Many Christians who want to talk with a Muslim friend about God find that the harder problem is not explaining Islam. It is explaining Christianity. Both scriptures confess one uncreated God. They give contradictory answers about who that God is, whether he became a man, and whether Jesus died on a cross. This guide takes those answers one at a time, in the order they depend on each other: one God, three persons, God made flesh, the cross. Learned in that order, the differences can be explained to a Muslim friend without inflating them or hiding them.
You can work through this alone in about an hour, or across two group sessions, with the first three steps in one meeting and the rest in the next. The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation in which Lisa Fields talks with Abdu Murray, an apologist who was raised Muslim in the United States, remained a Muslim until he was 27, and gave his life to Christ in 2000.
Before you begin: a starting test
Without looking anything up, write one sentence each on these: what Christians mean by the Trinity, what Christians mean by the incarnation, and why the cross matters for forgiveness. Keep the sentences. You will rewrite them at the end.
For groups: do this silently and do not collect the answers. Each person should see their own starting place without being exposed.
How to hold the conversation
Accuracy matters because a person is on the other side of it. Murray describes his ministry’s work as “recognizing that behind every objection, behind every issue, behind every controversy, there’s a person.” He explains why: “because questions don’t need answers, but people do.” His own story is the evidence he offers. Of the Christians who reached him, he says, “They didn’t just answer my objection. They answered Abdu Murray, and that resulted in me coming to faith.”
In practice, that means three habits. Describe your friend’s belief in words they would recognize as fair. Ask what they believe before telling them what Islam teaches, since Murray’s summaries come from one tradition and your friend may hold another. And state the real disagreements plainly, because pretending they are small treats your friend’s convictions as less serious than they are.
Step one: the sentence both faiths can say
Begin with real agreement. Murray states the Quran’s teaching this way: “The Quran teaches that there is only one God. He is the only uncreated being that there ever was, and he is the greatest possible being.” He adds that he thinks every Christian would agree the Bible teaches the same.
The Bible does. In Isaiah 45:5 God says, “I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me.” Christians are monotheists. They do not add gods to the one God.
Murray also clears up a confusion about the word itself. “And the word Allah, by the way, in Arabic, it literally means the God. So it’s not actually a name, it’s, um, a title.” Treating “Allah” as the personal name of a rival deity misdescribes both the word and how Muslims use it. The disagreement is not in the label. It is in what each scripture says next.
Observe: Read Isaiah 45:5-7. What does the passage claim God alone does? Which of those claims would a Muslim friend likely affirm?
Step two: one in nature, three in persons
Here the paths separate. Murray explains that a Muslim would call it blasphemy to say that God, though one in his nature, is three in his persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
To explain the Trinity accurately, you need one distinction: nature and person answer different questions. Nature answers what God is: one divine being. Person answers who God is: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christians do not claim one God and three gods at once, which would be a contradiction. They claim one being who exists as three persons. Murray puts it in the same terms: “because God is one in His nature, there’s only one being, but He’s three in His person, then the whole idea of the atonement actually makes sense.”
He also calls the Trinity “this beautiful doctrine that makes sense of every other doctrine of the Christian faith.” That is a claim you can test in the next two steps: does each later teaching depend on this one?
Scripture points to the doctrine in passages that hold oneness and threeness together. Matthew 28:19 says, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The word “name” is singular, and three are named. One verse does not prove the whole doctrine, which the church drew from the full witness of Scripture, but this text shows the pattern clearly.
The misconception to correct: many people, Christians included, assume the Trinity means three gods. When a Muslim friend says Christians worship three gods, the respectful reply is not offense. It is a clear restatement: one being, three persons. Your friend may still disagree, but they will be disagreeing with what Christians actually believe.
Step three: God made flesh
The second difference follows from the first. Murray says the Quran treats it as blasphemous to say that Jesus is God, or that God would ever become incarnate. Christianity says this is exactly what happened.
John 1:1 opens, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Verse 14 makes the claim concrete: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” Notice why step two had to come first. “The Word was with God” distinguishes the Word from the Father. “The Word was God” identifies the Word as divine. Without the distinction between persons, the verse makes no sense.
Why must Jesus be both divine and human? Murray answers by asking what a rescuer would need. “And so the incarnation, the enfleshment, as it were, of Jesus makes Him our representative.” A human must stand in for humans. But a mere human cannot do it: “But He has to have a divine nature because He’s also got to be perfect, and human beings just aren’t perfect.” Islam honors Jesus as a prophet. Christianity agrees he was a prophet and says he was far more.
The strongest objection: a thoughtful Muslim can grasp the nature and person distinction and still reject it. In its own terms, the objection runs like this. If God is truly one, then speaking of three persons divides him, and calling a man who was born, ate and slept divine erases the line between Creator and creature that monotheism exists to protect. That objection takes God’s oneness with full seriousness, and Christians should hear it that way. The Christian reply is that the doctrine claims distinction within one being, not division of it, and that Christians speak this way because texts like John 1 require it. Whether that reply satisfies is what an honest conversation tests.
Observe: Read John 1:1-14 slowly. Mark every phrase that speaks of the Word as distinct from God, and every phrase that speaks of the Word as God. What would be lost if you kept only one set?
Step four: the cross
The third difference is historical. Murray recites a passage from the fourth chapter of the Quran and translates it: “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it looked like it to them or appeared to them as if it was so.”
Paul gives the opposite report. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 he writes that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” Two texts that interpret an event differently can still share it. Two texts that disagree about whether it happened cannot both be correct.
Separate the two claims carefully. The Quran’s passage denies the death. The resurrection depends on the death, because only someone who died can be raised. So Murray calls the denial “a denial of the fundamental historical fact of the Christian faith,” and then names what is lost with it: “The resurrection is the centerpiece of the Christian faith.” His full chain runs this way: “Because without an incarnation, you can’t have an atonement. Without an atonement, you can’t have salvation in Christianity, and the Trinity makes sense of this.”
Quoting Paul against the Quran does not settle the matter. Murray frames the real task as asking whether there is adequate warrant to believe that Jesus died on a cross and rose. That historical case needs its own evidence: the ancient sources, their dates and their independence from one another. This guide does not supply it, and you should not pretend the question is closed until you have studied it.
A Muslim friend may also say the Bible’s text was changed over time. Murray grants that the manuscripts contain variants and argues that the sheer number of copies lets scholars compare them: “the variants actually help us. They don’t hurt us.” He also notes that the Quran has a transmission history of its own. Both are claims he would need to defend with evidence, and both are worth studying before you raise them.
Where salvation enters the conversation
Murray describes salvation in orthodox Islam as he was taught it: good works are weighed against bad works, and there is no savior. He grounds this in a Quranic principle he renders, “No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another.” Each person carries his or her own sin.
Treat this as one former insider’s summary, not a full survey. Murray qualifies his own account. Speaking of whether God reveals himself intimately, he notes, “There are other versions of Islam that suggest that He does.” Let your friend describe God’s mercy in their own way.
Murray then does something worth learning from. He does not attack the burden principle. He accepts it and follows it: “Well, that’s a relief, because Jesus does not bear his own burdens. He has no sins of his own to bear.” The principle assumes every burden-bearer already carries a load. Hebrews 4:15 describes Jesus as one who “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” If that is true, the principle does not exclude a savior. It explains why only a sinless one could be one.
Practice: teach it back in order
- On a sheet of paper, make four rows: one God, three persons, God made flesh, the cross.
- In each row, write one sentence describing what Islam holds, using only what you learned here, and one sentence describing what Christianity holds.
- Read your Islam sentences and ask whether a sincere Muslim would recognize them as fair. Remove any word that sounds like a jab. Add a qualification wherever a sentence claims to speak for all Muslims.
- Check each Christian sentence against the Scripture in its step. Could you show a friend the verse behind it?
- Explain all four rows aloud in under three minutes, in order, without reading.
For groups: work in pairs. One person explains while the other listens only for accuracy, then restates the explanation before offering any correction. Do not role-play a Muslim character, since inventing someone else’s beliefs tends to produce caricatures. If someone has a Muslim friend who is willing, the better test is to ask that friend, with their consent, whether your description of their faith is accurate.
Then return to the three sentences you wrote at the start and rewrite them.
Questions for discussion
- Murray finds real agreement in the first step. How would naming that agreement first change the tone of a conversation with a Muslim friend?
- Using the distinction between nature and person, how would you answer someone who says Christians worship three gods? Where does your explanation still feel unclear?
- Which later doctrines in this guide depend on the Trinity, and could any of them stand without it?
- How would you restate the Muslim objection to the incarnation so that a Muslim would say you had put it well?
- What evidence would you want to examine before discussing the crucifixion as a historical question?
- Murray treats the burden principle as a bridge rather than a wall. What is the difference between taking someone’s belief seriously and using it as a trap, and how would your friend be able to tell?
Carrying it into a real conversation
First Peter 3:15 asks believers to be “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” The verse asks for both: an answer you can actually give, and a manner that honors the person asking.
This week, choose one step from this guide that you can now explain more clearly than before. If you have a Muslim friend or coworker, ask them what their faith teaches about it, and listen to the whole answer before you say what yours teaches.