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.
If you want to discuss "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism," maybe we could start a separate thread on that...
But as far as this thread goes, I think the author does make some interesting points. First of all, let me say that I don't think Protestantism is directly descended from Islam. For one thing, what is "Protestantism"? There are so many varieties of it that the term is almost meaningless. Nowadays, it means simply neither Orthodox nor Catholic. So perhaps the best thing to do for this discussion is to limit it specifically to Luther and his immediate followers and disregard the variants that appeared later.
That said, I don't think Luther was directly inspired by Islam, although there certainly would have been some discussion of it in the universities of his day. Many of the things that Luther believed or defended, either initially or eventually, such as polygamy, were typical features of other, earlier movements and did not come from Islam. The only thing I do wonder about is the "Sola Scriptura" current. That strikes me as something that might reflect a direct influence of Islam and its approach to its texts. Or did it come from somewhere else? I don't recall it's having been part of any other earlier movement in Christianity.
I am in full agreement. But there are some very interesting points made in the article that are worth pondering. More than once on FR, I have seen it noted that Islam is a heresy of Christianity.
As always, your comments are much appreciated.
Very interesting comments. Thanks.
Interesting. Thanks for the links.
Okay, here's a "point."
What do you get when you ignore everything not found in the Bible? Fundamentalism. Christian Fundamentalism, to be exact.
Why, who are they? Presbyterians, Baptists, etc... Protestants all.
So you see, this one "point" in the article is flatly false.
Further, to compare Islamic Fundamentalism to Christian Fundamentalism is simply insane. We don't even worship the same God.
Maybe nice-looking, but it is hard to tell from here.
"Part of Islam was derived from Gnosticism, but much of it is derived from ancient Arab religious beliefs."
And from the influence of Nestorian monks on Mohammed. There were also various strains of Marian heresies, including on in which she was worshipped as a goddess which worked their way into Mahammedanism. Nestorianism still exists in pockets here and there from Syria to China. Most of its influence elsewhere is seen in certain Protestant views of the nature of Christ. Of course Judaism had a major influence, especially on the nature of the mohammedan god allah.
Doubtful, since Islam doesn't require Muslims to understand the Koran & translation into any language from the original Arab is frowned upon. The idea is to recite the book in Arab & Allah will do the rest.
Then there are the side books about the life of Mo, so the faithful can model their lives after him. When Muslims want to know how it all applies to something, they get a ruling about it (fatwa) from a Muslim scholar.
Catholics are not idol worshipers. That is a common misunderstanding.
*Ungh* (My brothers fight so!)
This is a Protestant bash thread, get with the program!
Hmm, no mention of the Islamic-esque inquisitions. No mention of spreading faith by the sword in Latin America. I could go on but why bother.
This is simply cherry picking history.
Thanks for your comments regarding the article.
"In my opinion, Allah is not God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob which means Muslims have no spiritual relationship whatsoever with Jews or Christians."
Well, we certainly can point to that moon god or goddess, I forget which, from which Allah seems derived, but the fact is that the Mahammedans say that Allah is the same god worshipped by Abraham, Moses etc. They've claimed that from the beginning. And you must admit that the complete ineffability of Allah is similar to that of God in the OT. Beyond that, the apparent vicious capriciousness of Allah fits rather well with at least some OT versions of God as well as what some Protestants profess to believe He is like. We've had a discussion on another thread here on FR about the differing views about God as between Orthodox and Latins on one side and Calvinist type Christians on the other. I myself remarked that the divergence is so profound that it is as if we worship two different "Gods".
Certainly Orthodoxy and to a lesser extent The Latin Church have similarities to and connections with Judaism. Jewish friends and a Rabbi I know marvel at the Divine Liturgy, with the Rabbi commenting that but for soem of the prayers, he imagines himself at a Temple ceremony. The Protestant connection to the OT and its ideas about the covenant God made with the Jews is self-evident. I doubt the author of this piece would deny that. Judaism exists complete within itself. That is to say, no one can call Judaism a heresy. One can say, however, that heresies arose out of Judaism just as they arose out of catholic Christianity or out of a mixture of both or the heresies of both. Islam is one such heresy and it has certain hallmarks which Protestantism shares. But as I said, I don't believe Protestantism arose out of Islam.
Of course Judaism had a major influence, especially on the nature of the mohammedan god allah.
They pulled the founder of their religion from Judaism, the whole Abraham thing. They are the children of Ishmael, the older son born to Abraham. Ishmael was the son Abraham offered in sacrifice & his inheritance was usurped. The Jewish prophecies about the Messiah are meant for them.
As a Christian Catholic, I publicly reject it. Helium could not make this rise to the level of offal
LOL! Okay.
So far Catholics have gotten the Inquisition thrown in their face twice and "Holier than Thou" branded on their forehead in way of refute.
I was more interested in ripping the article to shreds as nonsense than insulting our brothers.
Surbutt, it becomes a question as to where one even starts. LOL
That's what the Koran says, not the Bible.
It was Isaac.
Genesis 22:2
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