Welcome back to Timus Bopery. I'm Joe Heschmire. Now, I don't normally do a Friday episode, particularly on the 4th of July. But Dr. Gavin Ortland replied to my episode from yesterday in a way that I think naturally raised some questions about my integrity and whether I'm treating his argument fairly. So I want to actually begin by agreeing with Gavin on something. I'd like to try to maintain a positive relationship with Joe. I like Joe. I'd like to have a good relationship. He's very smart. And I feel like if we were talking in real life, we'd get along pretty well, I think. I'd say the same thing about Gavin. He is smart. He often does good work. His recent episode responding to Ted Cruz was excellent, I thought. And a lot of the confusion over one another's positions could easily be resolved if we could just

have a structured debate or a sit down of some kind on these topics. Now, I actually offered that

to Gavin back in May, but at the time he said he was too busy to, you know, debate the canon only to

instead create a panel of two other Protestants who agreed with him to talk about it. Now, look,

that's his prerogative, but the risk is that we do end up creating online echo chambers of just people who agree with us,

and we kind of talk past one another, and may become away feeling mutually misunderstood.

I want to also commend Gavin's emphasis on making sure that we're actually steel manning the other

side's position and interpreting

it charitably. Now, whether I've succeeded or not, I've tried to do that here, and I hope that

he'll do the same. The final point I want to agree upon here is this idea that when God reveals

himself, this is at the heart of kind of the discussion we're having, when God reveals himself,

he does so infallibly, of course,

without error. And after all, this is the whole point of revelation. It's God unveiling himself

so that we can know him in ways we couldn't from reason alone. That's what revelation means.

But our disagreement is this. Gavin says that, for instance, Moses is fallible when he hears the voice of God. But

fallible by definition means that it's possible that Moses is erring. And if Moses is erring

in hearing and in transmitting divine revelation, that logically undermines our ability to trust

the inerrancy and reliability of the Bible. Now, Gavin protests.

He says, so according to Gavin, even if God reveals something to you directly, that is still

fallible. No, that is not what I said. My point was precisely the opposite that God's revelation

remains infallible, even if it is received by fallible agents.

But look, the steelman version of my argument is obviously not that you're literally saying those words.

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