One would like to think that advanced
educational attainment is not a dominant factor in causing people to
lose all common sense, but after this week I am beginning to wonder.
I found myself having a cordial but
firm disagreement with a young lady who possesses a Masters and
Bachelors in History and who teaches history in a local community
college. She was admonishing a young college student who is in my
church regarding Islam. She made the claim that “Muslims are
not violent. ISIS is not Muslim if you study their history. ISIS is
to Islam in the same manner the KKK is to Christianity. Can't label
billions for the actions of a few.”
Certainly I agree with her that you
can’t label the billions for the actions of a few. But I am
astounded that a woman who teaches history would have such an
unhistorical knowledge of the background of Islam. A native of Mecca,
Muhammad’s new religion was not accepted—at first—by the other
tribes around him. They were polytheists and he was selling
monotheism. He fled from Mecca to Medina, where he had greater
success in building a following. Mecca itself later converted under
the threat of the sword in the early seventh century. The rapid
expansion of Islam in the entire Mediterranean region occurred
primarily by military conquest, or the threat thereof. Islamic
violence is not breaking news, it is a deep-rooted part of their
history and finds vigorous theological support in the Quran. ISIS is
perhaps the most faithful representation of Islamic roots that we
have seen in the modern day.
She is correct that most Muslims today
do not pursue violent jihad. Some have reinterpreted the Quran to
view jihad as a personal spiritual battle in their pursuit of
personal Islamic purity. But it will be unhelpful from both a
national policy and personal relational standpoint to revise the
history of Islam. Relationships built upon falsehoods are inherently
unstable and unsustainable.
“I love my
Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human
dignity. I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they,
like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis
stated last week, we worship the same God.”
I agree with her that we need to love
our neighbor, including and especially our Muslim neighbors at a time
like this. And I can grant her the stated reason of “human
dignity,” though I would frame it a different way: we should love
our neighbor because Christ commands us to and because all humans
bear the image of God.
But her other reasons are simply
incoherent. By definition a Christian is one who places their faith
in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for their sins.
Muslims don’t believe that Jesus died on the cross, period. Which
sort of puts a kibosh on the resurrection, too, you know? In other
words, they deny the central doctrine of the Christian faith. Soooo,
in what way exactly can she stand in “religious solidarity” with
them?
Secondly, they are indeed people of the
book. But it’s the wrong book. This is not trivial sectarianism.
Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING we know about God and redemptive
history comes from the Bible. You don’t lose part of it in the
Quran—you lose all of it. Soooo, how can this “Christian”
professor make such a claim, tell me again?
Third, I am to understand that we
worship the same God? Really? In fact, there is no resemblance, neither
superficial nor at greater depth. The true God, the Christian God,
exists as one God in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That truth is abominable to the Muslim. Both Christians and Muslims
claim that their God is merciful, so that might be a
similarity—until you dig deeper, anyway. Then you find that the
true God of the Bible is merciful because it is His nature to be
merciful and He always acts in perfect accord with who He is.
Allah is not so. Allah is pure will. Islam does not think in terms of
the attributes of its deity, only in terms of his will. Allah is
only merciful if he decides to be so, and he may decide not to be.
There is simply no correlation to be made between the true God of the
Bible and the god of Islam—unless one is entirely ignorant of one
or the other—or of both.
I applaud this professor’s desire to
love her neighbor and to avoid disenfranchising her Muslim friends,
and I stand with her in that regard. But if you stop and think about
her words for just a moment you’ll realize she has dishonored both
Christian and Islamic belief by trying to forge a non-existent via media between
two irreconcilable belief systems. I certainly can’t stand with her
there.
America once had a great educational
system. But the words of these two educators make me wonder, what’s
happened to American academics? They are not getting even the most
basic facts right.
