The recent bombing attacks in Boston have once again raised the cry across the internet, rehearsing the perceived violence of Islam.  In several recent discussions, Christians have repeated the mantra that the Qur’an is filled with commands to commit violence against non-Muslims.  Islam, they say, is an inherently bloodthirsty faith.  Commonly cited as empirical fact are screeds such as this one:  “The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule.”

It is important to note that these statements are made by people and on websites whose express purpose is to “expose” or “correct” the claim that Islam is a peaceful religion.  Frequently, such sites manifest considerable antipathy toward Islam and Muslims … for example the home page banner of the above-linked site describes Islam as “one really messed up religion.”  To put it kindly, the source of this purportedly-objective information is not remotely unbiased.

I propose an experiment for anyone interested:

1. Find an atheist. Not just an unbeliever, but someone who really hates Jesus.
2. Have that person start with the assumption that Christianity is a violent religion.
3. Now have him go through the Bible looking for proof of his preconception about our violence.  Be sure he doesn’t overlook the places where “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13.14) celebrates the orphaning and widowing of his enemies’ families (Psalm 109:8-10). Be sure he lingers over the various causes of stoning people to death, and the genocides of the Pentateuch and Judges.
4. Check how many violent verses, from Genesis (or at least Exodus) to Revelation, your anti-theist finds.  Now convince him you worship a God of love and peace.

I hope you would object “but you have to understand the historical and literary context for those verses … progressive revelation, the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ, old and new covenants, etc.  No one can fully understand those things who has not studied them in a perspective of submission to the God who inspired them.”  I agree.  This is a perfectly reasonable objection, whether you’re talking about the Bible or the Qur’an.  The fundamental truth is that it takes a person of faith to accurately interpret the texts of that faith.  If I want to know what the Bible means, I’ll ask a Christian, not a Muslim.  If I want to know what the Vedas mean, I’ll ask a Hindu.  If I want to know what the Qur’an means, I’ll ask a Muslim.

Furthermore, sola scriptura biblicist that I am, it is still true that to understand a faith or a “religion” (I really hate that word) requires more than merely dispassionate study of its texts (or even passionate study, for that matter).  Whatever one thinks of the thing called “Christianity,” one cannot really know it without interacting with a Christian–or many different Christians.  The community, the rituals, even some of the language, and yes–the sacred texts–are unintelligible without a knowledgeable insider to function as an interpreter.  If you don’t know any Christians, you don’t know Christianity.  If you don’t know any Muslims, you don’t know Islam (you may not, anyway, but I digress).

I am not suggesting there isn’t a whole lot of horrible violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam.  There is.  One doesn’t have to be a Fox News devotee or a Limbaugh dittohead to see the headlines.  But when other Muslims I know and trust tell me that those violent, radical Muslims are abusing and even violating the Qur’an, I believe them.  Why do I believe them?  Because I have seen plenty of violent, radical Christians abusing and violating my own holy scriptures as a pretext to commit terrible acts … why should I expect it to be any different to other religions?  Satan corrupts everything.

We must oppose the bearing of false witness against our neighbors, and against those we style as our enemies.  But even that isn’t enough.  It grieves me deeply that when arguments such as the “109 violent verses” are used, they are usually in the context of opposing Muslims who are trying to make peace with us, or opposing Christians who are trying to make peace with Muslims.  This is not only tragic, it’s monumentally stupid.  If we have an ounce of self-preservation instinct at all, we should welcome anybody who extends an olive branch to anybody else.  To whatever extent any Muslim is a threat to me, it’s not the one who is preaching peace from the Qur’an who poses that threat.  We would also do well to remember that our Lord said “blessed are the peacemakers.”  He did not qualify that phrase with the adjective “Christian.”  Neither, I believe, should we.

I normally don’t embed videos on this blog, so for those of you who would rather read a sermon than listen to one (as I normally would), I apologize.  However this message by my friend Rod Cardoza is worth the half-hour it’ll take you to hear it:

Rod is the founder of The Abrahamic Alliance, a Silicon Valley-based ministry that seeks to build bridges between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.  When Rod speaks, as he does in this message, about Muslims who actually respect Christians who follow Jesus’ commands to love neighbors, he’s speaking from personal experience of having lived and worked among Muslims in several countries as well as here in the U.S.  I say this in response to the inevitable comments that Islam is necessarily a hateful religion that is bent on world domination through force…this is factually untrue of Muslims I have met, and many more Muslims Rod has met.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not a universalist who thinks everyone who’s faithful to their own religion is “just fine,” whatever that means.  I hope I’ve made it clear on this blog that I repudiate the usual Evangelical boundaries of “saved” and “unsaved,” but that does not mean I think it’s all good.  I firmly believe that we are called to introduce all people–including Muslims–to Jesus.  However, we first must learn both who Jesus is, and who Muslims are, and I’ll give you a hint:  what’s usually taught by American Christians is a pretty lousy representation of both.

Several years ago I made an observation which led to a question: “Why don’t Christians stand out in culture?”

My observation was that so many Christians, particularly in the US, blend in with everyone else. With that observation in mind Matthew 7:13-14 when Jesus states that “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few,” strikes a chord with me.

OK, take a deep breath.  Trust me when I say I’m not asking anybody to throw away their Bible and start planning their pilgrimage to Mecca.  I am, however, going to attack some truly damaging language that I hear from many of my fellow Christians on the subject of Islam…language that I maintain is neither edifying nor honoring to God, and actually flat-out wrong.  There are many issues that need to be addressed in Christian attitudes toward Muslims (and, I’m sure, vice-versa), but one of the first we need to face is our sloppy language.

So I repeat my title statement:  Every Christian ought to be a muslim.  Note, first of all, that I used a lower-case “m” in the word “muslim.”  I am not suggesting that any follower of Jesus should change faiths.  In fact, I hope it’s clear to any reader of my blog that I wish for more, not fewer, people to follow Jesus.  But while capital M “Muslim” is the name for a follower of the organized religion of Islam, lower-case m “muslim” means simply “one who submits;”  by implication, one who submits to God.

I don’t speak Arabic.  I do, however, speak Swahili, which has significant Arabic roots, and while I’m going to explain in terms of the language I actually know, friends of mine who do speak Arabic have confirmed the truth of what I’m about to say.  In Swahili and in Arabic, if you take a verb and put either an “m” or “mu” prefix onto the front of it, the resulting word is a noun that means “a person or creature who does that verb.”  So for example, the Swahili word “kuzunguka” means “to spin or turn around,” so “mzungu”  means “one who spins around” (which hilariously is the term Africans coined to describe white Europeans and Americans).  In Arabic, the word “islam” simply means “submission.”  A “muslim” is just a person who does “islam,” that is, a person who submits.

Islam is, of course, not the only faith that calls its followers to submit to God.  In the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the original temptation and sin of Adam was not the fact of eating the forbidden fruit, it was the desire to “…be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:5)  In deliberate contrast to the human desire to usurp God’s position in Genesis, followers of Jesus are exhorted to “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Phil. 2:5-6).  Jesus’ example is further illuminated in Phil. 2:8 to be his humility and obedience even “unto death on a cross.”  Jesus is our ultimate example of submission, “islam,” to God.

Of course, the objection many Christians will immediately raise leads me to my second point of language:  submission to WHICH God?  While this may be a hard truth for some to grasp, the answer is “the God of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad.” 

Time for another deep breath, folks.  Please note that I have not said that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all equal, identical, one religion, or anything of the sort.  There are plenty of places where Jews, Christians, and Muslims disagree, and some of them are highly significant.  But Christians have got to get off their pigheaded high horse (dare I mix animal metaphors?) and face the reality that, whatever other important differences exist, the God of Islam is NOT a different God than that of Christians and Jews.  He is the God of Abraham; among his names are Elohim, YHWH, Father, and Allah.  Do you notice that “Elohim” (a plural of “El”) and “Allah” actually have a similar sound?  There is a reason for that…both Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages; that is, they come from a common ancient root.  The names “El” and “Allah” are the same.  Furthermore, Arabic-speaking Christians (at least those who haven’t been corrupted by fundamentalist American ideologues) have been using the name “Allah” to refer to the Father for many centuries.  When Christians in America make the claim (and I heard this in a church as recently as a month ago) that “Allah is an idol and a false God,” they are at best displaying breathtaking ignorance, and at worst blaspheming the very God they claim to worship.

Many Christians will raise the objection at this point “well, Muslims say Allah is not the Father of Jesus, so he must be a false god.”  Funny thing about that claim, it doesn’t seem to apply to Jews, who also do not believe that God is Jesus’ father (unless they’re what we call “Messianic Jews”).  If that criterion renders Islam a false religion, it must do the same for Judaism.  You can’t have it both ways…and yet the most conservative Christians do not doubt that Israel in particular and Jews in general are still God’s special, chosen people.  That’s another discussion, and not for this time, but for now, accepting the deity of Christ cannot be a criterion for otherwise worshiping the “right” God unless the same criterion is applied equally to both of the other Abrahamic faiths.

There is much more to say with regard to Muslim-Christian relations, and I expect some day to take on more of it.  But at the very least, let us please acknowledge that Allah is the God we Christians also worship, and may we all strive to be small-m “muslims” to Him.

Peace/Shalom/Salaam!

Today I finished the book A Deadly Misunderstanding by Mark Siljander, and I vigorously recommend it.  A former Republican congressman with impeccable conservative credentials, colleague of Newt Gingrich and the “Young Turks” of the Reagan Revolution, Mark was also a staunch conservative Evangelical Christian, solid supporter of Israel and opponent of communists and Muslims wherever they might be found.  Challenged not long after an electoral defeat, to find the scriptural basis for his conviction to convert others to Christianity, Mark discovered to his shock that the supposed command wasn’t there.  But rather than pull back into his comfortable religious shell, Mark did the crazy thing:  he learned Greek and Aramaic and started digging into what the original languages of the New Testament actually taught.

Without trying to tell Mark’s story for him (which I couldn’t anyhow–he tells it too well himself), let me just say that he’s a shining example of what can happen when a true believer in Jesus allows for the dangerous possibility that what Jesus said and taught might actually be lived.  In Mark’s case, that has meant learning Arabic and studying the Qur’an too, and discovering between Quranic Arabic, New Testament Aramaic, and Old Testament Hebrew, that an awful lot of the buzz words our faiths use to keep us apart, are actually the same words–or at least words with the same roots–in the Semitic language family.  For example, he demonstrates with some weight, that the Aramaic word “salem” that the Peshitta (Aramaic New Testament) uses to describe repentance and turning to Jesus, is of the same root as the Arabic word for “submission” to God (a Mu-slim is “one who submits or surrenders” to God).

I want to be clear:  this is no milquetoast universalist pablum.  Siljander is NOT claiming some notion of all roads leading to God.  What he’s doing is far more careful and well-thought than that.  He is demonstrating the frequency with which fundamental–often violent–differences between the Abrahamic faiths are based on ignorance:  not only ignorance of the “other’s” faith, but all too often ignorance of the actual text and context of our own faith and its creeds.  In this, he’s coming to a conclusion a Muslim roommate and I (with far less scholarship) came to more than 20 years ago:  if both of us and our brothers merely were careful to follow what OUR OWN SCRIPTURES actually said, we’d find a lot of common ground, and at the very least, we couldn’t fight each other.

Through story after story, Siljander tells how dealing with the actual person and teaching of Jesus (as opposed to the theological constructs ABOUT Jesus that make up most creeds), has opened doors for loving, peacemaking relations with Muslim, Buddhist, and other religious and political leaders on three continents.  This book is a powerful call to live in submission to the Prince of Peace, not in word and doctrine, but in actual love and practice.

Read it!