 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast to support this podcast with the NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 208 or 25th Q&A. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland. He's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing, sir? Good. Busy as usual. Kind of looking forward to a Virginia trip. You know, for people who want to know about that, I'm going to be in Virginia Beach in a little bit. You can go up to the website and check that out. If you're in the area, please come. And also, our Israel trip is getting pretty close, so... Yeah, that is alluring over the... No, I haven't. No, me either. I probably won't pack until the day of. I don't know how you are, but I'm pretty bad about that stuff. I mean, I still have to... I got to think about what I'm doing. And I haven't done that yet, so there you go. That's kind of where I'm at. I hear you on that. All right, Mike. Well, let's just cut to the chase and get into it. We've got about five questions this episode. If you're ready, I'm ready. Sure. All right. Let me just read all of this here from Justin. Justin's going to start off our episode with the first question. And his question is, when Revelation 2.13 refers to Satan's throne being in Pergamum, my NASB 77 keyword study Bible had a reference to this possibly alluding to a massive altar to Zeus. Now, when corrupt Elohim fallen angelic beings are ruling over or deceiving nations, I assume that they aren't actually and honestly representing themselves. Lying is, after all, the native language of Satan. So, with the footnote is true, would we assume that when ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus, they were actually worshipping the original rebel himself, as opposed to some other spiritual being hiding behind the identity facade persona of Zeus? We would say that Satan is not omnipresent in the same way that God is. Would this area actually be his territorial headquarters at one point? No, I would answer the question now for a number of reasons. Scripture itself never specifically identifies Satan with one point of geography. He'd be the God of this world. Just think of a phrase like that. The other issue is it's really not possible to create one-to-one correspondences, like the question sort of angles for or suggests or asks. In the case of Zeus, I think there is something to the reference that was described, their pergamum and then this altered to Zeus. Then you'd have to ask the question, well, why is that conceived of or thought of in, for lack of a better way of putting it, Satanic language? I think there's a conceptual reason for it, but it's not that we have the ability to identify what entity, what God that the Greeks or the Romans or the Egyptians or whoever it was, that they were talking about is this biblical figure over here. There's no way for us to make those kind of assessments or judgments. Scripture doesn't really give us that kind of information. In the case of Zeus, Zeus derives from old Greek deos or deus and the old Indo-European deos, which is Sanskrit deos. All those terms mean sky or heaven. I think that's the conceptual link. You don't have sky or heaven as a meaning of Satan or Diabolos, which is devil. These are different terms. Again, it forbids this one-to-one equation, but if Zeus was conceived of as the sky God, the God of heaven, the God of the heavens, just like Yahweh was, and he is also referred to as the most high, I think that thinking about it that way is helpful here because by this time, you're in the New Testament period, you've got the association of Satan on a number of fronts with being in control of the earth, control of the world, and also being portrayed as this kind of rival who wants it to be like the most high, wants it to be Lord of the Divine Council, that sort of thing, wants it to be the Lord of heaven. If you're thinking about Satan in those terms and then you run into a deity that the Greeks worship called Zeus who is referred to as the most high or the God of heaven, even his name is identified with that, that's the connection. In other words, Zeus would be viewed as a usurper or as a kind of a conceptual counterpart to the fallen being in the Hebrew Bible that wants it to be the highest authority. He wanted to be the most high, wanted to again be the God of the Council, the God of heaven. So you don't have a direct relationship with the names, the terms, Satan, Diabolos, Zeus, Satan. You can't make these neat identifications on the basis of the terminology. You can see how, again, in this case, the writer of Revelation would think of Zeus along the same lines as, again, the original rebel who wanted to be the most high because that's sort of a title that is attributed to Zeus, the God of heaven. Again, this is what the name means. So there's a conceptual congruence, but there's no way to fill out a roster like you would in baseball or football. This one's a third base, this one's a short stop. You can't do that. You can't say this name is this deity over here in the Bible or this figure like Satan. It's just not that easy. You don't have the data for that. The only time you can approximate that in terms of names is when the Hebrew Bible will actually use the name of Baal at a particular location. Baal is often part of toponyms, place names. We know who was worshipped there. There are things like that that you can do, but Satan is not a geographical name. It's a functional name, and it has obviously a long and varied history from the Old Testament through the Second Temple period onto the New Testament, and then to sort of try to strike a specific equivalent in Greek religion to that entity. You just can't do it with terminology, but conceptually you can see why they would think that way about Zeus. Chris from Grand Rapids has a question about how regeneration fits with Mike's view on predestination, election, and the fall. It would seem to me that a person's spiritually deadness cannot be explained simply as the product of making bad use of free will or the commission of actual sins after the age of accountability. What gives rise to this universal hostility necessitating regeneration? I don't quite understand the last sentence, universal hostility, hostility to want, but again, setting that aside, I wouldn't equate spiritual deadness with sinning. Sinning has to do with acts of sin. You're making decisions, and there's the free will element in there. I don't make them synonyms. Spiritual deadness, in my view, is the condition of being estranged from God, the source of spiritual life. Calvinists, of course, make spiritual deadness about an inability to believe based on the idea that dead people can't do anything. They're dead. But that presses the focal point of the metaphor, a dead body, into an unnecessary service. That is, it takes all the aspects of the metaphor and then loads them into the discussion. Now, that's an intentional, but unnecessary use of the metaphor. So I have a bone to pick with the Calvinists here. The spiritual death topic ultimately hinges on how one defines death. For Calvinists, death is the absence of conscious life. Now, you see what they did there? They loaded consciousness onto the idea of death. They load that aspect of the metaphor of a dead body into the discussion, and other people won't. There's no cosmic rule about how little or how much you use a metaphor, how many of its components. But Calvinists basically won't tell you that because it doesn't serve their use of the metaphor. If you define death as the absence of conscious life, in other words, if you define death, spiritual death, based on all the elements of a dead body, dead body obviously has no conscious life. If that's how you frame death, spiritual deadness, you're unable to believe because dead bodies don't do anything, they can't make decisions. If that's how you're approaching it, if you define death as the absence of conscious life, then you can say that spiritual death is the inability to believe, which is why Calvinists do that. Or you can say that it's the absence of any volitional impulse. And again, this is the kind of thing Calvinists are going to be saying in their theological system. But if we define death as the absence of life more generally, not pressing consciousness into the metaphor and hence into the definition, and then further, we view the source of life as God, we get my definition. Again, I didn't make it up. It's just what I prefer. Death is estrangement from God, the idea of separation. Now, all that is why Calvinism then on the other side defines regeneration as an imbuement with life so as to be enabled to make a choice. See, there's the consciousness element again. But that means that no human can actually be drawn to Christ or God until regeneration occurs. I know they don't want to say that, but I want you to think about it. How is it that people, and I would say every person, can relate to being drawn or attracted to or intrigued by some thought or action that led to a gospel decision? In all of our testimonies, somebody said something that drew our curiosity or that drew on us emotionally that got us to sort of move down the path a little bit toward a salvation decision. But if you're a Calvinist, you have to say, that's God just doing it and your brain's not engaged at all. Your consciousness isn't engaged at all because you're spiritually dead and dead people can't do anything. You're like a zombie or an automaton or a robot or something. They have to do that because they want to define regeneration as the enablement to believe because of their view of the Ordo Saludis, the order of salvation. They want to try to come up with this neat chain of things that happen in salvation, like justification, regeneration, what order do they come in? Calvinists are kind of absorbed with that kind of thing. So if you're going to do that, if you're going to sort of have a person be void of any volitional element prior to regeneration, then how is it possible that anyone can respond to anything in any way prior to being regenerated? Again, that's my question because our experiences, I think all of us that have a testimony of faith in Christ, our experiences are contrary to that. Again, we weren't passive. We weren't inactive. Our brains were not disengaged. We actually heard something and we had these little micro responses to it that God used to move us down the road toward an actual presentation of the gospel or actually committing in our faith. Otherwise, you have a brainless, mindless being. You have humans, you have human beings that are no longer self-aware in a Calvinist system prior to regeneration, which just doesn't make any sense. So again, back to try to be a little more organized in my thoughts. Again, you can't say that you were consciously drawn to the gospel before your consciousness was regenerated. In other words, the approach of Calvinism I think just implodes because again, you're no longer a sentient being. You're no longer self-aware. So to put it another way, if your consciousness is detached from spiritual attraction, how can you be drawn? You have to notice things. You have to make decisions. You have to be curious. These are all activities of consciousness. Again, Calvinists want to turn all that off, but then we have humans without self-awareness. And that seems self-serving at best for a definition and kind of silly at worst. This is again, part of the reason. There are other reasons, but this is part of the reason I think it's a lot more coherent to define spiritual death not as something that involves the shutting off of consciousness or the shutting off of self-awareness, the shutting off of all volitional ability. I think it's more coherent to define spiritual death as estrangement from God and therefore defining regeneration as a new birth that is being born into the family of God and then being indwelled by the Holy Spirit. That doesn't cancel out people from freely responding in curiosity, we'll say, about the gospel or responding due to some emotional need or connection that salvation meets. So free will, for me, again, relates to responding to things that draw one to the gospel to make a decision to believe or to reject it. And I'm saying you don't need to first be regenerated to respond because you're already self-aware. Free will also relates to choosing sin, choosing rebellions, choosing acts of sin. Now, I would need to add that the Holy Spirit, this always gets the sin of the thing. If you're indwelled by the Holy Spirit, born in the family of God, what about that series on Hebrews about rejecting faith later on? I would say we need to add that the Holy Spirit is the down payment of salvation in the sense that his residence in us is proof of God's grace and forgiveness and his promise to enable us to keep believing and serve him. But the Holy Spirit can be quenched and grieved. The New Testament tells us this. His presence doesn't guarantee that we cannot reject the faith. The guarantee involved is something like, yes, if you believe the Holy Spirit can see you through it to the end. And all those who overcome and keep believing were enabled to do so by the power of the Holy Spirit, not their own strength or their own cleverness. Our salvation is not due to our strength anymore than it was due to our merit. We have to believe. And if we do, the Holy Spirit will remain and keep us. Now that whole idea is akin to the Old Testament presence of God, which could leave a place. Left the temple. In the curses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, God said, I'm going to be out of here. I'm your God, you're my people. You're well and good. You're elect. That's all well and good. But if you corrupt the land through your moral abominations to a certain extent, I'm going to remove you or I'm going to leave. This ground is no longer fit for my presence. And I'm out of here. What I'm describing is very consistent with that. So again, I think we have continuity of thought here. Again, if we endure, at the end, if we keep faith, we remain and keep us. If we believe, if we keep believing, the Spirit is going to be there to see us through to the end. The Spirit of God will not coexist with the denial of the living God in our hearts. See, if you don't take my position, that's what you're left with. You not only have unbelievers in heaven, but you have the Spirit of God coexisting with the denial of the living God in your heart. And that's just a theological box more on there. Of course, the living God, they're being incarnate in Christ. So we're talking about faith in Christ here. So again, to sort of summarize this, the Holy Spirit gets the credit for our perseverance, but not the blame for our unbelief. We are never relieved of the need to believe the gospel. That isn't how the offer of eternal life works, though evangelicalism has sort of defined it that way. The gospel is not words to be believed like an incantation. It is a truth to be believed. And to which we must remain loyal in that belief to have eternal life. Whoever believes in him, John 3 16, is in the present tense. We're either in a state of belief or we're not. Lance from Cape Town, South Africa has a question and it is, Christians are seen as priest kings and there is, if I have understood things correctly, the idea of them ruling over the nations after the new heavens and earth are ushered in and God takes up his residence on earth. Who will rule whom? Why is there a need for such a rulership if all are resurrected Christians and the earth is full of the glory of the Lord and sin and death no longer exist? A couple of things here, you know that the question at the end there presumes that rule is somehow describing the restraint of sin or the restraint of something that's ready to burst forth and ruin everything again. I don't think that you have those conditions in the new earth, that's just a general response. More broadly I would say the rulership this is a metaphor. These are all metaphors, these are ways of describing the relationship we will have in the new earth with Jesus in that place. There's no need to be involved. A word like need is not appropriate. God doesn't need anything. He doesn't need co-rulers. He doesn't need the church now. He doesn't need a divine council. But he uses those things so that his created beings get to participate with him in enjoying and working with him to either further or maintain that which he has made. Again for our benefit not for his and God has no lack, he has no power. So I think that's the way we need to think about this. God does things in a way that involves us for our sake. That we get to participate. Rulership is about participation in governance or stewardship with our king. Since the New Testament describes unequal reward for all those who are saved it would seem that at least part of that refers to hierarchical governance. So I think the idea of hierarchy is there. It's implied again by the inequality of reward for all those who do have eternal life. We're not talking about salvation here. So I think it's inferred or implied that there's going to be some sort of hierarchical participation. That's going to be part of the reward package if you want to put things like that. But again that's not about restraining evil. It's not about filling a lack in God. It's about us getting to participate with the Lord being made co-rulers, co-heirs in all this language in Revelation 2 and 3 and lots of other places. That's what it's about. So beyond that, we're not given any details about how this works. We're not given any specific job descriptions or anything like that. So again when I run up against that wall I don't speculate and call it teaching. I just don't speculate. I try to just take things as far as the text allows us to go and just leave it there. Tracy has a question and it's regarding the line in the Lord's Prayer translated generally as forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Or forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. My question is about the quote as I have generally taken it to mean in the same manner as but I have come to realize that it could also mean at the same time as does the Greek provide any insight into which was intended. Both certainly would seem to be appropriate such a little word to mean so much. Yeah. I think generally to jump into this the Lord's Prayer appears only in Matthew in Matthew 6. So we're going to be going with Matthew 6 and Matthew 14 for this question. In the Greek New Testament the passage reads forgive us our debts as and the Greek word is host there. We forgive our debtors. There is no Greek word host later in verses 14 and 15 about the trespasses. So it only occurs in the one spot. So since the question revolves around that little conjunction, host, I wanted to point that out that it's only in one part of it. In the same manner which would be comparative or at the same time which would be temporal again to use grammar speak. The comparative is you could probably argue that the comparative is the predominant semantic for the conjunction host. However, grammars do note temporal semantics for the conjunction in certain passages. So the at the same time idea or translation that's legit. If we look this up in B-DAG which is the standard lexicon for the Greek New Testament it will note that host can be a temporal conjunction and it will actually say with the heiress it recommends the translation of when or after. In other words, there's when something happens or after something happens then you have that temporal sort of sense. Now in Matthew the verbs are heiress so again you have a temporal possibility there and you can translate it something like let me just go to Matthew 6 here and go to the actual example forgive us our debts when we have forgiven our debtors or after we have forgiven our debtors. If you go with when that's a little more closely coordinated the both sides forgive us. After implies a little bit more chronology this happens then that happens and when is like this feeling of simultaneity or something that approximates simultaneity. But there's no way to be any more granular than that. So back to the question does the Greek provide any insight into which option which of those semantic options was intended about what all you can say both certainly would seem appropriate you could go with either the comparison or the temporal idea but there's no way to really say well this is the case here and we can build an argument to exclude the other and I have to be honest I don't really see the need to choose but certainly lesser forgiveness isn't in view as though Jesus words could be construed to mean that one's forgiveness is not of the same extent or the same quality or the same genuineness so if you were opting for in the same manner let's go back to verse 12 forgive us our debts in the same manner that we have forgiven our debtors well that's implied I mean that's not something that can really be excluded because to argue that it should be excluded would leave you with this possibility that Jesus is asking you to pray Lord forgive us our debts in not quite the same way or to a lesser extent than we have forgiven our debts it just doesn't make any sense it's very obvious that without even thinking about the conjunction we want you know Jesus is suggesting we have a one to one correspondence here we God's going to be inclined to forgive us as we have forgiven our debtors and that's how we should be thinking about the situation so the comparative idea in the same manner idea that seems kind of intuitive now when the comparison is God's own forgiveness again that's what's being asked for in the prayer then it makes little sense to turn the question into Father forgive us to a half way extent so it just seems intuitive now adding to that just a little thought Matthew 614 if you go two verses later seems to provide a chronology so to speak by virtue of the conditional particle so verse 14 says this is ESB you forgive others their trespasses your heavenly Father will also forgive you so if there is the Greek word on and it's just what it sounds like a conditional particle and that is typically followed this is the case it's followed by a subjunctive verb form now the verbs up in verse 12 one is an imperative forgive us our debts and the other one as we have forgiven others that's indicative of command indicative is the mood of reality just sort of state something that is and down here in verse 14 we have the subjunctive the subjunctive is the grammatical mood of unreality that is it describes actions that haven't happened yet like future or that may or may not happen based upon conditions that are set and that's what we have here in verse 14 if you forgive others their trespasses your heavenly Father will also forgive you there's a contingency there so if that's the case then you obviously have a chronology one thing has to happen before the other and so you don't really have at the same time there you do have a chronology there and you could take that chronology that's clearly presumed in verse 14 and then read verse 12 in light of it but you would still have a temporal use of the conjunction it may not mean at the same time but there's a time element there so either way again just to recap here it allows us you know the host can be a comparative semantic in the same manner it can be temporal either at the same time or some sort of chronological time both of those are operable here again I don't see the need to choose I think the only thing that you could eliminate is simultaneity only because of verse 14 and if you wanted to look at verse 14 you have an obvious condition this has to happen before that does and then you would be reading verse 12 in light of that temporal situation alright skip from Columbus Georgia has a personal question for you Mike and he wants to know how do you as a Bible scholar stay grounded in the Bible and the truthfulness it teaches on the gospel of Christ and the whole nine yards of evangelical reform doctrine of the Bible you know about the Bible's historicity etc without going over the deep end and completely losing faith because of doubts about such things that cause many scholars it seems to become so liberal in their thinking that they completely abandoned faith in the God of the Bible and in the Bible itself how do you keep the faith and maintain a balance of a scholastic deep knowledge of scripture of a simple childlike saving belief in what you are reading well the short answer to this this might sound a little bit harsh and possibly a little bit simplistic but again I've been a believer for 40 years and just trust me this keeps popping it keeps rearing it's ugly head with great regularity the short answer would be the problem with so many other scholars and just people who think in general is that they lack imagination and they are content with either or fallacious thinking that just seems to be embedded you know kind of in the human condition the longer answer I'll try to unpack that what I mean by that statement is that many scholars can't seem to think about the phenomena of scripture without using the vocabulary the institutional structures and the approaches handed down to them in their past by whatever religious context they happen to grow up in they just can't seem to escape it they can't seem to frame the phenomena or the discussion in any other way than this caricature they have living in their head and I don't know why but I just don't suffer from that problem I'm not sure why I'll confess I don't know why that is it just sort of is but maybe examples will actually help here let's just take a topical example and I'll just relate some things about this in my own personal experience so let's take the mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch so let's just jump in with a series of questions here just so that you know some scholars again they can't escape from thinking about it in certain ways and then I'm going to suggest that that's not a good thing that's a lack of imagination a lack of racing of either or fallacious thinking so question why does Moses have to have written all the Torah, all the Pentateuch why? why does that have to be the case if you're the fundamentalist this is where you're going to land fundamentalist and others who sort of have inherited that tradition whether they realize it or not go through some really odd machinations to make that idea work without getting too granular the Missler conference in Coeur d'Alene several months ago I saw an example of this again for some reason the speaker feels compelled to justify mosaic authorship of every portion of the Pentateuch and so he whipped out this colophon argument about how Moses would have been using cuneiform tablets and how the cuneiform tablets had evidence of colophons which is a way of ordering material and Moses would have seen that all speculation and frankly it's just unnecessary and there are actually some primary text problems with it too both in the Torah itself with colophon language that doesn't work there and outside in the cuneiform world but the point is why do we feel compelled to go search high and low for what is really kind of a strange argument to justify this idea is so important why must we say this second question why couldn't Moses not have written any of it this is the polar opposite of the fundamentalist this is where your critical liberal critical scholars are Moses didn't write any of this stuff catch what I'm saying here this crowd is just as fundamentalist but in the opposite direction they cut themselves off being critically and creatively about their own set of ideas I'll give you a couple of examples here when I was at the University of Pennsylvania one of the things I did Penn had two libraries that people in my field were supposed to use one was in the museum if you're kind of bent archaeologically that's where you'd spend your time the other one was the Semitic's reading room which was in a different building so one night I decided I'm going to go up to the Semitic's reading room and do a little thought experiment so I went up there and they've got thousands of books there I had a couple of hours to kill and it was early in the semester so I'm not burdened with assignments I went up to the room and here's what I wanted to know I had been at a seminar I had two or three years of seminar under my belt so I was pretty well familiar with evangelical publishers what outfits were evangelical publishers so the little game I played that evening was I'm going to go through the stacks in the Semitic's reading room at the University of Pennsylvania in the Glorious Ivy League and see how many books published by evangelical publishers I can find I found one one and I can tell you exactly what it was it was R.K. Harrison's Old Testament Introduction now what that taught me was that well it generated some questions are you like not aware that these other publishers exist? surely the librarian must be aware well who orders the books for these things so that would probably be the faculty is the faculty unaware that these these other scholars have evangelical commitment and published through these publishing houses they're writing good books after all they've gotten their degrees from Harvard and Penn and all these other places they surely can't be unaware of that so are they afraid? do they want to filter the knowledge do they want to limit exposure? do they want to just eliminate ideas that they don't like? the answer to all those questions the answer is somewhere in there one of those is yes so it taught me very early on that there was a knowledge filter here it just worked in the opposite direction you know the fundamentalists don't want you to look at the stuff that the liberals say and the liberals don't want you to look at the stuff the fundamentalists say again those are those are using the two polar extreme terms here the liberals would they want to come down on this it's JEDP it's Documentary Hypothesis Moses didn't write a word of this maybe Moses didn't even exist they're just all the way in the other direction then you have the other people that are just like oh Moses that's right every word we're going to come up with some cock a Mamie theory to get him to be the author of every word and my question is why can't you have some of both? why can't you have the use of sources why can't you have non-mosaic authorship with mosaic authorship why is it either or that's a fallacy that is fallacious thinking and that's why I have again I don't know where it comes from it's just sort of in my head but I have carried that everywhere and in every topic and with every question I want coherence I don't want either or fallacies handed to me I don't have to accept the way you frame a topic or a question is there a cosmic rule that says the way you articulated the question is the only way it can be articulated there is or is there some cosmic rule that says the way you answer the question is the only way it can be answered no and no guess what? I don't need to play by those rules and I have found again you have as much fear and knowledge filtering on both sides of basically any issue and again I don't know if it's like is this my role in the universe here to just point this out it's so obvious but again it happens for different reasons so I look at these topics and say something to know why can't it be a little bit of both why can't we have some imagination here why why do we need mosaic authorship why is it a hill to dial I mean who said so and in a lot of cases you know you have so many will affirm obvious things, obvious points data points about the topic and then extrapolate to the completely unnecessary you know like without mosaic authorship the Bible is a crock you know I hate it now my faith is in vain well that's just kind of an extreme reaction why is that a reasonable conclusion then on the other side if Moses didn't write you know XYZ because we have sources then he didn't write anything at any time and it's all made up and maybe Moses wasn't even a real I mean it's just this total polar you know reaction and I look at it and say well why can't we affirm the obvious hey there's editing here hey you know Moses if you know if we presume you know Moses was was alive you know raised in Pharaoh's house like the Bible says he would have been literate you know what what is there to prevent him from writing stuff down that would get edited later the answer is nothing prohibits him from doing that nothing prohibits the Torah from being a little bit of both you know and is there something theologically wrong with all the New Testament says that it refers to the Torah is the law of Moses yeah it refers to the book of Daniel you know as Daniel refers to the books of Samuel Samuel okay what else would you call it because it's a book that is associated with the time period of Moses and the events of Moses life and the law that began during the mosaic period of course last long you know thereafter it's got these associations with it so you wouldn't call it the book of Joshua or the law of Joshua I mean it's a normative expression law of and I put this on my blog you know law of Moses simple Hebrew construct phrase the construct phrase has semantics it could be the law that originated with Moses it could be the law that was possessed by Moses it could be the law that's associated with Moses it could be the law that's about all of those things can be true and none of them require that Moses wrote every word these things just don't get thought about very well this is why I said in my short answer we've got a lack of imagination and a willingness to embrace either or fallacious thinking and I don't suffer from either and a lot of people I know don't suffer from either but too many people I know seem they they come across like they're trapped either they want to be trapped or they're like you know trapped in a victimized way in in one mode of thought and I think for on the critical side I think they're just again I think it's a it's something between an apathy and a disdain for the opinions of others and they don't really see the need to even think about these things I'll give you one more illustration okay when I my doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin we're sitting there in Pentateuch seminar and one of the criteria for these these source you know this is JEDP the documentary documentarian view is that you know the documents J E specifically J and E and to some extent some of the others depend on the vocabulary choice for the names of God the names of God is one of the criteria so that the J source uses Yahweh the divine name Jehovah is how the Germans would have said it and the E source uses L words L Elohim L this L that okay and so when we see that the various names for God then that indicates a separate hand and a separate source okay got the basics so I actually asked in class well you know we know that the Septuagint you know which of course you know how to Hebrew base and the Hebrew bases was different than the Maseridic text in places we know that the Septuagint didn't have the divine name you know it doesn't have the word courios because that's where the Septuagint consistently translates the divine name courios Lord we know that the Septuagint in 110 115 places it apparently had a different you know thing a different name for God than the divine name in the Torah maybe it had an L name or something like that I said doesn't that kind of mess up the neatness of the sources for the Hebrew text of the Torah you can just say when you encounter one it's one author and you counter the other it's the other author because if we throw in 115 differences doesn't that kind of muddy the waters there you know shouldn't that make a difference it doesn't that make the argument weaker and the answer I got from my professor in a doctoral program was that's probably just a lazy translator that the Septuagint translator was just happy again you've heard me say this on the podcast before that day was one of the reasons why I said later in the same class it's a wonder I got out I said later in the same class that I thought that every doctoral student in biblical studies should be required to take a course in logic because that was just not that was not an adequate response it just wasn't that is not a coherent response I'm sorry but it's not it's not a data driven response and critical scholarship is supposed to be about data well that answer was not about data that answer was I'm too lazy to have looked and even if I look well I want I like this approach so much I don't care about the data so again I could throw in a few more of these but back to the basics of my response to this you know what again it's nothing mystical I just think that we need to be able to think about topics and questions and answers to questions in ways that don't violate clear thinking clear logic that account for outliers that are not content to just dismiss parts of our arguments that don't work that are not willing to accept either or fallacies and to me that that makes it fun because then you have to engage the material you have to think about it and here's where the role of imagination and creativity I think helps an imagination not like you're just making stuff up but you're trying to reimagine how in this case how we got the Torah well how might this have worked in real time could Moses have had a role could other people have had roles could it have been done over long stretches of time if you try to put it in real time and reimagine how this would have worked does are you able if you do that are you able to come up with a more comprehensive view that accounts for the data in all its disparity that's what I'm looking for so I just don't feel pigeonholed I don't feel like one thing or the other there is no cosmic karmic rule that says there is a set of rules for how we must think or not think about scripture and I just know that again I don't know why I really know it it just seems sort of self evident to me but there it is that lives in my head all the time and again if that's what's living in your head let me just throw one other element since again I'm a theist I believe in God I'm a Christian all these things these basic ideas whose coherence has been defended quite capably for millennia I'm not going to overturn any of those apple carts and neither is anybody else trust me people have tried for thousands of years so given that assumption that we have God in the picture thinking creatively and trying to think big picture about how these things might have happened in real time that requires a providential role for God in all of it it just requires it by definition so then God becomes part of your thinking to answer the question how might this have happened how would this have looked in real time how would God have pulled this off using people again listeners here are going to know me well enough I would assume at this point that I don't believe the Bible is a divine book one adjective is not sufficient I believe it is a divine human book both adjectives are necessary and to strip the humanity out of scripture is to undermine the doctrine of inspiration to strip the human out of it you make the Bible vulnerable to all sorts of criticisms one adjective is not enough you need both and if you can't find that view in the Bible so what too bad get a better book think about it there's no cosmic rule that the way this is articulated in the book that my pastor recommended whatever there's no cosmic rule that that's where the inquiry ends so I think we just need to be a little more willing to think maybe it'll just appeal to you to have a little more fun with it don't get trapped into fallacious thinking about scripture and about what scripture says I think that would serve you a long way in it again that rambled a little bit I'm going to wrap it up here but I'm hoping the illustrations have a little bit of explanatory power to answer the question yeah I've even been asked Mike how getting this deep into the Bible has affected my faith from friends of mine who getting their mdev and we've all heard stories of people going through seminary and stuff and kind of questioning everything and I'm kind of like if you're studying the Bible and you start to lose your faith well you're doing something wrong the problem is in the Bible I don't know it just seems odd to me because the more you dive down the more questions you have for me it seems to strengthen it and not confuse it or lose it so I don't know again I'm always left with the question again how would this have worked how did God influence the writer do this what was the writer trying to do because the writer is under none of us live in a news flash none of us live lives of autonomy we're all influenced by people if you're a theist you're influenced by God all these things the biblical writers are the same kind of people and God has an interest in what they're doing especially in something of this magnitude where has God in these set of circumstances what did the data tell us about how this might have worked and to try to reimagine it imagination is not the enemy of biblical stories unless you're using imagination to just junk the truth, propositions and scripture and substitute your own when I talk about imagination I mean creatively thinking about the data that you have in front of you I think we need a little bit more of that yeah I'm amazed because I believe the Bible is a living word it tells you something one day and another another day but I get on some of these blogs or whatever and I see people have discussions and if you're not in our Facebook group you need to get in there we almost have 2,000 people Mike in our Facebook Neck and Bible group talking about some of these great topics but I'll go into some of these other groups I mean talk about Christians reading the same thing and having the exact opposite viewpoint they can read something or study something and they come away with something completely different than another person and it's crazy how us Christians can't agree on some of the most simplest things and it's just we're all over the map it's crazy yeah I mean some of that is you know they're again this is not meant to sound critical but they're you have a lot of sheep without a shepherd and what I mean by that is they have they may not have a lot of direction but they haven't quit and so I'm on their side you know I wish they had you know more direction but to the very least they haven't quit so that it's a positive thing in that respect but negative in that you know they're just trying to do it on their own you know and that's why we do stuff like the podcast to be honest you know just try to try to give a little help there you know but then you've got situations where people have sort of been you know funneled in one direction and when their knowledge filter the knowledge filter they were taught from very early on doesn't satisfy at some point then they then they are tempted and some of them just you know go all the all the way opposite to just junk the whole thing and just say well none of this matters is gonna is gonna help me and be any sort of guidance to me I'm just gonna wing it you know I mean they're gonna get rid of it or I'm gonna wing it and whatever pops into my head that's what scripture means or whatever the next person you know who maybe I like something they said I'm gonna just go with what that guys you know you have all these forces you know kind of operating you don't have anything that well I shouldn't say anything but you have a tremendous lack of discipline when it comes to method you've got people who are charismatic and they make certain arguments and they get followings just because they're charismatic and the people who follow them you know want to follow them because they didn't like the last person they were following or they had no direction at all it's kind of a mess but at the end of the day I'd still rather have that than people just quitting you know all together absolutely that's why we need everybody listening right now to go out there and give us a review or rating on iTunes or wherever you consume us if you're on Facebook or social media hashtag Naked Bible get it out there so people can get some guidance here and we appreciate everybody that has done so to date and with that Mike we appreciate you answering our questions and I want to thank everybody else for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast God Bless To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs go to www.brmsh.com