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Footnotes
1.
Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism
are three great theological/philosophical religions (though it might seem a
strange thing to say that about Buddhism but this is no place to take that
matter further). It is only a matter of time before Christianity engages
with them both at depth; and when it does, the meeting of minds and the
conflict of ideas will have the same profundity of spiritual and
intellectual benefit and influence as its engagement with Greek, and indeed
in a different way Persian, philosophy in the first few hundred years of
its existence. We are fortunate in England to have a substantial Hindu
population and an increasing Buddhist one. We cannot study their systems
and engage with them quick enough.
2.
In the person of their
respective founders in this and in many other fundamental aspects
Christianity and Islam all too obviously are radically different. On the
one hand Jesus in well known words and in the manner of his life rejects
violence; Mohammad on the other did not (cf the next footnote). He
positively made use of it. He was what nowadays we would call a warlord. He
even found a religious use for it. Just one example out of a number: ‘Those
who make war against God and his apostle (Mohammad) and spread disorder in
the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet
cut off on alternate sides or be banished from the country’ (The Table.
5.33).
3.
Mohammad inherited and
practised the attitude towards war and violence of his culture. It is an
attitude which finds expression not only in the Koran itself (as in the
example given immediately above) but also in his own life. As ruler of
Medina he followed the Arab fashion of conducting rassias (ghazawat
–raids) on the caravans of his opponents, particularly the Meccans. He led
three such rassias himself in 623 and two more in the first quarter of 624,
one of which consisted of some 314 men attacking a wealthy Meccan caravan
returning from Syria. This led to the battle of Badr (cf. sura The Spoils)
where Mohammad led his army in person. He led much larger Muslim forces on
rassias that same year against other nomadic tribes. The following year he
fought the indecisive battle of Uhud. In his closing years he fought the
battle of Hunayn, after which he established himself as militarily the
strongest man in the Arabian peninsula. In the year 630 he carried out his
biggest rassia when he took an army of 30,000 men on a month’s march to the
Syrian border. Inevitably he met with resistance from the Christians of
Syria, an experience which changed his attitude towards Christians in
general, especially those of Ethiopia, from friendship to hostility. We
should be straight about all this and consider in an objective and
scholarly manner whether both Koran texts and the life of Mohammad himself
do in fact lend justification to the use of violence by some of today’s
Moslems for the purposes of religion as religion is understood in Islam. I
say ‘as religion is understood in Islam’ because Mohammad identified his
political role as sole ruler with his religious role. Islam ever since has
maintained the identification. The political and civic consequences are
serious.
Fn 4.
During one session of the
annual conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain
in either 2001 or 2003 a participant made the suggestion that theologians
in dialogue with Moslems should hold back from discussing or mentioning God
as Trinity in order to find agreement with them. Such an attitude, well
intended though it is, will defeat the very purpose of inter-faith dialogue
which is ‘speaking the truth in love’ (Eph.4), will not present God as
God but only a diminished and
anthropomorphic notion of God, which defeats the purpose of revelation, and
departs from the instruction given by Christ in Matthew 28.19.
Fn 5.
In the last line a strong
emphasis must be placed on the word ‘We’ (mentally putting ‘however’
straight after it) to get the meaning Shakespeare intends.
Fn 6.
In its way this use of
Aristotelian/Thomistic/Scholastic concepts is a bit of an intellectual conceit,
maybe a bit too clever by half. But in another way it is not. The idea it
expresses is important, that what God wanted for all his creatures he set
about to achieve through one particular group of people or nation, so that
through them all mankind would benefit.
Fn 7.
I take almost all this
paragraph on Stephen straight out of J. Rawson Lumby’s ‘The Acts of the
Apostles’ (Cambridge University Press 1904, first edition 1885), which is
one volume in the Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges, the
General Editor being J.J.S. Perowne DD, Bishop of Worcester. It is but one
example of the immense scholarship of the Church of England of that period.
Fn 8.
Here in Romans Paul uses the
same word ‘prosopolempsis’ as Peter uses in Acts.10.34 ‘prosopolemptes’. It
occurs in Col.3.23 with the same intent.
Three different authors. It might point to an agreed formula.
Fn.9
It is interesting to read the
way Dawkins deals with Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God in his
‘The God Delusion’. What comes over is the very serious difficulty he has
in understanding the concepts Aquinas is using. As a consequence his
treatment of them is painfully inadequate. Intellectually it is the poorest
part of his book.
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