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What This Famous Sceptic Can't Deny (Bart Ehrman) || SLP645 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I absolutely don't believe in God or any supernatural powers, but I do think that the teachings of Jesus are something that I want to replicate in my life as much as I can.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Best-selling skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman does not believe in God, but in this video interview with Ross Dowthert, I think he makes a good argument for the supernatural.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get into it by figuring out what Bart Ehrman believe about God.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell You know, I'm not a radical atheist who insists, you know, there is no God, but I don't think there is.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there's a I don't think there's any kind of supernatural power that's overseeing the world, that is active in people's lives, that actually answers prayer.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't I don't believe a God like that exists.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Because such a God to exist would have to be bad?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Wicked?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell I don't think that that kind of God would have to be anything.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not that I have th some kind of criterion for what that God must be.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's that I think it's unlikely that there's a God who's active in the world.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because in my view, if there was a God who was all powerful, so I'm granting an all-powerful.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: If there was an all-powerful God who was loving, then you know we uh there wouldn't be people who starve to death every minute.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Which is what happens.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the first point is Bart Emman does not believe that there is a God because whatever God is worthy of the name would not allow unjust suffering to continue.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: People starve to death every day.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: There is clearly no God worthy of the name who is superintending this universe.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: So Professor Ehrman says, I don't believe that there's a God.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Neither does he believe that there are godlike events in this world, miracles, let's say.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Here's Professor Ehrman talking about whether we can know that a testimony to a miracle is true or not.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose you've got a story and you're not sure.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Did somebody make this up or did it actually happen?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like Jesus walking on the water.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Did it actually happen or did somebody make it up?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, has anybody ever made up a story of a miracle that didn't happen?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Has anybody ever actually walked on water?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, no, not in recorded history.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, so what is the likelihood?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not so I'm not saying that it's impossible.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying it's impossible that Jesus walked on the water.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm saying that if it did happen, there's no way for us to establish it historically.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because other explanations are always far more likely.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: But does that mean then that you are essentially taking a kind of a view of miracles that says that there is no scale of historical attestation that could make you say this possibly happened, just because you'll you'll always default to by definition, miracles are things that don't normally happen.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think Ross Douthit is summarizing Bart Ehrman's views uh correctly there.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: He basically thinks that by definition, miracles are things that don't normally happen.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Now, here are basically David Hume's views about miracles, but they are coming from Bart Ehrman in the 21st century rather than uh the Scottish philosopher David Hume in the 18th century.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: He said that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the alternative is even more miraculous.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: Which, if you notice, is not really the conclusion to an argument, it's the assumption by which he proceeds in the argument.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: For Hume, a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and we have always observed the laws of nature to be what they are.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Our uniform experience of the regularity of the universe is a testimony so overwhelming, no amount of counter-testimony is ever enough to overturn that.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Professor Ehrman says it, well, has anyone ever made up the story of a miracle?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they do that all the time.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: But then Professor Ehrman says, um, and has a miracle actually happened?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he's saying it's not impossible that Jesus walked on water.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: But if it did happen, there's no way for us to establish that historically, because other explanations are always far more likely.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess I want to say to Professor Ehrman, says who?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Am I meant to take your word for it over the many words that people have that attest to miracles in history?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Because if just one of those witnesses is in fact telling the truth, then the assumption that no testimony can actually outweigh our uniform experience of nature is falsified.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: I know that Professor Ehrman wants to present his position as being the very cautious position.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think it's a very dogmatic position because it's it's unable to be contradicted by the evidence, no matter how much evidence is ever brought.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: But Ehrman asks, has anyone ever actually walked on water?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Apparently so, if we are to believe the testimony.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: Now there are a bunch of priors in my coming to believe this truth that Professor Ehrman rejects.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: I I believe that this is God's universe, I believe that Jesus is God's Son, I believe that he is specially demonstrating his power over nature, I think that those testifying to these events are trustworthy, and at the end of the day, I think that Jesus is Lord, and if he was not able to walk on water, that would be the extraordinary thing.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: I believe in Jesus even more than I believe in the regularities of nature.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: That is a supernatural belief, but as we continue in this video, I want to show that there are supernatural beliefs that are perfectly sane to hold, and which Bart Ehrman is very close to holding himself.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't believe that Jesus walked on water, but there are ways in which he believes in Jesus more than he believes in the regularities of nature.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And let's get into that as Ross Douthit asks Bart Ehrman about the thesis of his book.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: And the thesis of his book is that Jesus enters into the regularities of nature and overturns them.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: And Bart Ehrman actually prefers Jesus to the regularities which Jesus overturns.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Check it out.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: What was so transformative about Jesus' moral message?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of my a lot of my students assume that before uh Jesus came along, uh there wasn't morality in the Greek and Roman world.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I my my university is in the South, and so it's you know, Southern students, most of them raised Christian, who just assume that morality came with Christianity.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's absolutely not right.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I am absolutely not arguing like Jesus introduced the idea of love into the world, you know, or the idea of altruism into the world.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: What I am arguing is that we today, uh almost all of us, whether we're Christian, whether we're agnostic, atheist, whatever we are, whatever we are in the West, when there's a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's a hurricane, there's uh wildfires, there's an earthquake, uh, and we feel like we ought to do something.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we might send a check, for example.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, we retire and we decide to volunteer the soup kitchen.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're helping people we don't know, and we probably w never will know, and we we may not like when we get to know if we did get to know them.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So why do we help them?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: My argument in the book is that that sense that we should help people in need, even if we don't know them, uh, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus, that in Greek and Roman moral philosophy uh at the time, uh this was not an issue at all.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: You were not you were not supposed to be helping people who just because they were in need, but that Jesus, based large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of of what he himself knew growing up, uh is the one who made this part of our conscience.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, uh.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can you can establish historically.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: So Jesus is a moral revolutionary, he has transformed our moral sensibilities such that the care that has always been offered to our in-group, we are to feel as an obligation towards the out-group.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite are very good at loving their own tribe, but the Good Samaritan wants us to extend the circle of our moral compassion far beyond our own tribe, not just our family, not just our clan, not just our tribe, not just our nation, but even the hated Samaritans.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: And the Samaritans are to extend it to the Israelites, and we're all meant to extend it to the very fringes of the human family.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus brought a universalizing tendency to our moral intuitions, he brought an equalizing tendency to our moral intuitions, he brought a compassionate tendency towards our moral intuitions, and that compassion is to extend even to the stranger and perhaps even to the enemy.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Bart Ehrman says this is an innovation.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is not what the Greeks and the Romans were talking about, this is not what other cultures have been talking about, this is not what nature demands of you.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Nature might demand that you take care of your kith and kin and those with whom you share genes, but neither nature nor culture seems to demand from the human person what Jesus demands of the human person.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: But get this, Jesus transcends the regularities of nature.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: And Bart Ehrman prefers the transcendent Jesus values over the values of nature.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: And Bart Ehrman is clear that this is not just an anomaly that is restricted only to Jesus.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the exemplar of this kind of transcendent moral concern, but he birthed a movement that has spread around the world and transformed the entire social imagination of the West.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how it happened.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell The one thing we can say about Christianity in this period, from the time Jesus died to the time, say the end of the Gospel of John, say, say that's a 60-year period, um, is that Christianity was spreading throughout the Mediterranean.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um it started out as a small group in Jerusalem, and by the time uh the end of the first century, we know of Christian groups who are scattered throughout uh Judea, Galilee, Syria, over to what we today think of as Turkey, Asia Minor, over to Greece, in Rome, possibly North Africa, possibly Spain.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So in those 70 years, Christianity has spread.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no social media, there are no there's no newspapers, there most people, the vast majority of people are illiterate, cannot read.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: It almost certainly spread by people telling stories about Jesus.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody tell and somebody in Jerusalem tells a story to somebody else in Jerusalem, and then somebody from uh Antioch comes and he tells them the story.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is go this goes on for 30, 40, 50 years before they are written down.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: So the story spread what actually is the story later on in the interview, but Ammon will talk about the story of Easter, the story of Jesus dying and rising again, that is the center of the story that takes over the ancient world and that has taken over the whole world and its social imagination.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how it happened.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think happened for Easter week?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I think the followers of Jesus definitely thought that uh before he died, before I think they thought that he must be the Messiah.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um or that he he he possibly was the Messiah.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: There are different views about what the Messiah would be at the time within Judaism.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um but whatever the view was, every view the Messiah thought that he would be a uh a powerful figure who would overthrow the enemies of God and set up a kingdom of some way.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um that was their expectation.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than that happening, though, Jesus was arrested and he was put on trial and was crucified, publicly humiliated and tortured to death.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's absolutely the case that some of his disciples afterwards thought that he had been raised from the dead.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterwards.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's pretty clear.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Paul believes he saw Jesus.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how he would have identified Jesus.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't know Jesus during his lifetime, but he saw something he said was Jesus.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think Peter claimed to have a vision of Jesus.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think Mary Magdalene probably did.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: So the people who claim to have seen Jesus alive again, it's interesting in 1 Corinthians 15, um, it summarizes three stories of people who have come to conclude that Jesus is God and beat death.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um they are his best friend, they are his worst enemy, and they are his brother.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it's always worth asking, what would you have to do to convince your best friend, your worst enemy, and your brother that you are God and that you've risen again from the dead?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: And yet Peter and Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, all came to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: But this supernatural claim, the miracle of resurrection, is woven together with a theological claim about who Jesus is, and therefore a moral claim about what the nature of reality is and how we live in accordance with it.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: The miracle of Easter leads to a certain theology and leads to a certain kind of ethics, and Bart Ehrman realizes this.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's why he says this.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: My point of saying that they thought Jesus was the Messiah before he died is the critical point.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because when he got crucified, it showed he was not the Messiah.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: He was not the one who's going to destroy the enemies.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But then they had these visions and they came to think he was alive again.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they thought, oh, we misunderstood.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: We thought he was going to destroy the Romans.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: God must have wanted him to die.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that God wanted him to die is shown in the fact that God raised him from the dead.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's raised from the dead.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: His death is the way of salvation then.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus must have had to die.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: God must have wanted him to die because he was the chosen one.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do we know he's the chosen one?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: He got raised from the dead.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if God had his chosen one killed, why?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sacrifice for sins.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the beginning of Christianity.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as these people started realizing, oh my God, he's raised from the dead, they thought that his death was a sacrifice.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: That starts Christianity.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: So why is there the doubt tradition?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: The beginning of Christianity is the Easter story, and the Easter story is that the Messiah, the one filled with the Holy Spirit to be God's King on earth, to put all things right, he died as a sacrifice for our sins and was raised again to life to say that love wins, that life wins, that God wins over the regularities of nature that are towards selfishness.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus died for that selfishness, he died for our sins as a sacrifice.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: He rose up again in triumph over that sin, over that selfishness, and over death itself in order to hand on to his people a story and a movement that goes out to the nations in the way of sacrifice that trusts to a future resurrection.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the pioneer of the good life because he is living God's life among us, a life of sacrifice now in the hope of triumph over the grave later.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: That is the story that births the movement that has the ethics that Bart Ehrman resonates with.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, Ross Douthit summarizes all things like this.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: We started this conversation a long time ago talking about the moral transformation that Jesus made and the idea that, you know, you were supposed to love your enemies, love people who persecuted you, love the stranger far away who has nothing in common with you, all of these sort of transformative ideas, right?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: You like those ideas.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes I do.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you do.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: If the gospels ended with the crucifixion and Jesus' death, right?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um you would have a story where someone came along and preached that, you know, it was important to love your enemies and important to care for the stranger, and so on.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that person was crucified and died a horrible death, and that was the end of the story.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he talked about the meek inheriting the earth and the last being first, and look where he ended up.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't the power of the argument for Jesus' ethics kind of inherently bound up in the idea that he won?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Christianity would not have become a thing if Jesus had died and there was no story of his resurrection.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It just would have been he would have been another prophet who preached something and then got killed for it, and boom, that was it.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there wouldn't be Christianity.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: But the power of the Christian message from the very beginning was the message that Paul has, which is that it seems, you know, it seems a little bit ridiculous that that God's chosen one is crucified.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it it seems a little bit ridiculous that the way the way to access ultimate divine power is by being a slave.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's but it's Jesus' message.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: You have to serve others rather than dominate message.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's so contrary to what's in our DNA and what's in every other culture.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: But because they thought it got raised from the dead, they thought it proved it.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: You you you have to be willing to die for others if you want to have life.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to have treasures in heaven, you have to sell everything you have now, completely contrary to what people would think.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it's because of the resurrection.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's the belief in the resurrection that that ends up making this the powerful message that transformed the West.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: And isn't it also just it to your own personal reasons for being an agnostic or a nonbeliever, right?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Part of the power is also that it's not a logical answer, but it's at least a poetic answer to the problem of evil, right?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: The question of why God allows suffering is not resolved by God Himself suffering, but it is at least addressed.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell It's a powerful message.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when I was still a liberal Christian, when I was a liberal Christian, I thought that the point of the gospel message was really that God had entered into the world and suffered with us.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a very powerful message.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not one that I agree with anymore.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I can recognize it is a really powerful message, and that it's so contrary to the way of the world that it that has uh special poignancy to it.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell And here you are, you know, so many years later, a you know, sterling example of academic historical skepticism, and you're writing a book trying to persuade people that you know Jesus' message has something to it.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is it possible that you're still, in some sense, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell, I sometimes call myself a um uh a Christian atheist.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um because I don't I don't believe in God.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't I absolutely don't believe in God or any supernatural powers, but I do think that the teachings of Jesus are something that I want to replicate in my life as much as I can.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Although, you know, I'm not a very good follower of Jesus.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't sold everything and given to the poor.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I but I um I think that that message is one that uh that I want to embrace.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: I don't believe in God, says Bart Ehrman.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: I absolutely don't believe in God or anything supernatural, and yet this is the story that Bart Ehrman wants to embrace, and this is a story of Jesus transcending the regularities of nature.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: It is the story of God entering into our suffering to sacrifice for us, to rise up again, and to hand onto us a compassion revolution that takes over the world.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: That is the story that Bart Ehrman wants to embrace.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's a story that claims to be historical and contains the supernatural, it's a story that involves the theological, that the one who is dying on that cross and rising again is God, and it's a story that is moral, a story that has implications for if this is the ultimate structure of reality, self-giving love, then to live in harmony with that ultimate reality is to live this kind of ethical life, and it is not the ethical life of tightly bounded kin relations, but of overflowing generosity to your neighbor, to the stranger, to the enemy, to the very fringes of the human family.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Now that kind of morality transcends the natural way that you and I operate with one another.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: It is therefore supernatural.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the kind of supernatural that Bart Ehrman goes, you know what?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna go with it.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Even though it costs him quite a lot.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: Bart Ehrman, in order to live out the ethic of Jesus, does a very admirable job.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: He gives the proceeds of his blog to charity.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: In the last three years, they've given away$1.5 million to homelessness charities and disaster relief.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: It is costly for Bart Ehrman to lean into this story and to embrace and adopt the supernatural way of Jesus.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: And Ross Daltett does a great job of saying the fact that you warm to this ethic and the fact that you warm to the story of the person of Jesus who shows up in the midst of our suffering, that is very akin to Christian faith, isn't it?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: Let me just read out a couple of things that Bart Emman says quite commonly at Christmas time.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: His Christmas blogs are very heartwarming.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: You should check them out.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Let me just read out what he said in Christmas 2017.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: He says the God of Christmas is a God of love who wants the best for people and gives of himself to bring peace, joy, and redemption.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great image of a divine being.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: This is not a God who is waiting for you to die so he can send you into eternal torment.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: It is a God who is concerned for you and your world, who wants to solve your problems, heal your wounds, remove your pain, bring you joy, peace, happiness, healing, and wholeness.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: Can't we keep that image with us all the time?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Can't we affirm that view of ultimate reality fifty two weeks of the year instead of just a few?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: I myself do not believe in God, but if I did, that would be the God I would defend, promote, and proclaim.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Enough of war, enough of starvation, enough of epidemics, enough of pain, enough of misery, enough of abject loneliness, enough of violence, hatred, narcissism, and self aggrandizement, and suffering of every kind.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Give me the God of Christmas, the God of love, the God of an innocent child in a manger, who comes to bring salvation and wholeness to the world the way it was always meant to be.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: That is beautiful Christmas preaching.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: I've never preached a Christmas sermon as moving as this Christmas sermon.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: But that one wriggling in the manger, if that is God, Then that is a miracle, orders of magnitude more improbable than the fact that as a 33-year-old he was walking on the Sea of Galilee.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, anything that would make the walking on water miracle in any way plausible is the fact that the one in that manger is God.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: God taking flesh and wriggling in a manger is incredibly miraculous, but it's the sort of miracle that Bart Ehrman can warm towards.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a way of pulling at that thread?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because when you pull at that thread, yes, it has ethical entailments, like self-giving love is ultimate reality, but it also has historical entailments like when that kid grows up, you better expect some freaky stuff to surround him.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: But there are already supernatural elements to Bart Ehrman's beliefs, and I just think it's worth attending to those things and maybe kind of fanning into flame that spluttering wick.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what he said at Christmas 2019.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Even though I am not a Christian, I resonate deeply with the actual basis and meaning of the season.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: It is a severely anti-material message.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: The Christmas story is about how God, for no benefit to himself, sent his son into the world as an infant.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: His son came not because he would get a solitary good thing out of it.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: He came into a world of pain in order to suffer a life of hardship and poverty with the ultimate goal of being publicly tortured to death for the sake of others, to help others, as an act of grace for others, to bring salvation to the world.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: The season is to reflect on that infant taking this upon himself and to be grateful for the incomprehensible gift that has been received.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: But we have turned it into the opposite.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Kids are raised to think of nothing except what they're going to get, and they grow up like that.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: We all grow up like that.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's about us, our presence, what we can get from others to make ourselves happy.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: Ugh.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: Once again, brilliant Christmas preaching.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what does it say?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: It says that if the Christmas story is true, then going with the grain of ultimate reality is self-giving love.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: But that what is natural to humans is we're always going against the grain, and it's all about me, me, me, selfishness, selfishness, selfishness.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Ugh.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: But if that kid in the manger really is God, then you can believe in the supernatural.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: Though it is so natural for all of us to live the selfish life, there is something that transcends the natural.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: There is something above the natural, the supernatural.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: And to some degree, Bart Ehrman believes in the supernatural.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: He really believes in it, to the tune of$1.5 million over the last three years.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: He believes in the supernatural a lot more than I do, probably a lot more than you do.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: He leans into and embraces and sacrifices for a vision of ultimate reality that is not the regularities of nature.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: And a Christian is just somebody who says, I'm not better than ultimate reality, I'm actually worse than ultimate reality, but I want to live into the story of Jesus and his self-giving love.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: I recognize that he is tops, that story is tops, that way is tops.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: And if that's true, then I guess Jesus is Lord.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then if he's Lord, then yeah, the one wriggling in the manger is God.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how that works, but he is.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: And the one who is walking on that Sea of Galilee, same guy.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Same God.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, it's a miracle.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: But I've already believed in the supernatural, and Bart Ehrman has already believed in the supernatural.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a whole movement of people who have believed in that supernatural, and Bart Ehrman has written a whole book about it.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: The way of Jesus has triumphed in the moral intuitions that we now have.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: And that triumph is an extraordinary supernatural event.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: Bart Ehrman says that no testimonies to a miracle can ever be sufficient for us to say that a miracle has definitely happened.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yet his book is testimony to a miracle.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: It is testimony to the supernatural way of Jesus that has overturned the way of nature.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Or perhaps overturned is the wrong word, perhaps transcended, perfected.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: There is a way of grace, a way of Jesus that rose up from the grave at Easter 2,000 years ago and has taken over the world.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: And if you already believe that supernatural truth, Christians just come along to say the reason why Christianity rose from the grave to take over the world is that Jesus rose from the grave to take over the world.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: I would much rather give the credit for all that to Jesus rather than to Christians.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I suspect that Bart Ehrman would much rather give the credit for all those things to Jesus rather than to Christians.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: And if you'd like to check out this story that has overturned the world, why don't you go to 321course.com and see life according to Jesus.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about God's threeness, the world's two-ness, your oneness.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: This is the story that has overturned the world.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: It has transcended the way of nature and birthed a revolution that has taken over the world.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you check it out at 321Course.com?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: And if you've got this far, surely this video deserves a like and a share around the place.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: And why don't you hit subscribe?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll catch you on the next one.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: God bless.