Sam Allberry’s RZIM Presentation on Transgenderism, Important Issues in Textual Tradition

Anchorings, welcome to the Dividing Line. It's, I think it's Tuesday and no, it's Monday. It's Monday because we are doing a short week.

I leave on Thursday for Virginia. If you're in that area, we've been posting the information for a long time.

You can register at the door. It's relatively inexpensive. It's on the

Trinity. And there is a bunch of smart guys talking other than me. I'm just sort of showing up. But I'm sure it will be very rich in apologetic material on the nature of God and things like that.

And so I believe it's Mechanicsburg, Virginia, I believe is where that, but you can get the information at AOMN .org.

So I leave Thursday. And so we've just basically moved the schedule back by a day.

So we're on today and we'll be on Wednesday at 530 Eastern Daylight Time, Lord willing, and the video cards and internet connection and everything else, because we never did figure out what happened that last time.

You're going to do a test tomorrow? Okay. Anyway, we're supposed to tomorrow on Wednesday have

Michael Brown joining me for about 90 minutes to discuss the issue of the extent of the atonement.

There was a debate last December. Very strange debate. Three -minute position statements followed by 45 minutes of cross -examination each.

Really weird. With Dr. Sonny Hernandez, it was frustrating, because in general,

I agreed with Dr. Hernandez's position, though not completely, because he goes way, way, way beyond where you need to go with a lot of this stuff.

Makes it an issue of fellowship and really Christianity for that matter. I don't believe that Michael Brown's even a

Christian, and not because of anything else, just because it's one thing. If you don't believe this, then you're not a

Christian. The most frustrating thing, and I'll only mention it briefly on Wednesday, was that no matter what text was addressed, for some reason,

Dr. Hernandez believes that you are to quote it in Greek and parse everything before you can comment on it.

If you took all the Greek quoting and parsing out from what Dr. Hernandez said, he talked for about five minutes.

You really can't make your position that way. And 99 .95 % of the

Greek was irrelevant to the topic. So it was just, hey, I'm really good at first -year

Greek. Big deal. It was just, ugh. Anyways, so after I listened to it, I was like, ugh.

And I had said beforehand, if it goes the way I sort of expected it to go, how about we have a discussion about this ourselves?

And Michael said that would be great. So we're going to attempt to do that. We tried to do that right before I left for Germany and Russia, and it didn't work.

Our system went bloop, and we still don't know to this point exactly why it went bloop, but it did.

And so we didn't even get to do the program that day. And so we're going to try it on Wednesday at 5 .30,

because you all play with your clocks, I think, the weekend after that, if I recall correctly, the first weekend in March. So the rest of us don't do that, and then we've got to figure out, you know, making all this stuff.

I did notice that a book was sent to me. I can't tell you much about it, and I don't even know exactly how to pronounce

Josh's last name here. Naeemi, I guess. Naeemi? Neemi?

Something like that? So he lives in central Illinois, and Phil Johnson, Mike Abendroth, and good old

Nate all put nice comments on the back. If Josh happens to be a listener, it's on Limited Atonement, The Supremacy of Christ, Limited Atonement, called

Greater Than Aaron. The best way for me to read stuff like this is if I get it in electronic format, because then

I can convert it to MP3 and I can listen to it. But who knows? Maybe I'll have a few moments to sit down and at least scan through it before Wednesday.

Obviously, my desire on Wednesday is to explain to Michael in a clearer fashion than was in the debate the

Trinitarian harmony argument for particular redemption, the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit in accomplishing one particular thing.

Obviously, Michael and I do not have the foundation in a belief in an exhaustive decree of God.

Sometimes Michael says things that sort of requires that, but that's where I think the inconsistency is.

But it will be challenging, but we will attempt to do so in a useful fashion.

So that will be on Wednesday, and hopefully everybody will find that to be useful.

I want to fairly briefly – I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this. I'm just going to play some segments.

I can't play to 1 .8. In fact, you know what?

Let me try this. Audio cleanup.

Oh, it doesn't do that. Noise cancellation, low frequency cut. No, I don't need that. Oh, drat.

I had a program once that would remove dead space.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not seeing it here in Audio Notetaker.

The audio cleanup, noise cancellation, click reduction, low frequency cut, high frequency cut. Thinner, brighter, and playback in mono.

That ain't going to do me any good. Wait a minute. Here's clear lecture processing.

I wonder what that is, but it's grayed out, so I don't know. Maybe that's something I have to buy or something. Anyway, as I'm looking at Sam Mulberry's presentations, it's about one -third blank space.

And we could get through it a lot faster if Sam didn't take very, very long breaks between statements.

So I'm going to kick that baby up to 1 .4 so we can use this when the speaker is talking too slowly.

I left the cursor on the plus. It's this little pop -up thing.

Anyway, I've got a lot of other stuff that I want to get to that only we talk about.

But this is important stuff. I mean, the stuff going on in the

SBC, how much of the conversation taking place there in the

Southern Baptist Convention. In light of the onslaught of wokeism.

I mean, man. It's not just amongst

Baptists. There are woke Reformed Baptists. There are a bunch of woke Presbyterians these days.

And man, once somebody gets woke, they're just once woke, twice broke.

And all of a sudden, they just lose foundational discernment skills.

And so there are people making suggestions that basically, fundamentally,

Baptists should abandon their ecclesiology because of the crisis.

We've got a crisis. We've got to do something. It's called reflexivity. It is a tactic of the left.

It is extremely effective now that most people are public school educated and educated by film and by culture to reflexively respond.

Rather than patiently considering long -term ramifications and functioning on the basis of a consistent worldview, you just knee -jerk reaction.

Just do something now. We've got to do something now. And then you use words like protect people or stop violence or whatever floats your boat, whatever is going to make people feel better.

You use those terms, even if what you're actually suggesting isn't going to help anybody and is actually going to make the situation worse, which is normally what you're going for.

And so that's what we have going on. That's what we have going on in the SBC. I mean, we've got a good crisis.

Can't waste the crisis. So let's change all of our ecclesiology and create a denomination with a hierarchical structure that can control local churches.

Well, if that's where you want to go, just stop calling yourself a Baptist. That's all. So many people say, well, we need to have a centralized structure that can do this, that, and the other thing.

You mean like Rome? You mean like the Anglican Church? You mean like the

Episcopalians with their gay bishops? I mean, this really accomplishes something?

Not really. And of course, what should be the first question? Tom Askell got to it right.

The real issue here is an unregenerate church membership. It's self -appointed, self -called pastors in churches that don't have elders, that do not have any type of situation where you have internal accountability.

It's completely discernible from a biblical perspective, but people are still willing to go, you know,

I think we're just over. Let's just forget about this conviction that people in the past have had that there are these offices in the church and that you're not supposed to have this hierarchy.

Hey, the fact of the matter is the vast majority of Southern Baptists have never even given thought to ecclesiology.

So why shouldn't they want to abandon it? I mean, let's just be honest. 95 % of Southern Baptists have just simply accepted whatever ecclesiology they were handed when they were a kid.

They've never thought about it. They've read over -versed, but they've been hit in the head over and over again by the apostles -appointed elders in the churches.

And all that stuff is like right on by because you don't have much in the way of interaction going on.

And so I'm not overly shocked that people would be willing to abandon ecclesiology they didn't know they had in the first place.

I mean, if you didn't have any investment—I was talking with this one guy who gets me in trouble all the time, so I won't mention who he is because I try not to get him in trouble all the time and he tries to get me in trouble all the time.

But anyways, I was mentioning a similar context where a

Southern Baptist—well, he was mentioning to me a similar context where a Southern Baptist was fundamentally arguing against original sin.

And we've seen amongst the traditionalists that there is really a deep, semi -Pelagian, really -there -isn't -any -original -sin concept.

Federal headship? Are you kidding? And so they're just left looking at Romans 5 going, I don't know what's going on there.

It's just really weird. And I would say, functionally, the vast majority of Baptists I know of, excluding Reformed Baptists—including some, but excluding the vast majority of Reformed Baptists—do not believe in original sin.

They believe in the age of accountability because they don't believe in original sin. The two don't go together, in case you have ever really tried to figure that part out.

They don't believe in original sin, and as a result, fundamentally, there is no grounds for their having a deep commitment to the imputed righteousness of Christ.

They don't see covenant relationships. They don't see Christ as the head of a new humanity.

Romans 5 is just a mysterious babble to them. And so, the idea of union with Christ, election, the imputed righteousness of Christ, this all stands and falls together, and unfortunately, for the large majority of Baptists, they do not have a coherent systematic theology.

They have no commitment to it. So, if something comes along, and all of a sudden, it's a crisis, well, okay. That solution sounds good.

Let's go with it. But that solution's against what your statement of faith has said all along. Let's rewrite it.

There you go. And that's what we see happening. That's what's going on.

So, it's troubling, but I come back to what

I was supposed to be here. What happened is, a little over a week ago,

RZIM had Sam Alberry speak. Now, my understanding, I forgot to look it up.

It's something I was going to do. It's a short week. I don't even know what

I'm going to be packing to get to Virginia. And I don't even know what the weather's going to be like in Virginia. Who knows?

I hope this cold front and all this cold stuff moves out before I get there. Okay, I'm done with the cold.

The snow in the mountains was nice. That's it. It snowed in Munster.

I never felt the cold that I felt in Russia. I'm done. That's it. Don't need it anymore.

It's going to be in the 70s here when I leave. It's going to be great. Yeah, I'm done. I'm ready for summer to come back.

People go, yeah, wait until September. I'm going to try to keep this in mind. Anyway, I've got a lot on my mind and so I keep forgetting various things.

But I was going to look up when it was that I addressed the

Live Out article. And it's been within the past three, four months,

I would say, where I took strong disagreement based primarily, as I recall,

I didn't pull up the article again, upon the fact that it seems very clear to me that Sam Ulibarri and I disagree on the nature of homosexual desire or just same -sex attraction if we want to include lesbianism without making distinctions and so on and so forth.

Now, this talk I'm going to be talking about was about transgenderism. So, related, but as we pointed out in the last program, actually at odds with each other.

Remember the Martina Navratilova story where you cannot hold together

LGBTQ. It's a self -contradictory, incoherent group.

And so, I had at that time wondered about some of the things that Sam Ulibarri was saying in regards to the nature of same -sex attraction.

And the issue of it being a disordered desire and therefore, if a person, as Sam Ulibarri says, he himself experiences same -sex attraction, he does not believe he can act upon that and therefore he remains celibate but is in leadership.

My understanding is he's in leadership within Anglicanism, which is a whole different dynamic.

Even within Anglicanism, I mean, you've got the GAFCON guys that are on our side basically and the conservatives and things like that, and then you've got

Canterbury and everybody else is way out in the sub -blood cells and the

African guys are with the GAFCON guys basically. But anyways, you've got your conservatives and you've got your non -conservatives.

That sounds right. So, November 6th of last year.

So, just a couple months ago. I said three or four months. That's right, four months or so. Anyway, I think we have a disagreement as to whether same -sex attraction is disqualifying for any number of things.

So, once I listened, well, by the way, I was directed to this article by another article about, okay,

I was directed to the RZIM. I had seen it was going to happen but I had forgotten about it.

I was directed to listen to the RZIM presentation by a written article about it that made it sound really bad.

I mean, really, really bad. Mega bad. And so,

I went into it probably unfairly prejudiced because of this article. Then when I listened to it,

I was like, I should have known better. It was meant to make it sound as bad as possible.

No effort made to actually listen in context at all. So, let me admit right up front that we're all subject to that.

And in fact, let's just face it, most of us act upon what somebody else says about something.

A lot of you are going to act upon Sam Albury based upon what I say. And that's not a good thing.

None of us can keep up with everything. None of us can avoid all of it. But that's why grace is important.

Grace and truth. The great balancing act that any mature Christian must constantly try to maintain that the world will do everything it can to destroy.

Balance of grace and truth. Anyway. So, I listened to it and so I said, you know, there was stuff in here that concerned me.

There was stuff in here that troubled me. But there was a whole lot of stuff that was said exactly the same way I would say it. There was a bunch of stuff that was like, yeah, that's how

I'd respond. Oh, there was one I forgot to mark it. Oh, it was the, there was an audience question.

He was asked, oh, that's right. He was asked, would you use someone's chosen pronouns when you knew what their genetic gender, birth gender, it's so confusing anymore.

Did we ever, when we started this program, we never thought we'd be sitting around trying to figure out who boys and girls are. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was asked, would you, if someone asked you to use their chosen gender pronouns.

And I appreciated the response because my immediate response would always be no.

Because that is asking me to engage in rebellion against God. God makes men male and female.

There is, I wrote it, oh man, why didn't I memorize it? What was it, 0 .05

was the maximum number? 0 .05 % of the human population experiences actual genetic polymorphism when it comes to sexuality.

I have an old genetics book because I studied genetics in college. I've thought about finding out what the current updated version would be that would give me the numbers, but I also looked it up online.

And, of course, you find all sorts of transgender sites that massively inflate the number just amazingly.

But the actual number is about 0 .05%. So when I say 99 .95,

that actually is the right number. Leaving out the 0 .05,

that's the maximum number, the 0 .05%, 99 .95

% of the people you're dealing with are not genetically abnormal and, therefore, are engaging in an act of rebellion.

They may have a serious mental problem. For example, and remind me that I'm trying to get back to whether you use gender pronouns or what

Sam Albury said, but, for example, there are people who have a mental illness that causes them to think that their appendages or an appendage, an arm, both arms, both legs, one leg, toes, whatever, that some element of their physical body does not belong to them.

It's unnatural. And they can't sleep. They can't rest. It's like an alien. That's going to get memed.

And they are absolutely serious about it. And some people have literally sawed off limbs.

Now, we're still at a point in our society where we recognize that's a problem.

We need to have some counseling here and there needs to be some intervention because we can't have people lopping appendages off just because you feel that's actually an alien when actually it's you.

And we recognize there's something wrong about that. There's something has gone in the mind and this person is ill.

There is a serious issue here that needs to be addressed. Now, obviously, there are going to be a bunch of folks who are going to go, well,

I don't see a problem with that. If you just don't identify with your hand, lop it off.

That's what we're doing today. That's what that dude in that unbelievable thing he was wearing on the red carpet last night was doing, right?

You know, we need to stand with the transgender people. So I'm going to wear a tuxedo top with a big old poofy skirt.

Okay. This happened in Rome, too. Not very long before it fell.

And that's what's going to happen here, too. Anyway, so there are people that can seriously experience gender dysphoria.

But again, out of all the people that are calling themselves transgender, all the

Bruce Jenners in the world, the vast majority of them as well are doing this as an act of sexual rebellion.

There isn't any truly underlying cause. They're not going to lop off a hand. They may lop off something else if they go far enough, but they're not going to lop off a hand.

And it's just rebellion. And a lot of it is now being engendered by the breakdown of the family, boys who don't have fathers, women who don't have mothers and fathers, and it just goes from there.

And so you have all sorts of these types of aspects that need to be kept in mind as well.

And so when someone says to me, do you use someone's preferred gender pronouns, if they are in the 99 plus percentile of people who are not genetically different and are simply experiencing rebellion, that's asking me to sin with them.

And so I cannot and will not do that. And that will lose you your job in many places today.

No question about it. That's something that each one of us has to make a decision about. But as the question was being asked,

I remember right where I was, right where I was on the canal riding, listening to this. As the question was being asked,

I had the thought across my mind,

I said, well, then I said to myself, well, I would want to be sensitive to the different contexts in which this could be asked.

In other words, if I know this person is simply in rebellion and doesn't know any better, in other words, if I know this person is in rebellion and they do know better, say, raised in the church and they've left the church and they've become an apostate or something like that, then yeah, wild horses couldn't get me to do it.

Because I'm confirming them in their rebellion. But what if it's somebody who's an abused foster child who has never even seen a

Bible, let alone heard the first word of the gospel? Am I going to, in that instance, make sure

I cannot ever say anything to them because this is the hill

I'm going to die on? They're not asking me to compromise anything at that point because they don't know any better. And so,

I thought to myself, I guess there could be some situations where I could at least use that as an opening to talk about God defines these things and say something like, well, you know what

Jesus said about that. And instead of just simply saying, no, try to find an opening to present the gospel.

Because I grew up in a time where there weren't all that many people in our society who hadn't had some exposure to the

Bible or to the gospel. That's not the case anymore. That is just not the case anymore.

We have an entire younger generation coming up that's just secular. They just haven't heard.

And so, in that situation, and right as I'm thinking these things, which I thought fairly quickly, you know, you're writing, you think faster.

Sam Mulberry gave the same answer, basically. He said, you know, if I know someone who was raised in the church, they know better,

I'm not going to do it. I can't do it because I know what they're asking me to do. But if I do not know whether they have any true knowledge of these things, then

I'm not going to make that to be a hill to die on and I'm going to try to find a way. And it's like, oh, okay.

So, what that did is that made me go, all right, before you review this, you wrote a book,

Is God Anti -Gay? So, I bought it in Audible, very short, barely two hours, and listened through it fairly quickly.

And I just simply have to say, Sam Mulberry and I are clearly at odds with one another in regards to same -sex attraction in ministry.

I'm getting the feeling that from living out, they are supportive of stuff that I cannot be supportive of in regards to the roles of same -sex attracted men and women in church, adoption, parenting, can't go there, be worth having a conversation about.

But I've got to say this, I've just got to be honest, when I listened to Is God Anti -Gay,

I'd like to find out from Sam sometime, did you read the same -sex controversy? Because the exegesis that was offered of the key texts,

Leviticus, Genesis 17 -19, the

Sodom and Gomorrah story, and the reason I'm giving you that look right now is there are all sorts of popular ways to get around that one.

He didn't take them. I wrote the section in our book on the

Sodom and Gomorrah story. We were smack dab on. We emphasized the exact same things all the way through.

I wrote it first. But Romans 1, 1

Corinthians 6, Arsinokoites, he thinks the ESV is right, which I think the ESV is right in its understanding of Arsinokoites, Amalekoi, 1

Timothy 1, on every single one of the biblical texts,

I could not bring a single word of criticism because the exegesis was identical.

To that which Jeff Neal and I had presented almost two decades ago now.

So I'm like, alright, at least I did due diligence and took the time to read the book.

So I'm going to play some of this material and hopefully, and of course on Twitter, I don't know, over a week ago,

I made the statement that given

Sam Alberry's confession of faith, acceptance of fundamental basic doctrine, and of course you're hyper -Calvinist type guys or people just go nuts as soon as you say it.

If you want to stand in heaven someday and explain to all these other people why you did not treat them as your brothers and sisters in Christ even though they confessed that Jesus Christ is

Lord and risen from the dead and so on and so forth, that's up to you. You're just much braver than I am.

If that makes you feel better, because I think that's why you want to feel better. People went nuts because I said

I have to accept that statement, that confession of faith, and therefore

I'm going to try to listen and study in that context.

And I also included, and I can believe that my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ can be in error on things that are not definitional of the gospel.

And of course those people who make everything definitional of the gospel go nuts at that point.

But made a bunch of people get all... yeah. James White attempts to decipher contemporary gender pronouns circa 2019 colorized.

Yeah, okay, there you go. Yeah, so can you see that?

Yeah. It's not exactly what was going on there.

It was more of the alien type thing, but hey, that's good. We knew that was coming.

The world has gotten a little strange. You know, that's just a little bit.

Anyways, I better get back to this. I'm never going to get this done, because this is supposed to be the short part of the program.

So I have picked this up all the way to 1 .4, so Sam's going to start talking a little bit faster.

But I do want to at least interact with some of the things that were said here. Okay, let's get to it here.

Stop. Well, he sounds funny. It would be helpful if I plugged it in. Let's try it again.

So let me ask an awkward question. Am I saying that transgender people are all futile in their thinking, foolish in their hearts, and darkened in their minds?

No, I'm saying that is true of all of us, without exception. Paul is making those comments to the human race.

It is a very unflattering anthropology. But the bottom line is none of us, not a single one of us, is qualified to determine our own identity.

And whatever identity we do come up with for ourselves will not be a good fit. We just don't have enough access to enough information to truly understand who we really are.

And the only identity that could be a good fit would have to be an identity that comes from someone who knows us exhaustively and thoroughly.

Now, he was attacked for this section. And once you listen to it, then you realize he was unfairly attacked for this section.

Because what he's saying is God defines our identity, not us.

We don't get to look at ourselves and our body fit or anything else and say,

I am this. We need to have access to divine revelation. There's a revelation outside of ourselves that defines who we are.

God gets to say this, not us. It's real easy, especially because of the long pauses, to cut that up and say he's saying something basically the opposite of what he actually did say.

And that's way, way, way, way too easy to do. So, yes,

Romans 1 is to all of humanity. That's true. But Romans 1, 26 and 27 tells us that there are certain depths and levels to which the disordered relationship of creator and creation can go that end up producing self -destructive realities and putting us in the position of what homosexuality does, being given over to shameful desires.

And just as, again, we discussed with J .D. Greer in that sermon that aged very badly in light of the

Houston Chronicle story, remember where he said the Bible only whispers about sexual sin? Ouch.

As we explained at that point, putting homosexuality or same -sex attraction, and I don't know if Sam would distinguish in Romans 1 between merely the experience of same -sex attraction and what's described in Romans 1 in reference to burning in desire one for another.

I'm not sure if he would make a distinction there. I don't remember him making that distinction in the book, but I could have missed it.

I don't see that there is a real distinction there, but I'd be interested to know whether he does or doesn't.

But, once again, in emphasis, I think it's important to see the role that same -sex attraction has in Romans 1.

Now, there really isn't a discussion, as far as I can see, of the modern concept of transgenderism.

Because, I mean, it's just such a violent violation of creation ordinance that you don't have a

Romans 1 or a Leviticus 18 and 20 or a Genesis 18 and 19 type situation where you can have a discussion and bring these types of things out.

I mean, it's just such an obvious category violation that you have the prohibition against cross -dressing, but that hardly gets into the modern situation with what that is all about.

So, we continue on. And so it is that after a Samaritan woman encountered

Jesus Christ, she went back to her hometown and said, Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the

Christ? Her encounter with Jesus showed her certain things about Jesus, but actually what she saw about Jesus she saw from what

Jesus showed her about herself. It was his ability to put his finger on who she really was that made her ask the question, could this be the

Christ? Come meet a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ? Sort of, except there's more to it than that.

I mean, Jesus didn't just tell her. Well, Jesus didn't tell her everything she'd ever done.

He just gave evidence that he knew her heart and knew what her situation was and how many men she had had and so on and so forth.

But he started off with teaching about who God was and where salvation comes from and a number of things along those lines as well.

So it wasn't just that. So when there seems to be some kind of tension between our perception, our mind, and our physicality, we can't just assume, well, my mind definitely knows who

I am. And if my body doesn't feel like it fits, it must be the body that's wrong and which needs to catch up with the mind.

Okay, so what did he just say? He's right. The primary problem that exists from the

Christian worldview is transgenderism, is your mind doesn't get to determine your reality.

Isn't this the whole point of the autonomous man concept, that as I think

I am? That's what it's all about. And he's saying, no, God has created you in a particular fashion, and it's getting your heart and your mind right that will bring harmony with your body.

And he's, of course, exactly right about that. As a pastor,

I've known many people... Okay, I don't need to... These big, big, big, big gaps.

And so we're simply refusing to eat. Okay, he talks a little bit about anorexia there, how your mental perception can bring tremendous damage to your body.

There was something objective about her physicality that she was missing to significant potential harm.

How we perceive ourselves and how we perceive our bodies is not always healthy, is not always accurate.

It's hard to have these conversations, and it's hard to raise these issues. Our culture seems to be in such a kind of...

I was going to say such a tiz. Do you have that word in the US? Can I commend it to you? We're in such a tiz about these issues that to stop and think about them almost seems like a kind of betrayal.

But think about them, we must, precisely because we are talking about people. And it does not do us well simply to be told, well, no, no, no, you've just got to agree with this and don't even ask questions about it.

Now, that sounds like he's talking about the people on the left, saying just accept it, just run with it.

And he's saying, no, we can't do that, and of course we agree. But as well as what we need to think more carefully about than perhaps our culture and the social media environment is encouraging us to, we also need to think through how we help.

And I want to finish with a few comments on this. What can we do, whatever our particular experiences may be, or even our beliefs at this stage may be, what can we do to help?

Again, I want to commend some wisdom to us from Christian scripture. Okay, so this is where there were statements made that made me go, and made me go like that more after reading the book, because the exegesis in the book was, in my opinion, quite solid, and these comments

I didn't find quite solid. The first thing we can do, all of us, is to listen well.

Let me share with you a proverb from the Old Testament. I suspect it's one of the most overlooked

Bible verses in our culture today. If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.

The hot take on Twitter, based on a snap, knee -jerk reaction to what you think the other person is saying and whether you like it or not, is folly and shame.

I don't care which side of the debate you happen to be on. We need to listen to people well if we're going to respond to them wisely, and people are people and not issues.

We may have very strong feelings one way or another about certain issues, but that is never a justification for not taking the time and care to listen to a person, to get a sense of who someone is, where they've come from, what have been the things that they've gone through.

Only when we do that will we begin to be in a position to know how to be an encouragement and a help to someone, so we can listen well.

Secondly, we can avoid unhelpful gender stereotypes. Now, here's where it was sort of like, unhelpful gender stereotypes.

Is every gender stereotype helpful and healthy? Okay, no. But are there all sorts of appropriate gender stereotypes?

And the answer is yes. The biblical prohibition on the switching of garments, that's going to change from what one society is to another.

It's a stereotype, but it's a good stereotype. This was different.

Whether we're believers or not, many of our ideas about what makes a man manly or a woman womanly are arbitrary.

And for those of us who are Christians, again, often our kind of instinctive sense of what we think a man should be like and what we think a woman should be like, owe far more to our culture, and often to a previous generation's culture, than to what the

Bible actually teaches. So a question I've been asking people recently, just to kind of gain a bit of a survey, both here and back home in the

UK, is when you have a men's event at church, what is it typically built around? What kind of activity? When you have a women's activity at church, what's that built around?

In the UK, the typical response for men's events is it's based around alcohol and spicy food.

Not in the US. Specifically beer and curry. Women's events tend to be based around things like craft.

We have an event back in my home church every year, a women's event in the run -up to Christmas, on how to make a Christmas wreath. It's a good thing to make

Christmas wreaths. There's nothing wrong with doing that. But it's interesting, we're just assuming, and we're giving out a signal, if you are a man, this is the kind of thing you are expected to be into and interested in, in our church.

And if you're a woman, this is what we expect you to be about, and to be interested in. And many of those things are somewhat arbitrary.

Okay. I'm not sure exactly what that means. Unless you're saying that we should encourage male

Christmas wreath production? I think we're going to get some of that when he starts talking about David here in a second.

And that's where I'm like, I don't see the reason to go here. So let me just say a couple of quick things on this from a Christian perspective.

The vast majority of what the Bible says, it says to men and women without distinction. So we mustn't overdo the differences. Men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus.

We are not entirely different species of human being. However, the fact that some things in the

Bible are addressed specifically to men, and some things specifically to women, means that our differences are not just biological.

And it's one of those areas where I think, when it comes to men and women, we want to say, as Christians, as much as the

Bible says, and not a single thing more. And I think one of the mistakes the church has often made is to say far more about what it means to be a man or a woman than the

Bible actually teaches. The same is true, actually, in the secular world.

One of the areas of most sensitivity in this particular issue is how to respond to children. Who might be identifying as something other than their own kind of biological sex would suggest.

And again, I want to suggest, oftentimes we are basing our view of maleness and femaleness on things that are very culturally arbitrary.

You can be a real boy, and you can be a real girl, without conforming to certain narrow stereotypes that the

Bible never ever taught. I think of one dear friend of mine who told me once that growing up in his church, one of the things he literally dreaded every year was the annual church picnic.

Because everyone would sit down, they would sit on the grass, have their picnic lunch, and then the same thing would happen every year. The men would go off and play,

I think it was softball or something, and the women would kind of sit down and chat. And he hated sport, just had no aptitude for it and no interest in it.

So he would kind of feel like, I can't go and do that because I just won't do it right, so I'll sit here and talk with the others.

And they would constantly be saying, why are you sitting here talking to us, you should be over there. Because that church had got into its head that this is what men do, and this is what women do.

I do feel for people who've never had any aptitude for sports, that's not the same thing as saying that there are not, maybe he's not saying this, but it sounds like he's saying that there should not be any consistent expectation.

That, you know, I'm concerned about pushing this idea of a spectrum. He said the

Bible specifically refers to men and to women and says different things to them, and so those things have to be accepted.

But we're in the middle of a society that is basically saying none of that is true.

And I don't think it's, well, he is an Anglican. It's almost like the via media, you know, let's find the middle way here.

And the via media has never worked, that's the problem. It's never functioned well, and I don't think it can function in our context either.

But the Bible gives us a much broader range of what it looks like to be a man and what it looks like to be a woman than our culture does, and very often than our churches do.

David was a surprise choice as King of Israel. Now, here's where I ran into something, this was, didn't make any sense.

Mostly because he didn't look like the kind of person you imagined the king to be. He didn't come from central casting. They didn't even put him on the short list because they just assumed, well,

David, not David. Whatever you've got in mind of the king is not him. As David is introduced to us in the book of 1

Samuel, we're told literally that he was beautiful. And the Hebrew word is the word used only ever to describe women.

In contemporary language, David was a pretty boy. And he was someone who spent an inordinate amount of time playing a harp and writing poems about his feelings.

Now, at that point, Sam just violated his own situation.

He just used a modern sociological paradigm, writing poetry about his feelings.

He was actually writing scripture. But writing poetry about his feelings, which would have a different context and different meaning in the ancient

Israelite context that it has today. So, pretty boy, writing poetry, he's basically trying to say he was effeminate in some fashion.

Why go there? Goliath didn't think he was feminine.

And all the Philistines that he slaughtered with a sword didn't think he was feminine. And he probably didn't look like a pretty boy when he was covered in blood.

Ever see that scene in Patriot where Mel Gibson's character goes after the

British soldiers with the Indian tomahawks and comes walking back to his kids soaked in blood?

David looked like that many times. When you talk about the slaughter of the

Philistines, he wasn't a sniper. Warfare was up close, personal, and bloody in that day.

Why, especially in this context, go here? I don't get it.

How is this helping? I don't see what the positive element of this is. By the way, if everyone's wondering why

I keep looking down, I'm watching for the big, long, multi -second gaps, and I'm clicking through them.

I've taken out a third of what we would have had to listen to up to this point, so that's why

I'm not looking at the camera as I'm looking down. They're called the Psalms, they're great. And my fear is that many people would look at David today and say,

David must have gender dysphoria. You're afraid that people...

So, if what he's saying is... Well, I don't know what he's saying. But when you say,

I'm afraid people would say he had gender dysphoria, I hope what he's saying is, but he didn't.

So, we shouldn't put unrealistic expectations on people. Is that what's being said?

Well, you think of some of the feisty women in the Old Testament, and again, many people would have looked at them today if they were growing up in our contemporary culture and said, well, probably some gender identity issues going on there.

Feisty women. So, I suppose the women that killed kings by trying to seduce them, which meant they were curvy and beautiful, but then had a dagger hidden in the folds of their skirt.

Gender dysphoria? I just don't think it's a biblical category.

And trying to create it doesn't help anything that I can see anywhere.

So, we mustn't deal in unhelpful gender stereotypes, but as I close, let me say, we need to recognize where real hope is found.

We tend to think, and our culture encourages us to think, that any problem we have with our body is ultimately going to be solved by our bodies.

And so, if I'm feeling out of place in my own flesh, well, the obvious answer is

I need to change my flesh, and then that will fix things. If I just get the body I want, that will make everything fine.

But friends, if you are looking for your body to fulfill you, you are heading for disappointment. Can't disagree with that.

Needs to be said, being said clearly. One of the unspoken tragedies of the transgender kind of issues facing us is the amount of pain and regret experienced by people after they've gone through some kind of transition surgery.

Gotta listen to this part, because this is exactly right. The rates of deep regret are high.

If you've gone through some kind of transition surgery, you are 19 times more likely to commit suicide than the average population.

Gotta hear that. Gotta hear that. And I suspect part of the reason for that is because if we spend years thinking,

I'm in the wrong body, that is what is most fundamentally wrong with me. If I can only go through this transition, that will be what makes me feel like I really am me.

That will be what will give me a sense of inner freedom, inner wholeness, inner completion. That will finally help me to feel like I'm okay.

I will finally be the real me. And you go through that process, which is highly invasive, and it doesn't make you feel fully okay.

You will not be going back to square one. You will be somewhere far worse, because now you won't have hope.

There is a body that will finally and fully give us freedom.

But it's not our own. Paul writes these words to the church in Colossae. He says, God has now reconciled you in Christ's body of flesh by his death.

We cannot be Gnostics. I'm not saying he was, I'm just...

We cannot deny the reality of the Incarnation and the importance of that. At the same time,

I'm really concerned about making this connection.

Because the body to which we are called is the church. It just seems to me that the answer for the person who has become convinced that they experience some gender dysphoria, some disconnection with their body, is not to make connections to the body of Jesus and Jesus experiencing gender dysphoria.

But to be much more basic than that, what people are missing is a creator who can wisely and properly define who they are.

That's what they need. They don't need association as the first thing.

They need submission as the first thing to a creator who made them the way they are to see that their body is a good gift from God.

I just think this is backwards. Well, not backwards, but I think it's an improper direction to go.

I can't agree with it. In order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

Holy and blameless and above reproach is another way of saying complete, authentic, real, whole.

True, but I, again, could never defend the transfer from the wholeness in sight of God's law to the idea of wholeness in a psychological construction, which seems to be what's being done here.

At peace, fulfilled, content, happy, fixed.

And it comes about by the brokenness of Jesus' body. And the only hope for our brokenness in our own bodies is the ultimate brokenness of his body.

He knew what it was like for his body to cause him enormous pain. He knew what it was like, if I can put it this way, to have body image issues because we're told in Isaiah.

Now, that's so fast. Let me, beep, beep, because this was the one thing I was like, what?

He knew what it was like, if I can put it this way, to have body image issues because we're told in Isaiah. To have body image issues?

This is where, and this is right at the end. I mean, there's only two lines of audio before the break and then the

Q &A section. And this is where I just go, tilt.

Okay, up to now, I can try to find a context. I can't find a context here.

Can't do it. He knew what it was like, if I can put it this way, to have body image issues because we're told in Isaiah 53 that people turned their faces away from him.

People couldn't bear to look at him. His body image issues weren't in his head. They were real.

The kind of people who are normally, do you call them rubberneckers here? When there's an accident on the interstate who will slow down to have a really good look.

There was something about Jesus on the cross that was so appalling, people would actually look the other way. It was more than they could cope with.

And there was no greater dysphoria than when he who knew no sin became sin for us.

There was no greater dysphoria. Okay, there is no question that it was the taking on of human sin that was in the forefront of Jesus' thought when he said,

Father, take this cup from me. Jesus wasn't afraid of physical death. He wasn't afraid of the suffering, the beating.

Father, let this cup pass from me is about the taking on of our sin.

It has nothing to do with body issues or dysphoria or any of this.

And making this connection, saying that, you know, once he becomes sin, this is the greatest, no, no,

I'm sorry. That is going, this would seem to indicate the impact of what is seen in far greater expression in revoice.

Okay, this is very concerning because Sam Mulberry is very much involved with TGC.

And this living out thing, this is where I think where the issues are with living outs, talking about men living with men, always abstinent, can't have sex, but you can adopt children.

No, I don't think so. Just for the sake of the children, let alone anything else, but no,

I don't think so. And here in handling of these texts, and again,

I actually tried to extend fairness and can honestly say when it came to the key texts, he was spot on.

So this just doesn't make any sense to me. There's got to be something else going on here. And that's something else

I think comes from his own experience, his own expression. And so that was very, very concerning.

Okay, I was actually going to play a section from a little bit more from the

David Bernard interview, but I'll keep that for when I get back from Virginia next week, because I spent a lot more time on that than I expected that I was going to.

All right, I almost queued up a bell to indicate change of topic, but we are going to do a major change of topic here.

I even had this stuff queued up for doing the Bernard thing, but I'll hopefully remember that next week.

Well, maybe I won't. Anyway, had some folks, once again, there are some, it's been sort of interesting to watch in Twitter, they're sort of going after each other now in different because they each have their own interesting little way of looking at things.

In this program, we address a wide variety of topics. We talk about Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses and Islam and atheism and we've been talking about homosexuality and issues related to God being the creator of all things for many, many, many decades and sometimes all in the same program.

Recently, one of the subjects, well, over the past couple of years, one of the subjects that has come up fairly regularly, it did, I think, even on the last program, is the issue of how we can know what was originally written in the

New Testament. I've been giving presentations on this particular subject for a very, very, very long time.

In fact, someone, Lane Chaplin, mentioned to me that the presentation that we did at Trinity Law School that we posted on YouTube is now 10 years old.

That was a decade ago and so I'm checking.

We are having, what are they calling them, porch pirates? They're calling them porch pirates and I'm expecting a delivery at home and at least

I'll have good video if it happens because if you come to my house, there will be good video of you coming to my house.

But that's becoming more and more and more of a thing and I don't know what people are going to do about it. Even though that one guy, did you see that one?

Oh, that was classic. The thing would blow up and then it would do the smell and oh gosh.

Then he could track it and trace it. I don't know how many millions of views he got, but most of us watched that only because it was like, man,

I wish I could do that. I have it do more than just blow glitter all over everybody.

There's some other things I could have blow all over everybody. Anyway, sorry about that. Distraction there.

We gotta have some fun around here. The textual issue is,

I think, extremely important. It's an area that I deal in, have been dealing in for a long, long time.

As I said, 10 years since we did that presentation over in California.

One of the movements that I am very concerned about is a movement that I dubbed textual traditionalism and I was informed last evening by a fellow

Reformed Baptist that that is a slur and gutter language. Who knew?

I think if you can look at the phrase textual traditionalism and call that a slur and gutter language, that means you are way too emotionally invested and are responding way too emotionally to what's being said.

Because what's fascinating, for at least 15 years, maybe 20, there has been a fellow, and this was before social media was as big as it is now, but there was a fellow that would take shots at me all the time.

He's a sharp guy. I've tried to be respectful toward him because he's obviously well read and is a scholar in his own way, but he would have to admit he's not in the mainstream by any stretch of the imagination.

He's a sharp guy, but he just loves taking potshots at me.

If something can bring he and I together to where we're saying the exact same thing, that's a pretty amazing thing.

And I'm referring to James E. Snap, Jr. And on a thread where Robert Truelove, again,

I don't know why the other side, okay, I do know why the other side, it's not that they're refusing to hear what

I'm saying, it's that there is an element of their presuppositionalism that keeps them from hearing what

I'm saying. And I'm going to mention one of the reasons I want to talk about this.

Last night at church, well, yesterday afternoon at church, apology, it meets in the afternoon, Jeff was preaching from Jesus' discussion of the law and the abiding validity of the law, and he talked about epistemology a lot.

And so I was accused of, by Robert Truelove, of having a different metaphysical perspective, different epistemology.

We have conflicting epistemologies here. Well, and of course, there is another fellow here,

Josh Sommer, says I'm not a presuppositionalist, and that if you're a presuppositionalist, then you need to hold this perspective, even though Van Til didn't, but hey, that's

Van Til's students. To my knowledge,

I know a bunch of the people, personally, who are Van Til students that do not hold this perspective.

So they're not presuppositionalists either, Van Til wasn't one, only you guys are? Okay, whatever you say.

But I had identified, I responded to a statement by Robert Truelove by using the phrase, textual traditionalism, and that's when he did the, that's slur, it's gutter language, why don't you be nice?

We're trying to be nice to you, why don't you be nice to us? And I'm just like, slur? Gutter language? What are you talking about?

I mean, seriously, James E. Snap jumped in in responding to Taylor DeSoto, because there's a core group of these guys who are just sold out to the idea that if you're really a

Calvinist, then you will use, this is it right here, this is, that's all there is to it.

James E. Snap, quoting Taylor DeSoto, you seem unwilling to take us at face value when we say, no, we aren't traditionalists,

James E. Snap. That is certainly true, because the essence of the confessional text position is one that depends on a particular traditional framework via which to select both individual readings and the

TR as a whole. Show me the scientific case you use to defend a particular reading, and I'll happily say, well,

QED, you take the evidence seriously, and it has an effect on your position, you do not depend on a particular creed or tradition to decide your textual critical questions.

Now, I stop right there. Just yesterday, on Twitter, I asked one of these guys, he's fighting with another one of these guys, because they're not exactly on with one another,

I said, what if we found another P52 style manuscript, which

P52 is generally agreed to be the earliest manuscript that we have, could be as early as 125

AD. That contained John 118, and substantiated the reading,

Theos, the unique God at John 118. How would that impact you? Because this doesn't say that.

And he said, it's just another witness. In other words, it wouldn't have any. So, you'd literally have to have a thousand of those manuscripts before it would have any impact, and even then, how could it have any impact?

What would be the scientific, textual critical, scholarly mechanism that could ever result in any alteration to this?

And for most of these guys, there isn't any. The manuscripts don't matter.

Who cares? That was not known when this was collated.

Every single person who worked on this would have loved to have had that, but let's not let history get in the way of anything.

So, snap goes on. If you say we aren't traditionalists, then you need to say what you are.

That is, either evidence matters to you, or it doesn't. So far, although I've explored practically no particular textual contest with you, it looks like you are deciding textual questions on the basis of a tradition, rather than by appealing to evidence.

Am I to be blamed for not being blind to this aspect of your present position? Taylor DeSoto, how would you like to engage with you when you won't accept another answer than the one you've decided for us?

James E. Snapp, Taylor, this is not complicated. Take in hand a specific textual question and tell me how you settle it.

Is it by exploring textual evidence, looking into manuscripts, patristic writings, early versions, or is it by looking at what the

Westminster Confession of Faith says and concluding that the reading in the TR must be correct?

If your approach is the latter, well, that's adherence to a tradition, not adherence to evidence.

Simply saying we're not traditionalists when practicing traditionalism before my eyes is not persuasive.

Folks, when James Snapp and I say the exact same thing, the lions are laying down with the lambs.

But we both, look, we are both seeing the exact same thing and are both probably banging our heads upon the desk going, why can't you see this?

Why don't you see what's going on here? I wrote to Robert Truelove and I said, look, guys,

I went through a whole series and I should have had this up. I apologize.

I went through a whole series of references in the

Textus Receptus that are problematic. You know what?

In almost every one of the Revelation texts, I'm pretty sure the Ephesians texts, other than Long Ending Mark and the

Prick of Adultery, I think Snapp would agree with me on these too because they're extremely minority readings.

They are either unwitnessed or are a tiny minority witness in any of these.

One of the things that Snapp and I think would disagree on, I'm much more Greek -centric and I think he has a little more concern about earlier versions and I'm concerned about the transmission, the patristic testimony and how accurate that necessarily is because the prevalence of paraphrasing and so on and so forth.

So we've got differences like that, but we're both trying to be consistent in the application of textual critical principles and looking at the data.

This stuff doesn't look at the data. And so I had written and attempted to point out what some of these key issues really are.

And I'm probably not going to be able to track this down, unfortunately. I should have saved this beforehand.

But I ran through a bunch of texts and said, look, this text contains these readings.

And this is what James Snapp was saying. Show me the methodology that is consistent in the application of textual critical principles to the manuscript tradition as it existed back then that would come up with this.

Because obviously, as it exists today, that would be impossible.

But the point is, when you listen to them defend Revelation 16 .5, I'll at least tip my hat to the guy who says,

I'm not going to talk about manuscripts. The TR is the standard. Well, I'll tip my hat.

You're at least being honest and not trying to make it look like you're doing textual criticism when you're not.

But if you've got somebody like the Texas Receptus guy on Twitter that tries to make an argument for the

TR reading of Esamenas over Hasias, you're making it sound like you're doing textual criticism.

Take the standards. In other words, what sources are you privileging? What kind of argumentation are you allowing for here?

You're basically saying that there could have been a massive editing of the primitive text before any of the manuscripts that exist today came in, give witness to this.

And so, you're basically agreeing with Bart Ehrman that there was massive variation in the early period, in what we call the dark period, even though it's the shortest dark period of any work of antiquity, but that's another issue.

Okay, lay all that out as you defend Revelation 16 .5.

Then go over to Revelation 14 .1. And let me point out to you what

Revelation 14 .1 is about, if you want to take a look at it. Then I looked, behold, the

Lamb was standing on Mount Zion, and with Him 144 ,000 having

His name and the name of His Father written on their foreheads. Now, let's add the parallel here.

King James. And I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on the Mount Zion, and with Him 144 ,000 having

His Father's name written on their foreheads. Not the Lamb's name. The Lamb's name is not there.

Well, why is that the case? Well, you have to track down the

Textus Receptus, and you have to take a look at it, and you have to recognize that that phrase is missing, and you have to ask the question, why?

And then when you start thinking about the history of the collation of especially the

Book of Revelation between 1516 and 1598, very small period of time there, there were serious issues.

And there are many serious issues in the examination of the text of the

Book of Revelation. There's no question about it. We have the fewest manuscripts and the widest character of variation within that one book.

I don't think anybody would dispute that. If you apply the standard of Revelation 16 .5,

you cannot answer why the Textus Receptus reads the way it does in Revelation 14 .1, or numerous places in Chapter 17, or other places in Chapter 14, or all through the

Book of Revelation, or in Ephesians, or in numerous other places where the TR has unique readings.

The argument you use for each individual text to come up with this as a whole, each argument would be different.

The standards, different. Not just double standards, but triple, quadruple, sextuplet standards, because historically there was a very unusual path by which that came into existence.

So, you cannot present to us a process, because there is no one process that would lead to that if you didn't have the historical vagaries of Erasmus happening to go to Basel, Switzerland.

Now, you see the Reformed going, but that was God's sovereignty, because that's exactly where God had the exact manuscripts he wanted, and so Stephanus had his manuscripts that he added, and they were the exact ones that he wanted.

Yeah, they're not representative of the exact same stream. Hey, you know, once you start backtracking and using

God's sovereignty as a way of defending your tradition, it's real easy to do that. That's simple to do, but it actually answers no questions.

And, here's the important part, it's utterly indefensible, because all somebody has to do is come along and say,

I don't think you're overly concerned about what was originally written anymore. You have a process here that pretty much doesn't care what manuscripts were running around the

Council of Nicaea. You all don't seem to give one wit. You really don't.

Now, I happen to think it's sort of important, because, you know, you've got this deity of Christ thing going on, you know, it's sort of good to know.

And that's why I've said over and over, not only is this a fatal flaw, it cannot be true. But that means that this movement has to remain focused upon this teeny tiny little narrow corner of the

Ecclesia, and can't have anything to say outside of that.

You can't walk into a debate with Bartirm with this. You can't walk into a debate with Shabir Ali or Ijaz Ahmed with this stuff.

You can't do it. I'm not saying you wouldn't do it, I'm just saying the result would be disastrous.

And so, I will do what

I can, given my convictions, to promote a healthy, solid, biblical, non -traditional defense of the

New Testament amongst the people that are supposed to be, along with me, holding to a very high view of Scripture.

And they will respond by saying, we're not traditionalists, and you're not really confessional. We are.

We are the truly confessional people. Even though I don't think they can, for the life of them, prove either that any of the

A .V. translators or Beza himself would have agreed with their perspectives.

For example, Jan Kranz has written a book called

Beyond What Is Written, Erasmus and Beza as Conjectual Critics of the New Testament. And he points out that they had differing sources available to them.

Beza had access to much more information and much more time than Erasmus had. And so,

Beza, for example, sees the

Syriac as very, very important, and he has communication as a scholar with people that Erasmus did not.

Well, are you going to just follow his perspectives? Because his decisions were pretty much followed by the

King James translators, but not completely. But does that mean that there was some type of providential preservation going on there?

So, is the Syriac more important than the Greek? How are you going to make this work?

And you guys don't care. It's not a matter of whether it works or not. Because fundamentally, what we're saying is true.

You've got a tradition, and you're defending the tradition in any way you have to. In any way you have to.

That's how it works. So, I just wanted to acknowledge, because I hadn't gotten around to it.

Where'd it go? Did I cover it up?

No? Oh, there it is. I did cover it up. I just wanted to acknowledge an article that was posted last week on February 22nd, well,

I guess it was last week, from the Agros Church, which is over in Gilbert, Arizona.

And it is a response to me and to my fatal flaw argument against the

TR. And it reads, after the general thrust of his argumentation,

White offers a final argument that he calls the fatal flaw in the ecclesiastical text movement. So notice, it's actually a fatal flaw in a movement, not in the

TR itself. The argument is based on three major premises. A hypothetical situation, a critique of the methodology used to form what is now known as the text of Septus, and another critique that labels the defense of the

TR as circular. Not exactly right in any one of them, unfortunately. And given how many misrepresentations

I'm seeing, either I'm just horrible at explaining this, or this tradition really causes people to misinterpret things.

The fact of the matter is, James Knapp understands what I'm saying. He may disagree with the particulars of how we respond, but we're both saying the exact same thing in what we're seeing when we identify traditionalism versus any kind of meaningful textual critical analysis of anything.

So, if James Knapp can hear what I'm saying, I don't know why these guys can't. The arguments are as follows.

One, if all the versions of the New Testament were wiped out, the methods employed by modern critical text criticism would be able to reconstruct the text we have today.

Let me try this again. If, when we talk about versions, if we're talking about the printed text, the

Nessieallen, UBS, ECM, Tregellus, Tischendorf, Scribner, so on and so forth, if all the printed copies that have been produced since the first one in 1560, if we simply took the relevant manuscript tradition and said, let's start from scratch and produce a

Greek New Testament, there are standards, each one has utilized particular standards.

Now, those standards can change over time. There has been a move away from privileging

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus over everybody else. That was very plainly present in Tischendorf, very plainly present in Westcott and Hort.

That has changed. The current advent of CBGM, coherence -based genealogical methodology, is introducing a relatively small number of changes, but I think once you're done with the whole

New Testament, it'll probably be at least 600, 700, of which maybe 75, 80, maybe up to 100, will actually be very translationally relevant.

CBGM is changing the whole ground of the conversation.

I can't even recommend to you a New Testament textual introduction right now. I can't.

Everything's changed so much, and will be changing between now and 2030.

That's when the ECM should be completed, is over the next 11 years.

Once that's all out, then it'll be possible to say, okay, here's the current state of things.

But it's changing, and this is what the other side doesn't like.

It shouldn't change. Why shouldn't it change? Because we don't want change.

We want to have black and white. Well, that's nice, but the problem is that means you don't view things historically.

You obviously don't read much in the early church fathers, or in the medieval period, or anybody else for that matter.

Do you really think that someone should have said in 1540, that's enough, we've got the five editions of Rasmus, that's it, no more,

Theodora Beza, stop that, you stop looking at that stuff. Again, it depends on where you want to plop yourself down in history as to what is quote -unquote change after that point.

Anyway, the point is that textual traditionalism, ecclesiastical textism, whatever you want to call it, does not have a critical methodology that applies to manuscripts that would ever produce this text.

The arguments for each of those texts that I mentioned to you are going to be different. That's all there is to it.

And if you have to use multiple standards, that inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

Somebody started saying that back in 2006 at Biola. Number two, the methods used to produce the traditional texts of the

New Testament are inconsistent and cannot be applied unilaterally. Right. Rasmus dragged stuff in from the

Vulgate. Rasmus had very limited manuscript evidence.

Even the manuscript evidence he had only represents one portion of the Byzantine textual tradition.

And I'm not even talking about Revelation here. Once you get into Revelation, it becomes nuts.

That's different than Stephanus, who introduced a few other manuscripts, and then Beza, who's utilizing foreign language versions, and Syriac, which is a secondary translation.

It is not the primary language of the New Testament. And who was deeply influenced by the

Latin Vulgate as well, by the Latin text. So, the number two argument is that there is no single textual critical theory that will give rise to the

TR, that will reproduce it as it exists today. Number three, the case of the traditional text begins with the

TR, and facts are used to support the text of the TR, therefore it is circular. Exactly. If you begin with that, and then whatever you need to do with the facts to substantiate this reading, you can do one thing there, and then you do it completely different.

Different set of arguments, different way of argumentation, different weighting of evidence for this one, different over here, different over there.

Yeah. It's a patchwork quilt that is inconsistent with itself, and hence indefensible to any person who knows what it is, knows it well enough to know what the background is.

Yep, that's right. There you go. It's not just circular, it's incoherent. I really wasn't emphasizing the circularity, but the incoherence of even trying to say you're doing textual critical argumentation in the first place.

Just admit. This is it. Just join Steven Anderson.

King James is our standard, that's where we start, that's the way it is. There you go. The first part of Dr.

White's argument is based on a hypothetical situation which makes it inductive, and therefore a mere probability, even if it truly happened.

Irrelevant. That's not the argument. The argument is the lack of a consistent methodology to produce a

Greek New Testament. I don't know why you guys got focused on, and Robert Truelove did the same thing, got focused on, well, that's just a hypothetical.

The point is that there is a consistent methodology.

You can argue whether the transmission, the translation, not translation, the editorial committees were consistent in the application of their own standards, but they had standards.

Metzger published his commentary. ECM, not so much the general epistles, but there is a commentary on Acts in one of the volumes on Acts.

They're trying to be consistent, and at least CBGM is a lot easier to be consistent on because you've got numbers.

Here's the numbers. Here's where this reading is consistent and that reading is consistent.

You can disagree with it, but at least it's there. The point is not the hypothetical.

The point is that one side is actually doing textual criticism and the other side is not.

The other side uses inconsistent, incoherent, incompatible arguments at this point, this point, this point, this point to drive the text.

That's the point. The conclusion hinges on him being able to control all variables in his hypothetical world in which this fatal flaw argument exists.

No, it does not. It depends on specific data being available on his choosing. Well, if by that you mean that...

well, again, you have to go into history here. Erasmus had this amount of information.

Stephanus had this amount. Beza had this amount. And that's pretty much it. We now have this amount that goes much earlier and is much more thoroughly collated and accurately collated.

They did not have high -resolution photography back then. They did not have the ability...

the manuscripts were not yet identified and catalogued and all that kind of stuff.

We've gotten advantage. You can ignore that history if you want.

I can't stop you. But specific data being available based on his choosing.

Well, I'm simply saying, let's just look at the manuscript tradition as it exists today.

What we have access to today. If we produced a new

ECM based on the manuscript tradition as it exists today, it's going to look very, very, very much like what we have.

But you ain't gonna produce this. And you have to produce this right down to the last words. Once you start saying, well, okay, we can, you know, there's some places that we can, you know, we can make changes here, there.

Look out. The other guys are coming after you now. They're gonna be on you like a duck on a

June bug. Yet, his hypothetical that creates an ideal scenario for his already pre -supposed position can be answered with another, less absurd hypothetical.

I don't even know what this is about. Y 'all didn't understand what I'm saying. And I don't know why. I don't get it.

Why don't you understand what I'm saying? What happens to modern textual criticism if Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were never published?

Now, what's interesting is I've had a few little conversations with these guys, and they've offered me

Mexican food. I'm gonna take them up on that. It's just a matter of when to, you know, I'll take, you know, it's worth chips and salsa, man.

Real good chicken chimmy. Yeah, just got to find the place over there. But as soon as I hear someone talking like this,

I know they're reading stuff from the 1880s. Dean Burgon, they mentioned to me, well, you know, you're just using

Schleiermacher's arguments. I'm going, what? Well, German higher criticism. What?

What do you mean? And they thought modern textual, lower textual criticism is just simply

Schleiermacher. And I'm like, you haven't read Schleiermacher, have you? No.

If you can't tell the difference between form criticism, redaction criticism, source criticism, which is by in the main theoretical in form, and textual criticism where you actually have to have stuff like that and collate things and have data and manuscripts and stuff like that, then you don't understand what the field's about.

And you've been reading some bad stuff and there's bad stuff out there. And a lot of it's very dated. Very, very dated.

That's why I've said more than once. And people don't get this, get this idea that you're, you're overblowing the papyri.

You cannot make a meaningful comment about the state of the

New Testament manuscript tradition, especially as it relates to the conveying of the most primitive readings of the

New Testament without talking about the papyri. You can't.

And I've given an illustration. There's lots of books written between 1900 and 1940 that speculated about the nature of space.

What was beyond this planet? What was out there? They're fascinating, but they're also meaningless outside of having historical use in light of the fact we've gone there now.

We've been to space. We know a whole lot more about it than we did in 1940.

So, those books back then are interesting, but they're no longer relevant. And books specifically talking about the nature of the earliest readings of the

New Testament, written post -papyri, that do not take into consideration the papyri themselves, are irrelevant.

Historically interesting, but not relevant to the current state of knowledge of the manuscript tradition.

I just cannot imagine anyone arguing against that. I just can't.

So, what happens to modern textual criticism if Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were never published has nothing to do with what

I was saying. The issue is the application of consistent textual critical analysis to Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, not if they were never published.

Guys, you just don't understand what I'm talking about. I'm sorry. I've tried. You've got to ask yourselves the question, why don't we get this?

Because other people do. And I think it may have something to do with fundamentalist understandings of some of the basic aspects of this.

Could you produce any semblance of the modern critical text as it appears today in the NA28? I guess that's without Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

Or what happens if a first -century manuscript is found without Romans 9 in it? Will the modern critical text remove it?

His fatal flaw argument crumbles when faced with other less extreme hypothetical arguments. None of those arguments were even relevant.

On a logical basis, you just failed logic 101. Sorry, guys. Don't mean to be mean to you, but if you're going to go to print, you might want to know what you're going to print about.

And you might say, well, who do you think? Look, why do you think I went to Munster last month?

I mean, just to take pictures of the three cages? That was fun. But that's not why

I went to Munster. I went to the INTF. I sat down with the leading expert in CBGM in the world right now and had in -depth conversation with him about my dissertation and what

I'm working on and the directions I'm going and about general textual critical issues. You don't put together your dissertation and continue the direction you're going without checking some of this stuff out.

So, a lot of this stuff is just basic stuff. It really is.

But I will have to ask a question of you all that Bart Ehrman asked of me. Have you ever collated a manuscript?

Do you know what collations are? Have you done any of this work? It is painstaking.

It is forever. I mean, right now, one of the things

I'm trying to invest time in, in between social justice warriors and everything else, is putting together the numbers for such things as, given

P45, P45 has a number of singular readings. Any of you ever read Royce's book on singular readings?

It is seriously that big. It's massive. You know that because had you chopped the spine off of one once.

Yes, so we could scan it. P45 has a lot of singular readings.

Part of my issue in analyzing and making a critical analysis of CBGM in the earliest periods is how can it deal with the historical reality of a witness such as P45, which has a very unique textual character to it.

One of the things I've got to do, I've got to find all the singular readings in the

ECM in comparison to P74 and to a number of other witnesses that I'm using in the first seven centuries in the

ECM analysis of the materials currently available in Acts. When you got to do that work, it sort of helps to clarify things a little bit.

It just seems to me, I'm sorry, that there's a lot of stuff being said by folks who have never done anything along those lines at all.

Let me just wrap up with this. What happens if a first century manuscript is found without Romans 9 in it?

Well, first of all, we don't have any first century manuscripts. Secondly, it is interesting that the text and canon conference, those two issues are extremely important.

Text and canon. What these guys are doing is they are recognizing, and here's where hopefully

I'll be able to explain this because this is extremely important, I've noticed that a lot of them like to take shots at me and Michael Kruger.

Dr. Kruger, of course, has written extensively on the canon, but he's no ecclesiastical text advocate by any stretch of the imagination.

And so these guys who are reformed go after that.

Now, I just minimized, unfortunately. Let me see if I can find it. What I had mentioned before, and that is, anyway,

I lost the one that says that I'm not a presuppositionalist.

And this is bumming me out that I can't. There it is. Yes, okay, there it is.

Good. All right. Josh Summers said, well, we can gather at least two things from this thread.

James White is not a presuppositionalist, and Robert Truelove is simply being consistent with Van Til's revelatory epistemology.

Even though Van Til would not have agreed with him on textual issues. I would love to see this discussion really get to the heart of the matter, which begins prior to questions about source or text criticism.

Both men represent two different views on metaphysics, consciously or not, I cannot tell, as it relates to epistemology.

The view of my dear brother Robert's thinking properly originates in a fundamental conflation of the order of being and the order of knowing.

Dr. White is, at least in practice, allowing for a distinction between the two in this discussion.

An innate and acquired natural understanding of God and his laws of nature, laws of logic, are required for textual criticism.

This means they are required before making the scriptures intelligible. No, no, no, no, no, and triple quadruple no.

Deep breath. I hate seeing the Reformed theology I love twisted like this.

I really do. I really do. Because I believe firmly in the priority of God's revelation.

But you guys are confusing God's revelation with a 16th century production of a

Roman Catholic priest for crying out loud. Wake up! Can't you see that?

Can't you see how unworkable this is? You and your big highfalutin theology.

I know that big highfalutin theology. I love it. You're abusing it for crying out loud.

Sorry. This means that this natural understanding comes prior to the presupposition of the

Christian God revealed only in the scriptures. I don't believe that there is any human knowledge that can be properly grounded outside the

Christian God. Let me say that again. I don't. And I believe that the

Christian God is the one who's created the world to where there has to be a consistency in your argumentation in science or textual criticism.

And the Christian God is the reason I reject your circularity. The Christian God is why

I say inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument. And that's why your argument fails.

How's that? Unfortunately, White is not consistent with this when it comes to arguments for God in support of what we might call tag -onlyism.

Because in the final analysis, he's not a tag -onlyist as this discussion has proven.

So, tag, by the way, is the transcendental argument for the existence of God. And so,

I've never understood how the transcendental argument is relevant to the analysis of Revelation 16 thought.

Okay? If you want to say that it is in some overarching way, fine, but good luck making that work.

You cannot be a presuppositionalist if you presuppose principles prior to presupposing the

Christian expression, God, which I do not. You are in error, sir.

Josh Sommer, S -O -M -M -E -R. You are in error, sir. So, all this, you know, when it says, what if you found a first century manuscript, which we'd love to find.

I'd love to find a first century manuscript. What if it's found without Romans 9 in it?

Okay, it doesn't contain Romans 9. It's never happened. If it happens, then we'd have to ask the question, is there continuous text?

Is there something, does Romans 8 end here and Romans 10 start there?

Or is there a defective manuscript? What is it? There's all sorts of questions that would immediately have to be asked.

But the fact is, there is no evidence whatsoever that Romans 9 is in any sense a textual variant.

So, are you asking the question about canon now, as in the content of Romans as a whole?

Or are you talking about manuscripts where there's an actual variant that's relevant? There are only two major variants, block of text -wise, in the

New Testament. Longer ending of Mark, medium ending of Mark, short ending of Mark. Prick of Adeltery.

That's it. There isn't anything else. You've got single verses. You do not have any blocks.

So, if that were to happen, the vast majority of the text, manuscript tradition, would stand against whatever that manuscript said.

It would be fascinating. We need to look at what context was. There's all sorts of things to bring up. But this raises the issue of the relationship of canon.

And the canon is a theological construct. The text exists in history.

And if you do not see what the relationship between the two are, you're going to create this kind of textual traditionalism.

And it is grossly inconsistent for Reformed men to end up staying in the same place where Pope Sixtus stood when he defined the

Latin Vulgate as the text of the Church. If you can get there, you missed the boat someplace, guys.

You missed the boat someplace, guys. You really did. Hi -ya, hi -ya, hi -ya.

There you go. So, we will be back driving the textual traditionalist nuts on Wednesday and a number of other people because, once again,

I'll actually be defending Reformed theology in regards to the Trinitarian harmony that exists in the particular redemptive work of Jesus Christ in behalf of his people and his sovereign decree of salvation.

And then I'll be driving a bunch of other people crazy because I will actually be interacting with Michael Brown as a

Christian. And you know what? The longer this stuff goes, the more

I don't care whether I drive you crazy or not. If you've got a problem, that's your problem.

It ain't mine. So, that was another one of those programs where we have just demonstrated for anybody who wants to see that we ain't going for the easy audience.

We spent the first hour talking about same -sex attraction, transgenderism, and trying to, in a proper way, in a balanced way, ask serious questions, raise serious questions, raise serious issues without using a flamethrower in the process.

And then the second hour, it's all about textual criticism and textual traditionalism and being consistent as Reformed folks in obtaining...

Look, one thing I've forgotten to say. Let me, let me, let me... One more time. Here is what a believing

Christian wants to know about the New Testament. What did the

Apostles write? What did the

Apostles write? Now, if you want to get into conversations of archetypes and Ausgang's text,

I've read all of it, I know. But when it comes to what Reformed believers should want to know, what did

John write? What did Paul write? What did Luke write?

I want to know what they wrote. That's the most important thing.

That's the most important thing. All right, let's wrap this thing up, and we will see you,

Lord willing, 5 .30 Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, discussion of the extended atonement with Michael Brown.