William Lane Craig, Andy Stanley, and Albert Mohler, Then, Surah 9, Islam, and the Changed Heart

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. I did remember today to see the Borg sphere there next to the Tribble. It's sort of a bobblehead thing, but there's the Borg sphere, not cube. Anyway, it came out of the cube, if you remember the movie.

If you didn't see the movie, then it really isn't making much sense. And you're wondering why there are fuzzy things on top of a green glowing cube next to me and probably don't really understand, but that's okay.

It's all right. So remember the Borg sphere today and appreciate that I was given that. I think that was at Kensington Temple, I think, because someone came up to me and gave me that after the dialogue with Abdullah Al-Andalusi.

And now everything just went black over here. That was happening last time. It flashes on and off and does fun stuff like that. So it's sort of weird. Huh? Yeah, it's back now, but it goes on and off and sort of odd and strange.

So anyway, yes, Robert, there is a live stream and you're not listening to it. Anyway, well, I'm hoping there's live stream. The look on Rich's face seems to indicate that there actually isn't a live.

YouTube weirdness. YouTube is reporting weird things to me. That's really exciting. I'm glad to hear that, that YouTube is reporting weird things. That probably explains no video or audio, according to the people in the channel, which means it's not working at all.

So what's your suggestion here? Just hopefully it's recording and we get to do a dead cast again. Lovely. Got to work on this. It's frustrating to tell folks, here we go. And then, well, but it's what's the chances of it doing anything?

Yeah. Yeah. So once again, I will minimize the channel. We won't have any interaction with folks because I'm just going to get flooded with, we can't see anything. Nothing's working. And I know, and there's nothing we can do about that.

And I don't know why that is. We need to, like I said last time, need to contact the IP folks because I don't know. Anyway, I will attempt to put that behind me and focus upon important things, which is somewhat difficult to do.

But we will do our best anyway, because we do have important things to talk about today. And yesterday morning, my YouTube, not YouTube. See, I've got YouTube in the mind. My Twitter account became quite active as people started telling me about what was going on with Reasonable Faith and Dr. William Lane Craig.

And that actually, it looked like the date was the day before, but maybe it just dropped that morning or late in the evening. I really don't know. But anyway, the episode that had been recently released sort of went back to, I think, last year sometime.

Let me look at the, I'm not sure what this, let's see. Well, that says March 27th, but that's not when it was released. September 26th of last year, Dr. Moeller posted an article, For the Bible Tells Me So, Biblical Authority Denied Again. Subtitle, A True Defense of the Christian Faith Has Never Been More Needed Than Now, But an Attempt to Rescue Christianity from Its Dependence Upon Scripture Is Doomed to Disaster.

And so, this was posted last year, and Dr. Craig decided to respond to it, this most recent episode of his webcast. Now, sometime, I forget exactly when it was last year, we dedicated a number of programs to the discussion of Andy Stanley and his sermon series and specifically his comments in regards to the relationship of scripture and the Christian faith.

And I said at that time that what Andy Stanley is doing here is he is popularizing the perspective of William Lane Craig. This is the minimalist perspective. This is the make Christianity as, make the target as small as possible.

Mere Christianity, the idea of the Trinity, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, leave everything else out. And I'll be perfectly honest with you, I'm starting to wonder if even a fully-orbed doctrine of the Trinity gets included in all of that.

But it also, you know, we have for years been attempting to help people understand, because look, my audience, the audience of Reformed apologists at Westminster and elsewhere, our audience and Dr. Craig's audience touch.

There are a lot of people who listen to what we have to say, who go, well, you know, that Calvinism stuff, you know, I'm not so much on that, but I like what you have to say on other things. Never understood that.

Reformed theology is what holds it all together, and so I've never really followed that, but what can I say? Anyway, we have attempted to make it clear, because it's a source of confusion. You know, I was being criticized on Twitter.

There's a guy, thereforeGodexists on Twitter he was accusing me of gossip, that this is going to be gossip. I was like, good postmodernist that he must be, though he would certainly scream if I said that.

Evidently, words don't have meaning, because gossip has a certain meaning, and my consistently responding to Dr. Craig's Molinism and his evidentialism and the perspective that he takes on apologetics and differentiating that from a biblical perspective, providing a biblical response, that's not gossip.

If you call it gossip, you no longer have any meaningful way of communicating with people. It's amazing. But anyhow, what? Oh, that's good. So anyhow, it's not at all surprising why we would take the time to respond to what Dr. Craig is saying, because if we do not, and look, it would be a whole lot easier for me, trust me, to just go with the flow, you know, and to just say, hey, everybody's, you know, whatever anybody has to say, it's good, everything's fine, because I have to respond to these things, because we do respond to atheism, to unbelief, to the secular movement in a different way than Dr. Craig does, and this causes confusion amongst people that go, wait a minute, we're all Christians, why aren't we defending things the same way?

Because apologetic methodology must flow from our theology and not the other way around. And I have criticized Dr. Craig for decades, probably coming up on at least two decades, I think, in late 1990s, you know, we're getting pretty close, for inverting that relationship.

And obviously, there are theological issues upon which I have strong disagreement with Dr. Craig, his Molinism being one of the primary ones, but there are others too, his frequent attacks upon Reformed theology, and so on and so forth.

But since this creates confusion, then there needs to be regular, because we have new listeners to the program all the time, regular interaction on this subject, and it is what we would call a teachable moment.

It is an opportunity to make appropriate distinctions, and in so doing, help people to understand why it is we emphasize so strongly the need for consistency in doing Christian apologetics, and that this is a theological activity.

We are seeking to be obedient to our Lord. This is something every Christian is commanded to do. When we are told in Scripture to be ready to give an answer, before that apologetic is ever mentioned, every Christian is commanded to set Christ as kurios, as Lord, quoting from Isaiah, as Yahweh, treat Him as holy in our hearts, and that this is going to so reorient our priorities that people are going to come to us and ask us for the reason to help us with this, and then we are to be able to give that consistent apologetic.

Most presentations on apologetics in that text from Peter invert that relationship, but you can't. Apologetics is a part of evangelism. Evangelism is a presentation of the gospel. It's all theological.

It's all theological. Now, today, you're going to hear Dr. Craig saying, well, that's apologetics, not theology. He's going to attempt to drive a huge wedge between doing apologetics and theology. I recognize that writing a text on a particular topic in systematic theology, hypostatic union, issues in the atonement, can be distinguished from apologetics in dealing with an atheist.

I recognize that. However, what is extremely dangerous to me is the idea of thinking that the very essence of the message you're attempting to communicate can somehow be isolated from the methodology you use of communicating it.

Apologetics is theology. Doing apologetics is engaging in a theological thing, and this is where there's another huge difference, because we say that if you're going to follow the scriptural example, if you're going to follow the apostles, then what you're going to have to do is recognize the nature of the person to whom you're speaking.

Well, where do you get information about the nature of the person to whom you're speaking? That's all theological. So, no matter what you do, no matter how you approach the subject, it has to be theology.

It is all theology. It's soaked in theology. So, to deny that relationship, as Dr. Craig's going to do here, is pretty amazing. So, in this program, what they did is they started off and they played about five minutes of Andy Stanley.

Man, I had forgotten some of the things he had said. It's not like I sit around thinking about Andy Stanley every day. But we're going to go ahead and play that, and again, I'm playing it fast so we can get through it a little bit quicker.

But I do want to remind us of what prompted all these things, and I may make a few comments along the way, but probably won't make too many because we've been over this ground before. So, here is what Andy Stanley had to say, and this is presented to us at the beginning of the Reasonable Faith podcast.

Andy Stanley, Reasonable Faith Podcast Host. Many of you, you're like me, many of you were brought up to believe this. Jesus loves me, this I know, right? I mean, it's a fabulous song. Most of our kids are still singing this song.

We sang this song. Jesus loves me, this I know. What's the next line? Right, for the Bible tells me so. And this is where our trouble began. It really did. This is where our trouble began because, and don't leave, because the implication is, the implication

Jared. That has to say, don't leave,.

Because for a lot of folks, it's like, our trouble began by saying, because we recognize the supremacy of Scripture as the foundation of Christian faith. The Christian faith is a revealed faith. Now, of course, that's not what he's talking about.

And the impreciseness of his words is his own fault. He's talking about a childish faith that remains childish. And no one's going to argue that a childish faith should remain childish, that you shouldn't learn more about the Bible, so on and so forth.

It's what he thinks he's learned about the Bible, that it's wrong about the Exodus, that it's wrong about the flood, and a few other things in the process. That's where the problem really lies here.

Jared. This is important. The implication is, the Bible is the reason we believe.

No, the Bible is the source of the object of our faith. We believe in God because He's spoken to us. God wants us to know who He is, so He's revealed Himself. And so, Scripture becomes God's speech to us that God holds all men accountable to.

So, it's not the reason we believe, it's the means that God has given to us what we are to believe. There's a tremendous amount of imprecision in Andy Stanley's words. That's one of the problems. Andy I was a reason to believe.

In other words,.

I can believe Jesus loves me because it's in the Bible. I grew up in a church where basically the byline, the subtitle for everything was, if the Bible says it, that—anybody? Settles it, right here on the front row.

That's right. If the Bible says it, that settles it. And so, we send kids off to college with a, if the Bible says it, that settles it, and oh my goodness, they discover that that didn't settle it. Jared.

Here's the problem. This is, he engages a tremendous amount of equivocation in this presentation. Once again, he takes the low bar on all this. So, he sent people off to university, and I've bemoaned this many times, without giving them mature faith, a foundation for recognizing the supremacy of Scripture, knowing where Scripture came from, knowing how we received it, really even knowing what it teaches.

That's not the same thing as recognizing the complete necessity of a divine revelation as the foundation of our faith. That's not the same thing. Being ignorant of that, and yet, you know, that's one thing.

But knowing it and recognizing the centrality of revelation, everything else, that's completely different. And yet, he allows those.

Two things to coalesce. And then they come home and they say, mom, dad, grandma, my granddad, uncle, aunt, did you know, did you know? It's like, I don't ask those questions. The Bible.

Says it, that settles it. The Bible says it, that settles it. That's not how we do apologetics, obviously. What he's referring to is a dysfunctional ignorance, and making that the same thing as meaningful Christian scholarship, understanding of Scripture, Christian worldview, that may have been his experience, and sadly, it is the experience of many people in shallowly evangelical churches where you don't preach the whole counsel of God, where you don't challenge people, things like that.

You know, I was talking to my daughter, and she was, we were at dinner a couple nights ago, and she mentioned why it was she first memorized Romans 1, verses 18 -32, and it was, if I recall, it was in Mike Porter's Sunday school class at our church.

And I think about the teachers that she had in junior high and high school, people like Warren Smith and Mike Porter, and they're all people that have been involved with this ministry, and they're going to be emphasizing the very things that, yeah, are not normally emphasized in most places.

That's quite true. There's no question about it. But that does not mean it's the application he's making. I join him in bemoaning the lowest state. It's his, the lowest state of Christian education amongst Christians.

It's his answer that is disastrous. And as Dr. Moeller rightly pointed out, he takes the Schleiermacher perspective, and, well, we'll see that in just a moment.

Problem is this. The problem with that is this. If the Bible is the foundation of our faith, if the Bible is the foundation of our faith, as the Bible goes, so goes our faith. In other words, Christianity cannot survive if the Bible goes away.

Yeah, Christianity cannot survive if we do not have a revelation from God. Duh. That's exactly right. Notice the conflation here. He's now conflating the ignorance that he described before with the actual statement that, yes, the foundation of the Christian faith is the Bible, which Christians have believed from the beginning.

I mean, we mentioned this back in September of last year. You cannot possibly look at the early church fathers and not recognize that they all said the same thing, that Scripture is the final authority, that it's absolutely definitional, etc., etc.

What we know about the resurrection, what we know about the reason of the resurrection, the function, the gospel, it all comes from Scripture. So, yeah, that's a given. But notice how he's going between the two, between a ignorant misrepresentation and then the actual theological assertion.

And that's massively problematic.

Christianity cannot survive if somehow every single part of the Bible isn't absolutely true, if the Bible is the foundation of our faith. If the Bible is the foundation of our faith, it is all or nothing.

This is why, when you grew or growing up, every once in a while, you would bring information to your parents or your grandparents or maybe somebody else who was raising you, and you'd say, today at school we learned, and they just kind of shut you down.

We don't believe that. We don't.

That's not what I did. That's not what anybody needs to do. I'm sorry if that's what Andy Stanley experienced. I really am. But that does not mean that Scripture is not God-breathed. That does not mean that Scripture is not inerrant, just because you don't know how to defend that, just because you haven't done your homework.

It doesn't follow.

We don't believe that. We're Christians. We don't believe that. It's like, yeah, but it's true. Well, we don't believe that. Well, what was that about? Why are Christians so afraid? Why are Christians so fearful?

Why are we not the most curious people and scientifically oriented people in the world? I'll tell you why. Because you were raised in a cult.

See, he's assuming things that are simply untrue. I was just, one of the books that I'm working through, I'm working through a couple of different books. I'm just about done with N .T. Wright's new book on the atonement.

We'll have some comments about that when I finish it up. But I've also, I'm almost done with Darwin's doubt. And I've read, I don't know, three or four books from the Discovery Institute and on intelligent design, people like that.

I guess Andy Stanley doesn't read these books. These people aren't Christians. I don't know. This is just so far from my experience. And are there lots and lots and lots of people who are raised in really shallow churches?

Yeah, there are. Is that what he's saying? He was raised in a shallow church. But you do not extend that kind of misuse of certain truths. Well, the Bible's true, so we just don't worry about all the rest of that stuff.

Well, if the Bible's true, if God is the creator of all these things, then there's actually answers to these issues. And once you actually develop a mature Christian worldview, you can normally find out where people have missed the boat in their utilization of argumentation, in scholarship today, etc., etc.

That's normally how you can do it. But anyway. Like I was raised in, and it was all or nothing.

If anything proves that something in the Bible isn't actually, absolutely, historically, scientifically reliable, uh-oh, the whole thing comes tumbling down. Because this version of.

Christianity is a house of cards. Did you catch that? This is, you know, you're all picking on Andy Stanley. He just said that the historic understanding of the foundational concept of the Bible is a house of cards.

I haven't heard too many people saying, hey, uh, shouldn't he have been a little bit more careful in his statements? Yeah? Instead, it's, well, he's just doing a great job. It's wonderful. It shouldn't be.

Okay. And all you have to do is pull out one card and the whole thing comes tumbling down. Christianity becomes a fragile house of cards that comes tumbling down when we discover that perhaps the walls of Jericho didn't.

Perhaps the walls of Jericho didn't fall. You know, it's funny. I had not seen the, uh, the video that came out, I guess, the year before last. Evidence for, was it Evidence for Exodus? Is that what the name is?

I've got it on my other, well, I might actually have it on this one. No, no, no, I don't, not on this. No, I might. Anyway, I'm not going to bother looking for it. But the Evidence for Exodus, I think is what it was called.

It was a really well done video. And what I enjoyed about it was it came to conclusions that I'd come to in seminary. Because again, I was in the minority in seminary. In seminary, you're taught that there's no evidence for the Exodus and that the Exodus took place 200 years out of sync with history and all the rest of the stuff.

And this video just goes through. And of course, back then, I only had X amount of information. But I was like, oh, it looks like there's some real presuppositions going on here. I thought presuppositionally and said, well, it would be obviously better.

You know, because remember, for a long period of time, in the 1800s, there were certain peoples in the Old Testament that scholars confidently told us never existed. These were just mythological developments of the scriptural writers and they never existed and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Well, and then what happens? You do a dig, you pull up these documents and lo and behold, guess what? Here's the very people that we've been told were mythological and this is in non-biblical writings and we were wrong all along and the Bible was right.

The Bible has been proven right so many times that it's probably best in areas of ignorance. And once you get that many thousands of years back, there's only so much information you can derive to go with the Bible rather than with people saying, I think the Bible is wrong about this based upon theories and so on and so forth.

So I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that the Exodus was probably 1400, not 1200 BC in that timeframe. Well, here's a whole video now with all sorts of new stuff going, wow, look at this, look at this.

If we just slide everything back, everything fits. Look at that. And why don't the scholars do that? Because that would mean having to stand up in the academy and say, we've been wrong and we can't do that because our jobs are wrong.

And it's like, ah, I've heard this someplace before. It's like whatever happens when you sit there and look at the structure of mitochondria in the cell and go, that's designed there. You can't say that.

We'll kick you out. Yeah, I've seen that before too. Yeah. So what can you say? What happens? He just accepts these things. We found out it didn't happen. That's the way it is. Capitulation on Andy Stanley's part.

We're told that perhaps there was no.

Exodus from Egypt to the promised land. There's no historical evidence of that. Really? I mean,.

Can you imagine what would happen to biblical theology if there was no Passover? I made the point Sunday evening in my sermon. It was really strange because I got to the end of a really deep passage, the John 10, 31 and following, you know, I said, your gods and Psalm 82 .6 and all the rest of that stuff.

We went through all of that, made a number of certain people's fans unhappy once again. Yeah, the guy at Logos. Anyway, and there's this transitionary paragraph, very short. I made a whole sermon out of it.

You might say, wow, you really had to milk that one. One of the points I made was it talks about Jesus going across the Jordan to where John the Baptist has been baptizing and people remember what John had said about Jesus there and stuff like that.

And here is the point. The point was this happened at a particular time in a particular place. It's rooted in history. Can you imagine how you could even have New Testament theology without the Passover?

And what we're hearing here from Andy Stanley is, well, you know, that we're not really not so sure about the historical stuff, you know, and it could just be a story, you know, but the resurrection is true.

That part, but all the stuff that was wrapped around it and stuff, it could just all be mythology and things like that. Look, what Dr. Moeller said in his article, what I said in my review, what Dr. Craig ignored in both is some of us have heard this before.

Some of us have heard this before. We know a little something about church history over the past three or four hundred years. And, you know, I went to Fuller. I've heard all this before. And people are rushing to Andy Stanley.

He's not getting liberal. He believes all these things. You know, all everybody who went liberal started off by saying, you know what I'm trying to do? I just want to make sure that the core message remains believable in this modern day.

You know, I want to keep it relevant. You know, they all started that way and ended up denying the whole kitten caboodle, completely redefining it. We've heard this before. There's nothing new here. That's.

The problem. We're told in school and in graduate school that there's no evidence for a worldwide flood when people point out apparent contradictions in the Bible. When in school, we're told there's no way the earth is six thousand years old.

It's four and a half or four point five five billion years old. The universe is fourteen and a half billion years old. And all of a sudden, all we have to do, you know, the tension is around the Bible says the Bible says the Bible says, but science has said science has said the Bible says science has said the Bible says.

And so what's all this about? Having a mature Christian worldview. That's what it's about. Is Andy Stanley correct that there are people sitting in front of him who were raised in nominal Christian situations that were never challenged?

Well, first of all, they were never converted. And even if they were, they were not taught to develop purposefully, intentionally, consciously a mature Christian worldview. Is that all he's saying? No, that's not all he's saying.

He's right that that happens. Maybe that happened with him, but it's the solution that's fatal. It's a fatal solution. That's the problem. All of a sudden, there's this extraordinary, extraordinary tension.

If the Bible, if the Bible. Tension, man, did I get sick and tired of that phrase in seminary. There's tension here in the text. If the entire Bible isn't true,.

Then let's be honest, the Bible isn't true. I mean, if the whole thing isn't true,.

Because when you grew up and I grew up, if you grew up in a church. I love this. Well, most of it's true. Who gets to decide? What's the criteria, Andy Stanley? Well, most of it's true. Okay. So how much?

What about those prophecies of Jesus? What, you know, for some reason, the early church taught that the Jesus Christ rose in the dead third day, according to the scriptures. What does that mean? Which scriptures?

How much error is in those scriptures? Again, it sounds good until you make application and.

The wheels fall off. And the United States is basically, the Bible says that that settles it. The Bible says that that settles it. And then we grow up and we become adults. We become aware of things that make us wonder if everything in the Bible is true.

Now see, then we grow up.

So we were, we were babies when we believed this and only babies continue to believe this. That's, that's really where, where it's coming from. And what this is demonstrating is that Andy Stanley was not taught to be a mature Christian and have a mature Christian worldview as a young person.

And that happens, happens a lot. Again, the solution is fatal.

And when we conclude, or if we come to the conclusion that maybe it's not all as true as we were told it was true, Christianity comes tumbling down. Christians feel, your parents felt, your pastor felt, perhaps you still feel that the pressure to defend the Bible, because if you don't defend the Bible, you can't defend Christianity.

And this puts the Bible in the center of the debate. This puts the spotlight on the Bible. This puts the Bible in a place that if we can't defend everything in it, everything in it goes away. And the good news is that that's very unfortunate.

And the great news is that is absolutely unnecessary. Christianity and the Christian faith is far, far, far more endurable than any of that. So here's, here's my plea today, and then we're going to jump into some detail.

If you deconvert...

Now again, okay, so what's the Christian faith again? And do not use the Bible. Good luck. The only place to go there is to go to tradition, abandon any type of concept of sola scriptura. I mean, it's, it is an incoherent position, but we're not saying anything we didn't say earlier.

If you walked away from Christianity, if you kind of step back from the whole thing because of something you read in the Bible, something you were told about the Bible, I want you to listen carefully.

Because at the end, I want to invite you to take a step back toward the faith of your childhood, not childhood faith. It's time that it grows up. But the great news is there is a grown-up version. There is an adult version that is far less fragile than the Bible says that settles it.

And if the Bible didn't say it, that doesn't settle it. And if there's anything wrong with the Bible, then the whole thing comes tumbling, tumbling down.

Jared. So there's, there's Andy Stanley, and that's what we talked about before. Now let's dive into the conversation between Kevin.

And William Lane Craig. William. Can you see how Dr. Molerud might be a little upset? Dr. Molerud. Oh, absolutely. William. And that's just one small snippet, Bill, of this whole sermon that Andy Stanley is delivering.

At first brush, it may sound like we don't believe Christianity because of the Bible is a denial of biblical authority.

Dr. Molerud. That's what it sounds like, but that's not what he meant. And as you read the entire article by Al Moler, I think that's very clear. What Andy Stanley is trying to do is make a fundamental distinction that I make in reasonable faith between apologetics and theology.

Now, what have I said from the start? As soon as I heard this, I said, oh, thank goodness, my fundamental criticism of reasonable faith and William Lane Craig has now been documented to the nth degree.

Make sure to download this and save it, because what have I said from the start? Theology determines apologetics. Not for William Lane Craig. And if I can establish the biblical reality that for a Christian, your theology must be the determinative factor in the creation of your apologetic, then the debate's over.

I would love to have a debate on this. Oh, we could have. Could you imagine if Biola would step up and on one night, and hey, California's not very far from here. Of course, he's in Atlanta. But one debate on doctrines of grace versus his synergism.

Another debate, Molanism. Is it consistent with biblical revelation? Final debate, apologetic methodology. How do we represent apostolic truth in a modern age? Man, that would be really useful to the church.

And there is no question. There is no question about the fact that those debates could be done in an absolutely respectful, proper, scholarly manner. Because between the two of us, we have a minimum of 300 debates.

If he's done as many as I have, I've done over 150. So there isn't any question about how well it could be done. Wouldn't that be valuable? It's never going to happen. And not because we won't do it. Not because we won't do it.

But.

Anyway. When we do systematic theology, the basis of theology, the rule of faith is Scripture. The Scripture is the only authoritative and infallible rule for faith and practice. But when we do apologetics, we are attempting to persuade someone who doesn't accept the authority of the Bible to believe that God exists and that God has decisively revealed himself in Jesus so as to place.

Your faith in Jesus. Now, just stop. Why? Why? Every word that was just used that's supposed to be extra theological only has meaning theologically. You're trying to convince someone who a rebel sinner against God, someone creating the image of God, someone whose reasoning capacity is the result of creation.

The very idea that you can reason that there is objective truth, dependent upon what theology? Dependent upon what God has done. And you're trying to get him to believe. Now, he said in God, but he starts off in a God.

There's a huge difference between getting someone to believe in a God and believe in the God. And then the specific revelation of God in Jesus Christ. And so we're talking about the deity of Christ. But we're also talking about Jesus as Messiah, as Son of God.

Saying, I want you to believe in Jesus, but I'm not going to get into theology is an empty set of words. It's a waste of breath. When Jesus presented himself to the Jews, he said, unless you believe that I am, you'll die in your sins.

In other words, you can believe all sorts of things about me that are partially true, but unless you believe the truth about me, you'll die in your sins. That's what Jesus said, which is why liberals said, nah, you never say that.

But anyways, so just listen carefully and be amazed at the result of what happens when you have an apologetic methodology that is not derived, does not receive its lifeblood from the exegesis of Scripture.

In fact, I really doubt that many people in this camp actually believe that you can derive your apologetic from Scripture. Scripture's even intended to give you an apologetic. I doubt they actually believe that.

And the apologetic enterprise or task does not depend upon biblical authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and all the rest.

Jared. Now, did you catch that? I'm going to play that again. In fact, I'm going to outline this and I'm going to change its color just so I remember where that is. We may need to make this a clip for use in future programs.

And the apologetic enterprise or task does not depend upon biblical authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and all the rest. Those things are important for doing theology, but when you're doing apologetics, those sorts of things are not presupposed, lest one be arguing in a circle.

Jared. Aha! Aha! Lest one be arguing in a circle. And here's the problem with that. You see, there's this thing called ultimate authorities. And any ultimate authority fundamentally, if you're going to accuse it of something, is going to be circular because an ultimate authority cannot appeal to an authority above and beyond itself.

When you, and I learned this from someone else many, many, many years ago, we all learn everything from somebody else. When you go into the court of law, well, used to anyways, and you put your hand on a Bible, why did you used to do that?

You are swearing by something greater than yourself. You're saying, I'm going to say, I'm going to speak the truth. And I swear by one that has higher authority than me that I'm speaking the truth. You see, this is the nature of oaths in the scripture.

Swearing by the temple, so on and so forth. Well, that's something that's greater than I am. So, that's why I swear by it. Who does God swear by? By himself, because there's nothing greater than him. Well, isn't that circular?

Yes, because he has to be the ultimate authority. And that's why scripture's truthfulness is not derived from any authority outside of itself and cannot be, because if there is an authority greater than God speaking, then that becomes the ultimate authority you're trying to prove.

And so, if you have the highest view of scripture, that it's God speaking, it's not just simply men thinking about God, their words elevated by the spirit of God or something like that. If you believe the scripture is actually a revelation, that it's theanoustos, then you can point to its consistency to other things as indicators of its truthfulness, but those cannot become the basis upon which you accept its truthfulness.

Instead, scripture becomes that which judges you, because if it's God speaking and you're a mere creature, then you are beneath it in authority and are under its authority. So, what Dr. Craig and the evidentialists are just loathe to admit is that in their system, they put God in the dock.

They put God in a position where you get to judge him. And what you do with the rebel sinner is you elevate the rebel sinner and you say, you judge the evidence and you decide whether God exists or not.

And the biblical presentation is God gets to decide. He's the judge and he's going to judge you. And he's already revealed himself. He's already given plenty of evidence. That means we are unapologetus, without an apologetic.

We cannot give a consistent defense of our rejection of our creator and our own recognition of our own created nature. And so, there's the real issue. We can't presuppose these things. We can pretend that we have this neutral ground with people.

We can lay these things aside. No, you can't. No, you can't. You can pretend. You can engage in fantasy apologetics. And guess what? God's even used fantasy apologetics a few times in the past. Yes, indeed.

God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick, but that doesn't mean that we want to do that because we want to glorify God. We don't want to make him overcome our errors and our inconsistencies. Well, I call it fantasy apologetics because there is no neutral ground.