A Quiz on Christianity? #1

So, I got to admit the fact that YouTube attaches what it thinks are relative videos to your videos is rather interesting. It's somewhat of a sort of very random research tool, not quite as useful as Amazon, but you.

Know.

And so, I was doing something with one of my videos, I don't remember what it was, and I look over and I see this test your faith video that for some reason YouTube thinks is relevant to something I just did.

So, I go over there and I start watching it and by the first or second or maybe the most the third question, I go, ah, a Muslim has posted this, and of course I was right. It is difficult to communicate to people the mindset of the Muslim, and it's very difficult to get through that mindset because Muslims are taught as a part of their faith certain denials of Christianity, and very frequently those denials are based upon just complete misapprehensions, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings of what we believe.

And so, what I want to do is I want to go through this video and give you the questions.

That they ask.

You're supposed to, you know, multiple choice questions or something like that, and then the answer is given at the end, and point out where our Muslim friend has completely missed the boat basically.

And hopefully, if I can post these as responses to his, maybe there will be some sort of a dialogue there, at least some sort of a means of communicating to him that the objections he's posting really don't address real Christianity.

The Canon of Scripture and the Difference Between Books and Gospels

Let's look at the first one. Okay, so we start off testing our faith in Christianity here, and we're asked, the Bible is made up of how many different books, also known as Gospels? So we start off with a bit of a problem because, of course, there are only four Gospels in the Bible, and our questioner seems to be confused as to the difference between a Gospel and just a regular book.

So what's actually being asked, and I think what the idea, once you see the answer, is the person's trying to bring up the fact there's a difference between the canon that Rome has and that the Protestants have in regards to the addition of the Deutero-canonical books, which if you looked at our other videos, we go into rather in depth on that.

But I guess the idea is to raise some questions concerning the canon, and maybe hope people aren't aware of that. But anyways, the second question, the word Bible means a book or a scroll, and it can have both meanings, though in Koine, it was primarily in reference to a book, and that is, of course, the background and usage of the term in regards to the Bible as well.

And we really don't have any particular problems with the answer that is provided. Not really sure, really, what the relevance of the whole book-scroll issue is really all about. Then we get into the third question, and that's when we really get into some of the theology.

The Incarnation and the Son's Relation to the Father

An accurate way of describing the relationship of Jesus to the Father is actually dependent upon what you're talking about. It would be B, if we're talking about possession of the divine nature in eternity, and it would be C, if we are talking about Jesus as the incarnate one who has voluntarily submitted himself to the Father, voluntarily entered into human flesh, as we see in Philippians chapter 2 or John chapter 1.

But, of course, that's not what's really being communicated here, because we see in the answer, John 14, 28, which only refers to part of the truth of this matter, because if you read the whole thing, why should the disciples have rejoiced?

Because Jesus said, I go unto the Father, for my Father is greater than I am. If they had looked, if our questioner would look back, he would see that Jesus was talking about the time before he entered into human flesh.

When was that? When he shared the glory of the Father. Then we have one of the most common objections of Islamic apologists to the deity of Christ, well, of many people, actually, not just Islamic apologists, and that is the issue of Jesus's self-limited knowledge during the incarnation.

And of course, this was an issue that I addressed back in 1999 in my first debate with an Islamic apologist, Hamza al-Dumalik, and in fact, here are the comments that I made at that.

Time.

Now, the vast majority of errors made by those who attempt to deny the deity of Christ are based on their failure or refusal to allow for the biblical fact that Jesus was both God and man, the eternal and divine word who became flesh, John 1, 14.

This is seen in those who cite such passages as Mark 13, 32, where the incarnate son says that the knowledge of the day or the hour of his return is known to the Father in heaven.

Alone.

That is, it is divine knowledge, and as the Lord had not yet returned to the presence of the Father, he rightly says that it is not currently within the sphere of his self-limited.

Knowledge.

Remember, Jesus said the disciples should have rejoiced that he was returning back to the presence of the Father because the Father was in a greater position in heaven than the son was while on earth, John 14, 28.

As we saw, the son voluntarily took that position, wherein he laid aside the exercise of divine prerogatives, which would include divine knowledge. To say that the son is not God because he laid aside the privilege of divine knowledge makes as much sense as saying the Father is not God because he does not know what it is like to be a human or to eat food.

The Father and the son took different roles in bringing about the redemption of God's.

People.

Those differing roles distinguish between the Father and the son, but they do not tell us that the son is any less deity than the Father. Next we have the question, Christians are immune to poison? And of course, this is based upon a misuse of the longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 -20.

Even though it cites the NIV here, the NIV does mark this section off as a later edition. The kind of use of this kind of information, again, just seems to point out that whoever produced this video is trying to prey on people who just really don't have any knowledge of the background of the Bible, don't have any knowledge of its text, and really can't utilize scholarly resources very well at all.

Old Testament Law and the Context of Deuteronomy 25

Next we have the time-honored mechanism of attacking the Bible, where you go back into the Old Testament, go into the Old Testament law. You find some obscure law that is difficult for people to understand today because they don't understand the original context, pull it out, and hope the shock value is enough to actually accomplish your purposes.

Here you have an exact example of that, even though the question actually misrepresents the original text in Deuteronomy chapter 25. It's actually talking about a woman who comes to the rescue of her husband and grabs the genitals, or attempts to damage the genitals of the man that her husband is fighting with.

People go, well, why cut off her hand? That's barbaric. Well, again, go back to the original context. The original context is the people of Israel, the land is passed down from generation to generation within families, therefore the ability to have children is vitally important.

If you read the context, it's talking about, for example, what happens to someone who would refuse to raise up children to his brother's widow, and how he is to be looked upon with great disdain. This is the context, and the whole aspect of it is respect for the procreation of children and the need to protect these things within Israelite society.

And so what you do is you just hope that people are ignorant enough, that they won't look at the context and just go, oh, I just didn't know anything about that, and that's how you get away with these kinds of questions.

Jesus and the Cleanness of All Foods

Now our next question demonstrates that our questioner is most definitely from the Islamic perspective, because it asked if Christianity is similar to other Abrahamic religions, such as Islam and Judaism, in regards to forbidding the consumption of pork.

But isn't it odd that when asking a specific question like that, instead of going to the New Testament documents that define Christianity, we end up back in the Old Testament, and hence, have the wrong answer.

We should have gone to Mark chapter 7, where Jesus said, he said to them, are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?

Thus he declared all foods clean. Now if you're going to try to define Christianity, you might want to go to the documents that actually address the specificity of the Christian faith. As Lord gives us time, we'll continue our examination of these Islamic questions about the Bible and the Christian faith.

Thanks for watching.