Meme Day on the Dividing Line

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line on a Monday. We're going with Monday because, well, it's going to be a busy week. Tomorrow, actually, I'm going primetime, or I guess it's late night. I'm going to be on with the guys over at Polygia Studios.

So that sort of messes up tomorrow as far as doing The Dividing Line. So we moved it to today. So that's what's going on there. And this is the last week of the program for a little while. I'm not sure if we'll have any opportunity while I'm in the UK and in South Africa, but generally it doesn't work real well just because of time differences and things like that.

So we'll see how all of that ends up ends up working out. There are a number of people tweeting a tweet. I really wish they'd come up with a different term than that, but tweeting a tweet that Royal Dutch Airlines, KLM, just put out.

And the caption to the graphic is, It doesn't matter who you click with. Happy Pride Amsterdam. And so if you can show the, there we go. It doesn't matter who you click with. Well, actually, folks, when you think about it, it really does.

Because there is only one of those situations that will keep you alive in a crash. Okay? That really illustrates the abject insanity of leftists.

So if your plumber takes that approach, would you hire him? If your plumber? Yeah, no.

No, there's no. If your mechanic took that approach in fixing your car, there's just, you know, electrician. Oh, electrician, bad. Very, very, very, very bad. But that's actually what they tweeted. And any child can look at that and go, But it was designed to only work one way.

And every plane I get on, it's only going to be that bottom, because the other two don't work. And yeah, that's the point. Yeah, and there you go. Thank you, KLM, for illustrating the insanity of the modern world and its abject foolishness.

The Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection Against the Meme

We have all sorts of neat stuff to get to, but primarily sort of in the form of memes today. I had said on the last program that there was this meme that had been posted by one of my Muslim friends. And I hadn't brought it up.

So I need to go back to where it was here. Preview. I'm not sure if that's the right one, unfortunately. No, that ain't it. Should be that one. There we go. I saw this and I thought, you know, I'd like to respond to this, because it just seems very often, amongst many of the Muslims online, there is a...

It's almost like, and I don't have it in here. I was going to grab it. But it's almost like the old Jehovah's Witness, the Red Jehovah's Witness, you can live forever book, study book. And there's the famous black page where the background is black, the printing is white.

So it's a reverse type thing. And they just grossly misrepresent the Doctrine of the Trinity. Whereas a page or two earlier, they accurately represented it. And the purpose was to create confusion. Now we know why the Watchtower is doing this, but there are times, especially amongst some of the Muslims that clearly do reading just outside of their own tradition, that you just really wonder, how can you repeat such confused stuff?

And this is a good example. It says, I am God. I had a son. He was also me. He was a man though. I had him killed. He came back. I did it to save you from how I made you. So, all right, let's say you have someone who, you know, doesn't have to be a Muslim, though a Muslim tweeted this.

And notice it says, Christian theology summed up question mark. All right, I am God. Let's at least start from there, which means this is a theistic system. At least we're not arguing with, well, obviously an atheist might be doing this just merely out of spite or mockery or whatever else it might be.

But God is personal here. This is, I had a son. Well, immediately, this is not Christian theology. Because fundamental to Christian theology is the fact that it is intrinsic to the nature of the Father to be the Father, the Son to be the Son, the Spirit to be the Spirit.

And these are eternal relationships. It's not, I had a son. You know, first of all, I forgot to turn my phone down. Secondly, it's the same telemarketers. And I, even the last time they called, I patiently, I said, please, please, please.

I'm not going to be buying your stuff. You call every day. Would you please take me off your list? Okay, sir. Just call again. There is a special place in the netherworld for people like that. They will never be allowed to sleep because they will get telemarketing calls every single time they start dozing off.

That's going to be their punishment for eternity. Anyway, sorry about that. So as I was saying before, so rudely interrupted by whoever the Go Green people are. Whoever Go Green is, it's a solar thing.

Once somebody sells your number to them, they will never stop. And of course, they spoof their things. You can't block them. I've tried and it's just not possible. So whoever those folks are, you're bad people.

And I've thought about getting solar, but I can guarantee you the one company I would never get it from is you, just so you know. So effective marketing there, guys. Well done. Anyway, what were we saying?

So Moses was in the bulrushes. Yes. Okay. So yes, I am God. I had a son. So the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit is eternal. God did not have a son. The son did not become the son at a point in time.

It is fundamental biblical teaching. If you look at John 1. 1, if you look at the language that John utilizes in the prologue, he always uses the imperfect aim, the imperfect form of I, me to describe the son, the logos prior to the incarnation, which does not point to a point of origin, a time of creation, anything along those lines.

So immediately, I am God. I had a son. Cannot be Christian theology because it fundamentally misrepresents. Now, it could be a misrepresentation of Christian theology on the part of the author of the Quran because the author of the Quran didn't understand what I just explained to you.

The author of the Quran did not understand what the middle school students at my church can explain to you regarding the relationship with the Father and the Son. That's just a fact. So I am God. I had a son.

He was also me. Further confusion, since this seemingly indicates a concept of modalism, a refusal to recognize a category difference that we all live with every single day. We recognize the difference between being in person.

We live with that. I would be a horrible person if I did not observe the distinction between being a person. Why? Because I just parked my nice little car outside and it's sitting in the sun. On blacktop.

It's cooking out there. Every car in Phoenix, unless it's in the shade and we don't have covered parking here, unfortunately. Every car that sits outside in the sun is just cooking. It's terrible what it does to batteries and rubber and everything else.

And if I did not recognize that my car is actually not personal, my car has being. If my car runs in another car, there is an inevitable physical reaction that could kill me. It's called potential energy.

And when you suddenly stop something, it contains a tremendous amount of potential energy. If bad things happen, your cells explode and you die. So it has being. If I hit you with it, you'll know that it has being.

But it's not personal. If it was personal, it would be terrible. I'd have to go out there. I'd be having to try to provide it with shade and giving a drink of water and all sorts of stuff like that. But I don't do that.

You just know that when you buy a car in Phoenix, eventually there's going to be problems. But it's not personal. We recognize the distinction between being in person every single day. You cannot interact with this universe without recognizing that distinction.

And so when we look at the biblical data, we clearly have presented to us in Scripture the fact there's only one true God. There's only one God, Yahweh. All the other gods are, well, as the psalmist said, all the gods of the peoples are idols.

But Yahweh made the heavens and the earth and everything that's in them. And so we have one God, Yahweh, and yet in that same biblical revelation, you have three persons revealed to us. The Father is not the Son.

The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. And they are distinguished from one another. They have interaction with one another. They use personal pronouns of one another. All of the Oneness Pentecostal modalistic stuff is thoroughly outside of biblical orthodoxy and historical orthodoxy and every other kind of orthodoxy.

So you have one God, three persons, and you have the regular identification on the part of all of the apostles, Peter, Paul, Luke. What are they doing in their writings? They identify Jesus as Yahweh.

And so you clearly have the foundation of what becomes informal creedal expression, the doctrine of the Trinity, which is specifically designed to protect the positive statements of Scripture in regards to this is what God has revealed.

Therefore, these are the errors out here that we decry because it's going to result in a denial of specific elements of biblical revelation. And once again, the author of the Koran didn't know any of those things, gives no evidence of knowing any of those things, and gives evidence of actually having badly misunderstood many of those aspects, which were, even if you say it was something developed over time, that development was done long before the period of Muhammad.

So, I am God, I had a son, he was also me. So we have two out of three statements so far in error. Only I am God works. I'm sorry? Yeah. Well, for some reason the picture is not up on the screen anymore.

I don't know what happened to it. It just disappeared. But anyway, he was a man though. Well, the son voluntarily took on flesh. That's what John 114 tells us. The Logos became flesh, Philippians chapter 2, the Carmen Christi.

The one who had eternally existed in the form of God made himself, notice the use of the pronoun there, the reflexive pronoun, made himself of no reputation. This is something he did, clearly demonstrating that he is a divine person.

I'm a popular person today. And so, he was man though, simply, and here really is the key issue in regards to the Islamic misuse of this particular meme. He was a man though. This is the issue. This is the fundamental theological issue that I debated with Abdullah Kunda in 2011 down in Sydney, and that's still one of my favorite debates, probably is my favorite Islamic debate.

Is the one with Abdullah Kunda on this very issue because we recognized, hey, for all the dancing around that we do on other subjects, this is the fundamental issue. This is where we differ. From the Christian perspective, God has the perfect right, power, capacity, ability, since he's the creator of all things, to voluntarily, not under compulsion, but to voluntarily take upon himself a human nature.

And he created human nature. He can create the perfect human nature. It was interesting that Abdullah's argument was, well, if it's not divine nature, then it's automatically imperfect, which means God cannot create anything that's perfect.

Anything that isn't God is automatically imperfect. So everything God creates is imperfect. I think that's an argument that has some very, very serious problems to it when you think about it. But that's the issue.

From the Islamic perspective, God cannot enter into his own creation, just can't do it. And so we do believe, and when it says, he was a man, though, we truly believe he truly was man. That does not mean that the nature of God changes, the being of God changes.

Many, many Muslims say, well, that's a change in God's being. No, it is not. And you don't have any basis for saying that. Because, you see, you believe that Allah has acted in bringing creation into existence.

He acted in time. There were miracles that took place that you believe actually took place historically. The Mirage in Isra, for example, took place in time. It took place in history. Was Allah different before those miracles and after?

No, God can act in history as he creates without himself ontologically changing. And the same thing is true here. If Jesus was a demigod, if Jesus was 50 man and 50 God, to where there is an intermixing of the natures, if there wasn't a such thing as the hypostatic union, okay, then you might have an argument.

But that's why Christian theology is what it is, is we recognize these things. We recognize the necessity of safeguarding the positive affirmations of scripture. And that's what the creedal statements are, is a thought through protective envelope that communicates the positive affirmations of divine scripture over against, well, in the context of, you know, the gospel goes out into the Greek-speaking world.

And so there's going to be questions that are asked, etc. etc. And so if there was a mixture between the divine and human, so something new came into existence. Well, then yeah, you could argue that there has been a change in God's being.

We fully recognize that that is an error and that's why we repudiate that. So he was a man though. He truly was man. I had him killed. You know, it's interesting in the sense that the death of Christ is the specific result of the divine decree.

If we are limiting the speaker here to the Father, there would be a context in which that is true. Acts chapter 4 makes it very, very plain. The early church gathers after being persecuted, being told not to preach in the name of Jesus.

And part of the fundamental understanding of the early church in that prayer is that what happened to Jesus? Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Romans and the Jews, all of those different motivations were all under the sovereign control of God.

And not only do we have a beautiful picture of what's called compatibilism there, where you have real acting individuals in time who are held accountable for their actions, they're acting upon different motivations, so on and so forth, but you see it's perfect harmony with the decree of God.

But you likewise see that the death of Christ was no accident. And I frequently say to anyone who is going out into doing work, in fact, we're gonna be looking at another tweet here in a while from a fellow by the name of Logan Stephen Kane.

He's asked, for my 16 months, I will be in Kenya bringing the gospel to Muslims. What homework do you recommend for that mission? Well, listening to this would help. That's the first thing. But one of the things that I say to anyone who is wanting to do homework and wanting to do preparation, wanting to be a sharp instrument in the master's hand to glorify him and to be used in spreading the gospel amongst others and being an instrument of mercy and things like that, you need to understand the mindset of the people to whom you're speaking, and for the vast majority, especially of Muslims in Kenya, there would be this.

Well, let me tell you a story because, you know, I need to mention this because I don't think Jeff watches this, but my good friend Jeff Neal, he and I go way, way, way, way back. Jeff went to Uganda.

I don't remember what year it was. It was quite some time ago. And was it in the 90s? Yeah, he came back and he... I need to... I may have told him this. I'm going to be at his church at the end of October.

So maybe I can remember to mention this to him then if he doesn't listen, but he gave such an incredible report on his time in Uganda. I felt like I had gone. I mean, it was so well done. Were you there?

Really? Okay. All right. It was like I had gone there. I mean, it was just... he's a tremendous communicator. And one of the things that he mentioned was talking to a Muslim individual. And their question, their just honest question, and these are people that live in extreme poverty in comparison to what we have.

One of the honest questions that the man had was, how can you believe that Allah would allow such a beloved prophet as Risa bin Maryam to die in such an ignominious way? And this is a real stumbling block in the Muslim mind.

The way that a prophet dies is extremely important in Muslim thinking. And so if Jesus dies a horrific death hung upon a tree, that indicates a level of disrespect on God's part for that prophet. And so they're like, we love Jesus, so we can't believe he died like that.

And you say you love Jesus and yet you believe that he died in a horrific fashion. And so it is extremely important to emphasize the voluntariness of the death of Christ. John chapter 10. No one takes my life from me.

I lay down my own accord. Extremely important to be able to emphasize this aspect of things. It really, really, really is. And so part of that homework, part of that preparation, memorizing those scriptures like that, that emphasize the fact that Jesus does this.

So when it says, I had him killed, was it the Father's will that the Son give himself upon Calvary's tree? Yes. Was it the Son's will? Yes. Was it the Spirit's will? Yes. Is this not what the Triune God had determined in eternity past to do?

Yes. These are all true statements in that sense. And it says, I had him killed. He came back. I guess that's the way of saying he rose from the dead. And a little dangerous for the Muslim to cite that because you can go right into scripture and you can demonstrate that the Father raised the Son from the dead, the Son received back his own life, the Spirit likewise raised him in the power of God.

So you have a Triune divine action in the Resurrection testified all across the text of the New Testament. The idea that 40 Arabic words, 600 years later, can overthrow that testimony all undoubtedly from the first century causes a bit of a bit of a problem.

But yes, he rose from the dead. You all have to have guards protecting the tomb of Muhammad because ISIS wants to blow it up just like they want to blow up the Kaaba. Again, from the from the Muslim perspective, ISIS is like the radical reformers.

They're like Jan of Leiden. And I know most Muslims don't know who Jan Leiden was. But if you know what happened in Munster, if you know about Jan of Leiden's bones hanging in the Cathedral for 400 years, then you get an idea.

But you have to protect Muhammad's tomb. Because we know where it is and we know what's in there. We don't have a tomb to protect because his was empty. And you've got to deal with that. You've got to deal with that Resurrection.

And I know the only way you deal with it is by saying, well, he wasn't crucified in the first place. He was just Rafa 'u. He was taken up, right? Well, the problem is, as I don't have it in here, but as your better modern scholars admit, Rafa 'u that is used there in Surah 4, verse 158 is only used of exalting people, not lifting them up off of planets.

That's a highly questionable interpretation of that particular text in Surah 4, verse 158. So we have an empty tomb. And that says a lot. So it says he came back. Yeah, he was resurrected. Father, Son, Holy Spirit all involved in that divine action.

And then the person who cited this wanted to make sure I didn't skip over the last part because he knows I'm a Calvinist. I did it to save you from how I made you. Now, other than the first line, other than the first sentence, we've found misrepresentation in every single phrase when it's given its lack of context and so on and so forth.

I did it to save you from how I made you. No, I did it to glorify myself in the salvation of individuals who were set in their heart and mind to be my enemies. I did it to demonstrate my own glory, my own power.

I did it to demonstrate my own wisdom in how I created this world. That's the biblical statement is that in the salvation of these individuals, this whole group of people, as numerous as the sand of the sea, in other words, a very large number of people that God's going to demonstrate his righteousness.

You may have heard of the term Theodicy from Theos, God, and Dikaio to justify. It's the justification of God in the light of the existence of evil in the universe. And the fundamental Theodicy, according to Christian scripture, is that God is demonstrating his wisdom and all of his attributes.

He's demonstrating his power, his wrath, his might, Romans 9, his mercy, his love, his justice, Ephesians chapter 1. Fundamentally, he's demonstrating the power of his grace in light of his holiness. And so it's not, see this, one of the primary problems with this statement is that it's focused upon the nature of man.

And it's ignoring not only the nature of the fall, but in the change that takes place in the fall, but it shifts the focus from what it's actually all about. And I can't blame this particular Muslim for this because probably the vast majority of Christians with whom he's spoken probably done the exact same thing.

In other words, rather than having the focus upon who God is and what God is accomplishing, there are many Christians who in their discussion of the whole field of soteriology, the purpose of the cross, purpose of God, end up focusing it upon mankind rather than upon God's purposes, upon what God is doing.

So I could understand why there would be a bit of confusion there, but it's not a matter of saving us from how he made us. It would be, if you're going to talk about us, it would be saving us from the fall that our father Adam brought us, the state that he brought us into.

And I don't see how a Muslim can argue. I know a Muslim rejects original sin, but not on a presuppositional ground. The reason being, you have the mitak, you have the fitrah. And so if the fitrah exists because of the mitak, because Allah rubs Adam's back and all of his progeny comes out and they stand upon the plain and they say, you are our Rabb, our Lord.

And because of that, there is this fitrah, this sense, sensus divinitatis, the sense of the divine. We say it's because of the image of God, different terminology, very similar applications. If Adam can represent us in that way, so that that mitak has the continuing application to us, I'm not really sure you have a really sound basis for saying, well, Allah cannot hold us accountable for what our representative did, even though Adam represented us in the establishment of the mitak.

It's not like we came into existence. We were in Adam. So anyway, just something to think about there. I did it to save you from how I made you would not, basically other than the first sentence, we were able to demonstrate a contextual, whoops, at every single point.

Homework for Missionaries to Muslims

So if we go over to this one here, I just wanted to quickly mention to Logan Stephen Cain, Logan's run 19 on Twitter. For my 16 months, I will be in Kenya bringing the gospel to Muslims. What homework do you recommend for that mission?

Well, thank you very much for taking the time, Logan, to be willing to take that amount of time out of your life. I think you'll be changed tremendously by that experience. You will be changed tremendously by a recognition of what we have here and what we're losing here.

You'll discover that you'll fall in love with the people there and you will miss them tremendously when you come back. The Christian people there will undoubtedly bring you conviction in the sense that it just seems to me that true Christian believers overseas, just they have so often have so little that they have a deeper spiritual reality than many people here in the United States do.

Just to warn you ahead of time. As I've said for years, your greatest asset will be your ability to clearly communicate all aspects of God's divine truth to everyone. So scripture memorization, a full understanding, and when I say full understanding of Christian theology, I'm referring to such things not only as really having a great deal of comfort in understanding the doctrine of the Trinity, the hypostatic union, atonement, all the things that are vitally important to be able to explain how the son did not become the son, how God did not have a wife and then have a child and all these types of things, which are not the general aspects of Christian theology that you're normally dealing with in the United States.

Those things are vitally, vitally important. But there also needs to be a full understanding of what justification is, why we have a proper standing before God in light of the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

Knowing your own faith is the most important thing, knowing it in such a way that you can explain it to others without using Christianese, and that's the tough part. We are so, so dependent. Within the church, we can depend upon a common vocabulary, which you will not have there.

And here's the, so knowing your theology, but here's where what I talked about last week in my refutation of Steve Kemp's Apologetics of Ignorance. It's one thing, because what I just said is very similar to what Steve said, gospel, gospel, gospel, know the gospel.

Right, but you're going to Kenya. You say you're going to be dealing with Muslims. What that means is you're going to be facing a set of barriers created by a pre-existing faith structure. And if you love the people to whom you're reaching out, then you will be the one, you won't expect them to be making the extra effort to understand what you are saying.

You will take the effort, you will make the effort to be clear in your presentation to them of what you're saying. So you will need to have sufficient knowledge of their faith structure to recognize that if you use certain terms, there's a danger that they will interpret them.

And this is especially true. It's obviously true in dealing with Mormons, for example, because they use the exact same terms, mean completely different things. But because of the nature of Islam and because of the Quran coming after the Old and New Testaments and becoming the lens through which the Muslim looks back at our scriptures and hence misinterprets our scriptures, you have to understand what they believe so that you can understand how they will not purposefully, not maliciously, but just naturally misinterpret words that you might otherwise think are self-evident in their meaning.

And so by understanding what they believe about Surah 4, verse 157, the denial of the cross, hence the denial of the resurrection, by understanding their denial of original sin, by understanding, it's not in the Quran, but in the Hadith, the very popular Hadith of the man who killed 99 people and yet Allah ushers him into Paradise because he just simply inquired about repentance.

If you know what the Sirat is, the bridge, the judgment, having enough Ameen to be able to see, to get across the bridge, all the pictures of judgment within the Hadith in Islam, those Hadith stories become the lens through which the Quran itself is interpreted and in some ways, those popular Hadith stories are more functionally important to know than a real good grasp of the Quran.

Obviously, I would strongly suggest for you getting the study Quran, just the appendices and things like that in it are very, very useful. Now realize that the level of writing and scholarship in here, in all probability, is going to be significantly more advanced than the average person you're gonna be talking to on the street.

There's a question about that, but that's an excellent resource to have to be able to, as you're reading through the Quran, and obviously if you have my book on the subject, the chronologically, the chart...

It's up here toward the beginning. Unfortunately, it got split across two pages. It's on pages 52 and 53, and he says he drops it. Whatever Christian you know about the Quran, use that instead of just reading straight through, because that will help you to get a better sense of what's really going on in the text and sort of follow it along.

Otherwise, the Quran can just seem like an interminable set of disconnected statements that just simply don't make a whole lot of sense to you. And so if you use that, it should help in coming up with a better understanding.

Scripture memorization. I wish I had a hundred verse memorization system for Islam someday. There are key texts. If you listen to some of the better... Well, listen to a representative sample of the debates, and you'll start picking up some of the key texts.

And yeah, there's no question, memorizing some texts from the Quran helps. It really does. I mean, if you don't know Surah 4, verse 1 to 7, you need to, and there are key texts. If you look at my Islam A to Z presentation I did in New Orleans, I don't know how many years ago it was now.

But a lot of the key Quranic texts in Surah 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, especially, you need to understand what shirk is. You know, there's all sorts of things along those lines that would be of great assistance to you as well.

But yeah, having that kind of information at your fingertips rather than having to look it up or have it on index cards, something like that. Memorizing. It sounds like you're a young guy, young folks can memorize things a lot easier than us old folks can.

Would be extremely helpful along those lines as well. So I was going to suggest, there's actually a... I know where the book is in my library, but there is a collection of hadith. What is that called?

I think it had the word pearls in it. I know right where it is in the other room, but there is a collection of hadith that are found in both Bukhari and Muslim, which gives them sort of a special authority when they're found in both collections.

Reading through something like that, rather than the eight volumes of Bukhari and nine of Muslim, you may not have time for that. This is just one volume. One volume would give you a good representation of the type of material that these folks have heard their entire lives.

And an understanding of that will help you to get through to these folks much much with much more facility than if you're unaware of these things. So there you go. I wanted to respond to that. And Pearl of Great Price?

No, not. Pearls of Wisdom? A Selection of Hadiths from the Prophet Muhammad? Don't think that was. Now that you know, now that I've said all this, you know what I'm going to have to go do. We're going to take a brief break.

We'll just look at the board cube a second.

James wants me to entertain you with a song while he's in looking for a book. So, let's see requests. How about run to the battle? No, that's not hmm. Could be a few other interesting offerings there while he's in there looking through, apparently without any success, looking through his, no, I'm not going to dance.

Apparently, he's not having any successes. He looks in vain. And no, B Forbes, I'm not going to sing Free Bird either. Can you guys actually hear him from the other room as.

He's trying to, he surprised me on this.

Otherwise, I would have had the John Denver album ready.

Okay. Well, I didn't even close the door. This is the only thing I could grab real quick and I know that ain't it. Well, this is interesting. It's called The Sealed Nectar. It looks like this, same publisher, but no, I couldn't find it.

Switch cameras. It's right there. It's in the wrong room. I told you, what does it say? Pearls and Corals, Arabic English, a collection of agreed upon ahadith from al-Bukhari and Muslim, volumes 1 and 2.

There you go. I knew it looked like that. I just thought it was, I just didn't realize I had it in here. Okay, there you go. Pearls and Corals. There you go. We've never done that before, but there we just did.

I'm going to drink a little lemonade here as we press on. Carla says we can hear him. Taking a brief break on the dividing line. Rich will sing. Good, good. Okay, we press on. We press on. Where did I put that?

I had an article that I wanted to respond to. Oh, okay. Good. Basam Zawadi, yesterday, 9 20 p .m. Christian apologists such as James R. White, that would be me, constantly try to argue that Muslims are not consistent when they critique Christianity.

Well, that's because I think Christians are not consistent in the vast majority of situations. A different standard is used by Muslims to, well, let's put this way. Basam, and Basam and I have debated, you can see our debate from Trinity Chapel in Wandsworth in London from a number of years ago on whether the Quran misrepresents the doctrine of the Trinity, especially Surah 5.

Basam's a nice guy and but obviously we're on opposite sides. And so we have to disagree with one another and we try to do so without expression of hatred. Personally, I think that's a mechanism, not only showing respect for the other person, but first and foremost, it's a mechanism for showing respect for the truth.

I think when you throw personal animosity into a discussion of these issues, you're actually disrespecting the truth. So that's neither here nor there at the moment. But Basam says, I've done this and I do.

I really do believe that there is an important issue of consistency on both sides, obviously, because as my Muslim friends know, I've gotten into a lot of trouble by calling my own Christian compatriots to consistency in the standards they use to critique Islam.

And so I have to be consistent myself. I do agree that there are many such Muslims, as I'm sure Dr. White would admit, the same could be said vice versa. Exactly. However, sometimes it appears Dr. White demands consistency from Muslims when it's not his place to do so, let alone even in his favor to.

The best example is when debating the historicity of the preservation of a religious scripture or religious tradition slash story. If a Muslim were to consistently apply the stringent Hadith historical method in his discussions with the Christian, the discussion would end pretty quickly.

Christians like Dr. White are perfectly comfortable believing that a certain book is divinely inspired even without knowing who authored it. Now, let's just stop right there. A lot of, vast majority of Christians have no earthly idea what this is about, none whatsoever.

Let me just use this as an example. We were just talking about this, pearls and corals. Alulu wal marjan. Alulu wal marjan. I guess that's pearls and corals. Um, so Alulu is pearls. Okay. Anyway, a collection of agreed-upon Ahadith from al-Bukhari and Muslim.

Now, what does that mean? Why is this relevant? The two most authoritative collections of, we call it the Hadith literature. The plural of Hadith is Ahadith, which is why it calls Ahadith. So Ahadith, just more than one.

A Hadith is a singular. I normally define it as a statement or action of Muhammad and his companions. You know, you could argue with that, but it's fairly close. And the Hadith literature becomes the very lifeblood and source of the entire Muslim narrative.

It becomes the mechanism by which the Quran is interpreted, the various schools of jurisprudence, all drawing from the Hadith. Sharia is a distillation that is fundamentally founded upon the Hadith. And so obviously the fact that the Shiites have their Hadith and the Sunnis have their Hadith, and they are not the same Hadith collections, and they're very different.

In fact, very, very different. Very, very important. So the Hadith are not technically inspired in the sense that the Quran has eternally existed as a, well, it's eternally existed as divine revelation.

It's eternal. It's uncreated. So the Quran is fundamentally different than anything else, really. The Hadith is not on the level of the Quran, but it is interesting to me that without the Hadith, you couldn't make heads or tails out of the Quran.

Even though the Quran-only folks would undoubtedly disagree about that. Anyway, when it says a collection of agreed-upon a Hadith from Al-Bukhari and Muslim, what they mean by that is these two experts in Hadith.