From Islam to Catholicism w/ Ex-Muslim Jacob Imam | Pints with Aquinas Episode #230

g'day g'day and welcome to pints with aquinas my name is matt fradd and today i am joined around the proverbial bar table by jacob imam to discuss his conversion from islam to catholicism we'll be talking about different things such as is islam perhaps the largest christian heresy we'll be talking about violence within islam we'll talk about muhammad how he's viewed how we should view him i want to make it clear that i know people often say this and it doesn't really help but i'm going to say it anyway we really mean no offense to our muslim friends who are watching this so we love you we care about you um just like you would think that christianity is a perversion of the truth we also believe that and i'm not offended if you think that about christianity and i hope you won't be offended as we seek to explore that with with jacob regarding islam but it's very good to have you no matter who you are or where you're from um so welcome if you have not subscribed to this channel do us a favor click subscribe click the bell button i'm not sure if google is in the business of uh wanting to proclaim and spread the christian message so you can help us out by clicking subscribe click that uh thumbs up button and sharing this on facebook or social media that really does help us so with without any further ado jacob it's great to have you matt thanks so much for having me on are you allowed to tell people where you are right now i am well generally i'm currently in one of jrr tolkien's former homes he has many around oxford so nobody will ever be able to guess which one uh but it's pretty pretty special to be here nonetheless that's amazing aro tell our viewers a little bit about who you are and what you're up to these days i'm currently a d-phil student that's the oxonian oxford term for a phd i've been here for since 2015 first as a visiting student getting some training in the classics before coming back to the masters in islamies uh before settling here now working on a catholic theology of money so this is what i'm doing i'm married to a beautiful woman named alice we have one child named blaze uh he is a blonde hair and blue eyes most strange looking imam that you've ever seen but uh but a happy baby all right man that's awesome hey do us a favor if you have other youtube tabs open or google tabs maybe close them jacob because we were just getting some uh getting some delay there but yeah man it's great to have you on on the on the podcast so um so you say you're in england right now but you have an american accent so do you live in america as well i do we live in steubenville ohio the other half of the year when we're not in england um we moved there only a year ago or a year a year and a bit ago it's an amazing place most people know it for the university franciscan university of steubenville the rest of the town is is dilapidated it's been defeated on so many levels and so the only thing that people really have there is one another and the lord and we we decided to move there specifically neither one of us are from there we decided to move there because we really thought our kids would have the best chance of becoming saints around these people rather than just us so it's it's been a real gift to be there that's really cool and that's where you and i met we had a beer uh in superville a few weeks back i was given a talk we had a little luncheon after that and that was it was great to meet you but i was telling you before the skype interview they really know nothing about you other than you have to be kind of a muslim so i'm really looking forward to hearing your story so tell us how you grew up uh i'm sure you grew up muslim take us from there yeah well i grew up almost i was born a muslim technically speaking and i was i grew up almost schizophrenic uh which is uh me no offense by this term jumping back and forth between my mom coming into the room to say prayers at night hands fold and kneeling by the bed as she was an evangelical and my father coming in at night lying down as he was a muslim he was born and raised in jerusalem his father fareed imam was the founder of the first local travel agency in the holy land he actually was one of the brokers of the dead sea scrolls as well um these ancient documents that held the sacred scriptures on them amongst other things his father was the imam of al-aqsa mosque so that he was the prayer leader at the third most holy site in the world for muslims and his father was the mufti of jerusalem so for mufti it's a legal expert within islam think of a mix between a catholic bishop and a civic judge uh submerged into one so it's we come from a pretty uh well-known muslim family um but there was some you mentioned imam and that's your last name so what's the deal there it is it's actually a bit of a funny story so my great uncle was uh mufti husseini he was the one that benjamin netanyahu prime minister of israel claimed gave hitler the idea for the the final solution the extermination of the jews it's not true don't worry uh but we did but he it was true that he was uh pro-nazi and so our family changed our name uh from husseini to imam uh mirroring what our historic spiritual function was in the family uh to get a little bit of a distance from him so that's that's the story okay and uh might but you know just as the catholic church has seen a number of scandals in the last number of years bubble up and come to the surface so the muslim community saw some of that as well and my grandfather was a bit disenchanted by that my father was certainly disenchanted by that and and particularly um as my grandfather was studying the christian holy places and leading tours there he began to read the new testament frequently he went to a new testament bible college for archaeology he didn't want his assets divided up but according to sharia law at the end of his life and he told my father to marry a christian and so there was this this slow uh transition away from this faith of his fathers that that he began uh and my father likewise was but even more so rather disenchanted and so when he met my mother who moved to jerusalem for a little while as a study abroad student from michigan state university and met her and married her and moved back to the states it was a slow process of liberalizing for him and so even though he taught me the quran growing up and taught me how to pray here and there it was he sometimes expressed his doubts as well and so i was raised uh constantly thinking between these two faiths he didn't want me to be a christian he didn't want me to learn the faith he didn't know that my mother was doing this at first uh praying with me and uh and so there was there was this all in the home uh in my early years what a strange way to grow up because i imagine a lot of people in america have the experience of two different denominations within the home maybe a catholic and a protestant and i wonder how they try to reconcile that maybe by thinking well we're really kind of both the same and so it's not that much difference and so there's not much cognitive dissonance but how did you deal with that well i was four years old i remember really clearly when i realized that my parents believed different things you know we prayed in different ways and they said things that were strange but it was a it was a conversation around the dinner table where my father finally found out that my mom was saying some things to me about jesus and the good news and so and he went up in a ball of flames and was very angry about this and and i kind of realized then that i had a long journey before me it was kind of constantly nagging at me which one's right the faith of my father or the faith of my mother for up until i was about nine years old or so and at nine i realized i just was too young to to deal with these questions so i kind of put it off i was going to a a classical school at the time i thought maybe the romans got it right maybe the greeks got it right uh the tragedy the tragic universe the tragic cosmos that that they envisioned made a lot of sense to me given the depravity that we see in ourselves and in other people and really in the environmental chaos that that surrounds us so um but it was it was uh short-lived just because it was around the time i became uh 14 15 is when i started to read the sacred scriptures and um and come to a new conclusion and how did you how did you get your hands on the scriptures what motivated you to want to read them well it actually came about because of a school project this classical school was also a classical christian school my father was fine of that the people of the book he said but they had me start to read the new testament and at that same time i had a deep conviction of my sin that was all-encompassing and so i turned to the god of my father first and said you know where what can i do to make atonement for what i have done and i saw that the answer was really do better try harder i could have moved to have more muslim friends in a muslim community and that could have helped but it seemed like it just wasn't taking my sin seriously enough if i really if i really grieved the god who created everything then just a i'm going to try and reform and say simple sorry it wasn't good enough and then i looked to the faith of my mother so this awareness of your sin did that come about through your teaching uh the teaching of islam i'm imagining you were practicing the faith that you were going to uh what mosque no i never did actually it was it was it was with my father in the home this was part of his liberalizing as he came to the states um and so and so i certainly studied the quran certainly read the quran certainly prayed from time to time but nothing nothing like going to to mosque it was uh it was really an a scene my friends and i start to watch bad movies and watch and listen to bad music and recognizing that this was obviously against both faiths um and it was it was this this real awareness of my own sin that was the first trigger to make me think that well if i did something this bad then there needs to be something that was done about it and islam did nothing about it and christianity did jesus died on the cross for our sins taking taking our sins upon himself and giving us a path to heaven that made sense all of a sudden how did your mum feel about you picking up the new testament i don't think she knew actually yeah i was trying to do this a little bit in secret because i knew how it was you know a bull in in a china store whatever however that phrase goes that uh bringing that up in the home so i really did this privately and uh and and that but the other big thing was that i recognized that this this culture that we have that was so laden with sin that was so far from god didn't matter which god it was but but clearly so far from the divine would never have been tolerated by allah he would never have had the patience for it the long enduring suffering from this but the trinitarian god of the bible really did and so it was really those two things as one that finally brought me to settle on my mother's faith rather than my father's it's really interesting because i imagine there's a lot of people who aren't moved by the scriptures they're moved by some charismatic preacher or some large prayer event and it's from that that they then perhaps have a desire to read the scriptures i wonder if it says something about your kind of classical education upbringing that prepared you to read the scriptures um what do you think that was uh it could have been i mean it certainly was an assignment first from school uh the fact that i carried on from there was uh basic exposure and teaching grace for sure the grace of our lord yeah no kidding i'm taking that as a given yeah but but but in a more material sense i do think that there's something about preparing a child's heart for receiving truth goodness and beauty yeah and that really does need to be taken seriously because then you're participating already in the grace that god has given you to raise up children the way that they should go um okay and so did you have other christians in your life any friends who were committed christians i you know i certainly did but i didn't we didn't really speak about christianity it was never a topic topic of conversation apart from in school apart from uh outside of class but it was it was really kind of a nerdy conversion at first it's really beautiful what happened next then did you go to your mother about it your father uh i went to nobody for a while about it eventually i did go to my mother and i recognized i don't know where this came from either again must be grace but in a material sense i have no idea where this came from but there was an overwhelming desire to be baptized and so i didn't really know any practicing catholics or eastern orthodox and it was quite a low low church community that we were in an evangelical community but there was an obvious need for the sacraments immediately and and so it was at the end of my freshman year of high school that i went to this church pastor that my mom knew of the church that she was attending and asked him if he would baptize me and he did could you read arabic could you read the quran in its original language i can now yeah not really at the time no my dad never taught me arabic until i got to about middle school did you pray the kind of muslim prayers daily not daily no okay no i bring this up because i can imagine someone saying okay well this guy wasn't really a muslim and that's why he's now a christian like he was never really exposed he didn't go to mosque he didn't pray the prayers regularly he couldn't even read the quran when he was young recently so yeah this is this is not surprising but what would you say to that well it's not necessarily surprising that i became a christian uh or rather it's it's not a given that i would become a christian uh but i think there is something that we all take for granted as the greater heresy that's running around today and that really is liberalism uh this understanding of personal sovereignty this vicious individualism this vicious with the tyranny of relativism as pope benedict called it that is manifested and given order by the market and by the state and and that really changes a lot of people's perspectives and particularly for muslims who move to the west and they don't have the legal structure that islam does require to be able to truly live the faith that really takes them for a loop you're not actually even able to live out the full islamic life even without the uh uh even even with the prayers of of mosque yeah it's fair enough so i could see somebody saying okay like it's one thing to leave the the islamic faith it's another to adopt christianity okay and so how did you journey from that small christian church where you were baptized to catholicism it was the same story as so many as john henry newman says to begin studying histories deceased being a protestant and i went to baylor university to study classics and historical philosophy and there i began to know the great tradition that is that is christianity and so i uh i started to read saint augustine and saint thomas and quickly realized that the only way that i could really have certainty of of this new faith i was entering into a tradition if you were entering into a tradition you said okay so then how did you i mean fair enough um you what you did so this is an intellectual process for you then you were you were kind of looking at different claims made by different christian sex and decided that catholicism went all the way back and that was for you or what i originally uh became an orthodox catechumen actually okay i uh i found that one of my friends had transitioned from being a pentecostal to uh to an eastern orthodox believer and so i started to ask him questions and he began to give me some really interesting answers and so i i went and became a catechumen and they started to always juxtapose what they believed to catholics to the catholic faith so i thought why not just do both catechetical processes at the same time so that's what i did and it made for a really kind of easy transition to be honest it was very clarifying and i left the orthodox faith being a huge fan of it and knowing that i had to to become a catholic and so i started that process in in at baylor in waco texas before i moved to oxford for that one brief period as an undergraduate undergraduate exchange student and i did you have a good was there a good parish you were going to in waco it was an excellent parish i think the last the last two years that i was there as an undergraduate some years ago now uh there i think there was 40 people received into the church just the last two years my two dearest friends were received into the church there it was a beautiful place did it celebrate the tradition or had it become modernized no not modernized at all my my senior year the the uh the priest was celebrating at orientum and beautiful in the latin mass twice a week i believe and so there's been some changes since then but uh it was a beautiful place and i wonder what would have happened if you hadn't been going through the catechumenate with the orthodox church which so beautifully upholds its tradition and went to a and here i'm not painting with a with a negative brush all nervous orders but i'm saying if you hadn't went to a more liberalized nervous order what that experience may have been like for you i wonder if you had would have ended up becoming orthodox i i don't think so there were a number of things again rather a nerdy conversion experience that uh were important one the understanding of sin that it was just not genealogical but actual and original that mary was really who she is and proclaimed for all of her goodness as the immaculate mother of our god and then lastly just the fact that there was no developments made in the church for a thousand years it seemed like it was almost a dying tradition um and the fact that there was this inversion almost that that occurred where the where the royal was supplanting the priestly where the where the ethnic groups of of the church were of the eastern orthodox church were rising up above above the the sacred authority that the church actually has that was made obvious and that was something that hadn't really happened since the fourth century and the crisis with aryanism so i think that all of these um almost political issues were coming to the surface as well as the more obviously theological ones as well what was your biggest obstacle to biggest doctrinal obstacle to becoming catholic would you say it was certainly the papacy i mean that was uh without a doubt the biggest issue and i'll tell this story i really i really think that this is why orthodoxy does appeal to the modern protestant it feels like the modern protestant has no roots he's sort of severed from any substantive heritage or tradition he wants the tradition he wants the beauty of the liturgy but he doesn't want the papacy i don't say that's the case with everybody but i can see that being a big factor so all right tell us tell us about that why it was an obstacle and how you overcame it well it really is real authority from heaven i mean this is this is a place in which god speaks to his people it's the place from which governs the nations governs our lives and that's that's no small thing so there's no wiggle room really with with the pope he really is the vicar of christ and you have to take that claim but i moved to oxford midway through my catechesis and i arrived on a thursday evening you know was walking through the town on the friday see the i see the oxford oratory a famous place where tolkien went to mass where uh where john henry newman preached uh gerard manly hopkins was a curet there for some time and thought i gotta go there so saturday morning i go the mass i look around for a man with a collar on and he i go up to him at the end he was talking to an old man and i asked him i said could you carry on uh carry on my catechesis my catechetical formation and he said oh actually i'm not the man that you should be looking for and he started to look around and the old man that he was speaking with says no he's not the priest he's the bishop and i just couldn't be able to i didn't i i wasn't able to identify him i don't think he was wearing a pectoral cross or any purple and then the bishop turns around he says yes well this is the man of oxford this is walter hooper and walter hooper was c.s lewis's former secretary and so i thought wow 36 hours in this is an awesome experience um but anyways i eventually did find the right man with the right collar on and i uh and i asked him if he would carry on my catechesis and he said very sternly and grave and very very uh you know it was very serious and very holy man and he asked me is this catechesis to become a catholic and my heart dropped to my stomach and i said uh yes i think it is but i immediately called up the orthodox priests at that point and i actually had a chance of meeting uh metropolitan callisto's ware in the church and he's he's an amazing man anyways i was able to ask him some questions about a meeting that happened between the patriarchs please spend no detail at this point please tell us everything so there we were drinking sweet sherry after a vesper service he celebrated and i started asking some great questions thanking him for his books and all that and i and i came to this question of a meeting that he had with the patriarchs and pope benedict in 2008 and i said you know what were the details of reconciliation that you were speaking about then and he said oh it was not just for reconciliation that we met we needed to gather together and we needed the pope to be able to lead us and gather us and unite us because we were having so many uh contentious conversations on our own and i thought oh my gosh if you need a pope then i sure need a pope and that was very relieved at that point wow what did he think did you share with him your interest in catholicism uh well i didn't actually because i was i was always very scared to be honest to bring bring this up with people um and i would always kind of pivot one way or the other saying you know i'm really going to become an orthodox or yeah i'm really going to become catholic and depending on who i was talking with and uh and so i never got an answer but i had the questions that i was looking for answered now i don't mean to pry so no need to answer this if it's too personal but i'd love to know a little bit about how your family is reacting to this maybe even just your mother or uncles aunts what's going on with with them they must be aware of your journey to christianity at this point certainly well there was there was immediate tension with my father and that was that was hard to push away to be honest until and there was a good falling out between us until he was diagnosed with lung cancer about eight years ago and we that was a great opportunity for reconciliation for us on on many levels um but i was also reading in uh imam bukhari in one of the hadith um the sayings and doings of muhammad that he recommended that muhammad recommended reading the sacred scriptures at one point so i offered to my father and so we did reunite we had a time together and we and we began to read sacred scripture together as well reading all of john's gospel and then moving through parts of luke and matthew and i'll never forget the night when we were reading the story of the prodigal son and he was expecting a different ending he had never heard it before he was expecting that as the son was returning the father would go out and kill him for his negligence he was that's actually how he thought it would end and so when it was quite the opposite ending he just said that was the most beautiful story i've ever heard and the day after that we read that my burden is easy and yoke is light and i was explaining to him a little bit of what that meant and uh and that's when you reached out to god in my personal will asked to be baptized and so i was able to baptize my father uh about three weeks before he died uh seven years ago in a day yeah yesterday so you broke up a little bit there so you it was fine when you talked about reading the prodigal son you said you read another story and it was at that point he asked for jesus christ be his savior or how did that happen yeah he has to be baptized he has to be baptized and so i baptized him uh three weeks before he died about it and when you were you were catholic at that point no i was still a protestant at that point actually but it was still again kind of like my own an understanding of the the necessity of baptism glory to jesus christ did you have other family members who were muslim i certainly do still and none of they're all still muslims there was certainly some even major falling out when i informed them of my father's baptism which perhaps was a mistake um but we've i've been in touch with almost everyone since and have not actually and because it was such a point of shame for the immediate family they didn't speak about it to our extended family all too much um which has saved some peace okay well i want to take a pause here and then i want us to talk about whether we should view islam as a christian heresy i'd also like to take some questions maybe even some objections from those in the chat but before we do i wanted to say thank you to exodus 90 who's a sponsor of this podcast exodus 90 is a 90-day catholic spiritual exercise for men where you get together with a small group of men and for 90 days you give up things you'd rather not give up perhaps like alcohol and snacks between meals and things like this um you take on things like cold showers every single day it is really bloody difficult i'm not going to lie to you but it is amazing and it is transforming the lives of catholic men i think one of the things that actually draws men to islam at least in a superficial sense is that they see what they perceive to be and i think what often times is the case a sort of rigor and masculinity that christianity in the west doesn't have and so this really does celebrate the sort of aesthetical tradition of our church so go to exodus nine zero dot com there's a link below if you go to exodus 90.com frat again it's right in the description click that sign up because we're going to start in january and so we'll give you more information as we approach that day but please check it out exodus 90.com mattfradd dot exodus90.com slash matt fradd would you agree with that about this sort of like we we we like i remember being in new york city with my wife and we're getting on the plane and i think maybe we're driving to the airport and seeing these men who worked at the airport who were clearly muslim with their prayer mat out bowing their heads to the ground you're like this is beautiful like this the seriousness with which they take their faith and you go to so many catholic churches and it's like we don't even we don't even care i totally agree i think there's another thing i have quite a number of close muslim friends here in oxford um and uh oh this might be a little bit of a surprise for them but they uh they once one guy in particular challenged me one day he says you know it seems like christianity in christianity god really doesn't care about your whole life he cares about like how you pray what you believe but he's not actually changing your social order at all like the the legal structures are the same he doesn't actually care how you walk how you talk how you conduct business uh other than just maybe being nice to your co-workers and that was that was a really challenging point too i think i think you're right to say that men in general hope to give their lives for something greater to actually die for something good die well and live well live in a totalizing way and and i think that that that is it's not true christianity that says that god doesn't care about all aspects of your life he cares about the political structure he in in its very form he cares about the economic structure in its very form and and the ways in which we we conduct ourselves in the public square as well and so and you know we'll i'll give a short little plug that was uh inevitably something that led me to help co-found new polity which was a think tank that we have started in in steubenville ohio to really think through what it means for christ to be king of the universe and king of our social life as well but really but i think it does come back to your point uh that people and particularly men want something to to live well for and to die well for as well yeah i want to share with you a couple of quotations here because i think it's fair to say and you can correct me if i'm wrong that in the middle ages people viewed islam more as a christian heresy than a separate religion i want to give you a quote here from hillary bellock from his excellent work the great christian heresies he says yeah the chief heresy muhammad himself was not like most heresy arcs a man of catholic birth and doctrine to begin with he sprang from pagans but that which he taught was in the main catholic doctrine oversimplified it was the great catholic world on the frontiers of which he lived whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel which inspired his convictions thus the very foundation of his teaching was that was that prime catholic doctrine the unity and omnipotence of god but the central point where his new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against catholic tradition was a full denial of the incarnation he taught that our lord was the greatest of all the prophets but still only a prophet a man like other men he eliminated the trinity altogether i could also quote from saint john damascene saint thomas aquinas but i bring that up because you know sometimes you can see the multiplicity of religions and think well maybe we're all just sort of saying the same thing but if you look at the three great kind of religions like judaism christianity islam and realize that well christianity is the fullness of judaism it's what the god of the jews wants for them and if you look at islam as a perversion of christianity all of a sudden you're like okay so christianity really is this rather unique thing so what do you have to say about that what do you think of the idea of cr of thinking of islam as a heresy christian heresy well i was hoping you were going to quote vatican 2 that says the same thing functionally do you have it in front of you i don't but i have a piece of his pieces of it in my mind that i can share so there's one part in particular that it was uh kind of bothersome for me for a while when the second vatican council in lumen gentium and uh nostra tate excuse me said things like uh we respect the muslims who adore the same god with us as it was as it was how it was phrased in translation uh that kui otarant dayum unu unikum nobiskum was what it was in the latin and so i thought wow this is this is really strange that they are that there's this claim that it's the same god especially when they are so different fundamentally different in so many ways and so i went i went here to black friars which is uh not too far away in oxford and i saw the notes of the council there are huge volumes volumes of untranslated notes from from the second vatican council just if you think about writing an essay about how many notes you take before before you sit down to write it's kind of what they did and so i was starting to read through these these notes and i found that the council fathers only ever exclusively referred to muslims as mohammedans which changes everything because you only ever call a sect after its followers name if you think it's a heresy so you think of arianism coming from aries and historianism coming from the stories even lutheranism coming from luther this is a way that they phrased it and of course in the encyclicals prior to this like from leo the 13th it was it was likewise considered to be or called rather mohammedans and then i started to realize again that they were not appealing to muslims worship of god as an understanding of the divine from a natural philosophical understanding of the world but rather from revelation itself citing abraham whom they whom they uh take pride in linking themselves with and i thought this is this changes everything at this point it is quite clear that the tradition has locked in that islam came out from a misunderstanding of revelation and not just from a misunderstanding of a natural theology and so i actually ended up continuing on and studying that for some time and and i think what we find in the quran specifically is very interesting most fundamentally we find that there are these authoritative biblical stories that are taken by the author of the quran whoever that might be mohammed or someone else and they the details were changed ever so slightly so as to apply a new theological backbone upon them so i can give you an example uh take the annunciation story in the christian tradition now today we find that mary is the queen of heaven [Music] and the spouse of the holy spirit this is but this nuptial mystery was back in the syriac fathers and in their tradition the people who surrounded the nascent islamic community just as it was in hours they have long liturgies long homilies long treaties spelling out mary as being this divine mother of god and also the chaste spouse of the lord and you see that primarily take it out and when she asks the question out of the biblical passage when she asks how will this be done you say that that i'm going to be burying this child how will this be done and the angel gabriel responds to her by saying that the holy spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you like very intimate language and that's what the syriac fathers understood to be that that intimate nuptial really divine wedding proposal and so when she ultimately responds fiat mihi secundum verbum tomb let it be done unto me according to thy word she's saying yes to that divine wedding proposal and all of a sudden heaven and earth become one flesh but what do you find in the quran instead and there's many details that are changed but the important ones instead of responding to mary with that intimate language you find her the the answer to her question how will this be done is rather it is easy for me i can it's just very simple very plain and all about the power of allah it goes further instead of waiting begging her for her yes to god what happens instead is that that same subjunctive fiat that mary said let it be done let it be that was taken out of her mouth put in god's own mouth mouth as an imperative be and it is and ibn kathir a very very well-known muslim exegete said that it was unbefitting for a woman to control what was going to happen god wanted it done and he got it done there's none of this intimate language and really this necessity of of a relationship that is built on a free will that is built on love um and these these start to bring out some of the ways in which the christian narrative is assumed and changed within islam to provide a new theological outlook um what do you think of those who claim and i believe the catechism the catholic church says though i don't have it in front of me that muslims and christians worship the same god yeah that's the dayum unicum no biscuit thing that i was mentioning earlier that we worship the same god uh and i think that there's two ways of really understanding this of the of the internal and external trinities that the church has thought about so much and is it the same god in the sense that it was the god that gave us the revelations about abraham and is it the same god in the sense that there really is only one god out there there's no two gods out there so they are certainly trying to praise god that's genuine and insofar as they are worshiping a monotheistic god they are doing so but are the persons of those gods the same absolutely not and i don't believe that the second vatican council is making that claim at all and maybe there's another way of backing into this as well is that um you find there's a lot of claims about islam being a violent religion and there's there's a lot to be said about that from a legal standpoint to his from a historical standpoint but also from a modern standpoint because you find that most muslims today are just some of the most wonderful people you'll ever meet i mean they're just awesome awesome people and they'll never claim anything other than islam is a religion of peace and they'll even go so far and i think this is clearly from uh from christian influence to claim that that god loves like a mother loves a child in her womb now most muslims will say that's too intimate that's too close don't dare you claim that for us but there are a select few that do and uh and that's captured in in the way that the quran is opens up bismillah that in the name of god the merciful the compassionate and you hear those words which categorizes these words together and they and there's another word that shares that same root and that's means womb and so that's where some of these people say that look he loves his compassion is like that of a mother suffering with her child in her womb and i think even at its best that's what islam has offered and that is gorgeous and it is beautiful but there is still a fundamental difference between what a muslim believes and what a christian believes in that because a christian will go so far that to say that god so loved the world that he became that child in the womb which is something that a muslim would would never dare say even the most those most influenced by western christianity all right well if it's okay with you i'd like to turn to some questions that we're getting here on youtube did you want to say anything else before we dive into that or oh that's great thanks absolutely before we do that i want to ask all of y'all watching and this is pretty cool we have around 500 people watching right now do us a favor and smash that like button click subscribe share this video on facebook or twitter that's really one of the best ways you can support the channel other than being a patron so we'd really appreciate it one of the questions that just came in from our patrons and we've touched upon it comes from bart eupart who i had on the show recently actually he says can you please ask him what's the significance of the virgin mary in islam yeah it's a great question the significance of it so uh i guess we don't really know his question all too well but it the the significance in its founding i believe like the way in which mary is was written about in the quran is very special she's the only woman ever named in the quran all other women are considered to be the wife of so and so but miri is given not just her name but also an entire surah a chapter of the quran dedicated to her surat maryam and you find that she is indeed a virgin and she gives christ in this gives birth to christ in this miraculous way and what i think is actually happening at the foundations of of islam is that what muhammad is doing is taking this character that people love this person that that people love and they're he's changing some of the details about her so that they don't know that they're being inculcated into a different vision of who she is but but the veneration of her goes on today and and with great praise especially in ephesus yeah i understand that we want to be charitable in our discussions with muslims and that it can be a real uh sign of of charity and and sort of uh to begin with what we agree upon i think sometimes we we over emphasize that though when we need to be condemning islam as a heresy how do we balance those two things well i speaking the truth and love is is a really tricky thing but one thing that i've i've noticed has been really helpful for me and speaking to muslims has been juxtaposing these stories because most westerners say that look at all these details that they get wrong about mary like at one point it seems like they confuse mary for certainly as a member of the trinity there's a there's a verse in the quran that says you jesus did you tell our followers to worship me you and your mother so certainly there's like a trinitarian linking that shows up multiple times but also at one point it seems like they mistake her for aaron and moses sister miriam as they call her the the sister of mary or the brother excuse me yes the sister of aaron um and and so there's there's quite a number of these details that seem out of place and so what i've tried to do with part of my research is to show that these were not accidental changes made out of ignorance but they were very purposeful and even though you might have a different understanding of mary than we do as someone who's fiat is absolutely essential who's it like the welcoming of the divine approach is essential um and that that is purposefully changed in the quran most muslims and all that i've met uh will say yes thank you that is the correct story that's the better story who are we to say it's not a slight against them it sounds like a slight to us that we're not granting that her that that power and the intimacy uh that that is that makes love possible but for them it's no problem we need the power of god to be uncompromised and so i find that a lot of these stories uh that you can tell about the annunciation the creation of adam a whole slew of them cain and abel where the details are changed they like it but but you finally have a clear vision from that juxtaposition of the two stories okay thank you here's a question from mcafee studios he asks how do muslims in general view catholics versus protestants versus orthodox etc do they view christian groups differently interesting question haven't thought about that before yeah it's a great question i i can only speak from uh my own experience i've never really studied the question directly but i do know that protestantism doesn't even seem like real christianity to them that it's not unified it's not grouped together there's no real hierarchy they understand religion not in the liberal sense um and i i recommend an article by andrew willard jones is the liberal conception of religion our problem i think is what it's called uh where we think about religion is just the thoughts that we have between behind our eyes and between our ears maybe in our heart but religion in the pre-liberal sense is this understanding of something that is totalizing that that captures all of our life and muslims still have that same understanding and so i and for them they see that catholicism and orthodoxy is a true religion and for protestantism it lacks those that fundamental thrust oftentimes okay another question comes from bear aristotle as in aristotle but not he says what do you think are the best lanes for discussion with muslims to move them over to christianity uh well i to be honest the a big one that i've seen work with many of my friends has actually been direct criticisms of of uh muhammad in the chronic text um oftentimes i find though that there is a mor there that that is you're you're going to lose a friend or convert the friend at that point and and i like these stories instead to give you an accurate vision of god and then to welcome them in from their conviction of sin which is taken care of by christian christianity by jesus christ alone um what's your opinion of david wood are you familiar with him you know i'm not that not that familiar let me rephrase it what is your opinion of those on youtube who criticize islam very strongly and mock muhammad i don't like that at all i don't like that at all i think that um i think that that love is does better than that or to be honest and there's a lot of problems with it within islam there's a lot of problems with an islam and it is a false religion and it is a heretical religion but it's but those but there's a difference between islam as the religion and muslims themselves and um evangelization is a primal act of love where you're inviting people to know love himself and i do think that that should be as ceaseless as a wooing robert boylan asks as a former muslim and protestant both traditions against the veneration of images right um how did jacob get over the hump of what roman catholic theology teaches about the veneration of images and statues right well that was that was tough uh i'll never forget it i think the only thing that really would have done is first there was kind of the intellectual conversion through reading john demuskine on on images on icons and uh theodore of mapsuestia if i'm saying that name anywhere close to correct but his uh it'll get you far enough on google that those two books defending sacred icons and of course the seventh council was was about this those helped my intellectual conversion but i remember when i was a orthodox catechumen and it came up at the end of a divine liturgy to kiss the crucifix yes oh my gosh i don't think if my friend kevin hadn't grabbed me by the arm and brought me up there and forced me to kiss it i could have ever gotten over it it was a tremendous thing and i and it was actually a gift too because it really was kind of a breaking the seal and yes intellectually i'm there i think this is right wow wow okay this question comes from renren do you find that muslims copy argumentation against the trinity from jehovah's witnesses and if so do you yeah i'm not sure do you think we have just as much of an obligation to see them as a heresy on the same level so i guess another way of thinking about this is there are different christian well non-christian sects that have some things in common with christianity such as the jehovah's witnesses you know do you see when maybe when muslims try to argue for why god is one person do do you think they're borrowing from jehovah's witnesses and should we see them on the same level as far as a heresy is concerned yeah well i i don't know that much about jehovah's witnesses they won't speak irritatively on this at all uh but as far as their aryans they are heretics i see the connections between mormonism more readily apparent where the leader finds these scrolls out of nowhere he builds a community it's polygamous and it really is totalizing of your life as well i had a muslim friend come to me once she was watching a documentary on mormonism she says what's up with this this guy just claims that he has this book out of nowhere and he has all these wives and i start to look at her like this and she gets big-eyed and she says never mind turns around and leaves and so i do think that there's there's obvious connections there but i can't speak about jehovah's witnesses i'm sorry what i love about this channel is we have people from all across the spectrum and you're also very welcome for example with lds and atheists and one uh lds just asked this question again robert boyle and he's like and let me see if i can phrase his question though he probably doesn't mean it this snarkily let me let me put some snark to it yeah that's great about john damascene but he's this dude's from the 700s um so like pointing back to the 700s isn't much of an argument for why we should venerate images um maybe the earliest christians never did something like that where is that taught in scripture isn't it forbidden oh interesting to make graven images i'm happy to respond to that too if you like sure no i'm happy to do so it's i don't think that an argument becomes a bad argument based upon its chronology so it's distance from us or the distance from the early church it doesn't make it wrong and in fact if you go back and look at the early church and they're worshiping in the catacombs you can visit the catacombs today they have icons on the walls that were participating with them in the divine liturgies they celebrated there so archaeologically the early church used them but i think that the the but the the real argument of saint john damascene is really important and should be considered uh with the due time that it deserves his argument in a nutshell is that when you find in the second commandment second commandment to not worship any graven images that that was because god was not visible to the people that it was in contrast to all the nations around who had these idols that were represented the hidden gods says that's not right and when he did engrave himself in a physical image as jesus christ then it is actually part of our creedal duty to affirm this truth by making him into an image i would also point out that if someone and i'm not saying i'm not putting words in robert's mouth here i'm not sure what he thinks but if somebody wants to condemn the making of images based on that commandment that you should make images of things above the earth then god broke his own commandment not just in becoming man in christ but in exodus 25 chapter 25 and elsewhere where religious iconography and tapestries and golden angels were commanded by god so now if you want to respond to that and say well yes but um i think i've heard james white say this in a debate i thought it was such a terrible answer he was debating jimmy aiken he said yes but then look at how those israelites went on to kind of sort of have an idolatrous relationship with with such statues or something to that effect sure but the abuse doesn't negate the proper use of it so um i've never really understood why protestants seem to be not all protestants but some seem to be allergic to this idea of religious iconography and statues it's such an it's such an out-of-date idea too to put it a little more uh with an edge to it you know as you say like this is something that was dealt with in the seventh ecumenical council yeah which meant it was important as well i guess i should add that say that again which means that it was important as well that if they were dealing with it at an ecumenical council it was uh something that we should take the time to to resurrect the council's decision and to explain it again so salt and pepper probably not their real name says jacob how did you deal with people when you converted to christianity surely they didn't agree that we all believe in the same god so i guess just in general i think you may have already answered this but how did you deal with people kind of really disagreeing with your choice to become a christian you know what you take it i mean that's you just as christ took the lashings and those were real lashings for a while and they hurt but it makes you realize that you just have you have christ and you have this church you have a new family and you share in the same blood as well a new blood relationship through the eucharist um i think like a similar sort of trilemma exists with anyone who claims to be a prophet as much as it does with christ so if if if if muhammad says he receives a message from gabriel this comes directly from god it seems to me that we have basic basically three maybe four options right either he's right and he did in fact receive that revelation or he didn't and if he didn't he's either mad or he's a liar or maybe he's possessed by an evil spirit which i suppose would also make him a liar what would you choose out of that trilemma trilameral quadrilemma yeah it's it's tough um i think it's a great question and i think that the answer is one that falls to many religious leaders like did caesar believe that he was actually a god when he wielded the whole world for for muhammad i believe that he may have at one point begun to believe his own lie as it was almost coming to fruition as his armies were growing in the last uh last uh years of his life in medina he was he fought 86 battles and and won most of them uh he was spreading it out and he declared as as sahih muslim says one of the hadith reports that i have come to expel all christians and jews from the arabian peninsula and and so and at that time there was a great conception peter brown brings this up um very well that that if you were winning in battle it was divine blessing and if you were speaking as a holy man a crazy holy man who would stand on pillars for days and and yell out to the people uh or or hide in caves that that was your greatest authority in life and so and it's almost like the way that we think about celebrities that they think they thought about holy men in the same way and muhammad certainly designed himself to be in that in that form and and there really isn't i think a good explanation for this other than there is he did believe it truly you can't convince somebody if you with a up with a lie that long and and you can't gain that much power without uh real spiritual forces augmenting them okay veronica asks i heard muslims believed the crucifixion happened but jesus escaped and was replaced by one of his disciples is that true well there's kind of juries out on this one my grandfather actually had his own theories about where jesus was crucified in jerusalem and we could put that out to say that those were one of his inclinations towards the christian tradition again but but again i don't i can't can't speak too much he did die a muslim and so muslims do have are split on that point the the quran makes it there's two ways of interpreting that passage that either that he made it look like christ was crucified and it's either it made him seem like that he was crucified by the jews or he actually changed the face of jesus upon the cross to pontius pilate which is what the many of the hadith and tafsir reports hold so it's it's the jury's out on that one but i think that the the latter that that christ really was not crucified is more predominant have you been hearing stories uh coming out of predominantly muslim countries in which muslims are having dreams of christ and are converting absolutely tell us about that well these are kind of extraordinary events something akin to a genesis 28 where jacob is wandering towards his uncle laban's house and he has this great vision of the angels descending and ascending on these ladders he's alone and god comes to him and calls him for himself and and i think that this is what god is doing when we're not doing the work of evangelization he's doing it for us he loves these people too much to let them go and so the he does come to to them in dreams the virgin mary comes to them in dreams and these often lead to conversions but also it often leads to disbelief one of my cousins had a series of these these dreams as well where jesus most beautiful man in the entire world he came to me he said i can save you he just he's still it's in the back of his mind he still doesn't know how to handle it and so but it happens and it's real and god craves this intimacy with us and he won't let anything stop it beautiful hey this has been an absolute pleasure thank you so kindly we've had like over 500 people just kind of watching they're watching now been doing this for a while so that says a lot to how bloody interesting and articulate you are so thanks so kindly for taking the time to do this any uh any final words thank you yeah you're welcome anything yeah point people to before we wrap up thanks very much we new polity is is the think tank that i mentioned earlier we have a landing page and some discounts and ways of just getting involved and understanding what our project is at newpolity.com frad uh you're welcome to we're welcome to this all right okay thanks very much appreciate it but we'll look forward to welcoming you there yeah awesome well i would like to kind of invite people to consider becoming a patron of pints with aquinas we are putting out a ton of stuff regularly i got the greatest compliment recently somebody said that i do more for my patrons than anyone else that they know of so i'm going to go ahead and take that right now we're doing a seven part video series on augustine's confessions led by dr chad england from the university of dallas we've done a 21-part series on uh dante's confessions uh we had uh father damian ferentz do a seven-part video series on aquinas and flannery o'connor uh we're continually putting out new content this amazing beer stein that you see could be yours when you become a patron at patreon.comfred we're doing a lot of work with we've opened up a spanish channel where i'm paying people to professionally dub uh pints with aquinas clips if you type in pints with aquinas espanol into youtube you'll be able to see them and they're really really professionally done we have video editors and marketers and all of this cost money so if you like what you're seeing if you'd like to see it go from good to great and see more of it please consider becoming a patron even for a dollar a month would be awesome at patreon.com mattfradd patreon.com mattfradd thank you this was great thanks this is great i really appreciate it it was great talking with you look forward to buying you another beer in uh steubenville you got mine actually you gotta come back i'll get yours this time thank you anything cool in that tolkien house just for those who are just tuned in just so you know um jacob is in one of tolkien as in jr tolkien's old houses anything in there sort of cool from when he lives nothing super cool we're in currently uh my wife and son and i live in walter hooper's flat and in our bedroom right next to us is the very desk that c.s lewis wrote the narnia chronicles on do you sometimes just curl up against it i kind of lick it genius no i don't do that but it's uh my wife was like emptying all of our stuff when we were first moving in and like stacking it up on there so you got to be a little bit careful with that one that's amazing well thank you for your time and god bless you hey god bless you thanks matt bye

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 73,046

Rating: 4.9200363 out of 5

Keywords: islam, muhammad, allah, koran, quran, muslim, convert to christianity, muslim convert, converted from islam to christianity, radical islam, islamic extremists, catholicism, bishop robert barron, word on fire, fr. mike schmitz, catholic answers, dr. taylor marshall, pints with aquinas, apologetics, theology, acts17, david wood

Id: PialRczWUwk

Length: 65min 33sec (3933 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020