The Transcendental Disunity of Religions

Stratford Caldecott

The following paper was given at the Light Within conference of the Chesterton Institute in Houston in
1999, and appears in the February 2000 issue of The Chesterton Review, which is devoted to the theme
of the conference, namely the issues raised for Christians by some aspects of the New Age movement.
Ever since the days of Madame Blavatsky (which were also the days of Chestertons youth), there have
been various attempts made to assimilate Christianity to one or other model of world religions, from the
fantasies of the Theosophical Society itself through Jungian and transpersonal psychology to the sociology
of religious experience. As others have noted, something very similar has been going on throughout
history, starting with the mythological systems of Gnosticism in the first and second centuries. Yet
authentic Christianity has always resisted such assimiliation; for at its heart is something irreducible,
unassimilable and essential.
We are called at this time in history, this millenial moment, to a very challenging work of discernment. The
cultural crisis that we are living through is unprecedented, although hardly unpredicted. It fits quite well the
traditional descriptions of the Last Times or the end of the Kali Yuga. The very evidence that was the
basis in the last century of the optimistic Victorian myth of progress and cultural evolution can be read in
an exactly opposite sense, as evidence of a degeneration that can only end in barbarism. How are we to
read the signs of the times aright, and what is to be our response? These are questions that the New Age
movement poses to us. In this paper I want to begin by taking a brief look at two of the more notable
modern assimilationist movements, one quite crude and the other extremely subtle, and in response to
attempt with Chestertons help a sketch of what it is that makes Christianity a sign of contradiction.
The
United
Religions
Initiative
I will begin with an article by Cornelia R. Ferreira that was published in the January 1999 edition of
Homiletic and Pastoral Review, entitled The One-World Church Emerges. This article directs the
attention of Catholics to the imminent establishment (in June 2000) of a global organization called the
United Religions - a kind of more ambitious successor to the failed World Council of Churches. The UR
was devised as an equivalent to the United Nations by such figures as Bishop William Swing of the
Episcopal Diocese of California, and is supported by the Gorbachev Foundation, the World Conference on
Religion and Peace, the World Congress of Faiths and the Temple of Understanding. It is to be a
permanent gathering center where the worlds religions engage in daily prayer, dialogue, and action for the
good of all life on this earth, where they will make peace among themselves and work together for the
healing of the earth.
The Draft Charter of the UR includes such statements as the following. We respect the uniqueness of
each religion and faith tradition, value voices that value others, and believe that our shared values can
lead us to act for the good of all. We unite to support freedom of religion and belief and the rights of all
individuals, as set forth in international law, and to witness together to the wondrous spirit of life which
embraces all our diversity. We unite to celebrate the joy of blessings and the light of wisdom in both
movement and stillness. Religion is concerned with the relationship of human beings with their spiritual
Origin. We believe in the universality and eternity of the Spirit. We believe that all religions derive their
wisdom from that ultimate Source. Therefore, the religions of the world share in common wisdom, which
can be obscured by differences in religious concepts and practices.
It is hard to object to many of the sentiments expressed here. But a few questions might possibly
suggest themselves to someone of a suspicious and dogmatic turn of mind. For example, by uniting in
support of a politically negotiated list of human rights, do not the signatories of this Charter forfeit their right
to judge the secular world and the entire political order in the name of divine law? What if these basic
human rights guaranteed by international law turn out to contain the right to an abortion, to a genetically
engineered child or to homosexual marriage? Secondly, does not the mention of the obscurity brought
about by differences in religious concepts and practices suggest that what is really being encouraged
here is a bland common denominator wisdom, rather than the uniqueness of each religion and faith
tradition that the Charter professes to respect?
Cornelia Ferreira certainly takes a dim view of the Charter and the organization it represents. She sees it
as in direct continuity with the aim of the early New Age leader Alice Bailey for a Church Universal, a
union of occultism, Masonry and Christianity, which Bailey predicted would begin to emerge at the end of
the (twentieth) century. Ferreira ends her article by quoting her trump card, Cardinal Ratzinger (from a
1989 interview in 30 Days magazine). Ratzinger says that the Church should not join meetings of world

His Seed Like Stars: The Dialogue Between Christians, Jews and Muslims
Stratford Caldecott

This article appeared in the second issue of Second Spring (Spring 2002). It generated a certain amount of
critical response from readers who objected to my seeming to attribute some possibility of "divine inspiration"
to the Qur'an and my neglect of the very serious persecution of Christians around the world. I responded to
this concern by refining my position somewhat in the Springboard section of Second Spring in the third issue
(which I reproduce after the article below) and in subsequent articles, such as "The Mystery of Islam: Further
Reflections", which appeared in The Chesterton Review and is available on the Second Spring web site.
During his visit to the University of Oxford, immediately after the Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi on 24
January 2002, which was convened by the Pope and attended by representatives of many of the world's
religions, Cardinal Francis Arinze gave an address on Interreligious Dialogue at the University's Catholic
Chaplaincy, and participated in a symposium on the subject on the following day.
The Cardinal made it quite clear that mutual respect and cooperation between the religions does not imply
relativism or indifferentism. By inviting them to pray (or meditate) in close proximity to each other, the Pope is
not saying that all religions are equally true, or that it makes no difference what you believe. There are,
consequently, issues that need to be addressed in this process of dialogue, and these issues concern the
differences between the religions. The following reflections are entirely my own, prompted by the experience
of the symposium and ensuing conversations. For a more profound theological analysis of the issues, I
would recommend the reader to turn to an article in Communio (Fall 2001) called "The Word of God", by
Roch Kereszty, O.Cist. No doubt we ourselves will return to this subject in the future, in Second Spring and
on the associated website.
Do Christians worship the same God as Muslims?
Many Christians would be tempted to answer this rather crude question in the negative, on the grounds that
"our God is a Trinity", whereas the doctrine of the Trinity is explicitly denied by Islam. But if we look at the
denial more closely, we find that in surah 4:171-2 the Qur'an alleges that Christians believe that there are
three Gods. In reality, of course, Christians uphold the Unity of God as strongly as Muslims do. The
threeness of the Trinity is not intended as a numerical threeness, like that of three apples, or three oranges:
as the Athanasian creed states, God is "not three eternals but one eternal". So here, although the Qur'an is
plainly wrong in what it says about Christianity, Islam is not denying the Trinity as Christians understand it
at all.
Islam further rejects the idea that God could "beget" a Son (surah 6:95-101), on the grounds that God has no
wife; it rejects the idea that he might "adopt" one (surah 19:88-98), on the grounds that all creatures can be
nothing but servants of God. But once more Islam's intention in these two instances is positive: to emphasize
and safeguard the Unity, Transcendence and Absoluteness of God, against those who would "associate"
others with him. Christian theology uses terms like "begets" and "Son" analogously, not literally. And it could
well be argued that you need the whole context of Christian theology to make sense of such statements.
One of the most serious points of disagreement between Islam and Christianity is the former's denial that
Jesus died on the Cross. Surah 4.157-9 of the Qur'an says that "they did not kill him nor did they crucify him.
They were under the illusion that they had." Here the Qur'an seems mainly concerned to refute those
enemies of Christ who wrongly claimed to have defeated him. It assumes that a true prophet could never be
humiliated as Jesus was. Without adverting to the Resurrection at all, it states vaguely that God "raised him
to himself", and gave him victory over his enemies. The best that can be said of this, from a Christian point of
view, is that the text at least intends to vindicate Jesus rather than to attack Christianity.
There are also many substantial points of agreement between Islam and Christianity, not the least
extraordinary of which is its account of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
When Muhammad's followers were destroying the idols in the Kaaba, it is said that he protected an icon of

the Madonna and Child that was found there with his own hands. Surah 4:171 goes so far as to describe
Jesus as the "word" of God though of course without the connotations this description would have in
Christian tradition and theology, beginning with the Gospel of John.
It seems to me at least possible that most of the apparent contradictions between Christianity and Islam
would become less of an obstacle to dialogue if we concentrated on the positive intention behind them. The
God of Islam is indeed the same God as that of Christianity, albeit not here revealing himself as a Trinity, but
rather emphasizing his Unity to a people who have been called to worship him under that attribute.
Is the Qur'an inspired?
If we accept for the moment that many doctrinal differences between Islam and Christianity might be
disarmed in the way suggested, the question for Christians then becomes the precise degree of inspiration
involved in the Islamic revelation: Was the Qur'an dictated by the Angel Gabriel (as the Muslims believe), or
not? If it does not, after all, flatly contradict the Christian revelation, then it might conceivably have a divine
origin. But if the Book is inspired by the same God, why did it not advise Muslims to seek baptism? There are
several possible answers, all deserving of consideration. The following list is not intended to be in any way
exhaustive.
One might in the first place somewhat facetiously reply that while Christians are enjoined to go out into the
whole world and proclaim the Gospel, they are given no guarantee that all men will be capable of welcoming
that Gospel, nor any guarantee that God will not himself (for his own reasons) "hinder" that work in history.
Our duty is to evangelize: the rest is not our responsibility. But at the same time as evangelizing, we must
show immense respect for the dignity and inviolable conscience of every human being, whether or not we
believe them to be in error. There is no compulsion in religion (a famous quotation from surah 2:256).
A second line of approach would be to suggest that divine inspiration need not be an all-or-nothing affair:
other religions may be inspired by God who wishes to communicate with humanity in every way possible
without being all on the same level. Only in the Christian revelation does God reveal to us his inner life as
Trinity, by sharing in which through the victory of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we enter eternal
life. Perhaps human, cultural factors enter more into some religions than others, just as they evidently colour
the inspirations of the visionaries, even those endorsed by the Church. (This distinction is not intended to be
insulting to Islam, but as a possibility to be considered by Christians who might otherwise be tempted to
reject the entire religion and its civilization as the work of the Devil.)
A third possible approach would question our simple, linear view of time. Muhammad was born after Christ,
yet he seems to belong to an earlier world, a world no later that that of the Psalms, for example. Perhaps
from the point of view of Christianity he belongs to a time before the Incarnation, rather than after it.
The mystery of Islam and the mystery of Judaism
What Christians call "salvation history" is normally described in a way that encompasses only Judaism, as
the forerunner of the Christian revelation. But if we bear all these reflections in mind, it may be that the
"mystery of Islam" can be linked to the continuing mystery of the Jews. The key to the whole mystery,
perhaps, is the fact that Christianity failed to convert the People of God themselves: that the Jew Christ was
ultimately opposed, betrayed and handed over to be crucified by those he came to save.
Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah of the Jews, but he was not yet (or at least not yet explicitly) the
glorified Messiah that had been foretold. The Jews therefore rejected Jesus as Messiah not out of simple
wickedness, but at least partly out of loyalty to the divine revelation that they had earlier received. Precisely
because it was divine in origin, this revelation could not be entirely superseded or abrogated until it had been
entirely fulfilled. As St Paul clearly indicates in his Letter to the Romans (11:25-36), the Jews remain the
Chosen People. God's call, once made, is irrevocable.
The failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah is connected with the "scandal" of the Cross. Not only did this
Messiah not restore the earthly Kingdom of his ancestor David, but he was executed like a criminal and died
in humiliation. Christianity began by reinterpreting the whole notion of divine glory as it had been understood

up to that time. The Cross became a Throne, the thorns a Crown. The rejection of the Messiah was therefore
connected with the incomprehensibility of the Cross as an instrument of salvation for the whole world. The
same problem exists in Islam, as we saw.
One could even say that Islam, too, represents a Covenant, though of course not the Covenant of Moses.
This may help to explain its hostility to the (misunderstood) idea of a trinitarian God. Islam is the religion of
Ishmael rather than Isaac. Ishmael was born to Abraham before the visit of the Three Strangers in whom
Christianity sees a symbol of the Trinity. Isaac, who is born after this visit, is linked to the revelation of the
Trinity in the very concrete sense that Christ is to be born of his line, as a Jew among Jews. Ishmael is rather
a prolongation of the earlier dispensation of God, and the people he represents exist outside the Covenant in
which God establishes a family relationship with men. Nevertheless God says of him, "I will make of him a
great nation". (On all this, see Genesis 16-18, especially 16:7-13 and 17:20.)
Conclusion
If the dispensation of Israel continues (according to St Paul) even after the First Coming of the Messiah, then
the appearance of Islam is connected with this. For if Judaism had been entirely absorbed by Christianity, no
doubt the Second Coming would have been combined with the First, the Christian Covenant would have
enfolded the whole world, and there would have been no need for the monotheism of Abraham to have been
renewed by the Prophet in the deserts of Arabia six centuries later. That Judaism was not absorbed means
that there must be a divine providence not only in the non-conversion of the Jewish people (as St Paul
implies), but also in the appearance of Islam as a kind of prolongation of the pre-Judaic covenant into New
Testament times. Christians may yet come to see Islam as a message akin in some ways to that of John the
Baptist, sent "in the spirit of Elias" to prepare the way for the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of glory
at the end of time. But God knows best.

Dialogue section
SPRINGBOARD
From Second Spring 3
My speculative article "His Seed Like Stars" in the second issue provoked a great deal of correspondence
from readers. Many were intrigued or even delighted with it; others reacted with horror and alarm to what
they perceived as a crypto-heretical sympathy for Islam. I suspect few of these will have read the parallel
debate that has been going on in the pages ofCommunio (Fall 2001 and Spring 2002), but I respectfully
suggest they do so. Gavin D'Costa's book The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (see Bookwatch) is also
an important point of reference. On our web-site I have posted, along with other relevant material as part of
our developing inter-faith dialogue, an article ("Further Reflections") in which I try to clear up a few
ambiguities in my piece, and to show that my speculations there concerning the providential role of Islam
were intended to be fully consistent with Catholic belief.
The Vatican document Dominus Iesus (2000) certainly insists that Catholics may not regard the Scriptures of
other religions as "divinely inspired" in the same sense as the Canon of the Christian Scriptures. I had in
mind a much looser sense of "inspired" when I raised the question of the inspiration of the Qur'an. Saints
Ambrose and Aquinas tell us that all truth no matter by whom it is spoken is "from the Holy Spirit". In that
sense there may well be elements of truth in the Qur'an, as well as error (for where Islam flatly contradicts
Christianity, obviously both cannot be right). My concern was to suggest that flat contradictions between the
two religions may be less common than believers in either often assume.
Dominus Iesus (section 14) invites us to explore the question "whether and in what way the historical figures
and positive elements of these religions may fall within the divine plan of salvation", thus suggesting that not
only Moses but even Muhammad may have a providential role to play in salvation history. While salvation (in

the full Christian sense of the word) is uniquely mediated by the Redeemer, Jesus Christ, his act of divinehuman self-sacrifice within history gives rise to a "participated mediation" by others, the exact extent of which
is a matter for debate. It should be clear that this important suggestion which is from Dominus Iesus rather
than from me, building on the documents of the Second Vatican Council does not in any way imply that the
Revelation of Christ is incomplete, or needs supplementation.
My own thoughts on a possible providential role for Muhammad are far from fully developed, but I described
Islam in that article as a kind of post-Christian echo of the Abrahamic Covenant, which by returning us to the
thought-world of the desert before the revelation of the Trinity prolonged an epoch that for Christians has
long passed away. Several readers found this idea intriguing, although at least one forthrightly objected: "If
something has been written in the seventh century, we can't place it in pre-Christian times and thereby give it
a justification that it doesn't have. The Qur'an is not only un-Christian in some of its aspects, but antiChristian and can't be made pre-Christian."
The Pope, in his reflective Crossing the Threshold of Hope, and despite his manifest commitment to
dialogue, certainly detects in Islam a movement away from the Christian Revelation: "In Islam all the
richness of God's self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has
definitely been set aside." Indeed, how can a Christian not feel keenly the loss of all that we most value: the
living presence of Christ, the great loving mercy of God revealed on the Cross, the sacraments and
"luminous mysteries" of the Kingdom the possibility not only of reconciliation with each other and with God,
but of the Vision of God that answers the impossible demand of the human heart?
So what can a Christian make of the Qur'an, which is regarded by a billion Muslims as the actual speech of
God in Arabic form? Divine or angelic provenance has been claimed for many other influential texts, from
the Book of Mormon to the Course in Miracles, but widespread acceptance is hardly proof of such claims.
Nevertheless, the stupendous importance of Islam in history and on the present world-stage is such that it
deserves careful study and if this enquiry is to be conducted in a spirit of fairness, then a certain
imaginative sympathy for the religion would seem to be one essential requirement. What makes sympathy
difficult to achieve in present circumstances is not only the terrorists who claim to be acting in the name of
Islam, but ongoing persecution of Christians by Muslims (documented by Aid to the Church in Need). If these
facts make it difficult for Islam to find a hearing among Christians, they certainly do not make it less urgent
for us to pursue this dialogue as the Church is urging us to do.
One significant criticism of my approach appeals to the writers with which the name of Second Spring is
associated: particularly Newman, Chesterton and Dawson. Chesterton's views on Islam may be illustrated by
the following extract from a 1903 piece called "The Nature of a Religious War" (recently republished in the
August 2002 issue of The Chesterton Review). "The Moslems are not without creditable qualities in the least
courage, sobriety, hardiness, hospitality, personal dignity, intense religious belief. These are fine qualities.
The thing we will not face is the enormous fact that they have along with all this, not merely from personal
sin, but by ingrained, avowed, and convinced philosophy, another quality: a total disregard of human life,
whether it is their own or other people's. Therefore our civilization is and must be at war with them, and that
war is a religious war, or, if you prefer the term, a philosophical war."
Now were Chesterton's remarks here as unfair as his remarks on other occasions about the Jews? The
reader must decide, but he should not be swayed by any false belief that Chesterton was infallible. As for
Christopher Dawson, being a professional historian he would never make such sweeping generalizations.
One gets no sense of a fundamental hostility to Islam from him, and he was almost certainly more aware
than Chesterton of the achievements of Islamic civilization, which in the tenth century quite put Europe in the
shade. Nevertheless, it has to be said that he saw these achievements as due less to the new religion per
se than to the contribution of assimilated peoples. Furthermore, he believed the Sufis, who were responsible
for developing Islam's mysticism of love (probably its closest approach to Christianity), owed much to contact
with the Christians of the desert. (This debt was repaid in the eleventh century, when the mystical love poetry
of Moorish Spain flowed into the south of France to engender the Christian Romanticism of Proven e, and
thus the music, poetry and chivalry that we associate with high medieval culture see Dawson's Medieval
Essays.)

The relations and mutual indebtedness of Christian and Islamic civilization are complex, and the origins of
Islam no less so. Vladimir Soloviev, in his 1889 book Russia and the Universal Church, pointed out that Islam
arose at the moment when the Eastern Emperor Heraclius corrupted large parts of Christendom with the
heresy of Monothelitism the idea that there was no human will in Christ, only the divine will, which Soloviev
calls "the disguised denial of human freedom and energy". In Byzantinism, "which was hostile in principle to
Christian progress and which aimed at reducing the whole of religion to a fact of past history, a dogmatic
formula, and a liturgical ceremonial", he saw an "anti-Christianity concealed beneath the mask of orthodoxy"
which was "bound to collapse in moral impotence before the open and sincere anti-Christianity of Islam."
Islam, in Soloviev's view, is a synthesis of the Monothelite and Iconoclastic heresies. Byzantium had
attempted to close a theological debate with a political compromise, and paid the penalty.
Perhaps. There may be other explanations for the birth of Islam and later the worldly success of the Islamic
empires. My own suggestion was in terms of a different kind of weakness in Christianity, due to a failure to
convert the Jews, which opened up a period of history in which the old covenants (including the covenant
with Ishmael's descendants, the Arabs) retain a kind of legitimacy until the Second Coming. This presumes
that the Jews rejected Jesus as Messiah "at least partly out of loyalty to the divine revelation that they had
earlier received". Louis Bouyer describes Islam as in part a prophetic protest against the "degradation of
popular Christian piety into polytheism and a real, if not theoretical, idolatry" (The Invisible Father).
A personal friendship with Muslims is probably the only way to understand the true spirit of this religion. The
spiritual successes of Islam are real enough, for all the ignorance of them among Christians, who cannot be
expected to have studied the literature of an alien (and often hostile) religion with much care. We are mostly
aware of the spiritual failures the bigotry, the acts of cruelty and aggression which to a large extent have
blighted Christian history too. I find it hard to believe, however, that, with enormous cultural and spiritual
achievements to its credit, Islam can be founded on pure malice. At the very least it has been permitted to
flourish by God for a reason.
From a Christian point of view, then, Islam is a challenge. It challenges us to understand our own faith, and
to live it and proclaim it in a way that will make the whole world rejoice to become Christian. God is indeed
the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Source of Peace, the Majestic, the Creator, the Opener, the All-Seeing,
the Forbearing, the Watchful, the Glorious. These names or attributes of God have inspired Muslim mystics
and poets for centuries. God is One, and there is no other beside him. Yet as Christians know, and Muslims
do not, he is also Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This revealed truth is bound up with the message of salvation.
It is tragic that our words, and our lives, all too often fail to communicate this Gospel to others. Without
ceasing to be One nature, God is three Persons. These three Names alone reveal what it truly means for
Him to be Al-Wadud, the Loving.
Stratford Caldecott