Concurr with Andrew Harrod

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Dec 26, 2013 at 23:25

I followed your link and basically agree with Andrew Harrod's piece.

The overlap of which Hooper speaks seems to involve a Jesus who is (1) born of a virgin, (2) a miracle worker, (3) a prophet, (4) human, (5) present body and soul in heaven, and (6) an important figure in the Last Judgment.

Yet, as a Christian, I cannot help but note that Islam's Jesus leaves out (1) the virgin birth as a new beginning for humanity, with Adam the sinner bringing us sin, estrangement from God, the miseries of this life, death itself, and the pains of Hell forever while Jesus, obedient even to the atoning death on the cross, brings us salvation; (2) Jesus is anointed not just as a prophet, but to a kingly and a priestly office as well; the first being manifested in the risen Jesus even now reigning from heaven and being the promised Davidic king whose reign shall know no end, the second again manifested in the atonement he worked for us on the cross; (3) Jesus being fully God as well as fully man, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who is the proper object of the rational creature's worship along with the Father and the Holy Spirit (emphatically NOT Mary); (4) Jesus having truly tasted of death for his people to atone for our sins; and (5) his current position in heaven coming after his true bodily resurrection from the dead, showing that even our last enemy death is conquered.

I am deeply bothered that Hooper and people like him make no mention at all of how Christians in Muslim-majority countries these days need to have armed guards as they engage in public worship, and that the Christmas greetings sent by their Muslim neighbors in those lands seem to consist of bombings, killings, and abductions.

The overlaps between Judaism and Christianity are far more profound: (1) Jesus was and IS a Jew, (2) four-fifths of the Christian Bible is the Jewish Bible, (3) the whole understanding of Jesus' person and work in Christianity grew out of Jewish Messianic expectations, and (4) no Muslim spokesman, to my knowledge, has yet to explain how Christians and Jews, in their millennia of non-cooperation and frequent hostility, wrangle over the same Oldd Testament text (albeit with the order of the books differing, this does not negate that a Christian can recognize any of the familiar books of his Old Testament in corresponding books of the Jewish Tanakh)--when Islam says that the Christians and Jews corrupted the Scriptures. Christians also do not excuse themselves from reading the Old Testament on the ground that it is corrupted, but read it for spiritual, intellectual, and ethical guidance.

From the little I have read in Qur'an and Hadith, it seems that the Muslim sources do not truly reflect on what the virgin birth and miracles of Christ mean, find in them no theological significance, and basically offer little save the "Oooh! Aaah! What a wonder!" reaction. The inclusion of the clay birds miracle from the non-canonical Infancy Gospel (much later than the canonical four) and such things as young Abram breaking Terah's idols (from the Midrash Rabbah) strike me as Muhammad and his earliest witnesses picking up "lore" and uncritically assuming it was part of Scripture.

I daresay that contra Hooper, there's less overlap between Christianity and Islam than CAIR and modernistic Christians think.

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