Recent Debate Recap

Recent Debate Recap and Travel Report

Well, I hope you don't mind too much if I depart a little bit from, well, I was going to say our normal thing, but it's not all that normal, at least not recently. I got back Friday evening, and it would just be easier for me anyways to sort of report on what took place, and there's some very interesting things to talk about there.

It actually sort of fits in, some of it, to what we've actually have been studying. I'll give you a report on five debates. I only did four, so the fifth, actually, that I'll start with was a debate that I attended yesterday morning at 10 o 'clock at a Presbyterian church in Paradise Valley.

It is not a normal thing for me to attend a debate that I am not participating in. It actually is sort of enjoyable to do when I can trust that the Christian is going to do a good job, and that was certainly what I could trust yesterday.

The Daniel Kirk Debate on Homosexuality and the Spirit

One of the leading Christian voices responding to the homosexual movement is Dr. Robert Gagnon of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Now, that's a PCUSA seminary. Dr. Gagnon would not be quite as conservative as I am in a number of areas, but despite all that, his work in the field of the biblical testimony regarding sexual ethics, morality, and especially the subject of homosexuality is really leading in the United States.

He also always wears a bow tie, which makes him very special. So when I saw him make the announcement that he was going to be doing a debate on that subject yesterday, I knew it was going to be within 12, 14 hours of when I finished a trip that started your time at 11 o 'clock Wednesday night, and then finished at 6 o 'clock Friday night, your time.

So almost, that was a long time. Started in Durban, and then to Johannesburg, and then I had to spend about six hours in the Johannesburg airport, and then from Johannesburg to London is right at 12 hours, and then another six and a half hours in Heathrow, and then thankfully the straight through flight from Heathrow to London.

So you put it all together, and I went through security over and over again, you just learn to be real nice to folks at security, you compliment them on how they're dressed that day and stuff, and it's just, you learn how to do these things.

But anyway, my friggin' flyer account is back up into the really good range. Anyway, so I made it out there, and Dr. Gagnon was debating a graduate of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, he did his master's there and then went to Duke University, and he teaches for Fuller Seminary up in their Northern California campus, and I didn't realize until later that I had a connection here, because a young man, there was a young man that sort of tried to help encourage, survive Fuller, and lo and behold, this fellow that was debating Gagnon had been one of the primary theology professors that I had had to encourage this fellow to survive up there in Northern California.

To say that he has left the tradition of Westminster Seminary would be obviously a major understatement. This I guess was his coming out, in the sense of his coming out as a full ally of the LGBTQRSTUV movement, and it was fascinating to listen to his presentation.

Fundamentally, he at the beginning said, I'm probably not going to argue much with what Dr. Gagnon has to say about the biblical witness. It seems to me that Old and New Testament, that in reality, all of the texts on the subject of homosexuality are negative.

That they take a negative view, so I'm like, okay, where are we going to go from here? And in essence, the argument that he presented was that the spirit does new things in the church, and that that's what's happening today.

There is a new move of the spirit in the church today, and his paradigm for this was the inclusion of the Gentiles. And so, though there had been this clear biblical teaching on circumcision and so on and so forth in the Old Testament, the spirit did a new thing and brought the Gentiles into the church, and as that happened then, so now today the spirit is causing us to recognize and to confess the sins of the church over the centuries in the abuse and misuse of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and opening our eyes to this greater work of the spirit, so on and so forth.

And so, he had half an hour to meander about making this argument that biblical norms really aren't biblical norms. I'm not really sure how he can talk to us about what the spirit can and cannot do, because once you take the perspective he did, I don't know that there's really anything left of biblical revelation to talk about, but what really caught my attention was toward the end of his presentation.

He said that we need to be listening to what the spirit of God is saying, and we need to let the spirit of God teach us to think differently than people did in the first century, and to think differently even than Jesus thought in the first century.

And I caught that, and I was like, did I just hear what I thought I heard? And I did. And so, Dr. Gagnon got up, and again, like I said, his books on homosexuality are really very in-depth, very scholarly, not easy to read along those lines, but very, very good, and he did an excellent job in making his presentation.

Well, after the debate was over, and it was a very one-sided debate, one side was in the text of scripture, one side was making consistent arguments, the other side was just simply saying, well, I feel this, and I feel that, all subjective, emotional stuff from a, quote-unquote, New Testament scholar, but I went up to Dr. Kirk.

His name was Dr. Daniel Kirk, and I asked him, I said, Dr. Kirk, when did you stop believing in Sola Scriptura? He's like, well, I said, I mean, you specifically said that we should allow the Spirit to teach us how to think differently than Jesus did.

Did you say that? And at first, he's like, well, did I say that? He said, well, yeah, yeah, I would agree with that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, you know, Jesus was a man, like you and I, he had lots of wrong ideas, he was the product of the first century, you know, and the example he gave me was, I mean, Jesus, obviously, multiple times said Moses wrote the Pentateuch, nobody believes that anymore, and I was, I don't know, I shouldn't have done this, but I said, you know, I said, you know, I...

Did you know who you were? No, Dr. Gagnon knows me, and I had a bunch of people come up to me that I was surprised actually knew me there, but no, Dr. Kirk and his realm of folks, they don't do apologetics, they can't do apologetics, they have nothing to defend.

Liberals don't engage in defense of the faith, and so they're not overly concerned about those who do, and actually don't think that we have a basis for doing it anyways. So, no, he had no idea. I mean, I introduced myself, he knew that I was a professor, that I'd written books on the subject and debates on the subject, so he knew that, but he hadn't seen any of it.

And I, I shouldn't have done this, but, you know, one of the first thoughts crossed my mind, I, here you've got a guy standing up here basically making the argument about Jesus that my Muslim friends make, and so I'm like, well, I really think it'd be useful if you'd engage in a debate on this subject.

Well, he says, not right now. I said, no, I didn't mean right now, I've done over 150 of these things, it needs to be organized right and properly, I said, but it just amazes me that you could make that kind of a statement, especially, you know, given what your background is.

Well, he's basically admitted he's really made a huge change from his background, which is obviously true. But what it illustrated so clearly for me is something I've been saying for a very, very long time.

This gay Christian movement cannot remain, cannot even pretend to be even semi-orthodox in its affirmations. The, the necessary abandonment of scriptural sufficiency inevitably leads to where this guy is.

That doesn't mean that everyone who starts there automatically dumps the deity of Christ, but there really isn't any reason to continue believing these things. Once you adopt the hermeneutic that allows you to get around the Mosaic Law, to get around Romans 1, to get around 1 Corinthians 6, so on and so forth, you just, there's no way to maintain any kind of orthodoxy.

And here's a fellow who just, from the start, his first talk demonstrates that it wasn't that making this commitment led to his unorthodoxy. He was already unorthodox, and it just took him a while to realize that his unorthodoxy likewise gave him an open door to affirm homosexuality.

And so it was, it was an amazing thing to experience that. Now what made it especially so for me was that a week ago this past Friday, my first debate when I got to Johannesburg, the very next evening, in fact, which had me worried.

You know, it's a long trip, and your body's just completely thrown out of whack by nine time zones and 23 hours in a plane and so on and so forth. So I was a little worried about whether I would be overly functional.

It wasn't too bad. I had gotten a fair amount of sleep, so it was OK. But the man that I was debating is Dr. Graham Codrington. And Dr. Codrington is a seminary graduate. His doctorate is not in theology or anything like that.

It's in a business area. But he is a fairly well-known international speaker. In fact, I discovered that a fellow that's visited here a number of times, Michael Fallon, who is involved in a lot of that kind of business speaking type stuff, had had him in and knew of him.

He's really well-known in the English-speaking world, though he's based there in South Africa. And he speaks on future trends in business and global economics and stuff like that. Well, one of the big things he's gotten into is this gay Christian movement.

And he's been writing a series of articles on his blog, which really are excellent summaries of what I would call the revisionist position. All of his sources, of course, are pro-homosexual. He doesn't even interact with any other sources other than those.

And in fact, he's not even done with his blog series. But when I put it into a PDF, it was 120 pages long. And that's full-size pages, so it's probably about a 170-page book right there already. And like I said, he's not finished.

So he certainly has done his homework. And so I had done more preparation for this than anything else on the trip. And thankfully, Graham is not to the point of making the statement that, well, we just need to improve on Jesus.

And in fact, I think he'd be scandalized by that statement. He claims to be an evangelical. He claims that the Bible is the word of God. But in the process, he takes what we would call a radical New Covenant theology perspective, wherein he basically says there is nothing in the Old Testament that remains relevant at all to us today, at all.

And even at that, having said that, he likewise argues that Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 were even less relevant than we might want to think that they would be, because they were totally cultic in their origination.

What he means by that is that this was obviously, clearly, religious laws that are to differentiate Israel from the nations around. And he just simply assumes, and if there is anything cultic about the law, it is utterly done away with, irrelevant to Christians today.

So he does not even attempt to interact with a perspective such as the one I've presented in our studies on the Levitical code or anything like that at all. He just does not think there is any possible way to make any meaningful distinctions between moral or ethical or what's still binding and what's not.

It's just he's thrown up his hands and said, no one can figure it out, and therefore, unless it's in the New Testament, it's irrelevant. So he just dismisses all of it that way. Sodom and Gomorrah is dismissed by being nothing but the subject of coercion, rape, violence, has nothing to do with homosexuality whatsoever, due to its parallel with the incident in Gibeah in Judges 19.

And he repeatedly says that in, I think, in 48 places where the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned, not once is homosexuality associated with that. When I point out to him that in Ezekiel 16 .50, after listing the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, it says, because of this, they committed, and it's toevah.

Now, some of our translations render it as abominations, but it's actually the singular use, the toevah. And there's only one of the sexual sins in Leviticus 18 that is specifically said to be toevah, and it's homosexuality.

And so any meaningful interpretation of Ezekiel 16 in light of the Mosaic law would see that parallel, recognize what's there. When I asked him during cross-examination, could you explain what the singular toevah is at Ezekiel 16 .50?

So we don't know. We don't know. But we know it can't be homosexuality, but we don't know what it actually is. So anyway. Yes, sir? What did you do with the newspaper? Well, we haven't gotten there yet.

Romans 1, the Apocrypha, and the Calvin Porter Theory

So in reading his material, he had already dealt with arsonic coites in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 71, said it was pederasty and so on and so forth, which isn't overly difficult to refute. But what had been helpful to me in preparation for this debate is the approach he took to Romans chapter 1 I had never seen before.

I'd never seen it. And I've read a lot of books on homosexuality, far more than I've ever wanted to. And I had never seen it. And thankfully, once I mentioned it on the dividing line, some people sent me some links.

And lo and behold, it's picking up some popularity. So Michael Brown had never heard it before. I talked with Bob Gagnon yesterday about it. And he was a little surprised at how many people were picking it up.

So it was good to encounter it beforehand. Because to be honest with you, if I had heard it in the debate for the first time, it would have been one of those, huh, moments, which are not good in a debate.

It's not good to have, huh, moments in debates. So basically, the argument is based upon a 1994 scholarly article by a gentleman by the name of Calvin Porter, who argues that Romans 1, 18 through 32, is a Greek rhetorical device, where Paul is arguing the standard Jewish view.

He's quoting from some ancient Jewish source. There are a lot of parallels between the wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha and Romans 1, 18 through 32. There's actually some fascinating differences, too.

But anyway, and they can't say what Jewish source it was. It's an unknown Jewish source. But he's quoting from this. And then, beginning at chapter 2, verse 1, he then turns to argue against what he's just said.

And so the rest of the Book of Romans is actually an argument against Romans 1, 18 through 32. And therefore, if we have taken Romans 1, 18 through 32 as having any normative theological value, we've completely missed the boat, because Paul argues against it.

Now, talk about a theological novum. Talk about a absolutely massive minority view. But there it is. I mean, it has so many problems in it that it's hard to even begin to know where to list them all. But the thing that's thankful is that I knew it was coming, and therefore, I've been able to think about it.

And interestingly enough, I think Graham realizes how tenuous that argument is. He didn't make it in the debate. He referred to it briefly. And if you'd read his stuff, you could see that he was saying something about it.

But he did not make it an argument in the debate, because I think he realized that against anyone who knows Romans or can deal with the original languages or anything, he was going to have a hard time defending that.

And so he sort of went a different direction, which did not shock me at all. But anyway, we had a very good turnout. It's hard to measure, but somewhere between 400 and 600 people. Had a very strong live stream.

I guess you were able, Josh was able to watch it. And it really went well. We already have the audio, but we should have the video this week. And of course, we'll get it up on YouTube as quickly as we can, however long it'll be there.

But it went well. It was, I think it's going to be very useful to folks to be able to do that. Because I think Graham did a good job presenting the standard revisionist perspective. And so it was strange to have done that Friday and then attend a debate on the same subject, basically, less than a week later, where someone else is taking the position that I had taken halfway around the planet.

It was sort of fun to get to sit back and you go get them, Bob. It was nice. So that was Friday night. Like I said, I spoke on Saturday and preached Sunday at Antioch Bible Church in Johannesburg morning and evening.

War and Peace, the Quran, and the Debate with Yusuf Ismail

And I obviously picked up some of the normal respiratory type thing that's almost impossible to avoid when you spend nearly a full day in a pressurized cabin with, well, since it was two legs, what is that, about 500, 600 different people.

In close quarters, it was a 747 from here to Heathrow and an A380 from Heathrow to Joburg. And so by Monday, my voice was sounding pretty rough. I was doing the Barry White instead of James White thing.

And we had found out on Sunday, much to our disappointment, that though we had been informed that both debates on Monday and Tuesday evening would be at the Juman Masjid in Durban, they were moved to a hall next door to the mosque.

And that was very disappointing to us. There's a lot of politics amongst the Muslims in Durban. And so we got a lot of different stories from the Muslims as to what was going on there. The location was not very good.

The acoustics were bad. Attendance was not nearly what it had been last year because it had been moved and the weather wasn't all that great. And the setup was just horrible. We had these comfy chairs and didn't have a table to sit at, to write at.

And we're tripping over each other. And it was challenging. And the first debate was on war and peace in Christianity and Islam. And I got up to speak. And I was honestly concerned I was going to make it through the evening.

I did not. I was struggling to produce sufficient volume to be heard. It was ugly. The gentleman I was debating is named Yusuf Ismail. I have attempted to work with Yusuf. He is an attorney, trial attorney.

I have attempted to work with him a few times now. We've done one, two, three, four, five. Five debates. I guess you could actually say 10 because they were two-part debates. And if you count them that way, I suppose, I don't know.

But Yusuf is frustrating because he utilizes the shotgun methodology. You just fire a bunch of stuff out there and see if something's going to stick somewhere along the line. He's not careful at all in his use of sources.

He is more than willing to utilize contradictory sources. And I have attempted over our exchanges and being friendly with him to try to encourage him to use even scales, to not use double standards. After the second debate Tuesday night, I decided that was a failed effort and have no intentions of debating him again.

And have publicly announced that. In the first debate, a subject I've not addressed before. And I've seen a number of debates. And basically, the Christian side just puts up all sorts of pictures of beheaded people and crucified Christians and crucified other people.

And I mean, the majority of Muslim violence is against Muslims, though we certainly experience it as well in many places. And so, you know, it tends to be extremely emotional. And the other side puts up, well, and Yusuf did this.

At the end of his presentation, his final closing remarks, he put up pictures of deformed and dead babies killed by depleted uranium bombs from the United States. And did all that under a quote from Jay Smith, a Christian from London, saying that Western societies have been influenced by Christian values.

And so here's your Christian values, dead babies. And it was sad at that point. I obviously attempted, what my attempt was, was to say, look, we both have texts of violence in our scriptures. And I knew what he was going to be going to.

You know, the Amorites and Canaanites and Perizzites and Jebusites and 1 Samuel 15 and Saul not being obedient and wiping out all that stuff. And then you go to the New Testament, and Jesus tells a parable where he's represented as the ones, as those who would not have me rule over them, bring them before me and slay them before my eyes.

And I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. And so I expected all of that and, in fact, addressed all of that before he ever stood up and then repeated all of that. But what I wanted to do was to say, all right, you're going to explain these texts in the Quran.

You're going to explain that Surah 9 had a specific historical fulfillment and so on and so forth. OK, I get that. Why isn't ISIS getting that notice? Because when people claim Christianity and go out and do things, the Bible is sufficient to be able to demonstrate their error.

But how is the Quran sufficient to be able to do that in light of theories of abrogation and all sorts of things that are relevant to Islamic exegesis? And really what I wanted to get down to is how we view our scriptures and how we look at the doctrine of inspiration.

Both evenings, that was going to become very relevant. Well, I brought up all that stuff, but Yusuf wasn't overly cooperative in engaging those particular subjects. And so I think it was useful, but not as useful as it could have been.

The second night was a very unusual topic, and that was we were looking at the synoptic Gospels in comparison to the parallel accounts that are found in the Quran. And obviously, my goal here was to, again, call for equal standards.

At the same time, my goal was to bring up the issue that we can explain in light of our doctrine of inspiration, why Matthew would telescope the details of the story of the raising of Jairus' daughter into a story that's one-third the length of Mark's version.

Because you have two different authors, you have two different audiences, you have two different lengths of Gospels, and Christians believe that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

So this would give me an opportunity to explain to the Muslims in the audience our understanding of inspiration. And then to challenge Yusuf in looking at the parallel accounts in the Quran, where, for example, the fall of Adam and Satan is narrated in about four different surahs.

And one or two verses are identical, which means the author of the Quran, if he wanted to, could have said them in identical fashion. But in the majority of instances, they're very different, not just different choices of words, but completely different presentations.

And sometimes it's Allah himself who's being quoted. Well, Yusuf, in responding to my discussion of synoptic Gospels, clearly laid out his standard, and that is, if Matthew, Mark, or Luke say anything different from one another, it's contradiction.

Everything has to be identical. Well, having established that as his standard, now I challenge him, all right, apply the same standard to the Quran. You've just rejected Matthew, Mark, and Luke as inspired and contradictory.

Now, here's the parallels. They're not saying it in the same way. In some places, they use a future tense. In some places, a past tense, directly parallel to what happened in the story of Jairus and whether his daughter was dead or about to die when they first met Jesus.

I drew perfect parallels. And in his opening response to what I had said about the Quran, he had 25 minutes. Well, that's why I decided about 10 minutes in, I wrote down in my notebook, I'm never debating Yusuf Ismail again.

It was just amazing. He simply dismissed my presentation as irrelevant, said, ah, it's just, it all means the same thing. Doesn't matter. And went off after, well, the night before, you'll all enjoy this.

The night before on war and peace, you know what his starting argument was once he got a chance to speak on the Bible? Cervetus. Miguel Cervetus. Now, those of you who are going, what's that all about?

If you haven't had someone argue Cervetus against you, I'm not sure you're a Calvinist. Because there's a great meme on sacredsandwich .com. Look up, go to Sacred Sandwich, look up Cervetus. There is this four-panel cartoon.

And it's a Calvinist and Arminian. And the Calvinist, the Calvinist goes, John 6. And the Arminian goes, 1 Timothy 2. And the Calvinist goes, Romans 8. And the Arminian goes, Matthew 23, 37. And the Calvinist goes, Romans 9.

The Arminian goes, Cervetus. And the next panel is, sorry, I panicked from the Arminian. Cervetus was the Unitarian heretic who was burned in Geneva. And he is the favorite argument of certain Arminians that Calvinism leads to murder and mayhem.

And no one could believe anything Calvin ever said because he had a role in Cervetus's death and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's just, so here I am in South Africa attempting to discuss war and peace in the Bible and the Koran.

And I've got five minutes of Cervetus. I was just, I cannot believe this is happening. And so it was even worse in the 25 minutes, the second night. What he clearly was attempting to do was to get the jihadi spirit going.

Because he's like, you need to be open about your agenda here. You need to be open about your rejection of the Koran as the word of God. And he's waving my book on the Koran around while he's saying this.

I'm just like, you don't see the insanity of this? You're waving around a 300-page book on the Koran written by a Christian. And you're saying I need to be open about my view of the Koran? I mean, he went after me for not dealing with other sources that the Koran used, which we weren't even debating.

And then he demanded that I answer the question, do you believe Muhammad was mad, possessed, or a liar? You need to tell us what you believe about the, you know, and I'm just. And then he finished off with a five or six-minute presentation of the Koran codes.

Now, you remember about 15, 16 years ago when a bunch of these Bible code books came out? And it was all the rage for a while was that, you know, there are these secret codes hidden in the original languages of the Bible.

And the number of this add up to the number of that. And, you know, you've got prophecies and just all sorts of these patterns and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, the Muslims have theirs, too. And I'll be perfectly honest with you.

I have a hard time not laughing at the Koran codes. One of the arguments he put up was the word for man occurs 65 times in the Koran. And then they put up all the development, all the stages of the development of man.

And so, like, drop of sperm, flesh, da, da, da, you add all those up, 65. There you go. There you go. And then man appears 23 times and woman appears 23 times. 23 to 23 is 46. How many chromosomes do we have?

There you go. Absolute proof. And the Muslims in the audience are going, oh, Hawthorne! This is, you know, I'm just like. So I'm just, I get up and I am just like, and the sad thing was, last Tuesday night, as far as we can count, and after all these years, I may have missed something or I don't know, and how do you, counting is, these things is difficult, but as best we can figure, last Tuesday night was my 150th moderated public debate around the world.

And it will be one to remember because I said, in all 150, I've never heard anything like what I just heard. That was absolutely amazing. And so, we still managed to squeeze a little bit of value out of the cross-examination period, out of the discussion period, because I pushed him on the inspiration issue.

And basically, he ended up saying God did not speak to Muhammad in Arabic. And I can guarantee you something. 99 .5 of the world's Muslims would be shocked if they heard, when they, and they will be, when they hear Yusuf Ismail say that.

He may, he may be backtracking on that one before long. But anyways, so it was, it was disappointing. Interesting, I'm sure people still find something useful in there, but certainly not what I'd hope for.

Ayub Karim and the Question of Jesus in the Bible

The next night, at a different location, we did a debate on the standard old, is Jesus God topic. And you might go, how many times can you do that? Well, last year I debated a Muslim by the name of Ayub Karim.

And Ayub Karim is the head of ICRA. And ICRA is an organization, Ayub argues all of the points of Ahmed Didat. Didat is still the most listened to Muslim in the world. He's dead, has been dead for nine years.

But his videotapes still circulate around the world. Hundreds of millions of Muslims have watched him. And imams, especially, are dependent upon him. So even people who haven't watched him have ended up being taught by him through their imams.

And Yusuf, I'm sorry, Ayub Karim, dresses like Didat, speaks like Didat. He just, he is an absolute clone of Didat. And so what we're doing is a series of debates. Because I never got to debate Didat.

Didat had a stroke in 1996. I hadn't even started studying Islam at that point. And never spoke again. And so the only way I can address Didat is to debate people like Ayub Karim or the Indian apologist Zakir Naik, who won't debate, who does the exact same thing.

So last year we did Crucifixion or Crucifiction, F-I-C-T-I-O-N, which is probably Didat's most famous talk. And it went really well. Because Didat's material cannot stand up to any serious scholarly examination, which is why Didat always chose his opponents very carefully.

And this year was his Is Jesus God talk. And so as frustrating as it might be to have to go back to basics over and over again, for the vast majority of Muslims, this guy is much more representative than Yusuf Ismail or Shabir Ali ever could be.

And so if you're dealing with Muslims outside the United States, which is the vast majority of Muslims, this is actually more useful. Because Muslims outside the United States have no earthy idea what Shabir Ali or Yusuf Ismail are talking about in the first place.

They're just like, oh, yeah, go. I have no idea. But yo, ye, allahu akbar. But they're not going to repeat what they're saying because they don't understand it. Ayub Karim is much more Muslim. And so he doesn't understand the trinity.

He thinks we think Jesus is the father. He thinks Jesus is talking to himself. All the standard misapprehensions that Didat had and that the vast majority of Muslims have, Ayub Karim has. So I get to correct all those things, but with him there.

And it's extremely useful. And Rudolf Buschhoff, the pastor down there that does all my organization stuff, and he travels with me, and he's just a wonderful young man. He leaned over to me after my opening statement.

He said, Dr. White, he said, I've never seen a Muslim audience transfixed like that. I mean, nobody moved. They were just, they were absolutely listening to every word you said. And he was right. It was amazing.

It really was. So it went really well. And the neat thing is, ICRA has a center in Cape Town. And the series of lectures that Ayub is scheduled to give next year are on Muhammad in the Bible, which was another one of Didat's big things.

And so I said, let's do it. You do all your lectures. And then in Cape Town, next year, we'll debate, is Muhammad in the Bible? He said, let's do it. So we've not been to Cape Town yet. So it looks like next year, it's going to be Johannesburg-Cape Town instead of Johannesburg-Durban.

I've been told Cape Town is the most beautiful spot in all of South Africa. So that should be nice. It's right, well, it's the Cape. It's the horn of Africa. It's right there. And so the ocean is supposed to be really beautiful.

But it would also open up some new venues. And there are a number of Muslim apologists down there as well to engage. So we were really pleased with the first and last debates, basically, because they were extremely useful and should be really helpful to have out there and available to folks on the web.

Closing Reflections, Media Reach, and Prayer

So the trip back is longer than the trip out, because you're going east to west. And prevailing winds slow you down a little bit, so the flights are longer. And it's an experience. No two ways about it.

But yeah, I am getting a little more accustomed to it over the years. But it was a really, really neat opportunity. And I had a couple young men show up at the last debate in Durban. I should have brought it with me.

One of the young men gives me a CD, and he's a guitarist. And some of the ones are specifically acoustic, and others are different. But he's a guitarist. And it's a Christian CD. And I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, because my MacBook Pro doesn't have a CD drive in it.

I'll have to burn that tomorrow. But he gave it to me, and he said, you're mentioning the liner notes. And so I read the liner notes when I got home. And he was thanking all these people that were helpful in the development of his faith over the years.

And I came right before Charles Spurgeon. So I was sort of like, ooh, wow, OK. I'm not sure if that's just because I'm the next oldest person in the group to Spurgeon or just what. But it was really neat to meet folks down there, listen to The Dividing Line all the time, and have been blessed by it.

So we do live in a much smaller world than we did only a number of years ago, because of our ability to communicate over great distances instantaneously. I mean, it was fascinating. Rich texted me. I said, how does the feed look during the debate with Graham Codrington?

Because the church we were at was a pretty fancy church. And so there was a live feed. And Rich's response on my iPhone was, looks like you're next door. So here he was in Phoenix at 10 o 'clock in the morning watching a debate going on at 7 o 'clock at night in South Africa.