Friday, August 12, 2016

Notes on Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Nongbri 2013)

Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

Main Premise: The concept of religion as a universal, timeless, personal, and private belief system that can be abstracted from public life resulted from the Enlightenment. Our common understanding of religion did not exist in cultures before the Protestant Reformation (including the Old Testament Israelite community, the early Christian movement, and Islam). These cultures had no way to express an abstract/universal/timeless truth that we consider “religious” belief today. We cannot project our ideas of religion on the Bible the Qur’an, because we distort the messages of those books.

About the Book: This is not a new premise. Many scholars have said the same things before. Yet Nongbri brings everything together in a sustained historical argument in a brief 150 pages. There are about 70 pages of endnotes- very extensive.

Thoughts: The ideas are so counter-intuitive and tied up with semantics that it is quite difficult (for me) to comprehend. If Islam and Christianity did not emerge as religions (in the modern sense of the term), then what were they? I feel quite disoriented from reading, yet I feel there is something significant for missiology IF these ideas are true.

Greek thrēskeía: Acts 26:5, James 1:26-27, is better translated as godly zeal, or piety, or worship, not as religion.

Arabic deen (دين): Better translated as law, not as religion. Islam was more of a civic movement than anything else- see also The Emergence of Islam: Classical Tradition in Contemporary Perspective (only 2.99 right now on Kindle!!!!). Early Christians saw Muhammad as a heretic, not a founder of a new religion.

To see these concepts expressed missiologically, see Religious Syncretism as a Syncretistic Concept: The Inadequacy of the “World Religions” Paradigm in Cross-Cultural Encounter by H. L. Richard.

In another recent article, New paradigms for religion, multiple religious belonging, and insider movements (Missiology July 2015), Richard argues (fn 17):

Particularly those who claim to support contextualization but oppose insider movements need to wrestle with how far their own modern Western context in relation to the meaning of religion is controlling their paradigm. I have written on this in an article on “Religious Syncretism as a Syncretistic Concept: The Inadequacy of the ‘World Religions’ Paradigm in Inter-Cultural Encounter”, suggesting that the true syncretists are the proponents of the “change of religion” paradigm.

Take away: As missiologists and missionaries, we need to rethink what religion is and what joining the Jesus movement was/is all about. Most scholars say religion is practically undefinable.

[Postnote: I still get annoyed when people refer to “IM” as if it were well-defined.]

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

The Real Theological Issue Between Christians and Muslims (Litfin, CT)

A good article at CT: The Real Theological Issue Between Christians and Muslims It's not about a different God, it's about a different Jesus, by Duane Litfin.

Some quotes:

[On the same God? issue…] One reason opinions flew in every direction is this: That question is not only unhelpful but perhaps worse than unhelpful. The question appears incapable of generating a satisfactory answer, and when well-intentioned people try to answer it anyway, as they often do, the typical result is turmoil and confusion…

Understanding what Islam and Christianity do and do not hold in common is an important task, but asking whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God will not get us there.

Litfin argues in a similar way to how we have approached this issue in the past. See Is Allah God? A Relevant Issue?

From the conclusion:

Yet it is critical to remember that this is a missiological, not a theological consideration. We must not confuse or conflate these two contexts. Points of theological similarity between Christianity and Islam can be useful in friendship or missionary settings, but citing these points as if we think they actually count for something with God apart from the gospel is a grave mistake.

Christians do their Muslim friends no favors by so emphasizing points of similarity that Christ’s ultimate verdict is never heard. The decisive question God asks of every human being is: What have you done with my Son? (John 1:10–12) If the answer is that we have refused him, nothing else we say can matter. As the rising sun overwhelms the nighttime stars, so the refusal of God’s gift of his Son renders every other claim irrelevant.

In the preface to The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis famously said, “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish, but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right, but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.” So it is with the reception of God’s Son. Until we get that fork-in-the-road decision right, all else becomes moot. “Whoever does not honor the Son, does not honor the Father who sent him” (John 5:23).