God Is Not One
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19. See also: “Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends, rather than the believers” (3:28); “O believers, take not the unbelievers as friends instead of the believers” (4:144); and “O believers, take not My enemy and your enemy for friends” (60:1). I am grateful to Omid Safi and Kecia Ali for email exchanges on this matter.
20. I once heard a renowned calligrapher of the Quran asked about an infamous Hadith, quoted in the Hamas charter, proclaiming that the Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims kill the Jews. He dismissed it out of hand as inauthentic because it contradicts Quranic teachings that embrace Jews as fellow “people of the book.” This hadith comes from the Muslim collection, 41:6985, http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/muslim/041.smt.html.
21. The four are: the Hanafi school, named after Abu Hanifa (d. 767); the Maliki school, named after Malik ibn Anas (d. 795); the Shafii school, named after Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii (d. 820); and the Hanbali school, named after Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855). South Asia is largely Hanafi. The Shafii school predominates in Indonesia, the Maliki school in North Africa, and the Hanbali school in Saudi Arabia.
22. “Al Qaeda’s Fatwa,” The Online NewsHour, February 23, 1998, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1998.html.
23. “La Comisión Islámica de España Emite una Fatua Condenando el Terrorismo y al Grupo Al Qaida,” March 10, 2005, http://www.webislam.com/?idn=399. Translation by the author.
24. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000).
25. Omid Safi, “Progressive Islam in America,” in A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America, ed. Stephen Prothero (Raleigh: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996), 52–53.
26. Safi, “Progressive Islam in America,” in Prothero, Nation of Religions, 54.
27. Fadiman and Frager, Essential Sufism, 102.
28. Fadiman and Frager, Essential Sufism, 111. Rumi made a similar point: “For them that have attained (to union with God) there is nothing (necessary) except the eye (of the spirit) and the lamp (of intuitive faith): they have no concern with indications (to guide them) or with a road (to travel by).” Quoted in Chittick, Sufi Doctrine of Rumi, 20.
29. Quoted in Kecia Ali, “Virtue and Danger: Sexuality and Prophetic Norms in Muslim Life and Thought,” Interreligious Dialogue, September 30, 2009, http://irdialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Ali-JIRD-Oct-2009.pdf. As Ali notes, a parallel Hadith states, “There is no monkery in Islam.”
30. Coleman Barks, trans., The Essential Rumi (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 242, 129.
31. Barks, Essential Rumi, 193.
32. Fadiman and Frager, Essential Sufism, 58.
33. Fadiman and Frager, Essential Sufism, 115.
34. Jalâl al-Dîn Rûmî, Selected Poems from the Dîv-ani Shamsi Tabrîz, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (Richmond, UK: Routledge Curzon Press, 1999), 135.
35. Ignac Goldziher, Mohammed and Islam, trans. Kate Chambers Seelye (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1917), 183. Sufi scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr is equally irenic: “To have lived any religion fully is to have lived all religions” (Ideals and Realities of Islam, 16).
36. William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 4.57.
37. Barks, Essential Rumi, 178.
38. Quoted in Naila Minai, Women in Islam: Tradition and Transition in the Middle East (New York: Seaview Books, 1981), 40.
39. Mohammed El Qorchi, “Islamic Finance Gears Up,” Finance and Development 42, no. 4 (2005), http://imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/12/qorchi.htm.
Chapter Two: Christianity: The Way of Salvation
1. Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 174.
2. Make that 1082 languages as of December 2009, according to The Jesus Film Project web site (http://www.jesusfilm.org/film-and-media/statistics/languages-completed). On this same site, megachurch pastor Rick Warren refers to this movie as “the most effective evangelistic tool ever invented.”
3. J. C. Hallman, The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe (New York: Random House, 2006), xv.
4. See Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).
5. David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing, “Missiometrics 2008: Reality Checks for Christian World Communions,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32, no. 1 (2008): 29.
6. John R. W. Stott, Basic Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: InterVarsity Press, 1971), 81.
7. David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 22.
8. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).
9. In a seminar on the history of the Bible in the United States, I assigned Revolve. After reading the whole thing, one of my students concluded it was an Onion-style parody of evangelicalism, not an expression of evangelicalism itself. See Revolve: The Complete New Testament (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003).
10. John Henson, Good as New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures (Winchester, UK: O Books, 2004), 23, 335.
11. Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 64.
12. Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004), 62.
13. George E. Ganss, ed., Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 213. This was number thirteen in Ignatius’s “Rules for Thinking, Judging, and Feeling with the Church.”
14. Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 191.
15. Here Anglicans, or Episcopalians as they are known in the United States, split the difference between Protestants and Catholics, relying on a “three-legged stool” of scripture, reason, and tradition.
16. World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org. This database divides the world’s Christians into six “mega-blocs”: Anglicans, Catholics, Independents, Marginals, Orthodox, and Protestant. It defines Marginals, which include in addition to the Mormons such groups as Unitarians and Swedenborgians, as groups that revere Jesus yet reject traditional Christian creeds and councils and in some cases employ new revelation beyond the Bible. Here I have read Anglicans and Independents as Protestants. All demographic data in this chapter derives from this database, unless otherwise noted.
17. Sally Atkinson, “America’s Next Top Mormon,” Newsweek, May 6, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/135758.
18. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 66. For a provocative argument that Mormonism is well on its way to becoming the first new world religion since Islam, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Mormonism, ed. Reid L. Neilson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005). According to Stark, the LDS Church could have as many as 267 million members by 2080 (22).
19. “There is not a young man now living in the U.S.,” wrote Jefferson in a letter to physicist Benjamin Waterhouse, “who will not die an Unitarian” (Dickinson W. Adams, ed., Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: The Philosophy of Jesus and the Life and Morals of Jesus [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983], 406).
20. David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–17.
21. Noll, New Shape of World Christianity, 111.
22. August Comte, System of Positive Polity, trans. John Henry Bridges (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 1.600.
23. George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 1.
25. Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (New York: Paulist Pres, 1920), ix.
26. Todd M. Johnson and Sun Young Chung, “Tracking Global Christianity’s Statistical Centre of Gravity, A.D. 33–A.D. 2100,” International Review of Mission 93.369 (April 2004): 166–81.
27. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Intimate Memories of Lincoln (Elmira, NY: Primavera Press, 1945), 243.
28. “Weird Babel of Tongues,” Los Angeles Daily Times, April 18, 1906, reprinted in Judith Mitchell Buddenbaum and Debra L. Mason, eds., Readings on Religion as News (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 175.
29. “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2009,” Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gcts.edu/sites/default/files/IBMR2009.pdf.
30. “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2006, http://pewforum.org/surveys/pentecostal/.
31. On what he calls the “primitivism” and “pragmatism” of Pentecostalism, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).
32. Cox, Future of Faith, 204.
33. “Moved by the Spirit: Pentecostal Power & Politics After 100 Years,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, April 24, 2006, http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=109.
34. Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007), 39–67.
35. “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2009,” Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gcts.edu/sites/default/files/IBMR2009.pdf.
36. “Christianity in all Regions,” World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org.
37. Noll, New Shape of World Christianity, 20.
38. Deseret News 2009 Church Almanac (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, n.d.), http://www.deseretbook.com/item/5018625/2009_Deseret_News_Church_Almanac). See also “World LDS Membership,” Rickety Blog, http://www.rickety.us/lds/world/.
39. “Social Values, Science & Technology,” Special Eurobarometer 225, European Commission, June 2005, 9, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_report_en.pdf.
40. Jenkins, Next Christendom, 24. “At the time of the Magna Carta or the Crusades,” writes Jenkins, “if we imagine a typical Christian, we should be thinking not of a French artisan, but of a Syrian peasant or Mesopotamian town-dweller, an Asian not a European.”
41. Jenkins, Next Christendom.
42. The Hartford Institute for Religious Research maintains a database for all American Protestant churches “with a sustained average weekly attendance of 2000 persons or more in its worship services.” See http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/definition.html.
43. Dana L. Robert, “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24, no. 2 (2000): 50. See also Dana L. Robert, “World Christianity as a Women’s Movement,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 30, no. 4 (2006): 180–88. How easy it is to forget this history was brought home to me during a conversation a few years ago among friends from Europe and India. After it became clear that the German Protestant in the conversation was assuming that the Indian was Hindu, she corrected him. “I’m a Mar Thomas Christian from Kerala,” she said, adding that her church, which claims the biblical Thomas as its founder, had been professing Christ for centuries before Luther was even born.
44. Cox, Future of Faith, 222, 1, 20.
45. Noll, New Shape of World Christianity, 111.
46. “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2009,” Status of Global Mission, Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gcts.edu/sites/default/files/IBMR2009.pdf.
47. According to Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, Christians would do well to examine their own history of violence and anti-intellectualism before criticizing Muslims for the same. The Bible, Spong writes, has been used “to oppose the Magna Carta and support the divine right of kings, to condemn the insights of Galileo and Charles Darwin, … to support slavery and later apartheid and segregation … to justify the Crusades and their unspeakable horrors against Muslim peoples, as well as the murderous behavior of the Inquisition and the virulent anti-Semitism of the Holocaust.” See his The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), dust jacket.
48. Quoted in Debray, God: An Itinerary, 264.
Chapter Three: Confucianism: The Way of Propriety
1. Analects 15:24, 15:23, 4:16; Miles Menander Dawson, ed. The Ethics of Confucius: The Sayings of the Master and His Disciples on the Conduct of “The Superior Man” (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 76; Analects 15:6. These and subsequent quotes from the Analects are from Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979).
2. Max Weber advances this argument in both The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, which first appeared in German in 1904–05 and 1915, respectively. The key observation is that capitalism failed to emerge in China as it had in Protestant countries in Europe.
3. There are competing systems for transliterating Chinese characters into English. Until recently, the most common was Wade-Giles, which rendered China’s capital as Peking and the most popular Chinese scripture in the West as the Tao Te Ching. Here I use the increasingly popular Pinyin system (used by the United Nations), which spells that capital as Beijing and that scripture as the Daodejing. So the I Ching (in Wade-Giles) is Yijing (in Pinyin).
4. The first Confucian canon actually included Six Classics, the current five plus the lost Book of Music. The Five Classics then swelled into the Thirteen Classics by the Song dynasty (960–1279 C.E.). Tu Weiming sees in the Five Classics five different visions that constitute the Confucian way: the poetic, social, historical, political, and metaphysical. Human beings, he argues, are multiple. To understand them, and ourselves, we need sight lines from a wide variety of perspectives. See his “Confucianism,” in Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition, ed. Arvind Sharma (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 195–97.
5. J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought (London: Routledge, 2000), 22.
6. Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998), esp. 128–70.
7. James Fieser and John Powers, eds., Scriptures of the East (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1998), 158.
8. Tu Weiming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma, Our Religions, 147.
9. Tu Weiming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma, Our Religions, 214. Some leading Confucian scholars, including David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, contend that through the Han dynasty there was no sense of transcendence in Confucianism. Transcendence, immanent or otherwise, comes later, and is a product of foreign influence. See their Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1987) and their Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998).
10. Tu Weiming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma, Our Religions, 207. See also Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Sacred as Secular (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
11. Gordon Haber, “The False Science,” Killing the Buddha Blog, http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/exegesis/the-false-science.
12. Tu Wei-Ming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1985), 15.
&n
bsp; 13. A thorough discussion of this term appears in Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, 176–92.
14. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Kirsten Fischer and Eric Hinderaker, eds., Colonial American History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 85, 87.
15. Analects 12:11.
16. James Legge, The Chinese Classics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), I.87.
17. Analects 7:1, quoted in The Analects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 23.
18. Confucius, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism, trans. James Legge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 5.353.
19. Fieser and Powers, Scriptures of the East, 148.
20. Analects 1:2.
21. Analects 2:5.
22. Analects 12:1.
23. See Fingarette, Confucius: The Sacred as Secular.
24. Tu Weiming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma, Our Religions, 206.
25. Analects 2:17, in The Analects, trans. Waley, 91.
26. Analects 17:19, in Philip Novak, The World’s Wisdom: Sacred Texts of the World’s Religions (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 116. This passage is often read as a denial of revelation, but it can also be read as an affirmation of a sort of mysticism.
27. Personal interview with John Berthrong, May 27, 2009.
28. Fieser and Powers, Scriptures of the East, 156.
29. Tu Weiming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma, Our Religions, 175.
30. Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, “Confucianism,” in Coogan, ed., Eastern Religions, 329.
31. Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 330.
32. Analects 1:12.
33. John Naish, “Why Confucius Matters Now,” Times Online, April 25, 2009, http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article6160664.ece.
34. Personal interview with John Berthrong, May 27, 2009.
35. Chenyang Li, ed., The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender (Chicago: Open Court, 2000).
36. Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary,” http://www.chinarice.org/madmans-diary.pdf.