So what did my encounter with Islam teach me? Well, there are a few incidents and some thinking. One of the incidents was in the mid 1990's when a young Muslim man, clearly wanting to try out his latest apologetic strategy on a Christian told me that the Bible couldn't be the word of God because some of it is addressed to God and other parts are clearly not really God speaking in the first person. At least the Qu'ran has the vrctue of appearing to be God addressing humans. At the time we didn't have time to go into it further. What went through my head was that this was a fundamental misunderstanding of what Christians mean when we talk about the Bible as word of God in a way that includes greater co-operation between human processes and God's desire to communicate. And I nearly said to him something like 'Don't you think after thousands of years that we haven't thought of that and have a way of thinking about it that makes sense of that?' -really I was wanting to signal that what he seemed to think was a match-winner point was only the beginning of a conversation and that he should perhaps consider that obvious issues like that would have been considered in the Christian traditions of thinking about Christian Scripture.
However, of course, that incident does put a question mark against a quasi-islamic understanding of the Bible which sometimes it seem that Christian fundamentalists have and i think that, in some ways, is indeed vulnerable to the rhetorical point made by Muslim apologetics of the sort just mentioned.
For me it started to make me clear that Christians really don't think of the Bible as God addressing humans directly. Now there's a whole world of important difference in the theologies of revelation between the two faiths. Christianity is much more 'incarnational' -even fundamentalists when it comes down to it will root their defense of the Bible as God's words in the term 'inspiration' rather than dictation. 'Men, carried along by the Spirit...' 'God-breathed' are the kinds of phrases picked up from Scripture to think about what the relationship between God and Bible is: it is something which involves humans more than taking dictation but is a process where something of the personality of the writers or the signs of developmental processes can be discerned. This complements theological understandings of God working through and in human beings, inviting us to be part of what God is about.
But there are a couple of further developments. One of those was the realisation that many Muslims tend to regard the Qur'an (or at least a heavenly antetype the Umm al-Kitab, 'mother of the book') as something that has eternally existed with God. I think i owe this insight to Kenneth Cragg. In Islam the Word of God that is eternally with God is made recitation/book. In Christian faith the Word of God that is eternally with God is made flesh. In other words where Muslims have Book, we have Christ. This made it clear to me that it is really quite significant that in Christian faith the Word of God is first, foremost and importantly a Person. Enter Karl Barth into my thinking: therefore it really is so that Scripture bears witness to the Word of God, that is Christ. In Muslim terms, Christian Scriptures are more like reliable Hadith -stories about what the prophet said and did which help Muslims to understand what the Qur'an says and means. These Christian 'hadith' are souped up with the work of God's Spirit.
As a result of this, i started to feel that the liturgical practice of my church (Anglican) gained new resonance for me. When we hear Scripture read in Communion services, we sit to hear most readings but stand to hear the Gospels -some churches even have extra ceremonial to prepare for the reading and for the announcement of the Gospel including parading the book of the Gospels to the centre of the congergation where everyone turns to face it (the book is our qiblah). By these actions we are telling ourselves and honouring the fact that Christ in the centre of our faith; the means by which we are most directly addressed, personally (that is 'in person'), by God. The Gospels are the witnesses closest in to the Word of God.
Steve Chalke wrote:
"We do not believe that the Bible is 'inerrant' or 'infallible' in any popular understanding of these terms. In truth, there is nothing in the biblical texts that is beyond debate and questioning, and healthy churches are ones that create an environment which welcomes just that. The biblical texts are not a 'divine monologue', where the solitary voice of God dictates a flawless and unified declaration of his character and will to their writers."So we would not want to think about the Bible as the Word of God -for that is Christ, but rather as word of God: witness and testimony to enable us to understand the Word of God. Witness and testimony that God has nurtured (by the action of the Holy Spirit) to be good enough to do the job of forming us in the way of Christ ('... useful for correcting, rebuking, teaching and training in righteousness ... equipped for every good work').
By the witness of these same scriptures, words like 'inerrant' or 'infallible' can only properly be understood in relation to whether they mean the ability of Scripture to lead us rightly to being trained in righteousness and being equipped to practice love in the way of Christ.
The biblical cat is out of the f - Brian McLaren:q
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