Jesus and the Incarnation

David Singh

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781870345903
• eBook ISBN: 9781908355751
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In the dialogue of Christians with Muslims nothing is more fundamental than the Cross, the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus. This book contains voices of Christians living in various 'Islamic contexts' and reflecting on the Incarnation of Jesus. The aim of these reflections is constructive and the hope is that the papers weaved around the notion of 'the Word' will not only promote dialogue among Christians on the roles of the Person and the Book, but, also, create a positive environment for their conversations with Muslim neighbours.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

‘The Word Made Flesh’: Community, Dialogue and Witness

David Emmanuel Singh

Dr. David Emmanuel Singh is Research Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, UK

This is the second in the series of three books. The first, Jesus and the Cross, published in 2009, was well received by theological students, teachers and generally Christians living in Muslim contexts. This book on Jesus and the Incarnation aspires to achieve the same level of interest among similar audiences.¹ The readership is expected to be varied but particularly theological students and, here, those specialising in the theology of religions and ordinary Christians wanting to hear different Christian voices on one of the most intractable ‘problems’ in the Christian theology of religions, namely, the Incarnation. For this reason, the book includes papers written by a variety of Christian authors representing a range of approaches and contexts. The approaches include exegetical/hermeneutical, empirical socio-anthropological, philosophical, historical, biographical and missional.

The attempt here is to allow these voices to speak for themselves from within the context of a broader structure centred on the notions of ‘the Word made Flesh’ and ‘the Word made Book’. The fundamental concern is not to interrogate the particular intellectual positions of the contributing authors but to allow the varied discourse on a central pillar of Christian faith, the Incarnation, to be available to the readers who can choose from this elements they deem to be useful for their witness and dialogue with Muslims and/or their continuing learning about Christian relations with Muslims. In other words, this is not a statement representing any particular intellectual position apart from the most general one which is the centrality of the Word made flesh as confessed by Christians and attested to by Christian history. It attempts to do so by organising the discourse around the discussion on the Word which is to be the basis for a sense of community, not as an end in itself but as a means to the performance of Christian witness and dialogue with Muslims.

The Word

In Christianity, the notion of ‘the Word’ remains inseparable from the historic Christian witness to the Incarnation and Jesus Christ. This is especially where Christians part ways with Muslims. Where Christians and Muslims can meet is in considering the pre-existing Word. For this reason, I think, it is a promising concept to explore here.

Most modern scholars agree that Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293-373) represented the ‘orthodox’ Christian position. His De incarnatione verbe dei is one of the earliest works on ‘the Word made Flesh’ where he speaks of the incarnation as the solution to a divine dilemma.² Aquinas’ ‘treatise on the most Holy Trinity’ addressed the question of the origin of ‘the divine persons.’ The logos is one who ‘proceeds’ in God Himself and has being in Him. There is no other Word that derives from here. This Word became flesh.³ In Islam the notion of al-lawh al- mahfuz (lit. ‘The Guarded Tablet’) is as central a notion as the logos of Christianity. The difference appears to be in that whereas the Christian notion of the Word is personal, the Muslim Word is understood almost in the Aristotelian sense of ‘substance’.⁴ What seems comparable between Christians and Muslims is the idea that what was part of God becomes something/somebody. In Christianity, the logos appeared in the form of the person of Jesus Christ while in Islam it was the eternal Qur’an which appeared in the form of the physical Qur’an. The dogmatic starting points of Christian and Muslim witnesses, therefore, are: ‘The Word made Person/Flesh’ and ‘the Word made Book’.

In practice and in doctrine, the idea of the Word as Book has been shared by many Christians to nearly the same degree as Muslims. Grafton’s paper, on the ancient Arab Christianity and Van Dyke’s translation of the Bible into Arabic, is a fine example.⁵ Arabic Christianity has existed for centuries alongside the dominant religion of Islam and has typically evolved a distinctive identity that reflects not just Arabic culture but the superimposing reality of Islam. ‘The Word made Book’, Grafton argues is one expression of this association. This means that many Christian Arabs have the same sort of understanding of revelation and the Scriptures as the majority around them. The Bible to them would be the Word of God in a similar sense as the Qur’an for Muslims.

In practice too, Christians have widely held the Scriptures to be ‘the Word.’ Ignatius of Antioch, also called Theophorus (ca. 35-117), was an early Church Father and Patriarch of Antioch. Like the Apostles, he is known for a good number of letters to churches under his care.⁶ One of these was to ‘the Philadelphians’ from a town in an area now in Turkey. It was a significant centre of early Christianity. In his letter to the Philadelphians, St. Ignatius sought to address what he saw as a serious error in the doctrines of the Book and Jesus. Some people were found popularising the notion that if something was absent in ‘the ancient scriptures’ (Hebrew scriptures) it was not worth believing in. They were particularly referring to the Gospel of Jesus and the argument was that since the Gospel was not in the ancient scriptures, it could not be right and, hence, not worth believing. Obviously, this was seen to be a cause of insidious disunity. St. Ignatius’ answer to this was not through the re-reading of the ancient scriptures to prove that the Gospel was present there but to challenge the Philadelphians not to focus on the Book but on the person of Jesus. The Book was from God who is Spirit, but it was the person of Jesus who was the true incarnation of the Spirit. ‘The archives ought not to be preferred to the Spirit.’⁷

The Hebrew-Christian canon was formed through different processes in history and in a particular cultural milieu. Both positive and negative examples have been cited of its influence upon those who lived by it. The positive impact, it can be argued, was linked to the consequences of certain developments in the Church. Protestantism introduced the notion of the ‘liberty of examination and discussion’. There was the Spirit of God behind the scriptures. The Church was accountable for the way in which it arrogated the right to be the single interpreter of the scripture, which was supreme over the Church. The Spirit superseded the scripture. God alone was the sovereign and the scriptures were under him. Each believer had their liberated conscience in direct contact with the scripture. Thus, the order they conceived for the great Protestant liberation was: the Spirit, the scriptures, and human conscience.⁸

However, the notion of liberty was not entirely natural in some contexts.⁹ The Protestant access to the Bible meant in some contexts that certain types of people, such as the ‘witches’ were excommunicated. So convinced was Martin Luther (1483-1546) of the ban against witchcraft and the excommunication of the witches that it was recommended that witches be ‘put to death without mercy and without regard to legal niceties.’¹⁰ John Calvin (1509-1564) shared the belief in the witches having a pact with the devil. His demonology was founded on the scriptures¹¹ and this had the same authority as the inviolable church dogma. The Biblically supported demonology, therefore, was in these cases, the basis for the justification of the persecution of witches.¹² The reformers sought freedom for Christians but this freedom was not absolute. Even for Calvin, Christian freedom or freedom of conscience was not the same as individual autonomy.¹³ It meant being subject to the will of God (revealed in the Word of God). The Word of God needed interpretation and the will of God needed an agency to draw it from the Word. The reformers themselves acted as the primary interpreters of the Word with exceptional cases of passionate excesses as in the examples above.

The Word we speak of is not the Book but the person of Christ. This poses some problem for Christian theologians of Islam. How does one relate with Muslims if it is assumed that unlike Christianity, there is no notion of ‘the Word as Person’ in Islam? In speaking of the Incarnation of the Word in John’s Gospel Grams engages with Hick.¹⁴ We know Hick has been a supporter of oral and written dialogue with Muslims. In replacing the Person of Jesus with a transcendental reality, Hick dispenses with the traditional centrality of Christology in Christian Muslim dialogue. This dovetails perfectly with the traditional Islamic rejection of the incarnation of Jesus. Grams endorses an opposite view, that the Qur’an denies the incarnation of Jesus. On the positive side, his argument is that there is promise in using John’s ‘concrete’ theologizing.¹⁵ He speaks of the Word’s incarnation in creation, in the Mosaic Law, and in Jesus as offering particular instances of the revelations of God. The person of the Word has the capacity to ‘translate’ itself to become manifest and through ceasing to remain hidden in transcendence. God’s compassion through the Incarnation of the Word thus becomes self-giving, sacrificial, and transformative. Jesus’ Incarnation was therefore a form of translation. As Walls affirms, ‘Incarnation is translation’.¹⁶ If, therefore, it is argued, the Incarnation is an instance of the divinity translating into humanity, its appropriation in different cultures and periods must allow for a degree of diversity.¹⁷ The sum of the argument, therefore, is that the concreteness of the Incarnation needs to be acknowledged but not in a rigid and mono-cultural sense; the Incarnation would be meaningless and have no transformative power without the possibility of translation.

Azumah, like Grams, agrees with the view that the doctrine of the Incarnation is central to Christianity but has been viewed with suspicion and rejected in Islam.¹⁸ However, Azumah goes further than Grams because he expands on the key sub-theme of translation. The sphere of the notion of translation for him can be expanded to allow a view of the interesting comparative discussion in Islam and Christianity. Christian orthodoxy (needless to say after a long struggle) has come to view scriptural and cultural translation as an integral part of orthodoxy. Islamic orthodoxy would appear to most, in comparison, doggedly opposed to translation (especially scriptural translation). This ‘change of gear’, proposed by Azumah, promises some movement in engagement beyond the traditional impasse on Christology-centred dialogue and witness. Thus, both Grams and Azumah start with assuming that Christology is absent in Islam. The former presses ahead with locating an alternative for engagement through emphasizing the ‘concrete dimension’ of the Incarnation and the latter refocuses attention on the broader cultural meaning of translation for a comparative exposition. Both are creative in their proposals and persuasive in their arguments but does Christian witness/dialogue have no possibility of enagaging Muslims at the deeper level of Christology?

Firstly, one needs to clarify that Christian engagement with Muslims at the level of theology/Christology is not simply a matter of historical interest or a matter relating to the past. A number of well known theologians of our time, Cragg, Hick and Kung, have all been engaging with Muslims, with Christology at the very heart of the dialogue.¹⁹ That is to say, even if there are strong historical and other reasons to suggest that on the issue of Christology/theology there can be no meeting between Christians and Muslims; one must not give up on it, as Hick does. There is no Christianity without Christology. The reality is that it cannot in any context of dialogue or witness ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Word
• Part III: Community
• Part IV: Dialogue and Witness
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Back Cover