The Confutation of Islam (Part 1)
When this blog first began, I made a conscious decision to emulate Steve Hays @ Triablogue, but write at a more popular level than him. I hadn’t written anything in the Reformed blogosphere in over a decade, & in the past year I have learned (having strongly suspected) that the advent of Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube have led to soundbite theology — unless you’re willing to endure 30+ minutes a pop on YouTube as well as the narcissism that YouTube both reinforces & generates.
That said, I do winnow Instagram from to time, & it’s given me an opportunity to interact with different points of view. I don’t like the character limits, & the comboxes aren’t as user friendly as the ones here & on YouTube.
That said, I would like to respond briefly to a few objections to Christianity that Muslims raise ob social media. Granted, I am probably not dealing with the cream of the crop in terms of media content. You can only say so much or write so much on a platform like Instagram & even moreso on Twitter (X). The video length & character limits on both get the content creator every time, so all a viewer really gets is a snapshot of what is probably a larger argument or presentation.
Objection: Christians believe a false gospel insofar as the root message conveyed in the Torah & the Gospels has been corrupted. To take just one example, the text of the NT has been corrupted so severely that the Yeshua’s original message has been lost over time either in part or in whole.
Answer: Before looking at the textual tradition & the minister a specialist like Wes Huff can address far better than I myself, let’s look at the reasoning behind the argument. In order for this objection to obtain, Objector must have some idea about the original message.
This answer isn’t so much about how the text & message was allegedly “corrupted,” rather this is about what must obtain relative to the Muslim apologists own claim.
In order to properly underwrite the objection you have to have some idea of what the text itself looked like prior to this alleged corruption via the editorial process. It isn’t enough to know what people believed &/o didn’t believe long ago, you need to know & understand what the text itself originally looked like — and — what it meant when it is correctly exegeted & exposited.
Simply pointing at Muslim ecclesiastical tradition &/o the Qu’ran won’t work. That just appeals to a disputed theology & theological framework, a framework that seems to be one part Qu’ran & one or more parts liturgical, biblically unnatural, ecclesiastical philosophy & tradition.
Pay attention to the way Muslims argue their case against homosexuality. They generally make the same argument the majority of Christians do, via looking to the sex/gender of one or more moral agents & concluding that homosexual behavior is immoral & therefore a sin. Their view is as erroneous as the majority of Christian theologians — and given a choice between what the Bible itself teaches when understood correctly via the rules of sound reasoning & biblical hermeneutics, I’d wager that, just as they do when confronted by the Bible correctly understood, they’d choose the Qu’ran & Islamic tradition over the Bible correctly understood — which strikes me us terribly fideistic.
Islam strikes me as **highly** fideistic. The Bible doesn’t teach fideism. Romans 1, Matthew 19, & Acts 17. both exemplify the principles of sound reasoning. For example, in Romans 1:20 the Bible teaches that the teleological purpose of the created order is to testify to God’s existence & attributes, that people suppressed the image & authority of God in favor of their own & did worship & sexual ethics from that foundation. Consequently, if “natural” means “heteronormative,” then that is the result of authorizing the human image for sexual ethics — and — if true, since the text binds worship & sexual ethics together, reverse engineering God’s attributes winds up with God having a body &/o sex/gender characteristics, which the Bible denies are one or more of God’s attributes.
In Matthew 19, Yeshua references the decretal will of God but does not epistemically warrant His theology via God’s decretal will. Instead, He uses Deuteronomy, Malachi, & texts like Jeremiah in order to get at God’s moral will.
Instead of just morally decreeing truth about divorce in order to confute His opponents, He refers to Scripture & then exposits in correctly.
In Acts 17, the Bereans test the words of God’s messengers via Scripture. It’s also worth noting that Antioch was some sort of Christian hub, &, as a matter of Church History, Antioch became known for its hermeneutical methodology, which looks very like modern day grammatical-historical exegesis/exposition.
That isn’t the way fideism operates. Fideism is often a top down affair in which Believer must believe Ecclesiastical Tradition with little or no questioning. Fideism doesn’t explicitly or implicitly pair with what the Antiochene & Berean churches did.
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