South African Controversy and Debate, and More Reformation History

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It's Thursday, last program of the week. Headed to the

Dallas -Fort Worth area over the weekend, and then off to the big shindig in Washington, D .C.

next week. It will be my first conference where I have been just of the speakers, along with the famous, well -known, now on the list,

I notice it's Summer White Yeager. I'm hoping that's not a

Hillary Clinton thing. But yes, so Summer and I will be speaking at the same, not even close to the same topic actually, but she's going to be doing her feminism thing.

So that's next week in Washington. You can see the link on our webpage if you want to go check that out.

I want to address what I consider to be a tempest in a teapot situation that developed about two weeks ago,

I think about two weeks ago, in South Africa. I saw the debate between Jonathan McClatchy and Yusuf Ismail.

The initial topic, the way it was expressed on social media, was the initial topic was, is the

Trinity taught in the Old Testament, which would, of course, cause me a problem. I don't believe that it is.

I believe that the revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity takes place in the incarnation and the outpouring of the

Spirit of God, and so it takes place between the Testaments. So you have prophetic texts that point to the reality that is going to be made known in history, in the coming of the

Messiah, in the incarnation of the Son of God, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But the point being that the revelation itself takes place in history between the writing of the

Old and New Testaments. So the New Testament becomes the record of the founding of this supernatural church that already lives in light of the reality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As I've said many times, Peter was an experiential Trinitarian. He walked with the

Son. He heard the Father speaking from heaven on the Mount of Transfiguration. He was now indwelt by the

Holy Spirit of God. And so the means by which the doctrine of the

Trinity is communicated by the natural expression of language in the

New Testament is because it is the only way to understand what God had done in Christ.

And so we've talked about that before, and so when I first heard about this,

I was like, well, that's interesting. I'll be interested in hearing the debate, but I couldn't support the thesis because I think it misses something important as to the progressive nature of this revelation.

Well, that wasn't actually what the debate was about. John McClatchy basically made the statement at one point that he's not saying that the

Old Testament reveals the doctrine of the Trinity in the way that the New Testament does, but that the presentation of God in the

Old Testament is consistent and that there are prophetic markers that are consistent.

Now, there were some, I didn't have a chance to dig into all of them. I thought there was a citation of Isaiah 4310 that I did not follow at all, but there were a couple of places that would have intersected with my normal presentation, and a lot of it was the discussion of Yahweh and His Word and His Spirit, and there are a number of texts like that, that in light of the fulfillment passages, and I don't consistently, this is where again the consistency issue comes up,

I can't see how Muslims can argue against that because plainly, Muhammad had accepted to the level of his knowledge of these things, which was extremely limited, had accepted the

Torah and Injil. He didn't know what they actually contained or have direct access to them, but there's nothing in the

Quran that would indicate that there was a fundamental rejection of the writers of the

Injil, and I know modern Muslims today say, oh, it's just given to Jesus. Well, that's your modern understanding.

The question is, is that the natural reading in the original context of the

Quran itself? But anyway, so what's the controversy about?

Well, evidently what happened is, the last

I checked, I believe Jonathan McClatchy writes for and contributes articles to Answering Islam, and so he used a lot of material from that website.

The first accusations I heard, the day it took place and the day and the next day, what

I saw a lot on Facebook was Jonathan McClatchy's embarrassing debate performance where he just stands up and reads the

Bible for 20 minutes, and so once I had to watch one of these things, you know, version of the debate, but you know, information's the same, sounds not as good, and it can give you motion sickness, but other than that, and so I listened to the debate, and yeah,

Jonathan read a lot of text of scripture, but that's because the issue was a scripturally focused topic, so I was a little surprised at the criticism.

I guess it was a criticism saying, well, you know, it's not a good presentation, or you're not really exciting, you're just reading.

Well, then everything changed, so instead of, oh, he just reads the Bible, all of a sudden he wasn't just reading the

Bible, now he was plagiarizing, and what some

Muslims did is they went through and demonstrated that he took many of his statements directly from the website that he writes for, which

I'm sort of like, okay, yeah, so? Well, he's plagiarizing. He should have said such and such person said that, and I'm like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, if you're writing for a website, and it's funny, again, the consistency issue comes up here.

It's painfully obvious to me that many of the Muslim websites are cooperative efforts, but without anyone caring to say, well, this was produced by this person, that was produced by that person, and when

I debated just a few months ago in Birmingham, there were other

Muslims online very broadly hinting that they were providing research to the person that I was debating, though that person never said during the debate, and I got this from this person,

I got that from that person, so it seems on the one side, it's perfectly fine if everybody cooperates and everybody's passing information around, and which is, if you write for a website and you quote from the website, that seems to be the same thing, isn't it?

I mean, this isn't a published work. He wasn't saying, and no one's ever thought of this but me, and I therefore say, no, he's giving a standard presentation on the consistency of the doctrine of the

Trinity with revelation of the Old Testament and the prophetic indicators and things like that, and we all know, we all know, and I said this without mentioning the name, but we all know that so much of the information that's being used now by this particular group of Muslims, they're stealing from Tovia Singer, the

Jewish apologist. I know that, they know that, it's not a huge secret, but I don't hear them going, you know, when they make these arguments, and as Jewish apologist

Tovia Singer says, I don't see them doing that, and so I was like, what is this all about?

Why? I'm sorry, I don't get it. If he was putting forward a book, a published work where he was going to be receiving royalties, and he presented this as,

I'm, this is my original material here, so -and -so, okay, then you could raise issues.

This is a debate. It's an oral presentation. It's transitionary statements.

Would I have probably paraphrased things more or something? I don't know. I don't write for anybody else's blogs, so I don't know, but it just seemed to me to have an inordinate amount of, well, just the whole response to the debate just seemed strange and strangely out of character, and then when

Jonathan's like, well, I don't get it. Yeah, there's a question.

I used stuff from the website. So what? Then some of them turned their focus on Rudolf Bischoff, and look, they want to drag him into this, and he's supposed to, well, he introduced it, and he's worked with this guy, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, if you want to start playing the game of, well, if you've ever introduced such and such a person or worked with such and such a person, then you need to comment on this.

You need to comment on that. South Africa amongst the Muslims is not where you want to pull that particular rabbit out of the hat, because there is a huge amount of infighting amongst the

Muslims in South Africa, and they've all worked with one another at one point in time and then thrown one another into the bus at one point in time, too.

So the politics are, there's a lot of politics down there. You don't even want to go there, but you certainly don't want to go after Rudolf.

I mean, talk about salt of the earth, a guy who just wants to see good, meaningful exchanges taking place, and to try to drag him into this and say, well, you need to answer for this, you need to answer for that, when he had absolutely nothing to do with what is a, seems to me, a completely irrelevant thing in the first place.

I'm just wondering what's the deal? Why, I don't get it. I think far more importantly would be when

I watched the debate, I decided that time, and I just haven't had time to do, that was,

I watched it before, let me see, did I close that? I did close that.

Let me see if I can real quickly grab it here. Wow, it disappeared that fast.

Oh, there it is. Is there a date on this?

Oh, drat. No, there is no, this was published October 10th, but this was,

I forget when the actual debate took place.

Sorry about that. But I didn't have the opportunity of following up on it, because if I recall correctly,

I watched it right before we went to Germany. We've aired that right before I went to Texas, right before I went out of town again, as normal for 2017.

And so I haven't had a chance to follow it up. My thought was, as I watched it, this could be educational, this could be useful to respond to what

Yusuf Ismail said during the rebuttal period. It's a little bit shorter than the longer one.

And people tend to be talking faster. And so you can get to more points a little bit more quickly.

Why not just engage the issue rather than all this cloak and dagger accusation stuff?

I don't get it. But that's what's going on. And so I said

I would comment on it. And so now I'd like to actually do that. I'm going to play, we got that working, right?

I'm going to play at least some portions, or maybe all, depends on how fast we go, how deep I go in response.

Yusuf Ismail's rebuttal period, and I want to interact with it and to try to push the conversation forward.

And you know what? I don't care if Yusuf was given information by somebody else.

I don't care if people in the background shared information with him. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me.

It's irrelevant. Deal with the issue. Not, well, I think you got that from somebody.

Okay, fine, whatever. You know, that's where you want to go. I find it irrelevant, but there you go.

So let's listen to what Yusuf had to say. And I'm just going to stop and start. I did not have, someday, someday, someday, someday, audio note taker is going to become audio video note taker.

I would just, just love to have the ability to do with video what

I can do with audio. It would be wonderful, but, you know, who knows? Maybe it's right around the corner.

I don't know. But here's some, here's some stuff from Yusuf Ismail. That's amazing. If the

Trinity Doctrine was so well articulated, there would be no need for this debate. Now, this was something that Yusuf said over, if the

Trinity Doctrine was so clearly articulated, there'd be no reason for this debate. And I go, why?

You have to debate fellow Muslims over issues that you feel are clearly articulated in the

Quran, do you not? I have to debate Muslims, and yet you would agree with me that monotheism is plainly stated in the scriptures, and yet Muslims find a way to,

I'm sorry, Mormons find a way, Mormons, Mormons find a way to put polytheism into the

Bible, to separate Elohim and Jehovah into two separate persons. And you look at that and you go, it's laughable.

And I agree, it is laughable, but you still have to deal with it. So it is, it is not a meaningful argument to say that, well, because we have disagreements, then that must mean that it's not clearly propounded.

No, I'm sorry. I can point to all, if the final prophethood of Muhammad was clearly articulated, there would be no reason to debate the

Ahmadi, right? See how easy that is? I'm sorry, that kind of argumentation is just wildly fallacious, and obviously so.

So I'm not sure why Yusuf uses it. Do Muslims and Christians debate on the virgin birth?

Do Muslims and Christians debate on the virgin birth? Well, we have individuals who call themselves

Christians, New Testament scholars today that deny the virgin birth, and so we have to deal with that.

And you might want to check your sources here, but you guys love using the

Ebionites. Be careful. Well, first of all, there's so many questions as to what the

Ebionites actually believed. We only know as it's mediated to us through other individuals.

And the only reason you all use the Ebionites is because you can say, oh, these were the real, really? Were they the real original followers of Jesus?

Some indication they didn't believe in the virgin birth. So why would you point to them as the original followers of Jesus?

Well, there you go. Debate on the crucifixion, for example, because of the inconsistency.

But if this was so clearly defined, what would we even need for this debate? Well, the crucifixion is very clearly defined, and yet we have to debate on it.

Why? Because of 40 Arabic words that have no meaningful historical foundation.

The very fact that Zakir Hussain's presentation in Birmingham comes from Jewish apologetics is never found, never found in the

Quran or Hadith. Should say something right there, because you want something that is clearly enunciated in every single first century document.

It's the historical reality of the crucifixion of Jesus. And to try to get around that by saying, well, but these prophetic things, they weren't about somebody who was crucified.

There was somebody who recovered. Well, that means that there can be no greater fulfillment of prophetic indicators, which means every single reference you've ever pointed to about Muhammad in the

Bible, throw it out. You can never use it again. See, sorry, but when it comes to being consistent uses of sources here, our

Muslim friends struggle mightily. You don't need for this particular debate. Now, Jonathan has made a number of points, and I think he's raised about five arguments.

I think I've taken them down subject to correction. Basically, you seem to indicate that the

Hebrew scriptures speak about the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is divine, and Messiah is divine. I don't know what the fourth argument was.

And then the fifth argument was that I think there was some sort of composite notion of the Trinity in the old context of the

Old Testament. And based on that... Now, again, I don't remember if it was in the opening or if it was in Jonathan's rebuttal.

I think it was in Jonathan's rebuttal, so it came after this, that he emphasized he was not saying that the initial revelation in specific terminology is found in the

Old Testament, but that the revelation of God and the prophetic indications of what

God was going to be doing in the coming of the Messiah and the outpouring of the

Holy Spirit and things like that would be consistent with the New Testament revelation. But again, that's why

I really doubt that I would have gone into a debate like this with that kind of terminology as far as the thesis is concerned.

I'm not exactly sure how I would phrase it, but I wouldn't necessarily want to go there. Dr. B gave us a number of passages and verses that tried to articulate this particular point.

I tried to make notes as he went along. Look at the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. Basically, Jonathan was arguing that the

Holy Spirit in the context of the Old Testament was a distinct divine personality, and as a result of which, basically, he could be viewed as part of the divine

Godhead. And again, what's important to recognize here is we're talking about looking backwards in light of, and see, that's where the two sides don't accept the foundational issue to begin with, and that's where a lot of the problem comes in.

In light of the New Testament revelation, then looking back upon the prophetic scriptures, assuming the unity and consistency of those scriptures as Jesus himself taught, as Jesus, you know,

David said by the Holy Spirit. And so, you have this consistency between Old and New Testament that is found in the ministry of Christ, in the outpouring of the

Spirit, in Jesus' teaching that all the prophets prophesied of him, things along these lines, which

I don't think most Muslims believe Jesus when he says that. Certainly, when you listen to Jamal Badawi's presentation on Muhammad in the

Old Testament, almost every prophetic text that would be used of Jesus is used of Muhammad.

Even Isaiah 9 -6 is used of Muhammad by Jamal Badawi. And when you listen to my debates with Shabir Ali on this, well,

Shabir takes a much more liberal perspective. He's chopping New Testament texts up and things like that, and that allows him to take a completely different perspective.

But, you know, again, I just struggle to find the consistency from the

Islamic perspective. I think the two sides are talking past each other.

And what Yusuf is trying to say is, well, you need to prove from the Old Testament.

And what we're saying is it's not proved in the Old Testament. It seemed to be consistent in the light of what takes place between the

Testaments in the ministry of Christ, our praying Holy Spirit, and then the inscripturation of that history in the

New Testament. You ask any Jewish scholar, you ask, look at people like we mentioned earlier, Benjamin Sommers and Tobias Singer, any

Jewish scholar. Well, they did mention Tobias Singer, so I wasn't just making up names. But the reliance upon Jewish scholarship by Islamic apologists,

I think is extremely troubling. It should be troubling to them for many, many reasons.

But mainly because of the untenable position that they're put in by their own historical reality.

The Jews reject the Messiah, Jesus, and now the

Muslims say they were wrong to reject Messiah, Jesus, because Jesus is called the

Jewish Messiah in the Qur 'an. But the problem is, they, the

Muslims then say, and Muhammad is prophesied, in the

Torah and Injil, and they adopt methodologies to try to locate these texts, at least some do, some others just go, hey, we're not told, so we know it's there, we just don't know what it is.

That's sort of the safe way, but I'm not sure it's an overly compelling way, to be honest with you.

Um, but then they, they will borrow Jewish methodologies that were specifically designed to deny that Jesus is the

Messiah, to use that to deny that Jesus is divine. So you, you, you have to disagree with them on the one hand and say, oh yeah, there was, um, there was sufficient prophetic clarity to hold the

Jews accountable for believing that Jesus was the Messiah, but not for believing that Jesus was the

Son Incarnate. And I don't see any of them coming up with a consistent methodology of doing that.

It seems to me when they try to get rid of the one, they get rid of the other. If they're trying to affirm the one, they have, they would, if they were consistent, have to affirm the other, they can't.

So what you're trying to do is you're trying to cut Jesus up in, as he's presented in the

New Testament, accept what the author of the Quran understood of Jesus, and reject what he didn't understand of Jesus.

And the problem that it's creating, it's forced upon them by the fact that once again, the author of the

Quran didn't, didn't have any meaningful firsthand knowledge of the content and teaching of the

New Testament. And if God wrote the

Quran, then God would have known. So it seems to be a human document, which is really the end of the debate at that point.

They would tell you that every human being in the context of the Old Testament, the discussion of the

Spirit, they would argue every person has the Spirit of God. Basically, we receive revelation from God.

No other human being, no other person, no other animal or being. So what he's arguing is that the

Spirit of God is not a person, but it's descriptive of mankind's ability to commune with God.

And again, while I would disagree that that is sufficient for everything that's found in the

Old Testament, there's an element of truth in that mankind is specifically differentiated from the rest of creation, from animals and so on and so forth.

But that's called the Imago Dei. That's the image of God, terminology that Muslims won't use. That's not the Spirit of God.

That's the Imago Dei. And so how do you deal with the Imago Dei? Well, you confuse it with the

Spirit of God. Well, of course, you end up confusing the Spirit of God with the angel

Jabril in Islamic theology, actually. But that's a whole other issue.

But that's what he's presenting here. Can know about God. So in a manner of speaking, the

Spirit of God is not distinct. It's our ability, in a manner of speaking, to pick up the numinous presence of God.

And it's done by means of the Holy Spirit. So something upon us, for example, Psalm 51 3, do not count me out of your presence or take your

Holy Spirit away from me. When you let God into you, you let the Spirit of God.

Basically means that when you let God into your life, the Spirit of God enters in your life. But this doesn't mean that to be viewed as a separate distinct personality.

Jewish scholars have argued that the Spirit of God, as contained and mentioned in the Old Testament, could be defined as a dynamic presence of God, not distinct from God.

And it's later Christian development. And again, you know, why? Why should that be relevant to a

Muslim? Modern Jewish theology, why would you?

Why do you guys need this? I would think if you have the final revelation, why are you depending upon a degraded?

Because I would argue it's degraded. I mean, much, much of modern Jewish theology does not take seriously the concept of the inspiration of the

Old Testament. It accepts all sorts of fundamental naturalistic approaches, developmental approaches, you know,

Christian style interpretation of the sources, which, again, nowhere mentioned by Muhammad, nowhere even hinted at in the

Hadith. Nothing like that. You cannot make heads or tails of because the sources that pretend to give us

Muhammad's understandings. And again, I don't believe everything in the

Hadith actually goes back to Muhammad. But there is a consistency here.

There's nothing that would be commensurate with modern Jewish understandings of the

Torah at all. He believed that it was a divine revelation.

It would seem to me that at least in the Hadith and in the Koran, there is a higher view of the inspiration of the

Torah than there is amongst the vast majority of modern

Jewish historians. So why would you use modern Jewish historians? Isn't the Koran enough?

Isn't the Hadith enough? Well, the fact is the Koran, the Hadith, though they interact much more with the

Jewish scriptures, they don't interact with the New Testament scriptures. They just don't. They just don't.

And when there's even an attempt, it's normally not even canonical scripture. Interact much more with the

Jewish scriptures and have a much higher view than most of you all do today. It seems to me that if you were really following the

Koran and the Hadith, you'd have a higher view of the Torah than the vast majority of Muslims with whom

I've communicated who very readily grab hold of the idea of a degraded, mistranslated, altered text over time.

So, again, I just heard so many inconsistencies as I was listening that it was very troubling.

Okay, so here, once again, this is where we're talking past each other.

What we are saying is that the revelation in the Old Testament is consistent with the greater progressive revelation in the

New. So we're looking back at that in the light of what happens in the New Testament. And very plainly, the

Holy Spirit is distinguished from Father and Son in the full revelation. And he wants to go the other direction, which, again, seems strange to me as a

Muslim. Because, would you then argue it's strange that nowhere in the

Old Testament do we find a specific statement about Muhammad being a prophet? No, it's supposed to come later, right?

So, again, it seems to be one standard for us and a different standard for you.

Why does one person not appear? You may want to read your theology into certain verses, but do we have any indication that the person

God places his Spirit on us, guides us, able to pick up the frequency of God?

It's like, basically, you know, I wrote it down here, radio waves.

You know, when you listen to the radio... Now, this got a little bit weird, okay? Let's just be...

Sorry, Yusuf, but it's got a little bit weird. The Spirit of God is like radio waves.

Okay, again, it seems so strange to me. If you profess to hold a revelation that you believe is the final revelation in a chain, you know, that's that Surah 5 thing.

I know it's troubling to you, but it's that Surah 5 thing. You know, Torah sent down to Moses, the angel sent down to Jesus, the

Quran sent down to Muhammad. And what does each one do? They testify to, and there's a chain.

And so, when you start trying to chop up any part of that chain, what you don't seem to realize is your text is the last one.

If it's hanging, starting with the first and the second, yours is this one here.

If you start chopping up this one up here, you do know what's going to happen, right? You know, to what's...

Yeah, yeah, it's not a good thing. Waves of the radio. The waves are not basically...

You're picking up the wave. The radio is picking up the waves on a particular frequency, and that obviously translates into music.

So, from that perspective, you can basically look at the idea that the Spirit of God is something that basically animals, dogs, cats don't have.

God's through our system. We can receive guidance from God. And this guidance is given through God by means of His Spirit, but it's not a distinct aspect of God.

So, when you use the term Spirit of God and Yahweh, it's used in many instances.

It's used not as a distinct person, but it's used as the same divine being, at least in the context of the

Old Testament. And I'd argue even to a certain extent in the New Testament, because it was a very much later time period that the

Spirit kind of attained the divine quality. Now, here we go again. Yusuf loves revisionist history, and I've called him on it for a long, long time, but it just seems to be his thing.

He's going to believe the liberals no matter what the liberals say until you talk about Islam, and then everything changes.

So, in the New Testament, you have the Spirit distinguished from the

Father and the Son. You have the Spirit sent by the

Father and the Son. You have the Spirit willing, acting as a person, being described as God, giving the gifts sovereignly within the church, sealing individuals, testifying, convicting the world.

You have the Spirit doing all these personal things and yet being distinguished, and yet likewise being used in Trinitarian formulae.

So, being associated with the Father and the Son and the Spirit over and over again.

Again, the New Testament is not trying to reveal something new. It's being written in light of what has already been revealed.

And so, you have this, but then what you get from the liberals, of course, is that because the focus was upon Christological issues initially, that means that all that biblical stuff, we can set that aside and apply evolutionary theory, which

Muslims will not do to the development of doctrines such as the

Quran being eternal, which clearly had a historical period of development in early

Islamic history. Well, what you'll do is you're willing to use naturalistic historiography in looking at the early church, but not at your own stuff, which, again, it's one of those inconsistencies forced upon you by the nature of your own text and the inherent problems that it contains.

And so, the idea is, so, that means that this stuff about the

Holy Spirit comes at a later point. The problem is that when I hear someone, and he has a bunch of quotes from various liberals, you always want to ask yourself the question, do they deal with, for example, the earliest, most primitive, extra biblical writings outside the

New Testament? Will they deal with Clement? Will they deal with Ignatius? And inevitably, they don't.

It's easier to come up with texts where you say, ah, see, this person should have said this in light of later developments, but they didn't, rather than to honestly deal with the reality that, you know,

I don't have it in front of me, but off the top of my head, I believe it was in his

Epistle to the Ephesians that Ignatius, writing 107 -108

AD, gives us a Trinitarian soteriology.

And he refers to God the Father, the

Son, and the Spirit as an engine. Man, I wish

I had that in front of me. Hold on, just one second here.

Because I did have, I was looking at, yeah, go ahead and swap the thing while you're, go ahead and try to confuse me.

It's okay. I had a file, and I thought that was in it.

And so I'm just looking real quick here, see if it pops up real fast.

Of course, the problem is, when you're looking at something like this, the idea is, what did

I call that? It used to have a real good name, and I'm just gonna give it a few more seconds here.

And if it doesn't pop up, because it was just this really, really, really, really cool description that he gives.

And of course, it's not gonna, you know, it'll pop up as soon as the program's done, and then it's too late, and I can't throw it into the notes or whatever else it is.

And I had, what I was working on, is I was actually, hadn't gotten to it. I was memorizing another one, but I put the

Greek into this file, and I was going to work on those. And unfortunately, it's not coming up, which is a shame.

And the term that he used for machine was really interesting.

It was very descriptive. But the machine of the engine, it was the engine.

And I'm trying to remember what the terminology was. But anyways, ah, look at that,

Algo. For as much as ye are stones of a temple, which were prepared beforehand for a building of God the

Father, being hoisted up to the heights through the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, and using for a rope the

Holy Spirit. It was Ephesians, Ephesians 9. Thank you, Algo. Now let's see if Algo has the

Greek. That would be the fun part. Well, you know what?

This is a live program. Oh, I have not updated Logos on this computer.

Oops. Well, actually, I have it in accordance too. I have it in two different places.

So I've already got accordance open here. So let's see.

Why don't you have some music over there,

Rich? You could... I meant real music, not that.

That's pretty bad, actually. Yeah, that second work for us, very good.

That was nice though, because it was from Jeopardy, and that was cool. But yeah, thanks very much.

Where did Ignatius go? Ignatius disappeared on me, which really bums me out, because he's the one

I need. And all of a sudden, he's gone. So the YouTube channel says maybe you just need to turn the radio waves on.

Turn my radio waves on? Yes. Okay, thanks. Appreciate that. I found it.

Yay! Found the Greek. Oh, so Algo does too. Do you see that in channel?

Thanks, Algo. Greek. Yep, I found the same thing too.

Unfortunately, we were both looking. And when I brought up Logos, guess what it opened up to? The same thing, which must mean that was the last thing.

No, I do not want to download 665 megabytes of updates right now. Been a while, obviously.

Thank you very much, Algo. We've never actually seen

Algo and a computer in the same room at the same time, so we are a little bit confused about that. But it's, yeah, that's what it was.

Mechanēs, Jesu Christu. Diatēs, mechanēs. Mechanēs, mechanic.

The engine, the mechanical engine. So, building, using the same term from Ephesians, and this is written to the

Ephesians, so clearly Ignatius is familiar with Paul's epistle to the

Ephesians, making it very, very early and already well -known. And so, the building of Theopatros, God the

Father. This is right outside. This is just after the completion of the New Testament. Raised up, and I think on a pharaoh is used, don't have time to look at right now, but is a

New Testament term as well. Āsta hupse, unto the heights. Diatēs, mechanēs, the mechanical, the engine, the mechanical engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross.

And then, and using as a rope, the

Holy Spirit. So, there you go.

And how did, I think this is Lightfoot over here, and using for a rope, the

Holy Spirit, while your faith is your windlass, and love is the way that leadeth up to God, etc.,

etc. Beautiful description stuff. Again, if you haven't read

Ignatius, I would highly recommend you do so. But sorry, we wandered so far astray at that point.

But just the information is there.

And if a person wants to see that there is a consistent

New Testament revelation, and wants to see that the apostles taught this, and that the early believers accepted this, then you can see it.

Now, you can be very selective and ignore these things, and go, yeah, well, this person over here, well, you know, it's sort of like, you've got

Ignatius 108, but then the middle of the second century, you've got Justin, and Justin has some serious holes in his theology.

He also doesn't ever quote Paul. So, you'd have some serious holes in your theology if you didn't have the

Pauline corpus as well. So, there's all sorts of things we could go with there. So, just wanted to bring that out.

There is a lot of other things we could go to there, but I want to do at least a little more Reformation history.

We've only got the one hour today. Sorry, I've got an appointment to get to, and so we just, there you go.

There's more I'd like to do, and maybe I will in response to Yusuf. But I think that's the best use of debates is to go through them and to shed more light.

I'll be honest with you, all this throwing sand in the air about plagiarism because Jonathan McClatchy used materials from a website he contributes to for his presentation after first throwing sand in the air about all he did was read scripture.

Which one is it? That does not help to facilitate future debates or to go more deeply into the subject or to deal with issues or anything.

I just don't know why that's going on, but it does seem to be going on.

Well, in the last few minutes we got together, I do want to try to very quickly pick up just a little bit more.

And this to me, again, this is what a lot of people, this is why a lot of people don't do much with history today.

And yet once you dive into it, you find it to be just really exciting and beautiful stuff. And I remember when

I was in seminary, when I first started seeing this, and again, I so appreciate the professor I had,

Dr. Nathan Feldmuth. Do not hold Dr. Feldmuth accountable for me. I think he'd remember me as a good student.

I got good grades in his course. But he certainly installed in me a great love for church history that was only broadened and deepened by my time in Germany a few weeks ago.

He had been over there himself, and that really helped in the class. And I would imagine that in the future, some of my church history classes will improve.

I always need to be improving. Anyone who ever gets to the point where you don't have to improve anymore, you've known it all.

But one of the things that really excited me when I first started studying church history, especially when

Dr. Feldmuth presented Reformation, was seeing the threads of development that had to come together to allow the

Reformation to take place. And so we've seen the pre -Reformation reformers, but I kept saying it wasn't time.

It wasn't time. There were certain things that were not in place yet. And what's exciting is when you realize we can look back and see how necessary these things were.

The people at the time couldn't see it. For example, the fall of Constantinople.

Got a whole book on the subject of the fall of Constantinople on my iPad, on my

Kindle, I'm sorry. And at the time, it was a dark day, 1453.

The Ottoman Turks finally break through the walls of Constantinople. Of course, the people saw it coming.

And so this had led to a tremendous exodus of Greek scholars coming westward.

And they brought their manuscripts and their learning with them. And that was extremely important for the Renaissance and for the

Reformation. But at the time, it just looked 100 % bad.

And Constantinople had been weakened by the foolishness of the West. One of the

Crusades had sacked Constantinople because of politics, just foolish, stupid politics.

And yet in God's providence, right at the same time, the invention of printing, you have the fall of Constantinople and these manuscripts coming into the

West. You know what happens with Johann Gutenberg developing the concept of movable type, at least in the

West, which allowed the setting and printing of entire books cheaply and quickly in comparison to the old style of hand copying.

It is interesting. I didn't go through the Gutenberg Museum. I wish I had.

Well, no, don't get me wrong. I did something more important, I think, but I didn't get to go through it.

Everybody else did. But I understand that he used mirrors to do the setting initially, because as you think about it, you have to do it backwards for it to print properly.

So if you use a mirror, then you can do it sort of forwards, I guess. In 1455, the

Bible was printed at Mainz. It was 1 ,282 pages long. Till then, the process was a highly guarded secret, but Mainz was sacked in 1456, resulting in a spread of the technology all over Europe.

So we're going to keep this a secret so people can't figure out how we're doing this.

And then your city and your print shop gets sacked and everybody goes, oh, look at that.

Let's spread this around. Certainly, certain people called it

Gutenberg's Folly. In the same way that people looked at radio and then television and then the internet, information technology, transfer of information, certainly the church viewed the whole idea as extremely questionable, extremely dangerous.

They saw it more in a negative way than a positive way. We like to try to view these things as, well, this is an awesome way to communicate

God's truth and look at what good has been done, so on and so forth. But any technological advance in the information area can be used for good and evil.

That's the nature of the world we live in. But there would have been no Reformation without printing.

Luther, as I've mentioned to you, well, as I assume I've mentioned to you, please forgive me if I repeat things, but not only am

I mentioning stuff at PRBC sort of ahead of time, but I lectured on the bus for hours over in Germany.

So where did I say it last? I don't know. I've been doing presentations. I'm going to be doing presentations this weekend.

And so sometimes I'll repeat things. I apologize. But for at least two centuries,

Luther held the record for the most number of imprints of printed books in Germany, even long after his death.

And there are certain things we possess today, certain books we possess from Luther today, that even modern scholarship does not know where they were printed.

The secrecy was so good that even in the modern context, we're like, don't know.

So he kept printers really, really busy. And I noticed that a number of the comments, little comments and letters from Luther had to do with typesetting of books and things like that.

He was very much involved in how that was laid out. Then of course, we have the

Renaissance. The period, this particular period of time, right before the

Reformation was truly exceptional. Listen to these numbers. In 1500, in the year 1500,

Leonardo da Vinci was 45. Christopher Columbus, 45.

Machiavelli, 31. Copernicus, 27.

Erasmus, 33. Michelangelo, 25.

Raphael, 17. Luther, 17.

Zwingli, 17. And John Calvin would be born in 1509.

Think of that group of individuals and ask yourself a question.

Has there ever been a time like that? You think of da

Vinci's genius and you think of Michelangelo, Raphael, their incredible artistic skills and abilities.

It was an amazing, amazing time. 1492, you've got

Columbus, who knew the world was round and thought going that direction would be shorter than going the other direction.

It wasn't. Runs into America in the process and huge expansion of understanding of the globe at that particular point in time.

Nationalism was on the rise, very, very important. You would not have had the response to the indulgence trade if nationalism had not been on the rise and Germans were thinking of themselves more as Germans than they were members of the

Holy Roman Empire. There was a shift in economic distribution, as I said, the middle class had formed and the middle class had formed under a number of influences, obviously.

You can never just limit it to just one or two. But I mentioned one earlier, that was the Black Death. But there was another influence called the

Crusades. You had entire huge armies. You had rich men raising armies of other men that were wealthy enough to go off on a multi -year crusade.

And often they didn't come back. And so while the wealth had been concentrated in their hands, if they don't come back, then it becomes distributed more.

And you end up with, between that and the Black Death, you end up with the middle class. Interesting how that happened.

Banking had developed in Italy in the 1300s. Now corporations were being formed as well.

This led to a need for education. And so more schools are coming into existence. And so you're coming out of that feudal time period and people are starting to travel again.

And that's why in the Renaissance, you have that phrase, ad fontes.

And in fact, when you hear about Renaissance humanism, the great cry of the

Renaissance humanists was ad fontes, to the source, to the source. It wasn't modern day humanism in the sense of viewing the world from a secular perspective.

But it did elevate man's capacity to actually directly interact with God's world and have true knowledge of it, rather than only mediated through the schoolmen or scholasticism or whatever else.

So humanism at that time emphasized study, scholarship, reading of the original languages.

And again, this is what directly leads to the work of Lorenzo Valla and then

Erasmus himself, which is what we'll have to pick up with next time.

But extremely important. And so again, you look at these threads coming together.

And when I say, I would have picked Wycliffe, but Wycliffe didn't live at the right time.

You didn't have the Renaissance yet. You didn't have printing yet. You didn't have the fall of Constantinople yet. You didn't have, you were getting the rise of the middle class.

And there were universities that were being founded. Obviously, Wycliffe himself taught at a university, but not as many as you're going to need for the kind of reformation that took place, to take place.

To me, maybe I'm just the only person on the planet. I know I'm not, but one of the few people on the planet that looks at this and goes, wow, that's incredible.

It is so awesome to look back and to see the fingerprints of God in history and to see what he was doing and the timing of things.

And to recognize that many of these things, at the time they were developing, no one could see how they were going to be tied together.

Which makes me think about today and go, what's going on around us is going to be so vitally important in the future.

Well, there's very few of us. I certainly do not have the kind of insight to be able to identify those things.

But there are, every once in a while, each generation will have a person with an incredible amount of foresight along those lines.

Well, anyway, there you go, folks. Appreciate your listening to the program today.

Again, next week, it's going to be tough. Probably Thursday afternoon, I would imagine, is probably a week from now.

But if you're in the Washington area, look up the conference on our banner ad at aomin .org.

And I know we're going to get to see a couple of our old timers from back there. But certainly pray for us as we seek to speak the truth.