The Rio Ozama runs through the Dominican capital city, and its low-lying banks are home to thousands of metal shanties. Every year the rains cause the Ozama to swell into the crudely constructed shacks, and for weeks the occupants flee until the floodwaters recede, only to return to disease-infested homes. At the time, newborn mortality rates were high as young mothers often could not afford quality healthcare and were forced to watch their babies die. Physicians for Peace stepped in to equip key women in these barrios, whom we called resource mothers, to educate mothers of newborns on disease prevention and hygiene. Thanks to their work, newborn morbidity and mortality rates fell dramatically.
When I came on board, I found that the young mothers were facing an insidious disease that had not been diagnosed: depression. In their cultural circles, depression bore the stigma of being an imagined disease of unstable women. For my project, I trained the resource mothers to detect major depression and postpartum depression in the young mothers they were educating. Many of the resource mothers, especially those who were suffering with depression themselves, were surprised to hear that it was a real disease. They had always been told that depression was just in their heads and that they simply needed to “cheer up”; but no matter how hard they tried, the depression was real.
Clinical depression is an all-encompassing disease and can be harrowing if not diagnosed. These women had tried everything, but they never found relief because they did not know the real problem. When I finally spoke to them about the reality of depression, many of them broke down in tears, relieved to hear that their disease was real and that there was help for them.
I share this story because I believe the spiritual realm has this in common with the physical: If we misdiagnose what ails us, the treatment will not work, and we will continue to suffer. Islam diagnoses the world with ignorance and offers the remedy of sharia, a law to follow. Christianity diagnoses the world with brokenness and offers the remedy of God himself, a relationship with him that leads to heart transformation.
What is it that truly ails mankind, and is there a cure?
From my perspective, the gospel resonates with reality: People are broken in their hearts and souls, and no matter how educated or self-reflective we become, it does not appear that following rules will be enough to address the problem. The problem of mankind is deeper than what we do; it is embedded in who we are. Having spent some time working with the dejected and downtrodden, such as those whose lives have been ravaged by various addictions, I do not think ignorance is their problem. It is brokenness. Having seen families torn apart by abuse or anger, I know the answer appears to lie not in knowledge or following rules but in transformed hearts.
This leads me to a second observation: Mankind seems incapable of saving itself. In our natural selves, we perpetuate cycles of destruction. Our hearts are broken, so we break other hearts. We were abused, so we abuse in return. Our families were fractured, so we leave fractured families in our wake. When loved ones are killed, we kill in revenge. This is the way of humanity, and we need an otherworldly solution—something radical to break these cycles. We need God to save us.
The gospel is that radical solution. It teaches us that God gives us that otherworldly grace, forgiving us no matter what our sins. His love is extravagant: “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God” (Rom. 8:38–39 NIV). He loves us, and we are forgiven. Our souls can rest in our loving Father and his all-embracing grace.
When we realize the depravity of our sins and the depths of our rebellion against God, it exceeds the mind’s capacity to grasp this grace. What could we do to deserve such forgiveness? Nothing at all! He engulfs us with his infinite love and absolute mercy, though we cannot earn it.
It is into that overwhelming flood of grace that our hearts release their poison. When we have been forgiven so much, how can we hold our fellow man accountable for so little? In his love, our hearts are made new. We no longer begrudge, no longer desire revenge. Renewed by the restoration he has brought about in us, we desire to uplift the abused and restore the broken. He transforms our hearts, and we in turn are driven to transform the world around us.
And that leads me to my final point: The gospel is all about God and what God has done. God introduces life into the world, and when we rebel, God saves us. When we sin against God, God pays for our sins. When we sin against one another, God gives the grace of restoration. This message is all about him, not at all about what we can do or have earned for ourselves.
Not only does this free us from the anxiety of having to save ourselves, but it also frees us from the pride that comes with successfully following rules and assuming that we have won our own salvation. Being so unburdened by anxiety and pride, we are free to live for others.
So the gospel accurately diagnoses the problem of humanity, which is our own brokenness. Through his otherworldly, heavenly grace, he transforms us and frees us from our cycles of destruction. Through it all, he is at the center, disentangling us from pride and anxiety, helping us focus on others and not on ourselves. The gospel is not just an answer that works; it is the only answer that will work.
PART 2
TAWHID OR THE TRINITY?
TWO DIFFERENT GODS
CHAPTER 5
THE ISLAMIC INQUISITION
Although many challenge the notion that Islam was spread by the sword, there is no question that the sword featured prominently in Islam’s early history. It was with the sword that Muslim armies swept North Africa and conquered Persia in the years immediately after Muhammad’s death. The caliphs, Muhammad’s successors, were soon after beset with high-profile assassinations: Umar, the second caliph of Islam, was slain by avenging Persians; Uthman, the third caliph of Islam, was besieged and then slaughtered by Muslim rebels; Muhammad’s cousin Ali, the fourth caliph, was also assassinated by dissidents, but not before he had marched against the army of Aisha, Muhammad’s young bride. That was the first Islamic civil war, often called the First Fitna, and on that day ten thousand Muslims killed one another on the field of battle. With the spilling of their blood were sown the first seeds of Shia and Sunni discord. The sword was ever unsheathed in these earliest years of Islam.
Following the age of the Companions of Muhammad, the Umayyad Caliphate governed the Islamic empire for a short ninety years until, through revolt and open war, the Abbasid Muslims took control and established a dynasty that lasted for 750 years. The reign of the seventh Abbasid caliph is fascinating, for it was he who imposed the Mihna, the Islamic Inquisition.
Al-Mamun became caliph in AD 813, after a struggle for power that ended in the beheading of the previous caliph, his brother. From the start, al-Mamun’s rule was tumultuous, his allies few. Although he never embraced Shiism himself, he began ingratiating himself with the Shia. In AD 827, al-Mamun officially declared that Muhammad’s cousin Ali, the paragon of the Shia and their first imam, was the best of all Muhammad’s Companions. Even more striking than the move toward Shia sympathies was his alignment with Shia rationalism: He declared the Quran to be a created book.
This was a colossal proclamation, and to understand its immensity we have to consider the contemporary theological controversies in Islam. In those days, debates about the Quran raged among Muslim theologians over the doctrine of tawhid. Tawhid teaches that Allah is absolutely one; and the conclusion naturally arose among some thinkers that since Allah is absolutely one, he cannot have attributes. Attributes would curb his absolute unity, being things he has as opposed to things he is.
This conclusion of Islamic philosophy can use a little exploration. If God has attributes, he must always have had them, because he is unchanging. That would make those attributes eternal. If those eternal attributes are not a part of his essence, part of who he is, then something other than God existed alongside God from the beginning of time. The existence of
eternal entities apart from Allah’s essence was an affront to Muslim theologians committed to tawhid, the absolute unity of God.
Where this philosophical debate mattered most was on the issue of the Quran. It was understood that the Quran is the Word of God, his attribute of speech. Is the speech of Allah eternal? If so, something apart from Allah, his speech, would be eternal. It would exist in eternity past alongside Allah. Theologians who defended tawhid, like the Jahmiya and the Mutazili, saw this as blasphemous in light of Allah’s absolute unity. It is clear why: It would mean there are two eternal entities, Allah and the Quran.
To establish their case from scripture, the rationalists referred to verses in the Quran that seemed to situate its contents in history. If the Quran refers to events in Muhammad’s life, like the Battle of Badr, how could it be Allah’s eternal speech? More convincingly, they cited 43.2 of the Quran, which says, “We have made it an Arabic Quran.” If the Quran was made, how could it be eternal? Thus the rationalists argued that the Quran was created, and that it taught the doctrine of its own creation. Anyone who disagreed was an enemy of tawhid.
That is why when al-Mamun declared the Quran to be a created book, he justified his proclamation by saying, “He who does not confess that the Quran is created has no belief in tawhid.” Those who believe in the eternality of the Quran, argued al-Mamun, are “the worst of the Muslims” and “the tongue of the devil.” He instituted their inquisition.
Over the course of fifteen years and the reigns of three caliphs, Muslim thinkers in major cities who believed in the eternality of the Quran were interrogated, flogged, and threatened with execution because of their challenge to tawhid. One such man, Ahmad bin Nasr al-Khuzai, was brought before Caliph al-Wathiq, who questioned him about the Quran. When it became clear that Ahmad did not subscribe to its createdness but believed in its eternality, the caliph flew into a rage and personally decapitated him. Ahmad’s head was taken to Baghdad and displayed publicly as a warning to others who might be tempted to make the same mistake.
Although such executions were not common, the victims of the Mihna included eminent theologians such as Ahmad ibn Hanbal, a founder of a major school of Sunni thought. Ultimately, it was the tenth Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil, who abolished the Mihna. Less passionate about his theology, he simply forbade argumentation on the nature of the Quran.
Although the Islamic inquisition thus came to an end, the arguments about the Quran did not. Ultimately, the majority of Muslims espoused a view exactly contrary to the defenders of tawhid. Based on the position of a man named al-Ashari, the average Muslim today believes that the Quran is eternal despite the problem this creates for tawhid. And how did al-Ashari counter the arguments of the rationalists? How can the Quran be eternal without challenging the absolute unity of Allah? His response is famous: bila kayf, or “without how.” In other words, there is no rational resolution; it is just true that the Quran is eternal and this does not contradict tawhid. In this proclamation al-Ashari emphasized revelation and tradition over reason and rationality, and his method has remained dominant among Muslim thinkers ever since.
Over time, and entirely without logical defense, al-Ashari’s position on tawhid became the standard view, changing the history of Islam forever. His position is so firmly entrenched that, ironically, those who take al-Mamun’s position today face persecution. In 1995 a highly respected Egyptian scholar named Nasr Abu Zayd was declared an apostate by sharia courts on account of his belief that the Quran is partially created. His marriage was officially annulled, he received death threats, and he was effectively forced into exile. However, in more tolerant Muslim environments like Turkey, debates about tawhid and the Quran continue unabated.
The Mihna is now but an obscure footnote in the annals of Islamic history. Most Muslims today do not realize that in the eyes of their forerunners, their beliefs about the Quran constitute a flagrant transgression of tawhid. Yet the debates of old echo into the present. If a Muslim is asked how belief in an eternal Quran does not challenge tawhid, they must still respond the way al-Ashari did over a thousand years ago: bila kayf. There is no rational response.
CONFIDENCE IN TAWHID AND SKEPTICISM TOWARD THE TRINITY
In my experience, devout Muslims are very proud of tawhid, their monadic conception of God. By contrast, they often see the Trinity as an indefensible, self-contradictory, polytheistic doctrine, especially since most Christians are unequipped to articulate the Trinity or explain how it is monotheistic. It is because of this relative confidence in tawhid that the Trinity is one of the most common topics of Christian-Muslim dialogue.1
As a practicing Muslim, I simply had no idea of the contradictory forms of tawhid, nor of how volatile intra-Muslim relations had been on account of them. I, and most Muslims I knew, simply thought that Islam’s doctrine of God was clearly defined, unanimously agreed upon, and entirely unproblematic. In other words, we uncritically believed that tawhid was an impervious doctrine.
But the Mihna illustrates that Muslims have significant disagreements over tawhid, and there are multiple views in Islam. We have already explored the two views of tawhid in the Mihna that were contrary enough to cause bloodshed. A third, equally divisive view is that of many Sufis, called wahdat al-wujud. Literally translated “unity of being,” this doctrine teaches that the entire universe is God. It is so offensive to some Muslims that they denounce Sufis as kafir, infidels, under charges of pantheism. By contrast, Sufi Muslims often believe that their knowledge of Allah is the most intimate and refined form of Islam. These are just three of the divergent views on tawhid that have been widely held by devout Muslims throughout Islamic history.
The average Muslim is not aware of this. Perhaps more than any other reason, my ignorance was why I was so confident in lodging criticisms against the Trinity. I would point out that the word Trinity is not found in the Bible and that the doctrine took hundreds of years to iron out. How could a doctrine so central to Christian theology have had such a long and complicated history? But because I had not studied the history of tawhid, I did not know that the exact same criticisms applied to Islam: the word tawhid is not found in the Quran, and the doctrine also took hundreds of years to iron out.
When we take a closer look at these two doctrines, we find that tawhid is similar to the Trinity in some other surprising ways, but as with our comparison of the Islamic and Christian worldviews, the differences are crucial. By the end of this section, we will see that the doctrine of tawhid is ultimately self-defeating, whereas the Trinity is not only coherent but also what makes us truly human.
CHAPTER 6
COMPARING TAWHID AND THE TRINITY
In 2003, while still in the throes of trying to convert my friend David Wood to Islam, I began watching debates with him. Out of the dozens of debates we watched, the Muslim debater for whom I had the most respect was Shabir Ally. He spoke warmly, had strong stage presence, and seemed very conversant with both Islam and Christianity. I had the privilege of watching him debate the following year in my hometown before an audience of nearly a thousand Muslims and Christians. I considered him the best Muslim debater in the world, and truth be told, I was a bit starstruck to see him live.
Had someone told me that I myself would debate him someday, I would never have believed it!
I received an invitation to debate Dr. Ally in the spring of 2015 at Wayne State University in Michigan. After much prayer and deliberation, I decided to agree, and I deferred to Dr. Ally for the topic. When I received his reply, my heart sank: He wanted to debate the Trinity.
Even though I had been a Christian for nine years and a full-time minister for five of those years, I still felt that the doctrine of the Trinity was at best something Christians could explain and defend; it was not a compelling doctrine and certainly not something to draw people’s attention toward. But I had already agreed to the debate and allowed Dr. Ally to set the topic, so I could not back out now. As it seemed to me, I had stumbled into a debate with the bes
t Muslim apologist in the world on the most difficult topic for Christians to defend. What was I to do?
There was nothing I could do except pray and study in earnest! So, joined by good friends and colleagues, I spent many hours with my knees on the ground and many hours more with my nose in the books. It was during that time, through prayer and study, that I discovered how magnificent the Trinity is, and how compelling it is when we trace it throughout Scripture and understand its implications. Studying the doctrine of the Trinity greatly increased my love for God.
It was also during those studies that I first came across the story of the Mihna. When I discovered it, I was shocked. An Islamic inquisition over tawhid? Tawhid had a developmental history? The insights I gained by studying tawhid more carefully have since given me much more confidence in presenting the Trinity to Muslims.
My first discoveries were the similarities between tawhid and the Trinity. Theologically, the debates about the Trinity among Christians unfolded in surprisingly similar ways as the debates about tawhid among Muslims. In order to understand this, it is very important to note that the Quran and Jesus serve as analogues in their respective religions. In the case of Islam, the Quran is the eternal Word of God, and in the case of Christianity, Jesus is the eternal Word of God (John 1:1–14).
This is more than a semantic coincidence. For Muslims, the expression of Allah in the physical world is the Quran, and for Christians, the expression of Yahweh in the physical world is Jesus. That is why each religion teaches their eternality: They are expressions of an eternal God.
But both of these doctrines were hammered into shape on the anvil of intrareligious debate. As we have seen, this posed a significant problem for Islamic theology, because tawhid has traditionally taught that there is no division within Allah. How can the Quran, something that is in some sense separate from Allah, be an eternal expression of Allah without jeopardizing his absolute unity? Bila kayf.
No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity Page 4