Corrie Ten Boom Attacked, Scholarship Under the Lordship of Christ

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I'll have to find the remote here. There it is. Turn on the TV and see if we can see something here.

I've been busy preparing and other people haven't been busy preparing at the same time.

And that's what happens when the two mix, I guess. Anyway, it's on and it's working.

Chris Honholdt sent me a tie. I should acknowledge this. I have not seen a tie like this before.

But I do have a kitty that looks like that. This is a little bit more short hair than mine.

Mine's a fluffy. He's got a really fluffy tail. That's why he's named Fox. My wife named him Fox. But we can iron that out.

And the only question is, who do we inflict it on first?

Do I do it while traveling? At a church, I'll probably never be back at again. So it really won't have a lot of damage.

I don't know. But now I need to get him a Buddy the Elf tie. Because remember,

Chris is a big elf fan. That's his thing. Every Christmas, just can't get him to stop talking about it.

Anyway, here we are. Oh, it's only 102 in Phoenix right now on March 19th.

I'm sort of the attitude, let's get it out of the way now. And maybe it'll be cooler in August.

But I realize that's probably a major level of self -deception. But when it's 170 degrees in your car when you get in, and you can't touch anything metal without burning your fingers, self -deception is okay.

It's all right to be self -deceived at that point. Because it's that or heat insanity.

So you just go with what you got. Um, big trip coming up.

Really hoping that next Tuesday, is it next Tuesday? Probably the next program will be from our new mobile command center.

It may not be fully set up as far as all the stuff I want to have in the background, because it could take me a little while to...

You got to be careful hanging stuff in an RV. You don't want to ruin the wall. You don't want to make it permanently marked.

But it's also got to be really held up there, because it's going to be bounced around, thanks to the fact that there is no such thing as the

New Mexico Department of Transportation, or road services, or whatever. Or Louisiana, or Missouri, or you find out that a lot of the money's going someplace.

Well, it's going to Somalia, pretty much. Pretty much all the money that was supposed to repair our roads, yeah,

I think has gone to Somalia. And I don't think they're using it for much there either, come to think of it. But why are you running around?

You're multitasking. Okay. All right. Rich is literally running through the offices.

I'm wondering what's going on. So yeah, hopefully next program, that's what we'll be doing.

When do I pull that thing over there? Is that Monday? Monday.

Okay. Yeah. So Tuesday, Lord willing, that's what we'll be doing. And getting ready to head up.

It's really got to be working well, because I'm really looking forward to this debate with Shabir Ali. Shabir better be ready.

I've gotten to put a little more time into this than I expected. And so this could be an interesting encounter.

It really could be. I mean, come to think of it, hey, what was the date?

It was May of 2016. The date, let's see if we can find the specific date for the debate with Shabir Ali at Biola.

I'd like, because we're talking, I'm pretty sure it was May of 2016.

No, 2006. 2008? Oh, you're not looking at it.

I'm not going with your memory. Sorry. Track it down for me. No, no, no.

It couldn't have been eight because I debated him in London in 2008. We had already debated. It was 2006. May of 2006.

This would be 20 years since we first debated. And that was where I first used the phrase, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

So I've been criticizing his use of dual standards.

One standard for the New Testament, another standard for the Quran for 20 years. And I am going to press that with examples in this debate.

Yes. Yep. May 4th, 2006. So this is only going to be like a month, a month and a week or so from the 20th anniversary of our first debate.

So there you go. If it was in person, I'd give him a gift or something like that, but it's not going to be in person.

And please pray for the tech that everything will work fine. The folks putting it on assure me that they've been having great success doing this.

So there you go. I'm looking forward to it. And it will not be live streamed because you can have, we're going to be, it's going to be being displayed at a conference, but it'll be recorded obviously, and then posted afterwards.

So that's how that's going to work. All right. I have to lead with this because when

I saw this, I almost became physically ill. I remember very clearly,

I remember which movie theater it was in. I'm not sure it still exists. I think it does. Over on the far side of the mill

Avenue bridge, famous theater over there. I remember many years ago,

I think it was after Kelly and I got married. So it'd be many years ago. I don't remember when the hiding place came out.

Billy Graham films did it. And it's a wonderfully made film based on the book, the hiding place, which

I had read when I was in high school. And it was a very moving experience to see it.

And the one time I've been to the Netherlands, just, I've only been there once and I'll never be there again because you can't drive to the

Netherlands. I got to visit the Ten Boom watch shop and house.

And I got to see, Chris has already posted a screenshot from the video in X.

I got to see the hiding place. I got to stick my head in there and see how small it was and all of that.

If you've not read the book or seen the film, I really can't recommend it too highly to you.

It's an amazing story. And Corey Ten Boom's life after the war, it was just a, she traveled the world speaking about how

God's love can overcome hate. That may be why there are people who don't like her because they're living a life of hate.

Yeah, I suppose that even as religious people. Anyway, it was an amazing story.

And I've told one of the many stories you could tell from the book and from the film a number of times.

She and Corey and Betsy were in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, which is for women.

And Betsy died there at Ravensbruck. And they were transferred to a new cell block.

And they got into this big, huge cavernous thing and they get into it.

And all of a sudden, they realize it is just infested with fleas, just everywhere.

There's no way to get away from them. And Corey's just at her wits end.

God had miraculously allowed them to keep this little Bible hidden.

And they used it to do Bible studies wherever they were. And again, it was always their theme.

Love is stronger than hate. If you give in to the hatred of these men, these guards, whether they're men or women, it'll destroy you.

And so they were able to witness to Christ's love in the darkest of places.

But at this point, Corey's like, she's at the end.

And Betsy's like, well, the scripture tells us to give thanks in all things. And Corey's like, I cannot give thanks for fleas.

I have tried to give thanks for so much of this, the beatings and the degradation.

But she bows her head while Betsy gives thanks to the fleas.

And that would make most of us go, I'm not sure that's the literal meaning of the text. That's how we would handle that.

Well, they start their Bible study. And all of a sudden, they realize after about a week or so that they're able to have

Bible studies in the center of this cell block with all the women they want. And the guards never come in.

They never interrupt. It took them about a week to realize why it was.

The guards didn't want to get near the fleas. They didn't want the fleas themselves. And so those fleas gave them the freedom to have much larger studies with many more women than they would have otherwise if they hadn't been in that cell block.

They may have been more comfortable in another cell block. Comfortable is even a term you can use in a concentration camp.

But they wouldn't have had those opportunities. And they gave thanks for it and God blessed it.

And so I've used that story a number of times just to remind all of us, we have it so stinking easy.

We really do. I mean, in comparison to what most

Christians experience around the world even today. And I'm not just talking about in North Korea, or in China, or in Muslim countries.

Most of us live lives of absolute ease. And in comparison to centuries past, we live like kings and queens.

We have freedoms that no one ever dreamed of having before. And we take it all for granted.

And when even our privileges and freedoms get impinged upon, and I'm talking to myself here, oh,

God has abandoned us and he's forgotten us. And we are so quick to complain and so slow to give thanks.

It's where we are. It's who we are. We all know it, if we're honest with ourselves. And so the story of her release, her miraculous release from a clerical error,

I think a week before all the women her age were executed, shortly after Betsy died from disease, which is how most people died in those places.

It was intentional. You save bullets that way. And then a really striking story of how a few years later, she was giving a talk about her and Betsy's life in the concentration camp.

And a man came up to her, and this was in Europe, of course. And a man came up to her, and he said, you probably don't recognize me, but I was one of the guards at Ravensbrück.

And he extended his hand. And she talks about the struggle that she had to apply the words that she was proclaiming about love being stronger than hate.

This was one of the men that was responsible for the death of her sister. And many other of the Ten Boom family died in imprisonment.

But she did. And it broke her. It was sort of the last step in really fulfilling what

Betsy had wanted for her. They had talked about when they would get out, what they would do, what they would talk about.

Well, Betsy never got out, at least not the way that they had wanted. If you've not read it, believe me, there's not much that you're reading right now that would be more worth your while than to read

The Hiding Place by Corey Ten Boom. So I said on Twitter a few hours ago,

I said, so the Nazis are out and about today. Certainly one of the most absurd, vile posts

I've seen in a long time. Sorry, must lead with this on the DL today. Mark Warren avoid the wolves are dressed up as sheep these days, but they barely bothered to zip up their costumes.

I can't help but think of that Gary Larson cartoon, where you've got this wolf and he's in a sheep's thing with a zipper and he's taking the head off and he's holding it and he's looking around everybody else and he goes, wait a minute, are there any sheep here?

Because all the rest of them have little zippers, because they're all wolves in sheep's clothing. That's what's happening in a lot of quote unquote reformed churches today, at least that use the name.

I think we need to have a discussion sometime. We've had discussions before about what does reformed mean and how can we define it better?

And unfortunately, that's normally spitting at each other about baptism or something like that.

I think in light of what's going on today, we need a significantly more serious discussion about the interface between reformed theology.

And I don't mean the narrow, how you view the covenants over here thing. I mean,

God is sovereign over all things and is accomplishing his purpose in this world. If you can get so focused that this stuff over here is all you can see, you can have the term go away.

I won't argue with you about it. But there are ostensibly reformed churches today that are becoming havens for neo -Nazis and are being led by neo -Nazis, by people who pal around with neo -Nazis.

And there's room for asking the question, why is this? What in the world is going on?

And so, here is the post I was responding to by a man named

Michael Spangler. Now, you may have heard the name Michael Spangler. He was once associated with the

OPC. I asked a dear friend of mine in the OPC, who

I think would agree that he unfortunately knows more about the ecclesiastical courts, trials, charges, counter charges in the

OPC than he ever wanted to know. But I'm like, so what's the official position?

And he's like, well, that was a mess. He's been dealt with, and he's left the denomination.

And he's started a Presbyterian church. And he's teaming up with some other guy, and it looks like they're going to try to form their own denomination.

But he was deemed unfit for ministerial service, which is,

I said, you guys use government terms, don't you? It's safer,

I guess. But anyway, so the OPC pretty much washed their hands of him.

But what he said was, a lot of the problem was that before an actual trial could take place, most of everything had been done out in social media.

Which unfortunately, yeah, that's how things are done these days everywhere. So anyway, evidently he's still pastor of a church.

In fact, let me see here. Pastor of Piedmont Presbyterian Church, principal of Salem Creek Academy, managing editor of the

American Mantle, and co -host of Old Paths Pod.

So that's Michael Spangler. He's a Nazi. I mean, let's just be honest, he's a big

Hitler admirer and white nationalist racist mess.

One of the worst of the worst. Now it's interesting, people like Stephen Wolfe, Eric Cahn don't have any problem defending him and referencing him and all the rest of this kind of stuff, which tells you how deep the rot has gotten in a lot of places.

But here's what Michael Spangler wrote. This is what I'm getting to here.

One of the most subversive books around, The Hiding Place by Corey Ten Boom.

Subversive. Okay, now if you don't know the story, when the

Germans invaded the Netherlands, invaded Holland, they started rounding up the

Jews. I suppose these folks might try to dispute that, I suppose. And Corey's father, a very elderly man, owned a watch shop very well known in that city, determined that as Christians they could not just stand by and watch people rounded up based upon their religion and never returning.

And so they got involved in the underground in trafficking in Jews.

They would smuggle them out of the country, get them to safe haven. Happened all across Europe.

And so they were opposing the

Nazi regime. They were part of the underground. Now, I'm starting to see over and over again now, the neo -Nazis are literally in opposition to this.

That once the Nazis took over, you were just supposed to submit to them, that's the governmental authority, that's Romans 13, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Let whoever they're deporting, gypsies, Jews, whatever, hands off, that's what the government gets to do.

When we're the ones being rounded up, I wonder if they're going to stick with that perspective.

I sort of doubt it, but hey, we don't know. So here's what

Spangler writes. Speaking of the book, it celebrates shielding

Christ's enemies from the political consequences of their evil. Evidently being

Jewish is evil. Promotes lying to do so. Glorifies resistance to just government.

The invading Nazis are just government. And co -belligerence with communists.

There's not a word about the communists in the book. Oh, she was just hiding that. That's the other thing. I saw there was another post in this thread.

She must have been a communist. I'm sure never said anything about it, but she must have been a communist. You look at her entire life, not a shred of this.

And these morons, sorry, these idiots, sorry, these empty -headed dolts, sorry, are willing to attack a woman of such

Christian character. She's dead and gone. But they are so vitriolic and consumed with their anti -Jewish hatred that they'll change history.

They'll read stuff in. And these people call themselves Christians. They call themselves ministers.

They call themselves reformed. Paints the just consequences for these actions as persecution.

We're talking about concentration camps here. I'm not sure how many of these idiot fools have been to any of the concentration camps.

I have. I've been to Sachsenhausen. I can't get it out of my mind.

I've seen Arbeit Macht Frei over the gate. I doubt many of these people have.

They want to turn all that into fiction. It never happens. So being put into a place where most people just simply died within a matter of months is the just consequences for these actions.

And that shouldn't be viewed as persecution. And does so all in the name of white

Protestant Christianity. There was never a whisper about white.

This was Holland. Okay. Most of the people there are white.

They're European. I mean, you can't have the

IQ of a wet shoelace and write this kind of stuff unless you are morally and ethically utterly compromised.

And that's what you've got to do. Two dozen copies are available at your local

Christian homeschool bookstore. Probably. I hope so. Ministers cite it in the pulpit as something well -known and beloved.

Yep, we do. I just did. And then the conclusion, the rot is very deep.

But when you're a Nazi, you probably think that anything like this is rot. You, sir, are the rot.

And anyone who supports you is helping with the rot. So watch people's feeds.

Watch people who will defend him. Mark and avoid. There you've got the

Nazi rot. And you've got the people already infected with it. Just watch. Just watch.

I didn't write this. He didn't have to post this foolishness in public.

And when I first saw it, you know what I did? I had to go and make sure that he had actually posted it.

Because this is so stupid. This is so vile. This is so immoral that I had to find out if someone could be this vile publicly.

And it's right there. So I should probably make note of that and drop a note to him saying, we talked about this foolishness on the dividing line today.

Hope you listened in. Grape. Grape protein.

Good stuff. All right. Gonna have to shift gears here or I'm gonna be calling everybody a moron, an idiot, adult, and everything else for the rest of the day.

It's warm in here. Well, it's only warm in here because my heart rate was a little bit higher during that segment than it might be.

Okay. So on the last program, right toward the end of the program, I mentioned

Dan McClellan. Dan McClellan, I'll confess, if I wanted to do anything more on this,

I'd have to invest the time in doing stuff I don't want to do.

Listening to Dan McClellan's stuff is not something that is of any great interest to me. He's the guy that starts off all his stuff.

I'm a Bible scholar and he strikes me as extremely impressed with himself.

Pat on the back constantly, stuff. And I've dealt with a lot of folks like that over the years who really think that they are the definition of scholarship themselves.

Now there are some who have produced a vast body of literature and at least they have, you know, N .T. Wright can at least point you to massive volumes with thousands of footnotes.

At least he can say, see, here's evidence of what

I've done. As a result, he really does think he's smart enough to overthrow everybody else.

And come to particular conclusions. And that Eastern Orthodox guy, pretty much the same, forget what his name is.

And there are a few others. He has the same attitude just without nearly the vita. I mean, he's written some articles, been published here, there, and everywhere.

So have I, big deal. And of course he went after my education. That's the coward's way, that's the easy way out.

What was fascinating, even Claude, I mentioned, I ran his response by the

AI Claude and his first statement was something along the lines of, man, talk about condescension.

The whole thing is just condescension ad hominem, which he does with a serious face because he's a serious scholar at all times, even though he wears comic book t -shirts for all of his stuff.

Okay. Anyway, the big thing was, what I had responded to was his statement that there is no monotheism in the

Bible. Now look, I went to Fuller Seminary. I had to dig through all the academic leftist drivel that was thrown at you.

You know, Ochtemeyer and what was that? Gerhard von Roth's Commentary on Deuteronomy.

And so I do know the scholarly consensus, and I know

I've known for 40 years that we pretty much gave the

Old Testament to the liberals a long time ago. Yeah, there's some conservative, good

Old Testament guys out there, but they're not generally the ones that get published by the big publishers.

You know, their stuff is in smaller journals or smaller commentary series, things like that.

The fact of the matter is, you go looking for Old Testament commentaries that have been written in the past 50 years, and you're going to have to dig a lot to find stuff that's actually going to take the

Bible seriously. And when I say take the Bible seriously, take the Bible seriously on its own level, based on its own claims.

And one of the reasons I want to address this, a lot of Christians struggle with the interface between scholarship and Christianity, primarily because there are many people who will claim some kind of Christianity, some kind of religious faith, but the

Christian faith isn't their ultimate authority. So, their

Christianity is a hybrid. It wouldn't have been recognized in centuries past as even being

Christian, but it's a hybrid. And it will very frequently use a lot of the same terminology, but the terminology has been very much altered and changed as to what it means.

To put it bluntly, they don't view Scripture the way Jesus did.

They don't hold Jesus' view of Scripture. And most of them have never been challenged about that.

Most of them have never had someone say, you know, if you're going to call yourself a Christian, don't you think you might want to possibly have

Jesus' view of Scripture? And so, they hold to a presuppositional framework that will often leave the believing

Christian completely befuddled as to how they got to where they got to in looking at the same text of Scripture.

And that's what you get with McClellan. I mean, he's all over the map. And guys like this, they take their scholarship, and since they're not serving the church, they're serving themselves, and they're looking for an audience.

You know, that's one of the reasons that we've done ministry the way we've done things for 42 years here, is that we've always viewed ourselves as servants of the church, first of all.

We've never viewed ourselves as a religion or a church, never take the place of the church. And so, a lot of the reason that we don't do a lot of the self -promotion that we could do, that other people do, and it's perfectly fine for them to do, but we don't do it, is so that I can say what

I need to say without worrying about clicks and followers and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

You know, look at all the people that are just laser focused. How many people watched the last episode of my webcast?

How many clicks did it get? How many likes did it get? How often did it get shared? And so, I mean, I know people who have lived that for years.

I remember one guy who went down in flames, though he's tried to resurrect himself. That's all he could talk about was how popular his program was.

The number one here, number one there, oh, just beating his chest. Didn't get him very far.

But that's where people are. And one of the reasons we've just never gone down that road, we've never tried to compare ourselves to other people, we talk about strange stuff.

We talk about a wide range of stuff. I mean, it's all

Christian theology, church history, ethics, morals, application of the

Christian worldview. You know, we don't talk about how to fix an

Allison 10 -speed transmission. Probably should, since I've got one.

Might be good to know something about. But that's not something we do. There's all sorts of topics.

If we've ever talked about the Nephilim, it's always been in the context of Genesis 6 and not trying to get people just excited about some weird, wacky theory that we've come up.

And the whole reason is what we do here isn't for us.

It's not to promote a particular sect in particular. It's for the church.

It's for believers. It's to equip them. It's to make them more confident to present the gospel in a challenging, changing world.

And so we're pretty simple. We take the

Bible to be the Word of God, and we don't do so in some simplistic manner. We certainly discuss foundational issues relevant to that, but that's where we start.

We start under the Lordship of Christ. We don't start outside and reason our way into the

Lordship of Christ. If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then you've got to start someplace that will not lead you to wisdom, but will give you that wisdom from the beginning.

And so when we do delve into scholarship, when we do delve into the original languages or things like that, we're doing so for an apologetic reason, a defense of the faith, and not just simply to go, oh, look at what we can do.

You can sort of tell when someone's doing the, oh, look at what I learned in graduate class today, and now

I'm going to make you all learn the same thing. I'm sure there may have been some times in seminary where I did that.

You're young. You haven't grown. But what we do, we do self -consciously to serve

Christ and to serve the church. And scholarship must be under the

Lordship of Christ. So scholarship needs to start with a view of Scripture that is commensurate with Jesus's own view of Scripture.

Once you start with a different perspective, I've said many times, there's no reason to be a

Trinitarian if you do not have the highest view of Scripture. There's no reason to believe in the resurrection if you do not have the highest view of Scripture.

Same thing with the Messiahship of Jesus. You have to believe in prophecy, one of the fundamental things denied in the majority of biblical scholarship today is that God can know the future.

Not because they have a theology of open theism or something. They're just naturalistic materialists, and they view the

Old Testament text as just another book. And so when you go to the

Old Testament and you view it through the JEDP lens, when you view it as a redacted mess that, you know, there was no

Moses, it's self -contradictory, you can interpret it almost any way you want.

The result is you mute God. You can never say God says.

The best you can say is, my best scholarly opinion is that this is the best way of interpreting this text.

But if you want to grant authority to this text, then fine, but you don't have to.

And it's just this mealy mouth. Well, it explains why the United Methodists collapsed, and the liberal

Presbyterians collapsed, and why the Episcopalians collapsed, because that's their view of Scripture. You can't say

God has spoken. And so there are people, now there's some people who do it really obviously, like Bart Ehrman.

I just saw somebody, they posted a graphic.

We're coming up on Easter, so you know it's going to happen every Easter, every Christmas, Bart Ehrman's got to get his clicks.

And, you know, there was no resurrection, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, Bart Ehrman is doing that because Bart Ehrman is an apostate, and he has spent his entire adult life substantiating his apostasy.

When you look at the titles of his books, that's what he's been doing, is defending his abandonment of the

Christian faith. That's, I don't think that's even arguable, it's so clear.

But other people are a little less clear in it, but still, while they maintain some kind of religious identity, they have shut

God up because the Bible doesn't actually say anything. So in this instance, what he's talking about is over the past couple hundred years, and especially over the past 67 years, there have been developments in Old Testament theology in regards to the gods of the nations around Israel.

And again, they start with the assumption there was no Moses. This is not divine revelation, it's internally incoherent and self -contradictory.

And so that's why they can go, the Mormons like to run off Deuteronomy chapter 32, you've got El Elyon, the highest god, and Jehovah evidently is a lesser god that's given

Israel, but El Elyon gives the other nations to other people. It's based on a textual variant in Deuteronomy 32, but this is how you make yourself look really wise.

Now, that makes Deuteronomy 32, well, who wrote Deuteronomy 32?

They don't know. When was it written? They don't know. Why is it authoritative? They don't know. They can't say.

They don't have Jesus's view of Deuteronomy. When Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy, he says, God said. Okay, so God's not going to lie about Moses.

So they've already started, they've already rejected Jesus's view of scripture. So it's not a

Christian view. I mean, it's taught in Christian seminaries constantly, ostensibly

Christian seminary, but it starts at a completely different place. And so, the result is you have to take, instead of reading the text in a harmonized fashion, which can be done very simplistically and falsely.

I'm not talking about how a lot of independent fundamentalist Baptists read the Bible and create wild -eyed harmonizations that don't make any sense, but the assumption is there cannot be any harmonization.

So instead of looking at, well, wait a minute, what does Deuteronomy as a whole, and then the

Mosaic, Revelation as a whole, and then the Psalter as a whole, the prophets as a whole, can we derive a theology of who

Yahweh is? Why nearly 600 times Yahweh Elohim is a singular name?

The perspective and view on other gods, can we derive something from all of this?

The assumption being that there is a consistency because it's actually God speaking. That is never allowed.

So you've put a big piece of gorilla tape right over God's mouth.

You can't speak. You can only say what we allow you to say, and modern scholarship can give you anything, absolutely anything.

So, you know, the popular consensus now will be the laughed at consensus from last century, next century, but that's the best you got.

That's all you got because you don't have anything from God. You just have to believe what we scholars tell you. So in the 1870s, 1880s, it was the consensus of German scholarship that John was written about 170

AD, and it came much later. It's a result of synthesis and, you know, thesis and antithesis and the synthesis and evolutionary theory and all the rest of this stuff.

And then you find fragment p52 from about 125

AD, which is from John chapter 18, and it, you know, 50 years worth of consensus goes out the window.

There's a lot of examples of this in the study of the Bible where a certain theory that certainly proved the

Bible is not the word of God was the big theory for a long time. And if you wanted to be considered a scholar, that's what you had to go with, you know.

And I would say the JEDP theory in all of its multitude of formulations, you know, has achieved that.

There are certain theories in the synoptic gospels, about the synoptic gospels and their relationship that's pretty close to that, mark and priority, things like that.

Will they be the consensus 50 years from now? Nobody knows, but history certainly shows probably not.

Discoveries are made, breakthroughs are made, someone writes a seminal work that overturns a lot of the presuppositions of a previous consensus and all the rest.

So what has happened is you've gotten all this discussion, especially in light of the expansion of knowledge that has come from archaeology.

We know much more today about the gods of the peoples around Israel than we did only 200 years ago.

A lot of archaeological digs, a lot of information has come to light, learning about languages that we didn't really understand before.

And then you've got intertestamental stuff that a lot of folks just love glomming onto that and all of the strange theologies that you can derive from that.

It's not consistent. Scholarship doesn't really like consistency because to get published you got to come up with something new and you can't just repeat what everybody's believed before.

So the way we do scholarship is almost a recipe for heresy. Let's come up with something new.

What's heresy? Well, it's something new. So when you look at that and what has happened, especially in Old Testament studies, you've got all these discussions about henotheism and forms of henotheism and theories that say, well, we can determine that this particular stratum of data in the

Mosaic materials—they'll still call them Mosaic materials even if there wasn't a Moses—this represents this stage of development where Israel is still polytheistic but is starting to come to understand that maybe there's a major god.

And then this stuff over here, the Eloist does this and the Deuteronomic does this and the Priestly does this.

And no one can agree on all this. That's how you keep getting papers published is everybody gets to come up with their own ideas.

But the result is that the one thing that you have to say is that what has been believed in the past, what became

Christian orthodoxy, that's the one thing you cannot believe. That's the one thing that will not be accepted.

So, Christian monotheism? Creatio ex nihilo? Creation out over into nothing?

No, no. Later Greek philosophy. Hey, look, there was a lot of later

Greek philosophy, no doubt about it. There's a lot of stuff that has become extremely popular down through the centuries that has nothing to do with the apostles, has everything to do with Greek philosophy.

That much is true. But this stuff? We're not talking about developments in the fourth, fifth centuries.

We're not talking about neoplatonism or anything else. We're talking about the monotheism of the

Old Testament. We're talking about Israel's struggle against polytheism. And what you discover is there is a lot of apologetic material in the

Old Testament against any god that did not create all things. Because all the gods, the peoples around Israel, came out of the creation itself.

Creation is what is not necessarily eternal. It didn't necessarily have that category universally.

But the gods came out of the creation. Wars, gods getting cut in half, and heaven and earth coming from one half, and Tiamat, and all that stuff.

If you've ever had to study the ancient Near Eastern text, ANET, I remember I got my first copy of Annet.

My parents bought it for me. I was still in seminary. We had nothing. We had no money at all. And my parents bought me my first copy of that.

It's dated now, but that stuff doesn't change much. They might find some new manuscripts.

And so there are all sorts of theories about what monotheism could even mean.

And what McClellan is saying is, oh, this is just... And he repeated himself. It's like being a fan of a particular football team, baseball team, soccer team, whatever, and saying that the other team isn't even a real team.

That's what we have in the Old Testament. Well, it's just absurd. And I demonstrated the absurdity by going to the text.

And we looked at Jeremiah chapter 10. And to reduce that to some kind of comparative statement of limited monotheism, when the text itself says, the gods that did not create the heavens and the earth shall perish from underneath the earth and from the heaven, in the language that you're actually supposed to give it to the

Babylonians, even changes from Hebrew to Aramaic at that point. Um, it's just absurd to say otherwise, but it fits with modern scholarship.

And you see, I don't want to fit with modern scholarship. I want to fit with Jesus' view of the Bible. And Dan McClellan doesn't care what

Jesus' view of the Bible was. In fact, from his perspective, you can't even know what Jesus' view of the Bible was. That's just how it works.

So he can't even go there. He can't even get to that point. So I want to, oh my goodness, it's 10 minutes to the top of the hour.

How did it get to be 10? Is the clock off in here? Did you do some messing around with stuff? I'm, I'm wondering if you've messed.

Yeah, well, I know. Uh, and some people like that, but I, I don't know.

Um, okay. I, I may not get through all this. Um, all right.

What we'll do, maybe I'll have to pick this up from the unit next week.

I don't know. Um, I wanted to give you an example. And I think this discussion of scholarship, the proper use of scholarship, viewing scholarship, demythologizing scholarship is a appropriate phrase.

Um, scholarship is important. Christians should be people of truth. Christians should be people who do their homework.

Christians should be people who learn widely. Um, but there's believing scholarship and there's unbelieving scholarship, and there is a proper set of presuppositions and an improper set of presuppositions.

And Christians have no choice. If we believe that Jesus, for by him were all things made, by him were all things created, whether in heaven, earth, visible, invisible, principalities, powers, dominions, authorities, all things created by him before him, he is before all things.

And in him, all things soonest they can, they hold together. If that's true, you can't do scholarship apart from Jesus.

You can't. The vast majority of scholarship thinks it can't.

All right. So if you want to be a faithful Christian, you do scholarship under the Lordship of Christ. And so it's an important topic.

It impacts all realms of research, church history, apologetics, whether you're dealing with Islam, Mormonism, Roman Catholicism.

It's vital. It's there. Um, so what

I did is I had remembered that last year or the year before last, people throw me

Dan McClellan stuff every once in a while. Thankfully they're short, so you can run through them pretty quickly.

And now you can just grab them, throw them at Claude or something, get a summary and go from there. Sort of like having automatic

CliffsNotes. It's, uh, no one remembers what CliffsNotes were. Do you remember CliffsNotes? Nevermind.

Um, uh, so I remembered that he had made comments and I may have commented,

I didn't throw it. I didn't throw it at our transcripts page at Let's Church to see if I did.

I don't think I did, but did I comment on Dan McClellan and his view on homosexuality?

Cause I, I remember I downloaded it. Um, but I don't have any recollection of actually having dug into it.

So, uh, yeah, but you and I don't remember anything. You ask the computer and the computer pops up and says,

Oh, and then you go, Oh yeah, I remember that now. Um, it's great.

Uh, you know, people couldn't do that in the past. Anyway. Um, so I downloaded what he said on homosexuality and it's a subject

I've dealt with a few times and, you know, wrote a book on the subject. He hasn't written a book on this.

I guess writing a book on the subject is the standard, but I don't think he would care about that.

I don't think he's overly consistent on that. Anyway, and debated it numerous times, both in the

United States and elsewhere. But I listened to what he,

I remembered that what he had said about Genesis 18 and 19, because that takes us back to the

Old Testament context. Genesis 18, 19, Sodom and Gomorrah was the standard revisionist view, which he very confidently goes, and this is the consensus scholarship, which is the final word when it comes to Dan McClellan.

Of course, he gets fine with that consensus scholarship is, doesn't ever tell you what scholarship actually is and how you define that, but that's another subject for another day.

So what I wanted to do, and I thought I would have gotten it done by now and haven't even gotten to, is

I want to play his stuff on this. And then

I just want to walk through Genesis 18 and 19. Well, specifically chapter 19. I wrote the chapter on Sodom and Gomorrah in the same -sex controversy 25 years ago now.

And I think it would be good because he is certainly correct that it is very popular.

And again, if you don't have the highest view of scripture, then you can do anything you want with Genesis 18 and 19.

But if you do have a high view of scripture, then you have to allow for harmonization. You have to allow to be consistent, even with something like Jude.

By the way, that is absolute heresy in the vast majority of biblical interpretations.

Genesis has nothing to do with Jude. Nothing. Too far separated in time, different genres, different languages, complete disconnect.

That wasn't Jesus' view of scripture. So there you go again.

And from my perspective, the empty tomb trumps all of their degrees. Put them all in there, doesn't even start.

So what I'll do is I'll play what he had to say.

That's what we'll do. And then we will pick up with Genesis 18 and 19 next day, unless something happens and we have to pick it up over time or something along those lines.

But here is, wearing a Spider -Man t -shirt, the great definer of all scholarship,

Dr. McClellan himself, with the third claim that he's dealing with, and that is

Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, before I do that. Yep, that would have not been good.

All right. And 3, 2, 1. Third claim has to do with Genesis 19.

And the claim there is that the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is not a lesson about the evils of homosexuality.

And this I 100 % agree with. And this is the consensus.

Most scholars agree this is a story about inhospitality. In Genesis 18,

Abraham has put on display exemplary hospitality to God and to that two angels.

Genesis 19 is intended to be the antithesis of that and show what happens when these two angels visit

Sodom. And all of the men of the city surround the house and threaten to sexually assault the two angels.

This is about the evils of leveraging the threat of sexually assaulting other men, because it is the very pinnacle of inhospitality.

And hospitality to outsiders was one of the central ideals of a

Semitic worldview. And so this is considered to be monumentally disrespectful and inhospitable.

Now, this is not to say that the authors of this story in Genesis 19 would have been allies or would not have objected to male same -sex intercourse.

I don't think that's true. I think they would have taken the same position that Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 take, that male same -sex intercourse is inappropriate.

But their story is not about that. The story is about how monumentally inhospitable it is to threaten outsiders with sexual assault.

And that brings us to claim number Okay. Now, go ahead. Now, there's that.

That's better than most pro -homosexual apologetics.

Okay. Because he recognizes a consistency, at least some consistency, between what you have in Leviticus 18 and 20.

And notice what he said, the authors. So it's not Moses. There is no

Moses, really. That's just like a collective perspective.

But he's saying that the issue is inhospitality. Well, yeah, there is.

That's not questionable either. And there's nothing questionable about how central being hospitable was in Semitic culture.

I mean, it's right there in the text. Lot says to the men, they've come under my roof.

He offers his daughters because they've come under his roof. Yes. Deep, deep commitment, honor commitment to the idea of caring for the stranger.

No question about any of that. That is true. But what is toevah?

When Ezekiel says that they committed toevah, was it inhospitality?

He had just said inhospitality. What's the toevah? What's the one sexual sin that's an abomination, toevah, in the

Mosaic Code? Same sex intercourse. So was

Jude wrong? I would not honestly have any shock if someone like Dan McClellan could say, oh yeah,

Jude just completely misunderstood it and made wrong application type of comment.

Again, that's not an option for people who actually believe that the

Bible's word of God. So I would like to walk through that text.

And I will likewise be responding to the pro -homosexual apologists out there who try to say that the same sex, he admits they wanted to assault the angels.

So he is not taking the pro -homosexual perspective on that.

That's good. There's applaud there. But that's the viewpoint of the pro -homosexual apologists.

They do not see, they literally see, when they say we want to know them, they will literally say, yeah, they wanted to be hospitable.

They wanted to get to, they were the welcome wagon coming to say hi to the strangers. And here's this lot guy and he's being mean and not allowing them to be hospitable.

No, that's, yada, did not mean the welcome wagon. So McClellan at least gets that right.

Yay. But he downplays the centrality of the same sex attraction and the same sex intercourse that is a part, very plainly a part of Genesis 18 and 19 and is behind the

New Testament's usage of Sodom and Gomorrah as a watchword, as a warning.

So we'll walk through the text. If you never ran into a follower of Dan McClellan, fine, but you may well encounter people who have seen the pro -homosexual apologetic on that.

And there's a lot of Christian ministers who likewise have collapsed on Genesis 18 and 19.

They're like, yeah, well, maybe, but maybe that's not what it's about. And they sort of let it ride.

And so we'll try to deal with that on the next program, which I very much hope will be coming to you from a completely different context.

Uh, if I'm sitting here, it means we ran into some real problems and we don't have much time to fix them, uh, before we go on the road.

Um, and I don't know if I'm going to have enough time before Thursday to get a couple of things up that I want to get up, um, that I've had made specifically, you know, thinking about the background.

It's not a big background. It's a very small amount of wall space, fairly close behind me. So you can only put a few things there.

What kind of pictures do you want? Well, I spent a lot of my own money, not a lot of my own money, but I had stuff made that would be, well, yeah, there's a manuscript as you can, as you can probably guess.

Um, there's a manuscript and, um, there's a fractal. Yeah. You know, it's, it's stuff that would reflect me, but you gotta be careful putting it up.

I gotta put it up firmly enough because that's in the very back and the very back. Now this one,

I'm hoping is not going to do as much of this thanks to that suspension system that it has, but still you just gotta, if you, if it's, if it's not firmly attached to the wall, it's doomed.

Um, so there you go. All right. So we've got, uh, Rich and I have got a lot to do between now and then

Rich's got more to do. He found out today that the, um, the, some of the ports we had installed at the dealership are in the wrong spot.

Um, they get hit by the desk and it goes up and down. And so he's going to have to move ports tomorrow and or over the weekend, whenever, um, cause we want to have it all ready to rock and roll when

I pick it up on Monday and start getting it cooled down and ready to go. So I'm excited about it.

It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm, I'm, I enjoy that kind of thing. And, uh, if it allow us to keep talking to you and do this kind of stuff while we're on the road, uh, that's the way to do it.

By the way, we're putting together real quick, putting together a trip in mid

May. Um, and it's a fairly short one distance wise, which is nice, but we're going through an area

I've only gone through once before. And we're going through, we're going to Lubbock, Texas.

And I haven't decided exactly what route we're going to, I'm going to take here yet because on X day for yesterday,

I put out a call. Do we know any churches in Las Cruces? We got any, any churches in Las Cruces, New Mexico that like us wouldn't, would be unembarrassed to have a speak or, you know, do something for you.

And, uh, I did get, get a contact and I've followed up with that. And so I'm hoping, um, to go through Las Cruces cause the, uh, it's a beautiful city.

The mountains there are gorgeous. The sunsets and sunrises, it'll take your breath away. Beautiful area.

And, um, the KOA there is in a really nice spot. It's not real big, but, um, you're up on a hill, you're up on the side of a hill and the views are just stunning.

It really are. It's a nice KOA too. Um, so I've stopped there more than once.

And guess what? I know where the best fuel station is that uses our fleet card, uh, to get

DEF and diesel and not very far from the KOA actually. Um, so yeah,

I just want to make, this is why we do this. You get, make contact with local churches, get to go places you'd never get to go otherwise.

And, um, so looking at, we'll be in Lubbock, uh, mid -May, I think it's 16th and 17th.

Um, talking about Islam and possibly before that doing something at the other church in Lubbock where I've been before, where I might do some stuff like on the deity of Christ, things that would fit in with the, um, uh,

Muslim thing. Cause they've just built a mosque in Lubbock. And so all of a sudden it's like, how do we deal with this?

And so, yeah, we've sort of talked about that a few times in the past and it would be good to be dealing with that again.

So, uh, all right with that, hopefully next time. Um, the only thing that I'm worried about is these cameras are going to be a whole lot closer to me than these cameras are.

Now, Rich says he can zoom them back and stuff and it's not going to be, you know, my big nose or something like that.

And I, you know, I think about it when we first started doing this in the first RV, you know, it was a webcam sitting right in front of me.

So, um, we'll, we'll be okay. Um, but, um, yeah, it should be a completely different, if you can imagine a oblong room with the desk in the corner, extending this direction.

That's the, the directions could be from that corner back toward the wall that's moving away from you.

And then there's a door we actually, this, this RV has two doors. First RV I've had that has two doors in it.

And Rich is very happy about the second door right now. Cause he's doing all that work in there.

Um, climbing over the slide out should not be a whole lot of fun. Um, so it's going to, it's not going to be right behind me.

It's going to be in an angle behind. And so we'll see how it all works out.

Um, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks again to everybody that's made that the possibility. And if you've been watching the diesel prices, don't forget to hit up the travel fund because, uh, yeah, uh, five 19, five 39 is what

I'm seeing pretty much right now for diesel. Yeah. I'm not, and I don't think on our card, it's much less than that.

So there you go. All right. Thanks for watching the program today. We'll see you next time. God bless.