Four Calls, A Bit on Thinking Clearly About Numbers, Digging into More from Wilson's Dissertation

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00:32

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We're taking your phone calls at 877 -753 -3341.

00:39

We only have one line left open. If you want to jump in right at the start before we go to the phone calls, just want to make sure you are aware of the fact that American Vision has put out

00:54

Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview by Greg Bonson, edited by Gary DeMar, and so when people are always asking about books on presuppositionalism and things like that, there are a number and most of them actually are designed to be sort of an intro type thing.

01:15

Jason Lyle's work and Pratt's work and things like that. And there are a few, if I don't mention it, it's not because I don't recommend them or something.

01:24

I just haven't read all of them. We've been sent many of them over the years, and I do need to go through my library and put them all together so that maybe we could put a bibliography together or something.

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You can go to American Vision and get Against All Opposition by Greg Bonson. Also coming up...

01:46

Actually, it's probably going on right now. We're probably actually competing. So you'll probably need to listen to this debate, but Chris Arntzen on Iron Sharpens Iron is doing a very important debate.

01:59

I hope he doesn't have technical difficulties, and I hope their server can survive the strain.

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They are having a debate on hyper -preterism with the gentleman who's best known for it and his former right -hand man, which is really interesting.

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And I'm personally really looking forward. I hope that the mp3 of today's part is available by this evening or by early, early, early tomorrow morning when

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I do an outside ride. That's definitely something I want to be listening to and following along with, so that will be great.

02:43

So Iron Sharpens Iron, Chris Arntzen, look him up. I've been on his program many times, and this is a big two -day debate.

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Two parts. And in fact, when I had seen the original thesis, the original arrangement, where the hyper -preterist is not having to defend anything,

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I was like, it's a two -part debate. Why not have the first, you know, one person to have the positive the one time and the negative the second time?

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And that seems fair if you got two parts and so that actually, my suggestion actually resulted in a switching of who is bearing the burden on one of the two parts.

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So I think it's just fair. So anyways, so keep an eye out for that.

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And I don't think I need to be plugging that in for any particular reason, but I did anyways. All right.

03:37

Let's go to our phone calls and then press forward with our studies. Let's talk with Nick.

03:45

Hi, Nick. Doing good. Great, so there has been some discussion, maybe cordial disagreement among a few people in my church about a catechism question, and it comes from the

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New City Catechism, and the question is, did God create us unable to keep

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His law? And then the answer given in the Catechism, or the Kids' Catechism, is no, but because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, we are all born in sin and guilt, unable to keep

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God's law. And so the controversy has been about whether or not humans, and in particular

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Adam and Eve, were originally created with the capacity to obey

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God. And so from the perspective of God's decree, as I understand it,

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Adam and Eve did just as God willed, and so in that sense, they could not have done anything else than what they did, but well, my question would be more like, what does the

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Bible communicate about the original state of Adam and Eve, and in particular their ability to obey before the

04:59

Fall? Yeah, there's no question the Catechism is correct. The Catechism is simply reflecting what all

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Orthodox Christians have believed from the beginning, and that is that God created man good, in fact, he was very good, and there is no created necessity in Adam to sin.

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It was not that there was an automatically provided defect that would guarantee this, anything along those lines whatsoever.

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We must differentiate between the secret decree and the revealed will of God. The revelation of God is that man was created upright, and the content of the decree is not something that is something that Adam had access to, or it's not

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God standing behind Adam with a gun saying, you're gonna sin, or any of those things. So we have to be very, very careful at this point, because if we take the concept of the decree and claim to have some type of knowledge of it within time, that's going to cause a real, a real major problem.

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So, so no, we can, we can affirm that in God's decree that all of this was exactly what

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God intended, but at the same time, you have to recognize the, the unity that exists between that decree and the revelation that God gives to us, that God gave to Adam, that it comes to us in Scripture, in the law, etc.,

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etc., all of which comes after Adam. Adam is, I've used him as an example many, many times, of someone that it's absolutely useless to speculate about, because we have basically no more than, at maximum, two chapters worth of revelation about anything pre -fall, everything after that's afterwards.

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So it's pure speculation for anybody, even though a lot of people try to do that, and of course, that's where Jonathan Edwards got into trouble, is he attempted to dig into what we don't have sufficient revelation to answer questions about, and ended up even in John Gerstner's opinion, who was a huge Jonathan Edwards fan, in a morass of contradiction.

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And so, no, we have to affirm that Adam was made good, that he had, that he had the capacity in and of himself to do what was right.

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That doesn't answer the question as to whether it was God's intention for what happened to happen.

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The issue is, did he have that potentiality? Did he have that capacity? To say he didn't is to say he was created defective, and therefore, was created to fall by nature, and that's, that's not what, that's not what has ever been affirmed.

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Because if you say that, then there was actually no intentionality on Adam's part. There was no rebellion.

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There was no deception. There was, he did what he was supposed to. You're sort of stuck with the Mormon view at that point, because they actually say

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Adam fell upward. That in the pre -existence, it was determined that he would partake of the fruit, so that mankind could come into existence.

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Because Eve was going to fall, so he had to fall, so he'd be mortal, and then have, he wouldn't be able to have children with her if he didn't do the same thing, so he actually fell upward.

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So no, there was a, there was a true fall, and the fact that that was decreed does not make it any less of a true fall.

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And if we don't affirm it that way, then you end up with the fallen one side or the other off the cliff.

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Gotcha, okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks a lot, Nick. All righty.

08:48

That's one. We got three more to go, and let's talk to Tyler about the

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Septuagint. Hi, Dr. White, how are you? Doing good. All right, so I begin my

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Greek studies here soon for seminary, and so I bought the reader's edition of the

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Septuagint. Ah, the two -volume? What was that? The two -volume readers? Yes, sir.

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Yes. Yes, I hate to tell you, Tyler, but you will never ever own as nice a version of the two -volume reader's

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Septuagint as I will soon have from Post -Tenebrous Lux Bible Rebinding, which has...

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Yes, I will be sending my grandmother's Bible to him in August. Well, but he has my reader's edition of the

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Septuagint right now, and the pages have already been gilded, and I've already seen the blue and gray dual leather cover is being put together, so I just don't want you to feel badly once I show this.

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This is just cruel that you do this. This is just cruel. It's like, what? Sometimes.

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And I'm coveting. That's the whole reason for it, Tyler. Isn't that pretty obvious?

10:06

Absolutely. Actually, this is sort of a backwards advertisement for Jeffrey and the folks there, but no, he's working on it, and I saw the gilding that was done, and as you know, those are huge volumes.

10:21

Oh, yeah. And I had first talked to him and asked him, would it be possible to bind them together?

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And he's like, not really. Not really. So it's like, okay, so we'll stick with the two volumes.

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But the two volumes are going to be, the leather is going to be reversed on each one, so you can tell which volume is which.

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So one's going to have a gray leather spine with blue, and the other will have a blue leather spine with gray, and it's just going to be absolutely awesome.

10:47

That sounds awesome. Yes, yes. So anyways, thank you for giving me that opportunity of doing a little bit of an advertisement there for Brother Jeffrey.

10:56

Anytime. He can pay me later. That's right. And me. So, I was wondering, as I'm looking through, as I'm scanning through,

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I noticed it contains the Deutero -canonical book. Yep. And I was wondering, since the

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Septuagint is what Jesus and all them in the early church used, were those included back then, or were those added for our edition today?

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Well, of course, we do not have any complete Septuagints from the days of Jesus. We have fragments, we have singular books, we have portions in the

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Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that. That is, that's not so much a Septuagint question as it is a canon question.

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In older materials, you will read about the

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Palestinian canon and the Alexandrian canon. And the assumption was, many years ago, that the

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Palestinian Jews had a different canon than the Alexandrian Jews. That the

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Palestinian Jews had what we would have in the Protestant canon and that the

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Alexandrian Jews had an expanded canon that included the Deutero -canonicals. I would recommend a book, it's getting older now, it's getting up to 40 years, but it's still fairly relevant along these lines.

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And that is the Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church by Roger Beckwith.

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And he really goes in depth, it's very scholarly, but he really goes in depth in refuting the idea, and most scholars who study this area today no longer hold that there were two different canons.

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There was only one Jewish canon, and that the

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Jewish people never embraced those Deutero -canonical books. As canon scripture.

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So, what's obvious, and this will become obvious once you've learned enough Greek to be really doing much with that nice two volumes that you've got, is that the certain portions of the

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Greek Septuagint were written at a very, were translated at a very high level. So the

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Pentateuch is excellent, it's really, really well done. There are a couple other sections that are really, really well done.

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And then there are other sections that are not really well done at all. And what that means is the

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Septuagint was not translated by one group at one time, it came into existence over a period of time.

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And so, what would have been the form early on, or even in the days of Jesus, and then our earliest versions, our earliest versions that would give us an idea of what was contained altogether come from three to four hundred, about three hundred years after the days of Christ.

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So, in Palestine, obviously, in Israel, in that geographical location, all the evidence is that the

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Jewish people did not accept these as canonical. They were not laid up in the temple.

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And so, whatever, because see, we always think of the Septuagint as a single volume, something that we can just grab hold of.

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I'm not sure what happened to mine in here. I thought I had one in here. Let's see.

14:20

Well, OK, there it is. Hold on a second. All right, there we go.

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Here's a nice, this was bound many, many years ago, but this is my Rolf's Septuagint here.

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And so, when we think of the Septuagint, we think of something like this, a single volume. It almost never existed like this.

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This is a modern innovation. The vast majority of them, well, first of all, they would have been on scrolls in the ancient world.

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And then, once Christians started utilizing them, Christians just, maybe it was so that they could differentiate themselves from the synagogue.

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There's a lot of different theories about this, but Christians just didn't do scrolls. They didn't like doing scrolls.

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And so, once you start getting codex versions, then those books start getting collected together and included within the

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Tanakh in Christian versions, because we do know that by the time of the

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Council of Nicaea and then that time onward, not only had the

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Septuagint become the Bible of the early church, but those books were being included within the canon of the

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Old Testament at that point, which led to the initial controversies concerning whether those books were considered canonical or not.

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So, as early as Miletus Sardis in the second century, there is controversy being discussed as to whether those books are to be considered canonical or not.

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He makes inquiries into Israel, discovers the Jews have never accepted them, and so he rejects them.

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Jerome does the same thing. And so, Jerome does not translate the Deuterocanonicals for the

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Latin Vulgate until the very last, and you can tell he didn't do a very good job because he did not believe that they were, in fact, a canon scripture.

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He and Augustine argue about the subject, because in North Africa they are accepted as canon scripture.

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They argue about the subject, and it's interesting that one of Augustine's arguments is that he thinks that they were a part of the

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Hebrew canon. Well, he was wrong. And so, if he had had the right information about that, if he had access to the sources

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Jerome did – Jerome was in Bethlehem, for crying out loud. He had access to all the Jewish scholars he wanted to talk to, but Augustine did not in Hippo.

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So, if he had had access to that, he would have had to have taken a different perspective. So, down through history, there are two streams as to the

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Deuterocanonical books, and that continues all the way to the time of the Reformation, and that's found amongst popes.

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Pope Gregory the Great rejected the Deuterocanonical books as being canonical, all the way down to the days of Cardinal Cajetan, who was the one who interviewed

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Luther. And he had written a commentary on the Bible, which rejected – he had read

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Jerome, so he rejected the Deuterocanonical books. And when Trent canonized them formally in April of 1546, you don't have a bunch of scholars there sifting through ancient materials to come to a conclusion.

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They are reacting against Luther's rejection of those books. It's – they don't answer what

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Cajetan had said or what anybody else had said. They just simply are reacting to Luther. So, when you get your earliest

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Septuagint copies today, they're Christian. They're not Jewish. And so they do contain them.

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But as to what the Jews would have had, there's no reason to believe that in the days of Jesus in Israel, that there would have been scrolls of those books that would have – the term that they used was to make the hands dirty, that they would have considered holy from touching them, because they just – they were never laid up in the temple, and that was even 200 years – 200 years before Christ, the canonical books of the

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Tanakh, which we would call the 39 books, they numbered them 22 to 24 because they did not separate out the minor prophets.

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They were all one book. And then some of the major prophets included some of the – like Lamentations was in Jeremiah, so on and so forth.

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They had 22 to 24 books, same list that we have today. They were laid up in the temple and were considered to make the hands dirty because they were holy.

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That's never the case with the Deuterocanonical books. They're just never treated that way. And in fact, when you read them, you discover that they recognize the threefold canon of the

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Hebrew Old Testament already existed by the time they were written. So it's pretty straightforward as far as that goes.

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But the earliest manuscripts we have of the Septuagint all seem to be of Christian origin, not

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Jewish origin. And so that enters into that. Okay? Thank you.

19:20

You're most welcome. Have a great day. You too. All right. Bye -bye. All right.

19:25

Didn't expect to – we already jumped into church history there. But by the way, if you want more on that subject, then we've done two debates on the subject of the canonicity of the

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Apocrypha. And I know that I've given presentations at numerous conferences since the 90s on the subject of the

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Apocrypha, the Deuterocanonical books. Is there something in our sermon audio stuff on that?

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Because I know I have. It's not the most scintillating stuff, but again, neither is

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Manichaeism, and we've done that too. But if you want to hear at least a rundown of those things, then you've got the really early 1993 debate with Jerry Matitix from Boston College.

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And then we have, of course, the great debate with Gary Machuda from Long Island.

20:26

I'm wondering if you may have done some dividing lines building up to that, because you tend to do that before a debate.

20:31

You would tend to – It's possible. Review that. Well, not before Boston College, obviously, but the one with Machuda is possible.

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It's possible. So around that time. Because I know I have an entire really lengthy presentation on the patristic evidences and who lined up on what side, and all sorts of stuff like that.

20:53

So there is more out there, but the Beckwith book goes into a tremendous amount of detail. Okay, let's talk to Lauren.

21:00

Hi, Lauren. Hi, Dr. White. Hello. Hello, and I just wanted to first say, from my husband and I to you,

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Rich, thank you so much for your ministry. You two really have had such a profound effect on our walk, and we just want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

21:19

Well, that's great, thank you. Okay. My question is – and I don't know how to word it exactly, but I know that the

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Lord has saved me. I know that I love Him. I love Him very much. But I think about this often.

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I go about my day sometimes, and I don't even think about the Lord, and I know that I'm not loving

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Him with all my heart, soul, mind, strength perfectly. And so my question to you – it's kind of weird,

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I think, but my question is – and I am a constant sin, because that's a command, and I can't keep that commandment, you know, to love

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Him perfectly all the time, or have I ever loved Him perfectly, or can we in this life?

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And I think about that a lot, and I was wondering what you would say to a question like that.

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Well, if you define imperfection as sin, then, you know, we do not experience perfection in this life.

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And so if you take that perspective, then we are in constant sin up until the eschaton and the final judgment, and – well, basically until we die and are resurrected and are fully sanctified.

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But that's – I'm not sure that's the best way to really look at it, because when you talk about someone who – being in constant sin, you're talking – normally, when we describe it in that way, we're talking about someone who is either struggling with or is given into some type of abiding sin in their life that just simply – they will not stop committing.

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And that's a different thing than sinless perfectionism, because again, if we define it in that way, then we would have to believe in sinless perfectionism.

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We would have to believe that once we are saved, then we are going to be made sinlessly perfect, and therefore would not be experiencing sin.

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Because it's true, the only one who has loved the Father perfectly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is the

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Lord Jesus himself, and that's why we need to have his righteousness to be able to stand before a holy God.

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But yeah, no, on a theological and pastoral level, I would differentiate between the idea of being in constant sin as imperfection and being in constant sin as a certain type of sin absolutely rules one's life, one cannot stop oneself from engaging in – you know, we can talk about all sorts of various forms of addictions and things like that that clearly do demonstrate a level of idolatry in our lives, that we love something far more than we love

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God. But I mean, you technically could make the argument that as long as there is any idolatry whatsoever – and really, you can make the technical argument that all sin is a form of idolatry, you're putting yourself before the

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Creator – if you go that direction, then the only way out would be to believe in a doctrine of sinless perfection, and then you don't need a mediator any longer.

24:36

Right, yeah, and yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because it's not like a rebellion thing, it's just that I think about it,

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I really want to love him perfectly, but I can't. And I know that. And so that's been on my mind for a couple of years, and I thought,

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I'm going to call Dr. White and ask him what he thinks. So that makes a lot more sense, because it's not a rebellious thing that I don't want to.

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You know, when we gather with the saints on the Lord's Day, it's like little splashovers of heaven.

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It's so wonderful, and I wish that I could, you know, feel like that, you know, 24 -7.

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But I just thought it was kind of a weird question, but I knew that you would answer it well, and I certainly appreciate it.

25:22

All right, thank you, Lauren. Okay, God bless you. Bye -bye. All right, last call real quick here.

25:29

Oh my, someone in the frozen tundra of Canada.

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Hello, Chris. Hello, Dr. White. Thank you for taking my call. Yes, sir. This is the second time

25:44

I've called. I called last year in April, and the same joke. You called it

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Canadia. Oh, did I? Well, there you go. You may have been the last person to call from Canada, so...

25:55

Yeah, I called last year to ask a question about elect infants and the

26:00

Baptist Confession, and since then, finished engineering, got accepted to Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Covenant Southwest? Sorry, Covenant Baptist. Oh, Covenant Baptist, so okay,

26:14

I'm having a little hard time hearing, it's a little bit mushy, so...

26:19

Okay, can you hear me now? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, I'll get to my question, and my apologies to Rich, I said textual variant at First Corinthians 1116, it's not a textual variant, it's just a difference of translation, whereas the

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ESV says, if anyone is contentious, we have no such practice and neither do the

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Churches of God. The New American Standard reads, we have no other practice and neither do the

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Churches of God. And in the footnotes on the NASV, I actually have both of them pulled up on logout on my phone, it says literally, such.

27:03

So the word other could be interchanged with the word such, but it seems like whether you use the word such or other completely changes what that verse is intending to communicate.

27:14

So since you were on that critical consultant board or whatever it was... Yeah, that doesn't mean

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I had anything to do with the rendering of this. Critical consultants just simply, like, would deal with textual questions of textual variants that came up later on and stuff like that.

27:30

But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given to her for a covering.

27:36

So, okay, this is a section about head coverings I never get into, but a lot of the issues here is punctuation issues and how you break up these sentences.

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Does not even nature itself teach that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given to her for a covering.

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But if one is inclined to be contentious, we have... Altane normally is such of such kind.

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We do not have such kind of a practice, nor have the churches of God.

28:16

And so the question would be, what's the practice in reference to? And again, that really depends on how you have punctuated the preceding couple of sentences as to what the reference is there.

28:31

I am certain there are entire in -depth discussions and arguments on both sides.

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I've never read them and couldn't help you with them, even if I tried. Okay. Well, I haven't taken

28:43

Greek yet. I just finished my first two levels of Hebrew and spoke to the

28:49

Greek professor at CBTS, and he pointed me to an academic article which goes into the ancient

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Greek view of sexuality, actually, and reproductive organs, which is fascinating.

29:02

And Michael Heiser, I know, has referred to or written an academic article exploring that even further, but I don't know.

29:12

I thought I'd give it a try. Well, you used a name there that makes me go, okay.

29:20

But other than that, like I said,

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I'm sure there are numerous in -depth discussions of what practice is being referred to here.

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We have no such practice that's referring to what practice that is actually referring to.

29:41

My concern with Heiser is elsewhere, maybe he's spot on on this, but I've not found it to be spot on on a whole lot of things.

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So I would just throw that warning out there, just in case. Yeah, I understand.

29:57

And I have watched a lot of your programs, and you've expressed that same caution with Heiser. It wasn't

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Michael Heiser's perspective or article that got me thinking about that.

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It was another article from another institution that my Greek and Hebrew prof sent me.

30:15

But yeah, well, thank you so much for taking my call.

30:20

And by the way, I've been listening to all the Manichaeism two -beat programs, and I'm looking forward to seeing it all wrapped up.

30:29

Everybody's looking forward to seeing it all wrapped up. I'm sure Ken Wilson is really looking forward to seeing it all wrapped up, too.

30:35

So am I. No, in all seriousness, not because I haven't enjoyed it, but because we're coming to the end.

30:41

Got to get there sometime. Yeah, definitely. All right. Thank you. Yeah, don't get me into the head covering stuff.

30:52

Just no, no, no, don't. Thank you. I'm not interested in the wars that come out of that.

30:58

By the way, there was a tweet that was posted on, well, it has to be posted on Twitter.

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I was going to try to log on to this Parler thing. Not me.

31:16

It would never, it just kept, just put me into an infinite loop, never let me in. I don't know.

31:25

I don't know. But evidently they don't want me. So it's like, okay, fine, whatever. But Anthony Vittolo put a comment up 238 years ago.

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We froze. This may have been Facebook. Yeah, it was Facebook. We froze and starved in order to defeat the largest military force on earth to build a free nation.

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And you surrendered it because you're afraid to get sick. And I had commented upon that.

31:52

And a fellow by the name of Vern Hall said that Anthony gets a free meal in Johnson City, Tennessee for an honorary mention on the dividing line of that comment.

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So Vern, you owe Anthony a free meal in Johnson City, Tennessee for an honorary mention on the dividing line for what he said.

32:12

There you go. How many mentions and how many meals? It was always in the singular.

32:18

So there's really, no, can't go there. I'm afraid. So yeah, there you go.

32:25

So we, I had to make a note of that or I would never have remembered it, unfortunately. So, and then

32:33

I, I think I did. Yeah, I think

32:38

I saved it to my, to Dropbox here.

32:44

Let me see if it's still there. No, no, it's not.

32:53

Huh? Anyway, Governor Cuomo has made face masks mandatory if you go out in public.

33:01

I just wanted to find out if that was in a particular area, because let's just, let me just make a quick comment. What would be tough about this?

33:10

What, why would this, yeah, why would this be difficult? How about you, because we have this data, we can do this.

33:21

How about we map the places in the United States that have extremely high densities of people?

33:32

Okay. Like, like, like Manhattan going out onto the Island, not all the way. Now, if you've been on Long Island, you know that the

33:41

Western part of the Island is not like the Eastern part of the

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Island. There's a huge density of people over here, but not over here.

33:54

New York state, you've got the city and then you've got rural farming places.

34:00

So how about some common sense and saying if there is this density of people and these numbers of infections, that you wear face masks.

34:20

But a farmer in Nebraska on his plow does not need to wear a face mask.

34:29

And he doesn't need to wear a face mask at Walmart or McDonald's or any place else in Nebraska for that matter.

34:37

It's insane. In fact, if you wear a face mask in your car, I'm concerned about you.

34:43

I'm a little worried that you're, you know, you, that may bump up into your eyes. You won't see where you're going.

34:48

Who knows? I don't know. But I see people driving around with face masks today and I'm just going, okay.

34:57

I mean, I hate them. I detest them. I feel like I'm going to die in them. And I had to wear one on the flights that I took recently.

35:07

And I've read a lot of stuff about this and I'm definitely on the side of this is a complete waste of everything.

35:15

But hey, if it makes you feel better, great, fine, wonderful. But when the government starts telling a farmer in rural

35:21

New York that he asked to wear a face mask to go into the hardware store, we've, we've discovered that this isn't about a virus anymore.

35:33

It's about something else. It's really about something else. And it is, it's very much about something else. One other comment before I dive back into Wilson.

35:42

No, nobody else saw this. Okay. But it really caught my, it just boomed.

35:50

Like I had once again, and this has gotten me into trouble so many times.

35:56

So, I mean, I, I posted a bunch of stuff on Twitter over the past 48 hours. It just should have resulted in us having to fight our way out of the mob outside the, outside the office.

36:10

But we don't live in Minneapolis. That's not what's going on. Hate to see that in my, my home, my town of my birth.

36:19

But yeah, I was born in Minneapolis anyway. I had, you know, allegedly yesterday using certain numbers, we passed 100 ,000 deaths in the

36:35

United States due to COVID -19. Now I questioned some of those numbers. We have, we already know that some states have had revised their numbers because they had included a number of gunshot victims in their

36:46

COVID numbers. And well, I think he coughed before he died. So therefore must be, must be

36:52

COVID. But let's just take the number. It's a nice round number. Let's, let's say a hundred thousand.

37:00

And as normal, I pointed out, if you're, if you're looking at MSNBC, especially, even

37:07

Fox did this, they've, they've stopped doing it now, but even Fox did this. You'd have this tally board upper right -hand corner of the screen and global cases,

37:21

US cases, global deaths, US deaths. It's in red. You can't avoid it. It's in your face constantly.

37:29

That's all they're talking about. And there's never any context.

37:39

And I'm afraid that if you asked any American citizen walking down the street today, if they would stop and pull their mask down to talk to you or try to talk to you through the mask, which will result in numerous miscommunications,

37:55

I can assure you of that. You would find that almost no one in the

38:03

United States has any idea how many people die in the

38:09

United States every year. Just, just no idea. So, so they have no idea how many per day, per week, per month.

38:18

And it varies, obviously. It's not like every week is the exact same number, but it doesn't vary that much.

38:25

It's pretty consistent throughout the year. No one ever talks about those numbers.

38:31

No one ever talks about the 600 ,000 people who die of heart disease, the almost 700 ,000 who die of cancer.

38:42

Um, no, those numbers are unknown. The, the nearly 3 million people.

38:50

And so as a result, 100 ,000 in the mind of the vast majority of people is 100 ,000 healthy people who would have lived another 30 years if it hadn't been for this dreaded disease.

39:07

And so that's the population of small cities. We have to, we have to shut everything down and put the entire globe into a depression.

39:18

Uh, so that doesn't ever happen again. And that's the thinking that has prevailed that that's how it's been done.

39:26

And so what I did is I pointed out how many just,

39:32

I've got the numbers. I pointed out how many people through the end of May of 2020 would have died of this disease and that disease and that disease and that disease on an, in a normal year.

39:44

And many of them were more than a hundred thousand. And then

39:52

I asked, where are the clocks in media for these things? Why is it just one disease?

40:01

What, why, why isn't it tuberculosis and meningitis and, and Alzheimer's and, and cancer and heart disease and all the rest of this stuff?

40:09

Why aren't there any clocks for that? It's just this one thing. Have you, have you thought about this?

40:16

And so I talked about how many people would have died up until this point?

40:22

Well, somebody, I don't remember who it was, but somebody pointed something out that I found fascinating because he didn't pick up on this or it might've been a she,

40:33

I don't know, but I thought it was he. He didn't pick up on this, didn't say anything about it, but it caught me. And he said, well, actually the

40:40

CDC says we're about 66 ,000 deaths ahead of what the normal projections would be for a regular mortality year at this point.

40:53

Hmm. Now think about that for a moment. Cause see, as soon as I heard that, my mind automatically goes, but there's a hundred thousand deaths.

41:08

At least that's what's being claimed. That's not taking into consideration any of the extra mortality that is resulting from missed cancer screenings and, and heart stuff and suicides and everything else.

41:23

That is not a result of COVID -19, but a result of the panic about COVID -19.

41:29

I mean, I can't tell you how many people I'm seeing, finally starting to see, it's starting to punch its way through the, the, the panic barrier.

41:38

People saying, I have loved ones that are dying of other diseases, but because of the

41:44

COVID panic, I can't even go see them and they can't get proper treatment. I mean, the number of people that will die from that, no one will ever see.

41:52

There's, there's no category for that. There's no category for that. So those numbers should be subtracted from the

41:59

COVID numbers, but they're not. Or added to the COVID numbers as this is what happens when you massively overreact and jump off the cliff and go, we must be safe.

42:11

And you jump in front of a freight train. That'll make me safe. Um, the guy that was about to stab me, won't get me because I jumped in front of the freight train.

42:18

Okay. Yeah, that works. That's what panic does is makes you think that way, but there was something else.

42:25

Why isn't it a hundred thousand more? Why is it only 66? That's only two thirds.

42:33

And I realized why, what that means is of the hundred thousand, 34 ,000 of those hundred thousand would not have lived to this point in time anyway.

42:42

In other words, what have we learned? Average age, 81 to 81.

42:49

How many have other complicating factors, mega complicating factors, almost all of them.

42:56

So that number tells you that one third of the numbers that are being counted would not have even lived to this point without COVID -19

43:07

COVID -19 simply took the place of other mechanisms that normally bring about mortality every single year.

43:17

And no one ever even talks about it. It's never up on the right -hand corner of your screen.

43:25

It doesn't show up in your, in your notifications every five minutes on your phone, but it happens.

43:32

It has happened every single year you've been alive and no one sits back and goes, huh.

43:38

I wonder why it's happening now. Could the complete reorientation of our entire culture have anything to do with this at all?

43:50

Oh no. You're put, you better put your tin far hat on. Go start watching Alex Jones now.

43:56

If you even ask the question, if you even go, this seems very strange, it does not seem balanced.

44:04

It's not balanced. And there is a reason for it. But I saw no one even, and I think the guy that pointed out that actually there's been 66 ,000 more deaths.

44:14

I would sort of go. And so if there's been a hundred thousand of you thought through what that might mean.

44:19

No, that's no, no, no discussion whatsoever. It's just like, think about what that means.

44:26

If those 66 ,000 are due to COVID -19 and it's not a hundred thousand, that means one third of COVID deaths would not have lived this point this year, no matter what.

44:42

And that fits exactly with the earliest data that we got. Remember the early days, that first week or so, there was that one website that was primarily based on data that was coming out of Italy.

44:53

Remember that? It was a really well done website. It's just great graphs and all the rest of that stuff. They were proven right.

44:59

And almost everything that they said, you were called a conspiratorialist if you cited them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, everything they said has panned out to be exactly right as far as the numbers were concerned.

45:11

And what they pointed out was that for that, for that, there's was over 85%.

45:21

I'm just going off. I could look it back up. I saved the screenshots, but I have to go find them. But over 85 % were people who had numerous other underlying conditions, which can cause mortality.

45:34

And so here's the question to think about. Let's say there ends up being 200 ,000 before this thing runs its course.

45:46

How many of those, let's say, let's say this, this goes through, let's say it goes for another year.

45:51

So a year and a half, how many of the 200 ,000 would have lived to the end of that time period with or without COVID?

46:00

That's the question. That's a meaningful question. If you say, it doesn't matter.

46:06

Every life is precious. No, listen, think for just a second. What are the costs that you are proposing?

46:16

I was just talking to a nice lady on Twitter right before the program started and she's about my age.

46:21

We're about the same age and she has asthma and some other stuff. And she was basically saying, no, we need to do this.

46:28

And I mentioned the pandemic of late 68 to early 70s. Yeah, I got sick during that time.

46:36

And then she made a comment and I said, so you're actually saying we should have shut down in 1960.

46:46

Cause I made the comment. I said, we had a pandemic going on in 1969. We also went to the moon.

46:54

That's when we landed. That's when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, 1969. And she said, well, it would have been delayed a few months.

47:05

So I was like, so you're telling me we should have shut down back then.

47:11

Moon landing is not worth a life. And I was like, there is the exact picture of what has changed.

47:24

I keep telling a friend of mine, he keeps looking back at the nation as it was and says, we're all going to recover.

47:32

Everything's going to be good. And I'm like, the nation has changed. And here's where it is.

47:38

There's where it is. You actually now have people saying, yeah, we should have.

47:45

And you need to realize if they had shut down Apollo, then it probably wouldn't have happened. The delays probably would have pretty much ended things.

47:55

And once you start doing it, have you already started seeing? I started seeing this morning the stuff about second wave aimed at October.

48:04

I keep telling you, wait for the October surprise, wait for the October surprise. It's a common, it's a common, and we're going to be told we got to shut it all down again.

48:16

It's going to hit you. And I actually, I think some governors are just hoping they can hold on till then, saying you just keep it constantly shut down, just never, never open up again.

48:29

But remember, two weeks became a month, then two months.

48:36

And here we are, they've moved the goalposts around so many times, we can't even find them.

48:44

And there are no goalposts. The goalpost is socialism. Yeah. And it's just constantly further, further, further down the road.

48:52

And I mean, come on, June is Monday. This is crazy that we have come this far.

49:01

I know. And yet they're still propagating it. And they're not done.

49:07

It works so well that once we told them we will do this, we will.

49:12

You have said it before, somehow, someway, our generation failed to pass along that intrepid thought mechanisms to our children.

49:26

Well, look, look, the reason for this is, quite honestly, is in academia, for decades now, it's been hate

49:36

America, hate America, hate the worldview that formed

49:44

America. Right, right. We both know that the generation that preceded us were the ones out with long hair, smoking dope, doing

49:52

Woodstock, all that stuff. And when those people went out and got a haircut, cleaned themselves up, they went and started teaching at the schools.

49:59

Right, right. That's actually our generation, whether you want to admit it or not. I mean, they were 10 years older than us, but that's still pretty much the same group, unfortunately.

50:08

Because my parents were, you know, they were married in the 50s, so they were the Elvis Presley generation, the baby boomers right after World War II.

50:17

Anyway, I wasn't going to spend that much time, but it just caught me that here's someone wanting to argue the point with the numbers throughout a number that I'm like, if that's true, what does it mean?

50:33

And what will it mean in June of 2021?

50:40

And let's say the number's 200 ,000 by then. Will anyone take the time to calculate how many of those 200 ,000 would have died of something other than COVID -19 by that time?

50:56

And then go, is that enough to destroy the entire economic fabric of the world with the resultant death and mayhem and violence and disease and end of research into other diseases and everything else that goes with it?

51:16

Will that have been worth it? There's what we should be talking about, but nobody's talking about it.

51:26

Yes, well, it has been observed that the only way to get mentioned when you die right now is if you die of COVID.

51:39

If you don't die of anything other than that, because no one's going to care. They're not going to say anything about it.

51:45

So yeah, that does happen. Okay, anyway, all right. Shifting gears.

51:54

Oh, man, there is just so much going on, and it is sad to see.

52:09

I'm not even sure what that means. Let me just mention something. Dr. Brian Loretz, fairly well -known social justice promoter, posted the picture of Chauvin, the

52:23

Minnesota former police officer who killed the man on the street.

52:29

Very obvious. I don't know how you can watch that without recognizing the animus on his part.

52:37

Very obvious. Extremely obvious, and I will be surprised if the sun goes down today, he hasn't been arrested.

52:44

Needs to be. Though I would have some comments about our justice system and how unbiblical it is, because biblically, he should either be executed or he should have to work the rest of his life for that man's family, but putting him in slavery and charging the rest of us for it?

53:15

Where did that ever come from? Just something to think about. It's what I was raised with, and what you're raised with, you just go, that's what

53:21

I'm accustomed to. I've never even thought about it, but there were no penitentiaries in Mosaic law.

53:28

There was either restitution, and you worked for the other person, or execution.

53:35

And anyway, let's talk about justice some other time.

53:41

But Brian Loretz posted this with the comment, this is why

53:47

I didn't sign that quote social gospel end quote statement. Now, my assumption, and everybody else's assumption, was that this was a social gospel, the gospel and social justice statement that I was involved with.

54:02

So I just retweeted part of the picture with a single quote from the statement, from right at the beginning of the statement.

54:13

We affirm that God created every person equally in his own image. As divine image bearers, all people have inestimable value and dignity before God and deserve honor, respect, and protection.

54:23

Everyone has been created by God and for God. So the reason you didn't sign it was what again?

54:33

But like I said, there is a lot of virtue signaling going on, not just face masks, but in regards to the

54:41

Minneapolis situation. And then someone named Kwebena Duku replying to me, and this is one of the things that bugs me about Twitter.

54:52

He says, God does not claim people outside of the kingdom like this man. Amen. And I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.

55:01

Is that about me? Is that about the cop? Kwebena, I don't know what you're talking about.

55:10

And unfortunately, you know, I don't know. So I see there's a bunch of stuff going on here that I'll have to look at later on in regards to some comments that were made, but obviously we've all been watching the looting going on, the stuff in the

55:32

Target stores going on up there. And just after the program started,

55:39

I saw a video come across. It was actually distracting because it stayed up in my screen for a while of someone trying to back their car into discount through discount tires, you know, the rolling door type thing.

55:52

I guess they wanted to steal some tires or something like that. I don't know. But I guess the place is just melting down. And I'm sorry.

56:02

Oh, well, I don't know. But hope and pray for peace.

56:10

And it just is a reminder of how thin the veneer of civilization is over the wicked hearts of men.

56:20

Every single one of those looters is demonstrating by their looting that they care nothing about the guy who died.

56:26

They care nothing about it. Don't have a concern about justice. Don't go out there and march in that parade and then turn off to the right and go burn a

56:36

McDonald's down. Just anyway.

56:43

There you go. I should just I should just minimize. Get out of there.

56:51

I will not get anything else done if I keep looking over there. Okay. I had at some point over the past three weeks started reading through.

57:01

Once again, I've already laid this out. There is a conclusion section in if you're if you're new to the program for some reason.

57:14

We were challenged by a group that calls themselves provisionists who seemingly have become very deeply connected with the free grace, anti lordship, anti repentance movement to respond to a to a book which has moved all the way over here to a book titled

57:40

The Foundation of Augustinian Calvinism. Well, actually, we had people calling about this book initially.

57:48

And so when I got hold of it, and I I listened to it on a ride one day, it's not very long.

57:55

It's only 100 and less than 118 pages. Fairly not non dense prints.

58:05

That's not long. Well, as soon as I started pointing out problems in it, just errors and argumentation and things like that.

58:15

We got pushback that said no, no, no, no, that's that's not for scholars. What you what you need is Kenneth Wilson's dissertation.

58:21

Well, I had looked it up and it was nearly 100 bucks. And I'm like, given what I was seeing in the book, I was like, I don't know.

58:28

I want to spend that amount of money. Given the argumentation I'm seeing. Well, Dr. Wilson sent it to us.

58:34

And once I started seeing what the dissertation was about, then we bought the dissertation online, we bought the electronic version so that at least

58:42

Dr. Wilson gets his money for that. And we were challenged, we were told no one can respond.

58:48

This is this is this man is the greatest living expert on Augustin in the world. No one knows more about Augustin than he does.

58:54

He got a defill from Oxford for this dissertation. And you guys can't touch his 10 foot pole.

59:01

So we have been spending a fair amount of time touching it with a 10 foot pole and poking holes through it that are about 10 feet wide, because it is very poorly argued, very poorly written, very poorly argued.

59:16

It is a theory that, to my knowledge, commands almost no following in scholarship at all.

59:25

It's not that accusing Augustin of Manichaean influence is anything new that took place during his life.

59:33

And someone pointed out that, remember Steve Gregg? That's one of Steve Gregg's big things is he goes after Augustin for being a

59:42

Manichaean and all the rest of this type of stuff. So it's nothing new. But what is new is the specific application of a concept called dupied.

59:56

And it's basically the theory that that Augustin, once he began arguing against Pelagius, Augustin had had two major controversies in his life, some minor ones, but two major controversies in his life.

01:00:14

This is something I've been lecturing about for years. The first is the Donatus Controversy, which is about the nature of the authority of the church, sacraments, things like that.

01:00:24

That's when he is first elected bishop. This is something he has to deal with a great deal.

01:00:31

And then you had, toward the end of his life, the Pelagian Controversy, where he is involved in the battle with Pelagius over the nature of the will and things like that.

01:00:42

The theory is that so as to fight

01:00:48

Pelagius, not only did Augustin develop a never heard of before baptismal theology, and this is clearly untrue from any meaningful study of church history, but that he also went back to a

01:01:08

Manichaean understanding of this dupied, this divine unilateral predestination of individuals' eternal destinies, and that that then was basically a direct line straight to Calvin and to Reformed Theology.

01:01:31

With the result that, and I have this, I just have this sitting on my desktop so that anytime

01:01:39

I need it, we can just simply play it. Here's an interview from 2018 with Leighton Flowers asking a question of Ken Wilson.

01:01:51

Listen to what Ken Wilson's response is. You say that Augustin was the first to clearly articulate these views.

01:01:59

That, coupled with what you found, seems to be an insurmountable argument against a more deterministic understanding of the text.

01:02:07

Yes, if you want to remain a traditional Christian. If you want to go be a Manichaean Christian with Augustin, then it's fine to take a deterministic view, but for a traditional

01:02:16

Christian, you should hold a free will view. So you have something called a Manichaean Christian with Augustin if you are a

01:02:24

Calvinist, if you're Reformed, and you'll notice that Leighton thinks that this understanding of the early church somehow becomes the lens through which exegesis to be done, too, which is an extremely problematic element of this that we have.

01:02:41

We've only touched on a little bit, but it's there. So more and more people, not only in the

01:02:50

English -speaking world, but it's getting elsewhere, are now touting this and saying, see,

01:02:55

I'm not going to listen to what you have to say about Reformed theology because you're just simply a secret Manichaean.

01:03:00

And so over the past couple of months, we have been doing what almost no one else has been doing.

01:03:06

There's been a couple of Lutheran guys who have been especially focused upon the sacramentology issue, baptism issue.

01:03:17

I've been much more focused upon these issues, but in reading the dissertation, have encountered just numerous problems, numerous, numerous problems that we have been documenting over the past period of time.

01:03:31

Along in that period, I have identified two sections of the dissertation that we need to finish reading through and responding to.

01:03:49

They're both conclusions, and the first is the conclusion to chapter one, and in chapter one, you have the philosophical religious context of Augustine, where you have a discussion of Gnosticism, Stoicism, Kikero, Judaism, which would include the

01:04:08

Qumran sect, that is how you say Qumran, Neoplatonism, which would, it's a later development, also around the time of Augustine, and then

01:04:18

Manichaeism. And so we have spent a great deal of time explaining

01:04:25

Gnosticism, Valentinian Gnosticism, Manichaeism. You've learned, I talked to a friend who said this morning he feels like he has a

01:04:33

PhD in Gnosticism now from listening to The Dividing Line, and look, if you have listened to each one of these programs, you have learned much more about Gnosticism, Valentinian Gnosticism, Manichaeism than 99 .98

01:04:49

% of seminary graduates in the United States. There is no question about that. If you are, if you are studying church history, then no, you're going to have to go into more depth than that, but for the vast majority of people graduate with an

01:05:02

MDiv or something like that, they take one, maybe two church history classes, I can assure you, you have now heard much more about these.

01:05:14

We spent, not only that, but in the vast majority of seminary classes, you don't have time.

01:05:22

You may be assigned some stuff, but we have read through portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the hymns that were found there to, again, reading what

01:05:31

Wilson said, going to the source itself, and then saying, is that an accurate understanding and providing a response to that?

01:05:46

So what I want to do is I want to finish up reading the summary, the conclusion to that first chapter, and then looking at the conclusion of the dissertation itself that ties all of these threads together, because a lot of the argumentation in the dissertation is about editing that Augustine made to his own books, and when certain portions of certain books would have been written, and did he go back and change things, and stuff like that, that, to be honest with you,

01:06:20

I'm not going to invest my time in while working on my own PhD at this point in time, because it's not relevant to the abuse of history that the dupied theory, and that's his own choice.

01:06:35

He said he coined that phrase, and he uses it hundreds of times.

01:06:42

When I first got the PDF, I thought I knew exactly how many, because I just put the phrase in. Because of the use of the emdash, it's hundreds of times, over 200 times in the dissertation he uses that phraseology.

01:06:57

That's his phraseology. It is the abuse of history that that represents, the inaccuracy that it represents, the fact that it's an indefensible concept that we have wanted to be focused upon.

01:07:08

So with all of that, I continue on page 37.

01:07:15

I've started 35, we've looked at things, just looking at 37. Stoic providence was a micromanaged predetermination of every detailed cosmic event.

01:07:29

Kikero, also pronounced Cicero, there's different ways of pronouncing Latin, achieved compatibilism by limiting providence and rejecting divine foreknowledge.

01:07:38

He simultaneously embraced both fate and free will by conceiving a direct divine intrusion into the human mind, manipulating the inept fallen will to a correctly reasoning will, thereby allowing a free choice.

01:07:52

According to Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Stoics, especially

01:07:57

Chrysippus, developed the theory that persons are incapable of choosing freely, yet despite this lack of choice, freedom to choose remains with each person.

01:08:07

Translating this into modern terms, redefined free will, achieving compatibilism remains despite being chained to compulsion, non -free free will.

01:08:15

Now, I have complained about the clarity of the writing all along,

01:08:23

I complain about it again, but the point is that I will not sit here and pretend to be an expert in Stoicism.

01:08:33

There are very few people who really are. You have to be a hard core philosophy type guy to want to invest the energy to really come to grips with the various forms of Stoicism, because as with any philosophical system, you know,

01:08:56

Chrysippus might represent one form of Stoicism, but there were there were others, especially when we look back in history, you might have, we have to be really careful about this, because you might have one person whose writings have somehow survived, and because of that, we have him define that position.

01:09:15

If you had lived to today, you might have realized that that guy, okay, he's written some books, but he wasn't nearly as important as other guy who actually really does define that position, but his books don't survive for 2 ,000 years, and therefore we end up with a skewed understanding because the nature of the sources.

01:09:35

Anyway, let's just be very clear here. Stoicism does not have a sovereign decree of a personal god.

01:09:50

The deterministic elements of Stoic philosophy are mechanistic.

01:09:58

They are due to the nature of the creation, and even at this point, when you start, look it up.

01:10:09

If you don't believe me, go to the Google Scholar, put in Stoic determinism, start reading a few papers, and you'll go, oh, it's because there is a completely, we're not, when

01:10:28

I say a completely different cosmology, it's not the differences between Manichaeism and Gnosticism and Valentinian Gnosticism and different myths and stuff like that.

01:10:40

No, this is a completely different way of looking at reality itself and the relationship of mind and matter and all of this.

01:10:53

When the Stoics made the assertion that what is has to be the way that it is, their reasoning is not because there is a divine decree that determines people's individual destinies.

01:11:09

There's nothing personal about that, and it's not just fate. It's not some simplistic idea that there are fates running around that determine it either, and it's not a modern scientific idea that, well, because of your genetics or because of the rules, the laws of nature, it's not even that.

01:11:30

It is much more complex than even all of those things, but it would be more in that realm.

01:11:36

It would be more the natural result of laws than it would be any type of expression of divine will by any stretch of the imagination.

01:11:46

Now, those laws are extremely complex and don't really map with how you and I look at the world.

01:11:54

That's why I would say trying to explain Stoic cosmology is just as difficult as trying to help

01:12:05

Westerners understand the Eastern way of thinking when we're talking about Eastern Orthodoxy and stuff like that, because when you're talking to an audience that just doesn't, we don't have that kind of background to draw from, it's hard to come up with illustrations.

01:12:22

We can't learn by analogy. The foundations are very, very different. But what we see again with Wilson here is he takes the modern terminology of determinism, decrees, choosing, free will, things like that, and he's trying, he's clearly seeking to forge connections to what would be today

01:12:52

Reformed theology rather than letting the Stoics speak as the

01:12:57

Stoics and defining the terminology within a Stoic framework, which is very, very, very, very, very different.

01:13:03

That's not explained here. But you end up with this non -free free will, which is meant to be a mocking term, but it's

01:13:12

Augustine's conversion from traditional free choice to non -free free will is the title of the work because very clearly he does not believe that that can be made a meaningful concept.

01:13:22

So, the whole concept of compatibilism, the whole concept that you can have a divine decree, and yet that creates time itself where man's decisions are meaningful, he just rejects its possibility.

01:13:35

But the Stoics didn't do that in the first place. They did not have a personal God who had a revelational decree of himself to his own glory.

01:13:42

It just wasn't there, just not a part of the system. So, I continue on. Although some scholars categorize

01:13:48

Stoics as compatibilists, determinism and moral responsibility are inseparably linked, presupposing and demanding each other.

01:13:54

Notice that's a criticism. That's his perspective. Concealing fated free will.

01:14:05

Sentence doesn't even really make much sense. Fate controls every minuscule event or occurrence in universe in a moral imperative.

01:14:13

Although the possibility of actuating an opportunity, free will remains solely by definition.

01:14:20

There are references given to each one of these that no explanation is provided as to how these references are meant to turn these sentences that don't have any relationship to the sentence before in anything meaningful.

01:14:33

The whole dissertation is like this. The section on the dating of Augustine's edits isn't.

01:14:42

That's actually better because you're not dealing with this type of stuff. The ancient

01:14:49

Indo -Mesopotamian religion, the Qumran community, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Neoplatonism all embraced similar divine unilateral predetermination of individuals' eternal destinies concepts.

01:15:03

This is central to the affirmation, the assertion.

01:15:09

If you want to underlies the sound file I played a few moments ago, here it is and it'll be repeated in the final conclusions.

01:15:17

That's why I'm letting the original sources speak here. The original source in this case being

01:15:23

Wilson himself. If you've been enduring up till now, try to tune in because this is key.

01:15:33

This is really central. This is where he's actually laying it out. You have

01:15:39

Indo -Mesopotamian religion. You have the Qumran community. You have

01:15:44

Gnosticism. There are lots of different kinds. You have Manichaeism. Also different kinds. You have

01:15:49

Neoplatonism. All embraced similar duped concepts.

01:15:56

Well, what are they? Number one, humanity's fall occurred by free will after which free will was lost.

01:16:04

This is false. It's false. It's like saying the

01:16:16

Arizona Cardinals have won the last five Super Bowls. False. Why are you looking at me like that?

01:16:23

That's really false? Well, I would have to say the

01:16:33

Cleveland Browns have won the last. That makes it really, really true. That's right.

01:16:46

We've already pointed out to even use the term fall, to use the term free will, given the differences between these groups.

01:16:58

I'm not sure exactly what he's referring to about Indo -Mesopotamian religion unless it's the earlier forms of what feeds into Manichaeism.

01:17:06

But if you are the result of the mating of demons who grew out of sperm and aborted things falling on the earth from divine beings that got sexually excited by an androgynous being from the realm of light,

01:17:31

I'm sorry, that's not the fall of Adam and Eve. There's no way to make a connection here.

01:17:37

This is violation of every logical category problem that man's ever seen.

01:17:44

Wow. So that's not a free will fall.

01:17:51

And in fact, in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, in Valentinian Gnosticism, the actual taking of the fruit is a good thing.

01:18:04

The Christ spirit is sent because gnosis is a good thing.

01:18:12

So number one in the definition of dupy, none of the people who held any of these views would have agreed.

01:18:22

Well, maybe the Qumran community, maybe the Qumran community,

01:18:28

I suppose that that'd be one, but none of the rest of them would even have a category to even work with.

01:18:37

Number two, unavoidable divinely fated actions remain punishable.

01:18:47

Again, just looking for a meaningful way of understanding these statements.

01:18:59

That would be true of Qumran because it's, it'd be true of Qumran without the word fated.

01:19:07

That's a prejudicial term. Fate is impersonal.

01:19:13

A decree is personal. I don't care if you don't want to utilize, if you don't want to recognize those differences, the differences actually exist.

01:19:20

But unavoidable actions remain punishable. This confuses the eternal and the temporal on the

01:19:27

Christian level, leaving all those things aside. How do you even have a meaningful understanding of punishable between these different perspectives?

01:19:43

Punishable by whom? When, when in Manichaeism and in Gnosticism, the physical realm at the end of time is destroyed, either after all the light particles are removed or whatever other strange forms of eschatology

01:20:04

Valentinianism had and whatever. When, when the physical realm is dissolved in Gnosticism, it's in Manichaeism, it's not dissolved.

01:20:16

It's just separated from the realm of light back to the way things were because they're two equal, two equal realms.

01:20:23

How is that punishment? How is that punishment?

01:20:29

Punishment on the basis of what? You see, the only way for punishment to be relevant is if there is an overarching law that governs all of this.

01:20:35

You don't have that in Gnosticism or Manichaeism. It's just not there. I'm not sure how the

01:20:45

Neoplatonists would deal with this, to be honest with you, or if they would even have a basis for the concept of punishment in that way.

01:20:53

But unavoidable divinely fated actions remain punishable.

01:21:01

That would be understood by each one of these groups in a completely different fashion and would be rejected by Reformed people entirely because of its aberrant assertion.

01:21:14

Number three. By the way, there are five points. In fact, the five points would be hua 'at.

01:21:25

See, they couldn't even come up with a tulip. I mean, at least we can come up with nice flowers. They have hua 'at.

01:21:35

Sounds Klingon. We really didn't need to bring a completely different topic into this particular subject.

01:21:43

It's tough enough to keep the Neoplatonists and the Essenes going, but throw in wharf and we've lost all of it.

01:21:54

So number three, a, scare quote, dead will, scare quote, required

01:22:02

God's extreme grace to resurrect dead souls in order for the unilaterally predetermined elect to receive salvation.

01:22:12

Once again, a surface level attempt to take a bad representation of modern

01:22:26

Reformed theology and read it back into ancient perspectives, none of whom could have understood what was being said, all of whom would have defined the key terms of this torturous sentence in completely different ways.

01:22:46

So dead will, what would a dead will mean to a

01:22:55

Manichean over against a Sethian Gnostic, over against a Valentinian Gnostic, over against a

01:23:01

Neoplatonist, over against the Indo Mesopotamian, over against one of the

01:23:06

Essenes? Each one would define the nature of man differently, will differently.

01:23:15

To say dead will, how do you define that when are we talking about the fragment of light?

01:23:26

Is that ever dead? What about amongst the

01:23:33

Gnostics? Is the result of Yaltava Oath's exercise of divine power he received from his mother

01:23:44

Sophia able to create a true soul? Why does

01:23:51

Yaltava Oath seek to rape Eve to get the divine power from her?

01:24:00

How does that relate to then the nature of Adam and Eve and their wills?

01:24:07

And it's a transparent effort to find completely bogus parallels.

01:24:17

This is the same stuff that is used, mentioned this yesterday, the same type of argumentation is used to try to draw parallels to the

01:24:30

Jesus story that you'll find splattered all over the internet on YouTube and everything else, proving that Christianity is not unique, etc, etc, etc.

01:24:41

This is the same kind of reasoning that's being used. God's extreme grace, you could not provide a meaningful connection between what that would mean to Calvin and Augustine back to the

01:25:02

Manichaeans, the Gnostics, the Valentinians, the Neoplatonists, or the

01:25:07

Stoics. They would have no idea. The community at Qumran, because they have

01:25:13

God's scriptures and they actually believe God's scriptures, they would have a foundation for an understanding of that, definitely.

01:25:27

The rest of them wouldn't. Number four, although, offered, to all, only the elect could receive faith as God's gift.

01:25:44

Again, meaning of elect, completely different amongst all these groups.

01:25:51

Faith, different definition. What does it mean that it's God's gift?

01:26:00

Why did lots of church fathers before Augustine believe that Ephesians 2 said that faith is

01:26:05

God's gift? These are questions that must be asked, but although, quote, offered to all.

01:26:14

This is, again, is a very poor effort to read

01:26:20

Reformed theology, a badly framed Reformed theology, back into this context to create the very connections that then he goes, voila, look at all my study, look at these connections.

01:26:34

Yeah, he started with them. He asserted them from the start. There was no meaningful argumentation before this in the summary statements that actually establishes any of this stuff.

01:26:48

It's just simply asserted. It's a bunch of assertions, and my understanding of scholarship may be different than other people's, but my understanding is when you write a doctoral dissertation, you actually have to back up what you're asserting and argue for it in a meaningful and consistent fashion.

01:27:12

Finally, number five, the one slash God slash

01:27:19

Redeemer infuses the gift of love instantaneously resurrecting dead wills.

01:27:28

When he gave what he commanded, God could command what he willed. Now, the last two phrases are a paraphrase of Augustine.

01:27:37

So, if you're paraphrasing Augustine as a part of what all these other groups allegedly believed, you haven't established that yet.

01:27:47

You have not established the similarity of terminology that this summary would actually be meaningful in any of these.

01:27:54

You haven't established any of that yet, but when you actually paraphrase

01:28:00

Augustine and then make that a part of your opening summary of the first chapter, then you're going to supposedly argue for it later on.

01:28:10

That's called arguing a circle. You've already made your conclusion, and shockingly, you're going to come to the same conclusion at the end of everything, too.

01:28:20

How did that work? Oh, well, it's because it's not being argued appropriately by any stretch of the imagination.

01:28:26

So, the one God Redeemer infuses the gift of love instantaneously resurrecting dead wills.

01:28:32

How does that happen in Gnosticism? It would be different between Sethian Gnosticism and Valentinian Gnosticism.

01:28:46

So, how does that exactly work? I don't know. I don't think they would have understood anything that was being said there, and even if you come up with a way to make it relevant to them, that would require changing the meanings of the words so it's no longer relevant to Reformed Theology.

01:29:07

Trying to maintain this connection is simply impossible. It's not done here. So, there is the assertion under the conclusion.

01:29:26

This is page 37. I'm sorry, page 38. And this is definitional to what the rest of the work is going to be.

01:29:38

What it's going to say. And it's simply wrong from the start. Foundationally corrupt.

01:29:48

These are impressive commonalities in sharing Stoic -type

01:29:54

Providence and Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals' Eternal Destinies. Well, no, they're not, actually.

01:29:59

They're fake. You may assert them. You haven't grounded it. And there are so many obvious category errors that, again, most of us are just sitting around going, did anyone read this?

01:30:13

What happened here? I don't get it. Christian heretics empowered

01:30:19

Gnosticism. Valentinian, which should be

01:30:26

Valentinus, appealed to Scripture, Romans 11, proving

01:30:32

God offered salvation to all but only the elect with freed wills could receive it.

01:30:41

Only the elect with freed wills. So, are you connecting the spiritual with the elect over against the psychokos?

01:30:55

Because, as I pointed out yesterday, there was actually discussions amongst Valentinians as to whether the soulish could receive the gnosis and, therefore, receive a form of return to the

01:31:12

One. But notice, proving

01:31:17

God offered salvation to all. God offering salvation has a meaning for a provisionist that it didn't have for a

01:31:25

Valentinian. Different meanings. Different context. Certainly different for the

01:31:31

Gnostic. But only the elect. There is no decree of elect that determines the identity of the elect.

01:31:43

With freed wills could receive it. Freed wills from what?

01:31:50

Valentinus taught it was Jesus that helped Adam and Eve to partake the fruit.

01:32:00

The Gnostic Basilites claimed initial faith itself was God's gift, as did numerous other people in that day.

01:32:07

Paganism contributed to Plotinus' One remained just and good by definition despite his inexplicable arbitrary injustice.

01:32:19

Paganism contributed... it doesn't even make sense in English. It doesn't.

01:32:24

I'm sorry. I'll read it again. Paganism contributed as Plotinus' One remained just and good by definition despite his inexplicable arbitrary injustice.

01:32:36

So who's the his? I'd assume Plotinus' One, but it could be

01:32:44

Plotinus. What did Paganism contribute? Okay.

01:32:54

Divine unilateral predetermination of individuals' eternal destinies appears inevitable in any philosophy when a theory of totalitarian providence demands

01:33:05

God must resurrect the totally incapacitated will, non -free free will, and infuse salvific faith as a gift of grace.

01:33:17

Now what's he describing here? He's describing Reformed theology. So what's he trying to do?

01:33:23

He's trying to forge that connection. What's the result?

01:33:29

He's taking his understanding and fabricating connections amongst categories that are completely disparate from one another foundationally so as to create this idea of the connection via Augustine through to Reformed theology.

01:33:51

Appears inevitable in any philosophy when a theory of totalitarian providence,

01:33:58

I would assume, that totalitarian providence is supposed to be something like Ephesians 1 .11,

01:34:05

works all things out of the Council of His Will, Psalm 135 .6, Daniel 4. Is that what that's about?

01:34:13

God's sovereign decree determining the very fabric of time, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the London Baptist Confession of Faith, I would assume, demands

01:34:22

God must resurrect the totally incapacitated will. You mean raised to spiritual life?

01:34:29

Use biblical terminology? Yes, raised to spiritual life and freed from the slavery to sin?

01:34:37

John 8? Yep, that's what the Son can do, definitely. And infuse salvific faith as a gift by grace.

01:34:46

If that means regeneration, the making of a new heart, taking out a heart of stone, giving a heart of flesh.

01:34:52

If that's, if what you're saying is infused would be the same thing as what we have in the prophets,

01:35:00

I will take out a heart of stone, I will give you a heart of flesh. It has to be infused,

01:35:05

I guess. Strange terminology, but okay. Although dupied could perhaps theoretically be held without a micromanaging direct providence, starting with the latter assumption apparently predestines the position of divine unilateral predetermination of individuals.

01:35:26

That appeared four times in one paragraph, three times spelled out, and once as an acronym.

01:35:33

I wonder how long this book would be if he had just used the acronym after the first time, probably been 20 pages shorter, just simply would have been much cheaper to typeset.

01:35:44

But although dupied could perhaps theoretically be held without a micromanaging direct providence, so without a divine decree, starting with the latter assumption, latter assumption of what?

01:36:02

Apparently predestines the position of dupied. I'm just reading it folks, and most of the time it just don't make no sense.

01:36:14

It's just so, so poorly written.

01:36:21

But predictably, no ancient religion or philosophy dared deny free will. Creative philosophical manipulations provide a semblance of free will while denying its effective capacity.

01:36:42

So if you don't hold to full autonomy, then you can't ever use the term free will.

01:36:49

You can't have creaturely free will. You can't have God has autonomous will and makes man with a creaturely free will.

01:36:56

No, it's not really real. It's denying its effective capacity.

01:37:03

Effective capacity, in other words, being fully autonomous. Even the strictest determinist retained the carcass of free will.

01:37:11

Notice carcass of free will. There's nothing unbiased about this word. Although it had been gutted of meaningful choice as non -free free will, the public was not so gullible.

01:37:24

Stoicism's declining popularity required Marcus Aurelius to finally soften its determinism.

01:37:30

Heretical and pagan concepts of divine unilateral predetermination of individuals' general destinies with non -free free will were being confronted with freedom of choice by Christian authors.

01:37:41

The Christians were coming with their autonomy. Well, except for those ones that we looked at earlier that believe in the elect.

01:37:52

Anyway, not until circa 200 CE with Alexander of Aphrodisias, did the pagan debate progress to Judeo -Christian free will.

01:38:11

Progress to Judeo -Christian free will. Progress to the level of it?

01:38:18

To the substance of it? What? We're not told. He denounced

01:38:24

Stoic and Neoplatonic determinism as impeding persons' moral development, argued for a genuine alternative choice and limited providence from controlling every detail of human action.

01:38:38

Alexander forged a compromise between the two extremes of the Epicurean denial of any divine interference with the physical world and Stoic meticulous micromanaging providence, which again is not, shouldn't have a providence to capital

01:38:50

P because it's not personal. Judaism had previously held such a view. One might argue that in addition to Alexander's peripatetic objections to Stoic blending, prior

01:39:00

Christians' authors' philosophical refutations, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, Clement had influenced pagan theological debates by 200

01:39:07

CE. Christians vehemently opposed the deterministic Stoic, Gnostic, Neoplatonic and Manichean non -free free will.

01:39:15

Well, you just said 200 CE. Manny was born then, so they hadn't opposed any Manicheanism at this point.

01:39:22

Early Christians emphatically rejected the divine unilateral predetermination of individuals' eternal destinies of heretics and pagans by hailing a

01:39:29

Judeo -Christian residual freedom of choice in determining eternal destinies. Why? Because God's fortunation to salvation occurred through foreknowledge of a human faith response, as the next chapters will demonstrate.

01:39:40

So there you have the thesis. There you have it laid out early on.

01:39:46

This is a person who went into this study with an absolute fixed endpoint.

01:39:55

I am going to prove that election is solely based upon God looking down the corridors of time and seeing what mankind's to do.

01:40:02

There is no divine decree, and I am going to find divine decree in all the pagan religions, but not in Christianity.

01:40:15

It's clear, compelling, very obvious. So what we'll do next time, which will not be tomorrow.

01:40:27

No program tomorrow. Sorry. I know we've been doing a lot of programs, but it just works out between Rich and I and stuff we're doing this weekend that that's not going to happen.

01:40:39

So we will be starting with the conclusion, which is on page 273, and working through the conclusion.

01:40:51

Once we're done with that, it should not take all that long if I can resist going into all the background issues with each thing.

01:41:03

But in the process, I'll need to be producing the summary statement that we can then make available.

01:41:12

Like I said, I encourage the translation of it, the posting of it, distribution of it.

01:41:19

Just don't edit it. Just put it out there. We want your help to get it out there.

01:41:27

I'd love to have a Spanish version of it and a German version of it. Wherever this kind of theory is being promoted as being some type of scholarship, we need to demonstrate that it's anything but serious scholarship when it comes to its conclusions.

01:41:44

Then what are we going to do after we get done with this? I've forgotten.

01:41:58

I've forgotten. As far as I can tell. Who knows what happens over the weekend.

01:42:05

And if that stupid green screen would ever arrive. Lost it.

01:42:14

Great. Wonderful. I know. I'm waiting for about three things from there, too.

01:42:21

Anyway, well, thank you for sitting through a whole lot more. Like I said, you're learning about stuff you never expected to learn about, but lots of background information.

01:42:30

Hope it's helpful to you. We will see you, Lord willing, on Monday. God bless.