david wood versus adnan rashid

A quite illuminating piece of intellectual discourse is currently unfolding via internet between the Muslim commentator Adnan Rashid and the philosopher David Wood.
Their debate is not unfolding face to face but on videos and video responses.
It is nonetheless dramatic, relevant and interesting.
Adnan Rashid is measured and formidable in his arguments.
His critiques of Christianity are often built on sound insight and reasearch.
He is robust but civil in the representation of ideas.
David Wood is probably the foremost scholar and critic of Islam in the West. He and his ideas are viewed by some elements  within Islamic culture (including on occasion governments, Imams, Jihadists, and individuals) as an existential threat to their religion.
To his credit, he has played a significant role in enabling many in the Muslim community worldwide and in other faith communities  to begin to question their own culture openly without being terrorised by the notion of questioning itself.
His scholarship and his showmanship are equally striking.
But with Adnan Rashid he has perhaps met his match.
Their mutual parrying regarding the Christian concept of the Trinity as an understanding of God got my attention a few weeks ago.
Adnan Rashid noted that the justification for the concept of the Trinity is scant enough in the Bible.
He cited an interpolated verse specifically mandating the Trinitarian concept which was apparently added to the King James version of the Bible in 1604.
Mr Rashid is absolutely correct in this. But I would suggest that the verse in question was never the lynchpin of belief in the Trinity which predates it in the observable witness of all Christian communities.
The mandate for the Trinity is not just Biblical. It is personal. It is inherent to the tradition as passed on by supposed witnesses and their linearly descended students. It is what was taught by the Gospel witnesses and by those who knew them from the word go.
How else do we explain its consistent presence in Christian churches at every corner of the globe, at every point in history?
Mr Rashid is nonetheless quite acuitive and makes legitimate points in touching on what sometimes seems like very scant specific justification for the notion of the Trinity even in the non interpolated texts, the gospels and so on.
I would admit that it can seem there is no precise affidavit in the Bible from the Almighty endorsing the concept of the Trinity, but I would suiggest that everywhere in the Gospels such a reality is implicit.
For example when Jesus is reported to have said: "Before Abraham was, I am."
Or: "The Father and I are one."
Or: "When I go to the Father I will send you a new comforter, the Holy Spirit."
And the most ancient witnesses who founded the most ancient Christian churches all concur on the matter regarding there being one God and three persons in the one God.
A prayer summary of Christian beliefs including this concept called the Nicene Creed was promulgated in the year 325 at the Council of Nicea and clearly predates the King James Bible by 1300 years.
I would maintain that an earlier Creed known as the Roman Creed which evolved into a form we now call the Apostles Creed, may actually have been written by those who knew Jesus.
David Wood and his associate Sam Shamoun answered Adnan Rashid's arguements regarding the Trintniy with erudition, conviction and elan.
But I don't think they quite refuted him.
When their confidence was most shaken, they were reduced to dismissing Adnan Rashid's perspectives as malicious and manipulative.
I think they were wrong in this.
They also suggested that Adnan Rashid's career as a commentator was over.
They are definitely wrong in that.
They further suggested based on their own selectively scrupulous reading of certain Quran verses that Adnan Rashid had himself apostosised from Islam.
I think that suggestion merely meant Adnan Rashid had really rattled them both.
So it goes.
Adnan Rashid has for his own part put his finger on Mr Wood's possible weakness in critical analysis, that is to say on Mr Wood's over reliance on ridicule to make his points.
The paradox is that while Mr Wood is undoubtedly courageous in his defiance of Muslim conventions regarding respect for the Prophet Muhammed, it is difficult to doubt, that if he wished to, Mr Wood could similarly cast aspersions on personnages in the Bible. For example with very little effort he could ridicule King David, one of God's great ones in the Jewish Old Testament, a shepherd boy who became the greatest of warriors, a ruler of Israel, writer of Psalms, father of the proverbially wise Solomon and yet one who might at various times from the accounts we have, be described as, er, well, somewhat lacking in certain virtues.
I'm suggesting that the overuse of ridicule is a poor analytic because if the mood takes you, it can be applied to anyone or anything.
The debates between Adnan Rashid and David Wood in all their frankness, freedom, daring and spectacle are unprecedented in the last 1300 years of known discourse between Muslims and Christians.
I commend them to your attention.