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Chapter 2

A Case Study in Apologetics Conversations

Years ago, I had to catch an early morning flight out of Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. Stepping into the first-class cabin,⁴ I was pleased to see that it was largely empty, so I’d likely be able to have plenty of room with no one seated next to me. I glanced at my boarding pass to see what my assigned seat was, and was dismayed that the window seat next to mine was already occupied by a stern-looking Middle Eastern man in his mid-forties. Not knowing if other passengers would arrive just in time to fill up the other seats, I plopped down in my assigned seat with the intention of moving to another seat as soon as the flight was ready to depart.

“Hey, once everyone’s boarded, I’m going to move to another seat so we’ll both have more room,” I told the man next to me. I figured he’d appreciate the extra elbow room if I moved.

“Oh,” he said, unsmilingly. “Does this mean you do not want to sit next to me? Is it because I am a Muslim?”

I was embarrassed that he would suggest such a thing and, I must admit, also chagrined because I had, in fact, felt a mild pang of anxiety when I noticed he was Middle-Eastern.

“Of course not!” I said, not wanting to offend him. “I just figured you’d want extra room.” I realized then that, like it or not, I’d be sitting next to this guy even if the rest of the seats were wide open. After no more than two or three minutes of obligatory small talk he got down to business. I’ll call him Khalid.

“I am a Muslim,” Khalid said matter-of-factly, searching my face to gauge my reaction. “I believe that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. What about you? Do you believe in God?”

Suddenly, I was very happy with my assigned seat. If nothing else, I knew this would be an interesting flight. Man, was I right about that.

“Oh yes. I believe in God!” I smiled broadly. “I’m Catholic and believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah and Savior of the World.”

“Allah does not have a ‘son’!” he parried emphatically. “Jesus, peace be upon him, was a great prophet, but he was not God. In fact, he was a Muslim.”

“Right on!” I thought to myself as I mentally rubbed my hands together in anticipation, “this is going to be a really good flight.”

For the next several hours, Khalid and I had a lively but friendly discussion about Christianity and Islam. He wasted no time getting down to his appeal to me to become a Muslim. I told him I would be happy to listen to any and all reasons he wanted to give to support his beliefs under one condition: When he had said his peace, he must agree to listen with an open mind to my reasons for believing in Jesus Christ. Both of us followed through on this promise. After about an hour of his giving me an uninterrupted series of arguments intended to convince me that Islam is the only true religion, it was my turn.

I spoke first about my personal faith in Jesus, how I had come to believe that he is indeed God, not a god or a godlike being, but God incarnate. It was necessary to explain before all else that Christianity is not, as Muslims mistakenly think, “polytheistic.” The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three gods, they are not separate beings, as Khalid was convinced Christians believe. I did my best to explain the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, that there is One God in Three Persons. This is a profoundly mysterious yet still, to some extent, knowable truth. God, I explained to Khalid, is pure spirit. He is eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, all good, all holy, utterly transcendent (i.e., outside of space and time and therefore immaterial), and is personal, not some kind of amorphous “force” à la Star Wars. So far, so good. Khalid agreed with all of these beliefs.

“Now,” I pressed further, “because God is infinite, that means there can be no barrier, no limit to his knowledge and his love. The same is true of his freedom and his power.” Everything in the universe, every thing, is finite, no matter how large it may be. The only thing that exists that is infinite is God himself. So, while God knows every thing in the universe perfectly, because each thing is finite, at a certain point it “runs out,” and therefore there is a finite limit to what can be known about it. But God’s knowledge is infinite, I explained. Khalid agreed with this.

I proceeded to say that the only way God’s knowledge could be infinite would be if there were some infinite thing, something that itself had no limits, that he could know infinitely. The only thing that God can know infinitely, I said, is himself. From all eternity, God has known himself. His self-knowledge, in fact, is similar to the image of yourself you see reflected in a mirror. That image of you in the mirror is an exact reflection of you, but it is not you. However, with God, the image of himself, his self-knowledge, his word about himself, cannot be separate from him or else there would be a second “infinite” thing. No, this infinite self-knowledge is in fact not something separate from God himself. It is his Word, a person, the very image and reflection of the Father. Christians know him as the eternal, unbegotten Son of God.⁵ The Father and the Son know each other perfectly, infinitely, equally, and eternally. This must be so, or else there would be some sort of division or hierarchy in God. And they also know each other perfectly, infinitely, equally, and eternally. This infinite mutual love between the Father and the Son is also a Person, the Holy Spirit. Thus, I explained to Khalid, the Catholic Church, far from teaching that there are three Gods, teaches rather that there is only One God, there is only one divine substance or nature, and that it is shared equally by the three persons in the Trinity.

I wasn’t able to spend anywhere near as much time as I would have liked explaining this key concept to Khalid, but at least, when I had finished with this part of my apologia for Christianity, he admitted that he now had an idea of what Christians mean by the Trinity. Before our discussion, he admitted, he thought Christianity was simply a polytheistic religion that just talked about “one God” but didn’t really mean it.

Next came my explanation that, as it says in the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse 14, “The word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, not in the sense that God produces offspring the way human fathers do, but in the sense that the eternally begotten Son took flesh for our salvation. I spoke about how humanity had become stranded in sin and alienation because of Adam and Eve’s original sin.

God in his mercy freely willed to save us from this disastrous predicament. And because we human beings are powerless to save ourselves, he became one of us; he came very near to us, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ to save us from our sins.

For this reason, I explained, Christ’s three-year public ministry of preaching the Good News of salvation, casting out demons, performing miraculous healings, and raising the dead, was followed by his arrest, torture, and crucifixion. And after his body had lain for three days in the tomb, he rose again from the dead, just as he promised he would.

It took the better part of an hour to explain carefully all of the above as I spiraled in toward the central point I wanted to make to Khalid: Jesus Christ is God, sent to redeem and save us by his atoning death on the cross. We are all sinners in need of God’s mercy and grace, and the way to receive that is to obey God’s commandment “that we should believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ and love one another” (1 John 3:23). In other words, I told him, Jesus is your savior, and you need to become Christian to accept his free offer of salvation.

Khalid’s reaction was about what I had expected. He brushed aside my claims saying that Islam is the true religion and that I must become Muslim. I wasn’t the least bit bothered that he hadn’t been persuaded by my explanations. I know that for some people, such as Muslims, it can be extremely difficult to break out of the preconceived biases and misconceptions people have given them about Christians and Christianity. I told Khalid I’d be happy to send him some follow-up materials to help him study the issue further.

By the time our flight was on its final approach to our destination, Khalid and I had each done our best, given the time available, to lay out our respective cases for our beliefs. It was obvious to me that he was not persuaded by my case for Christ, but I could see that he at least understood that case more clearly. For his part, he wrote down a few Muslim-apologetics websites he suggested I explore. When the plane landed, we shook hands, exchanged business cards, and agreed to stay in touch and continue our conversation via e-mail.

Over the next few weeks, I made good on my promise and watched a few of the Islamic apologetics videos Khalid had recommended. I studied the arguments closely, checking a few claims here and there, and made every effort to allow the best possible arguments for Islam and against Christianity to have a fair hearing.

Some of the arguments the speaker offered were clearly fallacious and easily refuted; others were more sophisticated and required an effort on my part to research the facts. But in the final analysis, after subjecting my Catholic belief in the Trinity and in Christ as my Savior to as rigorous a challenge as the Muslim apologist could muster, I came away not only unconvinced that Islam is the true religion, but also more convinced than ever that the message of Jesus Christ is not only true but eminently defensible. I could say with perfect honesty that yet another series of challenges to my faith in Jesus Christ and my Christian beliefs had been decisively answered and reinforced for me.

I was a bit disappointed, though not really surprised, that although Khalid quickly answered my first follow-up e-mail asking what I thought of the Muslim videos, he did not respond subsequently to the books, DVDs, and website links I sent him. Once he knew that the Muslim videos had not persuaded me to become Muslim, he never responded again. I can only hope that something in the materials I sent him and in the testimony of my Christian faith will at some point have a positive effect on him. Who knows? Perhaps someday he will come to faith in Jesus and become Christian. Perhaps I will one day meet him in heaven where we’ll have an eternity to discuss the truth.

Conversations such as that one have been an important part of my life as a Catholic, especially early on, as I sought to test the truth claims of the Catholic Church. I wanted to find any flaws, ferret out the untruths, and face up to whatever facts might disprove the Catholic Church’s teaching. Although I have encountered much undeniable evidence of the deplorable things that some Catholics have done, I could not uncover anything that could actually refute Catholic teaching.

I have found that the more one grapples with the biblical, historical, and logical facts involved in Catholic doctrines the more difficult it becomes to explain away the evidence. And the more likely it is that that person, if he’s open to the evidence, will be persuaded by it and will, in due time, become Catholic.

As I have seen with my own eyes and felt with my heart and mind, Catholic truth has an irresistible gravitational pull. Countless converts to the Catholic Church have told me as much over the past twenty-five years. Though journeys taken by these converts vary widely, it seems they all have one thing in common: to their surprise, the very things they once were certain are false — the Catholic Church and its teachings — turned out to be true.

John Henry Newman again comes to mind as an example of a man once so dead-set convinced that Catholicism was of the devil that he preached sermons about the pope being the Antichrist. Eventually, however, as he investigated the evidence in favor of Catholic teaching, he revised his opinion of the Church so dramatically that he embraced the Faith he had once reviled. And he spent the remainder of his life explaining and defending it to those who, like he himself once had, attacked the Church and its teachings without really understanding them.

I’ve seen it happen many times before. Take, for example, the hardcore, committed Protestant folks who attended a public Catholic/Protestant debate and wound up converting to the Catholic Church afterward.⁶ One former Calvinist woman I know told me that she attended a 1995 debate I did with two Calvinists and a Lutheran expecting to see the Catholic Church get “stomped on” (her words). She even brought a carload of her Catholic friends to the debate in hopes that they would “see the light” and abandon the Catholic Church in favor of Protestantism. I marveled as she explained what happened: She declared that she had never heard the Catholic response to the standard Protestant arguments against the Catholic faith. And she had never before heard the Catholic critique of the Protestant principles of sola Scriptura (i.e., Scripture alone) and sola fide ([justification] by faith alone). The debate shook her up so much that she felt compelled to start investigating the Catholic Church. Within the year, she had converted and was received into the Church. From time to time, she sends me a note or an e-mail letting me know how she had given a CD set of that debate to a Protestant acquaintance who then decided to convert.

I must hasten to point out that such debate-related conversions, when they happen, are surely realized in spite of my many flaws and failures as a debater. But conversions often do follow in the wake of public debates. I believe this happens because the truth of the Catholic Faith is powerful and attractive. It has its own powerful gravitational pull. Whether the issue at hand is the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the existence of God, the divinity and Resurrection of Christ, the communion of saints, or the Catholic teaching on Scripture and Tradition, whatever it may be, these truths are beautiful and coherent, not always easy to comprehend but always attractive, sometimes alarmingly so, when viewed for the first time in the full light of reason.

This is why apologetics is important. It is the perennially necessary task of clearing away whatever obstacles might prevent someone from laying claim to the truth, something all have a right to because God created us to know the truth as fully as humanly possible.

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31–32).