HOT TAKE: JAMES WHITE IS NOT THAT AMAZING OF A DEBATOR

Yes, he has plenty of debates where he is clearly several steps ahead of and above the opponent in terms of preparation, skill and cogent points. I can vouch for this, having listened to many of them myself. In his own words, he often prepares for a debate by listening to hours upon hours of his opponent’s material while bicycling. He is very well versed in certain subjects and has had over a hundred public debates IIRC.

But if you notice a pattern, his best performances are where he is arguing from a position of strength – and this is a condition where anyone can look good to a certain extent. For example, where the preponderence of facts are on his side such as debating on the divinity of Christ or what the Bible has to say about homosexuality (together with Michael Brown, both of them cited passage after passage while their opponents almost exclusively appealed to emotion).

Or debates where his opponent is relatively inexperienced – the (in)famous debate with Leighton Flowers on Romans 9, for example. It’s the common perception that White out-exegeted Flowers there, but note that it was Flowers’ first (or one of the first) public debates; you can see how much better Flowers holds his own in his subsequent debates with e.g. Tyler Vela & Sean Cole, Sonny Hernandez & Theodore Zachariades, Joel Webbon, or Gabriel Hughes. (And since I mentioned position of strength, recall how the latter two had to twist themselves into knots avoiding the plain meaning of passages about faith preceding regeneration! The snippets are on my channel.)

Again, White’s most recent debate was against Tim Stratton – with it being the latter’s first debate, the cross examination ended up strongly in White’s favour. Now compare the debate immediately preceding that, on a similar topic but against William Lane Craig – one of the few Christians with more debates under his belt that even James White! – and White couldn’t play semantic tricks at all (nine times dodging the simple question of whether he thinks God is the author of evil!). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics by Richard A. Muller, anyone?😜 Remove the advantage of experience, and White clearly doesn’t fare quite as well.

In fact, I have noticed this tendency of White’s – he will pick out someone way below his public-awareness, professional weight class to use as an attempted punching bag. Names like David Pallman (regarding Bahnsen) and most recently J.P. (a God who is trying His best to save everyone) come to mind.

Or back to the preponderence of facts – the worst I have ever seen White fare is when he debated Robert Spencer on Islam (the only one I’ll directly link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3KHyyp1Y8 ). Spencer had by then written a swathe of meticulously researched books about Islam. During the debate, he cited Islamic jurisprudence to show how orthodox Islamic authorities interpreted their own scriptures. Meanwhile, White was basically arguing that all that vast majority of Muslim experts didn’t know what Islam really teaches! White was clearly straying out of his own field of expertise and blundering into someone else’s.

(In mentioning the above, I mean that it is the worst which White has fared points-wise… The worst he has ACTED in a debate was the even more mocking than usual tone he took together with Jeff Durbin against atheists Greg Clark & Dan Ellis, juvenile behaviour that made even other Calvinists cringe, and the fact that he prefaces the video with ‘Incredible’ says everything about his attitude.)

So in summary, yes, White is an above-average debator. He might even be a great debator. But when the odds are not stacked in his favour, he doesn’t fare nearly as well. That’s all I have to say, really.

NB: I feel that this is exactly the kind of post where if White catches wind of it, his injured pride will drive him to devote a tweet or even a whole rant on The Dividing Line to steamrolling over a yet another amateur with an opinion!