Muslim Debate in South Africa

Transcript Muslim Debate in South Africa

Kevin Harris: Welcome to the Reasonable Faith podcast. I'm Kevin Harris in studio with Dr. Craig where we are continuing to cover your trip to South Africa – debating and speaking there. It was very exciting for Reasonable Faith to be there as many say that some long term effects for the truth of the claims of Christ were really put in place, Bill. Another debate that you had while you were there was with Yusuf Ismail, a Muslim.

Dr. Craig: That's right. He is Muslim. There is a small percentage of the South African population which is Muslim. He is a protege of the infamous South African Muslim apologist Ahmed Deedat who was a real firebrand for Islam in South Africa. Ismail is a practicing attorney and sometime apologist. He's probably the most prominent Muslim apologist in South Africa right now. So when my hosts invited me to come to South Africa they thought that having a debate with a Muslim and contrasting the Muslim view with the Christian view would be something that would be a good way of reaching out to Muslims. This debate was held in a fairly large church in a section of Cape Town that is on the side of the city where there is a good deal of Muslims. There is a large Muslim population. So the audience that night had several hundred Muslims there all dressed in different sorts of colorful garb as well as hundreds of Christians. There were about a thousand people in all that packed in the hall to hear the debate. It was funny, Kevin, because as I was speaking and seeing the Muslims and hearing them sometimes chant and so forth I thought to myself, boy, it really looks like there are a lot of African Muslims here tonight. Then I thought, you are in Africa! Of course there are!

Kevin Harris: Where am I?

Dr. Craig: Yeah, exactly, where am I? It really brought it home to me that here I was speaking to African Muslims in their own country. So it was a real thrill to do that.

Kevin Harris: The topic of the debate was “Identifying Jesus: Is he man or both man and God?”

Dr. Craig: Right. That topic was the result of a long negotiation. Mr. Ismail wanted to debate on “Identifying Jesus: Is he man or God?” And I thought this is an unacceptable topic because it just plays right into the Muslim misconception of who Jesus is. It is a false dichotomy to say “Jesus: Man or God?” Because as Christians we believe that he is truly human. We believe that he is truly man and truly God. So to setup that false dichotomy “Is he man or God?” already is buying into a Muslim view where these are mutually exclusive categories. If you demonstrate the humanity of Jesus, then you've automatically excluded his divinity. I didn't want to fall into that trap, so insisted that we have a debate on “Is Jesus human and divine?” or something of that sort. This was the wording that was finally acceptable to him: “Is he man or both God and man?”

Kevin Harris: Good move, because the most heated debates that you most often see on the internet and in public with Muslims on Jesus will begin to be very adamant about God has no partners and there is none other like God. It is a confusion that God doesn't go to the bathroom and things like that. So that just stirs up this fever.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. They think that if you demonstrate Jesus' weakness, his spatially being confined, his being confined in time, his mortality, his ignorance, or even as you say, Kevin, his going to the toilet – they think that by demonstrating his true humanity you thereby demonstrated that he is not God. Whereas from a Christian point of view, that is just a complete non sequitur because all those things do is demonstrate his true humanity which we wholeheartedly accept. Indeed it is a heresy to deny the true humanity of Christ.

Kevin Harris: That's right. Did you speak first?

Dr. Craig: Yes, I did go first in this debate.

Kevin Harris: I would think that this would be an opportunity to really lay this out – what you just laid out for us. Tell us what you did.

Dr. Craig: It did help me to set the tone for the debate by saying in order for him to demonstrate that Jesus is not God, he has to do more than demonstrate that Jesus is human because I agree with that. [1] He needs to show that there is no good reason to think that he is divine. What I need to do from my part is to show there are good reasons to think that Jesus was not merely human but also divine. So it helped to set out exactly where our respective burdens of proof lay; what each of us had to do.

My opening case was that Jesus made several indisputably authentic claims that demonstrate his radical divine-human self-consciousness. I appealed here to the parable of the vineyard where Jesus claims to be the only unique beloved Son of God. Secondly, to his saying in Matthew 11:27 about him being the absolute revelation of God the Father and the Son of God. And then finally his saying about being the Son of Man prophesied by the prophet Daniel. On the basis of these authentic sayings of Jesus we can see that Jesus had a radical divine-human self-concept. Then I argued that, having been crucified for these blasphemous claims, Jesus was then raised from the dead by God and presented the evidence for the resurrection. So his claims were vindicated. Far from being a blasphemer, the resurrection showed that Jesus had spoken the truth. God had publicly and dramatically vindicated these allegedly blasphemous claims. That was basically my case for the divinity of Christ.

What I also did in my opening speech that was kind of interesting was having looked at Mr. Ismail's DVDs in my pre-debate preparation I discovered that he pushes the mythological line about Jesus – that the beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology. What is so odd about this, Kevin, is that these same mythological beliefs would serve to undermine Islam as well because Islam also affirms that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he really existed, that he was a great prophet, that he performed miracles like healing the lame and giving sight to the blind, and that he is coming again at the end of history. So it was very odd to hear Ismail going on and on and on about all these pagan analogies of the mother and child – the mother goddess with the baby in her arms. He would talk about how these are in Hinduism and ancient religions from Africa as well as in Middle Eastern and Greco-Roman religions and I thought this is bizarre. If he really thinks that the virgin birth is mythological, this would undermine Islam because the Qur'an has the virgin birth story and affirms this of Jesus. So in my opening speech I pointed out that this mythological approach is taken by many secular websites. I didn't identify it with him, I just said in the internet you'll hear this very often spoken of, and that Muslims are rightly offended by these attacks upon Jesus because they repudiate Jesus as he's taught in the Qur'an as well as in the New Testament. Therefore we as Christians and Muslims agree with each other in repudiating these scurrilous attacks upon Jesus as being just a mythological figure. Then I explained how this was out of date in the scholarly world, and that it is only among popularizers, and so forth. I concluded by saying the next time somebody comes to you making these mythological claims, you can therefore know that he is either a charlatan, or he is completely ignorant of contemporary scholarship.

Well, that just sort of set Mr. Ismail up as you can imagine. I don't know if he changed his strategy at the last minute or not but there was scarcely a peep from him in the debate about the mythological Jesus. It only came up very late in the debate when he was desperate and began to talk about how December 25^th is the product of pagan mythology, even though the New Testament doesn't say Jesus was born on December 25^th. So that was kind of an advantage of going first in this debate – being able to frame these issues in advance in this way.

Kevin Harris: These Christian-Muslim debates can get pretty raucous sometimes.

Dr. Craig: Oh, this one did. There were lots – hundreds – of Muslims in the audience. They had come out to cheer for him. Although the moderator instructed the audience not to clap or cheer during the speeches, that was observed only during the constructive speeches. [2] But when it got to the rebuttals and Ismail began to run out of ammunition, he kind of went off the track and got away from the issues the debate was supposed to be on and started pressing all the hot buttons of the Muslims about Bible contradictions and the two genealogies of Jesus. He was throwing a lot of red meat to the partisans in the crowd. Then they began at this point to cheer and yell and shout Arabic slogans and so forth. He would use things like 1 John 5:7 is not in the original manuscripts – the one that is the King James Version proof text for the Trinity – thinking that because this is not in the New Testament therefore the doctrine of the Trinity has no basis. As though it depended on this one late verse. The Muslims all cheered and applauded at that. So when I got up in my next speech I said, you know you Muslims here tonight who have applauded for these points really ought to be ashamed of yourselves for applauding such vacuous and irrelevant points in the debate tonight. That just sort of put them back on their heels a little bit and silenced them. I think we've learned that in debates with Muslims, they really respect strength rather than conciliatory appeasement. If you disagree with them but do so with strength and conviction, that actually increases your credibility in their eyes. So just rhetorically I think it was important to face them down on this and say these points are irrelevant and worthless and anybody who thinks they are really ought to be embarrassed about that. It was a raucous debate because of the partisans in the crowd that were there to cheer for Islam.

Kevin Harris: Again, this was an instance of not having arguments or running out of ammunition so you go to your little pet rocks and just throwing them out there. It reminds me of a comedian. Comedians often say when they are doing stand up and they are really bombing bad and they don't have the crowd and their jokes are starting to not work they will go profane. They will start using a lot of profanity. The worse they fail, the worse they bomb, the more profanity they start throwing in. At that point the club owner knows that it is over. I'm not saying that Ismail was starting to use profanity, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is when you run out of ammunition or you can't answer then you just start throwing things out.

Dr. Craig: You resort to the red meat or the emotional appeals.

Kevin Harris: We Christians do that, too. We have to be careful. It is usually when we can't answer we'll say, “You'll find out in the end!”

Dr. Craig: Yeah, there you go, that's right. “I'll pray for you.”

Kevin Harris: “God bless you.” We are learning a lot from these debates on civility, technique, strategy.

Dr. Craig: I have to say, to his credit, he never attacked me personally, nor of course I him. So although he was pushing the hot buttons and trying to get the crowd to cheer and so forth, he always conducted himself as a gentleman. I appreciated that.

Kevin Harris: It has often been pointed out to me that the Muslim world looks at American television or American movies and thinks that that is Christianity because they equate American and Christianity. We are kind of taking a side trip here but if they see some profane video on MTV they will go, “That's Christianity?” There is that image that fuels that fire; we've got a lot of work to do in that area.

Dr. Craig: The image that Hollywood has given to the Muslim world I think has done more damage to America and to Christianity than almost anything. I remember a couple of years ago Jan and I were in Tunisia and one of the Muslim university professors that we had dinner with said, “Do you know what the average Tunisian's image is of an American?” We said, “No, what is it?” He said it would be a guy in a T-Shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cigarette pack in the sleeve, a couple of guns on his hips, and a McDonald's hamburger in his mouth. That was their image of an average American.

Kevin Harris: They might be right in that! [laughter]

Dr. Craig: Well, I told him I had never seen anybody ever use a gun in crime or in public. Never seen anybody pull a gun. They were absolutely amazed. They thought this was like the Wild West.

Kevin Harris: They will get that impression from the media.

Dr. Craig: Yes. And of course then the immorality and things of that sort that Hollywood purveys. It is no wonder Muslims are offended if they think this is Christianity. I would be offended, too.

Kevin Harris: Did he make some points as far as did he try to use the Bible, the New Testament, to make his points or did he go to the Qur'an? [3]

Dr. Craig: You know, about his only substantive attack was to claim that the doctrine of the incarnation is incoherent logically. That Jesus cannot be both God and man because these two things exclude each other. How can a being have the properties of being both, say, omnipresent and yet spatially located? Or being omniscient and yet being ignorant of certain things? The interesting thing about this, Kevin, was he was aware of my work on the incarnation. He had apparently read Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview and the chapter in there on the incarnation and attempted in some way to interact with it. It wasn't in depth. It was mainly just expressing incredulity about how this could be.

Here I had a really wonderful analogy for the incarnation that I think would be helpful to share with our listeners. I asked them if any of them had seen the movie Avatar and a number of them had. And I said the word avatar is actually another word for incarnation. That is what an avatar is – it's an incarnation. I said this film actually tells the story of the incarnation of a disabled American Marine named Jake Sully into this world of the Navi where Sully takes on this body of this Navi and becomes incarnate among them as one of them. What I pointed out was that Jake Sully in this movie is one person with two natures – he has a human nature and he has a Navi nature. Moreover, these two natures have very different properties. For example, in his human nature he is disabled. He is in a wheelchair. So if you were to ask the question, “Can Jake Sully run?” the answer would have to be “Well, yes and no. Yes in his Navi nature but no in his human nature.” Yet he has both of these properties simultaneously. So I said if you can understand Avatar the movie, you can understand the incarnation of Christ. Christ is one person with two natures with very different properties.

Kevin Harris: Boy, movies make great conversation starters don't they? We'd understand Jesus limited his rights to his divine nature. You can't limit the divine nature but he limited his access or his abilities in that area in order to take on the form of a servant – Philippians 2.

Dr. Craig: My inclination would be to say Jesus did not choose to access all of the powers that were available to him. So for example even though he could have repulsed all the Roman soldiers with just a wave of his hand, nevertheless he chose not to use his power that was available to him in his divine nature. He chose to limit himself to those powers that his human nature possessed. Similarly, with regard to his omniscience, I think it is helpful to distinguish in a theologically significant way between Jesus' subconscious and his conscious life. In his conscious life, I think Jesus limited himself to what a human being could know at that time and place in history. That is why the Bible says he grew in wisdom and in knowledge, as he grew from being a boy to being a man. But in his subconscious life, subconscious mind, there I think the full range of divine omniscience lay beneath the surface. But Jesus did not access that typically during his what theologians call the state of humiliation, that is the time of the incarnation up to the time of his death and burial.

Kevin Harris: He humbled himself.

Dr. Craig: He humbled himself, that is exactly right.

KEVIN HARRIS As we wrap up today, Bill, this is a real sticking point between Muslims and Christians. It can be so emotional. It is the scent of shirk in the Muslim world to attribute any companions or any equals to God. So they have a real resistance to any thought that Jesus was God.

Dr. Craig: Part of it will be understanding and be able to articulate the two doctrines of the Trinity and of the incarnation. I think when you have a proper understanding of the Trinity and the incarnation you can see that we are not committing the sin of shirk – of associating something with God. Rather we are saying that Jesus is God. [4] So it is not a matter of saying that God has some sort of a peer or that there is something else that is comparable to God that we are associating with God. We are saying that Jesus is God – he is one of the three persons of the Godhead, of the Trinity, that God is. So this charge of shirk or association simply falls to the ground once you understand these doctrines properly.

Kevin Harris: It seems that often our Muslim friends are kind of on a horns of a dilemma because the Qur'an says that Jesus is of God and yet if he is of God then we need to look at his claims, we need to look at records written of him and look at his words and look at eyewitness testimony about him and find out what his claims are – this man of God. This man who came from God.

Dr. Craig: This was a point that I tried to make during the debate. I said to the audience, those who are Muslims here really find yourself in a dilemma because you believe that Jesus was a great prophet and therefore what he said is true. You have to believe what Jesus said as a Muslim. Yet, tonight I've shown that he said that he was the unique Son of God, the divine human Son of Man, and so on. Mr. Ismail hasn't been able to dispute the authenticity of those claims by Jesus. Therefore you've got to believe what he said. Therefore, you should believe in Christ. [5]