Apologetics to the Glory of God

Category: Debate

  • Debate: Annihilationism – Chris Date vs. Joshua Whipps

    Resolution: “The final punishment of the risen wicked will be annihilation, the permanent end to the conscious existence of the entire person.”

    The debate took place June 16th, and lasted just over 3 hours.

    Chris Date is the host of the Theopologetics podcast. Joshua is one of the contributors here at ChoosingHats. The debate was moderated by Dee Dee Warren, the hostess of the Preterist Podcast.…

  • Debate Audio Update

    I will not have the audio ready this evening, unfortunately. I actually have the audio finished… however, I had a technical problem with the recording. There is an approximately 50 second gap in Mr. Date’s closing argument, where my recording software went haywire. Mr. Date was gracious enough to promise to send me the relevant section – however, there will be a short, but unavoidable delay until I receive it. I may make a limited version available to people who frequent our chat channel, but I’m going to hold off on releasing an official version until I have that section …

  • One correction I want to make:

    Before any audio goes up, or anything else, I want to correct something I said in the second-to-last Q&A section – I stated that “Christ died the first and second death at once. Think about that.” – I said it, but did not intend to say it. What I meant to say was that “Christ died the second death in place of the first, and did so all at once. Think about that.” I got garbled, and said it as I stated above, and didn’t realize I had said it until Chris responded to it. It was not intentional, and …

  • The “Self-Attestation” of Scripture (Part 1)

    People (and I mean believers and unbelievers alike) are generally confused about the so-called “self-attestation” of Scripture. Let’s think about the concept of self-attestation outside of the context of Scripture.

    To “attest” is to declare that something is the case. For example, “The sky appears to be blue.”

    Now consider another example, “This sentence appears on a website.” The sentence declares something to be the case. But its declaration is about itself. The sentence makes the claim that it appears on a website. In this sense it is self-attesting.

    Or consider one more example, “This sentence is true.” The …

  • T-Minus 3 Days and Counting

    I’m a real stickler for deadlines, schedules, and knowing when something is *supposed* to happen. While I can be disastrously disorganized in a plethora of ways, that is not one of them. That being said, I find it very interesting what I find myself up to in the days just prior to a debate. It’s not that I’m “burnt out” on Annihilationism right now or anything – this post is proof that I’m not, as you will see – it’s that I seem to be drawn to subjects that branch out from the subjects I’ve been repeatedly dealing with during …

  • Admitting the Possibility

    (4:50) “Please pray for us? It seems to me as though Joshua’s prayer leading up to this debate, and my prayer, are a bit different. I’ll let you follow his posts so that you can check that out. My prayer for the upcoming debate is not that what I think is the truth will in fact be made out to be true. Because I quite frankly admit the possibility that I might be wrong about this; I don’t think that I am, and I think that the Scripture is clearly in support of the position that I’ll be advancing. But

    …

  • In the Vein of “Everything you ever learned was wrong”

    There are the Jehovah’s Witness claims that the entire Christian church has always been wrong about, well, almost everything. Except for those few ECFs they could massage into some sort of superficial agreement, of course. Mormonism likewise asserts that all churches ceased to be true churches rather quickly following Christ’s ascension. Islam, with it’s idea of scriptural supercessionism and their revisionist version of what the Scriptures actually are, or taught, have a similar view of Christianity as a whole. It’s much the same with any other warmed-over historical error – be they large, as the wholesale replacement religions seen above …

  • Life and Death, Blessing and Curse

    The case being made by the annihilationists we have interacted with has certain presuppositional commitments which affect how they read Scripture. The first entails that we view death as an atheist would – empirically. The second entails that we read Scripture as if these descriptions it gives are meant to describe empirical processes or events. The third is that these descriptions are of the process, not describing the nature of the one who punishes. The fourth is that the nature of God is to be understood immanentistically.

    As we dealt with the commentary concerning “Think of how an atheist views …

  • Commentary on Comments

    [O]ne of the most basic features of presuppositional apologetics (though it is not exclusive to presuppositional apologetics) is drawing the distinction between proof and persuasion. Suppose, for example, that someone is not persuaded that 5+7=12. What does this lack of persuasion have to do with whether or not 5+7=12 is self-evident, true, or even proven? Nothing! Insert your favorite provable mathematical claim in the place of 5+7=12. It does not matter at all whether or not someone is persuaded by the proof offered in support of the mathematical proposition in question; it does not follow that the proof does not

    …

  • Romans 6 and Prolepsis

    If, as we are told by Date and Co., death spoken of a present tense is prolepsis – an event spoken of as certain to occur in the future – are we to take regeneration to be something that occurs only after this death? For what are we born again, as if we had a need? It’s not as if we are dead, is it? For, as we are told, death is something to be considered as the actual deprivation of life; and speaking of “dead in trespasses and sins” as if it was a present reality is prolepsis, is …