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Wes Huff on Joe Rogan: My Take
History of Huff and Rogan
Professing Christian and Christian apologist Wes Huff appeared on Joe Rogan for three hours. I believe this is the first time Rogan had anyone like Huff on his famous and popular podcast. Rogan was a fan of a man named Billy Carson. Wes Huff dominated Carson in a recent debate. This put Huff on Rogan’s radar, who according to him then watched twenty Huff videos. Huff greatly impressed Rogan.
Before having Huff on his show, Rogan seemed like on a trajectory toward faith in Christ. He is not there yet, but this was a significant jump for Rogan. Other factors affected Rogan in this path, including the faith of some of his friends he interviewed on his podcast. Rogan does not discount historical and even biblical evidence for Christ. It helped him a lot to hear from Huff.
Minimal Facts Approach
Huff took a “minimal facts approach” in his defense of the faith to Rogan. This means he focused on Christ Himself, targeting the historical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. He presented the most basic or minimal facts about Jesus that unbelieving historians will not themselves deny. Then he connected that evidence with the biblical account. To do this kind of presentation like Huff, someone must study it and practice it. It worked with Rogan, who said, “Wow,” in response to Huff dozens of times.
Rogan is his own fact checker on the show. If he doesn’t think you’re right, he questions you. He challenged Huff, but not in any egregious way. For an unbeliever, he asked good questions. As an apologist, Huff gave him good answers too. He was ready to give them.
Danger
As much as I agreed with most of what Huff said and was glad Rogan had him, I believe it is also dangerous too to overall biblical Christianity. Huff is a non-separatist, culturally liberal Christian of the popular variety.
Huff was not well known at large before the Billy Carson debate. That went viral. He went even more viral with Rogan and now Huff is famous, just that quickly. The trajectory of his entire life now changes because of that. I believe that almost any Christian podcaster hopes for this series of events to occur.
It is easier for pop Christianity to appear on Rogan. It surely must be someone who allows for all sorts of compromise to get to that place. I’m not saying it is impossible for a separatist to go viral, but very unlikely. This is the nature of celebrity Christianity today. Nevertheless, like Paul in Philippians 1, I am glad for the information Huff got to Rogan and his audience.
Huff on Rogan will open up many, many more opportunities for Huff and even for those now connected with Huff. Mark Ward will know that. He appears on Huff’s website first as an endorser, so anyone who checks out Huff will see Ward there. Huff has had him on his podcast. I would say that just by connection, Ward might double his audience. It’s probably already occurred.
Not a “Scholar”
As good as Huff was, I did not hear him as the scholar that people have projected him. He is right now in PhD work, not finished. He’s thirty-three. What Huff did, just ordinary Christians could do. They should, but most can’t. He made obvious mistakes that a scholar would not make. Someone does not need to be a scholar to do what he’s doing. I would say he is a very good student, who is much better, talented in his presentation, the ability to put these podcasts together. This is where we’re at today.
Someone who has technological capacity and knows how to use the medium for communication will move into the scholar category. He is at least a popular scholar because he makes it into the forum. Huff gets through the door with his abilities. He can talk to a Rogan, who also is no scholar. This is the new world in which we live. That too is dangerous, because it really does matter in this world if you have the “excellency of speech” that Paul warned against in 1 Corinthians 2.
The Great Isaiah Scroll
Shot in the Foot
One never knows the ultimate effect of such an interaction as that of Huff with Rogan. I saw negatives to it and I will list them in no given order. One, Huff said that the great Isaiah scroll in the Jerusalem Museum was word-for-word identical to the Hebrew Masoretic Text. This is a Dead Sea Scroll. Since the appearance, Huff has said apparently that when he said word-for-word identical he didn’t mean word-for-word identical. But he said word-for-word identical. How does that mean something different? It doesn’t make sense.
When I heard Huff say that, I knew he overstated his case, and it didn’t make any difference to Rogan, who believed him. Problem though, after the debate all the fact checkers and critics make a multitude of answer podcasts and shows savaging his point. It turns what he said a bit incredible. If you are going to go on a big show like that in front of millions, you have to get it right. You can’t say confident bombastic statements that come back on you.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are helpful. I use them at times when I evangelize. They are a net gain. However, the great Isaiah scroll, which I’ve seen myself displayed in the Jerusalem museum, varies from the Hebrew Masoretic in 2,600 places. That could be why it got buried at the Qumran caves for a few thousand years. It is not the text God preserved for His people. That is the Hebrew Masoretic.
Other Points on the Scroll
The Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete manuscript of Isaiah helps for fulfilled prophecy in Isaiah. The scroll shows Isaiah to be older than the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecies. I’ve noticed that the lost have no answer for that. Isaiah has a lot of prophecies and they predate their fulfillment, like any prophecy would.
I believe in word-for-word identical preservation, so that type of language I’m fine with it. However, we can look at the Hebrew Masoretic and compare it to the Great Isaiah Scroll and see that they are not identical, that is, unless someone wants to change the definitions of “word-for-word” and “identical.” I believe Huff shot himself in the foot with that one.
One more thing. Critics, like Alex O’Connor, the famous agnostic in England, the cosmic skeptic, he jumped on Huff’s statement on Isaiah and made hay over it. O’Connor overreacted though. The Great Isaiah Scroll is very, very close to the Masoretic text. That is still great evidence. O’Connor reacted with glee to a mistake that really doesn’t help his cause. That scroll shows that we have a preserved text that predates the fulfillment.
Four Hundred Witnesses?
Two, Huff said that four hundred witnesses saw Jesus ascension in 1 Corinthians 15. How could a scholar get the wrong number there? That was extremely curious. I don’t know where Huff got the four hundred number, but missing it was an unforced error on his part. If an ordinary Christian did that, I would not say it was a big deal. Someone purporting to be a scholar like Huff does, he can’t do that.
Stolen Body
Three, when Rogan asked Huff if there were any early examples of people rejecting the resurrection account, Huff jumped hundreds of years forward and absolutely missed the biblical account at the end of Matthew when the Jewish religious leaders made up the stolen body theory. That should have been instant recall of attempts to discredit the resurrection. It’s a perfect story and it’s in the Bible. Huff missed it there. It’s hard to explain how he could do that. My brain was screaming that passage to him as I watched.
The stolen body story shows what critics will do to discredit the resurrection, knowing how important it is. This began a long line of those trying to debunk the resurrection. The cover-up works as a force multiplier for the resurrection. They knew how important it was and rather than believe it, they tried to cover it up. And the cover-up is part of the record.
I liked that Huff used Jordan Peterson to discount moralism. He showed how that Peterson’s rejection of the bodily resurrection, viewing as a mere archetype undermined the gospel. Peterson explains the resurrection like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That misses the point of a true, actual, bodily, and historical resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus is alive today in a glorified body. Huff gave some respect to Peterson and then exposed that untruthful, unbelieving approach of Peterson. I was happy with that.
Better at Preaching the Gospel
Last, Huff could do better with preaching the gospel. He could have done better at going on the offensive and doing that. I’ve been in hundreds of similar situations as Huff, and an evangelist should preach the gospel. I get planting the seed and I’m glad he did. Also, I’m not saying he didn’t preach the gospel at all. He got some of it in. So many people were watching and it was three hours. He could have done better at going on the offensive with the gospel. Someone can do that in a respectful way and weave it in, if he knows what he is doing.
I could write far more than what I’m writing. Don’t get me wrong. Huff did good things. I rejoiced in those and still do. The issues I addressed needed addressing.
The Huff interview was so big nationally in the realm of Christianity. I don’t mean this at all like click bait. It is an opportunity for input on such an event and commentary on what happened.
How Does a Culture, Including a Christian Culture, Survive Without a Cancel Culture?
Previous Articles (One, Two, Three)
“Cancel culture” has a nice ring to it, a kind of poetic rhythm when one says the two words together. Go ahead, say them, “cancel culture.” It does now have a Wikipedia article. When I googled books with the terminology “cancel culture,” a glut of books appeared written in 2020-2021 with “Cancel Culture” in the title. I’ve not read one of them. I wanted to know how early the term appeared, because it’s been on my radar for at the most two years.
A book, Environmental Impact Assessment, written in 1979, reads:
We have come to the realization—yet again—that knowledge is power, that we need to keep building on our science and be ever mindful that a democratic society is based on genuine public engagement, not the so-called cancel culture that is denying genuine dialogue (author’s italics).
Before I graduated from high school, the quote appeared. Surprising. That’s the first and only usage I found in the twentieth century. I don’t know who popularized it. I went about trying to trace it, but I don’t know who originated the terminology. Originally, it seems, it was “call-out culture,” the idea here being that described by Adrienne Matei on November 1, 2019 in The Guardian:
The contemporary idea of a “call-out”, however, generally refers to interpersonal confrontations occurring between individuals on social media. In theory, call-outs should be very simple – someone does something wrong, people tell them, and they avoid doing it again in the future. Yet you only need to spend a short amount of time on the internet to know that call-out culture is in fact extremely divisive.
She pointed to a statement by former President Obama in an Obama Foundation Summit, which was on October 30, 2019, in which he said:
If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong word or verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was. I called you out.’ That’s not activism.
The rise of the term “cancel culture” seems to occur in the middle of 2020, which also happened to be right at the beginning of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic.’ Now it is well entrenched, and the earliest popular book seems to be Primal Screams, which said:
Consider an example that materialized in March 2019, captured in a New York Times piece called “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture.” It reported the case a (sic) young black man who identified as gay and was employed as a “sensitivity reader” by various publishing houses. In that capacity, he enforced “cancel culture” (i.e., the flagging that progressive groupthink would deem unacceptable).
Wouldn’t it be an interesting job to be a “sensitivity reader”? I had never heard of it until this quote. I googled that too, and it appears a lot, 40,000 times. As a pastor, a chunk of your congregation could take that job while listening to your sermons. The New York Times article was written on March 8, 2019.
Cancel culture emerged as perhaps one of the top issues for the 2022 mid-term elections. The cancel culture tried to cancel Joe Rogan on Spotify and failed. On the other hand, Whoopi Goldberg said something offensive about the Holocaust on her show, The View, and they cancelled her for a few weeks, so she could take time to reflect on her ignorance, stupidity, or callousness. Another aspect, it seems, of cancel culture is a reaction to the unvaccinated, losing one’s job even if he has natural immunity. This relates to the trucker protest on the U.S. Canadian border, which is bigger than a vaccination issue.
During this last six months I’ve worked on a lot of writing projects and wrote almost two chapters on sanctification for our book, The Salvation That Keeps On Saving. The two chapters are “Dedication and Sanctification” and then “The Biblical Theology of Sanctification,” the latter of which I’m halfway done, the former I’ve completed. For the latter, I am looking at every use of the related Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament words for sanctification, which is almost 1,000.
You reader know that God canceled in the most severe way everyone on earth except for eight people in Genesis 6-9. He ordered the cancellation of all the Canaanites. When Israel didn’t, Israel suffered greatly for that. The Assyrians and Babylonians tried to and succeeded greatly at cancelling Israel. The Bible requires churches to cancel someone’s church membership, called by us, “church discipline.” Jesus taught that in Matthew 18:15-17 (See our book, A Pure Church).
God says in Leviticus 20:24, “But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.” Two verses later, He continues: “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.” It’s not just Old Testament. Jesus said in Matthew 13:49, “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just.” Many more examples occur.
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