My Take on White v. Wood

Note: There has been an addendum added to this post at the end.

I’ve been discussing the White/Wood Controversy on Facebook, and one of my friends mentioned he thought it would be a good idea to write something more in depth about it.  Before beginning, I want to give a little bit of background.

In the early part of the 2000s, I was a channel regular at #Prosapologian, James White’s IRC.  In fact, for some time I was an Op there, and it’s even where I got my website name of CalvinDude, since that was my chat handle there.  White very definitely blessed me with his ministry through some formative parts of my life.  It was through White that I was first introduced to presuppositionalism, and in fact I believe it was after one of his Dividing Line broadcasts that I heard of, so sought out and listened to, the Bahnsen/Stein debate on the Existence of God and later picked up Bahnsen’s book, Always Ready: Directions For Defending the Faith.

There were really only two topics that White and I ever disagreed on in the channel.  The first was paedobaptism (since White is a Reformed Baptist and I am a Presbyterian).  The second, ironically enough, has some bearing on the current dispute because it was about what type of language is permissible for Christians to use.  To his credit, White has remained consistent on that from the time we had our discussion up until today.  But then, so have I, so fundamentally we’re still going to disagree on that part.  That said, I have continued to follow White off and on and watch several of his Dividing Line episodes each year (I sadly lack the time to watch all of them).

It is also through White that I first heard about David Wood.  And soon after, Wood debated John Loftus who, back when I was first contributing to Triablogue, was a frequent foil.  It was also around this time that Wood was unjustly arrested in Dearborn at the Arab Festival, along with Nabeel Qureshi and others, which introduced me to the full ministry of Acts 17 Apologetics.

In short, then, I’ve followed White for about 15 years now, and I’ve followed Wood for about 8.  I’ve learned a lot from both of them and believe both are genuine brothers in the LORD.  But when it comes to the controversy, I do have to say that I very strongly believe the evidence backs David Wood.  This isn’t to say that White’s objections have no merit, nor that they do not need to be responded to.  In fact, I applaud White for two things in his critique: one, for wanting to remain Biblically consistent; and two, for his intense desire for the Gospel to be proclaimed.  The disagreement I have is that I believe that Wood satisfies both of those requirements, whereas White clearly does not believe that to be the case.

Steve Hays has already commented on this, and he also has already linked the relevant videos in that post, so I will not do that here.  Instead, I want to focus on a couple of items of the dispute.  First, I have watched both of White’s videos and I watched the entirety of the response.  I’ve also read White’s comment on Facebook made before Wood responded on the video, in which White laid out the specific Bible passages that he wanted Wood to address, namely: 1 Peter 3:15-16, Ephesians 5:3-4, 11-12, and 2 Timothy 2:24-26.  I believe those verses were all addressed in the video response, with the exception of 2 Timothy 2:24-26, although Wood’s general comments did address that as well.

To paraphrase Wood’s argument regarding the verses, whatever the passages mean they cannot be legitimately interpreted in such a manner that Jesus, Paul, Peter, or any of the other prophets and writers of Scripture would have violated the commandment.  I believe this to be a solid response, and I do think that most of the writers of Scripture will run into problems if the passages are interpreted the way that White is using them in this discussion.

When we look at Scripture, we have to look at the entirety of Scripture.  The Bible uses sarcasm, mockery, and even outright insults against certain groups of people (but not all groups of people).  Clearly, this calls for wisdom before being employed by us, and this is especially the case when we realize that we each have our own sin nature we must confront.  In a way, this is where holy anger also comes into play, because we know that anger can be righteous and just—God does indeed display wrath, after all.  Yet we also know that it is incredible easy for us to employ anger in a sinful manner, and much, much more difficult to be angry in love.  In the same way, it is far easier to resort to evil insults than to righteous insults.  And to the extent that White cautioned against that in one of his videos, I do applaud him.  I do not think that every Christian is mature enough to draw that line by any means, and that we must always weigh ourselves to ensure that we are acting out of righteous motives and not sinful pride.

But the fact that it is dangerous ground does not mean that it is ground that should be avoided at all times, nor does it mean that when a Christian does attempt a rebuking response along those similar standards that he is guilty of prima facie sin.  Just because it is easy to fall into sin at one point does not mean that someone has fallen into sin at that point.

Another aspect that White raised was that we shouldn’t be interested in the pragmatic, but rather on what is the right thing to do.  In fact, on his Facebook post, White said: “Well, personally, I am not interested in getting people to leave Islam.  I am interested in bringing people to the cross and seeing them bow the knee in repentance and faith.  So I am not impressed by pragmatic arguments.”  In his (I believe first) video, White also brought up the fact that when the Jehovah’s Witnesses prophecies did not pan out, millions of people left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but virtually none of them became Christians.  I understand White’s point to essentially be that if you trade one heresy for another, what does that benefit?  You still end up in hell at the end.

That is true as far as it is applied to the individual, but it is not the case that all evil doctrines are equally evil.  Clearly in today’s world the vast majority of those who kill others in the name of a deity are doing so under the auspices of Islam rather than under any other religion.  I know that White began his ministry against Mormonism, so I would ask him a simple question.  Which would be the safer option for the world as a whole, if all Mormons became Muslim or if all Muslims became Mormon?  We agree that their eternal state does not change—under both systems, they will perish for eternity without Christ.  But clearly our culture would be far preferable if we had more of the kind of legislation that Utah passes than what Pakistan passes.

And this brings me to one of the points of contention.  Whereas White is adamantly opposed to the pragmatic aspects of ministry, I think such a view is at best naïve.  The real world exists, not a hypothetical world.  The real world has actual impact, not the hypothetical world.  We don't get to imagine a universe where everyone who rejects Christ will be equally evil, even if equally worthy of hell.

But beyond even that, I would maintain that God Himself is pragmatic.  He has not given laws against every single thing that is a sin, for example.  Let’s start with the most basic aspect.  Acts 17:30 says “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”  The “but now” indicates the command had not always been there.  This means that minimally there was a time when God did not have commandments for all things that are righteous, nor commandments against all things that are evil.  After all, Romans 5:13 says “sin is not counted where there is no law.”

Note very clearly that this doesn’t mean it is not sin—indeed, the first half of the verse specifically says “for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.”  But that sin is not counted.  Again, even if we assert that God now has established commandments against all sins, we are left with the fact that He did not always do so.  Why not?

We can see at least some of the reasoning when Jesus says in Matthew 19:8 that, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives.”  In other words, God knows our hearts are hardened and therefore He permits certain levels of sin to not only go unpunished but without any commands against them, because otherwise He would have to destroy us every single second of every single day.  It is an act of mercy on His part to not impose the full effects of the Law, by not passing Laws against certain behaviors and thus ensuring that those particular sins “are not counted.”

I can’t see how this can be explained by anything other than God being pragmatic.  He is instantiating His will by overlooking certain things such that He gets certain other things later.  The pragmatic outcome is that God’s glory is maximized through this.  At the very least, there is nothing wrong with pragmatism if we are pragmatic toward the glory of God (I would hope that is not controversial, but perhaps it is).  Add to this the fact that we are commanded to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life” (1 Timothy 2:2) and it seems to me that taking steps that would lead toward more peace and quiet for believers is not only condoned, but commanded.

This is not the only verse along this vein either.  Jeremiah 29:7 says “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  This is not asking to pray for the salvation of the city, and indeed Babylon was destroyed.  But God is clearly saying that our welfare is tied to the secular welfare in which we live.  Doing anything to make the world better is better for us, even when that is not tied directly to salvation.

Behaving in a pragmatic way, therefore, is not sinful.  It is wise.  Thus, even if Wood’s motivation was not to convert  Muslims to Christ, the fact that they are choosing a lesser evil is still objectively better for society as a whole.  But of course Wood’s motivation is also that Muslims embrace Christ.

White has criticized Islamicize Me for not presenting the Gospel.  Wood argued that in order for the Gospel to be heard, one must give reasons for the Muslim to reject Islam.  This is actually quite similar to arguments I’ve made against atheists in past debates with them.  For example, when I poked holes in a Naturalistic worldview, one atheist I was dialoging with responded with, “I don’t know the answers now, but it’s possible that we’ll find answers to those problems.”  My response to that was: “Why should I give up my worldview that provides answers for me as it is to take on your worldview that is only hoping to perhaps maybe get an answer in the future?”

Now suppose I was a Muslim.  If you present me an argument for Christianity, but you have not torn down the false worldview I’ve had in place, it would be easy for me to say, “Why should I reject the worldview that I hold to already, which I believe to be 100% correct, simply on the hope that your worldview might be at best just as good as the one I already hold to?”  This is precisely why apologetics isn’t just concerned with positive declarations of Christ, but also with the refutation of the impediments formed by the false doctrines others hold to.

But let me move on to the heart of the issue, as far as I can see it.  Do Wood’s videos contain offensive materials?  Do they depict evil?  The answer is clearly yes.  But what makes the video offensive?  It is not the showing of the thing that is offensive, but rather what is offensive is the thing itself.  It is the Hadith that offends, and Wood’s point in portraying it is not to shock for the sake of shock, but to shock for the sake of getting people to realize how crazy some of those commands in the Hadith are.  And this is the part that bothers me most.  White acknowledged in his first video response that you could easily find all the weird commands that Wood finds in the Hadith.  This means that White admits that Wood is not misrepresenting Islam by what he does.  To explain why I find this bizarre, I wrote on my Facebook page:

If I heard someone make a racist statement so I responded by making a video showing what would happen if people actually lived according to that racist statement, would it make any sense for you to get offended at *ME* for exposing that?  No, you ought to be offended by the one who created the statement and advocated for that world to be instantiated, not the one accurately informing what was said and showing you the consequences of it, especially when the intention of all of this is to get the original racist to *STOP*.

So, are the videos offensive?  Yes.  But they are offensive because they are accurate.  White has criticized the videos as being on the level of a Chick tract, yet Chick tracts do misrepresent opposing views, whereas Wood has not done that.  That is one clearly objective difference.  Wood is not lying to tear down Islam; he is being honest and showing the inevitable result.

But what of the next aspect?  Is the depiction of evil itself evil?  If so, I cannot see how the Bible would not be evil, for it depicts evil throughout.  It doesn't just say that some people are evil.  It actually shows them being evil.

And that showing aspect is key.  White has argued that one could simply talk about what’s in the Hadith and argue about it reasonably.  Yes, that is true.  And Wood has dozens of videos where he does just that.  But that sort of didactic rendering is very rare in the Bible.  Most of the Bible is not declarative statements or logical propositions.  It is stories.  Stories of events that happened.  But stories nonetheless.   And the key part of stories is that they become cross-cultural and relevant to everyone in ways that are far harder for didactic texts to accomplish.

Look at how much of the Bible is typological.  You can’t get through the book of Hebrews without realizing it.  God uses history to teach doctrine.  What is the purpose of story?  It is to bypass the intellectual filters that are put up.  When you see something happen, you have a visceral gut reaction to it.  Something that you will not get if you’re arguing a hypothetical concept in a rhetorical world.

Let me give an example of this.  In the book of Judges, we’re given the story of Jephthah.  Jephthah is famous for one reason.  He made a rash vow.  He vowed that if God helped him win a war against the Ammonites that he would sacrifice the first thing that came out of his door when he got home.  He won the war, and when he returned home…his daughter rushed out to greet him.

Jephthah murdered his daughter to obey the vow he made.  Nowhere in the book of Judges does the text ever give us a didactic explanation that Jephthah was wrong for what he did.  But by the same token, the story hits us so hard that it doesn’t need to.  We know just by visualizing the events as we read them that Jephthah’s choice ought to have been to take upon himself the sin for breaking the vow, not the sin of murdering his daughter.

It would have been easy for God to say in Deuteronomy, “You shall not make a rash vow, and if you have made a rash vow you shall break your vow rather than commit a sin against another person by fulfilling it.”  That would have been dead simple for God to have inspired.

But He didn’t.  He gave us the story instead.

The vast majority of Scripture is in story format.  Jesus taught via parables.  The history of Israel unveils the redemptive plan God uses: the slavery in Egypt followed by the Passover and the journey to the Promised Land—this just is the Gospel in story form.  All these types and shadows in Scripture are pointing in a much more powerful way than if God had simply said, “These are the facts of the matter.”

Again, this is why Christianity is so good at cross-cultural avenues.  We do not have to teach other cultures how to understand a story.  We do have to teach how to interpret law.  God communicates to us in stories because they engage our senses fully.  We imagine what we read.  We see it in our heads.  And we can recreate those visuals ourselves.

Consider what would happen if someone did a video about Jephthah.  Would you find that video offensive?  Yes.  because Jephthah's choices were wicked and evil, and to depict them is to depict evil.  But is that to condone evil?  Not in the least.  It teaches this is precisely why one ought not make such vows.

But this does lead to the final objection from White that I'll address here.  White has said, “What you win them with is what you win them to.”  And that is true, there is no denying it.  But in this particular case, it seems that White is concluding that if one can be “mocked” out of Islam, then one can be “mocked” out of Christianity.  But this is only the case if you do not really believe that there is an objective difference between Islam and Christianity.  Christians have answers for the problematic areas of the Bible, answers that Islam simply cannot use themselves.  We have the differentiation between the Old and New Covenant built into Christianity.  Islam has only that whatever Mohammed did is what is ideal for everyone to do.

That alone gives the Christian apologist a vast arsenal to resist one who sought to mock Christianity.  And of course as has been pointed out: Christianity is mocked relentlessly already.  We can withstand it, because we have the truth on our side.

But to respond more directly, I think that White is wrong that one would be “mocked” out of Islam through Wood’s video series in the first place.  This is not mockery for the sake of mockery.  It is not generated mockery from nothing.  This is Wood exposing what is actually there to the light of the sun.  If someone does the same thing to Scripture, exposing what it says without inventing mockery that isn't there—Scripture wins! In short, there is nothing to fear from “What you win them with is what you win them to” here.

To conclude, therefore, I do not believe that Wood is in the wrong with these videos.  In fact, I think he is engaged in the kind of thing that God did all throughout Scripture.  The offensive nature of the videos is solely in the offensive nature of the content of Islam.  If at any point Wood were to change and invent offense to add into his videos, I would immediately oppose him.  But he has not misrepresented Islam.  He has exposed it to the disinfectant of ridicule.

Addendum: Right after I posted the above (which is my original post), I discovered James White had posted a rejoinder video to David Wood.  Because of that, I wanted to touch on what White said there, because it did help to clear up one of his points.  You can also read the comments for a bit on that as well.

The main aspect that I want to update on this post is that White clarified his remarks regarding the statement that if we mocked the Hadith, Muslims could mock the Old Testament in response.  White intended his original statement to refer primarily to consistency, and I take the overall argument to be that if we use a specific tactic against Muslims then they have free reign to use that same tactic against us, and we do not have any consistent basis to object to that.  As far as that goes, I agree with that point.  I do disagree that Muslims will have the ability to mock the Old Testament in the same manner by which Wood is mocking the Hadith, and I explained my reasoning for that in the comments below.

However, one thing I must mention here is that while I do believe White intended to convey that point in his first video, he actually conveyed exactly what Wood, Malone, and McCray responded to.  In his rejoinder video, White took umbrage and said they mis-characterized him and were burning a straw man.  Unfortunately, this was a straw man of White's making in this instance, and I say that not only because I took what he said in the same manner that Wood did, but also every person I've spoken with on this issue (which is an admittedly small sample size, given that most of the people in whose circles I run haven't heard of either White or Wood) took it the same way as well.  When I examined what White said in his first video in light of his rejoinder video, I could see hints at his intent there, which is why I do not believe he intentionally moved the goal posts here, but he did not convey himself clearly in the first video so I do think it is a but uncharitable for him to characterize the misunderstanding itself as Wood and Company burning straw men.  They were responding to what he had originally said and it was on topic to that.

Additionally, I wanted to address something that White brought up that I do think Wood should have handled differently, and that's the fact that Wood was responding to White without having listened to White's presentation.  I almost mentioned that as something I found troubling in the first version of this post, but I left it out because I found Malone's and McCray's summary of what White said to be accurate.  It is plain that White disagrees on that, but I still believe they conveyed what White had said (although I find it likely, now, that it was not precisely what White meant).  Still, I do think that Wood ought to have at least listened to the videos White made before responding out of courtesy if nothing else.  Some people have noted that White appeared to be hurt by this.  If so, I definitely find that understandable.

One final aspect is that I do think there was a bit of what Wood said that White missed.  For example, White seemed to focus primarily on Wood's use of Ezekiel and stated repeatedly that he wanted to see where the New Testament evidence was, where there was any apostolic example of the type of behavior.  This seemingly overlooked the fact that Wood also spent a deal of time discussing Paul's comments in Galatians about his desire that the circumcision crowd emasculate themselves.  He briefly touched on Wood's use of Paul's rebuke to Elymas (Bar-Jesus) in Acts 13, but dismissed that as irrelevant to the discussion without precisely saying why it didn't matter.

In this case, I think Elymas does satisfy the requirement that White was asking for.  That is, nowhere does the passage say that Paul preached the Gospel to Elymas.  Instead, it says that Elymas was opposing the attempt of Paul to preach the Gospel to the proconsul, and Paul's response was: "You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?" (Acts 13:10).  Here is an instance where someone was rebuked with insults (and even struck blind) without any mention in the text that Paul ever preached the Gospel to Elymas, let alone with gentleness and reverence, and the end result was that the proconsul believed.  So I do think that White needs to explain why this is not relevant to the topic at hand.

That said, I do think White does hit the nail on the head in one part.  There is a radical difference between White's and Wood's purpose.  White quite clearly is concerned solely with presenting the Gospel and does not see any benefit for someone leaving Islam if they are not a Christian.  Wood on the other hand said at one point that he would rather a Muslim become an atheist than to stay in Islam.  At that point, White has rightly identified the disagreement and in the same place that I saw it.  As you can tell from my own statements above, I agree with Wood's position here that it is objectively better for a non-Christian to be a non-Muslim non-Christian than to be a Muslim non-Christian.

This is not anti-Muslim to say this.  It is anti-Jihad, yes, and it's applying the math of statistics.  It is true that the vast majority of Muslims are not violent and would never commit terrorism.  It is equally true that almost every terrorist in the past fifty years has been a Muslim.  Until those demographics change, then logic would dictate that we want people to move away from that which would increase the statistical likelihood of bad behavior toward that which would decrease the statistical likelihood of bad behavior, even if they don't move all the way to Christ.