August 18, 2005

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World 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, a Thursday afternoon, one more
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Dividing Line after this, and then we go silent, sort of like when, remember the old
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Apollo missions would disappear behind the moon for a certain amount of time, and you always wondered, are they coming out the other side?
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Well, they have to go someplace, so, yeah, they did. But anyway, yes, we'll be going silent, let me see here, how long?
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I suppose it's possible, marginally, that we might do a program on the 6th of September, which would mean we would be missing 1, 2, 3, that's only 3, that's only 3 programs, that's not too bad.
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But anyways, maybe we'll do that just to, you know, fill everybody in on what happened on the cruise or, you know, things like that,
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I don't know, we'll see what happens because I'm not exactly sure when it is we get back from all of this, and so if it's like four hours beforehand, or I've been up, you know, for 12 hours, something like that, then there's no reason to do that.
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But anyway, we will, Lord willing, be on the air next Tuesday, and then
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Thursday I'm actually traveling, so we'll see what happens.
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Now, I have a number of clips here to play, I haven't even opened up the lines to be honest with you, don't know that I will, we'll see, at least that question is somewhat relevant, hopefully.
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So, anyhow, lots of stuff to talk about, I was listening to this one, and I don't know if I should start with this because it just,
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I almost rode off the road, notice how English works there,
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I almost rode off the road, which really doesn't make any sense, but anyways, I was riding along listening to this stuff when they were doing questions and answers from the audience, and I heard this question, and I just,
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I don't know, you'll see what I mean, but I guess it's perfectly right, everybody else is a professional victim, so I'm just going to get with the flow here and say this offends me, let's just all say it directly here, this woman offends me, and I can guarantee you she's offended by what
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I believe too, but this woman comes to the microphone and asks
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Dr. Cross, well she doesn't really ask a question, it's more of a statement, but it was so, how do you put it, this is just the quintessential
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New York leftist, liberal, pluralistic, well listen, you'll see what
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I'm talking about. I was just wondering what your feelings would be on this,
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I like to have my own little particular view of my
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Jesus when I read the scriptures, and my Jesus embraces women, gays, blacks, people of other religions, historically,
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I mean I just don't know what I'm reading into the scriptures, but it seems to me that when I read Jesus' words,
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I know that he was a practicing Jew, but it seems in his encounters with people of beliefs that were different from his own
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Jewish religion, or even offshoots of that, that he embraced them, and I just wondered,
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I know everything revolves around salvation, and there's so many Christians that it's sort of that I'm saved and you're not mentality, and to me, it just breaks my heart, because to me that's not
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Jesus, and I just like to have this feeling that he would embrace everyone, and that he would look at God as bestowing his grace upon people of very different religions.
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I sort of made a statement instead of a question. I like to have my
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Jesus, I don't like the
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Biblical one, I don't like the real one, I just like to make my own, and aren't I special for doing that, and you hear,
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I'm saved, you're not, boy, shoot her into somebody, and he accepts women, well, duh, you think?
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He accepts blacks, as if the Biblical, and of course homosexuality, let's not have a
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Jesus who honors God's law, and oh, just listening to that just made me want to, and then
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Dr. Croson's response, I don't know, seems to have sort of missed, well, how do you respond to that, by the way?
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I mean, put yourself in his shoes, I mean, what do you say to someone who wants their own
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Jesus? But his answer is interesting, and there was one thing I wanted you to catch in it, though you'll see it just follows a completely different trajectory, so we'll continue on with it.
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That's what I said when I talked about distributive justice and the world belonging to God. I think you can certainly go into Judaism in the first century and find all sorts of little nastinesses in there.
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That is not characteristic of Judaism, that's characteristic of us. You can do the same in Christianity, so I won't go along with any way that says, well, look at all this bad stuff in Judaism, along came
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Jesus to clear up the mess, because it's just historically not true. There were certain things in Judaism that I think were dated.
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Even some of this beautiful distributive justice you could say is dated. A lot of the ritual purity, for example, with regard to homosexuals is certainly dated.
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By dated I mean historically irrelevant anymore. I think it's more important to insist on justice.
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It's not a preferential option for the poor or for homosexuals or for any discriminated group.
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It's a preferential option for God's justice, which takes care and demands all of it.
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It demands that God's world be made freely available, fairly, justly.
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Granted, we have to decide how that is, sure. We've seen them trying to work it out, right? Some of the stuff they did in 50 years, you say, well, that's not going to work.
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Fine, they change it. But what they are trying to make certain is that God's world is not discriminating against anyone.
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Now, did every Jew try to live that? Of course not. Not every Christian has tried to live by love, either. But it's in the law, it's there.
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So you can find it. And it's at the heart of the matter, it's not peripheral. It's not some wild -eyed prophet.
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So I find that what you've just said about Jesus is exactly where Jesus plugs into his tradition.
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I'll stop it there by saying, plugs into his tradition with what she just said? An amorphous, undefined, non -Lord, make -me -whatever -you -want -me -to -be person?
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I don't think so. But of course, you know, there's no
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Matthew 23 in the mouth of that Jesus. I mean, once you've abandoned the consistency of Scripture, you don't even know who
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Jesus is. You just pick what portions you want to believe, what portions you don't want to believe.
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You just ignore them and go on from there. And so, you know, it works out that way. He could have plugged in somewhere else, but he didn't.
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In his Jewish tradition. In his Jewish tradition. There were various options in the Jewish tradition in the first century. On everything.
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As there is with any serious question with anyone at any time. Now, did you catch that?
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There's always these different options. You know, I often hear, I've mentioned this before, but Dr.
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Croston will very frequently say, Now, I could be wrong about this. I could be wrong about this. I could be wrong about this.
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But what you need to understand is, he's saying that about everybody. We all could be wrong about everything we say about Jesus.
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We really don't know. We have no way of knowing. And that's why no one can say, this is right and this is wrong.
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There's just, no, you can't do that. Now, I have found some inconsistencies there. I have heard him be very dogmatic about certain things.
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Which doesn't really fit with the whole, I could be wrong about this stuff. But still, the general idea is, well, you know, we really don't know.
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Long time ago. Everybody could be wrong. And that's why we should never say that Jesus is true and Buddha is not.
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Christianity is true and Islam isn't. Et cetera, et cetera. Retributive, not retributive.
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Not retributive. I, for example, if Jesus sat down with the Jewish historian Josephus, Josephus says, and says quite openly, it is the will of God, the big
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G, it is the will of God that we obey Rome. God gives power to various empires. He's now given power to Italy.
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We should obey God. Do not rise against Rome. Do not resist Rome. It's the will of God. If you do,
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God will destroy you. I think Jesus would probably have said, we must resist and we must do it nonviolently.
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Which is a different option from either Josephus or somebody who says, we must resist and we're going to do it violently, in the name of God.
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So these are options within a Jewish spectrum of possibilities. And we now know that spectrum quite clearly.
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So we can kind of locate Jesus in it. Okay. Now, so what you get here is you get distributive justice.
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He focuses on just a few elements of the Old Testament law, letting the land lie fallow, the
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Sabbath laws. And he applies them sociologically. And they did have sociological implications, of course, in regards to the poor.
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The poor would be able to have the corners of the field and so on and so forth.
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There's all this stuff in there. And he focuses upon that. He obviously just throws out completely all the rest of the law in regards to sacrifice and wrath and atonement and personal sin.
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There's nothing. I've been listening to this stuff for a long time now. There's nothing here about sin outside of, well, you are sinning if you're not supporting the idea of having everybody have equal access to the goods of the world.
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It almost sounds like an almost communistic type idea. Everybody should be equal and have free access and there shouldn't be power from top to bottom.
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There shouldn't be distinctions and so on and so forth. We all should just be equal along those lines and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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And so you've got in all of that, though, you have no emphasis upon sin, redemption, forgiveness, pardon outside of, well, you know, when
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Jesus touches the leper, then he breaks the cultural taboos and that's where you have healing and la, la, la, la, la. So you don't have retributive justice, retribution, but you have distributive justice, sort of a free distribution, radical egalitarianism, a .k
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.a. old form communism. And then you have this idea of Jesus does not set up a hierarchy.
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He emphasizes very strongly, Jesus sent the disciples out to do what he was doing.
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He didn't set up shop someplace and say, okay, bring everybody to me because once you set up a particular location, now you're automatically creating hierarchy.
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You're creating people who are above other people. And that's not what Jesus wants. He wants distributive justice and then he wants common meal.
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If you want to know what the kingdom of God is from John Dominic Cross' perspective, then when he says the kingdom of God, what would the world look like if God was upon the throne rather than Caesar?
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What would the world look like? Well, the world would look like this. You would have the church and the kingdom of God there, the same thing, and what you've got going on here is you have equality in these little fellowships, these little churches where everybody has equal access, equal access to food, you eat together.
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And that's how, and it doesn't matter whether you're one of the downtrodden or whether you're one of the rich.
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See, that's where the equality comes in. And so that's what the kingdom of God looks like.
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That's what the kingdom of God is. And it's what the world would look like if God was sitting upon the throne and not
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Caesar. That, in essence, is the, everything else in the New Testament is either window dressing, it's allegorical, metaphorical means of expressing the same idea, or it's a later accretion because evidently even the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and then
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Paul didn't quite get Jesus' program, even though I should say, and I, oh, drat, where did
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I put that? I wonder if I can find that maybe while I'm playing this next section. Maybe during the break
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I can find this for you. But where would I have saved it? That's wonderful to have gigabytes and gigabytes and many, many gigabytes of space.
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But you know what? It was a whole lot easier to find files on a 20 meg drive, wasn't it?
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I just, I'm still thinking about that 20 meg drive I had many, many, many moons ago.
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And it was just, you know, that thing, it was just so easy to find stuff. I bet you I saved that out there on the big
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G drive. You know, you got one of those big drives out there. And let me see if I, just look real quick here.
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Come on, come on, come on. Come on, there you go. Boy, sometimes they're really slow, very, very slow.
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Oh, that's why. I probably put it over on my laptop because that's what's going with me up to where we are going.
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Yeah, that's probably where it is. Let's see. Let's look under crossing. That's a good idea, isn't it? Yep, that's a real audio file.
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Is that it? No, no, there it is. Okay, I found it. During the break, I will, someone remember this for me?
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Someone remind me during the break, which the only person who could do that, well, people on the channel could do that, to load up the
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PBS thing, the PBS discussion with John Domenic Rossi, because he does say something really interesting.
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And that is, he does say that those people who say that Paul invented
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Christianity are all wet. They're all wrong. He actually takes a less than ultra leftist liberal position on something, which is really interesting.
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It's interesting to hear him say it. The problem is, the lady who's doing the interview is that lady who speaks very slowly in her interviews.
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And it's just like, I can't even really listen to the whole thing. It's just like, you want to speed up the sampling rate just to make it go faster or something like that.
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But I'll try to remember to, I've got it on my screen here, but if I try to load up right now, that's going to bog down my program, in which we have this stuff.
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Okay, let me zoom in on where we are here and pick up with this.
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This is an interesting discussion. In fact, I listened to this as I was riding yesterday morning, did 50 miles out on the
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Sun Valley, and I was listening to this one. It's more of the Borg -Wright discussion.
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And after listening to Marcus Borg present on the Resurrection, listening to Wright was like a breath of fresh air.
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Though a couple times again, Wright giveth and Wright taketh away. I mean, you could be sitting there tracking with him, going, yeah, go, go, go, baby.
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And then all of a sudden, he just makes some offhand comment that just hands it all away and then goes back to doing something good.
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And I don't understand that, and it drives me crazy.
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But anyways, at least the presentation he made on the Resurrection was really good.
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It was really good. Now, here we get into the dialogue between himself and Borg after they've both made their presentation on the
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Resurrection. There's some very interesting things to hear here. ...to the audience to set the framework for the question
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I want to address to Tom. Tom says you really can't explain the rise of early
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Christianity without saying Jesus was raised from the dead. I agree absolutely.
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I agree completely with the statement Jesus was raised from the dead.
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What Tom and I are disagreeing about is whether that involves something happening to the corpse of Jesus.
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For me, raised from the dead means raised to God's right hand, one with God, Lord, and so forth.
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Now, did you catch that? That's going to be, I can tell you right now, on Tuesday, August 30th, around noon, high noon.
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I wish I had that little, someone should find that little wave file. That would be a great one to play. At that particular point in time, we are going to be debating this subject, and this is going to be central.
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It's going to be central. What does resurrection mean? Becoming one with God. Excuse me, once again, and Wright makes this point.
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He says, where did anyone in Second Temple Judaism believe that resurrection means becoming one with God?
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Where is that? And Borg never answers that. He can't. He really quickly, at one point, says, ah, there's a lot in New Testament about being exalted to the right hand of the
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Father. Yeah, that's about Jesus. That's not about us. And that's not the same thing as resurrection.
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In fact, Wright had already made a very good point in his presentation. That is, you can't confuse resurrection with exaltation.
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They're very closely related, but they're not the same thing. And so, that's good.
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But listen to what Borg is saying. Resurrected, become one with God. And so, everyone's going to be resurrected,
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I get the feeling, from what Dr. Borg is saying. And everyone becomes one with God, and we all say, and that's sort of how it works,
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I guess. I don't know, but that was sort of said quickly, because it's summarizing what he had said before, but this gives you an idea.
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Let me probe this question of physicality and transformed physicality.
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Let me put it this way. Do you think the risen Christ can appear in more than one place at a time?
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And if so, how do you reconcile that with your emphasis upon transformed physicality?
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I really don't know that, and I don't think anyone would know that. Many later theologians discussed similar questions.
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For instance, during the Reformation controversies about the Eucharistic presence of Christ, when they spoke of the body of Christ being in heaven and not on earth, and therefore the bread couldn't become the body and so on.
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But I take the point that all those questions that you raised at the end, and this one as another variation on them, they are exactly the sort of questions that Paul faced in 1
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Corinthians 15 when people say to him, how will the dead be raised? What sort of a body will it be?
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Paul does not attempt to analyze it, either molecularly or chemically or whatever, but he uses metaphors and symbols and images which, as you know, are pointing beyond themselves, but that to which they point, clearly for Paul, is a concrete reality.
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I would agree, and I would also point out that the... Now, I really appreciate that answer.
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I mean, I was dumbfounded, to be honest with you. That's what
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I was. Fast forward instead of pause there. Sort of sounded odd. I was somewhat dumbfounded in Dr.
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Borg's presentation that part of his primary argumentation against, and the terminology that Dr. Wright uses at this point is a form of physicality, and he's recognizing the difference between the resurrected body and the body that died, but also the connection.
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That's what Paul's doing. That's what he's doing in 1 Corinthians 15. The seed that goes into the ground, the plant that comes out, don't tell me there's no connection there, okay?
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That's the point. There is no connection if you don't have a physical resurrection. A transformed physicality is the terminology that Dr.
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Wright uses. His primary argumentation was, well, does that mean you can weigh
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Jesus? And you just want to go, eh?
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That's your argument? Well, you know, we don't know what this type of body would be like.
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That's the whole point of what Paul's responding to. It's amazing when people make objections, the apostles respond to, and they don't see themselves in the objections.
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How many times have you seen that with Romans 9? You'll be sitting there talking to somebody who claims to believe the
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Bible, and they'll do all the Romans 9 objections. They'll raise all the same objections that Paul answers in Romans 9.
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Then when you show it to them, they're like, well, I still accept your interpretation of that.
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All you did was read it. You didn't even interpret it. And they can't see themselves in it. Same thing here.
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Paul's responding to all this stuff right then. I'll be bold here. The most common translation of the body that Paul is talking about is a spiritual body.
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Okay, now, this is very important. This is very important, and this is, unfortunately, this goes way too quickly.
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Way, way too quickly. But we're talking here about 1 Corinthians 15, 44. It is shown a natural body is raised a spiritual body.
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If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. And his point here, and let's have a little quiz from the class here.
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See how many people can name various and sundry cult groups, and they are, they're cult groups, that we deal with who take this perspective.
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Let's have a show of hands. Who uses 1 Corinthians 15, 44 to deny the physical resurrection?
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Well, that's exactly right. You over there in the corner, you've got Jehovah's Witnesses. They do the same thing.
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And, oh, yes, that's what Hamza Abdu 'l -Malik did in our debate on the deity of Christ. He tried to go to 1
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Corinthians 15, 44 and raise the issue of a spiritual body and over against the resurrection body.
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And if any of you have seen that debate, and it's well worth watching, you remember how that happened.
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So it's like, wow, here we are again. Interesting conjunctions here. Now we've got someone way out to the left who is doing the same thing.
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Not for the same purposes. They're not going the same direction, of course. But coming up the same thing.
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So look at 1 Corinthians 15, 44. And this goes a little bit too fast. Dr.
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Wright has an entire section on this in his book on the resurrection. Does a good job. I might expand upon it from his comments when we finish listening to this.
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I have no problem with the notion of a spiritual body. What I have a problem with is that the risen Christ exists in a state of transformed physicality.
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I can't even imagine how you could put that together with a trinity. Did you catch that?
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How do you put a resurrected Christ together with a trinity?
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As if Orthodox Christians had ever not done that? I was stunned.
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I was left going, you've got... That's a lovely question which would be great fun to work at.
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And actually, if you read Pannenberg or Barth, that's precisely what they do. Two of the greatest Trinitarian theologians of our century.
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Put precisely the resurrection of the physical body within a glorious doctrine of the trinity. Anyway, that's a subject for another day.
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But this is such a critical point. 1 Corinthians 15, 44. The phrase normally translated in the
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RSV and NRSV, spiritual body, simply does not mean what most people in North America and Britain at the moment understand by that phrase.
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This has been demonstrated again and again and again in the scholarly literature on that verse and on 1
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Corinthians in general. Within a certain body of scholarly literature, I'll simply point out that in the
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RSV, in the NRSV, that translation is done by opinion. For that committee to decide on spiritual body as an apt phrase for that means minimally that a majority of that committee, perhaps even a consensus of that committee, thought that in context that does express what
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Paul is saying. Because amongst other things, Paul explicitly says that the resurrection body is not a body of flesh and blood.
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And that's because sarx caehaemer in 1 Corinthians 15, 50 and following is a specific
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Pauline technical term, flesh and blood, which again, and sorry, but we haven't been talking about Paul all week, but it is vital to understand how
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Paul uses Paul's language. Sarx, flesh for Paul, is always a negative thing about the destructibility of the flesh, about the corruption of the flesh, about the rebellion of the flesh, and the phrase flesh and blood does not simply mean what we would mean by physical.
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Back to 1544, the two Greek phrases are somapsuchikon and somapneumatikon.
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Now, that is translated in the RSV and NRSV, physical body and spiritual body.
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Look up the lexicons and see what they do with psychikon. Psychikon does not mean what we mean by physical.
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It means soul -ish, S -O -U -L, to do with the soul. It's a body animated by soul, that's the body we currently have.
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And the somapneumatikon is a body animated by pneuma. It's kind of difficult to have a hand -to -hand exegetical ding -dong without you all having the text in front of you.
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And let me simply add that it is not the case, as you seem to be suggesting, that the vast majority of scholarly opinion comes out where you do.
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I'm saying that scholarly opinion is divided about that, and the translators of the RSV and the
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NRSV can hardly be seen as left -wing skeptics. Okay, let me stop it right there because we need to take our break, but what about that?
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Well, as I said, N .T. Wright goes into much more detail about that in his book.
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He didn't have an opportunity to develop that at all, unfortunately, and so I'd like to do so because it's important to understand that what
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Dr. Wright was saying there is exactly spot -on. There's many times that we have pointed out things, for example, his interpretation of 2
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Corinthians 5 where he's not even in the right ballpark, but on this one he's right on, and we'll talk about that once we take our break, and we also have a phone call to get to, and we'll be right back right after this.
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Is the Bible true? Never before in history has the authority and inspiration of the
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Holy Scriptures been so viciously attacked by those outside the pale of orthodoxy and within the walls of traditional evangelicalism itself.
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Join us August 27, 2005 at the Sea -Tac Marriott for an historic debate between Evangelical Christian apologist
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Dr. James R. White and world -renowned Jesus Seminar co -founder and Bible skeptic
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Dr. John Dominic Crossan as they debate a topic which every Christian should be concerned about.
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In their book, 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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Welcome back to the
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Dividing Line, watching the chat channel and all the whiners in there. We are having feeding problems today, but it's not our fault and it's not our server.
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We even have some folks who have not been able to get back into our chat channel who have been in there for years and years and years because certain
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ISPs have had their systems all messed up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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So the Internet is somewhat crippled today, thanks to those wonderful idiots out there that demonstrate total depravity on a regular basis.
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And what you do in the silence of your office, you hacker nuts,
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God sees. And there will be justice someday. So anyway, that's what's going on there.
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Let's go ahead and take our phone call. Well, then I want to comment on the First Corinthians 1544 issue because, like I said, not just ultra -left liberals who don't believe
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Jesus actually rose from the dead, in a meaningful use of that particular term, use this, but all sorts of other groups do as well.
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It is important to understand what spiritual body thereof against fleshly body, whatever that means. That's actually very, very misleading translations, and we need to get into that.
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And then I did queue up the PBS thing so we can listen to that as well. And already we've only got like 23 minutes left.
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So let's go ahead and talk with Brett in Louisville. Hi, Brett. Hey, Dr.
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White. How are you doing? Doing good. Great. I've just been listening to you for the past couple of weeks as you've been talking more about crossings.
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Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry? I'm sorry. You know, it's what's on my mind.
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I've got to talk about it. Okay, well, listening to you doesn't hurt as bad as hearing the lady that you just played a few minutes ago.
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Isn't that just enough to make your skin crawl? You're just like, oh, man. But I just wanted to, first of all, tell you thank you.
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I mean, I know the task that you're going to discuss this with Cross, and it's just like banging your head up against the wall because you don't know where to go.
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Well, you know, the funny thing is I was just reading. There's a book that Oxford put out, and William Lane Craig did a chapter in it.
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Of course, this is Craig's area. And the chapter after him continues to discuss
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Cross's view of the resurrection. And in a footnote, the guy basically said, well, in text in a footnote, the guy basically said exactly what you just said, and that is how do you respond to this fellow because there's really nothing to grab onto here.
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You know, it's like nailing jello to the wall. It's this very complex ladder of propositions that's been built up, and it's just extremely difficult to really dig into it and respond to it in any meaningful fashion.
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So at least we're on the same page when we come to these conclusions ourselves with all sorts of other folks who have been writing about this stuff for quite some time.
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So if that's an encouragement, then let it be. Right. Right. And in terms of, I mean, I've listened to,
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I couldn't get a hold of Craig's debate with Cross, but I've listened to his debate with Borg.
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And I thought the best part of, I mean, obviously as a Christian, I agree with everything Craig said.
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I mean, he obviously takes an historical approach to apologetics that I don't take because it didn't get either one of them anywhere because what will happen is, and this is the case with the debate you were just playing, is one side's going to cite a scholar and the other side's going to cite a different scholar, and they're going to go back and forth, and they're both going to interpret those scholars in light of their ultimate authority, in light of their ultimate presupposition.
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And if it's anything that I've learned from reading Cross himself, is he loves to talk about presuppositions.
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I mean, how many books does he have in debates where the first thing he says is, here are my presuppositions, and he goes on.
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At least he's open about it at that time, even though I don't know that once he actually gets into his argument and his conclusions, he's quite as open as concerning the guiding force of those presuppositions as he needs to be.
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But we'll see where that ends up going in just a matter of days. Right, and I think the key thing to it is that, and I haven't heard anybody, and I think you mentioned this a few weeks ago, that you were trying to decide on what angle to approach him with, and you just came to the conclusion that it's got to be presuppositional.
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Yeah, it has to. And this is what I've learned from Van Til and Bonson. Bonson has been
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Van Til's mouthpiece for the most part for me, because I think he explains it so well, but doing a twofold apologetic, answering the full according to his folly, and then not answering the full according to his folly.
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But in order to do that, though, obviously you have to reduce your opponent to absurdity.
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And then, when your opponent has nothing to stand on at that point, you assert your position as the precondition for the intelligibility of what we're discussing at all.
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And that's what Dr. Bonson did in his debate on God's existence back about 20 years ago or so.
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Yes, it was 20 years ago this past February. Right. And I think we've talked about this in channel, but how do we apply that kind of an argument against another theist?
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And I think this is an excellent example, because Crossan, at least from everything he's said, claims to be a theist.
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He talks about God all the time. Yeah, sort of. But a deism at best is what it sounds like. You know,
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I wish I knew, because even I listened to the – and by the way, the
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Crossan -Craig debate is available, I think.
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I certainly know I got it fairly easily. I'm trying to remember if I got it. You know,
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I did get it now. I think I got that from CRI. I got that from CRI. But anyway, there's no question about where he's coming from, and I think he's going to be sort of accepting of that.
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The understanding that he has of God, when they were down in New Orleans, and he did the
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N .T. Wright thing, and then afterwards they had various professors from the seminary there presenting the papers on things like the
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Gospel of Peter and things like that that are very important to Crossan's perspective, then he would respond to each one.
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Someone brought up the issue of the philosophy and the philosophical position and the theology of John Dominic Crossan, and basically what he said was,
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I'm not sure that he fits into any classical category of a theist, because if he is a theist, he would have to be a theist where God has not spoken, he has not made revelation of himself in any discernible fashion in the sense of propositions.
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He has no control of the future, so he would not have any coercive power or authority, certainly would be a decree and time that he's working out or anything like that.
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And as a result, you are sort of reduced to some sort of form of deism, but do you even have that?
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I mean, is God doing anything? Is God ever going to wrap this? There's no judgment, there's no afterlife, there doesn't seem to be any real spiritual existence for Crossan.
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There is for Borg, that's where they're different. Now exactly what that is, whether it's a conscience, post -death, exactly how it works for Borg, I don't know, but that's where there is a difference between them.
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Yeah, and I think that's the whole point though, is whenever you approach this, because you know that Crossan's worldview, because you've got a
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Christian theistic worldview over against a non -Christian theistic worldview, that's the debate that this is going to be.
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And how do you reduce that position to absurdity? And whenever you're dealing with those presuppositions, as Bonson would say all the time, the only way you can prove a presupposition is transcendentally.
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And which worldview then provides the precondition for the intelligibility of what you guys are talking about?
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Well, in 30 minutes, I don't know that the transcendental argument, in a debate where the thesis is the
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New Testament, the Gospels of the New Testament are historically reliable, I'm not sure exactly how deep into the presuppositions we can go.
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I mean, maybe in the rebuttal period that's going to have to come out as far as my assertion that his theology is insufficient to bear the presuppositions that allow the
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Scriptures to be consistent with themselves. His God cannot do what is necessary, as far as I can tell.
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And I'm not trying to... If this sounds mocking in some way, I'm not doing that.
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As far as I can tell, and honestly listening to everything he's said, and reading his books, and listening to lecture after lecture after lecture,
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I just don't see how his God, who seemingly does not reveal himself, does not communicate, has no activity in this world at all, in any sense of extension of power.
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That God is an insufficient God to be a basis for the Christian Scriptures.
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But that's the whole point, that he doesn't have Christian Scriptures. When he approaches the debate, you're approaching the debate with the presupposition that you can judge, because the thesis question of the debate is, is the
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Orthodox Biblical account of Jesus of Nazareth authentic and historically accurate? He's agreed to enter the debate.
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The very terms used, authentic and historically accurate, presuppose that there is a means by which we can know something to be accurate and inaccurate.
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Historically, what is it? Authentic and authentic. There has to be a basis upon which we judge the thesis.
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Outside of just Dr. Croson's opinion. Yeah, and that's the whole point. It's either going to be his own personal opinion, or the opinion of Scholar A and B and C.
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Except in a lot of his positions, it is just him. I mean, he at least has the humility at times, like when he talks about his
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Gospel with Peter stuff, to say that his perspective has received the equivalence of a kind, scholarly chuckle.
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Believe me, I know where you're coming from. Obviously, my approach,
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I'm being very straightforward about this, my approach is going to be, you've got to remember, I am on the positive side here.
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And so, I am going to be demonstrating the consistency of the
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New Testament testimony to Jesus Christ in the Gospels, and contrasting that with Dr.
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Croson's position in the attempt to demonstrate, in only half an hour's worth of time, which is, when you think about it, is two -thirds of what you get for Sunday school.
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That's going to be a tremendous challenge. But in doing so, my desire is going to be to demonstrate that only one side can allow the
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Scriptures to be the Scriptures, only one side can give an answer for why the Scriptures are in the form they are in, without simply arbitrarily setting up a standard and saying, okay, if it doesn't fit what
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I think Jesus could have been like, then I'm just going to, in essence, throw it out, I'm going to turn it into allegory, I'm going to turn it into metaphor, and the results of this are these things.
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And I think pressing that very point that you just brought up, one side is going to be reduced to philosophical arbitrariness, and one side is going to have an objective standard of truth by which we can even answer the question of the debate.
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Well, let's hope that the folks in attendance, and I can't pretend that even a majority of those who will be in attendance will have been listening to these programs, unfortunately.
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And so a lot of them are going to be coming in without the background you and I have. Even men like Bonson and others can get this across.
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I mean, everybody can understand that whenever you look out and want to judge between something that is accurate and inaccurate, there has to be some kind of way to do that, other than just you say this,
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I'll say that, and different strokes for different folks. I mean, everybody can get that.
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And what you're presenting and getting this across to the audience is that this is a debate over the guiding presuppositions, the guiding worldviews upon which we approach this question.
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I'm going to approach this question from a Christian theistic standpoint, assuming the infallibility and the inerrancy of the
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Christian scriptures, which entails their authenticity and historical accuracy. And their consistency with one another.
46:53
Right. Yeah, exactly. That's what it's going to be about. No two ways about it. Hey, I need to get to First Corinthians 15 .44
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before I run out of time here, because we sort of got left. Hey, all right, thanks a lot. God bless. Bye -bye. First Corinthians 15 .24.
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Spiritual body, physical body. Is that what it's talking about? No, it is not. And at this point, looking at the book,
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The Resurrection of the Son of God by N .T. Wright, I think he does an excellent job here.
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The two sorts of body. Let's see. We have, in fact, already met the key terms and context where it should be quite clear what
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Paul means and does not mean by them. The two sorts of body, the present corruptible one and the future non -corruptible one, are, respectively, psuchikon and pneumatikon.
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The first word is derived from psuche, frequently translated soul. The second from pneuma, normally translated spirit.
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In First Corinthians 2 .14 -15, the psuchikos person does not receive the things of spirit because they are spiritually discerned, while the pneumatikos person discerns everything.
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Now, obviously, even right there, that's extremely important. I look up and someone's asking me questions in the chat channel.
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As if I'm reading a book, I can type an answer about a completely different topic.
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Completely different topic. Somebody slap that man. He's on another planet. Okay. There is, of course, no question there of physical and spiritual as appropriate translations.
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Nor would those words, with the connotations they normally have today, be appropriate at 3 .1, where Paul declares that he could not consider the
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Corinthians as pneumatikoi, but merely as sarkinoi, or perhaps sarkikoi. The words clearly refer to matters quite other than where the people concerned are physical.
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Clearly they are, and the question is rather to do with whether they are indwelt, guided and made wise by the creator's spirit, or whether they are living at the level of life common to all humankind, psuchikos, or whether, indeed, they are living at the level of life common to all corrupt creation, sarkinos.
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So, too, when Paul discusses pneumatika in chapter 12, these spiritual gifts are certainly not spiritual in the sense of non -physical, but involve, in most cases, the operation of the spirit precisely on aspects of one's physicality, whether through gifts of inspired speech, healing, or whatever.
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They are things which, though operating within the human body and life, enable that body and life to do things which would otherwise be impossible.
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The same is true of many other uses of the word in this letter and elsewhere in the New Testament. In fact, within the shadow lands of meaning and usage between ancient
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Hebrew thought and the highly influential Greek language, the word psuche and its cognates were able, by this period, to move to and fro over a wide range of meaning.
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This would be so, not least for minds soaked in the septuagint. The range would lie between a minimal meaning of soul as opposed to body, according to which, if one wanted to say non -physical, one would use psuchikos, not pneumatikos, which shows how misleading the regular translations are.
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Let me skip over a section here to the key here.
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Had Paul wanted, in any way, to produce the kind of contrast suggested to a modern reader, which, by the way, is exactly what's taken by Borg, by physical and spiritual, so you've got a physical body and then you've got a spiritual body, no connection between the two.
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If Paul wanted to do that, not only would pneumatikos have been an unhelpful word to have used for the latter idea, but psuchikos would have been exactly the wrong word to use for the former.
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In fact, if Paul had wanted to find a word for non -physical, psuchikos, which could literally be translated as soulish, would itself have been a possible option.
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If anything, if a reader of first century Greek came upon a phrase containing the word psuchikos, contrasted with anything else, he or she might well expect that, if there was a physical, non -physical contrast in the offing, psuchikos would refer to the non -physical side and whatever was being contrasted with it would be seen as more firmly bodily more substantial.
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So what he's saying is, the first term, which is translated sadly in most of our translations as physical or natural, actually that's not what he's talking about.
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He's talking there about the corruptible body, the body that is marked by the psuche, over against the incorruptible body, that which you have, the
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Holy Spirit of God, the pneumatikos. He says, there is one other factor to be taken into account which tells strongly in the same direction.
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Though it is dangerous to generalize in so widespread and plural form a language as Koine Greek, it is generally true that adjectives formed with the ending ikos have ethical or functional meanings rather than referring to the material or substance of which the thing is composed.
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Had Paul wanted to contrast a body composed of psuche with a body composed of pneuma, he might have chosen different adjectives.
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Okay? So, there's a footnote there that refers, provides you with plenty of references.
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Adjectives of material tend to form in inos, molten. Those which end in ikos indicate what something is like, giving an ethical or dynamic relation as opposed to material.
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In molten 2 .378, quoting Plummer in 1 Corinthians 3 .1, Robertson and Plummer, 1914, take this more or less for granted.
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They say, evidently, psuchikon does not mean the body is made of psuche, consists entirely of psuche, and pneumatikon does not mean it is made and consists entirely of pneuma.
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The adjectives mean congenital with, formed to be the organ of.
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And so, there's excellent citation found there. Unfortunately, when you are in a situation like Dr.
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Wright was in, in that particular context, where you're being asked to basically answer in 30 seconds, you just have to summarize that material.
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The point is, in 1 Corinthians 15 .44, the contrast is not between a physical body and a non -physical body.
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That is not right. Borg is wrong about that, 100 % wrong about that, and we are going to have to emphasize that in the debate.
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That completely ignores the context. If you just follow his own description in the text, it is painfully clear exactly what he's talking about.
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Alright, okay, real quickly here, I want to get to this section on the PBS thing before we run out of time. Let me start it up real quick here.
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You know, you talk about the letters of Paul. How do we know exactly which letters were actually written by Paul?
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Which letters were written after his death? There's a general consensus that seven of the letters, 1
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Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, those seven were definitely written by Paul.
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There's a consensus in terms of language, theology, and style. With regard to the other six, 2
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Thessalonians, possibly not, let me put it that way, Ephesians and Colossians, Colossians, probably not, 1 and 2
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Timothy and Titus, certainly in quotation marks, not. And the reasons would be the style is so different, the theology is so different, the tone is so different, it doesn't seem these were written by the same person.
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And this is not particularly anything we invented in this book. There's a fair consensus of scholarship on those points.
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John Dominick Crossan, his newest book is titled In Search of Paul, How Jesus Populated.
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We'll let her catch her breath here. Obviously we've mentioned this before, but the fact is
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Dr. Crossan and a large majority of other folks, sadly, are functioning with a very minimal
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Pauline corpus. That is a very small Pauline corpus. And many of them admit that if you were to allow 1 and 2
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Timothy into discussion, so many of the areas, this comes up in New Perspectivism as well, by the way.
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If you would let those texts in, if you would let Colossians in, it would completely overthrow everything in regards to the subject of what the
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Pauline perspective is. Opposed Rome's empire with God's kingdom, a new vision of Paul's words and world.
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John Dominick Crossan is Professor Emeritus at DePaul University and his co -author is archaeologist
55:11
Jonathan Reed. Do join us 1 -800 -433 -8850
55:17
Do not call this number, this is a recorded program. And be sure to email to drshow at wamu .org
55:24
We're running out of time here. In this book you talk about Paul's questioning of civilization itself.
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What did Paul, how did he define civilization and why was he questioning it?
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Well, the Roman Empire in the 1st century was what we call the normalcy of civilization. It certainly wasn't the evil empire of the
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Mediterranean. It was empire. And civilization has always been imperial for at least the last 5 ,000 years.
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That simply means we want to keep ours and take yours, please. It's only a question of who's doing it and who wants to do it and who hasn't got a chance to do it yet.
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So civilization has always been imperial. And what Paul is opposing is the Roman Empire not because it's
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Roman, it should be, say, Jewish or maybe Irish. He's opposing it because it's imperial. And his language, therefore, has to be extremely radical.
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He talks about a new creation. It's like we have to go back and start all over again from scratch.
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And somehow reform ourselves so that there's not this hierarchy.
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That's what he's saying. He's saying, in effect, from the beginning, violence has been,
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I'm using my metaphor, the drug of choice for civilization. And Paul and Jesus before him, and Paul is doing no more than taking the message of Jesus out into the great big
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Roman world, they're saying, it is time for withdrawal from our addiction.
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And they're proposing an alternative mode of global peace and cosmic peace.
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Not so much first victory, then peace, which is the Roman way, but first justice and then peace.
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So it's a radical alternative lifestyle. How were those ideas received?
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I would imagine very, very slowly and with great resistance because you're fighting yourself in a way.
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Well, I obviously didn't get to the point where he says Paul didn't invent Christianity. He's getting close to it.
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But when you're talking at that speed, you're not going to get anywhere very fast. So we're out of time anyways.
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But obviously, probably, you can take a wild guess at where we might be at next
57:44
Tuesday. But who knows? Maybe by then I will have said, you know what? I'm ready to go. Let's talk about Dave Hunt next week.
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Though that would be pretty hard to do, actually. That transition I mentioned on the blog last night is really, really hard to do.
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I don't know. We'll find out what happens next week on The Dividing Line, Lord willing, Tuesday morning.
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Lord willing, I'll be here. Lord willing, you'll be there. Thanks for listening. And God bless. Bye -bye. Brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
59:34
If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.
59:39
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59:45
World Wide Web at AOMIN .org, that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.