Ibn Anwar and the Incarnation

I would like to respond to an article that Sam Shamoon directed me to, a gentleman that has in essence misunderstood in a very serious manner my teaching on the subject of the nature of the incarnation.

Now, this gentleman is a Muslim, and in my opinion, the vast majority of misunderstanding that I have encountered amongst my Muslim friends on this subject is not because of a lack of clarity on our part.

Granted, I'm sure they have to deal with Christians who are somewhat less than accurate in their understanding of the doctrines of the Trinity, maybe not well-trained in the area. There are Christians like that, no question about that.

But the reality is that the doctrine of the Trinity is fairly easily defined and has been around for a long, long time, and therefore to understand what it's saying is really not that difficult as long as you're willing to go to people who have maybe spent at least some time dealing with the subject.

I mean, you can go back literally, what, at least 15, 16, 17 hundred years and find a lot of consistency in what is being said about the central issues, as long as you're looking for consistency and not looking to find contradictions, which I think is one of the problems.

But it's not that difficult to define the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine of the Incarnation. There are confessions of faith that lay these things out very clearly. There are excellent works in systematic theology that lay these things out very clearly.

And so why is there such confusion on the part of Muslims on the subject? I think it's because Islam forces the confusion upon them through its misrepresentation of the doctrines. Certainly the Quran never identifies the doctrine of the Trinity in any accurate fashion to any depth whatsoever.

In fact, I would say that it's inaccurate in its description of the doctrine of the Trinity. And so it seems that it's an inherent misunderstanding, in essence saying, well, you may say that's what you believe, but since my holy scriptures say it's this way, then this must be what you really believe.

And the results are a tremendous amount of confusion and not a whole lot of really meaningful dialogue of what we should be discussing, but a repetitive correction of the errors and understanding promoted by various Islamic writers.

Now some certainly had plenty of reason not to misrepresent the Trinity. They had it explained to them accurately more than once. Ahmed Deedat comes to mind. But continued the misrepresentation for purposes that I'll allow you to figure out.

Numbers 23:19 and the Mormon Misuse of God and Man

Now in this article, and I'll try to remember to use the annotations function in YouTube to put the URL for you, by Ibn Anwar, he is talking about Numbers 23 .19. Now Numbers 23 .19 says, God is not a man that he should lie nor the son of man that he should repent.

Hath he not said and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken and shall he not make it good? Now this is a text that I have quoted along with Hosea 11 .9 and others to Mormons many times over the years in going to Salt Lake City and going out to the Mesa Easter Pageant in Mesa, Arizona and speaking to literally thousands of Mormon people over the years.

I have often quoted these texts, and they are directly relevant to Mormonism. They are not directly relevant to Christianity. In this sense, Mormonism does believe that God as to his nature is of the same species as man.

God and man are of the same species. God is an exalted man. He once lived on a planet and was just like you and I, and has been exalted to the status of Godhood. There were many gods before him, there will be many gods after him.

Mormonism is an extremely polytheistic religion, and it is not in any way, shape, or form a Christian religion. And so to point out that God as to his nature is not of the same being as man, there is not this continuum of being so that man is here and then as he exalts, he becomes exalted then he becomes a god, and so that they are the same kind of being but just at different levels of exaltation, no.

That isn't Christian theology, never has been Christian theology, never will be Christian theology. And so Numbers 23 .19 is very relevant, but for Muslims to quote Numbers 23 .19 demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that we are claiming when we speak about specifically the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

It involves a fundamental misunderstanding and in essence forces us to assert that the essential being of God is the same as man, which is not the case. We do not believe that God is a man. We believe the gospel is that God took on human flesh.

He became the God-man, 100 God, 100 man. And Muslims immediately just sort of, well, that's just impossible, but if you won't take the time, the effort to try to understand what we mean by that, you'll never have any success in really speaking to serious-minded Christians, if that's what you want to accomplish.

If all you want to accomplish is to try to cause confusion or to keep Muslims as Muslims, well, then you don't have to go to a level of truthfulness in representing what we believe. But if you really believe what you believe is true and hence want to engage in dawah, then you're going to need to understand what we mean by that.

And the comments that are found in this article demonstrate the confusion on this issue and certainly show confusion in regards to me. Now, the second point is the one that I'm going to be looking at in this particular article.

The Word Became Flesh and the Rejection of Ancient Christological Errors

A second Christian rebuttal. God did not actually become man. What happened was that God manifested himself in the flesh. So the verse does not contradict the fact that Jesus was both man and God at the same time.

This argument is favored by apologists like VenomFangX. It basically postulates that God dwelt in the human cocoon made of flesh, that the flesh itself was not divine, and God certainly did not transform into the flesh.

Well, a tremendous amount of confusion here on the part of our author, Ibn Anwar. He is conflating a number of different issues and just really does not understand the issue that he's addressing. First of all, we affirm that the human nature that Jesus represents to us, the logos, the word, became flesh.

That human nature is a true human nature. He was truly human. It wasn't just an outward cocoon indwelt by deity. But notice what he says here, that the flesh itself was not divine. Well, of course not.

That would, that's one of the common, well not common, but that was one of the early errors in Christology that was rejected. And God certainly did not transform into the flesh. Same error, other side of the coin.

The incarnation is not that God ceased being God and became flesh. It is not that he took flesh and made it divine. It is not that God ceased being God and became flesh. It's not that there is a, you have the deity here and the flesh here and somehow there becomes an intertwining so that you have a 50 God, 50 man.

This is common errors that were repudiated long, long ago. Apollinarianism and all the related errors in the 4th and 5th centuries that people had dealt with. And remember, all this stuff had been dealt with and decided and worked through long before Muhammad came on the scene.

Let's keep that in mind. And so there is a fundamental confusion on the part of Ibn Anwar here in regards to what we're talking about. And he's creating distinctions between Christians that don't actually exist, at least amongst historically Orthodox Christians who have some knowledge of systematic theology and historical theology and some scholarly knowledge of what the Christian churches have affirmed all along.

So he then writes a counter-rebuttal and that's where I come in. This idea was also appealed to by Dr. James White in a debate he had with Sami Zaatari on the divinity of Jesus on the 13th of November 2008 at the Twin Holm Baptist Church, London, UK.

Sami Zaatari argued that God would have had to change his nature if he became man. Dr. James White argued against Sami's point, saying that God himself did not become man but rather dwelled inside the human Jesus so he did not actually change his own nature.

I did not say that. That is a clear misrepresentation of my position and, Lord willing, the actual debate footage is finally going to be delivered to us hopefully in the near future so that we can finally provide to everybody as we wanted to all along.

But that is not what I said. What I said was the nature of God, the being of God did not cease being God. It did not change. As I said before, it's not God being 100 God then it becomes 50 God or anything along those lines.

The divine nature of Jesus remained fully divine. The human nature of Jesus remained fully human. The God-man is 100 God and 100 man, not 50 -50. That's not historic Christian theology. So to assert that and to assert that I was saying that is just completely in error.

Sami was saying, well, God had to have changed. Why? That would assume that God could never act, that God could not act in time. God acted by taking on a human nature. His nature did not change. But the second person of the Trinity took on human nature and became the God-man.

So unless you're going to say that God can never act, which would involve some type of a quote-unquote change, some kind of an alteration in his, he was this before he acted and now he's this afterwards.

That doesn't make any sense. The essential nature of God is not altered. He does not cease being God, does not cease being eternal, does not cease being all-powerful, et cetera, et cetera. The essential nature of God, the being of God, that which makes God, God does not cease being God in the incarnation.

And that's what's being assertive that I somehow said here and that is simply not the case. He goes on to say, you can actually poke a lot of holes in this standard Trinitarian theological gymnastics, but I'm not going to bore you with the details.

Well, you might want to try because up to this point, anyone actually familiar with Trinitarian theology knows that you are not and hence are confused. Suffice it to mention here that Dr. James White on another occasion somewhat admitted that the Son of God who is God died, but the Father was there to look after the universe.

Now, this, well, I'll continue on. He said this is a response to the Muslim argument that if Jesus, who is God according to Christians, died, then God died, and who was looking after the universe? Well, that's exactly what I was responding to and it demonstrates a two-fold ignorance of the doctrine of the Trinity.

First of all, it assumes some form of modalism, does not recognize the existence of three divine persons, the Father and the Spirit, who did not become incarnate, who continue to exist as God and upholding the universe.

And secondly, it has a completely unbiblical and unchristian understanding of what death is. When Jesus dies upon the cross, it doesn't cease to exist. The divine person doesn't cease to exist. Even the human person doesn't cease to exist.

Death is not cessation of existence. It is the giving of life that was accomplished by the God-man on the cross of Calvary. He gave his life. He didn't cease to exist. And so when someone says, well, who was taking care of the universe?

Well, that assumes that when you die, you cease to exist, and the Bible doesn't teach a cessation of existence. And so that is why I responded to that, and that's perfectly consistent, 100 consistent with what I said in the debate with Sami Zatri as well.

James White mentioned this in a debate that he had on a Christian radio based in London with the Muslim missionary Abdullah al-Andalus. What this implies is that James White has actually conceded that Jesus, the second person in the Trinity who is fully God himself, actually died.

Well, of course, which does not mean cessation. It does not mean that the being of God ceased to exist. It means the God-man voluntarily gave his life. It was not taken from him. He voluntarily gave his life, which is what Christians have been saying all along.

And so I'm glad that Ibn Anwar has come to understand what the Christian proclamation has been all along, that the God-man voluntarily gave his life as a sacrifice upon Calvary's cross. His life was not taken from him by others.

Others were the means by which this was accomplished. But he himself gave his life, as the scriptures have said, from the beginning and, of course, for well over 500 years before Muhammad came along. This is also what Christian apologist Jay Smith said in a debate with Shabir Ali, which you can watch here, etc., etc.

This position has to be accepted by Christians who take him as God so as to remain consistent with their theology. Yeah, well, that's all Christians take him as God. If they don't take him as God, they're not Christians.

That's the one thing that needs to be emphasized. One other paragraph very quickly here. John 1 is perhaps the premier passage for Jesus worshipers to prove the divinity of Jesus. Well, it's a strong text, no question about it.

But I wonder why I don't see Muslims engaging some of the really strong texts. Titus 2 .13, 2 Peter 1 .1, the Karmic Christi, Colossians 1. I would like to think that I'm wrong, but my experience so far has been that they basically just want to borrow from Jehovah's Witnesses rather than doing first-level research themselves on these subjects.

And that's really not the way that it should be. I would like to think that those who attempt to engage in dawah to Christians would exemplify the same level of study that many of us have tried to exemplify in studying Islam.

But anyway, they say that the Logos is actually Jesus and the Logos is God. Well, yeah, John 1 .1, the Logos does become flesh, so yes, that is Jesus, and he is as to his nature, deity. That's true. In that case, Jesus is literally God in flesh because verse 14 says that Logos became flesh.

Now, it seems that Ibn Anwar thinks that this means that God ceased being God and transmuted into something else. And that's clearly not John's perspective. That's clearly not the assertion of the Incarnational passage.

The Word became flesh. He truly did have flesh. But he's taking Ginnemi there and transforming the meaning into some type of transmutation, ignoring the fact that it says he tabernacled amongst us. He did not cease being the Logos.

He did not cease being divine. But he tabernacled amongst us. This is explained in the Incarnation, as Christians have always understood it. Now, again, Ibn Anwar may be one of those who wants to use completely different standards for the New Testament than he does for the Quran and just isolate this text from everything else in the New Testament.

And if you do that, well, then we're back to the same point that we have to keep making, and that is if you can't apply one set of standards, one set to your religion, different set to mine, well, then you're obviously not functioning in a truthful manner and there's really not much reason to have any more dialogue because you're not acting in a rational or truthful fashion.

But if that's what he's doing, then he's in error. If he's not, then he has to allow the rest of the New Testament to address the nature of the Incarnation on other levels than what we have here. He goes on to say it does not say the Logos manifests in the flesh, and the flesh then acts as a body that clothes some divine spirit, which isn't what Christians believe anyways.

To sum up, according to the Trinitarian belief, God himself incarnated. As the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary says under Incarnation, as if English words were relevant, in Christianity, the act of God coming to earth in human form is Jesus.

True. Doesn't mean that he ceased being God, doesn't mean that the human nature becomes divinized, any of those things. God became human according to Trinitarian interpretation of John 1 .14, i .e. Logos is God and Logos became flesh equals God became man.

So evidently, Ibn Anwar absolutely has to insist that we actually hold to various ancient heresies where the flesh becomes divinized or the deity becomes humanized so that Jesus is only 50 -50. And I'm sorry, Mr. Anwar, but you don't get to define the beliefs of religion that predates your own.

That may make your apologetic task a little bit easier, but it's not truthful and it actually doesn't accomplish anything at all. And so here again we have one of these instances where we've been as clear as we could be.

I've written on this subject in the Forgotten Trinity, we've debated this issue not only against Muslims but against others. And yet there is this, well, to use a biblical phrase, veil that lies over the mind of the Muslim.

And it is my prayer that Ibn Anwar and any others who would view these debates and these tapes, these videos, that they would come to understand in the only way that they truly can understand, and that is by the ministry of the Spirit of God.

That is truly the Christian's great hope, is that God is pleased by His Spirit to cause His truth to come alive in the hearts of His people. Luke 24, 45, the Lord Jesus opened the minds, the understanding of the disciples so they might understand the scriptures.

That's something the Spirit of God does. And that's why the Christian can have such confidence in the presentation of the gospel message. It's because it is God's pleasure to reveal Himself in mercy and grace to His people.

And it is my prayer that He will do that for all those who would watch these videos and truly want to know what the Bible says about who Jesus Christ really was. Thanks for watching.