Posted on 02/17/2007 11:55:27 AM PST by Titanites
Protestantism and Islam: Points of Contact
Protestantism may well have begun as a genuine movement of reform. Accepting the teachings of the Church, its adherents wanted to bring the practice of the Church into line with its teachings. This is the object of all Christian movements. However, it very soon developed into something far more radical, jettisoning basic Christian teachings, bringing in doctrines entirely new to Christianity, and having to meld the results into a coherent whole. This involved developing doctrinal and practical solutions to new problems in the field of Christian faith and morals.
Most of Protestant teaching was conventional Christianity, with some being revived from St Augustine and the early fathers. Where there is novelty there is also often a strong similarity with Islamic doctrine. Perhaps there is an interestingly similar dynamic involved in the rejection of traditional Christianity that both these belief systems, to varying extents, share. Whilst the very title of “Protestantism” depicts its genesis as a reactive movement, it is the case that strong protests against the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation form part of the Koran and so of Islamic faith. It is also noteworthy that Luther issued his own translation of the Koran in 1542, along with a confutation of its soteriology—the key point of Islamic and protestant divergence.
Islam was not a distant or peripheral force in the Europe of the 1520s. The Ottoman Empire had taken Constantinople in 1454. Many scholars had fled to the west, especially to Rome, bringing with them first-hand knowledge of Islam and its practices. Some of these may well still have been alive when Luther visited Rome in 1510. A resurgent Ottoman Empire took Belgrade in 1520 and Hungary in 1526, coming to the very heart of Europe.
Scriptural Fundamentalism
Protestantism was a move closer to the Islamic view of Scriptural authority. The traditional Christian view is that Christ founded the Church which wrote the Scriptures, ratified them and gains constant nourishment from them. Their definitive meaning derives from the same Church which produced them. Luther’s view that Scripture is the only guide to faith and practice is similar to the Islamic view of the Koran. As Muslims are gradually discovering, this view is too optimistic: all Bible believing Protestants from Luther to the present-day have required a huge substructure of unacknowledged assumptions and beliefs by which they interpret the Bible, and which don’t come from it.
One of the most popular Islamic criticisms of “Christianity” is to show that the divergence in interpretation of the Bible is far greater than that concerning the Koran. Seeing such divergence as evidence against Christianity is based upon the Protestant-Islamic view of scripture (and in any case the gap is gradually closing). The Koran had described Jews and Christians as ‘people of the book’, which can be misleading. All literate religions have sacred books, but to suggest |24| JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007 faith that the Scriptures of the Christians and Jews are the key element of these religions is mistaken. The Protestant emphasis did give an added impetus to the wider distribution of the Scriptures in translation. Again, this echoes the Koran, which was written in the language to be understood by the people.
Anti-sacramentalism
The Reformation was also a move in the direction of Islamic belief on the question of the sacraments, and related ideas about the priesthood. Sacraments, by which grace is given to the people, are a crucial part of Christianity. One of the key sacraments is Holy Orders since only the priest says Mass, hears confessions, confirms, ordains and annoints. Islam has no priesthood, no sacraments, no sacrifice, no temple, and no altar. These things are not unrelated. The priest is one who (in any religion) offers sacrifice and the altar is the place of sacrifice. A religion without sacrifice does not have priests or altars. Luther’s denial that Holy Orders is a sacrament changed the nature of the priesthood.
The priest tended to become a minister or a functionary with duties more akin to a schoolmaster than a sacred person. He no longer wore symbolic vestments, but rather, like everybody else, he wore the uniform of his trade. The vessels (if any) were not sacred and could be handled by anyone. The altar became a table, to be moved as required. The church itself commonly became a meeting place, with no sacred character, and needed no special reverence when not in use for services. The services themselves tended to concentrate on the readings from the Scriptures (in the vernacular) and the sermon became a central part of the service.
Protestantism is then a convergence with the Islamic understanding of ministry and religious services. Luther, and most Protestants, retained two sacraments: Baptism and the Eucharist. Both of these soon lost their sacramental character. When baptism became “believers’ baptism”, the decisive step became faith in Christ (and the Scriptures) and baptism became not an infusion of faith and grace, but only the public acknowledgement of faith. This comes very close to Islamic practice; one becomes a Moslem by acknowledging ones faith in Islam in front of witnesses. This is all a shadow of the Judaeo- Catholic sense of God’s abiding, sanctifying, sacrificial, ritualistic presence amongst his people.
Radical Individualism
Two other points relating to the priesthood are relevant here. Firstly, the Christian priest is a Pontifex, a bridge, a constant channel of grace between God and man and is often a channel of prayer from man to God. He prays for the dead. None of these occur in Islam, or in Protestantism. Islam in fact explicitly denies that the living can help the dead in any way, as do most branches of Protestantism. Secondly we have issues of priestly celibacy, monasticism and religious vows. Christianity has always admired and looked up to monks and hermits, seeing in them a real attempt to forsake this world for the Kingdom of God. It has always admired and usually demanded celibacy from its priests. The Koran itself praised Christian monks for their charity and benevolence, but there was no place in Islam for monasticism. Celibacy was despised. Protestants deprecated both celibacy and monasticism and both virtually disappeared from Protestant countries. Luther had been a monk and had taken solemn vows, but readily forsook those vows to get married. Generally, Christians take vows very seriously but in Islam they are easily dispensed if they become inconvenient. In the play A Man for All Seasons St Thomas More says that when we take a vow we hold our very selves in our hands. You don’t get this in Islam, or in Luther.
We turn now to the destruction of images. Luther allowed and other reformers encouraged or even enforced a widespread and devastating iconoclasm. The fury of this destruction may be traced to the sacred or sometimes miraculous reputations of some images, or to their association with prayers for the dead, or perhaps to social causes. A similar iconoclasm had occurred in the Byzantine Empire in the eighth century under the influence of Islam. Islam and Protestantism rejected both images, and the intercession of saints often associated with them.
Marriage and the Position of Women Undermined
Turning to morals, it has often been noticed that the ethics of most religious systems are very similar to each other. Those of Islam and Catholicism differ most in the areas of marriage and the position of women and of the relation between religion and state.
A Muslim is expected to marry. But marriage is a contract with the possibility of divorce is built into it, not a lifelong commitment. Polygamy is also allowed. Less well-known is the fact that a man may also, in certain cases, keep concubines. Traditional Christianity forbids these things but the early Protestants allowed all of these arrangements. One of the scandals of the Reformation was the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse, conducted by Luther himself. Luther was not keen on it; he suggested concubinage as a compromise.
One of the greatest and most far reaching of the changes in the social life of Europe caused by the Reformation concerned the position of women. Outside |25| faith the domestic circles, the main channel for education and advancement for women was the church. They were educated at convent schools, could rise to become prioresses or abbesses of great houses and were numbered amongst the scholars, Saints, mystics and martyrs of the church. Many achieved fame for their letters or spiritual writings, women like Juliana of Norwich, Catherine of Siena. and Theresa of Avila.
Furthermore, they could find constant visual aids and role models in Our Lady and the female saints depicted in churches and books. All these were swept away in Protestant countries. This doesn’t seem to have been an oversight. Many of the reformers had a deep distrust of women in any positions of power. The domestic position of women could have become grim as well were it not that that the early Protestant experiments in this area were effectively abandoned. Polygamy never caught on. The official recognition of concubinage was short lived, and divorce became very rare to be indulged in only by the rich.
State Theocracy
What about the relations between church and state? The Ottoman Sultan claimed to be the successor of Muhammad and the spiritual leader of all the Muslims. He was of course still bound by the Koran and Islamic practices, but there was no conflict between church and state. This appealed to many reformers. It became a model for Protestant states, where generally the prince, rather than a priest, was head of the church, and at the highest level directed its affairs. Finally, Luther believed that reason was so corrupted by sin that it could not be relied upon. The radical transcendence of Allah produces a similar downplaying of the harmony of faith and reason.
I have tried to suggest that many of the major Protestant innovations have a relationship with Islam. Perhaps there are sociological similarities. One might even think that some of the Protestant ‘innovations’ were not really novelties at all. I would certainly not suggest that Protestantism imported every idea from Islam, clearly most of the key Protestant ideas are Christian. Nor do I think that all the innovations came from Islam. Outstanding exceptions are justification by faith alone, and possibly the Protestant distaste shown towards pilgrimages and honouring the saints. There may be something to learn from all this about the way in which pious men rebel against the idea of divine, incarnational authority and activity living on down the centuries in the Church.
I have also read many books on how Catholicism co-opted many practices from any country it has evangelised, including many middle eastern ways of being. Religions tend to do this - it is not right but it happens. Thefore it woud seem that adherence to the bible and the early church fathers would be seen as a good thing. It tends to get one back to their roots so to speak. Error enters the church through many mediums as you may well know - look at what has been happening with the tolerance of Homosexuals in the priesthood. If their is no looking back to the scripture and the decisions of the Early Church then eventually these errors can find their way into doctrine. I am not saying that this has happened in the Catholic Church but a regular purge of societal influence on the church is a good thing - pity Luther felt he had to go outside of the church to do this.
Certainly branches of Protestantism have, at various times, been intensely concerned with the Law to the point of obsession. One would have to doubt these group's ability to understand the broad sweep of Scripture rather than assign to them a draw towards Islam.
I think the article takes broad leaps in logic without the least bit of supporting evidence and is a bit of an embarrassment really.
Blessings
Mel
I don't think Luther spoke English...
I don't think that Protestants shared Muslim ideas about the book, but they, like Muslims, seemed to think that their scriptures had dropped down from Heaven and were revealed in themselves and to Protestants in particular.
Some Roman Catholics have some really funny notions about what Protestants think. I'm not sure whether or not all Protestant denominations adhere to the Apostles & Niacin creeds, but some do, even though they aren't spelled out in the Bible. Hmmm, wonder where those came from.
The Church, of course, developed the canon and threw out many competing scriptures that were not in accordance with doctrine as it had developed in the first centuries, but this is totally ignored by Protestants, or perhaps not even known by them.
We "ignore" it less than you probably realize.
But one of the things that is probably important in the development of Protestantism, as I mentioned above, is the development of printing.
As has been discussed at length in these back & forth threads, much of the population couldn't read anyway. Protestants have always relied heavily on hymns & there is more to them than just raising up a glade noise to the Lord.
Muslims had to keep their text in its original language because of the "information science" limitations of their time.
Arabic Korans are still the only ones considered to be true Korans, the very word of Allah.
However, once you had a system that could produce a standard, easily distributed and easily translatable text, you would then approach that text in a different way, and the way Protestants approached it was to enshrine it, as though it existed in isolation from the Church and the centuries of experience of the faithful and the Faith.
Not quite true, but I think your mind is set, so it's doubtful you'll believe me.
Just another day of herding cats. Your job here is a thankless one. Thanx for putting up with us.
I fell away from the church and from faith, and for more than twenty years I was agnostic. I received the Holy Spirit then, at a time of great struggle and suffering in my life. Only later did I go back to church.
The "Mark of Shiva" pic has been debunked before. The woman was a Catholic and the marking she put on his forehead was not a Hindu mark.
well, I guess when Billy Graham kneels down and prays with an Imam in a mosque, this article will have convinced me. This is a hit piece, pure and simple. I hope you got whatever thrill you were seeking in posting it.
The author didn't touch on the one area that might have been interesting. The predestination taught by Islam is like Calvin on steroids. The two theological positions do not have common roots, so it didn't serve the author's purposes (though that didn't stop him in other areas).
The article is a piece of crap, on par with the rantings of leftists who point out how the USA is Nazi Germany. The fact that Catholics on this board aren't the first to see this for the steaming pile of manure it is, is disappointing. Get that beam out of your eye, Francis Lynch. It's ugly.
State Theocracy? The author doesn't see the irony?
Sexual immorality amongst the clergy? He still doesn't see it?
Muslims and Protestants and the role of women? Is this one a joke?
Scripture? Many Muslims have never even read theirs. Many are illiterate. They count on the Imam. Sounds kind of like another religion until translations and the printing press came along, and with it ...........
"the key point of Islamic and Protestant divergence?" Really? Is that really the key point? Does the author really believe that? Does the author know anything at all about Protestant belief other than that he hates it? This morning at the United Methodist Church, I will pray that Allah will enlighten and forgive him.
"Hit pieces are the things with the inflammatory titles practically saying Whore of Babylon that some Protestants have been posting here lately."
It's a hit piece. Just like those you cited. You don't see it as such because someone else's ox is being gored.
specifically, the Christology of Islam comes from the Gnostics. I can't wait to see how the Gnostic gospels are really the foundation of (Sola Scriptura) Protestantism, but I am sure I will see it on this board.
An interesting study might concern the recent embracing of the Gnostic gospels by parts of our culture, and the inability of certain quarters (is there overlap?) to criticize Islam.
"Many said that since islam has a better view of Mary than most "protestants", they were closer to being "Christian". Now that is balderdash, but if I wanted to start throwing mud on this issue, it would be very easy to spin it the other way."
You stumbled across an interesting theological comment which points to an equally interesting religious phenomenon which is seen in Lebanon, Syria and the Holy Land. Alawites and some Shia have a profound devotion to the Theotokos. There are Marian shrines throughout the region where Mohammedans pray right along side Orthodox Christians for her intervention. It is of course, from a Sunni Mohammedan pov, syncretism of the highest order, but there it is. I know Lebanese Orthodox Christians who say that many Shia are "almost Christians" because of this and the Alawites are, derisively, called "Little Christians" by the Sunnis.
I don't think you could spin this the other way with any success even if you wanted to. These pieces of ancient Christianity which persist among the Mohammedans of that region are clearly relics of the Orthodox past of their ancestors. It is not an indication that Christianity learned Marian devotion from the Mohammedans. The timeline is all wrong. In this sense its like the comment once made to me by a WS Lutheran priest who attended one of our Lenten devotions during which we say the Prayer of +Ephraim the Syrian. That prayer involves full body prostrations. He said that we must have picked that up from the Mohammedans. Well, we do look like a bunch of Mohammedans when we say that prayer, but they got it from us, not the other way around.
LOL! The thing that always amuses me is how many people are ignorant of the fact that Islam simply used some of the Byzantine Christian religious practices common in its part of the world, the Middle East, in its picking and chosing of things for its syncretist cult. Part of this, of course, is because Muslims themselves are somewhat like the old USSR, where the Russians kept announcing that they had invented everything from electricity on up, despite irrefutable evidence that these things had been invented long before the USSR came into being.
Muslim doctrine gets around its recent arrival on the religious historical sceene by declaring that everyone is "born" Muslim, and that even historical figures who lived before Islam were therefore Muslims. It seems that they, unfortunately, have found many Westerners who are only too happy (or maybe ignorant enough) to give Islam credit for all sorts of things it could never possibly have done.
Sorry, I don't see it as a hit piece. I have seen many Protestant articles that are critical of the Church, btw, that I would not consider hit pieces, but interesting discussions of their perceptions of the Church. I see this article as a Catholic's discussion of some interesting perceptions about Protestantism (which Protestants, obviously, are free to clarify or reject entirely).
The more absurd the claim, the easier it should be to debunk - or laughed at. I prefer the laughing, so when I am sure no one would take the article seriously, I zot it for a piñata.
But because some might take this article seriously whereas some might consider it absurd, it is not a candidate to zot. So posters should make their case for or against the points raised in the article - and those who think the claim is laughable or mean, should simply say so.
If every post were pro-[pick a confession] there would be no debate, no town square - and every thread would be like a "Closed" caucus thread. A table full of brochures on different confessions is not a religion forum.
We do however draw the line on hate mongering. That is why Christian Identity aka Aryan Nations aka KKK sources are not allowed anywhere on the forum. Neither are Stormfront, V-Date, the false oath for the Knights of Columbus or Jack Chick materials or any anti-Semitic sources.
Examples of hate websites: Hate Directory
I think that a three-way comparison, one also bringing in Judaism, would have enabled him to make his points more strongly. Islam is, I think, a heresy of Judaism rather than Christianity, since Mohammed' s religion took on its shape a Medina as he clashed with the Jews there. The Koran is, more or less, a substitution for the Pentateuch. That said, the fideism of modern evangelicalism, with its indifference to theology, and its
arminianism are points of similarity to Islamic fundamentalism.
Thank you for the clarification. I try not to participate in anything I think is a [fill in the blank]-bashing thread, since I think it's pointless, makes one commit many sins against charity, and just raises the blood pressure. But a good discussion is always refreshing, and there aren't many places anymore where one can find this kind of discussion of serious issues, taken seriously.
There has long been discussion over whether Islam was a Christian heresy or a Jewish heresy. Personally, I think Mohammed was somewhat of an equal-offender borrower from other religions, which is precisely one of the things that makes it hard for people to deal with Islam intellectually. It's slippery, parts of it bear a fleeting resemblence to some Jewish or Christian belief or text or figure, and it even has many pagan components that no doubt baffled the good pagans of their day.
Reformation leaders, such as Luther and Calvin, did seek a return to the Chistianity of the early Church Fathers, but more radical reformers cared little about patristic writing. Evangelicals are only now rediscovering them. But I have never met a Baptist layman who has any knowledge about the Christological controveries of the 4th and 5th Centuries. Repudiating the historical creeds as authoritative has led to the repudiation of the Confessions, which are rational disagreementsd with Catholic doctrine. To reduce Christianity to the simple statement that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savor is to ignore two thousand years of reflection on the the question Our Lord asked: Who do you say that I am? There have been a thousand different opinions? Who is right?
Over the top, but the average Mexican evangical pastor has a very Kornic view of the Bible.
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