Monotheist Religion - Essay Example

Running head: Religion Religion [The of the appears here] [The of appears here] A monotheist religionasserts that there is only one God, transcendent over nature, who rules all creation and governs humanity in the here and now. Three religions take that view, all of them calling upon the Hebrew scriptures of ancient Israel ("the Old Testament" of the Christian Bible, "the written Torah" of the one whole Torah, oral and written, of Judaism). There, the three monotheist religions concur, God made himself manifest, principally through Moses, the prophet. And they agree that God further revealed himself and his will in other documents: the New Testament and Christ, for Christianity, the Qur'an and Muhammad, for Islam, and the Oral Torah and its sages, for Judaism, respectively. The three monotheisms, further, confront one and the same problem, and the basic logic of monotheism dictates the range of solutions that each of the monotheisms addresses: the problem of God's justice and mercy and how these are to be reconciled with the condition of the everyday world. A religion of numerous gods finds many solutions to one problem; a religion of only one God presents one to many. Life is seldom fair. Rules rarely work. To explain the reason why, polytheisms adduce multiple causes of chaos, a god per anomaly. Diverse gods do various things, so, it stands to reason, ordinarily outcomes conflict. Monotheism by nature explains many things in a single way. One God rules. Life is meant to be fair, and just rules are supposed to describe what is ordinary, all in the name of that one and only God. So in monotheism a simple logic governs to limit ways of making sense of things. But that logic contains its own dialectics. If one true God has done everything, then, since he is God all-powerful and omniscient, all things are credited to and blamed on him. In that case he can be either good or bad, just or unjust but not both. Within that framework, the three monotheisms pursue their distinctive expressions of the common faith in the one and only God, just and merciful, who created the world and made himself known through men of his choice and words of his own selection. (Paul Mojzes, Leonard Swidler, 2002) Judaism and Islam concur that culture and society cohere with religion, so there is no distinction between secularity and religiosity, state and church such as Christianity from Constantine's time forward contemplated. They in particular sustain comparison because they are sufficiently congruent in basic, indicative traits for the exercise to yield revealing contrast: alike, and then not alike, in that order. Both are religions of law, both monotheisms conceive of God in the same terms, both place heavy stress upon the formation of a society that conforms to God's will, expressed in verbal revelation having to do with social norms, and both set forth through jurisprudence an elaborate and articulated message. Different from all other religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a common belief in one, unique God, creator of heaven and earth, whose self-manifestation is achieved through particular prophets, beginning with Moses, continuing, for Christianity and Islam, with Jesus, and ending, for Islam, with Muhammad. So far as Judaism is the religion of the written Torah, Christianity tells the story of Judaism within its own narrative, and Islam takes account of the stories of both Judaism and Christianity. For its part, Judaism in the confrontation with triumphant Christianity and Islam had to take account of the claim of the newcomers to worship the one and only God who made Himself known to holy Israel at Sinai. And Judaism did not classify the new monotheisms as idolatry, which category encompassed all other religions through all time. It follows that the three monotheisms accord recognition to one another, if not always unambiguously and if never enthusiastically. Not only so, but all three accord special status to the Hebrew scriptures of ancient Israel. All three concur that, in addition to the Israelite scriptures, a further revelation, another revealed scripture, is required. That additional revelation is the Oral Torah for Judaism, the New Testament for Christianity, and the Qur'an for Islam. It has already been shown in several systematic works that the theologies of formative Christianity and Judaism build upon comparable category formations. 1With so much in common, the comparison and contrast of each with the other two certainly promise considerable enlightenment. But Judaism and Islam in one important way stand closer together than either does to the third companion in the trilogy of monotheism, Christianity. That way is their conviction that law embodying public policy as much as theology sets forth religious truth. In their classical statements, Islam and Judaism agree that the religious regulation of everyday life, extending to acutely detailed dimensions of ordinary conduct, is required to establish a godly society, a people and state formed in accord with God's will. Both stress norms of behavior as much as of belief, emphasis upon the formation, by the faithful, of a state governed by God's law as interpreted and applied by God's representatives. Judaism, appealing to the prophet Moses, and Islam, responding to the prophet Muhammad, concur that the community of the faithful form not only a religious but a political entity. The Israel envisioned by Moses governed itself by the law revealed by God to Moses at Sinai, and the abode of Islam envisioned by Muhammad would constitute a community meant to realize the law of God set forth in the Qur'an and associated teachings. This is not to suggest that Christianity took the position of indifference to public policy or left law outside of its realm of governance; far from it. But Judaism and Islam tell themselves the story of origins within the framework of the godly state, the Israel called into being by God at Sinai through the prophet Moses, for example, being instructed about constructing courts and settling claims of damages for the goring ox, not only building a tabernacle and setting up an altar for offerings to God. Islam from the beginning understood itself as a political entity, with realization of the divine will through revealed law as its reason for existence. For its part, Christianity spent three centuries without thinking a great deal about law beyond the realm of Church order, paying slight attention, except as victim, to matters of public policy and politics. Then, from the time of Constantine, while aspiring to infuse politics with its vision, Christianity recognized a distinction between the state and the church that Judaism and Islam never contemplated and could never have conceived. That is why the halakhah for Judaism and Shari'a for Islam find no counterpart in a uniform legal code joining civil to canon law in Christianity. So while the Christian emperors worked out an autonomous position vis--vis Church authority (for example, the Emperor and the Pope in the West's Holy Roman Empire), in the theory of the halakhah and Shari'a religious and civil authority were joined. They were not to be distinguished in practice either. It follows that for Judaism and Islam, a single system of law, embodied in a single cadre of religio-legal authorities, would undertake to define the social order in conformity with God's revealed will. That in the ordinary, political sense, in the historical imagination of their respective faiths, Moses and Muhammad govern, but Jesus never does, suffices to differentiate Judaism and Islam from Christianity. (Jane Dammen Mcauliffe, Barry D. Walfish, Joseph W. Goering, 2003) There are three problems that define our task: two are closely related and treated and the third is addressed. First, people recognize that a given religion encompasses diverse systems of belief and behavior. "Judaism" stands for kindred religious systems. The recognition that these systems are to be differentiated, each by its generative myth and distinctive symbolic system, requires us to define not a single Judaism but multiple Judaisms. The indicative traits of a given system may emerge from the variables of time, space, or inner logic. So systemic description of Judaism demands that we treat as separate the Judaism of one period from that of another, the Judaism of one location from that of another, or the Judaic religious beliefs and practices of one group from those of another, whether separated in time or in space or living side by side, as in the contemporary world with its Reform and Orthodox Judaisms, and, among Orthodox Judaisms, many systems with less in common than in conflict. 2That is why those who study religion today are accustomed to refer to "Judaisms," just as "Christianities" must be distinguished, whether Roman Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. Along the same lines when it comes to Islam, the more we learn about the complexity of the world of Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia, from the seventh century CE to the twenty-first, the more diverse that world appears. True, the differences between Sunni and Shi'i Islam are not of the same order as the differences among Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christianity, or among Orthodox Judaisms. But they do create, within Islam, two vast systems for the Islamic social and political order. There are other Islams as well; including sects described by the majority as heretical but whose adherents nonetheless describe themselves as Muslim (as much as Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism all call themselves Judaism). If, therefore, Islam to the uneducated eye presents a uniform visage, to the experienced, discerning vision Islam proves as plural in its distinctive way as do Judaism and Christianity in theirs. That is not to mention other academic constructions of complex things into simple compositions such as Buddhism or Hinduism. People now recognize that it is the outsider who sees uniformity, the insider who perceives difference; to study world religions, we treat as homogeneous what demands analysis and differentiation. And that defines the intellectual circumstance in which we carry out the work of comparing religions. The problem then becomes apparent when we compare religions: which Judaism to which Islam is subject to comparison Whence the ideal type subject to inquiry Second, when we speak of a religion, we have to determine the evidence we deem definitive. Here we take account not only of different systems, but, within a given system and among the community of the faithful as a whole (however differentiated in way of life, world view, and theory of the social entity), diverse modes and types of religiosity, belief and expression. Within the body of the faithful co-exist the virtuosi, engaged in intellect, concerned for doctrine and law; the deeply spiritual, whose devotion to the transcendent lifts them beyond the concerns of daily life; and common folk, who bring to prayer their own practical concerns. Specifically, when we compare religions, to what exactly do we make reference: the beliefs and practices of books as set forth by the religious virtuosi (legal or spiritual), or the actualities of local practice and particular conviction of a given time and place We may describe a religion by appeal to the official beliefs or the convictions of ordinary folk, who commonly take their own path to heaven. To take the familiar, Catholic case, the official teaching on birth control, endorsed by the Pope and the bishops, and the actualities of Catholic practice do not exactly coincide. So we have to address the issue: whose version of a given system within a particular religious tradition do we choose for comparison with which version in some corresponding system of that other religious tradition Third, we come to the question of category formation. Specifically, when we set side by side a particular Judaic religious system with a particular Islamic one, the classical with the classical, for instance, we may find not only areas in which the two overlap and address the same topics, but areas in which each tradition speaks of a topic that the other does not treat at all, or does not treat in the same proportion. Religions in some ways prove concentric; in other ways each viewed against the model of the other will emerge as eccentric. The categories intersect only partially. If, for example, we wish to compare the Christology of Catholic Christianity with the Christology of Reform Judaism, we shall find little to say and nothing that makes much sense. (James Parkes, 1960). The apostle Paul's dietary laws do not eat the remains of offerings made to idols hardly compare in volume, density, or depth with the dietary laws we know in Rabbinic Judaism, so to compare the one with the other would be to ignore the matter of proportions. Then again, where two religions do address the same issue, what they say may prove unintelligible to the other. For example, the enlandisement of Judaism in reference to the Land of Israel does not correspond in any close or exact way to the standing, in Islam, of Mecca and Medina. So the possibility that one religion focuses upon topics utterly ignored by the other, or treats as central issues deemed marginal by the other, has to be addressed: whose category formation governs, and how do we compare two (or more) category formations that do not exactly form counterparts one to the other The answer to that question derives from the decision made by those who undertake comparison: who takes the lead in defining matters, and who responds to whom The one who speaks first dictates the norm; the respondent, the abnormal. Then comparison wrongly structured merely recapitulates theological apologetics. But how are we to preserve for both participants in the work of comparison the status of normality norm-setting These three obstacles to the comparison of one religion to another, Judaism to Islam and Islam to Judaism, demand attention at the outset. If we ignore them, we may try to compare systems or parts of systems that are quite out of phase with one another and so do not sustain comparison at all. We shall be left merely to record the cacophony that results from different people talking about different things to different people. We may turn out to compare discourse and data of one kind deriving from a given religion with those of quite another order altogether deriving from the other religion: sophisticated theology with unreflective piety, for example. That hardly yields perspective on the things compared. Finally, we may end up comparing things that do not sustain comparison because they are not really comparable at all apples to Australians, because both begin with an A, for instance. One set of categories, characteristic of one religion, may not afford the possibility of comparison and contrast with the utterly out-of-phase category formation of the other religion. Reference: James Parkes (1960). The Foundations of Judaism and Christianity; Quadrangle Books Jane Dammen Mcauliffe, Barry D. Walfish, Joseph W. Goering (2003). With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Oxford University Press Paul Mojzes, Leonard Swidler (2002). Common Elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 39 Read More