Qur’an in the Eucharist? The Provost of Glasgow Cathedral subverts Christian revelation

Jan 12, 2017 by

by Gavin Ashenen, from Archbishop Cranmer’s blog:

I have just returned from Paris where I was invited to be part of a conversation with three imams sponsored by Lebanese TV.

I thought they were kind, impressive and delightful people. It was a privilege to meet them and talk to them. We had many things in common, but most of all a deep attraction to God who made us, whose intentions towards us, we know, are love and mercy.

The strength of the encounter was the friendship and mutual admiration it produced. The weakness was that we did not speak at all about ‘the problem’.

The problem was not about the ‘Good’ which we recognised together; it was about two things: the ranking of God’s virtues, and the struggle between truth and deception.

Islam sees power as God’s primary defining characteristic, and Christianity tells us that it is love. The difference is enormous in implication. Power remains invulnerable; love reaches out to the beloved and becomes vulnerable.

Jesus, to a Muslim, cannot be the Son of God, the Word made Flesh, for it makes God vulnerable. In which case anyone claiming that God is like that is peddling a deceit.

Christianity finds, however, in the life and person of Christ, that God is above all else Love – and holds that view because of what it finds written in the Gospels.

Christians also experience the spiritual dimension of putting the Gospels into practice. It confirms for them the integrity of the whole venture; the loving of the enemy, the turning of the other cheek, the forgiveness without limit – these practices flow from a God of Love who invites us to make ourselves vulnerable as He is vulnerable.

To Mohammed, and those who look to him for their window into God, the writers of the Gospels are deceivers. They have invented or distorted the claims and the evidence that Jesus is God incarnate, and that to look on Him is to experience the Father. The Koran claims to expose this deception and condemns it.

As you might expect, there are practical out-workings of these two different theologies and claims about God.

Read here

Read also:  Clergyman defends St Mary’s Cathedral Koran reading by Callum May, BBC News

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