Here’s part one of the Patrick Navas and James White debate. The introduction to the debate starts about 4:45 into the podcast. Navas’ opening statement at about 7:10. The second part of the debate may be found here.
Navas-White Debate: Part I & Part II
25
Nov
Dominique
November 25, 2011 at 10:27 PM
James White clearly won the debate. I pray Navas repents of his sins and turns to the REAL CHRIST.
Jehovah=Jesus.
Ivan Monroy
November 25, 2011 at 10:54 PM
Dominique:
When it comes to who “won the debate,” we should evaluate the arguments. For example, James White repeatedly stated in relation to 1 Corinthians 8:6 that the Shema is in view and Jesus included within it. But it would make better sense if Jesus is the “Lord” derivative from the Church’s favorite Psalm, namely, Psalm 110:1 instead of somehow including Jesus within or as a part of God’s being in relation to Deuteronomy 6:4. In fact, it would seem that Paul explicitly differentiates Jesus from the “one God” of the Shema, but includes Jesus alongside him on the basis of Psalm 110:1.
Pär Stenberg
November 26, 2011 at 7:56 AM
I will not have the opportunity to listen to the debate until Monday. White is a good debater, so it would not surprise me if he won the debate. I listen to the Dividing Line every week, and have been doing so for the last 5 years so I am aware of his impressive rhetorical skills. However, his argumentation in favour of the Trinity doctrine is at times quite strained. In fact, many of the arguments which he believes “forces one to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity based solely on the Scriptures” would equally fit a subordinationist paradigm as well.
Back in my Trinitarian days, I myself used to argue for the Shema-reading of 1 Corinthians 8:6 until I noticed that it was not the most logical reading (especially in light of how the word κυριος is used in v. 5). Paul does not split the Shema, if anything he adds to the Shema. Jesus is the vice-regent along side God. The one Lord that Jesus has become has a God over him (“the God of our Lord Jesus the Messiah”). Jesus is clearly the messianic Lord of Psalm 110; this becomes even more apparent when we see that “Lord” is used as a title with various possesive modifiers (a’la Psalm 110), unlike the tetragrammaton substitute in LXX.
I’ll shut up now.
Ivan Monroy
November 26, 2011 at 6:53 PM
Pär:
Would you see Jesus as the agent of creation in Hebrews 1 or would you differ?
Pär Stenberg
November 28, 2011 at 4:18 AM
I’m not sure what you are asking. The Son is clearly the agent in Hebrews 1; however, I am not sure whether this should be understood as “the Son in his personal preexistence” or “God’s word/wisdom which became the Son and thus what is true of the word/wisdom is also true of the Son” :-p I’m not sure where I stand in the pre-existence issue. But either way I think Jesus (in one way or the other) is the agent of God’s original and new creation. Does this answer your question?
Ivan Monroy
November 28, 2011 at 9:58 AM
Pär:
If the latter is true, how is preexistence removed? Not sure I’m following… If what is true of wisdom is true of the son, then both existed prior to creation, no?
David Barron
November 26, 2011 at 8:10 PM
My thoughts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44nEFf1Iopc&sns=em
Ivan Monroy
November 27, 2011 at 10:49 AM
Dave:
Interesting… What I find both frustrating and inconsistent from Trinitarians is when they state that a “mere creature” can’t do or say X and that of a “mere creature” it cannot be said X and Y. Yet, when it comes to God Almighty, 2nd Person of the Trinity, they have no problem asserting that he has a God above him (John 20:17; Heb 1:9), is in subjection to another, etc.
So a “creature” cannot be spoken highly of but God, 2nd Person of the Trinity can be spoken of as a “creature” in that he has a God, is exalted, is in subjection to another, etc… ?
Pär Stenberg
November 28, 2011 at 7:26 AM
I just finished listening to the debate. White’s argumentation forced me eat my own soul. Well done Patrick.
Pär Stenberg
November 29, 2011 at 5:44 AM
Ivan: For some reason there is no Reply-button attached to your last post. Now, let me see if I have understood your question correctly.
The latter option does not remove pre-existence per se; the “existence” is however ideal in nature and not personal.
I think there is a real possibility that passages such as Col 1:16f, Heb 1:2, 1 Cor 8:6, Joh 1:3 all speak about the role of God’s wisdom which then is linked to the Messiah since he is the fullest manifestation/expression of God’s wisdom. The person of Jesus is what God’s plan/wisdom/the word became. Thus it is possible to speak of Messiah as being the agent of creation, in a similar way that pre-existent wisdom is identitfied with the Torah in Sirach 24.
If this is or is not the paradigm through which we ought to understand the text above, I am not sure of. For me, Philippians 2 is the most crucial of all pre-existence texts. I’m not sure if it should be understood as speaking of the Son in his pre-incarnate state, emtyping himself and becoming human; or if it should be understood as speaking of (only) the human Jesus in contrast to Adam.
Ivan Monroy
November 29, 2011 at 10:34 AM
Pär:
Yes, for some reasons WordPress does that. Only the moderator of the blog is able to reply to all messages right under.
I’m familiar with this ideal view, I’ve had several interactions with Buzzard and others on the subject, but I’ve never fully seen how this view would work. I understand how the Messiah could be said to be the manifestation and pinnacle of God’s wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:24, 30), but this wisdom is not what we would call “pre-existent wisdom,” as Gordon Fee and others have pointed out.
I would make a distinction between what one would call “pre-existent” Wisdom associated with creation (Prov 8 ) and what one would call God’s wisdom in redemptive history (1 Cor 1:24, 30 [cf Gen 3:15]).
In my opinion, it seems like a stretch to say the Messiah is the greatest manifestation of God’s wisdom, therefore he can be associated with the Wisdom associated with creation because he’s what wisdom became. Again, I somewhat understand the idea behind the association of these texts but I am not entirely sure how one gets there.
Ryan
November 30, 2011 at 12:22 PM
Is anyone else having trouble accessing the debate? I got the first part but then the second wouldn’t load. Now I can’t load either.
Ryan
November 30, 2011 at 2:31 PM
Ok, well, while I’m waiting for the debate to be back up, I thought I’d offer a comment on something I noticed in the first half.
James White repeatedly made much of the idea that Navas – along with all others with a ‘Unitarian’ conception of God – was reading the scriptures with the assumption of Unitarianism. I think this is a very strange argument and I can’t help but wonder if White just got tired of being told he was reading with an assumption of Trinitarianism and decided to reverse the charge without thinking it through.
Why do I think White’s argument about an “assumption of Unitarianism” is strange?
At first blush it might sound like White is accusing Navas of a plausible doctrinal bias that he is importing into the text. But that illusion tends to disappear when we actually think about what White is really claiming Navas is doing and what it means to come to the text with an “assumption of Unitarianism.” The charge essentially claims no more than that the accused is approaching the text with the assumption that a discrete existent being consists of one person rather than of multiple persons.
Viewed in this light, it becomes quite apparent that the assumption of Unitarianism should be the obvious and rational default position of anyone coming to the scriptural text. And, indeed, that is precisely what it is both for non-Trinitarians and Trinitarians alike. That this is true is evidenced by the fact that Trinitarians do not go through the Bible and find a myriad of multi-personal beings. Trinitarians find only a single multi-personal being in all of scripture, seeing no requirement to declare the existence of other multi-personal beings even when coming across passages in scripture that could be interpreted that way if one were consistently using the interpretive framework of Trinitarianism (like a singular set of actions or a particular title or description being attributed to different persons).
So, really, coming to the scriptural text with an “assumption of Unitarianism” is not evidence of an imported doctrinal bias. Rather, it is evidence of simple rationality and common sense. It is the self-evident null hypothesis that must be over-turned by a preponderance of objective, confirming evidence. Any argument or proof-text for the Trinity that requires a person to NOT be approaching the scriptures with an assumption of Unitarianism is a worthless and powerless argument, because that necessarily means that, in order for the argument to be persuasive (or sometimes even coherent), a person must first accept that the very proposition of a multi-personal being that is being argued for is, contrary to our otherwise uniform understanding of reality and scripture, at least as reasonable or likely as the converse proposition.
But this simply will not do. The proposition of a truly multi-personal being is NOT remotely as likely or reasonable as a uni-personal being, and that simple fact has a natural impact on our reading comprehension when we come across an apparently confusing or contradictory text. In any non-Biblical text, or even in any Biblical text not dealing with God, coming across a set of passages that seemed to attribute the same identity, action, name, or title to different persons would cause anyone, including a Trinitarian, to re-examine the passage to find out where their misunderstanding had occurred. Just as telling is the fact that, if they could not resolve the apparent contradiction and attribute the action (or whatever) to different beings, they would more readily resort to the idea that the same being was one person referred to by different names or that someone had made a typo. In other words, even if a person had difficulty clearly resolving such an apparent contradiction down to two beings based solely on the text in front of them, inferring the existence of a multi-personal being would not even remotely be one of the primary cognitive tools the person would be likely to use in coming to a rational extratextual determination of the writer’s intent. The one and only exception is the way that Trinitarians deal with Biblical texts related to God and Christ.
Because of all this – because a ‘Unitarian’ conception of ‘being’ and ‘personhood’ is the self-evident null hypothesis while the Trinitarian conception of same is the utterly unique proposition that seeks to overturn the null hypothesis and is thus in need of significant evidence – the claim that someone is approaching the Scriptures with the “assumption of Unitarianism” is a meaningless and powerless accusation. The charge that someone is assuming Trinitarianism, however, is, when appropriate, a perfectly reasonable and meaningful claim. What a charge of “assuming Trinitarianism” means is that, rather than marshalling a sufficiently persuasive array of objective evidence in favor of the Trinitarian proposition over and against the null hypothesis, one is simply assuming the truth of the proposition in advance and then subjectively interpreting an array of ambiguous evidence (or even evidence that would be considered dispositive by an objective measure) in its favor.
Hopefully people who listen to this debate are not taken in by White’s meaningless but often repeated accusation against Navas.
Ryan
November 30, 2011 at 6:30 PM
EDIT TO MY ABOVE POST:
Where it said at the end -
“(or even evidence that would be considered dispositive by an objective measure)”
It should have said -
“(or even evidence that would be considered DISPOSITIVELY AGAINST THE PROPOSITION by an objective measure)”
The original wording may have been confusing because it might have sounded like it was referring to evidence that was conclusively in favor of the proposition when I was actually referring to the opposite.