April 18, 2006

The Purpose of the Program and the Debate Invitation

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

Yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation.

If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Well, good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning. A beautiful day here in Phoenix, Arizona, heading to a high of 85 degrees today, 75 right now. And we have air conditioning. It's not running at the moment.

No smoke coming in on top of me like we had last week. But, hey, you know, one way or the other, we'll get it all figured out eventually. But it is nice and comfy in here. And it will be interesting to see if we hear when oh, you're actually away from the keyboard.

OK. I'm sitting here sending messages to the one that says it's you and now you're away from the keyboard. OK. I'll adjust because AFK doesn't mean I guess it means at frequent controls spelled with a K or something.

I don't know. But anyways, I'm talking to someone who's got their knicks all messed up. But, hey, it doesn't really matter. We have the phone lines open at 877 -753 -3341. And, of course, I mentioned on Thursday when we did our uber-long dividing line wherein I responded to, reviewed Dr. Ergen-Kanner's sermon at Tom's Roadmap Church on hyper-Calvinism, that if you would like to respond to what I said, if you would like to comment on what was said, if you'd like to try to defend what Dr. Kanner said, if you found errors in what I said, this is your opportunity, 877 -753 -3341.

Of course, I did invite Dr. Kanner to if he wanted to respond. In fact, over the past 48 hours, at least about 20 e-mails have gone back and forth between myself and Ergen and Ymir Kanner and Dr. Thomas Askell.

And, in fact, I had 11 e-mails waiting for me from Ergen Kanner yesterday morning because I had written a fairly lengthy e-mail the night before, in essence. And so yesterday was an interesting day.

And one of the things that was asked was that the correspondence be kept out of the public eye. And Dr. Askell responded before I did and said, I will make no such promise. This is a public debate. I think that the fact that one side is asking for a formal debate, we'd like to have like a thesis statement and things like that, needs to be available to people.

People need to be aware of the fact of what led up to this particular encounter and what issues were discussed and so on and so forth. So that was one of the things that happened. One of the things that happened was very interesting.

Dr. Askell rather quickly responded when, in essence, it became very clear. We have been asking from the beginning specific issues concerning the nature of the debate, the amount of time, the thesis statement, the nature of cross-examination, if we're going to have sufficient time, if there's going to be sufficient focus.

And we've really struggled to get any meaningful response from the Kanners on these particular issues. I should report a positive thing. And that is, I mentioned that in the program last week that Dr. Kanner had said he barely had time to address the issue in his sermon.

I said, you know what, I think that's a good statement, it's a good point, and we need to have enough time to actually address this issue. And a two-hour debate, this is not sufficient. We need to have a longer debate.

I think it should go from seven to ten. Or if we want to have more audience questions, later than that. I don't think there's I mean, we go 730 to 11 on Long Island in the Roman Catholic debates. And so I think there needs to be enough time.

And Dr. Kanner, Ergin Kanner, agreed there needs to be sufficient time to actually allow each one of us to speak. I mean, if we had four men speaking and it's only a two-hour debate, it's half an hour per person.

That's half of one of these programs. That's hardly worth anyone even traveling to hear. And so anyway, that was positive. But everything else has been somewhat befuddling. I have sent page after page of documentation, references, quotations from books.

And I as we saw in the original correspondence between Ergin Kanner and myself a couple a month and a half when I was in the UK, none of that gets any response at all. It's not even acknowledged as having been sent.

I mean, I spent hours yesterday writing these things and it's like it's not even there. It's like I don't even send it. There's no response to any of those kinds of things at all. There goes the AC. And Rich now turns the little knobs and makes the AC disappear.

But anyway, that stuff just disappears. There's no response offered to it. Great offense was taken by both of the doctors, Kanner, to the fact that I referred to straw men and misrepresentations, one of the things that I know is going to happen because it's been stated it's going to happen.

We're going to be identified as hyper-Calvinists. No matter how often we point out what the historical definition is, we're going to be called hyper-Calvinists. So I've talked about misrepresentations, straw men, and that's been identified as calling names to identify improper argumentation.

That's calling names. And yet I have been described as arrogant and cowardly in response, and that's not calling names. So one of the things that Dr. Askle pointed out that I think is important is the fact that while they keep saying they're looking forward to this debate, Dr. Askle specifically said to them in one of the e-mails, is it a debate that you look forward to or a free-for-all?

Liberty, that's Liberty University, has attained wide acclaim for its excellent debate teams. Why not consult with the professors on campus there about the format and tenor of genuine scholarly debate?

Now I thought that was an excellent suggestion. The more I thought about it during the day. Last night, Alan Kirshner from the Calvinist Gadfly mentioned something similar and gave me a link. I looked it back up just a few minutes ago.

You can go to liberty .edu and look for the debate section. And there's an entire section on their website about debate. There's a picture of the debate team there. There's a mission statement. There's the coaching staff that is provided there.

You've got Brett O'Donnell, the director of debate. You've got Michael Hall, assistant director of debate. Heather Holter Hall, assistant debate coach. John F. Nagy, assistant debate coach. William Hayes Watson, assistant debate coach.

And so debate is something that is very important at Liberty University. Now I can't help but wonder if any of these fine students, and I applaud them. I applauded Liberty University, for example, for kicking the Soulforce people right off their campus, as they should well have done just a couple of months ago.

There's some great folks there at Liberty. I'm going to be speaking at some churches, at a church, at least one church, prior to being there. And the pastor is involved with Liberty University. There's some great folks there.

But I'm just sort of wondering, what would some of these students or these debate coaches think if they come to a debate and there's not even so much as a meaningful debate thesis, a statement about which we're supposed to be talking, and there's no meaningful cross-examination, and one side has no interest in following any rules as to how cross-examination is supposed to take place, and one side is just throwing out 16 million different subjects, so that nothing can ever actually be discussed.

How does that work? What are they going to be thinking? And then the response to Dr. Askle's, I thought, very fine suggestion, let's go talk to, why don't we talk to Brett O'Donnell. Brett O'Donnell is director of debate.

He was director of debate for 14 years at Penn State and Liberty University, coached number one ranked NDT teams in 95, 96, 99. Here's somebody who knows debate. And I would be happy to go to Dr. O'Donnell and say, suggest the proper format.

It's a four-man debate. Here's our amount of time. I would be happy to say, here, Dr. O'Donnell, give us the format that we are to use. I will leave it up to him to do that. That would be fine. That would be fine with me as long as both sides have the same amount of time.

There's cross-examination that takes place. Super. I mean, I'm not insisting that we have to have some rigorous academic format where you have just little snippets of time. I'm not saying that, but there needs to be order.

There needs to be, I mean, debate is supposed to be on a particular subject, and you get to hear both sides interact and interact with one another on a particular subject. If one side insists on throwing 47 topics out there, what good is that?

What is going to be accomplished in any meaningful amount of time? Well, nothing at all. And, you know, it's funny. I keep asking Dr. Kanner, could you give me a list of the debates you've been in? I'd like to listen to your debates.

He will not respond to that. I've given him mine. Mine are easy enough to find. He claims to have done 60-some-odd debates. I'd like to hear these debates. But I never hear back. There are certain things I can write, and I've just come to the conclusion they just don't appear on Dr. Kanner's screen.

They're just, I'm not going to respond to that. I'm not going to answer that question. I'm not going to provide these debates, anything like that. And so I just wonder if the folks at Liberty would be surprised to hear that their dean of students responded to Dr. Askell's statement where he says, Why not consult with the professors on campus there about the format and tenor of genuine scholarly debate?

Here's Dr. Kanner's response. Excuse me? Is this debate about form or substance? We will not, all capitalized, be entering the classic system of modern academic debate. A free-for-all, as you put it, puts all the cards on the table.

I have little interest in offering a public roundtable with Jim Lehrer moderating. Question, answer, lion's den type response, refusing to allow one's opponent to dodge due to time constraints. So that evidently is his view of academic debate.

And then later on, when Dr. Askell said, ask Liberty's debate coaches to define that for me, which was free-form debate, the response given was, I could not possibly care less, all capitalized, what any debate coaches, I think what he meant was any debate coach says.

This is not 1960 Kennedy-Nixon. It is Hoobmeier-Zwingli. So what does any of that mean? I don't know. One side, once again, in this correspondence, offers scriptural reasoning, documentation, references, citation, logical argumentation.

The other side has so far offered that kind of response. One side will use standard terminology of scholarship, and the other side refuses to do so. In fact, that's been one of the issues, is I keep pointing out to Dr. Kanner, referring to us as hyper-Calvinists destroys your credibility to anyone who actually knows the field, because anyone who actually knows the field knows that we are not hyper-Calvinists, that we have spoken against hyper-Calvinism, and anyone who knows the field also knows that Dr. Kanner did not identify hyper-Calvinism properly in his sermon at the Thomas Road Baptist Church.

Now, evidently, from the Kanner's perspective, no one gets to define hyper-Calvinism. Hyper-Calvinism is a word that anyone can define for themselves. What has happened in history, theological terminology is irrelevant.

Every generation can define words as they see fit to define words, evidently. And this is what, again, makes me sit here and shake my head. Now, I know that Dr. Geisler sort of did that a little bit in his extreme-Calvinism, moderate-Calvinism stuff, and as I pointed out, that doesn't accomplish anything.

I'm sorry, folks, but words have meanings, and when you will not utilize those meanings, then you're not wanting to communicate with anybody. And so I haven't had the chance yet this morning to respond to Dr. Kanner's last email.

I'm actually going to slow down my responses so that we can get other things done. Remember, this coming Friday evening, I'm debating this very issue against someone else, Mr. Wright, there in Sedalia, Missouri.

The directions and so on and so forth are finally on my blog, for those of you in the area, including a map and contact numbers and things like that. But when I respond today, one of the things is, one of the responses I'm going to provide, you know, I've asked Dr. Kanner, I said, I'm arrogant to suggest to you that you're misidentifying theological terms and that you simply don't know what you're talking about in this field.

Then I would like to ask you, please provide to me your published works and your published debates in the field of Reformed theology. Could you show me what books you've written? Can you show me what articles you've written?

Can you show me what debates you've done? And, of course, those requests have been ignored. They have not even been acknowledged. No response has been provided by either Dr. Kanner in response to my inquiries on these particular subjects, because the fact of the matter is they haven't addressed it.

And so I'm like, all right, if you've not actually published in the area, how can you in essence claim to be one of the greatest living experts? Because you have to be one of the greatest living experts to in essence say, I get to redefine the terminology that has been used to discuss this subject for hundreds of years.

And here's the illustration that I'm going to be sending to Dr. Kanner later today. If you do look up their publications, their primary, shall we say, claim to fame, their area of formal expertise is rather obvious.

They are converts from Islam. And if you look at the programs they've done, they've been on John Ankerberg, what's the subject? Islam. Islam, Islam, Islam. And in fact, Emir Kanner, I'm sorry, as I expected, accused me of being a fatalist, as a Muslim fatalist yesterday.

And I had to point out where that again demonstrates a lack of understanding. It may be repeated again, but again, I've done my best to try to clarify issues and be accurate in my statements, and I'm not getting a whole lot of meaningful response there.

But be that as it may, let me use Islam as an example. There are certain words in Islam that have certain meanings. And if the brothers Kanner wish to communicate with Muslims, they are not going to come along and say, well, you know, shirk has one meaning for you, but we have decided to redefine shirk.

Now, what is shirk? Now, I can look up the term shirk in a dictionary. And here is a definition of shirk. Idolatry, paganism, polytheism, ascribing plurality to the deity, associating anything with God.

Then there are different kinds of shirk, four different kinds of shirk, for example, ascribing knowledge to others than God, ascribing power to others than God, offering worship to create things, and the performance of ceremonies, which imply reliance on others than God.

And then there are breakdowns of each of those particular meanings of shirk. And you can go into various sections in the Koran, and you can see how it's used. And shirk has a meaning for Muslims. Now, most Muslims think that our worship involves shirk.

In fact, that when we present to them the deity of Christ, that we are presenting to them the temptation to commit the unforgivable sin of shirk. That's what's in their mind. And so, when I lecture on the subject of Islam, and I go around and talk about these things, I define shirk as it's found in the Koran, and as Muslims utilize the term.

It would be ridiculous for me, because I want to argue differently, or I find the particular definition of shirk to be limiting in my preaching. It would be ridiculous for me to redefine the term in a way that I want to.

Say, well, you know what? I don't trust all those people who have defined this before. Besides, they're Muslims. They're wrong. And so, I'm going to come up with a new meaning for shirk that won't refer to Christianity at all.

And that's what I'm going to use. Now, how would that work? Would that enhance your ability to communicate with Muslims? Would that enhance your ability to present Christian truth to Islamic people by using terms that they all know what it means?

Muslims know what shirk is. I'm using another example. There's another term. Qiblah. Q-I-B-L-A-H. Anything opposite, it means the direction in which all Mohammedans, that's an old term, Muslims, must pray, whether in their public or in their private devotions, namely toward Mecca.

It is established by the essence, injunction, instructions of the Quran. And then it gives the references and the quotation. There's all sorts of interesting stuff about Qiblah. For a while, you were to face toward Jerusalem.

And then in a short period of time, toward Mecca. And if you actually go to the Dome of the Rock, they don't have anything pointing away from there as you have in other mosques. And there's all sorts of interesting stuff that we could discuss about Qiblah.

If you say the term Qiblah to a Muslim, they know what it means. If I change the meaning, I'm no longer wanting to communicate with that person. If I will not define it the way they define it, I am not showing respect for the person to whom I'm speaking.

And so I don't believe that either Ergin or Emir Kaner would ever change the meaning of those words in talking to Muslims. Because they recognize that's just ridiculous to do that. That doesn't accomplish anything.

In fact, it closes down all meaningful communication. So my only way of responding to that is why do you treat Calvinists in a lesser way than you treat Muslims? Well, Dr. Kaner, Ergin Kaner, has said that Calvinists are worse than Muslims.

And in fact, you know, it's interesting, I'd have to check this. So I'm just going off the top of my head. I don't think I have been addressed as a brother by either of the Kaners. I've referred to them in that way.

I've explained to them. I don't consider them to be my enemy. But I honestly don't believe that I've even been addressed as a brother. And I guess if you believe that Calvinists are worse than Muslims, maybe they don't even believe I'm a Christian.

Maybe I'm a full-blown heretic and I'm not even a Christian. I don't know. I suppose I should ask. That would be interesting. But the fact of the matter is they will not treat Calvinists the way that they would treat Muslims in defining terms.

Dr. Askew and I have informed them. We are not hyper-Calvinists. This is what a hyper-Calvinist is. This is the historic meaning. We deny these things. We have spoken against hyper-Calvinism. We have written against hyper-Calvinism.

And therefore, we are not hyper-Calvinists. And if you call us that in the debate, then you're simply being dishonest. But their response is, hey, we can use the term any way we want to. Are they consistent?

No. And if truth is determined by consistency, then we can only hope that those who listen to the debate will be able to tell by that lack of consistency who is speaking the truth and who is not. So there is the situation as it stands at the moment.

As I write back today, I'm going to present that particular aspect. But I'm going to say, you know what? Obviously, though I provide numerous citations and references and everything else, that's not getting anywhere.

And you don't have time for this and we don't have time for this. Let's just stick solely and only to the reality of the need to have a very specific, written-out, agreed-to format and a debate moderator who will hold us to that.

And personally, what I would be willing to do right now, let's get one of those debate coaches from Liberty University to moderate it. I will allow a man who works for Ergon Kanner as the Dean of Students and as the President of Liberty Theological Seminary.

He's on staff there. He's got authority there. He's one of the leaders there. I will allow one of those debate coaches, one of those people who teaches debate, to be the moderator. Why not? These are folks.

This is their life. They know how debate is to take place. In fact, I would be more than happy for them to judge. Yeah, judge. Now, that's not something we've had done in debates before, but I'd be interested.

You see, folks, let me explain something. Then we'll go to our calls. 877 -753 -3341. Listen to what I'm saying here. Debate takes work. When you have a format to a debate, that format exists for a reason.

And the reason is to highlight proper debate over against improper debate. And in real debates, you get disqualified or you get penalized for using bad forms of argumentation. When you insult people, when you go off topic, when you go ad hominem, when you use appeals to emotion, you lose points.

You lose the debate. It requires you to think with clarity and with discipline. And folks, I'm going to tell you right now, there's only one side that wins when thought with clarity and discipline reigns.

You look at Dr. Cantor's sermon. Was that a sermon filled with in-depth, accurate exegesis? Or was it one that was meant to inflame the emotions? To appeal not to the rational mind, but to the emotions of man.

I think it's quite clear. And so I'm certainly open to allowing these folks to step in and say, hey, here's how we'll do it. We won't use as strict a format as we normally do. We need to allow a little bit more time for you all to make your presentations.

But here's how the cross-examination is going to take place. And I'm going to keep a very strict watch here. And we're going to control the audience because we want everyone to be able to hear and to follow the argumentation.

And let's see which side wins. And if one side says no way, then I can only say that's because they know they can't win that debate. They can't win a debate where the facts and the biblical presentation and history are the issues.

If they're not willing to do that, then they know the only way they can win a debate is to muddle the mind with emotion. So that the facts and the coherence of those facts are not seen. So there are my thoughts on the issue this morning.

A Call from Liberty University and the Question of Debate Format

877 -753 -3341. Let's go to our phone calls and let's talk with Brad. Hi, Brad. How are you? I'm pretty good.

How are you? Doing all right. Good, good. I actually just graduated from Liberty in May. Oh, really? Do you do any debating there? No, I didn't. My brother did. He's actually right now on the debate team there.

Well, then I may be looking at his picture on the website there.

Have you looked at the website? Yeah, he's the really tall one in the back.

I see him right now. In fact, because of the chandelier in the window behind him, it looks like he's wearing a crown. Is that him? Yeah, that's him.

Well, good. Excellent. Awesome. Well, I did want to comment on a few things with Dr. Kanner. When I heard his treatment of Romans 9, I almost fell onto the floor thinking, how can anyone treat Scripture in such a reckless manner.

To say that, you know, why did God hate Esau is because of what he did, rather than the previous verses clearly indicate that it was before he was born or by anything he could do or anything. And, you know, I'm going to actually be at the debate at Liberty.

I'm from Denver.

Hey, by the way, let me ask you something. Do you know how large the new Thomas Road Baptist Church Worship Center is supposed to be?

I've been there. We had a purpose-driven church there with Rick Warren, and it hosts, I'm thinking, about 8 ,000 people. Now, that's the new facility. That's the new one, yeah. Really? Okay, wow. It's pretty large.

Actually, it's in the former Erickson building, which is actually bigger than the local mall there. Wow. That's the whole complex. That's now across the street from it. Okay.

Well, I appreciate that. So, yeah, I heard the exact same thing you did. Now, did you have any classes with Dr. Cantor? I did. I had church history with him. Okay. Did it surprise you that he would say that in light of how he had handled his teaching duties?

Well, like you said previous before, he does have quite a bit of knowledge in things like Islam. He actually has a lot of knowledge in church history, and his books, Unveiling Islam and Christian Jihad, are very good and very scholarly.

But me and a few Calvinist guys in the back, when he got to this topic, he actually had said that the title of his sermon was Why I'm Predestined Not to be a Calvinist. He's actually said that in class before, and we basically said, well, we agree.

So, I mean, his argumentation, as you saw, is going to be more ad hominem, appealing to emotions, trauma and red herring, all that stuff. Almost kind of like Dave Hunt in Debating Calvinism in that book that I read.

And, in fact, have you read the correspondence we had back in February? With Dave Hunt? No, with Dr. Cantor. No, I haven't. It's on our website. If you look at my blog back in February, you'll see a link to the correspondence that took place over about three days between Dr. Cantor and myself.

Really? He kept making reference to Dr. Dave Hunt and to the stellar example of both Dr. Hunt and Dr. Geisler in simply wiping the floor with me. And I sent to him a tremendous amount of information. And, of course, I got no response back to any of the documentation I provided.

So, yes, it's very clear to me that he is reliant upon someone like a Dave Hunt, which, again, it would strike me that a person who is familiar with scholarly argumentation and the forms of scholarship would immediately recognize that Dave Hunt is not familiar with any such things and, as such, would avoid such materials.

But when it comes to this one subject, my experience has been that when you experience a certain tradition, you simply have no respect for those people. I think it's the same with Dr. Geisler, Dave Hunt.

You just consider these people to be so far off that you will not extend to them, in this case, the same courtesy that Dr. Cantor would extend to Muslims to get to define their own terms. And so I think that explains the utilization of that information and then the lack of critical examination of whether that information is actually solid.

I have heard Amir come to Liberty before, and his presentations have been less emotional and more scholarly.

I was hoping for that. Now, I've got to admit, yesterday, he was the one to first refer to my arrogance in identifying terms as straw man and as misrepresentation and to identify me as a fatalist. And so I was a little disappointed yesterday because I had hoped that there would be some balance at that point.

And I'm still hoping that. But yesterday, that unfortunately wasn't the case in the correspondence we had. It was disappointing. But be that as it may, my hope, obviously, I know that we're walking into the quote-unquote lion's den and everything else.

But you know what? There are some great folks at Liberty. And my hope, quite simply, is that I want to be an encouragement to folks, and I want by the way we present ourselves to have a testimony just at that point, just simply in the way that we feel this is a vitally important issue, but it's vitally important that it be addressed in a way that's honoring to God and honoring to that truth.

And that, to me, is one of the most important things, to encourage the people that are there and then to give a clear testimony to what we believe. And certainly I'm looking forward to cross-examination.

As long as I don't get interrupted all the time, I think that I can provide a solid response to the criticisms that are normally offered, and certainly Dr. Tanner offers to the position that's mine.

Even though I know you mentioned that it's going to be a lion's den, obviously, at Liberty with him being on staff and that kind of stuff, there is a population among Liberty who are Reformed in their thinking.

In fact, on your website you have that Amazing Grace DVD. I can't remember the teacher. He's a history teacher. He's not in the religion hall, but he's a Liberty professor that's on that DVD. So there's quite a bit of you'll see the stark difference between the Canor fans and the whooping and yelling and all that other stuff and the Calvinist Reformed kind of thinking that will be represented there.

So you actually might be getting some whooping and yelling. I don't know if you're used to that. Signs will be made, I'm sure.

Well, I was wondering, did you listen to Dr. Canor's sermon from the week before last at Liberty? Yes, yes, yes. Do you have any idea what Dr. Falwell was referring to when he referred to a guy sitting down front in a t-shirt?

No idea.

Man, me too. I'm thinking about calling my buddies and seeing if anybody was there.

I would like to it's bugging me because I would love to have had a TV camera spin down there and catch what in the world this was because everybody else evidently got the joke, but we didn't get to catch that.

Well, you know what? I do know that there are a lot of people who are looking forward to this particular encounter. I know that there's a lot of fine folks at Liberty. I've already been invited to speak at the church there in Lynchburg prior to the debate because it's a Monday night.

Which church is that? It's the one that I spoke at at the Founders Conference about four years ago. Wayne McGraw used to be the pastor. I don't know. It has something to do with the road in it, and I might be able to pull up the email here.

I'll look for it and see if I can pull it up a little bit later on. But I've been invited to speak there, which I would very, very much I've already said yes. I'd be more than happy to do so, very honored that someone would be kind enough to give me that opportunity.

And so I know there are fine, fine folks there, and I'm looking forward to that kind of an opportunity to do so. I'm looking forward to if you get a chance, come on up and say howdy and introduce yourself.

It's a long ways to go, however, for a debate. For a debate, yeah.

I'll be there visiting my brother and my wife's family, and they still live in Lynchburg. It'll be a good time, and I can't wait. I just can't wait to see like I said, there are a lot of very good points.

His Islam expertise, his church history, his passion for evangelism, all these things, but I think that he's a little bit out of his league in trying to debate this particular topic because even in class when we would debate it, I mean, you have undergrad students holding their own.

Well, you know, but there's one problem. Honestly, and I may have to put all this correspondence up so that people can see this because that's one of the issues that's come up between us is I don't think any of this should be secret.

I think this should be out in the open. I have bent over backwards to try and in as brotherly a fashion as I can say, you know, this is an area that you've got to do some study in. There's issues here that you're not showing any familiarity with at all, and don't you think it would be better for all the people that are there, if both sides are on the same page, we're using the same definitions.

I haven't yet seen any willingness on his part to admit that there is any possibility whatsoever that I might be right about that and that it might be worthwhile for him to look at that. I've seen none, none whatsoever, and that's disturbing to me.

I mean, I don't ever want to get to that point. There's all sorts. You'll never find me debating eschatology. It's just it's not my field. I'd have to read so much stuff to to be able to do so in a way that shows respect to your audience.

See, for me, if you're going to address an issue, you have to respect your audience and do the work that's required to do so in a meaningful fashion. That's how you respect the truth. And that's how you respect the people who have invested the time to come here.

You speak. I don't understand why someone would address a subject like this and not accept the fact that, you know what? I may need to do some more study on this. You know, I don't understand it. I really don't.

By the way, I just did find one of those. Oh, F .R .B .C. I'm looking for what that's what that is. Oh, F .R .B .C. Does that ring any bells? Could be. None. It's something. Road Baptist Church, Old Forest Road.

Old Forest Road. There it is. Old Forest Road Baptist Church. I'll be speaking on the 15th, the day before the thing.

There is one debate that you can have access to on his website. He has an online debate with another.

Yeah, that's Nadir Ahmed. Nadir's name is a description of his arguments, as in Nader. I know this guy, and I've reviewed a couple of his statements on the dividing line before. This guy is absolutely one of the worst Islamic apologists on the planet.

I mean, there's no meaningful interaction to be had with this particular fellow. So I did see that one, but it's not a live one. It's only a written type thing. Email and... Yeah, it's just email back and forth, and that fellow can't do anything without engaging in ad hominem.

So I still really, really wish I could see or hear some of these real debates, because I've asked about them, and the only comment I finally got once was, well, they've just been like community colleges.

We're not in the big leagues. That's all he said. And it's like, I would like to hear a formal debate. He claims to have been involved in 60 of them. That's more than I've done. So I don't understand why this unwillingness to provide that kind of information.

I have a feeling what he's counting as debates is any radio appearance, John Ankerberg show. If I started counting all the Bible Answermans and radio programs, I would have done 500 debates by now. But I only count the ones where you've got a moderator and you've got a time frame, and it's put out there for public use.