I’m taking a class on “Understanding Islam” this summer through Fuller Seminary. One of our first readings is a chapter by Martin Accad from “Toward Respectful Understanding and Witness Among Muslims.” I’m looking forward to learning more about the Muslim tradition and about how I may dialogue with and bear witness to my own Christian faith among Muslims. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working on some legal projects with Muslim scholars and have learned a great deal from them.
Accad notes that:
Christians are also met with a serious challenge today when attempting to witness in a Muslim context. The message that the media and leadership-political and religious-set forth is one that either demonizes or idealizes Islam. In the Christian church context, the attitude is more often one of demonization. Christians have always advocated that we are to love sinners but hate sin. This is a moral distinction that is fairly easy to maintain, as it is accompanied by the notion that we are all sinners outside the grace of God. However, there is today a parallel notion, which is spreading alarmingly fast, that we are to love Muslims but hate Islam. This notion is disturbing, for it is a very short step from the demonization of Islam and Muslims altogether. In reality, one observes that most people are unable to maintain such a theoretical separation between an ideology and its adherents.
Actually I think it’s difficult to maintain the “moral distinction” Accad mentions even in matters of ethics, but certainly I agree with him that it’s impossible concerning an entire cultural and religious identity.
In his chapter, Accad sketches a spectrum of possible Christian responses to Islam, ranging from sycretistic to polemical, as follows:
He advocates the “kerygmatic interaction,” approach, which he discusses as follows:
I want to retain from this Pauline usage the difference between the kerygma and the apologia, the difference in attitude between an apologetic defense of one’s beliefs on the one hand, and a positive proclamation of it on the other. The kerygmatic approach to Christian-Muslim interaction is thus devoid of polemical aggressiveness, apologetic defensiveness, existential adaptiveness, or syncretistic elusiveness; not because any of these other four approaches is necessarily wrong, but because that is the nature of the kerygma: God’s gracious and positive invitation of humanity into relationship with himself through Jesus. It needs essentially no militant enforcers, no fanatic defenders, no smart adapters, and no crafty revisers.
For the kerygmatic Christ follower, religions are recognized to be an essential part of the human psychological and sociological needs. At the same time, God is seen to be above any religious system. Although God is the absolute Truth, no single religious system is infallible or completely satisfactory. I would contend that the Gospels indicate that Jesus himself, who is never seen as denying his Jewishness, had this attitude. He was at peace with his religious identity as a Jew, practiced the requirements of the law from childhood, entered the Jewish places of worship, and was trained in Jewish theology and methods. At the same time, whenever Jesus expressed frustration in the Gospels, it was generally either toward some stratified religions institutional form such as the Sabbath, or toward stubborn institutional religious leaders. His message cut through the safety of the legalistic boundaries of righteousness, and his invitation to relate to God was extended to the marginalized and outcast of his society. Further, through carefully crafted parables, Jesus proclaimed himself to be the inaugurator of God’s kingdom in fulfillment of God’s promise to the nations, and he established himself as the final criterion of admission into that kingdom as the way to the Father.
Therefore) in recognition that social organization is a natural human phenomenon toward which we are all inclined, the kerygmatic position and attitude does not consist in rejecting one’s religious heritage, for it would soon be replaced by another form of ideology. In the kerygmatic approach it is Christ himself who is at the center of salvation rather than any religious system. The kerygma is never a message of condemnation, but it brings condemnation to those that arc stuck within religious boundaries. The principal difference between this position and the other positions on the dialogical spectrum is that the conversation is removed entirely from the realm of institutionalized religious talk. One theologian who captured this worldview was Karl Barth. In a chapter he titled “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion,” he said, “We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern) indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man.”
The kerygmatic approach that we are here advocating is therefore the equivalent of this Barthian revelation of God. The kerygma upheld by this approach is nothing less than God’s own revelation in Christ.
The invocation of Barth here is interesting, and I’m not sure I agree with Barth’s theology of religions. In fact, I’d say I lean more towards the “existential interaction” approach to the theology of religions (for this, Accad identified Karl Rahner), because I’m not sure Barth appreciated how God providentially works within religions to point towards the kerygma of Christ nor how important religious “institutions” are for human interaction. But on the whole, Accad’s approach seems to me much more faithful and fruitful than any of the extreme ends of the spectrum. It also both grows out of, and helps encourage, a more patient, gentle Christian spirituality of mission.