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Introduction
Abraham in the Koran
The
Galatian Test
Conclusion
Footnotes
Home
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The Heythrop College
statement and the Galatian Test
While I was working on this
paper, Heythrop College published an article in the May 12th
2007 education supplement of May 12th 2007 of the Tablet, The
purpose of the piece was to promote their ‘BA course in Abrahamic
religions’. Its title was ‘One Source, Three Faiths’. I had written to the
college in November 2006 to inquire ‘what the college understood by
‘Abrahamic, what its understanding was of the connection between Mohammad
and Abraham, whether or not the college ascribes to Islam the same
relationship to Abraham as it ascribes to Judaism and Christianity, whether
or not it attributes any role, maybe even the same role in Salvation
History to Islam as it attributes to Judaism and Christianity; and if any
role, what role?’ The reply I received stated: ‘The degree offers a study
of the relatedness of the three faiths: Islam, Christianity and Judaism,
the issues which they have in common, those on which they differ and the
beginning of the modern period of theological dialogue between them. Does
that help?’ it asked.
It did not. The course as
described amounted to nothing more than just a study in comparative
religion; and if being ‘Abrahamic’ meant nothing more than that, then
Hindusim, Shintoism, Jainism, New Age philosophy and any and every religion
qualified as ‘Abrahamic’.
The May 2007 article however
tells us a lot more. It speaks of the college originators of the course as
‘recognising the patriarch (Abraham) as the common source of the three
traditions’, as wanting to bring the three faiths together and while
respecting the distinctive features of each, studying ‘the dynamic of
relatedness that each of them has towards the others’. It quotes the
eleventh century Pope Gregory V11 calling the King of Mauretania ‘his
brother in Abraham’ and, without quotes, saying he is a believer in God,
One and Creator, a papal opinion, it says, which is ‘more instructive than
the harsh judgement on Islam made by Byzantium Emperor Paleologus recently
drawn from obscurity by Benedict XVI’ at Regensburg University. The article
also quotes what Pope John Paul II said to Moslems in 1985: ‘Your God and
ours is one and the same, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of
Abraham’.
From that the article
concludes that Islam is Abrahamic. ‘A combination of Gregory VII and our
great recent pope offers sufficient warrant for the designation Abrahamic
religions’. It goes further -much further. It proposes that ‘we
(Christians) make a positive assessment of Islam to match what we have to
say about Judaism’. Its author (fn.8) then explains what he means. He
speaks first of Catholic Christianity as ‘coming to see the continuing life
of the Jewish people, with all that sustains them, as a sacrament, not
simply of otherness but also more importantly of God’. And he asks: ‘Could the
godly witness to divine transcendence lived out by Muslims also be regarded
as a related otherness within the divine dispensation, which in humility we
ought to value?’ The language is so woolly, so esoteric, the meaning of the
statement is difficult to pin down. What does a ‘related otherness’
actually mean? And what is meant by it being ‘within the divine
dispensation’? The word oikonomia, translated as dispensation occurs just
four times in the Bible, and that only in the NT epistles: 1 Cor 9.17 in the sense of being entrusted with,
Eph.1.10 with the meaning of bringing something about, Eph.3.2 meaning the
dispensing or administration (of grace), and Col.1.25 meaning commission or
assignment (by God). It is difficult. However, in Christian theology the phrase the ‘divine dispensation’ has
generally been used to mean the design of God for the distribution of his
saving grace in Christ, and that is consistent with the four NT usages.
What the writer of the article seems to mean by his statement,
therefore, is that which he thinks is particularly special, indeed unique,
about Islam is its emphasis on the transcendence of God from the world and
humanity; that that perception of God and the way it is lived out in Moslem
worship and speech about God is not to be found in Judaism and Christianity
(hence the ‘otherness’); and for that reason it constitutes a part of God’s
oikonomia or plan of salvation for humanity.
In itself, if that Moslem perspective on God is compatible with the
Christian faith, there wouldn’t be anything necessarily objectionable in
the idea. ‘Nihil humanum a me alienum puto’ is an accepted theology in
Christianity. There is a long tradition within the Church of welcoming
input such as Greek philosophy, the contribution of modern science and all
sorts of 19th and 20th century literary criticism to
help Christianity understand its Scriptures, and hence itself, better etc.
The bigger issue is whether this perspective on God is compatible with
God’s revelation of himself in his dealings with the Jewish people and in
Christ, whether in fact Mohammad’s notion of God is God.
God is of course transcendent, he is being itself. In the old
phrase he is Cause outside of causes (fn.9). The notion ‘transcendent’ simply
does not do it justice. It actually misleads because being ‘being itself’
does not imply ‘transcendence’. Being ‘’being itself’ is what makes
creation possible, and of its essence creation is continuous (so long as we
understand ‘continuous’ anthropomorphically, as we must, and as
inapplicable to the divine act of creation. Little wonder some Christian
philosophers preferred to the ‘via negativa’ in speaking of God!).
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that to speak of God as
transcendent can seriously mislead us in understanding the relationship of
Creator and the created. Besides which, to put it humanly, God is not
interested in the slightest in transcendence. There’s no such need. Being
the Uncaused Cause makes our concern for insisting on the ‘transcendence’
of God quite trivial.There’s no surer indication of a man-made religion
that emphasis on the transcendence, power and greatness of God. That is
man’s notion of him; and it is neither what God is about or what God is
interested to reveal to us.
God is the God of revelation. God is ‘he’ who formed us in the womb
and blessed us before we were born (Jer.1.4), who is ‘God in our midst’
(Dominus Deus tuus in medio tui) (Deut. 6.14), who invites us to walk in
his light (Is.2.5). a jealous God, a devouring fire (Deut.4.24) jealous for
Jerusalem (Zech.1.14) whom he clothes in light and invites to glory
(Is.60.1). His love is more fragrant than wine, his name is like perfume
poured out, an apricot tree among the trees of the wood, our beloved, our
gazelle, leaping over the mountains, his lips are lilies, his whispers are
sweetness itself, he dwells on the spice-bearing mountains where he invites
us to dwell with him forever and be to him like spiced wine welcoming his
kisses (Song of Songs). He was a slave in Egypt with his people, he fled
with them through the Red Sea and fed them with manna in the desert, he
wandered with them for forty years, covering them with his wings like a hen
covering her chicks, he was in exile with them in Babylon; and he was born
as the baby of a young girl among them, and taught them face to face, and
wept over them when they would not accept him, and was crucified among them
for their sake and the sake of all mankind among whom he now dwells until
that moment when he will show himself like a gazelle or a young wild goat
on the spice-bearing mountain, where we shall see him not in a glass darkly
but as he is (Songs of Songs and Paul), in his new heaven and new earth,
the holy city, the new Jerusalem, a bride adorned for her husband, when at
last God has his dwelling among men, and they shall be his people and he
will himself be with them, wiping every tear from their eyes, putting an
end to death and to mourning and crying and pain, for the old order will
have passed away Apoc.21). This is God, there is no other. Any other god is
a false god. Our God is our Father, as his Son told us. And that is what
Pope John Paul II expressly told us, as we shall see shortly.
The author of the article
goes on to assert that the designation ‘Abrahamic’, is a designation that
Moslems would understand easily because, he maintains, it corresponds to
their understanding of themselves and their origins’. It does not. Moslems
understand themselves, above all the origins of their religion, emphatically
differently. He also states that Jews and Christians might initially find
the idea difficult. The designation, he writes, might be ‘too Muslim’ for
both of them. Well, hardly. If anything, and certainly with Judaism in its
popular form, the reverse might well be true. And in the light of how Islam
understands itself and its origins, it is not ‘Muslim’ at all
The article carries on to
make an interpretation of the Vatican 2 document Nostra Aetate, which was
the Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to
non-Christian Religions. The article says: ‘Nostra Aetate was saying to the
Church: “If you want to be missionary, connect again with the Jewish
experience of God. And recognise that there is an Islamic tradition that
understands itself to spring from that same source and to be deeply
committed to God. These religious engagements are central to the Christian
mission” ’. These assertions about the intent, indeed the actual text of
the Council’s declaration need to be questioned. It could well be a case of
a wish being father to a thought.
Islam understands itself to
spring, not from the spiritual experience of the Jewish people, but solely
from what it believes to be God’s revelation made directly to Mohammad, a
revelation furthermore that is as from eternity, owing nothing whatsoever
to the Jewish people. To ascribe to Islam an understanding of itself as in
some way founded in the Jewish experience of God is fundamentally to
misunderstand the Islamic notion of revelation. Though done with the best
intentions this reading of the meaning revelation has in Islam is importing
into Islam elements of the Catholic understanding of divine revelation. It
will not work. It is building dialogue on sand. It will all crumble.
The spiritual history of the
Jewish people is not just indescribably profound, it is in Christian belief
unique. God chose the Jews, no other nation, to be the vehicle of salvation
for all mankind. Islam does not accept that, but that is the Christian
faith. In Christian theology being ‘of the issue of Abraham’ (Gal. 3.29)
comes about, not by belonging to this or that nation or this or that race,
but by ‘belonging to Christ’ (ibid) which is available to everyone,
inclusive of anyone and everyone who never heard or might never hear of Christ
but is a person of good will. God’s ‘hidden purpose’ (Eph.1.10) is to bring
‘the universe, all in heaven and on earth, into a unity in Christ’ (ibid).
It is difficult for the Jewish people to accept that the crucial part they
played in God’s saving plan for all mankind has been done and is no more,
that ‘now that faith has come, the tutor’s role is at an end’ (Gal.3.25).
‘The Lord’s greatness reaches beyond the realm of Israel’ (Mal.1.5). They
do not accept the Christian understanding of Salvation History, that ‘We
are all Semites’ as Pope John 23rd said. If they did, they would
be Christians.
Genesis
represents Abraham as the father and founder of the Jewish nation. He was
an Arab. From modern day Iraq. He was not from the land of Canaan but, as
he described himself to the Hittites ‘an alien and settler among you’
(23.4). Genesis records that the Hittites treated him nonetheless with
great generosity. ‘There (in Canaan) he died at a good old age, after a
very long life, and was gathered unto his people’, which ‘people’ (or ‘his
father’s kin’ as in the NEB translation) were not themselves Jews of course
(Gen.25.8f). He was buried by his sons Isaac and Ishmael in the cave where
he had buried his wife Sarah, at Machpelah, on the land to the east of Mamre,
which is Hebron in Canaan. The cave was on the plot of land he had
purchased from Ephron, the son of Sohar the Hittite (25v.9f & 23.19).
There is significance for our times in these lines of Genesis. The father
and founder of the Jewish people was an Arab. So was his wife Sarah. Hagar,
her slave-girl, the mother of his son Ishmael, was Egpytian (16.1). What
her racial roots were who knows? Arab or African? Who cares? Obviously
Abraham didn’t. Neither did Sarah. It was at her suggestion after all that
he took Hagar as his concubine, indeed as his wife (v.3) to ‘found a
family’ for him. The Genesis author in 16 7-16 has the angel of the Lord
speaking with Hagar and making a promise of a countless posterity such as
the Lord made to Abraham. God,
hearing little Ishmael crying in the arms of his mother, discarded by
Abraham to wander helpless and abandoned in the wilderness of Beersheba,
promises ‘I will make of him a great nation’ (21 8-21).
Abraham’s
forefathers, to whom he was gathered on his death, were Arab not Jewish.
Before he died (Ch.24) Abraham instructs his servant to make sure Isaac’s
wife ‘is not a woman of the Canaanites in whose land I dwell’ (v.3), the
land ‘the Lord swore to me he would give to my descendants’ (v.7), but a
woman from ‘my own country, my own
kindred’ (v.4). In other words an Arab girl from Ur of the Chaldees. And
their son Jacob is likewise told by Isaac to find a wife from among his
mother’s relatives (ch.28) back in ‘the lands of the eastern tribes’
(29.1). It merits reflection that the three patriarchs of the Jewish
people: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their wives, the three mothers of the
Jewish people: Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, were all Arab. God put the stamp
of universality on his saving design from the very start.
Race is irrelevant to God,
that is one of the most important messages the Bible sends out in the Noah,
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob stories precisely as it does in the Acts of the
Apostles. What God wanted was for the faith of Abraham to be clung on to,
and deepened and developed, from generation to generation. Land and the
line of descent of course mattered because both gave to that faith a
physicality which conferred a recognisable and defendable identity. But
only until such time -‘ the dispensation of the fullness of time’- when a
small band of the descendents of Abraham headed by Simon and Saul were sent
by the risen Jesus of Nazareth of the House of David out of that land to
make all nations his disciples (Mt.28.19). ‘There is no question here of
Greek and Jews, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave
and freeman; but Christ is all and is in all’ (Col.3.11). ‘There is no such
thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female. For you are one
person in Christ Jesus. If you belong thus to Christ, you are the issue of
Abraham and so heirs to the promise’ (Gal.3.28f).
It is a matter of some
concern that the author of the article, while using a 1985 quotation from
Pope John Paul II which, he believes, lends support to the college designation
of Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity as Abrahamic, made no
reference to the same Pope’s lengthy interview on the subject of Christian
relations with Islam in the book ‘Crossing the Threshold of Hope’ (Jonathan
Cape 1994). It cannot possibly be a statement which the course organisers
can be unaware of. The book is very well known and will be in the library
of every substantial Catholic educational institution. The statement itself
is to be found in The Tablet 23rd September 2000.
In it the
Pope, after referring to Nostra Aetate, specifically to the statement of
the Church about its high regard for Muslims, and welcoming and encouraging
dialogue with Islam, reflects on crucial differences between God’s
revelation of himself in the Bible and what is contained in the Koran. I am
putting the passage into italics because of its important and its relevance
to this issue. ‘Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads
the Koran, clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation.
It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about
himself, first in the Old Testament through the prophets, and then finally
in the New Testament through his Son. In Islam all the richness of God’s
self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New
Testaments, has definitely been set aside.’
It is not
possible to reconcile this statement with the Heythrop College proposition
that Abraham is the source of Islam (which, as I stated a number of times,
is not the Islamic faith anyway) The Koran, says the Pope, reduces
Divine Revelation completely, which at the very least means it does not
transmit it. It takes people from Divine Revelation, not to it. Divine
Revelation, says the Pope, re-stating what is the Christian creed,
concluded with the life, passion, death and resurrection of the Son of God.
The pronouncement of the Pope is that the final statements of God about
himself are those to be found in Jesus Christ. In saying this the Pope is
only re-stating what is simply basic to the Christian faith, that
revelation is contained in the Old and New Testaments and is not to be
found elsewhere, that it was concluded with the birth, life, mission, death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, full of grace and truth. Revelation took
place in God’s dealings with the Jewish people –the OT, and in Jesus
Christ, his incarnate Son. It is not only not to be found in the Koran but,
says the Pope, the richness of God’s self-revelation has been set aside by
the Koran. Heythrop cannot turn a blind eye to papal statements like this,
not casually made but in published form.
And the
Pope continues: ‘Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room
for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned but only as a
prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Mohammad. There is also mention
of Mary his Virgin Mother but the tragedy of the redemption if completely
absent.’ The Pope then makes a statement of immense perceptiveness and
value: For this reason not only the theology but also the anthropology
of Islam is very distant from Christianity’
One has to
read the Old and New Testaments on the one hand and the Koran on the other
carefully to get the Pope’s meaning. The Koran is a monologue in which Mohammad
delivers his account of religion. There are some minor parties but
basically there are just the two participants, Mohammad and Allah as
Mohammad represents him (the reader will understand that as a Christian I
do not accept what seems to be the under-articulated but implicit
perspective of Heythrop College as contained in their article that the
Koran somehow is divine revelation. I say ‘seems’. But what else is meant
by its statement that ‘the godly witness to divine revelation lived out by
Moslems also be regarded (ie along
with Judaism) as a related otherness within the divine dispensation which
in humility we ought to value’? And how else are we to understand the
college statement that ‘Abraham is the course of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam’? Some explanation is needed at the very least). The degree of
‘anthropology’ in the Koran is that of a single preacher setting out his
religious experience and, in other chapters, responding both to the
requirements upon him to regulate local Arab tribal society eg surah 4
entitled Women. and to events such as the Battle of Badr in surah 8 entitled The Spoils.
The
anthropology of the Bible story is decisively different. It is a record of
human beings, a huge crowd of them, men and women, nations and tribes,
their doings, their history, their tribulations, their triumphs, their
sins, their betrayals, their poetry, their prayers, God’s dealings with
them, their response, God’s response, their prophets, their kings, their
judges, their disasters, of God’s intervention in the events and the
destiny of mankind, first by choosing the Jewish people to be the
instruments of his love for all mankind, and then by God the Son becoming
man to save and to glorify mankind. It is the story of Jesus, his mother,
his preaching and miracles, his death and resurrection, his disciples,
their actions, letters, and visions of the end of time. All of human life
is there, that is why it is anthropological. It is anything but the one-way
street of the Koran, it is the record of God’s incredible interaction with
men and women, and of the interaction of men and women with each other and
with God. The Koran is full of preaching, the Bible is full of stories,
characters and events.
The
anthropology of the Koran is very distant from that of the Bible, states
the Pope, and not just its theology. For him to say that just about its
theology puts a huge question mark against the Heythrop assertion that
Christianity, Judaism and Islam shares a common source. But to say it about
the anthropology of the Koran is something again. Anthropology concerns the
nature of humanity. Our nature is only to be understood in relation to God.
Our relation to God is being to being. Being attracts being. Attraction is
the nature of being. ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’ states the Song of
Songs. It is not transcendence, it is not power, it is not greatness that
matters with God. It is love. Even the Canticle could not anticipate how
great is the love of God for mankind. God so loved the world as to give us
his only Son. God became man. God did not abhor the Virgin’s womb. God
became the flesh of Mary. God died for us. If God hadn’t done it, it would
be unthinkable. The nature of man comes from the nature of God. Actio
sequitur esse. God is love. That is the revelation of God of himself. That
is the difference in anthropology that John Paul II is talking about.
I now wish to return to the
first line of the Heythrop article in the Tablet, namely its title: One
Source, Three Faiths. There is no attempt in the article to explain what is
meant here by ‘source’ or in the subtle variation of it in the phrase
‘common source of the three traditions’. ‘Tradition’ and ‘Faith’ are not
the same. To say the very least, in the two thousand years since
Christianity departed from Judaism they have developed into two very
different traditions indeed. Likewise, it is abundantly clear from the
Koran that Mohammad framed for Islam an even more different ‘tradition’
from both the other two. What matters decisively in Islam as stated with
utmost clarity in the Koran is Allah and Mohammad. Abraham, Moses, Jesus
and other ‘prophets’ are exemplars only. Mohammad is explicit time and
again that he was creating a different set of beliefs, a distinct system of
worship and a different morality. Just one example. In 5.73 Mohammad
repudiates the Trinity and warns Christians that to carry on believing in
it will merit them stern punishment. Nothing could be more intrinsic to the
very essence of Christian belief than its Trinitarian notion of God. The
whole Christian understanding of salvation rests on its belief in the
incarnation, mission, death and resurrection of the Second Person. Its
creed is framed precisely that way. Its whole liturgy is Trinitarian in its
feastdays, in every prayer, in every sacrament, in every gesture, not least
in that one distinctive sacramental, the sign of the cross which in every
blessing invokes the three Persons. The ‘tradition’ Mohammad established
has grown in its difference ever since.
Now, the college team organising
this BA course in what they are calling ‘Abrahamics’ must know as well as
anyone that as far as Christianity and Judaism are concerned Abraham is not
the source in the sense of originator of their religions. He is, as we have
seen in Genesis, one stage on the long road of Salvation History. Salvation
History, as it is represented in the Scriptures, begins with the covenant
God makes with Noah. For Islam Abraham likewise is not its source. The
Islamic belief is that the Koran as written by God himself in Arabic
without human intervention of any sort, and from eternity, which precedes
Abraham somewhat. Indeed, as has been shown, and as any a reader of the
Koran can easily find out for themselves, Moses figures much more in the
Koran than Abraham, as does Mohammad himself. It would be a most basic
contradiction of Islam, as indeed it is of Christianity, to represent
Abraham as the source of its faith. The whole point and purpose of Islam’s
understanding of revelation, and of Mohammad’s role in it, is that there
were no originators of Islam other than God himself. Not even Mohammad. In
fact, certainly not Mohammad. Much less so Abraham. If there one pillar
more than any other that Islam stands on, that is it. Abraham in Islam is
not its source, he is no more than an examplar.
It is not for me to find a
meaning for what the college intends by the use of the word ‘source’, much
less to find a justification for what is meant by it. The Oxford dictionary
defines source to mean spring/fountainhead/from which a stream issues, and
Abraham was not that. Neither does Genesis have him either as the first man
with whom God deals at the start of his plan to save and restore mankind.
That man is Noah –theologically a much neglected figure. God’s first
covenant is with Noah. For the Genesis writer Noah stands for all humanity.
‘The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and
Japheth…..their descendants spread over the whole earth’ (Gen.9.18f). The
covenant with Noah was ‘the everlasting covenant between God and living
things on earth of every kind’ (v.16). Abraham is the next stage, the
progenitor of the Jewish people, that moment when God narrowed down his
saving plan to one specific nation as his instrument of achieving salvation
for all mankind when in Jesus Christ, ‘the alpha and omega, the first and
the last, the beginning and the end’ (Apoc.22.13) the fullness of time had
come. To Abraham and his descendants
God promised a particular territory (Gen.13. v.14-18). The nuts and bolts
of salvation were being put into place. Yet Genesis despite distinguishing
between the descendants of Abraham and all the other nations of the world
(22.18), still emphatically locates him within the unity of the totality of
mankind by tracing his origins to Shem the son of Noah (11 v.10-32) and
twice makes the point of saying that the blessings God will shower on
Abraham and his descendants can be made available to ‘all families on
earth’ (12.v.3 & 22.18).
It is in that last quoted
verse that we can, I think, find something that resembles a justification
of a sort for the college ascribing the word ‘source’ to Abraham, though
not the one it seems they have in mind. ‘All nations on earth shall pray to
be blessed as your descendants are blessed, and this because you have
obeyed me’ (Gen. 22.8). He was not a source. But his response to God was
instrumental, intrinsic and pivotal to God’s saving plan for mankind which
embraces not just those who confess the name of Jesus but men and women of
good will everywhere. ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother, my
sister and my mother’ (Mk.3.35). The faith of Abraham in his god was the
sort that expressed itself in obedience, in deeds, even his readiness,
apparently believing in child sacrifice, to kill his own son. No matter how
deficient his understanding of God was, his sense of God, of God’s nearness
and of God’s significance must have been intense beyond words. That amazing
dialogue between him and God over the fate of Sodom in chapter 18 is a
record of a tribal or national memory of a mystic. When Isaac his son
carrying the wood for the sacrifice on his own shoulders asked where the
young beast was for the sacrifice, Abraham replied: ‘God will provide’. It
is faith beyond telling.
In no way, however, is it
taking anything away from the significance and role of Abraham in salvation
history if the point is made that the same faith expressing itself in
obedience was the basis of the role of every pivotal person in that same
history. Noah as we have seen. And Moses. “Who am I that should go to
Pharaoh and should bring the Israelites out of Egypt? God answered: ‘I am
with you’. (Ex.3.11). Throughout the long history of Israel there is
instance after instance. ‘Ah, Lord God,’ I (Jeremiah) answered, ‘I do not
know how to speak. I am only a child.’ ‘I am with you and will keep you
safe’. (1.v6f). ‘The word of God came to Jonah a second time. ‘Go to the
great city of Nineveh. Go now and denounce it in the words I give you.’
Jonah obeyed at once’ (3.v1-3). Above all, there is the ‘fiat’ of Mary: ‘Behold
the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word’.
Finally, it all came to its climax in the obedience of Jesus. ‘Not my will
but thine be done’.
‘If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs
according to the promise’. Gal.3.29
That statement by Paul is the kernel of this paper.
Abraham finds his meaning in Jesus Christ, and only in Jesus Christ,
precisely as we saw in the opening verse of the first gospel, that of
Matthew. Anything said to come from Abraham which does not ‘put on Christ
as a garment’ (3.27) is not the gospel of Christ. And that is the kernel of
Paul’s message in his letter to the Galatians.
Paul had
preached in the province of Galatia during both his second and third
missionary journeys. When he fell ill there, the local Christians had
looked after him with great kindness. On both occasions he had then made
his way across Asia Minor into Europe, down into Greece and back into Asia
Minor to Ephesus. It is more than likely that he wrote his letter to the
Galatians from Ephesus roundabout the year 55. The occasion was the arrival
in Galatia of Christians of Jewish origin, probably from Jerusalem,
preaching ‘another gospel…than that which we preached to you’(1.7-8).
According
to Paul’s teaching God offered justification through the faith of and in
Christ. But according to these preachers, while faith in Christ had a role,
justification was not complete without observing the works of the law,
particularly circumcision and the feasts of the Jewish calendar. God has
indeed, said the preachers, blessed all the nations of the world in
Abraham, to whom he had given his covenant. Part of the covenant was the
commandment of circumcision and the calendar. The Gentile believers in
Christ would only be fully included in the covenant if they accepted
circumcision and performed the requirements of the Law such as the Jewish
calender.
In response Paul wrote his
letter to the Galatians. What the preachers were saying aroused his every
Christian instinct, it set off every single alarm bell in his head. He was
besides himself in anger. He says he was at his wits’ end (4.20). The
letter is full of invective. At the end of it he grabbed the scribe’s pen
and wrote a line himself. What he saw as clear as day was that the unique role
of Christ in the salvation story was being fatally compromised; and,
responding to the preachers’ invocation of Abraham, he set out the true
meaning of Abraham in the saving plan of God.
There are,
says Paul with all the insistence he could muster, two versions of Abraham:
that represented by Sarah who stands for freedom and that represented by
Hagar who stands for slavery (4.21 to 5.1).The difference between the two,
says Paul, is Christ. ‘Christ brought us freedom from the curse of the law
by becoming for our sake an accursed thing….The purpose of it all was that
the blessing of Abraham should in Jesus Christ be extended to the Gentiles,
so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith’ (3.13f). The
key to what Paul is about here is those four simple words: ‘the blessing of
Abraham’. The blessing of Abraham is Christ Jesus. Paul says ‘Now the
promises were pronounced to Abraham and to his ‘issue’. It does not say
‘issues’ in the plural but in the singular: ‘and to your issue’; and the
‘issue’ intended is Christ’ (3.16). In all this discussion that last
statement of Paul’s is crucial, that the one and only issue or seed of
Abraham is Christ.
The faith
of the Church, expressed in the writings which it made canonical, is all of
a piece. Matthew opens his gospel as saying that Salvation History leads
from Abraham to Jesus Christ; Paul says that Abraham does not have
‘seeds/issues (sperma) in the plural to whom God’s promise was made but in
the singular…and the issue intended is Christ’ (v16). Christ and only
Christ is what Abraham was all about. Christ, nothing else, not even the
Law, is the one and only purpose of Abraham. ‘The law was a temporary
measure pending the arrival of the ‘issue’ to whom the promise was made
(3.19). Therefore, Paul declares, ‘faith in Christ is the ground on which
the promised blessing is given, and given to those who have such faith’
(v.22).
Christ is
salvation history, its alpha and its omega, its beginning and its end. ‘For
through faith you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus’ (v26).
The faith of Abraham, our father in faith, in the promise God made to him,
had its meaning in that promise being Christ Jesus. ‘For through faith you
are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. Baptised into union with
him, you have all put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew
and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person
in Christ Jesus. If you thus belong to Christ, you are the ‘issue’ of
Abraham and so heirs to the promise’ (vv.26-29). In the gospel of Paul,
which he is insistent to emphasise is ‘the gospel of Christ’ (1.8) as
opposed to the gospel of the preachers, the meaning, role and purpose of
Abraham is Christ Jesus, and only Christ Jesus -‘Christ in us, the hope of
glory to come’ (Col.1.27).
For that
reason it has to be stated that Abraham is not one source of three faiths.
Christ was his ‘singular issue’, Christ and only Christ. In God’s saving
plan Abraham had no other purpose, he was not intended by God to be
‘source’ to anything else. We dilute the Christian gospel at its essence if
we preach anything else. That would be ‘another gospel’ and not ‘the gospel
of Christ’. There is of course indirect revelation which we find in creation
and in the good things men and women say, write and do, to be found in all
religions and in all walks of life.
But direct revelation is to be found only in the Old Testament
record of God’s dealings with the Jewish people and in the New Testament gospels
and writings. Abraham was the
forefather of the people from whom came the Christ, the Word of God,
through whom all things were made, one with the Father, the light of men,
who dwelt among us, through whom grace and truth came to us, who alone has
seen God, God’s only Son, who has made the Father known to us (Jn.1.1-18).
This is not the Moslem faith. Neither is it the Jewish faith. But it is the
Christian faith. For Christians Christ Jesus is ‘the way, the truth and the
life’ (14.6); as Christians we must ‘speak the truth in love’ (Eph.4.15).
Belonging to Christ through baptism (Gal.3.27) is what it means to be
Abrahamic, nothing else.
The claim
that Abraham was a source of Islam is not supported by Scripture. Making
references to Abraham in a religious document and citing him as an example
of a prophet or a believer in the oneness of God is not Abrahamic in its
Christian meaning. Islam has no more significance in God’s saving design,
and no less, than any other non-Judaic/Christian religion. Likewise,
Mohammad has no more significance, and no less, than any founder and
preacher of any other non-Judaic/Christian religion. There is nothing more
special about Islam than any other non-Judaic/Christian religion. We all
know members of other religions who are as loving and kind as any Christian
or Jew. We all know humanists and atheists who are as loving and kind as
any Christian and Jew. The Christian faith, certainly in its Catholic form,
not only does not deny but also emphatically attributes to non-Judaic/Christian
religions, and to humanism, a role in that plan. Whatever promotes goodness
is part of that plan.
However,
there is only one saviour, who is Christ Jesus, who is the one ‘single
issue’ of Abraham, the light of every man coming into the world, through
whom comes grace and truth, who is with the Father and has made him known.
Heythrop College has no grounds to attribute to Islam a role in God’s plan
of salvation of the same significance as Judaism and Christianity. That, to
use the statement of St Augustine in de Trinitate, is our faith because it
is the Catholic faith. That faith we make known to others, neither
hesitantly nor arrogantly, but, as the letter to the Ephesians has
instructed us: ‘in love’.
No one can criticise the good
intent that lies behind such statements as Abraham is the one source of the
three faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We live in an age of severe
religious conflict. We have seen in the Holocaust how unbelievably evilly
and cruelly Jews have been regarded and treated by nations that professed
Christianity. Jews themselves in the
Holy Land itself, the very birthplace of the Jewish and Christian faiths,
have driven Arabs, Moslems and Christians both, out of their homes, hounded
them out of the land they have lived in for centuries and forced them into
refugee camps, confined them to a poverty-ridden over-crowded strip of land
in Gaza, or in isolated Bantustans separated from their fellow Palestinians
and are allowing movement between them only with pass laws and regulations
as wicked as those of South African apartheid. Moslems in Iraq, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan are denying Christians the practice of their faith,
even subjecting them to forcible conversion. In Egypt the Christian Copts
are daily subjected to harassment, discrimination and persecution. In the UK young Moslems, deliberately and
evilly misled by preachers and teachers, have committed appalling outrage
on their fellow British citizen in the name of Islam. In these
circumstances no one and no institution that tries to find common ground
between the three religions and promote understanding and mutual respect is
to be criticised; on the contrary they are to be praised. There’s no harm
however in asking how they are going about it. There are things in common
but there are huge, indeed fundamental, differences as well. It is required of all Catholic theology
faculties to say so. If we do not speak about what we believe, we may as
well not believe it. The Epistle to the Ephesians 5.14 advises us how
Christians should conduct dialogue and debate: ‘speak the truth in love, so
that we may grow unto Christ in all things’
Abraham in God’s plan of
salvation led to Christ and only to Christ.
Mohammad in the Koran does not lead his readers to Christ. ‘The only
true faith in God’s sight is Islam’ declares Mohammad (3.19). He is
entitled to such a belief and Islam must never be denied the right to
express it. But it is of course incompatible with Christianity.
Furthermore, what the Son
made known about God was not really about power and greatness and
transcendence and suchlike things. For what they worth, they can be known
by reason unaided. Such things are human concerns, not God’s. He who is, he
who is being itself, he who sustains all creation in existence, is not
concerned with power. He is power itself. Concern for God’s greatness is
evidence of the absence of revelation. The Son, who is revelation, is not
about God’s greatness and transcendenc. That is of the mind of man. That is
a human concern. God’s revelation of himself is the incarnation –the
enfleshment- of the Son of God, even unto death. The Son of God who is
revelation is about the communion and fellowship and sharing of God with
man. God made us for himself, as Augustine wrote and our hearts are restless
until they rest in him. ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he
shall dwell with them and they shall be his people, and God himself shall
be with them and be their God (Apoc.21.4). The incarnation of the Son of
God, second person of the Holy Trinity, by the will of the Father and the
work of the Holy Spirit, who came down upon his mother, is the ultimate
expression of that tabernacle and that dwelling, until such time, the
fullness of time, as we share in the beatific vision. Abraham has no other
offspring, no other purpose.
‘This is our faith because it
is the Catholic faith’ (Augustine de Trinitate I.7 haec et mea fides est
quando haec est catholica fides).
Accordingly ‘by the gentle authority of Christ’s law, which is love’
(1.6 suavissimo imperio lex Christi, hoc est caritas), we are
summoned to make that faith and revelation known, always keeping in mind
that ‘nowhere else is a mistake more dangerous, nor a search more
laborious, nor discovery more rewarding’
(1.5 neque periculosius alcubi erratur, nec
laborosius aliquid queritur, nec fructuosius aliquid invenitur’.
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