Contending for Christianity

We have full New Testament manuscripts that date to the 4th and 5th centuries. That is hundreds of years before Muhammad was born. And those manuscripts prove that the Bible that we have today is the same as the Bible that Christians had in Muhammad's day, which the Qur'an says Christians should use to judge Muhammad's claims.

I think that is a devastating internal problem for the Muslim worldview. As you engage with unbelievers in your day-to-day life, I'm sure you hear objections. There can't be only one way to God. If God is a God of love, surely He'll forgive me anyway. The Bible?

That can't be trusted. It was written by men. We've dealt with many of those questions this year already on Renewing Your Mind. But what objections do Muslims typically make? This week on Renewing Your Mind, we're doing a short exploration of Islam with James Anderson. I didn't grow up with Muslim friends.

Maybe you didn't either. So I'm finding Dr. Anderson's insights so helpful this week. Today, he considers some of the most common objections you'll hear when you engage with a Muslim about Christianity and the Gospel.

Here's Dr. Anderson. I want to focus on the task of Christian apologetics in connection with Islam and our interactions with Muslims. Despite what it sounds like, apologetics isn't about apologizing for anything.

It's not about saying sorry. Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, meaning a defense, like the defense that someone would give in a court of law when accused of a crime. The Apostle Peter used the word apologia in his first epistle when he wrote that believers need to be ready to make a defense, to make an apologia, to anyone who asks us to give the reason for the hope that we have. And so Christian apologetics means a reasoned defense of the faith, giving reasons to believe that Christianity is true and rational over against false religions and non-Christian world views.

The Apostle Paul engaged in apologetics with both Jews and Gentiles as he preached the Gospel, debating with unbelievers and trying to persuade them of the truth of the Gospel. In fact, Jesus himself engaged in apologetics when he debated with his opponents and exposed their inconsistencies and their false assumptions. In the same way, we are called to engage in the task of Christian apologetics as the opportunity arises. And it arises particularly clearly in the case of Islam, which takes issue at numerous points with what we believe about God, about Jesus, the Bible, sin and salvation. We do apologetics partly out of love for our fellow Christians because we want to protect and strengthen their faith. We do it partly out of love for our Muslim friends because we want them to see why their beliefs about Jesus and the Bible are mistaken and we want to remove obstacles to believe in the good news. But we do it primarily out of love for God and love for truth, believing as we do that all truth comes from God. Now, when it comes to apologetics with Muslims, generally speaking, there are two tasks which I call defense and offense. Just as a football team needs a good defense to stop attacking moves from the other team and also a good offense to score goals or points against the other team, so Christian apologetics needs a good defense and a good offense. In the defense, we are answering objections to the Christian faith. In the offense, we're showing why our opponents' views are mistaken. Now, in one short talk, I can't cover all the objections that Muslims level against the Christian faith, nor can I discuss all of the objections that we could level against the claims of Islam.

So I'm going to have to be quite selective here. I'm going to mention four common Muslim objections and I'll give a brief response to each one. And then I will outline what I think are four very serious problems with the claims of Islam, which show it to be a false religion.

So let's start with the defense, answering objections. Here's the first objection one hears from Muslims. Christians believe in three gods. They're polytheists.

Christians believe in three gods. Now, where do Muslims get this idea from? Well, the Quran. The Quran says this. I already read from Surah 4, verse 171. People of the book, addressing this to Christians, believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of a trinity. Literally, say not three.

Stop this. That is better for you. God is only one God. And then in Surah 5, verse 73. Those people who say that God is the third of three are defying the truth. There is only one God.

So you see how the Quran perpetuates this idea. Elsewhere, the Quran identifies these three gods as Allah, Jesus, and Mary. Now, if you are a Muslim and that's what you think Christians believe, then no wonder you think that Christians are polytheists and idolaters and guilty of the sin of Shirk. But all this is based on a misunderstanding of the doctrine of the trinity. And so, in order to answer this objection, we simply have to help Muslims to understand what Christians really believe about the trinity. We believe that there is only one God, but that one God exists in three distinct persons.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So we don't believe in three gods and we don't join partners with God. Jesus isn't a second God.

He is the same God as God the Father. Here's a second objection that Muslims raise. It's ridiculous and blasphemous to suggest that Allah would have a son. Ridiculous and blasphemous to suggest that Allah would have a son. Well, this arises from another misunderstanding of Christian beliefs. Specifically, a misunderstanding about the nature of divine sonship within the trinity. When Muslims, especially Arabic-speaking ones, when they hear the title Son of God, they typically think of son in biological, procreative terms. They think that Christians believe that Allah somehow procreated with a woman, Mary, and produced a son, Jesus. No wonder they think it's ridiculous and blasphemous.

So would we. But again, our response should be to help Muslims understand that is not what Christians believe or have ever believed. The relationship between God the Father and God the Son is a unique, eternal, spiritual relationship that bears only an analogical relation to human father-son relationships.

Here's a third objection that one hears. Jesus never claimed to be God. The idea that Jesus was divine was a later development. Muslims have been taught that Jesus never claimed divinity for himself, but that was an idea that developed centuries later and was probably forced on the church by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea. That's typically what they've been told. And they'll point to the four gospels in our New Testament, and they'll say, where does Jesus ever say, I am God?

And the answer is, of course, nowhere. We don't find those words on his lips. Now the odd thing is that Muslims are also taught that Christians have corrupted their gospels and have introduced their own aberrant teachings about the deity of Jesus, in which case you might want to ask them, well, why don't we find Jesus saying, I am God, in the gospels? If we've changed the gospels to add the deity of Jesus, why wouldn't we put that in there? But what we really need to explain is that there are other ways of claiming divinity without uttering the words, I am God, which would actually have been utterly confusing to people at that time and quite counterproductive to Jesus's mission. What we do find in the gospels is Jesus claiming to be equal with God in power and authority.

That is, Jesus ascribes to himself divine attributes and divine prerogatives. To put it in Muslim terms, it looks like Jesus in the gospels commits shirk. And the Jews of Jesus's day recognized that because they accused him of blasphemy for proclaiming himself to be equal with God. So we need to encourage Muslims to take a closer, more careful look at what Jesus says.

Here's a fourth objection, a very common objection one hears from Muslims. The Bible has been changed, but the Quran has been proclaimed. The Bible has been changed, but the Quran has been perfectly preserved. The Bible has been changed, but the Quran has been perfectly preserved. Although the Quran affirms earlier scriptures given to Jews and Christians, it also suggests that Jews and Christians have twisted and corrupted their own scriptures. Over time, this became a major component of Muslim polemics, that the Christian scriptures have been corrupted so that they now teach falsehoods about Jesus and contradict the Quran. This is often reinforced by Muslims reading the work of skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman, who argue that the text of the Bible has been changed at points by the scribes who copied it, sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally, so that we now have thousands and thousands and thousands of different versions of the Biblical text. In contrast, Muslims are told the Quran has been perfectly preserved ever since the time of the third caliph, Uthman, and that is part of the proof of its divine origins, that it has been preserved perfectly.

In answer to this objection, we need to point out two things. First, we admit that there are variant manuscripts of the Bible, but when it comes to the New Testament and the Gospels in particular, the vast majority of these variations are utterly trivial, differences of word order and spelling and such like, and none of them affect any major Christian doctrine. It's not as though we have versions of the Gospel that have Jesus crucified and resurrected and versions of the Gospel that don't.

No, all the major teachings are there. Secondly, we have to point out that despite what Muslims have been told, there are variants in the text of the Quran as well. In fact, this is common knowledge among scholars of the Quran that there are variant manuscripts, that it hasn't been transmitted without changes or errors, and in fact, the Quran was subject to a process of development, in the early decades of Islam before it settled on a fixed text.

And it really takes only a matter of minutes to find out these details on the internet. You can go, you can find images of variant Quranic manuscripts. The reality is that both the New Testament and the Quran have been very well preserved. The question is, which is more reliable when it comes to the real Jesus of history? Is it the one that was written within living memory of Jesus' ministry?

Or is it the one that was written six centuries later? Well, let's turn now to the offense side of Christian apologetics. What I want to give you are four major problems with the claims of Islam, that ultimately discredit it. Four major problems that Muslims need to grapple with.

Here's the first. The Quran undermines itself by both affirming and contradicting earlier scriptures. The Quran undermines itself by both affirming and contradicting earlier scriptures. I think this is one of the strongest arguments against Islam, because it exposes a fundamental contradiction in its basic claims. On the one hand, the Quran tells us that Allah sent down earlier books to Jews and Christians, specifically the Torah and the Gospel. What is more, the Quran explicitly directs the people of the book to consult their own scriptures to confirm Muhammad's message. There's a section in Surah 5, which is particularly significant, so I want to read it to you. These are verses 46 through 48 of Surah 5.

This is Allah speaking. We sent Jesus, son of Mary, in their footsteps to confirm the Torah that had been sent before him. We gave him the Gospel with guidance, light, and confirmation of the Torah already revealed, a guide and a lesson for those who take heed of God. So let the followers of the Gospel, that is Christians, let them judge according to the Gospel, that is Christians, let them judge according to what God has sent down in it.

The Gospel. Those who do not judge according to what God has revealed are lawbreakers. We sent to you, that is we sent to Muhammad, the scripture with the truth, confirming the scriptures that came before it, and with final authority over them.

So judge between them according to what God has sent down. So clearly the followers of Jesus are being instructed here to judge Muhammad's claims according to their own scriptures. Later on in that same Surah, we're told that Christians and Jews have a duty to uphold the Torah and the Gospel, which were sent down from Allah. So clearly the Qur'an wants to affirm these earlier scriptures. However, the problem is that the Qur'an also contradicts these earlier scriptures.

In particular, it contradicts some of the major claims of the Gospels about Jesus, that he was the Son of God, that he claimed to be equal with God, and that he was crucified as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. The Qur'an contradicts all of those claims. So on the face of it, that is a huge problem for the Qur'an. However, there's a standard Muslim answer for this problem, and it's this. Christians have corrupted their own scriptures so that they now contain all these false claims about Jesus.

That is what most Muslims have been taught, and that is why they will disappear. Why they will dismiss the Bible when we point them to what it actually says. But this claim about corrupting the Bible introduces more problems than it solves. Because we have to ask, when did this corruption take place?

When did this corruption take place? Did it take place before or after the giving of the Qur'an to Muhammad? From the Muslim perspective, there's really no good answer to that question. On the one hand, if the Gospels were corrupted before Muhammad's time, then the verses that I just quoted from the Qur'an make no sense. Why would the Qur'an direct Christians to judge by the Gospel and to uphold that Gospel if that scripture had already become corrupted? The Qur'an seems to take for granted that the Christian scriptures are reliable. On the other hand, if the Muslim says that the Gospels were corrupted after Muhammad's time, the problem is that we have a wealth of manuscript evidence which utterly refutes that claim.

We have full New Testament manuscripts that date to the fourth and fifth centuries. That is hundreds of years before Muhammad was born. And those manuscripts prove that the Bible has been meticulously preserved through the centuries, and that the Bible that we have today is the same as the Bible that Christians had in Muhammad's day, which the Qur'an says Christians should use to judge Muhammad's claims. I think that is a devastating internal problem for the Muslim worldview.

Here's the second problem, and this will be more brief. The second problem is that the claim that Jesus was not crucified flies in the face of all the historical evidence that we have. The Qur'an notoriously denies the crucifixion of Jesus. Surah 4, verse 157, the Jews said, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of God. They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, though it was made to appear like that to them. They certainly did not kill him. God raised him up to himself. Well, that's what the Qur'an says, but even the most liberal and skeptical of biblical scholars today will affirm the historicity of the resurrection.

Let me give you just one example. This comes from Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who's very critical of the Bible, no friend of Christianity, but he says this in one of his works. One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. And so the challenge for Muslims is this. Why should we believe one verse in a book written in Arabia 600 years after the life of Jesus, rather than multiple sources in the New Testament written within decades of the events and based on eyewitness testimony?

Here's the third problem I want to talk about, a third serious problem for Islam. The Qur'an doesn't merely reject Christian doctrines, it also misrepresents them. It also misrepresents them. The Qur'an doesn't merely reject Christian doctrines, it actually misrepresents them. An obvious example here would be the doctrine of the Trinity, which the Qur'an, to be frank, completely mangles.

It implies that Christians worship three gods, Allah, Mary, and Jesus. The point is this, it's one thing for the Qur'an to contradict Christian beliefs, it's quite another thing for the Qur'an to seriously misrepresent those beliefs. If the Qur'an really were divinely inspired, it should at least accurately represent Christianity, what Christians believe. Shouldn't we expect Allah to know what Christians actually believe about God, about Jesus, about the Trinity?

After all, this is several hundred years after the church councils that formulated the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Here's the last problem, problem number four, and again, it's a very serious one for Muslims, I think. The Qur'an shows very little knowledge of the New Testament. Of the New Testament, the Qur'an shows very little knowledge of the New Testament. This is a remarkable fact about the Qur'an, which is largely overlooked by both Muslims and Christians.

Just compare Christianity and Islam on this point. Think about the New Testament. The apostles claimed that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Testament types and prophecies, and so the New Testament quotes extensively from the Old Testament Scriptures in order to prove that very point. The New Testament writers knew the Old Testament forwards and backwards.

They're quoting from it all the time. The Qur'an claims to be the last in a series of Scriptures sent down by Allah, including the Scriptures given to Jews and Christians. And it claims that those earlier Scriptures confirm what the Qur'an teaches. But whoever wrote the Qur'an had at best a patchy knowledge of the Old Testament, and almost no knowledge, no direct knowledge, of the actual content of the New Testament. There are no recognizable quotations from the Gospels or from the Epistles.

None of the apostles are mentioned by name. As far as the Qur'an is concerned, Paul might never have existed. That is a huge problem if you are claiming that the Qur'an came from God and that it follows in the line of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.

Why is there no awareness of what the New Testament actually teaches? In the end, the best argument against the Qur'an is the Qur'an itself. When you lay the Bible and the Qur'an side-by-side and make a fair evaluation of the credibility of their historical and theological claims, there really is no comparison.

There really is no comparison, and that should give us confidence as we engage in conversation not only with Muslims but with anyone, regardless of their beliefs. Today on Renewing Your Mind, you heard a message from James Anderson and his ten-part series Exploring Islam. You can own this series and better understand Islam when you request your copy with a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. You'll learn more about the Qur'an, Muhammad, and how to share your faith with Muslims. So give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343. This offer ends tomorrow, so respond today. So how do you share your faith with Muslims? Are there particular things that we should be aware of? James Anderson joins us tomorrow to help equip us to navigate those questions here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.