Christianity and Islam: Incompatible Views on God, Christ, and Scripture [1 ed.] 1527556964, 9781527556966

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Bibliography

Citation preview

Christianity and Islam

Christianity and Islam: Incompatible Views on God, Christ, and Scripture By

John J. Johnson

Christianity and Islam: Incompatible Views on God, Christ, and Scripture By John J. Johnson This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by John J. Johnson All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-5696-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-5696-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 1 The Lopsided Nature of the Christian-Muslim Dialogue Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 11 The Attitude of the New Testament and the Koran toward Judaism Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 29 Is the Divine Pure Oneness, or Plurality in Unity? Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 39 Does Humanity Need a Savior? Or, Just How Sinful Are We? Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 55 Was Jesus Crucified? Chapter 6 .................................................................................................. 73 Christian and Muslim Views of their Scriptures: The “Inerrancy” Question Bibliography ............................................................................................. 95

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank my wife, Lisa, for her love and support as I wrote this book. I also want to thank Gail Kaplan for her meticulous assistance with the preparation of the manuscript.

CHAPTER 1 THE LOPSIDED NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM DIALOGUE

In 2016, Larycia Hawkins, a tenured theology professor at Wheaton University, ignited campus-wide controversy at the evangelical school because she claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” Hawkins wrote in response. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” 1 Her solidarity with believers of different faiths was not the problem; inter-faith dialogue between adherents of different faiths has been happening for decades. It was her claim that the God of Islam and of Christianity is the same deity that caused her trouble at theologically conservative Wheaton. And yet, why were her words controversial? Are not both religions monotheistic? Do they not both trace their origins to the Jewish patriarch Abraham? Do they not both believe in revealed scripture, heaven, hell, and the reality of angels and Satan? But Hawkins is not the only Christian to make such statements. Hans Kung, one of the greatest Roman Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, wrote: “[a]s a Christian I can be sure that, as long as I have chosen this Jesus as the Christ for my life and death, I have also chosen his follower Muhammad, inasmuch as he appeared to the one and same God and to

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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/the-professor-wore-a-hijab-insolidarity-then-lost-her-job.html. A statement from the Second Vatican Council states, “But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place among whom are the Muslims: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-inter religious/interreligious/islam/vatican-council-and-papal-statements-on-islam.cfm). Of course, this Council was convened in the early 1960s, and was a radical departure from what the Roman Catholic Church had taught about Islam during the previous centuries.

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Jesus.” 2 Or again. Kung writes, “[a]s a Christian I can be sure that, as long as I have chosen this Jesus as the Christ for my life and death, I have also chosen his follower Muhammad, inasmuch as he appealed to the one and same God and to Jesus.” 3 As we will see later, the Jesus of the New Testament is not the Jesus of the Koran, so any appeal like this will necessarily prove contradictory. Yale Theologian Miroslav Volf takes much the same conciliatory position toward Islam, and actually makes this startling claim. “What the Qur’an denies about God as the Holy Trinity has been denied by every great teacher of the church in the past and ought to be denied by every orthodox Christian today.”4 Why a brilliant Yale theologian would make such an obviously inaccurate statement is puzzling to put it mildly, and will be examined in more depth later in this book. Oddly enough, statements like this are rarely, if ever, made by leading Muslim theologians. It is almost as if they know there is a theological line they dare not cross. Yet in the West, many Christian thinkers seem to go out of their way to play down, if not deny, the contradictory teachings of the two faiths. Perhaps it has to do with religious ecumenism, so highly-prized in the West. Or perhaps it is a result of the uncertainty in its own traditions and religious beliefs that prompts the West to seek religious harmony. “Christian scholars seem slow to appreciate the rigidity of the theological constraints upon their Muslim counterparts.” 5 In any case, Muslim theologians have not responded in kind. In 2007, a group of Muslim scholars issued an olive branch of sorts to Christians. The document, entitled “A Common Word Between Us and You,” affirms such generic points as “love of God and love of neighbour,” but the Muslim scholars who penned the document present “a clear admonition against belief in the Sonship of Christ and the Trinity.” When they refer to Christ, they refer to Jesus as he is presented in the Koran, not in the Bible (more of this in subsequent chapters), and the Koranic Jesus is “neither Lord, God, nor Saviour.” 6 In a paper written as a stern rebuke to Kung’s “higher critical” approach to the Qur’anic picture of Christ, Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes “[i]f certain verses of the Qur’an are rejected by means of any intrinsic argument or reason such as making friends with Christians, or achieving world peace or getting into the United Nations, or for any other worldly reason though it be laudable in 2 Hans Kung, “Christianity and World Religions: The Dialogue with Islam as One Model,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 95. 3 Ibid. 4 Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 14. 5 Fred Farrokh, “The ‘Same God Question’: Why Muslims are Not Moving Toward Christians,” Themelios 41, no. 3 (2016): 465. 6 Ibid., 466-467.

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itself, then the rest of the Qur’an must also be rejected as the Word of God.” 7 Again, Muslims will go only so far in the Christian-Muslim dialogue. They will not sacrifice the essentials of their faith, and why should they? Even as early as 1968, before it was fashionable to engage in interreligious dialogue, a seminal paper on the Christian-Muslim encounter by Isma’il Ragi alFaruqi stated that the Christian and the Muslim both claim to know the truth about God. “Neither Islam nor Christianity can or will ever give it up. Certainly this is exclusivism; but the truth is exclusive.”8 His point is that both sides should be open to at least listening to the other, although the “rules” he lays out for the dialogue clearly favour the Islamic side. 9 For instance, he labels the following as outdated theological themes that should not be part of honest Christian-Muslim dialogue: humans are not inherently sinful; the doctrine “of original sin, of the fallenness of man, appears from the perspective of contemporary ethical reality to have outlived its meaningfulness;” 10 and the notion of Christian justification “ 11 does not accord with contemporary reality.” Of course, if all these doctrines are ruled out a priori, there will be precious little to talk to the Christian interlocutor about! Although I write as a Christian, this book is not intended as a critique of Islam. In fact, there is much that I admire about Islam. I am deeply impressed by the Haj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia which now, thanks to the ease of modern air travel, draws about two million devotees each year. My own religion, Christianity, has nothing like this ten-day-long display of unity among believers from all the nations of the world. I am equally impressed by the Muslim practice of praying five times per day. How many Christians find it onerous to attend church services even once a week! I have deep respect for the fact that most Muslim countries have not fallen prey to the moral relativism that is now pervading (some would say ruining) the Western world. In Islamic countries, the lines between what is morally right and wrong are still fairly clear, even if this demarcation does sometimes run the risk of devolving into fanaticism, as pointed out most vividly in the atrocities committed by alQaeda, and ISIS. I have personally taught several Muslim students, and I have frequented Muslim-owned businesses, and my impression of Muslims 7 Seyyid Hossein Nasr, “Response to Hans Kung’s Paper on Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 100. 8 Isma’il Ragi al-Faruqi, “Islam and Christianity: Diatribe or Dialogue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 5 (1968): 52. 9 Ibid., 45-46. 10 Ibid., 62. 11 Ibid., 66.

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is that they are far removed from the stereotype often perpetuated in the media. Even Martin Luther, himself no lover of Islam (and with good reason, as Islam was a palpable military threat to Europe in his day) could write that the Turks should be grudgingly congratulated for performing more good works in their daily lives than did the Christians of Europe. 12 But while I respect Islam, I see nothing wrong with pointing out the differences between Islam and Christianity. After all, if no differences existed, there would be no need for two religions. Jacob Neusner, one of Judaism’s greatest scholars, has said of Jesus: “Judaism does not reflect on the meaning of Jesus, who enjoys no standing whatsoever in the theology of Judaism or its law.” 13 That Christianity and Judaism are different religions is taken for granted. Jews do not view Christ as divine, while Christians do. Jews do not view the New Testament as scripture, while Christians do. Theological disagreement does not necessarily lead to hatred and violence (although it sadly did and can, as with the above-mentioned Islamic terrorism, or the terrible persecution of Jews at the hands of the Church during the Middle Ages). Yet past violence should not rule out an honest discussion of religious differences. Hans Kung has written a sevenhundred-page tome on Islam. These words appear on the back cover of the book. “The options have become clear: rivalry amongst the religions, a clash of civilizations, war between nations, or a dialogue of civilizations and peace between the religions as a harbinger of peace among nations. Faced with a deathly threat to all humankind, shouldn’t we demolish the walls of prejudice stone by stone and build bridges of dialogue, including bridges to Islam, rather than erect new barriers of hatred, belligerence, and hostility?” 14 Kung is, of course, correct that better understanding between religions can possibly reduce violence and hatred. But there are a few problems with Kung’s rationale. First, the violence in religion is not coming from those who read learned tomes on theology. And the problem with interreligious dialogue is that, sooner or later, an impasse is reached, and the two sides can go no farther. Of course, some thinkers reach the impasse and try to go around it as best they can. Thus, Christian theologian Martin Bauschke: “Christians and Muslims are agreed that however Jesus may have died and whatever happened to him after his death—this death did not and does not have the last word about his life and activity on behalf of God. 12

Quoted in Volf, Allah: A Christian Response, 67. Jacob Neusner, “Why Jesus has No Meaning to Judaism,” in Jesus in the World’s Faiths: Leading Thinkers from Five Religions Reflect on His Meaning, ed. Gregory A. Barker (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005 ), 166. 14 Hans Kung, Islam: Past, Present and Future, trans. by John Bowden (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2007), back cover. 13

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Rather, this death was the way through, the transition, the way back into the presence and nearness of the one who sent him.”15 It seems to me that there are several things worth noting here. First, who are the Christian theologians who “agree” that Christ’s manner of death and his fate after death can be left up in the air in such a cavalier manner? The author would have us agree that all Christian thinkers believe this. Second, note that this quotation is far more amenable to a Muslim than it is to a Christian. The Muslim, for whom Christ is far less important, can live with the ambiguity inherent in Bauschke’s words. My book is based on a more fair-minded approach that does not diminish either religion, bur respects the difference of each. Timothy George has written that “neither the uniqueness of the Christian gospel nor the distinctiveness of the Muslim faith should be forfeited in the interest of interreligious dialogue…. The call to conversion is inherent in both Christianity and Islam.” 16Christian trinitarianism, for example, has long been a subject of critique by those who claim to believe in “pure” monotheism, rather than the New Testament version of plurality within unity that characterizes the Christian understanding of God. 17 My goal in this book is not to “prove” one religion right and the other wrong. Rather, I wish to honestly assess both religions, and not on minor points of disagreement, but on essential ones. It makes little difference, for instance, that Muslims formally worship on Fridays, while Christians attend church on Sundays. But on the questions that really define the two religions, they disagree, even contradict each other. In chapter two, I begin with the nature of God as understood by both faiths. Since they both conceive of God in radically different terms, it is essential to understand these differences, since all other matters of doctrine will flow from these two contradictory views of the divine being. Does God enter into covenants with humanity? What is God’s attitude toward the Jews, the forefathers of both Christianity and Islam? This is especially important, since the God of the Jews is claimed by both Christianity and Islam. If the New Testament and the Koran portray this Jewish God in radically different terms, this raises serious problems. 15

Quoted in Kung, Islam: Past, Present and Future, 499. Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 93. 17 Imad N. Shehadeh, “The Predicament of Islamic Monotheism,” Bibliotheca Sacra 161 (April-June 2004): 144. The “non-trinitarian” groups that Shehadeh lists as unreluctant to critique the Christian Trinity are “Judaism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, Oneness Pentecostalism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, offshoots of Adventism (Armstrongism), the Unification Church, and especially Islam.” These are scholarly critiques though, not personal ones, and it is doubtful that most of these critics of Christianity harbor personal hatred for those Christians who hold to a trinitarian understanding of God. 16

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Can God be described as loving? Does he choose his followers for salvation, or do they choose Him? These are essential questions, and we will find that the Bible and the Koran, Christianity and Islam, disagree on all of them. Chapter three addresses the question of monotheism. Is God pure oneness as in Islam, or is God the trinitarian God of Christianity? Unadulterated oneness, or three-in-oneness? In Chapter four I address the biblical and koranic understandings of humanity. What are the Christian and Muslim understanding of sin, and what are the remedies for it? Again, we will get two very different answers from the two faiths. Chapter five is dedicated to the death and resurrection of Christ. These events are at the very heart of the Christian faith. Yet Islam denies the crucifixion occurred, much less the resurrection. Why is the crucifixion of central importance to one faith, but of no importance at all to the other? Although I do not intend to engage in Christian apologetics in this book, I will be somewhat critical of the Muslim denial of Christ’s crucifixion. But this is only because there is extra-biblical evidence supporting the veracity of the event, while Islam’s denial of it has no extra-koranic support. Still, even though I will be critical of the Muslim position, I will try to explain why the denial of Christ’s death on the cross makes sense from the Muslim viewpoint; I will attempt to present the Islamic position fairly. Chapter six is concerned with the scriptures of the Christian and Muslim communities. Are the Bible and the Koran reliable? Are they the words of God, or the words of men, or a combination of both? Must a believer take every word of scripture literally, or is there room for a more moderate approach to the Bible and the Koran? Ultimately, there are five possible answers to the question, do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? One, of course, is yes, they do. The second option considers the question pointless, since there is no divine being (atheism). The third option is that the God of Christianity is true and that divine being of Islam is false, or vice versa. The fourth option is that both Christians and Muslims are describing the same God, but doing so in very different ways. Consider an analogy. My friend and I both know a man named Smith. I describe him as kind, loving, devout, generous, and devoted to the well-being of all humanity. But my friend sees Smith in an entirely different light. He considers Smith to be dishonest, cruel, violent, racist, and misanthropic. We may be trying to describe the same Smith, but our descriptions differ to such a radical extent that, for all practical purposes, we may as well be talking about two different Smiths. The fifth option is that the one God has intentionally revealed himself in contradictory ways to Christians and to Muslims. If this is the case, such a God cannot be trusted, for Christians and Muslims, if they agree on anything, concur that God is the embodiment of truth. A Cosmic Deceiver-God is of interest to neither

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party. The old analogy of the elephant and the blind men comes to mind. Many who subscribe to religious pluralism, the idea that all religions teach basically the same truth, are fond of this parable. In it, several blind men use their hands to feel an elephant’s body. Each man only feels one part of the animal, and describes the way that part of the beast feels accurately. This, pluralists believe, is how humans are in relationship to the divine. We each grasp a part of it, but we are blind to the larger picture (or elephant, in this case). But this analogy will not work for Christianity and Islam, for two reasons. In the analogy, humans are grasping blindly for God, but in Christianity and Islam, humanity is not grasping, it is receiving God’s truth in the form of divine revelation. Also, both religions claim that God has revealed the full picture, so to speak. This does not mean that any Christian or Muslim makes the arrogant claim to have an exhaustive knowledge of God. But they do claim that enough has been revealed about the important issues like the nature of God, humanity, and the means to obtaining life eternal. For the most part, I will take the Christian and Islamic scriptures at face value, steering clear of critical views. This is because Christian and Muslim orthodoxies were created in the period before the advent of biblical criticism in the 1800s. And, the type of rigorous, often sceptical critiques to which the Bible has been subject are pretty much of a rarity among Islamic scholars, either out of personal piety, fear of persecution, or both. Not only that, but the nature of the Islamic revelation is different from the Christian one. Whereas the Church has always taught that men, under divine inspiration, wrote the Bible, the Koran is a divine creation, which most Muslims believe existed with Allah before it was given to Muhammad. “The Qur’an is seen as literal revelation, explicitly communicated in the Arabic language by celestial meditation to the Prophet who is ensured protection from even slips of the tongue. The Scripture, therefore, is divine, immune from verbal error and—all the more—from necessities in of scholarship in its reception.” 18 Thus, the concept of a scholar being a “moderate” or a “liberal” in her approach to the Koran is found far less often than in Christianity. One moderate scholar of Islam, Farid Esack, admits that while he considers himself a Muslim thinker who is open to critical ideas concerning religion, most Muslims, be they laypersons or scholars, hold the traditional view that the Koran is in full a divinely authored text. 19 However, 18

Kenneth Cragg, Jesus and the Muslim (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 8. Cragg is held to be one of the pioneers in the Christian-Muslim dialogue, who began writing on the topic in the 1960s. 19 Farid Esack, The Qur’an: A Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2002), 1-6.

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in the last chapter on the Bible and the Koran, I will have to employ a bit of what used to be called “higher criticism” in order to point out some of the problems with the traditional fundamentalist approaches to the Bible and the Koran.

Who is this Book for? I believe this book is for anyone interested in learning more about the differences between the world’s two largest religions. I have attempted to write in a way that will prove interesting to scholars, but at the same time remain relevant to non-specialists. In fact, I am probably more interested in the non-theologically trained Christian and Muslim. They make up the bulk of both faiths, and it is they who find themselves in an ever-shrinking world, where understanding what the other “side” believes about matters of ultimate concern is of the utmost importance. Confusion about the faith of the “other” can only be increased when noted scholar of religion Karen Armstrong writes this regrading Islam’s relationship to other world faiths: “today Muslim scholars argue that had Muhammad known about the Buddhists or the Hindus, the Australian Aborigines or the Native Americans, the Quran would have endorsed their sages too, because all rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source.” 20 Armstrong does not cite any of the scholars that she believes hold this position, but it seems unlikely that Muhammad would have found the widespread use of idols in Hinduism acceptable. And what would he make of Buddha’s claim that God’s existence was uncertain, and indeed unnecessary for the system of self-enlightenment that the Buddha was teaching? Non-Islamic revelations “all erred more or less from the truth because none has preserved the text of its original revelation.” 21 In fact, the period before Allah gave the koranic revelation to Muhammad is often 20 Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 910. In Islam, only monotheists, mainly Jews and Christians, are given the title “People of the Book,” in recognition that they worship the same God as do Muslims. When the Islamic conquests engulfed the Middle East and North Africa in the decades following Muhammad’s death, polytheists were faced with the hard choice of conversion to Islam or death, while Jews and Christians were basically permitted to continue practicing their faith, as long as they submitted to Muslim control and, especially taxation. Failure to do so would lead to violence on the Muslim side. See John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35. 21 Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi Islam (Niles, IL: Argus Communications, 1984): 10.

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referred to as jahiliyyah, or the “time of ignorance.” It is probably this idea that led to the recent destruction of priceless religious artifacts from Iraq’s pre-Islamic past at the hands of ISIS, and the destruction of giant-sized Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Islamic terrorists in that country.

Names for the Divine The Arabic word for God is Allah (literally, “the God”). Arabic-speaking Christians use the word just as English-speaking Christians use the word “God.” For the sake of clarity, I will use “God” when speaking of the divine being in Christianity, and “Allah” when referring to the deity of Islam. I will also retain the traditional practice, in both religions, of referring to the deity with male pronouns. This is not because I believe that the Supreme Being is “male.” Rather, I do it out of respect for the traditional ways of speaking about the divine in both faiths. Use of traditional terms for God also allows one to avoid such clumsy terms as “Godself.”

Theology When comparing theological positions, I am only interested in the orthodox positions of the two religions. All orthodox Christian denominations agree that God is a trinity, for example. My focus will be on what C. S. Lewis termed “mere Christianity,” or what is foundational to most Christian belief down through the ages. Similarly, all orthodox Muslims believe in the shahada, the Muslim statement of faith, that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His prophet. “Mere” Islam is best represented by Sunni Islam, which comprises eighty percent of the world’s Muslims. So, semiChristian groups like the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witness will not be the focus of this study, just as, for example, the black nationalist Nation of Islam will not be considered when discussing traditional Islamic positions. When discussing Islamic theology, I have tried to use Muslim scholars as much as possible, rather than peppering the text with quotations from the Koran. My position is that Muslims are far more qualified than I am to interpret their own scriptures. A word needs to be said about the Hadith literature in Islam. The Hadith is a collection of sayings about Muhammad, or utterances by him. The Hadith is especially important for Islamic jurisprudence. However, there is debate within the Muslim community regarding which Hadith collections are the most authentic, and which possess less historical

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reliability. 22 Because of the technical nature of the hadith literature, I will limit myself primarily to what is found in the pages of the Koran. All Bible quotations will be taken from the NIV translation. All quotations from the Koran will be from the Penguin Classics translation by N. J. Dawood. 23

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Thomas W. Lippman, Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World (New York: Penguin, 1985), 4-5, 79-80. 23 The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (London: Penguin Books, 1988).

CHAPTER 2 THE ATTITUDE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE KORAN TOWARD JUDAISM

Christianity and Islam are often called Abrahamic, or Western (to differentiate them from Eastern faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism) religions. Both religions believe they worship the God revealed in the Hebrew Bible, sometimes referred to by Christians as the Old Testament. Christ, of course, was a Jew, as were all his earliest followers. Those followers saw Jesus as the fulfilment of the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures. The Koran is full of characters (Adam, Moses, Joseph) from the Old Testament, although their stories often differ significantly from those found in the Jewish Bible. Still, the Koran makes clear that the God of Muhammad was at work hundreds of years earlier as He revealed Himself to the Jewish people. Now, the objective truth of, say, Hinduism could be true, even though it developed quite independently of Judaism. But, for our purposes, both Christianity and Islam claim they are continuing the monotheistic tradition of the Jews. If this is true, then how do Christianity and Islam treat that Jewish tradition? In Islam, Muhammad was the last, and the greatest of the biblical prophets. He follows in the prophetic footsteps of the Hebrew prophets, as well as the path of Jesus, teaching the same things they did, for it is a cornerstone of Muslim faith that God’s message to humanity has always been the same. Thus, Muhammad shares the prophetic, if not the genetic, lineage of the Jewish prophets. This may be true in terms of tawhid (the Arabic word for monotheism), but it is certainly not true in many other important areas. One area is the unique, ongoing chosen status of the Jews, revealed in the covenants God has made with them. The Koran’s teachings are at odds with the teaching of the OT prophets regarding God’s revelation to the Jews. Therefore, Islam’s claim that Muhammad stands in the same prophetic tradition as the Jewish prophets is problematic, though, obviously not automatically invalid. Still, considering the following, “Once when Muhammad entered a Jewish school to try to convert them, the Jews there insulted him by asking, ‘What is your religion, Muhammad?’ When he

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replied, ‘The religion of Abraham,’ they mocked him ‘But Abraham was a Jew.’” 24 The question arises, did God reveal Himself in ways that contradict His earlier revelations to Israel? Christianity also deviates from orthodox Jewish monotheism, namely because of its trinitarian doctrine. And there certainly is criticism of Judaism in the pages of the NT. For all the critiques of Jews and Judaism in the NT, though, Christianity is eager to portray itself as the heir to Judaism, in a way that Islam is and does not. Jesus takes the side of his Jewish brethren against that of the ethnically mixed and theologically dubious Samaritans in this passage from the Gospel of John, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.” (John, 4:22). In fact, Christianity cannot even exist with its older sibling Judaism, and this, no doubt, has caused much of the anti-Semitism on the part of Christians over the centuries. Christians know they are beholden to a faith that denies the central tenet of Christianity, namely the divinity of Christ.

Did God Send Monotheistic Prophets to All Peoples of the Earth? One aspect of Islam that may at first seem to connect Islam with Judaism is the idea that monotheism is the original religion of mankind. Fair enough, the OT seems to teach this as well, especially if one holds to a literal interpretation of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. 25 Adam and Eve, Noah, and others who lived before Abraham knew the one God, but according to the Bible, it is with Abraham that God enters into a covenantal relationship with humanity that will eventually grow into Judaism. This is axiomatic among the three monotheistic religions, and thus they are categorized as the Abrahamic religions. But the Hebrew scriptures do not teach that God sent prophets to all the peoples of the earth (as does the 24

Quoted in P. L. Rose, “Muhammad, the Jews and the Constitution of Medina: Retrieving the Historical Kernel,” Der Islam 86, no. 1 (2009): 13. The scene is the Arabian town of Medina. The dubious Jews are mocking Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet like those found in the Jewish scriptures. 25 Since the nineteenth century, many Jews and Christians have found themselves unable to take literally the creation account in the early chapters of Genesis, mainly because of advances in the fields of anthropology and geology. Much has been written on the subject, but for our purposes it is enough to note that both the Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran indicate Adam and Eve were the first humans on earth, and that they knew the one God.

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Koran) but rather that the pre-Abrahamic believers (like Noah) were, in a sense, laying the theological foundation for what would eventually become an exclusively Jewish covenant between God and His people. Yet Islam claims that once the truth of monotheism was lost by Adam and Eve’s descendants, Allah sent messengers to all peoples of the earth to remind them, or bring them back to the truth of monotheism (Koran 16:36). In fact, Muhammad is often portrayed in Islam not as a prophet with a new message, but as one who reminds wayward humanity to return to what it once knew to be true, namely monotheism. “The Koran says that there is no people to whom a prophet has not been sent…and Hadith literature [the Hadith literature is a collection of stories about Muhammad, as well as saying attributed to Muhammad] puts the number, symbolically, at one hundred and twenty four thousand.” 26 Now, there is no historical record of monotheistic prophets being sent to, say, the ancient Chinese or the ancient inhabitants of India. But even if there were, this would only reinforce the Islamic idea that Jews do not have a monopoly on revelation. In Judaism God reveals himself (after the prehistorical material in Genesis chapters 111) only to Jews. In Islam, the Jews do not occupy the special status as God’s chosen recipients of divine revelation. This is just one of many instances of the Koran diminishing the importance of the Jews in salvation history—other examples will be given below. So here we have the first of many contradictions that must be addressed regarding the God/Allah distinction. Was God primarily interested in revealing himself in an exclusive way to the Jewish people, or were the Jews but one of many ancient peoples who were recipients of divine revelation? This is no peripheral issue. The covenant between the Jews and their God is the central theme of the Hebrew scriptures. And it is a theme that is picked up and reimagined by Christian writers in the New Testament. There are enigmatic references in the Koran to the hanifs. These monotheists have been described as “purely Arabian monotheists.” 27 Purely Arabian they may have been, but history knows of no prophet who was sent to them. The best explanation is that these monotheists were influenced by either Judaism or Christianity, since they lived in Arabia, the land that saw innumerable caravans coming through, bringing new goods, ideas, and religious beliefs. Even the Koran, in 3:95, acknowledges that “they were

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Cyril Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 365. 27 Christopher M. Moreman, Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2008), 69.

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descendants of Abraham and his son Ismail.” 28 Similarly, a group called the Sabians are mentioned three times in the Koran, but “it is not known with certainty who the Sabians of the Koran really were or are.” 29 But, since the Koran mentions them along with Jews and Christians, it seems safe to assume they had absorbed biblical monotheism, for they are not associated in the Koran with any special, non-Jewish prophet. Why is it only ancient Jewish monotheism that outlasted all of the other ancient monotheisms? Why is it that only Jewish monotheism gave birth to Christianity and Islam, the monotheistic faiths that dominate the world’s religious landscape? If the Biblical God did indeed reveal himself to other primitive cultures, it was nothing like what the Jews experienced as his special, covenant people. Such is the unique, and utterly unlikeliness of Jewish survival that the great twentieth-century Protestant scholar Karl Barth thought the continuing existence of the Jews a sure proof of God’s existence. Barth is fond of quoting a conversation between Frederick the Great and Frederick’s personal physician, Zimmermann: "'Zimmermann, can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?' And Zimmermann replied, 'Your majesty, the Jews!'" 30 Of course, a Muslim could make a similar reply. How is it that a rag-tag group of Arab Bedouin, who once were pagans, converted to the monotheism of Muhammad and, in just a few decades after his death, had conquered much of the Middle East and North Africa? To Barth, religions grew from nothing and prospered, but they did so in spite of their very different understandings of God and his relationship to them. To the Jewish or Muslim believer, their survival and success seems providential. To the secular-minded, it is a lucky occurrence of history. But that both groups would prosper if the same God was behind each seems somewhat contradictory. Are both groups chosen by God, despite the fact that neither acknowledges the chosen status of the other? So, we have here a lack of recognition on the Koran’s part of the importance of Jewish monotheism. In fact, it could be claimed that the Koran “de-Judaizes” God as much as possible. Nothing like Christ’s abovereferenced words, “salvation is of the Jews” is found in the Koran, because for Islam, the Jews are just one of many ancient peoples who have been in communion with God. The Koran does mention God’s Mosaic covenant with the Jews, but “the entire Qur’an makes no mention of God’s unconditional covenants with Israel, namely, the Abrahamic Covenant [mentioned at 28 John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. 29 Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, 390. 30 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, ed. and trans. G. T. Thompson (London: SCM, 1949), 75.

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various points in Genesis], the Davidic Covenant (2 Sam. 7:4-17) and the New Covenant (Jer. 31:31-34).” 31 The Koran’s take on the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham is told differently in the Koran than in the Old Testament. In the Koran, it is never clearly stated which son, Isaac or the originator of the Arab race, Ishmael, is almost sacrificed. However, most Islamic commentators understand that Ishmael is the one who was almost sacrificed, and thus the divine blessing flows through him, rather than Isaac. The location of the almost-sacrifice in Islamic understanding is outside the Muslim holy city of Mecca. 32 The OT version is recounted in Genesis 22:1-19, and takes place somewhere in Mesopotamia, but certainly not in what is now Saudi Arabia. In Islam, it is Ishmael who, as the traditional forefather of the Arabs, paves the way for the final and greatest revelation— that given to Muhammad and enshrined in the Koran. In a sense, Judaism is only important in that it produced Ishmael, the forefather of the Arabs, the people who would receive God’s last and superior revelation. This is problematic, for it is a generally accepted scholarly position that the older version of a story is probably the most accurate version, and no matter when Abraham’s story was written down, it predates the Koran by many centuries. Of course, the Koranic version of the story could be the correct version. The OT version could be corrupted. Jews and Christians will opt for the biblical version, while Muslims will hold fast in the belief that theirs is the more accurate telling. But this is beside the point. If it is the same God who is revealing himself in these stories, why does he do so in a contradictory way? Both versions of the story cannot be true. And it is precisely this kind of obvious contradiction that will make itself clear as we move into the later sections of the book.

How are Jews Themselves Portrayed in the Koran and in the New Testament? It is important to point out that there is a great deal of condemnation of the Jews in the Christian Bible. And, tragically, the history of the church is replete with anti-Semitism. Most scholars believe that Jews generally had it better under Muslim rule than under Christian rule in the Middle Ages. Some scholars even attribute the Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust as the harsh portrayal of Christ-denial by Jews in the NT. I personally think this is 31

Imad N. Shehadeh, “Reasons for Islam’s Rejection of Biblical Christology,” Bibliotheca Sacra 161 (July-September 2004): 279. 32 Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, 221.

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going too far. 33 The NT never calls on Christians to shed the blood of Jews, any more than it calls on Christians to slaughter indigenous peoples in Central and South America. Rather, what happens in the pages of the NT is an in-house, inter-Jewish dispute. It is Jesus, the devout Jew, arguing with those other devout Jews, the Pharisees. It is Paul, who describes himself as a “Hebrew among Hebrews,” (Philippians 3:5) a student of the great Rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3) who is kicked out of Jewish synagogues in the Book of Acts. In Romans (9:1-3) Paul tells us, in agonized prose, that he would abandon his own salvation if his Jewish brothers and sisters would listen to his gospel message. Paul ends by stating that “all Israel will be saved.” This of course is a disputed passage, with some Christian theologians taking it literally, while others assume that only Jews who become Christians are truly Israel. Whatever it may mean, there is no comparable statement in the Koran. Even in the Gospel of John, where the term “the Jews” seems to be used dozens of times as a synonym for evil, it has been shown that the author of John had corrupt Jewish leaders, not the Jews en masse, in mind. 34 In fact, as I have shown elsewhere, the Jew-on-Jew criticism is no different from the brutal language the Jewish prophets use against their own people in the Hebrew Bible. 35 When we turn to the Koran’s depiction of Jews, the portrayal is mixed. Sometimes Jews are praised; sometimes they are condemned. 36 But in the Koran, the harsh critiques of Jews are coming from a non-Jewish source, Muhammad. 37 In the Koran, the negative “concern with the Jews is striking. The Qur’an addresses the Christians in a handful of passages scattered among its chapters, but it addresses the Jews [in a condemnatory way] regularly and repeatedly.” 38 Part of the criticisms stems from Muhammad’s 33 For a good introduction to the history of Christian anti-Semitism, and how some scholars think Christian theology did indeed lead to the horrors of the Holocaust, see James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword (New York: Mariner Books, 2002). 34 See, for example, Urban C. Von Wahlde, “The Johannine Jews: A Critical Survey,” NTS 28 (1982): 33-60. 35 "Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About the Shoah? Eliezer Berkovits as Post-Holocaust Jewish Apologist," Conservative Judaism 57, no. 1 (Fall 2004). 36 Farid Esack, “The Portrayal of Jews and the Possibilities for their Salvation in the Koran,” in Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others, ed. Mohammad Hassan Khalil (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 207-233. 37 I am assuming Muhammad wrote the Koran. Muslims believe that the Koran is the very words of God, compiled by Muhammad after many years of revelations he received. More on Koranic authorship will be presented in the final chapter. 38 Gabriel Said Reynolds, “On the Qur’anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (tahrif) and Christian anti-Jewish Polemic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 2 (April/June 2010): 200. The author’s thesis is that the Koran is

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frustration that the Jews in Medina (the city Muhammad fled to after he was chased out of Mecca by strident polytheists) refused to honor him as a prophet. “Not surprisingly, the gentile [italics mine] Muhammad’s revelation of his prophetic status to the Jews provoked their leaders and rabbis to scorn.” 39 It was difficult for the Jew to consider Muhammad to be part of the prophetic Jewish lineage when he not only was a gentile, but also manifested “ignorance of the Hebrew scriptures.” 40 The Koran seems to have no sense of the Jews as God’s chosen people, or of the all-important concept of God’s covenant with the Jews: “in the Qur’an the covenant is also understood to be universal, applying to all human beings. But for the majority of Sunni Muslims, and for the Sufi tradition, it is also believed to be pre-temporal, established before the beginning of creation as we know it.” 41 Again, we see a diminishing of the importance of Judaism here, for they are not the first people to be in a covenant relationship with God. “In the Qur’an, however, the eternality of the covenant stems from its being made between God and all of humanity before the beginning of creation. The majority of exegetes maintain that this is alluded to in Q. 7:172, “And when thy Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their progeny and made them bear witness concerning themselves, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, 'Yea, surely, we bear witness.’” 42 This is not to say the Koran does not recognize the various covenants God made with the Jews. It does, but there is nothing special about them, for God has made a covenant with all of humanity. “According to the Qur’an, many among the Jews and the Christians believed that they were not like any other people whom God had created, that their covenant with God had elevated their status with Him; and that they were the friend of God to the exclusion of other people.” 43 When we look at the Apostle Paul’s struggle in Romans 9-11, we see the agony that Paul, a Jewish believer in Jesus, feels because the bulk of his people have rejected Christ as Lord and Messiah. Paul simply cannot say harder on Jews than it is on Christians because the Koran is following the tradition of the Christian Syrian Fathers, who were especially harsh at times in their writings against Jews. Whether or not Reynolds’s theory is true or not, the fact remains that the holy book of Islam is especially biased against Jews and their religion. 39 Rose, “Muhammad, the Jews,” 11. 40 Ibid., 13. 41 Joseph E. B. Lumbard, “Covenant and Covenants in the 4XU‫ތ‬DQ,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17, no. 2 (June 2015): 5. 42 Ibid. 43 Farid Esack, The Qur’an: a Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2002), 50.

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the Jews are “wrong” about Jesus; he knows too much of Christianity is based upon the OT revelation. Thus he cautions Christians against spiritual arrogance (11:17-21), and finishes chapter 11 with the words, “all Israel will be saved” (11:26). There simply is nothing in the Koran like this. Part of the reason is, a Muslim might say, is because the Koran is made up entirely of divine revelation, not the theological musings of men. Whatever Paul’s enigmatic phrase “all Israel” may mean, the calling of God is irrevocable, Paul tells us. Despite his intense devotion to Christ, he believes, somehow, that the covenant God made with the Jews is still in effect. The Jews are chosen, Paul realizes, not because of their personal merit, but because God has decided to elect them. Compare this with the lack of election in the Koran, “the Qur’an is void of any signs of grace to the unworthy …. The Qur’an does not see God’s work of grace in chosen people, who nevertheless are sinful. In God’s relationship with humankind nothing depends on His grace and everything depends on human merit.” 44 Even the Koran cannot entirely avoid the apparently special nature of the Jews in God’s revelation, but again, that special stature is minimized. “Muslim commentators insist that the special favour God bestowed on Israel applied only to Moses’s lifetime.” 45 Christianity’s deep reliance upon Judaism is evident in the Book of Acts. Acts is the story of the gospel’s presentation to the non-Jewish world. In Acts 10:9-16, the Apostle Peter has a dream in which he is shown a variety of foods that were considered unclean according to Jewish custom. That Peter is a devout Jew, eager to maintain the traditions of his ancestors, can be seen from his reaction in this passage. He at first resists God’s command to “kill and eat” the ceremoniously unclean animals he sees. Later in the Book of Acts, the Council of Jerusalem is considering how “Jewish” new Christian converts are required to be. James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, says the following. “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” (15:19-21). Even if the NT at times indicates the Jews have been rejected from their ancient covenant (and according to Paul in Romans, that is highly debatable) the concept of the covenant God made with the Jews is viewed as axiomatic. 44

Shehadeh, “Reasons for Islam’s Rejection,” 279, 281. Ibid., 281. Shehadeh goes on to explain that “[t]he Jews breaking of the Mosaic Covenant caused them to lose forever the land promised to them” (281). The implications for the current Palestinian-Israeli troubles are obvious. 45

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Even setting aside some parts of that covenant require the approval of the Jerusalem Church. Still, a basic question the NT wrestles with is, are Jews still in this covenant? If so, which Jews? How does the “new” covenant initiated by Christ relate to the “old” one made with Abraham and Moses? It is true that Christianity broadens the definition of the covenant so that Gentiles may enter the once Jewish-only fold. But of course a new covenant and a New Testament require an old covenant and an Old Testament. The Jewish covenant matters little for Islam, since in the Koran, “the eternality of the covenant stems from its being made between God and all of humanity before the beginning of creation.” 46 So, before we even arrive at what Christian theologians often call the attributes (characteristics) of God, before we even delve into the contentious matter of Christ’s identity, a very clear contradiction has already arisen. Who are God’s chosen people? And when and with whom did God enter in a covenantal relationship? The OT/NT and the Koran give a very different answer. That answer is to be expected, for the divine being that inspires those scriptures, God and Allah, are very different beings, as will become apparent. We are now in a rather confusing place theologically speaking. Jews deny that Christ is the same God as the Yahweh of the OT. Yet Christians claim that Christ and the God of the Jews are in such a harmonious trinitarian relation as to be virtually one. And Islam claims that all three religions worship the same God, although Jews and Christians do not do it correctly! We next need to examine how Christians describe God, and how Muslims describe Allah.

Do God and Allah Predestine Their Followers? As stated above, the God of the Bible is a God who elects His followers. When Christ institutes the “new” covenant at the last supper, his followers would have clearly understood that the “old” covenant was in Christ’s mind. To what extent God elects men and women to follow him has been one of the great debates within Christian theology, and continues to divide Christians. Those who believe that no one can come to the Father except through me (John 14:6) are called Calvinists, after 16th century French theologian John Calvin (AD 1509-1564), who stressed that God chooses His followers; they do not choose Him. Calvin of course did not invent the doctrine, and merely claimed that he was taking his cue from the later writings of St. Augustine (AD 354-430). Augustine, in turn, found the idea of God’s electing grace in, for instance, Paul’s words in Ephesians that 46

Lumbard, “Covenant and Covenants,” 5.

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Christians were chosen by God before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:5), seem to strengthen the Calvinist, or predestinarian position. However, other Christians who see following Christ as a choice, rather than something they have been elected to, have passages of scripture too which do appeal as well. 2 Peter 3:9 famously declares that God is not willing that any should perish. This “freewill” position is often called Arminianism, after the anti-Calvinist theologian Jacob Arminius (AD 1560-1609). However, as Roger E. Olson has shown, Arminians traditionally have not rejected the idea of predestination unto salvation, but rather what is often called reprobation, or the idea that God consigns certain people to hell before the foundation of the world.47 This is often called “double predestination.” Here is Arminius on the matter of “single predestination.” “The decree of the good pleasure of God in Christ, by which he resolved within himself from all eternity, to justify, adopt and endow with everlasting life,…believers on whom he had decreed to bestow faith.” 48 Of course, divine foreknowledge, or God knowing who will respond to His call is tied to God’s predestination in a way that is not Calvinistic, but that God does indeed elect in some way is held even by Arminians. “Few of Arminianism’s theological critics would claim that Arminians do not believe in predestination in any sense; they know that classical Arminianism includes beliefs in God’s decrees respecting salvation and God’s foreknowledge of believers in Jesus Christ.” 49 Even in Roman Catholicism, where Calvinism has always been basically viewed as heretical, the concept of God as a predestining Lord is found, though with less rigor than in Calvinism. The Roman Catholic catechism says the following: To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of "predestination," he includes in it each person's free response to his grace: "In this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place." For the sake of accomplishing his plan of salvation, God permitted the acts that flowed from their blindness. 50

47

Roger E. Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), 179-99. 48 Quoted in ibid., 181. 49 Ibid., 179. 50 Catechism of the Catholic Church 600, http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/600.htm.

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Regardless of what committed Calvinists or devout Arminians claim, the NT evidence on predestination is capable of either interpretation. So, it is not my intention to resolve the debate here. I only wish to point out the concept of God’s election of believers into a covenant relationship with him; however that election is understood, is quite apparent in the NT. In Islam, too, we find a similar situation exists. Some passages of the Koran seem to teach the freewill view of human response to God, while other passages stress Allah’s total control over all that happens in the universe. “Many brief Qur’anic texts not only emphasize God’s absolute control but also suggest an almost capricious freedom in determining the ethical course of individual people.” 51 As in Christian theology, there has long been a debate in Islam as to how much Allah predestines people, and how much freedom they have to respond to him. The great Muslim thinker Averroes (AD 1126-1198) taught that there were three different opinions on predestination but, and this is key, Averroes believed that “God does not act by election.” 52 The emphasis that many Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages place on predestination now seems overwrought, according to many Muslim thinkers. 53 That predestination and freewill are taught by the Bible and by the Koran is self-evident from the texts, but the Koran has no concept of persons being elected in the covenantal sense that we find in the NT. Election into a covenant of salvation would make no sense from the Koranic perspective, for “[t]he Qur’an states repeatedly that every man and woman individually and every person collectively are alone responsible for what they do—a doctrine that underlies the Qur’anic rejection redemption.” 54 Compare this with the following passage from the Book of Acts in the NT: Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.” (Acts 2:38-39). Not only is this type of familial/covenant-based thinking absent from the Koran, it is explicitly rejected by it. There is a “Qur’anic critique of chosenness based on membership in [sic] particular group. When people make such

51

John Renard, Islamic Theological Themes: A Primary Source Reader (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 9-10. 52 Ismail Mohamad, “Concept of Predestination in Islam and Christianity: Special Reference to Averroes and Aquinas,” The Islamic Quarterly 44, no. 2 (Jan. 2000): 80. 53 Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 23. 54 Ibid., 19.

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claims, God responds to them not only by denying the claim but by reasserting their status as creations of God, a status shared with the rest of humanity.” 55 If the concept of covenant was so important to God throughout the centuries covered by the Old and New Testaments, why does it suddenly disappear from the Koran? We would expect a certain continuity on God’s dealings with humanity, yet the concept of divine calling into a covenant relationship simply does not appear in the Koran. This does not mean that the Koran is wrong in its portrayal of God. The Koranic portrayal could certainly be the correct one, while the biblical one is incorrect. But it seems doubtful that they are both true. Both Bible believers and Koran believers do not want to claim that God reveals contradictory messages, yet that seems to be the case here. The differences between the Bible’s God and the Koran’s Allah become even more pronounced, as will be evident in the next section.

Is love an Attribute of God? Is it an Attribute of Allah? Christians are fond of saying that the God of Christianity “is love.” It is more correct to say that love is an attribute, or characteristic of God, for He is far more than simply love. He is power, wisdom, judgment, grace, etc. But love is certainly at the heart of the NT’s description of God’s revelation in Christ. God in the pages of the OT is said to be a God of love, though perhaps it is fair to say His wrath seems sometimes more apparent than His love. Still, consider the following passages from the Hebrew Bible, “he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7). Or, “Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity” (Joel 2:13).

55 Jerusha Lamptey, “Embracing Rationality and Theological Tensions: Muslim Theology, Religious Diversity and Fate, ”Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation and the Fates of Others, ed. Mohammad Hassan Khalil (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 246.

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Much has been made in scholarly as well as popular circles regarding the perception that Allah in the Koran is more of a tyrannical oriental deity who rules his subjects through fear and intimidation. This comparison is an overstatement, but yet it is true at least in some ways. For instance, the idea of the fear of Allah “perhaps the most important single term in the Qur’an.” 56 Of course, the Bible often speaks of the fear of God, but few would call it the central idea in understanding the God of Christian scripture. But to be fair to the way the word “taqwa” is used in the Muslim scriptures, the English word “fear” is certainly intended in some cases, but not in most. In fact, the word, and cognates derived from it, often mean “a positive ethical quality which Muslims are entreated to cultivate.”57 Perhaps the oftquoted line from the Bible, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7) might be what the Koran has in mind here. But still, why should fear, regardless of the positive outcome it produces in the lives of Muslims, be so central to the Koran’s message, whereas in the Bible, especially in the NT, the love of God is so stressed, emphasized to the point where perhaps the best known verse in the NT is John 3:16, which speaks of God loving the world so greatly that he sends His son to die for the world’s sins? The difference is well-summed up by Rahman, when he writes that taqwa, which he equates with moral conscience, “is truly as central to Islam as love is to Christianity when one speaks of the human response to the ultimate reality—which, therefore, is conceived in Islam as merciful justice rather than fatherhood.” 58 Part of the reason for this “cold” view of Allah is that the Koran, and Muslim theologians, are reluctant to speak about Allah’s attributes the way Christian theologians have always done. For Muslims, God is pure act, pure intention; his actions are his attributes, so to speak. Allah’s “attributes communicate not His personal qualities but rather His limitless might as directed by His will.” 59 Ever on guard to defend Allah against the charge of anthropomorphism, the Koran and its scholars know that giving Allah attributes, or characteristics, could lead to a “humanization” of God, much as we find in the NT’s portrait of Christ as the God-Man. For the Koran, Allah is absolutely separate from his creation. “According to Islam, God

56 Erik S. Ohlander, “Fear of God (Taqwa) in the Qur’an: Some Notes on Semantic Shift and Thematic Context,” Journal of Semitic Studies, 50, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 137. 57 Ibid., 140. 58 Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an, 29. 59 Imad N. Shehadeh, “The Predicament of Islamic Monotheism,” Bibliotheca Sacra 161 (April-June 2004): 147.

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does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. He reveals only His will.”60 Thus Islamic revelation is very different from Biblical revelation (think of Christ’s words in John 14:7, where he says, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father”). Isma’il al-Faruqi writes that “Christians talk about the revelation of God Himself—by God of God—but that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam…. You may not have complete transcendence and self-revelation at the same time.” 61 Still, there are some passages where Allah is said to be loving, and in fairness these need to be examined. They prove that Allah is not loveless, as some Christians claim, but they also show that Allah is never described as a “God of Love” in anything like the New Testament fashion. St. Paul can say “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8), whereas Allah’s love in the Koran is not often mentioned, but when it is, it is predicated upon human response. Allah is said to love those who, for instance, are righteous (2:195, 3:148). The human act is necessary to being about the reciprocal reaction of Allah’s love. The first matter that requires attention is the manner in which Allah is often referred to in the Koran as merciful, and forgiving. At first, this sounds very much like the way in which God is portrayed in the Bible. Yet oddly, many scholars, both Christian and Muslim, seem to think that mercy and forgiveness are the same as love. Thus Miroslav Volf writes, “[w]ould Muslims agree about God’s generosity, even if they don’t specifically use the word ‘love’? In fact, many of what the Qur’an calls the ‘Beautiful Names’ of God speak of divine giving—of God’s compassion for those who are in any way needy, whether in an ontological or existential sense (‘The Merciful’ and ‘The Compassionate’); of God’s forgiveness of those who have transgressed (‘The All-Forgiving’); and of God’s generosity and benevolence (‘The Generous’ and ‘The Benevolent’). And among the Beautiful Names of God in the Qur’an is ‘The Loving.’” 62

The first thing to note here is that the characteristics of being generous, forgiving, and benevolent are not the same as loving. This is why even Volf is forced to admit that “over the centuries some influential Muslim theologians have either refused or hesitated to speak about God’s love.” 63 Even contemporary Muslim scholar Reza Shah-Kazemi, who believes love 60

Ibid., 149. Isma’il al-Faruqi, “On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah,” International Review of Missions 65 (1976): 405-06. 62 Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 15455. 63 Ibid.,153. 61

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is ontologically part of Allah’s being, admits Muslim scholars have often “debated the very legitimacy of ascribing love to God in any essential manner.” 64 Why the reticence on the part of these Muslim scholars, if the Koran clearly teaches that Allah is a God of love? According to Volf, the “best” evidence that Allah is a being of love is found in the thought of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). This is the man who has been the greatest influence on Wahhabism, the very conservative, sharia-based form of Islam found in modern Saudi Arabia. According to Volf, Taymiyya came to the conclusion that Allah loves the world, but only because “God first of all loves God’s own self!” 65 That Allah loves himself before loving others is problematic, but also theologically necessary from the Muslim point of view. It is problematic because we tend to think of self-love in humans as a less than desirable trait. How much more so in the Creator of the universe. Also, this idea that Allah is loving because he first loves himself sounds a great deal like the theory many panentheistic thinkers have advanced—God must love, he cannot help himself from loving, and thus his self-love overflows into the world. 66 But I do not think that many Muslims would conceive of Allah in panentheistic terms! Still, since Muslims deny any plurality within the Godhead, Allah must necessarily love himself if he is going to be loving at all. Perhaps Muslims have always sensed this, and thus their reluctance to speak about Allah being a God of love. For in order for love to be an inherent quality of Allah, Islam would have had to come dangerously close to something like the Christian trinity. Writing of the problem of describing Allah as a being of love, Imad N. Shehadeh writes that “[for] the attribute of love to exist in God eternally there must be at least the lover and the one loved.” 67 But on those occasions when the Koran does speak of Allah as loving, Shah-Kazemi notes, his love is only reserved for certain people, namely, those who trust in Allah, those who follow his commands, those who engage in battle (jihad) for Allah, etc. Then Shah-Kazemi enumerates those whom Allah does not love, including unbelievers, sinners, etc. 68 Even in the Hadith (the collections of sayings from, or about, Muhammad), the same pattern is found. Allah loves, but only if people love Him first. 64

Quoted in ibid, 166. Ibid., 166. 66 For a good overview of panentheism, see John W. Cooper, Panentheism—The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). 67 Shehadeh, “The Predicament,” 146. 68 See Volf, Allah: A Christian Response, 173 for the Koranic chapters and verses that describe those whom Allah loves and those he does not love. 65

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“When my servant comes near to Me through good deeds, I love him.” 69 Thus the idea found in the NT, that “we love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19) is reversed in the Koran; Allah’s love comes only after humans love Him. Volf seeks to salvage the concept of a loving Allah by looking to the Sufi version of Islam, a more mystical version of the faith than that practiced by Sunnis or Shia Muslims. But “Sufis are not representative of mainstream Islam, which over the centuries has often denounced Sufism as a departure from Islamic orthodoxy.” 70 Indeed, in Sufi Islam, it is not so much Allah as lover, but Allah as loved, “while there is rich tradition in Islam of spirituality and love of God, it is rooted in mysticism and must be considered separately from the traditional faith.” 71 Despite his intense efforts to portray God and Allah as the same deity, Volf bluntly admits that love is predicated upon God quite differently in the Bible than it is in the Koran concerning Allah. Regarding God as loving, especially the New Testament’s insistence that God loves unbelievers as well as sinners, Volf admits that, regarding divine love, “Christians [may] want to push Muslims to go farther than many seem able to go.” 72 Volf deserves credit for showing just how much more important love is to Christianity’s God than to Islam’s Allah. 73 Volf admits that this is a key difference between the two religions, but seems to take the position that the two faiths have so much else in common that perhaps they can agree to disagree on this matter. But I would say that this issue is so important as to render any similarities the two faiths have almost irrelevant. In John 3:16 (which so many of us are probably tired of reading about thanks to the verse appearing on so many signs at NFL football games!), it states that “God so loves the world that he gave his only begotten son.” This verse constitutes a shahada (that is, the Muslim statement of faith, rendered as “there is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet) if you will for Christianity. 69 William C. Chittick, “The Ambiguity of the Qur’anic Command,” Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others, ed. Mohammad Hassan Khalil (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 83. (Chittick does not cite the location of this passage in the Hadith.) 70 Gerald McDermott, “No, the God of the Qur’an is Not the God of the Bible,” https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/06/no-the-god-of-the-quran-isnot-the-god-of-the-bible. 71 Thomas W. Lippman, Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World (New York: Meridian, 1995), 11. Lippman writes of the mystical branch of Sufi Islam that they have “a personal relationship with God based on love, in contrast to the submission based on fear and prohibition that characterizes the official religion” (146). 72 Volf, Allah: A Christian Response, 182. 73 Ibid., 174-184.

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It states God is love, and that love caused him to send his son to redeem humanity. Thus is Christianity reduced to a sentence. And because no Muslim can agree in any way with this claim, it is hard to see how Christians and Muslims are talking about the same God. If the Christian gospel calls sinners to repentance, “the Qur’an is void of any signs of grace to the unworthy.” 74 A judge may show mercy to a man who stands before him in court. The judge may take into account the man’s harsh life of poverty; his abusive parents, and so forth. Upon consideration of such things, the judge may incline to mercy, but that is not love. The judge has no love for the criminal; in fact, the judge has never met the man before. The victim’s family may forgive the man who harmed their loved one, but few people would confuse this forgiveness with love in the sense that the word is usually used. They may forgive him, if they are Christians, because they know it is a command from Jesus. If they are not religious people, they may decide to forgive the wrongdoer because they know that harbouring hate in one’s heart will simply allow the criminal to victimize them all over again.75 Conversely, if a person is loving, they will by default be merciful; mercy is a characteristic of love, but love is not necessarily required of one who is merciful. The Arabic word rahma, or mercy, is at the heart of the Koran’s portrayal of Allah. “If it were possible to express the reality of [Allah] in a single word, it would be rahma.” 76 Thus the Biblical God and the Koranic Allah drift further and further apart.

74

Shehadeh, “Reasons for Islam’s Rejection,” 279.

75 That forgiveness can be practiced by Christians as well as by non-religious persons

in an effort at healing themselves psychology has been pointed out by Donald Capps, Jesus the Village Psychiatrist (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). 76 Chittick, “The Ambiguity,” 71.

CHAPTER 3 IS THE DIVINE PURE ONENESS, OR PLURALITY IN UNITY?

That Allah is not presented as an inherently-loving God grows out of the Muslim denial of the Trinity, which, of course, is essential for understanding the Christian concept of God. For if God has existed for all eternity as three Beings-within-one, that there was eternal love between these members of the trinity is axiomatic. This does not, of course, mean the Islamic view of Allah is wrong, only that it is fundamentally different from the Christian view. In Islam, God is pure oneness. The greatest sin for Muslims is the sin of shirk, or assigning divinity to anything other than the monadic God. Here, Islam is very close to Judaism, although, as we will see, Allah in the Koran is far less immanent in His creation than God in either the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. Part of the reason for this is that the Koran, and Muslim theologians, are reluctant to speak about Allah’s attributes the way Christian theologians have always done. But then what are we to make of Miroslav Volf’s statement: “What the Qur’an denies about God as the Holy Trinity has been denied by every great teacher of the church in the past and ought to be denied by every orthodox Christian today. I reject the idea that Muslim monotheism is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the trinity.”77 This is a truly bizarre statement, especially considering the fact that Volf is a brilliant theologian teaching at one of the United State’s finest universities (Yale). His statement is easily refuted by the scriptures of each religion, as will be shown below. To be fair to Volf, part of what I think he is getting at here is that sometimes Muslims accuse Christianity of making the One God into “three gods.” And rightly, Volf replies that Christians have never done this. The early Church inherited monotheism from the Jews, and no major Christian theologian that I know of has ever taught that Christians worship three gods; this kind of division in the godhead is reserved for semi-Christian groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for 77

Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (New York: Harper One, 2011), 14.

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example, posit that Christ is a sort of demi-god, thus creating a modern-day Arianism. 78 And in Mormonism, God shares the universe with other divine beings, most notably perhaps, His wife. 79 So, if Volf means only that the Koran and orthodox Christianity reject tritheism, he is certainly correct. Also, rightly ruled out is a crude literalism that sees Jesus as the Father’s “biological” son. Neither Christians nor Muslims believe that. Still, the Koran does not just deny this literalistic view of sonship. Timothy George says that in the Koran Christ’s “pre-existence and incarnation are explicitly denied.” Volf needs to explain what major orthodox church thinker has ever denied these things? St. Augustine, the greatest of all Church Fathers, writes that we should “not imagine any interval or period when the Father was and the Son was not.” And Augustine was not advancing some novel theological development, for “most exegetes have agreed that Paul, Hebrews, John, and other NT writings affirm that the Son of God existed prior to his incarnation.” 80 But so strong is the Koran’s denial that Christ is in any way divine that “there is little comfort to be found in a Jesus who is ‘no more than’ a prophet, and far less than the One who came from the bosom of the Father, full of grace and truth.” 81 While it is true, the Koran says some things about the Trinity that most Christians would probably agree with. For example, in Koran 5:72-77, it reads that “[t]hey do blaspheme who say, ‘Allah is Christ the son of Mary.’” Most Christian thinkers tend toward the idea that Christ is the divine Son, rather than that God is Jesus, although this idea is found in the so-called Oneness Pentecostals, who make no distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 82 The passage goes on to condemn those who “join other gods with Allah.” Again, Christians would condemn this along with Muslims, as it would lead to tritheism. So far, so good for Volf. But then the passage 78

The churchman Arius taught that Jesus was semi-divine, a created being who was less than the Father. His views were refuted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, where the Church decided on the orthodox formula of homoousios, meaning that Christ and the Father were distinct yet fully equal, for they shared the same divine substance. 79 “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaches that all human beings, male and female, are beloved spirit children of heavenly parents, a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother,” https://www.lds.org/topics/mother-in-heaven?lang=eng. 80 Douglas McCready, ‘’He Came Down From Heaven”: The Preexistence of Christ Revisited, JETS 40, no. 3 (September 1997): 420. 81 Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 96. 82 For a good critique of this heretical version of Pentecostal Christianity, see Gregory A. Boyd, Oneness Pentecostal and the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992).

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reads that “Christ the son of Mary was no more than a messenger.” In other words, Christ was no more than a prophet, much like the Old Testament prophets who called humanity to worship of the one God. But what “great teacher in Christian history,” to use Volf’s term, has ever seen Christ as only a messenger? True, with the rise of Christian liberal theology in the 1800s, some Christian theologians have taken this position, as well as many other unbiblical, unorthodox views of Jesus. But Volf is talking about “all” the great Christian thinkers of the past two thousand years. Indeed, Christianity is predicated upon the belief that Christ was precisely unlike all the previous prophets, because He was in some sense God’s son, and was in some sense equal with the Father. It was this divine nature of Christ that enabled him to die on behalf of sinful humanity and have that death prove eternally redemptive, rather than merely a temporary forgiveness of sins, such as the Jews experienced in Old Testament times through countless animal sacrifices. Athanasius, the orthodox hero of the Council of Nicaea, said that “God became man [in Jesus] so that we might become God.” By this statement he meant the Eastern Orthodox concept of theosis, which means believers do not literally become God, but rather that they will eventually share, at least in part, in God’s divine nature. And the English churchman St. Anselm (AD 1033-1109) wrote an entire monograph on the necessity of Christ being divine in order for his salvific death to have meaning. 83 But by denying any divinity whatsoever to Christ, the Koran nullifies the key doctrine of the Christian faith, the saving work of Christ on the Cross. Thus Fazlur Rahman, the esteemed Muslim scholar, can write that “[t]he Qur’an states repeatedly that every man and woman individually and every people collectively are alone responsible for what they do—a doctrine that underlies the Qur’anic rejection of redemption.” Again he writes, “[w]e have already said that the Qur’an rejects ‘saviorship.’ As a corollary, it equally rejects intercession.” 84 Again Volf has to answer the question, which “great teacher” in Christian history has denied that Christ was not the savior, that He did not intercede for the sins of humanity? Even if we look at pre-Nicene theologians, before the homoousios doctrine was developed, there are hundreds of passages from the Church Fathers, not to mention the New Testament, that disagree with the koranic denial of Christ as savior and intervener on humanity’s behalf. All orthodox Christians from the beginning have called Christ the Son of God, and although the term may have had various meanings before the Council of Nicaea put before the 83

St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo: Why God Became Man (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, August 6, 2016). 84 Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Koran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19, 31.

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homoousios doctrine, it meant at least that Christ was more than a man or great prophet, and that he was in at least some sense divine. Thus, what great teacher in Christian history would agree with the following koranic passages? “The Jews call ‘Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouths; they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s cures be on them; how they are deluded away from the truth!” (9:30). Or Koran 19;35, “it is not befitting to the majesty of Allah that he should beget a son.” John of Damascus (655750 AD), usually considered to be the last of the Church Fathers, knew Islam better than perhaps any Christian of his day, as his “family served the Umayyad caliph in the administration of Damascus.” Yet “John instinctively regarded Islam as a competitor, either as a Christian heresy or an upstart heathen creed…. He regarded Islam as a Christian heresy chiefly because of its denial of the central doctrines of redemption and the divinity of Christ.”85 I could continue in this vein, but the point is pretty obvious. Volf, a credentialed, Yale theology professor is making a claim that clearly has little basis in Christian or Muslim understanding of theological reality. Why he makes this statement can only be answered by Volf himself, but I suspect this kind of thinking is essential to his book, which makes the case that Christians and Muslims do indeed worship the same God. It is a noble goal on his part, but not if it requires ignoring biblical and koranic passages that clearly contradict each other. The Muslim and the Christian both take their scriptures to be God’s revealed word. To gloss over clear contradictions does a disservice to both groups of believers, not to mention those without deep knowledge of other faiths. One method that Christian thinkers in the Volfian camp try to downplay the differences between the Christian and the Islamic understanding of God is by suggesting that the kind of trinitarian theology that the Koran condemns 85

John Renard, Islam and Christianity: Theological Themes in Comparative Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xvii, xviii, xx. Renard also states that several “documents from the seventh and eighth centuries do roundly condemn Muslims and their Prophet on theological grounds. For example, some argue that Muslims do not worship the true God, because they do not acknowledge the divinity of Jesus.” Renard goes on to state that by the twelfth century, “generally positive assessments by Middle Eastern Christian theologians seem to outnumber the blanket condemnations.” This may be because, as Renard noted, these Christians did not feel confident in criticizing a religion that now firmly dominated the Middle East (xviii). But it can also be attributed, I think, to the fact that, even today, Christians see much that is positive in Islam. But when it comes to the denial of Christ’s divinity, John of Damascus was right to reject Islamic claims, at least from the Christian perspective.

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was somehow heretical, and that therefore the Koran is right to critique it. The idea is that Muhammad knew heretical Christians in the Arabian peninsula, and their views are the ones being denounced in the Koran. “The original Muslim disallowance of the Trinity may well have been a reaction to heretical notions of tri-theism, a view of God that no orthodox Christian could accept.” 86 But, precisely who are these heretical Christians that Muhammad would have been reacting to? The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had already established, at least for the Church in the Western World led by the pope in Rome, that Christ was both fully man and fully God, one person with both a divine and a human nature. Muhammad receives the Koran over two hundred years later. It is true that Chalcedonian Christology was not popular with the so-called Church of the East (Syria), nor with elements within the Eastern Orthodox Church headquartered in Constantinople. Still, the Eastern Orthodox Church, whatever some member thought about Chalcedon, was firmly Trinitarian, giving equal importance to the three Persons of the Trinity. Despite disagreements over aspects of technical Chalcedonian theology, the idea that there were Christians who thought the Trinity was three different Gods is not likely. Even if there were such Christians in Muhammad’s day, it is a moot point, for “even orthodox Christian teaching about the trinity has been rejected by Islam because it has seemed to be a breach of God’s sovereignty as well as of divine unity.”87 Hans Kung, in an effort to be as irenic as possible, offers the theory that Muhammad said nothing “unchristian” in the Koran, and that what he says about Jesus’s lack of divinity may have been what the earliest “Jewish Christians” believed, long before the Church Councils imposed technical trinitarian language on the Church. How else to explain the Koran’s great reverence for Christ, yet in its rejection of trinitarian language about him, Kung asks. 88 Says Kung, In the original Jewish Christian community, belief in the one God was so much taken for granted that the notion of rivalry through another being equal to God could not arise. The executed Jesus had been exalted by God to God and now (according to psalm 110) occupied the place of honour “‘at God’s right hand’’ he had been “made Lord and Messiah by the resurrection from the dead” (see Acts 2.22-36)…. In the Jewish paradigm—and also in Paul and John—this was not regarded as competition with belief in the one God but as its consequence…. Whatever may be said about Muhammad’s historical knowledge [of Christianity] there are unmistakable parallels 86

Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad?, 86. Ibid. 88 Hans Kung, Islam: Past, Present, and Future (London: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 493-497. 87

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Chapter 3 between the Qur’an and the understanding of Christ in [early] JewishChristian communities. They were worked out, around a century ago, by Adolf von Harnack [1851-1930] and Julius Wellhausen [1844-1918] and later by the conservative Protestant exegete Adolf Schlatter [1852-1938] and the Jewish scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps. However, these parallels have so far found few echoes either in Islam or in Christian dogmatics or in Jewish—Christian-Muslim dialogue. Not only Muslim theologians but also Christian dogmatic theologians of all confessions ignore inconvenient results of exegetical and historical research, whereas some of those involved in dialogue have a defective knowledge of dogmatics, exegesis and the history of dogma. 89

I quote this passage at length because Kung is making very serious claims here. First, one has to question the wisdom of reliance upon 19th century biblical scholars when addressing Christian-Muslim relations in the twenty-first century. Harnack, one of the fathers of German liberal biblical criticism, sought to push the biblical materials into rubrics that reflected his own time and place. “Harnack reduced Christianity to two essential affirmations, the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, neither of which is espoused by the Bible in the sense articulated by Harnack.” 90 If Harnack misunderstood his own religion, it is probably not wise to follow his lead on Islam. Second, Wellhausen is most famous for the so-called documentary hypothesis, the idea that the first five books of the Bible were not written by one person (Moses) but by several writers. This theory is pretty much mainstream seminary stuff today, because there seems to be good evidence for it. It there was good evidence for Kung’s Christian-Jewish connection, it would probably be remembered, too. Third, the Jewish Christians (those of the first century) never thought of Christ as a “rival” to the one God of Israel. But, in the first century, as reflected in the NT scriptures, Christ was already thought of as far more than human. Colossian 2:9 says the fullness of God lives in Christ’s body. Fourth, the very idea of a Jewish Christian makes no sense in the context of Judaism; Christianity broke away from its parent religion around one hundred AD precisely because most Jews saw Jesus as non-divine, if not an imposter. There was a group of early Christians called Ebionites, who seemed to have thought of Jesus as only a purely human messiah, but what evidence is there that these beliefs survived for another 500 years until the time of 89 Ibid., 495-496. For more on the scholars that King mentions in this passage, see his “Christianity and World Religions: The Dialogue with Islam as One Model,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987), 90-93. 90 R. C. Sproul, Grace Unknown: The Heart of Reformation Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1977), 9.

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Muhammad? If the case were as strong as Kung claims, surely at least a few Muslim and Christian scholars would have discovered it by now. So, when Kung states that these Jewish Christians, or Ebionites (a name meaning “the poor”) “accepted the virgin birth of Jesus…but rejected the notion of his pre-existence—just as the Qur’an does,” 91 Muslim apologists are not impressed, since Islam rejects far more about the NT’s portrayal of Jesus than just his pre-existence. But the theories of few scholars do not matter much when we have evidence of what the first-century Jewish Christians actually believed, and that evidence is found in the NT. These passages clearly present Christ as divine. Not as another God, but not identical to God the Father. The Church has never thought that Jesus and the Father were the same person. This is why the doctrine of the Trinity was developed. It was not an invention of the later church, nor a borrowing from Greek philosophy (as Mormon scholars usually claim). The Church had no choice but to develop trinitarian theology, because the NT so clearly traces it. Throughout the gospels and Paul’s letters, the Father and Son are portrayed as divine, yet obviously not the same person. Otherwise, who is minding the store in heaven while Jesus was on earth? Kung produces the standard liberal trope that Christ is not presented as divine in the gospels. He admits John’s gospel has a high Christology, but says that “the synoptic gospels still present him as wholly Son of Man, through whom God acts. Exegetes point especially to the monologues in the Acts of the Apostles, in which Luke uses material from an old tradition which has Jesus totally subordinate to God…. Do not all these statements of Luke, colored as they are by an ‘adoptive’ perspective, still have a certain place within the framework of a strict Jewish or Islamic faith in one God? Yet this was the faith of Christians, of Jewish Christians.” 92 Note, even if one agrees with Kung that Christ is not presented as divine in the synoptic gospels and in Acts (a very debatable point), note how he ignores the writings of St. Paul, despite the fact that Paul’s writings pre-date the gospels by two or three decades. Since many scholars believe that he wrote only seven of the thirteen epistles attributed to him, we will only focus on those that are unanimously thought to have come from his own pen. In Romans 1:3-4, Paul says of Christ, “regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead; Jesus Christ our Lord.” Here, Paul is not only teaching the divinity of Jesus, but his heavenly pre-existence as well, or else why bother to use the phrase “as to his earthly life”? Or Philippians 2:6. 91

Hans Kung, “Christianity and World Religions: The Dialogue with Islam as One Model,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 91. 92 Ibid., 90-91.

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Where Paul describes Jesus as “being in very nature God.” Also note that in Paul’s letters, he is usually not claiming to be teaching his audience new doctrine, but rather reminding them of what they already know and believe. So, what the synoptic gospels do or do not teach about Christ’s divinity, and what the Ebionites believed about it must be viewed in light of Paul’s teaching, since the earliest Christian documents we have, (Paul’s letters), present Christ as divine in a fully orthodox way. The liberal scholarly position is usually that the doctrine of Christ’s divinity developed over time, during the NT period and beyond it. But Paul’s letters undermine that theory. Paul wrote to his congregations in the 50s AD. And he often wrote to them not to impart new doctrine, but simply remind them of what they already knew and believed about Jesus. Thus, the Christology Paul teaches in his letters must necessarily predate the period when Paul is writing. So, even if there were a few of Kung’s Jewish Christians at the time of Muhammad, it would make little difference, since they did not represent the majority of Christian thought then or now. Besides, the Ebionites were rejected as heretical by the Church Father Irenaeus, in the late second century, so whatever they believed never became part of Christian orthodoxy. Also, in his effort to show dependence on the alleged existence of the Ebionites at the time of Muhammad, Kung earns the wrath of Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who, taking the standard Islamic position that the Koran is entirely a product of Allah’s revelation, rejects the idea that Ebionites influenced the Koran’s portrayal of Jesus. 93 Nasr also faults Kung for claiming the Koran assumes the Trinity is made up of God, Jesus, and Mary. “Muslims do not usually believe that the Christian God consists of God, Mary, and Christ. I do not know who among Islamic scholars told this to Kung… That is not the general Muslim interpretation of the Christian Trinity and has not been so historically.” 94 Apparently, Kung has the following koranic passage in mind: “Then Allah will say: Jesus, son of Mary, did you ever say to mankind: ‘worship me and my mother as gods beside Allah?’” (5:116). This passage probably refers to Christian veneration of Mary, rather than a mistaken belief that she was part of the Trinity. Attributing full divinity to Jesus, or even partial divinity, is strongly condemned in the Koran with the use of the Arabic word shirk. In fact, to attribute divinity to anything or any person besides Allah is not only a grave error, it is actually an unforgivable sin in Islam. Islamic scholar Daud Rahbar sums up the matter nicely. “There are several passages repeating 93

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Response to Hans Kung’s Paper on Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 99-100. 94 Ibid., 102.

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that under no circumstances does God pardon misbelief and associating partners with Him.” 95 Note the author’s use of the word “partner,” which does not demand that Christ be thought of as Kung’s “rival” God in order to be rejected by Muslims. Any type of sharing by Jesus with the Father’s divine nature is “categorically denied by the Qur’anic doctrine of shirk.” 96 If God is a trinity, as Christianity has always held, then the Koran’s insistence on Allah as pure oneness cannot in any meaningful way said to be the same deity. And we must keep in mind that when the Koran talks of shirk, it may be primarily referring to Jesus, but it would also apply to the Christian belief that Holy Spirit is a divine being, the third member of the trinity. That the Holy Spirit is personal is established by the use of personal male pronouns in places like Romans 8:26 and John 15:26. In the Koran, there is no basis for assuming that a personal being called the Holy Spirit shares in the Godhead. When the phrase “holy spirit” is used in the Koran, it is but a synonym for Allah. In the NT, the Holy Spirit is separate from either Father or Son, yet still portrayed as divine, as Christ’s departing words in John 16:7-8 make clear. The triune God of Christianity can be but a blasphemous chimera to the Muslim. The Allah of absolute unity cannot in any sensible way be reconciled with the NT portrayal of the God of Israel who makes himself known in different ways (or Persons as the ancient Councils termed the divine differentiation). We have already seen how the God of Israel is a God of covenants, while the Allah of the Koran is not. Now we add to that the essential differences in their nature (three-in-oneness vs. pure oneness). In the next section, we will see how the different concepts of God play out in radically different understandings of the essence nature of human beings, and the different responses to the human condition that are offered by the Christian God and the Islamic Allah. While debates over the nature of God may be a bit abstruse for the typical Christian or Muslim, the differences between the two understandings of God are essential for how all Christians and Muslims live their everyday lives of religious devotion.

95

Daud Rahbar, God of Justice: A Study in the Ethical Doctrine of the Qur’an (Leiden: Brille, 1960), 141. 96 Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an, 13.

CHAPTER 4 DOES HUMANITY NEED A SAVIOR? OR, JUST HOW SINFUL ARE WE?

In order to comprehend the utterly different understandings that are set forth by both the NT and the Koran, we must begin by looking at a story that both religions accept, namely, that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Both religions have traditionally interpreted this episode from the Hebrew Bible as divine truth, but put very different spins upon it. The biblical story of the so-called fall of man in the garden is well known. Due to Adam and Eve’s sinful disobedience, all sorts of curses from God follow. These curses affect the earth, childbearing, and the nature of daily existence (humans must now perform hard physical labor, rather than simply “tending” the garden in genteel fashion). This episode is the basis for the New Testament understanding of man’s inherently sinful nature. In Romans chapter five, Paul explains that Adam’s rebellion brought sin and death into the world, and that the only remedy is the work of the Second Adam, Christ, on the cross. And, of course, based on Paul’s teachings, the doctrine of original sin eventually becomes part of Church orthodoxy, especially as the doctrine is developed by St. Augustine. This idea that we are born into sin, that it is a part of our nature, is accepted by all orthodox Christian denominations, although to greater or lesser degrees. The Roman Catholic Church has always taught that the Fall damaged the image of God in humanity, but did not destroy it. Calvinists, on the other hand, have held that the Fall utterly wrecked the image of God in man. Eastern Orthodoxy holds that while we are not directly responsible for Adam’s sin, we do inherit his proclivity toward sin. To sum up in modern parlance, the Christian position is that humanity has “sinful DNA.” We have the freedom to struggle against our sinful nature, and with God’s grace often overcome it, but Christianity rejects as naïve any idea that the human race is not marred by sin. 97 97

One famous exception was the British monk Pelagius (AD 390-418) who taught that sin could be overcome, and that it was possible, at least in theory, to live a sinfree life, although Pelagius did not claim he himself was sin-free. St. Augustine spent

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In Islam, the story of the fall of man is similar, but its interpretation is far different. Man is presented as the pinnacle of creation, so much so that even the angels must bow to Adam (K7:11). Interestingly, Satan refused to bow down (K7:11-13), thus incurring Allah’s wrath, and provided a different understanding of satanic rebellion than the traditional Christian one, namely, that Satan initiated a cosmic rebellion in heaven before the creation of the world. Still, some Muslims take the Christian position, namely, that the Fiend’s machinations started long before the trouble he caused for Adam and Eve. “It is our sincere belief as Muslims that Satan (Iblis) has been the source and center of evil even before the creation of Adam.” 98 Be that as it may, the disobedience of Adam and Eve is a sad event, but not much more than that, says Shabbir Akhtar: “Islam, by contrast, sees the Fall as simply one powerful and contained manifestation of evil--more accurately, disobedience to God’s will—that has no larger implications for human nature in general or even for Adam’s nature in particular. Adam ate the forbidden fruit; Allah forgave him for Allah does what he pleases.” 99 In Islam, sin is a problem for humanity, but it is not the problem; forgetfulness of Allah is. This is why the Koran often speaks of reminded wayward humanity to come back to submission to His will. “When Adam forgot and ate the forbidden fruit, this was only to be expected, for it is human nature to forget.” 100 In fact, in Islam there is the idea that the Fall actually helped humanity to grow into a more mature state. 101 Thus the Fall as a great moral catastrophe in Christian thought, art, and literature over the centuries is simply not present in Islam. “Orthodox Islamic thought has always, by contrast, been characterized by its almost total freedom from the tragic instinct.” 102 The Koran certainly recognizes and records human sin. But that sin is not the result of anything like the Christian doctrine of great energy refuting the errors of Pelagius, and Augustine’s work on original sin became the standard view in Western Christianity. 98 Quoted in Norman L. Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002), 40. 99 Shabbir Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons: Islam and the Challenge of the Modern World (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991), 155. 100 William C. Chittick, “The Ambiguity of the Qur’anic Command,” Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others, ed. Mohammad Hassan Khalil (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68. 101 The early Church Father Irenaeus (AD 130-202) held a similar view of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, which is sometimes called the “fortunate fall.” However, most major Church Fathers, as well as later theologians, never sided with Irenaeus on this. 102 Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, 160.

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original sin. The Koran “advocates a healthy moral sense rather than the attitude of self-torment and moral frenzy represented, for example, by the teachings of Paul and many Sufis, which require some sort of savior ex machina.” 103 Even if one denies the literal historicity of the Adam and Eve story, the theologies that the story has bequeathed to the two faiths are contradictory. In Christianity, there is something essentially flawed with men and women. In Islam, all of us are precisely the way Allah made us, aside from the fact that we forget and stray from the true path of monotheism. Either Christians are labouring under a false understanding of their own nature, or Muslims are. “For the Muslim, then, our present situation is the normal human condition. According to the Bible, it is abnormal. God did not create us as we now are, nor does he intend that we stay that way.” Christ is the means whereby man’s sinful state is rectified, whereas “Islamic eschatology does not offer such a hope.” 104 I quote Muslim scholar Shabbir Akhtar at length because he so well encapsulates the enormous difference in outlooks between the two faiths on this matter: It is this feature [the doctrine of original sin] that so radically distinguishes the Crescent from the Cross. Here is no superficial difference. The Christian sees the permanent and grand failure of the human condition as being a presupposition of Christian redemption; one that introduces a dominant inconsistency into the foundations of Christianity because it effectively denies the wisdom of a God who created man. The Muslim is religious obliged…to entertain a more optimistic view of the matter…. For to admit that the human project is a failure is to endorse in effect the satanic, and hence culpable, scepticism about the divine decision to create and appoint man as God’s representative…. Christians need to presuppose, rightly or wrongly, the tragic failure of the human condition in order to operate the machinery of God’s redemptive grace; Muslims must, rightly or wrongly, refuse to concede the tragic failure of man on pain of having no theology left to articulate. 105

The lack of the concept of innate, unavoidable sin in Islam is undoubtedly attractive to many, especially in modern times, when much of what used to be called sin is now attributed to sociological or psychological causes. Also, the Muslim can point out, rightly I think, that most people are nowhere near as evil as a Hitler, or even a rapist or bank-robber. If humans are innately sinful, then why so much good in the world? And is it fair that we are 103 Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 30. 104 Samuel P. Schlorff, “Muslim Ideology and Christian Apologetics,” Missiology: An International Review, 21, no. 2 (April 1993): 176. 105 Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, 160-61.

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plagued by a sinful nature that we inherited from Adam and Eve, whose sin happened thousands of years before we were born? Still, even in Islam, “some Muslim theologians have held to a doctrine of Hereditary Sin…. Also, there is a famous tradition that the Prophet of Islam said, ‘No child is born but the Devil hath touched it, except Mary and her son Jesus.’” 106 Ayatollah Khomeini reportedly said, “Man’s calamity is his carnal desires, and this exists in everybody, and is rooted in the nature of man.” 107 Despite these passages, any concept of original sin in the Christian sense “has been rejected by the vast majority of scholars.”108 Norman Geisler has written from the Christian perspective on this topic, and I think he brings up several points regarding sin that would prove fruitful for Christians and Muslims when discussing the topic. “Even Muslims have to acknowledge that human beings are sinful. Otherwise, why do they need God’s mercy? Indeed, why do they believe that so many (including all Christians) have committed the greatest of all sins, attributing partners to God (K4:116)? Further, why did God need to send prophets to warn them of their sin, if they are not constant sinners? Also, why are the unbelievers sent to Hell to suffer?” 109 Of course, the Muslim could reply that sin need not be hereditary to be endemic. A Muslim could also reply that sin issues from free will; it need not be “original” in nature. And just why eternal punishment is needed is a question that has made many outside of the monotheistic traditions of Christianity and Islam at least a bit uneasy! 110 Despite disagreements on the nature of human sin, Christ’s redeeming death on the cross is not necessary in Islam, because there is really nothing to redeem. But this does not mean that Islam is content to leave humanity as is. All humans, Muslims believe, are actually Muslims, even though they may not know it, for “Allah has endowed man with a kind of innate knowledge” which should lead to Islam, the primal religion. Of course, this natural inclination toward Islam can be thwarted by false religions. 111 This is similar to what Paul says in Romans chapter one, where he teaches that 106

Michael Nazir-Ali, quoted in Geisler, Answering Islam, 47. Quoted in ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 285. 110 For a good overview of Christian views on an admittedly troubling doctrine, see Four Views on Hell, ed. William Crockett et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 1997). 111 Samuel P. Schlorff, “Theological and Apologetical Dimensions of Muslim Evangelization,” Westminster Theological Journal 42, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 335366. 107

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all humans instinctively know there is a God. There is no excuse for atheism, according to Paul, for atheism simply is a willful refusal to acknowledge what we all know to be true. So, both Islam and Christianity seem agreed that faith is “hard-wired” in the human condition. But specifics are needed to supplement this innate knowledge. Thus in Islam the Koran is needed as God’s final reminder to call us back to the truth, whereas in Christianity Christ is needed to do for us what we cannot, namely recognize the truth about God and submit to Him. But in Islam, wayward humanity is called back to simple monotheism. The genius of Islam is its simplicity; one Allah, and one Prophet who leads people to Allah. But in the NT, simply acknowledging the existence of God is not enough. The specifics of this God must be revealed by God, and taught by his apostles. Thus Paul in his speech to the crowd in Athens (Acts 17: 16-34) admits that his audience already has some sort of religion as evidenced by the statue they have erected, “to an unknown God.” They are the recipients of what Christian theologians call general revelation, or the idea that there is a God, or at least some kind of divine force in the world. But for salvation, special revelation is needed, according to Christian thinkers. And this special revelation would never come to someone unless he/she heard it proclaimed. Who would come on their own to the idea that God is triune? Or that their sinful behaviour separates them from God? Or that a divine savior is their only hope of achieving salvation? Islam wants to call humanity back to a monotheism that it believes has been there from the beginning. Christianity wants to build upon our innate religious nature, but then to confront it with the essential Christian specifics found in the NT, without which monotheism remains vague and ineffective. That the early church was teaching something staggeringly new can be seen in the response of the Jews, who for the most part rejected the Christian message. The gospel was radical news indeed for most, though not all, Jews. But in Islam, people are not called to “anything new, to something which is foreign or unknown to them. Islam is…already present in its fullness in man by nature. It is innate, as it were, a natural constituent of humanity.” 112 In Islam, not only is Christ not divine, but the idea of God entering the temporal order in the person of Christ is not at all acceptable from a moral or a metaphysical viewpoint. Christian apologists have often gone too far in portraying Allah as cold, distant and remote from His creation (Koran 50:16 says that Allah is closer to believers than their own jugular veins), but there is quite a gulf between the Christian concept of God’s immanence and the 112 Isma’il Al-Faruqi, “On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah,” International Review of Missions 65 (1976): 395.

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Islamic denial of this immanence. “Muslims do not see God as their father or, equivalently, themselves as the children of God. Men are servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any greater degree of intimacy with their creator.” 113 This explains why Muslims never address Allah as father; such intimacy “would compromise divine transcendence.” 114 Muslims freely admit that they do not “know” Allah beyond what is indirectly revealed in the Koran. “The Koran, unlike the Gospel, never comments on the essence of Allah. ‘Allah is wise’ or ‘Allah is loving’ may be pieces of revealed information but, in contrast to Christianity, Muslims are not entitled to claim that ‘Allah is love’ or ‘Allah is wisdom.’” 115 The Muslim concept of the unknowability of Allah produces a very different relationship between Muslims and Allah. It is, in a sense, impersonal: The Muslim view implies that to all intents and purposes God is unknowable; Christians believe that God can be known (John 1:18; 14:7; 17:3, 6). Muslims will often claim to have a knowledge of God, but they mean by that a knowledge of truth about God, not the knowledge of God as a person. They insist, against the Christian view, that God does not reveal himself to people; he only reveals his will. There is likewise no analogical relationship between God and people such as one finds in the biblical teaching that humans are created in the “Image of God.” 116

In fact, the idea of the Jewish/Christian concept of humanity being made in God’s image is so offensive to the Muslim mind that even when a passage in the Hadith (the collections of sayings by, or about, Muhammad) “had Muhammad say ‘God created Adam in his image,’ it became necessary for the orthodox to find a way of making this statement mean something different from its obvious (and biblical) meaning. So we are told, for example, that the pronoun ‘his’ refers to Adam, not to Allah—which seems to have little point except possibly that Adam was created in the beginning with the same image or form which he had after his expulsion from the Garden.” 117 In fact, such is the care in Islam to maintain an absolute, unbreachable gulf between Allah and humanity that, as stated earlier, even 113

Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, 180. Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002)), 88. 115 Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, 180-81. 116 Schlorff, “Muslim Ideology,” 175. 117 Harry B. Partin, “The Qur’an’s View of Man,” Encounter 35, no. 1 (Winter 1974): 16. 114

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the love of Allah toward humanity is ruled out, at least in any Christian understating of divine love. “Rahma, or Mercy of God, naturally finds more room in the Qur’an than His Love, for whereas Love admits of some equality and reciprocity of relationship, Rahma on the other hand connotes in its object certain inferiority.” 118 All of this results from the fundamental differences in the Christian and Islamic views of God. Because the Christian God is a trinity, He is a relational God. The members of the Trinity expressed love for one another long before the creation of the universe. That relational nature makes itself known in Christ’s incarnation. God is love from eternity not because he might potentially love, but because he does in fact love. There is love—and therefore relationship—between the Persons of the Trinity. 119 The way Allah relates to humans is necessarily different because he himself is different from the Christian God. “The relationship becomes more like that between potentate and subject than that between father and son, since man is made primarily for worship rather than relationship. There is a relationship between God and man, but it is not that of mutual love pictured in the Bible.” 120 In the Christian understanding, human sin not only alienates humans from God, it also “offends him [God] and grieves him so that he longs to restore the sinner…. In Islam, on the other hand, we have seen that God cannot be grieved or offended by anything that man does.” 121 Some claim that the Allah of Islam is more similar to the way God is portrayed in the OT. “Islam is Judaism for Arabs,” as some wags would have it. But the manner in which God is portrayed in the OT is relational. He is indeed grieved, for instance, before he decides to send the Flood, or when, time after time, His people, the Jews, go “whoring after strange gods,” as the King James Version so whimsically puts it. Both Christianity and Islam see God as punishing sin—that much is true—and that punishment will unfortunately take the form of eternal punishment, if the sinner does not repent. But in Christianity, the sinner is doomed because of “grieving the Holy Spirit, spurning the Son, [or-being at enmity with the Heavenly Father.]” However, in “Islam, sin is a violation of the law, of God-given instructions concerning religious duties and moral and social obligations.” 122 Of course, it is precisely such duties and obligations that the 118

Daud Rahbar, God of Justice; a Study in the Ethical Doctrine of the Qur’an (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960): 158. 119 Ida Glaser, “The Concept of Relationship as a Key to the Comparative Understanding of Christianity and Islam,” Themelios 11, no. 2 (January 1986): 58. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., 59. 122 Ibid.

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NT, especially St. Paul, teaches are not a requirement for salvation! Muhammad Abul Quasem writes that “Islamic teaching is that sin stands between man and God no doubt, but he is not dead in it; so no new birth of the spirit is needed; he must, however, repent. Man is not by nature in a position from which he needs to be redeemed.” 123 This difference between the two faiths is so large that the scant attention it often receives in books on the two religions is surprising. The goal for both Christian and Muslim is to attain heaven. But Christians say humans cannot do it on their own, while Muslims say precisely that we must do it on our own. If the Christian viewpoint is true, Muslims have no hope of forgiveness. If the Islamic viewpoint is correct Christians are basing all their hope on a “savior” who cannot help them, for, as the Koran states, “no one can bear another’s sins” (35:18). Christianity is salvation from above, in the form of the divine savior, Jesus. Islam is based on a person’s adherence to the laws of God, laws which are not even in the NT: Christianity is seen as lacking in what is really needed for salvation—the details of actions that will please God.” 124 So the dichotomy between Christianity’s God of love of Islam’s Allah of rules, though often taken to absurd extremes (as if the Christian scriptures do not have plenty of rules believers are to follow), seems to be firmly established. But this does not mean, as some Christian apologists have maintained, that the Christian concept of a loving God is “better.” Christian and Muslim apologetics break down here, as at so many other points, because God/Allah can exist however he chooses. Whether or not that existence pleases humans makes no difference to His objective existence. Rather, it is simply different. Daud Rahbar freely admits that in Christianity, God’s love “transcends His Justice. In Qur’anic thought Fear of God becomes the essential motiveprinciple of virtuous conduct. Why?.... The answer to why fear-motive prevails in the Qur’an is that the Qur’an’s God is, before anything else, a strict judge.” 125 To assume that the Koran’s God of Justice would ever reveal Himself as does the God of Christianity is impossible, Rahbar continues, since the interpersonal relationships for love between humanity and Allah simply do not exist. “The Qur’an never enjoins love for God. This is because God Himself loves only the strictly pious. To love God one must presuppose that God is reciprocating the sentiment. And to presuppose that is to presume that one is perfectly pious. Such presumption the Qur’an never allows.”126 This is not strictly true, as even Rahbar admits that there are a 123

Quoted in ibid., 59. Ibid., 60. 125 Rahbar, God of Justice, 179. 126 Ibid., 180. 124

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few koranic verses which talk of God loving those who do good (5:59, 2:160, and 3:29). But such verses are few and far between, and God’s love in these passages is always predicated on human obedience. Thus, a famous NT passage like John 3:16 would make no sense in an Islamic understanding of the divine. The same would apply to Paul’s statement that, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

Are Christians and Muslims “Assured” of Salvation? In Islam, “ultimate forgiveness depends on good works, [so] the Islamic religion knows nothing of assurance of salvation from Hell. The closest one comes to assurance is as a reward for Jihad 127, and even then one wonders about the level of assurance such a Muslim has.” 128 The Koran does seem to offer assurance to the veteran of Jihad, or holy war. Jihad “gives the devotee direct access to heaven should he so serve in the cause of Allah.” 129 That a Muslim cannot be sure of his status before Allah was taken by AlGhazali, the greatest of Islamic Medieval thinkers, a sort of Muslim Aquinas if you will. “The direction of da’wah [spreading of the Muslim faith] to Muslim as much as non-Muslim is indicative of the fact that, unlike Christianity, Islam is never a fait accompli. Islamicity [sic] is a process. It grows, and it is sometimes reduced. There is no time at which the Muslim may carry his title to paradise, as it were, in his pocket.” 130 This doubt may strike some Christians as unsettling to say the least, but many Muslims take precisely the opposite view. “To many Muslims the lack of assurance of salvation is not considered a weakness but a reality that can motivate continued obedience.” 131 Al-Faruqi states that “great as it may be in the eyes of Islam for any person to make the decision to enter the faith, the entry constitutes no guarantee of personal justification in the eyes of God…there is nothing the new initiate can do which would assure him or her of salvation.” 132

127

The Islamic word Jihad can mean an internal struggle with one’s own sin, or actual combat against non-believers. In the early centuries of Islam, the world usually meant military activity, though this is not always stressed today by certain Muslim apologists. 128 Iman N. Shehadeh, “Reasons for Islam’s Rejection of Biblical Christology,” Bibliotheca Sacra 161 (July-September 2004): 286. 129 Geisler, Answering Islam, 128-29. 130 Al-Faruqi, “On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah,” 393. 131 Geisler, Answering Islam, 128. 132 Quoted in Geisler, Answering Islam, 286.

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This of course stands in sharp contrast to Christianity, especially in its Protestant form. The Reformers taught that Christ saves His followers apart from good works, such is the efficacy of Christ’s work on the cross. The Protestant position is often misunderstood. Protestants do not say that good works are irrelevant. Rather, they are the proof that one has an assurance of salvation, not its cause. In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox versions of Christianity, good works take on more importance, and the process of salvation is seen as a combination of works and the believer’s faith in Christ. Just how far apart are the Protestant and Roman Catholic positions has been a matter of debate for Christians throughout the past five centuries, but even in the more “works-oriented” Catholic and Orthodox views, salvation is not possible without Jesus, and is based on his salvific work on the cross. Protestants have often accused non-Protestant Christians of relying too much on good works, while Catholics and Orthodox have characterized Protestants of a too-easy believism (“I trust Jesus, and nothing else is needed”). There is truth, of course, in these criticisms, but no Christian, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, would say that their salvation is possible without Christ’s sacrifice. Interestingly, even though Islamic orthodoxy denies a role of any savior or intercessor, in popular Islam, the idea that Muhammad can indeed intercede for the Muslim exists. Even though the Koran rejects the idea that an intercessor can help the Muslim on the Last Day, “in K2:255, it is stated that no one can intercede with God ‘except as He (God) permittith.’ Therefore, many Muslims understand that this special permission for intercession (shafa’ah) was certainly granted to Muhammad whom the Qu’ran had called a mercy to Mankind.”133 Again, this is not Muslim orthodoxy, but some Muslims do believe that even the worst sinners may achieve heaven because of Muhammad’s intercession. Of course, even Muhammad cannot help those who have “committed the worst sin of impugning the tawhid (unity) of God,” 134 so this would seem to rule out Christians, who have certainly violated the notion of Allah’s pure oneness! Still, for those interested in Christian-Muslim dialogue, the folk belief of Muhammad as intercessor may be worth pursuing. The above-mentioned attitudes naturally give way to very different Christian and Muslim understandings of what happens to humans after death. Since in Islam, there is nothing fundamentally “wrong” with the human condition, the transition from life to afterlife involves nothing very radical. “According to orthodox Muslim belief, God will recreate each 133 134

Geisler, Answering Islam, 87. Ibid., 121.

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individual’s body in its original shape from every person’s imperishable seed (ajuba all-dhanbad), and will then rejoin every soul to its body.” 135 The typical Christian understanding of life beyond the grave involves what is often called a spiritual, or a resurrection body. The model for this is, of course, Christ himself, who after his resurrection is still in a fleshy body, yet a body that has somehow changed. He now seems harder for his apostles to recognize (Luke 24:13-35), and he has the ability to enter and leave rooms at will. (John 20:19) This reflects the fact that in Christianity, salvation involves a total rescue of the sinner from his present state. “In the Bible, the resurrection of the redeemed involves a moral as well as a physical transformation; the work of salvation, or redemption, is consummated when the redeemed one receives a transformed body, free of sin and corruption, and lives forever with Christ.” In Islam, “the radical transformation described by the Bible is not anticipated; heaven for the Muslim is basically the same kind of life as this one, except that it is eternal.” 136 Both religions agree that God/Allah will bestow life eternal on the faithful. But the different natures of that life logically flow from the very different understandings of human nature and human sin that characterize the two faiths. These different understandings of God and salvation manifest themselves in other ways in the lives of Christians and Muslims. Since there is nothing fundamentally “wrong” with human nature, the stress that Christians have placed upon renouncing the world was never featured prominently in Islam (or in Judaism for that matter). That is because for Muslims, the world is not “fallen,” and there is no need to escape from it, either via the work of a Messiah or through the denial of the flesh, as happened with the Christian monastic movement, which started in the fourth century and reached its peak in the Middle Ages, when Europe was dotted with thousands of monastic houses for both men and women. The idea of the two kingdoms, God’s and man’s, first brought to prominence by St Augustine, then later by the Reformer Martin Luther, is noticeably absent from Islam. Islam “does not, therefore, call man to a phantasmagorical second or other kingdom which is an alternative to this one…. His joys and pleasure are all his to enjoy, his life to will and his will to exercise, since the content of the divine will is not ‘not-of-this world’ but ‘of it.’ World denial and life abnegation, asceticism and monasticism, isolation and individualism, subjectivism, and relativism are not virtues of Islam but dalal (misguidance).” 137 Of course, this is a bit of an overstatement on the 135

Ibid., 117. Schlorff, “Theological and Apologetical Dimensions,”365. 137 Al-Faruqi, “On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah,” 399. 136

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author’s part. Islam forbids plenty of worldly pleasures, like the consumption of pork and alcohol. And Muslims are permitted no food from sunup to sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. Still, their quotation is accurate in terms of its denial of the two kingdoms theology that is often found in Christianity. Thus the many theocratic states that we find in Islamic countries. Westerners often attribute this to a backwardness on Islam’s part, but in fact, theocracy, with sharia law at its core, is how Islamic countries are supposed to function. The concept of separation of church and state is a Western Christian idea, and even that concept did not come along until fairly recently in Western history. Islam “produces a particular outlook on life. Islam also provides a complete way of life; a system with explicit criteria for right and wrong and a set of clear instructions as to how to regulate major institutions of human society” [found in the Koran of course, but especially in the hadith, the stories about Muhammad, and the saying attributed to him]. 138

Ethics in the Two Religions Much of Islamic ethics springs from the idea, examined above, that Islam rejects any notion of chosen status, either for Jews or Christians. In fact, Al-Faruqi says the concept of God maintaining a covenant with people who violated that covenant is “offensive to moral sense.”139 In terms of the closeness of the Jews, Al-Faruqi goes so far as to call it the “racialization of election.” 140 He is correct, of course. The Jewish covenant is a matter of racial/ethnic election, although this election broadens beyond race when Christianity picks up the concept of believers being chosen in Christ. Still, for Islam, any kind of chosen status is immoral, for those Allah doles out only what each individual deserves, “only what his works and deeds earn for him on an absolute scale of moral justice.” 141 Christianity, Al-Faruqi claims, with its insistence that Christ has died to atone for sin, can only lead to moral laxity.” [H]aving denied it [sin] in the assertion that universal salvation is a fait accompli, the Christian ipso facto has forfeited his moral enthusiasm and laid wide open the gated of moral complacency.” 142 Thus when Christian apologists claim that Islam is a religion of works, or worksrighteousness, the Muslim is not offended, for the Muslim believes that only 138

Ibid., 401. Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi, “A Comparison of the Islamic and Christian Approaches to Hebrew Scripture,” Journal of Bible and Religion 31, no. 4 (1963): 287. 140 Ibid., 288. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., 290. 139

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works can earn Allah’s favor. Christians, of course, respond that as sinners, we can never do enough good deeds to earn that favor. The two faiths will never agree on this point, as they begin from radically different starting points about what human nature is like, and what it is, or is not, capable of. In Islam, it is not just a matter of good works, but rather the integration of Islamic faith and teachings with every aspect of life. Because the Muslim is not encumbered by original sin, he or she is expected to do much more than the Christian. In Islam, God created man for the specific purpose of carrying out a trust in this world, a trust so great that the angels, to whom it was first offered, turned away in terror. This trust is the perfecting of an imperfect world deliberately created imperfect so that in the process of a human perfecting it, ethical values would be realized which otherwise (i.e., in a necessary perfectible or created-perfect world) would be ruled out ex hypothesi. 143

Thus, the importance of not only good works in Islam, but the implementation of sharia law to govern all aspects of life. Just as the Koran is an eternal book, which existed with Allah before it was revealed to Muhammad, so sharia law (derived from the Koran and the Hadith literature), has an eternal nature to it. While certain moderate Muslims are willing to admit that some Muslim teachings may be cultural and temporally conditioned, this is not the traditional view. “[I]n the sharia, the Law of God,…the relationship between the external and the historical, the sacred and the profane, becomes most practical for Muslims. In the Islamic view, the Law exists in the realm of the eternal and the unchanging but is to be applied within the vicissitudes of history. It provides a God-given pattern for all human existence which, at least in theory, does not vary to accommodate the local needs of specific times and places.” 144 Because the law of Allah has such a permanence to it, the Koran has little room for nuance when it comes to sin. Thus Fred Donner writes: [t]he characters that populate the Qur’an’s narrations are bleached out, because its focus on morality is so intense…. More often than not, it gives us ‘ideal types’ with little suggestion that a single personality might be a mixture of good and evil impulses in constant tension. Moreover, it conveys no sense that the tension itself, being uniquely human, is of special interest. That is, there is little appreciation of the human moral struggle in its own right; there is only concern for its outcome. Hence one finds in the Qur’an no sympathy for the sinner as someone succumbing…to all-too-human 143

Ibid., 292. Newell S. Booth, Jr. “The Historical and the Non-Historical in Islam,” The Muslim World 60, no. 2 (April 1970): 109-22. 144

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impulses in the face of overwhelming temptation, despite the valiant efforts to resist temptation. Rather, the Qur’an portrays humanity in a strictly polarized way. 145 This of course is quite the opposite of the way humanity is portrayed in the Bible, with the Jews constantly backsliding on the Old Testament, and even the apostle Peter betraying Christ. This lack of nuance regarding sin is also made manifest in the form of Muslim prayer. Whereas Christians certainly have formal prayers, they often see prayer as a time to commune with Christ, almost as if he is a trusted friend or confidant. But in Islam, prayer is much more formalized, even outside of the “official” prayer area, the mosque. “The prayer posture is another important part of the worshipper’s focus in prayer; her proscribed prostration says that she approaches God in the manner of a slave to her master, the formality of prayers’ various positions representing the imperative distance between her and the deity.” 146 This is not to say that Muslim prayers do not provide comfort to those who perform them. Praying like this several times daily “doubtless helps Muslim believers prepare to meet a largely unknowable God amid the terrors of the Last Day and to do so with a remarkable sense of calm and serenity.” 147 Yet prayer in Judaism and Christianity is very different. “The psalmists are not opposed to ritual formations, but unlike salat [Muslim prayer] their prayers are always centred in real communication with God. The psalmists also meant their prayers to be sung. Indeed, they designed to partake of the full range of instrumental and choral music…which would have been unacceptable to the qur’anic author.” And unlike the formulaic, if heartfelt, Muslim prayers, the Psalms “run the full range of the emotional spectrum— from the depths of despair to the heights of joy.” 148 When we turn to the NT, “Jesus’ pattern prayer evinces the same sort of intimacy when it teaches believers to come to God as children to their heavenly Father.” 149 It is not so much a question of which prayer is “better,” the Islamic type or the Judeo-Christian type. Rather, the forms of prayer are so radically different because the Qur’anic and Biblical views of God are so radically different. Theological differences always manifest themselves in everyday life. Another example of theology shaping behaviour is the way in which the Christian and Muslim communities relate to the outside world. The “Qur’an 145

Quoted in Mark Robert Anderson, The Qur’an in Context: A Christian Exploration (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016), 122-23. 146 Ibid., 167. 147 Ibid., 170. 148 Ibid., 171. 149 Ibid.

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never actually commands love of neighbor. The closest it comes to doing so is to give what we may take as applications of the Golden Rule (Q2:267; 24:22; 83:1-4; cf. Q4:8-9). Neither does it ever command love of one’s enemies. Indeed, why would God require such love in his subjects when the Qur’an never once credits him [Allah] with loving his enemies?” 150 Of course, Christendom has a pretty poor record of loving its enemies as well, but this is in spite of the NT’s teachings, not because of it. And to be fair, when the Hadith literature is examined, a case can certainly be made that Muslims are indeed to love their non-Muslim neighbours. This was stated in “A Common Word Between Us and You,” which appeared as an open letter in the New York Times in 2007, the letter endorsed by some onehundred-thirty-eight Muslim scholars. However, a case can also be made that “that meaning [that the Koran teaches love of God and love of neighbor is found only by Christianizing qur’anic references to love. For centuries Sufis have been doing this, reading the Qur’an very selectively through the lens of profoundly Christianizing [sic] hadith.” 151 The levels of how much love Muslims and Christians show for each other, not to mention the nonbeliever, can of course be debated. And certainly, the NT, like the Koran, puts an emphasis on loving those within the chosen community (in Matthew 15:24, Christ says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” when confronted by a non-Jewish woman seeking help for her demonpossessed daughter). Still, the Islamic concept of the non-Muslim world as the Dar al-harb (house of war) and the Dar al-Islam (those lands where Islam rules) has no equivalent in Christian thought. Critical Muslim scholar Naseer Dashti says these two “houses,” are in the Islamic understating, in “perpetual confrontation until the final victory over the infidels.” 152 As for the intertwining of religion and politics, that has always been taken for granted in Islam, especially given the founder’s role not only as a military leader but as the political leader of Medina, the town he fled to after being harassed out of his hometown of Mecca. “A true Muslim cannot think of any modification or reform in Qur’an and Sunna [the Hadith]. Any deviation from actual Islamic tenets or any form of carelessness toward the propagation of Islam (jihad) or any tolerance toward unbelievers is tantamount to deviating from true Islam.” 153 For several centuries, religion and politics in Christian Europe were certainly deeply connected, but not because of anything Jesus taught or did. His teaching of rendering unto God 150

Ibid., 181. Ibid., 180.;Al-Faruqi, “On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah,” 399. 152 Naseer Dashti, “Is There a Non-Radical Islam?” in What is Moderate Islam? Ed. Richard L Benkin (Latham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 73. 153 Ibid., 74. 151

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what is God’s and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s seems to pretty clearly rule out the merger of church and state that eventually happened, beginning with the emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Of course, most Muslims are not violent, and usually live in peace with non-Muslims. But, as Umar Daud Khattak, who was raised in a madrasa of Afghanistan writes, “[t]he collective Muslim mentality is violent, but individually Muslims have differing mentalities…. A typical South Asian Muslim man may not hate his best Hindu friend or neighbor but still when something happens, support the collective behaviour of Muslims against the Hindus, or without feeling any contradiction support the elimination of Hindus in Kashmir or Bangladesh.” 154 To one who knows his Christian history, this sounds very much like the Christian mindset toward Jews in the Middle Ages. The individual Christian may have been content to let his Jewish neighbor live in peace, but once local Jews were accused of some sort of (usually false) perfidy, the Christian was often willing to engage in mob violence. Christianity, several centuries older than Islam, has largely grown out of such behaviour, and hopefully Islam will, too. Christianity appeals to those who feel the depth of their sin, and believe that they are powerless to conquer it, and that divine intervention in the form of Christ-as-Savior is needed. Islam appeals to those who believe that a person should try his or her best, and that Allah will reward that person’s adherence to the commands of the Koran. There is no point in criticizing the one view over the other, as neither can be shown to be true beyond a doubt; religious faith is not science, of course, subject to proofs and disproofs. Still, the matter of how one attains the Christian heaven or the Muslim paradise is of the utmost eternal importance, and the fact that the two faiths have contradictory understandings of the matter cannot be glossed over. Different Gods act differently. If the same God were behind both the Christian and the Islamic understanding of salvation, then it is hard to explain why He would give contradictory revelations on such a matter of eternal significance. But the contradiction between the faiths understanding salvation are not only a matter of theology. They also involve historicity, specifically, the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus, to which we will turn in the next chapter.

154 Umar Daud Khattak, “Moderate Islam is an Illusion—at Least for Now,” in What is Moderate Islam? 147.

CHAPTER 5 WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED?155

Before delving into the issue of Christ’s crucifixion as explained by the New Testament and the Koran, a summary of the Islamic understanding of Jesus is helpful. Al-Faruqi writes: While Christianity regards God as man’s fellow, a person so moved by man’s failure that He goes to length of sacrifice for his redemption, Islam regards God primarily as the Just Being whose absolute justice—with all the reward and doom for man that it enjoins—is not only sufficient mercy, but the only mercy coherent with divine nature. Whereas the God of Christianity acts in man’s salvation, the God of Islam commands him to do that which brings that salvation about. Thirdly, while Christianity regards Jesus as the second person of a triune God, Islam regards him as God’s human prophet and messenger. Fourthly, while Christianity regards spacetime and history as hopelessly incapable embodying God’s kingdom, Islam regards God’s kingdom as truly realizable—indeed as meaningful at all— only within the contexts of space-time history. Fifthly, while Christianity regards the Church as the body of Christ endowed with ontic significance for ever and ever, Islam regards the community of faith as an instrument mobilized for the realization of the divined pattern in the world, an instrument whose total value is dependent upon its fulfilment or otherwise of that task. 156

Despite all this, many non-Muslims are often surprised to find out how much the Koran has to say about Jesus. He is presented as a great prophet, second only to Muhammad himself. But, as explained in the previous chapter, any concept of shared divinity between God and Jesus is a priori ruled out. The Koran recounts certain miracles of Jesus that are familiar to New Testament readers, and others that are not found in the Christian 155 This chapter originally appeared as “The Koran’s Denial of Christ’s Crucifixion: A Critique,” in Evangelical Review of Theology 40, no. 1 (2016). It has been modified for inclusion in this book. 156 Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi, “Islam and Christianity: Diatribe or Dialogue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 5 (1968): 59.

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scriptures. Christ’s virgin birth is affirmed in K3:45-46, and in K3:49 he is said to cure leprosy and blindness. He even performs a few miracles that are not in the New Testament, such as speaking from his cradle while still an infant, claiming to be Allah’s servant. Then, in K3:49 he breathes life into birds made of clay. This same story of the clay birds is also found in the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas, written in the second century AD. Christian apologists often use this incident to charge that the Koran simply borrowed the story from a heretical source, and that the story is not divine revelation at all. The Muslim response is usually that the story is true, and that there is nothing unseemly about two sources recounting the same event. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas also describes the boy Jesus killing a child who irritated him. Needless to say, neither the New Testament nor the Koran records this brutal deed! Cyril Glasse writes “he performed various symbolic miracles: he raised the dead, brought the revealed book of the gospel (Injil), and called down as a sign from heaven at table laden with sustenance, (5:112-114), which symbolizes the communion host of Christianity.” 157 With such wonderworking abilities, it may strike the Christian that the Koran is indeed claiming that Jesus was more than a man. After all, in Christianity, Christ’s miracles are signs that he is the Messiah, the Divine Son, savior of His people. Yet for Islam, Jesus’s miracles are nothing more than Allah giving him power to perform the extraordinary. They in no way elevate him to divinity, nor do the miracles detract from the absolute sovereignty of Allah. The same standard is applied to Muhammad. When Muhammad is criticized by some for not being a wonder-worker, the Koran’s reply is that he has brought to his fellow Arabs, via divine revelation, the greatest miracle of all, the Muslim holy book, different from all other books and impossible to duplicate (K2:23-24, 10:38). Yet Islam has always denied that Muhammad partakes of divinity with Allah. Regarding Christ’s apparently supernatural status in the Koran, Glasse writes, [i]t would perhaps seem therefore that Jesus as he is viewed in Islam, and despite the extraordinary attributes credited to him by the Koran, would actually have a role and a nature that could be interpreted into the Islamic universe only with great difficulty. Such, however, is not the case, because Christianity, like Judaism, is specifically mentioned as a revealed religion and Islamic legislation gives it a protected status. It is the nature of Jesus as a Prophet among the other Prophets of the Old Testament which is decisive for Muslims, and the disturbing elements of Christianity as it actually exists are simply set aside, placed outside of Islam, and in practice pose no great 157 Cyril Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 239.

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enigma, being seen as a kind of archaic survival which God in the Koran has chosen to tolerate. 158

So, ironically, the very miracles that provide authentication to Christ’s claims in the New Testament are seen as not very important to Muslims, even though they are recorded in Islam’s holy book. But Islam does even more to alter the image of Christ familiar from the pages of the NT. There, Christ is, if anything, portrayed as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, the one who has come to save Israel (and the world) from sin. But, just as we saw in chapter two how the Koran downplays the importance of the Jews in God’s redemptive history, so the same applies to Jesus. Kenneth Cragg, one of the originators of the Christian-Muslim dialogue, has stated that Jesus in Islam is only viewed as a prophet sent to Israel; his universal significance is rejected, for only Muhammad can claim to be the prophet to the entire world. Muhammad is the prophet for all times, while Christ is a temporal, Jewish prophet, one whose alleged worldwide mission can only be blamed on the “early Gentile Church.” 159 In fact, a case can be made that the Koran really does not accord Jesus even as much respect as some Muslims and Christians think. Aside from its obvious rejection of Jesus as Son of God and Sin-Forgiver. The Koran devotes fewer than twenty-five verses to his adult ministry, teachings and death, on contrast to many times more that number to Moses. In fact, it says so little about Jesus’ adult ministry that Muslims get a picture of who he is only by generously supplementing it with data from the hadith. Further, the only qur’anic stories highlighting Jesus’ greatness are from his childhood, and these undercut the honor they appear to give him by making him look strange, freakish even. The Qur’an includes just two narratives from Jesus’s adult ministry and tells both in a way that makes Jesus appear weak in the presence of his disciples, who effectively lead their leader (Q 3:49-53; 5:111-15). 160

But there is one story about Jesus that the New Testament mentions time and time again, and which the Koran denies to have happened, namely, his crucifixion. It is well known among scholars of Christianity and Islam that the holy books of each religion portray the crucifixion of Jesus quite differently. In the New Testament, of course, Christ dies on a Roman cross for the sins of 158

Ibid., 240. Quoted in Norman L. Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002), 66. 160 Mark Robert Anderson, The Qur’an in Context: A Christian Exploration (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 319. 159

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the faithful, and is resurrected. In the Koran, however, we are told that Christ was not crucified at all, but rather someone who looked like him was executed in his stead. In this chapter, I want to do four things. One, to show that the New Testament account is preferable to the koranic account on purely historical grounds. (I say preferable, since neither account can be shown to be true beyond all doubt. Such “proof” exists only in the realms of mathematics and formal logic.) Two, to provide Muslim explanations of what happened at the crucifixion, especially regarding the so-called “substitution theory.” Three, to show that as Muslim scholars seek to reinterpret the New Testament narrative of the crucifixion they seek refuge in a supra-historical realm which is problematic when dealing with an historical event like the crucifixion. The disagreement over what happened to Jesus is of vital importance. If Christ was not crucified, then Christianity is without its historical and theological basis. The religion, is, put simply, false. If he was indeed crucified, then Islam faces historical and theological problems of its own. This is especially so since Muslims view their scriptures and their religion as superseding and correcting the mistakes of the earlier, mistake-riddled Christian revelation. Of course, even if Jesus was crucified, this does not mean that his resurrection necessarily followed. The story of Christ’s death is well known, and is described in detail by the four gospel writers, and is referred to in various other places in the NT. My goal here is not to address the topic of Christ’s resurrection, as this has been done before, and in excellent manner by numerous apologists from C.S. Lewis to John Warwick Montgomery to N.T.Wright, Gary Habermas, and William Lane Craig. The Islamic denial of Christ’s crucifixion is based on this passage from the Koran which reads as follows, with Jews exclaiming, in K4:157-158: [W]e have surely killed the Christ, Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of God. They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; rather it was made only to appear so to them. And those who have differed concerning him are in doubt regarding him; they have no knowledge of him except the following of conjecture. They did not kill him with certainty. Rather, God took him up to Himself, for God is mighty and wise.

How and when Christ did eventually die, is “not able to be clearly judged from the text of the Koran….[references to Christ’s ultimate fate] are acutely scanty and, moreover, ambiguous.” 161

161 Christine Schirrmacher, The Islamic View of Major Christian Teachings (Bonn, Germany: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2008), 23.

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The Koran’s teachings on the crucifixion “have become the crux interpretum, the burden and pain of exegetes.” 162 Some Christian theologians have not dealt realistically with the fact that the Bible and the Koran contradict each other on this matter. Martin Bauschke writes that “Christians and Muslims are agreed that however Jesus may have died and whatever happened to him after his death—this death did not and does not have the last word about his life and activity on behalf of God. Rather, this death was the way through, the transition, the way back into the presence and nearness of the one who sent him.” 163 Such a statement is troublesome because, apparently in the name of preserving religious harmony between the two faiths, it claims there is an “agreement” between Christians and Muslims where no such agreement exists. What Christian says it does not matter how Jesus died? And what Christian or Muslim holds that it does not matter what “happened to him after his death?”

I. Confirmation of the Crucifixion by Non-Biblical Sources A brief word needs to be said regarding the confirmation of the event by extra-biblical sources. It is a general rule of historical investigation that an event is more likely to have actually happened if it is multiply attested, that is, if the event is described by more than one source. Tacitus (he lived from approximately 56-117 AD), a Roman historian and senator, confirmed the historicity of Christ’s crucifixion: “Christus, from whom the name [Christians] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hand of the procurator Pontius Pilate.” 164 The first-century Jewish historian Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, also confirms that Christ was executed on the cross by Pilate. 165 A somewhat later source (though still early enough to be of at least some historical value) comes from 162 Hans Kung, Islam: Past, Present, and Future (London: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 498. 163 Quoted in ibid, 499. 164 Quoted in Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 2. 165 Scholars believe the passage in question by Josephus was later amended by Christian editors to make it sound as if Josephus believed Christ was the messiah, and that he had conquered death through resurrection. It is unlikely that Josephus, a non-Christian, would have portrayed Christ as the resurrected Jewish messiah, but most scholars believe he did indeed confirm the basic fact of the crucifixion of Jesus. For more on this, see Norman L. Geisler, “Flavius Josephus” in Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 253-54.

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Lucian of Samosata, a second-century Greek writer who confirms the crucifixion in a mocking description of the Christians: “[t]he Christians, you know, worship a man to this day—the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account.” 166 Finally, the Tannaitic Period of the Talmud, which ranges from 70-200 AD, references the crucifixion in Sanhedrin 43a: “On the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged.” 167 It is important to note that with the Talmudic evidence, “[i]t would be expected that the most reliable information from the Talmud would come from the earliest period of compilation—70 to 200 A.D., known as the Tannaitic period.” 168 So, there is at least a good chance that what is recorded about Christ’s death here is contemporaneous, or at least nearly contemporaneous with the event. That the Talmudic position on Christ’s death was still Jewish orthodoxy centuries later can be shown. In his debates with Jewish and Christian audiences, Petrus Alfonsi (1062-1110), a Jewish scholar who converted to Christianity, assumes that the one thing Christians and Jews can agree on is that Jesus died on a Roman cross. “Thus, Jews, Romans, and early Christians all affirmed that Jesus really died, differing only about whether he was raised from the dead.” 169 All the evidence listed above is far more decisive, from a purely historical perspective, than the Koran’s account of Christ’s death, which was written over 500 years after the fact. An analogy would be the life of Buddha. The earliest written records of his life date to 500 years after his death, and this huge amount of intervening time led to these writings being “embellished with fanciful details, which makes it difficult to separate fact from legend.” 170 Thus, even NT scholar John Dominic Crossan, the farthest thing from a biblical fundamentalist, can say that Christ’s death “under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical ever can be.” 171 This despite the fact that Crossan is well-known for doubting other portions of the New Testament’s accounts of Christ’s life. Even JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, published an article explaining that, based 166

Norman L. Geisler, “Jesus, Non-Christian Sources” in Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999),383. 167 Ibid. 168 www.garyhabrmas.com/books/historicaljesus/historicaljesus.htm. 169 Steven J. McMichael, “The Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus in Medieval Christian Anti-Muslim Religious Polemics,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 21, no. 2 (2010): 160. 170 Damien Keown, Buddhism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17. 171 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 5.

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on descriptions of Christ’s suffering in the gospels, his death is not in question. “Modern medical interpretation of the historical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead when taken down from the cross.” 172 Also, the koranic denial of Christ’s death is not multiply attested; there are no other sources that corroborate what the Islamic holy book says on this matter. This does not automatically mean the Koran is in error. One major function of the koranic revelation, Muslims claim, is to correct spurious information in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. There is, however, the version of the crucifixion offered by the second-century Christian gnostic Basilides. His position was that Christ “did not suffer, for at the crucifixion Christ and Simon of Cyrene (mentioned at Mark 15:21 and par) in effect traded places, each being transformed, so that Simon was crucified while Christ stood by laughing at the event. After the crucifixion had taken place, Christ ascended back to the father, knowing from when he had come.” 173 But there are at least two problems here. One, Christ is presented in a quite callous manner, laughing over the death of an innocent man. Surely Muslims, who have great respect for Christ as a prophet, would find this portrayal quite unappealing. Indeed, that an innocent man should suffer for another is unacceptable in Islam, a religion that holds each person accountable for his or her own sins, and denies the idea of substitutionary suffering. And not only that. A Muslim cannot accept Basilides’s general view of Jesus because of Basilides’s docetism (from the Greek word meaning “to seem” or “to appear”). Basilides “was convinced that Jesus did not get involved in the material realm. Since matter is evil, the good Jesus could not have had a real physical body.” 174 This is why Basilides denies the crucifixion; what is non-material cannot suffer a material death. Thus there is no corroboration here for the koranic denial of the crucifixion, 172

William D. Edwards, et al., “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ” JAMA 225 (March 1986): 1455. This article proved controversial, not because the analysis of Christ’s sufferings and death was inaccurate, but because of some thought that the medical doctors of the journal were taking the passion narratives too literally and falling into the age-old trap of blaming the Jews, en masse, for the death of Jesus. Whether or not the physicians who wrote the article are qualified to assess the extent of Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death is irrelevant for my purposes here, as I am only interested in their verdict that, from a modern medical perspective, Jesus did indeed die upon the cross. Their likely lack of knowledge of the intricacies of NT scholarship does not hinder their ability to interpret the physical realty of Christ’s death. 173 The Earliest Cristian Heretics, ed. Arland J. Hultgren and Steven A. Haggmark (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996), 60. 174 William E. Phipps, Muhammad and Jesus (New York: Continuum, 1996), 203.

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unless the Muslim wishes to accept all of the anti-Islamic theology that Basilides brings to his account of Christ’s avoidance of the cross. 175

II. The Spurious “Gospel of Barnabas” It was once commonplace for Muslim apologists to claim that the noncanonical “Gospel of Barnabas” (first published in 1907) could be used to corroborate the Koran’s teaching on the crucifixion. But today, all Christian scholars and most Muslim ones admit that Barnabas was written sometime in the Middle Ages, and is therefore useless as a source for the life of Christ. Still, as recent as the late 20th century, a prominent Muslim scholar could write that: The Gospel of Barnabas has provided modern commentators not only with a supposed first-hand report in support of the substitutionist theory, but also with what appears as a plausible justification. Thus we have come full circle back to the earliest interpretation of the words shubbiha lahum as meaning "another took his likeness and was substituted for him." Modern Muslim thinkers have been aware of the claim that Barnabas is a late document. Some have therefore used it only as partial evidence, while others have argued that it is the true Gospel in full or in part, which Christians had hidden for many centuries until it was found in their most sacred institution, the Vatican Library. The question of the historicity of the event of the Cross remains open, nonetheless, and a more up-to-date study of the Gospel of Barnabas would help greatly in moving Christian-Muslim dialogue from scriptural polemics to the more important task of understanding and appreciating the significance of Christ for the two religious traditions. 176

That the “Gospel of Barnabas” should arouse great interest among Muslim scholars is not surprising, since it quotes Jesus not only as denying his death on the cross, but also predicting the coming of Allah’s final messenger. Christ says that men will be deceived about the manner of his death, as well as his alleged divinity, “until the advent of Mohammed, the 175 Although, it must be admitted that certain stories about Jesus do seem, to nonMuslims at least, to have been taken from docetic Christian sources. “The Quran, in spite of its determination to deny that Jesus was a deity, accepts some of the tales that were invented to prove the opposite. The stories of baby Jesus performing miracles” are one example, according to Phipps (204). But this is quite different from taking the position of Basilides that Jesus was non-material, for the Koran goes to great lengths to stress that Christ was indeed fully human, and only human. 176 Mahmoud M. Ayoub, “Towards an Islamic Christology,” Muslim World 70, no. 2 (April 1980): 113.

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Messenger of God, who, when he shall come, shall reveal this deception to those who believe in God’s law.” 177 Barnabas is full of other problems if used to corroborate the koranic denial of the cross. Its anachronisms are many, one being that it seems to reflect the cultural life of fourteenth-century Italy rather than first-century Israel. Barnabas also suggests that the forty-day Lenten fast was practiced in the first century, when it fact it did not start until the seventh century AD. 178 Most damming of all, though, is that the author of Barnabas displays a thorough knowledge of the Latin version of the Bible, which, of course, proves that Barnabas is hundreds of years removed from the first century AD. 179 Even esteemed Muslim scholar Cyril Glasse says of Barnabas, “there is no question that it is a medieval forgery.” 180

III. Muslim Explanations as to Who Died on the Cross The Koran’s lack of clarity led one 19th-century Muslim sect in India, the Ahmadiyya, to postulate that Christ was indeed crucified, but that he “recovered from his crucifixion wounds and moved to Kashmir. After teaching there successfully for several generations, he died at the age of 120 and was buried at Srinagar. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the sect’s founder, claimed that he found Jesus’ tomb there and that he, Ahmad, was a reincarnation of Jesus.” 181 Another example of a rather fanciful attempt to avoid the belief that Jesus died on the cross comes from the late 19th-century Muslim scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan: “[c]rucifixion itself does not cause the death of a man, because only the palms of his hands, or the palms of his hands and feet are pierced …. After three or four hours Christ was taken down from the cross, and it is certain that at that moment he was still alive. Then the disciples concealed him in a very secret place, out of fear of the enmity of the Jews.” 182 Of course, Khan’s theory has a parallel in outdated European biblical scholarship, and was sometimes referred to as the “swoon theory.” Certain biblical scholars of the eighteenth century advocated this view, and so the 177 Quoted from The Mission and Death of Jesus in Islam and Christianity, by A.H. Mathias (New York: Orbis Books, 2008), 82. 178 Ayoub, “Towards an Islamic Christology,” 87, 88. 179 Ibid., 81. 180 Cyril Glasse, Encyclopedia of Islam (Walnut Creek, CA: Atamira Press, 2002), 78. 181 Phipps, Muhammad and Jesus, 218. 182 Quoted in Todd Lawson, The Crucifixion and the Qur’an (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2009), 115.

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idea that Christ was crucified but did not actually die on the cross “is something advocated in European rationalism prior to its discussion in Muslim apologetic literature.” 183 However, I know of no major NT scholar who holds to this position today. I am not aware of any mainstream Muslim scholars who accept it, either. There are plenty of Western scholars who doubt the truth of the resurrection, but Christ’s death on the cross is not doubted by credentialed biblical scholars. This swoon theory is, of course, an old canard, and the idea that the disciples stole and hid Christ’s body has been refuted by various Christian apologists. As for the assertion that Christ was not on the cross long enough to die, it must be remembered that Christ was beaten and flogged before being crucified, and that the loss of blood and related trauma caused by the especially savage Roman method of flogging is “the best explanation of his relatively speedy death.” 184 Another common Muslim objection to Christ’s crucifixion, and much more common than the above-referenced swoon theory is that Allah would not allow so great a prophet as Jesus to suffer such an ignominious fate at the hands of sinful men. Phipps writes, “[a] reason given for the rejection of Jesus’ crucifixion comes from the report of two Gospels that, after he was nailed to a cross, he cried, ‘My God, why have You forsaken me?’ Phipps continues, ‘This is a blatant declaration of disbelief,’ writes M.T. Al-Hilali; he claims that a true believer could not utter these words. The Koran affirms that Jesus was continuously a true prophet, so an account displaying his loss of faith cannot be accepted.” 185 But from a Muslim point of view, such sentiments seem problematic to say the least. First, Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross need not be taken as a loss of faith at all. Had he lost his faith, he would not have bothered crying out to a God in whom he no longer believed. Second, even if the cry of dereliction indicates spiritual weakness in Jesus, this is not problematic for Muslims, for the Koran does not teach that any of the prophets were perfect. Muslims often take Muhammad to be in some sense the “ideal” man of Allah, but the Koran never portrays him as perfect or sinless in a Christ-like way. In fact, when Muhammad first began to receive the koranic revelations from the angel Gabriel, he doubted his prophetic calling, and actually thought that he might be falling prey to satanic trickery: “Muslim tradition reports that Muhammad reacted to his ‘call’ in much the same way as the Hebrew prophets. He was both frightened and reluctant. Frightened by the unknown—for surely he did not expect such an

183

Schirrmacher, The Islamic View of Major Christian Teachings, 37. Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 32. 185 Phipps, Muhammad and Jesus, 222. 184

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experience. Reluctant, at first, because he feared he was possessed and that others would dismiss his claims as inspired by spirits, or jinns.” 186 But if Muhammad, Islam’s greatest prophet, had such misgivings about himself, how can Muslims cite Christ’s doubt on the cross as proof that he was not crucified? Perfect knowledge or faith is not a prerequisite for prophethood in either the Bible or in the Koran. In fact, it is precisely the doubt expressed by both Jesus and Muhammad that makes them credible figures. Had they been mythological constructs, we probably would not have such seemingly “negative” information about them. New Testament scholars refer to this as the “criterion of embarrassment.” This means that any passage in the gospels that seems to “damage” the image of Jesus is necessarily authentic, since the New Testament writers would not have invented stories or put words into Christ’s mouth that seem to play against the picture they are trying to present of him as Lord and savior. An example from the NT would Mark 6:4-6, where Jesus is said not to be able to perform miracles in unbelieving Nazareth. An example from the Koran is that a new koranic revelation had to be given by Allah to allow for Muhammad’s social faux pas of marrying a woman whom his adopted son had recently divorced. 187

IV. The Question of Someone Being Made to Look Like Jesus Muslim exegetes throughout the ages have been troubled by the idea of Christ switching places on the cross with another man: Important to most of the substitutionist interpretations is the idea that whoever bore the likeness of Jesus, and consequently his suffering and death, did so voluntarily. It must have been felt by hadith transmitters and commentators that for God to cause an innocent man to die unjustly to save another would be divine wrongdoing (culm), which cannot be predicated of God. Thus the theory which eventually gained most popularity was that one of the disciples voluntarily accepted death as a ransom for his master. 188

186 John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. It was only after his first wife, Khadijah, convinced him that he was not possessed and that he was a recipient of divine revelation, that Muhammad fully embraced his divine calling. 187 Thomas W. Lippman, Understanding Islam (New York: Meridian, 1995), 54. 188 Ayoub, “Towards an Islamic Christology,” 97. Hadith refers to the collected sayings of Muhammad, compiled by those who knew him well (often called his

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But in the koranic passage that describes this, we are not given any indication that human trickery was involved, so we are left to assume that it was Allah who made another man take on the semblance of Jesus. On the face of it, there is nothing objectionable here in terms of Allah’s power to do such a thing; he is omnipotent in both Muslim and Christian understandings of his nature. Yet the question must be pressed, why did Allah do such a thing? And it had to be his doing, for what other power could have caused another man to take on Jesus’s appearance? The only other option would be that this was a satanic deception, but the Koran gives no indication of this and, given the high regard in which the Koran holds Jesus, the Muslim holy book would not portray Jesus as a plaything in the hands of a wily devil. That all of this raises a serious problem for Muslims is partially acknowledged by Cyril Glasse when he writes, “the crucifixion as a pointless charade can hardly be met to God’s purpose, and two thousand years have not shown what God could have meant by such sleight of hand. Nor does the Koran warrant such a view.” 189 This, of course, is precisely my point; there is no reason Allah should have caused such a deception to happen. Yet this is precisely what Glasse claims: “[i]t is clear from the Koran that God willed the people to see what they saw …. The Koran does say that the crucifixion of Jesus is what the people saw, and does not go into the reasons why God let the event take place and let the people see what they saw.” 190 This point must be stressed. Allah is the cause of the confusion here, not Satan, not even the jinn (supernatural creatures in Islamic thought, whose essence is fire, and from which we get our English word “genie”). Thus for Glasse, the mistaken interpretation of the crucifixion is no mere human mistake, but part of Allah’s plan, although the reasons behind his plan are inscrutable, according to Glasse. Of course, the inscrutable nature of Allah finds many parallels in both the Old and New Testaments. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim that they are sometimes baffled by their God’s behavior.

V. The Islamic Retreat into “Supra-History” The nineteenth-century German theologian Martin Kähler, when addressing the historicity of the resurrection, took the position that there was a Companions). Throughout Islamic history, the Hadith literature has been almost as important as the Koran, especially in matters regarding Islamic law. 189 Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, 239. 190 Ibid.,78.

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“distinction between ‘ordinary history’ (Historie) and ‘supra-history’ (Geschichte).” Rudolf Bultmann, a prominent German NT scholar, responded to this by saying, “why regard such events as historical at all?” 191 But this kind of Kähler-like theological sleight of hand may not be a problem for Islam. For instance, Glasse writes that “the crucifixion of Jesus does not play a role in the Islamic perspective any more than does his superhuman origin, for salvation in Islam results from the recognition of the Absoluteness of God and not from a sacrificial mystery.” 192 If I read Glasse correctly, the issue of historical accuracy is secondary, since Christ’s death, whether it happened or not, plays no role in salvation for the Muslim: Western writers who, for reasons of the defense of Christianity and Judaism, or for reasons of their disbelief (kufr) in any Divine Revelation, have been want to disparage the Koran as regards factual, historical accuracy [emphasis mine], or have spoken of Muhammad’s confused knowledge of history or of his imperfect or deficient knowledge of Judaism are, in every respect, wide of the mark. To begin with, such observations presume the Prophet’s participation in the composition of the Koran, which is in no way admissible. 193

Again, here is Glasse: “In Islam it is the absolute, or higher, that takes precedence in the Koran over the appearances [i.e., what appears to be the historical truth of Christ’s death as recorded in the NT] of this world, be they of life or of death.” 194 In a similar vein, Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written of the crucifixion that [f]rom the traditional philosophical point of view it is possible for a single reality—especially of the order of Christ’s final end—to be seen in two ways by two different worlds, or from two different religious perspectives, without there being an inner contradiction. It is modern Western philosophy that does not allow such a thing…. When it comes to the question of the life of Christ, the historical life, on the level of fact it is either the Christian or the Islamic version that can be held. 195

191 Quoted in John Warwick Montgomery, “Speculation Versus Factuality: An Analysis of Unbelief,” Bibliotheca Sacra 168 (Jan-March 2001): 40. 192 Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, 239. 193 Ibid., 265. 194 Ibid., 239. 195 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Response to Hans Kung’s Paper on Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 100.

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The first thing that is odd about this passage is that Nasr attributes the law of non-contradiction to “modern Western philosophy” when in fact it goes back to at least the ancient Greek philosophers. Not only that, but the great Muslim philosopher Avicenna (980-1037 AD) insisted upon the importance of the law of non-contradiction as an aid to right thinking. Second, if the Koran is going to address historical subjects like the life of Christ and his crucifixion, then the Koran must play by the rules of history, like any other historical document. The facts of history do not change simply because of one’s theological worldview. Nasr goes on to write that the “Qur’an is more indifferent to the historical significance of sacred history than the Bible and much more interested in the moral significance of events recounted in that history.” 196 This is fine as far as it goes, for there are certainly multiple ways to interpret any historical event. But this does not allow Nasr to violate the law of non-contradiction by advocating two contradictory versions of the crucifixion, one for Christians, one for Muslims, both equally valid. Yet this is what he seems to be attempting. Nasr and Glasse cannot have it both ways. Both men, I imagine, accept as historical fact that Christ was born of a virgin, as taught in the Koran (3:45-47). This is portrayed as a surety in the Koran, without implying therefore that Christ is Divine. In the Koran, (19: 29-30) when the infant Jesus speaks, and calls himself a messenger of Allah, Nasr and Glasse surely would not reject the historicity of the event, because it fits in well with their theology, lending credence to Christ’s role as only a messenger of Allah, not his Son, or his Equal. Or, when Jesus predicts the coming of “Ahmed” (another name for Muhammad), in Koran 61:6, what Muslim relegates such a passage to a nonhistorical status? The Koran teaches that Muhammad was illiterate, and this is taken as a “real” statement of historical fact; this is proof for the Muslim that the poetic profundity of the Koran had to come from God, because the unlettered Muhammad could not have written it. The same can be said of K8:17, which explains that the Battle of Badr (the battle in 624 AD in which Muhammad’s forces were victorious over his polytheistic rivals) was won not by the Muslims alone, as some of them mistakenly believed, but by the grace of Allah. 197 Secular historians take Badr to be a veridical event, as do all Muslims. My point is, Muslims do take the Koran as a history book when it comes to such events as enumerated above. Yet when the Koran is faced with a conflicting version of the crucifixion found in the far earlier (and 196

Ibid., 102. Michael G. Fonner, “Jesus’ Death by Crucifixion in the Qur’an: An Issue for Interpretation and Muslim-Christian Relations,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 29, nos. 3-4 (Summer-Fall) 1992: 445. 197

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therefore more reliable) NT documents (not to mention the contemporaneous extra-biblical material), then somehow the koranic version must be interpreted in a very convenient non-historical, “spiritual” way. Of course, there are a few critical Koranic scholars, just as there are critical Old Testament and New Testament scholars. Such Islamic scholars are still probably on average more “conservative” than “liberal” Christian ones, but Islamic scholars are forced to ask “yes, but what does one mean when he or she says the Koran is God’s word?” 198 This, of course, is a question that has bedevilled (or improved, depending on one’s theological point of view) Christian scholarship since at the least the 1800s, when what was then called the higher criticism of the German biblical scholars began to question the divine origins of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. But for good or ill, the historical-critical approach is accepted by virtually all modern scholars when studying ancient documents, be those documents secular or religious. Thus even Hans Kung, who might be called somewhat of a Christian apologist for Islam, can ask of the Muslim scholarly community, “if we have historical criticism of the Bible (for the benefit of a contemporary biblical faith) why not then also have historical criticism of the Qur’an and this for the benefit of a Muslim faith appropriate to modern times?” 199 Indeed, there is no way to divorce the Koran’s theology from the historical milieu in which it was revealed: “the Qur’an’s claims to be a guide to people who are located within history mean that revelation remains related to history. Muslims, like others, have connected with a reality transcending history and that revelation, putative or real, has taken place within history and has been conditioned by history.” 200 But such “liberal” attitudes are not representative of the typical koranic scholar. “Both the doctrines of the Qur’an’s eternalness and its inimitability have profoundly affected the nature of Qur’anic scholarship and account for the absence of historical-literary criticism in Qur’anic studies.” 201 Thus, it seems fair to say 198

For a helpful overview of differing Muslim attitudes toward the Koran, see Farid Esack, The Qur’an: A Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2002), 1-12. The wide array of scholarly approaches that Esack mentions can only be expected to grow in the future, if the history of both Jewish and Christian biblical scholarship provides examples of how faith communities come to terms with the demands of modern scholarly investigation. 199 Hans Kung, “Christianity and World Religions: The Dialogue with Islam as One Model,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 89. 200 Farid Esack, ‘’Qur’anic Hermeneutics: Problems and Prospects,’’ Muslim World 83, no. 2 (April 1993): 136. 201 Ibid., 101.

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that while not all Muslim scholars interpret the Koran in a “fundamentalist” manner, it would be a rare one indeed who would accuse the Koran of incorrectly reporting the events of the crucifixion. In fact, concerning what Western scholars view as a fairly obvious error in the koranic record regarding the crucifixion, Muslims have a very different view of the matter based on their understanding of what the Koran is. For Islam, the Koran is not primarily a record of historical events. It is first and foremost a record of the revealed will of Allah. “According to Muslims, the Qur’an is not in any way a product of history. It is uncreated; that is, its existence is outside of history and it remains what it is regardless of the facts of history.” 202 Jews and Christians are accustomed to think of the Bible as revealing God’s action in history. And the Bible is often thought to be “true” or “false” based upon verification of the historical events it describes. “This is not the case in Islam, for while a knowledge of the life and times of the Prophet throws light on certain aspects of the Qur’an, the basic message is understood as having no necessary relationship to historical events. The revelation does not come through history. To hold that it did would be to make God dependent upon history and thus to compromise His absolute uniqueness.” 203 This does not mean that Muslims assume history is irrelevant. There are historical episodes in the Koran, but koranic truth is never based on them, it is based only on Allah’s unfailing revelation. “In the Qur’an, of course, there are many passages in which historical events are used to illustrate God’s will—especially His judgement. But there is a great difference between using historical events as illustrations and seeing them as actual carriers of revelation. This is a fundamental difference between the Qur’an and the Bible.” 204 So, as with the nature of God, and the nature of sin, the two faiths have difficulty talking to each other, because they presuppose such radically different understandings of what God’s revelation entails. For the Christian (indeed the Western scholar in general), holy writ that does not comport with history is questionable to say the least, false to say the worst. For the Muslim, Allah’s word as revealed in the Koran is beyond any temporally-bound interpretation. Ultimately, one must ask if the denial that Christ died on the cross would have even been mentioned in the Koran if the crucifixion were not at the heart of the religion that Muhammad saw Islam as surpassing: “It is interesting to speculate whether or not it would have been necessary for Muslims to deny the crucifixion of Jesus if that event were a doctrinally 202 Newell S. Booth, Jr., “The Historical and the Non-Historical in Islam,” Muslim World 60 (April 1970): 112. 203 Ibid., 114. 204 Ibid., 115.

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neutral issue. In light of the almost universal acceptance that ‘someone’ was crucified, it appears that the problem faced by [Muslim] exegetes is not so much Jesus’ death on the cross, but their inability to accept this and at the same time maintain their Islamic understanding of prophecy.” 205 The Muslim acceptance of Christ’s death on the cross seems necessitated by the evidence presented above. 206 Muslims could still maintain that a great prophet, Jesus, was killed by sinful men, but that Allah raised him up to heaven. The resurrection could be ignored, since it is not mentioned at all in the Koran, and is a matter of Christian doctrine, not a historical fact, as is the crucifixion. By accepting the historicity of the crucifixion, Muslims might actually make their faith stronger, as they would be bringing it into line with what all historians, even non-Christian ones, accept as the established fact of Christ’s death. Acceptance of this fact would in no way require them to accept Christ’s divinity, nor his substitutionary death. All other Muslim doctrines, such as Allah’s absolute oneness, the Day of Judgment, heaven and hell, and Muhammad’s status as Allah’s greatest and final messenger would remain untouched. This, it seems to me, would be the beginning of an honest Christian-Muslim dialogue. True, to admit that the Koran is wrong about the crucifixion would involve a major theological sacrifice for Muslims—the doctrine of the perfection and inerrancy of the Koran. This may seem unthinkable to many Muslims, but what is the alternative? To continue to claim that another was crucified in Jesus’s stead seems to be the result of theological obscurantism, rather the result of honestly grappling with history. Consider Nancy Roberts, who takes the rather curious position of calling herself “a Muslim who also considers herself a follower of Christ, and for whom Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are a meaningful reality.” 207 She admits that, when one surveys the theological gymnastics that Muslim exegetes have done to reconcile the contradictory crucifixion accounts found in the Bible and the Koran, it is 205

Lawson, Crucifixion and the Qur’an, 12-13. Some Muslim scholars have begun to employ historical-critical methods to the Koran, although it seems safe to say they do so with more restraint than liberal Jewish or Christian scholars when approaching the Bible. Still, in 1993 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd could write that koranic scholarship “must proceed from reality and culture as empirical givens. From these givens we arrive at a scientific understanding of the phenomenon of the text” (quoted from Esack, The Qur’an, 5). This approach is almost certain to become more widespread as the Islamic scholarly world modernizes and becomes more open to the types of historical and literary critiques to which Christian thinkers have subjected the Bible for the past two hundred years. 207 Nancy Roberts, “A Muslim Reflects on Christ Crucified: Stumbling-Block or Blessing?” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 24, no. 3 (May 2013): 313. 206

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clear “the insistence of many Muslim exegetes down the centuries on rejecting the historicity of the crucifixion may have been less a response to the text of Q. 4 157-158 [Koran chapter 4, the account of the crucifixion] itself than a reaction to Christian polemics against Islam and a need to assert their rejection of Christians’ belief in Christ’s death as atoning for others’ sins.” 208 This type of theological “split personality” is the inevitable outcome of Islam’s inability to confront the crucifixion as an actual event in space and time. I think both Christians and Muslims agree that a person really cannot be both a Christian and a Muslim. Either one worships Christ as Divine savior or he does not. Thankfully, positions like Roberts are rare indeed, as Christians and Muslims have enough to argue about when the demarcations of their religions are clear! But for now, the flexibility with which some Christians have handled the Bible since the rise of the historical-critical method in the 1800s is still largely missing from the manner in which Muslim exegetes treat the Koran. Thus, in summing up the Muslim position regarding the conflict between the Christian and the Muslim understandings of the crucifixion, “the Koran will always have the casting vote in any debate if it is perceived to speak decisively on the topic in [sic] hand …. So long as Q 4.157 is understood to deny that Jesus was crucified, this will be the understanding which holds sway among Muslims.” 209 But this seems more like fideism than scholarship. The facts of history are what they are, and they do not vanish because of one’s philosophical or theological commitments. Islamic thinkers must find a way to accommodate the certainty that Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross. Christians, too, must not shy away from the hard questions that scholarship forces them to ask about their scriptures. How Muslims view the Koran, and how Christians view the NT will be the subject of our next chapter. The same differences that are obtained in the two religions’ views of God, man, and Jesus, will be on display when it comes to the nature of the Christian and Islamic holy books.

208

Ibid., 318. M. Whittingham, “How Could So Many Christians Be So Wrong?” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 19 (2008): 176-77.

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CHAPTER 6 CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM VIEWS OF THEIR SCRIPTURES: THE “INERRANCY” QUESTION

Just as Christianity and Islam differ on major issues like the nature of God, Jesus, man, and salvation, so it is with the two religions’ view of their sacred texts. It is to be expected that the texts are very different from each other, of course, since they gave rise to the disparate doctrines that were discussed in the previous chapters. For Christians, the Bible is God’s word revealed to, and written by, men. For most Muslims, the Koran the very word of Allah, mediated through the angel Gabriel and given to Muhammad. The words Muhammad received are Allah’s words; he only recorded them (or had someone else do it if, as many Muslims believe, he was not literate). He imparted nothing to these words; he was merely a depository, so to speak, for the divine revelation. It is my position that the Christian view of the Bible is far more flexible than the Muslim view of the Koran in the light of modern critical scholarship. This does not mean the Bible is “truer” or, for that matter, “less true” than the Koran. It just means that Christianity has come to terms with critical scholarship, and the faith has not suffered all that much for it (it is still the world’s largest religion, and growing greatly in places like China). Can the Koran be subjected to the same scholarly approach without losing its essence as Allah’s pristine word? We touched upon this matter somewhat in the last chapter, but now let us look at it in greater depth. The terms “inerrancy” and “infallible” are usually heard in fundamentalist and sometimes in evangelical Christian circles when describing the Bible. To say the Bible is infallible usually means that it contains God’s truth, and makes no mistakes regarding correct doctrine, what we need to know to please God, to attain salvation, etc. Often, the term inerrancy is used as a synonym, but often it goes beyond the meaning of infallibility to mean that the Bible contains no mistakes at all, whether it addresses history, theology, prophecy, etc. The term basically means that the Bible is not only free of mistakes, but also that it is fully reliable regarding not just divine revelation,

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but any issue it teaches upon, be it history, science, etc. There is sometimes debate over the precise manner in which these two terms should be defined, but for the purposes of this paper, I will use these definitions. For the record, I accept the infallibility of the Bible, but not necessarily inerrancy. For my purposes in this book, I will be focusing on the idea of inerrancy, and how it pertains to the Bible and to the Koran, since many Christians, and most Muslims, view their respective scriptures in this way. In Islam, we probably hear more about the Koran’s inimitability, the idea that its poetry and profundity are such that they have never been equalled, rather than its inerrancy. But, Muslims certainly believe the Koran is inerrant; it is a core Islamic doctrine. The traditional Muslim belief is that the Koran existed in heaven, created by Allah, before it was revealed to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel at Allah’s behest. Thus, with Allah as its author, it cannot contain mistakes, as this would radically alter Islam’s understanding of its holy book. I want to do several things in this regard. One, to show that, despite what Christian fundamentalists since about 1900 onward have said, inerrancy has never been the majority position of the Christian Church, either in its Protestant or in its Roman Catholic forms. Inerrancy has, however, been held by Muslims regarding the Koran since the beginning of their faith. Two, I wish to show that deviation from the inerrancy position (as opposed to jettisoning the infallibility stance) does little or no harm to the Christian faith, while even the slightest denial of inerrancy raises serious (but not insurmountable) problems for the follower of the Koran. I believe that just as most Christians since the 1800s have come to view the Bible through varying degrees of critical eyes, so the Koran must be viewed in the same light, even if this means certain important Islamic doctrines will be challenged in the process. Just as Christians have had to re-examine some of their beliefs based on the challenges of the historical-critical method of bible scholarship, so Muslims must face the same challenges. Thus, I am not asking Muslims to do anything Christians have not already done. However, I do think that results may be more harmful for Islam than for Christianity; Christianity can survive a jettisoning of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Islam can survive it as well, but it will emerge more battered as a result. Still, the evidence must be followed, and neither the Bible nor the Koran can be read and studied the way they were hundreds of years ago. Our critical knowledge of both holy books simply will not permit us to read them as if we were living in, say, the Middle Ages. In this, both faiths need to face the sometimes harsh realities of the modern world. Biblical and koranic criticism does not mean either book is “false,” only that these scriptures must, at least in certain ways, be read differently by modern believers. Christian scholars long ago made peace with the historical-critical

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method, but this is not the case in the world of Islamic scholarship. Most Muslim scholars see the Koran as a book that “should be read literally and applied uniformly across time and space. As a result of this understanding, Islam has no tradition of using textual criticism—a practice long employed by Hebrew and biblical scholars.” 210

Church History Does Not Support Biblical Inerrancy Many American Christians today, and certain evangelical seminaries, hold to the position that the Bible is inerrant in all that it teaches, and claim that this has always been the case from the time of the Church Fathers onward. However, this view has changed somewhat in recent decades. Many younger conservative Christian scholars who take a “high” view of scripture are no longer comfortable with the traditional doctrine of inerrancy. 211 This trend essentially forced ETS, the Evangelical Theological Association, to “revisit its confession at its 2013 annual meeting entitled ‘Evangelicalism, Inerrancy, and the ETS.’”212 This in no way implies that ETS has “gone liberal,” or that the evangelical world has given up on the idea of biblical infallibility. It does mean, though, that “an up-and-coming generation of believing scholars sees inerrancy as a skandalon to the honest analysis of biblical texts.” 213 However, I do not see this trend as alarming for the evangelical world at all. These young scholars are doing nothing new or radical, but rather returning to something old and traditional. In their magisterial work (a work which has criminally been allowed to go out of print, and which should be required reading for all seminary students) entitled The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, by Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, in four hundred detailed pages, make a strong case that inerrancy was never the view of the Church, either in its Roman Catholic or Protestant forms. The inerrancy doctrine did not even arise until the late 1800s, at Princeton University. There, under the influence of theologian Francis Terrutin, the view was developed that “the authority of Scripture was based on its form of inerrant words. The Bible was a repository of information about all manner of things, including science and history, which

210 Nasr Abu Zaid, Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 4. 211 Robert C. Kurka, “Has ‘Inerrancy’ Outlived Its Usefulness?” Stone-Campbell Journal 18 (Fall 2015): 187. 212 Ibid. 213 Ibid.

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had to be proven accurate by then-current standards.” 214 In 1881, A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield, the legends so responsible for what is often termed the Old Princeton theology, wrote an article “asserting the inerrancy of the (lost) autographs of the Bible.” This view became “the official teaching of the Presbyterian Church and read back into its history as the confessional position of the church.”215 The well-known series of publications, The Fundamentals, from the early 1900s, took their cue from the Princeton theologians, and not only gave the American fundamentalist movement its name, but implanted in that movement the idea that scriptural inerrancy was always the position of the Church. 216 This view gained steam within a certain section of the American evangelical public, and Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible, published in 1976, further popularized the view of Hodge and Warfield, insisting the Bible was not only inerrant when it speaks theologically, but also when it touches on secular matters like chemistry and medicine. 217 So, while the inerrancy view became an entrenched doctrine with American fundamentalism, Rogers and McKim showed in convincing manner that the major thinkers of the Church, from the patristic age through the Reformation, were not inerrancy advocates. Origen (AD 184-253), for example, “acknowledged that the New Testament evangelists and Paul expressed their own opinions, and that they could have erred when speaking on their own authority.” 218 On the issue of the Bible and astronomy, St. Augustine wrote that “although our [biblical] authors knew the truth about the shape of the heavens, the spirit of God who spoke by them did not intend to teach men these things, in no way profitable for salvation.” 219 The Bible was neither “right” nor wrong” concerning scientific issues because the scripture is not intending to address these issues in the first place. Indeed, Augustine could not have held that the Bible teaches modern science even if he had wanted to, for “prior to the development of modern science and historiography, many such conflicts [like the creation vs evolution debate] were simply unrecognizable to the [ancient] biblical scholar.” 220 Augustine, 214

Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), xvii. 215 Ibid., xviii. 216 For a rebuttal of the position that inerrancy was never the position of the historical Church, see the fine collection of essays in Inerrancy, ed. Norman L. Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980). 217 Ibid., xx. 218 Ibid., 11. 219 Ibid., 26. 220 Kurka, “Has ‘Inerrancy’ Outlived Its Usefulness?” 189.

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like certain other theological luminaries, is sometimes credited with holding the inerrancy position, because he claimed the Bible is free from all error. But for Augustine, error “had to do with the deliberate and deceitful telling of that which the author knows to be untrue.” 221 Luther admitted there were discrepancies in the Bible, something the typical inerrantist today could not accept. But he took the position that when “discrepancies occur in the Holy Scriptures and we cannot harmonize them, let it pass, it does not endanger the articles of the Christian faith.” 222 Even John Calvin, that stern Reformer of Geneva, in his commentary on Genesis, famously says concerning Genesis 1:6-8: “He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.” When speaking about the water that Genesis refers to as being above the earth in the firmament, Calvin says “I conclude, that the waters here meant are such as the rude and unlearned may perceive.” 223 And this was not new to Calvin. R. Laird Harris wrote that “[a]s far back as Augustine, it was considered that these days [the seven days of creation in Genesis] could be epochal days.” 224 As for Martin Luther, he could at times seem to be questioning even the infallibility (and just the inerrancy) of the Bible, as when he “remarked that he would give his doctor’s beret to anyone who could reconcile James and Paul.”225 As for the Book of Revelation, 221

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 87. 223 Quoted in Vern S. Poythress, “A Misunderstanding of Calvin’s Interpretation of Genesis 1:6-8 and 1:5 and Its Implications for Ideas of Accommodation,” Westminster Theological Journal 76 (2014): 158. Poythress’s essay is an attempt to refute the idea here that Calvin was denying inerrancy and was resorting to the accommodation theory, or the idea that God revealed himself to the ancient people of the Bible in ways they could understand, ways that do not involve the revealing of “correct” historical fact. Poythress’s article was prompted by Kenton Spark’s book, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), which takes the position that Calvin was indeed an accomodationist regarding the creation story in Genesis, (see especially page 235). 224 Quoted in Louis Lavallee, “Augustine on the Creation Days,” JETS 32/4 (December 1989): 457. Lavallee also quotes evangelical scholar James Montgomery Boice to the effect that the days of creation could not be 24-hour periods because the sun is not created until the fourth day, and that “Augustine noted this 1500 years ago” (page 457). 225 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1977), 342. Of course, this is only one comment, and it must be judged against everything else that Luther taught. When the corpus of his work is considered, it is pretty clear that he did not think the Bible was a jumble of theological contradictions. Still, the fact that he uttered these words reveals he was no 16th-century fundamentalist. 222

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Luther was puzzled by it. “He mistrusted Revelation because of its obscurity.” 226 It is impossible to imagine Luther using Revelation as modern dispensationalists do, taking every word of the work as a literal blueprint for future events!

Apocryphal Elements in the Koran “Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the Word of God sent down to Muhammad from a heavenly archetypal source of all revealed scriptures, which the Qur’an calls umm al-kitab, mother or essence of the Book.” 227 Thus, every word of it is literally Allah’s word; Muhammad was only a vessel through whom the divine revelation came. The Koran calls Muhammad “unlettered,” which most Muslims take to mean he was illiterate, and therefore incapable of taking any part in the creation of the Koran. His ignorance of letters is the Sunni position, but not necessarily the Shia one. Yet the idea that the Koran is “off limits” to critical inquiry regarding its origin seems strangely out of place in the twenty-first century. Jews and Christians have been comfortable with critical examinations of their scriptures for many decades, yet the majority of Islamic scholars have eschewed the Western critical approach to the Koran. Even Roman Catholic scholar Hans Kung, who is about as much of an Islamic apologist as a Christian can be, wrote the following: “if we have historical criticism of the Bible (for the benefit of a contemporary Biblical faith), why not then also have historical criticism of the Qur’an, and this for the benefit of a Muslim faith appropriate to modern times?” 228 Although most Muslim scholars are uncomfortable with the idea, many non-Muslim scholars realize that the Koran contains stories that are obviously borrowed from Christian gnostic and apocryphal sources. “In the Qur’an itself, scholars have claimed to find traces of the Apocalypse of Adam, 1 Enoch, the Cave of Treasures, the Protoevangelium, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Arabic Infancy Gospel, and the Gospel of Barnabas (the early apocryphal text of this name, rather than the Islamicized version).” 229 The Adam and Eve story in the Koran differs from the Biblical account in that Satan (Iblis in Arabic) is condemned by Allah for not 226

Ibid. Mahmoud Ayoub, “History of the Qur’an and the Qur’an in History,” Muslim World 104, no. 4 (Oct 2014): 429. 228 Hans Kung, “Christianity and World Religions: The Dialogue with Islam as One Model,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 87. 229 Philip Jenkins, The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 195. 227

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prostrating himself before Adam. This story is taken directly from the firstcentury apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve. 230 In chapter three of the Koran, there is much about the early life of Mary, Christ’s mother, including how her Son Jesus will be able to speak when he is but an infant. “Every one of the Qur’an’s statements [on Mary in chapter three] is rooted in the Protoevangelium [written around 170 AD]—from the initial prayer for a child uttered by Mary’s mother to her decision to pledge Mary to a life of service to God and Mary’s childhood in the temple, where she received food from the hand of an angel.” 231 In chapter five of the Koran, we are told that Christ spoke wisdom from his cradle, and that he was able to make pigeons out of clay, blow on them, and make them come alive. There “is no mystery in finding the originals of these stories. The Arabic Infancy Gospel describes Jesus in his cradle telling his mother of his divine identity and mission. The tale of the birds features in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.”232 As for the Koran’s famous denial of Christ’s crucifixion in the Koran (4:157-158) this “is pure Docetism of a kind that had existed for centuries in Christianity’s eastern regions. It is an open question which a number of alternative gospels circulating in that region might underlie this text.” 233 Personally, I do not think Islam would be much harmed if it acknowledged the extra-koranic origin of these stories about Jesus. Jesus, like the OT, is not essential to the Koran’s teachings. If the Old Testament and the New were to disappear tomorrow, Islam would lose nothing, since the Koran is Allah’s final revelation, and works quite independently of either old or new testaments. Of course, many biblical scholars think that the Bible contains its fair share of borrowed material as well. The story of Noah’s Flood is usually assumed to have been based on the flood story in the Mesopotamia Epic of Gilgamesh. And many believe there are traces of Egyptian writings in the Old Testament’s Wisdom Literature. These borrowings in Proverbs and Psalms are “remarkably low,” 234 but the point is, both Bible and Koran are not magical books that fell from the sky, written by divine hands. And both books could theoretically be “true,” even parts of them reflect a mundane origin. How do Muslim scholars react to these borrowings? Most, of course, are loath to admit that the Koran is making use of stories derived from heretical 230

Ibid., 196. Ibid., 197. 232 Ibid., 197-98. 233 Ibid., 198. 234 Professor Bernd U. Schipper, “Egyptian Influences on the Biblical Text,” https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/places/related-articles/egyptian-influences-onthe-biblical-text. 231

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sources, as this would impugn the perfection of the Koran. “In Islam, since there is no preserved canonical document prior to the Qur’an, there is no problem accepting parallels with any previous canonical or extra-canonical Jewish or Christian texts. Whatever matches the Qur’an is valid revelation preserved in both sources, and whatever does not is regarded as inaccurately preserved.” 235 Of course, there are problems inherent with this view. First, there is the simple problem of modern historical criticism. If the Koran were any other document, no scholar would deny that it shows evidence of having borrowed stories from non-Koranic sources. Many Christian scholars believe this has happened in the Bible, and have not shied away from it (although Christian fundamentalists still reject this approach toward the Bible). For example, Christian scholars are confronted with this problem when they look at the very short New Testament Book of Jude. Only one chapter long, verse 14 mentions a prophecy made by Enoch, which most NT experts assume is based on the apocryphal book of 1 Enoch, a work that was quite popular in the very early years of the Christian movement. Scholars have sought to explain this passage in various ways. Peter Davids theorizes that the author of Jude used 1 Enoch before the New Testament canon had been defined, so quoting from 1 Enoch would not have been a problem. Richard Bauckham considered the 1 Enoch quotation to be a type of midrash (interpretation) performed by Jude. 236 J. Daryl Charles has written that Jude quoted 1 Enoch only because of the respect accorded to Enoch in Jude’s time even if Jude himself did not consider Enoch to be scripture. 237 The point here is that Christian scholars are open to various explanations as to how a non-canonical “prophecy” made its way into the “official” New Testament canon. None of the explanations offered above is tantamount to a denial of biblical infallibility. Rather each reflects honest engagement with the text, based on the current state of our knowledge. Even if Muslim scholars are right, and the apocryphal stories found in the Koran are true, they would still have to wrestle with the source of the stories. How likely is it that only the parts of the apocryphal writings that match the Koran are true, while the rest of these writings are false? In fact, many of these apocryphal books teach things that are clearly at odds with the Koran. For example, most Muslims believe that someone who looked like Christ was crucified in his stead, based on what the Koran says in 4:157-158. The problem here is that this very position was taken by the ancient Christian Gnostic Basilides, and his view seems to have found its 235 Michael Graves,“ Apocryphal Elements in the New Testament and Qur’an,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 47, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 166. 236 Ibid., 159. 237 Ibid.

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way into the Koran’s version of the crucifixion. Now, a koranic interpreter may say that Basilides is not generally a source of divine inspiration but, on this particular point, what he wrote was correct, since it matches what is in the Koran. But this is problematic because such sources as Basilides are “theologically distasteful sources far outside the accepted spheres for qur’anic interpretation.” 238 This is because Muslims do not view any source other than the Koran to be a source of perfect revelation (the Bible being partially true, partially corrupted at the hands of untrustworthy Jewish and Christian redactors). Muslims accept nothing else that Basilides taught, so why would they accept his version of the crucifixion, just because it matches the version in the Koran? Basilides exhibited a docetic understanding of Jesus, (that is, Christ only seemed to be a real flesh-and-blood man, when in reality he was only a purely spiritual being). This is as theologically unacceptable for a Muslim as for a Christian, since Muslims view Christ as one of God’s greatest prophets. For once, Christians and Muslims are united in their understanding of Jesus! But, if Basilides is a blasphemer for denying Christ’s true human nature, it seems highly unlikely that anything he believed or wrote is true or theologically acceptable from the Muslim viewpoint. Another example similar to the one cited above is where the koranic Jesus makes clay birds into real birds. The story is obviously taken from the Infancy Narrative of Thomas, a book neither Christians nor Muslims accept as authoritative. In fact, the miracle itself should be objectionable to both Christians and Muslims. Whenever Christ worked a miracle, it was for a specific purpose. Sometimes his miraculous powers were used to heal the sick, sometimes to demonstrate his mastery over nature, and sometimes to glorify his father. But changing clay birds into living birds? This strikes us as a cheap magician’s trick, far beneath the dignity of the Christian Son of God or the Muslim Prophet Jesus. Thus Muslim writer M.H. Durrani, in his The Qur’anic Facts about Jesus, is forced to interpret the clay bird incident as a parable, because “a prophet’s dignity is much above such actions as the making of toy birds,” and “the act of creation is not attributable to any but

238

Derek Eshelbrenner, “The Qur’an-Gospel Resurrection Resolution,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 44, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 676. Eshelbrenner says that although Basilides is the first to advance the idea of a look-alike Jesus dying on the cross, the same idea shows up again in “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth,” part of the Nag Hammadi library, but “this literature is grossly incompatible with the Qur’an” (footnote 22, p. 677).

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the Divine Being.” 239 Durrani is to be congratulated for his willingness to take a passage in the Koran in a less than historical manner. Still, most Muslim exegetes try to avoid this kind of conclusion, as explained by Michael Graves when he writes that “[w]hatever matches the Qur’an is valid revelation preserved in both sources, and whatever does not is regarded as inaccurately preserved.” 240 Graves is referring to noncanonical apocryphal biblical literature that has influenced the Koran, rather than heretical writings like those by Basilides that Christians and Muslims both reject. Yet the principle is the same. If a story matches the Koran, it must be true, and if it does not, it must be false. Against this type of reasoning it is hard to argue, for nothing can ever count as evidence unless it corresponds to what Muslims already believe. Christian fundamentalists display the same sort of reaction when the question of the age of the earth and human origins comes up. No amount of scientific evidence from biology, anthropology, history, or geology can convince the committed Christian fundamentalist that the world may be older than six thousand years, or that there may be better ways to understand the Adam and Eve story than in a purely literalistic way.

Why Do Muslims Reject the Historical-Critical Method Regarding the Koran? In fairness to Islamic scholars, the Koran was produced during the lifetime of a single man, Muhammad, whereas the Bible was produced by dozens of authors over hundreds of years. Thus, many Muslim scholars may not see the need to subject the Koran to the same type of historical-critical methods to which the Bible has been subjected. 241 But there is much more than this inherent in the Islamic refusal to treat the Koran with the tools of modern scholarship. As Mohammed Arkoun writes, “it is unfortunate that philosophical critique of sacred texts—which has been applied to the Hebrew Bible and to the New Testament without thereby engendering negative consequences for the notion of revelation—continues to be rejected by Muslim scholarly opinion.” 242 Muslim thinkers cannot avoid the fact that, regarding their holy book, “historians have demonstrated links 239

Quoted in Kate Zebiri, “Contemporary Muslim Understanding of the Miracles of Jesus,” Muslim World 90 (March 2000): 81. 240 Graves, “Apocryphal Elements,” 166. 241 David Emmanuel Singh, “Muhammad, ‘The Prophet Like Moses?’” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 43, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 554. 242 Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers, ed. and trans. Robert D. Lee (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 35.

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with the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, ancient Middle Eastern literature such as the story of Alexander the Great, the Gilgamesh legend, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.” 243 This is not to say that the Koran has no value as a revelation from God. It may very well be a true revelation from Allah, just as Christians believe the Bible is a true revelation, even if, for example, the Noah story borrowed from the Gilgamesh epic, or some of the Old Testament wisdom literature shows an Egyptian influence. And there are some Islamic scholars who are open to critical approaches to the Koran. Abu Zaid has written “[t]he Koran is a text, a literary text, and the only way to understand, explain, and analyse it is through a literary approach.” Then there are Muslims like S. Parvez Manzoor, who takes exception to the work certain critical scholars from the West have done on the Koran, but still admits that “sooner or later [we Muslims] will have to approach the Koran from methodological assumptions and parameters that are radically at odds with the ones consecrated by our tradition.” 244 Similarly, Mohammed Arkoun thinks that modern critical study of the Koran is best done within the Muslim community, stating that “it is time [for Islam] to assume, along with all of the great cultural traditions, the modern risks of scientific knowledge.” 245 Part of the difficulty is the fact that in Islam, change has never been viewed in a positive way. And, of course, if the Koran truly is Allah’s word in every way, change should not be something for which Islam strives. In the 1990s, Egyptian scholar Nasr Abu Zayd suggested that the Koran may have had some human influence in its composition. As a result, he was condemned as an apostate in an Egyptian court, received death threats, was forced to separate from his still-Muslim wife, and was forced to flee to Holland. 246 The great twelfth-century Muslim scholar al-Ghazali declared that “[b]lind obedience to God is the best evidence of our Islam.” 247

243

Ibid., 39. https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/the-fourfold-gospel/bysections/ parable-of-the-importunate-widow.html. 245 Ibid. 246 Ibid., 63. 247 Ibid, 104. Although it must also be said in Al-Ghazali’s defense that he seems to have had a sort of “born again” experience, indicating his Islamic faith was not simply based upon fideism. After a long period of religious doubt, he claimed that he experienced “a light which God most high cast into my breast.” Quoted in Alfons Teipen, “The Word of God: What Can Christians Learn from Muslim Attitudes Toward The Qur’an?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 38, nos. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2001): 296, footnote 34. 244

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But there is another factor to consider for Muslim exegetes. The words of the Koran are not understood linguistically by Muslims the same way the words of the Bible are understood by Christians. Summing up the position of Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Nidhal Guessoum writes that “even though the Qur’an can be compared to the Old and the New Testaments, the proper analogy to be made in Christianity is not with the Bible but rather with Jesus Christ himself. Indeed, both the Qur’an and Jesus can be defined as God’s logos, sent by God in similar forms to Muhammad and to Mary.” 248 If this is the case, then it is not surprising that so many nonArabic speaking Muslims, in all parts of the world, recite passages from the Koran even though the meaning of the words is entirely lost on them. This is because the words of the Qur’an are imbued with baraka, or a type of holy power. 249 This idea can probably be traced back to the pre-Islamic Bedouin, who were revered for their facility with poetry, and well-known as venerators of the spoken word. Some Muslims hold that the Koran was revealed in poetic form, ideally suited for oral recitation, because “the Arabs, to whom Muhammad was sent, prized eloquence and were accomplished in poetry, so a literary miracle in the form of the Qur’an was best suited to them.” 250 If some fundamentalist Christians have sometimes been accused of bibliolatry, then the manner in which some non-Arabic speaking Muslims recite what are for them meaningless sounds could be called an analogy. If Millions of Muslims are reciting the words of the Koran based on this concept of baraka, this is surely another reason why Muslim scholars are wary of any scholarly challenge to the utter reliability of the text. To challenge the Koran on any point is not just to challenge Allah’s revelation to Muhammad, but to cast doubt upon the religious power inherent in the Koran’s original Arabic. Indeed, this is one of the reasons many Muslims do not approve of translating the Koran into other languages. But, given the relatively small number of people who know Arabic among the world’s one billion-plus Muslims, the concession to allow for translations is grudgingly made. Again, we see here a radical difference between Christianity and Islam. Christians have always been a community obsessed with translating their scriptures into any language necessary for the propagation of the gospel. Muslims do it too, but are not exactly happy about it. This brings us to the heart of the matter of inerrancy as it relates to the bible and to the Koran. The Bible, as explained above, was never taken by 248

Nidhal Guessoum, “The Qur’an, Science and the (Related) Contemporary Muslim Discourse,” Zygon 34, no. 2 (June 2008): 412. 249 Ibid., 413. 250 Zebiri, “Contemporary Muslim Understandings of the Miracles of Jesus,” 79.

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the majority of major theologians to be inerrant, and Christianity has thrived for 2000 years despite this. But Islam is different. Muslim thinkers know full well what is at stake should they adopt Western-style criticism of their scriptures. Once the Koran is subjected to such criticism only four outcomes seem to be possible, none of which is good news for the traditional understanding of Islam. One outcome is that Allah made mistakes when he created the Koran. Two, His messenger, Gabriel, made mistakes when revealing it to Muhammad. Three, Muhammad incorrectly preserved what he heard from Gabriel. Or four, the scribes whom the allegedly illiterate Muhammad used to record the revelations he received made mistakes. Abdullah Saeed, an orthodox Muslim scholar, has written that “Muslims should be extremely cautious in accepting the legitimacy of attempts at revision, [of the idea that the Koran is fully the word of Allah] unless such attempts are well-supported from the Revelation itself.” 251

Different Gods Reveal Different Types of Scriptures Most of the problems enumerated above can be traced to the very different views that Christians and Muslims take toward their view of the divine being. Even the strictest Christian fundamentalist will admit that the Bible was written by men, and although they wrote under divine inspiration, they did not write as theological automatons, which explains things like, for instance, the different prose styles of the gospel authors. (Luke’s gospel, for instance, displays a greater mastery of Greek than does Mark’s gospel.) Not only that, but the Christian scriptures are viewed differently by Christians because their view of the divine is different. “We see major differences between the biblical and qur’anic concepts of special revelation also. The 251

Abdullah Saeed, “Rethinking ‘Revelation’ as a Precondition for Reinterpreting the Qur’an: A Qur’anic Perspective,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 1, no. 1 (1999): 95. The one Islamic “reformer” that the author treats, Fazlur Rahman, turns out to be not a reformer at all in terms of the issue of koranic authorship. Saeed writes that “[w]hat Rahman appears to emphasize is the close connection between the Qur’an as word of God, the Prophet and his mission and sociohistoric context in which the Qur’an was revealed…. Rather than argue that the Qur’an is the word of the Prophet (94).” But of course it is a given that there is a close relationship between the Koran and Muhammad, to whom it was revealed over the course of several years, and between the Koran and the historical circumstances in which it was revealed. Thus the distinction made by traditional Muslim scholars that some suras in the Koran belong to the early Meccan period of revelation, while others come from the later Median period. Generally speaking, later koranic revelations have more authority than earlier ones in Muslim thought, a doctrine known as the “principle of abrogation.”

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Bible’s concept of verbal revelation parallels its notion of divine incarnation, for the incarnation involved the perfect union of the divine and human in the person of Jesus, who is thus both fully God and fully man. Similarly, in the biblical understanding, revealed scripture is simultaneously the product of two authors, divine and human.”252 But when it comes to the Koran, “[i]nspiration means here not simply inspired thoughts and precepts, but inspired words, letters and sounds, an uncreated book existing from eternity. In the history of the Church we have had times and sects which advocated the verbal inspiration of the Bible to the utmost extreme. But even those are surpassed by the theory of Muslim inspiration.” 253 As we saw in the previous chapter, many Muslim scholars advocate the view that the Koran is, in some sense, supra-historical, that it is more concerned with moral and spiritual truth than recording “real” history. In a sense this is true, as even a cursory reading of the Koran indicates. Much of the Koran reads like a collection of sermons, each chapter standing alone, whereas the Bible reads much more like a novel, with a definitive plot line (creation, the history of the Jews, the coming of Christ, the eventual triumph of God over evil, etc.). But even if the Koran is less concerned with historical events than the Bible, there is at least some history in the Koran. And if Allah is the author of the historical episodes the Koran relates, then those historical passages must necessarily be true. Thus, it cannot be correct that “[t]he Qur’an in general has been denied any serious interest in history.” Or that the Koran “locates itself outside, beyond history.” 254 This sounds oddly like what certain liberal New Testament scholars say when discussing Christ’s resurrection. They will sometimes claim that the resurrection happened, but not in “real” history, but rather in some sort of suprahistorical realm. Nineteenth-century German theologian Martin Kahler spoke of two types of history, Historie (actual events in the past) and Geschichte (events that happened in a realm beyond normal, observable history). German New Testament expert Rudolf Bultmann, himself certainly no theological conservative and the founder of the “demythologizing” movement in New Testament studies said, regarding Kahler’s view, “why

252

Mark Robert Anderson, The Qur’an in Context (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 161. 253 Alfred Nielsen, “Can Islam Be ‘Modern?’” International Review of Missions, 44, no. 175 (July 1955): 261. 254 Angelika Neuwirth, “Qur’an and History—a Disputed Relationship: Some Reflections on Qur’anic History and History in the Qur’an,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 5, no. 1 (2003): 14, 1.

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regard such events as historical at all?” 255 Either an event happened in the actual past, or it did not. Thus the theological doublespeak displayed in the following quotation cannot go unchallenged: “it is of course in the historical nature of the [Koran’s] canonical text as a genealogical charter of rectitude to demand a status beyond history, figuring as a vantage point from which chronometric time becomes neutralized and in which the holy text places itself along a prior continuum of eternity instantiated in the rhythms of a Heilsgeschichte.” 256 Or the following passage from a Muslim who is attempting to reconcile the disparate account of Christ’s death in the Bible and in the Koran (note the utter refusal here to accept the law of noncontradiction, which even Avicenna, one of the towering figures in medieval Islamic thought, taught was absolutely indispensable for any scholar): [f]rom the traditional philosophical point of view it is possible for a single reality—especially of the order of Christ’s final end—to be seen in two ways by two different worlds, or from two different religious perspectives, without there being an inner contradiction. It is modern Western philosophy that does not allow such a thing…. When it comes to the question of the life of Christ, the historical life, on the level of fact it is either the Christian or the Islamic version that can be held. 257

These kinds of statements might make some sense if applied to certain Eastern religion texts, whose religions have typically been labelled as “nonhistorical.” But it certainly makes little sense when applied to either the Koran or the Bible. Also, there is an episode in the Koran that, similar to certain events in the gospel, must have happened, because it contains information that is not flattering regarding Muhammad (New Testament scholars often speak of the so-called criterion of embarrassment to prove that certain gospel events must have occurred, because they are too scandalous for the early Church to have invented. For instance, Christ’s inability to perform miracles (or at least, not many!) in Nazareth (Mark 6:5), or Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross. The embarrassing Koranic event in question is in chapter 33:37, and it reads, in part, “no blame shall be attached to the prophet for doing what is sanctioned for him by Allah.” What had Muhammad done that was blameworthy? He had married a woman named Zainab, who was divorced 255 Quoted in John Warwick Montgomery, “Speculation Versus Factuality: An Analysis of Unbelief,” Bibliotheca Sacra 168 (January-March 2001): 40. 256 Quoted in ibid., 1. 257 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Response to Hans Kung’s Paper on Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” Muslim World 77, no. 2 (April 1987): 100.

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from one of Muhammad’s earliest converts, a man named Zaid. This was a “violation of [Arabian] custom that required a Koran verse to justify it.” 258 If the Koran did not contain actual history, the following statement from Zebiri would make little sense: “the Islamic tradition has not known a Hume or a Bultmann. The miracles which are reported in the Qur’an, are still widely accepted as having occurred; in fact, there can be little doubt that a higher proportion of Muslims than Christians believe in the virgin birth.” 259 Whether the virgin birth actually happened or not is not the issue. The point is that Muslims believe the virgin birth happened, and they assign it to the realm of actual history.

Islamic Scholarship Done in the Christian Style Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Nasr Abu Zaid, the Muslim scholar from Egypt who is persona non grata in the world of Islam because of his non-traditional views on the religion. But Zaid has taken great pains to point out that he is indeed a committed Muslim: “I treat the Qur’an as a text given by God to the Prophet Muhammad. The text came to us in a human language, Arabic. As a result of my work, I have been critical of Islamic discourse…. Nonetheless, I identify myself as a Muslim. I was born a Muslim. I was raised a Muslim, and I live as a Muslim. God willing, I will die a Muslim.” 260 Zaid goes on to say that “Muslims believe that Muhammad received the Word of God. There is no dispute among Muslims about this. We believe Muhammad. We believe he is telling the truth. But, at the end of the day, it is Muhammad, the human being, reporting to us the Word of God.” 261 So far so good. But once Zaid opens himself to the idea that the Koran may be, even in a very limited sense, a human-influenced book, he begins to depart from what Muslims have always believed about the Koran, namely, that the divine book pre-existed with Allah in eternity before being revealed to Muhammad. Classical Islamic thought believes the Qur’an existed before it was revealed. I argue that the Qur’an is a cultural product that takes its shape from a particular time in history. The historicity of the Qur’an in no way implies that the text is human. Because the text is grounded in history, I can interpret and understand that text. We should not be afraid to employ all the tools at 258

Thomas W. Lippman, Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World (New York: Penguin, 1995), 54. 259 Zebiri, “Contemporary Muslim Understandings,” 71. 260 Zaid, Reflections on Islam, 11. 261 Ibid., 96.

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our disposal in order to get at the meaning of the text. God’s actual words, though, exist in a sphere beyond human knowledge—a metaphysical space that we can know nothing about except that which the text mentions. 262

What precisely Zaid is saying here is not entirely clear, but one thing seems certain. He is making a distinction between Allah, and what Allah has revealed to humanity. Allah’s revelation is true, but it is mediated through the human agency of Muhammad. Of course, this is precisely what Christians have always taught. The Bible is the word of God, written by men. In light of what has been said above, this seems a perfectly reasonable position for a Muslim scholar to hold in the twenty-first century. Yet Zaid also speaks in language that has been the domain of Christian liberal scholars for well over one hundred years. He is almost Barthian, distinguishing the Word of Allah from the word of Muhammad. “A distinction must be made between the absolute Word of God and the Qur’an.” Once he admits to this distinction, he embarks upon the slippery slope that Christian conservatives have often warned Christian liberals of, namely, the dangers of the descent into religious relativism. “God does not only speak Arabic. God speaks no specific language as we understand language. So, if God has no specific language, this opens up a space for other Scriptures to be recognized as manifestations of God’s Word as well. All these manifestations of the Word of God come to us by way of human beings. Human beings such as Moses, Jesus, the apostles, and Muhammad report the Word of God through language.” 263

Whether or not Zaid is a heretical Muslim is a matter for the Muslim community to decide (and that community seems to have decided that he is). But there are a few things to note here. One, he downplays the importance of Arabic, even though, as explained above, the Arabic of the Koran holds a sacred place in Islam, a place that the Greek of the New Testament has never held. Two, is Zaid here giving the words of Christ and the apostles equal weight along with those of Muhammad? If so, this would indeed be a radical departure from Islam as it has been perceived from the beginnings of that faith. If the Koran is a corrective to the semi-true, distorted words of both the Old and New Testaments, in which sense can a Muslim view the Bible as Allah’s words? This is a dilemma for Muslims like Zaid. They know they must be open to modern scholarship, but once they open themselves to it, the type of Islamic interpretation they produce is different from what has usually been considered orthodox Islam. This 262 263

Ibid., 99. Ibid., 96.

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may be a good or a bad thing, depending on one’s perspective. Christianity has survived the onslaught of critical scholarship, and my guess is that Islam can, too. However, Zaid goes beyond making a distinction between the Word of Allah and the words revealed to Muhammad. In good Christian historicalcritical style, he sees much of what is in the Koran as culturally-conditioned. Shar’ia is human law. There is nothing divine about it. When we look at certain legal stipulations spoken about in the Qur’an, such as the penalties for fornication, robbery, murder, or causing social disorder, we need to ask certain questions. Are the stipulated policies initiated by Islam? Can we consider them to be Islamic? Definitely not. The penalties meted out for such offenses were used in pre-Islamic times—some of them come from Roman law and some from Jewish tradition. 264

This is a fairly shocking statement for a committed Muslim to make. For one thing, to deny the validity of sharia law is to deny the framework upon which much of Islamic society has been built. Although, admittedly, only “Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states have fully functioning sharia law systems in place.” Still, the traditional understanding of sharia has been that “Islam makes no distinction between religion and life, nothing being excluded from religion, or outside it and ‘secular.’” 265 Also, just because there are laws that are in the Koran that have earlier parallels does not mean these laws are not Allah’s will. On the question of slavery, Zaid writes, [s]lavery as a socioeconomic system is mentioned in the Qur’an—it’s a historical reality. Human beings have developed their thinking since the seventh century. Slavery is no longer an acceptable socioeconomic system in most parts of the world. How can we use the Word of God to legitimate a heinous system that human beings no longer generally practice? If we do legitimate such a thing, we freeze God’s Word in history—but the Word of God reaches way beyond historical reality. 266

Of course, most Muslims today are not in favor of a return to slavery for non-believers (Islam has never permitted Muslims to enslave other Muslims). Still, Zaid faces the same problem that Christian scholars have for decades. How much of the scripture can be ignored because it represents an outdated, culturally unacceptable viewpoint? How much should the Bible or the Koran “change” in order to become palatable to the modern world? 264

Ibid., 89. Cyril Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 419-20. 266 Zaid, Voice of an Exile, 167. 265

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The question is far easier for Christianity, because much of the nowunacceptable teachings of the Bible (stoning for various sins, for example) are found in the Old Testament, and Christianity has long taught that much of the legal codes of the Hebrew Bible are no longer applicable for Christians, having been given by God to the Jews only for a certain time and place (that is, ancient Israel). Islam cannot appeal to this sort of thinking, since the Koran was produced in only a few decades, by one man, Muhammad. Thus, there is no “old” part of the Koran that Muslims can ignore, as Christians do with much of the Hebrew Bible, assuming as they do that Christians are under the “new” covenant. This is what makes modern study of the Koran all the more difficult and, too large extent, explains why most of the Islamic world has not embraced the historical-critical method of scripture study.

Conclusion In 2007, several Muslim thinkers published “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a statement aimed at improving Christian-Muslim relations. This document was answered by the so-called “Yale Response,” a document signed by numerous Christian theologians. Both documents affirmed that despite the major differences between the religions, the two faiths could find common cause based on the following two items: love of God/Allah, and love of the one’s neighbor. If the two faiths can agree on nothing else, these two teachings, love of the divine and love of one’s fellow human beings, seems a good place to begin (and perhaps to end) a Christian-Muslim dialogue. “A Common Word” and the “Yale Response” were published in book form, with attending essays by Christian and Muslim thinkers. 267 That so many Christian and Muslim scholars would seek a way forward after centuries of often acrimonious relations is admirable. And, if this dialogue is done in terms of mutual respect and theological honesty by both sides, no harm can be done to either faith, and both religions may actually learn from one another and even become the better for it. The overall tone of A Common Word is positive, and the writers on both sides are to be applauded for admitting that there are major theological differences between Christianity and Islam. There are some odd moments in the book, though. As I pointed out in my first chapter, some of the Christian writers in the collection of essays under consideration seem to be a bit overly zealous to appease their Islamic interlocutors. For instance, the 267 A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor ed. Volf et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2010).

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Christian Crusades seem to come up often in the essays of Christian writers. This is odd, and not only because they happened several centuries ago. As Bernard Lewis, the greatest Western scholar of Islam and the Middle East, explained, when the Crusaders took Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in 1099 AD, it was not viewed as a crisis in the Islamic world. “To judge by the Arabic historiography of the period, it aroused very little interest in the region.” 268 Lewis goes on to state that “[a]wareness of the Crusades [among Muslims] as a distinctive historical phenomenon dates from the nineteenth century, and the translation of European books on history. Since then, there is a new perception of the Crusades as an early prototype of the expansion of European imperialism into the Islamic world.” 269 If anything, it is that nineteenth-century imperialism, culminating in the defeat of the Ottoman empire and the re-drawing of the map of the Middle East in the twentieth century that has soured many Muslims toward the West, and justifiably so. Additionally, when speaking of war and expansionism, the Christian writers of the A Common Word volume are reluctant to say much about Islamic aggression toward Christendom, even though, since the advent of Islam, Christendom has “lost vast territories to Muslim rule [primarily the Middle East and North Africa].” 270 Mutual respect between the two faiths cannot be established unless Christians are willing to admit that they have been sinned against as much as they have sinned in the long standoff with Islam. There are a few other oddities in the A Common Word volume. The Christian contingent states that “Christians have for the most part believed that Muslims seek to worship the ‘same’ God as Christians and Jews. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther held this view, to name just two examples.” 271 These are not just any Christian thinkers, but two of the most important in Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian history. But did these men hold that Muslims worshipped the same God? Luther lumped Muslims under the rubric of “the Turks,” and referred to “the Turk’s god, the devil.” Luther also wrote that because Islam rejects the incarnation and atoning death of Christ on the cross, Islam has created “a new belief that dissents from the prophets and apostles” and that this religion is consequently a “new thing.” 272 As for Aquinas, he had harsh words for Muhammad, complaining that he could not be an authentic prophet, since he had no miracles to his 268

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 47. Ibid., 50-51. 270 Ibid., 37. 271 A Common Word, 67. 272 Quoted in Robert O. Smith, “Luther, the Turks, and Islam,” Currents in Theology and Mission 34, no. 5 (2007): 355, 364. 269

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credit, as did the biblical prophets. Additionally, he corrupted “almost all the teachings of the Old and New Testaments by a narrative [the Koran] replete with fables, as one may see by a perusal of his law.” 273 Perhaps the best we can do is to admit our theological differences and then proceed to attempt to live in peace. The A Common Word volume, for the most part, does this, and that is a good thing. Had the authors simply admired the two great faiths as being so contradictory that they cannot be reconciled, it would have been even better.

273

Quoted in John Tolan, Saracens: Islam and the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 243.

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