A Reply to John Fontain on the Gospel

The Deen Show is an Islamic show broadcast via YouTube. Credit where credit is due, the show is well made with high production values and the host, Eddie, is obviously well spoken and passionate about his faith. Having said that, I'm a lot less impressed with the content of the show. The typical episode will feature Eddie interviewing a convert to Islam, usually, though not always, a former Christian. Normally, these ex-Christians will be presented as being very active in their churches, well versed in scripture and knowledgeable about their former faith. When one listens to them, however, they will frequently show little of sign of having much knowledge of Christianity and they frequently give the impression that their grasp of Christian belief is very shallow.

As an example of what I'm talking about, I offer this recent episode in which Eddie interviews John Fontain. Mr. Fontain is the author of the book "Jesus and the Injeel." For those who are unclear 'Injeel' in the Arabic word for Gospel.

Mr. Fontain tells us that when Christians hear the word "Gospel" they think of the written documents by Matthew, Mark etc. He then tells us that these scriptures refer to the Gospel as something else, he notes, for example, that the Bible talks about Jesus, himself preaching 'the Gospel'. He seems to think that this fact will be surprising to Christians. Actually, this will not surprise any well instructed Christian in the slightest.

If one looks up any good dictionary, one will find that for most words, there are several definitions given: definition one, two, three, etc. In the same way, the word Gospel has two main meanings. Of these, the primary meaning is the message preached by Christ, and preached by the Church since His time. The secondary meaning of he word refers to written biographies of Christ. Practicing Christians are well used to hearing about "the preaching of the Gospel" or "what the Gospel calls us to" and we are well aware that this refers to more than just the written biographies in the New Testament.

Mr. Fontain then claims that in the original Greek, the term used for the Gospel is 'Injeelion'. The Greek letters are generally transliterated as 'Evangelion' but we need not split hairs here. The point is, the word comes from the Greek terms meaning good news. This is a simple fact that can be checked by anyone with Google. Mr. Fontain objects to this claim, saying that it must mean more than good news because the 'Injeelion' makes commands, for example Paul talks about people obeying the Gospel. This, Mr. Fontain tells us, proves that "good news" is not an accurate translation. This seems to me to miss the point of how language is used. The name, good news was the name Jesus gave to the message He preached, that it also contained more than news is besides the point. "Good news" is a perfectly good translation of the Greek word which Mr. Fontain pronounces 'Injeelion'. 'Gospel' which comes from the English "God Spel", literally "good news" is an equally good translation.

If this basic confusion were not bad enough, Mr. Fontain insists that the salvation message which Jesus preached was not recorded accurately in the New Testament or Church tradition, the Injeel preached by Jesus has, according to him, been lost. This claim, however, is contradicted by his own book. The Qran, 5:46 explicitly says that the 'Injeel' given to Jesus contains "guidance and light." Verse 47 then goes on to say "And let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed therein. And whoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed - then it is those who are the defiantly disobedient."  In other words, Mohammed, clearly believed that the 'Injeel' was something which people in his own day could read and judge by. By the time of Muhammed, Jesus' earthly mission had been over for some seven centuries. Clearly, therefore, no person listening to Mohammed could have physically listened to Christ's preaching. Any reasonable person will realise that the Injeel is something that Mohammed believed that Christians in his day had access too.

Ramadan Mubarak!

So, yesterday began the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. I'm not sure if any Muslims will read this post, but, if any of you do, my sincere good wishes for the fast.

I can imagine some eyebrows being raised at a Catholic Apologist wishing Muslims well in something tied to their religion. So that there are no misunderstandings, let me be clear; I believe public revelation ended with Christ and His apostles. For this  reason (and a number of other reasons) I believe that my Islamic friends are mistaken in their belief that Muhammad was a prophet. Logically enough, I therefor believe that they are mistaken in thinking that the Ramadan fast is something God commanded. To get an idea of why I reject Islam, you can watch my debate with Abdullah Kunde.

For all that I disagree with my Muslim friends, however, there are many things they a right about. One of those things is the importance of fasting. Fasting is not a specifically Christian or Islamic thing, but is a spiritual practice common to a great many of the world religions. For the Christian fasting is something Christ commands us to do (cf. Matt 9:15) and recommended by many of the saints a spiritual masters throughout history. I find it a source of some sadness that many Catholics today fast so rarely and would be very happy if a growing familiarity with Islam would help to encourage Catholics to reconsider fasting within our own spiritual tradition. So, while I don't believe the Ramadan fast to be divinely inspired, I admire the dedication of my Muslim friends on this point. I also think it is reasonable to hope that those who observe the fast in a sincere (even if mistaken) belief that it is God's command will be blessed by Him for doing so.

What really inspired me to write, however, was this news story. Apparently Woolworths supermarkets have been putting up signs in some stores wishing people a "Happy Ramadan". I have to say, wishing someone a happy fast strikes me as odd, but I guess their hearts were in the right place.

Some people, however, are upset, labelling the wishes as offensive and "Unaustralian." This annoys me, although it also amuses me a little. If you are an Australia who is anything other than (a) an Indigenous Australian, or (b) of pure White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, the odds are pretty good that you are descended from someone who was once labelled "Unaustralian." This is particularly the case if you are a Catholic who is inclined to join the "Islam is Unaustralian" chorus. If you are such a person, can I suggest that you have a look at what was being said about your own religion seventy or so years ago. Indeed, I'm occasionally tempted to write a FaceBook post that would go something like:

First, we need to kick out all the Muzzies. They are probably all terrorists, or at least terrorist supporters ,and this is a Christian country and if they don't like it they can all go back to Arabia where they came from.

Then, we need to kick out all the Catholics. They put loyalty to Vatican City above loyalty to Australia and most of them are probably IRA members and if they don't like the religion of our protestant majority and our protestant Queen then they are all free to got live in Italy.

If you think the second paragraph is not the sort of thing anyone would say, do a bit of reading. I've read some of what was being said about Australian Catholics back in 30s by some of our protestant neighbours (not all of them, of course) and the above is only a slight exaggeration.

In any event, Woolworths gets an A for effort at least, and I wish my Muslim friends a sincere Ramadan Mubarak.

A Response to "DawahIsEasy" on the Deity of Christ (Part II)

I continue my response to this video by YouTube Vlogger "DawhaIsEasy". The first part of my response is found here.

The historic Christian belief, shared by Catholic, Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox Churches is that Jesus Christ is the God-Man, both fully human and fully divine. Our Islamic friends, as this video makes clear, claim that this is impossible. The common Islamic argument is that being God necessarily requires certain properties (necessary existence, being unlimited, being immortal) while being human requires properties (being mortal, etc.) which are inconsistent with the properties of God. From this, it is argued that the very notion of a God-Man makes no more sense than the idea of a four sided triangle.

This point is well made at approximately the fifteen minute point of the video by the Islamic speaker. He declares that it makes no sense for one being to have two natures since the nature of God is to be almighty while the nature of a creature is to be limited and you can't have a being at once limited and unlimited.

To show why Christianity doesn't contradict itself, we need to unpack exactly what the Church teaches. The faith shared by Catholic, Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox holds that Jesus is one person with two natures. What exactly does this mean? Jesus posses a human body and a human soul. This body and soul forms the human nature of Jesus. At the Annunciation, when Christ was conceived in His mother's womb, this human nature was joined to the Eternal Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. Two natures, joined together, thus formed a single person.

With this in mind, it is possible to understand how some of the questions asked in the video should be answered. When for example, the Muslim speaker asks if Jesus is all knowing or if his knowledge is limited and the Christian replies "both" the Christian position looks horribly contradictory. The proper response is as follows: Christ has a human soul, one power of which is a human intellect. Christ also has a Divine nature, one power of which is His Divine intellect. These two intellects are the means by which Christ knows something. Having said that, while His intellects are the means by which Christ knows things it is important to note that it is the person who knows things.

From this it follows that Christ knows some things but not others through His human nature while he knows all things through His divine nature, but, and this is the crucial point, the person knows all things and is, in no way, limited in His knowledge.

It follows, from what is said above, that while Jesus has both a human and a Divine nature, the person, who is the union of these two natures, is a Divine and not a human person. Incidentally, the fact that the two natures make one person and that that person is Divine is the reason that the Church declares Christ's mother to be "Mother of God."

Let me say something to my Christian readers: I suspect many of you will find what I have just said rather technical and perhaps even difficult to follow. There is no getting around these facts, however. Anyone seeking to preach the Gospel in our current environment will increasingly find that we need to be able to answer the questions put to us by our Islamic friends. These are the questions they will be asking and, to answer them, we need to have a clear handle on exactly what the Church believes about the natures of Our Lord.

I will, deo volente, continue this response as time permits.


 

A Response to "DawahIsEasy" on the Deity of Christ (Part I)

I recently found this video, published by Islamic vlogger "DawahIsEasy". For those unclear, "dawah" is an Arabic word meaning roughly "preaching". The video shows a discussion on the deity of Jesus between a Muslim and a Christian. The video is well worth watching by any Christian interested in apologetics and evangelism.  I originally intended to write only a single post in response but realised that, some of the issues raised here, required a series. This first post, therefore, will cover a few minor and introductory points, the next post will (deo volente) delve into some deeper waters.

Let me first make a couple of minor points: The Muslim gentleman makes a couple of factual claims that are simple nonsense. For example, he claims that the English words "evangelise" and "evangelical" come from the Arabic word "Injil", the Arabic name for the Gospel. In fact he goes so far as to claim that "you can't disagree" that the Arabic name is the source of those English words. I'm sorry, but I can disagree. While I take it to be uncontroversial that the words are linked, the reason is not because  the English words are derived from the Arabic but because the Arabic and English words share a common root in the Greek "Evangelion."

Second he claims that "according to scholars" the gospels (he especially mentions St. John's Gospel) were originally in Aramaic and later translated into Greek. If he'd bother to do a simple Google search he'd learn what rubbish he was talking. In fact, while some scholars hold the St. Matthew's gospel was originally in Aramaic, they are a small minority. A majority of scholars agree St. Matthew was originally written in Greek and an effective consensus exists that the other three were written in Greek. The gentleman's claim that scholars generally believe St. John's Gospel to have originally been written in Aramaic is just ignorance.

Also, the Muslim claims that, on St. Paul the Apostle's tombstone, one will find the name "Saul", not Paul and that this calls into question whether Saul of Tarsus was ever really converted. Again, simply false. As this article notes, the sarcophagus commonly believed to have held the body of St. Paul clearly bears the words: Paulo Apostolo Matr". Paul Apostle and Martyr.

These are all minor points and I'm not suggesting that any of them, in and of themselves, invalidate his arguments. The fact of him repeatedly making errors like this is, in my mind, significant, however. The reason is that he frequently makes claims about "what I have read" or, more significantly, what scholars say and goes on to make a very basic error. These are not the sort of errors which it would require any deep research to discover, a quick Google search would have shown any of the three claims I noted above to be baseless. Given this, I think we must say that the gentleman making these claims is, at best, showing serious incompetence in his research and, at worst, simply dishonest.

Having said that, while the Muslim certainly asserted a great many factual errors, I don't think the Christian did a very good job of explaining Christianity. As a minor aside, our Christian friend declares that "there was discussion about the two natures of Jesus in the second century." Well, I'm not exactly certain what he means and I'm sure there has been discussion of Christ's nature in every century since His coming, but the major debates in which the Church's beliefs about Christ natures were defined were in the fifth and sixth century. Much more seriously, our Christian declares that Jesus "is not a man" but "He was both human and divine." No, this is not orthodox Christianity. The Declaration of Chalcedon, accepted by Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and the vast majority of Protestant Churches describes Our Lord as subsisting (present tense) in two natures.

More importantly, however, the Christian in the video is clearly not prepared to answer questions about the dual natures of Our Lord. He identifies himself as a theology student and street preacher. If you are going to be a street preacher in our contemporary situation you need to prepare yourself to answer the questions our Muslim friends will have. Generally speaking, these questions will involve the divine and human nature of Christ.

I will, (deo volente) in the next post of this series, lay out, in more detail what we believe and how Muslim criticisms misunderstand this belief.

P.S. A small point, but, as I philosopher, I can't let this go. The Christian in the video makes a couple of statements about Philosophy that show he has not the faintest clue what Philosophy is.

The Death of Christ Means Everything!

So, it's been a while, hasn't it? There are a few reasons I haven't blogged in a while, most of those having something to do with the fact that my health has not been the greatest of late. I've been spurred to blog again by this article, written by Islamic apologist Ijaz Ahmad, responding to remarks by Protestant apologist, James White. The article deals with one of the most important topics imaginable, the death of Christ.

For those unfamiliar with some of the relevant theology the Catholic belief, shared by Protestants and most of the Eastern Churches, is that Christ is one person but with two natures, these natures being the divine and the human. A less formal way of saying this, might be that in Jesus, there are two what's (God and human) but one who (the God-man Jesus Christ). It's important to understand that these natures were not, somehow mixed together, the divine nature remains eternally divine and the human nature is fully human, but these natures are united in a single person.

It is also important to understand that, according to Catholic belief (and again this Catholic belief is shared by protestants and others) the death of Christ was a death that affected the human nature, that is to say that His human soul was separated from His body. However, and this is absolutely crucial, while the death effected His human nature, it is not a nature which dies but a person. In this case, the person who died was God. Therefore, while the divine nature was not directly effected by the death, it is theologically accurate to say that, when Jesus died on the cross, God died.

It has to be said, Ahmad does a poor job of understanding this basic Christian teaching.

Ahmad quotes from The Catholic Encyclopedia, as distinguishing three, position, the Catholic, Nestorian and Monophysite views on the incarnation. I found it annoying that he did not tell us which article in said encyclopaedia (or even which edition) he was citing; doing so would have made it easier to check the context of his citation. He then tells us that in this context “Catholic” means “Trinitarian Christian.” This is quite wrong, both Nestorians and Monophysite's were Trinitarians as well; their heresies don't touch on the question of the Trinity.

Ahmad continues to write: “Christ has two natures, his divine nature known as the Son and his human nature known as the flesh and blood of the Christ. If he died a physical death and this what is being claimed, then the flesh and blood of Christ died, that is the human nature died.”

This is very wide of the mark. “The Son” is not a name of the divine nature but of the whole person. The Bible affirms in numerous places that the man, Christ is the Son of God (Mark 15:39 being a good example). Further, the human nature is not merely flesh (that would be a variant of the ancient heresy of Apollinarianism) but a fully human soul as well.

Once this misunderstanding is made clear, much of Ahmad's argument can be seen to be off-base. For example, his claim that, since only the human nature died, John 3:16 is disproven, since the Son, he thinks, does not die, is shown to be a radical misunderstanding.

Also, Ahmad's claim that death would mean the breakup of the union between God and man are shown to be based on a misunderstanding. At death, the human soul separated from the human body but this involved no separation between the divine and human natures and only Ahmad's failure to grasp actual Catholic teaching obscures this.

Book Review: "What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Quran" by James White

I've just finished reading James White's newest book, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Quran. James White is director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a reformed protestant apologetics ministry, and is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church of Phoenix, Arizona. I'll admit to being something of a “fan” Pastor White; on the many issues on which he and I agree I frequently find his work incredibly helpful; on the issues where he and I disagree I generally find his arguments among the most challenging to overcome and argue against. This book falls, largely, into the first category and certainly is one that I found very helpful and which, I imagine, I will be returning to many times in the future.

One note that should be made, the book's intended audience is made clear in its title. If you are a non-Christian considering reading this book, you should realise that it is not really written for you. This is not to say that such a reader will get nothing out of this book; if you are a Muslim wishing to understand why Christians reject what you believe to be God's word or if you are neither a Christian nor a Muslim but have an interest in inter-religious debate, then you will almost certainly find this book of interest. Such readers, however, should be aware that they are not the target audience of this book. (Although, keep in mind, this advice comes from an adult male whose current favourite T.V. show has a target audience of pre-teen girls.)

It should be added, if you are looking for a neutral or “dispassionate” discussion of the Quran, you should look elsewhere. This is not to say that the book is dishonest or unscholarly, but it is very much the work of a Christian apologist whose aim is to make the case, to Muslims, for the claims of

Christianity and to assist other Christians in doing the same.

I'm aware of a review of the book on Amazon which argues that the book would be more accurately called “What Every Christian Scholar Should Know About the Quran.” In this person's opinion, the book is too complex for the average lay reader. I disagree. I think a reasonably intelligent person without any scholarly background in religion should be able to understand what is being said. Having said that, I will give this warning, White does expect his reader to be able to follow an argument over the course of a chapter; if you are one of those people whose response to any argument longer than a page is “tl:dr” then this book is probably not for you.

The first three chapters give a brief introduction to the Quranic text and the history of the Quran's being written. The real polemic begins with chapter four. In this chapter, White looks at the Quran's handling of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. White's argument is clear and, it seems to me, compelling: the author of the Quran seems to have believed that the Trinity meant worship of Allah, Jesus and Mary as three separate Gods. By the time of Mohammed, the actual Christian teaching was well defined and, even assuming this doctrine to be erroneous, one would expect God to know what that doctrine was. From this, we can reasonably conclude that the Quran is not the word of an omniscient God.

The next several chapters consider a number of different subjects but all make arguments similar to that advanced in chapter four. These chapters consider topics such as the crucifixion of Christ, the relationship of the Quran to the Gospels and the alleged prophecies of Mohammed in the Bible. In each chapter, White argues that the Quran makes claims about history, Christian belief and the Christian scriptures which simply will not stand up to scrutiny.

At this point, I should mention one place where the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism substantially effect the argument. Chapter seven deals with the question of salvation in the Quran. This is not really the place to go into the long standing differences between Protestant and Catholics over soteriology but I will say this: White lays out what he calls the arbitrary role of God in pardoning whom he chooses in Islam, and contrasts this with the Reformed Protestant view of God pardoning the elect because Christ has been punished in their place. White argues that Islam gives no grounds on which a holy God can forgive sinners while still allowing His justice to be satisfied. As I said, this is not the place to go into such question in depth but I must add that I think, to many readers, it will be less than obvious that justice is truly satisfied in the punishment of an innocent, even if willing, victim.

The final two chapters deal with the alleged perfection of the Quran. Chapter ten examines the evidence that the Quran, contrary to orthodox Islamic claims, was influenced by apocryphal Jewish, Christian and even gnostic legends while chapter eleven gives a brief over-view of the early history of the Quaric textual transmission. I found chapter eleven one of the best parts of the book and think White did an excellent job showing how many difficulties are raised in claiming, with any degree of certainty, that the Quran we currently posses is what Mohammed originally wrote.

 

All told, I think this is a fine book which I would recommend to any Christian seeking to better share his or her faith with Muslim neighbours.