Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology E-Book

David B. Burrell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Challenges in Contemporary Theology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology delineates the ways that Christianity, Islam, and the Jewish tradition have moved towards each another over the centuries and points to new pathways for contemporary theological work.

• Explores the development of the three Abrahamic traditions, brilliantly showing the way in which they have struggled with similar issues over the centuries
• Shows how the approach of each tradition can be used comparatively by the other traditions to illuminate and develop their own thinking
• Written by a renowned writer in philosophical theology, widely acclaimed for his comparative thinking on Jewish and Islamic theology
• A very timely book which moves forward the discussion at a period of intense inter-religious dialogue

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Challenges in Contemporary Theology

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Free Creation as a Shared Task for Jews, Christians, Muslims

2 Relating Divine Freedom with Human Freedom: Diverging and Converging Strategies

Mu’tazilite Defense of Human Freedom

From Islamic Discussion to Christian Debates contrasting Aquinas with Scotus

From Philosophical to Literary Witnesses

Summary Remarks

3 Human Initiative and Divine Grace: Augustine and Ghazali

4 Trust in Divine Providence: Tawakkul, “Abandonment,” and “Detachment”

Al-Ghazali: Trust Emanating from Faith in One God2

Jean-Pierre de Caussade: One Abandoning Oneself to Divine Providence

Moses Maimonides and the Psalmists on Trust

5 The Point of it All: “Return,” Judgment, and “Second Coming” – Creation to Consummation

Hope beyond our Capacity to Hope: John of the Cross and Edith Stein8

Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart

Moses Maimonides: A Fresh Appreciation

6 Realized Eschatology: Faith as a Mode of Knowing and Journeying

Exhibit 1: Mohandas Gandhi

Exhibit 2: “A Man to Match his Mountains”

Exhibit 3: A Jewish Awakening during Occupation in World War II Holland6

Exhibit 4: Jawdat Said – Breezes of Nonviolence in the Hills of the Golan Heights (Afra Jalabi)8

What Can These Lives Tell Us?

7 Respectfully Negotiating Outstanding Neuralgic Issues: Contradictions and Conversions

Diverse Ways of Interpreting a Scripture Ostensibly Held in Common (Jews and Christians)

Barely Compatible Understandings of Scripture itself as the “Word of God” (Christians and Muslims)

Christian Doctrinal Positions Antithetical both to Jews and to Muslims: “Trinity,” “Incarnation,” “Original Sin”

Muslim Attitudes towards the Crucified

How Can Christians Relate to Muslim Claims to a Fresh Revelation in Arabia Seven Centuries after Christ?

Summary Reflections on these Neuralgic Issues

Epilog Misuses and Abuses of Abrahamic Traditions

Index

Challenges in Contemporary Theology

Series Editors: Gareth Jones and Lewis Ayres

Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK and University of Durham, UK

Challenges in Contemporary Theology is a series aimed at producing clear orientations in, and research on, areas of “challenge” in contemporary theology. These carefully coordinated books engage traditional theological concerns with mainstreams in modern thought and culture that challenge those concerns. The “challenges” implied are to be understood in two senses: those presented by society to contemporary theology, and those posed by theology to society.

Published

These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology

David S. Cunningham

After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy

Catherine Pickstock

Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology

Mark A. McIntosh

Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation

Stephen E. Fowl

Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ

William T. Cavanaugh

Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God

Eugene F. Rogers, Jr

On Christian Theology

Rowan Williams

The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature

Paul S. Fiddes

Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender

Sarah Coakley

A Theology of Engagement

Ian S. Markham

Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology

Gerard Loughlin

Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology

Matthew Levering

Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective

David Burrell

Keeping God’s Silence

Rachel Muers

Christ and Culture

Graham Ward

Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation

Gavin D’Costa

Rewritten Theology: Aquinas After His Readers

Mark D. Jordan

God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics

Samuel Wells

The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology

Paul J. DeHart

Theology and Families

Adrian Thatcher

The Shape of Theology

David F. Ford

The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory

Jonathan Tran

In Adams Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin

Ian A. McFarland

Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge

Lydia Schumacher

This edition first published 2011

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To a friend of more than half a century, Nikos Stavroulakis, animator of Etz Hayyim synagogue in Hania in Crete, who epitomizes the hospitality described in this study

Preface

While preparing to compose this study, I was privileged to spend the Jewish high holydays at Hania with my friend Nikos Stavrou­lakis in the Etz Hayyim synagogue (www.etz-hayyim-hania.org/). I had been overwhelmed by the rapprochement between Christian and Muslims at various levels effected since Pope Benedict’s speech at Regensburg in 2006. His ill-advised example, apparently in homage to a one-time colleague at the university, distracted from a recondite thesis on the role reason has to play in elaborating religious tradition, eliciting an astutely critical response from 38 Muslim scholars within a month. And a year later, a carefully constructed document, entitled (from the Qur’an) A Common Word between Us, precipitated an exchange unprecedented in the last fourteen centuries. Something had happened, not without astute guidance, which called for a reassessment of the commonalities between these two often estranged traditions. I felt prepared and called to undertake such an inquiry, since my own work over the past quarter century had been focused on exchanges extant among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Yet mesmerized by these recent events, I initially demurred from a triadic approach, lamely suggesting that monitoring actual or potential encounters between Christianity and Islam might at best be supplemented with links to Jewish tradition, while suggesting that these best remain illustrative, since Christianity and Islam are faith-traditions in a way that Judaism can be, but need not be. Yet while there is something right about that statement, it can also be grossly insulting, as celebrating the high holydays at Etz Hayyim synagogue forcibly reminded me.1

Yet I confess my initial faux pas here precisely to remind myself and recall to others how deeply Christian faith has been nourished in Jewish tradition from its beginning, illustrated whenever the New Testament refers to “the Scriptures” (that is, Hebrew Scripture), yet how easily the descriptor “Christian” can elide that originary fact. Even more personally, my own initiation into the mystery and fruits of dialog began with a celebrated mentor in Jerusalem, Marcel Dubois, OP, who spiced my initiation into the “sacred geography” of the Holy Land with trenchant reminders of a profoundly Jewish Jesus, best recovered through intercourse with living and believing Jews. Now the binary title – “Muslim-Christian theology” – can easily obscure that constitutive fact of Christian spiritual life and intellectual practice, so we begin with a proper Muslim silsala, giving due homage to mentors from all three Abrahamic traditions. So this elucidation of latent points of contact between Christians and Muslims, in selected theological topics over the centuries, will duly illustrate how that conversation regularly involved Jewish interlocutors as well. Our indispensable guide to help initiate this rich historical sweep will be Sidney H. Griffith’s The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Griffiths synthesizes years of painstaking scholarship to offer stunning detail regarding the ways the advent of Muslims in the Levant incited fresh initiatives regarding the telling questions of faith in which all of the churches had been so assiduously engaged, often leaving them at odds with one another. It is my contention that a similar opportunity attends us now.

My next mentor was Georges Anawati, OP, a Dominican confrere of Marcel Dubois whose Introduction à la thélogie musulmane (Paris: J. Vrin, 1946), composed jointly with Louis Gardet, offers a model for this inquiry undertaken nearly three-quarters of a century later. So I undertake it in grateful recognition of the guidance of these two French Dominicans, hoping to bring to it some of the astuteness of their intellects, as well as the simplicity of their spirit. Moreover, my own experience of comparative inquiry has ever illustrated the wisdom of the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, reminding us how inextricably triadic is all human apprehension, which I have found to be true of interfaith exchange as well, where dyadic conversation can easily lead to impasses that a third interlocutor may well unscramble. So while it may appear daunting to expound three traditions rather than two, that very exercise can also facilitate the comparative task, with one or another tradition playing the mediating role as we proceed.

The chronological emergence of the revelations which shape each of these traditions leads ineluctably to later ones presenting themselves as succeeding – indeed, even superseding – the earlier. Indeed, this dynamic is often inscribed in the founding documents themselves. The way Christians characterize their book as the New Testament, while assigning Hebrew Scriptures as the Old Testament, offers a classical paradigm of this maneuver. Muslim tradition presents the Qur’an as culminating the revelations to Moses and in Jesus, yet the book itself does one better by insisting that it initiates believers into the originary “religion of Abraham” (3:95). Here supersession meets the original to offer a complete package. Yet Christians make similar claims in presenting their revelation as “the Word who made the universe,” now become human in Jesus, so eternally finessing all claims to historical pre-eminence. Without pretending to set aside this chronological pattern, this inquiry will proceed more diachronically to show how each tradition, as it develops, displays features cognate to the other, usually with little actual contact. In that sense, we may call this an exercise in “creative hermeneutics,” detailing what we are able to discern in retrospect in a completely different interfaith milieu.

Our strategy will indirectly corroborate the (sometime contested) fact that Jews, Christians, and Muslim do worship the same God. Christians who might doubt this could easily find Christian Arabs directing their eucharistic prayer to Allah, yet our approach will address the question in time-honored philosophical fashion, while respecting the fact that our God ever remains unknown. That is the simple observation that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and tastes like a duck, it is a duck! So each tradition will privilege certain scriptural texts, which coalesce to offer a portrait of the God they worship in a catalog of “names” or “attributes.” From that initial platform, we shall observe how each of these traditions elaborates its original revelation, struggling to articulate features of the relations between the freely creating God and creatures, cumulatively displaying each to be wrestling with features leading to one God.

Indeed, the form of the struggle in one tradition will often mirror that of the other, and in the paradigmatic case of free creation of the universe, we find them actually beholden to one another to elaborate this central teaching. By juxtaposing classical theological themes, we will see how they inevitably emerge in each tradition, as it seeks to articulate dimensions of its revelation which can only leave questions to be pondered. That is indeed the way each will develop a “theology,” that is to say, an intellectual inquiry into the givens of faith, which Augustine formulated as “faith seeking understanding.” Those dimensions of faith become classical loci (or domains) where such questions emerge, identified here as free creation, divine and human freedom, human initiative and trust in divine providence, with the culminating judgment as “consummation,” “second coming,” or “return.” Separate chapters will explore each locus comparatively, to note how we can learn about ourselves from each other.

I have suggested calling this inquiry an exercise in “creative hermeneutics,” whereby conceptual patterns, often developed separately, can illuminate one another once we see them as executing cognate explorations. This approach reflects the fresh face of interfaith inquiry often associated with the liberating document of Vatican Council II, Nostra Aetate, yet more pertinently part of the air we have come to breathe. The Bavarian Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, attempted to articulate this spirit in an article, entitled “Towards a Fundamental Interpretation of Vatican II” (1979), where “fundamental” in Germanic parlance tends to mean “what has always already been going on.”2 This seminal lecture at Boston College focused on a Christianity now facing other major religions, much as Jewish Christians of the first century had been faced with pagans wishing to affirm Jesus. That comparison allowed him to offer 70 and 1970 CE as symbolic dates, so bracketing 19 centuries of Western European Christianity (including the missionary movement) to help us recognize how we now stand on the threshold of a “world-church.”

The parallels between 70 and 1970 were striking to me at the time, involved as we were in Jewish–Christian understanding, yet become even more so today, as Islam has come to take its place as the inevitable “third” among the Abrahamic faiths. Rahner’s precise point is that revelational communities are sometimes called upon to make decisions regarding matters for which the community itself has not yet been able to muster categories sufficient to offer reasons to guide those decisions. In short, they have to “wing it.” The example he gives illustrates the emergence of a community of Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus distinct from what was to become “Judaism,” itself a reaction to the new community’s formation. Paul trenchantly articulates the conundrum: should pagans who respond to the invitation to follow Jesus first be circumcised to initiate them properly into this community of largely Jewish believers in Jesus? One could certainly have argued that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” so the practice of circumcision could have served as a fitting catechesis, showing how one cannot even speak of Jesus without invoking the entire context of the Scriptures he treasured, with his community, and which he had brought to an incisive focus. Yet Paul insisted on a clean break: no need for them to be circumcised, yet was able to give a rationale, so this landmark decision helped to cinch the “parting of the ways.”

In 1979 Rahner could only remind us how underdeveloped was Christian theology to negotiate interfaith issues.3 Beyond a few intrepid pioneers, like Jules Isaac for Judaism, Louis Massignon for Islam, and Jules Monchanin for Hinduism, there had been little sustained consideration of “other faiths” as a theological issue, thereby reinforcing his selection of 1970 as a symbolic date inaugurating such inquiry. Five years after the Council had ended, we could then begin to see what novel steps Nostra Aetate had initiated, making it a landmark document from Vatican II, sharing with Dignitatis Humanae the distinction of being the only two which really broke new ground, the rest of the documents having largely disseminated the nouvelle théologie to a wider church. In fact, the argument of this very essay would not have been invited or entertained until quite recently. Yet the way it is developed here relies crucially on another Catholic theologian, the Canadian, Bernard Lonergan, whose sense for the intellectual developments latent in a revelational tradition have set the tone for our treatment. His manner of displaying theological inquiry as “faith seeking understanding” will provide us with tools to carry out Rahner’s impetus to theological renewal from “other faiths.”

Often identified as “a theologian’s theologian,” Lonergan devoted himself before, during and after Vatican Council II to shaping a mode of thinking which could bring the ressourcement elaborated by the nouvelle théologie to a systematic focus, thereby showing us how theological attitudes disseminated in that Council might bear fruit in genuine developments in theology. Yet given the relentlessly philosophical quality of the inquiry he stimulated, his “influence” was inevitably more subterranean than evident. All of this should help show how “comparative theology” can contribute to genuine development in Christian theology itself, due perhaps to the staunchly philosophical strategies it must employ to bridge between apparently fixed traditions: showing how they have always been fluid, so that fixing them will betray them as traditions. We can only hope that the same will prove true of Jewish and Muslim readers, as they endeavor to appropriate this exercise in “creative hermeneutics” in ways consonant with their traditions.

The Epilog must contend with a recurring discordant note: each of these traditions has also proved itself to be consonant with the use of force to achieve their ends, in the modern world allowing their cachet to be exploited by political – usually nationalist – leaders to their own ends. How can we explain this? And even more, how can those of us associated with one or another of these traditions employ resources from that same tradition to show how allowing a revelation to be harnessed to the service of power always betrays the tradition itself? Yet each tradition will need first to repent of its collusion with power, before seeking resources to correct what remains an Achilles heel of religion in the modern world. Without the first, we cannot be respected; without attending to the second, we cannot respect ourselves.

Notes

1 For Jewish testimony to the partial rightness of the statement let me cite Jon Levenson arguing with Paul’s contention “that one becomes an Israelite through faith into the promise rather than through birth.” Levenson insists that “this is not the position of the Hebrew Bible, and it is light years away from the theology of covenant in the Pentateuch. A more accurate statement would be that those who stand under covenantal obligation by nature and necessity are continually called upon to adopt that relationship by free decision. Chosen for service, they must choose to serve.” (Creation and the Persistence of Evil (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) p. 148). So while being Jewish ipso facto implies “covenantal obligation,” the manner of fulfilling it invites one to a posture of faith.

2Theological Studies 40 (1979) 716–727.

3 Although Jewish–Christian exchange had begun soon after the publication of Nostra Aetate in 1965, a gathering of Jews, Christians, and Muslims at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem (in 1975), under the inspiration of Sister Marie Goldstein, RSHM, was quite unprecedented in the West. As John Esposito has testified, it would take another ten years for Islam to be recognized as even a potential third partner.

Acknowledgments

As the Preface details, a lasting gift of gratitude comes from my friend of more than half a century, Nikos Stavroulakis, now animator of the Etz Hayyim synagogue in Hania in Crete (www.etz-hayyim-hania.org/), to whose graciousness this work is dedicated on behalf of those who have experienced it.

More immediate thanks to Paul Murray and to Tony Currer of Durham, whose roles in both the Alan Richardson and Cuthbert fellowships gave me the freedom and daily inspiration to execute this task. A special gratitude to Paul Murray and the electors of the Richardson fellowship for extending it to me for the Michaelmas term 2009, which provided access to sterling colleagues in the Faculty of Theology of Durham University, with the time and space to complete this study. And to the choral and ministry staff of Durham Cathedral, who provided a reflective evensong to cap my daily efforts. The rhythm sustaining each day was supplied by Father Currer and our student complement at St Cuthbert’s parish house: Benedict Douglas, Tommy Humphries, and Patricia Kelly, who united to begin each day with morning prayer and extended to our supper together, prepared by the one determined at breakfast. A splendid community of work and prayer, which spiced the term immeasurably, gracefully facilitated by Helen Lawless, valiant administrative assistant of St Cuthbert’s parish.

Finally, to Lewis Ayres, Bede Professor at Durham (the series editor who accepted this second book for Blackwell), and to Rebecca Harkin, faithful Blackwell editor to so many over the years, as well as her valiant assistants: Bridget Jennings, Sally Cooper, and most recently, Isobel Bainton, for seeing the manuscript through to a meticulous finish, a task every author especially appreciates.

Credits

Chapter 4. Jean-Pierre de Caussade: One abandoning oneself to divine providence. Excerpts from pp. 27–28, 31, 34, 51, 72–74, 87, 90, 102–3 from The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jean-Pierre de Caussade. English translation copyright © 1981 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. Introduction © 1982 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Chapter 5. The point of it all: “return,” judgment, and “second coming”; creation to consummation. Excerpts from pp. 526, 554, 560, 562 and 670 from Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi [Mulla Sadra] The Divine Manifestations of the Secrets of the Perfecting Sciences, translated and annotated Fazel Asadi Amjad, Mahdi Dasht Bozorgi reprinted by permission of ICAS Press.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Introduction

Modes of Comparing: Doctrines as Precipitation of Practices

Comparing religious traditions demands that we attend to the pluriform structure of their practices. For attentiveness of that sort will alert us to the inherently analogous character of any assertions which might be made. Here George Lindbeck’s invitation to regard doctrine as precipitations or distillations of practices makes eminent sense. Or Bernard Lonergan’s strategy for properly understanding assertions a tradition might make, as in pronouncements of early church councils: “if these are to be regarded as answers, we must first grasp the questions which they are proposed to answer,” questions arising as believers seek to relate religious practices to the milieu in which they live. So Jews and early Christians were readily accused of idolatry in the Roman Empire, in the face of their resistance to state deities; the defense would reveal how their beliefs structured their lives, as their mode of life would clarify those beliefs. In short, “doctrines” prove to be secondary in the life of believers, though they answer the need for clarity in the face of challenge. None of this would be news to practitioners of these traditions, which offers a far better descriptor than “believer.” For while adhering to certain beliefs is also a practice, everything depends on the way one adheres to them, which will best be revealed in practices collateral to assertions. To borrow a striking example from George Lindbeck, a crusader invoking God in striking down Muslim believers says a great deal more about his belief-structure, and indeed about his god, than could ever be told from his reciting the creed. So an account which tries to compare different traditions must always subject itself to personal experience, to artistic re-enactments, as well as alternative scenarios, for such is the pluriform richness of religious tradition.

How Historical Positioning of Traditions Invites “Supersessionist” Strategies to Understand the Earlier

The three traditions grouped under “Abrahamic faiths” have a special difficulty relating to each other, given the unalterable order of their chronological appearance. Indeed, given their close association, it would be surprising if the successor tradition did not consider itself to be superior to, or even claim to replace its predecessor, as we have already noted. Moreover, the propensity to consider what comes later to be better may be even more ingrained than Hegel’s legacy, for successor traditions will spontaneously argue their superiority from a chronological appeal. Yet Foucault’s strategy of intellectual “archaeology” will offer the antidote needed to restore this imbalance, reminding us how easily we will fail to construe a succeeding generation if we neglect to identify the lineaments of predecessors in its very structure. Paul encapsulates this reality when he insists, to the pagans of Rome becomes Christians, that “you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in [the Jews’] place to share in the richness of the olive tree” (Rom. 11:17). His insistence received spontaneous testimony in a 1975 visit to Mbarara to celebrate 75 years of Catholic Christianity in Uganda. Stunned at how recent this had been, I turned to some “White Fathers” (Missionary Society of Africa), asking them how their community had portrayed the initial contact. For they could hardly say: “I want to tell you about Jesus,” lacking any effective context for such an introduction. The response was telling. As they had gleaned it, pioneers in this endeavor listened to the people’s stories, responding with “we have stories like that: there was this man Abraham … ,” thereby corroborating Paul’s point as well as receiving good marks as missionaries: they learned the language and they listened! Indeed, had succeeding Christian communities continued to introduce Jesus in that way Christians would not find it surprising that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were Jews.

Yet a Western mentality finds it all too easy to overlook the past, especially in the interests of bolstering a successor’s pre-eminence. So this inquiry will introduce ways of countering that propensity, much as interfaith friendships do in individual lives, by focusing on practices which bring traditions into effective contact with one another: times, postures, rhythms of prayer; as well as patterns for appropriating revelation to meet contemporary challenges. The last century evidenced how easily ignorance of the ways one tradition is rooted in its predecessor can lead to denigrating and even despising individuals who exemplify an earlier tradition. The roots of this propensity, however, can be traced to a modern fascination with progress which fueled colonization as well, often soliciting religious sanctions to eradicate signs of a purportedly backward ethos. Yet as we come to realize the negative side of modernism, from colonization to ecological depredation, successor traditions can be helped to a more positive appreciation of their predecessors. Indeed, those of us who enjoy live interfaith contacts discover our own shortcomings by appropriating what we learn from those of other faiths about the God we share.

Practices as Practical Bridges: Times, Postures, Rhythms of Prayer; Patterns of Appropriation

Yet how can Abrahamic believers be said to share one God, when much of the interaction, and even their revelational deliverances, are polemical in character, sometimes explicitly directed against “the other?” Crafting a proper response to this vexing question has shaped the approach of this inquiry, urging us to begin with practices, in the light of which we will be better equipped to parse contentious statements. Jewish–Christian interaction offers a telling example. It is easy to oppose the two traditions starkly: Christians believe Jesus is the “Son of God” while Jews regard him yet another pretender; no way to cross that chasm! Yet when we participate as two communities at prayer, only to realize that Christians have never found a better communal prayer than the psalms, we find ourselves side-by-side praying to one God: the giver of the covenant to Moses, whom Christians have come to recognize as the father of Jesus as well. And when monks observe Muslims praying five times daily, accompanied by a haunting call to prayer and deep bodily obeisance, they are palpably reminded of their form of life canonized by Benedict. And Syriac Christians can even detect vestiges of their own chant in the call to prayer. For someone whose approach to religious traditions is primarily conceptual or doctrinal, these may appear to be accidental appurtenances, yet it is such rhythms of prayer which decisively form believers into the contours of their faith, as Shabbat does Jews, eucharistic celebration does Catholics, and polyphonic hymnody, Mennonites; and daily prayers and seasonal fasting (with pilgrimage) does Muslims.

Correlative to communal worship are ways each tradition appropriates its revelation into daily life, where marked differences also betray similar patterns. As Muslim children are offered stories of Muhammad to guide them to proper reactions to a playground bully, Christian children will be instructed by the evangelical charter of Matthew 25 to share what they have with less fortunate children when the opportunity emerges, and Jewish children to respect the elders of their community, who pass on to them precious traditions delineating their special, God-given, identity. The thrust of this early formation reminds them that theirs is a communal commitment which reaches into daily life, inevitably reflected in their relations with an encompassing society. It is here that most of us come to discern the shape of other faith communities, to discover where we diverge or converge in characteristic attitudes. The Muslim world, for example, is studded with primary and secondary schools animated by Catholic religious communities, where the practices embedded in those institutions convey more about Catholic Christianity then any set of teachings. They also dramatize a salient difference within Christianity, as well, for Catholics feel little compulsion to proselytize, confident that the charter of Matthew 25 is sufficiently evident in the organization of their studies as well as in extra-curricular activities of service. Needless to say, this makes them especially welcomed in the Islamic world.

Using Philosophical Tools that Unravel “Doctrinal Disputes”; “Intellectual Therapy” (Wittgenstein)

Following the trail of practices, let us not forget that elaborating a tradition intellectually represents a practice as well. At this point, each tradition found itself having recourse to philosophical strategies to help unravel aporiae (or persistent conundrums) left by their respective revelations. What will prove remarkable, as we trace the strategies employed to illuminate each theme, are traits common to the intellectual therapies undertaken. For philosophy exhibits its usefulness more in mediating disputes lingering from oppositions (or even contradictions) latent in revelational texts, than it does in attempting to “explain” them “systematically.” I hope to show that this manner of articulating the role philosophical strategies play in elaborating traditions, borrowed from Wittgenstein, more accurately limns their fruitfulness than any “systematic” pretensions. His approach will also display how the medieval trope of “handmaid” dignifies philosophy’s role in these arenas rather than denigrating it. For pretending to a magisterial role in divinis (matters concerning God) can only augur pretention.

Dialog and Proclamation: Assessing the Truth of a Tradition

A final caveat concerning a purported opposition between dialog and proclamation. Dialog, like any probing conversation, attends to meaning rather than truth. This should be evident enough, but attempts to contrast “dialog” starkly with “proclamation” have obscured this simple point, by implying that dialog is radically deficient as a faith-strategy, since it stops short of proclaiming the truth. But what would it be to proclaim the truth? Would it be to make an assertion and then to insist that it was true; or as one wag put it: to stamp one’s foot? In fact, any properly formed assertion, actually stated, intends what is the case. Grammar is inherently ethical, so lying – deliberately stating what is not the case – is inherently wrong. Yet we know that our acceptance of what another says is often conditioned by the moral probity or veracity of the speaker. So “proclaiming the truth” of one’s faith is better done than said, as the Amish community in Pennsylvania demonstrated to America by forgiving their children’s killer. Merely stating one’s faith convictions cannot in fact count as proclamation. What counts is witness; and while the fact of dialog may give telling witness in certain situations, like Israel/Palestine, the intellectual endeavor of dialog can at best be a means of sorting out awkward from promising ways of stating what we believe. Yet this is hardly a deficiency; it is simply what any conversation tries to do. Authentic proclamation is quite another thing, as the Gospels remind us again and again.

John Henry Newman, Bernard Lonergan, and Nicholas Lash can each be invoked as witnesses to this crucial distinction. Newman reminds us (in Grammar of Assent) how sinuous is the path to arriving at truth, and how delicate are the balancing judgments involved.1 Bernard Lonergan directly acknowledges Newman’s reflections when he parses Aquinas’s insistence that truth can only be ascertained by way of judgment.2 And Nicholas Lash’s Theology for Pilgrims deftly exhibits the quality of dialectical reasoning which must attend reliable judgment.3 In the spirit of Wittgenstein, the witness Lash’s writing gives to constructive and critical dialog offers a healthy antidote to television confrontations which leave listeners to “make up their own minds.” One can almost hear Wittgenstein query: “I know how to make up my bed, but how might I make up my mind?” So whatever effective proclamation might be, it cannot be had without probing discussion and the conceptual clarification that dialog can bring. Reduced to forthright assertion or downright insistence, it can neither be authentic nor effective. So there is no substitute for attending to meanings, as we attempt to minimize infelicitous expression in matters “pertaining to God and the things of God” (as Aquinas views theology). For the same thinker reminds us that our language at best can but “imperfectly signify God” (Summa Theologiae 1.13.3). In that vein, this inquiry will not attempt to assess which (if any) of these traditions is true, but it should assist believers in each to find their way to assessing – as best they can, and must – the truth of their tradition. Yet we should also appreciate how this can be a lifelong project.

Notes

1 Consult preferably Nicholas Lash’s edition of Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979) for its illuminating introduction.

2 Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (eds Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

3 Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

1

Free Creation as a Shared Task for Jews, Christians, Muslims1

It is certainly remarkable that it took the fledgling Christian movement four centuries to respond to its central faith question concerning Jesus: who and what is he? Moreover, the long-standing quest for clarity regarding Jesus doubtless overshadowed more explicit reflection on the first article of the creed as well: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”. As Robert Sokolowski observes: “The issue the church had to settle first, once it acquired public and official recognition under Constantine and could turn to controversies regarding its teaching, was the issue of the being and actions of Christ.” Yet he goes on to insist:

[While] the Council of Chalcedon, and the councils and controversies that led up to it, were concerned with the mystery of Christ … they also tell us about the God who became incarnate in Christ. They tell us first that God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in the intimate union of the incarnation. What is according to nature, and what reason can disclose in nature, retains it integrity before the Christian God [who] is not a part of the world and is not a “kind” of being at all. Therefore, the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive.2

Moreover, what Sokolowski calls

the Christian distinction between God and the world, the denial that God in his divinity is part of or dependent on the world, was brought forward with greater clarity through the discussion of the way the Word became flesh. The same distinction was also emphasized as a background for the Trinitarian doctrines and for the controversies about grace … Thus many of the crucial dogmatic issues raised in the relationship between God and the world, and the positions judged to be erroneous would generally have obscured the Christian distinction between the divine and the mundane.3

So creation not only comes first, as it were, in our God’s transactions with the world; it is also true that the way we understand that founding relation will affect our attempts to articulate any further interaction. For were the One who reached out to believers “in Christ” not the creator of heaven and earth, the story would have to be told in a vastly different (and inescapably mythic) idiom, as indeed it has often been on the part of Christians so preoccupied with redemption that creation is simply presumed as its stage-setting.

And understandably enough, since the narrative of incarnation and redemption captures the lion’s share of the tripartite creed associated with the initiation rites of baptism, creation can appear as a mere preamble. Moreover, an adequate treatment of the unique activity which constitutes creating, as well as the quite ineffable relation between creatures and creator which it initiates, will tax one’s philosophical resources to the limit, so more timid theologians (with philosophers of religion) prefer to finesse it altogether. Yet as Sokolowski reminds us, we cannot afford to do that since the interaction among these shaping mysteries of faith is at once palpable and mutually illuminating. Nor can Christians treat Hebrew Scriptures as a mere preamble to their revelation of God in Jesus, since the God whom Jesus can call “Abba” is introduced in those very Scriptures. Moreover, the Hebrew Scriptures reflect similar structural parallels between creation and redemption, as the engaging story of God’s affair with Israel begins at Genesis 12 with Abraham, while the initial chapters detailing God’s creation of the universe seem designed to offer a universal grounding to that story.

By the time medieval thinkers came to engage these issues, however, a third Abrahamic voice clamored for recognition, reflecting a fresh scripture. The Qur’an’s account is far more lapidary: “He says ‘be’ and it is” (6:73), yet the pattern is repeated. The heart of the drama turns on Muhammad’s God-given “recitation”; while Allah’s identifying Himself with “the Creator of the heavens and the earth” (2:117) assures us that we are not merely trafficking with an Arabian deity. So the forces conspiring to elaborate a Christian “doctrine of creation” were at once historical and conceptual, scriptural and philosophical, with parallel discussions in other faiths shaping the context.4 Both Jewish and Christian readings of Genesis approached the equivocal language regarding pre-existent stuff as part of the inherently narrative structure of the work, insisting that God created the universe ex nihilo; that is, without presupposing anything “to work on.” So the philosophical task will be to articulate how such “sheer origination” could even be possible, while the theological goal will be to show the action to be utterly gratuitous. For if creator and creation are to be what the Hebrew Scriptures presume them to be, neither stuff nor motive can be presupposed. Here is where what Sokolowski identifies as “the distinction” proves so critical: creation can only be creation if God can be God without creating. No external incentive nor internal need can induce God to create, for this creator need not create to be the One by whom all that is can originate. Yet if creating adds nothing to God, who gains nothing by creating, what could such a One be, and how might we characterize that One?

So the way we treat the act originating the universe will lead us inexorably to the One originating it, as whatever we can say about that One will shape our way of considering the One’s activity. So creation is not only first chronologically, as it were, but first conceptually as well. Yet there are bound to have been alternative accounts, since the question of origination arises naturally for us, evidenced in countless stories offering to articulate the process. As the move to more methodical considerations of these issues gained momentum in Greece, however, questions about origins were eclipsed by considerations of the structure of the universe. As Plato’s Timaeus proceeds mythologically at crucial junctures, Aristotle could deftly avoid the origins question. Yet by the time our respective religious traditions turned their attention to God as creator, a powerful philosophical figure had emerged from the Hellenic matrix: Plotinus. His relentlessly logical mind traced a multifarious universe to one principle, as the necessary condition for the order inherent in it, extending Plato’s pregnant image of participation yet further to speak of the manner by which the ordered universe originates as emanating from the One. As with Plato before him, Plotinus had recourse to metaphor to signal the limits to conceptual inquiry. Yet as we have just suggested, the manner will offer the only clue we can have to the character of the One originating. So as we shall see, Plotinus’s interpretation founders precisely on whether that “coming forth” is best described in terms of logical deduction, or whether it results from a free act of the One. At this point the deliverances of revelation and what was taken to be reason initially clashed, though further inquiry by illustrious thinkers would find them complementing one another.

Yet as circumstance would have it, creation offers the one area where we can track interaction of some kind among these three traditions.5 The interaction we can trace occurred as each tradition sought to clarify scriptural accounts of the origin of the universe – identical for Jews and Christians, and substantially the same for Muslims. Much work has been done to situate the Genesis story in the context of origin stories from the milieu in which the Hebrew Scriptures emanate, noting how the scriptural account reflects that milieu, and how it differs. Genesis shows traces of earlier accounts in postulating a chaotic matrix in need of ordering; but contrasts starkly in the manner of achieving that order. Earlier origin accounts graphically depict struggle, issuing in dismembering and reconstituting, while Genesis focuses on crafting or even more refined: executing by verbal command. However, we might conceive the pre-existent matrix, which remains utterly obscure, it offers no resistance to being ordered, so the divine act of originating and of ordering remains sovereign. That could be one reason why the matrix dropped from sight, reduced to a shadowy “prime matter” in Hellenic philosophical accounts, and to nothing in religious accounts. Yet the official nothing will return to undermine religious accounts in the form of primordial resistance to the sovereign action of God, dramatized in spiritual creatures as sin. Jon Levenson offers a remarkable delineation of this inescapable dimension of the Jewish tradition in his aptly titled Creation and the Persistence of Evil,