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Anglican Approaches to Christian–Muslim Dialogue*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Michael Ipgrave
Michael Ipgrave
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Abstract

Three aspects of the Anglican understanding of Christianity can make a distinctive contribution to Christian–Muslim dialogue today. Recognition of the importance of context highlights the complexity and variety of the situations in which Christians and Muslims encounter one another. Basing unity on a sense of collegiality which can withstand disagreement offers a model for shared working across religious differences. The interpretation of Scripture through reason and tradition under the guidance of conscience points to a dialogue between those addressed by the Bible and by the Qur'ān respectively. These themes are illustrated through contemporary Anglican involvement in three Christian–Muslim projects, and their theological implications are explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 2005 , pp. 219 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) and The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2005

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References

1. For an interesting historical survey of some Anglican contributions to this area, see Mosher, Lucinda, ‘Anglicanism and Islam: Then and Now’Google Scholar, a paper delivered to the Anglican Society at General Theological Seminary, New York in April 2002.

2. Nostra Aetate, cap. 3, in Flannery, Austin OP (ed.), Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1975), p. 739.Google Scholar

3. For justification of my claim regarding Anglicanism, see Ipgrave, Michael, ‘God and Inter Faith Relations: Some Attitudes among British Christians’, in Mortensen, Viggo (ed.), Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 218–34 (230–31).Google Scholar

4. According to the 2001 census in the UK, 1,591,000 people identified themselves as Muslims, representing 2.7 per cent of the total population (figures on www.statistics.gov.uk).

5. For more details, see www.anglicannifcon.org.

6. The agreement stated (in part): ‘We believe that friendship which overcomes religious, ethnic and national differences is a gift of the Creator in whom we all believe. We recognise that both sides need to accept each other in a straightforward way so as to be able to convey the message of peace to the world. We believe that direct dialogue results in restoration of the image of each in the eyes of the other.’

7. On 11 September 2004, Archbishop Rowan Williams carried forward this more explicitly theological dimension of the dialogue when he lectured at al-Azhar on the meaning and ethical implications for Christians of Trinitarian theology—cf. text on www.archbishopofcanterbury.org.

8. The first two seminars have been recorded in two volumes: respectively, Ipgrave, Michael (ed.), The Road Ahead: A Christian-Muslim Dialogue (London: Church House Publishing, 2002)Google Scholar, and Ipgrave, Michael (ed.), Scriptures in Dialogue: Christians and Muslims Studying the Bible and the Qur'an Together (London: Church House Publishing, 2004).Google Scholar A record of the third is forthcoming as Ipgrave, Michael (ed.), Bearing the Word: Prophecy in the Bible and the Qur'ān (London: Church House Publishing, 2005).Google Scholar

9. It is interesting at least to ask whether any parallels can be helpfully drawn between, on the one hand, the evolving attitudes to Church–State relations among Christians of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods and, on the other hand, contemporary debates among Muslims about the idea of Islamic statehood. However, it would be both foolish and presumptuous to imply that Islamic communities will or should follow the particular Christian path outlined here. In any case, my point is not to suggest how Muslims could learn from Anglicans, but rather to point to some of the distinctive contributions which Anglicans may be able to offer to ecumenical Christian engagement with Islam.

10. Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution V.1.

11. This is a view given academic credibility principally by Huntington, Samuel, cf. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Touchstone, 1998), esp. pp. 209–18.Google Scholar Huntington's thesis has been very extensively discussed, and criticized on many levels. It may be true to suggest, as he does, that future conflicts are most likely to occur along religious, cultural and racial fault lines. However, it does not follow that religious difference is necessarily a dominant causal factor in conflict; nor is it reasonable to single out supposedly intrinsic undemocratic and violent qualities in Islam as being particularly prone to lead to conflict.

12. Admirable as its intentions are, and significant as its contributions to interreligious dialogue have been, this perhaps highlights a conceptual weakness in the ‘dialogue of civilizations’ promoted especially by President Khatami of Iran as an alternative to the ‘clash of civilizations’. Unless religious pluralism is built into the understanding of what constitutes a modern ‘civilization’, there is a danger that this form of dialogue, too, is seen as the encounter of monolithic cultural blocs, thus inadvertently perpetuating a ‘them and us’ approach, albeit in a more benign form.

13. Cf. Ipgrave, Michael, ‘Fidei Defensor Revisited: Church and State in a Religiously Plural Society’, in Ghanea, Nazila (ed.), The Challenge of Religious Discrimination at the Dawn of the New Millennium (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003), pp. 207–22.Google Scholar

14. Evans, Gillian, Authority in the Church: A Challenge for Anglicans (Norwich: Canterbury, 1990), p. 41Google Scholar, citing St Thomas Aquinas. Evans distinguishes this sense of collegiality, as ‘a continuous common reflection and action’, from the closely related concept of conciliarity, which ‘refers to the exercise of consultation in the Church on particular occasions’. Both concepts are also very important in the ecclesiology of Vatican II. There they are related particularly to the ministry of the episcopate, though the Council also stressed that ‘the college of bishops has no authority unless united with the Roman Pontiff… whose primatial authority over all remains in its integrity’ (Lumen Gentiumcap. 22; Flannery, , Vatican Council II, p. 375)Google Scholar, at which point the Anglican context of collegiality diverges significantly.

15. ‘Participation’ was a central theme in the thought of the first recognizably Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker; cf. Irish, Charles W., ‘“Participation of God Himselfe”: Law, the Mediation of Christ, and Sacramental Participation in the Thought of Richard Hooker’, in Kirby, W.J. Torrance (ed.), Richard Hooker and the English Reformation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).Google Scholar In explicitly Christian and liturgical terms, ‘participation’ equates with ‘communion’.

16. The criticism is often made that those participating are invariably those who are in any case already most open to dialogue with the other, and therefore in least need of such encounters. It is true that inter-faith contacts do not generally directly influence those with closed attitudes in either faith, and those involved in such contacts may in fact be viewed with grave suspicion by their own communities. Yet this surely points to the necessity of complementing the primary inter-faith dialogue (between Christians and Muslims, in this case) with a secondary intra-faith dialogue (between Christians and Christians, or between Muslims and Muslims), which may be no less difficult to sustain than the former.

17. Article VI of the ‘Thirty Nine Articles of Religion’ appended to the Book of Common Prayer states that: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’.

18. Chillingworth, William, The Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation, or an Answer to a Book Entitled Mercy and Truth, or Charity Maintained by Catholics (1638)— excerpted in More, Paul Elmer and Cross, Frank Leslie (eds.), Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: SPCK, 1935), p. 104Google Scholar. Pursuing the Anglican via media, Chillingworth was in fact rejecting canonization of Reformed as well as Papal authorities: ‘By the Religion of Protestants, I do not understand the Doctrine of Luther, or Calvin, or Melanchthon … no, nor the Harmony of Protestant Confessions, but that wherein they all agree, and which they all subscribe with a greater harmony, as a perfect rule of their faith and actions; that is, the BIBLE. The BIBLE, I say, the BIBLE only, is the Religion of Protestants’.

19. Mt. 4.6; Lk. 4.10–11. The scene is famously taken up by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene iii: ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’

20. The Virginia Report of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (London: Anglican Consultative Council, 1997), 3.8.Google Scholar

21. The formula is well known in several Western Christian traditions, and seems to derive from the early fifth-century Capitula Coelestini, nowadays ascribed to Prosper of Aquitaine: ‘Legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, the law of praying establishes the law of belief.’

22. The Virginia Report, 3.9.Google Scholar

23. For example, Butler, Joseph, in his Fifteen Sermons (1729)Google Scholar and Analogy of Religion (1736)Google Scholar, taken up by John Henry Newman in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870)—although Newman wrote the latter as a Roman Catholic, it is a work in which he repeatedly acknowledges his debt to the Anglican tradition which had formed him.

24. Ijtihād, literally meaning ‘exertion’, is a term used technically in Islamic to describe the ‘effort’ a jurist makes in order to deduce from the primary sources a legal reading which is not self-evident. The vitality or otherwise of ijtihād is taken by some to be a measure of the spiritual confidence of Muslims, since it ‘continues to be the main instrument of interpreting the divine message and relating it to the changing conditions of the Muslim community in its aspirations to attain justice salvation and truth’—Kamali, Mohammad Hashim, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1991), p. 366Google Scholar. At the same time, ijtihād is often rejected by conservative elements within the Islamic world as a pretext for modernization or drastic reform.

25. Such accounts constitute the Islamic discipline of usūl al-fiqh, ‘roots of Islamic law’Google Scholar; cf. Kamali, , Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, pp. 1–13.Google Scholar

26. Ipgrave, , Scriptures in Dialogue, pp. 1–24.Google Scholar

27. Padwick, Constance, Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use (London: SPCK, 1961).Google Scholar

28. For a fine appraisal of Cragg's work, see Lamb, Christopher, The Call to Retrieval: Kenneth Cragg's Christian Vocation to Islam (London: Grey Seal, 1997).Google Scholar

29. I think that the distinction I am making here is the same as that made between ‘auto-interpretation’ and ‘hetero-interpretation’ by Gavin D'Costa, in The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000)Google Scholar. He writes (p. 100): ‘Theological affirmation requires both a serious engagement with the other religion on its own terms, which is an on-going process, and also allows for what I will call legitimate hetero-interpretation, that is, a theological evaluation of the meaning of that religion, or various parts of it, that may not necessarily be in keeping with the sense of those within that tradition—what I call auto-interpretation. While auto-and heterointerpretation may coincide, the latter is always reliant on auto-interpretation.’

30. This term was first systematically developed as part of the phenomenological approach of Gerardus van der Leeuw, notably in his Religion in Essence and Manifestation (New York: Harper, 1963Google Scholar; first published in German in 1933). For a liberal Anglican version, cf. Smart, Ninian, The Phenomenon of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Ipgrave, , Scriptures in Dialogue, p. 70Google Scholar, reporting a remark of Archbishop Rowan Williams.