Objection · Case 10 · Islam
The Old Testament records God commanding Israel to conquer Canaan and destroy its populations. If the founders’ model is the test, Christianity’s own Scriptures contain a conquest model that Christians have invoked for crusades and colonization.
One objection from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Response
The Christian reply is that the conquest narratives are tied to a specific, unrepeatable moment in Israel’s history and are not presented as a model for the church, which is given no mandate to conquer and whose founder explicitly renounced the sword; Christians who used Joshua as a warrant misread their own Scripture. Whether the conquest narratives are themselves defensible is a separate, hard question that this case does not answer. It is fair to hold that asymmetry against it.
About this exhibit
This objection is to The early Muslim conquests.
Historical records show that within roughly a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim armies had conquered vast territories from Spain to Persia. Muslims fairly note that forced conversion was…