11/5/25

Today on campus, I had a few distinctly interesting conversations. The question on the whiteboard today was, "Where is God in suffering?", but the most distinct conversations I had only started there. One of these conversations was with a faculty member who told me that God is in everything - thus naturally including suffering. As I asked him to unpack what he meant by God being in everything, he elaborated by saying that everything in existence is made up of God and fully controlled by God. He wasn't very clear on why he held this belief, and he kind of squirmed his way out of answering that question directly; however, I feel that we still made very valuable progress. We explored the idea of war and conflict that has seemingly always been present, and I asked him if that means that God is at war with himself. At first he rejected that idea, but he soon realized that he couldn't stay consistent and deny that. So, he shifted his narrative and decided that not everything is God - that there are some things opposing God. This was a very interesting jump for him to make, but it seems to help me, so I'm not complaining! I started to further flesh out the issues of believing that God is everything, as well as share the God of the Bible and Jesus' Gospel. He had to leave for a meeting and couldn't finish the conversation unfortunately; however, I think our conversation helped him to realize how ungrounded and problematic his previous theology was. Hopefully we will continue the conversation in the future!

Another great conversation that I had today was with a Muslim student. I can't remember exactly what his answer to the whiteboard question was, but it opened the door to a conversation evaluating Islam and Christianity as I asked him which god he was talking about. I asked the standard questions, (How long have you been a Muslim? What compels you to be a Muslim? Etc...) and this led quite nicely into why I'm not a Muslim. I think he had already asked me how I would answer the whiteboard question, to which I responded, "On the cross dying." This was my general response regardless of who I was talking to, but it doubled as a sort of "click-bait" for Muslims as well. If you're not aware, Islam teaches that Jesus was not crucified on the cross, but that Allah made someone else [some argue Judas] appear like Jesus and die in His place. This led to a friendly duel over the death of Jesus. Eventually in the conversation, we arrived at the usual issue: is the Bible corrupted or not? From here, I shared the Islamic Dilemma with him, and we talked about the reliability of the Gospels according to the Quran.

After laboring over Quranic verses saying to judge by the Gospel (Injil) and Torah, he finally accepted that Muhammed still had an uncorrupted version of the Gospel and Torah during his life. This was the largest point to establish in our conversation, and now all I had to do was demonstrate how we can know that we have the same Gospel that was present at the time of Muhammed. This can easily be done as we have manuscripts from far before Muhammed's time that are the same as the Bibles we have today. It took a while for him to fully grasp the point I was making, and you can see, in the pictures to the right, me drawing out a timeline as a visual. He finally understood what I was saying and even said that if he finds that there are biblical manuscripts from before Muhammed's time, then he will no longer be a Muslim. This will be extremely easy to find as there are SO many manuscripts prior to Muhammed that match the Bibles we have today. I gave him a copy of the Islamic Dilemma, as well as my phone number, and I hope to hear back from him soon and continue our conversation - moving him not just out of Islam, but into Christ!