(Quick Clip) Islam Critiqued

Yeah, for certain. Absolutely agree with that. How would you apply the presuppositional method to other religious views? Okay, we have the Bible. We presuppose the existence of the triune God. We presuppose the lordship of Jesus Christ overall.

We have our lenses on, which is provided by scripture. Well, what about Muslims that have their worldview glasses that is predicated upon the Quran and what it teaches about their transcendent God and their revelation or other quasi-Christian groups like cults, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses?

They have the Bible too. How would we apply engaging with them in light of what you just said?

Well, first, I think, and that's an excellent question, by the way. First, I think it's important that we learn a little bit about those religions, right? We want to make sure we have some kind of grasp on the religions.

What we're going to do in applying a presuppositional approach is we want to critique. We want to critique the unbeliever's perspective, right? And Islam would be a great example because Islam accepts certain aspects of Christian scripture, right?

The Muslims call Christians and Jews the people of the book. They believe we have a revelation. The problem is the portions of scripture that Muslims and Christians agree on include portions of how we are to test new revelation.

Of course, new revelation from the Christian perspective, if you're asking a Christian to accept the Quran, Muhammad doesn't come around until around 600 years after the time of Christ. 600, 700 years, something like that, after Christ.

And so when we take a look, for example, and someone wants me to accept the Quran, we need to take a look at that, right? Islam instructs people to judge new revelation. The Quran teaches that we are to judge new revelation based upon what came before, specifically referring to the Torah and the gospel.

But again, when discrepancies, right, arise between the Quran and these earlier scriptures, what do we hear? Muslims will claim what the Bible is what? Corrupt, right? Okay. So the problem here is that the Quran and Surah 548 commands people to test new revelation by what came before.

But then when Christians point out conflicts between the Quran and the Bible, what does the Muslim do? He asserts the corruption of the Bible. Now, notice the problem here. If the Bible is corrupted, the command to test new revelation by it becomes meaningless.

Isn't that true?

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah.

Okay. And so we want to judge the Quran by a corrupted standard, which really is illogical. And so Muslims accept the Bible is true when it agrees with the Quran, but they reject the Bible as corrupted when it disagrees.

And so that's kind of very convenient for them, right? This selective acceptance is inconsistent and undermines the reliability of the command in the Quran to test new revelation by previous scripture.

So you see what I just did there? I just did an thumbnail sketch, an internal critique of Islam. I did not adopt the foundation of Islam. I did not act neutrally like, well, let's just look at the bare facts, nor have I assumed autonomy that we could answer the question about Islam independent of divine revelation.

What did I do? I hypothetically granted that Islam were true and showed that if it were true, it actually implodes upon itself. And one of the ways in which it implodes upon itself is that the portions of our scripture that it accepts actually refutes their own position.

And the Quran itself commands us to do something to test it. That's literally impossible to do if the Bible is corrupted, as they tell us. And so those are one of the ways we can apply what we call an internal critique of competing religious perspectives.

And of course, the Muslim is free to do that to the Christian as well. The Muslim could hypothetically grant the truth of the Christian worldview and try to show that there are contradictions within the Christian worldview.

And of course, that's where the task of apologetics comes in. We welcome that. And one of the ways to survive the internal critique done on us is to simply know the Christian faith.