Don Richardson Interviewed http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/februaryweb-only/2-10-22.0.html

Q: But now you seem to say that not all cultures offer that bridge.

A: I approached the Qur’an after 9/11, and I began to study it intensively to see if the redemptive analogy approach could work for Christians to approach Muslims winsomely. But I found that everything that a Christian would use of redemptive analogy to lead a person to God was already redefined in the Qur’an by Muhammad in a way that made the redemptive analogy approach not work.

What do you mean by redefined?

Well, for example, if you’re going to lead someone to understand Jesus as the Messiah, the one who by his reconciling death provided an atonement for mankind, [you have a problem because] the Qur’an says Jesus didn’t die. He was just a prophet. There was no atonement.

[If] you’re going to talk about heaven [using] five passages of the Qur’an, Muhammad redefined heaven as what you might call an enormous bordello in the sky.

Heaven is redefined. The work of Jesus on earth is redefined. Even the very nature of God is recast by Muhammad. So whatever you would use a redemptive analogy to lead someone to has already been changed by Muhammad. Hence you have to take a different approach.

But there are Muslims who are yearning for bridge building because they’re moderate. And what you’re saying it going to be very, very jarring to them.

Jarring, shocking, unless they have really read the Qur’an for themselves. And many Muslims have not.

Now, in the Qur’an there are war verses. And, you know, Kenneth Woodward in the recent Newsweek article said, “Oh, but there are very few.” Well, I decided to count them and find out just exactly how many there are. There are 6,200 verses, approximately, in the Qur’an, Dick, and I counted 109 war verses. That means one out of 55 verses in the Qur’an was written to incite Muslims to violence against various kinds of non-Muslims. That’s not a few, that’s a lot.