Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? EO and the Spirit

The Ongoing Crisis of Islamic Violence Against Christians

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. A rather tired James White with you today. I have not felt 100 for a number of weeks now. I'll be perfectly honest with you. But here we are anyways, and may not go the full hour, we'll see.

But I have two, I think, fairly important videos to review. I think should be of interest to to a very wide number of people. It used to be in the news regularly. But other world events, wars in the Middle East, in Ukraine, all the other stuff going on, unrest in the U .S. has pretty well pushed right off the news pages.

The murder of Nigerian Christians by Muslim militants. And we've talked about all this in the past many, many, many times. We've we've gone over the motivation of the militants. We've gone over the the fact that well, that the sources of religious doctrine and dogma in Islam are inconsistent with one another.

And this one, the main reasons I've always felt that it's pretty much next to impossible to hope for some kind of reformation within Islam. There's a lot of reasons for that, but the primary ones being that the Hadith, which form the matrix of Sharia law, interpretation of the Quran, an understanding of what Muhammad allegedly taught, how he acted, things like that.

The Hadith are incoherent, they're inconsistent. I've told the story a number of times, but years and years ago, I've told the story where, I'm not trying to advertise for canes or anything, I'm just you know how they do it on America's Got Talent.

You know, you've got those big old cups out there. I don't know what they're paying for that, but they're paying a lot for that advertising. Anyway, I was riding back in the days, not too long ago, but, you know, 10 years ago.

Where I would go out for long morning bike rides frequently in the dark, especially during the summer. And I would be listening to the Hadith. I had found a way to convert them to mp3 and to just listen to these entire collections.

And if you're not familiar with the Hadith, the Hadith are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions that were collected 250 plus years after the days of Muhammad. And Hadith studies are still a huge issue within Islam.

What is Sahih? What is the sound Hadith? And there's all sorts of disagreements. And of course, the Sunnis have their Hadith and the Shia have their Hadith. And talking a lot about Tehran and Iran, they have a totally different body of Hadith than the Sunnis have.

And so I'd be listening to these things, and I remember so clearly I was on. A happy valley road. Westbound in the dark, Sun had was not even starting to rise yet. Probably going to be doing a hundred K ride that morning.

And I was out around 70. Second, 75th Avenue. Funny how the mind works. And I'm listening to these Hadith. And in the space of just a few Hadiths, Hadith can be a single saying, it might be a sentence long.

It could be a paragraph longer or longer. Within just a few Hadith. You had statements being made. That were clearly inconsistent one another. Now, you might say, well. Where'd you get these things? There are two primary collections of Hadith for the Sunni Muslims.

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. There are others, Jamia Termini and stuff like that. But as far as the historical stuff, that really impacts Sharia law, interpretation, things like that. You're going to find them in Bukhari and Muslim.

And there are six, seven volumes each. So there's lots of them. And these are the ones that are considered Sahih, that is sound. There were a small percentage of the total Hadith is considered sound. Which means that there was massive volumes of stuff that was fake.

That even Islamic scholars would say does not actually go back to Muhammad. And this section was about when you can take life. And so I had seen videos of Imams quoting one of these Hadith. About the permissibility of killing the infidel.

But it was in between other Hadith that said otherwise. And that's the problem. The vast majority of Muslims don't read the Hadith. And so when they go to the mosque. And they hear the sermons on Fridays.

And they're getting a very filtered amount of information. But that's pretty much all they've got. And so there have been, you know, there's been jurisprudence within Islam. That has chosen their sources.

And then the people disagree with them choose their sources. And on and on it goes. And so we've talked about all this stuff in the past. And we've done entire programs. Back when we were extremely unpopular.

Because we did entire programs on Islam. And looking at the Mutawatir Hadith. The ones that are universally accepted. And you know, I remember coming down Cave Creek Road. Listening to a book by a what would be considered a liberal Muslim scholar.

On how these Hadith. If Islam is going to move forward. These Hadith have to be removed from their position of controlling the theology of Islam. And he's exactly right. They have to be. But they can't be without Islam being fundamentally altered and changed.

So anyway, you know, we've been talking about this stuff for a long, long time. And we've covered do Christians and Muslims worship the same God. There are videos. I have numerous videos online discussing these things.

So it's not a new thing. But a lot of people who listen to the program today weren't listening six, seven years ago. When we were doing a lot of this stuff. Really, it was like 10 years ago. When we were doing all this stuff.

When I was flying down to South Africa. And doing debates with Muslims and mosques and stuff like that. And so we do a lot more of that kind of thing. Debating and Muslims in London and things like that.

So all of that to say that the current news cycle has caused us to not even notice the 200 Christians that were murdered by Islamic militants. And you can figure out what theological background these people have.

Now, I know, I know. A lot of these folks, let's just say they don't have much in the way of theology. They just like to murder. But then there are others that seriously believe that if you're going to believe what the Quran says.

And you're going to believe what Muhammad said. That this is what you're supposed to do. And there's no other way of looking at it like that. And so you can remove the history, remove the development of Sharia over time and stuff like that.

And we've talked about this too. How, in essence, the more radical perspectives that are in play out there tend to be more of the, and I say this advisedly, Sola Scriptura Muslims. In other words, if you look at how theology developed tradition within Islam, the only way that Islam could survive is if the sort of bloodthirsty, radical stuff about decapitating people was controlled and put into a particular context.

So, for example, you can make a very strong argument that what happened in Nigeria could not happen without the Caliphate existing and the Khalifa declaring a state of Jihad. And that's why, you know, ISIS and these people tried to declare a caliphate.

Without that, then you can't do these things ostensibly. At least you can make that kind of theological argument. And that's where a lot of the issues come from. So, anyway, Islamic violence continues and Christians, especially in Africa, are the victims of these things.

And yet we don't hear a whole lot about it right now. It's being, there's just so much other stuff coming at us, you know, threats of literal nuclear war that we don't think about it very much. So, in the midst of all that, Joe Heschmeier, the fellow I debated a number of months ago in Jonesboro, Joe Heschmeier put a video out discussing, do Muslims and Christians worship a different god?

Well, I don't know if Joe has done debates with Muslims. I don't think he's written anything on Islam. I addressed this, of course, in my book on Islam, Whatever Christian Needs to Know About the Quran.

But I have to take strong disagreement with what he said. And I think one of the main reasons that we're going to have this disagreement is because of what happened in 1965. During Vatican II, in Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate 3, you have a fundamental reversal.

It's just the only way to look at it. A fundamental reversal of the position the Roman Catholic Church, that the church had taken for, well, centuries and centuries and centuries, certainly since Trent, but well before that.

I mean, you cannot, you know, I love watching these guys, you know, they get all excited about church history.

Like Newman said, to go deep into church history is to cease to be Protestant.

I'm just like, really? Come on, guys. How do you put together the papal claims and papal statements at the beginning of the Crusades that only get worse and worse with time? Which basically, though that wasn't the initial idea, very quickly developed into go on crusade, die, go to heaven.

You know, I mean, that's basically what it ended up turning into. And obviously, what was being said about Muslims and about Muslim theology and belief, even though there's a tremendous amount of ignorance on both sides at that time.

Still, Rome's obviously official position, because look, the bishop of Rome cannot grant indulgences, use the keys to open the treasury of merit and do so is just some personal whim. He's exercising the power of the keys at this point.

And so it's just another of many, many, many, many examples of how Rome has changed. If you believe today what Rome believed, Council Trent, on capital punishment, on the nature of Islam, you're now out of the mainstream and out of the favor of papal curia and so on and so forth.

So it's just another example of all these changes. But here's the words. If you look up the Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 841. We've read this many, many times before. And I thought I had, oh, there it is.

Duh. It's a little one. And I mean, I have it up, so I don't need to be doing this, but I'm pretty sure that it's marked. Oh, it was right there. But it's bigger on my screen than it is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

There's a new edition, and this wasn't changed in the new edition. Here is the statement. The Church's relationship with the Muslims. The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims.

These profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us, they adore the one merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day. Now, I've never done, I'm hesitating there. I don't think I've ever done a debate on this subject.

I think it's come up in a couple of debates. But specifically on this, especially since I wrote whatever a Christian needs to know about the Quran. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us, they adore the one merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.

Now, Adoramus, the Latin, is very strong language. And so here, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is specifically saying that Muslims adore the one, with us, adore the one merciful God. And I've always found that to be the strangest language.

But, Joe Heschmeier, being a faithful Roman Catholic, that's his ultimate authority. And I think you can make a good argument. He doesn't have the right to look back through history and go, I don't think anybody at the Council of Trent would have agreed with that.

In fact, I think everyone at the Council of Trent would have rejected that very clearly. So what happened? Well, that's outside of our realm of discussion today. But Rome is committed to the idea that Muslims adore the one merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.

They're committed to that. There's nothing they can do about it. And so I think that's what's behind what Joe says in this video. It's three minutes long. And before I play it, and I suppose I should stop and start so I don't end up getting dinged with copyright violation or non-fair use and all that kind of stuff.

The main thing he's going to be saying is people can have imperfect ideas about who God is and still be Christians, or they can still be worshipping the same God. Now, on a very basic level, it's sort of like, well, yeah.

You can certainly understand, I've lamented it many times, that most evangelicals are actually modalists when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity. You could get them to confess a form of modalism really fast if you know how to use the proper misleading terminology.

And so perfection of profession is not the standard. Yes, I will need video, audio and video. I have it queued up. I'm not sure if you can see that or not, Rich, but I'm going to be playing the audio and the video.

And I just realized that's going to be really hard for you to start and stop. Well, no, I'll start and stop it. Doesn't matter. We'll just sort of let you. Rich is working remotely. He's under the weather much more than I am.

And so there's going to be some delay on stuff, but it hopefully will not impact the actual material. Anyway, so we're not talking about perfection of belief. There are, you know, if you stay the Trinity long enough, you can always come up with some obscure discussion about the Trinity that someone hasn't heard of, or read it using different language, or whatever it might be, and trip somebody up and go, oh, I'm not sure if you're really Orthodox about that and this kind of thing.

That's not what we're talking about. There is a vast, and in fact, what he does is he says, well, look, the Jews worshipped the one true God without knowing the Trinity. Well, I have some friends that argue that point and actually try to argue the Jews were Trinitarians.

I'm not as smart as they are, and so I could never defend that. And I don't think the majority of modern-day scholarship in any way does make that assertion. And I've explained why. I think the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in the Incarnation, Ministry, Death, Burial, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

And that takes place between the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament has prophetic, anticipatory language regarding the doctrine of the Trinity, but the actual revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity, in my opinion, is found between Malachi and Matthew in the historical reality of what took place in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

So, but there's such an obvious difference, in my opinion, between the Jews under the Old Covenant and Muslims today, or Jews today. And that is, we're living post-Cross, we're living post-Resurrection, we're living post-New Testament.

And the Quran, in particular, is coming six centuries after the New Testament, and tries to interact with the New Testament, claims a chain of authority from the Torah and Moses, to Jesus and the Angeal, to Muhammad and the Quran.

So, if it's revealed, if it's Natsal, is the Hebrew term, sent down in the New Testament, and then rejected by Muhammad, out of ignorance, but still rejected, that's a different thing than living prior to the revelation of the Trinity, where you only have prophetic foreshadowings, but you don't have the actual revelation.

So, there's a difference between living before a revelation takes place, and rejecting a revelation after it takes place. So, there's a difference between being a Simeon, an Anna, prior to the Cross, and the Resurrection, Ascension, so on and so forth.

And all Jewish people sense that. So, you have to look at those things in a different fashion, because of the fact that a revelation has been made, and whether someone is suppressing that revelation, denying that revelation, twisting that revelation, replacing it with something else, whatever it might be.

So, this is really important, because Christians tend to go, well, no, if you deny the deity of Christ, then you can't possibly be saved. And certainly, there is a massive swath of truth to that, but it has to be put into context.

Who are we talking about? At what point in history? What knowledge do they have? Was this before Christ came? Is this after Christ came? Do they have any idea what the New Testament revelation is about these things?

These are all very, very important issues to coming to a sober conclusion on this topic. So, now that I think about it, and now that I... So, for anybody who's going to get upset that we're going to play this whole thing, I'd like to stop and start, but since we're doing it remotely, I'm just going to play it through, and then we'll respond more fully on the other side.

Though, I've actually done most of the response. So, here we go. Here is what Joe Heschmeier had to say on this subject.

Why Muslims Do Not Worship the Same God as Christians

In making the case that Muslims and Christians worship separate gods, you end up seeming to have to make the heretical case that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are separate gods, and that just won't do.

A denial of the Trinity is, at least in a certain way, a denial of God. But here's the problem. Jews also don't believe in the Trinity. It's not just Jews today who don't believe in the Trinity. The Israelites in the Old Testament had never heard of the Trinity.

Now, there might be individual exceptions to that. People like Abraham may have had some glimmer of the triune nature of God, but certainly the ordinary Israelite believer was not a Trinitarian.

Okay, Rich says I can go ahead and stop and start, because he's just putting it down there anyways, so that's fine. Okay, so I would agree at this point. Like I said, I have friends who would say no, but I would agree.

But that's missing the temporal context. There has not been a revelation of the Incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Well, there was when the movie The Ten Commandments was made, which is where the video clips are coming from here.

Ah, that Charlton Heston. They don't make actors like that anymore. Some of you saw, I finally saw Ben-Hur. I had seen Ten Commandments a million times. But for some reason, don't ask me why, the only thing I'd ever seen of Ben-Hur were just sections of the chariot race, because that's the most famous part.

I don't know why I'd never seen it before, but I finally got it and watched it on a couple rides in Zwift. Man, they still make movies like that. If they ever start making movies that are completely AI, and that's just around the corner, I'm not going to watch them, no matter how interesting they are.

I want to see what human beings, that's even where CGI has been getting there, where it's sort of like, I can tell. You look at what they did with stuff like Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur and stuff, that was movie-making.

That was worth rejoicing in the creativity of the human mind, rather than the AI. But anyways, so back to the Ten Commandments here. So I just think that, just as Joe had a fundamental problem with the idea that if untaught and unstable men distort the scriptures, then obviously taught and stable men do not have to distort the scriptures, they can handle the scriptures rightly.

I mean, the vast majority of human beings go, yeah, and he's like, nope. And so there is an overarching authority thing that sometimes gets in the way of clear thinking here, but we continue.

In that reasoning, you would seemingly have to say that Christians don't believe in the same God believed in by the faithful of Israel in the Old Testament.

Okay, he says that's a huge problem.

Well, no.

We believe that Yahweh is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that Yahweh is tri-personal, that Yahweh is the one name of the being of God, and then you have fathers identify as Yahweh, the sons identify as Yahweh, the spirits, the spirit of Yahweh.

That's a given, but again, we're talking about worshiping in accordance with the revelation that God has made of himself to that point in time. So there would be greater revelation of who Yahweh is in Isaiah than Moses had, right?

I mean, it's not a different God, but there now has been further covenantal interaction with his people between the days of Moses and those of Isaiah, and so we've learned more about the character of Yahweh, right?

Does that mean that Yahweh changed? No, it does not. But that's not the issue that we're talking about when we talk about the triune nature of God and whether someone is accepting or rejecting, not embracing with perfection, but accepting or rejecting that revelation.

That's a huge difference.

It's a huge problem because the New Testament is quite explicit that the God of the Old and the God of the New Testament are one and the same God.

Well, yeah, there's no question about that. But the question becomes, all right, so if you are a Jewish believer who has been worshiping Yahweh, then Yahweh reveals himself as Father, Son, Holy Spirit and the person of Jesus Christ, and you reject that.

Are you still worshiping God aright? Because you're rejecting his self-revelation. Well, what did the Apostle John say? If you don't have the Father, you don't have the Son. If you don't have the Son, you don't have the Father.

He doesn't leave open this middle category. Now, look, there would have been a period of time, yes, where the Gospel message and the New Testament Scriptures are still being written and still being distributed and so there's a transitionary period there.

But we're not in a transitionary period any longer. You might argue for a transitionary period of 100, 150 years just simply because we know early church writers who still had a minimal New Testament canon, missing entire sections.

So, okay, we can be at least somewhat generous in that situation. That's not where we are right now. That's not what we're talking about today when we talk about Islam today. We talk about Islam when it arose.

600 years after the Incarnation. I mean, the Trinitarian controversies are pretty much over. The New Testament canon is complete, well-known. There just isn't much in the way of excuses at this point.

And so if you're going to reject, and we'll look at where the Koran does so, that's a completely different thing than ignorance or in a transitionary period where you can't just fax a copy of the entire New Testament around the world or send it to everybody's cell phone type of a situation.

This is a theologically dangerous error. So how do we avoid it? Well, by recognizing that people can be wrong about theology. You can say false things about the true God. You can even say false things about the nature of God.

The philosopher Saul Kripke, in his book Naming and Necessity, gives us a helpful example. So imagine you meet somebody celebrating Columbus Day and you ask them, Oh, who's Christopher Columbus? And they tell you, Oh, he's the first man to realize that the earth was round.

And he was the first European to land in the Western Hemisphere. These are the only two facts that this person can remember about Christopher Columbus. Now, you might know that both of those facts are actually false.

The ancient Greeks realized that the world was round and the Norse seemed to have been the first to arrive from Europe into the Western Hemisphere. But does that mean that when this person you're talking to is talking about Columbus, that they really are talking about somebody else, an ancient Greek or a Norseman?

It doesn't. They're talking about the same guy that you and I know as Christopher Columbus. They're just very wrong about all the details that they know or think they know about.

Now, here's one of the problems, though. The purpose of God's revelation is that we might know him, worship him aright, and grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Someone who has a knowledge of Jesus, as bad as whoever that example was, of Christopher Columbus, there's good reason to question whether they know who Jesus is.

And wouldn't this apply to Mormons? Well, they're just wrong about who Jesus is. No, they're polytheists. Not only do they literally demonize the Trinity, but they believe God is once a man living on another planet.

The circle is a star named Kolob. And that's not the same God. But they called the same God. They called the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They refer to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Oh, no, no, no, come on.

I hope you can see where the vast difference is there. Jehovah's Witnesses are a little less wild an example, but they're still a good example. They even use the name Jehovah. At least they know what the Tetragrammaton is, and the divine name, and things like that.

Doesn't that make them just an error? They're saying false things about God. Well, there has to be a dividing line. And there's a difference between saying false things about God and purposely and specifically denying truths about God that are part of his revelation.

So, when one of his Pentecostals say that Jesus is both the Father and the Son, the Son is his human nature, the Father is his divine nature, that there aren't three divine persons, but they're Unitarians.

Or when Jehovah's Witnesses say that Jesus is Michael the Archangel, is this just being wrong about facts? No, because both these religions came long after the truth has been revealed about who Jesus Christ is, and so they're replacing that truth with something else.

It's not that they're just confused. The fundamental doctrinal positions of Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, one is Pentecostalism, are formulated with the doctrine of the Trinity as held by Christians for many centuries as the background.

They're specifically saying, that's wrong, this is what the truth is. That's not a matter of just... And when you talk about the Muslims, Islam comes 600 years after Christ, it comes 170 years after the Council of Chalcedon, and the problem with Islam is that its founder or founders were deeply ignorant of the Christian faith, and they were confused about all sorts of things, because they were going on without access to the Christian scriptures themselves.

They were going on hearsay. What they had heard said here, what they had heard said there. Man, that would be a really confusing thing to do, wouldn't it? But that's where they are. But they're coming 600 years down the road.

We'll look at more of the Quran here in just a second.

So it's not just that you two might disagree about whether Columbus was a hero or a villain on a kind of qualitative value level. The other person might literally be getting every fact wrong, and still, they're talking about the same guy.

Okay, but what about the fact that the Trinity is the essence of who God is?

Well, and so it's interesting that, okay, he gets this now, but it's not just that it's the essence of who God is, and maybe this is part of the problem with Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholics are loathe to admit the New Testament is clear in its revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that's always been one of my deepest, visceral responses to Roman Catholicism, is when they say, well, you wouldn't know the doctrine of the Trinity except for the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and especially Roman Catholic apologists who have never taken these people on.

They've never gone into the streets and spoken to Muslims like I have, and like many other people like me have. Not just me, but, yeah. So it's a different context here. It's a completely different situation.

Yes, the Trinity is central to what we believe about God, but it's also central to the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity that is found in the text of the Koran itself. We'll get to that. I keep saying that.

We will.

Bear in mind, we only know God's essence through his revelation. So think about it like this.

I've never seen an H2O molecule. I've never seen a water molecule. I just trust that the textbooks and the scientists and teachers that I've learned from are accurately describing that molecule with two hydrogen and one oxygen.

So if you're sitting with your friend at the beach and you apparently have been run out of things to talk about, say, wow, that water is H2O, and your friend says, yeah, I actually don't believe in all that H2O stuff.

What follows from that? Well, you probably need to find better beach conversation, and your friend has some weird views about science, but it doesn't follow that the two of you are talking about different waters, or that one of you is talking about water and the other one is talking about something else.

No.

Okay, again, the problem here is this is talking about specificity of facts, not denial of facts. And the New Testament makes it clear. If you deny that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, if you deny that he came in the flesh, you're anti-Christ.

You're not a Christian. It's not that you're confused about the nature of water. These are issues that the Bible itself defines as definitional. And interestingly enough, so do the Muslims.

One of you is just wrong about the nature of water for the same reason that Muslims and Jews are wrong about the nature of God. The essence, whether it's the H2O or the triune nature of God, isn't something immediately obvious, something visible to the eye, and so it requires taking it on some level of faith.

And making the case that Muslims and Christians worship separate gods, you end up seeming to have to make the heretical case that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are separate gods, and that just won't do.

No.

Stop, stop, stop. Okay, you can take that down, Rich. So, we are not making that argument at all, and I think that's really where Joe's thinking is confused here, and hopefully will help us in clarifying our own.

We are not saying that the Jews, the Old Testament, believe in a different god. We are recognizing that revelation has taken place over time, that the revelation of the doctrine of Trinity is found in history, and that, let's just stick with the Muslims, that the Muslims are specifically and purposefully denying what the New Testament teaches.

Now, again, I've done entire programs on this. You can go back, use the transcripts tab, and dive into it, but surat al-Ikhlas,.

Surah 112,.

Surah al-Ikhlas, there are 114 surahs in the Quran. This is number 112. If you're familiar with the Quran, they get shorter and shorter and shorter as they go along, so it's only four ayah, four verses.

Say, He, Allah, is one. Allah is He on whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is like Him. Surah 112, ayah 3, He begets not, nor is He begotten. He does not beget, nor is He Himself begotten.

The Arabic word for birth, child, remember Hebrew is a Semitic language as well, so there's a lot of crossover. Yalad, same term used in Isaiah 9, a child be born to us. That's where the connection is.

Anyway, can you find Western Muslims who would say this isn't necessarily talking about the Trinity? I suppose, but I think it's pretty obvious that the vast majority of Muslims down through the ages would all say the same thing.

This is a specific, ayah 3 is a specific denial of Christian theology, and I would say the majority of Muslims in the world, if you were to press them on that, would say, well yeah, sure, that's where the Quran says He begets not, so there is no father, nor is He begotten, there is no son.

Now, did the author of the Quran understand that relationship? No, not by a long shot. But there's the problem. I can say that because I don't believe the Quran's divine. The Muslim can't say that because as historic Islam has said, there's not even a fingerprint of man in the Quran.

It's all divine. It's all the golden tablet in heaven. It's eternal and unchangeable. And so you can't even muse on the idea that the author of the Quran was ignorant of anything. Because the author of the Quran, the Quran itself is eternal.

It's as eternal as Allah is. So you can't go there. And so the Quran is specifically denying Christian theology. So the majority of Muslims that I know and that I have had extensive conversation with would agree, no, we do not worship a triune God.

And if triunity is definitional of who you believe Yahweh is, they rarely use the divine name. But if you believe God is, then no, we do not worship the same God. And again, Islamic sources, they're not completely consistent, but you can find all sorts of examples where that has been said down through the years.

No, we're not worshiping the same God. What they will claim is what they're forced to claim because of Surah 5, and that is the Torah was given to Moses, the Injil was given to Jesus, the Quran was given to Muhammad, and there is an intimate connection of content and authority.

And so they will say, yeah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, they're all Muslims because they bowed in submission to Allah. And so, yeah, we all have the same God. On that sense, they'll literally say that their religion precedes Christianity, especially, and that Christianity is marked by excess.

Do not go into excess. Do not say anything of Jesus that is not true. And they believe that what we assert about Christ is having gone into excess. And so you might want to see the debate I did in Wandsworth, London a number of years ago on that very issue.

We went deeply into what the Quran says, and interestingly enough, my Muslim interlocutor basically said we can't really know what Surah 5 is actually saying. I think we can, but there you go. Okay, so do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

The answer is no, we do not. And that is not a denial that Jews were worshiping one true God. It is a recognition of the fact that Islam comes after the New Testament revelation, is at least aware of the essence of that revelation, specifically denies that revelation, and therefore, on a logical basis, you have to go, no, the object of our worship is fundamentally different.

So Rich, can you change cameras? I'm not sure if you can do that out there in remote Villa Land, but it would be a little bit easier to be over on camera two than camera one. Otherwise, I'll just keep staring at camera one and all will be well.

All right, now, let me see here. This next little clip, I do not want to see anyone moving into a religious system that is going to, thank you, trap them in endless ceremonies and things like that. But I saw someone post this, and I don't know all the details.

I had heard from someone a while back that as many as six families from Joel Webben's church in Georgetown had converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. And I think Pastor Webben did a program on Eastern Orthodoxy or something like that shortly thereafter.

I didn't see it, but that's what I was told. And so this clip that I have, it's all of 47 seconds long, from what I read is from the guy at the Eastern Orthodox church there in Texas that these families moved under his authority into Eastern Orthodoxy.

That's what was said. I'm just repeating what I was told. Now, what's interesting is the substance of the argumentation here. Let's listen to it, and I'll give Rich enough time to make sure the audio's up and we're ready to rock and roll here.