Debating Religion

Don't do it

The whole chapter is about teaching. Read it. Saul of Tarsus, who was belittled (renamed Paul), tells Timothy, whom he is grooming to replace his apostleship with episcopacy in Ephesus (modern-day Turkey), to share his good news, that “Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from the dead.” He enforces the idea of teaching with soldiering, competitive sports, and farming.

Then he says,

Remind them of these things, charging them before the Lord not to strive about words to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers… shun profane and idle babblings, for they will increase to more ungodliness. And their message will spread like cancer… avoid foolish and ignorant disputes, knowing that they generate strife. And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.

This is the reason I tell my students not to debate people in matters of religion. And I was once the chief of sinners in this regard. During my undergraduate education, I minored (de facto majored) in Philosophy, and was exposed to many of the great thinkers of the Western canon (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, William James etc.) I don’t regret this at all, but through heavy doses of Scripture, over the years, I have had to exercise myself of the spirit of arguing endlessly, that I have come to believe is inherent to the Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, and German). I would be painting with too broad a brush to say everything written in these languages succumbs to this failure, but I do think they have it in greater tendencies than in the Semitic tongues (Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac, Ge’ez). And I know that I am not alone in this thinking. See what inspired Robert Alter and Everett Fox to do their own one-man-show translations of the Hebrew Bible. See what Sebastian Brock and Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev say about the Syriac fathers. Ask your local Ethiopian choirmaster about the content, not the melody, of Saint Jared the Aksumite’s texts.

I should add that I was an university-sponsored debater for my last two years of said undergraduate days. And so I did not just like to do it, but I became quite skilled at it. I had a natural proclivity, people told me that I would grow up to be a trial lawyer when I was a kid. But I nurtured and honed this skill as well with peers and mentors of the Speech and Debate team, also called Forensics. I did parliamentary debate, and so we were expected to be knowledgeable on every topic under the Sun, and given 20 minutes to prepare for a topic selected for us, prepared also to argue either the affirmative or the negative. For example, USFG should end the Federal Reserve Bank. USFG should roundup and capture the Somali Pirates.

There was a recent digital kerfuffle between a couple of my X mutuals, one Greek, one German, regarding James White’s ministry, which I judge to be the archetype of what I think my students should not do, and I strive to never do. He wants to argue you into submission till you become a Calvinist. He is not alone. Maybe he was predestined to this fate. But I am not. Nor should you be. Resist the fates.

His field is called Apologetics, rooted in the Greek word apologia from the Petrine epistle’s call to “always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.” Emphasis on the meekness and the fear. To be charitable to them, there are many flavors of apologetics. Besides White’s kind, there is a version that just gives Christians and Agnostics teeter-tottering on the fence, a well-thought out reason or two or three to believe in God. See St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument. In my final paper for Philosophy of Religion I used the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I was introduced to via William Lane Craig, but goes back to Al-Ghazali, a Persian Muslim scholar who died in 1111 (don’t make a wish). But I believe apologia has a different meaning. It means teach.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church has four main types of traditional schools: eucharistic liturgy, noneucharistic liturgy, poetry, and interpretation. The noneucharistic crew can say I am being unfair to them, because technically they are themselves split into three subschools: digwa, zimaré and mewasiit, and aqwaqwam. digwa is the most well-known hymnal of saint jared the aksumite. If we followed its contents, which are rich in quotes from and remixes of the Old Testament and the New Testament, we would have a spiritual song to sing everyday. aqwaqwam extends this school with more elaborate melodies and greater usage of instruments (drum, sistrum, and walking-stick). Though zimaré and mewasiit are technically two different arts, the former communion hymns and the latter hymns for the dead, they are bound in books together and their main school is at one physical site.

I love all of these schools, and that’s why I have a sample of each in my highlights section on Instagram. But the height of Holy Tradition are the Holy Scriptures, as it is written. I encourage you to learn from these trad schools, if you are an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian. Especially, the Aksumite school of biblical and patristic interpretation. And if you are something else, look to what your tradition has on offer to learn, and learn it. Then, teach. Not all of us are meant to teach from the pulpit, but all of us can teach someone weaker or needier than us.

Teach your son. Teach your niece. Teach your neighbor. Teach a stranger. Teach your enemy. Even better, have your enemy teach you, by paying them 30 pieces of silver to read Scripture aloud to you.

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12 NKJV)

P.S.

If you have to watch any of White’s debates, watch him vs. N.T. Wright, on the subject of justification and being declared righteous by God. But I would much rather you hear about Matthew Thomas’ research on this subject which he talked about with me, and with Fr. Dustin Lyon of the Ephesus School Network of biblically-centered podcasts, of which the Tewahido Bible Study is a part and parcel. Matthew Thomas grew up atheist and became Christian within a Protestant milieu, but studying at Oxford granted him the spirit of C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright and Sebastian Brock (my favorite Anglicans). He teaches at a Catholic University. He examines the so-called ‘Old’ Perspective (that of the Lutherans) and the so-called ‘New’ Perspective (that of N.T. Wright) and the actually Old Perspective of the first few centuries of Christianity regarding justification and being declared righteous by God.