by Matthew Aaron Bennett
During my time serving as a missionary I found myself in a few places where the landscape was littered with leftover landmines from historical conflicts. Safe passage through such minefields requires identifying and following the beaten paths of those who have gone before. This strategy for navigating minefields is also a helpful analogy for missionary work.
The well-trodden paths of orthodoxy help missionaries in new contexts to avoid the heretical landmines identified by the councils and creeds articulated by our forebears. Unfortunately—out of preference for urgent expedience—very few missionary curriculums prioritize reading the church fathers.
In this brief post, I will argue that there are at least two reasons that theological retrieval is of missiological importance to missionaries. First, the old questions whose answers determine orthodoxy or heresy continue to be asked today in various forms. Perhaps Arius was deemed a heretic seventeen hundred years ago, but missionaries continue to have to articulate the nature of Jesus in contrast with conflicting claims today. Second, wandering from orthodoxy does not merely produce theological imprecision. Neglecting orthodoxy leads to false faith and unfaithful religion. One sees the shrapnel of such dabbling with heresy in the world’s second-largest religion: Islam.
John of Damascus & the Heresy of Muhammad
Today if you hear someone discussing Islam you can be almost certain that they are referring to a distinct religion with its own prophet, history, and theology. But that is not the way that these teachings were always perceived. In fact, those who we call Muslims today were often referred to as heretics by the early Christian writers who engaged with this community.
Take, for instance, the eighth century church father, John of Damascus. In his work On Heresies, he includes a section addressing what he refers to as the heresy of the Ishmaelites, writing:
From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven.[1]
After declaring that Muhammad was a false prophet, John identifies his teaching as heresy derived from the influence of Arianism. John is not alone in seeing this community less as a separate religion and more as a heretical sect. In fact, Norman Daniel has demonstrated that Christians of the 12th—14th centuries broadly interpreted Islam as a Christian heresy.[2]
With several centuries of Christians suggesting that what we know as Islam is more akin to Arianism or Pelagianism than it is to Hinduism or Judaism, we might ask what caused our forebears to use this designation? And further, why might it benefit contemporary missionaries to approach Islam as heresy?
Addressing Islam’s Heretical Christology
Let’s begin by asking why church fathers might see Islam as a heresy. As with most heresy, the answer has to do with Jesus. The sacred text of Islam—the Qur’an—presents a character named ‘Isa who is called the Messiah and is a virgin-born miracle-worker. The Qur’an describes this figure as a Word from God confirming the Torah that was given before him.
As a result of these apparent similarities with the biblical Christ, Christians have been engaged in dialogue with the followers of the Qur’an for fourteen hundred years regarding the person, work, and nature of Jesus.
The crucial point in this dialogue, however, occurs when considering the differences between the qur’anic and biblical figures. Of central concern is the fact that the Qur’an seems to deny Jesus’s crucifixion and it repeatedly rejects his divinity.
Even if similarity may be found between Jesus and the qur’anic ‘Isa, the soteriological problem posed by a Christ who is not co-eternal and consubstantial with the Father has been determined long before the seventh century, let alone the twenty first century. Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon all unmasked the problem of suggesting that the Savior was not fully divine.
The church fathers determined the idea of a created Christ to be heresy because this creature is incapable of forgiving sins committed against an eternal God. Still, contemporary missionaries have too often dabbled with new paths through the minefield in search of shortcuts among Muslims.
Missionaries, Muslims, and Methods of Marketing the Messiah
Today, Christian missionaries to Muslims often approach this Christological discrepancy as a new problem to be solved. In order to increase Muslim familiarity with the biblical message, some propose accommodating the qur’anic idea of Jesus with the biblical portrait. To garner interest, these missionaries often prefer using the qur’anic name ‘Isa over the biblical Arabic name (yasua’) in Bible translations and evangelism. Others advocate for affirming the qur’anic material about ‘Isa that does not overtly contradict the biblical Christ.[3]
Rather than drawing from the councils that rejected Arianism as heresy, these missiologists contend that the best practice is to embrace the qur’anic Jesus character as common ground between Christians and Muslims. They advocate for supplementing the qur’anic Jesus with biblical material. [4] But in so doing, they often inadvertently smuggle in heretical conceptions of Jesus from the qur’anic context.
Today’s missionaries who are tempted to synthesize the qur’anic and biblical Jesus figures would do well to recognize that the conciliar conclusions have much to offer their contemporary discussions. If the Jesus they are confronting in Islam is functionally a repackaging of Arianism, then safe paths through the minefield of heresy have already been trodden. Thus, the qur’anic ‘Isa as a creature should be addressed as falsehood to be rejected in the same way Arius’s proposal was deemed biblically and theologically untenable.
These counsels drew bishops and churchmen from around the world to weigh in on these most serious matters. And the gravity of rejecting these determinations can be seen through church history which shows that sustained heresy becomes false religion. In fact, such effects of theological wandering may be more responsible for the rise of Islam than traditionally assumed.
The Curiously Obscure Origins of Islam
One reason that readers might initially be confused by John of Damascus’s description of Islam as heresy is that until recently, scholars of Islam have largely assumed the historical reliability of the traditional account of Islam. These Islamic traditions tell a story of a prophetic figure named Muhammad who was born into an Arabian city that served as a booming center of trade and a point of pilgrimage for polytheistic pagans. His early years were largely isolated from Christian and Jewish interaction, which makes the apparent references to biblical accounts that feature in the Qur’an all the more miraculous.
Yet, the traditional story of the rise of Islam fails to pass the test of historical reliability due to its late emergence, evident bias, and lack of attestation within extra-Islamic records of the period.[5] Noting the inadmissibility of the purported history of the Qur’an’s composition and context, scholars have turned attention to study of the Qur’an on its own terms. In so doing, several intriguing issues arise that indicate a greater degree of Christian influence on the Qur’an than one might assume from reading the traditions.[6]
Contemporary scholarship is increasingly convincing in its argument that the Qur’an and its author appear to be directly engaged with biblical texts, Christian communities, and Christological arguments. The religious milieu in which the Qur’an was being shaped would have included Nestorians, Jacobites, and Arians. If the Qur’an was influenced by communities espousing heretical Christologies, it is not surprising to find the distorted picture of Jesus at the center of a religion lacking a Christ who can redeem.
It is likely, then, that the Christological imprecision of these communities was not only heretical; it was also in part responsible for shaping the false religion of Islam. Today’s missionaries must see the gravity of their temptations to take short-cuts. Short-sighted compromises in Christologies ignore the safe paths of orthodoxy as they tap-dance through the landmines of innovation.
Yesterday’s Heresy, Today’s Islam
Despite the contemporary missiological tendency to highlight superficial similarities between the Christian and Muslim religions as common ground, the irreconcilable core difference occurs at the point of articulating each faith’s perspective on the person, work, and nature of Jesus. This discussion is not merely of consequence for Christian-Muslim relations today, but it was already a discussion that permeated the milieu of seventh century Arabia long before the purported birth of Muhammad in 570 AD. The answers of the historical church are faithful guides today as we seek to speak of the unchanging nature of the biblical Emmanuel.
For contemporary missionaries seeking to address the innovative heresy of the Islamic Jesus, retrieving the tried and true answers of our orthodox forebears is necessary. Furthermore, as seen above, aberrant Christology leads beyond mere theological imprecision and into the realm of false religion. The answers to current Christological questions are available to us via retrieval and they are necessary to guiding us safely through the paths that rightly represent the biblical Jesus who is able to save. All else is landmines.
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[1] John of Damascus, On Heresies, pp. 111–163 in The Fathers of the Church: St. John of Damascus Writings (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 153.
[2] Norman Daniel, Islam and the West (Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh, 1980), 285. As cited in Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam(New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 32.
[3] I have argued elsewhere that the Jesus character of the Qur’an is an imposter rather than a point of common ground. See Matthew Bennett, “Christ in the Scripture of Islam: Remnantal Revelation or Irredeemable Imposter?” STR 11 no. 1 (Spring 2020): 99–117.
[4] There are multiple methodologies that one might reference that range from Kevin Greeson, The CAMEL Method (Arkadelphia, AK: WIGTake, 2007) to the various authors represented in Harley Talman and John Jay Travis, eds. Understanding Insider Movements (Pasadena, CCA: William Carey, 2015).
[5] For a charitable and even non-polemical treatment of this situation, see the introduction to Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 3–36. See also, Emran El-Badawi, The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014). See also, Mark Durie, The Qur’an and its Biblical Reflexes (New York, NY: Lexington, 2014).
[6] Let’s call this the “rabbit hole” footnote. First, though Muhammad is thought to be the greatest of the prophets, the word muhammad occurs only four times in the Qur’an causing speculation that this may be a title rather than a name. In contrast, Moses is named 136 times and Jesus is mentioned over 26 times. This has caused some scholars to speculate that it may be intended as a title (meaning “the highly praised/exalted one”) rather than a reference to a person named Muhammad. See the argument by Karl-Heinz Ohlig, “From muhammad Jesus to Prophet of the Arabs: The Personalization of a Christological Epithet,” pp. 2512–307 in Early Islam: A Critical Reconstruction Based on Contemporary Sources, ed. Karl-Heinz Ohlig (Amhurst, NY: Promethius, 2013). Second, despite the Islamic contention that Muhammad did not borrow from other religious texts, the Qur’an includes references to apocryphal Christian stories (ex. The Cave of Treasures and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas) that were being proliferated throughout the Syriac-speaking world for hundreds of years before the rise of Islam. And third, though Islamic tradition teaches that Muhammad was born into a polytheistic milieu in the well-known Arabian city of Mecca, a city identified as Mecca is conspicuously absent from non-Islamic maps until well after Muhammad’s purported death. For this argument from the silence of the maps, see the convincing treatment by Ian Morris, “Mecca or Macoraba?” pp. 1–60 in Al-‘Usur al-Wusta 26 (2018).