Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology

David B. Burrell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118724118, 9780470657553
• eBook ISBN: 9781444395792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religioni asiatiche

Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology delineates the ways that Christianity, Islam, and the Jewish tradition have moved towards each another over the centuries and points to new pathways for contemporary theological work.

• Explores the development of the three Abrahamic traditions, brilliantly showing the way in which they have struggled with similar issues over the centuries
• Shows how the approach of each tradition can be used comparatively by the other traditions to illuminate and develop their own thinking
• Written by a renowned writer in philosophical theology, widely acclaimed for his comparative thinking on Jewish and Islamic theology
• A very timely book which moves forward the discussion at a period of intense inter-religious dialogue

1

Free Creation as a Shared Task for Jews, Christians, Muslims¹

It is certainly remarkable that it took the fledgling Christian movement four centuries to respond to its central faith question concerning Jesus: who and what is he? Moreover, the long-standing quest for clarity regarding Jesus doubtless overshadowed more explicit reflection on the first article of the creed as well: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”. As Robert Sokolowski observes: “The issue the church had to settle first, once it acquired public and official recognition under Constantine and could turn to controversies regarding its teaching, was the issue of the being and actions of Christ.” Yet he goes on to insist:

[While] the Council of Chalcedon, and the councils and controversies that led up to it, were concerned with the mystery of Christ … they also tell us about the God who became incarnate in Christ. They tell us first that God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in the intimate union of the incarnation. What is according to nature, and what reason can disclose in nature, retains it integrity before the Christian God [who] is not a part of the world and is not a “kind” of being at all. Therefore, the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive.²

Moreover, what Sokolowski calls

the Christian distinction between God and the world, the denial that God in his divinity is part of or dependent on the world, was brought forward with greater clarity through the discussion of the way the Word became flesh. The same distinction was also emphasized as a background for the Trinitarian doctrines and for the controversies about grace … Thus many of the crucial dogmatic issues raised in the relationship between God and the world, and the positions judged to be erroneous would generally have obscured the Christian distinction between the divine and the mundane.³

So creation not only comes first, as it were, in our God’s transactions with the world; it is also true that the way we understand that founding relation will affect our attempts to articulate any further interaction. For were the One who reached out to believers “in Christ” not the creator of heaven and earth, the story would have to be told in a vastly different (and inescapably mythic) idiom, as indeed it has often been on the part of Christians so preoccupied with redemption that creation is simply presumed as its stage-setting.

And understandably enough, since the narrative of incarnation and redemption captures the lion’s share of the tripartite creed associated with the initiation rites of baptism, creation can appear as a mere preamble. Moreover, an adequate treatment of the unique activity which constitutes creating, as well as the quite ineffable relation between creatures and creator which it initiates, will tax one’s philosophical resources to the limit, so more timid theologians (with philosophers of religion) prefer to finesse it altogether. Yet as Sokolowski reminds us, we cannot afford to do that since the interaction among these shaping mysteries of faith is at once palpable and mutually illuminating. Nor can Christians treat Hebrew Scriptures as a mere preamble to their revelation of God in Jesus, since the God whom Jesus can call “Abba” is introduced in those very Scriptures. Moreover, the Hebrew Scriptures reflect similar structural parallels between creation and redemption, as the engaging story of God’s affair with Israel begins at Genesis 12 with Abraham, while the initial chapters detailing God’s creation of the universe seem designed to offer a universal grounding to that story.

By the time medieval thinkers came to engage these issues, however, a third Abrahamic voice clamored for recognition, reflecting a fresh scripture. The Qur’an’s account is far more lapidary: “He says ‘be’ and it is” (6:73), yet the pattern is repeated. The heart of the drama turns on Muhammad’s God-given “recitation”; while Allah’s identifying Himself with “the Creator of the heavens and the earth” (2:117) assures us that we are not merely trafficking with an Arabian deity. So the forces conspiring to elaborate a Christian “doctrine of creation” were at once historical and conceptual, scriptural and philosophical, with parallel discussions in other faiths shaping the context.⁴ Both Jewish and Christian readings of Genesis approached the equivocal language regarding pre-existent stuff as part of the inherently narrative structure of the work, insisting that God created the universe ex nihilo; that is, without presupposing anything “to work on.” So the philosophical task will be to articulate how such “sheer origination” could even be possible, while the theological goal will be to show the action to be utterly gratuitous. For if creator and creation are to be what the Hebrew Scriptures presume them to be, neither stuff nor motive can be presupposed. Here is where what Sokolowski identifies as “the distinction” proves so critical: creation can only be creation if God can be God without creating. No external incentive nor internal need can induce God to create, for this creator need not create to be the One by whom all that is can originate. Yet if creating adds nothing to God, who gains nothing by creating, what could such a One be, and how might we characterize that One?

So the way we treat the act originating the universe will lead us inexorably to the One originating it, as whatever we can say about that One will shape our way of considering the One’s activity. So creation is not only first chronologically, as it were, but first conceptually as well. Yet there are bound to have been alternative accounts, since the question of origination arises naturally for us, evidenced in countless stories offering to articulate the process. As the move to more methodical considerations of these issues gained momentum in Greece, however, questions about origins were eclipsed by considerations of the structure of the universe. As Plato’s Timaeus proceeds mythologically at crucial junctures, Aristotle could deftly avoid the origins question. Yet by the time our respective religious traditions turned their attention to God as creator, a powerful philosophical figure had emerged from the Hellenic matrix: Plotinus. His relentlessly logical mind traced a multifarious universe to one principle, as the necessary condition for the order inherent in it, extending Plato’s pregnant image of participation yet further to speak of the manner by which the ordered universe originates as emanating from the One. As with Plato before him, Plotinus had recourse to metaphor to signal the limits to conceptual inquiry. Yet as we have just suggested, the manner will offer the only clue we can have to the character of the One originating. So as we shall see, Plotinus’s interpretation founders precisely on whether that “coming forth” is best described in terms of logical deduction, or whether it results from a free act of the One. At this point the deliverances of revelation and what was taken to be reason initially clashed, though further inquiry by illustrious thinkers would find them complementing one another.

Yet as circumstance would have it, creation offers the one area where we can track interaction of some kind among these three traditions.⁵ The interaction we can trace occurred as each tradition sought to clarify scriptural accounts of the origin of the universe – identical for Jews and Christians, and substantially the same for Muslims. Much work has been done to situate the Genesis story in the context of origin stories from the milieu in which the Hebrew Scriptures emanate, noting how the scriptural account reflects that milieu, and how it differs. Genesis shows traces of earlier accounts in postulating a chaotic matrix in need of ordering; but contrasts starkly in the manner of achieving that order. Earlier origin accounts graphically depict struggle, issuing in dismembering and reconstituting, while Genesis focuses on crafting or even more refined: executing by verbal command. However, we might conceive the pre-existent matrix, which remains utterly obscure, it offers no resistance to being ordered, so the divine act of originating and of ordering remains sovereign. That could be one reason why the matrix dropped from sight, reduced to a shadowy “prime matter” in Hellenic philosophical accounts, and to nothing in religious accounts. Yet the official nothing will return to undermine religious accounts in the form of primordial resistance to the sovereign action of God, dramatized in spiritual creatures as sin. Jon Levenson offers a remarkable delineation of this inescapable dimension of the Jewish tradition in his aptly titled Creation and the Persistence of Evil, contrasting it sharply with what emerged in all three traditions as creation ex nihilo.⁶ Yet in response to the Preface to the second (1994) edition of this work, I shall propose an understanding of creation ex nihilo whereby the opposition need not be so stark.

So it may well be that Plotinus’s magisterial account of emanation from the One proved less useful to a religious articulation of origins precisely because it was so magisterial, leaving too little room for any palpable resistance to an account of divine creating, relegating that feature to a matter residual to the outpouring of being as it transmutes into becoming. Yet once the influential Islamic philosopher, al-Farabi, introduced the model of logical deduction to provide a firm structure to Plotinus’s metaphor of overflowing, the model itself implied necessity, so settling the ambiguity remaining from Plotinus: does this emanation from the One take place necessarily, as a consequence of its nature, or as an intentional free act? In the end, however, the very feature which made the logical model attractive to philosophers made it repugnant to religious thinkers, intent on accentuating divine freedom in creating. The potential of freedom to be read as arbitrary led philosophers away from it, while religious thinkers found a necessary emanation to compromise the divine One by demanding that God could not be God without creating the universe. Yet by the same reasoning, would not the logical model also effectively adulterate Plotinus’s One, by endowing it with the necessary attribute of creator?

So we can recognize tensions which could arise between philosophical strategies and religious sensibilities, made all the more inevitable since thinking believers could hardly dispense with the tools of human reason to articulate the path revealed to lead them to truth. Yet while each of the Abrahamic traditions sought ways to negotiate this tension, in the case of creation they received help from one another, albeit in sequential fashion. This actual interaction privileges creation for comparative purposes, of course, and serendipitously so, since we will see how every other topic will return to the way one attempts to articulate the ineffable relation between creatures and creator. Moreover, the period fruitful for comparing ways of treating creation – from al-Ghazali (d. 1111) to Aquinas (d. 1274) – enjoyed a relatively homogeneous philosophical culture as well, so adherents of diverse religious traditions were able to share a common discourse. Avicenna had transmitted Aristotle to each principal: Ghazali, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), and Thomas Aquinas; so much so that Maimonides will often identify Avicenna’s views with Aristotle. None of them actually met the other, but those who came later were able to profit from earlier thinkers, in some cases actually citing them in critical conversation, often showing their esteem for the other by taking issue with them, as philosophers are wont to do. So Ghazali, who is trenchantly critical of some of Avicenna’s conclusions regarding points of faith, will also acknowledge his philosophical debt by structuring his natural philosophy along Avicennian lines.⁷ But the sticking point remains whether creation constitutes the initial moment in time, or whether (as the necessary emanation scheme proposed) the universe had no beginning, so that creatures were coeternal with their creating principle. Ghazali tends to link an initial moment of the universe with creation as a free and intentional activity. As if to display his dependence on Ghazali (which most presume to be the case), Maimonides inherited this criterion, insisting that an everlasting creation coterminous with the creator itself could not be free but would inescapably reflect necessary emanation. Furthermore, nothing seemed to divide “philosophers” from “theologians” so much as the contention that the universe would have to have had a beginning if it were truly to be created. Necessary emanation might be proffered as a theory of origination, but never as a way of explicating the statements of the Bible or Qur’an about God’s free act of creating.

Yet this very contention would be challenged by Thomas Aquinas, a thinker “in conversation with” both Avicenna and to Maimonides, though far less acquainted with the work of Ghazali. (He was “in conversation” in the sense that we are always contending with writers who impress us, allowing their mode of inquiry to affect our own, to learn from them in the process. Indeed, we have to acknowledge this to be a singularly fruitful way of meeting others without ever having personal contact with them.) Aquinas adopted Avicenna’s axial distinction of essence from existing, though radically recasting it, to adapt the metaphysics he gleaned from Aristotle (often through Avicenna’s commentary) to accommodate a universe freely created by one God. Yet so Herculean a task, while reflective of Aquinas’s singular genius, could hardly have been executed without Avicenna’s quite Islamic innovation on Aristotle’s treatment, later confirmed in the central role Maimonides gives to existence, as it is conveyed to creatures from a God who possesses it necessarily – Avicenna’s way of establishing “the distinction” between creator and creatures.

Yet Aquinas would see that, once such a “distinction” had been secured, it mattered little whether creation was conceived with or without a beginning. He also profited from Maimonides’ clear-headed observation that since neither position could be demonstrated, Torah-believers were free to accept the language of Genesis, which implied an initial moment, at face value. Yet while he averred what revelation stated to be the case, Aquinas argued that a creation coterminous with the creator need not derogate from the primary asseveration of each tradition about creating: that the act must be free and intentional. In other words, while insisting on free creation, the primary focus of revelation is not so much on an initial moment but on the way each creature depends on the sustaining power of God for its very existence at every moment. That is the radical revision of Aristotle which the Bible effects: asserting that what Aristotle took to be the lynchpin of his metaphysics – substance, existing in itself – rather exists by the power of a creator sustaining it in existence. The verses of the Qur’an or of Genesis 1–3, of course, hardly succeed in making that point, yet a concerted inquiry carried out by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian “interlocutors” (in the sense proposed) did reach that formidable conclusion, and in doing so illustrates how revelation can so illuminate the strategies of philosophy as to transform them. For our three signal Abrahamic thinkers – Ghazali, Maimonides, and Aquinas – each adopt a dialectical approach to persuade their fellow believers how fruitfully reason and faith can interact with each other. And one of them, Aquinas, coming last as he did, was able to utilize the others to illuminate his work, with a dialectical strategy which allows faith and reason mutually to illuminate one another.

Islamic reflection treated this subject in a sustained philosophical manner before the other traditions, profiting from Syriac translators rendering Hellenic philosophical texts into Arabic. But their primary source remains the Qur’an: “Originator (Badî’) of the heavens and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is” (Qur’an 2:117). There are eight...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Challenges in Contemporary Theology
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Free Creation as a Shared Task for Jews, Christians, Muslims
• 2 Relating Divine Freedom with Human Freedom: Diverging and Converging Strategies
• 3 Human Initiative and Divine Grace: Augustine and Ghazali
• 4 Trust in Divine Providence: Tawakkul, “Abandonment,” and “Detachment”
• 5 The Point of it All: “Return,” Judgment, and “Second Coming” – Creation to Consummation
• 6 Realized Eschatology: Faith as a Mode of Knowing and Journeying
• 7 Respectfully Negotiating Outstanding Neuralgic Issues: Contradictions and Conversions
• Epilog Misuses and Abuses of Abrahamic Traditions
• Index