Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 1A

Introduction of Dr. James White and His Ministry

Began discussing who we would like to come for this second annual conference here at GRBC. And I'll tell you, the first name that came to mind was Dr. James White. And I remember looking over to Mike, Mike Thompson, one of our elders, in my office and said, Mike, do you really think that we'll be able to get Dr. White to come here?

And he said, well, it's worth a shot. So, Mike, I remember sent him an email and very shortly thereafter heard back from Dr. White and he accepted. And I remember being so excited and I remember going to a like-minded friend of mine who was not a member at GRBC and I shared my excitement with him.

And thinking that he would share that excitement, all he responded was, and we did. We did, didn't we? And I'm grateful that we did. But before I formally introduce him, I do want to share my first exposure with the writings of Dr. White.

I was a first year, first semester seminary student and I remember walking into my church history class and the professor had yet to walk into the room and as seminary students usually do, there was a group gathered in one corner of the room, the back corner, I can still see it right now, and they were in a rather intense discussion.

And I remember walking up to them because I knew a few of them and one of them that I knew looked to me and whispered and he said, Brad, I think you would like this book. And it was this, again, this hush and he handed me The Potter's Freedom.

And I felt like at that moment I was holding contraband. I must say. And I carried that book around and I felt like I was carrying around a banned book because every time we discussed it, it was in this passionate whisper.

And I'm sure many of you in this room know what I'm talking about. But then I began to read it. And for the first time in my life, I must say, I had not been raised in a church where biblical exegesis was held in highest esteem.

I can assure you that. But for the first time, I was exposed to what biblical exegesis truly is. For the first time, I saw what it meant to allow the Bible to speak for itself. And since then, I have read just about everything that I can get my hands on by Dr. White.

As I, like many of you, listen to his dividing line. In fact, I am an instructor here at NCA and I require all my juniors, and some of them are actually here this evening, to read The Forgotten Trinity.

And I commend it to you. In fact, this year, and they can attest to this, Fridays became known as Heretic Fridays. Because not only could they wear jeans, but we got to listen to the dividing line. And they loved it.

So I was grateful for that. Heresy Friday, I should say, not Heretic Friday. I said this morning in the sermon, and I need to repeat, that in theology there is no subject where precision of language is more important than theology.

So forgive me for that. Heresy Friday. I'm sure I'll hear about that again. But seriously, Dr. White is, in my opinion, and I mean this, one of the greatest theologians, apologists, authors, and speakers of our day.

And I mean that in all sincerity. He is bold, articulate, and to the never-ending frustration of his critics, he is thoroughly and intensely biblical. In fact, on his website, one statement says it all.

The gospel is ours to proclaim, not edit. Dr. White is an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and Executive Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. And I am thrilled for a change to stop speaking and be able to sit back and listen.

So with that, I introduce to you Dr. James White. After the introduction like that, I'm excited to hear it. I had not heard that story. I can assure you, I could spend the evening regaling you with stories about the Potter's Freedom and the places that that contraband book has gone, including Calvary Bible College, Calvary Chapel Bible College.

But I don't want to go into that right now. It is, of course, an honor to hear those things every time that I hear someone saying that some small work of mine has had an impact on their life. I truly am blessed by that, because you need to realize Alpha and Omega Ministries, of which I'm the director, is a very, very small ministry.

There's two of us in it. We've been around for 25 years, but we're very, very small. And in fact, this morning at the church, someone said, thank you for coming to such a small church like ours. And I wanted to say, your church is bigger than mine.

Actually, I think we're almost exactly the same size. We have about 60 members, and our facility is about the exact same size. And that just seems to be how Reformed Baptists are. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but we won't wait to see.

But I will say, it's a valuable fellowship that I'm a part of. My fellow Elder there, I've been there since 89. My fellow Elder there, who does the Vascular Preaching, has been there for 33 and a half years.

And amongst certain denominations, if you're at a church for 33 and a half years and you have 60 members, you are the world's biggest failure. But in reality, I think just the opposite of that is the case.

You're talking about a faithful shepherd who loves the people and is very consistent in the preaching of the Word of God. In fact, you young men who are thinking about ministry or involved in training for ministry, let me just, before we get started this evening, give you a challenge.

One of the reasons I ended up at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church was because as a graduating student from Fuller Theological Seminary, believe it or not, you can survive that. It's good for you if you're going to be doing apologetics.

But anyway, you get to learn from the people you'll be debating later on. As a senior just about to graduate with my master's degree, I attended this little Reformed Baptist Church on a Sunday evening and the pastor comes out and he is preaching verse by verse through Amos.

Now, I was an advanced Hebrew at the time and I was just amazed that anyone would preach through Amos at all, let alone in the way that he was. It was very clear to me that here was a man who could work with the text in its original language.

And so I came back the next week with a friend of mine and the pastor came out and he said turn to one of the Psalms. And I was like, Psalms? I thought we were in Amos. And he, after opening prayer, some of those of you who attend regularly will know that we've been working through Amos.

But I've encountered a section now that I, it's just going to take me a while to work through it because it's very, very difficult and I don't want to go into it until we can really handle it well. I was sold from that point onward.

Because in the church I was coming from, the pastor would never stand in front of the congregation and say, I'm not sure what this text is saying. It's going to take me some more work. And that kind of honesty just was extremely attractive to me.

But there's a man, my fellow elder, his name is Don Fry, who knows Greek and Hebrew better today than he did when he graduated the seminary. And that would be my challenge to you. I've taught both Greek and Hebrew in seminary and I hate the way it's handled in seminary.

Basically, I'm forced to teach people to hate the language because we have to go so fast. But if you are looking toward that kind of education, please, whatever you do, people ask me, you know, what has been the best classes that you took in Bible college and seminary to prepare you to do the debates that you do, be on national radio, take phone calls on every English subject under the sun.

I have no idea what's behind those blinking lights when they come on. And I've always given two answers, Greek and church history. Not systematic theology. Greek and church history were the two classes that were the most useful to me.

Because as we'll see this evening, church history, if you forget where you've been, you're not really sure where you are. And you certainly can't figure out where you're going. And so I would encourage you in your studies.

I remember once in seminary, when I was teaching systematic theology, I was asked to teach the Hebrew class. And I took everything offered in Hebrew and even petitioned to take more in Hebrew. But I've never considered myself a Hebrew scholar at all.

But the man that had teaching him had a PhD in Hebrew, but he couldn't teach Hebrew. When people would ask him a question, he'd just repeat what the grammar said. And he wasn't getting, everybody was dropping Hebrew.

And so they asked me to take it over. And the only reason I could get people through Hebrew was I was able to excite them about the biblical languages and excite them about the Bible. I was able to give them illustrations about being on the air in Salt Lake City on KTKK radio for four hours in a row, talking about Mormonism, live calling in Salt Lake.

And the last half hour, a guy named Phil calls from Provo and he starts throwing stuff out about how in manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible in Deuteronomy 32, it demonstrates that Jehovah and Elohim were separate, distinct gods and all the rest of that stuff.

And I had my goodly Hebraic stukartensia with me. I was able to examine the sexual barrier, respond to men. It turned out he was a professor at the BYU calling in the last half hour or four hours to throw something like that out.

But using illustrations like that of the practical utilization of this is what got people through that difficult class. So hopefully as you hear the original languages being used in an apologetic context or an exegesis and things like that, that will give you a reason to really press forward in your study of those things.

The Conference Theme: Scripture and the Need for Precision

Well, since we have so much to discuss this evening, though, I'm very thankful that the clock on the back wall doesn't move. And that's fine since I got here, so we're not in any rush here. I won't have any difficulties covering all sorts of information, and into the morning hours.

But I will be trying to provide you obviously only with an overview this evening. We are looking at the subject of Scripture. Tomorrow evening we'll be looking at the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the person of the Holy Spirit.

On Tuesday night we'll be looking at the doctrine of salvation. And then on Wednesday night we have a real interesting treat where I will be playing segments of a recent sermon that was delivered here in the Houston area on the subject of Calvinism and providing my own unique interaction therewith.

And so I hope you will take the opportunity of being here if you possibly can. I am using interesting technology this evening. Hopefully it will work for me and you'll be able to see things. By the way, if you don't notice, the background on the screen is my top.

I designed it both. It was way too tight. And I already got one compliment from someone. I appreciate that. And oh, by the way, before we start, I just have to tell you something. Those two hymns you sang, why was anyone using a saw machine?

You were not. I watched and you didn't do it with Mighty Fortress. I was watching, who? See, you can tell who a true Calvinist is by the fact they don't need a saw machine for a Mighty Fortress. In fact, if you really want to be a true Calvinist, you sing it in German.

Anybody know what I'm describing? I am Fester Baird. Both of those hymns are beautiful hymns, but I was looking around My daughter, by the time she was eight, refused to open the hymnal for Mighty Fortress, so I thought that was pretty cool.

All right, looking this evening at the foundation, at scripture, at the very subject, that honestly, it is exciting to me to see so many young people here. And of course, my definition of young is changing as the years go by.

But it truly is exciting to see young men, young women here this evening. The reason that I say that is because the world has an X painted on your back, a laser beam between your eyeballs to go after you, and the primary area they're going to go after you on is exactly this, the reliability and the inspiration of scripture.

I don't care what secondary university you go to, there's going to be an atheist, a gunslinger in there, who is nauseous his gun handle every time he gets a conservative Christian to abandon his or her faith in the inspiration and the authority of the scriptures as the word of God.

And we cannot help but recognize the fact that when you live in a society where there is a constant drumbeat of disbelief, a constant drumbeat of skepticism, that it's hard to go against the flow. You at least have to recognize you're going against the flow.

You at least have to recognize that the whole position that Christians have held, you're going to have to stand against the majority of our society. That wasn't the case 100 years ago. That wasn't the case really overtly even 60 years ago, but it has become the case now.

And so to be able to see that attacks on the validity of scripture are not a new thing will be helpful I think to you in evaluating the kinds of argumentation that are just constant in our society. I mean, you're not going to find people like myself, once in a while John MacArthur gets a shot at Larry King, but in the vast majority of instances, when something comes up, for example, the Gabriel revelation.

How many of you have heard of the Gabriel revelation? Just a few people. Brand new story that you're going to be hearing more and more about. It's in the news right now. A slab of stone in essence with Hebrew writing on it, not a scripture, an actual writing, ink writing, that may, depending on, it's going to take a while for this all to be hammered out, but may have a pre-Christian reference, a reference from the century before Christ to a Messianic figure who after three days lives.

Now they're not sure about the word lives, but a lot of the speculation right now, but of course once CNN gets hold of it, as long as it's about Christianity, it's no longer speculation. So am I not speaking the truth?

Do I get an amen at it? Okay. So the idea being that up till now, what all the critics would say is that the Christians made up the resurrection to explain why the disciples continue to believe in Jesus after he stumbles into being crucified by the Roman authorities.

And now the idea being, well, if there is a historical reference prior to Christ about a Messianic figure rising three days or coming to life three days after he's died, then that's clearly where the Christians stole it from, and that means the resurrection didn't happen either.

So before it didn't happen because there was no evidence of this before Jesus, but now there's evidence of this before Jesus, it still didn't happen. So that's how skeptics think and that's how their minds function.

But that kind of stuff ends up in the media, and it ends up being thrown out as yet another example of the ubiquitous statement, well, scholars know the Bible isn't what Christians believe it to be. That is so common that we as believers in the church need to be constantly addressing these foundational issues.

We have to recognize when we live in a society where there's this rank unbelief and constant attacks on our faith, we have to focus upon those areas where the attacks are so that our people will be prepared for themselves, for their own faith, being grounded in faith, as well as the fact that we don't want to be silent Christians.

We don't want to be those Christians that say, well, you know, I'm a Christian, I'm just a friend and a brother in our society. Well, we don't want to do that, we want to be able to give an answer and to testify, at least as long as we have the freedom to do so, because folks, I don't know how long we're going to have the freedom to do what we're doing right now.

If I was addressing one of the subjects I've written on, the subject of homosexuality in Canada today, you all would have had to sign a statement before you came in here saying that you are here voluntarily and that you're voluntarily exposing yourself to what I'm going to be saying, did you know that?

Most people don't know, but that's the way that it is. Or you will be sued, and you can be sued, and just recently, just in the past six weeks, a pastor in Canada was fined $7 ,000 for writing a letter to the editor saying that children, first and second grade children, should not be exposed to information on homosexuality in public schools.

$7 ,000 for writing that because he hurt the homosexuals' feelings. That's what's coming our direction, folks. Now, Texas may secede before that happens here, we hope you do. You have a reputation for being a little independent.

And if we can get Alaska to come with us, we can start our own nation. And we'll be moving down there real quick if that happens. Unfortunately, my state borders California, so I get the fees and all that stuff.

Seriously, we need to be thankful for the freedoms we have to do this thing and not take it for granted because I don't know how long we will have these freedoms. I really do not. There's a time coming when we're going to have to count the costs.

The Authority of God's Word in Christian Debates

God's Word. In almost all the debates that I do, the final subject comes down to the authority of God's Word. And it doesn't matter what subject it is. I'm guessing, I mean, I've debated John Shelby Swann, John Donovan Crossan, Barry Lynn, two of those are on homosexuality.

What does it come down to? Whether God has spoken with clarity in His Word. When you're dealing with Roman Catholicism, has God spoken with clarity in His Word? Do I need a magisterium? Do I need a papacy?

Do I need traditions of the church? Do I need someone to determine for me what the traditions of the church are? When you're talking about Mormonism, is the Bible enough? Do we need to put Mormon down to cover the story of Christ, the Mormon priesthood, the Mormon prophet?

Jehovah's Witnesses, though they'll say they believe the Bible alone, do we really need the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses to interpret these things for you? Over and over and over again, it all comes down to the question, has God spoken and has He spoken with clarity?

In our society today, the idea is there are so many voices. There are so many different opinions. How can anyone be so, listen to this, arrogant as to think that their opinion is right? That level of skepticism is fundamental in our society and if we seek to proclaim the Gospel to people, we need to realize that's how most people think.

You are being arrogant to say that X is right and Y is wrong, or X is right and not X is wrong. Many people find that to be an arrogant statement to make. Well, are they right? This very fact that there's all this different perspective.

Wednesday evening, one of the statements in that sermon was given at First Baptist about Calvinism. You think you're going to figure out these issues that people have been arguing about for 500 years in College Station, Texas?

To which I'm going to say, what? God's truth isn't available in College Station, Texas. God hasn't spoken with enough clarity to determine whether salvation is a free act on His part, all of His glory, or it's a cooperative act upon His part where He tries but fails and sometimes succeeds and so on and so forth.

You're telling me God's word isn't clear enough to decide that issue? And so attacks upon God's word, attacks upon the Scriptures are of course nothing new. From the very beginning they've existed but obviously they've taken different forms at different times.

Gnosticism as the Earliest Major Challenge to Scripture

When we look at some of the historical challenges to the Scriptures, the earliest challenges came from something called Gnosticism and what I call Incipient Roman Catholicism. Now let me explain that phrase, Incipient Roman Catholicism, before we move on from there.

Many people, remember when Pope John Paul II died a few years ago, Fox News became that essential and every Catholic apologist on the planet is getting free air time on Fox News for days and what you heard over and over and over again was, the church that has existed for 2 ,000 years.

Well, anyone who has that naive view of history, whether they are Roman Catholic or whether they're non-Roman Catholic and think that, for example, it's very common for you to see these lists and Protestants will put this out and it'll have a date and it'll say, Purgatory comes into existence or this is the first place with papacy established, something like that.

Church history doesn't work that way. It's not like on December 16th everybody believed one thing and they woke up December 17th, wow, we got a pope, cool. It didn't function that way. Church history doesn't work that way.

Besides that, they didn't have blackberries and cell phones back then and so things, communication wasn't overly fast and things took time to develop. And the same thing is true of Roman Catholicism. I have often challenged my Roman Catholic opponents, show me a single bishop, a single bishop at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 that believed what you believe as a modern Roman Catholic, as dogma, not just as doctrine, but dogma, that which defines faith.

You deny dogma, you're not a Roman Catholic, at least technically. The Roman Catholic Church is not really big into discipline these days, so I know you get a lot of wide riders, but at least theologically you're not a Roman Catholic.

Show me a single bishop at the Council of Nicaea that believed what you believe. And if you can't, then how can you claim that your church is the same church that existed for the past 2 ,000 years? Well, it's a pretty difficult case to make because no one there did.

All the Marian dogmas and the idea of papal infallibility and purgatory and indulgences and all these other things just simply were not a part of the faith of the church at that point in time. So when I say incipient Roman Catholicism, I mean that element of development over time that eventually became the Roman Catholic Church.

In fact, we can have a very interesting discussion if we want to as to when Roman Catholicism itself begins, because you see a wide variety of viewpoints over time, and some would even argue that until you get at least to the definition of transubstantiation, the Fourth Lateran Council in the 13th century, things like that, that you have such a wide variety of viewpoints that you really can't pinpoint what would today be called Roman Catholicism.

So that's what I mean when I speak of incipient Roman Catholicism, and we'll look at that a little bit more in just a moment. Now, especially again, you young folks, and I'm not trying to leave you older folks out since I'm in your generation now, but I focus this upon some of the younger folks because this is a part of the constant attack that they will be receiving.

You cannot walk into a grocery store today, first of all, not sticker shop, but you can't walk through the checkout line and scan through the scholarly journals that they have there at the checkout. What is that?

You know, I was looking at this guy over here going, you know, if I let my hair grow out, I'd look like X at the top. So enjoy it while you can, because it just all disappears, gets too tired, and instead of getting anything all the way to the top, it comes out the middle.

It's just a gravity thing. It's sad. But anyway, you can't go through that checkout line without seeing all these headlines. Scholars discover Jesus never... I remember this. This happened in 1989. Scholars say Jesus never said he was coming back, so he's not.

That was the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar had taken a vote with their little, you know, putting their little marbles in the bag and discovered that Jesus had never said he was coming back, so guess what?

He's not. I remember doing a radio debate on a secular radio program with Robert Funk, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar with John Donahue Crossman in 1989 on that very issue. Dr. Funk did not like conservative Christians very much.

In fact, he eventually told us what the hell had come up on us, but he was very clear in his distaste for us. But that's the kind of stuff you see, is these statements. And in our day, what's happening is an amazing thing.

Gnosticism was the first great challenge, external challenge, religious challenge to the Christian Church. If you don't count the Judaizers, once you get outside of the apostolic period, for the next couple of hundred years, and you actually have it in the apostolic period.

Paul writes against it, John writes against it. But Gnosticism was the great battle. And eventually, the Gnostics disappeared, primarily. But what's happening in our day, especially since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, and some other works in the middle of the last century, we have a resurgence of Gnostic studies.

And almost everything you're seeing, there's just tons of books that are coming out these days. If you hit Amazon, I can show you just dozens and dozens of titles of people who are reviving the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, and using it as their primary means of beating the Christian faith over the head.

In fact, it was almost humorous, it wasn't sad to me, to note that in some debates we were doing against some Muslim apologists back in Norfolk, back in March, they, almost all the resources that they were using to cast doubt upon the crucifixion, the resurrection, the transmission of the text of the Bible, any of those things, were all Gnostic sources.

So we need to understand something about Gnosticism. Most of the textbooks you'd be studying in any type of university on the subject of the Bible will heavily rely upon Gnosticism as the foundation for, in essence, rewriting the position that Christians have held all along.

So if that gives you some reason to sort of stay tuned in here, because some of this stuff seems somewhat esoteric to people, maybe something you'd never really be interested in, but hopefully that'll give you a reason to remain focused and look at this information very clearly.

Gnosticism’s Dualism and Denial of the Incarnation

Gnosticism comes out of the East, and it is coming into the area of what we would call the New Testament and places like Colossae during the time of the New Testament. It is, at its heart, a dualistic system, as many of the religious systems were.

Certainly Greek religion at this time was dualistic. What does that mean? In essence, dualism refers to belief that that which is spiritual is good, and that which is material is evil. And therefore, God is all spirit, but the idea of him, for example, becoming incarnate, seriously incarnate with a real body, or being the one who created this world, to a dualist would be something that they would reject.

You can see evidences of this in the New Testament. Remember when Paul was preaching on Mars Hill, the people listened to him when he's preaching there in the midst of the great philosophers of Greece, up until one particular point.

He says one thing, and the people start mocking him when he says that. What does he say? Resurrection. Anastasis in the Greek language. And as soon as he says resurrection, they begin to mock. Why? Oh, because of what anastasis means.

It means that which died coming to life again. It is not a physical body dying and just a spirit coming out of the ground, as Job's witnesses would like you to think. It is, in fact, that which died coming to life again.

They recognized he was talking about the raising of the physical body, and they began to mock. Why? Because for the Greek, salvation involved getting out of this physical body. This physical body is an evil trap.

Your spirit, which is inside you, is a good thing. Your physical body is where evil resides. That's how they could sort of get away with their behavior, their debauchery, because that's just in the physical.

That's just the body doing that. That's not my spirit doing it. There's a separation between the two. And once I get rid of that physical body, now my spirit can rise to ever higher levels of existence, a la some of our new age type of presentations.

Sure and plain, never mind, but those of you who are younger might not remember sure and plain as anyone. So they began to mock this concept, because it was fundamentally opposed to their own perspectives and to their own understanding.

And so Gnosticism is dualistic. Christianity is not. When God created the world, he said it was good. And evil is not inherent in the physical universe. Man is a unitary being. We may distinguish between the body and the soul, but man is made to be whole.

That's what resurrection is all about. That's what the hope of the resurrection is all about. It is not natural for man to exist separated from his body. That's why resurrection must take place. These are much more of a Hebrew concept of man as a unit, rather than the Greek concept of these very distinct units that can be separated from one another.

We are not dualists. As a result of dualism, and as a result of the fact that Gnosticism as a religion was a very eclectic movement, what does that mean? Well, I liken it to theological Plato. Remember Plato?

Do kids even still play with Plato? How about Silly Putty? Do you still have Silly Putty? I remember Silly Putty. But the problem with Silly Putty, does it still come in a little plastic egg? Yes? Okay, cool.

There's some things every time. I guess they play with that until they discover their first video game and they're awesome. I don't know. But we just didn't have that, and I was, you just kept playing with them.

But it would come in this plastic egg, and it was really cool. You could stick it on the newspaper and pull off images of cartoons and stuff like that. And we were deprived. I was poor. But anyway, the problem with Silly Putty was that once you dropped it like in the dirt, what does it do?

It picks up anything it touches. And so eventually there's all sorts of stuff that isn't Silly Putty. In the Silly Putty, it becomes less silly than it used to be. And the same thing with Plato. It'll pick up anything, or give up anything, as mothers tend to know.

Ears, shirts, inside socks. How does it get there? You don't know. But it picks things up. It grabs things. That's what Gnosticism was like. The Gnostics did not have a doctrinal system that they'd come in and say, hey, this is truth.

The Gnostics, the very term Gnosis means knowledge. And from a Gnostic perspective, you obtain quote unquote salvation, whatever in the world that means. You obtain deliverance from this earthly life.

You obtain favor from God, so on and so forth, by your gaining of this esoteric secret knowledge. And it didn't really matter what that knowledge was. That knowledge could change over time. They weren't coming along and saying, we are right and others are wrong.

They were the quintessential moderates. They were the quintessential, remember Rodney King, can't we all just get along? They were the Rodney Kings of theology. And so they would pick up elements of the religions that they would encounter, partly as a means of bringing those people in, but partly just because that's the nature of their religious perspective.

And so as they'd be moving into Asia Minor, as they would encounter local religion, whatever it might be, they would pick up elements of this. Well, when it encounters Christianity, what happens, and you see this plainly if you read the book of Colossians, where most scholars believe Paul is dealing with a form of proto-Gnosticism, the earliest arrival of Gnostic thought in that particular area, where there is a movement to, in essence, keep Jesus, but demote him and fit him into the perspective of the Gnostic worldview.

And part of that, because they're dualists, is that if Jesus is a really, really good guy, then they had a problem with the idea of Jesus actually being a human being with a physical body. And so the Gnostics would say that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body.

The Greek term for seen is dachine, and so you forget from that the Gnositis, who taught that Jesus only pretended to have a physical body. He didn't really have a physical body. They would tell stories about Jesus walking with one of the disciples by the seashore, and when the disciple looks back, there's only one set of tracks, not because Jesus is carrying the disciples, but because Jesus doesn't leave tracks in sand, because he only seems to have a physical body.

And so they're called Gnositis, and if you want to know how Christians would respond to Gnosticism, read 1 John, because what is 1 John all about? Who is the antichrist, but he who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh?

The apostolic example is to say, that is so wrong, that is so false, that anyone who confesses that does not even have eternal life. That person is not a part of the church, that person is an antichrist, he is opposed to the Christian message.

As unusual as that is in our society, for people to actually believe there's a right and wrong, you need to realize that when the society places pressure upon you to abandon categories of right and wrong, they are asking you to deny the Bible.

They are asking you to deny categories of Christian thought. Now we should be offended by that, and if we're offended, then they'll certainly stop, right? Not exactly, because we're the one group that can be offended by anybody, and so forth.

So this is Gnosticism, a denial of the reality of the physical body of Christ. He only seemed to have a physical body, and of course if he only seems to have a physical body, then the result of that is there is no true crucifixion, there is no true resurrection, there is no redemption.

Gnostic Emanations, the Pleroma, and Christ in Colossians

I've already mentioned that Gnosticism is a very eclectic religious concept that draws many things into its fold and tries to find a place for them. Now, what you need to understand about what the Gnostics believed about Jesus, they had a problem.

Every religion has to answer the question of evil. Whether people know they need to answer that question, whether people give thought to it or not, everybody has to answer the question of why evil and suffering exist.

And in Gnosticism, the answer to this had to be consistent with their dualistic perspectives. And so if the physical world is the realm of evil, and evil clings to and abides in the physical realm, the question immediately comes, well, how did God, who is all spirit, create that which is the source of evil, the physical realm?

And so what they did is they posited the idea that if you have your one truly spiritual transcendent God, and then emanating down from that God, you have divine beings called aeons. And of course, the first aeon closest to God is very much like him, just slightly less.

And then the next one, and the next one, and the next one, descending down from him. And this whole group of aeons together forms what's called the Pleroma. Pleroma is the Greek term for fullness. The fullness.

And you may notice that both of these terms are very common terms in the book of Colossians, where Paul is utilizing the very terminology of the Gnostics against them, which I take as an apostolic example of how we likewise should seek to communicate with those who have a different religious perspective.