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Muslims and the Gospel: Bridging the Gap
by Roland E. Miller
Lutheran University Press, Minneapolis, 2006. 452 pp. $35.00. ISBN 1-932688-07-2.
As Roland Miller approaches the subject of bridging the gap between Muslims and the gospel, he brings long and rich experience as a missionary and scholar, and years of personal friendship and personal interaction with Muslims. He served for twenty-three years as a church worker in Kerala, India; seventeen years as a university professor and dean in Regina, Canada; and six years at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, where he set up an Islamic Studies Program.
Miller divides his book into three parts. In Part One, “The Context,” he describes Muslim views on significant matters that affect the communication and reception of the gospel, recognizing that “[w]henever and wherever the seed of the gospel is sown, it falls on occupied soil” (p. 19). He outlines key Islamic principles that inform the thought and attitudes of Muslims, including the centrality of God in their lives, and their views concerning revelation, Muhammad, law, community, salvation history, and Islam as a confessional and comprehensive religion. This is followed by chapters devoted to Muslim views about sin, salvation, Jesus, Christians, and Christianity. There is, Miller contends, a visible and real gap between Christians and Muslims. Throughout these chapters, he demonstrates a deep understanding of Islam and Muslims. He sympathizes with the Muslim desire that Islam be correctly understood and regularly indicates where there is diversity in Muslim thinking. Altogether, this section forms a good introduction to Islam for readers who come to it with particular Christian concerns and questions in mind.
In Part Two, “Bridges for the Crossing,” Miller describes ways in which Christians can cross the gap between Christians and Muslims with the gospel, making their way into the Muslim thought world and the Muslim heart. Deep friendship is the key. Indeed, it is “the essential paradigm for Christian sharing with Muslims today” (p. 157). Grounded in the example of God’s love for humanity, seen in the person of Jesus the Messiah, this deep friendship “is nothing other than self-giving love applied to real life relationships” (p. 165).
Miller’s discussion about deep friendship as the key for bridging the gap may raise a concern on the part of some readers, Christian and Muslim. Is he simply instrumentalizing friendship? That is, does he commend interfaith friendship so that Christians can bear witness to the gospel? I do not think that is his intent. He sees interfaith friendship as a gift from God and a worthwhile end in itself, although it can provide a context for the sharing of important beliefs. However, anyone reading the book needs to be alert to the possibility of misinterpreting him on this point, and thus violating Paul’s admonition in his letter to the Romans, “Let love be genuine” (12:9).
In the second part of the book, Miller also examines significant Christian figures of the past with a view to what can be learned from their engagements with Muslims. For the most part, they are persons one usually encounters in discussions of the history of Christian-Muslim relations. These include John of Damascus, Theodore Abu Qurra, Francis of Assisi, Ramon Lull, Henry Martyn, Charles de Foucald, Samuel Zwemer, Constance Padwick, and Lewis Bevan Jones. Others could have been chosen. Of those selected, not all would be considered models of deep friendship. Several had little direct contact with Muslims (Peter the Venerable, Nicholas of Cusa, and Martin Luther), and some were downright polemical in their approach (The Apology of al-Kindi). Yet helpful lessons can be learned from each. For Miller, it is important neither to disdain the past nor to glamorize it.
Part Three, “Connecting Muslims and the Message,” addresses the practical task. Here Miller discusses the profile of a sharing friend. His objective is not to present “a uniform and arbitrary ideal” that would violate individuality, freedom, and personal gifts. Rather, he lifts up desirable qualities that need attention. These include certain inner qualities such as patience, prayerfulness, courage, and a sense of humor. Others pertain to how Christians outwardly relate to Muslims, such as sympathy, empathy, respect, fairness, and honesty. The profile includes certain qualities of mind and will: a desire and will to know Islam and understand Muslims, the aspiration to reflect on Christian faith against the background of Islamic motifs, the determination to communicate with clarity, and an inclination to imaginative venturing.
In our time, Miller argues, it is essential that Christians serve Muslims willingly, share the good news with them, seek reconciliation and peace, and converse with them about common concerns and important issues. He advocates a holistic approach: “if any one of these is missing the structure of the engagement with Muslims will be severely weakened” (p. 262). Moreover, pursuit of deep friendship with Muslims is required of all Christians. The task is not limited to professionals; the whole people of God “are now called upon to turn their faces to Muslims in a new way” (p. 269).
As Christians approach Muslims, it is important to make connections (ch. 13). This implies four things: seeing the value of points of contact, such as those discussed in the first part of the book; being aware of contemporary issues that concern Muslims, which vary from person to person; exploring the Qur’an for possible connections; and recognizing matters about which Muslims are particularly sensitive. Among the latter, Miller singles out how Christians speak of the Qur’an, Muhammad, and the place of women in Muslim societies.
Miller does not shy away from the hard questions Muslims ask or from the hard issues related to inquirers and new believers, such as baptism. He outlines possible ways of conversing with Muslims about the Son of God, the Trinity, the Muslim charge that the Bible has been corrupted, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the Christian understanding of forgiveness. His discussions should not be seen as “canned” answers. Rather, they are suggestive of how the topics can be approached constructively. Even Christians not involved in conversation with Muslims will find these discussions helpful.
The book’s bibliography is limited to the books, articles, and theses that are cited. Although other works could have been cited, the bibliography is still rich. The book also includes a full and helpful index. However, the book stands in need of more careful editing. I circled nearly one hundred and twenty errors in my review copy. These included misspellings, incorrect transliterations, incorrectly numbered scripture references and endnotes, and missing endnotes. This made an otherwise generally pleasant reading experience a bit frustrating.
Even so, this book evidences a scholarly and sympathetic understanding of Islam and a deep passion for Christian communication of the gospel among Muslims within the context of deep friendship. Though very readable, this is not a book for those in a hurry, given its length and the comprehensive way in which the author deals with topics. This will make it a forbidding read for many. One, perhaps salutary, result of this thoroughness is that the reader comes away with a clear understanding of just how complex the task is. There is a great deal of wisdom, culled from experience and scholarly study, embedded in the pages of this book, and many pearls to be found.
Various Christians interested in constructive engagement with Muslims will find this book useful. It could be required reading for church workers living and working among Muslims. It could also be a textbook for a seminary course focusing on Christian-Muslim engagement. Congregations looking for ways to relate to their Muslim neighbors would benefit from reading parts of it, though many laypersons and pastors will find the length forbidding. Perhaps the author or some other interested person could be persuaded to produce a study guide that would facilitate the book’s use in a congregational setting. At any rate, Christians interested in positive engagement with Muslims and communication of the gospel among them will be richly rewarded by reading it.
Michael Shelley
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
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Song of Songs
by Robert W. Jenson
Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2005. 106 pp. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-804-23117-6.
With the publication of this volume on the Song of Songs, the well-received Interpretation commentary series is now complete. The inaugural volume on Genesis, written by Walter Brueggemann and published in 1982, set a high standard of quality. And the best volumes that followed— one thinks of Gerald Janzen on Job, Terence Fretheim on Exodus, and F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp on Lamentations—have exhibited the combination of close reading, an engagement with the relevant scholarly literature, and a concern for theological implications that has been the hallmark of the series. Although geared explicitly toward teachers and preachers in the church, the series is nonetheless regularly consulted by biblical scholars outside the context of the church, earning it a place in many personal libraries next to the more strictly scholarly series such as the Anchor Bible, Hermeneia, and the Old Testament Library.
It was with a certain amount of puzzlement, then, and no little disappointment, that I read this final volume in the distinguished series. Especially puzzling is the decision by the series editors to invite a systematic theologian, Robert W. Jenson, to comment on the Song of Songs. There are a handful of biblical books for which a systematic theologian might be especially appropriate as a commentator: Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, or the letter to the Hebrews, or even the book of Leviticus. But the Song of Songs seems, of all biblical books, the least suitable for a systematic theological exposition. Jenson is an accomplished theologian; but his approach to interpreting the Song of Songs is ill-conceived and in the end neither convincing nor helpful.
The commentary is divided into thirty-two sections, each of which treats what Jenson identifies as an individual poem that normally comprises just a few verses. He dismisses right away any attempt to discern a larger structure to the book (p. 9), treating it essentially as an anthology of poetry, albeit one with “most of the same personae from one lyric to another” (p. 15). For each poem, there are three sections of commentary: the first treats what Jenson calls “the overt story,” the second proposes “theological allegory,” and the third extrapolates from the first two in order to comment on “our created sexuality” or, roughly, contemporary ethical implications.
One of the main problems with this commentary is reflected in the author’s choice of the phrase “overt story” to characterize the first section of commentary on each poem, which should be the close analysis of the text. The problem is that there is no “story.” That is, we are not dealing here with narrative (or story), where one expects characters, action, and plot, but rather with lyric poetry, the building blocks of which are line-structure, wordplay, soundplay, metaphor, imagery, productive ambiguity, and the like. The Song of Songs arguably represents one of the very highest achievements of ancient Israelite poetry, and to ignore how it works as poetry is to ignore precisely what is most fundamental and most compelling about it. Yet this is exactly what Jenson does in his analysis of the “overt story.” He disregards almost entirely the poetic idiom of the text, paying no attention at all to the language of the poetry. (There is no indication that the author even knows Hebrew.) In fact, there is little real analysis to be found in these sections on the “overt story,” which are instead mostly taken up with summary and paraphrase, with occasional problems addressed in order to clarify the text.
The second section of commentary on each poem represents Jenson’s attempt to do a theological reading of the poetry, and although he seems to invest more energy and imagination in this section than in his analysis of the text itself, the attempt remains ill-conceived and unconvincing. There is, of course, a long history in both Judaism and Christianity of theological or spiritual readings (often called “allegorical,” though not all would count as allegory in the narrow sense) of the Song of Songs, in which the personae of the two young, unmarried lovers are interpreted as representing, in some form, God and humanity. Although this line of interpretation has produced some beautiful and theologically daring commentary—Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons perhaps the most well-known among Christians— one would be hard-pressed to find a modern biblical scholar who would accept that this is the intended or plain sense of the poetry. Jenson knows this and expresses some hesitation (though not much) in claiming that the poetry of the Song of Songs was written with a theological intent; he advises, instead, “agnostic caution” (p. 8) on the matter, implying that it may well be the case, but that it cannot be proven. But he evinces no hesitation in claiming that by virtue of the poetry’s inclusion in the canons of Jewish and Christian Scripture, a theological reading is not only warranted, but even demanded. He assumes, rather than argues, that “whoever definitively made Scripture of the Song . . . intended the Song to be about Israel and the Lord” (p. 11). The assumption is far from certain, and reflects a simplistic conception of the complex process of canonization.
In any case, it is clear that for Jenson the very fact that the Song of Songs is part of scripture means that it must have a theological sense: “the canonical entity is about the love of Israel and the Lord, and to read it by construing theological allegory is to read what we may call its canonical plain sense” (p. 8; emphasis added). But why? Although the author claims that “all other books of the Old Testament in some way concern Israel’s relation to her God” (p. 5), the claim is true neither in letter or in spirit. In addition to the Song of Songs, there is one other book in the Bible that never mentions God at all: the book of Esther. But even if God is mentioned at some point in all other biblical books, it is not the case that everything in them concerns Israel’s relation to God. The Bible is a repository of ancient Israelite and Judean literature, covering a thousand years or so of literary activity and containing numerous genres, perspectives, and concerns—including love poetry.
Whatever the warrant for offering an extended theological-allegorical reading of the Song of Songs at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and again, there seems to be very little—one can still evaluate the results. Here, too, the present commentary seems wanting. The theological payoffs tend to be conventional and unsurprising: God is always seen in the role of perfect (male) lover, and humans are the often wayward (female) lover. This theological conventionality spills over quite frequently into the third section of commentary on each poem, in which the author addresses contemporary sexual ethics and mores. Throughout the book, but especially in the theological and ethical reflections, Jenson is given to making odd, sometimes cryptic statements that are simply floated with no evidence or support. On 1:5–6, Jenson comments that “the Temple’s hangings may well be associated with a darkness, though of a different sort than that made by dyes” (p. 20). It is not clear what that means, unless it is just an old-fashioned Christian stereotype of the “blindness” of the Jews before Jesus came along. On 1:7–8, Jenson comments: “Contrary to what many ideologists assume, the evidence is that when spouses were legally bound to one another, there was more loving passion in the world” (p. 26). Really? I for one would like to see that evidence; but he gives no citation.
The Song of Songs is not narrative, and it is not theology—it is poetry. To take it seriously on its own terms requires paying close attention to its poetic art. It is just such close attention that is lacking in the present commentary, and the Interpretation series is the poorer as a consequence. The shame is that an opportunity has been lost—the opportunity to demonstrate, for the many pastors and teachers for whom the Interpretation series is the first and perhaps only place to turn for biblical commentary, the strange and compelling beauty of the best of biblical poetry.
Tod Linafelt
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
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