Let me begin by commending Joseph Abdelmalik for his effort at encouraging a robust political theology in the church. Protestant theology has often failed to take up its responsibility in public life, and by doing so has either perpetrated, or simply enabled, deep structural injustice in society. But though I have not yet had the opportunity to read Abdelmalik more comprehensively, many parts of his article raise some red flags for me. By responding exclusively to this piece, I hope not to do injustice to his thinking and repent in advance for any intellectual violence I might commit.
Church history holds within its pages both the extremes of the Byzantine heresy of instrumentalizing Christianity and the cross for political ends on one extreme, and the heresy of Tatianism and other radical ascetical movements that called for a total disengagement with the world at the other extreme. Any political theology today needs to learn from these extremes and steer away from them. What we should not do is to acquiesce too easily to Muslim political theory, as Abdelmalik sometimes seems to be doing. Rather, we must hold on to the radical critique of human political violence through the challenge that Christ offers by his self-giving act on the cross, an act that put an end to the legitimacy of placing religion at the service of human violence and political propaganda.
In my response, I will follow the author’s structure and comment in some detail on the content of his argument. I will give primary attention to his use of Muslim and Islamicist sources, which is in line with my own academic discipline. Being myself an Islamicist rather than a political scientist, I will leave the domain of political theory to later respondents, who I hope will be more qualified than me to engage the article from that standpoint.
To begin with, I fail to see how the gospel, properly lived out, has been “bad news for political life” to Muslims. It seems to me, rather, that it is when the church has lived out its political life according to the patterns of the world that the gospel has been bad news. Abdelmalik argues in his introduction that “presenting the gospel as political good news to Muslims requires the church to reform her historic witness.” But is the simple affirmation that the gospel is political sufficiently “good news” for Muslims?
Let us turn to the structure of the author’s argument, which begins with early Christian perceptions of Islam, followed by classical examples of Eastern Christian witness to Islam and Muslim responses to them. Abdelmalik then briefly touches on Muslim and Christian contemporary texts by Isma‘il al-Faruqi and Kenneth Cragg, before concluding with Oliver O’Donovan’s political theology, which he views as a needed corrective to a problematic history.
In my view, Abdelmalik’s reading of the Qur’an’s relationship with the Judeo-Christian scriptures lacks some perspective. The Qur’an indeed affirms continuity with earlier scriptures and revelation. But discontinuity with the interpretation and doctrine is also affirmed. As I have shown in my own writings, based on their reading of such verses as 4:46, 5:13, or 5:41, Muslims, all the way up to the eleventh century, accused Jews and Christians of corrupting the meaning of their scriptures. In other words, they accused them of misinterpretation. Only from the eleventh century onward are Jews and Christians openly and consistently accused of changing the very text of their scriptures. This is what I and others have referred to as the Muslim distinction between tahrif al-lafdh (corruption of text) and tahrif al-ma‘na (corruption of meaning, or misinterpretation). The author provides his own translation of Qur’an 5:12-15. Yet, other translations, such as the one found on quran.com (https://quran.com/5?startingVerse=13), are closer to the Arabic text:
“They distorted the words of the Scripture and neglected a portion of what they had been commanded to uphold” (5:13).
Both the words nasu and dhukkiru have to be understood not simply as “they forgot” and “they were reminded” (as Abdelmalik does), but rather as common terms used in the Qur’an as referring to the message that was “preached” and the commandments that were “neglected.”
Furthermore, the expression yuharrifun al-kalima ‘an mawadi‘ihi is used in two other verses in the Qur’an, where it is clear that the meaning is “removing words out of their proper context” in the sense of “misinterpretation”, not in the sense of “textual corruption.” Most Muslim polemicists against Christianity until the eleventh century understood those verses in this specific way. Only from the eleventh century onward is the interpretation of this expression also taken to mean “corruption of text.”
The inaccurate translation that Abdelmalik produces leads him to conclude that “For Muslims, what requires changing in the Bible is anything which appears to disagree with the Qur’an.” But I disagree with this reading. The Qur’an is not critical of the Bible nor of Jesus. It is critical of Christian doctrines primarily, and that is why Muslim scholars undertook so much “muhammado-centric” re-reading of the Bible. This phenomenon does not so much resemble Marcionism (as the author asserts), as it does Orthodox Christianity’s “christo-centric” re-reading of the Old Testament.
In fact, this Qur’anic argument further supports the hypothesis that Muhammad was much more a part of a Judeo-Christian hermeneutical community than traditional Islam would allow.
Based on such Qur’anic verses, Abdelmalik argues that “Muslims have sought to situate Jesus firmly within an ‘Islamicized’ Old Testament context and thereby ‘liberate’ him from the apostle Paul’s corrupting influence.”
But according to my own studies this is not actually part of the Qur’anic project, but rather a later trend that emerged within Islam from about the end of the first millennium.
The author argues that “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.” But in reality, both Timothy I and others equally used the Bible, the Qur’an, and philosophy to address Muslim questions. Day 2 of the dialogue between Catholicos Timothy and al-Mahdi is full of Qur’anic citations to support Biblical truth, and full of philosophical arguments to support his position.
By reading some of Timothy’s arguments away from his overall thrust, Abdelmalik claims that “later in the dialogue … Timothy will testify against himself.” But in fact, there is an orderly procession of arguments over the two days of debate. It is not so much that he contradicts himself as that he uses different types of arguments to address different questions.
In his review of historical texts, it often feels like Abdelmalik is reading political theology where none was intended. Timothy’s discourse was never designed to address political theory. His reference to Psalm 2 is intended to demonstrate the greatness of Christ, not some enduring political power in the hands of the church.
In his treatment of a second classical Christian text, the Apology of al-Kindī (c. A.D. 820), the author suggests that here “reason and the Qur’an assume greater authority alongside appeals to Scripture.” I disagree. Timothy’s argument is not only full of Biblical verses, but also of Qur’anic citations and of philosophical arguments. Those are in fact far more sophisticated than those of pseudonymous al-Kindī, whose words merely reflect the paradigmatic polemics of Christians of the ninth century against Muslims. The reason why al-Kindī’s discourse is so brazen about Muhammad is because it is pseudonymous, rather than due to a development of the metadialogue between Timothy’s time and that of al-Kindī. Reading carefully Timothy’s words on day 1 will show that he is just as adamant as al-Kindī that Muhammad was not a “necessary” prophet and that the Qur’an was not a “necessary” scripture, since Christ and the Bible fulfilled all the expectations of the Old Testament. But Timothy does it respectfully, partly because, as the Catholicos of the Church of the East, he had to give account for his words before his congregation, and partly because he was speaking before a Muslim audience, including the Caliph himself.
Abdelmalik may also be giving too much weight to his discernment of a change in the spirit of al-Jahiz’s writing. Al-Jahiz was a well-known satirist. He used his usual style of rhetoric in other writings unrelated to Christianity or interfaith dialogue, such as his well-known political satire, Kitab al-Hayawan (The Book of Animals). Here, against Christians, he is not developing a rational argument, but simply mocking Christianity and Christians. Therefore, we cannot expect a rational argument from him. In another place in his Three Letters, he mocks his own community by saying that there is so much ignorance among them that he would not be surprised if the entire world were soon to turn Christian! Of course, he does not mean this. He is just satirically chastising his own community for their ignorance of Christian thinking.
As for Abdelmalik’s reading of ‘Abd al- Jabbār’s tenth-century treatise, we must remember that the latter lived through the era that closed the first millennium. As I have shown through my own research, the turn of the millennium marks a near-end to the more civil era of gracious Muslim-Christian dialogue. With Ibn Hazm, in the eleventh century, we enter a time of great upheaval, with the Reconquista in Spain and the beginning of the Crusades in the Near East. It is at this turn of the millennium that the apostle Paul becomes the arch-villain accused of corrupting Christianity. Although Abd al- Jabbār’s critique of Byzantine Christianity is valid, I am not sure how it supports Abdelmalik’s argument. Every time Christianity has flirted too closely with politics and militarism, the result has been devastating for the Christian witness to Islam, whether in its gospel or political expression.
“The solution for ʿAbd al-Jabbār,” Abdelmalik reflects, “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.” It is not clear whether this is also the solution proposed by Joseph Abdelmalik. For sure, this flies in the face of much of the writings of the Holy Fathers, who followed the example of the New Testament in reinterpreting the Old Testament Christo-centrically. Thus, some went so far as to interpret every occurrence of violence in the OT as spiritual warfare against the powers of darkness. I am not suggesting that this is a correct interpretation of the OT, but to return to a Byzantine interpretation of the Bible to justify the use of the sword in God’s name under the banner of Christ is certainly not the solution.
What we need to do is to maintain the Christocentric interpretation of the OT and affirm that Christ’s kingdom is one of gentleness, love, and kindness. At the same time, we may have to recognize that the violent passages in the OT often bear within their prose an underlying Israelite chauvinistic ideology and a propaganda of war and politics that Jesus came to correct, to redress our understanding of a loving God. God’s justice is no tool for human political propaganda. It is an assurance to the poor and oppressed that God “has their back” and that the injustice brought on by human sin will not endure forever.
As he moves to the modern era, Abdelmalik proposes the writing of Ismail al-Faruqi as a valid critique of the claim to dissonance between Old and New Testament. But we can hardly expect that al-Faruqi will present us with a balanced and comprehensive interpretation of scripture. He is not in the NT tradition of reading the OT through the lens of Christ. His critique of liberal Protestant Biblical criticism may be valid on some points, but Abdelmalik’s apparent agreement with al-Faruqi’s conclusion that Jesus should be read more in line with OT ethics rather than in line with the way Church Fathers understood Jesus’s break with the past, need not necessarily be true or acceptable from a Christian ethical perspective.
In contrast to al-Faruqi, Abdelmalik discusses the views of British Bishop and Islamicist Kenneth Cragg. I will not speak for Cragg, but I will affirm with him that the cross was a radical critique of human political power. It provides us with a radical rearrangement of our understanding of power. It is an affirmation that the true power that leads to resurrection is the power of servanthood, of self-givingness that breaks the cycle of violence, a violence that drags the human understanding of power as violence through the mud of eternal self-perpetuation!
Finally, Abdelmalik describes Oliver O’Donovan as the greatest political theologian of the twentieth century, as he restores, in the author’s opinion, the model of the kings of Israel into its rightful place as the background to our understanding of God’s kingdom in the New Testament. But the kings of Israel’s wielding of power, regardless of whether it was supposed to be kept in check by the law, proved to be an utter disaster. Even David, in whom the hopes of the coming King and Messiah Jesus were to be fulfilled, was not allowed in the end to build God’s temple because of all the unrighteous blood that he had on his hands. We know that Solomon’s political legacy was also disastrous as he sought diplomatic alliances by giving free reign to his sexual moral bankruptcy. And the rest of the narratives of the kings of Israel and Judah were no less disastrous in the Biblical record. If anything, the Biblical record demonstrates that kingship in Israel was a total fiasco in the grand divine narrative, beginning with Israelite rebellion against God by asking prophet Samuel for a king, to the entire collapse of the system through the exile of both the Judean and Israelite kingdoms. The hope for a just king is only fulfilled in Christ, priest, prophet, and king, who brought a radical reinterpretation to our public and political theology through the cross’s challenge to every human understanding of power.
Indeed, O’Donovan’s analysis leads us to a reading of Jesus’s radical reinterpretation of OT concepts of power, judgment, and possession, by refocusing them on the unseen kingdom of the already and the not yet. This kingdom does not permit wielding human power, whether political, military, or judicial. Jesus’s kingdom undertakes a radical replacement of these components in the hands of a Biblical ethic, modeled on the Sermon on the Mount, where power is wielded through weakness, great strength through the subversive power of the tiny mustard seed and handful of leaven, a pinch of salt and weak ray of light in the darkness. The kingdom of God teaches us that it is through service that we gain the status of masters.
Furthermore, I fail to see how Christ’s seating on the throne of heaven should return his church to the Old Testament dispensation. The ascension to the right hand of God, as affirmed by the early Christian hymn in Philippians 2, is the fulfillment of a life of selflessness that destroys the validity of human understandings of power. It is by no means an invitation for the church to retake possession of earthly authority in the old sense of political power.
All the purpose and conduct of earthly government, Abdelmalik understands O’Donovan to be saying, are “reconceived to serve the needs of international mobility and contact which the advancement of the Gospel requires.” But is this statement not a justification of the colonial missionary movement? The missio dei and the coming of God’s kingdom on earth do not need the support of political power. There too the church has a history of failure. It is the subversive power of the mustard seed and leaven that leads to the growth of the kingdom in the sense that Jesus envisaged, not the mission history of power and coercion that so often went hand in hand historically with colonial armies. The conversion of the “heathen” and “savages,” from the Far East, to Africa, to the New World, were not manifestations of God’s power. Christ, through the power of his death and resurrection, no doubt has turned some of this legacy into blessing for the oppressed and raped populations that were subjected to this savage power. But a truly Biblical interpretation of this history and legacy cannot read it as a part of the missio dei beyond as an incident of history.
Finally, Abdelmalik seems to agree with O’Donovan that when the “Pauline and the Petrine writings of the New Testament … speak about the authority of earthly rulers,” they are encouraging the church’s collaboration with the ruling authorities. But in my view, this is a mono-dimensional reading of the NT treatment of human authorities and earthly rulers. The other lens required to create a multi-dimensional vision is to see that the Roman Empire, which was more often oppressive than not, could also be a figure of the anti-Christ. Christ, in his second coming, would once more bring it to its knees, as he brings history to its final conclusion, liberating the weak, the poor, and the oppressed.
“Rulers may reject the summons of the ascended Christ,” Abdelmalik warns, “and so the church in every time and place must be prepared for martyrdom.” But is it not, rather, whenever earthly rulers reject the summons of the crucified Christ, that they unmistakenly reject the summons of the ascended Christ. Without the cross, there is neither resurrection nor ascension.
Instead of reviving an Old Testament view of political theology, I would argue that rulers should rule today according to internationally agreed human rights laws. Whenever they try to claim for themselves a divine vocation, they will unmistakably become tyrants and do harm to those humans who do not abide by their understanding of religion and God.
What I believe this article helps us demonstrate is that Christ’s call to political theology and engagement is not a call to return to the OT pattern of kingship, which was itself born in sin and rebellion against God. The church is called to judge rulers not by their claims to divine legitimacy or simply by virtue of their accession to power. The church’s willingness to offer service to human rulers and collaboration with earthly power will always have to be subject to the scrutiny of Christ’s life model and teaching. If rulers fail this test, then they are to be resisted, and the church will not be coopted into their structural violence.
A Christian political theology should not be driven by partisanship that becomes blind to right and wrong through indiscriminate support for one political position in conflict with others. It is to be driven by a burning desire for divine justice in the way that was manifested through Christ. Political theology must be at the service of the poor and oppressed, willing to actively labor against deep structures of injustice and oppression, through service, selfless advocacy, even to the point of giving up one’s life in the face of the oppressor. It is certainly not a call to take up arms or embrace structures of human power which only lead to cycles of violence and deeper oppression.
Martin Accad is President of The Near East School of Theology, Beirut, Lebanon
Let me begin by commending Joseph Abdelmalik for his effort at encouraging a robust political theology in the church. Protestant theology has often failed to take up its responsibility in public life, and by doing so has either perpetrated, or simply enabled, deep structural injustice in society. But though I have not yet had the opportunity to read Abdelmalik more comprehensively, many parts of his article raise some red flags for me. By responding exclusively to this piece, I hope not to do injustice to his thinking and repent in advance for any intellectual violence I might commit.
Church history holds within its pages both the extremes of the Byzantine heresy of instrumentalizing Christianity and the cross for political ends on one extreme, and the heresy of Tatianism and other radical ascetical movements that called for a total disengagement with the world at the other extreme. Any political theology today needs to learn from these extremes and steer away from them. What we should not do is to acquiesce too easily to Muslim political theory, as Abdelmalik sometimes seems to be doing. Rather, we must hold on to the radical critique of human political violence through the challenge that Christ offers by his self-giving act on the cross, an act that put an end to the legitimacy of placing religion at the service of human violence and political propaganda.
In my response, I will follow the author’s structure and comment in some detail on the content of his argument. I will give primary attention to his use of Muslim and Islamicist sources, which is in line with my own academic discipline. Being myself an Islamicist rather than a political scientist, I will leave the domain of political theory to later respondents, who I hope will be more qualified than me to engage the article from that standpoint.
To begin with, I fail to see how the gospel, properly lived out, has been “bad news for political life” to Muslims. It seems to me, rather, that it is when the church has lived out its political life according to the patterns of the world that the gospel has been bad news. Abdelmalik argues in his introduction that “presenting the gospel as political good news to Muslims requires the church to reform her historic witness.” But is the simple affirmation that the gospel is political sufficiently “good news” for Muslims?
Let us turn to the structure of the author’s argument, which begins with early Christian perceptions of Islam, followed by classical examples of Eastern Christian witness to Islam and Muslim responses to them. Abdelmalik then briefly touches on Muslim and Christian contemporary texts by Isma‘il al-Faruqi and Kenneth Cragg, before concluding with Oliver O’Donovan’s political theology, which he views as a needed corrective to a problematic history.
In my view, Abdelmalik’s reading of the Qur’an’s relationship with the Judeo-Christian scriptures lacks some perspective. The Qur’an indeed affirms continuity with earlier scriptures and revelation. But discontinuity with the interpretation and doctrine is also affirmed. As I have shown in my own writings, based on their reading of such verses as 4:46, 5:13, or 5:41, Muslims, all the way up to the eleventh century, accused Jews and Christians of corrupting the meaning of their scriptures. In other words, they accused them of misinterpretation. Only from the eleventh century onward are Jews and Christians openly and consistently accused of changing the very text of their scriptures. This is what I and others have referred to as the Muslim distinction between tahrif al-lafdh (corruption of text) and tahrif al-ma‘na (corruption of meaning, or misinterpretation). The author provides his own translation of Qur’an 5:12-15. Yet, other translations, such as the one found on quran.com (https://quran.com/5?startingVerse=13), are closer to the Arabic text:
“They distorted the words of the Scripture and neglected a portion of what they had been commanded to uphold” (5:13).
Both the words nasu and dhukkiru have to be understood not simply as “they forgot” and “they were reminded” (as Abdelmalik does), but rather as common terms used in the Qur’an as referring to the message that was “preached” and the commandments that were “neglected.”
Furthermore, the expression yuharrifun al-kalima ‘an mawadi‘ihi is used in two other verses in the Qur’an, where it is clear that the meaning is “removing words out of their proper context” in the sense of “misinterpretation”, not in the sense of “textual corruption.” Most Muslim polemicists against Christianity until the eleventh century understood those verses in this specific way. Only from the eleventh century onward is the interpretation of this expression also taken to mean “corruption of text.”
The inaccurate translation that Abdelmalik produces leads him to conclude that “For Muslims, what requires changing in the Bible is anything which appears to disagree with the Qur’an.” But I disagree with this reading. The Qur’an is not critical of the Bible nor of Jesus. It is critical of Christian doctrines primarily, and that is why Muslim scholars undertook so much “muhammado-centric” re-reading of the Bible. This phenomenon does not so much resemble Marcionism (as the author asserts), as it does Orthodox Christianity’s “christo-centric” re-reading of the Old Testament.
In fact, this Qur’anic argument further supports the hypothesis that Muhammad was much more a part of a Judeo-Christian hermeneutical community than traditional Islam would allow.
Based on such Qur’anic verses, Abdelmalik argues that “Muslims have sought to situate Jesus firmly within an ‘Islamicized’ Old Testament context and thereby ‘liberate’ him from the apostle Paul’s corrupting influence.”
But according to my own studies this is not actually part of the Qur’anic project, but rather a later trend that emerged within Islam from about the end of the first millennium.
The author argues that “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.” But in reality, both Timothy I and others equally used the Bible, the Qur’an, and philosophy to address Muslim questions. Day 2 of the dialogue between Catholicos Timothy and al-Mahdi is full of Qur’anic citations to support Biblical truth, and full of philosophical arguments to support his position.
By reading some of Timothy’s arguments away from his overall thrust, Abdelmalik claims that “later in the dialogue … Timothy will testify against himself.” But in fact, there is an orderly procession of arguments over the two days of debate. It is not so much that he contradicts himself as that he uses different types of arguments to address different questions.
In his review of historical texts, it often feels like Abdelmalik is reading political theology where none was intended. Timothy’s discourse was never designed to address political theory. His reference to Psalm 2 is intended to demonstrate the greatness of Christ, not some enduring political power in the hands of the church.
In his treatment of a second classical Christian text, the Apology of al-Kindī (c. A.D. 820), the author suggests that here “reason and the Qur’an assume greater authority alongside appeals to Scripture.” I disagree. Timothy’s argument is not only full of Biblical verses, but also of Qur’anic citations and of philosophical arguments. Those are in fact far more sophisticated than those of pseudonymous al-Kindī, whose words merely reflect the paradigmatic polemics of Christians of the ninth century against Muslims. The reason why al-Kindī’s discourse is so brazen about Muhammad is because it is pseudonymous, rather than due to a development of the metadialogue between Timothy’s time and that of al-Kindī. Reading carefully Timothy’s words on day 1 will show that he is just as adamant as al-Kindī that Muhammad was not a “necessary” prophet and that the Qur’an was not a “necessary” scripture, since Christ and the Bible fulfilled all the expectations of the Old Testament. But Timothy does it respectfully, partly because, as the Catholicos of the Church of the East, he had to give account for his words before his congregation, and partly because he was speaking before a Muslim audience, including the Caliph himself.
Abdelmalik may also be giving too much weight to his discernment of a change in the spirit of al-Jahiz’s writing. Al-Jahiz was a well-known satirist. He used his usual style of rhetoric in other writings unrelated to Christianity or interfaith dialogue, such as his well-known political satire, Kitab al-Hayawan (The Book of Animals). Here, against Christians, he is not developing a rational argument, but simply mocking Christianity and Christians. Therefore, we cannot expect a rational argument from him. In another place in his Three Letters, he mocks his own community by saying that there is so much ignorance among them that he would not be surprised if the entire world were soon to turn Christian! Of course, he does not mean this. He is just satirically chastising his own community for their ignorance of Christian thinking.
As for Abdelmalik’s reading of ‘Abd al- Jabbār’s tenth-century treatise, we must remember that the latter lived through the era that closed the first millennium. As I have shown through my own research, the turn of the millennium marks a near-end to the more civil era of gracious Muslim-Christian dialogue. With Ibn Hazm, in the eleventh century, we enter a time of great upheaval, with the Reconquista in Spain and the beginning of the Crusades in the Near East. It is at this turn of the millennium that the apostle Paul becomes the arch-villain accused of corrupting Christianity. Although Abd al- Jabbār’s critique of Byzantine Christianity is valid, I am not sure how it supports Abdelmalik’s argument. Every time Christianity has flirted too closely with politics and militarism, the result has been devastating for the Christian witness to Islam, whether in its gospel or political expression.
“The solution for ʿAbd al-Jabbār,” Abdelmalik reflects, “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.” It is not clear whether this is also the solution proposed by Joseph Abdelmalik. For sure, this flies in the face of much of the writings of the Holy Fathers, who followed the example of the New Testament in reinterpreting the Old Testament Christo-centrically. Thus, some went so far as to interpret every occurrence of violence in the OT as spiritual warfare against the powers of darkness. I am not suggesting that this is a correct interpretation of the OT, but to return to a Byzantine interpretation of the Bible to justify the use of the sword in God’s name under the banner of Christ is certainly not the solution.
What we need to do is to maintain the Christocentric interpretation of the OT and affirm that Christ’s kingdom is one of gentleness, love, and kindness. At the same time, we may have to recognize that the violent passages in the OT often bear within their prose an underlying Israelite chauvinistic ideology and a propaganda of war and politics that Jesus came to correct, to redress our understanding of a loving God. God’s justice is no tool for human political propaganda. It is an assurance to the poor and oppressed that God “has their back” and that the injustice brought on by human sin will not endure forever.
As he moves to the modern era, Abdelmalik proposes the writing of Ismail al-Faruqi as a valid critique of the claim to dissonance between Old and New Testament. But we can hardly expect that al-Faruqi will present us with a balanced and comprehensive interpretation of scripture. He is not in the NT tradition of reading the OT through the lens of Christ. His critique of liberal Protestant Biblical criticism may be valid on some points, but Abdelmalik’s apparent agreement with al-Faruqi’s conclusion that Jesus should be read more in line with OT ethics rather than in line with the way Church Fathers understood Jesus’s break with the past, need not necessarily be true or acceptable from a Christian ethical perspective.
In contrast to al-Faruqi, Abdelmalik discusses the views of British Bishop and Islamicist Kenneth Cragg. I will not speak for Cragg, but I will affirm with him that the cross was a radical critique of human political power. It provides us with a radical rearrangement of our understanding of power. It is an affirmation that the true power that leads to resurrection is the power of servanthood, of self-givingness that breaks the cycle of violence, a violence that drags the human understanding of power as violence through the mud of eternal self-perpetuation!
Finally, Abdelmalik describes Oliver O’Donovan as the greatest political theologian of the twentieth century, as he restores, in the author’s opinion, the model of the kings of Israel into its rightful place as the background to our understanding of God’s kingdom in the New Testament. But the kings of Israel’s wielding of power, regardless of whether it was supposed to be kept in check by the law, proved to be an utter disaster. Even David, in whom the hopes of the coming King and Messiah Jesus were to be fulfilled, was not allowed in the end to build God’s temple because of all the unrighteous blood that he had on his hands. We know that Solomon’s political legacy was also disastrous as he sought diplomatic alliances by giving free reign to his sexual moral bankruptcy. And the rest of the narratives of the kings of Israel and Judah were no less disastrous in the Biblical record. If anything, the Biblical record demonstrates that kingship in Israel was a total fiasco in the grand divine narrative, beginning with Israelite rebellion against God by asking prophet Samuel for a king, to the entire collapse of the system through the exile of both the Judean and Israelite kingdoms. The hope for a just king is only fulfilled in Christ, priest, prophet, and king, who brought a radical reinterpretation to our public and political theology through the cross’s challenge to every human understanding of power.
Indeed, O’Donovan’s analysis leads us to a reading of Jesus’s radical reinterpretation of OT concepts of power, judgment, and possession, by refocusing them on the unseen kingdom of the already and the not yet. This kingdom does not permit wielding human power, whether political, military, or judicial. Jesus’s kingdom undertakes a radical replacement of these components in the hands of a Biblical ethic, modeled on the Sermon on the Mount, where power is wielded through weakness, great strength through the subversive power of the tiny mustard seed and handful of leaven, a pinch of salt and weak ray of light in the darkness. The kingdom of God teaches us that it is through service that we gain the status of masters.
Furthermore, I fail to see how Christ’s seating on the throne of heaven should return his church to the Old Testament dispensation. The ascension to the right hand of God, as affirmed by the early Christian hymn in Philippians 2, is the fulfillment of a life of selflessness that destroys the validity of human understandings of power. It is by no means an invitation for the church to retake possession of earthly authority in the old sense of political power.
All the purpose and conduct of earthly government, Abdelmalik understands O’Donovan to be saying, are “reconceived to serve the needs of international mobility and contact which the advancement of the Gospel requires.” But is this statement not a justification of the colonial missionary movement? The missio dei and the coming of God’s kingdom on earth do not need the support of political power. There too the church has a history of failure. It is the subversive power of the mustard seed and leaven that leads to the growth of the kingdom in the sense that Jesus envisaged, not the mission history of power and coercion that so often went hand in hand historically with colonial armies. The conversion of the “heathen” and “savages,” from the Far East, to Africa, to the New World, were not manifestations of God’s power. Christ, through the power of his death and resurrection, no doubt has turned some of this legacy into blessing for the oppressed and raped populations that were subjected to this savage power. But a truly Biblical interpretation of this history and legacy cannot read it as a part of the missio dei beyond as an incident of history.
Finally, Abdelmalik seems to agree with O’Donovan that when the “Pauline and the Petrine writings of the New Testament … speak about the authority of earthly rulers,” they are encouraging the church’s collaboration with the ruling authorities. But in my view, this is a mono-dimensional reading of the NT treatment of human authorities and earthly rulers. The other lens required to create a multi-dimensional vision is to see that the Roman Empire, which was more often oppressive than not, could also be a figure of the anti-Christ. Christ, in his second coming, would once more bring it to its knees, as he brings history to its final conclusion, liberating the weak, the poor, and the oppressed.
“Rulers may reject the summons of the ascended Christ,” Abdelmalik warns, “and so the church in every time and place must be prepared for martyrdom.” But is it not, rather, whenever earthly rulers reject the summons of the crucified Christ, that they unmistakenly reject the summons of the ascended Christ. Without the cross, there is neither resurrection nor ascension.
Instead of reviving an Old Testament view of political theology, I would argue that rulers should rule today according to internationally agreed human rights laws. Whenever they try to claim for themselves a divine vocation, they will unmistakably become tyrants and do harm to those humans who do not abide by their understanding of religion and God.
What I believe this article helps us demonstrate is that Christ’s call to political theology and engagement is not a call to return to the OT pattern of kingship, which was itself born in sin and rebellion against God. The church is called to judge rulers not by their claims to divine legitimacy or simply by virtue of their accession to power. The church’s willingness to offer service to human rulers and collaboration with earthly power will always have to be subject to the scrutiny of Christ’s life model and teaching. If rulers fail this test, then they are to be resisted, and the church will not be coopted into their structural violence.
A Christian political theology should not be driven by partisanship that becomes blind to right and wrong through indiscriminate support for one political position in conflict with others. It is to be driven by a burning desire for divine justice in the way that was manifested through Christ. Political theology must be at the service of the poor and oppressed, willing to actively labor against deep structures of injustice and oppression, through service, selfless advocacy, even to the point of giving up one’s life in the face of the oppressor. It is certainly not a call to take up arms or embrace structures of human power which only lead to cycles of violence and deeper oppression.
Martin Accad is President of The Near East School of Theology, Beirut, Lebanon
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