Qur’an 10:99-100 says: “If it had been thy Lord’s will, they would all have believed, all who are on earth! Wilt thou then compel mankind, against their will, to believe? No soul can believe, except by the will of Allah, and He will place doubt (or obscurity) on those who will not understand.”

The Tanwîr al-Miqbâs min Tafsîr Ibn ‘Abbâs explains the passage this way (the parts in parentheses are the text of the Qur’anic verse): “(It is not for any) disbelieving (soul to believe) in Allah (save by the permission of Allah) save by Allah’s will and given success. (He hath set uncleanness) He leaves denial (upon those) in the hearts of those (who have no sense) who do not apprehend Allah’s divine Oneness. This verse was revealed about Abu Talib. The Prophet (pbuh) was so keen that he believes, but Allah did not want him to believe.”

“Allah did not want him to believe.” Did Abu Talib have free will? Apparently not. Ibn Kathir, in commenting on the same passage, refers us to Qur’an 35:8 and 2:272, which say that Allah leads astray whom he wills, and guides whom he wills.

In fact, in early Islam there was a controversy about free will and divine sovereignty, and the Qadariyya, the upholders of free will, emerged as the losers — the heretical party. The Qur’an — and particularly the Shia in interpreting it — affirms that a person is responsible for his actions, but it also simultaneously affirms that Allah decides everything and guides everyone to truth or falsehood (”Allah leads astray those whom he wills,” Qur’an 35:8). This is not quite the same thing as the proposition that humans have been given free will to choose their destiny. In fact, it is just the opposite.

Call me what you will, but I will never call myself a Roman Catholic.

Conceptually to me there are two groups, those who consider the Pope vicar, and those who do not. So under the first group you’d have Roman (Latin Rite) Catholics, Eastern Catholics, Marionites, etc.. and under the other group you’d have the Armenians, Oriental, Coptic and Eastern Orthodox.

Hopko is the Thomas Sowell of Christian Orthodoxy… you can hear his podcast ‘Speaking the Truth in Love’ here on Ancient Faith Radio. It’s one of my Archdiocese’s ministries.

Thanks for the interesting information and links to further reading.

Robert, is there any evidence that Mo’s father or grandfather was a Nestorian?

You are thinking of Waraqa bin Naufal, the uncle of Muhammad’s wife Khadija and the person who told Muhammad he was a prophet after he had received his first, terrifying vision. In some versions of the story he seems to be a Nestorian priest.

St. John of Damascus and Fr. Thomas Hopko! Two great writers.

John of Damascus, you may already know, wrote one of the earliest Christian treatises on Islam. The fact that the author was a Christian neither adds to nor diminishes the possibility that he was representing Islamic teachings accurately.

HelsSailing: There are really only two ‘Traditional’ Christianities, that is, two that can legitimately claim that their teachings originated with the apostles (i.e. the teachings of what things in scripture mean were passed down from teacher to student and so forth.)

That is, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Everyone else denied a bunch of important stuff and lost the stuff that keeps us together, that is, the Spirit.

And that little-noted and marginal hybrid to which I belong, Eastern Catholicism. But yes, this is how I was using the term “traditional.”

I find the teaching of eternal salvation for the believer and eternal damnation for the non-believer to be abhorant – in both Christianity and Islam.

Agreed. In the early Fathers of the Church, however, and in Eastern Byzantine Christianity, there is not this idea. There is rather the understanding that Heaven and Hell are not diametrically opposed places, to which God sends people and sometimes does so arbitrarily, but the same place, in which the presence of God is experienced in quite different ways by people depending on how they have formed their souls on earth.

I just read Sura 32. Based on that reading, can you not say that Islam also teaches a kind of Pre-Destination/FreeWill paradox, like the kind I mentioned above?

Yes, there is definitely an element of such a paradox involved here: from the human perspective one must act as if it is all about human will, but from the divine perspective it is all foreordained. However, there is an absoluteness to Allah’s sovereignty — witnessed by how common it is for Muslims to qualify all statements with “inshallah” — God willing. This is in the New Testament also, to be sure, but it is much, much stronger an idea in Islam.

It seems to me that ‘traditional Christianity’ has more faces than a politician.

I was using it to mean generally the apostolic Churches: Catholic, Orthodox, and Oriental. It is hard to see this in the United States, but these groups still make up roughly two-thirds of the world’s Christians.

The churches I was raised in certainly believed in pre-destination from God. The grace of God was akin to the arbitrariness of God – he saved whom he willed. As I grew older I was taught that God did pre-ordain whom he saved, but we were also given free-will to choose salvation – a paradox which I now consider to be an unworkable contradiction.

Probably that represents a movement in your church from strict Calvinism to…a less strict variety of Calvinism.

Anyway, it seems to me there are many ‘traditional’ Christianities. Presbyterianism, and particularly Calvinism is now roughly 500 years old, and adhered to by who knows how many – dosen’t the ‘traditional’ tag apply here also?

Sure, but as a member of a Church roughly four times older than that, I admit I do tend to see such a group as rather newfangled.

“…generally speaking, do you think it’s an exercise in futility to compare the Koran and the Bible in order to conclude that one book/one God is superior to the other?”

barry norris on June 30, 2008 at 5:57 PM

OK, I just read this entire painful exchange and I must state that the question posed is as loaded as “when did you stop beating your wife?”

Christians obviously believe in the superiority of their texts and their god, as Muslims do, likewise. That is completely irrelvant to this discussion and this Q-blog.

This Q-blog is meant to understand the Qur’an as it is understood, interpreted and presented by mainstream Islamic scholars. This is not a compare and contrast blog.

Barry norris, afflicted with either a narrow atheistic vision or an Islamic apologia, used this disingenuine form of attack, yet Barry cannot refute a single point of context in this blog. Why, you ask? Because these are not Robert’s words or interpretations.

If one were to perform a mere cursory comparison between the Bible and the Qur’an, the difference in tone towards all those considered disbelievers would hit you in the face like a brick, unless of course, you are already predisposed to try to conceal that fact.

Thank you Robert for your tireless and thankless work.

Regardless, Christianity doesn’t so much have special ideas (if it did nobody would understand it) as it has the person of the Son of God and the experience of him.

To answer your question, I will say what Paul said, “Not all who are of Christ are in Christ.” He said “Israel”, but the type and shadow continue to this day.

t seems to me that ‘traditional Christianity’ has more faces than a politician. The churches I was raised in certainly believed in pre-destination from God. The grace of God was akin to the arbitrariness of God – he saved whom he willed. As I grew older I was taught that God did pre-ordain whom he saved, but we were also given free-will to choose salvation – a paradox which I now consider to be an unworkable contradiction.

Anyway, it seems to me there are many ‘traditional’ Christianities. Presbyterianism, and particularly Calvinism is now roughly 500 years old, and adhered to by who knows how many – dosen’t the ‘traditional’ tag apply here also?

HelsSailing: There are really only two ‘Traditional’ Christianities, that is, two that can legitimately claim that their teachings originated with the apostles (i.e. the teachings of what things in scripture mean were passed down from teacher to student and so forth.)

That is, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Everyone else denied a bunch of important stuff and lost the stuff that keeps us together, that is, the Spirit.

But anyway, as for the teaching on free will, here is what the Orthodox (the oldest teaching I know of) say:

It is contrary to the teachings of the Church which teaches, in the words of St. John of Damascus, that God “know all things beforehand, but He does not predetennine them. Although He knows what is in our power, He does not predetennine it” (De Fid. Orth.. II, 30). Man is free because he was created in “the image of God.”

Here is the whole article (someone get a designer to fix that horrible page!) John of Damascus is this guy here.

Fr. Thomas Hopko (to point to a contemporary wording and understanding of S.John’s points) says:

If God is a free, spiritual, personal Being, so human beings, male and female, are to be the same. If God is so powerful and creative, having dominion over all creation, so human creatures, made in His image and according to His likeness, are also to exercise dominion in the world. If God exercises dominion and authority not by tyranny and oppression, but by loving kindness and service, so are His creatures to do likewise.

The article is here on ‘man’.

Now, I don’t know specific Roman Catholic teachings on the subject, but those typify the pre/non-Augustinian view. Calvinism is only ‘traditional’ in the sense of the past couple of centuries. The other teachings date back millennia and thus truly can be considered traditional.

v26:

Does it not point out to them the right way, how many of the generations, in whose abodes they go about, did We destroy before them? Most surely there are signs in this; will they not then hear?Do they not see that We drive the water to a land having no herbage, then We bring forth thereby seed-produce of which their cattle and they themselves eat; will they not then see?

Fascinating Sura though. I find the teaching of eternal salvation for the believer and eternal damnation for the non-believer to be abhorant – in both Christianity and Islam. It is not the belief in God, or religion per se that is the source of all the religious struggles, wars, persecutions, tortures, or exclusion over the years. I am pretty convinced this one doctrine and belief – eternal damnation – can drive us mere mortals to madness in order to avoid it, and eternal salvation which we will do anything to attain.

It is pure barbarism and religious exclusivity, yet it is the bane of our existance, and the source of so many of the ills in our modern world.

Next week: Sura 33, “The Confederates,” about Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis …

Now THAT would be amazing prophetic fortelling in a Holy Book. That might even be convincing enough to make me convert.

That traditional Islam denies free will and traditional Christianity affirms free will …

It seems to me that ‘traditional Christianity’ has more faces than a politician. The churches I was raised in certainly believed in pre-destination from God. The grace of God was akin to the arbitrariness of God – he saved whom he willed. As I grew older I was taught that God did pre-ordain whom he saved, but we were also given free-will to choose salvation – a paradox which I now consider to be an unworkable contradiction.

Anyway, it seems to me there are many ‘traditional’ Christianities. Presbyterianism, and particularly Calvinism is now roughly 500 years old, and adhered to by who knows how many – dosen’t the ‘traditional’ tag apply here also?

I am fairly certain he meant both of us, and everyone who looks favorably upon this enterprise.

Let’s remember the initial point here. I made a comparison between Christianity and Islam that led you to call me a fool….
Robert Spencer on June 30, 2008 at 4:44 PM

Mr.S, with respect, it was my quote from June 29, 2008 at 12:08 PM that Barry Norris quoted when he first used the term “fool.” I am the fool! You are just explaining Islamic Theology way better than I will ever understand it. I am learning a lot in the process and for that thanks. I really do not know how you manage to deal with such obtuse people. For us regular reader this is almost a weekly event.

You twit,venividivici! You’re missing the point! You call Allah a jerk but say that “whereas in the Judeo-Christian religion, God loves humanity like a parent” but I gave you biblical evidence to show that God and Allah aren’t so dissimilar. My point wasn’t that God does bad things, my point was that Allah and God share similar characteristics. And if you want to call Allah a jerk then others can call God a jerk too.

No, you are missing the point of the portrayal of God in the Bible, which is that God “realizes” that he was too harsh in some of the things he did and promises not to do them again. By the end of the Christian version of the Bible, God even comes to earth in human form to sacrifice Himself for humanity. That is not something anyone can say of Allah. If anything, Allah undergoes the reverse evolution, from a more tolerant deity in the early chronology of the Koran to a more intolerant. Only a superficial reading of the Bible would lead one to believe that God and Allah shared any but superficial similarities.

It’s one thing not to believe in Judaism or Christianity, but it’s quite another thing to miss their essential nature and say their deity is similar to the Muslim deity.

barry norris on June 30, 2008 at 6:32 PM

Translation:
Nyaaa nyaaa nyaaa nyaaa nyaaa!!!

You’re the one hurling insults and can’t argue like an adult, Barr. I’ve read this whole thread, tried to argue a valid point, and, like you’ve done to everyone on this thread including Robert, you did the internet equivalent of plugging your ears and yelling “I can’t hear you!!”

And I’m the one who can’t argue like an adult?

Typical lib. Distract, ignore facts, then when that doesn’t work call names.

Yes, please do.

I will, but speaking of hurt credibility, I note (again) that you had nothing whatsoever to say about the evidence I posted above in support of my position.

Like so many others, you accuse me of inaccuracy, but cannot back it up, and make no response when I prove that what I wrote was indeed accurate.