The Inerrancy of Scripture Part 1

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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I'm just going to quickly read a short introduction of James before James comes up.

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James is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

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He is a professor having taught Greek, systematic theology and various topics in the field of apologetics.

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He has authored or contributed to more than 24 books including The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom and The God Who Justifies.

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He is an accomplished debater having engaged in more than 140 moderated public debates around the world with leading proponents of Roman Catholicism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormonism as well as critics such as Bart Eham, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong.

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In recent years, James has debated in such locations as Sydney, Australia as well as mosques in Toronto, London and South Africa.

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He is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and has been married to Kelly for more than 32 years. I don't know how old this bio is

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John, is it 32 still or is it three by now? Almost 34 now. And he has two children and one grandchild,

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Clementine. Two grandchildren, so this bio is a little old. But James, thank you very much for coming.

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The floor is yours. I am fairly certain we updated that thing.

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Maybe I didn't save the changes but you have to be very careful when you have two grandchildren to always mention the second one.

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You don't want any favoritism starting. She's only six months old so she probably wouldn't really notice it.

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But I think her sister would and so we need to be careful about that. But I'll have to admit, becoming a, how many grandparents do we have in the room?

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Will you agree with me that almost nothing makes you think more about the future than you ever did before in your life than when your kids have kids?

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You know, having kids, that does it. Because when you're a young adult, you're married but you don't have any kids yet, you're just having fun, you know?

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You're still just a youngin'. Now, I did get married and I don't know why this is so unusual anymore.

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But I was 19 and she was 18 and we didn't have kids for four years. So it wasn't one of those situations where we needed to get married either.

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So I'm really thankful for that because my granddaughter was born two days after my 50th birthday, which means that if I have a normal lifespan,

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I might actually get to see my great -grandchildren and that would be an exciting thing. But nothing changes your perspective more to look forward and be concerned about things that will touch the next generations than when you have kids, okay, but then when you have grandkids, then you realize how old you're getting and the fact that, you know what, you want to leave something behind in this world.

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So you start thinking about things in a way that you're not just focused upon your own retirement and all me, me, me, me, me.

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All of a sudden you realize, you know what, there's going to be people after me. And I'll have to admit,

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I wonder what kind of world my grandchildren are going to be facing. Some of you may have noticed that there are weird things happening in my land right now.

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Personally, I do not like election cycles that last for two years. They get really tiring, but I am a very concerned individual these days as to what's happening in all of our lands and all of our cultures.

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And especially the subject this evening, what is happening in many of our churches. The first class that I taught after I graduated from seminary was church history.

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And I'm very thankful that I had an excellent church history professor in seminary. He excited me about the subject.

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Sadly, when people teach church history, it's just sort of like, well, I'll try to get through this class or something like that.

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And over the years as I've taught church history, I've tried to excite Christians about it because I think it's a fascinating subject, not just fascinating, it's one of the few times when we as Christians have the ability to sort of hold a mirror up to ourselves and get a little perspective so we can sort of see ourselves.

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So often we're so close to the controversies of our day, so close to the things that we are involved in that it's difficult for us to have some perspective and to see what's really, really, really important in the long run.

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And as I studied church history, I came to understand,

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I came to see that there really is a pattern down through the ages, that when you have people who are absolutely convinced that God has spoken, that God has given us his word and he has spoken to us.

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I'm not sure if there's something I can do about this popping and stuff here. I call these

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Britney Spears microphones and that is not meant as a compliment, okay? Not by any extent of things.

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In fact, what I'm going to do, if you don't mind, could we turn this one on over here? I try with these as best

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I can. Test. Oh, yeah.

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I try with these as best I can, but my ears were not designed to have one of these things on them.

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And so you can turn that off and we will just go one -handed if that's all right with you.

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I realize they give you great sound, but for me, they were designed by someone who would have done very well during the

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Spanish Inquisition. So anyway, the pattern that I have observed in church history, and certainly it's true in my land, when you have people who believe that God has spoken, then there is going to be a concern for God's truth that is going to be a balanced concern.

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Because when you preach the whole counsel of God, as a minister, how many ministers do we have here in church this evening?

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When you exercise the discipline of preaching through the entirety of the word of God, not skipping the tough parts, not skipping the tough subjects or the tough books.

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I did a lengthy, I think, 80 -sermon series through the book of Hebrews. That is not an easy book to go through.

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There are certain sections that are a little bit tough there. We dealt with textual issues and all sorts of stuff, and that's not easy to do.

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And then I jumped from that into the Holiness Code, Leviticus 18 through 20.

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Now we're in Deuteronomy, working through some of the toughest, most difficult material you'd ever want to go through.

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When you force yourself to do that, what you're really saying to your people, not only are you demonstrating for them a respect for the word of God and that what is said in the classical text, all scripture is

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God -breathed. Not just the red letters, not just the last 27 books, not just the last 27 books plus the

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Psalms plus some really fun stories in Genesis and Exodus, but all of scripture is

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God -breathed. Do we really believe that? I think a lot of us, in our minds, will say yes, but in our practice, and especially if we're ministers, in our practice, we sort of demonstrate to our people that some parts are more inspired than other parts when that's not what the scriptures themselves actually say.

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There's a reason for those genealogies. There's a reason for all those long names that we're reading through right now in Joshua.

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We read through the Bible in our public reading, in our church. And there are some chapters, it's just like, and then

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Abinadab and Meadibu, and you're just going on and on, and people wonder why in the world you're doing this.

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It's rooted in history. This actually took place. This isn't some mythology where you've got some mythical Mount Olympus and mythical beings that never really existed, and the things they did, they didn't really do it at a period of time or anything like that.

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No. What God has done, he has done in history. He actually accomplished these things.

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He actually did these things. And when you have that kind of confidence in working through all of the word of God, what you're saying to your people is, we believe

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God has spoken. And when you practice the proper means of interpreting scripture, and the reason we have rules is not so we can get one kind of message out of scripture, but the reason that you exegete scripture in a particular way, the reason we look at biblical languages.

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So many people today, now I'm gonna, let me be honest, straight up front, I've taught both Greek and Hebrew, so you can say, well, you're prejudiced, you're just trying to get students.

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Well, I'm not teaching it right now, so I'm not really trying to. But I do believe in the importance of the biblical languages.

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It used to be, back in the 1600s in England, you couldn't even get a master's degree without being able, not just to read

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Greek by the time of your second year of study, you had to be able to debate in Greek by the second year of your study.

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That was back in the 1600s, folks. Let me tell you something, that's not the standard we have in seminary anymore.

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In fact, I don't know a single New Testament professor that could debate in Greek today. So things have changed, they've changed a lot, and not necessarily for the better.

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We have more information than anyone's ever had before, but I'm not sure any of us master that information nearly as well as people before us did.

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I'm not one of those folks that believes in the modern idea where especially the younger generation thinks everybody that came before them were idiots and had never thought things through because they didn't have the technology of an iPad or something like that.

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No, I realize our technology is wonderful, but I'm not sure really how well we use it.

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But the point is, when we take the time to exegete the text of Scripture, when we do the work, and those of you who minister the

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Word of God know it is work to minister the Word of God, what we're doing is we're showing respect for the one who gave it to us.

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Because when you don't do that, then all you can do is take your own thoughts and stick them in there and present them to people as if God said this.

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And a lot of people are doing that. I don't want to do that. You shouldn't be following me, you shouldn't be following anybody.

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You should want to know what the Word of God and the Word of God alone says. And those rules for interpreting

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Scripture exist so that it's God speaking, not me speaking. Otherwise, I can make any passage say anything

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I want it to say. And unfortunately, that's exactly what's going on in many places in the world today.

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But going back to my main point, as I look at how people have done this, as I look at the seriousness that people have shown down through church history, it all came back to what they believed about the

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Word of God. And once a commitment and a firm conviction that God had spoken was lost, that person or that group of people or in modern history, that denomination will not be long for this earth.

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That are dwindling away in almost any land in the world today, there are denominations you can see, they're just getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

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There's two reasons why churches get smaller. One is that the nation in which they live is under the judgment of God and no longer wants to hear what

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God has to say and is busy amusing itself with this, that, or the other activity.

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But the other reason the denominations die and wither away is because they become religious social clubs.

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They no longer have a message that the society recognizes is challenging to them and is even worth going to listen to.

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And we see this with major denominations in the United States, in the Church of England, in the

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United Kingdom itself. When you have a denomination that can't even remove a minister because he's become an atheist, you have a denomination that's no longer serious in believing that God has actually spoken and he's revealed something true about himself.

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And so, clearly, from my perspective, when people ask, you know, what's the greatest challenge, well, that the church faces today, well, certainly, in certain lands, we have many of our brothers and sisters who suffer under Islamic persecution today.

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There are many brothers and sisters this night that are in prison and they know that simply, if they would just simply say, la ilaha illallah wa muhammadun rasulallah, if they would say the

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Shahada, the doors would swing open and they would be released, but they won't do it because they are committed to the person of Jesus Christ and the truth of Jesus Christ.

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And so we know that that's one form of persecution. That's one attack upon the church. We know there is, in North Korea, for example, in places in China, tremendous persecution against Christians in those places by communist governments.

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And we know that secularism is on the rise all through Western culture, all through the world, where men and women are being convinced that they are nothing but animals.

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They are nothing but highly evolved animals. They have no transcendent purpose. There is nothing after this life.

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They can simply be focused upon their own self -gratification. There is no transcendent truth.

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There's no transcendent meaning. There is no creator. Hence, there is no basis for law. Law has to be based solely upon the current prevailing opinions.

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And this is a tremendous attack, a tremendous attack upon the truth of God and upon the

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Christian faith itself. And so, you also obviously have all sorts of other kinds of attacks that are coming against us.

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But I think, as long as the church remains convinced that her

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Lord has spoken, as long as the church remains convinced that we have a truth from God, that God has revealed himself, that we're not worshipping an unknown

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God or a God of our own mythology and our own thinking and our own imagination, that church remains strong.

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But when the church loses its confidence that God has spoken, that church is a church that cannot stand, and that is a church that no longer has a message that has any meaning.

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To anyone in whose life the Holy Spirit is bringing conviction, whose life the Holy Spirit is working, they are looking for someone that can give them a true word.

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There's a lot of people that will assure people. They'll say, I'll give you a message if you'll just follow me.

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But what results of the Spirit's work in someone's heart is looking for a true message that will meet the need that has now become apparent to that person because of the work of the

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Holy Spirit in their heart. And if we don't believe that God has spoken, if we don't have a confidence in the

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Word of God, we're not going to be able to give that message. And as I see it, as we look around, especially in Christian academia, in the seminaries and universities that were once founded to actually promote the knowledge of God and to defend the truth of God, it's in those very institutions that there is such doubt.

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Such doubt. I went to a seminary for my first master's degree that was way to the left of where I had been raised.

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Now, at the time, I'll be perfectly honest with you, I didn't know why the Lord was putting me through that. It wasn't enjoyable. I didn't like going to certain classes and feeling like I was having to engage in battle with my professors.

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I had been taught to be very respectful to those from whom I learned, and I tried to be, and I think

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I succeeded primarily in that. But there were many situations where I was exposed to all sorts of unbelief.

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And I know now why that happened. In hindsight, at the time, I didn't know, but in hindsight, I recognized that I've had so many situations now where I have debated individuals,

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I have engaged in controversy with individuals, and I had a unique standing from which to respond to what they were saying because I went to a seminary where, in essence,

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I had already studied their perspectives. I already knew where they were coming from. I knew how to speak their language, in essence.

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And so I know why that happened. But still, it was in that kind of context that I saw people,

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I remember one man very clearly who came into that seminary, and when I first met him, he started right around the same time

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I did, and he had a pretty firm conviction. He went to a decent church.

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By the time he graduated, he had a master of divinity degree in confusion. A master's degree in confusion.

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He no longer was certain as to exactly what the Christian faith was, or what it said, or how he could answer fundamental basic questions that people would ask concerning what the faith was about, and what the

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Lord would even require of them. And it was a tragic thing to see. And when

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I see young men who are filled with zeal, and want to have knowledge to match to that zeal, and say,

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I'm going to go off to seminary, and I'm like, okay, but I'm going to pray for you, and please remember something,

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I don't care where you go. I don't care who you study under. You must be discerning. You must, must, must recognize that even the best people, even the people whose books you may have learned a lot from, you've got to be discerning.

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You've got to hold them to a standard, and whatever you do, you must recognize that you need to hold the same view of scripture that Jesus himself held, if you're going to be a follower of Christ.

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Now that, when was the last time you heard someone say that? Say to you, you as a

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Christian need to hold the same view of scripture that Jesus held.

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You don't hear that very often. In fact, I wonder how many of us, maybe as you're sitting there, if I were to ask you right now,

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I do have a handheld microphone, by the way, and if I see anyone that starts to do the head bob type thing, you know, or especially the worst thing is, the worst thing is when someone right down here falls asleep, and they start snoring.

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I can't handle that. If you want to shorten a pastoral prayer while I'm preaching, start snoring. I cannot handle that at all.

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So if I see any of that, I am mobile, and I might, all of a sudden we might start doing some role playing, you know, where I'm asking you the questions and stuff, and I just bring you on up here.

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So that normally keeps people awake. The other thing I do is sometimes I have a laser pointer. I do have a laser pointer in my bag right down here, but I'm not displaying anything, so I really don't need to use it, but it is a very bright laser pointer, almost illegally bright laser pointer.

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It's the type you shoot down planes with, okay? And so what I'll do is I'll tell folks, if you fall asleep,

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I will shoot my laser pointer into your mouth. It'll make your eyes light up, and I will take a picture and put it on Facebook.

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And that normally keeps everybody awake. It really, really, really does. But anyway, as I said, do you hold

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Jesus' view of scripture? How many of you started thinking, well, what was Jesus' view of scripture?

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Now we might automatically just go, well, Jesus is God, so I mean, that's God's view of scripture. How can you have a higher view?

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But if someone asked you, if you were on the train, or I just spent 36 hours traveling on planes, if you're on a plane and you're actually talking to someone,

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I try to avoid that as much as possible, but it sometimes happens, and someone were to ask you, well, what was

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Jesus' view of scripture? How would you respond to that? How would you respond? Because you see, in our hyper -skeptical day, the primary enemies of the faith, people like Bart Ehrman, the

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Jesus seminar, people along those lines, they would tell you no one has a clue what

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Jesus' view of scripture was, because no one has a clue of anything Jesus ever said. The hyper -skeptical person does not believe that any longer we have any means of knowing what

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Jesus said. Bart Ehrman has been on a crusade now for many, many years to justify his apostasy.

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He is an apostate. He went to Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He claimed to be a

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Christian minister for a period of time in his life, and now is the primary critic of New Testament Christianity in the

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English -speaking world. And it's very clear when you look at the books that he has published over the past 15 years or so, the popular books, that it is his intention to provide a foundation for any one of you who wants to disbelieve to disbelieve.

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He's gone after every single stage in the transmission of the scriptures.

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He started off by saying we can't know what the original manuscripts said, that everything's been changed, so on and so forth, but he wasn't satisfied with that.

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So now his latest book, he goes after the idea that any of the apostles could have accurately remembered anything

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Jesus said, and so you can't trust that they got it right even when they wrote it down.

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You can't trust that what they wrote got transmitted to the first manuscripts. You can't trust that the manuscripts have been preserved down time.

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So you have every reason in the world to be like Bart Ehrman, a person who questions, a person who does not believe.

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That's really what's going on there. And you must understand that even if you've never read a book by Bart Ehrman, almost every single university professor who teaches in English anywhere in the world has, and will be communicating those fundamental skepticisms to you, or to your children, or to your grandchildren.

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Okay? And so we're all connected in one way or another, and unfortunately my nation tends to export a lot of really bad stuff.

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And that's one of the things. And so what Bart Ehrman would tell you is, nobody knows what Jesus' view of scripture was.

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Don't have a clue. We know what some highly educated Greek -speaking people long after Jesus said he said, but we have no idea, we have no way of knowing anything beyond that.

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That kind of hyper -skepticism is extremely rampant in our day. Now how many of you in this room have one of these?

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Cell phone. Come on. How many of you have a cell phone? Let's make it easier. How many of you do not have a cell phone?

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Well God bless you, brother. You know what that means?

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Now unless you're like my fellow elder back in Phoenix, the elder does not have a cell phone.

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His wife does. But I know some people who have dumb phones instead of smart phones.

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Remember dumb phones? You know, you actually use them as a phone. You know, you dialed numbers and you talked to people.

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Remember that? That seems like a very long time ago. I generally don't use my phone that way.

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I text people, and it's really weird, and I've fallen into the hole with all the rest of us. But because the vast majority of us have those devices, you cannot hide from this type of skepticism and this type of attack upon our faith.

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There's no place to hide anymore. I realize that my grandparents' generation did not have to deal with many of the issues that we're going to be talking about during the course of this conference.

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They never talked about homosexuality, the redefinition of marriage, or anything else. I assure you my grandparents' generation had no interest in such things and never, ever, ever figured that anyone ever would.

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But they also didn't have to do much in regards to response to a lot of the types of attacks that we have upon the

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Scriptures today. But because we're all connected, because even some of you right now are having a hard time resisting looking at Facebook.

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You're maybe even posting a status on Twitter. I'm at the conference, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

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I know. I'll see these things when I get back later on. I know it's happening.

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That means you are connected and you are exposed to these things. And you're exposed.

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What that means then is that there is even greater reason for you, and I don't care what you do.

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I don't care if you work in street sanitation, construction, you work at a grocery store, you work at an airport, you teach in a university.

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I don't care. As long as you make a serious claim to having bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, and you want to be a servant of Christ, you want to be used of him to communicate his truth to others.

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What that means is it is now incumbent upon you because of the culture in which we have been called to live to know much more about how we got the scriptures and to have thought through in your mind why you believe they're authoritative.

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Why you believe your scriptures versus somebody else's. I mean, we're going to be having a debate in Johannesburg next week.

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And we're going to be talking about the view of Christ in the Bible and the view of Christ in the

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Quran. And there are many, many Muslims who very much want to have a conversation with you, and yet they have another book of scripture, and they believe your book has been corrupted.

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Have you thought through the reasons why you believe in the inspiration of the

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Bible when there are many people who call themselves Christian scholars that can be cited as evidence against you?

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I mean, I will be absolutely honest with anybody who wants,

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I'll tell you straight up. In my land, and I think this is happening pretty much anywhere in the

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English -speaking world, if you want to get ahead in academia, there is one particular word that you must avoid.

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Avoid being associated with, being accused of believing, because it will be the end of any possibility you have to advance in the great exalted world of the

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Christian academy. And it was up there on the screen beforehand in the very title of the conference.

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And it's that, as N .T. Wright put it, silly American doctrine of inerrancy.

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Actually believing that God can speak without stuttering.

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Because that's really what we're saying. If you really believe that the scripture is theanoustos, as Paul says, which does not mean inspired, it does not mean inspired.

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Inspired is a Latin term, inspiratu, to breathe into something.

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Inspiration does not mean that God takes human words and breathes something special into them.

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That's not what it means. And that's not what Paul was communicating. When he used that very special term theanoustos, you hear thea, theos, theology,

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God, and noustos, nouma, spirit, God breathed, when he used that term, he had something specific in mind.

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It is as intimate as when I am speaking right now and if I hold my hand in front of my mouth, I can feel, inevitably, breath.

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Because that's how we pronounce words, we form sounds, is through moving air over our vocal cords and then moving our mouth and our lips and so on and so forth.

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And that is how we speak. And that's what's being said concerning the very words of God by Paul, it is

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God breathed. Well, if I believe that, then if God is God, if God made me able to speak, then

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I have to believe that he has a greater ability to communicate himself than I have to communicate myself.

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He can't give me an ability that's greater than something that he has. And if I know that I can accurately communicate my thoughts and intentions to another human being, no matter how obtuse they might be,

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I mean, there were a couple of times during my kids' teenage years when I started doubting my ability to do that. I mean, there are only a certain number of ways you can tell a 14 -year -old to clean their room, but they seemingly have the capacity of reinterpreting almost any element of human language into some other command.

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It's really an amazing thing. Only those of you who are parents fully understand what I'm talking about, or you're young enough to remember being 14 and working really hard at coming up with excuses.

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But the reality is that when I talk about inerrancy, when I say that God's word is without error as it was given to us, there is no error in that.

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Now we're gonna have to spend some time thinking about what that means, because people come up with some pretty wild ways of defining error, but that God can communicate in the human languages that he himself decreed would exist in such a way as to accurately and perfectly communicate his will to his people.

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When I say that, I realize I'm putting myself in a small minority when it comes to the

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Christian academic community, and I'm shutting myself out of many of the great schools today, because you're simply not allowed to believe that.

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It is considered to be truly enlightened, and even on one level spiritual, to go, well, you know, some of the greatest beauties of Scripture are found in its contradictions.

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I mean, we truly touch the very heart of God when we allow the tensions of Scripture to stand as they are, and we don't seek to harmonize them.

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Look, like I said, I went to a liberal seminary. I could do this all night long. It sounds wonderful. I can use, oh, all the flowing language and everything else, but what's the result?

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The result is, well, we don't really know. We don't really know because, well, you know,

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Paul and James contradicted each other, and Matthew has his purposes, and Mark his, and Matthew changes

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Mark, and so obviously Matthew disagreed with Mark on things, and Luke's off doing his own thing, and John was on another planet, and you end up...

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This is the reason that I tell Christians, you know where the single most dangerous place is for a Christian when it comes to, spiritually speaking?

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A Christian bookstore. A Christian bookstore because your defenses are down.

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Your defenses are down, and what you need to realize is there are coiled snakes on every single shelf just waiting to strike.

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They really are, and especially in the commentary section. You think that's the safe spot.

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You managed to get past the Benny Hinn section pretty safely, okay? You know? You had enough sense to go, oh, no, no, no, not going there.

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I'm not getting blown over by someone whipping their Armani suit around at me. No, I'm good.

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You thought you got away, and you made it to the commentary section. Ah, come on.

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A bunch of old Greek and Hebrew professors. How can they be any threat? Oh, let me tell you.

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Let me tell you, because you've been asked to do a Bible study, but you've been asked to do a tough

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Bible study. You've been asked to do something in Deuteronomy, oh, Deuteronomy.

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That's... Okay, so I need to go find myself a commentary. Let me tell you something.

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We gave up the Old Testament to the liberals about 150 years ago, and that doesn't mean that there aren't still good

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Old Testament teachers that are teaching good things, and that there aren't good commentaries being published, but in general, in general, there are very few modern commentaries that I can recommend in major portions of the

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Old Testament, because you pick up Deuteronomy, and you think... Well, I'll tell you a quick story.

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That clock's not right, is it? No way!

35:00

Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going way... Okay, anyway, I'm going to talk faster now. Jet lag, okay,

35:11

I can claim it now. I'm over 50, and I'm jet lagged, so we're good. When I was in seminary,

35:18

I took a class on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. I loved my professor. I knew he was to my left, but he was a good man, and he was one of those few people that would allow me to express myself, and he respected that there were differences of opinion, things like that.

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I don't know that there's many people like that out there anymore, but anyways, and one of our assignments was we were given a commentary on all five books, and we had to read the commentary, and write a review.

35:43

Positives, negatives, interact with the text of the commentary. And I was given Gerhard von

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Roth's commentary on Deuteronomy. So if you went into a Christian bookstore today, you could find Gerhard von Roth's commentary on Deuteronomy.

35:56

And my professor, when he assigned the text, he said to all of us, he said, I think this is the best commentary available on Deuteronomy.

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Great. So I was a good student. I read the entirety of that commentary, and I sat down to write my review.

36:15

And you had to write your positives and your negatives. And so I started with the positives first.

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And here's what I wrote. This book has a wonderful binding. And then

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I moved on to the negatives from there. And I got a 98 on the review. Give him credit, because he could tell

36:35

I had read and read carefully. But there wasn't anything else positive I could say.

36:41

Because it was so clear, von Roth comes from way off to the left, and he has all of this freight that he brings in, and presuppositions about how there probably wasn't even anybody called

36:52

Moses. And all of this has just been cobbled together from this source and that source. And the result was,

36:59

I don't know why he bothered to write this book on Deuteronomy, other than, you know, to...

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Let me tell you one thing. I can guarantee to you, Gerhard von Roth's view of Deuteronomy is not the view of Jesus in the

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Gospels. Okay? That I could tell. That I could tell. And that's what I mean by it being dangerous.

37:19

And I'll tell you this, in liberal seminaries and schools, the responses that believing scholars have given to alleged errors in scripture and contradictions and tensions...

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That's a nice way of saying contradiction, by the way. If you don't want to offend somebody, you say, well, there are tensions in scripture. What they mean is contradiction.

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The responses that have been written and have existed for a long, long time are utterly ignored in liberal seminaries.

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They don't think we have anything meaningful to say. They do not study our books. They do not study what we have to say.

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They just assume that when we see these things, we start drooling and go into a fit, and that's it.

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They don't study what we have to say. Every time I've ever debated a liberal, when I debated Bart Ehrman, I don't think he'd even

38:09

Googled my name. He certainly had not read anything I'd ever written because he doesn't feel that we have anything meaningful to say.

38:17

I had read everything, including his doctoral dissertation. They don't do that for us.

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They don't do that for us. Now, in conservative schools, we study the liberals. We read their books. Because we recognize that's a necessary thing to do to be able to formulate a meaningful response.

38:35

But the liberals don't do that. That's a little bit of a taste of where we are in the world today.

38:43

So I recognize that when I talk about inerrancy, when I say I believe that God not only gave us

38:49

God, my God is so big that he can inspire scripture in such a way that it actually perfectly communicates exactly what he wanted his church to have from eternity past.

39:04

I think my God's big enough to do that. And that makes me weird. And if you believe me, that makes you weird, too.

39:13

But we need to have a basis for our weirdness because there's a lot of people out there that say, you're just ignoring basic things.

39:18

Trust me, I'm not. I've seen more contradictions than your average bear has.

39:24

I mean, I'm dealing with Mormons, atheists, Muslims. I'm dealing with a lot of folks that have a lot of reason to poke holes in the scriptures.

39:35

And I've seen a lot of them. But I've never seen one that has made me go, yep, there you go.

39:40

Obviously, the original author was in error at this point. And the teaching here is in error.

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It's historically wrong or whatever else. I've never found one. There are some tough ones to deal with.

39:52

There's all sorts of places where I have to go, we don't know. We don't have enough information. What's happened is the enemy of the faith has come to conclusions on issues where they don't have sufficient basis to come to conclusions.

40:06

I mean, sometimes in the Old Testament, we're talking about a text that's 3 ,000 years old.

40:13

And that means there's all sorts of historical stuff that we don't know about. There's been lots of accusations made against the

40:20

Old Testament over the years that later archaeological information has helped to shed light on.

40:26

But still, you can dig something up, but it can be interpreted one way, interpreted another way, until you get another piece of information.

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There's all sorts of areas like that. But I have never found anything that has convinced me that Jesus was wrong when he identified the very words of scripture written by Moses as the very speaking of God.

40:48

Where did he do that? If I were to ask you right now, other than Rudolph who's heard me give talks like this many times before, and that's really not fair, but if I were to ask you, where did

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Jesus identify the Old Testament, and specifically the books of Moses, as God's very speech?

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If I leave you with nothing else this evening than this, I hope you catch this.

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Because this is really, really important. Remember the story of Jesus' encounter with the

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Sadducees? And they had been watching, and Jesus had just shut the

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Pharisees down. This is in Matthew chapter 22. And he had just shut the

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Pharisees down. And so you knew the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they were always arguing with each other. And it's very easy, this is an old one, and a bunch of you already know this one.

41:47

But it's a moaner, but you'll remember it once you hear it. Yes, Siri, I'm trying, see,

41:55

I don't know what I keep saying that Siri wants to talk to me about, but anyway, say, well, just turn it off.

42:03

I was gonna use it to read something, so we'll see if I can still bring it up. Anyway, they differed over the resurrection, because the

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Sadducees did not believe in the physical bodily resurrection, which is why they were sad, you see.

42:20

And the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, which was why they were fair, you see, but they really weren't fair.

42:26

But anyway, the Sadducees did not believe in the physical resurrection. So they had an argument that they clearly had developed.

42:34

Remember the woman who had the seven brothers, remember that story? Where it was called the

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Leverite Law, where if you married a man and he died giving you children, then his brother was to take you and raise up a seed to his brother.

42:49

Well, in this situation, this woman went through seven brothers. I don't know about you, but if I was like brother three or four,

42:56

I'm leaving, okay? I'm doing the Jonah thing, I'm heading out of here. But hey, it was a story.

43:05

And so, obviously, they had had great success, this particular story. In arguing with the

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Pharisees, they decided to use it on Jesus. Didn't work so well, didn't work so well.

43:16

Remember Jesus' first response to them? I love it. We live in a politically correct age.

43:22

You can't say anything that offends anybody. I mean, our teachers anymore. What's two plus two,

43:28

Johnny? Five. Well, that's one interpretation, but the one we prefer is four.

43:36

Great. And that kid's gonna be an engineer someday. Wonderful. I'm gonna drive over the bridges he makes.

43:41

Wonderful. That's lovely. Jesus was not politically correct.

43:48

Do you remember the first words out of his mouth were, you're wrong. You are not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God.

43:55

The first thing he said to them was incredibly offensive to them. First thing, you are not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God.

44:03

And then he gives a story. He says, have you not read what was spoken to you by God?

44:11

And then he quotes from the encounter back in the book of Genesis where God says,

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I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He's not the God of the dead, but of the living. And his point is, since I am the

44:25

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive in God's presence. Not I was.

44:32

But you see, even in the way that I just retold the story, and you understood what I was talking about.

44:37

I skipped over one of the most important texts of scripture and one of the most important statements of Jesus.

44:45

I said it correctly, but I said it quickly. I said, have you not read what

44:55

God, and the next normal verb.

45:00

If I said, have you not read, what's the next normal verb you'd use? What I wrote, what

45:08

God wrote to you, right? I've written a number of books, and so I could say some, they ask me a question.

45:15

Did you not read what I wrote in chapter seven? Read, write, read, wrote. But that's not what

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Jesus said. Did you catch what Jesus said? Have you not read what God spoke to you saying?

45:32

Now wait a minute. This was from 1 ,400 years earlier, 1 ,400 years earlier.

45:41

And however you work out the dating of the writing of the Pentateuch, these guys were not that old, okay?

45:52

The people, the Sadducees he's talking to were not around the days of Moses. And yet Jesus said, have you not read what

45:59

God spoke to you saying? And then he held them accountable for what had been written a millennium before they were born, as if God had spoken it directly to them.

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Now what must be true for Jesus' words to make any sense?

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Jesus held men accountable to the written scriptures as if God had spoken directly to them.

46:35

Don't tell me he didn't believe in the preservation of scripture. And don't tell me he didn't believe in the inspiration of scripture.

46:43

And you can't give me a scintilla of evidence that Jesus ever questioned a single word of what that scripture said.

46:51

You know why? Because since he's the incarnate word of God, he wrote it.

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He wrote it. Yes, the spirit of God, I believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, the whole nine yards.

47:07

The point is that Jesus did not embrace the view of scripture that is so common, even among so -called evangelicals today.

47:19

He held men accountable to, how many times did Jesus finish an argument by saying, thus says the

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Lord. It is written. It stands written. Even when he was accused of blasphemy in John chapter 10, where do you go?

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When they picked up stones to stone him. Is it not written in your law, ye are gods?

47:42

If he called them gods and to whom the word of God came and the scripture cannot be broken, how do you say that I blaspheme?

47:48

Because I said I am the son of God, John chapter 10. He's quoting from Psalm 82, 6. And in Psalm 82, the word of God came to the judges, and hence they were called gods because the word of God came to them and they were delivering

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God's words and God's judgment. And so since you go back and read

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Psalm 82, you find out that they were talking about unrighteous judges. The very next verse says, you shall fall like any one of the princes.

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He was identifying his accusers as false judges for judging him for saying he was the son of God.

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He believed the scriptures. He says the scriptures cannot be broken. And so when you understand that Jesus held this view, it's then fully understandable why his apostles did.

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That's why Paul said all scripture is theanoustos, God breathed. And that's why it's profitable for what?

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For every single thing the man of God needs to do in the church. To teach, whatever we need to know,

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God's revealed to us. And it's God's right to say this far and no farther.

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To teach, to exhort, to rebuke and reprove, that's gonna have to be done in the church too.

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Where does a man go? Man of God go? He goes to that which is theanoustos, that which is God breathed.

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And that's why the apostle Peter, real quickly here. That's why the apostle Peter likewise had the same view.

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Where did Peter give us most in -depth discussions of how we got scripture?

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Remember? When he discussed his own personal experience on the

49:34

Mount of Transfiguration. Remember when he talked about being on the

49:39

Holy Mountain and hearing the Father speak? Man, you would think if you were Peter, that's the story you'd tell over and over again, which

49:46

I'm sure he did. But isn't it interesting that even as Peter tells his own personal experience, he then goes on to say, but we have a more certain word.

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We have a more certain word than even his personal experience, and that is the word of prophecy.

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And he says, you must know this first of all. Before anything else, you must know that no prophecy of scripture ever had its origin in the interpretation of the prophet himself.

50:18

That's a passage that's frequently misused. The Roman Catholic Church will say, you can't interpret scripture privately.

50:25

You can't question the church's interpretation. And this text says that. That's not what the text is talking about.

50:31

The Greek term epiloseos that is used there is talking about the prophet thinking about and bringing forth words of prophecy.

50:39

It's not like Isaiah said one day, my book's not really as long as I'd like to be, so let's bring forth some prophecy today.

50:45

That's not how it worked. That's not how it came about. What does Peter say? He explains to us.

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He says, men, and that's actually the last word.

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The very last word. In fact, I had the very last word.

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By the way, this is 2 Peter 1, verse 21. For no prophecy of scripture comes forth from the will of man.

51:19

It's not man deciding, but here's the description that Peter gives to us. And it's perfectly consistent with what

51:25

Jesus said in Matthew. It's perfectly consistent with John chapter 10. It's perfectly consistent with Paul in 2

51:31

Timothy 3. But here's literally what he wrote. But by the

51:37

Holy Spirit being born along, spoke from God, men.

51:45

The last thing that is said is men. The emphasis isn't upon the human, but it recognizes that God used men to bring scripture into existence.

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But when he did so, those men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. Now that's as close as you're gonna get to some kind of description of the process of how it is we have scripture.

52:20

Because you need to understand something. I don't believe in a mechanical dictation theory of how we got scripture.

52:27

I don't believe that Peter was sitting there one day and he was thinking about writing a letter to somebody and then all of a sudden.

52:38

And then I was like, wow, it happened. Look at that, scripture.

52:45

That's how some people think it happened. And we chuckle, but some people think that's pretty much how it happened.

52:52

A form of automatic writing. Let me tell you something, that doesn't work. There is way too much in scripture that contradicts that.

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I mean, why in the world, if Paul was taken over by some automatic writing machine, does he say to Timothy, and bring the cloaks and the parchments?

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Because he wants something to write on, and he's cold at night. The Roman blankets obviously weren't nearly as nice as the blankets that he had, and he wanted his cloak to stay warm at night.

53:24

And when you read the Psalter and you see the whole range of human emotion and experiences expressed there, when you just read in the original languages.

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Look, when you read 1 John, and then you go read Hebrews, that ain't the same person talking.

53:42

That's the same God talking, but he's using different people. The vocabulary, the style, completely different, completely different.

53:50

That's why when you take first year Greek, you read 1 John, you don't read Hebrews, because you couldn't do it.

53:56

It's too complicated, it's too difficult. The vocabulary, syntax, everything completely different than 1

54:02

John. Men spoke, there's no question about that. But they spoke from God as they were being carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. And I think it makes perfect sense, and it's perfectly defensible, to believe that if someone is speaking from God, as they're being borne along by the same spirit that brought this vast universe into existence, that that spirit is actually capable of bearing them along in truth and not in error.

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And he can use them for who they are. God made them the way they were.

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He gave them the linguistic skills that they had. He gave them the experiences that were theirs.

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And so he is able to use them, and use their experience, and use their language in such a way that the result, because what does

54:56

Paul say? What is inspired, the person or the scripture? Think about it. We tend to mess around with that term.

55:03

We talk about Paul was inspired. Never says that. What's inspired? The scripture.

55:09

The result is what is theanoustos, not the person. We gotta be very careful about that. We gotta be very careful about that.

55:15

Because people will say, well, you have to look at the person, and what did they know and not know, and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

55:22

The locus of inspiration, according to scripture, is the result. That's why I don't have any problem with the fact that, have you noticed that Paul talks about his scribe?

55:31

He names them. He dictated his letters. He probably didn't dictate

55:37

Galatians. Probably wrote that one himself. That's probably what he was saying when he talked about large letters. But he dictated.

55:44

And that's probably why 1 and 2 Peter are very different from one another in their syntax, in their language, in their flavor.

55:52

Probably because one of them is dictating. They may have both been dictated to different scribes. And you go, I don't like that.

55:58

Why not? The result is what is inspired. The process is superintended by God.

56:04

So the result is what God wants us to have to do. He didn't need to have automatic writing. He's big enough to know exactly what's going to happen.

56:11

Not just because he's looking down the corridors of time, but I believe in a God who created time itself. So when you put it all together,

56:22

I wonder why it is that people question inerrancy. Because isn't your

56:29

God big enough to give you a certain word? The apostles certainly believed that he did.

56:37

The apostles were very clear about that. And yet today in our skeptical world, we're not clear about it at all.

56:45

We're not clear about it at all. Now, we need to talk a lot more about what inerrancy means and what it doesn't mean.

56:51

Because in the vast majority of situations, Christians get caught up defending a view of inerrancy that actually isn't a proper view of inerrancy.

57:01

And we end up defending things we don't need to be defending. Because we just figure, well, this person's opposing the faith. If they're saying this,

57:07

I need to oppose everything they say. It's a very common error that we get into. And that's why we're not done this evening.

57:13

That's why we have tomorrow. And we have the first session tomorrow morning to especially look at. And if you want to sort of do a little homework this evening for tomorrow morning, look up the

57:23

Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. There's only 19 articles in it.

57:30

So it's nice and short. And if you read through it, you'll find that it's very useful.

57:37

This was the one thing, this is why Siri kept popping up on my iPhone. And why everybody was,

57:43

I even got a missed call. But this was the section, whoa. And then he broke his iPhone on his iPad.

57:49

That'd be great, that'd be wonderful. It might be something there about Apple, but we're not gonna get into that this evening.

57:57

This is the last article. And I'll close with this cuz I've gone already five minutes over. But I don't trust that particular clock, it's not inspired.

58:10

Last article I think is important. It's something to think about this evening. We affirm that a confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the

58:22

Christian faith. We further affirm that such confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ.

58:29

That's the positive. Negative. We deny that such a confession is necessary for salvation.

58:37

However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences both to the individual and to the church.

58:49

Now, I think there is a lot of wisdom in the way in which that was stated and formed.

58:57

It is important to recognize that a denial of inerrancy does in fact have grave consequences both to the individual and to the church.

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I've seen it over and over again. History shows us what happens to every single denomination that has lost its commitment to the

59:22

Bible as the word of God. They have either passed from this earth or in the process of so passing.

59:29

And there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. I'll close our time with this. I am convinced, we'll probably start off tomorrow morning just reminding ourselves of this, but I am convinced that when the spirit of God changes the heart of a man or a woman, draws them to Jesus Christ, reveals him to be the glorious Savior, reveals your sin, reveals your need for a

59:56

Savior, I am convinced that part of that work of the spirit of God is in making that new heart, taking out that heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh as the prophet describes it.

01:00:10

That one of the results of that is that that heart of flesh will have an implicit desire to be obedient to the word of God and the word of God alone.

01:00:22

Now, there may need to be questions answered and things like that, but when

01:00:27

I see someone who fundamentally does not possess a confidence that God has spoken,

01:00:35

I am very concerned about that individual. I'm very concerned about that individual, and I've seen many make shipwreck of the faith because they lost their anchor and they lost that belief that God has actually spoken.

01:00:49

So, what we're discussing, albeit rather briefly, is exceptionally, exceptionally important.

01:00:57

I'm not sure if that means the battery just died or that's a good indication that I need to turn it over to whoever is going to give us our instructions concerning the brief ha -ha break.

01:01:09

I know I took 10 minutes too long. I apologize for that, but give us instruction, brother. Thank you very much,

01:01:17

James. You have 20 minutes. So, we've tried to consolidate some of the questions that are mildly duplicated and we try to preserve the questions which are directed at the actual topic of this evening and not outside of the main theme of this evening's message.

01:01:32

So, my apologies or our apologies if any of your questions don't get answered, but James will be in the back if you're brave enough to corner him.

01:01:43

I'll sit behind you and I'll read. First question, how do we deal with all the numerous variants found within the

01:01:50

New Testament text? Unfortunately, I don't get to do my New Testament reliability presentation on this particular subject.

01:01:59

It is, I think, one of the most important subjects to address, but we only have a certain amount of time.

01:02:05

What I'm going to do is sort of use an American football term here. I'm going to drop back 10 and punt.

01:02:11

I'm not sure if there's a corollary to that in rugby or something like that, which would make much more sense.

01:02:18

And I just do want to mention I only have about three rugby jerseys to my name and they're all from South Africa.

01:02:24

Anyway, but what I'm going to do is suggest that you look either to my book,

01:02:32

The King James Only Controversy, where I address the issue of the manuscripts and things like that. I've done a presentation on the reliability of the

01:02:39

New Testament. I don't know how many, over 100 times now. And a number of those are on YouTube.

01:02:46

One of them, a fairly complete version, is from the Trinity Law School in California, which

01:02:51

I know is on YouTube. But there's been a number of others as well. It's an extremely important issue.

01:02:58

We do need to know about it. You notice those little notes at the bottom of your page in the

01:03:03

ESV study Bible or something like that that say some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that. That is not a subject that we can skip over.

01:03:11

It is one of the most important issues in my perspective. That's why I want to direct you to a rather full hour and a half, two -hour presentation rather than just a 90 -second response.

01:03:23

But I will just simply say that the New Testament is the earliest attested document of antiquity.

01:03:32

It is the most widely attested document of antiquity. And it is the most purely attested document of antiquity.

01:03:41

And that's really not a question. And in fact, if I had my computer up here and hooked in, I could show you

01:03:46

Bart Ehrman saying that we have far earlier attestation with the New Testament than for any other work of antiquity.

01:03:52

It's one of the reasons I asked him the question I did in our debate in 2009. So you have to be a real radical skeptic to question that we can, in fact, and do, in fact, possess all the original writings of the apostles.

01:04:09

This is sort of a follow -up question just on that. Doesn't heresy only apply to the original autographs?

01:04:17

One of the things we'll be doing in the morning is in looking at that statement, I want to be able to flesh out some of these things.

01:04:25

Inerrancy specifically refers to that which is inspired. What's the term I used just a few moments ago?

01:04:30

What is the locus of inspiration, the point of inspiration, is in the production of the graphe, the writings, the scriptures.

01:04:41

And so we must distinguish between the writing of the scriptures, the production of that letter to the

01:04:49

Romans, which Paul dictated to a man. And it was probably written upon papyri.

01:04:56

And then it was carried in a leather case to the church in Ephesus. Not a nice, fancy leather case, but just something a man was carrying.

01:05:06

And for a period of time, that letter existed only as one copy on papyrus, being carried by a man who had never met a bar of soap or a can of deodorant.

01:05:16

That's how it existed. We need to recognize that God spoke to his people in time and in history.

01:05:24

All right? And so that's where the inspiration takes place. Now, I believe God has also preserved those scriptures.

01:05:32

The question is, what's the mechanism that he's used? There are some people would say that he used some type of mechanism.

01:05:40

Well, Bart Ehrman, for example, says he could never believe that the Bible's a word of God if God ever allowed any two manuscripts to differ from one another.

01:05:48

Well, think about that for a second. What would that require? What would that require? The first time

01:05:53

I heard him say that, I burst out in laughter, because I'm just imagining some poor scribe in the 4th century, okay?

01:06:01

You're copying the 17th chapter of John. That's a pretty important chapter, you know. But you've had a long day.

01:06:08

And how many in here are over at the age of 50? How many of you, your arms have gotten too short to be able to read small print?

01:06:19

Ah, you know what I'm talking about, don't you? These are progressive lenses, I fully understand.

01:06:24

I have a wonderful new watch, a new Garmin watch. I can't read a word of it without my glasses on.

01:06:31

And this is a little older scribe, okay? So he's just about to make a mistake, because his mind's wandering a little bit, his vision, he's copying from another manuscript.

01:06:43

He's just about to make his mistake. Now, according to Ehrman's theory of dictation, what happens?

01:06:49

Does all of a sudden, right as the quill is about to touch, boom, he explodes in flames.

01:06:58

There wouldn't be too many people copying the scriptures if this happened very regularly. So you wouldn't be able to produce many copies of scripture this way, you know what

01:07:05

I mean? Or is it all of a sudden, and then all of a sudden, that's right, and then it's like, wow, what happened?

01:07:13

Not feeling so good, I better finish this up here. And it doesn't even know that God just took over and automatic writing took over.

01:07:20

Basically, Ehrman's theory would be that God could not have given us the Bible until 1949.

01:07:26

You know what happened in 1949? That's when we invented the photocopier. So seriously, if you have the idea that you have to have that kind of photocopy reproduction, then we couldn't have had the

01:07:39

Bible until 1949. Well, there's been a few generations of people that have appreciated scripture before 1949.

01:07:47

And so it's the method of preservation that is the issue. And I believe that God preserved the

01:07:54

New Testament especially by having that message go out all over the known world so that no one body could ever gather up all those manuscripts, make wholesale changes, make edits, put doctrines in, take doctrines out.

01:08:07

That could never have happened. It is impossible for that to have happened because of the wide distribution of the manuscripts.

01:08:14

Now, the result of that is we have textual variance we have to examine. And we have...who feels confident right now that you could name the two largest textual variance in the

01:08:26

New Testament? One, two, three, small percentage.

01:08:35

And...okay. Rudolph, I was just checking Rudolph there. Just got to check my butt out, you know, make sure he's listened to the 47 ,000 times he's heard me talk about this.

01:08:45

Two places. The two biggest ones are the longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20.

01:08:51

And when I say the longer ending, it's because there's multiple endings to the Gospel of Mark, not just one.

01:08:58

And what's called the Pericope Adultery. As Dan Wallace of Dallas Seminary puts it, his favorite story that's not actually in the

01:09:06

Bible. And it's the woman taken in adultery, John 7 .53 through 8 .11. Now, those are big...those

01:09:12

are 12 -verse chunks. But those are the only ones like that. And they've been...Christians

01:09:18

have known about this all along. Now, normally, what I would do at this point is I'd talk about what the manuscript evidence is and all the rest of that stuff.

01:09:24

And I'd talk about how the story about the woman taken in adultery. It's not just found there in John.

01:09:29

It's found in two other places in different manuscripts. Two other places. And some manuscripts is found in Luke, in two different places in Luke.

01:09:37

Now, when you've got a text that's looking for a home in different places, pretty good evidence that it comes about later.

01:09:44

And, of course, the earliest manuscripts we have of the Gospel of John do not contain it. In fact, the first manuscript we have is an extremely unreliable manuscript,

01:09:51

Codex D, Codex Bese Canterburgensis. And that's written in the 5th century. And that's the first place that you'll find that as far as a manuscript of the

01:10:00

New Testament. So people like to say, well, that was just a story that was passed down. It really does go back to Jesus.

01:10:05

And, man, even Mel Gibson managed to get into the Passion movie, though it had nothing to do with the movie at all. You can't have a

01:10:11

Jesus movie without that story. But the fact of the matter is, from my perspective, what you want is what

01:10:17

John wrote, because that's the locus of inspiration, not what somebody 150, 500, or 1 ,000 years later thought

01:10:25

John should have written. Sorry, I went a little bit long on that because it's a two -hour presentation, and I'm trying to give you little snippets of real fast.

01:10:33

Can you please explain the difference between inerrancy and infallibility? That really depends on a lot of context and being used.

01:10:44

Classically, inerrancy is referring to the factual statements, consistency, coherency, historical issues, things like that in Scripture.

01:10:57

And infallibility normally is restricted to teaching. And so consistency of doctrine, not giving a fallible theological understanding of God, or something like that.

01:11:09

Obviously, though, the two are very closely related to one another, because many times we derive properly theological conclusions from certain things that God has done in history.

01:11:25

And so it's sort of hard to draw a hard and fast line between those terms.

01:11:31

But generally, historically, if a distinction is being made, one's referring to teaching of doctrine, the other's referring to statements of fact, issues along those lines.

01:11:45

Is there any major difference between your understanding of inerrancy and the teaching of the Catholic Church on inerrancy?

01:11:52

Yeah. Now, of course, when you say the Catholic Church, how do you define that today?

01:11:59

I mean, my Roman Catholic apologist friends are struggling mightily with Pope Francis.

01:12:06

Pope Frankie, isn't he a cool guy? You just want to have a cup of coffee with Frankie, and who knows what might come out of his mouth as you talk to him, because he says so many interesting things.

01:12:20

But one thing I can tell you for certain, he doesn't believe the same things that Cardinal Ratzinger believed.

01:12:26

He's the other not really pope, but still pope, but not pope because he's not dead. It's really confusing right now, and you know what's going to happen.

01:12:35

Write this down, he will resign. The current pope will not, his predecessor started this, he resigned.

01:12:46

That was the first time it had happened, like what, 673 years? I can almost guarantee you, Frankie will,

01:12:52

Francis, sorry. Francis will, we just love him so much, we just call him Frankie. So Francis, I think, will also resign.

01:12:59

What happens when you got three of these guys running around? Because Pope Benedict, which is

01:13:06

Cardinal Ratzinger, just spoke out about some things. And I was just struck, once again,

01:13:12

I talked about this on the dividing line. I was struck by how different what he was saying was than what you were getting from Francis.

01:13:21

And so when you try to define the Roman Catholic Church today, it's really, it's tough for them to do, and it makes it even tougher for us to do.

01:13:29

But historically, especially before the Reformation, Rome would have affirmed everything

01:13:34

I've said about inspiration. However, by denying sola scriptura, they then made scripture subject to this higher level of tradition, and essentially applied that to even the teachings of the church, which ends up coming out in 1871 in Vatican I, and it's teaching on the infallibility of the

01:13:55

Pope. But the reality is, if you've ever looked at papal biblical commissions and the material they produce, thoroughly infected with modernism.

01:14:06

And so what Rome has done, especially since Vatican II, has to affirm an inerrancy or infallibility of teaching interpreted by the church, of course.

01:14:17

And has backed away from any kind of inerrancy in regards to historical issues, or especially anything that would have to do with the natural realms, scientific areas, anything like that.

01:14:30

The vast majority of Roman Catholic institutions throughout the world, universities and things like that, would never affirm an overly conservative view of scripture at all.

01:14:40

So Rome has been thoroughly infected. The very liberal perspective on scripture, that's very clear.

01:14:50

Just it follows up from there, it says the following. It says, evangelical scholars like William and Craig, Craig Blumberg, Michael O 'Connor, and various scholars mentioned that they do not hold to classical inerrancy.

01:15:01

What is wrong with it, and how do they differ from you? Well, I don't know, because Dr.

01:15:09

Craig avoids that subject like the plague. His opponents are constantly trying to drag him into making a statement about it, and he just doesn't wanna go there, especially because some of the schools he teaches for still have inerrancy as at least some level of something you have to sign on to.

01:15:24

I've taught for Southern Baptist Seminaries, and Southern Baptist Seminaries also require you to sign a statement that you believe in inerrancy.

01:15:30

The problem is I've discovered that there's a lot of ways of redefining the concept so you can sign the statement even though you really, really, really don't believe the teaching anymore.

01:15:41

So I'm not really sure what that actually accomplishes. My criticism, especially of Dr.

01:15:48

Craig and Dr. Lycona in their presentation, is that they will say, well, we can use the gospels as reliable historical documents that will get us started.

01:16:01

We don't have to talk about inerrancy, we don't have to talk about inspiration. They're historically reliable enough to establish some basic facts of Jesus' life, and then you start building this case on that that is supposedly eventually gonna lead you to a belief in the deity of Christ and the supernatural resurrection, and he's the son of God, and he's coming again in glory.

01:16:20

And my argument is twofold. A, no apostle of Jesus Christ ever argued like that, not once.

01:16:26

And B, I do not believe that a generally reliable historical document is sufficient as grounding for a belief that the

01:16:37

God of the universe, who created all things by the word of his power, actually entered into his own creation, lived and died, and rose again the third day.

01:16:47

Those are supernatural claims, and they require a supernatural revelation to be grounded upon.

01:16:55

And so I just don't believe that you can minimize the target, so you don't have to deal with alleged contradictions and stuff like that, down to this generally reliable story that can then give you sufficient foundation for where you eventually want to get to.

01:17:09

You've got to have a strong enough foundation for what it is you're trying to assert, and that's really where my problem there lies.

01:17:19

Paul says, I Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 verse 10 to 12, not the Lord. What is your take?

01:17:26

I love that one. Okay, where's the Muslim in the audience? Okay, come on, go ahead. We love you, we love you, we want you here.

01:17:33

Seriously, because I cannot tell you how many times I've had my Muslim friends quote that text and say, but Paul specifically said he was

01:17:44

I, not the Lord. So he's denying inspiration.

01:17:50

Now, if you know the text, what he's talking about is he's answering various questions that have been sent to him by the Church of Corinth concerning specifically marriage, virgins, issues of divorce, so on and so forth.

01:18:04

And what's really neat about that section is if you actually look at it, and unfortunately, most of my opponents don't look at it.

01:18:10

They just know it says I, not the Lord, and they sort of go with it from there. If you look at it, previous to that, every answer that Paul had given on the issue of marriage and the relationship of men and women reflected directly what we have in the

01:18:26

Gospels of Jesus' own answers to those questions, which is really neat. Because what that demonstrates is

01:18:33

Paul's knowledge of those traditions and the Gospels' knowledge of those traditions. Now you've got another testimony to what

01:18:39

Jesus actually taught about these things, and the accuracy and consistency of the transmission of Jesus' teaching over time.

01:18:45

But the point is, when Paul was addressing things that Jesus specifically addressed, he simply repeated what

01:18:52

Jesus said. But then he was asked some questions, and there's nothing in the

01:18:57

Gospels where Jesus ever addressed the questions that he was asked.

01:19:03

And so what Paul says is, now I, Paul, not the Lord, say this.

01:19:08

What he's saying is, we don't have revelation in the Gospel stories. Jesus did not address this.

01:19:15

But I'm an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore I say that this is how you should handle the situation.

01:19:21

He's not talking about inspiration. He's talking about the source from which he's deriving the teaching.

01:19:26

And he's distinguishing between when he's quoting Jesus and when he's now answering a question that had not been asked of Jesus and is not a part of the

01:19:34

Gospel tradition. That doesn't change what inspiration is any more than I've had many

01:19:39

Muslims say, well, Paul can't be inspired because he said bring the parchment and the cloak.

01:19:44

God wouldn't inspire that. And again, that's because their view of inspiration is the dictation method.

01:19:51

Remember, you need to understand for the Muslim, all of the Quran, the Quran is eternal, it's uncreated, it's eternal as Allah himself is.

01:19:59

And it exists on a heavenly tablet, and it was sent down in one night, night of Laylatul Qadr, to the angel

01:20:06

Jabril, and then it was parceled out to Muhammad over 22 years. And it was a dictation theory.

01:20:14

The angel says, these are the words, Muhammad memorizes them, gives them to somebody else, that's it.

01:20:20

There's nothing of Muhammad in it. That's why in classical Islamic exegesis of the Quran, you can't ask the question, well, what did

01:20:26

Muhammad understand about this? It's irrelevant, because there's nothing of Muhammad in the Quran. So you can't even ask questions of context or things like that.

01:20:35

So that's where the difference really lies, and that's what's going on with Paul.

01:20:41

You're gonna do like one more? In the same line, it says the following.

01:20:46

It says, we do not know the Gospel authors, so why believe they are inspired? The Quran speaks authoritatively as God in the royal plural we, the

01:20:56

Gospels don't, why therefore believe the New Testament? Well, there are a lot of books where God allegedly speaks in the first person.

01:21:03

Certainly, you have that in the prophets, you have that in Isaiah, so on and so forth, but it is an anachronistic thing to apply a standard that says, you need to know who all the authors are.

01:21:15

Jesus quoted from books of the Old Testament, and we don't know who the authors were. And yet, as a

01:21:21

Muslim, you must believe that Jesus was a prophet. So Jesus quoted as prophet from other prophets and from other books, and we don't know exactly who the author was, so evidently he didn't have the standard you have.

01:21:32

Why do you have a standard that a prophet of God didn't have? The point is, there is no reason, cuz again, here's one of the major differences between Muslims and Christians on the issue of inspiration.

01:21:42

For the Muslim, the character of the prophet is absolutely central to the authority of the resultant scripture.

01:21:52

That's why Muslims don't believe that prophets sin, or if they sin, it's only an extremely minor type of sin, it's not a type of major sin.

01:22:00

And that's why they reject the fact that in scripture, we see prophets who sinned. David gave us scripture, and he was a murderer and an adulterer.

01:22:10

And the really ironic thing to me is that so strong is this desire amongst

01:22:15

Muslims to clean up the prophets because the prophet's character determines the authority of what is given.

01:22:22

That comes from the issue of Muhammad and the people that opposed him. So strong is that, that they still have the story of David, and even though Nathan isn't named, we know who it is.

01:22:33

They still have the story of Nathan coming to David. Why would you have

01:22:39

Nathan coming to David? Because the historical story, why did Nathan come to David? Because of David's adultery and murder.

01:22:47

And so you clean that up, and yet you still have Nathan coming to David in the Quran, why? It doesn't make any sense.

01:22:54

It's an anachronistic standard. And so there's all sorts of thus saith the

01:22:59

Lord's all through scripture. But when the son of God enters into human flesh and lives amongst us, the story of his life is given to us, not just in stereo.

01:23:12

I'm old enough to remember when stereo came out. Any of the rest of you remember? When stereo first came out, and it's like, whoa, that's cool.

01:23:20

So you young people are going, what are you talking about? I bet you you had one of those.

01:23:27

I showed my daughter some of my 33 RPM albums, remember those?

01:23:33

And I showed her what they're made of. And she goes, what's vinyl? I said, no, vinyl, dear, vinyl.

01:23:41

They're made of, you put a, oh, never mind. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember those things.

01:23:50

And look, I shouldn't have told that story. The point is that we have a completely different way of understanding how inspiration takes place.

01:24:03

And so I was telling you about the stereo thing. We have the Gospels, and we don't just have one.

01:24:09

We have three. And in harmonizing them and listening to all three of them, we get a much deeper understanding than if we had just one.

01:24:18

Your book only has one author, at least that's the traditional belief. We don't know a lot about the origins of the

01:24:25

Quran itself. But if you only have one author, we have multiple authors. May I suggest to you that it is a far greater miracle that we have a consistent teaching of the

01:24:36

Bible when it's written over 1 ,500 years by 40 different authors writing in different languages than you have with a book that's only 14 % the length of the

01:24:46

Bible written by one guy. Which one presents much more of a miracle?

01:24:53

Think about it. Think about it. Because you see, no group of people could control something in such a way as to present a consistent harmonious revelation over 1 ,500 years in three different languages.

01:25:06

It's not too difficult to come up with something when you're one author writing over only 22 years.

01:25:13

Completely different thing. Don't compare apples and oranges. The Bible and the Quran cannot be compared on many levels, not only size -wise, but linguistically, historically, the whole nine yards.

01:25:23

There's fundamental differences, fundamental differences between them. So all right, I'm ready for tomorrow morning.

01:25:30

How about you? James, once again, thank you very much.

01:25:37

I'm sure we've all learned a lot. Let's quickly close, and then we can go for a cup of tea. Lord and Father, we thank you for your inerrant word.

01:25:47

And we thank you, Lord, that it speaks straight to the heart. It is a double -edged sword, and it speaks with conviction in our hearts.

01:25:55

And we know it to be the truth because your spirit reveals it to be the truth to us. And we thank you for your spirit at work in us.

01:26:01

And we pray, O Lord, that as we explore, O Lord, your word for the rest of the weekend, that you would open it to us and help us to understand all of it.