Peter McKenzie

A few comments: There is no hope that an atheist can come to faith unless the person gives up their atheism Not sure why this needs to be said – as it is a trivial point. It is not different than saying “no one can read the Bible unless they read the Bible”. Your doing this sidesteps my question of how your view deals with atheism. If Jesus had meant just a particular setting that He had come from heaven for only this time and this place and this people, then He would have said The Father gave you bread from heaven. But again the ongoing action of Jesus is a life-giving Spirit frames the action as ongoing, not static. You are framing this in a way that helps your case but still leaves you in error. I am not sure if it because I am not explaining it properly – or if you are being stubborn. I basically explained this before – but here is another try. Since the words here are quotes of what He said, it is entirely valid to have him speak in the present continuous tense – and yet have those words NOT necessarily represent continuous action forever. The action can be non-static within a time frame – and yet have an end date. We talked about this. Simply by saying that Jesus is a life-giving Spirit is not enough – if the context rules it out. I mentioned before that verse 38 is a book end to the statement of verse 37 and 38 (you misunderstood what I said when you berated me for saying that “for” is the bookend. “For” connects the previous verses and locates the setting as His time on earth. His time on earth and His ministry was that He would lose none of those the Father GAVE him. Jesus is not talking about a physical seeing, but spiritually perceiving….I say it is a spiritual hearing The context would weigh in against you here then, Because only a few verses prior, Jesus tells them that they have seen him and yet DO NOT believe (verse 36). Surely He can’t be saying there that they spiritually perceived Him and yet do not believe – unless you are saying that spiritually perceiving and believing are not the same thing. Verse 30 also provides a contrast that seems to indicate a physical type of seeing. “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you”? In trying to determine if words are to be taken at face value or symbolically, a good rule is to assume the plain reading should be accepted – unless the genre states otherwise. There is no good reason to reject a physical meaning of seeing in this text. Unless you assert it 🙂 Either way, this is not significant to my case. I will remain steadfast on the contextual evidence for a unique giving of the Father – and the lack of anything else in Scripture that supports what you are saying. Despite your claim that the grammar is on your side, I simply say that you are refusing to look at the other aspects that limit the setting and, at the same time, do no injustice to the grammar. I think I need, at this point, to restate my understanding of the giving. The ones that were given to Jesus throughout His time on earth (as per 17:6) in an ongoing way as he travelled about in an action sense while He lived – were the Jews who believed what the OT scriptures and Moses said about Him. Contextually, the thing that he said about Moses “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for all he wrote about me” – can be taken as good reason to believe that these believing Jews believed in Jesus when He told them who He was. Contrary to what you stated before, they were believers in a coming Messiah as per Moses, and when they heard Jesus they put their faith in Him. This group did not include Paul or the Roman centurion. They came to faith despite not being part of the given group. I still haven’t heard a good answer from you re your seeming contradiction about Paul not being given to Jesus by the Father. Are you saying that some are given to Jesus by the Father – but not all? And Paul is in the “not all” group? Are you serious? Verse 40 has meaning to the crowd, but Jesus doesn’t say that the “everyone” is ONLY the crowd that stands before him. If you are going to limit this to the crowd in front of Jesus, you are going to have a big problem with verse 40 in being meaningless.