Shameless Papist Pretensions Followed by Foundational Issues with Mike Licona

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A tale of two programs today: I was going to briefly address a Roman Catholic on Twitter and that "briefly" became fifty minutes. But then I switched over to a review of an interview with Dr. Mike Licona for a total of about 1:40 for the program today.

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Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Oh, we've got to get the microphone up there somewhere. Somewhere. It would have worked.
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I bet you it would have worked down there. But that's probably not best. Better to have it there.
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Welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a beautiful Thursday. I'm sorry for all of you who are freezing to death.
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Weather Underground has a graphic up right now of this winter storm. Going way down south.
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Please don't do this in January when I'm driving around down there. Please, please appreciate that. But the jet stream is going just north of Arizona.
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So it is 66 degrees here, sunny, and it's basically for the rest of the week going to be 72 during the day and like 52 at night.
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So that's why it's Arizona. And there you go.
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So for all of you, I'm seeing people talking about, somebody in the channel was talking about their walk to the bus stop got them ice in their beard.
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You poor Calvinists. All you bearded
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Calvinists posting pictures of your frozen beards. I don't know,
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I think there's something funny about that. Anyway, welcome to the program today. I'm going to spend the bulk of our time looking at some comments made by Dr.
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Michael Lycona after the presentation of his new book and discussion with certain
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New Testament scholars in light of the Andy Stanley situation.
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And again, it's not anything personal about Mike Lycona.
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It is the simple reality that there are a lot of people in this audience that don't realize you are in the minority.
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I am in the minority. And we are in the minority because of certain commitments that are ours that we need to be aware of.
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We need to recognize the cost of making those commitments and standing by our beliefs.
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But it puts us in the minority. There's no question about it. We'll be talking a little bit about that.
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I wanted to start off sometimes things happen right before the program and they're fresh on my mind so it's easier to talk about them.
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I have a feeling I'm going to be dusting off a lot of old stuff and spending a lot of time digging through YouTube and pulling up one set of videos that I had done.
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Well, when I first started doing YouTube videos I had this camera up above my desk.
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I've got a camera that's sort of like right there now. But this was way, way higher up. And it's looking down on me.
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My desk hasn't changed much since then, interestingly enough. But this was, I don't know. Well, yeah, but it still looks a lot pretty much the same.
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Same corner, same desk for that matter. We just tore it apart and sort of rebuilt it.
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Well, actually we got rid of that. We got rid of that. Anyway, I dug out some old, old videos where I had responded to a particular
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Roman Catholic on their insistence that Ignatius teaches the modern
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Roman Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice and transubstantiation and all the rest of this stuff.
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I did a series of videos going pretty in -depth into what
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Ignatius actually said, what the context was, what Gnosticism was. So, I just get the distinct feeling that 2017, at least through October, is going to bring back a lot of stuff from the 1990s.
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It won't bring my hair back, but it will bring back a lot of stuff from the 1990s.
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Some people are saying I'm already doing that with my sweaters.
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And I was not wearing, I wasn't wearing one of my sweaters when I came in today. But this was waiting for me.
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It was a gift from a listener, and I really like the very subtle colors.
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It goes with jeans really well. I'm wearing jeans, and it goes real well with it. So, thank you very much. So, some people think
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I'm definitely going back to the 90s with that. But, anyway, the reason
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I say this is I made just a couple of comments about Roman Catholicism on Twitter, and wow!
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I didn't realize I had so many Roman Catholics that follow my Twitter feed. One of the reasons for this is
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Roman Catholics are not 100 % certain what to do with me. When I'm not talking about Roman Catholicism, the fact of the matter is, if they would be really honest, they would be like the little old ladies that were sitting in the front row at the first debate
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I ever did with a Muslim. Now, I don't call it my first Muslim debate because I wasn't studying Islam yet, but I was defending the deity of Christ.
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It was against Hamza Abdul -Malik. 1999, Long Island. Still a fascinating video, especially the audience questions.
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And before the whole thing started, I don't know if it was
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Chris Arnzen that talked to them or I did. After that many years, you can be forgiven for forgetting exactly what the situation was, but I recognized them because I had done a debate against a
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Roman Catholic just a day or two earlier. And they were at that one, too.
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And I knew they were Roman Catholics, and so here they are sitting in the front row of my debate with a
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Muslim. And either I talked to them or Chris Arnzen did. I forget which one it was.
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But basically, what they said was, oh, we love James White. We love when he's defending the things we all commonly believe.
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And besides, we don't have people who do this kind of thing. So, the more honest -hearted
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Roman Catholics are not really certain what to do because when they hear us talking about Islam and stuff like that, they're like, wow,
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I wish more of our people did stuff like this in that straightforward a manner and stuff like that.
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And so they're really not certain what to do. I guess that there's been a lot of people that have followed on the
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Twitter feed for quite some time, but then you start addressing some of these issues, and man, all the same stuff that we have refuted over and over and over and over again over the years just gets recycled.
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And Twitter, of course, is the perfect place for pretentious papal bloviation because it's so easy to make claims on Twitter, but serious inquiry requires so much more than 140 characters.
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And, you know, if you go to aomin .org, go to the search box at the bottom that can search the blog.
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I'll bet you anything, let me take a look at it real quick here, I bet you can find this and I'm going to double -check it.
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This will give an example I think that will help you to understand why so much of the discussion of Roman Catholicism today is on such a surface level rather than being really serious.
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Older posts, okay. Now why in the world would that bring that up?
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Hmm. 2016. Why is any of that coming up?
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Hmm. Well, sometimes
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I wonder exactly how the search thing works. Maybe I could get
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Algo to pull it up. Let me try a different search.
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Let's try that. There is a...
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there should be Ah! Oh, oh!
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Boop! There were... Sippery in the Chair of Peter. There we go.
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Okay. April 11, 2000 is a date on this.
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what would you... if you search for Catholic legends that would pull it up.
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But this is a very, very, very, very lengthy article that goes into the issue of...
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if you've seen the debate with Father Peter Stravinskis and his use of Augustine, and Augustine saying, having appealed to the
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Pope the case is closed, etc., etc. The Sea of Peter has spoken, the case is closed, la, la, la.
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Take a look at this article, Catholic Legends. If you just look that up, it should come up.
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I don't know how long it is. It's certainly not short, and there are links, as I recall, to other articles in it.
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But it took days to write this thing, because you actually have to use books.
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You can't rely simply upon Google scholarship. This stuff, that 2000,
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I think, is probably right around when it was, but here you have historical information that demonstrates that an incredibly commonly used phrase amongst
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Roman Catholics where they assume that Augustine is on their side and saying,
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Rome has spoken, the case is closed. They use this knowing that their audience is going to hear it in an anachronistic, modern context, and that their audience has no earthly idea what the context of Augustine's conflict with Zosimus was, and Pelagianism, and all the rest of that stuff.
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To be honest with you, I don't even think Peter Stravinskis, when he used it, had any clue.
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Any idea. I doubt he had ever read Sermon 131, which is where it came from, what the context was, anything like that.
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As the scripture says, deceiving and being deceived. Here's someone who has deceived others because he himself has been deceived.
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That's the nature of deception. That's how it promulgates itself. And the internet is the perfect, perfect venue for the promulgation of deception and falsehood and error.
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Well, take a look at it and see why that doesn't fit with Twitter. It takes
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Well, remember what Doug Wilson said, that one lady up there at the university when everybody was attacking him and stuff like that, he very...
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If I said it, everybody would have said I was being extremely snarky. Doug Wilson was being snarky.
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But Doug Wilson gets away with snarky. Because he's a wordsmith. Remember what he said to her was because she kept interrupting him.
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He'd only get half a sentence, maybe a sentence out before she interrupted him. And eventually he says, I frequently have thoughts that require more than one sentence to express.
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Which was basically saying, and clearly you do not. But he got away with it.
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And especially when it comes to issues of church history, the incredibly complicated development of what has become the
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Roman Catholic Church today you cannot seriously engage that subject without seriously engaging history.
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And a lot of the resources that would be required to go in depth on these subjects, not electronically available.
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You still have to do things like interlibrary loans and use card catalogs and know how to bibliography mine.
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If you don't know what mining a bibliography is, you don't do research. That's all there is to it.
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You don't know what you're talking about. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you don't know what you're talking about if you're pretending to do serious research, especially in historical stuff.
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These issues have been addressed. I didn't bring them in here, but we make available through the bookstore some of the great works of the past.
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William Whitaker's book, The Disputations of Holy Scripture. But these things are not you're not going to find these on the shelves of 99 % of the
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Christian bookstores in America today because they don't sell. And for the majority of Catholic Answers -trained
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Catholic apologists, they think church history is theirs. And in the late 1980s when
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Catholic Answers was just getting up ahead of steam, and people like Scott Hahn and Jerry Matitix and Patrick Madrid and Carl Keating were going around the country doing debates with Calvary Chapel pastors who were getting rolled over, just run over, just left squashed on the ground, we were the ones,
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I was the one who put the brakes on that train by doing what had not been done to them before, and that is bring in the issue of church history.
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Because I firmly believe that Roman Catholics must dogmatically engage in anachronism.
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Now what is anachronism? Well, anachronism is reading history outside of its historical context, and hence reading either out of it matters that defined the truth in that day and that were vital for an understanding of what was actually being said in that day, or more often reading into it later developments that the people at that time could never have possibly understood, could not have even, they had no experience with it.
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And so, some of you saw on Facebook this week, I don't know if any of you saw, well I bet some of you did, there was a picture floating around of New York or Chicago or something in like 1919 or something, and it was saying, see if you can detect what doesn't belong.
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In other words, what is anachronistic in this? And somebody had photoshopped into, over on the left -hand side toward the top, up toward the horizon, up on one of the buildings was a pole with a
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McDonald's sign. Well, there was no McDonald's at that time, so that would be an anachronism.
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It fit in because we see McDonald's signs everywhere now, but there wouldn't have been any back then, because that would be an anachronism.
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And so, unfortunately, the Roman Catholic, because of the dogmatic teachings of the
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Church, and because of the overblown papal pretensions of Rome, must engage in anachronism.
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They simply cannot escape reading back into historical sources, concepts that were not present.
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Now, don't get me wrong, there are many Roman Catholic historians who recognize all of this, but they're called modernists.
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And you can provide all sorts of citations from Roman Catholic scholars demonstrating, for example, the sacramental system developed over hundreds of years, the priesthood developed over hundreds of years.
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You know, I have said over and over again, there's not a single person at the Council of Nicaea that believed dogmatically what a
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Roman Catholic must believe dogmatically today to be a Christian. Not a single one. And John Henry Cardinal Newman well knew this.
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This is why he developed the entire development hypothesis. He recognized that the early
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Church simply could not possibly be put into a position of believing the things that he was now being asked to believe as he had converted to Roman Catholicism.
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That there has been tremendous development over time. And the idea of, this is the apostolic faith, this is what the apostles delivered, it is historically fraudulent.
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It is absolutely indefensible. But it's repeated over and over again. And there is a very pretentious papist on Twitter.
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And hey, his nick is shamelesspapist.
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So that's his term. That's what he's chosen to call himself. Chris at shamelesspapist.
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And he put up a he saw I was discussing some things with some people, so he put up a
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JPEG, a graphic. And here's what it says.
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Regarding Purgatory, first off, Scripture is quite clear in Revelation 21 -27 that nothing unclean will enter
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Heaven. I stop there and go, absolutely true. That's why you must have the perfect, spotless righteousness of Jesus Christ as yours.
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The Romanist has a robe of righteousness made up of the righteousness of Christ, Mary, the saints, and their own suffering in Purgatory, undergoing what's called satispassio.
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Now, by the way, the vast majority of Roman Catholics have never even heard the phrase satispassio. Never even heard of it.
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Don't even know what it refers to. But it is a thoroughly valid, thoroughly documentable belief within Roman Catholic orthodoxy, at least it was, that your sufferings in Purgatory are propitiatory.
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They remove the stain of temporal sins that are upon the soul.
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That's why you have to be cleaned up. That's what Purgatory is all about. And so the righteousness that eventually you have before God is not the seamless robe of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, because the thesaurus meritorum, the treasury of merit.
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So you have Christ's excess merit, because he only had to shed one drop of blood.
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Since he bled copiously, there is this excess merit that comes into existence. And this is what begins the treasury of merit.
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But then Mary had all sorts of extra merit, too, because she didn't sin, so just how good she was because there's so much extra merit.
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And then any saint, any extra merit they have beyond what they need to enter directly into the presence of God that totally balances any stains of temporal sin upon their soul, that goes in there, too.
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And a withdrawal from the treasury of merit is called an indulgence. And so the
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Roman Catholic has this patchwork quilt of different kinds of righteousness. Just one of the many, many, many differences between the biblical doctrine of salvation and that of Roman Catholicism.
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So I continue on. If we die with even a most minor sin on our soul, like telling a lie, our souls are unclean.
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Now, the more accurate way of stating this is if we die with temporal punishments from venial sins upon our souls.
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The problem is, if you commit a mortal sin, then you lose the grace of justification and you will be lost.
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I don't think that's what the current Pope believes, but we're talking about historic Roman Catholic teaching at this point, not what the current
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Pope believes, but that raises all sorts of epistemological issues right there, because isn't what the current
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Pope believes definitional of what Rome is? It's a mess. It's a mess. We won't get into that right now.
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It's too complicated. Yet, would
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God reject us from heaven for all eternity because of this? Well, the answer would be yes.
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Nothing unclean will enter His presence. It must be a perfect righteousness. That's why it can only be the imputed righteousness of Christ, which you don't have in Roman Catholicism.
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That's why you have no peace in Roman Catholicism. That's why you're on the constant treadmill of sacramental forgiveness in Roman Catholicism. Or would we be refined by fire, as St.
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Peter writes in his first epistle, 1st chapter, 7th verse? Well, you know, when
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Roman Catholics start citing texts of Scripture, y 'alls might want to look at them. What's actually being said here, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith being more precious than gold, which is perishable even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
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There isn't anything in there about our suffering, our being cleansed.
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This is talking about our faith being more precious than gold, which is perishable even though tested by fire may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
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Talk about proof texting, talk about ignoring context, and talk about twisting even the words of Peter. And by the way,
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I would ask the Shameless Papist, that's his name, it's his Twitter name,
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I would ask the Shameless Papist, do you have an infallible interpretation of this text or is this just your personal opinion?
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Because you're eventually going to throw it at me, even though you've got absolutely no basis for doing it. Because the vast majority of Roman Catholic scholars and even apologists admit that at most there might be 7 verses, 7 verses that Rome has infallibly defined and there are many
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Roman Catholic scholars who would say, no, no, no, there are none. There are none. So, been around this gum stump a few times, know how it's going to work.
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He goes on to clarify further in 1 Peter 3, 18 -20 to clarify that purgatory is not a salvation issue but a justification one.
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Justification and salvation are not in the same realm? That's interesting.
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Well, where is this about, let's see, 3, 18, hmm.
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For Christ also died for sins once for all. That's hoppox. You have him re -presenting that sacrifice in an unbloody fashion over and over again and it perfects no one.
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Why don't you believe that, why don't you believe what hoppox means? Hoppox means once for all, one time, never to be repeated.
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Hmm. The just for the unjust so that he might bring us to God.
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It seems like he brings us to God. It's not earning merit that we then are able to access this grace, the sacraments of the church.
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Having been put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit in which he also went and made proclamation of the spirits now in prison.
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So this is purgatory? Where does Rome teach this? Where does Rome dogmatically define that the prison to which
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Jesus goes and makes proclamation is purgatory? If that's what you're saying it is.
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Because the only ones there who once were disobedient when the patience of God kept waiting the days of Noah during the construction of the ark of which a few that is a person brought safely through the water.
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This is a limited location and a limited audience. This is purgatory?
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Where has Rome defined this infallibly? I wonder. Certainly isn't what Peter had in mind. But there you go.
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He says purgatory is not a salvation issue but a justification one. Huh? Where's anything about in here?
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Hmm. Seems that when the shameless papist touches scripture he should be shamed for his abuse of scripture.
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But as we see in Luke 12 59 we won't get out until we pay every last penny.
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Luke 12 59 which is talking about forgiveness and why do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right?
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For while you are going with your opponent to appear before the magistrate on your way there make an effort to settle with him so that he may not drag you before the judge and the judge turn you over to the office and the office will throw you into prison
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I say to you that you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last cent. This is purgatory?
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The people listening to this would have gone oh he's talking about purgatory. No it has nothing to do with purgatory.
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Not even in the same galaxy as purgatory. But you see once you're a shameless papist what the scriptures originally meant to communicate is irrelevant.
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Rome has her dogmas unknown to the early church but she has her dogmas they develop over time and then once they've developed you look back at the scriptures and anything that you can fit into it and this is especially the case with all the
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Marian stuff oh man anything that can possibly be twisted to have something to do with Mary the woman in Revelation 12 or whatever else it might be it's going to get thrown in there.
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And that's the same thing here. Same thing here. And by the way you have nothing with which to pay this.
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If you think you have to pay things in purgatory. Again this takes us back to sadaspatio. And the suffering of a soul in purgatory is not going to avail anything before God.
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Because the condemnation of sin is death. And if you die as a sinner without the righteousness of Jesus Christ you are lost.
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Period. End of discussion. At least from a biblical perspective. But there's all the world difference between biblical
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Christianity and that which is taught by Roman Catholicism. So it goes on. Also, as you have repeatedly referenced the
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Council of Carthage's canon from 397 AD as being authoritative, you must then accept 2 Maccabees 1239 -46.
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No I do not. Interestingly enough when I referenced,
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I provided I took the time. Went into YouTube, got the URLs to the debate with Gary Machuda.
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I don't think, I'm not sure if the debate with Jerry Matitix might be on sermon audio?
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Okay, so I didn't track that one down because it's audio only. But we've done 2 debates on the
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Apocrypha. Oh, Vestigi?
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I rarely even include Vestigi in my thinking. Okay, so there's 3.
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We've done a number of debates on the Apocrypha. The one with Machuda I think is the clearest.
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And without a doubt it's fascinating to me. Cardinal Cajetan, who interviewed
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Martin Luther prior to his excommunication, the exurge
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Dominate, which by the way will probably be the next big, I would say after 1517, the next big
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Reformation year will be 2021. And that's when we'll celebrate the
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Diet of Worms. And something along those lines
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I would imagine. What's that? Anyway, just saw something on Twitter that distracted me.
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What was I talking about? Oh, Cardinal Cajetan. The man who interviewed Luther had written a commentary specifically denying the canonicity of the
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Apocryphal books. Now how could he get away with that? Because all through church history there had been 2 streams.
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And the more people knew about the Old Testament and the Jews, the more likely they were to reject the
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Apocryphal books. The more ignorant they were, the more likely they were to accept it. And so you've got big names.
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Jerome argues with Augustine over this issue. The Council of Carthage is a provincial council.
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It is not ecumenical. It is not binding. The Apocryphal books do not become dogmatically canon of the
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Roman Catholic Church until 1546. 1546. And that's going against popes such as Pope Gregory the
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Great that rejected the Apocryphal books as canon. Hmm. They won't talk about that kind of stuff because, you see, church history is so much messier than the papal pretensions make it out to be.
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So much messier than the papal pretensions make it out to be. But besides that, the second
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Maccabees passage is irrelevant. If you've read it, then you know that the sin that these men were guilty of was a mortal sin.
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It was idolatry. How is that relevant to purgatory? Purgatory does nothing for mortal sins.
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These men were idolaters. So even though it says that pious people prayed for their souls, what does that have to do with purgatory?
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See, you're so desperate to find things in church history that you don't realize that to meaningfully interact with historical sources, you have to be able to provide a foundation that in the context of those people, it could have possibly had this meaning.
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Rome doesn't care about that, and Rome hasn't cared about that for a long time. All you have to do is look at all the frauds and forgeries that Rome used to produce its own power.
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The donation of Constantine, the pseudo -Isidorean decretals. Long history of the use of fraudulent documents to prop up papal authority.
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And as I mentioned just a few weeks ago, the last time we did a debate with a Roman Catholic, a Roman Catholic attorney on Long Island on a
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Marian dogma, one of the Marian dogmas, he quoted a fraudulent citation from Augustine.
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It was a fake. Augustine never said it. But he quoted it.
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And that's right in the line of what Rome has been doing for a long, long time because she is such an innovator.
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There's something apostolic about these teachings. Not found in the teachings of the apostles. So they have to come up with another source.
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There you go. The second
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Maccabees passage, irrelevant. Here is the last paragraph. Purgatory is absolutely
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God's truth, which is why all of the early church fathers speak of it without being a reality without hesitation.
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Let me read that again. Purgatory is absolutely God's truth, which is why all of the early church fathers speak of it being a reality without hesitation.
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My immediate response was, all of them? Really? It reminds me of Tim Staples when he said every single early church father.
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I don't think he'd say this anymore. But back in the day, he did. Back when I was listening to him using a
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Sony Walkman. Well, it might not have even been a Sony. It might have been a Kmart Special. But literally, a cassette tape player in my jersey pocket on my bike.
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I remember I was out. Man, it doesn't even look the same anymore because that area has developed so much. I think
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I was out on Union Hills, Beardsley. I think it was even before the 101 went through.
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Yeah, they were just working on the 101. This was years ago. This was the 90s. This was like 94.
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I remember him saying that every early church father interpreted
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Matthew 16 -18 the same way. The only way to say that is that anyone who would say that has either never read any meaningful work on patristic interpretation of the
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Petrine passages, or they're just desperately dishonest, or they are wildly ignorant.
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It could be a mixture. Or just so zealous that they just are willing to go off on all sorts of wild tangents.
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But there you go. So I wrote back, what do you mean? Where did Ignatius ever talk about this?
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I've got to find this because this was just such a wonderful example of... Yeah, here it is.
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St. Ignatius said in his Letter to the Trollions that he would not be teaching profound doctrine.
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Well, that's nice. In the Letter to the Trollions, he also teaches about the deity of Christ, so I guess that's not a profound doctrine.
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So this is your way of getting around it. Oh, I made the claim that they all talked about it, but then when I'm challenged, well, okay, they didn't necessarily all talk about it, but this guy did.
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Or what about Origen? Well, yeah, Origen was a universalist and believed in the preexistence of the soul and all sorts of other weird and wild and wonderful stuff.
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You really want to go there? Anyway, this kind of stuff just fills the
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Internet. And you know what? It will always fill the
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Internet. It doesn't matter how many times it's refuted. By the nature of the
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Internet, it will always fill the Internet. It'll always be there. Especially when it comes to historical stuff, you've got to know where to look.
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There you go. Trying to look at some of the things here on Twitter.
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I'm not following really what was being said. Something tells me we're going to be doing even though we did the whole series on Sola Scriptura, even though we've talked about these things for years, we're going to be talking about them again.
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Because it's been a while. I said on Facebook over the weekend, 2017 is going to see a number of people become
38:09
Roman Catholics. Because whenever you discuss these things, you need to understand, we have false professors in the
38:20
Church. And when you discuss controversial issues like this, one of the results is false professors will embrace falsehood.
38:30
And I just remind you, if you go to Sermon Audio, look up a sermon I did a few years ago called The Blessings of Apostasy.
38:37
It's good when false professors leave true churches. Because either they need to repent and become a part of the true
38:45
Church, or they need to leave. And for some people, it's like, are you really saying that someone should go into...
38:57
Look, if you're lost, you're lost. Does it matter whether you're an atheist lost or religiously lost?
39:03
I realize that when you discuss these things, it raises issues that will cause people to make decisions, and if they don't have the root within themselves, as Jesus said, if they're one of those...
39:20
The words hit the shallow... The message of the gospel hits the shallow soil, and there's sudden growth, there's no root, no fruit.
39:33
And religiously deceived people will make false choices, yes. And as a result, there are going to be people that are going to become
39:41
Roman Catholics, as a result of all the discussion this year. There are others, and I said this on Facebook too, and I need to emphasize this, there are only a certain number of good reasons to not be a
39:55
Roman Catholic. They have to be truthful reasons. They have to be sound reasons.
40:02
And I'll be the first one to say the majority of people do not have the proper reasons for not being
40:08
Roman Catholics. If you're a jack -chick -style anti -Catholic, you believe anything that Alberto said type of a person, that's not me!
40:25
That's not where I'm coming from. That's not even close. You need to have the proper reasons.
40:34
You know, when people contact me and say, you know, I'm thinking about leaving the Roman Catholic Church, one of the first things that I'm concerned to find out, is it because you've embraced the gospel?
40:43
Because if it's not, that's the first thing that needs to be addressed!
40:50
And so, there are going to be some that are going to be confirmed in their bias, their prejudice, their bigotry.
40:57
And they're going to continue on. They will not even listen to what
41:04
Roman Catholics are saying. They will not even, you know, I think one of the most important contributions we've made to this field is that when we engage in these debates, look,
41:14
I'm taking on the best people we can find! And they have just as much time as I do. Both sides will be stated.
41:22
And no one with an iota of honesty is going to say that I just simply talk over folks and ignore what they're saying.
41:29
I engage their arguments. That's why the cross -examination period is so important. And so, when, for example, you know, one of the topics that I'm going to be addressing a couple of times this year,
41:46
I think it's my topic at G3, I'd have to check. And I'm pretty certain it's related to my topic in Wittenberg in May.
41:59
Is the Biblical doctrine of the Atonement as the strongest argument against the
42:05
Roman Catholic concept of the Mass as a perpetuatory sacrifice? But do you know how many non -Roman
42:12
Catholics have any idea whatsoever what Rome actually teaches about the subject of the
42:19
Mass? How it's perpetuatory, what re -presentation means, the unbloody sacrifice, the arguments that Scott Hahn and others have put forward, the
42:32
Fourth Cup, and all the rest of this kind of stuff that Jack Chick never dealt with and couldn't deal with.
42:41
If you're one of those folks, you're in danger because you are susceptible to the best that Rome has to offer in refutation.
42:49
They love you. If you read Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating, that's what it's aimed at, is that kind of anti -Catholic rhetoric.
43:01
And you can't blame him. I mean, that's mostly what he'd be running into. Sadly, he wasn't running into a whole lot of folks who had been reading the
43:08
Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin and hence had a meaningful theological perspective to present.
43:16
But the third group, hopefully made up primarily of the people in this audience who are believers, this year is going to result in your having a accurate understanding, an accurate understanding of what
43:34
Rome teaches and why it's in error. And the result of that is that you will be even more encouraged to seek out
43:45
Roman Catholic friends and family and engage them and present the gospel that brings true peace, because Rome's gospel cannot bring peace.
44:00
That was the thesis of a book I wrote a long time ago. It's still out there, thankfully. It's still in print.
44:06
Roman Catholic Controversy. And if you haven't read it, you know, it's not huge.
44:14
It's only 260, 270 some odd pages long. I hope you get hold of it, and it might be good reading for this time of this year.
44:26
It might be very helpful. I did not expect to spend 45 minutes on that topic.
44:32
I was going to do just a brief little thing. Apologize for that.
44:40
But, I still need to get to this, because I said I was going to do it. Have you found anything to queue up?
44:48
Should we need to queue something up? You might want to do that. Not at the moment. Okay, good.
45:00
I'm going to try to work through this. If we need to take a brief break for a few minutes, I hope you don't mind.
45:08
We used to. Is that the real Sky Man in channel?
45:15
Maybe he heard we were talking about Romanism. The world is coming to an end. Yes, I know.
45:23
But, look, he can't resist this topic. Maybe he was listening in or something. I think he's there just to provide patristic citations for everything.
45:34
Because he's got them all queued up and ready to go. He's the machine gun of patristic citations.
45:42
I want to now shift gears.
45:51
Just by the way, Shameless Papist, after all of what I just said, just tweeted,
45:57
The truth is always stronger than lies. His brand of Christianity cannot stand in light of history.
46:04
Well, there you go. That's really the essence of the pretentious papist.
46:18
They really believe it. But they're zealots. I never find them to be the ones that take the time to read the other side.
46:28
And to approach it in a balanced perspective. By the way, a balanced perspective includes honestly recognizing that the early
46:42
Church Fathers were the early Church Fathers. They were not Reformed Baptists.
46:48
They were not Presbyterians. They were not Methodists. They were not Roman Catholics.
46:54
They were what they were. I think one of the great advantages that I have, for example, in teaching
47:02
Church history, is we can look at Church history with all of its warts and all of its gems, its gold, silver, wood, hay, and straw.
47:14
And just let it be what it is. Because I don't have any dogmatic pretensions that every person who wrote in the early
47:25
Church represented God's truth. Any more than if 2 ,000 years from now someone digs up the local
47:31
Berean Christian bookstore, what they're going to dig up there is actually representative of Biblical Christianity.
47:38
Can you imagine 2 ,000 years from now they're going to think Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn were the primary theological factors in modern day
47:46
Christianity? Well, no, they're not. But that's what it would look like to them.
47:54
I can look at the early Church and recognize it for exactly what it was. And the
48:02
Roman Catholic can't do that. That's why I'll always have the advantage. I will always have the advantage. Because the
48:08
Roman Catholic dogmatically is stuck with a viewpoint of the early
48:14
Church that is just simply not defensible.
48:19
In cross -examination, it's perfectly defensible in Twitter. But that's only because of the nature of the venue, not because of anything else.
48:28
That's why you've got to have cross -examination. Anyway, let's...what?
48:36
No. I'm about to shift gears. No, no, no. Once you've got it cut up and we can do things like that, there you go.
48:49
So, I don't remember when this was recorded. You've mentioned that arguments from Hyslop's to Babylon's book have been refuted ad nauseum.
49:02
Who would you cite? Thanks. Well, almost any modern historian. Interesting enough, even a guy named
49:09
Woodrow that popularized a lot of Hyslop's arguments, he put out a book based on Hyslop's stuff and then he had the integrity to refute his own book and to recognize, man, there's just no basis for this stuff.
49:25
It's pure garbage. But there's a lot of folks, a lot of the bigoted anti -Roman
49:31
Catholic folks, and they say that about me too, but if they can't tell the difference between me and Jack Chick, what can
49:37
I say? You can't reason with someone like that. They will really use
49:43
Hyslop a lot, but Hyslop is just horrific on every level.
49:51
Let's get to this interview that took place at the
49:59
Evangelical Theological Society with Mike Licona. Why do this?
50:06
Why shift gears? It would be a whole lot easier for me to just go with the flow and buddy up, network, doing programs like this where I discuss
50:31
Roman Catholicism and then discuss this issue. That's why our ministry will always be small. It will always be small.
50:41
Because these folks control the big apologetic conferences and things like that.
50:48
That's why you've never seen me at one. And you won't. But it is necessary to address these issues if we're going to be, here's that word again, consistent.
51:05
Because we have discussed Andy Stanley's statements, and people have found them so strange and so odd.
51:16
How can Andy Stanley say that Christianity was true before there was a Bible? How can he even define
51:23
Christianity? What's he talking about? How can you say that as long as the
51:29
Resurrection is true, then nothing else really matters? The Bible can have errors in it and we don't have to worry about what's in the
51:37
Old Testament and even right before Christmas. It doesn't really matter how the guy who predicted his own death, burial, resurrection came into the world.
51:47
That doesn't really matter as long as that's what happened. It's this resurrection is it type mentality.
51:56
And people are like, but what's the significance of the Resurrection? What's the meaning of the Resurrection? That's all dependent upon Scripture.
52:03
The prophetic fulfillment. This is not how the early church viewed these things. Where is he getting all this stuff? He's getting this stuff from scholarship.
52:11
Now he may not be as good at expressing it as other people, but you're going to hear
52:17
Mike Licona say the same things here. And so he's getting this from the
52:24
William Lane Craig minimalist apologetic approach, mere
52:30
Christianity camp, Mike Licona, Realm, Dr.
52:39
Turek, so on and so forth. This is where they're coming from. And none of them are Reformed. None of this is coming from the
52:44
Reformed camp at all. It's all coming from that perspective.
52:52
And as I said, it depends on how you define majorities and minorities and things like that, but this is the majority view of the academy.
53:05
Well, what's the academy? Well, it's sort of hard to define too, isn't it? But the reality is that to get a place at the table in the academy, there are certain,
53:21
I believe, compromises you have to make. There are certain doctrines that even if you profess to believe them, you have to do so with a wink and a nod.
53:33
Inerrancy is one of them. You certainly are going to have very strange looks from the academy if you hold the viewpoints that I have put in print in the books that I have written over the years.
53:49
That's why I don't even look to have a place there. I believe the function of Christian scholarship is to edify the church, not to edify the academy.
53:59
That's self -edification. That's not going to work. I don't even look for it.
54:05
People attack me all the time for that. It's like, you know what? My perspective, if I am using the best of the gifts
54:15
God has given to me to do Christian scholarship as ministry, then
54:23
I will allow my Lord and time to be the judge of those things.
54:29
You can dislike where I went to school. You can dislike the choices I've made as to where I teach and where I don't teach, what
54:36
I pursue and what I don't pursue. Fine. I stand before my
54:42
Lord to be judged by those things and I believe that fundamentally, in the long run, it is the service you do to the church that is going to really determine the eternal value of the things that you've done.
55:01
So take that or leave it. So why address Michael Icona? Because Michael Icona says in this interview the very things that Andy Stanley said, but in the context of the
55:13
Evangelical Theological Society. And you say, well, have you ever been to ETS?
55:18
Yeah, once. I presented a paper there on Greg Stafford. It was a really disheartening experience.
55:25
Well, it is interesting. The Skyman's in channel. Is he still there? Let me look here.
55:34
Yeah, Skyman's still there. Skyman was at ETS the same year
55:40
I was. Was that 98? I think it was 1998, if I recall correctly. And I had two really positive experiences there.
55:48
One of them was standing at the NET table discussing the
55:59
Carmen Christi with Dan Wallace for about an hour. And neither one of us had...
56:06
we didn't even have to look at the text. We both had it memorized. We were discussing it in Greek. It was fun. It was grand.
56:12
Because we disagree on a particular element of the understanding of the
56:20
Carmen Christi. And I eventually wrote an article for the
56:27
CRI Journal, where I represented Dan's position and sent him the stuff to make sure that I was representing him accurately in my comments.
56:38
The other positive experience was with Skyman. We came in late to one of the plenary sessions, and Dr.
56:55
Roger Nicole was speaking. Well, no, he wasn't speaking. They had a panel.
57:01
I think this was the 50th anniversary year of the founding of ETS, if I recall correctly.
57:10
And right as Skyman and I sat down toward the back, this woman gets up, because they're asking questions to this panel.
57:20
They're all founding members of ETS. And this woman gets up and says,
57:26
Why did you put the Bible alone in the Statement of Faith?
57:33
And Dr. Nicole, already elderly at that time, sort of with the hunch of age, struggles a little bit to get out of his chair and sort of shuffles up to the podium and just leans over.
57:54
And all he said was, Because we didn't want any Roman Catholics in the group. And then he shuffles back to his seat.
58:04
And there are two people! There are two people in the audience! Yeah! All right!
58:11
And it's me and Skyman. And everybody's turning around and looking at us because they're scandalized by it.
58:25
And we're like, yeah! Go! They looked at us like we had three heads.
58:34
We were just... Yeah. That's one
58:39
I will never... Yes, yes, yes. I know. He's laughing, too. I will never forget that.
58:44
That was so much fun. I appreciate that, David. That was... I'm glad you remember that, too, because that was awesome.
58:51
But to be honest with you, other than that, my experience at ETS was just so disappointing.
58:58
Because what I did not see, what I did not see was an attitude of a servant's heart toward the
59:06
Church. What I saw, which I've seen way too many times, was the attitude, we are the enlightened scholars, the
59:21
Church of the benighted people. We will guide you into truth. I don't see a position of Christian scholar in the
59:30
New Testament. That's not... Again, if you do not use your scholarship as a servant of the
59:40
Church, why are you doing it? What is it going to matter in eternity? What's it going to matter?
59:47
Makes you wonder. So with that background, this took place at ETS.
59:57
And again, the book which we have discussed before is...
01:00:05
look, I haven't gotten it yet. I got it on pre -order, I hope, or will soon have it on pre -order.
01:00:12
I'm going to read it and I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to agree with 90 % of it.
01:00:21
I am. And not ex post facto.
01:00:26
The nice thing here is, we have the synoptic series, at least most of it, on Sermon Audio from the
01:00:39
Phoenix Forum Baptist Church. I taught on the synoptics for at least a decade. Now, that wasn't consistent, because I do a lot of traveling these days.
01:00:46
But for 10 years, I was teaching on the synoptic
01:00:52
Gospels. One of the examples that Laikona is going to use here, of compression...
01:00:59
Everyone of you in the audience that has listened to my debate with Shabir Ali, or listened to the presentation
01:01:11
I made at G3 two years ago, knows that his term, compression, is my term, telescoping.
01:01:20
Compression, telescoping, same thing. He's going to talk about Jairus' daughter. And that came up in the debate with Shabir Ali.
01:01:29
I just taught on it at PRBC. All the stuff that is just,
01:01:34
I think, basic fundamental things to understand in regards especially to the synoptic
01:01:41
Gospels. The fact that each of the authors has to have the freedom to express the message to their audience.
01:01:48
In their language, they get to make the determinations as to how much time they're going to spend on any one story.
01:01:55
Matthew made the determination to spend much less time on the healing of Jairus' daughter than Mark did.
01:02:00
One -third. And so he compresses. He telescopes. I agree a thousand percent.
01:02:08
So, I have a feeling Laikona's big thing is, well, there was a genre of Roman biography at this time period.
01:02:21
And the Gospels fit into this genre in a sense. And that they can give us some examples of what authors were free to do without being called liars in that day.
01:02:34
You go back the first few weeks of my presentation. Look, folks, I'm a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary.
01:02:42
Do you know what it's like to go through Fuller believing in inerrancy? Well, I don't even know if you can today. But in the 1980s, that's when
01:02:50
I did it. And so I was hit upside the head with all this stuff.
01:02:55
I remember the night in New Testament in Nt1 or Nt2, I forget which one it was, but Nt1 I would assume.
01:03:03
I remember the night where we dealt with Jairus' daughter. And I was not given the answer from a believing perspective in that class.
01:03:20
I had to deal with these things on my own. Even in that class, the teacher was way to my left.
01:03:27
And so what you would hear in those classes was the tension in the text. Well, that's what you're going to hear from Mike Licona.
01:03:35
The tension in the text. And see, the idea is, well, you're really honoring the text when you allow the tension to remain.
01:03:43
Harmonizing is a fake, fraudulent way of getting around the tension in the text.
01:03:50
That's nothing new here. Nothing new here. And so the 10 % disagreement,
01:03:56
I have a feeling. I haven't read the book yet, but I'm just predicting. The 10 % disagreement is going to be basically the fact that Mike Licona is going to say, you know what?
01:04:04
There are places in the Gospels where we cannot harmonize it. It is in conflict with itself. There is a tension in the text.
01:04:12
Which is a nice way of saying there are errors, but I'm still going to believe in inerrancy. Well, I think
01:04:20
Mike Licona should stop worrying about because, look, he teaches at Houston Baptist.
01:04:26
They don't care about this. He should stop worrying about the term and just come out and say, you know what? I've come to the conclusion not only is inerrancy not the right word to use, but I just don't believe it.
01:04:38
Because he keeps saying, well, I don't have trouble with the Chicago Statement. Yes, you do. Come on. Be honest,
01:04:43
Mike. You do. The stuff that you present on Mark, you really think,
01:04:50
I mean, it's pretty obvious Norman Geisler doesn't take it that way, but you really think Sproul and these others who were a part of writing the
01:04:57
Chicago Statement, that they would go, yeah, that's cool. Yeah. No. Not going to happen. So all of that to say that what we're going to listen to, it just so happens that Mike Licona is the one saying this.
01:05:12
We could have listened to a half a dozen other people. It's not a personal thing. I've never met the man.
01:05:20
I appreciate the work he's done on the resurrection. I appreciate much of what he's done. But we have fundamental foundational differences in our approach to apologetics and our approach to Scripture.
01:05:32
And it will determine how we end up handling these things. And I admit,
01:05:39
I'm the one in the minority, not just because of my sweaters. I'm the one in the minority because there is...
01:05:47
The Academy does not hold to the high view of Scripture that I do.
01:05:55
They just don't. And if you hold to that, like I said, don't wait too long for your engraved invitation to a seat at the table, because you're not going to get it.
01:06:10
Time -wise, I wasn't going to do this, but time -wise, I'm going to speed it up. Sorry. It makes everybody sound smarter anyways.
01:06:17
But just for time -wise, let's dive in here. An explicit chronology. In some cases, you have things that seem to imply a certain chronology, but you can kind of squeeze out of it.
01:06:31
And we would call that implicit chronology.
01:06:36
And then the other would be a floating chronology. And this would be like passages in the Gospel of Luke, where Luke says, on a certain day
01:06:46
Jesus did this, or on one of the Sabbaths Jesus did this. Well, that's a floating chronology. He's not really connecting that to any particular time.
01:06:54
It's like an orphaned text that he just puts in there at some point. So, I think where Blomberg and I disagree,
01:07:00
I see explicit chronology that is intention. For example, in Mark and in Matthew, you've got the woman anointing
01:07:06
Jesus two days before Passover, whereas in John, it's six days before the Passover. And what I see
01:07:12
Blomberg doing is he'll make suggestions to try to get out of the tension there, the chronological tension.
01:07:20
Now, did you catch that? To get out of the chronological tension. This is the big thing now, is you need to allow the chronological tension to exist.
01:07:31
Now, let me just finish up the clip and I'll point something out. Now, remember, he used a bit of a stretch in regards to my harmonization of Mark, which comes from inside Mark.
01:07:54
From their perspective, harmonization is a stretch. You need to allow the tensions to exist.
01:08:00
In other words, you need to admit that there are errors. Even if that means convicting the author of contradicting himself, even when the author provides a way out of that that does not require special pleading.
01:08:17
But that's just where we had our disagreements on a couple of things like that. Like the day and time of Jesus' crucifixion, that was a major contention in this panel discussion.
01:08:25
The date and time of Jesus' crucifixion, major contention. Why? Because that is sort of a touchstone.
01:08:34
If you buy into the John changes the date and time to make a theological point about the
01:08:41
Passover lamb type stuff, then that's clear indication that you are willing to have a view of Scripture where the statements of the writers of Scripture themselves can be simply untrue.
01:08:56
You are now put in the position of determining what's true and what's untrue in Scripture. Again, years ago at the well,
01:09:05
I've done the presentation at least twice publicly. One at the Jeremiah Cry thing in New York. The other one in St.
01:09:12
Charles. But I've gone through Bart Ehrman's argument on this. And I make a presentation again, it's not my presentation.
01:09:22
It's basically what A .T. Robertson said 100 years ago in his Harmony of the Gospels. But it makes absolutely perfect sense.
01:09:29
And I've never heard any of these people who continue to talk about these temporal contradictions deal with the reality of John's purpose and the fact that the
01:09:42
Passover is not a single day. It is a multi -day celebration. And that these alleged contradictions, if you just take that in consideration why they won't take it into consideration?
01:09:54
I don't know. They have their reasons. But when you take it into consideration it's not even an issue.
01:10:03
We continue on. I guess someone had muted my computer so I have to start it all over again.
01:10:16
I don't know who did that. I don't know why they would do that. But they did. Alright, Richard here asks if you ever discover a gospel author or authors made a substantial historical error would you maintain your faith?
01:10:35
Oh, absolutely, Richard. And here's why. My faith in the
01:10:41
Christian message is not based on the gospels being inerrant or even divinely inspired.
01:10:47
I believe they're inerrant, I believe they're divinely inspired, but— Now, I'll be honest with you. When he says,
01:10:54
I believe they're inerrant I believe they're divinely inspired and then redefines what all that means from my perspective
01:11:00
I just wish he would come up with other language that is more consistent with the liberal perspective that he's presenting.
01:11:10
Because he is presenting a liberal perspective. So I don't know what language he wants to use. But it doesn't mean what we mean and it doesn't mean what the people who have written on this subject for centuries have meant.
01:11:23
So let's use a different language. Faith in the truth of Christianity, my belief that it's true, is based on the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.
01:11:32
Okay, now here's where the Andy Stanley stuff comes up. This is what Andy Stanley has been trying to say. Here's Mike Lycona saying what
01:11:40
Andy Stanley has been saying. It's game, set, match. Christianity's true.
01:11:45
So for example, most scholars today believe that Jesus died in April of 30 or April of 33.
01:11:52
We don't know which. It's like 50 -50. Maybe slightly favoring April of 30. Let's just call it 30 since it's a round number.
01:12:00
Well, if Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity was true as of April of 30. We know it's true as of then.
01:12:07
I don't know what that means. What do you mean Christianity was true? Can you define
01:12:13
Christianity for me? What is the message? What is the significance of the resurrection?
01:12:19
What's the purpose of the resurrection? What's the relationship of the resurrection to the life of Jesus Christ, to the birth of Jesus Christ, to the nature of Jesus Christ?
01:12:25
What is the relationship to the proclamation of the gospel? What is the relationship to Old Testament prophecy? You don't know any of this without scripture.
01:12:32
You don't have any of this without the apostolic proclamation. So what does it mean? I mean,
01:12:39
I guess it's a fail -safe fallback position to say, well, if Jesus rose from the dead, nothing else matters.
01:12:51
When did the apostles ever isolate the resurrection from the gospel, the incarnation, the life of Christ, the fulfillment of the purposes of God, going all the way back to Adam?
01:13:06
Where did they ever treat the resurrection as this isolated historical thing that in a moment we're going to see is not the result of divine revelation?
01:13:20
It's highly probable. It's the probability argument. Again, no apostle ever did this.
01:13:33
So why are we supposed to be doing it? Same question I asked Andy Stanley, but now
01:13:39
I ask it of Andy Stanley's source. How would that nullify the truth of the
01:14:20
Christian faith? Well, when you say there was a
01:14:25
Christian faith during that time period, what was it based upon? When we look at the
01:14:31
Book of Acts, we are given a window into that very time period that you're now talking about. And what was the early church doing?
01:14:40
What was the proclamation of the early church during that time period? What were the apostles doing?
01:14:49
Were they not proclaiming the gospel based upon the fulfillment of prophetic passages from the
01:14:56
Old Testament? The Old Testament, which is even less respected by redactionists and modernistic scholars than the
01:15:05
New? When you look at the preaching from the day of Pentecost onward, is it probabilities as you present it?
01:15:19
Or was it absolute fulfillment of a sure word from God?
01:15:27
Well, that doesn't work today. The Spirit of God has become weak. The gospel no longer changes hearts.
01:15:37
Question, I think, we all have to think about. If Jesus rose from the dead. And I think that we can show the resurrection of Jesus being highly probable just by the writings of Paul.
01:15:47
Did you catch that? This is all that this form of theology and apologetics can offer you.
01:15:59
Highly probable. And you see, this is considered epistemological humility in the academy today.
01:16:09
The Christian message is reduced to something that's highly probable. Could be wrong, but it's highly probable.
01:16:19
And again, I look at the apostles. I listen to their proclamation. I listen to Paul and the
01:16:25
Areopagus. He did not stand there and say, it is highly probable that someday
01:16:30
God will judge all mankind by this one that he raised from the dead. Highly probable.
01:16:37
Could be wrong. Don't know. Can I have a place at your table? When Paul proclaimed the resurrection of the dead, he knew that he was forever closing ever having a place at that table.
01:16:51
He knew that. He knew that. We can get back to the Jerusalem apostles. I don't think there's any error that could occur in the gospels that would nullify the truth of Christianity.
01:17:03
It would shake my faith in the historical reliability of the scriptures if it was a significant mistake, but it would not shake my faith in the truth of Christianity.
01:17:15
See, that kind of distinction, and I take the earpiece out because it pulls and I don't want to leave it in for a certain person in the chat channel.
01:17:25
And so I'm going to keep doing that. Thank you very much. Anyway, this distinction between the truth of Christianity and the scriptures themselves, it cannot be maintained.
01:17:40
This may sound good at an ETS meeting, but how do you make this work in the church?
01:17:48
How do you make this work in apologetics? How do you make this work in proclamation? Can you define the truth of Christianity without using scripture?
01:17:59
And the interviewer actually sort of goes there. Well, again, we get to it through Paul, right?
01:18:11
We get to it through Paul? So, you just...
01:18:18
The gospels are so late that they can be filled with errors that it's not going to make any difference. Because we can get to it through Paul.
01:18:27
Are you sure? Isn't it obvious that Paul is assuming the pre -existence of the apostolic tradition that is encoded in the gospels?
01:18:37
Like, when he answers questions like, not I, but the Lord, or not the
01:18:42
Lord, but I, what's he referring to there? He's referring to the very tradition that is written down for us in the gospels, which was the very lifeblood of the church at that time.
01:18:56
So, if you have errors in the gospels, they represent error that existed before Paul. And he's dependent upon that.
01:19:04
I'm sorry, but this is an escape hatch that leads into the furnace. It doesn't take anywhere.
01:19:13
Didn't anybody point that out at the scholarly meeting? What difference would it make?
01:19:19
Paul wrote his stuff, and the oral tradition that is embedded in it goes back pretty early.
01:19:26
The oral tradition that is the very basis of the gospels goes back just as early.
01:19:34
So, I don't see how anything is accomplished with this methodology.
01:19:40
We still could depend upon Paul. Paul's our ace. Gospels are like face cards.
01:19:46
You have kings like if John, son of Zebedee, or John the elder, a minor disciple of Jesus, if one of those were the disciples of the gospel of John, well then you've got a king.
01:19:57
He's an eyewitness. Mark and Luke, they don't claim to be eyewitnesses, but they got their information from eyewitnesses, so they're like queens.
01:20:06
But Paul is an ace because not only does he claim to be an eyewitness of the risen Jesus, but we can establish historically that he knew
01:20:14
Jesus' disciples. And we can also establish historically that he was teaching the same gospel message they were teaching.
01:20:21
So, when we hear Paul on the resurrection, we are likewise hearing the voice of the Jerusalem apostles.
01:20:26
So, that is why he's so valuable. Excuse me, but if you don't think that we are hearing the voice of Jerusalem apostles in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, wow, do we have a different understanding of the value, historically speaking, and spiritually speaking, of these gospels.
01:20:47
It all goes back to the same thing. If there's errors in the one, the idea that Paul is our ace.
01:20:57
You've got a queen there, you have a king over there, but I've got the ace. What also makes him an ace is that he was a skeptic, an enemy of the church when he had this experience of the risen
01:21:09
Jesus. It's just amazing what we have with Paul. He's a great source. So, because he was an opponent, that makes him an ace.
01:21:22
Okay, alright, well. Okay, we continue on with some other comments from the interview.
01:21:30
And it was almost like it was a Rosetta Stone that when you picked up and you read the gospels in view of these compositional devices, a lot of I would say most of the differences in them vanished.
01:21:40
So it was pretty cool to see that. Now, there are other ways of explaining the differences in the gospels.
01:21:46
I'm not one for strained harmonizations in order to make them compatible, but you can look at redaction and form criticism or oral tradition.
01:21:55
What's the term? Strained harmonization? You know, compatible. But you can look at redaction and form criticism gospels.
01:22:03
I'm not one for strained harmonizations in order to make them compatible. But you can look at redaction and form criticism, oral tradition, things like that.
01:22:12
So many different ways of explaining the differences. But my contention is, look, if ancient biographers used these literary devices, then we would be surprised if the gospel authors did not.
01:22:22
So when you read the gospels in view of these, it's amazing how many of the differences seem to be explained.
01:22:29
So, look, his position is that the gospels are using many of the same kinds of methodologies that other writings of the time period utilized.
01:22:45
That's not really new. And I don't really have a problem with that.
01:22:51
Unless it takes us to the point of saying, and what this actually means is that there are errors in the text description.
01:23:00
Which I think is what eventually it does get to. So we've got a question here from Tyson.
01:23:06
So getting back to the inerrancy, he says, if inerrancy isn't the right term, what alternative would you suggest?
01:23:13
Well, that's a good question. You know, for me, this is not a topic that just, it's not the one which
01:23:22
I have a whole lot of interest. Once I came to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead...
01:23:27
Now, stop here a second. I don't have a lot of interest? You're writing entire books that are directly relevant to it, but I really don't have a lot of interest?
01:23:38
Um, okay. That just, it's not the one which I have a whole lot of interest. Once I came to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead, then it's like everything else became peripheral.
01:23:49
You know? In terms of importance. It's like, okay, well, even if the gospels had errors, even if the
01:23:55
Bible's not inerrant, Christianity's still true. If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true, even if it were...
01:24:00
Are you hearing Andy Stanley now? Do you understand where Andy Stanley's getting this now? Um, he's not an innovator.
01:24:10
He's just following Mike Licona, and Gary Habermas, and William Lane Craig, and the whole group.
01:24:21
And some of you in this audience, you wonder, why is there division? Why is there this division between apologists?
01:24:30
Why can't we all just be on the same page? Because we have different theological understandings of what the gospel is.
01:24:40
And theology matters, and theology's going to determine your apologetics. That's all there is to it.
01:24:48
Um, that's why we have to address these things. Turned out that some things in the Bible aren't. Now, I'm not saying that some things in the
01:24:54
Bible aren't. I'm just saying, maybe we put a little too much emphasis on some of these other things. No, I think you are saying that.
01:24:59
You said that with Mark. Just go ahead and spread your wings. What do you have to gain by continuing to say that you're one thing when you're really not that thing?
01:25:12
Because those of us who are that thing recognize when you ain't that thing. Um, you know,
01:25:19
I like the way Gary Habermas has it. You've got your primary doctrines, you imagine a bullseye, and your gospel essentials.
01:25:24
What is really important? And there you have the deity, atoning death, resurrection of Jesus. Now notice, deity, atoning death, resurrection of Jesus.
01:25:33
I thought it was just resurrection. Uh, where do you get the deity of Christ from? Oh, you can get that from Paul.
01:25:40
You can get that from Paul. But, you don't get that from the gospels? This isn't something that takes a full, biblical, high view of scripture, the
01:25:51
Bible, to come up with these things? Of course it does. Um, and then you've got, you know, the ring that comes outside the bullseye.
01:25:58
And that, those are important, but they're not gospel essentials. So you look at those. And then you've got your tertiary doctrines.
01:26:03
Now, William Lane Craig puts inerrancy as a tertiary doctrine. I would put it there too, as a tertiary doctrine.
01:26:09
And he also puts original sin and a number of other things out there as tertiary doctrines.
01:26:15
Um, that can be abandoned and tweaked and changed, and that's going to impact your apologetic.
01:26:24
And that explains some of the major differences between the camps, the groups, and how we approach things.
01:26:33
You can still have historical reliability, and then it's going to depend on how you define inerrancy.
01:26:39
Right, and it seems that that's the issue. It's the definition. It's not necessarily what a new label should be, but it's about what it means.
01:26:45
That's what it boils down to. Yeah, but Kurt, you know, the question then becomes, like Mark Strauss, I've heard him say, in fact, it was in the paper, he just didn't say it, because he was abbreviating it.
01:26:55
But, and he has said it, Ben Witherington has said it, others have said it, that defining inerrancy, inerrancy dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
01:27:05
You know? So, you know, you've got the Chicago Statement, which is like eight pages, six or eight pages long.
01:27:10
I like the Chicago Statement. I don't really have any problems with it. Yes, you do. Come on.
01:27:15
You do. It's far too constricting. You just said it dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
01:27:22
But, it has to be qualified. You have to know what's being stated, because of the nature of the documents that you're dealing with.
01:27:30
But, you have a problem with it? It seems pretty obvious to all of us out here that you do. You've got the
01:27:35
Lausanne Covenant, which has just a basic one -liner. The Bible is without error in all that it teaches, or all that it affirms.
01:27:42
I'm fine with that, too. So, I like historically reliable. Look, I like divinely inspired.
01:27:50
I like infallible. I think those terms are fine. But, yeah, at the end of the day...
01:27:57
One other thing I'll put in there. I'm sorry to interrupt you. A couple of years ago, the ETS annual meeting was in Baltimore.
01:28:04
I think it was 2012, but it may have been 2013, 2014. It was interesting.
01:28:11
The theme of ETS this week is the Trinity. The theme of it back then in Baltimore was inerrancy.
01:28:17
That's when that book came out, Five Views of Inerrancy. So, they had the contributors on the panel. Four of the five were there.
01:28:24
The one, Kevin Van Hooser, couldn't make it. So, you had the four. Michael Byrd, Al Muller, I forgot who the other two were,
01:28:32
Peter Enns, John Frame, I think. What was the other? I know
01:28:38
Frame spoke at one of the ones recently. So, the question was asked, do you think inerrancy is the best term to use today?
01:28:48
Al Muller was the only one to say yes. Thank God for Al Muller. And the rest said, well,
01:28:54
I guess you could use it, but you would have to nuance it to mean something different than what we have typically thought of it to mean.
01:29:02
You could still use it. It still might have value, but it's got to have a little nuanced meaning to it than what we have had.
01:29:09
And that's what I think Walton and Sandy have said, basically. You can use it if you want, but there might be a better term. And they even said that there are no definitions of inerrancy today that really take into account what we know about oral culture and the way literature was written in the past.
01:29:24
And I agree with them. I do not agree with them by any stretch of the imagination. And that's going to be another part of the 10 % of the problem.
01:29:34
I had some other stuff here. I'm just going to jump down to one last thing because we're going way over time and it's getting late.
01:29:41
Let me see if this is...which one of these is the one I wanted to listen to.
01:29:46
Let's see. You might confuse him for J. Warner Wallace. His question is, what do you think of the possibility that some of the differences in the
01:29:52
Gospels could be similar to the differences one sees in crime Okay, I'll just play this one real quick because this is where he mentions the
01:29:59
Jairus thing. And I said that I was going to play that, so I'll just play it real quick. Oh, absolutely.
01:30:09
There's no question. That's probably going on at times. But there are many, many, many cases where that can't be the case.
01:30:17
For example, Jairus comes to Jesus at one point and Luke's Gospel says,
01:30:23
Please heal my daughter. She is about to die. And Jesus says, alright, let's go. And on the way, a woman with hemorrhaging, she's hemorrhaging, can't get rid of this bleeding complication.
01:30:33
She comes up and touches Jesus' robe and is healed. And then as they head to Jairus' home, some people come up from Jairus' home and they say, don't trouble the teacher anymore.
01:30:42
Your daughter has just died. When you read that same story in Matthew, though, Jairus comes to Jesus and says,
01:30:48
Lord, my daughter has just died. Please come and heal her. And there's no messenger that comes out later to inform
01:30:54
Jairus that his daughter has died, because she's already dead when Jairus comes. So which is it? Was she already dead or was she about to die? That cannot be explained in terms of various witnesses at an accident looking at different angles.
01:31:07
That is best explained by a compositional device, which would be compression and simplification.
01:31:13
So, compression and simplification. I agree. That's how I've explained it for years.
01:31:22
So, there's going to be places where there's going to be, obviously, agreement, but it's where the disagreement that is important.
01:31:30
There's one other thing I want, let me see if this is, there's only two, so one of these could be the right one. It's the belief that God does not know.
01:31:35
Okay, yeah. For some reason, a question was brought in on open theism. Check out the response.
01:31:42
It's the belief that God does not know the exhaustive future. Now, again, there are some nuances for different open theists, so that's just the way
01:31:50
I would say it. So, what is your view on that, or maybe just divine foreknowledge in general? It's a tough one.
01:31:57
I mean, I do believe in divine foreknowledge. I am not an open theist, but I wouldn't bet my life.
01:32:04
I wouldn't bet my retirement plan, as insignificant as it might be,
01:32:09
I wouldn't bet against open theism. Just because there's certain scriptures, you know, like God repented.
01:32:17
He repented? Things that would suggest that God didn't know certain things, or God changed his mind.
01:32:23
Oh, really? Well, if you reject open theism, how do you explain those kinds of verses? Well, you explain them by a compositional device, or you say that's a rhetorical device, or according to the genre, there's a kind of rhetoric that's going on here, or a figure of speech, you would do that.
01:32:38
So, you can get out of it that way, but a plain reading of the text, of course, would suggest open theism. I don't take open theism, but like I said,
01:32:45
I think open theists have some decent arguments, and I wouldn't bet against them. I'm not sure how to approach something like that.
01:33:05
What it fundamentally reveals is the non -existence of a confidence that the
01:33:15
Bible as a whole reveals a particular divine truth. The concept of open theism is so far removed from anything that anyone could seriously suggest the actual authors of scriptures believed.
01:33:33
It is so much a modern construct, so much a philosophically driven thing that requires you to abandon any meaningful concept of prophetic fulfillment, and to look at the authors of scripture as men of their time period with limited perspectives, etc.,
01:33:54
etc., that any New Testament scholar that can go,
01:34:01
I'm not going to bet against it. They've got their arguments. I don't go there.
01:34:07
This is this humility. There's a humility, understood humility, in saying,
01:34:16
I don't go there, but I could be wrong. Look, when you're talking about whether God didn't know 9 -11 was going to happen, go listen to my debate from up in Denver with where open theism leads you to, and it is pure rank heresy.
01:34:41
Pure rank heresy. If your view of scripture can't get you to the point where you can actually state that, then
01:34:50
I think you've minimalized stuff down to something way smaller than the
01:34:55
Christian faith, and that's troubling. That's troubling indeed. Well, anyway,
01:35:02
I had not intended to go this long today, but I had not intended to do the first 55 minutes on the subject of Roman Catholicism, but we did anyways.
01:35:13
Like I said, I have a feeling 2017 is going to have a lot of discussion of the papacy, and purgatory, and Marian dogmas, and going to be digging out the old notebooks on a lot of that stuff, because you know what?
01:35:32
Church history hasn't changed much over the past 20 years. Not much. So anyways,
01:35:38
I hope it was useful to you. Thanks for watching and or listening, or however you do it. Lord willing, and boy