A Critique of the CAMEL Method’s Use of the Miracles of the Muslim Jesus

In response to the challenging work of evangelical outreach to Muslims, missiologists began—especially in the early to mid-twentieth century—to ask questions about the methods that they were employing.

In Protestant circles, this emerged strongly during the 1970s when responses based on fulfillment theology; the application of linguistic dynamic equivalence theory to missions; contextualisation and qur’ānic bridging all were proposed. In Bangladesh, sometimes known as the laboratory for missiological experimentation, these ideas were tested, and in the late 1990s, a method based on the qur’ānic text of Sūrat Āl ‘Imrān 3:42-55 was developed. It used the acronym, CAMEL. The method, although declared wildly successful, requires a closer examination of its main premise that the Qur’ān can be used as an apologia for Christian truth.

This paper critically examines the CAMEL premise in light of four recurrent themes that emerge from the CAMEL corpus between 2003 and 2015. These themes touch on the idea that Christianity can fulfill Islam; a presentation of the gospel can be built on the foundation of the Qur’ān; that the Qur’ān is a repository of Truth—as it calls it; and that the miracles of the Muslim Jesus of Q. 3:49 can serve to prove his divinity or his divine attributes. In order to show that CAMEL has adopted the approaches of proof-texting and employing a ‘Christianized qur’ānic hermeneutic’ to Q. 3:49, we examine that text in light of the larger Islamic worldview and the exegetical traditions of Islam. These clearly demonstrate that CAMEL for all of its noble purposes of presenting the Biblical Jesus to Muslims has taken the Muslim Jesus (ʿĪsā) and has made him more Christian than the Qur’ān ever intended him to be. Thus, the paper concludes that CAMEL’s use of the Qur’ān as an apologia for Christian doctrine is inadmissible.

Span, John. 2016. “A Critique of the CAMEL Method’s Use of the Miracles of the Muslim Jesus.” Aix-en-Provence, France: The Faculte Jean Calvin.