Why N. T. Wright would not be asked to speak at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer event

It’s not hard to come up with reasons why the good Bishop would never be invited to speak at a National Day of Prayer event. To begin with, he lacks US nationality. But he would also be disqualified from doing so because Wright – like Franklin Graham – has said harsh things about Islam and its holy book, the Quran. Note the following.

We must let scripture be itself, and that is a hard task.  Scripture contains many things that I don’t know, and that you don’t know; many things we are waiting to discover; passages which are lying dormant waiting for us to dig them out.  Awaken them.  We must then make sure that the church, armed in this way, is challenging the world’s view of authority.  So that, we must determine—corporately as well as individually—to become in a true sense, people of the book.  Not people of the book in the Islamic sense, where this book just drops down and crushes people and you say it’s the will of Allah, and I don’t understand it, and I can’t do anything about it.  But, people of the book in the Christian sense; people who are being remade, judged and remolded by the Spirit through scripture.

The cite is from the conclusion of an article by N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” [The Laing Lecture 1989, and the Griffith Thomas Lecture 1989], Vox Evangelica 21 (1991) 7–32. Available online here. Some reflections.

(1) Wright’s statements about Islam and the Quran cannot be taken seriously. They were formulated, one suspects, with the sole intent of providing a rhetorical foil for an understanding of Scripture as the vehicle of privilege of God’s authority among God’s people over against the world. I would note in passing that Wright delights in developing the Christ-against-culture model of engagement with the world, a strength and a weakness at the same time. 

(2) Anyone who counts practicing Muslims among his friends knows for a fact that the Quran does not drop down from heaven and crush people with an assertion of Allah’s will. Rather, the Quran is received by Muslims in the context of a larger tradition. The voice of Allah and the voice of prayer in the Quran woo the believer and speak to the believer on all levels of existence. The Quran in private and public worship is received as a balm of Gilead for the many ills that beset the believer and her polity of reference. The Quran resources wholeness, “by judging and remaking the thoughts and intentions, the imaginations and rememberings, of men, women and children” (words Wright correctly uses to characterize the sense in which the Bible functions in the life of the church). The Quran resources jihad, which means “struggle.”

(3) For a few Muslims, the form jihad takes amounts to a cult of death: “you love life, we love death.” More simply, you love, we hate, and we will take advantage of your love to overwhelm you with hate.

(4) For most Muslims, jihad takes the same form it does among Jews and Christians. It is a struggle to be a better person in thought and action. It is philanthropic in nature.

(5) If and only if we have done our level best at understanding Islam from the inside, from the point of view of its own adherents; if and only if we have sought to practice Krister Stendahl’s rules of religious understanding, can we then move on to stipulate the reasons why we choose nonetheless to hunger and thirst for righteousness within a different paradigm.

US Attorney General Eric Holder is taking a lot of flack for not naming “radical Islam” as the culprit behind recent attempts at sowing terror and causing mass murder on US soil. Holder’s inability to do so, I submit, is hardly his fault. It is a reflex of a cultural environment which is unable to imagine Islam or its adherents outside of subhuman caricatures designed to demean them. The result: when people hear “radical Islam,” many hear “Islam which is radical.” They hear that Islam is the reason why people blow themselves up among women and children shopping for vegetables in Baghdad; among young people dancing at a disco in Bali; or among Arabs and Israelis eating at a restaurant in Haifa. Which is true. But the truth is nonetheless sacrificed if this is not heard in the context of awareness of the fact that Islam is also the reason why the vast majority of Muslims would never dishonor themselves and Allah by committing such heinous acts.

What happens, you may ask, when Christians and Muslims live and work side by side and cherish each other in full body contact without any precondition that one’s deepest beliefs are to be set aside or kept private for the purposes of a common life?

For five years, I lived in Sicily and spearheaded a ministry to Muslim migrant workers which involved Italian Methodists and Catholics on the one hand and Senegalese, Tunisian, and Moroccan youth on the other. They called me their “Muslim pastor”¹ and I rejoiced as they gave me lessons in their faith with the authenticity one associates with first-generation believers - most of them were just that; they had grown up in a secularized environment and had discovered their religious heritage on their own; or they had come to have a lively piety and huge warmth of soul through a Muslim revivalist movement in Senegal. For that reason alone, I could never spout the nonsense about Islam and the Quran quoted at the beginning of this post.

At the same time, some of the youth were attracted to the Christian faith and began a very difficult journey in which they sought to be Muslim and Christian at the same time (not very logical, but the attempt nonetheless continues to be made) or convert to Christianity altogether.

In short, I was privileged to be a part of complex dynamic in which Muslim and Christian believers cultivated respect for the faith of the other. It was a life transforming experience for the Muslims because here we were, the core Christian community of the town and rural area they lived and worked in, the only people who treated them as equals, invited them into their homes, played pick-up soccer with them, got them out of jams as one does for friends the world over, one day at a time. It was a life-transforming experience for the Christians because our stereotypes were smashed into a thousand pieces and we came to understand what unites and what divides in entirely unexpected ways.   

What on earth we were doing? We were trying to live out Matthew 5:13-18. If you think there is a shortcut to doing that, such as saying the kind of harsh things Franklin Graham and Bishop Wright have been known to say about Muslims and their faith, you have another thing coming.

I’m guessing that Wright cleans up his act when speaking to a “mixed multitude." I’m guessing that Graham and someone as bright as Al Mohler are likewise able to speak of Islam and to Muslims with the same tact as Paul did of paganism and to the Athenians (Acts 17). That kind of tact is to be recommended in whatever context we speak at this particular cultural juncture. Not of cowardice or fear of speaking the truth, but because there is universal validity to the teaching that the truth is to be spoken with love, and love is not a tone of voice or the falsehood that all religions say the same thing, but a context we create for our words by the larger witness of our lives, an attitude which believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

¹ “Muslim” means submitted to God and they perceived me as such notwithstanding the fact that I am a Christian. 

Comments

[Ryan]

Well said. Some of the most enlightening conversations I've had about my own faith have been with a devout Muslim friend from Yemen. I'd never been forced to present the trinity to someone before.

Mmmm... so glad I found this blog!

[mapoulos.wordpress.com]

Thanks for the thoughtful post. Your words challenge me!

[Jay]

Good words. It is interesting to read of your experience working with Muslims in Italy.

[Charlie J. Ray]

As you say, it is illogical to be both Christian and Muslim. The two religions, even in a moderate form, are mutually exclusive.

I worked as a prison chaplain and had to deal with Nation of Islam, which is not really Islam, and with various forms of Islam. Islam was much easier to dialogue with than the Nation of Islam, which is essentially a black nationalist religion and inherently racist.

Basically, Islam says we commit idolatry by worshipping Jesus or a trinity.

I'm more of a "neo-fundamentalist". Pluralism is irrational except on the political level and even there it is difficult to decide who is free to do what and where.

Charlie

[Tim Bulkeley]

Wright's words that you quote were intemperate. But is it not true that there is a great difference between Christian understandings of the Bible as human words inspired by the divine Word over against words dictated by God to the prophet? I rfealise that in the US context many Christians are busy trying to take the Muslim position, but the fact of Christian translation of Scripture surely demonstrates that this has never been the normative position....

[JohnFH]

Hi Tim,

To be perfectly honest, I *wish* many Christians in the US and around the world were taking the Muslim position as you call it.

That would mean that learning Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and reading the Bible in those languages would be considered a natural occupation of any Christian with the gifts of time and intellect required to do so.

As for the dictation theory of the inspiration of scripture, I believe that was the dominant explanation through most of Jewish and Christian history. It is likely that Muslim theory rides on that crest.

Dictation is not a bad description of examples of poetic inspiration (poets and prophets in all cultures self-describe the process of reception of text in terms of dictation, as in, I woke up in the morning with a full-blown poem in my head; wrote it down and never changed a word; I received the prediction in a dream, etc.). So I wouldn't throw it out the window.

Furthermore, when God is quoted verbatim in the Bible - pretty often in the Tanakh - to describe these words as human words is demythologizing at best and an utter misunderstanding at worst.

But dictation is not an appropriate way of thinking about the way a book of history is written, or a biography like a gospel.

Remember however that the Quran is poetry through and through. People like to make fun of the dictation theory, but only those, in my view, unfamiliar with the genesis of a lot of poetry in pre-modern times. When the poets describe themselves as musical instruments the muses were playing, there is a strong sense in which they were not making that up.

To recap, I wish Christians would adopt the Jewish and Muslim position on Scripture with respect to honor and privilege accorded to the source texts without for that reason being any less committed to the production of translations in vernaculars (in ancient Judaism, particular translations into Greek and Aramaic were authorized early on; a great model).

I don't think it's a great idea to take a lower view of the authority of Scripture than Muslims do of the Quran.

If anything I see Muslims learning to critique Sharia custom on the basis of the Quran. They are picking this up from the global religious discourse (yes there is such a thing; it has spurred Buddhists for example to integrate social justice themes into their practice as well, another borrowing) and ultimately and unconsciously, from Christian evangelical discourse. Or so it seems to me. If that is the case, Muslims are learning from Christians to have a higher view of the authority of their own constitutional text.

If one looks more closely at these things, they are not what they first seem.

As for US fundamentalists, I would not ask them to have a lower view of scripture. I would ask them to read it and let it challenge their presuppositions. That's always a good start.

As it is, the Bible has mostly iconic value even for those who profess to honor it the most. Or, as a friend of mine once said who grew up fundamentalist, "they don't know what they believe, but they believe every word of it."