|
Pastor's
Page
By
Fr. George Welzbacher
October
22 & 29, 2006
Pope Benedict XVI certainly caught the
world's attention with his recent lecture at the University of
Regensburg. And the media have had a field day ever since with their
conflicting pronouncements as to whether it was appropriate for the
Pope to point out, however politely, that the Qoran does indeed exhort Muslims to
jihad, to holy war. (In
the reckoning of Stephen O'Shea, author of The Sea Of Faith, an excellent new
history of Islam's wars against the West and the Western World's
counter-attacks against Islam, the Qoran
contains thirty-five such exhortations to jihad). For The New York Times (and seemingly
most cartoonists) Pope Benedict was "insensitive", whereas for the Wall Street Journal he was
"Benedict the Brave". My vote goes with the Wall Street Journal
To those who have taken the trouble to read the text of
the Pope's address it's clear that he was simply pointing out, within
the larger context of the relationship of faith to reason, that there
are two major obstacles that stand in the way of productive dialogue between Muslim
and Christian theologians, and until those obstacles have been cleared
away - and identifying them in the first place is the precondition for
their removal - ecumenical discussions between Muslims and Christians
will offer, so to speak, little more than an occasion for "making nice"
and sipping tea. The two obstacles cited by the Pope as militating
against productive dialogue are:
1) The Islamic sanctification of physical force in
promoting and sustaining conversions to Islam, such use of force being,
as the Pope stated, a violation of man's nature as a rational being;
2) The important hypothesis in a major school of Islamic
thought, though a hypothesis by no means embraced by all Islamic
theologians, that would discern in God's omnipotence the supposed
ability to act, should He so choose, even against His own nature, which
would mean, for example, that God, Who is Subsistent Truth, could, in
this interpretation, tell a lie. With respect to this distorted view of
what is involved in omnipotence Pope Benedict was at pains to point out
that this same flaw is also embodied in the teachings of a Christian
theologian of the High Middle Ages, the Franciscan Duns Scotus. A flaw
nonetheless it is. And a practical consequence is that if God can be
thought capable of violating His own nature even to the point of
telling a lie, then no statement of any kind can confidently be made
about God, since each statement's contradictory might be equally valid,
at which point there would be no point to holding theological
discussions at all.
The other major obstacle cited by Pope Benedict as
standing in the way of productive ecumenical discussion is the Qoran's advocacy of the use of
force to bring about and to sustain conversions to Islam. One should
note at once that the Qoran
forbids the forced conversion
of People of the Book, that is to say, Jews and Christians, though on
one notorious occasion Mohammed himself presided over the slaughter of
the men and the enslavement of the women and children of a Jewish tribe
at Yathrib, the city later known as Medina, The City of the Prophet;
the Jews in question had declined to accept him as the Final Prophet.
Nor should one forget that by and large a constant for Jews and
Christians living in Muslim lands is a very real form of social compulsion. Their status is
that of second-class citizens, dhimmis
who are typically denied many basic civil rights, including the right
to public expression of their religious beliefs. By way of contrast
with the People of the Book, pagans, kaffirs,
(unbelievers in the fullest sense), are to be allowed only the choice
of conversion or death. So too, Muslims who choose to transfer their
allegiance to a non-Islainic faith thereby stand convicted of a "crime"
that under Islamic law is punishable by death.
Pope Benedict conceded that historically the Muslims have
had no monopoly on the use of force in the supposed service of God.
Down through the centuries Christians, too, have done much the same,
resorting to compulsion of various kinds to bring about at least
outward assent to one or another version of the Christian
Creed. But
the important question at issue today in ecumenical discussion is not
what has been the behaviour of one's co- religionists in ages past but
rather what does your religion's
foundational document have to say about the use of physical
compulsion to evoke a religious conversion?
On that point the New Testament, the foundational document
of the Christian religion, is clear. When James and John, furious at
certain.villagers who had turned a deaf ear to the Apostles' message,
besought Christ to "call down fire from heaven" as punishment for their
unbelief, Christ's answer was a rebuke: "You know not from what spirit
you speak." At the beginning of the climactic week of His earthly
mission Christ entered Jerusalem seated not upon a horse, whose
strength and speed equip it well for war, but upon a donkey, the slow
but patient beast of burden that is symbolic of peace. And do we need
to be reminded that in the Garden of Olives Christ commanded Peter to
put away the sword that he had drawn, and briefly used. St. Paul was
thus introducing no departure from the spirit of the Gospel when he
wrote to the Corinthians (11 Corinthians 10:4): "For our weapons are not those of the flesh but they
are powerful for the overthrow of strongholds!" Faith in Christ as the
only- begotten Son of God Who took to Himself a human body and a hwnan
soul is a gift that comes from God alone. "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent Me draw him,
" (John 6:44) which is why St. John in the Prologue to his Gospel
declares that true believers are bom "not
of the will of the flesh nor of the
will of man but of God."
--------------------------
The Qoran's exhortations to holy war, to jihad, breathe forth a spirit very
different from that of the Gospel. For while it is true that jihad can be interpreted to mean a
spiritual warfare against one's own disordered passions, it is clear
from Mohammed's own example in seizing power through success in battle
that the primary meaning of jihad
is conventional warfare. Such was the conclusion drawn by Mohammed's
closest followers from the moment of his death. Within months of that
death Abu Bekr, the first caliph, rallied the recent converts to Islam
with a call to launch raids, quickly transformed into full-scale war,
against the two neighboring empires of Byzantium and Persia, empires
that had exhausted themselves in a recent prolonged and bitter war.
Such, too, was the interpretation of the Muslim armies and their
fervent generals who through centuries of warfare carried Islam to
dominance over much of the Mediterranean world and over much of Asia
and important regions of Europe as well. Pope Benedict objected to this
sanctification of force in the service of God on the grounds that while
force can be used in ordering brute beasts to the legitimate purposes
of man, man himself who is not a beast must not be treated as such.
Possessing the faculty of reason, with the concomitant power to follow
where his reason leads, man is the image of God, Who is Reason, Mind
and Logos to an infinite degree. As pure Spirit God is accessible not
to our physical senses but only to the spiritual power within us, to
our reason, our intellect, our conscience. Reason accordingly is the
bridge alone over which man can draw near to God.
For productive ecumenical dialog between Christian and
Muslim theologians it is at that bridge, the bridge of reason, with the
role of force excluded, that they must meet. Brilliant theologian that
he is, Pope Benedict has said what needed to be said to prepare for,
God willing, irenic and fruitful discussions in the years to come
between the exponents of these two monotheistic faiths. To utter truths
that many, perhaps most would judge to be impolitic takes courage.
I think the Wall Street
Journal got it right. Pope Benedict is rightly hailed as
"Benedict the Brave."
Fr. George Welzbacher
|
