Last night I was at a fascinating lecture by Paul-Gordon Chandler on his new book, "Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road". Chandler is an American Episcopal priest in Cairo and has many years of living and working in the Muslim world. His challenge is that the church should be seeking to develop points of contact and commonality with Islam, helping Muslims see that Jesus can be followed entirely within the cultural and religious norms of the Islamic faith. He takes the celebrated examples of Sadhu Sundar Singh (Sikh follower of Christ) and the work of E Stanley Jones ("The Christ of the Indian Road") as indicative of incarnational models of witness that avoid the imperialism and westernisation of so much of the church.
Arabic novelist Mazhar Mallouhi is a vital example of this: perhaps the most famous living writer of fiction in the Arab world, feted by Muslim scholars and yet professing to be a Muslim follower of Christ. Mallouhi has written novels infused by his Sufi spirituality and even published a number of commentaries on the gospels. He reframes the gospel for Muslim audiences highlighting the distinctive, peace-loving and decidedly Middle Eastern Christ shorne of the offensiveness of the typical Scandinavian, western Jesus frequently on offer from the church.
There was so much to ponder in the lecture...much that I welcome and much too that I'm a little uncomfortable with (a week of discomfort perhaps?...see the previous post!). Mallouhi still holds to the 5 pillars of Islam but adds in Jesus to the traditional creedal statement of belief in Allah and Mohammed as his prophet. My questions is, what is the nature of the Muslim Jesus presented by Mallouhi? I can't wait to get hold of some of his works and check this out. Is this a reductionist Jesus; a good man with an appealing ethic? And what of the church then? Is the church entirely irrelevant in the process of a Muslim following Christ? The Old Testament and Paul are clearly no-go areas for Mallouhi and Chandler as they advocate this road. Big questions of mission, hermeneutics, eschatology and ecclesiology....
But in the meantime, there is a very real challenge for us; one that is arguably of greater urgency in the post colonial Middle East than in the West where many of our Muslim neighbours are as distanced from Arabic culture and mores as the next person: How can the life of Jesus be fully contextualised in a Muslim world which has been so immunised against the church by the self-aggrandisement and totalising power of the Christian West?
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