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Don Richardson is one of the most read authors on Christian missions alive today. Peace Child, a book about his missions work with the Sawi people in Irian Jaya, sold about half a million copies in 27 languages, was a Reader's Digest book of the month selection, and became a film that's available in 26 different languages. He is also the author of Eternity in Their Hearts. All of Richardson's books focus on what he calls his "redemptive analogy" thesis: the idea that each culture has some story, ritual, or tradition that can be used to illustrate and apply the Christian gospel message.

But in his latest book, Secrets of the Koran (excerpt), Richardson argues that Islam is very unlike the Sawi culture. One can't bring Muslims to Christianity by using Muslim concepts, he argues.

If I understand your redemptive analogy thesis, your general approach to other religions is to find common touch points and build bridges to them, as opposed to seeing walls everywhere.

Right. When [my wife] Caroline and I lived among the Sawi and learned their language, we found that they honored treachery as a virtue. This came to light when I told them the story of Judas betraying Jesus to death after three years of friendship. They acclaimed Judas as the hero of the story. It seemed as if it would not be easy for such a people to understand God's redemption in Jesus.

But lo and behold, their way of making peace required a father in one of two warring villages to make an incredible sacrifice. He had to be willing to give one of his own children as a peace child to his enemies.

Caroline and I saw this happen, and we saw the peace that resulted from a man's wonderful sacrifice of his own son. That enabled me to proclaim Jesus as the greatest peace child given by the greatest father.

In Lords of the Earth, the Yali tribe had places of refuge. That was their special redemptive analogy. In other words, there's something that serves as a cultural compass to point men and women toward Jesus, something that is in their own background, part of their own culture.

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

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.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47