If you're serious about talking with Muslims about Christianity - I mean talking with true brothers and sisters in God and not merely at 'potential converts', this book is your place to start.
‘Gospel (meaning here, simply ‘good news’) for Muslims’ shows how, when we talk about Christianity to people of other faiths, we always start in the wrong place. We tend to talk about Western culture rather than the gospel of Jesus. To followers of Islam, we’re trying to impose Western thoughts and values onto their Eastern minds. If Christians in the West are to understand how Jesus is seen through Eastern eyes we need to look again at the gospel from the viewpoint of an Islamic culture which already knows both Jesus and the gospels.
Steve Bell shows that many of the devotions we label 'Islamic': headscarves, formal prayers, separation of the sexes and chair-less, carpeted worship halls were already a feature of Eastern Christianity centuries before the prophet Mohammed, and how all biblical interpretation and application is filtered through culture.
For instance, in Eastern culture, no one ever runs in public - except lunatics and criminals. So for Eastern Muslims, the father in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, describes a culturally shocking and revolutionary characteristic of the father-God. If we really want to talk about faith with our Muslim brothers and sisters, we need to understand how Muslims understand the gospel of Jesus. Only then can we find the cultural interpretation that’s right for their tradition – not ours. Who knows; we might even learn something that changes ours! I recommend this book.
March 26th, 2013 - Posted & Written by Les Ellison
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