This is a unique
and important book, simultaneously expert in Islam and Christianity, displaying
a deep sympathy for Muslim perspectives while remaining clear and persuasive
about the Christian faith.

Dr John Dickson, Centre for Public Christianity

Weaving his
characteristically keen intellect with heartfelt empathy, Richard Shumack
engages Islam at its philosophical apex by tackling its greatest challenges to
Christianity. A critical voice in this timely discussion, the lucid and
compelling arguments will sharpen the thoughts of Muslims and Christians alike.

Nabeel Qureshi, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

There's a common
myth in western culture that the major religions are essentially the same,
especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Aren't they all "Abrahamic
faiths", don't they all worship the same God, aren't they basically the
same?—I hear this time and again. Thus it is that a book like Richard Shumack's
is timely and essential. Not merely does it highlight some important,
fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity—but it does so with
compassion, generosity and also depth, carefully using the lens of
philosophy. Richard shows time and again how the answers that Islam and
Christianity give to some of the most profound questions—Who is God? What does
it mean to be human? What's wrong with the world? What's the solution?—are
utterly and entirely different. The question thus becomes not "are they
the same" but which is true? Richard engages with the evidence,
gently dismantles the strongest Muslim objections to the Christian faith and
the result is a book that every Muslim, every Christian and indeed anybody who
cares about exploring the answers to life's deepest questions should read
carefully.

Dr Andy Bannister, Melbourne School of Theology

Richard Weaver
wrote that "Ideas have consequences". Indeed they do.  Richard
Shumack's book is the first of its kind that I have seen, and his skilful
arguments and detailed explorations address issues of vital concern to those
interested in understanding Muslims and Islamic thought. This is a great book.
I highly commend it.

Dr Stuart McAllister, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

Richard
Shumack’s insightful and readable book fulfils a long-standing need for the
meaningful comparison of Islamic and Christian philosophy.  While making
the case for the superiority of Christian philosophy, he is charitable and fair
to Islam in discussing the most influential Muslim thinkers.  Shumack
punctuates his discussions with clear and compelling illustrations that
brighten up the rigorous discussion.   Whether you are a Christian or a
Muslim, I truly believe that The Wisdom of Islam and the Foolishness of
Christianity will provide you with insights worthy of your thoughtful
consideration.

Dr Abdu Murray, Embrace the Truth

The Wisdom of Islam

and the

Foolishness of
Christianity

A Christian Response to Nine Objections to Christianity by
Muslim Philosophers

Richard Shumack

Island
View Publishing

Sydney,
Australia

Email:
rshumack@publicchristianity.org

The
Wisdom of Islam and the Foolishness of Christianity: A Christian Response to
Nine Objections to Christianity by Muslim Philosophers

First
published April 2014

Copyright
Island View Publishing © Richard Shumack

Apart
from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or
review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced
by any process without the written permission of the publisher.

Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®),
copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

National
Library of Australia

ISBN
978-0-9924997-0-9

Cover
picture: Medieval Persian manuscript depicting Muhammad, Abraham, Moses and
Jesus. Copyright © Public domain.

To Shabbir, I
look forward to your reply!

Acknowledgements

Special
thanks to Simon, Stuart, Bruce, and Fiona and Erle. Without each of you this
book would not have come to pass.

Thanks,
too, to Andy, Sean and Tanya for your reflections on the ideas I have presented
here. I enjoyed the various coffees, emails and chats.

Contents

Introduction

The Wisdom of Islam and the
Foolishness of Christianity

Chapter 1

Certainty and Doubt: The Problem of
Certain Belief.

Chapter 2

Signs and Hiding: The Problem of
God’s Hiddenness

Chapter 3

Success and Tragedy: The Problem of
Human Sin

Chapter 4

One and Three: The Problem of the
Trinity

Chapter 5

The Sublime and the Ridiculous: The
Problem of the Incarnation

Chapter 6

Justice and Grace: The Problem of the
Cross

Chapter 7

Dictation and Inspiration: The
Problem of Revelation

Chapter 8

Law and Love: The Problem of Divine
Ethics

Chapter 9

Power and Weakness: The Problem of
Politics

Conclusion

The Best of People or Fools?

Key References

Select Bibliography

Introduction

The Wisdom of
Islam and the Foolishness of Christianity

The
Muslim challenge

Recently
I was at a friend’s house when one of their Muslim relatives dropped in to
visit. Upon discovering that I was a Christian, the first thing he said to me
was: ‘Come on! Surely you cannot believe in what the Bible says about God!
Surely you must realise that because the Bible is full of crazy ideas like the
Trinity, it must be corrupted!’ For this man the most objectionable things
about Christianity were that it did not make any sense to him and it appeared
to be based on shaky evidence. His preference for Islam, on the other hand,
grew out of his strong conviction that Islam did make sense and that it was
reliably grounded upon strong evidence. In my experience this mindset is very
common.

Many
Muslims today challenge Christians with the claim that central Muslim beliefs
are sensible whereas central Christian beliefs are foolish. This challenge
abounds in popular social media. A quick search of the internet will reveal any
number of popular Muslim apologists ridiculing Christians for their foolishness
in believing such things as the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation of
Jesus and human involvement in biblical revelation. One such apologist for
Islam is Zakir Naik. He boldly states that:

Islamic
‘faith’ is rational. Scientific fact and true Islam have never contradicted
each other. Moreover … belief in Islam makes much more sense than disbelief.

While
on the other hand,

At the heart
of Christian doctrine is a profound mystery of paradoxes … Christians don’t
merely ‘not always expect better explanations’ to their questions about reality, they also have no
problems with explanations that are logically self-contradictory or paradoxes.
To illustrate the point I’ll relate an incident that I heard about recently: A woman brought up as a
Christian accepted Islam and after some time decided to tell her mother of her
decision. Her Christian mother asked why she had become a Muslim and she
replied ‘Islam makes more sense’ to which her astonished mother replied: ‘But
religion is not supposed to make sense!’[1]

Despite
the boldness of such challenges, Christians are well justified in dismissing
them as crude. Closer examination often shows them to be high on strong
rhetoric, low on strong argument. Often they can be shown to misrepresent the
doctrines they are ridiculing and ignore the depth of Christian theological
reflection throughout history. For example, would Naik really have us think
that great Christian thinkers throughout history, like Thomas Aquinas and
Augustine, happily believed their faith to be logically self-contradictory? The
poor quality of much popular Muslim apologetics leaves some Muslims lamenting
the lack of serious apologetic thinking in their community. Shabbir Akhtar
suggests that:

Modern Muslims
are, as a group of people, embarrassingly unreflective: it were as though Allah
had done all the thinking for his devotees.[2]

I
want to agree with Akhtar that this is commonly the case. Nevertheless, it
would be a mistake to think that the Muslim challenge to the reasonableness of
Christian faith can simply be dismissed as being without substance simply
because popular Islam finds little time for serious philosophical reflection.

The
identical view – that Muslim belief is sensible and Christian belief is foolish
– is also put forward by thoughtful Muslims, including professional Muslim
philosophers. When these thinkers say that Islam is sensible, they mean that a
strong case can be made that its core beliefs are rational and believed with
good reason. Partly this is because they think that Islam has doctrines that
are clear, easy to grasp and without paradox or ambiguity. Partly, too it is
because Islam commonly holds that humans are fundamentally rational beings and
that God reveals himself in a way that appeals to human rationality. So, and for
example, Ismail al-Faruqi argues that:

Unlike the
faith of Christians, the imân (faith) of Islam is truth given to the mind, not
to man’s credulity. The truths, or prepositions, of imân are not mysteries,
stumbling blocks, unknowable and unreasonable but critical and rational. They
have been subjected to doubt and emerged from the testing confirmed and
established as true. No more pleading on their behalf is necessary. Whoever
acknowledges them as true is reasonable; whoever persists in denying or
doubting is unreasonable.[3]

(Islam) … comes
to us armed with logical and coherent arguments and expects our acquiescence on
rational, and hence necessary grounds.[4]

These
are strong claims. And Muslim philosophers are equally strong in their
conviction that Christian belief is foolish. Al-Faruqi holds that the central
doctrines of Christianity are impenetrable and incoherent to the degree that
they are not truly believed and are merely assented to superficially:

The
incarnation of God, the trinity, salvation as fait accompli, the Kingdom
of God as here and not-here, God’s death and resurrection, vicarious
guilt, suffering and merit, original sin and fallenness, the Church as the body
of God – all these have remained utterly opaque and incomprehensible.
Subscription to these views hardly ever went beyond lip-service.[5]

Along
similar lines, Akhtar chastises Christianity for

the
irrationality and demonstrable incoherence of (its) distinguishing dogmas, the
impracticality of its deceptively noble ethics, and the implausibility of its
gracious promise of unconditional salvation divorced from works of law.[6]

Akhtar’s
challenge is threefold: Christian beliefs are foolish because they are irrational,
impractical and implausible. In other words, he is suggesting
that Christian beliefs cannot sustain close philosophical scrutiny. The
arguments mustered by these thinkers in support of these claims are not so easy
to dismiss as popular rhetorical challenges like Naik’s. Indeed, the reason I
have written this book is because I consider the challenge of thoughtful
Muslims worthy of a serious response. I can think of at least five reasons why
Christians need to take the Muslim philosophical challenge seriously.

First,
when compared to Christianity, Islam is simple and clear. I agree
with Muslims that Islam’s theology is simple and relatively straightforward. It
does not offer doctrines that appear paradoxical to the casual observer. Its
ethics are for the most part laid out clearly (if exhaustingly) in the Qur’an
and hadith. Christians are rightly challenged to give adequate reasons for why
some of their key beliefs need to be so complex.

Second,
it is not immediately obvious that Christianity is not foolish! When first
encountered, key Christian doctrines can appear, and can be easily made to
appear, foolish. Some – like trinitarian beliefs – can appear foolish because
they are fearsomely difficult to articulate coherently, let alone explain.
Others – like beliefs concerning grace – can appear foolish because they seem
unjust, weak and impractical. Still others – like beliefs concerning original
sin – can appear foolish because they do not sit comfortably with how humans
generally view themselves. I want to agree with Muslims that the reasonableness
of these sorts of beliefs is rightly questioned.

Third,
the philosophical challenge is weighty. We will see that the particular
claims and objections raised by Muslims relate to a number of very substantial
philosophical questions that very great thinkers – both Muslim and Christian –
have wrestled with for millennia. Philosophy today is still full of unresolved
debates concerning the existence and nature of God and the way the humans can
know religious truths. Muslims are right to challenge Christians to re-examine
their beliefs in light of what Islam seeks to contribute to these debates.

Fourth,
there is a shortage of good philosophical discussion between Muslims and
Christians. There are, I suspect, various reasons for this. One is that
after a burst of enthusiasm early in Islamic history, Muslims have largely lost
interest in serious philosophical apologetics. Another reason is that most
Christian apologetics of late has been preoccupied with taking on the challenge
of religious sceptics. A further reason is that the vast majority of
Muslim/Christian apologetic discussion focuses on theological and/or historical
questions. This is understandable. It is easy for Muslims and Christians to
think that they are operating within the same theistic philosophical framework
and that we just need to sort out some of the theological and historical
details we differ on. This, unfortunately, ignores some real tensions in Muslim
and Christian thinking.

Finally,
even the Bible describes Christianity as foolish! The Apostle Paul declared
that the message of Christ is ‘foolishness’ to philosophers (The First Letter
to the Corinthians 1:18–25). It seems that the Bible is suggesting that some
religious truths might not be immediately obvious. These verses point to the
possibility that even core religious truths might be counter-intuitive and
might require deep and patient reflection before they can be believed. Thus, the
title of this book is not a trick title. It is not designed to trick Muslims
into reading the book by pretending that I believe Islam to be wise and
Christianity to be foolish, only to argue the opposite. Instead, I want to
genuinely agree with Muslims that Islam does appeal to common sense in a way
that Christianity does not at first glance.

For
all these reasons the Muslim challenge warrants a reply. However just because
the challenge is thoughtful does not mean it is fearsomely intimidating or that
it offers objections that Christianity has never faced before or that
Christians have not responded with good answers. I believe that very good
responses can, and have been, made to the various philosophical challenges made
by Muslims.

A
Christian response

As
a Christian, I think that Christian belief is reasonable and that the
various Muslim arguments concerning the foolishness of Christian beliefs can
ultimately be shown to fail. This book is an explanation of why this is the
case. In the following chapters I offer a Christian response to nine particular
Muslim objections. What I will argue is that, upon closer examination, the
Christian beliefs under attack are not only reasonable, but in fact more
reasonable than the Muslim alternatives. My general contention is that,
despite sometimes being counter-intuitive at first glance, Christian beliefs
offer an understanding of God that not only makes sense but is also more
profoundly challenging, beautiful and satisfying than the Muslim understanding.
My central specific contention is that the philosophical heart of the issue
concerns our conception of the way that God and humans interact. I will progressively
argue that Islam adopts what I will call a legislative model of
divine/human interaction, under which Muslim beliefs are sensible and many
Christian beliefs untenable. In contrast, Christianity operates under what I
will call a fellowship model of divine/human interaction. I will show
how the adoption of this fellowship model removes many of the Muslim objections
to Christian belief and opens the way to a much richer conception of human
knowledge of God. Shifting models like this, too, may seem immediately foolish
to Muslims. However, I want to suggest that not only is it philosophically
unobjectionable, but we will see how it makes sense of the Apostle Paul’s claim
that the foolishness of the Christian conception of God is wiser than man’s
wisdom.

I
agree with Paul that this is the case, and one of the reasons I do so with
confidence is because few of the objections offered by Muslims are new and most
have been vigorously defended by Christians. Indeed some of the issues were
first discussed by Muslims and Christians centuries ago when Islam first
encountered Christianity Unfortunately, many Muslims and Christians today are
not aware of this, or have not looked closely enough at these discussions to
realise that Muslim objections are not as strong as they might appear. It is
also unfortunate that, as I noted earlier, these substantial historical Muslim/Christian
debates have been clouded by the poor quality of so much of the popular
polemics that are prevalent today. Because of this, before we look at the
objections themselves I want to offer a few suggestions about how thoughtful
Muslims and Christians should generally go about discussing the reasonableness of
their beliefs.

When believers
talk

One
of the things I really enjoy about Muslim-Christian dialogue is that, because
it is a discussion between religious believers, we already agree on many of the
issues that consume contemporary public religious debates. Both Muslims and
Christians believe in one Creator God and the supernatural. We both accept the
reality of divine revelation and miracles, and we both reject scepticism about
knowing God and the current tendency to view deep religious conviction as a negative
force in society. Our disagreements, when they occur, are over the details of
exactly what God is like, how God has revealed himself, and what sort of
worship he requires of humans. What this means is that we agree on theism in
general, but we disagree on important questions concerning precisely what
we can know, and how we can know, about God. This book is an attempt to
explore more closely these epistemological questions. I want to suggest that to
do this properly we need to agree on the following five points. I do not think
that they are very controversial, and I hope that both Muslims and Christians
who are reading this book will be able to broadly agree with them.

Believers
should not think that philosophy is a dirty word

Although
this book is essentially a philosophical discussion, there are believers of all
persuasions that will view philosophy with suspicion. Sometimes this suspicion
is well placed. The earliest Muslim universities quickly – and correctly, I
think – recognised that their philosophers were trying to import a Greek
metaphysic that clearly did not, and could not, sit comfortably with Islamic
theism. More recently, philosophy has often been equated with a radical
scepticism that denies that any knowledge of God is possible. ‘Kafirs ask
questions!’ is a common slogan that expresses the Muslim dissatisfaction with a
sceptical mood. Nevertheless, I want to argue that philosophy and theology can
happily coexist so long as philosophy knows its place. For the purposes of this
book, I take philosophy to include the attempt to think carefully about the
reasonableness of our various religious beliefs in such a way that does not
immediately assume them to be true. This does not mean that philosophy is sceptical
about the possibility our religious beliefs can be true. There is a big
difference between thinking carefully about one’s beliefs and being sceptical
about one’s beliefs. Indeed, if we look carefully at our beliefs, there is just
as much chance of strengthening them as undermining them.

Even
if you are suspicious about the usefulness of philosophy, I want you to notice
that the particular Muslim claims and objections I am responding to are
philosophical claims and objections. So, if Muslims want to claim the
philosophical superiority of Muslim faith, they are going to have to buck their
tradition of avoiding philosophy!

I
also recognise that some people can be put off philosophy by the fear that it
is complicated and hard to understand. It is certainly true that there are some
complicated discussions that philosophers have – some of them will be touched
on as we go along – but philosophy is more about thinking carefully than
thinking complicatedly. In any case, my aim is to keep the discussion of
this book at a level that most thoughtful Muslim and Christian believers should
be able to follow and then offer references for those who want to go deeper
into the relevant discussions among philosophers.

Believers
should seek true beliefs

It
seems obvious that religious beliefs should be true, so why mention it? It is
worth mentioning because humans have demonstrated throughout history a natural inclination
to think that an apparently sensible belief is true, and a seemingly ridiculous
belief is false. This inclination seems fair enough, because most of the time
apparently sensible beliefs are true (and apparently ridiculous beliefs
are false). However, this is not always the case. Apparently sensible beliefs can
be false. One example is the belief that the world is flat. For many people in
history this was a sensible belief because it seemed obvious enough, smart and
trustworthy people told them it was true, and it fitted happily with everything
else they knew. Still, it was false. On the other hand, astonishing and
surprising beliefs can be true. One example is the physical phenomenon where
hot water often freezes quicker than cool water. Named after Erasto Mpemba, this
‘Mpemba effect’ seems to go against common sense. The reasons why this event happens
are complicated, but it does follow the laws of physics despite seeming to be
the opposite of what we would expect.

Similarly,
we cannot assume that just because Islam is simpler and clearer than
Christianity, it is more likely to be true. In fact, C.S. Lewis argued that the
opposite was possible:

If
Christianity were something we were making up, of course we could make it
easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are
inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone
can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.[7]

Thus,
the important question to ask of any religious belief is not how simple or
clear it appears to be, but how true it is.[8]

Believers
should seek reasonable beliefs

Our
beliefs should not appear to be sensible; rather, they should be
sensible. And, a sensible belief is a belief that we have good reason to think
it is true. There may be many sorts of reasons why a belief is likely to be
true, but here are three important ones:

1.       This belief is based on
good evidence.
A quick illustration using an old joke will show that we sensibly expect our
beliefs to be grounded in good evidence: A person went to the doctor and told
him that the problem was that he was dead. The doctor asked the patient ‘Do
dead people bleed?’ and the patient agreed they did not. So the doctor made a
small cut on the patient’s arm to show him he was not dead. Upon seeing his
bleeding the patient replied, ‘Well what do you know? Dead people do
bleed!’ Clearly the patient’s belief that he was dead was unreasonable because
it went against all the evidence he was shown. The reason this story is a joke
is because we all naturally recognise that beliefs should conform to the
evidence available to us.

2.       I came to hold this
belief in a way that can be seen to reliably produce true beliefs. This feature of belief
is noticed less often, but it is no less important. It recognises that often we
are confident that a belief is true even if we are not able to know or evaluate
all the supporting evidence. Many of the beliefs we will be discuss in this
book are beliefs that people come to hold on the basis of other people telling them
that they are true and without the hearers being able to access all the
evidence for themselves. For example, both Muslim and Christian beliefs rely
heavily on eyewitness testimonies to events long past. Because we have no
direct access to the evidence of these events, the truth of either Islam or
Christianity depends upon the reliability of the particular process that
transmitted the eyewitness accounts to us through history. So, for us to
consider any belief produced this way to be reasonable, we will need to be
confident that this process was highly reliable.

3.       This belief fits in with
my other beliefs – including new beliefs. Ideally, all our beliefs should fit
together coherently and not contradict each other. However, it is not enough
that our existing beliefs are coherent: they also need to be able to cope with
revision as we encounter new things in the world and come to believe new
things. I think it is fair to say that both Islam and Christianity are pretty
coherent as a set of beliefs by themselves. If they were not, Muslims and
Christians would have difficulty maintaining their beliefs over generations (as
they have done). Nevertheless, both these sets of beliefs cannot be made up of
all true beliefs because some Muslim beliefs contradict some Christian beliefs
and vice-versa. What this means in practice is that while Muslim belief is
reasonable for, let us say, a small child growing up in a Muslim village, this
does not guarantee that their beliefs are true. When they grow and leave the
village, they will have to cope with the challenge of meeting new people in new
places who have different, but also reasonable, beliefs.

Thus,
in a discussion between believers, together we should examine our beliefs to
see whether they are supported by available evidence, were arrived at in a
reliable way, and can withstand scrutiny in light of the challenges made by
others.

Believers
should remember that religious faith incorporates much more than just belief

One
of the dangers of focusing on evaluating religious beliefs is that it can give
the impression that religious faith only involves believing various
statements about God. Put differently, we reduce religious knowledge (of God) to
propositional knowledge (about God). Let me briefly assure the reader that that
is not my intention. While I want to maintain that our religious beliefs should
be reasonable, I also want to argue that religious belief is not the
same thing as religious faith. Religious faith is primarily an exercise
of trust. Faith is, of course, exercised in relation to our beliefs. So,
for example, I generally trust airplanes to be a reliable form of transport
because I believe things like: ‘Airplanes are safer to travel in than cars’. But
I do not actually have faith in any airplane until I put myself, or someone I
care about, into an airplane and fly in it. Notice that this faith/belief
relationship can be complicated: I can trust an airplane by flying in it despite
being unsure about its safety, or even when I believe it to be unreliable or
dangerous – nervous flyers do this all the time. Nevertheless, usually we trust
things because we believe them to be reliable and because we think this belief
is true.

Faith
is also exercised in relation to different sorts of knowledge. Think for a
moment about the faith I have in my wife. There are innumerable things that I
believe about my wife. I believe she is an incredibly welcoming and friendly
person. I believe her wild Celtic hair is brilliant. I believe that, luckily
for me, she is an unbelievably forgiving person. At the same time I know her in
many ways that cannot be put into words. I know her touch. I know her smile. I
know her love. It is for all these reasons that I can say I know her and
trust her. Thus, my faith in my wife incorporates all sorts of things I could
tell you that I believe about her, but it is much bigger than just that. Indeed,
my hunch is that very, very few beliefs are necessary in order to know and
trust something or someone. I can know how to ride (and trust) a bicycle
without consciously forming any beliefs about it. I can meet a new person and
immediately and unconsciously form an intuition that they are trustworthy. I
want to suggest that the same is the case in religious faith. Religious faith
incorporates beliefs about God – and we should evaluate our beliefs to see
whether they are reasonable – but we should never lose sight of the fact that
religious faith is much bigger than this. Religious faith is about knowing and
trusting God, not just about believing certain doctrines about God.[9]

Believers
should avoid ‘special pleading’ concerning their beliefs

In
a later chapter I will discuss the idea of human sin in more detail, but it
serves here as a useful example. Suppose I tried to defend the Christian
doctrine of original sin with this argument: ‘Humans are originally sinful
because the Bible tells us that all humans are originally sinful’. This
argument is unlikely to convince any Muslim because they will probably not agree
that the Bible is correct on this issue. This is an example of what is called ‘special
pleading’ I will take it that special pleading is when you uncritically assume
that a particular idea (or premise) you are using in an argument is true when your
audience does not necessarily agree with you that it is. I chose this example
because the most common form of special pleading in Muslim-Christian debate is
for Muslims to treat their belief that the Qur’an is the word of God as an
obvious given, and for Christians to do the same with the Bible. I want to
suggest that when Muslims and Christians debate each other, they should not
argue in a way that assumes the truth (or the falsity) of either the Bible or
the Qur’an. In line with this approach, it is my intention that none of the
arguments in this book assume the truth or falsity of the Bible or the Qur’an.
Indeed, it is my hope that every argument I offer in this book has premises that
both Muslims and Christians can agree with. Please hear me carefully here. I am
not saying that Muslims and Christians should stop believing in the truth of
the Qur’an or the Bible before they can talk. That would be silly. Nor am I
suggesting that we should ‘suspend belief’ in order to evaluate our beliefs. I
strongly doubt it is even possible to suspend belief concerning our deep
religious convictions. I am not saying that we should avoid defending the truth
of the Qur’an or the Bible. I am also not saying it is inappropriate to use the
Bible or the Qur’an in our arguments: we can surely say things like ‘The Qur’an
is correct in recognising … ’, or ‘If the Bible is the word of God then … ’ I
am simply saying that when we are making a case for our various beliefs, there
is little value in appealing to the truth of things that seem obvious to us but
not to the person with whom we are talking.

One
of the reasons I think these five broad guidelines should not be too
controversial is that they are supported by the Muslim philosophers I am
seeking to respond to. For example, al-Faruqi’s list of the principles that
should govern religious philosophical dialogue includes: internal coherence, external
coherence, and correspondence (or coherence) with reality.[10]
Similarly, Akhtar suggests that participants in these sorts of interfaith
discussions should exercise ‘intellectual patience, inter-faith courtesy and
skills of conceptual analysis’.[11]
In particular, philosophers should be able to ‘probe and assess the
consistency, coherence, truth and plausibility of religious beliefs presented
as truth claims’.[12]
Clearly we are on the same page in terms of pursuing true and reasonable religious
beliefs.

This
discussion

That
al-Faruqi and Akhtar adopt this kind of approach shows that at least some
contemporary Muslims are interested in exploring the comparative philosophical
credentials of Islam and Christianity. As this book is my personal contribution
to this discussion, I will now briefly outline the approach I will be taking.

First,
any discussion about Muslim and/or Christian belief is immediately contentious
because both Muslims and Christians argue among themselves about just what it
is that they (and the opposing faith) are supposed to believe. The question of
just what is orthodox or normative belief is a fraught one in both Islam and
Christianity; it is inevitable that there will be times in the following
discussion when both Muslims and Christians will be thinking: ‘Hang on! I don’t
believe that!’ I have therefore adopted the policy of addressing only what can be
sensibly viewed as mainstream beliefs. In the case of Christianity I will take
mainstream beliefs to be those included in the historical creeds or in doctrinal
statements like, for example, the Lausanne Covenant that are very widely
assented to. In the case of Islam, which does not have the same creedal
tradition, I am assuming traditional Sunni Islam to be representative of mainstream
Islam. For the purposes of this book, it is necessary that I refrain from
adjudicating too closely on just what traditional Islam consists of. Instead, I
will assume (with good reason, I think) that the Muslim philosophers in
question are presenting a mainstream Muslim position and then adopt their
descriptions of Muslim doctrines as orthodox. I will leave it up to individual
Muslims to decide whether the discussion in each chapter is relevant to their
particular beliefs.

Second,
this is primarily a discussion among philosophical realists. A
philosophical realist, roughly speaking, is someone who thinks that ‘things’ –
like God, people and the universe – exist and have properties independent
of our beliefs or concepts about them. So a realist philosopher of religion –
for example, Richard Swinburne – will say that our beliefs are true if, and
only if, they correspond to the way things really are in the universe.[13]
I point this out because anyone with even a little training in philosophy understands
that philosophical realism is contentious among philosophers of religion. Many
well-known Christian and Muslim philosophers – like John Hick, Seyyed Hossein
Nasr and Abdul-Karim Soroush – are largely anti-realist when it comes to
religious belief. They broadly argue that it is impossible for our beliefs and
concepts to accurately describe transcendent realities and, therefore, it is
meaningless for us to speak of our religious beliefs being objectively true or
false in any straightforward sort of way. Philosophical anti-realism is
particularly popular among Shia Muslims and many Sufis, but I do not propose to
interact at any depth with this sort of thinking in this book. This is partly
because I am a philosophical realist. However, I also think that, some mystical
approaches aside, traditional Muslim and Christian religious belief is
essentially realist, and the objections I am responding to generally arise from
Muslim philosophers who are philosophical realists.

Third,
each of the following nine chapters considers a different Muslim objection to
Christian belief. Each chapter is written such that its argument largely stands
alone. Each roughly follows a similar pattern: laying out the objection,
defining the terms, exploring the relative merit of the Muslim and Christian
position on the issue, and a concluding argument for why I prefer the Christian
position. This independence means the chapters do not need to be read in order,
and if some topic particularly interests you, then go right ahead and jump to
it. At the same time, there is logic to the order of the chapters that I think
is helpful in working our way through the issues. First, in Chapters 1 to 3, I
consider how certain we can be of beliefs about the ‘invisible’ God and whether
human sin limits what we can know about God in any way. Second, in Chapters 4
to 7, I look at key claims concerning how God has revealed himself to us and
what he is like. Third, in Chapters 8 and 9, I change tack slightly and look at
which of the two religions is more liveable.

Here
is my reasoning behind this chapter order: before we can work out whether Islam
or Christianity is correct about how we should worship God (i.e. religion), we
need to understand which faith has a clearer picture of who God is; however, before
we can work out whether Islam or Christianity has a clearer picture of who God
is, we need to work out how we as humans come to hold reasonable religious
beliefs about God.

As
mentioned earlier, there is also a common theme running through the chapters. Each
chapter plays a role in building my case that a key issue impacting upon the
reasonableness of Muslim and/or Christian belief is our conception of the
correct model of divine/human interaction. I hope that the following chapters
make a strong cumulative case for the reasonableness of Christian faith under a
fellowship model of divine/human interaction, and I draw this case together in
my concluding chapter.

Last,
this book has its origin in my desire to offer a defence of the reasonableness
of my personal Christian belief in the face of thoughtful objections by Muslim
thinkers whom I respect. As such, while I hope that it is philosophically
credible, it is decidedly apologetic in nature. It is not intended to merely
compare and contrast Muslim and Christian belief, giving equal space to each side
to present their case. Nor is it my aim to canvass the widest range of
scholarly opinion possible. This book is personal, too, in the sense that it
grew out of real conversations with real scholars. In particular, I place a
special emphasis on responding to the objections of Muslim philosopher Shabbir
Akhtar. Despite Akhtar being relatively unknown at a popular level outside the
UK, I believe him to be unique among contemporary Muslim thinkers in the depth
of his engagement with Christian belief. I admire the fact that his doctoral
research was into Christian thought, and I respect his decision to reject
‘special pleading’ I esteem him for despising crude argument and welcome his
generous spirit. I also consider Shabbir to be a personal friend, colleague and
fellow traveller on the search for truth and reasonable religious belief. My
arguments have been largely formulated with Shabbir in mind as my real
‘imaginary’ interlocutor. I offer the following rebuttals to his (and others’)
arguments with this rejoinder: ‘You’re up, Shabbir!’

Chapter 1

Certainty and Doubt:
The Problem of Certain Belief.

The
spirit of belief

The
first Muslim objection I want to address is about belief itself. It concerns
how certain we can be about our religious beliefs. For the purposes of this
discussion, certainty is a property of belief that describes the degree of
confidence we have – or should have, if we thought about it – in our beliefs
being true. So we say things like ‘I am extremely certain that the sun will
rise tomorrow morning’, ‘I am fairly certain that my old Volkswagen will start
this morning’ and ‘I am not at all certain that the Australian football team will
win the World Cup one day’. In this context, I consider doubt to be the
opposite of certainty. Thus, a certain belief is one that we have a high
confidence is true, whereas a doubtful belief is one that we lack confidence is
true.

Many
Muslims – and indeed the Qur’an itself – make the strong philosophical claim
that Muslim beliefs can be held with absolute certainty. By implication,
any contradictory Christian beliefs must be false. Most would also add the
further claim that if Muslim beliefs are absolutely certain, then Muslims
should not doubt their beliefs. I first encountered this claim when I was
learning Arabic. In an early course I had a lecturer who was a passionate
promoter of Islam. Early on in the course he discovered I was a Christian, and
from that point on he would often turn our classes into debates about faith.
During one of these debates I asked him: ‘Is there any possibility at all that
you could be wrong about the Qur’an being the word of God?’ His reply was that
there was absolutely no possibility whatsoever that Muhammad was not a prophet
or that the Qur’an was not the word of God. He felt completely certain that his
beliefs about this were true and viewed this supposed certainty as one of the
strengths of Islam.

The
Muslim idea of absolute certainty looks to the Qur’an for support. The Qur’an confidently
declares that it is ‘the Book about which there is no doubt… ’(Q2:2). It regards
its inimitability as evidence of its divine origin:

And if you are
in any doubt about what We have sent down upon our Servant, then produce a
surah the like thereof (Q2:23).

The
idea here is that any doubt concerning the Muslim belief in the Qur’an’s
divine origin is inappropriate. The claim is that the particular nature of the
Qur’an operates as incontrovertible evidence that allows one to be absolutely
certain of the truth of the belief that it is of divine origin. Presumably this
is what Ziauddin Sardar has in mind when he says that ‘The text itself, when
examined, questioned by a doubting mind, leads to the conclusion its origin is
not human but a revelation of the divine’.[14]
Given that not all doubting minds come to the conclusion that the Qur’an is of
divine origin, Sardar presumably means that the nature of the Qur’an provides
evidence that entails that the Qur’an is of divine origin, and that this
should be obvious to anyone who attends closely enough to that evidence.

Another
Muslim philosopher with a similar argument is Ismail al-Faruqi. While he acknowledges
that non-Muslims may have doubts about the Muslim belief that the Qur’an is
divine, he responds by claiming that this belief ‘comes to us armed with
logical and coherent arguments and expects our acquiescence on rational, and
hence necessary grounds’.[15]
Again the suggestion here is that the belief that the Qur’an is of divine
origin is warranted, including being justified by rational argument, to such a
degree that it can be held with absolute certainty.

Said
Nursi also argues in a similar vein. His epic writings are some of the most
comprehensive attempts at a philosophical defence of Islam in recent times. In The
Words, Nursi provides argument after argument in defence of core Muslim
beliefs about the Qur’an before concluding that:

The
comparisons and balances which form all the Words from the First to the
Twenty-Fifth, and the verses at their heads which form their truths, all prove
with the certainty that two plus two equals four the Qur’an’s miraculousness
and supremacy in the face of civilization.[16]

Nursi
believes, then, that his arguments conclusively prove that Muslims can hold
their beliefs concerning the divine origin of the Qur’an with the same sort of
certainty that is available in mathematical proofs.[17]

Nursi
also suggests that ‘absolute certainty is the spirit of (religious) belief’,[18] and I suspect he is
correct about this. I think humans do pursue certainty, especially for
their religious beliefs, and the idea that we could have religious beliefs that
are absolutely certain is very appealing for all sorts of reasons. If our
beliefs were absolutely certain, we would have complete assurance that
our eternal destiny is secure. Absolute certainty would allow us the intellectual
luxury of not needing to re-examine our beliefs or to look closely at the
competing beliefs of others. It would reaffirm the personal trust we
have in our religious teachers to be reliably passing on truth to us. Absolute
certainty would comfort us when religious faith is difficult: it would
help us to persevere in times of temptation or doubt or persecution. Absolute
certainty would give us the confidence to teach others about our
religion and to invite, or even logically demand, others to join our faith. I
agree that absolute certainty is appealing, but what about doubt? Is it also
true that doubt is undesirable? Does having questions about the truth of one’s
beliefs run contrary to the spirit of belief?

The
spirit of unbelief?

One
Muslim philosopher who thinks all doubt is foolish is S.M.N. al-Attas.
He argues that Western philosophy has trouble discussing religious truth
because

doubt is
elevated as an epistemological method by means of which the rationalist and the
secularist believe that truth is arrived at. But there is no proof that it is
doubt and not something else other than doubt that enables one to arrive at
truth. The arrival at truth is in reality the result of guidance, not of doubt
… Doubt, whether it be definitive or provisional, leads either to conjecture or
to another position of uncertainty, never to the truth.[19]

Is
al-Attas correct? Does doubting one’s beliefs always lead away from truth? I
want to suggest that while it can, it does not have to.

Sometimes,
of course, doubt does run contrary to the spirit of belief. One of the
reasons that believers of all sorts have shied away from philosophy in recent
times is because of a perception that ever since Descartes, philosophy has been
essentially and radically sceptical about being able to know anything at all.
For the radical sceptic everything can, and should, be doubted because nothing
can be known with certainty. This sort of doubt is obviously an enemy of any sort
of belief – including religious belief.

Despite
perceptions, however, few philosophers these days are radical sceptics. It was
Wittgenstein half a century ago who argued powerfully that, while it is
possible to doubt everything, many doubts are clearly foolish. So, it would be
foolish to doubt that the world existed 500 years ago. It would be foolish to
doubt that 2+2=4. It would be foolish to doubt the existence of other people.
These are the sorts of beliefs that it is sensible to be certain about – even
if we cannot offer a proof for them that would satisfy a sceptic. Doubt,
however, does not have to be sceptical. Sometimes there is a lot of wisdom in
questioning whether our beliefs are accurate.

Thus,
it is wise to question the truth of our beliefs when things are not
completely clear. For example, my sister was at a wedding reception and saw
an acquaintance looking very pregnant with a large round belly. My sister then
formed the belief that this acquaintance was to give birth in the next few
months and asked the due date only to be embarrassingly told the friend was not
pregnant at all! (What made it even more embarrassing was to discover they were
seated together at the reception!)

It
is also wise to question the truth of our beliefs when things are complicated.
While it would be unwise to doubt whether 2+2=4, it would be very wise to doubt
and revise your answers to complicated mathematical problems in a university
exam. It is wise to doubt when we encounter smart and learned people who
believe differently to us.

It
is wise to question our beliefs just in case our felt confidence in our
beliefs is misplaced. To explain what I mean by this, it is important to
recognise that there are different types of certainty. Two types are important
for us to consider here. The first is the degree to which you feel
certain that something is true. Philosophers call this psychological
certainty. The second is the degree of certainty with which you know
something to be true. Philosophers call this epistemic certainty. Let me
illustrate these two types of certainty and how they are related. As a student
I used to do a lot of windsurfing. I was reasonably competent and had graduated
from beginner boards, which were big, floated easily and had small sails so you
could not go too fast, to slalom boards, which were small, had big sails for
going fast – hopefully really fast – and sank if you stopped moving. I gave
windsurfing up when I started work and had kids, but one time we were visiting
my wife’s family in Africa and they had some windsurfers for hire on the beach.
Because of my past experience I had a high degree of certainty in my ability so
I asked them for the smallest board and the biggest sail they had. I then
executed an elegant standing start on the beach and shot off at top speed
towards the reef a few kilometres out to sea. When I arrived at the reef I fell
off as I was turning around and because a small board sinks when you stop, I
then needed to execute a water start where you hold the sail out of the water
and the wind lifts you up and going. Unfortunately because I had not sailed for
years my (now puny) arm muscles could not cope with this and cramped up. I was
stuck out at sea for what seemed like hours before I was humbled by a man
sailing out on a big beginner board (with a tiny sail) which he gave to me so I
could (very slowly) get back to the beach. The point of this illustration is
this: I felt very certain of my ability, and with some reason given my
background, but I had ignored, or not known of, important truths (like the
state of my muscles) that should have lowered my degree of felt certainty. I
was in a situation where my feelings of certainty were unreasonable
because they did not reasonably match up to my epistemic certainty, or
my knowledge of the key truths.[20]

Sometimes,
then, it is wise to doubt our beliefs. The important question is whether our
religious beliefs are the sort of beliefs that are silly to doubt or the sort
of beliefs that are wise to question in a way that seeks to clarify their
truth. By equating Muslim belief to simple mathematics, Nursi is arguing that
it is silly to doubt. I disagree. I want to argue that for all the
reasons we have just seen, religious beliefs are of the second sort: they
should be questioned and not just assumed to be obviously true.

Religious
beliefs are complex beliefs about things that are not always clear and that
intelligent and educated people disagree upon and, importantly, sometimes
change their minds about. Surely most Christians and Muslims reading this book would
readily agree with this observation! I am guessing that many Muslims would
think that Christians would be wise to doubt (and modify) their belief in the
incarnation of Jesus. On the other hand, many Christians would think it wise
for Muslims to doubt (and modify) their beliefs about the Qur’an. I am not
alone in thinking this. Perhaps you noticed earlier that Sardar was suggesting
that it was precisely the doubting – that is, questioning – mind that the
Qur’an was trying to convince of the truth. Indeed, he claims that this is an
example of the Qur’an taking human doubt seriously.

Religious
beliefs are also the sorts of beliefs that people often hold with an extreme
psychological certainty that fails to match up to the degree to which they can
show them to be true. Let me illustrate this point with a real-life example. The
Arabic lecturer I mentioned earlier was a highly intelligent and educated man.
He had a PhD in Chemistry as well as post-graduate qualifications in education.
He was, therefore, a highly trained critical thinker with all the capabilities
required to research his beliefs deeply. In another of our class discussions he
was attempting to prove to me that the Qur’an was a miracle using the common
argument that the Qur’an made remarkable scientific statements that could not
have been known in the time of Muhammad. In an attempt to support the
miraculousness of the Qur’an’s statements concerning clouds, he handed me a
supposed quote from a Japanese cloud expert who was amazed at the accuracy of
the Qur’an. The quote had no references, so I decided to do a little research.
I discovered that the quote was a complete fabrication; the scientist did not
exist and his name was impossible in the Japanese language. The fabricated
quote had simply been circulating on the internet where my lecturer had found
it and printed it out for me. Clearly the proof offered did not support the
belief. Clearly too, the confidence he felt did not match the strength of his
proof.

Of
course anyone can find themselves, like me in Africa, in a situation where we
feel extremely certain about our beliefs irresponsibly, but this is a
particularly pertinent issue for Muslims. Because Muslims are told that their
beliefs are absolutely certain, they feel extremely certain about them and see
no need for doubt. I would argue, though, that if religious beliefs are
complicated, unclear and susceptible to false confidence, then it is wise to
doubt them in the sort of way that allows you to ensure they are true. Perhaps
the greatest Muslim thinker of all time agrees with me about this.

The
pathway to certainty

The
revered medieval Muslim scholar al-Ghazali was one of the first philosophers in
the world to seriously consider the question of certainty and doubt. Indeed,
his writings have led to claims that he was a forerunner of Descartes, and
clearly there are parallels in the degree of certainty that al-Ghazali and
Descartes were seeking for their beliefs. Al-Ghazali looked carefully at the
religious diversity in his community and noticed that believers of other faiths
seemed to hold their beliefs just as reasonably as he. He therefore decided to
examine his beliefs, and how he came to hold them, in order to work out whether
he could in fact hold them with the following idea of absolute certainty:

sure and
certain knowledge is that knowledge in which the object is disclosed in such a
fashion that no doubt remains along with it, that no possibility of error or
illusion accompanies it, and that the mind cannot even entertain such a
supposition. Certain knowledge must also be infallible; and this infallibility
or security from error is such that no attempt to show the falsity of the
knowledge can occasion doubt or denial, even though the attempt is made by
someone who turns stones into gold.[21]

This
quote shows that al-Ghazali, like most religious believers, wanted beliefs that
were infallibly true and about which there was no possibility of error. What is
interesting about al-Ghazali is his argument that the sort of evidence offered
by Sardar, Nursi, al-Faruqi (and most Muslims) for core Muslim beliefs does
not secure the absolute certainty he was after. He was not absolutely
certain he could trust either the religious authorities who passed Islam and
the Qur’an down to him or his own rational thinking about the evidence. This
realisation led him to a crisis of faith involving many years of spiritual and
philosophical reflection which was only resolved when he decided that he could
secure absolute certainty for his Muslim beliefs through Sufism – that is,
Muslim mystical experience: ‘I learnt with certainty that it is above all the
mystics who walk on the road of God’.[22]
It is important to recognise that al-Ghazali was not saying that the usual
evidential arguments for the Qur’an were false or even that they could
not offer some degree of certainty. He was just saying that by themselves they could
not secure absolute certainty. He concluded that for absolute certainty
you need a whole package that includes: authoritative historical testimony to
the revelation of the Qur’an; rational argument for its divine nature; and
a personal experience of Allah as God.

If
you read his work carefully, you will notice that al-Ghazali was seeking the reasonable
beliefs we talked about in the last chapter. He was considering the three
features of belief that we identified: the grounds for belief, the process of
coming to belief, and how some belief stood up to competing beliefs. I believe
that al-Ghazali gives us a great model of doubting reasonably within a spirit
of belief. He saw that his beliefs needed to be supported by evidence, he
acknowledged that the way he had come to believe them played a part in how
certain they were, and he recognised the real challenge of competing beliefs. Al-Ghazali
realised that in order to have any sense of the certainty of his beliefs, he
would have to seriously question and evaluate them. He had realised that the
right sort of doubt could eventually lead to certainty, and I agree with him.
What I do not agree with is his conclusion that his Muslim belief was absolutely
certain. I disagree because I do not think that any religious beliefs – Muslim,
Christian or any others – can be held with absolute certainty. Next I want to
show why.

Doubts
remain

Al-Ghazali
correctly identified that for any belief to be absolutely certain, it needed to
be impossible that it could be false. What this means is that we need to
be able to say the following about the three features of belief we have
identified:

1.       The reasons and evidence
I have for holding this belief entail – that is, demand – that it is
true.

2.       I came to hold this
belief in a way that I know must produce a true belief.

3.       This belief must be unable
to be challenged by any other truth I can be shown.

If
Muslims want to claim absolute certainty for their beliefs, they need to be
able to say these three things. Can they? I want to argue that they cannot. To
do so, let me take as an example the central Muslim belief that the Qur’an is
of divine origin and examine each of the three features in turn.

1.
Do the reasons given by Muslims for believing that the Qur’an is of divine
origin entail it being true?

The
most common reasons or grounds given by Muslims for the Qur’an being of divine
origin are these:

·
the
Qur’an’s Arabic is so superlative that it can only be explained by divine
origin

·
the
unique impact that belief in the Qur’an has had in the lives of Muslims is only
explained by its truth

·
the
Qur’an contains no error

·
the
Qur’an contains truths inaccessible to humans at the time of its revelation.

The
first question we need to ask is whether these claims are true, and it is not
at all clear that they are. All of them can be disputed. For example, while many
consider the Qur’an to be the supreme example of Arabic literature, it is not
without competitors for that title. Other works of literature with a legitimate
claim in the minds of some include the Mu’allaqat (reputed to have originally hung
in the Kaba), the Magamat and the Hariri. The other claims are also disputable.
The impact of the Qur’an on Muslims seems no greater than the impact of the
Bible on Christians or even the writings of Marx on Communists, and the Qur’an
contains apparent grammatical and factual errors – such as the sun setting in a
puddle – that demand metaphorical explanation in a way that makes the claim
very hard to defend. The supporting evidence, then, is not incontrovertible. This
is a problem for those claiming absolute certainty. There is, however, a bigger
problem.

Even
if these four reasons were true, they would not entail that the Qur’an was of
divine origin. The beauty of a text is not a proof of divine origin; rather, it
is proof of sublime linguistic skill. As Akhtar says,

the perceived
beauty and impeccable style of Qur’anic verses does not guarantee their truth
for the simple but sufficient reason that the truth of a written tract is not
affected by our perception of its charm and beauty. Philosophers should search
for truth, not beauty.[23]

Similarly,
the influence of the Qur’an on Muslims is only proof that when people believe
things strongly they act on them – plenty of atheist communists also acted
strongly on their beliefs and it had a major global impact. Furthermore, while
we would expect a divine communication to contain no error, it does not follow
that any text that has no error in it is of divine origin. The last reason, to
do with inaccessible truths, is stronger evidence in a case for divine origin
because it suggests a supernatural origin for these revelations. However, both
Muslims and Christians acknowledge that supernatural revelations are not
necessarily from God. Both recognise the possibility of visions originating from
demons. Indeed, even Muhammad worried about the possibility that his visions
were not from God.[24]
Thus, none of these four reasons, either independently or in combination,
entail the divine origin of the Qur’an.

Please
notice that (like al-Ghazali) I am not saying that any of these reasons are necessarily
false or that belief in the divine origin of the Qur’an is false – it is too
early to draw any conclusions like that yet. All I am saying is that these
reasons are a long way from being evidence that leads incontrovertibly
to the conclusion that the Qur’an is divine. The evidence is disputable, and
even if it was not, it would not support this Muslim belief as being absolutely
certain.  Perhaps, though, Muslims can secure certainty by establishing that
they came to this belief by a totally reliable method.

2.
Do Muslims come to hold this belief in a way that they know must produce a true
belief?

We
have just seen that the reasons or grounds that Muslims usually appeal to for
supporting their belief in the divine origin of the Qur’an fail to secure
absolute certainty. Nevertheless, if the method by which Muslims came to this
belief was 100% reliable in providing true beliefs, then the belief could still
be absolutely certain even if Muslims did not know exactly the reasons or
grounds for why. Let’s see if it is. There are two main ways that Muslims come
to believe in the divine origin of the Qur’an:

·
authoritative
testimony of other Muslims

·
direct
religious experience.

The
vast majority of Muslims come to hold to their belief through the testimony of
some authoritative person. Usually this testimony is in the form of instruction
by their relatives or Muslim teachers, although some may study the Muslim
scholarly tradition passed down through history and so access testimonies from those
earlier in the ‘chain’ of testimony. How reliable is this sort of testimony?
Despite the lack of credibility given to personal testimony in the Western
mindset – as evidenced in the game ‘Chinese whispers’ – testimony is, in fact,
an astonishingly reliable method of developing beliefs. On reflection, we
should hope this is the case because the vast majority of what we
believe comes to us by way of testimony. Indeed, some of the beliefs I hold
with the highest degree of certainty arose in me as a result of testimony. As
an example, I believe that my name is Richard and that I was born in my home
town to my parents because they tell me so. This seems as certain to me as any
belief I hold and I cannot see any good reason to doubt it. But testimony,
while highly reliable, is not 100% foolproof. So, my belief about who I am is
not absolutely certain. I can conceive of a situation where I could
doubt it. There have been cases of people discovering late in life that they
were adopted. It is at least possible, however unlikely, that one day I could
take a DNA test that might reveal my mother not to be my birth mother.

Notice
that this illustration is an example of a very short chain of testimony and I
still have access to many of the eyewitnesses. We need to keep in mind that it
is far more difficult to assess the reliability of testimony concerning
historical events from a long time ago – like the events of Muhammad’s life. For
historical testimony to be absolutely reliable, it requires each testifier in a
chain of testifiers to be absolutely reliable. There can be techniques for
strengthening chains of testimony (such as writing information down or putting
it into songs – perhaps by employing ‘professional’ testifiers like bards), but
it remains highly unlikely that such techniques would guarantee 100%
reliability.

The
question is: how reliable is Muslim testimony concerning the Qur’an? I want to
argue that it falls far short of being 100% reliable. One reason why this is
the case is that the traditional Muslim account records gaps in the chains of
testimony that prevent us being 100% certain concerning the testimony about
Muhammad’s life. The earliest authoritative biography of Muhammad is considered
to be that of Ibn Ishaq, compiled at the earliest 70 years after Muhammad’s
death, and he often did not record the chain of testimony for his stories. Furthermore,
we do not actually have a copy of his account. Instead, we have a version
edited by Ibn Hisham at least 150 years after Muhammad’s death.[25]
This means that while Ibn Ishaq may have been very accurate in recording the
details of Muhammad’s life, we do not know this for sure, and we cannot
know this for sure. Thus, it is reasonable to question Muslim tradition
and many Muslim scholars today are doing just that.

The
second main way by which Muslims come to believe that the Qur’an is divine is
the method described by al-Ghazali – direct religious experience.
Usually this is by either a felt response to the recitation of the Qur’an or by
a Sufi religious practice that generates some sort of mystical experience. Now,
intuitively, this way of coming to believe something feels pretty reliable.
This is because some sorts of sense experience (like seeing or hearing) are
able to provide basic and reliable knowledge.[26]
But is sense experience always reliable? No. For example, if I see a red car,
it feels like I can be absolutely certain that that it is red. However, sometimes
the faculty of perception is not working properly: I could be colour-blind or
hallucinating from lack of sleep. Or, it is possible that I am looking at
sunset when the ambient light is red, and so the car looked red even though it
was actually purple. In the same way, a mystical experience cannot be regarded
as absolutely reliable. It is at least possible that such an experience is the
product of a hallucination or a deceiving jinn (demon).[27]
An intuitive response to Qur’an recitation provides even less certainty of the
truth of its divine origin. (This is really just the emotional side of the
inimitable Arabic argument – beauty, felt or analysed, is no guarantee of
divine origin.) So this method also fails to guarantee absolutely reliable true
beliefs. And there is a phenomenon that should alert Muslims to this
unreliability: people in many faiths make similar claims about their religious
experiences. How do Muslims know that their experiences provide exclusive
access to truth? This leads us nicely to the third question.

3.
Does the belief in the Qur’an remain completely unchallenged by any other
truths Muslims can be shown?

All
of us modify our beliefs in light of new evidence – sometimes reluctantly. For
a long time many people thought the earth was flat. It took many years of arguing,
looking at evidence and modifying world views for them to let go of this
belief. Philosophers call this process defeasibility. It is the
situation where a new belief – that the earth is round – is believed and so an
old conflicting belief – that the earth is flat – is defeated and
abandoned.

There
are many competing beliefs that, if discovered to be true, would operate as ‘defeaters’
of the Muslim belief in the divine origin of the Qur’an. Some can be found in
the claims of other religions: if a Muslim came to believe the Christian claim
that Jesus was divine, then he would have a defeater belief for the divine
origin of the Qur’an (because the Qur’an denies Jesus’ divinity and claims to
have no error). Some can be found in the challenge of unbelievers: if a Muslim
came to believe Hume’s conclusion that belief in miracles is unreasonable, then
he would have another defeater. Of course, people can always come up with potential
defeaters for our beliefs, but the important question is whether any of them
are worth taking seriously. It is possible that I might encounter someone who
believed that the universe was created by a giant cosmic duck. Clearly this is
not a serious challenge to my theistic beliefs.

Are
there serious challenges to the belief in the divine origin of the Qur’an? I
believe there are. I have said that I take the beliefs of Muslims to be
reasonable enough to take them seriously as potential defeaters of Christian
beliefs, but I take the opposite to be the case also. I consider Christian
beliefs to be reasonable enough to take them seriously as potential defeaters
of Muslim belief. Indeed, that is the argument of each of the remaining
chapters of this book! For the moment though, I suggest that the reasons
Christians have for believing that the Bible is of divine origin, and the way
that they come to hold that belief, stand up to close scrutiny just as well as
Muslim belief in the divine origin of the Qur’an. At the very least, the
Christian belief is well enough supported to open the possibility that
Muslim belief is false.

It
is clear, then, that upon considering these three features, Muslim belief in
the divine origin of the Qur’an is not absolutely certain. I want to
make a few important points about this statement. First, it does not, by
itself, mean that this belief is not true. It just means that Muslims should not
claim that it is impossible that they might be wrong about this belief or claim
that it cannot be doubted. Clearly there are good reasons to question and
examine this belief. Second, the reasons it is impossible to be absolutely
certain about this belief apply equally to all the religious beliefs of
Muslims and Christians. No Christian or Muslim beliefs are based on reasons
that guarantee them to be true. No Christian or Muslim beliefs came to be held
in absolutely reliable ways . All Muslim and Christian beliefs encounter
reasonable challenges. This leads to my third point, that absolute certainty
concerning religious beliefs is not simply an elusive goal, but an illusion. The
illusion of absolute certainty is recognised by one of the few contemporary
Muslim philosophers looking into these questions, Shabbir Akhtar. He argues
that Muslims do not have reasons that entail the belief in a divine
Qur’an He laments that this is because humans live in an ‘epistemological
predicament’[28]
where, despite our hopes, we are limited in what we can know and be certain
about.

So
absolute certainty, while appealing, is illusory. Nevertheless, believers
should not be too concerned. Just because we cannot be absolutely
certain about religious beliefs, this does not mean that we are left
permanently doubting and questioning. There is a sort of certainty we can have
that is reasonable and we will now see what it looks like.

Beyond
reasonable doubt

I
want to suggest that the sensible goal for the religious believer is to seek
reasonable certainty for their beliefs, and that this is found when it is beyond
reasonable doubt that they are true. What I mean by this is that (like
Wittgenstein pointed out) we should carefully examine our core religious
beliefs until we reach a point when the sensible thing to do is to stop
doubting that they are true.

The
idea is simple enough. First you establish the truth of your belief. By now you
can probably guess that this involves asking at least the three questions we
have been asking already:

1.       How strong are the
reasons/evidence I have for this belief?

2.       How reliable was the way
I came to hold this belief?

3.       Are there any truths
that might challenge this belief?

The
strength of certainty should, then, reasonably match up with the strength of
your answers to these questions, and at some point the answers will be strong
enough for doubt to be unreasonable.[29]

Let
me give an example of how this works. Imagine a situation where I come home one
day and see a dog in my house that looks like my dog. I call my dog’s name and
the dog comes. I then pat the dog and notice a scar on the dog in the place
where I saw my dog cut itself on a rock a few weeks ago. After all this I come
to the belief: ‘This is my dog’. I have all sorts of strong evidence that this
is my dog: it looks like my dog, answers to its name, feels like my dog and
shows evidence of experiencing what my dog experienced. I came to this belief
by an extremely reliable method: my senses of sight and touch are good, and my
memory is intact enough to reliably remember names and events. Also, there
seems no other plausible explanation. Now it is of course possible that I am
wrong that this is my dog. Someone may be playing a hoax by finding a dog that
was very like mine (maybe even a twin), training it to respond to me and
planting it in my house. Although this scenario is possible, it is so
ridiculously unlikely that it would be foolish to entertain it as a realistic possibility.
In other words, while I could doubt my belief, it would be unreasonable
to do so. This belief, then, is beyond reasonable doubt.

The
idea of a certain belief being a belief that is beyond reasonable doubt is
simple and sensible enough. However, while the idea is simple, its application
to religious belief is not so simple. This is because religious beliefs are
nearly always a lot more complicated than a belief like ‘This is my dog’. They
are usually based on a huge array of evidence, including other beliefs we have.
For example, the belief that the Qur’an is of divine origin is based on
evidence and beliefs concerning who Muhammad was and what he did, the history
of the Middle East (including its religious background), the content and
influence of the Qur’an, and the trustworthiness of the traditional accounts –
just to name a few.

Similarly,
we come to hold our religious beliefs in ways that are not always easy to
evaluate in terms of their reliability. We have already seen that this is the
case of testimony and religious experience. Importantly, too, our religious
beliefs are formed in the situation where we are very far from having access to
all the relevant truths that impact upon that belief – including challenging
it. Partly this is unavoidable because we are mere humans. As Akhtar has noted,
the mortal epistemological predicament is that we are holding important beliefs
without being all-knowing – only God has access to all truth and therefore only
God is able to know anything with absolute certainty. The rest of us are left
in the rightly humbling situation of always having new truths to learn, and
very likely old untruths (that we thought were truths) to unlearn. Partly, too,
this is because – as al-Ghazali recognised – we are products of our religious
upbringing and tradition and will always have something new to learn from
someone outside that tradition.

Noticing
the fallibility of our beliefs leads to an important realisation: sometimes we
can be in the situation where we have no reason to doubt our beliefs one day
(that is, we can be certain of them), but the next day we encounter new truths
that give us reasons to doubt. Imagine that Fatima is brought up, with little
schooling, as a Muslim in a small village in Yemen. She, of course, holds her
Muslim beliefs with a high degree of certainty. They are the only religious
beliefs she has had access to, she trusts the people who taught them to her,
they work well enough for her in her day-to-day life, and she has been given no
reason to doubt them. In fact, she has never learnt the intellectual tools
necessary to doubt and evaluate them. It is even fair to say that it is appropriate
for her, in her situation, to hold them with certainty. But what she should not
do is hold them with absolute certainty. She does not have access to enough
information to hold them with absolute certainty. She can go about her life as
a Muslim, but still be open to learning new truths about God and the world. One
day, however, her situation might change. Fatima might later  attend school in
a large city where she meets Christians who hold different, contradictory, but
similarly strongly supported beliefs. It would now be reasonable for Fatima to
question the truth of her own beliefs and begin to examine them and those of
the Christians. In fact, until she has done this it would be inappropriate, in
her new situation, for her to claim a high degree of certainty in her Muslim
beliefs. Doubtless this is an unsettling position for her to be in, but it is a
necessary path for her to have a mature and reasonable faith.

I
want to suggest that for Muslims and/or Christians to be reasonably (and
maturely) certain about their beliefs, each generation of philosophically able
thinkers will, like Fatima, need to carefully re-examine as many of the
features of their beliefs as they possibly can in light of new challenges. I
recognise that this process can be unsettling and that it involves hard work. I
also recognise that not every believer has the skills to participate in this
process. But every faith has at least some thinkers who are capable of this
task. Every faith, too, has the responsibility to undertake such a task before
they claim high degrees of certainty for their beliefs.

It
is in recognising this that I want to offer a challenge of my own to Muslim
thinkers. My contention is that, to date, Muslim thinkers have not carried out
enough philosophical work for them to establish that their beliefs are beyond
reasonable doubt and that this has left Muslims with a misplaced sense of
certainty.

An
uncertain certainty

Many
Muslims I have met boast, quite rightly, of the philosophical heritage of
Islam. There is, even at a popular level, an appropriate pride in the
contribution made by Muslim philosophers to keeping the discipline of
philosophy vibrant during the so-called ‘dark ages’ of Western thought.
Unfortunately, indeed tragically to my mind, this tradition has all but
disappeared in the contemporary Muslim world, a fact well recognised by Muslim
scholars. Khan, for example, laments that:

Today all over
the Muslim world there are hundreds of Islamic schools and universities that
produce hundreds of thousands of Islamic legal scholars but hardly any
traditional school produces political theorists or philosophers. Except for
rare exceptions this intellectual poverty has reduced Islamic thought to the
status of a medieval legal tradition.[30]

Too
few Muslims are asking the hard epistemological questions of their faith. There
is very little serious evaluation of Muslim belief concerning evidence,
reliability and challenges. It is true that there are some attempts at the popular
level to provide evidence that supports belief in the divine origin of the Qur’an,
but few of these attempts carry any real philosophical substance. I am aware of
no research at all into the reliability of the ways Muslims come to belief. So,
for example, Muslims today are told by their teachers that their text is
a totally reliable record of the words of Muhammad, but very few who are saying
this have any idea of exactly how or why that is in historical terms. Few Muslim
teachers are aware that Qur’anic scholars have serious questions concerning the
reliability of the text, and those that are aware of these questions tend to
dismiss such study as inappropriate. Please believe me when I say that I do not
point to this with any smugness. I join the lament. The sad thing for me is
that I have too few Muslim philosophers with whom I can debate the knowledge of
God. The sad thing for ordinary Muslims is that they are told by Islamic
scholars that their beliefs are absolutely certain, but they are left without a
strong supporting case for this assertion. Thus, Muslim certainty is generally
a felt certainty, rather than a known certainty.

Why
do intelligent and thoughtful Muslims find themselves in this situation? One
reason is the influence of two Muslim schools of thought that might easily lead
individuals to think they can safely ignore evaluating their core religious
beliefs.

The
first school of thought, which is promoted by philosophers such as al-Attas and
al-Faruqi, represents what is called the Islamization of Knowledge movement.[31]
This school argues that there are two sorts of knowledge available to humans:
knowledge provided by God’s revelation in the Qur’an and Sunna, and knowledge
provided by human perception and rational investigation. The idea is that the
knowledge found in revelation is completely true and authoritative. The truth
of the Qur’an, then, must be accepted without question and it sets the
boundaries for all human investigation – including philosophical investigation.
If you believe this framework then you will not see any need examine your core
religious beliefs very closely. You will, for example, believe – without
argument – that whatever the Qur’an says about clouds must, a priori, be
true. If a Japanese scientist agrees, then great (perhaps their word will carry
weight with a non-Muslim), but if not, there is no problem because it is still
true. This scheme is a form of what philosophers call un-argued fideism and it
has some very serious problems, as Christians who have tried to think this way
have found.[32]
How, for example, can humans know that the Qur’an and Sunna are revelation
without using their senses and rational investigation? It is clearly very hard
to build a supporting case for this approach to religious knowledge without
special pleading. While it is, of course, possible that believers in some
religions do happen to believe in the correct framework of religious knowledge
without ever having examined the reasons why, un-argued fideism is
philosophically negligent for Muslim scholars in a world of competing religious
truth claims.

A
second school of thought claims that religious truth can only be fully known by
those with special spiritual faculties. An example of this sort of thinker is
Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
Here is his
description of this supposed faculty:

There is first
of all the Supreme Science or metaphysics, as understood traditionally, which
deals with the Divine Principle and Its manifestations in the light of that
Principle. It is what one might call scientia sacra in the highest meaning of
the term. It is the science which lies at the very centre of man’s being as
well as a the heart of all orthodox and authentic religions and which is
attainable by the intellect, that supernaturally natural faculty with which
normal human beings of an intellectual bent, whose inner faculties have not
become atrophied by the deformations caused by the modern world are endowed.[33]

Roughly
speaking, Nasr is restating the Sufi argument of al-Ghazali (and others) that
Muslim belief is supported by the truth that can be perceived by those with the
ability to experience God’s revelation in some direct way. The idea that humans
can know religious truth in some sort of immediate way is plausible enough, and
it finds support from various Christian philosophers (including John Hick and
Alvin Plantinga) as well as al-Ghazali. But I have already shown that this sort
of knowledge is in no way infallible or immune from evaluation. Nasr tacitly
recognises this by smuggling into his argument the idea that it is only ‘authentic’
religious belief that is true. It is reasonable to ask evaluative questions
like: How do we know humans have this faculty? How can we tell in whom it is
working properly? How do we know what an authentic religion is? Nasr fails to
show how Islam is just such an authentic religion in a way that avoids special
pleading.

The
failure of mystical approaches to religious knowledge to secure certainty means
that Muslims cannot escape the situation where any extreme confidence they have
in their beliefs is merely psychological and is not grounded in the certainty
of their truth. Religious beliefs are too important to be held with
inappropriate psychological certainty and so ‘truth-seeking doubt’ remains a
wise option for philosophically capable Muslims (and philosophically capable
Christians too!).

Wise
doubts

We
have seen that Muslims claim absolute certainty, but while appealing, this is a
philosophically empty claim. It is an empty claim partly because it is an
illusion that humans can have absolute certainty about their religious beliefs
and partly because Muslim philosophers have failed to defend it. We also recognised
that, despite Muslim suspicions, doubt is not necessarily a foolish thing.
Doubt can lead to certainty if we are willing to walk the road of rigorously
evaluating our beliefs to see if they are true. Very few Muslims have been
willing to walk this road; therefore, the confidence many have in their core
beliefs remains, for the most part, psychological rather than reasonable. If
this is correct, the Muslim challenge that their beliefs are absolutely certain
and so Christianity is false fails. If Muslim beliefs cannot be held with
anything close to absolute certainty, then Muslims are unable to say that
competing beliefs are necessarily false, or that all doubt is foolish, or that
Christian beliefs can be uncritically dismissed out of hand. If it can be shown
that Christian belief is plausible, or held with a high degree of philosophical
credibility, then it is wise for at least some Muslim thinkers to question the
Muslim beliefs in order to determine the degree of certainty Muslims are
entitled to claim for those beliefs.

Now
before Muslim readers get too upset by me saying this, let me plead that the
reason I seek to refute this Muslim challenge is not to gloat. Let me state
very clearly that Christianity is largely in the same philosophical situation
as Islam on these matters. Despite the claims of some, Christians also hold
beliefs that cannot be considered absolutely certain. Christians hold their
beliefs for remarkably similar reasons to Muslims: we too base our beliefs on
historical evidence, the miraculous, the truth of prophecy and the changed
lives of believers. Similarly, Christians come to those beliefs in remarkably
similar ways to Muslims: we believe what we are taught is correct, we believe
because of religious experiences, and we believe because the Christian faith
makes sense to us. Christian beliefs are therefore vulnerable to the same sorts
of philosophical challenges as Muslim beliefs. Christians, too, dropped the
philosophical baton – particularly during the first half of the twentieth
century, when they evacuated the philosophy departments under the onslaught of
the radical skeptics. In short, Christian thinkers who seek certainty, too,
should wisely doubt their beliefs

The
reason I have dealt with this challenge early in the book is simply to level
the philosophical ground. The fact that we are in the same situation concerning
religious knowledge means that neither Christians nor Muslims can simply assume
the high ground without making a case for why. Both Muslims and Christians need
to acknowledge the possibility that they may hold some false beliefs. Both need
to open their claims to close scrutiny under the challenge of the other.
Neither can claim certainty unless they walk this road of wise doubt. My goal
in the remaining chapters of this book is to go some way along this path.

Chapter 2

Signs and Hiding:
The Problem of God’s Hiddenness

The hidden
God

For
a number of years now there have been mysterious reports of panthers living in
the mountains close to where I live. Australia has no native cats, but there
have been repeated sightings of cats supposedly the size of panthers stalking
livestock and prowling the bush tracks. The reports are mysterious because
there is no ‘hard’ evidence of the cats – just some signs that they may exist.
There are no photos, no movies and none have been caught. Instead, there are a
handful of witnesses, a few suspected paw prints and some spooked horses that allegedly
injured themselves trying to escape. People have, of course, tried to find the
panthers, but the problem with finding cats is that they are notoriously good
at hiding. They are fast, agile and silent. They can climb, swim and move at
night. They have good enough eyesight to see you coming, and they are smart
enough to avoid you. Importantly, too, they are most likely to hide in the
places humans are least likely to look for them – the deep bush. The reason we
are least likely to look there is because in the deep bush there is more
likelihood that the panthers will find us first!

In
this chapter I want to consider the possibility that humans are in a similar
situation with God. It seems reasonable to say that God is hidden from our
everyday experience and senses. We usually cannot directly see, hear, touch,
smell or taste God. There are many who claim to see signs of God’s existence
and actions, and even to have had personal encounters with God, but there
remains a lack of the sort of ‘hard’ empirical evidence, publicly available to
all, that would convince a sceptic that God is real.

To
say that God is hidden should not be controversial among Christians and
Muslims. Muslims believe that one of the 99 names of God is al-Batin,
the hidden (Q57:3). Commentators generally take this to mean that God is hidden
from our physical senses. The Bible, similarly, claims that ‘no one has ever
seen God’ (The Gospel of John 1:18). It is also uncontroversial among religious
philosophers that God is hidden from us (one of the very few uncontroversial
things in religious philosophy!). Blaise Pascal boldly claimed that:

God being thus
hidden, every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true;
and every religion which does not give the reason of it is not instructive.[34]

Shabbir
Akhtar agrees, believing that ‘God himself and his intentions are admittedly
hidden and irreducibly mysterious’.[35]
I take it that the key philosophical problem here is that humans are in the situation
concerning religious knowledge where important truths about God are elusive to
the degree that it is difficult to establish that our beliefs about God are
accurate.[36]

This
‘hiddenness’ of God is significant in any Muslim/Christian philosophical
discussion for three reasons. First, atheists make a big deal out of this issue
and theists of all types therefore share the burden of being able to respond to
this question. Christians and Muslims need to be able to respond to challenges
like that famously attributed to Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence God,
not enough evidence!’ Akhtar answers this call by recognising the philosophical
weight of such challenges when he suggests that ‘the silence of God is a fact
both undeniable and religiously disturbing’.[37]
Controversially for a Muslim, he argues that the various epistemological
problems arising out of the hiddenness of God render contemporary agnosticism –
and even atheism – reasonable by virtue of a scepticism that is ‘prima facie at
least, both intellectually well-grounded and morally worthy in its character’.[38]

Second,
the hiddenness of God is significant because it makes it harder to be certain,
beyond reasonable doubt, that our beliefs about what God is like are true. Unless
we are manifested to personally by God – and even Muhammad did not claim that,
much of our normal knowledge of God is rendered indirect or ‘second hand’. That
is, our knowledge relies on things such as evidence of God’s actions in the
world, intuitive knowledge of God’s moral laws, or mediated messages from God
through angels or prophets. We are in a situation where we know God indirectly
in a similar way to how I know the queen. I know a lot about her, but it is all
indirect knowledge as I have never met her. I have seen and heard her speak on
TV and I have read things she has written. I know people who have met her – in
fact, I know some people who lived on the queen’s property and know her and her
family personally. I am told she is gracious, compassionate and
servant-hearted. All of this knowledge has been built up slowly and it is
patchy and very limited. It arrived from many different sources – all of them
second hand. My knowledge is therefore vulnerable to being challenged by anyone
who has more and/or better knowledge than me – especially first-hand personal
knowledge of the queen. Now, none of this means that there is necessarily
anything wrong with what I know about her. It just means that my knowledge was
arrived at in a way that makes it harder for me to be certain it is true. Moser,
describing how we are in a similar position in terms of our knowledge of God, writes
that God is hidden from us because his existence is not obvious to everyone and
also fails to be ‘beyond cognitively reasonable doubt’.[39]

Third,
the hiddenness of God is significant because it is common for Muslims to make
the strong claim that humans can straightforwardly be certain that God
has the nature described by Islam – that is, that Allah is God – because this
conclusion can be drawn from observation of the created universe. This sort of
approach to religious knowledge is called natural theology, and it involves
making inferences from the nature of the universe to the nature of God. Put
differently, natural theology involves making a philosophical defence of the
theological claim that the heavens ‘declare the glory of God’. The Muslim claim
here is philosophically bold because Muslims are not simply saying that through
natural theology humans can be certain that ‘a Creator God exists’, but that
through natural theology humans can be certain that ‘the God of the Qur’an
exists’. Furthermore, Muslims are saying that the key important truths we need
to know about God in order to worship him and identify Muhammad as his prophet are
not elusive, but freely available to all observant people via natural theology.
How well supported is this claim? To answer this question, we need to look
closely at what these supposed signs are and how they might point to Allah.

Clear
signs!

The
Qur’an exudes a great deal of confidence that we can know that Allah is God
with certainty from the signposts – the ayat – seen in the universe around
us. Approximately one-third of the Qur’an focuses on the great number of clear
and obvious signs that point to the reality of Allah as God; Akhtar suggests
that one in ten of the verses in the Qur’an are concerned with natural
theology. The signs referred to in the Qur’an generally concern natural and
social order. As Akhtar puts it,

The Qur’an
locates the signs on two major axes: in the cyclical phases and periodicities
of nature (Q36:37–40) and in the linear continuity and progress of sacred
history from Adam to Muhammad.[40]

Here
are just a handful of examples:

Indeed, in the
creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day,
and the [great] ships which sail through the sea with that which benefits
people, and what Allah has sent down from the heavens of rain, giving life
thereby to the earth after its lifelessness and dispersing therein every [kind
of] moving creature, and [His] directing of the winds and the clouds controlled
between heaven and earth are signs for a people who use reason (Q2:164).

We will show
them Our signs in the horizons, and within themselves until it becomes clear to
them that it is the truth (Q41:53).

He causes to
grow for you thereby the crops, olives, palm trees, grapevines, and from all
the fruits. Indeed in that is a sign for a people who give thought (Q16:10–11).

And on the
earth are signs for the certain [in faith]; And in yourselves. Then will you
not see? (Q51:20–21).

The
idea here is that the intricate ordering of the universe, including the nature
and life patterns of humans within it, points to the reality that Allah is God
in such a way that any observant and reflective human can reach this
conclusion.

The
Qur’an makes strong claims about the evidential power of these signs. The signs
are, supposedly, so clear that they obviously and undeniably point to God:

And He shows
you His signs. So which of the signs of Allah do you deny? (Q40:81).

And say:
‘[All] praise is [due] to Allah. He will show you His signs and you will
recognize them. And your Lord is not unaware of what you do’ (Q27: 93).

In
short, the Muslim claim is that natural theology operates as a conclusive proof
for Muslim belief. How exactly do Muslim thinkers see this sort of natural
theology working?

Old
arguments

Natural
theology is as old as Plato and Aristotle, but Muslims can be rightly proud
that it was their early philosophers who developed many of the standard
arguments that are still in use today. Natural theological arguments are
usually seen to be of three sorts: ontological arguments, which argue
that the very concept of God is logically necessary in some way; cosmological
arguments, which argue that the existence of the universe is best explained by
a divine first cause; and teleological arguments, which argue that the
intricacy and order of the universe demands a divine designer.

The
reasoning that the Qur’an appears to be referring to is that involved in
cosmological and teleological arguments, and so, unsurprisingly, these are the
sorts of arguments that have been commonly offered by Muslim philosophers
throughout history. Examples are found in Mu‘tazilite and Ash‘arite thinking,
as well as in the works of Ibn Sina, al-Razi and Ibn Rush’d.[41] However, it is the arguments of
al-Ghazali that have remained particularly popular – especially his famous Kalam
cosmological argument. This particular argument is found in the Iqtisad
and may be set out simply as follows:

1.       Whatever began to exist
has a cause for its coming into being.

2.       The universe began to
exist.

3.       Therefore, the universe
has a cause for coming into being.

For
various reasons – largely to do with suspicions about the idea of causality
diminishing God’s continual sustenance of his creation – this argument fell out
of favour in Muslim thinking. It is, however, making a strong return in places
like Turkey. Moreover, in a surprising twist, an updated version of the Kalam
cosmological argument is being championed by the Christian philosopher William
Lane Craig in the following form:[42]

1.       Everything that begins
to exist has a cause of its existence.

2.       The universe began to exist.

3.       Therefore, the universe
has a cause of its existence.

4.       Since no scientific
explanation (in terms of physical laws) can provide a causal account of the
origin of the universe, the cause must be personal (explanation is given in
terms of a personal agent).

Less
well known is the fact that al-Ghazali also put forward a teleological argument
in his Al-Hikma fi Makhluqat Allah (The Wisdom in God’s Creatures). Like
many teleological arguments, his is an analogical argument in which the
purposeful design of the universe is seen as analogous to the purposeful design
of a house:

1.       All the elements of a
house are intricately adapted to their purposes, especially to the purpose of
supporting human life.

2.       This intricacy is
evidence of design by a powerful, wise and providential designer.

3.       Similarly to a house,
all the elements of the universe, including the sun, moon, water, plants,
animals, and so on, are intricately ordered and adapted to their purposes,
especially to the purpose of supporting human life.

4.       This intricacy is
evidence of design by a powerful, wise and providential Creator.

The
teleological argument is also undergoing a resurgence in recent scholarship,
largely due to recent scientific discoveries of how astonishingly fine-tuned
the universe is. Here are some examples:

If the initial
explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in
10^60, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on
itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would
be impossible. (As John Jefferson Davis points out, an accuracy of one part in
10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the
other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and
hitting the target.)

… calculations
by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part
in 10^40, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist.
This would most likely make life impossible …

… the apparent
probability of all the necessary conditions sufficient to allow just the
formation of planets (let alone life) coming together just by chance is utterly
outrageously tiny – by Roger Penrose’s calculation, the probability of chance
alone producing cosmoi capable of producing planets is 1 in 10 raised in turn
to the 10^123 … [43]

Many
theistic philosophers now offer an argument (although not an argument from
analogy) that because these sorts of probabilities amount to practical
impossibilities, chance alone cannot explain the existence of the universe. Instead,
the explanation of existence requires a divine designer. The same argument was supposedly
made, with less science but more humour, by G.K. Chesterton, when he suggested
that ‘one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked
like a plot’.[44]

The
continued popularity of cosmological and teleological arguments lends support
to the Qur’an’s claim that the universe points to the reality of God, but
notice something important about the above versions of these arguments: they
are simply arguments for the existence of a Creator. As they stand, they say
nothing about whether the Creator more closely matches the nature attributed to
him in the Qur’an or the Bible – or the book of Mormon or the teaching of Sikh
gurus, for that matter. The Muslim claim I am considering, however, is the
stronger claim that natural theology persuasively argues that ‘Allah is God’.
In order to prove this point, some Muslim thinkers take the teleological
argument further. They want to argue that the universe is not simply so physically
intricate and finely tuned so as to require a divine designer, but also so
profoundly morally intricate as to require a divine designer who bears
those moral attributes. They further claim that each of the divine attributes –
particularly those described in Islam as the ‘ninety nine names of God’ – is
imprinted in some discernible way within the created order. This sort of moral
teleological argument hinges on the idea that the existence of a moral divine Creator
is the best explanation for the apparently moral nature of creation. The most
prominent advocate of this distinctly Muslim argument in recent times has been
Said Nursi. This is his claim:

the Divine
Name of All-Merciful is manifest through the rays of a thousand and one Names
on the face of the universe, and is apparent through the innumerable
manifestations of God’s absolute dominicality on the face of the earth, so also
is the complete manifestation of the Name All-Merciful apparent in a small
measure in man’s comprehensive form, like on the face of the earth and the face
of the universe.[45]

In
defence of this claim, Nursi points to many supposed examples of this sort of
divine manifestation, imprint or stamp. Here is one example, focusing on the
divine attributes mentioned in the bismillah:

The First is
the Great Stamp of Godhead, which is manifest through the mutual assistance,
co-operation, and embracing and corresponding to one another of beings in the
totality of the universe. This looks to In the Name of God.

The Second is
the Great Stamp of Divine Mercifulness, which is manifest through the mutual
resemblance and proportion, order, harmony, favour and compassion in the
disposal, raising and administration of plants and animals on the face of the
earth. This looks to In the Name of God, the Merciful.

Then there is
the Exalted Stamp of Divine Compassionateness, which is manifest through the
subtleties of Divine beneficence, fine points of Divine clemency, and rays of
Divine compassion on the face of man’s comprehensive nature. This looks to the
Compassionate in the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.[46]

The
use of this sort of moral argument for God is not, of course, limited to Muslim
thinkers. Similar arguments are found in Christianity too, and one was most
famously put forward by Oxford University professor C.S. Lewis in Mere
Christianity. His version can be roughly summarised as follows:

1.       Every human knows, and
so believes, that objective moral truths exist.

2.       The idea that there is
an intelligence behind, or beyond, the natural universe that implants the
knowledge of right and wrong in us and serves as the foundation for the
objective moral judgments is the best explanation of human intuitions
concerning objective moral facts.

3.       Therefore, the existence
and nature of objective moral facts supports the existence of a divine
intelligence behind them.

Lewis
went further, arguing not only that God is the best explanation for the
morality of the universe, but also that any atheistic explanation fails to make
any sense of human morality:

If the whole
universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning:
just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with
eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.[47]

Lewis’s
version of the moral argument recognises that it is plausible to appeal to God
as the best explanation of obvious moral laws. What is distinctive about the
Muslim version is its argument that not just generally accepted moral laws –
like ‘do not murder’ – are obvious; rather, there are a vast array of moral
attributes that are obvious. Because this array is identical to the attributes
of God described in the Qur’an, Allah is clearly God.

Muslims,
then, place great stock in natural theological arguments because they believe these
offer a persuasive case that Allah is God in a way that means that His hiddenness
is not a problem for belief. But the supposed force of these arguments is not
the only reason for the emphasis on natural theology in Islam. I want to
suggest that there is a second reason. Natural theology is highlighted because Islam
recognises that knowledge of the 99 names is the only knowledge available
to humans about the nature of God himself. In Islam, signs are enough because
God is always hidden. Next, let me explain what I mean by this.

A
sign is enough!

In
Islam, God himself is permanently hidden from nearly all humans. This is not
seen to be a problem in Islam; it is just the way it works. To picture how, let
me use an earlier illustration. God is hidden from humans in Islam in a similar
way that the queen was hidden from my Australian ancestors in the days before
radio or television. The queen was not hidden from them because she was hiding
or because it would be impossible for them to meet her, or get to know her
personally. She was hidden from them because she was, to use an old-fashioned
term, ‘above their station’. She was the sovereign; they were her subjects. She
did not reveal her self personally to them; she just revealed her will
to them. A privileged few may have known her personally – a few honoured and
trusted ambassadors granted an audience in the throne room. However, as a
subject, all one needed to know about her was that she was real, she was the
sovereign and what her will for her subjects was. This situation was not an
epistemic problem; it was just the nature of things. It is similar with God and
humans in Islam. Listen to how Akhtar describes it:

Men are
servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any
greater degree of intimacy with their creator. This conviction is also
reflected in the extent to which God is thought to be accessible to human
knowledge. The Koran, unlike the Gospel, never comments on the essence of
Allah. ‘Allah is wise’ or ‘Allah is loving’ may be pieces of revealed
information but, in contrast to Christianity, Muslims are not entitled to claim
that ‘Allah is Love’ or ‘Allah is Wisdom’. Only adjectival descriptions are
attributed to the divine being and these merely as they bear on the revelation
of God’s will for man. The rest remains mysterious.[48]

In
Islam, then, Allah – al-Batin (the hidden) – reigns supreme in his
throne room, far above his servants. Interestingly, Allah appears to remain
hidden from ordinary humans even in paradise. The Qur’anic vision of jannah
(paradise) is overwhelmingly one of lavish material blessing for the ordinary
believer rather than of dwelling in personal knowledge of God. Only a few of
the most faithful are promised that they might come close to the throne of God:

And the
forerunners, the forerunners – those are the ones brought near. In the Gardens
of Pleasure (Q56:10–12).

Here
we begin to see the fleshing out of what I have called the Muslim legislative
model of divine/human interaction: it holds that the sovereign/servant
relationship is the essence of Islamic faith. Moreover, we see that a
key implication of this model is that knowledge of the signs of God is enough
for the wise believer. Faithful servants do not need to know the sovereign
personally. Servants do not need to see the sovereign face to face. Servants do
not need to ever enter the throne room. Faithful servants do not need to know
anything more than their sovereign’s will. Al-Ghazali recognises this, famously
pointing out that in Islam,

the end result
of the knowledge of the ‘arifin (knowers) is their inability to know Him, and
their knowledge is, in truth, that they do not know Him and that it is
absolutely impossible for them to know Him.[49]

Notice
carefully al-Ghazali’s point here. He is not saying that humans cannot know
anything at all about God or his will for humans – that would make
nonsense of his Muslim faith. He is, instead, saying that humans are incapable
of knowing God personally, directly, or intimately. He is saying that humans only
know God rationally and from a distance. If he is right, then knowledge about
God, not knowledge of God, is sufficient for the orthodox Muslim. So Islam
does not require any direct knowledge of God; it only requires the indirect
knowledge that he exists and has all the attributes that make him worthy of
worship, as well as the particular requirements of God’s will mediated through
prophetic messages. What this means is that the sort of indirect knowledge
about God that is available in natural theology is sufficient for a Muslim to
have faith that Allah is God.

In
Islam, then, Allah remains eternally al-Batin (the hidden), and so
Shabbir Akhtar reasonably suggests that ‘A sign is enough for the wise’.[50] The wise in Islam
are those who observe the signs. We could put it, perhaps irreverently, that
Islamic knowledge of God is ‘spectator’ knowledge. This spectator knowledge is
reasonable enough if God is permanently hidden, and if humans only ever remain
observant spectators of the signs of God rather than personal players in the
presence of God. But this account of the hiddenness of God is only reasonable
if natural theology can deliver the sorts of truths about God that Muslims
claim it can. Unfortunately, it can not.

How
clear?

Just
how persuasive are the arguments of natural theology? Intuitively (for
believers at least), they can feel pretty convincing. Arguments like al-Ghazali’s
Kalam argument appeal to common sense. They have survived scrutiny by
philosophers for thousands of years and are still going strong. They have, over
those years, persuaded some highly intelligent atheists to believe in God. C.S.
Lewis, whom I just mentioned, is one. Antony Flew, also an Oxford lecturer (in
philosophy) and famously atheist for most of his life, is another. Flew was,
ultimately, persuaded to believe in God by design arguments – particularly of
the scientific fine-tuning type. In his words, he ‘had to go where the evidence leads’.[51] Speaking personally,
an ‘aesthetic’ design argument – based on the idea that unnecessary, but
beautiful, things like music, art and especially sport are signs of divine
design – has been of great intellectual comfort to me in periods of doubt. Nevertheless,
I want to suggest that natural theology is not strong enough to sustain the
Muslim claim that it makes Muslim beliefs about God certain. Let me offer two
reasons why.

First,
there are weaknesses in the arguments themselves. Natural theological arguments
are intuitively strong, but they are not watertight or irrefutable proofs for
God. Arguments from best explanation and/or analogy rarely, if ever, are. There
is always the possibility of a better explanation coming along – Newton’s
explanation of physics seemed perfect until Einstein appeared. There are always
limits to analogies. We cannot, for example, say that God’s justice is exactly
like human justice – and if it is not, then just how analogous is it? Moreover,
even if the logic of the arguments works, there are many who challenge their
premises. Sceptics deny that the world is as ordered, or moral, as believers
make out. They point out examples of apparent disorder and poor design like
redundant or useless body parts (e.g. the human appendix and wings on
flightless birds), congenital diseases and genetic disorders. They point out
apparently natural examples of moral ambiguity, like the ‘law of the jungle’ in
which one kills or is killed. They point out apparent examples of a lack of
gracious divine providence, like disease, drought, tsunamis and other natural
disasters. All this suggests that the signs of God in creation are ambiguous.
This is, of course, recognised by Muslim philosophers. Al-Ghazali, in The
Deliverance from Error, thought that the arguments of natural theology
supported Muslim faith, but failed to provide the level of certainty required
for that faith. Akhtar, similarly, holds that the signs of God in creation are
merely ‘directive and suggestive, never compelling or coercive’.[52] I agree with him
when he suggests that

Contemporary
philosophers of religion concur that there are no deductively valid arguments
from premises evident to most or all rational human beings to the existence or
to the non-existence of God. Perhaps enough inductive force resides in those
arguments … to make the conclusion that there is a God far more probable than
the opposite contention.[53]

Akhtar,
controversially for a Muslim, even wants to go so far as to argue that the
universe is so religiously ambiguous that agnosticism is intellectually
credible. We do not need to go that far, however, to agree that the signs of
God fail to be so clear that they offer a complete and certain proof for God.

Second,
and more importantly in this discussion between believers in God, the signs of
God apparent in creation are not clear enough, by themselves, to help us
distinguish between Christian and Muslim theologies. Let me explain why.
Suppose that Nursi is correct in saying that every one of Islam’s 99 names of
God is clearly stamped into the created order in a way that leaves no doubt
that God is real and exhibits all 99 character traits. Even if we agree with
him, we are no closer to establishing the truth of Islam over the truth of
Christianity because Christians agree that God generally exhibits the sorts of
attributes described in the 99 names. So, we agree that God is the almighty Creator.
We agree that God is the gracious provider and sustainer. We agree that God is
the just judge, the exceedingly merciful and repeatedly forgiving. We agree
that God is the fashioner, the designer and the victory giver and so on. The
sorts of quibbles Christians might have with a few of the names are not of the
sort that can be decided by appeal to natural theology. Because we generally
agree upon the attributes of God listed in the 99 names, there is nothing in
Nursi’s arguments that point to the distinctive truth that ‘Allah is God’.

For
both these reasons, Muslims cannot claim that natural theology based upon the sorts
of signs of God mentioned in the Qur’an is proof of Islam. All that natural
theology supports is, at most, belief in the almighty, all-knowing, and
all-good Creator God of all the theistic faiths. So Nursi’s arguments, in
particular, fail to be convincing and Muslims need more than natural theology
to support their belief that Allah is God.

What
this means is that Islam is left with in inadequate solution to the problem of
the hiddenness of God. If this is the case, then the hiddenness of God remains
a barrier to determining whether Muslims or Christians have a clearer
understanding of God. It is a barrier that natural theology alone is unable to
hurdle, but what if God is not permanently hidden like Islam suggests, but is
just hiding from spectators? If God is not necessarily hidden, but hiding from
spectator knowledge for some reason, then perhaps a different sort of knowledge
to natural theology is required in order to know his nature. This strange idea
is precisely what Christians believe to be the case, and I want to argue that
it offers a plausible solution to the problem of divine hiddenness.

Why
hide?

Islam
says ‘God is hidden’; Christianity says, instead, ‘God is hiding’. The
Bible records the prophet Isaiah proclaiming that:

Truly, you are
a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour (The Prophet Isaiah 45:15).

Here,
the idea of hiding is not that God completely hides his existence from
us. We have just seen that the arguments of natural theology do seem strong
concerning the existence of God. Instead, the idea in the Bible is that God is
hiding himself from us in a way that hinders mere observers or spectators from encountering
him deeply enough to discover the key important truths about him required for
faith.

Why
on earth would God want to deliberately hide like this? Would not hiding be
foolishly childish of God? Perhaps not. Think back to the panther mystery for a
moment. If there really are panthers in the mountains near where I live, it
would seem wise for them to hide. This is because a panther wants to find,
rather than be found. Panthers find their prey, like all big cats
at the top of the food chain. Being found gets in the way of their purpose.

What
if the purposes of God were to hide from us in such a way that would prevent us
finding him, but would allow him to find us? What if the wisdom behind this was
that it would prevent us knowing God on our terms, but allow us to know God on
his terms? What if God was not at all interested in spectators knowing him indirectly
through signs, but instead was interested in children knowing him directly and
personally as a Father? This is precisely what Christianity believes to be the
case. Two beliefs are important to consider.

First,
Christians believe that God is deliberately hiding from humans as a consequence
of our sin. The biblical vision of sin is primarily that it is a rejection of
the intimate personal relationship with God that humans were designed for. This
is well recognised by Christians as the message of the biblical story of Adam
and Eve being cast out of the personal presence of God due to their sin. It is
less well recognised that this was the central message of the prophet Hosea,
who evocatively described the relational nature of sin in terms of adultery:

The land is
guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord (The Prophet Hosea 1:2).

In
this account, the hiddenness of God is a form of discipline.

Second, Christians also believe that the hiding God deliberately offers
religious knowledge only in a way that restores personal relationship with him.
We see this in this intriguing prayer of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Luke:

I thank you,
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the
wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for
such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my
Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is
except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (The Gospel of
Luke 10:22).

This
is, fundamentally, an epistemological prayer – it is all about religious
knowledge. It recognises that many important truths about God and his purposes
are hidden from us. It recognises that at least some of these truths are not
just hidden, but deliberately hidden by God from those who would seek to
understand them through the power of human reasoning and intelligence. It
recognises that God is deeply personal and relational, and that the sort of
religious knowledge that is most important is personal knowledge of God as
Father. It recognises that personal knowledge of God can only be achieved
through his direct revelation, and it recognises that this revelation is purely
on his terms – terms that have something to do with approaching God primarily like
a child rather than a philosopher.

If
this Christian account is correct, then clearly natural theology will have no
hope of providing the sort of direct knowledge of God we need to have a
personal relationship. Christian philosopher Paul Moser explains it like this:

If all the
relevant evidence of divine reality is captured by the premises and conclusion
of an argument, then the job of a truth seeker regarding God’s existence is
just to examine all relevant arguments carefully for the validity of their
inferences and the truth of their premises. In that case, one will decide on
the soundness of relevant arguments, and then reach a reasonable position about
God’s existence. This is a central motivation behind traditional philosophy of
religion in focussing on natural theology and its battery of familiar textbook
arguments for God’s existence. Those arguments … leave much to be desired as a
conclusive basis for belief in divine reality … in addition, they domesticate
God in omitting the inherently authoritative evidence characteristic of a
perfectly loving God, in contrast with the spectator evidence typical of
natural theology. (The) alternative to natural theology stems from the idea of
purposely available authoritative evidence that includes God’s uniquely
challenging self-manifestation … this self-manifestation … aims to be directly
inter-personal between God and willing humans in a way that human personal
agents experience God’s will directly and then yield to it obediently for the
sake of divine-human volitional fellowship.[54]

The
important recognition here is that natural theology has a tendency to
domesticate God. Natural theology is, as we saw, a form of spectator
knowledge. It is inherently objective and academic. It can even be done by
atheists! Christians, like Moser, believe that it is highly unlikely that this
sort of knowledge would form the major part of God’s self-revelation because
God is unlikely to be interested in those who are simply spectators. God is not
likely to want to perform for us, or to prove himself to us primarily on our
intellectual terms. Instead, he will be interested in followers and will likely
reveal himself in a way that is only available to those willing to follow. It
is likely, then, that God’s self-manifestation would not be sign-based, but
directly inter-personal.[55]

Clearly
this Christian account of the epistemological features of the hiddenness of God
is markedly different from the Muslim one. It is commonly observed that, while
Islam has 99 names for God, none of them is ‘Father’. Akhtar notes that ‘Muslims
do not see God as their father or, equivalently, themselves as children of God’.[56] Christianity, in
contrast, claims that the fatherhood of God is the pre-eminent attribute of God;[57]
therefore, personal, direct and intimate knowledge of God is available to those
who are willing to approach God on his filial terms (we explore these terms in Chapter
6).

It
is here that we begin to see the contrast between the Muslim and Christian
models of divine/human interaction. The Christian fellowship model does not
deny the lordship of God, but it finds no problem in holding that God could
sensibly be both God and Father. To his very great credit, Akhtar recognises the
appeal of this biblical idea. He nevertheless questions its philosophical
plausibility: is this Christian account of divine/human interaction appealing
but implausible? It is too early in the broad argument I am laying out in this
book to make a call on whether the overall account is true – this depends on
many factors we have not addressed yet, particularly those concerning God’s
nature and the nature of human sin. For now we can ask: is the particular
account of the hiddenness of God reasonable enough to take seriously? I think
so.

The
idea that human reason is frustrated in its unaided capacity to know God with
certainty is sensible. We have already seen that the arguments of natural
theology fail to deductively prove even the existence of God – let alone the
details of his character. The idea of God ‘hiding’ by separating himself from
us as discipline is also sensible. Think of when small children in class at
school misbehave by distracting each other from the lesson. What does the
teacher do about it? First she might tell them to stop. If this does not work,
she will make the children sit separately. If they still misbehave, she will
remove the child from the class – for both the child’s and the class’s sake.
The idea that despite this God could still be known personally is sensible,
because there seems no reason why an all-powerful God could not choose to
reveal himself personally to creatures he designed to cognitively receive such a
revelation. The idea that God would not be interested in mere spectators is
sensible too. It is reasonable to assume that any God worthy of worship would
not be content with pandering to human speculation about whether he exists or
not. The idea in Jesus’ prayer that personal knowledge of God requires the
exercise of some sort of relational epistemic virtue like child-like humility
is sensible in a way that I will explore in the following chapter. In short,
the idea that God might deliberately, and wisely, hide from humans is
plausible.

Hidden,
hiding and finding

Recall
Pascal:

God being thus
hidden, every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true;
and every religion which does not give the reason of it is not instructive.

We
have seen that both Islam and Christianity ‘give the reason’ for the hiddenness
of God. We are left, then, with a choice between two accounts. The Muslim idea
that the universe provides sufficient ‘signs’ of an essentially hidden God for
Muslim faith would be reasonable if the arguments of natural theology were strong
enough to support the strong claim that ‘Allah is God’. Unfortunately for
Muslims they are not, and the Muslim account is inadequate. The Christian idea
that God is not permanently hidden, but instead is hiding, however, is reasonable.
It is plausible that God might wish to be known personally, that our personal
knowledge of God might be tainted by our sin, and that God might deliberately
remain hidden from us for the purpose of negating the ‘spectator’ knowledge
available in natural theology in favour of finding us personally on his own
terms. Notice that even if a reasonable Muslim account of God’s hiddenness could
be offered, neither the Muslim nor Christian account of divine hiddenness can
stand on its own. They both depend upon a correct understanding of the nature
of God, our interaction with him, and, especially, of human sin. The Christian
account particularly binds the hiddenness of God to human sin in a way that
demands a strong defence of the cognitive effects of sin. This will be the
concern of the next chapter.

I
want to close this chapter by identifying a significant difference between the
accounts that leads Christians to favour their account – a difference that
might surprise Muslim readers. Both accounts differ greatly concerning the
epistemic responsibilities and capabilities – that is, the ‘shoulds’ and ‘cans’
– involved in humans knowing God. The Muslim account views humans as
bearing the greater epistemic responsibility; the Christian account holds that
the epistemic responsibility lies primarily with God. In Islam, God is
largely epistemically passive: God is hidden, but humans have the capacity and
responsibility to find him in the ‘signs’. In Christianity, God is
epistemically active: because of our sin, God is hiding in a way that prevents
us knowing him properly and requires him to find us! In the same way that the
panther hides so that he can find, instead of being found, the Bible offers the
tantalising thought that God is a ‘finder’ too. Jesus uses the following short
parable to make this exact point:

What man of
you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the
ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he
finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And
when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbours, saying to
them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I
tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than
over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance (The Gospel of Luke
15:4–7).

This
story is a picture of the activity of God in finding sinners who have run away
from a close personal relationship with their heavenly ‘shepherd’. Muslims may
well find this idea ludicrous – that the weight of responsibility in religious
knowledge lies heavily with God. Perhaps it is. However, I see no reason to
believe it to be impossible. Instead, my hunch is that this idea is both
plausible and beautiful. To see how, let me finish with a true story.

I
mentioned earlier that I was friends with someone who knew the queen of England
personally. The reason my friend knew the queen was because her father had been
a member of the royal staff in the queen’s palace, and so she had spent her
teenage years living in a house on the palace grounds and often encountered the
royal family. Eventually her father retired and moved away to a small cottage
in the country. As he advanced in years he grew frail, and at one point
recently there were fears he might not have long to live. One day during this
period of illness, the doorbell of the cottage rang, and my friend’s mother
answered the door only to find the queen standing there! Her Majesty had heard
that her faithful servant was unwell, and so she had made the long journey to
visit him personally and comfort him. The weakened condition of the servant had
meant that the only possibility for personal contact was for the queen to do
all the work of ‘manifesting’ herself to him. She willingly bore this
‘epistemic responsibility’ because of her compassion and grace. Christians
believe the same is true of God. They believe his compassion and grace are
attributes that lead him to act personally to find sinners. Next we need to see
whether it is sensible to think he needs to.

Chapter 3

Success and Tragedy:
The Problem of Human Sin

Tragic
humans?

I
never really understood the idea of tragedy until I saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet
on a junior high school excursion to the theatre. Although I could not
understand many of the words, I did comprehend that most of the key characters
in the play were scheming the downfall of each other until the final scene
where many lay dead – often as a result of their plans backfiring. I realised
then that tragedy was all about being trapped in suffering and despair. Some
Muslims argue that Christianity has a tragic view of humanity. They claim that
Christianity is tragic in the sense that it has a wrongly pessimistic view of
humans as being unavoidably trapped in sin and suffering. They believe that
this view is unrealistic and that humans have the innate and uncorrupted
potential to escape sin and be successful in the eyes of their Creator. Akhtar
puts it like this:

Christianity
has famously seen the religious outlook as being a supremely tragic one … Orthodox
Islamic thought has always, by contrast, been characterised by its almost total
freedom from the tragic instinct … The resolute determination to guard against
the temptation to tragedy is Islam’s distinctive contribution to religious
anthropology.[58]

The
issue of sin is an important one for us to sort out. It is a key point of
contention between Muslims and Christians because so many other beliefs rest
upon it. In the previous chapter, we saw that Christian beliefs about the
hiddenness of God rest upon the idea that humans are innately sinful, but there
are many others that do as well – including important beliefs about knowing
God, living the earthly religious life, and the possibility of eternal life.
Indeed, it is fair to say that if Muslims are right that humans are not trapped
in sin, then biblical Christianity is false. This chapter asks a particularly
epistemic question: is the human potential to know God damaged in some way by
our sin? Muslims say no, Christians say yes.

Before
I answer this question, I want to briefly acknowledge a related dispute between
Muslims and Christians that I will not address in this book. One particular
Christian belief about sin that Muslims often challenge is the doctrine of original
sin. This is the belief that humans have, in some way, inherited sinful
natures from Adam and Eve. I am, perhaps controversially, going to completely
ignore the question of the origins of sin for two reasons. First, I do not see
any way of proving that humans are originally sinful that does not assume the
Bible to be correct about this. I do not see any way of proving the causal link
between Adam’s sins and our sins. For example, I am not aware of scientists
discovering any ‘sin gene’. Second, we do not need to know the cause of, reason
for, or origin of a thing in order to know that it is real. There are many
things we know are real simply by observing them and/or their effects. For
example, a relative of mine was recently hospitalised due to an extremely rare
medical condition in which the blood turns against itself and starts breaking
down. Doctors have absolutely no idea how this condition arises, or why
particular people contract it, but they have a very clear understanding of how
the blood behaves in this condition, and they can clearly observe the serious
effects it has on the human body – for example, blood clots in major organs.
Doctors, then, know the condition is real, even though they know nothing of its
origins. I want to suggest that the same is likely to be the case with human
sin. Akhtar has suggested that a Christian ‘might quip that “unoriginal sinners”
are no different (to original sinners). Whether aboriginal or historical, sin
is a reality no theism can convincingly deny’.[59]
I agree with him, but it is no mere quip. If it is true that humans are
unavoidably sinful in a way that hinders our spiritual cognitive health, then
surely we should expect to see evidence that this condition is real –
regardless of the origin of sin. In the rest of this chapter, I want to compare
the Muslim and Christian positions on human cognition and make a case that it
is reasonable to think that humans are unavoidably hindered by sin in
their religious knowledge, but not in a ‘supremely tragic’ way that leads to
despair.

Weak
humans?

Islam
has an optimistic view of the human capacity to come to know the important
truths about God – particularly his divine law. It sensibly recognises that
humans can, and do, sin by disobeying God’s laws, but it claims that this sort
of sin is not connected to any problem with human cognition. Humanity sins,
Islam teaches, because humans are weak. However, this weakness does not involve
any hindrances to knowing truths about God that cannot be overcome through
religious education and spiritual discipline. To understand how Muslims see
this working, we need to look closer at the ideas of fitrah and
weakness.

Muslims
believe that Islam is the natural religion of humans, and that religious
knowledge is naturally built into human nature. This is the doctrine of fitrah,
and it is found in the Qur’an:

So direct your
face toward the religion, inclining to truth. Adhere to the fitrah of Allah
upon which he created all people (Q30:30)

The
commentators describe the term fitrah to mean ‘the natural inborn
inclination of man to worship his Creator’, and it is important to recognise
the strength of the epistemic claim connected to this doctrine. The idea is not
simply that humans naturally believe in God, or naturally seek to worship God
or even naturally accept Islam as the true religion – it is much stronger than
that. The idea is that all humans naturally know the important truths
about God and Islam. Akhtar describes this epistemic implication of fitrah
like this:

In our natural
(fitriyy) or pure state, we possess knowledge of God (Q7:172; 30:30); the
innocent eye and pure heart precede our entry into the world of error,
contingency and temptation … This optimistic religious epistemology assumes
that all truth known on and grounded in divine authority, has been
pre-programmed into us.[60]

Akhtar
offers no philosophical defence of the claim that Islamic knowledge about God is
‘pre-programmed’ into us; nevertheless, it is plausible. He also claims that
humans are completely capable of understanding this knowledge because our
faculties of reason are in perfect working order:

Man is
naturally inclined to accept Islam; the Muslim faith is the deen-ul-fitra, the
religion of human nature. (Those who embrace Islam often describe themselves as
‘reverts’, not converts.) Islamic doctrine is thought to provide a knowledge
satisfactory to reason, the integrity of which is unaffected by sinful
proclivity.[61]

The
idea that human reasoning about God functions properly is an essential feature
of Islamic epistemology. This is because human reason is thought of as the
primary cognitive faculty that is involved in religious faith. Al-Attas tells
us that ‘The real man can in fact only be his rational soul’, and he goes so
far as to suggest that human nature is primarily constituted by the two
faculties of ‘reason and conscience’.[62]
What this means is that the high level of epistemic optimism in Islam is
related to the idea that human reasoning is unimpaired in being able to
reliably arrive at true religious beliefs. But if Islam is natural human
religion, and there are no impediments to humans reasoning that Islam is true,
then why do so many people fail to follow Islam? The Muslim answer is that it
is due to human weakness.

Islam
recognises that, despite the doctrine of fitrah, humans are born into a
world of human error and disobedience in a state of weakness that makes us
vulnerable to such error and disobedience. The key verse in the Qur’an used to
support this idea is found in the chapter (surah) titled ‘Al-Nisa’:

And Allah
wants to lighten for you your difficulties; mankind was created weak (Q4:28).

How
does such weakness impact upon human knowledge of God? While resolutely denying
that such weakness in any way constitutes inherent sinfulness, the Qur’an
recognises a string of serious behaviours that stem from human weakness,
including forgetfulness (Q39:8), heedlessness (Q7:46), anxiety (Q70:19),
hastiness (Q17:11), ignorance (Q33:72), thanklessness (Q14:34), contentiousness
(Q18:54) and rebelliousness (Q96:6). It is easy enough to see how each of these
flaws might hinder someone from knowing God. It is also the case that these
flaws are not flaws in the human capacity to know the truth about God. They are
flaws in the human cognitive will, not flaws in human cognitive faculties. It
is worth taking a moment to think more about this.

The
flaws listed above are not malfunctions of our cognitive faculties, but rather
failures in the will to exercise what philosophers call epistemic virtue.
Epistemic virtues are the sorts of intellectual virtues that, when exercised, help
us to achieve true beliefs. They describe a virtuous will, or desire, to use
our cognitive faculties properly, to point our faculties in the right
direction, and to consider the information our faculties are providing us with
due care. So, for example, in testimony it is important to be honest if we are
to transmit truth reliably. Honesty will motivate a testifier to tell the truth,
and it will move people to question the testifier to clarify the truth.
Dishonesty, on the other hand, will hinder this. Similarly, taking heed (a virtue
mentioned in the Qur’an) of all the relevant evidence concerning, say,
Muhammad’s life, will help one come to true beliefs about Muhammad, whereas
ignoring the evidence will hinder one coming to true beliefs. Notice that there
is no guarantee that exercising a high degree of epistemic virtue will lead to
true beliefs. Many heedful European bird watchers held the false belief that ‘all
swans are white’ for many years because none had been to Australia – where
there are black swans. But despite this, the Qur’an sensibly recognises that
human knowledge is helped or hindered by how virtuously we choose to use our
properly functioning cognitive faculties.

Where
does sin fit into all this? Muslims believe that humans sin because they are
weak-willed, not because they are sinful. They believe that humans are
not unavoidably oriented toward sinful attitudes or behaviours, and therefore
they are not doomed to fail in exercising epistemic virtue. Instead, Muslims
argue that humans have the capacity to avoid all the epistemic virtue flaws
mentioned in the Qur’an if they so desire. They hold that humans can be heedful
of God, can be thankful to God, can be patient in seeking God, can be faithful
to God and can remember God – again, if they want to. So, in Islam, humans are
not doomed to fail in achieving whatever religious knowledge God requires of
us. As Akhtar puts it:

The Islamic
position is morally and doctrinally opposed to this proposed external rescue
from the plight of sin. We are not innately deviant or crooked or unsound
although we are easily misled into temptation. Divine education therefore
suffices. We need mentors who can guide us out of our heedlessness.[63]

Akhtar’s
solution is to educate, train and discipline our will to use our cognitive
faculties properly. Individuals should

cultivate and
discipline a faculty that would serve to remind them of their normative
endowment.[64]

To
summarise: in Islam, there are no necessary hindrances to humans achieving
knowledge of truths about God. Human faculties can provide this knowledge accurately,
and the only thing preventing some people from grasping that knowledge is a
weak willingness to listen carefully to what their faculties are telling them.
Next I want to suggest, perhaps controversially, that Christian belief bears
more similarity to this position than (I suspect) many Muslim and Christians
might be aware of.

Blind
humans?

Christians
believe that human sin unavoidably hinders any natural capacity we have to know
and worship God. How do they see this working? In this section I will suggest
that, like Islam, the cognitive effects of sin are less to do with humans
having damaged faculties and more to do with the willingness of humans to
accept the truths about God that our faculties can deliver to us. Where the
difference lies is in how serious this problem of the will is, and how the
problem can be solved.

First,
it is important to recognise that Christians readily agree with Muslims that humans
have a natural ability to form true beliefs about God and worship him. The
Bible declares that

what can be
known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his
invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been
clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that
have been made (The Letter to the Romans 1:19–20).

On
this basis, Christians believe that humans are built with the cognitive
capacity to obtain true beliefs about God. In Calvin’s words,

There is
within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of
divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy … God has implanted in all men
a certain understanding of his divine majesty.[65]

Christian
philosopher Alvin Plantinga recognises this also:

The capacity
for knowledge of God is part of our original cognitive equipment, part of the
fundamental epistemic establishment with which we have been created by God.[66]

The
sort of ‘cognitive equipment’ that Plantinga has in mind here includes all the
normal ways that people come to believe things, including intuition and the
ability to reason to at least some truths about God from our experience of
creation. Some Christians (Plantinga and Calvin included) go so far as to agree
with Muslim thinkers like Nasr and al-Attas that humans have a special in-built
spiritual faculty that enables them to come to true beliefs about God. They
call this faculty the sensus divinitatis, or the sense of God. It responds
to various triggers or stimuli around us – for example, the spectacle of the
universe as we gaze into the stars. Perhaps this cognitive faculty, if it
exists, constitutes the spiritual element of the human intuitive response to
our experiences. In any case, if it is true that humans are endowed with all
the cognitive abilities required to know God, then what is the problem? How
does Christianity see sin affecting human cognition?

Christians
believe that the human capacity to know God is seriously damaged because we do
not want to know God on his terms: we do not want to let God tell us
what to do with every aspect of our lives. This
is a problem of cognitive will, not cognitive ability. The Bible describes this
in various ways. It describes humans as being:

darkened in
their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance
that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (The Letter to the Ephesians
4:18).

The
image of darkness here captures the idea nicely. Humans are not completely in
the dark in their knowledge of God, but neither are they completely in the
light. We see dimly, and the reason we see dimly is not because there is a
problem with our ‘spiritual’ eyes, but because there is hardness in our hearts.
There is a resistance in our hearts to accept the sort of knowledge God wants
to give us. According to Plantinga, sin ‘carries with it a sort of blindness, a
sort of imperceptiveness, dullness, stupidity’.[67] He suggests that it is our
willingness to sense God in and behind all that we experience that ‘has been
damaged and deformed; because of the fall we no longer know God in the same
natural and unproblematic way in which we know each other and the world around
us’.[68]
In short, Christians believe that the natural state of humans is a state of
spiritual unwillingness that hinders us from accepting particular important
truths about God.

Christians
also believe that this spiritual ‘blindness’ is not total or irreparable, but
that it is beyond our ability to repair it ourselves through spiritual
discipline or anything else. Humans need God to show us how to grab hold of the
important truths that we tend to resist. So, the Bible records the first
Christians – Jesus’ disciples – as needing Jesus to ‘open their minds to
understand the Scriptures’ (The Gospel of Luke 24:45). Even though they had
witnessed first-hand all the various signs of God as they followed him around
on earth, they still missed many important truths. The Bible claims that all
humans need that same enlightening work by the Holy Spirit to open each of our
minds to fully understand the truth about God. It sees this work of the Spirit as
a fulfilment of this promise spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

I will put my
law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God,
and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour
and each his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,'
for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares
the Lord … (The Prophet Jeremiah
31:33–34).

Soon
I will explain how this works, but for the moment notice that Jeremiah clearly
challenges the idea that education and discipline suffice to remedy any human
cognitive deficiencies. Instead, our cognitive problems are addressed through
some sort of personal experience of God on his terms. To summarise: Christians
believe that sin involves a hardness of the will which causes a deep spiritual
blindness that seriously distorts our ability to know God and worship him.
Again, the problem is not with our cognitive faculties themselves, which are
beautifully designed by God to reliably provide us with true beliefs; instead,
the problem is with a steadfast unwillingness of our sinful minds to consider
or accept various important truths about God without distorting them.

Now
perhaps the reader has noticed that, once the question of the origin of
sin is put to one side, the Muslim and Christian positions on the cognitive
effects of sin are not as different as one might expect. Both agree that humans
have a ‘cognitive health problem’ of some sort to do with human willingness to
accept truth about God. Muslims talk of a weak will; Christians talk of a
rebellious sinful will. Is this just different ways of saying a similar thing?
Are any differences merely a quibble over degrees? I do not think so. I believe
there is a substantial difference between these two diagnoses of cognitive
health, and it is seen in the contrast between the solutions offered: Muslims
see the solution being within the powers of a believer, while Christians see
the solution only in the action of God. As an analogy, think of the difference
between being overweight due to a love of fast food and a serious heart
condition. Both these conditions are physical health problems. Both will
prevent you from running a marathon. Nevertheless, a heart condition is a
different, and far more serious, sort of health problem altogether. This can be
seen in the treatment required to solve the two problems. Being overweight due
to overeating can be solved by the personal disciplines of eating and
exercising healthily. A serious heart condition, on the other hand, is
completely outside the power of the sufferer to solve. It requires a radical
solution undertaken by someone else – perhaps an operation, or even a heart
transplant. In the same way, Muslims see humans as having a cognitive weakness
that can be solved by spiritual exercises, while Christians see a cognitive
blindness that requires healing by a radical divine intervention. Which most
accurately describes the human situation? Which is the more reasonable position
to hold upon philosophical examination?

Biased
humans?

First
I want to suggest that it is reasonable for both Muslims and Christians to
believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with the normal human cognitive
faculties that would prevent us knowing truths about God, or knowing God
personally. We discussed earlier how humans come to know things by a variety of
cognitive faculties that include our five senses, intuition, reasoning,
experience, and memory and testimony. I want to argue that none of these
faculties are significantly damaged by human sin. In fact, it is pretty easy to
see that they remain extremely reliable! Most of the time, our physical senses
provide us with incredibly reliable knowledge of the world around us. Healthy
eyes, for example, normally provide us with good information about the things
we see, and there is no reason to think that if an angel appeared in front of
us that our eyes would not provide good information about that too. In the same
way, human reasoning can reliably lead to true conclusions about things. This
is why mathematics works! Again, there is no reason to think that the sort of
natural theological reasoning we looked at in the last chapter could not
provide good logical reasons to believe in God. The same can be said about the
sorts of religious knowledge that are available through people’s memory and
testimony. If an angel did suddenly appear before you, there seems no reason
why your testimony about this amazing event could not provide me with accurate
details of what happened. Partly this is because human memory is, for the most
part, pretty reliable at remembering key features of important or amazing
things that have happened to us. Because our cognitive faculties are reliable,
life works and makes sense to us! Life is not completely unpredictable or
random. We can think straight about things – including God. We can operate
trusting that we can know things and talk meaningfully about what we know. It
seems, then, that if there is any hindrance to humans knowing God, it is not
the operation of these faculties that is the problem.

Next,
both Muslims and Christians are also correct in recognising the impact of the
human will on cognition. Our will, roughly speaking, consists of the choices we
make to act (or not act) based on our desires and wants. Think for a moment
about the role our will plays in cognition. Our will determines the sorts of
things we are interested in knowing. It influences the direction in which we
aim our faculties. For example, our will directs our eyes toward what we want
to look at. I can choose to gaze into the night sky and reflect upon the Creator,
or I can choose to gaze at an electronics catalogue and reflect upon which
device I already have that ‘really, really needs’ upgrading. Our will decides
what intuitions we will entertain and develop. I can pursue the hunch that I
have been made for divine purposes and will be called to account one day, or I
can pursue the hunch that I need more attention and praise from the people
around me. Our will inclines us to accept or reject other people’s testimony. I
might listen to someone because I like them, they are funny or they say things
that affirm me, or I might listen to someone because they speak uncomfortable
truths I need to hear. Our will controls what we choose to patiently reflecting
upon as well as how careful we are in reasoning properly. I can read a celebrity
Who magazine and reflect upon whether my life compares to that of the rich
and famous, or I can take the time to plough through the works of Dostoyevsky
to mine his rich insights into human character. Our will chooses which memories
we cling on to, or dwell on. I can choose to keep a record of all the times
people let me down or betrayed me, or I can choose to remember all the various
blessings I have received from God. All these illustrations bring out the role
of the will in cognition. In particular, all these illustrations show that our
will decides whether we will exercise epistemic virtues or not.

Now,
as we have seen, both Islam and Christianity recognise that humans regularly
exercise both epistemic virtue and epistemic vice. The important question is: are
humans free to choose to exercise epistemic virtue when it comes to religious
knowledge? Islam claims that we are; Christianity claims we are not. Islam says
there are no hindrances to our ability to exercise epistemic virtue if we want
to; Christianity says that without the Holy Spirit, we are trapped in some
degree of epistemic vice that taints our knowledge of God. The Muslim says,
with Akhtar, that we are in a condition where ‘we are not innately deviant or
crooked or unsound’; the Christian says, with Plantinga, that we are in a
condition where we suffer ‘an affective malaise, a malfunction or madness of
the will’.[69]
Which is a more accurate description of the human situation? My hunch is that
there are no irresistible arguments in support of either position. What I want
to argue, though, is that there is at least one well-recognised epistemic
phenomenon that makes the Christian claim plausible: cognitive bias.

Cognitive
bias is the term used by scholars to describe when we make unreasonably biased
judgements about ourselves or the world around us. Here is an example: A man I
knew was a gifted golfer. He was talented enough to first win a university
sports scholarship and then qualify as a professional golfer. Unfortunately, he
was not talented enough to make a secure living out of professional golf –
there were just too many better players. The problem was that for a decade, he
could not recognise this. He kept thinking that he was not making money because
he was having bad luck, or that his big break would come soon. In short, he
kept thinking he was better than he was despite all the evidence to the
contrary. Repeated empirical studies have left scholars with no doubt that
humans have an astonishing propensity for this sort of cognitive bias.
We seem to have an incredible capacity to hold unreasonable beliefs due to an
almost endless array of biases in the way we use our cognitive faculties. Some
biases are to do with the way we use our memories. For example,

·
Rosy
introspection:
The tendency to remember past events more positively than they occurred.

·
Self-serving
bias:
The tendency to view oneself as responsible for good past results, but not poor
past results.

Other
biases are to do with how we come to our beliefs. For example,

·
Selection
bias:
selecting to consider only the knowledge, sources and data we are interested
in.

·
The
Hawthorn effect:
having one’s conclusions influenced by an audience.

·
The
Ostrich effect:
ignoring obvious but unwanted data.

·
Authority
bias:
over- or undervaluing data in response to the wrong opinion of someone who is
seen to be an authority on the matter.

·
Optimism
bias:
the tendency to be overly optimistic about the likelihood of a desired outcome.

Yet
other biases are to do with how we reason. For example,

·
Focusing
effect:
placing too much importance on one factor in a judgement.

·
Post-purchase
rationalisation:
the irrational attempt to persuade oneself that one judged correctly in the
past.

·
Framing: adopting a biased
approach to a problem that shapes one’s conclusions toward a favourable
outcome.

·
Confirmation
bias:
only analysing data that is likely to confirm one’s preconceptions.

Still
others are social biases:

·
Superiority
bias:
Over-estimating one’s admirable traits and under-estimating one’s weak traits
in comparison to those around you. This is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon
Effect, described in one scholarly article like this: ‘Most of us have moderate
to high self-esteem. Like the mythical residents of Garrison Keillor’s Lake
Wobegon, we need to believe that we are above average. For example, in a survey
of a million high school students, only 2% stated that they were below average
in their leadership ability’ [70]

·
Herd
instinct:
the tendency to simply adopt the judgements of our community without adequate
reflection.

These
are just a few of the recognised biases – Wikipedia offers a (still growing)
list of hundreds – and each hinders us from achieving true beliefs.

Notice
a few things about these cognitive biases. First, each is an example of the
sorts of epistemic vices that both Muslims and Christians argue hinder
religious knowledge. Clearly this list is reminiscent of the epistemic vices we
saw in the Qur’an: the idea of heedlessness, for example, clearly corresponds
to the idea of the ‘ostrich effect’. Second, these biases are apparently
rampant in human cognition. It is blatantly obvious that humans do not always
think straight, make reasonable judgements, or see themselves and the world as
it really is. My suspicion is that the reader can, with little effort, readily
observe any and all of these biases being exercised by themselves and others –
and this is despite one bias being the inability to recognise one’s own
cognitive biases! For example, I always post-purchase rationalise any
purchase of a luxury item! I can convince myself of any number of good reasons
why I really need the wide-screen TV, even when I know that there are
needy children I could have sponsored instead. Third, all the cognitive biases
above are related to human desires – in particular, the desire for status,
significance, affirmation or comfort. They are biases that prevent us holding
true beliefs about ourselves and our place in God’s world whenever those true
beliefs do not correspond to how we want to see ourselves and our place
in the world. All the scholars in the field recognise this. Psychologists
Sahdra and Thagard identify that

Everybody
agrees that in self-deception the agent, say, A is motivationally biased to
believe p.[71]

So,
we can fairly say that these biases describe how the human will regularly
hinders us from coming to reasonable beliefs. Fourth, notice that something
sinister is going on here. Cognitive biases are not random hindrances to
reasonable beliefs about God’s world or ourselves. With only a few exceptions,
virtually all the various cognitive biases are in our personal favour in
some way. Some involve an over-estimation of one’s self or one’s tribe.
Some involve self-promotion. Some involve an unreasonable self-affirmation.
Some involve cowardly self-preservation. The overwhelming majority of
cognitive biases are inappropriately self-serving in some way.

This
brings me to my point: the nature and prevalence of cognitive bias lends
credibility to the Christian claim that the human will is seriously and
unavoidably tainted by sin in such a way that we habitually fail to exercise
epistemic virtue. The nature of all these biases sits nicely with the biblical
idea that humans are egotistically inclined to sin by pursuing our own glory,
rather than God’s.[72]
Similarly, the rampant prevalence of all these biases supports the biblical
claim that sin is a condition that all humans are trapped in. Note carefully
the strength of my claim here. I am not claiming that the existence of
cognitive biases conclusively proves that Christian beliefs about this are
true. Christians should also be assured, too, that I am not trying to define
sin simply as cognitive bias in some way – the Christian conception of sin is
much more profound than that. All I am claiming is that the Christian belief
that human sin is a deeply and intractably serious problem of the will that
affects cognition of truths about God is a reasonable one. It is so in light of
the overwhelming evidence of how adept we seem to be at deceiving ourselves –
in our favour. Just how serious is this cognitive problem? Is it so serious that
it prevents us from obtaining the knowledge of God we require to be religiously
successful? Next I want to argue that it is this serious, but to do so we need
to look a little closer at what standard of knowledge is required to be
religiously successful.

Successful
humans?

Do
humans possess the natural ability to be successfully religious? Muslims say
yes; Christians say no. We have seen that part of the reason for this difference
stems from a disagreement over whether or not humans are hindered from
accessing and understanding all the religious knowledge that is required for a
religiously successful life. Who is correct about this depends upon the answer
to another important question: what religious knowledge do we need to be
successful? Once again, the answer depends upon the correct model of
divine/human interaction.

Both
the Christian and Muslims models of divine/human interaction recognise that
religion involves knowing and obeying divine commands. They both acknowledge
that God’s creative Lordship invokes a range of moral, physical and liturgical
laws. Traditional Islam, in particular, has an essentially legislative model of
divine/human interaction under which the knowledge of God’s legal requirements
is the central concern of religious knowledge. Akhtar assures us that

The sacred law
(shari‘ah; lit., a path; Q:45:18; also shir‘ah at Q:5:48) derived from the
Qur’an and the Prophet exemplar specifies in meticulous detail the correct
exercise of the will in our imperfect attempt to attain to purity of heart and
intention. The holy law, rationally justifiable and comprehensive, covers
ritual obligation, moral regulation and extends to etiquette.[73]

His
claim here is that the divine law is spelt out in the Qur’an and Sunna in
sufficient detail and clarity for humans to access all the religious knowledge
they require. The difference between the various legal schools down through
history notwithstanding, this is the common claim of Muslims. Now if this sort
of detailed legislative and exemplary knowledge is all that is required for a
successful religious life, then it seems reasonable to agree with Akhtar that
most of the cognitive limitations we have recognised could be overcome. It is a
matter of pride for Muslims that the central tenets of Islam and the core moral
and ritual requirements are simple, easily understood and followed, and
relatively uncontroversial. As long as one takes heed of the Sharia, it is easy
enough to know the Sharia. If the Sharia is the heart of religious knowledge,
then cognitive biases, even if they are unavoidable, should not stop us from knowing
enough to be religiously successful.

Christianity,
however, claims that knowledge of a set of divine laws is not enough to be
religiously successful. The Christian fellowship model of divine/human
interaction acknowledges the need for humans to know not just divine law, but
to know the Lord God personally as well. The God of the Bible wants us to know
not just his will, but him. Recall the religious vision of the prophet
Jeremiah:

For
this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those
days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will
write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, ‘Know
the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the
greatest, declares the Lord … (The Prophet Jeremiah 31:33–34).

Thus,
in true religion, the divine will for our lives is best known not through
legislation, but through a personal knowledge of the divine Lord. Notice the
sort of personal knowledge involved: covenant knowledge. Covenants are
bonded relationships between people – for example, marriage. The sort of
knowledge involved in the Christian idea of covenant includes legal knowledge –
just like a marriage involves legal documents and promises, but it goes way
beyond legal knowledge. Philosopher Esther Meek describes covenant knowledge of
God as being less about knowing information about God and more about enjoying a
transformative personal encounter with God.

If
this is the sort of religious knowledge required for being successfully
religious, then it is easy enough to see how the sort of cognitive bias I have
identified might stop us from being successful. Cognitive bias damages personal
relationships. Here is an extreme example: I know a man who has a personality
disorder that causes him to have an outrageously overinflated image of himself.
He believes himself to be among the best in his chosen profession. He believes
himself to be irresistible to women. He believes himself to be highly
intelligent and able to offer expert opinion in any number of areas. Of course,
all this profoundly damages any relationship he is in because it diminishes
others and hinders the sorts of mutual sharing and caring that are at the heart
of personal relationships. In a similar way, Christianity claims that the sort
of personal, covenant knowledge of God described in the Bible is impossible
to achieve if one is cognitively biased towards religious self-affirmation,
self-achievement and self-sufficiency. If it is true that all humans are biased
in this way, then we really do have a serious problem if we are to know God
personally.

Can
humans, then, achieve the knowledge required to be religiously successful? If this
simply involves knowing a relatively straightforward, and achievable, set of
divine commands, then I think we can agree with Muslims that we can. Any
cognitive biases we have are unlikely to compromise our understanding of such
laws – although it is worth Muslims considering whether cognitive bias gives
them an over-inflated opinion of their capacity to keep those laws. If, on the
other hand, the sort of knowledge required for a successful religious life is
personal, covenantal knowledge of God, then we are in a far more complicated
situation. We are in a place where the knowledge required is far more profound,
deep and intimate, and vulnerable to damage from an over-inflated view of
ourselves. Which view of human sin is correct will depend upon which view of
God – and thus which model of divine/human interaction – is more accurate.[74] That is the project
we will turn to next. Here, the project is simply to answer the Muslim
challenge that the Christian view of human cognitive capacity is
unrealistically tragic. I hope that I have shown so far that the Christian view
is a realistic and reasonable one. I want to finish by showing that it is not,
ultimately, tragic either.

Joyful
humans

The
Christian picture of religious humanity certainly contains elements of tragedy
– including the possibility (shared with Islam) that some humans might suffer
in Hell – but it is not the sort of tragedy that inevitably leads to despair.
The biblical story of humanity does not read like the plot of Hamlet,
where everyone ends up dead or sad. The biblical plot is far more pregnant with
possibilities for joy than that. Jesus condenses it into a famous parable
recorded in chapter fifteen of the Gospel of Luke, and it is worth including
here in full:

There was a
man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give
me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property
between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took
a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless
living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that
country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of
the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he
was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him
anything. But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired
servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will
arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned
against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.
Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father.
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion,
and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I
have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called
your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe,
and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring
the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son
was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to
celebrate. Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to
the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and
asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and
your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe
and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and
entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have
served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young
goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came,
who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf
for him!’ And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is
mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother
was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’

Jesus
uses this story to describe the human religious situation; he uses the father
to represent God and the sons to represent humanity. The story captures many of
the ideas we have been considering in this chapter. The religious life is
viewed by Jesus in mainly relational, indeed familial, terms, and the tragic
element of the story is that neither son knows his father. The younger
son was tragic because he had little interest in knowing his father, even when
he returned in shame he was not imagining that he could come close the father –
he was merely hoping for work. The elder son is perhaps even more tragic
because, while he lived in close proximity to his father, and knew exactly what
his father’s commands were, he too did not know, or want to know, his father
personally. His focus on keeping the rules blinded him from accepting the joys
of intimacy with his father that were available to him all the time. The father
needed to point out that he was always there, always close, always offering
blessing, because the elder brother was too proud, too self-righteous to come
close enough to really know his father. Despite all this, this story is not,
ultimately, a tragedy. The story does not end in despair but in joy: unearned
relational joy for the younger brother at the party, and an invitation to joy
for the elder brother.

If
Christians have a tragic view of the current state of human knowledge of God,
it is not because they are pessimistic about human potential. It is because
they long to be freed from our spiritual cognitive limitations to enjoy Jesus’
promise of an almost unimaginably intimate and joyful personal knowledge of God
– a knowledge that radically transcends the ability to successfully obey divine
commands. However, the reality of this hope depends upon the accuracy of the
Christian picture of God as being, in his very nature, relational. This leads
us, unavoidably, to possibly the greatest point of contention between Muslims
and Christians: the doctrine of the Trinity.

Chapter 4

One and Three:
The Problem of the Trinity

Do
not say three!

‘Do
not do it!’ ‘I’m warning you, you’ll regret it!’ In my household, with four
teenage boys, things like this get said often because teenage boys are often
foolish. They think and say foolish things like ‘I don’t need to study for this
exam, it will be easy!’, ‘I know more about girls than you Mum!’ or ‘No Dad, it
isn’t dangerous to jump off a roof into a swimming pool!’ Teenagers are quick
to think they understand something and have complete certainty that they are
correct about it. It many ways it is a nice way to be, because it makes life
seem simple. Unfortunately life is not simple. One of the sobering things about
growing older is realising that life is not as simple as it seemed when we were
young, that we do not understand things as well as we thought we did, that the
really important things in life can be complicated and that certainty is
elusive. It was these realisations that led Mark Twain to famously observe: ‘My
father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got’. This sort of
respect for the wisdom gained through age is a hallmark of the Muslim world.
Abul Qaasim al-Qushayri noted sagely that ‘Staying quiet at the proper time is
a characteristic of manhood, just as speaking when it is proper to speak is
from the most honourable of matters’.[75]
It is indeed better to remain silent when you do not properly understand what
you are talking about.

The
Qur’an contends that this principle applies in the case of Christians talking
about what God is like. It warns that it is foolish for anyone to declare the
doctrine of the Trinity to be an accurate description of the nature of God:

Do not say ‘Three’;
desist – it is better for you. Indeed Allah is but one God (Q4:171).

The
idea here is that it is better for Christians to stop describing God in trinitarian
terms because Allah is one God not three Gods. Some Christians might respond by
saying that Christians do believe that there is only one God, it is just
that this one God is made up of three persons. Any thinking Muslim is unlikely
to be easily convinced by such a response because at face value it appears to
be nonsensical. The Muslim can fairly ask: ‘In what meaningful way can any
Christian claim to believe in one God when they believe that God is made up of
three distinct individuals?’ Or, similarly: ‘Can the trinitarian idea that one
God can somehow incorporate three individuals be described in any
philosophically coherent way?’ Muslims generally argue that Christians cannot
answer these questions sensibly, and therefore they should stop speaking about
the Trinity. The particular Muslim challenge, then, that I will respond to in
this chapter is that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is incoherent,
and, conversely, that the Muslim doctrine of Tawhid (the unity, or
oneness, of God) is sensible.

Of
all the Muslim challenges to Christianity we will look at, this is the one
where Muslims feel they are on the most solid ground. To Muslims, the doctrine
of the Trinity seems to be the most nonsensical, ridiculously complex,
obviously contradictory and foolish belief that Christians hold. The doctrine
of Tawhid, on the other hand, is seen to be simple, sensible, obvious
and free from logical problems. Popular Muslim preachers, in particular,
delight in pointing out what they claim to be obvious incoherence in the
doctrine of Trinity. Ahmed Deedat challenged the coherence of the Trinity like
this:

In
Christianity … the Father is a person, the Son is a person and the Holy Ghost
is a person! Person, person, person, but not three persons but one person. This
is gibberish, not English![76]

Zakir
Naik challenges the coherence of the Trinity by claiming it to be ‘scientifically
impossible’ on the basis that the sorts of ways that some Christians describe
the Trinity fail to make sense of the doctrine. So, for example, he says that describing
the Trinity as somehow like water in its three states of ice, water and steam
fails to explain the doctrine: in the three states of water the substance
remains the same (H_2O), but in the three ‘states’ of God the
substance changes.[77]
However, these sorts of popular objections are not worth taking very seriously
since they do not address what theologically educated Christians actually
believe about the Trinity. For example, Christians do not believe that God
is one person and three persons at the same time – as Deedat pointed out, that
would be absurd. Similarly, Christians do not believe that the Trinity is closely
analogous to the states of water. What Naik is actually describing here is an
idea called ‘Modalism’, which holds that God is a single person who manifests
himself in three different forms, or modes in different situations. This idea
was rejected by mainstream Christianity very early on in Christian history (a
fact of which Naik seems unaware). Once again we see that the popular Muslim
challenge lacks rigour.

Nevertheless,
thoughtful Christians acknowledge that the doctrine of the Trinity is
paradoxical enough at face value to be reasonably challenged. Shabbir Akhtar
does a much better job in formulating a philosophically sensible objection to
the doctrine of the Trinity as it is actually held by mainstream Christianity.
He recognises that Christians believe in only one God, and believe that God is
made up of three persons understood to be the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit. In the following quote he lists some of what he sees to be the
untenable implications of this belief:

Assuming that
there is only one God, the Trinity implies:

i.
Christ must be his
own Father and his own son;

ii.
The Holy Spirit is
neither Father nor Son yet he is both;

iii.
The Son was begotten
by the Father but existed before he was begotten;

iv.
Christ is as old as
his Father;

v.
The Father is as
young as his son;

vi.
The Holy Spirit
proceeded from the Father and Son but he is as old as his ‘parents’.

These are
absurd propositions.[78]

Akhtar
is, of course, correct that these are absurd and incoherent propositions. If
they are necessarily implied by the doctrine of the Trinity – and I do not
think they are for reasons I will explain soon, then it is understandable that
we should reject the doctrine. Akhtar goes so far as to claim that this is in
fact what happened upon the arrival of Islam, with its supposedly coherent
doctrine of Tawhid:

One can see
why the arrival of Islam is the true marker of the end of early Christianity:
millions of Christians left the convoluted complexities of their dogmatics to
embrace Islam’s simpler creed. Even if the Trinity and the associated
Incarnation have the moral benefits claimed … an omnipotent God could and
should have devised a solution that was coherent and yet equally effective.[79]

While
I dispute the historical accuracy of the unsubstantiated claim that many
abandoned Christianity due to its trinitarian creed, the Muslim gauntlet has
clearly been thrown down by Akhtar: the doctrine of Trinity, whatever its
appeal to Christians, is both incoherent and philosophically inferior to the
Muslim doctrine of Tawhid.

While
I agree that that coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity is to be rightly
questioned, what I hope to argue in response is this:

·
It
is sensible to say that there is just one God.

·
The
Christian doctrine of the Trinity is difficult to formulate coherently, but it
is not necessarily incoherent.

·
The
Muslim doctrine of Tawhid is just as difficult, if not more difficult,
to formulate coherently.

·
The
doctrine of the Trinity allows us to makes sense of claims about God like ‘God
loves perfectly’ in ways that the doctrine of Tawhid does not.

In
short, I hope to show that while all humans should be slow to say anything
definitive about the nature of God, Christians can sensibly and properly say
that ‘God is three’ and that the benefits of this doctrine mean we can say it
with joy, as well as with philosophical credibility.

What
can we say?

First
let us pause to consider what it means for a doctrine to be incoherent. There
are a wide variety of ways that an idea can be incoherent, but the most important
for this discussion is that an idea is incoherent if it is self-contradictory.
Aristotle put this ‘law’ of non-contradiction like this:

It is
impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong
to the same object and in the same respect, and all other specifications
that might be made, let them be added to meet local objections.[80]

This
law seems to be, as Aristotle claimed, the ‘most certain of all principles’
that guide our reasoning. Notice carefully the section I have highlighted with
italics. For there to be a genuine contradiction in some claim, it needs to
make logically incompatible statements about the same features of the one
thing. For example, the statements ‘that car is green’ and ‘that car is grey’
are contradictory only if they are both talking about the colour of the same
part of the car like, say, the car’s bodywork. They are not contradictory if
the bodywork is green, but the interior is grey. Put differently, you have to
compare apples with apples, not apples with oranges.

This
idea of coherence is very important in this discussion. Here is an example
using some of the contradictions Shabbir Akhtar claims flow from the doctrine
of the Trinity:

iii.
The Son was begotten
by the Father but existed before he was begotten;

iv.
Christ is as old as
his Father;

v.
The Father is as
young as his son;

vi.
The Holy Spirit
proceeded from the Father and Son but he is as old as his ‘parents’ [81]

These
four supposed contradictions all arise because Akhtar thinks that the
father/son relationship attributed to God in the Trinity is precisely and
necessarily the same as the father/son relationship within humanity in terms of
both temporal and biological order.[82]
We could put his argument like this: If it is a logically necessary truth that
fathers always precede sons biologically and temporally (whether human
or divine), then the doctrine of the Trinity is incoherent because it affirms
that the divine Son is eternal. However, Christians do not see this argument as
a significant challenge because they do not consider that the idea of
‘begotteness’ necessarily carries temporal or biological implications. When
Christians say that Jesus was ‘begotten’, they do not mean that he was begotten
in precisely the same way as human children. So they do not take
begotten here to mean procreated. Rather, it means ‘giving rise to’, so Jesus’
begottenness is of a radically different nature to ordinary sons. That he was
born of a virgin – a fact acknowledged by both Christians and Muslims – is at
least one clue to the radical nature of this difference. Because Christians do not
conceive of the idea of begottenness in the way Akhtar describes, his argument
fails to demonstrate that the doctrine of Trinity is incoherent. As we continue
this discussion, we will need to recognise these sorts of subtleties in
Christian philosophical defences of the Trinity (as well as in Muslim
philosophical defences of Tawhid).

Let
us first pause to consider just how important coherence is for having
reasonable beliefs. The law of non-contradiction holds that if some idea is clearly
and obviously contradictory then it is not true and is only believed unreasonably.
But before we excitedly run off looking for contradictions in others’ religious
beliefs, here are a few things to bear in mind:

·
Just
because we cannot explain something coherently does not mean it is
incoherent – it could just be really complicated. For example, just because
physicists cannot coherently explain how light can behave as both waves and
particles, it does not mean these behaviours are not real. We simply lack
enough understanding to explain all the features of light coherently.
Importantly, notice that while scientists cannot explain all the
features of light coherently, they can nevertheless describe the
apparently paradoxical features coherently.

·
Just
because something is described incoherently does not mean it is
incoherent. Any sensible idea can be described so poorly that it becomes
incoherent – even a simple one. For example, one of my sons is a promising
footballer and has been selected to join the junior academy of our local
professional team. At the academy he receives specialist kicking coaching from
one of the best players of the game in the country. This man is supremely
talented at kicking and showing people how to kick, but not quite so talented at
expressing his coaching philosophy in words. This does not mean that the
coaching philosophy at the academy is incoherent, only that it is sometimes described
poorly.

·
Just
because something can be described coherently does not mean it is
sensible and meaningful. Consider the statement: ‘The number “1” is red’. This
is a coherent statement, but it is nonsense because it is a category error –
number does not have colour.

Now,
I am not trying to confuse things! Rather, I am warning against getting rid of any
doctrine like the Trinity (or Tawhid for that matter) just because it is
complicated or hard to formulate coherently, or because people have put forward
incoherent attempts previously. Unless we can be sure that some doctrine has
been conclusively proven to be necessarily incoherent, it remains a possibility
that we can say it is true. Bearing this in mind, we turn to the doctrines in question,
starting with one that both Muslims and Christians can say coherently and
meaningfully.

Everyone
says ‘one’

Muslims
say there is only one God and Christians agree with them. Whatever the
philosophical difficulties in describing what God is actually like, it is
pretty easy to see how it is reasonable to believe that if there is a God – at
least the sort of God described by Islam and Christianity – then there can only
be one God. Philosophers have offered a variety of arguments in support of
this, but some of the most persuasive and simple can be traced back to early
Muslim philosophers. Al-Ghazali, for example, argued that there cannot be two
gods because

were there two
gods and one of them resolved on a course of action, the second would be either
obliged to aid him and thereby demonstrating that he was a subordinate being
and not an all-powerful god, or would be able to oppose and resist thereby
demonstrating that he was the all-powerful and the first weak and deficient,
not an all-powerful god.[83]

We
could call this an argument from greatness: if God is the greatest, then there
cannot be anything greater. In the same way: if there is something greater than
God, then God is not God; the greater thing would be God. Muslims, of course,
declare this idea regularly – Allahu akbar! (‘God is greater’) is the
slogan of Islamic monotheism. Christian theology agrees, and they are both
philosophically sensible to believe it. It is reasonable, then, to say that
there is one God. However, is it reasonable to say that this one God is made up
of three persons? I think it is.

Can
we say ‘three’?

In
this section I want to show that Christians can reasonably say that God is
three – that the doctrine of Trinity as it is actually held by
Christians need not be incoherent and nonsensical. To do so, I will first
outline the key ideas in this doctrine and then describe what I take to be the
best coherent philosophical defence of the doctrine.

It
is, I think, uncontroversial to say that mainstream Christianity almost
universally holds the following to be true:

1.       The Father is God

2.       The Son is God

3.       The Holy Spirit is God

4.       The Father is not the
Son

5.       The Father is not the
Holy Spirit

6.       The Son is not the Holy
Spirit

7.       There is exactly one
God.

Can
these propositions be held coherently, or do they necessarily contradict each
other? Well, that mainly depends on what Christians mean by the word ‘is’ in
each statement. If ‘is’ means ‘is identical to’ in the first six statements, then
there is obviously a problem. It would mean that the Father is identical to God,
the Son is identical to God, but the Father is not identical to the Son.
Clearly this is incoherent, and, unsurprisingly, Christians recognise this.
Christians do not use the word ‘is’ to mean ‘is identical to’ in the first six
statements – only in 4–6. The point being made in statements 4–6 is that each
person is not identical with the other because they are different persons. What
Christians mean in statements 1–3 is that God is a single spiritual substance
made up of distinct persons: each person is God, not because they are identical
with God, but because they are of divine substance. We could put it that God is
a complex whole, whose parts are the three persons of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. So when Christians say that the Father is God, they mean that the
Father is in nature God, but not identical with God. When understood in
this way, there is no necessary logical contradiction in the statements – that
is, they are coherent.

Nevertheless,
I can imagine a Muslim objecting that all this is simply word games: that it is
all very well to cobble together some coherent statements but (as I pointed out
earlier) this does not get us anywhere unless the statements are also
meaningful and sensible. Is the doctrine of the Trinity both coherent and
meaningful? Many Christian philosophers throughout history have offered various
defences for how the doctrine of the Trinity is reasonable. One of the best
recent defences (in my opinion) is put forward by William Lane Craig. I do not
have space to spell out the argument fully, but very roughly speaking, it
defends the idea that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit can be distinct
persons – that is, rational, conscious agents – while God is the metaphysically
basic entity that unifies the three, and whose nature generates the
omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness and intentions possessed by the
three persons. Craig argues that such an understanding is coherent and
accurately reflects the biblical description of God. I invite you to look
closer at his discussion,[84]
but for now let us assume, for sake of argument, that Craig’s description of
the Trinity is broadly coherent. We can still ask: Is it meaningful? Or is it,
like ‘1’ being red, coherently meaningless? To answer this question, Craig
offers an illustration of how these concepts can be meaningful. He draws an
analogy with Cerberus, a three-headed dog in Greco-Roman mythology. Cerberus is
a single being with one body, but with three heads each containing an
individual brain. Presumably each brain is capable of independent thought and
intentions, but presumably, too, the brains need to cooperate in order for
Cerberus to get anything done – like chasing food! Now consider the following
statements about Cerberus:

·
Cerberus
is one dog (one entity).

·
Cerberus
has one bodily substance (flesh and bone).

·
Cerberus
has three heads and three brains.

·
Cerberus
has three consciousnesses and three personalities (Fluffy, Ron and Harry).

These
statements are coherent and each statement is meaningful. So it does
seem possible to meaningfully describe a single entity with three minds and
personalities. It even seems reasonable and meaningful to say apparently
paradoxical things like ‘Cerberus bit me’ and ‘Ron bit me’ at the same
time. Craig takes the illustration further by imagining that Cerberus died yet
his minds survived beyond death. He suggests that it is still meaningful to
talk about a spiritual Cerberus – a Cerberus without a body – that is a single
spiritual entity that maintains three distinct consciousnesses. Please hear
Craig (and me) carefully here! The point of this illustration is not that God
is very like Cerberus – God forbid we would suggest that the Creator is similar
to an imaginary dog! The point is simply that because we can coherently
and meaningfully conceive of, and talk about, a single entity that incorporates
three consciousnesses, the doctrine of the Trinity remains a meaningful
possibility in philosophical terms.

Hear
me carefully about something else too. I am not for a moment suggesting that
Craig’s arguments – or those of any other Christian philosopher – remove all
the philosophical problems encountered in trying to describe the doctrine of
the Trinity. The vigorous discussions that these philosophers participate in are
highly complicated and no one approach is currently capable of drawing all the
threads of the doctrine together. The best we can say is that, with respect to
the Trinity, Christian philosophers are in a position similar to that of
physicists with respect to light: they may not yet be able to formulate a fully
coherent explanation of the Trinity, but they can, nevertheless
formulate meaningful descriptions of the Trinity that are not
incoherent. At the same time, it is very important to realise that there exist
no arguments – from Muslims or any other thinkers – that conclusively prove
that the doctrine of the Trinity is necessarily incoherent. Indeed, there is a
distinct lack of any contemporary Muslim critique of these sorts of
sophisticated arguments.[85]
Notice, too, that despite his confidence that the doctrine is
incoherent, even Akhtar concedes that he is unable to prove this:

I do not claim
to have shown that these convictions are demonstrably unintelligible … no human
author, however, has ever succeeded in rendering the Incarnation (and the
Trinity) entirely free of what may be termed conceptual confusion.[86]

Notice
carefully what Akhtar is saying here. He is, commendably, recognising that all
he can do is point to the fact that the Trinity is a doctrine of overwhelming
complexity. I want to ask Akhtar: why does he think this is necessarily a
problem? I concede that for any doctrine to be reasonably believed it cannot be
essentially confused, but why should we expect any attempt by conceptually
limited humans to describe the nature of the infinite God to be completely
free of conceptual confusion? Why should we expect a simple doctrine of the Creator
when there are no simple explanations of the creation? If the limited cognitive
capacities of humans cannot fully explain how light works, why should we expect
to be able to understand the nature of the divine author of light?

I
conclude this section by acknowledging that none of this shows that the
doctrine of the Trinity is necessarily the true understanding of the nature of
God. All I have done so far is show that the Muslim challenge that the doctrine
of Trinity is necessarily nonsensical does not stand up to scrutiny. Despite
the complexities involved, we can reasonably and meaningfully say that
God is in some sense ‘three’. Next I want to suggest that saying that ‘God is
one’ does not make things any simpler. Instead, I believe it makes things more
complicated.

Can
we just say one?

Muslims
do not just say that the doctrine of the Trinity is nonsensical. They also say
that the doctrine of Tawhid is eminently more philosophically tenable.
This is appealed to as an obvious truism. What I hope to show in this section
is that while at first glance it appears easy to say ‘God is one’, saying this
leads to a whole variety of serious philosophical problems. I am not saying
anything new. The very earliest Muslim philosophers recognised some of the
problems with this doctrine and the continued debate about it was one of the
reasons that philosophy was largely abandoned by mainstream orthodox Islam.

The
first difficulty we encounter is explaining what Muslims actually mean by the
doctrine of Tawhid. In the same way that the Bible does not
systematically spell out the doctrine of the Trinity, the Qur’an does not
systematically spell out the doctrine of Tawhid. Nevertheless, I think
it is uncontroversial to say that when Muslims speak of the doctrine of Tawhid,
they usually see it having three aspects: Tawhid al-Rubu‘biya or Oneness
of Lordship; Tawhid al-Uluhiyya or Oneness in worship; and Tawhid
al-Asma was-Sifaat or Oneness of the Names and Attributes of God. The first
two aspects are easy enough to understand. They refer to the uniqueness of God,
or in other words, that there is only one divine Creator worthy of worship.
They say, in effect, that ‘there is one God’ and we have already seen that
Muslims and Christians agree that this is sensible and true.

It
is the third aspect of Tawhid – the oneness of God’s names and
attributes – that is important to look closely at. This is because it is saying
something different to ‘there is one God’. Instead, it is saying that ‘God is
one’ in the sense that there is no division or parts within the unique Creator
God. Here is one scholar’s explanation:

God is one in
the sense that there is no multiplicity or division conceivable in Him, neither
outwardly, nor in the mind, nor in the imagination. God alone possesses such a
unity.[87]

The
important idea in Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat is that there is no
‘multiplicity or division’ in God. This sounds sensible enough at first glance,
but upon reflection it has some important – and necessary – implications. It
implies that God has no parts and therefore no complexity; God cannot change
over time; and, importantly, no distinction can be made between God and his
attributes – for God to be absolutely undivided, he must be identical to his
attributes. Philosophers call this the doctrine of divine simplicity.
Muslims are unlikely to be surprised to hear that this doctrine has had strong
support from many great thinkers throughout history – including Christian
thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas. Muslims, however, are more likely to be
surprised to hear that it is generally recognised by philosophers that it is
just as difficult, if not more difficult, to describe the doctrine of
divine simplicity coherently as it is to describe the doctrine of the Trinity.
Saying that ‘God is one’ creates a whole range of philosophical dilemmas for Muslims.
Here are three of the most obvious.

The problem
of the Qur’an

Very
early Muslim philosophers realised that the doctrine of Tawhid raised a
problem concerning whether or not the Qur’an was created. Muslims generally
hold that the Qur’an is uncreated and has existed eternally. They appeal to the
following verse:

Nay, this is a
Glorious Qur’an, (inscribed) in a Tablet Preserved! (Q85:21–22).

However,
this doctrine leads to the following problem:

1.       If the Qur’an is
uncreated, and

2.       If the Qur’an is not God,

3.       Then either there are
two uncreated things (God and the Qur’an), or God is divided (between himself
and his inscribed Word).

Because
of the strength of this argument, some of these philosophers (called the
Mu‘tazilites) began to say that the Qur’an must have been created. Theologians
labelled these early philosophers as heretics for adopting this solution and
ignored them. Later philosophers attempted to resolve the question by appealing
to Greek philosophical ideas, but as we are about to see, these ideas did not
seem to agree with Islamic theology either.

The problem
of an unchanging God

A
less obvious problem arising out of the doctrine of Tawhid is that if
God is undivided, then he cannot change. This is because change requires
movement from one state to another and some sort of force or cause for that
movement. There cannot, of course, be any external forces acting upon God to
make him change (if there were, those forces would be God!), and internal
forces imply some sort of division or complexity within God. Thus, the doctrine
of Tawhid implies that God cannot have any unrealised potentialities. Another
Muslim philosopher from the classical period, Ibn Sina, reflected on this:

It is
impossible for Him to change … if he were susceptible to change, he would
possess potentially an element of passing-away and an element of establishment;
and that is absurd.[88]

If
God cannot change, then it makes it hard to conceive how he could perform a
variety of different actions. This is because difference implies change. Ibn
Sina acknowledged this problem. His solution was to say that God ‘acts by
virtue of his own essence’ and ‘if his essence is one (then) only one act
emanates from it’. That is, for the Creator God to remain undivided in any way,
he could only act once. Ibn Sina thought that God’s one action was to
‘emanate’ his intellect or his Word. From this Word emerged the Soul, from the
Soul emerged heaven, and from heaven emerged the created sensible world. The
problem with this view is that it is completely speculative and finds no
support in Islamic theology. In short, what Ibn Sina (and many other early
Muslim philosophers) did to maintain the oneness of God in creation was adopt
the alien metaphysics found in Greek philosophy. In so doing, he strayed away
from the Qur’an’s vision of the active Creator.

A
second reason an unchanging God is a problem is that it is hard to conceive how
God could come to know new things about the created world as they unfold –
including coming to know and respond to the behaviour of people. Ibn Sina
argued that God’s knowledge did not change because he simply knew all things:
all concepts, all types, all created actual things (past, present and future), and
all uncreated possibilities. God knowing all these many things did not
compromise the doctrine of Tawhid because ‘this Knowledge is a single
knowledge’.[89]
Unfortunately, Ibn Sina did not explain how this could possibly be coherent.

The problem
of the 99 names

We
saw in an earlier chapter that a core belief of Islam is that God has revealed himself
clearly in creation to have at least 99 names that each describe one of his attributes.
The doctrine of Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat demands that these attributes
are not separate features of God, but are absolutely united with and identical to
God. In Ibn Sina’s words:

If it were to
be stated that His Attributes are not an augmentation of His Essence, but that
they entered into the constitution of the Essence, and that the Essence cannot
be conceived of as existing without these attributes, then the Essence would be
compound, and the Oneness would be destroyed.[90]

As
for the two previous problems, Muslim thinkers have struggled to describe this
in any meaningful way that makes sense and agrees with the Qur’an. There are to
this day complicated philosophical debates about the doctrine of divine simplicity,
but here are three of the more obvious difficulties:

1.       If God is identical to his
attributes, it requires that God is identical to all 99 attributes. This means
that all 99 attributes must be identical to each other. Philosophers have
attempted to describe how this might work – indeed, it is a topic of energetic
discussion of late – but the various solutions are far from convincing.[91] Moreover, these
solutions are so complicated that the conceptual problems seem just as
difficult as those faced by Christians in articulating the doctrine of the
Trinity.[92]

2.       A more serious
difficulty is that, even if it were possible to identify God with his
attributes, many of these attributes appear to require the existence of more
than one person. So, included among the 99 names of God are attributes such as
‘loving’, ‘forgiving’ and ‘merciful’. All these concepts describe features of
relationships between more than one person. This is clearly the idea in
the Qur’an, where God is seen to be merciful upon, and loving towards his
creation. Here is the problem: if God is necessarily, essentially and perfectly
loving and forgiving, then there must be someone for him to love and forgive.[93] This means that the
names of God demand either multiplicity within God or they impose the
metaphysical necessity to create other persons upon God. Neither solution aligns
well with Muslim theology. Al-Kindi noted a similar problem when he recognised
that any comparative attributes – for example, ‘the greater’ – necessarily
demand something to compare God to.[94]
Al-Kindi’s solution to this problem was to argue that the ideas represented in
the 99 names are not absolute concepts, but simply metaphorical concepts that
do not truly describe God. But how can we coherently say that attributes of God
do not describe God? This gets us nowhere, and it raised a third difficulty.

3.       The attempts of the
philosophers to explain the doctrine of Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat place
us in a position where it seems impossible to say anything meaningful
about God at all. Suppose we say that God is most powerful, and that the
London Olympic heavyweight weightlifting champion, Behdad Salimikordasiabi, is
quite powerful. Can we be talking about the same sort of power? If Tawhid
is correct we cannot be. This is because Tawhid says that God’s power is
identical to him, and if Behdad Salimikordasiabi shares in even a small part of
this power, then we are saying he shares in the divine nature in some way. In
Muslim theology this would be unacceptable – it would be shirk
(associating something with God). Adopting the doctrine of Tawhid leaves
Muslims in the situation where they have to say that God’s power bears no
similarity whatever to Behdad Salimikordasiabi’s power. This leaves us
wondering how the 99 attributes of God give us any meaningful insight into what
God is like. How can we know anything about God if his love is nothing like our
love, his mercy is nothing like our mercy, his grace is nothing like our grace,
and so on for all 99 attributes? This problem was recognised by early Muslim
philosophers and, interestingly, al-Kindi even went so far as to say the same
problem existed when talking about the idea of ‘oneness’ itself. He argued for
a distinction between the sort of oneness that God has and the sort of oneness
that we experience in the created world. Put very simply, his idea was that in
the world, single, united objects all possess attributes and qualities that
require some sort of complexity or multiplicity; however, God’s oneness is not
like this because it is not a numerical oneness, but an essential oneness.[95] It is not clear what
al-Kindi meant by this; it is, in fact, seriously open to question whether the
idea is coherent. What on earth (or in heaven) does it mean to have
non-numerical oneness? Once again, saying ‘God is one’ appears to leave us with
very little that is meaningful to say about God at all. To repeat al-Ghazali’s
observation,

the end result
of the knowledge of the ‘arifin is their inability to know Him, and their
knowledge is, in truth, that they do not know Him and that it is absolutely
impossible for them to know Him.[96]

It
is clear, then, that adopting the doctrine of Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat
leads to some very serious philosophical difficulties. Moreover, the three
philosophical problems I have briefly (and only roughly) outlined – the Qur’an,
the unchanging God and the 99 names – are just the tip of the iceberg in terms
of the complexity involved in attempting to put forward any coherent formulation
of the doctrine.

Of
course, I am not the first person to point all this out. Muslim theologians
going back to the very early days of the Mu‘tazilite philosophers recognised
that the doctrine of Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat did not meaningfully
cohere with orthodox Muslim theology. Al-Ghazali was one who rejected it based
on its implications:

Al-Ghazali’s
objection … is that it is possible that God’s knowledge should be like the
knowledge of man, that is that the things known should be the cause of this
knowledge and their occurrence the cause of the fact that he knows them, just
as the objects of sight are the cause of visual perception and the intelligible
the cause of intellectual apprehension.[97]

He
was sensibly recognising that there seems no coherent way of describing how the
idea of an unchanging God demanded by the doctrine of Tawhid could
sensibly correspond to the knowing and interacting God described in the Qur’an.

Since
the doctrine of Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat (as outlined by Muslim
philosophers) left Muslims without a coherent doctrine of God, Muslim
theologians often rejected it and labelled the philosophers as heretics. The
problem with doing so is that the Islamic idea of Tawhid does seem to
demand Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat. The sort of thing Muslims have in mind
when they declare that God is one is an absolute, monadic unity that denies the
possibility of any complexity within God. Attempting to ignore or dismiss this
real philosophical dilemma gets Muslims nowhere in the pursuit of reasonable
belief.

I
conclude this section by acknowledging that – like Akhtar with respect to the
doctrine of the Trinity – I have not conclusively demonstrated that the
doctrine of Tawhid is necessarily incoherent. That was not my intention.
All I am claiming is that, contrary to Muslim claims, the doctrine of Tawhid
offers no simpler or more sensible an understanding of the nature of God than
the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, it contains just as many philosophical
dilemmas – dilemmas which no Muslim philosophers have yet solved. In fact, it seems
harder to say ‘God is one’ than to say ‘God is three’.

Once
again we have found ourselves in the place where both Muslims and Christians
face formidable, and similar, philosophical difficulties. In the same way that
all humans lack a coherent explanations for things like how the immaterial ‘I’
connects to our material body, all theists are in the place where we lack
coherent explanations for how the nature of God works. Once again, too, we
should not be surprised. Sometimes we have to accept that there is not a simple
solution. Sometimes our minds are unable to grasp fully coherent explanations
of reality. However, if we assume, for sake of argument, that both the doctrine
of the Trinity and the doctrine of Tawhid can be formulated coherently,
there is one significant difference for Christians and Muslims. Holding to the
doctrine of Tawhid al-Asma was-Sifaat results in major theological
difficulties for Muslims in reconciling an unchanging, undivided, unknowable
God with the Allah who reveals himself in the Qur’an. Adopting the doctrine of
the Trinity, on the other hand, results in some very great theological
benefits. Chief among them is that it renders the belief that God loves us both
sensible and meaningful.

What
three can say …

Golfers
say that the worst thing that can possibly happen on the golf course is to
score a hole-in-one when you are playing by yourself. Holes-in-one are
incredibly rare (I have never scored one) and amazingly enjoyable (I have
witnessed this), and if you score one when you are alone, there is nobody there
with you to share your joy. Humans desire to share their joy because they are
created as social beings. More than this, they are created as loving
social beings. It is, I think, fair to say that humans find their greatest
earthly joy and satisfaction in loving and being loved within their families
and communities. Shabbir Akhtar concedes that the doctrine of the Trinity
carried with it certain ‘moral benefits’. I agree with him, and I suggest one
of the key benefits arising out the doctrine of the Trinity is that it assures
us that this sort of love is not simply at the centre of our lives, but at the
centre of the universe. The doctrine of the Trinity makes sense of how God can
be not just loving, but perfectly and meaningfully loving.

First,
let me explain how the doctrine of the Trinity makes sense of God being
perfectly loving. Love is a relational idea and there are three meaningful ways
of loving: self-love, mutual love and communal love. Self-love requires one
person, mutual love two persons, and communal love at least three persons. If
God is to exercise perfect love as an eternal attribute that is not contingent
upon him creating other people, it requires him to exercise all three ways of
loving. To do this God must exist in three persons. Christians have recognised
this since the time of the classical Muslim philosophers. Richard of St Victor
put it like this:

Shared love is
properly said to exist when a third person is loved by two persons harmoniously
and in community, and the affection of the two persons is fused into one
affection by the flame of love for the third. From these things it is evident
that shared love would have no place in Divinity itself if a third person were
lacking to the other two persons.[98]

It
is this idea that is behind the Bible’s claim that ‘God is love’ (The First
Letter of John 4:8). God is love because he is by nature multi-personal and
relational. So it is because God is three that he perfectly loves in every
possible way.

Next,
the doctrine of the Trinity makes the claim that ‘God loves perfectly’
philosophically meaningful as well as sensible. We just saw how a
doctrine of divine simplicity (in which God is identical to his attributes)
prevents us from saying anything meaningful about God at all because his
attributes cannot be anything like earthly attributes. So, if God’s love is
nothing like human love, then we have no idea what it means for God to love us.
The doctrine of the Trinity, on the other hand, assures us that God’s love is
like our love. God’s love is like our love because it is love between persons
who have real relationships. It is precisely because the one God is three
persons that he can say ‘I love you’ meaningfully.

All
that I have said to this point merely makes the point that the doctrine of the
Trinity is philosophically preferable to the doctrine of Tawhid in
making sense of the idea that God is perfectly loving. The reader, however,
should know that the doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of Christian
attempts to find the most philosophically sensible and meaningful doctrine of
God. Instead, the doctrine of the Trinity arose out of Christian attempts to
describe the God who they saw loving perfectly in practice in the world.
It describes the God we witness acting in events like this one recorded in the
eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John. Here we witness Jesus going on a
journey to the house of a dying man named Lazarus. While he was travelling,
Lazarus died. We pick up the story with Jesus meeting Lazarus’ sister upon
arriving:

When Jesus saw
her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply
moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, ‘Where have you laid
him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept. So the Jews said,
‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes
of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?’ Then Jesus, deeply moved
again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said,
‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord,
by this time there will be an odour, for he has been dead four days.’ Jesus
said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory
of God?’ So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said,
‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me,
but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe
that you sent me.’ When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud
voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ The man who had died came out, his hands and feet
bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth (The Gospel of John
11:33–44).

In
this story God is not completely other, or unchanging, or unknowable. In this
story he is personal and active. God is listening and speaking. He is present
and full of compassion.

Doubtless
many Muslims will reply that the same can be said of Allah in the Qur’an. I
reply that if Allah really is ‘one’ as described in the doctrine of Tawhid,
then we have no way of knowing that or understanding what ‘Allah is loving’
means. The doctrine of the Trinity, on the other hand, recognises that it is
because God is complex and personal that he can love deeply and practically.
Put simply, it is when we reasonably say that God is three that we recognise
how he can perfectly say ‘I love you’. Moreover, we can see how the Christian
fellowship model of divine/human interaction is grounded in the very character
of God: God is relational by nature, and the Trinity describes an essential
fellowship.

Doubtless,
too, this story will raise a variety of new objections in the mind of my Muslim
reader. Two stand out. The first is the identification of Jesus as one of the
persons of the Trinity. The second is the idea that God might weep – indeed,
the vision of Jesus weeping is also astonishing to many Christians brought up
on a diet of Greek philosophical conceptions of God. These two possible
objections are, in fact, closely related. They both challenge the radical
Christian belief that God might humble – and even humiliate – himself by
participating in his creation. It is this challenge to the doctrine of the
incarnation of Christ that we look at next.

Chapter 5

The Sublime
and the Ridiculous: The Problem of the Incarnation

Ridiculous!

Christians
make the astonishing claim that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was not merely
human, but also divine. More precisely, this idea – called the doctrine of the
Incarnation – holds that Jesus is identical with the Second Person of the
Trinity and that he has both human and divine natures. Muslims generally regard
this claim as ridiculous. Clearly it is a non-starter for Muslims on
theological grounds because the Qur’an unequivocally rejects the idea:

They have
certainly disbelieved who say that Allah is Christ, the son of Mary (Q5:17).

Fazlur
Rahman declares that ‘the unacceptability of Jesus’ divinity and the Trinity is
(theologically) incontrovertible’.[99]
As with the Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation is not just seen as
theologically unacceptable, but also philosophically unacceptable. Muslim
thinkers identify two key objections: metaphysical incoherence and moral
offensiveness.

The
incoherence objection argues that any descriptions of the Incarnation
that Christians come up with are sheer nonsense. Ali Quli Qara‘i put it this way:

Islam rejects
incarnation, whether in the case of Jesus or someone else. The Creator cannot
be incarnated in a creature … It is, from the Islamic viewpoint, no more than
play of words.[100]

Given
the strength of such claims, it is surprising to discover that few Muslim
philosophers have attempted to show exactly how the doctrine of the
Incarnation is metaphysical nonsense in a way that deeply engages with the
arguments of Christian thinkers. Shabbir Akhtar observes that:

Though easily
parodied, I know of no Muslim writer whose polemical attacks meet the issues on
the current level of sophistication among Christologists. That Christians are
‘associationists’ or polytheists needs much more careful argument … [101]

We
have to go back to some of the earliest Christian-Muslim debates to find a
careful incoherence objection that deals with actual Christian descriptions of
the doctrine (as opposed to Muslim caricatures of the doctrine). In the ninth
century CE, Abu Isa al-Warraq identified what he saw as seven incompatible
Christian explanations of how Jesus might simultaneously have both divine and
human natures: the Word mixing and mingling with the human body; the Word
taking the human body as a temple; the Word wearing the human body as a
garment; the Word dwelling in the human body; the Word appearing in the human
body, though not dwelling in it; the Word impressed upon the human body like a
seal impressed in clay; and, the Word appearing in the human body like a
reflection appearing in a mirror.[102]
He concluded that the radical conceptual disagreement between each of these
explanations was evidence that the doctrine was impossible to sensibly explain
and was, therefore, incoherent. While his argument is weak – all it proves is
the inadequacy of various Christian attempts to illustrate the Incarnation,
without proving that none of them are true, at least he was engaging with what
his Christian peers were saying at the time. Coming back to the present, Akhtar
also believes the doctrine to be incoherent. Although he recognises that there
is no reason for humans to expect theology to be simple, he argues that the
idea of the Incarnation goes beyond mere complexity:

Complexity,
however, is one thing, incoherence another. Paradox is one thing, nonsense another.
The doctrine of the Incarnation does appear, even in the eyes of sympathetic
critics, to be incoherent … the claim about God becoming incarnate in Christ
suffers from a variety of conceptual difficulties that would appear to be
insuperable.[103]

More
recently (and more strongly) he stated that:

[104]The divine gesture in the Incarnation is
metaphysically incoherent.

Elsewhere
Akhtar argues that such claims need careful argument, but he, too, fails to
offer one. This is surprising, because it seems to me that Muslims are on more
solid ground with this objection than they are with their objection to the
Trinity. To my mind, the doctrine of the Incarnation is even more difficult
to articulate coherently that the doctrine of the Trinity (if that is possible!)
and so the incoherence objection is worth taking seriously.

The
moral offense objection argues that, even if the doctrine of the
Incarnation were logically possible, God would not compromise his absolute
transcendence by such an act. Any such compromise would be a moral offense in
the sense it would supposedly render God less worthy of worship. So Ismail
al-Faruqi argued against the Incarnation largely for the reason that, in Islam,
Allah’s extreme transcendence is the ‘ultimate base of all religion’ – that is,
God’s sublime transcendence provides the moral grounds for worship.[105] We will look
at the details of this sort of argument soon, but notice carefully that this is
not purely a moral objection – it carries with it a related metaphysical
conundrum: the relationship between the transcendence and the immanence of God.
To his very great credit, Akhtar has recognised that the doctrine of the
Incarnation is wrestling with precisely this issue. In what is one of the most
generous – and astute – passages of religious dialogue I have come across in
recent years, he reflects:

It seems to me
that the doctrinal complexity of Christianity is intimately tied up with its
concern to record and partly resolve a central perplexity, namely, the riddle
of God’s moral involvement with a human nature that is so strikingly
recalcitrant to divine guidance. It is very much to the credit of the Christian
faith that it recognizes – feels and lives in creative tension with – this
puzzle.[106]

It
really is a puzzle how a transcendent God might be personally involved
with his creation in any meaningful way. And it is a puzzle for both Christian
and Muslim theologies. Muslims may reject the doctrine of the Incarnation as
incoherent and morally offensive, but can they coherently articulate any
plausible alternative idea of how a transcendent God might meaningfully
interact with his creation? The remainder of this chapter explores this puzzle.

To
summarise, for Muslims, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is both
metaphysically incoherent and morally offensive. It is metaphysically
incoherent due to an inability to explain how Jesus could simultaneously have
divine and human natures, and it is morally offensive due to it compromising
the sublime transcendence of God.[107]
In response I will argue two things. First, that it is not only possible for
God to have become incarnate in Jesus, but there are very good reasons for
thinking that he might have – indeed, strong enough reasons to even think that
God would have some sort of moral obligation to become incarnate! Second,
rather than detracting from the sublime glory of God, the doctrine of the
Incarnation makes more sense of the transcendence/immanence paradox in a way
that meaningfully enhances the glory of God. In short – and in (very)
non-technical terms – I hope to show that it is sensible to say that God’s
glory is seen in the fact that he ‘coulda’, ‘woulda’ and ‘shoulda’ become
incarnate.

Coulda

Is
there an answer to the incoherence objection that allows us to think that God
could possibly have become man? I believe so. In this section I want to show that
incoherence objection fails because there is good reason to think the
Incarnation is possible, there is no good reason to think it is not possible,
and that there exist coherent descriptions of this doctrine. Here are six
reasons why this is the case.

1.
It is sensible to say that God has a direct connection to his creation. Islam and Christianity
are theistic, not deistic, religions. Therefore, whatever they mean by God
being transcendent, it cannot involve a total lack of connection to his
creation. In fact, Islam and Christianity both necessarily require some sort of
meaningful connection between God and his creation: both religions claim that
God acts in the world, including acting to offer divine revelation to humans.
Moreover, the need for some point of connection is not diminished by either the
lack of an explanation of precisely how this coming together of infinite and
finite might work, or by the use of intermediaries by God to bring revelation
to humans. So, for example, God somehow giving his message to an angel to pass
on to a prophet still requires God to connect with a created being. (I will
look a little closer at this in the next section.)

2.
Surely God could do any logically possible thing he wanted to. The God of theism is
all-powerful. This means he can do anything he purposes to. However, God would not
seek to do things that are logically impossible. Note, for example, the
well-known, but childish, challenge to theism which argues that God cannot be
all-powerful because he is unable to make a rock too big for him to pick up.
The argument fails because it is incoherent. It demands that God acts in a way
that is logically impossible. The implication here is that, as long as the
Incarnation could be coherently described as a logical possibility, there seems
no necessary reason why God could not participate in his creation in that sort
of personal way if he so desired.

3.
It is meaningful to speak of something simultaneously having two natures. So we speak of a Venus Fly
Trap as being both a plant and a carnivore. Similarly, we view an angel as
being both a spiritual and a physical being. Along these lines, William Lane
Craig uses the movie Avatar to illustrate that we can even meaningfully
conceive of a being having two natures. Avatar (a Hindu word for
incarnation) tells how a disabled human soldier named Sully becomes an avatar
among a race of extra-terrestrials called the Na’vi. Sully remains human but
becomes physically incarnated as a Na’vi. Sully has both a human nature and a
Na’vi nature, each with different abilities. If you were to ask the question
‘Can Sully run?’, the answer would be ‘Yes and no: yes, in his Na’vi nature,
but no, in his human nature’. Craig suggests that if you can make sense of Avatar,
you can make sense of Christ’s incarnation. He argues that, in a similar way,
Christ has both a divine nature and a human nature, each with different powers.
In his human nature, Christ experienced all the limitations intrinsic to human
nature, but in his divine nature, he had supernatural powers. Notice the
strength of my claim here. I am not claiming that any of these illustrations
offer a very close analogy to the Incarnation. I am certainly not claiming that
they provide any detailed explanation of how the Incarnation works. All I am
saying is that we can, and do, coherently conceive of, and speak of, things
simultaneously having two natures.

4.
There seems no reason why we cannot say that the Second Person of the Trinity
could maintain a human nature. There seems to be no necessary incompatibility
between divine and human natures. Some might object that divine nature and
human nature maintain features that are mutually incompatible. What features
might they be? If we assume that divine nature involves being all-powerful, all-knowing,
without beginning, and logically necessary, and if we assume that human nature primarily
involves being a person having beliefs, intentions, perceptions and memory,
then there seems no reason why a being could not be all-powerful, all-knowing,
without beginning, and logically necessary, while at the same time being a
person having beliefs, intentions, perceptions and memory.

5.
It seems possible to coherently articulate the idea that the Second Person of
the Trinity became human. I just said it is possible to sensibly speak of
how some ideal human nature might be compatible with divine nature, but we need
to be able to say more than this to describe the Incarnation. Because the
Incarnation claims that the Second Person of the Trinity became human as a baby
who grew in maturity, we need to find a way of sensibly speaking of how a human
infant nature – with all the cognitive immaturity of a baby’s brain – might be
compatible with an all-knowing divine nature. This provides, I suggest, the
biggest philosophical difficulty to be overcome in articulating the
Incarnation. Christian philosophers have made various attempts at coherent
descriptions – again as opposed to explanations – of how this might operate.
Two approaches that have received the most attention in recent years are known
as Kenosis Christology and Two Minds theory. Highly complex and sophisticated
versions of both these approaches are put forward by philosophers, and there is
simply not space here to go into the details.[108] To give us a feel for the
reasonableness of such accounts, however, let me briefly outline another: the
approach of J.P. Moreland. He builds his thinking around the idea that ‘a
plausible model of the incarnation affirms that the mind of the incarnate
Christ was the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity’ and two features stand
out. First, Moreland thinks that the metaphysical compatibility of Jesus’
divine and human natures can partly be explained by the realisation that the
Second Person of the Trinity – the Logos – was always human in
the sense that humans are primarily persons with beliefs and intentions rather
than bodies. In line with the Christian (but not Muslim) belief that humans are
made in the image of God – and not the other way round, the divine Jesus can be
spoken of as the archetypal, or perfect, human. In other words, Jesus was not
made to be like us (metaphysically speaking) but we were made to be like him. Therefore,
when Jesus became incarnate, the earthly human nature was united with divine
human nature in a union of flesh and Logos.[109] Second, Moreland
explains the sorts of limitations experienced by the divine Jesus taking on
earthly humanity –for example, cognitive limitations – in terms of complexities
of consciousness. He suggests that Jesus did not lose his divine consciousness,
but instead chose to sublimate it and operate in his earthly human
consciousness. He argues that this idea is sensible and meaningful in the same
way that we sensibly and meaningfully speak of the conscious and subconscious
in our minds (or similarly the ‘front of my mind’ and the ‘back of my mind’).
Whatever one thinks of the theological credentials of Moreland’s approach, it
is clearly coherent. Despite the various difficulties involved, it does seem
possible to articulate the Incarnation coherently.

6.
There exist no conclusive arguments against sophisticated philosophical
accounts of the Incarnation. I suspect that by now some of my readers are agreeing
with Qara‘i that these are just complicated word games. I admit that the
discussion is complicated, but the strength of the defences offered by professional
philosophers as they debate the accounts I have referred to in the previous
point show that there currently exist no conclusive arguments that they are
incoherent. I contend that Muslim philosophers, in particular, have failed to
produce any proper demonstration of their incoherence. Akhtar, for example,
fails to clearly spell out the supposed incoherence of any serious
philosophical account of the Incarnation, despite his call for such arguments.
Indeed, I am yet to come across a serious Muslim response to any of the recent
approaches from the professional Christian philosophers I have referred to.
Until such time as Muslim philosophy can provide strong arguments against them,
it has not earned the right to declare the doctrine incoherent.

For
at least these six reasons, we can say that it remains sensible to say that God
could become man. The coherence objection, as presented to date, then, is not
strong. Next, we look at the moral objection.

Woulda

Just
because it is possible to say that God could become man, we cannot
straightforwardly say that he would have good reason to. Intuitively, it does
feel like Muslims could be right that there is something morally offensive
about the idea that God would taint himself, or his reputation, through the
sort of humiliation we see in the Incarnation. To defend the doctrine of the
Incarnation against this moral objection, we need to establish that there are
morally good reasons for God to relinquish heavenly transcendence and reveal himself
personally to humans. In this section I want to show that the Incarnation is
morally acceptable if it describes an act of self-sacrificial love by the
perfectly loving God towards those whom only he can help.

First,
the idea that God must remain heavenly transcendent does not agree with
the either the Muslim or Christian accounts of divine/human interaction. It is true
that under the Muslim legislative model of divine/human interaction, it is
usually the case that God remains transcendent in such a way that he reveals
nothing of himself but only his will. It seems sensible to think that under
this model, God could reveal his will to humans by, say, causing gold tablets
inscribed with divine law to miraculously materialise out of thin air in front
of humans (or angels like Gabriel, who could then pass the laws on to humans).
This sort of revelation would allow God to remain transcendent in heaven with
no personal contact with humans. In a debate with Kenneth Cragg, al-Faruqi
tries to explain this idea of divine transcendence like this:

Al-Faruqi: You spoke of God ‘willing and wanting to
reveal Himself to man’. God does not reveal Himself. He does not reveal Himself
to anyone in any way. God reveals only His will. Remember one of the prophets
asked God to reveal Himself and God told him, ‘No, it is not possible for Me to
reveal Myself to anyone.’

Cragg: Do you make this distinction absolute?
Is not the will expressive of the nature?

Al-Faruqi: Only the nature in percipe. In
other words, the will of God is God in percipe – the nature of God in so
far as I can know anything about Him. This is God’s will and that is all we
have – and we have it in perfection in the Qur’an. But Islam does not equate
the Qur’an with the nature or essence of God. It is the Word of God, the
Commandment of God, the Will of God. But God does not reveal Himself to anyone.
Christians talk about the revelation of God Himself – by God of God – but that
is the great difference between Christianity and Islam. God is transcendent,
and once you talk about self-revelation you have hierophancy and immanence, and
then the transcendence of God is compromised. You may not have complete
transcendence and self-revelation at the same time.

Cragg: But no more can you have complete
transcendence and creation.

Al-Faruqi: Yes, you can. Because creation is, in
the Qur’an’s words, kun fa yaqun, ‘be and it is’. Creation is a
commandment of God (Q3:41 et al.).[110]

Al-Faruqi’s
idea is that God can remain completely transcendent and reveal at the
same time because it is only his will (or commands) that is revealed and not his
personal self.

However,
while it may be the case in Islam that God is usually transcendent like
this, it is not the case that he is always transcendent. The Muslim
account describes God interacting personally with humans in at least some
situations. We saw in Chapter 2 that the Qur’an describes at least some humans
as being rewarded with entering God’s personal presence. Not only that, even al-Faruqi
describes a personal interaction with God: he spoke of God speaking to a
prophet – indeed, responding to a prophet by answering the prophet’s
question. Clearly this sort of personal interaction breaches heavenly transcendence.
Muslim logician Ibn Taymiyya (d.1328 CE) recognised the impossibility of
complete transcendence the best part of a millennium ago, when he tried to

achieve tanzih
(proper expression of divine transcendence) without ta’til (exaggeration
of divine transcendence which denies divine contact with the universe), tamthil
(proper expression of divine immanence) without tashhih (an
understanding of divine immanence which makes God essentially united with or
dependent upon the created universe).[111]

So
the issue that we (and Cragg and al-Faruqi) are really wrestling with is not
whether God could compromise his heavenly transcendence, but to what degree
it would be right for God to let go of transcendence in order to reveal himself
to us. We need to ask: ‘How far is it appropriate for God to go in order to
love us’?

Second,
there seems no moral objection to the idea that God would go so far as to reveal
himself personally through incarnation so long as it was the perfectly loving
thing to do. This is straightforward enough, but it hinges on whether a
personal revelation – and not just a revelation of his will – really is the
most loving thing for God to do. Is it? The answer to that question depends
upon how we understand the ethics of divine/human interaction – including the
degree of human need. Under the Muslim legislative account of divine/human
interaction, the loving thing for God to do is simply provide good and just
commands. There is little additional value in him turning up in person (even if
he could). However, under the Christian fellowship model of divine/human
interaction, the loving thing for God to do is share himself personally
(in a way that includes ruling us justly). This means that it is reasonable for
the Christian to say that God might be willing to compromise his heavenly transcendence
to the degree that he would, as the Bible puts it, ‘dwell among us’ personally through
incarnation. Akhtar correctly identifies this as the Christian understanding of
the divine purpose behind the Incarnation: to reveal himself to humanity in
such a way as to bridge a relational gap between God and humanity:

In the case of
Christianity, the inner religious genius is contained in the gesture that
closes the gap between the Creator and the creation while rendering humanity
into an episode within the divine career: the radically tragic episode in which
a merciful God pitched his tent among a sinful generation and graciously
disclosed himself as self-sacrificial love.[112]

The
doctrine of the Incarnation, however, requires God to  give up far more than his
heavenly transcendence. It claims that God did not simply pitch his tent among
us, but humiliated himself on a Roman cross of punishment. Here is where the
moral objection seems at its strongest: it feels like this is a step way too
far. I can, for example, imagine a situation where, upon the queen unexpectedly
turning up in person to my house, we would scramble to clean the house, prepare
some food and send invitations to any important friends and family we can think
of so that we can all gather at her feet and hang on her every word. I find it
almost impossible, however, to imagine a situation where, upon the queen
turning up, we ignored her while she went straight to the bathroom, stripped to
her underwear and began serving us by cleaning our toilets while all the
neighbours gathered to laugh and hurl abuse at her. Surely this sort of
humiliation of a sovereign is highly morally offensive because it is
inappropriate and inconsistent for the queen to act in a way that disrespects
her exalted position as sovereign.[113] And if it is morally
offensive in the case of a human sovereign, surely it would be much more
offensive in the case of a divine sovereign? Perhaps not. If the act of
sacrificial service was not menial, unimportant and capable of being done by
anyone (like in my illustration), but was, instead, of eternal significance,
for all humanity and only capable of being done by God, then, perhaps, it might
be morally permissible. This, I suggest, is what the doctrine of the
Incarnation claims. To see the sense in it, it is helpful to consider a third
idea.

Third,
there seems no moral objection to the idea that God would be willing to act
in self-sacrificial love if it was the perfectly loving thing to do and he was
the only person who had the power to act. The principle of serving
self-sacrificially when others are in a serious predicament, and you are the
only person capable of acting, is both morally sensible and morally admirable.
Let me illustrate this with a true story. Dr Matthew Lukwiya was a doctor who
came to the attention of the world during an outbreak of the Ebola virus in
Uganda in the year 2000. Dr Lukwiya, a specialist in tropical medicine, was
called to his hospital to investigate an outbreak of an unexplained disease.
After investigation he diagnosed it to be the deadly and highly contagious
Ebola virus – the first time the virus had reached a heavily populated area
with links to the wider world. Dr Lukwiya implemented the correct quarantine
procedures to isolate the virus, and he and a small team volunteered to remain
and care for those who had contracted the virus. One night, while treating a
badly vomiting and bleeding patient, Dr Lukwiya became contaminated. He died
six days later. In the actions of this remarkable man, we witness a love and
care for people that would lead to him giving up his life in the knowledge that
he was the only one qualified to both properly care for the sick, as well as prevent
the death of perhaps millions of people by quarantining the virus. Testifying
to this great act of sacrificial service, the hospital administrator said: ‘There
was never a doubt that he would stay – he would always say, “My people need my
service.”’ Likewise, his widow reflected that: ‘I don’t think he would regret
this. He knew the risk. He saw what was needed for his patients and he did it.
That was him’. The self-sacrifice of Dr Lukwiya was unquestionably morally
admirable because it was an act of love and he was the only one qualified to
act. Christians believe that the doctrine of the Incarnation is similarly
morally admirable, because it describes the way in which God, because of his
love for humanity, was willing to suffer the humiliation of the cross in order
to save humanity from its enslavement to sin.

Of
course, for this point to carry any weight, it must be true that humanity is in
the sort of desperate situation that uniquely requires God to become incarnate
and suffer the cross. We are not in a position to assess that yet – we need the
conclusions from subsequent chapters. We are, however, in the position to say
that if one is prepared to grant the reasonableness of Christian beliefs
concerning the sinfulness of humanity and the Trinity – including the
possibility that the self-sacrifice of Jesus was the only way of saving humans,
then the doctrine of the Incarnation is both philosophically coherent and
morally acceptable – and even admirable. In short, it is fair to say that for a
desperate humanity in need of radical divine assistance, God could have had
good reason to go so far as to become human.[114]

Shoulda

The
responses given so far to the metaphysical and moral objections to the
Incarnation raise a tantalising question: ‘Is there anything that might compel
God to become a human’? Put differently, even if it were possible for God to
have become a human, even if God had good reasons for becoming human, can we
say he should have become human? I think we can. To see how, I will
start with an astute observation by Akhtar. He recognises that if God’s
transcendence is not complete, then it must be the case that God is somehow
responsible to his creation:

The notion of
divine purpose for mankind without the corresponding notion of divine need (and
of the involvement that such a need may entail) is prima facie one of the
central oddities of transcendent theism. While Jews and Muslims are
theologically obliged to be inured to this peculiarity, Christians have
actively sought to defuse it. God, it is urged, became incarnate man and, by
implication, rendered himself morally credible to a rebellious humanity … Among
the monotheisms of Hebrew origin, Christianity alone fully explores the issue
of God’s implied normative engagement with creation.[115]

Akhtar
is touching here on the sensible idea that the Creator God has placed
obligations upon himself to sustain and care for humans and, if necessary, take
responsibility for doing something about their rebelliousness. Cragg put the
same idea like this in his conversation with al-Faruqi:

I as a
Christian am of the conviction that there are certain things about which we can
say: ‘God ought.’ I find it a terribly desolating and finally contradictory
concept to believe in unobligated deity. That is deism. Theism, to which we
here are all committed, must mean divine involvement for this, as I have said,
is implicit in creation itself. You cannot create and be as if you hadn’t. You
cannot have law and be indifferent to what happens to it. You cannot educate
and be indifferent to what is happening in education. The whole succession of
prophets seems to argue a divine solicitude; jāhiliyyah matters. If you
have a false god it matters. Now this is not fiction; it is not a play on
words. God is involved in the wrong that jāhiliyyah does to him. I would
say that this is where, if we are open together, Islam has to be open at a deep
level to what Christians are saying, just as we Christians want to be open to
what you are saying. Can we think of the Allāhu akbar as a genuine
accountability and responsibility to the human situation? Is not that within
the meaning of transcendence?

Cragg
here recognises that some sort of divine responsibility is inherent to many of
the key features of theism that are found in both Islam and Christianity.
Creation, divine law and prophetic revelation all imply that God is normatively
engaged with his creation – that is, that God is compelled to care for us. How
might this compulsion work?

Clearly
any such divine obligations or responsibilities (whatever they might be) are
not externally imposed upon God. Instead, it can only be the case that
something in God’s nature, character or purposes compels him to care for his creation.
Christians say that this ‘something’ is God’s perfect love, and it seems
reasonable to say that God’s love could properly compel him to care for, reveal
himself to, and even serve his creatures. What this means for our discussion of
the Incarnation is that if it is true that the Incarnation is possible and that
it describes an act of self-sacrificial love by God towards those whom only he
can help, then it seems reasonable to think that God’s perfect love would
compel him to become a human being.

Let
me use an illustration. A fellow student from my undergraduate days tells the
dramatic childhood story of a family holiday in New Zealand. One day, while
driving through a mountainous region, they pulled into a lookout, only to have
the brakes on the car fail. The car crashed through the lookout fence and over
the cliff edge, plummeting into the valley below. As the car fell, my friend’s
mother put her body between his sister and the car’s dashboard. When the car
struck the bottom, his mother was crushed and killed. His sister survived,
saved by her mother’s body bearing the brunt of the impact. This true story is analogous
to the Incarnation, as it is an incredible example of self-sacrificial, saving
love by the only person who had the power to act. It is an amazing act, but can
we say that the mother should have acted as she did?[116] My hunch is that we
can. Intuitively, it seems that the act was not just good and admirable, but
bound up in a mother’s responsibility to care for her children. I can imagine
that if I found myself in the same situation and did not act to save, then I
would properly feel guilty (not just grief stricken) for not acting. But
notice that there is no need for any external moral compulsion upon a parent for
them to act in this way. It is a willing act that is powerfully, and properly,
compelled by the pure love of a parent for a child. The doctrine of the
Incarnation simply, and sensibly, says that the same is true of God: it was his
willing responsibility to perfectly love and care for his creatures that
compelled him to become human and sacrifice himself on a cross.

All
this shows that the doctrine of the Incarnation is neither logically nor
morally objectionable. It is not ridiculous to say that God could, would, and
should have become man. I do not want to finish there, though: all I have done
so far is make a defence against the idea that the Incarnation is ridiculous. I
want continue by making a positive case for the sublime beauty of this
doctrine.

Sublime!

Christians
believe that the doctrine of the Incarnation highlights the sublime glory of
God, rather than detracts from it. They find an opportunity for praise, not
ridicule, in the idea that God would love personally and self-sacrificially..
And they have found it so ever since they first understood the implications of
what had taken place in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It might surprise
some Muslim readers to hear that the doctrine of the Incarnation was not some
late innovation developed by church councils a few centuries after the fact.
The historical record testifies to the Incarnation being praised in one of the
very earliest Christian songs – a song that was being sung within a few years
of Jesus’ time on earth. It is recorded in the Letter to the Philippians:

Though he was in the form of God, did not
count equality with God a thing to be grasped,

but emptied himself, by taking the form
of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form, he humbled
himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and
bestowed on him the name that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father

(The
Letter to the Philippians 2:6–11).

This
song reveals how the early Christians saw the humiliation of the Incarnation
not as an embarrassment for God, but as an act that deserves even greater
praise and worship. Why? They saw the size of the astonishing gulf between
Jesus’ heavenly throne of glory and his earthly cross of humiliation as
providing some sense of the depth of God’s love for us. In this song, Christians
are offering God the highest possible praise because the Second Person of the
Trinity was willing to go incredibly far in rescuing us from the perilous
situation our sin had placed us in.

This
sort of praise makes sense. It does seem right to say that, in acts of
self-sacrificial love and service, the greater the degree of sacrifice, the
more worthy that act is of praise. To illustrate this, I return to the story of
the Ugandan Dr Matthew Lukwiya who gave his life to care for Ebola sufferers,
and to save (potentially) millions from almost certain death. Dr Lukwiya was
not just any Ugandan doctor. Before the events of 2000 he had genuine claim to
being one of Uganda’s – indeed Africa’s – greatest doctors. He was
intellectually brilliant and performed outstandingly throughout his education.
He was awarded scholarships to prestigious medical schools, including
sponsorship for a Master’s degree in Tropical Paediatrics in the UK, for which
he won a prize for the highest marks in his course. He was the superintendent
of Lacor Hospital, perhaps Uganda’s best public hospital, and was in the
process of completing a second Master’s degree when the Ebola breakout
occurred. He was unfailingly loyal. Despite the fact that 70% of newly
qualified Ugandan doctors moved overseas for more lucrative opportunities, he remained
to care for his people. He was staggeringly brave. In 1989, when armed rebels
stormed the Lacor hospital to take nurses as hostages, he offered himself in
their place. During the week he was held captive, he was abused and dragged
through the desert before being released. Clearly he was a great and
praiseworthy man. This greatness makes his act of humble self-sacrifice even
more praiseworthy, for he had so much to give up. His glory is magnified by
the fact that he did not consider his high status, ability and knowledge
something to cling tightly to for his own sake. Instead, his unique training,
skills and abilities gave him the opportunity to serve – and save – people in a
desperate situation. This extraordinary story shows how we can say that humble
service is praiseworthy; humble service by a great one, at the cost of great
sacrifice, is highly praiseworthy.

That
is the declaration of the early Christians. Their song proclaims that God’s
glory is magnified, not diminished, by his willingness to
self-sacrificially share in the earthly human condition in order to serve and
save us from sin. Christians desire to sing such a song to celebrate a  sublime
vision of divine love in action. And Christians believe it is not ridiculous to
sing such a song because of the failure of the moral and coherence objections.
We have seen that it makes sense to say that God might become a human being,
and that doing so is morally admirable so long as there is good reason for God
to do so. Here we encounter a second moral objection from Muslims: the reason
Christians give for the Incarnation is morally objectionable too. Perhaps God could
become man, but surely not for the purpose of dying an innocent death on a
cross. I consider this second moral challenge in the next chapter.

Chapter 6

Justice and Grace:
The Problem of the Cross

Longing
for justice

Humans
appear to be hard-wired to long for justice. I see this in people’s reactions
when I tell the following story about a man I shared a house with at university.
One day he was riding his bicycle along a busy city road near where we lived.
He had stopped at a set of traffic lights, and while he was waiting he was
struck from behind by a luxury car. The impact knocked him and his bicycle off
the road and onto the footpath. The bike was wrecked and he was badly hurt. The
driver of the vehicle got out, came over to the stricken cyclist on the ground
and said to him: ‘I did that deliberately. I don’t like bike riders. I don’t
like them being on the road, and if you have any problem with that then talk to
my lawyers. They are very expensive, very good and they will get me off’. He
then got back into his car and drive off. There were a number of witnesses to
this event and they said to my friend, ‘We saw what happened, we heard what he
said, and we will testify to it in court’. The case went to court, and despite
the eyewitness testimony to the driver’s guilt, his expensive lawyers got the
charges dropped on a technicality. Intuitively, most would agree that this kind
of situation is just not right: it is an injustice that cries out to be
righted. Intuitively, too, we have a common sense of what would be required to
properly make it right. It would require the driver being punished in some way for
both his actions and his attitude to the law, as well as offering the cyclist
both an apology and reparation for the damage.

Humans
also appear to be hard-wired to desire grace and mercy, rather than simple
justice.[117]
When we are guilty of some offence, we are naturally pleased when we are able
to escape deserved punishment for it. Some want to escape punishment at the
expense of justice. This was certainly the case in the story of the cyclist and
the car, where the driver sought to escape the punishment he deserved, and he
did so in a way that was immoral and unjust (even if it was technically legal).
But escaping punishment does not need to be unjust. The laws of most societies
recognise that offended parties and legal authorities have the moral right to
act in grace and mercy towards the offender. They can forgive an offender and
not lay charges or waive the need for reparation. They can choose to graciously
bear the cost of any offence. I have been the recipient of such mercy many
times. One time was when, in my first job, I made a mistake on a building site.
I told the builders where to construct a staircase, but when they completed it,
they discovered it did not connect to the floor. The repairs cost my company
around $50,000 – money that I did not have! I could have offered to work for
free for a couple of years to pay off the debt, but instead I apologised and
appealed to my boss for mercy. Amazingly, he granted me mercy. The company bore
the cost, and I even kept my job! My hunch is that the appeal for mercy and
grace is common – especially in situations where the punishment or debt is
great, or where it is impossible to make reparations.

Both
Islam and Christianity teach that this innate longing for both justice and
mercy is sensible because God is both just and merciful. Because the Creator is
just, his creation is a place of justice where we long for right to be done,
wrongs to be righted and we wisely fear his perfect judgement on our sin. Because
the Creator is merciful and gracious, when we sin we long for him to accept our
apology and repentance by forgiving us our sins and relinquishing his just
punishments. Christians ritually pray ‘Your will be done’ and ‘forgive us our
sins’; Muslims ritually pray ‘Lead us on the straight path’ and ‘grant us
forgiveness and mercy’.[118]
We pray similar prayers, but we have different expectations of how God might
answer them. The devoted Muslim generally stands before their Lord and Judge
confidently expecting justice, but hoping for mercy.[119]
The devoted Christian stands before their heavenly Father confidently expecting
grace because justice was somehow fulfilled by the cross of Christ. Muslims
regard this Christian confidence as badly misplaced. In large part, this is
because rather than satisfying justice, Muslims see the Christian understanding
of the cross of Christ as a major travesty of justice.

A
travesty of justice!

The
Christian doctrine of the atoning death of Christ on the cross is unacceptable
to Muslims. Akhtar teases out some of the problems the doctrine causes for the
Muslim mindset like this:

Muslims
endorse redemption insofar as it resembles forgiveness, expiation and
reparation among humans and, between humanity and God, reconciliation through
closing the rift caused by sin. They reject, however, the Christian mechanism
whereby God attains redemption for us by atonement of deserved sins. The Qur’an
rejects it as metaphysically incoherent, theologically unnecessary and morally
demeaning. This difference creates an enduring and volatile dogmatic deadlock
between two religious superpowers.[120]

Loosely
speaking, Akhtar is agreeing with me that Christians and Muslims both see the
importance of divine justice and divine grace and the need for both these ideas
to meaningfully incorporate features like apology (repentance), forgiveness,
expiation (wiping clean of offence), reparation and reconciliation. He
identifies that it is the precise mechanism of atonement described by Christian
doctrine that is problematic for Muslims. Briefly, Muslims object to the atonement
in three main ways: historically, metaphysically and morally.

The
historical objection argues that Jesus did not die on the cross. Usually
it appeals to this single, well-known verse of the Qur’an:

That they
said, ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah’; but
they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them,
and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge,
but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not … (Q4:157–158).

Interpretation
of this ambiguous verse is contentious among Muslim scholars. However, it is
generally accepted that it denies that Christ died on the cross (and that some,
perhaps miraculous, illusion was performed by God). Since we are rejecting
special pleading to the Qur’an, then Muslims will require a supporting
historical case for this claim that accords with the evidence. This historical
case is not strong. The historical evidence is overwhelmingly weighted towards
Jesus of Nazareth dying on a Roman cross. Indeed, the claim that Jesus died on
the cross is almost universally endorsed by professional historians.
Furthermore, there are various theological problems posed by the ‘illusion’
account, and these have been pointed out by a variety of Christian thinkers.[121] This historical
objection is, therefore, a weak one. In any case, our concerns are primarily
philosophical, so I will move on to the next two objections.

The
metaphysical objection usually argues that the Christian understanding
of the cross of Christ is incoherent because it makes no sense that God could
die. This is reasonable enough at face value. Any doctrine that claims that the
immortal God died, in the sense that the necessary and eternal Being ceased to
exist (even for a moment in time), is clearly nonsensical. Nevertheless, this
objection can be dealt with by recognising that the doctrine of the atonement
does not make the crude claim that God died. Instead, it claims that Jesus, as
the Second Person of the Trinity, did not (and could not) die with respect to
his divine nature but he died with respect to his human nature. This is
coherent in the same way that it is plausible to think that Jesus was omnipotent
with respect to his divine nature, but incapable of ‘leaping tall buildings in
a single bound’ with respect to his human nature. Moreover, this doctrine does not
view Jesus as dying in the sense of ceasing to exist, but in the sense of his
spirit (or soul) being disembodied from his earthly body which died. William
Lane Craig puts it like this:

Christ could
not die with respect to his divine nature but he could die with respect to his
human nature. What is human death? It is the separation of the soul from the
body when the body ceases to be a living organism. The soul survives the body
and will someday be re-united with it in a resurrected form. That’s what
happened to Christ. His soul was separated from his body and his body ceased to
be alive. He became temporarily a disembodied person. On the third day God
raised him from the dead in a transformed body.[122]

I
do not claim that there are no metaphysical mysteries described by this
Christian doctrine, but I do claim that Muslims are yet to formulate a convincing
objection that takes into account this sort of subtle, rather than crude, description
of it. Once again we need to look back to the classical period to find an
attempt at a sophisticated objection. In the often-forgotten but thoughtful
polemic Al Rad Al Jamil (usually
attributed to al-Ghazali), the author argued that any Christian idea that held
Jesus’ human nature to be only a conceptual reality and not real in any
physical sense made nonsense of Jesus’ human nature dying on the cross in any
meaningful way. Although he is correct, he is arguing against a minority
understanding. The mainstream doctrine remains untouched by the metaphysical
objection, and this leaves us to focus on the moral objection.

The
moral objection argues that any Christian doctrine of the atonement that
incorporates the idea of ‘substitution’ is morally senseless and/or unjust.
Muslims see two main ethical problems. The first is that the idea of penal
substitution – whereby someone is penalised, and especially punished, on
another’s behalf – contravenes the sensible principle of justice that each
person must be held responsible for the morality of their actions. This
principle is articulated in the Qur’an like this:

And every soul
earns not except against itself, and no bearer of burdens will bear the burden
of another (Q6:164; also17:15; 39:7; 53:38).

Based
on this principle, the objection argues that it is immoral for Jesus to
substitute himself for us in any way that involves him taking punishment for,
or paying the legal cost for, the sin of humans. Ulfat Aziz-us-Samad puts it
like this:

This dogma is
not only a denial of the mercy of God but also of His justice. To demand the
price of blood in order to forgive the sins of men is to show a complete lack
of mercy, and to punish a man who is not guilty for the sins of others … We
fail to see how the suffering and death of one man can wipe out the sins of
others. It sounds something like the physician breaking his own head to cure
the headache of his patients. The idea of substitutionary or vicarious
sacrifice is illogical, meaningless and unjust.[123]

Key
here is the belief that it is unjust for an innocent person to be punished on
behalf of the guilty, and that the punishment of one person bears no relation
to expiating the sin of another.

The
second moral problem Muslims identify is that any sort of substitutionary
atonement doctrine is not simply unjust, but also compromises God’s mercy. Well-known
polemicist Jamal Badawi puts it like this:

Is it merciful
for God, knowing man's weakness, to ignore repentance and require bloodshed? Is
it merciful for God to kill his own Son? Is it not more merciful that God
simply forgives sin without this blood sacrifice? It appears that Paul's theory
is inconsistent with either the divine qualities of justice and mercy.

The
idea here is that it seems meaningless to talk about the cross being an act of
forgiveness or mercy when there is still punishment being meted out. Put
differently, if mercy involves waiving the requirement for satisfaction or
punishment, then the cross fails to be merciful because these requirements are
not waived but executed upon Jesus.

This
moral objection to the Christian belief that Jesus’ atoning death involved some
sort of ‘substitution’ is weighty enough to have warranted close examination by
Christians. Drawing on their thinking, I will argue that the moral objection
fails because it rests on too poor an account of divine punishment and
forgiveness: one that adopts an inadequate view of divine punishment as simply
retributive when it is, instead, reprobative; and one that ignores the
relational features incorporated in the Christian idea of atonement.

Justice
and forgiveness

In
this section I want to argue that the traditional Muslim view of divine
forgiveness is sensible, but that Badawi is wrong that God can ‘simply forgive’
in a way that does not require some sort of satisfaction, or atonement. In
Islam, humans are not in the situation where there is necessarily any problem
of sin that needs sorting out with God. Therefore, Islam does not have an
account of atonement per se. However, it does recognise that practically
all humans do sin against God, and that this sin has just consequences
including the requirement for apology, repentance, reparation and punishment –
in other words, the requirement for satisfaction or atonement. Moreover, in
response to this situation, Islam holds that because God is merciful, there is
the possibility that the requirements of reparation and punishment can be
remitted in some way for the apologetic and repentant sinner.

Once
again we need to recognise that this forgiveness dynamic operates within what I
have been calling the Muslim legislative model of divine/human interaction.
Indeed, this dynamic is demanded by the model, for God is the law-giver and
judge whose role is to legislate consequences to those who transgress his law.
Divine judgement is against a standard of perfection:

Then shall
anyone who has done an atom’s weight of good, see it! And anyone who has done
an atom’s weight of evil, shall see it (Q99:7–8).

Judicial
consequences are generally regarded to be of four types: qisas
(retaliation), diyya (compensation), hudud (fixed punishments)
and tazir (discretionary punishments). Clearly these consequences are
reparative and punitive in nature. Under this model, all (unforgiven) evil will
ultimately result in divine punishment. This model is reasonable. Under the
legislative model, God can fairly punish any offender for their disobedience
and he is under no moral obligation whatever to overlook or forgive sin, or to
moderate or be lenient in his punishment.

Nevertheless,
in Islam God is merciful and just, so Islam augments its model of divine
justice with a model of divine forgiveness. Under this model, God can forgive
whomever, and whatever, he wants to forgive. This forgiveness takes the form of
leniency in, or reprieve of, punishment:

The punishment
will not be lightened for them, nor will they be reprieved, except for those
who repent after that and correct themselves. For indeed, Allah is forgiving
and merciful (Q3:88–89).

The
idea here is that any deserved punishment can be waived, or lessened by God –
especially for those who display the correct attitude of apology and repentance.
The precise relationship of repentance to punishment under this model is a
matter of dispute. Conservative schools of thought (like Kharijites) teach that
punishments hold regardless of repentance; most traditional Sunni schools teach
that repentance does not prevent legal punishment, but these punishments should
be regarded as corrective not punitive; and liberal schools (e.g. Shafi) hold
that repentance removes the requirement for punishment.[124] All three approaches fit the
model, and this range of views is evidence of the fact that under this model,
God is free to forgive or not forgive, regardless of the attitude of the
sinner. God can forgive with or without the requirement for repentance or
apology. Nevertheless, it is philosophically likely – as well as theologically
likely, according to the verse above – that God is more likely to forgive someone
who displays a correct attitude of repentance.

Assuming
the legislative model of divine/human interaction, this account of forgiveness
is eminently reasonable. It is sensible to think that penalties and/or punishments
can be partially or fully waived. It happens all the time in our courts. I
recently had a speeding fine waived due to a clear driving record and an
apology. Did I deserve a fine? Yes. Was it unjust for the judge to waive the
fine? No. Under a legislative model, fines are fairly waived, criminals are
fairly pardoned, amnesties are fairly declared and sentences are fairly
suspended. Moreover, in this model any offended party can decline to press
charges against the offender – regardless of the attitude of the offender. In
this case, the sinned against can bear the consequences of the sinner. For
example, suppose I owned a classic sports car that I had found abandoned in a
shed and lovingly restored to pristine racing condition at great expense and
over many years. Suppose that someone then steals this car and crashes it
beyond repair. I am completely within my moral rights to forgive them the
offence by letting them go without any obligation, abandoning any feelings of
anger or resentment, and by replacing the car at my own expense. I might, for
the sake of correcting the man’s attitudes, make this forgiveness conditional
on an apology and repentance, but I need not. I am completely within my moral
rights to forgive them regardless of whether they are sorry, repentant and
prepared to make full restitution, or whether they are rebellious, full of
excuses and willing to pay nothing. It seems fair, then, to think that in the
case of divine forgiveness, God can also forego punishment in a way that does
not violate his justice.

But
notice that this Islamic forgiveness dynamic negates the Muslim moral objection
to the atonement – that is, Christ’s sacrifice compromises God’s mercy. We can
agree with Badawi that God can just forgive sin. But can he do it as ‘simply’
as Badawi thinks? Can God forgive without any atoning requirements? Can God
forgive without, as Badawi puts it, sacrifice or bloodshed? Not in any way that
conforms to Islamic justice. We have just seen that Islamic justice recognises
that disobedience usually has some sort of cost or consequence – whether
personal, financial or social – and in those cases, someone always has to repay
or somehow make satisfaction for that cost. This is one of the principles
behind the concepts of qisas (retaliation) and diyya
(compensation),[125]
and it is why we say things like ‘this criminal needs to pay for what they have
done’. Forgiveness does not ignore or avoid this principle of justice; it
simply transfers any cost from the offender to the offended. Think again about
my sports-car illustration. While it is possible, and morally right, for me to  “simply
forgive” the man who steals and destroys my classic sports car, it is, in fact,
in no way a simple thing. This sort of forgiveness is secured at great personal
financial and emotional cost to me. In order to forgive I must sacrifice the
cost of the car and my attachment to the car. Forgiveness here does not ignore
justice, it just transfers the payment or sacrifice to the forgiver. So,
forgiveness usually does involve sacrifice, but does this compromise mercy? I
do not see how. If anything, the opposite is the case: the willingness of the
forgiver to bear the consequences of sin highlights their merciful nature.

We
can conclude that, ironically, the justice principles of the Muslim forgiveness
ethic negate Badawi’s moral objection to the atonement. God can, in his mercy,
simply forgive people in the way the Qur’an describes, but not in a way that
ignores the various costs or satisfactions demanded by justice.[126] Put
differently, Islam sensibly recognises the need for atonement or satisfaction
for sin. This, however, does not let Christianity off the hook. If the Islamic
model of divine forgiveness is reasonable, then this seems to strengthen the
case for the moral objection to penal substitution. If it is true that God can
simply forgive the sin of some or all people who repent, then why does Jesus
need to get involved? Why is there any need for the sort of vicarious sacrifice
offered by Jesus on the cross? The Christian answer to this question is that
the substitution model of the atonement incorporates a range of relational
features of sin and divine forgiveness that a legislative model alone is too narrow
to address. The important question is whether or not the substitution model can
do so morally.

Justice
and atonement

In
this section I want to respond to the objection that the Christian idea that penal
substitution is part of the atoning work of Christ on the cross is incoherent
or immoral. First I will clarify what this idea is attempting to describe.
Unlike other doctrines we have looked at – like the doctrine of the Trinity and
the Incarnation, the doctrine of the atonement is not spelt out in much detail
in the creedal statements of Christianity. Instead, various attempts have been
made to draw together a large variety of images and concepts used by the Bible
to describe what was happening when Jesus died on the cross. Substitution – the
idea that Jesus was (in some way) ‘taking the place’ of humans on the cross – is
just one of these concepts. Others include ransom, reconciliation and victory
over death. Christian thinkers have articulated explanations and defences of
each of these ideas throughout history. Philosopher Steven Porter notes that:

We possess
Irenaeus’s recapitulation theory, Gregory of Nyssa’s fish-hook theory,
Athanasius’s mystical theory, Augustine’s ransom theory, Abelard’s
moral-influence theory, Anselm’s satisfaction theory, Scotus’s acceptilation
theory, and Calvin’s theory of penal substitution, to name only a few of the
historical stand-outs.[127]

Honing
in on the idea of substitution, the vicarious element of the atoning death of
Jesus is described most clearly in these Bible passages:

Surely he has
borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten
by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was
crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us
peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (The Prophet
Isaiah 53:4–6).

He himself
bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to
righteousness (The First Letter of Peter 2:24).

one has died
for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live
might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was
raised … All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself (The
Second Letter to the Corinthians 5:14–18).

Notice
some important features of the idea of substitution in these verses. First, it
is the case, as Muslims point out, that Jesus is portrayed as suffering by somehow
carrying a penalty that is the just consequence of human sin: it was for human ‘transgressions’
that he was ‘pierced’. Second, this vicarious suffering has contributed to the
forgiveness of sins in some way that removed any offence between God and us: it
made ‘peace’ with God. Third, the idea of substitution involves more than just
a legal/penal substitution: Jesus was in some way a relational substitute too. So,
in these verses sin is described as both a transgression and a turning
away, and similarly forgiveness is described as involving both chastisement and
reconciliation. It is fair to say that to my knowledge, no one has developed a full
and comprehensive philosophical theory of just how all the facets of atonement work
– understandable, given that the Bible does not explain it in great detail. Nevertheless,
we do not need a comprehensive theory in order to rebut the moral objection.
What we do need is a plausible defence of the idea that relational and penal
substitution could properly play a role in atonement. Let me offer just such an
account that draws particularly on the thoughts of Swinburne and Wolterstorff.[128]

First,
and straightforwardly, my Christian account of atonement (like the Muslim
account) recognises that human sin is an offence to God that has consequences –
including the need for us to apologise, repent, make reparation where possible
and suffer just punishment. Remember that, under the Christian account of
divine/human interaction, all these consequences are understood in both
relational and legal terms; if sin is to be atoned for, then all these
relational and legal consequences need to be dealt with to God’s satisfaction. Christian
atonement, therefore, requires the satisfaction of God’s justice as well as full
restoration of a personal relationship with God.

Second,
my account recognises that humans are in the situation where our sin is so
serious that we are unable to offer to God the requirements for atonement. Although
we might be able to apologise and repent, the damage done by sin is too great
for us adequately offer reparation and penance, or survive the just punishment
– that is, death.

Third,
like the Muslim account, my account recognises that God could simply
waive these requirements. We have already discussed how foregoing penalty or
punishment for wrongdoing need not violate justice. However, while such a
waiver could resolve the legal issues involved, by itself it would do little to
overcome the personal alienation and estrangement that the fellowship model
recognises as existing between humans and God. Put differently, Christian
atonement is not simply about escaping punishment through God’s mercy; it is about
making good our personal relationship with God – something we are unable to do
unassisted.

Fourth,
my account argues that Jesus could properly act as a substitute for humans in
order to offer the relational requirements for atonement with God. There seems
no moral objection to this idea: it is reasonable to think that a substitute
can properly play a role in fulfilling the requirements of reconciliation
between persons. Christian philosopher Bruce Langtry offers the following
example of how this might work.[129]
Suppose a husband forgets his wife’s birthday. Due to the state of their relationship,
this oversight is deeply hurtful to his wife and damaging to their marriage.
The husband apologises and as an act of reconciliation, offers to take his wife
away for a weekend to the city to see a musical that she had been hoping to
see. Unfortunately the husband falls sick and is unable to make good his
promise. His sister offers to help out by taking her sister-in-law to town,
staying with her in the hotel and accompanying her to the show. The plan
remains the husband’s, but his sister steps in to take responsibility for
carrying it out. In this case the wife can still reasonably regard the trip as
an act of reconciliation by her husband, even though the sister is acting as
his substitute. Richard Swinburne argues that something similar is going on
with Jesus on the cross.[130]
His theory is that, like the sister in Langtry’s illustration, Jesus is able to
step in and on the cross offer the sort of relational reparation and penance
that humans are not in a position to be able to. This sort of ‘relational’
substitution seems acceptable so long as it is acceptable to the offended party
(the wife/God) and achieves reconciliation. There seems no reason why the same
should not be the case with the Christian atonement account. The crucial
question, then, is whether atonement can meaningfully incorporate the idea that
a substitute can play any role in satisfying the penal demands of God’s
justice.

My
atonement account recognises that God rightly expresses his just character by
punishing sin. This is important to emphasise, because many Christian defences
of penal substitution appeal to analogies that concern penalties or reparation,
rather than punishment. This is understandable because substitution in the case
of penalties is morally acceptable in legal thought. So, fines can be paid on
behalf of the guilty party by some innocent third party, and there need not be
any close relationship between these two parties. We also accept substitution
in transferring moral responsibility for paying penalties or reparation. For
example, I can agree to accept responsibility for any damage caused by my car,
regardless of who is driving it. At law this is called the principle of
imputation. This does not seem morally wrong so long as I am willing to accept
this responsibility. A similar sort of transfer of moral responsibility seems
to be involved in the payment of blood money in many cultures. An additional
feature of this sort of substitution is that it recognises a communal view of
legal responsibility, whereby a whole family or tribe is viewed as being able
to step in and bear some sort of moral responsibility for the actions of its
individual members.

However,
the Bible does not describe Jesus as substituting for us with respect to a mere
penalty or reparation, but rather with respect to punishment. Jesus on
the cross is viewed as suffering punishment – indeed, extreme and capital
punishment, so we require an account of how substitution might properly work
here. On first appearance, offering to be a substitute – even voluntarily – to
take punishment on behalf of a wrongdoer does not seem to be morally
acceptable. For example, many of my readers would agree that it could be appropriate
for a father to pay a punitive fine awarded to his son for stealing a car, but they
would also agree that there is something wrong with the father of a convicted
murderer serving his son’s time in prison so that the son can walk free. The
feeling that something is wrong here stems, I think, from our natural, intuitive
understanding of punishment: our intuition is that punishment for criminal acts
needs to be largely retributive – a payback in which the wrongdoer gets his
‘just deserts’. It feels like a problem for this sort of punishment to be laid
upon a substitute. I think that this intuition is likely correct, but I want to
argue that this does not pose an insurmountable problem for the Christian account
of the atonement. This is because the atonement need not be seen to portray a
case of simple retributive punishment but instead what Wolterstorff calls reprobative
punishment. In order to appreciate the difference, I will pause to take a
closer look at the concept of punishment which, as it turns out, is a more
slippery idea than it might at first seem.

Justice
and punishment

A
legal punishment is generally agreed by philosophers to be some sort of harsh
treatment that is imposed on a wrongdoer by a judicial authority in response to
wrongdoing that is seen to be, in some sense, against us all – that is,
against the morals of just society. The exact purpose of punishment, however,
is a matter of dispute, and three approaches to punishment are commonly argued:
retributivist, consequentialist and communicative.

Retributivist approaches argue that
the purpose of punishment is to make any offender suffer what they necessarily
‘deserve’ for their offence: popularly thought of as ‘an eye for an eye’. The
difficulty for this model is that the idea of ‘deserve’ here is slippery: why
exactly do offenders deserve to suffer and what exactly do they deserve to
suffer? Here philosophers appeal to ideas like righting imbalance in the moral
order, restoring unfair advantages gained by offenders, and satisfying the
righteous indignation of the offended. As I mentioned, these ideas are
intuitively appealing: they seem reasonable to our natural moral sensibilities.
In practice, however, it is hard to see how crude or simple retribution alone
provides an adequate punishment model. So, the sensible ideas of leniency and
foregoing punishment suggest that retribution is not always necessary, and, in
any case, applying retributive punishment is not always simple. If, for
example, someone kills my child, it does not seem right that I (or the state)
should kill their child in return simply to make things even, or to satisfy my
anger. Wolterstorff reasonably suggests that any wooden application of
retributive justice would be horrifically destructive in society.[131]

Consequentialist approaches, roughly
speaking, argue that punishments are inflicted primarily for the purpose of
benefitting society. The sorts of benefits in mind include deterring crime,
reforming offenders or removing the possibility of further offence by the
offender. The main problem with this approach is that the link between some
particular offence/offender and the punishment need not be strong in order to
achieve the desired purposes. To use an extreme example, the (accidental)
punishment of an innocent person may still have the effect of deterring crime.
Any crude version of this punishment model seems inadequate for the demands of
justice.

The
communicative approach tries to address the weaknesses in the first two
approaches by arguing that punishment operates to forcibly communicate to the
offender the deserved condemnation and/or censure for their offence. This
approach recognises that punishment is an expression of the righteous
indignation of the offended to the particular offence and an expression
of the non-acquiescence of society to wrongdoing. Thus, punishment operates to
forcibly impress upon the wrongdoer the stern disapproval of the justice
authority to their wrongdoing. In Wolterstorff’s words,

punishment on
this account is entirely on the wrongdoer and his deed: the imposition of hard
treatment on him counts as condemning him for his deed, and it is a way
of expressing resentment of the deed done and anger at him for
doing it.

Wolterstorff
calls this sort of punishment reprobative punishment. It is unclear
whether a reprobative theory can escape all the features of a retributive
theory. So, we can fairly ask whether the concept of just deserts plays some
role in shaping the appropriate degree of hard treatment meted out reprobatively.
Nevertheless, the general idea that punishment can be necessarily linked to
wrongdoing without being primarily, or directly, retributive seems plausible.

Now
if God’s system of justice is essentially retributive, then I agree with Muslim
objectors that the Christian account of the atonement creates moral problems. This
is because the idea of ‘just deserts’ does not seem to allow those deserts to
be transferable to a substitute in any obviously meaningful way. However, it
seems to me that the sort of punishment in mind in the Christian account of the
atonement need not demand a simple retributive idea of punishment. Wolterstorff,
instead, proposes that God’s system of justice operates primarily along the lines
of the communicative model. He suggests that ‘God’s punishment of human beings
for their wrongdoing is a condemnation of what was done and an expression of
God’s anger’.[132]
Thus, punishment is not a ‘necessary desert’ that God executes upon humans in
direct proportion to, or correspondence to, their wrongdoing. Instead,
punishment is God’s symbolic condemnation of, and forcible expression of his anger
at, their wrongdoing. If Wolterstorff is correct about this – and I think that
he is, then a good case can be made that when the Bible speaks of Jesus
suffering punishment for us, it is describing reprobative punishment.
Let me briefly describe how this could be so.

God’s
atonement system in the Bible revolves heavily around the idea of sacrifice. In
the days before Jesus, wrongdoers would atone for their sins by offering
various sacrifices at the temple whereby an animal would symbolically suffer
death in the place of the sinners. Clearly this idea of sacrifice is not meaningful
under any crude retributive model of punishment, because animal sacrifice
cannot genuinely ‘even things up’. The temple-centred system was clearly
reprobative. Moreover, and importantly, there was within the system the
opportunity for corporate sin to be atoned for – that is, the ‘sins of
all the people’. The two obvious examples in the Torah are the symbolic yearly
atonement festivals: the ‘Day of Atonement’ festival (Torah: Leviticus 16) and the
Passover remembrance festival (Torah: Numbers 28:16–25). In both these cases,
animals are sacrificed publicly, ritually and symbolically on behalf of many
of, or all of, the people. The Day of Atonement festival, in particular, makes
it clear that both a goat to be sacrificed and a ‘scape’ goat to be banished
are symbolically bearing all the sins of the people. Again this makes
far more sense when understood as a reprobative, rather than a direct retributive,
punishment corresponding to particular sins.

Now
the Bible can reasonably be understood as viewing Jesus’ act of sacrificial
suffering on the cross as being of this corporate, reprobative, sort. So, his
death is viewed in Passover terms: he died on the Passover weekend and he is
described in John’s gospel as the (Passover) lamb who ‘takes away the sin of
the world’ (The Gospel of John 1:29). His death is viewed as bearing the weight
of God’s expressed anger at sin, and Jesus himself talks about it in terms of
drinking the cup of God’s wrath (The Gospel of Mark 14:36 alludes to this image
in the Prophet Jeremiah 25:15–26). Moreover, Jesus’ suffering for our sins is theologically
described as him being ‘made sin for us’ (The Second Letter to the Corinthians
5:21). It is generally agreed by Christian scholars that this is to be
understood in the sense of Jesus being made a ‘sin-offering’ on behalf of all
the people, again along the lines of the Torah’s atoning animal sacrifices. The idea, then, that Jesus’ death was ‘for us’ in the
sense that it satisfied the demands for corporate reprobative justice seems to
accord with the biblical account.

Now,
if I am correct that Jesus’ atoning work is best viewed under a system of
reprobative justice, then we require an account of how this substitution makes
sense within a reprobative account of punishment – especially as the account
requires that the wrongdoer is punished. I suggest that this requirement
is fulfilled in the Christian account along the following lines:

·
In
this account, it is humanity as a whole that is the wrongdoer.

·
It
is therefore humanity as a whole that should be punished in such a way that
God’s indignation and censure is forcibly expressed and impressed upon humanity
(as a whole).

·
This
requirement can be satisfied if a proper representative of humanity is
punished.

·
Jesus,
as fully human, can properly take on the role of federal representative.[133]

Clearly
this account hinges on the idea of a proper representative being a sensible one.
I think that it is. We recognise the sense of it in, for example, the ancient
idea that ‘champions’ can representatively fight a war on behalf of their
respective tribes. The champion can represent his entire tribe in a way that
fulfils all the requirements of military justice. If this idea is sensible,
then as long as humanity properly ‘gets the message’ (and the Christian account
incorporates the action of the Holy Spirit in enabling this to happen), then
the representative suffering of Jesus on humanity’s behalf is morally coherent
under a communicative model of punishment.

Nevertheless,
I can imagine a retributivist objecting that the adoption of a communicative/reprobative
understanding of punishment merely reduces to the adoption of a
consequentialist account. It then suffers the weakness that it fails to offer a
strong enough link between the substitute and the wrongdoing. One central, but as
yet unmentioned, feature of Jesus’ substitutionary role deals with this objection
– that is, the idea of substitution in the Christian atonement account is not
one that incorporates some innocent third party.

Justice
and Trinity

Whatever
model of punishment best aligns with the biblical account of Jesus’ death on
the cross, it is absolutely not the case that Jesus’ vicarious role can
be described as a simple substitution and punishment of an innocent third
party. Indeed, the Christian atonement account does not involve a simple case
of substitution of any kind. Instead, the atonement is understood as
operating within a trinitarian framework. This is important. Under a trinitarian
framework, Jesus is not simply some innocent representative human being
punished by an angry God for other people’s sin. Instead, since Jesus is the Second
Person of the Trinity, whatever was happening on the cross was all happening,
in a sense, ‘within’ God. Care is needed here, and crude parodies of what the
Bible describes will not suffice. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that, under a
trinitarian understanding, the cross of Christ involves God, alone, sorting out
atonement for human sin. Since Jesus is both divine and human, his death on the
cross operates as God (appropriately) expressing his anger at human sin and
censuring humanity, yet doing so in such a way that he, himself, bears the full
destructive force of that expression.

This
is, I suggest, sensible in the way that any true forgiveness involves
the forgiver bearing pain and anguish. I know, for example, of a woman who
discovered her husband had been betraying her for many years. Upon being
discovered, he pleaded for forgiveness. Astonishingly, she chose to forgive him
and allowed him to be restored to a full loving relationship. This act of
forgiveness, however, was profoundly painful. It involved the wife internally
wrestling and anguishing over how to avoid relinquishing graciously treating
her husband with love and instead justly punishing him for his infidelity. I can
imagine the painful, internal trinitarian struggle to atone for human sin working,
perhaps, a little similarly. If this is the case, then, even if punishment is
partly retributive, the moral objection loses its force. We have already recognised
that God can justly forego punishment, and therefore the requirement for full
retribution is unnecessary for atonement. We can also recognise that God can
satisfy his indignation and censure sin in any just way he chooses. As long as
Jesus is fully divine and fully human, it is completely just and appropriate
for God to bear the chastisement of human sin within his (trinitarian) self.

Let
me draw together the threads of my argument. The Muslim moral objection to the
Christian idea of penal substitution rests on – and is question begging against
– a retributive understanding of divine punishment and forgiveness. Christ’s
vicarious sacrifice can, however, be seen to be morally unobjectionable when it
is viewed as operating within both a reprobative understanding of divine
punishment and a relational model of divine atonement. If I am correct, then
the sacrificial death of Christ can reasonably be viewed as having satisfied
all God’s requirements for atonement. Under this account, human sin has been
conclusively dealt with in such a way that covenant fellowship with God can be
restored. Despite the appeal of such a notion to Christians, some Muslims find
this idea objectionable too. It is worth concluding with a brief response.

Justice
and grace

Supposing
the Christian doctrine of the atonement is philosophically unobjectionable,
there remains a further Muslim objection to the Christian view of divine forgiveness:
that it is too cheap. I think of this as the ‘Hitler objection’, because I have
been challenged by Muslims that under the Christian model Hitler could have
sinned, heinously and happily, yet with impunity before God because Jesus had
already borne the punishment for all his sins. It is easy to see how this
misrepresents the forgiveness dynamics of the atonement. The cross of Christ is
certainly viewed by Christians as sufficient to carry the punishment for
Hitler’s sin against God; it must be, if it is sufficient to carry the
punishment for the sin of all humanity. But to think that this gives the
pardoned sinner carte blanche to continue sinning is to completely
misunderstand the nature of atonement. Under the Christian account, atonement
is primarily concerned with restoration to a proper loving and obedient
relationship with God – the sort of relationship in which one would have no
desire to sin further. Obviously this atonement includes having the legal
consequences of sin dealt with, but only as a function of the deeper relational
problems being dealt with. Jesus anticipated the possibility that some might
misunderstand God’s forgiveness in this ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ sort of way, and
addressed it using the following story:

the kingdom of
heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his
servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten
thousand talents [approx. $9,000,000,000]. And since he could not pay, his
master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had,
and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have
patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the
master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But when that
same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a
hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you
owe.’ So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with
me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison until he
should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they
were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that
had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked
servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should
not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in
anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his
debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not
forgive your brother from your heart (The Gospel of Matthew 18:21–35).

This
story – in which, obviously, the king represents God and the servant an
ordinary human – highlights many of the features of the atonement ethic of
Christianity. Atonement involves an extreme inability of humans to satisfy
God’s requirements in light of our sin; a gracious foregoing of, and
forgiveness of, these requirements at great personal cost to God; and,
importantly, the commitment by God to restore and keep humans within his
personal ‘household’ community. The story emphasises that this restoration is
into a loving personal relationship with God, and a God-centred community that
is characterised by this sort of gracious forgiveness. Embracing the foregoing
of punishment while at the same time refusing to embrace this restoration is,
in effect, a refusal to accept atonement. A choice has been made to reject the
possibility of one’s sins being forgiven and one’s punishment foregone. What
this means is that whatever Hitler’s fate on Judgement Day, there is no sense whatsoever
in thinking that the Christian account of atonement allows him to sin with
impunity. The Hitler objection can only be made if one has a narrow view of
atonement that focuses only on the legal aspects of atonement. The Christian
account has a much richer view of atonement than this, and so it clearly avoids
this objection.

We
can reasonably conclude that, contrary to Muslim objections, the Christian
account of the atonement – and particularly its incorporation of Jesus as a
substitute – is neither immorally unjust nor an example of cheap grace. Since
it makes sense not just of the legal features of divine forgiveness, but also
the relational ones, it can reasonably be preferred to the Muslim conception of
divine forgiveness. In short, it sensibly and profoundly holds grace and
justice together. I recognise that this supposes that the Christian model of
divine/human interaction is correct. Soon I will argue for why I think it is,
but before I do so we will see how this model also impacts upon one’s view of
scripture.

Chapter 7

Dictation and Inspiration:
The Problem of Revelation

An
inerrant Word

The
accuracy of testimony often matters a great deal. Court cases are a case in
point. I have a Japanese-speaking friend who was called to assist in an
Australian court case in which a Japanese backpacker had been arrested as part
of a group of friends all found carrying heroin into the country in secret
compartments of their suitcases. This man’s testimony to the border police was
that he knew nothing of the secret compartment because his suitcase was a new
bag. It was one of a whole set of new bags given to him and his friends by his
hosts in Thailand, who had told the group that all their original bags had been
damaged by accident. The interviews with the border police used translators,
and unfortunately, imprecision crept in to the recorded testimony. In one
interview the backpacker was translated and recorded as saying ‘my bag was
stolen’; in a second interview he was translated and recorded as saying ‘our
bags were stolen’. The police thought he was changing his story. In actual fact,
the police had changed translators. This was crucial, because the
Japanese phrase Kaban o torareta can be translated as either ‘my bag was
stolen’ or ‘our bags were stolen’. Not only this, but the second translator can
be heard in the recording of the interview trying to clarify the meaning at the
exact time the police are accusing him of changing his story. In court, the
judge accepted the police’s assessment that the young man had deliberately
changed his story and sentenced him to 20 years in jail. He is still there
today. This story shows that in situations where it is crucial that testimony
be accurate, it is important that the original testimony is accurate and it is
transmitted in a way that prevents errors creeping in. If it is important for
us to be sure that any human testimony we receive is accurate, then it is all
the more important for us to be sure any testimony from God we receive is
accurate. All theists agree that, because we are creatures belonging to the Creator
God, God’s revealed truth is the most important testimony we can possibly
receive. It is most important personally, socially, globally and eternally. It
is most important metaphysically and ethically. If we are to confidently
declare any text to be the ‘Word of God’, then it is crucial that it be free
from errors.

Both
Christianity and Islam make the confident declaration that their respective
holy books consist of the received and inerrant Word of God. Both make this
claim in some sort of exclusive way, arguing that the other’s scripture is somehow
defective. Both make this challenge focussing on the features of testimony I
have just highlighted. So, both have serious questions concerning whether the
extant scripture of the other did, in fact, originate with a testimony from
God. Both call into question whether the extant scripture of the other has been
transmitted accurately over time. Concerning the origins of the Bible, the
Muslim challenge makes a much stronger claim. It holds that the Bible is
necessarily deficient because there was human participation in its original
authorship. They object to any human element whatever in the authorship of the
Bible, arguing that it results in us being unable to be confident of its
inerrancy. Once again, Akhtar puts it nicely:

There can be
no fallible elements in a work that is divine in conception, design and
delivery. If we concede … that scripture is a synthesis of divine and human
elements even in the genesis of its claims, we may legitimately ask; ‘Are the
human elements true?’[134]

What
Akhtar is talking about here is the Christian doctrine of the inspiration of
scripture. That is, the authorship of the Bible involved human participation
that was divinely inspired and therefore preserved the Bible as entirely the
inerrant Word of God. Notice that Akhtar’s challenge to this doctrine is purely
to do with testimonial inerrancy. It ignores – as I will ignore – any
theological controversy concerning whether the doctrine of the inspiration of
scripture is theologically satisfactory.[135]
This challenge can be described as follows: The Bible as we have it today
cannot be considered the inerrant Word of God because of the inherent
fallibility of the human involvement in the authorial process (as described by
the doctrine of inspiration) and the unreliability of the process by which it
has been transmitted to us. Conversely, the Qur’an can be considered the
inerrant Word of God because of the lack of human involvement in its authorship
and the absolute reliability of the process by which it has been transmitted to
us.

In
response to this challenge I will argue three points. First, the revelatory
process described in the Christian doctrine of inspiration is coherent and offers
a degree of reliability that can provide us with the inerrant Word of God.
Second, the Muslim account of the absolute inerrancy of the Qur’an fails because
its revelatory process exhibits similar epistemic features to the Christian
account – including, unavoidably, human participation in its origin. Third,
given that both accounts unavoidably feature human involvement, the Christian fellowship
model of divine/human interaction makes the most sense of such involvement.

Before
I continue, we need to clarify what we mean by inerrancy. At first glance we
might expect that it simply means that the content of any scripture must be
‘completely free from any error in any respect whatsoever’. However, this
simple meaning is inadequate because both the Bible and the Qur’an fail this
criterion. They both, for example, make statements that are clearly not intended
to be, or at least need not be, scientifically accurate. Both use hyperbole,
metaphor, poetry and parable to teach theological truth. For example, the
Qur’an talks about God ‘sitting on a throne’, and the Bible records Jesus
saying that a mustard seed is the ‘smallest of all the seeds on earth’ (The
Gospel of Mark 4:31). Sympathetic readers of both texts recognise that these statements
do not pose a problem because they are metaphorical in nature. Such statements are
sensibly read as a scientifically inaccurate, yet theologically accurate,
metaphorical description of a divine truth. Our idea of inerrancy, then, will
need to take into account that the Bible and the Qur’an are both complex pieces
of literature exhibiting a variety of genres – none of which could properly be
called ‘scientific’ in today’s terms. In saying this, I am not making excuses
for either the Qur’an or the Bible with respect to the accuracy of their
historical and theological claims. I am simply pointing out that we cannot have
a wooden, or simplistic, idea of inerrancy when it comes to scriptural content.
Instead, we need a sophisticated account like this one, made by a
representative group of scholars in Chicago in 1978:

Being wholly
and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its
teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the
events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in
its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.[136]

The
key idea here is that scripture is inerrant if it is free from error in the
particular propositions it makes – including historical and scientific
propositions, but in such a way that allows for its style and purpose in making
those propositions. Much more could be said about this, but for now I will
assume that this is a sensible approach to inerrancy with respect to content.[137]

Recognise,
too, that I am also using the idea of inerrancy with respect to transmission of
the words and texts of scripture. Any written or oral divine revelation will be
‘content inerrant’ when it is first received, but since the scriptures we are
talking about are ancient, we need to be sure that no errors have crept into their
words over time and reproduction. In short, we need to know that the transmission
process is inerrant. In this case, I am using the term inerrant in its
simple, absolute sense: we should hope that absolutely no error creeps in
during transmission. This idea is simple, but establishing that this is the
case with either the Bible or the Qur’an is not. Christians and Muslims make
different claims in this regard. Muslims claim that the Qur’an was transmitted
by just such an inerrant process; Christians claim an extremely high degree of
faithful transmission, but acknowledge that errors – tiny errors, but errors
nonetheless – have crept into their scriptural text in the last two millennia.
Our concern is whether either claim is philosophically tenable, so we will need
to examine the reliability of the various processes involved to see if they are
capable of delivering the claimed degree of inerrancy. Happily, recent
developments in the study of the epistemology of testimony will help us to do
so.

An
inspired Word?

The
Muslim objection to considering the Bible (at least as we have it today) as the
‘Word of God’ alleges both content error and transmission error. I will examine
each in turn. According to the content challenge, the Bible we have today
cannot be considered the inerrant Word of God because of the inherent
fallibility of the human involvement in the authorial process as described by
the doctrine of inspiration. That is, because humans are fallible, any human
involvement in the authorship of the Bible will render any claims to inerrancy
impotent. Akhtar puts it like this:

The presence
of any human contribution in the genesis of (scripture’s) contents could
prevent the text from being wholly free from error.

In
order to evaluate this objection, we need to look a little closer at the
Christian account of how the dual authorship of the Bible is supposed to work.

Christians
make an astonishing claim when they say that the Bible is in some sense
co-authored by God and humans. Put more exactly, this Christian doctrine of
inspiration holds that the Bible was confluently the product of human
and divine authorship. This means that the contribution of both God and human was
flowing, interweaved, at every point such that each and every word in the Bible
can be spoken of as fully the Word of God and fully the product of the mind of
the human author. The Chicago Statement put it like this:

Holy
Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by
His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it
touches.[138]

While
acknowledging that the details of this process remain mysterious, the authors
of this statement understood inspiration to involve God causing the human
authors to use all the particular words they do, yet not in such a way as to
override their writing styles and personalities.

The
idea in the Bible that this doctrine is trying to articulate is found most
clearly in this verse in the Second Letter of Peter:

no prophecy of
Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever
produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along
by the Holy Spirit (The Second Letter of Peter 1:20–21).

Key
here is the idea of the biblical authors being ‘carried along by the Holy
Spirit’. What, precisely, is this phrase describing? It is obviously talking
about a human religious experience – in particular, some extraordinary (conscious
or unconscious) personal experience of the Holy Spirit whereby he empowers the biblical
authors in such a way that they write precisely what God would have them say
without overriding their own creative minds. Does this doctrine make any sense?
Here are five reasons why I think it does.

First,
there seems no reason to deny that a human could have an extraordinary
personal experience of God’s supernatural empowerment. Muslims and
Christians should agree that this is possible because both believe that God
supernaturally empowers ordinary people to do extraordinary miracles. So, for
example, Moses is described in both the Bible and the Qur’an as performing a
variety of miraculous signs before the Pharaoh and the Egyptian community
(Q17:101, 27:12; Torah: Exodus 7—11). According to Akhtar, these sorts of
miracles are ‘performed by prophets, always mere human beings, commissioned to
perform them “by permission of God” (bi idhn Allah; Q3:49)’.[139] However this
works, it is clear that it involves a human extraordinarily experiencing God’s
power working in and through them in order to perform a particular task on
God’s behalf.

Second,
there seems no reason to deny that humans could have a personal experience of God’s
empowering them to receive and authoritatively speak his words. Again,
Muslims and Christians should acknowledge the validity of such experiences since
it is required by both their accounts of prophecy. Both the Qur’an and
the Bible speak of this sort of supernatural experience being integral to the
process of revelation in general:

Then will God
say: O Jesus the son of Mary! Recount My favour to thee and to thy mother.
Behold! I strengthened thee with the Holy Spirit, so that thou didst speak to
the people in childhood and in maturity (Q5:110).

When the
Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not
speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will
declare to you the things that are to come (The Gospel of John 16:13).[140]

Similarly,
both the Qur’an and the Bible speak of this sort of supernatural experience
being integral to the ministry of prophecy. For example, the Muslim account describes
Muhammad’s experience of supernatural empowerment while receiving the Qur’an as
taking the form of a trance (or trance-like state). During this trance, God’s
words were indelibly written upon his heart so that he could faithfully recite
them (Q87:6). Similarly, the Bible describes, for example, Ezekiel’s experience
of receiving God’s revelation by supernaturally eating a scroll that filled him
with God’s words. We need not quibble over whether the particular revelatory
experiences being talked about in either faith are identical in kind – they
need not be to make my point. My point is simply that it seems reasonable to
say that any account of prophecy requires some supernatural experience of
revelation and empowerment – whether directly from God or indirectly through his
supernatural agents.

Third,
there seems no reason to deny that humans could have a personal experience of
God’s spirit empowering them to speak God’s words using their own human
style and personality. The sort of prophetic method described exclusively
in Islam, and commonly in Christianity, is that of dictation. In this method,
God (or his agent) dictates words to the prophet which are subsequently
repeated – verbatim – to the intended audience. This method is sensible, but
why should we think that dictation must necessarily be the only form of
prophetic inspiration? Surely God could inspire a human to speak his truth in
their own words and style? At first glance this may appear paradoxical. So, like
with the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, there are energetic
debates among philosophers over the best way to describe inspiration without it
being incoherent. Furthermore, the outcomes of these debates give us good
reason to think that this idea is sensible and meaningful. For example, in one
debate, Basinger and Basinger argued that the key conceptual problem was making
sense of human creative freedom in the inspiration process.[141] Geisler responded by arguing,
convincingly in my opinion, that so long as the human prophet was a willing
participant who placed all their creativity in the service of the process of
inspiration, then there was no insurmountable problem in describing the
doctrine coherently.[142]

We
do not, however, need to delve deeply into these debates to see that this idea
of inspiration is meaningful. I suggest that there are real human experiences
that show us it is meaningful. Let me illustrate with an experience of my own.
There have been a few times in my life when I believe I spoke words that were
not just mine, but were inspired by God. In one such instance, I was speaking
with a woman whom I had just met for the first time and knew nothing about.
Very early on in our conversation we found ourselves talking about religious
faith, and I remember praying that God would give me the correct words to say.
As she was sharing her beliefs with me, there simply ‘popped’ into my head the
knowledge that this woman was not telling me the truth. I suddenly just ‘knew’
a particular hidden event in her past life of faith that lay behind her words,
and I just ‘knew’ that it required challenging in a particular way. When she
had finished talking, I challenged her that she was not being straight with me
and that she needed to deal with the issue that had popped into my head. Upon
hearing my words she stopped, looked straight at me, and said: ‘You are a man
of God!’ Now, I am not telling this story in order to claim that I am in any
way a special man of God! My wife will assure you that I am not, and I know
many people who could offer a similar testimony. I tell this story to make the
point that in this instance, I felt as if I was – willingly – being ‘carried
along by the Holy Spirit’ as I spoke. I had a strong sense that what I was
saying was directly from God, and that it was a divine truth that this woman
needed to hear at that time. Nevertheless, I had to formulate this truth in my
own words and in a style that suited the situation. I believed then, and still
believe, that my words were inspired as I was carried along by the Holy Spirit.
However, even if this was not the case, I cannot see any reason why it would be
impossible for God to place his thoughts in my, or any other willing person’s,
head in that sort of way.

Fourth,
there seems no reason to deny that this process could be inerrant.
Akhtar claims that any human involvement in the authorship of the Bible leaves
us unable to be sure that the writing process was totally reliable (i.e.
inerrant). Why? He gives us no supporting argument for this view, and I can see
no reason why it should be so. If God was fully involved in the authorship,
then why should it not be totally reliable? Why would human participation
hinder God supernaturally overseeing the process to guarantee its inerrancy? I can
imagine this oversight operating a little like flying lessons. In aviation
there is no room for error – ‘Trouble in the air is very rare. It is hitting
the ground that causes it’[143]
– and so training aircraft have a set of controls for both the instructor and
the student. Even when the student is fully controlling the aircraft, the
instructor will have their hands and feet on their own set of controls in order
to guarantee that the flight will never get out of control and be completed
safely. Surely the same would be true of divine inspiration. In inspiring
scripture, God would allow the human author full control, but his divine ‘hands’
would be following and guiding every move.

Fifth,
there seems no reason to deny that this process could be inerrant – even if
we cannot fully describe all its epistemic features. We do not need to
fully understand how something works in order to trust it to be reliable in
transmitting knowledge. Take, for instance, a digital camera. It is a complete
mystery to me how a digital camera works. I simply point it, press a button and
it produces an accurate – even inerrant – representation of whatever it was
pointing at. And it does it every time! It is accurate and extremely reliable. Moreover,
notice that the camera itself has no idea how it works – it is unconscious.
In the same way, the process of divine inspiration can be totally reliable
regardless of whether or not we fully understand it, describe it or are even
aware of it. It can be totally reliable regardless of whether the prophet fully
appreciates what they are experiencing or not. In fact, it can be totally
reliable even if the prophet has no awareness of the process. So long as it is
God’s words and God’s inspiration, there is no reason why human involvement
compromises inerrancy.

We
have good reason, then, for thinking that the Christian doctrine of inspiration
can sensibly describe a process by which humans might receive an inerrant
scripture. It does make sense to describe the human authors of the Bible as being
‘carried along’ by the Holy Spirit in such a way that their words can
meaningfully be regarded as God’s words. Next we need to ask whether the words
we see in our Bibles today are actually the words of those authors.

A
corrupted Word?

If
we suppose that the original Bible was in fact the inerrant Word of God, we
still need to address the second part of the Muslim challenge: that the Bible as
we have it today cannot be considered the inerrant Word of God because of
the unreliability of the transmission process. The contemporary Bible was
transmitted to us through a complex process of testimony. It originated in many
different places at many different times, and it was therefore transmitted by
many different testifiers via a complex array of testimonial chains in which
not every testifier was known by name. As it originated in a variety of oral
and written formats, it was transmitted by a variety of different testimonial
methods. It also originated long before the technology involved in reproducing
written texts had reached a high level of sophistication and reliability: there
were no printing presses, no digital copies and no hermetic storage facilities.
To the mindset of a digital age, the whole process sounds fraught with the
possibility for error. In this section I want to show how the opposite is the
case.

First,
philosophers have recently recognised – or perhaps better, rediscovered – that
testimony is a reliable way of transmitting ideas. This should come as no
surprise to those from an oral culture, but it might be a surprise to Western
readers. However, human testimony is the method we have used to learn the vast
majority of everything we know. It is the basis for our education system.
It is the basis of our communication systems. It is the basis of language: if
testimony were not extremely reliable, then language would not work. Studies
have shown that even pathological liars tell the truth nearly all the time –
there is just not that much that is worth lying about![144] Nevertheless, the modern person
might object that the problem with the Bible’s reliability is the vast length
of time involved. After all, anyone who played ‘Chinese Whispers’ as a child supposedly
was taught that long chains of testimony are unreliable. In this game, two teams
race each other to pass a word phrase from the first person in their chain of
players to the last. The phrase must be whispered so that only the next person
in the chain can hear it, and it cannot be repeated. Invariably, the phrase reaches
the end of the chain garbled and incoherent – especially if it was long and
involved. Does this show the unreliability of testimony? Of course not. Chinese
whispers works as a game because it deliberately sets up an unreliable chain of
transmission. The rules prevent clear testimony and verification, placing extra
pressure on each testifier. Imagine how different the game would be if the
teams could speak out loud, repeat their testimony, ask clarifying questions
and take their time. Furthermore, imagine that your team could set up extra
chains and cross check their testimonies between chains, and turn the final testimony
into a song that could be sung by a group of testifiers. And, imagine that the
original hearer could write down what they heard on paper so that subsequent
hearers could check the message they received with the original one. Finally, imagine
that teams could employ ‘professional’ Chinese whisperers: specialists with
extensive training in memorisation and oral communication techniques. It is
sensible to say that if the teams adopted all these procedures, then the
transmission of even complex testimonies could be achieved with extreme
reliability. Multiple interlocked chains, combined with multiple and specialist
techniques, build an exceptionally strong amount of redundancy and cross
checking into the process. Testimony and chains of testimony over time, then,
can be extremely reliable.

Second,
the process by which the Bible came to us exhibits all the traits of just such
a strongly reliable testimonial transmission. Muslims are correct, of course,
when they point out that the Bible did not come to us via a single, unbroken
chain of testimony in which all the testifiers are known by name. This,
however, provides no obstacle because the Bible came to us via multiple
interlocked chains incorporating all the features I described in the
modified Chinese Whispers game. We can observe in history that the testimonial
process of the Bible incorporated oral testimony, musical testimony, written
testimony, plural and overlapping testimony, testimony verified through
multiple witnesses of public events, and the use of ‘professional’ testimony
techniques. The most outstanding scholarly examination of this historical
process – focusing particularly on the gospels – that I am aware of is provided
by Martin Hengel in his seminal The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus
Christ. Hengel builds a strong case that the reliability of the process by
which the Bible came to contain accurate eyewitness testimony concerning Jesus’
life, teaching, death and resurrection is bolstered by the multiplicity of
testimonies and the conservative approach to transmission adopted by the early
church.[145]

Third,
the process by which the Bible came to us is extremely reliable, but not
inerrant. Christians readily concede that we do not have the original biblical
texts and that the ancient copies upon which modern translations of the Bible
are based are not identical. They contain very minor variations. This is clear
evidence that the Bible was not transmitted to us inerrantly. Does this call
into question everything I have just been saying about reliability? Muslim
polemicists certainly think so. Apologetic cyberspace is full of debates over
the percentage of the Bible’s verses that have been corrupted. Critics claim
anywhere up to 35%, while defenders claim around 1.5% with most of these being accidental
and insignificant spelling or copy errors. I do not have space to delve deeply
into the detailed world of textual criticism or the complicated world of
statistics. Instead, I will simply assert that it is the general consensus
among professional scholars that the Bible’s text has been transmitted to us in
such a way as to allow us to know the accuracy of its text with at least 99%
certainty. By this I do not mean that 99% of the Bible is free of variants. Rather,
by applying all the checks and balances provided by the various testimonial
techniques I have highlighted – particularly the multiple overlapping chains of
testimony, we can be certain we have greater than 99% of the original inerrant text
of the Bible in our hands.[146]
Let me illustrate how this can be the case. Imagine four of my friends went to
see a movie and all came back and told me the storyline. All their retellings
were extremely accurate, but none were perfect. They all made one significant
mistake. The first friend mistook a Ferrari for an Aston Martin, the second
misheard the name of one of the characters as ‘Max’ when it was actually
‘Mack’, the third missed one scene after they spilt their popcorn, and the
fourth did not understand what one complicated word in the dialogue meant.
Despite the fact that none of the retellings were inerrant, when I put them all
together and cross-check them, I can be certain of all the details of the
story. No single error from a single testifier compromises this. For example,
if three of my friends said a character’s name was ‘Mack’ and one said it was
‘Max’, I can be sure it was Mack – partly because I can understand how the
mistake was made. The same will apply for the three other errors. Notice
something really interesting here: because I have access to four testimonies, I
can be more certain of the plot of the film than any of my four friends – they
all had bits of it wrong! In the same way, when Christians talk about a greater
than 99% reliability concerning the Bible, they are referring to the existence
of thousands of ancient testimonies that allow this sort of cross-checking, meaning
we can reconstruct the original text with extreme certainty.

Philosophically
speaking, these three points endorse my claim that the process by which the
Bible was transmitted to us was extremely reliable. But what about
theologically speaking? Is this degree of reliability enough to satisfy the
standard for religious faith? Christians, obviously, believe so. They believe
that the epistemic credentials of their inspirational view of Bible are
sufficient for faith, despite the lack of an inerrant extant text. Muslims, on
the other hand, are not satisfied with this degree of reliability. For the most
part, they hold to a standard of absolute inerrancy for both the content and
transmission of divine revelation. Most Muslims also hold that the Qur’an
passes this standard. While there is, of course, something very appealing about
the idea that one’s scripture could have these epistemic credentials, this
Muslim claim does not survive close scrutiny. We will now see why not.

A
dictated Word?

Most
Muslims take it as a matter of fact that the text of the Qur’an was inerrantly
received and transmitted. Central to this account is the idea that the words of
the Qur’an were dictated by God’s agent (Gabriel) to Muhammad. According to Akhtar,
this process involved the suspension of Muhammad’s cognitive faculties during a
revelatory trance when verses of the Qur’an were indelibly written upon his
‘heart’ so that he would faithfully recite them (Q87:6). Akhtar highlights the
cognitive passivity of Muhammad in this experience, and he agrees with Rumi’s
description of the prophet as a ‘conduit’ for the recited Qur’an in same way a
statue is a conduit for the water fountain passing through its mouth.[147] He rejects any
need for a closer examination of the nature of this experience, arguing that as
long as the process was reliable, our understanding of it is irrelevant:

if the
Qur’anic doctrines are judged authentic, why should we care about the nature of
the prophetic experience? If the Qur’anic doctrines be judged false or
unconvincing, the exploration of the psychology of prophetic inspiration can be
at best a matter of wholly academic interest.[148]

Of
course, not every Muslim philosopher through history has agreed with this
epistemology of prophecy. Indian philosopher Jalal al-Haqq calls this
mainstream account an ‘externalist’ account of Muhammad’s prophetic role, and he
reminds us that major classical Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi and Ibn
Sina held an ‘internalist’ account that required a prophet to possess special
cognitive capabilities.[149]
Theologians, however, disputed the orthodoxy of the internalist view, and with
the demise of the early philosophical tradition, the externalist view became
mainstream. Its apparent simplicity and sensibleness left Muslim thinkers
without any impetus to develop a strong tradition of looking closely at the textual
origins of the Qur’an, and Muslim scholars continue to view non-Muslims’ calls
for them to do so as a product of unwarranted scepticism:

Muslims regard
the Qur’an as the unadulterated word of God. The theoretical question of the
exact mechanism of its revelation and reception is rarely discussed. Some
Muslims and non-Muslims indulge a speculative curiosity about the mechanics of
wahy (revelation) but, typically, such interest is motivated by scepticism or
reserve about the authority and truth of the Qur’an.[150]

I
disagree. I suggest that maintaining reservations concerning the reliability of
the mechanism of the Qur’an’s revelation and reception is warranted and
is not simply the product of faithless scepticism. It is warranted because the
process by which the Qur’an originated and was transmitted described in the
externalist account is not as error-proof as is made out. Indeed, neither the
dictation account of revelation nor the process of transmission was necessarily
inerrant: instead, they both involved human fallibility.

First,
contrary to Muslim claims, the dictation account of the Qur’an unavoidably
involves the contribution of fallible human cognition. I agree with Akhtar
that the psychological experiences of Muhammad are incidental to the prophetic
process of accurately receiving and transmitting divine revelation. The problem
is that Akhtar, and the traditional Muslim account, completely ignores the fact
that Muhammad’s prophetic experience was cognitive in a way that is not
incidental to the process. However the Qur’an was supernaturally impressed upon
Muhammad’s ‘heart’, the account requires Muhammad’s consciousness to have
accessed this ‘impressed’ Qur’an correctly in order to consciously recite the
words. Moreover, the account requires Muhammad to have been able to comprehend
all the words of the Qur’an. While he would not have needed a full
understanding of the Qur’an, surely he would have had to comprehend enough of
the Qur’an to be sure that he was recalling and reciting it correctly. Even
Akhtar recognises this: ‘Muhammad must understand the words he hears’.[151] Notice
carefully the point I am making here. I am not suggesting that the Muslim
account involves Muhammad in the authorship of the Qur’an. Rather, it
simply incorrect to claim that Muhammad was a mere conduit who had no
contribution whatever to make to the process of prophetic revelation. He
was not simply a loudspeaker out of which God’s (or Gabriel’s) voice
unconsciously emanated. Just because the process was dictation, it does not
mean that Muhammad’s mind was disengaged during the entire process. Indeed, astonishingly
many cognitive faculties operate in the process of dictation, including
comprehension, recollection and articulation. Again Akhtar implicitly
acknowledges this. He compares the production process of the Qur’an to that of
a scared school child receiving dictation from a strict teacher. He suggests,
reasonably enough, that the dictation process requires only a ‘minimal
engagement of the pupil’s faculties’. There is, however, a significant
difference between minimal cognitive engagement and none! In short, the process
of encapsulating the word of God in a form capable of human appreciation and
transmission involved the inevitable use of Muhammad’s conscious – and fallible
– cognitive abilities. This human involvement does not mean that the process
could not have been inerrant. But it does mean that the dictation process is
not necessarily inerrant: its inerrancy depends on the reliability of
Muhammad’s cognitive faculties.

Second,
and briefly, the process by which the Qur’an was transmitted to us
cannot be considered absolutely reliable. This is because the verses of the
Qur’an were transmitted from Muhammad’s original testimonies to the now
existing text by fallible human testimony. It involved chains of testimony by
fallible human witnesses with imperfect faculties of hearing, comprehension,
memory, recollection and recitation. Again, this does not mean that the
transmission was in error. We have just seen that this sort of process can be extremely
reliable, and there is no reason why this could not have been the case with the
transmission of Muhammad’s words. Extremely reliable is, nevertheless, not
absolutely reliable.

So,
while the dictation account of the Qur’an claims to secure inerrancy by
eliminating the possibility of human error, it necessarily involves fallible
human participation in both the reception and transmission processes.
Presumably God could, and would, have safeguarded his dictation by choosing a
reliable prophet and witnesses, supernaturally enabling them to inerrantly
comprehend, recall and recite his words. It is likely that this is what various
traditions had in mind concerning Muhammad’s memory,[152] although Akhtar remains
unconvinced:

If the Qur’an
is even partly the product of Muhammad’s mind, even if that mind is influenced
and protected by divine grace, the possibility of error cannot be eliminated,
since Muhammad was a man and therefore fallible.[153]

I
disagree with Akhtar here for all the reasons I explained in my evaluation of
the idea of inspiration. In any case, the failure of the dictation account to
secure inerrancy for the Qur’an leaves Muslims in the, perhaps surprising,
position that their ‘dictation’ account displays many of the same features as
the Christian ‘inspiration’ account in terms of inerrancy. There are, of
course, wide differences in the nature of the revelatory events described in
the accounts of the Bible and the Qur’an. The Qur’an’s account describes only a
single type of revelatory experience – Muhammad’s vision of a dictating angel,
whereas the Bible’s account describes a wide variety of revelatory experiences,
including dictating angels, audible words from heaven, miraculous tablets, and
especially the personal inspiration by the Holy Spirit of the authorised
witnesses of Christ. Nevertheless, both accounts describe fallible human
cognitive involvement in the prophetic process; both describe a transmission
process involving multiple interlocking and cross-checked chains of human
testimony that are extremely, but not absolutely, reliable; and both require
divine supervision of some sort if the text we have in our hands today is to be
considered the inerrant Word of God.

What
this means is that the Muslim philosophical challenge that the Qur’an has
better inerrancy credentials than the Bible is found wanting. The Muslim
dictation account leaves us with no good reasons to accept the strong claim
that the Qur’an is necessarily the inerrant Word of God. Moreover, the Muslim
history of largely ignoring text critical questions concerning the Qur’an –
especially in the pre-Uthmanic period – leaves them without any strong sense of
the reliability of the prophetic and transmission process. Contrast this to the
Christian position. The Christian inerrancy claim is more modest with respect
to the contemporary text – it claims extreme accuracy rather than absolute
accuracy, but due to the strong tradition of textual criticism there are very
good reasons for accepting it. Neither account secures absolute inerrancy for
either the Bible or the Qur’an. In any case, we need to take into account more
than the issue of inerrancy before we decide to grant either scripture the
status of the Word of God. Perhaps most importantly, before we decide we need
the correct account of divine/human interaction.

A
personal Word …

There
are different types of spokespeople. Some, like newsreaders (or town criers), are
mere mouthpieces who simply read a statement from a prepared text. They have no
choice in the words they use. They are unable to field questions about any
statement since they usually have little or no personal knowledge of, or
insight into, the mind of its author. Some, like ambassadors, have greater
autonomy in the choice of their words. This is not because they have any real
authority of their own – they still merely represent the will of their
sovereign. However, they have greater autonomy in the choice of their words because
they know the sovereign well enough to understand their will in a particular
situation. This example illustrates the differing Muslim and Christian views of
the words of scripture. It seems to me that the Muslim doctrine of ‘dictation’
is sensible if the prophetic role is more akin to that of a newsreader, whereas
the Christian doctrine of ‘inspiration’ is sensible if you view the Bible’s authors
as akin to ambassadors with a personal experience of, and knowledge of, God.

This
way of viewing inspiration accords with what we have already seen concerning the
two models of divine/human interaction described by Islam and Christianity. The
Muslim dictation account of revelation is sensible under the Islamic
legislative model. In this model, all that humans need to receive from God is his
divine law, so any method that accurately imparts to us the divine laws written
on the heavenly Qur’an – the ‘tablet inscribed’ – is sufficient. Limiting human
involvement in revelation to simple transmission is no problem, since there is
no requirement for any direct personal contact between humans and their Lord.
Indeed, one could even argue that there is no real need for any prophets at all
under this model! Presumably God could have simply had Gabriel hand humanity a
copy of the tablets themselves. Nevertheless, in Islam, God does use prophets
and the dictation method is sensible because God simply needs his prophets to
be accurate spokespersons.

Similarly,
the Christian inspiration account of revelation is sensible under the fellowship
model. Under this model, it is certainly appropriate for God to impersonally
impart to us his divine law, and the Bible regularly records the dictation
method of prophetic revelation. Here is an example from prophet Jeremiah:

Thus says the Lord: ‘Go down to the house of the king
of Judah and speak there this word, and say, “Hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah, who sits on the
throne of David, you, and your servants, and your people who enter these gates.
Thus says the Lord: Do justice
and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been
robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and
the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place. For if you will indeed obey
this word, then there shall enter the gates of this house kings who sit on the
throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their servants and
their people. But if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself, declares
the Lord, that this house shall
become a desolation”’ (The Prophet Jeremiah 22:1–5).

Interestingly,
the Bible also records the method of ‘handing out the heavenly tablets’ which
bypasses prophetic agency altogether:

Then Moses
turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in
his hand, tablets that were written on both sides; on the front and on the back
they were written. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the
writing of God, engraved on the tablets (Torah: Exodus 32:15–16).

The
Christian fellowship model, then, has no problem with the dictation method of
imparting divine law. However, under this model there is much, much more going
on in terms of divine revelation. Under this model, God also reveals himself to
humans in a variety of personal ways, including visions, epiphanies, the
Incarnation, and – crucially – through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Notice some of the epistemological features of personal revelatory experiences.
Unlike legislation, personal experiences do not merely provide simple
propositional knowledge. The knowledge of God gained by such experiences cannot
be passed on by ‘dictation’; it can only be passed on by a testimony that
involves the witness trying to express their personal experience in their own
words. This sort of testimony is precisely what the Bible’s doctrine of
inspiration describes, and it is clear that this personal testimony is what at
least some of the Bible’s human authors were consciously seeking to provide. The
apostles John and Paul, who between them account for 18 of the 27 books in the
New Testament, claimed that their writing provided authoritative testimony to
their personal experience of God’s personal revelation:

But when they
came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But
one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out
blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness – his testimony is true, and
he knows that he is telling the truth – that you also may believe (The Gospel
of John 19:33–35).

This is the
disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these
things, and we know that his testimony is true. Now there are also many other
things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the
world itself could not contain the books that would be written (The Gospel of
John 21:25–26).

For I
delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died
for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was
raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared
to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred
brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen
asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to
one untimely born, he appeared also to me (The First Letter to the Corinthians
15:3–8).

If
we remember that one element of the fellowship model is that every believer
experiences the personal empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, then there is
no reason why these testimonies should not be considered authoritatively the
Word of God.

The
argument of this chapter, then, can be summarised thus: the Christian doctrine
of the inspiration of scripture is coherent and describes a process which can
extremely reliably produce a text that can be reasonably considered the
inerrant Word of God. It is also sensible, because if one accepts a fellowship
model of divine/human interaction, then one can reasonably expect human
testimony concerning personal experience of God to be part of the authoritative
record of his will and purposes. I recognise that Islam does not ascribe to the
fellowship model of divine/human interaction, and I also recognise that the
adoption of this model is crucial for the success of the arguments of this and
previous chapters. It is now time to look a little closer at whether Christians
are justified in believing this model to be reasonable.

Chapter 8

Law and Love:
The Problem of Divine Ethics

Who
is good?

‘Why
do you keep going on about love?’ I was asked this question by a Muslim scholar
in the middle of a religious dialogue concerning the nature of God and the
religious life. He was not, of course, questioning whether love was important
in both life and theology – both the Qur’an and the Bible place value on God’s
love for humans and humans’ love for God and each other. What he was
challenging was the supreme place held by love within Christian ethics and, in
particular, the wisdom of holding the primacy of love over law in
religious ethics. He is not alone. Most Muslims I speak with view the ethics of
Islam as superior to those of Christianity. For them, the wisdom of Islam
includes its provision of rich, manifold and practical ethics that describe
ideals for day-to-day living. Crucially, they value the fact that it is a rule-based
ethic in which codified divine law is available in – and indeed is the prime
purpose of – prophetic revelation.

It
is important to notice that the key criterion by which Islam is being preferred
over Christianity here is that of ethical practicality. This is
primarily a philosophical criterion, not a theological one. Akhtar describes
how he sees this sort of ethical evaluation operating:

We judge
religions by their professed ideals rather than by the practice of those ideals
by their adherents. But the practicability of an ideal is relevant to the
question of its worth and nobility. For what is the point of an ideal that is
impossible to follow … To be practicable, a religious ideal must correspond to
the potential moral and spiritual resources of human nature; the required ideal
must be proportionate with the potential resources of its adherents.[154]

Put
simply, Akhtar argues that the truth of any ethic of divine/human interaction
is reflected in the possibility of fulfilling it. Intuitively, this criterion
of practicality is sensible enough. It does seem reasonable to expect that the
loving creator God would provide his creatures with both a morally good
universe to live in and the capacity to live morally well within it. It does
seem right to expect that any religion’s ethics should not be impossible to
follow.

Akhtar,
of course, sees Islamic ethics as eminently achievable for the reasons I just
alluded to – its legislative nature and the comprehensiveness and
reasonableness of its rules:

the Qur’an
contains rules of practical reason: intelligible, capable of being followed by
all according to their capacity, rules that are neither causes fully
determining conduct nor merely platitudes that completely fail to guide it.
Global in scope, but not uniform, these are flexible guidelines with room for
exceptions, for judgement and creative variation.[155]

Akhtar
also argues that the Christian ethic is impossible to follow. His reasoning is
that Christianity, uniquely among theisms, attempted to dispense with divine
law altogether and replace it with an ethic of love, modelled on Jesus’ love.
While seeing the appeal of the idea that Jesus’ acts of grace might somehow
inspire humanity to follow suit, he believes this ethic to be unrealistic
because it lacks the power required for coercing morally good behaviour out of
reluctant humans. So he argues that this ‘Christian attempt to dispense with
law’[156]
fails because an ethic that relies on simply following Jesus’ example is unable
to conclusively solve the problem of human sin:

The solution
contained in the Incarnation, even supposing it to be a coherent one, is
irrelevant. The problem of the recalcitrance of human nature – our ability and
willingness to break the divine law – remains untouched.[157]

Akhtar
offers this assessment with grace, lamenting that it is ‘extraordinary that
even the crucifixion of a sinless God failed to teach us the ways of
righteousness’.[158]
Nevertheless, he remains unequivocal in his strong allegation of the ‘impracticality
of [Christianity’s] deceptively noble ethics’.[159]

Soon
I will show that any characterisation of Christianity as abandoning divine law,
or of Jesus’ role as merely exemplar, is woefully inadequate in capturing the biblical
fellowship ethic of divine/human interaction. It would, however, be a mistake
to rush quickly to that defence without first recognising the genuine weight of
Akhtar’s ethical challenge – a challenge that remains weighty even with an
accurate account of Christian ethics. A cursory observation of Christian
history, or a short time immersed in Christian community, will reveal the vast
chasm between Jesus’ ideal ethic of love and actual Christian behaviour.
Christians need to be able to offer a sensible answer to the question of just
how (or even whether) the Christian ethic of love – even the gracious type of
divine love described by Christ – really is enough to shape and enable a
morally good life.

What
is good?

If
we are going to use ethical practicality as a criterion for choosing between
Islam and Christianity, then we first need to tackle a thorny philosophical
problem. The question ‘Is it possible for humans to do what is morally right?’
can only be answered properly if we have a clear sense of just what the right
thing to do is. But it is tricky to get this clear sense. It is not tricky
because people do not have a sense of right and wrong: pretty much everyone
agrees that there is right and wrong, good and bad, and that people should
do what is right and good. Put more philosophically it is reasonable to think
that nearly everyone, theist and non-theist alike, operates within some sort of
normative moral framework.[160]
Where it gets tricky is in clarifying exactly what this framework is. Just what
is the good we are supposed to do?

Nearly
everyone agrees that some things are obviously good – like honesty, generosity
and diligence – and that some things are obviously bad – like murder, rape and
child pornography. However, agreement on the less obvious details of any
normative ethic is elusive. For example, a few years back I met a newly arrived
refugee in my country. This man was staying at the house of a friend of mine
until he could find a place of his own, and, since he had no car, I offered to
help him find somewhere to live. The man eagerly accepted my assistance and we
arranged to meet a few days later. At the arranged time I turned up with my
car, but the man had no interest in getting in the car. Instead, he held out
his hand and waited for me to give him $2000 for a rental bond! When I told him
that I had no money for him, and that my help only extended to driving him
around, looking for houses and negotiating Australian rental bureaucracy, he
became extremely angry with me and stormed off. This is a case of two people
operating under different ethical norms. We both agreed in a general sense that
helping needy people was a good thing, but we had very different understandings
of the precise way someone should go about helping the needy in this instance.
Notice that it is not at all clear who had the correct understanding of helping
here. Doubtless a strong ethical case could be made that I should have been
more generous with a relatively unimportant thing like money. Doubtless, too, a
case could be made that he should have placed a higher value on a stranger
offering to help him. This example shows how difficult it can be to determine
the correct overall normative moral framework.[161]

It
is easy, I think, for Muslims and Christians to assume that because they are
both theists, they are operating within the same normative ethic and merely
squabbling over which religion best enables people to fulfil the requirements
of that ethic. This would be a mistake. Of course, Muslims and Christians do
have very similar approaches to divine ethics. So, generally speaking, we are
both what is termed ethical nonnaturalists, who recognise that ethical
statements express propositions which, if true, are made true by objective
features of the world, independent of human beliefs. We are both moral
absolutists, who seek to discover (divinely established) universal moral
values. We both adopt a normative approach to ethics that recognises all true moral
laws that are intrinsically right and wrong. We both subscribe to some sort of
virtue ethic which recognises that a key goal of this divine morality is the
description, and enabling, of humans living good, excellent and righteous lives
under God. We even agree on many moral laws (like ‘do not murder’, ‘do not
steal’ and ‘do not commit adultery’) and on the general idea of the virtuous
life being along the lines of belief that ‘true happiness is found in right
relationship with God’. Because of these similarities, there are many
situations in which Muslims and Christians agree upon the appropriate course of
action. I recall, for example, the beautiful picture of Muslims and Christians
standing shoulder-to-shoulder around a Coptic church in the suburb of Cairo in
which I lived, peacefully resisting violence caused by political unrest.
Similarly, it is no accident that Muslims and Christians are allies in the
fight against abortion, the disintegration of the family, and the rampant
pursuit of material possessions.

Despite
all that we have in common, however, there is a substantive difference between
Islamic and Christian ethics. As I have argued in previous chapters, Islam and
Christianity operate under different, indeed quite radically different, ethical
models of divine/human interaction. Islam operates under a legislative
model, in which God is simply our Lord, we are simply his servants, and
divine/human interaction takes the form of obedience to divine commands.
Christianity operates under a fellowship model, in which God is both our
Lord and Father, we are both his servants and his children, and divine/human
interaction takes the form of both obedience and intimate personal
relationship. This is not a small matter. Different assumptions concerning the
ethics of divine/human interaction have been undergirding, and at times heavily
impinging upon, much of the discussion of previous chapters. So, our understanding
of the ethic of divine/human interaction influences what we think about things
like: what God is like, how God is likely to reveal himself to humans, what sin
consists of, and whether or not humans are in need of some sort of salvation
from sin. This issue, then, bears upon our discussions of ontology and epistemology,
as well as ethics.

Before
we can decide on questions of practicality, we need to clear up the question of
which, if either, of these divine ethics is the more reasonable one. In the same way that it is of no use to be happy that
you were able to achieve 75% in your high school certificate exam if the mark
you needed to get into university was actually 80%, it is of no use to have an
achievable ethic if it is defective. What I will argue in the rest of this
chapter is that while both the Muslim and Christian ethics of divine/human
interaction are sensible, the Christian ethic is preferable since when taken on
its own terms, it is not impossible, and it makes the most sense of the human
experience of longing to be good – including the effects of sin on our
struggles to be good. First we will examine the Islamic legislative ethic.

Good
servants

We
can see the main features of the Islamic legislative ethic – including how it
challenges the Christian ethic – in the following montage of statements from Akhtar:

God is the
sovereign ruler, the just master; men are the citizens, the obedient servants.[162]

Islam has no
theology … for theology, it substitutes law and ethics: we are given to
understand the moral and legal will of God, not to speculate about his nature.[163]

(Islam) is a
juridical monotheism … it views law as ultimate even though it concedes that
the moral aim of the law can never be fully achieved by any mechanism once we
permit freedom of the will … [164]

the prophetic
office is the optimal method for the divine tuition of humanity.[165]

It is
incoherent to look for an external rescue from the plight created by human
recalcitrance to divine law. God warns; we disregard. God punishes and
destroys. This must be the typical divine-human interaction since humans
created free, have an inner, often dominant, tendency to do wrong.[166]

Clearly
Akhtar is describing the sort of legislative model of divine/human interaction
I outlined earlier. God is no more or less than a sovereign ruler, humans are
no more or less than servants or subjects. Divine/human interaction involves,
on God’s part, instruction of his servants via prophetic declaration of divine
law and, on humanity’s part, simple obedience to that law. This model is
clearly in accord with the Islamic account of religious history, which
describes a cycle of prophetic revelations of law, followed by subsequent
forgetting of this law by humanity, thus requiring a refresher course from a
new prophet. This ‘juridical monotheism’ is clearly a legislative model, but we
should not understand this woodenly as demanding a legalistic approach to faith.
The concept of law here includes not just statutes and regulations, but also
moral principles that imply a genuine responsibility on the part of humans to
reason ethically. This is important, because it reminds us that the goal of
this legislative model is not obedience to the law per se, but the
production of good people. In short, under the legislative model, righteousness
and all its attendant blessings are achieved through willing obedience to
divine law.

It
is important to recognise that the Muslim version of the legislative model is
ambiguous concerning whether or not God is a person in any way analogous to
human personhood. The model can incorporate a personal sovereign – for
example, even though my interaction with the queen is purely legal, she remains
a person. But while one can interact impersonally with a personal lord, Islamic
theology does not hold human interaction with Allah to be personal in any way
that is analogous to this relationship. Allah is, as we have seen in earlier
chapters, the awesome and glorious ‘other’ who is not like us in any way. This
has implications for what it means for a Muslim to say that they love God. When
Islamic law demands that a devoted Muslim should love God, we should not
understand this to be describing the sort of love experienced in personal
relationships. It is a love of God’s glory and majesty that leads to growing
obedience rather than devotion to another person that leads to deeper personal
knowledge.[167]
Thought of like this, it is, perhaps, like the impersonal love one has for
their country.

Under
this model, to be good is to be a good subject. At the very least, this will
involve fulfilling any obligations the law places on you as well as not
transgressing negative laws. In Islamic ethics this idea is expressed in the grouping
of behaviour into categories such as fard (obligatory), halal
(permissible), mubah (morally neutral), makruh (inadvisable) haram
(forbidden) and sawab (meritorious). Under this Muslim understanding of
the legislative model, the good person will at the very least avoid what is haram
and fulfil what is fard. Any devoted Muslim will, of course, want to
pursue a degree of goodness that transcends these minimums, and the model
provides freedom for the good person to act in a range of halal and sawab
ways that will result in blessings for that person and society. Nevertheless,
for this ethic to be practical, it will at the very least require that the
minimum standards are achievable for most, if not all, people.

This
legislative model is a reasonable one. We can witness this sort of model
operating sensibly at the level of human interaction. It is, to return to an
earlier illustration, the model I operate under in my interactions with the queen.
As my sovereign, she blesses me primarily by enacting just laws in order to
create a good society. As her subject, I primarily seek to obey the laws and by
so doing am blessed by all the benefits that go with living a good life as well
as contributing to good society. If I keep the law I am blessed, if I break the
law I am punished. It is meaningful to say in this model that I can and should
love the queen, but it is clearly not the sort of love that involves a personal
relationship because under this model there is no need for me to ever meet the queen.
I love her from afar and for her glory.

The
legislative model is a reasonable one for a sovereign/subject interaction, but
why should we agree with Akhtar that this model ‘must be the typical
divine-human interaction’? He gives us no good reasons to think that it must
be, and I can see none. It is fair enough to think, as he points out, that
under this model it is right for God to respond to the disobedience of his
morally free servants with warning, reinstruction and punishment. Nevertheless,
he gives us no reason to think that this sort of interaction exhausts all the
possibilities available to God in his dealings with humans. Christianity
claims, instead, that the divine/human interaction encompasses many more
possibilities than this. It claims that we are not just created to be good
servants of God, but good children of God as well.

Good
servants and good children

Under
the Christian fellowship model, God is both sovereign lord and personal father.
We see this is the way Christians are called to address God in prayer:

Our Father in
heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth
as it is in heaven (The Gospel of Matthew 6:9–10).

Although
this model incorporates features of a legislative model, it combines them with
a variety of features that flow from an intimate personal relationship. Five of
these features are important for our discussion.

First,
and despite Akhtar’s suggestion otherwise, the fellowship model does not
dispense with divine law. In common with the Muslim model, the Christian model
claims that God has universal moral and legal standards and that humans are
called to uncompromised obedience to those standards. Obedience leads to reward
and blessing, and disobedience leads to suffering and punishment. So in the
very book of the Bible that Akhtar accuses of dispensing with law, we read:

He will render
to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek
for glory and honour and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those
who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there
will be wrath and fury (The Letter to the Romans 2:7–9).

An
example of the Christian commitment to the idea of absolute and normative moral
laws is C.S. Lewis’ moral argument for God that we saw in chapter three. According
to Lewis, the intuitively moral fabric of the universe points to a moral God; Christianity
cannot dispense with divine law without rendering its ideas of moral
responsibility and accountability meaningless. Akhtar has noticed something
important, though. It is correct that Christianity downplays the role of
divine legislation in comparison to Islam. However, he fails to identify that
it is not the authority of divine law that is being downplayed. Instead, what
is being downplayed is the ability of a stand-alone legislative model to
produce the sorts of righteous life described by the law. Divine law is good
and should be followed by all, but it cannot, by itself, produce good people.

Second,
the fellowship model recognises a personal dynamic in the divine/human
interaction. It regards God as personal in nature and humans as persons created
for intimate relationship with their maker. In line with this, the story of
divine/human interaction described by the Bible begins with God walking and
talking with his newly created humans (Torah: Genesis 2) and ends with a vision
of paradise that is deeply relational:

Behold, the
dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be
his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away
every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be
mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away (The
Revelation to John 21:3–4).

This
personal dynamic is conceived most commonly in familial terms. God is viewed as
a loving ‘father’ and humans are understood to be his children who experience
the intimate presence of God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this
regard, the Holy Spirit is termed the ‘Spirit of sonship’ (The Letter to the Romans
8:15).

Third,
there is no necessary conflict, or incoherence, between a legislative and a
familial model. It is intuitively sensible to think that someone can be a
servant and a child at the same time. For example, a prince is both a subject
and a son of the king. He is legally and morally bound to obey the king, yet he
has unfettered personal access to his father and experiences the joy of loving
intimacy. Rather than experiencing an incoherent life, a prince is (ideally)
doubly blessed in that he knows his good lord deeply. Digging a little deeper,
part of the reason the legislative and the familial models cohere is because
personal relationships do not operate outside of ethical norms. Under God,
relationships are full of ‘shoulds’ – that is, moral norms. Husbands, for
example, should love their wives. Mothers should care for their
children. Children should respect and honour their parents. None of
these shoulds take away from the personal, loving nature of these
relationships. Often these morals are implicit along the lines of the moral
argument, but sometimes we codify them. One of the ways we do this is with
covenants. A covenant is a formal, legal relationship agreement between two
parties where both agree to fulfil particular responsibilities. It is a way of codifying
the relationship norms. The most common covenant that we experience in everyday
life is marriage. The traditional marriage ceremony is an act of covenanting in
which a series of relational promises are formally and publicly declared. However,
this in no way diminishes the personal, loving nature of the relationship. In
an ideal world at least, a marriage covenant is codified love or alternatively,
personalised law. Similarly, the Christian fellowship model views the
relationship between God and humans as a covenant relationship in which a
loving personal relationship is established via an agreement where humans
willingly and joyfully consent to abide by the divine laws that God graciously
provides to guide and bless us.

Fourth,
it should be obvious that the Christian fellowship model has a wider range of
requirements than the legislative model in order for someone to be good or
righteous. To be good under this model, one needs to be a good subject and
a good child. This is not to say that these are separate things. Rather, there
are a whole range of moral responsibilities that go along with being a child,
and one of the responsibilities of a good child of God is to obey the formally
constituted rules. It is difficult to state exhaustively all the moral
responsibilities that are involved in personal relationships, but they include
devotion, faithfulness, enjoyment, communication, honesty, forgiveness,
patience, longing and thankfulness. In a similar way, the Christian fellowship
model describes sin, or being bad, in both legal and relational terms.
Under a legislative model, sin can be understood as disobedience, and under a
familial model, sin can be understood in relational terms. The Bible describes these
relational features of sin using concepts such as betrayal, rebellion,
disloyalty, unfaithfulness, un-thankfulness and hard-heartedness. To see the
sense in this, recall Jesus’ story of the two sons. This story is one of Jesus’
clearest descriptions of sin in familial terms, and in the story both sons are
viewed as sinful – neither is a good son. The sin of the younger son appears
more obvious because he was a flagrant transgressor of moral laws. However his
sin was found not just in his moral profligacy but also in his betrayal of,
un-thankfulness towards and hatred for, his father. This familial sin is
highlighted even more in the fact that the older brother never sinned through
disobedience. He declared his total commitment to his father’s rules but sinned
in his stubborn, proud and unthankful refusal to share in the relational
blessings that are integral to family. His sin was to refuse to embrace things like
forgiveness, joy and celebration. Under the fellowship model, transgression
against divine law is intimately linked to the state of one’s personal
relationship with God.

Fifth,
it is reasonable to describe the relational features of this model as taking
priority over the legislative. To see how, think for a moment about how moral
norms work in a family. In an earthly family, relationship is the priority in
the sense that moral rules like ‘Don’t hit your sister’ facilitate
relationship. The other way round makes no sense: we do not have families so
that there will be someone to keep the family rules; we keep the family rules
so that we have healthy families. We can see this relational priority another
way by considering the question: ‘Are my children good children?’ By my family
legal standards the answer would have to be no! Thankfully, none of my children
take drugs or drink alcohol or are members of gangs, but, nevertheless, none of
them completely fulfils the family rules. They regularly break things –
including each other. They are generally lazy. They often are rude to their
parents and each other. They invariably fail to do anything for their mother’s
birthday. They are cocky, they are … normal teenage boys! Despite all their
faults, however, I would say that they are good children. They are good because
whatever their weaknesses, they love each other, they are committed to each
other, they forgive each other, they persevere with each other, they are honest
with each other, they enjoy each other, they celebrate each other’s
achievements, and they defend and support each other. They are relationally
good, not because they perfectly fulfil the family code, but because there is
no relational breakdown that has led them to abandon the attempt. They have not
turned their backs on one another but continue to love each other. The Bible
captures this idea in its declaration that ‘love covers a multitude of sins’.
Behind the Christian model is the idea that loving relationship is of the
deepest ethical value and that the law is simply attempting to articulate the
requirements of love.

This
leads us to another important way in which law takes second place to
relationship under the Christian ethic. Law is subsidiary to relationship
because law, in and of itself, has no power to establish or maintain personal
relationships. This is simply because law cannot enforce love. Coerced love is
not true love. So, for example, as a junior football coach I can order two boys
to shake hands and make up after an on-field fight, but the order has no power
to generate forgiveness in the hearts of either boy unless they are willing to
forgive of their own free will. This applies in a covenant agreement too. A
covenant spells out the responsibilities of a loving relationship, but it is
not entered into for the purposes of enforcing them. At least it should
not be! People, of course, try to enforce covenants, but a true loving
relationship that honours the other must be willingly offered and not coerced.[168] To see this,
imagine me taking my wife out to dinner on her birthday and then saying this to
her: ‘I am taking you out to dinner on your birthday because that is what
husbands are supposed to do, and I promised I would in our marriage vows, but
my heart is not really in it. I am not enjoying myself and I would prefer to be
at home watching football on television’. Surely this is not true love. It is,
at best, an extremely impoverished type of love. It is not joyful or thankful
or gentle or desiring or honouring. It does not promote and deepen relationship;
instead, it damages it.

Thus,
under the Christian covenantal relationship model, divine law codifies the
responsibilities of love, but it does not have the power to enforce them. Only
a person with a willing heart can love.[169]

I
contend that this Christian covenantal fellowship model of divine/human
interaction is no less reasonable than a legislative model. Whatever
theological objections Muslims might have to conceiving of divine ethics in
this way, there appear to be no philosophical reasons why God could not choose
to relate to us as his servants and his children at the same time. This leaves
us with two reasonable models of divine/human interaction. It is time to decide
whether each of them can produce the sort of good people they describe.

Can
we be good?

I
want to argue that both Islam and Christianity are practical because they can,
at least theoretically, produce the type of good people they describe. So I
agree with Akhtar that Islam is practical. Islam can produce good servants of
Allah because it offers a set of divine regulations that any devoted Muslim can
realistically fulfil and so be considered a good servant. The minimum
requirements of Islamic Sharia – that is, the generally agreed upon obligations
and proscriptions – do seem to be achievable for the devoted Muslim; the basics
of Sharia are clear and comprehensive. For most Muslims, part of the appeal of
Islam is that it is able to provide the sort of moral guidance that can produce
good citizens for the Muslim community. It does seem possible to be good by the
standards of an Islamic legislative ethic. In short, Islam can produce good
servants who obey its rules.

However,
I disagree with Akhtar that Christianity is impractical. Christianity can
produce good children and servants of God. Akhtar cannot see how this can work
when the only mechanism available to Christianity to do this is the placing of one’s
faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Recall his observation that ‘even the
crucifixion of a sinless God failed to teach us the ways of righteousness’. The
problem with this observation, of course, is that the primary purpose of the
crucifixion of Christ was not to teach us the ways of righteousness.
Instead, the primary purpose of the crucifixion was to restore relationship.
The gospel produces good people not by modelling how to be righteous servants,
but by restoring their relationship with their heavenly father and instilling
in them the desire to live a righteous life in fellowship with him. The
Christian ethic produces good people by a relational mechanism, not a didactic
one.

It
is worth taking a moment to explain how this is reasonable. Under the Christian
fellowship model, morality is fundamentally relational: the good child desires
to be obedient in order to please their heavenly Father and enjoy all the
blessings that go along with family membership. Under this model, human sin is
not solved simply by providing or enforcing moral rules, but first and foremost
by restoring the divine father/child relationship. The idea is that whenever an
errant child realises that their true happiness and meaning is found in proper
relationship to their heavenly Father, they will seek forgiveness and
restoration into this relationship. The gospel operates as the doorway to this
restoration. It declares that the cross of Christ was not merely an act of
exemplary sacrificial love, but it was, more than anything, an act of
forgiveness for sin, opening the way for relationship to be restored. The cross
of Christ was God declaring: ‘You and I are good!’

Looking
even closer, we see that integral to this model is the notion that the gospel
carries within itself key mechanisms that enable the believer to live a good
life. One is the requirement for the child to face up to, and repent of, their
relational (and legal) failures. Another is the personal assistance of God. The
idea of restoration to the family does not represent some sort of offer from God
to simply ‘give it another go’ at trying to keep the family rules. Instead, the
gospel promises a restoration to a depth of relationship that includes the
intimate – and empowering – personal presence of God’s Spirit. In line with the
fellowship model, this divine presence exercises both relational and
legislative roles. The Holy Spirit testifies to our spirit that we are
children, and he ‘writes’ the divine law on the hearts of believers (The
Prophet Jeremiah 31). Yet another mechanism is the role of the law in education
and warning. Under this model, the key role of codified divine law is to
outline the ‘shoulds’ involved in the relationship with God and each other.
This includes sounding a warning call to the unrestored to recognise the
brokenness of the relationship, and the drastic eternal consequences of a
permanent refusal to seek restoration.

This
model is sensible, and we can see the sense of it partially reflected in the
operation of human families. Here is an example. Some friends of mine and their
teenage sons used to devote their family holidays each year to volunteering as
leaders on a teenage motorbike camp. There was one camper who returned year
after year. He was not a particularly nice boy, and he was prone to anger,
disobedience and violence. Over the years the camp leadership came to realise
that this young man’s behaviour was explained by his background. He was a state
ward who was sponsored by the government to attend camps because he had no
family. In fact, he had never known his family, and he had spent his childhood
being passed around various foster homes. My friends realised that what this
boy needed to prevent him becoming worse was not just discipline and rules.
What he needed more than anything else was a real home – a real family who
loved him. So, amazingly, after one camp they decided that they would adopt him
as their own son. This was not an easy thing for their family. He was not
naturally a good son. Often he was disobedient. Sometimes he was violent
towards his brothers. Occasionally he would run away from home. But, little by
little, his behaviour changed and he became a loving member of the family. How?
It was not simply through being given a whole lot of family rules (although he
was)! It was through experiencing the joy of being in a loving family, and
especially the joy of having loving parents, and coming to see that the family
‘rules’ were simply there to describe the norms that undergird joyful
relationships. Importantly, the undeserved love – that is, the grace – of the
parents was not just a moral example for him to emulate. Instead, it was the way
in for him to enjoy the intimacy and joy of personally knowing the good that
lived incarnate within them. He saw goodness in that family and wanted to dwell
with, and in, that goodness. In some small way this story is a reflection of
the way that the Christian gospel of grace goes about producing good people.

It
surprises me that Akhtar fails to see the sense in the idea that grace can have
this sort of power. He seems to acknowledge the possibility of it when he
claims that:

Nothing can
cure (sin) in most of us – although God mysteriously cured it, by his grace, in
the case of prophets and reduced it drastically for saints.[170]

In
agreeing that God can sensibly ‘cure’ sin by grace in saints, Akhtar is,
ironically, endorsing the possibility of the Christian model. If God can
sidestep – or better, augment – a pure legislative model in the case of
prophets and saints, what is stopping him doing so for everyone else? The Christian
model claims that he has, and the Bible describes all believers as those who
are ‘loved by God and called to be saints’.[171]

So,
both Islam and Christianity can produce good people when assessed by their own
standards. This, of course, makes sense. It is exactly what we would expect of
two religions that have prospered for over a millennium. If either faith were
obviously, or even subtly, ethically impractical, then we would expect
adherents to have worked this out and abandoned them long ago. This shows us
that the Muslim challenge, as presented, to the practicality of the Christian
ethic is question begging upon a legislative model of divine/human interaction.
The only way for either faith to reasonably dismiss the other as impractical is
by presenting a case for the ethical merits of one model over the other. This
is what I hope to do briefly in the final section. I want to argue that the
Christian fellowship ethic is preferable to the Muslim legislative model
because it makes more sense of the experience of being human – including our
propensity to resist being good despite longing to be.

Longing
to be good

When
I was a child, and long before I was a devoted believer in God, I used to play
a lot of golf. Now, anyone who has played golf will tell you that it is a
frustratingly difficult game to play well. Whenever I was not playing well – that
is, most of the time – I would lose my temper. I would yell and swear. I would
throw my clubs around. I would hit things with them. I would throw balls into
the river. Now I am in my forties and have been a devoted believer in God for
twenty-five years, and I still play golf. It is still a difficult game to play,
and I still regularly lose my temper on the course. I would like to think it
happens a lot less often, but to my shame I still yell, swear, throw and hit.
Just recently I broke my favourite club by smashing it into my bag after a poor
shot. I know it is wrong, and I tell my kids not to follow my example. I hate
that I do it – partly because it makes me play even worse! But it is just so
hard to remain self-controlled. My dilemma is that I long to be good, but it is
so hard to be good even with God’s guidance and help. It seems to me that this
is true in every part of my life – especially the parts that, unlike golf, are
really important; I long to be a good husband, a good friend and a good
researcher. More than anything else in earthly life, I desire to be a good
father. Despite this I have, over the years, forgotten children and left them
behind; I have lost my temper at them countless times and often without good
reason; I have given them bad advice. I suspect that this struggle to be good
is the common experience of most humans who try to live by ethical norms. I am
sure that it is the common experience of the vast majority of Muslims and
Christians – it certainly is of those I know. And this is precisely the problem
for the Muslim objection concerning the practicability of Christianity to
produce good people. Islam appears no better! Neither faith can straightforwardly
claim better followers. Neither have a track record of producing radically,
profoundly and unquestionably good people. Instead, there is a track record in
both faiths of people longing and struggling to be good by the standards of our
two ethical models. Clearly this leaves us with a dilemma. Islam and
Christianity are offering alternative ethics, both of which are reasonable and
seem capable of producing good behaviour, yet neither seem able to conclusively
deal with the human tendency to behave badly. This is, I suggest, a far greater
problem for the Muslim ethic than for the Christian one – so great that it
suggests the Christian ethic is more reasonable. Let me explain why.

Islam
recognises that believers will struggle to be good. It describes the Muslim
life as a jihad – a struggle to be good. In itself, the need for
struggle to achieve a worthy goal is not a problem: mountain climbers struggle
to reach a peak, students struggle to pass their exams and mothers struggle to
give birth. The important question is just how hard should the religious life
be? Under the Islamic legislative ethic, there seems no reason why it should be
hard at all. It provides clear instructions on how to be good by following God’s
rules. It denies that there is anything necessarily stopping humans from
being good by following those rules. It claims that that we are not deeply,
profoundly or originally sinful and that we can successfully be obedient if we
choose to. If this is true, then surely it need not be so difficult for at
least some devoted Muslims to be radically and profoundly obedient to all the
moral rules – to be, as the Qur’an puts it, unquestionably ‘the best of
people’? The dilemma is that it does appear to be profoundly hard to be
radically obedient in a way that produces this sort of person. Akhtar acknowledges
this dilemma and makes a variety of honest concessions. In light of the
Qur’an’s lament that ‘few indeed of my servants are thankful’ (Q34:13), he
controversially states that ‘an assessment of the actual record of human
behaviour may lead one to deny, absurdly, the wisdom of God’.[172]
Despite the optimism of the Muslim ethic, he concedes that ‘Human perversity is
an irreducible feature of our constitution’.[173]
This weighty concession highlights the problem I have with the Muslim view. In
short, it fails to adequately account for the weight of the struggle to be
good.

To
me, the Christian ethic seems to make far more sense of this struggle to be
good. It acknowledges that sin really is a profound problem that inhibits our
interaction with God, and that it is beyond the power of humans to solve by
themselves. It describes a complex relational solution to sin whereby the
struggle to be good is addressed slowly in the context of a personal
relationship with God – in which he does not merely instruct and warn but also
empowers and renews humans by the personal presence of the Holy Spirit. It
recognises, too, that God requires far more of us in being good than simply following
rules. Instead, goodness is primarily described in familial terms, and any
codified ethical norms are designed to facilitate relationship. The Christian
ethic resonates with the intensity of the struggle to be good that we
experience, and the sort of good that we long for, in a way that seems to me
far more likely to be correct.

Humans
are deeply, and primarily, relational persons. So, families, for example, are
primarily relational not legal, friendships are primarily relational not legal,
and community (at its best) is relational rather than political. In each of
these realms, the role of moral norms is to describe the best way to love, care,
nurture, mature and grow the relationships. When I long to be a good father, I
am not longing to fulfil familial ethical norms per se. Rather, I am
longing to deepen the loving relationship that I have with my children, and I recognise
that the ethical norms describe the best way to go about it. The same is true
of friendship and community. Scottish philosopher John MacMurray goes further
and persuasively argues that to be a person is to be necessarily
relational. His idea is that humans are deeply, primarily and essentially
relational persons.[174]
The Christian ethic sensibly explains that the reason things are like this –
and the reason we long to be relationally good – is because our creator God,
too, is deeply, essentially and primarily personal and relational. If this is
correct – if God is personal and relational, then the Islamic legislative model
is inadequate. It is forced into saying either ‘humans are primarily
law-keepers’ or that ‘humans are primarily relational, but God is not’. Neither
seems correct. The first offers too weak an idea of human nature; intuitively
it does not seem right to say ‘to be a good human is to be a good rule-keeper’.
The second puts us in the position of having a model of human nature and
interaction that is richer than our model of divine/human interaction. While
possible, this seems unlikely, and to my mind far less likely than the
Christian model.

I
conclude, then, that while a legislative ethic of divine/human interaction is
sensible, the Muslim version appears less able to meaningfully explain the
human experience of longing and struggling to be good people – and not just
obedient servants – under God. A better explanation is found by adopting the
richness of the Christian fellowship model that recognises God as personal
Father as well as Lord.

This
is precisely the point that Jesus is making in the story of the two sons. Jesus
tells this story in order to persuade his religious listeners to shift from
their legislative divine ethic to a fellowship model. He was highlighting the
inadequacy of his listeners’ ethic by comparing it to that of the two sons. In this
story, both sons were operating under a legislative model in their interaction
with their father. The younger son had never loved his father, and even on his
return home aimed to simply take the role of an obedient servant. The older
son, despite having never left home, simply attempted to be obedient in order
to receive reward. The father, on the other hand, operated under a fellowship
model. He sought and valued obedience from his sons, but he sought and valued
intimacy more. We see this in his interactions with both his sons. When he met his
returning younger son, he refused to accept a legislative model. When he went out
to the elder brother, he tried to persuade him that their interaction had never
been simply legislative in nature. For Jesus’ listeners the story would have
been shocking. It would have been seen as foolish for the father to dishonour
himself by behaving this way. Foolish, perhaps, but it was a beautiful
foolishness that opened doorways to undeserved and overflowing relational
blessing to both sons. It is, to me, sensible that this beautiful foolishness
is an accurate picture of divine ethics.

I
can, nevertheless, imagine a further Muslim objection. I can imagine Muslims
objecting that I have been ignoring one of the most significant and beneficial
features of the Muslim legislative model: that it applies equally well to
societies as individuals. Muslims regularly challenge that the Christian model
appears to have nothing meaningful to contribute to politics. This is the
challenge that will occupy us next.

Chapter 9

Power and Weakness:
The Problem of Politics

Power
is good!

As
a child I loved superhero comics. Although I had a strange fondness for
Aquaman, my favourite superhero was Superman. Why? Because he had all the
powers he needed to fight crime and save the world. Batman was just a normal
man with some nifty gadgets and vehicles; Aquaman could only breathe underwater;
and Wonder Woman could defend herself against bullets, but her lasso was of
limited offensive value really. Superman, on the other hand, could do all that
the other superheros could do (and at super-speed) as well as fly, see through
things, be practically indestructible, and on top of all this be unfailingly
good. This is exactly the sort of power that a superhero needs to do his job.
And the job, as the name suggests, is heroic. It involves protecting people from
dangerous super baddies, rescuing people from disasters and generally doing
everything else required for creating a safe and just world. Superheroes are
heroes because they self-sacrificially use their superpowers for good. So, in
one of my favourite scenes from one of my favourite movies, The Incredibles,
superhero Frozone is looking for his super-suit’ to battle an evil robot when
his wife warns him: ‘You better not be thinking about doing no derring-do!
We’ve been planning this dinner for two months!’ Frozone replies that ‘The
public is in danger!’, only to be told ‘My evening’s in danger!’ Frustrated,
Frozone yells out: ‘Tell me where my suit is woman. It’s for the greater good!’
His wife replies: ‘Greater good?! I’m your wife! I’m the greatest good you ever
gonna get!’ Whether it is Superman, Mr Incredible or even Danger Mouse, popular
movie culture reflects that we love the idea that coercive power over evil, in
the hands of those with the moral fortitude to use it well, is of central importance
in creating a good and just society.

Islam
has this sort of positive view of power. It recognises that it is necessary to
wield coercive power in the service of creating a safe and just society. According
to Akhtar, ‘Muslims and Marxists concur that we need power because human
suffering is partly avoidable’.[175]
Moreover, one of the key ways in which Islam sees that coercive power needing
to be wielded is politically: ‘Islam, a paradigmatically political religion,
embraces power as a means of securing social justice and corporate amelioration’.[176]

Islam
sees politically executed divine law as the means through which God exercises his
power in shaping society for good. Nasr identifies this model of divine and
political power as a ‘nomocracy’ and explains it like this:

Technically
speaking, the Islamic ideal is that of a nomocracy, that is, the rule of Divine
Law. It is true that all power, including political power, belongs ultimately
to God, as the Quran states, ‘The command rests with none but God’ (6:57;
12:40). But in the case of Islam, the rule of God was never associated with the
rule of the priestly class; rather, it was associated with that of the Shari‘ah
… Today the one principle that remains clear to all Muslims is that sovereignty
belongs ultimately to God as expressed in the Divine Law and an Islamic society
is one in which this sovereignty is accepted …[177]

This
idea of nomocracy – a society ruled by divine law – is hard to define precisely,
and scholars debate both its meaning and appropriateness in the case of Islam.[178]
Nevertheless, the idea does seem to broadly capture the dominant traditional
Islamic conception of human society – that is, belonging to God, set up by him
to operate, at every level, in the good way described by, and prescribed by, his
revealed law – and not in the evil ways proscribed by that law.

Some
form of nomocracy is clearly what most Muslim philosophers of the classical
period had in mind when they considered the question of politics.[179]
For example, al-Farabi blended the concept with Platonic political thinking by
recasting Plato’s ruling philosopher-king in terms of Muhammad’s role as a
divinely inspired prophet-king who legislated, in the Sharia, an ideally
functioning community in which humans might flourish:

the idea of
the philosopher, supreme ruler, prince, legislator, and Imam is but a single
idea. No matter which one of these words you take, if you proceed to look at
what each of them signifies among the majority of those who speak our language,
you will find that they all finally agree by signifying one and the same idea.[180]

For
al-Farabi, the prime purpose of any political system is the instilling in their
citizens of the knowledge and practice of Islam.[181]
Scholar Daniel Frank writes: ‘For Islamic political philosophers, the divine
law (shari‘a) revealed to Muhammad was a necessary and sufficient
condition for bringing about human felicity’.[182]

The
more recent, and highly influential, political thinker Abul Ala Maududi also had
nomocracy in mind when he wrote:

The chief characteristic
of Islam is that it makes no distinction between the spiritual and the secular
in life. Its aim is to shape both individual lives as well as society as a
whole in ways that will ensure that the Kingdom of Allah may really be
established on earth and that peace, contentment and well-being may fill the
world.[183]

Islamic
nomocracy need not involve a wooden, legalistic or strict traditionalist
approach that attempts to imitate the particular application of Sharia in the
time of Muhammad. The concept of nomocracy can incorporate a wide range of
interpretations of the Sharia (as seen in the variety of Islamic schools of
legal thought and in the idea of ijtihad – i.e. the independent
interpretation of the law) and the political models suitable for implementing
it. This was argued by al-Ghazali. His sensible idea was that the application
of Islamic law under any sort of judicial system unavoidably required reasoning
and theological interpretation, and in Asas al-Qiyas he attempted to
spell out the various principles involved. Thus, Islamic nomocracy can be
conceived in a variety of ways so long as it achieves the goal of sanctifying
political power by subsuming it within religious authority.

At
the same time, Muslims object to what they see as Christianity’s refusal to
properly embrace power – especially political power. I say properly because
clearly Muslims, and others, have been on the wrong end of vigorous efforts by
Christians to improperly use political power throughout history.
Distorted use of power, though, is not the objection I have in mind. The
particular objection is that Christianity is weak and impotent in creating a
just and prosperous society because its social ethics see political power as
essentially secular. This means that Christians refuse to legitimise politics
as religious in the sense of needing to operate along the lines spelt out in
divine law. Akhtar points to Jesus’ command to ‘Therefore render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (The Gospel of Matthew
22:21) and argues that it contains an unrealistic command to withdraw from the
world:

Islam’s
laudable realism removes the necessity for that false antithesis of rendering
unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar at the expense of the things that
rightfully belong to God.[184]

Akhtar
sees two problems here: the impossibility of separating religion from politics and
a moral failing to address situations of injustice in the world – ‘private
piety is futile if one cannot dismantle the structures of evil’.[185]

Thus,
Muslims object to the idea that Christianity calls on its followers to
repudiate power and abdicate responsibility in the political realm. The Muslim
challenge is that Christianity is sociopolitically weak and this is evidence of
it being an inadequate religion, whereas Islam is sociopolitically powerful and
this is evidence of it being true religion. I propose to refute this claim, but
first we need to do a (very) little background work in political philosophy.

Power
or weakness?

The
question of religion in politics is always controversial; the question of Islam
and politics even more so! It is therefore very important for the reader to
understand what it is I am – and am not – trying to address in chapter. Put simply,
I am not concerned with describing or assessing how Islam acts as a
‘nomocratic’ political religion in any particular setting. While debates rage
over fraught political questions – like the relationships between Islam and
democracy; Islam and nationalism; Islam, pan-nationalism and the caliphate;
Islam and secularisation; Islam and Westernisation; Islam and globalisation;
Islam and the legacy of colonialism; Islam and Western militarism and
imperialism; as well as (just to make it really messy) Islam and the state of
Israel – I do not propose to address any of these sorts of concerns. They are,
to my mind, largely practical questions that can only be addressed once the
underlying concept of Islam as a political religion (as nomocracy) can be
established as reasonable and preferable.

Instead,
what I am concerned with is evaluating the Muslim concept that ideal
religion necessarily incorporates some sort of nomocracy. So, I am asking:
‘What (philosophical) arguments can be mustered in defence of the idea that
some sort of nomocracy is the ideal form of religious political engagement?’

Choosing
between religious political ideals is problematic in a way similar to choosing
between religious ethics. As with ethics, Christians and Muslims will agree on
some key political ideas and values, and disagree on others. For example, both
Islam and Christianity ascribe to some sort of divine-authorisation account of
political authority. That is, both faiths will view believers as operating
within some divinely ordained political structure (or structures), within which
political figures are granted some sort of divine authority to govern in a just
and prosperous society. By itself, however, such a view does not get us very
far. It raises key questions like: ‘What does a just and prosperous society
look like?’ As with ethics, once we move beyond answers that involve generalities
and platitudes like ‘peaceful’ and ‘wealthy’, we find controversy. This
controversy lies behind Akhtar’s book Islam as Political Religion, which
repudiates Kenneth Cragg’s critique of Islamic justice, societal ethics and use
of force in law enforcement in Muhammad and the Christian.[186]
In essence, Akhtar’s key response is that Cragg’s criticisms beg the question
against the Islamic conception of politics and law-enforcement.[187]
I agree with Akhtar, and this is why it is important to re-examine which faith
has the more reasonable/accurate view of the ideal relationship between
religion and politics. We must be careful not to appeal too quickly to
intuitive, but unexamined, ethical presuppositions.

Instead,
we will begin by identifying some presuppositions that should be relatively
uncontroversial among Muslims and Christians. Let us suppose that divine laws
(including moral, social and liturgical laws) exist which are universal – that
is, they are necessarily true for all people they are relevant to, regardless
of whether those people acknowledge it. Let us also suppose that humans are able
to follow those rules that are relevant to them. This will include humans being
in a position to know and describe the rules (especially through revelation and
intuition), having the capacity to follow the rules, and being morally
responsible agents that are able to choose to follow these rules. Let us
finally suppose that a broad (philosophical) conception of power exists that
allows for power to be properly both ‘power-over’ and ‘power to act’. So the
government rightly has the power over its people to use force to punish
disobedience to the law, and it also has the power to educate its people in divine
law thereby enabling them to love and worship God. Put differently, political
power can be legitimately both dominating and empowering. Both Christianity and
Islam seem to demand these suppositions and recognise that society should
ideally be built upon these divine rules.

It
is important to recognise the implications of the supposition of moral autonomy
for our discussion. If society should be built upon divine law, then it is a
problem that there is practically no society in the world where every person
acknowledges this law and seeks to follow it – regardless of which religion is
dominant.. Some people refuse to acknowledge divine law, through disbelief
perhaps. Some people believe in divine law, but steadfastly refuse to obey it.
This problem of disbelief and/or moral recalcitrance must be addressed by any
religious political framework, and Islam claims to provide a superior solution
to precisely this problem. It believes that steadfast disobedience to divine
law is best handled through the exercise of political power to enforce it even
upon the unwilling, for the sake of the greater good.

With
this groundwork under our belts, it is time to examine the relative merits of
the Muslim and Christian sociopolitical ethics. The reader will – if they have
read the preceding chapters – be unsurprised to hear that what I will be
arguing in the next section is that the Muslim preference for a nomocratic
political religion is reasonable enough given their concepts of humanity,
divine/human interaction and a concomitant view of power. Unfortunately, the
weakness of these concepts (that we identified earlier) prevents any Islamic
nomocracy fulfilling its promise to create even its own conception of a just
society.

Powerful?

Akhtar
supports the pursuit of an Islamic nomocracy by arguing for an absorption
model of political engagement. In Islam as Political Religion, he identifies
four degrees of political engagement that he sees as the only viable options available
to any faith community:[188]

1.       everyday dealings with
the political establishment

2.       agitation against unjust
political and economic structures

3.       the absorption of
politics into religion

4.       establishing religion as
an imperial power.

He
claims that every faith must unavoidably do (1) and has a moral obligation to
also do (2). He then suggests that Islam, uniquely, seeks to do both (3) and (4)
– that is, ‘the Qur’an seeks to absorb politics into religion and thus sanctify
it’.[189]
A few notes about terminology here. When Akhtar speaks of imperial power, he is
not using the term to simply mean military power. He understands Islamic
imperialism – both historically and ideally – as encompassing a whole range of
missionary activities including evangelism, social service, economic influence
as well as governmental military activity where appropriate. When he speaks of
sanctification, he does not mean it in the Christian sense that includes the concept
of salvation. Instead, he uses it in a similar way to the term ‘sacred’ – that
is, completely devoted to God. Although Akhtar does not use the term nomocracy,
it is clear that this is broadly what he has in mind by absorption.

Akhtar
thinks that politics is best absorbed into religion because of his conceptions
of human nature and power. We have already looked at Akhtar’s
account of human nature in Chapter 4, but here is a summary of the key
features:

·
all
humans have some sort of inbuilt knowledge of, and inclination towards obeying
Islam – that is, divine law

·
all
humans are born into a world of weakness and are vulnerable to forgetfulness
of, and disobedience to divine law

·
this
weakness is not innate or binding, so all that humans require is reminders of,
and education concerning divine law.

This
is summed up in a quote we noted earlier:

The Islamic
position is morally and doctrinally opposed to this proposed external rescue
from the plight of sin. We are not innately deviant or crooked or unsound
although we are easily misled into temptation. Divine education therefore suffices.
We need mentors who can guide us out of our heedlessness.[190]

So,
roughly speaking, since all humans are innately (if unconsciously) Muslim,
politics need only be an exercise in instruction in the societal elements of
divine law. Akhtar sees the political implications like this:

For Muslims,
since human beings are not inherently corrupt or fallen, every resource and
facility is to be harnessed in the service of a comprehensive lordship. Muslims
feel religiously obliged to establish a just order governed by a sacred law.[191]

The
problem, of course, is that divine education alone does not suffice to
create a just and prosperous (Muslim) society. Akhtar’s account recognises
that, despite education and the idea of fitrah, many humans remain recalcitrant
and disobedient to divine law. His solution is to recognise that some form of legitimate
governmental enforcement of divine law is required in any society. Indeed, it
is not merely required, but mandated: if government has the potential to create
a just society through the enforcement of divine law, then it should do so by
all means available. Although political enforcement of the law upon the
unwilling or unbelieving is unfortunate, it is nevertheless legitimate because
social evil, and/or the social effects of personal evil, cannot be ignored
wherever there are political tools available that ‘enable one to eradicate the
social consequences’.[192]
So Akhtar suggests that:

It is our
moral duty to legitimize the employment of power by qualifying force: making it
authoritative, rational, constrained and discriminating, limited in scope and
accountable to an electorate … part of the religious arsenal.[193]

In
short, the government should implement divine law by force, if required, for
the greater good![194]
And force is periodically required in an imperfect society.[195]

Akhtar
acknowledges that the forceful imposition of any divine law upon unbelievers or
the unwilling is problematic. There is the real possibility that the imposition
of divine law is incompatible with the demands of that very law. We could put
the problem like this: divine law calls for proper worship, and proper worship,
by its very nature, should not be enforced but rather be willingly offered from
the heart. This recognition leads Akhtar to put great effort into responding to
just such a challenge by Cragg. [196]
Cragg argues that the paradigmatic use of force by the prophet Muhammad
compromises his moral authority to call people to heart worship. Akhtar’s
response is that this sort of challenge rests on a false separation of
individual hearts from social structures. He believes that societal
transformation requires both structural sanctification and personal/individual
sanctification. So, he criticises Christianity for focusing exclusively on the
transformation of individual hearts while ignoring the transformation of evil
structures, and Marxism (as an example) for focusing exclusively on changing
infrastructure. Instead he suggests that both are (somehow) transformed together
and that the idea that we can ‘Purify the institutions – and the heart will
follow’ is just as valid a principle as the other way around.[197]
In short, he holds that enforced sanctification of social structures is a
legitimate pathway towards achieving citizens willing to seek personal
sanctification.

In
summary, Akhtar supports an Islamic nomocratic absorption model by arguing that
the ideal way to create the Muslim ideal of a just and prosperous society is to
absorb politics within religion. This allows government to use all its
legitimate powers to inculcate and enforce divine law upon society for both its
own benefit (through sanctification) and in the hope that it might lead to
willing worship by all its individuals. Notice how strong Akhtar intends his
argument to be. He is not arguing merely for the plausibility of this
conception of a political religion, but for its superiority. He is
arguing that the Islamic idea that religion subsumes and sanctifies politics is
one of Islam’s prime strengths. According to Akhtar, ‘The virtue of political
religion – a cardinal virtue characteristic of Islam – is its honesty about the
periodic need for force in a constituency imperfectly malleable to just demands’.[198]
Is Akhtar’s argument as strong as he hopes? I do not think so.

The
absorption model is certainly plausible. If the Islamic account of divine/human
interaction and human nature is correct, then some form of nomocracy is reasonable.
If true human religion centres on obeying universal divine law, then it is
(philosophically) straightforward enough to think that the role of human
government is to simply mandate and enforce the social elements of Islamic law.
This is reasonable – and simple too, because Islam, like government, is
legislative by nature: Islam consists of teaching and enforcing laws, and so does
government. It is also reasonable to think that enforcement of Islamic law on
the unwilling and/or unbelieving might not be immoral if the laws were good
laws and if it achieved the greater good of creating a just and prosperous
society. Surely this principle is central to any meaningful concept of societal
law. It makes sense in the same way that enforcing tax law makes sense: I may
not believe in paying tax or I may be unwilling to pay tax even if I believe in
it, but it is legitimate for the government to tax me – and/or punish me for
evading paying tax – so that it can use tax revenue to benefit society by
building roads, hospitals, schools and so on.

Nevertheless,
we can seriously question whether the absorption model is adequate. Even if we
assume, for the sake of argument, that Islam accurately describes universal
divine law, there are two obvious weaknesses. First, the model adopts a highly
optimistic view of both human nature and the capacity of politics to deliver a just
society. It is not at all clear that this optimism is justified. Second, Akhtar
fails to adequately consider other possible models of engagement, and in so
doing gives us no strong reason to choose his model as superior. Let us look
closer at each of these criticisms.

Akhtar
(and Islam) is optimistic that the application of divine law to society by
government can realistically create a just and prosperous society. My
contention is that this optimism is unjustified. This is largely because the
ideas of political power and human moral capacity described by the absorption
model are weak I have already argued in Chapter 4 that the problem of human sin
in any individual appears too great to be overcome by mere religious education.
Here I suggest that the problem of social sin and evil, which is a manifestation
of the sin of individuals, is too great to be overcome by the exercise of
political power. I do not mean that the rule of law through government is entirely
impotent: law can move hearts and shape society. It can do so (legitimately)
through incentives and threat. For example, it can paint attractive pictures of
utopian societies and terrifying pictures of judgement. It can describe laws
that appeal to intuition and conscience, empower through education and enforce
through punishment. I willingly concede that it is a necessary requirement of
any truly just society that its government enacts and enforces laws that
coincide with divine law. But while it might be necessary, it is far from
sufficient. And it is far from sufficient because it does not have any clear mechanism
to overcome sin if sin is an inherent and serious flaw in human will.

Akhtar
(and Islam), of course, does not agree with me on this point. But even if he
can convincingly show that law can somehow deal effectively with human
sin, this does not overcome the problem of the empirical evidence showing that
it has not: the Islamic model does not have a good track record of being
able to fully deliver what it promises. The historical record shows that this model
is not able to create a Muslim society that is ideally just, prosperous and
worshipful. The contemporary Muslim political philosopher Ovamir Anjum concedes
that:

Two
observations about Islamic civilization have been commonplace, shared by
Western as well as, often, Muslim observers. The first is the success and
predominance of law in Islam; Islam is seen as ‘nomocratic and nomocentric.’
The second is the failure of Islamic politics or the Muslim political
enterprise to enact coherent and stable political institutions and of Islamic
normative political thought to provide realistic guidance to governments or
avert cycles of tyranny, violence, and rebellion.[199]

It
is important to note that Anjum makes this point in order to support a revisionist
case that Islamic nomocracy as traditionally conceived is inadequate.
Nevertheless, he does not dispute the observed failure of Islamic nomocracy to
deliver what it promises.

I
am not claiming that Islam is entirely impotent to create a just and
prosperous society. That would be a great surprise to many Muslims who have
lived their lives happily within traditional Muslim communities! I simply want
to dispute Akhtar’s strong claim that ‘politically empowered Islam … historically,
at least, gave us peace, scholarship, political security and stability for
millennia in several parts of the world’[200]
in a way that is markedly superior to any other political system. I do not
share Akhtar’s optimism that coercive political power – of any kind – has the
required power to save a world full of sin. Politicians, even those with divine
law on their side, are left with the same dilemma as Mr Incredible:

No matter how
many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again.
Sometimes I just want it to stay saved for a little bit. I feel like the maid:
‘I just cleaned up this mess, can we keep it clean for ten minutes?? Please.’[201]

In
summary, the idea that complete societal sanctification can originate politically,
as much as personally, needs more work.

The
second, more serious, weakness relates to Akhtar’s imagination concerning
possible models of political engagement for any religion. He asserts, without
detailed supporting argument, that only four possible models exist: submission,
agitation, absorption and ‘imperial/missionary’ absorption (with each
incorporating the previous). Akhtar then assumes that only an absorption method
is able to sanctify politics and allow it to create a just and prosperous
society (along the lines mandated by divine law). But why should we agree with
him about this? I contend, instead, that possibilities for societal
transformation exist within the submission and agitation methods but Akhtar
fails to recognise them because he remains wedded to an Islamic legislative
model. Not only has he failed to recognise them in general, but he has failed
to recognise them in Christianity. He therefore dismisses the usual Christian
account as a weak submission method that has either no interest in political
power or a public agenda of submission masking an insidious power game. I
contend instead that biblical Christianity operates within a model that Akhtar has
ignored altogether. It is a model that does not repudiate power, but instead
adopts a radically different concept of the sort of power that is required for
societal sanctification by divine law, and then pursues that power
passionately. I call this a leavening model of religious political engagement.
Next we will see how this model operates.

Powerless?

Traditional
Muslims generally agree that the Islamic account of divine/human interaction
calls for some sort of nomocratic (or absorption) model of political
engagement. What about Christianity? What model, if any, does Christianity
ascribe to? The Muslim challenge presents Christianity as – a few examples of
agitation aside – generally adopting a model of meek (read ‘weak’) submission.
Akhtar sees the Bible calling for the politically oppressed to ‘imitate Christ
in his voluntary powerlessness’.[202]
This, however, is too crude a description of the Christian model. While it is
fair to suggest that the Christian model essentially operates at the
submission/agitation end of Akhtar’s spectrum, it is not fair to suggest that it
does so lamely, impotently or with a willing abdication from sociopolitical
responsibility. Christianity operates under a model of political engagement
that highlights believers radically influencing society through a whole range
of relational power dynamics – of which governmental executive powers is just one,
comparatively impotent, dynamic. In the rest of this section I will describe
this model as the Christian ‘leavening’ model of political engagement. I hope
to show how this model offers a plausible account of how to create a truly just
society in accordance with divine law.

The
key ideas behind the leavening model are described in the following words of
Jesus:

The kingdom of
heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour,
till it was all leavened (The Gospel of Matthew 13:33).

We
can take Jesus’ term ‘kingdom of heaven’ here as a rough equivalent to the
Muslim political ideal: it describes the social situation where every element
of life has come under God’s rule. Jesus claims that the mechanism behind this
process is a ‘leavening’. That is, society is transformed/sanctified by the
influence of believers permeating all levels of society – including politics –
from within. Thus, the term ‘leavening’ is used metaphorically to describe the
organic, relational process of inside-out influence. Other metaphors could be
used. Jesus himself uses the metaphor of ‘seasoning’ in the same way when he
clarifies the role that believers play in this social transformation:

You are the
salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be
restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and
trampled under people’s feet (The Gospel of Matthew 5:14).

The
idea here is that believers have a clear responsibility to contribute to the
sanctification of society.

Notice,
too, that the societal responsibility of Christians is viewed globally. Like
Islam, Christianity has a global social agenda. The key distinction between the
two faiths in this regard is that whereas the Muslim absorption model is
fundamentally a legislative model of personal and societal transformation, the
Christian leavening model is fundamentally a relational model. I will soon describe
how power is seen to operate within this model, but briefly note that the leavening
model of political engagement is fully in agreement with the fellowship
model of divine/human interaction. In the same way that codified divine
legislation supports a personal relationship between humans and God,
governmental legislation is viewed as merely one supporting feature of wide
societal relationships. It therefore makes sense that executive government
would be limited in the scope of its power to fully create a just and
prosperous society that is centred on divine worship.

In
the rest of this section I want to highlight some important features of the leavening
model that address Muslim criticisms. But before I do, I need to point out the limitations
of this model. It is, I suggest, a broad model that has the capacity to
incorporate a very wide range of sociopolitical activities and approaches,
including most of those adopted by Christians throughout history. However, I am
not claiming that the model fully encompasses all the aspects of Christian
political engagement described by the Bible or church doctrines. I am not
claiming that the model encompasses the full range of Christian political
philosophies. Importantly, too, I am not claiming to offer a fully developed
account of the model. My aims are more modest than that. I simply want to
describe enough of the features of the leavening model to show that it is philosophically
plausible, generally consistent with biblical and historical Christianity, and
avoids most, if not all, Muslim criticisms of the Christian position on
political engagement. Let me offer three ways in which it does this.

First,
the leavening model does not reject the idea of, or the use of, power. Akhtar
views Jesus’ apparently meek submission to authority as a repudiation of power
and a theological paradigm for Christian political engagement – indeed, a
theology of persecution and powerlessness.[203]
This assessment, however, suffers from being far too simplistic. The leavening
model shows that Christians should – and do – recognise, value and pursue power.
They do so in order to influence the world for good, but also with an
understanding of power that is radically different from that of Islam. Indeed,
the Christian conception of power is so different that it is apparently
paradoxical, so one can forgive Akhtar for not getting it quite right. When he
spoke of a Christian theology of powerlessness he was in the ball park (so to
speak), but it is more accurate to speak of a theology of ‘power in weakness’.

The
crucial – and, perhaps, counter-intuitive – idea in the Christian theology of power
in weakness is that the apparently ‘weak’ dynamics of relationships are in fact
the most powerful in influencing human society. The apostle Paul describes this
surprising reality like this:

For consider
your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly
standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose
what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world,
even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human
being might boast in the presence of God (The First Letter to the Corinthians
1:26–29).

Paul’s
point here is that, in God’s political economy, the exercise of relational acts
like service, humility, encouragement, sacrificial love, generosity, gentleness
and meekness are viewed as carrying greater transformative power towards a just
society than the exercise of things like leadership, policing, instruction and
discipline. This does not dismiss the role of the various authority features of
relationship in society, including the relationship of government to its
citizens. Rather, it downplays the ultimate significance of the role
authorities can play. This idea may be counter-intuitive at first glance, but
the sense of it can be understood with a little reflection. For example, think
about the power dynamics of a family. Properly operating families feature
authority roles and the exercise of instruction, legislation and enforcement of
family rules and discipline. However, it is plausible that the exercise of
love, service, humility, patience, forgiveness and forbearance is of greater
importance in building a family life that conforms to the divine will. The
leavening model simply views the same being the case for every social
structure.

Another
important idea in this ‘theology of weakness’ is that the power resources
required by humans to adequately exercise these relational acts are only available
through the supernatural empowerment of the Holy Spirit. So, according to Christian
doctrine, humans are sinful in a way that is beyond their own power to overcome.
Therefore, the way to access power is to recognise human weakness and impotence
and then source sanctifying power directly from God. This is exactly what Paul
had in mind when he wrote: ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ (The Second
Letter to the Corinthians 12:10). Because Christians see that the empowering
presence of God’s Holy Spirit is necessary for personal and social
sanctification, they pray to God that he would give them this power. Here is an
example of such a prayer, again from Paul:

I do not cease
to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of
revelation in the knowledge of him … and the immeasurable greatness of his
power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that
he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his
right hand in the heavenly places … (The Letter to the Ephesians 1:16–21)

So
Christians do seek power. They seek a share in the sort of divine power
that is able to raise the dead. They believe that they will find that power
only in a close personal relationship with God, including his personal empowering
presence, and so they pray that they ‘may know him and the power of his
resurrection’ (The Letter to the Philippians 3:10).[204]

This
theology of power in weakness that undergirds the leavening model can resist
Akhtar’s objections that the Christian model embraces powerlessness. Moreover,
it refutes another of his reasons for preferring the Muslim model. Akhtar
argues that the Muslim model is superior because:

by (Muslims) acknowledging
the need for power, we pre-empt a power-complex that leads us to overtly deny
the need for it – only to seek it covertly and all the more aggressively.

Thus,
any Christian theology that repudiates power is un-liveable (or will lead to
inappropriately covert power games) because society operates with power
structures and dynamics whether we like it or not. But the leavening model, of
course, recognises this. Akhtar’s preference arises out of an erroneous account
of the Christian take on power.

Second,
the relational focus of the leavening model does not diminish the importance of
humans being held accountable to divine law. Indeed, the very next thing that
Jesus says after outlining the Christian model using the seasoning metaphor is
this: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law … ’ (The Gospel of Matthew
5:17). Instead, the leavening model understands that the sort of resurrection
power that I have just described is precisely the sort of power that can write
divine law on people’s hearts. In other words, it is a divine power to
resurrect the human will so that it is inclined towards obedience to divine
law. This is important in the context of our discussion because it should
reassure Muslims that, despite its relational focus, the Christian model values
law. It also helps to explain why Christians resist the idea of nomocracy. Christians
do not resist the idea of nomocracy because they think that it is unreasonable
to enforce good laws upon the unwilling – we saw earlier that law requires this.
Christians resist the idea of nomocracy because they believe that divine law is
a covenantal law – that is, an encoding of the sort of responsibilities that accompany
a loving personal relationship between God and humans.

While
laws can be reasonably enforced on the unwilling, loving relationships cannot
be. This is the case no matter how much we long for it to be otherwise. So, for
example, it made no difference how strong a teenage crush I had on Argentinian
tennis player Gabriella Sabatini, there was no way I could make her love
me. To try hard to enforce it would have been to turn me into a stalker! In a
similar way, the leavening model views that, as covenantal law, divine law is only
properly obeyed when it is obeyed willingly from the heart.

Under
the leavening model, it is still possible for governments to impose various
elements of divine law upon society for its benefit. It is entirely appropriate
that if God says ‘Do not murder’, then a government, made up partly or entirely
of believers, could declare ‘Do not murder’ to be law and execute this law upon
the willing and the unwilling. However, this model cannot be properly spoken of
as nomocracy because any Christian nomocracy necessarily requires that the laws
be followed from the heart and in the context of personal loving relationship
with God. In Christian terms, while there are unwilling hearts within the
community, the Kingdom of God cannot fully overlap with any earthly religious
empire.[205]
Instead, the leavening model incorporates a mechanism that more comprehensively
addresses the problem of human sin and intransigence. Human disobedience and recalcitrance
to divine law is far more effectively resolved by a spiritual resurrection of
human will than external discipline imposed by human authorities.

Third,
the leavening model does not pursue or advocate political impotence. Rather, it
recognises that government of some sort – and it is silent on what form of
government is optimal – is a divinely mandated institution. The Letter to the
Romans commands that:

every person
be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from
God, and those that exist have been instituted by God (The Letter to the Romans
13:1).

Clearly,
the Bible envisages the leavening model to primarily operate within existing
political structures – whatever they happen to be. This is, of course,
sensible. Here is one example of how the leavening influence can work in the
political realm. A friend of mine had the privilege of speaking with an
extremely senior member of the political leadership in China. This man happened
to be a Christian, and he very clearly saw that one of his roles within the
political establishment was to use his relational influence with the other
leaders to encourage them to shape China towards a just society as described by
divine moral law. As this man said to my friend: ‘China will be great and
powerful – it is inevitable. The important question for us is whether we will
be great and good also’.

Akhtar
is correct to think that the leavening model aligns with the submission and
agitation end of his spectrum. Nevertheless, many Christians would, and have
argued that this principle must not be followed in an inflexible way. When
taken in the wider context of biblical mandates – for example, to care for the
weak, it seems reasonable to think that some government could become so corrupt
or evil that revolution becomes a legitimate political act. In any case, even
if it was true that the leavening model does not elevate political dominance as
a form of social transformation over and above any other social relationship, it
does not discourage Christians from pursuing the legislation of at least the
universal moral elements of divine law. Remember that under this model,
Christians proactively seek to influence all parts of society for good.

Power
in strength or weakness?

If
what I have argued so far is correct, then we are not offered a choice between
an Islamic model of political engagement that embraces power and a Christian
one that embraces powerlessness. Instead, we are offered a choice between an
Islamic model that endorses a Muslim government’s executive power to coercively
create a just society, and a Christian model that identifies apparently weak
relational dynamics as carrying greater transformative power. Both models are
philosophically plausible. How might we choose which is preferable?

Intuitively,
the easiest way would be to compare the success of both models in history: the
proof being in the ‘pudding’, so to speak. The problem with this approach is
that history, it seems to me, shows no clear winner. Historical claims are easy
to dispute – the empirical evidence is often ambiguous and difficult to assess
in any non-question-begging way. Nevertheless on the evidence we do have, an objective
observer seems very likely to conclude that the political track records of both
Islam and Christianity clearly fail to match up to their professed ideals. Earlier,
I pointed out that Islamic nomocracy did not seem to have fulfilled its
promises at any point in history. But it is hard to claim that the Christian
model has fared any better. The track record of Christian political engagement is
patchy at best. It has had its highs – the abolition of slavery – but also its
lows – the corruption of the (so-called) Holy Roman Empire. It is, I suggest,
impossible to point to any situation in which a Christian leavening influence
has created a truly just society. This means that Muslims can offer the same
objection to the Christian model that I made to the nomocratic one: that (whatever
its plausibility) the leavening model, too, has failed to deliver what it
promises in any ultimate sense. Akhtar, for example, devotes a great deal of
one chapter of his Islam as Political Religion to pointing this out. If
we are honest, Muslims and Christians can sensibly agree that history witnesses
neither a fully successful Islamic nomocracy nor a fully leavened society. This
leaves us in the situation where the relational power dynamics described by the
leavening model appear no more powerful than the legislative power dynamics
described by the absorption model – at least in sociopolitical terms. While the
leavening model might well describe a promising theoretical solution to
the social problem of human sin, it has failed to deliver full sanctification
in practice.

The
standard Christian reply to this problem is that the leavening model does not
promise complete social transformation/sanctification this side of judgement
day. Resurrection of the corporate human heart must wait until resurrection
day. The leavening model is therefore less optimistic in this age than the
Muslim model. It makes less extravagant claims. Akhtar clearly sees such a view
as a theological easy way out that tilts things in Islam’s favour:

While
Christianity’s apocalyptic eschatology condemned the world so fiercely that it
left little room for a functioning political order to ameliorate our plight on
this side of the grave, Islam’s ethical eschatology demanded precisely a
political order to rectify immediately the world’s evils. ‘Things are so bad
that nothing can be done about it’ is countered by ‘Things are so bad that
something must be done about it’.[206]

His
point is, however, overstated. Christianity does not say that nothing
can be done about injustice. Rather, injustice will not be dealt with comprehensively
in this age by any political means. In this, it seems, we do have the support
of the empirical evidence – at least so far: injustice remains prevalent in all
societies. Whether this raises or lowers the credentials of the leavening model
is hard to say. Politically speaking, in this age, Islam aims so high that it
regularly misses; Christianity aims so low that it is hard to tell whether it
has missed or not.

Once
again we are left in a situation where our choice of model cannot reasonably be
made in isolation. The accuracy of either model will depend on the accuracy of
the concepts that underlie them – in particular, the concepts of human moral
capacity and the role of the Holy Spirit. What we can say, unequivocally, is
that if the Christian account of sin is accurate, then the Muslim nomocratic
model is doomed to fail. If this is the case, the Christian model or something
like it is required to overcome human disobedience and intransigence to divine
law. If the Christian fellowship model of divine/human interaction is correct,
then any nomocratic model will fail to account for all the worship features of our
covenantal interaction with God

Speaking
personally, I find great intuitive appeal in the thought of divine law written
supernaturally on human hearts rather than in human law books. Let me
illustrate how using my confessed love of golf. Great Australian cricketer and
sports commentator Richie Benaud once quipped that:

Golf is a
great sport for many reasons, not least of which is that it’s the only game
where you call a penalty on yourself … [207]

This
is an intriguing thought. Why would Benaud think that self-regulation is great?
Why is it more meritorious than enforced rules? Certainly it is unusual in
sports. Nearly all sports need referees or umpires of some sort to enforce the
laws of the game. Despite the abuse they often suffer at the hands of
supporters (and often players), everyone would agree that sports officials are
there for the good of the game. They help, not hinder. They punish infractions
of the rules because these ruin the game for everyone. Moreover, good officials
also develop good laws and explain them to players. Why, then, would Benaud say
that the self-regulation in golf is better? It is, I suggest, because when rules
are willingly followed from the heart, it best facilitates community. It is
evidence of a community of trust, honesty, humility, service and honour. It is
evidence of a community where competition is not at the expense of
relationship. It is evidence that the ‘weak’ relational dynamics are of more
profound influence than coercive power.

I
acknowledge that heart obedience to divine law and the proper exercise of
‘weak’ relational power dynamics is also an Islamic political ideal. Doubtless,
Islam hopes that its political leaders use force only where necessary. However,
it seems to me this is neither central to, nor necessary within, the Muslim
absorption model as it is to the Christian leavening model. Heart obedience to a
covenant form of divine law is both central and necessary to the leavening
model, and it is a key to its appeal. What is even more appealing is the idea
that God would personally empower such obedience. If the Muslim nomocratic
model – within the wider legislative model – is correct, then God has simply given
us laws and left us on our own. If I had any strong sense from the historical
record that we were capable of pulling this off on our own then I could see the
appeal of the Muslim model. Unfortunately I do not. Instead, I see the need for
the sort of divine assistance described by the leavening model. Furthermore, this
need is sensibly explained by the Christian fellowship model.

Conclusion

The Best of
People or Fools?

Wise beliefs

The
Qur’an unashamedly encourages Muslims to think that they are the best of all people
because of their religious beliefs:

You are the
best nation produced for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is
wrong and believe in Allah (Q3:110).

The
idea here is that the wise person will choose Islam over other religions because
it provides true and sensible beliefs about God, and a legislative ethic that,
if obeyed, will lead to the best society. In this book I have discussed how various
Muslim philosophers have argued in support of this idea and its negative implications
for some key Christian beliefs. I believe I have done so in a way that
encounters these thinkers honestly and fairly, as well as on their own terms. I
hope, too, that the message has come across clearly that I can see the sense of
many traditional Muslim beliefs – and the foolishness of various Christian
beliefs – so long as Muslims are correct that divine/human interaction should
be understood along legislative lines.

Nevertheless,
I have shown how these Muslim objections, and their supporting arguments,
ultimately fail. Some fail because the arguments are weak. A few objections fail
to hit the mark because they misunderstand or misrepresent the Christian belief
they attack. Many fail to meaningfully engage with the strong Christian
philosophical debates around the issues. Most importantly, they generally fail
because they lose their force once Christianity is viewed under a fellowship
model of divine/human interaction instead of a legislative model.

I
have shown that the adoption of a Christian fellowship model of divine/human
interaction is not philosophically objectionable, and that Muslim philosophers
have given us no strong reasons why we should not prefer it over a legislative model
– let alone any reason why their legislative model is the correct one.

If
I am correct, then the Christian beliefs we have considered here are
reasonable – and not foolish or irrational – despite sometimes being complex
and counter intuitive. We can therefore say that, despite Muslim objections, we
have strong reasons for thinking, and no similarly strong reasons against
thinking, that:

·
Muslim
beliefs are nowhere near as certain as Muslims generally hold them to be, and (at
the very least) they are not so certain as to necessitate competing Christian
beliefs being false.

·
All
humans are in the situation where our sin has damaged a loving personal
relationship with God to the degree that we are unable, through our own
efforts, to either know God personally or to be religiously successful.

·
God
is essentially personal and relational in the way described by the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity.

·
God
might reveal himself personally – and not just his will – and he might do so in
a way that is only accessible on his relational terms.

·
God
might, because of his love, become incarnate if it was the loving thing to do and
only he was in the position to do it.

·
The
incarnate God might offer himself as an atoning sacrifice if we were unable to
atone for our sin in our own power.

·
God
might speak to us inerrantly, authoritatively and personally through his human
servants’ words that have been inspired and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

·
Divine
ethics operate in such a way that divine law serves to facilitate divine
covenant fellowship.

·
The
most effective sociopolitical power available to humans is the empowerment
given by the Holy Spirit to transform all levels of society through humble,
loving and self-sacrificial service.

I
think these Christian beliefs are reasonable, but they are also, in some sense,
foolish as well.

Foolish
beliefs

The
Bible, as we saw in the introduction, encourages Christians to view themselves,
in a sense, as fools:

If anyone
among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may
become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God … so let no one
boast in men (The First Letter to the Corinthians 3:18–21).

Obviously
this verse is not commending the pursuit of foolishness per se – clearly
it is commending wise belief. Instead the verse is picking up on the theme of
this book: that God’s beautiful wisdom challenges the way humans naturally
think about religion. And does so in ways that mean it is easy for Christians
to appear, and feel, foolish for their beliefs even if they are profoundly
beautiful and held reasonably. Here are three of these ways.

First,
Christian belief is intellectually counter-intuitive. Many, if not all, of the
doctrines we have examined in this book are not immediately or obviously
sensible. Some, like the reasons for the hiddenness of God, are able to be
explained, but they do not reflect how we naturally think about the issue.
Others, like the Trinity, are able to be coherently described but not
explained. Others describe a religious epistemology that devalues rational
spectator knowledge and highlights personal knowledge, which makes it difficult
for many Christian beliefs to be fully epistemically evaluated by the
unbeliever. I imagine the epistemic situation to be something like me sitting
in a swimming pool in summer inviting others in to swim. The day is hot and the
pool is refreshing, but the water is cool and takes a few minutes to get used
to. Those outside the pool ask: ‘Is it nice in?’ ‘Is the water warm?’ I say: ‘Yes!’
They dip their toe in the pool and are immediately suspicious that the water is
cold. ‘You get used to it once you are in!’ I say. The problem is, there is no
way of testing this personally until you jump in yourself. In our risk-averse
world that values scientific knowledge above all else – where one always ‘looks
before one leaps’ (so to speak), this sort of epistemology is indeed apparently
foolish. But it is rewarding! In the same way that the faith needed to jump into
the pool is rewarded with refreshment, the risk of entering deep, trusting,
personal relationships with those we do not know yet can be rewarded with
extraordinary joy – especially if that person is God!

Second,
Christian ethics is socially counter-cultural. The power-in-weakness theology
of the ‘leavening’ approach to social participation opens Christians up to
ridicule – and worse. Here is a sobering, yet at the same time inspiring,
example. A Congolese friend of mine worked with a Christian pastor named Obosa.
A few years ago, Obosa was working in an area of the Congo controlled by
rebels. One day, as he was walking through the jungle, he was ambushed by a
troop of rebel soldiers. When they threatened him with their weapons, he showed
them his Bible and said, ‘Those guns are your weapons, and they are weapons of
war. The gospel of forgiveness in this book is my weapon, and it is a weapon of
peace’. The soldiers simply laughed at him, slit his throat to kill him, and
then cut open his stomach and placed his Bible in the wound. Coercive power
seemed to have won – until the rebels’ leader heard what had happened. He asked
my friend to send another pastor to see him. This second pastor (the real hero
of this story!) was willing to forgive the rebels for killing his friend and
risk similar treatment in order to share with them the same message of
forgiveness from God. When he arrived he discovered that the rebel leader had
been convicted with guilt over his mens’ treatment of a man of peace. This
leader asked the pastor to share the message of peace with him, and afterwards he
decided that he and his troop would lay down their weapons and surrender to the
government. This story shows that the Christian power-in-weakness ethic is
apparently weak and easy to laugh at, but it carries extraordinary transformative
power.

Third,
Christian belief is personally humbling. There is a sense in which all theism
requires humility. Humility before God is an obviously sensible thing for a
weak creature like a human. The humility required by Christian belief, however,
incorporates far more than that: it humbles the believer before themselves. It
requires believers to move beyond their intuition that they could be good if they
wanted to (or at least good compared to other people) and recognise that they are
powerless to know God, or please God, by themselves. It requires the
recognition that we are spiritually bankrupt unless we receive the gracious assistance
of the personal presence of the Holy Spirit. The beauty of this sort of
humility is that it destroys human pretention and allows us to receive all the
underserved lavishing of God’s grace without needing to earn it.

Christian
beliefs are reasonable and beautiful, but in a way that profoundly
challenges the sorts of ways that we like to think naturally. Truly: ‘the
wisdom of the world is folly with God’.

True
beliefs?

Where
are we now, in terms of truth? At the beginning of this book, I argued that our
beliefs are most likely to be true (there is no guarantee!) if they are
reasonable. Our beliefs are reasonable if they conform to the available evidence,
were arrived at reliably, and are coherent both within themselves and with our
other beliefs. It should be pretty clear that I have not established the truth
of any of the Christian beliefs I have defended by these criteria. There
are vast amounts of evidence, belief processes and coherence issues that remain
unexamined for each and every belief we have considered. The truth of Christian
(and Muslim) beliefs will depend upon a range of historical, theological and
epistemological factors that are beyond the scope and aims of this book.

The
aim of this book has instead been modest. Its arguments have merely been offered
in defence of the philosophical plausibility of a few particular – but crucial
– Christian beliefs in response to a few particular Muslim objections. Doubtless,
some of these arguments suffer from unidentified weaknesses and gaps. Doubtless,
my conclusions will not be the last word in any of these matters. Doubtless,
too, Muslim thinkers – like my friend Shabbir – will point out any weaknesses
to me with gusto and with newly bolstered arguments. As a truth seeker, not a
dogmatist, I welcome this. Nevertheless, for the moment I will conclude with
this claim: The objections of Muslim philosophers, to date, have given me –
and, I suggest, Christians in general – no strong reasons to believe that Muslim
beliefs in these matters are true, and no strong reasons to doubt that my
Christian beliefs, though foolish in the eyes of some, are true.

Key References

Muslim philosophy

www.islamicphilosophy.com

The Islamic Philosophy Online website is a
one-stop reference for all things to do with Muslim philosophy.

Christian philosophy

J.P.
Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, IVP,
Downers Grove, 2003

The
most comprehensive intermediate level introduction to the key issues.

Faith
and Philosophy

For
those wanting to go deeper, this technical journal is the pre-eminent Christian
journal concerning the philosophy of religion.

General philosophy of
religion

plato.stanford.edu

The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a one-stop reference for all things to
do with philosophy in general. Articles are brief, relatively accessible to the
lay person, yet sophisticated.

Select
Bibliography

Shabbir Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, Ivan R. Dee, 1991

The
Qur’an and the Secular Mind, Routledge, New York,

2008

Islam
as Political religion: The Future of an Imperialist Faith,

Routledge, New York, 2011

Syed
Muhammad Naquib al-Attas,
Prolegomena to the
Metaphysics

of Islam, Kazi Publications,
Chicago, 1997

C.A.J.
Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical
Study, Clarendon Press,

Oxford, 1992

Isma’il
Raji al Faruqi,
Al Tawhid: Its
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Life, International Institute of Islamic
Thought (IIIT),

Herndon, 1992

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L. Geisler,
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Rapids, 1976

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al-Haqq, Epistemology of
Prophethood in Islam,
al Tawhid, vol.

4, no. 21

Paul
Moser, The Elusive God:
Reorienting Religious Epistemology,

Cambridge University Press, New York, 2008

Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, State University of

New York Press, Albany, 1989

Said
Nursi, The Words, Online:

http://www.nur.gen.tr/en.html#leftmenu=Risale&maincontent=Risale

Alvin
Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief,
Oxford University

Press, New York, 2000

Fadlou
Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable
God, E.J. Brill, Leiden,

1964

Richard Swinburne, Epistemic Justification, Oxford University

Press, Oxford, 2001

Is
There A God? Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2010

W.
Montgomery Watt (trans),

The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, Allen and Unwin, London, 2000,

Notes

[1] Zakir Naik, Islam for Western Minds,
http://saif_w.tripod.com/explore/i4wm/02p.htm

[2] Shabbir Akhtar, A Faith for All
Seasons, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1990, Preface.

[3] Isma’il
Raji al Faruqi, Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life, International Institute of Islamic
Thought (IIIT), Herndon,
1992.

[4] Ismail Al-Faruqi, Towards An Islamic
Theory of Meta-Religion, Part 1. Online:
http://islamicstudies.islammessage.com/ResearchPaper.aspx?aid=572

[5] Al-Faruqi, ‘Da’wah in the West: Promise
and Trial’, in Ataullah Siddiqui (ed), Islam and Other Faiths,
IIIT, Herndon, 1998, p. 320.

[6] Shabbir Akhtar, Islam as Political
Religion: The Future of an Imperial Faith, Taylor & Francis, London, 2010, p. 163.

[7] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity,
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1943, p. 145.

[8] I am operating within a realist
conception of truth.

[9] For a more detailed look at an exploration of these sorts of
ideas by a Christian philosopher, see Esther Meek, Loving to Know:
Introducing Covenant Theology, Wipf & Stock, Eugene, 2011.

[10] Al-Faruqi, Christian Ethics, A
Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas, Djambatan, The
Hague, 1967, pp. 4–7.

[11] Akhtar, Islam, p. 89.

[12] Shabbir Akhtar, The Qur’an and the
Secular Mind, Routledge, New York, 2008, p. 57.

[13] Richard Swinburne, Epistemic
Justification, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 1.

[14] Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Al-Baqara 1–7: The
Qur’an and Doubt’, Blogging the Qur’an,
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/quran/2008/01/albaqara_17_the_quran_and_doubt.html

[15] International Conference of Islamization
of Knowledge, ‘Toward Islamization of Disciplines’, Islamization of
Knowledge Series 6, IIIT, Herndon, 1989.

[16] Said Nursi, The Words, p. 420.
Online: http://www.nur.gen.tr/en.html#leftmenu=Risale&maincontent=Risale

[17] Nursi similarly argues that the
existence of God, the reality of resurrection and the prophethood of Muhammad
can be proven to be absolutely certain.

[18] Nursi, The Words, p. 766.

[19] Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Prolegomena
to the Metaphysics of Islam, Kazi Publications, Chicago, 1997, p. 117.

[20] This illustration gives us a window into
an important principle: certainty usually involves our degree of felt certainty
reasonably matching our degree of epistemic certainty. I say usually, because
sometimes this principle does not matter too much – for example, the issue may
not be important. To stick with a sporting illustration, I always have
unreasonable feelings of certainty when I play golf. I try shots I almost never
can make, but this does not matter because it is just a game (and because it
feels great when they occasionally do reach their intended destination).
Sometimes you need to act regardless of how certain you feel. If you need to
jump from a burning building, it does not matter how high your degree of
certainty of surviving is because you have no choice but to jump. At other
times you do not have access to enough knowledge to know how certain you can
be. This was the case for a parachutist whose parachute failed, but he survived
because he landed on snow-covered trees: the psychological certainty that he
would survive when he jumped was correct, but for all the wrong reasons!
However, when it comes to religion, it matters a lot whether your felt
certainty about some belief is reasonable. This is because religious beliefs –
like, say, the existence of God or life after death – are likely to be very
important and there are many competing beliefs for you to choose from.

[21] Translated by W. Montgomery Watt, The
Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, Allen and Unwin, London, 2000, pp. 21f.

[22] Watt, The Faith, p. 60.

[23] Akhtar, Qur’an, pp. 149–150.

[24] Muhammad Ibn Ishaq and Alfred Guillaume,
The Life of Muhammad, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Introduction, pp.
xiii–xlii.

[25] Ibid.

[26] For an extended discussion of the idea
that mystical experiences can generally be considered similar to other sense
experiences, see William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of
Religious Experience, Cornell University Press, Ithica New York, 1991.

[27] Surprisingly, al-Ghazali did not realise
this. This is surprising because he did question the reliability of the five
senses.

[28] Akhtar, Qur’an, p. 210.

[29] Note that I am not, here, seeking to
address global scepticism about things like the external world, or the past.

[30] M.A. Muqtedar Khan, Islamic Democratic
Discourse, Lexington, Washington, 2006, p. 160.

[31] Today this school of thought is promoted
through the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).

[32] Norman L. Geisler, Christian
Apologetics, Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, pp. 61ff.

[33] Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, Gifford
Lectures 1981, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1981, pp. 1f.

[34] Pascal, Pensees, Christian
Classics Ethereal Library, Grand Rapids, p. 115.

[35] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 78.

[36] My account of certainty recognises that
the hiddenness of God places us in the situation where one person is able to be
certain about religious belief p while another is unable to be certain
about p. This is, straightforwardly, because one person’s access to
evidence or process of belief or system of supporting beliefs can be different
to another’s at any given time. It is therefore fair to say, as Akhtar does,
that agnosticism could be reasonable for some while theism could be reasonable
for others.

[37] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 85.

[38] Ibid., p. 93.

[39] Paul Moser, The Elusive God:
Reorienting Religious Epistemology, Cambridge University Press, New York,
p. 1.

[40] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 217.

[41] See Majid Fakhry, ‘The Classical Islamic
Arguments for the Existence of God’, The Muslim World, vol. 47, 1957,
pp. 133–45.

[42] William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith,
1993, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, New York, Oxford
University Press, Ch. 1.

[43] Del Ratzsch, Teleological Arguments
for God’s Existence, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
plato.stanford.edu. For more detail see Moreland, Scaling the Secular City,
Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 1987, pp. 43–75.

[44] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy,
Hendrickson, Massachusetts, 2006, p. 79.

[45] Nursi, The Words, p. 24.

[46] Ibid., p. 19.

[47] Lewis provides this argument in Mere
Christianity. An excellent introduction to the ideas can be found here:
http://merechristianitystudyguide.blogspot.com.au/2008/12/c-s-lewiss-three-arguments-for-moral.html

[48] Akhtar, A Faith, pp. 180–181.

[49] Fadlou Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique
Unknowable God, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1964, p. 37.

[50] Akhtar, The Quran, p. 217.

[51] Gary R. Habermas ‘My Pilgrimage from
Atheism to Theism: an Exclusive Interview with Former British Atheist Professor
Antony Flew’, Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 2 (Winter 2004).

[52] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 225.

[53] Ibid., p. 339.

[54] Moser, The Elusive, p. 244.

[55] This account does not exclude the
recognition of the proper place of some epistemic evaluation in this sort of
personal cognition of God. God’s terms include him treating us as
epistemologically responsible agents. Here again the child/philosopher distinction
is helpful. A philosopher can properly evaluate their beliefs with complete
objectivity whereas a child properly evaluates their beliefs about their
parents in a way that cannot be objective since it is within the context of an
intimate, personal and obedient relationship.

[56] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 180.

[57] More precisely, fatherhood is the
pre-eminent attribute of the first person of the Trinity.

[58] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 160.

[59] Akhtar, Islam, p. 162.

[60] Akhtar, The Qur’an, pp. 274f.

[61] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 144.

[62] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 275.

[63] Ibid., p. 277.

[64] Akhtar, A Faith, p143.

[65] John Calvin, Institutes of the
Christian Religion, Book I, Chapter iii,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.toc.html

[66] Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian
Belief, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, p. 180.

[67] Ibid., p. 207.

[68] Ibid., p. 205.

[69] Ibid., p. 213.

[70] For a handy introduction to this, see
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We
Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts, Harcourt Books,
Orlando, 2007.

[71] Baljinder Sahdra and Paul Thagard, ‘Self
Deception and Emotional Coherence’, Minds and Machines, vol. 13,
2003, p. 227.

[72] Romans 3:23.

[73] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 275.

[74] I can anticipate some
Muslims objecting that my brief account sells Islam short concerning knowing
God. Some will say that Islam does incorporate a more intimate knowledge
of God for those who embrace Sufi practices. I have chosen to ignore Sufism
partly because it is a matter of contention within Islam just how valid Sufi
practices are, and partly because even Sufis suggest that only a few people are
capable of achieving the sort of knowledge available through Sufi practice.
This does not seem to be a promising avenue for the ordinary Muslim to
successfully know God. In passing, though, it is interesting to notice that the
sort of mystical knowledge talked about by Sufis is almost the direct
opposite of the sort of personal knowledge involved in a covenant. Muslim
philosopher Mahdi Yazdi describes this sort of knowledge as ‘knowledge by
presence’ and it is ultimately found in fana; a state in which one loses
themselves in the unity of God (Mahdi Ha‘Iri Yazdi, The Principles of
Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy, SUNY Press, New York, pp. 47–56). This
contrasts markedly with the Christian idea of covenant knowledge being a loving
relationship between two persons.

[75] Al-Qushayri, Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on
Sufism, Garnett, Reading, 2007, p. 138.

[76] ‘Ahmad Deedat explain about Trinity in
Christian Religion’, 22 March 2007,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9uF4hoU9HRs#!

[77] ‘Doctor Zakir Naik completely refutes
the concept of trinity’, 16 November 2007,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibDXZav4-zM

[78] Akhtar, Islam, p. 163.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Aristotle, Metaphysics,
1005b:19–23. We can state the law of non-contradiction more simply as: not a
and ~a at the same time in the same respect.

[81] Akhtar, Islam, p. 163.

[82] The contradiction he sees is this: 1.
Parents biologically precede children; 2. If Jesus was the begotten Son then he
must have been biologically preceded by the Father; 3. (2) contradicts the
belief that Jesus is the eternal Son.

[83] Al-Ghazali, Al Ghazali’s Tract on
Dogmatic Theology, A.L. Tibawi (trans.), Luzac, London, 1965, p. 40.

[84] William Lane Craig in J.P. Moreland, Philosophical
Foundations for a Christian Worldview, IVP, Downers Grove, 2003, pp.
587–595.

[85] Better attempts were made by very early
Muslim philosophers. Al-Kindi, for example, in a lost work entitled Refutations
of the Christians, argued for the impossibility of the doctrine of the
Trinity largely along the lines that any Trinitarian formulation would
contradict the doctrine of divine simplicity. As I will show soon, the doctrine
of divine simplicity has serious problems of its own that weaken al-Kindi’s
arguments.

[86] Akhtar, Islam, 180.

[87] ‘Tawhid’,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawhid.

[88] Arthur J. Arberry, Avicenna on Theology,
Hyperion, London, 1979, p. 30.

[89] Ibid., p. 35.

[90] Ibid., p. 30.

[91] See the entry on ‘Divine Simplicity’ in
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[92] Many of these philosophical approaches
tend to adopt a non-realist theory of universals that seem unlikely to be
theologically acceptable to Muslims.

[93] Perhaps one could argue that the concept
of love can be meaningful self-referentially: one can love and forgive oneself.
Even if this is the case, then Tawhid is problematic because this
requires a change of mind in that one person.

[94] George N. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi: The
Philosopher of the Arabs, Karachi, 1966, p. 64.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable
God, p. 37.

[97] Ibn
Rushd TT 284 in Leaman, p. 132.

[98] Cited in Graham McFarlane, Why Do You
Believe What You Believe About the Holy Spirit, Paternoster, Carlisle,
1998, p. 92.

[99] Fazlur Rahman, ‘The People of the Book
and the Diversity of “Religions”’, in Paul J. Griffiths (ed), Christianity
Through Non-Christian Eyes, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY, 1990, p. 109.

[100] Ali Quli Qara'i, Islam and
Christianity: A Review Article, n.d.,
http://www.al-islam.org/al-tawhid/islam_christianity/1.htm

[101] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 174.

[102] D Thomas (ed.), Early Muslim Polemic
Against Christianity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 88.

[103] Akhtar, A Faith, pp. 179–80.

[104] Akhtar, Islam, p. 165.

[105] Ismael Al-Faruqi, Divine Transcendence
and Its Expression, in Islam and Other Faiths, ed. Ataullah
Siddiqui, IIIT, Herndon, 1998, p. 45.

[106] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 175.

[107] There
is a related moral objection concerning supposed injustice of one of the key
purposes of the incarnation – the substitutionary death of Jesus on the cross.
I will deal with this objection in the next chapter.

[108] Very briefly, Kenosis Christology tries
to explain how the divine Jesus could temporarily relinquish some of his divine
attributes while still remaining divine. This approach tends, I suggest, toward
being scripturally faithful but philosophically problematic. On the other hand,
Two Minds theory – recently argued by Tom Morris – tries to explain how Jesus
had an eternal divine mind yet also acquired a limited human mind during his
time on earth. This approach tends, I suggest, towards being philosophically plausible
(though highly technical), but theologically problematic.

[109] In order to understand what Moreland
means by this, it is perhaps helpful to quote his explanation at more length
here. He is suggesting that ‘the Logos contained perfect human personhood archetypically
in his own nature. The result was that in assuming a hominoid body the Logos
brought to Christ’s animal nature just those properties that would serve to
make it a complete human nature. Thus the human nature of Christ was complete
precisely in virtue of the union of his flesh with the Logos. As a result of
the union Christ did, indeed, possess a complete, individual human nature
comprised of body and soul; for that nature was made complete by the union of
the flesh with the Logos, the archetype of humanity … Human beings do not bear
god’s image in virtue of their animal bodies, which they have in common with
other members of the biosphere. Rather, in being persons they uniquely reflect
God’s nature’ (Moreland, Philosophical Foundations, pp. 608–609).

[110] International Review of Mission,
vol. 65, no. 260 (October 1976), pp. 391–406

[111] Ibn
Taymiyya, of course, in no way endorsed the idea that immanence of God could
result in the Incarnation. He sought to balance ‘personal devotional piety
without hulul (the indwelling of God in a human person), ittihad (union
or identification of God with either a created being or the universe), or mulamasa
(intermingling of God in creation or in a created person) (Thomas F. Michel, trans. and ed., A
Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity: Ibu Taymiyya's Al-Jawab
Al-Sahih, Caravan Books, Delmar NY, 1984, p. 3).

[112] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 174.

[113] It is true that the behaviour of the
family in this illustration is also morally offensive. However, this moral
offense is irrelevant to the main issue. In the same way the treatment of Jesus
by, say, Pilate, is irrelevant to whether it is appropriate for God to become
incarnate.

[114] An interesting philosophical question
Christians could be asked here is whether the idea that God might have good
reason to become incarnate commits them to the view that the incarnation was
the only viable option for God if he was to save humanity. I am inclined to
think that it does, but I do not propose to argue for this here.

[115] Akhtar, A Faith, pp. 175f.

[116] I will reasonably assume for sake of
argument that the act of the mother in this story was genuinely
self-sacrificial in the sense that she was in a position where her chances of
survival were greatly diminished by her acting to protect her daughter.

[117] The two ideas of grace and mercy are
related but not identical. I take it that grace involves blessing another when
they do not deserve it, whereas mercy involves an authority not treating
someone under their authority as they deserve to be treated.

[118] Matthew 6:10,12; Q1:6, Q23:118.

[119] I say generally, because most
conservative schools of Islamic thought would say that repentance is no
guarantee of mercy.

[120] Akhtar, Islam, p. 113.

[121] For a quick introduction to the
historical case for the death of Jesus, see John Dickson, The Christ Files,
Blue Bottle Books, Sydney, 2006; for a scholarly treatment see Markus
Bockmuehl, The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2001.

[122] ‘When Jesus died, did both of his
natures die?’, Operation 513 – Apologetics Blog, 31 March 2010,
http://operation513.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/when-jesus-died-did-both-of-his-natures.html

[123] Ulfat Aziz-us-Samad, Islam and
Christianity, International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations,
vol. 45, pp. 50–51.

[124] For an excellent discussion of this, see
Chawkat Moucarry, The Search For Forgiveness, IVP, Leicester, 2004.

[125] There are a variety of philosophical
models of punishment. See the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry
on ‘Punishment’ for an introductory overview.

[126] Notice that this model can happily
accommodate the idea of human sin being endemic – or even original.

[127] Steven Porter, ‘Swinburnian Atonement
and the Doctrine of Penal Substitution’, Faith and Philosophy, vol. 21,
no. 2 (April 2004), pp. 228–241.

[128] Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and
Atonement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989; Nicholas Wolterstorff, Does
Forgiveness Violate Justice?, p. 23. Online:
http://adss.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000075/bookpart.pdf

[129] The illustration is taken from Bruce
Langtry’s lecture series on the Philosophy of Christianity, at the University
of Melbourne, 2006.

[130] Swinburne, Responsibility, 1989.

[131] Wolterstorff, Does Forgiveness
Violate Justice?, p. 23.

[132] Ibid., p. 29.

[133] Central to the Christian atonement
account is the notion that Jesus is not just some innocent and uninvolved
third-person, but instead is the one true and ideal human upon whom our
humanity is modelled and to whom all humans ultimately belong. As this person,
he is ideally placed to step in as our representative, assisting in restoring
our personal relationship with God. Theologians call this ‘federal’
representation.

[134] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 133.

[135] I will, for example, ignore as special
pleading the challenge that this doctrine constitutes the Muslim sin of shirk
(associating something with God) in some way.

[136] The International Council on Biblical
Inerrancy, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978, p. 6.
Online: http://library.dts.edu/Pages/TL/Special/ICBI_1.pdf

[137] This definition should not be read as an
attempt to defend the idea that it is okay for various historical and
scientific statements made in the Bible to be in error so long as they are
unimportant to the theological point being made. Instead, the authors of the
document go on to say: ‘We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are
limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions
in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific
hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of
Scripture on creation and the flood’ (Chicago Statement, p. 8).

[138] Chicago Statement, p. 6.

[139] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 136.

[140] I do not have space to rebut the
spurious claims of some Muslim polemicists that this verse is referring to the
ministry of Muhammad.

[141] Randall Basinger and David Basinger,
‘Inerrancy, Dictation and the Free Will Defence’, Evangelical Quarterly,
vol. 55, 1983, pp. 177–180.

[142] Norman L. Geisler, ‘Inerrancy and Free
Will: A Reply to the Brothers Basinger’, Evangelical Quarterly, vol. 57,
1985, pp. 347–353. William Lane Craig teases this out even further, believing a
so-called ‘middle knowledge’ approach that offers fruitful ways of speaking
coherently about all this (William Lane Craig, ‘Inspiration and the Freewill
Defense Revisited’, Evangelical Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 4, 2001, pp.
327–339.

[143] Amelia Earhart, 20 Hrs 40 Mins, National
Geographic, Washington, 2003..

[144] C.A.J. Coady, Testimony: A
Philosophical Study, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992.

[145] Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and
the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, Trinity, Harrisburg, 2000. This point is
also supported by Richard Bauckham in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The
Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2006). Bauckham
has helpful things to say, too, concerning viewing the New Testament as a form
of testimony (pp. 472–508).

[146] Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New
Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd edn, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1992.

[147] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 127.

[148] Ibid., p128.

[149] Jalal al-Haqq, ‘Epistemology of
Prophethood in Islam’, al Tawhid, vol. 4, no. 21.

[150] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 134.

[151] Ibid., p. 131.

[152] Relevant hadith concerning Muhammad’s
memory include: Narrated Aisha: The Prophet heard a man reciting the Qur'an in
the mosque and said, ‘May Allah bestow His Mercy on him, as he has reminded me
of such-and-such Verses of such a Surah’ (Bukhari: volume 6, book 61, number
556, Khan); Narrated Hisham: (The same Hadith, adding): which I missed
(modifying the Verses) (Bukhari: volume 6, book 61, number 557, Khan); 'A'isha
reported that the Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) heard a person
reciting the Qur'an at night. Upon this he said: May Allah show mercy to him;
he has reminded me of such and such a verse which I had missed in such and such
a surah (Muslim: book 4, number 1720, Siddique); 'A'isha reported that the
Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) listened to the recitation of the
Qur'an by a man in the mosque. Thereupon he said: May Allah have mercy upon
him; be reminded me of the verse which I had been made to forget (Muslim: book
4, number 1721, Siddique); Narrated Mu'awiyah ibn Khudayj: One day the Apostle
of Allah (peace be upon him) prayed and gave the salutation while a rak'ah of
the prayer remained to be offered. A man went to him and said: You forgot to
offer one rak'ah of prayer ... (Abu Dawud: book 3, number 1018, Hasan);
Narrated Imran ibn Husayn: The Prophet (peace be upon him) led them in prayer
and forgot something, so he made prostrations and uttered the tashahhud, then
gave the salutation (Abu Dawud: book 3, number 1034, Hasan); Narrated Abdullah
ibn Mas'ud: (Muhammad said) I am only a human being and I forget just as you
do; so when I forget, remind me ... (Abu Dawud: book 3, number 1015, Hasan);
Narrated 'Abdullah: (Muhammad said) I am a human being like you and liable to
forget like you. So if I forget remind me ... (Bukhari: volume 1, book 8,
number 394, Khan).

[153] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 133.

[154] Ibid., p. 290.

[155] Ibid.

[156] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 158.

[157] Ibid., p. 157.

[158] Ibid.

[159] Ibid., p. 163.

[160] Some ethicists, of course, theorise
about non-normative (or non-deontological) ethics, but I suggest that very few
people, or societies, actually operate along non-normative ethical lines.

[161] At this point both Muslims and
Christians might make an objection something like: ‘We do not need to work out
what is right and good, we know because God has told us!’ But remember what
Akhtar’s argument is here. He is arguing that Islam is the more reasonable
faith because its ethics are reasonable; Christianity is the less reasonable
faith because its ethics are unreasonable. In this argument, it is question
begging to assume that either an Islamic or a Christian ethic is correct.

[162] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 159.

[163] Akhtar, Islam, p. 6.

[164] Ibid., p. 161.

[165] Ibid., p. 15.

[166] Ibid., pp. 164f.

[167] I imagine many Sufis would object to the
idea that a legislative model best describes the Islamic idea of divine/human
interaction. Two very brief responses: first, I believe the model presented by
Akhtar to represent the orthodox position far more accurately than the Sufi
model; second, I would argue, in any case, that the Sufism does not ultimately
offer us any model of divine/human interaction at all. Instead it offers what
is best described as a non-interactive model in which the goal is to
lose oneself in God. At that point, the idea of divine/human interaction becomes
largely meaningless.

[168] I am not suggesting here that arranged
marriages per se cannot be loving: all the evidence points to the fact
that they are just as, if not more, successful than ‘marriages for love’.
However, even in this situation, love must be willingly offered to count as
true love.

[169] It is true, of course, that in a
less-than-perfect world, covenant promises may need to operate occasionally as
legal obligations. They do this in the same way that a sailing boat might need
to occasionally use a motor to get it through a lull in the wind.

[170] Akhtar, Islam, p. 165.

[171] Romans 1:7; also 2 Corinthians 1:1,
Ephesians 1:1, Philippians 1:1.

[172] Akhtar, A Faith, p. 146.

[173] Akhtar, Islam, p. 162.

[174] For more on this, see Gerard McCabe, The
Personalism of John MacMurray. Online:
http://www.crvp.org/book/Series02/II-7/chapter_ii.htm

[175] Akhtar, Islam, p. 240.

[176] Ibid., p. 120.

[177] S.H. Nasr, The Heart of Islam,
HarperOne, San Francisco, 2004, pp. 148–150.

[178] For more on this, see Majid Khadduri,
‘Nature of the Islamic State’, Islamic Culture, vol. 21, October 1947,
pp. 327–331.

[179] Black puts it like this: ‘The Islamic
Philosophers never adopted the idea of a universal, intercultural moral
language for all humankind, or of rights and duties pertaining to human beings
as such. Rather, all humans should adhere to the one true moral Code, the
Muslim Shari‘a’ (Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought,
Routledge, New York, 2001, p. 59).

[180] Tahsil al-sa'ada: 43–4.

[181] Black, The History, p. 66.

[182] While it is generally agreed that some
sort of nomocratic ideal was the model of religious political engagement
envisaged by classical philosophers, there were dissenting voices. Ibn Tamiyya
was one. Ovamir Anjum, a modern-day revisionist, argues that the dominant Sunni
account fails to reflect early Islam in which the caliphs were political
leaders rather than jurists. Drawing on the thought of Ibn Tamiyya, he develops
an Islamic political theory that argues that fitrah (Richard, check this
is not fitrah) – i.e. the inherent Islamic nature of all humans – can
undergird political thinking in a way that allows human political reasoning
freed from the constraints of a rigid judicial approach to Sharia (Ovamir
Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2012).

[183] Abul Ala Maududi, ‘The Islamic Concept
of Life’, n.d., http://www.islam101.com/sociology/conceptLife.htm

[184] Akhtar, Islam, p124.

[185] Ibid., p240.

[186] Kenneth Cragg, Muhammad and the
Christian, Darton, Longman and Todd; London, 1984.

[187] Akhtar, Islam, p101.

[188] Ibid., pp. 90–91.

[189] Ibid., p. 91.

[190] Akhtar, The Qur’an, p. 277.

[191] Ibid., p. 271.

[192] Ibid., p. 107.

[193] Ibid., p. 122.

[194] Ibid., p. 103.

[195] Ibid., p. 144.

[196] Ibid., p. 129.

[197] Ibid., p. 127.

[198] Ibid., p. 144.

[199] Anjum, Politics, p. 1.

[200] Akhtar, Islam, p. 2.

[201] The Incredibles, Pixar, Disney,
2004.

[202] Ibid., p. 131.

[203] Ibid., p. 259.

[204] For a detailed theological exploration
of the link between ethics and the resurrection, see Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection
and Moral Order, Apollos, Leicester, 1994.

[205] Can I (hopefully humbly) suggest that I
think that this is a better way of explaining what Cragg was getting at when he
argued for the inconsistency of enforcing divine law on the unwilling.

[206] Akhtar, Islam, pp. 240f.

[207] David Scaletti, Golf … It’s a Funny
Game, Lothian Books; Melbourne, 2004, p. 36.