Introduction

After the arrest of John, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the gospel of God. “The time is fulfilled,” He said, “and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the gospel!” (Mark 1:14–15 ESV)

As the beginning of Mark’s gospel makes clear, the gospel is political good news: the kingdom of God is near. Yet over the centuries, Muslims have often suspected that the opposite is true: the gospel is not good news but bad news for political life. Sometimes, this suspicion boils down to our different starting points: Muslims regard the Qur’an and the traditions of Muhammad as their ultimate standard for living, while as Christians we confess the Bible is God’s word for all of life. Other times, however, Christians have contributed to Muslim suspicion by giving faulty or incomplete explanations of the gospel’s impact on politics to Muslims. This essay argues that presenting the gospel as political good news to Muslims requires the church to reform her historic witness.

In the following essay, I will first situate Islam theologically with regards to Christianity. Next, I will offer a short history of how Christians have explained the gospel’s impact on politics to Muslims (for shorthand, I call this ‘Christian theo-political witness’), and how Muslims have received such explanations. Since space is limited, we will focus on the most important historical interactions in the Middle East, and in the contemporary period we will look more closely at one significant Protestant witness. Last, I will propose some reforms that need to be made to Christian theo-political witness to Muslims via engagement with Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations.

Islam in Christian Theology: Heresy and Punishment

Since the time of John of Damascus, many Christians have made theological sense of Islam by calling it a Christian heresy. This designation, though sometimes abused, should not be dismissed as mere mud-flinging or “othering”. It captures an important truth: the Qur’an does not try to tell a new story about the relationship between God and humanity. Rather, it self-consciously inserts itself into the Christian story and seeks to correct it. At one point in the Qur’an, for example, we read that Muhammad is told:

[God] has prescribed for you as religion that which He enjoined upon Noah, and that which We revealed unto thee, and that which We enjoined upon Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, that you uphold religion and not become divided therein (Qur’an 42:13, The Study Qur’an translation).

Muslims thus expect that the Qur’an will be consistent with what it regards as earlier divine revelations, not least of all the Tawrāt (Torah) revealed to Moses and the Injīl (Gospel) revealed to Jesus. As the quote above also suggests, though, the Qur’an teaches that Christians and Jews became divided over the meaning of their revelations, and other places in the Qur’an speak about Jews and Christians falsifying or corrupting their revelations. The Qur’an understands itself as having been sent to fix this:

God made a covenant with the Children of Israel...But for breaking their covenant We cursed them and made their hearts hard. They distort the words from their places and forgot part of they were reminded about...And from those who say “we are Christians,” We made a covenant with them. But they forgot a part of what they had been reminded about. So We stirred up enmity and hatred between them until the Day of Resurrection...O People of the Book [Jews and Christians]! There has come to you our Messenger clarifying for you much of what you were hiding in the Book and overlooking much. There has come to you from God a light and a clear Book (Qur’an 5:12–15, personal translation).

Historic Christian interpretations of Islam as Christian heresy thus acknowledge Islam’s attempt to co-opt and alter the faith that the church claims to represent. I think we can be more specific with regards to political theology, however, and say that Islam has a special kind of resemblance to the heresy of Marcion of Sinope (c. A.D. 85 - c.160). Muslims of course do not believe, as Marcion did, that the Old and New Testaments were written by two different “gods”. Muslims and Marcion do converge, however, on the opinion that the texts of the Christian Bible must be selectively purged and reinterpreted to recover their authentic message. For Marcion, what needed removing was anything to do with Judaism and the “god” of the Old Testament. For Muslims, what requires changing in the Bible is anything which appears to disagree with the Qur’an. As we shall see in the next section, the qur’anic standard has often encouraged Muslims to exhibit an “inverse marcionite” attitude towards Christian Scripture: rather than seeking to ‘liberate’ Jesus from the Old Testament via gnostic interpretations of Paul, Muslims have sought to situate Jesus firmly within an ‘Islamicized’ Old Testament context and thereby ‘liberate’ him from the apostle Paul’s corrupting influence.

The Qur’an alone, however, cannot claim all the credit for encouraging inverse-Marcionism among Muslims. As we shall also see in the next section, Muslim attitudes (and perhaps even those of the Qur’an itself) were often formed in reaction to the Marcionism which had crept into the doctrines and practices of the churches. This fact lends credence to another historic Christian theological interpretation of Islam: that it arose as a punishment for the church’s sins and must be addressed through repentance. If we want Muslims to understand the gospel as political good news, then, we first need to look in the mirror of history and assess where Muslim questions and criticisms, however mired at times by misinformation or caricature (as often were Christian criticisms of Islam!), reveal painful truths about failures in our own witness to Christ.

Historic examples of Christian Theo-Political Witness to Muslims

In the earliest texts which record Christian encounters with Muslims, Christians appeal to the Bible as their decisive standard when answering Muslim questions or criticisms. The answers they gave about political matters, though, often appear incomplete. For an example of this, we can look at the dialogue between the East-Syrian patriarch Timothy I and the Muslim Caliph al-Mahdī (A.D. 782/783). The caliph, like many Muslims, wanted to know why Christians did not regard Muhammed’s military success as a sign that his prophetic mission was authentic. Timothy responds by saying that:

As to the prophets they prophesied sometimes concerning the earthly affairs and kingdoms...As to Jesus Christ He did not reveal to us things dealing with the law and earthly affairs, but He solely taught us things dealing with the knowledge of God and the Kingdom of Heaven.

It would be “superfluous,” Timothy goes on to say, “that after the knowledge that we have of God and the Kingdom of heaven we should be brought down to the knowledge of the human and earthly things.” Timothy’s response, while effectively guarding against the need to recognize Muhammed’s prophethood, also inadvertently gives the impression that Christian belief and practice, founded on the heavenly gospel of Jesus, made all discussion of earthly matters such as kings and kingdoms superfluous.

Later in the dialogue, though, Timothy will testify against himself. During a discussion about whether Christ was merely a “servant” or also a “son” according to the testimony of Scripture, Timothy quotes from Psalm 2 at length:

Ask of me, and I shall give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thine possession. Thou shalt shepherd them with a rod of iron. Be wise now, O ye Kings, and be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and hold to Him with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye stray from his way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him.

Timothy’s explanation of this passage to the caliph emphasizes that Jesus is the eternal Son of God by nature, rather than merely a servant:

if the Kings and Judges of the earth have been ordered by God to serve the Christ with fear and hold to Him with trembling, it is impossible that this Son who is served, held to, and kissed by the Kings and Judges of the earth should be a servant.

The indirect political conclusion is difficult not to draw from Timothy’s words. If it is true that “the Kings and Judges of the earth have been ordered by God to serve the Christ with fear and hold to Him with trembling,” does this not amount to a concession that the gospel does indeed have something to do with “the law and earthly affairs”? By leaving this line of thought undeveloped, Timothy’s theo-political witness remains ambiguous. A Muslim reader could not be sure how an earthly ruler ought to submit to a serve a heavenly King who revealed nothing relevant to the law and earthly affairs.

In later texts, the strategy of Christian engagement with Muslims changes slightly. Reason and the Qur’an assume greater authority alongside appeals to Scripture. The Apology of al-Kindī (c. A.D. 820) offers what is likely an early and highly influential example of this change in strategy. The text is framed as an imagined dialogue between a Muslim (al-Hāshimī) and a Christian (al-Kindī). Early in the text, al-Hāshimī issues an invitation to rational debate:

Reason shall be the umpire between us. Reason, the attribute of God himself, the arbiter of human actions...We shall be satisfied with your decision of reason, for or against us.

Responding to al-Hāshimī’s invitation, al-Kindī’s apology draws a consistent and brazen contrast between Christ and Muhammad. Christ is characterized as gentle and peaceable savior and king, who taught kindness, compassion, and love towardsall and who performed healings. Muhammad, meanwhile, is characterized as a highway robber and a brigand who criminally raided and invaded the lands of peaceful neighbors for personal gain, spread his religion through the compulsion of the sword, and who deployed unjust tactics while engaging in warfare. This manner of presentation, via ostensibly complete contrast with Christ’s behavior and teaching, has the effect of making Christianity look opposed to coercive rule altogether.

Further confusion is caused, moreover, by the contrast which al-Kindī draws between the moral law of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament. He asserts that it was Christ who brought the divine law, surpassing reason and nature, to love one’s enemies. Moses’ law, based on reason and nature, is paraphrased with allusion to Leviticus 24:20: “Thou shalt do to another as he hath done to thee. Treat him as he hath treated thee; well if well, but if ill then ill.” This law, al-Kindī says, “does not agree with the divine law, nor was that prescribed by our Lord who was merciful and pitiful towards his creatures.” There is no room in al-Kindī’s paradigm, it seems, for Christ’s own summary and affirmation of the Mosaic law via the commands to love God and neighbor.

Historic Examples of Muslim Criticism of Christian Political Theology

Muslim polemics against Christianity couldn’t help but capitalize on what they perceived as a Christian disregard for the Mosaic law, and they often argued that this put Christians dangerously close to the gnostic heresies they claimed to repudiate. Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ (d. A.D. 869), for example, wrote in his well-known polemic that:

when one hears [Christian] notions about forgiveness and wanderings in quest for God, their censure for partaking of meats and their predilection for grain products; when one hears them preaching abstinence from marriage and from the begetting of offspring...one is convinced that there is a resemblance between Christianity and Manichaeism and that the former leans toward the teachings of the latter.

These Manichean tendencies in Christianity, al-Jāḥiẓ supposes, are linked with Christianity’s ostensible antinomianism. It has “neither penalties that impose fear, like the [Islamic] written punishments nor fire or punishment in the next world.”

About 150 years later (c. A.D. 995), we find a Muslim scholar named ʿAbd al-Jabbār developing arguments like those of al-Jāḥiẓ in several ways. First, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s critique moves beyond general observations about Christianity’s similarity to Gnosticism and accuses the apostle Paul of being the source of Christianity’s gnostic tendencies. Jesus, ʿAbd al-Jabbār says in an Islamicized rendering of Matthew 5:17, “came only to revive the Tawrat and to establish it.” What ʿAbd al-Jabbār means by “revival” and “establishment” is a straightforward repetition of the Law of Moses, including the requirement of circumcision and the prohibition on eating pork. Having created an Islamic Jesus for his protagonist, ʿAbd al-Jabbār then creates his villain. It was the apostle Paul who taught that the Tawrat was “entirely evil” and that “When the laws of the Tawrat are removed from the people, God's goodness will be perfected and His benevolence will be completed.” ʿAbd al-Jabbār supposes that Mani was a deliberate follower of Paul in rejecting the Tawrāt.

Second, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s narrative extends al-Jāḥiẓ’s antinomian critique of Christianity in a political direction. Where al-Jāḥiẓ’s had merely expressed concern that Christianity could not put the world right without adequate temporal and eternal punishments, ʿAbd al-Jabbār asserts that the desire of Christians for worldly power over their Jewish opponents led them to abandon their divinely given law and adopt the maligned socio-political practices of the Roman empire. Thus, rather than Rome being Christianized, Christianity was Romanized, with the result being that “[n]o sword has been carried with so much iniquity, in any era, as the sword of Christianity.”

Finally, ʿAbd al-Jabbār wields the accusation of Gnosticism to drive a wedge between the biblical narrative and Christian Christology. Responding to the Christian argument that Muhammad’s use of the sword invalidated his claim to prophethood, ʿAbd al-Jabbār counters that this view cannot cohere with the Christian belief that Jesus is God. For if Jesus is divine, then this means that he was responsible for sending Moses and the rest of the prophets who wielded the sword, to say nothing of the Flood that destroyed the entire world in Noah’s generation. If this is the case, how can the Christ who is responsible for sending the sword and judgment also be the Christ who was “kind and compassionate and above causing pain, severity, harm, and troubles”? This is one way that Christians like Mani had “washed [their] hands” of Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and David”. The only difference was that the Christian embarrassment was greater, since Jesus’ affirmation of the earlier prophets was “thoroughly demonstrated and utterly clear.” The solution for ʿAbd al-Jabbār is that Christians should drop their claims to Christ’s uniqueness and see him within an Islamic narrative in which the sword is justified any time it is commanded to be used by God.

The Contemporary Period

Muslim critiques like these are not merely medieval relics. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we find them being revived as Muslims become increasingly familiar with the tents of liberal Protestantism. No one better exemplifies this trend than Palestinian-American philosopher Isma'il Ragi A. al-Faruqi (1921–1986), whose books Christian Ethics: A Systematic and Historical Analysis remains the only attempt by a Muslim thinker to offer a systematic critical assessment of Christian ethics. The key to al-Faruqi’s argument is a marcionite dichotomy between the Old Testament and Jesus. The Old Testament is nothing but a long record of Hebrew “racialism”, in which God “irrationally” shows favor to one man, family, or party, at the expense of the rest of humanity. Drawing on the writings of Protestant theologians and ethicists such as Ernst Troelstch, T. W. Manson, Gerhard von Rad, and Paul Ramsey, among others, al-Faruqi argues that Jesus’ mission is a reaction to the Jewish racialist ethic. In reaction to the Jewish emphasis on the community’s self-preservation, Jesus emphasized the superior value of the individual. In reaction to the Jewish law’s consequentialist orientation towards community formation, Jesus proclaimed an interior ethic of intentional love for God, and the “removal of the neighbour—indeed all effects and consequences—from the act’s properly moral worth.” This ethic, an entirely asocial message of self-transformation, al-Faruqi terms “personalism”. Once it has been adopted, even Jesus himself is left behind by the liberated moral subject. And in true marcionite fashion, any social references to the ethical importance of the neighbor or the church in the gospels are deemed to be hangovers from Jewish legalism imported later by Jesus’ followers.

Kenneth Cragg (1913–2012) was an Anglican bishop and missionary scholar whose writings exerted enormous influence on Protestant attitudes to Islam in the 20th century. He was aware of al-Faruqi’s criticisms and was critical of al-Faruqi’s tendency to “sharpen the edge of Jesus’ encounter with the Jewish establishment and to think of him exclusively as the accuser of his own people.” Nevertheless, Cragg’s interpretation of Jesus’s political significance to Muslims was hampered by own historicist reading of the Old Testament. In this reading, the exilic prophets were the highpoint of divine revelation in the Old Testament, because, unlike Joshua, Samuel, and Elijah, they ostensibly witnessed to the truth and suffered for it without recourse to political power. Jesus’ decision to go to the cross was interpreted by him as a vindication of these exilic prophets against the earlier “belligerent” parts of the Old Testament. The result of this reading is a depoliticized understanding of Jesus and the mission of the church that is overly focused on the cross. The cross, for Cragg, reveals the “parting of ways” between the external success of political power and internally-held religious truth. The church can therefore only be joined by “consent”, while the state must be “free to organize itself.” Cragg does make a subsequent claim that Christians ought to exercise a costly political responsibility in the world. It is not clear, though, how this could be theologically legitimate for a follower of the crucified Messiah who refused political power in favor of religious truth.

Reforming Christian Theo-Political Witness to Muslims

Having looked in the mirror of history, it should be clear now that Muslims who accuse Christianity of veering towards Gnosticism in matters of political theology are not entirely wide of the mark. Given this history, what reforms might Christians engaged with Muslims make to their witness? While many things could be said, here I will focus on some lessons that can be learned from the greatest book on Christian political theology written in the 20th century: Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, and propose how this work might amend some of the problems we saw in Kenneth Cragg’s political theology.

O’Donovan’s political theology starts with a reflection on the reign of God as it is shown in Scripture. He begins with the observation that the refrain “Yahweh mālāḵ” (“Yahweh reigns,” or “Yahweh is King,” see Pss. 93:1; 96:10; 97:1; 99:1, and 1 Chr. 16:31) is consistently associated in the Bible with three recognizable activities: salvation—God’s giving of victory over enemies, judgment—his giving of effective discrimination between right and wrong, and possession—his giving of order and structure to the community via law and land. O’Donovan’s retrieval of Yahweh’s kingship in the Old Testament thus leads to a significant advance on Cragg’s conception of “politics.” Cragg’s political theology can never get beyond a general suspicion of the “political” because he defines politics as a wielding of sheer power. Power is an important part of God’s rule for O’Donovan, but this concept is enriched by being situated alongside judgment and possession. As O’Donovan explains: “It is divine authority, not divine power that is communicated by the idea [of Yahweh’s rule]. This authority evokes free action because it holds out to the worshippers a fulfillment of their agency within the created order in which their agency has a place and a meaning.”

O’Donovan also recognizes that it was Yahweh’s intention to enact his rule though human mediators who were designated to represent both God’s rule to his people and the faithful response of the people to God’s rule. Israel’s kings are typical of this. As channels of Yahweh’s salvation (e.g. 1 Sam. 11:9, 13; 19:5), judgment (e.g. 1 Kings 3:16–28), and possession (e.g. Ps. 89, esp. vv. 30–37), they represented God’s rule to his people. As the representatives of the people to God, though, their decisions to obey or disobey God’s law were the key to national renewal or decline. Kings were constrained in their role as mediators, but these constraints were not the result of a dialectic between an uncoercive “truth” held by the prophets and a coercive “power” held by kings, as Cragg supposed. O’Donovan instead argues that the king’s mediation of God’s rule was constrained by God’s law, which bore “independent witness to the divine command.” Indeed, the law constrained and guided not only kings but also the prophets in the performance of their duties. It gave the criterion for discerning the truth of a prophet’s words, regardless of whether they held the power of the sword (Deut. 13:1–5, Deut. 18:15–21), and it was the law which determined whether the king had used the coercive power of the sword truthfully (Deut. 17:14–20).

All of this has important consequences for how Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God is interpreted. For Cragg, the point of God’s kingdom is the revelation of noncompulsive love and therefore a parting of ways with the ‘political’ sword of the Old Testament. O’Donovan’s analysis, by contrast, sees Jesus displaying all the features of kingship seen in the Old Testament: he performed works of power over demonic forces, sickness, and death; he effected the judgment of God against the misguided rulers of Israel in favor of those who repented of their sins and believed in him, and he placed Israel in more effective possession of the law, fulfilling its expectations and enabling its expression within the community in the manner foretold by the prophets, being “written on their hearts.”

Viewing Jesus through the lens of kingship in the Old Testament also affects how O’Donovan views the cross. As the one representing the people to God, on the cross Jesus suffers the wrongful judgment of sinful Israel in Israel’s place. The full meaning of the cross, though, cannot be known when considered as an isolated event. In the resurrection, no less than on the cross, Jesus was the faithful representative of the people to God, and so his salvation from death is also Israel’s salvation. This, according to O’Donovan, is what the apostle Paul means when he says that Christ was “delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:24, emphasis mine). So too, the ascension, which O’Donovan interprets as a granting of eternal possession to Christ on behalf of Israel through his heavenly enthronement through the second Psalm, which as we saw earlier, directly addresses earthly rulers:

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
Be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
And rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
Lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
For his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
(Psalm 2:10–12)

In taking his seat on the throne of heaven, then, Christ has not removed himself from political relevancy nor finalized a “parting of ways” with the sword. Instead, the rulers of the earth find themselves directly addressed in the event of his coronation and are admonished to “kiss the Son” as the condition of their blessing. This is the first part of the political significance of the ascension for O’Donovan: because Christ now sits on the throne of heaven, all earthly rule has been subjected to his own; all political authority now has an inescapable, Christological dimension.

The second part of the ascension’s political significance for O’Donovan is the qualifying assertion that Christ’s enthronement “awaits a final, universal presence of Christ to become fully apparent.” The tension of these two assertions is encapsulated in Hebrews: “[I]n putting everything in subjection to [Jesus], [God] left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb. 2:8b). And between these two assertions, O’Donovan argues, “there opens up an account of...authority which presumes neither that the Christ-event never occurred nor that the sovereignty of Christ is now transparent and uncontested.” The reality of Christ’s subjection of earthly rulers and authorities makes the task of coercive government subordinate to the mission of the church: all the goals and conduct of earthly government are “reconceived to serve the needs of international mobility and contact which the advancement of the Gospel requires.” Furthermore, because the sovereignty of Christ is not yet transparent and uncontested, earthly rulers receive authority from Christ for the positive task of public judgment to address the evil and wrongdoing which persist until the parousia. This is how O’Donovan interprets both the Pauline and the Petrine writings of the New Testament which speak about the authority of earthly rulers: in light of the ascension, the power, judgment, and tradition which earthly governments coordinate in their actions ought to be focused upon the judicial task.

The church cannot take for granted, of course, that earthly rulers will fulfill their tasks of providing freedom for the church’s mission and providing public judgment against wrongdoing. Rulers may reject the summons of the ascended Christ, and so the church in every time and place must be prepared for martyrdom. Equally, though, the church cannot take for granted that rulers will always oppose her mission, and so she must also be prepared for mutual cooperation with earthly rulers, standing ready to disciple them where they seek to enact their vocation in service to Christ.

Conclusion

Readers who have endured to the end of this essay may be left feeling unsatisfied by all of the practical issues which have been left unaddressed by these proposed reforms. What ought mutual service between the church and earthly rulers look like when it occurs? This important question, and many others, will have to wait for another time. For now, it is enough to appreciate how O’Donovan’s careful attentiveness to the theme of kingship in the Old Testament generates an understanding of the gospel which has direct relevance to political life and refuses to make the church and earthly rulers into necessary enemies. Given the tendency towards marcionism in historic Christian theo-political witness to Muslims, O’Donovan’s work is a welcome corrective, and more careful studies like his will be needed in the future. At a more basic level, though, his work should encourage Christians reading the Bible with Muslims to resist the temptation to jump straight into the gospels at the expense of their Old Testament background.