To the Fellowship and Our Muslim Friends
Addressed to the fellowship, to our Muslim friends, and to the spirit yearning to be free in every human heart
Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 15 May 2026
The reading list in our previous essay is diagnostic. It equips the fellowship to engage Islam at the level of texts, doctrines, and history. But the diagnosis is not the witness. The diagnosis tells us what we are dealing with; the witness is what we offer in its place. This postscript is the witness frame that gives the scholarly material its purpose. Without the witness, the reading list is a mere academic exercise; with the witness, it becomes preparation for an encounter that may, by the grace of God, change a life.
I write the postscript in three movements. The first is addressed to the fellowship, laying out the theological framework within which Christian witness to Islam is to be understood. The second is addressed to our Muslim friends, who may eventually read this or hear it spoken — the conversation we hope to have and the questions we offer as the entry point. The third is addressed to the spirit yearning to be free in every human breast — the imago Dei that bears witness to itself, to which the Holy Spirit speaks, and which the gospel calls home.
I. To the Fellowship — The Witness Mission and Its Theological Foundation
The Renaissance Ministries fellowship was formed to deepen our knowledge and understanding of God and His ways as revealed in the Bible, as our guide. We must plant, nourish, and mature that word in our own souls first. The fruit of our own lives will nourish the seeds we plant in the lives of others. We gather Sunday by Sunday to build each other up so that we may experience the fullness of life lived in Christ. In so doing, we become living examples of the promises of faith. A life lived fully in the joy of the Lord is the real life witness that we carry to our friends, family members, acquaintances, neighbors, and strangers. And we must be ready to defend our faith so that we are ready to effectively answer the questions of every soul whom God has placed on our path and within our reach. This is the Great Commission lived locally. The Christian Underground is not a fortress for the saved; it is the base of operation from which the gospel goes out into the surrounding culture, including the increasingly significant Muslim presence in our cities.
Christian witness, however, is not generic. Different unbeliever populations require different witness postures. The witness to a post-Christian secular humanist is not the witness to a Mormon, which is not the witness to a Muslim. The differences are not merely tactical; they reflect a theological fact that different religions have different spirits, motivations, apologetics, and histories, different cultures and assumptions about the nature of God and the purpose of life.
Every religion is animated by a spirit, and the spirit behind a religion is not always the same as the Spirit of the living God.
This claim is not a post-apostolic invention of the Christian tradition. It is Pauline. The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils (1 Cor 10:20). We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Eph 6:12). The apostolic teaching is that the religious landscape is not religiously neutral. Spirits are at work, and not all the spirits are the Holy Spirit. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world (1 John 4:1). The Christian’s task in witness is, in part, to recognize which spirit is at work in the system he is engaging, so that he can offer the right testimony in the right way.
How is the spirit behind a religion discerned? Primarily by examining the revelation content the religion claims and comparing it to the revelation God has actually given in scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ. Where the alleged revelation contradicts the biblical revelation on matters central to the gospel — the nature of God, the person of Christ, the means of salvation, the character of the moral life, the destiny of the human person — the discernment is straightforward: this is not the Holy Spirit. The criterion John gives in 1 John 4:2-3 is whether the spirit confesses Jesus Christ came in the flesh as Lord and Savior. The Spirit who breathed the New Testament will not contradict the New Testament’s central testimony.
The fellowship has done this discernment work regarding Mormonism. When we studied the Mormon claim that Christ’s redemptive act occurred primarily in Gethsemane — that the sweat-as-blood was the atoning sacrifice, that this was revealed to Joseph Smith, and that this revelation continues today through Denver Snuffer and others — we recognized that the revelation differs from the biblical revelation on the very center of Christian salvation. Scripture places the atonement at the cross. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities… and with his stripes we are healed (Isa 53:5). Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God (1 Pet 3:18). Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree (1 Pet 2:24). The Mormon-Gethsemane revelation contradicts the apostolic-cross revelation. The conclusion follows: the spirit that revealed Gethsemane to Smith was not the Spirit that breathed the New Testament. Try the spirits. The same diagnostic, applied to Islam, yields its own conclusions.
II. The Spirit Behind Islam — A Structural Observation
The same diagnostic, applied to Islam, yields a structural observation that may be more important than any particular doctrinal disagreement. The observation is this: Islam, as a revelation system, is mono-vocal at its source in a way that the biblical revelation is not, and the structural mono-vocality has consequences.
The biblical revelation comes through many human authors over approximately fifteen centuries. Moses, the prophets, the wisdom writers, the gospel evangelists, the apostles — each writing in his own genre, his own moment, his own historical context, with the Holy Spirit working through the full plurality of human voices to produce a single canonical witness. The Bible is structurally multivocal even while being singularly authoritative. There is internal dialogue: Job questions; Ecclesiastes laments; Habakkuk argues with God; Paul reasons; James practices. The plurality of voices is part of the design. The reader of the Bible is implicitly trained, by the text itself, to weigh different witnesses, to read context, to reconcile apparent tensions, and to receive truth as something dialogically discovered through the play of multiple authoritative voices speaking from multiple angles.
The Quran, by contrast, is structurally mono-vocal at its source. It is presented as the recitation given to one human prophet by one angelic messenger from one divine voice over approximately twenty-two years. The Muslim reader is not implicitly trained in the play of multiple voices; he is trained to receive a single voice as final. This is reinforced by the classical Sunni doctrine of the Quran’s eternal, uncreated nature — the Quran is not a witness to revelation but the very speech of Allah, eternal, unchanging, untranslatable in any sense that would carry its full authority. The hadith adds a second layer, but a layer subordinate to the Quran and itself transmitted as the sayings of a single prophet through chains of narrators.
The structural consequence of mono-vocal revelation is mono-vocal authority, and the structural consequence of mono-vocal authority is submission as the central religious posture. The very name Islam (al-Islam, الإسلام) means submission — the verbal noun of the Arabic root s-l-m in the form-IV verbal pattern, with the meaning to surrender or to submit. The Muslim (muslim, مسلم) is the one who has submitted. The religion is named for its central act, and that act is the submission of the will to a single voice mediated through a single prophet.
The contrast with Christian discipleship is precise. Christianity also calls the believer to submit — Christ is Lord; the believer takes up the cross; the will yields to the Father. But the submission in Christianity is to a Person who became flesh, walked the earth, conversed with his disciples, addressed each of them by name, healed them, ate with them, washed their feet, died for them, rose for them, and now indwells them by his Spirit. The Christian submission is to a relationship, not to a recitation. The relationship is what makes the submission bearable, joyful, and free. Submission to a transcendent and distant sovereign, without relationship and without indwelling, is a different kind of submission. It is the submission of the slave to the master, not the submission of the son to the Father.
I want to be careful here. The Islamic tradition is not actually as mono-vocal in its reception as its source structure would suggest. There are four major Sunni madhabs that disagree on many matters of jurisprudence; Twelver Shia, Ismaili Shia, and other branches have their own legal traditions; the Sufi tradition cultivates a relational and experiential dimension that classical jurisprudence often does not. Reformist Muslims like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, and others have developed sophisticated readings that contest the classical synthesis. So Islam is plural in its reception even where it is unitary in its source. But the structural pull toward mono-vocal absolutism is real, and it has produced specific historical and contemporary manifestations that the fellowship needs to understand.
The plural reception within Islam is part of why the dialogue with our Muslim friend is worth having. We are not engaging the source structure abstractly; we are engaging a particular human person who has internalized one particular reception of the tradition. That reception may be more or less classical-traditional, more or less reformist, more or less Sufi-inflected. The witness task begins with understanding which reception we are dealing with and proceeds by offering the Christian alternative to whichever spirit has shaped the person before us.
III. To Our Muslim Friend — The Conversation We Hope to Have
If you are a Muslim reading this — perhaps because Michael Sherman or someone like him has shared it with you, or because the Zoom dialogue is being arranged and you wanted to know what we are thinking — I want to address you directly, and with respect.
You are made in the image of God. The Christian conviction is that the Creator of the universe made you in his image (Gen 1:26-27), loves you with a particular love (John 3:16), and desires a personal relationship with you. The conversation we hope to have with you is not a debate to be won; it is an invitation to a relationship offered by the One who made you and who, the Christian believes, has been pursuing you long before either of us thought to arrange a meeting.
Before we have that conversation, we want to listen to you. We do not know which Islam is your Islam. Are you Sunni or Shia, and if Shia, which branch? What madhab do you follow? Where does your local imam stand on the spectrum from Salafi-traditionalist to reformist-modernist? Are you Sufi-inflected, or do you find the Sufi tradition strange? What is your daily relationship with the Quran — do you recite it daily, study its tafsir, memorize portions? What is your relationship with the hadith — do you read Bukhari, or is your tradition shaped more by other collections? Have you been to the Hajj? What did it mean to you? Has Islam given you peace, or do you carry an inner unrest that the prayers have not stilled?
These are not idle questions. They are how we learn who you are. The Christian conviction is that the Holy Spirit deals with each person personally, and we cannot do a useful witness with you until we know what shape your soul has taken under the tradition that formed you.
On the more political-theological questions, we will want to ask, with respect: Do you want to live under Sharia, or do you find American constitutional civil order satisfactory and even good? Do you believe Sharia-based governance would be better for the United States than constitutional democracy? When you read Q 9:5 and Q 9:29, do you receive them as normative for the present moment, or as contextual to seventh-century Arabia? When you think about the relationship between the Meccan and Medinan periods, where do you locate the heart of your tradition — in the patient preaching of the Meccan years, or in the political-military establishment of the Medinan years? Do you believe the doctrine of naskh applies, and if so, in which direction? What do you make of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed by the Sudanese regime for arguing that the Meccan period was the eternal core and the Medinan was contextual?
These are not gotcha questions. They are questions whose answers will tell us where you actually live in the Muslim tradition, so that we can speak to you about Christ in ways that are intelligible to your actual frame.
But beyond the diagnostic questions, we want to ask the deeper comparative questions — the ones that go to the heart of why a person might choose one path or another.
What does Islam give you that you most value? Is it the structure of the five daily prayers and the rhythm of the Islamic calendar? Is it the sense of submission to a will higher than your own? Is it the community of the umma? Is it the assurance of Allah’s law as the ordering principle of life? We want to hear what you cherish, because what you cherish tells us what your soul has found.
And what does Islam ask you to give up — and is the cost worth it? Has Islam asked you to give up the right to question certain doctrines? Has it asked you to give up the conviction that women are equal in dignity and capacity to men in every sphere of life? Has it asked you to give up the freedom to leave the faith if you ever came to believe it untrue (the classical punishment for apostasy in Islamic law remains death)? Has it asked you to give up the assurance that your salvation is secure rather than uncertain (most classical Islamic theology holds that even the most pious Muslim cannot be assured of paradise until the Day of Judgment)? Has it asked you to give up a personal relationship with God in favor of a posture of submission to a sovereign who remains, in his essence, transcendent and unknowable?
Is the Golden Rule important to you? Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets (Matt 7:12). Does your tradition affirm this — fully, for all persons, regardless of religion? Or does your tradition draw distinctions in how Muslims and non-Muslims are to be treated that you, in your own soul, find difficult to defend?
Is free will important to you? Do you experience yourself as a free moral agent who can choose between good and evil, or do you experience yourself as the executor of a divine decree in which your choices were already determined? The classical Sunni doctrine of qadar (divine decree) presses heavily toward the second; the Christian doctrine of free agency under grace makes the first central. Which of these matches your own deepest experience of yourself?
And finally, the question we most want you to consider: Does the spirit of Islam call you to the kind of person you most want to become? Or do you find, in your deepest self, that there is a yearning for something that Islam, at its core, does not offer? For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17). The Christian conviction is that the human soul was made for liberty in relationship with the living God, and that any system which substitutes submission for relationship leaves the soul fundamentally hungry, however orderly it makes the surface of the life.
IV. What Christianity Offers — The Liberty in Christ
The Christianity that the fellowship offers our Muslim friend is not a competing system of law and submission. It is the Lordship of Jesus Christ exercised through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in a freely loved and freely loving relationship with the Triune God.
The center of the Christian offer is the indwelling Spirit. When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he promised: I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth (John 14:16-17). And again, more astonishingly: If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him (John 14:23). The Christian is not someone who has read about God; the Christian is someone in whom God has come to dwell. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (1 Cor 3:16). This is the difference at the heart of everything. Submission to a transcendent and distant sovereign is one religious posture; indwelling by the Spirit of the living God who is your Father, your Savior, and your constant Companion is a fundamentally different relationship to the divine.
The liberty that flows from this indwelling is not the liberty of moral chaos. It is the liberty of the Son of God in his Father’s house, where the rules are simple and good, and the Father’s love is constant, and the Son’s flourishing is the Father’s joy. The principle I want to commend to you in summary form, dear Muslim friend, is this:
Thomas – My Theological Summary: All that is not prohibited is allowed; and all that is allowed has its perfect time; and the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts, informing us of the next moment of greatest joy, greatest meaning, and greatest service to God, to our neighbor, and to our own becoming.
This is the formula of Christian liberty. Let me unpack each clause.
“All that is not prohibited is allowed.” The Christian life is not a list of permissions to be earned. It is a vast field of God-given possibilities within which the believer walks freely, bounded only by what God has explicitly forbidden as harmful to the soul, to the neighbor, or to the witness. The Pauline principle: All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1 Cor 6:12; also 1 Cor 10:23). The Christian asks not first “is this permitted?” but “is this good?” — and the asking is itself an act of liberty.
“And all that is allowed has its perfect time.” Not every good thing is to be done in every moment. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes laid this out plainly: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven (Eccl 3:1). Christian liberty includes the wisdom of timing — the recognition that life is composed of moments, each calling for the response that is fitted to it. The believer learns to read the moment and to offer the response the moment requires.
“And the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts, informing us of the next moment of greatest joy, meaning, and service.” The fitting response is not derived by consulting an external code. It is given by the Spirit who indwells the believer and who speaks to the heart with a quiet and unmistakable voice. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God (Rom 8:14). This is the practical content of Christian indwelling. The believer learns, over years of walking, to hear the Spirit’s voice and to follow it. The hearing is the relationship; the following is the discipleship.
“To God, to our neighbor, and to our own becoming.” The Spirit’s leading is not arbitrary. It is always toward the integration of the three loves the Great Commandment names: love of God with the whole self — heart, soul, mind, strength — love of neighbor as oneself, and a proper love of self as a being made in God’s image and called to flourish in the relationship the Creator intended. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind — and thy neighbour as thyself (Matt 22:37-39). The Christian is not asked to choose between God and neighbor and self; the Christian is shown, by moment-by-moment leading of the indwelling Spirit, how the three loves integrate into a single life.
This is Christian liberty. It is not lawlessness. It is the higher law of love, written by the Spirit on the believer’s heart (Jer 31:33; Heb 8:10), lived out in moment-by-moment communion with the indwelling presence of the living God.
The cross of Jesus Christ is what makes this liberty possible. The cross is, in one sense, the satisfaction of divine justice — He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Cor 5:21). The judgment that sin deserves was poured out upon the willing Substitute, and the believer who is in Christ is freed from the condemnation that would otherwise be his. In another sense, the cross is the defeat of the powers — Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it (Col 2:15). The demonic dominion over the human soul, by which the soul is held in bondage to fear, to sin, and to false religion, was broken at the cross. The believer is freed simultaneously from divine judgment (the wrath satisfied at Calvary) and from demonic dominion (the chains broken at Calvary). The two redemptions are not in tension; they are the two faces of the one act by which God in Christ rescued his children from every power that had bound them.
This is what Christianity offers. Not a better law. A new relationship.
V. To the Spirit Yearning to Be Free in Every Heart
There is one more address to make, and it is the most important one. It is addressed not to the fellowship, not to the Muslim teacher, not to any particular reader — it is addressed to the spirit yearning to be free in every human breast.
If you are reading this and something in your soul is stirring — a recognition, a longing, an unease, an attraction, a wish that something here were true — I want you to know that the stirring is itself a working of the Holy Spirit upon your heart, even now. The Spirit moves over the deep as he moved at the creation, and where he moves, light is called out of darkness. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (Rev 3:20). The Lord Jesus, who was crucified outside Jerusalem in approximately the year 30 of the Christian era, and who rose from the dead three days later in a real body that ate fish and was touched by his disciples, is at this moment knocking at the door of your heart. The fact that you are reading these words and feeling something is the knocking. The knocking is real. The Knocker is real.
You do not have to leave your name behind, or your family, or your culture, or your love for what is beautiful in your tradition. The truth that frees does not destroy what was honest in what came before. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32). What it frees is the part of you that has been trying to live under a yoke too heavy to bear — the law that condemns without enabling, the submission that requires without companioning, the sovereign who commands without indwelling. The Christian gospel offers you, in place of that yoke, the easy yoke and light burden of Jesus: Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matt 11:29-30).
The invitation is simple and serious. That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved (Rom 10:9). The confession is the handle of the door. The belief is the acceptance of the invitation, a heartfelt acceptance of the truth of Christ’s claim of redemption, and an indwelling is the door opening from the inside. When the door opens, the One who has been knocking comes in.
And he does not come alone. He brings the Father, in the union of indwelling that he described in John 14:23. And he sends the Holy Spirit to make his home in you — to teach you, to guide you, to comfort you, to convict you when conviction is needed, to console you when consolation is needed, and to assure you, in the depth of your soul, that you are loved with the love of the One who made the stars. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Rom 8:16). The witness is internal. The witness is unmistakable. The witness is the assurance that no system of submission can give, because the witness is given by the indwelling Person of God himself, Abba, Father (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).
I do not know if you, the reader, will receive this invitation. The Holy Spirit knows; the Father knows; the Son knows. But I will pray for you, as the fellowship will pray for you, and as the Lord himself is praying for you at the right hand of the Father (Rom 8:34; Heb 7:25). The conversation with Michael’s friend, if it happens, is one moment in a much longer conversation that the Spirit has been having with you and will continue to have with you, regardless of what happens in our particular Zoom call. The Spirit is patient. The Spirit will keep knocking.
May the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom is no darkness at all, find the door of your heart open in his perfect time. May the Father who made you draw you to himself. May the Spirit who hovered over the deep at the beginning hover now over your soul and speak the word that calls the light forth from your darkness. May the liberty wherewith Christ has set the captives free become your liberty also. And may we, the fellowship of Renaissance Ministries, meet you one day in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus, where every tongue shall confess and every knee shall bow (Phil 2:10-11), and where the table is wide and the feast is the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9).
Maranatha — come, Lord Jesus.
— Thomas