Shane Rosenthal and the Humble Skeptic

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministries. My name is Mike Apendroth. That's our new intro music. I want it to be about four seconds shorter, but that's alright.

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You have tuned into a show that loves to talk about the Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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If you know the term duplex gratia, you pretty much figured out No Compromise Radio.

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Christ for pardon and Christ for power. And it is my joy always on Wednesdays to have guests, authors, theologians, and other folks who are doing the

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Lord's work, and we want to get to know them. I want you, dear listener, to get to know them. And so I think for the first time ever,

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Shane Rosenthal is on No Compromise Radio. Shane, welcome to the show. Good to be with you,

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Mike. Have we talked in person before, or is this the first time? I think I was on your show maybe a year ago.

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Remember we were talking about issues in John's gospel. I am so sorry.

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That's true. Can I blame I almost died of COVID? Can I do that? Is that fine? That's maybe.

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I'll think about it. So for those that don't know about Shane, he is a co -founder of just a tiny little show called

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The White Horse Inn. Shane, tell our listeners how you got involved in that, because I'm asking.

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I used to listen to KKLA on Sunday nights, and I think 9 o 'clock was White Horse Inn maybe, and 10 o 'clock

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Dennis Prager was on. But maybe we talked about that a year ago when you were on the show. You know,

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I think, so I got started with,

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I hooked up with Michael Horton back in 1987 or so. He was, at the time, he had a small organization.

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It was kind of like a college ministry there at Biola University.

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He would bring speakers like R .C. Sproul, J .I. Packer to talk. And so by 88,

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I was volunteering for the organization. And then we did some fundraising and talked to some donors, and we turned it into an official 501c3 in 1990 and started a radio show, and it's been going ever since.

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I only stepped away just last year, and I started my own show, The Humble Skeptic Podcast. So I get a little bit more freedom to do what

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I want to do, and I'm really enjoying it. Amen. Well, that's the main reason I wanted to have you on today, Shane, is to talk about The Humble Skeptic Podcast.

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You can access the website at shanerose .substack .com, or you can probably just go to iTunes.

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Or there's an easier way to get it. That's humbleskeptic .com is an easy way to do it. Oh, okay.

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Well, then what am I doing on this one? Well, that's where Humble Skeptic sends you.

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It's got my Substack content. But, you know, in terms of telling people how to get there, humbleskeptic .com.

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Shane, with the title Humble Skeptic, tell me about its origin, its epistemology, etc.

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Enoko Radio started off kind of a discernment ministry. Now we talk about the one that never compromises the

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Lord Jesus. But I think your title, Humble Skeptic, hasn't morphed yet.

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So tell us why you entitled it that. Well, I think the root of it is somewhat related to, you know, your use of the word discernment.

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I mean, there are a lot of ideas out there in both secular culture and in the church that we should have discernment about.

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We should be skeptical about a lot of ideas because they all can't be true. All the ideas floating around in pop culture and, you know, follow your heart or new ideas about sexuality.

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Of course, we're going to be skeptical about some of those claims. But they're also for every interpretation you have about a particular given text.

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There may be five or ten others and all those interpretations of a particular passage can't be true.

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So that's one of the things I'm encouraging, a healthy skepticism when it comes to our most important beliefs.

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So we should not just be skeptical about other people's ideas, but even our own ideas, because this is what

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Paul teaches. Test all things, but hold on to the good. Should you call it the Healthy Skeptic?

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I'm just kidding. Well, I think the Humble Skeptic should encourage a healthy skepticism.

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And that's something I talk about because we don't want to just encourage radical skepticism where you never land anywhere.

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So it's a healthy skepticism, which means, I mean, this is the kind of thing you and I would do if a relative gave us a homeopathic remedy.

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You might think about it. You might look at the ingredients. You might do a little bit of research into it.

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Like, is this going to kill my liver? Is it going to work? My relative says it worked great. If it was a doctor who gave you the prescription, you might be a little bit more trusting because you have a little bit more trust in that particular person.

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He's been to school. He's educated. He understands the endocrine system. You don't. And so that's kind of where I think we should – now,

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I've had this happen. I don't know about you, but I've swallowed medicine from doctors, and it hasn't done any work.

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So I've gone to other doctors, and ultimately our beliefs should be rooted in reality.

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So sometimes we will have a belief that a doctor can do the – can fix my problem, but my faith needs to be combined with the actual problem that I have.

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And so I visit the second doctor. He does more tests. He gives me a recommendation for surgery that fixes my problem.

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Well, now I have a belief that matches reality, and that's when my pain went away. Shane, I had a grandmother, a

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German grandmother, and when I had a little cough, she would take a teaspoon of sugar and then soak it and saturate it with a very cheap whiskey, and that was my medicine.

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You know what? It worked. It just put me right to sleep, you know, as an eight -year -old. So let's talk a little bit,

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Shane, about faith because you've got a conference coming up. I believe a weekend conference called

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Questions of Faith, and you've got a great little booklet called What is Faith?

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That's something we talk about a lot at No Compromise Radio, faith and the object. Talk us – take us through a little bit.

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It's not faith in faith. It's not faith in science. It's not faith in this, that, and the other. Why are you obsessed with faith?

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That's a good question on the radio. Part of the reason I'm really interested in faith is because I wasn't raised as a believer.

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I became convinced that Christianity was true. Mostly I came in through fulfilled prophecy, also some apologetics material.

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John Mork Montgomery in particular was influential. But so I became convinced of certain facts, and those sort of pushed me over, and I became someone who was convinced that these things were true.

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But as I was talking with non -Christians, they were not – they didn't find my arguments persuasive, and they easily dismissed my beliefs partly because it's like, oh, he's talking a religious talk, and I'm just –

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I don't like that subject, so I just – I try to avoid that subject, and I change the subject. Now, when

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I was talking to my Christian friends, they didn't really like the approach of truth. They were saying, well, you shouldn't use arguments about truth or apologetics or facts.

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You should just tell them what the Lord has done in your life and how he's changed you, and so it was more experiential.

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So immediately I noticed there was something that changed my life.

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I became convinced that this religion was true whether we feel anything or not, whether we experience anything or not because I was just – like these prophecies were written thousands of years ago.

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Who could make up Isaiah 53, and it seems to match what you find in the

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Gospels to a T. So that was convincing to me. Well, so what

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I try to do in the little booklet on faith is just evaluate what was the foundation for the

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Christian faith. When you evaluate what they're saying early on throughout all the sermons, for example, that you find in Acts, they keep going back not to their own personal experiences but to here are things we saw with our eyes, and they match what was written in the prophets before.

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So now that sounds like proof, and that's actually language you find given in the

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Gospels. Peter will say these things have been attested. Well, that word in Acts 2 could also be translated proof, but when

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I talk to Christians, they don't like that word proof. They think the proof and faith don't go together. I just recently went to a whole bunch of different places like Christian megachurches, conferences, and music events, and I asked probably about 100

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Christians. And I've been airing those on my show, The Humble Skeptic. And I ask, what is faith?

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Why do you have this faith and not other faith? Why are you a Christian, not a Muslim? Why do you believe the Bible, not other holy books?

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And over and over, I just get the same – I got the same response, that it's kind of a blind leap.

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It's just something I feel in my heart. Mostly it's feelings and an irrational way of knowing.

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And I would say, well, what about this idea of proof? No, those don't go together at all.

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So I just took some time to explore that subject. And I think, when

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I study the New Testament, I think there's a big difference, what I find there, when it discusses faith, between when

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I compare that to what I'm hearing from contemporary Christians. I've been talking to Shane Rosenthal today,

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The Humble Skeptic podcast on No Compromise Radio. Shane, I liked your booklet,

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What is Faith? And thanks for sending that to me. I thought then to myself, 1

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Peter 3, verse 15, But in your hearts, honor Christ, the Lord is holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, or in you, plural.

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And how could we all have the same testimony or attestation or proclamation if this is experiential?

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This is what it means to me. This is what the Lord did for me. But here the focus is on the object of the faith.

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I think we can all have the same testimony, if you will, because faith is shorthand for faith in the

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Lord Jesus, right? Yeah, yeah. The word faith itself is not some kind of a spiritual, religious term.

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It's not a word that was invented by the writers of the Gospels in the New Testament. The word faith just means trust.

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And so one of the passages that comes up a lot when

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I ask Christians, you know, what is faith? It seems like most of them have memorized

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Hebrews 11, 1, and that's something I try to walk through how I think Hebrews 11, 1 has been misunderstood.

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The phrase says, faith is the substance of things not seen. And that sounds like a blind kind of thing.

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And there is an element of faith that isn't seen mostly because faith relates – often it relates to the future.

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Nobody can see the future. So I don't know whether I should trust my financial advisor or a babysitter because I can't see what they're going to do with my money or my children.

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But what we typically do is we look at the past, and we say the past is the best predictor of the future.

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So if this financial advisor has had success with other friends and they're recommended or same with the babysitter or if I know this person,

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I trust them, they're a relative, that gives me trust for the future. Well, Hebrews 11, 1 is sort of talking about our ultimate resting place, the heavenly city.

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And it's focusing on – you can have a general assurance of the unseen things, which is our heavenly inheritance.

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It's not talking about this blind leap. It's talking about something that relates to how can we have comfort.

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It's actually talking more about salvation than it is epistemology. You just mentioned that fancy word. How do you know?

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It's more faith alone. Like faith – if you have the empty hand of faith, you can have assurance that you will go to heaven is basically what

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Hebrews 11, 1 is saying. And so I kind of try to make that case in that text, and when

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I evaluated what that word faith was, how it was being used by people like Aristotle and other writers, they just simply meant the word trust and the word credibility.

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Aristotle, for example, would use that word as – you can have credibility.

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You can have assurance about something. Even the case where it was like because I furnished evidence.

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In other words, the assurance and the trust when they used that word was based on certain things that you knew to be sure.

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And that's the way the Gospels use this word as well. So I just – I think we have to go back and look at the foundational documents to really understand what we believe and why we believe it.

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And I think too many people, especially when we ask them, well, if faith is a blind leap, why did you make this blind leap?

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Why are you taking the blind leap towards Christianity? They often can't answer that question. Shane, a couple things pop into my mind.

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Number one, I meant etymology. Number two, lots of times when

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I read Hebrews 11, I'm thinking faith, faithfulness paradigm that most people are thinking they're in this hall of faith by faithfulness.

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And they can't figure out what to do with Jephthah and Samson and even some of the sinful escapades of Abraham.

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But I also like the way you're thinking and you say in light of what you just said on page 13 of what is faith.

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So in light of this, there is a sense in which we could say that because all modern Christian believers have not been given the opportunity to see, hear, or touch

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Jesus directly, that we are putting our trust in something, quote, not seen, end quote.

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In fact, this is why Paul says in Romans 10, 17 that faith comes by hearing. But in affirming that we presently walk by faith and not by sight is in no way to suggest that faith is somehow opposed to evidence.

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No, the eyewitness testimony provided by the apostles is itself compelling evidence in its own right.

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I like that. It makes me think Christianity is linked to history as well. Tell our listeners a little bit about even

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Machen's words. The Christian is primarily a historian. Yeah, yeah.

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Well, I think the clearest piece like the clearest New Testament passage for me on this is the scene in John chapter 20 where you hear about Thomas.

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So Thomas is doubting the what he's hearing. He's doubting the testimony of his of his fellow apostles.

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He wants to see for himself. And then what's amazing is that Jesus actually does appear.

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And then Thomas believes. So if faith isn't by sight, there's a lot of people when

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I interview them, they say faith is kind of like a sixth sense. It's something that comes not to the senses. It's just something spiritual.

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Well, that's a totally totally misunderstanding of what faith is. I mean, I have to interrupt you. I have to interrupt you just for a second.

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You said the sixth sense. Yeah. Well, then I'm going to have to play this. OK, sorry.

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OK, go ahead. Sorry. So that movie was was, you know, one of those.

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It's a good example of the way a lot of people misunderstand faith. It's not like this extra sensory perception where, again, this is the kind of language a lot of people use.

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It's something you just know intuitively. It's like a gut feeling. And that is not what faith is.

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It is Thomas believed because of what he saw. And then the the the apostles report they ever they're everywhere talking about that, which they have seen with their eyes, which they have touched with their hands.

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This is what we proclaim to you. So when you look at John's narration after Jesus appears to Thomas, John writes, these things have been written so that you may believe.

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In other words, John is presenting his gospel as a kind of written deposition with all the eyewitness testimony, the testimony of John the

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Baptist and all the apostles and Jesus testimony about himself. The father's testimony about Jesus, the

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Old Testament scriptures testimony. This is the kind of thing that we find everywhere.

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This is the language of the book of Acts, the language of the earliest Christian creed from first Corinthians 15, where they talk about the eyewitnesses who saw

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Jesus resurrection and that it was foreseen in the scriptures. So that is that's

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I mean, what does God say in the book of Isaiah? You know, show forth your proofs.

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Can your idol speak? No, they can't speak. But I will declare things to happen before he he gives clear proof of his own divinity.

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And that these are divine scriptures. And that's something I think we need to emphasize again in our day. I love in your booklet that you talk about Orwell and he invented the word.

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And this is all one word. It sounds like two words, but it's one word. Belly feel. And, you know,

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I'm thinking, OK, my belly feels pretty big right now, but I don't think that's related. In a couple of weeks,

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Shane, I'll be in Israel leading a tour with my brother, Pat Abendroth. And one of my favorite places to go is to Caesarea by the sea.

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And they've got a replica of a little stone with an engraving on there that contains two words,

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Pontius Pilate. And I think the original is back in the museum in Jerusalem. And I always bring the people over there and talk a lot about this very issue and discuss how important, for instance, in the

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Apostles Creed suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified, dead and buried. Why the addition here?

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And we discuss exactly what you're talking about in the booklet and faith and history and an object.

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And it's not just a feeling. I loved it in your little booklet. You said, I tried to search all the occurrences of the word feeling throughout various English translations.

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As it turns out, I wasn't able to find a single occurrence of this word near the word faith in the

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ESV, NIV, NRSV, NASB, King James and New King James. That's pretty interesting.

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It's the most common response that I got to, again, nearly 100 people just a few months ago.

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Nearly 100 Christians, they attempted to link faith and feelings. It's just something – it's not something cognitive, some people would say.

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It was just something you know deep down inside or something you feel in your gut, some people said, something you feel in your spirit.

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But that's nowhere taught in the New Testament. So yeah, faith is something that comes as a result of testimony.

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So you have to trust someone. Think about this in terms of a court of law. You've got a couple different witnesses claiming different things.

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Well, which one do you trust? Well, the job of one of the attorneys would be to show inconsistency in one of the witnesses to show that you can't trust that person.

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But if you have a receipt that shows this person used his credit card five miles down the road, that places him just a few minutes from the scene of the crime, that gives plausibility to what he's saying.

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Plausibility to the idea that he's a good witness to this crime or something to that effect. So when you find evidence that the witnesses are trustworthy, then you trust them.

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And that's where we have to evaluate these texts historically, and we can't just sort of go with our feelings.

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Part of, I think, the problem is that we've had a history of 2 ,000 years of Christianity where the world was at one point convinced

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Druids became Christians. But then after Western civilization was

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Christian for so long, we stopped needing arguments. It's just this is the way people are raised. And then people forgot about the arguments of what convinced all these

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Druids. We need to go back to that, especially now that our culture is becoming more Druid. So true.

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As you were talking, Shane, I was thinking about feelings and how so many folks these days, for many reasons, but probably including this one, they'd have no assurance of their salvation.

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Because I think it was Luther who said, feelings come and feelings go and feelings are deceiving. My warrant is the word of God.

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Not else is worth believing. And I'm always thinking about assurance. And, of course, if your faith is somehow a hybrid with feelings, it's not going to go too well.

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By the way, I am a husband and a grandpa and a dad, but I don't know if I really feel like that today. I feel like I've got a belly feel that makes me not feel that way.

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Speaking of belly feel, I mean that was Orwell's way of describing how people believed in the state.

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They believed in Big Brother and in the state of Oceania because they had this deep, deep conviction in their belly.

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It was something they just knew in their hearts. And so I was trying to interact with that because there are a lot of people today who have that same approach.

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Orwell was offering a criticism of that kind of way of thinking and knowing.

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And I think that critique applies to a lot of contemporary Christians who are basing their faith on their feelings.

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But again, as you say, feelings come and they go. There are times in which I will doubt certain aspects of the faith, and then

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I just am not sure. And then later, I'll discover more information.

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I'll change my complete view about it, saying, okay, I don't know why I was doubting that, but I'm now convinced the exact opposite.

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And that's something we just have to say. Feelings will take us down a path, and they sometimes are not reliable. Amen. I always think to myself, when

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I'm thinking rightly, feelings are good and right and healthy. We're humans. We need to make sure they're the caboose, though, and not the engines.

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I remember studying the word ventriloquist. And of course, we think of someone who's not moving their lips and trying to project a voice, holding a little dummy.

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And it's a ventriloquist, throwing your voice. But originally, Venter Loki is a belly talker.

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And so your stomach would make growling sounds. And you need to go to the Delphi Oracle or someone else to have them interpret your belly sounds.

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And so we've got more than belly feel. We've got belly talking, which makes me think.

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It's just the way we talk now, Shane. We say things like, I feel, but we mean think. And so sometimes with my daughter,

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I'll say, she'll say, Dad, I feel such and such. I said, do you feel it or do you think it? And she'll say, well, I think it.

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I was asked once, what do I feel about Joe Osteen? I said, well, what

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I think about Joe Osteen is he is a heretic. What I feel about him is he makes me want to throw up.

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So those are two different questions, think and feel. You know, Machen, you mentioned Machen earlier, and he is one of these writers.

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I mean, his book Christianity and Liberalism was written 100 years ago, 1923. But one of his other books,

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What Is Faith?, is also very helpful on this topic we're discussing today. 1925, and he says in the beginning of that book, the problem is it relates to the depreciation of the intellect, the depreciation of the mind.

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And in the place of it, the increase of emphasis on the feelings and of the will.

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This is one of the reasons he says it's there in the philosophers, and it's also there in the views of the men on the street.

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And he's exactly right. So what we've seen is those – that shift, which is why even in our churches, you have much a higher emphasis on the will, making a decision, and experience, the worship experience, feelings, and getting caught up in the music.

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Not so much on making a case for the historicity of apologetics.

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I talked to one pastor once. I said, what do you think about, like, apologetics and arguments? Do you think that's a good thing to do?

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He said, no, I don't really like apologetics or anything like that. I don't even like the things that Paul struggles with in Romans.

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What I want – what I'm interested in is whether a person feels – what's going on with Jesus in your life today?

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And what happens when that's your focus, it's me and Jesus now, and severed from the history and the text, is that it becomes gnostic and, you know, unrooted from reality.

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Amen. Talking to Shane Rosenthal today. Shane, I reread the chapter on justification in J .I.

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Packer's Quest for Godliness. I think he was talking about the Puritans, and he said something very interesting. I think it relates to our discussion today when you talk about the will.

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He said the Arminian, the Wesleyan approach, when you would preach the gospel to unbelievers, you would tell them their response needs to be a volitional response, submit, surrender, yield.

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I might add in desire, give allegiance to. It was that volitional category that they said, this is how you respond to the claims of the risen

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Savior. But it was the Reformers who didn't go for the volitional aspect.

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I'm fine for volitional in the category of sanctification. But the Reformers went after a fiduciary aspect.

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Therefore, they would tell people to trust, to rest, to receive, to believe.

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Because those things focused on the object of their faith. While the Wesleyan Arminians surrender, well, how much do

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I have to surrender? How much do I have to submit? It focused on the person. And so, I think this ties all back together to when we're preaching the gospel, we're telling people to believe because knowledge is,

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I mean, belief is knowledge, assent, and trust. And you have to know about the one. You have to give affirmation and agreement.

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And then you have to trust in him, right? Yeah, yeah. Knowledge, assent, and trust is a really helpful way to think about this.

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Because you can't put your trust in a financial advisor or a babysitter in whom you know nothing about.

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You can also have knowledge about a babysitter, a financial advisor, a doctor that you never trust with your child, your money, or your own care.

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You just know about them. That's knowledge and assent, but not trust. And what we're saying is that final level of trust is the kind of thing that's closest to Christianity.

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So we know about Jesus. We know that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, not a fairy tale. We know that this is the best explanation for all the available data, such as Isaiah 53 and such as the facts that we read in both our

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New Testament and in Josephus and Tacitus and all the countless documents that interact with all the stuff that we see with the history of Jesus.

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So it's the best explanation, but we don't just know about it. We also trust our very lives to this one who was revealed there.

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Amen. We are giving ourselves to him, and that's so it's faith in this character who appeared on the stage of history, but who was foreseen and forepreached, foreproclaimed in Isaiah and other prophets.

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Amen. Shane, two last questions before we need to wrap up for today. Number one, where can people get the

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What Is Faith booklet? And number two, tell us a little bit about the Questions of Faith conference that you've got coming up in February.

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If you'd like to make it available to your listeners, I can send you the link so that you can post that.

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Great. And tell us about the conference, February 24th, Questions of Faith. Yeah, so this conference is in Memphis, and I've got a few other speakers with me, but mostly we're focusing on this issue of faith and whether or not, you know, what is it, how it's been misunderstood.

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Are the Gospels authentic reports?

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Is it eyewitness testimony? All kinds of things related to the history and the reliability of this particular claim.

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So that's what's coming up last weekend of February in Memphis. Sounds good, Shane. Thank you for being on No Compromise Radio Ministry.

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I've appreciated your ministry for the last 30 years, and we look forward to having you on again in No Compromise Radioland.