Abstract
The Building Bridges seminars have met more or less annually since 2002. They bring together established and rising Christian and Muslim scholars for a few days of joint study of themes that arise within their respective traditions. Lectures alternate with group meetings aimed at introducing the participants to what will often be completely new understandings of the shared theme interpreted by minds moving along different ways from their own. The exhilaration generated is frequently evident in the communications from each seminar that are usually published each year.
The 2021 seminar was a casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic. Prevented from meeting in person, the 26 participants met remotely for what can be imagined as not so much intensive as gruelling hours of listening and waiting to contribute. The papers that were read as stimuli to the exchanges, together with passages from Christian and Muslim authors provided for reflection and learning, are gathered in this volume.
It is divided into four parts. The first, entitled ‘Naming God in Scripture’, contains two essays on the names given to God in the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’an. They both make the important point that since these names occur in Scripture they are generally accepted as having been given to God by God. For the Christian contributor, the single exception of Hagar, Abraham’s servant and the mother of Ishmael and the Arabs, herself creating a name for God (Genesis 16.13) leads to the thought that all who regard themselves as children of Sarah should acknowledge that God appeared to the ancestor of the Muslims and therefore ‘agree that [the Muslims] too have seen God’ (p. 22). For the Muslim contributor, the variety within the 99 ‘beautiful names’ of God, and sometimes their apparently contradictory meanings, leads to the conclusion that God cannot be confined within a temple or idol but is present wherever the name of God is mentioned (p. 40).
This promising start is followed in the second part, ‘Naming God in theological discourse’, by two further essays that essentially make this same basic point. In the first, various key statements about God within Christian discourse are set out, from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the sixth century to the present-day ‘fictional secularization’ in which indifference towards God and religion obliges Christians to be clear in what they say about God and to be open to others who speak about God in different ways. In the second, two medieval Muslim theologians commenting on the divine names are discussed, showing how the utter otherness of God is maintained and human inability to know God is acknowledged. Both essays are short and dense in detail. While they may have stimulated discussion in the seminar groups, when the lecturers were present and could explain what they meant when they had spoken, alone on the page their meaning is often enigmatic.
The third part, ‘Naming God in devotional practice’, contains the last pair of essays on the ways in which God is referred to and addressed in worship – one (probably the most polished of the six) from an Anglican theological college tutor and the other from a Shi’ite mystic. Both strikingly assert that the invocation of God by the worshipper assumes the realization that the transformations this effected in them come from the God who is already present to them.
Like the other books in the Building Bridges series, this attests to the extensive possibilities that Muslims and Christians of goodwill can recognize in the other’s religious tradition. But as a book specifically about naming God, one cannot help feeling that it may be preparing the way over the bridge to the neglect of the foundations beneath. Christians will always build from the foundation of naming a God who, while remaining a mystery, is a Trinity of reciprocating love, while Muslims will build from the foundation of naming a mysterious God who is utterly one and above any name or attribute: Christians emphasize immanence while Muslims emphasize transcendence. This being so, it follows that successful building together entails the recognition that the materials brought by each are different and must be handled in their own particular way.