Question for a Christian, are people able to embrace Muhammad in the same light as Jesus in the oneness with the Father?
When we talk about the unity of religions, which I regard as a
transcendent unity, as the differences and distinctions that stand here in the phenomenal world are real, unavoidable and inescapable, according to the nature of this world, we have to face the issue not just of 'religions' but also with the nature of human knowing and this unity's intelligibility.
When we name things, we conceptualize. Do our names correspond exactly to the things we seek to represent by them?
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Too often and too easily we confuse God with his our own thoughts, our own concepts, of God.
In Islam there are the Ninety-Nine Names – The Beneficent, The Merciful, The Eternal, and so forth – but Islam is at pains to make clear that these names refer to the attributes of Allah (The God), and no one attribute, nor even all of them, suffices to sum up, as it were, the Divine.
(The is a sc-fi short story by Arthur C Clark, the title I forget, and the story, as I recall it, is about someone who makes a final, complete and entire list of all the Names of God. Having closed the cover on the last and final entry, he looks out onto the night sky to see the stars going out, one by one.)
Names of God are cataphatic descriptions of the divine essence. St Gregory of Nyssa allows that these names are born from what we can predicate of the Divine, but the Divine infinity and simplicity means that all attributes are always subject to apophatic review or qualification –
neti-neti, 'not this, not that'.
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To follow a religion, to be a believer, to hold a faith, is to commit to a
particular faith and thereby think in terms of a
particular divine designation as the source of that expression. One cannot hold every faith without stumbling into a welter of confusions and contradictions.
As a Christian, I identify with Jesus Christ as the manifestation of the
Logos within whom subsists all creation, and all participates in Him.
That is to say, my universality and vision of unity is founded on my Christology. St Maximus teaches Christ the Logos subsists in and as the
logos of every creature, just as the Spirit is the true
pneuma breathing forth the rational soul into every being and the cosmos as a whole.
There is nothing then to finally encounter, on a Christian read of reality, than Christ:
"For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma, but then face to face; as yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I have been fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12) and "Beloved ones, now we are children of God, and what we shall be has not yet become apparent. We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2).
That my Christian universalism co-exists with other specific universalisms does not depreciate its value – rather, I would say that my particular inclination is a deeply personal response to the mystery of things I’ve encountered and learned. Furthermore I would say that
my inclination,
my vocation,
my calling, is
my response to that call in and from the very depths of
my being.
Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes. Each must answer as they are called.
I am a monotheist. I am a monogamist, but that does not mean I do not love others.
aboutislam.net
