The author and speaker John Piper recently stated that burning the Koran to Muslims is comparable to what the crucifixion of Christ is to Christians.
To help him reflect on the Koran burning incident that occurred last week in a Florida church resulting in violent protests throughout Afghanistan killing 24 people, including seven United Nations employees, Piper read through a book by the British scholar Andrew Walls called “The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History.”
In this book, Walls makes the point that one major difference between Islam and Christianity is that one is readily translatable while the other resists translation.
“Islamic absolutes are fixed in a particular language, and in the conditions of a particular period of human history. The divine Word is the Koran, fixed in heaven forever in Arabic, the language of original revelation,” wrote Walls.
“For Christians, however, the divine Word is translatable, infinitely translatable.
“Much misunderstanding between Christians and Muslims has arisen from the assumption that the Koran is for Muslims what the Bible is for Christians,” Walls continued.
“It would be truer to say that the Koran is for Muslims what Christ is for Christians," he said.
This last line led Piper to write in his own blog that the parallel between Christianity and Islam is not of Christ to the Muslim prophet Muhammad and the Koran to the Bible. Rather, the Koran parallels Christ.
“The giving of the Koran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity,” wrote Piper on his Desiring God website. “If this is so, then Koran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.”
Piper insisted that the burning of a book should not be seen as the moral equivalent of taking another human’s life, but that rather this understanding would help explain why Muslims are so outraged over the incident.
The pastor then stressed it is important for leaders in the two religions to teach their followers how to react when their sensibilities are offended. Piper argued that forgiveness should be the major paradigm in this regard, and violent responses should never be an option.
“So the Koran has been burned and the Christ has been crucified – and continues to be crucified,” Piper concluded. “The test is in the response.”