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Thanks for your feedback! The characterization of your position as Barthian was based on the TH-cam videos on your book from TurretinFan and James White. If that's an inaccurate description of your view, then I retract it and apologize. I would be interested to know how your own view of Scripture differs from a Barthian view. Where do you think Barth's view of Scripture goes wrong? I was reluctant to dive too much into your book's argument, because I have not yet personally read it. If you send me a copy of your book, I would be happy to give it a thorough review on my blog allkirk.net, and I will give my best effort to be fair-minded and charitable. Blessings!

@@kyle.a.dillon Thank you for your clarification. Back in August, I watched the video by TurretinFan and the two or three by James White that discuss my book, and I was taken aback by how they misrepresented my argument. I didn't bother to respond to White, because it's obvious that he doesn’t care about representing others fairly. (The fact that he doesn't allow comments for his videos speaks volumes.) But after I watched TurretinFan, I sent a 1500+ word email to the two gentlemen who discussed my book, pointing out problems with their understandings of what I wrote. TurretinFan responded that he would like to set the record straight in a future video, but, as far as I know, he hasn't done so yet. I recall White referring to me as a "radical liberal," and Dan Chapa referring to me as "quite liberal." I don't recall them saying anything that made it sound like I was a Barthian. I reject the Barthian view because I don't take the Bible to be a word of address (). Barth derives that more from Calvin than from Scripture itself. Scripture's authority derives from the fact that it preserves for us the apostolic kerygma-that is, the Gospel. In fact, it is the fact that Scripture contains the Gospel that makes it according to what that word really meant in the first and second centuries: life-giving. As I see it, the Barthian trajectory eventuated in a radically docetic stance, especially as the Yale School (esp. Paul Holmer and Hans Frei) combined it with the Kierkegaardian notion of truth as subjectivity and with the demythologizing program of the Southern Agrarians (esp. John Crowe Ransom). Please let me know where I can send you a copy of my book. I look forward to your reviewing it. P.S. Thanks for pronouncing the "p" in . When TH-cam Evangelicals treat the "p" as silent, it makes them sound quite ignorant.

Corrections: ... that makes it theopneustos ... [and] ... pronouncing the "p" in theopneustos.

BTW, Michael Bird's use of "life-giving" is probably an echo of my own understanding, since I shared my table of contents with Bird years ago at an SBL meeting--long before my book appeared in print.

My address is kdillon@riveroakspca.org. If you email me, I will send you my mailing address. I will also clarify in my next lesson that you don’t consider yourself a Barthian. It sounds like your position is somewhat unique and doesn’t have a commonly used label to describe it. Are there other contemporary scholars who share your view of Scripture?

This isn't a "Protestant" framework; it is quite literally the "Human" framework. What do you think the dispute between the EOs, RCCs, Assyrian Church, Oriental Orthodox, etc is all about? It's a dispute over how to INTERPRET history, the early church fathers, and Scripture. They all disagree. Is the RCC supposed to settle this dispute? That begs the question: you first have to already be persuaded that RCC is the one true church. You will get completely different answers by every tradition as to who the true church is. What's your response "to this chaos"?

@@tradphilosopher a couple of thoughts. 1. Equating the early schisms to the doctrinal chaos of Protestantism is a dishonest way of throwing all Christian traditions into the same cauldron so that they may all look alike. They don’t (the 4 churches you mentioned are all apostolic; no Protestant church is apostolic). 2. The problem of identifying which one of the apostolic churches is the true one is more of a historical issue and has nothing to do with the doctrinal chaos observed in Protestantism. There’s no doctrinal chaos among the apostolic churches: the theological differences generally reduce to mere technicalities (e.g., filioque, one vs two natures of Christ, etc). The disagreement is mainly about jurisdiction (papal supremacy). Of course all of them claim to be the “true church”, but with a simple historical research, one can easily identify which one is the original universal (catholic) church. 3. All apostolic churches reject sola scriptura, which is the source and the cause of the doctrinal chaos in Protestantism, so much so that different Protestant traditions cannot even agree on how we are saved and if we can lose our salvation. This doctrinal chaos is embarrassing for Christianity as a religion and is something that never existed before Protestantism.

Let’s pretend Protestantism doesn’t exist. You still have significant theological differences among all of the self-identifying Apostolic Churches. The papal supremacy is ESPECIALLY contested, as is icon veneration. You claim it’s easily settled by history but that’s quite obviously NOT the case since there are many intelligent people who disagree. It is not at all CLEAR (or perspicuos) which church is the true Apostolic church, so by your logic the RCC framework is meaningless.

​ @thejerichoconnection3473 You made an epistemic (philosophical) argument. Appealing to history, however accurate you think that is, will not help in responding to my objection. Your argument can be extrapolated as follows: 1. If there are different interpretations, then there can't be a **clear** answer as to which is true without an infallible magisterium. 2. There are different interpretations. 3. Therefore, there can't be a clear answer as to which is true. My argument is that this both (i) proves too much and (ii) is an absurd requirement. It proves too much because even if we assume Protestantism is 100% wrong, you still have different churches that say they're the true Apostolic Church (and not the other). In other words, different interpretations exist over the nature of the Apostolic Church. So by your own reasoning, "there can't be a clear answer as to which is true." Or consider another parallel argument: 1. If there are different interpretations about morality, then there can't be a clear answer about what is moral. 2. There are different interpretations. 3. Therefore, there is no clear answer about what is moral. But obviously this is false. I can know very clearly certain moral truths even if it is not clear to others without an infallible institution. Clarity does not entail that everyone will agree with you; all that it entails is that with due ordinary means and the proper virtuous disposition, the truth is accessible and not beyond the average person's capacities. If you are right, then we can't know any moral facts. This is why I find RC apologetics so incredibly unconvincing. If you follow their logic, it leads to agnosticism about everything because it demands that in order for us to know that something is true, it must be known with certainty and known infallibly. This is just a ridiculous epistemic requirement.

@@tradphilosopher well, it’s very simple. In order to know if something is true with 100% certainty either you can prove it mathematically/empirically or you need to be infallible. There’s no other way. For example, I can prove (mathematically) with a 100% certainty that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees without being infallible. Or I can prove (empirically) that the earth is not flat by going into space and taking a picture of it. In real life, most of the things we say we know are known with less than 100% certainty. For example, when I’m at work I “know” that my house is still there even if I cannot see it. And that is totally fine: real life can be run efficiently without having to have 100% certainty on anything we think we “know”. When we move away from either empirical observation or mathematical concepts and we go into humanistic disciplines like philosophy, politics, morality, etc. the concept of “knowing” becomes even less clear, because we generally enter the realm of interpretation of reality, which by definition is subjective. In these fields there’s no epistemological certainty, there are only stronger or weaker opinions. And this is also fine, and that’s why we like as human beings to argue about politics, etc. We all think we have the best opinion/interpretation of reality, but the truth is none of us does with 100% certainty. Things change completely when it comes to religion. Religion is not mathematical nor empirical in nature but it claims it can give you the Truth. This is a paradox, because, as I explained before, we, as human beings, can only be sure about something with 100% certainty only through logic/mathematics or through brute empirical evidence. And religion is not about any of those. You cannot prove the God of the Bible mathematically/logically nor you can provide empirical evidence for such a God. Still you believe in the God of the Bible. Now the 1 million dollar question: what do we need to believe exactly about the God of the Bible? Protestants say that the only thing we need is the Bible itself: through “ordinary means” an “average” person (whatever those ambiguous terms may mean) should be able to understand by reading the Bible what exactly we should believe. Little problem: since the Reformation, thousands of theologians who were definitely above the average and in possession of extraordinary means interpreted the same Bible for centuries and came up with hundreds of different/totally incompatible options about what exactly we should believe, with no way whatsoever to decide who is right and who is wrong. This is the paradox I was describing before and against which Protestants keep breaking their heads against: if you adhere to sola scriptura, you are assuming you can know with 100% accuracy something that only pertains to the subjective realm of interpretation, which by definition cannot be known with 100% accuracy. The only solution Protestants have to this conundrum is: only those that are led by the Holy Spirit have the Truth, which begs the question because nobody can prove they are led by the Holy Spirit, so that every dispute in the Protestant world from day 1 (see Luther vs Zwingli) boiled down to accuse the opposite party of not having the Holy Spirit or of being stupid or both. As centuries of doctrinal chaos in Protestantism have shown, the framework of sola scriptura is a total failure. Not only it does nothing to give believers any epistemological certainty but it also creates a complete epistemological confusion, so much so that in the Protestant world there’s not even an agreement on what exactly we need to do or not to do to be saved. If this is not a failure of the Protestant framework, I don’t know what it is. The problem of the choice of which apostolic church is true pertains to historical reconstruction, which, as any historical fact, can be in principle proved if enough empirical evidence is provided. The problem of the right interpretation of a text like the Bible is on a completely different level and pertains to textual exegesis, which by definition is a function of the subjectivity of the scholar that performs the exegesis. This doesn’t mean of course that we have no idea of what each verse of the Bible says. It simply means that, when we try to put together all those verses into a coherent theological framework, the number of possible interpretations multiplies exponentially, reducing the probability to solve the problem to virtually 0%. I would argue exactly the opposite of what you say: Protestantism generally opens up the gate to atheism because it is unable to provide a coherent theological framework that stands on its own. Take the simple question: how can Protestants defend the canon of the Bible in front of an atheist? Short answer: they cannot.

These are fair questions. I would say that at the present moment, antiracism is probably overall the greater threat, primarily because this movement holds far greater institutional power and because of the damaging effects of progressive policies. If you look at demographic trends within the church, you'll see that Christians are much more likely to abandon their faith because of their embrace of progressivism than because of racism. However, racism does exist and it needs to be repudiated, as I am also attempting to do in this course. I have engaged in many conversations with African American brothers and sisters about this topic, and their views are mixed. Some of them favor antiracism, others do not, and others fall in between. I've also read several thousand pages of antiracist books, articles, and blog posts. You can see some of my reviews at allkirk.net.

I see differently in our church: I see people moving towards so-called progressive positions because the church continuously views proposed remedy as more dangerous than the sin of racism.