Bodily Assumption, Then Facts and Observations on the Misrepresentations of the Qadhi Dialogue

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:34

Well, looks like Rich broke everything again, so we'll see what happens. Welcome to The Dividing Line.

00:42

Here we go again. I would really think that the stream would be our smallest problem.

00:49

The biggest issue is if the lights go out, because some electrical component blows up outside in the heat, because it's a little toasty, a little toasty.

01:04

Let's see, let's see. I was going to bring this up. I forgot to do that before we got started. Let's see. Officially, 116 degrees

01:12

Fahrenheit at Sky Harbor International Airport, which is still six huge degrees beneath the all -time record, and when you think about how much energy it takes to get from 116 to 122, that's a fair amount.

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We hit like 118, 119 last year, and hit 122 27 stinking years ago, so everybody's like, everything's going to melt, and nothing's going to melt.

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But if the power goes off, not only will we disappear, we won't be coming back either, because it's like, no

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AC? We'd even now, because I got AC in my car, and I got enough gas to keep running. So, anyways, welcome to the program today.

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Seems like a lifetime ago, I went to London, back when

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I still had friends and things like that, and had a debate with Peter D.

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Williams. I still haven't taken the time, haven't had the time, to look up the

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Brompton Oratory, but it certainly seemed to me that there was some historical connection between John Henry Cardinal Newman and the

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Brompton Oratory, but it was a great location. The room was a little small, but it worked out for the group that showed up on a

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Monday night. It wasn't exactly, oh, look at that, the official high of Sky Harbor so far today, 117 degrees.

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Okay, well, thank you very much. So far, and it's only 3 o 'clock, we got about another, it's normally around 3 .30

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that you get your tops, so yeah, we'll see. They were saying 118 today, so anyway,

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I predicted 117, so we'll see. Anyhow, we, some of you had heard the program that Peter D.

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Williams and I did on Unbelievable in regard to the Reformation, and a lot of people commented, man, need to have more programs like that, because wow, it was sharp, it was pointed.

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I know Justin liked it simply because there's no dead air with Peter D.

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Williams and I. He can just sort of toss something out and then stand back, and that's easy for someone to do when you've got a program like that going on.

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Anyway, and he was willing to debate what most people are not willing to debate at all, and that is he was willing to debate the

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Marian dogmas, and wow, let's see, we had that first debate with Jerry Matitix on Long Island, that wasn't the first debate with him, but it was the first of the

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Great Debate Series, and then, man, now I think about it,

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I think the next one was St. Janice in Santa Fe on bodily assumption, and so I think this is only the third,

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I think it's only the third time we've done a Marian debate. So, it's not easy to get folks to defend these things, and so it was exactly as I expected it to be, you know,

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Peter D. Williams is British, you know, so when you're British, you sound so much more intelligent than all the rest of his folks over here, but I had said beforehand this will be a debate over Sola Scriptura, because if Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith of the

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Church, there is absolutely no basis for these Marian dogmas. I'm sorry, you can play with all sorts of, you know,

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Solomon throwing in for his mother, queen mother type things, and Ark of the

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Covenant stuff, all you want, it's not going to get you where you need to go. You have to have, and it's not even what

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Rome's claiming. When you listen to Rome's claims, if you read

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Munificentissimus Deus, it's a really hard word to say, it says this doctrine is revealed by God.

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So both in the defining of the bodily assumption in 1950 and the

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Immaculate Conception a hundred years earlier, almost a hundred years earlier, it said these are doctrines revealed by God.

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This is revelation. That's interesting. Almost every

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Catholic apologist, and Peter D. Williams did this, Gerry Mattox did this, they want to establish sort of a hierarchy of truths.

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And what's weird is we're in this day where we have, well, genetic engineering and nuclear war and gender bending and transgenderism and all this kind of stuff.

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This is when you would need the clearest insight of mother church and what is

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Rome doing, but defining stuff about Mary that is abjectly irrelevant.

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And then says, well, and this isn't as important as the Trinity or stuff like that.

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It's sort of second order truth, but revealed, but no one knows it until 1800 years after the birth of Christ or something like that.

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It strikes me as a little bit odd. And so I knew it was going to be on Sola Scriptura and it,

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I'm not going to say that it was too much on Sola Scriptura.

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I expected that to be there, but, you know, it is an issue of authority.

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It's an issue of, you know, if Rome says it, and that's what it was with St. Janus too. If you've seen the

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St. Janus debate from Santa Fe from a number of years ago, it's like, hey, Acts chapter 15, the church can do this.

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So that's it. Don't have to worry about history or anything like that. And Peer D.

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Williams' approach was a little more nuanced than that, but it came down to the same thing. When he talks about the consensus fidelium, the, you know, the people of God have come together.

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And when the people of God agree with this, it's like, that's not the people of God. That was the

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Roman Bishop. That's not the people of God. You can claim that all you want, but it's not the people of God.

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And, but the, still the idea was, well, once you have this consensus fidelium, you have this, the ascent of the faithful, then census fidelium, maybe not consensus, but you have, you have this agreement of the people of God, it's all you need.

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It's all you need. And so it's basically the same argument as what

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St. Genes had, had presented. And so anyway, what

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I wanted to address, I know that we're working on the video. I saw it just a few minutes ago on the computer.

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So we're dropping in the, the presentations and stuff like that, and, and we'll, we'll, we'll get it out there.

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And the audio's been out. So, you know, once the audio came out, a lot of people, you know, listened to it and said, wow, this is, this is extremely useful.

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What are you doing? That's weird.

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That's a little, you know, interruption, but, you know, it's, it's just, anyhow, the video's going to come out.

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And so I'm not going to show you any video from it or anything like that, but you just have to trust me when

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I say that one of the things I wanted to address about the debate was not, you know, going through everything that was said.

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I think people can follow all that. There is one particular issue that came up that because, well, partly, and I did,

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I did sort of just make a brief mention of it, but I didn't make a big, a big deal of it. Peter didn't get his opening statement in the time period that he's supposed to.

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And technically you're not supposed to borrow from your rebuttal time to finish your statement because then the other guy never has an opportunity to rebut what you're saying.

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There's a reason why, you know, here's where you make your presentation and then the rebuttal periods for rebutting that part.

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Anyway, it came later in the debate that he made the amazing argument to me, amazing, that he admitted that the

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Immaculate Conception was pretty much not known or believed for the first thousand years of the church.

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There's just so much evidence against it. So many people spoke against the idea. There's just nothing that you can come up with that would be supportive of the actual dogma of the

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Immaculate Conception, which a lot of, well, both Catholics and non -Catholics don't even understand what it is. But it's the idea of the pre -application of the merits of the death of Christ to Mary in such a way that she does not contract the stain of original sin even in her conception.

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And so they want to be able to say that Mary has a

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Savior, that Jesus is her Savior, but she never really needed one because she had one before she needed one so that she didn't need one, but she had one.

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You can just go around like this forever. The idea being and the illustration that's normally used is, you know, if I'm walking through the forest and I come around a sharp bend and there's a steep drop off into a muddy pit.

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So, I fall into the muddy pit and someone comes along and they pull me out.

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They're my Savior, but I'm still covered with mud. With Mary, she's about to fall in and Jesus reaches out and grabs her and keeps her from falling in.

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So she's not covered with mud. In both instances, she needed a Savior. Now, of course, if Savior also includes cleansing and she never got the mud, then it's still an issue.

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But that's the illustration of what the Immaculate Conception is. And basically, he admitted, you know what? Nobody in the first millennium, first thousand years taught this or believed it.

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He admitted it. It's true now because the census fidelium, but yeah.

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But when we talked about the assumption of Mary, he pulled what

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Tim Staples does. Now, Tim Staples, there is a article, if you want to look it up, called

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The Assumption of Mary in History. It's on the Catholic Answers website. And writing around the middle of the fourth century, he gives, he's talking,

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Epiphanius is writing against various heresies of the day. And he's talking about the

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Coloridians. Now, the Coloridians is a group I've mentioned to you before because, interestingly enough, this hooks in in some strange, odd way with Islam.

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Because there have been some who see in Surah 5 and the reference to Mary as a deity.

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There are some who have theorized that Muhammad had some kind of contact with this group called the

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Coloridians. The problem is, there's no evidence that the Coloridians were in Arabia any time around the time of Muhammad at all.

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I mean, this is middle fourth century. This is almost 200 years earlier.

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And I've always found it to be a pretty long stretch, personally. But that's where the connection is.

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And he gives a quotation from Epiphanius.

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And Peter D. Williams did the same. I think he just, if I recall correctly, he just referenced

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Epiphanius. I don't think he gave the quote, probably didn't have time to because it was later on and it was sort of in a rushed context.

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Here's what Staples has for us in his article. For I've heard in turn that others who are out of their minds on this subject of this holy ever -virgin have done their best or doing their best in the grip both of madness and of folly to substitute her for God.

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For they say that certain Thracian women there in Arabia have introduced this nonsense and they bake a loaf in the name of the ever -virgin, gather together and attempt an excess and undertake a forbidden blasphemous act in the holy virgin's name and offer sacrifice in her name with women officiants.

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This is entirely impious, unlawful and different from the Holy Spirit's message and is thus pure devil's work.

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And nowhere was a woman a priest, but I shall go to the New Testament. If it were ordained by God that women should be priests or have any canonical function in the church,

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Mary herself, if anyone, should have functioned as a priest in the New Testament. She was counted worthy to bear the king of all in her own womb, the heavenly

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God, the son of God. Her womb became a temple and by God's kindness and an awesome mystery was prepared to be a dwelling place of the

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Lord's human nature. But it was not God's pleasure that she be a priest."

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And so he's talking about these Coloridians. Now what's interesting is that in, and I didn't bring it in here, but I have, if you look up Michael O 'Carroll's book,

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Theotokos, or as it's pronounced in modern Greek, Theotokos, which by the way,

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I was discussing Theotokos. We went back doing the Christian history series at church yesterday morning.

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Michael O 'Carroll says the following about Epiphanias. In a later passage, he, Epiphanias, says that she,

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Mary, may have died and been buried or been killed as a martyr.

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Or she remained alive since nothing is impossible with God and he can do whatever he desires for her and no one knows.

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A Palestinian with opportunity for some research, Epiphanias does not speak of a bodily resurrection and remains noncommittal on the way

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Mary's life ended. He nowhere denies the assumption or admits the possibility of assumption without death, for he has found no sign of death or burial.

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He suggests several different hypotheses and draws no firm conclusion. So here is someone who's very, very, very, very, very pro -Roman

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Catholicism, Marian doctrine, and even he admits Epiphanias doesn't seem to know anything about it and says doesn't deny the assumption.

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Well, the question is, was anyone talking about an assumption to deny it? And the answer is no, they were not.

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Any fair, serious analysis of church history to this point would tell us that there was opportunity after opportunity after opportunity for numerous writers to have made reference to the bodily assumption of Mary if it was something that was believed by all

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Christians. Not a whisper, not a word, nothing. And it's extremely important, for example,

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Everett Ferguson in the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, Epiphanias' approach suggests strongly the absence of a fixed tradition of Mary's final lot.

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Isidore Seville, 636, breaks the general silence, but only to attest profound ignorance on the way

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Mary left this earth. Now 636, that's over half a millennium later. A century later, the

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English bead confessed his ignorance of the final disposition of Mary's body. It is clearly a belief that evolved very, very, very, very late in church history and there were numerous references in the early church where other writers talked about people who were assumed into heaven.

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Never once is Mary mentioned. Now why would you mention Enoch and Elijah and not mention

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Mary if it was a common belief of everybody? So, any kind of fair, even -handed analysis of church history would say the bodily assumption was unknown to early

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Christians. Now what really, really surprised me was that Peter D.

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Williams actually took the perspective that, in reality, it was so widely believed that no one talked about it.

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So widely believed, no one denied it, therefore no one said a word about it. Not in hundreds and hundreds of sermons, many of which just exalted

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Mary, no one ever thought to mention what

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Rome felt needed to be dogmatically defined as a revealed doctrine in 1950 as if there had become this huge hue and cry denying what had always been believed.

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There wasn't. And he makes reference to Epiphanius.

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And what is he making reference to? Well, the same thing that Tim Staples does. And Tim Staples quotes, let me give you the quote that he gives.

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So, here's the quote. And Tim is saying, I think we need to really think this through because this is what, here's the quote.

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Like the bodies of the saints, however, she has been held in honor for her character and understanding. And if I should say anything more in her praise, she is like Elijah, who was virgin from his mother's womb, always remained so, and was taken up and has not seen death.

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And he says, Saint Epiphanius clearly indicates his personal agreement with the idea that Mary was assumed into heaven without ever having died.

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Now here's where it's really hard to take seriously Roman Catholic abuse of patristic sources.

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I'm going to read you the whole thing because context really helps. But just for clarity for a moment, what if this is how we defended the

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Trinity against Unitarians? Can you imagine if we have volumes and volumes of the writings of the early church and the closest we can get to even something that suggests the

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Trinity is something like that. How, what would you think about that?

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The problem is if you read the whole thing, here's context, context, context.

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I know I'm boring, context. Yes, of course, Mary's body was holy because remember he's talking about the

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Coloridians here. Yes, of course, Mary's body was holy, but she was not God. Yes, the

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Virgin was indeed a virgin and honored as such, but she was not given us to worship. Boy, that's a problem with hyperdulia.

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But anyway, she worships him who though born of her flesh has come from heaven from the bosom of his father.

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And the gospel therefore protects us by telling us so on the occasion when the Lord himself said woman, what is between me and thee?

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Mine hour is not yet come. For to make sure that no one would suppose because the words what is between me and thee that the

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Holy Virgin is anything more than a woman, he called her woman as if by prophecy because of the schisms and sects that were to appear on earth.

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Otherwise, some might stumble into the nonsense of the sect from excessive awe of the saint. For what it has to say is complete nonsense and an old wives tale as it were, which scripture has spoken of it?

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Interestingly enough, right in this context, he's asking for scriptural evidence. Which scripture has spoken of it?

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Which prophet permitted the worship of a man, let alone a woman? The vessel is choice, but a woman and by nature, no different from others.

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Hmm, doesn't sound like you believe in the immaculate conception either. Like the bodies of the saints, however, she has been held in honor for her character and understanding.

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And if I should say anything more in her praise, she is like Elijah, who was virgin from his mother's womb, always remained so and was taken up, but has not seen death.

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If Mr. Staples wanted to be accurate here, he'd continue on because what he's saying is what he's like,

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Elijah, she's like Elijah. And because she's like Elijah and Elijah was taken up to heaven, then

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Mary must've been taken up to heaven, but that's not where he stopped. She is like John who leaned on the

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Lord's breast, the disciple whom Jesus loved. She is like St. Thecla and Mary is still more honored than she because the providence vouchsafed her.

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But Elijah is not to be worshiped, even though realized in the son of, oh, great, page 625 is not part of this book preview.

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Thank you ever so much. So he makes connections to others immediately thereafter.

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And the issue with Elijah was his virginity.

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If you do not have anything in the context of Epiphanius, anyone contemporaries with him at all who believes in the bodily assumption of Mary, how can you read that into his words?

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This is what Rome has to do. This is what, and the only time, all

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I said in the debate was, I don't believe that the citation of Epiphanius bears the weight that you've placed upon it, but that's all the time that I had.

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And I thought afterwards, you know, it would be good to mention this in examining this.

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When you look at this and you think of the rich sources, citations that we can provide, you know, we can go to Ignatius on the deity of Christ and we can do all this kind of stuff.

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And this is all they've got to establish, not to establish, see, this is what took me aback.

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It's one thing to go, well, this was the seed that eventually grew into the oak tree.

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That's not what they're saying. The argument here was everybody believed it.

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Just nobody ever mentioned except Epiphanius sort of let things slip there. But this represents the entire faith of the early church.

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And I'm just like, I hope you wouldn't argue that way with Unitarian.

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I hope you wouldn't defend the Trinity or something like that, that way, because it's just, that's all you've got.

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That just shows, I have said many, many times, we can allow the early church writers to be the early church writers.

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With all their insights, imperfections, ignorances, traditions, whatever, we can let them be what they are.

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Once Rome says this is a doctrine revealed by God, and it's been believed since the early days, the faith of Roman Catholic can no longer handle these sources in a fair and meaningful fashion.

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They have to force the early church writers to be something they weren't. And I think that's what happens there with Epiphanius.

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So I've wanted to get to that, and, well, we have been just a little bit distracted, to be perfectly honest with you, ever since I got back from Europe.

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And some of you know why that is. I suppose

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I should look here real quick, because I thought I, nope, nothing much, just a few people like, are you guys all going to die of the heat, which we're not, it's okay.

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You just sweat, and if you drink real well, you'll be just fine. Tomorrow, I'm sorry,

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Wednesday, both hours of The Line of Fire with Michael Brown, I am going to be

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Dr. Brown's guest. Yeah, Wednesday, not tomorrow, Wednesday.

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And we are going to be discussing what has happened in the aftermath of the

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Brannon House hit piece series with Osama Dakdak and others, and then the articles, and then the picking up of this story by Robert Spencer, and the publishing of an article on Jihad Watch.

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And so we're going to be talking about what has taken place, and the gross, documented, unquestionable, wild -eyed misrepresentation of what took place in Memphis, when

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Dr. Yasir Khadi and I got together over two nights, one at Grace Bible Church, and one at the

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Memphis Islamic Center there in the area of Memphis.

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And I do not, I will not apologize for a second for identifying these gross misrepresentations, because that's all they are.

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When we can start off at the beginning of that presentation and lay out what we're doing.

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First of all, first night was not a church service. There was no gathering of the body as the church to open the

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Word of God, present the Word of God. Yasir Khadi was not asked to preach in a church, none of that.

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Everybody who's represented that way is lying through their teeth. Now most of them have not even bothered to watch it, and so they're lying as a result of trusting others who have their own reasons for their lies.

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The second night was not, again, a formal service in the mosque.

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It was a dialogue, it was a discussion between a Christian and a Muslim, just like the first night was.

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We laid out our positions. This is not a place where we are going to be compromising anything that we believe.

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Dr. Khadi is a, and I identified, I did not identify him as a moderate. I identified him as a believing, conservative

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Muslim. He is a Muslim scholar. He goes and speaks at Isna. Anybody who speaks at Isna, therefore, in the minds of many people who run websites and make money off their websites, because everybody else speaks at Isna, they're all connected and they're all jihadis.

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That's just, that's the nice, simplistic, easy way to avoid having to use more than 40

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IQ points to address this subject. Everybody's connected to everybody else, and look, folks,

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I'm just going to be honest. Follow the money. Follow the money. When people are making their money from selling you fear, and grape extract drinks along the way, they don't have any vested interest in being careful, fair, honest.

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They have a vested interest in you being afraid of other people, because that's how they make the money.

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And so, these websites that exist that say, well, this person spoke at a conference, and this person did, and that person went and did that thing, therefore, this guy is this.

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Okay, there you go. I never introduced Yasser Qadhi as anything other than a believing, conservative, studied al -Azhar.

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If you want to make connections, he's going to have connections. Easily done. Nothing surprising there.

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I didn't introduce him as anything other than that, because I still want him to know the gospel, and I have to wonder how many of you people do.

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I really do. The attitudes I have seen, I saw this poor little old lady, when

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I went on her Facebook thing, I saw her just posting a bunch of stuff, I think it was Saturday morning, all about how all

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Muslims are liars, and this, that, and the other thing, and then I went to her Facebook thing, and it was filled with Charles Spurgeon and Puritan quotes, and I'm like,

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God! The attitudes I have seen. Well, I guess

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I shouldn't be surprised, because in talking with Yasser Qadhi, one of the things he says is, we're in the

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Bible Belt. We're amongst some of the most conservative evangelicals in the nation, and the only people that will even look at us are liberal

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Protestants and liberal Catholics. The people from Bible churches,

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Baptist churches, things like that, they won't talk to us. They keep us as far away as possible.

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And some of you are sitting there going, yeah, that's right, keep them, their Muslims as far away from me as possible.

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And if you don't see why that's wrong, desperately wrong, then either you haven't been watching this program very long, or you ain't been listening at all, ain't been listening at all.

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Anyway, this was not, we laid it out. We were straightforward.

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We are not here to sing Kumbaya, but we also said we're not here to debate.

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And here's, there's a couple things that need to be brought up, because they have been, there's been assumptions made by people.

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We had, we had somebody called, called the church, found out last night, so we called the church about my compromising, I, you know, reformed

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Baptist, all the rest of this stuff. And I'm, I'm, I'm soft on Islam and all the rest is this silliness.

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And there's all these assumptions that people are making that are simply untrue. There are seeming a lot of folks that think that a building is the church, that a building is the church.

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It was in a, it was in a building called a church. That's just wrong. I thought the church was the gathered body.

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And when I read the New Testament, the Christians didn't have any buildings.

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They met in homes or other places that they could just get together or buy a riverside or anything else.

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And that was the church. So when you say, well, this took place in a church, it took place in a building called a church.

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That's right. But that was not a worship service. No one was being invited into the church to preach and proclaim and teach.

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And even though we met in a mosque, they were not asking me to teach and proclaim to their congregation.

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We use the buildings to get together, to have a dialogue, to discuss what we believe that's similar and what we believe that is different honestly and openly.

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So the first thing is nature of the church. Secondly, a lot of people said, well, you know, if your primary purpose wasn't to just proclaim the gospel, then

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I think it was wrong. You know, I will confess a level of frustration at this point because I'm just going to speak honestly here.

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There is no one doing debates with Muslims around this world that gets the gospel more clearly into their presentations than yours truly.

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There just isn't. Show me somebody, show me somebody, give me footage of somebody that more consistently brings the gospel into their presentations in Muslim contexts, in mosques, wherever it might be than I do.

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But you see, I recognize that there is also something called preparation for the gospel, tilling the soil.

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I recognize that in Islamic countries, you don't send missionaries into Pakistan to go stand on the street corner and do what we can, what we have the freedom to do in the

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United States. They will not last very long. Those missionaries that are in Muslim -majority countries, if they want to reach people, there can be literally years of preparation that has to be done, investment of one's life in the life of others to establish the relationships that will allow you to actually speak the gospel and communicate it in a meaningful fashion to somebody else because there's so many barriers, so many things in the way.

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And so, are all you critics out there really saying there is no place for gospel preparation?

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Because you see, that's what we were doing. And I pointed this out on Facebook and I want to make sure that you all understand it.

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The locus of the gospel presentation, very often in the debate in the

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Abu Bakr Sidiq Mosque in Erasmus, South Africa, the locus of the gospel presentation was in the debate itself because of the subject of the debate.

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So, I was able to very clearly, and you watch the debate, the camera's panning the room and you're seeing all these

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Muslims seated on the floor and I'm presenting the gospel because that was the topic. But the locus of the gospel discussion and presentation in Memphis was in the conversation between Christians and Muslims afterwards in both places.

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So, in other words, the respect, and believe me, some of you out there, and you know who you are, you do not believe for a second that I should respect

39:50

Yasir Qadhi, I should hate him. That's the attitude you have. You've said it clearly. You will insult him.

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You will attack him. You are ignorant of much of what he says. You haven't spent any time, it doesn't matter, he's a

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Muslim. So, you should detest the man. Good luck with that evangelistic methodology.

40:12

Look, the fact of the matter is, what I'm finding out is that a lot of people who call themselves Christians have no interest in doing evangelism, not any evangelism that actually requires you to open your heart to people anyways.

40:25

It's just yell at them, insult them, and then I've witnessed to the gospel.

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It's disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Some of you, you just, the fact that we could talk with one another, the fact that he respected me,

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I respected him, he was amazed at how closely I had listened to his material, and he says, we just don't encounter

40:55

Christians that take the time to understand what we believe. And what that means is,

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I can actually communicate with them. And I've actually, look, take any of my critics, put them in that same context.

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Are any of the Muslims in that mosque going to listen to a word they're saying? Not a word. Not a word. So, what happened is, because we showed respect for one another, and because we did not compromise our beliefs, because we were clear in what we said, the locus of the actual encounter where the gospel could be presented and discussion could take place, took place after the conversation and amongst a much wider group of people.

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In other words, Christians got to be Christians after those dialogues.

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And that, my friends, is what a lot of these people are afraid of, because you see, they view themselves as the absolute experts and they don't want

41:57

Christians doing these things. You just need to do it the way they do it. You need to be a fire -breathing, bomb -throwing, whatever.

42:07

The sad fact of the matter is, you've got the jihadis over there, and then the people that are always trying to respond to them end up becoming their mirror image.

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And they think that's the only way to do it. And that's why they have such an investment in, they're all that way.

42:23

And that's why these people are so twisted by their traditions that they can look at a man who's been marked out for death by ISIS and go,

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I think he's, that's conspiracy. Yeah, he's probably, yeah, yeah, we know all them

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Muslims are liars. So that's probably just a big trick. Wow, you're going to be really effective.

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It's just, it's just amazing. It's just amazing. So, by the way, likewise, what's the effect on ignorant minds of the kind of teaching that says all

43:11

Muslims are the same? What's the effect? Happened last night in London, folks.

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Some wild eyed wackoid runs his van into a bunch of Muslims because, hey, all

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Muslims are the same. All Muslims are the same, right? That's what y 'all are telling me.

43:33

There's only one Islam. And the only true Islam is a violent Islam. And therefore, the only true

43:39

Muslim is a violent Muslim. And therefore, the only way to deal with them is to kill them all. And so some nutcase decided to take it upon himself to do that last night.

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Isn't that disgusting? It should be disgusting to you. But there's some of you sitting there going, well,

43:57

I don't know. May I suggest to you, if you don't find what that man did last night, absolutely abhorrent, disgusting, you are not a

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Christian. You're not. You're not. Stop lying about it.

44:13

You don't know anything about a savior who died to save people. You would have been one of those people that would have liked to have seen

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Saul of Tarsus killed for what he did. You would never, ever, ever have accepted the idea of his conversion.

44:27

You would never have been one who would have risked doing something to reach out to him, huh?

44:36

You see, when you do this, they're all the same. Then you are falling right into the us versus them.

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There's never going to be a conversation. There's never going to be any bridges built. There's never going to be any opportunity of investing your life in somebody else, showing

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Christ to them. No, it's just us and them. And you know, very first Muslim debate

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I did, the moderator in the opening statement said, if you can't allow two sides to argue, then all they can do is fight.

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And I've pointed that out more than once. I've done debates with Muslims since the dialogue with Yasser Qadhi.

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I haven't gone, oh, you know, no, it's a both and. They both have their places. But I'll be honest with you.

45:32

It's the rare debate where you have the warmth of relationship and discussion between people afterwards.

45:46

It's the rare debate. It does happen. It can happen. But normally what happens is there's so much of this in the debate that the temperature is already so high that most people on both sides are, except for the, you know, the people that go to speaker's corner and yell at each other anyways.

46:06

Most people just are like, well, that was interesting, but I don't really. They just don't feel comfortable approaching that Muslim over there to talk about what we just heard.

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But that was happening after both conversations, both dialogues. In Memphis.

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And so keep in mind when you hear people saying, oh, you know, he invited this person in and this person's got all these connections and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

46:39

They can't deal with the substance. Oh, oh, oh. And there was something else, something

46:44

I forgot. The Robert Spencer article, he specifically talked about toward the beginning.

46:56

And Brandon House has posted this portion of it as well. I'm glad the whole thing's out there for the very few people who have enough integrity, honesty, sincerity in their heart to actually watch the whole thing.

47:11

But toward the beginning, I made a reference to sensing in Yasir Qadhi a kindred spirit.

47:22

Oh, apostate, you can't sense a kindred spirit in a

47:28

Muslim? Well, you know, you might want to ask me what

47:34

I meant by that. It's not that it was a secret. I think I'm pretty certain because I know that I had talked about it with Yasir himself.

47:44

But I think I've mentioned it on this program. And I think I mentioned it back years ago.

47:50

When I went through Dr. Qadhi's, it wasn't Dr. Qadhi back then, but Yasir Qadhi's, Sheikh Qadhi's discussion of shirk, because I use this material to help people understand what is shirk?

48:03

Why is this such a major barrier to our gospel presentation?

48:10

Because that's the difference between me and my critics. For me, it's the gospel. For them, it's fear.

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It's all there is to it. If you want to understand what's going on here, that's what it is. I want the gospel to go to these people.

48:23

They want you to be afraid of them. So it is. So it is. But so I've mentioned it and I mentioned

48:31

Yasir Qadhi. What did I mean when I said I sensed a kindred spirit?

48:36

What I was talking about in listening to him is I'm hearing a conservative, believing

48:42

Muslim who attempts to be consistent in his faith. And the specific story in my mind at that point, which

48:49

I had mentioned to him before, I don't remember if it was on the phone or when we had lunch that day. Yes, I had lunch with Yasir Qadhi.

48:59

Huh? Yeah, I most certainly did. We had Mexican, in case you're wondering.

49:05

And it was very good. It was one of those sort of like, oh, I can't remember the name of the place, but where you can sort of, they make it whatever you tell them to make there and, you know, type of thing.

49:15

And it was good. Anyway, I told him,

49:21

I said, you know, and I remember it's one of those situations again, sorry, where I remember exactly where I was on the bike.

49:30

And he was, it was one of those situations where he's lecturing to Muslims, not to Christians. He's lecturing to Muslims.

49:36

Most of his lectures are. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking to us. He doesn't claim to be an expert in Christianity or anything like that.

49:43

And which is why he doesn't want to debate is, he says, I'd have massive advantage. And I would, obviously.

49:51

But he was speaking to Muslims about teaching the Quran and about making sure that if you're going to learn the

50:03

Quran, then you need to live by its precepts. And he was getting very, very animated.

50:14

He was preaching. And what caught my attention, especially,

50:21

I remember exactly where I was on the, on the Arizona canal, is he was yelling and he said, why do we teach our children to memorize a book in a language they do not understand if we will not teach them to live by the precepts that are in that book, in the language that they do understand?

50:51

And I said, here's a guy who on the other side, and I even use the terminology in the dialogue, on the other side of the chasm that separates us, is seeking to be consistent amongst his people in the same way

51:08

I seek to be consistent amongst my own. You want evidence of that? Listen to yesterday morning's sermon from Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

51:18

It was pretty straightforward. Very similar in a way. So find out for yourself.

51:26

That's what I was talking about. They, Robert Spencer and those with him, want to twist the intention of those words.

51:37

Because honesty, really dealing with what we did there, that's not their intention.

51:43

No. Their intention is to self -hear. Their intention is to build walls, dividing walls, end this type of meaningful conversation.

51:53

It scares them to death. It's totally against what they're trying to do.

52:01

And so they want this half to twist what I said. What I said was very, very clear.

52:07

The context was very, very clear. And so this idea that, well, you see this kindred spirit that means you're just like them and all the rest of this stuff, it's not what we were talking about.

52:19

I was talking about the fact this man's not a moderate. This man's a conservative. He's actually a believing

52:24

Muslim. I mean, the first person I ever heard from that side talking about the jinn was

52:34

Yasir Qadhi. I had no idea. I had no earthly idea what

52:40

Muslims believed about the jinn until I got to the section in the Light and Guidance CD set, which he said to me, if you've watched the dialogues, you hear a discussion about it.

52:49

And I remember I wasn't a bike then too. And I'm just sort of like, really?

52:56

Wow. I had no idea. I'm going to have to listen to this again because this had never come up in anything else that I had dealt with.

53:07

He's not some wild -eyed liberal. I don't know exactly why

53:13

I would have much of a conversation with wild -eyed liberal because a liberal Muslim and a liberal

53:19

Roman Catholic and a liberal Methodist, they're united by their being liberal.

53:27

I want to talk to people who actually believe something. And that's the huge scandal. Oh, but he believes this and he believes that.

53:34

Yeah, he does. And you know what? I want him to know what

53:40

I believe. And he's not going to listen to a word that you fire -breathing

53:46

Islamophobes are screaming at him. He's not going to listen to a word. Not a word.

53:53

Some of you actually take pride in your ability to close the other person's mind before you finish the first paragraph of your article.

54:04

Some of you take pride in your ability to get insults into the first paragraph of your article as if it is your absolute intention to make sure that the person you're writing about or to never hears a word you've got to say.

54:20

Congratulations. That's brilliant. That's not what

54:25

I want to do. That's not my intention. So what you're seeing here today is an absolutely different set of priorities, purposes and intentions in doing what we do.

54:45

And I've never for a second denied that there is

54:51

Islamic violence in the world. Not for a second. Nor have I ever denied that there's

54:57

Christian violence in the world. I have said that fundamentally, Christian violence is opposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

55:08

And I'll demonstrate that. And I say the Muslim who interprets his text in a nonviolent way should be treated as a

55:19

Muslim who is nonviolent. And the Muslim who interprets his text in a violent way should be treated as a person who intends it and interprets it in a violent way.

55:29

And obviously my thesis is, my problem is my argument, I'm an apologist, my texts are consistent.

55:37

I can give you a consistent, exegetical, original language based foundation for saying what

55:45

I'm saying. Obviously my argument is I don't think the

55:50

Muslim can do that. And that's why I don't believe Islam is from God. But you hotheads don't seem to realize that as long as you keep this monolithic chant going, what you're saying the other side is your texts are consistent.

56:07

You're handing them the entire case and you don't even know it because of your emotions. Because of your emotions and your tradition.

56:16

You're throwing it away. I know most of you aren't presuppositionalists. You don't think on that level. Gotcha. But that's what you're doing.

56:25

You're giving away the most fundamental foundational element of the incoherence of the sources themselves.

56:33

So people say, well, I want to debate James White on, can you read the original source of Islam in a violent way?

56:40

Of course you can. Of course you can. Come on, people, give me a thesis for a debate that has some meaning to it that isn't a lie about me in the first place.

56:51

I'm well aware. I sat there, the video that Brandon House misrepresented.

56:57

I held up the book. The campaigns of Muhammad. Most of you don't even have the book.

57:04

I know it can be read that way. My point is, it can also be read another way.

57:11

And you don't have the right to tell somebody else, no, you got to read it my way. You got to read it my way. The results are, well, absolutely disastrous.

57:21

Absolutely disastrous. So there you go. Some things

57:27

I need to get out there. Uh, politics, politics. Folks, there's so much politics behind this.

57:32

And I'm not talking about politics amongst Christians. There's politics, politics here. And I'm, one thing you know from church history, once the politicians get involved, politics gets involved, the truth of the gospel always becomes perverted.

57:48

Always does. Always does. That's what's happening here. That's what's happening here as well.

57:54

There are people who have some real strong political perspectives and they've, they're putting a Christian veneer on it.

58:01

And if that, if that results in your trying to build walls between Christians and Muslims, rather than communicating with them, so you can bring the gospel to them, anathema.

58:13

Get rid of it. Get rid of your politics. If your politics destroys passion for the lost in your life, dump the politics.

58:22

Stick with what has eternal value. That's my advice. Thanks for watching the

58:28

Dividing Line today. We'll be back, I think, Lord willing, on Thursday. Hopefully see you then.