Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

An Introduction to Monotheism

Amanullah De Sondy, Michelle A. Gonzalez, William S. Green

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474257275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Introduction to Monotheism shows how a shared monotheistic legacy frames and helps explain the commonalities and disagreements among Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their significant denominations in the world today. Taking a thematic approach and covering both historical and contemporary dimensions, the authors discuss how contemporary geographic and cultural contexts shape the expression of monotheism in the three religions. It covers differences between religious expressions in Israeli Judaism, Latin American Christianity and British Islam. Topics discussed include scripture, creation, covenant and identity, ritual, ethics, peoplehood and community, redemption, salvation, life after death, gender, sexuality and marriage. This introductory text, which contains over 30 images, a map, a timeline, chapter afterthoughts and critical questions, is written by three authors with extensive teaching experience, each a specialist in one of the three monotheistic traditions.

1

Introduction

The idea that there is only one deity in the universe is a basic concept of Western civilization (often associated with, but not limited to, European culture). The primary expression of this One God is the monotheistic heritage that underlies Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These three religions claim to know, understand, and follow the One God, who, they affirm, created the universe and humanity and revealed to their foundational figures (i.e. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad) the terms of humans’ proper relationship to God and one another. Many ideas and values we take for granted as secular—such as justice, equality before the law, care for the poor, respect for parents, the elderly and disabled, the dignity of life, to name a few—draw on this monotheistic legacy.

The monotheistic heritage contains a set of essential beliefs, practices, and institutions that shape these religions’ conceptions of themselves and one another and inform their interactions, whether competitive or collaborative. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam acknowledge the Hebrew Bible as its source. This book attempts to describe the biblical monotheistic legacy—which the religions assume but often do not spell out—and to examine how it can help explain the commonalities and disagreements among them and between and among their significant denominations.

Numerous reports from the Pew Research Center project the continued impact of these religions and thus of the heritage that undergirds and generates them. Over half of the global population is either Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, with Christianity and Islam continuing to grow in parts of the globe. These projections must be contextualized, however, by the increasing number of individuals who identify as unaffiliated with any religion, whose numbers continue to increase in the United States and parts of Western Europe.

The growth of these religions will not be evenly distributed across the globe. Much of it will take place in sub-Saharan Africa. This means that by 2060, the religious heritage represented by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will affect—in diverse ways, to be sure—the lives of nearly two-thirds of the people on earth.

Today Judaism, Christianity, and Islam interact in unprecedented ways. There are hostile interreligious encounters in the realms of global and national politics. There are constructive relationships in the religiously pluralist life of the world’s great cities and within multi-religious families. At the same time, these religions also are experiencing increased scrutiny—and skepticism—particularly in Western industrialized societies. Among other factors, the global clergy sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, increasing public acceptance of same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, the events of 9/11 and their aftermath, the rise of ISIS, and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East have coincided with a drop in religious participation and increasingly sharp divisions between secularists and religious people, particularly in the United States and Europe.

These considerations set the context for this book. To forge a global future, it is important for us to understand how the ideas, values, and behaviors of these longstanding religions may influence the political, social, and personal choices of the majority of the earth’s population—particularly if we are part of a society and culture in which people increasingly do not subscribe to or share those ideas, values, and behaviors. While the internet enables people to know more about more religions than ever before, contemporary news and social media often foreground the most extreme or highly visible expressions of religion, so that much of what we think we know about religion may be either biased, incomplete, or wrong. This book aims to provide resources for understanding that can help us make sense both of what is familiar about religion in the West and what is not.

Understanding Religion

Before turning to the particulars of the monotheistic tradition, it will help to have a preliminary understanding of religion. The aim of this book is to develop a framework of analysis that can help us discern the shape and interrelationships, the similarities and differences, among the three monotheistic heritages in their diverse contexts. The academic study of religion developed overwhelmingly in Western Europe and the United States, and as a result is extremely influenced by a Christian framework. In other words, because the study of religion focused initially either on Christianity or Christianity’s encounter with other religions through colonialism, many of our definitions of religion are created to mirror the structure of Christianity. While recognizing the limitations of any definition that claims to describe all religions in their diversity, we offer some initial insights to provide a shared framework for the three traditions discussed in this book. The work of anthropologist Roy Rappaport and sociologist Robert Bellah can help us with that exercise.

Rappaport observes that humanity is “a species that lives, and can only live, in terms of meanings it must construct in a world devoid of intrinsic meaning but subject to physical law.” We humans live less by instinct than do other animals. We devise the purpose and significance of human life—our values, ethics, and community structures, for instance—rather than inherit them genetically as givens.

Bellah argues that we do this by creating what the philosopher George Santayana called “another world to live in.” The “world of daily life”—the “ordinary reality all humans experience”—Bellah suggests, is the world of necessity, work, striving, and adapting, and “no one can stand to live” in that world all the time. We transcend the “world of daily life” through distinctly human activities, such as art, poetry, science, and religion. Creating these other worlds is part of human nature.

Rappaport notes that our unique capacity for language enables us to “transcend the concrete” and articulate and imagine alternative realities. When we say “will be, might be, could be, ought to be, was, could have been, should have been,” etc., our very language lets us conceive and articulate possible worlds that differ from the empirical one we inhabit. Through language and imagination, we humans have the capacity to create structures of meaning that go beyond and do not entirely depend on the constraints of routine everyday life.

How does what we call “religion” fit into this picture? What makes religion’s “non-ordinary reality” distinctive? Two traits help answer these questions.

First, these religions contain supernatural agents, figures who have the capacity to affect humans in ways that humans cannot affect them in return. The nature of these agents and the ways people are supposed to interact with them are culturally specific. Different cultures and societies envision supernatural agents and people’s relationship to them in different ways.

Typically, religions claim that their supernatural agents revealed—and more often constructed—a cosmic order, which humans cannot alter. A religion explains to its adherents what they should do to live in accord with, and thus experience, the created order. It also asserts that people cannot acquire knowledge of cosmic reality by accident or on their own. They have to learn it, and the religion is their guide. Religion takes people out of the mundane and enables them to see and imagine things differently, to conceive that life is or might be otherwise. It tells people—no matter what is happening to them—who they really are by orienting them in a cosmic structure. It is important to note that by definition these religions understand themselves as self-contained systems whose teachings and practices do not lead to another religion; however, at times the way practitioners embody these religions can be more fluid.

Second, religion is all-encompassing. Unlike literature, music, athletics, politics, or philosophy, religion addresses and has addressed most, if not all, aspects of human experience: our communal and individual identities, what we eat, how we dress, how and with whom we have sex, how we raise children, how and whom we marry, how—and often with whom—we do business, how we die. Religion has come to expression in every mode of human creativity: architecture, art, music, clothing, dance, sculpture, film, and literature—to name the most obvious. And, historically, it has been both a primary legitimator of political structures and military action, and a source of resistance against political and military power. Because religion proposes a cosmic order, it reaches back before the present and forward after death. It tells people where they come from and where they are going. In a nutshell, religion enables human beings to live in accord with the conditions of the cosmos—once upon a time, now, and for eternity.

Rappaport observes that religions are grounded in what he calls “Ultimate Sacred Postulates,” claims about reality that are “typically absolutely unfalsifiable and objectively unverifiable but are nonetheless taken to be unquestionable.” Postulates are affirmations that people learn. People’s experience, rather than logical argumentation or scientific experimentation and proof, validates them.

The idea of an Ultimate Sacred Postulate may sound technical and academic, but it represents a distinctly human activity that is more familiar than we may think. For instance, we conduct substantial portions of our individual lives according to what we might call “personal postulates,” ideas or conceptions about ourselves that come from our experience and guide our attitudes and behaviors. These “personal postulates” assert what we feel about ourselves, and they resist falsification because the feelings are authentic. It is difficult to persuade people that they are not who they think and feel—who they “know”—that they are. When we assume, for instance, that we are not attractive enough to date someone (“I’m not handsome enough to ask her/him out”), or cannot do a certain kind of academic work (“I’m not a math person”), or cannot succeed at a particular activity (“I’m not smart/strong enough to do that”), or are immune to failure (“I’m a person who doesn’t make mistakes”), or can triumph over disappointment (“I am not a quitter”), we are living parts of our lives in individual worlds of meaning shaped by these “personal postulates”. However we may appear to others, to ourselves we are who our “personal postulates” tell us we are, and we negotiate the present and even may plan our futures in terms of them. To be sure, different experiences may disconfirm a “personal postulate” and replace it with another. The same thing can happen in religion, which helps explain why people abandon or change their religion.

In the religions we will explore in this book, Ultimate Sacred Postulates include, for instance, Judaism’s Shema’ declaration,

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,

or the Christian Gospel of John 3.16,

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,

or Islam’s Shahadah,

There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of God.

The singularity of the God of Israel, Jesus’ role as savior, and Muhammad’s mission as God’s Prophet are unquestionable convictions that ground, shape, and generate particular beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make them real. Unlike “personal postulates,” “Ultimate Sacred Postulates” are formalized and collective and constitute the basis for communal and social life and individual, group, or national identity. Non-empirical and unfalsifiable, they are about truths rather than facts. They are legitimated, reinforced, and validated by the authorities who teach them, by public reference to and recitation of them, and by being enacted in ritual, prayer, ethical behavior, and family and social life. Because Ultimate Sacred Postulates are abstract, different sectors of a religion can affirm them even if they may disagree about particular concrete teachings and practices.

By creating a “non-ordinary” reality grounded in Ultimate Sacred Postulates about supernatural agents and cosmic order, religion enables people to see through and beyond the concrete realities of everyday life, to find more than operational purpose in ordinary activities, and to envision and even plan for a future that is different and better, than the present. By opening possibilities that everyday life forecloses, religion creates the foundation of two other distinctly human traits: hope and faith.

To witness this dynamic at work, let us consider three pivotal moments in the monotheistic heritage: the destruction of two Temples in Jerusalem, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, and the death of Muhammad.

Judaism: Overcoming Destruction

In 587/586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, where the Israelites worshipped their God, and took large portions of the population into exile. In the “ordinary” reality of the ancient world, this meant that Israel’s God was indifferent, weak, or defeated. The “non-ordinary” reality of Israel’s religion held, to the contrary, that Israel’s God was the only deity in the cosmos and determined the behavior of all nations. God had ordained the Babylonians’ destruction of the Temple as a repriman...