July 1, 2004

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Desert Metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line. We are live today for the first time in about two weeks or so.
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It wasn't all that long, but we were back on Long Island and in Manhattan and it's just sort of difficult to really do
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The Dividing Line long distance. We used to do that every once in a while, but, you know, some people think we should continue to do it in that way, but I don't know if that's really the best way to do that.
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Be that as it may, 877 -753 -3341, I don't know if there's going to be just a flood of people who have all sorts of fascinating things or we're just going to stick with the topic that I announced on the blog earlier.
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And that is some reading of and the interaction with N .T.
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Wright and some discussions of that. There's much confusion concerning the relationship of N .T.
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Wright's perspective on Paul, the entire concept called the New Perspective, what's gone on with John Armstrong, what's gone on with other folks who have moved into this perspective, all of the consortiums and conferences being held on the subject,
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Covenant Seminary and various of the Reformed Theological Seminaries and Westminster Seminary in Escondido have had conferences where they have had their professors give responses to N .T.
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Wright and to the New Perspective or to Federal Visionism and the
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Auburn Avenue, which is the same thing, and that's the new word for it. And are they really in league with one another?
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And they say no, but then they say some of the same things that Wright says. And there's all sorts of confusion.
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And so we may be taking a look at that today on the program and taking a look at just simply the massive number of books that N .T.
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Wright has been cranking out. I don't know how anybody can keep up with all of them. You include all the journal articles and so on and so forth.
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And it's pretty hard to keep up with all of it. But if the phone just starts ringing off the hook and there are relevant questions, maybe we'll go that direction too.
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I don't know. Just briefly, I had the opportunity of sort of upgrading, shall we say, some of my presentations.
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The King James presentation that I made for the American Bible Society and Society of Biblical Literature and all the folks that helped to sponsor the symposium in Manhattan, about 75 % new.
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That means I'm probably going to be rearranging a lot of the King James only material in my
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King James only presentation. Some of you have downloaded that from our website, have listened to the dividing line in the past.
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I'm not sure that I'm going to be changing that. But I've tracked down, just make it look nicer.
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I cover some other things. I took the time to insert the quote from Gail Ripplinger.
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I even took the time to sit there and time it so that as Gail Ripplinger is talking about the sinking of the
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Titanic, the various elements of her explanation pop up on the screen right as she says them.
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So you can understand what it is she's talking about and things like that. And that's sort of fun. And if you're not sure what
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I'm referring to there, I might as well pop it up here and you might want to bring up the computer here in a second.
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I'm doing it through the network and for some odd reason it's just like taking forever to get hold of my laptop here.
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But there's a, I forget what radio program it was on. It wasn't all that long ago that Gail Ripplinger was on and she controls the questions that are asked of her.
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And this guy asked her a question and I honestly don't think that her response had almost anything to do with the question itself.
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But I just have a little short, it's just a little bit over a minute clip here. And what it explains,
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I guess, is the relationship between the sinking of the Titanic and the destruction of the
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NIV. And you got to realize all the other presentations were like, well,
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I mentioned some of them on the blog, but John Kohlenberger III gave a presentation, the textual sources used by the
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King James. It was very interesting. I mean, there were a lot of English translations done in the century preceding the
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King James and the Greek New Testaments were available to him and so on and so forth. And then we had had the day before,
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Jack Lewis, who wrote an extensive book on the subject of the King James, a talk about going through every version and change and edit.
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Wow, it was very long and very detailed. And we had a wonderful presentation from a professor from England on the subject of translating the
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Bible into English for millennia, almost a millennium prior to, of course, it was
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Anglo -Saxon and things like that. But prior to the translation of King James, that was very interesting. But they were very, very scholarly type things.
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And so here I am talking about Gail Riplinger and Peter Ruckman and Tex Mars.
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And I will say one thing. I got the most questions at the end. And I think I had the most people listening at the end with interest because they're like, you've got to be kidding.
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But here is if it's been a long time, here's that section from what a contrast from Gail Riplinger to N .T.
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Wright. This will be interesting. But just listen to what Gail has to say here. And one of the things that I guess some of our listeners have been wondering about,
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Gail, is when did the new versions first appear in America? Are these brand new things that just came about the last 20 or 30 years?
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Well, you know, the Titanic King 12, this was the same year as the corrupt
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American Standard version. And coincidentally, it was a man named Murdoch who threw the famous Titanic into reverse, causing it to sink.
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Now, scientists have just discovered that, of course, it wasn't a big gash, but as previously thought, that sunk the
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Titanic, but six small flicks. And today's NIV has cut out 64 ,000 words and 16 verses.
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Now, back in 1912, the New American Standard Bible had Timothy Dwight of the infamous
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Skull and Bones Society as a committee member. I have an educated guess about why the
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Titanic sunk and why the NIV will eventually sink in the lake of fire. The Titanic was from something called the
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White Star Line owned by J .P. Morgan. And the term White Star is a codename for Lucifer.
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Okay, yes, indeed. Well, so in my new presentation, as she's saying, six small slits, and 64 ,000 words and 16 verses, a lot of folks don't get that.
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But think about what's in each one of those six, 666. And the Murdoch thing, a lot of folks don't get that one either.
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The Murdoch thing is Rupert Murdoch, who owns the conglomerate that now owns the NIV. So Rupert Murdoch, and then the guy was named
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Murdoch who was at the helm that night. And so you see, you've got the two names and 666 and White Star Line.
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And oh, wow. Okay, so anyway, they found that to be very, very interesting.
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And then on the next screen, I had the what was the next one?
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Oh, our little discussion of acrostic algebra. Yes, I had the section on acrostic algebra from our debate, where she said that God calls it the
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NASV and NASB and God gave her acrostic algebra. And oh, it's lots of fun.
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But anyhow, be that as it may, it was very interesting.
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And so I'm supposed to submit a paper. What are you supposed to do with something so graphically oriented?
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So I'm going to focus it upon some particular issues and some particular textual variants and stuff like that and go with that direction.
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So it was very enjoyable to do that. Real briefly, before we head off to the subject of NT Wright, we've got plenty of time today.
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I was reading a the only way we can describe it, I think accurately,
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I was reading a rant on a on a blog recently. And I found it very interesting.
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It was all unhappy about the use of a phrase, the new counter reformation.
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And I thought this was illustrative of some of the stuff that's going on here. So I'm going to read this rant, especially because it names names and also because it'll allow me to sort of make a little bit of a point here.
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And that is the the rant begins this business about the new counter reformation is just a silly little slur issued by men who evidently define themselves and their faith almost entirely in terms of what they are against.
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In this case, the grim specter of Rome, that so obviously dominates their minds, they can't issue any kind of balanced responses to criticism, but just a lot of bluster and fearful propaganda.
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Who are these people? Well, yours truly is one of them. Put this together with Pastor King's overly enthusiastic support of men like James, quote,
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Why can't everyone else just submit their traditions of scripture like I do white? And Eric, I've consciously rejected all in biblical influences on my on my mind,
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Svensson. So there you have David King, myself, Eric Svensson, the the three of us are all bad men.
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And that, of course, for those of you who are not familiar with these issues, we actually all three of us believe that God's word is, is perspicuous and, and clear enough to be understood without necessarily being an expert in medieval philosophy and history.
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And if you believe that, then you are liable to be called names by this particular individual, who is sort of just a medievalist, and so on, so forth.
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Anyways, and it's not surprising that all they have to offer are slanders based on simple fear of that which is different from the self evident contents of their own minds.
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When you deal with men who are this self professedly ignorant of philosophy and culture, so incompetent that they can't distinguish a statement of Vantillian presuppositional denial of neutrality from Rortian nihilism and Derridian deconstruction, and who thus have no other way to respond to charges made against them regarding their
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Enlightenment view of hermeneutics and truth except name calling, it's not surprising that they close ranks with each other and pat each other on the back for how faithful they are and how compromising everyone else is.
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But else they have to offer obviously not anything balanced and reasonable. I believe these men are getting desperate, because they have no answers to serious critiques of their simplistic views.
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And thus they have adopted a kind of childish, he called me a bad name, so I'll call him an even worse name approach.
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This is simply childishness, and it's horrifying to find otherwise well educated men occupying leadership positions in the church and yet unable to be in the slightest way reasonable regarding criticisms of their views.
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Now, this is from a person who holds no position in any church. I don't believe he's finished his bachelor's degree yet.
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And to my knowledge has not published anything in any context.
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But that is the the rant that I was talking about. And the reason I read this outside of the just the shrillness of it is that that phrase so incompetent that they can't distinguish a statement of Antillian presuppositional denial of neutrality from Rortian nihilism and Derridian deconstruction.
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I'd like everyone right now unless you're driving, which you couldn't be doing and listening to a webcast unless you're like a super geek and you're doing this like off a satellite or something.
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And if that's the case, I'd like to get to know you personally. But anyway, so if you are not driving, which is the majority of our audience right now,
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I'd like to see a show of hands, please, from the listening audience. How many of you feel that you could fairly and accurately define those terms were used
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Vantillian presuppositional denial of neutrality from Rortian nihilism and Derridian deconstruction?
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How many of you like to see hands right here? How many of you know what any of that is about? That is not a large number of people.
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That means you're incompetent. Unless you well, unless you claimed unless you didn't claim, well,
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I don't know. Hmm. Well, you know, it's funny. A lot of folks will come into channel and they will very much want to demonstrate their their deep knowledge of philosophy.
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And I like to try to warn especially young men who are really getting interested in philosophy.
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I try to say, you know, I don't want to necessarily throw cold water on you.
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But I've seen a lot of young men really sort of lose their way.
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Christian young men lose their fervor, lose their passion, lose their ability to speak the gospel with clarity.
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They've ended up learning a lot about philosophy, but many of them have ended up pretty much not being of a whole lot of use to the kingdom because they ignored the warnings of scripture about the philosophies of men.
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I think there is such a thing as Christian philosophy, but I happen to be one of those odd folks that believes that Christian philosophy starts with the fear of the
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Lord and with the word of the Lord. And that Christian philosophy will really bow its head in the presence of scripture and the word of God.
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And it will demand that first the word of God be handled properly, understood properly, not that philosophy will determine those things.
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So many people want to start with philosophy and then force their conclusions upon the word of God so that its message is enslaved to the parameters of a particular philosophical perspective.
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And so I don't think a whole lot about philosophy in the sense of putting things in those terms.
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But what this particular individual wouldn't, since he doesn't know me, has never been in my office or anything like that, wouldn't know is
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I have a lot of philosophical materials in my library. I mean, I've taught now since 1990, 1991.
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And when you teach at various places, first degree at Canaan University, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the nice perks of teaching is you happen to get a lot of free books.
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And for many years, I have been teaching the Christian Philosophy of Religion class for Golden Gate in various contexts here in Phoenix, in Mill Valley, in Denver.
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It was a required class. It isn't any longer in the new catalog. And in fact, I'll be teaching, probably last time I'll be teaching it will be in Jan term, this coming
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January, just for those people who are graduating into the old catalog. You may be familiar with those things. Anyway, I get a lot of books.
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I have a couple shelves full of academic works on the subject of philosophy.
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I've studied symbolic logic and things like that. And so it's not too difficult to take the time to contrast various terms and to look at these things.
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And just because I don't basically want to lose my audience constantly, and just basically because I'd like to actually communicate with people in such ways to be helpful to them, to help them in their
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Christian life, to speak in the church in such a fashion that people don't just sit there and go, wow, he's really smart.
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I have no idea what any of that was. I mean, I certainly know the difference between Vantillian presuppositionalism, having made my way through Vantill.
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And I certainly know what nihilism is, just because there's a particular version of that that Richard Rorty has produced.
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And I couldn't tell you the difference between Richard Rorty's version and Nietzsche's version.
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Don't know that I really need to know that. I could find out. Certainly got the resources to do so.
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I know what deconstruction is, and it's pretty easy to track down the information on these things.
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But what's really odd to me is the person who wrote all these things. Just a while back, we tried to engage that person in exegesis of the text of Scripture.
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And those who watched, watched with a great deal of concern about the fact that he wouldn't do it, wouldn't touch it, wouldn't engage in it, and seemingly came to the conclusion that no one can really do it until they've studied these medieval authors and philosophies.
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These guys aren't medieval. They're still alive. Born in the 1930s, 1930, 1931, respectively.
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And the amazing thing was, this person couldn't answer basic questions about what the Bible was saying in particular passages.
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And that's what brings me to the reason why I even took the time to look at this rant. And rant, by the way, is a term that has become common in the blogosphere.
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It's in reference to someone's utilization of a comment to make a big point.
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In essence, it's almost taken on a meaning unto itself. Normally, rant is not a term that has any positive meaning to it.
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In this case, I wasn't using it positively, but it can be used that way. But the reason that I did this is because it illustrates,
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I think, where part of the problem is with modern
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Christian academia. And the problem is that, and I've said this for a long, long time, anybody can go back into the archives of the
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Dividing Line and they will see this is not something that began just with recent controversies.
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This is something I've said many times. There is no biblical foundation for the existence of Christian scholarship outside of, of course, you could say it's about all of Christian life, outside of the glorification of God, obviously.
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But beyond that, I do not believe that there is any biblical basis for Christian scholarship outside of that which edifies the people of God and the
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Church of God. And I really believe that Christian scholarship should look very, very differently than secular scholarship.
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It should be distinct. That doesn't mean it should be less. But you see,
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Christian scholarship begins with the Lordship of Christ. Christian scholarship begins with the
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Creator God. And as such, has a different epistemology and a different goal than secular scholarship does.
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They should look differently. They should act differently. They should have a different impetus to their practice.
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And if Christian scholarship gets to the point where you have to look at the people of God and say, you know, you've asked me a question about what
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Paul meant in the book of Galatians concerning false brothers. And to answer that question,
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I'm going to have to ask you to attend a class that I will be leading for the next six months on medieval philosophy into the modern age.
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And then maybe after all of that, I might be able to get you to the point where I might be able to comment on what
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I think maybe Paul was saying here. That's dangerous. That's frightening.
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And yet, that is what is going on in so many camps today. And people are hearing about these movements and they hear the term scholarship being used and scholar here and scholar there.
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And they see all these scholars coming up with completely different conclusions for one another. And really, fundamentally the final conclusion of all of it is, you know what?
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I don't see scholarship clarifying the gospel. I see scholarship, in point of fact, muddying the entire debate.
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And it seems to me that scholars know less about the gospel than I knew when
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I was in Sunday school. That should tell you there's something wrong, something really wrong, in that kind of a context.
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Now, when we transition from this into looking at N .T. Wright, we're looking at a a tremendously credentialed scholar.
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I mean, you've got to give the man his due. You've got to give the man his due on many levels.
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He is in the realm of British scholarship, which is to the extreme left, extreme left.
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And yet, in that realm, he's considered a raving conservative.
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You've probably seen him. You saw him in the Peter Jennings special, the great advertisement for the
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Jesus Seminar. And he was about the most conservative person they had. And he said a lot of good things.
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And when you see him, and you see him over against all this absolute out there in the left field, stuff, you go, hey, thank you, man.
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Wow, that's great. I'm glad to hear that. And when you read him, you will read stuff and there will be statements that will just resonate with you.
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And you'll go, wow, that's nice to hear somebody do it. I mean, this guy is the Bishop of Durham. He's way up in the hierarchy of the
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Anglican Church now. Anglican, I mean, yeah, those are the guys that have the goddess worship in their churches at times and way out left.
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And here's this guy and he's talking about the historical Jesus, all this stuff.
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And so he has what I call a tremendous amount of credit capital, credibility capital, that's a better phrase, credibility capital.
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And he's gotten that by defending certain foundational basic issues for all of us conservative folks.
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And so we see him with Peter Jennings and we hear these things and we go, wow, here's somebody who's been willing to take the lumps.
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He's been willing to take the shots. I mean, this is not something that would be considered a career advancing positions to hold within the realm of scholarship that he exists in.
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And I'm pretty certain he probably looks at America. In fact, I get this feeling very strongly as I read some of his writings.
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He probably looks at America. And I think folks like myself would scare him. He really thinks that we are our traditionalists and that we're way too conservative and we just we have no idea what it's like to be where he is.
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We have not walked a mile in his moccasins to use a very Western way of looking at things.
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I'm sitting here looking at I put all of his books together, at least the books that I have in my library. I do not own everything he's written.
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I don't know anybody does. I suppose there was probably some who do. He was only really starting to hit his stride after I got out of after I got out of Fuller Theological Seminary.
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Bart was still the big guy being talked about and done and Sanders. And Wright's big books all came after I was in a context where I would be dealing with that kind of stuff.
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I mean, new perspectivism, even as a term, had not yet developed. People talked about Sanders, new perspective on Paul, of course, it was a
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Copernican revolution and how people viewed Paul and things like that. But Wright had not yet really popularized that.
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And and Sanders and Dunn were you know, they were certainly known in seminaries, but not in the context that Wright has become known not only in seminaries, but outside of seminaries.
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In the mainstream, the bloodstream of the channel, the channel, I'm looking at the channel, the bloodstream of the church.
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So I'm looking up at some books here. Three of them, Jesus and the victory of God, the
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New Testament, the people of God and the resurrection of the Son of God. 700 or 500 over 800 pages each, and these are not fluff books, this is not the prayer of Jabez on steroids.
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These are big scholarly works. They're massive.
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They're the kind of books that you could take and you could whack somebody upside the head and they'd arrest you for assault with a deadly weapon.
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They're fortress press. When I was in seminary, as soon as you had to buy a fortress press book, you knew you had to take out a loan to do so.
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I mean, I bought some fortress press books that were extremely small.
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And, you know, 120 pages paperback, 30, 40 bucks, you know, they just knew no one was ever going to buy these things outside of us, us poor students that are stuck buying such things.
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A number of his books are our fortress, including Climax of the Covenant, which is not nearly as huge and massive.
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But then you have Following Jesus, Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, The Challenge of Jesus, it's an
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IVP book, For All God's Worth, Erdman's Reflecting the Glory from Augsburg, Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, that's an
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Erdman's book, Contemporary Quest for Jesus, just a little booklet, also fortress press, which, by the way, also did
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Sanders, Paul in Palestinian Judaism, and Paul and the Jewish People as well, it's a fortress press book as well.
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And then there's the New Interpreters Bible Series, he does the Commentary on Romans, Volume 10, that is a beast of a book, it's massive as well.
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Looks real good on a shelf, but it's very, very large. And you look at these books, and this is all like in the past 10 years or so,
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I mean, the guy has just got to have a carpal tunnel by now with all the stuff he's cranking out, and that's not including journal articles and the traveling and the speaking, and all the rest of the stuff that he is involved in doing.
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And then of course, the book that I think has had more impact personally, within the conservative reform movement, whatever you want to describe that as these days,
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I don't know that anyone even knows what that means anymore. There was a time, as little as four years ago, when
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I thought you could define that. I don't think you can anymore. I really don't. At least not in a meaningful fashion.
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But the book that has had the biggest impact, because it's written to communicate on that level, it's not filled with all the,
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I know these big words, I'm going to use them to impress you type of stuff that we saw in that rant we were looking at.
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It's entitled, What St. Paul Entitled. That's not a technically proper phrase. It's becoming technically proper.
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Sort of like splitting infinitives is now considered to be technically proper by most people. It is titled, What St.
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Paul Really Said. It's an Erdmann's publication. And it's interesting, I have been criticized by some righteans for using that to explain to people what
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N .T. Wright believes, specifically on the issue of the righteousness of God.
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That's funny to be criticized for directly quoting Wright's own words, where he is seeking to communicate, primarily to lay people, what he believes.
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It's odd to be criticized for that. I've discovered that righteans, and righteans, of course, are followers of N .T.
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Wright, they think that N .T. Wright has delivered them from so many things and has the answer to all things, or at least most things.
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It's odd to find them taking umbrage. I suppose if I were to use the terminology, the climax of the covenant, which would be significantly more scholarly and hence less understandable within the context of the church, then
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I'd be criticized for not using his more plain language. So you really can't win. You can't win with these folks.
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My experience with righteans is, if you criticize Wright, you'll be told you don't understand him.
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And then you'll be given another resource. And unless you've read every word he's ever written, and most of them haven't, then you just simply don't understand.
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You're just simply mistaken. You can't possibly be right. Now, part of it is, and I'm not the only one who's made this criticism, part of it is
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N .T. Wright doesn't communicate all that well with our culture.
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There is a little bit of the British -American thing going on, okay? That's part of it. But the fact of the matter is, sometimes he speaks out of both sides of his theological mouth, and I don't necessarily mean that it's always purposeful on his part.
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He's a very busy fellow and a deep scholar, but sometimes a lot of scholars themselves have said, it's sort of hard to get a perfect peg on this guy because he seems to be saying this in this book, but then he seems to say this over here, and he says something pretty radical here concerning where we've missed it in the doctrine of justification.
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But then over here, he seems to say the other, and that's part of the dangers in cranking out so many huge books over such a short period of time, is sometimes you're not perfectly consistent in what you've been saying all along.
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And I don't know that anyone can really stand up and say, I know exactly where he stands on such and so, certain issues most definitely, but sometimes he just contradicts himself.
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So, there's a lot of books out there, a lot of works that are available on the subject,
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I want to read you a section from, this is a, if I scroll all the way up,
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I'm going to lose this. Well, let's just guess it anyways. This is the Bible of the Post -Modern
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World, William Orange Memorial Lecture 1999. Let's hope I can get right back to where I wanted to be here.
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Ah, I did. Yay. I want to read you some stuff. It's one thing to hear about N .T.
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Wright, it's another thing to hear N .T. Wright, right? Right. I'm not going to play with the name.
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A lot of people do play with the name, but I'm not going to do that, because that's sort of a, that's a
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Gail Ripplinger type thing. So, let me just read you some things here. The early
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Christian writings we call the New Testament, declare with one voice that the overarching story reaches climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, whom the early
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Christians believed was the promised Messiah of Israel. In Jesus, the chosen people had found their rescue and restoration, though their self -appointed guardians and spokespersons had not seen it that way.
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And now the point, Israel's Messiah was always supposed to be the Lord of the whole world. So, the idea that Jesus is the
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Lord of the world is not a funny early Christian idea wedged onto Jesus and not really fitting.
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It grows right out of first century Jewish messianism itself. His followers then saw themselves as royal heralds claiming the whole world for its new king.
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That sounds good, doesn't it? Although it is often rightly said that the early Christians saw themselves as living in the last days, it is even more important to stress they saw themselves as living in the first days, the beginning of the new creation that dawned when
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Jesus emerged from the tomb on Easter morning. They saw themselves, in other words, as living within a story in which the decisive event had already occurred and now needed to be implemented.
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Even if we were to ignore Acts the moment, that is the implicit narrative which informs and undergirds all the epistles.
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The four canonical gospels in their very different ways are all only comprehensible if we understand them to be telling how the story of God and Israel reached its climax in Jesus and telling this story moreover from the perspective of those now charged with putting this into effect in and for all the world.
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Even if we were to rearrange the New Testament canon, this implicit storyline would still emerge at every point.
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It is only in the detached aphoristic sayings collections, such as Thomas, or the hypothetically reconstructed
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Q, that the narrative perspective is lost and Jesus is seen simply as a teacher of a strange and subversive wisdom, perhaps even of a religious gnosis in which the whole story of Israel and the creation is lost sight of in favor of a private religious experience or an individual protest against the ills of society.
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You haven't heard anything that's made big red lights go off yet, have you? No, you haven't. Lordship of Christ, the coherence of the
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New Testament message. Not only that, it's nice to hear somebody say Thomas and Q, whatever in the world we want to identify that as, are rather out to lunch in being out of touch with the milieu of the
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New Testament. So far so good. You see, we see that and we go, wow, an
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Anglican saying things like this. That's wonderful. And especially if you're familiar with the situation in the
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United States and theological education and the just assumed existence of the relevance of certain aspects of New Testament study, it's sort of like, wow, that's,
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I like to hear this. This is good. Yay. Way to go. And see, there's that credibility capital. See, there's that, oh,
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I like to see this. And you know what? There seems to be, there seems to be some, some conservativism here.
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There seems to be some passion. I mean, I like the way this is written. We continue on.
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Once we grasp this point, we can see easily enough that the interface between the Bible and our own contemporary culture still bears a great deal of family likeness to the interface between early
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Christianity and its surrounding milieu. When we construe the Bible in its own terms as the true meta narrative, the strange history of the creator in the cosmos, the covenant
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God and the covenant people, the God who becomes human and dies to the sins of the world, the God who breathed his own breath into his followers and equips them to implement his victory in the world when we read the
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Bible like this, we discover that this great meta narrative challenges and subverts several other worldviews.
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And then there's a parentheses. God forgive us within modernity.
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When often we as Christians thought that the way to use the Bible to address the world was to abstract large chunky doctrines from the
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Bible and hurl them at the heads of people who believed large chunky modernist doctrines. You have to deconstruct the
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Bible in order to do that. Much better to let the Bible be what it is, which is a story and stories are far more subversive and damaging to other to alternative worldviews than large chunky doctrines ever were, which are basically shorthand versions of stories and parentheses.
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And that's where we we stop and we go, uh, uh, what, what, what, what?
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We're, we just took a turn here and, and most of us conservative fundamentalist type guys.
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And that's a term that used to have a, had a meaning once we don't necessarily really embrace that meaning anymore, but it had a meaning once.
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And we, we go, um, hmm, maybe we're, we weren't as much on the exact same page there as we, as we thought we were.
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Um, what's a chunky doctrine? I'm not really sure what a chunky doctrine is. I really can't tell you exactly what a large chunky doctrine is, but, um, it sounds to me as if, and reading the rest of this lecture, this is, this is the whole point.
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You see, you've got modernity and you've got post modernity. And, uh, the idea is that, um, modernists and we get accused a lot of this modernists are people who believe in something called objective truth.
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And if you thought it was good to believe in objective truth, well, you just have not really caught up with, uh, leading scholarship anymore.
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And, uh, modernists thought you could really know things were right and wrong and that there were standards and objective things that you could look at and actually know something about.
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And postmoderns have gone, that's, that's ridiculous. Uh, you can't have those types of things instead.
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Uh, we, we need to, we need to deconstruct modernity and it's belief that you could really know things.
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And we have to replace that with postmodern concepts and postmodern concepts, of course, talking about the individual and, and changing dialogues and narratives and so on and so forth.
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And see what N .T. Wright is saying is we gotta, we gotta get through all of that and get past postmodernity too, to the point where we, we have this meta narrative that is above all the personal narratives and gives meaning to those things.
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See, and so I guess the, I guess what's being, when we talk about the, the people who, who extracted, abstracted large chunky doctrines in the
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Bible and hurled them, I'm not sure about using hurl and chunky in the same sentence. I, I guess that's a
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British thing and they don't realize that that may not work real well over here in the United States, but, uh,
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I guess abstracting large chunky doctrines in the Bible and hurling them at the heads of people who believe large chunky modernist doctrines,
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I get the feeling that that's what, um, that that's what someone like a
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B .B. Warfield was doing, a Charles Hodge. Now, if you're thinking with me, you're probably going, well, hmm, if you're, if you're listening to this program, you might have an interest in apologetics and, and apologetics sort of requires that you have some idea, some means of defining what you believe.
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And obviously if what he's saying is true here, how apologetics has been done basically all along is sort of irrelevant.
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And for many of these folks, that's exactly the case. You're starting to get the idea. A lot of folks say that, you know, all
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I can do is, is abstract large chunky doctrines. And since I'm sort of chunky myself, I guess that fits together.
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Let's, let's look at some more of this and give you a little bit more idea. I'm sort of skipping down here because he talks about, you know, first talks about paganism, the biblical meta -narrative challenges paganism in our neo -pagan world.
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And then it talks about, subverts the worldview of philosophical idealism in which historical events are mere contingent trivia and reality as we found a set of abstractions with a timeless truths or absolute values.
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And the attempt to see the biblical stories as simply illustrated as such timeless truths or absolute values is confronted by the biblical text itself in which the opposite is the case.
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Love of God, the justice of God, the forgiveness of God, and so forth are invoked, not to draw attention away from the historical sphere, but to give it meaning in depth.
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The love of God, for example, is not just an abstract idea. It happened on the cross. The forgiveness of God is not just a nice theory.
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It, it's what happened when Jesus was hanging there with nails in his hands and feet. And see, you know, one of the things just in passing, this is not how most modern scholars write.
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In fact, the odd thing is this, if you've read my book on justification, you know, the first eight chapters that that is how
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I did write. And I've really taken it on the chops for daring to do that. It's odd how people would be somewhat inconsistent at that point.
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I go back to reading when Israel invokes the justice of her God, what she wants is to be liberated from oppressive enemies.
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When the early Christians spoke the love of God, they're referring to something that had happened. Oops, I hit the wrong button.
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That had happened in recent history, which had changed the way the real world, not just their real world, but the real world actually was.
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If they weren't referring to this, they were quite literally talking nonsense. This means third, the biblical meta narrative also challenges and subverts the non -storied aphoristic world, both of the
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Gospel of Thomas and contemporary post -modernity. That is very relevant to contemporary debates about Jesus, not least with those who are most anxious in our own day to deconstruct what they see as the oppressive narrative and theology of the canonical
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Gospels. They end up with a Jesus who functioned like a wandering cynic or perhaps a Gnostic whose whole raison d 'etre was simply to utter striking paradoxical and challenging aphorisms, challenging the existing socio -cultural order, but offering simply a do -it -yourself way of constructing either one's relationship to the outer world or one's inner religious world.
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That makes sense, actually. This is, of course, the reflection on the screen of historiography of the post -modern emphasis on deconstructing all meta narratives and on the individual doing his or her own thing.
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In neither case does this reconstructed Jesus belong within a story. In neither case has he announced the kingdom of God as a new fact bursting in upon the public world.
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Ironically, the attempt to deconstruct Jesus leaves one with a sort of secularized version of the private world of the dualistic pietist in which
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Jesus and the Bible only tell me about myself, not all about public reality. We get challenged with that when we get accused of that a lot.
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Doesn't have anything to do with what we really believe, but that's okay. And it talks more about, um, and the biblical meta narrative challenges all such attempts at deconstruction.
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It insists that there is a public world. It acknowledges that there are all sorts of problems in this public world, including the problem of knowledge itself, but instead of allowing the problems to dictate the terms, ending with deconstruction, it insists that the problems have been addressed and defeated by the creator himself.
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This is not, please note, a creation version, a Christian version of the modernist rejection of post -modernity.
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That is an ever present temptation for some types of Christianity and is, I believe, to be resisted.
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The biblical meta narrative invites us to go through the post -modern critique of modernity, Christian modernity included, and out the other side into a new grasping of reality, a post -post -modernity, and Wright really believes himself to be promoting a post -post -modernity.
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What is that post -post -modernity? Well, let me skip down here because it's already 13 minutes till, and I don't want to leave you just completely and totally, uh, thrashing about in what in the world we're talking about here.
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Um, do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do -do
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I've already stressed the Bible as a whole, as well as in most of its parts, presents a large overarching narrative.
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Post -modernity is bound to object. Metanarratives are controlling, dominating, and we all know the ways in which the story, too, has been used politically, socially, and personally to bolster this or that power trip.
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But the biblical metanarrative itself resists being abused in this fashion because it is the story of love.
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The biblical metanarrative offers itself as the one story which cannot be deconstructed, to which the criticisms of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are not relevant.
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Look at Jesus on the cross. Was he doing that for money? Was he doing that for power? Was he doing it for sex?
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No, it was an act of love. The story speaks from first to last of a God who did not need to create, but who did so out of overflowing and generous love.
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It speaks of a God who did not need to redeem and recreate, but did so as the greatest possible act of self -giving love.
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The problem is, of course, that our telling of the story has been, and our living of the story as Christians, not least as modernist
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Western Christians, has often been, God help us, a power play of our own. Those of us who live and work within an established church feel that problem even more acutely, believe me.
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But the biblical metanarrative itself is not a controlling narrative, it is a self -giving narrative.
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Those who read it and are formed by it have to become a self -giving community in order for it to make sense.
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It is not a power play, it is a love ploy. The fact that post -modernity cannot recognize love but insists on deconstructing it is its
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Achilles heel. Somehow, if we are to address contemporary culture with the message of the
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Bible, we must get used to combining two things which are normally at opposite poles, humility and truth -telling. For us, humility intellectually has come to mean,
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I want to argue X, Y, or Z. In other words, I wouldn't go so far as actually to assert this because that might offend you.
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And truth -telling has come to mean arrogance. There are two ways of looking at things, the right way and your way. Somehow, we have to tell the truth but to tell it as a liberating story, the healing story, the true story.
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Have y 'all noticed something? I'm just sort of mentioning this in passing. We haven't seen the word sin yet, have we?
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That's because I think one of the major problems with Wright's viewpoint is that that objective reality becomes somewhat less than central.
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Anyway, and of course, as you might expect me to say, the best way we can do this is by telling again and again in story and symbol and act of drama the biblical story focused on the story of Jesus himself, the true story of the
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Word made flesh. That is why the great symbol of the heart of Christianity is the symbol of the Eucharist. It is the symbol of that story.
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Let me skip down here to something that I think is most important while we still have just a few moments left.
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A biblical way of knowing, and thirdly in this life, we can and must think in terms of reconstituted reality and genuine knowing.
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Yes, we must take on board the full postmodern critique of those arrogant enlightenment epistemologies, theories of knowledge, in which a supposed objectivism was actually a cloak for political and social power and control.
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Look how the empires of the 18th and 19th century made a way on the back of technology. We know what the world is, so we're just going to take it over and use it for our ends.
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But when all is said and done, it is part of the true human task, given in Genesis and reaffirmed in Christ, that we should know
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God and one another in the world, not with a spurious, hard objectivity, as if we were flies on the wall, but with a genuinely human knowledge.
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Paul speaks of being renewed in knowledge after the image of the Creator. What does that mean? Well, here's where I think we see some of the imbalance in Wright's own epistemology, and I think you'll see by October or so a fairly full printed critique of this and of his epistemology.
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However, instead of the normal contemporary accounts of knowing, which underlies so much current discourse, I believe we have to work towards a better one.
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In modernity, normal current accounts of knowing privilege the would -be objective scientific knowing, test -tube epistemology, if you like.
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Every step away from this seems a step into obscurity, fuzziness, and subjectivism reaching its peak in metaphysics.
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Instead, I believe that a biblical account of knowing should follow philosophers such as Bernard Lonergan, a great
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Catholic philosopher of the last generation, and take love as the basic mode of knowing, with the love of God as the highest and fullest sort of knowing that there is, and working, so to speak, down from there.
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The thing about love is, of course, that when I love, I affirm and celebrate the differentness of the beloved. Not to do so is, of course, not love at all, but lust.
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But at the same time, when I love, I am not a detached observer, the fly on the wall of objectivist epistemology.
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I am passionately and compassionately involved with the life of being of that... with the life and being of that, whether a thing, person, or God himself, which
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I am loving. Do you see what this does? In other words, though I am fully involved in the process of knowing, this does not mean that there is nothing which is being known, or to put it the other way, though I am really talking about a reality outside my own mental state, this does not mean
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I'm a detached observer. I believe we can and must give an account of human knowing for the postmodern world, which will amount to what we might call an epistemology of love.
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Well, that's wonderful. That's great. I don't honestly think that, you know, well, there's more here.
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Don't start playing that music again. I believe we have an enormous opportunity here and now for serious and joyful Christian mission to the postmodern world.
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There are those who seem to yearn for the days when things were nice and simple, when a supposed biblical gospel could be preached to people who were, in effect, unsuccessful
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Pelagians trying to pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps. That is a standard theme in Wright that ends up denying the knowability of what justification really is about,
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I believe. But we can't go back to the 1950s. I guess those of us are, you know, leave it to beaver type stuff.
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Someone said, the church that is now finally and gloriously ready for the 1950s, God help us, we've got to be ready for 2020 and 2040 and teaching young people how to engage with those issues and not preach the world we grew up in.
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Nor, however, can or should we succumb to postmodernity itself, though it may well be that for some people and groups a time of penitence, in which modernist nonsense can be purged and rethinking can begin, might be a good idea.
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That modernist stuff is actually knowing, I think, the substance of the gospel in a clear way.
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The point I want to make very quickly about this knowing as loving, I am commanded to love my wife.
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And that means I know my wife. But, you know, where I see a problem here is in making this dichotomy between knowing and having an objective reality.
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You see, I can say that I know, that I know my wife, but if I, my wife's name is
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Kelly, and if I call her Susan, she is going to be objectively mad at me. You see, it's not a either or, it's a both and.
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We can affirm all of this wonderful stuff about knowing and the fact that when you love someone that you have to be involved in them and we can, that's fine and wonderful, but I never ever thought that knowing
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God and having objective knowledge of the fact that God's creator and God made me and God is triune,
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I never thought that that existed separately from my being taken up by that in my relationship with him.
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This is taking one aspect of it and going the other way.
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You're taking one aspect, throw that out, oh, this has been misused, so we need to go this direction. No, how about both? How about recognizing that both are true?
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Okay? That's vitally important in understanding what N .T.
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Wright is talking about. And I'm very certain that both in my presentation and when
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Phil Johnson of Spurgeon .org, Phil was with us on our last cruise, he's going to be with us again at the conference in Los Angeles in November, Phil's going to be talking about the new perspective.
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He's going to be talking about these issues and it's really hard to get people really focused in on this stuff if we don't have some background.
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I think we may need to do some more dividing lines and provide some more of this background because this just isn't the milieu that most of us are functioning in, but if we want to understand what's going on the church day, we need to understand these things.
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And certainly as I address the issue of justification, I am going to be focusing upon these aspects as well because this stuff may sound like it's way out there, and who cares what the
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Bishop of Durham in England thinks anyways? But that's not the case. It is important, it's vitally important, it's impacting the church and it's impacting...
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people say, how come there are people who used to know what the gospel is, now they can't even answer a simple question as to what the gospel is, what happened?
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Well, this is what happened. It's a little more complex than you might have thought, but this is what happened. I hope some of that is helpful to you.
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We're going to continue talking about it and of course taking your calls. Don't forget to hit our website.
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Look at what's coming up in November, November 5th, in LA. The debate that we're going to be having, the conference the next day, the the crews that are going on, it's all related to this and I invite you to make sure to hit that stuff.
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Don't put it off any longer. If this has sounded important to you, you need to take a look at it on the website. We'll see you
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Tuesday morning, 11 a .m. here on The Dividing Line. See you then. ...brought
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to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -0318 or write us at P .O.
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Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona 85069. You can also find us on the
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World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's a -o -m -i -n -dot -o -r -g where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates and tracks.