Scot McKnight and his brainy comment posse at Jesus Creed have started discussing Miroslav Volf’s Allah, with two posts so far. The JC crew have spent more time than I did discussing Volf’s contention that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Volf actually spent more of the book on this issue than you might have thought from my posts, because I got bored by the semantic nitpicking — what exactly does “same” mean? — and I didn’t see that it made a vast amount of difference. Scot also doesn’t seem to think it matters that much: “I’m not yet convinced of the Same God theory, but I am convinced that the follower of Jesus, the Christian, is to love God and to love the neighbor as himself. … This means whether Muslims agree or not, and I’m encouraged by those who have participated in these concerns, I am called to love Muslims as my neighbor.”

In his book, Volf emphasizes the common God as a source of harmony between Christians and Muslims. In the introduction he quotes Abraham Lincoln’s words about how Confederates and Unionists followed the same God, and believes this aided in healing the nation after the Civil War. (This is a rather poignant observation coming from a former Yugoslavian.) But thinking it over again, I wonder if Volf doesn’t have another motive: having a common God gives him grounds to critique certain Muslim beliefs and practices.

Ever since 9/11, there’s been a running debate in the West over identifying the “real Islam.” You know: is it the “religion of peace,” or at least something Americans can live with, or is it the radical version of Osama bin Laden? My own view is that, if you don’t believe in the religion and think it’s a man-made creation to start with, you can’t say it even has a “true self” — it will be whatever its followers think it is. But by positing that the God of Islam is real, Volf has some standing to say that some versions of Islam are truer than others. So he can tell certain Muslims they’re wrong about apostasy and church-state relations, and say that the suicide bomber is following the wrong god, without simply imposing a Christian framework on them.

Or is he? I complained before that Volf’s comments about church and state, in particular, seem far too embedded in modern Western assumptions. But I can definitely see why he wants to get past the lazy pluralism of “You believe this and I believe that, and that’s our right.” As we have seen, some difference of opinion have deadly consequences.

So, here we are near the end of my series on Miroslav Volf’s Allah, and you may be wondering what happened to the “money quote” I mentioned at the beginning — the one about how you can be a practicing Muslim and 100% Christian at the same time. So far, Volf has argued that the differences between Christianity and Islam aren’t as big as they’re often made out to be, but he’s also acknowledged that they’re important and meaningful. So how can someone be both without melting into a pluralist soup?

Volf looks at two real-life examples. One case I remember hitting the news a few years ago: Ann Redding, an American Episcopal priest who visited a mosque one day and, for reasons even she can’t logically explain, decided she had to become a Muslim. She continued her duties as a priest until she was eventually defrocked, but she was not excommunicated.

The other example I was unfamiliar with, but has apparently been going on since the ’80s: Muslims accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior while still remaining Muslim. An article in Christianity Today explained how this works:

Ibrahim was a well-respected scholar of the Qur’an, a hafiz. When he decided to follow Jesus, he closely examined the Qur’anic verses commonly understood as denying the Trinity, denying Jesus’ divine Sonship, denying Jesus’ atoning death, and denying the textual integrity of the Bible. He concluded that each of these verses was open to alternate interpretations, and that he could therefore follow Jesus as a Muslim. Soon members of his family and community came to share his faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior. Ibrahim was also imprisoned for his faith, but unlike Nabil, Ibrahim still wanted to follow Jesus as a Muslim.

This appears to be similar to the lifestyle of Messianic Jews, who retain their traditional diet and rituals and so on but accept Jesus as their Messiah.

Volf mentions elsewhere that his father was a Pentecostal minister, and his defense of these dual religionists rests heavily on his very low-Protestant definition of “Christian.” Here is his litmus test:

1. Were you baptized in the name of the triune God?
2. Do you confess that Jesus Christ, in whom God dwelled in human flesh, is the Lord?
3. Have you received the divine gift of a new life given freely through Christ?

If your answers are yes, than you are 100 percent Christian (or, if you prefer, a follower of Christ). … Now imagine that you also fasted on Ramadan, prayed five times a day by prostrating and saying Al Fatihah (the first surah of the Qur’an, the seven lines of which sum up the human relation to God in contemplation and prayer), and believe that Muhammad was a prophet (not “Seal of the Prophets”, but a prophet in the way we might designate Martin Luther King Jr. “a prophet”). If your answers are still yes to the three questions above, you would still be 100 percent Christian.

… Can you be 100 percent Muslim if you answered the three questions above with yes? That is not for Christians to answer. Muslims must answer it.

It is interesting to compare this with the reason the Episcopal Church gave for defrocking Redding: she “abandoned the Communion of the Episcopal Church by formal admission into a religious body not in communion with the Episcopal Church.” Communion, whether as a sacrament or a concept, is distinctly missing from Volf’s definition of Christianity in this entire book. This isn’t just because Pentecostals tend to be individualists, but because Volf is opposed to faith acting as a marker of group identity and loyalty. This was also a major theme in Exclusion & Embrace, and it’s not hard to see why a Yugoslavian would feel that way. The Yugoslav heartland consisted of people who look the same and speak the same language, but who are split by religion: Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Muslims. Volf gives examples of childish behavior exacerbating this conflict, such as a Croat church building a giant cross over a largely Muslim town, and a Serbian sports team celebrating victory with the sign of the Orthodox cross.

In Volf’s view, what these people could use is some literal fear of God. “Bad people, with no intention of doing good, can think alike about God and still be at each other’s throats. But fear of that common God — the one who commands love of neighbor — would make a difference. Fear of that God will nudge Muslims and Christians to emulate God and therefore pursue the common good.” By “fear,” I should note, he’s not talking about petrification but allegiance and obedience. In that respect, I can see what he’s getting at. Though they may protest otherwise, many believers seem to think God is like a politician, whose power increases with the number and influence of his supporters. The idea that God is lord of all places and times, regardless of who’s worshipping him, counteracts the idea that you have to take extreme measures in his defense.

But I have the same problem with this that I pointed out near the end of part 2, regarding how Christians are supposed to care for apostates and dissenters from other faiths. Do community interests have any moral claims on Christians? Can you care for individuals while being indifferent to their community interests? My instinctive answer to the second question is “no,” and Volf isn’t really any help in answering either. He never really defines what the “common” in the common good is, but he seems to be invoking the Enlightenment ideal of treating everyone with equal benevolence regardless of their relationship to you, which is, among other things, physically impossible.

Another very Pentecostal assumption Volf seems to be making is that everyone has some kind of direct personal relationship with God that supersedes whatever scriptures, sacraments, traditions and histories they might have. But in my experience at least, those phenomena are precisely how many Christians know God. Most people don’t get to see Jesus, but they believe they see him in his works. I am reminded of Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God, which pointed out that the main legacy Jesus left on Earth was not an instruction book but a fellowship. Yep, he created yet another group.

I thought of Newbigin more than once while reading Volf’s book, actually. Back in my review of Household I said that Newbigin seemed to dispose of traditional church boundaries only to make up his own, and I see Volf doing the same thing here. Like Newbigin, he has a very broad definition of “Christian,” so he frequently points out that some of the differences between orthodox Christianity and orthodox Islam aren’t any greater than the differences between Christian sects. Yet he also has a clear idea of what he’s against. At one point, he considers a medieval Crusader and a modern Muslim suicide bomber, and declares that “They are naming God very differently, and yet they are, alas, worshipping the same god — a bloodthirsty god of power, not the God of justice and mercy of the normative Christian and Muslim religious traditions.”

I have seen this desire to rally the moderates against the extremes many times since 9/11. But I wonder what this does to Newbigin’s project of unifying the body of Christ. Volf is casting a wider net, but still ends up leaving some people out that Newbigin would probably leave in. Still, despite my carping I’m glad that I read this book. As in his earlier work, Volf is unafraid to tackle the hot issues, and he does it calmly and intelligently. I hope this leads others to follow his example.

I mentioned that Miroslav Volf avoids sexual and gender issues in his attempt to build a friendly relationship between Christianity and Islam. But there is one section that seems, at least, related. After admitting that the issue of missions is a tough one — both religions are evangelical, and they both want to convert each other — he considers whether there are any goals that Muslims and Christians can work toward together. There are many good causes out there, he acknowledges, but he singles out one that he thinks is particularly suited to both faiths. “For many human beings (not for all), the vision of the good life, the dream of flourishing as a human being, has shrunk to mere pleasure,” he writes. “Muslims and Christians can be allies in exposing the futility and destructiveness of the pursuit of mere pleasure as well as in making plausible that a life marked by love of God and neighbor is both deeply human and truly pleasurable.”

I must admit, my first reaction to this was that it was a really stupid idea. I mean, not that he’s wrong about the pursuit of empty pleasure, but that this could be turned into some kind of trans-religious public cause. He admits that Muslims and Christians don’t exactly agree on what that emptiness should be filled with, which leaves the cause better defined by what it’s against. And what it’s against is pleasure. That will go over well.

The thing is, there are really three parties in this confab. For some time now, western Christians have been sharing their society with atheists and spiritual freelancers who are suspicious of religion in general. Since 9/11 in particular, I have watched members of this group split between seeing Christians as fellow Westerners in the fight against radical Islam, and seeing Christians as just another bunch of wannabe theocrats. Sometimes, the latter view is taken by liberal Christians of their conservative brethren.

Christians themselves seem divided as to who they are more closely allied with. The Pope’s comments about Islam, which started the chain of events that led to this book, was one of a number of recent efforts by Christians to say, look, all this freedom and scientific progress you like about the West is built on the foundation we made. That never happened in the Muslim world, because Islam is different. On the other hand, a few years ago you had Dinesh D’Souza saying that conservatives should really rethink their attitudes toward Muslims because, among other things, they both hate the same things about modern American culture. I remember the latter sending Andrew Sullivan into one of his paroxysms because it supported what he’d been saying all along, that all fundies are alike.

I think Volf is trying to avoid that sort of thing, because he calls on secular sources to support his claims (including Freud, strangely enough), and because he keeps the actual action plan so vague. But I think secular readers could be forgiven for thinking that when religious types get together against pleasure, it means Prohibition, sodomy laws, media censorship, the war on drugs, etc. etc.

I’ve grown a bit more indulgent toward Volf’s idea since then, however. Such legislative efforts to end vice may have proved fruitless, but that only makes religion more important in countering the damage vices do. That’s especially true of addiction — empty pleasure taken to its ultimate — where “faith healing” seems to be at least as effective as medical science. I don’t know if Islam has an equivalent to AA, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Also, Appiah’s description of the role Christian missionaries played in ending footbinding got me to thinking about what makes Christian marriage, which seems so boring vanilla to Westerners, exceptional from a global standpoint. In my last post I talked about sex and family norms as if they were about nothing but reproductive control, which in strict honor terms is appropriate, since control is a central concern of honor. But of course Christians have a more exalted spiritual view of marriage, which at its best includes a level of trust that echoes the trust they put in God. That can stop a man from hobbling his wife to keep her from fleeing, or from resignedly writing up a prenuptial agreement for when she does flee. It is not rational to trust a fallible human to that degree, any more than it’s rational to trust God. But without it, things can get really ugly.

I don’t know what Islam would say about all this. Clearly it has taken a different view of marriage from the start. But the idea of putting everything in God’s hands — even your reproductive control, even your honor — seems inherent in its very name, submission. I do wish Volf had gone into this, but in one book you can’t have everything.

If you read my first post on Miroslav Volf’s new book, you may have thought to yourself, “This Trinity stuff is all very interesting, but what about the things that Christians and Muslims really fight about?” Volf doesn’t get into all of those, but he does explore several issues.

One point that I have seen brought up, which Volf addresses, is the idea that Islam is a harshly legalist and moralist religion while Christianity is about love and grace. I had already suspected that was an overly schematic way of looking at things, because Christians themselves have such a hard time sorting out the Law and the Gospel. I would say from anecdotal experience that a non-trivial portion of American Christians have no idea why they don’t follow the detailed legal codes in the Pentateuch, or even that there are detailed legal codes in the Pentateuch. But even the more biblically literate have a tendency to think of grace and forgiveness as inventions of the New Testament, contrasted against a theoretical Judaism where people think they earn favor with God based on how strictly they follow the Law. More recently, that contrast has been applied to Islam.

Whether this is a fair assessment of Judaism is a subject for another day, but Volf does not think it’s a fair assessment of Christianity and Islam. Both religions believe God is both just and merciful, he says. And their moral standards for human beings also include both aspects. Both advocate the Golden Rule and loving your neighbor. Islam, he admits, is not big on loving enemies, but he tells a couple of Sufi stories that illustrate the general idea. One tells of a man who, after his clothes are stolen, chases after the thief and tells him he may have them. The idea is that since he’s given the thief the clothes as a gift, the thief will not have this crime on him at the Day of Judgment. The other tells of a tailor who knows a client is paying him with counterfeit money, but who simply throws it down a well and keeps doing business with him anyway.

These stories are indeed about doing good to those who do bad to you, but it’s interesting how they differ from the depictions of loving enemies in the New Testament. The Sufi tales are both about covering up sins; in fact, the first of them seems to presume a legalistic God who cares more about technicalities than intent. This is quite different from, say, the stoning of Stephen, where the dying saint appeals directly to God not to hold his killers’ sin against them. But, since such heroic martyrs are rare enough, I expect that Volf is right that the average Christian and the average Muslim live their daily lives according to similar principles. I think any society that can accommodate actual human life would have to combine justice, forgiveness, and just letting things slide. I don’t know of a society that doesn’t.

Volf uses these commonalities to argue that Christians and Muslims ought to be able to live together in a state of political pluralism. Monotheism, he says, decoupled religion from the state. He traces this all the way back to Moses taking the Hebrews out of Egypt, and setting up a state that came to be ruled by humans rather than god-kings. The Golden Rule, he says, argues against using the coercive powers of the state in matters of religion. Somewhat more stickily, this leads him to tell the Muslim majority that they’re just wrong to think that apostasy is a crime. He admits that historically most Christians thought this too, but says such behavior is “more appropriate to armies at war and how they treat defectors and spies than to religious communities committed to worshipping the one and common God who commands love of all human beings.”

This, in my humble opinion, is just way too facile. The relationship between church and state has been one of my pet interests for some years now, and I don’t think their historic entanglement came from people just kind of forgetting the Golden Rule. Raising Exodus as the point of decoupling religion and state is pretty strange, given that the new country operated by a set of laws handed down directly from God. I don’t know a lot about Shari’a, but it does seem to be pretty similar to Mosaic law, including in its prescribed punishments. In fact, elsewhere in the book Volf quotes the infamous bit about cutting the hands off thieves. But the draconian nature of the punishments isn’t my point so much as that the whole existence of the punishments assumes someone is using the coercive power of the state to enforce these laws. Even Americans with such casual acquaintance with Islam as myself know this. Yet the most assurance Volf can offer is that Muslim scholars have differing opinions on the subject.

This points to a larger problem with Volf’s argument. The behavior that he considers a sin for people to do as Christians, seem to be OK for them to do as citizens. The coercive powers of the state are pretty much assumed. That includes such basic matters as choosing to belong to it. No one asked me if I wanted to be an American, and if I wanted to stop being an American, it could get complicated. Unless you’re an anarchist, there’s no outrage in this, because you figure it’s good for people to be born into communities under the rule of law. It’s even a way of loving your neighbor. So why is that unfit for religion to do? There are Christian rejoinders to that, and Muslim ones too for all I know. But this throws into relief again how the current Western configuration of religion and state reflects a very particular standpoint on both religion and the state, and I felt that Volf didn’t acknowledge the fact.

The issue of apostasy also brings up a point about inter-communal relations that I wish Volf had explored. When I think of the controversies that flare up in the West over Islam, very often apostates, or at least dissenters, are involved. Volf mentions his opposition to threats against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but only vaguely alludes to the fact that she has been publicly supporting efforts to destroy her former religion. Some other immigrants, frequently abused women, have not gone that far but seek help from outside their communities, sparking arguments about the right of Western governments to intervene in Muslim affairs. This sort of thing is a repeating pattern not just in religion but in communal politics in general: a factional dispute leads the weaker party to seek an ally from outside, calling on some shared interest or moral imperative. It was an important factor leading to the U.S. civil war — all those slave narratives — and has factored into virtually every foreign entanglement the U.S. has got into in my lifetime. I was reminded of this again recently when an Iraqi defector admitted that he’d lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to get the U.S. to topple Saddam Hussein, but said that it was totally worth it.

It’s hard to blame any of these people for doing these things. Who wouldn’t be tempted to lie to get out from under Saddam? But it does present a conflict in the Golden Rule. If you were an oppressed, abused person, you’d certainly want somebody to rescue you. But on a communal level, you wouldn’t want other communities to come charging in because of every story one of your own malcontents went and told them. After all, some of the Muslim terrorists who’ve been arrested for attempted attacks were American converts. Every community with flaws produces apostates, which is to say, every community produces them.

Like I said, there’s nothing new in this phenomenon, but our age of media and mobility surely enables more apostates and dissenters to attract more attention. To react with, “That’s not in our national interest” is not a very Christian response (or a very humanist one, for that matter). Somehow this makes John Howard Yoder’s concept of “revolutionary subordination” seem almost practical; certainly more practical than trying to rectify all the world’s injustices. But I gather that what Volf is trying to do here is connect Christians to Muslims with sympathetic views, so that every dispute over the stoning of an adulteress doesn’t appear to turn into a West vs. Islam debate. And that would certainly be a good start.

I haven’t been reading much theology the last few years, but I got lured into Miroslav Volf’s brand-new Allah: A Christian Response when I heard about some of its more interesting claims, such as “A person can be both a practicing Muslim and 100 percent Christian without denying core convictions of belief and practice.” I read Volf’s greatly admired Exclusion & Embrace back during my 2007 blogging hiatus, so I never posted about it. But I could see that the new book continues some of the same themes. Volf grew up in Yugoslavia and watched his homeland disintegrate into violence. In E&E he contemplates at length how diverse peoples can live together peacefully, especially after they’ve committed horrendous crimes against each other.

Allah is preoccupied with similar questions, but with a particular focus on the relationship between the world’s two biggest religions. As Volf relates in the book, the whole thing got started back in 2006 when the Pope controversially made a speech insinuating that Islam was a violent and irrational religion. That led a group of Muslim scholars and leaders to issue a detailed open letter refuting the Pope’s points. Then a year later followed A Common Word, an offer to all Christians to live together in peace. Volf, who teaches at Yale, was party to the “Yale Response” to this document, and Allah is essentially a book-length elaboration of that response.

Volf first addresses the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. He starts off with some historical perspective, which, interestingly enough, begins exactly where Lost to the West leaves off: the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Muslim Turks. Though the Pope at the time was trying to organize another crusade to take it back, Volf is more interested in his associate, a cardinal named Nicholas of Cusa. Nicholas sounds like the kind of mega-optimist that the 18th and 19th centuries cranked out more often than the 15th. He wrote a treatise advocating a grand conference between Christian and Muslim leaders to reason their way towards the truth together. He believed that both religions worshipped the same God — indeed, that all religions in some way seek after the same God — although he believed that Christianity had the clearest view of him. He took a close look at Muslim differences with Christianity and tried to explain why they weren’t such big differences after all.

Volf is especially interested in Nicholas’ treatment of the Trinity. The Quran and other Muslim texts include several criticisms of this doctrine, on the grounds that it violates the principle of monotheism. Both Nicholas and Volf, however, argue that those criticisms are really knocking bastardized versions of the idea — such as that it describes three different gods, or envisions God begetting a son like a human or a beast, or displaces God with Jesus (and his mother!). Nicholas concedes that the language can make it sound like that, but the words are mere attempts to describe the ineffable. Christians speak of the three Persons for a reason, but not because there are three “things” to count. “When you begin to count the Trinity you depart from the truth,” he wrote.

All this might sound extremely theoretical, but for both Nicholas and Volf this has a bearing on how to think about God’s love. Muslims, Volf says, have debated whether to ascribe “love” to God at all, but that depends on the definition of the word. Volf takes Socrates’ definition of love as a starting point: “to desire something that one does not have and considers to be good.” But that can’t be God’s love, because “God lacks nothing that is good, and God has no needs.” So to speak of God’s love describes his giving, and on that Muslims agree. Volf also seems to agree with the medieval Muslim scholar Ahmad ibn Taymiyya that God doesn’t love creatures simply for their benefit, as that would subject him to the whims of their desires, and God’s love is supposed to be eternal and steadfast. But he depart from Ibn Taymiyya when he concludes that, therefore, God’s love for creatures is simply his own love for himself. Apparently, subsequent Sufi scholars took this to mean that creatures are unreal, in a theory that sounds like Hindu monism: the ultimate reality is the unity of God, or something like that. I admit I didn’t completely follow it. But anyway, Volf says that the triune God’s love is not self-oriented but other-oriented, because even before the world was created he had “others” within himself. Volf doesn’t draw any bold conclusions about the two religions from that, but leaves it hanging there suggestively.

You’re probably thinking, this is still extremely theoretical. I’ve thought about real-world connections to this doctrine, based on my experience among Christians. What divine Trinitarian love means to most Christians I know is a lot more concrete than Volf’s philosophizing. It says that God gave the world his only son, who suffered, died and rose again for us. And that is how we know God loves us.

The suffering God — such a central motif in Christian thought — never turns up in this book. That’s probably because Volf is stressing commonalities. But it also complicates the picture of an ineffable God who doesn’t want or need anything. I know it’s a Buddhist and not a Christian precept that all suffering stems from desire, but I still say it’s true. You suffer because of the lack of what you want or need, or the loss of what you have. In fact, in my experience among American Protestants, I am constantly encountering a God who desires and therefore suffers. He is the parent who has aspirations for us, which are often frustrated. He is the bridegroom who courts us, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

I am reminded of a discussion of divine impassibility over on Jesus Creed awhile back, which spells out the connections between suffering and love:

“An impassible God can never be described as love the way the apostle John described Him. … The lover has to risk the rejection of his beloved.”
“Does He not suffer along with those who suffer, react with anger at oppression, and rejoice with good? Please say ‘yes’ because I would hate to think I’ve been worshipping a false God.”
“God is love, and this requires that he suffers. It pains him to see his children not living right. You have to ignore essentially the entire OT if you accept this (impassibility).”
“Well, we’re told not ‘to grieve the Holy Spirit’ right? Are we being commanded to avoid something that is actually impossible to do? I really doubt it. So, that’s 2 of the three persons of the Trinity that suffer. Is the Father somehow sealed off from the suffering of both Jesus and the Spirit?”

Scot claimed that people misunderstood the doctrine of divine impassibility, but all this raised issues in my own mind that were never resolved. It’s true that a pain-free God isn’t very relatable, but a desiring, suffering God brings another set of problems. I can imagine that to Muslims, this looks like a mess. Worse, it might make God look like a bit of a sad sack, subject to human whims in the manner that Taymiyya rejected. It may be cool to think of the sovereign God voluntarily surrendering power — maybe especially to us obstreperous Americans — but as we’re seeing today in Egypt, that euphoric moment doesn’t take the place of actual governance.

Volf seems to agree, as he suggests Muslims might remind Christians of this. “Currently, for instance, ‘submission to God,’ Islam’s central theme, is not a favorite ‘melody’ of many Christians in the West; it runs counter to Western egalitarian cultural sensibilities,” he writes. “But it’s an essential and often performed part of the Christian repertoire. After all, Christians believe that God is the sovereign Lord.”

Certainly, it’s clear from Volf’s Quranic quotes that Muslims don’t think of God as the Trinity mashed together; they identify God with the Father. How do Christians feel about that God? This whole thing also reminds me of the section of Telford Work’s book about our debates over the character of God (which I see is available now on Google Books, though with a few pages missing because it’s in preview.) In that chapter he first describes getting to know the God of Wahhabi Islam, and says, “I decided I would proudly go to hell rather than submit to such a tyrant.” But that God does bear some notable similarities to the God of the Bible, a problem that becomes more apparent when I come into the storyline and start questioning everything. Eventually, Telford’s basic answer to our problem is Jesus. Jesus reveals the true character of the Father and brings us into communion with him via the Holy Spirit. “Every good answer to every question about God’s character appeals to God as triune,” he writes.

It wasn’t until I read Volf that it occurred to me consciously for the first time that, by answering this way, Telford implicitly conceded that if I were facing the Father alone, I might be justified in not trusting him. But the Bible makes clear that worship was due to God before Jesus came along. Jesus reiterates the point himself. So while Volf isn’t defending Wahhabism here — he relies mainly on Sufis — I wonder if he would answer me the same way.

I also might note that the de-emphasis on submission plays a role in Western Christianity’s ability to coexist with secular liberalism, and one way that Islam riles up the West is by messing with that coexistence. But that is a subject for a later post.

OK, I haven’t gotten all the way through the Crusades in Lost to the West — they took like 150 years — but I thought I would get going on the Byzantine perspective on the relationship between Christianity and Islam. One thing that’s striking about the Crusades from the Byzantine viewpoint is that, while westerners tend to think of it as the primordial Christian/Muslim conflict, for the Byzantines it was one chapter in a longer story.

Byzantium started fighting Islam almost right out of the box, since shortly after Muhammad’s death his followers took the southern half of the Empire. They did it with amazing speed partly because Christianity was divided. Works like Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought are better references for the theological factions than Brownworth, who is far more interested in battles than in religion. But clearly these religious debates also had a political dimension, since they tended to fall along pre-existing ethnic and geographic lines.

In the early days, Christianity was organized under three patriarchs who presided over the major cultural regions where Christianity took hold: Antioch, in the faith’s homeland in the Levant; Alexandria, in Egypt; and Rome, where the Pope still bears the alternate title of Patriarch of the West. When Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, that became the seat of the patriarch of the Greek heartland.

Despite this internationalist setup, by the time the Muslims came along in the seventh century, almost all the major regions had fallen out. The Byzantine patriarch Nestorius had been charged with heresy at home but found shelter in Persia (which then included Mesopotamia), leading to what is now called the Church of the East. The Alexandrian patriarchate, whose domain included Sudan and Ethiopia, had split from the imperial capitals over the Chalcedonian controversy, and took Armenia and much of the Levant with it. And Arianism, despite having started in Egypt, was adopted by many Germanic peoples, although by the seventh century it was in decline. Though the Franks under Clovis had recently adopted Roman Christianity, it is still striking how completely “mainstream” Christianity, in the sense that we modern westerners think of it, was identified with Greco-Roman culture at this point. Underlying the newer identity of Christendom, the Romans still divided the world into civilization — i.e. themselves — and “barbarians.” And though Brownworth doesn’t say so, you get the feeling that this proved to be their undoing.

Islam, in some ways, resembled another Christian faction, since it also claimed the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. And in fact, many Christians throughout history have thought of it as a kind of reincarnated Arianism, since it too asserts that Jesus was not God but a subordinate (though important) being. The resemblance is very superficial though; a more obvious parallel is with Ebionism, because it sees Jesus as another in the line of biblical prophets (not as a demigod) and revived certain Jewish practices most Christians had abandoned, such as the dietary taboos, the belief in a divine law code, the absolute monotheism, and the refusal to use images in worship. The Muslim critique of Christianity cut right to its most primal conflicts.

All this brought on an unease in many Christians, who wondered if their defeats at the hands of Muslims was a message from God that they were doing something wrong. The use of images turned out to be a particular sticking point, since there was the Second Commandment and all. This led to the iconoclasm movement of the eighth century, led by no less than Emperor Leo III, forcing Christian leaders everywhere to define their own position against the Islamic one.

Again, those interested in the intellectual side of the debate should look outside of Brownworth’s book; in particular, Telford’s 2002 lecture on this very subject. (Those looking to skip to the meat of it are advised to start at section V.) In the end, the eastern church wound up merely emphasizing its most un-Muslim elements, including not only its iconography but the mariology, the mystery, the sacraments, and so on. It is interesting to contrast this with the Reformation which later occurred in the old Arian heartland, which wound up lodging some of the same criticisms against the church as Islam (though anti-trinitarianism was never a big part of it).

One of the most historically significant ways that eastern Christianity differed from Islam was in the concept of holy war. Eastern Christians weren’t pacifists, but they maintained an attitude that violence was essentially a worldly thing that had nothing to do with holiness. This belief was tested in the tenth century, when Emperor Nicephorus Phocas asked the Byzantine patriarch if soldiers who died fighting Muslims could be considered martyrs — in the saintly sense — because they had died defending the faith and all. The patriarch said no. And so that matter has, to my knowledge, stood to this day.

At least, it has stood in the East. In the West, things took a different turn. But that is the subject of the next post.