The New Perspective On Paul

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Well, it is good to be, whoa, I'm amplified, that's good. It's gonna be very useful. It is good to be with you.

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I think it's this evening. Yeah, okay, it's 4 .14 in the afternoon, so alrighty.

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That's for fighting off any renegade Presbyterians ahead my direction. I come to you,

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I have wonderful Presbyterian friends. I was referring to the amount of water in it.

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If it was a huge bucket, then it would be a Methodist. Some of you have no idea what

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I'm talking about. That's okay, it's alright. I come to you in the somewhat of weariness and weakness of flesh.

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Some of you who follow my blog know that I was in Italy until just a little while ago, and I call it the

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Italian diet. I lost nine pounds in Italy, and you wonder, how in the world do you do that? I eat protein, and Italians do not.

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It's just sort of how that worked out, and after about the 47th pizza, I just couldn't handle the 48th.

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It just got rough there for a while. I'm also a Scotsman, and even though we're starting a little bit late here, and I apologize for that, we're still starting a whole lot earlier than we would have started if we were in Italy, even if I had been sleeping next door.

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I mean, it just would have been the way it was. But we got back, and somehow I survived the trip back without any illness, and about four days later got sick, and so I, at least

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I hope my luggage got through the airport with all the prescription medications I have in there. So I come with a little bit of weariness there, and then when we're finished here this weekend,

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I drive down to Long Island, and next Thursday evening at the

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Huntington Townhouse on Long Island, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, or some of the folks I've already talked to who are not aware of this, we'll be doing the 10th year of the

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Great Debate on Long Island, where we've been debating the issues of Roman Catholicism for a decade now.

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And this year will be an unusual subject. The man that I will be debating will be defending the thesis that non -Christians can enter into heaven, and that is based on sections 841 and 1260 of the

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Catholic Catechism, which of course comes out of Vatican II, and it is the concept of Roman Catholic inclusivism that has developed, especially since the time of Vatican II.

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And so I know there's gonna be a number of folks at that debate who are going to be somewhat frustrated because no one is representing them.

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And what I mean by that is I know a number of Roman Catholics who aren't gonna agree with what the

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Roman Catholic is saying, and of course they're not gonna agree with what I'm saying either, so they're gonna be a little bit frustrated there, but hopefully that'll be a good thing and give me an opportunity to address the issues of the gospel.

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So if you're not able to be there, I hope you'll pray for us next Thursday evening. Those debates, of course, are videotaped and then are turned into DVDs and MP3s and CDs and so on and so forth.

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And so not only the 500, 800 people that are there, but then people later on can also hopefully benefit from those encounters.

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And then I try to drive to New Jersey after that to a minister at a church down in New Jersey. And if you've ever tried to get from Long Island to New Jersey on the weekend, you realize that I will need more prayer for that than for the debate itself, because that is one time where parkway actually means park, because that's basically what you do.

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You just sort of sit there and wave at everybody else and it's lots of fun. Ah, now this weekend, tomorrow morning when you all gather for breakfast at 5 a .m.

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my time on a Saturday, I can't guarantee that I'm gonna be here, but somebody will be.

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And the number of topics, did any of you catch, by the way, yeah, we gotta lean that baby down a little bit, lower, right at the bald spot, if you can find it.

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Just takes a little force and authority, that's all. The topics we are gonna be covering are very broad.

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Did anyone catch the radio program yesterday? Did anyone even, did you even know that I was, did you find out later that I was on the radio here recently?

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Oh, you found out after I was on. Okay. What's, WVNE, is that what it is?

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I was on WVNE yesterday and mentioned, and I can tell that the response was huge by the fact that none of you raised your hand.

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Who did, did anyone hear that? One, two, three, three folks, okay, all right, good, all right.

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They just wouldn't put their hands up before, so I was sort of wondering, do you all listen to radio here? Is there something against that station?

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Anyways, he started going through all the topics, and I started thinking about the fact that you are somewhat in danger of developing theological whiplash during the course of this weekend, especially because a number of the topics are not necessarily overly directly related in subject matter to what came before, and so I hope that you are aware of the fact that when you have 50 minutes to address a subject that that is meant to be somewhat of a teaser.

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It is meant to be somewhat of an introduction, a hoped -for foundation that will allow you to press on from there.

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The fact of the matter is I have a lot of people who come up to me and they ask about theological seminaries and Bible colleges and things like that, and any more outside of very few exceptions, anywhere you go, you have to exercise a tremendous amount of discernment, and I really appreciate what you all are gonna be doing.

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The classes you were mentioning are the very classes that I teach for Golden Gate Seminary.

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I'll be in Mill Valley teaching an apologetics class at the end of, it is June now, isn't it?

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It's at the month, sir. I think the end of this month, yeah, it's June 27th and 28th, I'll be in San Francisco teaching that class, and especially

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Greek, the biblical languages, the ability to do exegesis. But you know, even with what we're talking about this evening when

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I finally get around to discussing the issue of the new perspective on Paul, I really think that the day where you as a concerned

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Christian, I was gonna use the term layperson there, and I guess there's still a meaningful use to that term, but to be honest with you,

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I struggle with the layman clergy type terminology. You as a concerned

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Christian today have access to more information than any other generation of believers has ever had access to.

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I saw a computer down over here someplace, and on my laptop sitting there,

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I have an incredible library of material, not just biblical material in the sense of the

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Bible Works Program and Libronics Digital Library and the Scholarly Journal Library and all the things associated with that, but also just the amount of historical material available just right there.

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And of course, then when you connect it up to the internet, libraries coming online and things like that, there is so many more opportunities for learning without packing your family up and moving off to someplace else than there's ever been in any time in the past.

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And to be perfectly honest with you, I was asked a question yesterday about the new perspective by the interviewer on WVNE, and he said, are you surprised at how many people are embracing this kind of thinking that involves a total redefinition of the doctrine of justification?

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I said, to be perfectly honest with you, I am not. I am not surprised because of the fact that sadly, in my experience, the largest portion of what

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I call the academy, the Christian academic world, however you define that, has been ripe for this kind of a movement and this kind of a problem for a long, long time because it desires acceptance with the world.

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And I think there's a fundamental contrast between a mindset that says everything I'm going to believe and everything

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I'm going to do will be radically committed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and that which the world practices and possesses, which in essence always puts man in the center and causes

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Christ and God's claims upon us to be tested by whether we find them to be acceptable or whether we find them to be consistent and so on and so forth.

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And so the reason I raise that point is that I really think,

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I know some individuals, I know some pastors who have wonderful churches, tremendous ministries, they are solid exegetes of the word and one of their main reasons they are is they got to be that way before they ran into seminary.

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They didn't get to be that way because of seminary. I've seen a lot of folks ruined by seminary, to be perfectly honest with you, because of the love, well, what did

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Paul say? What does knowledge do? It puffs up and it does not necessarily lead to an increase in love and there has to be a balance.

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And I'm not going to get into this tonight, but I have a whole sermon that I tend to break into once in a while about how

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Christian education should be a function of the local church. It should be, people should be involved in the local church as they receive that education and as they then put that education into practice.

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That's just another one of the many odd views that I have of things. That certainly puts me outside the mainstream, but that's okay.

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I'm pretty well outside the mainstream on almost everything you can talk about. So anyway, I say all of this in way of encouraging you.

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We look at what we look at tonight and we're going to look at a number of quotes and some of you might go, wow, there's just so much out there and especially with this subject, there is.

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I mean, let's face it, most of the primary works on the subject of the New Perspective on Paul have not been mastered by almost anyone.

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There are so many, they're so varied in their numbers and also, especially in the fact that some of them are just mind numbingly boring.

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Some of the foundational works here, honestly, you have to really have a crusader's mentality to press on and actually get your way through some of this material.

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So not a lot of people have done that and so as a result, a lot of folks sort of back off from it and go, you know,

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I don't know that this is really something that I want to, that I feel any need to be any more aware of and so on and so forth.

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I'm encouraging you not to do that. There are some good responses to this movement and some reasons this movement finally starting to come out.

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It always takes the good guys a while to get their books out. For some odd reason, the other side can get books out so fast,

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I don't even know how they do it. I mean, I've written a couple books and, I wrote one book, it was a very short book in four days, but books like the

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King James Only Controversy took less than half a year, but still, these folks will crank out books just at the speed of light.

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It takes time for the good guys to be getting around and they're starting to do that. There's starting to be some materials out there and we'll talk about some of those that are available.

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So let's, with that, make sure that we're fairly focused here why should you be here on a

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Friday night? Say that with a little fear and trepidation, make sure

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I've got the right day of the week. There's lots of things you could be doing. The vast majority of even evangelicals in our society are not sitting in a church tonight, or if they are, they're watching something considerably more entertaining than the fat, bald guy from Arizona.

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So why in the world would you be here? Thank you, I appreciate that.

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That was the best of all the laughs was that one. It was, when it's all alone, that's even better. The subject we're gonna look at has a whole lot of background when we start talking about what

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Second Temple Judaism believed. For most folks in most churches, and I commend you for even wanting to discuss this, but for most folks in most churches, you start talking about Second Temple Judaism and Mrs.

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Hornfisher in the back is gonna put her hand up and say, could we talk about Christian finance instead? And you're just gonna move on from there and there's nothing necessarily wrong with Christian finance, but it's just illustrative of the fact that not a whole lot of people are gonna be discussing this particular subject.

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Secondly, I'll have to admit, I've listened to a lot of lectures on this subject. If you wanna find them, they're out there.

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I mean, if you've got a computer and you got an MP3 player, you can go find, Dr. J.

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Ligon Duncan sent me tapes, and actually, was it tapes or is

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MP3s? No, he sent me MP3s, thankfully. I didn't have to tape all of them. And there must have been 40 hours in that material.

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There's a lot of stuff out there, but I'll also be perfectly honest with you, the vast majority of it that I've listened to had no passion at all.

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It was a scholarly discussion that was just sort of like, and then this person thinks this, and then that person thinks that.

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And it reminds me a little bit of, have any of you ever read any of the Mishnah?

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Anybody ever read any of the Mishnah? The Mishnah, the codification of Jewish traditions around 250 years after Christ.

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This would be, Rabbi so -and -so said that on the Sabbath, you can take 14 steps farther toward the north than you can toward the south, because Rabbi so -and -so also said that da -da -da -da -da -da, and this rabbi contradicted that rabbi, and we see in the

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Gospels many times when the people are amazed at Jesus' teaching, why? Because he taught as one having authority and not as describes, who were just simply repeating what somebody else had said.

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And I gotta admit, I think one of the reasons that this subject is not as discussed as it could be is that very frequently, the only people who have any handle on it at all, for some reason are not overly passionate about what it means.

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Either that or they just can't express themselves in a passionate way. I'm one of those folks who believes that it's a sin to bore people with theology, okay?

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I just, I don't understand. I've taken a few of those classes, believe me. In seminary,

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I had a few of those classes where you know, you just had to sit there going, and why did you feel called to teach this class again?

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You know, where's, you know, are you even interested in what this is all about?

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You just sort of wonder. And I don't understand passionless theology. Now, I realized that the world's standard, you know, the world's standard of scholarship is that if you're a scholar, you're dispassionate.

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And that means that, you know, if you're a geneticist, you are to dispassionately examine the data regarding the certain genome on the certain, you know, certain chromosome and so on and so forth.

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And you're to be dispassionate. There's just to be, you know, you're to be a commander data type thing when he turns his emotion chip off, if any of you know who in the world that is.

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And if you are, it's like, I just found all the Trekkies in the room. So you're to be dispassionate in these things.

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And that idea comes across into Christian theology and scholarly circles, and I just don't understand it.

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I mean, if you're a Christian, and you're talking about, for example, the righteousness of Christ, how can you be dispassionate about the righteousness of Christ?

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Now, I understand. I understand that there is a need to be able to examine the biblical text without a fog of emotion.

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And I frequently have to talk with people who have a very strong attachment to a certain tradition that they think is biblical.

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And I have to try to exhort them to lay their emotions aside for a moment, to listen to what the word of God says, because their emotions are getting in the way.

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So there's a balance, I understand that. But at the same time, what we're talking about here is not just simply dry discussions about what the

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Jews at the time of Christ believed. Now, can you all see why it is important to know what the

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Jews at the time of Christ believed? I mean, it does make sense. If anyone thinks that's sort of irrelevant, think about it.

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How many of the conflicts that Jesus has in the gospels are with the

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Jews over their traditions, over what their beliefs were? And when Paul writes to the Galatians, we need to have some idea why he wrote that letter.

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What is the problem in Galatia? What's going on there? Why would Paul use the strongest language in all the

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New Testament about whatever is being taught to the churches in Galatia?

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What's going on here? Why is that there? We do need to understand these things. And if we want to dig into the word, if we want to be sound in our teaching, if we wanna have a solid basis for our faith, then we have to do all these things.

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There's no question about any of that. But at the same time, those discussions are all foundational to the fact that this movement, the

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New Perspectives on Paul, or New Perspectivism, fundamentally calls each and every one of us to abandon the view of justification that we have held, that we believe is the very basis of our faith and our standing before God, that we are to abandon that for a completely different understanding of how it is we're made right before God.

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Now, some New Perspectivists would say, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, you just need to understand.

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We're not saying that you can't have what you believe you have in the concept, for example, of the righteousness of Christ.

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We're just trying to say that the whole debate that has taken place over the history of the church between Protestantism and Catholicism, both sides were wrong.

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Both sides fundamentally misunderstood what the whole argument was about.

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And you can get to the same point, some of them will say, and again, please, please recognize,

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I keep saying some of them because there is no one New Perspectivist who defines the whole thing. Each person's a little bit different, a little bit different, some are very, very different.

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And so I put that caveat out front immediately. They'll say you can get to the same thing, but you just need to go a completely different direction.

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Now, I don't believe you can get to the same point, but what we need to understand is you're being asked to believe that if you understand this, if you look at that picture and you understand what's in that picture, this is a picture that was drawn by a fellow who was listening to the time

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I was on the Bible Answer Man broadcast, discussing my book, The God Who Justifies. And I was talking about what the imputed righteousness of Christ is all about.

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How Christ's perfect righteousness is imputed to us and it becomes the foundation of our standing before God.

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It becomes that in which we are clothed, that seamless robe of righteousness that causes us to stand before a holy and a just God without any fear of condemnation because there's nothing that can be added to this righteousness.

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It is a perfect righteousness. It is Christ's righteousness. And so as he listened to me talking about that, he started drawing this picture and he sent it to me a few weeks after the program was over.

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And it shows the poor sinner clothed in that righteousness that is not his own.

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If that is to you, the very essence of the gospel, the new perspective is saying you've missed the boat.

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You have completely missed the boat. That is not what Paul is ever talking about. Even in 2

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Corinthians 5 .21, even when Paul talks about he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in him has nothing to do with your standing before God according to the new perspective.

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And so it is important on a everyday basis. I mean, when you get up in the morning, why do you not fear the wrath of God?

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Why don't you? Well, if this is why you don't fear the wrath of God, you do not fear the wrath of God, not because of presumption, but because of the perfection of Christ's work in your behalf, then for someone to tell you, you've, that's not in the

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New Testament anymore. That's not biblical. That's not, that's ahistorical. That's something that what happened is

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Martin Luther had his experience and he read the

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New Testament in the light of his experience. And that's how you came up with all this stuff. And we've seen the light.

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That's a pretty radical claim. You can't just let that type of thing slide.

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And unfortunately, this type of movement is having a tremendous impact within conservative, reformed and evangelical circles.

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And why? Well, that's something hopefully we can get to. Let me introduce you to some of the works, give you some background here.

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And then, like I said, when we start talking about the questions and answers, having just gotten off the plane and stuff, you'll be able to stump me real easy and we won't even worry too much about that.

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What is the new perspective? Well, basically it describes a new perspective, a shift in scholarly thinking in regards to certain issues regarding how to interpret

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Paul. And of course, when at least 13 or 14, depending on how you view the authorship of Hebrews, 13 or 14 books of the

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New Testament are written by Paul and you completely change your interpretation of what

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Paul's main issues were, that's not a small thing. That's a fairly major, major issue.

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And one of the chief foundations of the movement is this book by E .P.

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Sanders, not just one book, it's actually, he's written at least four that are directly relevant. E .P.

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Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Dr. Sanders is a highly recognized scholar, but not an evangelical in any sense of that particular term and would certainly be far to the left of anything that we would be overly comfortable with.

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His emphasis is in the study of Second Temple Judaism, Tanniatic Judaism, in other words, the

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Judaism that provides the context of the New Testament, the Judaism that existed in Palestine at the time of the writing of the

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New Testament up until the destruction of the temple in AD 70. What did those, what did

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Judaism at that time believe? Well, immediately, I hope all of you probably stop for a second and go, that's sort of like asking what does evangelicalism today believe?

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Aren't there a lot of different strands and streams and viewpoints?

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I mean, if you go down to your local Christian bookstore, are you gonna get a unified singular viewpoint on theology out of what you find at your local

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Christian bookstore? I hope the local Christian bookstore owner isn't here. Sorry if I'm picking on you, but I mean, if somebody blew up the local

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Christian bookstore and you went in and started picking up pieces of the books and you got a little bit of this book and you got a little bit of Benny Hinn and you got a little bit of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, you got a little bit of Augustine and you got a little bit of Max Likado and you got a little bit of Prayer of Jabez, okay?

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You know, and you put it all together. Could you make heads or tails out of that thing consistently? Not really.

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And so when I hear anybody, and including someone as brilliant as E .P.

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Sanders, saying the Jews of Jesus's day believe this,

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I want to go and you explain the fact that even in the

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New Testament, we have the Pharisees and we have the Sadducees and we have the scribes and then we know historically you've got the

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Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community and you've got all these, you've got the Zealots and you've got all these different, how do you come up with a monolithic view is one of the questions

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I immediately want to ask. His thesis is that the

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Jewish religion at the time of Christ was a religion marked by grace. It was a gracious religion in the sense that it was not like a gross works salvation type thing where you just simply, you know,

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God just simply has the scales and you put your good works in, your bad works in and wherever it tips off, that's how you make it.

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He's saying, no, no, no. The nature of the covenants in Judaism was gracious and the maintenance of a person's relationship to the covenant is marked by grace and if that's the case, then

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Paul can't be trying to contrast grace and works, grace and law in the way it's been understood by Protestant theologians down through history.

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Now, the problem immediately that I encounter and looking at this is when

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I read Sanders, what he understands as grace is not what I understand as grace.

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That's one of the first things that, and I'm not sure why people don't emphasize this a little bit more than they have even in the good books that have been put out there, but it is in a number of them now, thankfully.

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What he means by grace is what, for example, my Roman Catholic opponents mean by grace when they say that their works, their penances, their

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Our Fathers and Hail Marys and pilgrimages and fulfillments of the priestly commands and so on and so forth, that those are all of grace.

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In other words, grace makes it possible for them to do these things, but without them doing those things, grace would not accomplish anything.

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And so when E .P. Sanders talks about Judaism and being gracious, of course the God of the

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Old Testament is gracious. He's merciful. Loving kindness is one of the primary words used to describe him, chesed, that loving kindness, that covenant faithfulness that is

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God's, and there's no question about that. But that's not the same thing as what we're talking about when we talk about the

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Pauline doctrine of grace itself. And so there's immediately, I think, a disconnection there.

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There's some more disconnections. For example, Sanders is approaching

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Paul outside the context of Scripture. That is, Paul is viewed without any reference to the rest of Scripture or divine revelation as a writer unto himself.

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Sanders, unconstrained by such beliefs as inerrancy or plenary inspiration, is able to atomize or break apart the text of Scripture, and hence his conclusions end up differing greatly from those who interpret the

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Bible as a whole revelation from God. And I cannot overemphasize this enough. When you do go down to the local

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Christian bookstore, it's unfortunate that there's no way that we can develop a little, well,

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I have a Palm Pilot in here, and I use my Palm Pilot all the time, and it has an infrared port on it, so you can sort of like scan stuff and do stuff like that, and beam files back and forth to people.

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It's too bad we can't come up with a little doodad that you take into the Christian bookstore, and as you scan down the aisle the books you're looking at, it'll tell you, okay, conservative inerrantist, whoa, whoa, wacky liberal, conservative inerrantist, you know, they don't put that stuff on the outside of the book for some odd reason, and so you don't know, and you might think, oh, well, you can just buy a set of commentaries.

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Ah, no, you cannot. Believe me, within one set of commentaries, you can have wonderful, sound, exegetical work in one, and then you get the very next book in the canon, and it is out in la -la land someplace, and you're wondering what in the world happened, and it's because commentary sets are not necessarily overly consistent with themselves to who writes for them, and so on and so forth.

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Discernment is necessary, and I believe that how you approach the text of Scripture has a huge impact on the conclusions you're gonna draw.

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Sanders can discuss what the Jews at the time of Jesus believed without any reference whatsoever to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John don't appear in the work. Well, he says, that's because it's about Paul.

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Yeah, but we're talking about Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and I don't know about you, but I sort of think that what

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Jesus said about the Palestinian Jews might have something to do with developing an idea of what they believed.

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But not for John Sanders, not for E .P. Sanders. Why? Anyone wanna hazard a guess?

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It's pretty simple. It's because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not reflecting what

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Jesus said anyways. You see, you need to understand for the vast majority of what calls itself

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New Testament scholarship, and unfortunately, these are the folks you see on TV. Remember the

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Peter Jennings stuff a couple years ago, the search for the historical Jesus, the Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg.

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These are the folks who are called the leaders of New Testament scholarship today, and they're the ones that are gonna be at your local community college.

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When you send your kids off to college, these are gonna be the folks, they're gonna be told, are the leading scholars in the

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New Testament. And the vast majority of that New Testament scholarship does not believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John were written by anyone actually named

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, that they are pseudonymous, that they are written many, many decades down the road.

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In fact, at the end of August this year, I will be debating

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John Dominic Crossan, one of the co -founders of the Jesus Seminar in Seattle, and one of his primary arguments, you know he believes that Jesus was taken down off the cross and placed in a garbage dump and eaten by dogs, and there is no physical resurrection of Jesus, that one of the reasons he believes this type of stuff is that he believes that Mark writes a number of decades later, and then

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Matthew and Luke take Mark, and they update him for a new church situation for each generation, until you got

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John way down the road, so you only have one witness that's many decades removed, and it's altered by each of the gospel writers, from Mark all the way through John.

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So since they felt free to alter it, why should we believe it's actually true, or historically true, see?

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And so when you have a large portion of scholarship going well, you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they're actually just the productions of the church, and so they're written by anonymous authors who feel free to alter and change, you know

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Matthew obviously, the church is in great conflict with Judaism, and so you have much more of the fulfillment passages inserted there, and Luke has a different audience, so he changes things, once you get to that point, then

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Sanders, accepting that kind of perspective, is going, why should I care what

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Matthew, Mark, and Luke, or John say about the Jews? Because all that is, is a later

34:59

Christian perspective of Judaism. See what happens? You know, sometimes folks in good sound churches, and I know this is a good sound church,

35:09

I'm gonna be speaking in Omaha, in October, I got to speak there since I was with you,

35:16

I have a feeling my being with you resulted in my being out in Omaha, but anyways, and I worked out when

35:22

I was there too, it's an amazing thing how that worked, but when you're in a good solid church, where you're being fed the word of God, and you're studying the word of God, sometimes it's difficult to understand, why in the world do these people, who know

35:38

Greek and Hebrew, as if that's sort of the gnosis, ooh, I love when people do that, they always come to me, what does this say in the

35:45

Greek? And I go, same thing it says in the English. It's sort of like, aw man, they're expecting some light to shine on the passage, and they're gonna see all sorts of neat things, and impress their families and friends, but even these people who know the biblical languages, and they have degrees coming out the wazoo, and yet they come to these conclusions, and you're left going, what do you mean

36:14

Jesus' body was disposed of in the dump, and eaten by dogs? And what do you mean that you can write a whole book, about what the

36:22

Palestinian Jews believed, but Matthew 23 doesn't come into that? Remember Jesus' lengthy denunciation of the

36:30

Jews, and their hypocrisy and so on and so forth, irrelevant. For you, what the

36:36

Jews believe the time of Jesus, is reflected in Jesus' words, but if you don't believe those are Jesus' words, and see that's where the difference is.

36:45

These folks approach the text of scripture, as if it is just another historical record.

36:53

It's just another historical record. And folks, once you start there, you're not gonna come to conclusions, that Christians come to.

37:02

You're not gonna come to conclusions, that Christians have come to down to the centuries. It really goes back to a very basic question.

37:11

Yea, hath God said? That's still the question today. In the vast majority of instances, it doesn't matter what group we're talking about.

37:22

The vast majority of theological heresies, are based upon starting with a questioning, of the inspired nature of scripture.

37:32

When Paul said to Timothy, Timothy, I'm leaving. My ministry is completed,

37:38

I've run the race, I've kept the faith. I know that Timothy, it's pretty clear from reading 1st and 2nd

37:46

Timothy, Timothy wasn't a wild man. He had a little timid nature to him.

37:53

It wasn't natural for him to be involved in conflict, and so on and so forth. So when Paul knows this is probably the last letter, he ever writes to Timothy.

38:01

What does he say to him? Man of God, if you want to reprove, rebuke, exhort, train in righteousness in the church, what's your source?

38:09

It's that which is theanustos, God breathed, breathed out by God, 2nd

38:15

Timothy 3 .16. Timothy, look to that which God has given to you, which is unique in its character and authority, that which is breathed out by God.

38:24

Without that, folks, Christianity is just another player in the world's religions.

38:31

And not an overly consistent one at that. That really is the fundamental issue.

38:37

And I think outside of N .T. Wright, who has the highest view of scripture amongst the

38:43

New Perspectivists, the foundation of New Perspectivism remains within critical scholarship that does not accept the consistency of the word of God.

38:54

Another thing to remember is, if I asked, who here

39:00

I was mentioning, I was told to me that the people who are in the pastoral class or the, what's the, is it the pastoral discipleship class?

39:11

Had to be here this evening, so I appreciate you being here. And if I were to ask some of you to give me

39:19

Paul's theology of Christ, what was

39:26

Paul's theology of Christ? Well, it'd be one of the first considerations that you would have to, you'd have to have when answering a challenge to develop and present

39:37

Paul's theology of Christ. Isn't the first question, what did

39:43

Paul write? Right? I mean, you might think that's a given. For the vast majority of New Perspectivists, the vast, in fact, for all of them that I know,

39:56

Paul did not write 1st, 2nd Timothy or Titus. Paul did not write

40:03

Ephesians or Colossians. Paul only wrote six or seven letters, grand total.

40:11

So if you cut the Pauline corpus in half, are you not gonna be changing the conclusions you come to in determining who

40:19

Christ is for Paul or what faith is for Paul or what works are for Paul?

40:25

Once again, this comes from the critical, liberal perspective that says, well, you know, there are certain terms that are used by Paul in this letter that don't seem original with 1st

40:39

Thessalonians or Galatians or Romans, which we know Paul wrote. And so we're gonna say that someone later than Paul wrote these letters.

40:47

And so we're gonna dismiss them. They're not even allowed in. That's another thing that causes confusion because when we start reading these things and these people are going, well,

40:56

Paul never really said that we're saved by grace through faith alone. You go, excuse me, did you lose

41:01

Ephesians? And then we realize, no, I didn't lose it. Paul didn't write it. And our young people go off to the community college and they get hit with that.

41:10

And they've never heard that before in their life, have they? What do you mean Paul didn't write it? And how do you respond?

41:17

That's the tough part. It's hard to respond to a question you've never ever heard before in your life, especially when it just leaves you going, huh?

41:25

And that's what ends up happening. So keeping those things in mind, you might be going, wait a minute, all right.

41:32

If we're not talking about people who believe in inerrancy, we're not talking about people who are actually trying to interpret the whole of the Bible and they don't mind if Paul contradicts

41:39

Paul or Paul contradicts Peter or Paul contradicts John. And I hope you realize that for the vast majority of quote unquote

41:46

Christian scholarship, the idea that there actually is a consistent view of theology in the scripture is laughable.

41:54

You do realize that. There are not many seminaries left where people really believe that you can do systematic theology.

42:05

Systematic theology used to be the queen of all the classes.

42:11

It was the hub and all the other classes were the spokes. It gave coherence.

42:16

It was the center point. You know where systematic theology is in most seminaries today? It's in the history department.

42:24

I know when I did my first master's degree, I live in Phoenix, that's where I was at the time.

42:31

My ministry remains very small and given the things I address will always be that way. And I couldn't go anywhere else.

42:40

There was only one seminary that I could go to in Phoenix in the middle 1980s and that was

42:47

Fuller Theological Seminary. And so I did. And over and over and over again,

42:54

I fought through this battle in regards to believing in inerrancy, believing in the consistency of scripture.

43:02

And when I took systematic theology, my systematic theology class was nothing more than the history of systematic theology.

43:11

In other words, in the early church, they believe this and during the Reformation, they believe this and then the Germans came up with this neat idea and this is the current state of affairs, move on to the next subject.

43:21

I'll never ever forget walking over to a snack bar during a break to get something there.

43:28

It's this Met at Green Canyon College and there was an attorney friend of mine walking along with me and we were sort of talking about what we had just discussed and he goes, that's really interesting, but what do we believe about that?

43:41

It's sort of sad that we had just concluded an entire topic in a systematic theology class and it leaves the students going, what do we believe about that?

43:49

But that's how systematic theology is handled in the largest portion of seminaries today because that's from a day when people actually thought you could develop a systematic theology.

44:01

They actually thought the Bible was consistent enough with itself to have a singular message.

44:08

Now you're starting to understand why in liberal denominations, in certain liberal denominations, let me give an example.

44:16

What denomination here in the United States right now is famous for just about getting itself kicked out of its

44:22

World Association for what it's done recently? The Episcopalians.

44:28

They ordain Eugene Robinson, an openly gay man as a bishop and the conservative

44:34

Anglicans in Africa are going, you guys are out if you don't change and the

44:41

Anglican church's biggest growth, huge growth is in Africa. And so they have more and more bishops being represented in their system and who knows what's gonna happen there.

44:53

But did you, so you've got the Episcopalians on the one hand doing this thing and did you hear what they did two weeks ago?

45:00

The Episcopalians got together with the Roman Catholics in Seattle and they put out a paper saying, you know what?

45:08

Everything that Rome has taught about Mary, immaculate conception, bodily assumption, perpetual virginity.

45:15

You know what? That's not really overly objectionable. That's pretty cool. The Reformation was wrong. Well, thank you very much.

45:23

So on the one hand, you've got, let's ordain an openly gay man as a bishop. On the other hand, you've got, you know what?

45:30

Rome may not be wrong about Mary. And you wonder, excuse me, you folks seem to be blown about by every wind of doctrine.

45:37

Why might that be? Because I can't think of a single, a single

45:43

Episcopalian bishop in the United States who believes in inerrancy, who believes that the

45:48

Bible has any consistent message. And so once you don't have that, what are you left with?

45:54

You're left with your feelings. Well, you know what? I think we should emphasize this, or I feel this.

46:01

You don't have any mandate. It's sort of hard to preach truth when you don't think you have a basis for knowing what the truth is.

46:11

So some of you are probably asking the question, well, if all of this is true, why is this coming into conservative seminaries? Because, once again, the fact that many of those seminaries have so wedded themselves to a humanistic mechanism of education and the acceptability of the world.

46:30

Ever notice something really odd? What's the major terminal degree coming out of seminaries these days?

46:37

It's a PhD, right? Why isn't it a PhD? Do you know what a

46:42

PhD is? Doctor of Theology. PhD is a Doctor of Philosophy. PhD used to be extremely common in seminaries.

46:51

In the 1800s? Sure. It's not anymore. Almost nobody offers it. Why? Well, if you get a

46:59

PhD anywhere, you can teach anywhere. But you get a PhD, pfft.

47:06

That sort of marks you. Really? I think being marked might be a good thing.

47:13

Odd idea that I have. Anyways, I'm preaching way too much about other stuff here. We're never gonna get through this if I don't pick up the pace here.

47:19

I'm sorry. The Advil kicked in, so I'm...

47:25

And in fact, if I hit the Flonase, we're gonna be here all night. I have a warning for you.

47:30

I just discovered something last night. I had never used Flonase until this week, and the doctor gave it to me. Works great.

47:36

I'll have to admit, one warning. Do not take it right before going to bed.

47:43

I tried to go to bed at 10 .30 last night. I got to bed at two, because I'm laying there in bed going, wow, let's run around the block, wow.

47:53

So if you ever get Flonase, great stuff, just don't use it at night, or you're going to be regretting.

48:01

You're gonna be up all night long. Anyway, Sander's thesis is that the

48:07

Jew keeps the law not to get into the covenant, but as a response to God's grace. This is called covenantal nomism.

48:14

Nomism, namos, the Greek word for law. You'll hear a lot of arguments right now. The Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church Conference, a lot of arguments that use that term nomism, lawism, and just be aware of what it means.

48:29

Some believe the only logical conclusion of Sander's thesis is that the Old Testament is still perfectly acceptable to God.

48:35

The Old Covenant is still perfectly acceptable to God. And that this view opens up the whole discussion of covenant works of faithfulness, i .e.

48:41

doing works to remain in the covenant. In any case, this new view is seen by many to completely undercut the majority reading of Paul and to throw a completely different light upon the meaning of justification.

48:52

And so there are all sorts of issues that have been raised by this. And it does seem that the final conclusion of much of New Perspectivism is that there's more than one way to be pleasing to God.

49:02

Now, certainly N .T. Wright wouldn't have that perspective, but your more liberal commentators might to go that direction indeed.

49:10

Now, if you see that book in someone's hands, be warned.

49:18

Unfortunately, it's a book used in many conservative seminaries today. I can name some very conservative

49:23

Southern Baptist seminaries that use it as a textbook. And I don't have any problem with using it as a textbook if you're using it in the textbook in the context of discussing

49:32

New Perspectivism and providing a response to it. Unfortunately, it's frequently used just simply as an introduction without providing a response to it, and that causes some major problems.

49:43

N .T. Wright takes Sanders' views. He doesn't just simply accept everything.

49:49

But the concept of what the Jews were actually like, he takes that, he expands upon them, popularizes them, and he has what

49:58

I would call a tremendous amount of credibility capital. Why do

50:04

I say that? Well, remember the Jennings, the Peter Jennings thing on ABC? Who was the one conservative person that they interviewed in the

50:13

Peter Jennings special? N .T. Wright. He was that one guy who was actually willing to say, actually,

50:20

I think Jews did rise from the dead. Huh, shocking, you know? This isn't amazing.

50:25

One voice, yes, I think there was a resurrection. Real fair, wasn't it, yes.

50:30

But anyway, he has written consistently against the likes of the

50:36

Jesus Seminar. He just did a debate against John Dominic Crossan down at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in March.

50:47

And he's an excellent speaker. He doesn't fall into the category of what

50:53

I said earlier about people who bore you to death. Okay, I'll take that back. Once in a while, he has a bad day.

50:58

I mean, you know, he's British, but. I'm Scottish, so you can figure out why

51:05

I just said that. But, you know, especially when, it is sort of funny that your initials here are

51:11

BBC, when you think about it, because when I was in England a few months ago, I got sick, and I got stuck laying in a hotel room for a couple days.

51:20

It's horrible to be sick. It's horrible to be sick away from home. It's really horrible to be sick away from home in another country, okay?

51:26

Because I had to watch British television. Man, that made me more sick. I was,

51:34

I actually came home appreciating Perky Katie Couric, because there ain't nobody who's

51:40

Perky on the BBC. I mean, they start off in the BBC in the morning. Good morning.

51:45

This is the morning show on the BBC. You know, you just collapse right back in the bed right there.

51:52

So British folks aren't known for their fiery preaching, you know. They tend to be very reserved, and in fact,

51:59

I'm gonna be preaching, Lord willing, in February, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, and I need to be careful that I don't blow all of my

52:09

British brothers out of their British socks by being too loud, boisterous, and moving too much, and wearing, notice

52:19

I'm not wearing a Russian bow tie. Those of you who were here two years ago, you're wondering what happened.

52:24

I went to Scotland. This is actually my clan tie. I'm of the,

52:29

I'm Scottish, and this is the MacGregor. You know Rob Roy MacGregor? Yeah, there you go, right there.

52:36

I have my sword in here. It's hard to get through screening, but I managed to do it. Anyways, what are we talking about?

52:42

Oh, yes, the new perspectivism. We'll get to him. Antirite, he's a good speaker, and he's not boring, and he actually seems to communicate the idea.

52:49

He really believes what he's saying, and that almost makes him unusual amongst theologians these days, which is a bad thing when you think about it.

53:00

He is prolific. He cranks out books, and they're not small books.

53:05

This isn't the biggest book on the planet. That's why more people read it, but he's put out some books, horrible -looking covers, but they're 800 pages long, and thoroughly referenced and footnoted.

53:15

The guy knows what he's talking about when he throws things together, and so people have tended to be willing to listen to him because, hey,

53:24

Antirite defends the resurrection and these historical facts about Jesus' life and things like that, so if he starts talking about these other areas, why shouldn't we listen?

53:34

Why shouldn't we give him an ear? He begins with Sanders and focuses primarily upon the concept of the nature of the righteousness of God in Paul's vocabulary.

53:44

What does that mean? What does the righteousness of God mean? We use the term all the time, right? What does it mean?

53:51

How do we know what it means? The very word of, in the

53:57

Greek language, expresses two different, you have the genitive and ablative concepts within that.

54:05

You've got objective genitives and subjective genitives. There's all sorts of possibilities. Is it a righteousness that comes from God?

54:12

Is it a righteousness that belongs to God? Is it a godly righteousness? What is it?

54:20

See, we tend to just sort of take one particular perspective and never really give much thought to what other possibilities might exist, and then when those possibilities are raised, we're left going, hmm, hadn't thought about that one before, so he focuses on that.

54:34

For Sanders, and this is important, the righteousness of God is

54:41

God's covenant faithfulness. It is the description of God.

54:48

It has almost nothing to do with you and me, all right? God is going to be faithful to the covenant he made back in Genesis, where he said that through the

55:00

Messiah, he's going to bless all the nations, and that is the default meaning, and in fact, not only is it the default meaning, but I would suggest that for NT Wright, it is the only meaning, and it is forced into passages that it just doesn't fit in, and I'm probably gonna have to skip through some stuff to get through all this tonight, but I especially wanna get 2

55:22

Corinthians chapter five so you can see exactly what that means. It is not something that is imputed to the believer.

55:29

He denies that Christ's righteousness is imputed to the believer by faith, and so you have an

55:38

Anglican scholar, and I would recommend J. Ligon Duncan. Has his book come out? It was supposed to be out real recently.

55:45

If it hasn't come out, it's gonna be coming out. He wrote an excellent article. You can track it down in the archives of my blog.

55:51

I have a link to it there. If it's still there, it should be. Lengthy article on the subject of the new perspective, and one of the things

56:00

I appreciate about it most was it had some fascinating footnotes, if you bother reading footnotes, where he provides emails from N .T.

56:09

Wright discussing some of these issues that were extremely insightful. N .T.

56:14

Wright's constantly saying that the Reformers thought the Jews could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and that they were just simply

56:21

Pelagians, and I've read a fair amount of the Reformers, and I don't remember that personally, and I think that's a misrepresentation, and Dr.

56:31

Duncan confirms that in some of the things that he has written. So, since you've, how many of you have read the book?

56:38

Anybody here read the book? One, two, was there somebody over here? Two folks read the book.

56:44

How long ago, if I may ask? Recently? Two months? A year ago, okay.

56:51

Well, well -written, right? It's not dry. It's not like chewing on cardboard or something like that.

56:59

It communicates fairly clearly. It's not a scholarly tome, the sense of being dry and boring and things like that.

57:08

But only two folks have read the book, and so let me give you some citations from it. Why am

57:13

I focusing on Wright? Because first of all, I would consider Wright to be the most orthodox of the New Perspectives. In other words, we could spend a lot of time on E .P.

57:23

Sanders, but where's that gonna get you? Wright provides to me the approach that is making the most inroads within conservative churches.

57:33

That's why I focus upon him, and that's why I want to provide you with a taste of what is actually being said.

57:40

Before I forget it, because I will forget it in passing, I don't have an update to this presentation.

57:47

It has a picture of this, but you will, especially if this is an area where you want to do more study.

57:55

There is a book that came out about six and a half, seven months ago now by a man by the name of Guy Watters, The New Perspectives on Paul.

58:07

Anyone who went to the Shepherds Conference, I think you got a free copy, did you not? Yes, I was told it was being passed out.

58:15

Then again, they were passing out lots of fun stuff at the Shepherds Conference, but they were passing out Guy Watters' books to everybody at the

58:21

Shepherds Conference. Watters studied under Sanders. His PhD is in the same area, and that's certainly one of the best works out there that is providing a critique, a response, an explanation of the wide variety of the

58:40

New Perspectives. The New Perspectives, it's a PNR, Presbyterian Reformed, publication.

58:50

Just a second one down here. Judaism, Sanders insisted, was and is an issue as a perfectly valid and proper form of religion.

58:57

Pauline Christians and the successors of first century Palestinian Judaism should not anathematize each other as they have often been wont to do.

59:10

Brother Wright is very concerned about ecumenism. He believes,

59:17

I do not question, that he firmly believes that his view provides the foundation for the unity of all of Christianity.

59:28

You gotta know what motivates folks. What motivates N .T. Wright, I think, is he really does feel that if his perspective were to be embraced, the vast majority of things which divide

59:39

Christians, and for him, Rome and Geneva are all Christianity. There is no fundamental distinction there whatsoever in the sense of being

59:49

Christianity, that we would have unity. He believes that the Catholics and Protestants should meet together at the one place where unity would be accomplished, and that is at the table.

01:00:00

Because for him, the whole thing of justification is that there is no

01:00:07

Jewish Christian, there is no Gentile Christian. Peter's denial of table fellowship was all wrong.

01:00:15

Justification is about church membership primarily, and that therefore, anyone who believes in Jesus, please don't ask specific questions about what that means, but anyone who believes in Jesus and meets together at that table, there is unity, and there should be unity amongst all

01:00:28

Christians based upon that acceptance, and you have this, you just need to understand that's where he's coming from.

01:00:35

That's really what he does believe. Some of these statements

01:00:41

I find odd. For example, the second one here. Many New Testament scholars use detailed exegesis as a way of escaping from heavy -handed and stultifying conservatism.

01:00:51

Any attempt to articulate an overarching Pauline theology looks to them like an attempt to reconstruct the sort of system from which they themselves are glad to be free.

01:00:59

Now, you've gotta try to hear him in his context to understand what he's saying there, and I forgot to ask if we were supposed to be taking a break anytime during this time.

01:01:12

What? No, well, when did we want to start taking questions?

01:01:27

Okay. Hey, you know, time to me is a meaningless concept right now,

01:01:36

I assure you. What he's, in essence, trying to say here is he is developing what he calls an overarching

01:01:46

Pauline theology. N .T. Wright is saying this is what Paul meant by the righteousness of God. It's not something imputed to you.

01:01:53

It's God's covenant faithfulness. It's God's covenant faithfulness in every passage. But what he's saying is that many

01:02:00

New Testament scholars resist what he's doing because it sounds like those nasty fundamentalists who actually think that you can come up with a single meaning for Paul, and if you come up with other meanings for Paul that contradict what

01:02:15

Paul says in this passage, that passage, then you're a mean, terrible, horrible, nasty person. And for N .T.

01:02:21

Wright, you gotta realize, he's one of the most conservative Anglicans in England. A lot of the Anglicans in England think he's almost a fundamentalist, if that gives you an idea of what's going on here, okay?

01:02:31

Just how far off to the right we are if you're anywhere near where I am. So just to give you an idea of where he's coming from.

01:02:41

Some still use him, that is Paul, to legitimate an old -style preaching of the gospel in which the basic problem is human sin and pride, and the basic answer is the cross of Christ.

01:02:53

Well, that sounds like a terrible thing, doesn't it? Others, without wishing to deny this as part of the

01:03:01

Pauline message, are struggling to do justice to the wider categories and the larger questions that seem to be a non -negotiable part of Paul's whole teaching.

01:03:11

What he's saying is, what he's gonna say is to preach the gospel for right is to preach the lordship of Christ, period.

01:03:20

Jesus Christ is lord of history. God has been faithful through Christ to his covenant.

01:03:25

That's the gospel. Sin, personal salvation, that's

01:03:31

Luther, not Paul. That's Luther, not Paul. Gotta get your perspectives right, which is why it's called

01:03:39

New Perspectivism, I guess. I'm gonna skip a couple of these things here, just so we have enough time to get,

01:03:47

I wanna get into the text, at least for a few minutes this evening before we run out of time.

01:03:53

The gospel is supposed to be a description of how people get saved, of the theological mechanism whereby in some people's language,

01:04:03

Christ takes our sin and we his righteousness. In other people's language, Jesus becomes my personal savior.

01:04:10

In other languages, again, I admit my sin, believe that he died for me and commit my life to him. In many church circles, if you hear something like that, people will say it, the gospel has been preached.

01:04:21

In the present case, I'm perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say the gospel.

01:04:27

I just don't think it is what Paul means. Now, that's that wonderful Anglican way of speaking.

01:04:33

For us, if what you mean isn't what Paul meant, then you've got a problem. But for an

01:04:39

Anglican, it's much easier to say, I'm comfortable with that, but that's just not what

01:04:46

Paul meant. And we wanna go, well, then why are you comfortable with that? It reminds me of when

01:04:54

I asked R .C. Sproul in 1995 with the Christian Booksellers Association in Denver.

01:04:59

We were talking in the hallway and we were talking, remember what happened in 1994, evangelicals and Catholics together, the

01:05:05

ECT Accords. And I asked him, I said, Dr. Sproul, J .I.

01:05:11

Packer can sign ECT and the denunciation of ECT.

01:05:17

How come? Well, you need to understand

01:05:24

Packer. He's an Anglican. He's got one foot in the Bible and one foot in Rome.

01:05:30

And that was his answer. It's just the nature of things.

01:05:36

It's just where, and you know that this is not the first time that J .I. Packer had this debate, right? Who else did

01:05:43

J .I. Packer have this argument with once before? Huh? Not MacArthur.

01:05:48

No, this is back in the 50s. Lloyd -Jones. D. Martin Lloyd -Jones.

01:05:54

So, this is, he's been consistently Anglican, whatever that means.

01:06:00

Which means you can sign both the statement and the denunciation of the statement at the same time, which leaves me going, ah.

01:06:06

But anyways. In all this discussion, it is clear that we must add one further dimension to the discussion. Well, this is important, but I wanna get to something here.

01:06:18

Here is a chart that he produces about what the meaning of the righteousness of God means.

01:06:25

Here are all the different possibilities. God's own righteousness. A righteousness given to humans.

01:06:32

And then two subcategories, and then four smaller categories. And you'll notice that imputed righteousness is over here.

01:06:41

So we're the B1A folks. And imparted righteousness is here.

01:06:47

That's the Roman Catholics. They're the B1B folks. And he's actually up here with covenant faithfulness.

01:06:55

He's an A1B person. And righteousness is a moral quality of God, descriptive of God.

01:07:02

And yet there are these other possibilities here. And this is just part of the discussion that is presented by him.

01:07:15

How are we to decide between these multiple competing options? Despite the long popularity of the lower half of the diagram,

01:07:21

B, that's us. The overwhelming weight of Jewish evidence. And where is he getting his Jewish evidence?

01:07:27

Sanders, primarily at that point. Including many passages of scripture that Paul either quotes or alludes to.

01:07:33

Pushes us decisively into the upper half of the diagram. A, the righteousness of God must refer to God's own righteousness.

01:07:39

Now, let me stop right there. At times, of course. My point is, it doesn't always mean that.

01:07:46

The context has to decide. And I really think, at this point, that Dr. Wright has missed something that he himself should know.

01:07:53

And we'll see that, I think, when we look at Philippians chapter three and 2 Corinthians chapter five. The Jewish context, in fact, creates such a strong presumption in favor of this that it could only be overthrown if Paul quite clearly argued against it.

01:08:04

And as I shall show, this is not at all the case. Now, what about some of the passages that would automatically cross our mind in regards to a righteousness that comes from God?

01:08:17

Now, let me back up just for a moment. When I say forensic righteousness, what do you think of?

01:08:25

Forensic righteousness. Well, hmm? The law.

01:08:32

And so, righteousness proclaimed in the context of law, that is, the court.

01:08:39

Forensic righteousness, at least in the history of the discussion of that between Protestants and Catholics, has been the context of righteousness as the declaration of God the

01:08:51

Father, based upon the work of God the Son, regarding the believer in Jesus Christ, that because of what

01:09:00

Christ has done, the law's requirements have been fulfilled. The believer is not guilty because of the imputed righteousness of Christ, and his standing before God is safe and secure.

01:09:15

He is de chaos. He is right with the law because of what has been done for him on behalf of Christ.

01:09:22

It is a forensic declaration. It doesn't change the sinner. The sinner is changed in regeneration and sanctification.

01:09:29

Justification is a legal declaration that becomes the basis for our peace with God.

01:09:35

Romans 5 .1, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.

01:09:40

Why do we have peace with God? Why do we who are sinners, knowing that we are sinners, knowing that we sinned this day in thought and deed, why are we not here quaking in the fear of the wrath of God?

01:09:54

Well, some would say we should be. But there's clearly in Paul's teaching, joy and rejoicing and embracing of Christ and freedom and peace.

01:10:03

And what's the basis of all that? Well, the basis of all that is that forensic declaration. Wright will use that term.

01:10:10

He will talk about forensic justification. Unfortunately, he doesn't mean what we're talking about when we use the same term.

01:10:17

And I just love when terms are used in multiple different ways. He will say there is a forensic aspect of it.

01:10:23

In fact, I've got a slide a little bit later on that will show this. But what he means by that is he says, look, we need to understand the righteousness of God in the

01:10:31

Jewish law court. And what do you have in the Jewish law court? You have the judge and you have the two parties standing before the judge.

01:10:39

Remember Proverbs back in Exodus when it's talking about Moses trying to judge the people and he's wearying himself.

01:10:47

He can't do all of it and so on and so forth. They had to bring in other judges and all the rest of that stuff. The Jewish law court, the two people come in,

01:10:54

Solomon. Remember Solomon and the two mothers, the one baby, cut the kid in half, wisdom, all that kind of stuff.

01:11:01

You have the two people and the judge makes the decision on behalf of one and says, you are right, you are wrong.

01:11:10

And he says, nothing is transferred from the judge to the person who was right.

01:11:17

He was right when he came in. And the person who was wrong was wrong when they came in. There's no imputation in forensic justification.

01:11:30

And he repeats that a number of times in the book. And every time he repeated it,

01:11:35

I remember at one point I was writing, I was reading the book in an airport. I live in airports.

01:11:41

I've seen that one movie recently with Tom Hanks. What was that called? Terminal, yeah. I was like, they stole that idea from me.

01:11:51

What is that all about? I live in them. And I was in Canada. And I'm not sure if you can do good theology in Canada, but I was in Canada and I always am looking forward to getting out of Canada when

01:12:04

I'm in Canada because I'm always afraid I'm gonna get stuck there or something and never get back.

01:12:10

But anyway, I was reading the book there and I'm sure people were looking at me oddly, especially

01:12:16

Canadians, because I was like, I'm probably under my breath.

01:12:23

Because I kept wanting to say, that's not the law court that Paul himself presents.

01:12:29

Where does Paul present the law court in regards to justification? Remember Romans chapter eight?

01:12:36

Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? And then he names.

01:12:42

God is the one who's justified. Jesus Christ is the one who's died, has risen again, who intercedes for us.

01:12:51

Oh, we've got an intercessor. There is another character in the divine law court in regards to justification that somehow gets missed by Dr.

01:13:03

Wright here. And that is an intercessor, Christ himself. And when we're talking about the imputation of his righteousness, the concept of union with Christ, substitutionary atonement, all the rest of that stuff comes flying into this subject and cannot possibly be ignored.

01:13:22

Though it doesn't come into the discussion, unfortunately. So we look at Philippians 3 .9. Paul says that I may be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.

01:13:41

Now you would think, just reading that, you go, wow, okay.

01:13:47

Paul does not want to have a righteous standing before God that's based upon what he's done.

01:13:53

And immediately, being the biblical Christian you are, your mind starts going, that sounds like Titus 3, verses five through seven.

01:14:02

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by his mercy. But remember something, that's where you're wrong.

01:14:08

Paul didn't write Titus. See the disconnect with this immediately at that point?

01:14:14

You just automatically go, but, but, but, but, but, and anyway, and you sputter a while and then you move on.

01:14:21

Here's the, then it says, not of my own, but the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.

01:14:30

That sounds like a righteousness coming from God. All right, all right.

01:14:38

The key phrase here, importantly, is not to dikaiosune theou. Dikaiosune theou, the righteousness of God, God's righteousness, but dikaiosune ektheou, a righteousness from God.

01:14:51

And he's right, of course, that's true. Does that mean that this is different for Paul?

01:14:56

That would be another question. All too often, scholars here have referred to this passage as though it could be the yardstick for uses of dikaiosune theou, but this is impossible.

01:15:07

Well, his history is often wonderful when it's ancient history.

01:15:15

His history of the Reformation is not all that good, but at this point, I simply have to go, I'm sorry, but I'm seeing a tremendously unfair reading here.

01:15:23

I would say that the largest majority of scholars, at least conservative scholars, while recognizing that he says dikaiosune ektheou would simply say, all right, what is the basis for saying this is somehow different than what we have in Titus or we have someplace else?

01:15:41

But he's not functioning on the same foundation that we have to function at that point, and so doesn't have to answer the same questions.

01:15:47

Thinking back to the Hebrew law court, and there it is again, what we have here is the righteousness, the status, which the vindicated party possesses as a result of the court's decision.

01:16:00

This is a righteous status from God, and this is not, as we saw, God's own righteousness.

01:16:07

Now, let me make sure I got, okay. So what he, in essence, is saying is this is not imputed righteousness.

01:16:15

The word imputation does not appear there. We have to admit that. This isn't imputed righteousness. This is not

01:16:22

God's righteousness given to the sinner. This is simply the fact that the judge has said, because you've believed in Christ, you are given the status of a righteous person.

01:16:37

And then one of the big discussions in all of New Perspectiveism, and especially in Wright, is how do we know who has that position?

01:16:43

Well, we don't really know until the end day. That's why, as we'll see, he emphasizes the eschatological, the end aspect of justification.

01:16:54

It's more something that's still future rather than something that's past, and that should be something that makes your little alarm bells go off, too, because there ain't nothing new in that one.

01:17:06

That one's actually rather old. But time's a -wasting. I need to get through some of this stuff and see if we can start wrapping some stuff up.

01:17:15

2 Corinthians chapter five. Probably, for most of us, the first passage we thought of when we think of an exchange, the great exchange, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were making appeal through us.

01:17:32

We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made him who knew no sin to be sent on our behalf so that we, that in him, we might become, and then

01:17:45

I'm quoting directly from Wright at this point, become the dikaiosune theou.

01:17:51

He says, I have left the last critical phrase untranslated. This time, it is certainly the righteous of God, unlike Philippians 3 .9.

01:18:02

And generations of readers have taken it to be clear evidence for a sense in the lower left half of the diagram, most likely

01:18:09

B1a, in other words, the imputed righteousness of Christ. Wright knows that his view here is very much against the consensus reading of theologians all along, but that's his whole point, is that the

01:18:24

Reformation missed the boat on this topic. The Reformation did lots of good things, but the

01:18:29

Reformation missed the boat here. And aren't we all thankful for the new perspective at the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st to have corrected us?

01:18:38

It's a new Reformation in and of itself. He says,

01:18:44

I have pointed out in detail elsewhere, and he doesn't bother to even put a footnote here. It took me a little while to track it down, but this discussion is found in Pauline Theology, edited by David M.

01:18:55

Hay, Fortress Press, 1993. However, that Paul is not talking about justification in 2

01:19:03

Corinthians 5 .21, but about his own apostolic ministry, that he has already described this in chapter three as the ministry of the new covenant, that the pointed issue is the fact that apostles, now this is

01:19:18

Wright's reading of 2 Corinthians 5 .21. You start with the overarching idea, righteousness of God must mean

01:19:25

God's covenant faithfulness. Therefore, here's how you plug it in. That the pointed issue in 2

01:19:33

Corinthians 5 .21 is the fact that apostles are ambassadors of Christ with God making his appeal through them.

01:19:43

And that therefore the apostolic ministry, including its suffering, fear, and apparent failure, there certainly were problems in Corinth, weren't there?

01:19:53

Is itself an incarnation of the covenant faithfulness of God.

01:20:00

So the apostles are the incarnation of God's covenant faithfulness.

01:20:07

What Paul is saying is that he and his fellow apostles, in their suffering and fear, their faithful witness against all the odds, are not just talking about God's faithfulness, they're actually embodying it.

01:20:23

So what he's saying is that last phrase, so that in him, we, not you and I, hate to tell you this, but 2

01:20:30

Corinthians 5 .21 has nothing to do with anyone alive today. This promise has nothing to do with you.

01:20:38

This is only about the apostles. And the apostolic ministry is the we, we might become the incarnation of the righteousness of God.

01:20:51

Now, I would sort of argue, excuse me, even incarnation of the righteousness of God is not the same thing as just simply

01:20:58

God's covenant faithfulness. So that we might become the covenant faithfulness of God? Well, no, the incarnation of the covenant faithfulness of God.

01:21:06

I'm sort of like, eh, it's fudging things just a little bit, but that's what he says.

01:21:13

So he says the death of the Messiah has taken care of their apparent failure.

01:21:19

Please notice that that means he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf is about the apostles and their apparent failure.

01:21:36

Now in him, they're the righteousness of God, the living embodiment of the message they proclaim.

01:21:43

He says this reading of 2 Corinthians 5 .21 ties the verse so closely to the whole surrounding context that thereby demonstrates its correctness.

01:21:51

If however, you insist as about every single exegete before him that I can ever think of has insisted on reading 2

01:22:02

Corinthians 5 .21 with a meeting in the second half of the diagram, presumably B1A imputed righteousness.

01:22:08

You will find as many commentators have that it detaches itself from the rest of the chapter and context as though it were a little floating saying which

01:22:17

Paul just threw in there for good measure. The proof of the theory is in the sense it makes when we bring it back to the actual letter.

01:22:28

Now, don't have time to develop this fully tonight but I think just listening carefully and looking at the text, you don't have to be an

01:22:40

Oxford trained theologian to go, excuse me, but I don't think so. Give the man his due for his brilliance, but that, you know,

01:22:52

I'm sorry, that doesn't mean that especially when it's your pet theory that you're gonna be fair in the application of your pet theory that you happen to be the one who is the world's leading expert on.

01:23:05

And I think what we have here, first of all, think about Paul for a moment. How many times does

01:23:12

Paul all of a sudden in the middle of even discussing mundane things, he just mentions the gospel and all of a sudden he's a charismatic, you know what

01:23:23

I mean? Continue with me in suffering for the gospel which is the power of God, hallelujah and amen be to him.

01:23:31

And he goes on and talks about through him and to him are all things and oh yeah, what was I talking about? Oh yes, okay, and we continue on from there.

01:23:38

I mean, this is Paul, this happens and especially if you actually look at all of Paul.

01:23:44

If you don't just chop Paul's Canada up into little pieces and you look at everything Paul wrote, he does that more than once.

01:23:51

He uses tremendous theological examples as sermon illustrations.

01:23:56

That's what the entire Carmen Christi is in Philippians 2, five through 11. It's a sermon example. And so this whole thing here at the end about, well, it just becomes this little floating thing, no way.

01:24:08

No, excuse me, that doesn't even begin to do justice to the fact that there's nothing out of character for Paul to upon discussing the proclamation of, even if we say it's just the apostles, we are ambassadors for Christ, regular

01:24:29

Christians aren't. Well, okay, let's just say we're talking about apostles. He's talking about be reconciled to God.

01:24:35

Well, how can you be reconciled to God? Is it really that far off to assume that when

01:24:40

Paul would say be reconciled to God that the next thought would be, and this is how you can be reconciled to God.

01:24:47

God has made this a possibility. He's made this a reality. And he's done so in Jesus Christ because he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

01:24:59

That's the promise being held out the very foundation of the reconciliation. So there's no, this whole part here, and I went back and tracked down what he said elsewhere.

01:25:11

And trust me elsewhere, he didn't actually deal with this either. But you're left with this entire incredible statement.

01:25:22

He made him who knew no sin to be sin in our place, reduced to the mere assertion that through the death of the

01:25:34

Messiah, the apparent failure of the apostles was dealt with. Wow, I think there's a reason why, you know, my dad said a long time ago, son, if you ever think you come up with something in the

01:25:50

Bible no one's ever seen before, you're wrong. That's, you're wrong.

01:25:59

And that's someone, you know, N .T. Wright's daddy should have told him that too because that's basically what's going on here.

01:26:07

There's a reason why we look at that and we go, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.

01:26:13

This is just the apostles? And he goes through all this, he made him who knew no sin, what's the connection of that to the apostleship?

01:26:23

What's the connection of that to the context? I can see what the connection is when we talk about reconciliation to God, but if all this is about is about the apostles becoming the incarnation of the covenant faithfulness of God, we've got a real problem.

01:26:35

Well, the clock continues moving on. Let me run through a number of these.

01:26:44

Conclusion, this is the important part. Well, this is his conclusion, by the way.

01:26:50

And since some of you might be fading fast about now because it's a little warm and stuff, I'm gonna help you out here.

01:26:59

No more little wimpy red laser. And if I see you fading back there, one shot in the eye with this and believe you me, you'll be awake, you'll be blind, but you will be awake.

01:27:15

This is the conclusion which he himself offers, all right? Covenant, justification is the covenant declaration.

01:27:24

Please notice this, which will be issued when? On the last day in which the true people of God will be vindicated and those who insist on worshiping false gods will be shown to be in the wrong.

01:27:40

Secondly, law court. Justification functions like the verdict in the law court. Which law court?

01:27:46

The Jewish law court. By acquitting someone, it confers on that person the status righteous.

01:27:53

This is the forensic dimension of the future, future, future, future, covenantal vindication.

01:28:00

Now, who knows that status? Nobody knows. It's only gonna be shown in the final day. It's given to us now, but nobody sees it.

01:28:08

No one can tell until later. And even then, it is not an imputed righteousness. It is a status only.

01:28:18

Eschatology, this declaration, this verdict is ultimately to be made at the end of history.

01:28:26

And that raises all the issues about, okay, if I get this status, how do I keep it?

01:28:33

What's the nature of keeping it? So that raises all those issues. Therefore, and this is the vital thrust, the argument of Galatians in particular, but it plays a central role in Philippians, Romans as well.

01:28:43

All who believe the gospel of Jesus Christ are already demarcated as members, the true family of Abraham, with their sins being forgiven, which sounds good, but what does that mean?

01:28:56

And all the issues of the nature of one's relationship with Christ and all the rest of those things, to be honest with you, there's whole sections of this that I think

01:29:06

N .T. Wright would honestly say he hasn't yet developed the conclusions to. It's a work in process.

01:29:12

It reminds me a little bit, though not fully, but it does remind me a little bit, how many of you are familiar with the concept of open theism?

01:29:20

Anybody ever heard of John Sanders? Okay, John Sanders, Gregory Boyd, and Clark Pinnock, the big three of the open theists.

01:29:30

I debated Sanders, different Sanders. This is John Sanders, not E .P. Sanders. I debated Sanders at Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando in 2000, or 2001, or 2002.

01:29:43

Man, when you can't even remember years anymore, you're really starting to get a little bit too well -traveled. But anyways, we had a debate, and it's available, and we have it available on the website, but at one point,

01:29:54

I asked a question during cross -examination, and he made the statement. He said, well, you know what?

01:30:00

We honestly haven't figured that out yet. He said, you Calvinists have had a lot of time to work on your theology.

01:30:07

We're still working on ours. So I thought, ah, that's an honest way of putting it, and so there's some things that we haven't quite really figured out yet.

01:30:21

This is, I'm gonna go ahead and read this. Second, I must stress again that the doctrine of justification by faith is not what

01:30:26

Paul means by the gospel. This is right. For right, justification is about ecclesiology, the church, not soteriology, salvation.

01:30:39

It is implied by the gospel, when the gospel is proclaimed, which is Jesus Christ as Lord, people come to faith and so are regarded by God as members of his people, but the gospel is not an account of how people get saved.

01:30:51

It is the proclamation and lordship of Jesus Christ. If we could only get that clear in current debates, a lot of other false antitheses, not least in thinking about the mission of the church, would quietly unravel before our eyes.

01:31:02

Remember what I said, from his perspective, his view would bring unity to the church. This is the true ecumenism.

01:31:09

If everybody would just get on board and realize what Paul was all about. And that's one of the things that's attracting conservative evangelicals is they're tired of the division.

01:31:22

The gospel is the announcement of Jesus lordship, which works with power to bring people into the family of Abraham, now redefined around Jesus Christ and characterized solely by faith in him.

01:31:32

Justification is a doctrine which insists that all those who have this faith belong as full members of this family on this basis and no other.

01:31:40

And what he means by that is what Paul's problem with the Jews were is they were saying to be a member of the family of Abraham, you had to have the external covenant signs, circumcision, the observation of the law, et cetera, et cetera.

01:31:51

So the works of the law in Galatians and Romans become the ceremonial law, the demarking law, those things that made you look

01:31:59

Jewish, not works of righteousness that would give merit before God.

01:32:06

That's an old part of the debate as well. Now, this one you may hear all the time.

01:32:12

One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith. This is becoming an old,

01:32:17

I'm hearing this constantly. I've heard Doug Wilson say this. One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith.

01:32:27

Who believes that you're justified by faith by believing in justification by faith? This is a subtle way around of saying justification by faith is not definitional of the gospel.

01:32:37

And if we saw anything two months ago in the death of John Paul II, we saw this.

01:32:46

Justification by faith is not definitional to the gospel for the vast majority of evangelical leaders alive today.

01:32:57

I've never seen anything in my 20 years of ministry that's shown a brighter light on the nature of what the evangel of evangelicalism is than the death of John Paul II.

01:33:14

When you have evangelical leaders passing a man into heaven because he was a nice old man who kissed little kids and he had the right politics and ignoring the volumes of writings that he produced in praise of Mary, Mary as Mediatrix, advocate for the people of God, Agiliatrix, crediting her with saving his life, trusting his soul to her, his unquestioned faith in transubstantiation of the mass as a perpetuatory sacrifice and every element of traditional

01:33:52

Roman Catholic theology regarding the gospel, ignoring all of that and saying he was such a nice guy, boom, bingo, punches, ticket and he's in heaven.

01:34:02

When even Roman Catholic theology doesn't do that. Amazing thing to watch, absolutely amazing.

01:34:09

For the vast majority of those folks and we could name lots of names and I did on my blog and got me into lots of trouble, but for the vast majority of those folks, the

01:34:16

Reformation was a big mistake, big mistake.

01:34:23

We just shouldn't have had to have gone through all that. One is not justified by faith, but believing in justification by faith.

01:34:28

One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus. It follows, listen to this, quite clearly that a great many people, now he's saying this in reference to the book of Galatians, a great many people are justified by faith who don't know they're justified by faith.

01:34:46

The Galatian Christians were in fact justified by faith, though they didn't realize it and thought they had to be circumcised as well.

01:34:58

Think for a second, what does Galatians 5 say? What does

01:35:03

Paul say to those? Stand fast, stand firm, do not be subject to a yoke of slavery again.

01:35:10

I say to anyone among you, if you receive circumcision, what?

01:35:17

Christ will be of no benefit to you. Well, Paul, you're not nearly as open -minded as the

01:35:26

Bishop of Durham is, that's for sure. Now, I don't know if he has some textual issue with Galatians 5 not being

01:35:34

Paul or something, but Paul makes it very clear, you receive circumcision, you have fallen from grace.

01:35:43

You have been severed from Christ. Christ will be of no benefit to you. What does that tell us? These people clearly claim to be

01:35:50

Christians. They clearly claim that faith in Christ was vital and important.

01:35:56

And Paul's saying, you add to that faith the reception of circumcision, and you can talk about Christ all you want.

01:36:06

He will be of no benefit to you. Those are harsh words, but I didn't write them. I just wonder where they go in a context like this.

01:36:17

The people who receive circumcision in Galatian, the Judaizers, that Paul anathematizes and says, if you receive circumcision,

01:36:27

Christ will be of no benefit to you, they get a much nicer letter from the other side of the continent, from the

01:36:34

Bishop of Durham, who says, no, no, no, you're justified by faith. Don't worry. You just don't know it.

01:36:41

Wow, that I've not been able to figure out. I mean, I can understand most of what he's trying to say, but that one,

01:36:48

I cannot even begin to figure out. I really can't. So, let me summarize and take a couple of questions.

01:36:57

Wait a minute, you need to have the questions, don't you? Why don't you pass them, how are you gonna get ahold of them real quick? Pass them this direction, if you have any.

01:37:06

I mean, there may not be that many of them. Let me summarize as you're passing them down and then we'll be able to utilize our time more efficiently that way.

01:37:17

We've just begun to touch on things here. We really have. I mean, it's barely even,

01:37:28

I wouldn't even call it a decent summary because we didn't spend nearly enough time on some of the historical issues regarding second century

01:37:37

Judaism and all the things that go with that. But let me try to summarize why you should be concerned about this.

01:37:47

We don't live on an island. Sometimes in our churches, we get the feeling we do.

01:37:54

That we can sort of, hey, as long as things are good here at BBC or at PRBC, where I am, these other things aren't necessarily all that important.

01:38:08

But the fact of the matter is, aren't you bothered when you read in the newspaper, you hear on radio, you see on television, someone representing the

01:38:18

Christian faith and what they say is so far off of what you believe that you're just like, man.

01:38:26

And then you think about the fact, I've been witnessing to a friend of mine at work and I bet they're watching this and the very issues

01:38:34

I've been trying to talk with them about, they're gonna be hitting me with this now themselves and I'm gonna have to explain these things and how am

01:38:42

I gonna explain this? And they keep saying there's so much confusion and if the

01:38:47

Bible's so clear, why are there so many different views? And here's another one. See, we don't live on an island. And when this stuff is happening and it's happening in churches that historically have affirmed with us what justification is, they no longer do so very much but historically have done so, it only adds the confusion.

01:39:11

And so we can't insulate ourselves even when we're in a nice, good church and we have good preaching and good teaching, we have to recognize what's going on around us because A, we have to interact with the world around us as I just pointed out and B, that door is wide open.

01:39:37

And folks, when teaching comes in, it doesn't always come in waving a laser that bright.

01:39:47

It doesn't come in wearing pink and purple polka dots saying, hi, I'm gonna cause problems.

01:39:53

I'm gonna come into your Bible study classes and I'm gonna start introducing people to stuff that you don't want. They're gonna introduce it not just simply in the way of refuting, they're actually introduce it and they're gonna say it's true and it's gonna cause problems and they normally don't do that.

01:40:08

Normally they sound like us and talk like us and it may just be ignorance for them.

01:40:16

They may not be actually trying to cause a problem but there are others. Let me tell you something. There are people who get a burn their saddles and they will pick a church that they're just simply gonna cause problems at.

01:40:29

I've seen it happen. And so we can't insulate ourselves. We have to know about these things and certainly there are many who are questioning whether we have a right to have the kind of confidence that we say we have and what justification is in light of this.

01:40:45

Let me tell you one group my Roman Catholic apologists friends are not ignoring the new perspective. Oh, they love to say your own side says this.

01:40:55

See? And so if you're gonna be involved in apologetics it all ends up coming together.

01:41:01

So there are a number of reasons to consider it to be exceptionally important. Sir. Oh boy, isn't that how people do it?

01:41:12

I'm gonna ask my question before everybody else's question. Yes. Now, are you talking about what's

01:41:29

Andy Snyder? No. That's a whole nother issue. With connections though.

01:42:00

It's funny a friend of mine, you know,

01:42:06

I hate when people ask me to repeat questions for the tape. I really, you know, I just, it just drives me insane because I can never remember how to do it exactly right.

01:42:14

How would this stuff in essence demonstrate itself in a church?

01:42:19

How would you recognize that a church is actually functioning on the basis of the new perspective? And it's obviously not necessarily something that is going to pop up in every

01:42:31

Sunday service. I mean, going through Romans it might. I mean, you certainly could detect it in the comments that are made from the pulpit in regards to the nature of the righteousness of God.

01:42:39

But you could be at a church for a while before hearing certain things. But it would impact if it was being consistently applied.

01:42:47

And one of the problems here is that many of those who are being exposed to these things are in confessional churches where the confession stands inalterably opposed to the conclusions of new perspectivism.

01:43:01

What happens then? You end up with an inconsistency between what is preached and what is confessed, or you have an ahistorical redefinition of what the confession said in comparison to what it now is allegedly to be understood as having said.

01:43:17

And so the problem is how many people are actually in a position to detect when a church's confession is being rather subtly, very rarely is someone can get up in the pulpit and say, excuse me, but our confession of faith says that we are closed in the impurity of righteousness of Christ, and I would like to repudiate that today and bring it up for a vote before the people right now that we get rid of this.

01:43:41

That's not how it's done. It's done much more slowly and much more subtly than that. And so most people wouldn't even recognize that.

01:43:48

But my friend was attending this church, and he detected it in the discussions in Bible study classes about how we know who a

01:43:58

Christian is. The last stuff there toward the end about the future vindication, that's where it started coming out.

01:44:04

That was the first thing that made him go, well, wait a minute, the foundation is that I currently possess the imputed righteousness of Christ.

01:44:12

And the emphasis there was upon covenant works of faithfulness that would be vindicated in the last day.

01:44:19

And he's like, what? And he goes to the elders, and that's when he finds out what's actually going on. But for most folks, they would just not even see it until, because they don't have the background.

01:44:34

I mean, let's face it. The big argument between Protestants and Roman Catholics at the time of the

01:44:40

Reformation, the difference between imputed and imparted righteousness. What percentage, what percentage of evangelicals today would even be able to tell you what that was about, what the difference was?

01:44:57

If they're not aware of that, this is, what can

01:45:02

I say? Well, I would, first of all,

01:45:23

I'd ask them what they think that means, because for communication to take place, you have to have some idea.

01:45:29

Are they talking about, they're probably gonna be talking about an N .T. Wright type of perspective. What books have you read?

01:45:35

What are you familiar with? What do you mean by that? But secondly, for me, I cannot help but to avoid, despite the fact that this makes me a dinosaur, it makes me irrelevant, it makes me a backwoods fundamentalist in shorts, married to my first cousin with no teeth.

01:45:52

It really does. I have my teeth, but they're only fake.

01:45:58

But I have to start with the authority of Scripture. I mean, how can

01:46:03

I meaningfully begin to discuss what Paul's theology of the righteousness of God is when

01:46:09

Titus 3, five through seven, and Ephesians 2, eight through 10 can't be quoted? And why can't they be quoted, et cetera, et cetera?

01:46:16

So for me, that's really where the issue is. And if I'm gonna be talking about what the

01:46:22

Jews believed, what Jesus said in Matthew is going to be important to me, and it's going to be definitional to me, in fact, to be more important than anything else

01:46:30

I can think of, even the Mishnah is 250 years after Christ, and I have to start with the fact that we're functioning on different grounds.

01:46:39

And then once I've established that, it's fairly easy to demonstrate that Paul uses righteousness of God in a much wider way than Wright, and certainly than Sanders understands, once you have an entire

01:46:50

Pauline corpus, once you have all of Paul, instead of just bits and pieces of Paul. And then this idea about the

01:46:56

Bible being consistent with itself might be a good idea to raise as well. So that's where I would start.

01:47:15

I know that it's actually used as a textbook at Boyce College at Southern Seminary.

01:47:24

So I should have said college rather than seminary at that point. I don't know which other ones do, but I can guarantee you that at least in two others that I can think of, there wouldn't be any objection to it in any way, shape, or form.

01:47:40

I know that at Golden Gate, if I used it as a textbook, there would no one would blink an eye, wouldn't have any problem with me doing that at all.

01:47:49

Sure. Sure. Yeah. I think you were here before.

01:48:02

Right, I mentioned that. Yeah, I mentioned I wouldn't have any problem using, I mean, if I did a class on the new perspective, what better workbook to use?

01:48:12

But my understanding is it was not being used in a situation of comparison for critical perspective.

01:48:19

It was actually being, at Boyce, it was actually being used in an introductory Pauline class as one of the foundational texts.

01:48:28

Wright has written some great stuff, but I'm concerned, especially at that level.

01:48:35

I mean, I would at least think that it would be something that would be at a seminary level to where you would have the give and take but I'm not sure if anyone is aware of this, but I ran into a buzzsaw last year.

01:48:52

And I think this is relevant. So I'll share it for a moment. We got started a little bit late. I ran into a buzzsaw.

01:48:57

I gained an incredible education last summer.

01:49:03

I was on Long Island and a pastor asked me to come to his church.

01:49:09

I was gonna be speaking at that night early to talk with him, to be glad to. It's been a church that's had me there a number of times and went into the pastor's office and he showed me a book called

01:49:19

Christ Our Righteousness. And he said, this book was recommended to me by D .A.

01:49:24

Carson. Now, if anybody knows, D .A. Carson has taken the lead in providing a scholarly response to New Perspectivism in the now the two huge volumes,

01:49:34

Justification and Variegated Nomadism, volumes one and two. And his co -author, co -editor on those volumes is a man by the name of Mark Seyfried.

01:49:45

And Mark Seyfried teaches at Southern Seminary in Louisville and this was his book called Christ Our Righteousness. It came out in the year 2000.

01:49:51

So this is 2004. So it's four years later. And he says, this was recommended to me as response and yet I got to the seventh chapter and could we read through this together and I'd like to get your thoughts.

01:50:05

Okay, I've got the book at home. I had used it, some sections of it, but I hadn't read the whole thing. So we go through chapter seven and chapter seven starts talking about how categories of imputation are unbiblical, sub -biblical, misleading.

01:50:21

The active and passive obedience of Christ distinction is very misleading.

01:50:28

And I'm sitting here going, he says, you see why I'm confused because one of the main issues to me in the new perspective is the idea of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

01:50:38

And this chapter seems to be indicating that's not terminology I should use in my preaching, that doesn't fully give the idea of what

01:50:48

Paul's actually after and that we've missed the boat here. And I'm like, wow, that does seem to be what's being said here, yeah.

01:50:54

And so I went home and I went to Mill Valley to teach for a week.

01:51:00

And while I was at Mill Valley, I started working on a review of that chapter.

01:51:08

Because I thought, you know, if a pastor, and what I really appreciate about this pastor is he says, you know, I'm a busy pastor.

01:51:14

I have a large church here. There's lots of, you know, I've got babies and deaths and dah, dah, dah, dah, you know,

01:51:19

I've got all these things. But I try to keep up with what's going on in theology. I only have a certain amount of time. And I run into this and it really bothers me.

01:51:27

If he was confused by that, then there may be many others who are confused by it as well. And so I took the time to quote extensively.

01:51:37

In fact, in everything else I've read, I've discovered since then, I arrived on this story real late. In other words, there were articles and jets.

01:51:45

I talked with Dr. Duncan about this and he said, I haven't known about this stuff since the mid 90s. I arrived on the scene really, really late.

01:51:52

But at least I gave to my knowledge the fullest, fairest review and interaction.

01:51:59

It's still on the website. You can still go read it with Dr. Seyfried's chapter and especially the material on the issue of imputation and the passive and active obedience of Christ.

01:52:11

And I did this in a blog format. So if you're familiar with blogs, you know that blogs post things on a, you know, you do a section a day.

01:52:18

You don't just do a big, huge core dump. And so it took a couple of weeks to post it all.

01:52:26

The firestorm that that prompted, I can't even begin to describe to you.

01:52:35

I really can't. And the seminary wrote a response.

01:52:43

Didn't mention me by name, but the seminary wrote a response to my review.

01:52:50

It didn't deal with what my review said, but they wrote a response to it. Now when a seminary takes time to do that, they've been hearing stuff.

01:52:59

And it's all on the blog. If you wanna go look at it, it's just aomin .org slash seyfried .html.

01:53:05

You can read the whole thing for yourself. It's an amazing, amazing, amazing thing that has continuing repercussions this day.

01:53:14

The response did not have to do with the nature of what

01:53:20

Dr. Seyfried said. The response was, how dare you review what a seminary professor said?

01:53:29

In fact, I had someone there that I won't mention wrote to me and said that I had betrayed my trust as a professor at a

01:53:38

Southern Baptist seminary by daring, and I ask anyone, read what

01:53:44

I said. Read my review of Seyfried. There was no ad hominem. I don't know the man, if he could be sitting here tonight for all

01:53:53

I know. I dealt only with what he said. I did not go after him. The book had been out for four stinking years.

01:54:02

There's nothing that I, none of my conclusions were any different than what Guy Waters says about Dr.

01:54:08

Seyfried in the book that you mentioned that was passed out, which was recommended by Dr. Muller. There was articles in Jets, all the stuff that said all the same things

01:54:17

I did. The one thing I did different, I guess, well, two things

01:54:22

I did different was this, A, at one point I quoted Seyfried in regard to the act of impassive obedience of Christ, and then

01:54:30

I quoted James P. Boyce. James P. Boyce, one of the founding fathers of the

01:54:36

Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Seminary. Abstract systematic theology is the doctrinal standard for Southern Seminary beyond the

01:54:46

Baptist confession of faith, Baptist faith and message. And I quoted the whole two paragraphs that Boyce had, affirming and teaching the act of impassive obedience of Christ.

01:55:01

And then I quoted Seyfried's dismissal thereof in essence. And all I said was one sentence.

01:55:06

I said, it seems very obvious to me that Dr. Boyce's view of the act of impassive obedience of Christ is much fuller than Dr.

01:55:13

Seyfried's. That was turned into a witch hunt on my part to get him fired for violating the abstract theology, which never even crossed my mind.

01:55:22

I can't imagine anyone would even want to debate whether his view was in fact lesser than Boyce's.

01:55:29

But the whole idea was you did this in the wrong context.

01:55:35

The only place for that kind of dialogue is in scholarly journals.

01:55:42

Don't involve the people in the church. That's what

01:55:47

I learned. Don't involve the people in church. Don't do this in any other context other than journals that quite honestly, the readership is what?

01:56:00

It's all one type of, one group of people, isn't it? I did it in the context, and I'm sorry, but my purpose was transparent from the beginning.

01:56:11

Pastor confused by book. I concern for pastors, therefore review the book.

01:56:18

Real simple. I learned that that can really get your head handed to you on a platter real fast.

01:56:24

And it was an education. And I can't say that it was a positive education. And I can't say that the matter has actually been resolved to this day.

01:56:33

I wish I could say that, but it hasn't. And I don't know what is gonna happen in the future.

01:56:39

But it was a, I'll think about, I have to admit, I would have to think twice in the future.

01:56:46

I couldn't help but think twice. I would hope that would not stop me from doing it. But I would have to think twice.

01:56:51

I really would. So anyways. Brother? Day by day, somebody asked, as if anyone could read, no compromise from that far away.

01:57:36

Yes, I have, you've seen these rubber, these bands that people are wearing for all these different things.

01:57:42

Like that yellow one, and mine's a blue one that says no compromise on it.

01:57:49

I came up with the idea after the brouhaha that developed after the

01:57:56

Pope's death. I mean, you would not believe the unhinged emails that we received, because I dared to say, excuse me, but isn't the whole issue of someone's eternal destiny related to the gospel?

01:58:12

That radical idea unleashed a torrent of not only

01:58:18

Roman Catholics who didn't like the very fact that I was even talking about that. I mean, there are many Roman Catholics who felt we should just shut up.

01:58:24

Shut up, don't talk about the gospel, be quiet. That this is an opportune time. But it was the

01:58:29

Protestants. How unloving. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, whoa, whoa, time out here.

01:58:36

What can be more loving than to talk about what the gospel is? I mean, and I preached a sermon at a church in Detroit, which is still available on the website, two days after the

01:58:48

Pope's death. And I had so many former Roman Catholics coming up to me afterwards saying, thank you.

01:58:56

No one understands what we're going through in trying to witness to our families.

01:59:02

You understand it, you've seen it, but no one even in our church seems to understand what we're going through.

01:59:10

And so the pressure to compromise, to shut up, to stop talking about the offensive aspects of the gospel.

01:59:21

I was looking at all the bands out there and God bless Lance Armstrong with Salvation, first and foremost, big time.

01:59:35

But as I was thinking about that, I was saying, you know, I'd like to have a Christian one. And in light of that, we put together these little no compromise bands.

01:59:43

So that was the story there. Oh yeah, no kidding. They'd be easy to carry around.