Islam and Christianity – Can the two live in peace?
During the past week Charles Stuart University made several significant presentations at Parliament House. The first was by the University’s distinguished Professor of Theology, Rev Dr Professor James Haire A.M., KSJ, MA, PhD, DD, Dlitt, DUniv. Professor Haire is the Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. He has had a distinguished career as an academic and missionary. He is a foremost teacher on the relationship between Islam and Christianity having spent thirty-six years as a missionary in Indonesia. He was appointed by the Indonesian Government to the Commission on the causes of the armed conflict in the Malaccas, Sumatra and Ambon provinces.
Summary of ‘Islam and Christianity: Can the two live in peace?’, Presentation by Professor James Haire, 1 April 2008, NSW Parliament, Extracted from his notes.
Ninety-five percent of Christians and Muslims in the world live in peace with each other. There is conflict in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia. The three Abrahamic faiths, being Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were all born in a world of violence. Each had its origin as a powerless and persecuted minority but grew to be powerful over time, when Constantine chose Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire, the Sultanates were established in the Middle Eastern nations, and with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Each faith has experience with violence and oppression from the receiving end, and each faith also experienced the congenial place of power with a supportive state. The ebb and flow of their range, globally and historically, is also similar.
We should now seek “communities of peace” for many reasons. Christianity and Islam represent the largest religious populations in the modern world, which include the richest and poorest of people, and should take responsibility for finding peace between our people. Both are international in scope, with people of all races, cultures and ethnic groups. Australia has a very heterogenous population of Muslims born in many countries overseas.
Our reality today is also one of profound violence. The end of the Cold War has not meant the hoped for peace, but uncontrollable violence; a violence that often calls upon God’s name to suit its agenda. This constitutes a pattern, which results in insecurity, fear and anxiety in the lives of many people. This violence finds expression in many ways: the structural violence of governments ignoring or dominating their populations; corruption and the abuse of power; discrimination on the basis of gender, disability, race, caste, class, age; and against the environment.
Positive signs are also evident, however, with young people yearning for peace. After the Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 there were combined efforts to create communities of peace in various places. Reconciliation after ethnic and communal violence has often been rapid. There is resilience evident in society, even in those communities that have been deeply wounded.
Early Christians sought to transcend the violent world they lived in. We as Christians must take the New Testament writings seriously regarding to building communities of peace, as can be seen in the ethical sections of Paul’s letters especially the Letter to the Romans. This letter is central to Christian self-identify, and self-understanding, and has been enormously important to the development of western civilisation through its effect on Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Wesley, Barth and the members of the Second Vatican Council.
This letter also forms a useful basis for our own exploration of the understanding of the Christian community. Social groupings were based on kinship, ethnic issues, power and politics. The kinship group was the focus of individual loyalty, and had decisive influence over identify and self-awareness. The security of each individual was grounded in the community sharing common interests, values, and citifies. The most basic unit of social awareness was at the individual, as that individual consciousness was subordinate to social consciousness. This group consciousness was also the background for Islam.
Religion was enmeshed in kinship and politics. In the first century the religion of voluntary members resulted in a newly created kinship group. This was a created, or imitative, kinship grouping, although on the surface looked like any other kinship group, and used the same relationship terminology for itself eg “household of faith”. This was repeated in the Islamic setting.
Concern for honour and shame was significant in these cultural settings. Honour determined social standing, and was essential for social cooperation. Honour was the outward, external approval given to a group or individual by those whose honour was unquestioned. It was acquired by outdoing others in the social sphere. People were shamed when they transgressed group standards or when they sought a social status to which public approval was not given. Therefore a person’s sense of self-worth was established by public reputation, rather than their own conscience. This is not foreign to the experience of the early development and theological struggles of Islam.
This new, voluntary kinship religious community based on identity in Christ also had new social roles in its Greco-Roman first century setting. These were based on the twin concepts of peace or harmony, and mercy. The same Greek word, eirene, means peace and harmony. It is closely associated with the Hebrew term for peace and harmony, shalom, and Arabic’s term salaam.
In the New Testament eirene refers to two distinct states of peace. Firstly, it means salvation and harmony of the whole community, and of each person. The concept has a future orientation, and refers to the end of history. Secondly, eirene refers to a condition here and now of peace and harmony guaranteed by what will occur at the end of time. This divinely willed state includes Christians’ well being, and their harmony with God, with one another and with all human beings.
The Greek terms for mercy are oiktirmos and eleos. Both refer to mercy and compassion, with oiktirmos additionally meaning pity. The verb forms mean to show kindness, or to be merciful. Human mercy is the intended attitude of Christians toward others. It signifies sympathy and loving-kindness, and through acts of help to the needy. In the definitions of these terms we see communal elements, and pointers to the ideal of a society under God’s rule.
Christians are summoned to new social roles based on mercy, peaceable conduct, and reconciliation. This means new expressions of group identity. No longer based on kinship or ethnicity, group identity seeks to retain the intense cohesion of those former groups. They now bind themselves together as one body in Christ. This is a metaphor suitable to a society where self-awareness arises from group association rather than from individual concepts of worth. Patterns of social cooperation are modified as a result. Within Islam we see parallel dynamics.
However for Christians there is another factor of immense significance: attitudes to those outside of the newly created social groupings are to be the same as those within them. There is to be no distinction, all are to be treated the same way. Again we should note the parallels with Islam, particularly in relation to the other “Peoples of the Book”.
Throughout history Christianity has both succeeded and failed in being able to live out this new identity in Christ. The gospel existed in a cyclic and agricultural mode, as it was interwoven into agricultural societies, moving into the Hellenic world but not into the world of Judaism to any degree. That world spoke of planting, development, maturity, harvest (or death), new life, renewed fertility of the soil, and new growth. The Jesus story fitted the pattern of agricultural life.
Another world existed in which Christianity had not been able to develop so well, that of the trading and word culture, giving more attention to common standards to guide diverse peoples as they sought to live together. The emphasis for them was the Book (the Bible), the Guide to the Book (Confessions and Catechisms) and the interpreter of the Book (Preacher). In Islam, the parallel emphasis is on Koran, the Shari’ah, and the Faqih. In Judaism, it is the Torah, the Mishnah and Talmud, and the Rabbi.
Finally, Christian and Muslims are called to advance the eight goals of the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations:
1. Eradicate poverty and hunger,
2. Achieve universal primary education,
3. Promote gender equality and empower women,
4. Reduce child mortality,
5. Improve maternal health,
6. Combat HIV/AIDS malaria, and other diseases,
7. Ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development.
These are indeed expressions of communities of peace. When people of Christian and Muslin faiths work together to achieve these ends, conflict diminishes and concord between the people exists.