261020 – Leaving Islam and Coming to Christ

by | Oct 20, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts | 0 comments

From Law to Witness: Reading the Qur’an as History and Winning Muslims to Christ

· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

The thesis

The root of Islamist violence is not poverty, police tactics, or Western foreign policy, though each can inflame it. The root is a doctrine about a book. Islam teaches that the Qur’an is God’s uncreated, eternal, and final speech, valid for every time and place. A man who believes that and reads the book’s commands of war literally has divine warrant to act on them. Most Muslims never do. But the warrant is always there, waiting for the man who wants it.

I stand on that diagnosis. The cure follows, and it has two horizons. The near horizon is to help Muslims read the Qur’an as a document of seventh-century history and culture rather than as a timeless legal code. Muslims themselves have pioneered that reading, and it removes the warrant without asking anyone to stop being a Muslim first. The far horizon, and the only final answer, is that Muslims come to know Jesus Christ. Christ does not offer a better book. He offers Himself, and the Father whom the Qur’an never names.

This essay sets out both horizons, and the methods that serve each.

The diagnosis: one man, one book, no appeal

Every religion has hard passages. The Old Testament records wars of conquest. What makes the Qur’an different is not that it contains violent verses, but what Islamic doctrine says they are.

Three teachings work together.

  1. The Qur’an is uncreated. Mainstream Sunni theology holds that the Qur’an is God’s eternal speech, existing before creation. It is not a record of what God said to a people in a particular time; it is what God says, always.
  2. Muhammad is the seal of the prophets. No later prophet can come to correct or complete the message. The text is closed.
  3. Later verses abrogate earlier ones. Classical jurists developed the doctrine of naskh (abrogation). When verses conflict, later revelation overrules earlier revelation. The Qur’an’s more tolerant passages come largely from Muhammad’s early years in Mecca, when his community was small and persecuted. Its commands to fight come largely from his later years in Medina, when he led an army and a state. Under abrogation, the Medinan commands govern.

Put those three together, and you get a frozen law. It was given through one man’s private revelation. It is closed to correction. And its harshest commands outrank its gentlest. This is the same structural danger seen in Mormonism, where the entire revelation of God comes through a single man’s revelation by an angel, which is the very warning given in Galatians 1:8-9. Islam is arguably more rigid, because it forbids any later prophet who might soften the founder’s word.

The Bible works differently. It is a chorus of witnesses: some forty writers across fifteen centuries, in three languages, on three continents. They converge on one Person, and the Person is greater than the text. Christ Himself reinterpreted the law (“You have heard that it was said… but I say to you”). He fulfilled Israel’s sacrificial and civil codes rather than imposing them forever. Christians read the Old Testament’s wars as history fulfilled in Christ, not as standing orders. Islam has no such Person above its book. The book is its highest revelation.

Two horizons: the stopgap and the goal

The two horizons are different in kind, and confusing them causes mistakes in both directions.

The stopgap is a change in how Muslims read their book. Its aim is civic: to get a Muslim neighbor to regard the Qur’an’s war passages as history, not as instruction for today. People can pursue this through public argument, scholarship, education, and law. It does not require conversion, and a Christian can support Muslim reformers who pursue it without endorsing their faith. Its success would be measured in lives not taken.

The goal is to convert people to Christ. Its aim is eternal, and its only means is freely received witness. Law cannot accomplish it. Argument alone cannot accomplish it. It happens one heart at a time, and it is God’s work before it is ours.

The two horizons help each other. A Muslim who has learned to read the Qur’an historically has already admitted that it is a book shaped by its time. He has stepped out of the sealed room and can now ask the question the sealed room forbids: if this book is a seventh-century document, where is the living Word of God? The Christian has an answer. The stopgap opens the door; the Gospel walks through it.

Reading the Qur’an as history: the precedent already exists

The historical reading is not a Western imposition. It has deep roots inside Islam, and its modern champions are Muslims who paid dearly for it.

The Mu’tazilites. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Mu’tazilite theologians of Baghdad and Basra taught that the Qur’an was created: God’s word, but spoken into time and therefore bound to its occasion. From 833, the caliph al-Ma’mun made this the official doctrine and enforced it on scholars. The traditionalists, led by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, resisted, and within a generation the policy was reversed. The uncreated Qur’an became orthodoxy, and the door to rationalism closed. As Beaulieu notes, that closing was a turning point for the whole civilization. But the debate proves that a created, historically situated Qur’an is a position Muslims once held and argued from their own sources.

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. The Sudanese reformer proposed in The Second Message of Islam that Muslims turn the classical doctrine of abrogation upside down. He argued that Islam’s universal message lay in the early Meccan verses of peace and conscience. The later Medinan verses of law and war were a concession to the seventh century, suspended until humanity was ready for the higher message. Sudan’s government executed him for apostasy in January 1985.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. The Egyptian scholar, who had memorized the entire Qur’an as a boy, argued that it must be read as a text addressed to particular hearers in a particular culture. As one academic obituary put it, his work opened room for historical-critical exegesis of the Qur’an, in which some statements carry historical rather than binding value. In 1995, an Egyptian court declared him an apostate and ordered his marriage dissolved, since a Muslim woman may not be married to a non-Muslim. He and his wife fled to the Netherlands under death threats.

Fazlur Rahman. The Pakistani scholar, later at the University of Chicago, proposed a “double movement”: read each verse in its original setting to find the moral principle behind it, then apply that principle, not the verse’s literal command, to the present.

The pattern is consistent. The historical reading exists; it is argued from within the tradition, and apostasy charges silenced the men who advanced it. That fact points directly to the lever the West must pull, discussed below.

What a historical reading can and cannot do

A historical reading of the Qur’an does real good, and Christians should promote it honestly. It removes the divine warrant from the war verses: a command given to Muhammad’s army at Medina becomes a record of what happened, not an order for today. It restores conscience as a judge of action. It makes room for natural law, the moral order written in every heart, to stand beside the text rather than beneath it. And it lets a Muslim keep his community, language, and culture while setting down the sword.

Christians can contribute to this reading in three ways.

  • Model it with our own Scriptures. We already read the conquest of Canaan as history fulfilled in Christ, not as a command to modern Christians. We can show, without embarrassment, how a faithful believer reads a hard text through its fulfillment.
  • Teach the Qur’an’s own history. Its compilation under the caliph Uthman, the variant early manuscripts, the circumstances of each revelation. These are subjects of open scholarship, much of it by Muslims. A Muslim who learns them sees a book with a history, the first step toward reading it historically.
  • Honor the reformers. Translate Taha, Abu Zayd, and Rahman. Give them platforms, chairs, and protection. Their voices carry what no outsider’s can.

But historical reading has limits, and Christians should say so plainly. If the Qur’an is a seventh-century document, it is not God’s eternal word. A thoroughgoing historical reading therefore tends to dissolve faith rather than reform it. Many who take it end in secular unbelief rather than in a gentler Islam. Iran shows the pattern: forty years of enforced theocracy have produced, by one large 2020 survey, a population in which only a third still identify as Shia Muslims, with a large share now claiming no religion.

That is why reform cannot be the goal. It empties the house. Jesus warned that a house swept clean and left empty will be filled with seven worse spirits (Matthew 12:43–45). The Christian’s task is to make sure the house does not stay empty.

Methods for winning Muslims to Christ

The most encouraging fact in this whole subject is that it is already happening, at a scale never seen before. The missiologist David Garrison spent three years interviewing more than a thousand believers from Muslim backgrounds across the Islamic world. He counted every “movement” to Christ in history, defined as at least 1,000 voluntary baptisms (or 100 new churches) within two decades. He found 82 such movements in fourteen centuries: two in the nineteenth century, eleven in the twentieth, and sixty-nine in just the first years of the twenty-first. He estimated between 2 and 7 million new believers. In Iran, a 2020 survey of 50,000 people found 1.5 percent identifying as Christian, which researchers put at roughly 750,000 to 950,000 people in a country where converting can mean prison.

What is God using? Garrison and others who have studied these movements point to a consistent set of methods.

  1. Prayer. Every movement studied was preceded by sustained, organized prayer for Muslim peoples. This is not a pious preliminary; it is the first method.
  2. Scripture in the heart language. Muslims are taught to read the Qur’an in Arabic, which most do not understand. When they read the Gospels in their own language, often for the first time, they meet Jesus directly. Garrison found that even reading the Qur’an in translation led some Muslims to question it once they understood what it said.
  3. Begin with Isa. The Qur’an honors Jesus (Isa) as born of a virgin, a miracle worker, the Messiah, the Word from God, and one who will return. A Muslim already reveres Him. The conversation can start there and move to the question the Qur’an cannot answer: why does a mere prophet carry these titles no other prophet holds?
  4. Present the Father. The Qur’an speaks of God through ninety-nine names, yet never calls Him Father. The Gospel’s central news, that the Creator is a Father who seeks His children, answers a hunger Islam cannot reach. More than any argument about the Trinity, this moves hearts.
  5. Dreams and visions. A striking number of converts report a dream of Jesus, often a man in white, that preceded their faith. Christians need not engineer this, but they should expect it, ask about it, and be ready to explain what the dreamer saw.
  6. Friendship and hospitality. Most Muslims in the West have never been invited into a Christian home. Shared meals, practical help with a newcomer’s needs, and patient friendship over years do more than any tract. Newman’s rule applies: heart speaks to heart.
  7. Media where the church cannot go. Satellite television, radio, and the internet have carried the Gospel into closed countries, where seekers can listen privately and anonymously.
  8. Converts reaching their own. The most effective evangelists to Muslims are former Muslims. They know the objections from the inside, speak the culture fluently, and testify to the cost they paid.
  9. Honesty about the cost. Converts may lose family, work, and safety. Evangelism that hides this is not loving. Churches must be ready to absorb that loss with them (the next section).

These methods have one thing in common: none is coercive, and none depends on Western power. They rest on the one thing Islam’s founding story cannot offer: a God who came in person, and who wins hearts only by being freely received.

The church that receives them

Islam is not only a creed. It is a family, a calendar, a diet, a language, and a social safety net. A Muslim who comes to Christ often loses all of that at once. If the church offers him only a Sunday service and a handshake, it has asked him to trade a whole world for an hour a week.

The church that wins Muslims must therefore be a family in fact, not in name. It must share meals and holidays. It must help with jobs, housing, and legal trouble, and stand with the convert when his relatives cut him off. It must give him a place to belong.

It must also show him a moral life worth joining. Many devout Muslims look at the West and see sexual license, broken families, drunkenness, and the worship of money, and they believe this is what Christianity produces. They are partly right about the West and wholly wrong about Christ. The only refutation is a visible Christian community whose marriages hold, whose children are raised in faith, and whose members care for the poor. A Muslim who meets that community sees something his religion told him did not exist.

This is also the honest answer to the question of whether bringing Muslims into our midst will show them how good our life is. It will, only if our life is actually good. A secular America has no complete way of life to offer against Islam’s complete way of life. It can tolerate, regulate, or fear. It cannot persuade. The church can, but only if it is living what it preaches. The renewal of American Christianity and the evangelization of Muslims are therefore one task, not two.

Law and public policy: making conversion survivable

The Gospel cannot be coerced, but law shapes the conditions under which it is heard. Romans 13 gives the sword to government, not to the church. A government’s first duty is to protect the innocent, and in this field that means five things. The moral test for each is the same one that should govern every public act: would a Muslim neighbor, rightly understanding it, recognize it as an act of love toward him and toward those around him?

  1. Make leaving Islam survivable. This is the single most important lever. Pew found that 22 countries had laws against apostasy in 2019, 13 of them in the Middle East and North Africa. In others, family and community, not the state, impose the penalty. Where leaving Islam can cost a man his life, neither reform nor conversion can be freely chosen. The United States should make freedom to change religion a central condition of its foreign relations and aid. At home, it should prosecute honor-based threats against converts as the crimes they are. Sudan’s 2020 repeal of the death penalty for apostasy shows such laws can fall.
  2. Protect the reformers. Every reformer named in this essay was silenced by an apostasy charge. Asylum, academic positions, and security for Muslim scholars who advance the historical reading are cheap investments with large returns.
  3. One law for all. Violence is punished the same whatever its religious motive. No parallel religious courts may govern family law or settle crimes, as has happened in parts of Britain.
  4. Citizenship means assent. Immigration should require real assent to liberty of conscience, equality before the law, and others’ freedom to worship or not. Integration is not a mood but a commitment, and people can ask for it openly.
  5. Name the doctrine in public. Officials and educators should be free to say plainly that certain classical doctrines (death for apostasy, the subordination of non-Muslims, armed jihad) are incompatible with a free society. Saying so is not hatred of Muslims. It is the precondition for the Muslims who already agree to say so too.

None of this is hostility to Muslims. It is the minimum structure of freedom within which a Muslim can hear the Gospel, weigh it, and accept or reject it without fear.

Why the concern remains plausible

Some readers will say this essay blames a religion for the crimes of a few. Others will say the statistics on terrorism are disputed, or that Muslims interpret the war verses in many ways. Those uncertainties are real, and I name them. But they do not touch the central claim, for four reasons.

The doctrine is a fact, not an interpretation. The uncreated Qur’an, sealed prophethood, and abrogation are mainstream classical teachings, not extremist inventions. A literalist reading of the war verses is not a misreading of Islam; it is one of Islam’s oldest readings. The burden is on the reformers to overturn it, and they acknowledge that themselves.

The system enforces the doctrine. A religion that punishes apostasy, criminalizes blasphemy, and declares its own reformers apostate has built a structure that protects its harshest reading from challenge. When a Muslim scholar who memorized the whole Qur’an must flee his country for reading it historically, the problem is not a few bad actors. It is the system.

The fruit is visible. Islamist movements have been responsible for a disproportionate share of major terrorist attacks in the West since 2001, and their own propaganda cites the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad, not economic grievance. The overwhelming majority of their victims are Muslims, which only strengthens the point: the doctrine endangers Muslims first.

The intuition is sound. Ordinary people sense that a faith which commands the death of those who leave it, and promises paradise to those who kill for it, is not the faith of a God of love. That intuition is the natural law at work, and Christians should not argue themselves out of it. Jesus gave the test: “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). The answer is not hatred of Muslims, who are the doctrine’s first captives, but their liberation, first from the sword and finally into the freedom of the sons of God.

Notes

  1. Abrogation. Classical scholars agreed that abrogation exists but disagreed widely on which verses it applies to. Some counted hundreds of abrogated verses, others only a handful. The claim that the “sword verse” (9:5) abrogates the tolerant verses is a common classical position, not a unanimous one.
  2. Garrison’s figures. David Garrison wrote as a Southern Baptist mission strategist, and his counts rest on interviews and reports from the movements themselves. They are the best available, but they are not independent census data. His range of 2 to 7 million believers reflects that uncertainty.
  3. The Iran survey. GAMAAN conducted an online survey, and its weighted results rest on an effective sample of about 1,900. Researchers translate the 1.5% figure into roughly 750,000 to 950,000 Christians, including about 300,000 ethnic Armenian and Assyrian Christians. Converts would therefore number roughly 450,000 to 650,000.
  4. The Mu’tazilite inquisition. The mihna (inquisition) began under al-Ma’mun in 833 and was abandoned under al-Mutawakkil around 848–851. The Mu’tazilites also used state coercion; the historical reading’s first champions were not liberals in the modern sense.
  5. Terrorism share. The claim about Islamist terrorism’s share of major attacks in the West reflects Europol and U.S. government assessments for most of the period since 2001. Shares vary by year and country; in some recent years, separatist or left- and right-wing attacks in Europe have outnumbered jihadist ones, though jihadist attacks remained the deadliest. Verify current figures.
  6. British religious courts. Sharia councils in Britain operate as voluntary arbitration bodies, chiefly for religious divorce. They have no legal force under English law, but critics have documented pressure on women to use them.

Sources

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