An Interview with the Rev. Dr. Jacob Rodriguez
The Rev. Dr. Jacob Rodriguez is an assistant professor of New Testament at Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania and an associate director of the Stanway Institute.
Zachary Miguel: Thanks again for doing this. I’d like to open up with talking about your missionary experience. What were you doing in the mission field? Where were you working? What kind of things were you doing?
Rev. Dr. Jacob Rodrgiuez: Before I did my doctoral studies, I was based in Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa. I initially went to teach at a small Bible College and train pastors and church leaders in how to how to read the scriptures faithfully, as well as teaching other basic theology. But as I got there, I realized that one of the most important things that was needed for training was how to evangelize, share the gospel with Muslim neighbors, and disciple Muslim-background believers who had come to Christ from a Muslim context. So after a couple years into being there in Ethiopia, I kind of pivoted—still teaching in the classroom, but then spending a lot of my time doing grassroots training for Christian-background believers on how to reach out to their Muslim neighbors, and also doing discipleship training for Muslim-background believers.
ZM: Great. Now, you’re also a New Testament scholar, so let’s talk a little bit about Scripture. You were in a Muslim context at the time. Are there any differences in how Muslims and Christians approach their respective sacred texts, perhaps in interesting areas like how we talk about inerrancy? Do you affirm inerrancy? Is there a difference between maybe how a Muslim and a Christian would approach their sacred text?
JR: Yeah, so I’ve actually said many times before that in the context of evangelism training, I personally find it much easier to evangelize and share the gospel with Muslims than with secular humanists, because there is a reverence for sacred revelation and sacred texts. That is, it takes a little bit more translation or philosophical groundwork when talking to a secular person, whereas a Muslim has a context for a sacred text that is completely without error, utterly reliable, and coming from the nature of God Himself. So when sharing Christ with Muslims, I actually found it to be the case that, fundamentally, they wouldn’t disagree that the law, the prophets, and the gospels are inerrant, but they would come up with some kind of argument that some way along the path in the reception and transmission of the Christian Scriptures, they were distorted. So then we can go back-and-forth, toe-to-toe, and actually talk about historicity. But really, I found it most effective sometimes to literally put the Bible in the lap of a Muslim neighbor and say, “Read. Read the Injeel—read the Gospel—and see what happens.” Missiologists have done studies and shown that that’s one of the most effective ways to lead a Muslim to Christ: just read the Gospel of John or read the Gospel of Matthew and say “Whatever Jesus the Teacher says, try to obey. See if you can keep all of his law.” They have an awareness that the words of Jesus are authoritative, so I’d say, “Let’s see if we can obey them.” That introduces the grammar of the gospel. His law is so perfect, so flawless—but we are the flawed ones who can’t keep it. That introduces the need for the saving grace of God that Jesus himself reveals through his cross, death, and resurrection. We’re really building on a foundation where we have some commonality and understanding that the scriptures are utterly reliable and completely trustworthy in all they affirm. I actually found that to be a kind of common ground that I would have with Muslim neighbors.
ZM: Okay, that’s great. Talking about commonality in evangelizing Muslims, there’s a lot of debate these days over whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Could you maybe speak to that and then speak to how the position that you take affects how you share the gospel with your Muslim neighbor?
JR: Yeah, well, just like I shared in terms of methodology—how I much prefer just putting a Bible in the hands of a Muslim neighbor—I prefer that to trying to use the Quran to point to Christ. I think a good Muslim would identify my use of the Quran as disingenuous, because they would see how the Christian claims about Jesus are fundamentally incompatible with Muslim claims. For me to be a faithful Christian and for my neighbor to be a faithful Muslim, we can’t pretend that we have common ground about Jesus as he’s ultimately proclaimed by Christians. Right off the bat, it’s good to acknowledge that we have incompatible views about Jesus the Christ, so then it’s just a matter of saying, “Muslim friend, have you ever read the Scriptures of Jesus through and through? No? You haven’t? Okay, well, I challenge you as your neighbor and as your friend: let’s read through these together and see what happens.” That invites the work of God through the inerrant, infallible Scriptures to reach the heart of the Muslim neighbor.
Now, similarly, when it comes to concepts about God, there is some common ground. Just like a Muslim might understand the concept of inerrancy, a Muslim might understand the concept of one God, but when it comes to the question of whether we believe in or worship the same God, I would like to differentiate between God as a person, God as a concept, and God as a name. So if we talk about God as a name, and the person with whom I am sharing the gospel or fellowshipping is an Arabic speaker, then it is reasonable to acknowledge that Allah is an Arabic name for God. Just like we translate “Gott” in a Germanic context or “Shangdi” in the Chinese context, Allah is an Arabic word for God. Can it be used to worship the one true God? Absolutely.
But then we get into the realm of concept. The oneness of God might have overlap with the Christian or Jewish understanding, but the way that that oneness of God is revealed to humanity through a mediator that is also God, and by the inspiration of the Spirit, who is also God (and we’re still worshiping one God) – that’s the Trinitarian understanding of the oneness of God. It’s incompatible with the concept taught in Islam. So the name can be used in the same way if we speak Arabic, but the concept only has some overlap, not total overlap. I would even say minimal overlap.
Then we come to the person of God—that’s where I think we have complete incompatibility with a Muslim understanding of God, because our God is only revealed to our human consciousness, understanding, and faculties through the mediation of Christ, the person—Christ the Son. We could never have the unmediated glory of God if it were not for the Son. Patristic theologians would say that even the glory of God in the temple, in the Old Testament, or the cloud on Mount Sinai, or the burning bush, were through the logic of incarnation—through the mediation of Christ. We cannot know the unknowable God except through the mediation of the person of Christ, and that understanding of who God is as a person, or three persons in one God—that’s incompatible with the Muslim understanding. So, when I’m discipling Muslim background believers, it’s a slow process to get to a Trinitarian understanding of God, just as it was a not-so-straightforward process for the disciples when they followed Jesus for three years.
This is a discipleship goal we can’t avoid. In fact, we don’t want to avoid it. We want to go for that goal. For Muslim-background believers to worship God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (through the mediation of the Son, by the work of the Spirit, praying to God the Father) this kind of Trinitarian logic of worship is utterly necessary in our goals for discipleship. That’s a long-winded way of saying that, in our ministry towards Muslim neighbors, we have a respect for where they’re coming from, but also honesty about our own goals—that we want them to come to a knowledge of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, worshiping Him in the beauty of holiness and according to the grammar of the Scriptures.
ZM: That’s great. Let’s talk a little bit about maybe a distinctly Anglican approach to Scripture and how that might impact how we do evangelism amongst our Muslim neighbors.
JR: Well, I think right off the bat, something that I’ve heard from several contexts of mission in the Muslim world is that we Anglicans, as a liturgical tradition, have a structure for worship, with patterns that we explicitly teach and embody, that teach us about God, about ourselves, and about our communion.
Most of the time, when Muslims come out of an Islamic context of religion and into Christianity, they’re kind of surprised when there’s a low-church context and there’s no liturgy. They think, “Well, I left five pillars. What do I have in place of these pillars? These pillars told me about the sanctity of a place like Mecca, or about the regularity of prayer, or about the self, the asceticism of fasting, and the oneness of God and the surety of his revelation through his prophet. If I’ve left all that behind, then what do I have to fill these gaps? What schema do I have to understand who God even is, or who his people are?” I found on several occasions that when they come into Anglican worship, they say “Okay, this creed that I now confess shows me how God is one, yet He reveals Himself to me through the Son by the Spirit. I see how this same creed that has been confessed by Christians across the world, across the generations, unites me to a new brotherhood. The practice of feasts and of fasts, of Lenten fasting leading to Eucharistic feasting, is tuning and reframing my heart to worship the one true God in Christ.” So I think the liturgical understanding of Christianity in the Anglican tradition really meets the needs of Muslims who come to Christ and then are baptized and are in need of a new liturgical way of life to teach them who God is and who they are as His people.
Now, when it comes to Scripture, I think we should consistently approach Scripture as the unerring Word of God—and I’m borrowing from Lee Gatiss here, who’s done some great research on folks like Augustus Toplady and other evangelical reformed Anglicans who understood the Scriptures to be completely unerring. So, we can trust God with everything that he affirms in His Word, from Genesis to Revelation. That is really consistent across the board for Anglicans—a confidence in the Word of God to communicate the truth of God, and to neither be led astray or lead others astray. So that confidence, I think, is thoroughly Anglican, and you can get that in non-Anglican traditions, of course.
But another facet that connects to the unerring nature of Scripture in the Anglican tradition is how Word is always paired with Sacrament. Particularly emphasized in the reformed Anglican tradition, Word and Sacrament reveal God in Christ. So just as the Sacraments sanctify earthly things like bread and wine to faithfully communicate the presence of Christ to God’s people and feed them with the fruits of the Gospel, in the same way the scriptures give us Christ, sanctifying papyrus and ink; sanctifying Koine Greek and ancient Hebrew to fully and faithfully communicate the presence of Christ, the Eternal Word, through human words as they are inspired, as they are spoken, and as they are transcribed and preserved in manuscripts. We can have confidence in the unerring Word of God, and we can have the wonder that God has chosen to use frail human instruments and sanctify them to give us the unerring Word of God in human words.
ZM: That’s beautiful. Okay, last question. Since you’re teaching an intensive course on the Gospel of John at Trinity this summer (which I’m very excited about), I’d love to hear how a text like the Gospel of John helps inform the way we evangelize our Muslim neighbors.
JR: So, maybe 15 years ago, I used to think that the Gospel of John would be a no-go for Muslims. I thought, “Okay, start with Mark, because Jesus, according to scholarly accounts, is more human in Mark, but he’s more God-like in John.” (Side note, I would completely disagree with that caricature now, because I now see a very high Christology in Mark, and a very human Jesus in John, and vice versa. But I digress). So, I used to think, “Well, let me get them a very human Jesus in Mark or in Matthew, and let’s save John till they’ve already been converted. It’s sort of the capstone for their discipleship course.”
But then I heard enough testimonies of Muslims coming to Christ through reading John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” And they’d stick with the text of John’s Gospel all the way through to when he’s feeding his disciples with fish in John 21. And they’d be coming to faith in Christ by the Word of the Gospel in John. So I began to think, “You know what? The Gospel of John and the way it communicates the glory of God in the flesh of Christ is effectual for monotheistic Muslims who have no concept of incarnation. It’s effectual to show them the glory of God in Christ and bring them to salvation.” That’s lingered with me for a number of years now, but I haven’t yet had the opportunity to dive more deeply into the grammar of John and see why John works in that way—bringing exclusive monotheists who have no concept of incarnation, to faith in Christ—until recently.
As I’ve been preparing for this course on the Gospel of John, I’ve been reading a book by a friend of mine, Steve Bryan, The Visible Word of the Unseen God, recently published in 2025. Steve was with me in Ethiopia; we were in the same mission organization. He was my leader and a mentor who really encouraged me into Biblical studies. His book makes the case that John portrays Christ as the Image of God that was revealed on Sinai, now revealed fully in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ—and that that revelation is fundamentally incompatible with pagan conceptions of Godhood and with first century Jewish misconceptions of Jesus.
Now it’s obviously not incompatible with the Jewish traditions that received Jesus as the Messiah, and, as Bryan argues, the glory of God in Christ is revealed in a way that thoroughly fulfills and agrees with the grammar of the revelation of glory in the Garden, on Mount Sinai, to Abraham, to David, and to all the prophets. It follows the tabernacling grammar of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. So it’s not un-Jewish, it’s certainly not anti-Jewish, and it’s certainly not anti-Old Testament. It is a fulfillment of that same grammar. But when we get to the Pharisees and the chief priests who are fully convinced that the Christian proclamation is a breaking of the First and Second Commandments of worshiping only one God and not making any images, they’re convinced that the proclamation of Jesus breaks those first two commandments. John has to say, “Look, that accusation is incompatible with our proclamation of Christ. So let me show you how God, just as he revealed his glory in the cloud on Mount Sinai and through the manna in the desert, so now he’s revealing fully his glory through Christ incarnate.” There’s a radical call to repentance that shows the incompatibility of Christianity with a rival tradition, but also invites the interlocutor to faith and salvation.
That approach really helps me. As I look at a Muslim neighbor and appreciate how there are echoes of general revelation in any context they’ve come from, I don’t have to be afraid or shy away from the incompatibility of their tradition with mine. Instead, I can, through various kinds of translations, but mostly fundamentally through the unadulterated preaching of the Word of God in Christ, invite a neighbor from a Muslim background to experience Jesus as the fullness of the glory of God revealed in human flesh. That, I think, is a very Johannine way of preaching the gospel—a very effective way of preaching the gospel to monotheists who have no concept of incarnation. We can do so compassionately, but do so also with unwavering conviction.
ZM: That’s wonderful. Thank you.
Author’s Note: Dr. Rodriguez will be teaching “The Gospel of John” as an intensive course from June 1-5. Registration will be open to both students and visiting auditors Mar. 30. More information can be found here.
Image Credit: Unsplash.
