1
Response to Mona Siddiqui by dr. Harm Goris
Annual Lecture Master Christianity and Society Tilburg 20 Febr. 2014,
This is a fascinating book and it is one of a kind. Professor Siddiqui has a vast knowledge of
the history of the theological dialogue between Muslims and Christians. She quotes Church
fathers, Syrian-Christian authors from the ninth century I did not know, Thomas Aquinas,
Luther, Kierkegaard up to the great 20th century protestant theologians Bultmann, Barth and
Pannenberg. And likewise, there is an impressive number of references to Islamic writers
ranging from the early kalam scholars, the great Al-Ghazali, to Shia authors and Sufi mystics.
It is not that professor Siddiqui wants to show off and impress the reader – although this is
an unintended result– but to show the wide variety of views on Jesus. That is also, I think,
why the title of the book is not ‘Christianity and Islam and Jesus’, but ‘Christians, Muslims
and Jesus’.
Negative Christology
There is not one, final, fixed picture of Jesus in Islam or in Christianity, but individual
believers in both religions developed their own ideas of who Jesus is and of what he did and
does and will do. And as a Christian theologian, I think this rich diversity is how it should be.
Jesus’ person and his works remain an inexhaustible mystery to us. He is greater than we can
ever comprehend. John the Baptist confesses this when he says about Jesus: ‘Among you
stands one whom you do not know’ (John 1, 26). The early Church struggled for centuries to
find a formulation for expressing the Jesus mystery. It took long discussions and creative
theological ingenuity before, in the year 451, the council of Chalcedon decided on the
famous dogma ‘Christ is one person in two natures, the divine and the human nature, and
both natures are unconfused, unchanged, not divided and inseparable.’ What is important is
that the dogma is not be understood as a positive, biographical description of Jesus. It does
not say how Jesus is put together, but rather the dogma is a warning or a rule for how not to
speak or think of Him. Do not say anything of Him that takes away either from his full
humanity or from his full divinity. But about the relation between his humanity and divinity,
we can only speak in negative terms: the two natures are not confused, not changed, not
divided, not separated. The dogma serves to safeguard the inexpressible mystery of the
Incarnation. That is something that I and my fellow Christians must always be reminded of:
we do not comprehend Jesus, we do not have him in our back pocket, but we must always
convert, repent and try to grow spiritually, penetrating deeper into the mystery, becoming
more and more aware of the infinity of its meaning and its significance and more aware of
how little we grasp of it. We can call this ‘negative christology’.
2
Revelation
The incarnation, the Eternal Word of God becoming man and sharing our fate till death,
belongs to the heart of the Christian gospel. It also involves a different understanding of
what revelation means. In her book, prof. Siddiqui states that the concept of revelation in
Islam and in Christianity is one of the key differences between the two religions. “The
fundamental issue, however, remained that for the purpose of Islamic prophecy, revelation
appears but divine distance is maintained. For Christians, in the Incarnation, God is revealed
and the distance is overcome’ (pp. 147-48). And again, on p. 221: ‘In Christianity and Islam
the modes of God’s disclosure are dramatically different.’ And she is right. For Christianity,
basically, divine revelation does not consist in God telling us something. It is not so much
that God gives us information or instruction, that he communicates messages to us. No,
revelation means that God gives Himself to us. For Christianity, divine revelation is God’s
self-communication to humankind. He does so by sending the eternal divine Word and the
eternal Holy Spirit into history. The Word becomes human in Jesus and the Holy Spirit is
given to the Church and poured out into the hearts of the believers. These two missions of
the Word and of the Spirit constitute so to say the infrastructure of God’s revelation and are
the backbone of salvation history. That God has become present to humans for their wellbeing and their flourishing with such an unthought-of and unheard of nearness, is what
motivated Christians to develop the doctrines of the Trinity and of the two natures of Christ.
By God’s self-gift, the distance between Creator and creature, between God and human
beings, is indeed overcome, as prof. Siddiqui says.
Distinction God – creatures
However, for Christians this does not mean that the distinction between the two is nullified.
True, in the Bible, 2 Peter 1,4 it is said that we “may become partakers of the divine nature”.
And the theology of the eastern church focuses very much on the topic of our ‘deification’ or
‘divinization’, that means, that we become divine through the transformation that God’s
nearness brings about in us. However, such language should not be understood as if the
distinction between Creator and creature is removed, as if we are dissolved in the ocean of
God’s unity. The question is then: how to articulate the distinction between God and
creature. How does God differ from human beings? In her book, Professor Siddiqui points
out that the very same question has also occupied Muslim scholars from the very beginning,
and she refers to ‘the perennial tanzih-tashbih debates’. How to think together God’s
transcendence and his immanence? In Islam, God is the sovereign Lord of all, yet he is also
closer to man than his jugular vein, as the Qur’an says (50,16). Christian theologians were
confronted with similar paradoxes, and so it seems, even more urgently. For it is not only the
3
question of how the transcendent God is present to all of creation, but moreover, how God
is present in a truly new and different way to his adopted children, to those who know and
love Him. And, on top of that, the question of how God is present in a unique, singular way
in Jesus Christ. These three ways of divine presence, as Creator in everything, as known and
loved in the believers, and as person in Christ, differ qualitatively; it is not just a matter of
gradually less and more, but of fundamentally new modes of divine presence in the world. I
think that Muslim and Christian theologians can help each other in finding words for
expressing the distinction between God and the non-divine, the creature. This is not an easy
task. After all, we are only familiar with distinctions and differences within created reality.
And there we can discern different types of differences. This chair differs from that chair,
that is one kind of difference. But it also differs from a desk, which again is another type of
difference. And the chair differs from me, from the Milky Way; the chair also differs from the
battle of Waterloo and from the number 12. These are all distinct kinds of differences, but
however disparate, these differences have one thing in common. In one way they are
similar, for they all indicate differences between creatures and hold within created reality.
The difference between God and creatures is of a totally other nature. It is a difference of its
own kind. As my colleague Henk Schoot has phrased it: God differs differently. I think that a
shared effort of Muslim and Christian theologians can help us all to become more aware of
the unicity of this distinction and find ways how to formulate it. Such a joint enterprise of
Muslim-Christian dialogue in dealing with the same religious question can also contribute to
a better mutual understanding of the differences between us. I think here especially about
what it means for Christians to become transformed, recreated, through God’s grace and to
participate in God’s self-knowledge and self-love and what it means for Christians to profess
that Christ is fully human and fully divine.
Human transformation
Professor Siddiqui correctly points out that the Christological debate between Muslims and
Christians is not an isolated topic. It is intrinsically connected to views on what human beings
are and to what end God has called them. Christians believe that in Christ and through the
Holy Spirit, they are in the process of being transformed, of being recreated into new
persons. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit are the decisive
eschatological events. According to Christianity, the eschaton, i.e. the final realization of
God’s intention for humanity from all eternity, or what Jesus called ‘the Kingdom of God’, is
not solely something future, but it is already beginning to open here and now. In Christianity,
God has not ordained us for returning to Paradise, to the pristine status of creation, but for
something much more and higher. It is the participation in the divine nature, the deification
4
of human beings. In traditional Catholic language, this is called the supernatural end of the
beatific vision. We are destined for a loving communion with God, for seeing Him face-toface. As Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians: ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but
then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have
been fully known.’ Although that final, eternal vision is not of this world, but is hoped for in
the future world, there is already a beginning here and now: we see dimly in a mirror and
know in part, says Paul. This eschatological, supernatural transformation of human beings is
what Professor Siddiqui finds difficult or even impossible to follow. As she writes: “I am not
sure that I see the complexities of this theology as meaningful in my life. I don't understand
the radical nature of this love which makes God man and man God […] I also know that I
must go to him eventually, that he has not already come, the descent of the sublime” (246).
Maybe Christians don’t understand it very well either, that’s why they keep talking about it
and writing complex theological volumes. But somehow this transformation is a reality in
their lives. And it is also from the reality of somehow being saved and recreated by God, that
they look backward and develop stories about the Fall, original sin and about humanity being
lost by sin. It is very important to keep that order straight. We have to start with being saved
by God and from there by way of contrast understand our previous condition. We should not
reason the other way around, although this has often been done in Christian theology and
preaching. We should not start with the observation how wicked people are and then
conclude that Christ must come and must die in order to overcome our wretchedness. The
right perspective is the reverse. Professor Siddiqui writes that she cannot understand ‘why
the Fall becomes the paradigm of human life, making the cross the ultimate paradox of
death and new life’ (242-243). My point is that in true Christianity the Fall is not the
paradigm of human life, but the new life in Christ and the Spirit is.
The final chapter of the book is very personal. Prof. Siddiqui writes that in Islam, ‘the
vocabulary of God’s nearness is radically different because there is always a separation
between God and man. But this separation is in doctrine only, not in experience. The
absence of the cross does not diminish divine love, it is replaced by a different longing for
God. I have a copy of the Qur’an always at my bedside table. I try to read at least a couple of
lines before I leave the house every day. I do not see God physically in this reading but I feel
this presence. To feel God’s gaze in this action is powerful, consoling, even moving’ (p. 245).
A few pages before, Mona explains that in her experience as a Muslim the separation from
God is always overcome through his mercy, his compassion. To know and to trust that we
can always return to him when we have gone astray and that he will always mercifully
welcome us, is what I would call the faith that saves.