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 10⁶⁰, 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 10⁶⁰ 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 10⁴⁰, 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 10¹²³ … [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 (H₂O), 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 Implications for Thought and

Life, International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT),

Herndon, 1992

Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics, Baker Academic, Grand

Rapids, 1976

Jalal 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.