Episode Transcript
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Hey everyone. Assalamu alaikum. Welcome to a Common Word and Islamic Mary podcast. So as we discussed before, the Common Word podcast focuses on Islam and inter religious studies, is inspired by the chronic verse 364 which calls the people of the book to a common word, and is inspired as well by the Common Word initiative held in 2007 in Amman, Jordan, and interview with scholars, activists and practitioners in the realm of bridge building, peace studies and social justice. So today I want to focus on the issue of evangelicals and Muslim dialogue. And I got to meet our interviewee today, Alex Massad at the American Academy of Religion. Alex has been very important to me in terms of opening doors to better understand evangelical Muslim dialogue. Oftentimes when we think about Christian Muslim dialogue, it's in the realm of Catholic Muslim dialogue and the work that the Vatican has done. But as Alex discusses, evangelicals are important segments in American and the world population that need to be engaged. There are people that know their scripture, they may be ignorant of world religions and Islam, and many of them are Islamophobic, which translates into our political discourse and dialogue. In this interview, I talk with Alex Massad from Wheaton College about his program that he started at Wheaton College as well as new book Witnessing God.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: So I want to welcome Alex Masad to the Islamic Mary and a Common Word podcast. Alex, welcome.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: Well, thank you so much for having me, Eunice. This is, I'm really excited. As I, I think I mentioned earlier, this is kind of the first review for my book. So I'm nervous and excited. You know, books are like our little babies and we put them out into the world and go and live life.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And this is, I got opportunity to look at your new book, so called Witnessing God, Christian Muslims Comparative Theology of Missions. So we're going to definitely dive into that later in the interview. So I want to first start off by sharing with the listeners how we got to meet. So we know each other through the American Academy of Religion and you were kind enough to invite me to Wheaton College to see your work there and give a talk on the Islamic Mary. So, yeah, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your spiritual biography. How did you get interested in Christian Muslim relationship?
[00:02:51] Speaker C: Yeah, no, that's a, it's a very generous interpretation. It's more like I accosted you at the American Academy of Religions and chased you down and said, eunice, you should come over.
But yes, this is. And we have a Georgetown connection. But you graduated before I got to Georgetown.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I'M a little older.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So spiritual biography. I always, every time I tell this, I just realized kind of how, how strange this might sound to people. But so I, I, although I was born, as my mother would say, I was born in the nation of Texas.
My parents were living in Saudi Arabia, so they worked for the Aramco oil company. So even though I was born in Texas, I flew back when I was about four or five weeks old. So for all intents and purposes, I, I, I grew up in Saudi Arabia for the first 16 years of my life. So my mother's Mexican American, my father's Lebanese. So I was a Mexican, Lebanese American, Catholic kid growing up in Saudi Arabia. And so religion and religious identity, religious practice were just very apparent for the formative years of my life. Coming to the United States in 2001, there's a bit of a culture shock in the sense of, like, oh, people don't think about religion so much. So kind of growing up, religion was always something I thought about.
So in Saudi Arabia, school ends in ninth grade. We all go to boarding school. So I went to a Christian evangelical college prep boarding school called the Stony Brook School. It's actually just a high school version of Wheaton College, as I would later learn. So there I shifted. And I use a language of shifted because going from Catholicism to evangelicalism is the same tradition. That's not conversion, it's shifting. So I shifted to kind of like a vague evangelical belief and practice after going to a retreat, a Christian retreat, and as I would put it, encountering the Holy Spirit for the first time in my life. God making good the, the promises of baptism I had as a youth, as an infant. So I was kind of like aimless. I knew kind of this faith was new for me, and I was really kind of passionate about it. And then in college, I latched onto Reformed theology. So Reformed theology comes out of John Calvin, kind of post Reformation, just after Martin Luther, then all of the kind of intellectual tradition that kind of flows out of that. And I've kind of remained roughly in the Reformed tradition since then. I knew I wanted to do Middle Eastern studies, so I went back to uva. And that's when I discovered Islamic studies. And I really liked Islamic studies because unlike Christian thought, so if you're doing Christian theology, you have to do ethics or systematics. You kind of get pigeonholed. But Islamic studies is just like, you can do everything. And I just liked studying all of it, you know, philosophy and theology and Sufism.
So I was staying with Dulazis Ashudina and Ahmed al Rahim. And, you know, Sasha Dina told me once, and this has always stuck with me in interreligious dialogue, we build weak bridges built on similarities. We need stronger bridges built off of differences.
And that's always kind of stuck with me is that emphasis that differences are actually stronger.
And so that. That kind of then pushed me to pursue a doctorate program at Georgetown. But while at Georgetown, I went over to Qassad to study and classical Quranic grammar and some other things. And for many people who go into classes, they might know that Sheikh no Keller has a zawiya over there.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: As well.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: So.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: Yeah, you did. I mean, so many Georgetown people do it. I. I now send students to classet. I'm sending a student to class now over the summer. But I was actually, like, partially living with the kind of the murid, the disciples of Sheikh Keller. And, you know, they would pray and they would do their. Their. Their thing, and I would sit in the back and I would do my kind of daily lectional readings so they knew I was Christian. We'd have dialogue back and forth. And so one day I was like, hey, can I see what you guys do in the zawiya? And Sheikh Noah's like, he goes, it's not a spectator sport. You have to participate or you can't come. I was like, oh, okay. Can you tell me what you do? And so this is the hadra, you know, the kind of concentric circles. And so I was like, can you tell me what you do? And he. The hadra, they say one of the 99 names of God. They recite poetry. And I was like, okay, can you give me the poetry and everything that was there? I was like, as a Christian, I could say these things. There's nothing ostensibly about the Prophet Muhammad. Nothing I felt kind of uncomfortable with. I was like, you know, I'm gonna do this. So I went. I participated in the hadra, and that was the second time in my life I felt the presence of the spirit of God. And so coming out of that, I had to say, okay, how do I explain Alex Massad is a follower of Jesus Christ to experience the spirit of God at a Christian retreat in high school and just now in a hadra with Muslims?
How do I explain these transformative experiences in my life to my own community as evangelical Christians, but then also to Muslims? And that's kind of the point of my book, my dissertation. So I ended up leaving Georgetown, going to Fuller Seminary. My wife had moved to Los Angeles. It was Hard for me to do the, like, live in LA, do the PhD in Georgetown. @ Fuller Seminary, someone was doing neocalvinist theology. So I was like, let's do it over there. And it gave me the freedom to kind of explore how do I articulate my identity as a follower of Jesus Christ whose understanding of faith and practice is also influenced by Muslim thought.
So my dissertation was trying to put my identity and my beliefs and my practices into words that make sense to my own community. And then the book is a translation of that. Marianne Moyer, who runs Currents of Encounter with Brill, was really gracious to be interested in the book and kind of take it on as a project. But that's really, really what this dissertation is about is.
You could almost say it was kind of like my own self psychoanalysis through a dissertation.
Yeah, so it sounds like probably why it's really den.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: So it sounds like it was a personal experience growing up Saudi Arabia, then grad school was formative, and then actually the spiritual experience in Jordan as well. And then, you know, going to having that relationship in Fuller. So that sounds super fascinating. And before we hit the book, maybe you could tell us a little bit about like Wheaton College. Because I was really interested when I came to Wheaton College and I got a chance to see the university. People may have heard of it, they may have different understandings or images of what the university about, but you're really, you're running a really special program there on Christian Muslim relations. So. Yeah, speak about that maybe a little bit before we jump into talking about the album of the book.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: Thanks. Yeah, I actually, I really do love bringing scholars of religion, Muslim scholars, Hindu, Buddhist scholars, Jewish scholars, to campus because our students are just so different. They're just so well versed within their own traditions. So like we have a, we have a mutual friend, George Archer, who teaches at Iowa State, and he has, he does a Quran in Bible class. And we were talking about how he has to do so much work teaching the Bible before he can teach the Quran. And I'm currently developing a Quran in Bible class with another professor. And pretty much day one I can just look at the students and say, bible, okay, let's do the Quran. Because they have Old Testament, they have New Testament, they have Christian. Like they're just so deep in their tradition that dialogue can get really deep really fast. But that's partially because of the mission. I mean, the school's mission is to serve Jesus Christ and advance his kingdom through excellence in liberal arts and graduate programs that educate the Whole person to build the church and benefit society as a whole, worldwide. I wrote that down. I didn't have that memorized.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: I was like, wow, you got that pretty well.
[00:10:43] Speaker C: I memorized it when I did my campus interview. Then I forgot it. But part of that mission is what does it mean to root students deeply within their tradition in such a way that it's not only deep, but really engages all aspects of human knowledge and human thought through a faithful approach from our evangelical perspective. So something I really love about the position that I have is, is it allows me kind of the depth and intensity and mentorship of my students to really get into what does it mean that you claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ and then want to learn about Islam or Hinduism or Judaism. And so that's the point of my position. So my position technically is the Robert O. And Annie E. Oliver Chair of World Religions. So it's an endowed chair that was created in 2019 in order to research other religious traditions from an evangelical perspective to create courses for students. So that's kind of my role here at Wheaton College. It's a brand new position. There have been other kind of professors of world religions before, but this is the first time we've ever had kind of a sustained program that engages the diversity of religious traditions in the world. Part of that also is I'm the director of a certificate program in world religions. So as part of that, I've created six new courses since I've gotten here two years ago. So I, I created a course on the Jewish tradition, a whole semester on the Muslim tradition, a course called Theological Approaches to Other Religions. So essentially kind of walking students through what I do as a scholar. So why I do compare like understanding Theology of religions and comparative theology and then actually doing the project of comparative theology. So at the end of the the class, each student picks a tradition that they do comparative theology with and then produce their own approach to another religious tradition.
I created a class on comparative mysticism, so Sufism and Christian mysticism, Islam in America. Being in Chicago has been really amazing for that class because there's a lot of hands on experience that they can just go to Chicago and just engage with Muslims doing inner city work. And then new class this year, Israel, Palestine Historical and Theological Approaches is I'm doing this year as well.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: So. And you know, when I went there, one of the things that was so impactful for me is, you know, I, we both went to Georgetown. So sometimes when you think about Christian Muslim dialogue, it's really kind of Catholic Muslim dialogue. So you kind of. Kind of, you know, expanded my horizons and stress the importance of Protestant and Muslim dialogue and evangelical Muslim dialogue. Can you speak a little bit about that?
[00:13:27] Speaker C: Yeah. So, yeah. With your book on the Islamic Mary, you know, I had two colleagues who just wrote books on Mary. I was like, you know, Eunice, if you're going to write a book on Mary, you know, I have two colleagues, they just wrote these amazing books from an evangelical perspective. And so, yeah, we had. We actually had a really amazing dialogue on campus about, like, I think the title was Seeking justice with Mary. Right. What does it mean to see Mary as a figure of seeking justice in the world? And how does a Mariological Christian dialogue give a different framework or a different kind of flavor to Muslim Christian dialogue, as opposed to Abrahamic dialogue, which is something I know you're very passionate about as well. So something I really appreciate about evangelical Muslim dialogue is the way. In which.
Way in which evangelicals approach our own religious tradition and bring that to the table. I think there's actually a lot more overlap with evangelicals and Muslims than with Catholics and Muslims, particularly because evangelicals are so thoroughly rooted and well versed in our scriptures and our traditions. I know that the. The co. There's a joke amongst Catholics. It's like, oh, I'm Catholic. I don't read the Bible. They do read the Bible. But, you know, in teaching my class, I had a student correct a rabbi on his Hebrew.
You know, this is an undergraduate student. Like, they just knew it so well. They're like, no, actually the Hebrew word is this.
And the rabbi was so thrilled. Like, he was just so happy that he could just sit in a classroom and just talk about the Old Testament and the Hebrew with these undergraduate students in such a depth and also in just an approach that evangelicals approach our scriptures with such reverence and deference and the importance of memorization and the importance of using the memorization in our worship and in our practices, the importance of kind of bringing that. That message to the world.
This notion that evangelicals have of missions or like kind of engaging the world is also, I think, paralleled well in the history of the Muslim tradition that each individual is responsible for this mission. Not just like a society, but we're all individually responsible for what God has called us to. So I think there are some unique overlaps that Muslims and evangelicals have that you don't find in Catholic Muslim dialogue. But I do also think it's really important for evangelicals to do this because Islamophobia is particularly rampant within evangelical communities.
And so to really engage problematic relationships between Christians writ large and Muslims writ large, we need to bring evangelicals into the discussion.
So this is something a good friend of mine, Matthew Kma and Shadi Hamid, do in their work is really try to engage that problem. They focus really more on like the public theology and political theology aspects of Muslim Christian dialogue, but also that kind of same approach of we need to engage the problems of like Islamophobia within evangelicalism. And to do it, we actually have to have honest and open engagement between our two traditions.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So, so great. So let's transition now to the book. So I always like hearing about the personal story and then the institutional, you know, how you're contributing not just in ideas but into programs and events. So tell us about, you know, witnessing God, Christian Muslims and comparative theology and missions. And what would you say is kind of the main argument or the thrust of the book?
[00:16:56] Speaker C: My main question is really, again, this is born out of my own experience is with a sincere truth seeking religious other. And from my perspective, it's the Christian or the Muslim who rejects your claims out of a desire to worship God in spirit and truth. So in other words, it's like, how would a Muslim account for me? Like, I've spent decades studying the Muslim tradition, right? And I've, I went and practiced Sufis and I've done, I've done so many things in the Muslim tradition. I feel like I really do get it. There are even times, I mean, once we had a discussion, I mentioned Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kamek and Shadi was on campus and there were times he would turn to me to answer for the Muslim tradition, which I was honored to do so. But it's like, look, I get it, but my heart is pulled by Jesus Christ. So how does a Muslim make sense of that and vice versa? I know many Muslims who really get the Christian tradition. They fully get it and it's just their heart is pulled by the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran and like that's where the heart lies. You know, Jonathan Brown at Georgetown, once he said he, I'm paraphrasing, but he's like, he was skeptical of people who criticize the Prophet Muhammad, who don't love the Prophet Muhammad.
And I thought that was really interesting because as a Christian I would kind of say something similar about Jesus. Like, you know, my heart is pulled by Jesus. And so what Jack is saying there is like, look, if your heart is drawn by the Prophet, then I will listen to your criticisms. And so it's like, really, where's our. Where is our heart being drawn towards? And that's why I wanted to engage, because I found kind of traditional explanations of like, oh, it's sin or it's antagonism, or like, it just didn't account for this experience that I had. So how do I explain the experience of Muslims and Christians who really do understand the tradition, but say I really want to worship God truthfully and piously, and therefore I say no to what you are telling me?
How do I account for that as a Christian without going in as an evangelical? So as an evangelical, there are certain things I hold on to, particularly claims of exclusivism with regards to salvation. And so how do I hold on to this exclusive claim that I have?
At the same time, I've been transformed by the Muslim tradition. At the same time, I know Muslims who totally get it, who say no. And my tradition can't account for that. So how do I account for that? So this is why, like, I'm trying. I actually, my argument is trying to talk to three different audiences. So on the one hand, I have my evangelical community, right? So comparative theology, you're always beholden to your own community. My community is the evangelical and the Reformed tradition. Like, that's my community. That's what I want to talk to. At the same time, I also want to talk to the comparative theology community.
In comparative theology, many times it's not an official doctrine, but many times when I'm engaging with comparative theologians, there is an implicit assumption you're a soteriologically inclusivist or pluralist.
So John Samotamil, in his book Circling the Elephant, has quite the critique of soteriological exclusivism. It seemed to me when I read his book that he said it has no place in comparative theology. And so I kind of wanted to push back and say, no, we do have a place at the table. So I'm also talking to the comparative theology community to say so theological exclusivists also need to be here at the table. But also comparative theologians can learn from us. So it's not we can learn from them, but they can also learn from us. And the thing they can learn from us is this missiological aspect. And then which I'll talk about in a second. And then the third community is the Muslim community, because I do a lot in Islamic thought. You know, I engage with a lot with Rashi Reda, Martin Win, Yusuf Qaradawi, and a little bit of Al Ghazali. Sprinkled in there for some fun. Baisal al Maulawi. Right. So there's a lot of Islamic thought too. And so I also want to like, I also want Muslims to engage with the work.
Now, not being Muslim myself, this is not a prescriptive work from, for the Muslim tradition being evangelical and reformed, it is prescriptive. So I'm saying things that, to my tradition that I think are prescriptive, and I'm saying things to comparative theology that I take as prescriptive because these are my traditions and my practice in the Muslim tradition.
I'm just saying things and saying, what do you think about this?
So this is more of a observation of scholarship, not so much prescription, because that's not my role and that's not my place as a comparative theologian. So those are kind of the three audiences I'm trying to get at. So the argument itself, Argument itself kind of has three parts. So one. So the first part is that comparative theology is inherently missional. That's my first argument. Second, there is an a posteriori aspect of comparative theology that can heal the problems I find in evangelical and reformed approaches to other religions.
So a posteriori just for audiences just means after the fact. So a priori would mean I make an assumption before I meet a Muslim. A posteriori is I make a conclusion after I actually meet a real Muslim person. And then third, is that because of 1 and 2. So because comparative theology is missional, because there is a a posteriori aspect that can heal some of the problems within evangelicalism and Reformed theology. Therefore we can engage real ethical problems that exist between evangelicals and Muslims in evangelical Muslim dialogue. Right. So that's kind of the, the main argument I'm trying to get at in the book that I. And then I just kind of break it down as I go through the book.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah, so maybe you could move to that. So you use the word dense, but maybe I can use the word rich. So it is, you know, a good sized book and you, you make your argument, you know, systematically through it. So why don't you walk us through how you make this argument? You quote a lot of figures you mentioned already, like Rashid Riddla, you talk about Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf Kardla, we also some neocalvinist thinkers. So how, how are you making this argument?
[00:23:29] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, so I'll try to walk through kind of part 1, 2, 3, 4 and to clarify it the best that I can. And please, if I have any questions, just let me know.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: So four parts of the book each Part has two chapters. So part one of the book is trying to establish that comparative theology is inherently missional.
Missions is particularly important for me because as an evangelical, engagement with other religious traditions requires also this concept of missions within it.
You can't have engagement with other religious traditions or with culture at large without the concept of missions being a part of that discussion. So I wanted to say, look, comparative theology itself is inherently missional. So the thing evangelicals do is constitutive of the comparative theological practice, and comparative theologians have just overlooked it.
So chapter one traces kind of the history and development of the tradition which arose out of the Jesuits in the 16th and 17th century doing missions. Francis Clooney, Dr. Frank Clooney, is very explicit about this, that there is an inherently missional kind of Jesuit's ethos that he's drawing upon. And I really want to kind of hang my hat on that aspect of comparative theology as inherently missional. So that's chapter one. Chapter two then, makes the argument that because comparative theology is missional, comparative theology and missions have something to offer each other. So missions offers comparative theology the ability to accept soteriological exclusivists into the discussion, not just Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Whoever is a soteriological exclusivist, you can be at the table.
Comparative theology offers missions what I call autobiographical vulnerability. In other words, I can open my own identity to the religious other in a way that is vulnerable or in a way that can be transformed by the religious other's tradition. Right? There's something in the religious other tradition that speaks powerfully to the religious other. And I have to take that seriously. I tell my students, when we study the Quran, I say, look, you don't have to agree with it, but unless you take seriously the Quran's claim that it is a book for you, right? The Quran claims it is a book for the world.
It is claiming to be a book for you.
If you do not actually seriously engage that claim, you haven't quite engaged the Quran.
You don't have to agree with it, right? But you just have to just be honest in your engagement with it.
And so this is the part that I see compared to theology, offering missions, offering the evangelical community, to say it's okay to take seriously the claims of another tradition.
You can really wrestle with it, and then you can say, no, that's okay. But I found such a hesitancy or even a fear to do so within the evangelical reform community that it is detrimental to our interreligious dialogue. So part one is really Sorry, yeah.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Is that because of the fear of conversion? That if you go, you kind of wrestle and you go into. And I felt that reading that book, you're really into kind of wrestling with like, you know, these different theologians and scholars and kind of seeing the world as they see it is. Yeah. What is the fear behind that?
[00:27:01] Speaker C: So this is more just anecdotal, right? I have, I don't have a study to back this up. So this is anecdotal from my conversations with other evangelicals, scholars, colleagues and then students.
The fear I see is twofold. One is, yes, fear of conversion amongst my students. Like, oh, if I, if I learn about another tradition, maybe it'll actually convert me. To which I usually say, well, that's actually a sign of a shallow faith. If you truly believe in an all powerful, all sovereign, all beautiful, all loving God, you can take anything to this God, you can take anything to our Lord Jesus Christ. And it's going to stand.
If you truly believe it, it's going to stand. So why not bring everything out there in the world? I mean, this is the mission of Wheaton College. Again, this is why I love being here, is I can sit with my students and say, how do you as a Christian wrestle with the claim of the Quran that you are a polytheist? Like, answer that. How do you answer that?
When I teach, like, when I teach Christian thought on the day I teach the doctrine of the Trinity, I always start with like, okay, now you will learn by every Muslim taxi driver thinks you're a polytheist.
Every taxicab I get in, they just hold up three fingers. They're like, we believe in three gods. Do you believe in one God? It's like, how do you honestly explain that as a Christian? That should actually make you a better follower of the gospel, not a worse follower of the gospel. Or when we do atonement, we study the concept of dukkha in Buddhism and I say, look, the concept of dukkha we translate as suffering. But that's not quite it. It's unrealized desire. So how does the concept of dukkha from Buddhism help you as a Christian understand Christ's atonement on the cross better than the word suffering? Or how is dao from Taoism a better word to describe Jesus than Logos in the Gospel of John? And so like, just to show like, no, this actually deepens your faith. It's not scary. But on the second part. So that was a long answer. The second thing that I see is I do engage this in the Text is it's the problem of the a priori approach, the assumption that there is nothing there in other religious traditions that is worthwhile. So it's not the fear, it's the a priori assumption that there is nothing there to learn and that it's the second thing that I'm really trying to tackle in my book is that a priori assumption that there is nothing in other religious traditions that is of value to the Christian.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[00:29:45] Speaker C: Okay, so that's what part two is really trying to get.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, let's go back to the part two.
Part two, and then maybe part three as well.
[00:29:54] Speaker C: And so. So part two is saying, okay, if I've. So I've established part one, comparative theology missions, they can harmonize. So as a evangelical Christian, I don't have actually a theological warrant to do comparative theology. It comes out of a Catholic tradition, comes out of Nostra Aetate Lumen Gentium, and, you know, all these other Catholic documents that as a evangelical Reformed Christian, I don't use as foundational to my faith and practice.
So I need to develop my own theological warrants to do comparative theology that don't rely on the Catholic warrants. And so that's what part two does. It says there's this tradition called Neo Calvinism. So Neo Calvinism comes out of late 18th, early 19th century, particularly Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bovink, who are Dutch theologians who are really wrestling with the question of how does a Christian faith engage publicly in a pluralistic culture. So they're interested in faith and culture. I take that and say, great, let's now do it with religions too. Not just faith and culture, but faith and religious pluralism and religious diversity.
So chapter one is establishing through this tradition of Neo Calvinism that there is a theological work that's rooted in Reformed theology. And Reformed theology provides a lot of theological language for evangelicals.
So I'm trying to use the language of my own tradition to say, look, there is a warrant within my tradition to do this practice, particularly on the concepts called common grace in general revelation. That's what I do in chapter three. Chapter four is. Then I say, okay, these neo Calvinists have a particular interest in Islam. So if you read these neo Calvinists, whenever they talk about other religions, it's almost always the Muslim tradition.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:31:52] Speaker C: And so I call it obsession with Islam as the religious other par excellence. And there's. There's a historical reason for that too. The Dutch were the colonizers of Indonesia.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:04] Speaker C: And Indonesia is a very large Muslim majority Nation. And so whenever they're thinking about Muslims, a lot of times they're thinking about their colony.
And so that's going to be Indonesia, which has a small, it has a Buddhist and a Hindu population, but it's majority Muslim. And so they're always thinking about Muslims. And so I go through and I say, okay, let's look at how these Neo Calvinists actually thought about Muslims. And I come out of that saying, there is an ethical problem in the way in which this tradition has engaged with Islam.
It's twofold. One, it's either a priori, which the problem with that is that it rejects other people's ability to identify themselves.
It says, oh, you don't know who you are, I know who you are. And as I tell my students, if you approach a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew, that way you're not actually talking to the person, you're talking to your idea of what that person is.
So you've actually just oppressed and suppressed that person's identity. That's ethically problematic. So I completely reject that approach.
But then I look at another approach that tries to be a posteriori. But the problem I find in that approach is that they don't take the voice of the Muslims with whom they engage as constitutive of their conclusions. In other words, they engage with Muslims, but the voice of the Muslims with whom they engage don't form part of their conclusions.
So they're still not really incorporating the Muslim voice into their discussion. Yeah, so that's the problem I find. So then part three is I'm trying to actually try to do the project that I call for my own tradition to engage with. In other words, what does it look like to make the voice of someone in the Muslim tradition constitutive of my own conclusions.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: So you try to model, you're trying to model what you're trying to argue.
[00:34:02] Speaker C: Yes. So then I'm going to actually do it. So my question, my original question is what do you do with a sincere, truth seeking religious other who fully gets it and rejects it? So then I'm going to, then what I do is I just go through the kind of contemporary Muslim tradition and see, well, what did Muslims say about this phenomenon?
So what really kind of turned me on to this question from the Muslim tradition was Muhammad Khalil's work in the Fate of Others and his.
He has an edited volume, I forgot the name of the volume. But that work kind of turned me on to like Ghazali and Ridda and kind of also Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Arabi. But I don't get into them in this book. But they're really wrestling with this question. It's like, wow, this is really interesting. So with chapter five, I look at Riddha's engagement with a Lutheran missionary named Alfred Nielsen, and I just found. I found his letters with Alfred Nielsen really interesting because he has this.
It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's. It's actually quite a friendly relationship. And Ruda is really honest about the problems that he finds with Christianity and the things that he appreciates about Christianity and Christian missions in particular.
So for my project, someone who wants to engage in missions, I here have Rashid Riddha engaging a missionary, talking about my question with a missionary. So it was a really great kind of place to examine my question within the Muslim tradition.
So from Riddha's discussion and Riddha's thought, I kind of drew out three ideas. So Ta'in, Tahrif and Dawah. That's kind of how I tried to organize Riddha's thought. So Ridda is fine with Christian missions.
Many times, actually, unless they do ta'in. Unless they do kind of not bless. What's the word I'm looking for?
Dan comes from the word to like, to stab. Puncture.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:36:00] Speaker C: Defamation. Defamation. There we go. Right. So if Christian missionaries are defaming Muslims in Islam, then he has a problem with that.
So, like, there's an example at the. What. What now is the American University Beirut, but it used to be, I think, the Syrian Protestant College.
It was a Presbyterian, it was a Christian institution, but there were Muslims there. And so there's a letter where these Muslims are complaining to Riddha that they have to go to chapel. And it is like, go to chapel, it's fine. Go learn about Christians. There's no problem with that. He had no problem with that. But the problem he had is when the president forbade the formation of a Muslim student group, then he had a problem because Muslims are being singled out in defame.
So I thought that was really interesting is there's an ethical question that Reddah has in the way of Christians and Muslims treating each other, he's fine with dialogue as long as they're being treated equally by the powers that be. But once Muslims are singled out, once they're stereotyped or reified, once they're maligned, that's problematic.
Sorry, go ahead.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, no, go ahead. Why don't you finish reading that then? I'm really interested in this section with Martin's kind of piece because Martin actually came on the. Yeah, he came on the podcast. So he's someone that does kind of Christian Muslim dialogue and comparative theology and Muslim theology in particular. So, yeah, so keep walking us through and maybe give a special emphasis on what Martin has to say.
[00:37:24] Speaker C: So, yeah, then Tahrif is kind of a byproduct of that, because how these Christian missionaries corrupt or kind of rework the Muslim tradition to make it look particularly blasphemous or particularly unethical and then regurgitate that back to Muslims in order to try to convince Muslims to leave Islam. And he finds that that type of corruption unethical. And the last one is dawah, right? There's called not only to other Muslims to kind of reaffirm their own faith tradition, but even a call to Christian, to Christians to come to the faith of Islam. And so I, I put this all together and I call it his Tariq al Dawah, like Ridda has like a method of dawah, which is kind of this combination of these three terms. So this, that term is I think, my own invention. So this is one of the things where I'm like, hey, this is not prescriptive. This is an observation. So I'm kind of curious what people think about that.
But this is kind of just establishing, like Riddha as engaging the ethical problems of Christian missions, evangelicals and Christian missions engaging with Muslims.
So I will. I take what I do in chapter five and I come back to it in chapter seven.
So kind of put a pin in chapter five. So then chapter six is okay, now that we've talked about kind of this early discussion of Christians and Muslims engaging with each other ethical problems. What do Muslims do now? Like, what is a contemporary discussion for this song? And this is where I found Martin Nguyen's work really, really fascinating. So his book Modern Muslim Theology was so fascinating for me. So I really liked his idea of a Muslim theology of engagement. Couple reasons. One, he uses the term theology, which is not necessarily inherent within Islamic thought historically.
So I thought it was interesting to see what does Muslim intellectual life look like in an English speaking North American context.
And so in order to kind of speak into this context, Martin is using the word theology, which again, as a Christian for me is really interesting. And then it's engagement, which is what I'm also very interested in. So I'm like, okay, how is he going to engage? And what I really loved about his work, and he doesn't use this word, I think, but I summarize it as the following. It's intellectually ludic.
It's playful. He frames the contemporary Muslim engagement as kind of playful, working within the Muslim tradition.
And I really like that idea. That idea allowed me to then organize the scholars I wanted to look at in chapter six.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:12] Speaker C: So I look at Al Ghazali and I look at Rashid Rida and I use of Yusuf Qaradawi and Faisal Maulawi and Tariq Ramadan. And this notion of intellectual playfulness helped me organize them all as doing a similar project, which is how do we creatively engage our tradition in light of new context around us.
So that idea functionally within chapter six, that's what I use Martin for. However, there are other things I really liked about his work.
I really like that he. He emphasizes the human creative power within the framework of worship and revelation. Right. As an evangelical Christian, there is something tremendously important, and he uses this word as well, about the pastoral aspect of our faith. Right. So it's not just intellectual, but it's pastoral. I think this really speaks to Martin's, the work he has after that with. I think with Sahib Webb's book.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Suhaib Sultan. Yeah. I actually did an interview.
[00:41:20] Speaker C: That's a totally different person.
Actually, I purchased that book because I have a very good friend of mine is the imam of the masjid up the street from Wheaton. He used to work at azhar for about 14 years. Came to over here to Wheaton, and we are reading that book together as part of, like, what does it mean for him to be an imam in America, giving the khutbah in America and not in Egypt? It's a very different context. So, like, I bought Martin's book and I was like, let's read it together. Because I think this would be really helpful for you to really understand what it means to be an imam in America. Yeah.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: And it's interesting you say that because, you know, in that interview, if folks go back and listen to it, Soheb Sultan, he went to Hartford Seminary, which is a Christian seminary, and he draws a lot on Christian pastoral care. And obviously it's a Muslim text that's focused to Muslim audiences, but it does draw from a Christianity. So. Yeah. So what. So what would you say, like, kind of moving towards the conclusion? Like, would you say your kind of key arguments, key conclusions, and how is it going to advance Christian, Muslim dialogue and just interreligious studies and interfaith dialogue in general?
[00:42:32] Speaker C: Yeah. So my major conclusion of the book. So this is chapter seven and eight. This will be part four of the book is I want to move beyond superficial comparisons within Muslim Christian dialogue into transformative engagements, particularly between evangelical Christians and Muslims. And I want the book to provide not only the warrant to do so, but the encouragement for those within my tradition, evangelical tradition, reformed tradition, the encouragement for those within my tradition to trust the strength of our own tradition, to be fully open and honest in our inter religious engagement, particularly with Muslims, and that there is such richness and value in interreligious engagement because of many of the similarities that I spoke about earlier that we miss out when we don't truly engage. James Fredericks has this essay about the virtue of interreligious friendships. And I tell my students, in my experience, the more honest I am about my faith as a follower of Jesus, the better my relationships are with Muslims.
Like it's actually better, the more honest I am. So I want to encourage not only my tradition, but also, you know, the, the kind of larger scholarly community of comparative theologians to open up kind of space for evangelicals and Reformed theologians to be at the table and to do this kind of discuss. There aren't a lot of people within my tradition that do this work. I know three, I know four Protestants that are compared. Sorry, four evangelical Protestants that are compared to theologians. So one is Amos Young at Fuller Theological Seminary and he engaged with the Buddhist tradition. Another one, I received an email after our last AAR where he, this professor said, hey, I didn't know there was another person like me, and he's down in Florida. And the third is Joshua Ralston up in Edinburgh. So he works in the Reformed tradition and the Muslim tradition. Other than that, the other Protestants I know are mainline Protestants. And so they would have different theological foundations than I would have and they have a different community than I would have.
So I'm actually serving on the committee of a number of evangelical Christians who want to do this comparative theological work.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: That's fascinating.
[00:45:05] Speaker C: And so I see this book as providing a kind of stepping stone for further work by other evangelicals to say, look, I'm providing the foundation now, go build upon it.
But kind of a minor conclusion that I have is I am truly interested in what Muslims think about some of my conclusions in the book about the Muslim tradition.
One of my calls, one of my conclusions at the end of the book is that there is something in the evangelical tradition and the Muslim tradition that is inherently missiological, that provides a more robust dialogue, namely the Christian. The evangelical tradition is charismatic. In other words, it is trying to proclaim the gospel. Both the content of the gospel but also the act of proclaiming proclamation. And in chapter six of my book, I walk through on how kind of contemporary Islamic thought has moved from the concept of dawah, which is inviting someone into the tradition, to the concept of shahada, which is witnessing out into the world.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:46:14] Speaker C: So it's a fundamentally different movement. Instead of you join me.
I am going to now go into the world, and I will witness God into the world. Which is why the title of the book is Witnessing God. Christians, we're saying, I witness the work of God out in the culture, out in other religious traditions, in the concept of shahada. I see in Islamic thought this notion as well of witnessing God out in other cultures and in other religious traditions. And so evangelicals and Muslims are saying, I witness God in you, then that provides a rich foundation for inter religious engagement that encourages depth and encourages true engagement that is vulnerable with others.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Absolutely. And when, as you're speaking, it reminds me of the previous Commonwealth podcast with Rachel McFaul on her book Interreligious Studies. And she actually talks about the interreligious studies as being relational. So one of my frustrations with grad school was to have a Near Eastern studies approach where you're reading these texts and they're kind of medieval, they're classical, but they don't really live kind of in the modern world and they're not really connected to any people.
So one of the things I really admire about your approach, also Rachel's, is this idea that we need to actually go out and meet people. You're someone that's serious about the text. You know, you read the text, you engage Islamic scripture, but you also engage Muslim communities. You know, I think that's. That's something. I think that's unique and something that could be emulated. So one question I had reading the book, and this is, you know, a larger question regarding comparative theology and to religious studies is can someone be a sociological exclusivist?
You know, exclusivist in the way understanding that they understand their religion to be kind of the absolute truth, but then be a civic pluralist, meaning that, yeah, they don't recognize the truth of other religious traditions in the sociological element, but they are willing to live in the same space with them, build community, be part of a democracy. So can those things coexist?
[00:48:28] Speaker C: Yeah, they can. I would say, at least from within my tradition. I've seen a couple different approaches to that.
So one approach is an a priori approach which would say we have. So they would say we, in our tradition, we have the truth, but we will align with other traditions as. And they use the term co belligerence. So let's say there's a public issue, education, health care, funding for the poor, something like that.
So even though we fundamentally disagree with the Buddhists down the streets, we can be co belligerence on this particular issue.
So there is that approach. I don't hold on to that approach. Again, it has this a priori approach. And the problem I see with that is it doesn't really truly build community. It's just we're going to be together on this one idea and once this idea is over, we're not going to engage with each other.
So I have, I have a problem with the concept of co belligerence. The second approach is the one that I again, I prefer this comes out of. So there is a missionary to India. I think he was a missionary 30, 40 years. His name is Leslie New Beginning. So Les and u begin missionary to India. Then he goes and is a professor in England. He's written a number of books in the 90s about theology and culture and theology and other religions. So one is called the Open Secret and the one I'm referring to particularly is the Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
And in that book he has a response to the theology of religions that I find very interesting but also very helpful for evangelicals. And this is partially answered question. So he says, I am an exclusivist in that I believe in the particular revelation of God and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, but I'm not an exclusivist in the sense that I believe that salvation is only for those who claim to be Christians.
So let me break that first part down. So he comes from the Reformed tradition. In the Reformed tradition, we hold on the doctrine of election. Doctrine of election says only God knows whom is saved. So I don't go around saying you're in and you're out. It's God's job. I don't know the mind of God, so I can't say who's in and who's out. Jesus many times warns in parables, you might think you're in and you're out. You might think you're out, but you're really in.
So that's the first line. Second, he says I'm an inclusivist and that this is lesson you begin. So he says I'm an inclusivist and that I'm open to salvation outside of the explicit Christian church, but I am not open to the idea that all religions are vehicles of salvation. So what he means by that is you can be outside the boundaries of the church and be saved because again, it's not new begins Job. That's God's job.
But as a Christian, we do firmly believe that Jesus is the fullness of revelation and there are competing claims by other religious traditions. So I can't say Jesus is the fullness of revelation and also agree with certain tenets of Buddhism or Islam. At some point they contradict. So I can't say yes to both of those. Then finally he says, I'm a pluralist because I believe in the pervasiveness of God's grace throughout the entire world. But I'm not a pluralist in the. In the sense that I believe that in universal salvation. Right. So God's grace extends throughout the entire world, in every culture, in every person, in every community, in every human production. God's grace is there.
And as a. This, this is the part of the work I do in chapter in part two. As a neo Calvinist and as a. So as a Christian, we follow, we believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. As a neo Calvinist, I would say wherever God is, the Trinity is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So if I say, if I. So if we're engaging and I say Yunus has the image of God, what I'm saying is the trinitarian God is in unison. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is in unison. That means there is something dynamic and something beautiful and something robust that's happening there.
And I, as a follower of Jesus and a Christian, need to affirm that and encourage that and really just engage with that reality.
But as evangelicals and Reformed tradition, we don't hold in the doctrine of universal salvation. Yeah.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:53:03] Speaker C: So this is a way to say, like, look, we have claims, but we also have limitations on our own epistemological capacity. Yeah, I need to realize my own limitations. So what can I claim within the reality of my own limitations?
[00:53:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I had an interview with Jordan Generic Duffner, and she talks about the fruits of the Spirit. So Christians being able to see the Spirit in non Christians while still retaining their kind of Christianity, but seeing also God's grace and presence in his creation. So grace. So maybe to conclude, any final thoughts, things you want to leave our listeners with as we wrap up.
[00:53:44] Speaker C: Yeah. So I do have another manuscript I'm working on. It is translating this into something more understandable.
So within the evangelical tradition, as I mentioned before. Right. We really try to root our claims within Scripture this is something this book doesn't quite do adequately enough in my estimation. So my next book, the title of the next book is An Evangelical Comparative Theology. And what I do in that book is just walk through here's Old Testament warrants for the for comparative theology. Here's New Testament engagement with comparative theology. Here is detractors to the practice. In other words, I need to wrestle really with the aspects of scripture that might be problematic for doing the practice. And then here are the theologians that evangelicals care about and that we listen to that do comparative theology. Right. So the second book is really trying to reach a broader audience of undergraduate college students, maybe even like church groups who are interested in doing interreligious engagement to say, here's a way to do it. Let me provide you with a practice. Let's walk through our scriptures together.
20 pages, couple questions at the end. Each chapter is like 15 to 20 pages with like a couple questions at the end. I will not use the word a posteriori anywhere in the book.
So it's, it's more. Yeah, that, that's, that's my next kind of, kind of project. And then I'm working on a longer term project on hermeneutics.
So this is a question. So within, within evangelical and reformed kind of hermeneutics of scripture, we always use the phrase canon within the canon. Right. So many reformed Christians were like the Book of John, the book of Romans, that's like the canon within the canon. But in the Muslim hermeneutics you don't quite find that same phenomenon mainly because there's not like clear chapters where it's like you can just choose, you know, oh, I read the whole Quran through Surah al Imran. Like it doesn't really, like it doesn't work like that. But rather there is this robust system within Quranic within of Seer of how do you read the text and how do you negotiate canon within canon.
Yeah. And so my long term project is actually again comparative theology, but within hermeneutics. How can the hermeneutics of Tafsir regarding how do you read scripture against itself help Christians understand our own phenomenon of the canon within the canon.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: Fascinating. Sounds like you're going to be busy with those works. So. All right, thanks so much Alex for joining the show and I wish you the best in your work.
[00:56:34] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Eunice. I appreciate it again and I look forward to our next time chatting.
[00:56:38] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:56:40] Speaker A: And that was my interview with Alex Massad. So many things stood out to me. First, the idea of deep engagement with the Scripture and with text When Alex is speaking about Islam, he wants a deep engagement with Muslim scholars and thinkers. He reads Tariq Ramadan, Martin Win, as well as others such as Rashid Riddullah and Yusuf Qarlawi. You can feel him in the book wrestling with the theologians and the different scholars, trying to understand their perspectives and take their claims seriously. He also is relational that he doesn't simply want to read the books of these scholars, but he wants to interact with Muslims and he is someone that actually, as he mentions, develops a relationship with the imam down the street and they're reading a book together. Alex is not only about learning or teaching about Muslims, but he wants his students to engage with Muslims and Muslim communities. And you see that while Alex holds on to his evangelical beliefs and exclusivist theology, he still has room for non Christians, for Muslims and people of other faiths and seeing the presence of God within them. Thanks so much once again for listening to a Common Word podcast which is available on the major podcast streaming services such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit the Maydown website for more podcasts, blogs and videos. You can visit my website to learn about my bio, research and blogs as well, and you can join my listserv to be updated about my research, speaking and publications, especially my forthcoming book on the Islamic Mary. Thanks once again for listening to a Commonwealth podcast.
