Presuppositionalism Apologetics vs. Mormonism

Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics and the Mormon Debate

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala and today I have two guests. I don't think I've ever had two guests on before. It's usually just one other person and we have super interesting conversations covering a wide variety of topics from theology and apologetics, but today I have two Christian brothers who are deacons at Apologia Church and they just recently did a debate with two Mormons on a very interesting topic and so I think you guys are going to be in for a treat as we're going to be doing something that you don't normally see.

Apologia Church, if you're familiar with the church and their apologetics ministry, you've seen it done there, but generically speaking we don't often get to see a presuppositional approach applied to Mormonism.

So when we think of a presuppositional apologetics or you know the more technical term that when we use transcendental arguments and these sorts of things we we typically think in terms of like the Christian and the atheist, but really the presuppositional approach because it's biblical and it's grounded in Scripture and it can be used against any form of unbelief and so I really enjoyed watching the debate between the two gentlemen that I'm that I'm gonna have on with me in just a moment with the Mormon gentlemen and they did an excellent job and we're gonna talk a little bit about what that debate was about, what was their game plan and how they applied this what we would call a biblical apologetic to that context and so they did have a very intimidating task as they'll go into detail, but it was their first public debate and of course you know James White is the moderator so that can be a little intimidating, but they did a good job and looking forward to jumping into this topic with them.

Just as a heads up I think May 17th, I might make a correction, but this presuppositionalist right here is going to have an evidentialist apologist on my show. Now as you guys know I am a hardcore presuppositionalist.

I believe that that is the biblical approach to apologetics, however you have often heard me say that there is great benefit in learning from people who don't share our same apologetic methodology and so when we learn for example information from evidentialists and classicalists, the information is still useful as long as we, being faithful to Scripture and to our biblical presuppositions, we learn to contextualize that information in a way that does not compromise our biblical and presuppositional commitment.

So I'll be actually having a doctor, I don't know if he's a doctor, Jay Warner Wallace who wrote the the book Cold Case Christianity, he's gonna be coming on the show I believe May 17th, don't quote me on that, I'll double-check.

And so it should be a really fun and interesting conversation and so just wanted to give you guys a heads up, we want to look at our classical brothers, our evidentialist brothers, and even unbelievers that we're engaging with through presuppositional eyes, through the lens of the authority of Scripture.

So when we do that we can still find great value in speaking with those that we we don't necessarily agree with on various issues. So with that out of the way, I would like to introduce my guests Oscar Dunlap and Daniel Constantino.

How are you guys doing? Good, good to be here. All right, well welcome, I'm happy that you guys are here. Congratulations, I think you guys, it's the first time I ever had two guests on, so for what it's worth, congratulations.

This is the.

Second time that happened with us. With Pastor James, when he brought us on the dividing line, he said the same exact thing, he's like, I've never had two people in studio with me, so I don't know, maybe we're just gonna get used to this.

Good to be a first, right? You guys did this kind of two-on-two debate, I wonder if you'll ever get on someone's show individually. I can't see one without the other. I reached out to Oscar and was like, hey, is your buddy joining us?

It feels weird if it's just you, so you guys, I'm happy that you guys are here. Praise God, we are too. Thanks for having us. All right, well why don't you take a few moments to let people know who you are, a little bit about your church, and what you guys do, and then we'll kind of jump right into the discussion of your debate, and just the main content of the show tonight.

We're talking about presuppositionalism and Mormonism. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself.

Sure, so we are both, as you said, deacons at Apologia. We do a lot of evangelism. We run some Bible study groups at our church, and we're just very active in ministry throughout the week. Our church does a great deal of ministry out in the abortion mills, downtown.

We're all about reaching out in the culture, like pressing the crown rites of Christ, and trying to make his name known. So that's our primary thing as far as ministry goes, and then kind of when that happens, we kind of run into some individuals, and sometimes it turns into longer, deeper discussions, and we're always happy to kind of go further into those discussions if time permits.

So we'll usually go out Friday,.

Saturdays together. We have a First Friday. We'll go out to downtown Phoenix. We have thousands of people there. We run into Hindus, witches, Muslims, Roman Catholics, everything you can think of under the sun.

We have a Mormon outreach, so I lead that every other Sunday. What we do is we go to their, they're called wards. It's basically their churches where they meet for their Sunday gathering, and we'll go out there, we'll stand outside, and we'll engage and try to call people and say, hey, let's have a conversation.

We love you guys. We're concerned about some things your church teaches. Can we talk about it? So that's actually how this debate came about through our Mormon outreach. One Sunday we're out at a ward, probably five minutes from my house, and Hayden, one of the Mormons we debated, comes down.

He's like, hey, and we start exchanging information. Me and him having great conversations, and that eventually leads to us having the conversation with Matt Oscar on their podcast, Two Witnesses podcast, and that led up to the debate.

The whole point was, the way the debate originated was just through outreach. By saying, we love our Mormon neighbors, we're gonna take time out of our Sunday morning to go out and talk to them about the gospel, about why they're under a false teaching, a cult, a Christ that can't ultimately save them, and so we do that every Sunday at Apologia.

So for.

People who might not know, and I know people who are in apologetics and learn about the cults and the theology of Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and things like that, why is it the case, and I guess I have two questions here, so why is it the case that Mormons require evangelism?

You know, there are some Mormons who might be watching who are like, what are you talking about? You know, we're genuine Christians, you know? What is the key difference between what we would call Orthodox Christianity and Mormonism?

And perhaps you can make a distinction between the different kinds of Mormonism that's out there. I was sharing, I posted something, I think you guys might have seen it on Facebook, about Mormonism and how the Mormon God is unable to ground, you know, logical absolutes and stuff like this, and there was an old friend of mine who was a Mormon, reached out to me, and she was under the impression that what I thought about Mormonism was perhaps from a source other than the main branch of Mormonism.

There's a branch that broke off, and so she thought that I was having misinformation, that, no, it's not what you think, it's this over here. What is it about Mormonism that regardless of whether the branch, you know, the main branch that broke off, what is it about Mormonism that requires us as Christians.

The Person of Christ and the Gospel in Mormonism

To still proclaim the gospel to them? Yeah, there's two main big, big problems. The person of Christ, and the gospel itself, right? So if you ever hear Christians talk about the Bible, we say this is ultimately about Jesus.

The Old Testament prophesied about him, in the Gospels he arrives, in Acts he's proclaimed, in the Epistles he's explained, and in Revelation he's expected, right? It's all about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and so we would agree it's important then that we get the person of Jesus right.

If he's the central aspect of the Bible, we can't say there's room to get him wrong, and so part of Mormon theology includes things about Jesus that we would say is fundamentally in opposition with what the Bible teaches.

For example, one quick one is Jesus being the creator of all things, right? You have John 1 3, it says if anything was made, it was made by him, and I always tell people, okay, John's telling us that if it falls in a made category, if you can look at this over here and say it's made, that means Jesus made it, okay?

In Colossians 1, you have Paul's explanation about all things were created through Christ and for him, and then he exhausts every category there is, right? He says visible, invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through Christ, and in him all things hold together.

So you have this consistent, it's not just those two verses, there's more, but you have this consistent teaching from Scripture that Jesus created all things, and the Mormons don't teach that, and so the problem is not, I had a Mormon tell me this, do you think when I die God's gonna ask me, well did Jesus create all things?

And the problem is not that God's gonna ask you that when you meet him in judgment, the problem is who died for you on that cross? If the creator of all things didn't die for you on the cross, if he's just an offspring, if he's a part of creation himself, that sacrifice is not sufficient.

It can't pay for your sins, and so the person of Christ is one area that is distorted in Mormonism. They teach that he's offspring of Elohim. They would not affirm, you can ask Mormons this, they would not affirm that Jesus created Lucifer.

They would actually say that he's spirit brothers with him, he's even our spirit brother, and so that's one area. And the second one is the gospel itself. How are you saved? How are you reconciled with God?

And every cult will affirm you need grace, right, you need some of God's mercy, but in Row 9 -10 it tells us that God's grace is only sufficient for us after we've done all we can do. That's when it becomes sufficient, so the question you ask a Mormon is, have you done all you can do?

And if they're honest, they're gonna say no, and so it's this teaching of the gospel where it's like, yes, God's grace is necessary, but you also need to do your part as well. There's actually something that you can show before God, and if you talk to any Mormon, they might want to deny that language, like, no, no, no, there's nothing I can do, and it's like, okay, that's fine, but you need to be consistent with that.

And the problem is, is you're not. Your prophets have taught otherwise, the Book of Mormon teaches otherwise, and you live in such a way that you're trying to show God things you've done to merit salvation, and we would say, of course, good works for Christian are a good thing, but they don't merit any good favor in front of God, so that's the reason why they need to be evangelized.

Okay, so that's.

Interesting. So you said something about the grace of God being sufficient after all they can do, so His grace is not sufficient unless you're meeting some prior condition of righteousness. So now, as a Protestant, I understand grace as being undeserved or unmerited favor.

Do Mormons understand grace in that way? Because if they do, then there seems to be a conflict with what the definition of grace is and the condition that has to be met. If it's unmerited, then how must, why does it only come after a condition of righteousness is fulfilled?

Do they have a different kind of a nuanced understanding of what grace is?

Maybe Oscar, if you want to jump in on that. Yeah, yeah, that's where we see a fundamental contradiction, right? Doing an eternal critique of Mormonism, you'll see that those two concepts are in conflict, right?

They will affirm when talking that they believe grace is unmerited favor, but then when you actually critique, right, the fundamental beliefs of Mormonism, you'll find that that which they make more meritorious is in contradiction, in fact, with biblical definition of grace.

So when you make grace conditional, you've then made, you've put a merit there, and it destroys, fundamentally it destroys it being unmerited, right? So you can't have both of those concepts. So I think what's interesting is when we view that, we had a conversation with our opponents, and it took us 30 minutes to really flesh out that concept, right?

They would say, no, no, we believe by salvation through, salvation by grace alone as well. And then eventually Daniel got to, wait, don't you guys believe they need to be baptized in order to be saved?

And like, absolutely. Like, well that's a contrary concept now. Now you've just introduced something different than what we've been saying the whole time. Once you add a condition, it's no longer grace.

Now it's due. Now you're owed something, and that's argumentation in Romans and also in Galatians when they're in circumcision, right? You destroy the gospel when you add anything to it.

Hmm, all right, very good. Now here's my other question, and then I want to get into, this is my last question before we get into kind of the issue of the debate that you had. Now folks have heard you say at the beginning here that you guys do street evangelism.

Now there are Christians who may want to get into that, but it's kind of an intimidating thing, you know, like to go out into the street. What do you do when you go out? Okay, we're outside. There's a bunch of Mormons, there's Christians, there are Hindus, there's some random cult that you never heard of before.

How do you start or begin to engage in conversation without being like the weird Christian who's holding up this huge sign, you know? How do you engage? How do you kick off the conversation and really just start.

Interacting with people right away? I think what's fundamental for us as Christians is approaching it from a biblical worldview. So actually the last sermon from our church from Pastor Jeff was the ending of Matthew, right?

We just finished Matthew. I think it took the church eight years to get to Matthew, right? And Matthew ends with Christ proclaiming that all authority in heaven and earth is His, and He says, therefore go, right?

Therefore go, we make disciples of the nations. And that's what rounds us when we're going into apologetics or evangelism. We're going out into the culture to press the rights of Christ. We're going out as ambassadors of a king, right?

So our common ground with all people is that we're all made in the image of God, right? We recognize that that's fundamental to us all. That's our starting place. And then going from there, understanding that that's true, and understand that the Bible is infallibly true, we can go and speak with authority into the lives of individuals because we know their Creator, and He's told us to go and preach to them.

So if we truly believe what we're saying, truly believe what we believe, then how could we not? It's not so much a question of how do you, or how could you, how could you get into evangelism? How could you not, right?

If this is true, then it necessitates Christians to go out into the culture and to preach. As far as methodology and things like that, I think that's something that you grow in over time, right? It's just a practice of doing it, and you get better at it.

My brother, Matthew DeJesus, our podcast is kind of all entirely what we focus on. Two Minutes Podcast, it's all about going out, well, what's the methodology? What's the mindset of going into the culture and preaching?

But I think as far as why is it necessary, it's because all authority is Christ.

So when you're out on the streets, do you like walk up to a person and be like, hey man, do you know Jesus? Like how does that look? So we understand the necessity of it, because of course the scriptures teach us.

It's kind of like when someone says, you know, how do I become a strong Christian? And then the generic answer, and it's a correct answer, is you pray and you read the Bible, but not there you go. You're Pentecostal, you have the gifts of the Spirit, you read my mind.

It's the force. So someone says pray and read the Bible. Well, not everyone knows what that looks like. Well, how do I read the Bible? I mean, do I just open up anywhere? It's like, how do I study the Bible?

How do I pray? Am I just talking? Is there a way to do it? When someone says go out and proclaim the gospel, like what does that look like? Do we stand on the top of a rock and scream repent? You know, like what does that look like?

If you can show me in like a thumbnail, how do you actually talk to someone? So suppose I'm a Mormon, I'm the local Puerto Rican Mormon, right? Just walking the street, you know what I'm saying? I need Jesus.

And so I see you two gentlemen on the street. And so what is this going to look like?

Yeah, so practically speaking, one, it's just good not, you can't go alone, it's probably better not to. And I always tell people, when you first start this type of ministry and outreach, go for a couple of weeks, and just listen to people who've done it for years.

That's the way you're going to benefit greatly. But practically, what does it look like? If we see a Mormon walking, and it's me and Oscar, we say, hey, do you have a minute to talk about, we know there are already Mormons, so hey, do you have a minute to talk about Jesus?

Right? Because it's already that kind of common ground, they believe in him. And they say, yeah. And really, it turns into, Bonson says, if you give somebody enough time to talk, they'll hang themselves.

Right? So now it's a matter of asking them questions. Hey, like, be genuine. I tell people all the time, be genuine. What's your name? How long have you been in the Mormon Church? Where did you serve your mission?

Like, ask those questions generally, not to like, just kill time. Ask them, get to know the person. And okay, is it true that you believe this about Christ? Is it true that you believe Christ didn't create Lucifer?

How would you reconcile as a Mormon, when Joseph Smith says this, and then it's good to show them the actual quotation in the King Father discourse of Joseph saying you can become a God? How do you reconcile that with Isaiah 43?

And then read it to them, and let them get an answer. So practically speaking, when you're talking about evangelism in the street, it's good to ask people questions, and to let them actually hear their folly.

Sometimes they haven't thought about it. But when they actually say it out loud, when you press them enough, and they say something, whether it's an atheist or Mormon, and they say something, they're like, oh my God, did I just say that?

And they may not tell you then, but they'll go home, and they'll think about what they said. So a good practical tool is asking them questions. Obviously, you want to be grounded in the scriptures. You want to know how to respond.

You want to know how to stay on task. Don't argue about things that are on the outside. At the end of the day, you're looking at an image bearer of God who's going to die one day, who's going to see God, and so you want them to have peace.

And that needs to be in your message, too, is, hey, I'm concerned for you. I want you to have peace with God. I understand as a Mormon, you may be self-deceived. You may think you actually have peace with God, and you don't know Him.

And that's why I'm here. That's why I want to talk to you. If it's an atheist, it's hey, I understand you may hate your Creator right now, but I know I don't deserve His mercy and His grace either, and I want you to have peace and be reconciled to your God.

So asking questions is going to be.

Key. Excellent. Well, folks, if folks are interested in learning how to ask questions, you could watch videos, of course, watching people engage Mormons in Jehovah's Witness, and I know, apology on their YouTube channel, there's a lot of content there, but there's an excellent book out there that I highly recommend, and it's called Tactics by Greg Koukl.

Excellent resource, teaches you how to ask questions and navigate conversation. I think that's an excellent resource for people doing small groups and things like that. Koukl's not a presuppositionalist, but if you read the book, it's very presuppositional, and there's a lot of useful information there to navigate conversation.

But, all right, well, thank you for that. Well, let's jump right into the debate then. The debate topic was super interesting. The proposition was, on what authority should we believe? And, of course, you guys took the Reformed Protestant position, and the Mormons took their own position.

Now, can you explain for us then, what is the nature of the answer to that question from a Mormon perspective? That's the first part. And was the position they held, was that normative for Mormons, or did they have kind of this idiosyncratic view of the authority that differs from, say, the broader Mormon church?

Yeah, sure. And anybody can jump in and answer that. Yeah,.

Yeah, we can kind of tag on that. So, to answer the first part, the traditional Mormon position, it would be predicated upon the veracity of Joseph Smith's claims, right? Prophethood and priesthood, the restoration of the gospel, it's all predicated on whether or not Joseph Smith's first vision is true, if he's truly a prophet sent from God.

And they would, all of their authority, the authority of the church, would rest upon that. And so, typical of argumentation dealing with Mormons and their ultimate authority is going to be dealing with the authority of the prophets.

And then, I think, along with that, it would be the validity of personal revelation that they can receive from the Spirit of God, right? And so, I think those two aspects, everything stands on those, right?

You have these prophets of Mormonism, right, Joseph Smith and the following prophets, and then you have a direct line to God to basically witness to you whether or not these prophets are true prophets.

So, I would think that's probably normative as far as all of the people that we've come in contact with in the Mormon literature that we've read. What they presented, though, no, not at all. We had Mormons tell us directly that that is not what we believe, that's not what the church teaches.

They would say what they presented was consistent, but it's not normative of what we experience with Mormons whatsoever.

Yeah, so actually, so this is what they were supposed to say, right? So, we said, okay, what we're going to argue for is the Scriptures alone, and they're going to argue for something called the collective witness model.

So, one of the Mormons we debated, Jacob, he actually coined that term. It's an idea. He has a YouTube video. You can go find it. The idea is you take a collective amounts of evidence and evidences and resources, and when you combine them together, that's how you know things, right?

And you can have greater certainty or less certainty, depending on all the evidences you have to your disposal. So, he actually coined that term. Now, when you look at Mormons historically, they are fine and okay with saying, because Joseph Smith and because the Spirit told me, and that's it, and they're fine with that.

They actually, they're getting advice from a Mormon apologist named Robert Boylan, and they did an interview with him after the debate, kind of similar to this, and they asked him, hey, how would you have responded to this question?

What your answer would have been? And he would have been personal revelation. That would be my ultimate authority, personal revelation, and that would have been sinking sand too, but the point is, I think they were trying to disguise, that was essentially the answer as well, personal revelation, but they were trying to disguise their actual ultimate authority and say, hey, we appeal to all these evidences.

God gives us our eyes, God gives us reason, God gives us the prophets, God gives us history, and so when we look at all these evidences, we can triangulate and see and come to a conclusion, and the most important witness of their collective witness model is the Spirit.

So, when we press them on that in the debate, you'll hear them say, when I ask them, how do you know anything infallibly? Well, because the Spirit told me, okay? And then I asked them, is it possible that it's actually Satan telling you those things and not the Spirit?

And he says, yes. So, it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. It's really, it's sinking sand because Jesus tells us that the wise man built his life on the words of Christ, and the moment you don't do that, you're building your house on sand, so they've tried to disguise all these appeals to evidence and all these things that sound nice, but it really has no ground.

So, okay. So, if someone says, well, personal revelation or the use of my reason. Now, there was a lot of appeal to reason and observation and things like that, which I think is very interesting if people understand what God is like in Mormonism, that He has a body of flesh and bone.

He is stuck, the God of Mormonism is stuck in the same way human beings are, in what philosophers call the egocentric predicament. There is no way to get outside your finite self to get an objective vision of reality and to know how facts relate to each other exhaustively, so that God ultimately has to be agnostic with respect to certain claims to knowledge, right?

So, when your God tells, when the God of Mormonism tells a Mormon reveal something, the certainty of that fact is as dubious and doubtful as it is for the God who reveals it, because He doesn't have, He's not absolute all-encompassing like the of Christianity.

So, that was very interesting. But at any rate, let me turn it around on you guys. So, if someone were to say personal revelation, okay, or, you know, the evidence, whatever, and then you kind of offer your critique and you say, well, wait a minute.

Well, what do you have, Mr. Christian? What is your authority and on what basis can you be certain of that? How would you answer that? And please give me permission to interrupt and give pushback while you give your answer, just so people can see what it's like in conflict.

Go ahead. What's.

Scripture as the Ultimate Authority

Your authority? So, we would stand on Scripture as our ultimate authority.

No, no, no, no, no. Oscar, no, no, no. You don't stand on Scripture. You stand on your interpretation of the Scripture, okay? Am I doing good?

Yeah, you're doing very good. That's the first critique, right? We stand on our interpretation.

And I would push back and say that God has been clear in His Word pertaining to His will for man, pertaining to His nature, pertaining to the nature of Scripture itself. And so, we can be sure about the things that we're holding to as absolute regarding particular things.

Everything in Scripture is not exhaustive pertaining to the knowledge that God reveals within, but there are things that God has spoken with perspicuity and that we can be sure about.

Okay, okay. But the Roman Catholic or the Jehovah's Witness or whatever, they say, well, the Word of God is clear. And you guys completely disagree. So, saying that it's clear that God has revealed these things doesn't make it so.

You're just evincing your bias towards.

Your interpretation. What we'd say is, for example, if you look at the Jehovah's Witness or the Roman Catholic, is they themselves have to be inconsistent with the Scriptures. So, with one hand, they'll affirm the Scriptures are clear, right?

God cannot lie. And then when you hear them deal with a text that is in complete opposition to their beliefs, Jehovah's Witnesses deny the deity of Jesus. We can take you through hours and hours of Scriptures, multiple Old and New Testament, proving the deity of Jesus.

So, when you want to know how is someone's interpretation true, right? The question is, what's consistent with what's been revealed in the Scriptures? If there's two different interpretations, the problem is not the Scriptures.

The problem is one of the people. One of us is wrong, but what you don't do is dismiss all of Scripture and say, it must be the Scriptures, right? So, the question is, okay, now we know that the Scriptures are the Word of God.

Jesus held men accountable to the Scriptures in Matthew 22 and all throughout His ministry with ease. You see the Lord Jesus quoted from the Scriptures as authoritative, right? Have you not read what God spoke to Usain?

And even the Sadducees in His day, they didn't say, Jesus, we don't understand that interpretation. Or Jesus, how are we supposed to know what that meant? Jesus holds them accountable for what was spoken, and He says, God spoke this to you.

So, there is a clarity in the Scriptures. It's an objective testimony of God's revelation, of how God reveals Himself. Of course, we would acknowledge the Scriptures themselves say, there are hard passages in others.

And as Christians, we should be diligent to say, okay, what's the context? Who's writing this? Why? What does all of Scripture teach on this? But as Christians, we hold ourselves to high standards. We should be able to do that.

It's not the hardest work, but it requires some type of focus and diligence to say, okay, I'm going to understand this passage. But what it's not saying is that it's completely ambiguous, and nobody can know what the interpretation is.

When it says Jesus wept, I don't know how else you're going to interpret that than He wept. That's clear, right? And there's other passages that talk about other things, not just physical things Jesus did, that are clear as day.

That you have to be dishonest to say, I don't know that interpretation. Right.

And just to add to that really quick, just to add to that, if you deny that, you actually give up the reality. You give up the reality of apprehension of absolute truth. If you deny that Scripture is clear on certain issues pertaining to salvation and the will of God, there is no way to ground truth whatsoever.

So the argument on the other side is the destruction of.

Knowledge essentially. Yeah. When I was listening to that portion about interpretation, I was thinking about this, and I think this is important to bring out, is that the existence of multiple interpretations does not negate the reality and possibility of one having the correct interpretation.

Now, some say, well, that's just your interpretation. Cool, but my interpretation is correct. Even if you disagree with it, the fact that you disagree with it doesn't falsify my interpretation. So what we believe as Christians, and I know that you guys would agree with this, is that while it is up to interpretation, number one, multiple interpretations does not negate the possibility of a true one.

And number two, because God has revealed Himself through His Word, God has seen fit to use language as an adequate mechanism to conveying truth. So it's an adequate mechanism. According to God, language is sufficient to understand.

If you deny that, and you kind of adopt some kind of linguistic agnosticism that we really can't interpret language, then I can say, someone says, the Book of Mormon is true, and I'd be like, thank you for saying you like my sweater.

I could just interpret anything you say in any possible way. And you can't object to that, because you've now relativized all of language, and you've denied the central idea that language is a sufficient tool for interpretation.

Because it's not just books we interpret, it's conversations. As we're having this conversation, I have to exegete your words in my mind and interpret, and we're in agreement that certain words mean certain things in context.

And so, as you said, Jesus wept. I mean, that's a sufficient statement. I could know what that statement means. And if I could know what that statement means, then why can't we apply this to these other areas, even if someone wants to close their eyes and say, Jesus wept doesn't mean Jesus wept.

And you're wrong. You're wrong.

That's one of the things we were talking about as we were prepping for the debate was, you're really seeing an assault on the sovereignty of God from how they're presenting their God is, right? Which is why I think Oscar brought up greatly in the psalmist says, our God is in heaven.

He sits and he does as he pleases. If God wants to reveal himself through the scriptures, to the writings of the prophets and the apostles, we as men are nobody to tell God, hey, God, you should have done it better.

God, you should have done it this way. The clear teaching is, is that it is how God has revealed himself. That's taught clearly through the apostles. And again, the Lord Jesus held men accountable for what was written in the scripture.

I think it was interesting that didn't engage at all with second Timothy three 16, first Peter one, second Peter one and Matthew 22. And there's a verse we could have went to, but those were verses where you see the scripture is being placed as such a high pedestal that this is the ultimate authority.

This is how we know things. And if, if the Lord Jesus held this view, you have to ask yourself, do I want to hold the position that Jesus didn't hold as someone who's professing to believe in Jesus, right?

If Jesus believed the scriptures were clear and sufficient that he was quoting from Exodus, which was written 1400 years earlier, he can quote that and say, God spoke this to you, right? Then Christians now, 2000 years after the apostles, God spoke to you.

And you're accountable. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Now, thinking in terms of, well, real quick, let's let people who are listening, there's a question here. We'll take it towards the back end of this discussion, but if anyone has any questions, these two gentlemen have agreed to take questions.

So please preface your question with question so that I could differentiate them from the comments. So please, I encourage you guys to do that. All right. So in the discussion, there was a debate about interpretation.