As Christian doctrine, the deity of Christ and the Trinity are inseparable. If one accepts the biblical doctrine about the deity of Christ, then he has already acknowledged that there is more than one person in the Godhead. If the doctrine of the Trinity is received, then the deity of Christ is already part of it. This is precisely why Muslims reject both, since to accept either is to them the denial of the absolute unity of God.   The Muslim ideas of God consist not only in what is asserted of deity, but also, and more emphatically, in what is denied. Our Muslim friends deny the Triune God—that is, God the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit. We see this in Sura’s Miriam [vv 91-92] which says   ‘They say the Merciful has taken Himself a son—ye have brought A monstrous thing! The Heavens well-nigh burst asunder thereat, and the earth is riven and the mountains fall down broken, that they attribute to the Merciful a son! But it becomes not the Merciful to take to Himself a son. ‘Praise belongs to God who has not taken to Himself a son and has not had a partner in His kingdom, nor had a patron against such abasement’-The Night Journey vs 112].   One scholar calls attention to this important fact regarding all false faith in these pregnant words, ‘Of all the systems of belief which had a widespread hold on mankind, this may be posited, that they are commonly true in what they affirm, false in what they deny. The error in every false faith is usually found in the denials, that is, its limitations. What it sees is substantial and real; what it does not see is a mark only of its limited vision.   Our Muslim friends should understand that the doctrine of Trinity has always been confessed by the church, and all who opposed it were thrown off by the church [like Arius, the church father and a heretic who denied the doctrine of Trinity]. He was excommunicated out of the church. For Christians, the doctrine of Trinity, in its widest sense, includes that of the Incarnation and of the Holy Spirit.   In studying what the Quran teaches and speaks on this subject, therefore, we must examine not only what it tells of the Trinity, but also those passages that speak of the nature of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit. We will divide this article into three sections so that when our Muslim friends read it they will understand it better.   Muslims misunderstand the Biblical Data on the Doctrine Of Trinity:   One can understand that there are obstacles in the mind of our Muslim friends that hinder accepting the Christian doctrine of Trinity. Some are philosophical and others are Biblical. Muslim scholars are very selective in their use of the biblical texts that suit their purposes in their discussion of Trinity (Jehovah Witnesses do the same, SDA, Mormon and other cults do the same). But even the texts they [Muslim scholars] pronounce ‘authentic’ are twisted (or used out of context making it pretext) and misinterpreted in support of their teaching. I will examine several of the more important ones to illustrate my point for the benefit of our Muslim friends.   No concept in all of Christian terminology receives such a violent or strong reaction from Muslims as the claim that Jesus is the only begotten son of God. This raises flags in the Islamic mind. They understand it in a greatly anthropomorphic manner. Clearing away this misunderstanding is important to open the Muslim mind to the concept of the Trinity. It is important to refute the mistaken Muslim view of what the Bible means when it refers to Christ as the ‘only begotten’ Son of God (John 1:18; cf. John 3:16). Muslim scholars often misconstrue this expression in a fleshly, carnal sense of someone literally begetting children. For them, to beget implies a physical act. They believe it is absurd since God is a Spirit with no body parts. As one Muslim exegete contends, “He [God] does not beget because begetting is an animal act. It belongs to the lower animal act of sex. We do not attribute such an act to God, for to the Islamic mind begetting is creating and God cannot create another God, he cannot create another uncreated”. The foregoing statements reveal the degree to which the Biblical concept of Christ’s sonship is misunderstood and misapplied by Islamic theologians. No Christian scholar believes that ‘beget’ is to be equated with ‘made’ or ‘create’. No wonder the Muslims deem that this doctrine of the eternal birth or generation of the Son is blasphemy, just like the Jehovah Witnesses who deny the doctrine of the Trinity, saying that God created Christ as he created humans. Surely Muhammad was influenced by the heretical sects which existed in his days in the Middle East.   Refuting this view, this extreme reaction to Christ’s eternal Sonship is both unnecessary and unfounded. The phrase ‘only begotten’ does not refer to physical generation but to a special relationship with the Father. Like the biblical phrase ‘Firstborn’ (Colossians 1:15), it means priority in rank, not in time (cf. Colossians 1:16-17). It could be translated as ‘God’s One and Only’ Son. It does not imply creation by the Father but the unique relation to him. It does not refer to The Word of God in the sense of any physical generation but to an eternal procession from the Father. Just as for the Muslims [Quran] is not identical to God but eternally proceeds from him, even so for Christians, God’s Word, Christ [Sura 4:171] eternally proceeds from him. Words like ‘generation’ and ‘procession’ are used by Christians of Christ in a filial and relational sense, not in a carnal and physical sense.   Muslims confuse Christ’s sonship with the virgin birth. One Muslim scholar says ‘in the Muslim mind the generation of the Son often means his birth of Virgin Mary. As Shorrosh notes, many Muslims believe Christians have ‘made Mary a goddess, Jesus her son, and God Almighty her husband’ (like in the teaching of Mormonism).   Also, the misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Trinity was encouraged by the writings of Muhammad who said ‘O Jesus, son of Mary! Didst thou say unto mankind, Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah’ [Sura 5:116]. Every Christian living hundreds of years before Muhammad condemned such as a gross misunderstanding of the sonship of Christ. In summary, the Muslim misunderstanding of the Christian concept of what it means for Christ to be God’s Son should be resolved when ‘Son’ is understood in figurative sense [Like Arabic word [ibn], not in a physical sense [as in the Arabic word, walad, which means ‘son’].   Another text which proclaims Christ's deity that Muslim scholars twist is “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Without textual support from any of the thousands of available Greek manuscripts, they render the last phrase “and the Word was God’s”, Muslim scholars claim, without any warrant whatsoever, “the Greek form of the genitive case, Theou” i.e, [God’s] was corrupted into ‘Theos’, that is ‘God’ in the nominative form of the name.   Refuting: This translation is arbitrary and without any basis in fact, since in the nearly 5,700 manuscripts there is no authority for it whatsoever; it is contrary to the rest of the message of John’s Gospel where the claims that Christ is God are repeated over and over (John 8:58, 10:30, 12:41, 20:28).   When Jesus challenged Thomas to believe, after Thomas saw him in his physical resurrection body, Thomas confessed Jesus' deity, declaring His deity by saying “My Lord and My God” (John 20:28). May Muslim writers arbitrarily diminish this declaration of Christ’s deity by reducing it to mere exclamation, “My God!”? One Muslim commentator: “What? He was calling Jesus his Lord and His God? No, This is an exclamation people call out.” He adds, “If I said to Anis, ‘my God’, would I mean Anis is my God?, No. This is a particular expression”.   But there are several clear indications that this is the Muslim’s misunderstanding of Thomas’s proclamation:

1. First, in an obvious reference to the content of Thomas’s confession of Jesus as “my Lord and God,” Jesus blessed him for what he had correctly ‘seen’ and ‘believed’ (John 20:29).
2. Second, Thomas’ s confession of Christ’s deity comes at the climax of the Gospel where Jesus’ disciples are said to gain increasing belief in Christ based on his miraculous signs (John 2:11, 12:37).
3. Third, Thomas’s confession of Christ’s deity fits with the stated theme of the Gospel of John, “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have eternal life in His Name” (John 20:31).

No doubt there was an exclamatory note in Thomas’s declaration of Christ’s deity, but to reduce it to a meaningless emotional ejaculation both misses the point of the passage and borders on claiming that Jesus blessed Thomas for profanity [i.e. using God’s name in vain].   In Matt 24:43, citing Psalm 110, Jesus says, ‘How then does David in the Spirit call Him [the Messiah] ‘Lord’. According to the Muslim scholars ‘By his expression that the ‘Lord’ or the ‘Adon’ could not be a son of David, Jesus excludes himself from that title [Muslim scholars are wrong and they have twisted the verse here. If one looks at the context, this passage reveals just the opposite].   Refuting this false exegesis: Here Jesus stumped his skeptical Jewish questioners by putting them in a dilemma. How could David call the Messiah “Lord”[as he did in Psalm 110:1], when the Scriptures also say the Messiah would be the “Son of David”[which they do in 2 Samuel 7:12 ff]? The only answer to this is that the Messiah must be both man to be David’s son [offspring] and God to be David’s Lord. In other words, in affirming these two truths from the Scripture, Jesus is claiming to be both God and man. The Islamic mind should have no more difficulty understanding how Jesus can unite in one person both divine and human natures than their own belief that human beings combine both spirit and flesh, the enduring and the transient, in one person [Sura 89:27,30; cf. 3:185]. For even according to Muslim beliefs, whatever Almighty God, the Creator and Ruler of all things, wills in his infinite Wisdom he is also able to accomplish for ‘he is the irresistible’ [Sura 6:61][10].   Many Islamic scholars claim that Jesus denied being God when he rebuked the rich young ruler (Mark 10:18), “why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone”; If one looks carefully at this verse Jesus never denied his deity here according to the context of the whole passage. Here Muslim scholars take the verses out of the context and make it pretext or they use their own reasoning [like, I think this is what the verses mean]. Christ simply rebuked him for making this careless appellation without thinking through its implication. Nowhere did Jesus say, ‘I am not God, as you claim’, nor did he say ‘I am not good’. Indeed, both Quran and Bible teach that Jesus is sinless (John 8:46, Heb. 4: 15). Jesus challenged this rich young ruler to examine what he was really saying when he called Jesus ‘Good Master’. In essence, Jesus was saying, “Do you realize what you are saying when you call me, ‘Good Master’? Only God is good. Are you calling me God? ”. The fact that the young ruler refused to do what Jesus said, proves that he did not really consider Jesus his master. But nowhere did Jesus deny that he was either the master or God of the rich younger ruler. Indeed, elsewhere Jesus freely claimed to the both Lord and Master of all (Matt 7:21, 28:18, John 12:40).   The assertion by Jesus that “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) is misunderstood by Muslims. They do not like the term ‘MY Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). It is taken out of its actual context [bad exegesis on the part of the Muslim exegetes] to mean that the Father is greater in nature, but Jesus meant only that the Father is greater in office. This is evident from the fact that in this same Gospel of John Jesus claims to be the “I Am” [or Yahweh of the OT (Exodus 3:14)]. He also claimed to be ‘equal with God’ (John 10:30-33). In addition, he received worship on many occasions (John 9:38; cf. Matthew 2:11, 8:2, 9:11, 14:33, 28:9,17, Luke 24:52). He also said, “he who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:23). There are seven of the I Am’s in the Gospel of John.   Another verse which the Muslim exegetes understand in a wrong way is John 17:21, where Jesus said to his disciples, “that they may be one, as You, Father are in Me and I in You: that they may also be one in Us” [One Muslim scholar says the following: if Jesus is God because he is in GOD, why are the disciples not God, as they are, like Jesus, also in God—this is a foolish argument].   The misunderstanding here is simple but basic: Jesus is speaking relationally not essentially. That is, we can have an intimate relationship with God as Jesus did, for he shared God’s eternal glory “before the world was” (John 17:5). Jesus is in God because he is God. However, we are not in God because we are God, but only because we have a relationship with him.   This summary of some of the key biblical passages misinterpreted by our Muslim friends illustrates an important point made by an Islamic scholar: he correctly noted that ‘Christian missionaries, who are either themselves theologians, or who are well deposed to Christian theology— overestimate the role of Jesus in the Quran. They are misled by their way of understanding Jesus which they retain from their Christian Tradition. It is no surprise that, under such circumstance, they arrive at false conclusions and evaluations. But this cuts both ways. For many Muslim scholars do the same with the Bible, reading their own misunderstanding into the text rather than seeking to understand what the text actually teaches. This is true when it comes to understanding what the Bible claims about God and Christ as the Son of God. So just as Christians should allow Muslims to interpret their own Book [the Quran] on these matters, even Muslims should allow Christians to interpret their own book [the Bible]. For example, just as it is wrong-headed for Christians to twist verses in the Quran to teach the deity of Christ, likewise it is misdirected for Muslims to distort verses of the Bible to deny the deity of Christ. For someone to read the New Testament and not to see the deity of Christ is like a person looking up on a bright and cloudless day claiming that he cannot see the sun. [Thank you, Vijay Chandra, for contributing this most informative article.]