How should a Christian ‘think’ the relationship between Christianity and Islam? The familiar approaches are historical or comparative: in school we learn something of the origins and development of Islam and in inter-faith encounters something of the ways in which Islamic belief is like our own and different from our own. All that is important. Ignorance is a great barrier to understanding and a real danger. But the historical-comparative does not amount to a theological understanding of the relationship.
Despite the efforts of Christian theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, and the attention given to the meaning of Islam in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium, on a popular level little has changed. Most Christians have little idea of where, for them, Islam stands in the history of faith. Muslims have gone further in this respect than Christians. Later revelations are generally forced to theologise their antecedents, and so Muslims have a theological understanding of Christianity. For them it is a faith grounded in the true teaching of the Messiah, Jesus, a prophet of God, but requiring the revelation of Islam to correct its later corruption.
Most Christians are now ready to agree (with John Paul II, among others) that Islam offers a path to God. But how it does that, and how that path can be consistent with the centrality of Christ, is rarely worked out. At this stage the great irreconcilables begin to loom: the divinity of Christ on the one hand, and the God-spoken authority of the Quran on the other.
Christian approaches to Islam often start from the recognition that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace their origin to the faith of Abraham; but again, this is needs to be taken in more than a historical sense. We need to understand that this common origin carries a theological significance that can help Christians to locate Islam within the history of revelation.
To deal with all this is the work of a generation, not a short essay. But I recently came across something that seemed to be a clue. At a multi-faith gathering, I asked our host, an Anglican theologian, about the weakness of Christian theology of Islam. He made a good point about the difficult of reconciling faiths that work through narratives of God’s activity; how narratives, because they are linear constructions of particulars, tend to be closed to each other. It occurred to me, listening to him, that it is easier in some ways to relate a non-narrative faith like Buddhism to Christianity than one like Islam, which also tells a story, but a different one.
At that point a Muslim came up to thank the theologian for his hospitality, and he mentioned Abraham’s hospitality to his three angelic visitors. Here was part of the narrative that we all, Jews, Christians and Muslims, know and share, and there was a sense of standing on common ground. The Anglican asked the Muslim if he knew Rublev’s icon of the filoxenia, of the hospitality of Abraham. At that point, though the conversation had taken an apparently unrelated turn, I felt a strong relevance to my question about a Christian theology of Islam. Somewhere here there was the hint of an answer.
Rublev’s painting shows three figures, similar in dress and appearance, seated on three sides of a table, their faces turned toward us but also inclined to each other. On the table there is a chalice-like cup, containing what appears to be wine. One figure is at the centre of the painting and the other two are to the sides, but there is no sense of hierarchy or priority among them. Though the icon has often been taken as an image of the Trinity, it is impossible to distinguish between the three figures, or to see a pre-eminence in any one of them as representing God the Father. Nothing could better illustrate the equivalence of the three persons of God, their shared being.
But what emerges most powerfully from this icon is a quality of attention and tenderness. We feel the attention, the deference, the gentleness that flows between these figures; they are deeply and tenderly aware of each other. We are looking, not at three individuals, still less at three ‘personalities’, but at three persons whose personhood is precisely this mutuality that flows, unbroken, between them.
But their attention is also directed to what is before them. Seated as they are on three sides of the table, they enclose something very precious, the object of their tender attention, which is Abraham’s cup of hospitality. Rublev, a Christian, has made this cup a Eucharistic chalice. In that perspective, what lies before them is the blood of Christ, though we can’t distinguish him among the three (none of the hands bears the stigmata). The whole Trinity contemplates his sacrifice.
As I recalled this image, it seemed to contain a way of approaching the three Abrahamic faiths. Perhaps the way to ‘think’ their relationship was not through trying to integrate their stories or reconcile their dogma, but through an image. Might we not see Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the three figures around the table, attentive to each other and attentive to what lay before them?
A nice thought; but the problem, of course, is what lies on the table. Rublev makes it a Eucharistic cup, which at once excludes Judaism and Islam. If asked, Judaism might lay the Torah on the table, and Islam the Quran; but both would object to my Christian inclination to see in these three figures an image of the being of God.
Once again, the great irreconcilables. But Rublev’s icon is, after all, taken from the life of Abraham, and he is the primal figure because he entered into a covenant in which he offered God his trust in the assurance that God would show him some good thing. This is what is happening in this icon: the angelic visitors have come to bring him the news that his aged wife will bear him a son. Sarah, behind the tent-flap, can be heard laughing. But Abraham will trust, and God will show his hand.
At the heart of the three Abrahamic religions lies this defining Abrahamic act, this kernel of a common narrative. Before anything else, we are called to faith that exceeds all calculation and probability, and God, as the true host, the fountain of hospitality, will lay something on the table. For some it has been the Torah, for others the Eucharistic sacrifice of Christ’s death, for yet others the Quran. But against all the odds of history and rational expectation, the gift will come. And when it comes, it commands our tender attention.
The three angels of the three faiths enclose and protect—but also make available to us, because it is we who stand at the fourth side of the table—God’s showing of himself in history, a showing that we recount in different ways. The three are defined by the attention that they give to God’s action. But in this attention they are brought into a mutual relationship, because there is only one God to whom that attention can be given, and his action in history is, therefore, a single action and cannot be otherwise. When we understand that, we shall stop talking about error and difference, and our relationship will be illuminated by the tenderness that unites Rublev’s angels.
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