This post is a letter I wrote to Bob Donaldson, one of the developers of the Abrahamic Heritage overture headed to the PC(USA) General Assembly. The conversation started on the basis of PFR’s Advice on that overture. This post could be understood in itself, but it picks up the correspondence in the previous post.  Feel free to post your own comments below and discuss this important matter of Christian-Muslim dialogue.

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Dear Bob,

I admit to feeling a bit like we are having our own inter-religious dialogue! 

First, let me say that Christians have much of which we need to repent when it comes to the history of our relationships with Muslims. My reference to it being “easier” for Christians was not well put, but was intended to indicate the stronger presence of exhortations to peace  in the New Testament relative to the Koran, not to indicate that Christians have come close to abiding by those teachings of Christian peace found in the New Testament.

Rather than responding point-by-point to your letter, let me hit the main substantive points, keeping the issues front-and-center, rather than our particular language.

Where to Begin?

In my previous letter I indicated that I thought the right “place to begin” dialogue as a Christian with Muslims is to make sure we engage the dialogue as Christians (i.e. not checking our faith at the door) and that, while searching for points of contact between the faiths, we also begin with respect for the differences between the faiths.

One part of respecting difference is being able to articulate the other person’s perspective in a way that the other person would be able, upon hearing you, to recognize the position you are articulating as their own. In other words, try to put yourself in their shoes, seek first to understand rather than be understood, etc. That’s a good basis for dialogue – understanding.  I hope to do that with you.  And my biggest point, regarding the basis for healthy dialogue with Muslims, is that as Christians we need to do that as well for our Muslim conversation partners, respecting the integrity of their religious beliefs.

Do Muslims Believe They Worship the Father of Jesus?

Here’s the first place I sense an important disconnect between us: I’m afraid that again in your letter you presume the very thing in question, i.e. that Muslims are worshiping the God Christians worship, that they are worshiping the Father of Jesus as Christians do.  (You wrote: “How can we suggest that Muslims, by worshiping the same God that we do, are not, in fact, worshiping the Father of Jesus Christ?”)  Let me explain briefly, sequentially, why I see such an assumption as disrespectful of mainstream Islam, or of mainstream Christianity, or both.

If what you mean by “worshiping the Father of Jesus Christ” is consistent with mainstream Christian understanding, then I think your assertion and that of the Abrahamic Heritage overture about “unity and harmony” and “worshiping the same God” is disrespectful to mainstream Islam. Why?

As Christians, we worship the eternal Father of God the Son, Jesus Christ; we worship the Father who raised Jesus from the dead in the power of the Spirit – we worship a God who is Triune, eternally existing in three persons, whose revelation to us in and as Jesus Christ the Incarnate One is the very basis for our salvation by grace and the means of our worship of the Father. These things are central to the Christian faith, i.e. they are things without belief in which we are not Christian in any sense that has continuity with the history of mainstream Christian faith and practice. These things make us who we are as Christians.

And yet, Muslims have their own faith, and they do not believe God is eternally the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (the Koran does clearly reject this central Christian belief). Muslims do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, nor that he was crucified for our sins, nor that he was raised from the dead in the power of the Spirit. 

So, with these things in mind, the question I am left with is: how does it help us to initiate dialogue with Muslims by asserting that they really do, in fact, believe these things? That they “worship the same God”? Of course it would not be good to do that. It would demonstrate that we presume to know their religion better than they do (e.g. they do in fact do worship the Triune God, though they don’t realize it), or that we just don’t understand them, etc.

Of course, you may not be assuming that they believe these things. And my hunch is that’s because you may not be working within the framework of mainstream Christian understanding.

My sense is – and correct me if I am wrong – that, as you say in your letter, you and the Abrahamic Heritage overture are hoping to “get past” the divinity of Christ as a difference of foundational importance (you mentioned that “they just don’t accept the divinity of Christ” and your overture seeks to “get past” that and say we worship the same God). It would appear that your understanding of God as Father might be simply that God is Father of all peoples (Jesus being one of those persons), not that God is the eternal Father of God the Son, who has made us his brothers and sisters and that therefore we are adopted by faith as God’s children (and so we, too, are able to call God “Father.”)

This, if I am not mistaken, is the express intent of the overture you have helped to develop on Abrahamic Heritage. In other words, it seems to me that your approach to saying that Muslims worship the same God as Christians is to call Christian that which is very different from an orthodox Christian (much less Reformed and Presbyterian) understanding of God and our worship of him. Am I getting this right? 

Let me put it simply and briefly: to pursue a course that you believe could lead to peace, you seem to be willing to move past those things that are different about us as Christians, even when those things are the things that make us Christians, rather than entering dialogue with respect for difference – ours and theirs. 

If it would be offensive to many orthodox Muslims to assert a blanket “unity and harmony” between Christianity and Islam while holding onto orthodox Christian understanding, then this latter approach of discounting mainstream Christian understanding in order to achieve that “unity and harmony” is an approach that disrespects the centrality of Jesus Christ for Christians, the teaching of Scripture and certainly our own church’s confessions of faith.

One way or another, the two things that are being brought together in this overture’s approach would not be Christianity and Islam, but some aberration of one or the other or both.  Your statement that the overture simply focuses on areas of “total agreement” is, I think, impossible to maintain.

A Western “Enlightened” Strategy (in Brief)

Now let me take a step back from looking at things from the vantage point of the distinctive beliefs of Christianity or Islam and take a look at this discussion from the vantage point of what I called, in my previous letter, the “old method of inter-religious dialogue,” what some people call the “lowest common denominator” method. This may ultimately be the basis for your approach.

As I mentioned earlier, you may be assuming that we all worship the same God just in different culturally-derived forms.  This view typically derives from the Enlightenment’s view of reason and the nature of religious belief. Put overly simply, reason is presumed to be universal and to be the proper basis for certainty, while distinctive beliefs based on supposed revelation are at best less certain and at worst the cause of wars and strife (remember that the Enlightenment followed the European “Wars of Religion”).  It is reasonable to believe in God and to behave “morally,” with reasonable principles to back that up. So the proper thing to do, on this view, in order to pursue peace and harmony, is to downplay distinctive beliefs based on revelation, and play up the more “reasonable things” (“One God,” good moral principles, etc.).  That way we can be at peace, express the real “unity and harmony” that transcends religious distinctions, and so on.

If I’m getting close to the underpinnings of the Abrahamic Heritage overture and your apparent willingness to downplay central Christian teachings, there is, I think, a damning irony here.  The Enlightenment is in origin and still primarily in reality a western phenomenon.  And yet the feared ongoing “clash of civilizations” that propels Christians and Muslims into dialogue is not intra-western strife but primarily strife between the modern west and the faith and life of primarily non-western Muslims who wish to be anything but westernized and who deplore the secularizing impact of the western Enlightenment, including the discounting of revelation at the expense of western “reason.” The presumptions of “unity and harmony,” then, are actually a proposal to export western culture to the very conversation partners who want not to embrace western culture (and we shouldn’t have to ask them to do so in order to engage in dialogue with us). In other words, it’s as though we’d be asking them to become like us in order for us to dialogue. Irony does abound.

We now live in a day where Enlightenment views of reason and the assumption of certainty and universality of such reason, at the expensive of the particularity of religious and other beliefs, is seen as intolerant and culturally imperialistic. Claims based on such “neutral and universal reason” very often masked just another culture-bound and ultimately religious ideology, a tertium quid (“third thing”) in this case.  I almost hate to say it so harshly, but it does seem to me that such is the approach of the Abrahamic Heritage overture.

So where does that leave us?

So….you had hoped the Abrahamic Heritage overture would “underline our sincerity” to engage in dialogue as Christians. But when we let go of those things that God has revealed to us and that make us Christians, especially when we do so based on a modern western religious ideology that masquerades as a universal basis for dialogue, then we are not being “sincere” Christians, as you sincerely intend the Abrahamic Heritage overture to express.  Rather, we’d simply be repeating mistakes of the past, trying again to export western culture, and not respecting the religious and cultural distinctiveness of the people with whom we wish to be in dialogue.

The Abrahamic Heritage overture might make a good starting point for dialogue between Liberal Protestants and westernized Muslims.  But it’s difficult to see such a particular western dialogue as the best way of addressing the concerns for peace in the world. How do orthodox believers from different cultures live peacefully together in the world, while living conscientiously out of the distinctiveness of their respective faiths? This is the $64,000 question. I would like to believe we can do it. But there is no easy answer. And we must begin dignifying our differences, not denying them.

Finally, let me suggest that establishing a sound basis for dialogue with Muslims is not the sort of thing that can really be done by an overture of the General Assembly. It would be better to help others begin the active conversations that you seem to be having locally. God bless you in those efforts!  I hope and pray that we can maintain the full wealth of conviction in the truth of the Gospel – a Gospel which leads us to engage in honest dialogue with both Jews and Muslims, and doing so with a repentant and enduring commitment to peace.

You had asked if it would not be better to modify the Abrahamic Faiths
overture rather than throw it out altogether. This might be possible. I
will suggest some ways to modify it in another post.

Thank you for engaging in this important discussion!

Michael Walker

P.S. One book I would highly recommend would be Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad?