RHE & Brian Zahnd on Inerrancy, Matt Chandler’s Pirates, the “Secret” Leviticus, & a Little Revoice

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00:36

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. I think that's a little bit too close. Welcome to The Dividing Line. We are back in Phoenix, Arizona, where the possibility exists of hitting 117 degrees today.

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We broke the record yesterday at 115, so I tweeted my dear friend

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Marty. Bruce and Marty is where I stay at their place up there in Evergreen.

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I tweeted, could I come back? It's really hot in Phoenix.

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And I'll be honest with you, I'm not really acclimated. I mean, the past two and a half months, which are the two and a half hottest months of the year,

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I've been here two and a half weeks. And so the heat's just like, ooh, ah, and it's going to stay that way for a while.

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But what can I say? Anyway, welcome to The Dividing Line. I got to start off with something sort of fun, though.

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As everybody knows, I am a big cycling fan and love to ride myself, obviously.

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And so I'm watching the Super Bowl of cycling right now, which is called

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Le Tour de France. And I also watched a little bit of the

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World Cup while it was on, which was enjoyable. There were some really good games and those penalty shootouts are a lot of fun to watch.

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And that's great. But I had to make the comment about how much flopping there is, especially that one guy from Brazil.

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Someone can whistle at him from the stands and he flops over and wants a penalty kick or something.

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And so I just wanted to compare. You know, you can watch these compilations of just horrific flops where people aren't even touched or just barely, you know, these highly paid footballers or soccer, as we call it here in the

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United States. I want to compare that with what happened on today's stage.

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Now, tomorrow's stage is going to be brutal. Shortest stage they've had in like 40 years in the

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Tour de France. You might say, how's that gonna be so brutal? You're either climbing a monster mountain or going down a monster.

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That's all there is. There's not even a warm up. You start off just going straight up.

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It is going to be a brutal, brutal stage. These guys, they go for three weeks with two rest days, basically doing the equivalent of about three marathons a day.

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That's what they've got to survive to get to the end of this thing. They are machines.

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One of the biggest machines, in my opinion, is Philippe Gilbert. And Philippe Gilbert started down a mountain today in the lead and he was flying along until he lost it.

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Can you show this, Rich? Here's what happened to Philippe Gilbert today.

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A couple minutes later, they pull him up.

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He gives the thumbs up sign to the camera and gets back on his bike and finishes the stage.

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Now he's torn up and the medical guy, there's a video later on, the medical guy putting him back together again while he's riding and all the rest of this stuff.

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He's out of the Tour because you know what? He fractured his kneecap in that and he still finished the stage.

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Uh -huh. Yeah. And so whenever I watch these floppers in the

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World Cup, I'm just sort of like, okay, yeah, well, yeah, all right, whatever can you say.

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So yeah, there's what's going on in the Tour de

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France. Actually, there's a lot of stuff going on in the Tour de France. Will Sky have Geraint Thomas win this year?

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Will that end Chris Froome's run at four? What's going to happen? Tomorrow might tell.

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Tomorrow might tell. If you see Chris Froome taking off and Geraint Thomas doesn't follow him, then you know what's going on.

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So anyway, sorry, I've been gone and it's been, like I said,

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I've been home two and a half weeks out of two and a half months, but I love going up to Colorado and I love that time up there.

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But now we are back at least for about a month or so. I need to get information from Chris Arnzen as quick as possible so we can start advertising that upcoming debate where Michael Brown and I are taking on two homosexuals.

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That's early in September. So we got to get flights booked and all sorts of stuff like that.

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So I need to get some information from him. We'll try to have some information for you on that for the next program.

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Lots of stuff going on here. Let's start off with the easy stuff.

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There is a tweet I would like to discuss briefly and I just put it up on the screen here.

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I'll let Rich have a second to sort of clean it up. But when apostates chatter,

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Rachel Held Evans, whose departure from orthodoxy has been rather clearly documented, and Brian Zahn, who likewise,

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I'm not sure if there ever was orthodox actually. You may recall Brian Zahn is the man that Michael Brown debated on the substitutionary at IHOP a couple of years ago, about three or four years ago.

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But we've gone through Brian Zahn's stuff and he was the guy that didn't know what the

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Tanakh was and is lecturing and stuff like that. Well, anyways, Rachel Held Evans and Brian Zahn were tweeting back and forth and I have the tweet here.

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Rachel Held Evans says, Inerrancy is so utterly beside the point.

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Who has these inerrant original manuscripts? No one. Who owns the inerrant translation?

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No one. Who has the inerrant interpretation? No one. It's entirely theoretical, to which

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Brian Zahn, notice there are 29 retweets and 328 likes.

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Brian Zahn says, Right, an inerrant Bible still has to be interpreted. Then we are left with the problem that Christian Smith calls pervasive interpretive pluralism.

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That only had 64 likes and one retweet, maybe because people didn't really know what in the world he was talking about.

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But I really think that if you are going to say you are an inerrantist, that you believe in the doctrine of inerrancy, that it might be best if when you hear someone say what

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Rachel Held Evans and Brian Zahn are saying, that you should be aware of where they have completely missed the boat.

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Because they have. The vast majority of denial and denunciation and embarrassment about the doctrine of inerrancy goes back to a complete misunderstanding of what the doctrine of inerrancy is actually stating and why it is vitally important.

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And that comes out very clearly in Rachel Held Evans' words. She says it's utterly beside the point.

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Well, what is the point? Might not the point be the nature of, say, what

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Peter means when he says that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit?

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Might it be relevant and important to be able to affirm that the

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Holy Spirit leads in a particular fashion and, in fact, in a trustworthy fashion?

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Might it be important that Theanustos, God breathed, has a particular range of meaning, that it refers to God's speaking, to his very voice, his very utterance?

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What is the point? Well, she tries to expand upon it and in the process demonstrates that she has no idea what the doctrine of inerrancy is.

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It's amazing how many people apostatize from a belief they never understood in the first place. It doesn't mean that having an accurate understanding will keep you from apostatizing from something, but having an inaccurate understanding is certainly not a good ground to be standing on.

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Who has these inerrant original manuscripts? No one. Well, no one claims that the original manuscripts continue to exist in this day and age, and if Rachel Held Evans would read carefully the

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Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, for example, that was written probably before her birth, it would be clearly understood that we do not possess or need to possess the original manuscripts.

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There is a hidden assumption behind what is being said here, and that is there is a rather straightforward assertion here that if you don't have the originals, then inerrancy is irrelevant.

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Now, part of what would make that an argument would be a certain view of the corruption of the text of Scripture over time, and I wouldn't be surprised if Rachel Held Evans would hold to a view of the corruption of the text of Scripture over time, and to have a low view of biblical inerrancy and not just biblical inerrancy, but then the accuracy of the manuscript tradition itself.

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It wouldn't surprise me at all. But we do not need to have the original manuscripts to even address the subject of inerrancy.

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That shows a confusion between the original subject, which is the nature of divine revelation and the interface between the

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Spirit of God and the authors of Scripture, and then the later transmission of that text over time.

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You could have an inerrant original and God could choose not to even preserve it.

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Preservation's a second issue that's vitally important, one we've discussed many, many times in this program, obviously, but it has to be distinguished from the original issue, which is the subject of inerrancy.

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Who owns the inerrant translation? No one. Well, again, no one claims other than King James Onlius and a few other people like that, that there is such a thing as an inerrant translation.

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It has nothing to do with inerrancy. This, again, shows a fundamental misunderstanding, a fundamental ignorance on Rachel Held Evans' point, on her part.

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It's very common. Lots of people repeat this kind of stuff, but it just demonstrates that lots of people don't take the time to be careful in what they're saying.

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Who has the inerrant interpretation? No one. It's entirely theoretical.

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So look at what she's looked at. She's looked at original manuscripts, translations, and interpretation as if this has something to do with inerrancy.

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Why would we want to engage in textual criticism

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There are people who do textual criticism of documents that they don't believe to be inerrant at all. But as a

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Christian, the primary purpose for doing textual criticism is because you believe

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God has spoken, Jesus taught that he had, and that the Scriptures are the means by which God has spoken, and therefore to know what

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God has said is sort of an important thing. What about translation? Same issue. You want to have

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God's word to be able to be communicated to the people of God. What about interpretation? You want

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God's truth and God's voice to be spoken. You want to be handling accurately what is found in the

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Word of God. But what's behind all of this? Well, whether you can trust that God can speak to his own creation, which is what inerrancy is all about.

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She's missed it at every single point. Every single point. This is not a wise woman in her studies, by any stretch of the imagination, any more than Brian Zond is not a wise man, if wisdom involves accurately handling factual truths in an appropriate context, shall we say.

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And so it's entirely theoretical. It's just simply her conclusion for, I don't have a clue what

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I'm talking about, but I will repeat what I've heard other people say, and we'll get some brownie points for having done so.

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And so Zond, instead of correcting her, he doesn't know any better either, right, an inerrant

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Bible still has to be interpreted. Well, no kidding. So do your tweets.

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And sometimes it's a whole lot harder to interpret your tweets than it is the Bible. Notice that for Zond, it's always the inculcation of doubt.

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Same thing with Peter Enns. You saw the, I think you may have seen the tweet about Peter Enns going to have a meeting with Andy Stanley.

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Gee, why would that be? Well, because they're saying the same things. It's just the further trajectory of the departure of Andy Stanley from anything that would be remotely relevant to a meaningful evangelical expression of faith.

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And an inerrant Bible still has to be interpreted, then we are left with the problem that Krishna Smith calls pervasive interpretive pluralism.

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Well, why is there pervasive interpretive pluralism? Well, it's not because of a lack of clarity on the part of Scripture.

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We've discussed this many times. This is your standard Roman Catholic argument, even though Brian Zond isn't technically a

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Roman Catholic by any stretch of the imagination. It is the standard Roman Catholic argument that, well, you can have an inspired text, but you still got to interpret it.

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And since God doesn't strike people dead for misinterpreting the Bible, then that means the

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Bible is worthless. Well, when you put it that way, its error is rather obvious, but it's never put that way.

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You only get a part of the argument, normally clothed in language that pretends to respect

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Christian tradition or Christian theology or even the Bible itself, but really doesn't.

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That's why we do meaningful, serious exegesis, and that's why Brian Zond doesn't do and has never shown himself capable or willing to do meaningful biblical exegesis.

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Same with Rachel Held Evans. That's hard work, so the easier thing to do is to flit around out there in the left and misrepresent inerrancy and misrepresent what

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Scripture is about and what it actually says and get 328 likes just simply for demonstrating that you have no earthly idea what you're talking about.

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That's looking into what you have in those things called social media, but that's how it works.

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Now, let's go ahead and do this first, and then I'll do the secret history of Leviticus, and if we get through that fast enough, then maybe we can pop open the phone lines real quick for just a few calls.

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When I was up in Evergreen, I briefly addressed the sermon,

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A Supernatural Community and a Personal Word, Matt Chandler at the Village Church, and then after I did that, lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of other people.

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There have been jumping the shark memes and pirate ships and guns and sharks, oh my, and all sorts of stuff.

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I tried to focus upon what I thought was most theologically relevant for the longest period of time.

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In other words, there's cheap thrill, quick rebuttals, and then there's the real issue here is this part, rebuttals.

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Hopefully what you want to do down the road is do something that basically five years from now would still be relevant.

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The only way to do that is to find the real problem that's being addressed that's going to be repeated over and over and over again in the future, or you can try to minimize how many times it can be repeated by engaging in a word of refutation.

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Remember, we played a particular point, and so let's listen to that point again, and then

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I'll play a second section as well. You're going to be able to do something with this?

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Okay, here we go. Prophecy consists of spirit -prompted, spontaneous, intelligible messages orally delivered to a person or community intended for edification or encouragement.

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Now I thought we put the video up, but, um, huh? Ah, he's working on it.

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Well, and I'm done with it. So, a little slow there. We'll be doing some more.

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Yeah, there it was. Okay, well, we'll continue on from there. Now, it has been pointed out that, um, this is, it would be interesting to know the biblical argumentation behind this because there seems to be many uses of that term in the

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New Testament, but evidently the definition for the village church is prophecy consists of spirit -prompted, spontaneous, so I guess prophecy can't be something that's consistent over time if it's spontaneous, intelligible messages, that's better than non -intelligible messages, orally delivered to a person or community.

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Okay, so the person giving the prophecy can't study it out?

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Would that be what, what does spontaneous mean? So what he's doing since he prepared the sermon is not prophecy.

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It's not a fourth telling of the Word of God, right? So I don't know. I'm just,

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I'm just trying to figure out where this came from because it doesn't, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

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Spontaneous, intelligible messages, well, I'm glad, I'm glad that that's intelligible, orally delivered to a person or community.

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So I guess you couldn't act it out, but it, it doesn't have to be in church, evidently, because it can be delivered to a person.

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So it's not a specifically ecclesiastically exercised, is this a gift?

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Intended for edification or encouragement. So there's no prophecy for rebuke, for correction, for exposure, refutation of error.

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This seems like a really convenient definition that I think misses some stuff that the

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New Testament itself would, would refer to. So. You tracking?

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This is what we mean, this is what we think the Bible means when it talks about prophecy. So, so we receive from the

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Lord a word that doesn't contradict the Scriptures, doesn't stand in contrast to the sufficiency of the

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Scriptures, but it personalizes the Scriptures. Okay, so that's the point that I focused on.

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We played the audio only up in Evergreen. And we pointed out that if it does not contradict the

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Scriptures, what were, what were the, okay, it does not contradict, there, there were, between that and personalized.

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Intended for edification or encouragement. You with me? You tracking? This is what we mean, this is what we think the

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Bible means when it talks about prophecy. So, so we receive from the

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Lord a word that doesn't contradict the Scriptures, doesn't stand in contrast to the sufficiency of the

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Scriptures. Okay, does not, I want the exact terminology, does not stand in contrast to the sufficiency of Scripture.

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So, that's, it's just, that's a weird way of putting it. It doesn't deny the sufficiency of Scripture.

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So, there could be ways of bringing encouragement to the saints that the

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Bible cannot provide you, but that you need a word from the

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Lord to be able to do that, right? So, does that involve a narrowing of the definition of the sufficiency of Scripture, what it's for?

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Sufficient for life and godliness? Lots of questions that are not expanded upon here.

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But then you have the idea of personalizing. It personalizes the

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Scriptures. Hmm. I'm not sure what that means either.

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I mean, I guess in the context of a mildly reformed, mild continuationism,

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I get the idea in light of the example that he gives of the personalization aspect.

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But it's really hard when you start asking the tough questions like, how does this relate to biblical prophecy?

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When Paul writes to Timothy, was that just a really, really, really, really, really unusual because it was done by a prophet example?

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I mean, I'm sure Paul's not the only one that wrote letters to ministry associates.

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And so, why weren't, why wasn't any other apostles' personal letters to ministry associates considered to be prophecy in the sense of the foretelling of the

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Word of God as Scripture? These are just some of the many questions because if you're going to say it does not contradict

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Scripture, well, there's, it's real easy to say it does not contradict Scripture. Then you have to flesh that out because there are people all over, absolutely all over today claiming that God has said this and God has said that and they then use that as the lens through which

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Scripture is to be interpreted. And once you set it up as a lens, it can't, you can't detect contradiction because it's the lens that filters out where the contradiction would be in the first place.

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There's just so many holes in this definition that it's extremely confusing, extremely difficult.

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So, there was a little bit more here. But it personalizes the Scriptures. On the bathroom floor that afternoon, the

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God of creation bent down and kissed my forehead in the darkest night of my life.

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Yeah, and that's, that's not demonic, right? That's the other thing. Well, the devil can make things confusing.

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It was not confusing in that moment. Okay, now let me just stop just a second. What makes it not demonic?

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I mean, we all, I remember praying for Matt Chandler when 2009, the story of his brain tumor comes out and I remember that.

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And so you've got all sorts of emotional weight, you know, God reached down and kissed my forehead.

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Well, that sounds wonderful. Here's the problem. What happens when you're talking to the

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Mormon man who claims he's been healed through the ministration of the

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Holy Spirit that directed him to believe in the Book of Mormon? See, it's real easy in our nice, comfortable communities to do this stuff.

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But you've got to remember, Mormonism is chock full of spiritual experiences.

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Joseph Smith and the original Twelve Apostles of the Mormon Church spoke in tongues all the time in Kirtland, Ohio.

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They would have entire meetings filled with tongue speaking and healings and all sorts of stuff like that.

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And they used that as part of their pointing to their apostolic authority and hence the reality of continuing revelation in the

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Book of Mormon and eventually in the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. That's just one example.

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You get involved in doing ministry to other religions and it really does help you to get an idea of what is actually special and unique about Christianity over against these other religions.

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And we think we've got a corner on this stuff. We don't. We don't. So that's a personal experience that is being then used to form a lens to promote a particular perspective amongst the people here.

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And I think we just need to recognize it for what it is. You can like Matt Chandler all you want.

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We are all subject to doing this kind of thing. It was a beautiful gift of God. Just to remind you,

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I see you. I have not forgotten you. I am in this. Okay. That was all in the

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Bible. I see you. I have not forgotten you. I am in this. Isn't that what

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Romans 8 .28 says? Isn't that the promises of Scripture over and over and over again?

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It is not meditation upon his law, meditation upon the

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Psalter. Isn't that why we have such a wide range of experiences of the psalmist's writings in the

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Psalter? Or you look at, man, the wild stuff that Ezekiel was asked to do and what he went through and the difficulties of Jeremiah.

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Aren't those things there so that we can not have to have new stuff?

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What's the relationship between the Word of God being a light and a lamp unto our path and needing something new, something beyond that?

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Where do you draw the line and say this is sufficient and that's beyond sufficient? That's what

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I was asking when I heard this. Not, you will survive, you will be healed.

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That's not what he said. I'm going to use it. I'm going to use it. Isn't that a scriptural teaching?

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Why did you need something more than that? Oh, it's just something God added.

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Okay, but hadn't you already believed what was found in Scripture? When Peter talks about his personal experience, he places

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Scripture above his personal experience. Isn't that what we've always said? You and I see you.

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And I knew Bible verses for all of that, but I felt saw and loved that day. Okay, so there's the point

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I want to get to. I knew Bible verses for all that, but because of this experience, then

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I felt saw and loved that day. So the Bible isn't enough. It's I am not saying that God does not give grace when grace is needed in the midst of horrible suffering.

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And I've never had to suffer like Matt Chandler was suffering in chemotherapy at that point.

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But the problem is we've imbibed the society's idea that unless you go through something terrible like this and you can't, you just have to accept what anybody says.

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If anyone's a victim of anything, disease or sinful activities, all of a sudden now they have an expertise that nobody else has and they are beyond criticism and they can say whatever they want, even to what they're saying fundamentally has serious categorical biblical errors in it.

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They can say whatever they want. Well, I don't think

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Matt Chandler would make that claim for himself. At least I hope he wouldn't. But then it got a little odd.

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Okay, so this is what everyone's been talking about here. What would it be like to be known as someone who always brings life, always speaks life, always calls out what is true?

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The kind of power that could be unleashed, I think, would blow our minds and it takes us into other spaces that are good, right, and beautiful.

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And I just don't think you're ever going to offend anybody like this. And if they don't understand what's being said, then just let it sit.

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Maybe in time, God will reveal it to them. What I'm asking you to do... God will reveal it to them.

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So he's talking about being open to the Spirit of God, encouraging somebody, okay, it's wonderful to be open to the

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Spirit of God. But open is not the same thing as shutting down your mind and looking for visions and emotions and feelings.

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That's not being open to the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God has spoken. To be open to the Spirit of God is to say,

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Spirit of God, truly examine my heart. Bring conviction to every part of my life. Use your word to bring that conviction.

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That's, I think, a lot scarier than saying, I'm going to empty my mind and whatever pops in must have come from the

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Spirit of God. Be brave. Ask. Hear. Step out.

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Approach. And just say, hey, while I was praying, the Lord brought you to my mind. And even if it sounds crazy to you, just trust

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Him. So if you're like... I saw Danny Spencer over here. Okay, now did you hear what he said?

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The Lord brought you to my mind, and then he says, just trust Him. So you're trusting, you're putting the same trust in the feelings of your heart that we're supposed to have toward trusting the

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Holy Spirit of God that gave us the inspired words of Scripture that tells us, say, of the resurrection of Jesus and what His purposes are.

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You see the problem here? You see where the issue is? It just seems like...

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Again, I thought this was something that we all were clear on, but I guess we need to repeat it over and over and over again.

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I love him, and so I'm just going to use you, Danny. Say I'm praying in the morning, and I'm just like, Lord, just bring me somebody to encourage us.

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I want to be used by you. I want to pursue love. I want to push out darkness. I want to expose the lies of the enemy, and I want to use my mouth to build up your sons and daughters.

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And he puts Danny Spencer in my mind. Okay, I want to use my mouth to build up your sons and daughters.

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Okay, but shouldn't the prayer be, fill my mouth with your words, not with impressions, visions?

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Give me a deeper love for your truth and knowledge of your truth. Bring your word to my mind.

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And if we really were praying that seriously, wouldn't that mean we'd be spending much more time in the Word? I mean, anybody who does this, who is not actively memorizing

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Scripture and is a serious student of Scripture, you're a hypocrite. You're taking the shortcut. You're taking the way around it.

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Right? Am I wrong about that? That's a good question.

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And then I don't do that well. Is that me? Is that, gosh, Danny texted me earlier this week, so am I, is that bad chicken?

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Is that what, well, you know, no. I'm just going, okay, Danny, let's do it. Lord, what would you want me to encourage

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Danny with? And then I quiet again, trying to listen. Okay, if anyone has watched TBN for more than 14 seconds, there's a lot of bad chicken out there.

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Okay? We live in a land of bad chicken. All right?

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So it's not an irrelevant thing to ask the question, could it be bad chicken?

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Because there are Mormon missionaries with tears running down their eyes telling people today that they know that the

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Book of Mormon is true. Bad chicken, bad chicken. And TBN is filled with people who are saying send $69 in based upon Psalm 69.

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It's bad chicken. So it's good to be concerned about bad chicken. Have you ever eaten bad chicken?

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It's a bad thing. Very, very bad thing. I mean, last time I was in an

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ER was when I had some bad milk, just one gulp of bad milk while teaching at a seminary in California.

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And wow, wow, that was, that was bad.

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You don't want it. Food poisoning is bad. Spiritual poisoning is worse. And so, yeah, we need to be worried about bad chicken.

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We really, really do. Automatically in my head, there's a picture of a ship, a pirate ship. And then there's like cannons on the pirate ship and there's a shark chasing the pirate ship.

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Now at that point, you're like, nope, no. And that's probably a good, sane response.

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Because this has nothing to do with scripture. It has nothing to do with your knowledge of what this man's life is.

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You're not reflecting upon scripture. You're not reflecting upon theology. I mean,

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I am not one of those people that says that Christianity is just this completely non -emotional mental activity that has no bearing upon how

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God made us as creatures. I'm not saying any of that. I'm really not saying any of that.

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I've talked about supernatural experiences, but the point is that this kind of a opening up of yourself is not the same thing as meditation upon the

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Word of God, a recognition of the holiness of the Spirit of God, the centrality of the truth of God.

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I mean, if you want to speak to someone and encourage them, then talk to them about their standing in Christ.

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Encourage them to consider the beauty of the empty tomb. Do something that has some kind of meaningful foundation to it, not walking up to somebody and talking about sharks and cannons and pirates.

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I mean, can't you see the difference? I think of Jonathan Edwards, and I think of a story.

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Again, it goes back to seminary, and I got on an Edwards kick in seminary.

39:33

I had the chance of going up to Northampton at one point and seeing some of his writings and thinking about how

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Northampton has gone since then. One of the stories that Edwards tells is he's going out in the woods one day and he's contemplating the

39:52

Trinity. How many people in the body are contemplating the

39:58

Trinity? And he was just so taken with the excellencies of Christ and the

40:08

Father and the Spirit and the relationship that is theirs and their condescension and all of that stuff that he dismounted his horse and he's on the ground weeping.

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Now, I can get that, but I don't think

40:28

Jonathan Edwards would have had any understanding whatsoever if you came up to him as he was about to preach a sermon on the glories of the

40:37

Trinity and delivered him this message about pirates and guns and sharks.

40:48

Remember when Fonzie jumped the shark and what that's come to mean? Well, this is theologically jumping the shark, and it's doing it from a theological perspective.

41:02

Not gonna happen, right? And here's what I want you to do. I want you to just step out and you can even admit, like, we're growing together and we're gonna fail and it's gonna get weird.

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It's gonna be awesome. Like, I'm just gonna go to Danny and I'm gonna be like, hey, brother, you heard my sermon.

41:22

I was praying. Danny was a pirate ship. There's a shark chasing it.

41:30

There were cannons. I'm not gonna interpret that for him. I'm not gonna be like, what I think that means is that maybe you're stealing some stuff from people and Jesus is the shark and you need to repent.

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I'm not gonna interpret that for him. I'm just gonna go. And in a great deal of humility, I'm just gonna be, does that make any sense to you?

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And it's perfectly okay to go, that doesn't make any sense at all, but here's what we need to be.

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How do you deal with the pastor standing in front of his people saying, actually encouraging his people?

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First of all, it's wonderful and necessary and good to be encouraging the people of God to encourage one another.

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It's great. We need to hear that and we need to be doing that.

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No two ways about it. We aren't nearly as good at that as we should be. We should be putting ourselves out there to do that.

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No question about it. But I would not be encouraged by someone coming up to me and telling me the incoherent thoughts of their mind as if that has something to do with the

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Spirit of God. If they come to me and they say,

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James, I just want to remind you, I was praying for you and I just want to remind you that Jesus viewed the scriptures as the very speaking of God and even though he himself was the

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Son of God on earth, he showed such a deep respect for the

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Word of God and he taught us that and I just encourage you to stand firm in your proclamation of the

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Word of God. I don't have to sit there and go, hmm, let me go home and ponder upon this.

43:38

Now, I can go home and ponder upon it. I can read some sections of the 119th Psalm and I can think about what it would have been like to have been

43:46

Timothy to receive from Paul his discussion of you remain convinced of those things you become convinced of and for I know whom

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I believe in and persuade he is able to keep that which I have committed on him against that day. Those would be good things to meditate upon, but I don't need to be sitting there meditating going,

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Lord, am I the shark or the cannon or am

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I a pirate or am I the guy that got stolen stuff from the pirate?

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Am I a sail? You can go nuts trying to figure something like that out and there's nothing edifying about it.

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I can't imagine what's been going on at the village church after this because I'll be honest with you, at least the pirate ship and the shark has the consistency of being in the ocean.

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There are things people think of all the time, just look at Twitter, that don't even have that level of consistency to them.

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You see the problem? Let your exhortation, let he who speaks, speak according to the word of the

45:03

Lord. Not some, this came into my mind and I don't know what it did, it might have nothing to do with you at all, but hey, you know, why not?

45:14

I wasn't going to spend that much time on it, but I don't know

45:22

Matt Chandler and I doubt Matt Chandler could care less what I have to say and probably won't listen to what

45:27

I have to say, but those who do, you might want to direct him to some more solid perspectives because he's got a large following and that's not a good thing.

45:49

Anyway, wow, it's 2 .45, look at that, and I'm just now getting to the heart of the program today.

46:00

But anyway, yes, someone on Twitter is saying he's getting his definition and theology of prophecy from the work of Wayne Grudem.

46:10

Well, I've never agreed with Wayne Grudem's definition of prophecy either and this is just a helpful way of demonstrating where that definition ends up having some serious problems.

46:24

But one of the things I wanted to get to, were you going to comment on something or?

46:32

Well, my only question is along the lines of, well, in our churches, if,

46:38

I mean, let's say Pastor Fry gets up on Sunday morning and starts doing that, or anything close to it,

46:47

I don't know that he would be getting up the next Sunday morning. Well, there would definitely be a meeting, but obviously

46:58

I was sent, the troublemaker in Dallas sent me a link to some stuff from a number of years ago that was very similar, not the pirate ship thing, but more of the same continuationist stuff.

47:17

And again, there is a consistent way of being a charismatic, but I don't know if there's a consistent way of being a reformed,

47:31

I know, I know, just hold on, listen to what I'm saying, reformed but a charismatic that has a consistently reformed epistemology and view of Scripture, especially the sufficiency of Scripture and solo scriptura.

47:44

And I think you see that right here. Which is going to take precedence? Which is going to take precedence?

47:50

And obviously as one who has defended solo scriptura against many, and I hope to, been gone a lot, got the debate coming up, got another trip in October, falling behind in my

48:05

PhD stuff. And this would be a program or a series of programs that would take a fair amount of preparation.

48:15

But I would like to try to at some point, and I've said this many times, everyone's got good intentions, but who has the time?

48:25

But I want to do a program where I really delve deeply into, because it's not just his argument, it's an argument that Roman Catholics are using more and more.

48:37

The argument against solo scriptura, you know, it's a distinction without a difference, you know, the

48:44

Peter D. Williams thing, I did respond to it in our last debate, but I really want to expand upon it because I am absolutely convinced it is a horrible argument.

48:53

It not only boomerangs upon the Roman Catholic, but it is just not even close to dealing with a reformed epistemology.

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And I think that does help me to see where the issues here are. A lot of these guys don't do apologetics, they don't have to take their epistemology into battle with someone like a

49:13

Peter D. Williams. And so they end up saying things that, you know, if they had to be doing that, they could never say those things.

49:21

They'd go, oh, I can't say that because, oh, okay. And then they'd be a little bit more on the consistent side.

49:27

But anyway, so let's just see where this goes.

49:33

I'm not sure how long this is going to take. I may not be able to get calls because I think this is important. Someone sent,

49:39

I think it was in Twitter, it's one of the main reasons I stay there, but someone sent me the link to the

49:50

Secret History of Leviticus by Aiden Dershowitz.

50:03

Dr. Dershowitz is a biblical scholar, that's all it says. And this was a, what was the source again?

50:19

The Times. But which Times? Well, let's click on this here. And New York Times.

50:24

It's New York Times opinion piece by Dr.

50:31

Dershowitz, a biblical scholar. And it was based basically upon a scholarly article for Hebrew Bible in Ancient Israel, Volume 6,

50:46

Number 4, December 2017. A 17 -page scholarly article titled

50:56

Revealing Nakedness and Concealing Homosexual Intercourse, Legal and Lexical Evolution in Leviticus 18.

51:05

The abstract reads, The list of forbidden unions in Leviticus 18 reflects comprehensive revision that obscures its original character.

51:14

The motive for reworking this passage was to reverse the original text's implicit sanctioning of male same -sex intercourse.

51:24

This conclusion finds support in additional biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts. So there's the abstract.

51:29

So what you have is a straightforward, ultra -left, revisionist assertion that Leviticus 18 has undergone comprehensive revision and that its original teaching was the opposite of what it is now, specifically the original sanctioned male same -sex intercourse, and that the reworking has been to introduce the revision of that.

52:15

So that's the, you know, who knows? Maybe someone from the Times was scanning through abstracts, looking for possible article titles or article material, whatever it might be.

52:29

And maybe that's how this took place. I don't know. But sadly, it is this kind of article that gets copied over and over again.

52:40

It gets read in basic introduction to religion classes and rarely gets refuted within solid churches because you don't even see this stuff or you dismiss it as being utterly irrelevant.

52:56

And then we get hit with it and we don't have good responses. Okay, so that's why I wanted to take time to look at it.

53:02

I sent it to Michael Brown because I was away and he said, yep,

53:08

I've had a number of people send it to me and he wrote an article yesterday. His articles are word limited as to how long they can be, so it's not super in -depth.

53:18

It really can't go into everything. But I did retweet his tweet where he announced that article and you can go read that.

53:32

So what do we have here? No text has had a greater influence on attitudes toward gay people than the biblical book of Leviticus, which prohibits sex between men.

53:41

True and false. I would say that Romans 1 has been read by a much wider audience than Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20.

53:53

And I think the vast majority of Christians who've read Romans 1 probably were not even aware of the specifics of Leviticus 18 and 20.

54:06

It is interesting to me that this biblical scholar never once mentions, and this is a

54:12

New York Times piece, maybe he does mention it in the scholarly article. I don't know. It's 25 bucks.

54:17

I just didn't want to spend the money. But I sort of doubt that he did mention it, to be perfectly honest with you, that Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 have two different audiences.

54:32

One is talking about the abominable, the toevah actions of the people of land that's going to result in land spitting them out.

54:39

Leviticus 20 is specifically for the people of God. That's why there's a difference between the two prohibitions. And that's why one has a legal penalty and the other does not.

54:49

So again, by the way, I haven't mentioned this in a while, but I did a 35 -sermon series on the

54:56

Holiness Code, tackled, as far as I could tell, every tough, and I mean really tough, biblical text on difficult laws.

55:09

And that's available at sermonaudio .com at the PRBC website. Drop down the sermons thing and you'll find the

55:15

Leviticus Code or the Holiness Code series there. So I obviously spent a great deal of time in Leviticus 18, 19, and 20 right at the beginning.

55:26

Before Leviticus was composed, outright prohibitions against homosexual sex, whether between men or women, were practically unheard of in the ancient world.

55:34

That sounds really neat until you think about what that means. A, there's almost no literature before Leviticus would have been composed.

55:47

Now, of course, he's going to use a very late date for Leviticus. I put Leviticus at 1400 years before Christ.

55:55

He's not going to do that. But even at that, all that sentence says is, it was a pagan world.

56:08

And Israel and monotheism and a meaningful, ethical, moral system like that is pretty hard to come by.

56:16

Yes, that's a given. But that has little to do with the topic at hand.

56:23

Chapter 18 of Leviticus contains a list of forbidden incestuous acts, followed by prohibitions against sex with a menstruating woman, bestiality, and various other sexual acts.

56:32

In verse 22, we find its famous injunction, You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination.

56:39

Leviticus 20, 13 repeats this law along with a punishment for those who violate it. They shall be put to death.

56:44

Their blood is upon them. Again, Dr. Dershowitz, for some reason, probably because he doesn't... These types of left -wing

56:52

Old Testament interpreters don't look to see coherence and consistency.

57:01

They look only for division. And so it would not be normative for them to say,

57:08

Well, what you have in Leviticus 18 is a discussion of the sins of the nations around Israel that results in their being expelled from the land.

57:17

And then in Leviticus 20, you're getting into the specific legal code for the people themselves.

57:24

And so there's a difference between the two. That's why there's a punishment attached, the second one, etc., etc. They're not generally going to do that.

57:30

It doesn't even look like he's recognized that particular aspect of these things.

57:38

Like many ancient texts, Leviticus was created gradually over a long period and includes the words of more than one writer.

57:46

Well, that is a very, very popular theory. It's stated as a fact rather than as a theory.

57:55

What should be stated is one theory regarding the origin of the book of Leviticus is that it was created gradually over a long period and includes the words of more than one writer.

58:10

I mean, it's just simply dismissed the possibility that this was actually the writings of a man named

58:17

Moses. I'm sure Dr. Dershowitz does not believe there was a man named Moses at all. But it's important to recognize that the vast majority of writing about the

58:31

Old Testament today comes from people who believe that it is an incoherent, recension -rich, edited, badly, poorly edited text that is the result of literally generations and centuries of development and that there is no way to come up with any kind of meaningful, coherent understanding of the text.

59:01

That's their presupposition. That's their starting point. They rarely defend it.

59:06

You need to understand. If you go to a vast majority of seminaries, liberal seminaries, unbelieving seminaries, you're going to be given this as the enlightened, factual understanding of the origination of the

59:29

Old Testament, especially the Torah. There will be no discussion of any counter views.

59:37

There will be no discussion of the possibility of the text being in any way consistent with itself.

59:51

There might be a brief discussion. People in the past actually used to believe there was one guy named Moses who wrote all this stuff.

59:58

But we know that's ridiculous today, and so we don't even bother to go there. And that'll be it.

01:00:05

If you go to a conservative seminary, you will be taught all about what these people believe.

01:00:12

It will be rejected. It will be interacted with, but you will— and sometimes it felt like waste your time, but it's not necessarily a waste of time.

01:00:20

You will—conservative seminaries listen to what the other side says, interact with it, and refute it.

01:00:27

Liberals don't even give it the time of day. If you want proof of this, look at almost every single debate

01:00:34

I've ever had with a liberal. Most of them had not even Googled my name, let alone read anything that I ever wrote, because from their perspective, we have nothing meaningful to say at all.

01:00:47

And they're just reflecting their own upbringing. They're reflecting their own experience. That's how they were trained.

01:00:55

And so this is what you're going to encounter. It's the old J -E -D -P theory,

01:01:00

Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, priestly sources, and it's exceptionally, exceptionally subjective.

01:01:11

But that's the wonderful thing, is that you can come up with all sorts of theories, and you can get published in all sorts of journals, because basically the

01:01:20

Old Testament text is theological Plato. Do with it what you will. And here's the important part.

01:01:26

He never refers to a single textual source, because he has none.

01:01:34

He can theorize, well, Leviticus originally said this. Do you have any evidence of that?

01:01:42

I mean, like, you know, a manuscript, a citation, quotation, you know, maybe some astraka from an archaeological dig in Israel.

01:01:52

You know, just anything? I was going to bring it up, and I got distracted.

01:01:58

I'm sorry. But remember just nine months ago, when they used that really cool new computer technology using x -rays to unroll the

01:02:13

Leviticus scroll that can't be unrolled, because it would fall apart into a thousand pieces? Remember they scanned it, and they could actually literally unroll it, and read it, and the whole nine yards?

01:02:23

What did it say? Exactly what the Masoretic text said 900 years later.

01:02:30

So where are these variant Leviticai copies of Leviticus promoting same -sex union between men?

01:02:42

Where's the quotations? Where is the inscriptions on a stone someplace that can be traced back to ancient

01:02:47

Israel? And quoting from Moses saying, it's great to do that.

01:02:56

There isn't any such thing. Well, it's just all been destroyed. Well, you know, the Roman Empire tried to destroy the

01:03:03

New Testament, and we have got a pretty substantial amount of material that somehow survived even their efforts.

01:03:11

And they were better at it than anybody in the earlier period would have been. Had a whole lot more material available to them.

01:03:18

No. Just realize, it is pure speculation, without the slightest bit, the slightest bit, of historical material to go on.

01:03:32

So, he goes on to say, many scholars believe that the section in which

01:03:38

Leviticus 18 appears was added by a comparatively late editor. By the way, was

01:03:43

Leviticus 18 in the scroll that was unrolled electronically?

01:03:49

Of course it was. Word for word. Perhaps one who worked more than a century after the oldest material in the book was composed.

01:03:58

An earlier edition of Leviticus, then, may have been silent on the matter of sex between men.

01:04:05

Then again, it may have spoken about Vulcans. And may have had an entire speech from Spock in it.

01:04:13

You have just as much evidence of that. It is really easy to come up with stuff like this.

01:04:20

That is why I have objected when you do the same type of thing to the text of the

01:04:25

Quran. Even though the Quran is much later, and hence should have more information to it,

01:04:31

I still just have this aversion to this kind of speculative, hey, maybe there is a version that said this, and a version that said that, and hey, if you don't have evidence of it, at least

01:04:45

I can point to Su 'anna, and it has lots of variations in it, but that is another issue. We won't go there right now.

01:04:51

But I think a stronger claim is warranted, as I argue in an article published in the latest issue of the journal Hebrew Bible in Ancient Israel, the one

01:04:58

I read the abstract from, there is good evidence that an earlier version of the laws of Leviticus 18, notice it says there is good evidence, the evidence is purely based upon speculative form criticism.

01:05:11

There is no material evidence whatsoever. None. Most people reading the

01:05:18

New York Times are going to assume that evidence means something more than what he actually means.

01:05:28

Good evidence that an earlier version of the laws of Leviticus 18 permitted sex between men, in addition to having the prohibition against same -sex relations added to it, the earlier text,

01:05:38

I believe, was revised in an attempt to obscure any implication that same -sex relations had once been permissible.

01:05:45

Now, what would you have to now prove? That there was some kind of major revolutionary change in the nature of Israelitist religion at this very point in time that allowed, without any evidence surviving history, to prompt a complete revision of the text without anything surviving that indicated otherwise.

01:06:12

Is there any evidence of that? Of course not. Pure speculation. That's why publishing in the area of form criticism, you might say, aren't you working in doctoral work in textual criticism?

01:06:25

Isn't that the same thing? No. No, no, no, no. No, it is not. Textual criticism is not form criticism.

01:06:33

Textual criticism, you have to deal with actual manuscripts and actual readings.

01:06:39

You have to deal with something that you can actually place in history at a point in time. Form criticism, you can go, you know, it's possible that maybe originally, before the revision, it said this.

01:06:56

Well, that's nice. That's why, coming up on 40 years ago, the

01:07:07

Lord dragged me off to, well, it's only been 32 or something like that, but dragged me off to, well, just kept me so poor that because this ministry had already started, the only place

01:07:20

I could go to get graduate theological training was Fuller Theological Seminary. And at the time,

01:07:27

I wondered why. Now I know why. I've told you the story of Gerhard von

01:07:32

Roth's commentary on Deuteronomy. I got a 98 on that book review. And it was completely negative.

01:07:39

But the point is, I know how these guys work. And here they are. They're still doing the same thing.

01:07:45

Now they're in the New York Times someplace. I'm sorry? Oh, yeah,

01:07:51

I would never survive it today. No, no, no, no, no. He says, the chapter's original character, however, can be uncovered with a little detective work.

01:08:02

Actually, it's with a little fantasy writing. That's what it is. This is fantasy writing. Just because somebody has letters after their name doesn't mean that they are not actually a frustrated fantasy writer.

01:08:17

The core of Leviticus 18 is the list of incest laws. Well, that's important, but I wouldn't identify it as the core.

01:08:27

But again, from his perspective, placing it in the context, flow of thought, can't do it. Each of which includes the memorable phrase, uncover nakedness.

01:08:36

This is typically understood as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. So you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister.

01:08:42

It means something like, do not have sex with your father's sister. Yeah, basically.

01:08:50

It may not require the entire act, but normatively would have.

01:08:58

So, yeah, in that sense. I'll take that as a general given.

01:09:05

Most of the incest laws are presented in a straightforward manner, but two are not.

01:09:11

The first exception is, the nakedness of your father and the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover.

01:09:17

She is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness. At first, this verse appears to outlaw sex between a man and either of his parents.

01:09:25

However, the italicized explanation or gloss, notice he's assuming this is a later edition, suggests that the law actually addresses only one parent, the mother.

01:09:37

It is difficult to reconcile the two parts of the sentence. No, it is not.

01:09:43

No, it is not. It is very common, not only in the Pentateuch, but elsewhere in Scripture, for Hebrew to emphasize an aspect of a commandment or a statement by a repetitive, not just Hebrew parallelism, but by a repeated emphasis upon one aspect of it.

01:10:03

Don't tell me that that is not a standard characteristic of Hebrew writing.

01:10:11

It is. End of his theory. That's the problem.

01:10:17

Because, see, foreign criticism, you always have to come up with a hook. Something unique.

01:10:22

Something new. It may be absurd. It may be so stupid that no one ever thought of it before.

01:10:29

But it will allow you to get published. And once you get published, you put it on your vita, and now it helps you. It's how

01:10:37

Western scholarship works. It's how Western scholarship works. It is difficult to reconcile the two parts of the sentence.

01:10:46

No, it is not. The, uh, She is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness is simply an emphasis upon the intimate relationship between mother and offspring that is represented elsewhere in the text of Leviticus and other

01:11:00

Old Testament books. It's simple repetition for emphasis. And yet, you turn into,

01:11:07

Oh, there's evidence of tampering. You can do that with anything! Any theory you want to come up with.

01:11:15

That's how you do it. Right there. I realize I just ruined a large portion of Old Testament stuff that's being published today, but that's the way to do it.

01:11:25

The same thing happens again a few verses later. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother. Simple enough, right?

01:11:30

The following gloss, however, may give you whiplash. You shall not approach his wife. She is your aunt. By the time we've finished reading the gloss, a prohibition against intercourse between a man and his paternal uncle is transformed into a law about sex between a man and that uncle's wife.

01:11:45

No, it is just expanded it! It is including other aspects to make sure that the prohibition is clearly understood.

01:11:55

You see, once you can start atomizing a text and start, Oh, I think this came from over here and this came from there and came from there.

01:12:02

There's nothing you can't do with the text. You can make any text prove anything.

01:12:08

You can make any text prove absolutely anything. As long as you're willing to just pull it apart.

01:12:19

Put it back together again, whatever form you want. That's easy to do. And yet, that's what a lot of scholarship today is.

01:12:26

Each verse in Leviticus 18's series of incest laws contains a similar gloss, but the others are merely emphatics.

01:12:32

He even knows the emphatic element. Driving home the point, as are those. For example, you should not uncover the nakedness of your daughter -in -law.

01:12:40

She is your son's wife. You should not uncover her nakedness. Exact parallel! Only in these two cases, the father and mother and the father's brother do the glosses alter our understanding of what is prohibited.

01:12:50

Alter as in expand. A law prohibiting sex with one's father fades away.

01:12:56

No, it doesn't. And a law... You see how the atomizing of the text allows you to say this?

01:13:03

Because if you were to stand back and say, well, wait a minute. Is this author clear in prohibiting something?

01:13:13

Given other things he says, the answer is yes. These guys can't do that because they don't think there is an author.

01:13:20

And so you can just... Again, it becomes Plato in your hands. You can do whatever you want with it.

01:13:29

A law prohibiting sex with one's father fades away and a law against sex with one's uncle is reinterpreted as a ban on sex with one's aunt.

01:13:35

It's not reinterpreted. It is added to. It is expanded. It doesn't change.

01:13:42

You're not supposed to have sex with your uncle either or with your father. What we have here is strong evidence of editorial intervention.

01:13:52

Sorry. You're not supposed to laugh at that. But, folks, this is the best that the unbelievers have.

01:14:02

And, you know, I've said many times walking down the commentary aisle in the

01:14:08

Christian bookstore is one of the most dangerous places you can go. Why? Because, especially when it comes to Old Testament stuff, if it was published in the past hundred years, it's going to be filled with this kind of garbage.

01:14:22

This kind of garbage. Unsubstantiated. Everybody else is doing it, so I'm going to do it too.

01:14:31

Subjective garbage. Taken as a given. Taken as a given.

01:14:39

It is worth noting that these new glosses render the idiom under uncover nakedness incoherent.

01:14:46

The phrase can no longer denote sex if uncovering the nakedness of one's father is an act that involves one's mother, as the gloss implies.

01:14:55

Does it sound like he's overcomplicating things here and missing the obvious? Yeah, he really, really is.

01:15:00

But more strikingly, the two exceptional verses are the only ones that address incest between men.

01:15:06

All the others involve women. Once the new glosses were added to the text, for which I offer absolutely no evidence whatsoever, the prohibitions of Leviticus against incest no longer outlaw any same -sex couplings.

01:15:17

Only heterosexual pairs were forbidden. If a later editor of Leviticus opposed homosexual intercourse, you might wonder, wouldn't it have made more sense for him, and it was probably a him, to leave the original bans on homosexual incest intact?

01:15:31

No, the key to understanding this editorial decision is the concept of the exception proves the rule. According to this principle, the presence of an exception indicates the existence of a broader rule.

01:15:41

For example, a sign declaring an office to be closed on Sundays suggests that the office is open on all other days of the week.

01:15:47

Now apply this principle to Leviticus 18, a law declaring that homosexual incest is prohibited could reasonably be taken to indicate that non -incestuous homosexual intercourse is permitted.

01:15:58

So now once you've atomized it, then you don't have to worry about, well, but verse 20 says, oh, no, no, no, no, no, that's later on.

01:16:07

But over in chapter 20, oh, no, no, no, no, different time. You see, there can be no consistent message to any text given the presuppositions that are brought to it by the forum critics.

01:16:22

All you've got to do to come up with your publishable thesis is to choose, okay, of all these sentences,

01:16:30

I'm going to take out this phrase and that phrase and that phrase and these sentences and that sentence.

01:16:37

And I'm going to say, this is the original. And now when I put them all back together again, I can say, oh, this is what happened.

01:16:42

Look at my brilliant insight. And now I'll get published in New York Times. Am I missing something?

01:16:56

I just looked in the channel. No, I was simply saying that you made the comment about him missing something.

01:17:09

And my point was, he isn't missing anything. He's drawing his conclusions on purpose because it's where he wants them to go.

01:17:17

Oh, yeah. That's what forum criticism is all about. That's what forum criticism is all about. It's not a serious handling of the text.

01:17:26

It is the utilization of the text in such a fashion as to allow you to come up with whatever you want to come up with.

01:17:33

Now, what's going to happen then is what you're going to hear,

01:17:43

I guarantee you, in a short period of time, that there's going to be some

01:17:50

Christian father somewhere who is going to have their child go to local community college and run into one of those guys who isn't even as bright as Dershowitz here, but read

01:18:08

Dershowitz's article and went, oh, there it is. And some poor

01:18:15

Christian child is going to say, but the

01:18:20

Bible says. And here it comes. Don't you realize scholars have recognized that Leviticus 18 has been edited and all that stuff was put in later and originally it said same -sex relationships were good?

01:18:41

You got to get out of the Bible and start seeing real scholarship. It's going to happen. It's not going to happen just once.

01:18:48

It's going to happen over and over and over again. Now, we've got a choice to make.

01:18:55

We can either send our children into Caesar's schools unarmed or you might want to send them into a

01:19:04

Christian school. That might be, I mean, a really good Christian school. There aren't that many of them left, but there are a few out there.

01:19:11

Or if they're going to go to that university and maybe they're studying accounting, economics, and they have to take a class and they choose this one and they run into this, okay?

01:19:26

Maybe this isn't their major or something like that. Are you going to send them in without armor, without weapons, without training, without defense?

01:19:37

Or are we going to stop entertaining our children and start training our children, calling them to a higher level?

01:19:52

When are Christians going to start rebelling against the cultural norm today that has children maturing at 28 to 30

01:20:06

What happened? When I was growing up, somehow my parents communicated to me that when

01:20:16

I was 18, I was responsible for myself. And that didn't mean they were going to throw me out of my ear, but I was supposed to be responsible.

01:20:30

And so when I tell folks, I've been married for 36 years. How old are you? I was 19.

01:20:37

She was 18. That's too young. Man, if mankind had thought that through most of its history, there would be no mankind.

01:20:46

I can assure you of that. Given how long life expectancies were in the past. How come people 100 years ago could mature and could take care of themselves and could do educational things that we just aren't doing anymore, could handle challenges that we just don't even think are possible anymore.

01:21:15

And now with all of our technology, we are the pampered generation.

01:21:22

Give me everything on a silver platter. You know, let me waste my life playing first person shooter games in a basement someplace.

01:21:34

What happened? Well, anyways, I'm not sure how I got into that one, but the point is, this kind of stuff is not going to stay in the

01:21:44

New York Times. It's going to be used. And we need to know, we as the adults need to know why it is the hooey that it is.

01:21:55

See through it and then train our young people to think with the critical thinking skills that are necessary to be able to recognize these very things.

01:22:10

That whole big word of epistemology shouldn't be a big word for anybody.

01:22:19

Our young people should be using the term epistemology and should be fully cognizant of what it means and why they can know what they know.

01:22:32

I think so often we so underestimate what our young people can do.

01:22:39

And once we do it, then they never get challenged and so we just perpetuate the cycle.

01:22:48

There you go. Sorry. Yes, did you notice that Ryan just closed

01:22:55

Counter -Strike in channel? He was busily playing games. Didn't he have something to do with damaging the background of the…

01:23:12

Oh, he really thinks that was a real coup, doesn't he? Oh, no question about it.

01:23:19

No question about it. He infiltrated the bunker. Oh, I see.

01:23:25

And he's very proud of that. Very. Wow. I think he's been watching a few too many

01:23:30

Mission Impossible movies. Or it could be he's watched too many left -behind movies.

01:23:38

Well, that's possible. Because that's the book that he left behind. I wasn't going to insult his eschatology.

01:23:46

But anyway. Yeah. So there you go. Okay. That's all

01:23:54

I've got for the day. It would take too long to open up phone lines.

01:24:00

We've gone for an hour and 23 minutes. And we're going to do another program later this week. And so there are more things to be discussed.

01:24:11

I'm just looking at some of the things that I've… But, by the way…

01:24:16

By the way, one thing. Don't start the music. You haven't started it, did you? Okay.

01:24:27

Yeah, there we go. I don't know why.

01:24:35

But it's right there. And the dates haven't changed. I kept thinking the

01:24:40

Revoice conference… Well, first of all, I thought it already passed. And then

01:24:45

I thought it was last weekend. But, you know, it says… July 26th, 28th, 2018 in St.

01:24:51

Louis. So… I don't know when the audio is going to be available.

01:25:03

Or if it's… Just how it's going to be available. I don't know. I'm looking through the speakers list here.

01:25:14

And… It's quite interesting.

01:25:21

Greg Johnson will actually be speaking as well. But especially the workshops.

01:25:29

Rekindling Hope as a Sexual Minority in the Church. Journey to Embrace.

01:25:39

A Conversation on Empowering the Church to Embrace the LGBT Plus Community in Fresh Ways.

01:25:46

Reverend Michelle Sanchez. Don't tell me there isn't a connection between these things.

01:25:52

Race, Sexuality, and Intersectionality. A Panel Discussion. That will be interesting.

01:25:59

Given the commonalities in those movements. Grant Hartley, his big one.

01:26:08

Redeeming Queer Culture and Adventure. Building Justice Bridges.

01:26:17

How a Missiological Approach Shifts Our Posture and Reaches LGBT People. Making Church a

01:26:26

Haven for Sexual Minorities. Thoughts for Church Leadership. It would be…

01:26:32

Maybe a little bit too much to ask to find the word repentant somewhere in the titles.

01:26:44

A Parent's Unexpected Journey. Navigating Life with Your LGBT Child. Sexual Minorities and Ministry.

01:26:53

That'll be interesting. How to Be a Straight Ally. Human Dignity and the

01:27:01

Intersection of Race and Sexuality. Gotta have intersectionality everywhere. I mean, we wouldn't want

01:27:08

Carl to feel like he'd been left out. Carl Marx. Oh, here you go.

01:27:15

Mixed Orientation Marriages That Work. A Panel Discussion. Moderated by Nate Collins.

01:27:22

He's the guy who says that he is the gay man in a mixed orientation marriage. That's the new language. Now we have mixed orientation marriages.

01:27:33

Now this will be interesting. So, why can we eat shellfish? A look at Leviticus and how it relates to questions of sexuality today.

01:27:41

I'm going to want to listen to that one. In this session, we will look at some of those common reasons it is argued that prohibitions of Leviticus 18 .22

01:27:49

and 20 .13 no longer apply before turning to consider why they do still apply. Throughout the session, we will also consider why

01:27:57

Leviticus itself can legitimately be viewed as part of God's good news for his people today. That's one that, for some strange reason, is probably the first one

01:28:06

I want to listen to. Okay, so anyway, here's...

01:28:18

Experiencing intimacy with God and others as the antidote for shame in your sexuality. A room of one's own.

01:28:26

Blessings and challenges of celibacy for women. Et cetera, et cetera.

01:28:33

So, oh. Coming out in the shadow of the cross, queer visibility as redemptive suffering.

01:28:48

Yeah, okay. That's this coming weekend. And I'm... I'll be very interested in knowing when the resources will be available because I foresee a lot of writing in my future to get through those things.

01:29:08

So, that's coming up. That's coming up. Alright, so. Looks like Lord Willen will be back regular time on Thursday.