Introduction
I am grateful to Abdelmalik, Accad and Zekveld for challenging me about witness generally among Muslim people, and my witness specifically among the Muslim people God has placed me. Much of my response is, therefore, based on my context and experience. This is not because I think that experience trumps theology or missiology, but to show how my context has informed my response as well as how their essays might inform my context.
Meeting Islam at the Bus Stop and Elsewhere
Shortly after 9/11 and the War on Terror’s stirrings, there were numerous adverts on bus stops in London showing semi-naked women: for Reebok sportswear, Moet & Chandon champagne, and the film Chicago. After a few days, the adverts in my area of East London were covered over and the following poster was stuck on top:
Muslims Against Western Values
Pornography
Nudism
Homosexuality
Paedophilia
Far from Western values being universal, concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘secularism’ and ‘liberalism’ give rise to evils which must be extinguished. The only workable system, proven to have eradicated such evils historically and where Muslims and non-Muslims live peacefully side-by-side, with their belief, dignity, honour and life protected and all their basic needs met is a system laid down by God, that system is called Al-Khalifah.
“Al-Khalifah” is life is dictated by Islamic Law. Witnessing publicly (theo-politically or otherwise) about Jesus Christ being Lord and turning to Him from Islam is prohibited. Not all Muslim people subscribed to this, but at least a few in my area clearly did.
Not long after this, I visited some Sylheti Muslim friends. (Sylhet is in NE Bangladesh and is the region from where 95% of Bangladeshi people in the UK originate. In my small area of London, there are over 100,000 Sylheti Muslim people.) The father proudly said, “I pray five times a day in my mosque, while you pray only once on a Sunday. You’re only a Christian once a week.”
Some other Muslim friends went further. For them, Christianity is one-dimensional: only concerned with life after death. It has nothing to say about everyday life, whether at individual or the national level. “We have the hadith, which details everything we do as Muslims, and which helps our leaders rule properly under God. But you just talk about loving your neighbour.” Others have said “Jesus says nothing about government, beyond don’t get involved. Just look at his teaching render unto Caesar…”
Through meeting some Muslim people at book tables, we began Meetings for Better Understanding with a group of Muslim men (stealing the MBU idea from Anees Zaka in Philadelphia, and explained further in his co-authored book Muslims and Christians at the Table). Their main and charismatic speaker was a fervent believer in Al-Khalifah, as were many of the Muslim people who came to the discussions. They rejected terrorism, but saw the caliphate as the answer to all social injustice and the straight path through the mess of right and left wing politics.
Our meetings compared and contrasted our views of Scripture, God, sin, Jesus, Abraham’s sacrifice, religion in daily life, family life, the afterlife, and building a just world. Such topics were not necessarily a Western church’s standard evangelistic content. Thinking about those meetings then influences what I think of theo-political witness now.
Taking another Look in the Mirror of History
Like all world views outside of Christ, Islam is a suppression of truth, an exchange of truth for a lie, something of God’s judgement, too, upon rebellious people. Being more parasitical on special revelation than say, Buddhism, it is also a closer parody of the truth. However, I am still pondering whether Abdelmalik’s “inverse-Marcionism” is a helpful label for Islam.
It is true that many modern-day Muslim apologists try to liberate Jesus from “Christian corruption”. It is also true that some modern-day Christians can sound Marcionite in their witness to Muslim people. Indeed, in one online debate between a well-known Christian polemicist and an erudite Imam, the discussion went through Islamic violence, to Crusades, to Joshua, with the Christian saying “but we follow Jesus of the New Testament”, to which the Imam replied “so, you’re a Marcionite then!”
Yet, I am not convinced that this is based on a Qur’anic response to the Apostle Paul or that Islam arose due to Marcionite tendencies in churches. My reading of the Qur’an and of current critical scholarship of the Qur’an is similar to Accad’s. I also agree with Accad that Timothy I’s arguments are based in his particular context, not least living in a Muslim majority area and under Islamic rule. Understandably, he reflects some of his constraints, rather than giving a denial of political discourse.
Similarly, al-Kindi’s pseudonymity is crucial for his tone as well as his content. In some ways, though, he sounds very modern. In London’s Speakers’ Corner or Youtube debates there is freedom to be explicitly critical of Islam generally and of Muhammad particularly. Yet, I was also struck by Abdelmalik’s implicit criticism of al-Kindi’s presentation: “Christ = kind vs Muhammad = brigand”.
There is obviously more to say about our Messiah, but we should recognise that many Muslim people see truth here. They are attracted to Jesus and repelled from Muhammad. Indeed, the day I received Abdelmalik’s essay I had lunch with a man who told me that he no longer followed Muhammad due to his violence, but loved Jesus because of his compassion.
My reading of al-Jabbar is similar to Accad’s and again shows the importance of both personal and historical context. Rather than seeing his response as “inverse-Marcionite”, a better label maybe the older one of “Judaizer”. It is certainly true of Muslim people around us that they often adopt the elementary principles of this world and act in Pharisaical self-righteousness.
I experience al-Faruqi’s kinds of arguments quite often, and so am sympathetic to Abdelmalik’s use of al-Faruqi. Just as Rahmat Allâh Kairânawî utilised liberal Christian scholarship in his debate with Gottlieb Pfander in Agra in 1854 to “defeat” the Christian Scriptures, so did al-Faruqi to critique our Book and our practice. Yet, with Accad, I concur that al-Faruqi, Kairânawî and the theologians they use “neither know the Scriptures nor the power of God”.
To draw some of these strands together and bring this back to my context again, I can remember one Muslim person who was a regular at MBUs, debates and Speakers Corner (and in a slight twist of inverse-Marcionism) banging on: “Paul made up Christianity, but James gives you the real version of what Jesus meant.” So, we sat down for 5-6 weeks just to read through James’ Letter. By the end of the time, he could see how James, Paul, Jesus and the Old Testament could cohere and were not contradictory. He did not at that point say, “Good sir, what must I do to be saved”, but he did see how our Scriptures could be consistent. And so (to agree with Accad again), al-Faruqi and other like-minded-Muslim-people do not have “a balanced or comprehensive interpretation of Scripture”. Further, my Bible studies in James did not need to necessarily touch on O’Donovan or the magistrate to be a faithful witness to my Muslim friend.
Re-forming Christian Witness
Abdelmalik prefaces his use of O’Donovan with the statement “that Muslims who accuse Christianity of veering towards Gnosticism in matters of political theology are not entirely wide of the mark”. This follows straight after his paragraph on Cragg as an exemplar of “a depoliticized understanding of Jesus and the mission of the church that is overly focused on the cross.” As with Accad, I cannot speak for Cragg, but it is obviously significant in 1 Corinthians that Paul preached Christ-crucified, even as he gloried in the resurrection. And, that at both the beginning and end of Jesus’ earthly ministry he subverted human notions of wisdom and power as he fulfilled the Old Testament by taking the way of the cross.
Explicitly, for example, Jesus did not avoid the way of suffering in the desert by making bread, bowing down or testing the LORD. Implicitly, Jesus also suggested that his earthly ministry was not about using power politically when he quoted from Deuteronomy chapters 6 and 8, rather than from chapter 7’s conquest and power. (This is not saying that Jesus does not have power nor that he will not conquer. Rather, that his earthly ministry was not focused on temporal power. And, that his followers should not rely on it to further God’s kingdom.) Also, at the end of his ministry, Jesus refused the sword to defend himself, while affirming that his kingdom was not of this world.
So, we must not quickly dismiss the way of the cross for Jesus and his disciples, as Abdelmalik appears to do. Yet, the cross is clearly not where the gospel story ends. Jesus’ resurrection and the ethics which flow from this now lead us to O’Donovan.
I first came across O’Donovan at the same time as our MBUs were taking off in the 2000s and I was trying to find responses to “Muslims Against Western Values” and assertions that Christianity has nothing to say about society and politics. I found O’Donovan alternately inspirational and incomprehensible. Many of his theological assertions that I understood I could agree with, but like Accad I baulk at the statement that earthly government is “reconceived to serve the needs of international mobility and contact which the advancement of the gospel requires”. It suggests too close a tie between Church and State and that the gospel cannot advance if state actors prevent mobility.
I am not persuaded that Jesus, Paul or Peter necessarily required Caesar to enact laws which enabled gospel advance. Clearly the first three centuries of Church growth did not require Christians to have political power to enable gospel witness to take place. Nor did the church in China in the 20th Century. Indeed, in some parts of the world, suspicion that a Western power has enabled the mobility of a missionary is a severe hindrance to their witness.
I was at a conference last summer on polemics and apologetics. One of the panel discussions was on how to engage with the Islamification of Britain. Putting to one side what Islamification might mean and whether it is happening, five of the panel put forward various proposals that involved politics and law. One person said we should pray and proclaim, but was talked down as naive. The five were from the West, the one was from Iran. All were clearly speaking from their backgrounds and contexts. The one simply asked the others where in Scripture they could show him that their proposals was part of the mission that Jesus had left his Church. The silence was telling.
Yet, that still leaves us with at least two questions: what if Caesar, the UK Prime Minister or the Iranian President should start following Jesus? And, do we still have nothing to say to a Muslim person about society and politics?
A Theo-Everything Witness
Timothy Keller’s preaching often aimed to show how God’s grace meets and challenges the legalist and the lawless. Fallen image bearers of God seem to end up in one of those two camps. Muslim people are often in the legalist camp, but not always. We could also argue that realities such as totalitarianism (Islam?) and individualism (Western secularism?) end up in each of these camps. But here, it is not so much God’s grace generically that meets and challenges coercive power and self-centerdness, but more specifically that the Triune God’s interpersonal love, and the grace which flows from this, subverts and fulfills human sinful desires, Islamic or otherwise.
Within Himself, the Father, Son and Spirit live in joyful, righteous, self-giving, other-enriching intimacy. And, because the one true God of the Bible is a personal God, He can bring forth personal beings in his image. It is no surprise then that men and women are said to be created in God’s image and can relate to one another. Nor is it any surprise that God’s intention for the world is that it reflect and enact his life, serving one another, full of love and joy.
What may be a surprise, though, is that this intention is primarily focussed within the Church, as diverse persons are united together in Christ and welcome others in. The letter to the Ephesians, written into a context of magic and power (according to Acts), is full of these themes. And, rather than using the armour of God to promote political ends, it is for combating spiritual forces – whether these are the spiritual lies of Islamic totalitarianism or Western individualism or something else entirely. And this is what we are trying to be in our small patch of East London among Sylheti Muslim people, along with other churches: a community of hope in Jesus the Messiah, welcoming people into a loving and just place.
Our Muslim friends (“against Western values” or otherwise) are not wrong to look for a just world. They are simply looking for it in the wrong place. And, they have the wrong basis for their search. Our witness should help them see that their foundations are on shifting sands – that the hadith is not from Muhammad’s time, that the Qur’an is not eternal nor in keeping with the previous prophets, and that Muhammad did not know the one true God. Our witness should also help them to see that the just world they desire is only found in and through the Messiah, ultimately in the new creation, but with foretastes now in the Church, and as people actively love and serve others.
This Trinitarian, serving, welcoming, loving and unified witness offers a better way to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. And so, we walk as members of Jesus’ resurrected family, showing the family likeness, living lives of beauty, justice, peace, love, service, self-giving, humility, forgiveness, contentment, generosity, patience, sexual purity, enjoying good things – challenging both Muslim and Western values.
And this also provides a framework for the magistrate or other appointed official, just as it does for the slave and master, husband and wife, and every other role and relationship. Yet such a framework will have a different appearance depending on the time and place in which God has placed us, as it always has done. What Nehemiah was able to do, was different from Esther, was different from Daniel, was different from Pharaoh’s midwives, was different from Joseph, was different from the Philippian jailer, Crispus, Phoebe…and will be different for Jesus’ followers in East London, Sylhet, Iran, and elsewhere. And such differences should never be tied to protecting my own tribe’s narrow financial, political, ethnic or national interests, as both Accad and Zekveld acknowledge.
Instead, it might lead to a Christian councillor in the Noughties opposing a mega-mosque near the London Olympic site to maintain religious freedom for all in the area. Or to 19th Century Acts of Parliament enabling slavery to be abolished, industry regulated humanely, and the poor housed, through people like William Wilberforce and Earl of Shaftesbury. It might mean ensuring that Sunday is an official day of rest, that poor children are cared for, and infanticide is discouraged, through Emperor Constantine. And, crucially, still recognising the horrendous blind spots and abuses which existed within all these times and societies, and therefore that a right humility before God and under his word is always required.
Indeed, even where society may be making progress in a Christian direction, we must recognise too that sadly things often (always?) go awry. As the Preface to the 1549 Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it, “There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted.” Therefore, we do not put our faith in horses and chariots or commonwealths and magistrates, even as we pray that God will enable the latter to do what is right. Rather, we look to and speak about the One who can conquer all evil and will do so when He returns.
Jesus will return as the true and better Joshua of Revelation 19. He, not us, will right all wrongs and physically defeat all Western and Eastern values. Jesus and his righteous rule is ultimately the vision we hold out to Muslim people, whether they are convinced supporters of the caliphate or not. We need to witness to Jesus historically (that our book is true and evidenced), ethically (that we are seeking to please God not ourselves), theologically (that the one true God is personal, present, speaking and saving), and unitedly with other believers. And we point people to the great day when around the throne of the crucified, risen and ascended Messiah will be countless multitudes from all kinds of backgrounds.
Robert Scott helps to lead a new Sylheti- and English-speaking church in East London, as well as lecturing on Islamic Studies at Oak Hill Theological College.
Introduction
I am grateful to Abdelmalik, Accad and Zekveld for challenging me about witness generally among Muslim people, and my witness specifically among the Muslim people God has placed me. Much of my response is, therefore, based on my context and experience. This is not because I think that experience trumps theology or missiology, but to show how my context has informed my response as well as how their essays might inform my context.
Meeting Islam at the Bus Stop and Elsewhere
Shortly after 9/11 and the War on Terror’s stirrings, there were numerous adverts on bus stops in London showing semi-naked women: for Reebok sportswear, Moet & Chandon champagne, and the film Chicago. After a few days, the adverts in my area of East London were covered over and the following poster was stuck on top:
Muslims Against Western Values
Pornography
Nudism
Homosexuality
Paedophilia
Far from Western values being universal, concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘secularism’ and ‘liberalism’ give rise to evils which must be extinguished. The only workable system, proven to have eradicated such evils historically and where Muslims and non-Muslims live peacefully side-by-side, with their belief, dignity, honour and life protected and all their basic needs met is a system laid down by God, that system is called Al-Khalifah.
“Al-Khalifah” is life is dictated by Islamic Law. Witnessing publicly (theo-politically or otherwise) about Jesus Christ being Lord and turning to Him from Islam is prohibited. Not all Muslim people subscribed to this, but at least a few in my area clearly did.
Not long after this, I visited some Sylheti Muslim friends. (Sylhet is in NE Bangladesh and is the region from where 95% of Bangladeshi people in the UK originate. In my small area of London, there are over 100,000 Sylheti Muslim people.) The father proudly said, “I pray five times a day in my mosque, while you pray only once on a Sunday. You’re only a Christian once a week.”
Some other Muslim friends went further. For them, Christianity is one-dimensional: only concerned with life after death. It has nothing to say about everyday life, whether at individual or the national level. “We have the hadith, which details everything we do as Muslims, and which helps our leaders rule properly under God. But you just talk about loving your neighbour.” Others have said “Jesus says nothing about government, beyond don’t get involved. Just look at his teaching render unto Caesar…”
Through meeting some Muslim people at book tables, we began Meetings for Better Understanding with a group of Muslim men (stealing the MBU idea from Anees Zaka in Philadelphia, and explained further in his co-authored book Muslims and Christians at the Table). Their main and charismatic speaker was a fervent believer in Al-Khalifah, as were many of the Muslim people who came to the discussions. They rejected terrorism, but saw the caliphate as the answer to all social injustice and the straight path through the mess of right and left wing politics.
Our meetings compared and contrasted our views of Scripture, God, sin, Jesus, Abraham’s sacrifice, religion in daily life, family life, the afterlife, and building a just world. Such topics were not necessarily a Western church’s standard evangelistic content. Thinking about those meetings then influences what I think of theo-political witness now.
Taking another Look in the Mirror of History
Like all world views outside of Christ, Islam is a suppression of truth, an exchange of truth for a lie, something of God’s judgement, too, upon rebellious people. Being more parasitical on special revelation than say, Buddhism, it is also a closer parody of the truth. However, I am still pondering whether Abdelmalik’s “inverse-Marcionism” is a helpful label for Islam.
It is true that many modern-day Muslim apologists try to liberate Jesus from “Christian corruption”. It is also true that some modern-day Christians can sound Marcionite in their witness to Muslim people. Indeed, in one online debate between a well-known Christian polemicist and an erudite Imam, the discussion went through Islamic violence, to Crusades, to Joshua, with the Christian saying “but we follow Jesus of the New Testament”, to which the Imam replied “so, you’re a Marcionite then!”
Yet, I am not convinced that this is based on a Qur’anic response to the Apostle Paul or that Islam arose due to Marcionite tendencies in churches. My reading of the Qur’an and of current critical scholarship of the Qur’an is similar to Accad’s. I also agree with Accad that Timothy I’s arguments are based in his particular context, not least living in a Muslim majority area and under Islamic rule. Understandably, he reflects some of his constraints, rather than giving a denial of political discourse.
Similarly, al-Kindi’s pseudonymity is crucial for his tone as well as his content. In some ways, though, he sounds very modern. In London’s Speakers’ Corner or Youtube debates there is freedom to be explicitly critical of Islam generally and of Muhammad particularly. Yet, I was also struck by Abdelmalik’s implicit criticism of al-Kindi’s presentation: “Christ = kind vs Muhammad = brigand”.
There is obviously more to say about our Messiah, but we should recognise that many Muslim people see truth here. They are attracted to Jesus and repelled from Muhammad. Indeed, the day I received Abdelmalik’s essay I had lunch with a man who told me that he no longer followed Muhammad due to his violence, but loved Jesus because of his compassion.
My reading of al-Jabbar is similar to Accad’s and again shows the importance of both personal and historical context. Rather than seeing his response as “inverse-Marcionite”, a better label maybe the older one of “Judaizer”. It is certainly true of Muslim people around us that they often adopt the elementary principles of this world and act in Pharisaical self-righteousness.
I experience al-Faruqi’s kinds of arguments quite often, and so am sympathetic to Abdelmalik’s use of al-Faruqi. Just as Rahmat Allâh Kairânawî utilised liberal Christian scholarship in his debate with Gottlieb Pfander in Agra in 1854 to “defeat” the Christian Scriptures, so did al-Faruqi to critique our Book and our practice. Yet, with Accad, I concur that al-Faruqi, Kairânawî and the theologians they use “neither know the Scriptures nor the power of God”.
To draw some of these strands together and bring this back to my context again, I can remember one Muslim person who was a regular at MBUs, debates and Speakers Corner (and in a slight twist of inverse-Marcionism) banging on: “Paul made up Christianity, but James gives you the real version of what Jesus meant.” So, we sat down for 5-6 weeks just to read through James’ Letter. By the end of the time, he could see how James, Paul, Jesus and the Old Testament could cohere and were not contradictory. He did not at that point say, “Good sir, what must I do to be saved”, but he did see how our Scriptures could be consistent. And so (to agree with Accad again), al-Faruqi and other like-minded-Muslim-people do not have “a balanced or comprehensive interpretation of Scripture”. Further, my Bible studies in James did not need to necessarily touch on O’Donovan or the magistrate to be a faithful witness to my Muslim friend.
Re-forming Christian Witness
Abdelmalik prefaces his use of O’Donovan with the statement “that Muslims who accuse Christianity of veering towards Gnosticism in matters of political theology are not entirely wide of the mark”. This follows straight after his paragraph on Cragg as an exemplar of “a depoliticized understanding of Jesus and the mission of the church that is overly focused on the cross.” As with Accad, I cannot speak for Cragg, but it is obviously significant in 1 Corinthians that Paul preached Christ-crucified, even as he gloried in the resurrection. And, that at both the beginning and end of Jesus’ earthly ministry he subverted human notions of wisdom and power as he fulfilled the Old Testament by taking the way of the cross.
Explicitly, for example, Jesus did not avoid the way of suffering in the desert by making bread, bowing down or testing the LORD. Implicitly, Jesus also suggested that his earthly ministry was not about using power politically when he quoted from Deuteronomy chapters 6 and 8, rather than from chapter 7’s conquest and power. (This is not saying that Jesus does not have power nor that he will not conquer. Rather, that his earthly ministry was not focused on temporal power. And, that his followers should not rely on it to further God’s kingdom.) Also, at the end of his ministry, Jesus refused the sword to defend himself, while affirming that his kingdom was not of this world.
So, we must not quickly dismiss the way of the cross for Jesus and his disciples, as Abdelmalik appears to do. Yet, the cross is clearly not where the gospel story ends. Jesus’ resurrection and the ethics which flow from this now lead us to O’Donovan.
I first came across O’Donovan at the same time as our MBUs were taking off in the 2000s and I was trying to find responses to “Muslims Against Western Values” and assertions that Christianity has nothing to say about society and politics. I found O’Donovan alternately inspirational and incomprehensible. Many of his theological assertions that I understood I could agree with, but like Accad I baulk at the statement that earthly government is “reconceived to serve the needs of international mobility and contact which the advancement of the gospel requires”. It suggests too close a tie between Church and State and that the gospel cannot advance if state actors prevent mobility.
I am not persuaded that Jesus, Paul or Peter necessarily required Caesar to enact laws which enabled gospel advance. Clearly the first three centuries of Church growth did not require Christians to have political power to enable gospel witness to take place. Nor did the church in China in the 20th Century. Indeed, in some parts of the world, suspicion that a Western power has enabled the mobility of a missionary is a severe hindrance to their witness.
I was at a conference last summer on polemics and apologetics. One of the panel discussions was on how to engage with the Islamification of Britain. Putting to one side what Islamification might mean and whether it is happening, five of the panel put forward various proposals that involved politics and law. One person said we should pray and proclaim, but was talked down as naive. The five were from the West, the one was from Iran. All were clearly speaking from their backgrounds and contexts. The one simply asked the others where in Scripture they could show him that their proposals was part of the mission that Jesus had left his Church. The silence was telling.
Yet, that still leaves us with at least two questions: what if Caesar, the UK Prime Minister or the Iranian President should start following Jesus? And, do we still have nothing to say to a Muslim person about society and politics?
A Theo-Everything Witness
Timothy Keller’s preaching often aimed to show how God’s grace meets and challenges the legalist and the lawless. Fallen image bearers of God seem to end up in one of those two camps. Muslim people are often in the legalist camp, but not always. We could also argue that realities such as totalitarianism (Islam?) and individualism (Western secularism?) end up in each of these camps. But here, it is not so much God’s grace generically that meets and challenges coercive power and self-centerdness, but more specifically that the Triune God’s interpersonal love, and the grace which flows from this, subverts and fulfills human sinful desires, Islamic or otherwise.
Within Himself, the Father, Son and Spirit live in joyful, righteous, self-giving, other-enriching intimacy. And, because the one true God of the Bible is a personal God, He can bring forth personal beings in his image. It is no surprise then that men and women are said to be created in God’s image and can relate to one another. Nor is it any surprise that God’s intention for the world is that it reflect and enact his life, serving one another, full of love and joy.
What may be a surprise, though, is that this intention is primarily focussed within the Church, as diverse persons are united together in Christ and welcome others in. The letter to the Ephesians, written into a context of magic and power (according to Acts), is full of these themes. And, rather than using the armour of God to promote political ends, it is for combating spiritual forces – whether these are the spiritual lies of Islamic totalitarianism or Western individualism or something else entirely. And this is what we are trying to be in our small patch of East London among Sylheti Muslim people, along with other churches: a community of hope in Jesus the Messiah, welcoming people into a loving and just place.
Our Muslim friends (“against Western values” or otherwise) are not wrong to look for a just world. They are simply looking for it in the wrong place. And, they have the wrong basis for their search. Our witness should help them see that their foundations are on shifting sands – that the hadith is not from Muhammad’s time, that the Qur’an is not eternal nor in keeping with the previous prophets, and that Muhammad did not know the one true God. Our witness should also help them to see that the just world they desire is only found in and through the Messiah, ultimately in the new creation, but with foretastes now in the Church, and as people actively love and serve others.
This Trinitarian, serving, welcoming, loving and unified witness offers a better way to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. And so, we walk as members of Jesus’ resurrected family, showing the family likeness, living lives of beauty, justice, peace, love, service, self-giving, humility, forgiveness, contentment, generosity, patience, sexual purity, enjoying good things – challenging both Muslim and Western values.
And this also provides a framework for the magistrate or other appointed official, just as it does for the slave and master, husband and wife, and every other role and relationship. Yet such a framework will have a different appearance depending on the time and place in which God has placed us, as it always has done. What Nehemiah was able to do, was different from Esther, was different from Daniel, was different from Pharaoh’s midwives, was different from Joseph, was different from the Philippian jailer, Crispus, Phoebe…and will be different for Jesus’ followers in East London, Sylhet, Iran, and elsewhere. And such differences should never be tied to protecting my own tribe’s narrow financial, political, ethnic or national interests, as both Accad and Zekveld acknowledge.
Instead, it might lead to a Christian councillor in the Noughties opposing a mega-mosque near the London Olympic site to maintain religious freedom for all in the area. Or to 19th Century Acts of Parliament enabling slavery to be abolished, industry regulated humanely, and the poor housed, through people like William Wilberforce and Earl of Shaftesbury. It might mean ensuring that Sunday is an official day of rest, that poor children are cared for, and infanticide is discouraged, through Emperor Constantine. And, crucially, still recognising the horrendous blind spots and abuses which existed within all these times and societies, and therefore that a right humility before God and under his word is always required.
Indeed, even where society may be making progress in a Christian direction, we must recognise too that sadly things often (always?) go awry. As the Preface to the 1549 Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it, “There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted.” Therefore, we do not put our faith in horses and chariots or commonwealths and magistrates, even as we pray that God will enable the latter to do what is right. Rather, we look to and speak about the One who can conquer all evil and will do so when He returns.
Jesus will return as the true and better Joshua of Revelation 19. He, not us, will right all wrongs and physically defeat all Western and Eastern values. Jesus and his righteous rule is ultimately the vision we hold out to Muslim people, whether they are convinced supporters of the caliphate or not. We need to witness to Jesus historically (that our book is true and evidenced), ethically (that we are seeking to please God not ourselves), theologically (that the one true God is personal, present, speaking and saving), and unitedly with other believers. And we point people to the great day when around the throne of the crucified, risen and ascended Messiah will be countless multitudes from all kinds of backgrounds.
Robert Scott helps to lead a new Sylheti- and English-speaking church in East London, as well as lecturing on Islamic Studies at Oak Hill Theological College.
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