Destruction of Christianity in 55 Seconds?

Today I was directed to a, well, it's an audio, but it's posted on YouTube, so it's sort of an audio video, something, posted by someone

I do not know, by a Muslim, and I only respond to it because I want to go to the portion where the gentleman says that Shabir Ali just decimates

Christianity in 55 seconds. Well, in reality, Shabir demonstrated in that 55 seconds that, again, he still does not understand the

Christian faith that he attacks, but I will demonstrate that when we get to it.

But there were all sorts of other things said that were just amazing in this post, and it's further demonstration of the current state of desperation amongst

Islamic apologists. And I say that because once one side starts going ad hominem and starts calling people liars and getting into all the personal stuff, it's very clear that they're not winning the debate any longer, that they cannot maintain their position in any meaningful fashion.

And so this individual made a number of comments. He starts off with some just outrageous comments, just completely over the line, and then he brings me in, and I want to respond to some of the things he said because it's just so disconnected from reality that it truly makes you wonder a little bit what's going on.

So let's listen in to what he had to say. You know, there was a time in these

Muslim -Christian debates that the notion of a

Christian winning one of these debates was unheard of. Christians never won these debates.

It was expected that the Muslim would just come on stage and dominate the

Christian from beginning to end. But Christians like David Wood and James White started getting smart.

They started moving away from opponents that knew their stuff. Really?

What planet did this news come from? My first, you know,

I did one debate in 1999 with Hamza Abdel Malik, but I had not begun studying

Islam at that time. I was simply defending my book on the Doctrine of the Trinity. The first Islamic debate that I really did was with Shabir Ali at Biola University.

So I start with Shabir Ali. Then we arranged another debate over a year and not quite a half later, right about a year ago right now, with Shabir Ali in Seattle on the crucifixion.

We arranged that. We challenged him to that. We brought him in. And it was a part of something we were doing at His Alpha and Omega Ministries.

And so, during this time, I have been seeking to get Jamal Badawi to debate.

Right now, I am trying to, I've had someone on YouTube that says that they can help to arrange a debate with Zakir Naik.

I'd be happy to debate Zakir Naik. I would love to track down Gary Miller. Who else do you want to suggest?

We've put the challenge out there to these individuals. The very idea that we've gotten smart would require, first of all, that somehow this person believes that those first two debates

I did with Shabir Ali were just wipeouts. And you know what? They weren't. No matter what you say, they were not.

And Muslims know that. So maybe do we have a little changing of history here? I don't know. But the idea that since I have been invited by others to debate individuals, some of which weren't very good debaters.

Nader Ahmed, Osama Abdullah, shouldn't debate. There's no question about it. Farhan Qureshi, different issue.

Farhan is a different league. But the idea that somehow we are to blame for that.

That we've gotten smart. We were getting beat up bad so we're going after these other people. It's just absolutely absurd.

I mean, this is a fantasy on someone's part. Can I even begin to imagine where this guy is coming up with this stuff?

But again, truth and reality over here. Muslim over here.

Big difference between the two. This kind of rhetoric is just, it absolutely has no value to it at all.

And they started debating people that were either shamefully ignorant or people that had a very weak command of the

English language. And they take these people and they put labels on them. They label them as scholars.

They'll be like David Wood versus Nader Ahmed, a scholar in Islam. And they would take these debates and they would use them as propaganda tools.

So you would have Muslims out there harming Islam more so than helping it.

Because what you were doing is you're turning yourself into a trophy for the Christians to use to propagate

Christianity. But unfortunately due to the over inflated egos of a lot of these

Muslim debaters, they become completely blind to the truth of what's going on.

But I tell you honestly, from a marketing point of view, I don't blame people like David Wood and James White for doing what they're doing.

Because the Christians were getting their rear ends handed to them on stage. Now once again,

I leave it to the audience to judge themselves whether the two debates that I did with Shabir Ali were some type of a wipe out as this gentleman is trying to suggest.

I don't think Shabir Ali would say that. And I've had many other Muslims, in fact I've been criticized by other

Muslims for having in essence ambushed

Shabir Ali. So you know, you all need to get your stories straight here. Be that as it may, yes there are people who make claims about themselves that are not meaningful claims.

And you know when I debated Nader Ahmed, I just showed up and I gave a meaningful presentation for my side and I let himself destruct.

That's all I did. When I debated Osama Abdullah, I gave very nice presentations on the reliability of the text of the

New Testament, on the issue of the historical witness for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and he had to throw out stuff on 20 different topics because he couldn't respond to the information

I presented. That's not my fault, okay? If you want to complain about that, complain to Nader Ahmed.

Go after his supporters. His supporters were after me for years, calling me a coward for not debating him because he's the only true

Islamic debater anyways. Folks, that problem's on your side of the aisle, not mine. I was asked to defend the

Christian faith and I did so. Now I pointed out recently that, and I apologize for this,

I at first criticized Shabir Ali for debating Dave Hunt. And I started thinking about it and I apologized for doing that.

I was wrong. I think Shabir Ali, if Dave Hunt is foolish enough to debate

Shabir Ali, Shabir Ali should go ahead and debate him. Dave Hunt is an evangelical, he is my brother in Christ, but he's not a good scholar and he only sees on the page in front of him what he wants to see.

And he lost his debate with Shabir Ali very badly, that was very clear. But I don't have any grounds for criticizing

Shabir Ali for defending his faith against Dave Hunt because Dave Hunt is a voice that is out there.

He is out there criticizing Islam. Well folks, the Nader Ahmads and the

Osama Abdullahs of the world are much more similar to the kind of apologetic argumentation that Muslims are using against the persecuted

Christians in the rest of the world than Shabir Ali will ever be. Now what you need to understand is that I have an advantage over you.

It is very clear, and I'm speaking of the gentleman who is speaking in this clip, it's very clear you do not understand me.

You do not understand why I do what I do. You don't understand my motivations. You think that I think it's all about me.

It's all about marketing. It's all about winning. And as long as you think that that's how

I think, I'll always have an advantage over you. This is an advantage

I have over a lot of people I debate because Islam is not the only subject that I address. People do not understand why

I do what I do. It may sound trite to you, but I'm unimportant.

Who I am is unimportant. This isn't about my ego. It's not about anything about me at all.

It really is about the truth of God. And it really is, you are actually debating someone who believes that what

I'm doing has eternal consequences and that I am just overjoyed to be able to be used by God to bless

His people. You may not understand that, but that's my motivation.

And so when I am invited to have an opportunity to defend the faith,

I will do so. And that's why even when I'm debating someone who cannot even behave as an adult like Nader Ahmed, people say, how can you be patient with someone?

How can you not just, well, because I have a higher priority.

I have a different audience that I'm there for. I'm looking down the road.

I want what I'm doing to be useful to the generation after I'm gone and the generation after that and to people outside of that room because there's a camera sitting there recording these things.

That's why I do what I do. I'm not trying to avoid Islam's best.

I am pursuing them. That's a documented fact. And I say to this individual, if you can't see that, well, then you're very, very deceived.

You're a clip of literally Shabbir Ali disproving Christian logic in literally 55 seconds flat.

I mean, you can time it with your watch. 55 seconds flat. He's up against William Lane Craig and this

Craig guy is supposedly like the big thing in Christianity. Shabbir destroys him and destroys

Christianity, the logic of Christianity in 55 seconds. Listen to this. But in the

Christian concept, I do see a difficulty. I had asked, does God love his son? And Dr.

Craig said, yes. But I also asked, you know, does God love his son as much as he loves the world?

This is the whole point of that. And if he loved the world enough to want to spare the world, did he not love his son enough to want to spare his son?

And couldn't there have been another way that God could just simply forgive human beings? Wasn't that within his power to do it just to forgive human beings and let his son also go?

Or if his son decided to take the sin upon himself, couldn't God have said, son,

I really love what you want to do for these people and I want to do for them that very thing more than you want to do it for them.

As much as you want the people to be forgiven, I also want the same. Let them go and you'll be free.

And here's a clip of David. Now, here was the specific section I wanted to get to in this 55 seconds of Shabir Ali that this gentleman thinks is just a complete destruction of Christian logic.

What it is is a complete demonstration that once again Shabir's knowledge of the

Christian faith is limited and deeply influenced by, shall we say, traditions that have no place within the

Christian faith. First of all, he makes reference to William Lane Craig. I would direct people to the many times, the many hours we have spent on my webcast,

The Dividing Line, going through William Lane Craig's debates with Shabir Ali and with Bart Ehrman and including,

I believe, this very debate and the subjects that came up therein. And we were consistent, unlike many of my

Muslim friends, in disagreeing with many of the things William Lane Craig said. He is a

Mullenist. He comes from a theological position that we would find, as Reformed believers, to be very inconsistent with Biblical revelation.

We don't hide that. We put it right out there in the open and explain why it's relevant to the differences in our approaches to Muslim apologetics itself.

And so we've been very clear about all of that. And I don't see that being done very much by Muslims in particular providing a critique of their own apologists along those lines.

But the question that comes up confuses the eternal love of the

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing within the Trinity and the external love of God toward the world.

And as Shabir always does, he separates the Father, Son, and Spirit as if it's a sort of an anthropological thing, which may come from, again, a simple

Islamic misunderstanding of such terms as Father and Son. I think the writer of the Koran did not understand the doctrine of Trinity either.

But be it as it may, he does not seem to realize that the Biblical presentation, it's not, salvation doesn't find its origin in one person and the other is unwillingly involved and the third just tagging along.

The Gospel is Trinitarian. It is the work of the triune majesty in eternity past that shows the roles that each of the divine persons would play in bringing about the eternal covenant of redemption.

Jesus gives himself voluntarily. The Father is the fountainhead of this entire plan.

The Spirit is the one that comes and makes this to come alive. The entire response completely misses the point because it separates the divine persons and likewise, again, does not understand that from a

Biblical perspective, God's holy law, his holiness, not only must be vindicated through the punishment of sin and hence his justice demonstrated, but that that entire concept of holiness is intimate.

It's intricate within the text itself. It cannot be just separated up. God can't just go, okay, I forgive because that would mean that his holiness is not being demonstrated.

There would be injustice in the world. If he brings wrath against one but he doesn't give against another, you have injustice.

The cross is the only way that we can have forgiveness because God's wrath comes against Jesus Christ and against him perfectly.

No one receives injustice. Your sin will be either punished in yourself or in a perfect substitute.

The cross, however, is a demonstration of mercy and of grace and that's where those attributes of God, his mercy, his grace, his loving kindness is demonstrated in the perfect plan of the gospel that is revealed in the work and ministry of the

Lord Jesus Christ. So, I'm sorry that this gentleman thinks that Shabir's misunderstandings are representative of the

Christian faith, but he's wrong. And again, who are you debating for?

Who is this man even recording for? If you're only looking at making yourself look good in the eyes of your people, then you're going to debate in a certain way.

That's not why I debate. And that shouldn't be why this gentleman's doing whatever it is he's doing.

He undoubtedly feels that he's serving Allah, but I would like to suggest that to serve

God requires truthfulness in what you're doing. All of us make errors, but there seems to be a consistent attitude problem in this particular instance.

After this, he then plays a section, I'm not going to play the whole thing, of David's debate with Ali Atai.

Interestingly enough, he only plays that part of it and it, I'm sorry, from a

Christian perspective, is in no way, shape, or form a compelling section to play at all.

I would suggest people listen to David's debate with Ali Atai. I would direct people to the numerous articles

I posted on my blog demonstrating error after error after error in context and language in Ali Atai's materials in regards to Apostle Paul.

And that raises one other issue. This video is getting rather long, so let me wrap it up here.

Another thing that he brought up in this particular video was that I'm allegedly dodging a debate challenge.

Some of the things he would say, if Zakir Naik was standing outside my door asking to debate, and Shabbir Ali, and Gary Miller, and etc.,

etc., and I was only debating people like Nader Ahmed, he might have a point. Obviously, that is not true.

But there is, I was told, I don't know how many months ago, maybe a year ago, it may have been more than that now that I think about it,

I'm not sure. I've never seen the video. But I've been told about a Muslim in Greece who wants to debate in Greek.

And that's why I've never even bothered looking at it. Because just think at how much the

English language has changed just over the past four, five, six hundred years since really its inception.

I have never claimed, not once have I ever claimed to speak modern Greek. I could probably make my way around well enough, but I do not claim to speak modern

Greek. The New Testament was not written in modern Greek. It was written in Koine. And so,

I've just always chuckled at the idea that somebody wants to debate in Greek. If that debate challenge was to have any meaning whatsoever, any scholarly meaning whatsoever, it would be you have erred in your responses to people like Ahmed Dida, where I demonstrate he couldn't even get the right article with the right word.

You have erred in these other videos that you've done. And here's the demonstration.

But that's not what they're doing. If I've made a mistake about Koine Greek, not modern Greek, Koine Greek documented, should be easily done.

There's no question about the fact that I've taught Greek and Greek exegesis on the graduate level at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.

That's a documented fact. There's no questions about that. But that's not my field in the sense that there are people and all they ever do is teach

Greek. All they ever do is teach New Testament. That's just what they do. They don't study church history.

They don't study Islam. They don't study Mormonism. They just teach in that area. And that would be very enjoyable, but I'm an apologist.

And one of my strengths as an apologist is that I have been a teacher. I've taught Greek and Greek exegesis and Hebrew and Hebrew exegesis and church history and systematic theology and Christology and special topics and patristics.

And I've loved having those opportunities. I love teaching, but I'm limited in the amount of time that I can do it because my first calling is to be an apologist, one who defends the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So I do have a background in those areas and especially in textual criticism of the New Testament.

That's an area that I do do a lot of work in. So if you want to document errors in that area, then do so.

Put it out there. But the idea of debating in modern

Greek is not, I never even took it seriously. This gentleman does, but I'm sorry,

I don't even take it seriously. If you want to demonstrate that what I've said about John 1 -1 is false, then throw it out there.

Put it into the arena of ideas and let's see if it stands up.

That's all I'm asking that people do. That's what we're doing. And that's why I do not want to get into this kind of personal stuff with individuals like this gentleman.

I hold no animosity toward the gentleman. I'm sorry that he feels that this is a worthwhile type of thing to be doing.

I'm not talking about the Greek fellow, even though, again, I don't understand that challenge either, but this fellow we've been listening to.

Why aren't these folks investing their time in maybe correcting the

Greek errors of an Achmed D -Dot or correcting the errors of another

Achmed? Clean up your side of the aisle first. Be consistent like we are.

And then, if you feel that I've been in error concerning the things I've said about Greek, prove it.

Put it on the screen and prove it. Isn't that fairly simple? Isn't that how this should be taking place?

I think it is. So, I hope this has been useful to you. I hope that the gentleman who recorded this recognizes that I have no personal animosity toward you despite,

I think, the rather unkind way that you spoke of me. As a

Christian, I forgive you for that and I would ask you to realize that this is not about me and it's not about you.

These are about eternal things, things that go far beyond you and I. And I, again, would call my

Muslim opponents to a higher level. Demonstrate where I'm wrong. You know, when one more of the

Muslims or one of the Muslims, whatever his screen name was, accused me of patripassionism, how did I respond? With anger toward him or just simply demonstrating that he was completely wrong and then found out later he stole that from Gary Miller anyways?

People like that need to come out on YouTube and say, you know what? I was wrong. I should never have used that argument.

It was a bogus argument and I withdraw it. That's the way that you can demonstrate that you actually have a love for truth.

And, of course, as a Christian, I believe the Holy Spirit of God births that love of truth in someone's heart as a part of drawing them to Jesus Christ.