ELCA

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. Good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line for the only

Dividing Line this week. I have no intentions of being here at 4 o 'clock on Thursday afternoon.

I intend to be getting ready to start snitching dressing from the turkey at my parents' house.

That is a family tradition. It is something you only get to do twice a year.

And so about this time we start getting ready to drag that big bird out and we just make lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of dressing.

And the stuff on the outside gets a little bit more burnt, see, than the stuff on the inside, see. So, man,

I better stop this right now because I'm starting to get really hungry. Because there is nothing like my father's turkey and dressing.

So we will be there on Thursday afternoon. If you want to tune in to listen to The Dividing Line Thursday afternoon, you feel free to do so.

But you're going to be humming the sounds of silence during the entirety of the program because I ain't going to be here.

So we've got to get it all in today at 877 -753 -3341. But no

Skype address yet. But it's coming. We know that it's coming. Yes, someday. It will arrive.

And then we'll have it sound like you're in the studio with me. Right up until the point where you try to call in with dial -up and it'll be really bad.

Remember Max Headroom? That's what it'll sound like. You don't remember. Yeah, I do. I do. I just don't necessarily remember.

Oh, okay. All right. I don't know. I didn't really watch that stuff. I was a Christian when I was younger. But anyway, okay,

I don't see anybody in the other room right now. There's feet dangling in the air. I think I took them out with one shot on that one.

All right, hey, there's some interesting stuff going on here while the huge crowds line up on the phone lines there.

I was pointed to an article in the

Chicago Tribune. Lesbian ordained despite refusal to take vow of celibacy.

Pastor says vow of celibacy for gays is discriminatory. This is from November 18th.

And it says sitting inside of her father and grandfather, both Lutheran ministers,

Jen Ruud on Saturday became the first ordained lesbian pastor since the

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. That's ELCA for those of you who are wondering.

Urged bishops to not penalize congregations who violate the celibacy requirement for gay clergy.

Well, it ain't much of requirement if you're doing that now, is it? It doesn't seem to be. Several of the more than 100 congregants present wept as the 27 -year -old stood before them, a beaming smile drawn across her face.

Under church policy, homosexual minister is required to make a vow of abstinence outside of marriage. Oh, shocking!

A vow of abstinence outside of marriage? How discriminatory is that?

Oh, Ruud, who is not in a relationship, believes the policy discriminates against gay clergy who may not marry.

This paragraph, as published, has been corrected in this text. Just thought I'd add that in there since they corrected it.

We all realize that sexual orientation has nothing to do with how well a person can minister a congregation, said

Kathy Young, a member of the Resurrection Lutheran Church in Lakeview, where the ordination was held.

Young was absolute about the decision to violate church policy by ordaining Ruud. This is who we are, and this is what we do.

At a National Assembly in August, members passed a resolution that allowed bishops some breathing room about the vow of celibacy issue until a church task force releases a comprehensive statement on sexuality in 2009.

Well, there you go. Just need to wait until 2009 to know what God says about sexuality because we have no way of knowing in the

ELCA since they stopped believing the Bible a long time ago. But it did not change the church's policy of requiring gay clergy to remain celibate.

Ruud, who will be installed at the church on Sunday, said she is grateful to the Lakeview congregation for making her call to ministry complete.

Yeah, well, that's the only place that call came from was from those group of people. It certainly didn't come from any place else.

It's meaningful to me in the sense that my call is being affirmed not only by God, but by the people of God, she said.

Chicago's Bishop Wayne Miller, who took office in September, said he met with the congregation in October to discuss potential consequences should the national church choose to enforce the policy in the future.

The congregation could be expelled from the denomination for calling Ruud to serve. This does not imply any bitterness or any hostility.

It's simply where we are right now, Miller said in an interview last week. My goal is to keep people in the conversation.

And I do not see this as an issue that should be dividing the church. I think it's one of the many places where differences of opinion can make the church stronger and healthier as long as people stay at the table and keep talking.

Yes, that's all they have left is people at a table talking. They don't have God talking because they stopped listening to that a long time ago.

Miller did not stand in the way of the ordination, but also did not attend the ceremony. A little plausible deniability there.

He said he believes the celibacy rule should be lifted, but also believes bishops should follow the rule of the church.

Aren't politicians great? I just love politicians. They're wonderful. I have happily come to the place of following the wise counsel of the church and being restrained, he said.

It takes away the problem of having to pit matters of personal opinion against the official boundaries of my office at this point in time.

Of course, that's a more pleasant situation to be in for me. That's a nice way of saying, I'm being politically correct here, and I'm not going to give you a meaningful response.

Miller's predecessor, Reverend Paul Lindahl, attended Sunday's ordination. Under Lindahl's leadership, gay clergy and relationships were allowed to serve in Chicago as long as they were in consultation with the bishop.

Lindahl, who serves as acting director of candidacy for Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology, said the seminary's board recently approved an unprecedented welcoming statement affirming inclusion.

Great. Isn't that wonderful? Rood's ordination allows her to offer sacraments during Holy Communion, which she will do for the first time

Sunday. But she still won't be on the official roles of the ELCA clergy.

Instead, her name will be added to the list of gay clergy ordained by Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, an independent group that supports gay

Lutheran clergy and the congregations that call them. Isn't that great? Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries.

The 4 .8 million -member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America based in Chicago is the nation's largest

Lutheran denomination. The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod are separate denominations that accept a literal—I love this— a literal interpretation of the

Bible and do not ordain women or gays. That's the way it was originally written.

It's right there in the text. I can see it. It's a different font that was being used. So anyway, even the reporter can tell.

Those other Lutherans are different. They actually believe the Bible. And so they'll do this, and so they don't do that.

What do you do after a while? I mean, these denominations, when do you just say,

Ichabod, these denominations long, long, long ago left having any meaningful or serious view of the

Scripture as the Word of God. They long, long ago left having any idea of the

Bible as having authority, the Bible as being normative, as being theanustas.

They left that stuff long, long time ago. And every denomination that does, what is the response?

What is the result? It's always the same. The result is the destruction of all meaningful theology, morality, everything.

It's all gone over time. Sad thing. Now, I saw this link while I was down in Tucson for Alterta Tucson, which

I wrote on Saturday, the 80 -mile portion of it. And I have only seen this here, and so that makes me wonder because I would think this would be being discussed right, left, and center.

So I bring this to you only to go, hmm, well, someone mentioned this.

I don't get the feeling that they're quite right, but it's the only place

I've seen this discussed. So this is from November 16th. Vatican joins historic talks to end 950 -year rift with the

Orthodox Church. This is from Ruth Gledhill, religion correspondent and Paul Bompard in Rome.

The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches took tentative steps towards healing their 950 -year rift yesterday by drafting a joint document that acknowledges the primacy of the

Pope. For those of you who are not quite up on your church history, 1054, the split between the

East and the West. So it's been 953 years to be specific. The 46 -paragraph

Ravenna document, written by a special commission of Catholic and Orthodox officials, envisages a reunified church in which the

Pope could be the most senior patriarch among the various Orthodox churches. Just as Pope John Paul II was driven by the desire to bring down communism, so Pope Benedict XVI hopes passionately to see the restoration of a unified church.

Although he has understood to favor closer relations with traditional Anglicans, the Anglican Communion is unlikely to be party to the discussions because of its ordination of women and other liberal practices.

And I doubt they'll be talking to the ELCA any time soon either. Unification with the

Orthodox churches could ultimately limit the authority of the Pope, lessening the absolute power that he currently enjoys within Catholicism.

In contrast, a deal would greatly strengthen the patriarch of Constantinople in his dealings with the Muslim world and the other

Orthodox churches. Pope Benedict has called a meeting of cardinals from all over the world in Rome on November 23rd, that's

Friday, when the document will be the main topic of discussion. The Ravenna Roadmap concedes that elements of the true church are present outside the

Catholic Communion. It suggests that means be sought out to set up a new ecumenical council similar to those of the early church which drew up the

Nicene and other creeds and to which the Catholic and Orthodox bishops would be invited. Such a council would attempt formally to end the schism of 1054 between East and West.

If the proposals move forward, the Pope would be acknowledged as the universal primate as he was before the schism.

Although it is not stated outright, he would be expected, now listen to this, here's where it gets a little bit weird.

He would be expected by the Orthodox churches to relinquish the doctrine of infallibility.

The proposals could also allow married priests in the Catholic church as already happens in the

Orthodox. Now, if you're listening to this and you know something about Roman Catholicism, you're going, hmmm, really?

However, continuing disputes within the Orthodox church between Constantinople and Moscow mean that there is unlikely to be agreement among the entire

Orthodox community about reconciliation with Rome. The document, the ecclesiological and canonical consequences of the sacramental nature of the church, don't you just love long titles like that, has been produced by a commission of Orthodox and Catholic bishops and theologians that met in Ravenna in Western Italy last month.

The Russian delegate walked out of the meeting an indication of the enduring disputes within the

Orthodox church. Let me just stop there for a moment. Anybody who knows anything about Orthodoxy knows that there is no such thing as an

Eastern Orthodox church, period. I mean, Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox and this group and that group, the cultural and ethnic lines there are so distinct that to even talk about a single unified

Eastern church is just silly. And the patriarch of Moscow is not going to do anything that would bump him any lower in the food chain, shall we say.

And letting Rome into the food chain would certainly bump him lower. So that ain't happening anytime soon, but anyway.

Referring to the early councils of the church, whose decisions are still central to doctrine throughout Christendom, the document adds,

In the course of history, when serious problems arose affecting the universal communion and concord between churches in regard either to the authentic interpretation of the faith or to ministries in a relationship with the whole church or to the common discipline which fidelity to the gospel requires, recourse was made to ecumenical councils.

These councils, which assembled bishops from Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, are still regarded as binding by Catholics and the

Orthodox in particular. The means which will allow the reestablishment of ecumenical consensus must be sought out, the document states.

The Catholics at the Ravenna meeting were led by Cardinal Walter Casper of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

The Orthodox were headed by Metropolitan Zizoulas of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

A delegate from Moscow blamed Constantinople for upsetting the talks and that the final text published by the

Vatican was agreed without the input of the Moscow Patriarchate.

After Rome and Constantinople, Moscow was agreed to be third in the hierarchy of equals, but it is still at odds with Rome over the

Union Catholics in Ukraine whose loyalty is to the Pope. And by the way, one could argue, I think rather successfully, that Moscow really doesn't deserve that, it's a political thing.

I mean, Moscow was not one of the apostolic seas or anything like that. So this is clearly just a matter of politics, quite obviously.

If the Orthodox were able to move closer to Rome, the Constantinople Patriarchate would have much stronger influence in its dialogue with the

Muslim world in Turkey and beyond. Healing the schism would in effect turn Patriarch Bartholomew into an

Orthodox Pope. The document suggests that the Pope, always referred to in the text as Bishop of Rome, could be the first among the regional patriarchs, but this would be only a primus inter partes, with his authority resting firmly on the support and consensus of the other patriarchs.

Certainly Rome could not be the absolute center of administration with authority over all the others. Greek Metropolitan Athanasios Chatzopoulos, one of the participants of the

Ravina Conference, said, the primus would not be able to do anything without the consent of the other patriarchs.

On July 16, 1054, Pope Leo IX excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The Patriarch Silurius soon reciprocated, excommunicating the Pope. Christianity has since been split into two, largely because of three words.

The Nicene Creed, I'm reading this of course, the Nicene Creed of the Roman Church, says that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the

Son. The Orthodox Church claims the Holy Ghost originates with the Father alone. The Filio Clause was the official reason for the

Great Schism, but other disputes would now need to be clarified before the churches could unite.

And I didn't see anything there in regards to the Trinitarian issues and how they would get together.

And certainly Moscow stands in the way there. But let me tell you, if something were to happen, and obviously especially

Orthodox churches that are feeling and have been feeling for hundreds and hundreds of years, the tremendous pressure of Islam would find it, shall we say, somewhat advantageous for them to consider this move, this reunification, and it would be helpful for them.

And it would have quite an impact within our own country, even though Eastern Orthodoxy is not exactly the major influence around here.

And the Roman Catholicism of America is a grab bag at best.

Still, you see today this movement toward Rome on the part of scholars and intellectuals who, again, having been deeply infected with a

Western view that diminishes the authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of Scripture, are always looking for something to add to that, something to allow them to speak the world's language in essence and think like the world along those lines.

And so those very same type of ecumenically -minded folks would be truly stepping up the pressure.

If there was a united church, because now they'd look at the Protestants and they'd say, well, look, if we've been able to get together, given the threat of Islam and given the threat of secularism and a militant atheism, we all just need to get together.

You need to stop being so picky about these little things like how a person is made right before God and whether the sacrifice of Christ is complete and sufficient in and of itself.

You need to get over all this gospel stuff and this Scripture stuff, and we need to stand united.

Now, of course, what you're standing on would become a bit of a question.

If you stand united, normally you have to have some kind of a foundation or something like that, but we don't have to worry too much about that.

But the pressure would be much greater for people to just give in and say, well, if we're going to allow at least for some variation, some differences, but we're all united in looking at these patriarchs as having certain authority, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, the pressure is going to be on. So what's going to come of this? Well, like I said,

I've not heard anybody else talking about it. Now, I looked this morning. I didn't have anything in my RSS feeds, and I would assume that certain

Catholic blogs would just be all a chatter about something like this, but maybe this particular article is just way overblown.

We'll find out. The meeting is this weekend, and we'll see what really is going on with it.

But I know that the move toward reconciliation with Eastern Orthodoxy was probably the primary reason that John Paul II did not define the fifth

Marian dogma as a dogma of the Church, because he knew that that would be a tremendous stumbling block because the last

Marian dogmas are not so much rejected by the

East as the East doesn't like them because they were unilaterally defined as dogma by Rome.

And all those things that were unilaterally defined as dogma by Rome after 1054 are going to have to be discussed.

Now, the only way I can see that happening is basically Rome allowing for I guess the only way

I could describe it would be a fluffy interpretation of those dogmas, a sort of floating on the cloud, fluffy, warm, fuzzy, puppy -dog -eye interpretation of those particular dogmas.

And again, that creates a unity that isn't a unity. And it really comes down to the idea that, well, these dogmas weren't really dogmatic.

Well, were they or were they not? Were they part of the Gospel or were they not part of the Gospel? I mean, the

Roman Catholic apologists have got to be looking at this going, oh, no, because there's no way to defend this.

You have to go, well, whatever the Church says, but just don't ask me what the Church is or don't ask me specifics.

We've just got to sort of let it slide the way it is. And they've got to be just shaking their head going, how on earth are you going to defend something like this?

Because there's really nothing left to defend. It's all just really squishy and stuff like that.

So I find it fascinating. I would be interested in – excuse me.

Yeah, it's over here. I just didn't reach it in time. Yes. I've got a cough drop. See, it's right there. I can touch it like that.

It cuts me in and out just like that. Did that work? Oh, that's right. That's cutting the other one off. It don't work at all, man.

I could sit here and hit this thing forever. It's cutting that microphone right over there off. Where is our sound man?

Where is the guy who strings this stuff up? I want to know where he is. That was supposed to be a guest microphone.

Just because you liked it better, what can I say? Well, there's this thing about being able to see the computers that you're reading from that is sort of important.

That one's way over there, and it takes up much more. This one goes up and down.

We will have to play with the cough drop and get that fixed.

What do you think? Where is that sound guy? I haven't seen him around for a while. He did all this wiring and then left.

Now he seems to be doing other stuff. Anyway, 877 -753 -3341 for those of you who would like to comment on either of those two stories.

I've got time here to get into our next topic before we take our break. Tony Costa sent out an email

November 6th. Now, some of you don't know who Tony Costa is. Tony is up in the

Toronto area, and he has debated Shabir Ali much more often than I have.

In fact, they had a series of dialogues, as they called them, right after we had the debate up in Seattle.

He sent out a letter to Shabir in light of Shabir's comments, and those comments came up in our debate as well.

We're pretty close to having that debate ready. Hopefully we'll have it soon. One of the citations that Shabir has used more than once,

I had heard it. He used it in our debate. There is a series of books, and some of these books are really useful, and some of them are really bad.

This is one of the really bad ones. The Oxford University Press puts out the

Very Short Introduction Series. There's at least 160 or 170 of these things. The 42nd in the series is called

Paul, A Very Short Introduction. It's by E .P. Sanders. Now, E .P. Sanders, again, here's one of those situations where you go,

E .P. Sanders is a great scholar. Yeah, well, what do you mean by great scholar? He's a smart fellow? Yes. Does he start from even semi -meaningful presuppositions that would result in something being useful within the church?

No, he doesn't. That's the problem. He makes very, well, on this page that Shabir cites, this is why

Shabir likes him, page 29 of E .P. Sanders' work, the other difference between Paul's summaries of what he preached and Peter's sermons and Acts is that the former emphasizes the nearness of the return of the

Lord. As time passed and the Lord did not return, this motive receded. The author of Acts probably revised

Peter's sermons accordingly. So here you have just, you know, just thrown out, no documentation given.

I realize these are short introductions. But this is the motif of modern scholarship.

You start with the assumption that the only thing that cannot possibly be the case is that what we have in scripture is actually truthful, that it actually represents what was said, why it was said, that it's harmonious.

You start with the assumption that can't be. And so once you break the text apart and turn it into little building blocks where you can pick and choose what you want to put into your particular structure and what you don't, then it's easy to go, well, you know, we're going to interpret, we're going to look at what happened in Thessalonica where people clearly misunderstood the concept of the coming of the

Lord and they're out there sitting on the hilltop type thing. We're going to take that and since that fits into our mold of what we think these people were like, we're going to take that as what was actually first preached but then there's a disappointment,

Jesus doesn't come back when he's expected, something like that. So we're going to throw that out there and so then when it doesn't happen, then we're going to redact the text and we're going to have the author of Acts, whoever in the world that was because it couldn't have been

Luke, even though, you know, he in essence dishonestly lies because, you know, the pronouns indicate this person claims to have been a part of what was going on.

Partly he's recording what he's heard from others and partly he's participating because it goes from they to we and stuff like that.

And yeah, okay, so this particular author is just like super accurate in always using the exact terminology that archaeology, when it allows us to do so, demonstrates was being used exactly of who was a leader and what they were called in that particular area.

But the author of Acts, whoever it was, is just doing that to try to fool us.

He's just being historically accurate just simply to try to fool us. And so we just sort of take that and we then go, well, what's going on with the author of Acts is that now that Jesus hasn't returned, he's originally,

I guess, maybe Peter did talk more about the coming of the Lord, but we're just going to tone that down.

We're going to cut that down. And no, we don't have any evidence of this. We don't have any documents of this. And yeah, we're having to do mind reading and we're having to basically accuse people of being dishonest.

And yeah, our starting presupposition determines all this. But that's scholarship, you see. That's serious scholarship because we can write 800 -page books where we do this on every page.

And being able to keep that kind of effort up that long means we are a great scholar. And that's why

I don't fit in there very well because I go, you know, that's not really a really solid argumentation. But anyway, it's on this particular page.

In fact, the very next paragraph that Shabir Ali takes is, quote, we will look at that and what Tony has said about that and the context of that, but we're going to take a break.

And your phone call is 877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back. The history of the

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This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the gospel of the grace of God.

The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of his worship in his church. The elders and people of the

Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day. The morning

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where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.

And welcome back to the dividing line. Talking a little bit about a citation. Some of you may recall it if you were at the debate.

A citation that Shabir Ali uses from a little, very small book,

Paul, A Very Short Introduction by E .P. Sanders, published by Oxford. And here's the context.

Here's what it says. Modern people have a difficult time seeing how believable the basic message was to many ancients.

If we now heard the proclamation of resurrection, the first question would probably be, how do you know he was really dead?

And what was resurrection like? What form did it take? These questions did later come up, and Paul replied to the second in 1

Corinthians 15, 36 -50. His answer, which we shall consider in the next chapter, was that the resurrection was of a spiritual body, not a physical body, not flesh and blood, which further demonstrates

E .P. Sanders has no idea what Paul is actually teaching. But anyway, I continue.

The first question in the ancient world, where many believed that humans were basically immortal, seems to have been, how do we know that God raised this man to heaven to appoint him

Lord? Paul testified to his own vision of and commissioning by the risen Lord, and it is evident that many believed him and accepted

Jesus as their Savior. You can see again why we can hardly recommend this as an overly useful introduction to Paul's thought, given the gross bias of E .P.

Sanders. But anyway, the quotation that is used is, if we now heard the proclamation of resurrection, the first questions would probably be, how do you know he was really dead?

And what was resurrection like? What form did it take? Clearly, in the context of this particular book,

E .P. Sanders is talking about what modern people would ask. He is not saying that there was no crucifixion.

He was not saying Jesus didn't die on a cross. He was not promoting a swoon theory. He wasn't addressing any of that.

He was just simply saying, modern folks, this is what they would say. Now, Shabir has used this to imply, anyway, that E .P.

Sanders is supportive of his own swoon theory. So I go to Tony Costa's letter to Shabir, and I think you will find him to lay this out fairly well.

Let me read it for you. Hi, Shabir. Thanks for the reference that you supplied me with by E .P. Sanders. Paul, a very short introduction.

Oxford University Press, Oxford 1991, page 29. Wernie states, modern people have a difficult time seeing how unbelievable the basic message was to many ancients.

If we now heard the proclamation of resurrection, the first question would probably be, how do you know he was really dead? And what was resurrection like?

What form did it take? These questions did later come up, and Paul replied in 2 Corinthians 15, 36 -50.

I think it is important to place this in context. Sanders is clearly speaking what modern people would say to the resurrection claim.

Yes, some like H. Reimarus and F. Schleiermacher in the late 1600s and 1700s did suggest the swoon theory or apparent death theory, i .e.

that Jesus did not really die, but this has been discarded universally by New Testament scholarship as far back as 1835.

As we see with the radical critic David Strauss in his book Das Leben Jesu, The Life of Jesus, who laid it to rest.

The question of Jesus' death was also denied by the Gnostics in the 2nd century because they denied that Jesus was a true human being to begin with, assuming that the divine could not be material, which they saw as inherently evil.

It is important to note, however, that Sanders points out that Paul answered the second of the questions posed above. In other words, there was no denial in the 1st century that Jesus died on the cross until the

Gnostics challenged it, as I said, into the 2nd century CE. The death of Jesus was clearly presumed both internally in the

New Testament and in the extra -biblical sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Babylonian Talmud, etc.

If you recall that our debate at McMasterite had challenged you to produce one New Testament scholar who denied that Jesus died on the cross.

During the rebuttal period or conclusion, you cited E .P. Sanders and the text above in support of your contention that Jesus did not truly die on the cross and posited, that was an answer to my challenge.

I know that after the debate was formally over, you had told me personally that E .P. Sanders did not deny that Jesus died on the cross.

I wish that you had stated that to the audience because I think that you gave the impression that Sanders was one

New Testament scholar who sided with you in adopting the apparent death theory or swoon theory, when in fact it is not.

For instance, in the quote above, Sanders is not disputing that Jesus died, but simply stating what questions modern people would raise in regard to the resurrection claim.

In support of my contention that New Testament scholars, including E .P. Sanders, accept the death of Jesus as indisputable,

I cite Sanders in the same book. Quote, Jesus' death was sacrificial.

That comes from pages 25, 26, 32, and 92 of E .P. Sanders' Paul, A Very Short Introduction.

In an earlier work, E .P. Sanders lists Jesus' crucifixion as one of several facts about Jesus' career and its aftermath that can be known beyond doubt.

E .P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, Philadelphia Fortress, 1985, page 11. And so,

Tony finishes his letter. If you do cite this passage from Sanders in the future, please keep these points above in mind. I think it is important that if you cite

Sanders that you emphasize his position on the issue. Thanks again for the time, and I look forward to exciting future engagements with you.

Take care and best regards. And that's, of course, Tony Costa, written to Shabir Ali. So, Shabir has used that same citation in our debates as well, and it is quite clear that that,

I believe, is a misuse of Sanders' words. All he is, in essence, saying is if we heard that proclamation today, then this is how we would respond to it.

These are the questions we would ask, but we are modern people, and we ask different questions than the ancient people.

Now, I don't agree with almost anything that Sanders says in that context. His view of that time period,

I think, is quite slanted, and the idea of viewing people as immortal is, again, extremely simplistic, and I don't think overly accurate as to really what the question was.

Certainly, you do not have secularistic, naturalistic presuppositions and scholarship that you have today.

That's a given. But I think there's a real snootiness amongst modern men as to the beliefs of the ancient world and the mind of the ancient world, and we tend to think of ourselves as being much smarter than those people because we have gadgets.

I mean, good grief, these people didn't have an iPod for crying out loud. How could they know anything if they did not have an iPod?

And that, unfortunately, I think, carries through a lot into scholarship. So I'm not agreeing with Sanders, but at the very least, you have to accurately represent what

Sanders' position actually is, and it is not the swoon theory and not supportive of that particular concept.

877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. I was just looking at a quick review of Erwin Lutzer's new book,

Slandering Jesus, that I believe Tim Challies put up, and there's a useful list provided there.

It says, Lutzer introduces six assumptions that give scholars permission to reinvent Jesus according to their own liking.

And here are these six. Number one, take a lesser aspect of his teaching and present it as the heart and soul of his ministry.

Number two, the Jesus of history should be separated from the Christ of faith. Boy, how many times have I heard that one?

Number three, history is subjective, and that one historical viewpoint is really no better than another. Number four, anti -supernaturalism, the notion that all miracles are to be summarily dismissed is impossible because of the supposed consistency of natural law.

Number five, whatever is new is true. And number six, all religions of the world are essentially the same.

Well, how many times have we heard basically all of these put together?

We heard this from John Shelby Spong. The result is an incoherent mishmash.

We heard most of it, of course, from John Dominic Crossan. And sadly, what you see in a lot of post -evangelicalism is the same type of thing going on.

That first one, take a lesser aspect of his teaching and present it as the heart and soul of his ministry.

That's how you get published. I mean, let's face it, you've got to come up with something new, right, if you're going to market stuff.

Marketing doesn't go to those who can take old truths and present them with clarity and passion.

There's only a few people who get to do that, and they're the ones who've got real big names and anything they write is going to sell at least 50 ,000 copies right off the top.

And there's only a few people about whom that can be said. And so, to get interest in a publisher, you've got to come up with something new.

Now, that is very similar to the impetus within scholarship that says, well, if you're going to do a

PhD dissertation, it cannot be on something we already know. It has to be on something new.

Now, there are certain areas of theology and research where that's okay. I mean, there's still all sorts of constructions in the original languages and things like that that need to be fleshed out and examined, even though then, still, if you really want to be, you know, have people take notice, you've got to come up with something a little radical, a little bit challenging that can tend to cause some issues.

But, especially when it comes to theology, you can't just keep repeating the same old stuff, see.

So, you've got to come up with something new. Well, that's not overly helpful when your faith is that God has spoken and he has spoken in such a way as to give his word to his people and that, you know, since we are created in the image of God, even though we're moderns, the image of God is still the image of God and so there are certain parameters that we're to live within and that doesn't really fit real well with having to come up with new stuff all the time.

And so, it's not overly shocking that most of the new stuff has to challenge the old stuff, which means it has to partake of the nature of what is called heresy.

so, what you do is you find some phrase of Jesus, some aspect of Jesus in his teachings and you don't look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

You don't apply sound rules of exegesis. Instead, you come up with something that's going to scratch an itch in your day.

And there are certain people who can, who are very, and I'm not one of them, but there are certain people who can read the signs of times and see where trends are going.

And if you can see where a trend is going and sort of get where the wave's going before it gets there and stake out some ground there, it doesn't matter if it's heresy, you can still stake out some ground there.

Once the wave hits, you're considered the great leader. I mean, we're talking emergent church here.

This is what it's all about. You know, liberalism, emergent church, this is, you know, feeling the pulse and following the waves and the trends and stuff like that.

And it's something I've never even wanted to try to do, but certainly not something that I'm skilled in doing anyway.

So, what you do is you take that minor, that minor chord, maybe it's even a real truth in Scripture.

How many times has it been said that if you take something that's true and you take it out of balance, you make it something that is untrue?

It was true in the context in which it was revealed. It was true when you use sound and respectful rules of interpretation.

What I mean by respectful, I mean actually allowing the Word of God to be the Word of God and to actually speak in its own words, its own emphasis.

But once you take it out of that context and you use it as a bludgeon, in essence, to beat the sources you just got done using in the submission so that this can be the primary thrust and now you've made yourself, you know, famous and so on and so forth.

Well, that also is what results in what's called heresy. And so, people have been doing that for a long, long time.

Take a lesser aspect of his teaching, present it as the heart and soul of his ministry, and if you don't get it, then you're just not really listening to Jesus anyway.

And I'm just going to grab my disciples and that's how you get whole new religious movements going.

How many times, I don't know how many times in the Spong debate we heard the second one, that Jesus of history should be separated from the

Christ of faith. And, you know, this is an area where a lot of evangelicals just don't get what's going on in quote -unquote scholarly writing and that's why so many young men go into seminary and this has never been discussed in their church, it's never been presented as something to be understood.

And so, they go into seminary and all of a sudden they find out that, hey, the big smart people in my denomination realize and teach and believe that the

Jesus of faith, the Christ of faith that is the, you know, the most formal way in which we describe this is the

Jesus of the Council of Nicaea, that the Christ of faith, the Christ of proclamation and preaching, there's no connection between him and the

Jesus of history. The Jesus of history, remember John Dominic Cross wasn't assured that the

Jesus of history was illiterate. He couldn't have been reading from the scroll in the synagogue.

I guess he just didn't listen during the synagogue school. Well, they didn't have synagogue school back then, you see, because my archaeological digs have determined that these people were just a bunch of poor peasants and that fits much better into my view of Jesus.

And so, once you separate the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history, guess what?

That Christ of faith happens to be the Christ of the New Testament and guess what? Without the

Christ of the New Testament, you get to come up with whatever Jesus of history you want to come up with, because that is our best and pretty much only source of meaningful biographical information upon which to create a view of Jesus is that which is found in the

New Testament. And once you've decided that that actually isn't historical and now you're going to join all those questers for the historical

Jesus, and there has been a lot of those over the history of academia, you're really stuck in a situation where it's not overly shocking that the

Jesus you come up with looks a whole lot like you. Yep, he looks, well, he's an idealized you.

He doesn't have your shortcomings, but it's amazing that he seems to fulfill all your deepest longings for what

Jesus should have been like. Now, it also just so happens that your Jesus doesn't look like that other scholar's

Jesus, who has a different set of priorities than you do, and doesn't look like that Jesus over there or that Jesus or that scholar over there.

Isn't it surprising, or not surprising at all, that the Jesus derived, the

Jesus of history derived from all these scholars, they all look different, don't they? And there's a reason they look different.

They have to look different because they are all little more than the reflection in the mirror of the scholar who has created them because he started off with this false dichotomy of the difference between the

Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. So then you have number three, history is subjective and that one historical viewpoint is really no better than another.

You really have a lot of Pyrrhonists today. What's a Pyrrhonist? Well, it goes back to Pyrrho and his, who wasn't into fire, but it's a form of skeptical philosophy that basically says you really can't know nothing and you really can't have knowledge and history is all subjective and we all get out of history whatever we want to get out of history.

And the way this works is you can find people who just put really, really thick glasses on that are only one color and so all they see in history is that which matches that one color, you see.

And there are people that have done that. There's no question about that. No one's arguing that there's anything but truth there.

That you can misuse and abuse history. I've said many, many times the faithful dogmatic

Roman Catholic apologist is in no position to handle history fairly. Why?

Because his dogmatic decrees of his church have already told him what he has to find there on certain subjects and so, golly bob, that's what he finds.

What a shocking thing that when Steve Ray looks into the history of the church, he finds a bunch of Roman Catholics that look just like him.

And I've said many times at least the Protestant is free to allow the early church fathers to be the early church fathers and is free to go, wow, this early church father had great insights here but wow, did he blow it over there.

And he just didn't seem to have almost any knowledge of these books of the Bible and he's got a blind spot here and because of his controversies here, he's got a blind spot there.

And, you know, I was listening to John Piper recently and he was saying that, who was it he was saying?

Was it C .S. Lewis that said that one of, one of every three of the books you read should be from outside of your century.

The reason being that those people from the past and he did have a rather humorous discussion that yes, it would be fine to read books from 200 years in the future if they were accessible to us.

But it happens to be only in the past because that's all we can do. And what that does is it helps us with our blind spots because we have blind spots.

I have blind spots created by the controversies in which I engage and I'm thankful.

You know, since I know that I have those blind spots, I'm thankful for a couple of things. First of all, we don't deal with just one group.

It has been my experience that those who do deal with just one group can tend to have really big blind spots because they're only looking one direction at a time.

And secondly, I am very thankful that I'm a part of the church and so I have to preach and teach and I can't just be preaching and teaching about one subject all the time and so that helps you to at least identify some elements of your blind spot but you can't identify all of them.

None of us really have that capacity to be that perfect in our self -examination.

And so reading the people of the past, it's real easy for us to identify their blind spots but their emphases help us to identify our own and so I think that was wise information but going back to the point that is raised here, history is subjective and that one historical viewpoint is really no better than another.

That's just simply not the case. I mean, just think back over a brief period of time in your own life.

Is it really true that any particular view of your past is equally good with any other particular view of your past?

I mean, you know some people in your past who have a pretty warped view of reality and you start hearing them talking about, say, conversations you've had in the past and you and everybody else that was there looking at them going, excuse me?

What were you on that night? You know? That person's view of history, especially if they have all sorts of biases and axes to grind and stuff like that, isn't as valid.

It isn't as truthful to history as someone else's and so that assumption that basically says, hey,

I can turn history into silly putty and I can pick and choose what I want to use out of history and I can create these straw men views of history.

Yes, very, very common and it does allow you to once again create your own Jesus along the way.

And of course, I don't know how many times I've addressed anti -supernaturalism, i .e. naturalism, the belief that if you cannot measure it, if you cannot see it, taste it, touch it, feel it, sense it by some sort of measurement, whether it even be subatomic particles or whatever, that's all that exists.

There is nothing else. Anti -supernaturalism, a notion of all miracles to be summarily dismissed is impossible because of the supposed consistency of natural law.

Truly, let's face it, the vast majority of Christian scholars, look at what's happening politically right now.

I won't mention names, but there is a particular political candidate who is an ordained Baptist minister, in my understanding, and so what you have happening is people think that it is a easy refutation to just simply mention the possibility that someone might not be a philosophical naturalist.

You might actually believe that at some point in time, the God who created all this actually had some interaction with his own creation in such a way that everything didn't just follow natural law.

That's enough to have you labeled as an absolute loon, a nutcase, a person not to be trusted with someone's children or to drive a car, even though at least, at least, at least 50 out of 56 of the founding fathers, at least that many, all held that worldview, which is another reason to just dismiss them as a bunch of angry, hateful white men, which is what happens in our society.

Anyways, it is, it is such a dogma of the modern culture that there is no such thing as the supernatural.

There is no such thing as the creator. And that's what's interesting about the, the intelligent design debate.

The more and more books are coming out, the more and more we learn about the complexity of life at the, at the molecular and, and cellular level.

It is so compelling that there is an intelligent designer. It is, it's just really beyond all possible question that there is a, there is a, an intellectual crash coming because of the absolute dogmatic nature of Darwinian micromutational evolutionary theory.

They, it looks like the only way they're going to handle it is to absolutely try to laugh down any questions of it and make it the force of law.

Look what the EU has done, warning people against intelligent design don't notice how complex things are because this will be bad for our children.

I mean it's, it's the, the blindness of it, the circularity of it, the irrationality of it is shocking.

But secularists can be just as dogmatic and blind and irrational as the worst

Spanish inquisitor was in the, in the 1300s. And it is a dogma.

And the, the worldview of these folks, the more and more they learn about the complexity of life, the result, the result's clear.

They, they can't hold the two together so they have to try to subjugate one to the other even if it results in intellectual suicide, which is what many of them are, are committing.

And that's, that's on the natural realm and sadly there are very, very, very few theologians today who without stuttering and without blushing and without hesitating would stand before a group of scholars and say,

I believe in the virgin birth. I believe that God has a right to do with his creation as he sees fit and that he is not limited by what mankind's scientists will allow him to do.

Now, biblically, that doesn't mean that he's going to do everything under the sun just simply for the fun of it.

In fact, the regularity of nature points toward God wanting us to be able to examine his creation, see his glory in creation, all those things.

But the fact is to confess that you are not an anti -supernaturalist is to commit intellectual suicide in our society today and sadly within the church as well.

And that has had wide -reaching results. Well, thanks to all of our callers today for the scintillating conversation we had but we did cover a wide range of things and hopefully that's been useful to you.

Remember, I ain't going to be here Thursday. You can be here Thursday if you want to be but I don't have any intentions.

I am going to be eating turkey and dressing, Lord willing, and it's going to be good and I'm going to be enjoying it and enjoying my family and it's going to be wonderful and I hope you have a wonderful day of thanksgiving, of remembering

God's many blessings in your life and, Lord willing, we'll see you next Tuesday here on The Dividing Line. God bless. We need a new

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