I’ve had an incredibly long day of traveling, so please forgive me if these replies are a little curt or nonsensical.
Certainly. But I don’t think you could argue that there are not good and bad ways of doing that. Conversion is rarely (if ever) the instantaneous result of one person telling another person “Your beliefs are false.” More often, it is the realization that another set of beliefs is true.
Yes, sure. By proclaiming Christianity as the truth (which it is), we are at least
implicitly denouncing Islam (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.), which is why I wrote a bit ago about how we don’t even need to directly address Islam unless a Muslim asks us to out of curiosity from a comparative religion perspective or what have you. Like I wrote, I’d be overjoyed to never discuss Islam. But, it’s a threat to humanity, and Christians in particular, so that’s not realistic.
As a means of perhaps refining my understanding of your position in my own mind, I’d like you to describe a hypothetical conversation with a Muslim, if you don’t mind. Let’s say a Muslim family moves in next door. You walk over to their house, get invited in for tea. The topic of religion comes up. What do you say? How do you imagine this exchange going?
Can I use an actual example instead? When I was an undergraduate in college, the town that I lived in had a large Saudi population (it wasn’t a big town, but they were the second largest foreign born student population at the university). I lived in an apartment complex with probably about a dozen Muslim guys (mostly Saudis from what I could tell, and one Iranian guy). Also because I studied Arabic language for a year at the university, I got to know everybody in that department, all of whom were Muslims except for one Christian guy from Iraq and my instructor, who was an American who lived in the Gulf for about a dozen years. Anyway, so because of that I got to know some of the local Muslim guys from classes or just being in the same department building all the time or what have you. One of them was a Saudi who called himself “Meedo”. Meedo was a funny guy, always talking about how “USA is freedom country” (this was years before Borat…), so he doesn’t worry about going to clubs with girls or whatever. I guess Islam’s Allah is too busy watching over KSA to care about what goes on in America.
So, anyway, I didn’t figure Meedo was very big about religion, so I was surprised one day when he tried to teach me and a few other friends from the Arabic department some cursing phrases, but kept saying “we have to say _____, because we can’t use God or Muhammad”. One of the things used “al-Masih” instead, and when he saw that I was not happy about that, he got really apologetic. We got to talking and I said that even though it seems like the USA is “freedom country”, that doesn’t mean that nobody believes in God, and we Christians say that Christ IS God, so it’s as bad to say to include His name in a curse as it would be for a Muslim to use God’s name in a disrespectful way. He kinda winced a little bit when I said that Christ is God, but he understood my point and apologized, so y’know…mission accomplished? I don’t know. That’s kind of a stupid example, I guess, but like I said earlier, I don’t invite these kinds of conversations. If Muslims want to know, I’m open to any question, but like how you wrote there are better or worse ways of evangelizing, I think there are better ways of inviting a talk about religion than just “hey, you live near me”, or “hey, we’re in the same building every day…what do you think about Jesus?” Serious evangelism with a completely unchurched person (whether Muslim or not) requires a preexisting relationship beyond just occupying nearby space. My friends from Egypt and Lebanon have told me (on separate occasions) that when the Christian communities were strongest in their respective countries was when people didn’t discuss religious differences so much. It was understood that you’re this and your neighbor’s that, and that’s just how it is, unless one or the other thinks of changing their mind.
I would argue that there’s a significant difference here. The Fathers already understood the finer points of Arian and Nestorian theology. In fact they would have to. The Arians and Nestorians believed things which would appear, to an outside observer of the Christian world, extremely small and insignificant things. The analogy doesn’t really apply to Christianity and Islam.
To finish the quote: “they heard doctrine being preached that was against the faith, and because they knew their own faith so well and were so strong in defending it, they were able to take the heretics to task.” You are right that they understood the finer points of Arianism and Nestorianism (and you’re right that they would have to, as these were
Christian heresies, i.e., their proponents claimed to be teaching true Christian doctrine), but wrong that this means that the analogy doesn’t apply to Islam. Taking the second part, to reiterate: because they knew
their own faith and recognized how the heresies didn’t match it, they could refute them. By the same token, you don’t really need to know the finer points of
Islamic theology to know that, for instance, “God does not beget” is wrong
as concerns our own faith – which is, again, the only yardstick by which anything else (whether it claims to be Christian or not) is to be measured. Christianity is true, everything else is not, and that’s what matters, not the finer points of everything or anything that is not our faith.
And I will not argue that there have not been different ways of addressing Islam throughout Church history, from polemical to “touchy-feely” (as you might put it
). I will argue that there is a balance between the two that is the most effective, and I tend to think that many Catholics tend toward the polemical to a harmful extent.
And you are of course entitled to that opinion. I don’t agree (and it absolutely doesn’t matter, as I’m not Catholic
). I don’t want to have dialogue with everybody under the sun in the first place, regardless of how it might be conceptualized. I don’t think it’s very helpful, interesting, or illuminating for anybody. Modern ecumenism or dialogue or whatever is generally a race to the bottom, and I am not interested in that at all. Coming to Christianity is not dialogue and assent to a set of common principles or whatever those who are involved in ecumenism want…it’s a kind of transfiguration by direct participation in God through the mysteries of His Church. That’s not possible through any means that allows “the old man” to remain as he was in his sins and heresies (whether he was Muslim or whatever else).
