Islam & Homosexuality

Peceptive piece published today, (I also touched on this subject in my speech this week, see below).

Friday 29 May 2009, by Tariq Ramadan

The Islamic position on homosexuality has become one of the most sensitive issues facing Muslims living in the West, particularly in Europe. It is being held up as the key to any eventual “integration” of Muslims into Western culture, as if European culture and values could be reduced to the simple fact of accepting homosexuality. The contours of this de facto European culture is in a state of constant flux, shifting according to the topic of the day. Just as some insist, as do the Pope and certain intellectuals—often dogmatic and exclusivist defenders of the Enlightenment—that Europe’s roots are Greek and Christian (thus excluding Muslims), so several homosexual spokesman and the politicians who support them are now declaring (with an identical rejection of Muslims) that the “integration of Muslims” depends on their acceptance of homosexuality. The contradiction is a serious one: does Christianity, which forms the root structure of European culture, and which purports to embody European values and identity, not condemn homosexuality? A curious marriage. Unless the contradiction is intended to stigmatize Islam and Muslims by presenting them as “the Other”… without fear of self-contradiction.

rest of article here

My Speech at Islam and Terrorism Debate

MDI Event Wednesday May 27th. (Video of the event can be seen on the MDI site)

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and salamualikum. Welcome to this evenings event organised by the Muslim Debate Initiative. We are glad you were able to come.

Our subject night could not be more controversial or more topical: Islam and Terrorism: Is Islam a threat to the West? Is Islam inherently violent and barbaric? Is the media misrepresenting the facts or is there a real threat?

The five of us seated here are all Muslims who are willing to put ourselves in the firing line, so to speak, and face your questions, criticisms and comments about this most important subject. We welcome discussion and debate, and dont worry, you will not offend us! Feel free to leave political correctness at the door and raise all those anxieties and disagreements you really want to make!

Each of us will present a controversial topic:

Abdullah will tackle sharia law and the Islamic state
Yahyah will discuss who the real Muhammad (pbuh) was
Sami will talk about Jihad and terrorism
Adam will survey the issue of Muslims and the media
and finally I’ll attempt to discuss whether Muslims in the UK are a threat to traditional British values.

We’ll each talk for a maximum of 10 minutes and then after that we go straight to the Q and A session. I’ll explain the format of this after the talks.
———————————————————-

My Speech:

Are Muslims in this country a threat to traditional British values?

I want to discuss a particular example of how Islamic values and traditional British values walk hand in hand, but before I do that I want to say a few words of a general nature.

The Western image of the typical Muslim is often an image of lethal anger. The television viewer watches, from the safety of his armchair, mobs on the rampage; “hallucinated automata”, to quote Wyndham Lewis’s phrase. He sees faces contort with fury and hears voices made hoarse by the shouting of slogans. If these were indeed religious manifestations, one would be justified in abandoning all hope for the future of Islamic spirituality. But they are nothing of the sort. “Anger”, said the Prophet, “burns up good deeds just as fire burns up dry wood”.
Anger can be a powerful manifestation of the disordered ego, and the very meaning of the word Islam implies the subordination of the ego to the spirit, its chastening and its purification. ‘Holy anger’, when the circumstances demand it, is detached, calm and just.

People who complain that Muslims refuse to fit in with what are called “civilised values” are unaware of just what is being demanded of Muslims. These values are part of the air we breath whether our politics are of the left or right, conservative or liberal. They are the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

I think they can be summarised in four ways:

Firstly, man is now the measure of all things and nothing is to be judged in relation to an absolute or to a transcendent reality.

Secondly, man is both judge and criterion of judgement. There is no higher court of appeal or source of pardon.

Thirdly, whatever happens occurs within earthly time, for human existence stretches only from birth to death. Mans earthly life is therefore unconditionally important; to live is the supreme value, at death the game is over and lost.

Finally, there is the conviction that man is basically good; the evil which surrounds him is never his fault. It can only be blamed on institutions, on society, the economic system or defective education. Even MPs say their fraudulent expenses claims are entirely within the rules. Its not their fault!

These beliefs, so readily taken for granted, cannot be reconciled with Islam or traditional Christianity. What we do in this life echoes in eternity and we will be held to account for all our actions and thoughts by a God who is both completely just and the most merciful of all those who show mercy. Mankind is called to submit to Gods will, not to do our own will. As Jesus is reported to have said to his Lord, ‘May thy will be done, not mine’. This spiritual disposition is vanishing fast from Britain’s Christian churches, which have made some astonishing compromises with the spirit of the age. But Muslims see religion as a citadel resistant to decadence and changing tides of opinion, not as one strand in the pattern of modern life – the western way of life – but as an alternative to it. Those who have gone astray are invited to return and that is that. For Muslims there is one fixed mark, set down in the midst of times flow and that is the Faith as it came from God through the Prophet.

Last week the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted by 326 to 267 to uphold the decision to appoint a gay minister to a church in Aberdeen. The man in question, The Rev Scott Rennie, lives with his male partner. Muslims, and traditional Scottish Christians, find this decision astonishing for two reasons:

The very idea that men and women can actually vote, and by a majority verdict, alter God’s clearly expressed will, seems like presumption and blasphemy. The Christian churches, it seems, are trying desperately to keep up with the times and are in dereliction of their duty to be faithful to the revelation they received.

Secondly, God has expressly given us his commands in the Torah, the Gospel and the Quran. They cannot be changed. We, as Muslims, stand should to shoulder with those traditionalist clergy who resist these compromises with modernism. One of these ministers, the Reverend David Randall said, according to the BBC website, that he believed “a minister is somebody who ought to live by the Bible and we believe that the Bible’s teaching is quite clear in this matter – that marriage is the right and only context for sexual relationships.” And Muslims of course agree.

So not Islam is not a threat to traditional British values, which historically are based on Christian values, but their ally. Islam complements and reinforces them. I could duplicate many times over the same point: whether it be the sanctity of life, opposition to abortion on demand, the rejection of euthanasia and assisted suicide, or the respect and courtesy due to women, Muslims find a natural affinity with many traditional Christians in our churches, and hence with the best of British values and culture which were formed by the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

But of course Islam is a challenge to the forces of atheist materialism that reduce the individual to a mere consumer of goods; it is a challenge to those hedonist philosophies that deny God and worship the man-made idols of short-term pleasure and greed.

So the enemy is not Islam, which like Christianity and Judaism shares a common origin in the faith of Abraham, the great prophet of God.

America as a Jihad State: Middle Eastern perceptions of modern American theopolitics

Faith and Public Policy Seminar
Kings College, London, 21.04.09

© Abdal-Hakim Murad [April 2009]

The present time of slackening is a helpful moment to examine Muslim perceptions of Western religious intention. A kind of seven-year itch following 9/11 seems to have thrown up some possible resolutions of the polarity which look beyond the clearly fruitless ‘security agenda’. The publication, two years ago, of the Common Word marked perhaps the clearest and most remarkable sign of this, a genuine shift in the Muslim-Christian equation: David Burrell, one of the most seasoned Catholic specialists of Islam, has spoken of a dramatic turn-about unparalleled in recent history.[1] Even more recently, the fall of the Bush administration has allowed a more measured and less histrionic assessment of America’s engagement with political Islam and political Christianity over the past eight years. The Obama victory was followed within days by the death of Samuel Huntington, most notorious of advocates of the thesis of the mutual allergy of Islam and Christendom. It is a good time to take stock.

In today’s seminar I propose to begin with a survey of changing Middle Eastern perceptions of America following upon the rise of the so-called ‘theocon’ agenda in Bush’s America. I will then move on to some more general considerations of the issue of religious extremism as a strand in the mutual regard – or disregard – of what remains of Christian and Muslim civilisation.

continuation of article here

The Gospels are like Bilal: however hard you torture them, they will only say: ‘One! One!’

The Liberal Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Zeitgeist

The Vicarious Atonement proves that torture can be a good thing.

The Christ of the Apocalypse: No More Mr Nice Guy.

Christology: where is his Torah-observance?

From Contentions, by Tim Winter

Excellent Advice from Sh. Yasir Qadhi on ‘Dealing with Homosexual Urges’

In our religion, the discussion of whether these urges are because of ‘Nature’ or ‘nurture’ is really quite irrelevant. And by this I do not mean that we don’t have an answer to this question. As Muslims, we believe that the fitrah that Allah created us upon is that, in terms of sexuality at least, opposites attract. But it is possible that some people have corrupted this fitrah themselves, or it has been corrupted by external methods. And it cannot even be ruled out that for some, the change in this fitrah is beyond their control.

But the point is – and that is why I say the question is irrelevant to the Shar’i ruling – even if somebody has such urges, it does not justify them acting upon it. Rather, what we can say to those who feel attracted to the same gender is that having such urges and conquering them is a part of the test Allah has given them. Each one of us is tried in different ways, and merely wanting to do an act is not justification enough to carry it out. [...]

I say that I’m attracted to women. Does that legitimize going after every woman I’m attracted to? Of course not. We all have our desires and urges and we must all battle them. So if you experience urges that are unnatural, you must battle them, and without doubt Allah will reward you for that.

Another point to realize is that the urge, in and of itself, is not sinful. It is simply a desire, and desires are beyond our control, hence we are not accountable for them. But to allow such feelings to persist without trying to control them is problematic. In any case, the urge in and of itself is not sinful, acting on the urge is what incurs sin. As long as the desire remains in the realm of feeling, you are not accountable on the Day of Judgment, but the second that this desire is manifested in a physical action, you are liable for all that follows.

Lastly, even if you have acted upon this urge – and we seek Allah’s refuge from this – know that this would constitute a sin. Yes, a major sin, and one that most people would be disgusted by, but realize that it is a sin alone and not kufr. Hence, even acting upon it and committing a major sin does not expel you from the fold of Islam. However, to stand up and justify it, or defend it, or write articles claiming that it is Islamic, without a doubt constitutes kufr, and not merely sin.

Read the rest of this excellent article here

Talk at Regents Park Mosque, 16th May 2009

Salamualikum brothers and sisters

Today I would like to share with you some little know facts about one of the greatest Englishmen of history, Isaac Newton, and why he might be of interest to Muslims living in Britain today.

Sir Isaac Newton, born on 4 January 1643, was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, and theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His most significant work called the Principia, published in 1687, is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science.

When most people think of Isaac Newton, they think of him sitting under an apple tree observing an apple fall to the ground. When he saw the apple fall, Newton began to think about a specific kind of motion—gravity. Newton understood that gravity was the force of attraction between two objects. He also understood that an object with more matter exerted the greater force, or pulled smaller objects toward it. That meant that the large mass of the earth pulled objects toward it. That is why the apple fell down instead of up, and why people don’t float in the air.

Newton’s stature among scientists remains at the very top rank, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain’s Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Newton was voted the more influential.

Now Newton was also highly religious, producing more work on the Bible than the science he is remembered for today.

Newton’s study of the Old Testament was, as was to be expected, rigorous and thorough. He had more than thirty different versions of the Bible. He learned Hebrew in order to study the original texts of the prophets. He began a notebook in which he sch ematised his study, with headings such as ‘Incarnation’ and ‘Father God’. He amassed a huge library of biblical and early church literature. He read all the authorities of previous centuries, and assimilated the most modern texts of seventeen-century theology in his desire for knowledge. Newton wished to become the master of his subject, just as he had previously become the master of optics and mathematics. At his death he left a manuscript on the Bible of some 850 pages as well as a mass of assorted papers and notes.

In particular he became preoccupied with a dispute that raged in the fourth century, during the course of which he determined that the true faith – Protestantism, as he conceived it – had taken a perverse and dangerous turn. The great controversy at that time was between Arius and Athanasius. Athanasius taught what has become the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, in which Christ is seen as equal with God. Arius denied the doctrine of the Trinity by denying that Christ was of the same substance as God. The views of Athanasius were accepted at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and of course became a part of the Christian Creed which is still recited in most churches today.

But in the course of his intense study of the biblical texts Newton came to believe that Athanasius had perpetuated a fraud. Newton argued that Athanasius had inserted key words into the sacred Scriptures to support the argument that Christ was God. In that endeavour he had been supported by the Church of Rome, and from that corruption of the texts had sprung the general corruption of the Christian Church itself. The purity and faith of the early church had been destroyed by superstitious zealots who were intent upon bowing down before the illusion of the Trinity or Three In One. Newton’s mathematical, as well as his spiritual beliefs directly opposed their position. In his support of Arius Newton was proclaiming that the priests and bishops of the Church were practising idolatry in their worship of Christ. Newton discovered, in the words of a fellow Arian, ‘that what has been long called Arianism is no other than Old uncorrupted Christianity; and that Athanasius was the grand and very wicked Instrument of that Change’.

Newton also believed that the true religion was derived from the sons of Noah, and had been transmitted by Abraham, Isaac and Moses. Christ was a witness to that primitive faith in his simple commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbour. In a later document Newton declared that we must worship ‘the only invisible God’…at the peril of our souls ‘we must not pray to two Gods’. We must not worship Christ. Christ had been filled with divine spirit, but he was not God.

The fact was that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Arianism was still considered to be a dangerous heresy. If Newton had admitted his faith he would have been stripped of his university appointments, as were other and less cautious Arians. So he did not discuss these matters openly. He reserved his theological conversations for fellow believers.

At the close of his life he reflected on his extraordinary career. He said, ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’.

These words have been much quoted over the centuries and demonstrate a principle that I have found to be true in my own life: that the more I learn and think I understand, the more I become aware of just how vast my ignorance is of the true nature of things. Only God is All knowing, All wise.

On his death bed he refused the sacrament of the Christian church. He would not subscribe to the heresy of trinitarianism a few hours before meeting the Creator of the universe. The full scale of his religious beliefs were not revealed until after his death, and even then the knowledge of it was suppressed by those scholars who believed that the father of English science must be above suspicion. To all outward appearances he remained a firm and orthodox member of the Church of England.

So Newton was a man who used his reason and encyclopedic knowledge to think for himself about God and Jesus. His courageous determination to uncover the truth lead him to rediscover the truth about Christianity. His conclusions are very close to what we as Muslims think of Jesus and we share Newton’s sense of tragedy at what befell the Christian church which still worships Jesus as a god.

My purpose in my very brief talk about Isaac Newton today is to introduce you to a figure from English history who we can all revere, not just for his extraordinary scientific genius but as someone who might well have been extremely sympathetic to Islam if only England had been open to the uncorrupted teaching of tawheed.

The Holy Quran says:

“…and nearest among them in love to the believers will you find those who say, ‘We are Christians,’ because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant” (5:82).

Unrestrained Glances…A Reminder to Myself

The unrestrained glance results in the one who looks becoming attracted to what he sees, and in the imprinting of an image of what he sees in his heart. This can result in several kinds of corruption in the heart of the servant. The following are a number of them:

It has been related that the Prophet once said words to the effect: “The glance is a poisoned arrow of shaytân. Whoever lowers his gaze for Allâh, He will bestow upon him a refreshing sweetness which he will find in his heart on the day that he meets Him.”

Shaytân enters with the glance, for he travels with it, faster than the wind blowing through an empty place. He makes what is seen appear more beautiful than it really is, and transforms it into an idol for the heart to worship. Then he promises it false rewards, lights the fire of desires within it, and fuels it with the wood of forbidden actions, which the servant would not have committed had it not been for this distorted image. This distracts the heart and makes it forget its more important concerns. It stands between it and them; and so the heart loses its straight path and falls into the pit of desire and ignorance. Allâh, Mighty and Glorious is He, says:

“And do not obey anyone whose heart We have made forgetful in remembering Us – who follows his own desires, and whose affair has exceeded all bounds.” (18:28)

The unrestrained gaze causes all three afflictions.

It has been said that between the eye and the heart is an immediate connection; if the eyes are corrupted, then the heart follows. It becomes like a rubbish heap where all the dirt and filth and rottenness collect, and so there is no room for love for Allâh, relating all matters to Him, awareness of being in His presence, and feeling joy at His proximity – only the opposite of these things can inhabit such a heart.

Staring and gazing without restraint is disobedience to Allâh:

“Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that is more purifying for them. Surely Allâh is aware of what they do.” (24:30)

Only the one who obeys Allâh’s commands is content in this world, and only the servant who obeys Allâh will survive in the next world.

Furthermore, letting the gaze roam free cloaks the heart with darkness, just as lowering the gaze for Allâh clothes it in light. After the above ayah, Allâh, the Glorious and Mighty, says in the same sûrah of the Qur’ân:

“Allâh is the light of the heavens and the earth: the likeness of His light is as if there were a niche, and in the niche is a lamp, and in the lamp is a glass, and the glass as it were a brilliant star, lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it. Light upon light. Allâh guides whomever He wants to His Light. Allâh strikes metaphors for man; and Allâh knows all things.” (24:35)

When the heart is a light, countless good comes to it from all directions. If it is dark, then clouds of evil and afflictions come from all directions to cover it up.

Letting the gaze run loose also makes the heart blind to distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between the sunnah and innovation; while lowering it for Allâh, the Might and Exalted, gives it a penetrating, true and distinguishing insight.

A righteous man once said: “Whoever enriches his outward behaviour by following the sunnah, and makes his inward soul wealthy through contemplation, and averts his gaze away from looking at what is forbidden, and avoids anything of a doubtful nature, and feeds solely on what is halâl – his inner sight will never falter.”

Rewards for actions come in kind. Whoever lowers his gaze from what Allâh has forbidden, Allâh will give his inner sight abundant light.

from The Four Poisons Of The Heart by al Ghazâlî

Islam: Religion or Ideology?

I have not given much thought to the pros and cons of the work of the Quilliam Foundation, but a cursory look at the site leaves me thinking they are not all bad. Far from it. I looked at their Related Resources section and found some good articles, two by Tim Winter and an excellent piece by Imam Zaid, ‘Islam: Religion or Ideology?’ which critiques the tendency by some to reduce Islam to a political ideology.

Its good to hear a voice speaking so clearly for Islam…

Talk at Regents Park Mosque Saturday 2nd May 2009

Salamualikum brothers and sisters. Today I would like to give you a taster, a flavour so to speak of how New Testament scholars and historians do their job when they study the life of Jesus. I’m going to use a number of quite long words and perhaps unfamiliar concepts but I hope you’ll bear with me. I hope to give you some idea of how these academics uncover facts that have far reaching consequences for today’s Christian theology. So I’ll be outlining just two significant discoveries. Here we go!

Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as predicting his own death: difficulties with taking this at face value

Did Jesus clearly announce his suffering and death to his disciples? Or did his arrest, crucifixion and reported resurrection take them completely by surprise? We will briefly survey these questions in this talk.

The synoptic gospels contain six separate instances in which Jesus predicts his suffering and death, and four times he predicts his resurrection. Here are three examples from Mark and one from Luke.

• And he charged them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again Mark 8:30-31

• And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the son of man should have risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what the rising from the dead meant…And he said to them,…How is it written of the son of man, that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? Mark 9:9-10

• But while they were all marvelling at everything he did, he said to his disciples, Let these words sink into your ears; for the son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men. But they did not understand this saying…and they were afraid to ask him about this saying. Luke 9:43-45

• And they were on the road, going to Jerusalem…And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him saving, Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise. Mark 10:32-34

Note the detailed prediction in Mark 10:32-34 (in bold) and how clear and unambiguous it is.

I wish to make the following observations on these passages:

1. According to the evangelists (with one exception, Matt. 12:40) all of the predictions were made during the final period of his life. They are all solemn in tone: ‘Let these words sink into your ears…’ They are not mysterious, but expressed in plain language. There is no doubt that Jesus had put the disciples in the picture about soon to transpire events, at least six times.

2. Yet how did these same disciples react when the recently foretold events started to occur? At the critical time between his arrest and execution, absolutely no one seems to have remembered the repeated warnings concerning the events leading to the cross. All Jesus’ disciples fled when he was arrested (Mark 14:50). When Peter was confronted he denied having anything to do with Jesus or that he even knew him (Mark 14:66-71). None of the apostles (or his family) went with him to Golgotha, according to the Synoptic Gospels.

3. Jesus would certainly have had good grounds for believing that an attempt would be made on his life and that he may get killed. However, at the same time he prayed that God would save him from death. ‘Father, everything is possible with you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will‘ Mark 14:36

4. All the apostles were initially extremely reluctant to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Amazingly, after the death of Jesus and the women had returned from the tomb, the disciples ‘did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense’ Luke 24:11. The Greek work for nonsense is leros which literally means ’silly nonsense’.

5. Would a group of people who had been assured in advance by their charismatic and prophetic teacher that the tragic events would be followed promptly by a happy ending have shown such deep disbelief? Even if we allow for the initial shock and fear caused by the arrest of Jesus at night, the apostles should surely have remembered the chain of events so often and so recently rehearsed before them by Jesus.

6. The evangelists had to provide some explanation for this curious phenomenon to ensure the credibility of their stories.

7. All the Gospels end up by laying the blame on the disciples themselves for failing to grasp or simply forgetting (!) the predictions of Jesus.

So we are faced with something of an historical dilemma:

Either Jesus did not in fact predict the events, and the weakness and disbelief of the disciples are quite natural and understandable.
Or he did in fact warn them, and the ignominious behaviour of every single one of the disciples is quite inexplicable!

Weighing up the pros and cons, at a distance of 2000 years, leads me to think that it is much more likely that the Evangelists invented the predictions and inserted them into their story (or it could also be that the predictions were fabricated prior to the composition of the Gospels and came to the authors though tradition), than all concerned should suddenly forget those clear, detailed and repeated warnings.

Fabricated prophecies after the event are known to exist elsewhere in the Gospels. Matthew even went so far as to invent a prophecy about Jesus from the Old Testament: ‘he shall be called a Nazarene‘, see Matthew 2:23. There is no such passage anywhere in the Old Testament! Scholars call this genre of ‘creative’ writing pesher interpretation, and it was widely used by the teachers of the Qumran community in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

We have seen that the final form of the Gospels is self-contradictory and occasionally bizarre. The apostles are portrayed as having no idea what rising from the dead meant (Mark 9:10), though historians are aware that the idea of resurrection was widely understood amongst 1 st century Jews. The evangelists tried to excuse the disciples by saying that not only did they not understand Jesus, but also the meaning of his words was hidden from them.

In the attempt to give the Gospels some coherence and sense the evangelists make the apostles look extremely dense and dim-witted, hardly the reliable people Jesus would have chosen to continue his mission!

Did Jesus claim to be the Creator of the universe?

The short and incontrovertible answer is No! The fact that later generations of Christians came to believe that Jesus is ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’ (as stated in the Nicean Creed) is therefore in need of some explanation.

I want to look at two historical phenomena which I hope will give us some understanding of this development. They are:

i) the traditional Christian belief that to confess Jesus as ‘the Son of God’ is to confess his deity, and to say that ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ means and always meant that Jesus is the pre-existent, second person of the Trinity, who ‘for us men and our salvation became incarnate’.

ii) An illuminating historical parallel to the divinisation of Jesus: the divinisation of the Buddha
+++

i) The New Testament (NT) calls Jesus ‘the Son of God’. But what does this mean? It is important, if we wish to adopt an historical approach (and most Christians do not), to discover the significance of words and ideas in their original language, as the original speakers meant the original listeners to understand them. Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew, and spoken by most Palestinian Jews. Jesus’ Aramaic teaching (except for a dozen words that are still found in the gospels) has not been preserved.
In the years after Jesus was taken up to God, the early church spread quickly in the Greek-speaking (i.e. non-Jewish) world, and the gospels and letters that came to comprise the NT were all written down in Greek. It is important to grasp that this Greek NT is a ‘translation’ of the original thoughts and ideas of the Aramaic thinking and speaking Jesus, a translation not just into a totally different language but also a transplantation of the thought of the gospels into an utterly alien cultural and religious environment of the pagan Graeco-Roman world.
To discover the authentic teaching of Jesus, and what others believed about him, it is therefore necessary to be alert to any changes or developments in meaning arising from the transmission of ideas through the channel of Hellenistic culture.

Therefore, when we examine the term “son of God” in its original ‘context of meaning’ we make an interesting discovery. In Hebrew or Aramaic “son of God” is always used figuratively as a metaphor for a child of God, whereas in Greek addressed to Gentile Christians, brought up in a religious culture filled with gods, sons of gods and demigods, the NT expression tended to be understood literally as ‘Son of God’ (with a capital letter): in other words as someone possessing the same nature as God.

In the fourth century the Catholic Church officially endorsed this new pagan idea at the Council of Nicea: Jesus was declared to be of the same ’substance’ or ‘nature’ (the Greek word used was ousia) as the Deity. Pagan philosophy triumphed over the Jewish understanding of God.

The same transformation, or rather deformation of meaning occurred to another key term: ‘Lord‘. According to the gospels the title ‘lord’ was regularly used as an address to Jesus during his ministry. In its Aramaic context it was synonymous with ‘teacher’.

Later generations of Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians would completely alter this meaning: the Aramaic definition of ‘Lord’ = teacher became synonymous with the title of God himself: the Lord Jesus = the Lord your God. As noted NT scholar James Dunn comments, expressing the consensus view of New Testament scholars’

‘The history of this confession of Jesus as Lord in earliest Christianity largely revolves round the question, How significant is the application of this title to Jesus? What role or status does this confession attribute to Jesus or recognise as belonging to Jesus?…The problem is that ‘lord’ can denote a whole range of dignity – from a respectful form of address as to a teacher or judge to a full title for God. Where do the early Christian references to the lordship of Jesus come within this spectrum? The answer seems to be that over the first few decades of Christianity the confession of Jesus as ‘Lord’ moved in overt significance from the lower end of the ’spectrum of dignity’ towards the upper end steadily gathering to itself increasing overtones of deity.’

So Dunn recognises that the title ‘lord’ originally denoted a human being. As the term began to be used in pagan contexts as the Gentile mission spread, where it was well established as a title for the cult deity in the mystery religions (especially Isis and Serapis), and also in Emperor worship – ‘Caesar is Lord’- a radical alteration of the meaning of the term occurred. Above all, St Paul advanced this change in meaning quite deliberately. He uses Old Testament texts that speak of Yahweh and applies them to Jesus (e.g. Romans 10:13). For Paul, ‘Lord Jesus’ had become a title of divinity.

In a profound sense, Paul founded the religion of Christianity we know today.

The perils of failing to ask the following simple question are incalculable: what would those who first used this language about Jesus expect their hearers and readers to understand by the phrase? The answers will show that Christians need to re-evaluate their understanding of who Jesus was. If Christians would undertake this difficult but necessary task, they will find that the results will bear a striking resemblance to the Jesus of the Qur’an, and that the two great faiths would be in substantial agreement.

ii) We can see a comparable religious impulse behind this startling divinisation of Jesus by looking at some developments in India at about the same time. The Buddha had died at the end of the sixth century BCE. A deep love developed for him and a need to contemplate his enlightened humanity became so strong that in the first century BCE the first statues of the Buddha appeared in NW India. Buddhist spirituality became focused on the image of the Buddha, enshrined in statues, despite devotion to a being outside of the self being quite different to the interior discipline advocated by Gautama.

Devotion to Jesus arose in a similar way, in disregard of his clear teaching about wholehearted love of God and neighbour. As the Gospels unmistakably demonstrate, Jesus invited people to turn in heartfelt repentance and obedience to God, never to himself. Later Christians inverted Jesus’ message by announcing the worship of the proclaimer rather than the God he proclaimed.

Conclusion

The Holy Qur’an says:

People of the book, do not go to excess in your religion, and do not say anything about God except the truth: the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was nothing more than a messenger of God, His word, directed to Mary, a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers and do not speak of a ‘Trinity’ – stop this, that is better for you – God is only one God, He is far above having a son, everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him and He is the best one to trust. (Qur’an, 4:171)

The Debate “Are morals without God a delusion ?”

A Poem

I moderated a debate last night entitled Are Morals without God a Delusion? (see the video above) I wrote this poem this morning after hearing the atheist try to defend Godless morality.

The Emperors New Clothes

Yes, we atheists condemn the Holocaust
And rape and child abuse
(but our morality is fashion, feeling and fancy).

Yes, we assert the wrongness of wrong actions,
(but our ethics are evanescent and easy and endlessly evolving).

Yes, we, like you, believe in right conduct, right principles and right values
(but these are bound by culture and climate and calculation).

Yes, we too condemn the Holocaust
(but, please don’t look too closely at our finely woven moral apparel or our impressive attire – for like the Emperors New Clothes – we are really naked).

***

For they deny the Source, the Sustainer, the Spirit

They relativise the Absolute

They Absolutise the relative.