According to the dictionary definition of “debate,” we’ve been debating in these comments, and Jesus and Paul debated with their critics, as represented by the New Testament. That’s a fact about English.
But according to your theological definition of “debate,” which takes all debates to be sinful and egoistic, Christians are incapable of debating when they’re doing God’s work. Instead, they’re “ministering.” So this is purely a semantic issue, a decision about linguistic labels that doesn’t interest me.
What interests me—only because it’s so amusing—is that you seem to think any reasonable person would read your lengthy, highly argumentative, defensive response and conclude that you’re _not_ engaging in a debate here. That’s laughable. Obviously, you lace your response with personal attacks because of your wounded pride and your religious sanctimony. It would be obvious to any reasonable reader. But that’s fine. It’s none of my business.
The issue is which definition of “debate” ought to be used. Are all debates sinful? Is it sinful to argue? According to your born-again Christianity, the answer is yes, but according to English, the answer is no, because the English definition treats the word neutrally, not pejoratively. Again, the dictionary says the verb “debate” means simply, “to engage in argument or discussion, as in a legislative or public assembly; to participate in a formal debate; to deliberate or consider.”
It’s in that plain, commonsense way that I’m right and you’re wrong in this case. Jesus, Paul, you, and I have all been debating. But you’re welcome to your specialized, technical Christian definitions. What would be fallacious (equivocal), though, would be to go back and forth between the definitions as if they weren’t different.
I’m not going to waste time going through the details of your preposterous theology. I know that’s an offensive thing to say, but it is what it is. You’re the one doing the trolling, by way, beginning your interaction with me with very short comments to lure me in before sending in the proverbial walls of text which fundamentalists are known to resort to, as though the quantity mattered more than the quality of our words.
I’ll just point out that if we assume the New Testament narrative for the sake of argument, Jesus would have engaged in argument because the gospel writers thought he wasn’t just God, as in God the Father. Jesus was the Son of God, a human incarnation of God, which means he included everything divine that could fit into human form. Jesus might have debated because of his human side.
Also, the gospel writers needn’t have shared your late, born-again interpretation of these matters. They needn’t have thought debate itself was sinful because that conception hadn’t been invented yet.
Likewise, not all the gospel writers shared Paul’s view of original sin. The New Testament was written before the theology had become established. So they might have assumed God would want to debate humans because we were made in God’s image and aren’t wholly lost and deplorable. God gave us the power to reason so he could associate with us on that level.
It’s only because you read the Bible through your fundamentalist lens that you think there’s some absurdity in the notion of an honest debate or in God’s arguing with people.
God debated Job in that he meant to refute Job’s doubts about God’s intentions and sense of justice. He did so mostly with rhetorical questions. That was a debate in the ordinary, English sense of the word. The gospel writers might have depicted Jesus in that same biblical mold, as refuting people like God refuted Job.
Use the label “ministering,” if you like. It’s still debate according to English. The substance of the concept is unchanged, despite the sanctimony and condescension you add to it with the “ministering” label.
