June 2019

Taking a look at the “Almighty” Questions that Christians could not answer

The ‘professional logicians’ are here again with their bags of nuts that Christians allegedly cannot crack. You will see articles having many patronizing memes – memes like “10 questions that Christians cannot answer”, “5 questions to ask Christians”, “25 questions that render Christians speechless” and so on and so forth.  After getting wary of all these questions, don’t you think that it is high time we picked a scapegoat?

A Muslim threw ten ‘logical’ questions to the Christian community – questions that Christians had already answered for centuries. Perhaps due to the fact their skull is too thick that they find it too difficult to wrap their head round the replies, I still find it difficult to fathom why these guys keep parroting refuted questions.

Before passing my judgment over this particular article that can be found here, I want the readers to join me on this tour of assessing each and every of the questions asked.

He started:

1. How could Jesus Christ (pbuh) be God if he learned obedience from the things he suffered from. (sic) We read…

Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;

Hebrews 5:8 kjv

Who could God learn from? Is he not all-knowing?

How many times should we keep reminding these guys that one of the core tenets of Christianity celebrates the ultimate love of God when He became man? Which part of this do they stubbornly refuse to grasp? If Jesus is not a false human therefore we should not be surprised if Jesus is not all-knowing with respect to his humanity. While His divine consciousness comprehends and knows everything, His human mind on the other hand is finite. The human mind added by the Son is finite and cannot know everything.

The very scriptures that testify to the finite knowledge of Christ also testify to the omniscience of Christ (John 2:24-25; John 16:30; John 21:17; Colossians 2:3; Acts 1:24; Revelations 2:23 etc.). The scriptures made a careful distinction between Jesus human nature and His divinity unlike classical Greek literature that presupposes the notion that divinity is embedded in the DNA of a Greek god that incarnated. In other words, the divine nature of Christ is not mixed with His human nature but the two are rather distinct and unified in His Personality.

This is a logical question to ask Docetists and some Gnostics not orthodox Christians. So if these sects had gone into oblivion, why should this question not follow suite?

2. To attribute a son to God would be to deny God’s perfection. It implies that he lacked or needed something. What does God need or want a son for when he has no needs and is independent of all?

(i) How did this Abdul come to the conclusion that barrenness is a form of perfection that God must possess?

(ii) This writer is evidently ignorant of what Christians mean by the term ‘Son of God’. He is still reading Muhammad’s erroneous definition into the appellation. This particular term has meanings which vary with the context.

D.A. Carson warns,

“In short, in the New Testament “Son of God” is not a terminus technicus, as the Latins say—a technical term that always carries the same associations. It always presupposes some sense of deriving from God, or of acting like God, or both, but the domains of such acting are pretty diverse. Bible readers should exercise special pains not to succumb either to unjustified reductionism, in which one particular usage is read into every occurrence, or to “illegitimate totality transfer,” in which the entire semantic range of the expression is read into every occurrence. Context must decide.”

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