say, my time has not yet come?

Yes. If that is not a script, what is it? It's a whole lot more than a script.

It's a whole lot more than a script. It's the incarnate son of God in time.

Yes, God decreed the very moment of the crucifixion. No one's denying that. I can't believe that you are thinking that I have this.

Okay, I'm going to go. Don't get offended. This is a reductionistic view. It's a reductionistic view.

You want the one so much, and I affirm it as well, that you cannot see that that decree creates this entire temporal realm where the actions of men and God together bring about the glorification of the triune

God. And that my actions as a believer, when

I, when the Holy Spirit of God prompts me, when

I have the desires in my heart as a redeemed believer to be obedient to my

Lord and say no to sin, that matters. It's important.

It's not just a script. Oh, but God decreed it. Yes, he did. But it matters and it's compatible with God's decree.

It's a part of my created nature. It's not just a two -dimensional puppet on the string type situation.

Sort of have I not been saying, excuse me, Mr. Pierce, have I said this before sometime in my life?

Yes, many times in this program, right? I just want to make sure, you know, I'm getting old. So sometimes, you know, things get...

Brother Porter, have I said this before? Oh, nevermind. Hey, keep him awake, would you?

That's your job from now on. If he starts wandering, keep him awake. All right. If that is not a script, what is it?

Or is it the dislike of the term script? Yeah, I dislike that term. God's decree is so rich.

Here, here, here. This is gonna get me into a lot of trouble, but maybe it'll help.

Do you know what a fractal is? Do you know what a fractal is? I'm sorry, I'm almost wearing a fractal, but not really.

When you look at a fractal, the hyper complexity of the fractal, if you've never heard a fractal before, go online and yeah,

I'm gonna actually be going over the mega, sorry, but I'm getting close. Go online and look up Jason Lyle's video on fractals and listen to it.

It'll give you some idea of what I'm talking about here. I love fractal art. Fractals are a mathematical evidence of God's existence.

It's beauty that God built into the mathematical structure of the universe that no one knew about until 25 years ago.

It's incredible, just awesome stuff. It's fingerprint of God. Fractals are hyper complex reproducing algorithms, basically.

And the complexity, weather is a fractal phenomenon.

That's why we can never predict it exactly right. Even with our satellites and all of our instruments, it has rightly been said that a butterfly taking off from a branch of a tree in the

Sierra Nevada mountains can determine whether a hurricane will or will not hit a particular house on the

East coast. That is a true statement. That is a true state. Now, does

God's decree control the butterfly and the hurricane?

Yes, but in a beautifully complex and interactive and interwoven interplay of so many things that are absolutely meaningful, including the will of man.

Fallen will of man, redeemed will of man. In the case of Jesus, unfallen will of man. None of that overthrows

God's decree. It's all under God's decree, but it does not squish it down into a script.

It's too beautiful for that. It's too big for that. What if I refer to the decree?

Christ lived out his time on earth according to the decree of God. If Christ was predetermined to die on the cross, he was not free to decline.

Though his choices were real, Jesus' human life was predestined as everything else that takes place according to God's decree.

I might ask James White the questions he poses to the Arminian in his book, The Potter's Freedom. And then he quotes to my

Potter's Freedom. The irony here is that the questions of the Arminian are precisely the ones

White must answer in light of his insistence that responsibility is based on creaturely freedom. This is my favorite.

What do you mean by real choice isn't a choice real if it actually occurs at all?

There seems to be just a... I don't know what the source of the confusion is.

I really don't, but there's confusion. So, Mr. White, at least

I was Dr. White at the beginning. So, Mr. White, here is my challenge to you, and I hope that it is clear as crystal for you.

Let us debate the proposition. Is God's decree conditional? No, it's not.

Are you going to take that side? Because somebody needs to, but neither one of us believe it. You may take the affirmative so you can assert as much as you like about meaningful choices of creaturely will.

I will take the... There it is. There it is. There's the problem. Did you catch it?

Let me read it again. Let us debate the proposition. Is God's decree conditional?

Now, neither one of us believe that. I don't believe it's conditional. I don't believe his decree is conditional upon what man does.

Not for a second. No compatibilist I know does. So it's straw man.

Don't even know where it came from. Don't know how... He quotes in Potter's Freedom and then misrepresents my position.

Why? I don't know. I've never met the man. God bless him. But here's the problem.

You may take the affirmative so you can assert as much as you like about the meaningful choices of creaturely will.

So that's the issue. You can't have meaningful choices.

I say to you, the meaningfulness of my choices is compatible with God's decree.

In his mind, if my choices are meaningful, they can't be compatible with God's decree.

It simply has to be a script. I say my God's bigger than that. My God's bigger than that.

He can decree the ends and the means. And the means are meaningful.

So how can we have a debate when the thesis offered is one that I have repeatedly in debate and publications denied as my side?

I don't believe God's decree is conditional. But I do believe that man's actions in time, which are the result of God's decree, are meaningful in the demonstration of God's glory.

Now, I've gone over the mega and I didn't even show you some of the screenshots

I had here. There was one interesting one from Sonny Hernandez that does concern me.

From November 15th. I don't know if you saw this one. There are too many of them.

I can't throw them up right now. I'll just read it to you. Dr. Robert Morey is a man that I've learned a lot from over the years. Yes, that's what, yeah.

That explains a lot of the attitude issue. Yeah, right there. And I'm not going to go into this other one right now.

It would distract from the things we've done. But let me see if I can at least get this one for you.

It's a little bit hard to do. Preview. There should only be one left.

Oh, there's two left. Great. Okay, which one are you getting right now?

Okay, good. That one's good enough. Because the other one was just pulpit and pen saying that I'm hiding from Dr.

Zachariadis' challenge, which I have yet to receive a meaningful thesis to.

And I just dealt with rather fully. So you've got the big one.

It says 13. Okay, all right. Pulpit and pen. And again,

I lost my doctorate. Mr. James White needs to go ahead and officially denounce the Second London Baptist Confession and join a new

Calvinism YRR church, which would be far more in line with the theology. They have the tolerance for charismatism and semi -Pelagianism that he appreciates.

And there he will much more easily be able to pronounce brotherhood upon men like Michael Brown and Leighton Flowers. The fact that chapter 9 of that confession is basically being completely reinterpreted outside the realm of the actual authors by these individuals seems to be being ignored.

But this is just an illustration of the kind of stuff that's flowing around out there, which is not meant to bring light, but only heat whatsoever.

Now, I'm just going to have to, I'll just be honest, I'm just going to have to summarize some of this stuff.

But what's fascinating to me is in the midst of all this, uh, someone links me, and this is from a number of years ago, but I'll just, let me put it this way.

Go back into the archives and find in the reasonable, at reasonablefaith .org,

William Lane Craig's website, question number 157, Mullenism versus Calvinism.

And you have a guy who writes in, and he says, I'm troubled at the mass of Calvinists I see who are incredibly intelligent and trustworthy

Christian leaders. What I mean is that so many seem to be capable of great analysis far beyond myself, but seem to stick their head in the sand when it comes to the problem of evil.

If they don't, then they tend to make God a self -contradicting being. Why do you think this is so? I'm also personally troubled at how few leaders

I see subscribing to Mullenism. It seems to me that it answers the most questions and creates the least problems.

I understand that it can be complex, but I wouldn't, but I wouldn't think we would just rest with the problem of evil not being satisfied.

I don't base what I believe on the beliefs of others, but we can't ignore the influence of others in our lives, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, Craig's response is what you'd expect from Dr. Craig. But what

I would direct you to, and I was going to spend some time going through it, but I'm not going to right now. I'm just going to direct you to this.

Read Craig's criticism of compatibilism and see who it reminds you of.

Now, of course, Craig doesn't even attempt to offer a biblical defense of Mullenism because there isn't one.

But he gives five difficulties. Universal divine causal determinism cannot offer a coherent interpretation of scripture.

Well, actually, it certainly can. But here it says, nine streams of text affirming human freedom.

People face a multitude of divine exhortations and commands. People are said to obey, believe, and choose

God. People sin and rebel against God. People's sins are judged by God. People are tested by God. People receive divine rewards.

The elect are responsible to respond to God's initiative. Prayers are not mere showpieces scripted by God.

And God literally pleads with sinners to repent and be saved. That's actually from D .A. Carson. Number two, universal causal determinism cannot be rationally affirmed.

This one I might try to remember to come back to because this one is actually somewhat helpful.

But the whole point is this. He's arguing against compatibilism.

And when you look at Flower's arguments, you look at the Molinist arguments, and then you look at Dr.

Zachariadis. What are they all doing? They all have to do the same thing. Flatten it down.

Flatten it down. There cannot be any fullness, any richness to the relationship of the divine decree and events in time.

It's all got to be a rationalistic, in this case, philosophical, whatever.

It's got to be flattened down. And the scriptures won't allow it. I mean, you look at William Lane Craig, you go, oh, and so your response is

Molinism. Yeah, I got that from the Bible. No, you didn't. And you know you didn't.

Once you start laying out, you'll always end up going exactly where that card dealer come from again now.

And you don't have any answers. You don't have any answers. Oh, my, my, my, my, my, my boy, did we cover the ground today?

Yikes. That'll keep you going, at least until next week.

Now, before you start the music, this weekend, starting

Friday, we'll be addressing some of this stuff. We'll be talking about the

Doctrines of Grace. We'll be talking about Reformed Theology, the five points at Covenant Grace Church in St.

Charles, starting Friday night. And there will be opportunity for questions and answers.

And yeah, one of the themes is going to be presenting the

Doctrines of Grace graciously. And so, yeah, we'll definitely, we'll definitely be talking about that.

I think it's sort of necessary, sort of needful in our day. And then we'll be back,

I think the week after that should be normal. And then the week after that is not normal. And, you know, it's the end of the year.

So that's just sort of how it goes. But thanks for listening to the program today. Sorry for going so long, but hopefully you enjoyed it and it's useful to you.