Where is Christianity Going, Faced By Islam?

Where is Christianity Going, Faced By Islam?

Christian Duquoc
Listing the challenges of Islam to Christianity is an ordeal. In so doing, Christians should admit that their faith and institution have their weaknesses hidden by their own convictions but revealed by another religion. Islam would then make visible what Christianity is blind to. So we should understand those challenges as disturbing questions and not as aggression.
Four main challenges from discussion within Christianity and in the contemporary world.

1. The fact that Islam came after Christianity justifies its claim to end historical revelation. Islam claims itself as a religion achieving what came before and correcting its deviations. But as far as the Christian faith is concerned, is it possible to imagine that God reveals himself again after the decisive Easter event which gave its full meaning to the Old Testament? Vatican II eluded this question. In the Koran, this historical assertion is not presented as the negation of the former Jewish and Christian revelations, but as their seal.
2. The strict monotheism of Islam rejects the Biblical compromise of God with History. The first revelation written in the Koran is an assertion: God is One, He has neither companions nor associates nor rivals, He is solitary. Monotheism is to be taken stricto sensu. The Koranic revelation of divine transcendence has no historical substratum. God is perfectly transcendent. To say that God has revealed Himself in History ends up necessarily in corrupting the monotheistic rigidity, even if this corruption was different in Judaism and Christianity. According to Islam, God doesn’t belong to History, He is the master of it, without any compromise, as opposed to the Risen One mastering History and accepting humiliation: being a servant until unfair death.
3. The dogmatic and moral simplicity of Islam breaks with the complexity of Christianity. The hiatus between the complexity of dogmas and popular religion specific to Christianity has favoured the expansion of Islam centred itself on divine unity. Islam thus simplifies two fundamental Christian dogmas: the Incarnation and the Trinity. It also rejects the Christian conviction of the salvation mediation (“He died for our sins”). But today, the rejection of such a number of dogmas since Antiquity is also manifest in several Christian movements (Evangelicals, Protestant theologians) and also among some Catholics, who consider all that doctrine as impossible to assimilate and whose coherence is not obvious. They wish to focus on the essential: one God, one witness – Jesus, one aim – fraternity in love and compassion. The idea of a common base of the religions is rooted in this return to what is judged essential. 
   It’s the same thing with morality. The Koran’s is simple, it restates the Decalogue, with more leeway on certain points. It represents a sort of natural morality attached onto certain taboos and ritual practises. The natural morality of Islam is adapted to community life without acetic or mystical excess, without culpability through failure to live up to an ideal perfection. Christian morality would like to articulate together a natural morality taken from the Decalogue, and an ideal of perfection. Furthermore, their relation to the law is ambivalent, for they lay claim to freedom, one of the sources of the Western notion of freedom of conscience.
4. The individual versus the community in the modern world: a controversy.
   
   In Islam, the community (umma) has a preponderant role. It engenders the individual, protects him and decides his work to insure his permanence, his vitality and his defence. The community works like a matrix; it has holistic value. In this sense, nothing exists outside of the community whose basis and centre are the Koran. The Koran arbitrates all possible conflicts.

The modern world rejects this holistic regime, especially on two essential points: arbitrating conflicts, and the place of the individual.

• Western Europe’s history is marked by violent conflict between faiths all claiming Christ as figurehead. They provoked religious wars. The modern state is not behoven to any particular religion, and was born of the will to arbitrate religious conflict, but without the pretension to God’s truth as with the rival faiths. What was at stake was to live peaceably together. If calling upon God did not create civil peace, then divine perfection had to be assigned to the backbench, organise tolerance on the basis of divine non-intervention in this world, on God’s absence. A charter of rights was needed, one that depended neither on faith nor on the state but on reason alone. This model is disputed by Islam, which finds it in contradiction with the object of the Koran: that is, integrate all of human existence, the private and the public, the political and the legal, with God’s will as expressed in the holy book. Islam does not accept that the community serve only as a lifebuoy for people in their everyday troubles, or that it not be what holds society together. With this non-negotiating attitude, Islam challenges the churches to reflect on their part in society, and perhaps to refuse to be relegated to a sort of therapeutic office for individuals.

1. When Westerners celebrate individual rights, they deny the community’s precedence and finality over the individual’s. The Islamic model, with exceptions, particularly in mysticism, is foreign to the individualistic ideology of the West. There, freedom of conscience makes the communitarian principle relative. It allows individuals to choose their own orientations; people are autonomous in the sense that they decide their own paths. They may take the community’s interests to heart, but are not obliged to integrate themselves in that community. They have freedom of choice, and they have a choice because they are free. Consequently, religion is no longer the central worry of life, it is a side-worry.

Conclusion. Two-way Interrogation
For centuries, Islam and Christianity were face to face, each declaring to be custodian of the ultimate truth on God and on humankind. This dual situation was hardly an encouragement for dialogue. The modern world broke up this binary monopoly on ultimate truth, becoming as it were a third party. Thus ultimate options were defused, and lost their political and socio-economic power. Islam late appearance on the scene, its strict monotheism, its simple dogma and morality scratch Christianity not on the outside but on the inside, for these challenges become the accomplices of relativity with which the modern world has changed it. Where a religion comes from is not deemed decisive, God is not the object of an historical experience, dogmas and sophisticated morals are institutional needs, and thus variable with time. Islam finds an unexpected ally in the modern world for founding dialogue with Christianity. the dialogue with Islam requires for its future an uncompromising decisiveness with regard to its capacity to integrate the ways of the modern world, as Christianity has done, not without scruples and conflict. The challenges become mutual, but are their mediator is the type of relationship to the world that they condone, relationship to what we call the “modern” world.  Islam’s relationship to this world, as yet undecided, will decide its new and open-minded relationship to Christianity.