August 11, 2005

The Apostle Peter’s Call to Defend the Faith

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll-free across the United States.

It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Opening Remarks, Travel, and Upcoming Seattle Debate

And good afternoon. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon. Lots of stuff to look at today and to take your phone calls at 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341, is the phone number where you can get involved with the program today.

Well, where do we start first? I suppose it would be best to skip over the unpleasantries of recent developments, shall we say. Really not much more to be said than what has been said on the blog and on the documentation provided there.

However, let's just say that sometimes in dealing with folks who have a long history of opposition to the gospel, it can get a little bit unpleasant. And of course, sometimes that lasts for like 14 years.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, then don't worry about it. That's perfectly fine. We don't have to even concern ourselves with it. But if you follow the blog, then you know that of which I am referring to.

But unless there are further developments there, and who knows, maybe some excuses will be offered like space aliens or something like that. We can discuss that should it come up. But other than that, I think anyone who wants to know the truth is able to determine what the truth is.

And that's really all there is to talk about at that point. I was out once again on what's called the Sun Valley Parkway, which is basically Charlie Keating built the Sun Valley Parkway many, many years ago.

At that time, it was out in the middle of nowhere. And he was going to build a community out to the northwest of Phoenix. And it was going to be, I don't know, his dream community, I guess. They were going to have covenants there about how you could behave and all sorts of stuff.

And so he built this road that goes from way northwest Phoenix all the way around what are called the White Tank Mountains down to Interstate 10. A lot of you have heard of I -10. That's a rather major road across the United States.

And of course, he ended up in prison. So the community didn't get built. They're building stuff out there now, sadly. But it is a cyclist's paradise because on some days, you'll only have maybe 10 cars pass you while riding for hours and hours on end.

And it's just a nice, wide, open road. And if you don't like playing tag with cars because most people don't know how to drive with a bicycle nearby them, then that's a great place to ride. And so if you're trying to get a lot of miles in, in fact, what do you call it?

The far end down near I -10. They use that because it's fairly flat as a time trialing area. If you want to ride time trials, I know a fellow that, in fact, I used to ride with back in the 90s just set the 100-mile time trial record out there on the Sun Valley Parkway.

So it's a great place to go ride. And so I was out there day before. No, just yesterday morning. Yesterday morning. Seems like a long time ago. But I was out there yesterday morning doing, I thought I was doing 50 miles.

I did 49 miles because I forgot, I didn't add things up correctly and got back and beamed my workout to my, to my computer and went, duh, don't, do not do math in an oxygen-starved state, you know, while, well, right now, I know everyone thinks, every time you talk about how warm it is in Phoenix, everybody says, yeah, well, it's a dry heat.

For the past couple of days, it's been, there's been more moisture in the air in Phoenix than in Miami, OK? This is the monsoon. This is our incredibly icky time of the year. So the worst time in the world to go back to being a bicyclist.

But that's what I did starting June 14th. And so I was out there trying to get a 50-mile bike ride in. And it's also one of the only ways that I can get much studying in, without distraction, in listening to what people have to say.

And the MP3 players has made that, oh, so much easier than it was. Well, you can even do a lot of the things that we get to do today, back when I was riding back in the 90s. So anyway, I've been doing a lot of listening to John Dominic Crossan, and I likewise took the time to track down some lectures by Dr. Marcus Borg, because he will be a part of the discussion on the subject of the resurrection on the ship.

Coming up, if you're not aware of this, especially for those of you in the Seattle area, if you're listening to this, I would imagine that you are aware of this by now. But in case you've been hiding under a rock, fearful of a thermonuclear attack or something like that, we have our conference and debate coming up in basically two weeks from now in Seattle.

And that's going to be incredible. And of course, that's where my focus is, or it needs to be where my focus is. That is where it is. But boy, there's a lot of stuff getting in the way of really getting the stuff done that I want to get done.

Anyhow, so I'm out there listening to Dr. Borg. And I mentioned in channel this morning, it must have been rather odd to see this fellow riding along the road out in the desert. And every once in a while you hear, oh, no, that's not what it means.

And there's sounds of disgust and things like that as I was listening to these lectures, especially concerning the Bible and all the rest of the stuff. But then part of the lectures, well, a series of lectures ended up being a discussion between Marcus Borg and N .T. Wright.

And these are from the Chautauqua Conference Center, where I've been listening to a number of presentations by Dr. Croson and Dr. Borg. And it was fascinating to listen to the two going at it. I'm not really certain how much anybody sitting there who hasn't been studying this stuff for a long time was getting out of it because the vocabulary is very, very specific.

And, you know, I would just imagine someone who just attends a conference center for the fun of it during the summer, I don't know a lot about this place, but it seems like some place you go for the summer and you stay and, you know, do your summer vacation type thing.

And they bring these folks in who all seem to be way off the left some place. So I'd imagine a lot of these folks wear Birkenstocks and have patches on their sleeves and things like that. But anyway, what an amazing thing to listen to these these discussions and sort of wondered just and listening to the to the audience questions afterwards.

Some people get it, but some people you can tell are just going, what are you people talking about? So anyways, N .T. Wright and Marcus Borg are going back and forth. And partly because I think of the fact that they did a book together and so maybe they were promoting that or something.

I don't know. But it's interesting to listen to to the give and take. I want to play a section of it here and interact with it. Part of it that that caught my attention especially and made me go, hmm, this would be something to be worthwhile sharing with folks.

Is that you listen to N .T. Wright and, you know, sometimes he says things you just go, yeah, oh, good. Boom. You know, he's going to do something. He's going to do that in part of what I play here. But then having just said that, he can turn around and take everything back that he just said in essence and leave you going, what?

And that takes place in this as well. So it'll give you a little sense of of Borg, but also some odd stuff from N .T. Wright. So here, let's listen.

Miraculous Claims, Worldviews, and the Resurrection Discussion

It's my turn. OK, well, I'm taking you. We're getting. Oh, OK, OK. Well, I think I'd like to press you a little bit on an assumption that I was making as I was preparing my talk.

That's Borg. And he's asking a question of N .T.

Wright, namely that you would stretch the limits of the spectacular further than I probably am willing to. I mean, do you think that Jesus did feed five thousand with a few loaves and fishes?

Let me let me stop right there. They don't like using the term miraculous. They would rather use the term spectacular. Yeah, OK. And that had been part of this is the introductory discussion they were having.

So it was foundations. And so it had to do with worldviews and things like that. And interestingly enough, Borg identified them both as postmodernists. In fact, he identified himself as a post post postmodernist, if that gives you some idea of where he's coming from.

You think he did walk in the water?

I don't mean. Yeah, go ahead. Let me let me say where I come at this from. I don't find it helpful to say as an exercise in abstract thinking, how far do I or don't I stretch the limits of this spectacular?

I begin by saying, as I think you probably do, if God is God in any meaningful sense, God can do all sorts of things that probably are outside our initial assumptions. And that's not just within modernity, but within in all sorts of other cultures.

Would you extend that to other religious traditions?

Oh, there are all sorts of evidence for all sorts of odd things happening in all sorts of different traditions, religious and not. And some of those happen, do you think? Oh, yeah. OK. You know, the world is full of extraordinary things that are well documented, but which modernism has really had a hard time coming to terms with.

By the way, I don't describe myself as a postmodernist, except in the very loose senses that you use. I think of myself as a post postmodernist, but that's a conversation. That's a conversation for another occasion altogether.

And I'm post post post. Well, that's fine. And the check is in the post in case you want. I start by looking at the big picture of the rise of Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus within that will come to this on Thursday, I think.

And in the light of what I discover at all sorts of levels as a historian, but as I've already said, doing history is a self-involving exercise as a self-involved historian looking at that question, I find myself saying, of course, all the early Christians knew that dead people don't normally rise.

I mean, that's part of the given, but that Jesus actually did for reasons which will come to on Thursday. And that in the light of that, I look back at the rest of the stories and I say, this is very bizarre, but it looks as though some of this stuff actually happened.

Now, of course, it is part of the deal, as with the Exodus stories, that when you have a Moses doing stuff with a rod and a serpent, the magicians of Egypt can do the same thing. It's part of the given in the New Testament that Jesus did exorcisms.

The early church did exorcisms and so did Jews and no doubt other people do exorcisms. However, the resurrection does seem to be a complete shock, both to Judaism and to Hellenism. But it's in the light of that shock, not as now the problem is not because it's a one isolated oddity.

It's not like God making a square circle or God making pigs fly or something like this or Sandini with his head under his arm in that delightful story. This is this is more like new creation. It's a reaffirmation of something within creation rather than a bizarre twist, as though some celestial prankster was just having a fun day.

There's a story of the Buddha walking on the water, and I'm willing to take that story equally as seriously as the story of Jesus and say probably yes or probably no to both. And then I would add again very quickly, I was in a debate with another scholar earlier this year and he said, why do you have a problem with the virgin birth?

There's a story about Lao Tzu being born from the side of an elephant. And I said, if if if you'll believe that Lao Tzu was born from the side of an elephant, I'll believe in the virgin birth.

OK, that's one I need to type out. I need to put a mark there. And I guess it's one of the reasons that I've found listening to some of the lectures to be a little bit more interesting than books, because books have editors and editors flag something like this and go, do you really want to say that?

Is that really where you want to go with this? Because I listen to that and I go, wow, you actually think there's a parallel there. And evidently he does. You have you have a proper religious grounding purpose, context, history.

You've you've taken into the into account. The the absolute amazing element in a monotheistic religion. Not in a polytheistic religion, not in an animistic religion, but in a in a monotheistic religion where you have a transcendent God, you've taken into account how utterly amazing it is.

That that God would enter into his own creation. And the purposes of doing that and how vastly different the Christian perspective on the virgin birth is and the reasons for the virgin birth and the the the purpose of the virgin birth than you'd have in in any of these these other religions.

And then you can just sort of throw it out and say, well, if you believe that Lao Tzu came out of the side of an elephant, then I believe the virgin birth. I I've mentioned to folks that I didn't mind listening to to Dr. Crossen as I was writing the week before for a long period of time.

Because he's a Roman Catholic in the sense of being raised in the Roman Catholic Church. He was a priest for almost two decades. And I I hear where he's coming from. But to Dr. Borg, as I understand, is a Swedish Lutheran or came out of a Swedish Lutheran background and hence is is a a Protestant liberal way, way liberal.

I mean, not even within the bounds of Orthodox anymore, of course. And it's not nearly as fun to listen to to Dr. Borg as it is Dr. Crossen. No, not not even close. And that's why I mean, that kind of lighthearted, if you'll believe.

And whether though he tries to hide it, he cannot help but hide the fact that he really finds historic Orthodox Christianity, which he describes as the former paradigm over against the emerging paradigm, which is his own, I guess, this very pluralistic type of thing affirming really nothing more than whatever you feel that that's he really can't hide the fact that he really, really doesn't have much respect for anyone who can possibly believe that kind of stuff.

He he likens it to the difference between the Ptolemaic and Copernican views of astronomy. And of course, what that means is that if you're the the fundamentalist and anyone who believes that the Bible is actually the word of God, it's God breathes.

He even used that term once, which shocked me. If you actually believe those things, then then you're in the old, you know, the world spins around the earth type type of perspective. So anyway, I just I just found that an amazing how very facile he is at that point.

And it's, I don't know, not enjoyable to listen to.

Q and A on Q, the Synoptic Gospels, and the Historicity of John

This is really a comment with a with a question attached, but a footnote, by the way, you said the majority of North American scholars believe in Q. That's that's certainly true. And worldwide, it's much more complicated than that.

And most Q scholarship is not done in North America. There is a problem which we from the other side of the Atlantic Sea here.

Now, let me stop. Make sure you're tracking here. The subject of Q is not exactly something that that most evangelicals are running around discussing, though it's probably something we'll be discussing a whole lot more should be discussing a lot more than we are.

Q, of course, is a term that refers to a German word, Quella, which means source. So much of theology is just simply knowing a little something about another language. And it is simply the the terminology that is used to refer to a never seen hypothetical collection of sayings, not not actions, not activities, but sayings of Jesus.

That is allegedly to have existed. And it allegedly existed because when you look at, for example, the the harmony of the Gospels that I'm using in teaching through the synoptics right now at our church, you look at Matthew, Mark and Luke, and there are times when Matthew and Luke and Mark are tracking together in reporting the same particular incident.

And they're pretty much online with one another. And then there will be these sections where Mark, if he's placed in the middle, is missing. There's Mark doesn't record a particular incident. And one might say, well, how does that you know, what what what's the importance there?

Well, people argue constantly and have been for hundreds of years now as to the relationship that exists between the synoptic Gospels and in the US, as Dr. Wright just noted. The the primary viewpoint of quote unquote scholarship, and of course, how do you define that the people on the left don't have any problem in essence, saying that people on the right aren't really a part of scholarship and the people on the right return the favor very frequently and people in the middle try to be as broad minded as possible, I suppose.

But using the term in its in its broader sense, the majority of scholars would would seem to believe that Mark is the first gospel written. This is called Marken priority and that Matthew and Luke possess Mark, that they they possess, I would assume in written form, what Mark writes.

And so when Matthew and Luke are talking about something else, when they when they have one of these sections where Mark isn't there anymore, well, where did that come from, especially when there is a great deal of agreement between Matthew and Luke in recording this non-Marken material?

Well, what is the source? And that's where Quella comes in. What is the Quella, the cue, the source? And so the idea is there's this hypothetical collection of sayings because most of the time when they're doing this, it's it's something where he's just talking about something.

It's a collection of sayings of the Lord Jesus. And so the cue source or as Marcus Borg has even done a book called the the the cue gospel, where he just basically collects all that stuff. I have. Oh, thank you very, very much.

Appreciate that. Don't worry, that was my weather thingy warning me about something stupid. There's there's nothing in there's nothing anywhere in the county that's overly relevant. It just did the boom, boom, boom thing.

We have a weather alert for for Maricopa County. Aren't we all excited about that? Anyhow, it's live webcasting, folks. It happens. So anyway. What they're discussing here is the fact that in American scholarship, that's almost all that you're even taught in certain schools.

That's almost all that you don't even hear a whole lot about much else in a lot of seminaries in the United States. And I was very interested in hearing Dr. Wright, in essence, say, no, we don't know that that Q existed as a as a collection of writings.

We we don't know what it would have looked like. There's all sorts of discussion about this. And I was that's one of the things I was going. Very interesting to hear someone in his position saying that.

And that's what he's talking about there. So that's going to come back up here in a couple of moments in the first question that is asked in regards to the Gospel of John from the audience, too. So there's the background for that.

I know most of you were all aware of that. But, you know, we want to keep our bagel in the same direction here.

Like when you know you have this thing called the World Series, but only American teams take part in it. We do. We do feel sometimes we're being. Well, never mind. I notice you're not playing the rugby World Cup.

That's coming up soon. Or maybe you are. You're not going to win. I have a different account of how our view of history remembered and history metaphorized impinges upon our decisions about Jesus. You were saying that it's dependent on a prior reading of individual incidents in the Gospels as history remembered or history metaphorized that makes us then say, therefore, Jesus was like this.

I suspect actually that not only for me, but also for the majority of people, e .g. in the Jesus Seminar, which I know is quite a broad category in itself, it actually works the other way, that there's a big picture of what is likely or unlikely, which then leads people to say in this respect, this is metaphoric, metaphorical, or this is remembered.

Is that not a fair guess?

Yes. Response time. And I would agree that not enough scholars acknowledge the extent to which their gestalt or overall picture of Jesus affects what they then will see as historical and non-historical.

Let's stop that one right there. I want to repeat that because maybe, again, some of the British lingo or some of the background terminology made you start watching something on television or something.

Listen to what Dr. Borg says here, because I'm afraid that in discussing almost every single aspect of both debates between myself and Dr. Crossan and then the discussion with myself and Dr. Renahan and then Dr. Borg and Dr. Crossan on the ship, almost anything we can talk about is going to come back to this.

Because the entire presentation that they make, the entire position that they sketch out is based upon the presuppositions that they've started with, which in essence say Jesus could not have been more than this.

Jesus could not have been unique. We have to turn Jesus into an illiterate Jewish peasant. And so when you find him reading from the book of Isaiah in the synagogue, well, he couldn't do that. And so what is this obviously is a later story being projected back upon Jesus.

And what's it trying to tell us? And then you get to do all this wonderful spiritualizing and allegorizing and coming up with theories. And that's how you write papers to become tenured in your position and wallah, wallah, wallah.

So that's every time, no matter what passage of scripture we bring up, that's what's going to come back to is they don't have to worry about harmonizing anything. They don't have to worry about seeing things as a whole.

You can just simply chop the entire story up and treat everything as, well, in my understanding of what Jesus could have been, then this would mean this. And he wouldn't have said this, but what Luke here is communicating is Luke was having a power struggle in the church in the 80s and or in the 90s.

And this is why he says this. And there you go. And that's what you end up with. So listen again to what Dr.

Borg says here. This is remembered. Is that not a fact? Yes. Yes. Response time. And I would agree that not enough scholars acknowledge the extent to which their gestalt or overall picture of Jesus affects what they then will see as historical and non-historical.

And then I would immediately argue that, of course, it is a, well, it's the classic hermeneutical circle, if you will. There's this reciprocal back and forth relationship constantly between gestalt and data.

So it's not simply you come up with a gestalt and then make the judgments about the data. It is a back and forth thing.

Except I don't know how it can be much of a back and forth thing for the Jesus Seminar, I suppose, if someone were to find the rest of 7q5, which is a fragment from Dead Sea Scrolls that may contain a section of the gospel.

Mark, if it does, it would push it back 30 years and it would destroy the vast majority of the argumentation and hypothesizing concerning the early period in Christian history. I suppose that would be one instance where they would have to deal with that.

But other than that, without some major find like that, really, how do you, since these are starting presuppositions, how do you address those things? That's going to be one of the questions that's going to come up in the cross examination and the discussion on the ship and all of it.

So it's going to be very, very important.

And I suppose what I would say about your way of working with the question of gestalt and data is that one of your tests for the viability of an overall hypothesis is the amount of the data that it can accommodate within it.

And and and I think for you, I'm going to stop right there because we need to take a.

Break, Sponsor Read, and Return to the John Question

Break. What he's about to say about right is something he would say much more about me and will say much more about me, I would imagine, in just a couple of weeks. But we're going to take our first break and your phone calls as well at 877 -753 -3341.

We'll be right back.

Such a rarity today, so many stars strong and true quickly fall away.

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Is the Bible true? Never before in history has the authority and inspiration of the Holy Scriptures been so viciously attacked. By those outside the pale of orthodoxy and within the walls of traditional evangelicalism itself.

Join us August 27th 2005 at the Sea-Tac Marriott for an historic debate between evangelical Christian apologist Dr. James R. White and world-renowned Jesus Seminar co-founder and Bible skeptic Dr. John Dominic Crossan as they debate a topic which every Christian should be concerned about.

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The Limits of Jesus Seminar Methodology and the Authority of Scripture

And welcome back to The Dividing Line. We are listening to an exchange between Marcus Borg and N .T. Wright on basically the same issues that we are going to be discussing up in Seattle. Dr. Borg is now making an observation concerning N .T. Wright's Gestalt, his worldview.

Let's listen in. Overall. Gestalt to work, you basically need most of the synoptic tradition to be historical. It's not only that you can accommodate it, but you really need it.

Now, listen to what he's saying there. What he's, I think it's an insightful observation. And if I were Dr. Wright, I'd be extremely complimented by it. And I would like to think in point of fact that what Dr. Borg would say is that I need all of the synoptic tradition to be what the synoptic tradition claims to be in its historical claims.

And that is that his perspective requires a large portion of the synoptic tradition to be historical. Obviously, Dr. Borg's requires basically none of the synoptic tradition to be historical at all. That's what he's saying here to be historical.

I know the beep is just gone, but a one liner on that ever since Albert Schweitzer, it has been clear that one particular overall way of reading the gospel, namely locating Jesus within the world of apocalyptic Judaism, means that at a stroke, you get a whole lot more of the gospel tradition making historical sense over against the Vreda view, which again has had a long run for its money this century, which is that Jesus was a teacher of abstract or timeless truths rather than one who was living within the narrative of apocalyptic Judaism.

And then you lose quite a lot.

Yeah. And I would simply add that Schweitzer's apocalyptic vision, though it allowed a lot to be accommodated that had been cast aside. In turn, it accounted for a lot needing then to be cast aside. So it excludes as well as includes.

And that's why we've had subsequent debates and through the post Saunders period and.

So on. Well, how do we go to Q &A? Do you call on people? Do we call on people?

People come forward. OK, there's a microphone here.

Here. My name is Don Jackson, chaplain for the unity. Week, we certainly followed the Jesus Seminar very with a great deal of interest. And I observed that the book of John is not considered to be historical material by and large by the Jesus Seminar.

When you talk about the spectacular one item in the book of John really gets my attention. That's a raising of Lazarus from the dead. Now, the synoptic gospels doesn't mention that at all. And I would think that the orthodox position would have a great deal of difficulty in defending the historicity of the Lazarus story and not see it as a metaphor.

I just wonder what.

Now, you need to understand that the question that's very much the type of assertion that you hear all the time in New Testament scholarship today, if something is not contained in multiple sources, then you can't possibly believe that it's historical.

And I, you know, I hear this and I go, excuse me, wait a minute, I thought it was give it was a given taken from from the start that any gospel writer, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. There really aren't any other competitors, to be perfectly honest, I mean, Thomas, completely different worldview, completely different time frame, completely different form.

All the second century Gnostic Gospels, Gospel Peter, all that stuff, just totally in a different different world. All right. So you look at the four gospels and I thought it was a given that the gospel writer has a purpose for writing his gospel.

That he has an audience, that he does have a context and everybody goes, oh, yes, you'll hear them talking about that all the time. Well, you see Luke's context was I'm not sure exactly how they know what Luke's context is.

They certainly don't feel that they have to be constrained by what Luke's actually saying to come up with with that. But so if each writer has his own context, his own purposes, Luke, Luke is is writing and he's writing to Theophilus and he wants to he wants to assure him that what he has been taught actually is true.

It's it's it's sure it's steadfast. So he's looking at all this information. And you can only write so much, you know, I mean, it's not like they could use teeny tiny little laser printed fonts and they had an unlimited supply of paper and they could just whip these things out.

It's it's it's not quite the same thing. We can we can do a whole lot more than they could do technologically at that point. And so there is a there is a limitation size wise. None of the gospels are overly large, of course.

And so you have to choose what you're going to include and you have to choose how you're going to tell certain stories and and one writer can sure can choose to to be very detailed in the recording of a particular story.

But another writer might record the same story because it's very important, but it's not as central to his thesis as it is. Maybe Matthew's recording is not as central as it is to his thesis is to to Luke's.

And so he does something called telescoping. He will he you know, the old telescopes, you'd pull them out like the spyglasses that would be used on the old ships. Well, you could either pull it all the way out, give all the detail or you can push it all the way in and you can you can summarize in a much, much quicker way.

And so. I just don't understand this, this arbitrary assertion that, well, if only John tells the story, then it must not be historical because that that's what everybody says. That's what all the scholarship says is, well, you know, obviously John's not John's not historical because, well, first of all, he's written so much farther down the road.

You know why the assumption is made that he's written so much farther down the road? The assumption is made he's written so much further down the road because of his Christology, because of his view of Christ and the assertion is, well, Jesus certainly never said those things about himself because no one in the early church really believe the things because I don't believe those things say.

And so you've got to keep the circularity of this of this argumentation is is tremendous. It's it really is. So John's written way down there. John's not historical. John couldn't have known these things.

He's making all this stuff up. And if John's the only one. Who records the resurrection of Lazarus, then it could not possibly have happened. It is simply meant to be an allegory. It's meant to teach us something, it's maybe a parallel to to Jesus' resurrection, something along those lines, which Dr. Borg doesn't believe in anyways.