Radio Free Geneva: NIFB Arguments Reviewed, the Ecclesiastical Text Movement Examined

Our mighty fortress is our God, the full -bred caravan.

I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them.

They're following men instead of the Word of God. I'll ever be amidst the fly, a mortal in spring day.

And I'm going to be the one standing on top of my hands, standing on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out,

He died for all those who elected, were selected. For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.

His cross I'm not afraid, and I'll drift through the lake.

Our mighty fortress is our God, the full -bred caravan.

You'll constantly hear people that are Calvinists harp on this, God's sovereign, God's sovereign,

God's sovereign, sovereign, sovereign. They just keep repeating it, and they repeat it so much you start to think it's a biblical truth.

I'll ever be amidst the fly, a mortal in spring day.

Jesus stands outside the tomb of Lazarus. He says, Lazarus, come out. And Lazarus said, I can't,

I'm dead. That's not what he did. Lazarus came out. Do you mean to tell me a dead person can respond to the command of Christ?

For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.

Well, I can talk over your head like that. I know the Hebrew, the Greek. I've done theology. You can tell I know. His cross

I'm not afraid, and I'll drift through the lake.

Do you really believe that it parallels the method of exegesis that we utilize to demonstrate those other things?

Um, no. Some new

Calvinists, even pastors, very openly smoke pipes and cigars just as they drink beer and wine.

Even Jesus cannot override your unbelief. He poured the earth like that to Him, you know what it would sound like if you were listening to it?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It wouldn't make any sense to him. A self -righteous, legalistic, deceived jerk.

And you need to realize that he's gone from predeterminism, now he's speaking of some kind of middle knowledge that God now has to I stand,

I deny and categorically deny middle knowledge. Don't beg the question that would demand me to force you to embrace it.

And now, from our underground bunker deep beneath the faculty cafeteria at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, safe from all those moderate

Calvinist Dave Hunt fans and those who have read and re -read George Bryson's book, we are

Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say for his own eternal glory.

Well there you go folks, that's for the people who like the old one and the new one all at the same time, because I heard it started going, dude, you started the wrong one.

And he's like, what? What? That's not the new theme. We're going to have people knocking down the doors.

And it's like, okay, and it's just like, okay, we'll start over. Okay, welcome to Radio Free Geneva.

We've got a lot to get to. If you see a pile of Greek New Testaments next to my right elbow, then you know we've got a lot of stuff to get to today.

On Radio Free Geneva, it's going to be a little different than normal, but the topics should be useful, very, very useful.

The first part of the program will be sort of normal. I'll be playing some standard objections to the

Reformed faith, responding to them. And then the second half, we're really going to get into some,

I think, extremely important, much higher level discussion.

And it's not an attack upon the Reformed faith. It is a debate within the

Reformed faith that I think is extremely important. And I refer to the issue of ecclesiastical textism,

TR -only -ism, the movement amongst Reformed men, both

Paedo -Baptist and Reformed Baptist men, that I believe is a capitulation of apologetics.

I do not believe that those who hold this position can engage in any meaningful defense of the

New Testament outside of the narrow little confines of, oh, let's all get together and talk about Westminster or something.

Outside of that, you got nothing. You can't take on the ermines or the ermine students of the world.

Can't do anything like that. And so anyway, we'll get into that at the second half of the program as we have time to get into it.

So let's start off. Back in November, December, I started following the new

Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Twitter account. And yeah, it's painful, but there's a lot of things that I do online that are painful.

And that's one of them. And I started seeing it was right on the same time they announced this movie that seemingly has died.

You know, the big movie exposing me and Jeff Durbin and Calvinism, Doctrine of Demons.

Seemingly is dead. It's gone. And so because the people that were doing it, the church split and all of a sudden they're lobbing bombs of false prophet and false teacher and stuff at each other.

And, you know, I'm sorry to see things like that happen. But the fact that happened within about a week of the last video they did making just absurd accusations and slander.

Fitting, appropriate that something like that would would take place. So anyway, but right around the same time, this young guy from the

Philippines, he's evidently an American missionary pastor in an

NIFB, which must be amazing in the Philippines. The Philippines is wow. You've got a glaceon of Christo and you got this type of stuff going on.

And that's that's weird. Anyway, starts posting these videos where he doesn't even have anybody to help him.

He's doing it on his own, OK? Because, you know, it starts off with a blank screen. I mean,

I have you have it up. Here's here's the first here's the first screen. This is how the first video we're going to we're going to look at that.

That's how it starts. So that's how it starts. And he hits the button and runs around from the camera and starts talking.

So, OK, that's what you got. That's what you got.

And he's refuting Calvinism.

And what's useful about it is these are nice short videos.

You can pretty much just play the whole thing in one shot and then respond to it. Is there anything new here?

No, no. But after all the years of doing Radio Free Geneva, is there really anything new?

I mean, we'd have to start getting into lesbian, transgendered,

Swahili, feminine, feminist type critiques or something to come up with something new.

I mean, I'm sure there's something new every year at SBL. I'm sure SBL comes up with something new, but stuff that you'd really be writing into.

Not really. We've pretty much covered it over the years. We've pretty much we've dealt with the good guys, you know, the scholars, those types of things.

And then the more common stuff. This is this type of stuff. But again, it's the stuff that you're going to be hearing.

It's the stuff that you're going to be dealing with on a regular basis. And so it is important to look at it.

So we're going to look at a few of his videos. And I'd said that I would at some point in the past.

And then it's always easy. Oh, and we'll there's so I, I cannot imagine.

Well, I can't imagine what the convention is going to be like in June of this year, let alone next year.

Um. Think about everything that's happened since twenty eighteen that would be relevant to the convention coming up in this summer, let alone next year.

Um, there's so much developing right now. I mean, it's it is an intersectional.

It's it's an intersectional tsunami in the convention right now.

And so given that living out with Sam Albury is doing stuff in Southern Baptist churches, it would be relevant to address the issues that I had with Sam Albury's presentation at RZIM last

Friday or Saturday. It was Friday. Um, but do so once a little bit of this dust has settled on Thursday.

Um, because there may be further developments relevant to the SBC me to stuff like that.

Let me just say before we get to the the stuff here. I dared.

I haven't seen much pushback yet. Maybe you've gotten pushback and didn't tell me anything about it. But I dared to,

I think on Facebook or Twitter, I forget which one it was. I think I forgot to do one of the two.

Uh. I dared to make a link to. To he who shall not be named.

There are so many dangerous things, right? Uh. To you shall not be named, which immediately goes, you're not supposed to know about that.

Um. But for many people, the name Douglas Wilson.

And Voldemort are pretty much the same thing. I mean, for some people, when they hear

Douglas Wilson, they their mind. Here's Voldemort. Um, and so I, I actually linked to the article that Doug Wilson wrote on, um.

On Al Moller's apology in regards to C .J. Mahaney. And all

I'll say right now, we'll talk about on Thursday. Um, but all I'll say right now is you just need to read. Look it up.

It's on blog and may blog. Um, try to put aside. Some of you have just some of you are dear friends of mine, but you've just got.

You, you can't listen to the man for love to money. And, you know, if I can give you an example,

I've debated him. We've, we've, we've debated on the opposite side of an issue. We don't agree about everything, but the fact of the matter is sometimes.

Doug just cuts through the fog in a way that nobody else does. Um, and so read what he said.

Were you asking for something? Well, yeah.

Okay. I don't really consider the written stuff to be debates. Someone did was kind enough though, uh, to send me.

That's I kept saying the publisher never did. There's our book, uh, um,

Douglas Wilson versus James R. White debating the text of the word of God. So that's actually relevant.

I'm going to leave that out. Um, that's actually relevant to the current topic we're gonna be looking at, but, um, thank you to whoever sent that to me.

Um, yeah, we've, we've done written stuff and we've always been in disagreement with one another.

So the point is, um, uh, especially these days,

Christians, you have to learn to develop the ability to discerningly listen to others.

Um, one of the problems I have, you know, I was just listening to Jeffrey Riddle sounds like a really wonderful, nice guy.

He's a pastor reformed, baptist church, great, fine, wonderful. Um, but there's just this mindset that basically, you know, he's basically saying, well,

I can't understand why James White would, um, have any problem with conjectural inundation, which

I, what I specifically said was, I don't believe there's any place in the new Testament that requires conjectural inundation.

It was pretty obvious what I was saying, but somehow I got misinterpreted. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but I can't understand how

James White would disagree with a conjectural inundation when Metzger defines it.

And he just agrees with modern textual critical theory, as if everybody who doesn't hold to some type of traditional, we don't care what the papyri say.

We don't care what anything discovered in the past 500 years says we've got our text. That's it. As if we all believe the exact same thing, and you cannot critically engage with, with the text itself.

You know, here's, well, here, here's, here's the Tyndale house, the Greek new Testament. There's really cool stuff that they've done with this.

And, and I think it's very, very well done, but does that mean I agree with everything?

No, I disagree with it. It's rendering of John when he teeth, you have to be able to engage stuff critically and yeah.

Okay. I'm a scholar in this area. That's I've taught I'm doing doctoral level research in it.

Fine. But everybody has to be able to have the right to go.

I agree with that, but I don't agree with that application there or that application there, things like that. So in the same way, you have to be able to listen to folks like Doug Wilson and be discerning.

I mean, he doesn't demand that you fall down before him and go, I will agree with every word you say needed to Bruce Metzger.

And so it's, it's a matter of discernment. I guess I just got lucky, lucky, blessed, didn't realize it was a blessing at the time.

But when I did my, my first master's degree at Fuller, I had to cultivate the skill of listening to people with whom you have fundamental disagreements, gathering up all the good.

And there was frequently a tremendous amount of good to be gathered up. But not picking up the stuff that you recognize to be inconsistent with what you understand to be the truth.

Yeah, it's a skill, but I would think it would just be so obvious. And yet there for so many people.

if you agree with Metzger on this, you agree about everything. No, I don't. Uh, well, if you agree with Doug Wilson about it, you agree, you agree.

No, no, but I can, I can recognize an absolute wordsmith.

I can recognize someone who's just so skilled with words that it's astonishing. And then someone who just simply, especially on this social justice stuff, is slicing right through all the fog and sees right what the issue is and can express it in such incredibly entertaining fashion too.

So take time to look at it. That's, that's all I'm going to say today. I shouldn't have taken that time. We're supposed to be doing something else.

All right. Um, so let's get to, uh, this first one. I forget what it was about.

We'll find out soon enough. It's two minutes and 33 seconds long. And, um, here we go.

Matthew Sagan here from Verity Baptist Church, Manila, providing you another video on the topic of Calvinism and most specifically total depravity.

And one argument that Calvinists like to use is in John chapter six, verse 44, where the Bible reads, no man can come to me except the father, which had sent me draw him and I'll raise him up to the last day.

So the Bible says that you cannot come unless the father draws you.

And so they'll look at this verse and say, well, see, some people are drawn and some people are not drawn.

And so if you're not drawn, you're going to go to hell. And if you are drawn, you're going to go to heaven. No matter what, if you're drawn, you're going to get saved and believe my keys.

They say, but if you're not drawn, you're going to go to hell. Well, let's compare spiritual things with spiritual and see what it says in John chapter 12, because it's very clear in John six that unless the father draws you, you cannot come.

You're not going to be able to go to heaven unless the father draws you. When John chapter 12, verse 32 and 33, this is what it says.

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, we'll draw all men onto me.

This he said, signifying what death he should die. So Jesus says that if I'd be lifted up from the earth,

I'll draw all men onto me. And so the Bible is very clear that Jesus is going to draw all men.

Now, here's where Calvinists don't understand this. And most Christians don't understand this. And that's that.

You know what? God draws everybody, but there are certain people where he stops drawing them at a certain point.

So when it says you can't come unless the father draws you, there are people here on earth that become walking dead men because they rejected

God so long that they become a child of the devil, which we talked about in earlier videos. But he did die for everyone.

And he drew everyone. It's just that some people can reach a point on earth where they've lost their chance to be saved.

But it's very clear. He's going to draw all men onto him. Jesus died for everybody's sins. He wants everybody to be saved.

And it's our choice. We're going to believe on Jesus Christ. And if we believe on Jesus Christ, then we become a child of God and we're on our way to heaven.

So if you compare spiritual things with the spiritual and you look up that word, draw what's very clear in John 12, that if he lifted up from the earth, which he was, he will draw all men onto him.

Now, what Calvinists will argue is, well, I mean, if he draws all men onto them, then why don't they just all go to heaven?

Well, because he gives us free will whether or not we're going to accept him or not. It doesn't say that you're guaranteed you're going to heaven if he draws you or you're forced to go to heaven.

No, we have our free will to accept. Yes, he draws everyone, and we have our choice if we believe or not.

Thank you, and God bless. Okay, so there you have just very, very standard surface level argumentation.

Very, very common. That's what makes it useful to refute it. We always have new folks listening and tuning in and stuff like that.

So it's good to go over this type of stuff. And so what did we see there?

Well, you have your standard argumentation, your standard lack of any meaningful exegesis.

You went to John 6 .44. You did not notice there was no reference to how verse 44 functions in the entirety of John 6.

When you begin at John 6 .35, you can start back at John 6 .1 if you want to, but if you begin at John 6 .35,

you begin after the miracle of the walking on the water, and you're now in the synagogue at Capernaum.

You start following that context along, and John 6 .44 already comes after the clear statements of God's absolute sovereignty in this matter, of the fact that he has a people he gives unto the

Son. There's nothing in here about a free will of man. There's everything about the free will of God. Man is unable.

God is able. It's the exact opposite of the external stuff that he brought in, never gave a biblical citation, never gave anything from the text, just simply assumes, and he can assume that the vast majority of the people he's going to be talking to are going to accept the idea of the free will of man.

They're not going to give you any Bible references to it. Well, you know, there's free will offerings. Well, that doesn't exactly equate to the same thing as man having a free will.

There's all sorts of statements in scripture about man's will being enslaved, and about man not being able to do certain things, and all the rest of this stuff is very, very plain, very, very clear.

But keeping that stuff out, if you follow John 6, God the Father gives a certain people to the

Son. The Son raises them all up. They are looking to Him only because of what

God the Father has first done in giving them to the Son. Jesus comes down out of Heaven not to do

His own will, but the will of the Father who sent Him. What's that will? That He lose none that are given to Him, but raise them all up on the last day.

Jesus is able to be the perfect Savior. There's nothing in there about man's faith, actuating, no, it's all of God.

And so you get to verse 44, the people are complaining. You're making yourself the center of all this stuff. Who do you say that you are?

And what does Jesus say? No one can come, stop grumbling. No one can come to me unless the

Father who sent me draws him. Now, if anyone ever, when you are dealing with a biblical passage, if anyone ever says, well, you know, and this is, people get away with this.

I've seen it happen in our own circles. I've seen it happen in churches. I've been in over and over again. Didn't it strike anybody as strange?

That instead of giving a meaningful contextual interpretation from John 6, the immediate thing that this young man does is he jumps out of John 6, six chapters later,

John chapter 12. And he excuses this, he excuses this complete abandonment of context, complete abandonment of exegesis.

And amongst this group, exegesis is a bad word. They don't like the term exegesis because they don't do exegesis.

You can't meaningfully present the Bible as the word of God without doing exegesis, and that's one of the issues with the new independent fundamentalist

Baptist movement. But didn't it strike anyone as strange that you would think that Jesus' words would have a meaning to the people he was talking to at that time?

But if the only way to interpret it is to bring in something from six chapters later and then call that comparing spiritual with spiritual, that sounds wonderful.

What does it mean? Is comparing spiritual with spiritual a way of getting around doing the hard work of exegesis?

Getting around actually allowing the word of God to speak for itself? Because, see, the

NIFB presents so many doctrines and theologies that are unknown to the apostles.

That's why they have to mock exegesis, because they have to proof -text stuff without reference to context, and they look down upon people who are careful to stop speaking when

God's words stop speaking. In other words, so much of what they think is just absolutely –

I mean, this guy also has a whole series attacking repentance. I mean, how you can read the

New Testament and not see the absolute centrality of repentance, that it's the mark of the

Christian life. It is the beginning. It's the work of the Spirit of God. See, again, they think it all works because they reject

God's sovereignty in salvation. They think we're working this all up within ourselves.

Faith is something we do, and so repentance must be something we do, and so it's only faith. They can't see and cannot develop a balanced biblical understanding of the relationship of faith and repentance and works because they don't have

God as the one who's the source of all these things. They're synergists, so they can't come up with it, and so they end up with this horrifically stilted and odd and strange and at times downright heretical perspective, but they don't get that stuff from exegesis.

This is their traditions, and then they use scripture. You can't do exegesis if you're going to be doing this kind of stuff.

So, you jump to something later on, call it comparing spiritual to spiritual, which is just simply abandoning context, and then don't even bother to note that you are reading your own meaning into John 12, because when

Jesus says, If I be lifted up, I will draw men unto myself, you're saying every single person in the world is drawn unto

Jesus by the crucifixion, even though the Bible says the cross is foolishness to men. It's a stumbling block, stone of stumbling, a scandalon.

You don't even hear yourself. That's one of the problems with NIFB and a lot of IFB people, is you've got an echo chamber, and all you hear is the same stuff being repeated over and over again, and there's never any challenging.

That's what's good about, you know, I'm very thankful that I have friends who do not agree with me on every single point that there is.

They challenge me to think about things. I see things in other perspective. When I went to Fuller, I saw things in other perspective.

Now, Fuller back then was not what Fuller is today. I could not ever recommend anybody going there, but back then, most of my teachers

I already knew from Grand Canyon, but there were others, and it was like,

I had never thought about that before, and unlike a lot of people in the emergent church and stuff like that,

I didn't just throw everything out. You analyze what it is you've been taught, and realize, oh, okay, here's the core.

These are the next things, so on and so forth, and you grow in your understanding of what's definitional, what's not definitional, what's called the adiaphora, the things that do not make a difference, and when you encounter anybody who has no adiaphora, anybody who has no adiaphora, run for the hills.

This is one of the marks of fundamentalism, is that there's no adiaphora. Everything's definitional.

You have to believe like me, all the way down to every little thing, and that makes the trinity, and whether you go swimming in the same pool of females, they're all on the same level, and that's disastrous.

That's disastrous. Just look around and see how disastrous it is. We've seen the results of this for a very, very, very long time.

Anyway, so he jumps off to John 12, doesn't realize that it means all kinds of men, because of the context where the

Greeks are seeking after Jesus, so that's what the context of John 12 is, reads his errant interpretation of that back into John 6, interrupting the flow of the argument, and calls that good.

Without ever realizing in the process what Jesus said, no man is able to come to me unless Father sent me, draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

By introducing the concept of synergism, man's free will, man's choice, and cramming it in there before that last phrase, you are left with an incoherent statement.

Jesus says that if you're drawn by the Father, Jesus will raise you up on the last day. To be raised up on the last day is to be raised to eternal life.

That's the context of John 6, 37 and following. So, in John 6, 44, it's all of God.

Salvation is perfect. It's perfect harmony of the Father and the Son, perfectly to the glory of the triune

God. It's beautiful. But once you break that, now you've got, well, a broken mess.

And if all that are drawn by the Father to the Son are raised up by the Son, you've got universalism.

Well, no, no, no, no, we've got our free will. Where is that in John 6, 44 again? And see, they can't derive one of the key elements to be able to recognize meaningful exegesis.

Is it derived from the text itself? Because we can go back to verse 35, follow it through, go on to 45, go on down.

It's a perfect, seamless, beautiful whole. There is no such thing as a perfect, seamless, beautiful whole anywhere in NIFB interpretation.

It's all proof texting. It's never derived just from the text itself. And so that's what you just saw.

That's not exegesis. That's not allowing the text to speak for itself. And yet, that's what people find to be very, very...

If you want to remain comfortable where you are, that's the way to do it.

That's the way to do it. Just explain it away, and all will be well.

And you go from there. Okay, let's see here. Let's do this one.

How long is this one? One minute and 30 seconds. That's what I like about these. These are useful because it's a minute and 30 seconds.

This must have been done the same day because the camera hasn't moved. All right, here we go.

because it uses the word ordained. Well, here's the thing in Ephesians 2, verse 10.

This is right after Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, where the Bible says we're saved by faith, not of works, lest any man should boast.

And then right after that, you know what it says? We're his workmanship, creating Christ Jesus onto good works.

When we get saved, yes, God has a plan. He has good works that he wants us to do.

And God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

The key in Ephesians 2, 10 is he says we should walk in them. Not that you're automatically going to walk in them.

Not that it's a guarantee, but that you should. When we get saved, yes, you know what? God expects us to be a peculiar people.

He expects us to obey his rules. He expects us to be honoring to him and follow the Bible and go to church and go sowing and do these things.

It says that we should walk in them. It doesn't say it's going to be automatic. Yes, we're his workmanship. Yes, he's created us onto good works, but we should walk in them.

It's not a guarantee. It is still our free will whether or not we're going to walk in them, whether or not we choose not to.

Thank you, and God bless. Okay, it seems that his King James Version of the Bible is filled with the phrase free will that no one else can find in theirs.

And so you get this constant refrain of free will, free will, free will, being forced into other texts that say absolutely positively nothing about free will.

And notice that once again, the idea of going, well, let's look at this in context.

Let's follow the flow of the argument beginning back at verse 8, and he didn't. He didn't even, and look,

I understand people. I've done it. Anybody who speaks for a living, you know, messes up in citing a verse, something like that.

But he didn't get the verse very well at all in looking at it. For by grace, he said by faith, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves is the gift of God.

And we've already discussed in the past many times how everything in the preceding clause is wrapped up in the secondary clause.

That is all of it. Grace, salvation, and faith is the gift of God, not the results of your autonomous free will.

Saving faith is different than an empty faith. That's why saving faith endures to the end. That's why we can believe everything

Jesus said, including when he said he who endures to the end shall be saved. That's where the balance comes from.

That's the only way you can maintain sola fide. They say they're believing in faith alone, but it turns into this twisted, no repentance, no lordship, no holiness.

Even though the Bible says without holiness we will not see God, but hey, that's just for super -Christians, blah, blah, blah, stuff that the apostles would never have believed, never taught.

But these folks, sadly, honestly think that the apostles were running around wearing ties and formal shirts and doing independent fundamentalist

Baptist things, and they weren't. That not of yourselves is a gift of God, but not as a result of works, so that no one may boast, it's not my works that brought me this gift, it's totally the free grace of God, not actuated by my free will.

That's the context. For we are his workmanship.

See, instead of emphasizing the fact that the redeemed are his creation, and therefore as his creation, they rebound totally to his glory.

It's not about us, it's all about him. We can't boast over anybody else.

Anything that we have, including our faith, came from his hand. We are his workmanship, created exclusively, they're good on the exclusive part, frequently without much grace, but they're good on the exclusive part, created in Christ Jesus, nowhere else, for good works.

The purpose of our being created in Christ Jesus, right there, is specifically said to be unto four good works, which in those good works,

God foreordained. God sovereignly foreordained in order that in them parapatesomen.

And he didn't bring this out, because I don't think he's aware of it, but he emphasized the word should, not would.

Again, this is where our forefathers in the faith understood that if you were going to rightly handle the word of God, now,

I'm not saying that you have to know biblical languages to rightly handle the word of God, but if you don't know the biblical languages, you should always be ready to accept correction when your understanding of a translation runs up against the reality of the original.

The reason that we use the word should in English, in translating the

Greek, and for those of you who are following along, if you will look at the last phrase in verse 10, you have a hinah clause.

Now, hinah clauses normally are purpose or result clauses, and therefore, they are not in the indicative.

They're in what's called the subjunctive. Now, the subjunctive is often misunderstood and misrepresented. There are conditional sentences, for example, that can be placed within the subjunctive.

It has a number of different functions. But we use various English helping words like would, should to express the fact that we are no longer simply stating a fact.

We are talking about purposes. We're talking about results. We're talking about conditional situations.

And so, the point is that what Paul is saying is that we are his poiema.

We are his workmanship. We are what he has made. We're something he has formed and fashioned.

Made in Christ Jesus on two good works which

God before ordained in order that the reason that he ordained this, that he sovereignly ordered his creation and his work of redemption in this way in order that we should live in them.

Peripateo literally means to walk, but in the New Testament, almost every single time when it's being used to describe walking someplace, it means to live in something.

It's to be your everyday activity. It's to be the context in which you live.

And so, if you're in Christ Jesus, it is God's purpose. This is why, you know, why does he leave us here?

Why not just save us and boom? You know, use angels to come down, proclaim the gospel as soon as you accept it, poof, you're gone.

Because we are being conformed to the image of Christ, because he's chosen to use us as the means by which he glorifies himself and spreads the message of the gospel to others.

And Jesus lives his life out through us. And so, in order that in them we might walk is not like, well, we might.

He's saying, well, automatically. It's not a matter of automatically. There have been many times I've missed the opportunity to walk in good deeds that God indeed would have desired in his, what's called revealed will, that I walk in those things.

Whenever I pass up an opportunity to do what is right out of selfishness or anything else, from my perspective,

I missed something that he could have done in me. But God's purpose in creating people in Christ Jesus is that we walk in good works.

If you throw repentance out, if you throw out the purpose of sanctification, it's no wonder you have a man -centered gospel.

You no longer have a God -centered purpose at all. So, again, did he touch on any of that?

No, no, he's not going to. The NIFB just simply doesn't,

NIFB theology is a tradition that is being presented with proof texts as if it is derived from scripture when it is not derived from scripture.

And we have demonstrated this over and over and over again and continue to do so now.

All right, let's see here. I think I closed that one, yeah. Let's go to this one.

Hey, at least it was easy to grab these. And this looks like it was the same day too. All righty.

Get out our high -tech listening device here. And here we go.

Oh, wait a minute. That's a different shirt. And the camera is not cutting off the little blue flower thingy on the left, so it's a different day.

See, we're doing close video forensics here. He could have gone and changed shirt and bumped the camera in the process.

So it could be. We can't be certain about these things, but there you go. I'm here from Verity Baptist Church, Manila, and I want to provide you another video on the topic of unconditional election as part of this

Calvinism series. And I want to talk to you about 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 10 -13. And this is what the

Bible says in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 10. And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

This is just after it was talking about the working of Satan. It's talking about the Antichrist here in 2 Thessalonians 2.

And then it talks about how there's people that receive not the love of the truth. And it says that they might be saved.

If they had chosen to receive the love of the truth, if they had believed on Jesus Christ, they would have been saved, but they received not the love of the truth.

And a lot of people, they hear the message of salvation, and they end up rejecting it. They don't believe it. And so it says in verse number 11, and for this cause,

God shall send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie. And look, there are certain people that, you know what,

God does send them strong delusion. This is where a lot of Christians get confused because they see how sometimes God will harden people's hearts, or it says they cannot believe.

And you know what, there are certain people God sends them strong delusion that they should believe a lie because they rejected the truth for so long.

And during the end times, you're certainly going to see that where people, you know, they reject the truth, and then they end up embracing the

Antichrist and the devil's scheme and things like that, which is a context in 2 Thessalonians 2. So in verse 12, it says that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

So the people that believe not the truth, those that don't believe, they go to hell. He that believeth not the sun shall not see light, but the wrath of God abideth on him.

So they choose not to receive the love of the truth. They believe not the truth. Then it says in verse 13, which is the verse

Calvinists love, but we are bound to give thanks already God for you. Brethren, we love the Lord because God has from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth.

And so they love to focus on that where it says he's chosen you to salvation. But as we've said before, he didn't just choose us randomly.

Even in this verse, he's chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth.

Remember what he kept talking about, how they received not the love of the truth. They didn't receive, they didn't believe the truth.

And you know what, God ends up sending them strong delusion. So once again, the way he chooses them to salvation is through belief of the truth.

That's clearly what you see in 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 10 through 13. And so it's not an unconditional, a random election, a random choosing based on nothing.

No, it's based on the fact, did you receive the love of the truth? Did you believe when you heard the message of salvation?

And for us that are saved, look, you know what? We chose to believe the truth. Once again, it comes down to our free will.

It's not random. It's very obvious the way he chose them to salvation. Yeah, he chose them to salvation based on whether or not they would believe the truth or not.

Thank you and God bless. Okay, so in that one, you get to see how synergism and a man -centered view of the gospel can turn the text completely upside down.

Here's a young man, stand there with the Bible in his hand, and his traditions cause him to see the opposite of the order in the text, and he doesn't see it.

I mean, I don't have any reason to believe that this young man knows that he's doing these things.

I mean, when I went to Bible college, there were all sorts of young preacher boys around me that did the exact same thing that this fellow would have done, and they had never been challenged.

In fact, one of the reasons that one of my favorite professors Dr. D .C. Martin, that I've talked to you about before, one of the reasons that D .C.

was disliked by so many in the establishment

Southern Baptist context at that time, Southern Baptist school, I was in a

Southern Baptist church, was because D .C.

Martin would say things that were purposefully provocative to make you think, and he could tell whether your responses were just you mouthing your traditions or whether you had actually heard what he said, and I'm really thankful for that today, very, very thankful for that today, and so when you get to verse 13 here, but we should, it is indebted upon us, we ought to give thanks.

Eucharist, that beautiful word that's been stolen from us by the passage of history.

We owe thanks to God always concerning you, brethren, beloved by the

Lord. Now, if you were just reading that without presuppositions or filters, that's something that the

Lord has done. His love is the basis of this. He has preceded this. It's not that they deserved the love of God.

They are loved by the Lord because God chose you.

Now, there's actually a variant here, and he didn't get into it because he's using the

King James, and so he's probably not even aware of it, but there's an interesting variant here. As first fruits unto salvation, or from the beginning unto salvation, it's almost the exact same spelling in the original language.

I'm not going to get into the issue right now, but it is, excuse me, it is interesting. God chose you, whom

Mass is accusative. God is the one doing the action.

He chose you from the beginning, eis soterion, unto salvation. Then you have what we would call an instrumental clause, using

N, enhagiosmo numitas kaipistai ale theos, by or in the means of sanctification by the

Spirit. It's spiritual sanctification, but numitas here is probably more in reference to the

Spirit himself, and so most translations, I think, recognize that by, sanctification by the

Spirit, by means of the Spirit, and pistai ale theos, faith that is oriented toward, has as its object, ale theia, truth.

So, the mechanism that God uses to bring about this salvation is the work of the

Spirit and faith in the truth. But did you hear what our young man did?

He turned that upside down. When God sees your faith in the truth, when you have faith in the truth, let's not worry about the fact that Paul said elsewhere that man is incapable of doing this and can't repent and cannot submit himself to the law of God.

As long as you're in the flesh and not in the Spirit, let's not worry about all that anthropology elsewhere, which would give us a context, at least, to be able to discuss

Paul's anthropology here. But his idea is that what's being stated is that in light of God seeing your action of faith in the truth, he then chooses you.

That's the opposite of what I said. The choosing comes first and results in the means of salvation, which is not just faith and truth.

But did you notice? There's not a whole lot in NIFB theology about the sanctifying work of the

Spirit. But the two are connected by a kai. They can't be broken apart.

So he focused on only the one. If he had thought through his argument, he would have had to have gone, hmm, if faith in the truth is why

God is saving me, then I guess the sanctifying work of the Spirit is why

God is saving me too. Wait a minute. You work up the faith out of yourself and that's why

God saves you? How do you control the sanctifying work of the Spirit? Is the

Spirit working in sanctification in all people? Of course not. You see, if you have a

Trinitarian theology, the Father ordains, the Son redeems, the Spirit sanctifies, then you have the same audience.

You have the same people in view. You have harmony. You have consistency. NIFB doesn't care about consistency.

It's like no one ever challenges them on that. That's why, and it's never been.

I've talked with Jeff about this. I don't know why Jeff and I, Jeff Durbin and I, everywhere we go, people are saying,

I used to be in one of those churches, but I saw your videos, and remember how many times, over and over again, we never, and Jeff will verify this, we've never sat down and said, you know,

Jeff, we ought to have a specific emphasis upon getting people out of the

NIFB. Yeah, the outreach to the NIFB. No, sorry.

We've never even thought about it. It happens naturally by simply doing what we're doing right now.

Because they're in such a narrow, tiny, little echo chamber that if they, and this is why they tell them not to listen to us.

If the door opens just a little bit, and some light comes in, and you hear some, I never thought of that before.

Wow, that consistency thing is sort of important. Huh, huh, huh.

And that's what happens. No, the instrumental phrase at the end, by sanctification of the spirit and faith in the truth is not what causes our salvation, it's what results from it.

And of course, here's the other problem. NIFB folks, many folks, not just NIFB, NIFB, most synergists, when they see the term salvation, they read into it a ton of stuff that may not be in the context at all.

And there are so many aspects to the broad concept of salvation. Regeneration, adoption, forgiveness, there's just so many different things we can identify.

That every single time Sotería, salvation, appears in the New Testament, it doesn't mean that it's all packed in there.

Sometimes, it's specifically not. It's only one aspect that is being looked at. But they tend to just simply see, you've been saved, you've been saved, you know, you walk down an aisle, you shook a hand, boom, that's it.

Got your ticket punched, you're going to heaven, nothing you can do about that. And there you go.

So, there is Second Thessalonians. We have so many of these, but I have other things

I need to get to, too. So, I'm not sure I'm going to get all of these. The last four,

I've got four others queued up. I just didn't expect to spend quite so much time on each one. The rest of them are on limited atonement.

Let's leave those. Let me leave those on limited atonement for another time.

Because I do want to get to some important stuff here. Some really important stuff here.

There has been a movement developing over the decades.

I guess it's always been there in some form or another, but social media has given it a real boost.

And it concerns me greatly. And I've expressed my concern about this before, and I will continue to express my concern.

I have expressed my concern to presidents of the various theological seminaries,

Reformed Theological Seminaries, anyways. And I have opportunity to talk to professors of New Testament that are teaching regularly at a particular location.

Most of my teaching is guest teaching at locations all over the place. Including now in Russia.

That was cold. But it was great to have students that were again, normally when

I'm overseas, I'm always impressed by the students and their level of attention.

You just never feel like you're having to force things on them. They're just seemingly so thankful that someone would travel so far to share their knowledge with them.

And so it's always a joy. Anyway, I'm seeing this stuff developing all around the world, and I blame social media for a lot of it.

But amongst Reformed men, Reformed Fellowship, Reformed Churches, Paedobaptists and non, and I know some of you

Paedobaptists are so much from being Reformed, is this idea of ecclesiastical textism, textus receptus onlyism, normally it's cloaked in other languages, other terminology,

I'm sorry, religious terminology, specific definitions of providential preservation, the preservation of scripture, and that can only be understood in a certain way.

There's almost always a strong emphasis upon looking at the framers of the

Westminster and the London Baptist Confession and saying, well, they, it bears strange similarities to,

Muslims will emphasize Muhammad and his companions and those first, that first pure generation, it's sort of like the framers and that first generation thereafter, that's where we have to stay.

And the idea evidently is, well, you know, we've seen things devolve, and so the way to not have things devolved, there's always this tendency for theological institutions to go left.

It's almost, they almost never go right. They almost always go to the left, and we've seen this happen, we've seen the rise of liberalism, and I mean,

I can't even follow the history of Presbyterianism over the past 150 years with go left, split, go left, split, go left, split, go left, split, and eventually all these down here start withering so they get together and then die together.

But go left, split, go left, split, it's all the time. Now Baptists, Baptists generally don't split over the same theological issues as Presbyterians do.

They generally split over what color the cushions are on the pew. That's why you have the 6th Baptist Church and the 7th

Baptist Church around the corner and stuff like that. But Baptists have the same, everybody has the same tendency, go left, split, go left, split, go left, split.

And the idea amongst many of these guys is there's a reason for this, and the reason for this is we need to stick with confessionalism, however they define that, and they end up defining it extremely narrowly.

And I'm just going to straight up front, I think there is a real danger in elevating the confessions and the people that wrote them to a quasi -scriptural status.

I have seen in Reformed Baptist circles, I've seen that happen. I've seen it happen.

Where if you don't just walk absolutely lockstep with someone's interpretation,

I mean there are different interpretations even of some of the statements in the confession, you're just considered to be out of the realm and no longer confessional and you need to go away.

And it is an element of human reality that we tend to have some of the strongest feelings against the people who agree with us 99 .5

% of the time, more so than people who agree with us only 90 % of the time, because they're so close to us that we almost take it as an offense that you would agree with me and 99 % of everything we believe, but that one thing instead of going that one thing probably does not define the faith.

Anyway, it seems to me that the motivation for many of these men is uh uh it does go back to a fundamentalist separationist idea.

Um you can't learn anything from anybody who you disagree with, so you separate from them.

And so if modern textual critical theory is held by a wide variety of people, it must as a result be wrong.

Because you can find somebody somewhere who believes in modern textual critical theory that's going to believe almost anything.

And so all you gotta do is look at the list at the front of the UBS 5th edition, and you've got Roman Catholics, and you've got

German Lutherans, the state church stuff, and you've got all this stuff. So unclean, unclean, separate, separate, that's the fundamentalist mindset coming through loud and clear.

And so this movement is all over the place, and the leaders of this movement know,

I will not stand for it. I am going to expose this. I consider this movement dangerous.

But why do I consider it dangerous? Do I consider its adherents heretics? No, I do not.

They're my brothers in the Lord. But I believe them to be sincerely wrong.

And the result of this is to remove all those people that are under this influence from any meaningful apologetic defense of the

Word of God in the very day when we need all hands on deck. That's my concern.

That's my issue. And so they know that I'm opposed to their position, and they have their

Facebook groups. Their Facebook groups I've joined and then left because I couldn't say, hey, look at this beautiful picture of a sunrise

I took on my bike today. Well, yeah, it's nice, but you're a scripture perverter.

You don't believe in providential preservation. It doesn't matter what I say. They're on top of me in a second.

So it's just like, ah, fine. You all have fun. We'll see ya. I mean, there's some pretty nasty ones out there.

There really have been. Anyway, so what brings this up right now?

Well, it keeps coming up over and over again, but yesterday on Facebook, someone tagged me on something, and somebody had put up a poll.

The greatest living apologist, Cy Ten Bruggenkate or Jeff Durbin, and somebody in the comments had said, well, you've got to put

James White in there. And one of the comments that came after that was, sure, if you want to have someone who denies the preservation of scripture, and, you know,

I've spent, I don't know how old this guy is, but the probability exists that I've been defending scripture longer than he's been alive.

I mean, I don't know that. He might be a 50, 60 year old. I don't know. But a lot of these young guys, they weren't even out of diapers, weren't even born when

I was defending the preservation, inspiration, authority, solo scriptura against people like Jerry Matitix.

They weren't even around. Okay? So, forgive me for going, and who are you?

And what have you done? And why are you ignoring everything I've ever said about this subject? I mean, you know,

I know Facebook is sort of designed for slander, but why indulge it when you call yourself a

Christian anyways? That just doesn't seem real good. So, I wrote back, and I'm like, what are you talking about?

And so he responds to me, well, do you believe John 7, 52 through 8, 11 is a preserved word of God? And so I wrote a fairly long response, pointing out that while that's interesting, the first manuscript we have that contains this as a part of the gospel, and I didn't even get into the fact that it appears in different places.

It appears in Luke, it appears in John. I just simply pointed out, I wonder why we don't worry about the first 400 years of the church.

You know, all that stuff like the Council of Nicaea and stuff like that that was going on.

Those folks didn't know what in the world they were talking about, so let's not worry about what Bible they actually had, or what their Gospel of John looked like, and this kind of stuff.

Well, that of course brought everybody running, including Colin Pearson, who

I've sparred with before, and then Robert Truelove joined in as well.

And so, I made a text file of something

I wanted to respond to. Then I saw that Robert Truelove had jumped in, and we've responded to Robert Truelove many times in the past.

And, let me see if anything here has changed, by the way. I don't see anything here, but that doesn't mean a whole lot, unfortunately, because there are simply times when

Facebook isn't nice to me. And I'm going to see if I can't find this again, and then there we go, and see if it'll refresh it.

Yeah, I don't see any responses to it yet. So, this was three hours ago, there may be some discussion going, or it may not have been seen yet.

But, I'm going to lay this out here right now. In this thread,

Robert Truelove included this statement. This was five hours ago.

And for those interested, announcing the Text and Canon Conference, when? October 25th to 26th, 2019, where Christ Reformed Church Atlanta, Georgia.

Current speakers will be myself and Pastor Jeff Riddle. More details to come. Very quickly,

I wrote the following. I would like to challenge you and Dr. Riddle to debate me on Thursday the 24th as a pre -conference event.

Now, if you all want to make it a part of the conference, that's fine too. I just didn't want to interrupt everything the night before.

We've been doing that at G3, so. I have a number of possible thesis statements.

A and O will cover my costs. None will be asked of the conference sponsors, underwriters. We only ask for a neutral moderator, and both sides receive an edited master of the video and audio recordings with full rights of distribution.

We'll repeat this challenge in a few hours on the dividing line, which is what we're doing right now. So, here's what seems to me to be a great opportunity.

Good location, Atlanta, Georgia. Easy to get to. Just about every airline on the planet flies to Atlanta.

This says October, so we shouldn't have to worry about Snowmageddon or anything like that.

Good timing. Very, very good timing. I think this needs to be debated.

And I will debate both of you together at the same time. Just me, myself, and I. That's fine. I prefer that.

Or one of the two of you. Though, I think, I don't know whether you both hold exactly the same position.

I would want to know. Remember when I had the debate with, you know, when

Doug Wilson and I did this, I had to ask Doug Wilson, what's the text?

You want an inerrant Bible? What's the text? And he said, this.

And you know what? I've decided. Jeffrey Rice, brother, I need your help.

This was given to the ministry. Donated to the ministry in 2010. Nine years ago.

And its greatest value to the church and to the ministry is for me to be able to carry this and utilize it.

What is it? It's a 1550 Stephanos. It's a real 1550 Stephanos. It's not a replica.

What do we list it at? What's the? $35 ,000. $35 ,000.

This is the real thing. There's only one problem. The cover is coming off.

See? Right there. Like I said, how are you going to look in 400 years?

Jeffrey Rice, you ready for the biggest binding challenge in your life? Will that diminish its value?

Yes. Financially. Will it make it far more valuable and last longer and actually help the church?

If I have Jeffrey Rice rebind this in thick, protective, full yap.

Not cowhide. He's got some super thick buffalo skin.

It looks just... Your hat's buffalo? That settles that. Okay, Jeffrey.

Rich's hat is made out of buffalo. There you go. But I bet you've never bound a book that costs $35 ,000.

Don't get nervous, dude. But I want to be able to carry this thing and I haven't been able to do it because it's so old and because the cover is literally now all off on that side.

Anyway, sorry. 1550 Stephanus, that's what...

The cover is just falling apart. That's what Doug Wilson said. There's your standard.

I need to know what standard you all have. Which one is it?

Is this your standard? Is this a preserved word of God? That may be one of the thesis statements.

Is the Texas Receptus the preserved word of God? I think that would be a great thesis.

Why? What's going on? What are you laughing at? The chat room is melting down? Do not rebind.

Do not rebind that book. Somebody stop him. No, go away. Get a copy.

Use that. No, that's not going to do it either. No, that's not going to work. Sorry. I have a photocopy of Erasmus' text.

Nobody cares. It's a photocopy. The fact that you're holding a 1550 Stephanus is the issue.

Now, that cover is not the book. What's inside it is what needs to be protected.

If that cover can't protect it anymore, then it needs a cover that will. Why isn't anyone listening to me?

Somebody stop him. Should I drive him completely crazy by muting him right now so he can't talk?

Now he just fell down on the floor and he's weeping. We don't really care. Anyways, need to know what your standard is.

Need to know what it is. But I think this needs to take place.

We're laying it out there. You're putting on the conference. We're not asking for nothing from you.

We will say to the folks, like I said at the end of the last dividing line, we have a travel fund and this is one of the reasons we have the travel fund.

If that travel fund is doing well, then we can challenge people and do stuff like this.

Sometimes stuff comes up short notice and we can do it if we've got the travel fund nice and healthy to do it.

I'm saying let's do it. If you want to make it a part of the conference, that's fine. If you want to do it the day before the conference, that's fine. If you want to do it the

Monday after the conference, whatever works. I think beforehand would be better, but whatever.

We will make it work. So there you go. Show your debate opponent a picture.

No. Did you see what somebody said in channel? This is why we need a

RichCam. Yeah. So do you think we need a

RichCam? I don't know. Do you think we need a RichCam? I don't know. Laughter.

Yeah. So we did it. Is that just simply the ambient light?

The camera just adjusts to it? Because that doesn't look that bad. What's neat about it is

I was rummaging around the storeroom this morning and realized that someone had given this to us years ago.

We have a lot of stuff like that. We just didn't have a use for it and I stuck it on a shelf and I'm like, I wonder if this would work.

Here we are. And it does. And that's actually shooting through the door of my office into the back of one of my bookshelves.

Actually. It's good that I don't have the lights on in there. Anyways. There you go, folks.

The reluctant surprise is out of the bag. There were so many people at G3 that just demanded it that we had to give in to public pressure.

Everybody else is giving in to public pressure these days. Anyway, I want to respond to Colin Pearson and I took the time but I'm not sure if I'm going to get time to.

I took the time to queue up. We will get to it eventually, whether we get to it today or not.

Jeff Riddle's last podcast where he commented on my comments on what's called conjectural emanation and then commented on Revelation chapter 16 and came up with what seems to me to be a brand new novel interpretation.

And that is that bases change because here's the inspired version, at least from Douglas Wilson's perspective.

And if you turn to the very end and you find

Revelation 16 .5 and you look it up, it has the term

Hoseos in Revelation 16 instead of Isomenos.

And that's a big issue that I've addressed. I addressed it rather fully in Owensboro.

And it's funny, the Texas Receptus guy on Twitter provides all this argumentation, none of which is accepted by Jeff Riddle.

He comes up with a completely different perspective, which is that he interprets the

Latin of Beza's note, even though he's the only person

I've so far encountered that interprets it that way, that Beza was claiming to have restored from an ancient manuscript the reading

Hoseos. What ancient manuscript? Just to prove to you that I'm not making all of this up, you got audio?

Here we go. Here's my translation of Beza. Therefore, I am not able to doubt but that the true reading should be as I have restored it from an ancient codex manuscript of good faith, truly,

Ha Isomenos. Let me read that again. Therefore, I am not able to doubt but that the true reading should be as I have restored it from an ancient handwritten codex of good faith, truly,

Ha Isomenos. So, when I look at that, what Beza said is, he didn't say here, hey,

I logically figured out a conjecture that I couldn't find in any version in any patristic author or in any manuscript.

In fact, he says quite the opposite. He says, I have restored the proper reading,

Ha Isomenos. Now, by the way, before I play this, if this is true, then everything

Texas Receptus said is wrong and vice versa. That's one of the problems here, is that once you get into these out of the center type perspectives, every one of them becomes idiosyncratic and you can't keep up with all of them.

You know, people always say, did you hear this person? You can't keep up with all of it. Anyway.

Ex, ex vetusto boni fide manuscripto codice from an ancient handwritten codex of good faith or reliable or a reliable one.

Now, what was that ancient hand written codex?

Now, I stop right here. That's an excellent question.

And it absolutely astonishes me that anyone could think that Theodor Beza, scholar that he was, would say that he had restored from an ancient manuscript a reading unknown to anybody else.

It's not in Stephanus. It's not in any of Erasmus. And never whisper a word as to what manuscript it is.

Because we don't have one. We don't have a manuscript that reads that. All the Greek manuscripts read the same way.

So, here's a theory. There was an ancient manuscript that Theodor Beza had and he never told anybody about it.

Now, we know he had codex Bezae Canterburgensis, but he didn't trust it. He didn't trust it. So, it can't be that.

But he had one. We don't know where it is anymore. We can't find it, but it must have said

Esaminas. Let's say he had one. That's one versus all the rest. The point is, if you use this kind of argumentation, you can never, ever again use

Byzantine priority argumentation. You cannot use any type of argumentation of majority text theory.

None of that. You can't use that argumentation. Stop talking about Greek text because you don't believe that's relevant.

I'm going to get to more of that in just a moment. This is almost done. We do not know. I don't know what

Beza had, but it seems to me in reading this in Latin, unless I've missed something, somebody tell me if I've missed something,

Beza never says he makes a pure conjecture there. He says he was relying on a handwritten codex.

So, this is... That was the very last thing. There was other stuff up above, and let me just simply mention it quickly.

To Dr. Riddle, you totally misunderstood what I was saying about conjecture elimination.

A, you do not have to buy into everything anybody says just because you happen to agree with their fundamental approaches.

I love B .B. Warfield. It doesn't mean that I agree with everything B .B. Warfield ever said. Obviously, I don't know why you would think that that's the case, though that was behind much of what you said.

Secondly, what I said was I do not believe that there is any variant in the

New Testament that demands textual elimination. I believe in the tenacity of the New Testament text.

I've been saying this for decades. I don't know how you've missed it. If you've missed it, then you clearly have no earthly idea of what

I believe about preservation. I don't know how that can be. You have my 2009 edition, and one of the funny things is, even when

Steven Anderson reviewed it, he even noticed where I expanded a bunch of stuff about preservation.

He just ignores it as if it's irrelevant. That was some of the most important stuff I added to it was the stuff on preservation and the mechanism and means of that preservation.

If you believe in the tenacity of the text, then the idea of textual emendation, which obviously is relevant to massively and you read into, and I'm sorry, sir, it's a massive misrepresentation of Metzger and others, this idea of corruption meaning complete corruption.

We have no idea what it is. That's never what they say. That is never their intention at all.

That's overblown by factor of ten. You make the same mistake that the

Muslims do in looking at Metzger's title. Corruption does not mean destruction.

It means there are textual variants. No one questions that there are textual variants. Nobody. No one in the early church.

And if you question their textual variants, I don't even know what to say at that point. But what

I said is I do not believe that there is any need to appeal to conjectural emendation.

All the definitions you read in, you spent a lot of time doing it, reading those definitions of textual emendation had nothing to do with what

I was saying. And especially anything written before the papyri just isn't relevant at this point.

I mean, Westcott and Hort, even Warfield, the amount and the antiquity of the information we have now renders so much of what they said as irrelevant.

They would even say, given the state of our current knowledge of the text, well, we now have the papyri for crying out loud.

How can you not see that that's so vitally important? I don't get it. But you accused me of inconsistency.

I was not being inconsistent at all. Not even on the slightest bit. If you want to get my attention, accuse me of being inconsistent, but I wasn't being inconsistent at all.

I was not denying that there are texts that are so corrupted that you need textual emendation, conjectural emendation.

Obviously. But the New Testament isn't one of them. That's what

I was saying. We may play the rest of that, but I said I was going to read this in seven minutes.

I can't even read it in seven minutes. Colin Pearson. I quote the subtitle of the

Metzger's book above. It's irrational to suggest that you can both uphold providential preservation and claim that the text has been corrupted requires restoration.

No, it is not. Can we turn over here? I don't want to keep turning my head. No, it is not,

Colin. You don't understand. You do not understand the historical reality of the text to make a statement like that.

Or you do not understand what corruption means. From even when you guys try to defend the

Prick of Adultery and quote from Augustine's really bad reasoning on that subject,

Augustine notes the existence of textual variation. You can go all the way back to the second century and find writers talking about textual variation.

That is a reality of the text. It is a byproduct of the mechanism by which God preserved the text.

So corruption simply means that there has been a variation in the copying at some point.

If there's only one, then the text is corrupted. You're thinking corruption means we have no idea what it says.

That's absurd. It's just simply absurd. One of the things that is so cool about CBGM today,

I was just in Munster. I was talking with one of the main guys that's doing CBGM on Gospel of Mark right now.

One who edited Acts. And one of the things we were talking about was the massive consistency of the

New Testament manuscripts. We've never been able to compare them absolutely with computer precision document.

The massive consistency of these documents.

Their massive similarity to one another. I'm sorry if you want to come up with an idiosyncratic, out of context, blown up, exaggerated meaning of the term corruption.

I can't stop you. But I can expose it and expose everybody who keeps doing it.

Saying, this is wrong. It is not proper to misrepresent what people are attempting to say by reading some new thing into that.

I believe that God has preserved his text by the means of the massive distribution of that text in the first centuries so that no one man or group of men could ever control, edit, or redact the text.

The result of that is scribal errors. CBGM is based upon the assumption that scribal errors are not doctrinal in character.

They're not purposeful. They're just simply mistakes. That's what they're functioning on. Maybe one of the reasons

I haven't heard Bart Ehrman say much about it because they're not really buying his orthodox editing concept.

Yes. Colin, I believe that God has preserved his text and that that means that there are textual variants within it.

I do not believe that God used automatic handwriting or transported Xerox machines back to the first century.

That's not the context in which God spoke. Having read your book and Metzger, it seems you basically hold his view.

On what? I think I have a significantly broader...

Well, first of all, Metzger was not involved in apologetics, and he's seeking to be primarily a classical scholar, and I'm not seeking to do that.

I am an apologist. I am a Christian theologian. That's going to influence what I'm saying, but I do believe that you have to follow the evidence and actually have a factual basis for what you say and that the idea of starting with a traditional text and then just simply defending it is an irrational circular argument that is nowhere warranted in Scripture.

Don't even go with a transcendental argument on that. It won't work. I'm not making this up, by the way.

Dr. Jeff Riddle agrees with me, as does Dr. Maurice Robinson, Richard Muller, et al. Three different perspectives.

I know Maurice. Maurice doesn't believe in the Kamihanian, does Riddle? I don't know.

Maurice Robinson is a great scholar, but Maurice Robinson will admit that at the basics, at the basis, and we had this conversation about this years ago, because I was trying to understand

Maurice Robinson, how he analyzes textual variance and how this works and it eventually came out.

You begin with the priority of and presume the originality of the

Byzantine reading. So you end up with a Byzantine text. That's not the same thing as a

TR -only advocate. Maurice Robinson is not a TR -only advocate. The Robinson -Pierpont text is not the

TR, in case you haven't noticed. Have you looked up Revelation 16 .5

in the Robinson -Pierpont? Hmm. It was the position of all

Reformed Orthodox, Reformed Scholastics, and Puritans that the text that the Church possessed and used up until that time was in fact immediately inspired and infallible.

This is what this movement is thriving on. Is this kind of fallacious, empty assertion.

Sounds wonderful. Oh, it's so wonderful to have such unity with such great godly men whom the vast majority of them didn't even address this issue, had no knowledge of the background of these issues, who lived long before there was even a publication of any of the great codices and never engaged in textual criticism and would love to have seen a papyri or two in their lifetimes, but never did.

Those are empty words. They sound so great. My concern is, when you love

Reformed theology and you love the Puritans and you love all these people and you get so much out of Turretin that you go, oh, and that means

I can't disagree with them. Even though they had one one hundredth of the information, in some instances a thousandth of the information that we have today.

That becomes a traditionalism that invests in individuals who never had access to the information we have today, a decision -making ability they never would have claimed for themselves.

Never would have claimed for themselves. And that sticks us in time and makes us incapable of providing a meaningful defense of the text in our day.

And I don't want the Reformed, who have the clearest explication of the

Gospel, disarmed by a movement of traditionalism.

Because that's what this does. It disarms you. You can't go against the best that Islam has.

You can't go against the best that the agnostics have. When you have a circular, indefensible, presuppositional, not in the good sense, defense of Scripture that cannot work, that's stuck without all that God has given us in the modern period to be able to meaningfully defend the text of Scripture.

Then there's this big, long quote that, again, after the Reformation, Rome went after the issue of authority and tried to attack sola scriptura on the basis of text.

What you don't seem to recognize is Rome has collapsed on that issue. Rome now agrees with us as to the primacy of the

Greek text. They collapsed on that. But just because someone, look,

I recognize that my Reformed Baptist forefathers might have been a little imbalanced in their battles for their self -definition of their own theology against Presbyterians and vice versa.

I recognize that. That means that the Reformed might have been imbalanced in their battle for their very existence against Rome in the decades after the

Reformation. All of them were operating with significantly less information than we have today.

To enshrine their position as what we must hold to is, again, to stick your head in the sand and to doom us to only being able to do apologetics amongst ourselves, not outside our tiny little spectrum.

The fact of the matter is, I'll say it again, I have here the artificial

TR. The artificial TR. Because there is no one TR. I mean, that's a form of the

TR right there. There's the Stephanus. That's a form of the TR there. One of many.

This is the artificial one based on the King James. You actually need this. That's actually a

USB 4th edition. And that's the island 5...

It's 27. This is the new Tyndale House, Greek New Testament.

And that's just, nothing more than the general epistles from the

ECM. And that's only one of the volumes. This has all of them in it, I think. But that represents

ECM. Which ECM then becomes what these guys in every edition are going to be modified to match.

Will be the Editio Critico Mayorum. You take any one of these, you apply the same standards of interpretation, exegesis and hermeneutics.

You're not going to end up with a different message. You're not going to end up with a different theology. So why should

I care about this? Because especially in apologetic issues. Not only in the broad issue of the reliability of the text of Scripture, but in dealing with Islam, dealing with the deity of Christ.

You have to have a defensible consistent basis that is not circular.

Last thing, and since this is the last thing, it's probably going to get missed and that's a shame. I should have started with this. I apologize.

And I would love if somebody could come up with a thesis for this because this would be the best thesis for the debate. I believe there is an absolutely fatal flaw.

Fatal flaw in the broad ecclesiastical text movement.

Fatal flaw. If you defend any form of this as the best form of the

New Testament, this is addressed to you. We, those who reject that and utilize modern, standard, textual critical principles that are being used in all the seminaries that I know of, except maybe one that I can think of, we have principles by which if all the

Greek New Testaments were wiped out and yet we still have the manuscripts, the application of those principles, those manuscripts could reproduce if we were consistent in applying them, could reproduce what we have.

Now you can argue that an editorial group was inconsistent here or there.

That's one of the nice things about having the Metzger textual commentary or the folks at Munster have been putting out commentary on stuff they've been doing like on Acts and things like that.

You can look at what the people in the editorial groups thought and said and see how consistent they were.

The information's there, not hiding something. We have a verifiable, repeatable methodology that would reproduce our text given the manuscript tradition.

You do not. You do not. The idiosyncratic, historical and personal experiences of Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza then modified slightly by the disparate, inconsistent editorial choices of differing translation committees between 1604 and 1611 produced this.

There is no single set of textual critical principles that when applied to the manuscript tradition would ever reproduce this.

Couldn't happen. You want the illustration? Alright, let's take the text in Revelation 16, let's take the

Kamiohanium, and let's take the Percupe Adultery. Alright, three different texts.

Those of you who have defended this reading of those, just try to be honest with yourself for a second.

The standard by which you chose your sources and arguments to substantiate each one of those readings, are they consistent across the board?

There is only one answer to that. A glaring and astonishingly clear

NO. The arguments used to try to defend

Esamonos in Revelation 16, the sources you're willing to use, the number of manuscripts you're willing to rely on, completely totally different than your argument for the

Percupe Adultery. John 7, 53, 8, 11. Completely different than the

Kamiohanium. What you're willing to argue for each one of them is completely different.

And if you used the same argumentation and sources that you used to defend the

Revelation 16 text, you'd have to change all the rest of the New Testament. Same thing with the Kamiohanium, except differently.

You start here, then you do with the facts what you need to do to substantiate this.

We don't do that. You rejoice in that. It's circular. It's indefensible.

It's what the people in the days of Jerome did to argue against him because they thought the

Septuagint should be the standard. It's what the people in the days of Erasmus did because they thought the Vulgate should be the standard.

It's nothing new, but it is indefensible. Christians should not adopt indefensible positions.

Okay? Alright. I went much longer than I expected to, but there you go.

That's what happens. Radio Free Geneva. That was an unusual aspect.

This was more of an internal to those within the group.

Stop being traditionalists in that sense. Anyways, we've got some more of those videos to show sometime, so we'll get to it, but yeah, unfortunately, we've got to get back to some other stuff that's going on on Thursday, Lord willing.