Amen

Submitted by Erich W (United States), Dec 31, 2010 at 16:06

Dear Lactantius

Thank you for your serious engagement with the problem of sin, both in Mohammed, according to his own confession, and in all of us. The Quran calls Jesus a word and spirit from Allah, and says that he is the Messiah. The meaning with which it uses these expressions is not according to the Gospel, but the origin of the expressions themselves must be sought in the Gospels, and from among the Christians of Mohammed's time. It is the power of the Name of Jesus, and faith in that Name, that overcomes both guilt and alienation,demonic disturbance and fear of death. The one sinless Man is the only incarnation of the Eternal Word. He was anointed by the very Spirit of God, and he anoints all who believe him with the same Spirit...who is not an angel, but is God's very own Spirit.

Dr. Pipes was right to say that Muslims have tried to make Mohammed into a figure like Jesus is to Christians: i.e., some kind of mediator, savior, and intercessor. All Muslims know about Allah comes through Mohammed and through him alone. They read no other book but his. This makes him functionally equivalent to the Son of God in their thinking. They even say that the worlds were made for him. This is a doctrine and a mindset from which a Muslim can retreat, because of the Islamic texts you have quoted. The point of developing such an exaggerated view of Mohammed, though, is that God really cannot be known without a mediator. Since the Muslim rejects Christ as the mediator, they make up other mediators: Mohammed is one, the Quran is another, and I think Sharia is a third. They want God unmediated, direct and accessible. In fact, they find him unknowable, terrifying, and inaccessible. The intercession of Mohammed as a man for his "umma", the sound of the Quran as the Word from Eternity, and the Sharia as the manifestation of the Divine will in the here and now, are all false and inadequate mediations of Allah. Still, the Muslim will deny that Mohammed, the Quran and the Sharia are in fact functioning as mediators, or media, of Allah. Rather he still claims Allah is unmediated. H says Allah has no Son, and he has no Spirit (in the Trinitarian sense), and damned by the one who ascribes a partner to him! Yet, in fact how can there be a mediator who is not effectively, on some level, a partner? I would argue that functionally, the Muslim does in fact make their prophet, his Quran, and the Sharia, to be partners with Allah; all the while denying what they are doing. It is a fundamental dishonesty. This self-contradiction is their only way to deal with the fact that they have contradicted God, when he said of Jesus, "This is my unique Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear him!" "To live is Christ..." They have abjured the true Mediator, and they find it difficult to do without false mediators.

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