Always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you.
--1 Peter 3:15
I determined not to know anything among you, except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
--1 Cor 2:22
Saul dressed David with his clothing. He put a helmet of brass on his head, and he clad him with a coat of mail.
...
David said to Saul, “I can’t go with these; for I have not tested them.” Then David took them off.
--1 Sam 17:38-39
In this blog I am showing you my way of sharing the Gospel with Muslims. I have selected and designed this material to be easy for you to learn, and yet very effective.
If you learn this, you should be able to give a reasonable defense of your Christian faith against even the toughest Muslims you will encounter.
What motivates my approach is that many Muslims have rejected the Gospel because they have heard many carefully crafted lies, distortions, and half-truths about Christianity. I have spent much time collecting the objections that Muslims have heard, and providing you with answers to these.
There are so many positive reasons to believe the Gospel that by articulating these reasons, and by answering the disinformation Muslims have learned, you should be able to present a persuasive case to just about any Muslim you may encounter.
In contrast, a lot of the other material on I see out there suffers from one or more of these drawbacks:
Too complicated.
Most material I seem to come across is by top apologists, for other top apologists (not for lay people). They quote extensively from the Quran and Hadith (Muslim traditions). My material here has a MUCH more shallow "learning curve", but is still very effective
Too ecumenical or "Interfaith":
There is a lot more to evangelism than just inviting your Muslim friend to a bible study. Unless you are equipped to talk to Muslims, you will just have a useless clash of prejudices, with much heat and noise generated. If the Muslim you invited is well-trained, you can end up worse off in your beliefs, not him.
One "ministry" is disseminating material that is so weak that they may as well be sponsored by the Saudis. I believe they are on the whole counterproductive, on top of the fact that they are consuming donations from believers that could be going to useful causes.
Teaches too much about Islam:
There is much to learn so you can talk to Muslims effectively, but learning about Islam itself is not very helpful. Instead, I show you what Muslims believe about Christianity and I will show you how these beliefs may be grounded in Islam along the way.
Too "Hateful" about Islam:
There are many passages in the Quran and Hadith that most people would find disturbing.
It is certainly possible to learn to quote passages from Quran, and to be able to do this so well that you can handle the Muslims' well-prepared responses. I have seen people do this and get good results. However, it only seems that the training needed to answer Muslims who are well-prepared is not easily available. Even then, you need to overcome the perception that you are being hateful. Some of the earliest material like this that I encountered was by Silas on Answering-Islam.org
Too Negative about Islam:
Similarly, you can study about the problems with the Quran, like contradictions and scientific errors. Keep in mind, however that if your Muslim friend detects that the foundation of his worldview is threatened, he may respond by erecting mental barriers of prejudice and/or just walk away. Winning the argent is not the same as persuasion. Alternatively, you may find that your conversations degenerate into a "tit-for-tat" shouting match that is useless.
My approach:
Leads to friendly, productive and meaningful conversations using what you already know know, but reconfigured to answer Muslims.
Pastors and teachers who live in areas where Muslims are well-represented can incorporate the material found here in their sermons without any mention of Islam in order to better equip their congregation to answer Muslims they encounter.
For example, rather than proclaiming how Quran verses that show the Quran advocates violence, you can teach like this:
"Love your Neighbor as yourself"
--Mark 12:30
Jesus said this is the greatest commandment. Jesus is our greatest prophet and this is the greatest commandment, so nothing can supersede this. Christianity always has the high moral ground.
How did this blog come about?
All the polemics here I have actually heard Muslims actually use. I set out to document these along with effective and simple responses.
Is this effective?
David did not defeat Goliath with the best weapons that were available at the time, but instead he used what he knew. In the same way, you can learn to provide good answers to Muslims using what you already know from Church.
Why does this work?
I would like to point you to a video in which Jay Smith talks to John Gilchrist about his experiences countering the polemics of Ahmed Deedat, in South Africa in the 1980's. Ahmed Deedat is the person who single-hadedly infused into the Muslim culture the set of anti-Christian arguments that are still in use to this day, largely unchanged. It is hard to overstate his influence on Islam. He left many Muslims believing that Christianity could be defeated with the arguments he championed.
However as Gilchrist shows, when the church learned to answer the arguments in that time and place where Deedat taught Muslims, the Muslims soon found that his material was having a counter-producive effect. Christians could answer Deedat's overstated arguments and they gained an avenue to share and discuss the Gospel who brought them up.
Unfortunately, the church everywhere else has come to accept the spread of Islam as inevitable, rather than learning to resist it.
I am inviting you, dear reader to not "roll over and play dead", but answer the Muslim polemics like the church did in South Africa in this video:
John Gilchrist and His debate legacy:
https://youtu.be/12qAj5qdLqs
People who are familiar with books like "Kingdom of the Cults" may have the expectation that to disprove Islam, you need to talk about is wrong with it. As mentioned above, this can be done, but it takes more time to learn to do this than most Christians will realistically be able to do. The other way to way to respond to Islam is to show that Christianity is reasonable. This renders Islam redundant because it sees itself as a correction to Christianity.
Muslims: Armed and Dangerous
Anyone who has been a Muslim for any length of time has been exposed to a lot of anti-Christian polemics that seem convincing. while some of them just keep this in mind, others become full-blown anti-Christian "Missionaries" in their community or with wider influence. Either way, it is the goal of this blog to equip you to turn their polemics into opportunities to share the truth of the Gospel with them and everyone around them, so that in the end the polemics would be dangerous to their own faith.
An apology
Any of the topics covered here could be could fill an entire book by itself, but the purpose of this blog is to be able to give a reasonable defense to the typical Muslim you may encounter.
Usually you don't need to quote more than two or three verses to show your point.
An appeal
From my personal experience, the material in this blog is useful and effective for explaining and defending the gospel. And it does it very simply.
If you know any Christians who live in areas where Muslims are well-represented, then please encourage them to read this book. Anyone going to college will definitely encounter Muslim recruiters, so they need to read this. If you have opportunity to start a Bible study, you can discuss the material in here and watch the videos cited together.
What Bible Translation am I using?
Unless otherwise indicated, I am quoting from the World English Bible, which is not copyrighted.
However, it turns out that in some ways the field of Muslim apologetics is tied to the KJV more than you would expect, because Ahmed Deedat used it. If you find yourself talking to a Sheikh who says he uses the KJV, then he may be a disciple of Deedat.
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