Analysis: Appealing to Muslims

WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- Editor's note: In this second installment of the UPI series on dialoguing with Islam, two prominent pastors talk about the right way to appeal to Muslims -- with love and intellect.

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It should be simple to trigger a Muslim's interest in Christianity, pastors experienced in dealing with followers of that other monotheistic faith will tell you. All that's needed is what Christians are supposed to possess amply -- love and brains. The problem is they often provide little evidence of having either quality, and thus they repel Muslims.

The sentiment required for a successful interaction with Muslims is of course no mushy sentimentality but the love that emulates the love of Christ, says the Rev. Marc Erickson, senior pastor of the large Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee; Erickson was a missionary doctor in several Islamic countries, including war-torn Somalia, for decades.

What's vital is that this love is selfless and unconditional. "It is the kind of love which may well result in the loss of your life," Erickson cautions, "but what does it matter?"

On the other hand, Muslims also see an intellectual appeal in Christianity, but it must be linked to faith, insists the Rev. Michael Stollwerk, pastor of the Lutheran Cathedral congregation at Wetzlar in Germany. For the past three years, Stollwerk has been busy catechizing refugees from Iran, all very educated women.

Yale professor Lamin Sanneh, the African convert from Islam to Catholicism featured in the first installment of this series, explains the intellectual curiosity of many Muslims in Christianity thus: "Islam does not allow for hermeneutics," or the rigorous scientific interpretation of the Koran.

Christianity, on the other hand, welcomes intellectual quest. "Fides quaerens intellectum," said St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109): faith seeks understanding, a statement that moved the greatest minds of Catholicism and then Protestantism in the nine centuries that followed.

"The Muslims coming to my study show a burning interest in the hermeneutical question," Stollwerk reports. "They find it liberating that they don't have to leave their mind at the door before entering." In the same vein, Christian scholars in Middle Eastern and North African countries report that even imams sneak into their homes through the back doors at night, eager to be secretly instructed in the Bible, in systematic theology, church history and ethics.

As a result, in many parts of the Muslim world, including Afghanistan under Taliban rule, a curious phenomenon has emerged -- mosque congregations that are outwardly Islamic but covertly Christian, according to ministers who requested their names and even locations be withheld so as not to endanger the clandestine converts.

But, as Erickson rightly remarks, doctrinal discussions can never be the initial step for bringing down the wall between Christians and Muslims. "First you need to befriend Muslims," he says. It is standard Christian theology that man does not create faith -- the Holy Spirit does. Hence, "we cannot convert people," says Erickson, who like Stollwerk has several Muslim converts in his congregation. That's God's work.

The display of Christian love -- or the lack thereof -- initiates or precludes a relationship with Muslims, says Erickson. "On the one hand, Muslims can smell people who love them," he continues. "On the other hand, they are put off by the unseemly behavior of many Christian NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that fight with each other, badmouth each other, and whose staffers don't get along."

Christians appeal to Muslims, Erickson relates, when they show that they love each other as Christ loved them -- in other words, when they display true discipleship. Erickson calls this the secret of the success of some dynamic missionary churches making tens of thousands of converts in Algeria and Iraq.

But even where Muslims have no intention of converting, they reciprocate the love they receive and observe in genuine Christian homes, according to Erickson, who says his house in Somalia was for this reason a center of attraction. "In Somalia, a steady stream of kids came to us because of the warm relationship between my wife and myself. Bring Muslims into a place like that, and they melt."

"And then, when we were physically threatened, the villagers, including the local Muslim judge, protected us with their bodies."

Intellectually, however, there is some irony in the fact that one feature of Christian scholarship, which has contributed to the deplorable state of contemporary mainline Protestantism, seems to entice Muslim seekers -- and that's the Historical-Critical Method of scriptural exegesis.

Among conservative Protestants, this method has a bad name because it is often used to deconstruct the Biblical witness, resulting in generations of non-believing ministers, the kind of Christian clergy Muslims abhor. But investigating the sources of Biblical texts critically can also be a constructive undertaking, the Rev. Stollwerk relates, "and that's what Muslims like about Christian theology because Islam does not allow for that form of exegesis.

"For example, there are secular sources confirming Christ's crucifixion, which Islam denies," the German pastor explains, "and secular arguments can be made in support of the Biblical narrative about the empty grave and therefore Christ's resurrection. This is what excites Muslims in my catechism class."

There's more. What troubles Muslims about Christianity is that the Gospel appears to have so little impact on the conemporary Western world. "Here you realize how much they are marked by the Islamic worldview of the unity between the divine and the secular realms."

Stollwerk, a Lutheran, discovered that his Muslim catechumens found Luther's two-kingdoms doctrine a helpful tool to cope with this discrepancy between the radical demands of the Sermon of the Mount and the structure of this world's orders.

This doctrine distinguishes between the infinite spiritual realm of the "Deus revelatus" (God who revealed himself in Christ), and the finite secular realm of the "Deus absconditus," where God reigns in a hidden way (absconditus) through temporal authorities.

This dialectical theology, which makes the Christian a dual citizen of two distinct but complementary "kingdoms," has "an enormous impact on Muslims," according to Stollwerk. Yale professor Sanneh, a descendant of an ancient African dynasty who converted from Islam to Catholicism, confirms this observation.

Like the Iranian women in Germany, Sanneh is keen on Luther's dialectical definition of a Christian as "simul iustus et peccator" -- at the same time justified before God through faith in Christ's vicarious death on the cross and resurrection, and yet still sinner because that's what humans are in this world.

"If you come to my house and mention 'simul iustus et peccator,'" warns Sanneh, "you'll find that I won't be able to sit still. I'll hop about full of excitement."