April 2015 – Americans may tend to think of Muslims in relation to extremist acts. But the reality is far more complex. According to Pew Research, 23% of the world’s people belong to Islam, making it the second largest religion in the world. The Muslim population in the U.S. is expected to grow rapidly from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million by 2030. While 84.9% of Muslims are unreached according to joshuaproject.org, millions now live in a historically Christian country. At one time, Muslims received only one missionary for every one million Muslims. Now, people who claim to know Christ surround every Muslim in America. The opportunity for sharing Christ with them has never been greater. 

The difference God makes
But outreach can be frustrated by the misconception that Islam and Christianity, as monotheistic religions, share some understanding on the nature of God. In truth, the vast differences separate them into a Muslim worldview with no room or reason for the gospel, and a Christian worldview that requires the gospel. 

Dr. Mike Edens, professor of theology and Islamic studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, spent 17 years in Cairo, Egypt, as a missionary to Muslims. He talked with AFA Journal about identifying the different starting points for Islamic and Christian theology.  

“Islam’s monotheistic view of  god* is both a bridge and a barrier,” Edens said. “But it isn’t the word that’s important. It’s the character of the person.”

The Muslim believes in a god who is completely unknowable and unreachable. There is no expectation of being with god, even in the afterlife. 

“When a Muslim talks about god, he means an indivisible, singular person without relational reality,” Edens explained. “He is purely transcendent, almost isolated from his creation.”

Thus, there is no intimate or familial relationship with god. The Quran, the holy book of Islam, describes the only possible relationship as that between servant and master. 

 “Muslims do not see god as their father or themselves as the children of god,” Muslim theologian Shabir Akhtar writes. “Men are servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any greater degree of intimacy with their creator.” 

This also means that god does not reveal himself. As is consistent with his nature, he does not make himself known in person, word, or deed. He reveals only his will.  

According to Al-Farqui, a Muslim scholar, “[The Muslim] god does not reveal himself to anyone. Christians talk about the revelation of God Himself – by God and of God – but that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam.” 

The difference of revelation
In turn, this affects how Muslims view their scripture, the Quran. God does not reveal himself, but in the Quran, his will is revealed “as a guide to mankind, also clear signs for guidance and judgment between right and wrong” (Q2:185). Unlike the Bible, the Quran is not meant to reveal god, but to teach man how to obey god. 

As Edens described it, “The purpose of the book is to guide people in worshipping god and to reveal the simple monotheism [of Islam]. In Islam, the problem of humanity is not the need for a savior, it’s not knowing how to worship god.”

The Muslim god provided the Quran to satisfy man’s need to know right behavior. However, while god examines and judges human acts, he grants salvation completely by his own volition, another aspect of his complete transcendence. 

As the fullest and most complete revelation from god, the place of the Quran in Islam is more comparable to the place of Jesus in Christianity than to the Bible.

“In Christianity, Jesus is the Word of God. In Islam, the Quran is the word of god,” Edens explained. “[The Muslim god] dictated exactly the words written down, so it is completely the word of god.”

But nothing in Islam even comes close to comparing with the Incarnation of Jesus. Their god is distant and removed even in the act of revealing the Quran.

“He sent books of revelation down through angels to messengers, but he himself was not involved,” Edens clarified. 

Another thing to understand is the Quran is not in the same literary genre as the Bible. Whereas the Bible is written as a narrative, progressing along a cohesive storyline, the Quran is an episodic collection of revelations received over a period of 23 years. It could seem fragmentary, unclear, or even contradictory if read in the way one would read the Bible. 

The Asbab al-Nuzul of al-Wahidi is a book citing the historical context of the verses of the Quran. It examines the occasion, reasons, or causes of revelation, as described in a prologue to the book: “For most of the Quran, the exact occasions and contexts of revelation were not preserved in the historical record. … Muslims and non-Muslims are often not aware of the occasions of the revelation when they quote verses from the Quran.”

However, even apart from their meaning, the words themselves are seen as sacred and valuable. They are memorized and recited in worship in the original Arabic, exactly as they are believed to have come from god. 

Where faith starts
For these reasons, without first discussing the view of God, it is difficult to advance in conversations about teachings of the Quran and Bible or in obvious contentions such as the Trinity, atonement, or resurrection. It is the nature of the Christian God that makes key Christian doctrines reasonable and even necessary. To make God known, Christians must understand what Muslims do not know about Him, and then introduce Muslims to the Person they had never had the hope of meeting. 

“I want my Muslim friends to know the God I worship, and that He loves them,” Edens said. “It is God who illuminated you and me. It is God who reaches inside Muslim minds and hearts and draws them to the biblical concepts that Islam has built tremendous barriers against.”  

Wisdom for witnessing
Based on his ministry experience, Dr. Mike Edens offers suggestions for sharing faith with Muslims:

• Recognize responsibility: “Christians in America have been given the opportunity to share the truth of Jesus with Muslim neighbors.” 
• Identify yourself: “Don’t identify yourself as a representative of Christendom but as someone who is desperate to let Jesus direct your life.” 
• Make faith important: “For a Muslim, first things are priorities. The first conversation, for a Muslim, is about who you are as a person, what’s most important to you.” 
• Display biblical impact: “They don’t have confidence in our Bible, but when Muslims see its influence in your life, the Bible will receive authority in their minds.”
• Invite Muslims home: “Open your home, where they’ll see you walking with Christ in dependence on God. That’s a stronger witness than doctrinal discussions.” 
• Protect their ministry: “Don’t publicly celebrate Muslim conversions in a way that would endanger their freedom to be ambassadors to their families.”

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More about Islam and outreach:

• i2ministries.org
• frontiers.org
• missionfrontiers.org

New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s Institute for Christian Apologetics hosts Defend the Faith, a Christian apologetics conference each year in January. As associate director of ICA, Edens teaches sessions on Islam. Learn more at nobtsapologetics.com.