Debating Dale Starter Pack

(updated November 2025) Please don’t take this personally, but in all likelihood, I’m not willing to debate you. I can only do so much with my time, I am always over-committed, and I’m getting my decrepit by the day. Also, I have to think you’re a worthy opponent. Most likely, though not necessarily, you will have a PhD in some relevant field and some relevant professional publications in philosophy or theology journals. So don’t get your hopes up. Still, if you were thinking about debating me, or just refuting me online, here are some things you should study.

Required reading: What is the Trinity? and “Trinity.” These will help you to understand why I’m going to ask you to clarify what Trinity theory you’re defending, or why I won’t allow you to smudge the difference between a Trinity theory and a claim that “Jesus is God” or that he is divine. (More on these below.) And if we are debating the Trinity, you will have to explain (at least) these six facts, facts which trinitarians who assume that Christians have always been trinitarian have heretofore not been able to account for. Probably the best place to look for why I hold that the New Testament does not teach any Trinity doctrine is my opening statement in this debate book. (See also here and the published book chapter version.) When it comes to biblical terminology, my thoughts on the idea of heresy, what I call the fulfillment fallacy, how any Trinity theory conflicts with the Bible, what is essential to the New Testament gospel, relative identity Trinity theories, and how current logical treatments of identity statements can help us in reading the New Testament, the place to look is my book Monotheism, Heresy, and the Bible. This should, God willing, be published in early 2026 by Theophilus Press.

I’m not going to be impressed if you urge that John 17:1-3 doesn’t say that only the Father is the only true God. (See also here.)

I will object if you argue that when a New Testament author says that Jesus fulfills some OT prophecy that was originally about Yahweh, this is the author’s way of saying that Jesus is Yahweh. I explain this fulfillment fallacy here and here and here. It is a beginner’s mistake in reading the NT, not any kind of deep insight, despite being endorsed by an embarrassing number of recent evangelical scholars.

Are you going to hit me with Richard Bauckham’s confused and confusing neologisms about “divine identity”? I really wish you wouldn’t, but if you must, you’ll want to read the published critique he’s been ignoring since before it was published, and also this and this.

You should think this is a sound argument. If you think a premise is false, you should have a strong reason to give for that claim, because as I explain here and in follow-up posts and podcast episodes, there are strong reasons for a Christian to agree with each premise. Evangelical apologists have been almost to a man ignoring this argument for years now, to their shame. Don’t join their ranks! If you’re unclear what a “sound” argument is, consult standard sources, like this.

These two talks explain why I will not be impressed with the points that Jesus is referred to as “God” and as “Lord” in the NT. In short, those terms are ambiguous in the NT, and these usages are not at all a way of hinting that Jesus “is God.” These authors never confuse Jesus and God. Again, the best place to look is the big opening chapter of Monotheism, Heresy, and the Bible. But earlier versions of that material are in podcasts starting here.

“But Jesus is worshiped!” Yes, he is and he should be, but this is not a problem for biblical unitarian theology. Here’s a problem for trinitarians: justifying the speculative claim that one should only worship someone if they have the divine nature or essence. It’s neither self-evident nor is it found in the Bible. It’s only an inference from post-biblical catholic traditions. In this talk below (or in this podcast) I explain why I worship Jesus without embarrassment, even though I don’t confuse him with God and do not think he “has a divine nature,” and why this isn’t idolatry, by NT standards. In brief: I go back to the original justification for worshiping the exalted Lord Jesus.

Two natures theories about Christ are and always have been, to put it nicely, difficult, and it is not true there is some straightforward New Testament teaching here which is been the same from the beginning. For my pessimism about two natures speculations see my two chapters in the forthcoming collection edited by Chandler and Nemes called A Man Who Heard from God, which hopefully will be out in 2026. One chapter details up to 21 contradictions implied by claims that Jesus is fully divine, and the other critically surveys the many ways of trying to build a two natures theory so as to try to (in most cases) avoid contradictions.

For a historical overview of the speculations that led to Christ being called one Person in two natures, see this lecture below, which distills a lot of information from a college course I used to teach on the development of incarnation theories in Christian theology:

Notice that back then (from Origen on) most of them did not construe the “natures” merely as essential properties; also see podcasts 143 and 144. But if we go with that properties interpretation of the “natures,” here are some problematic properties which are arguably essential to God which seem like they cannot be essential to any human: uncreatedness, aseity, omniscience, omnipotence, immunity to temptation, immortality/immunity to death. Yes, one can try to go the way of recent kenosis theories, but these go against Chalcedonian tradition and really have no New Testament support, with Philippians 2 being the only passage that even kind of sort of sounds like that.

Apologists and others treat appeals to “two natures” as a sort of one-size-fits-all solution to looming christological contradictions. How can Jesus have a god if he is God? Two natures! How can he be created and uncreated? Two natures! How can he know all yet be limited in knowledge? Two natures! How can he be immortal and yet die? Two natures.

I am convinced that there is a lot of hand-waving and fakery here. I’m not going to stand idly by and let you assert that appeal to two natures solves the problem at hand. I’m going to press you to explain how it actually solves that problem without creating christological problems which are just as bad. For a preview of that:

podcast 145 – ‘Tis Mystery All: the Immortal dies!

(Click through the slides linked near the bottom to follow this.)

But isn’t preexistence still a slam-dunk as far as the NT is concerned? Surprisingly, no!

(For a bit more on John see podcast 70.)

And if we are debating the Trinity or “the deity of Christ,” I will be pointing out that if Jesus existed before his human life, it does not follow that he is one of three “Persons” in the triune God, or even that he is divine. In fact, people held such theories for about two centuries before it was popular to say that the Word is divine in the same way the Father is, and more than two centuries before confession of a triune God was made mandatory. If you are going to trot out standard apologists’ lists of early “fathers” calling Jesus “God” or “a god,” I will be pointing out that modalistic monarchians aside, they all held that Jesus (or the Word) was a lesser divine being, and that none of them so much as mention any triune God, at any time before the second half of the 300s. For my treatments of the pre-trinitarian theologies of the 100s and 200s see this lecture and this one.

Propagandistic historical narratives, anachronistic readings of the Bible, and sophistical traditional catholic arguments must yield to knowable historical facts. For more about anachronism and dueling historical narratives about early theologies, see my opening and closing statements in this debate. You don’t have to be a philosopher to debate me, but it will help if you aren’t scared by analytic philosophy, and if you have a healthy respect for honest history and for careful, charitable, non-anachronistic reading of historical works.

Want to try to prove the Trinity apart from the Bible, using reason alone, arguing that God wouldn’t be perfectly loving unless God is multiple Persons? Really, it’s a bad idea, as I explain in this published paper.