Again, if I were a militant atheist, and I knew you were being selective
in your supernatural approach, oh, I'd hammer you for it.
Yeah. Yeap.
I would make you cry.
We could make a grocery list of the things that every Christian holds dear:
the Resurrection. How is that explainable scientifically?
Exactly.
But, you know, we know these things are crucial. They define Christianity.
And so, we're content with sort of not being too critical of them
in terms of scientific method. We will appeal to miracle there, which is fine.
No miracle conforms to the scientific method. Okay.
But then we won't do the same thing in other passages. And that's very inconsistent.
Yes.
Now, all it would take and you say," Well, why should I care about this?"
Again, if I were a militant atheist, and I knew you were being selective,
in your supernatural approach, oh, I'd hammer you for it.
Yeah, yeah.
I would make you cry. Okay. Because I would make you see
that your approach to your own Bible is quite inconsistent.
So I know these things you do believe, and these things that you want to be like me
and not believe them. Well, that's wonderful. But what I'm asking you is,
on what basis do you accept one and not the other?
Yes. Yeah.
What is that basis? And I don't think Christians realize how vulnerable
this sort of schizophrenic position is.
Less viewers misunderstand. I'm not the person here that says;
every supernatural claim must be real, because it came out of somebody's mouth.
Sure. Yeah.
I don't believe that at all. I like to present myself this way. Look,
I am skeptical of everything. But I'm willing to believe anything.
In other words, I want some reason to believe it. Okay, I want to see how it conforms
to a scriptural model. And if it does, if that door is open, hey, you know, sure.
I'm willing to accept that. I'm not going to marshal a theological argument
that allows me to keep this one supernatural thing and shut the door on yours.
I'm not going to do that. Because I know that's inconsistent.
It's kind of like, we like to believe in the resurrection. Well, that's a happy one.
That's a good one. But like, Okay, this stuff in Kings and you know, Genesis 6, well those are,
this is kind of dark. This is disturbing.
Why is that weird and then the resurrection isn't?
What's so normal about the resurrection?
Like...
You know, I always get the question, well, how does that work?
How does that "Sons of God, daughters of..." how does that work? And I'm honest with you,
I don't know. I don't know how it works. And I don't know how the resurrection works.
I don't know how the Incarnation worked. I don't know how any of that works.
Okay, but if there is a spirit world, okay.
And this takes you into the whole theology of the nature of supernatural beings,
and you know, God is different. He's ontologically superior and unique.
But they're not like helpless and void of abilities. Okay.
So if there is this world that the Bible actually affirms, well,
I don't really know how that works. But Scripture affirms that it does, and that it did.
And if God put it in there.
Right, and so I'm content to leave it at that.
I'm content to leave Genesis 6 be what it is,
and some of these other passages because I'm content to leave the resurrection
for where it is, and all these other doctrines. And, you know, we've just been taught.
A whole huge swaths of the church have been taught to look at this
and not look at that. Affirm this and don't affirm that. I mean, things in the Bible.
And I understand why; it's because
in the history of the church there's been a lot of abuse
of things like supernatural phenomena, or giftings. Or, you know,
I'll be the first one to admit the church has a long history of just wackiness
and abuse. I get it.
But that is not evidence against these things, in principle, being real, being legitimate.
Because they did occur in scriptural times and scriptural days in certain contexts.
And so, we ought to evaluate a claim instead of just either ditching it,
or "somebody said it so I have to believe it." I mean, those are two extreme.
All those people in the ancient Near East.
They're all just liars and imagination people.
They would be viewed as less enlightened.
Yes, yep.
See, we are products of the modern world,
we are products of the Enlightenment, you know, 17th-18th century.
We're products of the scientific method, we have technology.
So, we are just out of the gate prone to look at a supernatural thing or some event.
And we want to explain it away using those tools.
And in principle there's nothing wrong with that. Because God knows that's who we are.
But at the end of the day, if you go through that process,
and you just don't want to believe it.
Yeah.
Then you have a problem.
If it's in the pages of Scripture, and it's very evident that the biblical writers believed it.
Yeah.
And I'm talking about something about the supernatural world,
the world that is beyond the scope of scientific method here.
If you look in the page of Scripture, and it's very clear that a biblical writer affirms
something about the supernatural world, and you just don't like it.
The problem is with you.
Yes.
It's not with the text.