Christianity and Islam: An Inevitable Clash?

Public Lecture delivered by Revd Professor Keith Ward at Trinity College, 21 March 2003

The title of this lecture, of course, reflects the title of a book by Samuel Huntington, a distinguished American political scientist, on the clash of civilisations. One of his themes is that there is very likely to be a clash of world civilisations, and one of those clashes will be between Islam and Christianity. Tonight, I want to examine how far that might be true, and what a theologian, like myself, or what a Muslim theologian, might say about that.

One difficulty is, of course, that religion very easily gets mixed up with politics. And, as we started with a moment of silence about the present conflict in Iraq, it is well to remember that it is not a religious conflict at all, though there are religious overtones felt by some people. It’s not religious because, for a start, this is an occasion when all the mainstream Christian churches and all the mainstream Muslim organisations are in complete agreement about what they feel about the present conflict. So, in fact, from the religious point of view it’s a time when Islam and Christianity are closer together than they have been for many years. So, it’s not that sort of conflict.

But, let me begin by looking at the history of relations between Islam and Christianity and why there has been felt to be historical conflict. The reason is this, I think: that, in Europe, at least, what is called the Dark Ages is the period from about the seventh century to the tenth century, I suppose, when Europeans were rushing around with armour bashing each other with maces. On the other hand, at that time, after 622 by the Christian calendar, when the Muslim era begins, Muslims would regard this period as the age of enlightenment, not of darkness. It’s an age when al-Andalus, what we now call Spain, was a great Muslim nation and when Muslims were those who were rediscovering and retranslating, for the benefit of the world, the great Greek classics. This was a golden age of Muslim civilisation, which extends into the tenth century.

But, there’s something a little bit odd about both Islam and Christianity. Christianity began as a virtually pacifist sect of Judaism. It was very difficult to be a soldier in the Roman army, for example, if you were a Christian. There was alleged to be one legion of Christians but, on the whole, Christians steered clear of military conflict. And, yet, after the conversion of Constantine, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And, some say, it’s all been downhill from there. Whether or not that’s true, Christianity certainly changed at that time. It became associated with the

Roman Empire in both its eastern and its western parts. This set up between Christianity and the Roman Empire what Weber would call an ‘elective affinity’—that is, a relationship not quite logical but a little more than causal. On the one hand, you have the Byzantine Empire, centred on Constantinople, and then a Roman Empire, centred on Rome. The Byzantine Empire was, like most military dictatorships, a rather unpleasant place for the people who were dominated by it. When Islam came along, Islam overran the Byzantine Empire remarkably quickly and did so largely by force of arms—but, in response to the pleas of the subject peoples of the Byzantine empire for liberation from their imperial masters. Islam was seen as a liberating faith at that time. The Byzantine Empire, of course, collapsed. The Roman Empire collapsed too, although that collapsed for other reasons—mostly because of an especially barbaric people, the Germans, who managed to eat away at its borders.

This strange, sad story of the association of religion with military empire has been the tragedy of Christianity. It’s been difficult to disentangle that original pacifist faith from the empires which have actually called themselves Christian, and that would include not only the Byzantines and the Romans, but the British Empire, and now you might talk about the American Empire.

What about Islam? I have to say the record is not really very much better. Islam, too, gave birth to what is arguably the greatest empire the world has ever seen: the Ottoman Empire. But, again, it was an empire, and it got into conflicts with other empires and particularly with Europeans. So, here you have two imperial faiths which have indeed been in competition. The point is, however, they’re not really imperial at their inception. That wasn’t their basis. They became imperial by being taken over by imperialists. And the problem of both is how to deal with this now.

I think if you wanted to ask about the question of Islam in the modern world, you would have to bear in mind that the tenth century (in Christian terms)—was the age of enlightenment in Islam, when Baghdad was basically the centre of world culture. But in the present age, as Muslims are well aware, one hundred years ago virtually every Muslim nation was owned by some European nation. The dominating question for many Muslims is ‘how did this happen?’ How did it happen that one of the great civilisations and cultures of the world collapsed and Muslims became very largely a dominated, colonised people? And, what can now be done to remedy this situation? I don’t think you can understand the Islamic point of view at all unless you see this political dimension. It raises deep questions about the role of Islam in world history, and how it comes to have the position that it has, and what should be done about that.

Christians have an equivalent problem, but in the Christian case it’s one of having too much world-dominating power, and what should we do about this? As a spokesman for the Vatican said just this week, ‘is George Bush too Christian or not Christian enough?’ That remains a very difficult question. So, that’s the political background to the conflict of Islam and Christianity. But it belongs to the past. Those empires really are dead. There’s no Ottoman Empire. There’s no British Empire. There are remnants of both, but we call them something different, and let’s disconnect from those imperial dreams and start again, or not start again, get back to where the thing did originally start. So, let me turn from the political and, I think, the obsolete past, to the religious sources of Christianity and of Islam.

Muslims see themselves as the children of Abraham, as Christians do. So, there’s a great commonality right at the beginning. Of course, we know that children often disagree and are often unafraid to show that they hate each other more than they hate anybody else. So, it doesn’t solve all your problems to say you’re both children of Abraham, but still it’s worth bearing in mind. Christians trace their descent from Abraham through Isaac, whereas Muslims trace their descent from Abraham through Ishmael. The relevance of this was that Ishmael was not a child of the covenant. If we look at Genesis 17:20, you’ll remember that Ishmael was the child of Hagar and because of Sarah’s jealousy, Hagar and Ishmael were pushed out of the family of Israel to go and live in the wilderness. But, the Bible is quite clear in saying that God said, ‘I will bless Ishmael and make him fruitful, make him a great nation.’ And God said to Hagar that he would be with the boy. So if you look in the Bible, there is the record of a non-covenant people, the children of Ishmael, not the children of the covenant, but still the children of Abraham, whom God loves and is with. For any Jew, religiously speaking, it is impossible to think that only Jews are loved by God. I’ve never met a Jew who thinks that. Jews on the whole don’t care much what God thinks about other people, but they don’t think God only loves Jews. That’s not a possibility for Jewish thought. It’s only Christians, some Christians, who shall be nameless, who think that God only loves Christians. I don’t know how they get that idea. But, certainly it’s not part of Judaism to say that God only loves Jews. There are many other people, and the Ishmaelites—the Muslims—are one of those whom God loves.

The Muslim point of view is very similar to that, in that it is quite clear that God loves many people, not just Muslims. It’s a standard part of the Muslim faith that each nation has its prophets. If I may quote from an English translation of the Qu’ran, ‘we believe in God and that which is revealed to us and that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob of the tribe, and that which Moses and Jesus received, and that which the prophets received from their Lord, we make no distinction between any of them.’ So a fundamental tenet of Muslim faith is that every nation has its prophets. Jesus is one of those. And, although Christians, according to Islam, make lots of mistakes, they are nevertheless people of the book. And they are loved by God. If I may give another quotation from the Qu’ran, ‘whoever believes in God on the last day and does right, there shall come no fear upon them, neither shall they grieve.’ I’m going to say a little bit more about this later, but there are quite clear statements in the Qu’ran that to believe in God on the last day and to do what is right is what is expected of people, Muslim or not. So, Judaism and Islam agree absolutely on these points. And, I think Christians ought to, as well.

There seems to be a common basis of belief between Islam and Christianity that there is a God, there are prophets, and that God loves all human beings and desires them to come to know and obey and love God. So, that is common ground. That common ground is worth stressing. Not only that, Muslims do revere the person of Jesus. They hold that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, ascended into heaven and will return, and that he is a genuine prophet of God, a spirit sent from God, in a mysterious way that no one can quite understand, but it’s something very special. So, here are some similarities: An agreement that there is one God; one creator of the universe; there are prophets sent from God to every people; God loves and wants all people to obey God, to be saved, in Christian terms; there will be a resurrection of the dead; there will be a judgement; and that judgement will take place largely on what you have done—the

deeds you have done for good or ill. It’s a huge area of agreement.

But, of course, there are disagreements, too. And, I think, at this point, what is most important is to understand why these disagreements exist. It’s very easy to misunderstand why, and when we do, Christians can say, ‘it’s because Muslims are rejecting the Gospel’, and Muslims can say ‘it’s because Christians are wrongly giving Jesus divine status.’ It’s possible for each religion to demonise the other. If you do this then there will be an inevitable clash. If you’re a Christian, you look for the worst Muslims you can find and you say ‘that’s Islam’ and you look for the best Christians you can find and you say ‘that’s Christianity’. In fact, there probably aren’t any quite good enough so you make up something that is purely an ideal and say that’s Christianity, it’s all love and peace. If you’re a Muslim, you look for the worst Christians you can find—and don’t have to look very far—and say ‘that’s Christianity’, and then you look for the best Muslims or an ideal Muslim—the Prophet himself, perhaps—and say ‘that’s Islam’. Now, that has to stop. You have to stop demonising. And, to stop demonising means you have to start understanding why differences arise. There are some big differences, and I’m going to talk briefly about the major differences and why they arise. I think this will help to understand that they’re not demonic. There are genuine issues of conscience and belief. We must all learn to respect those who follow their consciences in going their different ways.

So, let me take one of the most obvious differences. That is, is Jesus the son of God? Christians do say Jesus is the son of God. And, Muslims, in the Qu’ran, deny that God has a son. Now, that is a pretty big difference. The temptation is to say, ‘oh, the Qu’ran must be rejecting the word of God,’ and from a Muslim point of view ‘to say that Jesus is the son of God is to say something utterly ridiculous’, namely that God is like a human being who has a son and possibly a pigeon too (think of the Trinity). It all looks a little bit odd.

However, it shouldn’t be difficult to sort this out. Indeed, the way to sort it out is perfectly obvious. Look at the Bible; where does it talk about people as sons of God and who does it call sons of God? The Bible calls King David the son of God, it calls King Solomon the son of God. It calls the people of Israel the son of God. So, the expression ‘son of God’ is a metaphorical expression that just means the beloved of God. What we need to do is get away from literalism in religion. If you say God is a father, you don’t mean he’s got different chromosomes from mothers. Gods have no chromosomes. If this lecture has a motto, it’s that God has no chromosomes. If you call God ‘father’, you’re speaking metaphorically. And, where you use a metaphor, people cannot disagree with you. You cannot disagree with a metaphor. Supposing I say, ‘I am a lion’. You can’t say it’s false. I know it’s false. That’s not the point. I’m talking about my absolutely wonderful, aggressive character. I know what I mean. And, you may say, ‘oh no, I think you’re a fox’. Is that a contradiction? No, that’s not the way to think of it. It’s not a contradiction. You’ve found these metaphors appropriate because there is a place that you allocate me to in your worldview. So, religion largely consists of metaphorical expressions. The Qu’ran is full of metaphor, metaphor about God seated on a throne with hands and eyes. It’s a metaphor, not a literal truth. Christianity is full of metaphors about God seated on a throne and he has a son. But, remember the other things that were said of Jesus. Jesus is the ‘word’ of God. Now, how somebody can be a son and word at the same time, literally, just beggars belief. But, if you take those as two different metaphors they make perfect

sense. ‘Son of God’ means chosen by, beloved of God. It is in this sense that Jesus is God’s son. Of course, Christians, when they use that expression, mean to make Jesus more than a prophet. There is a difference here. I’m not at all suggesting that Islam and Christianity are the same. They do disagree. They are different. We have different beliefs. What I’m saying is, let’s understand why those beliefs are different and let us try to see it in a way that will make this is an honourable difference, a difference that could well exist, and does exist, between two people who are honestly, in good conscience, concerned to find spiritual truth.

I can see perfectly why a Muslim wouldn’t like to call Jesus the son of God because a Muslim is so concerned to make God transcendent above every finite thing that a Muslim will not want to associate anything with the majesty of God. This is out of honour for God. The greatest sin for a Muslim is Shirk, that is, associating something with God, saying that God has a partner, saying that anything is like God. Well, this is an honourable view. Any Christian would have to say, ‘I respect that view. It is indeed true that nothing should be associated with God at all. God is beyond everything finite.’ And, a Christian would agree with that. But, what a Christian would say is that God has assumed a human nature, in the person of Jesus, into God. God has not changed or become diminished in any way, but has actually assumed humanity. But, I can understand people, and in Christianity, they’re called ‘unitarians’, who say, ‘I can’t agree that Jesus was actually the embodiment of God’. There are Muslims who do talk about embodiments of God. They would not use the word incarnation, but let me tell you who they are: They are the Ishmaelis. And, Ishmaelis, I assure you, would speak of some human beings as those who, in some sense embody Shariah—God’s law, God’s teaching—in their own lives. And, indeed, within Judaism there are Rabbis who would say that a well-instructed, completely faithful Jew will embody Torah—the Jewish version of Shariah, the teaching of God. So, it is possible for a human being, even possible for a Muslim to say, the acts of human beings can embody Shariah. They still wouldn’t use the word incarnation, but let me suggest the difference is not so absolute and it is honourable. So, there is difference: the religions are different. But, each one has good reason for the view it takes. Islam has good reason for saying God transcends everything finite. And, naturally, since I’m a Christian minister, I think Christians have good reason for saying that the person of Jesus is a genuine embodiment and disclosure of the love of God. This is a genuine difference, but not a difference where one person is evil and demonic and the other is completely saintly. It is rather a difference in the way people honestly see the nature of the spiritual life and of human relationships with God.

What is important, I think, if Islam and Christianity are to live together, is that they should agree to differ. There is no possibility of them ever agreeing. I am not arguing for that at all. Just as I will never be a Unitarian, so I will probably never be a Muslim because I disagree with some of the things that Muslims believe. But, I don’t think that to believe those things would be evil. I just think it would be mistaken. I would expect a Muslim to say the same thing to me. We do this in ethics, we do it in morality, we do it politics. We have to learn to do it in religion and say that difference does not mean argument. Differences might entail, rather, explanations and searches for greater understanding. I think that is happening in the modern world.

Let me take one other case of major disagreement between Islam and Christianity. That is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Again, the Qu’ran says ‘do not say that

God is three’. Again, however, this is an understandable and honourable difference. You can imagine someone saying, ‘how can you say that the one creator of all things is somehow three?’ There are not three Gods and most ordinary Muslims that I meet go on thinking Christians think there are three Gods. I just can’t get them out of thinking that. I can assure you I do not think there are three Gods. At least one Christian doesn’t think there are three Gods. But, there are three somethings. As Augustine said, and I’m happy with what Augustine said, I don’t know three whats but there are three somethings: the father, son, and holy spirit. Again, we might be in the realm metaphors here. We might be in the realm of images that we, as human beings, have to use to understand the infinity of God. It might be better, from a Muslim point of view, to say not that there are three Gods—that is definitely wrong—but to say that God is threefold. Why not? Why not say that God has many aspects and many names. Isn’t God infinite? Doesn’t God have at least ninety-nine names? What are names? You could say they are just human ways of speaking about God. But, probably, if you were a Muslim theologian you would want to go a bit deeper than that and say, no the names of God are actually aspects of the infinite divine being, which is always one but in an infinity of forms. Well, couldn’t the Christians say ‘yes, you’re getting closer to what I wanted to say there’. I want to say there are three forms of God, which my tradition, the Christian tradition, is especially interested in because we’re interested in seeing God in Jesus and in seeing the holy spirit of God within us, and in seeing God as the transcendent creator of all. We’re interested in those three aspects. We don’t deny there are more. We don’t say we understand everything about God. Indeed, in the tradition I belong to, we’d say the essential nature of God is always beyond human understanding.

But, the Trinity is a way of thinking of God which has been given to us, through Jesus and in the Christian tradition. So, again, might we not be able to say, we are not going to agree about this? There are always going to be Unitarians and there are always going to be Trinitarians, but let’s not make these into the sorts of literal disagreements where one person says, ‘I know exactly what I mean and I know that you’re wrong’. I have never met a Muslim who knows what they mean when they say ‘God is one’. Never. I have talked to the best Muslim theologians—and I make a big qualification here—who speak English. Not one, when pressed, could say what is meant by the ‘unity of God’. The unity of God is a mystery beyond human understanding. What the great Muslim theologians, like Al-Ghazali, do say is that God is not one in the sense of being one of two or three possible beings of the same sort. It’s a completely unique sense of unity. It’s a divine mystery.

Well, say I, in my philosopher’s dress, what’s the difference between a Muslim saying, ‘God is one and I don’t understand that’ and a Christian saying ‘God is three and I don’t understand that either’? Wouldn’t it better for religious conversations to say none of us knows what we’re talking about here? I know you may think that’s absurd, but it’s not.

Let me take one of the greatest Muslim writers, Al-Ghazali, and one of the greatest Christian writers, Thomas Aquinas, and give you a little quotation from each. Thomas Aquinas starts his great work Summa Theologica, by saying, ‘we do not know what God is’. And, Al-Ghazali also, taking a verse from the Qu’ran, says, ‘everything perishes except the face of God’. Ultimately, the way he construes this enigmatic verse is that in the end you cannot even distinguish creation from creator because to

do that you would be using human distinctions and concepts that are completely inadequate for the divine being. What you’ve got in the end is silence, the fading away of all duality in the face of a unity which encompasses everything.

I think instructed Christians and instructed Muslims will agree about the ineffability of God. They would agree that God is unitary: there is only one God. They would disagree about whether they’re going to speak about God as Trinitarian—three-fold. Theologians like Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, probably the best known Catholic and Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, would say, ‘when we think about the Trinity, we must use new concepts because the old ones now are very difficult to use and we must say that there are three modes of the divine being, three ways in which the one God is’. Christians talk about these three modes of being as introducing a certain sort of complexity in the being of God, whereas Muslims do not. So there is a difference, but an honourable difference, one you can understand. It is, in fact, the same difference between Christians and Muslims as there is between Trinitarians and Unitarians.

I think we can understand very well the temptation for a Christian to be a Unitarian, and even give up on the Trinity altogether. On the other hand, an instructed Muslim would be equally wary about talking about the unity of God, because such talk inevitably raises one of the central Islamic problems in theology. Does the unity of God include the world or exclude it? Many volumes have been written about this. If you read Muslim writers like Al-Ghazali, you will find a position which sounds very like saying everything is actually the face of God. It may seem odd to get to such a position from a faith which starts by saying that God and the world are absolutely distinct. God is sovereign, the world is the creation. They are absolutely apart. You couldn’t get further apart. But you suddenly find that you’re saying the opposite. And, it happens like this: God is the ultimately sovereign will. All that happens is decreed by God. The will of God is identical to the essence of God, so the will of God is identical to God’s essential nature. So, what God wills is what happens in the world and what God wills is God’s essential nature. So, what happens in the world is God’s essential nature, and in a sense there is no longer any distinction between God and the world: QED. ‘All perishes except the face of God’. There it is.

We could say that this is the ultimate mystical impulse. All dualities fade away before the absolute unity that is the will of God. To be a spiritually mature believer is to see this. It’s not to have some sort of creed and a set of beliefs you can come out with. It’s to see, to have an insight into the absolute presence of, the infinite God. I think both Christians and Muslims can say this, so there is a mystical convergence at that level.

The tragedy is that although Al-Ghazali and Aquinas agreed very closely in their doctrine of God, they were unable to spell this out because, as I said, Christianity and Islam had got mixed with conflicting empires and you weren’t allowed to make friends. So, they had to find and stress a difference. Now, do we want to live in a universe where we have to find a difference which demonises those who differ from us? Or, do we want to live a world where we say that although there are differences, we’re not going to demonise anybody? We’re going to say those differences arise from freedom of conscience and expression. I’d go for the latter. I think it’s clear that Christians ought to do so, although not many Christians would, apparently. The New Testament says that the chief Christian virtue is to love your neighbour as yourself,

and makes it perfectly clear that your neighbour is absolutely anybody, especially if they’re very different from you, including those who are quite different from you in belief and in custom. That is an absolutely unequivocal Christian command: you must love those who differ from you. And, of course, you cannot love anyone if you don’t try to understand them. That wouldn’t make any sense. So, if you follow the Christian command you have to try to understand people who are very different from you. So that’s the Christian command: understand the differences. And, in Islam, too, there is the same concern for understanding and accepting those whom God has created who are different from you.

Let me give you two quotations from the Qu’ran—the first is a very famous one, but worth repeating endlessly: ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion. Whoever rejects evils and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks.’ So, let there be no compulsion in religion. And again, ‘If your Lord had willed, he truly would have made mankind one nation, yet they do not cease to differ.’ So, it’s the will of God that there are differences. We don’t know why, but it’s God’s will that there are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Unitarians and atheists in the world. Why God has created atheists, I don’t quite know. I can make a good guess, though. I think God has created atheists because there are too many people like me about. Christians like me can get on people’s nerves after a while. If we are not closely criticized, we can very easily become judgmental and censorious. Atheists are the people who will do the necessary criticising, and so help to make the religious slightly less hypocritical.

In a similar way, perhaps Christians and Muslims need one another just to stop the absurdities that they each keep falling into all the time. Now, it doesn’t quite work out the way God would like, I think, because what we do to this is to make these differences into demonising oppositions. So, here’s what we have to do. We have to say—and this is the essence of what we call a liberal education—that what you have to do is encourage positive criticism and learn from it, understand the criticisms that other people make of you. That is the great breakthrough that people who were mostly atheists in Europe made in the eighteenth century—the Enlightenment as we call it. The Enlightenment allowed and encouraged critical thought. Critical thought does not have to be destructive, but if someone says, ‘look there’s something here which you haven’t seen and I think this is wrong’. Then you have to think, ‘how can I respond to this?’ Both Christianity and Islam have found it very difficult to really encourage critical thought. Yet it’s in our religious tradition to encourage such thought, because God has created differences for a purpose.

One of the meanings that some Muslims theologians give to the word jihad—striving in the way of God—is that we are to strive with one another in the way of God, to see who shall be the best, not to see who can curse the worst, but to see who can achieve unity, union with God in a positive way which survives the criticisms that can be made of it from other positions. That word jihad means primarily the inner striving of the soul, to become worthy of union with God.

Regrettably in the present political situation, we often hear more about the lesser jihad, the less important one, religiously. It licenses taking up arms in defence of Islam or to remedy gross injustice. This is almost identical to what Christian theologians have almost all said, namely that it is permissible to defend yourself or

the innocent by the use of force. In the present military conflict, some people have gone beyond that doctrine and that’s why the Churches are objecting to the Iraqi conflict, because it goes beyond the traditional Christian rules for the engagement of war, which is that you should only wage war in defence of innocent people who are threatened. Well, in this respect Islam is exactly the same. The Islamic doctrine of jihad, as formulated by the theologians of Al-Azar University in Cairo, is almost exactly the same as the Christian doctrine of the just war, formulated by theologians like Thomas Aquinas.

It’s easy to say Muslims believe in war, Christians believe in peace. But, who wages war most? I wouldn’t like to make a judgement on that. But the fact is that the rules for warfare are much the same in both traditions. Those who are called Islamic fundamentalists and who are perhaps better called Islamic militants, are actually in revolt against traditional Islam. That is their enemy. Traditional Islam is the Islam by which the Qu’ran is interpreted in many different traditions—at least six major traditions of legal interpretation of Islam. The Shariah is not something which tells you to do all sorts of strange things like cutting people’s hands off and so on. It doesn’t tell you that at all. Shariah takes a thousand different forms. As I say, there are six major schools of interpretation of Shariah and it’s perfectly possible to interpret Shariah in the same way that a Jew interprets Qu’ran, if you can work that out. In other words, there are many different ways of interpreting it. Some people would be more rigorous than others, but there will always be different traditions of interpretation. People who call themselves Islamic fundamentalists reject every tradition of interpretation and they say, ‘I’m just going to read the Qu’ran myself and interpret it on my own’, but very often, paradoxically enough, with the aid of Karl Marx and the Communist doctrine of the overthrow of unjust societies by violence. What is happening in the Muslim world is a rejection of tradition. We must be careful to distinguish traditional Islam from these radical militant movements that are very different in character.

A similar thing happens in Christianity. Remember how strong fundamentalism is in Christianity now, certainly in some parts of the world. Christian fundamentalism, too, is a rejection of Christian traditions. It’s saying, ‘I don’t believe in tradition. I don’t care what it says. Thomas Aquinas? Who’s he?’ The mark of fundamentalism is to say, ‘I’m going to read the Bible, probably in English, probably in old-fashioned English, and I’m going to decide what it means for myself. I’m not going to read these commentaries and I’m not going to look at church tradition and see how things have been interpreted over the centuries. I’m just going to make it up and say this is what God says.’ Furthermore, they usually add, ‘I’m a very humble person. I’m not saying this. It’s in the Bible. I just happen to know what the Bible means. I’m privy to the thoughts of God. There have been thousands of theologians before me, but I don’t know what they said and I don’t much care either.’

That, I think, is most unfortunate, because religion is a quest for truth, the quest for the most important sort of truth: spiritual truth, the truth about God, the truth about ultimate reality, the truth about how human beings should live. And, if you’re seriously on a quest for truth you need to learn from others. You can’t make things up for yourself. You need to know what the best minds have thought about. You need to read and respond to them critically. If you’re a Christian, you need to know what Thomas Aquinas said and then you need to criticise it. That’s the difficulty. If you

can’t do this, don’t pretend that you’ve done it or don’t pretend that you don’t need to do it. In other words, just be a bit less arrogant and admit these things are very disputed and difficult to interpret.

What we can do is to concentrate on what will make our own lives closer to God—not on abstract doctrines, which we can always disagree about, which we probably don’t know how to interpret anyway. Never use beliefs as weapons to hit somebody else with. Christians must never say to Muslims, ‘you don’t believe in the Trinity so I’m excluding you from my arena of worthy people’. Muslims must not use the doctrines of the unity of God and the absolute sovereignty of God as a way of excluding others. Use them as ways of coming to understand what God is in your own spiritual life. And, if you do that, you’ll find that both Muslims and Christians have a shared spiritual concern to obey and love God. That agreement ought to overshadow all the real disagreements there are, and ensure that they do not become the sources of bitter dispute.

There is one final thing I should say as I come towards to the end of my talk tonight. That is, that if we are to have a future which is not going to have a clash between Islam and Christianity certain things need to be done. The danger of a clash—Samuel Huntington was right—is always there. There’s always a danger. The danger will be realised if one set of doctrines, intellectually formulated as apparently clear, is then set over against another set of different doctrines and said to be the only correct one, whereas the other doctrines are clearly false. That way, there will be a clash because though the differences may be stressed by wise and spiritual people, their words will be used by arrogant and violent people. So, don’t say that sort of thing. Rather, accept the conscientious freedom of people to come to their own conclusions in belief. There should be no compulsion in religion, for true religion lies in the free assent of the heart to the inviting presence of God. Both Christianity and Islam need to insist more strongly and obviously than they do on the freedom of belief.

What is also needed is full acceptance of plurality, within your own faith, as well as between faiths. An acceptance of plurality means living with difference and being able to distinguish when differences are honourable and conscientious from when you really are faced with evil. There is evil in the world. But, people who have different beliefs are not, as such, evil. You need to accept that there are going to be differences of interpretation. Why this should be true, I don’t know. But I know that if you have a room with three people in it you will, if you talk for long enough, have four theological opinions. (Somebody will change their mind in the middle). If you let people believe what they conscientiously think, they will always disagree with one another sooner or later. Religions find it hard to accept this. So, we must accept there’s always going to be difference of interpretation religion.

Both Christianity and Islam must put first their belief, which is shared, that God is a god of compassion and mercy and love. Every Muslim prayer begins with the phrase, ‘In the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful’. Christians believe that God is a god of unlimited love, who will stop at nothing to bring people to know and love God. If you put those things first, then there couldn’t be a clash between Islam and Christianity as such, because we would both be praying to be forgiven by God for all the mistakes that we are probably making. I am prepared to swear an oath that many of my theological beliefs are mistaken, but I cannot find out which ones they are. This

means I must simply be true to what it seems to me is right, given that I have listened to the wisest, most spiritually-advanced voices that I can hear. Some of them have come from Islam. Some of them have come from Christianity. And, having listened to those voices I must, in the end, come to my own decision. Or I must follow someone, not as an infallible guide, but as a guide who is a provisional guide and who can help me to tread a further stage on the spiritual path.

So, could there be a clash between Islam and Christianity? Yes, there could, if religious believers insist on not understanding one another. But does there have to be? No. In the modern world, for the first time we are in a position when Muslims and Christians, freed from the empires of the past, can begin to seek to understand one another better without falling into the old stereotypes—three Gods/one God, one son/no son. So, let me end, as a Christian minister, with a quotation from one of my favourite philosophers, Al-Ghazali. He said, ‘To be a Sufi means to abide continuously in God and to live at peace with men.’ If only all Christians and Muslims could agree about this, there will be no clash, but a striving in the way of virtue, until we all come to the final vision of God which will silence all disputes.

Trinity Papers:

This paper represents the twenty-sixth in a series published from time to time by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, religion, politics, and science.

Further Copies:

Copies of this and other Trinity Papers are available upon request from:

Tutorial Office Trinity College Royal Parade Parkville VIC 3052 Australia

Telephone: 03 9348 7100 Facsimile: 03 9348 7610 Email: enquiries@trinity.unimelb.edu.au

Trinity Papers can also be found on the website at: www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/publications/papers/

About the Author:

Revd Professor Keith Ward (Emeritus) is a former Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon Professor of Christ Church College, at Oxford University. Prior to his appointment to Oxford, he taught at the Universities of Glasgow, St. Andrew’s and London. He has also been Visiting Professor at Duke University, Claremont Graduate School and the University of Tulsa. His areas of research and teaching speciality include: concepts of God; the idea of revelation; method in theology; doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity; religion and science; inter-religious dialogue; Christianity in the context of world religions. He has published widely, with his major books being: Religion and Revelation (1994, Clarendon Press, Oxford); Religion and Creation (1996, Clarendon Press, Oxford); Religion and Human Nature (1998, Clarendon Press, Oxford); Religion and Community (2000, Clarendon Press, Oxford); and God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oneworld, 2002).

Professor Ward was the 2003 Frank Woods Fellow at Trinity College.

Copyright © Keith Ward 2004