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Let’s talk modestly about God, Archbishop urges Muslims
by a staff reporter
 Students from the Middle East create artwork with the Cathedral artist, Regan O’Callaghan, at St Paul’s Cathedral last week, as part of an initiative in which UK and Middle East students interact through creative projects. www.offscreened.com GRAHAM LACDAO/ST PAUL'S CATHEDRAL |
| CHRISTIANS and Muslims must not rush into agreement about God, Dr Williams cautioned this week.
He was responding on behalf of a group of theologians to the letter, “A Common Word Between Us and You”, which was signed by Muslim scholars and sent to 27 church leaders, including the Archbishop and the Pope, in September 2007. Dr Williams also tackled the problem of violence, and challenged the view that God’s purposes could ever be achieved by “uncontrolled coercive power”.
In a detailed 17-page response, Dr Williams writes that some had read the Muslim scholars’ earlier invitation “to come to a common word” about God as “an insistence that we should be able immediately to affirm an agreed and shared understanding of God”. But “such an affirmation would not be honest to either of our traditions”: it would fail to recognise the deep divisions that persist.
A “more modest but ultimately a more realistically hopeful” aim was to recognise that Christians and Muslims speak about God and humanity in ways that are “not simply mutually unintelligible systems”.
As if to prove the distance that the two faiths have to travel to reach a common understanding, Dr Williams launches into an explanation of the Trinity. Muslims, he acknowledges, interpret the suggestion that God could have a son as somehow limiting him to physical processes. The doctrine was “difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims”.
Since the earliest councils of the Church, though, Dr Williams says, Christians have been taught to “put out of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a process or event like the processes and events that happen in the world. . .
“The name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person . . . ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life, a ‘nature’ or essence — eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing.”
He goes on to say that the “three dimensions of divine life relate to each other in self-sacrifice or self-giving. The only human language we have for this is love.”
The challenge for Muslims is to be able to see God powerfully at work in what appears to be failure or suffering. The challenge for Christians is to see how an acceptance of suffering might lead to a failure to pursue God’s justice in the world.
Dr Williams goes on to consider love of God, with reference to a number of psalms, and love of neighbour. In the case of the latter, he emphasises two aspects that he would like to explore in future dialogue. The first is Christ’s definition of who is a neighbour.
“To be a neighbour is a challenge that continually comes at us in new ways. . . It demands that we be ready to go beyond the boundaries of our familiar structures of kinship and obligation, whether these are local, racial, or religious.”
The second aspect is Jesus’s teaching to love those who do not love you, he says. “The way in which God loves . . . teaches us to recognise as neighbour even those who set themselves against us.”
Dr Williams continues: “We look forward to the opportunity to explore with you how this teaching about being a neighbour relates to the Qur’anic imperative to care for neighbour and stranger.”
He then moves on to religious violence, which, he argues, stems from religious insecurity. “If we believe that our failure is a failure or defeat for God, then the temptation will be to seek for any means possible to avoid such an outcome. But that way lies terrorism and religious war and persecution. . .
“There can be no justification for the sort of violent contest in which any means, however inhuman, can be justified by appeal to the need to ‘protect God’s interests’. . .
“What we need as a vision for our dialogue is to break the current cycles of violence, to show the world that faith and faith alone can truly ground a commitment to peace which definitively abandons the tempting but lethal cycle of retaliation in which we simply imitate each other’s violence.”
What is needed, Dr Williams says, is a recognition of “common security”, based on the pragmatic realisation that, in two communities so closely bound together geographically, “what is needed for our convictions to flourish is bound up with what is needed for the convictions of other groups to flourish. We learn that we can best defend ourselves by defending others.”
Dr Williams suggests a variety of ways in which the Christian-Muslim dialogue can be continued: strengthening grass-roots partnerships; intensifying shared theological discussions; deepening an appreciation of each other’s religious practices. He discourages the idea of a further exchange of statements and letters, preferring instead the idea of a face-to-face meeting to explore “the new possibilities for creative work together for the good of our world”.
The text of the letter is at: www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1892 |
