Someone came in channel last night and gave me the URL to a brief article by Jimmy Akin where, finally, after many years, he addresses the error he made in attempting to explain away John 6:37-44 in our debate. I had noted this, yet again, in my blog entries for 5/1 and 5/2/04. Here it is. I quote the most interesting part:
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’ll take that as an acknowledgement of the propriety of my response. However, of course, he couldn’t let it stand that simply: though we are not told what the passage does mean (and since this was central to his position in our only moderated debate, does that mean…?), we are told that I made other errors (that do not get named), but the article ends with the assertion that I made a mistake about the passage in describing the present and aorist tenses. Of course, Akin is correct that there are punctiliar presents and non-punctiliar aorists (it is a matter of syntax and lexical meaning); however, I was referring to the Johannine usage in Drawn by the Father, and the application I made is quite correct. So I guess if the best Akin can come up with (he claims to be teaching Greek now: I’d be interested in knowing more about that) is that he feels my comments were too broad, yet properly applied in the text, while admitting that his entire explanation of John 6:37 and 44 was….wacked, well, that’s not too bad.
