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INTERFAITH:
Archbishop of
Canterbury's Speech at al-Azhar
Address at al-Azhar al-Sharif, Cairo
I am very deeply moved
by the honour of being invited to address you in this place, as
a guest and, I hope, as a friend. It is some twenty five years
since I first visited this great city and al-Azhar mosque; and I
can remember my wonder and delight at the quality of its
buildings and the atmosphere of dedication and calm reflection
expressed in the very stones of the walls.
I am here as a Christian, to speak to you of some of those
matters which both unite us and divide us. In the world as it is
now developing, it is of the most central importance that we as
Christians and Muslims understand one another better. I am
delighted at the continuing commitment to this process that has
been shown here, a commitment evident in these last few days.
And better understanding means understanding our differences as
well as our common vision. In these few remarks, I want to
meditate a little on the greatest theme of both Muslim and
Christian faith, the doctrine of God; and I want to suggest how,
despite some of our differences, we can, in the light of our
belief about Almighty God, together make certain affirmations to
the world about the way to peace and justice for human beings.
If I understand the doctrine of Islam correctly, its most
important conviction can be expressed in the word tawhid. God is
one. No being is associated with God as a second reality
deserving of worship and obedience. God has no need of any being
outside his own eternal and self-sufficient life. In these
words, I do no more than repeat some of the most luminous and
uncompromising words of the Qur’an, which I give in the new
translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem.
‘God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever
Watchful.’ (al Baqara 255)
‘He is God the One, God the eternal.
He fathered no one nor was he fathered.
No one is comparable to Him.’ (al ’Ikhlaas 1-4)
This last text reminds the Christian that this great affirmation
of the uniqueness of God is what has always caused Muslims to
look with suspicion at Christian doctrines of God. Christian
belief about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appears at once
to compromise the belief that God has no other being associated
with him. How can we call God al Qayyuum, the Self-sufficient,
if he is not alone? So we hear in al Baqara 115-117,
‘The East and the West belong to God:
wherever you turn, there is His Face.
God is all pervading and all knowing.
They have asserted, “God has a child.”
May He be exalted! No!
Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him,
everything devoutly obeys His will.
He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth,
and when He decrees something, He says only “Be,” and it is.’
The belief that God could have a son is, for the faithful
Muslim, a belief suggesting that God needs something other than
himself and is subject to the processes of limited bodies by
‘begetting’ a child. How can such a God be truly free and
sovereign? For we know that he is able to bring the world into
being by his word alone.
Yet these anxieties do not belong only to Muslims. Egypt was, in
the first centuries of the Christian era, the location of great
debates on just such matters. Indeed, without the contribution
of Egypt, Christian theology would have been infinitely poorer,
for many of the greatest minds of that period were natives of
Alexandria. And one of the great concerns of these thinkers and
their successors was this: if Christians say that the eternal
Word and power of God was fully present in Jesus, son of Mary,
can we avoid saying this in such a way as to imply that God is
subject to a physical process, or that God has a second being
alongside him? These Christian sages believed as strongly as any
Muslim that God was self-sufficient and free, and that he could
not be affected or limited by physical processes and did not act
as a physical cause among others. They say quite explicitly that
when we speak of the father ‘begetting’ the Son, we must put out
of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a
process like the processes of the world.
Those Christian thinkers and their successors developed a
doctrine which tried to clarify this: they said that the name
‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person, a limited
being with a father and mother and a place that they inhabit
within the world. ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life – eternal
and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. And
that life is lived eternally in three ways which are made known
to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people
and in the life of Jesus. There is a source of life, an
expression of life and a sharing of life. In human language we
say, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, but we do not mean one God
with two beings
alongside him, or three gods of limited power. Just as we say,
‘Here is my hand, and these are the actions my one hand
performs’, but it is not different from the actions of my five
fingers, so with God: this is God, the One, the Living and
Self-subsistent, but what God does is not different from the
life which is eternally at the same time a source and an
expression and a sharing of life.
Since God’s life is always an intelligent and purposeful life,
each of these dimensions of divine life can be thought of as a
center of mind and love; but this does not mean that God
‘contains’ three different individuals, separate from each other
as human individuals are.
And Christians believe that this life enters into ours in a
limited degree.
When God takes away our evildoing and our guilt, when he
forgives us and sets us free, he breathes new life into us, as
he breathed life into Adam at the first. That breathing into us
we call the ‘Spirit’. As we become mature in our new life, we
become more and more like the expression of divine life, the
Word whom we encounter in Jesus. Because Jesus prayed to the
source of his life as ‘Father’, we call the eternal expression
of God’s life the ‘Son’. And so too we pray to the source of
divine life in the way that Jesus taught us, and we say ‘Father’
to this divine reality.
But in no way does the true Christian say that the life and
action of God could be divided into separate parts, as if it
were a material thing. In no way does the true Christian say
that there is more than one God or that God needs some other in
order to act or that God promotes some other being to share his
glory. There is one divine action, one divine will; yet (like
the fingers of
the hand) there are three ways in which that life is real, and
it is only in those three ways that the divine life is real – as
source and expression and sharing. It is because of those three
ways in which divine life exists that Christians speak as they
do about what it means to grow in holiness.
And the Christian also says something which may again be a
source of disagreement. God is a loving God, as we all agree;
but, says the Christian, God does not love simply because he
decides to love. He is always, eternally, loving. His very
nature, his definition is love. And the interaction and relation
between the three ways in which God lives, the source and the
expression and the
sharing, is eternally the way God exists. The three centers of
divine action, which we call Father, Son and Spirit, pour out
the divine life to each other for all eternity, a sort of
perfect circle of giving and receiving. And the only word we can
use for that relationship of pouring out and giving is love. So
as we grow in holiness, we become closer and closer in our
actions and thoughts to the complete self-giving that always
exists perfectly in God’s life. Towards this fullness we are all
called to travel and grow.
Now these are difficult matters, and the greatest minds of the
Christian Church have always found them hard to put into words.
But what I wish to say to you today is simply that the
disagreement between Christian and Muslim is not, I believe, a
disagreement about the nature of God as One and Living and
Self-subsistent. For us as for you, it is essential to think of
God as a life that has no limit, as a life that is free. God is
never to be listed alongside other beings. All through the
centuries that we call the Middle Ages, Christians, Muslims and
Jews thought alike about this, and our greatest philosophers,
Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Maimonides and others, all worked to
make this clear. They would all have agreed that only if God is
alone and needs no other is he worthy of our complete worship
and devotion. God is not a being who is like us, only greater
and more powerful. If God were like us only much greater, we
might worship him out of fear instead of giving him free
obedience and love. But the true God’s freedom is infinite and
he can never be limited by any definition. When we have used up
all the names that human language can find for him, we shall
have spoken true things of him, but never expressed the whole
truth which is hidden from created minds. And so we adore him in
trust and thankfulness but we accept that we shall never have
him in our grasp.
Together we can acknowledge these things. And it is sad that
sometimes an unfaithful or careless Christian way of speaking
has led Muslims and Jews to believe that we have a doctrine of
God that does not recognize the oneness and sufficiency of God,
or that we worship something less than the One, the Eternal. In
our conversations with Muslim friends, we Christians are rightly
challenged
to think more deeply, to think as our Egyptian Christian fathers
did, about the unity of Almighty God.
But there is a practical consequence of this belief about the
One Living God. If God is truly not a part of the world, truly
self-sufficient, then his will never depends upon how things
turn out in the world. We cannot work out what is just and good
simply from what seems to work, from what the world finds
successful or easy or popular. What is good and just is rooted
in eternal truth,
in the nature of God, who is what he is quite independently of
what the world is and what the world thinks. The world may tell
us that we should behave in such and such a way – that we should
seek only to make and keep money, that we should break our
promises, that we should take revenge and show no mercy, that we
should take our pleasures where we like. Sometimes behavior of
this sort seems to bring success in the world. But the believer
knows that no amount of
worldly success can make bad things good, because nothing in the
world can change the will of God, who is beyond all change and
cannot be affected or weakened by any other being. So we hold to
our calling to virtue and generosity and justice whatever may
happen, even if, today and tomorrow, it does not make our life
easy and comfortable. We struggle in our interior, spiritual
battle, to be faithful to God’s will.
The greatest challenge today for our world is how to react to
circumstances in a way that is faithful to God’s will.
Undoubtedly, greed and revenge affect all of us. We feel that we
want to defend ourselves in the way that a person without faith
or hope or love would understand – in anger and bitterness and
unforgiving cruelty. But when we act in such a way, we show that
we do not
really believe in a God who is living and self-sufficient. We do
not believe that God’s will is enough; we act as though the
circumstances of this world could so change things that cruelty
and fear could become the right tools with which to defend
ourselves.
So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his neighbor
of another faith following the ways of this world instead of the
peaceful will of God, he must remind his neighbor of the nature
of the one God we look to, whose will cannot be changed and who
will himself see that justice is done. Once we let go of
justice, fairness and respect in our dealings with one another,
we have dishonored God as well as human beings. I am deeply
grateful that it was once again in this country that Jewish,
Christian and Muslim leaders from the Holy Land under the
co-chairmanship of the Grand Imam, Dr Tantawy, signed the
Alexandria Declaration together, with its commitment to respect
for the rights of the peoples of the Holy Land, its call for
justice, and its refusal of terror
and violence. How much we still need that vision to inspire us
today, as the tragedies of this region of the world continue to
resist settlement!
There is no doubt that the present violence throws a deep shadow
over conversations between the West and the Muslim world. Three
years ago today, I was one of those who shared just a little in
the terrible experience of the events in New York. I was in a
building just a short distance from the World Trade Center that
morning, and for a while I and my colleagues were trapped there;
we
were among those fortunate enough to be able to get out of the
area just as the second tower collapsed, and we saw at first
hand something of the nightmare and the suffering of that day.
On the day after, I was asked by a journalist for some of my
reactions. I said that when someone spoke to us in the language
of hatred or abuse, we had a choice about what language we might
use to reply. So when someone ‘spoke’ to us in violence and
murder, we could choose what we should do. We may rightly want
to defend ourselves and one another – our people, our families,
the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to act
in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts
done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we
imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to
show our belief in the living God who always requires of us
justice and goodness.
So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in
violent revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the
innocent, that person bears witness to the true God. They have
stepped outside the way the faithless world thinks. A person
without faith, hope and love may say, If I do not use
indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no safety for me.
The believer says, My
safety is with God, whose justice can never be defeated. If I
defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way that honors God and
God’s image in others, and that does not offend against God’s
justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and
the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards
the One Living and Almighty God.
This is why it is important to be clear about the God we
worship. There is, as you will have seen, a great difference
between what I as a Christian must say and what the Muslim will
say; but we agree absolutely that God has no need of any other
being, and that God is not a mixture or a society of different
beings. And if we are committed to this God, we shall be able to
do justice and
act rightly even when the world around us expects us to follow
its own violent ways.
And just as I have said that Christians have sometimes spoken
carelessly about God and led others to think they believe less
than they truly do, so all of us, Jews, Muslims and Christians,
have sometimes spoken carelessly and let people think that we
live by the same standards as those who have no faith or love,
appearing to encourage violence and terror. If we look back to
the Alexandria Declaration, we see how it is possible for all of
us, in the light of our conviction about God, to be committed to
something different from the world’s ways; there we find a
promise to approach each other with respect and patience and to
turn away from open battle, even when we feel threatened by each
other.
There too we find the common commitment not to use the name of
God to justify violence and injustice. It has been impressive to
hear in recent days the strength and clarity with which so many
Muslim nations and Muslim leaders have condemned the unspeakable
atrocities in Beslan. The common commitment of Muslims and
Christians, as of all people of compassion, hope and
intelligence, is not for a moment in doubt in this context.
In our own country, we have recently conducted a process in
which Muslims and Christians together have listened to the
concerns and hopes of many local communities, and we are now
hoping to set up a national forum in which the anxieties of
Muslim communities may be expressed and freely discussed. And we
have also been discussing how each of the religious communities
in Britain should react when any one of them is under threat or
open attack – so that we hope a
Christian community will give support to local Muslims if a
mosque is attacked, and Muslims may do the same for local Jews
if a synagogue is attacked or a cemetery desecrated, and Muslims
and Jews will stand alongside Christians when they are abused
and attacked. We pray that this willingness to stand alongside
each other will be shared in other nations.
We believe that in such local ways we can, despite our
disagreements, show to the world a different standard of
behavior, one that is worthy of the all-powerful and
self-sufficient God we worship, worthy of him in a way that
crusades and terrorism and oppression are not. All of us need to
be able to repent before God for our errors and for the ways in
which we are enslaved by a greedy and fearful world. But as our
Christian scriptures say, we must not be conformed to this world
but transformed, with our minds renewed (Romans 12.2).
If we truly understand the nature of our God, our minds will be
renewed. We do not only teach truths about God, we allow those
truths to change our lives.
May we all find the strength and the courage from Almighty God
to honor him by seeking peace together in fairness and respect
and thanksgiving for each other.
‘To be one of those who believe and urge one another to
steadfastness and compassion.’ (al Balad 17).
And as Jesus says in our own Christian Scriptures,
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they will be shown mercy…
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they will be called children of God (Matthew 5.6-7, 9).
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