The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live for an hour each weekday afternoon. We do that so that we can interact with you by telephone if you call in and you can ask questions to discuss on the air about the Bible or the Christian faith. Any questions you have, you’re welcome to call and raise them for conversation. That would include if you happen to question the correctness of something the host has said. That is, if you’ve heard an answer you don’t think is quite right and you want to bounce a comment, feel free. That’s fair game here.

The number to call is 844-484-5737. Just so you know, there are some lines open right now. There will not be, probably, in just a little while, so you may want to seize this opportunity to get in line. The number is 844-484-5737. Our first caller today is Brian, calling from Twin Falls, Idaho. Brian, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Good afternoon, Steve. I've talked to you a couple of times. A couple of years ago, I was driving and I heard you say, "And now we're going to talk to Brian from Orcas Island." I thought, wow, there are two Brians on Orcas? And then it was me. For about a second, I was in the Twilight Zone until I realized I was listening to an archive show.

Steve Gregg: You used to live in Orcas Island? I was once driving in Idaho many years ago and listening to Sirius satellite radio in the middle of the night. I turned to a Christian station that had Hank Hanegraaff’s program on, and lo and behold, I was the guest. I’d been a guest on his show about six times, but it had been years earlier, so I didn’t expect that. It's interesting to be listening to the radio and hear yourself when you don’t expect to.

Guest (Male): I’ve got a two-part question to get your opinion on. With this war going on, the pastors feel like they have to speak on it. Me being a partial preterist, one part of the question is, do you believe on a Sunday morning there’s a difference between a sermon versus teaching? Should it be more sermon-esque as in teaching?

At times, some of the teaching that is controversial to me, I feel that it should be more of a Thursday Bible study or a lesser, not so formal meeting because I want to raise my hand and ask a question. So, I'm curious about your opinion on that. If you think there should be more sermon-ish as opposed to teaching.

Steve Gregg: I think a man should present according to what his gifts are. Some people’s gifts are more in the area of preaching sermons and some are more in the area of expository teaching. I like expository teaching, though I don’t dislike sermons if they’re biblical and if God seems to be owning it while the speaker is speaking and so forth.

But you mentioned something about the preachers talking about the war. Is this what you’re contrasting this with?

Guest (Male): No, but the context now is, let's say a subject a few months ago was the Nephilim. It was fairly dogmatic that this was angels having sex with women. I thought that would be a subject for a Bible study as opposed to a Sunday morning sermon where there’s no room for debate. Some of that, then, the pastor has to be very dogmatic on some of these issues.

Steve Gregg: It depends. There are certain churches that are continually teaching through the Bible. At Calvary Chapel where I went for a long time, the people were supposed to read ten chapters a week of the Bible, and on Sunday night, Chuck would teach verse by verse as much as possible through those ten chapters. He usually ended up skipping really rapidly over the last several because he took a long time on the first ones, which is a flaw I would have also if I was trying to cover ten chapters in a night.

He’s trying to cover ten chapters a week in verse by verse on Sunday nights, and then on Sunday morning, he would pick a verse from within those ten chapters and he’d present a sermon on it. So, you’d get sermonizing and you’d get teaching, too. I’m not saying either one is better. The Bible doesn’t say which has to be done.

I would say that there was kind of something for the tastes of everybody from the pulpit there. I thought Chuck did a good job. But if you’re wondering whether on a Sunday morning a pastor ought to be talking about current events or about controversial theories about the Nephilim and things like that, I can’t say that he shouldn't. I just don’t know that he should.

You mentioned with the war going on, the pastors feel like they have to say something about it. I would say if World War III was going on, it’d be hard to avoid saying something about it. But there are little wars, smaller wars, going on all over the world and always are. There are always wars going on. I don’t know why there’s an obligation of preachers to talk about them.

Now, I think most of the pastors who do talk about war, they’re not talking about Russia and Ukraine. They’re not talking about the way that China treats the Uighurs. They’re not trying to talk about various little intramural wars going on in Africa. They want to talk about the Middle East. That is a war that’s going on among very many others around the world, and there are always wars going on. I don’t know that it’s our obligation as preachers to address every war that comes along, especially if it’s no more significant than any other.

Of course, I would say that lots of Americans are concerned about the Middle East war, not merely because of the whole question of Israel and Zionism and things like that, but because our boys are on ships and stuff over in that area. Obviously, people’s minds are on it if they have their loved ones invested in it. But I don’t think any specific messages to the church that would have to be given in an American pulpit would be determined by the war.

There might be a need to speak comfort or faith to people who are concerned about their loved ones who are in the service or whatever, or there might even be that a pastor would, by some kind of a rotation on Sunday morning, say, "Each Sunday we’re going to pray about one of these wars going on in the world. Let’s pray about the one in Iraq. Next week we’ll pray about the one in Ukraine" or whatever.

I’m not trying to present a curriculum for pastors, and I’m not against pastors mentioning anything about which Christians need to take some kind of a moral or ethical stand. I think Christians should be charged with taking moral and ethical stands about things, and wars would be one of those things that might be something we’d have something to do with. I never heard a sermon where a pastor mentioned the persecution of the Uighurs in China, partly because Americans are not involved in that, and most Christians don’t even know about it. But the welfare of the Uighurs is as much on God’s heart as that of Israel or Palestinians or Iranians.

God loves all people, and I think churches sometimes feel almost like more of an obligation to address things in the Middle East even though that particular region is no more special than any other since the time that Christ has come. Prior to that, most of what God was doing of importance was in the Middle East. But when Jesus came out of the grave, he said, "Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations." So, the Kingdom of God now is global, and the concerns of the whole globe are the concerns of the church. But of course, a pastor can’t spend his whole sermon time talking about geopolitics. I don’t think that means he can’t say anything about it. I’m not really sure what you’re hoping to find out about my opinion on this.

Guest (Male): Because the futurists, my pastor come from a Calvary background, so of course he is a Zionist. Then the topic is much more political. Then the congregation hears a futurist presentation once again. Even when I’ve gotten in the vehicle with my wife after church, I sometimes feel like I have to sort of correct because my beliefs are very different than hers. My wife has said, "Maybe you should find another church, honey." I love my pastor and the church and stuff, and I thought that maybe that’s a direction I should go. Lately, I’ve thought, I wonder if I should maybe have dialogue with some of my male friends in that church and share where I come from as a partial preterist.

Steve Gregg: I wouldn’t until you talked to the pastor about it because he’ll feel like you’re causing division. Even though you may not have that intention at all, pastors very often are rather insecure if there’s somebody in their church going around talking to the men in private undermining the whole theology of the church.

I would speak to the pastor about it first. If you get zero response of any good type, then I could say if you left the church, you could certainly communicate with your friends who are still in church about why you left and just say, "You know, if you’re curious about these issues, I’d be glad to have coffee with you and tell you what I believe." You would at least not be causing any kind of divisions from inside the church then.

Just because someone goes to a church, let's say your friends, that doesn’t mean the church owns them. That’s something that institutionalization of the church has brought about that’s very unfortunate. Pastors feel like they own the people who go to their churches. I’m not sure why. It seems more likely that the church should be seen to own him since they’re paying his salary. He’s not paying their salary. I don’t know why he’d have any ownership of them. He might like them, he might wish for them to be loyal to him, but there’s no reason why they have to be. You can leave a church. Anyone can leave a church.

But I wouldn’t be staying in the church, giving the impression that I’m flowing with the flow of the church at the same time trying to undermine it. I think I would try to speak to the leaders first. If they didn’t have an acceptable response, I would probably change churches. But the people you’d talk to who are your friends, the church doesn’t own them. If you’re not in the church, you can still be friends with them and you can talk about anything you want to, even your reasons for leaving.

I will give you some encouragement. I just heard today about a church, a rather growing large church with kind of with a Calvary Chapel influence behind it, that for several years the pastor has been having struggles with dispensationalism and kind of distancing himself. I heard that just recently, just last week or maybe it was this week, the pastor had an all-church meeting and he announced that the church is no longer going to follow dispensationalism. Now, he’s been struggling with it for a long time. He’ll lose some people over it. That’s what happens when you take a stand against the popular views. But he’ll be able to speak freely now. He’ll be able to speak his conscience and not be worried that people will find out what he really thinks.

There should be freedom, and I hope maybe your pastor may give that some consideration if you talk with him. But you can’t expect miracles all the time with people.

Guest (Male): How are the debates and then I’ll let you go to the other callers? How are your debates with pastors? How are they coordinated then? You probably know my pastor, Greg Fadness, who is at Calvary.

Steve Gregg: I don’t know him. But as far as debates go, Calvary Chapel pastors generally do not believe in debates. I would gladly have a cordial debate with any Calvary Chapel pastor or any other pastor or any other theologian who wants to discuss the dispensational pros and cons. But I have found, and I’m from Calvary Chapel myself going back far enough, I was a teacher in Calvary Chapel, but not for decades now. Over the decades, I found there are not Calvary Chapel pastors who want to debate.

Generally speaking, if someone in their church says, "Hey, would you have a debate over this subject or that subject against this person?" I can pretty much tell you what they’re going to say. They’re going to say, "That would just confuse the sheep." That’s what they think. They think the sheep should only hear one side because sheep are very stupid. That’s pretty much apparently what they think about their congregation.

It doesn’t occur to them, or at least they don’t say, "Frankly, sir, I would be too confused. I think that I would be incapable of debating. I don’t think I understand the issues well enough so I’m not going to have a debate." Maybe they do, maybe they’ve studied up, but they don’t think the sheep are as smart as they are.

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been in a lot of debates and I never worry that anyone who listens to me will be confused by a debate, not because I’m sure I’ll win, I may not win, but the point is, I would like to think that all Christians would become thinking people. Rather than dumbing down my presentation for the ones who are the most confused, I’d rather try to teach to the point that they’re not confused.

Anyway, that’s me. It's a different philosophy. That’s frankly why I’m not a Calvary Chapel minister anymore because that’s my philosophy. But yeah, you could ask him to debate somebody, and if he says yes, that’s fine, but I’m going to suggest he probably will not. I’ve never met a Calvary Chapel pastor yet that really wants to debate.

Guest (Male): Fair enough. I appreciate you answering my questions. Take care, Greg.

Steve Gregg: God bless you, Brian. Bye now. Okay, our lines have been full for a little while here. Let’s talk to Bart in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bart, welcome.

Guest (Male): Hello, brother Steve. How are you today?

Steve Gregg: Well, thank you.

Guest (Male): I listen to you from time to time, and I don’t know how many callers you get in a period of time, but it seems like there should be some kind of a time limit. I don’t know if you have a clock running when you each call, and then it seems like it would be helpful if the callers would have what they want to ask kind of dialed in if not written down so it doesn’t meander. I really appreciate your flexibility to expand the conversation, but just in the interest of getting the most content out, that was my first statement.

Steve Gregg: Frankly, I agree with you. I agree with you. Though if I was very strict about it, I wouldn’t have given you the last 60 seconds to give all that. I realize that there are people waiting. I’m also trying to pace it so that we can get all the calls in. But the truth is, some people’s questions have more parts to them than others, and I try to follow my instincts as to when I feel like I’ve given the answer that’s needed before going to the next one. But go ahead.

Guest (Male): I appreciate that. I believe in being spirit-led as well. But my real question is, could you share two examples in your belief system that have changed from your foundational time when you came to believe to now? One of the frustrations is people who just stay with what they were raised with. I do take you as an intellectual, well-read person. Could you share with us a couple of examples of how your theology, your belief system, your worldview has changed?

Steve Gregg: The fundamentals of my worldview have always pretty much been the same, namely that there is a God, Jesus is His Son, Jesus died and rose again, Jesus is Lord, and God has given us a revelation of Himself in the Bible, which is very important for us to know. Therefore, I can do very little of value more than to get to know, understand, and communicate what God has revealed for us to know. That’s my worldview.

As far as my theological opinions, I’ve changed on many things, and that’s simply because I do have that worldview. My worldview is that the Bible is the Word of God. My pastors, who give their opinions, are not speaking with the authority of the Word of God. Now, if they agree with the Word of God, that’s great, but the Bible says in Isaiah 8, "If they don’t speak according to this word, it’s because there’s no light in them." So, I’m always testing things by the Word of God, which I think is what the Bible tells us to do.

Because of that, and because I was raised a Christian and I received in my upbringing factory-installed theological convictions, over the past 55 years that I’ve been teaching the Bible, I’ve been confronted with a number of things that challenge the convictions I started out with. They’ve never just said, "Oh, okay, I’ll change." I’m a very conservative person by nature. It takes an awful lot to get me to change.

I have changed on several things. I’ll tell you some because you’ve asked me. It's taken years in every case because I become first of all aware that the view I’ve been taught may have some chinks in it, may not be fully biblical. Then I begin to explore out of curiosity what the Bible does teach, and a new way of looking at it begins to take shape over time, and eventually, I just realize that to my mind, the preponderance of all the biblical evidence points to X, which is the new view that I now hold. I don’t change quickly because my temperament is conservative, but I do eventually change because my temperament is not stubborn.

My eschatology is certainly one of the things I changed. I was thoroughly dispensational. I was teaching it, defending it over a period of years. I changed my views on the pre-trib rapture, which was part of the eschatology package. Once I changed on the pre-trib rapture, some of my ideas began to change on some other parts, like the Millennium. Over several years, my views on the Millennium began to reshape and reform. My views on the fulfillment of the promises God made to Abraham and what that looks like changed over time completely, which is why I don’t see Zionism the same way that I would have back when I was a dispensationalist.

My views on whether Satan is a fallen angel or not underwent some serious catastrophic changes from my studies of the Scripture. My views on Hell have changed, not to something yet, because I don’t hold one now, but I had a very solid and undisturbed belief in the traditional view of Hell up until my 40s, I would say, which means I taught it for 25 years as a teacher, the traditional view of Hell. But as I began to restudy that from the Scriptures, I began to realize that I didn’t have very much in the Bible to go on for that, and some other views seemed to have some merit biblically speaking. Eventually, I did change. I don’t hold the traditional view anymore, but I have not settled on one of the alternatives because both of them look fairly persuasive to me biblically.

I'm different than I was on that. I also used to think when I was a Baptist growing up that I was at least partially a Calvinist. I thought that maybe two or three of the points of Calvinism were correct. But as I grew older and read the Calvinists and became aware of what the five points of Calvinism really say, I realized I don’t believe any of those. None of those points are taught in Scripture. So, I’ve changed on a lot of different things of different types. I don’t know that I won’t change again.

But if someone says, "Well, you must be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine," not at all. I’ve never gone to and fro. I’ve gone from here to there and from that point further on to another point. I’ve never gone back and forth in some state of confusion. It’s been a linear learning process for me. But anyway, I’ve changed on a lot of things, but not my basic worldview. My basic worldview has never changed.

Guest (Male): Thank you, brother Steve. That's helpful.

Steve Gregg: All right, Bart. God bless you, man. Steven in Foothill Ranch, California. Welcome.

Guest (Male): Hi, Steve. Can you guide me through the nuances of inerrancy versus infallibility? Why have I become tremendously uncomfortable anytime someone says that they believe in the Scriptures as a record of revelation? I’ve come to discover that I don’t agree with any of those people after conversation, and I just sort of wonder where that comes from.

Steve Gregg: I will, but I’m looking at my clock and I realize that I’m going to have to take a break. So, I’m going to go ahead and answer you after the break. Can you give me some idea of who some of the teachers are that you’re getting that feeling from?

Guest (Male): Well, I have for most of my life been Catholic. I am now a Protestant. A lot of the reasons why I hung out in Catholicism were intellectual. I liked Hans Küng. I liked O’Brien. But these are not people that I adhere to any longer. Generally, when people say Scripture is a record of revelation, I find that as weasel language to get out from under the Bible as being true and not entirely literal, but accurate. And I’m uncomfortable with those people now. Have you ever heard that term, the Bible as a record of revelation?

Steve Gregg: That specific phrase does not connect in my own mind with any particular movement or teachers. That’s why I wondered what teachers you’re getting that from. Because I do know of some teachers who might use that language. I don’t know if they do or not, but they could, and that I disagree with them on certain points, but I’m not sure exactly of the nuances of it.

I’m going to take a break, but I’m going to keep you on over to after the break and then I will do what I can to clarify those issues if I can. At this point, we’d just like to let you know that The Narrow Path is on the air because we pay lots of money to radio stations. I was just checking the most recent. I think we paid $150,000 last month, and that’s approximately what we pay each month to radio stations to be on the air.

But we don’t sell anything and we don’t raise funds. We don’t do anything except let you know we’re listener-supported. If you’d like to help us out, feel free. You can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. Take anything you want for free, but you can donate if you wish at thenarrowpath.com. I’ll be back in 30 seconds.

Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we’re live for another half hour taking your calls. Got a couple of lines open if you’d like to join us today. If you have questions about the Bible, feel free to join us. The number is 844-484-5737.

Just before the break, we were talking to Steven in Foothill Ranch, California. Steven, welcome back. I want to address your issue. You were saying that you’re encountering people who refer to the Bible as a record of revelation, and that term makes you uncomfortable. I believe you were suggesting that that term strongly undermines what you believe to be true about the inerrancy of the Bible. Is that correct?

Guest (Male): Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty close to it. The people who commonly use this phrase are people who say that the Bible is people’s understanding of who God is, not the revelation of God Himself.

Steve Gregg: Well, let me just go ahead and address that. During the break, my wife kindly looked up that phrase and found that the term is associated with Eastern Orthodoxy, but also Karl Barth, who’s famous for being a leader in the neo-orthodox movement back a century ago or so. I’m not that familiar with what nuances it is, but apparently, it means that the Bible contains things that God has revealed, but that it may not be verbally or word for word every word about the Word of God.

If that is what they take, then I would say they are not coming up against anything the Bible says about itself. Now, you said you were Roman Catholic, you’re now Protestant, and typical of Protestantism, in contrast with Roman Catholicism, is the emphasis on the authority of the Bible as over against the Catholic view that the Bible and church tradition have equal authority.

Now, I’m not sure what any Catholic scholar believes specifically about the nature of inspiration of the Bible, and I really can’t say what would be acceptable or within the range of acceptable beliefs about the inspiration of Scripture among Protestants. We all agree that Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is God-breathed and is profitable." Of course, the question is what does God-breathed mean? What does it look like?

We can actually see by reading the Old Testament, for example, that some of the material actually says, "Thus says the Lord." I mean, God speaking to Isaiah or to the prophets Jeremiah or someone like that and says, "Thus says the Lord," and it’s God speaking directly. It’s Him speaking in the first person. "I" is God speaking about Himself in those passages. That very clearly is claiming to be a word-for-word inspired message from God.

In the Old Testament, as well as the New, there are also passages that are historical record. In fact, more than half of the Old Testament and more than half of the New Testament are simply historical narrative. The Gospels themselves make up more than half the New Testament, then you’ve got Acts, so you’ve got considerably more than half of the New Testament is historical record of the life of Jesus or whatever, and in the Old Testament, of course, historical records about Israel and pre-Israeli history.

Since Paul said all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, I believe he would include the historical narratives are given by inspiration of God. But the question then is what does that mean? I mean, does it mean that the people who wrote the history didn’t have any historical sources? They just kind of, it was a flow of consciousness streaming from the Holy Spirit through their pen to write something directly inspired for them? Well, I suppose it could, and I have to say when I was a child, or the way I was raised, it was my opinion that that was true. That whatever was written in the Bible was sort of a word-for-word stream of consciousness from the mind of God directly to the page.

Then I realized that the Bible doesn’t actually say that’s true. That was simply my interpretation of what is meant by inspired by God. The truth is, sometimes I feel inspired by God. Not like a prophet, but I just feel inspired to say certain things, and sometimes I think the Holy Spirit may speak through those things, but I don’t claim to be a prophet and I wouldn’t be inclined to make any claims of inspiration for myself.

I don’t know what inspired by God always looks like. Like the oracles in the prophets certainly look like a direct word from God. The narratives, it looks to me like somebody who was really there and witnessed things could easily have written those narratives if they’re honest and competent. I mean, that’s how history often is written. I would also believe that I think the Old Testament historical narratives were written for the most part by prophets. Moses was a prophet. There’s some Jewish tradition that Jeremiah wrote the books of Kings. The books of Samuel seem to have three prophetic works, one by Gad, one from Nathan, and one from Samuel as their source. In other words, there’s prophetic inspiration going on there.

But does it mean that God is live streaming His own words from His brain to the page? Or does it mean that God is using the competence and the skill and the faith and the belief of people that He has revealed the truth to and guiding them in what they include and what they don’t include? For example, every historian has to leave stuff out. There’s no way you could write everything. Even John said, you know, if everything Jesus did and said would be written, the world wouldn’t contain them. So, he’s clearly saying there’s a lot of stuff I’ve left out here.

I believe that an inspired author writing history may be God is guiding him in what to include and what to leave out, since not everything’s equally important. But I don’t know if it’s claiming that it’s a direct stream of words that the prophet goes into some kind of trance and it’s like automatic writing. I don’t think the Bible suggests that. In other words, the inspiration of the historical narrative wouldn’t look exactly the same as the presentation of a prophetic oracle where God says, "Thus saith the Lord, I have told you and I will do this and I’m angry at you for this." When God is speaking directly, that’s one kind of communication. Guiding writers to write history, that’s another kind.

In the Psalms, we see certainly that sometimes God is speaking, sometimes the psalmist is speaking to God, sometimes the psalmist is speaking to his enemies, and sometimes the psalmist is praying, and other times he’s ventilating his anger toward those people who hurt him and things like that. To say, well, these are inspired by God, I don’t doubt they are, but they don’t all look the same. I mean, some of them are oracular where God actually speaks in His own voice in some Psalms. Other times it’s David speaking in his voice, and we could say well God is guiding him, God’s spirit is leading him in what he writes. Okay, I’m for that. I don’t criticize that at all.

When somebody’s expressing doubt in God or criticizing God, which some of the Psalms do, I’d say well that’s them. God doesn’t inspire people to criticize Him, I don’t think. Although He might inspire them to simply write their true feelings. But that doesn’t mean that these are words from God to us in the same sense as an oracle is.

Luke, for example, one of the great historians of the New Testament, in fact, he wrote more history than any other New Testament writer, in fact, he wrote about a quarter of the New Testament. The books of Luke and Acts together make a quarter of the New Testament, and they are historical narrative. Now, Luke doesn’t claim any inspiration at all. He just, in fact, at the beginning of Luke, he says there are others who have tried to write good accounts of the sayings of Jesus and life of Jesus, and he said, "I myself have had a complete familiarity with this story from the beginning, and I thought I’d do my best to write out an account of this."

Luke doesn’t claim he’s inspired. He might have been. If he was, he doesn’t tell us so. What he does tell us is he’s an expert. He has expertise on the subject and he’s concerned to make the truth of the matter known in writing. That’s what he tells us himself.

I have to say when I was younger I would have said, okay, so that’s from his point of view he was writing that but behind the scenes Luke didn’t know that God was moving his hand and choosing the words and things like that because that was my understanding of inspiration. Then I realized that if Luke didn’t know about it, how do I know about it? He doesn’t seem to know about it, and what is it that makes me say something about his writings that he’s not willing to say about them? I realized what makes me say it is my particular doctrine and my particular interpretation of what it means to be inspired.

I believe everything in the Gospels was inspired in the sense that they are about Jesus, and Jesus is fully inspired. Everything Jesus said is right from God. His words are the words of God. His actions are a manifestation and a revelation of God. In other words, the way that God has given us the Gospels is different than the way He gave us Jeremiah and Isaiah, or the Psalms, or even the Proverbs, and the epistles.

The epistles are letters from apostles to various people, and some of them are relevant to those people and to few others. I mean, when John says in his epistles "I hope to visit" or when Paul says "I hope to visit you, prepare a house for me, prepare a lodging for me," he’s not talking to me about that. He’s talking to the people he’s writing to. Likewise, when John says "I have many things more to say to you, but I don’t want to put them in pen and ink, I’ll clear these things up with you when I show up," he’s obviously not saying that to me. John’s not going to show up at my house. He’s talking to someone there.

So, epistles have a personal element to them. Are they being dictated word for word from God’s mouth? That’d be very interesting because if they were, I would think they’d all have the same personality being expressed. Whereas Paul’s personality and his style of writing is very different than John’s. John’s is very distinguishable. Everything John wrote has the same style. But the other books written by other authors don’t.

Which means that whatever inspiration does mean, it doesn’t mean that these men’s minds were simply overtaken and a different mind, the mind of God, preempted them. I’d have to say it would be fairly safe to say God revealed to them the truth and they wrote it fairly and accurately the way it was revealed to them, but they used their own literacy and their own vocabulary and so forth.

So, when someone says the Bible is a written record of revelations, I’m going to say I don’t know what the person who uses that phrase means. If they’re saying that we can’t trust the Bible in any sense, or that we can’t take everything it says as the Word of God, then I’m going to disagree with them on that. But the phrase itself is not objectionable to me. It is a record of revelations. I mean, Daniel recorded revelations that were given to Nebuchadnezzar and to himself, dreams and visions. He recorded them. Those are a record of the revelations that were given.

I believe that the apostles received revelations from Christ, both when He was speaking on earth and even during the book of Acts, and those are recorded there too. So, I’m not going to react adversely to the statement that the Bible is a record of revelations. If somebody is using that phrase to mean "therefore we can’t trust it" or "therefore it isn’t as true as it would be if it was inspired in a different manner," well, then I’m going to have a problem with them because I believe every word of Scripture can be trusted. I believe there’s no where to go for the truth about things that God wants to reveal to mankind other than the Bible.

My whole life and ministry is based on the conviction that whatever is in the Bible, I’ll live by it and believe it and teach it. Whatever’s not, I’m going to withhold judgment about it because I see the Bible as God’s inspired revelation to us. But I guess there was a time, as I said, when I would have seen a particular view of inspiration, which might have been culturally fed to me through my American evangelical upbringing, as the only way to correctly understand the statement that all Scripture is God-breathed.

He obviously used people, even fallible people. You know, Paul writing in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, he’s telling the Corinthians "I thank God I didn’t baptize any of you except for Crispus and Gaius," and then he says a couple verses later, "Oh yes, I remember now, I also baptized the household of Stephanas, and I don’t remember if I baptized any others."

That certainly is not the language of automatic writing where the Holy Spirit is streaming. I mean, the Holy Spirit wouldn’t make a mistake and have to correct himself. Paul could, because he was a man and, you know, if he forgot for the moment how many people he baptized and then remembered and corrected it, he’s still reliable. So, to me, what matters most is were the people who wrote the Scriptures chosen by God to write them, enabled by God to write them, directed by God to write the things they wrote? And most of all, are they true? My answer would be yes to all of those things.

What it comes to the exact way that inspiration took place, I’m going to say I don’t want to go further than what the Bible itself tells me to go because I’m very devoted to the Bible. So, I hope I didn’t just bring more confusion, but it is true that the statement "it’s a record of revelations" is not in itself objectionable. It depends on what persons are trying to say or trying to unsay when they use that term. Anyway, my view may not be fully satisfying to you, but those are my thoughts and I’ve given a great deal of thought to this over the decades. I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.

Jeff in Sacramento, California. Welcome to The Narrow Path.

Guest (Male): Hello. I’ve got a question related to altar calls. Now, I’ve been a Christian since 1984, and I was mostly a part of the Assemblies of God. I even became a minister with them for like two years, 1991 to 1993, but I departed because I didn’t agree with everything. One of the issues was I saw a lot of manipulation with altar calls. It was like the only way you could get free from a sin or something in your life, you had to come forward. "If you’ve got this sin in your life, you need to come forward right now." I saw a lot of that type of stuff and I just had a problem with that. One time there was a girl that I was actually interested in, and they gave an altar call for people struggling with sexual issues, and she went forward with a big smile on her face and I was like, "I didn’t need to know that she struggled with that." That’s not right. Anyway, go ahead. What do you have to say about that type of stuff?

Steve Gregg: Well, of course, the Bible doesn’t actually use the term altar call or give any examples of an altar call. What we see more like it is that Peter would preach on the day of Pentecost and people would come up and say, "What must I do?" He didn’t call them forward; they just responded spontaneously. Likewise, when Paul would preach in a synagogue or something, just after he got kicked out, a lot of people who were there would follow him out and say, "I want to hear more about this."

So, it’s not like we see altar calls being given, which is not to say they’re not okay. It’s one of those things that the Bible doesn’t teach it, but the Bible doesn’t forbid it. So, the question would be is it appropriate in any given situation? The idea of altar calls that in the church I was raised in, which was Baptist and then later Calvary Chapel, was to call people forward to be saved, calling unbelievers to come forward and receive Christ and become a Christian. That’s where I think that comes from American revivalism—D.L. Moody, Billy Graham, and things like that popularized the altar call. And then evangelical churches often picked up on it because it seemed to work well for them for getting people to come forward and become Christians.

Now, in Pentecostal churches, they have another aspect of that. Sometimes the altar calls in Pentecostal churches are not specifically for people who are not saved to come get saved, but rather for the Christians to come forward for prayer for some specific need, including to be prayed for to be filled with the spirit or to be prayed for to overcome and be set free from some sinful habit, maybe even to be delivered from demonic oppression or whatever.

Now, I have no problem with that. I never went to a church that regularly did that. I had a friend in ministry, a partner who helped me run my school for years, who grew up Pentecostal and he didn’t like going to a church that didn’t have those. He said at the end of a service, he always wanted to go forward for prayer, not to get saved again but to just have an encounter with God in a way that he’d customarily done so growing up.

I had no complaints about that, but it wasn’t my culture. What I’m saying is I can’t see anything wrong with having altar calls, whether it’s to call the unsaved to be saved or to call Christians to come up and rededicate their lives or to be delivered or filled with the spirit. Altar calls are simply a way of putting people who have a need in close proximity with the persons who are ready to minister to them. You don’t need altar calls per se if the people would come and approach a minister or someone else privately, and they might. But it’s just something some churches have culturally gotten used to doing, and I don’t want to say anything against it except they can be manipulative sometimes.

Or, as you said, inappropriately revealing of people’s private sins. What that pastor did in that case where that girl went forward because she had sexual struggles, that was a pretty strange kind of altar call to have. I think the pastor probably should have said, "If you’re having struggles in this area, please approach the pastors after the service discreetly."

But churches do different things different ways. That’s not the way I would do things. But I do think there’s real manipulative altar calls where they pretend they’re not going to ask you to come forward. They just say, "Every head bowed and every eye closed, if you’d like for me to pray for you because you’d like to give your life to Christ, just raise your hand. No one’s going to see it because all the heads are bowed. This is strictly private between you and God." And then once they’ve done it, they say, "Okay, come forward now." It seems really deceptive and manipulative and, in other words, some churches the altar call has become simply a device for selling Jesus like advertisers do and manipulating people to buy the product and so forth. I’m not sure how many people who get saved in those altar calls are really getting saved because I don’t know what’s really going on. They may be manipulated in a carnal way.

But I’m not going to lambaste altar calls and say they’re all bad. I can say you just need to make sure you’re not doing something manipulative, and there are times when you probably shouldn’t give an altar call about a certain kind of subject if it’s going to require people to expose inappropriate things about themselves. So, I can take them or leave them, but I think there’s times that they’re inappropriate.

Joshua from Houston, Texas. Hi, Joshua. Welcome.

Guest (Male): My question is, can a woman baptize a man, woman, or child?

Steve Gregg: We have no case in the Bible of that happening. Of course, Paul didn’t allow women to be in the leadership roles of eldership or overseer in the church, which would correspond to pastor today, and in many churches, they want the pastor to do it, in which case it would be a man. However, the Bible doesn’t actually say that baptism has to be conducted by a clergyman. In the Bible, it was just an ordinary Christian that baptized Saul of Tarsus, and then Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip was not a pastor, not an elder in a church.

So, whether a woman could baptize another, I don’t know. I think it would be a very sharp breach of protocol in terms of precedent in the Bible. On the other hand, I could imagine a situation where somebody is leading somebody else to the Lord and the person doing the evangelizing is a woman. Now, the Bible does acknowledge female evangelists. The first evangelists in the Bible were the women who came to the tomb and the angels told them to go evangelize the apostles. So, the apostles were evangelized by women, and that was the first evangelists in the Bible.

For a woman to preach the gospel, for a woman to evangelize people is not wrong. I think if a woman would lead a man to Christ in biblical times, she would expect him to be baptized and that would probably be done by the male leadership of the church, but the Bible doesn’t say it has to be. I think that would be just the way things would go without really giving much critical thought to the question. But if she was the only one there to baptize, there were no other Christians around available, then, you know, if someone told me, well, you know, I was led to the Lord by a woman and we were in Saudi Arabia and there was no church we could meet with and she baptized me, I don’t think I’d be critical of it. To me, it would be abnormal, but I don’t think it would be evil.

Matthew in New Jersey, welcome to The Narrow Path. Oh, Matthew hung up. Oh, no, I am sorry. I thought I hit your button and what I hit was the hang-up button. That is operator error here, and I am very sorry for that. If you can call back immediately, Matthew, 844-484-5737. I’d love to talk to you. But we only have a very few minutes left, so you might not be able to get through. Our lines are open if you want to try.

My apologies. I make mistakes. I’ve been doing this show daily for 29 years, but I still make mistakes. And as I’m an old man now, you know, old men kind of the mind deteriorates a bit and you do some goofy things. I’ve made a lot of technical errors when it comes to the technology involved in doing a radio show.

Anyway, let me just say there was a questioner who wrote to me who said, "Steve, I listened to your lecture on the dating of Revelation. You make a good case for the early date. One question that I still have about it is when John was exiled, since John himself says he saw the vision in exile, that seems pretty significant. My research, although very limited, I can’t find anything that would suggest the Apostle John was exiled to Patmos by Nero."

Well, nobody knows when John was exiled to Patmos. Some believe it was in the time of Nero, some in the time of Domitian. Whichever it was, is when he wrote the book of Revelation. Now, there are arguments for the later date and for the early date, but there’s no independent witness that John was exiled to Patmos other than the fact that it was believed in the early church by many that it was during the time of Domitian that he was exiled and had the vision. Certainly the time he had the vision was the same time as the exile. But the time of the exile is what is discussed as a controversy. My book on Revelation Four Views goes into the pros and cons. I’m out of time. Our website’s thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.