From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Religions: India Islamicism

Philip Jenkins has an excellent brief introduction to the thought of the Indian Muslim thinker, Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi, in the December 24 issue of TNR.  He writes:

“His guiding assumption was a totalistic view of Islam: Everything in the universe was God’s creation, so Muslims could freely use modern technology and organization–but only to build a visionary new Islamic order. Where Mawdudi broke from his contemporaries was in his utter rejection of all historic Islamic models as unworthy of Islam’s First Age: He condemned virtually every achievement of Islamic politics and culture as jahiliyya, ignorance, the word normally used to describe the pagan darkness that prevailed in Arabia before Muhammad’s time. Muslims who resisted the call were part of a new jahiliyya and could legitimately become the targets of jihad. . . .

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Religions: Anthropology of Religion

The second edition of the Blackwell Reading in the Anthropology of Religion (edited, Michael Lambek) looks to be a great resource, for those who like such things.  There are classic essays from Tylor, Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz, Wittgenstein on Frazer, Susanne Langer on symbols and Mary Douglas on clean and unclean animals, Victor Turner, Maurice Bloch, and Roy Rappaport on ritual.  There’s a nice cross-section of theoretical essays and field-worky ones.  Perhaps the most useful part of the volume are the extensive bibliography and the guide to literature, organized both geographically and topically.

Religions: Jihad

Despite the evidence of the past half-decade (longer, actually), many Muslims still insist on portraying Islam as fundamentally peaceful, tolerant of non-Muslims, and claim the holy-war interpretation of jihad as an aberration of a few fanatics. Perhaps not surprisingly, these apologists are found not only in Arab and Iranian mosques but in American univerities.

Andrew G Bostom, a professor of medicine in Rhode Island, massively destroys these apologies in The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Prometheus 2005). After a lengthy introduction, the book consists mainly of a compilation of texts relating to jihad – from the Qur’an, ancient and modern Qur’anic commentators, eye-witnesses to jihad from the seventh to the twentieth century, and historians and journalists.

Religions: Idolatry and Comparative Religion

In its origins, the study of comparative religion in the West arose within a Christian context. Many of the early writers in this field emphasized the imperfections of other world religions, and attempted to show how those imperfections were realized or corrected in Christianity.

In an 1871 volume entitled Ten Great Religions (first serialized in The Atlantic Monthly!), James Freeman Clarke argued that “comparative theology” (tinged with competitive Darwinism) could be used to establish the superiority of Christian faith. A “fair survey of the principal religions of the world” will show that Christianity is

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Religions: Islam: Mirror of Christendom, Part III

One premise of the above analysis is that Islam, which conquered some of the most vibrant areas of early Christianity, was and is a judgment of God, and therefore that Christians must recognize that Islam?s rise and continuing success results from the failures of the church. Laurence E. Browne concluded that the ?eclipse of Christianity in Asia?Ewas due to the ?feebleness?Eof the church?s faith and witness. It will not do, he points out, to say that Christianity failed to make headway because of the power of the scimitar: ?persecution to the death does not stop a real Christian movement.?EThe footprints that we traced back to the criminal?s hideout turn out to be our own.

The exact nature of our crime, however, is not so obvious. It has been suggested that Islam is a judgment on Eastern Christianity?s attraction to icons, and will continue until the unbiblical decision of the so-called seventh ecumenical council is reversed. Though this might account for the persistence of Islam in Eastern Christendom, it fails to explain Islam?s resurgence in the modern West. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy offered the intriguing hypothesis that Islam was a judgment on the church for her inability to agree about the date of Easter, since without a unified holiday the church had no unified time.

The circumstances of Islam?s rise are of less significance than the fact that it continues to function as a parody of Christianity, a distorting mirror that exposes by exaggerating the blemishes of Christendom. Ultimately, these blemishes all boil down to the church?s failure to live and proclaim the gospel, our unwillingness to stake our lives on the wager that we have entered a new creation. In general, this failure is in two directions: On the one hand, we are faced with a Judaizing parody of the church because we have become a Judaizing parody of the church; on the other hand and somewhat paradoxically, we are faced with a Judaizing parody of the church because we are not nearly Jewish enough. Our simultaneous Judaizing and de-Judaizing of Christian faith is evident in four areas: Christological, ecclesiological, sacramental, and political. We will examine each of these in turn, and each will provide both a richer theological perspective on Islam and an insight into what it will take for Christianity to respond fully to Islam.

First, as noted above, Islam arose in a region of Christendom plagued by Christological heresy, of both Nestorian and Monophysite varieties, and such Christological confusion is both Judaizing and unHebraic. It is Judaizing because it implicitly denies what Nicea was designed to safeguard, namely, the gospel announcement that Jesus brings final and full redemption. Nicea determined that the unsurpassable gospel of the New Testament depended on the fact that Jesus was the eternal Son of God incarnate as man. As T. F. Torrance has put it, ?If God himself has not come to be one with us in the incarnation, then the love of God finally falls short of coming all the way to be one with us, and is not ultimately love.?EBoth sides of that formula are equally crucial: For the gospel to be good news, God must come down to us, and God must come down to be one with us. Both Nestorianism and Monophysitism teach a truncated gospel because they present a truncated Christ ?ENestorianism because God doesn?t quite become one with us, and Monophysitism because God makes us one of Him.

Early Christological heresies are unHebraic (or, to say the same thing, Hellenic) in the same way that all early heresies were unHebraic. From Arius to Apollinaris to Nestorius, all Christological heresies arose from a sniffy Greek disdain for any God who lowered Himself to come into close contact with time and created reality, a God who mucks Himself up with flesh and blood and clay and spittle. Had they taken their fundamental theology from the Pentateuch rather than from Plato, they would have discerned that the God of Israel has been moving within time since the first ray of light, that He has been mixing it up with tyrants and arrogant despots for centuries, that it would be the most natural thing in the world for Him to become man. They would have realized that God?s hands were dirty before man had hands.

From this angle, Islam parodies Christianity?s pallid confession of the incarnation, which appeared and continues to appear not only in Christological heresy (Arianism is rampant in modern Christianity) but also in our inability to articulate a fully Trinitarian gospel. Too often, Christian apologetics to and polemics toward Islam have worked from a basically Islamic unitarianism, a theology that blurs the antithesis at the very point where the antithesis must be least blurry. At the very point where Christianity should drive Islam from the field, Christian apologetics has turned apologetic. Mohammed likely never heard a clear proclamation of who Jesus is, and, consequently, of who the Christian God is. It is likely that Islam still has not.

Point one on the church?s to-do list: Begin to preach, teach, and live a fully Trinitarian Christianity.

Second, when Islam first began to conquer the Arabian Peninsula, Arabia had long been a dispensable pawn in conflicts between Byzantium and Persia, and when the Byzantines retreated, you could almost hear the swoosh as Christians from Ethiopia rushed into the vacuum to take their place. During those periods when Arabia was not useful to the Byzantines, it was simply ignored. Christianity thus entered Arabia not as good news but as a sporadically invading, sporadically indifferent, but always alien political power. Arabs might have been excused if they came away with the impression that the interests and agenda of the Byzantine empire were identical the interests and agenda of the Christian church.

Many seventh-century Christians embraced Islam because it represented a liberation from the overbearing lordship of Byzantium. Christians converted and fought alongside Mohammed in some of the early Muslim conquests, and former Christians married into the families of the early caliphs. For Arabs, Islam was more evangelical than Christianity. Modern missionaries to Islamic nations continue to be seen as imperial invaders, and as a result have had little impact. There is black humor in the fact that during the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries to Islam ?converted?Efar more Christians than Muslims.

Further, in the sixth century the church in the Middle East was deeply divided. Byzantine Melkites, Nestorian, and Monophysite (Jacobite) Christians contended with one another, but according to later writers, the contention had little to do with the purity of the faith. In 893, Eliyya Jauhari, a Nestorian eventually consecrated bishop of Damascus, reported on the strife between Byzantines and Nestorians:

whereas they differ in word they agree in meaning; and although they contradict one another outwardly the agree inwardly. And all of them follow one faith, and believe in one Lord, and serve one Lord. There is no difference between them in that, nor any distinction except from the point of view of party feelings and strife.

Petty bickering was unlikely to attract converts, and, more fundamentally, division of this sort was a denial of the gospel that announced the union of Jew and Greek into ?one new man,?Ea contradiction of baptism that proclaimed the end of ancient divisions by union of all in Christ (Gal. 3:28; Eph 2:11-22).

Again, the early history of Islam exposes our Judaizing, the church?s failure to live according to the Spirit and our preference for the ?fleshly?Estrife of the old creation. And it exposes our inadequate Hebraism as well. Islam?s unity should not be exaggerated; it is divided between Sunni and Shi?ite, and subdivided further within those two large camps. Yet, even with its divisions Islam provides an overarching structure that transcends national and ethnic boundaries. In the main, Islamic nations recognize that they are part of a larger whole, and the individual Muslim has a sense of being part of a ?people of God?Ethat is not confined to one locale, but embraces the globe. In this way, Islam appears more Christian than the church, especially the modern churches, which can hardly see beyond their denominational or national boundaries. The church does not see herself as a global nation; in short, we do not recognize that we are the new Israel.

Point two: Don?t forget that we are Christians and churchmen, not agents of American foreign policy. Pursue the visible and global unity of the church.

Third, in the early centuries the Christianity of North Africa, and especially of Syria, was radically ascetic. Pillar-sitting Simon Stylites was a Syrian monk, and Eastern monasticism as a whole began with Anthony?s retreat into the blistering sands of the Egyptian desert. Ascetic monasticism undermined the gospel in two ways. First, to retreat into the desert meant giving up the obligations of life in community and the obligations of culture-building. To be a holy man, a true and profound Christian, meant to retreat from culture. But this was an implicit denial of Christ?s Lordship over all things, which is the basic confession of the apostolic church. Second, Eastern monasticism suppressed the joy that the gospel released. When God decided to save the world, He sent Jesus to eat and drink, but the followers of Jesus introduced inhuman fasts, isolation, silence, and self-affliction. Ascetics were as tin-eared to the festive music of the gospel as the Pharisees of first-century Jerusalem.

Islam was in part a reaction to and in part an extension of these trends within Arabian, Syrian, and Egyptian Christianity. It was a reaction in the sense that Islam has always been not merely a religion but a civilization. Though Islam has its holy men and sages, its ascetics and mendicants, it has always been emphasized that one can be a good Muslim without living at the top of a pillar. As many Muslim apologists point out, the faithful Muslim serves Allah in his daily life, as he submits to Allah in his eating and drinking, in his marriage and raising children, in work and in worship. Sura 107 pronounces woes on anyone who devotes himself to prayer and neglects acts of mercy, and among the targets of this prophetic warning were Christian monks who abandoned their fellowmen (cf. 57.27). On the other hand, Islam perpetuates the asceticism of Eastern Christianity. At the center of the church?s life is a table filled with bread and wine, but the fast of Ramadan is much more central in Islam. Looking in the mirror should, again, make us wince, for the church has for centuries been celebrating the Supper as if it were Ramadan. This is not just a minor issue of liturgical tone; it is a denial of the gospel; it raises a Judaizing doubt about the Bridegroom?s arrival.

Point three: Put the feast at the center of the church?s life, and do the Supper the way it was meant to be done — often, and joyously.

Finally, Islam, as noted just above, has always understood itself not merely as a religion but as a politics and a civilization, and this vision has been especially prominent in modern Islam and Islamism. ?Islam?Edoes not refer merely to a set of practices and beliefs, but to that portion of the world that has been subdued to Allah; it is a contraction of ?House of Islam,?Ethe ?Dar al-Islam,?Ewhich is opposed in Islamic jurisprudence to the ?Dar al-Harb,?Ethe ?house of war.?EAllah, the Muslim believer says, will not be satisfied until the world has entered the Dar al-Islam, until every nation adopts the shari?a as its standard of righteousness, until every ruler gives ear to the judgments of the ulama, until every child memorizes and recites the Qur?an from his earliest years. The Muslim, in short, believes that in his religion inheres an all-embracing politics, intellectual culture, and nurture.

And this vision is not purely theoretical. In a number of Muslim nations, an Islamic civilization has been erected in the face of expansive Western secularism, and this is a most impressive achievement. In fact, the specific threat to the United States can be traced to precisely this achievement. Members of the Taliban were trained in the schools of Wahhabi Islam, an eighteenth-century ?Puritan?Emovement that has long been promoted by the Saudis. And in Iran, to take another example, Islam continues to shape political life. This is not to say that such Islamic civilization is always agreeable to the people who live within it. Many Iranians chafe under the rule of the clerics, and Iran has in any case always divided its loyalties between its ancient Persian heritage and its Islamic identity. Yet, Islam is a threat to the West today precisely because it is a civilization, a politics and a paideia, and not merely a ?religion.?E

This helps us understand something of the power that Islam has to hold its adherents. Sociologists of knowledge talk about social orders as ?plausibility structures,?Eby which they mean social and political arrangements that reinforce certain beliefs and discourage or exclude others. Liberal democracy, for example, encourages a certain kind of world view and a certain style of public engagement (?nice?Eand ?tolerant?E, which is different from the world view and style promoted by medieval Christendom. Sociologically, Islam is an all-embracing plausibility structure. Everything that surrounds a Muslim in the Dar al-Islam reinforces his faith: Calls to prayer ring out publicly fives times daily, his education includes learning and recitation of the Qur?an, universities seek to understand the whole of human knowledge from the perspective of Islam, and (in a total repudiation of First Amendment restrictions) political and legal practices are shaped by the shari?a. Until this plausibility structure is damaged or destroyed, it seems unlikely that the church will be able to make much progress in Islam.

Several trends suggest that there is some hope for progress. The fact that millions of Muslims are now living in the West gives Christians an unprecedented opportunity for mission, since we now deal with Muslims outside the reinforcing cultural and political apparatus of Islam. We no longer need to enter Dar al-Islam to encounter them; they have invaded the Dar al-Harb, where we can engage them more readily. Whatever the fortunes of the ?war on terrorism,?EAmerican military power could have the positive effect of weakening the hold that Islam has on cultural and political life in the Middle East world. And for all the evils of Western pop culture, perhaps the Lord will use its global spread in a similar way. We may someday have to deal with cheerful Arab nihilists rather than grim Arab terrorists, in other words, with Arabs who are more like our unbelieving neighbors.

Islam?s all-embracing vision is a rebuke to modern Christianity. Once upon a time, Christians saw their faith as equally all-embracing. Whatever the failures of medieval Christianity, retreating pietism was not one of them. Theologians attempted to make sense of the latest scientific and philosophical findings from the viewpoint of Christian faith; kings and leaders were as power-hungry as they are today, but they recognized at least that there was a King to whom they were accountable; even monks were adventurers and builders of cities. That vision all but evaporated in modern Christianity. ?Religious?Ewars gave a pretext to politicians to eliminate theology from politics, and to pursue politics as a science and practice of pure power. Scientific advances were believed to undermine the biblical picture of the world, and intellectual life gradually moved away from its moorings in theology and Scripture. Monks, and not just monks, gave up building cities and became monks indeed. Whatever plausibility structure Christendom provided has crumbled, and millions of people now grow up in the former nations of Christendom without the slightest exposure to Christianity in any form. Christendom shed its Hebraic attachment to culture.
This too is a Judaizing denial of the gospel. At the heart of the gospel is the announcement that Jesus, the Crucified One, has been raised to be Lord of all. If that has happened, then, as Oliver O?Donovan has argued at length, we should expect the nations to become worshipers of this Lord. But Christians have largely given up this expectation, and have certainly given up the demand that the nations bow before the Son. We act as if the cross and resurrection left the world unchanged.

Point four on the to-do list: Revive Christendom.

This model has led to a simple four-point program for resisting Islam ?Esimple, but impossible. Or, rather, impossible if the gospel is not true. But the gospel is true, Jesus did die and rise again, the bridegroom has come, He is enthroned in the heavenlies, and what now matters is a new creation. Given that, it is not impossible but inevitable. The great lesson to learn from Islam is the one that Luther suggested. When he attached the Crusades in the Ninety-Five Theses, he explained, he ?did not mean that we are not to fight against the Turk.?EInstead, ?we should first mend our ways and cause God to be gracious to us.?E

Still, there?s a lot to do. So, Let?s Roll.

Religions: Islam: Mirror of Christendom, Part II

In this section, I explore two biblical perspectives that throw light on the rise and persistence of Islam. First, Scripture indicates that the Lord judged Israel by raising up parodic versions of Israel to plague Israel. When Yahweh wanted to call Israel to repentance, He held up a pseudo-Israel as a mirror, and by examining herself in the mirror, Israel was supposed to see her blemishes and learn how to go about amending herself.

A key example comes in 1 Kings 11. At the height of his power, riches, and wisdom, Solomon fell into sin. Like Adam, he had been placed on an exalted throne, ruling over the kings of the earth, the lions subdued before him (cf. 1 Kgs. 10:18-20). Also like Adam, he grasped for forbidden fruit, taking wives and concubines from the nations that turned him from Yahweh to other gods (1 Kgs. 11:1-13). Solomon?s sins determined the history of Israel for several centuries, but in the short term, Yahweh punished Solomon by raising up a series of adversaries, what the Hebrew Bible calls ?satans?E(11:14, 23): Hadad the Edomite; Rezon who became king of Aram; and Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who eventually ruled ten of Israel?s tribes.

Scripture provides brief biographical portraits of each of these ?satans,?Eand each biography is strikingly familiar. Hadad was driven into Egypt during David?s conquest of Edom, and there he gained the favor of Pharaoh, who gave him a land and a bride. As soon as he learned that David was dead, Hadad (rather brusquely) demanded that Pharaoh let him go, and he (presumably) returned to Edom, where he was an adversary to Solomon (11:14-22). Jeroboam?s story runs along similar lines: Driven out of the land because of Solomon?s hostility, Jeroboam fled to Egypt, where he remained until Solomon?s death. Upon his return, he led a delegation that asked Rehoboam, Solomon?s successor, to lighten the burden of labor on the population of Israel. When Rehoboam refused, ten tribes seceded from the house of David and made Jeroboam their first king. He quickly built shrines at Dan and Bethel, where Yahweh was worshiped through golden calves (11:26-12:33). In both of these cases, the story of the ?satan?Eis a repetition of the story of Israel. Hadad and Jeroboam both fled to Egypt, both were welcomed by Pharaoh, both eventually made an ?exodus?Efrom Egypt. Jeroboam eventually became a king, and even built a temple.

Hovering behind the biographies Rezon and Jeroboam is another narrative familiar to the original readers of 1 Kings. Rezon was opposed by his master, Hadadezer of Zobah, and fled his homeland. While in exile, he gathered a band of marauders and eventually marched into Damascus, where he began to rule over the Arameans (1 Kgs. 11:23-25). Rezon?s story, clearly, is a replication of the story of David, who fled from Saul into the wilderness, gathered the disaffected of the land to him, and eventually established a capital city in Jerusalem. Jeroboam?s story is similar: His promising career was cut short when Solomon learned about Ahijah?s prophecy and sought to put Jeroboam to death (11:26-28, 40), and Jeroboam?s scene with Ahijah is reminiscent of Samuel?s prediction that Saul would yield his place to ?your neighbor who is better than you?E(1 Kgs. 11:29-39; cf. 1 Sam. 15:24-33). There is even an explicit parallel: Yahweh told Jeroboam that his royal house had the potential to be as long-lasting as the house of David (1 Kgs. 11:38).

In part, the point of these parallels is to pass implicit judgment on the sins of Solomon and Rehoboam. If Jeroboam?s move from Egypt to Israel was an exodus and conquest, that casts Solomon and Rehoboam in the role of Canaanite kings ?Enot surprisingly, since they had begun to worship like Canaanites (1 Kgs. 11:1-8; 14:21-24). But the text also gives some insight into the ironic justice of God?s judgments. When the house of David fell into idolatry, Yahweh raised up another ?David?Eand promised to establish his house. We may generalize: Still today, one of the ways Yahweh judges His people is by raising up a pseudo-people as a parody and mirror.

There is a keen-edged justice to this, but Jeroboam?s rise was also an object lesson for the house of David. Jeroboam proved himself a false David; he was not ?complete with Yahweh?Eas David had been. Instead, Jeroboam established an unauthorized system of worship, an unauthorized priesthood, and an unauthorized festival calendar (1 Kgs. 12:25-33). His rebellion, however, should have alerted Rehoboam to his own failings. Not only did Rehoboam promote a more flagrant idolatry than Jeroboam, but he pursued religious policies that were as damaging as Jeroboam?s, if not more so. Jeroboam, after all, saw that Israel had to be united in worship (1 Kgs. 12:26-27), and he accordingly established central sanctuaries and centralized worship. By contrast, Rehoboam, following his father?s lead, promoted liturgical chaos (1 Kgs. 14:21-24), which could only lead to social and political fragmentation. Examining himself in the mirror that was Jeroboam, Rehoboam was supposed to learn, on the one hand, that he should reject Jeroboam?s example of idolatry, and that, on the other hand, he should see the wisdom of Jeroboam?s policies.

And so we come to the first perspective on Islam: The Lord raised up Islam as a parody or mirror of Christianity, which is designed to expose our failings and to call us to faithfulness. Indeed, Mohammed?s life strikingly recapitulates the history of Israel. Called (so he claimed) by Allah, Mohammed led his people out of Mecca to Medina, established his rule in Medina, and then conquered a promised land, which included his original hometown of Mecca. Within a century after his death, the promised land has expanded to imperial proportions, including Persia, Iraq, and North Africa. In the sixth century, Yahweh tore the robe that was Eastern Christendom, and gave a large swath to Mohammed. Mohammed is wearing it still.

Before we examine more fully how Islam is a parody of Christianity and of Christendom, and what we can learn by examining ourselves in this mirror, we need to explore a second biblical perspective on Islam, namely, that Islam is a global and systematic form of Judaizing. This is not just to say that Islam was shaped by Mohammed?s contact with Judaism, though that it is true enough that Islam?s debt to the Judaism of the Talmud is profound and fundamental. Judaism had had a marked presence in the Arabian Peninsula for centuries before Mohammed, and there was even a Jewish state among the Himyarites in Southwestern Arabia. Further, the Elkasite movement of the second century A.D. combined Jewish and Christian elements into a proto-Islamic system, though there appears to be no evidence of any direct link with Islam. Scholars who have investigated the sources of the Qur?an have noted similarities between its accounts and Talmudic and apocryphal renditions of biblical events.

What unites Islam is not doctrine so much as ritual, and ritually, Islam has a number of affinities with the ancient Israelite religion and with later Judaism. Though circumcision is not prescribed by the Qur?an, Muslims practice it, and the high point of the hajj (pilgrimage) is the ?Great Sacrifice?E(?Id-al-adha), which occurs annually and requires every Muslim male to sacrifice a goat (on sacrifice, cf. Sura 5.97; 22:33-34). The Qur?an, further, proscribes certain meats (?Forbidden you is carrion and blood, and the flesh of the swine, and whatsoever has been killed in the name of some other God,?ESura 5.3; cf. Sura 23.51; Lev. 11), and prescribes ritual washings before worship (?O believers, when you stand up for the service of prayer wash your face and hands up to the elbows, and also wipe your heads, and wash your feet up to the ankles. If you are in a state of seminal pollution, then bathe and purify yourself well,?ESura 5.6; cf. Lev. 15). M. E. Combs-Schilling description of the ritual life of early Islam is worthy of full quotation:

Early Madinan [i.e., in Medina] preachings and ritual enactments stressed the lines of unity between Islam and the other monotheisms. For instance, Muhammed instituted a fast for Muslims on ?Ashura?E the tenth day of Muharram, in echo of the Jewish fast celebrated on the Day of Atonement, the tenth of Tishri. In Makka [Mecca], Muslims had prayed only twice a day, but in Madina, Muhammed instituted another prayer, so that Muslims prayed three times a day, as did Jews. . . . And, at first, Muhammed enjoined Muslims to conduct these prayers like Jews, facing Jerusalem, a city all three monotheisms regard as holy.

Yet when it became clear that there were not going to be mass conversions of Jews and Christians, Muhammed began to use rituals to distinguish Islam, to mark off its sacred boundaries. He dramatically altered the direction of prayer, calling upon Muslims to turn around, to no longer face Jerusalem, which lay to Madina?s north, but rather to pray facing Makka, a city which lay in the opposite direction, to Madina?s south. Makka was a city that was distinctly Islam?s own. The number of prayers was eventually changed so that Muslims were called upon to pray five times a day rather than three. Muhammed instituted a whole month of fasting from dawn to dusk, Ramadan. He distinguished Muslims through the style of prayer. Whereas Christians were summoned by bells and Jews by trumpets, Muslims were summoned by the sound of the human voice crying out ?Allah Akbar,?EGod is great. Furthermore, Muhammed settled upon Friday as the Muslim sabbath.

Place yourself in the position of a Syrian or Egyptian Christian of the seventh century, and it will be clear that conversion to Islam would mean nothing less than a return to life in bondage under the ?elements of the world?E(Gal. 4:1-11). That is, converting to Islam meant becoming a Judaizer. Peter the Venerable was right: Islam shows itself as apostasy most clearly in its rejection of Christian rites and its embrace of archaic ?sacraments.?E

For many Protestants, first-century Judaizers are seen mainly as advocates of works-righteousness, late medieval Catholics before their time. Though ideas of meritorious righteousness were circulating in first-century Judaism (see Phil. 3:1-11), the basic thrust of Judaizers lay elsewhere. A Judaizer might be a perfectly sound Lutheran, might believe that Jesus was the eternal Son incarnate, and might believe that salvation was through the cross. What the Judaizer would not admit was that the cross and resurrection marked the beginning of a new world, a world radically different from that died on Golgotha (see Gal. 1:3-4; 5:11-16). Yes, the Judaizer would say, Jesus was the Messiah, crucified for the sins of the world; but still, we must keep Torah, avoid contamination from Gentiles, be careful about who is sitting next to us at meals, and practice circumcision. Judaizers denied the present reality of the new creation. Judaizing denied that the gospel is an eschatological message, that it is a message about an ending and a beginning.

In this sense Islam is fundamentally a Judaizing movement. To be sure, Islam teaches, far more emphatically than first-century Judaism, salvation through works (Sura 9.4: ?God loves those who take heed for themselves?E. But the most important heresy of Islam is the denial that Jesus brought in a new creation. Islam has a place for Jesus and the Qur?an even speaks of Jesus?E?gospel,?Ebut the Islamic Jesus was no more than a prophet, and after his non-crucifixion and non-resurrection, the world went trundling on as it had since creation. Even Mohammed did not bring in a new creation. He saw himself as a messenger from the one God, another in the line of prophets from Noah to Jesus, sent to call Jews and Christians from their various errors back to the monotheistic faith of Abraham (Sura 2.135). He was emphatically not the proclaimer of a new faith, much less a new creation. James Kritzeck puts it well: ?Islam was seen not as a new covenant but as an urgently needed restoration of the old.?EWhen Muslims look to Ishmael as their forebear, they are more Pauline than they realize, for Ishmael is the symbolic Judaizer (Gal. 4:21-31). Medieval Christians were strictly correct to speak of the ?heresy of the Ishmaelites?Eor the ?religion of the Hagarenes.?E

Combining the two biblical perspectives discussed above, we have these clues for understanding Islam?s place in Christian history: Islam is a parody of Christianity, and, more particularly, Islam is a Judaizing parody of Christianity. If we want to be more responsive than Rehoboam, we have to take a good look at the face in the mirror, and not ignore the warts.

Religions: Islam: Mirror of Christendom, Part I

I wrote the following a few years ago, and have not been able to farm it out anywhere. Other parts to follow in subsequent posts to this site.

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was (Jas. 1:23-24).

Deep in the pit of hell, the pilgrim Dante came across yet another chilling sight ?Ea man walking with his torso split open from chin to groin, so that ?his guts spilled out, with the heart/ and other vital parts, and the dirty sack/ that turns to s*** (merda) whatever the mouth gulps down.?ELike a motorist rubbernecking at an accident, Dante stared in fascinated horror, and the man began to speak:

?See how I tear myself!
See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!
In front of me, and weeping, Ali walks,
his face cleft from his chin to the crown?E(Inferno 28.22-33).

The surprise in this scene is not the gruesomeness of Mohammed?s punishment. A descendant of Crusaders, Dante would not give a second thought to the sensitivities of Muslims, nor did he regard Muslims as fellow-worshipers of the God of Abraham. The surprise is the place where this scene occurs, in the ninth Bolgia of Malebolgia, in the subcircle of hell reserved for schismatics. Mohammed is not among the idolaters or the pagans, but among sinners being punished for breaking off from the Christian church, all of whom, appropriately enough, have their bodies rent as retribution for rending the body of Christ.

In treating Mohammed as a Christian schismatic, Dante was not inventing a new perspective (he rarely did), but presenting views widespread in his time. Many in the Western medieval world believed that Mohammed himself had apostatized from Christianity, and some even believed he had once been a cardinal. Centuries before Dante, John of Damascus (675-749) treated Islam in the final section of his treatise de Haeresibus, calling it the ?heresy of the Ishmaelites.?EJohn wrote that Mohammed was influenced by an Arian monk named Bahira, who encouraged the spread of Islam by predicting that Mohammed would become a prophet.

Peter the Venerable, abbot of the famed abbey of Cluny during the twelfth century, hesitated over whether to call Islam a heresy or a form of paganism, ?for I see them, now in the manner of heretics, take certain things from the Christian faith and reject other things; then ?Ea thing which no heresy is described as ever having done ?Eacting as well as teaching according to pagan custom.?EYet, Peter wrote treatises with titles like Summa totius haeresis Saracenorum (?Summary of all the heresies of the Saracens?E and Liber contra sectam sive haeresim Saracenorum (?A Book against the Sect or Heresy of the Saracens?E, and he viewed Islam as a sum of all Christian heresies. According to Peter, Mohammed himself had been taught by a Nestorian monk named Sergius who ?made him a Nestorian Christian,?Eand Mohammed?s teaching was a mish-mash of Sabellianism, Nestorianism, Manicheanism, and Judaism. False teaching was bad enough, but Peter was equally concerned with Muslim practice. Even if, as Peter concedes, the Qur?an records truths about the prophets and Jesus, Muslims reject the sacraments, which is something that ?no one besides these heretics ever did.?E

These medieval treatments of Islam find little favor today, even among Christians, yet as a purely historical matter, the medieval accounts have some points in their favor. That Mohammed had contact with a Syrian monk is mentioned in the hadith, collections of Mohammed?s words and actions that serve for most Muslims as a second source of authority alongside the Qur?an. And it is clear that Mohammed had wider contact with Christians. One of the key themes of the Qur?an is a denial of the Trinity, since it is ?far from his glory?Efor Allah ?to beget a son?E(Sura 4.171; cf. 2.115; 5.73, 116; 6.101; 9.30-31; 18.4-5; 25.2; 112.3). More generally, Nestorian Christianity had by Mohammed?s time spread through Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Persia, and eastward as far as China, and Monophysite Christians had founded churches in Syria and Egypt. Prior to the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, those areas were predominantly Christian, if often heretically Christian. It is, furthermore, a vast oversimplification to suggest that these Christians submitted to the superior force of the Islamic sword, since many Christians greeted the Arabian conquest as a liberation, and willingly converted to Islam. Whatever the experience of individuals, as a region and as a culture, the Middle East and North Africa became Islamic by abandoning Christendom. The medieval perspective is true to this extent: The Islamic world is not pagan but apostate.

In addition to highlighting important historical factors, the medieval account of Islam also has the virtue of being a theological account. For modern religious scholarship, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, and all the rest are variations on a single, more basic phenomenon called ?religion.?EBut this is worse than useless. For the church, Islam cannot be considered another variation on a universal religious impulse but must be understood theologically, and addressed as both a theological and practical challenge. The practical problem is obvious. Over a millennium ago, the Middle East and North Africa were Islamicized and Arabicized, and, though medieval Christians withstood Islam?s advance into Europe, Christianity has made scant progress in the Islamic world. Far from retreating, in recent decades Muslims have become a significant minority in Western Europe and the United States, and, of course, the rise of Islamism or radical Islam means that Islam has become a more direct threat to the West than at any time since Lepanto. Political difficulties aside, the practical question for the church is, What can we do to break through the apparently impenetrable boundary of Islam and ensure that the gospel will be heard and triumph?

The theological problem is equally daunting, and more fundamental. It can be put this way: Islam?s account of history has a place for Jesus and Christianity. To be sure, the Jesus of Islam is not the Jesus of the New Testament: He is not the divine Son incarnate, He was not crucified and raised (cf. Sura 4.157), and He is not reigning at the Father?s right hand. Still, the prophet Jesus has a place in Muslim ?redemptive history,?Eand this poses the challenge to Christians: Has Christian theology been able to locate Islam within its history? Luther and Hal Lindsey have little in common, but they have this: Both were able to find Islam in the penumbra of John?s Apocalypse. Dispensationalist and historicist views of Revelation fail on many counts, not least because of their marvelous elasticity, their capacity to discover in biblical prophecy explicit references to the Middle East threat du jour ?Eeveryone from Turks to Saddam Hussein, and no doubt bin Laden and John Walker Lindh as well. The failure of these approaches to prophecy only intensifies the question: Can Christians make theological sense of the persistence of Islam? Can we fit them into our story?

Though Islam does not meet any strict definition of ?heresy,?Ethe medieval idea of Islam as a Christian heresy or as an apostasy from Christendom provides some clues to answering that question. Following up those a few of those clues is the business of this paper.

Religions: Tantra

Today, Wendy Doniger writes in the May 21 TLS, “Tantra has become an Orientalist wet dream, a transgressive, weird, sexy, dangerous world. Many people refer to the Kamasutra, or even The Joy of Sex, as Tantric.” It was not always so. Doniger is reviewing David Gordon White’s Kiss of the Yogini, and White argues that originally Tantra was “a ritual in which bodily fluids ?Esexual or menstrual discharge ?Ewere swallowed as transformative ‘power substances.’”

Here is Doniger’s summary of the main features of the original Tantric program: “[White] tells us that Tantra originated sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries of the Common Era in central India, among a subaltern stratum of the Indian population who used intoxicating drinks and sacrificed animals to terrifying clan deities. In the ninth or eleventh centur this ritual developed into an erotic mystical practice, and the clan deities were replaced by a horde of ravishingly beautiful, terrifying and powerful female deities called Yoginis. The Yoginis continued to be worshiped with blood offerings and animals sacrifices but came to be propitiated also by exchanging sexual fluids with the male practitioners and by consuming those fluids (as well as other prohibited foods). In return, the Yoginis would grant the practitioners, at the very least, ‘a powerful expansion of . . . the limited consciousness of the conformist Brahmin practitioner’ and, at most, supernatural powers, including the power of flight.” During the eleventh century, a revised form of Tantra took over, one that suppressed the exchange and transforming qualities of fluids and stressed instead the expansion of consciousness, an effort to cultivate “a divine state of mind homologous to the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm.” The various sexual techniques promoted today as Tantric were originally rooted in this quest for heightened consciousness.

Religions: What Kind of Religion Is Islam?

French historian Alain Besancon raises this question in a fine article in Commentary. He suggests that religions can be classified as either revealed or natural, and asks whether Christians and Jews can regard Islam as either of these. Christians and Jews cannot consider Islam a revealed religion, he claims, because the elements of the Qur’an taken from the Bible are not recognizable to Christians and Jews: “The Abraham of Genesis is not the Ibrahim of the Qur’an; Moses is not Mousa. As for Jesus, he appears, as Issa, out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel. His mother, Mary or Miriam, identified as the sister of Aaron, gives birth to him under a palm tree. Then Issa performs several miracles, which seem to have been drawn from the apocalyptic gospels, and announces the future coming of Muhammed.” In contrast to the fundamental historical emphasis of the Bible, the Qur’an is not an historical document: “Muslims also hold that they received a revelation. It is conceived, however, not as part of a historical narrative but as the transmission of an eternal preexisting text. In this transmission, the prophet Muhammad, does not play a role akin to that of Moses and Jesus. He does nothing but receive texts, which he repeats as if under dictation.” Thus, “foreign to Islam is the idea of a progressive revelation.” Even the Jesus of the Qur’an does not reveal or bring anything new: like all other prophets, “Issa is sent to preach the oneness of God.”

Besancon suggests that there are some significant analogies between Islam and Greco-Roman “natural” religion. For instance, “Islamic civilization is the civilization of the good life, and it offers a certain latitude in the realm of sensory pleasure. Asceticism is foreign to the spirit of Islam. There is a Muslim spirit of carpe diem, a this-worldly contentment that often fascinated Christians who may have seen in it a dim echo of the ancient, classical world.” Also, “In concordance with natural religion . . . Muslim religious life offers more than one model of piety. For the truly devout, two ways are open, just as in the Greco-Roman world: philosophy (Arab falsafa, itself heavily impregnated with neo-Platonism) and mysticism. Less rigorous souls, with the help of the law and moderate observance of the ‘five pillars’ of Islam, can adhere to a mild but perfectly sufficient religious regimen.”

Yet, Islam is not exactly a natural religion either. Instead, Islam represents a third type of religion, one that doesn’t fit easily into the categories of revealed or natural. Besancon points to three qualities of Islam that make it hard to classify: first, its “occasionalist” ontology (there are no secondary causes, and for some Muslims the universe is created anew moment-by-moment); its abandonment of history; and its tendency to push religion into areas of life “beyond what biblical religion considers appropriate.” He concludes that “To treat Islam suitable, it becomes necessary to forge a new concept altogether, and one that is difficult to grasp ?Enamely, an idolatry of the God of Israel. To put it another way, Islam may be thought of as the natural religion of the revealed God.”

Much food for thought here. Besancon raises precisely the question I’ve tried to raise in an article on Islam (submitted to a theological journal; if accepted, I’ll post bibliographical information here), namely, How does Islam fit into redemptive history? Can we find a place for such a religion, which has persisted and threatened Christendom for well over a millennium? My answer to that question differs from Besancon’s in a crucial respect: I believe that God raised up Islam to be a mirror to Christendom, in which we see our own flaws and corruptions. Besancon actually betrays one of these corruptions in his comments about the “domain” of religious life according to the Bible. According to his account, Christianity teaches that “man is responsible for conducting his affairs within the framework of a universe ?Enatural, social, political – that operates by internally consistent rules. The performance of one’s religious and moral duties is thus confined to a rationally definable area.” That is not, I believe, what Christianity teaches at all, for Besancon has made the existence of a “secular” space an essential feature of Christian faith. On the contrary, here is something that we can learn from Islam ?Ethat in fact there is no secular space, and that religious duties must be “pushed beyond” the “rationally definable area” provided by modernity.

Religions: The Evangelicalization of Hinduism

C.A. Bayly discusses the development of “imperial religions” and their globalization in his book on the Birth of the Modern World. He points out that the major world religions other than Christianity were transformed by their encounter with Christianity, and their response to that encounter. Of Hinduism in particular he writes:

The Asian religions rapidly took up Christian missionaries’ methods of preaching and evangelization. In some senses, indeed, they became proselytizing religions for the first time. By 1900, the Hindu orthodox had begun to establish purifying associations (shuddhi sabhas), whic tried to “reconvert” to Hinduism lowers-cast and “tribal” groups who had become Muslim or Christian. Of course, the idea of conversion in Hinduism, or even the idea of a unified Hinduism itself, was quite recent in origin [a reflection, perhaps, of the church's catholicity ?EPJL]. This went along with the slower and older process of ritual consolidation by which Hindu priests, ascetics, and text-readers moved among tribal and lower-caste people, gradually attaching them to more orthodox rites and forms of worship. In the case of the Arya Samaj, the Aryan Society, a self-consciously modern form of Hinduism, “evangelical” activity extended to denouncing other world religions and sending missions to Indian communities abroad in places such as Fiji, Mauritius, and the Caribbean. The society’s preachers and publicists consciously imitated the aggressive form of Christian preaching and printing and ridiculed the inconsistencies and dubious logic of the Christian scriptures. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, students along the China coast and in Southeast Asia followed suit and began to found organizations such as the already mentioned Young Men’s Buddhist Associations, which were directly modeled on the YMCA and played a significant role in the origins of Chinese nationalism. In all these revival movements, the newspaper and printed pamphlet played an important role in confirming the integrity of believers.

Religions: Religion in Europe

In Italy, there is a raging debate over a judge’s ruling that crucifixes need to be removed from schools. Seems that Europe, where religion (or religions) is still often a part of government education and where state churches still exist, is beginning to play catch up with American secularism.

Religions: Baal is Antichrist

Baal is AntiChrist. Like Nabu, who usurps the place of his father Marduk in Babylonian mythology; like Thoth in Egyptian mythology, who substitutes and replaces Ra; like Zeus, who rebels against his father Chronos and takes his place as chief of the pantheon ?Eso Baal attacks and replaces his father El. And that is to say that all these gods are false sons, sons who attack and kill the father, Oedipal sons, and not the Son who glorifies the Father and reveals Him.

And, yes, I’m back to reading Derrida.

Religions: More on Two Faces of Islam

Well, there’s a problem with speaking well of a book before reading far enough in it. I’m still learning a lot from Stephen Schwartz’s Two Faces of Islam, but fairly early in the book he makes it clear that he’s working with the view that at least all “Abrahamic faiths” can work together for the betterment of mankind. His hope is that “Islam may . . . fulfill its destiny as a positive force for all humanity.” So, my enthusiasm for the book is now a significantly qualified enthusiasm.

Religions: Schwartz on Islam

I have been reading Stephen Schwartz’s wonderful pieces on Islam in the Weekly Standard for several years. Schwartz has done as much as any journalist to highlight the responsibility and role of Saudi Arabia for the rise of radical Islam, and particularly the central importance of the Wahhabi sect in modern Islam. I have been eager to dig into his recent The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror. It is even better than I expected, and I was expecting it to be good. Schwartz has a profound historical sense, and has done extensive research in various issues related to the Middle East.

The “two faces” of his title are the peaceful, tolerant, and pluralist face of traditional Islam and the violent and intolerant face of the Wahhabi sect. Early in the book, for instance, he challenges the notion that hatred between Muslims and Jews is centuries old, a myth that leads to a vicious quietism in the face of Jewish-Islamic conflict. He explains his research into the “dhimma,” the “contract” concerning Muslim relations with “People of the Book”:

A valuable truth about the dhimma and its consequences emerges from a topic seldom discussed in this context: Jewish printing. The first book printed by Western technique in Asia was a Jewish legal code, the Arba Turim or Four Rows, authored by Rabbi Yakov Ben Asher of Toledo (c. 1270-c. 1343). This exquisitely designed typographical gem was issued in Constantinople in 1493. . . . The first book printed in the continent of Africa was an edition of Abudarham, a collection of laws and commentaries on prayer, written in 1340 by Rabbi David Ben Yosef of Sevilla. This volume was produced in the Moroccan city of Fez in 1516. Both of these books, and hundreds more after them, were produced under Muslim rulers.

Schwartz goes on to point out that Jews were free and unpersecuted in the Ottoman empire during the time that Jews were being persecuted in parts of Christian Europe.

I’m not far enough into the book to know how sharply Schwartz distinguishes between the “two faces,” but the historical details cited above point to the fact that Islam is far more complex than some Christian rhetoric has suggested.

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