‘That is
why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor
about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food,
and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow
or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not
worth much more than they are? Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one
single cubit to his span of life?
Matthew
6:25 - 27
Kinder teachers start the year with a
class full of quite ego-centric, sometimes impulsive young charges and their
role is to draw their students into a sense of community beyond their immediate
family. Ultimately, the skills of a lifetime of learning are required before
finding your place: at school, for some - at home, at work, at university, at
play, at church, and with yourself.
You have to know your place in the
universe [check out this
clip]. We know the ancients had various understandings of what lay beyond
the earthbound world they experienced. For some there existed a great dome, for
some the heavens were layered, and for others the worlds of the gods mingled with
the daily lives of humankind. Even we postmoderns who struggle with reason and
faith, raise our eyes and hands to the unseen God and from our thuribles emit
and propel towards the heavens our prayers upon the smoke and smells that
please the Divine.
Our place is found in the stories we write
with our lives, our reflected lives. There is the story of how atheist CS
Lewis, found God in his life, through literature and conversation – including
his friendship with JRR Tolkien. There is the journey of Richard Holloway, the
Scottish Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh who lost faith, and has become an ardent atheist. Then there is Bishop John
Shelby Spong whose whole life has been a constant cycle of re-conversion. There
is my story and your story. In these stories is the search for meaning, the
discovery, the joy, the pain, the suffering and the loss.
It was Benjamin
Franklin who, in corresponding with Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789, wrote: "In
this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." So whether you live a fleetingly brief or
very long life, our earthly lives are terminal. And so we must make the most of
our time between being born and dying. Our stories must be complete. Auschwitz
survivor Viktor Frankl believed there was meaning in every moment of life, in
suffering and in death. Indeed for Frankl, love was the ultimate truth
and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
It is at
the essence of our nature to seek understanding, create or make meaning. Blind
faith, uncritical religiosity, slavish devotion is not what God is asking of
you. You are alive just to find yourself, make sense of who you are and what
you called to be and do, and in doing so find the one who created you and who
will walk with you in every step you take. We then respond to this
extraordinary and lavish generosity by caring and loving those who cross our
paths, and give thanks and praise for the gift of our lives.
Peter
Douglas
A Muslim scholar sets out to
investigate Jesus Christ
First published in America February 16, 2017
Mustafa Aykol, a practicing Muslim who writes a column for The International New York
Times, begins his book by relating how one day in Istanbul he received a copy
of the New Testament from a Christian missionary. Before going to sleep he
opened it to the Gospel of Matthew and quickly became fascinated. Within a
couple of weeks he had finished the entire New Testament. While there were
parts of it he as a Muslim could not accept, much was not contradictory to his
own faith, and parts were strikingly similar to the Quran. Like a good
investigative journalist, he began a study of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim
sources that come together in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. This book is the
result.
Mustafa Aykol
The book traces the complex relations between the Gospels, Judaism and
Islam. From the beginning the author contrasts Pauline Christianity, with its
emphasis on the divinity of Jesus, with early Jewish Christianity, especially
as it comes to expression in the “Q” sayings source, the Epistle of James and
later Jewish-Christian sects like the Ebionites. How to explain the startling
connections between the theology of the Jewish followers of Jesus who saw him
as the promised messiah but not divine and the Arab followers of Muhammad?
Jesus is honored in the Quran as born of the Virgin Mary, the Messiah of
the Jews and a reformer but not divine; he appears in 93 verses in 15 different
Quranic chapters. Akyol shows parallels between a number of Quranic stories of
Jesus and Mary with some of the apocryphal gospels, the Protoevangelium
of James, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Arabic
Infancy Gospel and
the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—for example, the story
of Jesus making birds out of clay and then giving them life—imaginative stories
rejected by mainstream Christianity. As a Muslim, Akyol believes in the Quran
as divinely revealed, though he suggests that the similarities show that the
Quran was in dialogue with various traditions present at its time of origin,
both the apocryphal gospels and various Jewish-Christian sects, some of which
believed in the virgin birth. He sees another parallel in the expression “Two
Ways,” appearing in both the Didache, a late-first-century
Christian text, and the Quran, which offers salvation to those who are devoted
to God and benevolent toward other humans—in other words, salvation through
faith and good works, not “faith alone,” as in the Protestant understanding of
Pauline Christianity. This is the teaching of Jewish Christianity, reflected in
the Epistle of James.
But his contrast of early Jewish and Pauline Christianity is much too
facile. He falls into an approach first popularized by liberal Protestant
theology of speaking of the “Platonization” (or Hellenization) of Christianity,
making recognition of the divinity of Jesus a late development, an approach
long since abandoned by mainstream scholars. The church’s high Christology is
rooted in the Jesus of history, in his use, at the time unprecedented, of the
familial term Abba in his prayer, the fact that he
referred to himself as “Son” and in his claim to authority to interpret the
Mosaic law and proclaim the forgiveness of sins, both of which scandalized his
contemporaries. Theologians as critical as Walter Kasper and Edward
Schillebeeckx find evidence that Jesus understood his death as tied in with his
mission, promising his disciples a renewed fellowship beyond it.
Akyol does not seem to appreciate how the church’s Christological
language developed slowly within the New Testament period as the early
Christians reread their experience of Jesus against their Jewish tradition. For
example, while Mark’s Christology is still inchoate and his use of “Son of God”
did not mean what it would mean two decades later, there are clues that he is
struggling to express a mystery that goes beyond the language available to him.
His account of Jesus walking on the water is clearly a theophany, using the
expression, “He meant to pass by them” (Mk 6:48), jarring in context, to echo a
verse in the Book of Job where Yahweh walks on the “the crests of the sea” and
might “pass by” (Job 9:8, 11).
From the beginning, both Jewish and gentile Christians used the divine
title “Lord” (Mari or Maran in Aramaic, Kurios in Greek) for Jesus. The Septuagint,
the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (third to 2nd centuries B.C.E.),
used Kurios to
translate the Hebrew Adonai, which took the place of the holy name
Yahweh. Jewish Christians used Mar to avoid pronouncing the divine name.
Even the Epistle of James refers to Jesus consistently as “Lord” or “the Lord
Jesus Christ.” Larry Hurtado points out that Paul can use the Aramaic
invocation Maranatha, “Our Lord, come” (1
Cor 16:22), to his largely Gentile church at Corinth without translating it, as
it was certainly familiar to them. He notes that Jesus, from very early in the
Christian movement, was the object of the prayer and worship ordinarily
reserved for God and that there is evidence of pre-existence theology even
prior to Paul. Akyol pays little attention to the Gospel of John beyond
commenting on its high Christology. But John is a very Jewish Gospel; its
Prologue, which most probably predates the Gospel, speaks of Jesus as the
divine Word, active in creation, a recasting of the Wisdom theology that
developed in the late Old Testament.
In spite of the author’s
efforts to explain the church’s Christology in terms of an aberrant tradition,
there is much to recommend in this study. Akyol writes with a clarity that is
admirable, and the book is well researched. (The footnotes take up 55 pages.)
He finds common themes within the Scriptures of the Abrahamic religions, the
People of the Book, a term originating in the Quran. Both Muslims and
Christians can learn from it. Muslims might see in the example of Jesus
inspiration to focus on the spirit of their tradition rather than legalistic or
fundamentalist interpretations, or his teaching that the law—whether Torah or
Shariah—is for man rather than man (and woman) for the law, or his words in Lk
17:21, “The kingdom of God is within you,” for Akyol evidence that Jesus
transformed the kingdom of God—which Muslims would call the caliphate—from a
political kingdom into a spiritual one. Christians will be introduced to a more
irenic vision of Islam, one that has come to terms with modernity. The fact
that the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have far more in
common than is generally known should lead to greater mutual respect and to the
reconciliation so needed today.
Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., is the T. Marie Chilton Professor
Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University. His Systematic
Theology: A Roman Catholic Approach (Liturgical Press) and Go
Into the Streets: The Welcoming Church of Pope Francis, co-edited with
Richard R. Gaillardetz, appeared last spring. The Slow Work of God:
Living the Gospel Today (Paulist Press) will appear early in 2017.
The original article may be found here.
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