This video is about 'The Trinity: a Muslim Perspective' and I want to just read some extracts
from a text of a lecture given to a group of Christians at the University of Oxford some years
ago by Abdul Hakim Murad, he's also known as Dr Tim Winter. He's a professor of Islamic Studies at the
University of Cambridge he's a convert to Islam. He gave the following lecture as I said to a
group of students at Oxford some time ago. I'm not going to read the whole lecture but I am going to
read most of it. I think it's a really fascinating insight into a scholarly Muslim perspective
on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and this avoids all the usual kind of criticisms
of Da'wah that one usually hears. This is a much more nuanced and more academic approach - maybe both
approaches have their role in life but this one is quite different from the usual fare you will hear.
So he begins: "A number of difficulties will beset any presentation of Muslim understandings
of the Trinity. Not the least of these is the fact that these Muslim understandings have been
almost as diverse and as numerous as those obtaining among Christian scholars themselves.
It is true that medieval Islam knew much more about Christian doctrine than the doctrines of
the doctors of the Church did about Islam, for the obvious reason that Muslim societies contained
literate minorities with whom one could debate something which was not
normally the case in Christendom. Muslim- Christian dialogue, a novelty in the West,
has a long history in the Middle East going back at least as far as the polite debates between
St john of Damascus and the Muslim scholars of 7th century Syria.
And yet reading our theologians (by which Tim Winter means Muslims of course) one usually
concludes that most of them never quite got the point about the Trinity. Their analysis can usually
be faulted on grounds not of unsophistication but of insufficient familiarity with the
complexities of Scholastic or Eastern Trinitarian thinking. Often they merely tilt at windmills.
There were I think two reasons for this. Firstly, the doctrine of the Trinity was the most notorious
point at issue between Christianity and Islam and hence was freighted with fierce passions.
For the pre-modern Muslim mind, Christian invaders crusaders, inquisitors, and the rest were primarily
obsessed with forcing the doctrine of the Trinity on their hapless Muslim enemies. It is recalled
even today among Muslims in Russia that when Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan, capital of the Volga
Muslims, he told its people that they could escape the sword by "praising with us the Most Blessed
Trinity for generation unto generation." Even today in Bosnia, Serb irregulars used a three-fingered
Trinity salute as a gesture of defiance against their Muslim enemies. And so on. Much Muslim
theologizing about the Trinity has hence been set in a bitterly polemical context of fear and often
outright hatred: the Trinity as the very symbol of the unknown but violent Other lurking on the
barbarous northern shores of the Mediterranean, scene of every kind of demonic wickedness and cruelty.
To this distortion one has to add, I think, (says Dr Tim Winter) some problems posed by
the doctrine of the Trinity itself. Islam, while it has produced great thinkers, has nonetheless
put fewer of its epistemological eggs in the theological basket than has Christianity.
Reading Muslim presentations of the Trinity one cannot help but detect a sense of impatience.
One of the virtues of this Semitic type of consciousness is the conviction that ultimate
reality must be ultimately simple, and that the Nicene talk (this is a Council of Nicaea in the 4th
century) Nicene talk of a deity with three persons, one of whom has two natures, but who are all
somehow reducible to authentic unity, quite apart from being rationally dubious,
seems intuitively wrong. (I think here Tim winter may be alluding to the fitra which I did
a video on recently - this instinctive sense of belief in one God that our species seems to have).
God, the final ground of all being, surely does not need to be so complicated. These two
obstacles to a correct understanding of the Trinity do to some extent persist even today.
But a new obstacle has in the past century or so presented itself in as much as the old Western
Christian consensus on what the Trinity meant, which was always a fragile consensus,
no longer seems to obtain amongst many serious Christian scholars. Surveying the astonishing bulk
and vigor of Christian theological output, Muslims can find it difficult to know precisely how
most Christians understand the Trinity. It is also our experience that Christians are usually
keener to debate other topics (it's my experience as well!) and we tend to conclude that this is
because they themselves are uncomfortable with aspects of their Trinitarian ideology.
What I will try to do, then, is to set out my own understanding as a Muslim,
of the Trinitarian doctrine. I would start by making the obvious point that i
that i recognize that a lot is at stake here for historic Christian orthodoxy
the fundamental doctrine of Trinity makes no sense unless the doctrines of incarnation and atonement
are also accepted. St Anselm in his 'Cur deus Homo' (in English 'Why God became Man') showed that
the concept of atonement demanded that Christ had to be God since only an infinite sacrifice could
atone for the limitless evil of humanity, which was, in Saint Augustine's words "a massa damnata" that's
Latin for 'a damned mass' because of Adam's original sin. By the way according to Augustine
if you're an unbaptized baby and you died you were going to hell so you know it's pretty severe.
Jesus of Nazareth was hence God incarnate walking on earth, distinct from God the Father
dwelling in heaven and hearing our prayers. It thus became necessary to think of God as at least
two in one' who were at least for a while existing in heaven and on earth as distinct entities.
(No similarity to polytheism there! that's me by the way). In early Christianity, the Logos
which was the Christ-spirit believed to be active as a divine presence in human life,
in time became hypostatized as a third person, and so the Trinity was born. No doubt this process was
shaped by the triadic beliefs which hovered in the Near Eastern air of the time, many of which
included belief in a divine atonement figure. So Tim Winter here is drawing attention to the
quite similar uh religious systems that existed in the pagan world at that time and remember of
course the Judaism as in its belief in one god was actually unique amongst the religions of
the ancient world but christianity was much less dissimilar to what was going on in the pagan world.
Dr Tim Winter continues: "Now looking at the evidence for this process, i have to confess i am not a
biblical scholar armed with the dazzling array of philological qualifications deployed by so
many others (Tim Winter is being modest here) but it does seem to me that a consensus has been emerging
amongst serious historians preeminent among whom our figures such as Professor Geza Vermes
of Oxford University that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed or taught that he was
the second person of a divine trinity. We know that he was intensely conscious of God as a divine and
loving father and that he dedicated his ministry to proclaiming the imminence of God's kingdom and
to explaining how human creatures could transform themselves in preparation for that momentous time.
He believed himself to be the messiah and the son of man foretold by the prophets we know from the
study of first century judaism recently made accessible by the qumran discoveries (this is
the Dead Sea Scrolls) that neither of these terms would have been understood as implying divinity
they merely denoted purified servants of God.
An Englishman must have his tea! The term 'son of God' frequently invoked in patristic and medieval
thinking to prop up the doctrine of jesus's divinity was in fact similarly unpersuasive in the
Old Testament and in wider Near Eastern usage it can be applied to kings pharaohs, miracle workers,
and others yet when Paul or saint Paul carried his version of the Christian message beyond jewish
boundaries into the wider gentile world this image of christ's sonship was interpreted not
metaphorically but metaphysically. So it wasn't a figure of speech it was a hard literal description
of something. The resultant tale of controversies anathemas and political interventions is complex
but what is clear is that the Hellenized Christ who in one nature was of one substance with God
and in another nature was a one substance with humanity bore no significant resemblance to the
ascetic prophet who had walked the roads of Galilee some three centuries before.
From the Muslim point of view this desemiticising of Jesus was a catastrophe. So taking away the
Jewishness, the semitic culture and historical context of Jesus - as the story about Jesus went into
the pagan world this was from the Muslim view a catastrophe. Three centuries after Nicaea the
Quran stated: "The Messiah, son of Mary was no other than a messenger, messengers the
like of whom have passed away before him ... O people of the Book - stress not in your religion
other than the truth and follow not the vain desires of a people who went astray before you."
That's Surah al-Maida, verse 75. And again: "O people of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion,
nor utter anything concerning God save the truth. The Messiah Jesus son of Mary, was
only a messenger of God and His word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from Him.
So believe in God and his messengers, and do not say 'Three'. Desist, it will be better for you.
God is only One God.... The Messiah would never have scorned to be a slave of God." Surah al-Nisa 171-2.
The Qur'anic term for 'exaggeration' used here, 'ghuluww', became a standard term in Muslim heresiography for any
tendency muslim or otherwise which attributed divinity to a revered and charismatic figure.
We are told that during the life of the prophet's son-in-law Ali a few of his devoted followers of
iraq where hellenistic and pagan cultures form the background of many converts described him as
god or the vehicle of a divine incarnation. The claim of course irritated Ali profoundly
and he banished those who made it from his sight but even today marginal islamic sectaries like the
Kizilbash of Turkey or the Alawites of the Syrian mountains maintain an esoteric cosmology which
asserts that God became incarnate in Ali and then in the succession of imams who descended from him.
Mainstream islam however despite its rapid spread over non-semitic populations
never succumbed to this temptation
The 12th century theologian Al-Ghazali had summed up the dangers of when he wrote that
the Christians had been so dazzled by the divine light reflected in the mirror-like heart of Jesus
that they mistook the mirror for the light itself and worshipped it but what was happening to jesus
was not categorically distinct from what happened and may continue to happen to any purified human
soul that has attained the rank of sainthood the presence of divine light in jesus heart does not
logically entail a doctrine of jesus's primordial existence as a hypostasis in divine trinity
there are other implications of trinitarian doctrine which concern muslims perhaps once you
briefly mention our words about the doctrine of atonement which implies that god is only
capable of really forgiving us when jesus has borne our just punishment by dying on the cross
Professor John Hick he was a professor at Birmingham university and probably the world's
leading uh philosopher of religion has remarked (he was a christian by the way) has remarked that "a
forgiveness that has to be bought by full payment of the moral debt is not in fact forgiveness at."
Now this is a really important point i'm going off the text here because christians often say
as if there's no incoherence that Jesus paid our debt on the cross and forgave our sins.
Well no, if you pay a debt then there's no forgiveness if you forgive then you're not
paying a debt they are two completely conceptually distinct ideas they're not the same and christians
think that paying a debt and forgiving a debt are the same and they're not they're quite different.
More coherently, Dr Tim Winter continues, "surely is the teaching of jesus himself
in the parable of the prodigal son this is in luke's gospel chapter 15 by the way who is fully
forgiven by his father despite the absence of a blood sacrifice to appease his sense of justice
the famous lord's prayer that superb petition for forgiveness nowhere implies the need for
atonement or redemption that's interesting tim winton mentions this if you read luke's gospel
jesus teaching there about sin forgiveness reconciliation and so on nowhere does it mention a
need for a blood sacrifice nor does it say this will only happen when jesus dies on the cross
that what he teaches is very islamic and this is where a lot of jesus authentic teaching i think
is still to be found in the teaching of jesus attributed to him in the gospel of luke jesus's
own doctrine of of god's forgiveness as recorded in the gospels is in fact entirely intelligible
in terms of the jewish bible and islamic conceptions is what tim winters says god
can forgive all sins it says the quran and in a well-known hadith of the prophet we are told
on the day of judgment a herald shall cry out god's word from beneath the throne saying o nation
of Muhammad all that was due to me from you i forgive you now and only the rights which you owe
owed to one another remain thus forgive one another and enter heaven through my mercy
something that jesus could have said quite easily i think and lastly in a famous incident uh this
is the final passage i'll quote from this text it is related that a boy was standing under the sun
on a hot summer's day he was seen by a woman concealed among the people who made her way
forward vigorously until she took up took up the child and clutched him to her breast
then she turned her back to the valley to keep the heat away from him saying my son my son
at this the people wept and were distracted from everything that they were doing then
the messenger of god upon whom be peace came up he they told him of what had happened
and he was delighted to see their compassion then he gave them glad news saying
marvel you at this woman's compassion for her son and they said that they did and he declared truly
the exalted god shall be even more compassionate towards you than this woman towards her son
at this the muslims went their ways in greatest rapture and joy and that could have been taken
from the gospel of luke but it was said on the mouths on the mouth of muhammad not jesus
so that's it i think that's a fascinating insight into Tim Winter's understanding he is probably one
of the greatest scholars Muslim scholars in the west. Not everything that he says is agreed upon by
other muslims but i think on his central points here about a muslim perspective on the trinity
i think everyone muslims will all agree on that. I hope that was of interest. Until next time.