“Ok, which is it?” he asked. “Did he make you into the atheist, or do you have the free will to be an atheist?” Praying for Dwayne to believe “is not a contradiction because your entire argument is a non sequitur,” said Schultz. “It doesn’t even follow its own internal logic.”
He explained, “The will of God is something that the people of God discern by not being conformed to this age, but being transformed by the renewing of our mind. And it is something that even the believer on a day to day basis will choose whether or not to submit to it. This is why Paul says to offer up our bodies as living sacrifices because part of knowing the will of God and ultimately following the will of God is to pick up our cross and die daily, again, circling back to the sinful desires of man.” Schultz concluded that prayer is in fact working because Dwayne is being confronted with the truth about God, even though she is rejecting him.
The next day, Dwayne posted a video saying that her grandmother had recently passed away and she hadn’t been eating or sleeping well. What’s more, she had gotten up that morning to an “onslaught” of hateful comments from Christians as a result of Schultz’s response video. Dwayne said that Schultz did not refute her claims, but simply quoted the Bible at her. Since the Bible cannot prove itself, she did not see his response as valid and would not engage with it.
Dwayne called comments she had received from Christians as a result of the video “sickening,” adding “there’s no hate like Christian love.” A couple of days later, however, she posted a video thanking numerous Christians who had since sent her kind comments and private messages apologizing for any hurt she had experienced. “It inspired me,” said Dwayne. “The absolute, unconditional love and support I have gotten from you guys honestly and truly inspired me to be better.”
In an Oct. 11 video explaining why he does response videos, Schultz said that it is the Holy Spirit’s job to change people’s minds and that he does not expect the people he is responding to to agree with what he says. The reason he posts such videos is to fulfill 2 Corinthians 10:4, which says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
Schultz also posts such videos for TikTok users who are wrestling with questions of faith. He said, “For every hundred comments that I got with, ‘Yeah brother, amen, that’s great truth,’ I would get one comment saying, ‘I’ve been really struggling to provide a rebuttal to this type of argument. Thank you.’ And it’s those comments that I’m ultimately after.”
In response to a request for comment from ChurchLeaders, Schultz said that Santos, who asked him to respond to Dwayne’s video, is a friend of his and explained his reasoning for this response video:
My whole platform is based off answering questions for Christians to help better understand the faith, and understanding Jesus deeper. A lot of Christians don’t have either the training/equipping to understand why they believe what they believe to offer up a defense for the hope that’s in them, and that’s the space I primarily operate in on TikTok. My response videos are primarily aimed at the people asking my input, not the original poster. In other words, it’s for the Christian, not the non-Christian…I don’t do response videos to “take down” another creator. Always to educate.
