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May 22 - August 22, 2025
Jesus called himself the Son of Man more than eighty times in the four gospels;
If these were divine claims, Jesus’ deity was laced throughout the gospels and earliest church history.
At nightfall, I reluctantly turned off the computer, put McDowell’s book away, and just let this new information simmer.
I was at an impasse. I could not get myself to admit that the earliest gospel, and in fact every gospel thereafter, was built around the framework of Jesus’ deity, but neither could I deny it. On the one hand, the cost w...
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the tension and pressure found an outlet in my life by way of a renewed fervor for Islam.
I gained a new zeal for salaat, spent more time studying hadith, and employed Islamic terms more frequently in daily speech.
There are writings from before the gospels that prove Christians saw Jesus as God.”
“The letters of Paul.”
Muslims are often trained to despise Paul,
Paul had corrupted Jesus’ message, misleading billions into worshiping the mortal Messiah.
Muslims must revere Jesus and the disciples.
somewhere very early in Christian history, people began to worship Jesus.
Muslims are left with no recourse other than to place the blame on an early, influential Christian outside the circle of disciples. Paul is that Christian.
“The writings of Paul make it clear that Jesus was God to the earliest Christians. Paul started writing in the forties, a decade or so before Mark was written.
Paul must have been the one to invent Jesus’ deity. He’s the one who corrupted the Christian message.”
Paul took the religion taught by Jesus and turned it into a religion about Jesus.”
“And why would he invent Jesus’ deity?
Paul saw a power vacuum.
he wanted power.”
all he wanted was power, he could have stayed just where he was. He was the top student of the top rabbi of his time; power was coming his way.
He went the total opposite direction, choosing a life of meekness and poverty. The early Christians had Paul and his sacrifices to thank for their survival!”
OUR ARGUMENT OVER PAUL was not the only time David and I butted heads. Our emotions often got heated as we spoke about our core beliefs. The more important an issue on which we disagreed, the more likely it was that one of us would say something rash. Intense disagreements are bound to lead to intense emotions.
There was a benefit to our arguments, surprisingly. They showed us where points of tension were hiding beneath the surface, needing to be addressed. One such issue that constantly bubbled to the surface was that of the Trinity. As with the doctrine of Jesus’ deity, a strong aversion to the Trinity was woven into my Muslim identity and made for a latent land mine.
The core doctrine of Islam is Tauheed.
Tauheed is the doctrine of God’s oneness.
If god has no 1 to love Before he created man how did he learn to love man to be a loving god?
Does Islam even teach that god loves man ?
In Christianity the Father loves Son And the Son loves the father.
I'm not seeing this very clearly but I don't know how else to say it , but this allows so god can be a loving god And love man
Distilling this theology in the context of Muslim-Christian dialogue boils down to this: Tauheed, Islam’s most fundamental principle, is antithetical to the Trinity.
my Muslim elders galvanized me against the Trinity.
rebutting the Trinity. They all taught the same thing: the Trinity is thinly veiled polytheism.
God is at the same time both three and one,
3 persons in 1 being.
If you were a 3 persons in 1 person, that would definitely cause a problem.
If you were 3 beans and 1 bean that would also cause a problem.
Three what in one what?
It's 3 whos and 1 what.
The What is God , and the whos are the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
My questions were
simple questions of clarification on essential Christian doctrine, yet no Christian I met growing up was able to answer them.
It was coincidence that the solution came to me while I was sitting next to him in the unlikeliest of places.
IT WAS JULY 2003, the summer after my sophomore year,
I sacrificed my summer to grueling doses of o-chem five days a week. Not surprisingly, David took the class with me, which meant I got grueling doses of David five days a week too.
But I was not the only one with big life changes. A while earlier,
I made an argument to support the swoon theory, to which David responded, “That weak stuff isn’t gonna work on me, man. I come from the trailer park. I got common sense!”
Unbeknownst to us, a new girl on the forensics team had been listening to our debate. She threw her hat into the ring, interjecting, “Oh yeah? Well, I come from single-celled organisms.” David and I incredulously turned to her. We barely knew who this girl was, yet she wanted to take us on?
Three days later, Marie was a theist, and David was in love.
By the summer of 2003, David and Marie had been married a year,
David and I sat in o-chem on a hair trigger, ready to pick up the phone and race to the hospital....
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I vividly remember the exact location of my seat because it was there that I first opened up to the Trinity, a moment still etched in my mind.
We were studying resonance, the configuration of electrons in certain molecules.
Different arrangements of the electrons in certain molecules are called “resonance structures.” Some molecules, like water, have no resonance while others have three resonance structures or more, like the nitrate on the board.
Although the concept was easy enough to grasp, the reality proved to be baffling.
Technically, a molecule with resonance is every one of its structures at every point in time, yet no single one of its structures at any point in time.”
I turned to David, unable to get past what Mrs. Adamski had just said. David subtly shrugged and returned his attention to the professor as she moved to the next topic. It appeared I was the only one still thinking about the bomb she had just dropped.
How could something be many things at once? Many different things?
We were talking about separate spatial and electrical arrangements. What the professor said would be akin to saying that Nabeel is eating
