Worldly Wisdom and Foolish Grace. Barbara Carnegie Campbell

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СКАЧАТЬ called “Judaism,” the faith of those who followed a Judean/Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, which became known as “Christianity,” and the faith of those who followed the revelations of Allah’s messenger, the angel Gabriel, to the Prophet Mohammad, which became known as “Islam.”

      These three “families of faith” within Abraham’s tent hold many of the same stories within each of their sacred spiritual texts. The Christian faith grew out of stories and lessons that Jesus told from Torah and other writings that are now part of the Christian Elder Testament. The Quran, God’s revelation to the Prophet Mohammad in the seventh century CE, includes many of the stories of Abraham and other Elder Testament prophets, as well as many of the stories of Jesus found in the Younger Testament.

      These three faith traditions are monotheistic religions which believe in one creator God. Abraham is credited as the founder of monotheism by all of these faith traditions. Mohammad, in his travels throughout the Middle East as a merchant, met Jews and Christians and heard their faith stories. The story is told that Mohammad may have been so discouraged by the constant conflict and violence between those two religions, which were so closely related, that he continued to listen for a new message from Allah about a more pure form of living faithfully as Allah willed.

      Many people who are part of these three faith groups acknowledge today that they worship the same God, the same divine Ground of all Being. There is little disagreement within Abraham’s tent today about whether the “foolish grace” of Yahweh/God/Allah and the “wisdom” of the world are often on radically different moral and ethical tracks.

      One of the over-arching lenses through which I have studied the scriptures of the Elder and Younger Biblical Testaments and have learned to think theologically is the lens of interfaith understanding, especially the lens of those sharing Abraham’s tent. Each chapter in this study will begin with three quotes, listed in chronological order, first a quote from the Elder Testament, then one from the Synoptic Gospels of the Younger Testament, then a quote from the Quran or the Hadith of Islamic traditions.

      The Elder Testament quotes are taken from the Tanakh, the English translation completed by The Jewish Publication Society in 1985. “Tanakh” is a word originating from an acronym which represents the three major parts of Hebrew Scripture: t for Torah, n for nevi’im or prophets, and k for kethuvim or writings.

The Tanakh was first translated into an Aramaic version called the Targum. Because many Jews in the Helenistic world spoke Greek, the Tanakh was also quickly translated into a Greek version, called the Septuagint, after the “seventy-two” translators who worked on it. Legend has it that each of the seventy-two came up with an identical translation even though they worked separately.3

      Unless I include a specific reference in the footnotes, the scripture references taken from the Elder and Younger Testaments of Christian scripture throughout this study will be taken from New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) was first published in 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. This version replaced the Revised Standard Version which the National Council of Churches had published in 1952.

      The spiritual quotes from the Islamic tradition are taken from two sources. I take these quotes from the Quran which contains the revelations the Prophet Muhammad received from God’s messenger, the Angel Gabriel; messages which Islam considers the literal word of God. I will be quoting from “The Study Quran” with Editor-in-Chief, Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This is the translation and commentary that sits near my desk at all times.

      Islamic quotes will also be taken from “The Wisdom of the Prophet: Sayings of Muhammad” which translates selections from the Hadith, the second most important literary source in Islam, into English. The Hadith do not contain revelations, in the sense that the Quran is considered a complete revelation. Hadith was collected about two centuries after the Prophet’s death to document what the Prophet is remembered as saying or doing during his lifetime and relied on people’s memories over generations. A rule of thumb in Islam is that if any hadith is contrary to or not supported by the Quran, it cannot be considered valid.

      Let me share, a this point, a few stories from my personal faith and interfaith journey. I have spent nearly seven decades listening to and studying stories about the man people call “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Jesus, the Christ.” This man, most agree, lived two thousand years ago on the other side of the world. As a child, adults told me stories of Jesus that led me to understand him as a man of compassion, acceptance, and love. As I grew in understanding, I accepted that Jesus uniquely and sacrificially revealed the divine One to me and therefore had “saved” me from all that sought to destroy my life.

      Later, I began to hear from some Christians that only the followers of Jesus were “saved.” Many said he was the only divine son of the one and only God who judged people severely for their mistakes and saved only those who believed in Jesus. Believing in Jesus, many told me, made people “good enough” to go to heaven when they died. Only by God’s grace did I refuse (eventually) to believe that the one God was vindictive and violent and continue to know Jesus as one who perfectly revealed a compassionate, forgiving, and grace-filled Creator.

      Perhaps it was this conflict between two understandings of Christianity that finally led me to seek a seminary education. I went to learn how to study the words of Christian scripture more deeply so that I could defend and share the compassion and justice of the God I knew and trusted. In a Christian seminary, it was no surprise that as I learned how to study ancient literature most of what I studied was the Younger Testament. I had chosen to attend a progressive seminary within a reformed Christian denomination so that I could study many theologies of the divine other than that of a God who seeks retribution and saves only a chosen few.

      When I became an ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister who preached to a congregation regularly, I continued to study the biblical texts that I was called to interpret to others. I read many different interpretations of these stories from many Christian commentaries.

      I found the same interpretations repeated almost verbatim again and again in many of these commentaries as if the authors were simply copying each other. Once in a while I found newer research based on what is called “The Search for the Historical Jesus.” The theologies of these scholars, who other Christians sometimes considered heretical, began to line up with the Jesus I had known since childhood. The “historical Jesus” spoke less to salvation doctrine and more to how one could live faithfully and in keeping with a divine calling.

      In 2003, I became the pastor of St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Portland, Oregon, one of the most progressive Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) congregations in Oregon, and one of only three open and affirming “More Light” congregations in Cascades Presbytery. I felt I had finally found my people, my tribe, within my life-long PCUSA community. St. Mark had been a founding member, before I became their pastor, of both the Community of Welcoming Congregations of Oregon and the Interfaith Council of Greater Portland.

      In 2007, a member of a small Jewish Renewal congregation called P’nai Or (which means literally “faces of light”) walked into my office at St. Mark asking if her community could rent space in our building on Fridays and Saturdays. Since we were not using the building on those days, our congregation agreed eagerly anticipating, initially, some much needed additional income. It wasn’t long, however, before we appreciated even more deeply the relationship that began to develop between P’nai Or and St. Mark and the fact that they could help us reconnect with our Christian roots by teaching us much more about stories within the Elder Testament and Judaism.

      We grieved with these brothers and sisters from P’nai Or when their founding rabbi and our friend, Rabbi Aryeh Hirshfied, z’tl died in a tragic scuba diving accident in Mexico in 2009. (z’tl is a shortened Hebrew phrase which is transliterated as “His name is a blessing” and is used in the Jewish tradition СКАЧАТЬ