Defending Christianity: Engaging with Islam Through Apologetics

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 am going to have to be quite selective here. [00:02:46]

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. [00:03:07]

Now where do Muslims get this idea from? Well, the Qur'an. The Qur'an says this. I already read from sura 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 sura 5, verse 73: "Those people who say that God is the third of three are defying the truth. There is only one God." [00:03:41]

So you see how the Qur'an perpetuates this idea. Elsewhere the Qur'an 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. [00:04:13]

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. [00:04:41]

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. [00:05:19]

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. [00:05:57]

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. [00:06:15]

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. The odd thing is that Christians, or rather 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? [00:06:51]

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' mission. What we do find in the Gospels is Jesus claiming to be equal with God in power and authority. [00:07:20]

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' 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. [00:07:59]

Here's a fourth objection, a very common objection one hears from Muslims: "The Bible has been changed, but the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved." The Bible has been changed, but the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved. Although the Qur'an affirms earlier scriptures given to Jews and Christians, it also suggests that Jews and Christians have twisted and corrupted their own scriptures. [00:08:41]

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 Qur'an. This is often reinforced by Muslims reading the work of skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman, who argued 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 of different versions of the biblical text. [00:09:06]