David Wood gives an overview of the 6 questions or challenges he suggests are the most common posed by Muslims to Christians. David then added another in a different video.
They are:
- The Bible has been corrupted
- The Trinity makes no sense
- Where did Jesus say, "I am God, worship me"?
- How can God die?
- How can God punish one person for the sins of another person?
- If Jesus died for your sins, can't you sin all you want?
- Why did Jesus pray to God if he is God?
Let's look at them.
But first, a question. As in any contentious discussion, you need information (see Koukl's 'Tactics' and 'Street Smarts') start with a question.
So when claims such as these are made, ask for more information with questions such as 'Why do you think that is the case?' or 'What do you understand or what do you mean by...?
Then I'll set out some notes that may be relevant to your response to the claim.
1. The Bible has been corrupted
Q: 'What do you mean 'corrupted'? OR 'Why do you think it has been corrupted, and by whom?'
Behind this is that Muslims claim the Bible foretold Mohammad as the last prophet, but no information can be found relating to this so the Bible must have been corrupted.
1. You mean like the Quran has been corrupted?
This will light a fuse because Islamic rhetoric is that the Quran has been preserved intact to the dot from all eternity. Of course it has not been with textual evidence of erasures and over-writing in early texts, there being no texts from before { }. The text was said to have been finalized by Uthman in {} who also burned the versions he didn't approve of. Uthman was not a prophet, so what gives? Pieces of the Quran have been eaten by a sheep, and lost. Many who had memorized sections of it were killed in battle. Jay Smith presented in London (Speakers' Corner) 27 different Qurans.
2. How can you say that, the Quran tells us that God protects the integrity of the Torah and the Gospel; how could it be corrupted. He's the same one who tells us that he protects the integrity of the Quran.
Refer to this video by David Wood. and this more recent one.
2. Let's look at what we know of the text of the Bible:
[textual history]
Compared to the text of the Quran.
2. The Trinity makes no sense
Q: What to you understand by 'the Trinity'?
The typical Muslim view is that the 'trinity' is God, Mary and Jesus. This appears to be a collocation of misunderstandings, perhaps from a garbled report on the RC adoration of Mary from early or aberrant Christian sources or confused oral reports.
1. The Trinity makes the best sense of the information in the Bible. The Bible shows the Father, Son and Spirit equally as God in conduct, knowledge, power, and will. The NT shows Yeshua as creator.
2. The Trinity shows God eternally personal and in eternal fellowship of love. God has no need of mankind to be either personal or love or to complete him. He made mankind rather than to serve him, to enjoy fellowship with him for ever.
3. The Trinity is not 'three gods'. But one God in substance in three centres of consciousness of shared purpose and will. This is similar to our own experience of multiplexed signals, or of how a business partnership works at law, or indeed in a pale way as to how a family is: husband and wife of one flesh and the child proceeding from them together as one family of one nature (human) in three persons.
4. The Quran shows a multiplicity in Allah: it speaks of his....{}
3. Where did Jesus say, "I am God, worship me"?
Islam holds out Jesus to be a great prophet, but not divine in any way. Yet the Quran claims that he was sinless. It also claims that Jesus did not die on the cross but that Yahweh made someone else take his place and to look like him. Jesus was 'taken up' to heaven.
Q: Why does Jesus have to use your words to tell ancient Hebrews and 1st century Jews that he is the Creator?
Alternatively, this is an example of the informal fallacy of the 'false dilemma'. That is Jesus is only God if he uses the formula above, or if he doesn't use this formula (a formulation that would be foreign to the ancient Hebrews and the 1st century Jews) he is not 'god'.
But God is not constrained to use your made-up formula to say that he is God. He spoke and acted in first century AD Judaism, so he spoke in terms and lived a pattern that was signally meaningful to them. Islam wasn't even invented then, so how could it understand the Creator God?
Here's how Yeshua showed and said that he was God:
[walk on water/still the storm
I AM
He forgives sin
He instructs demons
I lay down my life, I take it up again. He is in sovereign over life and death, even his own.]
4. How can God die?
Islam's basic problem is that it can't accommodate the Triune nature of God and that if Jesus is God, then there is no other person who is god.
They will say that we claimed God died when Jesus died on the cross. Here is an opportunity to reflect back on their misunderstanding of the Trinity, the nature of God and the nature of the Incarnation.
A related claim by Muslims is that 'anything that is in the creation cannot be God because it would be 'dependent' and that God doesn't enter into specific things within the creation'. However this amounts to 'made up' special pleading.
Yet the Quran contradicts this: S. 27:7-9 had Allah entering the burning bush before Moses. And the hadith Jami at-Tirmidhi 446 "Blessed and exalted is he descending to the earth's heaven every night" has Allah descending to the creation to hear prayers.
Refer to this video by David Wood.
And this one by Sam Shamoun.
1. The only begotten son of God entered human life, the life of his creature, to defeat death in his resurrection and rescue us from it and for his kingdom. Because he was begotten from all eternity, he is of the same nature as God: like your child is of the same nature as you. Only the relationship of Yeshua (Jesus) and God the father is eternal, because God is love.
Refer to John 1:1-5, 14; Philippians 2:6-11;
5. How can God punish one person for the sins of another person?
Because Muslims think that Jesus is 'just' a prophet, they think that we claim somehow his death pays for our sin, and that our sin was 'placed' on him, a mere mortal.
[see Wood on the Sura about this]
6. If Jesus died for your sins, can't you sin all you want?
Islam has a very behavioural and legalistic view of sin, and much of what the Bible calls sin is avoided by Islam's escape clauses (e.g. sexual brutality being 'temporary marriage'). Allah, the fake god of Islam, will overlook your sin if you have done certain things in life: the 7 pillars and/or kissed the black stone or died as a martyr.
There is no concept of new life from the Spirit or repentance as part of our union with Christ.
Q: What do you think it means that Jesus died for our sins and what is the consequence of this for we his followers?
1. In a way yes! Once a person is re-born by the Spirit he or she can sin all they like. But we no longer like to sin, we like to follow our Lord whose Spirit has given us new life. We do sin, but live in the humility of repentance and seek to grow out of the habits of pride, selfishness and greed.
2. We not only have been forgiven our sins, but we are freed from them and from the death that is their wages. So we look forward to the second resurrection and life forever in the Kingdom of God in his New Creation. Sin is not just actions and thoughts, it is life that is turned away from and rejecting Yahweh our creator.
3. Paul in Romans 6 deals with this very question:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? Far from it! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be [c]in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7 for the one who has died is freed from sin...
7. Why did Jesus pray to God if he is God?
This is an attempt to show the incoherence of the trinity, it fails to understand what prayer is and that the trinity is inter-communicative, sharing one will. To adopt the language of partnership law: the members of the trinity are jointly and severally divine.
Q: What do you understand prayer is, and why is Yeshua praying to Yahweh an issue?
And, if you meet a Muslim?
If you meet a Muslim, ask why one should be a Muslim. You might then ask why they would not be Christian and repent and follow Yahweh. They might use the questions above, or that Jesus was a Muslim, a great prophet, and submitted to God, but not the final prophet, who is Mohammad, the greatest man. You can then contrast Jesus and Mo, for instance.
