My Review of last nights debate at SOAS

MDI speaker Sami Zaatari made a joint presentation with Christian politician Alan Craig on what members of the Muslim/Christian communities should know about the other’s beliefs at the University of London, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) yesterday evening.

In my review I want to focus on three arguments put forward by Alan Craig last night.

In the context of an impassioned presentation which was really his own story about how he became a Christian and how central Jesus is in his life, he argued the following:

1) That “only through Jesus sacrificial death on the cross can humanity find forgiveness for all its sins”. This is the standard Christian position. But, oddly, this is not the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

During the Q&A I read Mark 1 to Craig:

‘And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.’

I pointed out that this ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ took place before Jesus’ ministry had even begun and there is the clear implication that those who confessed their sins did receive forgiveness by God.

Craig’s answer to me was that God was outside time, so Jesus’ death on the cross had a timeless effect on the past, present and future forgiveness of sins, so even those who came before Jesus received forgiveness through the cross. But this somewhat extravagant metaphysical claim has some unacceptable consequences.

John the baptist in his ministry and Jesus in his ministry never taught that forgiveness of sins was conditional on the latter dying on the cross for them. Why this curious omission? Consider the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples:

‘This, then, is how you should pray:

Our Father in heaven,

may your name be kept holy.

May your Kingdom come soon.

May your will be done on earth,

as it is in heaven.

Give us today the food we need

and forgive us our sins,

as we have forgiven those who sin against us.

And don’t let us yield to temptation,

but rescue us from the evil one.

If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.’

Matthew 5: 9-14

So according to Craig, this prayer is quite misleading, for this simple (and typically Jewish) petition to God for forgiveness is not going to be answered in those terms, but will be rerouted via Jesus’ sacrificial death to become effective! But why was Jesus so coy about the real mechanism for the forgiveness of sins? Is Craig’s hypothesis at all plausible? Craig will need to ponder this question further.

2) He asserted that the whole Bible is inspired by God and is “perfect”.  During the Q & A he seemed to brush off as a minor irrelevance criticism from an audience member that as Christians in the early church and even today are still disunited about which books constitute the Bible, how can he speak of a perfect and inspired book? To add to this significant point I added my own: The Bible in places explicitly denies that it is the Word of God. I cited Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (7:12)

‘To the rest I say this I, not the Lord: If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her.’

Craig’s response to this was to claim that for Christians Jesus himself was the ‘Word of God’. Craig thereby implicitly conceded my point that not all of the Bible can be claimed to be the Word of God. There are other passages I could have cited to make the same point, and contrary to Christian apologetics, the Bible as such nowhere claims to be the Word of God or even inspired (compare the Qur’anic claim concerning its own origin).

3) Craig asserted at the beginning of his presentation that in Jesus of Nazareth,

“all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell”

(citing the deutero-Pauline Letter to the Colossians, 1:19).

Yet during Q & A when Craig was reminded that Jesus was ignorant of certain facts such as the date of his return (information known only to God – see Mark 13:32) Craig asserted that Jesus as the incarnate deity had “imperfect knowledge” of future events. So which is it to be? Is Craig going to simultaneously assert that Jesus was God in his fullness and yet was God with reduced powers and attributes, such that God was ignorant of certain facts and could even die (despite the clear scriptural teaching that God is immortal, eternal)? Clearly there is much muddled thinking here.

Craig told us that as a businessman he was extremely successful, traveling the world on Concorde and employing an army of factory workers. This was all very impressive. But, I am sad to say, his grasp of the Bible and Christian theology struck this reviewer at least as superficial and muddled.   Sami Zaatari, in contrast, had a good grasp of the Bible and the Quran and left the impression that Islam is far more credible as a way of salvation and a sure path to God.

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Yesterday, a Muslim friend emailed me about the Christian claim he so often hears that the Bible is ‘the word of God’. I replied:

the usual Christian argument is to quote 2 Timothy 3:16 as a defence of the Bible’s own claim to be the Word of God. But there are 3 problems with this:

i) if you read this verse in its context the author is clearly referring to the Old Testament not the New Testament

ii) then as now there are different canons of scripture (the list of books that make up the Bible). The diaspora Jews at the time of Paul used a longer Greek translation but the Palestinian Jews used a shorter version which omitted key books. Which is the real Bible?

iii) nearly all NT scholars believe that 2 Timothy is a forgery, ie the letter claims to be by Paul but is really by someone else pretending to be by him. If this is correct, then Christians are putting their trust in the testimony of a forged book to support their truth claims about the Bible!

hope this helps…