Fourth Edition
Christians and Muslims Are Relying on Different
Primary Sources and Premises and Assuming That These
Must Be the Same for Both People Groups Is Erroneous
by Mark Mountjoy
Introductory Remarks
A bigger story than the debate between Reverend Green and Ustadh Rasheed can be told. Without knowing anything about the thoroughly Jewish context and background of Christianity (which is itself the eighth sect of Judaism the lone victorious winner out of the Second Jewish Commonwealth) I see that Ustādh Adnan Rashid wishes to enforce and bind upon Christianity a theology of a unipersonal deity which in Islam is the normn and native but in Israelite theology is altother alien and unknown.1 Israelites Scriptures (not the anti-Trinitarian Oral Tradition of the Rabbis) only knows of a multi-personal God—both in the Old and New Testaments.
To dominate the discussion and to be successful Ustādh Rashid must insist (without any Jewish primary source evidence) that God is absolutely one person[ality] and that Jesus is only a prophet. He must also cherry-pick the New Testament and stay focused on maintaining the Qur’ānic theological narrative and enforce this paradigm upon Rev. Green and Christians against all contrary evidence. What evidence?
Ustādh Adnan Rashid’s Evidence
Ustādh Rashid provides a stratagem of ploys to discredit the idea of the Trinity without actually giving all of what the Bible itself says about God the time of day. He offers that nineteen centuries of grappling about Trinitarianism brings no unified definition that can describe what the Trinity is and each Christian has a different explanation or definition to give. So what? The Bible, in many ways, is not a how and why book. In many ways, it is a what book, not a dictionary or a scientific explication—especially about God.2 Many ideas and concepts in it have to be arrived at by combining what was said by one author with what was said by another. It does not change basic facts if people do not have the whole picture and the passage of time and spiritual maturity increases the scope of their understanding of any given topic.
Avoidance and disregard can be a Muslim strategy in discussions simply because they believe the Qur’ān is the final and perfect revelation and the Bible (in their eyes) is corrupted and inferior. Accusations can happen when Muslims falsely assume Christians have changed texts to reflect something about God that the Bible did not originally convey.
But each person needs to remember that the Jews do not avow the Trinity yet their Tanakh still reflects the multi-personal deity that Christians continue to believe, worship, and adore. Why would the Jews be against the Trinity but not also bother to change their Scriptures to reflect absolute monotheism? They did not change anything in Genesis 1:26 and 19:24; they did not alter anything in Isaiah 48:16, and they did not expunge anything in Daniel 7:13, or Zephaniah 2:11.
At issue of Islamic Tawheed is a discussion that takes us far and away from Yahwist basis of echad (אֶחָד) compound oneness and into the distinctly uncharted waters of yachid (יָחִיד) absolute singularity. An extra level of authoritarianism is added to discussions like this whenever the concept of Sahih Muslim (or any number of authorized Islamic commentaries) are used to guide, inform, and intensify discussions that are frankly irrelevant to Christianity.
Over Nineteen Centuries of
Apocalyptics Still Unresolved
It is a fallacy that a controversy [among Christians] about the Bible, the New Testament, or doctrine (in general) is proof positive that Christian ideas or notions are ultimately wrong or false. Not very long after the disappearance of the Second Temple and then following hard on that the total extinction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth civilization Christians have suffered serious apocalyptic confusion and disorientation. This is a indirection that finally crystalized into its basic present-day Amillennial form under the auspices of St. Augustine of Hippo in fifth-century Roman Catholic Algeria. But what does it prove to demonstrate that Amillennialism does not parallel any Bible claims about Jesus’s Second Coming?3 Does it show that the Bible is false? Does it call for Christians to turn away from the Bible and towards the Qur’ān for the real answers?
For argument’s sake, let’s say that Amillennialism’s superficiality really doew prove we should turn away from the Bible and adopt the Qur’ān as a means to weigh and measure what is true or false. What would happen and where would it get us?
A. It would immediately destroy the Jewish salvation timeline established in Daniel chapters 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10-11, and 12. These eight chapters are the backbone of the Bible calendrical timeline and represent the absolute course of Jewish history.
B. It would mess with and destroy the promises that tie Isaiah 53 to Daniel 9:26 before the Second Temple was destroyed. This is no small consequence because it would make such bombshell prophecies essentially meaningless!
C. It would make the coming of John the Baptist at the time that he did and the content of what he said to Israel around the 15th year of Tiberius superfluous and non-sensical. If John's threats haven’t even materialized in good time and within the designated window that only proves that he was a false prophet!
D. An analysis of Christian creedal/confessional eschatology as well as popular concepts of Futurism only proves that the Christian understanding of the Biblical material is wanting. But it, interestingly, does not actually prove the Biblical material is in any way false.
In other words, the Scriptural material is true while the grasp of it leaves plenty to be desired. However, turning to Islam and the Qur’ān can hardly be said to be the solution to all these problems; it isn’t.
E. In a very similar way, Bible theology shows the same complexities reflected in early post-New Testament theology statements, debates, and controversies. Yes, it is true that Justin Martyr and Tertullian believed in the subordination of the Son of God in relation to God the Father, but so did the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15:28) and so did Jesus himself (John 14:28).
The subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the beingness of the Godhead does not destroy the idea of the Trinity or change any relevant facts that the Holy Scriptures make us have to face. Hence, Christians can acknowledge that there is a hierarchy in the Godhead and still affirm that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are included in that inner arrangement. To drive this point home we need only observe what the Hebrew Writer had to say in this regard, that at one and the same time, God was able to address his Son as “God” in Hebrews 1:8. There in Hebrews 1 God (obviously the Father) openly told all the angels to worship the Son and at the very same time, he applauded the Son for creating the universe (Hebrews 1:6 cf. Deuteronomy 32:43). . .
“Rejoice, ye heavens, with him, and let all the angels of God worship him; rejoice ye Gentiles, with his people, and let all the sons of God strengthen themselves in him; for he will avenge the blood of his sons, and he will render vengeance, and recompense justice to his enemies, and will reward them that hate him; and the Lord shall purge the land of his people.”
Now, a discussion like this can be in danger of going nowhere because, in spite of the plethora of Bible evidence a Muslim has no inherent reason or need to honor or admit any attestations that limit or neutralize Islamic qualms against Trinitarian monotheism, but only the texts, chapters, and sayings he or she sees that agree with the Islamic narrative; and this reluctance is understandable and natural.
Christians, on the other hand, have different commitments. For us, the issue of God’s oneness and his threeness are legitimate category topics and are not mutually exclusive from each other. Both are true, but Muslims want to have one but not the other. Christians accept both as true.
F. The Book of Daniel has a continuous historical narrative buttressed by dreams, visions, and revelations from chapter 2 to chapter 12. This bold strand of information represents the flow of history from the Exilic Period to the Bar Kokhba Revolt and the establishment of Christianity, once and for all time.
The Qur’ān has NO long-range Islamic prehistory or steady futuristic prophetic narrative at all—but the Bible does! . Each and every Muslim can observe this fact for him or herself to verify if this is true or not. If this proves to be true it means the Bible is a very different kind of book than the Qur’ān is in a variety of very important ways and it can make no sense for a Muslim to criticize it using Islamic theology as the ultimate criterion.
In other words, Muslims are not really in a position and neither do they have the right to dictate to Christians the validity of the Trinity because the matter is a Biblical one and an intramural issue [between different kinds of Christians]. These issues clearly stand outside of the realm of Islamic textual realities and creedal imperatives. Ustādh Rashid assumes (without justifiable reasons) that the Bible teaches a uni-personal god such as Islam does, but it does not. A uni-personal God is a Qur’ānic concept, not a Biblical one. Saying the Bible espouses a Unitarian view of God does not make it so. Rev. Samuel Green correctly established the premises upon which Christians, over the past almost 20 centuries of reflection, believe in the three identities included in the proper noun “God.”
The Strategy to Avoid Textual Anomalies
Ustādh Rashid’s approach to the subject of the Trinity is characteristic of other anti-Trinitarians: Attack the councils held hundreds of years after the New Testament was written; impugn the issues they grappled with and make it a working assumption that they (then and there) created something brand new and artificial to the New Testament narrative: The Trinity.
He does not deal with the inner structure, claims, or logic of
His approach would be credible and substantive if he took, for example, the Gospel According to John and read what it says about our Lord from John 1:1 all the way to John 20:29. The point of the book (if we take all that it says) is not that Jesus is just a man, but that Jesus was with God in the beginning and Thomas was correct when he confessed Christ to be his Lord and his God.
Observations Instead of Accusations
One woman is mentioned 34 times in the entire Qur’ān: the Virgin Mary. This is an odd feature, not that anything is necessarily wrong with it, but only that it is bizarre that this should be the case when the Bible mentions 93 women. Why is Mary so important in Islam that she is the one and only female named in the entire corpus? But besides being unusual, historical anomalies destroy or delegitimize Jesus’s genealogy and make the Virgin Mary a Levite when she was not (Qur’ān مريم Sura 19:27-28 and مريم Sura 66:12 but see Hebrews 7:14 and Revelation 5:5).
Besides raising red flags about the genealogy of our Lord, variant copies of the Qur’ān were burned only 16 years after the death of Mohammad and these actions deprive us of the ability to know all that Mohammad originally wrote down. We simply do not know what else the Qur’ān said that we could compare or contrast with what the Bible continues to say.
If a percentage of the Qur’ān was destroyed by Uthman at the very beginning of the Islamic era what was lost and who knows what overall clarity was forever forfeited when certain chapters, passages, and suras ended up being eliminated.
At Issue of Trinity vs. Tawheed
Chapter 4, verse 48 of the Qur’ān reads: “God does not forgive the joining of partners with Him: anything less than that He forgives to whoever He will, but anyone who joins partners with God has concocted a tremendous sin.”
“We have no issue if one does not use the word Tawhid. On the other side though, Trinitarians have a major problem on their hand, the concept nor is the word trinity anywhere to be found in the New Testament.”4
Islamic gaslighting is happening here! Notice this: In Genesis 1:26 Moses wrote,
“And God said, Let us make man according to our image and likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the flying creatures of heaven, and over the cattle and all the earth, and over all the reptiles that creep on the earth.”
From the very beginning, God speaks of himself in plural terms. In John 1:1 Jesus is included in the identity of God without any textual critical controversy! But the Bible never ever teaches or advocates that God is absolutely one. Follow these Bible addresses: Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:8, Ephesians 5:31. Muslims and other Unitarians will argue that the use of the plural us and our is only for royal purposes. But this explanation falls flat when we observe that Jesus somehow thinks that he and the Father can dwell in the people of God,
“Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:23).
Unitarians have no satisfactory explanation for why or how Jesus and the Father can indwell believers if the Father is only God and Jesus is only a man and this stormy controversy can almost be summed up in the Bible use of one word over another word: echad v. yachid. If Muslims were correct in their contentions about intra-psychic complexity in the Bible Godhead the Scriptures could have easily used the word yachid, which is an absolute unity; but it nowhere does that!
The Concept of Sahih Muslim
Not only is the Qur'ān used by Muslims to critique Christianity, but Hadith, a litany of secondary authorized Sahih commentaries are utilized, too.5 But we do not agree that the use of these commentaries is a fair means to resolve any dispute like this. Instead, it is an imperious strategy to make Christians blush by directing attention toward contentious discussions about the deity of Jesus in relation to the Father in the third and fourth centuries rather than the textual causes which preceded these quarrelsome councils by generations and centuries.
Sahih Muslim, therefore, is intent on codifying Trinitarianism as illegal and a crime, a crime even punishable by death. The legislative and juridical tendencies of Islam are thoroughly embued with this attitude towards something that is a fundamental rubric and entirely interwoven in the fabric of Christianity. Below are literary examples of this.
The concept of Shirk singles out Christianity as being a prime example of associating partners with God.6
The concept of blasphemy finds the adjective ‘Son of God’ to be objectionable to the degree that it easily falls within this definition.7
Worshiping any other being than God alone is in line with the concept of idolatry.8
The idea that three persons share in the beingness of God (as Christians believe) evokes the concept of polytheism in the minds of the authorities of Islam and everyday Muslims.9 If the concept of the Trinity is objectionable on Qur'ānic terms then any Hadith (Sahih Muslim or otherwise) only double down on those proclivities by elaborating on the issue by hardening the opinion of Muslims in a direction that goes completely away from Biblical ideas which make no such theological category errors or imperatives on either Jews or Christians.
Summary and Conclusion
When approaching apologetics, especially when dealing with comparative religion, it is very important not to compare proverbial apples with oranges. We get nowhere by first assuming that the Bible and the Qur’ān or that the Israelite Yahwist religion and Arabic Islamic religion stand or fall on the same basis, criteria, or measurements. They do not! In fact, Yahweh, the Israelite deity is never once mentioned in the Qur'ān or the Hadiths.10 And, moreover, God shows his three-ness again and again in the Old and New Testament Scriptures. Yet this quality of inner plurality is straightly and strenuously denied in the Qurʾān and in all the Hadiths. That, too, is a very strong hint that we are not even dealing with the same essential monotheism from the word go.
Therefore, we cannot assume what the criteria are and even seriously question any criticism Muslims advance against us but must seek and discover what issues are at the Hebrew roots that are fundamental, central, and indispensable in the foundations of ancient pre-Rabbinic Israelite theology. The Bible can stand on its own two feet and it can be defined in its own right and neither the Qur’ān nor Muslim efforts to impose foreign imperatives on this peculiar Semitic religion will succeed or be valid—even if victory against Biblical ideas is declared in spite of all contrary evidence.
Endnotes
1 Yoel Natan, The Jewish Trinity: When Rabbis Believed In The Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Library of Early Christology)
2 The notion that the Word was with God, was God, and was facing God from the beginning (John 1:1) and that the Holy Spirit is so close to God that he actually examines God’s thoughts (1 Corinthians 2:10) shows how inexplicable, entangled, and intimate the Deity is and at the same time how foreign the God of Israel is to any Islamic conception of divine oneness, which is simple rather than complex.
On the issue of hierarchy within the Godhead see: https://en.wikipedia.org/Subordinationism.
3 See, eg., Matthew 10:23 cf. Matthew 24:29. These and many other ideas in the New Testament do not mesh with Amillennialism at all. But this does not prove that Amillennialism is true and that the Bible is false.
4 https://discover-the-truth.com/2016/11/24/tawhid-tawheed-is-no-where-to-be-found-in-the-quran-or-hadith/.
5 Islamic Hadiths fall into three main categories,
“All acceptable hadiths, therefore, fall into three general categories: ṣaḥīḥ (sound), those with a reliable and uninterrupted chain of transmission and a matn (text) that does not contradict orthodox belief; ḥasan (good), those with an incomplete sanad or with transmitters of questionable authority; ḍaʿīf (weak), those whose matn or transmitters are subject to serious criticism.” Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ilm-al-hadith
The ultimate criterion and authority for the soundness of a Hadith would not be the Bible or the norms of ancient Israelite theology, but the Qur’ān itself.
6 ‘Shirk’ in Islam is the practice of ssociating partners with God. The Islamic polemic against Christian trinitarianism assumes (without any warrant) that the multi-personal controversy originates in fourth century Christianity when, in reality, it extends from the Tanakh and (more specifically) Mosaic, Isaianic, and Danielic motifs (e.g., Genesis 1:26; Isaiah 9:6, and Daniel 7:13-27).
7 Muslims are offended and sometimes angered by the term, concept, and notion of Jesus being the Son of God which Jesus explained as his coming out of God (John 17:5-8).
8 The notion of idolatry, but in the Bible God is able to assume any form that he wants. See, e.g., Exodus 24:10; Isaiah 6:1-5; Ezekiel 1:15-28, and Daniel 7:13-27. When and if God assumes a physical form who are we to say that that form is idolatrious (Philippians 2:1-11)?
9 In the minds of the authorities of Islam and everyday Muslims the normative expectations about the God of the Bible (clearly established in the Tanakh, the Jewish Old Testament) are largely if not altogether unknown, but a genuinely fruitful discussion between Muslims and Christians must begin by recognizing these critical differences, and Muslims (even if they initially disagree with the Tanakh) must openly acknowledge such important events and parameters and concede that these core issues did not originate with Christians and are not interchangeable or compatible between these two great world religions.
10 The name Yahweh is only used in the Bible but not the Qur’ān should alert everyone that there are basic unbrigeable differences between the two holy books and, even the description of Allah as having two right hands and one shin (fact-check here) does not match the Biblical description of God and these differences must make Muslims and Christians seriously question if we are right to assume anything a priori about differences between Christianity and Islam without serious prior research, study, and reflection.
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Why Don’t Christians Believe in Mohammad?
Caption source: muslimmatters.org