This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 604: Did Jesus Really Have All the Divine Attributes with Brandon Duke

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
604 Brandon Duke - HANDS 2.mp3

Transcript

00:00 Sean Finnegan
Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to restitutio, a podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:12 Sean Finnegan
Most of us understand what deity means. Generally, we think to be God is to be eternal, uncaused, and indestructible. This gets at the word aseity, which is a fancy philosophical term for a being that doesn't depend on anyone or anything else for exists.

00:32 Sean Finnegan
Since to be, ah, Sir, from the Latin ah, equals from and Sir equals self is to be uncaused and non contingent. This cuts to the very essence of what it means to be God in the proper sense of the word. So if Jesus is God in the same way in which the father is God.

00:53 Sean Finnegan
Then Jesus, too, must have a safety.

00:57 Sean Finnegan
Right. We'll see about that in today's episode. But here's the thing. It's actually even harder than establishing Jesus's society to claim Christ. Deity entails claiming he has all the other divine attributes as well. Deity of Christ, apologists like Bowman and Thomashefsky know that this is a problem.

01:17 Sean Finnegan
In fact, in Part 2 of their book, The Incarnate Christ and his critics, they outlined 7 conflicting attributes between Jesus's alleged divine and human natures. They say he is both eternal and born, immutable and able to grow impeccable and.

01:35 Sean Finnegan
Wanted omnipresent and able to walk omniscient and not knowing something omnipotent and capable of sleep. And lastly immortal and mortal all at the same time. Although they revel in such quote UN quote paradoxes, this list presents grave difficulties for the classical dual nature.

01:56 Sean Finnegan
Used from calcitonin that we covered last.

01:58 Sean Finnegan
Week in this episode, we'll consider several of those contradictions as part of our second episode on whether or not Jesus had the divine attributes here. Now is episode 604. Did Jesus really have all the divine attributes with Brandon Duke?

02:22 Sean Finnegan
Hello everyone and welcome to Restitutio. I am Sean Finnegan here with Brandon Duke, member of the UCA Unitarian Christian Alliance Board, and we are talking about the big book by Bowman and Tomashevsky, the Incarnate Christ and his critics.

02:41 Sean Finnegan
And this book breaks into.

02:43
Who?

02:44 Sean Finnegan
HANDS. That's the acronym, right? So five points we talked about honor. And now today we're on the a letter of the acronym, which is attributes. We've got a few different topics to talk about. The book is very long. Like you said before.

03:02 Sean Finnegan
Guy has not met a proof text he didn't like, so anything that can possibly hint at inferring that Jesus is in some sense divine, they have included.

03:16 Sean Finnegan
That results in a lot of material, and even though we are looking at doing 5 episodes on this book, which is a lot, we're scratching the surface here because they're just, they wrote so many words. And that is just the way it is. So we're trying to take kind of a via media. We don't want to exhaust the viewers and listeners.

03:36 Sean Finnegan
But we do want to at least engage on the strongest points, so I think we're going to be doing some sifting and sorting here and our kind of subtopics for today are preexistence.

03:48 Sean Finnegan
The idea that Jesus is the Creator and his sinlessness, and then last of all is paradox. But you were saying earlier before we started that paradox might be a good place to start. So why don't you lead us off with that?

04:02 Brandon Duke
Sounds good. There's like 8 chapters in this section on attributes, but yeah, you can really boil it all down to those 3.

04:09 Brandon Duke
Things and they should have opened with their their view on paradox, because it is informing all the ways that they're using the passages that they reference in the other chapters. Let me give you a few quotes from the book to kind of help the audience understand where they're coming from. So.

04:25 Brandon Duke
They say quote.

04:26 Brandon Duke
Although it staggers the imagination and stretches the mind.

04:30 Brandon Duke
Somehow Jesus has characteristics and abilities properly assigned exclusively to.

04:36 Brandon Duke
God. So I appreciate that they recognize the difficulty of of what they're claiming they go on and say there is no one like God, a point made over and over in the Old Testament. And yet as we will see, the New Testament claims that Christ possesses the fullness of that unique divine nature.

04:56 Brandon Duke
To understand this, what I I think is kind of a myopia for the the authors where they're.

05:02 Brandon Duke
They're constrained by 5th century ideas about Christ being fully God and fully man, and then bringing it back to the text. Anachronistically think to understand it. Maybe we should go to the last chapter in the section called the paradoxical Christ.

05:19 Brandon Duke
And then maybe circle back to the other, the other question.

05:19 Sean Finnegan
OK. Yeah, yeah, this is something I love about your Brandon, is that you always have this philosophical intuition myself and and some others we get kind of focused on the text itself, the exegesis and nitpicking at this grammatical construction and that syntactical usage and so forth.

05:42 Sean Finnegan
Whereas you were like, OK, so that why are you using that text and how does this fit with all the other texts? And what is the overall argument you're making and how does that then affect your other commitments? And so I think in a conversation on this topic, really the philosophical approach is a lot more important.

06:02 Sean Finnegan
Because there's just no way we can get through all of the checks.

06:05 Sean Finnegan
You.

06:05 Sean Finnegan
Know like. Yeah, to give, like, honest, in-depth exegesis on, say, for example, the Carmen Christie of Philippians 26 or 10.

06:12 Sean Finnegan
Like that's ours. Ours. I mean, if anyone has ever read Ralph Martin's Carmen Christie book. I mean, it's hundreds of pages. It's in depth. That's one. That's one text. Right. So let's do it. Let's go to paradox. What did they say?

06:24 Brandon Duke
Well.

06:25 Brandon Duke
Well, I I appreciate that and God bless you, biblical studies guys that know the languages and can do that because I find that in some cases, insufferable. So.

06:32 Brandon Duke
I'm glad there are people that will do it.

06:34
OK.

06:35 Brandon Duke
So the authors offer their definition of the incarnation by quoting Thomas Oden. Here's the quote. Christ is truly God. He is truly human. He is one person. There are in him two distinct natures, divine and human, clearly distinguishable and substantially different, yet undivided, inseparable.

06:55 Brandon Duke
And unconfused and if after that definition you are confused, you are normal because that doesn't clarify anything.

07:02 Brandon Duke
This may help you get a a sense of where they're going. They say, quote. The more we learn about Jesus, the more surprising and paradoxical we find him to be.

07:11 Brandon Duke
So this is.

07:11 Brandon Duke
What their reading of the New Testament requires. It leads them into paradox, and that's a nice word. Really. What it's leading into his contradictions about.

07:21 Brandon Duke
Christ and I'd point out that apparent contradictions are apparent falsehood.

07:26 Brandon Duke
Married bachelors in square circles and silent sounds, and they're all impossibilities. Yeah, exactly. Hot ice cubes, colorless red objects going on right. If someone asserts they're real, they shoulder an enormous burden of proof to demonstrate that the contradictions are merely apparent and not actual contradictions.

07:31 Sean Finnegan
Hot ice cubes.

07:47 Brandon Duke
And if they can't establish this, we're responsible to reject their claims. And from a biblical like a hermeneutical standpoint, someone making claims about attacks in the old or New Testament that is straight up control.

08:00 Brandon Duke
Victory. We should reject that reading. We should be charitable to the authors. We should be if we believe in the inspiration of scripture, we should be. We should assume that God is telling us things that make sense. And this is a basic hermeneutical expectation is to read and author charitably. Now I'm going to read you some things where they disagree with that fundamentally.

08:20 Sean Finnegan
Hold on before you jump into that this idea where they say this quote you just gave, the more we learn about Jesus, the more surprising and paradoxical we find him to be.

08:33 Sean Finnegan
There's something about this that bothers me. I don't think it's really them learning about Jesus. I think what it is is them reading about Jesus through the lens that they've already pre committed themselves to and finding it to be weirder and weirder the more they drill down into the details.

08:54 Sean Finnegan
And to me, those are two different things. Like I want to look at the lens as a model.

09:00 Sean Finnegan
OK. Because we understand models, I just saw a post the other day like there was a guy who had invented the hydrogen engine for cars, right? And there was a picture of him, old guy, and he had his engine there. Where did that engine come from? Well, a drawing probably right that there was originally a model of it, either on paper or in a computer.

09:21 Sean Finnegan
He probably did a lot of work in the model and then he made it into reality. And so the model tries to represent what is real accurately, but we we know that like models are heuristics. They're they're just sort of like simplified versions that we can think.

09:37 Sean Finnegan
With and, especially when it comes to philosophy and theology, so their model is this statement you just quoted from Odin that they're committing to Christ on the one hand is truly God. On the other hand is truly human, but no explanation as to how that works or any kind of like further.

09:57 Sean Finnegan
Collaboration. Other than to say he has these two natures.

10:01 Sean Finnegan
They're not all mixed up together, and they're not totally separate. OK, so like, that's not really definitional like I we're using the term apathetic last time to talk about that because it's like they're just kind of saying what he's not rather than what he actually is. But that is their model or their what I'm saying. They're lens for reading and they're finding.

10:22 Sean Finnegan
Jesus, to be totally they use the word paradoxical but like I would say contradictory because it doesn't really fit. So I don't think that's a good way to do.

10:32 Sean Finnegan
Yep.

10:33 Sean Finnegan
I'm just gonna blow the whistle methodologically right here and just say we have a method error. Let's not take a council or creed or some sort of later tradition and then try to shoehorn that into 1st century Second Temple Jewish literature.

10:53 Sean Finnegan
That is written in the in the context of of Judea and Galilee, on the one hand, with the Gospels or in the context of the Hellenistic metropolises and the in the sense of Paul's epistles. Right? So, like, let's read it within that world, rather than reading it in light of later stuff. I'm. I'm just saying stuff that you you already have.

11:12 Sean Finnegan
Said. But I just wanted to say.

11:14 Brandon Duke
It again, preach it. I love it. Well, let's let's let's make it worse. So I got another quote from him. We would predict in advance.

11:22 Brandon Duke
That if God revealed rich truths to us about himself and his relation to the world, we would encounter paradoxes in those revelations. I have no idea why they think that's justifiable. Also, I will point out they always refer to God in the singular, and I I don't understand how they do that either. But anyway.

11:39 Brandon Duke
If we have reasons to believe that the Bible is a reliable source of doctoral truth about God, and we do they say, then we are warranted in believing a state of affairs that we cannot fully analyze rationally. If the Bible teaches it.

11:54 Brandon Duke
And I just say this is a huge red flag for their readings. This is a rhetorical manipulation. It's reframing. You're taking an obvious weakness of your case and trying to pass off the problems with it. All these contradictions, as if they're strengths.

12:09 Brandon Duke
This is what politicians do. They call it spinning, right. If someone says our products price isn't a flaw, it's a sign of premium quality. When the price is actually unjustified, that's spin. It's not actually a strength of their product, it's it's a weakness. Some people will say it's it's putting lipstick on a pig. It's trying to trying to pass it off.

12:12 Sean Finnegan
Yeah.

12:30 Sean Finnegan
So.

12:31 Sean Finnegan
Well, and it also is a slight against God, isn't it? That he's like such a bad communicator?

12:35 Brandon Duke
Well, and it's it's an assumption that God is inherently like contradictory with him within himself, that there should be paradoxes within God. It's just glorying in confusion, as if it's profound insight. And this is irresponsible.

12:51 Brandon Duke
God's supposed to be near to us. We're supposed to be able to understand him. By the way, this is something that is not claimed in the older New Testament. That God is paradoxical and.

13:00 Brandon Duke
Using that's not there anywhere. Obviously there we can't fully wrap our minds around around God because he's got all the knowledge that exists and all the power that exists. So we're not, we're not claiming to have some kind of exhaustive knowledge of God. We're just saying that, that assuming contradictions from your readings are a strength of it.

13:21 Brandon Duke
It's just false. It should be a warning against the way that you're reading the New Testament. So I want to list the paradoxes that they list about.

13:30 Brandon Duke
Priced and they give they give 7 and they talk about how great they are. So the eternal One was born. The immutable 1 grew the impeccable 1 was tempted. The omnipresent one walked the omniscient 1 did not know the omnipotent one slept and the immortal one died and they list these.

13:50 Brandon Duke
So. So I appreciate that they're aware that they're.

13:53 Brandon Duke
Taking on these.

13:54 Brandon Duke
Dale Tuggy has an article called Greg's contradictory.

13:58 Brandon Duke
Christ, which is a response to Liam Lane Craig's attempt to resolve these paradoxes. I mean, this is something I would say to Bowman and Thomashefsky regarding them is they're choosing not to follow the path that other Christian thinkers have followed, which is to try to make sense of this to say these are only apparent contradictions. Bowman and.

14:18 Brandon Duke
The chefs you're happy to just accept them as contradictions and say my Bible tells me so, bro. I don't need to make.

14:24 Brandon Duke
Sense of it.

14:25 Brandon Duke
Well, OK. Then what then? I guess they think William Lane Craig.

14:27 Brandon Duke
Is wasting his.

14:28 Brandon Duke
Time there's a deep split here between Christian philosophers and theologians that are trying to make sense of of Jesus as fully.

14:29 Sean Finnegan
Hmm.

14:36 Brandon Duke
Mine and what Bowman and Tomaszewski are doing based on their readings and just and just throwing up their.

14:42 Sean Finnegan
Hands. Yeah, I would say any one of these would sink the ship. I mean, eternal one was born.

14:50 Sean Finnegan
That doesn't make sense. If you're eternal, you don't. You don't need to be born, you already exist. Unless by born you just mean transformed, and that amorphous used. Yeah, right. Immutable 1 grew. If you're immutable, by definition, you can't change. You know, I think honestly, this is like a.

14:59 Brandon Duke
Added a human flesh.

15:09 Sean Finnegan
This list you just made or that they gave is a good outline for a biblical Unitarian response book. Certainly, you know, sort of like they just loaded our gun with all the bullets here. Yeah. The Eternal One was born. The immutable 1 grew the impeccable 1 was tempted. The omnipresent one walked the omniscient 1, did not know the omnipotent ones.

15:29 Sean Finnegan
Left and the immortal one died. That like these are our points.

15:32 Sean Finnegan
As biblical Unitarians, they're saying. Ohh, isn't this wonderful? No, it's not wonderful if you're a mortal, you can't die unless, unless. OK, now we have to go to the philosophy for a second. You're operating an.

15:45 Sean Finnegan
Avatar.

15:46 Sean Finnegan
OK. And the real you doesn't die, but the avatar of you dies. But then the question is.

15:52 Sean Finnegan
In what sense is that a real death and how in the world could that possibly be efficacious to pay for the sense of the world? If only your avatar died, but the real you is comfortably safe in heaven? Yep, right. So we have to get to that philosophy side of things.

16:07 Sean Finnegan
To make sense of the claims, you know what you're saying is that these guys just steadfastly refuse.

16:12 Brandon Duke
Absolutely no. We can have that conversation with other Trinitarians that are making this case for two natures. But Bowman and Tomashevsky aren't. They're not interested in that discussion. In fact, they appeal to like that. We should in humility, not have that discussion. We should accept what the Bible.

16:27 Brandon Duke
Says and and trying to make sense of it is somehow. I don't know. Almost like a shirk against God. Like we lack faith or something like that. So that's the part that I find most frustrating with this book is the mysterianism of it. They're exegesis. Is fine. It's typical Trinitarian exegesis of the the, you know, key passages, but then they they always bail once they get there.

16:47 Brandon Duke
Like here's how I read it and if that has weird implications.

16:51 Brandon Duke
Tough. It's my.

16:52 Brandon Duke
Bible bro, I I think that that's not good enough for most other Trinitarians. They wanna. They want an explanation too. And and for the average sort of Pew said. Or the average churchgoer and the, you know, the layman like like us that are out here reading this stuff, it's not satisfactory. We want Jesus to make sense. We want to, we want the church councils to make sense. And if they don't, we'll protest sense and we'll.

17:13 Brandon Duke
Reject them. That's fine. We can just stick with the text.

17:16 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I think otherwise. You're kind of left with the conspiracy, right? Like, like, the text appears to say this. But like, we know, it really means that. And, you know, that's just a bad style of reading. You know, you could do that to anything. You could take Moby Dick and say it's really.

17:32 Sean Finnegan
About, you know, doing drugs or whatever, you know, like. Yeah, you can make up anything you want. That's like the whole problem with allegory as an interpretational system. What else about this?

17:44 Brandon Duke
I think it might be worth at this point going to a couple of passages that they say force their hand into this. So for example, they turn to collagens 1 I think might be a good place to start collagens 119, right? The fullness of deity dwells in Christ. And they say, well, obviously this is saying that Jesus as fully divine in addition to his full.

18:06 Brandon Duke
Humanity. We can certainly go to it. They also say it's an allusion to Psalm 6717, which was new for me. I I had, I had to go look it up, but this will also tell you the kind of things that they think are New Testament illusions, the Old Testament. So in Psalm 6717, my notes, I don't have it pulled up. You can you can look it up. But it says the mount.

18:27 Brandon Duke
Which God was pleased to live in or live in it. So it's referring to the mount that God is like inhabiting or occupying. And they're saying, ah, well, like, that's what's happening here, that the fullness of deeds is dwelling in Christ.

18:42 Brandon Duke
If that's true, number one, I don't think it's true that it's actually an.

18:46 Brandon Duke
Illusion. But even if it is.

18:49 Brandon Duke
I don't actually think it makes their point because the the mountain didn't now become God. It doesn't say the fullness of Didi dwelled in Jesus's body or something. There's a much better Unitarian reading, I think, of of collagens 119 and then collagens 29, which is just to say that he's fully empowered by God. And we've got all kinds of stuff and.

19:09 Brandon Duke
All that that talk about that where where God dumps his his Holy Spirit on him without measure. So it's it's these kinds of claims.

19:17 Sean Finnegan
Let me just mention as a helpful verse on this one is in Ephesians 3.

19:21 Sean Finnegan
13 which says and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God to be filled with the fullness of God, or in the case of Ephesians 319, all the fullness of God does not make one deity. It just makes 1A Christian.

19:42 Sean Finnegan
We're all seeking that. We're all praying for that. That's something that we all long for is to be filled with all the fullness of God. Christ, as a sinless man, as the forerunner.

19:54 Sean Finnegan
And head of the new creation, he's already he's already there. You know what I mean? He's already in his in his life. He's already experiencing that to the to the fullest degree that a human can experience it. But just the fact that it says in dwells him, right, or that it's in him, tells us that it.

20:13 Sean Finnegan
Is not him. I don't think that's a very strong text at all. In fact, it doesn't really come up that much.

20:18 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

20:21 Sean Finnegan
But their point on it is that this is paradoxical in some way.

20:21 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

20:26 Brandon Duke
Well, here I'll read the quote, the emphatically redundant language that Paul uses, combined with its clear allusion to David's statement about God dwelling in Zion proves beyond reasonable doubt that Paul was affirming the deity of Christ in the strongest possible way.

20:40 Sean Finnegan
These are big words.

20:42 Brandon Duke
It's these huge claims these really aggressive claims throughout the books.

20:46 Sean Finnegan
Strongest possible way like I I I I just missed it.

20:50 Brandon Duke
I think of a lot of other stronger ways.

20:52 Sean Finnegan
Like I'm reading, I'm following them and I'm just like, you know, in him the deity was dwelling bodily. OK, so in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto himself. OK, where's the part where there's a strong claim of something, you know, like, I just don't.

20:56
Yeah.

21:10 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. And if it is, if you're going to say that this is a strong claim, then it's a strong claim for all of us and we're all.

21:16 Sean Finnegan
Getting.

21:17 Sean Finnegan
Divinized you know. So now you know it destroys the uniqueness of the claim with that Ephesians 319 so.

21:20 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

21:25 Brandon Duke
Yeah, alright, I.

21:26 Brandon Duke
Got. I just got one more before we go on another tax, just to help us really get a feel for for where they're coming from, quote, we are prepared to accept truths about God that Scripture reveals, explicitly or implicitly, even though these truths are often beyond our ability to comprehend fully or to penetrate logically, they are not illogical.

21:28 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, let's do it.

21:45 Brandon Duke
But they transcend our ability to provide a perfectly logical analysis of them.

21:50 Brandon Duke
And that that leaves nothing unexplained or correlated. Again, it's a smokescreen. It's a smokescreen for being able to read a later interpretation back onto the text and not force yourself to grapple with it so I can stop beating that drum. And maybe we can go back to their actual text about pre existence and other things.

22:09 Sean Finnegan
On this statement, they make being prepared to accept truths about God that Scripture reveals. I think that's good. You know, if we recognize Scripture as authoritative, that we should be prepared to accept the truths it it it says about God.

22:28 Sean Finnegan
I don't think that's problematic. I think what's problematic is that they're just sort of like blind to the lens.

22:34 Sean Finnegan
Through which they're reading.

22:35 Sean Finnegan
Scripture and it's like, let's just take them off and let's talk about them, you know, like, OK, so this is your lens. And I kind of want to be like the eye doctor and be like well.

22:47 Sean Finnegan
Try it, yeah.

22:49 Brandon Duke
This one, this one, this one.

22:50 Sean Finnegan
His number one, Liz #2, you know and see, you know, it's just like, try out some different lenses. You'd be shocked be like, Oh my goodness. Like, I am wearing glasses. This is a model. This is not.

23:00 Sean Finnegan
Actually, what the Bible says is just how I'm reading the Bible through my presuppositions. And so let's talk about the presuppositions rather than glory, and how confusing the Bible is.

23:11 Brandon Duke
Yeah, yeah, that way. Because we're happy to say that there are things that the Bible can reveal that we accept based on its testimony.

23:12 Sean Finnegan
When interpreted.

23:20 Brandon Duke
Straight up like, yeah, the the resurrection of Jesus. I accept on the testimony of the witnesses and the authors that we have, right. We're not challenging whether the Bible is saying things that are paradox. We're challenging whether you're reading in a way that's a paradoxical, right. Like you said, it's it's the lens that we're challenging, not the authority of Scripture.

23:38 Sean Finnegan
Alright, where did it go?

23:39 Brandon Duke
Next, so I think maybe the next is they've got an entire well two, maybe 3 chapters on the pre existence of Christ.

23:47 Sean Finnegan
Pre existence OK.

23:49 Brandon Duke
And I would point out a couple of things to start, #1.

23:53 Brandon Duke
Unitarians can believe in the pre existence of Christ. You don't have to believe that Jesus is Co equal with the father to believe that he pre exists. So even if we gave them all of it and said Yep, you're right, he preexists most of the people in their list of critics are going to say, yeah, of course you pre exists. It's fine. What's the problem?

24:12 Brandon Duke
So there's there's Btus like us that say no, he doesn't pre exist literally as a person he comes into existence in his mother. But I would just point that out the target that they're they're aiming at isn't Unitarianism itself. And also, as we go notice that what they'll argue that pre existence also establishes eternality.

24:34 Brandon Duke
And establishes being uncaused or uncreated. And these are all four different claims. They're different things, and you have to establish each one of them individually.

24:41 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, those two.

24:44 Brandon Duke
Really it's really strange when we get to the last chapter, they claim they've done it and I just I I went back and I looked through the all the chapters again, looking for the substantiation for the claim that Jesus is uncaused as they want him to be and I couldn't find it anywhere where they actually defended the claim. So I would just start with that. The first tax that they tackle.

25:06 Brandon Duke
Is Luke 1130.

25:08 Brandon Duke
5 Because it's a favorite of Unitarians identifying where Jesus began that he didn't pre exist. So from the IRS fee, it's the Angel said to the Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the most high will over shadow you, therefore the child to be born will be holy, and he will be called the son of God. They want to agree.

25:28 Brandon Duke
That son of God here is a Davidic title which I appreciate. That's right, it is. But they also think it has two contexts. It's not just a Davidic title. They want to say that it's also a title for the pre existent divine person called the Son of God.

25:45 Brandon Duke
So I again, they'll do this move where they'll say. Well, of course, the original people referred to him as son of God in a sense that a 1st century Jew could have understood a messianic title. But Luke is doubling down on that, or adding meaning to that by applying it to also this preexistent son too.

26:05 Brandon Duke
To which I would say, where is your textual evidence that that he's doing that? They'll say, Luke, 135 quote neither affirms nor denies the pre existence of the one called Son of God.

26:16 Sean Finnegan
The issue I think Brandon, is this word therefore in the translation you read, which is.

26:22 Sean Finnegan
Typical of most translations, it says.

26:25 Sean Finnegan
You know that the spirit will come upon you, etcetera. Therefore the child to be born will be holy. He will be called the son of God. So it's it's because of the Holy Spirit.

26:37 Sean Finnegan
Overshadowing and the power of God, and this, this text too has some structural stuff going on. You have two sets of two parallel lines, so it says the same thing twice and then it says the same thing twice. The first half is the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary and the holy and the power of the most high overshadowing her, so that those those are the 1st 2:00 and then the 2nd 2 are.

26:59 Sean Finnegan
The child to be born will be holy and he will be called the son of God. I think it's saying the same thing twice and then in between those two sets of two you have this word therefore.

27:09 Sean Finnegan
Which is indicating that the reason why the child is holy. The reason and as opposed to just a regular human being and the reason why the child is the son of God, is because of that miracle. So it doesn't exclude pre existence to say this whatsoever, but it does define son of God.

27:30 Sean Finnegan
On the basis of the miracle, rather than on the basis of an already existing eternal son who becomes a human, so it just kind of gives us a different basis for defining the word, son of God, than the basis that Polman and Komisarjevsky assume must be true.

27:49 Sean Finnegan
So I think it's, it's not like the strongest text in the world to argue against pre existence, but it certainly does get it's a very like positive theological block in the edifice.

28:03 Brandon Duke
Yeah, I agree. I wanted to make a quick note because I know you've read some of Simon Gathercole stuff. They referenced his pre existent sun book for a lot of their material. So they're pulling from that. So if anybody's interested kind of get underneath where they're where they're coming up with these gatherings book I think might actually be better than this one for for that info.

28:22 Sean Finnegan
But philosophically, you've already kind of made the point.

28:25 Sean Finnegan
That.

28:25 Sean Finnegan
Like pre existence doesn't really matter for their argument, right?

28:30 Sean Finnegan
Well, we could continue on with it a little bit, but we do have these other ones to talk.

28:35 Brandon Duke
About too. Yeah, I was gonna say we can. We can run through a few of these quickly. I mean, they wanna argue that that, for example, that that we know he preexisted because the demons knew him. Quote The demons were personally acquainted with Jesus and knew him in a way that.

28:40 Sean Finnegan
OK. Yeah, go ahead.

28:49 Brandon Duke
Human beings did not.

28:51 Brandon Duke
The demons recognize Jesus because they like him, are spiritual beings.

28:55 Brandon Duke
This is a claim that again, I I didn't find their substantiation of it to be convincing. The demons don't say oh, I remember you. It's it's there's not any kind of implication that they're reflecting on a past meeting in order to identify them typically doesn't even tell you if memory serves and most of like how they how they identify.

29:15 Brandon Duke
They just know.

29:16 Sean Finnegan
So yeah, perhaps the best parallel would be Saul with the witch of end.

29:21 Sean Finnegan
And he's disguised and she has a little seance and suddenly she recognizes. Oh, it's Saul, the King of Israel. Oh, my goodness. Are you going to kill me because he had made a law against the witches. Right. And so the demon revealed this to her.

29:34
Maybe.

29:41 Sean Finnegan
Or some sort of spiritual force revealed this to her.

29:45 Sean Finnegan
And it's not like ohh, uh. I knew you from a pre existence. It's just like, no, I've I recognize who you are. You are? Yeah. This king. You are this soul. So I think with Jesus like just recognizing him as being this holy one as being this one who came into the world in this very unusual.

30:05 Sean Finnegan
Way mentioned in Luke, I would argue also mention in Matthew and who had this unusual calling to be the second Adam to be the new representative, the Messiah, the ruler of the age to come, you know like he is way bigger of a king than Saul ever was.

30:22 Sean Finnegan
And they're recognizing that, you know, it doesn't say, like I remember back when we used to hang out in the spiritual realm.

30:30 Sean Finnegan
100 years ago? Or you know what?

30:31 Sean Finnegan
Like, that's just not what it's saying.

30:33 Brandon Duke
Yep, and. And if that was what was going on, they could. That would have been a totally plausible thing to say is I, you know, I saw you at the throne of God or whatever. There's ways they could, they could say that in general, they just believe that the New Testament claims Jesus was present and involved in Israel's history. And so they think he's the rock that followed.

30:42 Sean Finnegan
Yes.

30:43 Sean Finnegan
Yeah.

30:53 Brandon Duke
The Israelites, they spent time on that that First Corinthians 10.

30:58 Brandon Duke
Message. I think most people won't find that one persuasive. They think in Jude five that Jesus is the one that saved people out of Egypt, that he's, you know, he's the one there. I was reading about that one. There's a there's some really serious manuscript questions about about that passage too. Whether it's saying it's, you know it's it's Jesus or it's the.

31:17 Brandon Duke
Lord, that did that.

31:18 Brandon Duke
This is an interesting thing where I can't tell if they're. I'm going to give the credit. They're not contradicting themselves, but they want to say that Jesus both was the Angel.

31:27 Brandon Duke
Of the Lord.

31:28 Brandon Duke
That was that was present in the old.

31:30 Brandon Duke
Estimate and then they have an entire chapter later that says Jesus is not an Angel Contra the Jehovah's Witnesses.

31:37 Brandon Duke
And so I don't know how he can both be the Angel of Lord and not be an Angel without really stretching the the term Angel. My man. Like I get what they're trying to do. They want to have him be the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament and they and they reference all the typical Angel.

31:54 Brandon Duke
Of the Lord passages for that.

31:56 Sean Finnegan
That's always seemed a little strange to me. Like, what is the deal with that? You know, just working so hard.

32:03 Sean Finnegan
To.

32:04 Sean Finnegan
I guess it's to find something for Jesus to do in the Old Testament because it's awkward to have him be there and do nothing.

32:13 Sean Finnegan
So maybe that's the weight this sort of pet doctrine is lifting, but yeah, it just proves too much. Like if you say Jesus is the Angel of the Lord, you've just proved Jesus is an Angel like now you got to go join the the so-called Aryan crew. You know what I mean?

32:29 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

32:30 Sean Finnegan
So yeah, I don't think it's really helpful to anybody unless you're really do believe that Jesus is an Angel, in which case obviously it is very.

32:36 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

32:37 Brandon Duke
Helpful. Yeah. I mean, if you wanna find the Trinity in the Old Testament, they gotta go there.

32:42 Brandon Duke
Because otherwise in the Old Testament we know that the the God of the Old Testament is the father and the New Testament. So what are we going to do? And I think it presses him into that weird spot. Why don't we go on to Galatians and and they won't talk about pre existence. And Paul, so Galatians 4/4 through 6 and I'll just read it quick, if that's OK. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son born of a woman.

33:03 Brandon Duke
Born under the law in order to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as children, and because you are children, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, praying, ABBA, father.

33:14 Brandon Duke
My point would be I read that passage and I could not find the pre existence in it. I tried I had to have them explain it to me when I first read.

33:22 Brandon Duke
That I'm like where where is.

33:24 Brandon Duke
It I don't get it. And so it's the sending. They think that the sending must be referring to from I guess the geography of heaven.

33:34 Brandon Duke
Through the geography of Earth.

33:35 Brandon Duke
And so it places Jesus in a place that would pre exist creation. And my point would be there are all of these passages where Jesus talks about being sent and it's always out into the world around him. It's not from heaven to earth, it's always in the context of the people that are going to receive him the the sociocultural.

33:56 Brandon Duke
Situation that he's going to.

33:58 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, definition one is to send someone off to a locality or on a mission.

34:04 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I mean, I guess if he is already living in heaven, he's got to get sent down to the earth. But once again, you're presupposing that the text isn't saying that that's you're bringing that to the table. Yep. So, you know, I guess we'll have to come.

34:17 Sean Finnegan
Over.

34:18 Sean Finnegan
To how we could do them justice. But like Philippians 2 and John 1, which are probably like the main places where they're getting that.

34:24 Sean Finnegan
Assumption from but like yeah, if you don't have that assumption in mind, yeah, I agree with you. It seems like this is just talking about comma.

34:31 Sean Finnegan
Thing, and we certainly do have that same language used of John. There was a man who came from God. Or how does it go? There was a man sent from God whose name was John. You know, I'm talking about.

34:31 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

34:42 Brandon Duke
Yeah. And if, yeah, and if memory serves, they do some business with that passage, distinguishing how the his sending is so different from Jesus's, and I'd have to go check the reference. They acknowledge it. I I will. OK. I want to give them credit. They do business with Unitarian responses. Not all of them, but some of them. I just don't think they're responses are persuasive.

35:02 Brandon Duke
So I I do want to give him credit for for engaging, which is the whole point of their book. So it's the least I can.

35:08 Sean Finnegan
There it is. There was a man sent from God whose name was John John, 16. It's the word Apostolo. And in Galatians 4 four it's X Apostolo. Again, definition 1 of Apostolo is.

35:08 Brandon Duke
So.

35:22 Sean Finnegan
To dispatch someone for achievement of some objective. OK, whereas ex Apostolo was to send somebody out on a mission.

35:31 Sean Finnegan
It's not all that different, so I think we have to be kind of weary of philological cases made on the basis of prefixes in the coin, a period at least, just throw that out there.

35:45 Brandon Duke
Got that? That is a beautiful sentence. I want that on a T-shirt, so I'll skip past the part.

35:52 Brandon Duke
Where James Dunn thinks he disagrees with him, there's other authors that don't that don't think it's the best read.

35:58 Brandon Duke
Maybe we go to Romans 8 and I'll read that quick for God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin. He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in US who walk not according to flesh, but according to the spirit. So again, we have another one of these.

36:18 Brandon Duke
Sending passages and of course they like that that it refers to his being sent in in flash, that they think there's a correlation between that before a previous unfleshed only existence and then being sent in in flat.

36:35 Sean Finnegan
It's it's still it's, it's just not the right words in the Greek bro. It's not. It says having sent in the likeness of flesh what they wanted to say is into the likeness of flesh. I think it's the wrong preposition in the Greek it's it's the Greek word N instead of East or ace. If you want to use the.

36:56 Sean Finnegan
Rasping pronunciation. So it's in, so it could mean in the likeness of sinful flesh, in the sense that that's how he was sent. He was already in the likeness of, you know, he was sent in, in the likeness of flesh. He was sent. You know what I'm saying, as opposed to sent into the like, he wasn't in the like.

37:16 Sean Finnegan
The flesh and then he was sent into that likeness. So I don't think it's really saying what they wanted.

37:17 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

37:22 Sean Finnegan
Say here.

37:23 Brandon Duke
Yeah, interesting. Well, and then they think those two passages are parallel. What we just read in Galatians 4 and Romans 8, they think these are parallel passages. Quote, we must be clear on what Paul is and is not saying here. He is not saying that God sent a human being as his son, which is what you just pointed out from the Greek. It's saying rather he's saying that he sent his son as a human being.

37:44 Brandon Duke
And that leads them to Philippians too. I have a note that I think I read last time where they talk about the literature on Philippians too is quote unmanageable. Like nobody can read at all which.

37:56 Brandon Duke
That by itself is enough for me to say I'm not building anything on Philippians two other than I should be humble like I could take away that I should be humble. Jesus was humble. All the other metaphysics, all the other stuff is beyond my pay grade. I'm happy to have the scholars argue about it, but I'm not going to base an important doctrine.

38:16 Brandon Duke
Like the identity of Jesus on.

38:18 Sean Finnegan
It.

38:18 Sean Finnegan
That's interesting really. The the pillars of the incarnation idea come from John one one through 14 and Philippians 2 really 6 through 9 or so.

38:34 Sean Finnegan
Both of them have so much debate and controversy about, you know, like the grammar and John, 11, and what the word God means in those, you know, the anarthrous theos, you know, the the word God without the definite article. And John 11B and you know.

38:55 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. And then one would see and then in Philippians 2, you have all these words that are.

39:04
There.

39:05 Sean Finnegan
Kind of weird. You know, they're they're they're not like everyday words. Or at least they're not using an everyday sense.

39:11 Sean Finnegan
Where it's the meaning is clear. They're used in sort of an abstract or theological sense. This generates a lot of confusion, a lot of theories. So you're saying hey.

39:24 Sean Finnegan
Build something on solid rock.

39:27 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, these two texts, by the virtue of the fact that they have so much scholarly literature behind them, indicates it's not just like.

39:35 Sean Finnegan
Marveling at them. They're disputing what they mean. That indicates that these are not good texts on which to build something substantial. I think that's a fair point, Brandon.

39:46 Brandon Duke
I mean, it was one of the first things that I ran into and I like started looking into this. I was probably in the area or something growing up and I started looking at this and I'm like, let me let me really as an adult look at these passages and see if I'm wrong. Is Jesus equal to the?

39:59 Brandon Duke
There every time I ran into a passage that was used in the argument, there was whole books on them. There were there were scholarly articles like just page after page. If you looked them up on academia like like. This is a really bad sign. If this is a fundamental doctrine that there's this much.

40:19 Brandon Duke
Argument among the people that agree on what it should be saying right the people that say it's saying that he's fully divine them are disagreeing. It's analogous, I think, to the way deal talkies exposed the differences between Trinitarian theories, right? Everybody says we're all Trinitarian.

40:36 Brandon Duke
And and he's just, I was just talking to him. He's just having to add another entry to the Stanford Encyclopedia on the Trinity with another Trinity theory that disagrees with the others. So yeah, this is I. I don't mean to dismiss these passages. We should absolutely take the time and learn about them, whatever. However, we should be very cautious, I think, in building.

40:56 Brandon Duke
Doctrines on them, because of the various problems, whether they be manuscript translation, interpretation, whatever they are that stack up so.

41:06 Sean Finnegan
Yes, and and we we could also note at this.

41:09 Sean Finnegan
Time that Jerry Werewolf is currently doing his PhD on Philippians 2/5 through eight or five through 11, and he's doing it as a biblical Unitarian. So people will sometimes make the case, they'll say, Oh well, where's the where's the biblical Unitarian dissertation?

41:16 Brandon Duke
Yep.

41:29 Sean Finnegan
Well, just give it a couple of years. We have been held out from a lot of the institutions of higher learning among evangelicals. And so we we a lot of times we'll have to study at more liberal universities.

41:30 Brandon Duke
Here comes.

41:44 Sean Finnegan
But sometimes it's hard to do that in biblical studies because the assumptions are so different and the focus is so different, they tend to focus on authorship and dating and linguistics and things like that that are not so interesting. Too many of us, but we're rather interested in the meeting.

42:06 Sean Finnegan
You know, like, what does this mean? And then like your question, which is the theology, like how, OK, how how does this meaning affect my overall belief about this subject, which is pretty much impossible to do in, you know, some of these universities today, which is sad, but.

42:20 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. So I think that dissertation is forthcoming. I can't wait to read what he puts down there. And I would say that in the meanwhile, if you want a really in-depth take on this read Andrew Perriman's book in the form of a God, it is absolutely fascinating. I don't know if it's right or not.

42:40 Sean Finnegan
But it it's just it's just a fresh take on Philippians too, even if you don't agree with his main conclusion. His work on the word Morphy or some pronounce it morphe did this word.

42:55 Sean Finnegan
Is typically something that refers to the outward appearance. How somebody or something looks not their nature, which is probably, I would guess how Bowman and Tomashevsky are taking it as he was in nature, God as opposed to in the outward appearance of God.

43:14 Brandon Duke
I got the quote for you. They say rather it means that Christ's intrinsic or original mode of appearance was that of God, the brilliant, shining, glorious appearance associated with his divine nature.

43:25 Brandon Duke
And so.

43:25 Brandon Duke
Yes.

43:26 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. So that's interesting that they kind of had to mention that brilliant, shining, glorious appearance. So like they needed to get there, but they front loaded it with what they really wanted to mean. And then they backloaded it with what it actually means. And that's really saying two things, though.

43:33 Brandon Duke
The learnings?

43:46 Sean Finnegan
You know, to have the appearance and to be intrinsically. Usually they go together, but not necessarily.

43:53 Brandon Duke
And we can contradict them with Dunn, James Dunn says quote Christ existed as a man in the image of God in his Adam Christology. I like that that.

44:02 Brandon Duke
For me.

44:03 Sean Finnegan
That's another possibility yet.

44:04 Brandon Duke
I know. Yeah, there's there's lots of different ways to play to work that where it makes sense. They spent an entire chapter on John 1, and I don't know how much time you want to spend with.

44:13 Brandon Duke
It, but I can just give you this.

44:14 Sean Finnegan
Well, I just want to make one more comment on Philippians 2 just because you know it's fun. I want to say two things. One, I agree with everything you said before about this being complicated.

44:16 Brandon Duke
Oh, sure, yeah.

44:27 Sean Finnegan
Stuff, but to me it is utterly fascinating and worth studying like it's it's so interesting. It is really a worthy text for us, as biblical Unitarians to dig into and try to understand and get into the the literature on. I don't feel intimidated by it at all.

44:48 Sean Finnegan
I feel intrigued by it, but I think you're absolutely right that it shouldn't be a foundation stone because we're not really sure.

44:56 Sean Finnegan
It could mean different things, and then the second point I wanted to make is that the word form there in verse 6 and verse 7 it in one case it says the form of God or a God as Perriman puts it right, and then the other case, it says the form of a slave.

45:13 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

45:13 Sean Finnegan
And so.

45:14 Brandon Duke
Not form of a.

45:15 Sean Finnegan
Human you know, what is the essential nature of a slave? You know, like is, is that just like genetic?

45:16 Brandon Duke
Form of God.

45:19 Brandon Duke
A.

45:20 Brandon Duke
Right.

45:24 Sean Finnegan
And if so, guess what? You're a racist. Newsflash. You know what I mean? Like you can't. You know what I mean? Like, that's that's.

45:30 Brandon Duke
No one is essentially a slave, right? This is a contingent property.

45:32 Sean Finnegan
Right, nobody's essentially a slave. You're you're born into slavery. But then as soon as you're freed, you're no longer a slave. But did you have a any kind of ontological transformation? No. So there is no ontology of slave hood, unless, again, you're a racist. In which case.

45:48 Sean Finnegan
You need to go read the Bible, but so I think there's a there's this has got to be talking about function. This has got to be talking about something that's external, not something that's by nature not something related to ontology or being because the slave parallel just doesn't fit that. And when it comes to interpreting poetic.

46:09 Sean Finnegan
Stanzas and and you know poetic units if I can put it that way.

46:13 Sean Finnegan
Parallelisms really matter, and if you're going to do something one place and we have the same kind of language in another place by interpreting it this way, you cannot disassociate it from the obvious poetic structure in its meaning, because that's just like reading the poetry wrong. So I just figured I'd mentioned that you want to.

46:34 Sean Finnegan
Do John 1 now.

46:35 Brandon Duke
I just one more thing on on flipping.

46:36 Sean Finnegan
OK. Yeah, no, let's do it.

46:37 Brandon Duke
Suit it always.

46:37 Brandon Duke
Makes me think of Jesus washing their feet.

46:40 Sean Finnegan
Yes.

46:40 Brandon Duke
The king of the world washes the.

46:44 Brandon Duke
The.

46:45 Brandon Duke
Of the disciples, that's Philippines too, for me anyway. Yeah, let's talk. Let's talk John 1 and we do as much as little as you want, because I know we got to get to. There are other crazy claims like only God could be sinless and that Jesus couldn't be human because he was uncreated. But let's do John John for a little bit. If we got the time.

47:07 Sean Finnegan
Well, why don't you take the?

47:08 Brandon Duke
First step? Yeah. So let me say this. The authors, there's obviously there's more ink spilled on John one than maybe any other passage other than Philippines 2 in the whole Bible.

47:21 Brandon Duke
And there have been Unitarian responses as long as they've been Unitarians, which means for centuries there's written responses from Unitarians to both Philippians to and and John wants. So we can't respond to all of it here. However, I will just say this, their approach to John 1 is it start in verse 14 and say, quote, everyone agrees that Jesus is the personal subject of the prologue by at least.

47:44 Brandon Duke
Verse 14.

47:45 Brandon Duke
Which I don't think that's true, that everybody agrees with that, but that's their assumption, is it? By the time you get diverse 14, we're talking about the personal Jesus. And then to try to work backwards verse by verse, all the way back to verse one and say that that therefore establishes that in verse one the word is Jesus, that there's a direct.

48:06 Brandon Duke
Connection between the that the word is just another title for for Jesus in his pre existence state. That's their methodology. And so if you want to go through their argument, you can get the book and you can read how they link all of those verse by verse. Like I said, they spend a whole chapter on it.

48:22 Sean Finnegan
And and what's her overall claim?

48:24 Brandon Duke
Oh yeah, sure, obviously. Yeah. Obviously they they go through verse verse one claiming that that the word is the pre existent second person. Therefore that existed with God and that is God and therefore he pre exists and he can't be a part of the creation. So this is how they're tying it into their their argument about attributes. They're saying that this logos.

48:46 Brandon Duke
Preexist the creation with God, therefore, Jesus has to be has to be.

48:51 Brandon Duke
God.

48:52 Sean Finnegan
So do they get into the creation side of it here too, or no?

48:56 Brandon Duke
So let me look through my notes and refresh my memory.

48:58 Sean Finnegan
Because you also have that creator creature divide.

49:01 Brandon Duke
So they they get into that in the next chapter. Actually they don't. They don't tackle that directly during during John one. They spend a lot of time with John 1 referencing for example. They go to other places in John where for example, John, three, no one's ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the son of man.

49:04
OK.

49:07 Sean Finnegan
OK.

49:18 Brandon Duke
They they look for all of the sort of ascending, descending passages, they tie it back to John 1 and trying to establish that he was in heaven beforehand. Guys, he just really was. That's that's mostly the argument. And I don't know. I don't know that I can make a better case than other Unitarians that have that are on record.

49:21 Sean Finnegan
OK.

49:34 Sean Finnegan
I don't know how much time we want to spend on it either, but I would just say a couple of things. One is that.

49:41 Sean Finnegan
When we read.

49:41 Sean Finnegan
The words in the beginning was the word I think most of us are going to be thinking, OK.

49:48 Sean Finnegan
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and then God said let there be light and there was light, and God saw the light that it was, you know, and so forth. So we know that you know Psalm 33, six and 33, nine also bring this out, that by God's command, by his word the heavens were made and so forth.

50:09 Sean Finnegan
And that there's a lot of other literature.

50:11 Sean Finnegan
Sure that the Jewish people wrote prior to the New Testament or during the time of the New Testament talking about wisdom as well as this principle by which God created the world. So I think to say that that's Jesus or to say that that's the son prior to becoming Jesus.

50:32 Sean Finnegan
First of all, you're just reading that in. That's not what it says. It leaves it open.

50:37 Sean Finnegan
It just says logos. It says word.

50:40 Sean Finnegan
It could mean different things could be an attribute of God, or it could be an actual person of some.

50:47 Sean Finnegan
For it you have to decide as the reader, because look, this is the verse. This is the first verse of the 1st chapter of the beginning of the book. It's not like there's another line before this. It's like alright guys, I'm going to give you a cool poem.

51:04 Sean Finnegan
Don't take it too literally. I'm John. If you read my gospel, you realize don't take anything too literally. I'm always speaking abstractly and theologically.

51:14 Brandon Duke
People are in other people and it doesn't mean geographically, right? Yeah.

51:18 Sean Finnegan
So Oh my goodness. But you know, as far as I, as far as I think it is, personification.

51:24 Sean Finnegan
And some biblical Unitarians complain about the tendency to capitalize the W on word here. I think it's fun.

51:34 Sean Finnegan
And you know the the the other thing that some point out is that in John 1/2 it says he was in the beginning with God, that that could just as well be translated as it was in the beginning with God, which is grammatically true. But I'm fine with it, you know, like, either way, because I think what we have here is just a beautiful personification of an attribute of God.

51:53 Sean Finnegan
His logos, his, his word, what he speaks and that that is how he created everything and that that is in one sense.

52:03 Sean Finnegan
With him, in another sense is him just like the Trinitarians are saying. Well, in one sense, Jesus is God. In another sense, Jesus is with God, right? I think we're just talking about an attribute of God personifying it here. It's just as simple as that. So.

52:20 Sean Finnegan
I I have to leave it there. I don't know, Brandon, if you have another thing to add.

52:21 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

52:25 Brandon Duke
One of the thought the word word in the rest of John.

52:29 Brandon Duke
Other than there in the in the prologue, it is always the good news. It's always the gospel. It's the good news that they've.

52:36 Brandon Duke
So take that for what you will use. All the other usages and read it.

52:40 Brandon Duke
Back.

52:40 Brandon Duke
Into the 1st chapter. I think it makes you read read it differently, where where Jesus then becomes that in flesh.

52:47 Brandon Duke
I can I can understand the poetry of that. This is.

52:49 Sean Finnegan
Me just to to mention two resources on this, I would recommend Dustin Smith's Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John.

52:59 Sean Finnegan
And also Dale Tuggie's presentation what John one meant on YouTube, you just type in what John one meant Dale Tuggy and you'll find our plus presentation where he actually goes through the whole text. He goes through the wisdom lit from Second Temple Judaism and.

53:18 Sean Finnegan
He really brings a nice synthetic understanding to that.

53:23 Brandon Duke
Yep, and I appreciate the way that he, he says if you're gonna make the word, if you're gonna place Jesus in there.

53:31 Brandon Duke
What are your options for what the words the 2?

53:33 Brandon Duke
Words God mean.

53:34 Brandon Duke
Afterwards, right. He's going to say you're going to have to equivocate, like, and all Trinitarians do this right because they, because they want to say that Jesus is with the father, they want to say the word was with God. That's why they want to read that first thing. Else is the word is with the father and then they say and Jesus was the father.

53:51 Brandon Duke
Nope. Nope, that's not what they want to say. They wanna say in Jesus was divine or something like that. So there's this inherent equivocation that's happening that they're having to they're having to read into the passage. And I love it. Doctor. Tell you goes through all the different options for how people could have interpreted that in the 1st century and.

54:08 Brandon Duke
The shocker the Biblical Unitarian interpretation is what he thinks was the original reading.

54:14 Brandon Duke
There's one other John Passage we could just talk about quickly cuz I know this comes up. John, 17 five, where Jesus talks about the glory that he he's asking for the father to get to, to give him the glory that he had with the father before the world began.

54:29 Brandon Duke
And lots of people read this to say this is Jesus having divine status and then in his act of humiliation of becoming man, now it's somehow without this glory and he's asking the father to return it to him so that he can become divine again. I have all kinds of problems with this reading of this First off.

54:49 Brandon Duke
It seems very obvious that the glories with the father, not that not Jesus.

54:52 Brandon Duke
The father. Secondly, I would say the second person of the Trinity, if the second person the tree is glorious, this is an intrinsic property. This is an essential property. You cannot give up omniscience, omnipotence, etcetera. I safety these other these other properties that are unique to God. You you don't give those up. And the authors recognize this and we'll get.

55:13 Brandon Duke
Into this later where they have to, they have to bite the bullet and say somehow some way he both does know and doesn't know things and is temptable and isn't temptable so they know it's a problem. And yet.

55:28 Brandon Duke
Just accept it and I just think there it pushes the reading the other direction. I don't know if that's if you read it, that the glory is what was with the father and that he's asking for it to be delivered to him.

55:38 Brandon Duke
As the prophesied Messiah. But yeah.

55:41 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I think the glory was prophesied and that this was something that he had with God in the sense that it was stored with God. It was promised by God. And you know, again, we have to take into consideration.

55:59 Sean Finnegan
The particular way in which John writes John does not write in a con in concrete terms, he writes in abstract terms. That's just how his brain works. And God wonderfully used him with that magnificent brain and almost very little knowledge of the Greek.

56:19 Sean Finnegan
Language he has. That's why we love the Gospel of.

56:22 Sean Finnegan
John, it's easy to read.

56:22 Brandon Duke
Kind of narrow vocabulary, right?

56:24 Sean Finnegan
He has. Yeah. It's just very little vocabulary.

56:27 Sean Finnegan
But you know, he's able to do incredible things with such a limited vocabulary, but the downside is then you have to use words in different ways to mean multiple things, and that creates ambiguity. That's why scholars prefer precision. Yet the church has preferred the Gospel of John over the centuries like we know that from the manuscripts.

56:48 Sean Finnegan
Like we have so.

56:49 Sean Finnegan
Many gospel of John manuscripts because people just love it. So I think there's more of a heart approach that John takes than just a chronological or biographical focus, which you just have to factor that in that.

57:04 Sean Finnegan
Jesus and John is going to speak and say his words are more of an abstract way, not that he didn't do that in the other gospels a little bit, but it just brought out more.

57:09 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

57:13 Brandon Duke
I think in John I want to throw one other verse with it and then close on that chapter with their quote about how confident they are about this passage. In John 1722, Jesus says the glory that you have.

57:24 Brandon Duke
Than the I have given to them. So unless we're talking about a different glory, whatever glory Jesus is asking for, he's passing on.

57:33 Brandon Duke
So it can't be the status as the divine second person. I mean, I don't think you're the divine second person, Sean. I certainly am not. So there's other passages that that contradict that kind of reading. But that's not what Bowman and comma checks you're confident Jesus's statement, quote quote Jesus is statement in John 17 five is a clear affirmation that he existed alongside the father.

57:53 Brandon Duke
The divine glory before the creation of the world. They just think it's open and shut.

57:57 Sean Finnegan
I don't think so. This is something that I've noticed too.

58:01 Sean Finnegan
Proving that someone existed at a certain point in time doesn't mean that that person always existed prior to that point in time, right?

58:09 Brandon Duke
Totally true, yes.

58:10 Sean Finnegan
So, like saying that Christ was there in the beginning doesn't mean that Christ is eternal. I mean, we wouldn't have an Arian controversy if areas didn't have a point. Everyone would have just said to Arias, yo, you're crazy.

58:23 Sean Finnegan
Right. But like, if he did have a point, now you've got, you know, really the the A civil war in the church, mostly a Cold War, thankfully, but nonetheless, a lot of political maneuvering.

58:35 Brandon Duke
Yeah, it was easy for areas to say. Of course he preexisted, but he's not the same as the father. Easy. He's caused the father.

58:42 Brandon Duke
As I say, this is another thing that Bowman and Homer Chesky don't don't talk about, but it was really strange. They don't point out that other Trinitarians say only the fathers.

58:51 Brandon Duke
Say because the sun is generated in the spirit spirited, the other two are caused by the father, or I guess you're Orthodox. The spirits caused by both of them, but right, the father is the uncaused cause, is the arcade. They're. They're trinitarians. That'll that'll point this out. That if you think that the son and the spirit are uncaused, that you've created a whole big problem.

59:11 Brandon Duke
With, with the tradition, and they argue amongst themselves on this. So yeah, again, we said this before, but Bowman and Tomashevsky's entire point about pre existent.

59:19 Brandon Duke
It doesn't establish that he has the same attributes as God. They could have done this, they could have said Look, Jesus is omniscient, father is omniscient. Look, he's obviously him, but they can't do that because they have to explain how he's not omniscient in in the text. How he doesn't know stuff they could have said Look Jesus is all powerful. He does things that only God could do.

59:39 Brandon Duke
Intrinsically, but they can't do that because he shows weakness. So they have to then look for these clues based on pre existence passages or other things.

59:50 Sean Finnegan
Let's move on to the creator creature divide. What do they say on?

59:53 Brandon Duke
That. OK, so their first passage they go to is John 520.

59:58 Brandon Duke
Sex. While they claim that they've shown that Jesus existed before his birth and even before Creation, and was involved with creation, we point out not all of those are claims that some an Arian Unitarian could accept. Now they want to show that he's uncreated, and this is a passage that they turn to and it.

1:00:18 Brandon Duke
Boggled my mind that they spent, I don't know, 10 or 20 pages on this passage. It just says for just as the father has life in himself, so he has granted the son also to have life in himself.

1:00:32 Brandon Duke
And they say, quote, these scholars argue that the father's life in himself is most naturally understood to mean his eternal self, existent life. And therefore we should understand the sons life and himself here to be the same kind of divine life. If this view is correct, the son is fully God by nature. And yet in some sense functionally subordinate to the father.

1:00:53 Brandon Duke
In the sense of being eternally dependent on him.

1:00:56 Brandon Duke
So they're giving with one hand and taking away with the other on a passage that says nothing of the sort that that the son has life in himself always has. He would have always had it to say that he has granted it.

1:01:12 Brandon Duke
Where is the context that shows it's in eternity past nowhere in John 5.

1:01:18 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, you make a good point there.

1:01:19 Brandon Duke
Thank goodness the the father eternally generates the son. Thanks. Thank you.

1:01:23 Brandon Duke
Origin like it's not in the, it's not in John where it says the father eternally generates the son, but they want to appeal to authority. Quote the classic view going back to the church fathers is that the father granted the son to have life in himself in the sense that the son has had life from eternity past. Independence on the father. Now if that is not.

1:01:43 Brandon Duke
Ontological subordinationism I don't know what is the second person on that account would not exist if the father did not give him life, did not cause him to exist.

1:01:47
Hmm.

1:01:55 Brandon Duke
Now that's ontological.

1:01:56 Sean Finnegan
Subordination. So it actually proves the opposite.

1:01:58 Sean Finnegan
Of what they wanted to prove.

1:02:00 Brandon Duke
Indeed, they interact with it and they claim, oh, this is a Unitarian text. But look how great it works.

1:02:05 Brandon Duke
For.

1:02:06 Brandon Duke
Us. So they want to try and spin it, and it's typical of their spin where I don't think it works anyway. They quote a scholar I didn't know. And Edgar.

1:02:14 Brandon Duke
Good speed. Who did a translation. Apparently New Testament that, and here's his paraphrase for just as the as the father of self existent, he has given self existence to.

1:02:23 Brandon Duke
The.

1:02:23 Brandon Duke
Son and I would just point out that the life that that he gives the son, the son, that then is promising.

1:02:29 Brandon Duke
Plus, right.

1:02:31 Sean Finnegan
Self self existence is not something you.

1:02:34 Sean Finnegan
Need to be given right?

1:02:36 Brandon Duke
I say he doesn't get delegated like it just works.

1:02:36 Sean Finnegan
You know what I mean? Like. Yeah, like it's not a transferable attribute, you know, to be out, say by definition means you don't need somebody else to give it to you because you always had it or else you wouldn't be a say, you know, I I don't think this works at all. It's not a communicable attribute. It's intrinsic.

1:02:55 Sean Finnegan
Sick and so it cannot be given if that's what it's talking about. You know what Jesus is actually talking about in John 5 is his role as the son of man to judge and resurrect. And that's the life that God has granted him to have in himself. That he could extend to others because he says, just like verse 24, right before this and verse 28 right after it.

1:03:16 Sean Finnegan
That people are going to hear his voice and come out of the tombs. So hearing his voice.

1:03:22 Sean Finnegan
Normally wouldn't do anything to make dead people alive. But if God has imbued you with a force of life or whatever you want to call it that, that makes that possible, so that even just your voice would be able to call people out of the tomb.

1:03:37 Sean Finnegan
Then that's, I think what it's talking about. It's not talking about his contingency. You know, it's not saying that he's not dependent or contingent or caused. It's just saying that he has this ability now that's been granted to him.

1:03:52 Brandon Duke
Yeah. Plus he dies after saying this.

1:03:52
Yeah, I think you're totally.

1:03:53 Sean Finnegan
Right on that.

1:03:54 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, and he dies after saying this.

1:03:57 Brandon Duke
Like what are we talking about? Like it? Yeah.

1:03:59 Sean Finnegan
Well, I mean, while we're here, come on, we we gotta do it again. John, 519 very truly I tell you, the son can do nothing on his own. OK, so.

1:04:09 Brandon Duke
Yes.

1:04:12 Sean Finnegan
Like, that's not a say.

1:04:14 Brandon Duke
Ohh, and and Bowman and become Cheska say ohh. They just mean in his state of humiliation. As a human he can do nothing of his own and I'm like, dude, you're saying he's still fully God.

1:04:24 Brandon Duke
What are you talking about? He can do nothing of his own. That's I. I've never understood this Trinitarian argument that that you can have a omnipotent being, a second person. The Trinity rely on somebody else for anything. It I it. It doesn't make any sense to me, but do we do you want to talk about Collagens 1?

1:04:44 Brandon Duke
115 where they want to say the title first.

1:04:48 Brandon Duke
Born for Jesus means the first uncreated thing. I guess they they they go there, we can talk about it, but I I know we got to get.

1:04:56
No, ma'am.

1:05:00 Brandon Duke
To Sinlessness and other stuff I have.

1:05:02 Sean Finnegan
I've got a really good quote from F Bruce on on that one.

1:05:06 Sean Finnegan
This is what he says. This is from one of his commentaries. He says no reader conversant with the Old Testament scriptures on reading these words of Paul could fail to be reminded of the statement in Genesis 126. And following that man was created by God in his own image.

1:05:25 Sean Finnegan
So that is coming from the first half of verse 15. If you notice, Colossians 115 has two halves and the first half is calling him the image of God, the invisible in the Greek it's noun adjective. It's very clearly that image of God term there. I know in English.

1:05:45 Sean Finnegan
We flip it, we say the image of the invisible God, whatever F Bruce's point, it's like yo, this is Genesis 1262728. Gotta be.

1:05:55 Sean Finnegan
I'm I'm on board. I'm on board F Bruce, we're talking about the creation of humanity, and we're saying that Jesus is not the creator of the humanity, but he himself is the image he himself is the humanity. OK and then.

1:06:15 Sean Finnegan
First born of all creation.

1:06:17 Sean Finnegan
To me that that's partitive. He's a member of all creation and he's the first born chronologically. Now a lot of people don't like that.

1:06:28 Sean Finnegan
They say, Oh no, first born has to only refer to status that Israel is God's first born in Psalm 8927, and so forth. And that's true. That's all true. No, I'm not disputing that. I just don't think it is always true. A lot of times, first born just means the first kid that was born.

1:06:37
Yep.

1:06:47 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. And, you know, rarely it can also have this like sense of like, oh, I'm just giving my first born status to this other person, right. Either one's possible. But this is not.

1:06:58 Sean Finnegan
At all, an isolated line, and that's what nobody seems to be realizing. It's a line in a poetic unit. Like I said before, about Philippians 2. So with Colossians 115 to 20, you have parallels. What's the parallel?

1:07:14 Sean Finnegan
Is the first born from the dead down in was that verse 20 or so or 18?

1:07:22 Sean Finnegan
Verse 18 so.

1:07:24 Sean Finnegan
When we say first born from the dead.

1:07:27 Sean Finnegan
Was he dead?

1:07:29 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, he was. He participated in death. He was a member of the Dead. And he's the first born from the dead. So, you know, I think if you're going to say, OK, he's the first born of all creation, you have to say he is a member of Creation. And he's the first born member of Creation, just like he's the first born member of the dead.

1:07:49 Sean Finnegan
OK. The construction is slightly different between the two and the first case you use it generative, and the second you use this preposition in X. But I don't want to interpret them as totally.

1:08:01 Sean Finnegan
Different.

1:08:03 Sean Finnegan
The generative can mean the same as ex, OK? Or it can mean a subordinate generative, which is like the first born overall creation, which is what Bowman and thomashefsky need it to say. They have to have a say that because if Jesus is a member of Creation, Jesus is created. If Jesus is created, he's not eternal and the.

1:08:22 Sean Finnegan
The whole so like this whole thing hinges on taking kind of like a a side look at Colossians 115B and ignoring the parallel of verse 18 and ignoring the first half of the verse, which is clearly talking about him being a human being, not someone who created human beings.

1:08:43 Sean Finnegan
But himself, being a human being, and This is why I think new creation makes the most sense. Because if he's the newly.

1:08:52 Sean Finnegan
He created image of God and he's then he's obviously the first born of that new creation and he is first born from the IT all just fits together very nicely on that. That's my take on it. But like, hey, this is a really dangerous verse. Colossians 115 really dangerous verse if you need Jesus to be eternal.

1:09:12 Sean Finnegan
And not create.

1:09:14 Sean Finnegan
Because just like the standard, simple, straightforward.

1:09:17 Sean Finnegan
Reading of first born of all Creation is going to make him part of Creation as well, so you have to have a special pleading to argue, and if you do succeed in arguing that special pleading, you dislodge it from the poetic parallel. In verse 18, which to me is just bad form.

1:09:36 Brandon Duke
Love it. The subject is not an imagination of God, of the logos in eternity past.

1:09:42 Brandon Duke
It's not the subject of.

1:09:45 Sean Finnegan
No, no it's not.

1:09:45 Brandon Duke
Of that chapter.

1:09:46 Brandon Duke
People could look if they want it. Revelation 314.

1:09:49 Brandon Duke
I mean, because they want to say that the origin of God's creation is Jesus, and I don't know whether I I I don't know whether I think that's where I think maybe is referring to the new creation of the church and whatnot, don't have a I don't have a strong opinion.

1:10:09 Brandon Duke
On it because I don't think that it's making a like a theological claim about where the universe came from.

1:10:16 Sean Finnegan
When I read to you, this is Ephesians 210. It says for we are what he has made us or we are his creation.

1:10:23 Sean Finnegan
Created in Christ Jesus for good work.

1:10:23
Yeah.

1:10:27
Looks.

1:10:28 Sean Finnegan
You know, Paul does not say new creation there.

1:10:32 Sean Finnegan
He just uses the standard word for create.

1:10:36 Sean Finnegan
And so does that mean Genesis creation? No, obviously not. Like Paul does this all the time. He uses the word create to refer to this new reality that has come into existence by virtue of the Christ event, including the crucifixion, death, resurrection and Ascension.

1:10:53 Sean Finnegan
Christ, that's what I mean by the Christ event in the Christ event. It makes it possible for these people to become created, but we already exist. All right, we've got it. It's new creation. It's no big deal. Right? So I know Revelation is not written by Paul, but it's just like, this is something that we see.

1:11:12 Sean Finnegan
Typically, in fact, in all of Paul's writings, and I take a very conservative view of Paul's writings. So we say the maximum number, OK.

1:11:22 Sean Finnegan
The phrase new creation only occurs twice.

1:11:26 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:11:27 Sean Finnegan
And yet he talks about new creation all the time.

1:11:30 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, you know well over a dozen texts that I was able to list out and this is not just me, it's not a.

1:11:35 Sean Finnegan
Biblical Unitarian thing.

1:11:36 Sean Finnegan
There are all kinds of books on new creation. Lots of people have seen this. This is not like some sectarian view. New creation is like a major concept in policy ologi. And I think it is present in revelation as well because of this alpha and Omega.

1:11:50 Sean Finnegan
Language.

1:11:51 Sean Finnegan
And that Jesus recognizes himself as the first, and you even have this idea of the first born from the dead in Revelation as well, right? Isn't that somewhere in there? So yeah, there's there's there's definitely like, you know, it's not. I don't think revelations, Paul. I just want to be clear on that. But I think you do have similar.

1:12:01 Brandon Duke
Yeah, I remember.

1:12:03
Yeah.

1:12:09
Right.

1:12:11 Sean Finnegan
Ideas circulating in the Book of Revelation, because Christ really has generated this or God through Christ generated this new reality.

1:12:21 Sean Finnegan
That, you know, Revelation is all about the unveiling. How the spiritual invisible realities connect with the the physical on the ground realities. So it would make sense that the terminology would be the same. But like in Revelation 314, it doesn't even necessarily mean that, right? Because that or he word could mean.

1:12:41 Sean Finnegan
Ruler or it could mean beginning. Yeah. You know, so rule or ruler or beginning. So it doesn't necessarily mean that he's the beginning of everything. And if he is the beginning of everything, that doesn't necessarily mean that he always existed.

1:12:43 Brandon Duke
Yep.

1:12:46
Yep.

1:12:58 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:12:59 Sean Finnegan
Back to my earlier point.

1:13:00 Sean Finnegan
Point let's talk about sinlessness. This one is a fun one.

1:13:04 Brandon Duke
Sounds good. Sounds good. So the I'll quote from them to get us started. The best explanation for Jesus's moral perfection is that he was God Incarnate and they quote a scholar named Sychar that I'm not familiar with SIKER to be human is to send the notion of a sinless human.

1:13:24 Brandon Duke
Is a contradiction in terms. So now they want to use reason and describe things as contradictory is not acceptable or possible.

1:13:32 Brandon Duke
So anyway, they referenced their work in Chapter 2 to say that quote Jesus did not proclaim himself to be God and would he was even reticent to assert that he was the Messiah he normally spoke about his divine identity in indirect ways, having come to honor the father rather than himself. So could Jesus have sinned? The authors say.

1:13:52 Brandon Duke
No.

1:13:54 Brandon Duke
Jesus could not have sinned. It was impossible. So they have to say, well, then obviously, what do we do, where he's tempted? What do?

1:14:01 Brandon Duke
We do with.

1:14:02 Brandon Duke
This because the Bible explicit the New Testament, explicitly says he was tempted in multiple gospels at length.

1:14:10 Brandon Duke
They start by offering this tortured definition of what temptation is, and it's and requires from a Calvinist guy from a couple of centuries ago. Jonathan Edwards, anybody that's familiar with Jonathan Edwards. If you're an open theist like me, I read his name and I like kind of have it throw up in my mouth a little bit. I'm not. I'm not a fan.

1:14:30 Brandon Duke
But he comes up with this distinction between a natural ability and a moral ability, and so the analogy is this.

1:14:38 Brandon Duke
That a mother could absolutely smother and murder her baby. She's got the natural ability to do that. However, her moral character prevents her from ever doing this. She would never actually smother the baby and kill it. And so they say all that's required for temptation to be real is for you to have the natural ability.

1:14:57 Brandon Duke
Reality to do the thing that is being suggested and for it to be suggested to you, but if you don't have the moral ability, you'd never choose that and so therefore you would never, ever sin. That's fine. That was still a temptation. And so obviously you can see where they're going with this, with the two natures where the the human Jesus has the natural ability.

1:15:18 Brandon Duke
To abandon God and worship at Satan's feet. But due to his moral perfection as the second person, he doesn't, and so therefore the old you know, testament prophets about the success you know, talking about the success of the coming.

1:15:34 Brandon Duke
Via that can be certain because the second person of the Trinity is going to come and be a man. The the divine Omni perfection of Omni benevolence, all goodness will prevent him from sinning. So that's where they start.

1:15:49 Sean Finnegan
This is like two young boys.

1:15:53 Sean Finnegan
One daring the other one. I dare you to punch yourself in the face.

1:16:00 Sean Finnegan
It's like, yeah, he's got the natural ability. You know, you could punch yourself in the face, but you don't have the moral desire because that would hurt.

1:16:10 Sean Finnegan
Right. I would argue that in that case, it's not a temptation. Absolutely. You know, just because it's naturally available to your natural abilities, that's not enough. That's that's necessary, but not sufficient.

1:16:10 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:16:25 Brandon Duke
Yep.

1:16:26 Brandon Duke
We need to feel the tug, right?

1:16:28 Sean Finnegan
Hey, Brandon, I dare you to only eat healthy food the rest of your life.

1:16:32 Brandon Duke
Nope, not tempted.

1:16:33 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, but you could. I could. You're physically able to do that. You're mentally well, maybe you're capable. Maybe you're not. I I'm not.

1:16:35 Brandon Duke
Do that.

1:16:41 Sean Finnegan
I'm not capable but but.

1:16:42 Brandon Duke
As long as doughnuts exist in this world, I am going to be tempted to.

1:16:46 Brandon Duke
Not eat healthy.

1:16:47 Sean Finnegan
Right, right, right. So it's not a temptation if it's not something you desire. A mother doesn't desire to kill her own child, so it's not a temptation if you tempt me with a mushroom casserole. Guess what? I'm not tempted because I don't like mushrooms.

1:17:02 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, you know what I'm saying? So I don't think it works. What?

1:17:04 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:17:06 Brandon Duke
Do you think no, doctor? I agree. Doctor Tuggy has done a bunch of work on this where analytics theologians have tried to avoid the temptation problem. How do we have a fully divine person that's also fully human? How do we we get an authentic temptation and people only make a few moves?

1:17:23 Brandon Duke
They they water down what temptation is and really say he wasn't really tempted, which is what I think Bowman and.

1:17:28 Brandon Duke
Tomashevsky are doing.

1:17:30 Brandon Duke
Others say that in some sense they'll divide Jesus's wills where he's got a human will that's tempted, and a divine will. That's not they make all these wild move.

1:17:39 Brandon Duke
Well, the bottom line is everyone has experienced temptation. In fact, Bowman and Tomashevsky claim that that's universal, that sin is universal and unavoidable. So we all know what temptation is, and it's when we're actually drawn to something, we think it might be good to do this thing that otherwise we would know we were conflicted.

1:17:58 Brandon Duke
Right. And doctor Teddy talks about how God isn't temptable by definition, because God's omniscient it's not just his perfect goodness. It is his perfect goodness. But God's omniscience means there's never any time that he could be confused about whether something's gonna.

1:18:12 Brandon Duke
Be good or?

1:18:12 Brandon Duke
Not right. He knows that. You know, Satan comes up and says, hey, bow at my feet.

1:18:18 Brandon Duke
Jesus doesn't know for sure how the rest of his life is gonna go. Is he gonna fulfill his mission or is he not? He's gotta walk the walk. So there's a shortcut straight to being the ruler of the whole world. That's 8 is offering him. This is a real temptation. The other temptation of of hey, throw yourself off from the temple. This would.

1:18:38 Brandon Duke
Instantly give Jesus the credibility and authority that he's got to earn as part of his mission, right? If he does this, and God.

1:18:45 Brandon Duke
Swoops in the.

1:18:46 Brandon Duke
Whole city would know that he's the Messiah and God is with.

1:18:50 Brandon Duke
So these are real temptations. There's a reason that Jesus would have to to want to do these things. And of course Jesus is stellar and throws scripture right in in Satan's face and and resist the temptation. But I just don't think that they've got a thick enough definition of temptation. I guess would be my my answer. And I would also say.

1:19:10 Brandon Duke
Bowman and Thomashefsky work at length to prove the other side, which is that no mortal human could be sinless. So instead of leaning into like they're like, alright, fine, we got a thin definition of of temptation but fine.

1:19:24 Brandon Duke
And no human could go without sinning, and they referenced first John 1/8 through 10. And here's the quote. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in US. If we confess our sins, he who's faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us clean us from all in righteousness. If we say that we've not sinned, we make him a.

1:19:44 Brandon Duke
Liar and his word is not in US.

1:19:46 Brandon Duke
So they take that verse and they apply it to all living humans, dead humans ever.

1:19:52 Brandon Duke
And say, therefore, there's no way for the Messiah to be sinless without this divine nature and and before you comment on that, if I can quickly, I would just point out there's this old saying and maybe and I can't get it exactly right that unless it was assumed it's not saved or something, what is that?

1:20:13 Brandon Duke
They can't. Jesus. You know the one I'm.

1:20:13 Sean Finnegan
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Unless it's assumed it's not saved. Yeah, I.

1:20:15 Brandon Duke
Talking about where?

1:20:17 Sean Finnegan
Think that's right.

1:20:17 Brandon Duke
Yeah, right. So what they're saying is in his humanity, Jesus did not resist the temptations. It was his divinity that allowed him to resist the temptations.

1:20:28 Brandon Duke
I'm not sure if that's heretical for Orthodoxy or.

1:20:33 Brandon Duke
Right. Yeah. But like, like I know other trends are gonna say. No, no, he he's able to because of who he is, not just what he is but who he is. He's able to resist.

1:20:44 Sean Finnegan
You you were reminding me of Hebrews 415, which says.

1:20:50 Sean Finnegan
That we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, or tempted as we.

1:21:01 Sean Finnegan
Are.

1:21:02 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:21:02 Sean Finnegan
Yet without sin. So for me.

1:21:06 Brandon Duke
Thankfully to that, that's second nature. Man, that's really.

1:21:06 Sean Finnegan
Jesus, really?

1:21:10 Sean Finnegan
For me, you know, he he has to really be tempt, have been tempted and it can't be a different kind of temptation than what I experienced because the whole point of the verse is that because he was tempted, like I'm tempted, he is a good high priest because he understands if you have a very thin.

1:21:29 Sean Finnegan
View of temptation.

1:21:30 Sean Finnegan
Then it's like well.

1:21:33 Sean Finnegan
I've definitely faced worse than that. You know, worse than just like being tempted to do something I don't want to do. Those are not to me. Temptations of concern. Yeah. The Temptations I have of concern are tempting me to do something that I want a great deal and shouldn't do.

1:21:35 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:21:52
Yeah.

1:21:52 Sean Finnegan
Right, like yelling at somebody who drives too slow in the fast lane. That is a great temptation, right? Roll down the window and just light them up. Right. That's what we want to do. But, you know, if Jesus was riding in the car and that thought popped in his head. But he's like, why would I want to do that?

1:22:03 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:22:14 Sean Finnegan
I don't want to do that.

1:22:16 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:22:17 Sean Finnegan
Then that's not the same as my temptation. You know what I'm saying? It's just.

1:22:17 Brandon Duke
He's he's deserving.

1:22:20 Brandon Duke
It's just different. He's gotta fill the poll and then overcome it. Look, that's why we we always as Unitarians talk about how much we admire Jesus in ways that that we think the Trinitarians can't because he he did something that there, Jesus didn't.

1:22:21 Brandon Duke
Yep, no, he's got a.

1:22:35 Brandon Duke
He actually was an obedient human being.

1:22:39 Brandon Duke
Not an obedient divine person with a human nature attached.

1:22:43 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. And I think there are multiple solutions to the.

1:22:47 Sean Finnegan
Problem of human sin or of human perfection, not the the lack of sin. Right? So and I think you and I have different views on that. I think your position is just to deny that we we have kind of a corrupted nature.

1:23:07 Sean Finnegan
To such a degree that we will inevitably sin, just constitutionally, whereas my position on it would be Jesus is prelapsarian.

1:23:19 Sean Finnegan
In in his nature. So he actually lines up with Adam and Eve prior to the fall. They're real humans, but they're not prone to sin in the same sense that fallen humans are. And there's probably other solutions beyond those two that I represent you correctly.

1:23:35 Brandon Duke
No, no, that's super. That's super fair. I agree. I think there's different moves that Unitarians can make on this. We can either say that the divine intervention in his concept.

1:23:44 Brandon Duke
Option means that he's not subject to the same constraints that others are due to the fall. You can have a thinner definition of sin too, where I mean there were Jews. They're like I'm sinless. I mean we've got the guy that's like I've I've kept all these commands, you know, what's what's the deal. So you can have a thinner definition of sin where every time that you know, a guy casts his eye on a pretty girl.

1:24:05 Brandon Duke
It's not. It's not sin or something. You can do it that way.

1:24:08 Brandon Duke
You can say that God, especially in power Jesus, be the Holy Spirit or something in in a unique way. I I listened to a podcast by Dustin Smith here recently on this exact topic where he inventoried tax in the New Testament that explained why Jesus didn't sin. And I think it's interesting that the New Testament.

1:24:13
Spirit.

1:24:28 Brandon Duke
Everywhere never assumes that it would be impossible, and then like makes an argument against it. It just says he chose to obey.

1:24:36 Brandon Duke
Over and over and over, it says that he follows the father. He's obedient to the father. It's always a description of his exercise, of his moral conscience and his will in obedience to the father. There is no discussion in the New Testament of, well, how did he overcome the sin, nature, or how did he not to beat up on that idea? But but I mean.

1:24:49 Sean Finnegan
Yeah.

1:24:56 Brandon Duke
There's none of this, like no human could do this. How? How did this happen? It's just not. It's not in there, which to me says maybe this is a false assumption that we're that we're.

1:25:05 Brandon Duke
Taking in all due respect to 1st John 1/8 through 10, we're specifically talking to people who are in need of Christ. It's like yes, we all, all of us have sinned and are in need of mediation between US and God. And there was an old way, you know, right, with sacrifices of stuff. And now here's this new way.

1:25:26 Brandon Duke
So let's get in on this, guys. I I don't think John's making a claim that that Jesus couldn't have been human by saying, you know, all of us, all of us, have sinned.

1:25:37 Sean Finnegan
Very good. What else should we cover or?

1:25:39 Sean Finnegan
Is is that pretty much it?

1:25:39 Brandon Duke
So I got one more, one more chapter, and we'll try and go through it fast, but it's it's spicy, so it's worth it. So they they have a chapter called what Jesus did and did not know. So finally in this whole section on attributes where we have really not talked about any of his attributes that would be a second person's divine attributes. We finally get to omniscience.

1:25:50
Hold.

1:26:00 Brandon Duke
Like thank you. Now we can have an interesting discussion.

1:26:03 Sean Finnegan
Bring it. Let's do it.

1:26:05 Brandon Duke
Unfortunately, the authors say, quote, since God knows everything. If Christ were God, one would expect him to know everything as well. Did he? The Biblical answer seems to be yes and no.

1:26:19 Brandon Duke
Ohh so the Bible both says he both knew everything and didn't, so obviously we're we're leaning on the paradox.

1:26:31 Brandon Duke
So let me strengthen their position here for a little bit quote, although one might explain many of these examples of supernatural knowledge as available to Jesus as a prophet, UN quote. Yes, I would. They continue. 2 considerations suggest his knowledge was evidence of his.

1:26:47 Brandon Duke
Deity.

1:26:47 Brandon Duke
1st at least some of this knowledge goes beyond what biblical prophets.

1:26:51 Brandon Duke
Are able to know just as Jesus knowledge of hearts did.

1:26:55 Brandon Duke
Make a middle page. Hold that thought that Jesus's knowledge of hearts is somehow beyond the proof.

1:27:01 Brandon Duke
2nd at no time did Jesus ever make these statements in any of the typical ways that a prophet or other divinely inspired human being would do, for example. Thus sayeth the Lord, like in in quote. Thus sayeth the Lord. Right now I'm speaking for God, so since he never said, thus saith the Lord, since he.

1:27:21 Brandon Duke
Offers specific kinds of knowledge that supposedly the profits never offered, like what's in someone's heart.

1:27:28 Brandon Duke
He must have that knowledge through his divinity, and this is the the meat of the argument that the father knows, like in the Old Testament, God knows men's hearts.

1:27:39 Brandon Duke
And I think they even found a verse where it says like only God knows, like other men don't know each other's hearts or something. I I don't have it in my notes. And then they say, you know, Jesus obviously knows men's hearts. There you go, Jesus and God same Jesus says divine knowledge. I don't know why they think that God couldn't give this knowledge to Jesus.

1:28:02 Brandon Duke
I looked for where they where they're explaining how God could not give this information, deliver it to Jesus if the second person of the Trinity could know it. Why couldn't the first person pass it to Jesus? I like empower him as a prophet. I I don't get.

1:28:17 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, seems like it comes down to intrinsic versus extrinsic again.

1:28:21 Sean Finnegan
Is this knowledge by virtue of his nature, or is it communicated to him from an external source?

1:28:31 Sean Finnegan
And I don't think the text really says either way.

1:28:34 Brandon Duke
Other than he says, all my words are given to me by the father, right?

1:28:40 Sean Finnegan
Ohh yeah, what is that the end of job?

1:28:43 Sean Finnegan
1.

1:28:44 Brandon Duke
12 John 1249 I think.

1:28:47 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, or I got it. Yeah. For I have not spoken on my own. But the father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. I know that this commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore I speak just as the father has told me.

1:29:03 Sean Finnegan
So yeah, it's pretty powerful, like Jesus saying my words.

1:29:09 Sean Finnegan
Came from.

1:29:09 Sean Finnegan
God.

1:29:10 Brandon Duke
Not from my second nature. And remember these guys. Moment of machesky think God in the New Testament. That phrase refers to the father.

1:29:18 Brandon Duke
So it's not coming from the Trinity. It's not coming from his second the second person. It's coming from the father and they'll say constantly that Jesus is subordinating himself to the father and his human ministry. So they cut against their own argument.

1:29:34 Brandon Duke
I mean, obviously we should talk about. There's also about I've got some other notes, John, 519 John, 828, all these passages where Jesus is being led by the father and that's where he gets his power and his ability to do the works and all that kind of good stuff. So I think, yeah.

1:29:49 Sean Finnegan
I really like John 334. He whom God has sent, speaks the words of God, for he gives the spirit without measure.

1:29:59
There you.

1:29:59 Sean Finnegan
And this is actually the testimony of John the Baptist that Jesus had the office of a prophet.

1:29:59
Go.

1:30:05 Sean Finnegan
But he was also beyond that. He had the spirit without measure, and the way John the Baptist is putting it together, he's saying, well, that's why he speaks the words of God is because he has a spirit without measure. So again, this is an extrinsic source for his knowledge, not to mention the other text. You were just saying.

1:30:25 Brandon Duke
So let me let me read just some more quotes from.

1:30:27 Brandon Duke
These guys just to make it worse.

1:30:29 Brandon Duke
So so Jesus was simultaneously omniscient with respect to his divine nature and not omniscient with respect to his human.

1:30:37 Brandon Duke
How do you make sense of one person both being omniscient and not omniscient? I don't know because it seems like if I had two natures and one of them was omniscient. I'm omniscient, right? Like it's it's going to Trump the non omniscient part. If if part of me is strong and part of me is not strong, the strong part is going to be what I'll.

1:30:57 Brandon Duke
Lift with right?

1:30:58 Brandon Duke
So that's where they make the next move.

1:31:01 Brandon Duke
As a result of becoming humans as quote as a result of becoming human, the Divine Son really experienced limitations of knowledge appropriate to his sharing and our mortal weak nature. Yet in some way that's difficult for us to understand. He also possess the divine nature which is on mission, so they get it and they don't offer an explanation like a solution. They're just saying just.

1:31:21 Brandon Duke
This is how it is. We got passages where he knows stuff passes where he doesn't know stuff, and you Unitarians are leaning on that he doesn't know stuff.

1:31:29 Brandon Duke
And we're saying that the kind of stuff he knows only God himself could know.

1:31:33 Brandon Duke
There you go.

1:31:34 Sean Finnegan
I don't think that's fair.

1:31:36 Brandon Duke
For us.

1:31:37 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're just like leaning on one side of the equation. We're we're accounting for both sides, we're saying, yeah, he knows stuff because the the father told him through the spirit. However, that works and he didn't know stuff because the father didn't tell him everything.

1:31:38
Yeah.

1:31:48 Brandon Duke
Sure.

1:31:53 Sean Finnegan
You know, there's some things he didn't tell him and the things he didn't tell me he didn't know.

1:31:58 Sean Finnegan
It seems like that's pretty much what is happening with his confession about not knowing the day of the hour in Mark 1332. You know, it's funny that there's a version of Matthew's manuscript tradition of of Matthew that changed that so that it didn't. Jesus didn't say it because it was just.

1:32:15
Hmm.

1:32:17 Brandon Duke
Save the sons.

1:32:19 Sean Finnegan
They just didn't like it. They're like, man, why don't the why doesn't the sun know? I understand why the Angels don't know.

1:32:25 Sean Finnegan
But.

1:32:26 Sean Finnegan
This this can't be right. Whereas the scribes who copied Mark never did.

1:32:31 Sean Finnegan
Make any adjustments so we have it very clear in Mark, which is why I tend to quote the Mark version, not.

1:32:37 Sean Finnegan
The Matthew version.

1:32:38 Brandon Duke
Mm-hmm.

1:32:39 Sean Finnegan
Just because why get into textual criticism if you don't?

1:32:42 Brandon Duke
Have to this is what we were talking about. If we've got some, if we've got a passage that doesn't have manuscript problems, doesn't have translation ambiguity, let's use those.

1:32:53 Brandon Duke
And not and not the others. So I've got a sweet Richard Swanberg quote I want.

1:32:57 Brandon Duke
To.

1:32:57 Brandon Duke
Share just I like.

1:32:57 Sean Finnegan
Let's do it.

1:32:59 Brandon Duke
That's one burn.

1:33:00 Brandon Duke
But not here. Quote God in becoming Incarnate will not have limited his powers, but he will have taken on a way of operating which is limited and feels limited.

1:33:10 Brandon Duke
I have no idea what that sentence means. I've read it 20 times, God and becoming Incarnate will not have limited his powers, but he will have taken on a way of operating which is limited and feels limited.

1:33:24 Brandon Duke
I'm just saying Richard Swinburne is a really smart guy, and when he has to say stuff like that, I think he's defending a bad position.

1:33:31 Brandon Duke
That's the point I'm making.

1:33:31 Sean Finnegan
Yeah.

1:33:33 Sean Finnegan
It sounds to me like you're wearing a cast.

1:33:36 Sean Finnegan
Your legs not broken, but you're wearing a cast, so you can't walk normally. Let's say the cast covers the knee, so the only way to really get around is to sort of like do this weird shuffle or use crutches. But like, you're actually fine.

1:33:53 Sean Finnegan
Right. So maybe that could be an analogy of what they're trying to say that like, really he knows. But he has limited himself so that he.

1:34:01 Sean Finnegan
The.

1:34:02 Sean Finnegan
Does it, but like knowledge is not the sort of thing like mobility like either you know it or it's more digital like either you know.

1:34:09 Sean Finnegan
It or you don't know it.

1:34:11 Brandon Duke
Yeah, there's this weird move that. Yeah, there's this weird move that willing Craig makes where he describes the divine knowledge, as in Jesus is subconscious and he.

1:34:13 Sean Finnegan
Right.

1:34:21 Brandon Duke
Can.

1:34:22 Brandon Duke
Tap into it when he wants it, but my, but obviously there's lots of problems with that if you're Omnis.

1:34:28 Brandon Duke
Didn't you just know it? Like, we don't think that. God, I've heard Doctor tell you say this. God doesn't have to, like, think. OK, how many grains of sand are there on the moon and then pull that information up or, like, go look and see. He just knows. He just got that information. And so the idea that it's somehow in the in, like, the subconscious of Jesus.

1:34:48 Brandon Duke
Number one, the New Testament says nothing like that. There's nowhere where it that's indicated, but, but also if it that's not how emissions works. If if he's got the second person is supposed to have added a nature.

1:35:00 Brandon Duke
And and it's supposed to not diminish the divine nature at all. Look, it's just a contradiction. There's, there's and. So whenever you try and square the contradiction, you're gonna have to pick one side or the other. Either. He really did have some kind of cyanosis that happened, right? An outpouring of his divine nature. So he didn't have that somehow. Or you're gonna have to say he was play acting as a human.

1:35:21 Brandon Duke
And for a lot of people, what they really have is in play. Acting is a human. They have a disec. Jesus docetism is where it's an illusion of of something, right. He looks like a man, but really he's God. And really he does know and.

1:35:34 Brandon Duke
That's when I get mad, because I think there's they're attributing deceit to Jesus, and I would point out we talked about this in the last episode. Bowman and Tomashevsky opened with that one of their two explanations for why Jesus isn't explicit about being God is that he needs to cloak himself like a king who's hiding among his people.

1:35:56 Brandon Duke
So they do think that he's deceiving people in a way and and like for a good purpose. But I just that want to get under my skin and say Jesus is deceiving people about who he really is.

1:36:10 Brandon Duke
So.

1:36:10 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I don't like that either. I have to think more about that. William Lane Craig idea. Because I'm not. I'm not fully sure I'm getting it. There are times, and I'm sure you have this too branded. It just just happened to me the other day.

1:36:25 Sean Finnegan
Where I was with my wife and somebody else.

1:36:29 Sean Finnegan
I can't remember who and.

1:36:31 Sean Finnegan
We had a disagreement.

1:36:33 Sean Finnegan
In front of this other person, it's like fun times.

1:36:37 Sean Finnegan
Ohh.

1:36:41 Brandon Duke
The best arguments start with other people around. They just sorry.

1:36:45 Sean Finnegan
Man, that's when everybody's so sensitive to myself. But you know, we were. We were disagreeing about whether or not she had told me something.

1:36:56 Sean Finnegan
I tell you, Brandon, I had no memory and my wife was like.

1:37:04 Sean Finnegan
I 100% know that you know this and I'm like, but I don't know this. And she's like, no.

1:37:08
Yeah.

1:37:10 Sean Finnegan
You do know this?

1:37:11 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. You know, she was very gracious to not **** ** up in the moment.

1:37:16 Sean Finnegan
But later that night, she's like, I'm going to tell you how I know you.

1:37:20 Sean Finnegan
Know.

1:37:21
Hmm.

1:37:22 Sean Finnegan
You remember what was going on and I said this to you and you said.

1:37:25 Sean Finnegan
That and you knew I told you.

1:37:29 Sean Finnegan
And she was.

1:37:30 Sean Finnegan
Right. Why that?

1:37:30 Brandon Duke
The light bulb goes off and now you have recall you'd forgotten, but now you've got recall. Yeah, right.

1:37:32 Sean Finnegan
I had forgotten. Yeah, so.

1:37:37 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. So I don't, I don't know how that plays in like is Craig saying that like Jesus knows but can't remember all of his divine stuff?

1:37:46 Sean Finnegan
Off.

1:37:47 Brandon Duke
Yeah. So it's not clear he wants to say that the divine stuff is there, but that he's not accessing it.

1:37:56 Sean Finnegan
OK.

1:37:56 Sean Finnegan
He can access it, but he doesn't accept it, sort of like the way I use AI like I could get the answer to most things, but like I have to ask.

1:37:59 Brandon Duke
Right.

1:38:05 Brandon Duke
It yeah, yeah.

1:38:07 Sean Finnegan
So, like Jesus has like this memory bank installed, presumably in his brain.

1:38:14 Sean Finnegan
Or maybe in his soul for Craig, I don't know.

1:38:15 Brandon Duke
I think Greg would say it's the soul.

1:38:17 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, metaphysical. Alright, so it's there, but he just doesn't access it, OK.

1:38:18
This.

1:38:19
Yeah.

1:38:22 Brandon Duke
Unless he needs it. Now, here's the thing. If you're omniscient, you know that you know it.

1:38:27 Brandon Duke
Right. And I'm.

1:38:27 Sean Finnegan
There's still a deceptive. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

1:38:31 Brandon Duke
No, go go. Keep going with the deception. I think it it's still deceptive cause it's really there. If Jesus says I don't know. Only the father knows. Not the son that is a lie.

1:38:41 Brandon Duke
It's just, it's just not true, and the authors spend some time with it, but they give up. In my opinion, they just say and that's why this chapter on what Jesus knew and didn't know that obviously leads into paradox, is followed by a chapter on the paradoxical person. Then now we're back to where we started.

1:38:59 Sean Finnegan
Alright, I'm. I'm gonna strengthen what you just said. Just just a hair and then we really do need to closeout because it's it's getting crazy in Mark 1332. It's, it's the word I would say either or you say oida. OK? It's we're for knowing. OK.

1:39:06 Brandon Duke
Stop.

1:39:17 Sean Finnegan
Definition one for this word that Jesus used about that day or hour. No one knows neither the angels in heaven, nor the son, nor the father. All right, so that word knows their definition. One to have information about.

1:39:33 Brandon Duke
Yeah.

1:39:34 Brandon Duke
He says he doesn't have that information.

1:39:37 Sean Finnegan
Anywhere he's saying he doesn't have that information. You can't say if you don't have that information. If you actually have access to that information and just choosing not to use it, right? I mean, that's too fine of a distinction for Jesus to reasonably make without deceiving.

1:39:49
Yep.

1:39:55 Brandon Duke
Yeah, the whole audience is obviously going to think he doesn't know and only the father knows.

1:40:00 Sean Finnegan
They think that if he says he doesn't know, it means he doesn't have the information.

1:40:06 Sean Finnegan
That's what they're going.

1:40:07 Sean Finnegan
To.

1:40:07 Sean Finnegan
Think. Yeah. So if he knows, but he has access to the information and he's just not going to check.

1:40:14 Sean Finnegan
That's. That's deceptive. Yeah, you're right.

1:40:14 Brandon Duke
Yeah. Still deception. Yep.

1:40:17 Brandon Duke
Why a lot of Trinitarians that I've read want to say, well, it's not actually claim about knowledge. It's a claim about who is the authority to.

1:40:23 Brandon Duke
Decide.

1:40:24 Brandon Duke
We'll say the father gets to decide when he's going to return.

1:40:27 Brandon Duke
But my point is, it's not talking about who has the authority to decide. It says no one knows. It's talking about knowledge and who is awareness. And it says the father doesn't know. It doesn't say that the father hasn't decided. It says he knows and nobody else does. And but like, there's all every time Jesus asks a question.

1:40:47 Brandon Duke
It's not a rhetorical question.

1:40:48 Brandon Duke
Every time we ask a question, he wants to.

1:40:50 Brandon Duke
Find something out.

1:40:51 Brandon Duke
It's good that he does.

1:40:52 Brandon Duke
No. So to deny that is just really talk about pressing something on the text and isagenix will approach like that. But I mean with each of those paradoxes, the seven that we read off, they all have this problem.

1:41:08 Sean Finnegan
All right. Well, thanks for going through that. We made a lot of progress. We covered a lot.

1:41:12 Sean Finnegan
Of.

1:41:12 Sean Finnegan
Texts and hopefully that can help some people to.

1:41:18 Sean Finnegan
See that this book is not the definitive answer. Once for all delivered to the Saints that Jesus is God, but there's actually a lot of a lot of weakness despite all the endorsements.

1:41:31 Brandon Duke
Yep, despite the links that the endorsements, what's underneath is just mystery mongering.

1:41:37 Brandon Duke
For bad reading comprehension, I mean, I'll just be blunt. I mean it's, it's scholarly, it's well.

1:41:43 Brandon Duke
I mean, it's everything that you would want except for the truth.

1:41:46 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I would say my big critique about it, which we may be able to get into later, is that it's not really reading the Bible contextually. It's just cherry picking and building a systematic theology without respect to the categories that would have been available to people.

1:42:04 Sean Finnegan
In the 1st century in the Mediterranean world, especially among the Jewish people especially.

1:42:10 Sean Finnegan
Those who are living in the areas of Judea and Galilee, where Jesus's ministry is active, right, that's a lot to take in any final thoughts before we close down.

1:42:20 Brandon Duke
No, thanks, Sean. Thanks everybody for listening.

1:42:22 Sean Finnegan
Alright. Yeah, thanks. Well, that brings this interview to an end. What did you think? Come on over to restitutio.org and find Episode 6.

1:42:33 Sean Finnegan
04 did.

1:42:33 Sean Finnegan
Jesus really have all the divine attributes with Brandon Duke and leave your feedback there. Well, we've gotten some feedback in over the last week.

1:42:41 Sean Finnegan
And First off, I'd like to read a new review. We got an Apple podcast.

1:42:50 Sean Finnegan
T Siegel, 2018 gave a five star rating and left a review titled Church History, saying the series on church history is so. That's five O's, so helpful, highly recommend they're in the four 80s. Well, thanks so much for that kind rating.

1:43:10 Sean Finnegan
And.

1:43:10 Sean Finnegan
View indeed one of my great loves is church history. That's what I focused on for my master's degree. And if you are interested in especially early church history, you could find that starting in Episode 481, which is called early Church History 1, Christianity in the 1st century and that is something that you can get in the podcast.

1:43:31 Sean Finnegan
Feed as an audio, but it's also available as a YouTube video series through Living Hope International Ministries on their YouTube channel, which you can look up just like I am or early church history and my name, Sean Finnegan. And you could probably find it.

1:43:45 Sean Finnegan
That way, but this was something that I really wanted to take a wide perspective on. I wasn't interested in just looking at, for example.

1:43:55 Sean Finnegan
Christological history and the development of the doctrine of Christ. Overtime I wanted to cover all the different aspects of church history, including the historical developments of the church or churches, really both for the mainstream but also for the Gnostics, the Valentinians, the other groups that.

1:44:16 Sean Finnegan
Became known as heretical. I wanted to cover the influence of.

1:44:22 Sean Finnegan
Alexandrian theology on Christianity, notably through Philo Clement and most influentially origin of Alexandria, and how that affected Christian doctrine and practice. I wanted to cover church orders. That was actually a really interesting new research project for me.

1:44:42 Sean Finnegan
Was delving into.

1:44:44 Sean Finnegan
Not just the did. OK, but the Apostolic constitutions and didascalia and some of the other Apostolic tradition documents that have been preserved to see, like, how did how did churches function? How did they handle communion and baptism and new people coming in, and how did they organize themselves? So that was.

1:45:03 Sean Finnegan
That's that's in that church history class.

1:45:06 Sean Finnegan
We went through persecution and the Constantinian shift and then finally the controversy of the 4th.

1:45:13 Sean Finnegan
Entree. But I didn't even really stop there. Went right into the 5th century. We covered monasticism. Certainly Jerome and Augustine, two of the most influential 5th century Christians that there there ever were. And then I also dealt with some specific doctrines and tracing those doctrines and how they developed over time, including the Kingdom of God and the gifts of the Spy.

1:45:35 Sean Finnegan
It before looking at how the Roman Empire basically got infiltrated by the so-called Barbarian Kingdoms, or also called Arian Kingdoms, and then last of all, I also brought in some of the early church history from outside the Roman Empire outside the Mediterranean Sea, namely the African Armenian.

1:45:56 Sean Finnegan
And Asian churches, so hopefully, obviously it's not an exhaustive class, but hopefully it will have what you're looking for. It's not always so easy to predict. Like, OK, what do I cover? What do I not cover? Because not everyone's interested in the same thing.

1:46:11 Sean Finnegan
But I would say this since we're in this series on Christology right now. Looking at this book by Robert Bowman and Ed Thomashefsky, I think probably the episode that if you haven't listened to yet, you really, really need to listen to is Episode 503. And it's actually part 21.

1:46:31 Sean Finnegan
Of the early church history class, it's called the dual natures controversy of the 5th century.

1:46:37 Sean Finnegan
And you might ask yourself, well, why is it episode 21? Because that's how far into church history we finally got to this issue of the dual natures of Christ. So many people assume that this is really the first doctrine developed and then the Trinity is later. No, the Trinity comes first, and then they figure out how can he be God.

1:46:57 Sean Finnegan
And man at the same time. And what is that?

1:47:00 Sean Finnegan
Even mean, and I think if you haven't listened to episode, you really need to listen to it once again. That's episode 503, the dual natures controversy of the 5th century, and it will shock you how much politics played into the doctrine that now all these evangelical apologists have to defend.

1:47:21 Sean Finnegan
They feel they absolutely have to defend it because it's, quote UN quote orthodox, it's quote UN quote, dogma. It's creedal. They they use this word, Nicene well, it's not Nicene, it's Chalcedonian. But whatever. That's a side point. So take a look at that if you haven't already.

1:47:38 Sean Finnegan
We also got feedback in on 2 episodes ago 6/04 which was called abused, kidnapped in suicidal finding hope after a lifetime of trauma with Sheila calculus and this is from Teresa, who wrote in saying thank you, Pastor Sean, for posting such a much needed view into the debilitating pain that even faithful believers sometimes.

1:47:59 Sean Finnegan
Have to endure. Thank you, Sheila, for your bravery in recounting trauma. I'm sure you would rather not focus on. I admire your openness about the fact that trust in God gives you hope and strength in spite of the fact that your struggle continues.

1:48:14 Sean Finnegan
I haven't experienced anything close to the trauma you have, but I have walked through times when it seems like the best option. Only option is to check out by taking my own life.

1:48:25 Sean Finnegan
Your testimony was encouraging to me in that even though you still fight the anxiety and depression, you stand up as a faithful believer. Trust in God as you continue to fight the good fight of faith. I used to think because part of my testimony to God's deliverance was that he had delivered me from my depression and anxiety any time I went through another episode.

1:48:46 Sean Finnegan
I was failing to be a good witness.

1:48:48 Sean Finnegan
I do think Christians sometimes assume if we are praying and studying and trusting God, our depression will go away. Therefore, if we go through a bad patch, the assumption is we must not be believing or we must be harboring some other sin in our hearts. It was refreshing to hear both you and Pastor Sean publicly acknowledge and educate people to see that it is not.

1:49:09 Sean Finnegan
Always the case, I pray for you and your continued walk and encourage you to know that God is using what you have learned and are learning to bless other people.

1:49:19 Sean Finnegan
God bless you. Teresa. Thanks so much for writing in. Teresa. It is really a complex subject because as Christians, we do believe that healing is available. And I do know people who have been healed from depression, from anxiety that had experienced it all the time. Sometimes that occurs miraculously. Other times it occurs through medication.

1:49:41 Sean Finnegan
And when they're on the medication, they're good. I know people that get off the medication and they're fine. And then other people that spiral. OK, so like I said, it's complex.

1:49:50 Sean Finnegan
And as a pastor, it's my job to walk with somebody through life and through the ups and downs, and to bring them back to God over and over, and to help them in any way that I can. So obviously this episode with Sheila's a little different than our, our super epic, long doctrinal.

1:50:10 Sean Finnegan
Philosophical episode we're doing right now that we just or that we just did, but it's all it's all part of life. It's all part of ministry. You know, the doctrine is important obviously. I love doctrine and I love to talk about it. But hey, if there's somebody in your church that is really struggling.

1:50:26 Sean Finnegan
Knowing the communicatio idiomatic between the two natures of the hypostatic union is not actually in any sense relevant to that situation. So.

1:50:38 Sean Finnegan
But I'm interested in both. You know, I'm interested in real people, and I'm also interested in doctrine. And so I guess this podcast is just a reflection of that omnivorous Ness that I have. And I think some of my listeners have too, although others maybe just skip the episodes that aren't of interest.

1:50:55 Sean Finnegan
So uh, thanks so much for writing in Teresa. We also had somebody comments on YouTube T Hand Bone 30 writes Jehovah's and this was on last week's episode on did Jesus receive divine honors he or she writes Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe Jesus created the universe.

1:51:15 Sean Finnegan
They believe the father alone is the creator, but Jesus was a master worker.

1:51:21 Sean Finnegan
And then this author quotes, presumably from the Jehovah's Witnesses the the quote reference is IT-252, so I don't know be be honest, I don't know what that refers to, but I'm just gonna read it out. This is the the quote that ham bone 30 leaves. It says not a Co creator.

1:51:41 Sean Finnegan
The sons share in the creative works, however, did not make him a Co creator with his father.

1:51:48 Sean Finnegan
The power for creation came from God, through his Holy Spirit or Active force, and since Jehovah is the source of all life, all animate creation, visible and invisible, owes its life to him rather than a Co creator. Then the son was the agent or instrumentality through whom.

1:52:08 Sean Finnegan
Jehovah, the creator, worked. Jesus himself credited God with the creation, as do all the scriptures. Matthew 19 four through 6.

1:52:18 Sean Finnegan
To me this seems like a distinction without a difference, and maybe I'm just missing some critical piece of information here, and I'm not a Jehovah's Witness. I have no experience with the Jehovah's Witnesses personally, so you're just going to have to help me understand the distinction a little bit more clearly. But to say that.

1:52:38 Sean Finnegan
I baked the cake right. I mixed the ingredients and I baked the cake.

1:52:43 Sean Finnegan
But really I don't get any credit for it because my wife is the one that asked me to bake the cake and she's the one that had purchased all the ingredients at the store and she's the one that gave me the recipe. Therefore, I'm not really a Co creator. She's really the Co creator because she's the one really behind it, supplying it and.

1:53:04 Sean Finnegan
Powering it if you will. I'm just the instrumental cause of the cake. Come on.

1:53:10 Sean Finnegan
I baked the cake.

1:53:12 Sean Finnegan
I created the cake.

1:53:14 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I depended on her for the ingredients for the recipe and for the necessary direction to do it in the first place, sure. But I did the thing. OK. So if Christ created the heavens and the earth, then Christ created the heavens and the earth. And that's, I believe, what Jehovah's Witnesses teach.

1:53:34 Sean Finnegan
Now you could say he's the instrumental cause rather than the source or the origin of all.

1:53:41 Sean Finnegan
OK. Well, that's that's a distinction in this, you know, I understand why they say that. But to say that he's not a Co creator or that you can't say Jesus created the universe when he did create the universe, even though God was working through him.

1:53:56 Sean Finnegan
You know, to me it just I don't see the distinction here. So maybe again, I'm just going to assume I'm missing something on this and then I need to.

1:54:04 Sean Finnegan
He educated on to the Jehovah's Witnesses position on this, so if somebody can help with that, come on over to episode 604. Did Jesus really have all the divine attributes, which is the episode for today and leave some feedback? Comments, clarifications there I would so appreciate it. Well, that's going to be it for today. Thanks everybody for listening to the end.

1:54:24 Sean Finnegan
Here, if you'd like to support us, you can do that on our website, restitutio.org. I'll catch you next week and remember, the truth has nothing to fear.