Sorry, rinnie, I cannot answer your question, because – now attending church in North America – the topic of the object of Muslim worship has not come up for discussion, so far as I am aware. Not being confronted with the issue, perhaps there is no official teaching on this subject.
Dear Simka,
Cordial greetings and a very good day.
When he was Archbishop of Canterbury, the late Dr. Robert Runcie, delivered the annual Sir Francis Younghusband Lecture in 1986. Whilst this could not be classified as “official teaching”, it is, nonethless, interesting to hear the views of Anglicanism’s then chief prelate. Dr. Runcie spoke of “the moments of revelation” in non-Christian religions and of “the spiritual treasures which our respective faiths have handed down to us - a spark of divine life and a vision of holiness whereby the lives of countless people in the past and present are nourished, transformed, sustained and sanctified”. Referring to the first meeting of the
World *Congress of Faiths *(W.C.F.), he identified himself with Francis Younghusband’s own words :
“Religion, taken as a whole, benefited much from the variety of its different forms. All the centuries that the Spirit of God had been working in Christians, he must also have been working in Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and others…”.
Dr. Runcie, it is quite true, denied that he was a syncretist (“I am not advocating a single-minded, synthetic model of world religion”) and he affirmed that for Christians the life, suffering, death and Resurrection of Jesus would always remain the primary source of knowledge and truth concerning God. Thus the self-giving of God in His beloved Son was “firm and fundamental” and “not negotiable”. However, he went on to declare that “other faiths reveal other aspects of God which may enrich and enlarge our Christian understanding”.
The views expressed by Dr. Runcie do not appear wholly dissimilar and chime somewhat with those those of the Catholic Church and the Second Vatican Council - “Other religions…strive variously to answer the restless strivings of the human heart by proposing ‘ways’, which consist of teachings, rules of life, and sacred ceremonies. The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions. She looks with sincere respect upon those ways of conduct and of life which…often reflect a ray of that
Tru**th which enlightens all men” (
Nostra Aetate). The Catholic Church, to quote the enclyclical of Pope Paul VI, “respects and esteems those non-Christian rleigions because they are the living expression of the soul of vast groups of people. They carry within in them the echo of thousands of years of searching for God, a quest which is incomplete but often made with great sincerity and righteousness of heart. They possess an impressive patrimony of deeply religious texts. They have taught generations of people how to pray. They are all impregnated with innumerable ‘seeds of the word’ and can constitute a true preparation for the Gospel, to quote the felicitous term used by the Second Vatican Councill and borrowed from Eusebius of Caesarea” (
Evangelii Nuntiandi).
Granted, the views expressed by the late Dr. Runcie were his own and not those of the Anglican Church, but, in light of what he said in that lecture, I cannot imagine him denying that Allah is the same God Jews and Christians know and worship. He would have surely accepted that Islam is a Western, theistic religion, which bases itself explicitly on the historical revelation of the God of the Jews, tracing itself to Ishmael, to whom God also promised special blessings. Issac and Ishmael, Jews and Muslims, have been engaged in sibling rivalry ever since.
The theology of God the Father and the ethics of human living are essentially the same for Jews, Christians and Muslims. If that is so, then what is the missing link? What is missing is the link between the two - Christ the mediator between God and man. Mohammed and the Koran are basicly another Moses (lawgiver) and another law. Missing are grace, salvation, redemption: precisely the essential things.
God bless.
Warmest good wishes,
Portrait
Pax
