The flaw in his approach is that while the Muslims who chose the reading seem to have been only too aware of the differences, and chose to declare them in their Koranic reading during the Christian worship, the Provost, on the other hand, appears to have been unaware.
When asked if he had known what the passage of the Koran said about Jesus, how it denied what Christians hold central to their faith, he “declined to comment further”.
This was not, then, “a dialogue about the ways we differ”. It was not even a strategy of parity. If there had been a conversation in which he had said, “Let us insert into each other’s worship and prayers readings from our sacred scriptures which confront and contradict each others’ faith”, how would the Islamic community have responded? We will never know, because the exercise was not actually the one he claimed it to be.
Read it all from Gavin Ashenden.
يسوع هو الله
Ralph, can you translate that Arabic, please?
Katherine, the translation is “Jesus is God”.
In the context of interfaith dialogue, this is the only thing that a Christian can say to a Muslim. The response will initially be, “Let’s talk about what we have in common,” but invariably the response is, “Jesus is not God.” This stuff swirls around all the time, particularly at Christmas.
Judaism represents the written law. Christianity writes that law on the hearts of humanity. Islam…well…attempts to tell us that the law on the outside is worth more than the Spiritual written law on the inside.