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As we begin all of our lectures by praising Allah subhanahu wa ta 'ala, he alone is worthy of being praised. And we thank Allah for the blessings he has bestowed upon us, both openly and secretly. And we ask Allah's blessings to be sent upon all of the prophets, beginning with Adam, all the way through Moses and Abraham and Solomon and David and Noah and Jesus and culminating in our Prophet Muhammad.
May God's peace and blessings be upon all of them. I greet you with the greeting of Islam, As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu, which translates as, may God's peace and blessings and mercy be upon all of you.
And this is the greeting of not just the people of Islam, but of the prophets of God. They would greet one another with the greetings of peace. And that is why, of course, shalom and shalom alaykum is also a Jewish greeting as well, because it is essentially the Arabic salam alaykum.
And in one of my studies as well, I learned to that priests in medieval Europe would greet one another with the greetings of Pax Vobiscum, which also translates as peace be unto you. And so the phrase of peace be unto you and may God's peace be upon you is a standard phrase of all Abrahamic faiths.
And that is how we children of Abraham have been commanded to greet one another. And then a special greeting to our guests from other faith traditions. We welcome you to our mosque. And we know that for some of you, this itself was a big move to enter into a mosque.
Well, you can see that everything is pretty much normal here, except that we typically don't have chairs. That's the one thing that these are special for you. And for those of us, we're typically we sit on the floor and we pray standing and bowing down.
So we don't really have pews. I'm sure as well that for some of you to see those cubby holes outside reminded you of your days in high school. But that's standard for us where we were placed our our our shoes.
But apart from those small idiosyncrasies, as we were testing the mic yesterday, we also had some mic problems at the at the church. And so I marked, I remarked to James here that mic problems are an interfaith dialogue issue, that one of the things that we definitely have in common are mic issues.
And he remarked as well that no matter how well the microphone is set up, by the time he gets to the podium, there's always some issues. And I sympathize with him, you know, the sheikh and the priest, we kind of found a common ground here that no matter how eloquent or how great we have the lecture prepared, the AV staff might have done a great job, but somehow Satan gets involved in both the church and the mosque.
And by the time we get to the microphone, it's something is not working. So there is a lot of room for interfaith dialogue. For those of you that attended yesterday, let me just get a quick show of hands.
How many attended yesterday's talk? Oh, wow. OK, so we have, I would say, a majority. OK, that's good, because today's talk is absolutely complementary to yesterday's one. Yesterday, I was more on the grilling seat and I was asked some questions.
I enjoyed it thoroughly and I was happy to give my frank responses. Today, we're going to shift the tables a little bit and I will be doing some questions and dialogues. But many of us here have never really heard directly from a minister from a person learned in the Christian faith that is willing to be honest with us.
We all know that, as we said yesterday, that a lot of times the people that we meet with are following understandings of Christianity that we don't really we don't really understand. We don't really sympathize with.
It's rare to meet a an expert and an erudite learned scholar who is faithful to the tradition and is willing to share with us his interpretation and his understanding of Christianity. So, of course, we welcome James White.
We were we introduced well, he introduced himself yesterday. I don't really have much more information other than he is very famous in his community and he is the minister of the Alpha Omega, director of Alpha Omega, director of the Alpha Omega Ministries living in Phoenix, Arizona.
He had asked me yesterday if I remembered how he contacted me. So I did a quick search about in my email about how that happened. Yes, I did. So apparently Shabbir Ali introduced the both of us by email.
Oh, I think 2007 or 2008, a long time ago. And so he CC the both of us and we had a lot of questions back and forth. And I was honestly very surprised to meet a pastor online. So, by the way, yesterday was the first time we actually met in person.
After speaking on the phone for hours and hours and hours after corresponding back and forth for almost a decade. Yesterday was the first time we actually met in person. And so he was asking such detailed questions.
I was honestly impressed. And he was using Arabic terminology that, again, it's rare to find a minister who speaks even words of Arabic. So I was very impressed. So I said, give me your address. I'm going to send you some some CDs that I have.
So I sent him my most detailed CD of Aqidah, of theology, which is Light of Guidance. It's the class that I teach for Maghrib. It says, you know, two double weekends and it's been compacted into 16, 17 CDs.
So I sent him the CD set and I honestly thought he just put it on his shelf or something. He began bombarding me with a series of questions, very detailed. And I was honestly just blown away. Like you mentioned that Tawheed al-Rububiyah has three categories.
It's like, what? These are questions that some of my students don't even ask me. Okay, how do you define shirk in this way? And we're going back and forth in this manner. And it was just so impressive and refreshing, really, to meet somebody who's taking the time to research what we actually believe from the sources.
And then he began asking me questions about Hadith. So I sent him my CDs, no not CDs, it was online series of Hadith lectures I gave about the sciences of Hadith. And so he's studying mustalah al-Hadith, like the terminology of Hadith, you know, sahih and hasan and daif and whatnot.
And it's just, I mean, it's very impressive to meet somebody who's going to be so dedicated to actually learn the sources. All of you in the mosque know that three years ago, the far right targeted me, you know, Spencer and Pamela and whatnot.
And they released this fabricated audio clip, all of you are aware of it, where they cut and pasted literally snippets of my lecture from light of guidance. So quite literally, they took 10 seconds here, 30 seconds there, and they constructed a paragraph in my voice that made it sound like I'm threatening jihad and kill and whatnot.
Literally, as you all of you in the mosque know, but our Christian visitors probably don't know, they literally concocted a paragraph that I never said, but it is in my voice. And they put it on YouTube, which is still available on YouTube because I tried to get it down and they and they got their lawyers involved.
The lawyers, you know, contacted YouTube and a long story to cut to cut a long story short. That YouTube clip, fabricated audio caused me and continues to cause me so much damage. I almost lost my job.
Rhodes College was inundated with thousands of emails and letters to get me fired. I began to receive debt threats. This is 2013. And all of a sudden, I came across a YouTube clip of James White, where he has an entire lecture entitled is it in defense of Yasir Qadhi, something like this.
And I was like, whoa, that's intriguing. And I clicked on that lecture and he defended me against the right wing bigots. And he said, I've listened to that audio lecture from cover to cover. I've heard the entire light of guidance and I know exactly where he's getting those snippets from.
And even if I disagree with him in theology and I don't think, you know, his his theology is right that, you know, I disagree with Islamic theology. He's not preaching radicalism or hatred or terror. And the fact that he stood up for me and I never asked him, he never even told me that he's standing up for me.
He didn't even say, oh, by the way, I'm defending you. This is something I just came across just accidentally. I came across this and the fact that somebody would do that to me, that indicates good character.
To me, that indicates a purity of heart. And I find a kindred spirit in James here. And I literally consider him a brother in a faithfulness that is very similar to mine. It's not the same faith. But I do not question his integrity and I do not doubt his commitment and I do not challenge his sincerity.
And I know that he feels the same way about me. So that is why we have been wanting to meet for the longest time. He wanted to have a debate and a book with me. And his his expertise is debating theology with Muslims and with Mormons and with Catholics.
That's what he has established. His niche is, as you all know, my expertise is in other areas, seerah and hadith and whatnot. And so I kept on and eventually I said, you know, I just don't feel comfortable because then I told him, you are more knowledgeable than I am in these particular areas.
Everybody has a speciality. And, you know, may God have mercy on the one who is humble enough to know his own limits. Right. So I didn't want to take on this expertise because early Christian theology is not my area of expertise.
And the development of Christian doctrines is not my area. So I politely, you know, said, you know, thanks, but no, thanks. I'm not I'm not the person for a debate. Then after Trump's election and in the in the, you know, call up to that in the in the framework for that, we started corresponding by email and we both sensed a kindred sentiment of dread of what are we what's going to happen in this country.
And that's when we came across the idea rather than come together for debating. Advanced theology, which has a time and place, and it is important rather than to come together and talk about, you know, this and that about the nature of God and whatnot.
Why don't we introduce each other to our respective communities and make people see and realize that, you know what, we can fundamentally disagree without hating one another, without having to resort to lying, without having to to have anything but genuine respect, because Muslims in the audience know that unfortunately, many people who are very committed to their faith end up being the most isolated from us, committed to the Christian faith.
And most of the groups that want to meet with us, their understandings of Christianity are very different than the mainstream that we are surrounded here in Tennessee. So, Reverend James White is a breath of fresh air for us.
We appreciate his candidness and honesty. And that's why it's such an honor and a pleasure to have him here at the Memphis Islamic Center. So I want to just start off by asking some very, very generic questions that I know are on the minds of many Muslims.
And I know that they've never really had somebody explain to them with the amount of knowledge you had of the Islamic faith, explain to them in a way that they can.
Understand. Well, first, I've got to ask you, is this the first time there's ever been a bowtie in here? Do you think it probably is? Then I'm proud of myself.
It is indeed. It is indeed the first time there's been a bowtie over here. Yes. It's very rare to meet somebody like this wearing a bowtie. My wife says the same thing. So I want to ask you a question that is on the minds of many, many Muslims.
And even yesterday, I got the same question as well, like, can you ask him to explain this concept? The average Muslim is struggling to understand the Christian doctrine of Trinity and how it is viewed as being monotheistic, because, again, this is something that is not comprehensible to the average Muslim mind.
Excellent. I wrote a book in 1998, I believe, called The Forgotten Trinity. And I mentioned yesterday in our discussion that I've said many times that I think if you went to most conservative Bible-believing Christian churches on a Sunday morning and gave their people a quiz on the doctrine of the Trinity, I don't know what percentage would pass it, but it would not be more than 50 percent and probably be less than that.
There is a lot. So it's really easy to understand if, in talking with Christian people, you haven't been given a real clear understanding of what the doctrine of the Trinity is. The first and fundamental—there are three pillars.
You have five, we have three for the doctrine of the Trinity, so we can use pillars here. The first pillar of the doctrine of Trinity is absolute monotheism. There is only one God. The Jews don't pronounce the divine name, but Christians don't have any problem doing that.
In the Old Testament, or what we would call the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, the law, the writings, and the prophets. That name is Yahweh, or as we slaughter it in English, Jehovah.
That could not have been its proper pronunciation, but Yahweh is probably the best pronunciation. And that's used over 6 ,000 times in the Old Testament. There is only one God. Yahweh created all things.
He himself is uncreated. Everything is dependent upon him. He is accomplishing his purpose in this world. And monotheism—some of you don't—in fact, I don't think you were really aware. I started really as a teenager dealing with Mormonism.
That was my first real area of challenge. And the Mormons are the most polytheistic religion I've ever encountered. They believe in an unlimited number of gods, literally infinite number of deities. And so I've had to defend monotheism in debates at the University of Utah, up in Salt Lake City, all over the place.
And so I firmly believe there is only one true God, and every Trinitarian believes there's only one true God, if they understand what the doctrine is teaching. So you say, well, then why do you have Jesus as the Son?
Why do you have the Spirit of God as a divine person? And the thing to understand that maybe will help you to conceive, at least, of what we're saying is there's one distinction that must be understood, and that is the difference between being and person.
Everything that exists has being. My iPhone has being. And if I toss it into the front row here and the gentleman up front isn't expecting me to do so and it hits him in the forehead, he's going to know it has being because it's going to hurt when it hits him.
But I can insult my iPhone. Well, Siri might not like that, but we know that's artificial. My iPhone does not have personhood. It does not know that it's one iPhone amongst many other iPhones, that it can work for the good of iPhone kind or anything like that.
So there's a difference between being and person. We believe God's being is unlimited, cannot be limited by time, space, anything along those lines whatsoever, and hence can be shared by three divine persons, the Father, the Son, the Spirit.
My being is limited. I'm a human being, so my being can't be shared by multiple persons. And when that happens, we have special places we put people that have multiple persons that share their one being.
But God's being is not limited in that way. And so when we look at the Bible as a whole, and I want you to understand, one of the things that I've so much appreciated about Yasir Qadhi is his knowledge of the Quran, his ability to quote from it, but then the emphasis upon understanding all that it has to say.
And as I have engaged in dialogues with Muslims, one of the things that I have gotten in trouble for from my own community is that I want to apply the same standards of interpretation to the Quran that I'm going to demand from my own text.
So in other words, I can't isolate texts in the Quran from other texts in the Quran and say, ah, here's a gotcha text or something along those lines. I have to be fair and I have to have what I call equal scales, because I think that's the terminology that's used in the Quran.
We have to have equal scales. And so when you look at all of what the Bible teaches, it teaches three things. There's one true God. It teaches that there are three persons that are equal with one another, not in their function, but in their power and their authority.
And then it teaches that these three persons, Jesus is not the Father, the Father is not the Spirit, Jesus wasn't a ventriloquist at his baptism, he wasn't throwing his voice, there are people who believe that.
I didn't see any of the churches while I was driving here. Man, there are a lot of churches down here. There are, yeah. My goodness. And sometimes there'll be two Baptist churches right next to each other.
I can't figure that part out. But if you've ever encountered the oneness Pentecostal denomination, there are people out there that do believe that Jesus is the Father, the Father is the Spirit. They only believe in one divine person.
That can confuse people. That's not the doctrine of the Trinity. They reject the doctrine of the Trinity. So fundamentally, when I look at the New Testament, Jesus differentiates himself from the Father.
He is the one who is sent by the Father. The Father and the Son send the Spirit. They are differentiated from one another. And yet, clearly, from not only Old Testament texts like Isaiah 9 -6, all the way in the New Testament, Jesus is identified as Yahweh, the Father is identified as Yahweh, the Spirit is the Spirit of Yahweh.
So the only way to put these together, and again, I'm taking all of Scripture, not just parts of it, is to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. And so that's why I called myself a biblical Trinitarian in my book, is that I am attempting to be faithful to the entirety of Scripture.
And that's why we differentiate between being and person. And we recognize there's only one being of God, identified as Yahweh, and there are three persons that share that one being. And so I can go far more into depth than that in the early church and things like that.
I've taught church history for many years. But basically, I think that's the one thing to understand, is if you recognize that we're differentiating between being and person, that helps you to understand that we're not preaching a form of polytheism.
We're not trying to say there are multiple gods. And of course, last evening, one of the things I mentioned was, I think in a really in-depth discussion between a learned Muslim and a knowledgeable Christian, in regards to the key important issue of whether Christians are actually guilty of shirk, is to get to that level and to recognize that when we worship Jesus, we are worshiping Jehovah God, we are worshiping Yahweh.
We do not believe that we're worshiping someone different than Yahweh. And I think that's extremely important. And to be honest with you, I've only heard one or two people, one or two situations where that's even come up.
And I would think that would be vitally important in any discussion on that subject.
So by the way, we're going to be having a discussion for around 15 -20 minutes, and we'll open the floor for Q &A. So all of you be ready for your questions. So if I understood you correctly, would it be correct to say, theoretically, theoretically, God could manifest Himself in more than three persons?
No, because this is an eternal relationship. I'm glad you raised that, because one of the common areas of conversation we have with our Muslim friends is this idea of the nature of sonship. Jesus did not become the Son.
You couldn't have another son or something like that. This relationship that exists between Father and Son has eternally existed. It did not come into existence at a point in time. And if I had time, I'd walk through John chapter 1 and how, in the original language, the writer brings this out through the use of verb tenses and stuff like that.
It's quite beautiful, actually. But no, God has eternally existed in this way, and God does not change. We believe, as the Song of Moses in the 90th Psalm, Before the mountains were brought forth, wherever thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
He does not change. And therefore, if He has eternally been Father, Son, and Spirit, that could not change, because God cannot change.
So another question that many Muslims have, why does a God or a part of God have to die for our sins, and what does it mean that God died or Jesus died?
It's very important that you recognize that what we believe about Jesus is, first of all, we do not believe death means cessation of existence. I've very frequently been asked, well, when Jesus died, who was running the universe?
Well, we don't, all of us, none of us believe that death is a cessation of existence. And so even in the death of Christ, He does not cease to exist as a divine person or a human person. But we also believe that Jesus was the God-man.
He was not a mixture. He was not 50 -50, because that would be a demigod. We believe that what's called the Logos, the Son of God, the eternal Son of God, took on a perfect human nature, and that there is no intermingling between the two, and that as that one person with two natures, He gave His perfect life on behalf of His people.
So there's two different questions here. One is the nature of the death of Christ, and how that could be in light of His being divine. That's one issue. And could I mention that debate that I had? I had a, just, it's my favorite debate that I've had with a Muslim gentleman.
His name is Abdullah Kunda. I've known Abdullah for a number of years. It's in Sydney. And so he has a very interesting, almost Germanic-Australian accent, which is really, it may challenge you just a little bit to follow sometimes.
But he's a brilliant young man. I consider him a friend, and we debated the subject, can God become man? We actually cut to the chase. We cut to the real issue, and it was fascinating, the depth that we got into, especially in the cross-examination.
It's available on YouTube. So if you want to hear, I mean, he read my book. He attempted to communicate in that way, and I really appreciated that. That made it, like I said, one of the best debates I've ever been engaged in.
So if you want to look more into that, and some really strong objections from your side on that subject, that debate would be helpful. The other subject, because there were two subjects in that question, the other subject is why is it even necessary?
Why does there have to be a sacrificial death? And this is a major area of discussion between us, and again, I can reference, I could direct you to a debate with Shabir Ali. Most of you probably know Shabir.
I've debated him. I'm starting to lose track, six, seven, eight times, something like that, on multiple continents. And we did a debate in the Abu Bakr Asidic Mosque in Erasmus, Pretoria, South Africa.
And it was the first time in South African history that a debate had taken place, and I stood in front of the Qibla. So it wasn't a room associated with the mosque. It was right there. I mean, we observed the prayers before the debate started.
This is a mosque, by the way. We'll be praying after our talk. Oh, I know that, but I mean, but what I mean is it was the first time in South African history that the debate itself had taken place, and they put chairs out, too, for the wimpy Christians.
So they knew we couldn't handle what you guys can handle sitting on the floor. So... Cross-legged. Yeah, that's exactly right. But in that debate, we discussed this very specific issue of why is it necessary for there to be a sacrificial death within Christian theology?
And I had much more time to expand upon that, but fundamentally, this is what I would like, the bug I'd like to put in your ear in response to that. And that is, from my perspective, the key issue to remember is that God's law, from my perspective, and I think from a biblical perspective, God's law reflects his nature.
It is not something separate from him that he could change if he wanted to change it. It reflects his essential holiness, and so when it is broken, there needs to be atonement. It needs to be... There needs to be justification.
There needs to be a rectification of the breaking of that law. God can't just simply say, my law's been broken, but that's okay. I don't mind. I'm just going to forgive a person anyways. This is reflected in the sacrificial system under the old covenant, and then its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.
And so from my perspective, the necessity is related to the fact that God's law reflects his very nature. And if we had more time, since I have a Hadith expert, and most of my understanding of Sahih and Hassan and everything else comes from listening to him, in some very unusual context, I'm probably the only student he has ever had that has listened to his entire Hadith lectures in cotton spandex shorts.
Because I listen... I ride a bike, and I ride many, many, many miles. I did almost 9 ,000 miles last year on my bike, and that's when I study. And so I've told him I have distinct memory. In July in Phoenix, and if you've ever been to Phoenix, it's very hot in July.
And so if you want to do a 60-mile bike ride, you have to start about 3 o 'clock in the morning. And I remember very clearly waiting for a light at Union Hills and 16th Street, going northbound. And I'm listening to Yasir Qadhi, specifically...
In fact, this is going to freak you out, I'm sorry. You were talking about the rules by which you analyze the criteria that have to be passed for something to be Sahih. I remember you were about halfway down, and I was at that light.
Isn't that weird? Okay, I'm strange. I realize that. You're probably all saying you tie your bow ties way too tight. But one of the Hadith that I would love to discuss sometime, maybe in the future, is the one about the man who killed 99 people.
Because I have used that as an illustration of this for many years, and then I did a debate at the largest mosque in New York. And the imam... We were on a radio program beforehand. He brought it up as well.
So, I didn't feel like I was cherry-picking anything, given that it is obviously one that comes up very frequently. And so, I brought that up in that debate. That particular Hadith, and how many of you know which Hadith I'm talking about?
Okay, most of the Muslims in the room know what I'm referring to. Sorry, Christians, you'll have to look it up later. Look at the debate, don't have time to go into it right now. But the forgiveness of that man, especially in some of the versions of the Hadith, the fact that Allah actually makes the earth shrink between the man and the city he was going to.
I think that's directly relevant to, from a Christian perspective, a person who understands the Christian doctrine of atonement. That's one of the key issues we need to talk about, because that's where we have a major disconnection, our understanding of the justice of God and how forgiveness takes place.
And so, I just want you to know, you're talking to someone who is... I didn't read all of Sahih al-Bukhari. I have the same set that's over here, Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim. I didn't read them. I listened to them.
In other words, they're available electronically, so I converted them to MP3. So can you imagine listening to the entirety of that in an electronic voice? That's what I did. And think about how much better that is for memorization.
Because when you're reading it, once you've read it once, what's the tendency when you encounter it the second time, to sort of skip over it? But there are subtle differences between each one that are given.
When you're on a bike on an iPod, you can't stop and fast forward. So you know the one hadith about the man, the woman who comes and offers herself in marriage to Muhammad, and he declines, and the man gets up and says, would you give her to me?
He says, what do you have to give to her? I have nothing. Go to your family, ask, we have nothing. And so finally he asks, have you memorized any of the Quran? And some of the versions give the specific surahs that he had memorized.
And so he gives the woman to him for the memorization of the Quran. I don't know how many times that appears between Bukhari and Muslim. It must be about 45. I'm going to tell you something. But about the 45th time, I wanted to ride my bike into a cactus, because I had, face first, because it was like, oh.
But it's good, because repetition is the mother of memory. So I remember, it's amazing how many hadith I can actually narrate, because I did it that way.
It's fascinating. So by the way, 9 ,000 miles on a bike. I didn't do 9 ,000 miles on my car last year.
I've done 108 ,500 miles on my bike so far. Wow.
Wow. And Bukhari and Muslim, the vast majority of Muslims here haven't even read, much less listened to it. So you're ahead of most of the Muslims here. OK. And by the way, for the Muslims in the audience, I want to ask these very basic questions, because I feel that many of us here really just don't understand these basic Christian doctrines.
And we end up asking questions that are just indicative of our own ignorance, when somebody says, well, when Jesus died on the cross, there were only two gods. That's not, that shows that we don't understand Christian doctrine.
Even if we disagree, we should at least understand and ask the right questions. That's why I'm asking these questions here.
And that's why I was asking you to clarify last evening the same thing. We have the exact same problem going the other direction. Exactly. I appreciate that.
Yes. And I'm giving you the opportunity to spread your teachings here, because, and again, it's all honesty, because you're just as confident in your beliefs as we are in ours. And that's the whole point.
There's nothing to be scared of. There's absolutely nothing. Here we are. We want to better understand so that we can better dialogue and also just live together. So I had another question that many Muslims have is a very key Quranic doctrine is that no soul shall bear the sin of another.
This is a verse repeated in the Quran like seven or eight times. It's literally no soul shall bear the sin of another. And the motif is extremely Quranic on the day of judgment. It doesn't matter what your father or your son did.
If you didn't cause it, it doesn't matter what your brother did. If you weren't involved in it, you are responsible for yourself and yourself only. So Muslims have theological trouble understanding the concept of original sin.
Why should any one of us be responsible for what our father did, even if it's a million generations ago or one generation ago? So if you can explain to the Muslims, what exactly is original sin and why is it so fundamental for Christian theology?
There are obviously a lot of Christians today who don't emphasize the concept. I would say many really don't even let it enter into their thinking, but I think it is part of the biblical text. It's very clearly laid out in Romans chapter 5, and I think it is important.
I think the technical term we use is federal headship. What does that mean? Well, Adam represented us. In Christian theology, Adam represented us in the fall. And I think, is there not a hadith where Adam and Moses are talking?
Yes. And doesn't Moses say to him in some sense, sort of, he represented mankind in the fall or his fall caused all these problems or something along those lines?
The blame is not original sin. The blame is like your sin caused you to be expelled from paradise, and so because you were expelled were your children.
So that's... Right, right. There is almost a sense of federal headship, and here's what we understand. Just as Adam represented us in the fall, then Christ becomes the head of a new humanity. So in Adam, all we have is what he can give us, and that is death.
The person who is in Christ receives from him what he can give us, and that is eternal life. The idea that this is unjust, well, if you look at, for example, the law of Moses, if you look at the taking of the promised land, if you look at what happened, for example, in Jericho, if you remember the story in the Bible when the children of Israel took Jericho, a particular man by the name of Achan broke God's law, and when God exposed his sin, who was punished?
Achan and his entire family. He represented that entire family. So this idea of representation is very, very clearly laid out in Scripture. But I also wanted to add to that this idea that when you talk about representation and the idea of a person bearing the punishment of their own sin, you mentioned, I'm not sure if, I think you just mentioned it briefly yesterday, and then over lunch you mentioned more fully, the idea of a legal system, that you see tremendous parallels between the Jewish and Islamic legal systems, and that Christianity has moved away from that.
You mentioned Paul, so on and so forth. I think it would help us, it would help our two communities to talk if you recognize that biblical Christians have a very high view of law. I have a very high view of the Mosaic law.
I just finished an entire sermon series on the law and its relevance today, and how we are to honor God's law today. But what you need to understand is we believe that the gospel is a message of mercy and grace that transcends the law but does not get rid of the law.
So in other words, from our perspective, everyone in the universe, well, okay, everyone on earth, okay, let's just put it that way, everyone on earth will receive either justice or mercy. No one will receive injustice.
No one will be unjustly treated. God is under no obligation to extend mercy or grace to someone. We cannot force God's hand on anything. Instead, what we understand is that when Jesus bears our sins in the place of God's people, that he does so, he has a perfect life to give.
He is fulfilling God's law, and most importantly, he gives his life voluntarily. It is not taken from him. He lays his life down of his own accord. That's extremely important to understand because this was what was decided before the incarnation between the Father, Son, and Spirit in the eternity past.
So it's not like someone took it from him, it's not like he failed, anything like that. This was his intention. And so when he bears our sins in our place, we receive mercy and grace, but God's justice and his law is fulfilled.
The person who does not avail themselves of that atonement receives justice for their sins. But from our perspective, and this is where last evening we didn't get a chance to expand upon it, but you were talking about, you used the term chance, excuses at the judgment in the sense of being able to offer up an excuse to your ignorance or chances to be able to do so.
Here's where, interestingly enough, the legal understanding that underlies Christianity is there is an absolute standard of perfection to enter into God's presence. Absolute standard of perfection. And that's why, for example, the man who killed 99 people, you know, we look at that and recoil from that because we have nothing unclean.
The book of Revelation says nothing unclean will enter into the presence of God. So how could anyone ever enter the presence of God? The understanding of the gospel is that Jesus, in his sacrificial death, not only provides forgiveness of our sins, but in his perfect life, he fulfilled all the commandments of God.
For example, what's the greatest commandment in the New Testament? I'd be interested from a Muslim perspective. From the New Testament is, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
What is the first commandment in the Qur 'an? Would there be a parallel to that?
So the first commandment that is mentioned in the Qur 'an, if you start reciting the Qur 'an from the beginning, is, O mankind, worship your Lord who created you.
But first and important would be Oh, the first important would be worship God. So to worship God, would that include love of God?
Well, one of the pillars of worship, if you remember from the Levitic guidance, is love. That's the primary pillar of worship.
So there's a connection there. And yet, I will be perfectly honest with you, I have not loved God perfectly. And so if that's the standard, how could I ever enter into his presence? Well, Christ, the Son, did love the Father perfectly.
And so his perfect righteousness, both negatively in the removal of my sin, and positively in the perfect life that he lived, is imputed to me by faith. And so when I stand before God, I stand clothed in that righteousness, and that's how I can have peace with God.
So that's one of the areas I think, again, when I think of most of the interactions that take place, that's where the conversation should be, and it's almost always off on something else. And that's why I appreciate you and these folks so much.
You said so many kind things about me at the beginning, but may I say that the reason I've pursued him, and maybe bothered him a few times, I'm sorry if that's the case, but one of the reasons I pursued him, and I've told him this, is not only did I appreciate the scholarship and the consistency and so on and so forth, but I was listening to a lecture he did once.
I don't remember where it was, I remember where I was, I don't remember where you were. The audio recording may not have even indicated that, I don't know. But he was talking about the Quran, and he was starting to preach, he was starting to get very passionate.
And he said, why do we have our children memorize a text in a language they don't even understand, if we are not at the same time teaching them to live by the principles that that text communicates to them?
And he said it with a lot of force. At that point I said, here is my counterpart on the other side, because that's exactly my perspective. Why spend the time studying the scriptures if you don't believe them and make application to your life?
It doesn't make any sense. And so it was that consistency on his part that when I had the opportunity to come, I'm speaking at a conference this next weekend down in Laurel, Mississippi. That's a four-hour drive, but it was close enough to say, hey, I got in contact, is there any way we can work something out?
And the kind folks at the church, some of the members are here this evening, stepped up and said, yeah, let's do it. And so I wanted to make sure that you understood the respect goes both directions. And by the way, it's costly to defend a Muslim from when you do what I do.
Because there are certain people, they don't care. They do not care. They will not even try to refute the information I provided when I debunked that clip, because it wasn't difficult to do. All you have to do is know what in the world he was actually saying.
That's not the point. They are just simply so filled with, they're all the same. They all want to put you in the exact same bucket. And I can't do that as a Christian. I do not see how a believing Christian can engage in that.
We must be truthful and honest to be consistent with our own profession of faith. And so I don't care what it costs. If they do it again, I'll do it again. Appreciate that.
I have two more questions and we're going to open the floor for all of you. So the second to last question, I know this is a really heavy and deep one, but let's try to make this simple for our audience.
Can you explain to us outsiders the primary difference that you would want us to know between Protestants and Catholics, number one, and the number two, particularly between your strand of Christianity, and that is Reformed Baptists and other Protestant strands?
So it's a two-layered question.
Two-layered question. Until I began dealing with the subject of Islam, and by the way, I will always just be a student of Islam. You will never hear me claiming to be an expert. There's too much to know in one lifetime.
And I recognize that. But the primary group that I had done the most debates with publicly was with Roman Catholicism. I just did a major debate in Atlanta last week, a week ago tonight, in fact, with a Roman Catholic representative in Atlanta.
And so what's the primary issue there? Well, there are interesting parallels. Protestants, at least historical Protestants, and this is the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, October 31st, 1517, two principles, the two principles of the Reformation.
The material principle of the Reformation was the preaching of justification being made right before God by faith alone, not by the lengthy number of sacraments, indulgences, pilgrimages, all the other things that developed within Roman Catholicism over the centuries.
And so the issue is the gospel. Is a person made right before God by faith? Is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ sufficient in and of itself, or do we have to add things to it? Is it something that sort of makes us savable, and then we have to do the rest?
Or is Jesus a powerful savior? That's really the primary issue in the gospel. And then what was called the formal principle was, we believe, what's called sola scriptura, scripture alone versus the Roman Catholic understanding of sacred traditions, certain citations from early church fathers and things like that.
It's not that we ignore those things. It's not that we ignore church history, though I'll be perfectly honest with you, many Protestants do. For many Protestants, I've often said, church history starts with Billy Graham, which really was not all that long ago when you think about it.
And I say that as a person who teaches church history fairly regularly. So, but we do believe that only scripture is theanoustos, that's a Greek word which means God breathed. And so it's God speaking.
Now we do, it would be a great thing to discuss our differences in how we understand inspiration. Because we do have a divide there. We both talk about God's word, we both talk about inspiration, but there is a difference in understanding.
And I've spent a lot of hours reading books, primarily from the Sunni perspective, to try to be able to nuance that and accurately represent you when we discuss it. But that would be one of the major areas.
Quickly, where do I then differ from other Protestants? Well, the real big divide, and this is a divide that you've mentioned and recognized, is between liberals and conservatives in the sense of people who continue to believe that God has spoken or that God can even reveal himself, and those who do not.
I'll be honest with you, once Christianity abandons the supernatural element, abandons revelation, abandons the idea of miracles, virgin birth, things that we would agree on in regards to virgin birth and things like that, it becomes a social club.
And every mainline Protestant denomination that has abandoned a belief in the Bible as God's word is collapsing today. They're closing their churches and they're selling them off because they're dying.
Because they have really nothing to offer. So that's the biggest divide, is right there. But the other divide where I would be somewhat different than many of the people that you'd have around you in Tennessee that are good old Baptists, because like I said, I saw a lot of Baptist churches on the way here, and I saw a couple Church of Christ buildings, and I wasn't invited to go to any of those.
And the primary reason would be that a Reformed Baptist is a person who has a strong emphasis upon the sovereignty of God and salvation, that there is an elect people, that Christ's death atones for them perfectly, and hence the freedom of God in saving his people, rather than the idea that God's just trying his best to save as many as he can, but he's doing his best, but it's all up to us to help him out.
I don't see that as a presentation of Scripture. I've debated a number of times. I believe that God is able to save, and he saves perfectly. And again, if we were to expand upon that, we would want to discuss the differences between Kaddah and what we believe about predestination and the elements of that.
But our time is limited this evening. So those would be some of the specifics.
Okay, so do you mind if I simplify what you said in language that probably they would understand? Sure. Because terms like justification are not new to us. So essentially what the Reverend said was that Protestants believe that in order to enter Jannah, I'm going to use Arabic words here, all you need is Iman and no Amal.
You need pure Iman, and if you have Iman in Jesus, Iman in Jesus dying for your sins, then you really don't need any Amal after that. Whereas Catholics would require not just Iman, but more than that.
And the second point was, what is the primary source? So it's the Quran only, let's say, or it's Sola Scriptura. And it's not, well, for the Shia, it would be the sayings of the Imams, let's say. So the Protestants say, we don't believe in those as actually sources.
We can look to them for reference or whatnot, but they're not actual Asad. So that's the main difference between Protestants and Catholics. And then with regards to what the difference is between Protestants, the main issue would be, as he explicitly said in Kaddah, what is the position of Kaddah, and how does Allah or God choose people to be saved, and what does that entail?
And all Baptists would agree in a profession of faith as an adult, correct? Yes, yes. So that's another major point of difference that Baptists have with some of the old school Protestants. We don't baptize our children.
Yes, but children are not baptized by Baptists. Baptists believe in adult's baptism. So you choose to convert, or you choose to make a confession. Confession is the term, yeah. See, Muslims and Christians need to understand these terms have different meanings.
We have language. Yeah, we have language barriers. So when you say justified, nobody understands what it means, you know, it's not our vernacular. Well, that's not a problem. I mean, I had a problem with it, and you have a problem when I speak in my Arabic phrase as well.
So that's one of the things we need to do. No, I've learned them all from you. Well, now that's true, actually.
That's true, actually, yeah. Okay. In fact, I can blame you for most of my mispronunciations, so you've been my guide there.
Which leads me to my final question. My final question, a personal note, why are you so interested in studying Islam? I'm so glad you asked that. And why me in particular? I'm just curious.
Like, there's so many people out there. Well, let me answer the second question first. You, first of all, let's be honest. Many of the first people I started listening to, it was hard to understand them.
You are, you speak, you know, you're from here. So there's a real practical level that it's easier to understand you. Your Arabic is very good and understandable to me as well. I was just starting to study with an Arabic tutor at that time, so it was very, very helpful.
But what I found, especially once, when I listened to, the first thing I listened to you was actually your material in Shirk. And that was so vitally important because that is one of the key issues between us.
And you're a great teacher. You are very good at communicating what you believe. You have a good cadence to your teaching. It's very understandable. I'm a teacher as well, and so I recognize good teachers.
And so I wasn't trying to stalk you. But once you sent me light and guidance, I mean, that was just so, so useful that I started ransacking the net. And you've got a lot of stuff out there. There's a lot of material.
And a lot of it goes a ways back. And so the reason was, you're a great teacher, and I've even raised your name, and I've asked people that I've been debating, would you agree with Yasir Qadhi on something like this?
And sometimes there's a yes, and sometimes there's a no. It's difficult. But why do I do this? Well, look, I do understand that I'm a little bit unusual. I never dreamed of this. Believe me, when I did my bachelor's degree in Bible at Grand Canyon University, which is a Southern Baptist school.
Back then it was. It's not any longer. But nobody envisioned doing apologetics, what you would call dawah. No one talked about anything like this. It was the farthest thing from my mind. Even after 9 -11 and things like that, was not on my radar screen.
What happened was two students at Biola University contacted me and said, we'd like to arrange a debate between yourself and Shabir Ali. I didn't know who Shabir Ali was. I really didn't know these issues.
But I said, well, let me listen to some debates. So I started listening to some of Shabir's lectures, debates. I ended up listening to many, many hours of them. And I realized the things that he was raising regarding the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the person of the Holy Spirit, the transmission of the text of the Bible, allegations of corruption, the role of Paul, these are things I had been spending my entire adult life studying and teaching in other contexts.
And so I realized I would have something positive to present here. And so when I met Shabir, I found him to be a very kind individual. And I started realizing, well, basically, let me put it in a spiritual sense, the Lord really started birthing in my heart a love for the Muslim people.
And one of my chief concerns is, and one of my greatest criticisms of my own community is that many of my people fear you when we're commanded to love you. And as long as there's fear in the heart, we will never extend ourselves in love to the Muslim people.
And that's why I've done what I've done here. People need to understand there's a strand, and you run into it all the time, there's a strand of people that would be formerly in my community who simply will not recognize that there's different kinds of beliefs amongst Muslim people.
And so they take the worst and demand that all of you be put into the exact same category. I know enough to recognize that that's a lie. And it's untrue. And as a Christian, I cannot propagate untruths and claim to follow he who is the truth.
And so when you ask me why I do this, I'm sorry if this sounds trite or weird or odd. But as a Christian, it's because I love you. And when I bend over backwards, listening to this man's lectures at three o 'clock in the morning in cotton Lycra shorts and sweating profusely, the reason I'm doing that is so I can not only communicate with you, so I can understand, I can listen to his lectures, he can use Arabic, and I can follow him, and I can understand, I understand the terminology.
But so I can show respect for you. You know what I've found? I can disagree with you openly and firmly, but as long as I have demonstrated to you that I want to honor you by accurately representing you, you folks are the best people in the world to talk to.
I have been in mosques, not just here in the United States, but in South Africa. One week after the Benghazi embassy attack, I was debating, is Muhammad prophesied in the Bible in the East London mosque?
And the Muslims there loved it. And I had to say some strong things, but my experience is with Muslims, if you have shown them the respect of accurately representing what they believe, then you can honestly disagree and they'll listen and they'll talk.
And we live in a day, I tell my Christian community, we live in a day we have to break our backs to get secularists to talk to us. And here's a whole group of people that want to talk to us, but we're not talking.
What a tragedy. I'm trying to change it, but I'm just one funny looking guy in a bow tie.
Well, two people at a time, we're going to continue to have this conversation and dialogue and hopefully we will be building more bridges together.
And before we go to the questions, I brought some books for your imam. One of them I brought, and unfortunately it's a paperback and it doesn't like humidity. So the cover has been doing the Watusi ever since I left Arizona.
This is a book by a friend of mine called Behold Your King. It is an entire study of the Old Testament prophetic texts about the messiahship of Jesus. So you might find it to be very useful. And then I ordered this one in two days ago because I was, I happened to, again, I wasn't stalking you.
I was literally looking for something else on YouTube when your, is it Khutbah? From Christmas came up on YouTube. Right over here. Yeah, right over here. This is right here. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, I was trying to remember where in the room it was.
And you were, we can't debate this, but when you, what you talked about Constantine, I was sitting there grinding my teeth as a church historian going, no, no, no, no, no. And so I started, I started thinking about what book would a scholar find to be most useful.
Larry Hurtado is not quite as conservative as I am, but he is a, he is one of the leading historians, especially in early Christianity today. He's especially done a tremendous amount of work on the development of the codex amongst Christians.
A lot of people, did you know that we've only found six scrolls of Christian scriptures out of 5 ,717? Christians did not want to use scrolls and we don't exactly know why. This guy is the guy who's done the most work on it.
So he does a lot of stuff with archeology and the development. It's called Destroyer of the Gods, Early Christian Distinctives in the Roman World and how the Christian church wasn't trying to look like the Roman world.
The Christian church was subverting the Roman world and purposely so. Excellent, excellent work. And I want you to have those for your library because something tells me you're probably a bibliophile.
You probably like books.
I just have 10 ,000, not that many. See? Not that many. Well, since you're giving me some books, let me also give you a book of mine. This is a book that is one of the most popular books that I've written.
It engages with prayer and the proper etiquette of prayer and it talks about monotheism and what is the best way to reach God. So this is the weapon of the believer here. By weapon, we don't mean weapon, weapon.
We use the same terminology. It's sad that we even have to explain it anymore. Well, these days, yes, yes.
So this is my gift and there's also a gift as well from the mosque as well. Oh my. A small gift and token for you. Small? Yes. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate that. Well, thank you very much. We're not done yet.
Now you can send your questions. So the first question that we have, and I'm going to go in order of votes. So you can vote a question up if you like it and you can vote it down if you don't like it. The number one question is, well, the top question I have, how does a Christian with your position on homosexuality, i .e. it's forbidden, deal with the LGBT community on a day-to-day basis, you know, given the context we live in here in America?
Well, what an incredible question.
I did my first debate on the subject of homosexuality with Barry Lynn, who was an ACLU attorney, the head of Americans Deny the Separation of Church and State. He's on Fox News all the time. I've seen him many times.
In 2001 in Long Island. And it's interesting, a friend of mine, Michael Brown, and I have been challenging the leading advocates of the quote unquote Christian LGBT movement to debate for years, and they just simply won't do it.
And I know why. They've already won the public battle. Why in the world even bother? I had to go to Johannesburg, South Africa last year, the year before last, to have a debate with Dr. Graham Codrington there on the subject to be able to get a really well-recorded debate.
Look, from my perspective, this is a hill to die on. It's a hill to die on because in Matthew chapter 19, the Lord Jesus Christ specifically taught that God created, he quoted from Genesis 1, he would quote it from what you and I would both agree.
In the beginning, God created man. He made them male and female. It was good. This was his creative purpose. And from my perspective, what Christians are being asked to do in our culture today is to deny the authority of Christ in his teaching and to adopt a different authority.
And this is what the early church faced with the Caesars. The Caesars wanted us to engage in a form of pluralism. If you're familiar with the persecution of Christians in the early centuries, they were asked to take a pinch of incense and offer it upon an altar and say, Kaiser kurios, Caesar is Lord.
Well, the Christian confession is Jesus kurios, Jesus is Lord. They couldn't say that. And so this was the form of persecution. And we're facing that again. Caesar is saying, you need to bow the knee and you need to start celebrating what your own scriptures say is a fundamental denial of God's right to say, this is man, this is woman, these are the roles they're to have, this is the relationship they're to have.
And of course, from our perspective, these lifestyles are destructive to human flourishing and human happiness. So if we actually love the people that are involved in these lifestyles, we can't just go along with the culture and say, you know, whatever you do.
And it's going to cost, I think, Christian colleges and universities. I think if the election had gone the other way, it would have been faster than it's going to be. But I believe Christian colleges and universities will be losing their accreditation, their any type of government funding and Pell grants and things like that, if they do not collapse on this issue.
It's going to be coming, and I don't care what happens over the next four or eight years, it's still going to happen eventually. Just how fast, I don't know. But yes, from my perspective, this is a gospel issue.
Because if you cannot define sin, you cannot proclaim a savior from sin. And the scriptures are clear. The law of Moses is clear. There's no way around this. There really isn't. And so it is an issue of, if I believe that the scriptures are God speaking, that's the final authority.
I can't go anyplace else. There's going to be a huge collapse on this, by the way, though. I can guarantee you right now, you will see many large names, well, most of the mainstream denominations already have collapsed.
Exactly, yeah. But you're going to see evangelical churches that are going to decide, you know what, this is not a hill to die on, and they will collapse on this. There will be a small minority left, there really will be.
I think that's one of the main areas of cooperation we need to work together on, to preserve the Sanctity of Family.
Well, the family, and of course, the whole issue of our society. I'm sorry, but if we don't believe that there is a moral and ethical standard outside of the most recent poll, what culture could ever survive that?
Exactly.
No culture ever has. A question, everything we've learned about Jesus, from a Muslim sister, everything we have learned about Jesus talks about his compassion, his strong belief in helping those that are less fortunate, yet most of our co-workers who are good church-going Christians identify politically as right-wing, and believe in policies that seem to directly oppose the teachings of Jesus.
How do we, Muslims, reconcile this? So I think from our perspective here, well, you understand right-wing policies, which don't seem, they seem to be more catered to the influential and the elite than the poor.
There's just a lot of issues that Muslims socially identify with Democrats, yet morally identify with the right, you know, that's our problem. So we seem to be confused. Why do church-going, God-fearing Christians not seem to understand that we have a role to play with the poor, and the unfortunate, and the weak, and the oppressed, and the downtrodden?
Well, first of all, most of us believe that that's not the role of government in the first place, that's the role of the church. We believe that the church should be the one engaging in that kind of, to take, it's an inefficient way to take my tax money, and then only 20 of it ends up going to where it's supposed to be, whereas if in the church, it is a much more efficient and effective way of doing that.
We just don't, there is a fundamental distrust on the part of many of us here in the United States of the state because of our doctrine of sin. This is a theological thing, and this is, the original sin thing, this is actually, it helps to explain where we differ some on this, because we have a fundamental distrust of centralized power because we believe that man has fallen, and therefore, when you look at how the founding fathers set up things here, they dispersed power for this very reason, and a lot of it came from the Judeo-Christian background that was theirs.
They didn't want any one person having a tremendous amount of power because that person, if they are evil in their heart, are going to act upon that, and we believe that outside of the restraining grace of God, well, even back in the days of Genesis, every intent of the man's heart was evil continually, so part of it is that, is our doctrine of man, but part of it also, you need to understand, from my perspective, so that you can listen to me even better, I did not vote for Donald Trump.
I was left without a choice in this election, I really was, because theologically and morally, I could not begin to conceive of voting for Hillary Clinton, because I believe abortion is the murder of an unborn child, and she was the most pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-gay marriage, pro-everything along those lines candidate I'd ever seen, but I also couldn't vote for Donald Trump, and I couldn't because I thought they were both morally and philosophically and worldviewly disqualified to be President of the United States, and from my perspective, and I was not trying to trap you last night, by the way, by asking this question, but from my perspective, and it is interesting, I have the freedom to say this, from my perspective, the choice we were given is indicative of God's displeasure upon a society that has taken His many blessings and has squandered them, and is spitting in His face.
When we take the first institution that God established amongst mankind, which is marriage, and say we don't care what God says about it, we're going to let five people in robes determine what that is, I think God's wrath abides upon a people unless they repent, and so it may be old-fashioned, but when I say God bless America, I say it this way, God bless America with heartfelt repentance, because that's the first thing we need to have.
We don't need material prosperity, we need repentance before God. The rest will follow after that, and so I think for a lot of people, that was so important, so central, the abortion, homosexuality issue, that it overrides everything else, and so from our perspective, it is important to deal with the poor, but it's not the state's role, it is the church's role to be able to do that, and we want to have that freedom to do that without state interference.
Fair enough, fair enough.
We have a question from a sister here, why do so many non-Muslims seem to have issues when Muslim women wear the hijab, even though every single picture or painting we see of Mary shows her wearing similar clothing?
I think most Christians look at quote-unquote paintings for what they are, a cultural thing. The reason that I think a lot of people express a concern, I don't have any problem with it, modesty, I think, happens to be a wonderful and great thing, and in fact, there are, amongst the Reformed, there are traditions of wearing head coverings amongst the women, so it's not something that's just completely unknown, but I can tell you where they're getting it from.
They haven't, they're not talking to you women who want to do that, they're hearing from those that are, they're saying that women are forced to do that against their wills as a part of being subjugated in Muslim lands.
They see videos on YouTube of women being struck and hit and beaten, and they see things about honor killings and all that kind of stuff, and they associate it all together. Again, the issue is the difference between making the proper distinctions and recognizing that there are people who want to voluntarily do these things, and then there, look, I think you'll admit that there are abuses that you can point to in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, where men abuse their wives, and so on and so forth, and of course, we don't believe in polygamy, we would, you know, the New Testament teaches that the relationship of the husband and the wife is a monogamous thing, and that it's the picture of Christ and his church and things like that, so we would have some issues, we want to talk about divorce and things like that, there are issues we need to talk about along those lines.
But again, most people do not make distinctions amongst the abuse and then the non-abuse, the same thing. It's ignorance. It's the sources we're drawing from. And since the communities generally don't talk to one another, how would they have ever talked to someone who could say, I want to do this, and here's why I want to do this.
They've never heard it, and therefore, they can only go with what they've been told, that it's a sign of abuse. A pressure. Yeah, a pressure, yeah.
Here we have a theological question. Since God is absolutely just, how do Christians understand or justify that God allowed thousands of years to pass between Adam and Jesus without those people knowing about Jesus explicitly or understanding the essential concepts of the Trinity?
Well, two things. God was saving people all during that time by faith in himself, according to Romans chapter three, based upon the absolute certainty of the work of Jesus Christ. So Abraham is saved, all of them were saved, and saved on the same basis.
Faith in the same God who had made promises all the way back in Genesis 12 and Genesis 15 that he was going to fulfill his covenant. And so we do believe that God was saving those people and that there is not a need for explicit knowledge of who Jesus was, because Jesus hadn't come yet.
But let me mention something. The doctrine of the Trinity was revealed between the Old and the New Testaments. There are prophecies, there are texts in the Old Testament that directly point to these things.
Isaiah 9, 6, extremely important. The use of Emmanuel in the book of Isaiah, a number of passages like that. But the revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity takes place between the Old and the New Testaments.
So it's already been revealed by the time the first word of the New Testament was written. And why do I say that? Because the primary revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the incarnation of the Son, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, his claims for himself, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
And when did that take place? That took place during the ministry of Christ, immediately thereafter. And it was 10, 15 years before the very first words of the New Testament were written down. And so that revelation took place at that time, and not beforehand.
And so no one's claiming that people in the Old Testament had to have explicit knowledge of these things to be saved. That's not what the New Testament teaches.
Okay, fair enough. Back to social questions. A lot of Muslims here are concerned about social issues. With the announcement of the wall being signed as an executive power by Trump today and the banning of immigrants and refugees, how do you and your congregation view all of this?
And will you work towards eliminating marginalization of minority communities, one of which is our community?
This is an especially difficult issue because, first of all, I'm traveling and I'm not totally up on everything right now. I haven't been keeping up with the news. So I am really, really concerned about the fact that it seems we've now entered an era of rule by executive order.
That's not how this was supposed to work. There was a reason why that you're supposed to have the House of Representatives and the Senate. It's supposed to represent the people. It's supposed to be a longer process.
So you can't just do things like this. And I'm really concerned that the executive branch is becoming way, way, way too powerful. I am very concerned about what the future holds. I have basically said, look, I like some of the appointments I've seen.
I don't like others. My biggest concern is real simple. I don't see a consistent worldview driving any of this. And so if there's no consistent worldview, there's going to be massive conflict and there's going to be gridlock and it's going to become a mess.
During the primary season, I took a lot of heat because I'm a debater. And when you debate, you listen to what the other side is saying and you can tell by how they answer whether they have a consistent understanding of what the question is and what the issues involved are.
I've done over 150 moderated public debates around the world. And when I listened to Donald Trump answer questions during debates, I wanted to vomit. I was absolutely amazed because it was just, I'm sorry, saying it's going to be huge is not an answer.
OK, that does not tell me anything. And so, look, I want to allow things to take place. It's only been a few days. I want to see what's going to happen. I don't know what the fallout of all these things are.
Some of these things are just reversing things that Obama did. I'm not a political expert. But the one thing that I said last night that I'll repeat this evening, I am very concerned about religious liberty in this country.
And I'm primarily concerned about it because of the secularization of the millennial generation. They do not see religious liberty as something that is a precious thing. They see it as something that's in the way of their desire to change the society.
And so it's real easy to look at a marginalized minority group and say, we need to register these people or these. I was so disgusted about six months ago when a video, did you see the video that surfaced of Muslims in Texas were trying to get a permit to build a mosque.
And this guy stands up and he just starts yelling at the imam, doesn't let him get a word in edgewise and just simply says, we know who you people are. We know what you're trying to do. Just don't even try lying to us.
There was no reasoning going on. And I thought it would be a pretty simple and safe thing to point out that this guy was massively ignorant and that this was completely inappropriate. I was disabused of that fairly quickly by how many people actually defended that kind of expression.
And I don't even know how any American can do that, but I can't speak for Americans anymore, I guess. I don't know how any Christian can look at something like that and not immediately recognize the danger that even if we were just being selfish, even if it wasn't proper for us to look at somebody and say, you're throwing them all into one basket, you're not making proper distinctions.
You're not being truthful. You're not being fair. You're not being accurate. That shouldn't be what you do. Even if you don't take that in, how foolish for Christians to give power to a secularizing government and think they're not going to use that against us.
Of course they will. I mean, we're the ones opposing their agenda in regards to the sexual revolution and marriage and abortion and all the rest of this stuff. Don't you think they're going to use those very same powers against us, especially against those of us that refuse to submit and give in?
Of course they will. And so I'm really at a loss as to why so many don't recognize that when it comes to religious liberty issues, we're in this together. And it's similar to what happened in Nazi Germany when many of the Lutherans and stuff, they saw what was happening with the Jews, but they didn't do anything about it because they figured, well, they're not coming after me.
But eventually they realized the huge mistake that they had made in that context. And so, yeah, I'm afraid that the bigotry is strong. But please realize a lot of that is from people who are what I would call nominal.
In other words, there's a cultural Christianity here in the South that technically we don't believe anyone's born as a Christian. I understand that there are certain Hadith that say you're born upon the fitra because of the mitzvah and then your parents make you Christians or Jews or whatever else it might be.
I understand that. We don't believe that you're born as a Christian. We believe that you're born as the son of Adam and that you're in rebellion against God and that God has to change your heart. And so just simply being born and walking down an aisle in a Baptist church doesn't make you a Christian.
There needs to be a fundamental spiritual change within your heart. And so just because someone calls themselves a Christian, I hope you can extend the proper and necessary distinctions between those who claim something and those who try to live consistently in light of those things.
If we're trying to do that, at least some of us, I hope you can too.
I think that's why your voice is so important. If you can spread this message far and wide, it is a beacon of hope for us where people like you can remain principled, you're not compromising on your faith, but we know we can trust you to say the right thing and you're not going to lose track of the principles this country was founded on, the freedoms it was founded upon, and you're not going to let your differences in religion cloud your judgment about us and who we are.
And I think it's important that people like us are aware of James White and support him in what he's doing, because we're going to need people like this as the administration continues down the line that it's going.
Time is getting closer to then, and we'll try to wrap this up with a question or two. We have a question here. It seems that the Bible is an ever-evolving or changing text. How do Christians ensure the authenticity of text?
Is there the equivalent of an isnad or chain of narrators in the Christian tradition? Fascinating.
It's fascinating to me as a person who teaches in the field of textual criticism, which is we have 5 ,717 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. We have nearly 25 ,000 other languages, Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, so on and so forth.
That's the area of in-depth study on my part. I'm actually doing a postgraduate study in that area right now. There's a lot of misunderstanding ever since a book came out in 1864 called The Vindication of Truth.
I'm not sure if you've seen that book. It was the book that made Ahmed Didat engage in Dawah. That book has really promulgated the idea of a tremendous amount of corruption in the text of the Bible. The reality is that both of our texts have a history to them.
Both were transmitted by handwritten manuscripts for certain periods of time. All of us have to engage in textual critical study of our manuscripts. I guess the best way to answer this question would be to direct you to two debates.
I like being able to do this. It's sort of neat to be able to do this because there are Muslims representing the other side, so it's a fair thing. That's what I like about debate is you have an absolute equal amount of time from both perspectives.
I did two debates with Adnan Rashid. How many of you know Adnan Rashid? You've heard of him? Okay. Adnan would call me friend now. We did two debates, one on the transmission of the Koran, one on the transmission of the New Testament in London.
Those are available on YouTube. Then Yusuf Ismail, who is big in the IPCI down in South Africa, he and I did the exact same debate, basically, at Northwest University in Patrasum, South Africa. All of those are available.
We both gave keynote presentations, and there's a lot of data involved and discussions of manuscripts and stuff. That conversation is an important conversation. It needs to be undertaken. I can just simply tell you that the New Testament is the most early and best preserved and documented work of antiquity.
I'm not including the Koran in that because the Koran I would put into the medieval period because I cut off at about 500. It's a medieval document rather than a document of antiquity. That's a very important area, and I have been involved in discussions in that area.
I want to see more taking place in the future because it's technical, but it's very important. Can I just add on to that?
Can you explain as well to the audience? For us Muslims, one thing that is a common misconception is languages. For us, the Arabic has to be the Arabic. The Koran is only in Arabic. Everybody knows Jesus didn't speak New American English.
Can you explain the issue of languages? There are actually a few churches around here where you might get a little bit of an argument on that, actually. It's called the King James Only Movement, and you don't even want to go there tonight because no.
Yeah, no, definitely. From the Christian perspective, you have multiple languages. The vast majority of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. There's about 12 chapters in Aramaic. The New Testament is written in Greek.
We do believe, there's strong evidence, actually, that Jesus had proficiency in Greek. Almost everybody in that day had to for one simple reason. If a Roman soldier called you out and told you to do something, you better know what he's talking about.
It was an occupied place, and Palestine especially was an area of a tremendous amount of trade. The point is that the New Testament was written in the language of the day, so that the gospel could be spread throughout the known world, where that language had been spread by Alexander the Great.
We believe that we need to translate that message into every language. We believe, because of the nature of inspiration, that a translation can accurately be called the Word of God. This is the fundamental difference.
There is a fundamental difference there at that point, yes. I try to teach, when I teach on Islam, I ask, how many of you have read the Koran? A few people put up their hands, they'll say parts, or something like that, and I'll say, how many of you read it in Arabic?
Nobody puts their hands up. I said, from the Islamic perspective, you haven't read the Koran. In the sense, in the fullest sense of the fact that the Koran exists in Arabic, and that is the fundamental base text, and anything else is merely a, very often the term transliteration is used, and that's not the proper meaning of that word, but we do have differences in understanding of how that's communicated as well.
Great, well I think we've learned an immense amount. We've asked some really deep and probing questions. There's just one question that I have, which is actually a follow-up to something we were discussing yesterday.
Over lunch, I had asked James about bow ties, and I was shocked to discover, I mean, I am not as skilled in bow ties as he is, that you don't just clip it on. I actually learned that you have to tie it.
So he said he'd show me how to tie a bow tie. So I said, okay.
This is what I'm wearing right now. So if you go most places, you can just buy one, and it's already got the knot pre-tied, it looks nice and pretty, and you just wrap it around your neck, and there's a little clip, and you put it on.
There are only about 12 of us left in the world that know how to do this, actually. It's a tremendous knowledge. And so what I would like to do is, I would like to give Dr. Khadi this. It happens to go, I think it goes fairly well.
Don't you think this goes well? Wait, wait, this was for you. You want me to wear this? How many of you would like to see Yasir Khadi with a bow tie on? Is this being recorded?
Is this going to go on YouTube? I have no clue what to do. Well, here. Put that around there.
All right. All right. Now you got to put it down to where it's about one. Is there a foxtrot against this?
I do not want to get him in trouble. Oh, I'm in enough trouble already, believe me. I couldn't get worse right now.
Don't worry. Well, basically, then you have to tie, you have to bring it through here and tie a knot. And then you bring this around here. And here's the tricky part. Okay. You have to, this is going to be almost impossible for me to do from this angle.
But you have to sort of try to bring it through here. And I'm going to try to do this. There you go. It's hard to do. But that sort of is supposed to form the front part of the knot. And I didn't tie it right.
We're just going to have to go with that one for right now. How do I look? Oh, my God. The shirt really wasn't designed for it, you know, but thank you. Thank you very much.
We had a great evening today. We did. And I think we ended off on a nice note as well. Thank you. Is this mine now? It is. Thank you very much.
It is. Thank you. Go on YouTube. You can find the actual instructions on how to do it. And I would love to see a picture if you ever find out. Okay.
Well, a round of applause for our visitor here. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for having me.