Kreeft Between Allah & Jesus

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7944-1
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 188 Seiten

What would happen if Christians and a Muslim at a university talked and disagreed, but really tried to understand each other? What would they learn?That is the intriguing question Peter Kreeft seeks to answer in these imaginative conversations at Boston College. An articulate and engaging Muslim student named 'Isa challenges the Christian students and professors he meets on issues ranging from prayer and worship to evolution and abortion, from war and politics to the nature of spiritual struggle and spiritual submission.While Kreeft believes Christians should not learn extremism or unitarian theology from Muslims, he does believe that if we really listened we could learn much about devoted religious practice and ethics.Here is a book to open your understanding of one of the key forces shaping our world today. It's a book that just could make you a better Christian.

Peter Kreeft (Ph.D., Fordham University) is professor of philosophy at Boston College. He has written more than forty books, including Does God Exist? (Thomas Nelson), A Summa of the Summa (Ignatius), and Between Heaven and Hell, The Best Things in Life, The Journey and Socrates Meets Jesus (all IVP).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kreeft, Peter

Leseproben

Introduction

The “Bottom Line” Up-front

Full disclosure: I am a Catholic Christian. I write to other Christians. Muslims are invited to listen and talk back and correct what I may have gotten wrong about them.

But where am I coming from? Neither left nor right, neither liberal (or modernist) Christianity nor fundamentalism. And that includes my take on Islam, which is neither the naive, limp “Why can’t we all just get along?” nor the blind demonization of “Enemies!”

As a Christian, I say Islam crucially lacks the Cross, and Christ, and his radical love. But as a Christian I also say Islam has great and deep resources of morality and sanctity that should inspire us and shame us and prod us to admiration and imitation. Thus my subtitle. In the spiritual competition for the most sanctity, all sides win.

My medium is not essays but fictional dialogues between a pious Muslim and various Christians. For my strategy is indirect rather than direct, showing rather than telling. (This is explained further in the subsection “Introducing ‘Isa Ben Adam,” page 13.)

Why the West Fears Islam

Many Christians today have a deep fear of Islam, as of no other religion. They have reasons: over three thousand of them after 9/11. Yet many Muslims, most Muslims in the West, and the vast majority in America, want to be our friends, not our enemies in our battle against our real common enemy, which is sin, Satan, selfishness and secularism. If those are not our real enemies, then Jesus and all the saints were fools.

Why do Christians believe our irreligious media’s picture of Muslims as hate-filled, violence-prone, ignorant, superstitious, irrational, fanatical terrorists? To the secular media, the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim, that is, a secularized one. The same media believes that the only good Christian is a bad Christian; that is, a secularized, de-supernaturalized, modernized, liberalized, compromised, rationalized one—especially one that worships the gods of the Sexual Revolution (the old one, I mean, not the new one expressed in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body). To let this media define a religion for us is idiocy.

The secular media fear Islam for two reasons: (1) because they think it is the reason, or the rationalization, for nearly all the terrorism, murder and war in the world today, and (2) because it is deeply religious. The media believe these two things naturally go together. They are wrong.

What Christians Should Not Learn From Muslims

While the subtitle of this book, and its main focus, is What Christians Can Learn from Muslims, there are many things that Christians should not learn from Muslims; for instance:

1. Anger or jealousy at Western civilization

2. Proneness or addiction to violence

3. Politicizing religion (that always messed us up whenever we tried it!)

4. Preventing apostasy by murdering apostates

5. Treating women like slaves

6. Prioritizing justice over mercy and forgiveness

7. The continued chewing of centuries-old grudges

8. Fear of freedom

9. Fear of reasoning and dialogue

10. Terrorism

11. Theological voluntarism (the doctrine that God’s will has no reason)

12. Unitarianism (the theology that insists that the one God is only one Person, not three, and that Christ is only human, not divine)

With the exception of the last item, however, these are not essential parts of Islamic orthodoxy. If these ideas appear in the Qur’an at all, they are disapproved rather than approved. And they are not typical of all or even most serious Muslims in the world today, especially in the West, though they are typical of the ones we usually hear about in the news. For quiet piety does not make headlines; loud terrorist explosions do.

Please ask yourself whether you would like others to judge Christianity based on the picture of it now being presented in the modern Western media. Then please remember the Golden Rule, and apply this to the picture of Islam presented by the same source.

What Christians Should Obviously Learn from Muslims

There are also many things we Christians already know we can and should learn from Muslims, or be reminded of by Muslims. These are things which we already believe, though we do not practice them very well; for instance:

1. Faithfulness in prayer, fasting and almsgiving

2. The sacredness of the family and children and hospitality

3. The absoluteness of moral laws and of the demand to be just and charitable

4. The absoluteness of God and the need for absolute submission, surrender and obedience (“islam”) to him

You will not find many Muslims anywhere who are indifferentists, moral pragmatists, hedonists, utilitarians, materialists, subjectivists, relativists or libertines.

The list of things Christians should not learn from Muslims is a list of things we already recognize as evils, and the list of things Christians should obviously learn from Muslims is a list of things we already recognize as goods. But there is a third thing, which is good, not evil, but which we do not clearly recognize as obviously good, and this is the thing we very much need to learn from Muslims. That’s what this book is about.

It is not unique to Muslims. We could learn it from anyone, but Muslims seem to be the ones who are most clearly manifesting it today. So it is to the Muslims that we should turn to learn it—not primarily for the sake of being nice to Muslims or for religious harmony or ecumenism or even world peace, but for our own holiness and wholeness and humanity, our own supernatural and natural completing.

I find it hard to give a single name to this thing. I could call it something like the “spirit” of Islam, but that is far, far too slippery and subjective a term. Rather than telling you what it is, by defining it, like a philosopher, or by selling it, like a motivational speaker, I want to show you what it is, by exemplifying it, in a fictional character, like a novelist.

Introducing ‘Isa Ben Adam

My protagonist, ‘Isa Ben Adam, is a creation of my imagination, though he is modeled on a few real Muslims whom I have met and many more whom I have read. ‘Isa is the protagonist of my novel, An Ocean Full of Angels (St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), and he has already appeared in print as one of the two dialoguing characters in A Refutation of Moral Relativism (Ignatius Press, 1999).

The four characters ‘Isa dialogues with in the present book are also taken from my novel. They are: (1) Libby Rawls, a sarcastic, sassy Black feminist “liberal”; (2) Evan Jellema, a very straight Dutch Calvinist who is the opposite of Libby in nearly every imaginable way; (3) Father Heerema, ‘Isa’s kindly, wise, old-fashioned Jesuit philosophy professor at Boston College; and (4) “Mother,” a large, hospitable, bread-baking lady who wears bright dresses, has a parrot on her shoulder and holds continents of common sense in her brain. “Mother” runs a sprawling old Victorian boarding house shaped like a ship on the beachfront in Nahant, Massachusetts, in which she, ‘Isa, Libby, Evan and five other people live. ‘Isa also dialogues on campus with Father Fesser, another professor at Boston College, who has the reputation of being a freethinker rather than a traditional Catholic.

I should also note that several others (including myself) make an appearance in chapter one, and so this chapter, unlike the rest of the book, is written in first person. The other dialogues are fictional, but chapter one is not. It actually happened in one of my classes at Boston College. Only the names have been changed. In fact, this was the incident that first prompted me to write this book.

Please remember, in reading the following dialogues, that the author, as a Christian, does not necessarily agree with everything said by ‘Isa as a Muslim. I simply present him as a consistent and admirable literary character. I have unfairly “stacked the deck”: I have made ‘Isa a very smart and articulate Muslim, an “idealized” Muslim (though he has conspicuous social and psychological faults of insensitivity and bluntness), while I have made the Christians, especially Libby, less than flawless Christians.

They are flawed in both their reason and their faith (like most of us, of course, in many different ways). Libby has a liberal heart, but, unfortunately, also a liberal head. Evan has a conservative head but, unfortunately, also a conservative heart. Fr. Heerema has both a good head and a good heart, but lacks toughness, as ‘Isa lacks gentleness. I stacked the deck like this only to make the point that we all have something to learn from each other.

Without the novel to frame them, the characters in this book are bound to be somewhat thin and flat, even stereotyped. But this book is not a novel. Its point is not to convince its readers of the characters, but of a character—the character trait I find hard to define but easy to show in ‘Isa. It is a character trait I find more obvious in Muslims (and in Jews too) than in Christians.

Identifying the Thing We Need to Learn from Muslims

Perhaps I could call it “strength of will” or “spiritual toughness.” The Chinese word te comes close. It is the spiritual power of moral conviction in a person’s soul. I believe this is...