Adam Francisco:
There was a certain point where I asked—his first name is Omar—how it was that Muslims denied that Jesus was crucified on the cross, when, making the same point you just made, Mike, it’s at least 600 years after the actual events. And we’ve got eyewitness testimony and companions of eyewitnesses who say it happened as a matter of fact or did not happen in a corner, you have Roman authors: Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus. It’s sort of a well-known event in the ancient world. I asked him, “Why is it you would”—because, him being a scholar—I said, “You, as a scholar, how is it you prefer a text that’s 600 years after the events, with no connection to eyewitness testimony or any other historical evidence? Why prefer the Quran over Tacitus—or better yet, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?” And his answer really helped me understand where apologetic conversations can reach a dead end. He said—and he kind of smiled—“You know why. Because I’m a Muslim first and a scholar second.”

Walter Strickland:
Oh, wow.

Adam Francisco:
And wow, I thought I’d just scored points, but he got a standing ovation for that. As we talked about that, I made the point—I don’t remember exactly how it went—but I said, “So you’re allowing your ideological commitments to determine what is the case, rather than letting what is the case tell you what your worldview should be?” And he said, “That’s right.”

Michael Horton:
Hello, and welcome to another edition of White Horse Inn. I’m Mike Horton, with my good friends Bob Hiller, Walter Strickland, Justin Holcomb. And we have a good friend of many years here, Dr. Adam Francisco, who’s Director of Academics for our friends at 1517.org. He’s also a professor in the Concordia University system. It’s great to have you on, Adam.

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, it’s great to be here, Mike.

Michael Horton:
Besides being a terrific Lutheran theologian, Adam is a scholar in Islam, with lots of background in those studies. So we thought it would be a good idea to have him on, since a lot of online discussions today—which is what we’re talking about in this series—are active around Muslim apologetics. So we want to know how we can be ready to give our Muslim neighbors and friends, perhaps even family, a reason for the hope that we have.
So first of all, Adam, could you give us a little bit of Islam 101? The different schools, maybe how they differ, just in a very broad-brush kind of way.

Adam Francisco:
Sure. I’ll try to keep this really brief, but it’s 1,400 years of history, so we’ll see. It starts—every Muslim, whether they’re Sunni, Shia, or like the Sufi (that’s more of the mystical variety that cuts across Sunni and Shia), believes that in the seventh century, a man named Muhammad was called to be a prophet. And he’s seen as the last in a long line of prophets that extends all the way back to Adam. The Quran, in fact, sees Adam and Noah and Abraham and Jesus as prophets of Islam. Jesus’ first miracle in the Quran is speaking from the cradle, where he tells Mary that he’s a prophet of Allah, and so on. So all Muslims believe that. They believe that the Quran—and there’s some variance here across the different sects of Islam—is a perfect transcription of what Muhammad taught.

Some will go so far as to say it’s a, and it’s a perfect copy of a Quran that’s up in heaven, that’s maybe even on golden tablets. That’s a bit of a bad joke. They regard the Quran—Sunnis, which is like 85 to 90% of the Muslim world—as the eternal speech of Allah. And, like a real austere Muslim, while there’s lots of tradition—the example of Muhammad in his biographies and anecdotes concerning Muhammad and what’s called the Hadith—all Muslims agree that the basis for Islamic doctrine is found in the Quran and the Quran alone. The other material helps you interpret the Quran, but it’s the Quran that tells you what you are to believe and how you are to pray and act, generally.
There are five core beliefs in Islam. Everybody’s heard about the five pillars. Those are more like the things you’ve got to do to be a Muslim in good standing: from prayer and giving alms to the poor, making a hajj or a pilgrimage to Mecca, and so on. There are five core beliefs, though. If there’s one thing you could say that all Muslims, if they’re aware of their tradition, will confess. The first is a doctrine of maybe we could call it “unitarian monotheism.” They all use the term “tawhid” to describe that. That is, God is one in essence and one in person. The Quran says in quite a few places he cannot have a partner, he cannot have a son.
The second would be a doctrine of creation that emphasizes the invisible aspects of creation, that there are other creatures out there: angels and jinn, or genies. And they are quite—the genies in particular are quite active in whispering in the ears of all people, enticing them into sin and so on.

The third doctrine and fourth kind of go hand in hand: it’s a doctrine of prophets, that Muhammad is not a new—he didn’t bring a new revelation, he simply reasserts the revelation from prophets in the past. If you read the Quran, there’s about two dozen prophets named, and they all, with one exception, are biblical names: from Adam to Abraham, Moses, and so on. Then, along with that, is that fourth teaching that says some of these prophets brought books or Scripture. So the Quran will refer to the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel. In one place it refers to the Sahu— or the Scrolls of Abraham, which Mormons have, I guess, recovered. Another bad Mormon joke.
But then the fifth one is the—

Justin Holcomb:
Don’t stop with those, please.

Adam Francisco:
They’re kind of inside jokes, though, so I don’t know if—
The fifth is the doctrine of the Day of Judgment: that there will be a final judgment where everybody will be judged on the basis of their good and bad deeds. There’s disagreement over how it all pans out in the end. There are, like, real orthodox Sunni Muslims historically assert a doctrine of—usually called the divine decree, which is a pretty hard determinism that says regardless of what you believe or what you’ve done, Allah has determined it all from the beginning. Whereas others will stress the free will that you might have, and so on. So those are the five core tenets.
Islam grew in the early days, all the way up until around the time of the Protestant Reformation—a little thereafter—mostly by force, by imperial expansion, if you will. I wrote my dissertation on Martin Luther and Islam, and one of the things that was really interesting, in reading histories of the Protestant Reformation, is how—at least before the 20th century—not a whole lot of emphasis is given to the Turks and the distraction they—the role they played in distracting the Pope and the Emperor from dealing with Luther. And what was interesting, though, is seeing how the Turks are banging on the gates of Vienna in 1529 and working to push deeper into Central Europe to overtake Christendom. Never happened, thankfully.

Michael Horton:
But don’t conservative Muslims believe that Jesus was good as far as he went, but he only touched on the inner life and the heart and individual morality, whereas Muhammad brought a kingdom with him? Muhammad was a political figure.

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, the way they’ll usually describe that—so if you ask a Muslim, “Well, if Jesus was a prophet of Allah or a prophet of Islam, how is it that his message is so different than Muhammad’s?”—and the way they’ll usually put it, though there’s a lot more nuance than what I’m going to say, is that all the previous prophets were sent to particular groups of people. The Quran says that Allah has never left himself without a witness to the various tribes and nations and clans and so on. Muhammad universalized the message.

So all the prophets, in their view, taught the same theology, but they taught different ethics and laws that were particular to the culture these folks were found in. And Jesus in particular—the emphasis is that his emphasis was on reforming the inner spiritual life, if you will. When Muhammad comes around, not only does he restore a theology that had been corrupted by the Jews and the Christians, but he brings a law and an ethic that is for all people. Even though it’s in Arabic, it’s for all people.

Walter Strickland:
This is super helpful, Adam. As we think about, you know, Muslim influencers, do you find that there’s a specific kind of Islam that’s being purported by these influencers? Because sometimes if we’re talking about, you know, some forward-facing Christians, we would sort of critique how they are engaging with the Christian faith. So any idiosyncrasies with those sort of influencers that you’re seeing, before we jump into the meat of our discussion?

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, so I failed to address this earlier, but most are going to be from what we could describe as the Sunni position. So the big division in Islam is between Sunni and Shia—85 to 90% Sunni and 10 to 15% Shia. The Sunnis—what makes them distinct is for Sunni is from the Arabic term sunnah, which means tradition. And they believe that the tradition of Islam was established once and for all by Muhammad. And some would go a little further and say the first four caliphs of Islam—so up until 661 AD—and the example they gave, the way they answered questions, their ethic and so on, that seals everything. To deviate away from that is to introduce innovations. Even if you’re asked the question, you know, “Can—because Coca-Cola has, like, a minuscule amount of alcohol”—this was a big question in the FIQ Council in North America, I guess two decades ago—“can Muslims drink Coca-Cola?” And Muhammad never answered that question, nor did the caliphs, and so they had to deliberate. 

For the Shia, they could have answered that question easily, because for them, because Islam is by its essence expansionistic, it’s going to reach cultures that are very different than Muhammad’s culture, and new questions are going to arise. And Islamic clerics are able to discern Allah’s will, whereas in Sunni Islam, questions that are new, that Muhammad or the first four caliphs (the rightly guided caliphs) didn’t answer, those aren’t even questions Muslims would really entertain.

So that Sunni is super traditionalist, such that everything’s done by the 7th century, all you need to know for living. 

The influencers are mostly from a more popular or populist type of Sunnism. Sunnism is, you know, because it’s so popular, there are so many variants of it. And they’re going to all believe that the Quran is Allah’s eternal speech, but they’re going to be a little more flexible, especially those who grew up in the West. They are used to interacting and moving about in a secular culture, because they recognize—and this kind of goes back to the thinking of a guy who was described as the Martin Luther of Islam once. His name’s Tariq Ramadan. He was like the reformer of Islam—he’s going to bring conservative Sunni orthodoxy to the Western world, because there is no, to use their terminology, Dar-al-Islam anymore. There is no Islamic world with a caliph at the center.
So Muslims face a situation that’s kind of like what Muhammad faced before Islam really became a thing. And so every Muslim is a missionary, so to speak, and can use methods and means that are not ideal, that in, you know, decades or centuries past weren’t even a possibility, and use that with liberty, so social media.

Bob Hiller:
Adam, let me ask, why do you think it’s so effective right now in the West? Because it seems like—and maybe I don’t know the, I don’t know any stats or numbers—but, like, Andrew Tate’s really popular with young men. But it does seem like Islam—it’s fascinating to me how much Christianity seems to get dunked on, but Islam is seen as sort of this thoughtful and reverent and important thing for us to take seriously. So what is it about the West, and what is it about Islam, that’s sort of meeting up right now?

Adam Francisco:
I don’t have a definitive answer there. I mean, I’ll take some stabs at it. I think, one, is there’s just this huge vacuum in the West. Secularism, if you will, has left the West spiritually, ethically, theologically void. And Islam asserts itself with confidence. There’s a—I don’t follow social media influencers, but I know, I’m aware of a few of these Muslim debaters. Daniel Hakikachu is—has sort of been making the rounds. He’s made it into my algorithm, at least, and he debated—I think he’s an orthodox—small ‘o’ or a big-O—Orthodox Christian, Andrew Wilson. And the debate was over what’s better for culture or civilization, Islam or Christianity. It’s a very long debate. It’s kind of funny because Daniel Hakikachu—Islam gets skewered—but Daniel Hakikachu, he maintains throughout, and his presence on social media, his presence is that Islam is the most “based”—that is, not “woke”—of the religions. And so, therefore, it’s good for culture because it will restore sort of normative, you know, gender or sexual positions and—Oh, I should say gender roles. Sorry!

Michael Horton:
Here are some questions that may come up because people are listening to some of these social influencers. “The doctrine of the Trinity actually isn’t taught anywhere in the Bible itself. It’s something that people came up with, especially at the time of Constantine.” How do we respond to such people when it’s not obviously just Muslims—it’s Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, all kinds of folks?

Justin Holcomb:
And before you answer that, Adam, can you also, in the Trinity sphere of questions, what do Muslims—most Muslims—think, or what does the Quran say that Christians believe about the Trinity?

Adam Francisco:
Okay, so let me take that one first.

Justin Holcomb:
The reason I’m asking is because I’ve heard that people are like, “Oh yeah, it’s God the Father, Mary, and Jesus,” and—so I’m just kind of curious, what do they think we believe about the Trinity? And then Mike’s Trinity question.

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, well, there’s—so the Quran—there are two places that I can think of right off hand. At the end of—I believe it’s chapter or surah 4 of the Quran—tells the people of the book, in particular Christians, that they should not be excessive in their religion, is the way that wording is. But what that means: don’t go into theological extremes, and do not say “tathleetha,” which is, you could translate that, “Do not confess the Trinity.” So, and it kind of leaves it at that. Then there’s another passage—I believe it’s in the following chapter—where the context, if you will, is the Last Day, and Jesus returns as everyone’s being judged, and Allah points to all the Christians and says to Jesus, “Did you tell these people that they should take you and your mother Mary as lords besides Allah?” It suggests that the Quran’s understanding of the Trinity is this tritheism where Mary replaces the Holy Spirit. But Muslim debaters—and there’s a long history of this—know full well what Christians mean by the Trinity. The typical argument, the point they’ll bring out with respect to this, is the term Trinity is not in the Bible. The doctrine, as Dr. Horton put it, was—they could say, along with that great historian Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code—that there would be no doctrine of the Trinity or the deity of Christ had it not been for the Council of Nicaea or something like that. There is a very long—you can trace it back at least 1,000, maybe 1,200 years—in the Islamic corpus of writings on Christianity, there’s this idea that somewhere between Paul and Emperor Constantine, the religion of Jesus is transformed, and the usual culprit is Paul. They will say something like he blends Jewish monotheism with Greco-Roman polytheism, and out comes a Trinity.

Michael Horton:
Sounds like Adolph von Harnack.

Adam Francisco:
And yes, yeah. Well, they—and what’s interesting in all this, and I don’t want to get too far afield here, is they, at least up until very recently—I haven’t seen it in the last few years—but if you were to go to, like, youtubeislam.com—I haven’t been there in a long time, I’m sure Pastor Hiller is there every morning—if you typed in something like “New Testament” or “Trinity” or something like that, the lectures that you’d—the video clips that would appear right away would be things by Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels and others of their ilk.
And so they’ll say even Christian scholarship is affirming what we Muslims have said all along about Christianity.

So they will accuse Christians of using a term, but also inventing a doctrine that is not found in Scripture. I think the easiest—or maybe not easiest, but the best way—to start talking about that with a Muslim is to acknowledge, “Yes, the term Trinity is not found in the Bible, nor is the Islamic term tawhid.” These are terms that we use because they’re the best terms we’ve got to describe the data in the text.

And then—and you all know this way better than I—there are plenty of pretty clear passages that led Christians to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. We could go over a few of them. They think Matthew 28, when Jesus says to baptize in the name (singular) “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” or promises the Paraclete or the Holy Spirit—or promises he’s going to send the Holy Spirit after petitioning his Father. So, what are you supposed to do with that data? Monotheist, but we see in the Scriptures that there are three persons, and you get the doctrine of the Trinity out of that.

And I found—I don’t want to get into personal anecdotes so much—but in my conversations with Muslims, when you just emphasize that, “Yeah, the term is not something we find in the Bible, it’s just a helpful term to make sense of the data in the Bible,” that it’s kind of mysterious.

Michael Horton:
But not a contradiction, because it’s one in essence and three in persons, rather than one in essence or three in essence and three in persons. Is that where they kind of get hung up when it comes to the Trinity? Well, besides not believing that Jesus is God.

Adam Francisco:
Yeah. Well, they’ll say, “That just doesn’t make sense that you have three persons in one being.”
And it’s interesting. When I get that sort of accusation or objection, it really comes from a place where they will—you’ll see, like Sam Shamoun is a great Christian debater of Islam, in my view. He’s—if you’re going to watch somebody do this on the Internet, he’s the guy to watch.

He will emphasize how Muslims come to the theological table with notions already in mind of what God must look like, and if Christians don’t fit that framework or that Procrustean bed, they cry foul. But they do really believe—like, historically believe—that Christians are essentially tritheists. And it probably—back to your question, Justin—

Justin Holcomb:
I know we have other topics since this will be brief, but when you were talking about the Quran and they talked about the eternal Quran—and I know enough to know about the Ash‘arite-Mu‘tazilite debates, because the Mu‘tazilites said the Quran was created when it was revealed and Ash‘arites said, “No, no, no, the Quran is eternal”—I mean, isn’t there a sense within Islam that there is something else eternal from God? Isn’t there a little problem that they have with their own doctrine of the Quran?

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, so you could—this guy I mentioned earlier, Sam Shamoun, loves getting into that, because if the Quran is uncreated, that kind of gives it a similar status to Allah.

Justin Holcomb:
Like an eternal word, maybe.

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, yeah.

Walter Strickland:
So, Dr. Francisco, I do have another question for you. I mean, as we’re just kind of thinking about the Trinity, you know, as Protestants, we were talking about the second person of the Trinity, of which an essential claim, you know, for Muslim apologists is that Jesus identified himself only as a prophet or a servant of God and not divine. And so, how would they deal with verses that portray Jesus’s divinity, and so on and so forth? There just seems to be a lot to be engaged with there.

Adam Francisco:
So my experience here—and I’ve had a lot of this—is that if they’ve read the New Testament, if they’ve read the Gospels or are somewhat aware of them, they’re going to point out that there are places where Jesus prays to the Father. But also, they’re going to point to places where Jesus says things like, “I and the Father are one.” And they’re usually going to move forward and say, “See, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are incoherent.”
So what Muslims typically don’t understand—maybe they don’t want to understand—is that Christians don’t just confess that Jesus is fully God, but also fully man. So those passages where Jesus is praying to God the Father or crying out to God the Father, “Why have you abandoned me?”—usually the way I’ll respond is, “Well, that’s Jesus’ human nature.” And that will sometimes clarify it.
But for them, like with the doctrine of the Trinity—they’ll say, “But isn’t this contradictory? How can God be, at the same time, man?” And then we’re back to the same thing where Muslims—we’re all guilty of this in some way, right?—but Muslims typically have preconceived notions of the way God must be and how he can act.

I like to emphasize that a lot with Muslims, because they tend to have this posture, this disposition, that they let the revelation—the Quran, in their case—do the talking. But really, when it comes to doing theology and apologetics, they bring in all sorts of philosophical presuppositions before they even let the revelation speak.

Justin Holcomb:
Real quick on the Jesus stuff. And this is like rapid fire—having a Muslim scholar is great. So I’m not intending this to be a huge long question. I’ve read the Quran, and I was surprised at some of the things that were said about Jesus in the Quran, and I think Christians would be surprised. Can you just go through just like a bullet-point list of some of the things the Quran says about Jesus? That he’s—he’s a prophet, obviously, but he’s like the greatest prophet, one of the greatest prophets, the sinless prophet. So just all the really high view of Jesus in the Quran.

Adam Francisco:
Yeah. So he’s born of—the only—of the Virgin Mary. She’s the only female named in the Quran. There are females referred to, but you never get their name. He performs miracles at an early age. He speaks from the cradle—that’s chapter 19, verse 30, in the Quran. But also performs other miracles in his early life, like breathing on clay pigeons—not the kind you shoot with a shotgun, but like little trinkets—and they come to life.

Michael Horton:
Which he got from the Gospel of Thomas, right?

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, well, there’s the Gospel of Thomas, and there are a couple other infancy gospels that were floating around some heretical communities that had established themselves outside—getting into the weeds—but the Byzantine Empire, in the northern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. So yeah, a lot of borrowing in the Quran from other sources.

Justin Holcomb:
Does the Quran refer to Jesus as sinless? Is that accurate, or am I exaggerating?

Adam Francisco:
He’s sinless. Not all the prophets are sinless, but he’s not the only one. Muhammad, of course, in their view, is sinless. Moses, I believe, was sinless, and Abraham. What’s really surprising for the Christian reading the Quran for the first time is in chapter four, around verse 157, 158, you get this statement about Jesus—or, you get Jews boasting that they killed the Messiah, “They did not kill him, nor was he crucified or nor did he die. Instead, he was taken up into heaven.” So you get a denial of—a pretty clear denial of—the crucifixion of Jesus, and this idea—and it’s developed in the Hadith, the traditions that arise outside the Quran—that maybe Judas volunteered to take Jesus’ place and be crucified in his stead after Allah performed, like, a facelift to make him look like Jesus.

Michael Horton:
Don’t they have total contradictions, like it’s Judas, or it’s Sergius, or he ascended spiritually because his soul was the Holy Spirit—he ascended—and clearly getting that from the Gnostic gospels?

Bob Hiller:
Yeah, this all sounds like it’s come from the Gnostic Gospels: Judas the hero, and all of this—

Justin Holcomb:
No, it was from Allah. Stop it, guys!

Michael Horton:
But the contradictions—can you address the whole issue here of, I don’t know what Islam’s position is actually on the history of the life and times of Jesus, because it seems that they have really conflicting views, especially about his whereabouts after the so-called crucifixion.

Adam Francisco:
Yes, and it’s in—within the Quran itself, but also in the interpretation of the Quran, you find lots of contradictions. So, like the Right Reverend Dr. Justin Holcomb put it earlier, one of the things about the Quran is if you—when you read it, you’re not reading a text that’s written chronologically.
It’s just a smattering of stories. So you get—in a couple verses, it’ll be talking about Moses, and then the following verses will talk about the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and then refer to them as brother and sister. And so you get some who will say, “Well, it’s referring to their—they’re both Israelites, or they’re brother and sister in the faith,” and things like that. But, it’s pretty—the natural reading of the text is that they actually—lived at the same time; they’re brother and sister.
So you get lots of contradictions with Jesus.
There’s that passage that says he was not crucified, nor did he die, but he was taken up into heaven. But then there’s another passage that says he dies and rises again. And the way Muslims will deal with some of these differences: some of them will say, “Well, the text is what the text is.” Those who try to reconcile these difficulties or contradictions will say, “Well, the death and resurrection of Jesus is something that’s going to happen at the Last Judgment, when he returns.”

But then, you mentioned, Dr. Horton, that there’s a little book out there published by a group called the Ahmadis. There are a lot of Ahmadi Muslims in America, and they tend to—they’re all heretics within Islam. They had to flee the eastern parts of Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan a hundred years ago because they were being so heavily persecuted. But they’re very pacifistic, but very missionary. They have some real bizarre theology. But they produced a book called Jesus in India that argues that Jesus, when there’s that mix-up on the road to Golgotha and Simon the Cyrene takes up the cross and Jesus slips out of the crowd and heads eastward looking for the lost tribes of Israel and eventually winds up in Kashmir. Allegedly, there’s a tomb in Kashmir somewhere of Jesus, and the—I’m told that the locals, though they know nobody’s buried there, but they love when Westerners come there because they want to see the tomb of Jesus, so they pay these fees to see it, and so on.

Walter Strickland:
So as we’re thinking about the Quran’s testimony to Jesus, am I correct in thinking that the Quran actually affirms scripture in some way? And if so, does that further complicate its testimony to Christ? If the scripture is contradicting what the Quran is saying, even though it’s internally contradictory?

Adam Francisco:
Yeah. So there are several passages in the Quran where people of the book—usually, it seems, the context suggests it’s Jews, but it could have been Christians too—come to the Muslims in Medina when Muhammad’s up there and he’s got total power over this little city, and they have this internal dispute within the Jewish community. Muhammad’s told about this, and Muhammad tells his followers, “Tell them, they’ve got their books, they’ve got the Torah. They should discern what is right and wrong from the Torah.”
So you have lots of little instances like that where Muhammad seems—where the Quran seems—to be confirming that the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel are legitimate authorities, at the very least. So if you ask Muslims today, “Well, if they are, as the Quran suggests, revelations from God, why is it that the teachings contradict the Quran in many places?” And the usual response they’ll give is that the scriptures—the Old and New Testaments—have been corrupted. The term they’ll use is “tahrif.” And there are different ways they’ll describe it. The Quran does not suggest that the texts have been textually corrupted through scribal errors or purposeful additions or takings away. 

The Quran suggests in one place that the Jews and Christians—or people of the book, that’s the Quranic language for both groups—have misinterpreted the text. So the usual example they’ll give is Deuteronomy 18, when Moses says, “Another, a great prophet will come from Israel who will be greater than I,” and for them, that’s a reference not to Jesus but rather to Muhammad.
So that’s an example of the “corruption in interpretation” of the text. 

There are some who will—this is something that develops a couple centuries after the Quran’s put together—they will argue that the text itself has been corrupted and not just by, like, scribal variants; we’re talking things have been taken out or purposely changed or added. A fairly common example is Jesus in chapters 14 and 16 of John saying that he’s going to petition the Father to send the Paraclete to his disciples. Some will go so far as to say, if you go to the Greek New Testament and you change one vowel and one consonant—and I don’t know if it’s “parakletos” or “parakleton,” I can’t remember off the top of my head—but if you change it to the other and translate that Greek into Arabic, what you get is the name Ahmad. And if you go to Quran, chapter 61, verse 6, it has the Prophet Isa, or Jesus, saying, “I give you good news of a prophet who will come after me. His name is Ahmad.” Ahmad is just another way of saying Muhammad.

Michael Horton:
Interesting.

Adam Francisco:
So they believe that there have actually been scribes who have purposely removed references to Muhammad in the text.

Michael Horton:
Does it help to bring up—or is this offensive to bring up to a Muslim, if you’re talking to one—this is anachronistic, obviously, because you’re talking about a 7th-century product that has no textual history that is actually connected to the first century, in contrast with the embarrassment of textual riches that the New Testament enjoys?
And so why should we believe that the text written by Muhammad or transcribed by Muhammad, or whatever, centuries later than any of the living witnesses, should be the standard for a first-century document? Just, if we’re talking about historical transmission—not even talking about, “My Bible can beat your Bible,” but just historical transmission.

Adam Francisco:
Right. So this is the big issue—the oftentimes unspoken issue—in Christian-Muslim apologetic discourse. And I’ll give an, actually, another personal example. Years ago—maybe 20 years ago—I was invited to a mosque in Indiana to have a dialogue with this imam who’s also a professor at the University of Notre Dame. I don’t know if he’s still there or not, but he was a professor of peace studies, of all things, at Notre Dame, but he served as the leader of that mosque. 

It was a friendly exchange where, basically, the instruction was that we were to describe, from our particular tradition—me from the standpoint of Christianity, and him from Islam—what both religions believe about Jesus. And then we had a time where we could ask each other questions. And there was a certain point where I asked—his first name is Omar—how it was that Muslims denied that Jesus was crucified on the cross, making the same point you just made, Mike, that it’s at least 600 years after the actual events, and we’ve got eyewitness testimony, companions of eyewitnesses, who say it happened as a matter of fact or did not happen. In a corner, you have Roman authors: Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus.

It’s sort of a well-known event in the ancient world. I asked him why it is he would—him being a scholar—I said, “You, as a scholar, how is it you prefer a text that’s 600 years after the events, with no connection to eyewitness testimony or any other historical evidence? Why prefer the Quran over Tacitus—or, better yet, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?” And his answer really helped me understand where apologetic conversations can reach a dead end. He said—and he kind of smiled—“You know why. Because I’m a Muslim first and a scholar second.”

Walter Strickland:
Oh, wow.

Adam Francisco:
And I thought I’d just scored points, but he got a standing ovation for that.

Justin Holcomb:
Wow.

Adam Francisco:
As we talked about that, I made the point—I don’t remember exactly how it went—but I said, “So you’re allowing your ideological commitments to determine what is the case, rather than letting what is the case tell you what your worldview should be?” And he said, “That’s right.”

Bob Hiller:
That’s fascinating.

Adam Francisco:
And not to—I mean, I’m not trying to score points with you here, Mike, but I remember you wrote an article in Modern Reformation a long time ago where you made the point how, while assumptions don’t always determine a worldview, they play a heavy role in how a worldview shapes out. And I remember thinking this is where apologetics comes to a dead end: when you’re interacting with somebody who’s ideologically committed to something, dogmatically committed to something, and it’s a position that’s not built on facts, but rather just sort of an assumption.

Michael Horton:
Yeah, I wanted to ask you too, before we get away from Christology, that I was on a plane having a long conversation with a Muslim sitting next to me. Absolutely wonderful, cordial conversation. And he was very interested in having the conversation.
I did kind of go to the evidence for the resurrection and so forth, like I would do with anybody else. And I said, “So what about the historical evidence?” This is like talking to a Mormon, as you’ve already said, Adam. “What about the historical evidence?” And he said something equivalent to “burning in my bosom.” He says, “When you submit to Allah, you know.” But you’re a very intelligent man; are you just dismissing all of these historical arguments? And he just completely bifurcated the historical from the fideistic sort of commitment. I wonder if I should have, instead, and this leads us into the next question—if I should have instead focused on the existential question, “How are you right with God?” and just stayed away from that. As you said, you just get to a dead end there. Maybe I wouldn’t have had a dead end in the conversation if I had started with really kind of cracking that one open: repentance takes the place of someone dying for your sins—how does that work?

Justin Holcomb:
Can I piggyback on that? Because that’s exactly where my other question is. And I just—because I think they dovetail. It seems like Islam is about Muhammad as a prophet revealing the will of God, so you can do what God wants, so you can be made right with God. So, I don’t want to be too simplistic, but I’m going with Mike on: “How are you right with God?” God reveals his will through Muhammad. You learn it, you read it, you know it, you do it—you’re good. 

Christianity says there’s a sin problem, not so much a knowledge problem. And the sin problem influences your knowledge problem. But you don’t so much need to hear the will of God so you can do it; you need to receive the gift of the work of Jesus. Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. Now, I’m imagining, going back to Mike’s question, that that’s a scandal—which maybe it’s illogical, maybe it’s unjust—but the fact is, faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God. Maybe Mike should have proclaimed the gospel instead of argued about philosophy. That’s what I hear Mike saying that he did wrong. But I’m with you, because when you were asking the question, I was thinking I would have done the same exact thing. I would have been like, “What about the text? What about the history?” The apologist in me would have come right out. And I am wondering: “What about the actual gospel?”

Adam Francisco:
Yeah. So, you know, Dr. Montgomery would always say, “Gospel first or evangelism first, apologetic second.” In fact, your conversation with the man on the plane, Mike—I had a guy whose daughter—He was a recent pastor, his daughter converted to Islam. And so he showed up at my office in Fort Wayne, at the seminary, and said—he had told me about his daughter—but he just sort of showed up at the door and said, “Here’s my daughter”—I won’t name her name—”but you need to talk to her,” and just sort of left. And I’m like, “Okay.” 

So we had a two-hour conversation, and I just asked her sort of things—not existential questions, but her story, like, “How is it that you’re now Muslim when you’re raised in a Christian home?” And she was a bright, very bright young girl. And it became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that this was a boyfriend—there was pressure from a boyfriend. They were from near Dearborn, or just outside of Detroit. So we had a good two-hour conversation, and she had memorized things. She had converted because of pressure from the boyfriend, but had kind of intellectually come up with a story how she had done this research, and she was quoting full-on paragraphs from Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, telling me that she reflected on the faith she was raised in, and she learned that the Bible is filled with errors, and so on.
So I did all the fancy—well, I don’t know that it was fancy—but just apologetic work. And I’m thinking, “Eventually I’m going to win this,” or something like that. And it came to a dead end. And then I asked her, “You know enough about Christianity, and you clearly know Islam well, for someone who’s new to the Islamic faith—does it not concern you that in this new faith of yours you have no assurance of salvation?” And her response is another one of these—what do they call these “aha” moments, I guess—where she said, “It doesn’t bother me, because Allah has already determined my fate. My job is to submit to Allah.” And the way Muslims generally talk about this is that all human beings are actually, by nature, Muslim. There’s a primordial covenant that’s established with all of humanity, and so they don’t even talk about conversion; they talk about “reversion” back to your original nature when you embrace Islam. 

So, when they embrace Islam, the goal is not assurance of salvation. They’re really not concerned about that the way Christian, or Christian theology, is concerned with that question. They’re concerned with: What do you do now, in this life? Submission, following the—
I mean, every prayer they say starts with the recitation of the first chapter of the Quran that petitions Allah that they would be able to follow what they call the “sirat al-mustaqim”—a straight path to paradise. Salvation—paradise—is there, but the focus is now.

Justin Holcomb:
What does a Muslim hear, when they hear about the active obedience of Christ, about him submitting to the will on our behalf—does that just sound like—how does that, how do they hear that?

Adam Francisco:
Yeah, for them—there’s one passage in the Quran that says something like, “One cannot die for the sins of another,” and that’s the typical—I don’t remember chapter and verse anymore—but that’s the typical passage they’ll quote as being a passage against any sort of substitutionary atonement or anything like that. So, while they can hear it, it doesn’t—because the Quran says there is no vicarious—Christ has not lived this vicarious life and died in our place or anything like that—it’s just not on the table. It doesn’t fit the framework.

Bob Hiller:
So, Adam, what do they do with the Day of Judgment? Because you said one of the five major teachings is judgment. So is that a hopeful day? Is that just an inevitable day?

Adam Francisco:
The Quran is all over the place on that question. The picture—the way—there’s a lot of agreement that there will be a Day of Judgment, that it will be preceded by a general resurrection: the living and the dead. And all people will be judged on the basis of their good and bad deeds, is kind of what the Quran suggests. But there are a lot of verses that say there will be surprises. There will be people who are non-Muslims who did the best that was in them, so to speak, and actually end up in paradise; and there will be Muslims who are “naughty Jack Muslims,” maybe, and they end up in hellfire. So there’s a determinism there. 

The way it’s sometimes described when they get into the details is, as every individual stands before Allah, there are two scrolls that have been written on since you’ve been born, these recording angels sitting on your shoulders, as they say. One is writing every bad deed you did, and one is writing every good deed that you did.
And they’re unraveled at the end of time; depending on what’s longer is going to largely determine where you end up. Unless, of course, you die as a “shaheed,” or a martyr, in this life—then you get immediate salvation. But then the Quran says that you’re going to be taken up into paradise and there will be these “black-eyed houris,” these perpetual virgins, who are going to be reaching down to you and saying, “Come on up here, you’re going to receive your reward.” But it was such an honor to die in the path of Allah that you petition to go back down and do it all over again.
So the Quranic eschatology—and martyrology, I guess you could describe it—is all over the place in the Quran. But it’s eeire, very sensual, and actually quite dangerous, too, because if you’re some teenage kid with no hope of finding a spouse or whatever, you know, you get this reward,

Walter Strickland:
It’s an easy-out there. It’s interesting—the good and bad deeds versus the determinism versus the martyrdom, and those things come together. That’s something I’ll need to look into more. Thanks.

Michael Horton:
Yeah, that’s really helpful, Adam. Thank you for coming in and helping us understand more about Islam and how to communicate with these wonderful people we encounter, who in many cases are happy to talk to us about it. We have to be ready to give them an answer for the hope that we have. Thanks again.

Adam Francisco:
You’re welcome.