Reflections, Part One: Islam and Christianity

With the inflammatory actions of a small, but vehement local church, I think this topic is vitally important. What is the reality of Islam and the beliefs of its practitioners, and how do they compare to Christianity and the words of the Bible? That's what I hope to answer here.

God

From my year spent in Turkey, one thing I learned about Islam is the very high view they have of God. Part of the argument against God being incarnate in Jesus Christ is that God is too holy, too far above mankind to lower Himself to become one of us. But there is a profound irony in this high view of God, which I will expound upon in the section on salvation. On the topic of Jesus unity with God, the Bible says many things, including the words of Christ Himself:

Jesus says:

John 10:30 “I and the Father are one.”

John 14:9 “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

And in Paul's epistle to the Phillipians, we read:

2:5-7 “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

Prayer

The Muslim conception of prayer is vastly different from the Protestant Christian understanding. It is repetition, and must be done in the same way, every time. When I went to the doctor, I chatted with one of the nurses for a while, who asked if I was a Christian. He said it must be hard for me, since there were no churches in the city, so I couldn't go anywhere to pray. As a Protestant, I have no need to go to a church to pray. I can pray anywhere and everywhere I am, and at any time of the day, not only the five times prescribed by Islam.

More importantly, the nature of prayer for us as Christians is actual communication with God. It is the chance to offer worship and thanks to God, and bring my problems or the concerns of life to Him. And though I have never physically heard Him speak, He does answer our prayers, whether through His word, His people, or His provision for the needs we bring to Him.

For examples of what prayer is, we can look to the prayers of Christ Himself, recorded in all four of the Gospels. Any look at these will show that prayer is an intimate, personal encounter with God. And the entirety of the Psalms, long before the incarnation of Christ, are examples that demonstrate the same thing. David, in the Psalms, was sometimes brutally honest with God, even accusing Him of failing to fulfill His promises. And though we can pray the Psalms or the prayers of Christ, and many of us do, those are not our only options. Prayer is a way of drawing close and growing intimate with God, something it does not do in Islam, if I understand it correctly. But of course, how can one be intimate with a God who is so far above and beyond mankind?


Salvation

Here is where the irony of Islam's high view of God, which I alluded to earlier, comes in. Muslims and Christians actually agree that God is great, and beyond human comprehension, even, if things worked the way they should, beyond human access. And yet Islam maintains that simply performing the actions that God revealed through the Quran – profession of faith, fasting, prayer five times a day, charity, and pilgrimage. But if God is so high and great, beyond human access, how can these simple actions impress Him?

Christians say they can't. For us, even the much more elaborate system of laws laid out in the first five books of the Old Testament are not enough. Even a person who kept every detail of these laws to the letter would still deserve damnation. God is too Holy to be impressed by human actions, no matter how well-intentioned. As Paul writes:

Romans 3: 20 “For by the works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”

In fact, he argues that all the laws in the Old Testament do is condemn us the more!

Romans 4:15 “For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.”

We cannot be saved by following the law, but only by the sacrifice of Jesus. In the same section of Romans, Paul argues that it was not Abraham's following the laws of God, but His faith that made Him righteous.

Romans 4:13 “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

That it is only by faith in Christ is further made clear in Paul's letter to the Ephesians:

Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Islam still seeks salvation through faith. It can be said of every religion (including Christianity at times in the lives of individual believers as well as particular types of it), that religion is humanity's attempt to reach God. But only bible-based Christianity argues that instead, God has come to reach man.

Community

Finally, on the topic of community of believers, my experience with Islam remained sadly silent. Certainly, believers form communities whatever their religion, and the doing of good works necessarily involves community. However, I have seen no evidence that the concept of community is inherent in the faith.

It is in Christianity. Ephesians is again an excellent source to point to in examining the role of the community in Christianity. It is full of metaphors of the body of Christ, and even suggests that Jesus' work of salvation was meant to draw us into a community. I think it is clear from the Bible that God's plan of salvation from the beginning of time was to save a people for Himself – in other words, to redeem a community of believers in Him. Jesus summed up the commands of God from the Old Testament in just two:

Matthew 22: 37 “And He said to them, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

I think Islam would have no problem at all with the first one, given their appropriately high view of God. And though they would likely not say the second one is wrong, I know of nothing in their own writings that compares. It seems that, for a Muslim, the most important thing is one's own relationship with God.

But Christianity was never meant to be experienced alone. The work of salvation itself is a community affair.

So, there are similarities in the two religions, particularly in the understanding of how great our God is. But really, I have to argue that Christianity has an even higher view of God's greatness: if only the work of God Himself (incarnate in Christ Jesus) is enough to earn God's favor, while all works of man are “like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), Christians seem to believe that God is even higher and more beyond the access of humanity than Muslims. This only makes the access purchased through Jesus' blood the sweeter and more intimate, allowing prayer to be so much more than mere repetition. And it is an integral part of the Christian experience that we live in a community of believers. That is in fact the purpose of attending church. Not to recite meaningless prayers, nor even to experience the intimate prayer that only Jesus' death and resurrection permit to us. The church is where we go to connect to God through His people. We do that in part through prayer, yes, but also through collective worship, reading of the word, and just plain and simple fellowship – just hanging out with people who are as close as brothers and sisters because of our shared experience with the transforming power of Christ.

This is a fairly good summation of what I have learned from a face to face encounter with Islam. Feel free to comment, and especially is I've gotten something wrong, please correct me!