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Here we go, sound, awesome. Hello everyone, really great to see you all today. My name is Luke Pasquarelli, I am the president of Why Should I Believe in Georgia Tech, which is one of the organizations co-hosting this event.
Just a little bit about us really quick, and the slide's not up. Okay, that's fine. That's not good. You know, for Georgia Institute of Technology, there's some things we still don't do very well. That's okay, we'll roll with it.
So anyways, let me tell you a little bit about Why Should I Believe. We're a Christian apologetics organization here on campus. We believe in applying the lens of reason and science to Christianity to discern its truth value, and that's what we do weekly.
We meet over at the Instructional Center on campus on Mondays at 6 .30, and if you're interested in learning more about us, we have a table outside where you can sign up for our mailing list, and you can absolutely talk to me afterwards.
We also have a Facebook page, so feel free to check us out there, we post weekly updates on what our events will be and so on. So anyways, it's a little bit about Why Should I Believe, and now a little bit about the debate.
First of all, I wanna talk about what this debate is, and then I wanna talk about what this debate is not. This is a pursuit of truth and understanding, and what do I mean by this? I mean, God is objectively real and has objective truth, and it is our job to align our beliefs with that objective truth, and that's what we're doing here, pursuing that truth.
We're also pursuing understanding, understanding of people who think differently than us, and how they think, so that we can better just converse with them and understand people. So that's what this debate is.
Let me tell you what this debate is not. This debate is not the intellectual analog of the USC. We aren't here to watch a couple of intellectual heavyweights throw arguments at each other and see who emerges victorious as the champion to the roar of the audience.
We're here to pursue truth and understanding. So what does that mean for you as an audience? It's really simple. It really boils down to just respect. Respect both of our speakers here. Respect the people around you, because not everyone shares your beliefs.
So the other thing it also means is ask great questions. Both of our speakers are very well-read individuals who have devoted most of their lives to studying this topic, so they'll have a lot of evidence and a lot of points that you may not have thought of before.
Feel free to jot those thoughts you have now about those topics and ask them. We'll have a Q &A session at the end. With that being said, I'd like to introduce our first speaker of the night, Dr. James White.
Dr. White has a number of apologetics degrees from seminaries across the nation. He's director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, which is located in Phoenix, Arizona, and he's a Christian apologetics organization.
And he's very well-read on this topic. He's debated topics within this vein multiple times. I've seen a number of his debates, and I'm a huge fan. So let me now welcome my friend Hassan up to introduce our other speaker and kick off the night.
Thank you.
Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you, Luke, for that warm introduction. My name is Hassan Asif, and I am the president of Georgia Tech's MSA, or Muslim Students Association.
MSA is a non-profit student-run organization here on campus, and in fact, is the only one representing Muslims here at this university. Throughout the school year, we offer a wide variety of events.
Our social events include football tailgates, sporting competitions, and monthly general body meetings. And we offer Friday prayers, Quran study, and Islamic history on Thursday nights, as well as monthly group discussion meetings.
We also offer an array of volunteering opportunities and interfaith prayer opportunities for our members. If any of you would like to join our organization or join the mailing list, you can find us on Facebook.
Just Google, or just put Georgia Tech MSA into Facebook. You can come talk to me. We also have a table outside. Or you can send an email to contact at gtmsa .org. In essence, our organization strives to create a welcoming and collaborative environment for Muslims and non-Muslims alike on campus.
And we also work to bridge the gap between Islam and other religions here. And that's precisely why we're here at tonight's debate. You've already met Dr. White, and now I have the honor to introduce Dr. Shabir Ali.
Dr. Ali is an internationally renowned Muslim scholar who travels the world to represent Islam in public lectures and interfaith dialogue. He holds a Bachelor's of Arts in Religious Studies from Laurentian University, with a specialization in biblical literature.
And he also has his Master's and PhD from the University of Toronto, with a specialization in Quranic exegesis, or interpretation. He's the President of Islamic Information and Dawah Center International in Toronto.
And he explains various topics from Islam in his television series called Let the Quran Speak. And you can find some of his episodes from that on QuranSpeaks .com. It's also worthy to note, and Luke touched upon this, that our debaters actually know each other.
They're friends, and they've debated multiple times in the past. And even though logic and proof are necessary components of a worthy debate, the one thing about that that we know is mutual respect. And tonight, we happen to have mutual respect here on the stage.
And instead of just a simple debate composed of clashing opinions, we'll have the opportunity to witness true and amazing interfaith dialogue. With that being said, let me talk about some of the technicalities of the debate tonight.
The debate will begin with a 20-minute opening statement from each debater, starting with Dr. White. And then we'll move on into a rebuttal period, where each debater will get 10 minutes to refute the comments of the other debater.
This is followed by 15 minutes of cross-examination, where one debater will get to ask questions to the other one, and they're gonna sit at their tables and discuss. So each debater will get 15 minutes to do that, starting with Dr. White, and then Dr. Ali.
And then after that, both debaters will get five minutes for their closing statements. And then, like Luke said, there's gonna be a question and answer series at the end. We'll have all of you guys, those of you who have questions, line up in the middle, and we'll ask, we'll alternate between the two lines.
And we'll have that go on until 9 .15 p .m. Finally, before we begin, a couple housekeeping notes. Let's take a moment right now to check our cell phones and make sure that they're either turned off or on silent.
I say this because this event is being recorded, and so we ask that you don't record from your phones, as that is both distracting to yourself and also the people sitting around you, and actually the people sitting behind you.
If you need to use the restroom, the restrooms are actually on this floor right outside, on the other side of the stairs. And if you need to exit for the restroom or for any other reason, you can use the doors in the back, not the ones up here.
And at this time, the debate will begin. Dr. White, I now ask you to come up to the podium and make your opening statement. Dr. White, everyone.
Thank you very much. It is an honor to be with you this evening here in Georgia. We have a very interesting topic to address this evening. I would say that about 50 out of the about 174 debates I've done so far have been with my Muslim friends.
I think Shabir and I have debated probably six, between six and nine times. We've debated in South Africa, Canada, London, all over the place. And so we've addressed this topic before. And in my experience, when the topic is Trinity or Tawhid, the focus is completely upon the subject of the Trinity and almost never upon the subject of Tawhid.
So I really think that it's important that maybe this evening we try to even things out just a little bit as far as dealing with the subject from both perspectives. And so let's begin with a definition.
Because most of the time, objections to the doctrines of Trinity are based upon a misdefinition of what the doctrine of the Trinity is. This happens a lot in my experience in debates, so let's try to avoid that.
By making sure that you understand, we believe that there is one true God. One true God in the Old Testament to the divine name, use this one true God is Yahweh. Sometimes you hear it pronounced Jehovah.
And we believe that that one true God has revealed himself to exist in three divine persons that follow the Son, the Spirit. Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father.
They are distinguished from one another. They take different roles in the economy of salvation. They are distinguished from one another by the actions that they undergo in our salvation as well as the relationship that they bore to one another in eternity past.
Now I believe very clearly that the doctrine is revealed, especially in history, in the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which means that the New Testament is written by experiential Trinitarians.
They're not trying to say, hey, we have this new doctrine that we want you to understand and so here's our defense of it because the New Testament never bothers to do that. Those who wrote the words of the New Testament were individuals who had experienced this revelation.
So Peter, Peter had heard the Father speak from heaven. He had walked with the Son. He was now indwelt by the Holy Spirit. He was an experiential Trinitarian. And so they speak. That's why it just naturally flows.
That's why the New Testament writers can speak of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus, and just flow between these things and the Trinitarian passages about the love of God and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
It just flows along and they never stop and say, oh, let me explain what I mean by that. They don't have to do that. This was already the experience that was theirs as the church. But what is important to understand is I think one of the greatest evidences of the deity of Christ is the fact that the New Testament writers take passages that were specifically about Yahweh from the scriptures and apply them to Jesus in unambiguous fashion.
They knew the Old Testament scriptures. They take these passages that are about Yahweh, not just vague things about Yahweh. Yahweh's king, Jesus is king, therefore Jesus is Yahweh. No, that's not what I'm talking about.
They take passages that are specifically about Yahweh as, for example, the eternal creator and apply them to Jesus. Now, Dr. Ali has rightly said about Jesus, if he is not Yahweh, then he cannot be God.
But Dr. Ali joins to this correct observation a fully erroneous one, that Yahweh is Unitarian in his existence. So, for example, he will undoubtedly argue that in Isaiah chapter 42, Yahweh speaks of a servant that he will send, and then, of course, Matthew identifies that servant as Jesus.
Therefore, if Yahweh is Unitarian, then Jesus can't be Yahweh, he can't be God. That's where the erroneous assumption comes in because, yes, Yahweh sends Jesus. The Father's identified as Yahweh. It's Yahweh that places our sins upon the Messiah.
Jesus is the Messiah. So, if Yahweh is Unitarian, Jesus can't be Yahweh. But the problem is the very same New Testament writers then turn around and they identify Jesus as Yahweh. So, if you have the writers taking one divine name and applying it to Father, Son, and Spirit, that might tell you that they were indeed Trinitarians or they do that.
For example, very quickly, I don't have time to develop all of these. It's a really fascinating study if you wanna dig into it. But, for example, in John 12, verse 41, after quoting from the famous vision from Isaiah 6, you have these words from John.
He says, Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and he spoke about him. If you go back to Isaiah 6, whose glory had Isaiah seen? He saw the glory of Yahweh. He saw the Lord sitting upon his throne and it's Yahweh who speaks to him.
In fact, in the Greek Septuagint, it even uses the word glory as something that Isaiah saw. So, if you ask Isaiah, Isaiah, whose glory did you see? Isaiah's gonna say, I saw Yahweh's glory. If you ask John, whose glory did Isaiah see?
John's answer is Jesus, a very unique, not just some lesser creature representative. No, this is the very temple vision of Isaiah 6. Peter does the same thing. In 1 Peter 3 .15, a text that many of the, all the young guys involved with apologetics know the text, to be ready to give an answer, prosopologiam, to anyone who asks you a reason for the hope that's within you, with gentleness and reverence.
But, if you read the preceding verse, Peter is quoting from Isaiah chapter eight. And he's actually continuing that into 1 Peter 3. And when he does so, he's saying, set the Lord as Lord Christ apart in your hearts.
Treat him as holy. You go back to Isaiah chapter eight, who do you treat as holy? Yahweh. He identifies Jesus as Yahweh, that you're to set apart as Lord, kurios, as Yahweh, in your hearts. That's what changes you.
That's why Unitarianism has always resulted in emptiness. Because without a divine savior, there's no change of the heart. And so, true Christianity has always emphasized the fact that when you set Christ as Yahweh apart in your heart, that changes the entirety of your perspective, it changes how you respond to the world, and as such, that is why people will ask us about a reason for the hope that's within us.
And then the writer of the Hebrews, probably Paul, but I personally think it was a sermon by Paul written down by Luke. But in Hebrews chapter one, you have Psalm 102, 25 through 27 quoted, and Psalm 102 is about Yahweh in his unchanging nature.
He is the one who is immutable, and the author is clearly, when you follow the argument, beginning of verse three all the way through, look at verse six, look at verse eight, all the way through, the author is plainly demonstrating the supremacy of Jesus, and then closes out by applying words that can only be about Yahweh, only Yahweh is unchanging.
Anything else is a creature, anything else has been made, anything else is derivative, but of the Son, he says, and in the citation of Psalm 102, is applied to Jesus, to the Son, in Hebrews chapter one, verse 10.
And so, Paul does the same thing, if Paul didn't write Hebrews, in Philippians chapter two, verses 10 through 11, you have the great Carmen Christi, where there the balance is struck so beautifully, and boy, I wish that we could just spend the whole time in Philippians chapter two, it's so clear, so compelling in its teaching of what Christians have always believed, that Jesus had eternally existed in the very form of God, but he laid that equality he had with God the Father aside to do what?
To enter into human flesh, to enter into human existence, that's the great picture of humility there, no other interpretation gives you humility, that's the only interpretation that gives you the picture of humility that that section is to be, and then, to top it all off, what does Paul do?
But he quotes the words from Isaiah 45, 23, where Yahweh says, to me every knee will bow, to me every tongue will confess, and what do you have in Philippians chapter two? At the name of Jesus, every knee bows, and every tongue confesses, all to the glory of God the Father, it doesn't detract from the Father's glory, this isn't one God over here, and another God over there, that's what John five was all about, perfect unity between the Father and the Son, here you have over and over again, throughout the authors of the New Testament, this theme being struck, and being found in the pages of the New Testament.
And now, to something different, something different that we have not had in previous debates, I'm sure Shabir is looking a little bit worried. Let's remember that the Quran comes to us, at least in its historical manifestation, I realize that there are Muslims who believe it's eternal, so and so, but just a debate on that, found that there's a lot of different opinions on that, but the Quran comes to us in its historical appearance in history, over 500 years after the completion of the New Testament, so half a millennium has passed, between the last words of the New Testament being written, and the arrival of even the first portion of the Quran.
In the Quran, we have references made to the Torah, and the Injil, exactly what those are meant to refer to, it's difficult to know, because there is next to no meaningful intertextuality between the Quran, and what we would call the Christian scriptures of the Old and New Testament.
In other words, there's almost no citation of scripture. You have the Lex Talionis, that could have been done orally, you really don't have any specific citation, there is no, you don't have the relationship that exists between the New Testament and the Old Testament, you have citation after citation after citation, you don't have that.
Instead, you have basically oral concepts. And so what exactly the Torah, the law, and the Injil, the gospel, means to the author of the Quran is somewhat difficult to understand. There does not seem to be, there is strong evidence that the author of the Quran did not know what the canon of the New Testament was, because he includes stories in the text of the Quran that Christians never accepted as scripture.
The story of the, they were derived from proto-Gnostic gospels and things like that, the clay birds that were made alive and float away and things like that. These come from after the period of the writing of the New Testament, and so the Quran speaks to Christians as to a group.
We are addressed as the Al-Anjil, the people of the gospel, as well as the people of the book. And so the Quran warns that saying three will bring you to hellfire. Saying three in reference to God. Now every single time the Quran says do not say three, the next line is, there is only one God, Allah.
So very plainly, it is the intention of the author of the Quran to understand the Christian saying of the word three. Doesn't use the term trinity, but the word three to refer to polytheism, a belief in three gods.
But here's the problem. You already had early church writers like Justin Martyr identifying Jesus as Yahweh, arguing with Trifle the Jew, putting into the words, putting onto Trifle's lips arguments that allowed him to then demonstrate that Jesus is being identified with Jehovah God, with Yahweh, so why doesn't the author of the Quran seem to understand that if in fact our argument is there is one God, Yahweh, who is identified with the Father, with the Son, and the Spirit, then why is there no interaction with that?
Why is there no response to that? Instead, the argument is, if you say three, it's hellfire for you. There'll be no one to save you, heaven is forbidden to you, and hellfire will be your abode. See Surah 572 for just one example of that rather strong language that's found in the pages of the Quran.
So here's the question that I really, really hope that other than just, in all these debates, we sit here and we talk about the trinity, we never talk about the Islamic side of things. I mean, most people end up walking out, they have no earthy idea how any of these things end up fleshing out.
Shabir knows what the issue is. As I mentioned, I quoted him earlier. This was from a debate four years ago with Jonathan McClatchy. If Jesus is not Yahweh, then he cannot be God. So he knows what, Shabir knows what the issue is.
If Jesus is Yahweh, yet is distinguished from the Father and the Spirit, then clearly the trinity is the one conclusion one can come to on non-naturalistic grounds. In other words, if you're willing to start cutting the Bible apart, if you don't believe that there is a single message to be found in the page of the scripture, then you can come up with anything you want.
You can come up with Benetarianism, whatever you want. If you want to assert contradiction and all the rest of that kind of stuff. In other words, if you want to approach it in a way that Shabir does not approach the Quran.
When he does the television program, the Quran is allowed to speak as the Quran. If you let the New Testament speak as the New Testament, it teaches this doctrine. This is why Christians have believed this for so long.
So here is the real question. If Shabir Ali knows what the issue is, why didn't the author of the Quran know what the issue was? Why didn't the author of the Quran? Now, I can anticipate the answer. Well, I didn't want to necessarily address that or was talking about this little group over there.
Look, unless we're gonna get to the point of saying that God doesn't know the future, unless we're going to come up with, well, the Quran is just addressing this very small little group of here doesn't exist anymore, that kind of thing.
The reality is that we as the people of the gospel are told that we are to judge by what is contained in the gospel. What are we to be judging? Well, if I judge the message of the author of the Quran and the content of the Quran by the gospel, I have to find it to be lacking.
That's why there's still Christians and there's still Muslims, and we're having debates. If we had come to an agreement on this, we wouldn't be doing this any longer. It wouldn't just be for entertainment.
And so if Shabir knows what the issue is, why didn't the author of the Quran? Why does the author of the Quran show no knowledge at all of the divine name? I'll be interested to find out if Shabir believes that there is any evidence that you can point to in the Quran where there would be a knowledge of the name of Yahweh.
Could it be because his knowledge was so limited that the tradition of the Jews not to use the divine name meant he had never heard it himself? Certainly by that time, the Jews would not utter the divine name.
So if he was only learning things orally, he wouldn't have heard it being given. So is that a possibility? If saying three sends you to hell fire, why doesn't the Quran address the most definitional argument for the Trinity, which it is then condemning as something that will separate you from the true worship of God?
If the Quran argues the Trinity is polytheism, but when we identify the Father, the Son, the Spirit as all sharing the one nature of God indicated by the divine name Yahweh, we are arguing just the opposite of the assumption of the author of the Quran itself.
We are starting with monotheism. There is only one God, Yahweh, and then showing the revelation of that one God prophesied in the Old Testament. You look at Isaiah chapter nine, you look at these texts, prophesied in the Old Testament, but still the revelation takes place in the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God.
So why doesn't the Quran address this while it still then condemns this as, and I'll ask Shabir if he will define for us please, shirk, which is the unforgivable sin in Islam. According to the Quran, all our sins can be forgiven to men except for shirk.
And most Muslims with whom I interact believe that our worship of Jesus is major shirk, which cannot be forgiven. And so if that's the case, then I think it's perfectly proper on our part to say if a revelation comes along, half a millennium later, it needs to accurately interact with what it is condemning if we are going to believe what it has to say.
We can't just let that aspect of things slide. We can't let those things, they just don't generally come up and they need to come up in our conversation this evening. Why is there not a shred of evidence to be found in the pages of the Quran that the author had any knowledge at all that John and Paul and Peter and the writer of the Hebrews had specifically identified Jesus as Yahweh in their writings?
Why is that? And if there is such a huge chasm, which I say would go against the chain that is forged in surah five as well, beginning verse, at ayah 44, 44 through 48, the revelation of the Torah of Moses, the revelation of the Injil of Jesus, and the revelation of the Torah of Muhammad.
If there is that huge break, then how do we explain that? How do we understand that in regards to what Christians believe on this subject, the doctrine of the Trinity? Now, I'm sorry if some of that was a little bit, I didn't get a chance to necessarily explain everything, but I wanna try to sort of move the ball forward.
It's one thing to do the same topic over and over and over again, but I don't know how many debates Shabir has done on the subject of Trinity and Tauhid. I know I've done a bunch of them, he's done a bunch of them.
Let's try to move it forward into an area that will advance our knowledge, especially in comparison with the debates that we've done before. I think that would be a great way of advancement for both of our communities.
I think Shabir and I are in good shape to do that type of thing here this evening, and you get to listen in. Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. Shabir Ali, you can now deliver your opening statement.
Let me begin by praising our creator and fashioner, the creator of the heavens and the earth. I ask you, God, to bless all of the righteous servants in all of history, bless us all here tonight, bless our meeting, bless our discussion, make it fruitful, open up our understanding,.
And help us to say the right thing in the right time and the right way.
And Dr. White, I want to thank you for sharing this platform with me and giving me another opportunity to engage with you and to learn from you. Folks, I'm so thankful that you've all come out here tonight and I look forward to engaging with you, not only during my presentations, but also and especially to hear your questions later on.
Now, let me start with the first half of my talk to address the Muslim belief in the Quran and its expression of tawheed, or monotheism. I want to very quickly remind you all of what the topic was about.
The topic is tawheed versus trinity, and then the subtopic says, is it one person or three persons? Is God one person or three persons? And the subject is not really, does the Quran have the correct understanding of what Christians believe?
But nonetheless, as Dr. White has raised that question, I will try to address it. So very quickly, from the Quranic perspective, what is tawheed? The word tawheed itself does not occur in the Quran, but the concept of the oneness of God, or that God is one, is said explicitly in the Quran again and again.
The Muslim kalima, or declaration of faith, says la ilaha illallah, there is no God but God. And this statement is found exactly in that expression twice in the Quran. And elsewhere, some 30 or more times, the Quran says something like la ilaha illahu, there is no God but He.
Or, kullu allahu ahad, say, is Allah one? So the idea that God is one is something that is emphasized in the Quran. So Muslims will take great confidence, or have great confidence in the fact that when they say that God is one, they are following the scripture which they believe to be the word of God.
What is shirk then? James has asked me to explain. Well, shirk is one of those terms that is not so easy to define, but I'll try my best. It seems to be that shirk is the opposite of tawheed. So if belief in tawheed, in the oneness of God, is the pure belief showing the Muslim allegiance to God, shirk would be anything that takes us away from that tawheed, or from that oneness of God.
If one were to worship an idol, that would be shirk. If one were to consider that God has a son or a daughter, that is associating someone with divinity, that would be shirk in Muslim definition. Now, of course, there could be relations of shirk, and James did speak about this being like a major one.
Well, one might speak about lesser rates of shirk. For example, some Muslims will say that if you do a good deed while trying to please someone else other than God, that is, in a way, shirk, because you're supposed to do it only for the pleasure of God.
But of course, that is a lesser degree of shirk. Now, the major one, taking somebody else as an associate with God, that is what the Quran promises severe punishment for, and calls us away from. Now, why doesn't the Quran then show an understanding of what the Christians believed?
That's James's question to me. And the answer to that is that the Quran actually does show an understanding of what Christians that the Quran was interacting with at the time believed. And a scholar recently, Sidney Griffith, in his book, The Bible in Arabic, has actually drawn attention to this and explained, step-by-step, how the verses of the Quran actually relate to the belief of Syriac Christians, in particular, because those were the Christians in the environment with which the Quran interacted.
I have to say something, then, about the mode and manner of the Quran. The Quran is revealed to the Prophet Muhammad,.
In whom be peace, Muslims believe, as the word of God, into his mind,.
To interact with his immediate environment. People ask him questions, he gives answers by way of divine revelation. All of that is collected into the book that we have today, as the Quran. So, the Quran does not have much interest in commenting upon beliefs of people who are outside of that immediate milieu.
However, the Quran does say some things which, in fact, will apply to all. For example, when the Quran says, laqad kathra lalina qaloo innallaha thalithu sadaqa, they disbelieve, who say that God is one of three.
And some translators put in a trinity, but it doesn't have to be in a trinity, just to say three. And that's why the Quran follows up by saying, innamallahu innahu wahid, that God is only one God. So, the Quran is telling you, don't say three, just say that there is only one God, and that's it.
And so, if our Christian friends were to only say one God, and they stopped at that, they would be saying something that conforms with the Old Testament. They would be saying, actually, what conforms even to some of the explicit statements of the New Testament writers, which we'll get to as time commits.
And, of course, they would satisfy the Quranic requirement.
That you do not commit this, sure.
But, of course, Christians do not stop at saying that there is one God. Some Christians say that there is one God and three persons. Some say that, yes, there are three persons, but this is not in the Trinity, but a modalistic belief where the Father comes down to earth as the Son, and then eventually manifests Himself as the Holy Spirit.
So, in either case, various Christians are saying three in one way, or three in the other way. And rather than the Quran utilizing a lot of words to explain and contradict and deconstruct all of these individual beliefs, what the Quran does is to displace the Bible as the sole reference.
And the Quran introduces itself as the book that will command respect, attention, and will become the book of guidance for the Muslims in particular, and for humanity at large. So, the Quran does this in a very excellent way.
Look at the way in which the Quran has actually gripped the Muslim world so that, to this day, there are people like myself who did not grow up in an Arabic environment, but we learned the Quran in its original Arabic, and we're able to recite large portions of it from memory in the original Arabic.
Muslims have remained devoted to this book, and Muslims have remained on monotheism. There's no question about the Muslim monotheistic concept. When a Muslim says, I believe in God, you can be sure that the Muslim knows who he believes in.
But let's say a Muslim is talking to a Christian friend, and the Christian friend says, yes, I also believe in God, the Muslim will not be sure. Does the Christian friend mean God the Father? Does he mean God the Holy Spirit?
Does he mean God the Son? Or does he mean all three together? So, there is no question about how the Quran has actually emphasized, and successfully done so, the monotheism that it preaches. So, the Quran is apt in the way that it actually puts things.
Jin says, well, the Quran does not seem to know the canon of the New Testament. That's why the Quran is referring to things that is outside of the New Testament canon. Well, do you know, folks, that even the writers of the New Testament have quoted things which are outside of the New Testament canon, and outside of the Old Testament canon?
Especially outside of the Old Testament canon. Because think about it. The first Christians used the Septuagint, Greek translation of the Bible, and that has books, seven books, which are outside of the Protestant canon.
And the New Testament writers refer to those. For example, to Phobos, and to the Wisdom of Solomon. Moreover, Jude refers to things which are not mentioned either in the Old Testament, or in the other New Testament books.
So, he's quoting apocryphal works. This is already known. So, if James is going to have a problem with the Quran, quoting or referring to things that is outside of the biblical canon, would he also express the same difficulty with the New Testament itself?
Now, the Quran does tell Christians, judge by what God has revealed in the Gospel. But that's what it says. It says, judge by what God has revealed. It doesn't say judge by all of the Gospel, because not everything that people call Gospel has been revealed by God.
Think about why you have four Gospels. And there are four different viewpoints by four different writers, as to what the Gospel of Jesus was all about. So, the Quran says, wal yakhtum adhul in jili dima anzal Allahu feeh.
Let the people of the Gospel judge by that which God has revealed therein. So, you need to go back to the Gospels and ask, what did God actually reveal here? There is something, a puzzle for you. The Quran is actually stimulating the thinking of people, and getting them to do their own homework.
Now, one might say, well, I don't want to listen to the Quran. But if you see what the Quran is saying, some Christians have actually thought about this in their own way. Not necessarily because the Quran says so, but you will find a website with this URL, Jesus words only.
That's something. Look for it. You'll see that there are Christians who are interested in just simply following the words of Jesus, because they recognize that Jesus was definitely inspired by God, and we don't know about the rest of the people.
Who wrote the New Testament? Notice that in James's presentation, he quoted lavishly from 1 Peter. Now, 1 Peter has doubtful authorship. Some Christian scholars think Peter wrote it. Some think Peter didn't write it.
2 Peter, most scholars say, was not written by Peter. And this is alarming, because the letter actually starts out by saying, this is Peter, the disciple of Christ, writing all of this. And now, even some conservative Christian scholars are saying that this is not written by Peter.
For example, Richard Balcombe, in his commentary on the letter of Peter, has said that to attribute this to Peter is a fiction. Now, that has tremendous ramifications, because that letter closes with an assertion, or a kind of inference, that the letters of Paul are also scripture.
And if not for this letter, you would not have another statement like it in the New Testament, affirming that the letters of Peter are scripture. And that the letters of Paul are scripture. And that brings back the whole question of who Paul was, and was he himself also authorized to teach on behalf of Jesus?
We'll have to speak about that. Many of the authors of the New Testament are unknown. And this is widely acknowledged. In a past debate, James actually quoted, with the great confidence and the powerful voice that he normally speaks with, a scholar that we both respect, N .T. Wright.
And James emphasized the words of N .T. Wright. We don't know who wrote the Gospels. And that's what N .T. Wright actually says. We don't know the names of the authors, they're all anonymous. We don't know if John wrote the fourth Gospel, or if somebody else wrote it, and if John, which John?
So the question that comes back then to be addressed is, how do we know that these New Testament writers were writing experientially after experiencing the Holy Spirit? This was one of James' major points in his presentation.
He said that the writers of the New Testament did not have to spell out in great detail what the Trinity was about. Why? Because they experienced it. Well, how do we know that they experienced it? If we don't actually know these individuals, if some of them used false names and pretended to be somebody else while writing, how do we know that they actually had this experience?
I think that needs to be discussed. To continue then, why does the Quran not show any knowledge of the divine name James wants to know? Well, let me say something about the divine name. In the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus, in chapter three, Maltus goes up to meet God, and he sees this angel appearing as a fire on this burning bush, and then he goes up, and then God speaks to him, and tells him, I am Yahweh, and God tells him, he writes, this is my name, and this should be my name forever.
All right, so that's the name forever. I think James' point is valid. Why is the Quran not showing any knowledge of this name? But then, let's ask, why did the New Testament writers mostly show no knowledge of this name?
Why is it that after this name has been translated into Greek, and the New Testament writers are writing in Greek, why are they not writing this name? Why is it that Jesus himself does not utter the name?
Why in the cross does Jesus say, Eli, Eli, with the Son of God. Why is he calling to Eli? My God, El. Why is he calling God El, instead of calling God Yahweh? Why does he say, Yahweh, why are you forsaken?
So the same objection can be lodged there. The only New Testament writing that uses the name, uses it in a truncated form, that's in the Revelation, where those in heaven are given glory to Yahweh by saying, Alleluia.
Instead of saying Yahweh, they're saying Yah. Alleluia. Alleluia. So we know that too. Alleluia. So on the book of Revelation, why is it not unearthed if this is what is seen in heaven? So is that really the name of God?
This is my next question. Actually, nobody knows the pronunciation of Yahweh. This is why James had to say it's either Yahweh, or some people say Jehovah. Why say it two different ways? Because nobody knows the name.
Then the name's pronunciation of these four Hebrew letters. Now, knowing what the Quran is, it would be pointless for the Quran to go into all this great detail to explain about the history of this name and how it came to be like this, the four letters and how it should be pronounced and how do you convert that to Arabic.
What the Quran did successfully was to give its readers a name of God, Allah, which in the Arabic language means the God, and it ensured that Muslims all knew who the God is, that they're worshiping and they're not in confusion.
Whereas, in fact, now we are in confusion when we look at the name Yahweh. Because remember what James had said. James said that the one God, Yahweh, revealed himself as three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit.
What that means, in essence, is that he's thinking that the one God, Yahweh, is doing something. And if that one God, Yahweh, is doing something and revealing himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now you have four entities.
The one who revealed himself as the three persons and the three persons themselves. So how do you explain that? Now you have not a trinity, but you need to have something like a tetraunity, a combination of four in one.
So the Quran actually avoids all of that detail and gives Muslims the guidance that is actually needed. Moreover, one might even ask if this YHWH was the name of God itself, or was it a kind of plaguing word?
Because in the first instance it is mentioned when Moses said, ask what is your name? And God said, I am what I am. Eche, eche, eche. I am what I am. And maybe from this eche, eche, eche, from eche, somebody coined the term Yahweh.
We don't know the full history of that. Yahweh probably is not even the name of God. Yahweh in Hebrew would mean something like he is. And it does not seem to be that that is the name of God.
It's just an expression, a verbal expression.
So finally, why does Shabir seem to know more about the Christian beliefs than the Quran does? Well, I don't know more than the Quran does, for from my belief perspective, the Quran is the word of God and God knows everything.
But if I show more specific understanding of what James is saying, it's because I've read his books. And I have listened to his words and I interact with him and I study Christian scholars and what they're saying.
So that is because of my particular context. If the Quran were being revealed today to God's prophet in this context, it would show knowledge of this particular context. So now with just a few minutes remaining, let me look at some of the other problems regarding the idea of whether God is one person or three persons.
James has given us some examples of how the New Testament writers are taking passages that refer to Yahweh and now they're referring to Jesus in the New Testament. And lo and behold, that means that the New Testament writers are taking Jesus as Yahweh.
But then why doesn't anyone in the New Testament give you a simple declarative statement saying, Jesus is Yahweh? Why don't they do that? They're not doing that because they cannot get to that stage. In their minds, that would be wrong to say.
But something is stimulating them to say, well, Jesus is like Yahweh. Why would they say that? I mentioned Paul before. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1 .24, that Jesus is the power and wisdom of God. So what Paul is thinking is that the wisdom of God somehow became Jesus.
The power of God somehow became Jesus. Some attributes of God now are in Jesus. So they're not thinking that Jesus is actually God. They're thinking that Jesus is a figure that is subordinate to God, but somehow he shares some of the attributes with God.
Yes, it is sure, but it was not Trinity. This is not saying that Jesus is God. For this to be Trinity, Jesus has to be God. But Paul is very clear. Jesus is subordinate to God and He will remain so to the very end.
1 Corinthians 15 .28 says that in the end game, this is what will happen. Jesus will surrender everything to God so that God will be all in all. So Jesus will remain subordinate. In fact, the idea of subordination is so strong in the Bible that recently a number of evangelical Christians have put together a volume of essays.
Half of the essays approximately support a subordinationist view, which means that evangelicals who subscribe to the doctrine of the Trinity are nonetheless saying that within the Trinity, there is an eternal subordination of the Son to the Father.
But I think that the subordination of the Son to the Father actually proves, I didn't realize I was going over time, actually proves that there is no such thing as a Trinity. There is only one God, one person.
Thank you, Dr. Ellington. Dr. James White, we now need your 10 minutes.
Well, while the words are still ringing in your ears, the reason Jesus did not cry out to Yahweh is he was quoting Psalm 22, verse one, which doesn't contain the name. So he would have to misquote the text to do it the way that Shabir was doing.
Just look up, I'm sorry, Psalm 22, verse one, and you will discover that the word Yahweh is not used in the section that Jesus was quoting. So that's pretty obvious. Now, there are numerous issues to try to get to, and very, very little period of time to do so.
It isn't odd in a debate. You have a 20-minute opening statement, and half the time to respond to the point. So it actually takes at least two or three times to get us out of time. So you have to pick, and you have to choose.
Now, some of the problems that we have here is I didn't really get a clear understanding. I think Shabir said that the reason that the offer of the Quran does not show as much knowledge of Christianity is because in the context that the Quran was being written, that wasn't necessary.
Except that the context in which the Quran was being written included, for example, the meeting of Muhammad with the Christians from Najran, which then becomes a part of Surah Three. There was all sorts of interaction there.
And they already believed all these things. All the Christological controversies were already a thing in the past at this particular point in time. So the reality is, let's back up and look at the whole story.
We have a book that is barely half the length of the New Testament, that never quotes from the Old and New Testaments showing literary dependence in any way, that comes along and says what everybody believes and has been decided about Jesus in regards to his relationship with the Father, if you believe that, you're going to hell.
But this book does not give any meaningful evidence of understanding of anything Paul wrote, anything John wrote. The author of the Quran had no earthly concept of people saying that 2 Peter wasn't written by Peter, even though 2 Peter had a name, Lentz is someone who wrote it down, which is, we can get into that, that's a completely different subject.
Doesn't have any knowledge of anything like that, doesn't raise any of those issues, because the author of the Quran never heard of 1 to 2 Peters. And by the way, the fact that the New Testament writers know that books exist outside of the Old Testament canon and quote from them, or quote from secular works, is not the same thing in any way, shape, or form as the fact that there is that much evidence that the author of the Quran had any knowledge whatsoever of what the canon of the New Testament was.
The authors of the New Testament knew what the canon of the Old Testament was. They knew the law and the prophets, they knew the writings, they knew exactly, they made reference to them numerous times.
There's nothing like that in the Quran at all. We don't even know what Injil refers to in the Quran, even though we're told it is perspicuous, it is mubinun, but no, it does not tell us these things in any way, shape, or form.
So, we still have to ask the question, why should we abandon what was written in the first century by the followers of Jesus and accept what is written by someone 600 years later in a different language who gives us absolutely, positively, no reason to believe that he is interacting with the material that we have believed from the eyewitnesses of the resurrection of Jesus in the first place?
Why should we do that? And when Muslims accept a book that comes 600 years after Muhammad, shows no knowledge of what Muhammad taught or believed, but told you all to stop following him and believe something else, would you be consistent at that particular point in time, is the question.
And so, I think it's extremely important, and when we are told, well, Surah 5 should be recorded to, it says, well, what God has revealed in the Gospel. So, Surah 5 is actually telling Christians to engage in some sort of redaction criticism of their Gospels to try to figure out what that is there, is still from God and what isn't.
Is that what Surah 5 is talking about? Or is a real reading of the historical context, isn't it interesting? Well, the Quran isn't gonna go into that type of detail because of its historical context only dealing with these people.
But, on the other hand, Surah 5 actually means that the Christians are supposed to be doing in-depth redaction criticism based upon modern concepts as to what's still part of the Gospel that was sent down by God and what isn't.
A reading of Surah 5, verses 44 through and following, is going to very clearly mean, you Christians, you have the Gospel, believe and judge by what it says. We know what they had. They were not engaging in redaction criticism that time.
And so, to be consistent, they would need to be judged by what was in the Scriptures that they had, which are the same Scriptures that we have today as well. Now, a reference was made to a website, Jesus's Words Only.
I would like to, as a thought experiment, would that make any sense at all? Of course not. Because Jesus makes reference to the Scriptures. He makes reference to the Scriptures that came before him. He makes reference to his disciples.
He makes reference to the coming church. He leaves all sorts of things unexplained because he knows he doesn't have to explain everything because the church is gonna be found, the Spirit's gonna come.
He even talks about the coming of the Spirit, which is not Muhammad, because he's gonna dwell within the individuals and believers themselves that he's talking to at that point in time. So, Jesus's Words Only would be utterly incomprehensible by Jesus's own testimony.
Think about John chapter 10. He refers people back to Psalm 82. You gotta know what Psalm 82 is about to even understand what Jesus is saying. So, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to make that kind of an argument at all.
So, when I quoted N .T. Wright, by the way, what I was emphasizing was not that we don't know who wrote the Gospels. I disagree with him on that. We don't know the order in which they were written or when they were written.
That was actually what I was referring to when I talked about N .T. Wright at that particular point in time. And believe you me, the writers of the New Testament well knew what the divine name was. They're not ignorant of the divine name in the way that Muhammad and the Quran is ignorant of the divine name.
That's why they can actually specifically utilize texts that were about Yahweh and apply them to Jesus in a specific fashion. Of course they knew what the divine name was. Yes, they used, the people that they're writing to, they're writing in Greek.
So, what Bible are they gonna quote from? Hebrew? No, they're gonna quote from the Greek. And the Greek used Kurios. So, they used that. But they know what the divine name is. And folks, listen to this.
Think about the book of Acts. What do the early Christians do? They consider it to be a fantastic thing and honored to do what? To suffer for the name. Who's the name they're suffering for? Jesus. Now, they've not seen themselves as some new religion.
They're the fulfillment. So, if Jesus becomes the name they suffer for, if Jesus is the name given above every name, to the name of Jesus every knee bows, every tongue confesses. And yet they quote, Paul quotes from the Shema, the prayer that defines the Jewish people.
Shema, yes and I know, Yahweh Elohim, Yahweh our God. He quotes that in 1 Corinthians chapter eight. Like he expands it out to include the Father and the Son. Can you imagine including a mere prophet in the description of God in the Shema as Paul does?
I don't have time to expand upon that right now. I did, in a debate that Shapir and I did, in South Africa, one of the earliest followers of Jesus, which was God. I would recommend that you take a look at the, because we had all sorts of projection and all sorts of neat fun and stuff like that.
At that particular point in time, I would suggest that you take a look at that. Now, finally, we had a demand. Why don't we have a specific phrase, Jesus is Yahweh? You know, Ahmadinejad used to say, nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say, I am God, worship me.
As if that is actually a reasonable argument. It is not a reasonable argument. If the writings communicate the reality, you don't have to use a specific phrase to get to that reality. If you have the author of the Carmen Christie If you have the author of the Carmen Christie in Philippians chapter two, specifically applying Isaiah 45, 23 to Jesus, think it through in the context.
If you have Psalm 102, 25, 27 being applied to Jesus, in a very chapter where Jesus is described as the one through whom everything has been created, figure out what it's talking about. You can see exactly what is being communicated.
And so, we have the revelation that is found in the incarnation and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. 600 years later, someplace else, someone who's never read any of those documents says, I'm not going there.
That's what we're facing, you see. That's the issue that we are dealing with. That's why we have to recognize and deal with these subjects and recognize the difference between the nature of the New Testament, the nature of the Quran.
That's what our conversation is about. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. Ali, you were lovely. Yeah, and this time I'll pay more attention to that clock. So, very quickly, folks, thank you for your active engagement, James.
I really enjoyed listening to you and taking notes to prepare to respond to your specific questions. And I'm so glad that you're still so lively here today. Well, James is asking, well, I'm saying that because Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, that's why he didn't mention the divine name.
But look at all the words of Jesus throughout the New Testament. Didn't he have any chance to quote any other passage where Yahweh's name is mentioned so that he could mention Yahweh? And while on the cross, didn't he actually mention Yahweh?
Why didn't he pick a passage that has a different name when Yahweh said in the Old Testament, this is gonna be my name forever, Exodus chapter three, verse number 15. It looks like the New Testament portrays Jesus himself as not actually following the Old Testament, which itself is a prophet.
Because if for Jesus to be legitimate, he has to follow the Old Testament. And notice what James is saying about the prophet Muhammad. Why should we follow a prophet who came 600 years after the Bible was already completed?
So Muhammad is being judged against the Bible that was already completed before him. Well, let's do that for Paul before Muhammad. Paul has to be judged against the words and teachings of Jesus. That's where the words of Jesus only comes in.
Not that the words of Jesus only take not a context to make all sense, but that they should be given priority. And if Jesus says one thing and Paul says the other, Jesus stays and Paul goes. And then Jesus has to be evaluated based on the same principle.
Because the Old Testament existed before him as a scripture from God, and he has to conform to the scripture that is already from God. Otherwise, as David Klinghoffer writes in his book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, the Jews would have reason to reject it.
In fact, our Christian friends claim that the Jews were picking up the stone Jesus because he was claiming to be God. Well, why were they picking up? Because they said we have a law that says that's what we have to do.
Who gave them that law? God gave them the law. So now you have the odd situation that God gave them a law that says that if a man comes to you and claims to be God, you stone him to death. And they're just carrying out God's law.
It's as if God wants to die and he sent some Jews to kill him and then take the blame for that. And obviously there are problems all over the place if you follow the Christian line of argument here. But what is simpler is to recognize that Jesus, on whom be peace, was in fact a follower of the Old Testament law.
He himself was a human being and he did not claim to be God himself. And so there is no such thing as a trinity. God is only one person, not three. James says, well, Peter had an amanuensis. That's why, you know, that answers the pseudonymity problem.
But of course, Christian scholars have gone through this and they have concluded generally that second Peter is not written by Peter. So the problem of pseudonymity remains. So why accept a book that's come 600 years later?
Because this book is actually calling Christians back to the Old Testament and to the teachings of Jesus. The Old Testament in Yishma says in Deuteronomy chapter six, verse number four, hereo Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.
Jesus, on whom be peace, in Mark chapter 12, verse number 27 to 29, shows that Jesus repeated the same Shema as the greatest commandment, as the greatest commandment. You know what the later gospel writers did with this?
They omitted the statement of Jesus, Yishma. Why did they do that? Because Christianity was heading away from the teachings of Jesus and towards Trinitarian doctrine a step at a time, one gospel after another.
The gospel according to John was quoted from early on where James says, well, Isaiah saw his glory. Well, the gospel according to John, by most scholars' count, is the last of the four gospels to be written.
And James himself, in his book, The Forgotten Trinity, has said that James had more time to reflect on these things. That's why it comes out more plainly in John's gospel, because John had more time to reflect.
That's why it's not so clear in Mark. It's clear in John. Well, what is happening here is that there is an evolution of the Christian faith, and the evolution goes through the gospels. You find that Mark, the earliest of the four gospels, shows Jesus to have limitations in his knowledge and his power.
For example, when Mark has Jesus say that he does not know when the hour will occur. So if there's one thing that the Father knows, that is the hour, and the Son doesn't know it, that shows that the Son is not the omniscient God, and therefore the Trinity does not actually exist.
God is only one person, not three. So that's why we should accept the book that came 600 years later, because it's actually calling us back to the original faith of Moses and Jesus with all of the great prophets.
In fact, the rest of the New Testament writers, or we should say many of them, because we don't know all of them and all of their minds, and whether in fact they were monotheists or not, but some of them did actually make explicit statements.
Paul himself said, there is no God but One, in the very passage that James was actually quoting. And then he goes on to say, for us there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. Okay, so he did something with the Shema here that requires some discussion, but it is very clear that for him, there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ.
So there is a hierarchy here according to him. And he explains this in so many other passages. In 1 Corinthians chapter 11, the head of every woman is her husband, the head of every man is Christ, the head of Christ is God.
So there's a hierarchy, so unfortunately the women below, I don't agree with that, but that's what Paul says. And then men above women and Christ above men, and God above Christ. So there's a hierarchy here.
Now the same thing we find in John's Gospel. John's Gospel has Jesus as the law, but that too is an innovation, because the lawless, this was not mentioned in the previous three Gospels, only in the Gospel according to John.
Actually, obviously, as a result of later reflection, right? So John came to this understanding that Jesus is the lawless of God. Another attribute of God, similar to wisdom, or maybe the same thing as wisdom, nobody knows for sure.
And if it's two different things, then it would mean that Jesus is two different things. He's the wisdom according to Paul, he's the lawless according to John. But if there's one thing, then it's less of a problem, but we're still in the same ballpark of showing that for Paul and Jesus, and for Paul and John, Jesus is a subordinate figure to God.
He shares something of the attributes of God, but John has Jesus blatantly say, the Father is greater than I. John 14, verse 28. So there's a hierarchy. And John actually does not call the lawless God as an identifier.
But according to Daniel Wallace, when it says, and the Word was God, that's a qualitative statement. So the Word was divine is the best translation. But he says, no, I won't use that translation because today people call all kinds of things divine.
Even like a good meal, people will say, this is a divine meal. But if you want to say that, then don't say divine God, divine Holy Spirit or anything. Nothing is really, use a different word. But that's the word that John used to show that this lawless is divine, but it's not the Almighty God.
In John 17, verse 3, Jesus Himself prays that they may know you as the only true God, and Jesus, your messenger, as Christ. So he makes a distinction between the only true God and Himself. So that's why you should follow the Quran that came 600 years later, because it's talking you back to that original faith, which became lost through all of the creeds that developed later on.
Now, is the Quran telling Christians to engage in redaction criticism? Well, not 1400 years ago, because that would not have been possible. But the Quran accepted Christians as they are, utilizing their knowledge and whatever intellect and capacity God had given them to the best of their abilities.
Whatever they arrived at, the Quran actually treats Christians with respect and actually speaks about them respectfully, calls them, people of the book, which means that they're educated people. And the Quran says that God has placed love in the hearts of those who follow Jesus, which is, as you know, the love commandment.
Christians are very good with that. Muslims can learn something from that. And so the Quran praises and respects Christians as they are. But I will say that the onus is on somebody like my friend James, because he has the capacity to engage in redaction criticism.
But he's not listening to his colleagues and other great scholars who are actually doing that today. And he's not listening to his own words, because he looks at that, what he has said about John's Gospel and really thinks about it.
Well, the later the Gospel, the more they reflected, the more they said things. Well, why didn't the earlier Gospel writers know this? So if the earlier Gospel writers and other writers of the New Testament were not clear about the Trinity, then they could be committing all kinds of heresies in their own minds.
James has explained in his book, The Forgotten Trinity, how easy it is to fall into a heresy. And some of these may have fallen into heresy while writing the New Testament Scriptures. May God save them and save all of us.
That's all my time. I'll speak with you some more later on. Thank you very much. All right, so many things to get to. A question, you just referring to 1 Corinthians chapter 8, and you said that even in that text, I haven't looked at it closely enough because Paul still differentiates between the Father and the Son.
You've read The Forgotten Trinity, right? Yes. Okay, so you know that in the Doctrine of the Trinity, we differentiate between the Father and the Son. I do. And in fact, we believe that the Son voluntarily comes to earth, that He is sent by the Father, and takes over the world, right?
I may believe that. Okay, so in 1 Corinthians chapter 8, when Paul utilizes the language of the Shema in the Greek translation, and he says, Geek one, Lord. Familiar with underground. That's the term, kudios, right?
Mm-hmm. In Deuteronomy, when the Shema is found there, what does kudios represent? Of course, the Shema is in Hebrew. Right. And Shema is Israel, Yahweh, Elohimu, Yahweh Ha. And they translated the term kudios, which Paul uses of Jesus, is translated which one of those Hebrew words?
For kudios. But the Hebrew words, what Hebrew word? Yahweh, yes. So, if Paul is quoting the Shema, and he says there's one God, the Father, that would be Elohim, right? The term Shema is Israel, Yahweh Elohimu, Yahweh Elohimu, right?
It's not clear what Paul is referring to. In terms of the wording of the Shema, but the outcome of what Paul is saying is that there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. And the term kudios there is in reference to Yahweh in Deuteronomy, right?
You can't be sure what's in the mind of Paul. You can only read what he has written. You can't say that Paul used this word to refer to that Hebrew word because he's not saying this is my dictionary of words, Yahweh equals this.
He's saying that we, for us, there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. If you want to make that connection by saying, oh, kudios here is referring to this particular word in the Shema, that's your equation.
But Paul is saying, for us, there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. He has done something different. He said something different than the Shema. The Shema says that there is only one Lord, God.
But Paul is saying one Lord and one God. That's what he's saying. But you're saying that Lord is lesser than Yahweh. In what Paul is saying, because he's saying there is only one God who is the ultimate, and Jesus is the one through whom God makes everything.
So you believe that because the prepositions are used there, that somehow lessens Jesus, even though the same prepositions are used in the Father, Elshar, and Yahweh. It's not the prepositions, James.
It's the whole concept that Paul is, it's what you said, through him. That's the preposition, isn't it? Yes, but it's not the preposition alone. He's saying, he's differentiating, look, that there is only, if we say, this morning, Donald Trump met with the President of the United States of America.
It makes no sense, because he is the President of the United States of America. Excuse me. I'm assuming you're hearing this, but I'm not. Now, if there are two persons who are God, if there are two persons who are God, the Father is God, the Son is God, it makes no sense to say, there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ.
Because now, the natural question is, why didn't you say, there are two persons who are God, or three persons who are God, the Father is one of them, Jesus is one of them? Why use the term God only for one, but not for the other?
So, it is, so you reject the idea that the normative term that Paul uses for the Father is Hatheos, and the normative term he uses for Jesus is Hatheos. You don't believe that? I'm not denying that, but I'm saying that this means, okay, that in Paul's mind, there is only one who is called God, and that is the Father, and Jesus is called Lord, which is a glorified title.
So, I don't want to belabor this, but I think it's extremely important, because it is excruciatingly clear that Paul is quoting from the Greek Septuagint of the Shema in Deuteronomy, in 1 Corinthians 8.
You call that quoting? Yes, he's using the exact same words. I put it all on the screen. We debated in South Africa with all the, I wish I could put it up right now, because I can prove this. If he is quoting the Shema, was he not identifying Jesus as Yahweh?
Well, he wasn't quoting the Shema. He has in mind the Shema, obviously, but the Shema doesn't say for us, this, that's Paul's own wording. And the Shema does not include all of that, you know, through whom all things are made, and so on.
That's Paul's own wording. So, he is using words from the Shema, and he's spilling it out in his own way, and separating things in his own way, but the result from what Paul is writing is very clear. There is only one God, the Father, and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ.
So, we have a God and we have a Lord, but there is only one God. And he just finished saying, is it not true that both God and Lord, both the same terms are used of the one God, Yahweh, in the Greek Septuagint, in the Shema?
Was that confusing for Moses? Let me hear a question again. So, the term Elohim, God, and Yahweh, Lord, are both used in the Shema of the one God, correct? So, Moses can differentiate the terms without confusion.
And when Paul does, in light of the Incarnation, somehow, he doesn't get to do that? Well, the difference is that Paul is not using the exact words. To begin with, he's not using the exact Hebrew. He's translating it in his own way, and it's not even a translation.
He has actually split it up. So, you know, Yahweh Elohimu, Yahweh Echad. Yahweh, our God, Yahweh is one, which is one in the Greek Septuagint. If you translate Yahweh as the Lord, in the Greek Septuagint as it is, then you have it something like the Lord, our God, the Lord is one.
So, the Lord of our God, the Lord is one. So, there was only one Lord God to put it in a very simple and precise manner. So, could Paul have taken those words and applied them to the Muslim Jesus who is merely a prophet?
No, I said that. This is sure. What Paul has said is sure. It is sure. But it's not Trinity. But it's not Trinity either. So, it's a lesser sure, but it's still sure from your perspective. It is sure, but it's not Trinity.
How about in Philippians chapter two, quoting Isaiah 45, 23, applying it to Jesus. Is that sure? Every needle bowed, every tongue confessed? Look at the ending. It says, to the glory of God the Father.
So, for Paul, Jesus is like, it's at his name every knee should bow. It's like, we have the name Jesus. Okay, so we bow. But who are we bowing to? To the glory of God the Father, not to Jesus himself.
We hear his name and we bow to the glory of God the Father. I'm not saying Muslims should do this. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with it, but I'm saying that this is not Trinity. So, you're actually saying that at the name of Jesus, instead of bowing to Jesus, you're bowing to somebody else, is what Paul intended in Philippians chapter two.
Even though he's committing shirk over first Corinthians 8. Again, I'm not saying that I know the mind of Paul, but I'm saying, looking at the writing, the writing is not telling us to bow to Jesus. The writing is telling us to bow to the glory of God.
And so, can you give me some interpreters that actually go that way? Well, these are the plain words. Hold on, I think the plain words are just opposite, but can you give us any of them? Yes, in fact, I'll just give you a poll.
Well, yeah, the Unitarians. Even though the Unitarians, I'm sure are gonna go the same direction as you are. Okay, so, great. So, you then said, you made a, when I explained, you rather loudly repeated the Aramaic for Psalm 22, right?
And then you said, well, why would Jesus quote Psalm 22? Could he have misquoted it? I'm trying to understand what you're, I do not understand what your position is. I was responding to your point that Jesus did not mention Yahweh because Psalm 22 did not mention Yahweh in that verse.
Right, right. So, I'm saying that he had other options. He could mention another verse that has Yahweh. If not on the cross, he could have mentioned it somewhere throughout his life. But, well, you admit that the Psalm 22 citation probably wasn't the best one to go to.
Are you saying that I should admit that Psalm 22 was not the best citation? If you're trying to say that Jesus didn't use Yahweh, Psalm 22 is not where you wanna go. Why do you think Jesus said, Eli, you don't know this about me.
Some interpreters say that this was a reference to the entire psalm, right? And he's just giving you the beginning. And what's the entire psalm about? Well, it shows that somebody is in distress, in deep distress, they're calling out to God for help, and God will help them and save them from that distress.
Do you see it as a messianic psalm? No, because Dividing my garments, piercing my hands, that has nothing to do with the prescription. It can't, it can't. Well, it can't from your perspective, because you don't hold, do you still hold the view that Jesus was crucified, that he didn't die?
Well, that requires an explanation, it's a different topic. But I wanna get back to that in a second, on whether it's a messianic psalm. Today, Christians think, oh, this is exactly about the crucifixion.
But what you need to recognize is that the New Testament writers wrote about the crucifixion by borrowing wording from that psalm. So they didn't go around to ask the eyewitnesses what actually happened at the crucifixion in this respect, but they took the wording from the psalm.
And the psalm used to say that they pierced my hands, but the Hebrew earlier texts that were discovered shows that they're at my hands, like wolves or something, like wild animals. So it's not about piercing at all.
So it's not really, this is not a messianic psalm. You have some correction to that I'd be glad to hear. Are you not aware of the fact that, in fact, the Masoretic has tearing at my hands, but they have now found Masoretic texts wrong that had piercings.
You sound like you present that fact to us. I could be corrected on that. Yeah, so they have found it in the Hebrew, and it's certainly in the Greek. So, very quickly, Jesus, what is the problem? I say that Jesus quotes the 22nd Psalm, because he's saying to, he quotes the beginning of it, because he's saying to everyone, this is being fulfilled in me right now.
You don't believe that? Could that not have happened? Well, there are many problems with having Jesus just read the opening lines of the psalm, because this is referred to as a prior interpretation. On the surface, it makes Muslims wonder, how could this be God?
He's calling out to God. In fact, everybody should ponder, why is he calling out to God if he himself is God? So, from the get-go, it shows that this is not a God on the cross. It's just about somebody dependent on God.
Okay, but right there, do you realize that's not an objection from the Christian? Because you have kenosis, Jesus. If he's truly the God-man, and he is about to become a sacrifice for sin, he who has eternally been pure and holy is about to take on the wrath of the Father on behalf of his people who have sinned.
You don't think that he could quote this 22nd psalm and say, look at what happens in the 22nd psalm. I will be justified, because that's what happens to the psalms. Well, the justification is that this person will be saved from his distress.
Yes. And that would support the Muslim view that Jesus wasn't actually finally killed on the cross, but he was actually saved from this distress. Okay, so you're saying that an interpretation would come 600 years later, it would be a more likely interpretation than the one that would have suggested itself in the first century, which was based upon the fact that every single one of the gospel writers is now going to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus.
Well, and they, you say it would have suggested itself in the first century, but the first century writers overlooked certain things. They quoted Psalm 45 and made that refer to Jesus, but Psalm 45 is according to Adar al-Baq in the Spoken Testament use of the Old Testament.
Psalm 45 is a wedding psalm about a king who gets married to a queen. Of course, we all know that. And Jesus wasn't that. So what they did was they overlooked certain things and they applied what they wanted.
So they overlooked the fact that this psalm actually shows that the person who's crying out to God would actually be saved by God. So you can apply John 14 and 16 to Muhammad, which had nothing to do about the prophet coming 600 years later, but if we look at a wedding psalm and Jesus recognizes the scripture that contains within it pictures of what's coming, that's invalid.
Okay, I wouldn't change the subject now to talk about John chapter 16 in reference to the prophet. We can drag people through our debate on that. However, I will deal with it from this perspective. John chapter 16 is the place in the New Testament that most clearly attributes personal qualities to the Holy Spirit.
And many commentators on the Bible who are not Muslims and who have not been Muslims, great commentators have said that this initially was saying that refer to a male celibatic figure to come after Jesus.
Now, I'm not saying Muhammad, not in this debate. That's a different topic. But now I'm throwing it back at you. But I'm throwing it back to you. If you think I'm saying Muhammad while I'm quoting the words of Christian scholars, no, but that is not the point.
No, it's not the point I'm making, but you see the connection. There was a male celibatic figure. This is what Christian scholars have said. But now, if this is true, that this was a male celibatic figure and not the Holy Spirit, then we have a problem in that.
And the Holy Spirit is not clearly shown to be a person that is distinct from the Father and the Son in the New Testament. And therefore the Trinity also fails on that.
Dr. Ali, you may now. Okay.
So, Dr. White, so you have the kenosis which you refer to. I want to come back to that. So, and Jesus emptied himself of divinity. Is that what you would say? Of course. Okay, so he was still absolutely divine?
Yes. And he must have had two minds then, a human mind and a divine mind. No. Yeah, one mind. Well, he is one person. One person. We need to understand that when we talk about the incarnation, we do believe that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures.
So he is absolutely unique. There is no one to whom we can compare him. And your term, your use of the term kenosis, I'm not sure what you mean by that. It's only used that one time in Philippians chapter two.
But while there are things that Jesus's glory, for example, is veiled during the incarnation, he lays certain things aside so he functions inside. He does not cease to be God. What certain things did he lay aside?
Well, for example, his glory. Jesus didn't glow when he walked down the streets of Jerusalem. Would have been nice at night, but that's not something he did. So while he was glorious, as John says in John 12, verse 41, Isaiah saw his glory and spoke about him.
He was glorious. That had been veiled. And in reference to the day or the hour, that knowledge was veiled during the time of the incarnation. It wouldn't be something that would be veiled after that. It would only be things that would be relevant to Jesus being able to function and doing the will of the Father, which was life, to lay his life down for his people.
Okay, so now you subscribe to the principle of fuller scriptura, scripture alone. Scripture alone is the sole and fallible rule that affords information. That does not mean we do not have confessions.
Okay, so how do you know that this is the only thing that Jesus laid aside, his knowledge of the hour? I didn't say that that was the only thing. I do ask for examples and categories of things. So there was a submission to the Father.
There were some other things that you might be able. Whatever would hinder Jesus from doing what the Father desired him to do would be something that would be laid aside. But his divine nature, which is what he started out with, is not something that was laid aside.
Yeah, so the very statement, whatever would have hindered him from carrying out whatever the Father commanded him to do, that is not a scriptural statement. That's an inference that you have. That is a pure confession.
Yes, you're asking questions that are not answered in scripture, and therefore you have to then reason from the basis of scripture. Okay, good. That's not a violation, of course. Okay, sure. I'm understanding that.
I wrote a book on it, though, didn't you? I read it, but still. I read the book. I can't keep track of which books I've given you. You need to give me a list. Thank you. Thank you for all of these. I'm still waiting on your books, though.
Say again? I'm still waiting on your books. Sure, sure. Absolutely. Now, to continue then, while he laid aside certain aspects of certain aspects of his knowledge, and he nonetheless retained his divine mind.
Yes. So he knew that he was God, like, from the beginning of Japan. He's in the womb of Mary, but he knows, I'm God, and I'm here in the womb of Mary. Well, the exact relationship of the divine and human and Jesus, just like what it was Jesus like when he was a four-year-old, are things that scripture would not reveal to us.
And, in fact, that's in Gnostic studies. Speculation. What we need to know is given to us. What we don't need to know, we've not speculated. But you just said that you do actually speculate because you have reason and compassion.
In response to certain questions. Yes. That would have an impact upon specific statements made in scripture. For example, Jesus has to be who he said he was to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Then, obviously, at that point, we can draw a line.
But I can go beyond that into all sorts of things. How did Jesus behave with other children? That's what the Gnostics got into. Sure. Sure. Of course, that depends on some historical records that we don't have.
So I'm not going to ask you silly things like that.
But I'm going to ask you, logically, Jesus must have had a human brain. We would certainly hope so, yes.
And, therefore, a human mind. In that sense. And he also had a divine mind. Well, now you're taking something that is, does God have a human brain? Does God have a mind? So you're taking something that is divine that is not connected with physicality and paralleling it with something that would be necessary for Jesus to be truly human.
So those are two different categories. I lost you there. So for Jesus to be truly human, he had to have a human mind. True? Yes, he had. He was a fully man. Yes. But that doesn't, when you talk about a brain, now you're getting into something that's physical and then you turn it around and attribute it to God.
No, no, I'm attributing this to the human Jesus. I'm saying the human Jesus must have had a human mind and a human brain from the basis of this mind. Well, his body moved, so he doesn't have a brain. Okay, so he had a brain and a human mind.
It's a human brain and a human mind. But he also had the divine mind. You just told me that he had. See, as soon as you say divine mind, you're paralleling that with the human mind based upon a brain, which I don't get.
No, I'm not connecting the divine mind to the brain. Okay, so there's a divine mind. God is, let's say, okay, it's not clear, but God exists and God has. God is aware of his existence, has plans, he's communicative.
In fact, we're made in his image, which is the only reason we are able to worship him and communicate with him, yes. Okay, and we can speak of the mind of God. Yes? In the sense of his revelation of his will.
Okay, so something of God is in Jesus, but that's not a mind? No, it's not described as a mind. It's not a person. That's a person. He's the eternal law of us, the second person of the Trinity. Okay, so this eternal law, the second person of the Holy Trinity is not a mind.
He's not just a mind. Okay, so he's a mind plus more. Again, I don't know what you want me to use the term mind for, James, you have to think about this because this actually would be a very important problem to be solved.
If Jesus is to be God, he has to have a divine mind, otherwise he's not God. But to be human, he has to have a human mind, otherwise he wouldn't be human. And the human mind cannot think I'm God, nor can the divine mind not know that he is divine.
So you have problem minds. The problem you have here is you're trying to conflate two different things together. You're making the error of what's historically known as Utopianism, where you have the mixture of the two.
The early church was very, very, very focused upon this, and that's why it was called the Hypostatic Union. Utopianism, which you're suggesting, Historianism and Apollinarianism were all rejected as errors here.
And when you try to positively identify how you have the human and the divine joined in Jesus without changing each one fundamentally into something else, we cannot answer questions about that for one simple reason.
It's unique. There's absolutely nothing to compare it to. Instead, you can only describe it. And how did Paul describe it? I'm sorry, I shouldn't ask you a question. Paul described it if the rulers had known, they would have not done what?
Crucify the Lord of Glory. Now, crucifixion is something that only can be done to a physical body, but the Lord of Glory can't be crucified. So Paul speaks of Jesus in such a fashion that he identifies his eternal nature as the Lord of Glory, but also recognizes himself on human flesh.
So he describes it, but he doesn't answer every question that could possibly be asked about brains and minds. Now, on your website, you have a statement of faith in which you say that the Trinity is the relationship between the three persons, that the relationship between these three persons.
Is described by the word Trinity or the doctrine of the Trinity.
Can you tell us in your own words how you say that? Well, in the doctrine of Trinity, right towards the beginning, you get the definition within the one being that is God and are eternally co-eternal.
There exists eternally three co-eternal persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, and we differentiate between the words being and person.
So probably that's what's in the, whatever you're referring to on the website. Yeah, I'm asking you because this foreign port relation came up there, and I know that there is a dispute among Christians today as to whether Trinity is just a relationship between three persons, in which case some people say this amounts to trinitism.
That would be true, yeah. Okay. If you limited it just to some concept of relationship, well, they're not denying that there is a, that there are specific signs of relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and I think that's what you're referring to.
In your presentation, I think you were talking about the eternal subordination of the Son controversy for a couple of years. That's a different controversy. Right, okay. But that is what you're referring to.
No, I'm referring to another one, where if you have, let's say you have one God who manifests himself in three different ways, like you showed with the white box. So everybody knows this is only one God.
He looks differently at different times, but it's just the one God, and of course, you might have a different problem with that. But if you say that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, what keeps them together as a unity?
Now, obviously, there's a relationship among them. Augustine spoke about love, and he was speaking about the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit would be the love between them. So that's not really the trinity that's classically defined, because in that case, love would not be a person, so you could have only two persons and the love between them.
Now, if you have three persons, what's holding them together as a unity? Their entire existence is found in the being of God. We do not believe the being of God can be divided up into parts. So Jesus isn't one-third of God, and the Father one-third of God.
There is one being of God, infinite and eternal, Yahweh, shared by three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So they would cease to exist as a person without being. The being is the divine being. So unlike you and I, our being is limited to time and space.
We're preachers. God's being is not limited to time and space. And so can be shared by, and is revealed in Scripture, shared by three divine persons, and not four, because Scripture doesn't give any indication.
But you just told me that there's a being, and there are three persons, three divine persons, who share not one being. And they differentiate between being and person. So you cannot put being in the same category as person and come up with four.
Can you pray, or do Christians pray to the Holy Spirit? They can. Who, they? Well, yes. Okay. So I know that they normally... And I'm sure there's some that do not, but you can. It's normally, the Spirit right now takes from the things of Christ and testifies to them.
So He is not the focus, according to the Bible's own testimony of what His current role is right now. When all things are wrapped up, and God is all in all, then you'll have equality of ignorance too.
Then we'll have equality in terms of worship. So are you saying that... Yeah, right now you have the economy of salvation. You have the redemptions being worked out right now. God is still calling His elect people.
And so there is a focus upon Jesus. The Spirit indwells us and directs us to Him, and through Him, worship to the Father. But someday, this is all going to be wrapped up, thankfully. And Jesus will be victor over all things.
So the Father is obviously a Spirit, because in John chapter 4, it's written in this Mark, the moment Jesus said, God is Spirit. So the Father is a Spirit. The Son is obviously a Spirit. Yes? Yes. So you have three Spirits, at least.
You have three persons, not Spirits. And they are spiritual, that is, they are not limited to some kind of physicality. So they are spiritual, and they are not limited to creation. That does not make them three Spirits, as in, for example, sometimes you've gone to the Book of Revelation, and the apocalyptic language is used there, the seven Spirits of God, which simply means the God has all, and the Spirit has all knowledge.
That kind of trying to come up with extra numbers or something like that, I don't think anyone reading the New Testament originally would have been able to follow where you're coming from there. Speaking of numbers and seven Spirits, how do you know that there are only three persons?
That's what I was referring to before. Because, as you said earlier, I believe it's solo scriptural. And if you'd like to suggest a fourth divine person, when we have Matthew chapter 28, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, show me where the fourth is.
The love of God, fellowship in the Holy Spirit, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, give you all the words of the fourth. There is no fourth. How do you know there's not a fourth manifesting himself or herself on another planet or another galaxy somewhere?
Well, that's what Battlestar Galactica is about. I love Star Wars and Star Trek, but I'm not going to get into that. How do we not know that? Because solo scriptura tells us that scripture is given to his church.
Everything the church needs to know now to worship him in truth. So if I'm going to worship him in truth, I need to know who he is. Yeah, but I think we should humbly say that looking at the scripture, all we know is so far three persons have revealed themselves to us, the Father, the Old Testament, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the new.
And we don't know if there's a fourth or fifth or seventh person up there, except that the purpose of the revelation of Jesus Christ is to accomplish with finality the revelation of God's entire intentions and the wrapping up of all things in Christ.
So the very idea that there would be no one goes against what scripture says. Thank you, James.
Thank you, Dr. Ali. Dr. White, you may now go to your five-minute opposing remarks.
Five minutes is not a lot of time.
Let me start off. I started a tradition in 2006. Shabir and I debated for the first time at my own university, and I started a tradition there that has now gone out the world of giving my Muslim interlocutors a gift.
I have the new updated edition of The Forgotten Trinity. Some of you know who had this. Shabir gets it. And I have here the tin nail house produced at Cambridge, Leather Greek New Testament that came out only last year.
It's a very interesting edition. We'll have to talk about it sometime. Now, we have decisions to make. I honestly believe that if you will go back, I'm so glad this is being recorded, if you will go back and listen carefully, you will find a number of instances where standards were being used by dear Shabir in his analysis of the New Testament that he would never apply to the Quran and that he didn't when I asked questions about the authorship, content of the Quran, and the knowledge of the individuals.
And you'll hear his normal presentation. That is, well, you've got this progression. Mark doesn't know anything about the deity of Christ. John has even said that I said this in the book. What I said in the book is that John clearly addresses issues that the Synoptic Gospels do not address, but that I did not say and did not intimate and do not believe that you do not have clear and compelling testimony of the deity of Christ in the Gospel of Mark.
You do. If you can read Mark chapter 14 and Jesus standing before his accusers conflates Psalm 110 and Daniel chapter 7, puts them together in a way that the Jews know exactly what it is he is saying.
So much so that the high priest tears his robes and says, you've heard the blasphemy. Why do we need any further testimony? Why do we need any further witnesses? He is worthy of death. If you can see what Jesus does in Mark and not recognize, even as Bart Ehrman recognizes that even there you have a divine person, though he does not take it to the doctrine of the Trinity, then you are missing something.
I would invite you, please, in light of the beginning of the first 10 minutes of my questions, please go to YouTube tonight, look up James White, Shabir Ali, look at our debate in, I think it was Pretoria.
Did we bring Pretoria? I think we did. Pretoria, South Africa. Did the earliest followers of Jesus believe he was God? That has the graphics of 1 Corinthians chapter 18. The evidence there is absolutely overwhelming.
Please take a look. So we were told by Shabir that we should listen to the Quran, a book that came 600 years later, despite the fact that we were not given any evidence whatsoever that the Quran understood the content of the New Testament, even what was in the New Testament.
And what evidence were we given? Because Shabir can interpret certain passages in a Unitarian fashion, rather than allowing the entire New Testament to speak. At one point, for example, he said, comparing Paul and Muhammad, well, we should look at Paul and compare him to Jesus' words.
Paul, as a vision of Jesus, is accepted by Jesus' followers, writes in the first century, and his writings are accepted by the Christians. And that is compared with someone who comes 600 years later, who knows nothing about the content of the New Testament, contradicts the fundamental teaching of the New Testament.
In Surah 112, it says, لَنْ يَلْغَوَ الْيُّلِدُ يُبْيُّنِ يَتْسْنَرْ سِيْبِغَتْنِ a clear contradiction of what the Christians were saying and were to believe. That one, on the basis of some comparison with Paul and Muhammad?
No, I'm sorry. Take the time, I'm sure the videos will be up in a relatively short period of time, though we in the digital age demand they be up tonight. Take the time when they are made available. Listen carefully.
Go back over the scriptures and ask yourself who is presenting a consistent and coherent case. I think when you do, you will see that what we have here is the revelation of God in the incarnation, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, 600 years later in another place, was rejected going back to the old ways.
The question is, will we believe what the followers of Jesus said in the first century or someone who was not a follower of Jesus said in centuries later? Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Dr. White.
Dr. Ali, you have five minutes. And as we come to the end, folks, before your questions, let me also present a gift to my good friend on the new evangelical subordination, subordinationism.
So you see tonight that.
In looking at the doctrine of the Trinity, there are many problems that are left unanswered. And my friend James could mostly just simply say, well, you know, we don't have to think about that. We just go by what the scriptures say and so on.
But we do have to think about it because when Muslims say there is only one God, period, that's the end of it. The Muslim knows what they have said and that's the end. Now, if you say that God is one in three persons, then how do you know that there is only three persons?
Now, if you stress the doctrine of sola scriptura, scripture alone, well, that makes sense. Yeah, that the scripture tells because that's God telling us who he is. But if there is no statement in the Bible that says that there are only three persons, the most a Christian can say is that so far, our Bibles and our experiences have only shown us that there are three persons in the divine Godhead.
However, we have to be open to the possibility that ontologically there could be other divine persons that we don't know about. We've only been shown three so far. Imagine the people in the Old Testament.
According to what James did when he held up a light box, he showed that in the Old Testament, people saw God as one person. But now in the New Testament period, they're seeing God as three persons when the light is separated into three, the red, green, and blue.
Well, now, if the Old Testament folks were only seeing God as one person, and then in the New Testament, now you're seeing God as two more persons because they happen to reveal themselves, you cannot be sure that ontologically there are only three persons in the Godhead.
Absolutely. You have to be open to the possibility that there are more, but you just don't know about that. So when you speak about the Trinity, you cannot say that this is all of God. You can only say this is all of God that we know so far.
Whereas when the Muslim says, God is only one, that is a simple, declarative, and complete statement. And it corresponds with what Paul himself said. There is no God but one in the very passage that James built so much upon.
James said, if you believe that God is one, great, even the devil knows that and shouts. And James doesn't go on to say, well, we have to know something else, but there are three persons. No. Now he goes on to talk about good works.
So the belief completely is that there is only one God, there is nothing more to say. That's why the Qur 'an says, وَلَا تَكُونُوا ثَلَاسًا. Do not say three. إِن شَهُوا حَيْرَتَكُمْ. And desist. It'll be better for you.
So the Qur 'an says, stop saying three, just say that إِنَّمَا اللَّهُ إِلَىٰهُ وَاحِدُ. There is, God is only one God. And that is the statement of the Muslim and Christian faith. And so, James says, well, Mark also has testimony that Jesus is divine.
But look at Daniel 7. Daniel 7 does not show that this Son of Man figure is God. Yes, this is a divine figure, but it's this number up here in heaven, and he comes down to earth. First of all, is he Jesus?
Bruce Chilton says no. In Mark's gospel, when Jesus speaks about the Son of Man, notice he uses the third person. You will see the Son of Man, not that you will see me. He's talking about somebody else, possibly.
And secondly, this other person is not God, but God is the Ancient of Days. And this Son of Man, if you can call him Son of Man, because he says one who looks like a man. This one who looks like a man goes up to the divine throne and takes the scroll.
And this actually, in Daniel 7 itself, is shown to be the saint. It is the people of Israel all together who will be given universal rule according to that passage. It's not about some futuristic divine figure to come into our world.
And so there are so many problems. Psalm 110, this is quoted so many times in the New Testament that it deserves some mention. There too, there's a distinction between Yahweh and Adonai. Yahweh said to Adonai, Adonai is my Lord, true.
But that's a different, that's Adon. And that's the simple meaning, sir, today. Like a modern Hebrew, if you say Adonai, you mean sir. Excuse me, sir. That's how people use this term even today. But knowing the language from that time, Yahweh said to Adonai, that means there's a distinction.
There is one God who is called Yahweh. There's somebody else called Adonai, my Lord. And it's that Lord that is being spoken about that shows that there is no trinity.
God is only one, one person.
And you do not need to have this trinity. Finally, let us leave this all tonight as friends working together for the greater good, Muslims and Christians together, hand in hand, in mutual love and cooperation.
Thank you all very much. Thank you, Dr. Ali.
Let's thank our debaters. At this point, we'll be transitioning into a Q &A session. So we're going to have two lines running down the middle of this auditorium. So try and speak to this chair as much as you can.
The line on this side will be questions for Dr. White. The one on this side will be questions for Dr. Ali. Hassan and I will be standing up here with the microphone. We'll be holding it. You get about 30 seconds to ask your question.
Whoever the question is addressed to, we'll have two minutes to reply. And then whoever was it being addressed to, we'll have one minute to respond. So with that out of the way, let's see.
For Dr. Ali, my question is, so in John chapter one, verse three, it says that Jesus created all things and that without him was not anything made that was made. This seems to say that everything that was created was created by Jesus.
So doesn't that mean that Jesus is uncreated, according to John? No, it wouldn't mean that. Let me refer to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 28, when he says that when I say all things, I don't mean God because he's obviously excluded from the all things which will be subjected to him.
But why was it necessary for him to say that? If he didn't say that, some people might be asking the same question that you asked. But we should take the statements reasonably. What John is referring to here is what colors are traced back to the writings of Philo of Alexandria, where he spoke about the Logos as the word of God through which God created everything.
The Old Testament used the term Sophia, which almost means the same thing, but that is feminine, Sophia. And Sophia speaks of the woman who is a personified wisdom of God in the Old Testament. It says that she was there when God laid the foundations of the world.
But in Proverbs chapter 8, verse number 22, Sophia speaks and says, Yahweh created me. So Sophia is created. And so what we have here is a concept in which God created a being and then used that being as the conjugate through which to create everything else.
That's why Paul could say, we have one Lord Jesus Christ through whom everything was made. That's why John 1 and following would say that through the Logos, everything that has been made, that has been made.
It doesn't mean to exclude the Logos, but then again, there is some ambiguity there, and I will give you that. But throughout, it is very clear that Jesus says in John's Gospel, I live because of the thought.
That means he's dependent upon the thought. So if we think of the contingency argument for the existence of God, God is the necessary being, and everything else is contingent upon God. It's clear that through his statements that Jesus is contingent upon God, and therefore he himself is not God.
John chapter 1, verse 3 does teach exactly what was said. No exegesis was offered that, except in other places and other interpretations to try to force upon that. Simply look at the Gospel of John. Recognize it starts with this statement.
It ends with Thomas saying, my Lord and my God. John 17, 5, Jesus refers to the fact that he eternally existed in the presence of the Father, was glorious in the presence of the Father. That's only one sentence after John 17, 3, which had been quoted earlier, but out of that context.
And so even people like Bart Ehrman recognize this is clearly what the Gospel of John's all about. My point is, when you go back to the Gospel of Mark, and you actually listen to the fact that the one who approaches the ancient days in Daniel chapter 7 is worshiped, his people worshiped him.
This is why the high priest tears his robes. He didn't have Shabir's interpretation of that text, just like St. Zechariah chapter 1.
Hebrews 5, 7, 9 says, In the day of his flesh, Jesus offered prayers and supplications of loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death. And he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.
Being made perfect, he became a source of eternal salvation to all who obeyed him. If Jesus was a human son of God, and not God himself, I can understand why he would need to show reverence in order to be heard, why he would need to learn obedience, and why he would need to be made perfect.
Can you help me understand how to make sense of these facts of Scripture from the Trinitarian perspective? Yes, especially since the book of Hebrews lays this out with such clarity. When the writer begins with these tremendous statements in Hebrews chapter 1 about Jesus, the one through whom everything is made, and he's the exact representation of the Father, and you've got him being called God, and Psalm 102 being applied there.
When the writer starts there as his supremacy over every creative thing, then you have the discussion that continues from that being Jesus' role as our intermediary. And we are told in Hebrews, starting in Hebrews 2, that because the children partake of flesh and blood, he had to partake of flesh and blood.
And so very often what you hear Shabir doing and other humanitarians doing is they focus upon the incarnate Christ and the fact that he submits himself to the Father to accomplish the redemption of God's people, and then extrapolate backwards from that to deny the deity of Christ.
This is what happens when you do not take the entire New Testament and allow it to speak and to define its own terms. I accept everything the New Testament teaches. I do not then get rid of those portions that do not fit into my narrow unitarian assumptions, which is what takes place so often.
And so in eternity past, as Jesus says in John 17, 5, glorious in the presence of the Father, creator of all things, nothing made apart from him, in him all things soonest they can, they hold together.
And yet he humbles himself, what, so that he can be the perfect obedient son, who by his death provides perfect salvation for those who are united to him by the decree of the Father, and then they experience that union by faith and repentance in time so that we can have eternal life in Jesus.
It's a valid question because it shows that Jesus was dependent on the Father. Now, what James could say about that is because he underwent kenosis, he gave up some of his divine prerogatives. But what prerogatives did he give up?
What was he before he became incarnate as a human being? And James is referring to the beginning of Hebrews, but here at the beginning of Hebrews, chapter one, verse number nine, God speaks to this person and says, you loved justice and hated wickedness, therefore God, your God, anointed you with the oil of gladness above your companions.
This shows that whatever Jesus was before he became a man, he had companions, and we know that God is a sui generis. He doesn't have anyone equal to him. And he has a God. God, your God, has anointed you.
So this God has anointed him and has made him Christ. And as for John's gospel, it is clear that John has a two-tier system where there is God and below him, Jesus. Dr. Ali, in your opening, you seem to indicate that the reason why the Quran doesn't accurately condemn the Trinity, or for example, why the Quran doesn't address modalism is because the Quran was interacting with Christians of their immediate environment.
Hence, you asserted that the Quran displaces the Bible as the sole reference. Would you please elaborate on this? Yes, Angelica Neuwirth has actually recently written a book in which she has dealt with this at great length, a German scholar.
And in this book, she shows that the Quran had its own way of making waves in the time. Rather than engaging in detail with the beliefs of a lot of people, the Quran stated certain principles in general and made such a deep impact on people that people rallied to the Quran as a book of God.
This was going to be their sole reference point. And from there on, Muslims had the clarity on what the Quran is calling them to believe. Neil Robinson, in his book, Christ and Islam and Christianity, made a similar point here and there, where he showed that if the Quran were to engage with all of these various doctrines, imagine what the Quran would have to do and what kind of book the Quran would have to become to deal with the problem of pritheism, to deal with the problem of modalism, to deal with patri-passionism.
All of these decrees of Christian history started with the apostles. This is what the apostles' creed was. This is what the first Nicene Creed was. This is what the second Nicene Creed was, because the first Nicene Creed, they didn't say that the Holy Spirit is to be worshipped.
The second Nicene Creed included worship of the Holy Spirit. Then they didn't decide on the deity of the Holy Spirit until the Council of Constantinople, 181. And then finally, the Council of Chalcedon in 450, in which the final details of the trinity were hammered out.
And then we have the confusing Athanasian Creed, which is cited in James's book, Approvingly, where it reads something like, God is creator, the Son is creator, the Holy Spirit is creator, but yet there is only one creator.
The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, yet there is only one God. And it goes on and on like this. And then it says, this is how you must think about the trinity, otherwise you will lose your salvation.
So for the Quran to say all this, the simple thing was, just do what the Bible said. Norbert said the Quran displaced the previous. Well, the problem with that, of course, is the Quran doesn't displace it, and it can't, because anyone who's read the Quran recognizes that it assumes that its readers already have the biblical narrative as the background.
You can't make heads or tails out of most of what the Quran says. If you do not already understand the framework of the biblical narrative, references to Watts and to Moses, it is taken for granted by the author of the Quran that you've already read the Qur 'an in June.
It can't displace it. It alleges in its own words that it is the continuation of that revelation. When we test it as it invites us to test it, it fails and it fails badly, especially on the fact that it tells us, if you say three, hellfire is yours.
And when it defines the three in Surah 5, verse 16, it gets the three wrong. So this becomes the issue that simply cannot be left aside and said, well, they're just talking about something else.
Thank you both. So many questions, so little time.
Dr. White, you both referenced Psalm 110, which is the classic Old Testament text. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand so I can make your enemies your footstool. As you well know, the Hebrew there at the lead is translated as the Greek.
This is a modern Greek pronunciation. Dokirio mu,.
And which means to my Lord.
So the question is, how do you account, Dr. White, for the fact that that phrase, dokirio mu, is never used for deity, for God? Now, the same way I've responded to Dr. Buzzard's presentation of this for many years, including in our debate, I would recommend that you look at the debate of some good Jewish news broadcasts and on our unbelievable experience we've had as well.
This is a very clear, it amazes me that this is still being presented by anyone because it's been refuted without question. The vowel pointing in Hebrew came after the time of Jesus. It is not inspired.
Therefore, to focus upon vowel pointing is to focus upon that which is not inspired to make your case. The Jews didn't believe Jesus was the Messiah, and they certainly didn't believe in the deity of Christ, and they certainly understood that Psalm 1101 is the most quoted text from the Old Testament in the New.
So it is not surprising whatsoever. So when the person asks, that was never used for deity, they're basing that upon the Masoretic vowel pointing from the Jews rather than the continental form, and that leaves us wondering, wonder what the high priest was actually doing, tearing his robes?
Because if you take Shabir's interpretation of Daniel 7, together with that interpretation of Psalm 1101, the high priest, the Mark 14 should have gone, oh, okay, no problem. But instead he tears his robes and says, you heard the blasphemy, why do we need any more witnesses?
Someone is missing the plain meaning of the text here, and that's where it's coming from. So when it's said it's never used for God, that's based upon the Masoretic vowel pointing, and that is the fundamental problem, with this assumption that comes after the time of the Testament, it's not inspired, it is not the ground for Christianity.
It's hard to believe that this Jewish leader thought that he had before him God, and he's thinking, this is God, let's kill him. It's more likely that if Jesus claimed to be God, that this leader is thinking, well, this is man, he's claiming to be God, so let's kill him, and we're fulfilling the Old Testament law.
Now, in that case, he seems to be celebrating, however, however, why this is more likely, I'm not saying this is the situation, but why is this more likely? Is that, now, it makes sense, if you think about the psychology of this Jewish leader, but then it creates a problem for God, because it would show God to be irresponsible.
He knows himself to be God, he doesn't prove himself to be God, he claims to be God, knowing that he already gave this guy a law, saying that if somebody like me comes and claims to be God, you have to kill him.
So that means that God has a death wish, he comes in and he makes the Jews responsible for his own death. That would be wrong.
You asked, the Qur 'an tells us the people of the Gospels are just, and an example that you gave of that is Christians over at Jesus' word. You gave us an example of that, but what we have to do is say Jesus is the Lord of the world.
So how is the Qur 'an also, at the same time, making those narrative accounts,.
Stack those up against the Qur 'an? When the Qur 'an was revealed some 1400 years ago, a century, and obviously the Qur 'an had to accept many things that could not be changed overnight. And one of these things is the fact that we have to come to an idea of Macedonian free, Christians are already set in their ways, the Qur 'an is not going to change that overnight.
So, and the apparatus for studying the details of the life of Jesus historically was not yet fully available. So the Qur 'an is putting things in such a way that may have a greater applicability and meaning later on, when people could actually do this.
But the Qur 'an is actually saying something that even people at that time could have thought about. Because when Christians were discussing the Trinity and what should be believed about Jesus, they were citing Scripture and they were asking who wrote Scripture.
But that history was somewhat forgotten and people now are not thinking clearly. Remember the chains said, when it referred to Hebrews, Ipheniel did not write Hebrews then. What do you mean Ipheniel did not write Hebrews?
That is the question, right? Who wrote Hebrews? And nowadays it is likely recognized that Hebrews is anonymous, we don't know who wrote it, and most likely called it writing. So questions like this have to be asked.
Okay, if you depend on Hebrews to know that he was this glorified figure, who is the author of Hebrews? Why should we depend on him? If we depend on Paul to say that Jesus was the wisdom and power of God, how do we know we should trust Paul?
If you depend on John, who is this John who wrote the 4th Gospel? Do we even know that his name is John? And so on. So Christians can still ask these questions. And yes, Paul and James were saying as they talked about the Trinity, that there is a development.
Why didn't Mark say, Jesus said he will aid me? Because, you know, maybe he said it, but Mark didn't really pick it up. He didn't quite understand the implication of that. Only John thought about it much later on.
I wasn't misquoting James. Right here in his book. And I'll quote you the page number in case you're interested. So in short, that's what the Qur 'an is asking you to do. Think, reflect, understand. Okay, first of all, Jesus quoted from section of the Old Testament where we don't know the author.
Jesus was a prophet according to most of the perspectives. That's double standard. You can't make that kind of subjection. It is irrelevant. But the Qur 'an gives us no reason to think. He mentioned the Council of Nicaea.
It's not gonna change the Council of Nicaea, right? The Qur 'an gives us no reason to think the author of the Qur 'an had any clue what the Council of Nicaea said, what the content of the Council of Nicaea's decrees were, or anything else.
That's the point. We are being asked, you need to submit to this book that's half the length of the New Testament, whose author had no earthly idea what the extent of the New Testament was or the contents of the New Testament was, but that needs to become the lens to which you read everything in your New Testament.
And Christians have said, now it's in the centuries. I'm sorry. That is not a compelling argument. We're not going to do that. We're gonna stick with the eyewitnesses, not with someone who comes 600 years later.
Thank you. Sorry, I really commend you.
My question is, you just mentioned a good standard. And using your standards of judgment of the Qur 'an, can we judge the New Testament similarly? So specifically, God knows what was always unchanging.
Using only the Old Testament, specifically the Son and Spirit, are included in Yahweh, and if not, why?
If not, why not? Why not is because the Trinity is revealed in the astounding reality of the Incarnation, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. There are passages that prophesy these things. It can only be understood in light of that reality, which would include Isaiah 9 -6, Isaiah 7 -14, and things like that.
But I do not make the assertion that the Trinity is revealed in the Old Testament, so I would not even utilize that standard. My assertion in the book that was just held up, both editions of it, is very, very clearly that the New Testament writers were themselves experiential Trinitarians, because every word of the New Testament is written after the Incarnation of Christ, His death, burial, and resurrection, the empty tomb, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
That is what makes sense of all the statements of the early Christians. As I've often talked about, they wouldn't have crucified the Lord in glory. He doesn't have to stop and say, well, let me tell you what the Lord in glory is, because he never heard it.
No, they already know. They already know that Jesus is the glorious Lord. James was brought up earlier. James also refers to him in the same phraseology. His brother refers to him by exalted phraseology in that exact same way.
So all the New Testament writers are functioning on the communal recognition of what has taken place in the coming of Jesus Christ, in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And now they can then see the shadows and the fulfillment and the prophecy, most definitely.
But they are now living in the reality. And the simple fact of the matter is, if you reject this, you will have to end up rejecting portions of what every single New Testament writer says. You're just going to have to kick them out, because they make straightforward statements that Shabir has already identified as absolute sure from your perspective.
You can't let the New Testament speak for itself. James says that the New Testament writers were experiential Trinitarians. How do you know that? Like, how do you know what's in their minds? How do you know they weren't populists?
How do you know they were not Trinitarians? How do you know that they did not think that Jesus is a divine being, but not God, who came down and became flesh? In fact, we can see that many of them actually thought so.
That's what exactly they described. Paul described that. John described that. The writer of Hebrews described that. And the book of Revelation, which has one of the highest Christology, read Revelation chapter three and see how many times in one verse that the God of Jesus is being spoken about.
And so, that is Jesus and His God. Jesus and His God. Jesus and His God. Why isn't Jesus called God? Revelation chapter 15 verse number three, the son of Jesus and Moses, how they are praising God. So, they are worshipping God.
So, this is, yes, some passages might refer to Jesus as a glorified figure, but He has a God. And that shows that God hasn't changed. Malachi chapter three verse number six says, God does not change. And He didn't change.
He didn't become a trinity. He was always a singular God, one person.
I have a question that's got two parts. First, how do Muslims consider the texts of the New Testament and the Torah respectively? And with those perspectives in mind, how and where would a person learn about Jesus?
So, the Quran shows that there are some revelations in the Christian Bible, including the Torah and the Psalms and the Gospel, which are from God. And at the same time, there are some other writings by other people which may or may not be valid.
So, one has to use that discernment and ask questions about the scripture. So, for example, the Quran in the second chapter in the 79th verse says, both of those who write the scripture with their own hands, and they say, this is from God.
So, the Quran is asking Christians and our Jewish friends to be discerning about who wrote what, do we know these persons, where they may be inspired? Think about James saying that the New Testament writers were filled with the Holy Spirit.
How do we know that? Because they said that, right? So, this you have a circular reasoning where you should believe that they have the Spirit because they said not to have the Holy Spirit. But there's no independent verification.
And Christians may feel, but we have some independent verification because the Spirit is in me. But how do you know that's the Spirit in you? How do you know that's not your own mind? So, what is the Spirit actually said to you?
Did you hear a voice in your mind saying to you, Paul, walk straight, straight? Did you get such a voice in your mind? Or is that your own subconscious mind because you've been brought up in a culture in which you just believe that there is a Holy Spirit inhabiting you, that you feel that there is a Holy Spirit inhabiting you?
I remember John chapter 16 saying that this Holy Spirit will come, this power of faith, and he will teach you things. I have much to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. What did the Holy Spirit actually teach the first Christians?
Did anybody write down something and say, well, this is what the Holy Spirit said to me like any one of the books. Why does Luke start by showing that he did this research and he's writing? Why does he say the Holy Spirit inspired me to write this whole book?
Only Revelation claims something like that, and yet that was one of the last books to be accepted after much debate in the New Testament. Except that book of Revelation also, where it says, Jesus talks about Jesus as God, which the Trinity explains as an incarnate man.
He's not an atheist. He's going to have a God. Also describes Jesus as the Almighty God. We believe everything the book of Revelation says, not just parts of it. You're seeing this over and over again this evening.
One of us accepts everything and allows it to speak for itself. One says, well, it can't be that because it says something over here. You end up with just parts of it. And as to Spirit of God, well, why should I believe that Muhammad had the Spirit of God?
If he had the Spirit of God, he would have known what the Spirit of God had already given in his rod, the angel, but he didn't, and he didn't accurately represent it. And in fact, when he tried to represent it in Surah 5, verse 16, he got it completely wrong.
So why should I believe that Muhammad had the Spirit? You know why I believe in the Holy Spirit? I'm sitting on the other side of the planet, and there's a bunch of people in this room who believe exactly what I believe about an empty tomb and a risen Savior.
And if that doesn't say the Holy Spirit's in the world, I don't know what does. I thank you both of you for engaging that. So Dr. White, you mentioned a criteria of being consistent. So you quote the Philippians 2 chapter and 17 fight referring to the Gnosis.
And in your debates in your book, you had mentioned that the sun has preexisted. And in history, it joined with the human nature. And then the Messiah, Jesus Christ, came into existence at the time of incarnation.
So it's not that Jesus preexisted, but in fact, the sun was preexisting. And the Messiah, Jesus, at the time of incarnation, that person is called the Messiah, Jesus Christ. But even in your debate right now, you actually refer to it again and again, Jesus preexisting.
And Philippians 2 actually specifies the Messiah Christ and applies the Gnosis to this Messiah, not some preexistence. It doesn't say there's a preexistence. And similarly, in John 17 fight, in 17 free, Jesus has already identified himself as the Messiah.
But you are saying that the sun preexisted and the Messiah came into existence at a certain point in time. So how do you like, you know, understand this? Is the definition of fall in terms of incarnation different?
Because he clearly identifies the Messiah and he's applying the carbon Christi to the Messiah, not the preexisting sun. Well, Paul actually does. I mean, for example, Colossians, when he talks about the one through whom all things were made, he specifically references the sun at that point.
So that's an artificial distinction. What we're saying is that there is a divine person who is the sun, who is the one who is chosen by the triune God as the one who is going to come into and take on a human nature in the incarnation.
John 1 14, that Logos became flesh. So there are, we should differentiate between, for example, the functions of Jesus as Messiah here on earth. And so we do that and we are careful, but there are times when, for example, Paul says, crucify the Lord in glory.
That's taking two different categories and putting them together because Jesus was one person. So there are times when you specifically talk about Jesus as a person, you can talk about the pre-incarnate state of Jesus, but we made very carefully.
We are not saying the sun has eternally existed in infleshment. The infleshment, the incarnation took place at a point in time. Jesus was a man prior to the incarnation. So it just depends on what level of strictness you're utilizing at any particular point in time.
Paul does not have a different perspective than John or Paul contradicts himself. We can talk about Jesus having eternally existed. What we're talking about is that the sun has eternally existed and that the sun took on infleshment.
And it's the sun who will return someday as king of kings and Lord of lords, judge them for them because he left behind them to tomb. So yeah, we do recognize that the New Testament gives those distinctions, but sometimes we don't speak really, really specifically.
So that point is addressed in this book, God of Jesus by Keaton Chandler. I was referring to this book, but I won't go into the technicalities of the point. So I'm going to use my minute to address a couple of other points.
The James that he's arguing on at Quran chapter five, verse 116. But I think he's misunderstood the verse. The verse is not saying that the trinity comprises father, son, and mother. It's saying, it shows us a dramatic scene that God is going to ask Jesus, did you tell people to take me and my mother as gods beside God?
Now that obviously is a drama directed against people who did take the mother of Jesus as another God. And some people don't have. Now I hold here a book called the Gospel of the New Testament. And on page 177, he's sympathetic towards this Quranic passage.
And he says that this could have referred to the Syriac Christianity in which the spirit is actually considered to be feminine. And on page 101 of this book, he goes into more detail, showing that Jesus, according to the Gospel of the Hebrews, cries out, my mother, the Holy Spirit.
And before I ask my question,.
Can I also mention that, okay, so in Exodus 3, 14, God told Moses, I am who I am, is what you are to say to the Israelites. So God sent Moses to tell the Israelites, I am who I am. So back in John chapter 8, verses, they say from Jesus, talking to the Pharisees to the Israelites, said, your father, Abraham, enjoys to see my day.
And he saw it and was glad.
So the Jews said to him, you are not yet 50 years old. And have you seen Abraham?
And Jesus said to him, truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am. Therefore, Jew, they pick up stone to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself in my mouth. How would you respond? First of all, about people picking up stones.
To stone Jesus, this, by him, is something that came up before. And remember Jesus said, in part of the gospel of John itself, says to the people, you are determined to steal me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.
That's in John chapter 8, verse number 40. They are determined to kill him by hook or crook. Just because Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath, according to John, took to Mark's gospel, they already started talking to kill him.
So they wanted some excuse to kill him. It's not because they understood that he's claiming to be God, it's that they're trying to put it into his mouth. So Matthew and Luke, recording the statement in the last trial, have Jesus say to the imperial tutor, you say that I am.
So it's ambiguous. But even if he actually said I am, he was not saying, I am God. He's saying ego in me, which means I am. It's a very common statement in the Greek language. And the I am of Exodus chapter 3, verse 14 is ambiguous.
It's almost like God saying, never mind what I am. And so if Jesus is also saying, never mind what I am, then it's ambiguous. And this characterizes much of Trinitarian thinking. There's a lot of vagueness.
There's a lot of equivocation. Things mean something like that, and that means something like that. So this must mean something like that, and so on. There's a lot of false connections this way. But we have simple, clear declarative statements showing that Jesus denied that he is God.
Like for example, in Mark chapter 12, verse number 28, when he declared the Shema, and the man said to him, you're a right teacher. There is only one God, and besides him, there is no other. Obviously, they're talking about somebody else who is God, and Jesus is right there in front of him.
And Jesus praised the man for his wisdom. On another occasion, a man came and knelt before Jesus and said, good teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? And Jesus says, why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
In that particular passage, Jesus was not saying, I'm a sinner. He was saying to the man, you don't know who you're dealing with. But you want to know how ambiguous this is about the I am sayings? In John chapter 18, the soldiers come to arrest Jesus.
And when he says, I am, what happens to the soldiers? They fall down upon the ground. Folks, that's not ambiguous. That's as clear as can be. John in John 8, 24 says, Jesus says, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.
John 8, 58, when he says, I am, they pick up stones to stone him. And in John 13, 19, he tells his disciples, I'm telling you before it happens. So what happens, you may believe that I am. Quoting from Isaiah 43, 10, where Jehovah identifies himself as the I am.
I am is not ambiguous. It is another phrase used for Yahweh from Jesus's own lips. You'll only call that ambiguous if you have another reason not to believe what the New Testament says.
So Dr. John, thank you very much for Dr. Ali. Thank you for this conversation. I have just one quick question actually, is that Trinity started, and we all know that Jesus. So can you explain how the Trinity we can define before Jesus, where will the connection between son and father is, right?
Before Jesus was born. And unfortunately, I have another question about that. In your rebuttal arguments, you have said that, and you've repeated many times that how Islam can, of Quran, can cancel or nullify some argument about Christianity after 600 years.
Can we apply this? Can we apply the same standard for Christianity when it cancels the Moses Sharia or Moses principles or other Abrahamic religions? So how you can do that?
Well, there are two questions there. I answered the first one previously. Another individual asked the exact same question. I already answered that one, so I'll answer the second one. And the answer is no, because the New Testament writers know the Old Testament very, very well.
They quote from it constantly. And they're not saying that Moses' Sharia is that way, but it is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And they make the strong argument, for example, to go to Hebrews, that's the valley.
There is no meaningful documentary connection between the Quran and either the Old or New Testaments. It doesn't quote it. The author doesn't know what's in it. He quotes stuff as if it's in it, that isn't in it.
There is a huge chasm. And the question I've been asking all evening is why is this? So for example, Surah 5, verse 16, you all go read it for yourself. If the Quran says, do not say three, you show me anywhere in the Quran where you have three names other than Surah 5, verse 16.
And you say, well, he's just dealing with a particular group right there. Read elsewhere where it's in Surah 5, where it's specifically making the argument that if you say three, and then it says, see how Allah makes his signs clear?
Because Mary ate food. Well, who's he dealing with there? We believe Mary ate food. We believe Jesus ate food. But the idea is clearly the author is trying to make an argument against the idea of the exaltation and marriage status of Godhood.
And the only time the three is ever mentioned is there in Surah 5, verse 16. You never have fathers and unborns. It was well known, but it's never addressed. And yet we've been told that Trinitarian worship is true.
That's why I say, I'm sorry, the vast chasm in that 600 years means there's no connection. There is a connection between the Old and New Testament. It's very, very clearly laid out. There isn't anything between the Bible and the Quran.
I want to bring up something that it doesn't give me any pleasure to bring up, in the light that I have. Now, when we look at what the Quran says, it's very clear that the Quran understands Christian beliefs and practices and denounces misrepresentations of Jesus and misrepresentations of God in a very general way.
It shows that there is only one God, which is the original teaching of the Old Testament, teaching of Jesus. It shows that Jesus is a prophet and messenger of God. And so it reverses the distortion of Jesus that occurred in the New Testament writings and in the subsequent Christian creeds.
Now, speaking about the distortion, James is proud to say that the New Testament writers knew the Old Testament and they quoted the Old Testament. What he doesn't tell us is that the New Testament writers actually miss-quote the Old Testament a lot.
And this also deals with the New Testament views of the Old Testament by several authors. And there is one by C .K. Beale in which there is an article that is entitled Matthew twists the scriptures. I'd like you to look at that.
This is the last question of the night.
I guess with that, because the last, maybe something a little bit different. Hopefully both of you guys can answer this. Again, thank you both so much for your time. I think with that, it's more than just this debate.
It goes back to wondering beyond this debate and what we're doing here. If there were one thing about this and your position outside of this debate, is there one thing as we talk about our view to change your perspective on this?
What would it take for your position on this to change down the road outside of this debate?
So what would it take for me to change my position? I would say that I continue to read and study in preparation for this debate. I've read several books written by Christian scholars like Larry Hurtado, Richard Faulkham.
I've read James's own books. You see some of the books I have here. Books on the synoptic problem, books on divinity, books on... I might write your books. I will continue to do this study. And it may happen that I stumble upon something that caused me to revise my entire worldview.
I don't know what that thing is in advance, but it could happen. But I'm always open to that. I continue to study, but I also pray to God for his guidance. And I do so now. I pray God, give me guidance.
Give James guidance. Guide us to that truth if you want us to accept for our eternal happiness. Well, someone asked that question. I think we need to recognize there cannot be an end to our discussion and our dialogue as long as Islam is Islam and Christianity is Christianity.
There's no such thing as Chrislam. The Quran's not going to change. The Bible's not going to change. The Bible's going to keep teaching what it's taught. And Surah 1, 12 is going to say, when Allah will be with you for as long as the Quran's going to be around, I think it should be re-agreed.
And therefore, my desire in engaging with these, aside from showing respect to the other side by accurately representing them, and by resisting the nasty Islamophobias that many Christians do have, if you can't sit down with a Muslim and talk about your faith because you're too afraid of them, you might be an Islamophobe.
We should not fear. We should love. And that love means we speak the truth. And that's going to have to continue on. Yes, yes, shut up. He went over time, but I'm going to continue. We must continue these dialogues with respect.
They can be pitched. They can be strong. They can be straightforward. But we must continue them because there's a lot of forces. And Shabir, let me say this because I think you'll agree with me. There's a lot of forces in your country, in my country, on the sidelines.
They don't want this to happen. And the pressure's coming against the Uighur Muslims in China, against Christians in China. We're praying for our fellow believers. I pray for the Uighurs too. If you think that's weird, then I think you misunderstood something.
Because those people have come that long. And so we're going to be pushed into a smaller and smaller space. We don't respect one another. I respect one another enough to tell each other the truth without getting angry and starting to throw stuff at each other.
We're going to get in big trouble. Folks, this world's changing. I think about when you and I first started in 2006. We were weird as hell. Go look at the things in the wall. Look at this. Neither one of us were grandparents.
We've been doing this a lot. We respect each other. I think both of us drive the other one crazy once in a while. But hopefully we're demonstrating to everybody that this can be done. What I'm saying is, it needs to be done even more than when we first started.
So I just want to thank everybody for being here. Thank you, gentlemen. And I hope it's been a benefit to everybody. Take the time to listen to more music. Thank you very much.
So unfortunately, that's all the time we have. For those of you who had a question and didn't get to answer it, I'm so sorry. All good things must come to an end. We have to go to sleep at some point tonight.
So like Dr. James said, there will be a video for this debate online. It will be on the Why Should I Believe YouTube page by the end of this week. Also a bit of a surprise, there's actually a t-shirt that we designed for this debate.
Unfortunately, I can't show it on the projector, but trust me, it's nice. And all of you should consider buying it. If you want to look at the design of the t-shirt, you can find all that information on tinyurl .com slash gtdebate.
Tinyurl .com slash gtdebate. So right afterwards... Can the speakers get their own? Maybe. Once again, thank you all so much for coming out tonight. Thank you, Dr. James White and Dr. Peter Elie for being here with us.
It's been an honor and a privilege to host you guys at our university. Can we please get one more round of applause? That's all we have for you. Drive safe. Have a good night. Thank you.