Continuing the Lynn/Spong Discussion

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From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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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.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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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
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line.
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We continue on with, well, with your phone calls if you insist, at 877 -753 -3341, as well as the various topics we have been addressing for a while now.
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We have been listening to an interview between Barry Lynn and John Shelby Spong, and I also have some discussion from Mr.
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Martignoni, and I also took the time to look back while attempting to get my stereo system to play nicely with my computer, and it just won't.
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I've got it in the input thing, and it's just like, there's no line in thing on my thing. I don't know why. There's no line in.
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I don't, there's a place for it, it says it should be there, and it's not there. I'm sort of frustrated. I don't know where it went. But anyway, we'll find it.
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I'm not sure where we'll find it, but we'll find it. And while I was doing that, I happened to be listening around, and going way back, about, well, it is the eighth month now, about seven months or so ago, we had been at that time sort of struggling a little bit because of the audio quality, but we had been listening to some, sadly, in my opinion, the most popular, some of the comments, the most popular
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Islamic apologist in history, and I'm not talking about Shabir Ali.
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I'm not talking about Jamal Badawi. I'm talking, of course, about one, if you went online right now and started looking at Islamic bookstores, if you started looking at what's available on VHS and DVD and CD and everything else, still, by far, the most popular
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Islamic apologist, at least of our time, of course, was Ahmad Didat.
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And probably because Didat was a good speaker in the sense that he is entertaining to listen to, he's not monotone, he's not going to put you to sleep, you can tell that he has a sense of humor, sometimes he sounds like your old grandpa, but in reality, in comparison to others, just on a simple scholarly level,
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Didat was horrific, he was terrible, made error after error after error, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, his material is widely distributed.
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And therefore, if you want to be prepared to speak to an individual influenced by or a part of the
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Islamic religion, and though the number of Muslims in the United States is fairly small, we have listeners in the
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United Kingdom, we have listeners in Europe, and at the rate that your folks' birth rates are going, the
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Muslims aren't going to have to fight you for your countries, they're just going to be able to take over in about two generations, because you're having so few children, in some of your countries, there will be half as many of you in one generation as there are now.
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And so they're not even going to have to worry, they can just sort of, you know, start taking everything over, and that's all there's going to be to that.
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So anyway, the opportunity of, if you happen to be in the situation where you have the opportunity of, without losing your life, or maybe even at that, giving an answer for the faith that is within you, you need to be prepared to give that answer.
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And so we'll be listening to some more of the Didat material as well. Just going to be throwing out one of his alleged contradictions, just examining, because he's not the only one who makes this assertion.
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I found it somewhat ironic that the particular alleged contradiction we're going to look at today from Didat is a common area of misunderstanding.
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And in fact, Tim Warner, who I have been reviewing on my blog with the pristine restoration faith, whatever it is, progressive dispensationalist
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John Sixth stuff we've been dealing with, he pretty much makes the same kind of an error from a different perspective, but it's on the same subject.
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So we'll be taking a look at that as well on the program today. So let's start off with the one that has the best sound quality.
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That's how you organize your discussion, by what has the best sound quality.
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And the best sound quality happens to be the discussion between Barry Lynn and John Shelby Spong, mainly because, have you noticed, at least
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I can hear, you probably can't hear it over real audio. You could probably on the MP3, but I can hear Barry Lynn doing stuff over the microphone because the balance really wasn't overly good between Lynn and Spong.
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So I can sort of hear him getting ready to talk and stuff like that. I couldn't hear that while I was writing, but I can hear it now.
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It's interesting when you've got headsets on. But let's continue with their discussion. We're talking to the former bishop of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong, the author of the new book,
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The Sins of Scripture. You know, Bishop, you were talking about how you got a humanist award.
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Actually, we have one thing in common. I also, as you may or may not know, I'm among other things, a minister in the
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United Church of Christ. I was aware of you. I was worried that when I put my notes down that I had skipped the section because this this thing reads out only where the start is, not where your finish is.
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And I didn't check it. I apologize to all of you who are going, we already heard that. And now you're going to have to listen to the ye olde skip down the road.
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Because remember, he was a how can you believe in God type of a thing? Religious faith, the fastest growing organization in the
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Christian West. There we go. The Church Alumni Association, I think that's where he's from, would drop out of organized religion every day to no religion because it no longer makes sense.
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We still assume things in the way we tell the Christian story that modern people, if they think about it, can't assume the
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Earth is not the center of the universe. God does not live just above the sky. Human beings were not created perfect only to fall into sin.
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Yeah, we listened to it, listened to all that. OK, now I'm feeling really embarrassed because how far I didn't think
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I could have gotten that far. How far did I get? I didn't really do it until, first of all, the Protestant Reformation opened up a little bit for the
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Christ. And then secularism grew out of the Protestant Reformation. And that's when women started to make progress in this world.
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Well, how do you let me ask you this, Bishop. I mean, there's no doubt that when you look at the at the Christian Bible.
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OK, here we go. All right, take us off. What we got there. This is what I've been saying before. This is where evidently one of Barry Lynn's least favorite texts in the whole
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Bible is John 14, 6. And I have no idea who's he.
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I don't know who that is. Sorry. If you look at the way in which, in general, women are characterized in both the
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New and the Old Testament, this is an unhealthy view. There are exceptions and you can find them in both sets of chronicles.
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But the truth is, this is not a pro -feminist tract. And some of the
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Gospels that could have been included that might have been a little more friendly toward women, excluded.
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And you find them in obscure collections of other works. Now, let me stop right there. You know what he's referring to there.
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And you heard this at the beginning when he was talking about the canon of scripture. He's talking about the Gnostic Gospels. So remember,
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Barry Lynn thinks that he's just as inspired as Paul was. So, man, talk about a Plato canon. That's what he's dealing with.
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So how do you transcend that? How do you say, this is a question
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I'm asked a lot myself. I mean, how do you say, well, we'll accept certain principles of the Bible as true and accurate and a guide for the common good and a common life.
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But some of it, we just are going to have to get over. Get over.
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I guess that's Barry Lynn's way of saying to Christianity, get over that offensive stuff in the
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Bible. Just get over it. Get rid of it. That's an ordained minister speaking.
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So we all need to listen very carefully. Well, when I was writing The Sins of Scripture, I don't like to be just negative.
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So after I analyze all these dreadful texts of the Bible that we've used to hurt people, then
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I take a whole section of the final section of the book and try to say, OK, what is there about the
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Bible that is worthwhile? So what is there that's worthwhile in this thing?
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We need to spend some time trying to figure that out after I've ripped and shredded the whole thing. And that's when I start by saying it begins with a tribal mentality where God hates everybody that the tribe hates.
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But it doesn't stop there. You get into the prophets where you begin to get a concept of the love of God in Hosea that's really profound.
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Then you get a concept of human justice from the prophet Amos. As if this isn't in Moses.
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Talk about a complete mystery. But again, how do they do that? I know we need to understand where they're coming from.
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How can he say this with a straight face? Well, it's so real simple. There is no
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Moses. There is no Moses. See, you've got to understand from their perspective, scholarship, whatever in the world that is, has determined there is no
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Moses. So you can't look back at those. You might have had some prophets by those names, but Moses is clearly a heavily redacted work of many, many people much, much later.
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So that's why they can look at that. And if you find something in Hosea that you like, a redemptive kind of love, a forgiving kind of love, if you find it in Moses, you just simply say, well, it's coming from the same thing that really wasn't back there in Moses.
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And so you can create this artificial, well, you move from tribal God to now the prophets, blah, blah, blah type of thing, which is what you're hearing right now.
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And if that's not what you're used to hearing, as many evangelicals are not, then you might be going, what's he talking about?
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But once you embrace this kind of of liberal theology that is sadly prevalent and rarely challenged, though it is highly challengeable, then you're stuck with that.
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And in fact, I just in passing groaned this morning.
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I was working on my computer in the kitchen and there's a reason I had to sort of stay a little bit later today at the house.
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And the Today Show at the beginning had a discussion about how certain evangelical
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Christians believe that events in the Middle East right now are the sign of the approach of Armageddon.
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And I'm just rolling my eyes going, oh, no, what's this going to be about? And so guess who the primary guy, well, almost the only guy.
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Well, let's put it this way. They sort of interviewed, as far as having any meaning, two people.
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The evangelical Christian was John Hagee. Oh, yeah, there's
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Hagee, and he's talking about Israel and he's talking about, you know, Ezekiel 38 and 39, which used to be, you know,
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Russia's leading down all these Arab nations against Israel. And this could be the beginning of that and all that stuff.
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And then to have the opposite side, they came up with some liberal woman preacher someplace.
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It's just like, oh, yeah, that's OK. All right. That's good. There was no discussion whatsoever of other viewpoints outside of a really strange, dispensational, premillennial, pre -tribulational.
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I mean, just, you know, you can't blame them. I mean, most Christians can't keep the various eschatology straight.
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Certainly nobody at today's show can. And they are probably walking down a frozen food aisle like I have a few times.
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Have you ever found the Left Behind series in the frozen food aisle? I have. Seriously, at Safeway, over here at Safeway, if you go down the end cap of the frozen food aisle, there's almost always one of the
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Left Behind novels, and it's very cold there. I'm just not sure why in the world it's there.
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But if that's all they've ever run into, then that's what they figure it's all about.
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And they probably don't know that there are considerably less wild eyed viewpoints on eschatology than what you find in the frozen food aisle at Safeway.
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You get in the prophet Micah the idea that it's not how you worship, but how you live that really makes the difference.
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And then you finally get Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, where he says from the rising of the sun to its setting, my name shall be great among the
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Gentiles. That is, the tribal identity begins to break down and you begin to see all of humanity.
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And then you're able to come into the Christ story where he says, you've got to love your enemies. You've got to bless those who persecute.
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Now, you're listening to this and you're and you're going, well, at least he's not completely, you know, every page is ripping out of the
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Bible. Of course, he ends up with something about the size of Thomas Jefferson had. But still, and you're listening to this, but I'm listening to Barry Lynn breathing.
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And the reason I'm doing that is because I know that if it's possible,
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Barry Lynn is actually far as the left and Spong is. Remember that interview I did last year with that one prophecy fellow?
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And it was the one time that Dave Hunt's been on with me since our book came out and he didn't know he was going to be on with me and you could tell he was just as mad as a wet hand.
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And at the end of the interview, when the issue of of eternal security came up, the interviewer ended up actually being more or he was disappointed with Dave Hunt because he was more
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Arminian than Dave Hunt was. And I ended up being on his program and just he and I discussed it later on and had some interesting conversations about and things like that.
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But that's sort of what you got going on here. If you can believe it, Barry Lynn is actually farther out and wants to blast the
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Bible even more than Bishop John Shelby Spong. So that gives you some idea of the sort of the spectrum here.
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And you can have the earliest written writing disciple of Jesus, Paul, who says, once you get inside the
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Christ experience, you know that there is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, bond or free.
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That's a tremendous movement. And I think what we've done is to literalize the text in such a way that you can't see this dynamic, transcendent movement from tribal religion into universalism, from a punitive
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God into an ultimate God of love. And I look at the cross and I don't see it as the sacrifice that God makes to overcome the sin of the world.
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I see it as the picture of human life, so complete and so whole that he can give his life away, he can accept whatever abuse is placed upon him and he responds by loving.
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That's the portrait of the God that I see in Christ. And it's a now stop right there again for Spong, you have this this view of the atonement.
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If you can even you know, the term atonement really doesn't carry much meaning here. But but if mankind is just not fully human yet, then all the cross really does is show you how to be more fully human, say, and you understand that you may be going, how can anyone believe that?
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But you need to understand that that's where he's coming from at this particular point in time.
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So you can you can at least understand what he's saying. You need to learn. Everybody needs to learn this because I've seen
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I've seen a lot of conservative folks. They don't have this skill. They almost feel like they're somehow being disrespectful or or unfaithful to the truth.
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If you listen to someone speaking falsehood and you listen well enough to know why they're saying it, if you actually try to get inside their worldview and understand where they're coming from, well,
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I can't do that. I mean, that's just so wrong that I can't even listen to this and I can't I can't understand that. And there are some people who just shouldn't be listening to these people at all and should never be talking to these folks.
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But hopefully you're in minority and probably shouldn't be listening to this program if you are. But anyway, that's sort of the you need to hear what he's saying, why he's saying it and understand it.
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And his view of the atonement, we need to hear it. But then to be able to contrast that, of course, with what the scripture writers themselves had to say,
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I think makes sense in this world today. And it's a it's a portrait that is, in a sense, not it's not fully painted,
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I'd say and in the Bible, that is probably Christians made as we close the Bible, we act as if God hadn't spoken since the second
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Peter was written about one thirty five. You know, I find it very controversial when I'm to catch that catch that second
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Peter one thirty five. You know, what evidence do you have of that? Well, it's all redaction and critical thinking.
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And but, you know, you accept it and you'd call that scholarship and anything that disagrees that or would dare to question it is automatically not scholarship.
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Talking to some evangelical conservatives to suggest that God could still be speaking that that is almost as shocking as a position
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I might take in regard to gay rights or the separation of church and state. I wondered when
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I heard that. Think about for just a second. This man, this man tried to keep us from distributing my debate with him on homosexuality.
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And in that debate, he specifically claimed that he was inspired in the same way that Paul was.
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And he said Galatians was over the top and it wasn't canonical and blah, blah, blah. And I just I just have to wonder if maybe just maybe there is a flash in his mind of just a moment of that that most unpleasant experience on Long Island.
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I don't know. But I just had that strange feeling when I heard that. You see what you're what you're tapping into is not people's knowledge.
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You're tapping into their fear. Now, there's an enormous amount of insecurity in this world. You know, in my mother's lifetime, my mother died at 92 just a couple of years ago.
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But in her lifetime, she watched this world go from horse and buggy travel to space travel.
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That's a lot for one life to absorb. And we've gone from being isolated to being connected on the
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Internet. There's been an enormous making small of this world.
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And people are very anxious and very fearful. And all sorts of identity crises are going on.
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And I think that's why we're in a reactionary period. And I think we'll get through it because we always go through reactionary periods when enormous change takes place and it takes we can't process it all.
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We'll get through that. But in the meantime, we can do enormous damage. And I think the war in Iraq, which has overtones of another crusade against certainly does
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Muslim people of the world and the homophobic stuff that's going on in this country.
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Now, just hold on just a second. I'm sorry, but to try to to try to make a connection between the crusades and what's going on in the
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Middle East right now. Wow, what a massive reach that ignores so many factors, that's not even it.
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I mean, you just left you just left going, what to talk about a complete destruction of history there.
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Whoa. My constitution, which I really honor, my constitution has been amended a number of times and every amendment was to expand freedom for more people.
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If we can now take that constitution and use it to deny freedom and justice to a significant group of people, then we need to remember that yesterday that today's majority won't always be the same.
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Tomorrow's majority will make us the victims. Now, I assume he's referring, of course, there to the issue of defining marriage.
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And once again, once again, you have this is the the standard form of argumentation of the the radical left.
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Everybody knows what marriage has always been. Everybody knows the founders thought marriage was it's not even an issue.
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You can't debate it. There's no way to even argue this. And so what you do is instead of bearing the burden of proving your point, you phrase it like it was just phrased there.
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We we've always wanted to just expand freedom, expand freedom. And and so and it's just like, oh, my goodness.
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That's just sort of how how things work with these folks. Well, we don't need to hear the pretty guitar music, so.
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OK, we are back on Culture Shocks. This is Barry Lynn and my guest is former Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong.
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You may have read some of his other books like Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, his new book just out from Harper's San Francisco, The Sins of Scripture, exposing the
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Bible's texts of hate to reveal the God of love. And the idea of this book is that there's plenty to be found in the
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Bible, words that seem to be quite shocking, sexist, homophobic, anti -Semitic, but that maybe when one looks at the
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Bible entirely and looks at the other sources of of understanding what God's intentions are, maybe some of these sentences like, oh, no one comes to the father but by me.
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There you go. See, I knew we were getting to John 14, 6 eventually. He does not like that. And it is interesting to listen to them try to dance around this and find something around there that's that's worthwhile to them.
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Let's just face it. The exclusive claims of Christ are rejected by both these men who call themselves
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Christians is not just a statement of religious bigotry, but in fact, it opens up a broader conversation.
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Bishop, one of the things about the Bible and about thinking about Jesus, I was really appalled at the film
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The Passion of the Christ. And you're talking to somebody who goes to karate movies and wants to like them.
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I like the experience of films and I wanted to like it, but I couldn't for a number of reasons, including this rigid sense that the filmmaker
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Mel Gibson understood everything about the nature of what Christ looked like. Can you tell this is recorded before last week?
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How he suffered. The truth is, we don't in spite of all the historians searching for the so -called historical
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Jesus, we don't know a lot about this man, Jesus. We have snapshots of him in the
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Gospels that are found in the Bible, but without CNN and MSNBC and heaven help us, even the
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Fox News channel, we don't know nearly as much as some people assume we know about what this man said or how he conducted himself.
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Now, again, if you've listened to my debate with Barry Lynn, you've heard this before. One of the fundamental approaches is to say, well, you know what?
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While you're wrong in what you say, the Bible says, in reality, most of us don't have a clue what the
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Bible is all about. We really don't know anything about Jesus. Most of the stuff you're reading in the New Testament isn't about Jesus in the first place.
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It's been made up. No one really knows. And see, once you can convince someone that they don't really know, that they don't really have a foundation to stand on, that they don't have any way of really addressing something, you can mute them.
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You can you can make them shut up and be quiet and accept multiple different perspectives if we just don't know enough to be able to say anything intelligently.
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And that's, in essence, what they're arguing here. Well, it's very true. The overwhelming probability, since it's not a single detail in the
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Gospels that describes any physical characteristic of Jesus, the overwhelming probability is he looked like a
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Middle Eastern Semitic man of today, which would mean he had brown skin and black hair. And he probably was not very tall, because the average height of a
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Semitic person in the first century is between 5 '5 and 5 '7, probably weighed between 120 and 140 pounds.
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He probably could not have entered into public places in the South where I grew up. Probably would have been considered a person of color.
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There goes the South again. All of that you need to understand. You mentioned snapshots, though,
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Barry, let me suggest another image, because I don't think I think that's where the problem comes. We think of the Bible as tape recordings of things
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Jesus said and photographs of what he actually did. I think we need to see Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as four portraits painted by Jewish artists trying to interpret the power that they found present in this man,
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Jesus. And you read a portrait very differently from the way you read a photograph. You stand in front of that portrait and you try to understand what the author of the work or the artist who is painting the canvas, what he saw in the character of the person he's trying to describe in paint.
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And that's a very different way. I think we've got to begin to learn to read the Bible in that kind of fashion.
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Now, just stop for a moment. And if you can cut out the application that he makes there.
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And what he said before, if you're just to take that section and say, is there something that can be something positive you can take out of the idea of a portrait?
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Sure, there is. I mean, we've been teaching through the Synoptic Gospels for quite some time at Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church.
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And when you do that, you have to wrestle with and deal with the fact there are differences between the
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Gospels and how they express things. And I've often mentioned the fact they have different audiences and therefore you're going to utilize different languages, not languages, language, terminology, means of communicating with your particular audience.
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And if you want to refer to that as a portrait, in other words, you have the author has the right to choose what kind of colors he's going to use and things like that.
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Nothing wrong with that in of itself. It's what they end up using that to do. And that is to get around any kind of offensive teaching on the part of Christ or any kind of ability to make a harmonious whole as to the teachings of Christ.
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You want to keep it so that you can just pick and choose what you want to believe about what Jesus said and then limit that and say, well, you know,
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I'm just I just want I like this. I'm not saying it's binding on you, but I happen to, you know, personally like Jesus was also a revolutionary.
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Jesus wasn't popular with the religious establishment of his day, and he certainly wasn't popular with the political establishment of his day.
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And he overcame barriers, you know, the barrier between the Jew and the Gentile. Jesus says things like, you've got to go into all the world where the
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Gentiles live and proclaim the love of God for all people. That's a radical statement.
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Certainly is a tribal identity. He talked with the woman by the well. He allowed
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Mary, the sister of Martha, to assume the stance of a rabbinic pupil, to sit at his feet and learn.
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And if you would just allow the Bible as a whole to speak for itself, these would be great indications of the fact that Christianity from its very inception was radically different in regards to its view of women.
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But you see, once you just chop it up in little pieces, then you just can point these things out. But then you get over to Paul, nasty
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Paul, Paul's mean to women. Well, wait a minute. Isn't Paul the one got quoted just a little bit ago?
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Where is no male or female Jew or Gentile or one? Hmm. That's so much for consistency.
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Those are things that you didn't do with women in the first century. He had female disciples. It's amazing to me how the church has trouble dealing with that.
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But they're in the book and you can't get rid of them. They become visible only when Jesus is arrested because all the men have forsaken him and fled.
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Not quite. They're not invisible. There is a reference specifically to them providing support for the disciples and their ministry that occurs before then.
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But there's no question that they are not in the forefront of the gospel writing, but they are referenced and they are there to the women.
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But if you read Matthew, Mark and Luke carefully, you'll discover that all three say that these women have followed him all the way from Galilee.
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They've always been there. They were just invisible. Again, not completely invisible.
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That's that this actually gets into an interesting section. I want to hold off on for the for the a future episode, shall we say, because you start getting into Lynn wanting him to make statements about whether there was relationship between one of these women and Jesus and the
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Da Vinci stuff and all the rest of that stuff. So we will continue with that and we come back. Get on your your linguistic filter ears because it's not all that easy to listen to to Amed Ddot, but we're going to take a shot at it and listen to one of his alleged biblical contradictions.
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We'll be right back. A man such a rare today, so many under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality, even more disturbing.
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Some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior. In their book,
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The Same Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the
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Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including
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Genesis, Leviticus and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law in a straightforward and loving manner.
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They appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for his people.
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Listening to various sundry things today, it's sometimes the only way that, well, certainly the only way we can do any debates with Ahmed Didat anymore.
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But, you know, we are doing others that demonstrate that we can do that with folks that are still with us.
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But like I said, it's been, I believe, I looked fairly closely, so I think
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I'm accurate about this, that the last time we dealt with Ahmed Didat was
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January 10th of this year. And that was a while back.
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And one of my problems is I'm looking at all these sound files and I'm not sure which ones are which and where I was in which ones.
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And it would be very, very, very, very difficult to sit there and listen to a dividing line and then listen to a bunch of sound files and go, oh,
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OK, this is here and that's there. And so we're just doing the best we can. And so I was listening to this particular discussion.
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And I ran across this, so I went ahead and queued up because, as I mentioned, if you've been reading the
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John Six series that I'm doing right now, and the last one, the last, just the last blog article I did on the John Six, I think it was number three, took about three hours to do that.
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Why? Well, part of it was just the writing. But then once I tried to post it,
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I kept getting XML parse errors, which had never happened before in my blogging software. And so a bunch of folks were looking at it and they were trying to find this unformed something or something or token and not well -formed token.
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I think that's what he was saying, like, oh, great. Some some geek somewhere has been making this language up anyway.
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It took quite a while to get up there. I had to cut and paste it and do it all in line. And it was it was a mess.
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But if you've been reading that series, which I have invested a lot of time in, then you saw a little statement and we haven't gotten to it yet.
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But one of the arguments that Warner presents is that Jesus doesn't save all those that are given to him.
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So we can't read John Six that way because of Judas. And so it is common for people to to, for some reason, assume that the context of John Six is the same as the context of John 17 at every point and John 18 at every point.
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And, you know, you can give them you can cut them some slack because some reform folks do tend to quote, I have not chosen you, but you've you've not chosen me, but I've chosen you.
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And that's in the context of discipleship and apostleship there. It's not in the context of anything else.
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And so people, you know, sometimes on both sides will just assume a context that is not actually there and as a result, either create alleged contradiction, which is what
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Didot is doing here, or they will say, see, we can't have a contradiction here because we believe the
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Bible's inspired inerrant. Therefore, we must be misunderstanding one of these two. What we're misunderstanding is that Jesus would not lose any of those that are given to him.
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OK, so that's the direction that Warner is going to be going. So we'll be taking a look at that in the blog.
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Now, the sound quality is not overly good here.
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And combine that with the fact that Ahmed Didot spoke in such a fashion. He was normally speak very quickly, very quickly.
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And some people struggle with that. And he spoke with a strong accent.
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And I have found that you can actually sort of overdo trying to listen to him.
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It's almost easier to almost sort of like relax your mind rather than trying to focus really hard.
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Eventually, once you listen to him enough, he's very easy to understand. But if you've not listened to him before, you can be a little bit on the some folks just can't can't do it.
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And if you're one of those folks, I apologize. I will try to somewhat give you an idea of what he's saying as we as we go along.
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But most folks are able to figure out what he's saying if they will just sort of allow it to allow it to go on.
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So let's let's listen to Ahmed Didot. I'm going to play the whole thing where he presents his contradiction.
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What I invite you to do is remember, if you do encounter an individual on at the gate at the airport, on the train, on the bus, at work, at school, and he is a
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Muslim who seeks to defend his faith, the chances are about 80 percent, at least in our country, that he's heard we're about to listen to or he has read
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Ahmed Didot stuff. And so you got to be prepared for this. I mean, at least that's one advantage to us when we're dealing with most groups.
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We can't really know exactly what apologetic material they're going to have been exposed to with quite as much confidence as we would this particular group.
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Ahmed Didot is the the most popular. So here it comes.
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Let's Rich is all set up with the headsets ready to do his his flip the switches, turn the knobs, try to clean it up as much as possible.
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So if it starts going, why are we just blame him because he's very easy to blame.
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So, all right, here we go. But the same John, in a chapter before he had written chapter 17, verse 12, he had written,
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OK, I got started in the wrong spot. I can't believe I did that. Let's try it again. Then from the
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New Testament, John chapter 18, verse nine, John saying, my people, which he spoke,
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Jesus spoke and in his words of those whom you gave me,
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I have lost none, none means not one.
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OK, John 18, nine is the reference that he's giving us. And what is John 18, nine?
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It is in the garden and it's right after the I am sayings. Who do you seek? Jesus and Nazarene.
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He answered, I am he. I go, I me. So if you seek me, let these go their way. They fall down, et cetera, et cetera.
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And when it says, if you're seeking me, let these go, John 18, nine to fulfill the word which he spoke of those whom you have given me,
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I lost not one. Now, if we were to stop right there and just ask ourselves the question, what does this tell us?
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John thinks about Jesus's words. Leaving it off for a second, what does this what's this formula to fulfill the word fulfill, play, play, rothay?
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That's the same language used by all the gospel writers when the New Testament is fulfilling the old.
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And so when Jesus does this, that fulfillment. Is being put in the exact same language, so.
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He's right, he's referring back, John 17, this is the words of Jesus of those whom you have given me, I lost not one now just keep one thing in mind.
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This is John 18. John 17 is before that. And if you're going to allege a contradiction.
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Then context is extremely vital. Keep that in mind. Let's continue listening. I'm sorry, I went interrupted.
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I sort of need to interrupt it in case you're not following it as far as the language goes, because it is difficult. Here we go.
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Zero. In John, in a chapter before he had written, chapter 17, verse 12, he had written, while I was with them, quoting
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Jesus in the world, I kept them in your name, in the name of God. Those whom you gave me,
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I have kept and none of them is lost. None. Same as the first one, none is lost, except for some of perdition.
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You know who Judas Iscariot, except one, none but one.
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The first one says none. The difference between none and one. OK, now
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I'm going to stop right there. I'm going to let him, I'm going to let him do his thing here so you can see how Didat functioned.
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But you need to hear what's being said here, because this is how Didat got away with most of this. He got away with really bad arguments because he was a showman.
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And the way he would present it and the almost mocking tone he would frequently use and the audience illustrations he would use helped him to get away with what are, in reality, lousy arguments.
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Because what he's done is he's inverted the two so that you've got 18 being quoted before 17.
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If you followed, for example, if I were to read Ahmed Didat's books and he says something in chapter three and he lays out a context and he gives a foundation and then chapter four, he says something else and he modifies that a little bit.
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If I start with chapter four and ignore chapter three, I can make it look like he's contradicting himself. That's what he's doing here. Because in John chapter 17, he's talking about those that have been given to him and he's lost none of them except one that is the son of perdition.
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And he's right. That's in reference to Judas. But what does it say?
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So that the scripture would be fulfilled. And so you have all through John thinking and Matthew thinking and Mark thinking,
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Luke thinking, you have in the early church the firm belief that Judas was marked out for this role prophetically and that the scriptures must be fulfilled.
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And so Jesus says, I was keeping them in your name, which you have given me, and I regarded them and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition so that the scripture would be fulfilled.
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And who is he talking about here? Here he is specifically talking about the disciples. Now, if you've followed
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John chapter 17, you know that he's going to expand out from them to those who believe on their basis, on the basis of their preaching.
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And that gives us different context. But the point is the first reference is I've lost none of them except the one that the scriptures said has to fulfill this role.
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And then in John 18, all you've got is a portion of this being quoted because why?
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Because Judas is the one betraying him for crying out loud. Read John 18, the preceding verses.
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And again, the only way you can get away with this is because he knows his audience doesn't have a New Testament in front of them.
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He's he's he's trying to convince his own audience. If you had read up to verse 12, starting back at the beginning of John 18, you would have known.
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And in fact, remember, John 17, 18, no division in the original writing. So this is within basically a paragraph.
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So you're following the exact same same thing. You would have to to to assume
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John to be a complete moron, first of all, and your audience to be completely disconnected from the text itself because it's a very short space to not see that.
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Jesus knows what Judas is doing, that what Judas is doing is a fulfillment of scripture, that when
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Judas comes and he's with those that are arresting Jesus, Jesus's divinity is demonstrated by his use of the
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I am sayings. And then when he says, let these go, the the play wrote a language is used once again pointing to the divinity of Jesus.
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That's how you'd get it if you were actually reading the text to understand it rather than trying to find something silly in it to attack.
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So having put on his head, spun around backwards, ignore the context and create a contradiction.
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Now, listen to the DEDOT methodology. Your argument actually is extremely vacuous and has almost nothing to it, but listen to how you make it stick in someone's mind.
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You know, in percentage wise, I have some few notes with me here, five notes, ten pounds each.
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That's all I have got with me. I would like some lady to just tell me, the first lady, I want to give the ladies a preference, please, if you don't mind, my pleasure, don't mind, give the ladies a chance.
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If they can tell me what percentage is that between one and none, between zero and one, how many percent?
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A lady, a lady who was talking like a man, any lady, young lady, old lady, the difference between zero and one.
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Fifty pounds, I don't know how many corona that is. I want to give it away, man, please, please help me.
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Well, there you go. Now, how long does that take? That that was that was, you know, over a minute of of getting the audience going.
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People are clapping. Let's just do this for the ladies and give some money away.
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He's laughing. He is a showman. And the entire argument was vacuous.
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It had no meaning. Oh, there's such a difference between zero and one.
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Oh, there's an infinite amount. And if you just read it in context, a schoolchild could understand what the author was saying.
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That's the DDOT methodology. And unfortunately, if you're going to be trying to talk to somebody who's found that to be convincing, it's pretty difficult to get these folks to start dealing with what you're saying on a fair basis.
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And you know what? Again, theology matters.
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If I wasn't a Calvinist, I wouldn't think there'd be a whole much of a much of a shot in doing this.
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I mean, think about the wall you're up against when people think that's good thinking and that's good speaking.
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And I'm not going to be able to outdo that. I'm not that kind of a showman. If I can't trust the Holy Spirit of God at that point, we got a problem.
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Houston, we definitely have a problem. So I don't know. Anyway, 877 -753 -3341.
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Let's go ahead and talk with John. Hi, John. How are you? Pretty good.
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What can what can we do for you today? I'm an objection to the,
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I guess, the general understanding of free will and total depravity.
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Uh -huh. OK, well, basically, all right,
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I'm just going to break this down. If you've subscribed to the view that man had free will prior to the fall, but that after the fall, he didn't have it and he lost it, then that puts you in an awkward position, especially when you're going to debate
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Armenians or people who deny the efficaciousness of God's grace, because what you're doing is essentially is saying that at one time
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God was only partially sovereign over creation, but at another time, totally sovereign over creation.
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And so what you really do is you amalgate to your particular theological system.
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And when you amalgate to it, all the philosophical problems of predestination and libertarian free will.
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Well, OK, a couple of things. First of all, well, both the
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Armenian and the Calvinist have to deal with the effect of the fall and whether an
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Armenian is going to use the term free will for both or the effect of sin and how much the effect of sin on the will is a completely different issue.
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But the obviously one of the flies in the ointment and errors in the objection is the idea that at one point
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God is only partially sovereign and then fully sovereign. That obviously does not follow, because when we're talking about Adam being in an unfallen state, all that means is that he has a creaturely will, which is not yet in bondage to sin.
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Creaturely will is not the same thing as asserting two autonomous wills that are equal to one another.
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So never does mankind, as created by God, have a will that is equal to God's because that's putting
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God and man the same plane and that wouldn't follow. So the whole objection that was at least part of what
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I think I understand was being said, doesn't follow because it assumes facts are not inevitable, shall we say, and in fact goes against the understanding of the fact that Adam was created as a creature.
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He was not created as God's equal, despite Benny Hinn's ideas that Adam could fly and all the rest of that silliness that they've come up with.
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So that doesn't follow as far as that's concerned. As to the nature of Adam's will, the fact is we know almost nothing about it.
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Think about it. You only have Genesis two and the first little bit of Genesis three upon which to even attempt to speculate about such things.
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And I realize there's all sorts of rampant speculation as to what the nature of an unfallen will is.
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But the fact of the matter is, since there isn't such a thing any longer amongst us in the sense of the children of Adam, the
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Bible doesn't spend much time talking about it, because outside of Adam, for that whatever brief period of time that was, or however long period of time it was, and the person of Jesus Christ, who is the
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God man, we don't have any other examples of that unless, of course, one's a Pelagian and comes up with stuff like that.
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So exactly what the nature of that will was no Arminian or Calvinist does know or can know if they want to base themselves upon what the scriptures state.
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So the issue really, for me, comes down to over and over again, it comes down to the difference between simple speculation about things about which the word doesn't say anything over against clear exegetical assertions about what the word does speak about.
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And in my experience, the Arminian takes the speculations over the exegesis. I mean, I mentioned last time
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I was on the air that I'll never, ever forget John Sanders sitting there in front of that audience in the debate on inclusivism, a man who calls himself an
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Arminian. He's a scholar. And when I asked him about John 6, it's like, well, you know, I haven't looked at that in a long time.
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And he's just turning through the pages of his Bible. And that's clearly not an individual who is deriving his theology, first and foremost, from a passionate desire to base it in exegesis.
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It's coming from philosophical considerations. And the fact of the matter is, what you do in philosophy pretty much depends on who you decide is the best philosopher.
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And the fact that philosophers can argue forever about even the most inane things and do so equally is good demonstration of that.
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So that's why I try to avoid that and stick with what the scriptures say with clarity, as they do in many contexts.
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Can I respond to that? Sure. Well, my phone's kind of weird, so certain sections of your reply just went blank.
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But I think I understood what you were saying. My objection,
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I think, like in the
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Westminster Confession, for example, Uh -huh. You're, yeah, sorry about this,
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John, but you're not there anymore. Evidently, your phone, either the battery's going, it doesn't have a proper signal, it's wireless, something,
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I'm not really certain what it is, but we couldn't hear you.
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And that makes conversation pretty much nigh unto impossible if you're not hearing what I'm saying and I'm not hearing what you're saying.
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So you're cutting in and out as well. So I apologize, maybe if you could find a better line, you can call in another time because we're just about out of time for today.
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So if I didn't get to your actual objection because I wasn't able to hear you, then we'll get to it at another point in time would probably be the best way to do that.
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I, let me just mention, I got through the whole program and I'm awful glad I have actually about three minutes here to make a comment.
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We put a rather important statement up on the website today, an announcement, a joint statement from Ergin and Ymir Kanner, Tom Askell and myself.
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The debate is looking good at the moment and I'm happy about that.
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The debate will be three hours long. I'm happy about that. The parliamentary format has been modified to where there is only one question that can be asked during the intermediate speeches.
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And so it's not going to be a situation where you can be constantly interrupted, interrupted, interrupted. And so I'm happy about that.
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There will be a small amount of cross -examination, not as much as I would like, but there is at least some cross -examination to be able to clarify points and issues and things like that.
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And though I would like to have, obviously, I've expressed my reasons for wanting to have a more specific thesis statement,
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Baptist and election will work fine given that we have four men who will be speaking and I can be very confident in Tom Askell's presentation and the direction that he's going to go.
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And so, but as I have said, and as I said on the blog article this morning, despite all of that, this is going to be at the
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Thomas Road Baptist Church. It's a big place. I've seen some pictures inside. It's a big, big, big, big place. But it also happens to be where the
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Liberty University students go. And there are far more Liberty University students than there are seats in that particular facility.
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And therefore, if the president of the seminary and the dean of the students, who is very popular there, is going to be engaging in a debate there, something tells me that more than a couple dozen students are going to show up, if you know what
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I mean. And we cannot guarantee that if you travel, and I've heard people from as far away as California, I'm going to be there.
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We can't guarantee you can get in. There's no such thing as tickets. There's no such thing as reservations. We can't guarantee you're going to get in.
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It's going to be videoed. It's going to be audioed. We're going to rush that stuff to have it available at the conference in Orlando.
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Tom and I are going to be available to talk to folks. We're going to be talking about the debate and the issues in the debate and why we did the debate and things that took place beforehand and the things that took place during and maybe even the things that took place afterwards.
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But the point is that if I keep hearing folks say, well,
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I'll be there. I have to keep saying, well, I hope you're not. If you're going to be anywhere, be in Orlando.
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Support us there. If you're up in the New York area, we'll be doing the debate on baptism today. I mean, think about this.
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I really would ask for your prayers. Think about this. I'm going to be in Lynchburg the weekend beforehand, probably a
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Friday, Saturday, Sunday deal. The debate's Monday night. Travel Tuesday.
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Speak Wednesday night at the Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Thursday night's the debate on baptism. And then
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I'm not sure how Friday, Saturday, Sunday is going, but I'm going to be speaking at least like the Friday, Sunday or the
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Saturday, Sunday and then coming home. And then I've got less than, I think less than 10 days, about eight days,
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I think, before I have to fly out to Orlando for the conference. And then the debate was sponged.
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So I would very strongly encourage you to be praying mainly for my health during that time period, because one thing that I can't afford is to be sick during that period.
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That's going to be a challenge. So three debates and speaking, what, more times than that, all within just a very short period of time.
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It's going to be intense, but it's a wonderful opportunity to be able to do so. We'll be back again next week on Tuesday at our regular time,
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Lord willing, here on The Dividing Line. See you then. God bless. That's A -O -M -I -N dot
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O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates and tracks. Join us again next