Beeson podcast, Episode 336
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/Islam-and-Christianity
Barbara Pemberton
April 18, 2017
Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George.

Kristen Padilla:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. I'm Kristen Padilla, executive producer of the podcast, filling in for our dean, Timothy George, who is away this week speaking at the Gospel Coalition Conference and at Hope College in Michigan.
	Well, today I have the great privilege of introducing you to a wonderful friend and mentor of mine, Dr. Barbara Pemberton. Dr. Pemberton is Professor of Christian Missions at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. and Director of OBU's Carl Goodson Honors Program. She did her PhD in World Religions at Baylor University and is particularly interested in Islam.
	For 11 years, she spent her Christmas and summer breaks in Saudi Arabia studying Islam. Dr. Pemberton is a prolific speaker and has written numerous academic papers on the topic of Islam. She was one of my professors when I was a student at Ouachita Baptist many years ago. And she is one of several professors who encouraged me toward theological training. In particular, toward Beeson, of which I am most grateful.
	She is here in Birmingham this week talking to our students about Islam. So Dr. Pemberton, it is with great joy to welcome you to the Beeson Podcast.

B. Pemberton :	I'm happy to be here. Most happy to be with you.

Kristen Padilla:	Well thank you. This is going be a fun podcast. I want our listeners to know something about you. About the person I love so much. Tell us about yourself, how you came to Christ, and your call to ministry.

B. Pemberton :	I love telling how God drew me to himself. It's my favorite part of me, I think. I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, which is so much like Birmingham, I think, in my grandparent's home. My parents divorced when I was just a baby. But that was okay. I loved them but I loved living with my grandparents. They were so good to me. But my parents came and went. And that stayed with me. I wondered why someone who loved me so much had to go away, go and come. And that has still stayed with me, actually. 
	But I loved going to church. They faithfully took me to a church where I sat with my grandmother, who was in charge of the cradle roll ministry for 50 years. I used to help her make little pink and blue bows for the new babies. These were for families that had babies. These were new families in Christ. They had been brought to Christ through that ministry so it was very, very profound to see a woman so dedicated to that ministry. 
	I sat with her in church and I loved it. But I'll never forget the Sunday that the pastor was talking about Christ, of course. And he said, as you enter into a relationship with Christ, it is a forever relationship. And he used Hebrews 13:5 that says never will I leave you, never will I forsake you. And I really, truly think my heart skipped a beat. Because that's exactly what I needed, what I wanted so desperately in my life. That forever assurance and so I went home and I sat on my bed and I opened Scripture for myself and I read it. And I gave my heart to Christ in prayer on my bed.
	The follow up of that, though, is of course I went to talk to my pastor about wanting to be baptized to follow up. I knew to do that. But I asked him, so what about people in other religions? And he was so surprised. But I was blessed to be in a church that really discipled people, that discipled children. And he assigned women to me really quickly and we went through children's study course books. I don't know if that even exists anymore. But I learned about missionaries, I learned about theology, they put me in discipleship training and I had a woman leader who really put us through our paces. We had to stand up and talk about theology and memorize Scripture. 
	And that has really been a huge part of my life. I even teach a class at OBU in discipleship in the church. So little did I know, and little did that leader know, what was coming in our futures. But she invested so much in us.

Kristen Padilla:	And I remember having you in class for that discipleship class. And that class had a profound impact in my own life and my call to ministry and my journey to seminary. So I thank you and I guess I should thank the leaders in your church, the women in your church who instilled that desire for training and discipleship in you.

B. Pemberton :	No, actually thinking back, every one of us in our small group that went through discipleship with this one leader, when I went back to see her years later after I had finished seminary. And she said finally, the last one has come. Every one of us went into ministry. Think about the ministry that she had. Working with young people. Who knew, really? But that brings up my call because we talked about that a lot in that class on discipleship. And it was about a year after I came to Christ that I was sitting on my same bed again and I was reading in Isaiah 6:8 when it says whom shall I send and who will go for us? And I said, here am I, send me. And again, I think tears dropped in my Bible.
	To me, what that meant, I said, send me, but to me what it meant then and it still means to me is okay I'll do whatever. It didn't mean missions now or youth work or women's ministry or any of those things. And I've kind of done all of them. But it has been a joy.  Every day there's something new. And I never dreamed I'd be a teacher so you never, ever know what God has in store when you are just willing.

Kristen Padilla:	So what happened after you received that call to ministry?

B. Pemberton :	Well, I went through discipleship training at my church for a long time. And stayed with it. And I can't say that I didn't take some detours in my life. I went to college and studied. I did study comparative religion, actually, but I did get a degree in television broadcasting. Believe it or not, I worked in radio, I got married, had three children. Three under three. Now there was a challenge. That was the challenge. Raising them was really the challenge. Moved all over. My husband is an engineer so we lived in Alaska, we've lived in South Carolina, we've lived in Arizona. He has moved us a lot. So that took up a lot. That was my life until I really knew that it was time for seminary.
	And I can't say why I knew, but God just laid it on my heart. Right then I was youth minister in a mission church that we had started in Anchorage, Alaska. And I knew I needed to know more. I wanted to be able to answer their questions with Scripture really soundly and fill out that theology for them.  They deserved that. So I told my husband, and man, not within the next week, he was transferred to Texas. Wouldn't you know?
	So then I did have the opportunity.

Kristen Padilla:	That's wonderful. And so then how did you get to Baylor University? And particularly, to study world religions? To do your PhD in world religions? What drew you to that?

B. Pemberton :	I've thought a lot about why world religions. Because my master's work is in theology. And that was very, very important because I'm very rooted in my faith. That was very important. The deeper I studied other religions.
	People ask me quite often am I ever lured into thinking, well maybe this could be true? And I never have been shaken. Because I really was well rooted. And I take very seriously introducing students to world religions because I don't want to introduce anything that might shake their faith. So I'm very careful to get to know the students and invest in their lives to be sure of that. And what's humorous, I am a generalist. And in world religions you do study ...
	Did you know that there's a new religion every day? That's so crazy. But a visiting missionary on furlough was teaching at the seminary and I was taking his Biblical Basis of Missions, which turns out it was a really important class for me to have had. But he assigned a paper to me on the five pillars of Islamic orthopraxy. And I was hooked. I was totally hooked.
	I think, looking back, because I can understand a people who love their text. And I have always loved Scripture and I can understand a people who want desperately to trust their text. But what Muslims are doing is trusting their text to tell them how to merit paradise. And I want to use text to engage them. I've done a lot of comparative textual work so I can sit down with someone and talk about how we don't merit paradise. And there is another text through which they can find Christ.

Kristen Padilla:	So why would, then, a Christian study Islam? And what is it that they believe?

B. Pemberton :	It's really important today to study Islam because it's growing. And it's growing mostly in its influence, really. We may not have that huge percentage of Muslims here in the US even, but it's influence around the world is huge. And we do have Muslims in many, many communities. And fear leads to all kinds of problems and it's better to know about something and not be fearful. That's why we need to know our own faith. So we're not afraid too. When you have a more solid foundation, you're not afraid but a little bit. Just a little bit in case people don't know much about Islam. 
	Now according to their story, it began in the early seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula when their prophet Muhammad received a revelation from God. Now, Allah is just the Arabic name for God so I'm going to say God. But they would say Allah. He received this message through Gabriel that there is one God and he would be their prophet. And through him, they would learn how to merit paradise. At that time, there were Bedouin tribes, they had many different Gods. That was polytheism there, but there were Jews and there were Christians. But their message says that Jews had corrupted their text and Christians had corrupted the New Testament. 
	So to them, the prophet's work corrected the earlier texts. Now Muhammad did not write it. They believe that he was just a man but God's very words corrected the texts, is what they believe. Now they strongly have to lean on this because they do desperately want to avoid a very bad hell that is described their text, the Koran. So they are given orthopraxy, or things to do, in love. They hope that this will work. Much faith and they believe God is benevolent and loving and he will accept the rituals that they do. 
	These are very visible signs. These are the things we all see. We kind of know what a Muslim looks like because they do these things, right? The first thing is they have a profession of faith that says that they believe there is one God and Muhammad is his messenger. And that's important to remember. Because a Muslim not only believes in this one God and no Trinity. They believe that's our error, is our Trinity. But they also are really, really believing that Muhammad, they are trusting that Muhammad gave them the truth.
	So I call what they do, sort of what would Muhammad do? This is what you find in their work called the hadith. They have written down what they think he said and did and allowed and that is their way of knowing how to live out the Koran. So the prophet is that important to them. So to be a Muslim is to trust your eternity to the things that you are doing following the example of Muhammad. 
	They pray five times a day. And that is ritual prayer. It's not like our sitting down and having a conversation with God, though they can do that too, they say. But for a Muslim, God is very distant and “other”. Unapproachable, really. I had a Muslim friend look at me and say, "You can no more have a relationship with God than you can a pencil." Which was so sad. It was just so different. But I have had Muslim friends say they do talk to God regularly. But again, technically, according to their faith, God is held to be so “other” that you are doing this ritual prayer in hopes that it will be accepted. They even start with asking God to accept their prayer.
	And how wonderful, we know, that when we can come boldly to the throne, we just need to do it more often. They give Alms every year and they give about two and a half percent of what's left over each year. And they can give it to the needy, the mosque, an organization or whatever. Most of us know they fast during Ramadan. What we may not know is that is honoring the receiving of the Koran. So they are honoring the giving of their text.
	Not only do they fast but sometimes they memorize the Koran. The Koran is about the length of the New Testament and it's very normal for a little child to memorize the whole Koran, whether they speak Arabic or not. Technically it's not the Koran unless it's in Arabic. But I ask my students, so have you memorized the New Testament? Not many have. My goodness, we should. 
	The last of the five is their pilgrimage to Mecca. This is really, really, really important. I don't think people understand quite how important that is. Because if they can at all go or afford it, they have to go there. Mecca is their holiest site on earth. The whole country of Saudi Arabia is holy ground. But it is most sacred to them. Unbelievers can absolutely not go there. Not at all. And when they go there though, they do the things they think Muhammad did there. But they experience what they see as the ideal Islam. They see it regulated with everything that they do there. 
	They do not believe in separation of Mosque and state. Like we believe in separation of church and state. Because they believe the prophet was not only their religious leader but also their political leader as well. So when you have that situation, you can have religious police who enforce prayer time and enforce modest dress. This is why we see pictures of women veiled and covered. 
	It's a very communal religion. I kind of think of it, they're in this together. Thinking about the way women dress, I had a Muslim friend, a young man, tell me, I understand that in your faith people come to Christ one on one. You share your faith one on one. But we're in this together. We cover up the women so the men will not be tempted. So they're in this together and they believe that it is the role of the community, if you will, to help everyone merit paradise.

Kristen Padilla:	You just said profession of faith. Do they actually use that term that we, Christians, do?

B. Pemberton :	They use a lot of terms that we do. Especially in the US. Their imams, sometimes are called pastors. They have congregations. I've actually been to Vacation Koran School. 

Kristen Padilla:	Really?

B. Pemberton :	Yes. A Muslim woman was very impressed with Vacation Bible School and thought this would be a great way for their children to learn the Koran so they do those kinds of things.

Kristen Padilla:	So it could be that for us, Christians, sometimes if we were to overhear Muslims talk about their religion, we might need to be aware that they're using some of our terms because we can be easily confused. Is that correct?

B. Pemberton :	Yes and remember, they really do want to see us come to the religion of Islam. They have a goal for the whole world to come to Islam. I've had dear women weep over me telling me that if I would just come to Islam, I would have peace. The word Islam itself means, it has the root word in there, peace. But we need to remember that what they are meaning by peace is that peace found in Islam. There will only be peace in the world when the whole world is submitted to Allah and you do that through Islam.

	And we know that Jesus Christ is our peace. 

Kristen Padilla:	Right. What are some misconceptions Muslims have about Christians?

B. Pemberton :	They have many, just like we have some misconceptions of them, they have many. I think I already said that they do not believe in the Trinity. They really believe, their texts tells them that our Trinity is Father, Son, and Mary. They think we think that we think God had sex with Mary to have Jesus. Well, of course not.

Kristen Padilla:	Right.

B. Pemberton :	And you try to tell them, no we don't believe that. Yes you do, yes you do. No, no we don't. Again, they also believe that we dishonor God and Jesus by the very idea of the cross. That God would have never let his dear prophet, and they believe Jesus was a very wonderful prophet, would never let a beloved prophet die so terrible a death. No way.
	They also believe that God, again, is so “other” that he can't be known. And so they think there's no way we have ... We talk about relationship, we talk a lot about loving God. And because their God is not really relational, that kind of misses them. That is not part of their language in their religion.
	Though, you talked about them using our terms, I have been in a setting where they gave an alter call and they did talk about having a loving relationship with God and joining brothers and sisters in the faith, and I was stunned. But I think that's very Americanized, really. I think that's something that's done here. 
	They also believe, many do, that we want to lure them to hell. That if they visit our churches, they might go to hell, which of course they don't. We don't believe. We don't want to lure them to hell, that's terrible. But they also, oddly, some think that the aid we might send to other countries that are in need, that we're trying to buy them into the faith. And that is so not true. Of course that's untrue.

Kristen Padilla:	What is our response then, to these misconceptions? How do we relate to a Muslim?

B. Pemberton :	Their values. They have marvelous, wonderful values. Honor, power, submission, submitting to God. Well, let's think about that. Back to, are we dishonoring God? No, we can talk about the incarnation itself, they have a lot of trouble with that. But if we talk about it as the power of God to take on human nature, so let's not limit God. Of course he can do that. They do not understand the incarnation. That troubles them deeply. But also the cross.
	And I said they see the cross as dishonoring God. Well no, it does not dishonor God. We need to be able to explain it as God's victory over sin and death and Satan and they are very aware of the spirit world. They understand that it's ever present with them. So the understanding that he has defeated evil forces is very powerful for them.
	The cross displayed, God's glory, his power, his sovereignty, all things that resonate with the Muslim heart. Another aspect of the cross that we could explain to Muslims is, it is the generosity of God. They think often about their generous people and hospitality is so important. But this is God's free gift. But it has to be received.
	And yes, relationship, we don't deserve it. They think, well Christians, because they say they are saved, they know they're going to heaven. That we just run amuck. That we can just sin and it's no big deal. And of course that's not true. But if we say we would never dishonor our God, our Father in that way, they would understand so much better.
	They also, remember they truly think you can merit paradise, and I have found, and this is the one thing I always ask my world religion students to remember, every religion offers only what you deserve. And exactly what you deserve. And do you want what you deserve? I don't want what I deserve on any given day at all. Eastern religions give you karma, western religions give you what you can do, your own works. You have to merit it. But only in Christ do you get grace.
	And other religions try to lean that way, some of them move in that direction, but only in Christ do you find that eternal saving grace. That's the difference. People ask me often, what is the real difference between Islam and Christianity? And it all really goes back to their understanding of God and Christ. God is not, their God, their understanding of God is he is so unknowable. He's so far in a distance and he does not love sinners. How different is that? 
	How different is that? We know, and I love the verse Romans 5:8-9, "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." And I still remember, from my childhood back in church, that marvelous children's song. “Oh How I love Jesus.” When I talk at churches I make everyone sing it with me. But it's good to remember, “Oh how I love Jesus, oh how I love Jesus, oh how I love Jesus because he first loved me. 

Kristen Padilla:	Well today my guest on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. Barbara Pemberton. She is the professor of Christian Missions at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. We have enjoyed having you on this podcast, not only enlightening us about Islam, but even how we as Christians can relate to Muslims and understand our faith that much better.
	Before we end this conversation, can you suggest a book to our listeners who want to learn more about Islam?

B. Pemberton :	The first book that comes to mind is “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus” by Nabeel Qureshi. The reason is, other than that it's just very well written and wonderful book, but he shows you a very loving Muslim family. And how it is lived out in a wonderful home and a religion that he grew up loving. But how God called him out of that. And it was hard. It was hard to come to Christ. But he teaches you so much about Islam. But it's that great story of coming to Christ.

Kristen Padilla:	Well thank you, Dr. Barbara Pemberton, for this wonderful conversation. And I am glad that you are here at Beeson this week.

B. Pemberton :	Thank you. I've enjoyed it. 

Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.