Why Study Islamic Thought?

With my present studies I am aiming to establish a foundation for a larger study that hopefully contributes to two parallel debates going on in missiological circles and North American theological circles with great implications for how we do church-planting in any culture. In my courses at Near East School of Theology I have discovered the great wealth of common philosophical influences and cross-pollenization between so-called "East" and "West." Digging into the works of Plato and Aristotle via Medieval Islamic philosophers I have discovered that the thought and methods of these ancients have influenced both Christian and Muslim  philosophical, theological, and mystical traditions alike. This fact has become a very intriguing subject to me. Why?

I am primarily concerned with how my studies apply to the ministry. A major concern of mine lately as a pastor/missionary has been a missiological shift in Evangelical thought and practice in the last 3 decades starting with the foundational works of Eugene Nida which in turn inspired Charles Kraft. Eugene Nida introduced the idea of the Dynamic Equivalent translation of the Bible. Charles Kraft took this idea and applied it to missions and church-planting among resistant cultures. The influence of the works of these men has manifested itself in at least two ways: 1.) the popular American Evangelical evangelistic response to its perception of post-modern thought which has gone by the nebulous title the “Emergent Church” or “Emergent Conversation” and 2.) the academic-turned-popular approach to missions among Muslims and other ‘resistant’ people groups which comes under the banner of “Insider Movements” or attempting highly contextualized expressions of the church in resistant cultures.

At the heart of much of both debates is the book of Acts and the (Jewish-background) Apostles’ (especially Paul’s) approach to the Greek cultures they encountered when the church first expanded from Jerusalem to Rome (paying much attention to Acts 17 and Paul’s dialogue with the Stoics and Epicureans at Athens). Some of the pro-Insider Movement voices have suggested that 1.) the message Paul delivers at Athens is profoundly different from his messages to his Jewish audiences, and 2.) His use of Greek literature to deliver the gospel message sets the precedent to use the Qur’an as a theological and cultural starting point for evangelism among Muslims. A short response to this would be to say that Paul’s message to the Athenians in Acts 17 is indeed different from his other addresses, but only in that he doesn’t use any Jewish prophet name-dropping as he does when speaking to a Jewish audience. At Athens he doesn’t give an obvious redemptive-historical account of the Old Testament message so as to prove that Christ is the Jewish Messiah. Rather, his approach is to simply call on the Athenian philosophers to consider the inconsistency of worshipping idols when their own poets teach that we all come from one Creator and Supreme Being. He is calling them to think and act consistently with what they already claim to believe with regards to the monotheistic nature of God. He then proceeds to enlighten them about what they have admitted their ignorance in their erecting of an altar to “an unknown god”. He describes this God of whom they have admitted their ignorance as He is revealed in the Hebrew Scripture and calls them to consider the resurrection and the final Judgment over which God has appointed Christ (Peter emphasizes the same point with Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile, and household in Acts 10:42).

The Insider Movement position posits that Paul has radically adapted the message according to distinctions between Semitic/Eastern and Western receptive cultural expectations and worldviews when, in fact, Paul has only conveyed the same message about the God of the Jewish scriptures while being sensitive to the Greeks' lack of knowledge about those scriptures. In other words, the starting point has remained the same.

The Insider Movement proponents advocate the idea that what has since arisen in the West is essentially a Hellenistic form of church and a Greek presentation of the Gospel. Whereas Islam, they say, is essentially Eastern/Semitic and cannot understand or relate to such Greek originated “Western” thinking. They insist that just as Paul supposedly Hellenized the gospel message in order to reach the Greeks in their context, we also in our age need now to Islamize the gospel message using the Qur’an and Islamic cultural forms in order to advance the Kingdom in the Muslim context. The Emergent Church would say something similar; that we need to Post-Modernize the gospel message in order to reach the post-Christian West.

In order to make this claim the Insider Movement proponents have to 1.) overlook or downplay the Hebraic cultural background of the NT and the gospel message , and 2.) emphasize a great disparity between “so-called” Western (Hellenistic) and Eastern (Semitic/Arab) cultural expectations and worldviews (consider, on the other hand, the studies of Kenneth Bailey who suggests we fail to truly understand the gospels for our inability to recognize the great amount of Semitic and "Middle Eastern" material within them). In order to call for a radically different approach of evangelism to different cultures not only must one suggest that Paul radically changed gears (i.e. taking Greek worship forms and terminology and filling them with Christian meaning) when addressing different cultural audiences, but one has also to observe radical differences between “Eastern” and “Western” cultures and (philosophical worldviews) then and now.

But the more I read of the Islamic philosophers, the more I realize how much “East” and “West” has shared historically and foundationally over the last millennium and a half and how much cross-pollenization there has been. In fact, if we were to be transported back to the time of Plato we would probably find his culture to be profoundly characterized by elements we would deem as “Eastern,” “Semitic,” and tribal. Likewise, if we were to sit with Medieval Islamic philosophers like al-Farabi or Averroes (as we do by thoughtfully pondering the texts they’ve left behind) we would be amazed at the “Western” character and origins of their assumptions and philosophical methods.

Are the Emergent Conversation movements in North America and Insider Movements among Muslims attacking a straw man?  The practical pastoral and missiological upshot is the question of how we do “church” and church-planting faithfully among divergent cultures which are resistant to the gospel message of the New Testament.

By doing serious work in Islamic Philosophy as it interacts with the Greek Ancients (and possibly also how Islamic Philosophy turns around later and influences Medieval Christian Philosophy) I believe it will demonstrate that Islam (even modern expressions of Islam) in terms of worldview due to philosophical underpinnings, is really not all that different from that of the Greeks and Hellenized Jews Paul interacted with in the 1^st century. In other words, the essence of the gospel message essentially remains the same when presented from culture to culture and Paul’s methodology remains virtually intact when transported to our century as we also bring the same gospel message with sensitivity to our divergent audiences’ relative depth or lack of Scriptural knowledge.