Dear Sir,
I got quite a reaction from someone over my article in the November en in which I said that Islam blasphemously denied the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I was approached at the back of a church, a copy of en was waved at me – which initially I thought was a good sign – and then I was angrily told that I must not write such things, ‘especially at the moment’ (presumably referring to the murders in Paris). I was also told that this person had good Muslim friends. A day later, an agreeable Muslim taxi driver told me he opposed the murders in Paris because the Qur’an said that murdering one person was like murdering humanity.
What do you make of it? Does my positive experience with the Muslim taxi driver show I was wrong? I think not. First, we must distinguish between saying that all Muslims are terrorists (which is clearly not true) and saying that Islam is blasphemous when it denies Jesus’s deity. You do not have to be a terrorist in order to blaspheme. Secondly, let’s think about blasphemy. Blasphemy is offering the most serious dishonour to God. You do not have to be a horrible person to do that, it is – tragically – entirely normal for post-Fall human beings to do just that. And when I deny the deity of Jesus the Son, I do not just dishonour Jesus. I dishonour the Father who sent him. In fact, since God the Father testifies that Jesus is his Son, if I refuse that testimony, I make God a liar. 1 John 5.10 says this explicitly.
This is simply standard Christian theology. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in the 350s, was completely clear that when you deny that Jesus is divine you do not just insult Jesus, you insult his Father. What is more, it is not a good thing to call God a liar: when we believed Satan rather than God in Genesis 3, we necessarily implied that God had lied to us. We were expelled from Eden because of it.
This means that Muslims who accepts the Qur’an’s teaching that Jesus is not the Son are in the most appalling spiritual danger. If I truly care for them, I will tell them the truth, that it is blasphemous to deny the deity of the Son, just as I would try to prevent them from drinking antifreeze thinking it was lemonade. What is truly concerning about the attitude that insists ‘Don’t say that’, is that it treats blasphemy against God as trivial and also does not care enough about Muslims to tell the truth.
Yours faithfully,
