I.
Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Vatican II, states that the Mohammedans “profess their faith as the faith of Abraham, and with us they worship the one, merciful God who will judge men on the last day” (par 16).
At first sight, that statement appears friendly and matter-of-fact; the “faith” of Muslims is evidently thought to be the same “with us”. We “agree” about a last judgment and a merciful God who is one. This mutual understanding apparently comes from Abraham. This way of putting the issue argues for a common origin of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each of which “appeared” in history at different times—the New Testament some twelve hundred years after Abraham and Islam some seven hundred years after the time of Christ.
But when we examine what each tradition means by unity, worship, judgment, and mercy, we hesitate to affirm that they mean the same things by the same words. And the assumed agreement that God is one provides little basis for further agreement about what flows from it. Islam confronts religion and politics as we know them with questions of the true and the false, with questions of life and death. Seemingly both fascinated and paralyzed, we watch Christians and others killed or beheaded before our very eyes in the most brutal manner. The great Monastery of St. Elijah near Mosul in Iraq, dating from the 600s AD, was recently not just destroyed, but pulverized, not for any military reason but to erase any sign of historic Christian presence there. This is a foretaste of what will happen to other Christian churches and buildings if this Islamic expansion continues.
These killings and destructions are considered a judgment, so it is claimed, on a corrupt society that refuses to accept the will of Allah as the norm of how to live. We also hear of women molested even in front of European cathedrals as if such deeds are “rights”. Indeed, the women are said to be themselves the “causes” because they do not attire themselves as Muslim law requires everywhere. The victims thus cause the crimes, not the “true” believers who carry out the assaults.
We also know of blatant discrimination against non-Muslims in all Muslim lands. But again, this is said to be a “right” of every people to decide who is or is not a citizen and what its laws are. Nor are such brutal activities new or unjustified within Muslim thought. They have been present in one form or another ever since Islam began in the seventh century. There is a philosophic consistency about them. Many ways to come to terms with this abiding conduct, however, are currently proposed to render it less violent. Many, including Pope Francis (Evangelium Gaudium #253), maintain that the “true” Islam is “peaceful”; the “violence” is presented as an aberration unrelated to Islam, not the norm.
When it comes to understanding the implications of these Islamic things, no one is more insightful than the French philosopher and historian, Rémi Brague, winner of the 2012 Ratzinger Prize, a professor in both Paris and Munich, and author of books including The Law of God, The Legend of the Middle Ages, and On the God of the Christians. In an essay in the French journal, Commentaire (Spring 2015), entitled “Sur le ‘vrai’ islam”, he addressed himself to a consideration of the Pope’s view that “true” Islam is a “peaceful” religion. Brague noted that no pope is an “authority” within Islam to define what it is.
One might point out, though, that a pope is an authority within Catholicism. In that capacity, he has the responsibility of identifying what is not Catholicism. This authority would include pronouncing on the understanding of Christianity found in the text of the Qur’an, where both the Trinity and Incarnation are denied. Judeo-Christian Scripture is itself said to be a false interpretation of an “original” Qur’an existing only in the mind of Allah before time; hence, it is the oldest “book”. But popes have rarely seen fit to exercise this responsibility. Pope Benedict XVI, in the “Regensburg Lecture” pressed the issue of recurrent violence coming from Islamic sources.
To understand what is at stake, Brague proposes certain distinctions that I will try to spell out in a more general way. Some issues about Islam deal with fact, others with law. With regard to facts, all sects and movements within Islam—Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, Wahhabi—even when they conflict with each other, intend to represent the “true” Islam. The so-called “terrorists” claim, on legitimate Qur’anic and historical evidence, to be the real voice of Islam. They accuse those who do not follow their aggressive example of being “traitors” to Islam. Those Muslims who reject ISIS’s understanding of Islam cannot, however, claim that their view is the only legitimate view.
On the question of right or law, many approaches are likewise possible. How, then, is one to go about distinguishing the “true” from the false Islam? It is quite possible, as Samir Kalid Samir SJ, observed in his 111 Questions on Islam, that violence is justified both in the text and in tradition. To deny this justification of violence is contrary to many well-attested points in the Qur’an and in Islamic history. In this sense, one cannot simply say that the “true” Islam is not violent. Such an affirmation does not do justice to the complexity of the issue.
II.
Who does have the authority, in its own name, to state definitively what Islam is? Certainly, a pope does not have this power. Within Islam, however, we have no official authority designated to resolve matters of fact and principle. Brague thinks that it is important to guard against the ambiguity of the term “true Islam”. Like a pope, he is not himself an authority within Islam. As any good scholar, he seeks to make a fair statement of what is at issue. Still, it is worth examining what the term “true Islam” might mean.
What is the meaning of the word “Islam”? How can Islam be considered as a “religion”, a “civilization”, and a “population”?
As a religion, Islam means the complete abandonment of the whole person into the hands of Allah. In the West, Islam refers to the religion preached in Arabia by Mohammed beginning in the seventh century. But the Muslims themselves consider their religion to be much older than Mohammed. Indeed, it is said to go directly to Allah, passing through nothing, not even the interpretation of Mohammed. In this sense, Mohammed was in no sense an “author” of the Qur’an as the evangelists were said to be “authors” of their respective Gospels, or as the prophet Samuel was said to be the author of the Books of Samuel.
As a civilization, Islam began at a given time and a given place. But it has an inner spirit. It consciously distinguished itself from the polytheistic and ignorant pagans who preceded it. Thus, the Muslims have their own calendar that begins in 622 when Mohammed left Mecca for Medina. Within the broad geographical limits under basic Islamic control, we have the area of “peace”. Outside it, everything is in the domain of “war”. The ISIS-type Muslims still use this peace/war terminology; others tend to use terms like “land of mission”. But all those people in the arena of “war” can be considered to be “enemies” of Allah. Therefore, they are subject to his law and vengeance. In this world, there are no “innocents”.
III.
Islamic civilization includes those who do not belong to the Muslim religion, but live within its ambience. But they must pay a price to be left alone; they must accept second-class citizenship. Many of those who early on translated Muslim texts into other languages were, in fact, Christians or ex-Christians in Muslim-conquered lands. Today we can speak of Islam as the totality of those peoples ever touched by either the religion or the civilization. The modern revival of Islam, especially its nationalism as inspired by Western political trends, also included Christians who hoped that a modern “state” would give them status and equality not dependent on Islamic law.
Today, we see, however, the few remaining Christians being driven out of Muslim lands, which provides no place for them. European languages distinguish between Christianity as a religion and Christendom as a culture. This distinction does not exist in Islam. This lack of a distinction indicates a different understanding of Muslim reality by those who are Muslim and those who are not.
In this sense, one cannot easily distinguish between the “true” Islam as a religion and what it is as a civilization. In examining the notion of a “true” Islam, Brague hopes to show the difficulty in using that phrase in such a manner as to be able to say that it is or is not, in principle, “peaceful”. One useful way to understand Islam is to see how it looks to those who hold it from the inside, who believe it. Another way to see Islam is from the perspective of non-Muslim academic specialists using their own scientific methods. Such methods can only show what the methods allow. Belief as such—Christian, Muslim, or whatever—is not a direct object of scientific inquiry.
There is, again, no “pope” within Islam. That is, no one is officially authorized to state what it does or does not hold. Everything is open to multiple interpretations. This is why Islam seems so erratic. Indeed, it is from this collection of contradictory practices and beliefs in the Qur’an and in Islamic history that Islamic scholars themselves had to develop a “theory” that would justify these contradictory phenomena and thereby save the religion from evident incoherence.
This is the real origin of the voluntarism that underlies Muslim views of the cosmos, man, and God. For the voluntarist, Allah can order the opposite of what he ordered before. Otherwise, it is held that he would not be all-powerful. Allah’s will, not a divine logos, is at the origin of all reality. In law, this move necessitates a theory that would argue that the last or latest contradiction is the rule until another can be justified. This voluntarism is also the basis of the “two truths” theory that allows revelation and reason to hold contradictory views.
We can acquire a “sense” or an “agreement” about what the Muslim community or population holds in practice. But this observed consensus is usually something articulated by a few scholars, with the al-Azhar University in Cairo as the most obvious. The newly formed authority of the ISIS caliph recalls the loss of the earlier Caliphate at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This reestablishment attempts to re-found the earlier caliphate’s authority, but, as Brague sees it, on the basis of power or “terror”. The question of authority is especially complicated because “the Qur’an was thought not to be written by Mohammed but by God in person.” This origin leaves no room for consistent interpretation. To “interpret” it would imply a human authority capable of being Allah, hence a blasphemy.
The Qur’an also relativizes the Old and New Testaments as faulty documents that have stolen or misinterpreted the original Qur’an text, properly located in the mind of Allah. The most obvious comment on this understanding is that the opposite is what happened. The Qur’an was itself a selection and interpretation from earlier Jewish and Christian sources. When this became obvious, a theory developed of a prior revelation in the mind of Allah that was only later spoken through Mohammed. This view became the device to save Islam from incoherence.
Can a pure or authentic Islam be found before the later Jewish and Christian influences came to its attention after the military conquests of the Near East? It looks rather like the Qur’an is really a rewrite and selection from the Old and New Testaments and other apocryphal sources. Can we find an Islamic text written before Judeo-Christian scripture? Thus far, no. Most early texts of the Qur’an or its parts were destroyed, though some fragments show up as in Yemen. The text of the Qur’an reflects a series of “purifications” of the text at different levels. Mohammed is said to be purified by Allah. The original Qur’an that we possess may not be the pure one if the Qur’an is in fact a later redaction from many texts that we no longer possess, as seems to be the case.
We can perhaps speak of the “true” Socrates or the “true” Christ or the “true” Plato, which term does not immediately refer to their words but to what they come to mean. We can also distinguish what is primitive and what is grown or mature—the acorn and the oak tree. The German scholars who have been attempting for decades to determine the origins of the texts of the Qur’an by form-critical analysis are involved in this process.
Islam does not maintain that it is what initially appeared with the first preaching of Mohammed. Rather, Islam thinks of itself as first rooted in the mind of God before history. This is why it claims to be older than Judaism or Christianity. It “existed” unchanged in the mind of Allah. In this view, Judaism and Christianity are corruptions of the original Islam, not vice versa, as is more reasonably the case. Thus, if this view about Islam’s origin in the mind of Allah is true, everyone is born a Muslim. If someone in history is not a Muslim, it is because they were corrupted by their parents, schools, or other religions. This is why Islam does not have for itself any official beginning dates in history.
History, however, gives us a picture of the “real” Islam as lived, as it manifests itself before the nations. Sometimes it is harsh, sometimes mild; sometimes it is strong, sometimes weak. Just when Mohammed himself first appeared is also a question. Thus, Robert Spencer can write a book entitled Did Mohammed Exist? (ISI Books, 2012). The many biographies of Mohammed repeat the same tales. They first appeared a century or more after Mohammed died. Archeologists have never been allowed to investigate Medina or Mecca. In Brague’s view, then, we cannot easily arrive at a “true” Islam.
Yet, we can see the effect of Islam by observing how people actually live their lives. Islam has a real talent for both borrowing and hiding practices from outside itself. The tension between Islam as a religion and Islam as a civilization can be great. The government and the religion in differing Muslim states usually reach some kind of working harmony in getting along and reinforce each other. The mission of subjecting the world to Allah and, within that subjection, of having its government and its religious side in harmony, is a prevalent hope in all of Islam. Many now envision it can be achieved by democratic and demographic means, as well as by terror.
Modern thinkers are often surprised, even astounded, that such an idea as Islam as a world-conquering religion can persist and be a factor in century after century since its beginning in Arabia. “To carve out a ‘true’ Islam from one that is not ‘true’ has,” Brague amusingly thinks, “as its purpose only the satisfaction of intellectuals in their taste for classification.” To seek to isolate the clinical essence of Islam from the actualities of Islam itself is always a “risk” when appealing to its historical and geographical terms.
IV.
What about a reform within itself of Islam to soften its violent impetus? Robert Reilly, in a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal (Nov 5, 2015) noted that this “reform” is what now exists in Islam. We are now living with a twelfth-century rejection of any connection with reason in Muslim philosophy as its basis. Change and reform were constant things in both Protestantism and Catholicism, Brague observes. In Islam, the early military conquests were not much different from Greek or Roman conquests. The Muslim armies took over, set up government, and reduced the population to order.
The terrorists of today reclaim these earlier power methods, even those commanded by Mohammed. The terrible scenes of historic Muslim conquests are accepted as facts of its history. They are in the Qur’an. Mohammed is a good example. Thus, one can invoke the facts and deeds of the Prophet. He is one chosen by God to do these things. One can say these examples are chosen, but one cannot say that they betray the tradition. The justification of suicide bombers can be cited from Mohammed himself who gave advice on how to enter heaven. Is this just fundamentalism which is not really Islam? But these things are from the beginning. A man was recently expelled from France for beating his wife, but the Qur’an sanctions this practice.
Can we make Islam, as an alternative, into a purely spiritual movement? The Sufi tradition does exist in Islam; it is spiritual. But the question in Brague’s mind is this: Is it more representative of the “true” Islam than the other views of the same subject? Western scholars often oppose this “spiritual” Islam to a “legal” one, where the latter is somehow looked down upon. Muslims themselves usually do not consider “mystical” Islam as the “proper” one. Within Islam, we have a tradition of opposition to it.
This mystical tradition has been limited to small sects. They often seem radical in the eyes of the Law, manifesting all sorts of moral aberrations. But it was al-Ghazali in the twelfth century who found a place for Sufism within Islam. The holy ones can turn in on themselves to better observe the commandments of Islam. But this mysticism is not presented as an alternative to the Law. The effect of this mysticism is better to observe the public law. It might be noted that the notion of the “two truths”—a truth of reason and a truth of revelation, within Islam—is related to this notion. In the case of the philosopher, as opposed to the mystic, he could become, say, an Aristotelian, but only provided that he does not question the practices of the public Law.
What about tolerance? Suppose we did allow for a multiplicity of ideas. The strict observance of the Law would still keep any expression of this difference from coming forth in public. In short, “Sufism does not oppose the legitimacy of the Law but makes it acceptable.” What about a secular or lay view of the state wherein religion is strictly a private affair of conscience? The separation of politics and religion is as old as Christianity. We could look at them as ignoring each other. Each European country recognizes a domain for the other.
The case of Islam is different. Its religion includes public legislation. The separation of mosque and state is not conceivable. Islam enters Europe as a civilization in which these relations of religion and politics are already included. While the number of laws in the Qur’an that might touch the public order may be few, they are considered culturally important and include marriage laws, punishment, treatment of property, and women.
The problem arises when we think that these points of the Muslim law are merely questions of our civil law, when the Muslims consider them to be the unbreakable Law of God. Thus, a “true” Muslim, faced with a Western positive law state, has to choose between a changeable custom and the Law of God contained in the Qur’an. That is, he cannot be at peace in any society that does not establish the Law of Islam as its civil law. Thus, in the end, it seems clear that the “true” Islam is indeed a “peaceful” religion only when it has attained political and religious control of the Law that governs our thoughts, actions, and polities.
(Editor’s note: This essay by the late Fr. Schall was published originally on January 24, 2016.)
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In 2003 Fr. James Schall SJ made his last invited speaking visit to the G.K. Chesterton Society of Seattle (1994-2014). In 2007 he published his analysis of the Pope Benedict’s “Regensburg Lecture” (2006) in a book by that title (St. Augustine Press). As a non-credential researcher, yours truly overreached by sending him my own extensive notes on Islam—partly keying off of Benedict’s work…
For purposes on namedropping…in a hasty note Schall responded: “[of “abusive and dynamic” Islam] what is the source of such passion? [….] You might well work this into a book [!]” This book came five years later: “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity” (University of America Press, 2012). An author interview can be found at: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/04/29/the-mosque-the-manger-and-modernity/ Schall’s insight into Islamic passion/belief (!)—the inability to make (blasphemous!) distinctions—signals an alternative universe to any coherence of Faith and Reason:
A few supporting details and a question:
FIRST, the Islamic presupposition or “fitrah” as the “germ” of Islam—which is confused by Muslims with the “uncreated”/ heterogeneous/ package-deal Qur’an—is our original orientation toward God, and what in the West is understood as the distinct, inborn, and universal Natural Law….BUT, with human nature mutilated by denial of a fallenness, original to ourselves (Original Sin) rather than to an all-good God. Hence, the inscrutable/arbitrary/contradictory Allah. And, with multiple Qur’anic references to “the Law of Moses” but then absent explicit mention of the six prohibitive Commandments (“Thou shalt not…”).
…And, instead, this vacuum then defaults to the Arabian heritage of plunder, polygamy, the jihadist warrior code (not unlike Japanese Bushido), and (con)fusion and syncretism e.g., the mosque-state caliphate.
SECOND, about the alternative Jesus Christ and his promised coming of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete and the Comforter (Jn 14:15-17, 14:26, and 16:12, 13, 17), Muslim “scholarship” (think the new prayer rug in the Vatican Library) dismisses the Triune One and rationalizes this event as referring, instead, to the coming of the final prophet Muhammad.
The Greek term “Paraclete” (Holy Spirit) is substituted by Muslim commentators with their presumably correct “Periclyte,” which is said to be the Greek form of Ahmad or Muhammad. (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, “The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary;” Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1983/1938, Qur’an surah 7:157, fn. 1127 on p. 388). The symmetrical comparison is NOT between the two scriptures—the Bible and the Qur’an—but between the incarnate Christ and the (“uncreated”) Qur’an.
THIRD, in the early 7th Century, the newly monotheist—but still perplexed and hesitant— Muhammad was scandalized by theological divisions within Byzantine Christianity, which to him were polytheistic. Cut from the same cloth as the polytheism he rejected in pagan Mecca. (Two centuries before Muhammad, St. Augustine already warned: “All who want to live piously in Christ Jesus…realize how many would-be converts are driven into perplexed hesitancy because of heretical dissention,” “The City of God,” Bk. XVIII, Ch. 51).
In Mecca, all the 360 tribal images were the offspring of Allah and his wife Al-hat, and their three daughters—such that Qur’anic Islam remains largely a natural religion (!) but with accreted biblical alloys? And arrived at by simply subtracting the extraneous members from the multitribal pagan construct? Moreover, did the monotheist Muhammad, himself, still see outwardly through the compound eyes of rejected paganism—such that the Triune One, Himself, was perceived as just another pagan “triad” to be avoided—Father, Son, and Mary? The Butterfly Effect in history, now with 1.8 billion “followers of Islam”?
QUESTION: to understand Schall’s “passion” of Islam, might dialoging Christian scholars defer more to cultural anthropology, rather than to their theological specialization and the presumably parallel texts of natural religion and supernatural faith?
P.S. Irrefutable evidence of Original Sin includes but is not limited to the prideful arrogance of Muslim clerics. Dismissing human freedom, they regard themselves as “executors” of the divine will. Asked if he might consider a “constitutional” government, the Ayatollah Khomeini responded: “I already have a constitution; it’s the Qur’an.”
Fr Schall effectively articulates the determinant why Islam cannot assimilate within a Christian, adjustable civil law society – since it requires all civil law be drawn from the intransigent precepts of the Koran. And as a sad rejoinder, deadly Muslim violence, attacks against young women are rampant.
Open border policy for Europe, when the vast majority of migrants are Muslim ensures its destruction. And the tragedy is that our two recent pontiffs, former Pope Francis and present Pope Leo encourage this suicidal migration. Why remains a mystery. Is it that progressive sentiment rules out justice?
There is no such thing as an “orthodox” version of a heresy. Some Sects of Islam like the Ahmadiyya & some Sufi groups reject the “lesser Jihad”. Which is more amiable than the other dominate versions with promote it. But Islam in general is still a heresy.
Just like during the Reformation. Radical Anabaptists where violent. The Amish and old order Mennonites not so much. But they are still heresies.
Since Islam is a false man made religion one can encourage Muslims short of conversion to embrace less extreme versions but in the end we should convert them anyway.
We might be entering a time when many Muslims are disillusioned by Islam. We should strike while the iron is hot.
If God is Trinitarian in nature and the Muslim god is not, then how can they be correct?
God the Father is the Father of Jews, Christian, & Muslims. We are all Abrahamic religions but we differ on things like the Trinity.
“We are all Abrahamic religions but we differ on things like the Trinity.”
That’s not a minor detail. Given the syncretic nature of Islam, it seems a stretch to call it “Abrahamic”.
They can be called Abrahamic in so far as all three instruct their followers to give worship to the one creator God of Abraham.
Of the three only two of them are true and divinely revealed.
Catholicism and Judaism.
Catholicism is the fullness of Truth and Judaism is true as
far as it goes. Judaism is Proto Catholicism and Catholicism
is Judaism now that the Messiah has come.
We await the return of the Jews pf Old Israel to recognize New
Israel and unite with us and in the end be one Faith and one
Shepard.
I do believe many Muslims will come to see Jesus as well because Abraham did
pray “Oh Lord would that my son Ismael might live in your sight.”
God granted his prayer.
Christ is King of the Jews.
Praise be to Yesua Al Mesin aka Yeshua Ha Mosheach
aks Jesus Christ.
The Trinity’s not a minor detail for Christians but it doesn’t negate the fact that we all descend from Abraham either through blood or adoption.
How is Islam adopted from/by Abraham? If it is, why not Mormonism? Joseph Smith had about as much right to claim being “Abrahamic” as did Muhammed. After all, the term “Abrahamic religions” is very new—less than a century old. It’s nonsensical.
Islam claims to descend from Ishmael, Abraham’s carnal offspring, but the biblical promise is not for a world religion downstream of Ishmael, but only for a great people (the Arabs). But, then there’s this possible connection between Islamic culture and Mormonism:
In addition to other parallels (e.g., polygamy), the 19th-century Joseph Smith made at least one direct comparison between himself and his understanding of the 7th-century Mohammed. At an agitated moment in Missouri, he said he would “trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean . . . I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was ‘the Alcoran or the Sword.’ So shall it eventually be with us–‘Joseph Smith or the Sword!’” (Fawn M. Brodie, “No Man Knows My History” [New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995], 420). Still, the later Brigham Young’s Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 doesn’t measure up to a millennium and a half of Islamic jihad.
Through the descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael:
“Jews trace their lineage to Abraham and Isaac, and Christians trace Jesus’ lineage through Isaac and Abraham, as well. Muslims trace their lineage to Abraham’s firstborn son Ishmael, whom Abraham banished along with his mother Hagar after Abraham’s wife, Sarah, gave birth to Isaac (Genesis 16 and 21).”
Abrahamic religions – Britannica
841. The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
The Catechism
3. “The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.
Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.”
NOSTRA AETATE
Every human can trace their lineage to Noah, according to the flesh. Not to Abraham. While the descendents of Ishmael can trace their lineage to Abraham, I very much doubt that the Malaysian Muslims can. And *no* Muslim can trace their *faith* back to Abraham, as Catholics do. The faith of Abraham was to believe God, and good Muslims reject the religion He revealed. Insofar as they are good Muslims, they are bad children of Abraham.
Just as no Pope has the authority to declare what the Islamic religion holds, neither does any Ecumenical Council. It is not a matter of Faith or morals, or of Church discipline.
Flat Earther=The Earth is flat.
Correct Person=the Earth is round.
They are both talking about the same Earth
even thought one is correct and the other is not.
The First Person is the Muslim and the Second the
Christian and subtitute Earth for the God of Abraham.
Muslims and other non-Christian Monotheists do give
valid natural worship to God. It is up to God as to
weither or not he wants to grant extra ordinary Grace to
said worship.
Oppose every false religion: whether that be the Moslem or the Jewish Religion (i.e., the post 33 AD religion).
If that false religion expresses itself in lethal force, then it may be responded to with lethal force. In making this response, one should be animated by supernatural Charity and Wisdom; and all acts of justice should be tempered with mercy.
In this present violent age, this *may* entail using lethal force against radical Judaism as well as radical Islam.
I don’t imagine post AD 33 Jews draw that same timeline identity.
And in an ironic way this fiction would be an assault on Christianity. How easily it is ignored that the vast majority of Jews did convert to Christianity in the first two centuries.
And how easily it is ignored that the jews did not crucify Christ. i did, and every other sinner who ever lived.
Thank you for that Mr. Baker. God’s timing isn’t the same as ours.
And yes, Christ died for us all & we each have a part in those nails that crucified Him.
Marcionite nonsense.
Judaism is true. But it is only True as far as it goes.
It is by nature a completely true story but it is only
part one waiting to join to part two.
Judaism (understood as a Christ-denying religion–which is how the term is normally understood today) is more than just an incomplete religion.
It is a *false* religion.
Today’s believing Jews well know the assertions of Christianity.
The great bulk of them either deny the claims of Christianity or they are uninterested in them.
Neither of these choices place one in a good spiritual situation.
Pray that they abandon their error.
Listen to yourself for a moment. Are you actually calling for, and justifying, acts of violence against the Jewish people? Do you actually think that Jews pose the same existential threat to the West as Islam? That is profoundly evil.
What version of Christianity are basing this conclusion on?
The average person thinks Islam is just another denomination like Lutheranism or Presbyterianism. Since VII, we’ve been taught that Lutherans, Presbyterians et al are pretty much like us and we should get along with them. Many of our Muslim neighbours seem to be good people and, in fact, we often admire their religious observance. And Pope Francis repeatedly told us Islam is a religion of peace.
Now here goes Fr. Schall stirring up doubts. What the?
Francis was more influenced by worldly sentiment that the imperatives of his own religion.
Not “stirring up doubts”…but simply turning the lights on. And not “now”…the article is dated 2016 ( for non-amnesiacs, that would be only fifteen years after 9/11).
Messieurs Baker and Beaulieu – You need to sharpen your irony-detecting skills.
On my part, that’s for sure!
Considering how frequently we sinners lie to ourselves, don’t we all.
By their fruits you know them.
An allah of contradictions is progenitor of a Muslim society of irrationality.
Ensuring a perennial dark age wherever it pervades perhaps.
Intruding now into an atheistic liberal Europe that has its own self willed cult of death but without the wherewithal to survive its own inherent contradictions or protect its borders and identity.
A parasitic religion more from Cain than Abraham that with some poetic justice threatens to drag backward progressive Europeans back to the dark ages
I’ve always been struck by the similarity between Islam and Mormonism – yes, Mormonism. While Christianity and Judaism both cite the origins of revelation in a series of prophets, patriarchalism and martyrs, both Islam and Mormonism derive from the witness of single men, and from them only. For Muslims, Mohammad is “God’s Prophet,” for whom there is no equal or other source of information about God or Revelation. So also with Mormonism, which rests solely on the unique and hidden private revelations of Roger Smith and his individual pipeline to God, Who gave to him the Book of Mormon. he principal differences between them, of course, is that Mormons
don’t seem to feel the need to dynamite airliners, churches or other “infidel” structures as Islamists do.
The similarities are striking. The difference is that Mormonism is American, which means that while it was violent at the start, Young and others realized they would have to adapt in order to survive. And so Mormonism has a history of being misleading in what it really teaches, as it strives to appear “Christian”. Islam began peacefully enough, but then Muhammed decided that success depended on coercion and even violence.
Both are frontier cults…one in desert Arabia, the other in desert Utah…
And, there’s a coincidental symmetry of sorts, on the calendar. Muhammad was born in A.D. 570, while Mormonism holds that the American Indians are migrant descendants from the Israelite patriarch Lehi arriving via Arabia to the New World in B.C. 590, coincidentally only twenty ticks different from the date of Mohammed’s birth (but now, adaptably, Mormonism do not reject possibly Asiatic origins).
But on one fundamental, the two belief systems are diametrically divergent from central, historical and incarnational Christianity…
Islam views everything as miraculous, as coming directly from the hand of God (the Western and secondary “laws of nature” constitute a separate autonomy from the autonomy of God who alone is great, and therefore are a blasphemy). Mormonism rejects the supernatural, insisting that even God is evolutionary, likewise Jesus Christ, both of whom are simply further along the terrestrial/evolutionary trajectory than the rest of us.
The discerned coherence of Faith & Reason (a uniquely Christian perspective and a taproot for the European cultural event) was enabled by the confluence of Classical thought and Christian witness to a Self-disclosing Triune One who is both absolutely transcendent and relational).
This witness/perspective is truly revolutionary (revolutionarily true), and yet is an always vulnerable and fragile breakthrough—a breakthrough rejected equally by fossilized 7th-century Islamic fideism, on the one hand, and on the other by Secularist and Darwinist materialism—which has more in common with earthbound 19th-century Mormon evolutionism than we are likely to admit.
Isn’t that Joseph Smith?
Another similarity is that, as with so many false religions, the founder was given license to “marry” any and as many women as he wanted.
ICYMI – Mark Lambert on Catholic Unscripted
St. John of Damascus, the last of the Great Fathers of the Church, who lived under it, gave what is still the best assessment of the religion of peace and its origin in the heresies of the time. Our present day Church and Popes’ statements on the subject are nonsensical at best and cowardly and harmful at worst. See this important excerpt from this monumental treatise The Fount of Knowledge:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/stjohn_islam.aspx
St. John of Damascus, the last of the Great Fathers of the Church, who lived under it, gave what is still the best assessment of the religion of peace and its origin in the heresies of the time. Our present day Church and Popes’ statements on the subject are nonsensical at best and cowardly and harmful at worst. See this important excerpt from his monumental treatise The Fount of Knowledge:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/stjohn_islam.aspx