Islam and Catholicism: Beyond reason versus faith | The Economist

The Economist’s commentary on faith, reason, Islam and Catholicism:

These are choppy seas for any theologian or historian of religion to navigate.  In every faith that believes in divine revelation—the idea that at certain moments, God discloses essential truths about Himself or the universe—there is bound to be a tension between revelation and reason as methods of understanding the world. Christians and Muslims have found many different answers to that dilemma.  It’s probably true, on balance, that after much internal debate, Islamic thought from the Middle Ages onwards put more emphasis on divine revelation, while Christianity as it emerged in western Europe put more stress on reason. But that did not make the west Europeans behave more peacefully.

Over the centuries, Muslim thinkers have had a lot to say about reason, including the reasonableness of God; and many Christian texts—including the New Testament—stress the fact that God can utterly trump and render meaningless whatever passes for intelligent reason among unaided human minds.

Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing that Christian and Muslim thinkers could and should talk about in a civilised way. They cant and wont agree on the question of when and to whom God definitively revealed himself—unless one or the other religion ceases to exist. But they do face common intellectual dilemmas, and they can interact constructively as well as destructively. Not all the exchanges between Christianity and Islam in the medieval era were as abrasive as the Byzantine emperors dialogue quoted by Benedict.

His big failure of tact, perhaps, lay in making generalisations about Islam which relied on Christian commentaries, instead of letting Islamic sources speak for themselves. To any Muslim listener, his tone sounded “Orientalist” and condescending. But an indirect result of the furore was the “Common Word” initiative launched in 2007 by 138 Muslim scholars who invited their Christian counterparts to a debate on the subject of “love of neighbour and love of God”—and the resulting debate continues in universities like Yale and Cambridge.

None of that is much help, you might say, to people threatened by the nihilist fury of al-Qaeda or Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria. But ill-judged pronouncements in the world of academia can certainly have a negative effect on the streets. It would be nice to think that the opposite is also the case: that jaw-jaw is not merely better than war-war but at least a partial antidote.

Islam and Catholicism: Beyond reason versus faith | The Economist.