Hans Küng on the construction of historical narratives

Swiss theologian Hans Küng got Faulknerian in his book Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1991), writing, "It is impossible to cope with the past in the sense of bidding it farewell or neutralizing it. Whether one likes it or not, the past always remains part of the present."

This comes in his discussion of the Holocaust, which he prefaces with some theoretical declarations about his approach to history, also noting, "A repressed past easily becomes a curse."

He offers these three bullet-points:

• Neither a national history nor a church history may be sweepingly 'instrumentalized' in the interest of a particular party, state or church policy as a means of creating identity. As Habermas has remmarked, history is not a 'substitute religion', capable of offering compensatory meaning to those deprived o f their roots in the process of modernization, and creating a consensus in state and church.
• Rather, both national and church history need to be examined critically and appropriated self-critically: with a view not only to the historical dialectic of continuity and interruption, but also to the ethical difference between humanity and inhumanity, good and evil.
• So those who because of negative historical experiences have a critical relationship to their own history and thus have a heightened moral awareness and greater human sensitivity can help to avoid the repetition of earlier mistakes. They can find a new, freer identification with their state or their religion, which excludes the former uncritical total identification with all its totalitarian consequences.

Küng isn't making only methodological points for academic research there. In the second bullet point, he emphasizes a focus on "the ethical difference between humanity and inhumanity, good and evil."

I could undoubtedly fine ways to quibble with or qualify some of what he says in the bullet-points. But I'm not really inclined to try. Because it largely reflects my own approach to history. And the kind of emphasis I've given here to the events that developed democracy and human freedom.

That's also how I've used the historical figure of Andrew Jackson, for which this blog was named for most of its existence ("Old Hickory's Weblog"). The fact that a white supremacist view of Andrew Jackson via Steve Bannon and Donald Trump has become for the moment the "hegemonic narrative" in popular usage in the US is an obscenity. One I hope will be short-lived. Because that also reflects a serious deficiency in how the left in the US tends to both understanding and use early American and antebellum history.

History, the study and evaluation of the past, has an indispensable empirical basis. But it also involves quality in the construction of narratives and both technical and normative judgments about the significance of events. Those different aspects can be distinguished. But never entirely separated.

Religion, secularism and the complications of the American tradition of religious freedom

In my recent post Mark Twain's white suit and Andrew Jackson 02/16/2016, I cited Tracy Fessenden's book Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007).

Her book is a collection of essays divided into two sections. The four chapters in the first part are more thematically tied together with the idea that the development of the American notion of freedom of religion well into the 19th century largely took the form of the privileging of a non-sectarian Protestant Christian narrative. The second is a more diverse set of essays on literary topics, including the one that deals with Mark Twain's white suit.

I was especially intrigued by her elaboration of Puritan texts equating the "savage Indians" with "Catholicism." Puritan views lumped women with Indians as part of Nature, a condition above which white European Protestants had risen, though obviously white European Protestant women weren't put on quite so low a level as the other humans regarded as part of degraded, unregenerate Nature. Or at least true Protestants like themselves. Dissenters from their true way were quickly lumped in with the other wretched inferiors who were part of Nature: Indians, Catholics, women. The Puritan era is one of Fessenden's specialties. She is a co-editor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (2001).

But Protestantism was plagued from the start by its own schismatic tendencies. Fessenden in a footnote (p. 245) quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson from 1844: "[T]he Catholic religion respects masses of men and ages. ... The Catholic church is ethnical [sic], and in every way superior. It is in harmony with Nature, which loves the race and ruins the individual. The Protestant has his pew, which of course is only the first step to a church for every individual citizen - a church apiece." (my emphasis)

So in terms of the secular government's attitudes toward establishment and protection of the Christian religion, Papist and heathen Indians came in practice to be regarded as far more threatening to the True Faith than dissenting Protestant sects.

Fessenden writes about the great appeal of captive narratives, stories of whites who lived among the Indians. This is a fascinating shadow side of white-dominated American history, a reminder that some whites were forced into a relation with natives peoples in which they were regarded to treat them as humans like themselves. At least at some level, for some length of time. In some cases, such whites decided they preferred the company of the "savages" to that of the civilized whites.

The following passage gives a glimpse of Fassenden's nuanced treatment of the complexity of these trends and their evolution over time:

Bur if the view of Indians as deficient Christians - and of wayward Protestant Christians as Indians [in an earlier Puritan view] - made Indians the inverse of the Puritan ideal, it also permitted the Puritans' gradual recasting of Indians not as the image of the unregenerate Puritan interior but instead as the external periphery of an increasingly incommensurable otherness, against which different varieties of Protestant Christianity could then be subtly consolidated. After 1679, the civil and spiritual reforms of the Puritans were directed less toward individual regeneration than toward securing ministerial leadership and civil order among the new outlying towns and "unwalled villages" of the expanding white frontier. Because Puritans failed to credit Indians with a distinctive interiority, the Indian became a blank slate for Puritan projections of spiritual deficiency, first by being made into emblems of unregenerate Puritans, and then subtly and increasingly as tools of enemy Catholics. The "conversion" of lndians from weak Puritans to vigorous papists was facilitated by the literal removing or subduing of autonomous tribes from southern New England, which meant that the resistant Indians with whom Puritans came into contact after King Philip's War were those who had been "Romanized" in their association with French colonists to the north. "There is a Danger lest your Neighbors be made Captives," warned Cotton Mather in 1707; "If they become Captives, they fall into the hands of Papists. The Papists will use more than ordinary Pains to Debauch them." Indian captivity had earlier provided Mather the occasion to exhort his congregants to examine their spiritual fragility, their own incipient Indianness in the absence of full conversion. As Tara Fitzpatrick argues, however, the threat of captivity to "papists" now enabled Mather to emphasize less the vulnerability of the Puritan community than its theological strengths, its elevation of faith over works and the gracious workings of the Word over the meretricious agency of the sacraments [associated especially with the "Papists"]. (my emphasis in bold; p. 30)

She concludes that by the end of the eighteenth century, with the image of Indians as the Other, bolstered by and identified with the image of the Papist Other, "the Puritans' recasting of the otherness of Indians as a spiritual difference of kind rather than degree enabled the proliferating sects of white New England Protestants to remain united as solid and worthy heirs of the Reformation against the miscegenate corruption represented to [Increase] Mather as the 'half Indianized French ... half Frenchified Indians." (p. 31) The Puritans were particularly focused on the "Papist" threat because of the close proximity of Catholic French settlements.

Fassenden is careful to look at the periods she examines as what they are, events taking place in particular temporal and geographic contexts and is careful against generalizing those experiences beyond the evidence she cites. But she does argue that the broad trend in the United States well into the 19th century tended to regard "freedom of religion" in schools and public institutions as a nonsectarian support of Protestant religiosity. She doesn't stress the legal and Constitutional evolution in the United States. But it is important to remember that the freedom of religion enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution was generally understood as applying only to the federal government, not to the states. It wasn't until the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights fully to the states as well, that the pre-Civil War state-level approach to religious liberty was superseded by the protections of the federal Constitution.

As she does note, "Just prior to the Revolution, religious establishment was the rule in nine of the thirteen colonies. Soon after, New York's state constitution of 1777 abolished establishment, South Carolina's in 1778 for the first time require it, and other states proceeded unevenly to codify their relationship to established churches."

Her third chapter looks at local rounds in the "Bible wars," in the nineteenth century over religious education in public schools. The influx of Irish Catholic immigrants into northern cities added nativist and ethnic elements to Protestant anti-Catholicism. Use of the King James Bible in public school education became a flashpoint with Catholics:

In Massachusetts, whose 1780 Constitution had stipulated that "public protestant teachers" would be supported to foster the "piety, education, and morality" on which civil government must "essentially depend," an 1827 law gave school committees power over textbooks "provided also that said committee shall never direct any school books to be purchased or used in any of the schools under their superintendence, which are calculated to favor any particular religious sect or tenet. " Sectarian objections that the public schools made no provision for specifically religious teachings were answered by interdenominational Protestant assurances that the content of instruction would be broadly Christian. At the center of the curriculum was the King James Bible. As the educational reformer Horace Mann insisted, the public school "welcomes the Bible, and therefore welcomes all the doctrines which the Bible really contains .... [I]t listens to these doctrines so reverently, that ... it will not suffer any rash mortal to thrust in his interpolations of their meanings, or overlay the text with any of the 'many inventions' which the heart of man has sought out" - a policy that rendered the annotated Douay Bible used by Catholics unacceptable, even as it enshrined the edition (the King James Bible) whose dedication referred to the pope as the "man of Sinne„ and whose preface refuted the legitimacy of the Catholic Church. As head of the Massachusetts School Committee, Mann vetoed as inappropriately sectarian a book then in wide use, The Child at Home, which was staunchly Calvinist in matters of sin and final judgment, but he made the Bible into the principle of tolerance itself: "In every course of studies, all the practical and preceptive parts of the Gospel should ... [be] sacredly included .... In no school should the Bible ... [be] opened to reveal the sword of ... polemic, but to unloose the dove of peace." [my emphasis in bold; pp. 66-7

The real-life conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the US cannot be cleanly separated into religious, ethnic/cultural and political elements. But there was a political element. And whatever their various motivations, American Protestants were not wrong when they viewed the Catholic Church as largely an opponent of free, republican institutions Fessenden writes about the aftermath of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 in Europe:

[I]n 1853 [in Cincinnati], violence was again narrowly averted when the visiting Archbishop Gaetano Bedini of Rome was burned in effigy by a crnwd of two thousand Protestant marchers, who advertised on placards their intention to burn the residence of Archbishop Purcell, where Bedini was staying. As Peter D'Agostino observes, Bedini's American visit "crystallized Catholic loyalty to the symbols of papal Rome" in the wake of Pius IX's triumphant return from exile after the fall of the independent Roman Republic in April 1849. Before coming to America, Bedini had been assigned by the Vatican to oversee the defeat of the liberal rebellion in Spain, an involvement that earned him the nickname of the "Bloody Butcher of Bologna" among the rebellion's supporters at home. While Catholic immigrants saw in the pope's hurniliation and exile a mirror of their own experiences of alienation in an often hostile new land, American Protestants (among them Margaret Fuller, William Lloyd Garrison, and Horace Greeley) vigorously hailed the rebellion that would have secularized the Papal States and destroyed the Vatican's temporal power. ("So deeply rooted in every American heart is the love of liberty," declared the American consul Nicholas Brown in Rome, that Americans would "at once hail with joy the independence of the Roman Republic." ) As a symbol of the Roman Republic's defeat, Bedini's visit to Cincinnati revitalized Catholics' spiritual allegiance to the "Eternal City" and gave urgency to the Protestant project of portraying as dangerously un-American those whose more deeply imagined community lay beyond national and temporal borders. [my emphasis; p. 75]

She defined the outlines of the Protestant-Catholic conflict in the mid-19th century this way in "The Other Woman's Sphere," her own essay in The Puritan Origins of America Sex:

The arrival of more than three million Catholic immigrants in the middle decades of the nineteenth century reconfigured urban spaces and magnified existing tensions among races, classes, and regions. Skilied craftspeople viewed the immigrants as fodder for industrialists, while factory owners saw them as shiftless and unprofitable. Immigrants threatened industrial and domestic laborers by accepting even the lowest-paying jobs, which until then only free black men and women had been called on to fill. To slave owners, Catholic immigrants were instinctive abolitionists who were unwilling to compete with slave labor; Protestant abolitionists who saw Catholicism as inherently despotic, meanwhile, considered them natural allies of the slave power. Tue seemingly monolithic structure of Catholicism cast the splintering of Protestant congregations and the arrival of new religious bodies into relief, while Catholicism's celibate vocations appeared to threaten both the family and the workplace as bulwarks of Protestant power. [my emphasis, p. 171]

Giovanni Maris Mastai-Ferretti served from 1846-1878 as Pope Pius IX. When the College of Cardinals selected him as Pope, "Liberal Europe applauded his election." (Richard McBrien, Lives of the Popes, 1997) But the shock of the revolutions of 1848 and that in Italy in particular shocked the previously liberal-minded Pope into becoming "one of "the more reactionary popes of history," as McBrien writes. Hans Küng writes in Das Christentum (1995) that after French and Austrian troops restored Pius IX in the Vatican, he became "an unreconstructed opponent of all free ('liberal') political, intellectual and theological currents." Küng claims that Pius' thinking "was not clouded by intellectual doubt" but instead was "marked by psychopathic features." (my translation) McBrien lists some of his later dubious accomplishments: "He called the First Vatican Council (1869-70), which defined papal primacy and papal infallibility; he defined the Immaculate Conception of Mary; and he published the 'Syllabus of Errors,' which condemned the major developments of the modern world."

Fessenden in Culture and Redemption sensibly does not attempt to draw direct lines between the history she recounts of the limits of earlier American conception of freedom of religion as the tolerance and public support of nonsectarian Protestantism, and the present-day disputes over freedom of religion and religious establishment in the United States.

But her account does give us some insight into the religious and rhetorical traditions on which today's Christian Dominionists draw in trying to define freedom of religion as freedom for Christians to use state institutions to impose their religion - most often a version of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity - on everyone else. And as the right to discriminate in public businesses and accommodations against people using Christianity as the justification. She notes, "Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini suggest that the Christian right develops its political and cultural power 'both by
drawing on its connection to the Christian aspect (itself supported by mainline Protestantism) of hegemonic Christian secularism and by claiming to be oppressed by the same secularism.'"(p. 214) She also suggests, tentatively and in parentheses, "Secularists, meanwhile, might be said to draw on the secular aspect of hegemonic Christian secularism while claiming to be oppressed by its Christian aspect."

In a concluding chapter written after the Presidential election of 2004, Fessenden describes her book as "calling even the progressive elements of a secularized Protestant culture to account" and as putting "hard questions to cherished liberal narratives about, for example, the separation of church and state, the value of literacy, or the privatization of religious faith." But she also expressed concern that in the post-9/11 "war on terror" and its Islamophobic baggage, "the hegemonic power of appeals to a Protestant consensus in American public life remains, it would seem, as strong than ever: what William Hutchison identifies as the nineteenth-century dynamic of '[religious] pluralism as selective tolerance' ..."

What she means about troubling "liberal narratives" on the topic is that she objects to any easy explanation of the history of religious tolerance in America doesn't reflect historical realities, especially when our foreign policy or our occasional exercise in nation-building tires to apply simplistic models based on an idealized version of the American experience:

[T]he model we seek to export in the name of American values, one that attempts to ensure religious freedom and eradicate conflict by confining religion to a privatized sphere, does not even describe the dynamics of our own history. Worse still, it hides the violence and coercion that have attended the formation of American democratic space in the guise of the neutrality and universality of the secular. Academics tend to dismiss challenges to this narrative as the retrogressive voices of religionists who clamor for an ever greater share of public power. And not without evidence. Even so, however, our own embrace of a simplified narrative of secularization-as-progress is in part what allows this template to operate as the norm for bringing American values to a benighted world. [my emphasis]

And she makes this important observation about the endless scolding of the religion of Islam generally for allegedly never having had its own Reformation:

[I]n the post-September 11 calls from politicians and pundits for a "Reformation" in Islam, an Islam that would conform to Western expectations of acceptable religion: should we be surprised if such appeals are no longer made by the side of a moderate Muslim leader produced for the occasion, and all forms of Islam are now suspect for not looking enough like post-Reformation Christianity? [emphasis in original]

And she notes how this not-Protestant-enough criticism of Islam is used by advocates of war against Islamic countries as propaganda:

In the same way that a familiar liberal narrative of Islam - "the Reformation of Islam will arrive as an inevitable byproduct of modernization" - is made to yield up to its more violent and triumphalist counterpart - "Islam will ever remain incompatible with the West's secularized Protestant values" - so also do two versions of U.S. imperialism become mutually supporting and difficult to untangle. In the first, a liberal interventionist narrative sees the United States as uniquely able to redress, even if reluctantly, the failure of backward states and cultures to enter fully into modernity. The United States acts in its own interests and in the interests of those oppressed by the failed states in which they reside, this story runs, when it uses whatever means necessary to bring the blessings of religious liberty, economic freedom, and representative government to those parts of the world that would otherwise remain breeding grounds for violence, human rights abuses, and terrorism. This narrative's calming appeal to freedom, democracy, and their inevitable sway migrates also to its more hawkish counterpart, which urges perpetual aggressions against all those who oppose our universal values and who "hate" the freedoms we hold so dear - witness the hypocrisy of our guarantee of "religious freedoms" to those Muslims violently detained at Guantänamo Bay, without due process and apparently indefinitely.

In an observation that sheds some light on the incongruous ecumenical alliance in Islamophobia between Christian fundamentalists and some self-professed atheists:

However starkly continuing dispatches from the "culture wars" may portray an America divided into a conservative Christian faction hostile to the secular and a dogmatic secularism at odds with religion, it must be noted that the category of the West readily accommodates both of these polarized alternatives when the paradigm shifts from the culture wars between Christians and secularists to the "clash of civilizations" between the West and the rest. ... According to either version of this story, the formation of democratic societies requires that "irrational" religious behavior be banished to the private sphere, on the Protestant model, as a way of containing otherwise intractable and potentially violent conflict between contending worldviews. This is the model to which warnings of a "clash of civilizations" continue to appeal, even if secularists looking out from the Westsee theocratic assaults on modernity where religionists see godless assaults on the cherished values of Western civilization. lt is also the model that Western projects of nation building have traditionally sought to install around the globe. [my emphasis]

Ludwig Feuerbach and the origins of religion

I just came across a popular sketch of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) Dale DeBakcsy Philosophy Now Jul/Aug 2014.

DeBakcsy doesn't mention Feuerbach's status as one of the Young Hegelians, among whom he's often grouped. Instead he stresses Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel, his atheism and his critique of philosophy in general. Atheism was far more consequential for an academic's career in the German lands of the early 19th century than it is today in Western countries. This psychological-anthropological analysis of the human origins of religion pretty much excluded him permanently from a conventional academic life:

After five years of searching unsuccessfully for a permanent university post, Feuerbach fired off Thoughts on Death and Immortality in 1830 – a merciless, ironic, and downright fun broadside leveled at the Christian notion of personal immortality. You can hear him chortling while laying down lines like, "The entire pietistic or modern mystical theology rests only on a game of ball. The individual throws himself away only in order to have God throw him back again; he humbles himself before God only in order to be reflected in him. His self-loss is self-enjoyment, his humility is self-exaltation. He submerges himself in God only to surface again intact, and, refreshed and renewed, to sun himself in his own excellence."

But he also notes:

Even the [neo-orthodox] theologian Karl Barth, who recommends that the best way to criticize Feuerbach is to "laugh in his face" has to concede that "In his writings – at least in those on the Bible, the Church Fathers, and especially on Luther – his theological skill places him above most modern philosophers" and "No philosopher of his time penetrated the contemporary theological situation as effectually as he." And this is what you intimately feel when reading The Essence – the words of a man who has made the contemplation of religion his life's work, offering us his dearly-bought insight into its psychology.

As DeBakcsy says, The Essence of Christianity (1841) is generally consider Feuerbach's most important work.

Feuerbach basic idea in Essence was, "The secret of theology [is] anthropology." Hans Küng in Das Christentum (1994) calls Feuerbach's view a "projection argument," according to which humanity is projecting important elements of themselves onto an abstract, imaginary entity, God. Küng calls attention to the similarity between Feuerbach's projection concept of religion and that of Sigmund Freud in the 20th century.

Küng challenges Feuerbach's argument on two major points. One is that understanding the human psychology of religion does not exclude a theistic faith. "The fact of projection in no way determines whether the object to which it applies exists or doesn't exist." Or, "A real God can correspond to the wish for God." It's one thing to say that projection is present in human religion. But that in itself doesn't mean that the divine object of the religion is only a projection.

The popular joke expresses a similar idea about projection: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you!

Küng also argues that historical developments since Feuerbach's time don't give much confirmation so far to the notion that religion will fade away and be replaced by reason, a more just social order or scientific knowledge: "But rather what appears more in fact is exactly the opposite: the faith (!) in the good nature of humanity (Feuerbach) as an understandable projection, the faith in the fjuture socialist society as an interest-determined consolation, the faith in rational science as a dangerous illusion."

Tags: hans küng, ludwig feuerbach, freud

Hans Küng (and others) on religion and world peace

This video is a panel discussion on religion and world peace which includes the great ecumenical theologian Hans Küng, who serves as President of the Global Ethic Foundation. The video is dated 12/09/2010.



Tags: hans küng

Varieties of Islāmic law

The Prophet Muhammad (ca. 570/571-632) in a depiction from ca. 1315

With all the hate-mongering going on over the "Ground Zero Mosque" - which isn't on Ground Zero nor a mosque - one of the things we're hearing a lot from people like Sean Hannity is about the danger of "sharia" (Islāmic law) being imposed on us good Christian Real Americans. This sharia bogeyman is also used by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremists in Europe. So, for anyone who actually cares to know a tiny bit more about the historical context of Islāmic law (sharia), I'm posting this brief description I originally did in March 2006, with only minor changes except for the addition of material about Afghanistan. It's based largely on the scholarly account by the Christian ecumenical theologian Hans Küng.

But I'm adding these introductory paragraphs. In one sense, the US discussion on this is just plain silly. American law is secular. It's not based on religion. On the contrary, for the national or state governments to adopt or enforce purely religious laws would be unconstitutional.

The conservative fear-mongering over "sharia" can't easily acknowledge this for several reasons, some of them obvious and others not so obvious. Pointing out that it would require a change in the entire Constitutional order to impose sharia law in the US wouldn't make it sound like an immediate threat to freak out over. Also, many conservative Christian Republicans want Christian religious ideas to be enacted and imposed by law, however much they might comma-dance around admitting it. (See Julie Ingersoll, Washington Post Story Gets Christian Reconstructionism Wrong Religion Dispatches 08/16/2010.)

The pseudohistory promoted by the scamster David Barton that is popular among Christian fundamentalists in the US - and forms the basis of history lessons at Glenn Beck University (there really is something called that!) - argue that US Constitutional law actually is founded on Christianity. (See J. Brent Walker, A Critique of David Barton's Views on Church and State 04/01/2005 on the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty website and Steve Foster, Beck U. – Leave Those Kids Alone The Donkey Edge 07/08/2010.)

It's also worth remembering that other religious groups have their own laws that are considered binding on their members, e.g., Catholic canon law. As a general rule, American law doesn't enforce those religious laws and doesn't interfere with their enforcement within religious institutions. Ask any Catholic who has had to have a marriage annulled. There are lots of "gray areas", of course, which sometimes produce much rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth among Christian political conservatives. Civil and criminal responsibility of church officials in case of sexual abuse of minors may be affected by the types of internal rules and oversight a church has exercised. But the basic rule is if religious law contradicts civil law, civil law overrides it. That applies to Islāmic religious law just as it does to Christian canon law or other kinds of religious regulations churches adopt.

Finally, Islām is a religion of law. Much of the development of Islāmic tradition has been in the context of the development of religious law, sharia, as compared to Christianity or Judaism, where theological disputes as such have had a greater role. (As always, this kind of broad historical generalization should be understood as just that.) That is due in no small part to the fact that in the traditional Islāmic lands, separation of church and state didn't develop as it did in Christian Europe. Islām has never been organized around a central religious hierarchy comparable to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches. As referenced below, there are certainly problems within the Islāmic world around issues of law and what we call "separation of church and state." But there's a difference in understanding them realistically and making a scary bogeyman out of sharia.

Following is the text from March 2006; it references what at the time were current events and I've left those comments because they also provide context:

Up until not long ago, the President's [Bush's] most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan. Yes, the dominant Islāmic law tradition in Afghanistan historically is not the gruesome fundamentalism of the Taliban government ousted in 2001. To what extent the Hanafi school in Afghanistan has been corrupted by three decades of more-or-less continuous war with no end in sight, I don't know. In an undated article at GlobalSecurity.org (Hanafi Islam accessed 08/24/2010), they write:

Broad-minded without being lax, this school appeals to reason (personal judgment) and a quest for the better. It is generally tolerant and the largest movement within Islam. The Hanafi school is known for its liberal religious orientation that elevates belief over practice and is tolerant of differences within Muslim communities. ...

An estimated 84% of Afghanistan's population is Sunni, following the Hanafi school of jurisprudence; the remainder is predominantly Shi'a, mainly Hazara. In March 2003 Ayatollah Mohammad Asef Mohseni, leader of the predominantly Shia Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan, proposed that, along with the Sunni Hanafi school of jurisprudence, the Shia Ja'fari school of jurisprudence be included in the new constitution as an official sect.

Taliban legal practices were particularly influenced by the Deobandi tradtion in Sunni Islām.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna (religious tradition), development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

Hans Küng on the current crisis with the Pope

Ecumenical Christian theologian Hans Küng

Ecumenical theologian Hans Küng, who lost his Catholic franchise from a decision of the now-Pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, writes about the current crisis over the Catholic Church's handling of priestly sexual abuse cases in Why Celibacy Should Be Abolished NYRblog 04/01/10. Küng is one of the leading living Christian theologians, probably the leading one. So his opinion carries considerable weight in the Christian world.

He begins with a formulation that may not reflect his actual argument so well: "The rule that Catholic priests must be celibate is responsible for the crisis in the church."

I think it would be a mistake to see ending the celibacy rule as a magic fix for the problem of sexual abuse by priests - and Küng isn't making that argument. As I understand it, the most typical profile of a child molester is a married man with children of his own.

But Küng makes some important arguments about the effects of the rule celibacy for priests in the Catholic church today. He writes:

Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).

During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and - outside the Roman Catholic Church - remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.

And he makes the important point that the celibacy rule contributes in a major way to the shortcomings of the Church hierarchy that creates tremendous pressures to handle scandals like the current ones defensively and in a self-defeating manner:

Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests. [my emphasis]

Also in Church-scandal news, Maureen Dowd is starting to seriously creep me out. She's now done three columns on the Church scandal, all of them using it for cutesy word plays, the latest being Devil of a Scandal New York Times 04/03/10. As I said before, it trivializes both the real harm done to the victims and the serious issues of responsibility that the Church is confronting to treat it this way. Exceptionally bad taste on her part. (I would also avoid using the term "tragic death of six million Jews" to describe the Holocaust; "tragic death" implies that Fate or a traffic accident or something was responsible.)

Melinda Henneberger in About That Vast Anti-Catholic Conspiracy ... Politics Daily 04/05/10, doesn't display the exceptionally bad taste as MoDo, but her judgment is about as tacky. The Church scandal makes her think of, uh, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is very right about our sad press corps and and Lewinsky: they can't stop loving her.

The Jesuit magazine America has a worthwhile piece by Thomas Meese, Taking Responsibility: What can Europe learn from the U.S. sexual abuse crisis? 04/12/10 edition (accessed 04/02/10).

America also has an editorial on the current controversy, The Millstone 04/12/10 edition (accessed 04/05/10).

Tags: catholic church,, hans küng

Flag pin campaigning and countering Christianist politics

It's at least a sign of progress that so many Democrats are now articulating their outrage at some of the real failings of the national news media. The Reps have made it a basic part of their understanding of the world, it seems, that the national media is part of a gigantic Liberal Press Conspiracy. The fact that no living, breathing liberal thinks that anything remotely like that is the case doesn't dissuade them a bit, it seems.

Two veteran observers of press dysfunction weighed in today on the sad state of our press corps as illustrated by ABC's debate on Wednesday, Bob Somerby in his Daily Howler post of 04/18/08 and Joe Conason in Obama, get ready for the "Clinton rules" Salon 04/18/08. Both observe, among other things, that the Great American Maverick McCain rarely wears an American flag lapel pin himself. Why our press lords (following the GOP lead) consider that failing a sign of insufficient patriotism from Barack Obama but think it's - what? - a sign of maverickness on the Straight Talker's part, it's a bit difficult to see.

Tankwoman pointed out this essay by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the left-leaning Jewish magazine Tikkun. Obama's Error--and What It Would Really Take to Rectify It OpEdNews.com 04/16/08. Lerner discusses some related considerations in The Obama Phenemenon Tikkun Mar-Apr 2008. The main point Lerner makes in "Obama's Error", the "error" being his now-famous "bitter" comment, is that the need for and function of religion in the lives of many people involves an affirmation of very real, important human needs for community and for consistency between the lives we live and the values we hold.

In discussing his research and that of others at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, he writes:

... we found that it was not only material, but spiritual deprivation that was at the heart of much of the pain that Americans experience today. That's why even at the height of American prosperity in the Clinton years, a powerful resurgence of right-wing religious forms was providing an avenue of expression for people whose needs were being ignored by the liberals in the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party, and even in parts of the liberal churches.

Similarly, the revival of a religious Left has not gotten much traction to the extent that it adopts the liberal political and economic agenda and makes it "religious" by finding some useful Bible quotes to back up the peace and justice planks of the Democrats. Valuable as that may be, it too misses the deeper pain that has led people to embrace right-wing religions.

What we discovered in groups that we ran for over ten thousand middle income working people is that most people spend their days in a work world governed by the "bottom line" that judges institutions and social practices to be efficient, rational or productive to the extent that they maximize money and power. Day after day, people breathe in the message that to be rational in this society is to "look out for number one" and treat other people instrumentally - that is, as valuable to the extent that they help us achieve our own goals and desires. People learn how to treat each other as means to our own ends.

We were struck, however, by how bitter many people feel about this way of life. Over and over again, middle income working people told us that they felt they were wasting their lives because their economic survival required them to do work that in no way connected to their hunger for a higher meaning to their lives, what Rev. Rick Warren correctly described as a desire for a purpose-driven life.

Moreover, as people bring into their personal lives the values of "looking for number one" and believing that getting their own needs met is the highest possible good, they find that their families and friendships become increasingly unstable, as more and more people switch from one relationship or marriage to another, imagining that the next one might satisfy yet more of their needs. No wonder people feel lonely, afraid, and deeply troubled by a society in which the narcissism is bred not by some peculiarities of one generation or another, but by the fundamental notions of rationality that predominate in all of the major economic and social institutions. (my emphasis)

In terms of its theological meaning, religion involves a relationship between people and God, a supernatural deity that exists outside our normal, day-to-day material reality. (I'll specify here I'm talking about Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the group that theologians sometimes call the "transcendence series" because of their conception of the relation of God to our material reality.)

But few of us see visions like Saul of Tarsus experienced on the road to Damascus. The Archangel Gabriel may have revealed the Qu'ran directly to the Prophet Muhammad, but most of us have to rely on other, less celestial intermediaries. Not many of us get to quarrel in person with God on a regular basis the way Moses did.

And the kinds of experiences Lerner talks about in that article are all part of the ways people connect to religion. Churches and religious groups are social organizations. People are social animals and that is one avenue in which many people realize that need. Religious ceremonies like church services and prayer give people a chance to step back from the noise of daily life and reflect their situations in terms of where they want to go and what they really value in life.

None of these experiences exclude the more mystical aspects of religion. The fact that someone can use prayer as a time to reflect on their lives doesn't exclude their experiencing it as a special communication with God, and vice versa.

Now, we all have our ways of framing these things for ourselves. I'm a big fan of the ecumenical Swiss theologian Hans Küng and the German psychoanalyst theologian Eugen Drewermann. And I have a lot of sympathy for the notion expressed by that old Deist Thomas Jefferson to his nephew that he should question even the existence of God because if God does exist, He surely respects honest disbelief more than unthinking faith.

Küng encourages Christian thinkers to engage with the work of thoughtful atheists, like Frederick Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Few believers have as much respect for and understanding of religion as the atheist, philosophically materialist Freud did. I know a French theologian who researched Freud's childhood family Bible, which was a full Christian Bible (Old and New Testament) with Jewish commentary throughout. This was a book Freud had studied carefully, and this researcher discovered that a lot of Freud's understanding of psychological symbolism was stimulated by this particular Jewish edition of the Christian Bible.

Drewermann tells a story about a British group that scheduled an event in St. Andrew's Cathedral in London to commemorate Freud on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1954. (Freud died in England in 1940.) Some critics objected to the notion of putting a church at the service of honoring a man who was a convinced atheist. The group responded with a statement that they were quite sure that Dr. Freud was no longer an atheist.

How does this rambling relate to Lerner's article? Lerner makes a big deal about what he calls the "the anti-religious culture of the Left". In fact, his useful observations about the appeal of religion are made within an argumentative framework that basically accepts the Republican accusation that liberals are anti-religious. It's a common pitch from some prominent figures associated with the "religious left", including Lerner, Jim Wallis, and Amy Sullivan.

It's perhaps a measure of the problem of that argument that up until a week or so ago, I would have included Barack Obama in that list. Because one of the things that has worried me about him as a candidate is that he was way too willing to play the Republican game of scolding the Democrats for not reaching out to "people of faith", as our current odd phrase for "religious people" has it. Now Obama is being lectured in much the same way he previously lectured those unnamed Democrats who he said were insufficiently appreciative of "people of faith".

My basic response to this notion that Democrats are anti-religion is, since when? Who are these nasty Dems who sneer at religious people? Some of the most prominent liberal Dems of the last 30 years have some kind of notably religious background. Gary Hart studied theology in college. George McGovern had been a Methodist minister. Jerry Brown was a Jesuit novitiate (meaning he lived in a monastery) for four years, and after he was Governor he did a stint working with Mother Theresa in India and studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. And has anyone ever heard of a labor union that was hostile to religion or sneered at religious people? Maybe there is one, but I couldn't tell you what it is.

That's one of those issues where I sometimes wonder if I haven't crossed over into some alternative universe. Because in the one that I remember living in all my life, the Democrats have not been anti-religion or contemptuous of religious people.

Are non-believers more likely to vote Democratic? The polls tell us that this is so. But are non-believers anti-religious? If we look at it as in a "those who aren't for us are against us" way, yes, they're anti-religious by definition. My own experience tends to be that non-believers don't much care what others believe about the supernatural as long as they don't hurt anybody in pursuit of those beliefs.

I try to keep in mind a few key things in this particular discussion. One is that religion is good for some people, and it's bad for others. Some people find religious faith helps them affirm positive things in life. Others find religious faith out of desperation. Some embrace forms of religious practice that provide them an authoritarian psychological structure in which to operate. Chris Hedges in his very unfortunately titled, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (2007), provides some excellent case studies of people who embrace fundamentalist religion out of fear or desperation. The title is unfortunate, because it is likely to make many people brush it off as an "anti-religious" tract, which it is not. I would expect to see his case studies of individuals cited in future studies of Christian fundamentalism.

Another thing is that freedom of religion, including separation of church and state, is an essential element of democracy. This is an area in which the fundis may well come to wish that they had been more careful in what they prayed for. They haven't achieved a merger of church and government quite yet, but they have achieved the merger of fundamentalist Christianity with the Republican Party. For instance, we can no longer discuss US Middle East policy without some understanding of the crackpot apocalyptic theories of the "premillenial dispensationalists". Since it's based on bad Biblical interpretation and reeks with anti-Semitism, the advocates of that theology may find themselves more exposed to public scrutiny than they would prefer.

The fact is that most of what the fundis call "anti-religious" on the part of Democrats ("the Left", as Lerner puts it) are actually church-state issues: Christian prayer in schools, public funding for religious proselyting, stem-cell research, abortion rights. The latter two are very much church-state issues. Because the notion that Christians once called "ensoulment", i.e., at what point a fetus becomes a human life in the eyes of God, is very much a religious judgment. Despite the imaginative claims of the anti-abortionists, my understanding is that no medical development has changed the biological and medical reality that existed in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided, which is that the fetus cannot survive independently of the mother's body until around the end of the second trimester. There is no clear Christian position on this. Jesus himself in the Bible doesn't mention a word about abortion - and a form of abortion was practiced in Roman times.

Which brings me to another point. The Democratic Party is not going to be able to make itself a "Christian left" party in any parallel sense to the Republicans and the Christian Right. Because the whole idea of the Christianist movement involves Christian dominionism, though many Christianists don't like the marketing sound of that term yet. If "left" is going to include meaning defending democracy, then defending freedom of religion and the secular state, i.e., the separation of church and state, will have to be a part of it. And the Christianists like the Liberty Regent University law graduates who apparently put the higher values of Christianist politics above following the law in their prominent role at the Justice Department under this administration are going to attack any movement that believes in democratic freedom of religion and separation of church and state as "anti-religion".

Finally, Democrats should have any illusions about the heavy overlap between the group we call Christian Right voters and white people who just don't like blacks very much. There's nothing new about the fact that this is a touchy topic in many ways. But it's real.

Political campaigns aren't the place for religious revivals or reformation movements. For those, religious or not, who believe in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth that society needs to care about the weakest and most vulnerable, to protect the rights of women and to respect the dignity of all people, to not steal from others (through crony-capitalist contracts or otherwise) the Democrats can find ways to express their shared values with them.

Not even many Christians fully embrace what would seem to be the radical pacifism that Jesus expresses in the Gospels. But plenty of us think it's a violation of the Christian Just War doctrine to make up lies to justify attacking Iraq and to keep the war going when any reasonable possibility of the gains exceeding the costs have long since past. For Christians who believe the religious doctrine that Jesus was God Incarnate who was tortured to death by an unjust government, most will not find torture an acceptable practice.

The Democrats can speak to the religious values of those "people of faith" without turning themselves into a Left Christianist party.

Tags: authoritarianism, barack obama, christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, eugen drewermann, hans küng

Happy Easter

The Resurrection as pictured by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

Jesus said to [Martha], "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." - John 11, 25-26 (RSV)

The Christian faith in the Resurrection does not deny death, though it can be used in that way at some level. Rather, it affirms that people can experience eternity in our earthly lives, through life and love themselves. And that this experience of our lives is not solely related to the material facts of our earthly lives.

Jesus appears to Mary of Magdala

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. - Mark 16: 9-11

"Gregory of Antioch (d. 593) portrays Jesus as appearing to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the tomb and saying to them: 'Be the first teachers to the teachers. So that Peter who denied me learns that I can also choose women as apostles'." - Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (2003).

Image from St. Martinskirche, Messkirch

I say, to believe in the Resurrection is to trust in God that His love will survive death. But it's not done with such statements. The Bible lives by pictures, and only he who understands the language of these images can preserve the truth of the faith. Even the empty tomb is an image for a truth of faith. - Eugen Drewermann, interview with Der Spiegel 52/1991 (12/23/1991 issue)

A Reubens version of the Resurrection

Spiegel: Was Jesus' tomb empty? Did Jesus rise physically from the dead on the third day after his death? That is what is celebrated on Easter.

Drewermann: If I say the Easter stories are legends, some will say that, therefore, they didn't happen. But that is thinking too simplistically. Even legends have their own value. But one can't avoid the findings of exegesis - therefore of New Testament research: the Easter stories did not provide the basis of the belief in the Resurrection, rather they only want to explain it. They are meant to proclaim in images that the story of Jesus did not end with His death on the Cross.

Spiegel: Therefore pious literature instead of truth?

Drewermann: Literature instead of historical reports, not instead of truth.

Matthias Grünewald's cosmic vision of the Resurrection

Spiegel: Only an image, not a report. Therefore you agree with [Biblical scholar Rudof] Bultmann: "A corpse cannot come to life again and climb out of the grave."

Drewermann: So it is. That goes for the grave of Jesus, and it goes for all other graves: in Verdun and in Vietnam, in Paderborn [where Drewermann's parish was located] and in Hamburg [where Spiegel is published]. The Resurrection is just so little visible there as three days after Easter in Jerusalem.

This interview of Drewermann's with Der Spiegel didn't make the Vatican happy, to put it mildly. But although most Christians probably assume that the Resurrection involved the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body, Christian doctrine understands the Resurrection as a spiritual event.

Drewermann's formulation emphasizes a key element of the Christian understanding of the Resurrection and eternal life: the emphasis on the importance of life in this world. Whatever the fate of souls may be the other side of death, the Christian religion insists on recognizing that something important and vital and irreplaceable is lost when people's lives are terminated prematurely.

The 1994 version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, prepared under the direction of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, insists on the certain physical aspects of the Resurrection experience. But even the Catechism hedges its language carefully. The Catechism notes that the empty tomb "is not a direct proof of Resurrection" because "the absence of Christ's body from the tomb could be explained otherwise." (Item 640) Even the disciples themselves are recorded in the Gospels as reacting to the news of the empty tomb by asking whether Jesus' body had been stolen.

Hans Küng observes in Credo (1992) that the earliest mention of the Resurrection in the Christian Bible comes in St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 15:4 and does not mention the empty tomb in connection with the Resurrection at all:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. (1 Cor. 15:3-5)

Nor does Paul rely anywhere in his writings, Küng notes, rely on the "empty tomb" as part of the Resurrection doctrine. And St. Paul was, after all, the first Christian theologian.

But even in what seems to be a direct description of the Resurrection as a physical event, the Catechism's language, at least in the English translation, doesn't quite insist on the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body: "Given all these testimonies [in the Gospels], Christ's Resurrection cannot be interpreted as something outside the physical order, and it is impossible not to acknowledge it as an historical fact". (643)

I'm not focusing on this as some sort of argument against village atheists or hardline philosophical materialists. It's a question of the religious, theological meaning of the Resurrection, however closely one might wish to parse how "historical" the event was.


The language of the Catechism can be easily misread if one forgets that for Catholic Christianity, there is a distinction between spiritual and material, but not between spiritual and real. Thus, the Church recognizes an essential continuity between the physical body of Jesus and his post-Resurrection body, while nevertheless insisting on a fundamental difference between the Resurrection of the Lord and the physical resuscitation of others in the Scriptures (645-646):

By means of touch and the sharing of a meal, the risen Jesus establishes direct contact with his disciples. He invites them in this way to recognize that he is not a ghost and above all to verify that the risen body in which he appears to them is the same body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion. Yet at the same time this authentic, real body possesses the new properties of a glorious body: not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when he wills; for Christ's humanity can no longer be confined to earth, and belongs henceforth only to the Father's divine realm. For this reason too the risen Jesus enjoys the sovereign freedom of appearing as he wishes: in the guise of a gardener or in other forms familiar to his disciples, precisely to awaken their faith.

Christ's Resurrection was not a return to earthly life, as was the case with the raisings from the dead that he had performed before Easter: Jairus' daughter, the young man of Naim, Lazarus. These actions were miraculous events, but the persons miraculously raised returned by Jesus' power to ordinary earthly life. At some particular moment they would die again. Christ's Resurrection is essentially different. In his risen body he passes from the state of death to another life beyond time and space. At Jesus' Resurrection his body is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit: he shares the divine life in his glorious state, so that St. Paul can say that Christ is "the man of heaven". (my emphasis)

It is this aspect of the Resurrection Jesus as "the man of heaven" which Grünewald's depiction shown above emphasizes. The Catechism also recognizes a distinctive feature of the Resurrection as presented in the Gospels is that the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus often found people who knew him extremely well not recognizing him at first:

[Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb] turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you hhave carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Ra-bo'ni!" (which means Teacher). - John 20: 13-16 (RSV)

The Catechism recognizes the essential mystery in the Resurrection:

Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles' encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history. This is why the risen Christ does not reveal himself to the world, but to his disciples, "to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people." (647)

Hans Küng writes that although the term "mystery" is often misused by Christians, the Resurrection in a mystery in the truest Christian sense of the word, because it deals with "God's fundamental realm", that being "in the resurrection to new life". The Resurrection of Jesus is not theologically about a return to earthly life but "in the apocalyptic-Jewish horizon of expectations, has to do directly with the raising of this executed and buried Nazarene from God to God, to a God that [Jesus] himself called "Abba", "Father". (bolding in original)

Brother Al and the Muslims

Here is a story that gives us some insight into the prevailing American fundamentalist Christian view of Islam.

Evangelical Leaders Pledge Common Cause with Islam by Stephen Adams, CitizenLink (from James Dobson's Focus on the Family Web site) 01/03/08. the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), an umbrella group of conservative Protestants, recently wrote a conciliatory public letter to Muslims. The petition was a response to a statement by a number of prominent Muslims, that was called A Common Word Between Us and You. The Christian petition originated with a group of Yale Divinity School scholars and is titled A Christian Response to "A Common Word Between Us and You".

This kind of exchange seems to be very much in the spirit of ecumenical dialogue to promote world peace that Hans Küng's Global Ethic Foundation promotes.

Evangelicals in the American sense means conservative Protestants who adhere to a "born-again" theology. Fundamentalists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Former President Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham are non-fundamentalist, evangelical Christians. (Billy's son Franklin may be another question.)

Conservatives regularly complain that "moderate" Muslims aren't doing enough to counter violent jihadism. But you don't have to listen that closely to see that in many cases, what the conservatives are really saying is that the real enemy is Islam and that the "moderates" are either useless against the jihadists or actually support them.

This exchange of public statements gives an example in practice of how this works out. If the conservatives were serious about wanting "moderate" Muslim to step up to promote peace, one would think they would embrace such a moment. NAE President Leith Anderson gives an example of this in the statement he about his support for the Christian public letter at Signing the Letter to Islam NAE.net 11/2/07:

What are my hopes from this dialogue [between Christians and Muslims]? First, mutual respect between the two largest religions on the globe. This includes a freedom to state what we each believe without pretending that there is comprehensive mutual agreement. Second, peace in places and between peoples who are hostile toward one another. Third, religious liberty where every nation allows its citizen to freely believe and worship even if that means changing what is believed and how worship is rendered. Fourth, an opening for future dialogue with the conviction that it is not good to live in either ignorance nor isolation.

The CitizenLink news report notes that prominent Baptist theologian Albert Mohler has attacked the Christian statement:

Their response [the Christian petition] — initiated by Yale Divinity School and endorsed by other liberal Christian leaders — apologized for the sins of Christians during the Crusades and for "excesses" of the global war on terror, without mentioning Muslim atrocities. It appeared to leave the fundamentals of Christianity — especially the deity of Christ — open for discussion.

It even seemed to acknowledge Allah as the God of the Bible. "Before we 'shake your hand’ in responding to your letter,” it stated, "we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world."

The very name of the Muslim communiqué — A Common Word between Us and You — is from a verse in the Quran that condemns “people of the Scripture” (Christians) for alleged polytheism (the doctrine of the Trinity).

Mohler said the agreement “sends the wrong signal” and contains basic theological problems, especially in "marginalizing" Jesus Christ. He also condemned the apology for the Crusades. (my emphasis)

While the theological buzzwords may not be immediately obvious to all readers, this position essentially rules out all ecumenical dialogue between Chritianity and Islam (and Judaism) that isn't a sales pitch of Christians proselytizing believers of the other faith.

There are different motivations for people to learn about someone else's religion. The kind of dialogue sought by Hans Küng and the Global Ethic Foundation is one that would help believers understand what the other religion believes and to seek common ground in the interest of world peace. A genuine ecumenical dialogue, that is.

Learning about another religion for the purpose of proselytizing means that one is seeking to understand the other religion from a sales standpoint, i.e., how can I convince the other side to give up their own religion and adopt mine?

The former means understanding the other religion on its own terms. Not accepting it or converting to it, but understanding it in its own terms, not just from the standpoint of one's own religion. Christianity and Islam are both religions that historically emphasized winning converts. So such an approach can be challenging for both.

The latter means understanding the other religion in order to discredit it, at least in the eyes of those targeted for conversion.

This is where the fundamentalist view converges with the desire of those who wish to demonize Islam for more earthly reasons than saving the souls of Muslims. The quote above on criticism of the Christian petition provides some good examples of how that works.

First of all, saying that Christians should never make a statement that would have the effect of "marginalizing" Jesus Christ is pretty much the same as saying that Christians should never talk to Muslims about religion except to convert them. Or maybe to anger and humiliate them during torture sessions in the Bush Gulag. The reality is that Christians have never won a lot of voluntary conversions from Islam or Judaism, in part because the doctrine of the Trinity doesn't make any sense to them.

For that matter, it doesn't make sense to Christians either. Any minister who is remotely respectful of the religious complexities of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is going to wind up explaning it by some version of saying, "it's a Mystery", and that believing it is a matter of faith. My own pastor, who takes his theology pretty seriously, explains it as a type of dialogue of God with Himself. Then he reminds people that they're never going to really understand the doctrine and that you shouldn't beat yourself up over it. (Kind of like a native English speaker attempting to master German, for instance.)

Muslims and Jews believe that there is one God. Not "one God in three Persons" as the Trinity doctrine describes it. But one God in one Person. Historically and theologically, that one God is God worshipped by Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Maybe someday She'll explain to us how many Persons She really is in a more understandable way. Meanwhile, we can't understand the doctrine. But we can do the math. The belief in one God is a common belief among Christians and Muslims. The belief in Jesus as a prophet is also common to both faiths. The belief that Jesus is God is common only to Chrisitians. And, for that matter, the Western and Eastern Christian Churches split nearly a thousand years ago (theoretically and at least in part really) over how to define the doctrine of the Trinity and have never reconciled over it. But let's not even go there.

So, saying, "I'm not going to talk about your religion on any kind of equal, respectful basis until you acknowledge that Jesus is God", is pretty much eliminating the possibility of Christians talking to Muslims about their faith on any kind of equal, respectful basis. It's very similar to Cheney and Bush telling Iran, "Do everything we tell you to do with nothing in return, and after you've done it then we'll hold negotiations with you."

It's a particularly brainless fundamentalist habit to talk about Allah as though the word designates a particular deity different from the one worshipped by Christians. "Allah" is the Arabic word for "god". Arabic-speaking Christians also pray to "Allah".

The defense of the Crusades is particularly ironic coming from hardline Protestants. The Crusades were for a long time a standard item in Protestant polemics against the Catholics, wars of conquest in the name of God that Protestants claimed with the doing of the vile papists, not some common and dubious legacy of the religion of Christianity. Brother Al, though, is more than happy to embrace the Crusades.

If you can stomach a half hour of this, Brother Al did a radio program on this. He spends the first ten minutes on anti-abortion. The segment on the evangelical letter to Muslims begins around 11:15 in the excerpt.

There's a telling moment near the end that gives the listeners a brief exposure to the limited nature of fundamentalists' alleged fondness for Jews. A caller to the show asks a reasonable question: if fundis can recognize that Jews worship the same God as Christians, why is that not the case with Muslim. Brother Al responds, with a minimum of mealy-mouthing, that Jews do not worship the same God as Christians.

Tags: albert mohler, christian fundamentalism, christianism, christianity, hans küng, islam

Varieties of Islāmic law

Up until not long ago, the President's most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna, development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is not now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

See also Index to Posts on Hans Küng's Der Islam

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

Islām's first theological controversy

The first major theological controversy within Islām came during the Umayyad dynasty's rule. It gave rise to the Qadarīya, who took positions on the key theological questions that differed from those preferred by the caliph's court.

Christians have had their own differences over the questions of predestination and free will. Although the issue at first glance seems very similar to that which occurred during this Islamic controversy, I always hesitate to assume that surface similarities between religions are necessarily reflective of deeper ones. The content and particular understanding of an issue can be very different and often can't be understood well without that broader religious context.

In this case, the question was closely bound up with the issues of right conduct by the rulers. Mu‛āwiya and ‛Abd al-Malik held to a strong deterministic position which justified the actions and decisions of the caliph as representing the will of God. Yazīd II (caliph 720-724) held a particularly clear form of the idea, which in Hans Küng's description in Der Islam (2004) said that "a caliph is not required to give an account of himself before God, because everything the 'rightly guided deputy' of God [the caliph] does, is by definition right."

Küng observes drily that this doctrine proved especially convenient to the "life-loving" al-Walīd II and his life of "wine, women and song."

But there was a dissenting view which developed into the beliefs of the Qadarīya. It held that while God is responsible for the good deeds of the caliph, the bad deeds were due to the less-than-infallible decisions of the human rulers. The word "qadar" is used for both the will of God and for the responsibility of people. But it was those who emphasized the latter who became identified as Qadarīya.

Küng describes how such a view could become especially undesirable from the rulers' point of view in certain circumstances:

For evil, humans are responsible; it cannot simply be attributed to God. Every person is created by God for good, but is nevertheless free to do evil, as well. As an individual, he is [angesprochen] and so has his own qadar, his own self-determination and responsibility. One immediately recognizes the political brisance [sp?] of such an apparently purely theological controversy: If a person is responsible for his evil deeds, he can also be held responsible for them before God - whether subject or caliph!

It comes as no surprise, then, that leading Qadarīya found themselves in rough political waters at various times. ‛Abd al-Malik inquired of al-Hasan al-Basrī (642-728) about his ideas, which held that the strong predestinarian view favored by the caliph was an innovation - and not an altogether good one - in the Islamic religious tradition.

Karen Armstrong in Islam (2000) writes that the Qadarīya supported the Ummayad dynasty as being the best way to preserve the unity of the ummah (Muslim community). But they were also willing to criticize its faults - sometimes at great risk to themselves (see below). And she writes of Hasan (her spelling conventions are somewhat different than what I use):

He had opted for a theology known as the Qadariyyah, because it studied the decrees (qadar) of God. Human beings had free will and were responsible for their actions; they were not predestined to act in a certain way, since God was just and would not command them to live virtuously if it was not in their power. Therefore, the caliphs must be accountable for their deeds, and must be taken to task if they disobeyed God's clear teaching. When Caliph Abd al-Malik heard that Hasan had been spreading this potentially rebellious doctrine, he summoned him to court, but Hasan was so popular that the caliph dared not punish him. Hasan had begun the strong Mulsim tradition of combining a disciplined interior life with political opposition to the government.

In his article for Britannica on Hasan, David Ede writes ( "Hasan al-Basri, al-."Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD .[Accessed September 20, 2005]):

The enemy of Islām, for Hasan, was not the infidel but the hypocrite (munāfiq), who took his religion lightly and “is here with us in the rooms and streets and markets.” In the important freedom-determinism debate, he took the position that man is totally responsible for his actions, and he systematically argued this position in an important letter written to the Umayyad caliph ‛Abd al-Malik. His letter, which is the earliest extant theological treatise in Islām, attacks the widely held view that God is the sole creator of man's actions. The document bears political overtones and shows that in early Islām theological disputes emerged from the politico-religious controversies of the day. His political opinions, which were extensions of his religious views, often placed him in precarious situations. During the years 705–714, Hasan was forced into hiding because of the stance he took regarding the policies of the powerful governor of Iraq, al-Hajjāj. After the governor's death, Hasan came out of hiding and continued to live in Basra until he died. It is said that the people of Basra were so involved with the observance of his funeral that no afternoon prayer was said in the mosque because no one was there to pray.

Another notable Qadarite was the Syrian Gailān ad-Dimašqī (died 732). He was an official responsible for coinage under Caliph ‛Umar II. Küng summarizes his view as follows:

The rulers should not look upon their power as simply "a gift from God," with which they can do as they please. They should rather be much more conscious of
their responsibility before God for their people.

Gailān would later be cited as an authority by Muslimswho challenged what they saw as illegitimate authority. Gailān himself was executed as a conspirator against Caliph Hišām (caliph 724-743).

Another Syrian Abū ‛Abd-Allāh Makhūl, became known as a kind of father figure for the Qadarite movement. He barely escaped execution himself under Hišām.

Tags: hans küng, hans küng's der islam, hasan al-basri, islam, gailan, qadarites, qadarīya