Christian-Muslim Relations in the Anglican and Lutheran Communions: Historical Encounters and Contemporary Projects

Historical Encounters and Contemporary Projects

D. Grafton, J. Duggan, J. Harris, D. Grafton, J. Duggan, J. Harris

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137372758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Using vignettes of Muslim-Christian engagement within the Anglican and Lutheran communities from around the world, this book provides thoughtful Anglican and Lutheran responses to Muslim-Christian relationships from a variety of perspectives and contexts, lays the groundwork for ongoing faithful, sensitive, and sincere engagement.

Part I

Historical Encounters

1

What Dialogue? In Search of Arabic-language Christian-Muslim Conversation in the Early Islamic Centuries

Mark N. Swanson

Abstract: After giving a brief orientation to the field of Arabic Christian studies, the author examines an example of early Arabic Christian theological writing. He argues that doing so attunes one to the complex processes by which Christians and Muslims became aware of, interacted with, and shaped one another’s beliefs, extending conversation over generations.

Grafton, David D., Duggan, Joseph F., and Harris, Jason Craige (eds). Christian-Muslim Relations in the Anglican and Lutheran Communions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Introduction

A natural question for practitioners of Christian-Muslim dialogue is whether there is wisdom to be gained for our present-day encounters from the written records of encounters—or of the reflections preparatory to encounter—between Christians and Muslims in the past. In his recent book Allah: A Christian Response, theologian Miroslav Volf dedicated his second and third chapters to reflections on Islam by the 15th-century cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther, on the grounds that “[t]he past responses of Christians to Muslims and their God can guide our responses today.”¹ Volf makes a good case that “history matters,”² as these two giants of the Western Church set the stage for Volf’s own argument.

Practitioners of Christian-Muslim relations can indeed benefit from a greater awareness of the history of Western theological engagement with “Muslims and their God”—even when this engagement was carried out by theologians with little or no direct contact with Muslims and no knowledge of the languages of the Islamic world. But if this is the case, how much more can these practitioners benefit from the writings of theologians who lived within the Islamic world and were fluent in Arabic? In fact, a huge corpus of Arabic-language Christian literature exists, going back to the 8th century of the Common Era.³ Some of this literature specifically addresses issues of Christian-Muslim encounter; in fact, some of it takes the form of treatises addressed to Muslims, or reports on Christian-Muslim debates, or refutations of books by Muslim theologians. In the 15th-century West, Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book (De pace fidei) devoted to a (mostly) Christian-Muslim dialogue—but an imaginary one taking place in heaven!⁴ In this chapter, I will argue that the considerably earlier Arabic-language literature, when read carefully, points us to kinds of Christian-Muslim dialogue taking place in earthly time and space—even if it does not provide us with transcripts of particular conversations (or with “tools” that can simply be put to “use”).

In what follows I shall give an extremely brief orientation to the field of Arabic Christian studies, with some observations (for the sake of this collection of essays) about the involvement of Anglicans and Lutherans in this field. Next, I shall turn to one of the earliest pieces of Arabic Christian theological writing in our possession, an 8th-century text that, on the face of it, is addressed to Muslims and could be taken as an artifact of a very early Christian-Muslim theological conversation. However, I shall then urge some caution in taking this and other medieval Arabic Christian texts as direct evidence of particular Christian-Muslim encounters, even when they present themselves in the form of a dialogue-report or an epistolary exchange. The need for such caution should not deter us from the study of medieval Arabic Christian literature, however. Not only does it point in an indirect way to the complex processes by which Christians and Muslims became aware of and interacted with one another’s beliefs, but it may also be searched for what we might consider extended Christian-Muslim conversations, involving many interlocutors over the course of generations and even centuries. I shall illustrate this last point with reference to Arabic texts concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.

Arabic Christian studies—and the role of Anglicans and Lutherans in it

Within a very few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, his Arab followers had conquered the eastern Byzantine provinces and the whole of the Sasanid Persian Empire, including major Christian centers such as Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Edessa, and Alexandria. With those conquests, large populations of Christians found themselves within “the new Islamic world order” of the Dār al-Islām. These Christians were a diverse lot, widely distributed geographically (from central Asia to al-Andalus), speaking a variety of languages (from Syriac in the East to Latin in the West, with Greek, Palestinian Aramaic, and Coptic in between) and belonging to all the major Christological communities (Church of the East, Miaphysite, and Chalcedonian). Over the course of time, many of these Christians came to learn and to teach their children the Arabic language, an important key to flourishing in the new world order, whether in the government bureaucracies, in trade, or in cultural life. Over the course of time, Christian teachers came to see the need for a Christian literature in Arabic. By the second half of the 8th century, such a literature was taking shape in places like Jerusalem and Damascus and the monasteries of Palestine and Sinai: at first largely a literature of translation of key Christian texts from Greek and Syriac, but soon including texts written directly in Arabic as well.⁵

This Arabic language literature should be important to scholars interested in the history and current practice of Christian-Muslim relations! The Christian teachers who wrote in Arabic, after all, were using a language that was by no means religiously neutral, but rather the very idiom of the quranic revelation; to make that language into an instrument for conveying Christian truth was a daring act of translation and enculturation. Furthermore, those teachers had to address pressing Islamic challenges, whether the understanding of God as Trinity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, or the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for the redemption of humankind. They wrote their treatises in a language that was accessible to Muslim scholars—who could and did read their texts and react to them. I recall my own excitement when, as a student of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary in the early 1980s, I discovered the existence of this literature⁶: here, I thought, was surely a body of material where one could learn something about the possibilities, the hopes, and the pitfalls of Christian-Muslim conversation!

When I decided to study this literature I did not immediately find a great deal of help from Anglicans and Lutherans.⁷ In fact, I decided to pursue my doctoral studies in Rome.⁸ That decision was a logical one, historically speaking. The Roman Catholic Church has a long history of involvement in the Arabic-speaking world, dating back to the period of the Crusades and the affiliation of the Maronite Church with the Holy See. The establishment of the Maronite College in Rome in 1584 brought Arabic-speaking scholars and students to Rome, and ongoing diplomatic and missionary work in the Middle East resulted, among many other things, in a flow of Arabic Christian manuscripts to the Vatican and other libraries. The history of Arabic Christian studies in the 20th century through the present day has been dominated by Catholics; I think especially of four priests: Louis Cheikho, SJ (1859–1927)⁹; Georg Graf (1875–1955)¹⁰; and two people whom I consider mentors and to whom I owe a great deal, Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, SJ¹¹ and Fr. Sidney H. Griffith, ST.¹²

However, I do need to add this. Many theologians from Reformation traditions who have gotten into the study of Christian-Muslim relations over the past half-century have done so in large part because of the work of the late Bishop Kenneth Cragg (1913–2012).¹³ Cragg’s sensitive questioning of the Quran and the writings of Muslim thinkers, his constant search for bridges of thought between Islamic and Christian concerns, changed the way many English-speaking Reformation-tradition Christians thought about Islam—and predisposed at least a few Anglicans and Lutherans to study the history of Christian-Muslim relations (even if some of us then turned to Catholics for orientation). I hope I may be permitted a reference to a project in which I have recently been involved, the five-volume reference work Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History.¹⁴ The general editor and section editor for Arabic Islamic texts is David Thomas of the University of Birmingham, an Anglican priest. I, a Lutheran pastor, have been the section editor for Arabic Christian texts. One might say that this particular project in the study of Christian-Muslim relations in the Arabic language has been an Anglican-Lutheran partnership.¹⁵ And I am certain that Thomas would be more than happy to join me in paying tribute to the rich contributions that Bishop Cragg has made to our field.¹⁶

A particular example: Christian theology in an Islamic idiom

Does the medieval Arabic Christian liter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Historical Encounters
• Part II  Anglican-Lutheran Projects
• Suggested Bibliography