Reposted permission, from The Cripple Gate.
Almost every system or religion proposes some sort of love. From systems in the east to the west, they feature some concept of love. Both the Qur’an and the Bible do so. They both teach that God is loving. But, what do they mean by love? And, what is it about the God of the Qur’an and the God of the Bible that renders them loving? Most assertions of love remain in realm of abstract or human-to-human benevolence. How can we tangibly measure love?
Reposted with permission from The Cripplegate.
You’ve probably heard it said. “All of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—they all worship the same God.” More and more today, we hear such things from the mouths and tweets of idealized and uninformed westerners.
However, such thinking is a hazardous ignorance. The Qur’an does not believe that Allah (the God of the Qur’an) and the God of Christianity are the same. Many Qur’anic teachers do not believe that they are the same. And neither do biblically thinking Christians.
“Two friends, one Muslim and one Christian, have just published a Quran for English speakers to help fulfill a sacred shared mission: to show people of the world’s largest and second-largest faith groups how much their holy books have in common.” RNS
Even in the final decade of Muhammad’s life, during which he engaged violent campaigns against non-Muslims, he did not carry out “evangelism by the sword,” Brooks said, but operated “according to a reasonable code of just war theory that was consistent with the developing Islamic worldview.” BPNews
