Now, I held a fairly negative view of Islam until about a year ago.
That’s a very good reason to “go slow” with regard to conversion. When you have had negative stereotypes of a religion, it’s easy to go to the other extreme. That was my experience with regard to Catholicism. (I did not convert to Catholicism, but I almost did. Sometimes I wish I had. But one valid reason why I didn’t was that I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t simply overreacting to my anti-Catholic background.)
Firstly there is the concept of the Trinity. . . . I really don’t see how this is other than linguistic acrobatics.
The question is whether we can ever adequately describe God in words. All our language about God is “linguistic acrobatics” in a sense.
can anyone honestly say this idea doesn’t strike you as intuitively false?
It certainly does not. It is rather rude to generalize from your own experience to that of others. It is “simple monotheism” that seems intuitively false to me. (Whether Islam is really as simply and logical as all that I’m not sure–and I say that out of respect to Islam, not as a criticism. The Sufis, who seem to me to be by far the most profound and interesting Muslims, certainly have a rather wacky view of God themselves.) The wackiness of Christian theology seems to me to correspond well to the weirdness of the world in which we live. If there is a God at all, of course He’s going to be a God of mystery and paradox.
Secondly there is the matter of Jesus’ Crucifixion. I know, “God is just, and infinite sin must be reconciled by and infinitely perfect sacrifice”
Why would I want to use that particular rather frigid and legalistic formulation? It has its merits, but it’s hardly the central Christian tradition. I would urge you to read Athanasius *On the Incarnation. *That’s a view of the Atonement on which almost all Christians can basically agree. The basic idea there is that we are enslaved to the powers of sin and death–but we were justly enslaved because we chose to disobey God and listen to Satan instead. That’s why the sacrifice of Jesus was necessary. Jesus submitted Himself to death in order to free us from it and break its power over us. (Read Athanasius–he puts it much better than I do!)
Again, I think it’s important to ask whether this corresponds to reality as we perceive it. Granted that no explanation of the Atonement is going to be sufficient, it’s clear that we live in a world where simple justice does not prevail. God does not strike down the wicked and reward the righteous on a regular basis. The reality is darker and more complex than that. Again, if there is a God, and if that God is acting to deliver us from sin and evil, I would expect that action to take some tragic and paradoxical form. Any other kind of divine action would seem thin and tinny against the lurid backdrop of the world we see all around us.
God s omnipotent, yet He must kill himself, excuse me His Son, no excuse me, the human nature of his Son, which is what died, of course that’s not the sacrifice as human nature is not infinite perfection, so Christ was sacrifices, his human nature is what died, yet that was not the totality of the sacrifice, but all of Christ was sacrificed? Am I missing something? Does this make any sense? I really think this doctrine can only survive so long as the issue is examined episodically rather than the totality of the concept.
This is incredibly arrogant and insulting to the generations of Christians who have thought deeply about this. I can respect your difficulties with Christianity, but I can’t respect your failure to recognize that brilliant and sincerely devout people have been Christians. (Similarly, I find Islam as a whole to be remarkably unconvincing and unappealing, but I am not going to say that Islam “only survives as long as” one doesn’t ask the kind of questions that naturally occur to an intelligent undergraduate.)
It is precisely the “totality of the concept” that I find convincing. It is the one Christ who dies, and the one Christ who rises from the dead. The one Christ who conquers death, and the one Christ who submits to it. The one Christ, human and divine, who offers the sacrifice, and the one Three-Personed God who accepts it. It is precisely this set of paradoxes that I find intellectually satisfying. But I guess our mileage differs.
Thank you for reading the confused ramblings of a Uni Freshman:shrug:
Are you in America or Britain? You referred to having grown up in America, but I’ve never heard an American use the term “Uni” before. Are you an American studying in Britain? (I’m curious because I was born in Britain and am actually a British subject–also because it seems that conversions to Islam are a lot more common in Britain than in America, and if you’re studying in Britain that would bear out my generalization!)
Edwin
I looked all over Dr. Kreeft’s website and did not see the lengthy piece on Islam which you quoted. Would you please provide the link?
