Islam and Christianity

Until the mid-twentieth century confrontational, rather than mediating, patterns of thought characterized the Christian theological reckoning with Islam. The reasons were not far to seek. A certain anti-Christian animus is built into the fabric of the Qur'an and is thereby given the sanction of inviolable truth. A measure of incrimination of Christian faith thus belongs, as Muslims see it, with divine revelation itself, disavowing the Christian understanding of Jesus as the Christ and, thus, of 'God in Christ'.

This makes the Christian/Islamic scene quite distinctive from all other inter-faith issues. When Alice muses in Wonderland about emerging in 'the antipodes', a slip of the tongue produces 'the people of the antipathies'. The phrase fits much of the theology between these, two monotheisms.

To be sure, antipathies are by no means the whole story. There are moods in which the Qur'an itself is benign to Christian monks and Christian faithful at prayer, and there is much common territory to house what divides. Nevertheless, the contrarieties persist, have long dominated the mutual history and live in the psyche as well as in the mind. Thus the will to appreciate Islamic meanings, vital as it must be to Christian integrity, has to engage with that reluctance to look beyond domestic concerns which has so long attended Christian doctrine in both Christology and the cross.

Antipathies have to do with the criteria for God, the status of Jesus, the implications of prophethood, the form and authority of revelation, the relation of truth to text and the measure of divine response to the human situation. The Jesus who has been unwarrantably divinized has to be—as some recent Muslim writers have it—'re-Semiticized' into the prophet he truly was. Whereas medieval Christian thinkers saw Islam as 'a Christian heresy' they must correct, Islam insists that the 'heresy' is Christianity itself. Mutual 'hereticizing' does not take us very far.

Relations are further beset by debate about the cross. Was Jesus in fact 'vindicated' from the malice of would-be crucifiers by a rapture to heaven so that, in docetic terms, his demise was 'only apparent'? If so, the theology of redemptive love, and of a history which epitomizes the grace that is divine encountering the 'sin which is the world's', must be forbidden.

Modern Christian thought was heir to grooves of controversy from as far back as John of Damascus (c. 615-c. 749), which were painstakingly reproduced by, for example, the Mizan al-aaqq of C.G. Pfander ([1829] 1910). His erudite labours were exemplary but tended to proceed from fixed premises of rival revelations, the one true and the other false. The fallibility of the credentials of Muhammad, moral and scriptural, was seen as crucial. Thomas Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship of 1840-keenly savoured by Muslims to this day—served to lift the argument, but he still assigned the Qur'an to well-meaning opacity.

The tireless translator Henry Martyn (1781-1812) was of different calibre. His theological yearning over Islam—for such it was—proved an anxious education into evangelical imponderables. He was convinced that once the New Testament was ...