William Lane Craig – South Africa Debates, part 1: vs. Yusuf Islam on “Identifying Jesus: Is He Man or both God and Man?”
William Lane Craig recently engaged in two notable debates in South Africa: Capetown and Pretoria. He states that, “Professional recordings of all the debates and conference talks were made and will be disseminated throughout South Africa”; hopefully they will find their way into cyberspace.
As for the Islam vs. Christianity debate:
…about a thousand people crowded the auditorium that night. The debate was anything but dull! What Ismail (who is a lawyer by profession) may lack in substance he makes up in a robustious delivery, with lots of grandstanding and theatrics. By the time we reached the rebuttals, he had pretty much exhausted what substance he had, and so he began to throw out lots of red meat to his partisans in the crowd, offering the usual Muslim talking points like the inauthenticity of 1 John 5.7, at which they began to shout Islamic slogans.
In my rebuttal I rebuked them, saying that they ought to be ashamed of themselves for cheering for such irrelevant and fallacious arguments. I hammered home my positive case for Jesus’ deity, which Ismail could not answer, and in my closing speech gave a strong evangelistic appeal to the Muslims in the crowd. It was a great evening and a strong witness for Christ.1
Moreover,
In preparation for the debate I discovered that Ismail will use any argument he can find against Christianity, even if it also implies the falsity of Islam. For example, he uses all the drivel popular on the internet about Jesus’ being a mythological figure drawn from pagan religions of antiquity. Never mind that the Qur’an itself teaches that that Jesus was the greatest of all the prophets who had ever lived, that he was miraculously conceived and born of the Virgin Mary, that he himself performed miracles, and that he was indeed the Messiah!
In order to pre-empt any such appeal to pagan mythology to dismiss the deity of Jesus, I explained in my opening speech that contemporary studies of the historical Jesus have come to recognize that pagan mythology is simply the wrong interpretive context for understanding Jesus…
when you do read the original myths, you find that they’re not really parallel to the Gospels at all and that all the supposed parallels are concocted and spurious….based upon pseudo-scholarship which is more than 100 years out of date…
With nothing much of relevance to say, Ismail then turned to doling out the red meat!2
Of interest may be the Avatar based metaphor that William Lane Craig employed:
I explained the doctrine of Christ’s being one person who has two natures and used the movie Avatar to illustrate the doctrine. (“Avatar” is another word for incarnation.) The movie tells the story of Jake Sully, a disabled marine who becomes an avatar among a race of extra-terrestrials called the Na’vi. He becomes physically incarnated among them as one of them. At the same time he doesn’t cease to be human. So Jake has both a human nature and a Na’vi nature. In the movie these two natures have strikingly different powers. If you were to ask, “Can Jake Sully run?” the answer would have to be, “Yes and no: yes, in his Na’vi nature but no, in his human nature.”
I told the audience that if you can make sense of Avatar, you can make sense of Christ’s incarnation. For in a similar way, Christ has both a divine nature and a human nature. These natures have different powers. In his human nature Christ experienced all the limitations intrinsic to human nature. But in his divine nature he had supernatural powers. Just as Jake Sully in his Na’vi nature became the Savior of the Na’vi people, so Christ in his human nature becomes the Savior of mankind.