IV. The Five Surgical Excisions

I will describe them in the order in which they were necessary.

The First Excision: The Trinity

The triune nature of God was the most theologically precise gift Jesus left His people. The eternal love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit — God who is not merely loving but who IS love in His own internal nature, before any creation existed to love — is the foundation of everything that follows. A God who is intrinsically relational loves not because He needs an object but because love is what He is. Remove the Trinity and you lose the ontological basis for the claim that God is love. Replace it with absolute divine unity — Tawhid — and God becomes loving by sovereign choice rather than by nature. The difference is enormous.

The Second Excision: The Incarnation

If the Trinity established that God is intrinsically relational, the Incarnation established that He entered the relationship at cost. He did not reveal Himself from a distance. He came. He took on flesh. He entered the condition of the people He was trying to reach, lived their life from the inside, and offered what they could not produce from within that condition: a fully righteous human life. Remove the Incarnation and you lose the only mechanism by which a holy God could become the substitute for unholy human beings. Replace it with a prophet — even the greatest prophet — and the gap between God and the human being remains as wide as it ever was. The prophet can show the way. Only God incarnate can walk it for you.

The Third Excision: The Cross as Atoning Event

This was the most critical excision. The cross was not hidden. It was visible to everyone — Romans, Jews, the disciples themselves. The evidence for the crucifixion is among the best-attested facts of the ancient world. A simple denial would not hold. What I needed was a denial that could be presented as reverence. And I found it: the proposition that a God of such power and majesty would never allow His prophet to be humiliated and killed. That God would have intervened — removed Jesus before the cross or substituted someone else in His place — precisely because He is great enough to prevent such a thing.

The theological result was a view of power that looks like reverence but functions as a barrier. A God who rescues from suffering rather than entering it. A God who is too great to be crucified. This sounds honorable. But it removes the cross as a payment, which removes the debt as something paid, which leaves every human being still owing what they cannot pay.

The Fourth Excision: The Holy Spirit as Indwelling Person

Of all five excisions, this is the one that produces the most visible difference in day-to-day spiritual experience — and the one that most sincere adherents sense without being able to name.

The Spirit is acknowledged. He has a role — the angel Jibril, the Spirit of holiness, the divine agent. The Spirit is not denied. But the specific promise of Jesus — that the Spirit would dwell inside every believer permanently, not visiting but residing, not assisting from outside but transforming from within — that promise requires the cross to have happened and the resurrection to have vindicated it. If the cross did not happen, there is no basis for the Spirit's indwelling. And so the third excision enables the fourth: remove the cross, and the indwelling Spirit becomes theologically unavailable.

The result is a worshipper who reaches toward God with great sincerity and finds that the distance between them remains constant. They pray, and God is acknowledged as near — nearer than the jugular vein (Surah 50:16) — but the specific nearness of the Spirit who says I will be in you (John 14:17) is not available. The worshipper is left on the outside of a house that could have been their home. And they believe that this distance is appropriate — that the transcendence of God requires it. That a God who actually dwells inside human beings would be diminished.

They have been given a theology of God's distance that feels like reverence but is actually the barrier I needed. A God who stays outside cannot do what the indwelling Spirit does: produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — not as requirements but as fruit. Not demanded from the outside but grown from the inside. The difference between the two modes of spiritual formation is visible in the lives of people who live them. But if you have never experienced the inside mode, you cannot miss what you do not know to look for.

The Fifth Excision: Grace

The final excision was perhaps the most elegant. I replaced grace with scales.

Not by denying that God is merciful — Al-Rahman, Al-Rahim, the Compassionate, the Merciful, begins every chapter of the holy book. The mercy of God is proclaimed constantly. But the specific operation of that mercy — the mechanism by which it reaches the individual believer — was replaced.

In the original: grace operates as a gift, unearned, based on what Christ has already accomplished, received by trust. The believer's standing before God is not determined by the balance of their deeds but by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. This produces certainty — not the certainty of personal achievement but the certainty of a signed contract.

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." — Romans 8:1 (NET)

Not probably no condemnation. Not no condemnation if the scales cooperate. No condemnation. Now. The question is settled.

In the replacement: grace operates as sovereign mercy applied to the scales system. God can forgive, but whether He will — in your specific case, for your specific record of deeds and sins — remains His sovereign decision. You cannot know in advance. You live, therefore, in a state of perpetual uncertainty about the most important question you will ever face. Muhammad himself — and this is recorded in an authentic hadith — told his followers he could not promise them paradise. "By Allah, though I am the Apostle of Allah, yet I do not know what Allah will do to me" (Sahih Bukhari 6:60:60).

The uncertainty is not incidental. It is the entire point. A worshipper who knows they are forgiven serves God out of love and gratitude — freely, joyfully, from an overflow of what they have received. A worshipper who is not certain works and works and works and is never sure whether it is enough. One of these modes of operation produces the Fruit of the Spirit. The other produces a very different kind of religion — one that I find much more useful to manage.

The five excisions map to the five points at which Islam diverges most sharply from orthodox Christian theology. For academic analysis of these divergences, see: David Thomas, ed., Christian Doctrines in Islamic Theology (Brill, 2008); Daniel Janosik, John of Damascus, First Apologist to the Muslims (Pickwick, 2016). John of Damascus, writing in the 8th century, was the first major Christian theologian to engage systematically with Islam — and he identified the crucifixion denial as the central point of divergence.