Look, I realise this might be seen as trying to provoke a reaction. I'm not. I've just had three thoughts hit me at once, and found a common strand in them.
I've always been struck by the thought from Leslie Newbigin (in "The Open Secret") that
the working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess - shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.
Now I'll admit up front I'm not enough of a historian to judge how that happened and what effect it actually had; I have no idea, so I'm going to trust Newbigin on that one and assume that it is true, that Islamic theology has affected Christian thought in a profound way. (Let's be fair, it would be very strange if it hadn't!) There were three areas I recently came up against where I detected perhaps a hint - perhaps not - of this influence.
Trinity
This was Newbigin's original point. We don't, on the whole, think of God as Trinity. Well, at least I don't, so I'm a representative sample of what he was talking about. Although I'm (fervently) trinitarian, my day-to-day experiential view of God is dominated by God the Father, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as useful adjuncts to perform His work for Him. I don't think of God as three persons; I don't pray to God as three persons; it's a less natural concept to get your head around.
And if it's less natural, then it's harder to preach. Much easiest to start with the concepts of God that people have already, and "tweak" them a bit! But if God is fundamentally three-in-one, then that ought to be what we preach, ought it not?
The Bible
I've been discussing with Custardy about the role given to the Bible in evangelicalism, the concept of "the Word of God" and charges of bibliolatry - worshipping the book. There's a cruel but somewhat understandable joke about a local church that it is trinitarian, but its Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Scripture. But as Custard points out, the supreme revelation of God is not the Bible, but Jesus the Messiah.
It was that phrase that God me thinking about the Islamic concept of the supreme revelation of God, which is of course the written scripture. Did Islamic thinking on relevation - "at the beginning of the High Middle Ages" - affect our own? My personal view is that, of course, the exaltation of Scripture was the result of a need brought about by the lack of a magisterium post-Reformation, but as usual it is difficult to separate all the elements. But however it came about, the tendency to make the Bible (a static thing) "the Word of God" (which is generally a dynamic thing when used in the Bible itself) and to declare it infallible, inerrant, and all the other in-s - and thereby to reduce it to pure revelation, to decontextualize it and to dismiss the questions raised by its human transmission - is most certainly Quranic.
Is that an influence we should be swallowing wholesale?
Sin
OK, I don't have my thoughts fully worked out on this one, but a recent discussion with H reminded me of the fabulous EMQ article "The Gospel For Shame Cultures" which pointed out the abhorrence in which Muslim theology holds the Christian incarnation, the idea that God participated in and identified himself this world. How can God do this? He is pure and holy, and hates sin. Now I have to affirm that. God is pure and holy, and He does hate sin.
But at the same time He does not shy away from it. The common idea that God "abandoned" Jesus on the cross because He could not bear to look upon the sin is utterly heretical. It is heretical because it repudiates the Trinity; just like my (equally heretical!) common workaday concept of God, it regards Jesus as a separate entity dispatched by God to do His work, rather than as God incarnate. If God could not bear to look upon Jesus' sin, how could Jesus, who is God, bear it himself? How could Jesus, who is God, take upon himself such sin?
It is also heretical because it repudiates the Incarnation. Jesus, who is God, entered this world. He lived among us, dealing with the sin of our society. He enjoyed hanging around with prostitutes and drunkards; they were his people. He spent very little time rebuking them for their sin, even though he had plenty of opportunity. Instead of talking about it, he did something about it. (In fact, thinking about it, he fairly clearly told us not to rebuke others' sin, because we're always worse ourselves.)
But this, after all, the whole darned point of Christianity: that God did not leave us to fight our sin on our own in some holy arrogance, keeping Himself pure and unsullied, but He got His hands dirty - very dirty - and joined us in that fight. He who had no sin became sin for us. It's a paradox but there it is: God hates sin so much he filled himself with it.
Should we try to avoid sin? Of course. Did God avoid sin? Of course not. God abhors sin, but at the same time, He embraces it, and through embracing it, overpowers it. This is obviously not something we should emulate! His goodness is enough to conquer sin, but ours is not! But it is, at any rate, something we should not deny.
And here's where I haven't got it all worked out. I want to affirm the idea that God is pure and holy and hates sin. But I do not want to fall into saying that sin is utterly abhorrent to him, and to overemphasise His hatred and separation from sin, because I think I know where that idea comes from. God did most certainly not separate himself from sin, and that is what is so offensive to Muslims about Christianity! And I see their point. It's a complete scandal. Why aren't we offended by it? God became sin! It would be blasphemous if it wasn't what the Bible teaches... Maybe our overfamiliarity with the story has blinded us to how scandalous it really is.
I don't know. I haven't got it worked out. Both are true. Perhaps what God actually hates is not the sin itself, but the knowledge of what that sin has done to His beloved people.
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