Islam and Christianity both claim to be rooted in God’s revelation to mankind. While there are certainly similarities in how these two religions understand revelation, there are also significant differences. This article is neither an apology for the Christian position nor an attack on the Muslim one. It is simply an exposition of the differences, aimed primarily (but not exclusively) at readers familiar with Islam but perhaps not with Christianity.
God revealing himself
Both Christianity and Islam view revelation as a means by which God interacts with humans and reveals something of his nature to them. To be sure, neither makes the claim that revelation makes it possible for people to understand everything about God. Nonetheless, both assert that in revealing to humans something about himself – and also who they are in relation to him – God makes it possible for them to be in a relationship with him. The two religions are in agreement that God calls all people to be in right relationship with him.
Progressive vs. repetitive revelation
Divine revelation, as understood by Christianity, is progressive: through narratives taking place over the course of several thousand years, God gradually reveals more and more of himself. In doing so, he gradually gathers together a people, whom he unites to himself through a series of covenants, with the ultimate goal of including all humanity in an everlasting covenant. Thus, he begins the process by revealing himself to Abraham and his family, then to the Jews (the descendants of Jacob), and finally – in the person of Jesus Christ – to all mankind. Islam, in contrast, teaches that God sent every nation a messenger instructing them to turn away from idolatry and serve him (Quran 16:36), but in each instance but the last, the message was either lost or corrupted. Muslims believe that the Quran is God’s direct revelation and his final communication to mankind, although it is essentially a reiteration of the same message sent earlier.
What does this distinction tell us about differences in how these two religions understand divine revelation? One observation is that Christianity views God’s self-revelation as inextricably bound up with human history. Certain events (for example, the exile of the Jews to Babylon) are not only episodes of human history but also vehicles used by God to communicate something about himself in relation to us. Such an understanding is not completely absent from Islam, but its scope is much narrower. Individual events might be understood as manifestations of God’s power or his providence, but (beyond being authored by God) there is nothing in particular that links them together. Thus, the divine economy, the plan of God as it unfolds in human history, figures much more prominently in Christianity than in Islam.
Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of revelation
Among the central teachings of Christianity is that God’s self-revelation reaches its climax in the person of Jesus Christ. To grasp the relevance of Jesus Christ to revelation, it is necessary to become acquainted – at least at a basic level – with two central doctrines of Christianity: the Trinity and the Incarnation.
The doctrine of the Trinity asserts that God exists eternally as three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), in a single divine nature. What does this mean? Catholic author Frank Sheed explains these terms succinctly: “The person is that which does the actions, the nature is that by which the
actions are done, or better, that from which the actions are drawn.” To say that the God has a single nature implies – among other things – that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all have one will. It also means that any action performed by God outside himself (for example, creation) will be an action of all three persons of the Trinity. (In the inner life of God, one person of the Trinity may be a subject of an action while another is the object: for instance, the Father gives everything he has to the Son, and the Son returns everything he receives to the Father.) A picture of God thus emerges of a single “nature” shared by three persons. This is difficult for us to comprehend, because every human we encounter is a single person in a single nature. Christians assent to this doctrine based on the text of the Bible and a consistent affirmation of it in the liturgy (pattern of worship) of the early Church.
The Incarnation is an event that took place in human history. At that moment, God created a human body and a human soul within the womb of the Virgin Mary and united those to the (already existing) divine person of the Son. This is the person we call Jesus Christ. He is God, because he is the Son, the second person of the Trinity, and hence shares his divine nature with the Father and the Spirit. He is also man, because he assumed a true human nature (body and soul) at the Incarnation. Thus, Jesus Christ has two natures, one human and one divine, but he is not some sort of Frankenstein. The two natures remain distinct from each other, neither ever impinging on or diminishing the other.
Without worrying about how Jesus could live a human life as God (which even Christians admit is a mystery beyond human comprehension!) it is apparent from the divinity of Jesus that he himself is divine revelation in its highest form. How much more explicitly could God reveal himself to us than by actually coming among us and communicating with us directly? This, though, is not the end of the story. Jesus Christ is not only God; he is also man. His life shows us – more perfectly than human words could ever express – how to live a life perfectly aligned with the divine will. This is why Christians believe that since the coming of Christ, there has not been – indeed, cannot be – any further revelation. He is also the fulfillment of revelation, in the sense that all revelation that preceded his coming in human history points to him.
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Jesus Christ, the Word of God
It is all well and good to understand “Father” and “Son” as names Christians use for two of the three persons of the Trinity, but why those terms in particular? Christians agree with Muslims in their belief that God, in his essence, does not have a physical body; therefore, the terms cannot have exactly the same meaning as, say, when speaking of a father cat and his son, or a human father and his son. A great deal can be learned from the first chapter of the Gospel according to John. The first sentences read as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3) John continues: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth . . . The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1: 14, 17-18) In the first three verses, John is telling us that the “Word” was both with God and was God. Early Jewish readers of his gospel knew God from the Old Testament; they were now being taught that the “Word” was in some sense distinct from God as they knew him, but in another sense identical to him. That relationship is clarified in verse 14, which specifies that the Word became incarnate and also likens his glory to that of a “father’s only son.” In verse 17, John clarifies that he is speaking of Jesus Christ, and verse 18 states unequivocally that the Son, like the Father, is God. The point here is that Christians understand Jesus Christ to be the Word of God. There is an analogy between the conception of thought in the human mind and the conception of a new life. This is why the eternal conception, in the mind of God, of his Word bears a relationship to God analogous to that between a (natural) son and his father. Human words approximate yet do not capture fully the depths of the human mind; however, the Word of God lacks no perfection in expressing who God is. Moreover, just as human words express the inner lives of people, so the Word of God expresses truths about God that would otherwise be hidden. The Incarnation allows the Word to express those truths in terms that humans can understand and to which they can relate.
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Revelation in a Person
The Muslim belief that the Quran is God’s direct revelation to mankind is in some sense analogous to the Christian belief in Jesus Christ as the Word of God. Muslims believe that in the Quran, God himself spoke to mankind, just as Christians believe God spoke to us in the person of Christ. Both religions present God as using something created, something finite, as a matrix for communicating with people: for Christianity, this is the human nature of Christ; for Islam, it is the Arabic language. The key difference is that the Muslim model is unidirectional, while the Christian one is bidirectional. Muslims believe that God speaks to people in the Quran, but they cannot use it to respond to him. Phrased differently, the Quran does not mediate a relationship between man and God. (I am saying that Muslims do not or cannot enjoy a relationship with God, simply that the Quran is not the medium through which this happens.) Christians, however, believe that the fullness of revelation to mankind came in the person of Jesus Christ. One person can respond to another, and so it is possible for people to enjoy a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, there are (at least) two objections a non-Christian might make to my last sentence; I will explore these separately.
The first objection from someone with a limited knowledge of Christianity runs along the lines of: “I thought you guys claim that Jesus Christ is God. How can you talk about a relationship with God through him? That implies that he’s distinct from God, so you’re showing that you’re actually polytheists.” This is a complex objection requiring a complex response. The short answer involves recalling that Christians believe that God is a Trinity of persons, yet a single entity (or nature). Relationships exist between persons, and the person of Jesus Christ – who is the same as the person of the Son before the Incarnation – is in effect the “touchstone” that allows us to form relationships with all three persons of the Trinity. Once again, I am not saying that every person who enjoys a relationship with God necessarily comes to it by hearing the Gospel. I am simply saying that Christians believe God has offered us an opportunity to enter into relationship with him through the person of Jesus Christ; this is the normative way to do so, in the sense that God has not guaranteed any other way for it to happen. On the other hand, because God is not limited by the order he has established, it is quite possible (and I think very likely) that he enters into relationship with other people according to his will, through ways known only to him.
The second objection runs as follows: “Jesus Christ is no longer here. How can I have a relationship with someone who is not present?” If that claim were true, then Jesus’ contemporaries must have enjoyed a huge advantage over everyone else. The Christian (or at least Catholic) response is that while he walked the earth, Jesus established a Church. This no mere human institution or priestly hierarchy. More than anything else, the Church is, mystically, the abiding presence of Christ on earth, the tabernacle in which he dwells. Catholics believe – for reasons that merit explanation of a sort that lie well beyond the scope of this article – that Jesus Christ is “substantially present” in the Eucharist. This means that when the Eucharist is offered on the altar of any Catholic Church in the world, Christ becomes present among us in the consecrated bread and wine, in both his divinity and his humanity, just as he was to his first disciples. We cannot perceive him with our natural senses as they did, but we can nevertheless experience his presence and the blessings it brings through our participation in the Eucharist, in particular by receiving him in Holy Communion.
The Word of God: Jesus or the Bible?
One often hears Protestants referring to the Bible as the “word of God”, even though John the Evangelist calls Jesus the Word of God. Are they wrong in doing so? Not exactly, if one understands the phrase in its full meaning. Properly speaking, Jesus is the one and only Word. (Note the use of a capital letter.) The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar described sacred scripture (the Bible) as “. . . the Word in the contemplating of his own action, recording it, and elucidating it . . . and only he can assign a valid human interpretation of it.” In simple language, this means that scripture is the authenticated written record of the activity of Jesus, the Word. In an appropriate sense, then, the Word can be said to abide in the written word of sacred scripture. The Word likewise abides in the Church within its tradition. Often the kerygma, the proclamation of the Gospel, is also referred to as the “word”. Thus, “word” is multifaceted in meaning, but in all its usages derives from the eternal Word.
Divine Inspiration in Islam and Christianity: different models
One might still ask: in concrete terms, how exactly does the Word give us the thing we call sacred scripture? Is the Christian understanding of this process analogous to the Muslim one?
The two religions actually have quite a different understanding of scriptural inspiration. I will begin with the Muslim one, as it is easier to articulate. Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel dictated the words of scripture, which originated with God himself, to Mohammed, who memorized them and proclaimed them to his people. These utterances were eventually compiled in written form into what is now known as the Quran. This means that, according to Muslim belief, no human element entered into the composition of the Quran; it was simply “passed on” from God to Gabriel, then to Mohammed, then to the world.
Christianity maintains a view of dual authorship of scripture. The way this has been understood has varied from person to person and from time to time; the perspective I am presenting here is the one articulated by the theologians of the Second Vatican Council. According to this understanding, every piece of sacred scripture has two authors: a divine author and a human author. The divine author is of course God, but the human author varies, depending on what book (or portion of book) from scripture one is talking about. The human author is inspired by God to write down the truths God wants to communicate to people. We have no knowledge of exactly how this happens. As far as Christianity is concerned, the important points are: (1) God, as the originator of scripture, ensures that the human author faithfully and accurately records those truths that God intends to communicate to people and (2) the writing is truly the work of the human author, in the sense that it is written in his or her literary style, and reflects both the cultural background of the author and the society to which he or she belongs. Note that (1) only requires that the writing be a faithful and accurate record of truths God wants to communicate about human salvation. It is still possible, therefore, for the human author to make mistakes in the text of a sort that have no impact on the truth of the message. A well-known example of this comes from Mark 2:25-26, in which Jesus tells the Pharisees: “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence . . .” Jesus is referring here to an episode in the Old Testament, from the beginning of 1 Samuel 21. The problem is that 1 Samuel 21 names Ahimelech as high priest at the time, not Abiathar (who was actually his son). Evidently, the human authors of 1 Samuel 21 and Mark 2 cannot both be correct; at least one of them must have erred in the identification of the high priest at that time. But the matter of the discrepancy that entered the text through human error is clearly irrelevant to the spiritual message God intends to communicate. The Christian doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture insists that despite mistakes of that sort, the spiritual message – the message about human salvation – is preserved exactly as God intended it to be.
One author or multiple authors?
Therefore, both the Muslim and Christian models for scriptural inspiration involve a single divine author, but the Christian model involves human authors as well. More precisely, in the Christian model each portion of scripture has a single divine author and a single human author, but the entirety of scripture has a single divine author and multiple human authors. Muslims view the uniquely divine authorship of the Quran as evidence of its indefectability and sometimes criticize the Bible as unreliable on account of its human authorship. Christian scripture, however, with its many human authors, raises a question that cannot be bypassed. Even though the Bible may contain errors of fact owing to human forgetfulness, cultural bias, or poetic license, how could dozens of human authors, working independently of each other and over a span of many centuries, together produce a work that is internally so coherent? While it is plausible that a later author might read the work of an earlier author and (in the absence of divine inspiration) craft a narrative consonant with the earlier work, how likely is it that there are thousands of such connections, all consistent with each other, among the seventy-three books of the Bible? One would have to imagine a vast conspiracy theory in order to explain away the existence of a single divine (or at least unseen) author behind the whole enterprise. And if that author were someone other than God, why would the whole text be centered on God and his plan for humanity? What could that author’s agenda be?
Conclusion
Divine revelation is central to both Christianity and Islam; however, there are significant differences in how the two faiths understand it. A meaningful assessment of either religion’s claims depends on an understanding not only of the content of its scripture, but also on the function that scripture serves within the broader religious tradition and its intersection with human history.
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