RTS Papers / A Christian Encounter with Islam / Spring 2019
IMPLICATIONS ON THE JUSTICE OF ALLAH
The questions of revelation and righteousness come together in practical life. Muhammad’s example is a normative for Muslims. The phrase, “the living Quran,” is even used about his words and deeds. Does this not present a problem for the eternal decree of Allah? Even we take away the Satanic Verses, what about when Muhammad felt like committing suicide after the revelation? Is this praiseworthy, blameworthy, or irrelevant? Even the living out of righteousness takes us right back to the revelation problem for Muslims. How do we know which parts are more authoritative than others? And that is only another way to ask: How do we know the will of Allah for our lives?
Let us ask an even more clarifying question: What must a Muslim do to be saved? There is great reward for fighting for Allah’s cause (Q2:217-218; 3:168-175, 195; 48:16-17). Paradise can also be gained by reciting the ninety-nine names of God. But the closest thing we can call their “gospel” is that God can overlook sin arbitrarily. That is what “mercy” seems to imply in the oft repeated “merciful” (Q1:1) He can simply choose to forgive sins. There is no moral law requiring him to either punish sins or require atonement for them. He gives moral law to man, but he himself is under no moral obligation. Yet interestingly the sin of shirk will not be forgiven. Then on what basis can there be an unforgivable sin? Why should his mercy not be able to extend to this as well? Is there a reason in him or none at all? Is there a reason outside of him? But this reason outside of him, does it not exert a causal influence over him in the effect of such inevitable unforgiveness toward Christians? What is so powerful about the bad nature of Christians that it would be determinative for the hatred of Allah?
It is interesting that the description of Allah as “holy” occurs only once in the Quran (59:23). The whole conception of divine justice seems devoid of moral quality, of virtue, so that behavior that accords with it is more like a mercenary affair. For Zwemer, “The reason is plain. Mohammed had no true idea of the nature of sin and its consequences.” Note that this does not mean that there is no Muslim definition of sin. It is mentioned in quite a few surat (Q2:80, 284-286; 4:30, 46; 9:116; 14:39; 47:2-3; 69:35; 70:19-25; 86:9). The reason for the disconnect between what is right and what is holy must run deeper than sin, and so must lie in the standard against which sin is measured.
Zwemer contended that, “The words ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ have superseded the use of ‘guilt’ and ‘transgression;’ the reason for this is found in the Koran itself. Nothing is right or wrong by nature, but becomes such by the fiat of the Almighty” [30]. He goes as far as saying that the total lack of any distinction between ceremonial and moral law shows the same thing. In other words nothing is revealed to be wrong by nature because the moral nature of the Lawgiver is unknown. Al-Ghazzali put it this way, “It is in His power to pour down upon men torments, and if He were to do it, His justice could not be arraigned. Yet He rewards those who worship Him for their obedience on account of His promise and beneficence, not of their merit or of necessity, since there is nothing which He can be tied to perform” [quoted in Zwemer, 33].
We too would say that God is not indebted to anyone, but that is because (1) the sinner really is objectively guilty and (2) Christ fully satisfied God’s punishment for that guilt. So in both the sinner’s objective guilt and Christ’s objective payment, there is a ground of justice in God that is “binding” God. To say that God “must be just” is not to imagine something extrinsic to him constituting this necessity. The Muslim thinker conceives of the necessity of justice in God as somehow or other binding upon God, as if from outside of God. Thus he must posit a justice in God that is both “higher” than our ability to conceive or question, and yet still not binding on that will! So the tenth century Muslim theologian Al-Ash‘ari coined the expression la kayf, apparently meaning “without asking ‘how’” [Chapman, 108].
Let us set down a general principle for salvation from sin in any religion. What does it means that one could ever be “saved” by achieving an actual righteousness before the bar of divine justice? As the Reformers recognized in their argument against Rome, the only righteousness that could satisfy God is a perfect righteousness. The Muslim’s doctrine has two choices here. Allah is either accepting human beings on the basis of justice or on the basis of his own mercy. If by justice, then it is an imperfect justice; if by mercy, then it is a mercy in the face of justice unsatisfied. We have already examined the implications for an arbitrary mercy. But what does the Quran hold out about the other option: salvation by personal deeds? The only possible hope here is in the notion of the “scales” (Q7:8-9; 21:47; 101:4-11). Whatever the exact law behind these scales, clearly there is a causal relationship between deeds and eternal rewards and punishments. And if all else fails, Muhammad becomes a kind of mediator (Q4:80; 33:36), yet on what ultimate basis? Only one will.
IMPLICATIONS ON THE LOVE OF ALLAH
This may appear as a strange heading. Muslims do not speak of the “love” of Allah in the same way that Christians speak about the love of God. However that is just the point. This is not coincidental. The question I want to close with is this: Can a deity of sheer unknowable will be either loving or loved? Now the first thing that a Muslim would say is that love is ascribed to Allah (Q3:31-32). That is true, and yet that surah speaks of the reciprocating love for man that depends upon whether or not he has first loved Allah. How different this is from that statement of John: “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).
What does this have to do with voluntarism? If what was said before is true, that the attributes of Allah are really expressions of his will, then this “love” is an expression of his will. Consequently, Allah is not love but rather may love or else may not. Indeed he may love one person today and choose not to love that same person tomorrow. There is no inherent reason in his being (none that we can know of) for his love to continue. Where does such a love fit in to that common division of Allah’s attributes into two: the “terrible” and the “glorious,” and the former “more numerous and more emphasized than the latter”? [Zwemer, 27]
We receive a chilling vision of what can only be called the sadism of this deity in Sahih Hadith: “Abu Musa' reported that Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: When it will be the Day of Resurrection Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: That is your rescue from Hell-Fire” [bk. 37, ch. 8]. A being who is able and willing to throw whoever he wants into hell, in spite of (from his perspective on justice) being good, in order to reward those who are unjust, for no reason whatsoever, but simply that he wills to do so--this is hardly a being we can recognize as much of a person, let alone a good person.
This was always one of the defining characteristics of the pagan gods as the Christian God liberated their worshipers. The polytheistic deities of Israel’s neighbors, as well as those of the Greco-Roman pantheon and Oriental cults encountered by the early Church, were gods that could not be counted on for personal relationship or ultimate security. In addition to being at each other’s throats, they were capricious. At the end of the day, these false gods were like the abusive rulers who fashioned them. Gods of sheer will are gods of power, of irrational force or hopeless threat.
We cannot love what we do not know. In Christianity God’s sovereignty and justice are reasons to worship God precisely because they are seen to be good. We can see how God’s decrees are rooted in his holiness and our eventual good (Rom. 8:28). His ways are not always discerned, but since Jesus shows us what the Father is like, we know all of his ways as good, and we know that He bore the cost to reconcile us in spite of all our wickedness.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963
Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Two. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004
Chapman, Colin. Cross and Crescent. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007
Copleston, F. C. Medieval Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1961
Geisler, Norman & Abdul Saleeb. Answering Islam. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993
Popkin, Richard H. ed. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999
The Qur’an. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010
Riddell, Peter G. & Peter Cotterell. Islam in Context: Past, Present, and Future. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003
White, James. What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur’an. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2013
Zwemer, Samuel M. The Muslim Doctrine of God. CrossReach Publications, 2017
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