Church History: Great Division

Fr. Lucio Gutierrez O.P. a renowned professor, who has been teaching in UST for more than 40 years. He helped us to have general knowledge of the history so that we will be able to continue the history of the Middle Ages. We ended up by the Great Division between the Western Church and Eastern Church in 1054. For the report I got the topic called “The Impact of Muslim in the Relationship of Christianity”

7/4/10 Division of History

9/4/10 Characteristic of Christianity

12/4/10 Germanism, Romanism, Christianity

14/4/10 Monasticism in the East

16/4/10 Monasticism in the West

19/4/10 Monasticism in the West

21/4/10 Benedictine Monasticism

23/4/10 Spread of St. Benedict’s Rule

26/4/10 The Fall of Western Roman

28/4/10 The Conversion of Barbarian

30/4/10 The Conversion of Ostrogoth

3/5/10 Conversion of Slave

5/5/10 Iconoclasm

7/5/10 Final Examination

I submitted the report on “The Impact of Muslims in the Relationship with Christianity”

Introduction

The relationship between Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages is usually seen, in the West, as the military conflict. While in the East, it is seen as the Arab contribution to Western culture. The perspective point of view, in the relationship between these two faiths, might bring us to the concept that each focuses upon an issue which the other regards as a secondary.

In this essay I would like to present a concise history of the relationship between Christianity and Muslim. The effects of this relationship are remained in our contemporary world.

Terminology

The term “Muslim” is used to identify an adherent of the religion of Islam. This word by literally means “one who submits to God” whiles the term “Islam” is referred to the religion. It is derived from the Arabic verb, “Aslama”, which means “to accept or to surrender”. As encountering the term “Arab”, one should not legitimate the concept to religious meaning as the Muslims but rather a widen meaning in geographical, ethnic and linguistic dimension. According to the history, therefore, we used to have Arab Christian kingdoms and Arab Jewish tribes. However, today, most Arabs are Muslim but there is also a minority adhering to other faiths like Christianity.

Christianity and the Arabs before Islam

We have to trace back to the time of Pompey (106-48 BC), who conquered the East around the year 66-63 BC. He created the political geography which was to dominate Near Eastern history. There were two superpowers, Roman Empire and the Persian faced each other across the Euphrates. The Syrian Desert thrust like a wedge between them that pushing upwards and outwards upon their frontier. This desert, therefore, was the land of the Arabs. The Arab dominated the desert between Rome and Persia until the third century CE. When the widespread of Christianity came to the Roman East, the Arabs were also assimilated into the cultural empire of Roman. It was almost universally accepted during the third to fifth centuries and developed into the distinctive form of the Syriac church.

Invasion in the East

In the mid seventh century, the followers of Muhammad moved westward from Arabia with the intention of converting the world to the teachings of the prophet. They swept down through Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, lands sacred to the Christians and the Jews, determined to conquer the world and prepared to fight to achieve their aims. To this end, they successfully overran the countries that had first responded to the Christian gospel. As they pushed farther into Africa, the monarchs of Europe looked on with dread at the approaching hordes, whom they viewed as no different from the barbarians. The Muslims pushed their way farther from Africa into Asia Minor and conquered much of it. However, despite besieging Constantinople, they were unsuccessful in their attempt to capture the city.

In 732 the Muslims pushed in France. At this time, Charles Martel, whose name means the Hammerer, the Christian king of the Franks, confronted the invaders at Poitiers. During the battle the Muslim emir, the ruler of Spain was killed. The advance of the Muslims was thus checked for a while, and in 739, when they advanced as far as Lyons, Martel’s army again routed them and drove them back into Spain. The threat of all of Europe being conquered was neutralized, the spread of Islamic power slowed down, and the rate of conversion to Islam became less dramatic. Whereas the barbarians were assimilated and became Christian, this was not to be the case with the Muslims, who resisted all attempts at conversion and had their own strong proselytizing mission.

Isolating East and West

The overall effect of the Muslim invasions was the breaking of the link between East and West, isolating one from the other. The Christian church in the West was threatened by the invader, which effectively divided it from its contact with the emperor of the East. The popes were forced to look to Europe rulers for protection with the result that they became aligned with the barbarian West. The middle of the eighth century saw the last Greek pope to step onto the papal throne until the fifteenth century.

The Islamic expansion saw the loss to the Arabs of the patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, old rivals to the power of Rome and Constantinople. The struggle for supremacy was now between the bishops of the two imperial cities. Eastern Christendom became concentrated more than ever in the Constantinople as many Christian left those regions ravaged by the Arabs to settle in and around the city. These refugees included monks and clergy who took with them the store of knowledge and the accumulated wealth of their monasteries and churches. Constantinople continued to grow in strength, and the balance of power tilted generously toward the East for the following three centuries. The East and the West had doctrine in common and a common enemy in Islam but culturally and politically drifted far apart.

Christianity’s survival in the East

As the Muslims became more successful in their conquests, Western Europe became separated from much of Asia. However, in such areas as Persia, Palestine, and Egypt, the Islamic onslaught did not mean the end of the Christian church. For instance, in Egypt Christianity continued in the form of the Coptic Church, and in Persia the Nestorian form of Christianity survived. The Christians were protected and favored, with some even achieving positions of high status under the Muslim nobles.

After the death of Muhammad in 632 A.D., within two decades armies of Muslims had occupied all the territories of the ‘Oriental Patriarchates’ of the Christians, likewise,Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. In the following decades the Muslims moved across North Africa, and across the Straits of Gibraltar into the Iberian Peninsula. Their advance was not halted until the year 732, at the battle of Poitiers in France, one hundred years after the death of Muhammad. This accomplishment set the stage for the long era of confrontation between Muslims and Christians. There are two phases of Christian response to the challenge of Islam. One phase involves the Christians and Muslims living within the confines of the Islamic world. The other phase involves the confrontation between the political entities of the Islamic world and the largely Christian, political structures of the Byzantine Roman Empire and the countries of Western Europe, outside the political boundaries of Islam. In both phases the religious critique of the Qur’an, and the Islamic sciences, posed a challenge to which the Christians had to respond. The character of their responses in their very different sociopolitical and historical circumstances has determined the profile of their correspondingly different views of Islam to this very day.

Christians and Muslims in the Islamic World

For the first hundred years or so, most people in the territories occupied by the Muslims seem to have regarded Islam as simply the religion of the Arabs, and the new Arab overlords seem to have taken the same view. In the beginning, conversion to Islam by non-Arabs seems to have been discouraged. When Christian writers living in the world of Islam first took notice of the religious convictions of the Muslims, almost three quarters of a century after the death of Muhammad, they noticed first of all what Muslims said about Jesus of Nazareth. They spoke of the Muslims as heretics, a term with inner Christian connotations. St. John of Damascus (d. c.749/754), for example, a monk of Mar Sabas monastery in the desert of Judah who wrote in Greek, described Islam as the “heresy of the Ishmaelites,” using the name of Abraham’s son by the slave girl Hagar so to designate them. It was a name that Greek and Latin writers had long used for the tribal Arabs of the deserts of Syria and Arabia. From the theological perspective, John of Damascus went on to surmise that, given his views of Jesus, Muhammad must have been in conversation with an Arian monk. This, of course, was John of Damascus’ way of bringing Islamic teaching within the framework of Christian, theological discourse. For the Christians who lived within the world of Islam this would remain the proper theological frame of reference for discussing Islamic teaching.

From the mid-eighth century onward, Christian writers in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic frequently wrote about the religious challenge of Islam. Their works were addressed primarily to their fellow Christians, many of whom were under pressure to convert to Islam. So in addition to taking account of the Islamic challenges to Christian faith, Christian writers in the Islamic world were also called upon to provide a Christian evaluation of Muhammad, the Qur’an, and of Islam itself. Their purpose always was to defend Christianity as the true religion, and to give their readers reasons why they should not convert to Islam. Unlike Christians outside of the world of Islam, these writers, having themselves become inculturated into the life of the burgeoning Commonwealth of Islam, spoke of Islam, Muhammad, and the Qur’an from a position of thorough familiarity. They spoke knowledgeably and respectfully. While they could not accept Muhammad as a prophet, they praised him as one who “walked on the way of the prophets,” and as one to be praised for having brought the polytheistic Arabs to a knowledge of the one God. They could not accept the Qur’an as scripture, but they could and did quote from it to support their own Christian beliefs. They argued that Islam was not the true religion, but they alleged that the prophetology of the Qur’an could be used to bolster the claims of Christianity to be the true religion.

The major theological problem for the Christians living in the world of Islam was to find a way to explain Christian faith in the Arabic language. By the ninth century all these Christian communities had adopted Arabic; it was the lingua franca of the new civilization, and Christians played a major role in bringing it about. The problem was that Arabic religious vocabulary was already co-opted by Islam; the very terms Christian writers used to commend Christian faith in the new socio-linguistic milieu inevitably carried an Islamic connotation with them. On the one hand this phenomenon made possible the full inculturation of Christianity into the life of the caliphate. On the other hand it also helped to bring about a measure of cultural estrangement between the Christians of the Islamic world and the Greek and Latin speaking Christians living outside of that world. This is one of the insufficiently studied, historical effects of the rise of Islam; for all practical purposes, it erected a barrier of cultural, and even of theological mutual misapprehension between the Christians of the Islamic east and those living in the west.

Within the Islamic world Christians contributed significantly to the growth and development of the classical culture of Islam. One particularly notable moment in which the Christian contribution was crucial was the Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad from the eighth to the tenth centuries. Christian scholars played a major role in the transmission and translation into Arabic of the Greek works of philosophers, physicians, mathematicians, and physical scientists, with Aristotle, Galen, and Plotinus leading the list. Some of these Christian scholars who had major roles in this enterprise still have name recognition in modem times. One thinks in this connection of men like Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873), a member of the Assyrian Church of the East who was a notable translator of the works of Aristotle. And there was Yahya ibn ‘Adi (d. 974), who belonged to the Syrian Orthodox Church; he not only translated philosophical works into Arabic but wrote original works in philosophy, theology, and public morality. These scholars prepared the way for the great Muslim philosophers of the Middle Ages, such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose names and works would later become well-known in the west. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Islamic Spain, Latin-speaking Christians would encounter the works of these thinkers, along with the works of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers and scientists. They made the Latin translations of them that would ultimately furnish the raw material for the golden age of scholastic philosophy and theology in the west in the thirteenth century.

The quality of life of the Christians living in the caliphate varied widely from place to place and from era to era, but everywhere and at all times in the Islamic world they were subject to the disenfranchising effects of the laws governing the dhimmi populations. Gradually their numbers dwindled, from the majority in many places in the Middle East before the time of the crusades (1099-1291), to the demographically insignificant numbers of the late twentieth century. Sometimes they have been severely persecuted; sometimes they have lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors and have made substantial contributions to the societies in which they lived. Always they have lived with the uncertain effects of what one modern Maronite of Lebanon has called the persistent condition of Dhimmitude.

Before the time of the Crusades, often in the context of free and open interreligious exchange, Muslim scholars wrote refutations of Christian doctrines and practices, sometimes in answer to Christian tracts against the teachings of Islam. Caliphs, sultans and emirs not infrequently sponsored interreligious discussions in their presence. But by the thirteenth century, as Christian populations in the Islamic world began their steep decline into demographic insignificance, Muslim teachers of a much more exclusive turn of mind, such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) began to be heard. And their voices echo even in the contemporary world as Muslims everywhere react to the challenges of secularism, nationalism, and materialism that many of them believe Christians have brought into the modern world.

A further diminishing factor in the experience of the Christian communities of the Islamic world has been the unusual attention of missionaries from the west. These well-intentioned co-religionists often came with the aim of converting Muslims to Christianity; and failing in this purpose they turned their attention to the conversion of the local Christians, whom they regarded as heretics or as practitioners of a degenerate form of Christianity. While these activities sometimes resulted in the establishment of schools, hospitals and other institutions of humanitarian aid, some of them enduring to the present day, they also brought about further divisions among the Christians in the Islamic world, thereby weakening their over-all social significance. Only in recent decades has this problem begun to be addressed, with the convocation of the Middle East Council of Churches. And even now Middle Eastern Christians, especially in Israel and Palestine, have a sense of having been abandoned by their brothers and sisters in the faith in the west. Beyond the Middle East, in the wider world of Islam, wherever Christians live in close association with a Muslim majority, social problems abound, often with attendant, inter-communal violence. One need only mention the names of the places and refer to the nightly news to make the point: Egypt, the Sudan, Nigeria, Algeria, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, to mention only the most prominent, recent flash points. The lives of Christians in the world of Islam continue to be uneasy; many of them are no longer optimistic about the prospects of interreligious dialogue with Muslims.

Islam and the Christians outside the World of Islam

Beyond the confines of the Islamic world, the history of Muslim/Christian relations took a different route. From early in the seventh century, when Muslim armies first occupied the territories of the Christian, Oriental patriarchates, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, up to and beyond the day in 1453 when even Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, there were almost constant, military hostilities between Muslim governments in the east and the Christian nations outside the world of Islam. This state of constant, Muslim/Christian warfare came to an end only in the early decades of the twentieth century, with the end of the Turkish, Ottoman Empire.

The combination of religious animosity, cultural disdain and military hostility that obtained between Muslim and Christian polities for well over a millennium, produced on both sides a large literature of mutual rejection. Over the course of time the mutual demonization of the other became almost subconscious. It was relieved only occasionally by intellectual borrowings, and sometimes by a romantic, intercultural fascination on the part of some westerners for the Arab east. As for the Muslims, until Ottoman times they seldom showed much interest in the civilization of western Christians when they did they found its necessity.

In the Greek-speaking world of Byzantium from the ninth century onward an anti-Islamic, polemical tradition developed that lost no opportunity to blacken the name of Muhammad, to ridicule the Qur’an, and to criticize Islam. It is important to emphasize the fact that, with very few exceptions, these texts, unlike those produced by Christians living in the Islamic world, show little concern for disclosing the actual beliefs and religious practices of Muslims. Rather, their burden was to demonize the adversary and to sustain the public animus against him. Nevertheless, even in this tradition in the works of Manuel II Palaiologos (1350-1425) efforts were sometimes made honestly to understand Muslims, and to correct the major misconceptions of Islam that circulated so widely in the Christian world.

The earliest literary response to Islam in the west may well be Eulogius of Cordoba’s (c. 8 10-859) Latin account of the Martyrs of Cordoba (850-859) in a text called Apologeticus martyrum, along with Eulogius’ exhortation to martyrdom named simply Documentum martyriale. The martyr movement in Cordoba was driven by a desire on the part of some Christians living there under Islamic rule to testify to the truth of the Christian faith by the shedding of the martyr’s blood. They acted in conscious evocation of the memory of the martyrs in the times of the earlier Roman persecutions of Christians. Many of the martyrs in Cordoba achieved their goal by provoking arrest, and by persistently defaming Muhammad, attacking the Qur’an, and ridiculing Islam in public, to the dismay of the Muslim authorities themselves, who had distaste for executing Christians. This tactic also precipitated a controversy among the local Christians about the propriety, indeed the legitimacy, of self-promoted martyrdom. Although subsequent generations did not seek the death of martyrs, all the Christians of Islamic Spain, from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries were willing to testify to the truth of their faith, sometimes in the Arabic language.

In many ways the views of Islam expressed by western Christians at large in the Middle Ages mirrored those circulating in Byzantium. Writers were much less interested in discerning and presenting the truth about Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Islam than they were in corrupting them in the public eye. At times the presentations bore no appreciable resemblance to reality at all. Yet this state of affairs was not the whole story. Peter the Venerable (c. 1092-1156), the abbot of Cluny, commissioned a Latin translation of the Qur’an, along with other Arabic texts deemed useful to his interreligious concerns. Some of the translators have been shown by modern scholars to have been very well attuned to the currents of Islamic thought at the time.

Ramon Liull (c. 1233-1315), with a view to commending the truth of the Christian faith, sought to engage Muslim religious thinkers in discussion on their own terms. In the later Middle Ages, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), very concerned with the ways of discerning and expressing religious truths in the east and the west, published a Latin commentary of the Qur’an that searched for points of strength and weakness that would allow for a more effective commendation of Christianity to Muslims. In the high Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and other prominent schoolmen were engaged in a virtual philosophical dialogue with prominent Muslim thinkers of the past, on the basis of Latin translations of their Arabic works, and of the works of Aristotle and other Greeks, that were made available in the Latin-speaking west from the eleventh century onward. Arguably, these scholarly works from the world of Islam played an important catalytic role in the life and institutions of medieval scholasticism.

Meanwhile, throughout the high Middle Ages, the Crusades formed the backdrop for Muslim/Christian relations east and west. First preached by Pope Urban II (c.1035-1099), they originally had as their twin goals: preaching the Gospel; and making the ‘holy places’ of Jesus’ homeland safely accessible to Christian pilgrims. As time went on other motives and more political and this-worldly interests became intertwined with the religious agenda. The crusades became military adventures that ultimately brought about not only a more pronounced, religious estrangement between Christians and Muslims generally, but, through the Crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204, they exacerbated the rift between the Byzantine and the Latin churches that had been festering since the so-called ‘Schism of 1054’. The effects of this Crusader misbehavior are still painfully felt in Orthodox and Catholic relations to this day. From the Christian perspective, the one highpoint in interreligious relations that one can point to with some measure of equanimity in the crusader period is St. Francis of Assisi’s (1181/2-1226) debate with Muslim religious scholars at the court of Sultan Malik al-Kamil in Damietta, Egypt in November of the year 1219. The credit for this peaceful interchange goes to both St. Francis and to the sultan.

In the early modem period, after the attentions of the crusaders and their ecclesiastical promoters had turned from the eastern Mediterranean to Spain and the Reconquista that by 1492 would drive the last of the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, the Muslim/Christian encounter became more and more a Turkish/Christian confrontation, especially after 1517 when the Ottomans unseated the Mamluke dynasty in Egypt. On 7 October 1571 western naval forces defeated an Ottoman fleet off Lepanto, making the Mediterranean once again safe for European travel. But it was not until well into the seventeenth century those Ottoman encroachments into Eastern Europe were definitively repulsed. It was against this background of the Turkish threat that the leaders of the Reformation in western Christendom continued the already very negative Christian polemics against Islam that had been standard fare in earlier times. The virulence of this literature seems to have increased with time, combining cultural, religious and political attacks against Islam. It went hand-in-hand with the movements in the churches to send missionaries to the Islamic world to encourage conversions to Christianity.

Within the Islamic world, the numbers of indigenous Christians continued to decrease in the Middle East during Fatimid and Mamluke times. But under Ottoman rule their numbers increased notably; the millet system of self-government for religious minority groups fostered by the Turks provided more stable protections against the harsher measures of dhimmitude. Also, as time went on the influence of increasingly stronger European governments played a greater role in soliciting protection for Christians. Nevertheless, in the Islamic world at large the production of tracts against the doctrines and practices of the Christians continued apace, with even a crescendo of rejectionism after the time of Ibn Taymiyya, as mentioned above. By the dawn of the twentieth century, and well up into the century, Muslims and Christians had more than a millennium of mutual hostility and recrimination behind them, fueled by both religious animosity and the vicissitudes of almost continuous warfare between Muslim and Christian countries. One would not have thought that efforts at some measure of rapprochement were in the offing.

The Proclamation and Dialogue

In view of the foregoing millennium and more of Muslim/Christian warfare and interreligious polemic, one of the more surprising statements in Vatican II’s “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” Nostra Aetate, promulgated on October 28, 1965. The following paragraph in the section of the document dealing with the Muslims;

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom. (NA 3)

These and many other western Christians prepared the way for the thinking that would be adopted by the fathers of Vatican II. Ultimately, in Nostra Aetate, they not only exhorted Christians to forget the acrimonious past between Muslims and Christians but they also offered a positive appreciation of Islam.

Since Vatican II, it is no exaggeration to say that the Roman Catholic Church has been the leader in Muslim-Christian dialogue worldwide. The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue set up after Vatican II soon issued guidelines for the dialogue between Christians and Muslims. And there has been no more tireless promoter of this dialogue than Pope John Paul II, who in numerous documents has taught Catholics to proclaim their faith in Jesus Christ in open and free dialogue with Muslims and members of other religions. On his numerous journeys to Muslim countries John Paul II has himself led the way in this enterprise, and by now there is a sizeable collection of his talks and formal greetings to largely Muslim audiences. Always he echoes the themes of Vatican II, the dignity of the human person, the necessity of the free exercise of religion in society, and the conviction that “the truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth.” High Vatican officials have followed the Pope’s lead. Francis Cardinal Arinze, for example, the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, was in regular contact with Muslim groups around the world.

What is different in the approach to Islam in the post Vatican II climate in the Roman Catholic Church, by comparison with earlier periods, is the determination to highlight what Christianity and Islam have in common, rather than to pay exclusive attention to what divides the two religions. This approach in turn prompts the search for ways in which Muslims and Christians can cooperate in promoting justice and peace around the world, on the local level as well as in the international forum. In no way does this effort derogate from the church’s mission to proclaim its faith in the lordship of Jesus Christ, or from the Muslim’s duty to call others to Islam. Rather, dialogue between Muslims and Christians opens the space for an honest conversation of this precise topic. It recalls an occasion in the first days of Islam, when Christians from the southern Arabian city of Najran came to visit Muhammad in Medina. Islamic tradition records the memory that the conversation on that day turned to the issue of faith in Christ, and that in reference to it the following revelation, recorded in the Qur’an, came down to Muhammad.

Effectively this advice from the Qur’an can be interpreted to invite Muslims and Christians each to profess their faith sincerely and to leave the judgment in God’s hands. But it also reminds the modern believer that after all the scholarly efforts, especially on the part of Christian theologians, to devise a conceptual model for the encounter with people of other religions, that in the end one requires a theological response tailored to the challenge of a particular religion. Specifically, in the case of the encounter with Muslims, it calls for a Christian, even a Catholic theology of Islam. Such a theology would respond to the Islamic critique of Christian doctrines in the idiom of the challenge, and not in terms that caricature the teachings of the Qur’an and of the Islamic community. Centuries ago, from the middle of the eighth century to the time of the Crusades Arab Christian writers began this project, but it never came to fulfillment. Perhaps the time has come to try it again.

Throughout the Muslim world since Vatican II, writers have continued to put forward the Islamic view. Many have written strong, anti-Christian polemical tracts; some have promoted an interest in dialogue with Christians. In this latter connection one might call attention to the foundation in the mid-1990’s in Amman, Jordan, of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. In addition to sponsoring colloquia featuring Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholarly participation, the Royal Institute also puts out a Bulletin that contains scholarly studies in the three Abrahamic traditions and publishes books on related themes.

Many individual Muslim scholars have eagerly participated in Muslim/Christian dialogues and they continue to do so. One of the most enthusiastic and influential Muslim teachers to promote interreligious dialogue and respect for other religions, especially Judaism and Christianity, as an Islamic duty, is the Turkish scholar, Fethullah Gülen (1938-present). Taking his cue from Beddiuzaman Said Nursi (1876-1960), a prominent scholar in Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century, with a large current following, Gülen made his own Nursi’s dictum that “World peace would be possible only via Islam and Christianity, that would join and be allied with the Qur’an”.

Conclusion

Throughout the history of the relationship between Christianity and Muslim has become an interchange between each other. For the Christians who lived within the world of Islam they have to adapt themselves and contribute the theological framework within the Islamic environment. On the other hand, the Muslims, who live in the Christian countries, have to adjust their lives in accordance with the situation. This adjustment can refer to the theological science and the religious practice in each religion which however need to be improved in the midst of all limitation.

There is a so called “inculturation” practiced between both religions. The language is one of an instrument in order to inculturate the faith into the life of the people. Within the Islamic world many Christian writers have contributed many classical writings. There was the Graeco-Arabic translation movement who produced many translations of the Greek works of philosophers, mathematicians and many other sciences.

The role of Christianity after the second Vatican Council has opened themselves to the Muslim, especially in the Declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religion. This will bring a approach toward other religions especially the Muslim, which there was tremendous history left behind between these two major religions.

The theme of love between a Christian and a Muslim had a particular impact upon the popular imagination. This theme is found in the official teaching and in some works of fiction. It would be a great deal between the two religions but not only the religion itself but those who practice the teaching. The message of love is universal and can reach through all the believers, therefore there will be one day that the dream may come true and all may be one.

Reference

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Johns, J. (1998). Christianity and Islam. New York: Sheed and Ward.

Rasmussen, M. (2005). The Catholic Church the first 2000 years. San Francisco: Ignatius