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Excerpt from: Lovat, T. & Fleming, D. (2014). What is this thing called theology? Considering the spiritual in the public square (pp. 45-53). Macksville: David Barlow Publications. CHAPTER FIVE Abrahamic Theologies: Judaic, Christian, Islamic Introduction The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are commonly referred to as the Abrahamic religions because of the common link with the story of Abraham which can be found in all three religious traditions (Peters, 2004; Lodahl, 2010). The sacred story that relates to Abraham (Ibrahim to Muslims), Sarah, Hagar (Hajar to Muslims), Isaac, Ishmael (Ishma’il to Muslims), is shared by these three religions and, in each case, is part of the foundations of each of the religions. While one could be forgiven for not noticing it, granted world events now and for the past 1000 years, these three religions actually have much in common and every reason for intense understanding of each other. Their common heritage is in the story of the ‘wanderer’, Abraham, to whom a promise was made by a ‘new’ god, a single, universal and all creative God, that this God would be the god of the people that Abraham would gather as a ‘new nation’, a special people who would live according to God’s ordinance rather than under human ordinance. For the Jews, the ordinance is in the ‘Torah’ (incorporating the ‘Ten Commandments’), for Christians in the ‘Great Commandment’ and for Muslims in the ‘Five Pillars’, each slightly different but essentially driving at the same set of beliefs, duties regarding worship and their related ethics. God is above all other gods and hence is to be worshipped exclusively and those who worship this God must live out the practical ethics outlined in the relevant ordinance above. Each of the ordinances shows that these practical ethics centre on personal and communal moral action. In the Ten Commandments, the early ones concern matters of core belief (eg. ‘I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt not have strange gods before me’), worship (eg. ‘Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath Day’) and the actions focus on the ways in which anyone who claims to be one of God’s special people must behave (eg. ‘Thou shalt not steal’). In the Great Commandment, the core belief and implications for worship are in the first tenet (‘Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and self’) and the single action that follows is ‘And love thy neighbour as thyself’. In the Five Pillars, the core belief is in the first pillar, 1 essentially the opening passage of the Qur’an (in part ‘Praise be to Allah, Lord of the World, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy, the Master of the Day of Judgment’), the duty to worship in the pillars is concerned with daily prayer and making the Haj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and the necessary practical action is in the pillars concerned with fasting and the giving of alms (the mandatory tithe or tax so that no-one in the community is left in want). So, the Abrahamic religions have much in common, regardless of their obvious differences. The central point of commonality is in their core theology, their belief in a certain kind of God, a single, all creative and all powerful God who is in relationship with His People. The commonality between the three religions has been likened to a large old tree with two huge branches. The two branches are Christianity and Islam, while the trunk of the tree, that which has given life to and sustains the two branches, is Judaism. Judaism Judaism is an unusual religion for one that has been so influential (Avery-Peck & Neusner, 2001). It is quite small in number and always has been. It has never desired to spread by proselytising or conversion; in fact, it is quite exclusive in wanting to keep to itself and being highly demanding on anyone who wishes to convert to it. So, unlike Christianity and Islam, its branches, it has never engaged in missionary activity and the numbers demonstrate that this is the case. Unlike both its branches whose numbers each exceed one billion followers, Judaism has scarcely more than 20 million or so followers. So why has it been so influential? Judaism’s influence is arguably in its conception of God. Among the religions that had preceded it, religions typical of the features of primal religions that we saw before, gods and spirits were plentiful. Typically, every aspect of life had a god attached to it. There were gods in all the natural features of life, whether geographical (eg. the mountain god), climatic (eg. the storm god) or seasonal (eg. the god of the harvest). These gods were to be taken seriously and appeased where necessary but they were normally not in relationship with humans. Note in the earlier chapter that there were exceptions to this generalisation and the likelihood is strong that the primal religions that preceded Judaism actually had some of these all-powerful high gods, yet more humanised and relational ones. Nonetheless, it is central to the beliefs of Judaism that the God the Jews came to understand as their God was distinctive as being a single, all powerful (omnipotent) God who had created 2 all things and sustains all things according to his will. In this regard, Jewish theology of God is of a High God, in the ultimate sense. At the same time, this High God is one who relates to his people, potentially to all people but central to Jewish theology is the belief that the Jews are his special people through an exclusive relationship of the High God’s choosing. In spite of this God being the creator of all things and, in that sense, capable of being Lord of the whole world, this God selected the Jews to be his Chosen People. This God is therefore cast as a ‘jealous’ one, who makes heavy demands of loyalty on his people but, at the same time, protects them against the ambitions of all other peoples. Significantly, the loyalty of God’s chosen people to their relationship takes the form of both piety towards God and also ethical relations with one’s neighbours, including both those within the Jewish tradition and those outside of it. Such theology is expressed throughout the Jewish Scriptures (more commonly known by Christians as the Old Testament), including especially in the prophetic books and the psalms. This central theology about God explains why the Jewish religion has never grown to be large like others. It is an exclusive religion, highly selective and self-protective. Everything that Judaism has been to the world, and continues to be today in its strengths and challenges, is explained by its theology. Without understanding this theology, there is no understanding of the Jews, a mistake that many people, politicians, media and educators, have made in their estimations and postulations about the Jews and the issues pertaining to them. It is worth noting at this stage that there are many different interpretations of Judaism, including within Judaism, and most especially about the controversial nature of what it really means to be ‘chosen’. For some, it is an offensive notion, including among many Jews themselves that the Creator of the entire world and all people would ‘choose’ one people over another. It has also been the cause of much hostility and violence, most especially aimed at the Jews themselves. So, chosen-ness needs to be carefully defined and understood. While some Jews are happy to take it at face value and declare, in imperious fashion, that they are in fact a superior people in God’s eyes and the rest of the world simply has to accept this fact, others argue that the notion of chosen-ness has been tragically misunderstood and caused more problems than it is worth. For instance, Lurie (2014), himself a Jewish Rabbi, argues that the central idea behind the Jews as chosen is neither elitist nor exclusivist. The biblical idea sitting behind the Covenant 3 is that Jews are chosen to reveal the greatest truth of all, namely that God is the Creator and Lover of all people. They are chosen for an essentially humble and inclusive mission to take the message to the ends of the earth that, at the end of the day, God does not choose one people to be superior to another, but rather that God chooses all people, and indeed all of creation, to be under his care. Understood in this way, Judaism’s mission is to be a means to a far greater end, rather than to be an end in itself. Christianity As suggested above, we might imagine that Judaism is the trunk of the tree we call the Abrahamic religions, with Christianity then being the first of the huge outgrowth branches. Mind you, this tree would have fallen over long ago if the analogy was extended too far. Currently the branch called Christianity is approximately 70 times the size of the trunk so clearly the image is metaphorical. Christianity is said to be a branch in the sense that Jesus was a Jew and so were his disciples, so the entire location of Christianity’s origins is within a Jewish world and most of its original theology would be very hard to understand without some understanding of its Jewish foundations (McGrath, 2006). Above all, its theology of the High God, all creative and all powerful who relates in personal fashion to his people, is the theology that Christianity inherited. This is the same God whom Jesus called ‘Father’. It is the same God who made the original Covenant with Abraham, renewed it with Moses and continually reminded the people of it through the Prophets. Having inherited this tradition, Christianity moved on, partly through deliberate theological venture and partly through circumstances, to re-fashion this theology into something distinctively Christian. In the early days after Jesus’ departure, the disciples are seen to be in hot debate about whether their new movement is best understood as being merely a branch of Judaism, albeit one in which the Messiah (Jesus) has come or as a new religious movement altogether. Jesus had not been specific about this and so the early church had to sort it out. From all we are led to believe, Jesus’ own disciples were narrowly Jewish and so naturally found it difficult to imagine life outside their Jewish experience, at that time, subjugated politically and under siege religiously. Jews had learned to keep to themselves and live by a strict and exclusive code. This explains many of Jesus’ confrontations with the Jewish authorities in particular, confrontations which seemed to suggest that Jesus’ vision was of a movement (for him, the fulfilment of all for which Judaism had really stood) that was far more open to the foreigner and the whole world than Judaism had become. 4 It was the ethic behind these confrontations, and Jesus’ explicit stance around them, that St Paul utilised in convincing the early church, including the likes of St Peter and the original disciples, that Christianity was not a sect of the extant Judaism, but indeed a new movement that both fulfilled Judaism’s original mission and went beyond it. The specifics of the argument centred on whether a newly baptised Christian needed to be circumcised first, effectively becoming a Jew before being eligible to be Christian. The latter restriction was a natural way for the disciples to think, granted the narrowness of their experience, including their theological boundaries. St Paul is of course a very different ‘kettle of fish’, being immersed in Greek culture and carrying Roman citizenship as well as being Jewish. He was the veritable citizen of the world, used to moving in the cosmopolitan circles of the day. Eventually the church (the name for the community of disciples which continued in Jesus’ name) would back Paul’s view that he was the one who truly understood what Jesus had intended. In contrast with the exclusive High God theology imputed popularly of Judaism, Christian theology came eventually to see Jesus’ Father God as the God of all peoples, truly the creator and sustaining power of all life, including human life. Note again, above, that it is debateable within Judaism whether Judaism should really be understood as being as exclusivist as the popular notion suggests. Whether or not, certainly early Pauline Christianity is clear that anyone was eligible to be among the Chosen People, simply by submitting to God through following the example of Jesus and confessing faith in his Messiah-ship, this latter relating to a Jewish theology of anointing God’s chosen leader to bring forth and endorse God’s kingdom. Eventually, Jesus would be understood as Son of God and, together with the Holy Spirit and the Father would constitute the Godhead, a Trinity God, one being with three Persons (or expressions). In time, the notion of God as a Trinity of Persons would become the centre of the hottest theological debates of all within Christianity and between Christianity and its Abrahamic siblings. It would fracture the church in the fourth century and create the major split between East and West, known as the Eastern Schism, in the eleventh century. We return to all of these points in later chapters. We see in the Pauline influence on Christian inclusivism and especially in the notion of God as a Trinity, the clear development of theological thought that was wrought by Christianity. The essential notion of a singular all creative and all powerful High God is taken from the parent religion, Judaism, but expanded in terms of its universal reach, its intimate relationship 5 with people and its character in the form of the Trinity. Let us take each of these important theological points in turn. First, the notion of universal reach is seen in a God who originally chose to be Lord of a special people now being Lord of all people; this is at least the way Christian theology tended to interpret the connection with Judaism, gradually separating out from its dependence on Judaism and, arguably in the process, actually relegating Judaism as the original but now quite dispensable foundation of the Abrahamic tradition. We will see below how St Paul pioneered this interpretation in the Letter to the Galatians, effectively relegating both Judaism and Islam (well before historical Islam) in the interests of promoting Christian claims to be the supreme religion. The effect was that one need not be part of the Jewish heritage, ethnically, politically or religiously, to be among God’s people (as above, this is not something which all Jews would disagree with anyway; nor would many Muslims). One needs merely to submit to God the Father through following in the footsteps of the Son and in fellowship with the Holy Spirit (this element would not be so acceptable even to the most liberal of Jews or Muslims). This accounts for the fact that Christianity went on to become an imperial religion and one of the great missionary religions of all time, a proselytising mission that would see its numbers expand well beyond those of the parent religion, Judaism. Second, the intimate relationship is seen in a God who becomes incarnate, en-fleshed as a human being in order to relate as closely as possible with humanity. God is one with humanity through the person of Jesus who gave an example which humanity can copy. This is the supreme expression of an incarnation theology, a theology that rests on the notion of God becoming human. Third, the erstwhile simple notion of the Jewish High God, remote yet involved in his world, evolves into the more complex Trinitarian theology of Christianity whereby the remoteness of this High God is maintained in the Father, the involvement strengthened in the Son and the ongoing relationship secured in the Holy Spirit. If Hinduism spawned a loose (some might say ‘low’) trinitarian theology, Christianity developed a tight and highly sophisticated (‘High’) Trinitarian theology (McGrath, 1990, Erickson, 2000). Islam 6 Islam can be characterised as the second huge branch of the Judaic trunk, although in a quite different way from Christianity (Nigosian, 2004). The connection between Judaism and Christianity is immediate. Jesus was a Jew who grew up, preached and enacted his sacred mission in the unabashed context of Judaism in the precise place where Judaism had flourished, the land known then as Palestine. Muhammad is neither Jewish nor Christian, as the story goes, albeit he is clearly influenced heavily by both religions. Furthermore, the context of the original Islam is in Arabia rather than Palestine, among a people for whom, by and large, Judaism and Christianity were minor players, at least in their most recognizable forms. In fact, as we shall see in later chapters, both Judaism and Christianity were present but as virtual diaspora communities, separated from their mainstream forms. For Judaism, this was how it had survived since the Fall of Jerusalem in 70CE, as a scattered people and a fragmented religion that nonetheless continued to influence other peoples and religions through its intense and codified (by the book) religious beliefs. In contrast, for Christianity, its main survival form by the time of the official birth of Islam (622CE) was as an imperial religion. This was the high age of Christian domination of the European world and indeed much of the world beyond. Nonetheless, the Christians who had survived in the Arabic world were largely displaced Christians because of their many disagreements with Roman Imperial Christianity. In fact, Arabic Christianity had been among Christianity’s strongest sites in the early centuries of its existence. We know that Christian communities were in Mecca within a century of the birth of Christianity and that one of its strongest communities, with a fully-fledged bishop, was in Alexandria in Egypt by about 150CE. Regardless of their relative weaknesses as religious influences in the world into which Muhammad was born, nonetheless there seems little doubt that it is in part Judaism and Christianity that, between them, inspired his mission to establish Islam and, within that inspiration, it is the universal High God theology of Judaism and Christianity that sits at the centre of Islam. Indeed, many Muslim scholars and others would argue that it is in Islam that the conception of God as a single all-powerful, all creative and all-loving God is perfected. For Muhammad’s Arabic people, whose religions were multifarious if not chaotic and for whom a god could be as troublesome a feature as helpful, the notion of a single, all loving, all caring God is what he wants to instil, according to the stories about him. The way the story is conveyed, Muhammad seems to have been an intense student of both Judaism and Christianity, taking elements from both into the original Islamic theology. From 7 Judaism, he took the central concept of the High God who is remote, yet caring. Of the remoteness, he exacerbates the notion, rendering God unable to be named or even represented. God is ‘Who is’ (Allah), the ultimate source of all being. There can therefore be no naming or characterisation of God for that would be to reduce God to something less than what he is. Of the caring, he sharpens it in the very notion of Islam itself. Islam is ‘to submit’ to ‘Who is’ whose love for humanity is what sustains it. This is not a caring of one entity for another but of an entwined entity. Without the love and care of ‘Who is’, there would be no humanity. The one who understands this therefore submits. The other central feature of Judaism on which Islam relies is the entire story of the promise that God made initially with Abraham, then through his son and heir (for most Muslims, this means Ishma’il rather than Isaac), reinforced through Moses (Musa) and thereon through the Prophets who constantly remind the Jewish authorities that God wants mercy and justice rather than pomp and sacrifice. Muhammad identified himself as being in the line of the Prophets (the last and greatest of the Prophets) and so Islam is rightly understood as a prophetic religion above all else. From Christianity, Muhammad takes two key elements into Islamic theology. Allah is in many respects more like the Christian God the Father than the Jewish High God in that Allah is truly Lord of the World, there for all who submit, rather than in any way a partial God who loves one people more than any other people (again, note there are many Jews who believe this is a fundamental misinterpretation of Judaic beliefs anyway). In Islam, there is no particular ethnic, political or religious eligibility required of the one who submits, who becomes Muslim. Allah is not an exclusive God but the veritable ground of all being. Anyone who recognizes this, understands it and submits to God belongs thereafter to God’s people. This is what Islam is. The other Christian feature that Islam relies on is the person of Jesus himself. From the way the story is told, it would seem that Jesus was Muhammad’s own greatest prophet, described in places as the first prophet of Islam. Jesus (Issa) was a foundational prophetic character in the early development of Islam; hence, in the Qur’an and Hadith, one finds more reference to Jesus than one finds in the canonical Christian gospels. Similarly, one finds far more about Mary, Jesus’ mother, than one finds in the gospels, by which we mean the gospels that can be found in today’s Christian scriptures. Indeed, Mary is accorded with her own sura, or chapter in the Qur’an; she is a far stronger and more central character, quite prophetic in herself, than the fairly meek and mild marginal character to be 8 found in the Canonical gospels. This all underlines the important influence that the older Abrahamic branch, Christianity, had on the younger one, Islam. For all the similarities between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, there are also some profound differences. As mentioned above, Islam finally differs with Judaism around the notion of God’s exclusivity, assuming for the moment that this is an accurate depiction of Judaism. It is a deep sticking point in relations between Judaism and Islam that one religion identifies itself as God’s exclusive ‘Chosen People’ while the other religion believes that the same God is a God for all people (again, note importantly that many Jews and Muslims are in agreement on this latter view even while their political institutions are not). It underlines the central importance of theological understanding that, in our own time and throughout the many negotiations between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, this potent theological difference has rarely if ever been addressed. One might venture to say that, until it is addressed and resolved in some fashion, there will be no accord in the Middle East. Needless to say, the Islamic view is as profound a threat to conservative forces in Judaism as any they could hope to deal with. While the (Christian) West implicitly accepts Judaism’s claims around this issue, together with the attached land issues, it is a sticking point for Islam that violates its deepest held understanding of what Islam stands for. The elements of Christianity that Islam rejects are equally a most grievous threat to conservative Christian forces. While Islam regards Jesus far more highly than does Judaism (for which Jesus is informally recognised as a wise teacher but remains officially a nonentity), nonetheless Islam rejects Christianity’s estimation of Jesus as God or even Son of God. Indeed, so profoundly does Islam hold to the notion of a single, in-divisible High God that the very idea that God could spawn a son or reveal himself in human fashion amounts to heresy of the first order. The Qur’an is explicit about this. The fact that the Qur’an puts the rejection of his divinity in Jesus’ own mouth does nothing to soften the antagonism between these sibling religions. Conclusion In summary, the theologies of the Abrahamic religions have much in common and much that divides them. What is in common fits well with our definition of theology. The three religions share the main conception of the spiritual (other) as an all creative, all powerful, all loving High God. They share in many of the experiences of this High God and they share 9 many of the ways in which this experience is conveyed, most especially through sacred text. For each of them, the Torah, the Bible or the Qur’an represent ways in which God’s revelation to the world is captured in textual form. These three religions constitute the ‘Religions of the Book’. At the same time, we could go through and depict the differences between them against the items of this definition as well. Either in common or in dispute, it will only be through understanding their theologies that many of the contemporary tensions and conflicts that threaten world order might be resolved. When so many of the most intractable conflicts have theological underpinnings, the continuance of theology-free dialogue, negotiations and threats between Islam and the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ West is bound to result in failure to resolve anything. References Ata ur-Rahmin, M. & Thomson, A. (2002). Jesus: Prophet of Islam. Norwich: Diwan Press. Avery-Peck, A. & Neusner, J. (Eds.), The Blackwell reader in Judaism. Oxford: Blackwell. Erickson, M. (2000). Making sense of the Trinity. Grand rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Lodahl, M. (2010). Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an side by side. Grand Rapids, MN: Brazos Press. Lurie, A. (2014). What does it mean that the Jews are God’s chosen people? Huffington Post, 29 June. McGrath, A. (1990). Understanding the Trinity. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. McGrath, A. (2006). Christianity: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Nigosian, S. (2004). Islam: Its history, teaching and practices. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Peters, F. (2004). The children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 10