The Moral Insanity Grows Worse—Continuation of Review of James Brownson

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Had to spend some time discussing today’s events in the jailing of Kim Davis, and then went back into our review of James Brownson’s presentation on Romans 1. This will be the last DL I will be hosting for a while, as I head to Zurich and Kiev to teach over the next few weeks, but we will be continuing our review upon my return.

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We continue our never -ending effort to demonstrate that we have north the idea how to make an overly exciting program.
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No, seriously, we've got a lot of important things to get to today. And this will be the last,
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I don't know what, have you talked, John? No? Okay. So we don't know what we're doing the next three weeks, but I'm going to be in Zurich, Switzerland, teaching and then in Kiev, Ukraine, teaching and then back for two weeks to recuperate and then
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South Africa. So the rest of this year is just going to go right on by. And I have no real idea what that's going to mean for The Dividing Line, but there you go.
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So we began a response to James Brownson on the last program, and I am going to continue with that, but I don't think there's any way to avoid a very closely related issue.
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And that is in regards to the news today of the jailing by U .S.
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District Judge David Bunning of Kim Davis, County Clerk of Rowan County in the
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Commonwealth of Kentucky. Now, most of you are aware of what's going on here.
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I would simply direct you to an article at albertmohler .com,
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In This World You Will Have Trouble, Welcome to Rowan County. And Dr.
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Mohler very rightly points out that this is not a simplistic issue.
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This is not a easily determined issue, that there are all sorts of complications.
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Sadly, on a governmental basis, the complications here really can be traced back to Fort Sumter and Appomattox Courthouse.
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A lot of people have been pointing out, well, Kentucky law says this, yeah, but after Appomattox Courthouse, it doesn't really matter.
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It's sort of irrelevant. You can make all the arguments you want about what the original intentions were and stuff like that.
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I'm speaking personally here. I am not a historian of government.
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I know more than your average bear about the war that took place between 1861 and 1865.
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Notice I put it that way because it's called different things in different places. I know, you know,
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I'm an observer like most people are. I'm not an expert when it comes to these issues.
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I don't make any claims to these things. But the fact of the matter is, from a theological perspective, it is plain to me that in the massive moral and ethical revolution that represents an underlying giving over of this culture in God's judgment and the moral depravity, the obvious embrace of a culture of death, a rejection of what is good and honest and just and pure and lovely and a replacement of those things with things that are not any of that and yet being called that now.
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With the resultant reality that secularists demand full obedience to secular dogma and therefore cannot settle for simply winning the battle and being able to do things they want to do, everyone has to be on the same page.
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Again, we've talked about this many, many times before. It's Brave New World.
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It's 1984. It's all of that wrapped up into one.
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It's not that people have not seen this coming, but it's just that we live in a generation now where in the
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United States, leftism, not liberalism because liberalism would allow dissent, but a leftist, socialist, communist mindset has become prevalent.
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I think one of the two political parties should drop its current name and rename itself just simply on the basis of truth and advertising laws as socialist, minimally.
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I mean, when you've got somebody running as one of your primary candidates who isn't about socialism, I don't know why you'd have a problem with that.
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But from my perspective, there is tremendous theological meaning to all of this.
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And so I do comment on it from that perspective. But when it comes to the issue of what's going on here, from my perspective, personally, the system's broken.
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The system's broken. I don't believe that the constitution is a relevant document any longer, not after the last session of the
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Supreme Court, where in one case, I'm not talking about Obergefell here, in one case, the law says
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X and the Supreme Court goes, we think they meant non -X.
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So we'll go with non -X. So words have no meaning. Just as the original intention of the authors is utterly irrelevant any longer.
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We're no longer a nation of laws, we're a nation of man, we're run by an oligarchy, the federal judges are now our kinglets and queenlets.
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And that's how I view it. You might call me a pessimist, but I don't see any other way of viewing it personally.
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And so in this situation, I think Dr. Moeller really lays it out in saying, you know, it's a complicated situation.
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How did he put it here? Yeah, but the hardest question in this case has to do with the fact that Kim Davis holds a constitutional office that now requires her, according to the federal courts, to do what she believes she cannot do in good conscience.
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Anyone who sees this case in simplistic terms simply doesn't understand the issues. Christians of good conscience may answer these questions in different ways.
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In a fallen world, some questions seem to grow only more vexing. And I agree.
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There have already been numerous people before Kim Davis who simply resigned.
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But I can't do it and therefore I'm out of here. And on the one hand,
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I go, this is a totally unjust decision on the part of the Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court has made decisions in the past that were abjectly absurd and we recognize that today.
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That's what this one is. I've read, you know, we went over it when I came back from Utah.
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And the reasoning is infantile. That's the only way to describe it. It's absolutely infantile.
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So I'm hearing some of my theonomist friends going, yeah, this is, yeah, magistrate rule, et cetera, et cetera.
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Okay. At the same time, there's lots of questions about what if this, what if the shoe was on the other foot?
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What if this is a homosexual who would not give licenses to Christians? Well, track the person in prison, you know, and all of it just goes back to a nation that has peace and harmony.
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That's blessing from God. And it's based upon God giving to that people a common commitment to what is good and right and honest and just.
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We're not that people, not any longer. Remember, I've read it before.
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It's down here someplace. I know it's down here because I read it on another program just recently.
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There it is. Let me, let me read it again. Uh, John Adams, because we have no government armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion, avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.
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Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
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I've almost got that memorized. I suppose I should get it completely memorized since I use it so often. Um, it seems to me like the system is broken and I don't know what system is going to take its place.
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Um, again, call me Debbie downer if you want. Um, but I see our, the fact that we have the smallest
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Navy since before world war two while the Russians and the Chinese are running all over.
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Did you hear the news that, uh, Obama was up in Alaska, uh, you know, probably freezing to death, but, uh, global warming.
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And, um, uh, there were, uh, Chinese warships just outside the international boundaries.
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Uh, we can't even send ships. We were having the, the Marines are having to hitch rides on other countries boats to get where they want to go.
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Um, now part of that is the current administration, but part of that is the fact that, uh, your military strength is directly related to your economic strength.
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And when your economic strength, ask the people of Europe, when your economic strength is completely given to government dole out programs, you don't have money to do much else.
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And I believe that in my lifetime, again, I'm just speaking as a private citizen here.
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Um, I believe in my lifetime that we will be under the dominion of foreign powers, which foreign powers,
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I don't know what that's going to look like. I don't know. But all of our rights and all the other stuff that we scream about that was all based upon the blessings of Liberty.
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And that's given to a, uh, a people who are, um, concerned about doing what's right in God's sight that ain't us.
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So get ready for whatever. And this mad, uh, love for homosexualism and for the resultant gender, and it's not gender confusion, by the way, this all does get back to what, you know, cause
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Brownson Brownson's part of the problem. Brownson is giving ammunition to the destruction from Brownson's perspective.
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What this woman is doing is wrong because she doesn't understand the Bible. So, I mean, that's a pretty basic thing.
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So that's why we're going to be getting back to him fairly quickly. But, uh, along these same lines of what's going on in Rowan County, you had the situation with the young man.
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He is a male. Um, I do not, will not, and never will accept the idea, um, that being male and female is just simply how you're feeling one day, any more than being human, uh, is how you're feeling one day.
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Uh, that is insanity. It, it, it, it, there is no reason to respect that perspective because it is simply moral, ethical, and functional insanity.
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Um, if you think you're an ape, then you need severe mental, uh, counseling and, and help and maybe need to be protected from yourself.
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Um, if you're a man and think you're a woman, you're not just confused. And here was the question I had. You probably saw the story about the young man in the high school.
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Um, he is clearly a boy. Uh, he has all the equipment of a boy, but he wears a wig.
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And a dress. And so he insists on using the girl's bathroom and the girls are like, we don't think so quite rightly.
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That's not bigotry. That's common sense. That's human sanity. Human sanity will be called bigotry in a land filled with insane people.
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And there was a big protest and counter protest and blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of this stuff.
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I'm a transgender woman. Yeah. Yeah. So is Bruce Jenner. Um, but what's, what's relevant here, uh, is that this idea of being given over what, you know, when we use the term gender confusion, this young man experiences, what's the technical term?
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Gender dysphoria, gender confusion. What does that mean? Does that mean when he goes to the bathroom and he looks south that he's confused about what he sees?
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I don't think so. Generally, the idea is that, well, he feels different than what he sees.
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All right. Let's say there are people who are truly gender confused. Let me ask you a simple question.
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What would gender rebellion look like? I haven't heard anybody ask this question.
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That's why I'm asking it. What would gender rebellion look like?
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How would you, how would you differentiate gender confusion and gender rebellion?
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Well, what there can be no gender rebellion in a secular world.
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In fact, there can't be gender confusion. Now you think about it. How can you have gender confusion? Because gender is what you think it is.
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And so you can't be confused about what's going on in your own mind. So if you think you're a woman and you're a woman and there can't be gender confusion, but gender rebellion assumes that there is a appropriate assignment of gender.
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Have you heard that terminology? The agenda he was assigned at birth sounds like there's a committee that comes along with a clipboard and goes, uh, how many boys do we have to have today?
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And how many girls? Okay. You're a boy. You're no, you know what? I was present for the birth of both of my children.
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And you know, the doctor was really sort of limited by the physical realities.
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You mean there was no confusion? There was no confusion. Nope. Nope. Soon as both of them came out, it was like, that's boy.
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That's girl. And the fact that one of those two is pregnant right now proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, that it wasn't just merely assignment that it, it was, it, there was a reality.
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There was a reality involved. So gender rebellion, we can understand that the
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Christian worldview can explain what gender rebellion is and what is gender rebellion. It is rebellion against what?
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It's rebellion against God. It's rebellion against God's sovereignty. It's rebellion against the fact he's our creator and the vast majority of what we're seeing.
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And remember the number of crossdressers, transsexuals, whatever is tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny number.
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Yet we're willing to overthrow the entirety. We're willing to put our teenage girls at risk to sexual predators and destroy their privacy and their wellbeing of mind for a tiny group of people.
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And I suggest to you that 95 % of them are gender rebels, not gender confused.
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That demonstrates an evil, wicked, rebellious society that has been given over by God to absolute stupidity on the moral and ethical level.
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It's just, it's beyond the understanding of almost anyone.
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The, the, the lengths to which the leftists are going and they're doing it fundamentally for the destruction of the society.
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That's the destruction of the family and destruction of the society. And all of this, then I've said many times, one of the things we don't like about what's going on with the county clerk is that we see that it is the intention of the left to shove us into Christian ghettos.
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They want to shove us into Christian ghettos. Um, they want us to have our own version of Facebook, our own version of Twitter, our own version of YouTube, you know, and that's, what's going to happen.
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Uh, Google controls everything. Um, I keep seeing memes about them finally becoming honest and removing the name
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Google and becoming Skynet, which, which they are. Um, but you know that they have the power and they have the ability to silence all of us.
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They, they can't, we would just go dark, boom. And, uh, that's going to happen.
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They will do it and they will use this. They will use discrimination, a beautiful word that we all use every single day that has been turned into, it's been narrowed down and formed into a weapon against sanity.
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I am going to publicly announce right now that I am going to discriminate. I am going to make an act of discrimination right after the dividing line.
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And I've already decided what I'm going to do. It's real simple. I've got a 76 .6 mile bike ride in the morning.
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I want to have Mexican food. I really want, I haven't had any for a few days.
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And let me tell you something. There is no Mexican food in either Zurich, Switzerland or Kiev, Ukraine.
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Now there may be some places. Now there actually is a restaurant and I need to go there. I'm only in Kiev like six days.
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So I'm, but there is a Mexican restaurant in Kiev and I, I want to just go just to find out because I went to the one in,
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I went to the one in Edinburgh. Oh, that was horrible. It was, it was entertainingly horrible.
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Okay. That's how bad it was. It was, should have taken pictures. That wouldn't have helped because the presentation wasn't the issue.
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It was what they thought Mexican was supposed to taste like. That was the issue. I mean, wow.
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So I want Mexican, all right, but I am going to discriminate against my favorite
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Mexican restaurant after the dividing line is over. You know why? Because I don't want
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Mexicans sitting in my stomach over a 76 .6 mile bike ride in the dark in the morning where I'm working really hard, burning 2000 calories, climbing 1600 feet.
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No, I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to do pasta. Yep. Going to do pasta. Cause that, yeah, that's, that's sort of what you need to do before you do a little carbo loading there.
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So I'm going to discriminate because discriminate means to make a choice between options. It does not speak to the basis upon which you do so.
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It just simply recognizes that you are doing so. All right. So that term is an important term and the basis upon which we do.
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If you pretend you can't do it or you shouldn't do it, you're an idiot. I mean, that's the only way
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I can put it. Every single day you discriminate. The issue is, do you do so consistently and upon what basis?
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Google is going to say you discriminate. Now it's the people on the other side.
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They're discriminating all the time, but that's okay. The hypocrisy of leftism, of secularism, of socialism is astounding, which is why they never do debates because it's too easy to demonstrate the hypocrisy.
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So they just silence the other side. That's what we could do. And they're going to shove us into a ghetto and we're going to set up our own websites.
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And that's going to be okay for a while. But remember, secularism can brook absolutely no dissent. Then they'll go after that.
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But the first step is the silencing. And it's coming. It's coming a lot faster than we think.
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Coming a lot faster than we think. And we want to fight that. Well, okay.
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Is that what's going on in Rowan County? I don't know. Is that the way to do it?
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I don't know. I can't say. Part of me just wants to go, this is so grossly unfair.
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This is so there's not a single founding father. This is a revolution. You've taken over my country.
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Yeah, it's true. But my country has been given over because of the just judgment of God against its many, many, many, many sins.
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And the fact that it has had so much light and so much blessing and hated it. That's the reality.
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Sorry for all you flag -waving, you know, Michael Medved. Praise country and God's green earth.
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How many tens of thousands of babies do we murder? I mean, we're putting this woman in jail while the people of Planned Parenthood get a million dollars today from the government.
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We have one person running for office who has clearly broken high -level laws about security and state secrets that has clearly led to the death of Americans.
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Who cares? Who cares? But this woman needs to go to jail.
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I say the system is broken. Absolutely broken.
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All there is to it. So what do you do? Well, what we're going to do is we're going to continue our response to James Brownson.
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And at the very least, when you have the opportunity, still. I mean, let's face it.
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For a lot of Christians, what she's doing is wrong simply because she's wrong theologically. She's wrong that homosexuality is wrong.
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James Brownson would say, you know, I mean, and the secular media is flocking to the
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Matthew Vines and the David Gushies and people like that go, see, see, these people have a leg to stand on.
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Well, we started looking last time at, we started, we didn't do an overview.
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What we did was I wanted to try to explain to you the need to demythologize scholarship and to recognize that scholars can have a goal and then do with the data what you need to do to get to your goal.
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That's happening in the scientific realm constantly, constantly.
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And it happens in the theological realm as well. And that's exactly what we've got.
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So we want to listen carefully and thoroughly.
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To what Dr. James Brownson taught. Now, he's written a book I finally remembered.
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See, I've said a couple times. When Matthew Vines first did his video, he was clearly influenced by what used to be the
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Bible of the homosexual movement.
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John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Fairly decent sized thing.
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Almost over 400 pages in length. And there were others.
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I've mentioned names before. Skenzonian Malinkot and Daniel Hominiak and Scroggs and all the rest of that stuff.
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But now Boswell was himself a homosexual.
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His scholarship is extremely biased. One might say bigoted. Died of AIDS.
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So he was an individual who was very clearly involved in the lifestyle.
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But this was the book. This was the Bible. Boswell was no conservative.
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And so while his arguments were utilized by the gay Christian movement, they were so uncomfortably.
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Then in 2013, I'm fairly certain that's the year.
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2013. James V. Brownson released Bible Gender Sexuality.
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Please note the subtitle because especially if you watched the last dividing line, you'll know why this is relevant.
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Reframing the church's debate on same -sex relationships. And when you look at the direction.
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You have patriarchy, one flesh, procreation, celibacy, lust and desire, purity and impurity.
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This is Romans 1. Honor and shame, nature and then conclusions. So he starts off attacking compatibilism.
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Promoting an egalitarian perspective. You have to do that because without it, you got no place to go.
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And his intention is to reframe the debate. To fundamentally alter the context for the discussion.
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And that's what he's doing in this book. And it obviously is a little bit easier to respond in our context.
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To this video than it would be to the entire book. Because then I have to select the portions of the book.
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And try to represent the book. Here Brownson's doing it himself. And I think that's important.
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I think that's useful. And he's in a friendly context. So you can't say that he was having to be rushed.
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Or you know that it wasn't a debate type situation. Whatever. This is him in front of a friendly audience.
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And so fair presentation. Fair presentation. I want to hear him. Because once again.
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Once Vine's book came out. All of a sudden this had become his go -to. Rather than Boswell.
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This now becomes you know. Vines is not an original thinker. He's not a scholar. He's just simply a figurehead.
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And he's regurgitating what he's getting from these other sources. And the source he's now dependent upon is
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James V. Brownson. So with that in mind. Are we ready to utilize our technological wonders out there?
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We are. All right. Let's dive into Dr. Brownson's presentation at Matthew Vine's Reformation Project.
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Which by the way. This is the very essence of fair use.
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We are responding to and criticizing publicly made comments. Just in case someone decides.
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You know. Anyway. Okay. This afternoon we come to the mothership.
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Romans 1. Okay. And we're actually going to spend all afternoon.
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We're going to spend both sessions this afternoon on Romans 1. And so just to break it up.
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We're going to devote the first session to everything up to contrary to nature.
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Okay. So we're going to talk about impurity. About lust and passion. And about honor and shame.
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As they're reflected in Romans 1. And how to interpret these in the larger context of biblical interpretation generally.
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Now again. Let me just remind you on the last program. And of course we'll put all this together.
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We may cut out the first part of this program. And then put it in. And we'll have a file.
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And hopefully maybe we can find some way of actually doing it video wise as well. Because it's video presentation.
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But we'll have a file like we have in response to Vines and Gushy. In response to Brownson.
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So that the very least. You've got that resource. You can download it. Distribute it.
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Until ways are found of even keeping you from doing that. Anyway.
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In the preceding program. I went through Romans 1. And if you want to see how consistent
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I've been on that. You could look at The God Who Justifies. My book on justification.
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There's a chapter on Romans 1 there. And that was written. Nine years.
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Yeah, nine years before Brownson published his book. And you will see that what
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I said in the section on Romans 1. Is especially in regards. My focus there was on homosexuality.
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Books on homosexuality. But what I focused upon was the creator creation.
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The twisting of the creator creation relationship. And the fact that the created one. Is completely marred and impacted by the fall itself.
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And that this is the reason for the raising of the issue of homosexuality. In verses 26 and 27.
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Is that even the most basic sexual instincts. Can be deleteriously impacted.
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By the suppression of the knowledge of God. And by the rebellion that man engages in.
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So I've been consistent on this point all along. But keep that in mind.
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Because what you will not hear from Brownson. Is a walk through the text interpretation.
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What you will get is. Clearly oriented toward accomplishing his goal.
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And not really honoring the text. By allowing the text to speak for itself. That's one of the major problems.
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And hopefully if you've been a listener to this program. You have seen so many examples of this.
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On so many levels. That you've become rather adept and expert.
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At identifying that when it takes place. And that will be our first round.
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And then we'll take a break. And come back. And do contrary to nature. And I'll move to some more general observations.
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So there may be some times in our first discussion. Where I say I'll get to that. Just so you're aware.
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Kind of what the overall flow of things is. And then I'll end the second session.
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With a little discussion about the vice lists. In 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1. And how those impinge on interpretation as well.
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So that's the plan for the afternoon. So let's dive in to Romans 1.
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Romans 1 is obviously central to this debate.
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It is the New Testament passage. That addresses the issue of same -sex relationships.
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In far more detail than anything else does. It's also the only experience in the entire
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Bible. That might at least speak to the sexual experience of women with women.
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Apart from this. We got nothing in the whole Bible about lesbian sexuality.
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Even though it should be noted. For the first 300 years of the church's life.
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It wasn't interpreted as lesbian sex at all. Right? It was non -natural.
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Probably non -coital. Sex between women and men. And I'll say a little bit more about that a bit later.
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Now I want to comment on that. I intend if I have time.
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I mean right now a little on the busy side with other subjects. But I want to do more research on this.
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I've done some looking into this. And notice the utilization of a time frame there.
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First 300 years. I'm wondering exactly when he's cutting that off. Because that makes it sound like there was a consistent church -wide purposeful understanding that was then changed later on.
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The reality is that there are very few. Well, for example, there is no meaningful full -length discussion of the doctrine of the atonement.
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Until approximately a little bit longer than that time frame.
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It'd be around 360s. The 360s. So depending on when you start the church.
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Do you start the church in 30? So first 300 years would be to 330 or something.
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I say I'm not really sure what parameters he's using at that particular point. But the point is this. There is.
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I used my rather extensive Lagos library to do some looking into what early church fathers had to say.
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And there is precious little in the way of any type of what we would refer to as a full exegetical commentary working through the text of any book, let alone
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Romans 1, let alone some type of universal perspective. And so that sounds like an argument until you recognize the nature of the patristic evidence and what that actually represents.
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Is that. There was such a unanimity.
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Throughout all of the Christian church of the sinfulness of homosexuality that no one even gave it a second thought.
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Let alone, I mean, lesbianism. Who would even think?
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You simply can't find any evidence amongst Jews or Christians.
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That there was a debate. I mean, you really have to figure that if this is a quote unquote move of the spirit today, the spirit was really on vacation back then.
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Because they're just there's just nothing there. So. You can find some references, some confused interpretations of, well, almost any text of scripture, especially in the early patristic period.
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I mean, you have certain people who never even mentioned, you know, Justin Martyr doesn't even seem to know
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Paul existed as far as quoting from goes. So that first 300 years, it's real easy to misrepresent it.
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It's real easy to make people who don't know what the nature of the evidence is, how much biblical commentary, the nature of the biblical commentary that is found.
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What's the cutoff point? Are we talking Athanasius? Are we talking Augustine?
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What exactly are we referring to here? And even then, you know, as much as we might respect those individuals.
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They had their problems, too. They had their issues as well. So keep that in mind when you hear folks throw out a statement like that.
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It's it very often is meant to carry a whole lot more weight than we really should give it,
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I think. But this passage also speaks about male male sex explicitly as a particularly egregious and obvious and and self -evident example of Gentile sinfulness.
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All right. And it's particularly that sort of rhetoric that gets you this.
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Now, let me just stop right there. Gentile sinfulness. Again, pointed out yesterday, the
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Jews would definitely hear this as being applicable primarily to the
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Gentiles. But Paul himself in his own conclusion in Romans 3 will contradict the idea that he is simply talking about Gentiles here.
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He will say we have concluded that all men are under sin and that it is only
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Jewish arrogance refuted in Romans chapter two that would lead them to not see themselves.
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In what is said in Romans chapter one and the issues of sin that are addressed there as well. So I didn't.
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It is. These are universal issues. The unregenerate
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Jew suppresses the knowledge of God just as much as the unregenerate Gentile suppresses the knowledge of God.
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The issue is the unregenerate heart. First question that probably some of you have encountered as you talk with people about this issue is why are you even talking about this?
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Why? You know, isn't the Bible absolutely clear about this?
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Right. And it really has to do with. Yeah, actually, it is.
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When you have a meaningful biblical doctrine of inspiration and revelation, it is.
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And the church has recognized that. And it is only in the past 50 years that not that new light has come, but that the old light has been turned off.
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And it requires a less than sound view of Scripture to be able to pull it off.
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With how we interpret the text. So the critical question that I want us to focus on is a simple one.
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It's the same one that I've been encouraging to ask about before, and that is why? Why are the behaviors that Paul describes in this passage such acute examples of Gentile sinfulness?
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Or properly, why are these such acute examples of the universal sinfulness of man in light of his suppression of the truth of God and the exchange of the truth for the lie?
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See, that's the actual context. We've already pointed this out. We've already proven this. Start at verse 18, read through.
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That's what's there. So you see the already the building of the basis for dodging the actual meaning is by reading out elements of the text.
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And the way you do that is you focus people's attention on other things. I mean, sadly, it's the same type of thing that salespeople do when trying to sell a car.
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You focus their attention upon the stuff that would otherwise, away from the stuff that would otherwise cause them to go somewhere else or get some other vehicle.
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You're trying to sell something here. And so you focus their attention away.
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And that's what scholars do when they're trying to present a perspective as well.
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And, you know, then to what extent does that seem to apply to committed gay and lesbian relationships today?
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I mean, that's the basic. Committed gay and lesbian relationships. Again, you cannot find a committed gay or lesbian relationship in the
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Bible. So as we point out with everybody else, the gay
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Christian movement contains within itself the fundamental denial of the sufficiency of Scripture.
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It can never maintain Christian orthodoxy because it has to begin by asserting that you can have committed gay and lesbian relationships as a good thing.
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That's a gift from God without any evidence whatsoever of the positive approbation of God upon that within the pages of Scripture.
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So Scripture has to be insufficient. It just has to be. There's no other way you can go.
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And you will see this over and over and over again in the presentation.
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And it's just a necessity. It's the only way to twist the Scripture in this way. Overall. And my strategy in this is not, well, let's figure out a way that we can sort of avoid engaging this.
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My strategy is let's look at it more closely. Let's take the language of Romans 1 more seriously and interpret it more carefully and pay more attention to what
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Paul actually does say rather than what we simply assume he's talking about.
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Yeah, that sounds great. That's what everybody should do. And when
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I hear shallow thinking Christians just throwing out
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Bible verses and not having thought through ramifications, not knowing anything about context, that kind of shallow anti -homosexual stand gives rise to this and gives credibility and credence to this.
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But the reality is this gentleman right here, that's really hard to do.
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Yeah, there we go. This gentleman right here won't debate this gentleman right here or Robert Gagnon or Michael Brown.
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You would think, again, just like with David Gushy, what David Gushy said places him under a moral responsibility to engage us, those of us whom he says are engaging in sin.
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But he won't do it. Won't invest the time with our ilk. Well, I think
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Dr. Brownson knows that if his position, it's one thing to do a monologue in front of a very friendly audience that wants to have ammunition.
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It's something completely different to present this type of stuff against someone else who can read just as much
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Greek and just as much Hebrew as you can. Different world. Different world.
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So judge for yourself. So that's the overall strategy.
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So I want to just first of all introduce all four of these forms of moral logic that I think are part of the text.
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The first one is impurity, right? And we talked about this whole area to some extent when we were talking about the
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Levitical materials. But there's a whole set of issues around what does impurity mean, particularly in a
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New Testament context where Peter has the vision that says what God has cleansed you must not call unclean, right?
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So the New Testament is doing some stuff with impurity. So we need to figure out what's going on there.
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And I just very briefly add, yes, the
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New Testament is doing stuff with impurity in the sense that what was impure on a political or identity basis for the nation of Israel, dietary issues, clothing issues, yes, has to be done so that the gospel can go to the whole world.
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But what the New Testament is doing with moral and ethical purity in light of God's commandments in sexual purity,
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Jesus takes to the innermost core of our being and Peter who received that vision in his first letters, what's his primary focus at the beginning?
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You're to be holy for I am holy. The very language of purity from the
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Old Testament, the one who saw the vision of the sheet doesn't interpret that to mean that what was impure in the sense of to a va in God's sight, which caused the land to spew out its inhabitants has now become good, acceptable gift from God.
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Got to keep that in mind. And then there's also language about lust.
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Okay, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts, later degrading passions.
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And then finally, in verse 27, they're consumed with passions, lest we miss it three times using different words, the strong emphasis that this is an expression of lust.
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All right, so we need to figure out why is lust wrong? What is lust?
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And in what sense are these lustful relationships that are being described? And I would agree at this point, that that is extremely important to recognize and to focus upon where we're going to draw that from.
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You know, we saw in the last program, in some places, he wants to make stoic philosophy, the standard.
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I think you're going to have a hard time making heads or tails out of anything with Paul.
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When you want to change the primary sources of his thinking and his language, the primary sources of his thinking and his language, always, always, always going to be the
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Tanakh. It's always going to be the Torah, the Ketuvim, the language introduced there, always going to be that.
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And that's important to keep in mind. The third moral category is the category of honor and shame, talking about the degrading or literally the dishonoring of their bodies, both in verse 24 and again in verse 26.
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And again, in verse 27, this whole notion of shameless acts, which is, again, part of this same category of honor and shame.
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And then along with that, this last line, which commentators have sort of puzzled over a little bit.
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What does it mean when it says they received in their own persons the due penalty of their error? We'll talk about that a bit.
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Okay. And then finally, if that weren't enough, we also learned that these relationships are not natural, but they're contrary to nature or beyond nature or something like that.
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They ain't natural in one way or another. And what the heck does that mean? All right.
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And what I'm trying to suggest is these are four distinct forms of moral logic, somewhat interrelated to each other, but each one of them having their own sets of issues that if we're going to really unpack this, we need to understand all of them.
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Now, again, I don't disagree that all of these issues are relevant to a meaningful interpretation of Romans 1.
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They are. But isn't the first duty of the exege to follow the line of argumentation of the author?
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I submit to you that what Brownson does here is he distracts.
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It's a it's a it's a card game. It's a it's a magic trick, you know, a card trick game where he distracts the eye from what he's doing by overemphasizing something over here.
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All these things are relevant, but they have to be subsumed under the primary issue.
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And the primary issue is what is Paul communicating in Romans 1 and how does the discussion of homosexuality in verses 26 and 27 fit into the overall flow of that argument?
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That's that's the issue. All the other things are important. But if you miss that, what
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Paul is talking about here is the exchange of the truth, the lie, the resultant impact upon the fallen creature, the twisting of the creator creation relationship, the very essence of idolatry and why idolatry exists.
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You've missed the point. You have completely and totally missed the point.
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In this talk, I'm going to and when you put them all together, you see there's a lot of evidence in this text.
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There's a lot of data in this text on which we can rely to tell us why
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Paul says what he does and why these behaviors are wrong. Paul has not left this unclear.
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This is not a speculative exercise. This is an exercise where we have an abundance of exegetical data that is confirmed by lots of other examples in the
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New Testament. By the way, again, I agree.
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But if that's true, why do we end up having to define key terms on the basis of stoic philosophy?
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The text isn't sufficient here. By the way, it was pointed out to me.
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Well, someone on Twitter on Tuesday did what you're supposed to do.
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You fire up your Accordance or Logos or Bible works, whatever it is you're using, and did a search on the term
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Fusus and said, it's in the Septuagint. And, you know,
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I double check the references myself and I'm like, yeah, it's in the Septuagint, but it's in the non -canonical works in the
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Septuagint. In other words, what's called the Apocrypha, the Deuterocanonicals. And that would fit in with what he was saying as to the rise of the use of this particular term around the time of Alexander the
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Great, approximately that time period. And it begins to influence Jewish writings and therefore you have it in the non -canonical, apocryphal works of the
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Greek Septuagint. And so it is there. But I think Brownson himself specifically indicated he was talking about the canonical books of the
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Greek Septuagint that it's not there. So we'll be, you know, got to be honest in our criticisms and listen carefully to what he's saying.
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So there you have, he's going to dive into the next section. We don't have time to continue that right now.
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That's where we are going to pick up the next time on the program when we have the time to do this.
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When will that be? My assumption. Now, again, I don't know what's going to happen over the next three weeks.
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The world could be in abject upheaval when I get back, if I get back.
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So. But. Assuming that.
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Things the world hasn't just gone completely insane, which in three weeks. I will make sure to have moved everything up to the outpost.
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Yes. Make sure the ammunition is dry and we've got the food stores ready. Assuming that we are still on an even keel, then probably what?
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The Wednesday or the Friday or Thursday or somewhere around there after I get back.
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So probably late on the 24th. I actually have a appointment in the morning, but late on the 24th or maybe let's go for a big one on the 25th or whatever, depending, you know,
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I don't know if I'm going to be sick or whatever. I appreciate your prayers. I won't be. We will dive back into this and that will give us about two weeks.
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Um, to get a little more progress done before I head down to South Africa.
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And again, your support and prayers very much appreciated for that. We still need more funds to, you know, make all that work.
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So if you want to help us get down there and indeed the day, the debate with Graham Connerly on subject to homosexual marriage, it's want to see it happen.
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If you can help us to make that happen, that would that would be great. Very, very much appreciative of that. So thanks for listening to the dividing line today.
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We will continue this study in the future. Prayers again with travel. Very much appreciated.
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We'll see you soon in Zurich and Kiev. Looking forward to meeting new class
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Kiev folks. I haven't met in Zurich. It's going to be a lot of work. Looking forward to it.