Sermon preached at St Mary's, Primrose Hill by The Reverend Robert Atwell
1 October 2006

I have two questions this morning. Do Christians have a monopoly on truth? And did the Pope get it right two weeks ago in what he said about Islam? Let me begin with the second question first.

There's no doubt that some people took offence at what Pope Benedict said at Regensburg, but I've read his lecture and I'm clear that he was quoted out of context. The trouble is the Internet provides instant communication, and before he could take his white cassock off he had a major diplomatic incident on his hands. 

The Pope was quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor. But he could just as easily have quoted St John of Damascus, who during the eight-century expansion of Islam portrayed the Saracens as heretics who had distorted the beliefs of the Bible. At the Reformation Martin Luther thought the Turks were agents of the devil come to punish sinful Christendom. Trawl through history and you will find various responses to Islam.

Today many Christians think that Muslims are unreasonable and inclined to end differences with violence. How can they be respected? Violence is a fault-line throughout humanity and from which no religion has historically been free. It is one of the scandals of our history that so many persecutions have taken place in the name of Jesus. It's not many years ago that there were photographs of bishops blessing tanks.

Nowadays, however, Islam seems to be the only major religion in which violence is a serious doctrinal issue. It's true that tribalised Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have only recently stopped killing one another; and vengeful Sikhs assassinated Indira Ghandi, the Prime Minister of India, twenty years ago. But neither Catholics nor Protestants, nor Sikhs believe in terror. Of course, neither do the vast majority of Muslims who are peace-loving and hard-working people.

I was talking to Mohammad and Aftab, two of my Muslim neighbours the other day, and like a lot of parents what they're worried about is their kids getting into trouble. They're desperate for them to get into decent schools, to go to university and get good jobs. There are huge moral and ethical overlaps between our two faiths. Muslims and Christians can find themselves curiously close in a perception about what's wrong with our society today.

The trouble is a significant minority of the Islamic community believes that suicide bombers are martyrs carrying out a religious duty. It's not Islam that's the problem, it's Islamism: the radical political stream of thought within Islam deriving from the teaching of Sayed Qutb who was hanged in Egypt in August 1966.

Another factor is that unlike Christianity, Islam has only partially experienced the modern process of enlightenment and reform. But before we get too cocky, let's not forget that the Church wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the Enlightenment two hundred years ago.

We forget that what many Muslims find threatening is not so much Christianity, though they reject much of its teaching, but the aggressive secularism of western society. They find our culture materialistic and individualistic, and they're right. In certain crucial ways, we've lost the plot. The label ‘Christian' may still be attached to this country but does it have any meaning? Let's face it attendance at church in this country isn't exactly at white-heat. If ours were a Christian society it wouldn't be so bad; what Muslims react against is that it is an atheistic one.

Muslims are big on the family, on loyalty to the community, and the ‘umma - the world-wide Muslim family. In the West, as they perceive it, it's all about me and my rights. We have exalted individual and personal choice and neglected the family and social responsibility.

It's undeniable that the central tenets of Islam are different from the teachings of Christianity. A reading from one of the most important parts of the Qur'an reveals this: 

Say: He is God, the One,
God who stands alone:
He does not beget and is not begotten,
And beside Him there is no other.

This is from the Chapter on Purity, and asserts uncompromisingly the oneness of God, his transcendence and invulnerability. God is a mystery. He cannot be comprehended by finite minds. The word Islam means ‘submission': we must submit to the will of this ineffable God.

This text also explains why the Qur'an rejects the possibility that Jesus was divine or the Son of God. Think about that when you stand up in a moment and recite the creed that Jesus was ‘begotten, not made'. For a Muslim Jesus was just a human being, the ‘Son of Mary' the Qur'an usually calls him. Muslims also steadfastly refuse to believe that Jesus was crucified. That's why the cross is so repellent to them.

All this is in stark contrast to Christian teaching where the primary motif is love. God is a mystery, but I believe that in Jesus Christ we see God's human face and that face looks on us with love. On the cross Jesus chooses to give himself to others. And as Christians we are called into his body, the church, to model a way of living for society which is not self-obsessed but self-giving and which finds delight in serving others.

So where do we go from here? How do we view the Qur'an and its teachings? Can we go beyond St John of Damascus condemnation of Muslims as heretics or Luther's view of them as demonic?

If we allow the Qur'an to be the authentic utterances of a sincere man, then we have to concede the possibility of divine involvement. In the prologue of St John's Gospel it says, ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.' The Greek word Logos means not only ‘word' but ‘reason'. St John goes on to say, ‘What has come into being was life, and the life was the light that enlightens all people.'

The life and reason that God gives in Christ does not give light just to Christians, but to everyone in the world. Perhaps in the way the saints have been reflection of that light, so holy people outside the Christian Church have also shone with it, including Mohammad.

Do Christians have a monopoly on truth? No, I don't believe so. But one truth I won't let go of is that God is love. In my book God calls us not so much to submit to him as to be open to his grace which can transform our lives and our world, and that transformation happens without violence.

Did the Pope get it right? Personally I think he was naïve to think that what he said in a university lecture wouldn't ever be lifted out of context. But he was right when he said that faith and reason need to go hand-in-hand, not faith and violence. ‘He who lives by the sword will die by it,' says Jesus.

So let us be faithful to our Christian calling. The Christian response to violence is to oppose it, to show loving service, the vulnerable love of Christ himself. Let us be respectful to our Muslim neighbours and talk to them. Let us work with them to recover a spiritual heart to our society. Above all, let us pursue all that makes for peace and builds up our common life.