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Islam: Mirror of Christendom, Part III

Islam: Mirror of Christendom, Part III

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm by Peter Leithart

Islam: Mirror of Christendom, Part III 2017-09-06T23:45:15+06:00 Peter Leithart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, the early history of Islam exposes our Judaizing, the church?s failure to live according to the Spirit and our preference for the ?fleshly?Estrife of the old creation. And it exposes our inadequate Hebraism as well. Islam?s unity should not be exaggerated; it is divided between Sunni and Shi?ite, and subdivided further within those two large camps. Yet, even with its divisions Islam provides an overarching structure that transcends national and ethnic boundaries. In the main, Islamic nations recognize that they are part of a la

rger whole, and the individual Muslim has a sense of being part of a ?people of God?Ethat is not confined to one locale, but embraces the globe. In this way, Islam appears more Christian than the church, especially the modern churches, which can hardly see beyond their denominational or national boundaries. The church does not see herself as a global nation; in short, we do not recognize that we are the new Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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