Help Me Rob Rowe, You're My Only Hope

I've been fairly open with my background as an ex-Christian on this blog. I used to believe in God, and now I don't. I have no ill will towards my former faith or those I used to share it with. It was simply a decision that needed to be made. What is more, there are very few individuals who self-identify as "apologists" who could restore my faith. Their arguments simply don't convince me. Notwithstanding this lack of satisfactory argumentation, the one man who could bring me back to the fold is, bizarrely, the least apologist-like. I am, of course, talking about Rob Rowe from Sentinel Apologetics.

Rob and I have known each other for a good number of years now. I first met him on one of his Sentinel Q&A's in 2020 (I've dug around for that livestream to no avail). This was in the middle of my journey as a Christian and Rob was instrumental in leading me into a more sophisticated way of thinking about my beliefs. His emphasis on academic inquiry substantiating faith is one that I yearned to emulate. I would be lying if I said I didn't still hold that emulation dear. 

I am convinced that Rob is one of the few intellectual powerhouses in modern Christianity that could find a way to bring me back to the faith in a way that wouldn't be purely to satisfy my post-teenage existential angst. Rob has a mature, informed faith—something that I wanted but could never foster. He has no fear of the big objections to the Christian faith—something that I was cursed by and couldn't shake as much as I tried. 

All that being said, I have picked up on some issues with Rob's approach over the years—issues that he will need to one day address so that he can become a true bastion among Christian intellectuals. This post is a well-intentioned open letter to a friend who played a vital role in my growth as a Christian and continues to fuel my passion as an academic and as a person. A little bit of constructive criticism never hurts. 

You're Bloviating!

The first issue in need of resolving is something that has been pointed out by a number of Rob's critics (no less than the eminent Doug from Pinecreek): Rob is a bit too verbose for his own good. I certainly don't mean this in a pejorative sense; Rob can be a lucid communicator and his deep knowledge of historical and scientific data gives him a unique ability to answer anyone's questions. Regardless of whether these answers are persuasive, it shows he’s done his homework. He is friendly, well-mannered, and stays calm in conversations that would make anyone else's blood boil. 

But I have observed many times where Rob, once he gets going, goes down the academic rabbit hole. In July of 2022, Rob joined a livestream on Rebekah Davis' YouTube channel Bread of Life (click here if you wish to watch it). When on the topic of the Genesis flood, Rob's interdisciplinary mind kicked into overdrive and a whole range of different topics where unboxed: anthropology, mythology, abiogenesis, geology, and more. His monologue went on for so long that Rebekah intervened and said "We're not gonna ask Rob any more questions because it's becoming a one-man discussion." She even went so far as to kick him from the stream.

I think the crux of this problem is that the people whom Rob is engaging with in these livestreams simply do not know what he's talking about. Rob has the admirable desire to bring scholarship to the laity, but his complex vocabulary and scholarly jargon tend to put people off. He has previously acknowledged that he is not the best is communicator and that he needs to practice his brevity. I think he just struggles to elucidate his points. 

In a sense, this is not Rob's fault at all. Most of his interlocutors demand the short, bite-sized, Tik-Tok-length responses to questions on the biggest topics human beings are capable of discussing. They don't want to do the heavy lifting that is often required in these debates and sometimes there are no ways to condense these gargantuan topics into casual conversation. Rob cannot be blamed for other people's obstinance.

Nevertheless, there have also been times where a little more elaboration and clarity from Rob would have salvaged conversations that were totally derailed by his lack of explanation. For example, in Rebekah's aforementioned livestream Rob had a conversation with a PhD by the name of Jason Torn who takes issue with the idea of a global flood. Now, for any of us who have watched Rob's videos, we know that Rob holds to a local flood model. He rejects the idea that the entire earth was covered by Noah’s deluge and that it only encompassed the area of what is today the Persian Gulf. His go-to scholar is Jeffrey I. Rose and his volume published by Springer entitled An Introduction to Human Prehistory: The Lost World of the Southern Crescent (2022) where he provides evidence of a local inundation in this region around 12,000 years ago.

However, Rob is unambiguously in the minority of Christians when it comes to the extent of the flood. For most, this is a non-issue: the earth was flooded. Everyone knows the story. Jason knew the story. Thus, after Rob cited Rose and his model for a local flood, Jason opined: "The mass consensus of scientific work does not suggest that there was a global flood!" Gah! Facepalm. Come on Jason! Rob isn't arguing for a global flood! Don't you know that?

Wait a minute. No, that's just it: Jason didn't know that! My irritation at his reply came about purely because I know Rob's position. But there was no way Jason or anyone else in that Streamyard studio could have known! Rob was so eager to present his flood model to a livestream filled with evangelicals and atheists that he forgot to preface his case with any disclaimer that he didn't believe that the flood was global.

Look, as someone who was once labelled a heretic by a youth pastor for believing in humans before Adam and Eve, I have great sympathy for Rob on this. He has made it his life's work to reconcile faith with science and history. But it is also understandable why Jason assumed that Rob was arguing for a global flood. For him, that is the only model. It's what most Christians believe and it’s what the general public believes. It's either a worldwide deluge (with all the incredulous claims of flood geology) or it didn't happen and the Bible is wrong! This dichotomy is obviously not the case, but Rob's views are totally alien to those whom he meets online. In the eyes of both evangelicals and atheists, Rob has sacrificed his orthodoxy to concord his faith with new research that overrules the traditional perspective.

I've told Rob before that he comes from a completely different theological universe than the majority of people he interacts with in these livestreams. It's one of the things I like about him. He's the maverick academic who's unwilling to be bogged down by western-centric dogma and will try to follow the evidence where it leads. 

However, Rob implicitly seems to think that he can present his rather heterodox views and people will just nod their heads and go "Huh, that's interesting." That's just not how these conversations go. The evangelicals become indignant and the atheists remain indifferent. This is certainly not to defend the likes of a certain evangelical who, in utter ignorance and conceit, derided Rob as being "educated beyond his intelligence." Rob just needs to train himself to alter his vocabulary and I think his points will be received far better.

But the Quran Says...

My second issue with Rob's method are his recent forays into discussions with Muslims. For the last few years Rob has become increasingly interested by the Quran and its alleged dependence on earlier Christian and Jewish apocrypha (such as The Life of Adam and Eve and medieval legends about Alexander the Great) as well as the translational and historical issues in the Quran (Abraham and "Ur," the drowning of the Exodus Pharaoh, Mary and Aaron, etc.). These are questions worth discussing and pose some interesting conundrums for the Muslims he engages with.

But it's no secret that these conversations are, ninety percent of the time, total dumpster fires. From the now infamous Clubhouse discussions to livestreams on the top Dawah channels, these interactions are often toxic and infuriating to listen to. The Muslims are resistant and aggressive. It’s as if Rob teleported to Speaker’s Corner in London and got himself featured on an episode of Soco Films.

After Rob interacted with the YouTube apologist Muslim Lantern (which went about as well as you'd expect), I asked him on Discord, "Do you even enjoy interacting with ignoramuses like this?" Rob replied, "Nope, but not for me. The more I talk to these people, the more my heart breaks for them." Does he have a sense of duty to enlighten unlearned souls which keeps him going? Either way, it doesn't seem to be working. It's hard for me not to come to the conclusion that these conversations that Rob has with Muslims are a total waste of his time.

In my opinion, Rob is at his best when he is interacting with critical scholarship. His series entitled A Den of Critics does a great job popularising the traditionalist positions on the authenticity of the Book of Daniel. Rob has also produced three commentaries for Revelation, Daniel, and Mark with many more well on the way. They are filled to the brim with hundreds of pages worth of dazzling illustrations and quotations from scholars. It's brilliant stuff! So when I see him trying to explain his problems with the Quran to Muslims who side-step the issues, disregard the scholarship, and accuse him of Islamophobia (how original), I can't help but feel frustrated.

There was only one time that Rob met his match with a Muslim. This was during one of the early Clubhouse discussions (click here if you wish to watch it), during which, a Muslim by the name of Wesam challenged Rob on his use of James H. Charlesworth and his magisterial work on the Jewish pseudepigrapha. Rob cited Charlesworth as an authority to reinforce his claim that the Quran is literarily dependent on The Life of Adam and Eve, a Jewish legend written in the early centuries C.E. Wesam retorted by pointing out that he could just as easily cite the Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown as an authority to show that ninety percent of scholars agree that the Apostle Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus). Rob retorted by citing the work of Karen Jobes. You can begin to see the issue in the dialogue.

We can go back and forth on authorities all day until someone actually produces a scrap of evidence. And if Rob can cite Charlesworth and Jobes as his authorities, what’s to stop Wesam from citing Brown as his? Rob's appeal to Jobes may be a mis-citation anyways as I am not aware of any work by Jobes on the Pastorals. This does not help Rob's credibility here at all. 

Wesam's further toxic behaviour aside, his response to Rob in this discussion was completely fair. He likes leaning on authorities to make his case. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with this. But once the conversation devolves into back and forth appeals to authority, someone has to break the stalemate eventually. I can only hope that Rob will be the one to do that.

Ultimately, despite his flaws of communication and where I obviously disagree with him, Rob Rowe is undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated apologists I have encountered. If anyone were to reel me back into the faith that I had once put my whole being into, it would be him. I can only hope that he takes my constructive criticism well. 

And to Rob, if you are reading this: thank you for everything you have done. We've had our disagreements in the past, but I hope you can see that both of us are on the same path, just walking alongside each other. 

Sincerely, a veteran of the Sentinel community.