The church's answer to Islam remains what it has always been: Christ crucified and risen for sinners.
Twenty-five years ago, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Americans watched something almost unimaginable unfold. Passenger planes became weapons. Two were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which then collapsed. A third struck the Pentagon, while a fourth, apparently intended for the U.S. Capitol, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers learned what was happening elsewhere and fought back against the hijackers. By the end of the day, nearly three thousand people were dead, and a generation of Americans had acquired one of those rare memories that divides time into before and after.
The twenty-five years since have brought consequences few could have imagined that morning. The United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, where thousands more Americans were killed during two decades of fighting. Osama bin Laden was hunted for nearly ten years before American forces found and killed him in Pakistan. The Taliban were driven from power only to return twenty years later as American forces withdrew from Afghanistan. Yet a quarter century after the attacks, the legal reckoning remains unfinished. Only weeks before this anniversary, a military judge set a June 2028 trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and three of his co-defendants. If the trial proceeds as scheduled, nearly twenty-seven years will have passed before the alleged architect of the attacks finally stands trial.
Meanwhile, an entire generation has reached adulthood with no memory of that September morning. The passage of twenty-five years can make 9/11 seem like an event belonging to another age, but the questions it raised have not gone away. Among them is one Christians cannot afford to avoid: What are we to make of Islam?
It is tempting to answer that question politically. Since 9/11, much of the discussion has understandably concerned terrorism, immigration, national security, and Islam's compatibility with Western political institutions. These issues matter, but for Christians they are not the deepest ones. At bottom, Islam is grounded in a theology that makes claims about God, revelation, Jesus Christ, sin, judgment, and salvation that place it in direct conflict with Christianity. That conflict is nearly as old as Islam itself.
Within decades of Muhammad's death in 632, Arab Muslim armies poured out of Arabia and conquered enormous territories. Syria and Palestine fell. Jerusalem came under Muslim rule. Egypt, one of the great centers of ancient Christianity, was conquered. Muslim armies swept across Christian North Africa, crossed into Spain, and pushed into what is now France. Constantinople endured repeated Muslim attempts at conquest before finally falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, when the Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Constantinople, was converted into a mosque.
We should be candid about what this history means. Islam did not spread merely because merchants and missionaries peacefully persuaded people to adopt a new faith. Military conquest was integral to its early expansion, and much of what had once been the Christian world eventually came under Muslim rule. Not every conversion was forced, nor did Islam spread everywhere by the sword. But the popular picture of an essentially private and peaceful religion later distorted by political extremists cannot account for the historical record.
Nor can Islam's political dimension be separated from its founder. Muhammad was not merely a preacher but a political ruler, lawgiver, and military commander. The caliphs who succeeded him did not regard the expansion of Muslim rule as something unrelated to their religion. Islam emerged as a religious, political, and legal order.
September 11 forced Americans to confront this reality in a terrible form. The men who flew airplanes into buildings were not representative of every Muslim, but neither were their Islamic convictions incidental to what they did. Osama bin Laden justified his war in explicitly Islamic terms. The hijackers believed they were obeying God and expected paradise as their reward. Many Muslims reject their interpretation of Islam, but it makes no sense to insist that Islam had nothing to do with their understanding of the world. To treat their theology as irrelevant is to refuse to take religious belief seriously.
Today Islam is a substantial presence in Western societies, raising legitimate questions about immigration, assimilation, religious freedom, and national identity. But for the church, the fundamental challenge is not demographic. It is theological. Islam makes claims about Jesus Christ that directly contradict the gospel.
The Qur'an has much to say about Jesus. It calls him the Messiah, speaks of his miraculous birth, calls him a word from God, and honors him as a prophet. These points of contact have led Christians to emphasize what Christianity and Islam share. But they can also obscure the central disagreement between the two religions: Who is Jesus, and what did he come to do?
On that question, Islam and Christianity part company completely. The Qur'an denies that Jesus is the divine Son of God and rejects the Christian confession of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Most consequentially, Qur'an 4:157 says that Jesus' enemies “did not kill him, nor did they crucify him,” but that it was made to appear so. Mainstream Islamic tradition has therefore denied the crucifixion proclaimed in the New Testament and confessed by Christians from the beginning. This is not a disagreement at the margins. Without the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection, there is no Christianity. Islam honors Jesus while denying the very things that make the gospel the gospel.
The historical problem is equally serious. The crucifixion of Jesus is among the best-attested facts of ancient history, reported throughout the earliest Christian sources and attested outside the New Testament. The Qur'an, appearing in seventh-century Arabia some six centuries later, denies what the first-century sources report. It also claims to correct Christianity while appearing at important points to misunderstand what Christians actually believe. Christians do not believe in three gods, nor do we confess a Trinity of Father, Son, and Mary. Before accepting Muhammad's correction of Christianity, we have good reason to ask whether he understood the Christianity he claimed to correct.
This brings the disagreement to its decisive point. Islam offers a Jesus who is prophet but not Lord. At best he is named Messiah but not a crucified Savior. He is honored but not worshiped. Christianity proclaims the eternal Word made flesh, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead and buried, and raised bodily from the grave. And with that Christ comes a gospel Islam cannot give: God has come down to sinners. Christ has borne sin and judgment in the sinner's place. Salvation rests not on our ability to make ourselves acceptable to God but on what Christ has accomplished for us. The grave is empty, Christ is risen, and forgiveness is given freely on account of him.
Christians should therefore say plainly that Muhammad was wrong about Jesus and that the Qur'an is wrong about the cross. Questions about immigration, terrorism, religious liberty, and the future of Western societies have their place, but they are not the church's answer to Islam. The church's answer is the gospel Islam denies: Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for sinners.
“Never forget” became one of the defining phrases of the years following September 11, and rightly so. We should remember those who went to work that Tuesday morning and never came home, the firefighters who climbed the stairways while everyone else was trying to get out, and the passengers aboard Flight 93 who learned what was happening and decided to fight back. A civilized people remembers its dead.
But twenty-five years later, remembering also means refusing to forget what the attacks forced us to confront. Ideas matter. Theology matters. Religion is not a private preference tucked away from the rest of life. It makes claims about reality, good and evil, life and death, and those claims work themselves out in history. September 11 demonstrated that with horrifying clarity.
The church need not fear this. It has lived under emperors, caliphs, kings, dictators, republics, and democracies, and its future has never depended upon possessing the largest army, the highest birthrate, or the most favorable political arrangement. Christ promised to build his church. Twenty-five years after September 11, Christians should therefore be clear-eyed about Islam, honest about its history, and unafraid to say where its claims collide with the gospel. The question finally comes down to Jesus Christ: Who is he, what happened on that cross, and did he walk out of the grave? Christianity stakes everything on its answer. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, was buried, and on the third day rose again. The church's answer to Islam remains what it has always been: Christ crucified and risen for sinners.
