OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I'll try to combine two different replies into one here.
I admit this is a somewhat odd position for me to take, because in my experience, almost all of the Catholic priests I've known have been, though possessing their various human flaws, genuinely warm and faithful men offering up their lives for the sake of the gospel, and the Protestant ministers I've known have been an incredibly mixed bag, ranging from people I genuinely consider non-Christians or heretics to people who just seem to be interested in social status and conforming to trends while seeking high status to, thankfully, the small minority of devoted servants of Christ. If I were just judging by what I think of them as people, Catholicism would have a very easy win over Protestantism.
I also agree in principle that the quality of the priest as a person is not the important thing. I am not a Donatist; the sacraments are valid even if they are performed by people who are inconstant, foolish, un-virtuous, or in the most extreme cases, even unbelievers. I tend to think there is a tension here in the church. The efficacy of the sacraments does not depend on the priest's holiness, but nonetheless we do validly want priests to live holy lives. We want all people to live holy lives, after all, and priests are seen as representative of the community, and their lives affect many others. So the tightrope to walk is that priests must strive to be good and holy men, learned, faithful, compassionate, good speakers and wise counsellors, etc., but that priesthood does not depend on any of these things.
However, all that said, I do stand by the observation that, in my experience, lay Catholics do not know their priests as well as lay Protestants tend to know their pastors. I think Catholic priests are often felt to be interchangeable in a way that Protestant equivalents are not, and I take that to be because of the role of the wider ecclesial structure. In general I think Catholics care more about the structure and institutions of the church than Protestants, so the specific individual priest in front of you can be less important than the office he represents and the function he performs.
In defense of the Catholic position, you could argue that's the way it should be. You go to mass to meet Christ, not the priest. I myself think about my role in those terms. (I don't want to get into institutional details, for reasons of privacy, but I am a kind of pastor.) My role is to be 'transparent' - I want people to look through me and my service and see God. All ministers must, in a sense, be like John the Baptist: "he must increase, but I must decrease". We make ourselves small for the sake of the gospel. Protestantism is much more vulnerable to 'celebrity pastors' than Catholicism is. There are celebrity priests, unfortunately, but I think Catholicism has resisted that more effectively than Protestantism has.
That said, no human being is ever fully interchangeable, and ultimately we encounter Christ not through ecclesial offices, but through other living human beings, and sometimes I do worry that the human is lost. Sometimes I do speak to a priest and realise that somewhere beneath his ministry is a very lonely man, and I feel a compassion for him. I remember one priest telling me once about how precious he finds the friendships he has that go back to before his ordination - people who are still able to know him as just 'my friend X', not 'Fr. X'.
At any rate, as far as individuals go, I think the average of Catholic priests is better than the average of Protestant priests/ministers/pastors. No doubt standardisation helps with that. Possibly it's also just because my background has exposed me to a great many mainline Protestant leaders who have been slowly selling out the gospel. In my case, therefore, it has been very important to distinguish between the church's representative (frequently corrupt), the visible institution of the church (also frequently corrupt), and the invisible church (resplendent throughout eternity, terrible as an army with banners). So I put an especial value on practices of resistance, which allow one to remember and hold to the gospel even in the face of straying leaders and institutions.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I was annoyed to read this piece on it in the national broadcaster, which, for all that it is marked 'Analysis' (not even Opinion!), just uncritically repeats the book's claims as truth.
I have not been able to read it yet - and I may not bother - but certainly the impression I get from the coverage of it is that its fundamental case is, well, that nerds are gross.
It is, as it happens, true that plenty of the people it's talking about are gross. I have said it myself. If you look at most of the people he's talking about - Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Altman, Zuckerberg, Srinivasan, etc. - they are, I think it's fair to say, kind of disconcerting. But I think you can't build a larger political argument on that. Someone presenting as anti-social is not necessarily a threat to democracy. Something is being elided here.
I was also struck by the repetition of the word 'billionaire', in a way that reminds me of attempts to use 'oligarchy' as the word of the day a while back. It's democracy versus billionaires, data centres are an intrusion of billionaire power, they found billionaire cities, and so on. Clearly the author has very negative affect around the word 'billionaire', but my sense is that Americans in general do not. As with oligarchy, it feels to me like an attempt to will a movement into existence, as if repeating "people are waking up" enough times will summon the revolution into being.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I am sometimes surprised how much, in Catholicism, the priest both matters and does not matter. Protestants, on the one hand, have significantly less formal need for a minister. There can be entire lay congregations, and most functions of an ordained leader can be done by a layperson in extremis. The priest is an essential part of the ecclesial machinery in Catholicism in a way that he is not really for Protestants. On the other hand, Protestants listen to their pastors much more than Catholics listen to their priests. Protestants seem to take pastors and ministers seriously as a source of moral guidance more than Catholics take priests seriously.
(For example, here is a survey about role models in faith from a 2016 Australian survey. The main difference that stands out to me is that Catholics are much more likely to say that their parents are their role models, and to a lesser extent school teachers are more important to them, while Protestants are significantly more likely to say their pastor/minister/priest, as well as other Christian leaders like speakers or authors. I think that does reflect a difference in attitudes toward church leaders. There may be a lot of reasons for this - the Catholic school system exists while Protestant schools are much rarer, but also adult converts are much more common for Protestants than for Catholics, which I imagine brings down the family numbers.)
What I find anecdotally is that Catholics are more likely to think of the priest as something like a technician. The priest is a kind of 'sacrament dispenser' - he the person trained and authorised to provide a specific, limited service for the community, and outside of that service you do not particularly care what he thinks. Meanwhile I think Protestants seem to want to have more of a relationship with their pastor, seeing the pastor as a friend as well as a teacher.
Thus even the way you present it here - the sacrament is what matters, and the priest as a person is a kind of adjunct to that.
I gave that estimate of active Catholics, people who follow the precepts of the Church. By definition, this group 100% consists of people who go to Confession once a year at minimum. It's probably 1% of Catholics who claim to be Catholic on a survey who go to monthly confession.
That sounds plausible to me. The anecdotal figure I hear from priests is that they expect maybe 10-20% of the children they baptise to be anything more than Christmas-and-Easter Catholics when they grow up. And of that number, people who go to confession more often than the mandatory once a year are an even smaller minority.
Likewise, I think people have forgotten how horrible sin is. They explain it away psychologically or simply think it's not that bad. If God isn't bad, then He'll forgive you, even if you never stop to be actually sorry. If you never reflect on your failures and mistakes, then you will be ignorant of your sin and God can't actually punish someone for being ignorant, right? That wouldn't be fair. So it's best not to think about it and remain in ignorance as if ignorance is the same as innocence.
I think that's true. I worry a lot about how I preach about sin. If you come on very strongly with it, you can provoke too much resistance and people will stop listening, or adopt a hostile position to you and close their hearts. But the alternative to preaching about sin is to adopt a purely therapeutic position, and then people forget about it entirely. That way is the broad and easy path that leads to the fire; sleepwalking into hell.
The gospel convicts us. It makes us aware of our own failings and limitations. The Christian life is one of constant repentance. There's an extent to which the churches have forgotten how to speak about sin, but an even greater extent to which the people have forgotten how to hear words about sin.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Firstly, thank you for the generous and eirenic response. I'm glad that we started with a disagreement but now appear to have reached a point where we're sharing personal experiences and giving each other advice for how to grow in holiness.
I join you in wholeheartedly endorsing a daily examen. Ignatius was definitely one of the figures who appealed to me and prompted me to investigate Catholicism! I think the idea of pausing to consciously look back at your day is a good one, and for what it's worth I wouldn't say exclusively Catholic. For example, I'd say that Wesley's twenty-two questions are approaching a similar idea. I approve of the way that link puts it in terms of spiritual accountability, and I can see how personal confession would serve the same end.
One of the risks of the approach I laid out, after all, is that it might make sin generic, abstract, and universal. The more a believer contemplates sin and holiness in glittering generalities, the easier it is to ignore the small everyday duties. It is easier to say, "All of my motives are partly mixed with sin" than it is to say, "I lied to my friend Kevin today".
All that said, I notice that one word was missing from your post. There is no mention of the priest in your post. I would have thought that the priest is the most distinctive element of confession in Catholicism. I wholeheartedly endorse a regular examination of conscience, and confession of sin before others and corresponding penitence is obviously meritorious. In Catholicism, though, we are talking about a rite done with a priest, who represents the institutional church and absolves you in Christ's name. (Indeed, in the very person of Christ.) I'm curious what your experience of the priest's role has been. I'd suggest that for most people raised Protestant, the idea of making yourself vulnerable and telling your shameful secrets to a priest seems alien and uncomfortable.
As Shrike mentioned, many Protestant churches technically have liturgies for confession to a priest or minister. In my experience, however, these are almost never used. For that matter, confession is decreasingly popular even among Catholics - you gave a 10% figure for monthly confession, and frankly I think that's optimistic. I've talked to Catholic priests about this locally and they've told me that it is more and more neglected (at least here in Australia), and to an extent it has become 'a sacrament without a theology'. It still exists and is still offered, but there is minimal felt sense among the people of its purpose, much less its necessity. I can't bring myself to approve of that, because even though I don't think that confession to a priest is necessary, I think that what's going on here is probably a society-wide amnesia around the very concept of sin.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, from my Protestant perspective, I do think that the sacrament of penance and reconciliation is unnecessary, but I would say that's because it's got a mistaken ecclesiology. Mutual confession and forgiveness is, of course, essential to the Christian life and to any Christian community, but I think the sacrament of penance institutionalises that in a way that is unnecessary.
If you'll pardon a personal story, I've flirted with conversion to Catholicism a few times, and something I found very odd, psychologically, was the idea that I should be recording or making some sort of mental list of my sins for purposes of confession. I think that often I am not conscious of my sins, or I do not recognise sins even in the process of committing them, or that both my motives and my actions are mixed, combining sin and righteousness in ways beyond my ability to extricate. There are some unambiguous sins - I know if I have stolen, or murdered, or committed adultery! - but those are very much the minority. Thus when I confess my sins, both in a church context and privately to God, I name (or bring to mind) specific sins that I feel guilt for, but I am also conscious that those are only the tip of the iceberg. I ask God to purify and transfigure my mixed motives, to make me aware of the sins I have not recognised, to correct and chasten my wayward heart toward those sins that I struggle to regret, and so on. I find the - pardon my language - mechanical nature of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation to be an obstacle to this holistic view of sin.
I don't think that, in general, I am in a state of grace right up until I impair it with a grave sin, which I think need a priest to absolve. It doesn't seem that binary to me. I think that I am constantly in a process of metanoia - I pray that God, through his grace, is mysteriously at work in me healing and transforming my sinful nature.
Naturally I don't expect a Catholic to agree with me. In principle I have no objection to a person making a confession to a priest or minister, and that priest or minister offering absolution. In fact I have no objection to a person doing that to another layperson. It is salutary in each case. So I don't think a Catholic is doing himself or herself spiritual harm by going to confession.
But I do think that the visible economy you get in Catholicism, the ledger of sins accumulated and absolved that I felt I was asked to start recording, is not the right way for Christians to think about sin, reconciliation, and grace.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I admit what was going through my mind when I wrote that, as a mental example of a good Protestant response to that question, was Joan of Arc's answer to the question of whether she was in a state of grace - if I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God so keep me. Since that we cannot ourselves know whether we are, we should try to adopt the attitude that Joan did. In a sense it does not matter, because our obligation to always continue to put our trust in God and turn back to him is unchanged.
In any case, I'm certainly not saying that Protestants don't know what sins are. What I'm saying is that I think for Catholics the economy of grace is considered somewhat more visible than it is for Protestants. This is not about whether or not such-and-such thing is sinful, but rather about, with our limited human self-knowledge, estimating our own places in the larger economy of salvation.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
You've inserted the word 'mortal' there. Mortal sin, in Catholic theology, has three elements - it must concern a grave matter, it must be committed with full knowledge, and it must be committed with deliberate consent.
The grave matter can be determined objectively and externally. Knowledge and consent are where grey areas emerge, and is it is technically impossible to fully see into someone else's head, we thus cannot determine mortal sin with total reliability. Knowledge is the easier fork; for many mortal sins, e.g. murder, it is practically inconceivable that the sinner not know that the act is wrong. Consent is the trickiest, because consent can be made somewhat less than full by passions, addictions, mental disorders, or any other frailty. It is impossible to fully rule out the possibility of some such frailty.
This is thus the usual justification for hope in the situation of people who've committed suicide. Suicide is in theory a mortal sin - it concerns a grave matter, as it is murder, most Catholics can be reliably assumed to know why self-murder is wrong, and since suicide involves making a choice to kill yourself, consent seems pretty easy to observe. That was why for a while the standard line was that all suicide victims go straight to Hell. Nowadays, however, I think the line is that suicide in itself suggests that there was some sort of mitigating factor like a mental disorder.
In any case, I did not say mortal sin. I think the terminology appropriate to what I'm saying would be 'grave sin', which only requires the first of the three points of the mortal sin trident. Dying with unrepented grave sin does not necessarily mean you are damned, but grave sin is discernible from the outside, and Catholicism has various procedures for identifying and repenting of grave sin, and participation in various rites of the church (most notably the Eucharist) is contingent upon doing so.
Thus, for instance, Catholics do stress sometimes about who is or is not permitted to partake of communion, whereas in my experience the Protestant line is usually "examine your own conscience, and then decide" (cf. 1 Cor 11:28).
I think in Catholicism there is a kind of external economy of grace that the believer participates in. The Catholic Church is much more willing to list and define the parts of this economy, and state their implications for one's eternal welfare - in that sense I'd argue that Catholicism is, intentionally, a more legible religion than Protestantism. There are senses in which I'd say that Judaism and Islam are both even more legible than Catholicism, though I think it depends on the issue a little. Thus in this case, with both Muslims and Protestants being, I think, more reluctant to make definite statements about the saved than Catholics. Catholics don't make pronouncements recklessly or willy-nilly, but as you say, there are circumstances where they will definitively say that such-and-such is in Heaven.
Generally speaking you are correct in the specific points you make, but I think you're not really contradicting me in terms of the big picture.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
You do, however, affirm that specific people are saved. Canonisation, for instance, involves making the formal judgement that the person canonised is in Heaven.
In this world, at least, I think Catholicism tends to be more confident than Protestantism in making clear pronouncements about whether a person is currently in a state of grace or a state of sin. The sacramental economy is visible in Catholicism, whereas I think Protestants tend to emphasise the invisible church more.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
As often is the case, there is an attempt to delineate the terms which resembles legal reasoning, and a focus on harms and benefits.
Islam is certainly a religion of law to a much greater degree than Christianity. A common Islamic criticism of Christianity is that it is a regression; it has not transcended the need for law and replaced with grace, but rather by abandoning law it has removed the possibility of grace.
One consequence is that you find that legal reasoning occupies a much higher place in Islam, and abstract theology a much lower place. There is theology in Islam, but it's fair to say that fiqh occupies a higher place; much the same way that canon lawyers exist in Christianity, but are more peripheral. If you think about the major schisms in Christianity, they are mostly about what is permissible to believe, whereas the divides in Islam tend to be more legal or even political in nature.
This is a tendency and not absolute. There are theological differences in Islam - for instance, a noticeable difference between Sunni and Shia is over the question of whether God should be wholly identified with his attributes. Some Islamic thinkers have argued (e.g. here) that the Qur'an simply does not have a theology, but rather has an 'ergatology', a doctrine of works. I think that's going a bit too far myself, and the Qur'an does have a theology, but it is true that the Qur'an is primarily concerned about how to live well.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I have not come across that hadith before, interestingly, but I have come across, in my experience, Islam having very strong taboos against making assumptions about other people. Barring the most extreme circumstances, it is not for you to judge another person non-Muslim, because you cannot see into their heart. It is not for you to ever say that so-and-so is going to heaven and so-and-so is going to hell, because you cannot know the condition of their soul, and their final fate rests in God's hands only.
This is one of the places where Islam is, I would hazard, closer to Protestantism than it is to Catholicism. There are some places it seems to have more kinship with Catholicism (the emphasis on law, community practice, etc.), but it shares with many strains of Protestantism a deep reticence to make definitive judgements about matters that properly belong to God.
It's not that judgements can never be made. There is a procedure for declaring someone takfir. But it is truly the nuclear option and there is, traditionally at least, an extreme reluctance to use it. (Some more radical groups in the 20th century have gotten more willing to; I take that as a negative development.)
OliveTapenade
11d ago
This is a bait-and-switch. You posited a specifically anti-white agenda, and now you're presenting evidence that communists supported the case.
But obviously communism is a different issue to anti-whiteness.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
If so, it's a bit odd that he immeditely bit the bullet, isn't it?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
The idea that the American mainstream media in 1955 was trying to indoctrinate people in some sort of anti-white feeling is so evidently ludicrous that it ought to cause you to doubt everything else in coffee_enjoyer's post.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I mean, I think that if you had asked people whether enemy AI in a video game is a 'real' or 'true' AI, they would have answered no.
In the past I would have said that what 'AI' implies is something similar to a human intelligence, only in a computer. I think the term implied some sort of self-awareness, consciousness, or sapience. When I say 'AI' in that fuller sense, I think people picture something like HAL 9000, or Isaac Asimov's Robots, or heck, Holly from Red Dwarf. I think what 'AI' implied was something like personhood.
LLMs are not that sort of thing, and I see no particular likelihood of them becoming that sort of thing. So I prefer not to speak as if they are. To do otherwise would be to reify an illusion, I think? ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini are not intelligent, that is, they are not people.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.
In any case, I'm not sure I buy the leap into the material world? We've had CAD for decades. 3D printing is mostly a hobby technology, isn't it? At any rate, the best case scenario here is, what, that you can use an LLM or similar system to help produce models for 3D printing?
You're right, I think, that what would really make a difference is automated construction. But I don't yet see any reason to think that's on the horizon. Manipulating language is one thing, but we still very much struggle to build robots capable of interacting with material reality.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
If 'niche' is too dismissive, would it be better to say 'bounded'? Thus far bots seem to be very good at interacting with data, but they do not interface with the world beyond that. I think I stand by the idea that they're a wordcel technology. Maybe they will put all the coders out of work, but that leaves the overwhelming majority of the economy. I can't help but feel like people who work in data manipulation are over-generalising from their situation to everyone.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
The same way that I think of AI boosters as being too credulous, I suppose. I grant that there are some niche uses for the technology that we have seen thus far, but the claims people make about its potential so absurdly exceed anything it has been capable to do thus far, and anything that it looks like it might realistically be able to do in the near-to-medium-term, that I mostly just shake my head at the whole field.
Maybe I'm wrong. When we're all uploaded to the cloud and colonising Proxima Centauri, I'll apologise, I guess.
I suppose the other half of it is a disagreement about the merits of the technology - for instance, considering purely the technology that exists right now (and not guessing anything about the future), I think that it is net a bad thing that LLMs exist.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Where do you put me, in that I think that data centres themselves are mostly harmless, but also that so-called 'AI' is mostly useless?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Yes, translations of 33:35 don't convey the rhythm that well. Consider:
Surely ˹for˺ Muslim men and women, believing men and women, devout men and women, truthful men and women, patient men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, men and women who guard their chastity, and men and women who remember Allah often—for ˹all of˺ them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.
Surely, Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women, devout men and devout women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, and the men who give Sadaqah (charity) and the women who give Sadaqah, and the men who fast and the women who fast, and the men who guard their private parts (against evil acts) and the women who guard (theirs), and the men who remember Allah much and the women who remember (Him) - for them, Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.
For men and women who are devoted to God- believing men and women, obedient men and women, truthful men and women, steadfast men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, chaste men and women, men and women who remember God often- God has prepared forgiveness and a rich reward.
Lo! men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere (in righteousness) and women who persevere, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember Allah much and women who remember - Allah hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.
None of it flows that well, whereas Arabic fortunately expresses all this with suffixes - -in for men and -at for women, so transliterated from Arabic you get:
'inn ٱlmuslimin waٱlmuslimat waٱlmuminin waٱlmuminat waٱlqanitin waٱlqanitat waٱlssadiqin waٱlssadiqat waٱlssabirin waٱlssabirat waٱlkhashiein waٱlkhashieat waٱlmutasaddiqin waٱlmutasaddiqat waٱlssayimin waٱlssayimat waٱlhafizin furujahum waٱlhafizat waٱldhdhakirin ٱlllah kathiranۭa waٱldhdhakirat 'aeadd ٱlllah lahum mmaghfiratanۭ wa'ajran eazimanۭa
And this is just one example. There is a lot, both in terms of aural quality and in terms of meaning, that works well in Arabic, or in other Semitic languages, but does not come across well in English. One that comes up a lot is comparatives and superlatives. Arabic expresses degree by modifying the vowels that connect the root elements, rather than by adding a new word. English translations have to come up with awkward phrases like, to use the example of 1:1, "the most compassionate, the most merciful", or "the all compassionate, the everlastingly merciful", or "the supremely beneficent, the greatest in mercy", and it loses the elegance of the original.
This is not to say that I think that Arabic is uniquely well-suited to expressing God's word or anything - I am not a Muslim and I do not subscribe to the doctrine of i'jaz. This is a problem with all translation, and there are things that can be expressed very beautifully in English but which are very difficult to translate into Arabic. Nonetheless, for me as a non-Arabic-speaking observer, it is still useful to learn just enough to be able to see what it is that people have in mind when they talk about how the Qur'an is so much more attractive in the original language.
Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.
UBS Greek New Testament. Git gud. :P
Nah, to be serious, I go back and forth a bit. The translation I use the most as a default is the NRSV, which generally strikes a good balance between readability and formality or dignity, but there are certainly places where I think the NRSV mistranslates, or just has a bad style. In places I think the Jerusalem Bible or NJB have quite nice turns of phrase as well.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
The Mu'tazilites denied predestination, I believe, but they ceased to exist a long time ago.
To make a very broad generalisation again, I think the three Abrahamic faiths all have a different 'main character', in a sense. For Jews the main character is a specific people - the story is about the Jewish people and their collective relationship with God. For Christians the main character is often an individual person - it is about your relationship with God. For Muslims the main character is all people - it's about humanity's relationship with God. Anecdotally when I have spoken to Muslims, by far the main criticism they make of Judaism is that it is particularist, focused on a single people and distinguishing between peoples, and by far the main criticism they make of Christianity is that it compromises the absolute oneness of God.
Anyway, in that broader context, it is perhaps understandable that free will is not as important in Islam, and Muslims are less inclined to go to lengths to rescue the principle. Islam is, in a sense, the most theocentric of the Abrahamic religions. Islam is about God, and it is comparatively less interested in anthropology. (Since Christianity's most basic claim is that God became man, Christianity must wrestle directly with the meaning of both 'God' and 'man'.) The human fades into the background before the absolute majesty of God.
If I think about the most beloved verses of the Qur'an, they're all about God. 1:1 is regularly cited; the Throne Verse is immensely popular as well. It is about the majesty of God. By contrast the most beloved verse of the Christian Bible is, what, John 3:16? It is about Jesus - about fathers and sons and salvation. It's also about what God has done rather than about who God is. I think there is a significant difference of emphasis between the traditions, even though Christians would surely agree that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and Muslims would surely agree that God deeply loves the world and has compassion towards humanity.
Funny; that's actually how I understand Christianity itself to be, including the concept that "God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do".
There are definitely passages in the Bible that point in that direction. Jesus famously says "my yoke is easy and my burden is light", and 1 Cor 10:13 reads, "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it."
Even so I think there is a tension here in Christianity. God does not test you beyond your strength, but at the same time, it is impossible for you to achieve true righteousness under your own power. Everyone is a sinner.
The latter is kind of Christianity 3:16 101. I agree that lots of Christians never really make it past that part, which is why doing things like writing the law on one's heart is a meaningless statement, for the answer it gives would always be wrong. Why even tell us to put on the armor of God when no man could even begin to don it? Why imply that one might even expect to understand what the Lord's will is? How could we even have been created to do good works, and how could they have been prepared in advance for us to do them?
Certainly it would be a gross misunderstanding of Christianity to say that, because true righteousness is impossible to achieve unaided, we therefore need not strive for it. That would obviously be a perverse position, and as all the passages you've just alluded to indicate, Christians are exhorted to constantly strive for righteousness.
In your opinion, what is Islam's relationship with that law?
Islam is fairly straightforward, I think. In most matters like this, I find Islam tends to be more straightforward and common-sense than Christianity.
Depending on your perspective, this is either because Islam has the simple clarity of God's true and final revelation, whereas Christianity is such an incoherent, hacked-together set of false assumptions that it requires endless paradoxes and epicycles just to fit together; or it's because Islam is a simplistic creed inadequate to either life or God, whereas the paradoxes of Christianity speak to its deeper truth.
Anyway, Islam is simple. The divine Law is true, obligatory, and binding on all people. It is Sharia. The Law as it is understood in Judaism is a kind of distorted funhouse mirror of Sharia. Ancient believers like Abraham were Muslims and followed Sharia correctly, but at some point their descendants got confused, mixed up records, and so their Law, through a decent approximation of the true Law, nonetheless requires correction. Fortunately God has provided that correction. The next step is obvious - all Jews (and for that matter all people full stop) should become Muslims.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly.
One of the interesting tensions in Islam, it seems to me, especially as compared to Christianity, is that Islam tends to emphasise firstly that everything is absolutely foreknown and determined by God, and secondly that also human free choice is absolutely vital. Compared to Christianity, Islam has a much stronger teaching on predestination, but also claims to uphold free will to a greater degree. On the face of it this seems like a contradiction.
The latter is probably easier to grapple with. Christianity says that human freedom or human will is in some way blunted or damaged. The Fall happened and so we are either unable to independently choose good, or our ability to choose good is in some way constrained. As such the believer is wholly dependent on the grace of God. While Islam agrees that the believer is always wholly dependent on God (as all things are, at all times, for only God is self-sufficient), within that overall framework, it is much more confident about the ability of people to freely choose the good. Islam assumes from first principles that God would not set before us any task that we are not capable of accomplishing. God asks nothing of us that we cannot do. To do otherwise would be unjust of him.
Christianity tends to say that God asks of us more than we can do. Jesus commands his followers "be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). Throughout the gospels Jesus is constantly asking people to do the unreasonable or the extreme, like sell all their possessions, or die with him. He says that if the disciples truly had faith they would be able to ask a mountain to move, and it would. It seems as though, for Jesus, even the very best that a human can do is not enough. The usual interpretation of this is that Jesus wants to challenge people beyond their own capacities so that they realise they radical dependence on God - that they come to understand their own finitude, and therefore are able to wholeheartedly cast themselves upon God's mercy.
Through Islamic eyes, this is unjust. God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do. Christianity comes to this conclusion in past as a response to the failure of the Law - Paul spends a long time agonising over the fact (as he sees it) that the Law failed to produce righteousness. Islam, however, is much more positive about the Law, and in fact tends to see Christianity as a retrogression, a kind of civilisational backwards step in abandoning the rigour of divine Law. (Judaism is in principle correct about the Law and its value, but it goes wrong firstly by applying it to only a select people, rather than everyone, and secondly by getting muddled up about some details.) You can see that Islam is thus, in a sense, much more optimistic about human will and the possibility of human righteousness than Christianity.
However, this optimism about free will occurs in front of the backdrop of God's absolute sovereignty. Reconciling God's authorship of all creation with human free will is going to be reminiscent of Calvinist debates - but that might be a discussion for a bit later.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
It is also worth bearing in mind that most hadith collectors were both obsessive and pedantic and therefore included every hadith they had heard that had a reasonable chance of being authentic, including those that were just minor variations of others. This means that if you read any given large hadith collection, it is likely that modern scholars would dispute some of them, or argue over their plausibility and likely context. Al-Bukhari or Imam Muslim did try to filter out unreliable hadith, but their judgements were not infallible. Authentic hadith are authoritative for Muslims, in theory, but the word 'authentic' leaves a lot of room to dispute.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I find the Qur'an is often more attractive when sung or recited in the manner of a poem. Certainly as far as religious texts go, it reads almost uniquely badly. However, famously there is a whole small genre of recitation of the Qur'an among devout Muslims, and even as a non-speaker of Arabic, I recognise the beauty of this. I don't know how much it's unique to the specific text of the Qur'an - Christian hymns in Arabic sound beautiful to me as well - but I can at least entertain the possibility that Arabic speakers are right when they tell me that the language of the Qur'an is beautiful, in its original language, and when proclaimed properly.
I am more experienced with the Bible, of course, and I'd say it varies. There are passages that, in Hebrew or Greek, stand out to me as particularly beautiful, or even individual phrases that, for me, have the character of a refreshing wind across my soul. Often they do not have this quality in translation in English - though that may simply be because of over-exposure to the translations. But there are also undoubtedly better or worse translations into other languages as well. I'll never forget once knowing someone who grew up with the equivalent of those excitable, contemporary Bible translations aimed at teenagers, who bounced off the Bible and found it tawdry, and then seeing their reaction upon first reading a more mature translation. The way the light came into their eyes as suddenly the words of Jesus lost that cheap feeling, and instead struck home, was a privilege to witness.
In what way did the resources not belong to him?
You might assert that Abel does not own his sheep in the sense that nobody can own any natural resources, because all resources, animals, plants, etc., are created by God. But Cain does not seem to have objected to Abel having a flock of sheep in the conventional, everyday sense of the term.
Moreover joking about 'redistribution' here seems like just a bad interpretation of the text? Cain's motive is not to steal any of Abel's material goods. Cain does not take Abel's sheep, nor even Abel's physical body. It's hard to read as a 'redistribution' of God's favour, because there is no reason for Cain to think that murdering Abel will somehow cause God to favour Cain. On the contrary, Cain attempts to conceal his actions from God. It looks to me like Cain (correctly) believes that God would look upon his act with disfavour.
Surely the traditional reading of this text, where Cain was motivated by envy, hatred, and pride, just makes more sense? Abel had done well, and Cain was envious, and that envy curdled into bitterness and despising. He killed Abel not as part of some strategic move to take anything that belonged to Abel, for Cain makes no attempt to take anything of Abel's. Nor does he make any suggestion that Abel committed an injustice. Cain was angry that Abel had been favoured more than he had been. That was it. That was the whole cause.
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