Double Book Review

Alpha & Omega Ministries iconAlpha & Omega Ministries

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Started off challenging Peter Lumpkins to provide documentation of claims he has been making, and then moved on to important stuff: a quick review of key issues relating to both Love Wins as well as Forged by Bart Ehrman. I hope to provide some foundational and important observations that will be helpful to my fellow believers.

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.
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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good afternoon, welcome to the Dividing Line. Before we get to the most important information today,
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I have two books to review today. I think they're very important. I think you'll want to stay tuned.
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I think it's some of the most important stuff we've looked at in a long time for the health of the modern church.
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I wish to call out a certain individual. I normally don't do this, but I think it is necessary.
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Most of you are aware of the fact that during the height of the Ergen -Kanner scandal, which is of course ongoing, it's just nobody talks about it anymore, it's just a, oh, we don't think about that anymore type situation.
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There's a Southern Baptist by the name of Peter Lumpkins, who made a name for himself by editing videos, changing words, he's put out silly little videos with cartoon characters and things like that, and been documented to be dishonest and, you know, a troubler of the brethren.
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And he continues in that role. He has said a number of times that he has absolute information that I will never teach for Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary again.
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Well, he sent a letter to someone recently who had me on their program. They had simply looked at my bio, saw that I've been teaching for Golden Gate since 1995, taught many, many different subjects, and no one disputes that, by the way, from systematic theology,
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Christology, apologetics, Christian philosophy, religion, Greek, Hebrew, Greek exegesis, Hebrew exegesis,
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Islam, atheism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And always as an adjunct, obviously.
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And so he sent an email to this individual. Let me read here, as I have fully documented,
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James White does not teach at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. His last teaching contract with that institution was one of 2010.
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He has no contracts presently, and official seminary personnel has indicated he will be offered no contract in the future.
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That's a direct quote. Later on, it says, the fact remains, however, it serves the public readership, and in your case, the listeners as well, no honorable benefit for him to be profiled as presently teaching at an institution which definitively cut its ties with him long ago.
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So here's my challenge to Peter Lemkins. First of all, prove it. Tell us who this individual is so that I can contact this person, because no one from Golden Gate has told me that.
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And so I want to know who it is so we can get to the bottom of this. Because if this is the case, and if Peter Lemkins is behind this, and I don't think
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Peter Lemkins doesn't have the standing to be behind something like this.
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He's doing this for somebody else. I have a feeling I know who it would be. But prove it.
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I'd like to contact this person, like to talk to this person. And if it is true, it would be a sad thing to have taught for Golden Gate for all those years and then not be informed of this in this fashion.
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But I would like everyone to think for just a moment the twistedness of someone like a
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Peter Lemkins that would be illustrated by this. We have a man, Ergin Kanner, who has publicly lied over and over and over again about his background.
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He has claimed to have done debates with Muslim imams in Arabic in mosques, but he can't speak
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Arabic. He has told newspapers that he has done more than 60 debates with Muslims, but we can't find a single one.
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He has claimed that he had debated Shabir Ali twice. He's never debated or met Shabir Ali.
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Here's a man who claimed to have been born in Istanbul and raised in Turkey and come here in 1979 and studied in madrasas in Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut, and all of it was a fraud.
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Just never happened. And yet Peter Lemkins has defended him, and I really doubt
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Peter Lemkins is writing to Liberty or to anybody else saying that Ergin Kanner shouldn't be teaching there.
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On the other hand, take the individual who all you've got to do is go to YouTube.
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You can find on YouTube the debates, all four debates I've done with Shabir Ali. They're right there.
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Two in the United States and two in the United Kingdom. And you can find debates I've done with Abdullah Kunda in Sydney, Australia, and you can find debates with – it's
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Sammy, by the way, Peter, S -A -M -M -I, Sammy Zatari, not
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Sanny as you have in one of your videos. Sammy Zatari at Trinity Road Chapel and Abdullah Al -Andalusi and Bassam Zawadi and Farhan Qureshi and numerous other people that you can go and you can find these things.
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The documentation is just as clear about the truthfulness of my claims in that area as it is about the lies of Ergin Kanner in his areas.
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And so the twistedness here would be you want the man who has lied to continue teaching, but the man who's actually engaged a wide range of Muslims, you don't want him teaching.
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Not in apologetics, no, he's debated Bart Ehrman and you don't even know enough about the subject to recognize bad argumentation of Bart Ehrman, but John Dominic Crossan and John Shelby Spong, but no, that person should not be teaching, but the person who has no background at all should be.
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That's calling light darkness and darkness light. That's about as twisted as it gets, and that's
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Peter Lumpkins. So Mr. Lumpkins, pony up the name. Who is it?
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I'll get in touch with him. And then come on this program, Mr. Lumpkins. We have a lot we could talk about.
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We could talk about editing videos and defending falsehoods, and I'd like to talk about the work
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I've done in my scholarship and the books that I've written, which you probably haven't even read. And we can talk about the
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Bart Ehrman exchange. I'd like to talk with you about that because you don't know anything about textual criticism and it would be nice to point those things out.
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Might be useful to folks. So we'll open up next Tuesday morning for Peter Lumpkins to call in and we'll have a great discussion.
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But first he needs to provide his names because I'd like to contact these folks.
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If you're going to go around saying these things to people, it's time to put your cards on the table and I'd like to know who you've talked to and I'd like to know why they haven't contacted me.
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So there you go, Mr. Lumpkins. The challenge is to you. Will you shed the dishonesty of your past?
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Because we've documented your dishonesty. We've documented you making videos where I say one thing and then you change my words on the screen.
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That's called dishonesty. And that's a documented fact. Maybe you've repented of that.
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I haven't gotten any notes where you've repented of that, but maybe it got lost in the mail.
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It happens, I suppose. Got caught in a spam filter. It's possible. But there you go,
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Mr. Lumpkins. Who have you talked to? And we'd like to get in touch with them. And then maybe we'll hear from you.
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So there you go. Now moving on to actually important things, very important things.
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I hold in my hand two books. They're hardbound.
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They're published by the exact same publisher. They are written by men who claim to be speaking the truth.
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And both of them would say that it is important that people know what the truth is. They're brand new books.
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And there are a lot of similarities between them. Both authors at some point in time were part of a fundamentalist
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Christian tradition. And fortunately that can mean a lot of different things.
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But by their own confession, they were conservative Christians.
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And both today are not. One would claim to remain absolutely orthodox.
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The other does not. So there are interesting similarities between them.
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Both of the books want you to not believe in conservative fundamentalist understandings of Christianity.
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Both of them want you to abandon that. There's no question about that. Now one thing that is really, really interesting to me before I get into the content of the books is what they illustrate about our changing world.
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And folks, I don't know about you, but it is changing so fast that change is becoming the norm.
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I don't think a lot of us realize how different that is than preceding generations. I don't know that someone today could even begin to understand the medieval mindset.
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People who on average never traveled more than seven miles any one direction from where they were born.
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People who really believe that things had pretty much always been the same as they are now. That's why they painted pictures of people, of David, you know, and he lived in a medieval castle and he rode a horse with armor and things like that.
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Because things have always been the same. And there's such a huge, vast chasm between that and how we think today.
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Today for the people, for my kids, change is the norm, not sameness.
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The evolution of our society, of Western society is so fast now that no one feels like there's any kind of solid foundation upon which to stand other than the foundation of change.
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These two books illustrate one element of that. And that is,
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I had read both the books before I ever possessed the paper copies.
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This has never happened before. I had read both the books before I ever possessed the books, at least in a physical form.
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Obviously, what that means is I had received the Kindle versions before I received the physical versions.
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And that tells you something about where publishing is going and how it's going to look in the future and how we're going to read books in the future, if anyone even continues reading books.
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But one of the books also illustrates something. It's fascinating, because I listened to it,
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I recorded it from Kindle to an MP3 file and then I listened to it.
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It's amazing how much more sense it made when I listened to it than when
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I read it. I mean, I opened it up and I started looking at it. There's so many one -liners, two -liners, it's like a
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Twitter book. There's almost, well, okay, there's a paragraph and it takes up about a quarter of a page.
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And there's one, two, there's three sentences in the paragraph. That's about as long as it gets.
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It's a Twitter book. It's specifically designed to be read by people who can no longer invest enough attention to read a paragraph that has four or five or six sentences.
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And that's the next generation. It's a Twitter book. Now, it also happens to be a fluff book.
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What I mean by fluff book is the paper's thick and there's a lot of white.
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There's a lot of space in here. It could have been typeset and made about half the size it is.
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It's 202 pages long. And I would say you get about, I don't know, you get about 100 pages worth of stuff, maybe, approximately.
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I'm looking at the only picture in it right now. That's interesting. I had heard it described, but I had never actually seen it until just now.
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Look at that. That's interesting. Anyway, two very different books.
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The second book isn't like that. The second book is longer, thinner pages.
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It is just over 300 pages long. And it's not a puff book.
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Major difference, next major difference between the two books, one has no references.
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No footnotes, no end notes, no nothing. I mean, even in the text itself, you're lucky to get a verse reference when the
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Bible's quoted. Sometimes you don't even get that. And in the other you have,
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I was going to take the time to look at it, but I had other things to do, but hundreds, not hundreds, but you have lots and lots of footnotes, lots and lots of references, very different.
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Okay, you all know what I'm talking about. You know that in my hand right now,
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I am holding Rob Bell's Love Winds and Bart Ehrman's Forged. I think that Bart Ehrman is probably not happy with Rob Bell today.
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I think he's probably not happy with Rob Bell because Rob Bell's book, they're both published by HarperOne.
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Rob Bell's book comes out and it just dwarfs poor Bart. If Rob Bell's book hadn't come out, then there would probably be some meaningful press coverage of Forged.
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But people are sort of burned out on that right now and with Japan and all the rest of that stuff going on.
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So I guess, you know, Forged, writing in the name of God, why the Bible's authors are not who we think they are by Bart Ehrman, New York Times bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus.
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Notice it doesn't say Jesus Interrupted. There is praise for Jesus Interrupted in the back, praise for God's problem, and praise for Misquoting Jesus.
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In Forged, leading Bible authority Bart D. Ehrman exposes one of the most unsettling ironies of the early
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Christian tradition, the use of deception to establish the truth. With the scholarly expertise and provocative claims for which he's known,
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Ehrman reveals which texts were forged in the name of Jesus' disciples and considers how the deceptions of an unnamed few have prevailed for centuries.
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The untold story of widespread forgery in the ancient world sheds new light on how documents of scandalous origin became part of the
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Bible we have today. I could have told you ahead of time which books he was going to go after because, well, that's just nothing new.
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And ironically, instead of actually using the books today as I talk about them, I'm going to be using
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Kindle right in front of me because I can put little bookmarks in it and just click on stuff and you don't have to. It's great.
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It's great. Two reviews. Very quickly, since it's already 20 minutes after.
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That's why I don't know. Sorry, Eric. I just don't know whether we're going to get to you today or not. It would be a completely different topic anyways, so we'll see.
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Rob Bell obviously hit a chord, didn't he? Given that there's reviews online and programs have been online and I've talked a little bit about it, hit a chord.
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In fact, it's interesting. These two books hit in two areas that illustrate once again that, you know,
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I can't even use the term evangelical anymore. I guess, you know, we've got to come up with a big, long name that identifies people who actually believe the
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Bible is the word of God and you have to believe all of it. What is that? You know, Tota Scripturists, Tota Scripturists, Sola Scripturists, Sola Tota Scripturists.
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There we go. Something. Sola Totas. Sola Totas. Thank you very much.
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Rich. Rich Pierce has now thrown his hat in the ring and Sola Totas, Tota Solas, whatever.
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Something like that. But there are two areas. What? Tolas?
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I can't hear you loud enough to hear that. You got to, you got to, you got to use, you got a microphone in there. Stolas.
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Stolas. You conflate it. Okay. Well, that's not really, that's not conflation because it's, ah, nevermind.
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Stolas. Stolas. That works good. All right. Anyway, two areas that Stolas don't spend a lot of time thinking about.
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We don't. I mean, how many believing
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Christians can explain why, can give you even a semi -rational explanation of why there is such a fundamental, syntactical, grammatical, and linguistic difference between first and second
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Peter? How many even know why new perspectivists, for example, function on a minimalized
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Pauline corpus? And which books do they function on? Why are there modern scholars who don't believe
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Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians and the pastoral epistles? Or second Thessalonians? Though they might believe he wrote first Thessalonians.
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I think a lot of people are vaguely aware of those things, but they're just, it's just, well, I just never looked into it.
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And about the only thing less known and comfortable than issues of canon and authorship would be the doctrine of hell.
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And so, you know, eternal punishment. I mean, it's, it's the subject we don't talk about.
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It's sort of there in the background and it's, it's something you want to be saved from, but man,
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I really don't want to talk to anybody about this. I don't want to make it part of my presentation, mainly because we also know people, that's all they ever talk about.
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And we don't want to be like them. We don't want to be a Fred Phelps. We don't want to be one of those folks that all they ever talk about is you're going to hell.
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You know, I've been told that by lots and lots of folks and I didn't take them seriously. When I was in London a number of weeks ago now,
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Doug McMasters and I were, we got some fish and chips and then we tried to find a place to sit down and eat.
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We walked city blocks. There's no place to sit in London. It's amazing. That's why everybody walks because there's no place to sit other than on the tube.
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We finally found this sort of this stoop sort of outside of a closed business. We sat down there to eat our fish and chips and our mushy peas.
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Yes, I ordered mushy peas. It was actually pretty good. I like peas. But anyways, you never eat mushy peas.
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It doesn't sound good. Well, anyway. And while we're sitting there, we see a street preacher not very far away.
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And I'm just sort of watching this guy because we're going to be doing some street preaching pretty soon ourselves. And pretty much all he talked about was, you know, hell and stuff like that.
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And I'll be honest, nobody was nobody really cared. Nobody really listened. We don't want to be like that.
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So these two areas, isn't it interesting? Areas that a lot of people, if they do pick it up, if they do start reading, they think, man,
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I've never even thought about this stuff. Let's talk about Love Wins. I'm sure this book was written and titled long before winning became really popular.
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So there's not a connection there. At least we hope not. There are a growing number of us,
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I'm quoting now, who have become acutely aware that Jesus' story has been hijacked by a number of other stories, stories
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Jesus isn't interested in telling because they have nothing to do with what he came to do. The plot has been lost and it's time to reclaim it.
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Now please recognize something. For all of Rob Bell's ooshy -gooshy -squishy -squishiness, he's saying something is true and something is false.
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And what he's saying is false is his own background. Isn't it interesting that both Bell and Ehrman spent time in fundamentalism and both have abandoned it for different things?
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And what he said here, notice what he says, stories
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Jesus isn't interested in telling. Isn't interested in telling.
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Rich, we've got a visitor outside that just pulled up and that's a friend of mine. If we could get them in here so they can watch, that would be great.
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Appreciate that. I was going to try to type that out for you, but I can't. It's like walking and chewing gum.
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He is telling us what Jesus isn't interested in telling. Rob Bell knows. When we ask him all sorts of other questions, he doesn't know, but one thing he does know is that there are certain stories
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Jesus isn't interested in telling. And that's a story of God's wrath and the exclusivicity of the gospel and things like that.
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I go on. I've written this book for all those everywhere who have heard some version of the Jesus story that caused their pulse rate to rise, their stomach to churn, their heart to utter those resolute words.
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I would never be a part of that. Isn't that exactly what
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Paul was talking about in first Corinthians? In fact, didn't he describe the gospel as, as a stumbling block, a scandal on?
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I think he did. I've had a lot of people who, when you talk about the holiness of God and their sin, who said,
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I would never believe that. Isn't that the natural reaction to, um, to the gospel on the part of a lost person?
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Yeah, it is. He goes on to say, you are not alone. There are millions of us. He puts himself in that camp.
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I think that's a rather resolute statement on his part. This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the
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Jesus story. Everything's, you know, the Jesus story. It's not revelation.
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It's the Jesus story. See, we all have our stories. This is the emergent element of it.
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A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.
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It's been clearly communicated to me that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject
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Jesus. This is misguided and toxic, and you need to understand, in Rob Bell's world, toxic means false.
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This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.
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And so this book. You need to understand something.
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What you just listened to. Those are Rob Bell's words. Listen to it again. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few
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Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.
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It's been clearly communicated to me that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject
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Jesus. Now, when you hear that kind of summary, I hope the first thing across your mind was, wait a minute.
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That's completely man -centered. Rob Bell comes from a background of a man -centered gospel.
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It's all about me. It's all about what I do. There's nothing about God here.
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There's nothing about God glorifying himself or how he's glorified himself. There's nothing about the cross and the resurrection and a people joined to Christ and God's self -glorification.
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No, no, no, no, there's nothing about that. And if that's the kind of fundamentalism that Rob Bell is a part of, well,
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I can understand why he doesn't find that to be very attractive. I certainly don't.
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You see, folks, I know I sound like a broken record. Theology matters.
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And when you have a man -centered gospel, when you have a
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Jesus who tries but frequently fails to save, and it's all up to the autonomous man, well, there are results from that.
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And what Rob Bell, you know, Rob Bell asks lots of really bad questions and a few questions that we really do need to think about.
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But one thing that this book made me think about is that the only people that can give a meaningful response to the issue of the reality and may
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I say necessity of hell in light of God's holiness are people who actually believe that God has a purpose in what he's done in the creation of this world.
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And if you think that his purpose is just, you know, he's going to try and try and try, but you know, he's just left all those
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Muslims over there and all those Buddhists over there and all those Hindus over there. You know, the kind of fundamentalism that's just us and our little enclave and doesn't see any of the rest of the world.
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You know, I understand why he rebels against that, but the problem is the emergent church has decided to rebel against that and rebel against all truth and toto, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
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And that's what Rob Bell's done. It's a twisted book.
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It's twisted because he quotes from the Bible, but he's not trying to seriously interact with what the
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Bible itself is saying. You already know that, you know, the exegetical errors that he makes and historical errors, you've already seen that in the other reviews
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I'm looking at, I want to try to add something new to this. And when I look at it, what you see here is the rebellion of a heart against a, a man centered fundamentalism that he admits there's nothing new here.
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He admits there is absolutely positively nothing new here. He says, and I quote, this is, uh, according to Kindle, it says it's page one, but that doesn't make much sense.
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And then last of all, please understand that nothing in this book hasn't been taught, suggested or celebrated by many before me.
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I haven't come up with a radical new teaching that's any kind of departure from what's been said an untold number of times.
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That's exactly right. There isn't anything new here. I mean, the way it's presented,
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I don't know, it seems a little bit new, but it isn't new because as Dr.
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Moeller has rightly pointed out numerous times, this is just simply liberalism in skinny jeans.
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So it is, that's what this book is. This is liberalism in skinny jeans, skinny jeans with no tie and, uh, and a, um,
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Britney Spears microphone. I hate those Britney Spears microphones. You don't have a Britney Spears microphone, do you?
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Good. That lapel mic. You're a Baptist. There you go. I'm sorry.
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Um, I'm talking to the studio audience and if, if, hey, if Rush can do it, I can do it too. That's just all there is to it.
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Um, I hate those things. They give me a migraine. They really do. They, they push on your ear and the, but that's what this is.
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This is liberalism in skinny jeans with a Britney Spears microphone. That's what it is. He hasn't come up with anything new.
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And, and that's why I said, man, as, as a Fuller grad, it's like, um, this, this sounded all so familiar.
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It's just, it's, you know what it is? Here it is. Liberalism with skinny jeans and Britney Spears microphone done by Twitter.
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There you go. There you go. That's, that's how you, that's how Love Wins got written. Is, it's, that's, that's how it works.
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Theology does matter. And when you get to the end of the book, he says, first, an observation about hell.
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Hell is our refusal to trust God's retelling of our story. Now, when, when
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Rob Bell says, I'm not a universalist, I believe in hell. You need to understand in his book, what he means is he's talked to some people who've had some really rough lives.
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We're going through rough things and therefore that's hell. That's not the hell of scripture.
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And that's not the actual issue. I'm not going to go back over it, but I would direct you to something
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I posted. Actually, uh, the rookie posted it for me last night on Sermon Audio, but it's on the blog.
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Paul's rather harsh words in 2
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Thessalonians chapter one, which ironically Bart Ehrman doesn't think Paul wrote. But, this is evidence of the righteous judgment of God that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God for which you are also suffering.
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Since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the
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Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know
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God and those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the
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Lord and from the glory of his might when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at among all who have believed because our testimony to you was believed.
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Now, what does that mean? They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the
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Lord and from the glory of his might. You see, there's something about justice. There's something about God's holiness and there's something about the necessity of the demonstration of God's justice that's all bound up in what the cross is all about and that's gone.
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That has been evacuated from Rob Bell's gospel. It's not there anymore. I was very appreciative that one of the first full reviews, obviously written by someone who has more insider contacts than I do at HarperOne, pointed out that Rob Bell's version of God's love is twisted.
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It's not biblical. It's that kind of liberal, ooey -gooey love that God must have, but we would never respect any human being who had the same kind of love.
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We would never respect a human being that has the kind of love that liberalism asserts
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God has. Undifferentiated, no categories to it. It's clearly unbiblical and I appreciate hearing somebody else saying this because I've said it so many times about my
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Arminian friends who want to have this peanut butter love. They can't deal with the Old Testament. They can't deal with the fact that there's clearly a kind of love
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God has for his people which he, I'm sorry, Pharaoh would struggle with thinking that this is how
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God really acted, especially after the firstborn were dead. But that's the kind of love and hence kind of God that Rob Bell is promoting.
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And there's a lot of people who want to have a God like that. They want to have a God that does not have holiness or wrath or anything like that.
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But the problem is, folks, that leaves the cross dangling in the air. Why? Why the cross?
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Why Gethsemane? You can't understand the cross in Gethsemane if you don't understand
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God's justice, holiness, and wrath against sin. And once you get rid of that, you may make a lot of people feel much better about themselves.
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But have you really done anything for them? And what have you done to the gospel? I get the strong feeling that Rob Bell no longer believes in substitutionary atonement.
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No, no, no. That has had to go by the wayside. No two ways about it.
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Hell is our refusal to trust God's retelling of our story. That's not what hell is.
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Hell is the place where those who have refused to obey the gospel of Jesus Christ live out their rebellion.
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It's where those individuals spend eternity attempting to efface the image of God in which they were created.
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God's hand of restraint has been removed. And that's why
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I've said many times, I don't think God has to expend the slightest bit of energy to torment anyone in hell.
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They are their own torment. Think of, well,
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I'm not going to go there because I've already directed folks to the debate I did on Unbelievable, on the subject of hell, posted on the blog last night, some more comments on that.
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And as the clock is moving quickly and I have a second book to review, we'll leave it with that.
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Theology matters. It matters a lot, and Rob Bell has proven that for us again.
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I hope we don't speak flippantly of hell. It is not a fun thing to talk about, but it is a necessary thing to talk about.
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And anyone who talks about the cross needs to see the relationship between the greatest act of God's love and the absolute necessity of punishment.
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I really hope you see the connection between the two. It's vitally important. Forged. Somebody at HarperOne realizes they've got a potential gold mine on their hands in an apostate.
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And, of course, Bart Ehrman is an apostate. That's a technical term. He once confessed something.
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He now believes it's wrong. It's a lie. He no longer confesses it. That's apostasy. They realize we've got a gold mine here because we live in a society that wants to disbelieve.
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And there are lots of people like Rob Bell who don't want to go Rob Bell's direction into squishy, feel -good liberalism.
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They realize there's... In fact, some of you go, wait a minute, that book only came out on Tuesday.
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And this is Thursday. That's right. Some of you know that on Tuesday, I spent nine hours and 49 minutes riding a bicycle.
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I set my new PR at 157 miles, and I listened to the whole book during that ride.
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And there was a period of time, I remember right where I was, out near Katie Bowe's house, actually.
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Actually, I was out toward your neck of the woods right when this was happening. I think it was what, West Wind Parkway? Is there something like that?
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Okay, you know where that is? All right. I was right along there. I'm pedaling along. It was pretty early on in the ride. It was only about 60 miles in.
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I have 157, so I still had 90 or so to go. And I'm listening to Bart Ehrman just shredding liberals who come up with this...
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They'll accept... They've abandoned a high view of scripture, but they still want to sort of be religious.
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And Bart Ehrman even sees. That's really dumb. And it was a strange feeling to be going, yeah, he's right about that.
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I mean, like shooting fish in a barrel on this one. But here's a guy who, like Rob Bell, has apostatized from his roots.
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But he's gone. He calls himself a happy agnostic. I'm sorry. I've met Bart Ehrman. That's not really happiness, okay?
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He's sort of a semi -miserable agnostic, I think, if that's a category to put things in.
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But I'm certain that his royalty checks make him a somewhat happy agnostic, because he's certainly pulling it in.
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Did I know what he was going to say? Yeah. I was a little surprised at how much of this book is actually a recitation of all sorts of Gnostic forgeries, which everyone's known about.
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And did I learn anything from the book? Well, there were a couple of things that he narrated that I hadn't bothered to read or something like that, so that was somewhat interesting.
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But, no, if you are a graduate of some place like Fuller Theological Seminary like I am, you've heard all this before.
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There's nothing really new about it. And even in conservative seminaries, we actually take the time to look at these things and look at the theories and la, la, la, la.
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It's just in the liberal ones you don't normally listen to the other side, the conservative responses. So if you had asked me before I picked it up which books he was going to go after,
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I would have said, well, he's probably going to question. I was a little surprised he called
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Acts a forgery. I understand attacking the authorship issues on Luke and stuff like that.
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But I would have said he's going to go for the seven books of Paul, and so everything else is a forgery.
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So he's going to go after Ephesians, Colossians. He's going to go after the pastoral epistles, 1 Timothy and Titus. Clearly going to go after 2
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Peter. Figured he'd probably go after 1 Peter and Jude. I didn't think he'd, and I don't think he did actually identify
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Hebrews as a forgery because there's no name on it, so how can you call it a forgery? You're not claiming to be somebody that you're not.
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And, of course, he did all of that. What I want to do is
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I want to give you, I want you to hear, because people look at Ehrman and go, oh, graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and therefore this is the voice of scholarship.
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And he certainly believes his own PR at that point. I want you to hear what the arguments against Ephesians are.
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Here's why you shouldn't believe that Ephesians was written by Paul. Quote, the reasons for thinking
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Paul did not write this letter are numerous and compelling. For one thing, the writing style is not Paul's.
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Paul usually writes in short, pointed sentences. The sentences in Ephesians are long and complex. In Greek, the opening statement of Thanksgiving, all 12 verses is one sentence.
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There's nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek. It just isn't the way Paul wrote. It's like Mark Twain and William Faulkner.
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They both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other. Some scholars have pointed out that in the hundred or so sentences in Ephesians, nine of them are over 50 words in length.
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Nine of them. Compare this with Paul's own letters. Now, I hope you're thinking here.
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You see, I can find scholars who think Ehrman's a conservative for thinking that Paul wrote any of this.
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But you see, Ehrman gets to decide that here's the genuine Pauline corpus, and so we compare everything to this, which
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I think Paul actually wrote. Okay? So, compare this with Paul's own letters.
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Philippians, for example, has 102 sentences, only one of which is over 50 words. Galatians has 181 sentences, again, with only one over 50 words.
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The book also has an inordinate number of words that don't otherwise occur in Paul's writings, 116 altogether, well higher than average.
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Now, remember, when it says, does not appear in others of Paul's writings, he's already set what Paul's writings are.
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And so, that means he's not including Colossians. He's not including the pastorals. Just the seven that he thinks
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Paul actually wrote. I just point that out because, as I said to you a couple weeks ago, before the book ever came out, you get to determine this by your choice of what was actually really
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Paul. Because if you take Romans out of that and create a new real
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Paul, you can prove Paul didn't write Romans, but he thinks he did. You see, if you get to determine the starting parameters, you can always determine the end game here.
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Well higher than average, 50 % more than Philippians, for example, which is about the same length. But the main reason for thinking
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Paul didn't write Ephesians, listen to this, this is the main reason, is that what the author says in places does not jive with what
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Paul himself says in his own letters. Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, for example, certainly looks like Paul's writing, but just on the surface.
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Here, as in Paul's authentic letters, we learn that believers were separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through his grace, not as a result of works.
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But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and the senses.
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This doesn't sound like the Paul of the undisputed letters, who says that he had been blameless with respect to the righteousness of the law,
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Philippians 3, 4. In addition, even though he is talking about the relationship of Jew and Gentile in this letter, the author does not speak about salvation apart from the works of the law, as Paul does.
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He speaks instead of salvation apart from doing good deeds. That simply was not the issue
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Paul addressed. Now, let me stop there because there's a little bit more.
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I wonder how many people in the listening audience have read Bart Ehrman's doctoral dissertation.
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If you have read Bart Ehrman's doctoral dissertation, please raise your hand. I have. I wonder how many even possess it.
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I do. Yeah, I took the time to get it. Look it up. Read it. Bart Ehrman is an expert on the
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Proto -Alexandrian text type. He's the man. In a certain narrow range of the study of the
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Proto -Alexandrian text type. But Bart Ehrman is not an exegete.
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I was blown away by the surface -level simplicity of the alleged contradictions and problems that Ehrman raises here.
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By the way, it would be simplicity to raise the exact same issues in the genuine
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Pauline epistles. In the seven he thinks Paul did right, it would be just as easy to say, well, wait a minute,
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Galatians says this, but Romans says this. That means one of them can't be Pauline. But think about this.
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Since Paul includes himself with his audience in talking about... And what is
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Ephesians about? This is the thing that just really, really bugs me about these folks. Is that they don't get the idea that you can write books to different audiences and they're going to sound different.
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I mean, this is so easily proven from Bart Ehrman's own books. Compare his textbooks with the books that he writes for HarperOne.
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And if you looked at the length of his sentences, if you looked at the number of pronouns he uses, if you looked at the number of footnotes he uses, you would see a massive difference, which proves what?
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That he's writing to a different audience and he has different editors. That's all it proves. It doesn't prove he didn't write those books.
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Ephesians is meant to be a circular letter. It is meant to be distributed around the churches.
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It's probably exactly what Paul was talking about in Colossians 4 .16 when he talks about the letter coming from Laodicea. And so it's meant to have a general audience and Paul includes himself with his listeners, with his readers.
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He's not talking about his life in Judaism. I mean,
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Ehrman likes to give stories about his own past. And in this book, he talks about how he deceived his parents and was up in his room with a friend smoking cigarettes before he became a
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Christian. How does that jibe with other places where he's described as having had a Christian youth?
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Well, clearly, if you allow context for either one, he's not lying. But if you use his standards, he must have been.
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Why doesn't he apply the same standards? Well, that's the problem with this kind of criticism.
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So, then he talks about works of law and apart from doing good deeds. What in Pauline theology would make a deed good except that it's done in accordance with, let me think,
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God's law! This is supposed to be the greatest living critic of Christianity.
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And I'm reading you what he's saying. And I find the arguments to be so surface level and simplistic that I was wondering, is the written book going to be different than the
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Kindle book? What is this? It continues on. Moreover, this author indicates that believers have already been saved by the grace of God.
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As it turns out, the verb saved in Paul's authentic letters is always used to refer to the future.
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Salvation is not something people already have. It's what they will have when Jesus returns in the clouds of heaven and delivers his followers in wrath of God.
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Really? Corinthians, really Pauline? To those who are being saved,
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Christ is the power of God. That's present tense. And in Romans, Romans 8,
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Pauline, according to Ehrman, you don't have the now and the not yet, adopted but not yet adopted.
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Again, I'm just, I look at this and go, who are you trying to convince here? You're not trying to convince people actually know anything about the
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Bible. Relatedly and most significantly, in Ehrman's words,
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Paul was, listen, I'm not making this part up. Just listen to this. Paul was emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized had died to the powers of the world and were aligned with the enemies of God.
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They had died with Christ, but they had not yet been raised with Christ. That would happen at the end of time when
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Jesus returned and all people living and dead would be raised up to face judgment. That's why in Romans 6, 1 -4,
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Paul is emphatic. Those who are baptized have died with Christ and they will be raised with him at Jesus' second coming.
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Paul was extremely insistent on this point, that the resurrection of believers was a future physical event, not something that had already happened.
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One of the reasons he wrote 1 Corinthians was precisely because some of the Christians in that community took an opposing point of view and maintained that they were already enjoying a resurrected existence with Christ now that they already were enjoying the benefits of salvation.
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Really? That's what the Corinthians are saying? Paul devotes 1 Corinthians 15 to showing that no, the resurrection is not something that had happened yet.
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It is a future physical event yet to occur. Christians have not yet been raised with Christ. Now, immediately, hopefully, you see what's coming here.
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He does not recognize the difference between a spiritual resurrection, union with Christ, and the physical resurrection that was coming.
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The false teachers in Corinth had already said, the physical resurrection was past.
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So here he goes on to say, But contrast this statement with what Ephesians says. Even when we were dead through our trespasses,
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God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us in heavenly places. Here, believers had experienced a spiritual resurrection and are enjoying a heavenly existence in the here and now.
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This is precisely the view that Paul argued against in his letter to the Corinthians. Therefore, Paul didn't write
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Ephesians. In point after point, when you look carefully at Ephesians, it stands at odds with Paul's own work.
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This book was apparently written by a later Christian in one of Paul's churches who wanted to deal with the big issue of his day, the relation of Jews and Gentiles in a church.
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He did so by claiming to be Paul, knowing full well that he wasn't Paul. He accomplished his goal, that is, by producing a forgery.
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That's the end of the argument. He moves on to Colossians. I was left amazed.
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Not that I had not heard this before. Before I debated him, I listened to his New Testament survey course and I had heard most of this at that time.
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He has expanded some things for the book, obviously. But I was absolutely amazed at the surface level reading of the text that I just presented to you.
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How can you not see the difference between spiritual union with Christ and hence spiritual resurrection and hence being seated in the heavenly places in Christ because of union with him and the argument in 1
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Corinthians chapter 15, which is about the physical resurrection? How can you not see the difference there? That kind of surface level reading would have to make every single one of Paul's letters utterly contradictory to every other one of Paul's letters.
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How can you put Galatians and Romans together and say they're both Pauline, which he does, and not see that you have to somehow allow for the different context of the two letters?
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And if you allow for that, how can you come up with this kind of argumentation regarding Ephesians and Colossians? The same thing is true about the pastorals.
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This is a later situation, because we're talking about churches that had elders and stuff. Doesn't Acts say that Paul appointed...
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Well, Acts is wrong too. Once you set yourself up as judge, jury, and executioner, all bets are off.
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You can make the charge, the allegation of forgery, from every which direction.
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And anything... You know, I'm reminded when I debated Robert Price. Now, Robert Price doesn't believe that Paul wrote anything.
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And so when you point out to him, well, what about, for example, Clement? Some people put
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Clement as early as the 90s, and yet he knows of Paul's letters. So what do you do about that? Well, it's not the 90s.
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You just shove everything out of the way. It's way, way back there. What about the summary of the gospel in 1
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Corinthians? Well, that wasn't even in Corinthians when whoever wrote Corinthians wrote it. It came 150, 160
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AD. Anything that gets in the way of your thesis, you just shove it back farther into history somewhere.
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Now, I remind you that German scholarship had told us that the gospel of John was written around 170
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AD. And if you were really scholarly, you would have believed that back around 1870.
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And then we found physical remains of the gospel of John. Manuscripts of John that predate that.
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And so, all of a sudden, that scholarly confidence had to be reworked. But this kind of, well, you know what, we don't have to believe this.
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We can just simply chop stuff apart and put it together as we please. And, of course, please realize something.
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If you're going to read Forged, whenever he refers to scholars, and especially to critical scholars, that means people who agree with Bart Ehrman.
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There is almost, there's once or twice, maybe in a footnote here, something like that, but there is almost no meaningful interaction with the volumes of works that have been produced, disputing everything
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Bart Ehrman says. He admits, everybody's been saying this for quite some time, he spends a huge amount of time attacking people who say that, well, there's no big deal about people writing in the name of Paul, even though they didn't write in Paul, because that was very common back then.
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He completely debunks that. And that's fine, that's wonderful, I would agree with him.
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He spends a lot of time on that. But you need to realize the sources that he uses, when he talks about scholars, he's talking about people who agree with him.
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And if you don't agree with him, well, you're not a critical scholar. And that's just the way it is.
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In his mindset, that's how he functions. And he's not the first one to function in that way.
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We've heard that many, many times. We know that he uses the argument from authority. Much more that needs to be said, and will need to be said, in response to the specific things, he repeats the copies of copies of copies of thing.
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And, I mean, again, if you've read as much Ehrman as I have, and if you've read Jesus Interrupted, and Misquoting Jesus, and a lot of repetition on levels like that.
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But we're going to hear about this book for a long time to come. Those people in the community colleges that hate
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Christianity, and we know their names, they're going to be assigning this as a textbook.
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And you know what? There's a part of me that's angry about that. And there's a part of me that goes, you know what? It's exactly what we need.
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Because sadly, a lot of believing Christians, what do we call them? Stolas? A lot of Stolas.
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We need to get kicked out of our comfort zone. How many times have you heard on this program, folks, we need to know what we believe and why we believe it.
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We can't stay behind the walls of our little enclaves. And this is going to force a lot of us to think these issues through.
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But we have the promise, Jesus himself said, there will come a time when even the elect themselves, if it were possible, could be led astray.
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But they won't be. They won't be. Christ is still building his church. And I'm awful thankful that he is.
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Thanks for listening to the program today. Lord will, and we'll be back on Tuesday. See you then. God bless.
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It's a sign of the times The truth is being trampled in And the way it's buried down Won't you lift up your voice
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Are you tired of plain religion It's time to make some noise I'm your witness
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I'm your witness I'm your witness I stand up for the truth
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