Arguing with Muslims: God-talk on campus

A WHILE BACK a Duke student was telling that he and his roommate were not getting along well. I asked him why. "Because he is a Muslim and I'm not." I asked him how that made a difference.

"When we moved in together, he asked me what my religion was. I told him that I was a sort of Christian. A Lutheran. I told him up front that my family and I weren't the very best Christians, that we only went to church occasionally, and it wasn't that big a deal to me. But my roommate has this nasty habit of asking embarrassing questions."

"What sort of questions?" I asked.

"Like after we had roomed together a few weeks, he asked me, 'Why do you Christians never pray?' I told him, 'We pray all the time. We just sort of keep it to ourselves."

"He said, 'I'll say that you do. I've never seen you pray.' He prays, like, a half dozen times a day on his prayer rug in our room, facing East Durham.

"The last straw was Saturday morning, when I came in from a date, and he asked me, 'Doesn't your St. Paul say something about not joining your body with a prostitute?'

"I told him, 'Look, she is not a prostitute! She's a Tri Delt. I told you I am not the best Christian in the world. You shouldn't judge the Christian faith by me!'"

And I, hearing the torment in his voice, asked, "Well, how should he judge the Christian faith? I ought to write your Muslim roommate a thank you note. If that Muslim keeps working on you, he may yet make you into a real Christian."

Such are the encounters between Christians and Muslims on campus these days.

I've enjoyed the series in this magazine, "Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?" (April 20, May 4, May 18, June 1, August 24). The comments on worship in Judaism and Christianity, compared with that in Islam, have been clarifying and helpful. But there were times in reading those articles that I wanted to protest: "But we have a much more interesting and difficult God than that!" I'm fond of saying to students that the modern question, "Is there a god?" is unbiblical. The Bible's big issue is, "Who is the God who is there?"

We have a most interesting God. But so do Muslims. And our God looks even more interesting when compared with their God. From my own experiences in a bubbling multifaith environment, when we interface with people of different faiths, the toughest task is to let the other be the other, to attempt to love our neighbor, as Jesus commanded us, in all the neighbor's differentiation and peculiarity, to bless the neighbor as the neighbor really is, not as the person we would have the neighbor become.

When it comes to faith, it's often the differences and the peculiarities that we love the most about our religion. This is what Diana L. Eck fails to recognize in books like A New Religious America. Her approach, like that of many, seems to be, "First make Muslims convert into liberal, Western universalists, then render your faith into an abstraction, a generality. Then we can talk." The great theological challenge for Christians is to demonstrate, in our interactions with Muslims, that we have God-given resources for letting the neighbor remain the other and still be the neighbor.

In his book Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graft sass that the purpose of higher education is to teach students to argue. Our society, says Graft, is conditioned to avoid engagement with the ideas of others. Better simply to assert our beliefs than truly to listen and to respond to the beliefs of another, and to risk being changed in the conversation. The purpose of higher education is to begin an argument.

"Yet most of us learn to converse with other people in such a way that either we don't encounter them its they are, in all their difference and particularity, or we rework them, making them over in our minds so that we are able to say to them, "Well, after all, we're both really saying fairly much the same thing, right?"

It would be a shame for us Christians to do that to our sisters and brothers in Islam. On campus I've found that our Islamic neighbors can be important allies in our attempt to walk by faith rather than merely to acquiesce to the American Way.

If you keep your attributes of Cod abstract enough--God is omnipotent, God is onmiscient, loving, just--all three "Abrahamic" faiths appear to be on the same page, or talking about the same God, because to be Muslims, Christians and Jews all believe that God is omnipotent, loving and just. Trouble is, this sort of abstract reasoning is about as revealing as saying that "Mary Jones is a Caucasian, female android." You haven't said much. And who wants to talk to someone who is just like us?

When, you get down to the scriptures of these faiths, the specific stories they tell about God, then the claim that all these often conflicting stories are talking about the same God seems simplistic and silly. Christians and Jews worship the same God because we share many of the same stories. We share Abraham, though we say very different things about him and Sarah. Two thirds of the Bible, and just about every one of our claims for Jesus, came to us as gifts of the Jews.