Oneness Debate

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. And welcome to the Dividing Line, a mega edition today between 3 and 5 p .m.

The DL is live right now, so I forgot to put that on Twitter, I apologize for that.

But hey, what can I say? Most folks listen via podcast anyways.

Why a mega, and yes for Ralph, just a mega, a mega

DL today? Well, because next Tuesday evening I am leaving for Australia, which is why

I forgot to even announce this. Didn't put it on the blog, I didn't put it on Twitter, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So people will be coming in an hour from now going, hey, I missed the first half of Dividing Line. Well, that's why we make it available in other means, and so on and so forth.

But I'm heading to Australia next Tuesday evening, and that means that my debate with Abdullah Kunda will be coming up less than a week after that, and just over a week after that, a week and a half after that,

I'll be debating Roger Perkins in Brisbane. And so I really, really, really wanted to try to finish getting through Abdullah's debate with Samuel Green on the

Trinity versus Tawhid, and through the

Perkins -Reeves debate. Now we're much closer to finishing off the Kunda -Green debate than we are the

Perkins -Reeves debate by a long shot. And I'm really not 100 % certain how

I'm going to handle that. But if we do a mega today, and maybe a jumbo tomorrow, and like a jumbo on Monday, we might get through the vast majority of it, and I will do what

I had said I wanted to do. And honestly, again, the reason is,

I know that Abdullah has been listening, and I have been told from others that Roger Perkins has been listening, as time has allowed.

So in both instances, I have really bent over backwards to make sure that my debate partners,

I could say my debate opponents, have everything they could possibly need to prepare the most accurate, focused presentations to present their side.

I think that most people would admit that I have addressed some misapprehensions on the parts of both of my future opponents as to what the

Orthodox Christian position is. And so I really, really hope the result of all of this, aside from the edification of you, the listener, and of course the preparation of me, the debater, is that the resultant debates will be extremely useful to everybody.

I really hope that, especially since Abdullah and I are going to be addressing a subject, at least in a form that I have not heard addressed before,

I mean, Trinity and Tawhid is obviously very similar, but what we are really addressing is, can

God become man? Did God become man? That really is a fundamental presuppositional contrast between the

Christian and Islamic position, and I think Abdullah would admit it's rarely addressed in a meaningful fashion from either side.

It just stays down there at the presuppositional level and keeps most discussions from really getting anywhere. And what

I'm trying to do is find folks to debate where we can actually do debates that create more light than they do heat.

Sometimes that works, and sometimes that doesn't. And I have to leave it up to the

Lord as to which it is. Anyways, so if we do a mega today, put in two solid hours today, we put in two and a half hours on the

Christology lecture, so put in two solid hours today, we should be able to get, we should be able to finish off the debate with Abdullah Kunda.

We really should. And if not, we can finish it off tomorrow.

And really start making major headway in the

Roger Perkins debate as well. Especially because, to be honest with you, we start hitting some repetitive elements in the

Perkins -Reeves debate, and though I think it would be really, really helpful to hear

Roger Perkins' positive opening statement on the Tuesday portion of that particular debate, we're getting close to finishing up his opening portion on the

Monday, where he's responding to Reeves' positive defense of the

Trinity. So that's where we are. And very different from what we were doing the last time we were together.

I've gotten a lot of really positive responses from that, and I appreciate that.

And the problem is, what everyone's been saying is, oh, well, if you did that, then we expect two and a half hour long lectures on, you know, let's go back and let's do the

Apostolic Fathers, and let's do Nicaea, and let's do some stuff on Reformation history, and stuff like that.

Not realizing that a two and a half hour program is, it's exhausting.

It really is. If you're just lecturing the whole time. If you've got callers and you're changing subjects and stuff like that, that's a little bit different.

But it takes a little effort. We'll see. It might be something. I know especially things like, well,

Reformation history, Luther, the confluence of historical developments in regards to printing, and the rise of nationalism, and doctrinal developments during the medieval period, all that stuff coming together for bringing about the

Reformation, and Erasmus, and stuff like that. A lot of people have real interest in those things, and I really enjoy talking about them too, and stuff like that.

So we'll see. We'll see what comes of all of that. With all of that having been said,

I hope that since we're going to start with the Kunda Green material first, I'm sort of alone here.

We're sort of between shifts as far as people are concerned. I'm a little concerned about the quality of this sound.

Hopefully it's set where it'll do best, but we'll find out as we dive into it.

So, going back to the debate. This is actually, as you may recall, Abdullah had gone a little over time in his opening statement, so he was docked that time in his response.

It's supposed to be a ten -minute rebuttal, but he had a seven -and -a -half -minute rebuttal. And so this is

Abdullah Kunda responding to Samuel Green. ...has the need for an originator.

They're totally, totally different concepts. Now, Samuel quoted Psalm 2 to give us the idea that the

Son of God is present in the Hebrew Scriptures. Well, Psalm 2 is actually referring to David.

Now, where have we just recently heard that? Psalm 2 is referring to David.

Well, we know that Psalm 2 is referring to David. There's no question about that.

But remember, Dr. Lawrence Brown responded to the same text.

Well, it's just about David. It's not about Jesus. And once again, and maybe this will come up in the debate, but I'll ask it now of Abdullah Kunda.

How could the Jews have been expected to recognize Jesus as the

Messiah, given Islamic methods of interpreting the Old Testament, where any text, if it has an immediate fulfillment, cannot have a prophetic fulfillment, except that every single reference

I have ever heard presented by a Muslim in defense of the idea that Muhammad is found in the

Old Testament. Well, at that point, they completely abandoned this objection. Anything.

I mean, if you're going to go for a Song of Solomon and say that is actually in reference to Muhammad, then the idea that you would then object to prophetic fulfillment in Jesus, even when that's written in the

New Testament, the New Testament that we are told in Surah 5 to go to, to judge by, well, the double standards become patent and clear and obvious.

And so there is no question that Psalm 2 has an immediate fulfillment.

The reality is that every single one of the followers of Jesus, about whom we know anything, looked to the

Old Testament scriptures and saw in these scriptures a fulfillment in the life of Jesus.

So, basically, the Muslims on the one hand saying, you can't have any prophecy of Jesus, and on the other hand saying, but there are prophecies of Muhammad, even if there is no connection whatsoever between the original context and the fulfillment in Muhammad.

Just even Mahmadim in Hebrew becomes Muhammad, even though the roots aren't right, and the forms aren't right, and the context isn't right, and you can find prophecies of anyone and anything in the

Old Testament using that kind of argumentation. By the way, for those interested,

I finally heard back from Dr. Lawrence Brown. You may recall that last week we specifically challenged, well, actually refuted, all 15 points on the

Dean Show of Dr. Lawrence Brown. He finally did respond to me, and he basically quoted the

Quran verse, you believe what you're going to believe, I'm going to believe what I'm going to believe, thanks for reaching out to me, but no thanks. As I wrote back,

I said, well, okay, I'm sorry that you're not willing to debate or defend the things you said. However, I asked you certain questions that I think do require a response.

On the program it was said that you have a Ph .D. and D .D. that make you an expert on Christianity, and then you said certain

Bible translations have mistranslations in them and all the rest of this stuff. Where did you study?

How can we evaluate these claims in light of the fact that you don't seem to understand the original languages at all?

I mean, there are obviously important questions there, and I wrote back, raised those issues.

I haven't gotten any response, and I get the really, really strong feeling that I'm not going to get a response to that either.

So there you go. We tried. We played everything he had to say, refuted everything he had to say, gave the opportunity for him to defend everything he had to say, but that ain't going to happen.

So there you go. First time that's happened on the dividing line?

No, that unfortunately is what happens all the time. And indeed, God is reported to have called

David, my forgotten son. This day I have forgotten you in Psalm 2. And everybody can read it here.

It's about King David, peace be upon him. It's not about Jesus. So if David is also the forgotten son of God, what does that mean?

Well, again, the Christian belief is that these prophecies of the

Old Testament have near fulfillment. For example, Isaiah chapter 7. Isaiah chapter 7 had a meaning when

Isaiah uttered it. But that meaning is not exhausted by that. And I don't understand how a

Muslim can argue against that. Because A, the Muslim is saying that there are prophecies of Muhammad, and therefore they would have to have a far fulfillment, a much farther fulfillment than even

Jesus time -wise. And B, that it's clear the

Jews were supposed to recognize their own Messiah, but if there's no prophetic information as to what the

Messiah is going to be like or who he's going to be, how could they know that? So it doesn't make any sense.

The point is that the followers of Jesus, who the Quran said would be made victorious until the end of time, the only followers of Jesus we know of,

I mean, the Muslim position really has to be that the real followers of Jesus, the non -Paul followers of Jesus, they were the ones who knew the truth about these things.

And they didn't see any prophecies, I guess. And they didn't make a connection to Psalm 2, I guess. But we don't know because we have no evidence of their existence.

But they had to have existed because, well, the Quran contradicts what the Bible says at this point.

This kind of thing just doesn't... Again, we're searching for that consistency. Use the same standards that you use in defending

Islam that you then use in attacking Christianity. If you're going to be a supernaturalist, then be a supernaturalist.

If you're going to be a naturalist, then be a naturalist. But don't use naturalistic, materialistic arguments against the

Christian scriptures and then turn around and use supernaturalist arguments in defense of the Quran. Inconsistency is the sign of a failed argument.

It doesn't mean that it's metaphorical. If it means that it's metaphorical, then we're back to where I started about an hour ago.

If we want to consider... Now again, this metaphorical, this use of... These are just all metaphors.

I simply have to question, especially, much more so,

Lawrence Brown, but I have to question Abdullah Kunda as well, as to what standards he uses for determining what is and what is not metaphorical.

Was Muhammad's journey to Jerusalem metaphorical? There are lots of liberal

Muslim scholars who would say, oh, it's just a metaphor. The moon splitting in two? Just a metaphor.

And yet the vast majority of Muslims don't believe that those things are metaphorical. So there has to be some kind of a standard by which you're making this kind of judgment.

And I would argue that the nature of biblical revelation is significantly more amenable to determining what is and what is not metaphorical than is the

Quran. And why do I say that? Because the Bible, most of the

Bible, there's all sorts of literature in the Bible, but most of the Bible is rooted in historical reality.

You can read Paul's epistles, and when he writes to the church at Corinth, we can go back and we can look in Corinth.

And we actually know, we can make connections between some of the people he mentions and inscriptions that we find, and we can look at the cultural background and language backgrounds, and there's all these things we can do that will help us to identify what kind of language we're examining, what kind of argumentation we're examining.

And hence, I think we have a much safer ground for determining what is and what is not metaphorical in the

Bible, in most of the Bible. I mean, certainly you get into certain poetical forms, and it might get a little more difficult.

You get into apocalyptic, and it's a whole different world. But much more so, generally in the

Bible, than in the Quran, which so often is either completely disconnected from history, or it's only later sources that say, well, the background of that was this.

And you have to be very careful in analyzing those historical sources. Who says?

I mean, is the source of that really reliable in identifying what the historical source at that point was?

Daniel 7 and the Son of Man figure out, well, first of all, we have the Ancient of Days. Now, let me just, sometimes when

I stop and then pick up again, it's hard because of the quality of the recording and the accent to figure out what's being said.

But now we've transitioned from Psalm 2 to Daniel 7. Samuel Green had brought up the fact that as we see in Mark 14, in the trial of Jesus, the high priest abjures

Jesus to answer the question, is he the Messiah, the

Son of the Blessed One? And Jesus' response is, I am. And then he quotes from Daniel 7, where you have this divine figure who is presented before the

Ancient of Days. And this Son of Man, his servants render to him

Latruo, highest form of worship in the Greek Septuagint. And the

Jewish response is immediate. The high priest tears his clothes and says, what need is there for further witnesses?

You've heard the blasphemy. So they fully understood. And Jesus doesn't go, oh, come on, guys, nah, you think that Son of Man guy is really truly divine?

No, he doesn't do that at all. He specifically connects the

Son of Man imagery from Daniel 7 to a positive fulfillment of the question, are you the

Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One? Now, a

Muslim just cannot even begin to, I think, enter in fairly to a discussion of why the high priest would even ask this question, the

Son of the Blessed One? The Jews didn't believe God had a wife and a kid. Well, of course not.

But that's not what the Jews understood by the Son of the Blessed One. That's not what Christians believe by the Son of the

Blessed One. It's only the confused author of the Koran that thinks that sonship requires a woman, a consort.

Sura 61 .6. So we've now transitioned into that particular element.

Two totally separate what?

I think he said bodies. But again, since we don't believe that the being of God is limited by time and space, even if this were to be attempting to communicate something about that, we don't have a problem with that.

Remember the baptism of Jesus? Remember the Mount of Transfiguration? These would all be

New Testament parallels that would fulfill the very same type as you have in the vision of Daniel.

The Son of Man is not worshipped, but He's given a kingdom. The Son of Man is worshipped. I'm sorry, he's just wrong at that point.

As I pointed out, the Son of Man receives Latruo. And that is the highest form of worship.

Even if it was proskuneo, it wouldn't change anything because what was Jesus' self -understanding of this?

Mark 14. Jesus' self -understanding of this was not only an application of Himself, but it was the answer to the question,

Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One? And the Jews understood the exact application he made. So, Abdullah either has to say,

Well, Jesus misunderstood this, which I really don't think he would ever say. I mean,

I know some Muslim apologists that would say that. Some that I would never engage in debate again, having done so once in the past.

But, I don't think Abdullah would say that. I think Abdullah would have to attack the propriety of the transmission of the text of Mark 14, despite the fact that the same sources that he is fond of quoting would make

Mark the most primitive gospel. The closest to the early followers of Jesus, and so on and so forth.

By the way, that Mark 14 passage is one of the passages that gives the lie to the constant assertion that Mark has this really low

Christology and stuff like that. That's just not the case. It's one of numerous places where that can be refuted.

The angel that is with Daniel explains his whole vision to him. The point of it is that it's metaphorical.

The point is that it's metaphorical. So, all visions are metaphorical, therefore they cannot communicate truth about the identity of who

Jesus is. So why did Jesus quote a metaphor of himself in Mark 14? And again,

I guess the only response is, well, he didn't, because I reject Mark 14. Which gets us back into that interpretational and authoritarian loop, in essence, that we've discussed so many times before.

But it can match up with Christian theology, because we recognize that Jesus addressed the

Father as God, and Jesus in John chapter 17 addressed him in that way, and he said you're the only true

God. No, it fits with Christian theology perfectly, as long as you do not assume what

Muslims must assume as a presupposition, and that is not Tawhid, but Unitarianism.

Now, Unitarianism is a part of the developed dogma of Tawhid, but it does not have to be, and it is not in Christian theology.

Now, you can assume it, but now you're not really going to be able to engage the topic very meaningfully, if you just assume it rather than prove it.

So, no, it is perfectly in line with Christian theology, always has been. And secondly, the angel explains the vision, indicating that it's all metaphorical.

So, it's not a great use on Samuel's part, and if you can read that yourself, Daniel chapter 7, onwards from verse 9.

The earliest sources that represent the teachings of Jesus do say this and say it consistently, and you've got to do that in light of the

Quranic promise that the true followers of Jesus would be victorious, Allah would make them victorious until the end of time.

...on the Gilbridge, which has just recently ended, and how he relates to sacred stones and taking blessings from God, blessings from the stones of God.

The thing that's lacking here... In case, you know, he's making reference to something

Samuel said, and we didn't play Samuel's comments, therefore you might not know what he's referring to, but since the subject was

Trinity and Tawhid, Samuel raised a pretty important question, and that is, shouldn't we be allowed to...

Just as the Muslim will challenge the Christian's commitment to monotheism for consistency.

I mean, are you really a monotheist if you believe in three divine persons? And we have given an answer to that many, many times, but it's a valid point to raise and to respond to.

Well, then it's just as valid for Christians to raise the issue of inconsistencies in Islamic theology and practice as well, and this specifically

Samuel did by making reference to Hajj, and specifically to the circumambulation of the

Kaaba, and specifically to the kissing of and bowing toward the

Black Stone, which allegedly came down from heaven as a white stone, but because the simpleness of man has turned black, it actually is probably a meteorite, and it is what makes the

Kaaba the Kaaba. As I've said many times, the building itself is not the center of devotion, it's the

Black Stone, because the building has been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, not just by wars and things like that, but because it gets old and gets rebuilt, and I think the current one isn't all that old, actually.

I forget when it was last built, but the point is it's the Black Stone, and Samuel raised the issue.

Do you really believe in Tawhid? You can go online right now, if you want to, and go to Google and search

Black Stone, and then go to images, and you'll be able to pull up all sorts of pictures of people touching the

Black Stone, kissing the Black Stone. It must be a bacteriological nightmare, a microbiologist's dream all over the surface of the stone, and I've seen a picture of Muhammad Ali there by the

Black Stone, there at the Kaaba in Mecca. And so Samuel had raised this question.

You talk about Tawhid, and you talk about not ascribing equals with Allah, and the purity of worship and all these other things, which we can agree with as far as monotheism is concerned, and I don't think that there is any,

I would gladly argue that the arguments put forth by Isaiah and Jeremiah in defense of monotheism far exceed anything found in the

Qur 'an. For beauty, you know, you always hear the argument that, well, one of the greatest evidences of the

Qur 'an is from God, is that no one could produce anything like it. I'm sorry, the Qur 'an doesn't even come close to the Bible in many ways.

It really doesn't. I mean, it's a fully subjective thing. That's why, as a proof, it's just silly.

But the reality is, the biting sarcasm combined with the transcendent argumentation of the trial of the false gods in Isaiah 40 -48, this extended defense of the one true

God as relationship to time and creation, there's nothing like that in the Qur 'an. There's a little bit here, there's a little bit there, there's parallels in some way, but I don't think there's anything that comes even close to what you find in the

Bible. That's my opinion. And the problem is, when you're talking about this, it's all opinion as far as which is better or something like that, but I think

I could do a very good job in defending that kind of argumentation. I really do. So, anyways, the argument that Samuel has presented is, do you really, honestly believe in Tawhid?

In light of these things? Not so sure.

And so that's what he's now transitioning into responding to. And funnily enough, part of the contention that Samuel presented in the beginning of his presentation that we're going to do is that we follow exactly what the

Prophets say. And indeed, if we consider the Qur 'an, chapter 69, verses 43 onwards,

God is reported to have said, in our English translation, that this is a message sent down from the Lord of the worlds, and if the messenger,

Muhammad, peace be upon him, were to invent any saying in our name, we should certainly seize him by his right hand, and we should certainly then cut off the artery of his life.

Might we kill him? Might we kill him? The reason this is part of Tawhid is that we follow everything the

Prophet commands us, everything that the Prophet brought from God. Well, pardon me, it's not the Prophet commanding, it's

God commanding us. So I guess the argument is,

Allah has commanded us to do this. And I think Samuel's argument was, but is it consistent, is it consistent with Tawhid, to be bowing down to a black stone?

Hello, Rookie. It wasn't me. Rich got me started, so you can't give me a thumbs up.

I didn't really... The pro did it, so... But I'll figure it out eventually.

I'll figure it out. Anyways, we now have someone operating the board, so I'm not just sitting here talking to myself anymore, which is a good thing.

Even though, while Abdullah was talking, I tried to take a drink of water. Why is it that if I try to drink anything in here,

I end up choking all over myself? I had to turn off... What? What's wrong? You look...

Very... Looks like Adobe Audition stopped recording. Oh, that's not good. So we'll see if this is going to be a...

If you hear it live, it's the only time you'll hear it. Well, that's not good, because... Because the tape's not running?

Oh, the tape's running. What we do is, when that happens, we record the tape over to Adobe Audition.

Yeah, but the tape only has about an hour and a half capacity. Well, I'm sure we can find another tape someplace, or we can get

Adobe Audition running, or something. We'll figure something out, not to worry. You have about an hour to figure it out, so get to it.

I think I can do something in that time. Let me just find the billing where I'm chewing gum. Okay, that's how we run things around here.

Get to it. All right, well... So the digital recording is not recording, and so there's going to be a delay in getting this posted to the web, but we need to, because that's pretty much how both

Abdulla... Abdulla might be listening live, I suppose, but I want to make sure this information is there so they can download it.

So let's hope we can figure it out, or... I don't know.

Maybe someone in channel. No, what I mean is, I wonder if someone in channel would be able to fire up a recording on their end.

Quality wouldn't be as good, but we'd always have the backup that way, just in case we need to do it, and they could let you know that they're doing it so that we have the backup.

Well, for those of you clamoring about megas, you know, we wouldn't have this problem if you weren't clamoring for 2 -hour dividing lines.

That's true, because the tape would be long enough to cover all of it. You people are burning up for a man. No, they're not burning me up.

I'm kidding. Now I sound like I'm getting cold, but it's only because I, again, while drinking, choked.

But anyway, we're getting close to the end of Abdulla's statement here, so let's see if we can finish it up.

That's why we do it. We're following his instruction. This is part of worshipping God. And indeed, if you want to go further into practice, well, all of Christianity will be familiar with phrases in the

New and Old Testaments that are referring to men standing before God, bowing in front of God, putting their heads on the ground for God, Jesus did this in Gethsemane, David did it,

Samuel did it, Solomon did it. Yeah, but they weren't doing that before a black stone.

They weren't doing that before a meteorite. There was specific... This is one place where Islam, and again, secular scholars would not even argue on this one.

Would not even argue on this one. They would say, here you have a clear example of a preceding pagan belief that has been incorporated lock, stock, and barrel into Islamic theology, and it creates dissonance.

It creates contradiction. I don't see the consistency.

Now, you can sit there and say, well, Allah commanded us to do it. Well, I'd have to see where Allah commanded you to do that in the

Quran. It's one thing, you know, I just see so many different interpretations of a hadith that I'd want to see the specific commandment.

But none of that changes the reality of the argument that Samuel made is, how is this consistent? It does create a dissonance that you can't just simply dismiss by saying, well,

I'm just not going to deal with it. ...

Now, I think that at that point, he was making reference, if I recall correctly, to, once again,

Samuel having raised the issue of the role of Muhammad as an intercessor.

And this is something we have discussed in the past. You may recall, oh, wow, it's probably 2006, 2007.

It's been a few years since I played some portions of lectures by Shaykh Yasir Qadhi, and what

I found interesting, especially in those lectures, was how much time Yasir Qadhi has to take to warn

Muslims against bid 'ah, innovation, specifically in relationship to a violation of certain forms of tawhid, specifically tawhid in matters of worship, found in practices related to prayers to supplications of celebration of birthdays of Muhammad.

And what I connected that to, and I think it's a proper connection, is the fact that you have a religion that has no mediator.

You have a religion with a holy god, you have a religion with punishment, you have a religion that holds out the possibility of eternal life in paradise, but what it doesn't hold out is the mediator who makes all those things work together.

And in fact, fundamentally, denies the possibility of having a mediator in that sense who can do what what

Jesus did. So, I think that's a very, very important observation to make and to understand.

Now you just made me nervous out there when you took that out. That's because I finally just started recording again, so that way

I record up to where it ends here, and then we splice it in over the recording here. Well, that just means that that recording better not stop.

It won't. I know what happened. Okay. To save you trouble, pro number one, set up the record auto start time.

I saw that, at three minutes. Yeah, and he only set it to three minutes record. Okay, so we got the first three minutes recorded, but we really don't need that.

Okay, well, as long as we get it done, that's the important part. We want Abdullah to have everything that I have commented on here.

Now, there was one more four -minute comment that I need to find here, and this is pretty much it, because there were a couple audience questions, but as is so often the case with audience questions, they're almost always utterly irrelevant to the thesis of the debate.

I just you know, and don't get mad at me for making that observation. I can, there are a few people on Earth that have more grounds upon which to state that than me.

There aren't too many people who have done more debates than I have, and but I've got other people who have said the exact same thing.

I mean, I love it when Bill Shishko, when he would moderate the debates with Roman Catholics, and we'd come to the question and answer part.

He'd get up there and he'd say, okay, look, and he'd have to define what a question is.

It ends with a little squiggly thing with a dot at the bottom, and it normally is just like one sentence long, and you know, he'd have to go through all this stuff because he would say, look, modern

Americans don't know what a question is, and so he said it so you can blame him. I'm just following whatever

Bill said at that point. I don't follow anything that Bill says on all points, because we've actually debated on other issues, but on that, he was exactly right, so I'm going to blame him.

So, we have a four -minute closing statement, and then we just basically had some audience questions, and I just did not see any major usefulness of the audience questions as relevant to current subject.

So, four minutes of the Abdullakunda debate to cover in 20 minutes, I think we'll probably get it done today.

So, that's exciting. Let's press on. Okay, that goes back to the infinity thing, and I think

Samuel had raised the possibility you can add infinities, and you can subtract infinities, and that there's math that allows for that kind of thing, and the engineer in the other room is saying, yes, there is, and basically,

Abdullah is saying, no, there isn't, and I will confess that mathematics is the last thing that I'm going to make any comments on, but we had made the comment earlier that it really wasn't relevant to the doctrine of the

Trinity when you make the distinctions that we make as part of the Athanasian Creed or anything else in regards to being in person anyway.

So, but we covered that, I don't know, a couple months ago now. But that's not what we do, and we corrected that before.

We did not say that the Father is one -third of God. We did not say the Son is one -third of God. We did not say the

Spirit is one -third of God. We did not say that the power of God is divided into thirds, and so each person commands one -third of the power of God or any of these things.

I would direct Abdullah to Tuesday's program, because one of the things we emphasized from reading the

Athanasian Creed was its assertion of these very issues, the necessity to recognize the categories of being in person, that they are not the same thing, and what they do actually mean.

And that we do not have three Almighties, but one Almighty. And while the Father is Almighty and the

Son is Almighty and the Spirit is Almighty, we have one Almighty, we do not have three Almighties. And we explained that, and we went over that and do their participation in one divine nature and so on and so forth.

So, it's just not a valid argument against the

Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Now, I don't remember at this point, and I apologize for this,

I did listen to the majority of the Perkins -Reeves interaction yesterday on my ride.

I did not get the opportunity to re -listen to this one. So, it's been a few weeks since I heard the cross,

I'm sorry, the statements. But if I remember correctly, Samuel had raised something about the use of the term word in the

Quran, and there is a very interesting text in the Quran that describes

Jesus as a word from God. Now, I understand the normative modern interpretation of that is that Jesus is the result of a word spoken by Allah, that is,

B. But that's later interpretation. And I'm not sure that's the natural understanding of that particular

Quranic text itself. But that may have been what Samuel brought up, I'm not 100 % certain.

If you do believe, the issue is not just about the terminology in terms of similarity to the

Greek philosophers, to the Christians, it's about the actual role, it's about how they're described. Now remember,

Abdullah had erroneously tried to make a wholesale import of a

Greek philosophical concept, Lagos, in the New Testament, which just simply isn't possible. That had ignored the use of Davar and other terms in the

Hebrew Old Testament, and the role of the word, wisdom, etc., in Jewish sources, and had in essence presented the idea of the

Lagos as this impersonal force that is the ordering principle of the world, but it's the means by which

God can create the world without having to touch the world. And I point out, that's the exact opposite, the exact contradiction of John's use of Lagos, because the

Lagos becomes flesh. It's not God separating himself from the world, it's

God invading his world. It's the exact opposite concept. So, we had made criticism of that just a number of weeks ago.

The word is described in the Christian scriptures as being the thing through which creation occurred.

And this is exactly what the Greek philosophers say. Now, we don't say that in terms of the Lagos being an entity, being a thing.

The Christians say that. Yes, we believe that God has eternal speech, and yes, we believe that the

Quran is the eternal speech of God, but the paper and ink, the Quran being a whole, between the hands of the moment, is just a creative representation of that.

The ink isn't uncreated, the paper isn't uncreated. Even when we speak of it, that's not what's uncreated.

The eternal speech of God is separate from those creative representations of it. Now, if the

Christians want to say that Jesus is a creative representation of God, but he's a creation, and he's separate from God, so to have that same analogy as what we say about the text of the

Quran... I wish I could remember the specific argument that was being made at this point, because it diminishes my ability to accurately criticize what is being said.

The parallel... There are some fundamental and interesting differences between Christians and Muslims as to how we view

Scripture. There's no question about that. It needs to be understood. Frequently we talk right past each other because we don't know what those differences are.

We obviously do not believe that the paper and ink Bible that we hold is in and of itself eternal or magical or something like that.

When you burn a Bible, you are not burning God's Word because God's Word cannot be attacked or destroyed by mankind.

You are burning one representation of it, one translation of it, one embodiment of it, if you want to use those terms.

But yes, in the sense that the Word of God is the creation of God that has specific purpose and intention and is communicated to us in written form.

In that eternal sense, then the Word of God cannot be burnt or destroyed or trampled upon or any of these other things.

The mechanism by which that revelation comes to us, we view to be very different.

We don't think that you have to be wrapped up in a cloak or all the prophetic behavior that Muhammad demonstrated.

In fact, we believe that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

Holy Spirit, but they spoke. Paul said, bring me the manuscripts and the cloak that I left at Troas.

That's still the Word of God because God used Paul in the context he was in to communicate his

Word to us. That's not a part of the Islamic concept, at least the historic

Orthodox Islamic concept of how the Quran comes into existence. I would be, I would not at all be surprised if there are liberal

Western Muslims that take that kind of a perspective as to the nature of the

Quran. The problem is once the conservative Muslims take over a country they either have to leave or die.

One of the two. That's not the central concept of what the

Quran is. Well then, we basically agree. If we can agree that the Father is not a picture, that He is without an origin, and the

Son has an origin, which is what the Christian theologians that are quiet, such as what we see in Justin Mater and Athanasius, say.

No, that is not what they said. That is untrue. I'm sorry, but Abdullah, you don't know what you're talking about at that point because you are placing the concept of begettal in time and making it a creative thing, and that is not what

Augustine's doing. That's not what Athanasius is doing. As to what Justin's doing, we don't have enough of his writings to know and he doesn't ever quote

Paul, so what he's drawing from, I don't know. But that is not what begettal means.

It's a relationship term, it's eternal, and it is just completely inappropriate to ascribe to Augustine and Athanasius a doctrine that says there was a time when the

Son was not. That's the very argument, that's the very thing they both wrote entire books against.

But that's what he just did. Because he's misunderstood, because of Islamic presuppositions, this concept of begettal.

It was Arius who understood begettal to be a time -bound thing so that there was a time when the

Son was not. But that, to attribute Arian perspectives and Arian viewpoints to Athanasius, Arius' most inveterate enemy and Augustine is, well, just to make a rather major mistake, on the level, honestly, of saying that one of the

Sahaba worshipped Zeus along with Muhammad, or something like that. It's just a, whoops, not quite

It's just what happens when you bring in Islamic presuppositions and read the text in an appropriate fashion.

Or, Abdullah Kunda is wrong in his reading of patristic sources. He's making a point about the reliability of some of the stories in the

New Testament. We've got the story in the Gospel according to John, which we read at the beginning tonight, which suggests that the

Jews wanted to stone Jesus or kill him because he didn't use this expression on the Sabbath. So the narration is happening on the

Sabbath. The opening, I don't think I played this, but both sides got to have a portion of their scriptures read at the opening of the debate.

And, if I recall correctly, the end assert of Midah was sung and then read in English.

And the Christians had John chapter 5, specifically dealing with the seeking to stone

Jesus and then Jesus' discussion of the relationship of the Father and Son. You may recall that Jesus had healed on the

Sabbath and in John 5 -17 Jesus says, My Father is working until now, and I am working. For this reason, the

Jews seeking all the more to kill him, not only because he was loosing the Sabbath, but he was calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

That is the context. The reason that they were seeking to kill him, you see, making himself equal with God is the interpretation of Jesus' words,

My Father is working until now, and I am working. Which, I would ask Abdullah, in light of what

Jesus did, what else could that mean? What else could that mean than what the

Jews understood it to mean? So, evidently, the argument is that you could not, the

Jews would not punish blasphemy on the

Sabbath. Therefore, this could not have happened because the Jews would not punish blasphemy on the

Sabbath. Well, I think a much better argument we've made, the Jews would know that if they did this under Roman rule, they'd get in trouble with the

Romans in the first place, right? People, could we sort of look around the world today and see how many times mobs ignore the standardized rules of their day?

I mean, if you're going to pick up stones to stone somebody, outside of a formal setting, and I unfortunately have seen some of these horrific stonings in Islamic lands where they take people and they put them in their burial shrouds and they bury them up to their waist and then they stand around and toss huge rocks at them until they are dead.

You know, that's continuing to happen today. That's a different thing where a sentence is read and so on and so forth.

That's not what's going on here. You have a mob responding to blasphemy.

And just as the high priest tore his robes, said, what need do we have of further witnesses?

Once blasphemy is uttered, are you saying, well, then they would have put him in jail and waited?

They couldn't even arrest the guy. They are responding directly to what they see as a fundamental violation of the highest law, and that is blasphemy itself.

Who obviously had no understanding of Jewish law. Oh yes, John had no understanding of Jewish law.

Let's not worry about the fact that very clearly his gospel was written by a first century individual who knew what was going on in his context.

I know that there is an argument that someone might make. Actually, what's Dirks, Dr.

Dirks, who also has been on the Dean Show. 460 calories.

I just want you to know. 20 grams of saturated fat. I'm watching the rookie.

He has a, what do they call it? Texas something cinnamon bun?

Big Texas? Texas sized cinnamon buns, I guess. I thought it was Big Texas. I just call them good.

You are making me hungry. However, have you ever seen me eat one of those?

No. Because it's 460 calories and 20 grams of saturated fat. And I will try to live long enough to do your funeral.

But I can burn them when you can't. Well, the problem is it's still going to be clogging your arteries, son.

And I'll put you on a bike and ride you into the ground even though I'm almost old enough to be your papa.

What? I'm 19 years older than you are? 19 year olds could be papas.

How old are you? No, I'm saying you're about 19 years younger than my dad. Well, how old are you?

28. I would have had to start early, but I could have been your papa.

So don't even go there. And you know I could outrun you on a bike. Just eat your cinnamon bun and let me get back to work.

Alright, let's finish this up. I'm just trying to make a point. That's the one way we can take it.

The other way we can take it is that it's meant metaphorically. Now, the first word of creation means coming from creation.

It's sort of our relationship to the father. I'm not disputing that relationship. Let me just...

I was just thinking about the last thing you said there. I did want to comment further. I really wonder if Abdullah looks at something like that and is so biased in his interpretation of the

New Testament. Remember, this is the same fellow who said that Jesus was amazingly ignorant of what was going on when he turns around and says,

Who touched me? As if there wasn't any purpose in this. And bring out the confession of faith in the woman.

I just wonder if he'll use the same kind of standard in the interpretation of the Quran in its historical context and the splitting of the moon and the turning of people into apes and all the rest.

I mean, if you're going to make this kind of objection that, Well, this couldn't have happened because this guy has no idea what

Jewish law was. Really? I mean, John gives all this information about first century

Jerusalem that someone writing later would not have known about. Or someone writing far away would not have known.

He knows names. All the gospel writers cite names the way that people in first century

Palestine did, but people outside of first century Palestine never could have. And yet,

Oh, it's just obvious. These guys didn't know what you're talking about. Really? I mean, that's the same kind of surface level criticism that a lot of people offer against the

Quran. And I try to avoid that kind of criticism and try to make sure that the criticism that I offer is a little bit more textually based and isn't, you know, try to take it a little bit more seriously.

So I would suggest to Abdullah, he might want to look a little bit more closely and be a little bit more consistent.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. I'm sorry. I've got to back this up. And by the way, if you can get all that stuff off of your fingers from the cinnamon bun.

Oh, you can use the other hand. Oh, good engineer. Eat with one, type with the other. I see. People are getting really...

You can't even talk to me right now. You've got too much cinnamon bun in your mouth. I do want to take a break after we finish up with Abdullah before we move on to Roger Perkins.

But I need to play this section because this is one of the main reasons I wanted to play this. Let's listen to it again.

Firstborn of creation means coming from creation.

No, it doesn't. Protodocos posses tisseos.

I don't have the text up in front of me, but I'm going from memory at that point. Adberg.

The terminology, and again, this took place before I sent my book down to Abdullah, so hopefully he's had the time to look at it now.

And to look at the background of the meaning of protodocos in the Greek Septuagint, the

Hebrew terminology that lies behind it, and to realize that to assume that the term protodocos in Colossians 1 .15

means that Jesus is a part of the creation is a direct contradiction to Paul's entire argument.

It would turn the argument on its head. It would make Paul contradict Paul in an absurd way.

And of course, he may want to do that if he wants to argue that Paul couldn't even go for two or three lines without contradicting himself.

But it is not a meaningful interpretation, I don't believe, of Colossians 1 .15

and the term protodocos. No.

That's your common Jehovah's Witness misinterpretation. Common Jehovah's Witness New World Translation.

Protodocos does not mean first created. ... ...

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... ... you mean? If we've got them, how do you say they were burned?

There's no burn marks on the edge of these things. They were buried. Romans were burning anything for the first 300 years that had the name of Jesus in it, so I suppose the

Romans burnt lots of stuff. But I'm sorry, there is no parallel to what Uthman does in any of this.

There just isn't. ...the bishop of Rome issued a deed that they should be burned.

So, you know, the difference is, however, we have collected these...

Well, let's say the bishop of Rome... now, of course, the development of the power of the bishop of Rome over time, all the rest of this stuff, takes a tremendous amount of time.

It's not like in the year 200 the bishop of Rome had power over the entirety of the church. That's a

Roman myth and that's easily demonstrated. But let's say that happened. How is that a parallel to the actual first collation of the

Quran under Uthman? There's nothing in the assertions, in the

Orthodox assertions, saying that the materials that Uthman burned were heretical, that they came from a heretical group.

Nothing. The question becomes, why did he burn them?

Unless he made alterations in them. There's the issue. And from a textual critical perspective, that's the big question.

I mean, it's not difficult to create a edited version and enforce it with the power of the sword upon everybody else.

That's what led to the dislike of Uthman by many of the companions who still lived.

And they're flocking to Ibn Masud and the differences between Ibn Masud and Ubay ibn

Ka 'b and so on and so forth. But this is not parallel to something that would happen a hundred or two hundred years later in Christian history, when we already have entire manuscripts in the

New Testament, at that point, that do not include any of these books. So I'm sorry, from a historical perspective, maybe he was just rushing or something, but I just don't see how this was at all relevant.

Now that's interesting. We are all united on the same theology with minor differences.

You know, Abdullah gets away with that in Australia. I'm just not sure if he'd be safe saying that in Pakistan or Iraq or places like that, because, man,

I have heard Sunnis talking about Shiites with a venom that I've never heard expressed toward a

Christian ever. Ever. Oh, yeah, I've heard. I'm thinking of one particular

Sunni scholar who is reserved. I mean, he's passionate about Islam and stuff, but he's balanced.

Man, you hear him start to address Shiism. Wow, the flames fly forth.

And I can guarantee you, looking at the radical Shiites in Iran, and look, if Muslims can blow up other

Muslims in their own mosques, which happens all the time in Iraq and other places, how many, how much of the violence do we hear is

Muslim upon Muslim? A large portion of it, I would say a majority of it, is Muslim upon Muslim.

So that's due to small variations. Obviously, you know, more power to him if he feels these are just small variations.

He has a very wide view of things, but I'm not sure that that's really a mainstream

Islamic perspective. I have Trinitarians, I have Unitarians, I have Adoptionists, Anti -Adoptionists, etc.

Um, no. None of those other groups you mentioned outside Trinitarians are Christians, Abdullah.

Again, there has to be definitional things. Though, the issue that we're talking about here is as definitional as, was

Muhammad a prophet? So, would you say, someone who answers that, no, could ever be a

Muslim? If not, then how can you identify a Unitarian or an

Adoptionist as a Christian? We're talking about definitional things here. Theologies are totally different.

Why are they totally different? Because the message is confusing, and God is not the author of confusion.

I'm not confused, Abdullah, and your presentation hasn't introduced confusion to me.

Thank you very much. And so, that was the end of the presentations.

After that were audience questions. So, I wanted to get through all of that.

I wanted to respond, and especially, once I heard it, I remembered, oh yeah,

I specifically wanted to address the Colossians 115 thing on the part of Abdullah Kunda.

So, I'm looking forward to our interaction. I think it will be spirited. I hope that it will be on a level that, utterly unlike certain other encounters

I've had, okay? I mean, let's be honest, other than Farhan Qureshi, who is no longer a

Muslim, Shabir Ali, I'm sitting here thinking,

I just, off the top of my head, I can't think of any other encounters that have been too much depth.

I mean, even when Abdullah and I debated, it was on a subject that, you know, we sort of got into some things during the

Q &A, but it didn't get into anything of any particular depth. But I think of Jalal Abu Alrub, sorry, his arguments were surface -level, simplistic, based on pure ignorance.

And then you've got people like Osama Abdullah, which are not even in the realm of rationality.

Just not. They're irrational people. They don't hear a word you have to say. There's no reflective thought.

And then, of course, we have the Islamic cyber -stalker, who has been trying to flood my account with...

And then you've got Sheikha Wall, oh yes, our Akhmed Didat repeating fellow who got all he wanted in one debate and decided not to show up for the second half.

So it's pretty unusual to hear in -depth. I'm hoping that we're supposed to be having a debate.

I'm just waiting for them to get back to me with location and time. But there is supposed to be a debate the third week of January in Dallas with a fellow by the name of Adam Dean.

And when someone contacted me about this possibility, the name rang a bell, and he is the fellow.

And I played a portion of this sometime in the past. He's a fellow who debated Dan Barker, atheist

Dan Barker, that I've debated twice. And so I'm looking forward to that.

So hopefully, having gone through all this, having sent Abdullah my book, and having gone through all of this discussion, we will be able to have a discussion based upon what both sides actually believe, and one that is useful to folks.

And so I look forward to that. We're gonna take a break and then move back to the Roger Perkins Reeves debate, and we'll be right back right after this.

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And welcome back. We've got about 45 minutes, but we'll be able to make some some headway here,

I think, in working through the Perkins -Reeves debate. Might be able to pick up a little bit of speed simply because, to be honest with you, we've addressed many many of the issues.

And I've been thinking as I was listening again to the debate at high speed on a ride yesterday, not that I was going fast, that the mp3 player was.

Yes, it was an mp3 player designed by the late Steve Jobs. But anyway,

I just, I have high hopes, but I just don't know if my high hopes are going to be realized as far as the debate with Roger Perkins is concerned.

For two reasons. First of all, someone in our chat channel who uses the

Nick Hebrew student, who is a doctoral candidate, a student of one of the best known

Old Testament scholars in the United States right now, and obviously someone who knows that field very very well, far better than I do, had contacted

Roger Perkins and had directed him to an article he wrote basically demonstrating that his assertions at one point in this very debate on the subject of Elohim and the utilization of the term, the linguistics in regards to the utilization of the term, you have to discuss the verbs that it's used with and things like that, that Mr.

Perkins was an error. Now I don't have any reason to believe that Mr.

Perkins is trained in either Greek or Hebrew. Certainly in Greek, in light of the embarrassing situation that developed in the second day, which we have already played, and I could go back over that, where Mr.

Perkins went after Mr. Reeves for being so ignorant of Greek exegesis.

It's well known, he said, the Church of Christ is extremely lacking in Greek exegesis and hermeneutics.

And I had to chuckle a little bit at that, because he then went on to even correct

Mr. Reeves' pronunciation of Greek terms, and of course there are two primary ways of pronouncing ancient

Greek, the Erasmian and the modern, and Mr. Perkins uses a mixture of neither one as far as I can tell.

And then made the rather embarrassing argument about heis and hen as if they're two different Greek words, when they are in fact the same word in different gender forms.

And that can just as simply be proven by asking Mr. Perkins to look up hen in Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, and Donkert.

He won't find it. It's under heis, because heis is the masculine, me is the feminine, hen's the neuter.

It's a mistake that first -year Greek students would not make, and yet he made this big thing about it.

And when you're going to, you know, if you're gonna make a big thing about it, well, be prepared to, you know, if you're wrong, to admit it.

So what concerned me was that Mr. Perkins' response to this gentleman who is a graduate student in Hebrew studies was very dismissive.

And, oh, it'd be easy to refute that. And to be honest, I don't know that he possesses the scholarship to be able to analyze it, let alone refute it.

So that concerns me. Secondly, I've been really thinking about it a lot recently, and it just seems to me that I don't know that a oneness advocate can argue in any other way than Mr.

Perkins argues. And the reason I say that is, it seems, and what do

I mean by that? The primary, when Mr. Reeves gets up the very first time in response to him, and I may go ahead and play a portion of it here,

I'm not sure, but the way Mr. Reeves put it was, there is so much double -talk in that, I could never get to every single illustration of it.

And the way I would have put that, you know, Mr. Reeves is from Conway, Arkansas, so he said, so much double -talk.

The way I would have put it was, there were so many category errors. So many times where Mr.

Perkins does not show either an understanding of acceptance of utilization of proper categories in logic, and hence makes category errors in his misrepresentation of Trinitarian theology, that, yes, his presentation,

I think if we were to just sit there with a counter and start counting them, we'd have dozens and dozens and dozens of examples after any particularly lengthy statement.

And what I've been thinking is, I don't know if there's any way around that. Because oneness theology as a whole is a category error.

And it is, you would have to abandon classical expressions of oneness

Pentecostalism to avoid the category errors that are inherent to the system. And so I don't know how many times we can stop and say, no,

Mr. Perkins, you're ignoring the fact that though you operate every day on a recognition of the difference between being in person, you recognize the difference between your humanity and who you are as an individual, you recognize these distinctions, but you will not allow them.

You continually confuse them in your argumentation. No matter how many times we stop and do that,

I don't think that it can fundamentally make a change unless Roger Perkins stops believing what

Roger Perkins believes. And I don't think he's gonna do that. So while I could hope for a very focused discussion on the biblical evidence of the pre -existence of Jesus as a divine person,

I don't know that that's anything but a pipe dream on my part.

It may not be possible. I don't know. We'll find out. I can hope. I have certainly done everything in my power to make that a possibility.

But we'll see. We'll see. I wish

I could go back. I need to find it because I want to have it available to me. But I was thinking about the fact that right at the beginning of, no, not right at the beginning, about five minutes into this opening statement, and I did comment on it then, but I want to comment again now, in giving a positive definition of his own view of who

Jesus is, I was just struck by how much language

Mr. Perkins was willing to use that language was not biblical in any way, shape, or form. Then he'll turn around and say, you won't find persons in the

Bible. He's not using the Bible. So when he positively presents his own perspective, he's willing to admit the existence of different categories and utilize language like that.

But then when the shoe is on the other foot, there is that level of inconsistency once again.

So we dive back into looking at this. We're about two -thirds or maybe three -quarters of the way through his opening statement from Monday night.

Then we'll want to look at the rebuttal period and then move to Tuesday. I really want to get to Tuesday tomorrow because that's where he gives his positive statements in defense of his own position.

And I think that's extremely important. ...of co -equal and that they all have their own, each have their own mind.

And then you have the second God, the Son, calling the first God, the Father, his God. Does God have a

God? And if he enters, if the second person of the

Trinity enters into human flesh, he's not going to be an atheist. So yes, he will have a

God. The whole argument, that kind of argument, assumes

Unitarianism without proving Unitarianism. And in my opening statement, I'm going to tell you right now,

Mr. Perkins, I can tell you right now what a part of my opening statement is going to be. I am going to say in my opening statement that any argumentation, any time spent arguing against the doctrines of Trinity based upon the assumption of Unitarianism rather than the proving of Unitarianism, is a waste of time.

And I will point this out over and over and over again. It will be necessary to do so.

And then in Ephesians 1 and 3, the Bible mentions the God and Father of our

Lord Jesus Christ. Is this the God of God? Does God have a God? Romans 10... Yes, once again, the

Incarnate One is going to have a God, if he's truly man. Now, I would just ask, how do you interpret any of these things in regards to your view of Jesus?

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Who was Jesus Christ? Oh, so now the Lord Jesus Christ is just the human nature.

See, every single time a distinction is made, well, that's just the human nature, that's just the human nature. Immediate abandonment of the fact that Jesus was

Jesus. And when you call him the Lord Jesus, and yet you make this distinction, now you're making a human being who came into existence, you're making

Paul apply the term kurios, which he uses of Yahweh, of the human person. But you don't believe the human person was

Yahweh. You believe the human person was indwelt by Yahweh. Let's be consistent.

Acts 2, Acts 4 says that God raised Jesus from the dead. So there is a distinction, not just from the

Father, but from God altogether. So will Unless, of course, the normative term in the

New Testament for the Father is the os, I said normative, and the normative term for the

Son is kurios, which actually it is. And ironically, at one point,

I do remember this from yesterday, Mr. Perkins quotes A .T. Robertson as making that very statement that I just Please be consistent now and tell us tonight that Jesus is not

God, based upon the same criteria of distinctions that he used to say there's three distinct persons in the

Godhead. Apply the same logic to the distinctions from Jesus being distinct from God altogether. Now notice what he's done.

He thinks that's a logical argument, because he simply refuses to allow a person being to be meaningful and yet distinguishable categories of existence.

Since he won't allow that, then he can make that kind of argument. It's not a valid argument. It's not valid against Dr. the

Trinity, but, you know, who's he trying to impress? I guess for those who are locked into his into his train, that sounds good, but it doesn't mean anything to those of us who are not.

We believe there is a sense in which Jesus is distinct from the Father and the Holy Spirit. So it's really a moot point to quote.

We believe all that. No, no, no, you don't believe all that. You do make distinctions.

There's no question about it. But that's why the only real issue here is this.

Did the Son, as a divine person, pre -exist his birth in Bethlehem?

If so, oneist theology is wrong. Period. End of story. End of story.

You can go back and forth on all sorts of other stuff you want, but if that one thing is true, oneist theology collapses.

It's the end of it. But divine individuals with their own mind, apart from two other divine individuals?

No, sir, we don't believe that. We're waiting for the scripture that says that he signed to affirm tonight that the scriptures teach.

There's the double standard I was talking about. When he defines his position, he can use non -biblical terminology. But then you show us where the

Bible says, you know, it's like when the Muslims say, well, Jesus never said, I am God, worship me. You know, they got all that from Ahmad Didat, and they just repeated ad nauseum, and as if any of us have ever said that those words are found somewhere in the

Bible. If they're not, well, then we must be wrong. But we're waiting on that scripture tonight that states that. What birth from Genesis to Revelation says this?

It doesn't exist. Our position is that the one Old Testament God became a man, and the distinctions are between the humanity and between the deity.

Let me hasten on. My time is getting away to deal with John 16. Now, John 16, again, the word authority is not there.

He made a big play on it. It's not even there in the original manuscript and italicist. So, but John 16.

But that's irrelevant. Mr. Reeves had, in his opening statement, gone to John chapter 16.

He talked about the Holy Spirit will not speak on his own authority. And I don't have the text in front of me right now, but I think it's afhale2.

I'm going to look that up. The whole point was that if the

Holy Spirit is the Father, yeah, John 16, 13.

Well, okay, and look at that. Afhale2. Yay! When the

Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. For he will not speak on his own authority. Whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

Now, I think speak on his own authority is a perfectly valid rendering of Ugar lalesai afhale2.

The term authority, dunamis, or exousia, or whatever term might be rendered in that way, isn't there.

But afhale2 is a perfectly understandable phrase.

He will not speak from himself. But then, since you have the the adversative, alhasa akusai lalesai.

But whatever he hears points us away from himself to someone else.

So, the point is, the Spirit will not speak on his own, if he doesn't like the word authority, we'll leave it out, from himself.

But whatever he hears, he will speak. If this is the Father, Mr. Perkins, then who's he hearing speaking?

Are you telling us God is speaking on the authority of someone above him?

Who is it? It can't be the Father, because you say he is the Father. It can't be Jesus, because he's a mere human being.

So, whose words, Mr. Perkins, is the Holy Spirit repeating here?

That was the point. And I don't really believe that Mr. Perkins responded to that point.

He just jumped up and down, said, you know, there is no word authority. And I guess, from what

Mr. Reeves said later, and I've only listened to these, I think, but I'm gonna have to put those in and see if those are

DVDs. I think I have the DVDs. I think I could have watched this. All I've done is listen to it. I wonder how different it will feel to watch it.

I'm gonna have to throw it in and take a look, because it's, you know, hey, I was just listening to a fascinating discussion of the, well, a couple days ago, of the

Kennedy -Nixon debates. Oh, this is way before your time.

Well, it's way before my time. I've heard about them. You've heard about them. And they inaugurated, there were no presidential debates for 16 years after that.

That was the first, then 16 years before it happened again, because everybody realized, wow, that makes a huge impact on how people judge things.

But everybody who listened, well, the majority who listened on radio thought Nixon won, and the majority who watched on television thought

Kennedy won. You know why? Because Kennedy had been out on his boat, and he was nice and tanned.

Nixon had just gotten out of the hospital and was, well, he looked like you. Yeah, and he was, he basically didn't look ready for television.

Right. He kind of blended into the back and right. Yep, yep, you're right. And he was a white pasty boy.

And there you go, white pasty boys. Yeah, okay. So anyways,

I am, I'm gonna see if those are DVDs, because I just, I just grabbed them and ripped the audio off them.

So I, I didn't even look. Anyway, I'll take a look at it and see, and see if that sort of gives me any further insights into what

I might expect. But from what I read, or listened to, Mr. Reeves say, Mr.

Perkins actually walked over to his table with his open Bible to show him the, the italics in the word, in the

King James. And I'm just, Mr. Perkins, if you're gonna do that, don't walk over there with an English text, because I'm gonna hand you the

Greek text. Okay? Not an interlinear. I'm gonna hand you the Greek text. If you pull a stunt like that, if you do that kind of theatrics,

I'm prepared. I am prepared. The Holy Spirit says he shall not speak on his own.

Well, you told us, Mr. Reeves, that the Holy Spirit was omniscient. If the Holy Spirit's omniscient, why is he getting the door from somebody else?

Irrelevant response, Mr. Perkins. You are not hearing the point.

While the Spirit may search the deep things of God, that does not mean the Spirit cannot take a particular role as revelator, and that the revelation he gives comes from the

Father. Okay? So that's irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant. That's not an answer, Mr. Perkins. What you have to answer is, if the

Holy Spirit is the Father, then whose revelation is he giving?

Omniscience has nothing to do with this. Nothing to do with this at all. He can't speak on his own authority?

I thought he was omniscient. Omniscience and authority, sir, are not the same thing. It says, af healtu.

So if you are a Unitarian and identifying the Spirit as the only person who is

God, you have God here speaking, not of himself, but he speaks what somebody else tells him.

Well, if he's God and he created all things, then the only somebody else is his own creature.

So God is going to be repeating what he's taught and what he's told to say by what he brought into existence.

Is that what you're telling us? I think that's such a good point, it needs to come up in my presentation, too.

And Mr. Perkins, that answer you just gave there is not going to stand.

In fact, I'll present it in such a way that you won't even be able to go there. So you're gonna have to come up with a real answer to John 16, 13.

Not this kind of, well, category error, illogical response, pure rhetoric, but not substance.

A third divine individual can't speak for himself, he gets his orders from somebody else. Again, he says the Spirit of Truth.

This is the third time in the same conversation that he mentions the Spirit of Truth, which he had already identified as the same one that was dwelling with him.

Then he says he qualifies it even further. I'm going to come to you. But the implication is that the divine persons are so radically separated that they can hold a conversation with each other.

So you'd have God the Holy Spirit having a conversation with God the Son. Let me throw this in. Excuse me, radically separated?

How about distinguishable? How about the Father loves the Son? How about the

Father sends the Son? You see, Perkins says, omnipresence can't send omnipresence.

So there can be no throne of God? All of the biblical terminology of God acting or doing anything, you just got to throw all that out because he's omnipresent.

The terminology is there. You may not like it, but he constantly says, well,

God can't send God. Well, if you have three divine persons, one can voluntarily submit to the other to accomplish the glory of God as a whole, and that's exactly what the

Son did. And that's why, you know, whenever Reeves brought up the fact that the

Son voluntarily came to do what he did, he goes, John 5, the

Son does nothing of himself. Guess what phrase is? Afheal to. Once again, illustrating the unity of the divine persons.

They do not do anything separate from one another, in opposition to one another. They're accomplishing the one divine will, and yet they are distinguished from one another in their actions and in their relationship to one another.

That is the biblical terminology. You never find the Holy Spirit and the Son interacting.

Now that's very strange. Except that the Holy Spirit is sent by the

Son, and the Holy Spirit is the one by whom the Son makes his dwelling amongst his people.

But let's face it, outside the Holy Spirit speaking a few times and acts, and the

Holy Spirit giving gifts as he wills, demonstrating his true personhood in Corinthians, it is not the

Spirit's role to put himself out front. He takes from the things of Jesus, and he proceeds from the

Father and the Son. There you go. You don't find God the Holy Spirit and God the

Son, which the Scriptures never say that, you do not find them speaking with one another. Ladies and gentlemen, you won't find where the

Holy Spirit is loving the Son, where the Son is loving all the interaction is between the

Father and the Son, which is very strange language whenever the so -called third person come upon Mary and gave birth to the

Son. Therefore, or it says in Luke 1, that Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, therefore that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the

Son of God. Evidently, he holds the same views as Brigham Young at that point, because he seems to think that human categories of fatherhood should be applied to the overshadowing of Mary by the

Holy Spirit, even to the point of asking Mr. Reeves, do you believe, who is the

Father of Jesus? And when Mr. Reeves says, well, the Father is the Father of Jesus, well, it's the

Holy Spirit that overshadowed Mary, as if Son of God specifically has to do solely with the idea of some type of divine parentage sexually or something along those lines.

That's the same kind of confusion Muslims and the Mormons both have, which completely misses the significance of the divine action of the virgin birth.

It really, really does. So that's very strange to me. I will say to you, he says tonight, he does not believe in three gods.

Now, I understand that with his mouth, he says he does not believe in three gods.

There is a difference in confessional tritheism and conceptual tritheism. I will submit to you tonight that my opponent in his concepts in his mind is indeed a tritheist, but he will never come out of his mouth.

He won't say that. But when you get up here and tell me that God the Father has his own mind and he's omnipresent, separate and apart, who is not the same as, by definition of his definition he gave of distinct, who's not the same as God the

Son, who's not the same as God the Holy Spirit, they each have their own mind, you don't have one God any longer. And there you have the fundamental oneness unwillingness to allow words to have the meaning that we use them in.

That's not an argument against our position, it's just that I don't want to believe that. I just won't accept that.

When we say we can distinguish between the Father, Son, and the Spirit, we go to the Bible, we demonstrate it, and I'm sorry, but Mr.

Perkins utterly fails to give a meaningful response to the clear distinctions that are made between the

Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And when they use personal pronouns of one another, they speak as we would speak to one another and clearly differentiate between themselves.

It's very, very clear. And yet he just wants to say, well look, I no matter what you say,

I will not allow, even though I function in such a way as to recognize the distinction between person and being,

I will not allow that to be true for God in an even greater way. Even though He's our Creator, even though He must be able to exist in that way, if He can communicate that to us, it has to be something that He can do and that's within His creative capacity, but I just don't care if you say you can distinguish between the

Father, Son, and the Spirit, if there can be communication between them, if Jesus can say, glorify me, Father, the glory which I have with you for the world was.

Oh, that's just a plan. That's a plan speaking. That's a plan speaking. I'm sorry. That's just a stubborn unwillingness to believe what the

Word of God says in favor of a tradition of men. Just what it is. Now the context of John 16 is that He will guide you into all truth, for He will not speak on His own.

Where do we find all truth, ladies and gentlemen? From the Bible, which the Holy Spirit itself inspired. The Holy Spirit will not act independent from the

Holy Scriptures that it itself inspired. He Himself, not it itself, but He's not talking about the

Spirit speaking in accordance with Scripture. It's saying there was further revelation at the time of Jesus, Mr.

Perkins, and the Spirit does not speak from Himself, and that gives you a real problem because you think the

Spirit is the Father. In other words, the Holy Spirit will not give any extra -biblical revelations such as if there's a three -minded deity.

What? The Spirit will not give any extra -biblical revelations as like there is a three -minded deity, as if we believed in something like that.

Since we confess that the persons are distinguishable and have true personality, then

He wants three minds. You know, you can always tell when someone's arguments weak when they can never respond to a balanced presentation of the side.

If they can never give a balanced or fair presentation of the side, then you know their arguments are very, very weak. But the

Spirit did not give any further revelations after the time of Jesus. What's Romans? What's 1st

Corinthians? What's Galatians? What's Ephesians? What's any of the New Testament? None have been written to this point.

So the whole idea is just, you can tell,

John 16 gives him a really, really tough road to climb.

John 17 5 was taken in an isolated vacuum. We need to read the entire context. Verse 1,

Jesus says, Now the hour is come. What hour had come? Calvary had come.

Verse 3 says that Jesus—now get this—God the Son, the Almighty, according to Him who is the

Almighty, along with three other Almighties—catch that? You know, along with three—again, like I said, if you have to constantly tweak the other side so that the unity that is part and parcel of their profession is constantly undermined, it's just an indication of the weakness of your argument.

Second person, co -equal person in the Godhead, God the Son says the Father is the only true

God. The Greek word for only is monos, that's where we get our word monotheism.

Bower's Greek -English lexicon, page 527, said that this word means alone and only.

Thayer's says that He who alone is God. Strong's says soul, single.

So now God the Son is calling God the Father the only soul true singular

God. Yep, because we are monotheists.

Yes, indeedy. And unless you assume Unitarianism, which of course

Mr. Perkins is, there's—what do you expect the Son to be? Do you expect

Him to say, Oh Father, you're one of many gods? Do you expect Him to fall into your tritheism?

You're one God and I'm a different God and the Holy Spirit's a different God after John 5? No, what would you expect

Him to say? As if this is some grand revelation.

If Christ's deity is imbued, this is very strange language coming from a second co -equal divinity.

I have to hurry along, I've only got—oh, A .T. Robertson. Whoa, what happened to John 17 5?

I wanted to hear how Jesus, as a non -divine, non -pre -existing human, can say,

Father, glorify me together with yourself with the glory which I had before you the world was.

I want to hear all about plans and ideas, because this is really where oneness starts collapsing.

And if you saw at least what's available of my oneness debate from 1999, this is really where it fell apart.

My opponent just could not give a meaning. I mean, it's just, it's really hard. And I've heard people, you know, it's very difficult to try to come up with some meaningful way of saying that, well,

Jesus knew about this plan, and oh, so if I know that God had a plan, well, wait a minute,

God did have a plan for my existence. So I could speak just like Jesus. So I guess

I existed in the presence of the Father because he had a plan that included my existence, right?

And since it's a glorious plan, glorify me, right? No. Absurdity.

Absurdity and blasphemy all rolled into one. Of course not. You mentioned,

A .T. Robertson, literally that the Son was literally by the side of. Now he said literally by the side of.

Mr. Reeves, does omnipresence literally have a side? Obviously what

Mr. Reeves meant was that the Greek text, when you examine it, the term literally means by the side of.

And you then have to interpret that, and para se auto does literally mean by the side of.

The point, Mr. Perkins, as was so obvious in Mr. Reeves' comments, the point was that these are the words of a person referring to a period of time of personal relationship before time itself.

These are not the words of a person reflecting upon a divine plan that was encapsulated in himself.

Plans do not speak. Persons speak. That obviously was the meaning.

And so to say, well, does God literally have a side? Would be to be like one of those atheists that, well, it'd be like a

Muslim saying, well, obviously the Bible can't be true because it says that Jesus stands at the right hand of the

Father. And we know the Father doesn't have a right hand, so this guy must not have known what he was talking about. Right?

Again, not a meaningful response to the argument. That was your position.

That's what you quoted. You quoted A .T. Robertson and said that he had literally had a side, that the

Father literally has a side. So now you have omnipresence with a literal side. Omnipresence does not have a side,

Mr. Reeves. And we're going to see if you believe A .T. Robertson elsewhere also. Ladies and gentlemen, the terms

God and Father. Now, I stop right there and I go, John 17 5 was not touched.

Much verbiage was expressed. Mr. Perkins' mouth moved up and down many, many times.

A great deal of glycogen was transferred into the ATP pathways and glycolysis took place and electron chain transport and Krebs cycle and everything else.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're not a biology major or a biochemistry major.

All that took place, but nothing was said that is meaningful to the interpretation of John 17 5.

Nothing. There was no explanation there. And, you know, I think it's in Tuesday one where he says to both parts of the

Sabin debater on YouTube. I don't know how both parts will be there, because we only had a tape of the first portion and I had to cut it up into two parts.

So I don't I don't actually think all the Sabin debates on YouTube, because I remember specifically having to apologize because we couldn't find the rest of it.

But I'm pretty certain we have the entirety of available in audio. It's just maybe not in YouTube.

But John 17 5 wasn't touched. And it needs to be answered.

And I think it was in the Tuesday part he was going, he says, Mr. Reese, now we know you've been over there on Evidentialist Truth and we know you've been you've been listening to James White and stuff like that.

So, okay, well then I would assume that Mr. Perkins has listened to my debate with Robert Sabin as well.

And what were the three texts that I used? The specific three texts that I used, which

I will use again, because there hasn't been an answer given. One of them was

John 17 5. That's the best they have in response, is to say, well you don't really literally have a side.

Well that's not the point, now is it? We're gonna need something a whole lot better than that to provide that kind of, to provide any kind of meaningful rebuttal.

Are used interchangeably. There's synonymous terms in the Bible. To us there's one God, the Father, on and on and on.

So when Paul says that there is, God was manifest in the flesh, it's not a different God than the Father, but he's the same

God. Matthew 1 23 said he is God. I guess he's assuming a textual reading at first time in 316,

God was manifest in the flesh, means the Father's manifest in the flesh, unless he is misusing 1

John chapter 3 there, which we have demonstrated already that he has misrepresented, not misrepresented, misinterpreted 1

John and his statements that is found there. It is clear the Son that John argues has been manifested.

I'm with us. Philippians 2. I've got to hurry up and deal with Philippians 2. Yes you do need to deal with Philippians chapter 2, because, interesting enough, hmm,

John 17 5, Philippians chapter 2, that's two of the three that I presented.

The third was John 1 1. I do have some others to present this time around, but I I'm quite open.

No one would expect me, I think, to try to come up with some new presentation. I am going to focus upon the pre -existence of Christ as divine person, and I have not heard from Mr.

Perkins in this debate, which, as far as I know, is the most recent example of Mr.

Perkins' position. Same thing with Abdullah Kunda. As far as I know, that's the most recent example of his views on the relevant topics of our debate.

So I'm not talking about debates from 15 years ago. We're talking about the up -to -date stuff.

I have not heard a meaningful rebuttal. I have not heard a meaningful response to those texts.

So there will have to be something new that is provided at that time.

We will not be able to get through everything here, because we only have about three minutes left in the program before the music starts, but we can we can get a start anyways, and then we will press on tomorrow and get as far as we can get.

Now, Philippians 2, 5, says, "...let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, the Messiah, being as a present active participle in the

Greek, in the form, or faith, of God, doesn't say a thing in the world about a person there, did not regard equality with God to be grasped."

He's saying this is referring to the second divine individual in the Godhead. Let's look at some grammatical facts real quick.

Now, I'm already confused, okay? Why did he mention that Huppakon is a present active participle?

When someone throws something out and then doesn't explain why that's significant, that normally indicates there's a problem with their own understanding.

And he is specifically going to criticize Mr. Reeves for emphasizing that Jesus has eternally existed in the

Morphe Tutheo on the basis of this participle. Now, a number of years ago,

I wrote an extensive paper, an extensive article, a feature article, for the

CRI Journal, and I hope Mr. Perkins has obtained it. And in my translation,

I provided a full translation of the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, 5 through 11. And in my translation,

I specifically said he eternally existed. Now, why did I do so? Because when you use a present participle about an action that takes place in the past, you have to explain why that is.

Now, there could be iterative uses. I mean, I would like to ask

Mr. Perkins, which works on Greek syntactical categories he has studied or taught from, but I have in the past taught both

Greek and Greek exegesis and syntax. And I can defend my understanding of Huppakon as a present participle in its context, referring to eternal existence.

And we'll do so tomorrow on The Dividing Line, when we continue at this very point, focusing on Philippians chapter 2.

Excellent material. Hopefully get through the rebuttal period, and then we will also,

I really do want to get to the Tuesday material. So we hopefully will get as far as we can before I have that long, long journey on the airplane heading that direction.

We'll be back again tomorrow. I'll let you know on the blog this time exactly when. For a jumbo edition of The Dividing Line, we'll see you then.

God bless. The Dividing Line, we've been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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