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Review of Peter Barnes and Mohamad Younes, A Conversation Between a Muslim and a Christian, Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2023.

I am glad I have read this book, and would therefore encourage others to read it too.  But I did not enjoy reading it.  I agree wholeheartedly with the basic sentiments expressed by Mohamad Younes and Peter Barnes in the last chapter, ‘Living Together’.  We certainly need to resolve, and make every  effort, to listen to one another, to seek to understand one another even where we disagree, and to avoid causing unnecessary hurt or pain to one another – ‘to agree to differ and resolve to love’.  I say this with all sincerity, and I try to live it out in connection with my own relationship with Muslim friends and neighbours.

But I must share why I didn’t ‘enjoy’ reading it.  The more Mohamad Younes explained his understanding of Islam and the Qur’an – and, I must admit, it made me realise how little I had understood these things before! – the more my mind was driven to Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

From the very beginning of Christianity, the Christian Church has been plagued with heresies.  These almost invariably arise when the (fallen) human mind wants to feed on the ‘fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ and to claim the right to decide for itself what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, what is ‘acceptable’ to believe and what must be rejected as ‘unacceptable’.  The ‘fallen’ human mind cannot bear to submit itself to the absolute authority of God’s revealed truth in his infallible written Word, and so it either ignores, modifies or rejects it in favour of what seems to it to be more ‘rational’ and ‘logical’.  It seems to me that the Qur’an is just another (albeit 7th Century) blatant example of ‘heresy’. 

What disturbed me, and took any ‘enjoyment’ away in my reading of it, was that the Qur’an, if accurately portrayed by Mohamad Younes, outdoes all the heresies that the Early Church had to deal with by far.  It is one thing to reject or ignore the historical Jesus, but it is quite another thing to want to portray him as a good and authentic ‘prophet’ of God while, at the same time, deny (and even ridicule) his dual nature as fully God and fully Man, deny his own persistent personal claim to be the Second Person of the Trinity, and to imply that the Christian Scriptures predict a better and final Prophet after him. That is not just heresy, it is blasphemy! 

Because the Qur’an has the historical advantage of being able to call on 600 years of heretical perversions of God’s truth, and treat these perversions as ‘Christianity’, it has free rein to distort the truth even further.  Because the ‘Prophet’ Mohammed and his followers claim that the Qur’an was miraculously inspired by the spirit world, I found I kept asking myself, “What ‘being’ or ‘entity’ in the spirit world is capable of such distortions of the truth and then might try to masquerade as an ‘Angel of Light’ in the process?”  I couldn’t help but think of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, and Jesus’ words to the Pharisees in John 8:43-45.  I wanted to keep on trying to put the conclusion all this led to out of my mind in the interest of giving the ‘other side’ the benefit of the doubt, but I found it increasingly hard to do so.

Because our fallen mind in Adam gives us an innate desire to be our own arbiters of ‘truth’, and we like being in the ‘Garden’ with Adam and Eve, enjoying the fruit of the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’, it becomes clear as we read ‘A Conversation Between a Muslim and a Christian’ that the only hope for any of us is the miracle of the new birth through God’s grace alone.  I was disturbed by how many times, and with what unashamed dismissiveness, Mohamad Younes, and his namesake, the ‘Prophet’, rejected so much of God’s revealed truth which is the basis of historical Christianity, because it was illogical and irrational by our human standards. 

I’m so glad the Apostle Paul wrote what he wrote to the believers living in Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:18) … because Paul also pointed out that “the message of the cross [although foolishness to those who are perishing] is to us who are being saved … the power of God.”  I am inspired and encouraged by reading ‘A Conversation Between a Muslim and a Christian’ to pray more earnestly and more often that the Sovereign Lord will act miraculously (as he did in my heart over 65 years ago) to bring about the conversion of my Muslim friends and acquaintances, and while I am waiting for these conversions to happen, I will make every effort to keep the Conversation going.  I hope you will read it too, and that it will have the same effect on you.

– Bruce Christian