The Deen Show's "Aspiring Baptist Minister"

So I had the opportunity recently of watching another edition of the Dean Show, the

Islamic program that very often includes individuals who are converts to Islam from Christianity, or at least who make that claim.

And we've noted many times in the past a penchant on the part of the folks at the

Dean Show for, shall we say, fluffing the claims of those that they have on to make them seem like they were, well, a whole lot more involved in Christianity than they actually were.

When you're putting former youth ministers on as if they're experts in Christianity, most of us realize that's not really the best way of doing things.

Similar to certain people within Christian circles who have puffed their own involvement with Islam, or maybe relatives, you know, saying, well, my father gave the call to prayer as if that somehow makes you an imam or a scholar or something like that.

Be it as it may, this most recent episode that I was directed to involved

Khalil Meeks, who has a fairly prominent position as far as, in the

Islamic community, he is involved in providing legal defense to Muslims and things like that now.

But for some reason, the folks at the Dean Show decided to present him as an aspiring

Baptist minister. And so I found that interesting, an aspiring Baptist minister.

Well, why would anyone, first of all, want to emphasize someone's former religious position?

Well, the only thing that makes any sense to me is that they are trying to say this person knew their faith very well, and when they encountered the arguments for our faith, they discovered that, in reality, our faith had the better arguments.

And so it's an argument in and of itself that someone with that kind of deep knowledge of their own faith found the arguments for our faith to be superior.

That's the only reason that I can think that you would present someone as having had a position of authority or expertise in their former religion.

And I start listening to this dialogue, and of course, I want to know, aspiring

Baptist minister. Now, what that says to me is that this person was just about to graduate from seminary, they've been involved in ministry, they know

Greek and Hebrew, they studied systematic theology and church history, and they have just been overwhelmed by the arguments of, well, then he starts talking about who he got information from, and he's talking about Ahmed Didat.

Now, we have exposed Ahmed Didat's extremely shallow level argumentation many times on this

YouTube channel. We really have. And there's much more that could be said because his extremely shallow arguments have been picked up by Zakir Naik, and he continues to repeat them no matter how often they are shown to be embarrassingly false.

And so, well, Zakir Naik has been on the Dean Show, and we've responded to his appearances and refuted what he had to say then, too.

And to all you Muslims watching, we stand ready to debate Zakir Naik. We have challenged him many times.

He won't do it. He picks and chooses who he will debate based upon, well, knowing whether he can take them or not.

And he will not debate anyone who knows the original languages of the Bible or knows church history or things like that.

He's just not going to do it. We'll love to see it happen, but it would be a very surprising thing to me.

Anyways, he starts talking about the information that convinced him, and it's like,

Zakir Naik? Really? Ahmed Didat? That kind of stuff? Then the story actually comes out.

The story actually comes out that, well, actually he had gone to college and was sowing his wild oats, so to speak.

Oh, he had been raised as a Baptist in Texas. Well, newsflash, being a

Baptist in Texas does not mean you have made a personal faith commitment to Jesus Christ.

Being a Baptist in Texas is just the same thing as being a Texan. I mean, nominalism in Texas is a major, major problem for even good

Baptist churches, let alone the Baptist churches that exist just simply because, well, there's just a lot of Texans that want to go to church on Sunday, but it doesn't really impact the rest of their lives.

And so nominalism, just being a Christian in name only, big problem. And clearly,

Mr. Meeks was a nominal Christian, raised, went to Sunday school, heard stories, but didn't know that faith at all, as we'll see in a moment because he then gives some of the arguments that he found so very compelling, and they're not compelling at all.

So he's off in college, and he's been a bad boy. He feels guilt over the way he has lived.

And so he decides his senior year, I think I'll become a Baptist minister. By the way, that's not a serious way of becoming a minister.

One goes to one's elders, and you are evaluated as to what your gifts and callings are.

And to be a college person and go, you know, I've really lived lousy, I think I'd better become a minister, shows a gross misunderstanding of the

Christian faith, a gross misunderstanding of the Christian ministry as well, just horribly so.

And so to say he is an aspiring minister means that in college he decided to do something religious.

Well, how many Muslims would take seriously someone who said, here is an aspiring imam, this man was going to be an aspiring, this man was becoming imam, and then you find out that actually he had been raised as a nominal

Muslim and had gone out and gotten drunk and stuff in college, and toward the end of his time there decides to get back into Islam and maybe become an imam, and therefore that somehow makes him an expert on Islam.

I just don't understand why it is so many Muslims refuse to put the shoe on the other foot, so to speak, and to recognize that the kind of stuff the

Dean Show puts out is embarrassing. Where are the people standing up and saying, this is not how you do dawah.

This is, we are embarrassing ourselves by using double standards continuously, and yet it's the vast majority of what

I see in Islam these days. The number of Islamic apologists who even consider the need for consistency, let alone seek to try to actually approximate it, is extremely small.

And the vast majority, obviously the most popular, in no way shape or form even try for consistency.

And so here we have an aspiring Baptist minister who is actually just a college kid, no training, clearly never understood the

Trinity, never understood the Gospel, never understood the history of the Bible, and yet here he is in the Dean Show as an expert former

Christian. Really really makes you wonder about what Eddie and the guys at the Dean Show are really up to.

And it doesn't surprise me then that you don't find these folks doing debates, you don't find them actually willing to be challenged and to answer for the falsehoods they present on this program in a meaningful fashion.

So let's take a look, let's watch a section where Mr. Meeks talks about, well you know

I decided I needed to present the reliability of the Bible. I had grown up in this religion.

You can grow up in a Baptist church and know nothing about the history of the Bible, nothing at all, zero, nada.

I encounter many Muslims that have never even heard of Abdullah ibn Masud, don't know anything about Ubaid ibn

Ka 'b, okay? You understand that, same thing. This guy is shocked, shocked

I say, to discover that some of the books of the Bible we don't know the author.

Oh no, really? Really? That's basic level, 101,

Bible 101 stuff. And yet he's shocked to discover this. And this is what's being presented as an aspiring minister.

Amazing stuff, let's take a look at what he has to say. It occurred to me through the conversation

I had with my friends that the best way to do down low would be to convince other people of how authentic and persuasive the

Bible is. You can rely on the Bible, you can trust the Bible, you can use the Bible as your authority.

So I decided that my down low as a Christian would be to use the Bible to persuade other people of Christianity instead of an emotional connection, instead of an argument.

So because I wanted to go that route, I decided to learn more about the history of the

Bible so that I could convince others of its authority. Do you want me to?

No, keep going. Okay. So as I did that, I myself had to learn more about the Bible. I was convinced the

Bible was true, again, my mom loved me, she wouldn't lie, this has to be right, everybody I knew was

Christian. So it was just me that needed to know how to understand the Bible better to present it.

Okay, let's stop right there. Did you just hear that? My mom loved me and wouldn't lie to me, and that's how you know

Christianity is true? Everybody I knew was a Christian? Really?

There's clear evidence of where Mr. Meeks is coming from. And look,

I don't blame him. I feel badly for him. If that's the level of your understanding, then it's fully understandable.

Look, ignorant Baptists, and by the way, that's not an insult. He's demonstrating that what we're saying is true here.

Ignorant Baptists make great converts to other religions. I've been saying that for a long time. I mean, there was a time back in the 1980s when every week, 273

Southern Baptists became Mormons and an average Southern Baptist church had 274 members.

So that was one church wholesale every week becoming Mormon. Why? Because, in essence, especially down South in Texas, you're just a

Baptist because you're a Baptist. That's what you're born into. And Christianity is not something you're born into.

You may be born with Christian parents. What a blessing. It doesn't make you a Christian. It doesn't make you a

Christian. It's a blessing. It means you're going to hopefully hear the gospel and hear it clear, see it lived out, but it doesn't make you a

Christian. And being born in Texas doesn't make you a Baptist or a Christian either. It might make you a

Baptist, I suppose, but not a Christian. As I started to study the

Bible and what's called the historicity of the Bible, I started to learn more about the book that I believed in.

The more I learned about the book that I believed in, the more confused I became. I started to learn things that I didn't learn in Sunday school, things

I didn't hear in church service, things that was never told to me as a Christian. Give us an example.

Well, I started to learn how we got the Bible. And the Bible is a collection of books that have come together over time.

And I was shocked to find out that the books that are now in the Bible, specifically the

King James Version of the Bible, just in case there's a different version, that we don't know who the authors are.

There are people today, you pick up a Bible, the author is unknown. Okay, as we've already noted, this is

Bible 101 stuff. It's basic level knowledge.

Any Christian who, any aspiring Baptist minister should know that there are discussions about who wrote

Hebrews, should know that the historical books do not have a single author or a named author.

This is basic stuff. And of course, for the Muslim, it's like, ooh, that's terrible. Why? You have one book, one author, you assume one author.

You hardly ever take time to actually attempt to prove that. But even taking the standard

Islamic perspective, you have a book that is written only over a very brief period of time by one author that's less than two -thirds the length of the

New Testament. We have a book that is written by 40 different authors over 1 ,500 years.

A little bit of a difference, a massive difference between the two, in fact. Basic level stuff.

Does this mean that Mr. Meeks wasn't listening in Sunday school or that he wasn't taught?

Could be either one. There are a lot of churches. This stuff isn't taught. In fact, he sort of mentions that in the next segment.

Let's look at that. We pick up books of the Bible. We find that the

Old Testament, the copies we have of the Old Testament, the oldest version of the Old Testament, is newer than the oldest versions of the

New Testament. Now here Mr. Meeks is either just completely misinformed or confused or not speaking clearly.

I'm not sure what. The Dead Sea Scrolls obviously predate the earliest manuscripts of the

New Testament. So the oldest manuscripts of the

Old Testament that we have, the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, the Ketuvim, obviously are older than any

New Testament manuscripts we have. So not sure what his point was there or if he's just confused or just what the issue is but clearly not someone who has studied the issue really well.

And we find that there were councils and votes taken on which books should be in and which should be out.

And that when you look for the history of this book, you start to say it's more concerning than persuasive.

And the more I learned about the history of the Bible, the more challenging my own conviction became.

Okay, I'm wondering what councils were referring to here. Which books were in, which books were out.

When was the Gospel of Thomas ever voted on? Other Gnostic Gospels? When were these voted on and voted out?

What councils were these? What about Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter which predates any council's addressing of the issue of the canon?

What about Origen a century earlier that has almost the entirety of the New Testament canon? And did he at the same time,

I don't think he's going to hear it from any of the people he's mentioned like Achmed Didat or Professor Badawi or whoever else he's relying upon, but did they talk about the difference in the number of surahs, for example, between Abdullah ibn

Masud and Ubaid ibn Ka 'b and Uthman? Did they go into all those things? Looking for that consistent

Islamic apologist, still looking, still looking, I haven't found him yet.

My own conviction became. And I started to learn and really,

I have a bad habit. And that is if something's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

So I have this one speed, you know, full speed ahead. So I immersed myself in this my senior year and talking to people about religion and trying to convince them about the authority of the

Bible. And as I'm learning more about the Bible, and I learn about the New Testament and learn more about Jesus and he spoke

Aramaic and nothing's been preserved in his original tongue, nothing's in Hebrew, the closest dialect that the

Jews spoke and preserved all their religion in. So I started to get more and more frustrated with the authority of the

Bible. Then I started. So now we're told that Mr. Meeks dove into it.

I wonder what he was diving into. I mean, was he diving into meaningful, believing

Christian materials? Doesn't sound like it to me. All of a sudden he's shocked to discover the

New Testament was written in Greek and Jesus spoke Aramaic. Yeah. So the reason this is an issue?

I mean, even just from a Muslim perspective, why is that an issue? Because first of all,

I mean, does the Quran raise that issue? Does the Quran even recognize the issue? Did the author of the Quran recognize the issue?

And if the Quran says in the Injil is guidance and light and it was

Natsal, it was sent down, aren't you here disagreeing with the Quran? Sounds like you might be.

But be that as it may, even from the Islamic perspective, the Christian belief is that the point of inspiration is in the writing of the scripture itself.

You mean God can't speak Greek? And if Jesus spoke in Aramaic, the

Holy Spirit cannot accurately inspire the record of his speech in another language?

So this is another example of where Muslims, they'll grab hold of secular, naturalistic, materialistic criticisms of the

New Testament and go, oh, this is great, but I won't use any of that in the Quran. No, no, it's all supernatural, the moon split and all that kind of stuff.

Double standards, unequal scales, no consistency. It is the very essence of Islamic dawah.

One of the ideas I had no idea that even existed is that Muslims think that Muhammad is mentioned in the

Bible. And I said, no, I've been to school, I've grown up in this religion, we don't talk about Muhammad.

He's not in the book. He's not in the Old Testament. He's not in the New Testament. I'm pretty sure this is where you've gone off base.

But I asked people to share with me what verses they feel apply to the prophet

Muhammad. And there's a plethora. There's lots of verses that people say this is the prophet Muhammad in the

Bible. And you go read the verse, and it may not say the prophet by name, but it mentions somebody's going to do something at a certain time in a certain way.

And as I read these verses, I'm thinking, whatever you want to interpret, anybody can come up with any conclusion they want.

But for me, I wanted to know what the Christian would say to the Muslim in response. So I got the best answers

I could to explain each verse. And as I heard the argument of this is the prophet Muhammad, here's his life, here's his story, here's where he's coming from, here's what he's going to do, here's how he's going to do it, here's what he's going to say, all of this started to persuade me that my book that I believed in was actually ordering me to follow this person.

Personally, I'd like to know not only what text Mr. Meeks is referring to, I assume

John 14, John 16, he's mentioned Achaemenid Didot. We've taken apart Didot's errors on that one many times before.

He mentioned Jamal Badawi, maybe he listened to the series that Badawi did, we've refuted those as well.

But he doesn't give us specific ones, because look, the Qur 'an doesn't say. And Muslims can very easily say, well, you know, it doesn't matter which ones you disprove, the

Qur 'an doesn't give a specific text, so it's in there somewhere, you know,

Allah knows. But, be that as it may, he doesn't tell us. But he also doesn't tell us what information he obtained in response to this.

He said he talked to, what was the term he used, experts or leaders, whatever it might be, got the best answers.

Who? Where? What were the best answers? I mean, we have taken this material apart so many times, we've debated this subject a number of different times,

I'd be happy to debate Mr. Meeks. I'm sure there are people in this audience that would help to make it possible to come down to Dallas and debate

Mr. Meeks right there in public on this very subject. We'd love to do so. Because the fact of the matter is, the

Bible nowhere mentions Muhammad. It does not prophesy Muhammad. It is an abuse of the text of the

Bible to say that it does. And so we'd be happy to engage that subject, be happy to do so with Mr.

Meeks in Dallas. Let's see if we can't arrange that and make it happen. My search at that point came down to, is

Jesus God or not? That was it in your mind. Is he God or not? If he's God, then I'm a Christian.

If he's not, I'm a Muslim. Simple. That was it. And so as I wanted to focus on that issue, what

I started to see is Jesus speaking to me from the Bible in his own words, not what

I heard from the minister, not what I heard in Sunday school, not the theology. I wanted

Jesus to tell me who he is, where he came, what he did, so I could see if Jesus is telling me he's

God or if he says something different. Now at this point, what we'd expect if Mr.

Meeks was a knowledgeable Christian of any level at all, would be a refutation of the key texts that teach the deity of Christ.

He would show a knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity. He would explain why New Testament writers identify

Jesus as Yahweh. He would recognize what Son of God means, not the way that Ahmed Didat perverted it, but the way that the

Bible presents it. He would deal with the Granville Sharp Constructions in Titus 2 .13 and 2 Peter 1 .1.

He'd deal with John 1 .1 and John 8 .58 and the I Am Sayings in John 20 .28, where Thomas identifies

Jesus as my Lord and my God. He would deal with the Carmen Christi in Philippians chapter 2, the fact

Jesus identifies the Creator in Colossians chapter 1. He would go through these things and he would explain why these things were the case, and why we shouldn't believe that, and we shouldn't believe what

Jesus said in accepting worship and making statements that no one but God could ever make.

That's what we expect to get, but unfortunately it's not what we get at all. Instead, we get a very short list of isolated texts, the standard

Muslim stuff, very shallow, no knowledge of the background, no knowledge of what these texts mean in a context, and that's all we're given.

That's all that's there. Again, to my Muslim friends, if you could just for a moment see it from our perspective, if you could see this man as if he were claiming to be a former

Muslim, and he gave these kinds of reasons for leaving the

Muslim faith, you'd go, oh, come on. And yet, why is this on the

Dean Show? Why is this so popular? Why is this so consistently the kind of ex -Christian expert that the

Dean Show trots out? Shallow arguments, and so far,

I haven't found a single person, and we've tried with a number of people. A number of the people who've shown up,

Yusuf Estes and these other people who've shown up on the Dean Show, we've tried to get them to debate. They won't. And when

I start looking at Jesus and what he said in the Bible, he said, the Father's greater than I. Well, I'd like to ask,

Mr. Meeks, is that what Jesus said? Did he call himself the Son? Did he refer to the

Father? I thought Muslims denied that. Did he really say the

Father? And what did that mean in context? The Father is greater than I am.

Is that a denial of deity? In speaking to your disciples and saying, if you'd loved me, you would have rejoiced,

I said I'm going back to the presence of the Father because the Father is greater than I am. Isn't that just a recognition that Jesus is in a state of humility and the

Father is glorified in heaven? If you read that in context of John chapter 17, which surely you did because you're being honest with the

Bible, you would have recognized that Jesus said that in eternity past he was glorious in the presence of the

Father with the very same glory that the Father had. What mere prophet, a mere Razul, Mr.

Meeks, says that? You see, John 14, 28, when read in context, is actually presenting the deity of Christ, Mr.

Meeks. The people you went to and asked about that, they didn't point that out to you.

Who did you go and ask to? Ask about that. And if you're an aspiring minister, why weren't you aware of what the context of John 14 is?

I think that's an important question to ask. I of mine own self do nothing. What does the rest of John chapter 5 say,

Mr. Meeks? Isn't that where Jesus, a mere Razul, also says that we are to honor the

Son even as we honor the Father? Again, did he actually use those words? Did he refer to God as Father, himself as Son, and say that all men, not just Jews, are to honor

Him even as they honor the Father? Did he actually say that? And given that we believe, and you as an aspiring

Baptist minister would have known, you would have understood the doctrine of the Trinity, you would have understood that he is in the incarnate state and he does everything in unity with the

Father. That there is no division, that Jesus is not presenting himself as some separate God, but that he has come to do the will of the

Father, that he has voluntarily taken on this role. And if you knew all of that, then how could these words cause you a problem, unless you didn't know all of that, which would make the whole reason of having you on the

Dean Show somewhat irrelevant, wouldn't it? We have, of course, spent a great deal of time on John chapter 5.

We will address, we will direct people to those videos where we've spent a great deal of time going from verse to verse to verse in context, in the original languages, which

I don't think Mr. Meeks has ever done. And so this text does not say what he thinks it says.

Why call us me good? There's none good but the Father. Of course, Mr. Meeks, Jesus never said what you just quoted him as saying.

When the rich young ruler came to him, he said, why do you ask about what is good? There is none good but God alone.

He didn't say the Father. So there's none good but God alone. He was seeking to get this young man, who is an idolater.

That's what his conversation is going to demonstrate. He's going to demonstrate. The man thought that he was a worshiper of the one true

God. And when Jesus asks him about the second part of the Decalogue, he says, oh, all those things I've done. And then

Jesus demonstrates he hadn't done any of them because he hadn't done the first part of the Decalogue. He didn't love God supremely.

So he's an idolater. And he's trying to get this young man to recognize that. And the man was so far away that he didn't even understand what goodness was.

Our Father who art in heaven. Even on the cross, he says, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Our Father who is in heaven.

That's how he taught us to pray. Do you believe that he referred to God the Father as Father?

Again, contradicting the Koran? How is that a denial of the deity of Christ in any way, shape, or form?

For instance, we don't believe that Jesus is the Father. Or did you believe that? If you believe that, then you weren't even an

Orthodox Christian. That's called oneness theology, in fact. And on the cross, he quotes

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani from Psalm 22. So unless, again,

I'm, you know, you're, you're the one allowing the phrase theology aspiring Baptist minister here. So an aspiring

Baptist minister would know that we believe that it was the Son who became incarnate, not the Father. That the

Son was the God -man and therefore he prayed. He wouldn't become an atheist. I mean, he'd continue the communion he had with the

Father from all of eternity. So how are any of these verses relevant? They sound real good rolling off the tongue, especially talking to a

Muslim audience as Mr. Meeks was talking to a Muslim audience. But they don't have any impact whatsoever upon a believing

Christian. And so once again, we're brought back to asking the question of our Muslim friends.

Why do you do dawah? Why does the Dean's Show exist? Why does it do all these programs that quite literally are anti -Christian programs?

Why? Who are you trying to convince? This kind of stuff, all it does is convince

Muslims. It convinces the ignorant and maybe confused nominal

Christians. It doesn't convince people who know their faith. And I want to deal with Muslims who know their faith.

They're the ones I want to dialogue with. I want my apologetic, my response, my presentation of the faith to reach the best the

Muslims have to offer. It'll reach those that are nominal as well as a result. But that's not how

Muslims do it. Why is that? I think that says a lot. I think it says a lot about the

Dean's Show and the motivations of the Dean's Show too. So, once again, we continue looking for that consistent

Muslim apologist, that one out there that will apply the same standards to their arguments against Christianity that they would use in defense of Islam.

And well, once again, we haven't found that apologist. I would love to engage

Mr. Meeks in a debate on the deity of Christ, on whether the Bible prophesies the coming of Muhammad.