The Qur’an in Context: A Christian Exploration by Mark Robert Anderson

Book Review

The Qur’an in Context: A Christian Exploration

By Mark Robert Anderson

InterVarsity Press, 2016

ISBN: 978-0830851423

340 pages

USD $16.99

Reviewed by Benjamin Lee Hegeman, SIM missionary, historian, and missiologist at Lilias Trotter Center, Houghton College, New York, USA.

Mark Anderson has answered a foundational question: ‘Can Christians fully grasp the Qur’anic worldview without becoming Muslims?’ Anderson has, by engaging the Qur’anic faith dialogically (grace) and by analyzing its doctrines thematically (truth) (305).

In the spirit of irenic dialogue, Anderson welcomes the Qur’anic deity as ‘God’ even if each chapter contains disclaimers concerning major doctrinal differences (308). To the question: ‘do we worship the same God’ he resoundingly replies: ‘Yes and no’; (34) and while the ‘yes’ receives the majority of attention, Anderson rejects Muhammad’s claim that the Qur’an is the sequel to the Bible. His closing chapter captures it well: ‘So Close Yet So Far’.

Anderson addresses Muslims as “brothers and sisters,” being sensitive to their truth claims within the Qur’an (11). Any reader not already committed to Anderson’s generous hypothesis will ask constantly, ‘So, of which God is he speaking now: the Qur’anic God or Scripture’s God?’ Given Anderson’s commitment to graciously advocate common doctrinal ground, the text moves seamlessly and dialogically between the Biblical God and the Qur’anic God.

Anderson’s defense of the Qur’an’s historic origin debate is refreshing as he rebuts the secular revisionists’ arguments. He is an excellent ‘tour guide’ of the Arab world and Muhammad’s Bedouin ‘God’.

The text treats Muhammad’s worldview as a unified whole. This allows Anderson to address the classical doctrines (God, creation, the fall, sin, salvation, prophets, revelation and Jesus) using a thematic grid. However, Islam’s unified ‘classical’ worldview only crystalized some two centuries after Muhammad’s death. Anderson’s research does not engage Muhammad’s significant evolution in doctrine and self-perception from early Mecca to late Medina. Anderson only engages Islam’s final classical theology as anchored in the Qur’an; and not the tensions of the internal process, and which—I would argue—accounts for all inter-Muslim tensions and violence. But then his book does not address the internal crises within the Qur’an but rather the classical Islam which Christians have faced since AD 632.

Anderson rightfully gives a central role to the treatment of Jesus and he joins most Christian scholars in lamenting how Muhammad not only sidelines Jesus but makes him “weak, unappealing, even freakish” (317). Missiologist Kenneth Cragg would have agreed with him. Anderson’s final threefold test of the Qur’an (the friendship of God, the free grace of God, and the humility of God) qualifying or not as the Bible’s sequel is so beautifully done that it was inspiring to read.

Like the wedding of Cana, Anderson leaves the best to last in his ‘Christian Reponses’. It reads as as marvelous summation of the whole. Anderson ends with three probing yet hard questions (Does the Qur’an really honour Jesus? Why does the Qur’an remarry monotheism to geopolitical violence? Has the Bible really been corrupted?) which Christians must ask their Muslim friends and which he believes can be done with “grace and truth”. Make room on your shelf for this new book. 

For Further Reading

Mateen, Elaas. Understanding the Koran: A Quick Christian Guide to the Muslim Holy Book. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004.

———. The Teachings of Jesus and Muhammad. Escondido, CA: EChristian INC, 2013.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary. Harper-One, New York, 2015.