Highly respected evangelical pastor John Piper made a startling yet insightful comment Tuesday when he compared the burning of the Islamic holy book to crucifying Christ.
His comment comes amid reports that at least 24 people have died, including seven United Nations employees, in Afghanistan since Friday over the burning of the Quran by a fringe Florida pastor in March.
To help explain Muslims’ violent rage over the Quran burning, Piper cited the writing of U.K. scholar Andrew Walls, founder of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, in his book The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History.
In the book, Walls highlighted that a 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 Quran, 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 Quran is for Muslims what the Bible is for Christians,” wrote Walls, who was one of the first scholars to study the global church shift away from the West. “It would be truer to say that the Quran is for Muslims what Christ is for Christians.”
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