Month: July 2017

Categories
Comparative Religion Islam

Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an

Ingrid Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an:  Its History and Place in Muslim Life (London:  Blackwell 2008).

This is another review of a book assigned for an “Understanding Islam” course I’m taking at Fuller Seminary.  This book provides an overview of Muslim perspectives on the history, nature, interpretation, and role of the Qur’an.  I have often heard critics of Islam cite verses from the Qur’an that they believe incite violence or that they think reflect a corruption of the Gospels concerning Jesus.  It was always obvious to me that these cherry-picked citations were not the whole story, but I hadn’t previously studied the context for myself.  The Mattson text helped me better understand how Muslims think about the Qur’an.

I was particularly interested to note the many ways in which these aspects of the Qur’an in Muslim life are resemble the Bible in Christian life.  Like the Bible, the Qur’an contains a diverse array of content that requires contextualized reading.  I appreciated Mattson’s discussion of different Islamic hermeneutical schools and of the principle employed by most Islamic scholars that the Qur’an must interpret itself.  This is similar to any serious school of Biblical hermeneutics:  we recognize the Bible speaks in different voices and that part of the interpretive process is to take any passage within the context of how the rest of scripture treats a question.  For example, when God commands Joshua to wipe out the pagan nations, we don’t take that as normative for Christians today, in no small part because we interpret that command in light of Jesus’ later teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

I also note an interesting but perhaps subtle difference here, however, which is the role of history in hermeneutics.  A good Christian hermeneutic of the Bible’s conquest narratives would also stress the historical context of those narratives, which in a sense relativizes the immediate commands they contain.  As Mattson suggests, there is a similar issue in Qur’anic hermeneutics, because the unique occasion on which a revelation is given provides context.  There is also a difference, however, because much of the Biblical revelation is embedded in historical narratives, while the Qur’anic revelation is largely in the form of statements rather than narratives.  Moreover, the Biblical narratives span thousands of years of history, while the Quranic revelations all occur during Muhammad’s life.  In a sense, it’s easier to contextualize much of the Biblical revelation, because the narrative itself is a key part of the context.

This dynamic also relates, I think, to the question of the Qur’an’s ontology, which Mattson also explains ably.  I find the question of whether the Qur’an is eternal or created endlessly fascinating.  For Christians, the Bible itself is not eternal, and indeed it is a fully human, fully historical product, even while it is also divinely inspired.  Again, the difference is subtler than it seems at first glance:  Christians also must try to explain what it means for the transcendent, eternal, timeless God to speak in history.  Even more directly, we finally locate God’s “speech” to us in the eternal Logos, which is Christ.  So here, this most basic difference between Islam and Christianity – the question of the incarnation of the Word – is central.

Categories
Ezekiel Luther Science and Religion

Jenson on Secondary Causes and Divine Hiddenness

Continuing in my reading of Ezekiel with Robert Jenson, I come to his commentary on Ezekiel 30:20-26.  This pericope is unremarkable, in that it is part of series of judgments against Gentile nations found in this part of the overall text.  Here, God pronounces judgment against Egypt:  “Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon and he brandishes it against Egypt.”  (Ezekiel 30:25).  Jenson’s interest in his theological commentary is about how God acts through agents within the created order, like the King of Babylon.  I’m going to set out Jenson’s commentary at length because I think he states the problem correctly, with one qualification I mention at the end of this post.  I don’t think his proposed approach, rooted in a Lutheran sense of God’s hiddenness, however, is really all that fruitful.  Here is how Jenson describes the problem.  (Quotes below are from Jenson, 237-239.)

[T]he theologically most striking feature of this prophecy is its drastic identification of the Lord himself as the one who determines and indeed fights the battles waged by created armies. An actual pharaoh is or will be made militarily incapable; it is the Lord who breaks his arms. Nebuchadnezzar has been or will be victorious; the sword that wins victory is the Lord’s own, put into Nebuchad­nezzar’s hand. Leaving aside at this point the question of God’s involvement in violence (7 7:10- 27), how are we to understand the relation between God’s act and creatures’ act, when the event itself is but one?

The question has been posed and debated throughout theological history. Traditional scholastic theology, Catholic and Protestant, has said that God is the “primary cause” of created events, which within creation have also created “secondary causes.” Thus God is here the primary cause of Egypt’s disaster, and Nebuchadnezzar the secondary cause. The doctrine is descriptively correct, but it is doubtful that it does much more than restate the problem. Through the latter part of the previous century, several movements attempted to place the scheme within a more substantive theory-in my judgment, without great success.

Jenson then describes contemporary efforts to solve the problem (and I love here his reference to the fact that Christian philosophers really are doing theology — the presumptions of Christian analytic philosophy of religion irritate me to no end):

Thus some Christian members of philosophy departments have taken to doing what is in fact theology. They are especially occupied with the question: How is an eternal God’s agency within time possible? In my view they pose the question in a way that makes a faithful answer impossible, for they tend to use words like “eternal” or “agency” or “time” so uncritically within an Aristotelian frame that the notion of an eternal reality’s agency in time becomes a simple oxymoron. If to be “eternal” is simply to be “not temporal;” than an eternal entity cannot do a temporal act, and  there is little more to be said.

Some other recent movements have taken an opposite, drastically revisionary path. Process theology among liberal theologians and open theism among evangelicals have produced metaphysically more or less coherent accounts of primary divine agency and secondary temporal agency. But they have done so only by revising Christian language about God past all biblical recognition. A God who is one pole of a universal process is not the God of Ezekiel or any other prophet.

So far, I think Jenson has rightly diagnosed the problem, and that he has rightly suggested that process theology and open theism are not viable alternatives.  He then makes another move I think is vital, which is to note that in the classical theological tradition God is not an entity within the universe, so any talk of God’s causality, whether “primary” or otherwise, can only be analogical:

I have a diagnosis and suggestion. At least since the advent of modernity, West­ern thought has tended to see the universe as a system, a self-contained process determined by immanent regularities; much modern theology has-sometimes subliminally-accepted this vision. When the world is envisioned in this fashion, God is willy-nilly envisioned as a second something external to the world. Then the question necessarily becomes: How does the eternal God intervene in the temporal system, without wrecking it? And the obvious answer  is that he cannot: either it is simply closed to him, or his entry will compromise its constitutive laws.

But scripture does not envision the creation as a system at all, but rather-as Ezekiel and this commentary have all along construed the matter-as a history.

This vision poses quite a different question: How does God  present himself as an actor in the drama of history?

After this useful diagnosis and suggestion, however, I think Jenson’s proposal relies too heavily on a Lutheran theology of God’s hiddenness:

In ancient drama, the actors brought the gods and heroes into the theater by and as masks behind which the actors hid and through which they spoke; within the ceremony  the masks were the dramatis personae. Martin Luther adduced this phenomenon, but reversed the relation of actors and masks. God brings the created heroes and villains of the temporal drama onto history’s stage as masks that hide him-for were he to appear barefaced creation would perish. Thus Nebuchadnez­zar and his like are larva dei, God’s masks-as indeed are all creatures in one way or another. And we masks truly are the personae  of the drama; we are not puppets manipulated by someone distant from us. Yet behind us hides the Creator.

Calling the created carriers of history masks of God may at first sight seem to be a figure, not to be taken with ontological seriousness. But we should remember that the great metaphysical categories are always created by drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty. To instance Scholasticism’s language for our present matter, God is of course not  a “cause” within any such cluster of cause and effect as quotidian language presumes; thus when the tradition calls him the primary cause of created events it drafts “cause” to serve in an alien discourse. And when Luther and I propose instead to draft “mask” for metaphysical duty, we perform the same move-but, just possibly, more appropriately.

Although I do think there are some important insights in this perspective, I’m not sure how it advances the ball over the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories of primary and secondary causality.  In particular, I think Jenson’s view of causality here tends to eliminate the genuine agency and freedom of creatures that the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories seek to preserve within the domain of secondary causation.

And here is my qualification about how Jenson states the problem:  I think the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework does much more than merely “restate the problem” and that contemporary philosophers of religion have mostly abandoned the “Aristotelian frame” in favor of a materialist-naturalist frame.  Much of the work in philosophical theology on these problems of causality, along with much of the modern philosophy of science, rejects formal and final causality and focuses on on what an Aristotelian frame would consider material and efficient causes.  This makes sense if the material universe is all there is, because the rules of energy and matter tell us that physical causation is a closed system.  But Christian theology insists that the material universe is not all there is, and that in fact the material universe was created by God, who is by definition transcendent of creation and not material.  The question, then, is how to speak of God’s transcendent causality while retaining the contingent freedom and reality of causality within the universe.

Of course, as Jenson notes, anything we say here is bound to involve “drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty” — that is, to require analogical reasoning.  But the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework is a way of expressing God’s transcendent causality as the source and goal of the acts of creatures within their appropriate sphere of creaturely freedom.  This brings a bit more clarity and sharpness to our thinking, which is of course not an “explanation,” but is more than a mere restatement.

In addition, concerning creaturely freedom, the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis emphasizes that no creature has the absolute freedom God enjoys, but rather creatures have certain limited range of powers, dispositions, and capacities of action given to them by God.  Nebuchadnezzar, then, was created with the power and capacity to act as God’s agent of judgment, and he was capable of various dispositions to act or not act.  That God gave Nebuchadnezzar these created powers and capacities, and that God may have influenced (though not determined) Nebuchadnezzar’s disposition to exercise them on a particular occasion, involves both God’s “action” and Nebuchadnezzar’s free agency, and seems consistent with the Biblical text.  I’m not sure why the rubric of Lutheran “hiddenness” is better on these fronts — or even if it is really much different.

 

Categories
Islam

Hillenbrand, Introduction to Islam

For the “Understanding Islam” class I’m taking this summer, we were assigned Carole Hillenbrand’s text “Introduction to Islam:  Beliefs and Practices in Historical Perspective.”  I recommend this text to anyone interested in the subject.  Here are a few thoughts.

This book provides a helpful historical and contemporary survey of the development and diversity of Islam.  I was already familiar with most of the basic historical outlines, but Hillenbrand provides some useful reminders.  I became interested in Arab and Islamic history more than twenty years ago when I first read Albert Hourani’s book A History of the Arab Peoples.[1]  Over the years I have also done lots of reading on the history of the Crusades.  Occasionally I teach a Church History class at a local seminary, in which I cover the rise of Islam and the Crusades.  All of this left me with a deep respect for the achievements of Islamic societies along with a sense of the complexities of historical and contemporary relations between Arab states and the West and between Muslims and Christians.

Hillenbrand significantly added to my understanding of the diversity of religious movements within Islam.  I had known of some the distinctions between Shiites and Sunnis, but Hillenbrand deepened that understanding.  I had not previously known much about the role of Sufism or of the varieties of Sufism.  This raises interesting questions because, as Hillenbrand notes, the role and “orthodoxy” of Sufism is questioned within various parts of Islam itself.  As I read these materials I tried to consider how I would feel about reading an “outsider” account of “Christianity,” when I know as an “insider” that one’s location within Christianity often determines how broadly applicable that term could apply.  I think this shows that there are many overlapping ways to define or describe a “religion”:  doctrinal, sociological, historical, phenomenological, emotive, and so-on.  This is true for Islam no less than for Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other variety of religion.

Hillenbrand also significantly added to my understanding of the Qur’an and its place within Islam.  I had not appreciated the Qur’an’s uniqueness as a literary creation in its historical context, that is, before there was any significant written literature in Arabic.  I loved reading the “Verses of Light” and I can relate to how the textures, cadences, and phrases of the Qur’an become part of a person’s cultural DNA, just as this is true for me with the Bible.  I also appreciated Hillenbrand’s contextualization of the concept of jihad and the distinction between the lesser and greater jihad.

There are two aspects of Hillenbrand’s book that unfortunately are already outdated:  (1) her repeated optimistic references to the Arab Spring; and (2) her focus on Al Qaeda rather than ISIS.  I did appreciate the contextualization of Usama bin Laden, whom I had assumed was serious religious scholar (as Hillenbrand makes clear, bin Laden was not a scholar of any sort).  I would be interested to learn more about how ISIS has exploited and amplified Al Qaeda’s ideology.  It also would be helpful to understand the role of the military in contemporary Arab states and how military leaders exploit Islam to quell populist movements such as the Arab Spring.

[1] Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Harvard Univ. Press 1992).