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1. The Christian prophet and the Prophet of Islam

The concept of prophecy underlies the central teachings of Islam and Christianity and raises serious questions for the followers of the two faiths.  For Christians, the questions revolve about the meaning of prophecy and revelation in the light of a response in faith to Christ’s life, death and resurrection.  While not compromising their conviction of what they believe that God has done in the person of Jesus Christ, Christians ask whether they can accept Muhammad as a prophet and, if so, what kind of prophet they might see him to be. What implications does an affirmation of extra-Biblical or post-Biblical prophecy carry for a Christian understanding of revelation? If Christians accept Muhammad as a prophet, why do they not accept as well the revelation he brought and enter Islam?

The questions prophecy raises for Muslims determine their evaluation of the continuing validity of the earlier messages and the faith communities formed by those messages.  Must Muslims consider Judaism and Christianity as superseded faiths, founded on genuine prophetic messages but abrogated by God’s later message brought by Muhammad?  Is dialogue possible between the three communities if two are judged to be relics of earlier revelations which have been possibly corrupted and in any case superceded by the final revelation?  On the other hand, what evidence might Muslims find in the Qur’an and hadîth for accepting Jews and Christians as fellow believers in a family of faiths in a direct line from Abraham?

This is not simply a theoretical issue of interest only to specialists, but affects the way that ordinary Muslims and Christians regard one another.  In the course of my encounters with Muslims, the question has often been raised.  My students in Turkey and Indonesia have candidly articulated their perception of the problem in terms of fairness and reciprocity.  “We Muslims recognize your prophet Jesus,” they state.  “Why do you Christians not recognize Muhammad as prophet?”  What answer can Christians give to this quite reasonable inquiry?

The decree of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, with its radically original attempt to reorient the attitude of Christians toward Muslims, has had great impact on the way that Catholic Christians regard Islam.  Promulgated in 1965, the decree states clearly in the opening words:“The [Catholic] Church has high regard for Muslims” (NA, 3).  The document has produced widespread attitudinal changes in a relatively brief period and has been generally welcomed by Muslims.  Nevertheless, the document has been subject to criticism by both Muslims and Christians for what it does not state.  The Nostra aetate passage on “Muslims” contains no reference to the religion of Islam, nor to Muhammad or the Qur’an.  How, ask the critics, can Christians possibly produce a document meant to build mutual respect and esteem between the two communities which makes no mention of the Islamic religion as such, of its Prophet or its Sacred Book?

What can Christians say about the prophethood of Muhammad?

In my opinion, this criticism, while well meant, is begging the question.  The question is not what Christians should say about Islam, Muhammad and the Qur’an in order to be present themselves as friendly, respectful and fair-minded.  Such would amount to a type of condescending courtesy or a public relations ploy.  The real question is what can Christians say about the prophethood of Muhammad and the revealed nature of the Qur’an and remain, at the same time, faithful to the Christian faith handed down from the apostles?

This is an important matter for theological research and speculation among Christians, and we are far from a consensus on what can be said that is in accord with Biblical teaching and Christian tradition.  For this reason, I am satisfied with the prudent silence of the Second Vatican Council on this issue.  Instead of making a declaration on Muhammad and the Qur’an which later generations might find restrictive, untenable or embarrassing, the question is left open for the continuing research and reflection of theologians.

The official silence of the Churches on the prophethood of Muhammad can only be defended, however, if Christians are conscientiously engaged in seeking an adequate response.  As Cardinal Tarancon, Archbishop of Madrid, said at a 1974 Muslim-Christian Congress in Cordoba:

How is it possible to appreciate Islam and Muslims without showing appreciation for the Prophet of Islam and the values he promoted?  Not to do this would not only be a lack of respect, to which the Council exhorts Christians, but also neglect of a religious factor of which account must be taken in theological reflection and religious awareness.

Christian theologians in the past century have moved away from the old polemical view that Muhammad was an imposter, madman or ambitious visionary who took advantage of the Arabs’ gullibility to set himself up as religious founder, political leader and social arbiter.   Rather, each of these 20th century thinkers recognized the sincerity of Muhammad’s religious experience and his sense of mission to bring a divine message to those around him.  Where these Christian thinkers run into difficulty is in whether they can call Muhammad a prophet and what such an assertion would carry.  What would such an affirmation mean to Christians, and would it mean to Muslims?

Islamic concept of prophecy

The problem that always arises when Christians and Muslims discuss the question of prophecy is that the term is used diversely by Muslims and Christians.  Islamic and Christian teaching is in agreement on many elements of prophecy and prophethood, but on key points the theological content borne by these terms is not identical or even compatible.  This ambiguity colors every discussion between the followers of the two religions and is intensified by a similar lack of congruity in the concepts of revelation as taught by the Islamic and Christian faiths.

In the course of almost every series of lectures on Christian theology that I have delivered to Muslim students, at some point the question is asked: “Muslims must believe in all the revealed Books, including the Torah brought by Moses, the Injîl (Gospel) brought by Jesus and the Qur’an brought by Muhammad.  But you Christians have four Gospels.  Which one is the Gospel brought by Jesus?”  They are startled when I answer that Christians do not believe that Jesus brought any book at all.

The question raised by these students follows logically from the Islamic understanding of prophecy.  God selected certain individuals to whom God revealed, through the action of the Holy Spirit (identified in Islam with the angel Gabriel) a message.  In the case of most prophets, the message took the form of verbal utterances, but a few prophets or messengers  (the relationship of the Arabic terms nabi and rasûl is disputed by Qur’anic exegetes), brought written messages or “Books.”

These books are not the products of the prophet’s hand or mind, but the direct speech of God in human language.  As such, one cannot speak of what Muhammad said or wrote in the Qur’an, but rather of what God said and taught and commanded in the Qur’anic message.  The prophet’s role is limited to being a faithful conveyer of the message entrusted to him.  In the important doctrine of ismâ’, the messenger is preserved by God from both intentional and inadvertent error in whatever he brings from God and, according to many scholars, the prophets’ infallibility is accompanied by impeccability or sinlessness.

Some modern Muslim scholars have challenged what they call a “mechanistic” understanding of prophetic revelation.  The most notable is the late Fazlur Rahman, who based his argument for a more complex process of revelation on what the Qur’an says about itself.  While affirming that the Qur’anic revelations originate wholly from God, he asks how the eternal - thus, pre-verbal - message of God reaches the prophet in human words.  Following the views of the 18th century Indian scholar Shah Waliullah, he holds that “the verbal revelations occur in the words, idioms, and styles which are already existent in the mind of the prophet.”  Following Shah Waliullah, Rahman concludes that God sent down the Qur’an and the previous revealed Books “in a nebulous and undifferentiated manner” into the “heart” of the prophet.  Then, when the occasion arose, God produced well-strung speech from the rational faculties of the Prophet through the agency of the angel.

According to this theory of revelation, the prophet is no mere mechanical transmitter of divine oracles, but rather a person chosen by God whose previous knowledge, contemporary experiences, and personal struggles are relevant to the content of the revealed message.  Fazlur Rahman’s theory of Qur’anic revelation can be seen as a development of the studies on the asbâb al-nuzûl in the tafsîr tradition of Qur’an commentaries.  The asbâb al-nuzûl are “the occasions for revelation,” and Qur’an commentators have, down the centuries, sought to locate the specific occasion for the revelation of each Qur’anic verse at its proper moment in the life of Muhammad.

A strong motivation for this study is to determine the chronology of the revelation of Qur’anic verses, which is essential for application of the legal principle of abrogation in which a verse revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career will abrogate one revealed earlier.  In the thought of Fazlur Rahman, the asbâb al-nuzûl are relevant not only for determining chronology but for understanding the manner and content of the revelation itself.  God’s eternal, non-verbal revelation, placed in the “heart” of Muhammad, that is, in the depths of his personality, is formed by God, through the agency of Gabriel, into words - that is, the text of the Qur’an - in the context of Muhammad’s knowledge, language, and existential situation.

Fazlur Rahman’s view of prophecy has not been widely accepted by Muslims.  He had to leave his post as Director of the Islamic Research Centre in Islamabad, Pakistan, after he was accused of claiming that “the Qur’an is the Word of God and also the word of Muhammad.”  Fazlur Rahman always denied this accusation and claimed that it was a misrepresentation of his position.

Despite the views of Shah Waliullah and Fazlur Rahman which would appear to arrive at positions not widely divergent from a Christian understanding of Biblical revelation, it must be stated that the weight of Islamic tradition has favored a concept of revelation which distances the revealed message from the life and personality of the prophet.  The prophet brings a message which he has received from wholly outside of himself and which in no way “belongs” to him.  Muhammad is seen by Muslims not only as the conveyer of the message, but as its first hearer, the model Muslim who lived fully in accord with the message he received.  But, according to traditional Islamic doctrine, he was in no way involved in the production of that message.

Christian concept of prophethood

Whatever Christians say about the prophethood of Muhammad must be argued in the context of what prophethood means in Christian, not Islamic, terms.  In my opinion, this is where many Christian thinkers set themselves an impossible task.  They accept as their starting point an Islamic understanding of prophecy and its characteristics as recognized by Muslim scholars.  Then, arguing within the Islamic conception, they seek to acknowledge or reject Muhammad as one of the prophets.  It is important, I believe, to recognize that in reference to the phenomenon of prophets and prophecy, Christians and Muslims do not mean exactly the same thing.

The Christian view of prophecy can be illustrated by reference to the thought of the prominent Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner who, in his article on “Prophetism” in the theological compendium Sacramentum Mundi, lists the following characteristics of the prophet:

The prophet always comes with a new message and has to produce his own credentials, and thus the uniqueness of his vocation is essential to the prophet.  He is the religious revolutionary, the critic of society, and does not confine himself to truths which become immediately perspicuous to hearers.  He sees himself as the instrument of the personal, living God, bringing a message not meant for himself alone, but primarily for others.  The “word” is constitutive of the prophet and his mission.  In his criticism of religion and society and interpretation of historical events, the prophet actually exerts an influence upon events by making known their real depth and truth and by offering a new and forward-looking situation in his criticism of society.  In seeking to transform the status quo, the prophet is the organizer of religious and social changes and thus institutionalizes his message.

The prophet is distinguished from the priests, mystics, diviners, and teachers of wisdom precisely by his claim to be “bearer of revelation.” “The prophet is convinced that what he proclaims is the word of God himself.”  Thus far, Rahner’s treatment could be read as a thoroughly Islamic treatment of prophethood, in Islam.  That Muslims would immediately recognize the prophetic mission of Muhammad in Rahner’s description is an indication of how much Christians and Muslims have in common in their concepts of prophethood.  The correspondence among religions of South Asian or East Asian provenance, for example, would be much less.

In this description, Rahner is speaking primarily of the prophets of the Old and New Testaments, but adds that this does not mean that there have been no true prophets outside the Bible.  He distinguishes between the specific revelation found in the Bible and a universal or general history of divine revelation which occurs throughout human history.  This genuine, grace-given history of transcendental revelation is inconceivable if it has not been concretely realized at specific moments of human history.  As the grace-filled general revelation is translated into words, the phenomenon of prophecy, he states, must occur again and again in the general history of revelation.

Moreover, the “pre-Christian” period need not have ended chronologically at the same time in all the regions and situations of salvation, thus allowing for the possibility of prophets appearing historically after the time of Christ.  It is worth noting that he is speaking not only of geographical regions but more broadly of human situations where God’s self-revelation and saving grace precede any knowledge of Christ on the part of the human recipient.

In this treatment of the phenomenon of prophecy, it would seem that there are two areas for further research by Christian and Muslim scholars.  The first is the correspondence between what Rahner calls “grace-filled general revelation,” that is, God’s universal self-revelation in history which goes beyond the specific revelation contained in the Bible, and the Islamic concept of the dîn al-fitra, the one, primordial, natural religion which God places in the heart of every individual.

Secondly, there is Rahner’s idea that as God’s general revelation is concretized, the phenomenon of prophecy occurs over and over again in human history.  In other words, not all instances of genuine prophethood are mentioned in the Biblical books, which deal with the specific revelation of the Bible For a Christian, this specific Biblical revelation always ultimately refers to Christ.  Here we find an interesting correspondence with the Islamic position which never claims that all prophets have been mentioned in the Qur’an.  Most exegetes list approximately 26 prophets and messengers mentioned by name in the Qur’an, although a sound hadîth from Muhammad puts the total number of prophets in human history at 124,000.  This is probably a symbolic number indicating that the phenomenon of genuine prophethood, and thus revelation, has occurred countless times in human history.

Divergence between Christian and Muslim views of prophethood

However, Rahner holds - and here emerges a key difference between the Christian and Islamic understanding of prophethood - that this historical actualization may be partially defective or its relevance limited to certain areas and periods of history.  In other words, not all instances of prophecy are equally universal in scope nor of equal relevance for all times and places.  In Islam, the issue is complex, but here too there is material for further study.  For Muslims, the complete, final, and inerrant character of Muhammad’s prophetic message are unquestionable marks of his prophetic work.  However, the conviction that only the Qur’an presents the final and perfect revelation presumes that other genuine revelations and prophetic missions, which are neither complete nor definitive, have preceded the Qur’anic revelation, in other words, partial and limited expressions of the prophetic mission.  Moreover, for Christians, prophethood implies neither infallibility nor impeccability whereas even inadvertent error is excluded from the Islamic concept of prophecy.

For both Christians and Muslims, the question comes down to one of the criterion by which the true prophet is distinguished from the false.  For a Christian, that criterion, according to Rahner, is the prophet’s relationship to Jesus Christ who, for Christians, is the great prophet, the incomparable paradigm who not only completely fulfills but defines the genre.  He is the criterion by which true prophets are distinguished from pseudo-prophets.  Rahner’s assertion is likely to surprise Christians, who are not accustomed to thinking of Jesus Christ in terms of being the preeminent and definitive prophet.  The assertion will be less astonishing for Muslims, for they affirm Muhammad’s prophetic role in precisely those terms.

It would seem that both the Christian understanding of prophethood and the Islamic understanding of the prophetic nature of Muhammad’s mission are theological reflexes in the sense that the  characteristics of Christian or Islamic prophet are defined by the qualities discovered in the person who embodies and epitomizes the prophet par excellence in each faith.  Just as Christians build their concept of prophethood by reflecting on their faith in what God has taught and accomplished in Jesus Christ, so Muslims begin from the messengership of Muhammad as bringer of the final and perfect revelation and construct from that the Islamic understanding of what constitutes a prophet.

The prophet and the message

At a deeper level, it is not the prophet but the message which constitutes the criterion by which prophecy is judged.  For Christians, God reveals God’s own self in Jesus Christ who incorporates the divine revelation in his own person: “In these last days, God has spoken to us through His son...the radiant light of God’s glory and the perfect copy of God’s nature” (Hebrews 1:2-3).  For Christians, Jesus does not bring a revelation or sacred book from God (a central function of the prophetic mission as conceived by Islam).  Rather, he is the message, the revelation to which the Scriptural books bear witness.

As prophet, his critique of society and religiosity does not arise from a revelation received from outside himself which he then conveys to people, but emerges from his own unique relationship to God.  This message of God’s sovereignty and saving power Jesus conveys both through his teaching in parables, in deeds of healing, exorcism, and raising the dead, in symbolic actions of eating with sinners, baptism in the Jordan, washing the feet of the disciples, the Eucharistic sharing of the bread and wine, and in the ultimate disclosure of the meaning of his life in his death and resurrection.

In other words, the early disciples were convinced that what was communicated to them was a human person who, through his unique prophetic relationship to God, revealed God’s nature, God’s will, and God’s power to save.  As the revelatory anecdotes and accounts of “this man Jesus” were orally handed down and eventually written in Gospel form, the accounts were not regarded as prophetic oracles, but rather as pointing beyond themselves to the revelation which the disciples believed to have found in the person of Christ.  Evidence for this is the lack of interest shown by the Evangelists and their communities in the original words of Jesus and the freedom which the Evangelists felt was theirs to restructure the transmitted materials in order to better enunciate their theology.  I will return to this issue below.  The point here is that the early Christian communities and their Evangelists did not regard the Gospels as divine messages delivered from God by the prophet Jesus, but rather as witnesses of faith to the revelation they had found in Christ.

It is a matter for reflection among both Christians and Muslims that in Islam, the process is not so different.  In Islam, it is the Qur’an, not the person of Muhammad, which is the criterion for distinguishing true from false, right from wrong, as observed in the Qur’anic self-understanding as al-furqân (“the Criterion”).  The Islamic principle for discerning between sound affirmations of Christian faith, such as the Virgin Birth, the miracles wrought by Jesus, his nature as faithful servant of God etc., and beliefs considered erroneous such as the crucifixion, the divine Sonship etc. is their agreement with or divergence from what is taught in the Qur’an.

What then can a Christian say about the prophethood of Muhammad?  Muhammad certainly fulfills the characteristics of prophethood according to the Christian understanding, but Christians can never accept Muhammad as prophet according to an Islamic concept of prophethood.  It would be difficult to find a clearer instance of grace-filled, extra-Biblical, general revelation concretized in a specific, prophetic mission than in what God accomplished in Muhammad.  However, to accept Muhammad as prophet in the Islamic sense would be to accept claims for Muhammad, such as verbal inerrancy and sinlessness, that Christians would not make of the Scriptural authors in their own tradition.  Moreover, just as Muslims find in the Qur’an the criterion by which to determine those elements of Christian doctrine which are to be affirmed and those to be rejected, so for Christians, it is Christ, God’s definitive Word who is the criterion by which elements of Qur’anic teaching are discerned.

One who admits the prophethood of Muhammad, as it is understood by Islam, should properly accept the message he brought and become a Muslim.  Once the role of Muhammad as a prophet in the Islamic sense is admitted, it follows that he cannot err in anything he claims to have brought from God, including the Qur’anic assertion that Islam is intended for all humankind.  However, this would seem tobe a circular argument, that is: we know that Muhammad claimed to be a universal prophet because this is what is stated in the revealed Qur’an which he brought.  The Qur’an can be believed in this because it was brought by a true prophet who delivered an innerant message.

Muslims and Christians must be aware of the limitations of logical argumentation to “prove” the authenticity of their respective faiths.  When applied to faith convictions, human logic will continually produce circular arguments.  If Christians accuse Muslims of employing a circular argument, we must be ready to admit our own.  Christians believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, because the New Testament books bear witness to this.  These writings can be believed because they were inspired by the Holy Spirit sent upon the apostles by Christ the Son of God.

In discussions between Muslims and Christians, I believe that it is important to admit frankly that our convictions concerning God’s intervention in human history are founded on premises that are neither logically demonstrable nor ultimately compatible.  For Christians, the central event of human history occurred in God’s communication of the eternal Word taken flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, an assertion that, should a Muslim accept it, that Muslim should become a Christian.  For Muslims, God’s greatest blessing and guidance to humankind occurred in the final and perfect revelation of the Qur’an through the messengership of Muhammad, an affirmation which, were a Christian to accept it, he or she should enter Islam.

Acceptance of each other’s prophets is not a matter of interreligious courtesy, for the concept of prophecy is constitutive of the very essence of each religion.  Easy and watered-down solutions fail to satisfy anyone.  For Christians to admit that Muhammad was “a kind of prophet” similar, perhaps, to Amos or John the Baptist, will not impress Muslims and is likely to be rejected as condescension.  Similarly, for Muslims to expect that Christians will be happy to learn that Jesus is highly respected as one of the Islamic messengers who preceded the perfect and final revelation brought by Muhammad is to misunderstand the essence of Christian faith.

I suggest that this impasse, which cannot be resolved by human logic, must be left to God, rather than worried and exacerbated in polemical confrontation.  To paraphrase Qur’anic teaching, “to God we are all returning.” Soon enough we will learn the answers to those matters over which we have disputed.  Discussions in Islamic texts commonly conclude with the words Allahu a'lam, “God is more knowledgeable.”  This principle needs to be mutually acknowledged in dialogue on the vexed question of prophethood.

2. Revelation and Scripture

Christian understanding of Biblical inspiration has moved far from the literal, even mechanistic, understanding held in earlier times.  Our understanding of the Biblical text, its authorship and inspiration, has been irreversibly influenced and shaped by the historical-critical studies on the Bible undertaken in recent centuries.  The fact that during the same period Islamic interpretation of the Qur’an has moved in a different direction makes difficulties in discussing revelation and Scripture.

Christian scholars today are less interested in rediscovering the original words or deeds of Jesus than in determining the original intention of the Biblical authors.  The “search for the historical Jesus” has proved to be a dead end, just as efforts to determine the original wording of Jesus’ evangelical teachings (the most recent attempt being that of the highly publicized Jesus Seminar) must be seen as an interesting exercise in historical reconstruction but one which can produce nothing beyond scholarly conjecture.

Christian Biblical scholarship has come to realize that the Scriptures are the product of the Church.  It was the early Christian communities that orally preserved the message of Jesus in the crucial period before the communities had any Scriptures in addition to the Septuagint.  Moreover, it is clear that the communities did not consider the preservation of the original words of Jesus to be an essential element of the message they intended to communicate.  One need only look at the verbal variations in passages of fundamental importance for Christian faith, such as the quite different versions of the Lord’s Prayer found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, or the words of Eucharistic institution at the Last Supper as reported in the three Synoptic Gospels and in Paul’s account in First Corinthians - none of which contain identical wording - to see that the preservation of the original words of Jesus was not one of the concerns of the early communities of disciples.

Moreover, as communities convinced that they were being guided by Christ’s own Spirit, they did not hesitate to rework the words of Jesus to fit the needs of the individual communities.  When the oral traditions came to be written down in Gospel form, the evangelists’ intention was not to communicate the very words of Jesus, which in some cases had already been lost, but to proclaim and communicate the faith of the community in the risen Lord.

The Bible is the product of the Church in a second important sense.  It is the Church which has decided which books of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament writings are to be considered part of the canonical collection.  Until about the year 100, when the Christian communities cited “Scripture,” they were referring to the Jewish Scriptures.  Moreover, when Christians began to make collections of specifically Christian writings, mainly for liturgical recitation, they did not consider the four Gospels to be more inspired than, for example, the Epistles of Paul.

In reviewing these generally accepted points of New Testament scholarship, already well-known to many of you, my purpose is to show that in dialogue with Muslims today, the Christian understanding of Scripture has moved far both from the ideas of medieval Christianity as well as from the mainstream of Islamic teaching on questions of revelation and Scripture.  This awareness compels modern Christians and Muslims to reformulate issues of Scripture and revelation as follows:

1. Christians today recognize that it was the apostolic Church that produced the Scriptures.  The New Testament writings are not considered to be verbally inspired oracles of Divine speech delivered through the agency of a delimited number of prophets.  However, by Muslims, the Qur’an is held to be the literal message of God delivered through the agency of the prophet Muhammad.  They tend to find it a scandalous symptom of rationalist decadence that Christians might even admit the possibility that the divine words brought by the prophet Jesus have been revised by his disciples.

2. The apostolic communities that produced the New Testament were convinced that the Holy Spirit was guiding them to express their faith in what God had accomplished in Jesus Christ and what the Spirit was continuing to effect in their lives.  Their concern was less to preserve the original words of Jesus than the enduring divine message embodied in the person of Christ.  Muslims, on the other hand, are equally convinced that the Islamic community, or even the prophet Muhammad himself, had no role in the production or authorship of the Qur’anic message, which they hold to be God’s own words delivered to humankind through the final prophet.

3. The Christian tradition has been unanimous in holding the Biblical Books to be “equally inspired by God.”  The Islamic tradition has never defined which book or books are intended by the Qur’anic references to Torah and Injîl (Gospel), but generally presumes there to have been one original book given to Moses and Jesus, which alone can be considered to have been revealed by God.  Consequently, Muslims and Christians, when they discuss the Injîl or Gospel, are not referring to the same textual material.  Muslims have in mind a unitary Gospel which God handed down to Jesus, whereas Christians think of their proper Scripture as the 26 books of the New Testament which were accepted as canonical by the apostolic Church.

4. The liberty with which the apostolic community developed its Scriptures from oral tradition to written documents is based on a specifically Christian concept of revelation.  Christian faith is founded on a person, not a book.  Christians hold that God revealed God’s own self in the person of Jesus Christ.  The Christian Scriptures do not contain the literal Word of God but rather announce, bear witness to and point toward God’s self-revelation in Christ.  Thus, although Christians are called “People of the Book” by Muslims, Christian self-understanding denies that Christianity is a “religion of the Book” in the way that Islam holds itself to be.  For Muslims, it is the divine Word revealed in the Qur’an that forms them into a community.  Similarly, the usage by non-Muslims of the term “Mohammedans” to indicate the followers of Islam violates Islamic self-understanding, for Islam is founded not on a man but on a message contained in a revealed Book.

5. For Christians, their faith is based on a continuity with the faith of the apostles in the person of Christ whom God raised from the dead, and their New Testament Scriptures are the normative witnesses to this faith.  Christian faith stands or falls on the question whether the apostolic communities properly understood the message of Jesus and faithfully transmitted, under the guidance of the Spirit, their experience of the risen Christ.  Thus, it is logically consistent for Christians to seek to determine, through historical and critical studies, the original content of that message and the original intention of the apostolic communities that produced those testimonies.

By contrast, in affirming a faith grounded in the divinely-revealed text of the Qur’an, Muslims are adverse to critical scholarship that would seek to determine human authorship, sources, or historical development in the Qur’an.  Thus, while Muslims tend to view Christian historical-critical studies of the Bible as evidence of the human origins of Christian Scripture, that it was not divinely revealed through a prophet, Christians tend to regard Muslim rejection of such studies as applied to the Qur’an as an indication of a non-scientific, pre-modern approach to Scripture.

It is also important to consider whether the sole purpose of Scripture is simply to convey oracular utterances from God.  Scripture has other purposes, such as the proclamation of good news of divine redemption, the spiritual formation of disciples, the establishment of moral values, the communication of an enduring message, the edification of believers, and the consolation of the afflicted - none of which requires a precise replication of prophetic speech.  In trying to prove that Christian Scriptures fulfill an Islamic criterion of revelation, which is not that of Christian faith, Christians give the game away before it begins.  This can be seen in contemporary polemical debates between Muslim apologists like Ahmad Deedat and Christian evangelists who share a literalist view of Scripture.

Transmission of the Qur’an

Christians, however, might be permitted to wonder whether the conviction with which Muslims affirm the pristine nature of the Qur’anic text is all that different from the confidence which Christians place in the faithful transmission of the message of Christ by the New Testament authors.  Muslim scholars over the centuries have debated as to whether or not Muhammad was illiterate, and the issue turns on the precise meaning of the Qur’anic term ummi.  It could mean someone who could not read or write, which would not have been unusual for a person living in the Arabian desert in the 7th Century, or it could indicate an Arab who could not read or write any language other than Arabic.  One strong current of the Islamic tradition has held that the illiteracy of Muhammad is evidence for the miraculous nature of the Qur’an.

Whatever one’s opinion concerning the ability of Muhammad to write, Muslim scholars are virtually unanimous in asserting that Muhammad did not write down the revelations coming to him from God.  According to traditional Islamic belief, Muhammad received verbal revelations, which he memorized and taught orally to his Companions in the course of the 22 years of his prophetic ministry.  As it became clear to the Companions that Muhammad would not be with them forever, some Companions began to write down the memorized verses on whatever primitive writing materials were available in Central Arabia.  The amount of the Qur’an which Muslim scribes had been transcribed on papyrus, stones, hides, bark, bones, etc. before the death of Muhammad is disputed, with some scholars claiming, on not very sound historical evidence, that the whole of the Qur’an was written down before the death of Muhammad.

According to the traditional accounts, a first compilation of revealed verses was made in the time of Abu Bakr in the second year after the death of Muhammad.  Because so many of the Qur’an reciters who had memorized much of the Qur’an were killed at the battle of Yamâma, Zaid ibn Thabit was summoned by Abu Bakr who ordered Zaid to collect the existing fragments into a volume.  The tradition records that Zaid collected the fragments into a “volume” which remained in the possession of Abu Bakr until his death and was then passed on to Umar who in turn gave it to his daughter Hafsa.  Uthmân, the third calif, ordered a second recension which is generally accepted as the basic text of the Qur’an today.  On completion of the work of the redaction team, the previously existing fragments were then destroyed.

For the first generations of Muslims, the authentic Qur’an was that preserved in human memory rather than on the pages of a book.  A characteristic of oral cultures is that memory is the criterion by which written texts are judged and verified.  If what is written agrees with what has been memorized, it can be considered correct.  In literary cultures, the process is reversed.  An actor who has memorized a Shakespearean soliloquy checks his memory against the script.

My point is that, just as Christian faith stands or falls on whether the apostolic Church faithfully understood and communicated the Good News of the crucified and risen Christ, so also Islam stands or falls on whether those whose memories were the criterion against which the Uthmanic recension was checked were accurate and comprehensive in their recollection of the Qur’anic revelations.

Christians believe that these communities were guided by the Spirit in communicating their experience of the crucified and risen Christ.  One might define Christians as those who trust that the disciples of Jesus had an experience of the risen Christ and faithfully handed on that message.  Just as Christians have confidence in the Spirit’s guidance of the apostolic communities so that the Scriptures that they produced can be trusted to convey a credible account of the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Christ, so also Muslims place their faith in the memories of the huffâz (those who memorized the Qur’an) among the Companions.  They believe that these early Companions were preserved from error by Jibrîl (Gabriel), who is identified with the Holy Spirit, from erring in their preservation of the Qur’anic revelations.

Once, in a question-answer period after a conference to Muslim university students, I was asked: “How can you place confidence in Scriptures whose early codices contain so many variants?”  I answered that we are happy to have these early codices, for our scholars can study and compare them scientifically and offer their informed opinions on the more probable reading.  As partial manuscripts continue to be found and scrutinized and the scientific study of the manuscript traditions continues to grow in precision and sophistication, one can confidently claim that through modern scholarship, the churches are approaching a knowledge of the original Biblical texts that was impossible in pre-modern times.

By contrast, the pre-Uthmanic fragments of Qur’an revelations have been destroyed and are lost to history.  One must “take it or leave it”.  Either one accepts that the huffâz were accurate and comprehensive in correcting the pre-Uthmanic fragments, or one doubts that.  The few Qur’anic variants found in Ibn Sa’d and other early writers cannot be checked against preserved fragments.

This is not to say that the early huffâz were inaccurate in their memories nor that the Uthmanic recension of the Qur’an is not the complete and authentic collection of revelations delivered by God directly to Muhammad.  But it does mean that a Christian can neither affirm nor deny the completeness and accuracy of the Qur’anic text, because we have no historical evidence in either direction.

3. The One and Triune God

It is clear from the opening words of the Nicene Creed “I believe in One God...” that Christians understand their faith to be professing only One God, and yet Christian Trinitarian formulations have often raised the accusation made by Muslims (and Jews) that Christians worship three gods. This raises several difficult questions for Christians and Muslims concerned about the relationship between these two faiths.  Is there a sense in which one can hold that if Muslims understood properly the Christian doctrine of the Trinitarian God that they would find in it nothing incompatible with true monotheism?  Does the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition formed by the Qur’an ever treat orthodox Christian belief in the Trinity?  Can the Arab Christian theological tradition, developed in the context of an ongoing debate and dialogue with Muslims, be a corrective to European/Western formulations which evolved in a cultural context in which Islamic objections need not be taken into consideration?  And - what is the perhaps the most difficult - has the defensive attitude adopted by Christians in dialogue of trying to convince Muslims that they really believe in one God rather than three prevented them from challenging Muslims to show, without adopting a Trinitarian view of God, how God’s activity in human history and in the universe can be adequately affirmed?  In other words, should Christian Trinitarian belief be considered the radicalization of monotheism?

One and the same God?

It might be worth prefacing our reflections with a more basic one, but one which is still occasionally raised.  Do Muslims and Christians believe in the same God?  From a Christian point of view, does the Islamic denial of the Trinity result in such a fundamentally contradictory  conception of God’s nature that Muslims cannot be considered as worshiping the same God as Christians?  Conversely, for Muslims, does Christian Trinitarian doctrine remove Christians from the family of monotheist believers?

The idea that the terms God and Allah refer to distinct and rival divinities is not new.  In the past, European Christian writers often considered Allah as a rival deity to the God professed by Christians.  On the other hand, Arabic theological tradition, both Muslim and Christian, has always presumed that Allah is the common name for the One God about whose nature the two communities have points of disagreement.

The question continues to have practical implications.  Some conservative Christians refused to accept the Pope’s invitation to take part in the 1986 and 1991 Days of Prayer for Peace in Assisi because they denied that Jews, Muslims and, a fortiori, followers of other religions would be praying to the same God.  On the other side, some Muslims have objected to the use of the term Allah by Christians because they reject the notion that Christians pray to the same God as the One revealed in the Qur’an.

Among Roman Catholic Christians, the issue would seem to have been settled by the statement in Lumen gentium (LG16) that “they [Muslims] worship with us the One God.”  Lest any doubt remain, Pope John Paul II has repeatedly stressed that Muslims and Christians believe in and worship one and the same God.  In 1985, he said to a visiting Muslim delegation: “Your God and ours is one and the same, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham.”  Perhaps Kenneth Cragg, Anglican archbishop of Jerusalem, has stated the issue most succinctly: “When we [Christians and Muslims] refer to God, the subject is the same.  On the predicates we differ.”

There is a serious reason why Christians, I believe, must affirm the essential oneness of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic God.  It is the same God encountered by Moses, the God in whose name the prophets spoke, whom John the Baptist proclaimed, and whom Jesus taught his disciples to call Abba who is the one God worshiped by all three communities of believers.  Rejecting the Allah of the Qur’an is tantamount to rejecting the consistent affirmation of the Hebrew Scriptures and the great figures of the Gospels.  Who would dare to claim that the God of the saints and prophets of the Old Testament or the God of John the Baptist, Mary, and other Gospel figures is not the God of Christians because their understanding lacked a specific Trinitarian content?

Did the Qur’an misunderstand Christian belief?

Christians often claim that the Islamic rejection of the Trinitarian nature of God is based on a misunderstanding of Christian doctrine.  Some go further to root this misunderstanding in Qur’anic passages, an assertion which Muslims find offensive, as it implies that Muhammad, rather than God, was the author of the Qur’an or else, what is even more blasphemous, that the Divine author of the Qur’an was guilty of misunderstanding Christian teaching.

The Qur’anic passages which appear to reject the Trinity are not numerous but are emphatic in their rejection of trinitarian concepts.  Two passages, both taken from Surat al-Mâ’ida, are typical: “They disbelieve who say: ‘God is one of three’” (5: 77); and “Recall when God said, ‘O Jesus, son of Mary, was it you who said to the people: Take me and my mother as two gods apart from God?’ He replied: ‘Glory be to You! It is not for me to say what is not true. Had I said it, you would know it’” (5:116).  Such affirmations would seem to place a unsurmountable barrier to Muslim-Christian understanding on the nature of God.

However, such affirmations must be understood in their historical context.  For centuries before the time of Christ, the “Semitic triad” was evident in the religiosity of both nomadic tribesmen and settled populations of the Arabian region.  Although the names of the divinities changed from place to place, from tribe to tribe, there was widespread belief in the High God (called by some Arabs Allâh, that is, “the God,” his consort (called Allât “the Goddess” by some Arab tribes) and their son Ba’l (or Ba’l Shamîm), that is, “the Lord.”  It was natural for Christians, poorly educated in their faith, to identify the persons of this traditional triad with God “the Father,” Mary “the Mother of God” and their son Jesus “the Lord.”

It is this primitive, pseudo-Christian understanding which is strongly rejected by the Qur’an, implying, as it does, the physical generation of Jesus from a type of sexual union of God with Mary.  This concept has also been consistently rejected by Christian theologians, bishops, and councils.  One could, in fact, find parallels in authoritative Christian sources, both before and after the time of Muhammad, to every Qur’anic condemnation of multiplicity and association in God.  Thus, Qur’an can be read as rejecting these unworthy understandings of God, proclaiming God to be far above such improper intermingling and, in effect, affirming Christian condemnations of similar erroneous interpretations.  The Qur’an pronounces neither positively nor negatively on orthodox Christian trinitarian doctrine, because such was not encountered among the few Christianized Arabs of the Hijaz region in which Mecca and Madina are located.

This argument is intriguing and somewhat convincing.  One could wish for more hard evidence that the Semitic triad was worshiped not only by settled populations but also by nomadic Arabs.  In any case, so little is known about the form or forms Christianity may have taken in 7th Century Hijaz or even whether Christianity in the Hijaz had progressed beyond the stage of isolated individuals who were adopted some elements of Christian belief that it is difficult to move beyond conjecture.

Three persons in One God or One God in three modes of subsisting?

Karl Rahner, one of the few modern European theologians who has attempted to formulate Christian Trinitarian doctrine in full awareness of Islamic monotheist sensitivities, has noted that the terminology of “three persons in God” is, to say the least, “misleading and open to misunderstanding.”  Although one can find an orthodox explanation of the phrase by redefining “person” out of its normal usage, the modern Christian and non-Christian will almost inevitably think in terms of “three subjects differing from one another in their subjectivity, knowledge, and freedom, and wonder what kind of logic it is that permits three persons to be simultaneously one and the same God.”  A more accurate statement of what Christian faith says of the Triune God can be achieved by use of the term hypostasis defined by the early Councils, which can perhaps best be translated as “mode (or manner) of subsisting.”  Christians thus profess faith in the one God who exists and acts in three basic ways or “modalities.”

In the 2nd Century, a Christian theologian, Sabellius, described God as “one God in three modalities,” but his writings were condemned by the Council of Nicea.  What was condemned in the thought of Sabellius was his view that the divine modes of being and acting were not part of God’s eternal nature, but rather ways of being which God adopted in time.  Thus the modalities were something extrinsic to God’s unchanging nature, historically conditioned “accidents” rather than pertaining to God’s essence.  The Council of Nicea affirmed the traditional belief that the Divine hypostases, or modes of God’s being and acting, were eternal rather than originating in time, real, rather than logical constructs, and essential, that is, pertaining by necessity to God’s essence and not extraneous characteristics added on to God’s nature.  Any modern modalistic formulation of the Trinity must remain faithful to the Conciliar understanding of One God whose three modes of subsistence are eternal, real, and essential to the Divine nature.

Mutual challenge of monotheist believers

We must proceed beyond the matter of adopting the most suitable terminology to the deeper question about the nature of God which religious monotheists pose to one another.  On the one hand, Muslims (and Jews) must continually ask Christians whether their profession of faith in the Triune God does not amount to a disguised tritheism or at least a doctrine that cannot be implemented religiously by one for whom the acknowledgment of one God is not merely a metaphysical statement but the very heart of the believer’s faith.  On the other hand, the Christian must continually ask the Muslim (and the Jew) whether they need to go farther to achieve the radical monotheism whose expression Christians find in the doctrine of the Trinity.

For all monotheist believers, questions regarding God’s oneness are not speculative problems whose solution is to be sought in metaphysics, but rather efforts to know better this Living God who creates, teaches, saves, and gives life.  Christians’ experience of the history of revelation and salvation is of a threefold nature.  It is an experience of the one God, who does not live and remain in a metaphysical remoteness, but continually seeks to impart God’s own self to created humans in truth and love as our own eternal life.  From a Christian point of view, it is not a question of a revelation of something other than God, but rather a self-revelation to humankind in both our historical contingency as well as in the transcendent core of our existence.  God’s historical self-revelation Christians find in the incarnation of God’s eternal message or Logos in the person of Jesus Christ.  God’s active, transcendent presence at the heart, not only of human nature, but of the whole created universe, Christians call the Holy Spirit.

If our concept of God is not that of the distant totally Other, but rather God who has freely chosen to be part of contingent human history and who remains actively present at the innermost core of creation, it is not sufficient to speak of an eternal Message embodied in a covenant, person, or Sacred Book.  God reveals God’s own self in the daily affairs of human life and God’s transcendent self-revelation in every sub-atomic particle of the cosmos.  A radical monotheism requires that the one God have these two ways or modes of acting in history and in creation. Moreover, these modes cannot be created or different from God.  If we are speaking of a genuine self-communication of God to the creature, then the modes of communication must be Divine and not some created mediation.

For a believer who is content to worship and obey the incomprehensible God from an infinite distance, this discussion might appear irrelevant.  But if we admit the possibility that God might also be intimately near, and if we respond to a religious thirst for intimate communication with present God, this would seem to imply that God has ways or modes, which are themselves divine, not created, and not separate from God, by which God enters definitively into human history and also remains as a life-giving presence at the transcendent core of the created universe.  Anything less would lead to creaturely mediations and unacknowledged polytheism.

The key differences between the Christian and the Islamic perceptions of the Living God would seem to come down to two.  The first is the distinction between revelation and self-revelation, that is, between a God who reveals a Message and God who reveal’s God’s own self as present.  Islamic faith speaks of revelation, Christian faith of self-revelation.

Secondly, if one believes that God is radically present in human history and at the transcendent core of the universe, one might ask how God is present.  Speaking of the “how” is to speak of modalities, the ways God effectuates this Divine presence.  Whereas Islamic faith, in my view, does not address the question of modality, Christian faith proclaims that God’s ways are two: God’s historical self-revelation in the person of Jesus and God’s transcendent and active presence at the heart of creation, which we call the Spirit.  These are the two divine processions and two missions of classical Trinitarian theology.

If Trinitarian belief is ultimately concerned with the ways or modalities by which God is present in transitory human history and in the cosmos, one might seek to explain the Christian belief in terms of Divine presence.  A modern Christian theologian has formulated Christian Trinitarian belief in just such terms, speaking of the Divine presences:  “God present for us,” whom we call Father, “God present with us” in the Word made flesh, “God present in us,” whom we call the Spirit.

Many Muslim scholars hold that the affirmation of Divine Unity is the central concern of theology (tawhid).  As a Christian, I agree that this is both the goal of religious faith and the goal of theology.  In this, we must avoid, on the one hand, considering God so different and remote as to prevent a vibrant response in faith and, on the other, confusing and intermingling God with creation.  I would describe the doctrine of the Trinity as radical tawhîd in affirming the ways or modalities by which the One Eternal, Infinite God is present “for us, with us, and in us,” in our history and universe, avoiding both remoteness and irrelevance and avoiding the implicit polytheism of positing created mediations.

No doubt the debate between Muslims and Christians will continue for centuries to come.  Each has sound bases on which to challenge the other.  If the Islamic vocation in our world remains that of witnessing to God’s true oneness and challenging any conceptualizations or formulations of the Divine which would diminish or deny that Unity, the Christian vocation is to bear witness that this one and same God is intimately close to humankind, has become part of our changeable human history, and unceasingly lives and moves at the heart of the cosmos.

One might say that Muslims approach the Divine with the fundamental question, “Who?” and the answer of Islamic faith is “Allah, the One God.”  Christians agree and then ask a second question, “How?” and the answer of Christian faith  is “in three essential modes of Divine presence.”

4. Sin and redemption

If the Christian dogma of Trinity can be understood as a radical form of monotheism, and if Christians and Muslims can recognize one another as professing diverse but genuine forms of belief in One and the same God, each with its own emphases and theological concerns, they might be able to discover a deeper level of agreement that goes beyond and unites the apparently contradictory dogmatic formulations of the two faiths.

In my opinion, the Christian doctrine of the redemption is a more basic difference between Christianity and Islam.  In my experience of teaching Christian theology in Islamic theological faculties, I find that the doctrine of the redemption is the element of Christian faith which Muslims find most inexplicable, gratuitous, and even blasphemous in its implications.

Some years ago, a Muslim colleague stated the problem to me in the following way.  “You Christians and we Muslims both believe that God is all-powerful and all-good.  That means that God can do whatever God wants, and that God only wants to do what is best for humankind.  In other words, when I sin and then repent of my sin and turn to God in forgiveness, God can forgive me because God is all-powerful, and God will forgive me, because God is all-good and merciful.  But if this is so, why do you say that it was necessary for Jesus to die for our sins?”

Obviously, to my colleague, who was not trying to score polemical points but sincerely wanted to know why we Christians held what was to him such an absurd doctrine, the concept of redemption for sins appeared as superfluous, irrelevant, and opposed to what Christians and Muslims both profess to understand about God’s nature and the way God relates to sinful humanity.  To him, the doctrine of redemption is not only unnecessary but implies a denial either of divine omnipotence or divine goodness or both.

This is not a new objection.  The 13th century Muslim scholar, Ahmad al-Qarâfi, posed the problem in the form of a conundrum.  If, he said, Christ’s death on the cross was to expiate for mankind’s sins, did Christ gain forgiveness for those who repented or for those who did not repent?  If it was for those who repented, Christ’s death was unnecessary.  If it was for those who did not repent, they would not in any case be saved or find forgiveness through his death.  In other words, if the sole precondition for forgiveness of sins is genuine repentance, Christ’s death - or any other form of vicarious redemption - is beside the point.

Most Muslims who have studied Christian faith have been far less acquainted with the epistles of Paul than with the material of the Four Gospels.  Unlike Christian thinkers struggling to understand their own faith, Muslim scholars have not treated verses such as the hymn in Ephesians that refers to Christ as “God’s free gift to us...in whom, through his blood, we gain our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins” (Ephesians 1:7).”

The early Fathers who grappled with Pauline passages and the Ephesians hymn emphasized diverse aspects of redemption.  While the Greek fathers stressed the restoration to divine life lost through sin, the Latin fathers emphasized the expiation of sins through Christ’s sacrificial death.  With Augustine, the restoration of humankind to original righteousness lost by original sin became the central focus, while in the East, as in Origen’s commentaries, the salvation of the just before the time of Christ was considered a key effect of the redemption.

Muslim reactions to the redemption

Muslim objections begin with the concept of “original sin.”  According to Qur’anic teaching, Adam repented of his sin, God forgave him, chose him as prophet, and guided him in his ways.  If God pardoned Adam’s sin, how is it possible that great and holy men like Abraham and Moses would later be held in the bonds of Satan for an offence that was already forgiven?  Abraham’s own father was an unbelieving idolater, but God did not punish Abraham for his father’s misdeed, so why would God punish Abraham for a wrong committed by a more distant ancestor?  Moses wrongly killed a man, but God forgave him.  If God forgave Moses his own sins when he repented, why would God hold him in Satan’s bonds for the sin of another?

These same questions have been asked for centuries by Christians, and many of the speculative solutions proposed found their way into Christian teaching.  One such theory, going back to Origen in the 3rd Century, was that the devil had certain rights over humans due to the Adam’s sin, but Satan was defeated when he wrongly tried to extend the domain of death over the sinless Christ.  When the devil tried to imprison Christ after his crucifixion, Christ defeated him and released all those who had previously been held by Satan.

To Muslims, this solution is nothing less than blasphemous.  That God would resort to the stratagem of concealing the divine nature in the person of the sinless Christ in order to defeat Satan unworthily imputes deviousness and weakness to God.  Moreover, if Satan had been properly given power to imprison souls in hell because of their sins and the sin of their father Adam, then it would have been improper to release them because of Christ’s sinlessness.  On the other hand, if souls had wrongly been imprisoned by Satan, God would have set them free long before Christ was crucified.

In the 12th Century, Anselm of Canterbury proposed the satisfaction theory which held that the gravity of offenses is measured by the dignity of the one offended.  In the case of human sin against the infinitely great and good God, nothing less than the death of God’s own son can make up for the wrong.  Anselm’s theory, while not positing an elaborate ploy on the part of God to deceive and vanquish Satan, nevertheless envisions a God who demands the blood sacrifice of God’s own son in order to atone for human sin.  No doubt Muslims will ask what loving and just God would demand the blood of the sinless Christ, in a particularly vicious form of death by torture, in reparation for the sins of others?  Even more if Jesus were in some way “son of God.” No human would be so unfair and cruel.  No human father would ever permit such a thing or fail to do everything in his power to prevent it.  How can Christians claim such unworthy behavior of God?

To return to the words of my Muslim colleague in modern Turkey, since God is able, God can forgive. Since God is good, God wants to forgive.  If the only precondition for forgiveness is sincere repentance, why should God need to employ the drama of the death of Christ in order to make this forgiveness possible?

Faced with this apparently inexorable Islamic logic, the Christian must either sidestep the issue, or be prepared, as some have done, to relativize the Christian doctrine of the redemption into a myth which can nevertheless teach some useful and morally uplifting lessons, or else to ask whether there are other issues important for human life before God which the Islamic logic has not addressed.  It is some of these “other” elements that I would like to explore now.

Preliminary issues

If not only Muslims but also Christians today find the earlier explanations proposed by Origen, Anselm and others unacceptable, what can be said positively about the meaning of the redemption as a way of understanding how God acts in history to save men and women?  One place to begin is with insights gained from the Biblical renewal.  Christian thinkers today are more ready than in previous times to take as the starting point of theology the Biblical narratives rather than magisterial statements or Conciliar definitions.  They recognize more clearly that the New Testament Scriptures are the books of the Church and reflect the faith of the apostolic communities that produced them.  Hence they seek to rediscover the primitive faith of the early church of the early Church as the basis for theologizing.

If we take seriously the New Testament Scriptures, we arrive at several preliminary conclusions.  Firstly, it is clear from the New Testament that Jesus did not want to die and that God did not desire Jesus’ death on the cross.  What Jesus wanted was for people to accept his message, repent of their sins, be converted and allow God to reign in their lives.  Moreover, God who never desires or wills or condones sin, could never have wished for or approved the many sinful acts and hateful attitudes involved in Judas’ betrayal, Jesus’ abandonment by his own disciples, the treachery of the religious leaders, the venality of Herod, and the unjust sentence of death imposed on an innocent man by the Roman authorities.  We cannot ascribe a “martyr complex” to Jesus.  The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says: “During his life on earth, Jesus offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the One who had the power to save him from death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard” (Heb:5:7).  The Gospel narratives that portray Jesus in the Garden expressing to God his inner revulsion at the suffering and death that were likely to befall him can only mean that for the early Christians, there was no thought that Christ desired or sought out suffering and death.

Secondly, it was not absolutely necessary that God incarnate God’s Word in the man Jesus, nor that Jesus’ death on the cross have a saving effect for mankind.  God, who is supremely free and not constrained by any events of human history, or by history itself, could have worked in some other way.  This is not a new idea, but formed the basis of Thomas Aquinas’ rejection of Anselm’s concept of the necessity of redemption through the death of God’s Son.  Aquinas taught that God could well have redeemed the world in other ways, but chose the manner of the death and resurrection of Christ because it showed the harmony between God’s justice and mercy and God’s wisdom and goodness.  If this is the case, any understanding of Christ’s death which results in a portrayal of God as unjust, pitiless, ignorant or evil cannot be considered a truly Christian explanation of the redemption.

Christians believe that God chose to accomplish human salvation through the life and death of Jesus Christ, while admitting that God could have conceivably chosen countless other ways to accomplish this goal.  Here the question of mediation is joined.  Granted that God need not have employed any human mediation to save humankind, Christians claim that God chose to do so.

In itself, the notion of God working through a human mediator poses no contradiction between Christianity and Islam.  According to Islamic teaching, God’s sovereign freedom does not preclude God’s employing human mediation - God can do whatever God wants - but Islam denies any need for God to use mediators.  Christians and Muslims agree that God has exercised saving power through human agents.  In Islam, God uses the prophets as messengers to bring God’s Word, but the prophetic mission is not limited to the work of delivering a message.  Prophets also accomplish other tasks in God’s name.  Through Abraham, God established divine cult in the construction of the Ka’ba.  Through Moses, God led the Jewish people out of Egypt.  Through Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, God gave their people a sharî’a or religious way of life.

According to Islam, Muhammad was not only the bearer of the Qur’anic message, but also strove to construct a social and political order formed according to teaching of the Qur’an.  In his actions and decisions, he was the model Muslim, not merely the prophet who delivered the Qur’an but also its ‘first hearer,’ the believer who lived the message of the Qur’an in an exemplary way, so that his words and actions become sunna for the Islamic community.

In the case of Jesus, Christians believe that God not only incarnated the eternal Word in Jesus, but that his deeds, teaching, life, and tragic end have a special saving efficacy.  The insights of narrative theology underline the efficacious divine power at work in the life of Christ.  He began as a simple preacher, urging people to repent and turn away from sin and to accept God’s sovereignty.  But he also healed by the power of God, confronted and expelled demons, defended those who were oppressed by the regulations and interpretations of religious leaders, and condemned those who corrupted pure religion by making it into a profitable business.

In the course of his ministry, Jesus realized that the path which he had taken was putting him on a “collision course” with human selfishness, greed, and thirst for power.  The Gospels record several attempts on Jesus’ life.  If the Gospels can be believed, at least as a record of the faith of the early Christian communities, it became clear, especially by the time of his last visit to Jerusalem, that Jesus would not escape with his life from the situation of hatred which surrounded him.  His apostles warned him not to go to Jerusalem because of the rumors of plots against his life.  Statements of Jesus confirm that he knew that such stories were not idle tales.  None of this implies a “martyr complex” in Jesus or that he wanted to suffer and die.

Although he did not want suffering and death, he freely accepted all that as the predictable consequence of his call to preach God’s Word without compromise or flight.  According to the Gospel accounts, it was while he was still praying to be released from the cup of suffering that the Roman soldiers captured him, after which he was tried, sentenced to death, and crucified.  The Gospels record that Pilate, the Roman governor, offered Jesus a “way out.”  If he would retract or soften his teaching, Pilate could release him.  But Jesus refused, not because he wanted to die, but because he was faithful and obedient to the mission which God had given him.

For Christians, the question is not why Jesus had to die, or why God wanted him to die. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, we must not imagine that “those who handed him over were merely passive players in a scenario written in advance by God” (CCC: 599).  Rather, given the fact that this is the unjust and tragic way that Christ’s prophetic ministry ended, Christians ask: “What has God achieved for us in the death of Jesus and what does God teach us by it?”

The answer that a believer gives to such questions cannot be separated from one’s understanding of crucial issues like sin and salvation.  Depending on how one understands the nature of sin and the meaning of salvation, one will be led to conclude either that redemption is congruent with God’s revelation in the prophetic tradition or else an anomaly that must be rejected.  Because Christian doctrine of the redemption is perhaps the most basic issue that distinguishes the Christian understanding of God’s salvific activity in history from that of Muslims, I would like to offer a response to the perceptive objections raised by Muslims to the Christian belief in the redemption.

There are basically three areas in which people feel the need for salvation.  Firstly, we are conscious of living in a human condition where egoism, injustice, and violence are a part of daily life and bring suffering to all.  We feel oppressed by forces outside ourselves which influence the behavior of everyone despite one’s best intentions.  Secondly, we realize that the evil in the world is not only the result of the sinful condition into which we are born, but also of our personal contribution to the long history of human sinfulness.  This can be called the objective aspect of sin which defiles all persons before the infinitely holy and good God.  Finally, there is the subjective aspect of each one’s need to repent, seek forgiveness and be transformed by God’s grace.  Corresponding to the ways in which people feel a need for salvation, I will propose three models by which Christians understand the death of Jesus as liberating evidence of God’s power to save.

1. Liberation from sin and death

People feel oppressed by forces outside themselves prevent them from attaining happiness.  Paul says that we have been freed from the powers of sin, death, and demonic forces.  I refer here not to personal sin so much as destructive attitudes, values and societal structures that are bigger than any individual and lead us to act in ways opposed to God’s will.  These forces vary from culture to culture and from age to age, but are always present in human societies in one form or another.

In some societies, it might be the fear of powerful forces of nature which strike down those who break the taboos.  In secular societies, it might be a gross materialism and consumerism which persuades people that they will be happy so long as they surround themselves with beautiful objects and constantly enjoy new and exciting pleasures.  Elsewhere, concepts of family honor, ethnic identity, or racial pride cloud sound judgment and make people do terrible things that otherwise they would know to be wrong.  Some societies preach youth, beauty, wealth, power or success as the factors which bring true happiness - a particularly bitter message for the vast majority of people who are not, in fact, young, beautiful, rich, powerful or successful.

Such attitudes are oppressive and cause misery.  The Bible calls these societal attitudes “the sin of the world,” for which no one is individually responsible, but which negatively affect the lives of all.  Christian theologians speak of “original” sin, in the sense that this sinful environment has exerted its influence on human life ever since the beginnings of the human race.  One need not posit a sin handed down genetically from Adam to recognize, as does the Qur’an, that God has created humankind fi kabad (90:4), that is, “in disorder, affliction.”  The Qur’anic concept seems not far from the Buddhist notion of dukkha, where humans find themselves inescapably living in a situation which is “out of kilter, disturbed, troubled,” like a dislocated bone.  An innate inclination or tendency to evil, to act against one’s own best interests, is an element of the human condition addressed by the Qur’an, which states, “The soul of man is truly prone to evil” or, more literally, “has a bias toward evil” (12:53).

Perhaps Christians over the centuries have done a disservice to this human reality by overemphasizing Adam’s sin as causative, rather than descriptive of the universal human condition which transcends individuals, cultures, and historical periods.  However, the reality underlying the  Genesis story of the Fall is the sinful condition, that “bias toward evil” which has characterized human life from its very origins, which no individual has committed or performed but which affects everyone.  If sin is conceived not only as personal acts of disobedience and wrongdoing, but as a disordered condition affecting all human life, then any understanding of salvation that seeks to respond to this condition must go beyond God’s personal forgiveness of repentant sinners to include liberation from the sinful condition itself.

Moreover, it is not only living in an atmosphere infected by a human inclination to evil that oppresses humans.  There is death which awaits us all.  One can devote one’s life to the struggle for what is good - for justice, art, knowledge, human rights, peace, and alleviation of the suffering of the poor, etc. - yet it all ends in death.  Anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a loved one must face the apparent waste and meaninglessness and asks whether love and devotion is worth the effort when all ends in annihilation.  Is there any way to make sense out of life when death awaits both the just and the evildoer?

The first model of redemption responds to the human tragedy of sin and death.  Christians understand Jesus’ death as liberation from these oppressive forces.  He lived among us in innocence, preaching love and showing it by his service of the poor and the sick, calling people to truth and to love and obey God.  When his teaching was rejected, he did not run away from death, nor did he oppose his enemies with the same weapons of force and falsehood they were using against him.  He did not return hatred with hatred or violence with violence.  His dying words, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, were: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

His death by crucifixion was brutally painful, a despised form of execution reserved for slaves and evildoers.  Most of his followers, including his closest apostles, abandoned him.  Dying young, mocked and powerless before his enemies, his features disfigured by his own blood and wounds, an apparent failure in the mission he had set for himself, Jesus is the epitome of all that worldly wisdom says we should not be.

Yet Christians believe that God raised this man Jesus from the dead, and in doing so confirmed Jesus’ ministry, all that he taught and the way he lived.  He triumphed over sin, not by fighting back with the human methods used by his enemies, but by placing his trust in God and submitting himself in obedience to God, even to dying on a cross.  According to Christian belief, just as Jesus triumphed over sin on the cross, so also he triumphed over death in his resurrection.  For Christians, Jesus’ resurrection is the sign of God’s mighty power to bring life out of even the most shameful death, to bring success out of the most obvious failure, to transform even the most hideous suffering into joy.  In raising Jesus to life, God shows that death, the final enemy, has no lasting power over us.  Paul says, “Death, where is your victory?  Where is your sting?”

Among all religions, Christianity is unique in having as its central symbol of faith an instrument of torture.  Muslims have often noted that this seems like a rather morbid fascination with suffering and death.  However, to a Christian the cross is a constant reminder that God has triumphed over sin and death and all those forces of evil which bind and oppress humankind.

One might object that this is unrealistic.  It is obvious that we live in a world where sin and death still abound.  Injustice, violence, cruelty, and hatred still exist, and people still die.  The New Testament teaches that God has overcome these forces through the death of Jesus and has shown that sin and death need not control our lives.  We live in an interim period when, although God has achieved victory over sin and death in Jesus’ death and resurrection, the final victory is still to come.  Hence, Christians live and work in this world with hope in God’s power and await the time when God’s total victory over sin and death will be fully manifest in creation.

2. Atonement for sin

The concept of sin refers not only to the disordered condition in which humankind finds itself.  When Christianity and Islam address the question of sin, most often they are referring to personal sin committed by individuals.  On this matter, Muslims and Christians find they have much in common, in contradistinction, for example, to religions of South Asian and East Asian provenance.

Islam regards sin is a personal act of disobedience and wrongdoing, a spiritual sickness whose main victim is the sinner himself.  Unless the individual reject sin and disobedience in sincere repentance, there is no forgiveness and no salvation.  This cannot happen without God’s grace, and hence God’s saving activity in human history can be defined as God sending through the prophets the same call to repent, to accept God’s sovereignty, to obey God’s will and thus to be granted salvation.

The effects of sin do not remain outside the human person.  In the Psalms of David, there are repeated pleas to “cleanse me of my guilt.”  People feel themselves contaminated, stained, dirtied by their involvement in sinful mankind.  In most religions, washing the body symbolizes our recognition of the contamination of sin and our need for the cleansing power of God’s grace.  In Judaism and Islam, there is the purification with water before prayer; in Christianity the first sacrament of God’s power is baptism, an immersion in water.  We all realize that we have been “infected” by sin and need a washing away of our guilt.

The second way by which Christians understand the death of Jesus is in terms of “atonement” or expiation for sin.  Christians agree with Muslims that when a person gives oneself over to sin, the proper relationship with God is disrupted.  When individuals repent, God generously forgives them and immediately wipes out their personal or “subjective” guilt.  In this sense, both Islam and Christianity preach the ready availability of God’s abundant forgiveness which requires sincere repentance as its only precondition.

Nevertheless, there remains the enormity of the objective wrong which sin commits against the goodness of God and the moral order.  This is goes beyond the individual sinner to contaminate the whole human race and is the source of our feelings of “uncleanness.”  To ignore the serious disruption of the moral order brought about by sin and to concentrate solely on personal guilt could cheapen God’s generosity in forgiving and could almost result almost in treating evil lightly.  The atonement model for understanding Christ’s death attempts to take seriously the wrongness of sin and avoid the trivialization of evil.

Just as all people share in the “objective” disorder caused by sin, Christians believe that one representative of humankind can atone for that wrong.  Christian faith holds that Jesus accomplished this atonement for the objective disruption of sin once for all time.  By his act of submission and obedience, Jesus broke down the barrier which sin erects between the infinitely good God and rebellious humans.  This act could not be performed by anyone, but only by one who was himself without sin and united to divine Wisdom, that is, the right order of the universe.

Some Christian preachers have pictured Jesus’ act of atonement as satisfying an angry God who demanded the death of God’s own son.  This view, which has no basis in Scripture, presents God as a cruel and vengeful tyrant rather than the loving Father taught by Jesus.  By contrast, Christian faith holds that Jesus freely accepted suffering and death, acting as representative of the human race to atone for all the sins ever committed against God.  We do not need to posit a conscious awareness in Jesus of this meaning of his death.  It is rather a post-Resurrection reflection by the early Christian communities.  Just as at the annual Day of Atonement ritual in the Jewish Temple, the sacrificial blood was poured by the priests on the golden lid - the “mercy seat” - of the Ark of the Covenant to wipe away the people’s sins of the previous year, so Paul sees Jesus as the new “mercy seat” who in the shedding of his blood has achieved for humanity once and for all what the Day of Atonement ritual symbolized every year for Jews.

Christians sometimes speak of Jesus’ death in terms of sacrifice, but this must be understood in the Jewish context of sacrifice.  Unlike pagan sacrifices, Jewish Temple worship was not meant to appease an angry God or to bribe God into doing something which God would not otherwise do.  In the Bible, it is God, not humans, who takes the initiative for sacrifice, who sets up rites by which people can come into union with God, who provides opportunities for people to pledge themselves to live and die in obedience to God.  For the Jews, the blood sprinkled on the altar, which symbolized God, and on the people, symbolically expressed the communion of life shared between God and the people reenacted in the sacrifice.  This basic meaning of a covenant of shared life between God and the people is seen by Christians as having been renewed in Jesus’ death, in which a new universal covenant between God and the whole human family has been established.  This new life is one where the objective guilt for sin is no longer an obstacle, for the whole human race has been reconciled to God by Jesus as its representative.

3. Transforming love

This brings us to the third model by which Christians understand the death of Jesus.  It is that of the power of love to touch and change human hearts and transform a person’s life.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “There is no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  This corresponds to the third way in which people feel a need for salvation.  It is not only forces outside of us which oppress us, not only the sense of contamination which comes from being part of sinful humanity, but it is also our own interior drives that lead us to rebel against God and do wrong.  This is the subjective nature of sin and guilt.  Left to ourselves, we would, through our personal greed, pride, anger, lust, envy, and laziness, destroy our own lives and those of others.

When we have sinned and repent, God forgives us, but in itself, forgiveness is not enough.  We still need God’s power and grace to transform us into what we could be and what God desires us to become.  Christians find in the example of Jesus the inspiration and the grace to imitate him and to be transformed by him.  We could say that the model of selfless love which Jesus gave is the central ideal that Jesus handed on to his disciples.  It has inspired men and women to high degrees of generosity and forgiveness.  Many Christians have been guided by Jesus’ words when he washed the feet of his disciples, “I have given you an example.  If I, who am your master, have washed your feet, so you should wash each other’s feet.”

Muslims often point out that these are beautiful words, but that it is difficult to see them actually practiced in the life of Christians.  Christians do not seem to be more generous, loving, serving, or forgiving than anyone else.  Christian history itself can be read as a series of wars, vengeance, ambition, greed, intolerance, and colonial domination.  It was Christians who invented the Inquisition and carried out the massacres of the Crusades.  It was Christian Europe that perpetrated the Holocaust in which millions of Jews, Gypsies, and others were sadistically murdered.

This criticism stands as a strong indictment of Christians, and the evildoing can only be explained as the work of Christians who ignore or refuse to follow the central teaching and example given by Jesus.  However, the Christian reality consists not only of intolerance, war, and domination, but also of individuals and groups whose vision, attitudes, and deeds have been formed by the example and power of Christ which has transformed them into more loving, self-giving, forgiving people.  It is by looking at those Christians who have allowed Christ’s love to guide and shape their behavior that one can see the effects of Jesus’ loving act.  It is in their lives that the effects of the third model of redemption can be seen.