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John 6:44—Correcting an Old Mistake by Jimmy Akin I’m going to fix a mistake I made eight years ago. The mistake is in a file called “Loss of Salvation (Debate)” on my personal web site (www.jimmyakin.com). It consists of notes I prepared to use in a radio debate I did on whether it is possible for a Christian to lose salvation, as was universally understood to be the case prior to John Calvin. Afterward, I put the notes on the web. The material on the site was written toward the beginning of my apologetics career, when I was a much greener apologist than I am today. With virtually any of the files there, I could do a much better job writing it today than I could back then. Since my current writing efforts prevent me from doing a thorough revision of the articles, I’ve considered simply taking them down. But there is a lot of useful material there, and I know it is helpful for folks to have access to it. So I decided to leave the material up, “warts and all,” to allow it to continue doing good. Revisions will be made as time permits and as the need for them comes to my attention. The debate notes need revision, in part because much of the document was not written for publication but simply as a list of memory joggers for me to use during the debate in case certain issues came up. It has come to my attention that in the years since the debate, my opponent—a Calvinist named James White—has criticized a particular thing in the debate notes. I don’t know if this note was used in the debate itself, but it is on the web. Apparently White has issued challenges to me to defend it or retract it on multiple occasions, though he only recently addressed such a challenge to me personally. (He e-mailed me an audio file excerpt of a webcast he did). After listening to the file, I looked up the passage to see whether there was merit in his criticism. There was.
The Passage and My Reaction Here is the passage:
When I looked up that passage and compared what I wrote with the Greek text, my response was to ask, “What the heck was I thinking? That analysis is unsupportable! That translation is horrendous! I would never accept something like that from one of my Greek students. Was I severely sleep deprived when I wrote that or something?” I’d like to sit down and rip that passage apart and explain each and every thing that’s wrong with it. In fact, I started down that path but decided that the amount of explanation I’d have to give to make the mistakes clear to those not familiar with Greek would make this paper way too long and turn it into just another of the many unreadably massive apologetics files already clogging the Internet. So I decided to simplify, delete what I had started, and keep this short. This is not to say that White is entirely correct in his webcast critique. There are a number of places in that where he misrepresents things or overplays his hand. He is in top form as far as sneer-factor goes, and ironically he seems to miss one of the most obvious arguments why the above account is lame. But fisking his critique and pointing out its flaws in detail would serve no useful purpose, so I won’t. I also can’t rule out certain elements of the original account I wrote. I just can’t support them exegetically and would not accept them if they were presented to me by a student. Therefore, as soon as I can get around a problem that I’m having with the server that is preventing me from altering the file, that passage will be deleted. When I have time, I’ll see about writing a new explanation of the passage, for it in no way precludes the Catholic position, however much a Calvinist might like it to. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do that right now. In fact, at the moment I’m ignoring pressing writing assignments just to compose this.
(We All) Live and Learn I care greatly about the work I do. I try to bring a great deal of precision and rigor to it. The value I place on those qualities is something that has grown as the years I’ve spent in apologetics have passed. Today I often literally quadruple-check my facts. When I wrote those debate notes, I had been working in apologetics for about two and a half years. Back then my knowledge of biblical Greek was a fraction of what it is today. I’ve now been working as an apologist for over eleven years, and in that time my knowledge of the biblical languages has blossomed. In fact, as the folks who read my blog know, language and linguistics are two of my main interests. The fact that people grow in their knowledge of the biblical languages is something that I’m sure White can appreciate. In fact, his own works display considerable growth in the past eight years. Ironically, as I was looking at my debate notes, I found that they contained the following quotation from White’s book Drawn By The Father: A Study of John 6:35-45:
This passage contains errors regarding Greek. It is not true that “the present tense refers to a continuous, on-going action.” It can refer to such an action, but it often does not. Other information in a biblical passage may allow one to establish that in a particular case the present tense is being used in the way White says, but it is the other information and not the tense itself that establishes this. Similarly, it is not true to say that “the aorist tense . . . is a point action, a single action in time that is not on-going.” Again, the aorist can be used in this way, but when this can be established, it is other information and not the tense itself that does so. (It’s also a category mistake to say “The Greek contrasts this kind of action [i.e., continuous, ongoing action] against the aorist tense”; kinds of action and tenses belong to different categories and don’t directly contrast.) The fact that individuals grow in their knowledge of Greek or any other subject over time is an unavoidable feature of human experience. The only alternative to having one’s knowledge grow is having it atrophy, and as much as one might want, it is impossible to get all the knowledge of a field at once. Even the greatest scholars, as long as they remain active, are still learning in the twilights of their careers, though they are long past the kind of elementary errors that White—and I—made in these passages. |