Quranology

In Christian theology, the theology of the Bible is called bibliology.  Some call the theology and study of the Quran, the Islamic holy book, quranology.

In orthodox Islam, the Quran is an eternal book, written from the foundation of the world, and then revealed, word-for-word to prophets.  It has never changed and is an eternal word for the ages.

However, if you read the Quran, it seems clear that it isn't an "eternal book" at all.  Rather, it was given to a particular people in a particular place and to read the Quran isn't to read an eternal volume for every time and place, written before the foundation of the earth.  This doesn't mean the Quran doesn't have eternal principles that one could glean from it.  But it is not for everyone.

Let's take Sura 54 as an example.

1. Arabic
Orthodox Quran students declare that the Quran isn't properly understood outside of it's original language, Arabic.  I think that there is a strong case to be made for that, as the poetry and tone of the book cannot be grasped in any other language than the original.  However, this also points to its cultural and linguistic limitations.  Arabic was, for a time, used as a kind of lingua franca amidst the Middle East and North Africa for a historic period of time, but it was never a majority language, even in the Muslim world's most extended empire.  And can it really be said that Arabic is the language before the foundation of the world?  There was a form of Arabic before Muhammad and a form of Arabic after, and the Quran is written in one form of Arabic.  But can we really expect Moses, Jesus and David to have spoken Arabic, or spoken to the people in a language they could not have known?

Sura 54 begins with a discussion about the splitting of the moon

2. Stories
The Quran makes reference to many stories also found in the many books that make up the Bible.  Sura 54 mentions Pharoah of Moses' time, Noah, and Sodom's destruction.  But it also makes mention of stories that only the people of Muhammad and those after him would know, like the 'Ad people.  Would Noah or Moses have spoken of events that would not have occurred yet?  Would Jesus have spoken a reference to an event that is not known among his people?  Or worse, would they have spoken of prophets that did not yet exist-- would Noah have spoken of Moses?

This is not a problem with the Quran, but with the theology that has developed about the Quran.  And I must admit that there are such problems about theologies that have developed around the Torah and the Bible.  Some insist on the Bible's truth to such a degree that they deny truth that has been proven without question, even if the Bible isn't explicit about the subject.  Some speak of the Torah as being eternal, denying it's proper place in the history of humanity.

"I speak for myself!"

As in almost all literature, we need to allow books to speak for themselves.  A clear, lightly critical read of a book, any book, whether holy or mundane, will often give us an idea of what the book claims for itself.  The Bible is clearly not a single volume, but a collection of many books, many of them not written by a single individual, but a collected volume of many documents.  The Torah-- whether of Moses or Rabbis-- are collections of ancient wisdom, some of which is contradictory.  And the Quran is a collection of beautiful religious poetry written by and for Arabs of the seventh century AD.

That is not denying any of the eternal truths found in any of these books.  To say that Surah 54 was written for a particular people in a particular place does not deny the eternal truth of coming judgment.  All I am saying is that we "people of the book" need to take care that we do not put our holy volumes, written, compiled and transcribed by limited humans, above God who truly is eternal and unchanging.

Creative Theology

In reading Sura 53, I was pretty mystified.

Have ye seen Lat. and 'Uzza,

And another, the third (goddess), Manat?

What! for you the male sex, and for Him, the female?

Behold, such would be indeed a division most unfair!

Manat sounds familiar-- and Ali helpfully gives us the note that it is the name of a goddess.  That means the other two names are probably goddesses as well, right?  

But what about the next two lines?

Looking around (in a commentary) I see that the verse is highlighting the pagan hypocrisy.  It is a common pagan practice to allow female babies to starve, if they were really wanting a male one.  No one wanted to refuse to have female babies, but just not as many as male ones, as male babies grow up to be farmers, breadwinners and defenders.  Women, in the ancient world, grew up to be house cleaners and pregnant, and generally a burden to fathers and later husbands in patriarchal societies.

The Quran is pointing out that the pagans make up females for their gods (under the authority of the Most High God, of course), but they aren't really interested to have daughters for themselves.  "Go ahead and refuse to have daughters, but you will fill heaven with women!", it seems to be saying.

The Quran is not saying anything against women here-- although it does say that no spiritual power is given a female name-- rather, the word is just pointing out that the pagans don't know the first thing about the Spirit world.  They make up what they want and present it as the truth.

The Quran speaks the truth-- the only way anyone can know anything about the spirit world is by revelation, not by invention.  

For this reason, theologians of most types truly disturb me.  Theology is not supposed to be innovative or imaginative.  Theology is supposed to be conceptually conservative.  This is because, ultimately, the Spirit World is a mystery, displayed to us in fits and starts unless there is someone who can be proven to know more about that world than any of the rest of us.  The Spirit world is like an image in a kaleidoscope-- one person may see one image, and other person may see another image, but it is impossible to determine in that image.  Only when we put the Kaleidoscope down and look directly at the object, can we really know what it is.

But who has actually seen that world, directly.  Only God Himself, or angels.  Muhammad claimed to have his revelation directly from an angel.   Jesus claimed to have seen it himself, directly.  Moses claimed to have his revelation directly from God.  So, as long as their claims are true, they qualify.

Theologians, however, are only dealing with shadows and mysteries.  Interpretations of texts and dreams and ancient stories.  They should be the most conservative, careful of sciences.  Instead, most theologians are slip-shod, careless and inventive.

This is not to say that the presentation of truth shouldn't be imaginative-- Madeline L'Engle isn't to be denied, nor her ilk. Nor does it mean that theology shouldn't be radical.  If theology is true, it must demand radical change to the world.  But the message of theology should be only that which was revealed, without innovation, without addition.

The Problem With Paul

Paul the Apostle has always been a controversial figure since the time he was very young.  As a young man, he persecuted the small group of Jesus disciples that grew up after Jesus' death.  He considered himself a "zealot" at that time, or one who does violence for the sake of God.  Then he claims to have seen Jesus face to face after Jesus had died, and Jesus helped him realize how wrong he was and gave him a commission: to bring Gentiles to Jesus.  That certainly didn't do much for his reputation, for either the Jews or the Jewish followers of Jesus.

Today, Paul isn't in much better shape.  Sure, he's really honored by many, especially evangelical Protestant Christians, but anyone who isn't of that fold seem to consider Paul a real problem.  He's been accused of creating Christianity, of stealing Jesus' religion away from him.  Paul has been considered a misogynist, an anti-Semite, a religious hypocrite, a bigot, and many other nasty sounding things.

The biggest part of the problem with Paul isn't what he himself did or said, but how he has been interpreted over the years. Peter summarized it the best:  "In them (Paul's letters) there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures."  (2Peter 3:1).  The fact is, Paul is difficult to understand.  Perhaps this is because Paul wasn't a really great writer-- I mean, sentences that go for ten or more verses?  A good portion of the problem is because Paul was writing letters: thus, he was speaking to a particular context, and without that context some of his writings can be used for anything.  And Paul occasionally uses some strong language, which need to be taken in their own context.

Paul himself was a pretty simple person, and his whole theology can be summed up in the experience he had with Jesus, which is described three times in the book of Acts and referred to in Galatians 1.  There are two things that really shook Paul's thinking in that experience, that can summarize his entire approach to theology.

1. Jesus is Lord.  What Paul realized, immediately, is that Jesus is a great spiritual power.  This isn't the same as saying Jesus is God (although Paul might as well have said that in his statement on creation in Colossians 1), but that Jesus is worthy of being followed and obeyed and honored as king of creation.

2. Gentiles are accepted to be followers of Jesus.  Because Jesus commanded Paul to go to the Gentiles to make disciples (which Paul refers to many times), his outlook on the gospel was different than most of the other followers of Jesus.  He demanded that Gentile believers could have their own customs and traditions because they were not under Moses' law.  He also demanded their equality in the Jesus synagogues that were popping up.

If this is Paul, he sounds more like a Christian civil rights leader than a bigot.  And if he is pointing people to Jesus, then how can he be creating a new Christianity?  This is because it isn't Paul, but people who use Paul who are the  problem.

The problem began with Marcion, the first Christian heretic.  His understanding of Paul's letters is that there were two gods: the Old Testament God and the New Testament God and that Jesus defeated the OT god.  The idea of the OT presenting a "wrathful" God and the NT presenting a "merciful" God continues to this day.  The fact is, all throughout the OT, God is presented as "compassionate, forgiving, slow to anger."  The NT helps us realize that WE need to act that way as well.

Patriarchalists also make use of Paul.  They take passages that seem to say that Paul is refusing women leadership in the church and to remain submissive (interpreted as "under their husband's thumbs") and ran with it.  In doing this, they had to ignore all the women who Paul praised in the church's leadership (Romans 16, I Corinthians 16), and the fact that they didn't understand the context in which Paul wrote (in I Cor. 14:34 Paul is quoting a letter from the Corinthians, not presenting a personal view, which he strongly disagrees with immediately after).

Antinomians, who oppose the use of any law, also make use of Paul.  Paul does oppose the specific use of Mosaic law to the Gentiles, but he certainly approves of many laws in the church, including sexual purity, no vengeance or violence, caring for the needy, and no greed, all in accordance with what Jesus teaches.

Anti-Semites have used Paul (and John) to speak against "the Jews".  However, when Paul was speaking about "the Jews" in I and II Thessalonians in negative, even harsh, terms, he was speaking of a certain kind of Jewish person (of which he was himself). More accurately the term "Jew" in the NT should be translated "Judean", or one who holds to a Judea-centric form of Judaism.  These are nationalists, who opposed and persecuted Paul because he was decentralizing Judaism.

Others, such as Augustine and Calvin, used Paul to create a new orthodoxy, and a new vision of God, who not only rules the universe, but has control over every single event.  This is not the teaching of Paul, who claimed that God controlled certain aspects, but also recognized that God gave rule to human beings, who made their own decisions.

All this to say, we should allow Paul to speak on his own, within his own culture.  Let's not put on Paul all the misunderstandings and mistakes of Christianity, simply because people want to use the ancient writings for their own purposes.

Interpreting Scripture

There are many different ways to interpret Scripture. We could have the Talmud interpret Scripture or the Church fathers do so. We could have Paul interpret Scripture or the Mosaic law.

My conscious decision is to allow Jesus and Jesus only be the lens through which I interpret the rest of Scripture, for Jesus alone was risen from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father.

Let me give an example of how this could be done. The Mosaic law says that all Canaanites must be killed. However, the Scripture is not consistent in that, for Rahab was spared because of her faith in God and the Gibeonites were spared due to their cunning. God rescinded his command to kill the Canaanites in Judges 2. Jesus, however, explains how we should act in his response to a Canaanite. They are deserving of the full blessing of God if they show faith and humility in God's promise. Thus, Jesus is in agreement with the rescinding of the command and shows us how to love even those under the judgment of God.

Scripture Summary

A summary of my view of Scripture:

Truth is all around us, in every book that has ever been written. And every book is written by humans, thus open to human truth and fallacy. No book has ever been written by God. Some have written about their experiences with the spirit world. Some have written about their personal experiences with God, and others have had people writing for them. All of these are helpful.

However, there is only one person who has proven to represent God perfectly in love and miracles and resurrection, and that is Jesus. Jesus appointed apostles to memorize what he said which were later written down. Others wrote of their experiences and knowledge of Jesus-- this is what is called the New Testament. Jesus himself affirmed the Hebrew scriptures and their truth, although that truth, he said, is necessarily interpreted by love.

Every Scriptural text (no matter which religion) as well as our own experiences could be interpreted through Jesus' focus on love of God and humanity and we can find the greatest truth. In the end, however, Scripture only leads us to the truth. It does not become real until we apply Scripture and we live it.