Are you a Liberal or Conservative?

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Thank you for the opportunity to to again teach your word, to talk about the differences in ideologies and specifically theological systems, and as we continue this study that we started many months ago, Lord, we just pray first and foremost that you keep me from error, as I certainly am fallible and capable of teaching error, so I pray that you would keep me from that for the sake of your people, for the sake of my own conscience, and for the sake of your name.
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I pray oh God that we would be fair and honest in our discussion this morning, and that we would always seek to be searching and seeking for the truth, and not tied to traditions which are not biblical.
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We thank you, we praise you for all that you've done and are going to do.
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In Jesus' name, amen.
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Well this morning we're going to be talking about the difference between liberal and conservative, and the reason why I'm teaching on this is we have been for the last few months in a book, we took a month off because Mr.
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Lee taught for me last month, but I've been teaching through this book by Mr.
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Wainhouse, Charts of Theology and Doctrine.
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This particular book allows us to do sort of a systematic overview of theology, but it allows us to do so in more of a visual form, and for a lot of people that's very helpful, a lot of people learn visually.
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And the book begins by giving overviews and distinctive traits of theological systems.
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So, so far we've looked at Roman Catholicism, we have looked at Lutheran theology, Anabaptist theology, we've looked at Wesleyan theology, Arminian theology, and Reformed theology.
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Well the next one, the next page we're on, and we've been in here for a better part of the year, we're only on page eight, but the next page we're on is liberal theology.
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And, well, yeah exactly, so what I wanted to do was I wanted to address the subject of what it is when we say liberal, and because in our politically charged atmosphere, people tend to group themselves into conservative and liberals, and we say I'm a conservative, or I'm ultra conservative, or they'll say I'm liberal, or I'm far left, you know, and they use these terms, and I think oftentimes they use them in a way that's somewhat ignorant of the meaning, and oftentimes unfair to the meaning of these words.
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So we're going to talk about this one.
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I did make copies, I know not all of you have a book.
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If you do have a book, like I said, we're on page eight, but if you don't, I have a copy for everyone to look at.
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Here you go.
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Yeah, yeah, Jason, would you close that door for me just in case I get loud? I know I bother the classmates.
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Oh, thank you.
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As you can see in the book, what it does is it breaks down into categories what different theological systems look at, and it looks at normally theology, how they look at God, the Trinity, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Revelation, Salvation, and the future.
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But before we get to that particular point, I just want to address the subject of the definitions.
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I actually did this for family worship last night.
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I asked my children, we have a dry erase board at home, so I said, okay kids, I'm gonna write down these two words, you tell me what they mean.
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I wrote down the word liberal, I wrote down the word conservative, and of course my children, because they're hilarious, they start naming people, family members.
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Well, Aunt so-and-so is one of those, and Uncle this is that, you know, and so they, and I said, well you're giving me examples.
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It's just like this morning, I went into the other class, I said this morning in my class I'm teaching on liberalism and conservatism, and I said, what's a liberal? And they they started naming people, and I said, wait a minute now, you're telling, you're giving me an example of someone you think is a liberal.
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Not a definition.
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That's right, so before we begin to categorize, it's best that we understand what the words mean.
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So we're gonna break them down real quick and just sort of get the idea of where these words come from, what they mean, and why we ascribe these words to certain people.
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The word liberal, does anybody know what the root is of the word liberal? Liberty.
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Okay, well actually liberty has the same root as liberal, but it's not the root.
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Well, it's kind of hard because it's not an English word.
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The word liber or labor is the word for free.
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It's Latin, okay, so liber is free.
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It's where we get the word liberty, liberal, liberate, right, means to free people, right, so the idea of a liberal is the idea of freedom.
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That's the concept that underlies the word liberal.
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All right, so in the same way, let's talk about the word conservative.
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What's the root word of the word conservative? This is an English word.
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Conserve, right, okay, so we, that's the same way, we say, okay, it's conserve.
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This actually also comes from the Latin.
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The word conserve comes from Latin and ultimately it means to hold something, to preserve.
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That's the word, to hold something in place or to preserve something.
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So that's probably the better word as far as trying to make a definition, to preserve something.
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So if we talk about liberalism as being concerned with freedom or lack of restriction, that's another way of saying this, lack of constraint or restriction.
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Liberal is lack of constraint or restriction.
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Conservative is to preserve something.
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Now, typically, a conservative is concerned with preserving tradition, okay, so if we separate these two, a conservative is concerned with preserving tradition, a liberal is looking to be free or to have a lack of restraint or restriction in regard to what? Typically tradition.
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Almost always, it's, if you think of how a liberal might say something, you know, think about traditional marriage.
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What does the liberal say? I want to be free from that.
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The traditional view of men and women, I want to be free from that.
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Traditional view of the workplace or the home structure or traditional view of economics or anything like that, I want to be free from that.
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So really this restriction is tradition that the liberal sees.
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So this is how these two operate in different worldviews.
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This one says tradition is worthy to be upheld.
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This one says tradition is worthy to be jettisoned, okay, and typically if you look up a definition, just a textbook, you know, you go to your Funk and Wagnalls, you know, your dictionary, and you pull that out and you read it, the dictionary definition says for liberal, open to new behavior and willing to discard traditional values.
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That's the, actually that's Google's definition, but the Google dictionary, which is based on, I think, the Webster definition, open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values, right? And then if you look up the word conservative under the same dictionary, it says holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change, innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.
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So oftentimes you'll hear the word, with liberal, the word progressive, right? Why have they chosen the word progressive rather than liberal? I think that's Geico, but what That's gonna be great for the audio, that's gonna be funny.
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No, what is, why go with the word progressive rather than liberal? It does.
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It has the word pro in it.
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That's why we're, that's why they're pro-life.
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That's right, we're going forward, right? We're not looking back to tradition, we're looking forward to progress, right? And so this word becomes very common use, you know, we're progressives, we're looking forward, looking to innovate, looking to change, looking to jettison the old and in with the new.
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Now, I want to make a kind of a bold statement.
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Most of us would probably, and I'm assuming, and I know assuming can be dangerous, so just bear with me for a moment.
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Most of us would probably, at least at some perspective, put ourselves in the conservative camp, especially when it comes to things like politics and religion, but I would venture to say that, and I have said this before, people say, are you conservative or liberal? I say it depends on the subject.
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It always depends on the subject because there are many ways in which other Christians, particularly in certain realms of Christianity, would call me ultra-liberal, okay? In fact, just to name, maybe let you guys name a few, what are some things that you do that other Christians have maybe labeled you liberal for doing? Wearing pants, that's right, you know, as my first my wife said last night, we were talking, and she said they wear pants, women wear pants, and somebody says, you know, somebody says that's liberal for a woman to wear pants, you know, and makeup, okay? We'll just add that one here.
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What else? What's another thing that people do that others would say you're liberal? Okay, not use the King James, okay? So anything other than, anything other than KGV.
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I've certainly been called liberal for that, like straight up to my face, you're a liberal.
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Okay, contemporary Christian music, well we're going to go to that in just a minute.
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That's where we're going, that's where we're going, but I'm just saying, this is my point, is to say that, to say that anyone is completely liberal or to say that anybody's completely conservative without examining the specific subject is often unfair.
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And honestly, when it comes to liberalism, from the simplest definition of being free from restraint, here is it, here is something that I think, and we are going to look at a Bible verse in just a moment, here is something that I think is good.
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If I can say something good about liberalism, and whoever's listening to this on audio, because I know there are people who, even if you say anything nice about liberalism, they want to burn you to the stake.
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Just listen.
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The good thing, the one good thing, if you can find something good in the idea of liberalism, is that the traditions are not always biblical, and so if a religious or Christian conservative, I think, should be more concerned with conserving truth and, by extension, doctrine, because doctrine is based on truth, than they are with tradition.
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Now we're going to look at a Bible verse.
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Take out your Bibles and turn to Mark chapter 7.
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There it is, excuse me.
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Okay.
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Starting at verse 5, And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands? Remember at this point, Jesus' disciples have eaten without doing the traditional washing of the Pharisees, and the Pharisees find great offense at that.
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It's like wearing pants in a church service, you know, lady wearing pants, this is why are you not following the tradition that has been set down for you? Why are you bucking the system, man? I mean, you know, to make it in the vernacular, what's your deal? This is law because this is tradition, right? This is law because this is tradition.
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And he, that being Jesus, said to them, well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
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In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
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And could also be translated the traditions of men, because that's what we see here.
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Oftentimes in what is called conservatism, what we see is a forcing of traditions as doctrine, and that is not good either.
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See, I come here today as a person who would identify myself mostly as political conservative, and certainly as a biblical conservative, religious conservative, but if we are to ever be really growing in our faith, we have to be honest about our failures.
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We have to be honest about our issues and the problems that we have.
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And one of the problems that we have is we set up our traditions oftentimes as doctrine.
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Things that are not biblical, and we make them the standard by which other people must behave.
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And this comes in all kinds of areas.
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I mean, there are things that are good, but they're not required.
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There are things that are wholesome, but they're not mandated by Scripture.
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So we might encourage another person to do a certain thing, but we cannot condemn them for not doing that thing.
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When we do that, we set ourselves up as the standard.
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I mean, there's all kinds of things, you know, and I'm nervous to even mention any, because of the quick to offend that people are today.
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Even people who make fun of other people for being quick to offend are themselves also equally quick to be offended, you know.
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We need to be willing to say, okay, this is a tradition that I hold to.
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I like it.
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I think it's good and wholesome and right, so I'll continue to hold to it.
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But it's not a standard by which other Christians must measure themselves, because I am not the standard.
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Like I said, we're not even looking at liberal theology yet.
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I'm just looking at the issue of how we have misused both of those ideas, liberal and conservative.
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When you read how Mr.
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House describes liberal theology, he's basically right in that when you look at liberals from the perspective of guys like John Shelby Spong and Marcus Borg and, well, Marcus Borg might not be a good example.
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There's John Shelby Spong, there's all the guys of the Jesus Seminar.
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These are ultra-liberal guys who don't believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, they don't believe what the Bible says about him, and they reinterpret the Scripture.
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One even said that he believed like the feeding of the 5,000, and he said that the feeding of the 5,000 wasn't miraculous in the sense that Jesus took five loaves and two fish and miraculously multiplied it.
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That's not the miracle.
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What the miracle was was that everyone who came was a mixed multitude.
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Some had brought food and some hadn't, and Jesus led them to share what they had, and so those who had gave to those who didn't have, and so what you see here is a great socialist miracle that those who have would be willing to share with those who have not, and that's the miracle is that socialism is so good.
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That's nonsense.
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You're not drawing that from the text, but that's what I say when I typically refer to liberal theology, I'm referring to people who would take that type of freedom with the text, they would take that type of freedom, and typically in liberal theology what you have is a jettisoning of anything miraculous, anything which would be outside of the realms of what we would experience in our senses, you know, that's what we call science.
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Science is the study of the senses.
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What can I see, smell, taste, touch, feel, you know, all those things, because that's how I experience, and that's what the scientific method is based on.
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I hate it, you know, one of the things that bugs me, and now I'm getting kind of on a rabbit trail for a moment, I hate when people say, well science says this.
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Have you ever heard people say that? Well science says this.
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It can't.
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Science can't say anything, because science isn't a person, neither is science a entity at all.
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Science is a formula, a formula that is used by men to discover truth based on the senses.
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What we see, what we hear, what we feel, what we taste, that's how science works.
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Science doesn't work without people.
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I've heard people say, science has produced many miracles.
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I say, no, men have done that.
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Men have made the space shuttle.
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Did they use the scientific method? Yes, but science is not an entity.
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Science didn't do anything.
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Men did that, and that's, I do make that distinction, because we have deified and personalized science as a being, and it's not.
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Yeah, and then they say, well science says, I say science can't say anything.
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A person, using what they believe the appropriate scientific method, has come to a conclusion based upon his senses that that's what that is.
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Science doesn't say anything.
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Yeah, nature created.
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I had a discussion last night, I had about an hour-long conversation over online, and it was a good conversation.
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It wasn't like we were arguing, but a guy asked me a question about Scripture, and he's an unbeliever, and and and I kind of knew where he was going right off the bat, but from the very outset, he would use things like, well, well nature, because I said, I said, I said, if you don't believe that your brain was designed to think, why do you trust your own thoughts? He said, well, I do believe my mind was designed to think.
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I said, well, who designed it? And like, you see the little dots? He's waiting, he's waiting, he's waiting.
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My mother and father's genetic material designed my brain.
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Well, and I said, now you're in eternal regression.
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You got to go back to something.
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I said, here's the problem.
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You believe that your thoughts have meaning, and that your reason and logic are valid, but the only way you can determine that your logic and reason are valid is by using your own reason and logic, and that is circularity in your argument, and thus you can't have any assurance at all that you know anything.
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Absolutely, absolutely, and that's what we do, and that's what men do.
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They worship the creature rather than the Creator, exactly, and that's Romans 1.
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So getting back to this, again like I said, I took a little rabbit trail, but just getting back very quickly.
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When we start talking about liberal theology, we have to understand that what Mr.
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House has done is he has taken, in generalities, what liberalism is versus conservatism, and a very specific generality.
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As I said, any one of us could be called liberal on certain issues, and you know, that it just is what it is.
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So when we begin going through this, we need to be fair, both to the persons that we're discussing, just like we've tried to be fair with Wesleyism, we've tried to be fair with Arminianism, we've tried to be fair with Roman Catholicism.
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Let us be fair with liberalism, because here's the thing, and I know this.
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My friends who are very conservative in their conversations and everything that we talk about, they're very quick to just ascribe the title liberal and not do so with a whole lot of thought.
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So that's kind of why I wanted to start this way this morning, is I want us to be thinking, not just name-calling.
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Yes, sir? Historically, we find that over time, that one group that might have been described liberal here could be conservative on the other end.
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For instance, take the founding fathers.
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They would have been heretics and liberals in many ways for what they were doing against the king and England and so forth.
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But now we look back on them and found them as our conservative fathers, you know, founding fathers.
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Absolutely, they went against tradition, and in a sense they would have been liberal.
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Well, it's a good point.
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I don't know if you remember this a few weeks ago when I preached on Acts 15, and I made the point that Paul and Barnabas, in the story of the Jerusalem Council, Paul and Barnabas represent the liberal position because it was the Judaizers who were saying, hey, we've done circumcision for thousands or for hundreds of years.
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We've done circumcision, and here are these guys telling us we don't have to.
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In a sense, they're the liberals.
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In that scenario, the conservatives are the ones who are saying we have to maintain tradition, not truth or doctrine, but tradition.
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And in that sense, I remember a few ears perked up when I said it.
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I said, Paul represents the liberal position.
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And people, you know, like to suck all the air out of one room, you know.
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I said, but he was right.
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Exactly.
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It's just like, how many of you have a degree that's a liberal arts degree? I mean, I guess not everybody went to college, but you've heard that term, right? Liberal arts.
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Do you know why it's called liberal arts degree? Typically because it's not based on a specific area, but it's free.
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It's like if you go for engineering or electrical or something or business, right? But liberal arts is the idea of being free and open, right? That you have several.
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That's why you study, even when you go to study any particular thing, you have to study all the basics first.
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And that includes math, science, even if you're not going for anything related to math.
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I didn't go for anything related to math.
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I have a degree in social science, which means I know how to scientifically look at socials.
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Social science is a study of human behavior, right? It's sort of like political science, but it's more broad than that.
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And so we studied about how to group people and how to do different things.
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Not much math involved, but I still had to take math.
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Why? Because the degree broadened.
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That's the idea of broadening.
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That's why we got higher education, liberal arts, liberal education.
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To broaden.
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But again, what has happened? And even in colleges with the liberal arts, it has abandoned any of the traditions of the past, any of the conservation of the past.
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And a lot of it's been jettisoned.
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You were going to say something? It seems like to me that people always want to try to pigeonhole you into a category or define you.
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They say, so what are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a libertarian? That's another whole, yeah.
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Are you this? Are you that? I'm like, none of the above.
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I don't have any of those.
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I don't fit any of those categories that you have defined because they're very confining and defining.
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And I'm much more, I just don't fit that.
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I'm a Christian.
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I'm a Christian.
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I go on the Bible.
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If it's in there, it's true.
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This is my guide to life, not politics or what people define politics.
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Like you said, I've got conservative views on what the subject is.
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For me, oftentimes it does determine.
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I remember talking to people like that.
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I say, are you conservative or liberal? They'll say one or the other.
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And I say, what about this? And they say, well, I think this.
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I say, well, that's a liberal view on that issue, if you take a liberal perspective.
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It really depends on the subject.
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But generally, again, we categorize.
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And I understand the desire of people to categorize for the sake of simplicity.
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That's why racism is so easy, because people categorize simply by what you look like.
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And it's easy.
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Well, everybody who's this color acts this way.
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Or everybody who's this color acts this way.
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And it's stupid, but it's easy.
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And so people do it.
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It's wrong, but it's easy.
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People tend to do what's easy.
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So looking now at our sheet, what time is it? Because we're not going to go very far on the sheet today.
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We've got a few minutes to look over the first part, the theology.
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Next week we'll continue on and hopefully do the whole thing.
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But under theology, liberal theologians, and remember, Mr.
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House is painting with a broad brush.
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So that was sort of my introduction.
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Liberal theologians seek to articulate Christianity in terms of contemporary culture and thinking.
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They attempt to maintain the essence of Christianity in modern terms and images.
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So what is Mr.
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House saying in this? Well, the liberal theologian like Mr.
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Spong or any of the others, and for the life of me, Robert Price is another.
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I've met him.
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I've met Spong.
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I've met Robert Price.
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I've met a lot of these guys.
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I've seen them debate, talked to them, had very minor conversations with them.
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They consider themselves Christians.
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Spong was a bishop in the Episcopal Church.
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I don't think Robert Price is in the ministry at all, but he was part of the Jesus Seminar.
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These are scholars who gathered together to have conversations about the historic Jesus.
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They look at sources outside of the Bible to try to draw information.
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How many of you have ever read the Gospel of Thomas? How many of you have ever read the Gospel of the Proto-Evangelium of James? These are 2nd century Gnostic works which were never part of Scripture, but the modern scholars, liberal scholars, will say here are books that should have been put in the Bible, and often times they'll come up with conspiratorial ideas.
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Well, Constantine, he stole them from the Bible and he took them out of the Bible, which is untrue, historically totally falsified, not true at all.
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But, that's the arguments that you'll hear.
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325, the Council of Nicaea took these books out of the Bible.
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Not true, didn't happen, but you'll hear those arguments made.
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They used those books.
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By the way, I tell you what we should do.
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One Sunday, maybe two weeks from now, if I can remember, somebody remind me, I'll get a copy of the Gospel of Thomas and I'll come in and read it to you.
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It's very short.
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You can read the whole thing in just a few minutes.
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But I want you to hear what they are ascribing and saying this should be in the Bible, this should be in the Bible, because it shows you just how wildly open and divergent the ideas are.
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Again, they want to articulate Christianity from the contemporary culture.
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What does that mean? Well, the idea is that they're trying to use everything that they can to modernize the Christian faith.
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Why would we say Jesus was a socialist miracle worker? Because it helps us to push forward the idea of socialism.
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It also helps us to push forward the idea that Jesus wasn't a real miracle worker, but that his miracles were simply the miracles of politics.
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That's the miracle.
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If we could really get our political system, if we can get the political engine running like it should, we could see miracles all the time.
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So there's a social component that helps drive the desire for this.
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And again, they're using contemporary culture to sort of redefine Christianity.
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What do we think happened on the cross? What do we believe, according to Scripture, happened on the cross? Okay.
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They wouldn't argue necessarily with that one, but what happened from a divine perspective? How? How is the debt paid? Okay.
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That's exactly right.
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So Christ on the cross takes as a substitute the punishment for the sin of those who believe on him.
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God looks at my sin, which is worthy of punishment.
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He takes that and he, as the apostle Paul says, nails it to the cross, meaning that Christ becomes sin.
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He made him who knew no sin to become sin, to be the sin-bearer all the weight of my sin, all the weight of your sin, all the weight of everyone who'd ever believe on him's sin is poured out on him, and on his shoulders rests our sin.
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Right? Then what? Well, and that also reflects the tradition of the past, because that's what it was.
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You know, the sins were paid by the bulls and goats and so forth.
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In that respect, as they did now, we're entering into a different phase now with the liberal.
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That's after his death.
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Is that where you're going with this? No, no, no.
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A little different from where...
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What I was saying is, we understand the cross as a substitutionary atonement, whereby God's wrath is poured out on his son, and the righteousness that Christ has in and of himself, because he is righteous.
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He didn't earn righteousness, he is righteous.
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And so, by demonstrating his righteousness, by living a perfect life, thought, word, and deed, all of that righteousness becomes ours, and thus we stand before God wrapped in his righteousness.
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That's what we call double imputation.
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My sin is imputed to him, his righteousness imputed to me.
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That is the traditional, reformed, and I would say Protestant view of the atonement.
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The liberal comes along, liberal theologian, and trying to understand the cross in contemporary terms abandons the idea of substitutionary atonement because that's archaic.
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And it's good that you pointed out that that was the Old Testament, that's how the blood of bulls and goats were sacrificed for those things.
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That's primitive and obscene.
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Remember on Resurrection Sunday when I was preaching and I said that R.C.
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Sproul was preaching on the atonement, a guy stood up and he said, that's primitive and obscene? And R.C.
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said, yes it is.
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The cross of Christ is primitive and obscene because that is the method that God used, and the Bible even says it's foolishness to those who are perishing.
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It really is.
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So the conservative, or I'm sorry, the liberal, the scholar comes along and he says, well it's foolishness.
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So I have to reinterpret it in a modern context.
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So the cross isn't about anymore the atonement for sins and the substitution for my sin.
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The cross becomes an example of martyrdom.
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Look how good Jesus was and look how quick they were to kill him.
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It's an example of somebody willing to forgive those who hate him.
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You know, Jesus said, forgive them for they know not what they do.
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Jesus becomes an example of the willingness to be injured and not injure back.
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The willingness to be hated and not hate back.
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And thus he becomes this great existential hero which is wonderful but he's not a savior, which is terrible.
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You see, that's the problem.
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Is there willing...
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Not usually.
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Again, depends on the scholar, depends on the situation.
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Typically, but that's a good example that you just used because if you look down the history of any faith, there have been martyrs in any faith and if Jesus died as nothing but a martyr, if Jesus died as nothing but an example of one who went to his death without complaint, then he really is no different and his death is no different than so many other religions, so many other situations where people died as martyrs for what they believed in.
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Well they do...
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Well, but that's for a little different reason because they believe that the reason why Christ is on the cross is because that sacrifice is continued through the mass.
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But they do believe in a type of propitiation, but they believe that the mass, the taking of the bread and the cup is propitiatory.
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That's how you get your sins forgiven is every time that that mass is said, Christ comes down and is sacrificed again.
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So it's a little different because they do believe in propitiation, but it is surely false, absolutely false.
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But I guess what I'm saying is, and I need to close, I hear the other class cutting out, is when I say that they try to bring the contemporary culture in, is they try to abandon the ideas of the past.
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They're abandoning specifically the Old Testament structure that gives light to the New Testament revelation.
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You see, the structure of the priest, the structure of the sacrifice, the structure of the temple and the holy of holies and the presence of God and the blood and all of these things, that structure is what is the foundation of the cross.
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If Jesus would have just come along and none of that had come before, and somebody sacrificed him and said, this is a propitiatory sacrifice, somebody said, what does that mean? But when we say it's a propitiatory sacrifice and you look back in the Old Testament and say, okay, that's what a propitiatory sacrifice was.
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God is angry over sin.
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He is appeased by having the sin debt paid by a substitute.
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That's what propitiation is.
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But they deny propitiation because they deny the purpose of the cross.
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And that's the beginning, I think, and the most dangerous part of liberal theology as we're discussing it today.
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Let's pray.
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Father, thank you again for giving us this opportunity to study.
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I pray it's been fruitful.
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I pray it's been encouraging.
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I pray ultimately that it's been correct.
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In Jesus' name, amen.