Many years ago Helen and I lived in Bristol, where she was serving a church in a part of the city that included a significant Muslim population. We developed contact with local Muslims, particularly an imam, whom we met regularly, often over a curry. These meetings helped to foster good relations between our communities, and also enabled us to learn more about each other's faith. A major topic in our discussions was scripture: the Bible and the Qur'an, the scripture of Islam. The imam naturally knew the Qur'an well, but he also studied the Bible, and he asked us many questions about it.
At that time I was doing a research degree on Islam, focused on the Qur'an itself. So both my studies and the conversations with the imam prompted me to think a lot about the Qur'an and the Bible. This made me reflect on some of the most distinctive features of the Bible. It's a bit like travel abroad, which makes you see more clearly what's distinctive about where you come from.
Today I'll say something about the Qur'an and what it means to Muslims – for two reasons. First, it's important for Christians to learn more about Islam. But I realize this isn't a university lecture: I'm preaching a sermon in church – and it's Bible Sunday. So my second motivation is the hope that this brief journey 'abroad' into perhaps unfamiliar territory will help us reflect in a new way on what the Bible is like, what it is for, and its place in our faith.
To help you see where I'm going in the following reflections – in case they get a little obscure… My essential point is that whereas the Qur'an is the very centre of Islam, the Bible does not hold that place in Christianity, which is held by Jesus Christ. But the Bible is essential to our faith: through it God points us to Jesus Christ and we are taught how to be his followers.
So, then, what does the Qur'an mean to Muslims? Muslims believe that God chose Muhammad as his messenger and, through the angel Gabriel, revealed the Qur'an to him. Muslims see the Qur'an as the Word of God in an absolute sense. God 'sent it down' upon Muhammad gradually, section by section, over some 23 years. Muhammad faithfully passed the Qur'an on to others, but he was no more responsible for its contents than a secretary would be for a letter dictated to him. When all the words sent down by God to Muhammad were written down and collected, they formed the scripture called the Qur'an. For Muslims, then, the Qur'an is absolutely not a human product. When they quote the Qur'an they always say 'as God says', never 'as Muhammad writes'.
So the Qur'an really only is the Qur'an in the original Arabic spoken by God. There are many translations, including into English, but these are not the Qur'an itself. If you don't know Arabic, translations can help you understand the Qur'an, but they are not the Word of God. Most of the world's Muslims are not Arabs, but Pakistanis, Iranians, Turks, Indonesians, so to be good Muslims they must learn Arabic so they can read God's Word in its true form. It's no surprise, then, that from childhood Muslims are taught to memorize the Qur'an in Arabic. It's normal for serious Muslim scholars to be able to recite the whole of it by heart – and it's not much shorter than the New Testament.
Muslims treat physical copies of the Qur'an with the greatest respect. They wash their hands to be ritually clean before touching a copy. They never put it on the floor or place anything else on top of it. Not yet knowing this, I once placed my Arabic dictionary on top of a copy of the Qur'an, and my Muslim teacher immediately moved it off. For Muslims, the Qur'an has something of the place that the consecrated bread, the sacrament of the Body of Christ, has for Christians. Disrespectful treatment of the Qur'an upsets Muslims greatly.
The Qur'an in fact is the heart of Islam, the eternal sacred reality that bridges the gap between God and humankind. It is a mercy from God, a great miracle – perfect divine communication in language of incomparable beauty and power, the mere sound of which moves Muslims very deeply. The Qur'an guides believers along the straight path to God and to the blessings of Paradise in the Hereafter. Islam is pre-eminently the religion of the book.
If it strikes you that what I've been saying about how Muslims see the Qur'an and relate to it is in some ways very different from how Christians see and relate to the Bible . . . yes, that's the point. I hope this contrast will make us think about the place of the Bible in our faith and practice. So then, with this contrast in mind, what strikes us about the Bible in a fresh way?
I said earlier that Muslims deny any human authorship of the Qur'an; it comes from God alone. But the Christian faith sees the Bible differently. Yes, the scriptures are 'inspired' by God, as we heard in today's New Testament reading (2 Timothy 3:16), but Christians should be quite clear and open about the active human involvement in the production of the Bible. It is a collection of books written over many centuries by many different writers, who were not just secretaries recording what was dictated to them. They were human beings, with brains and imaginations creatively at work. So we find great human diversity within the Bible – held within an overarching unity, but still a great diversity. For example, we have four Gospels, not just one. They are fundamentally in harmony in their message about Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection, but each Gospel-writer has his own style and brings out different aspects of the story of Jesus. It's interesting that Luke mentions in his opening passage the research he carried out to write his Gospel (Luke 1:1-4); it clearly was not dictated from heaven. And when Christians quote the letters of Paul they typically say not 'As God says in Romans…' but 'As Paul writes…'
So Christians recognize both the Bible's divine origin – inspired by the Holy Spirit – and also its humanity, with all the diversity that brings. To Muslims, this looks like a contradiction because the Qur'an, the final and perfect scripture by which other scriptures are judged, comes only from God, uncompromised by human involvement and free of any human influence. Viewed from that angle, Muslims generally see the Bible as a problematic mixture of divine truth and human error. But for Christians the dual origin of the Bible as the word both of God and of human beings should not be seen as a problem or an embarrassment. In fact, it points to a fundamental truth about how God chooses to relate to human beings.
The belief at the very heart of our faith is that Jesus Christ is both truly God and truly human; in him the eternal God has become fully present in a fully human life. This, too, is something Muslims cannot accept: God creates humans, speaks to them, is merciful to them, but God cannot become a human being. In response, Christians can only say that if God has chosen, in the amazing humility of divine love, to become one with us in our humanity, who are we to forbid this? And if God works in this way in Jesus, who is God's eternal Word made human flesh, shouldn't we expect that if the same God provides scriptures for our guidance they will bear the same hallmark of divine-human convergence? So we need not be surprised or embarrassed by the obvious humanity of the words of scripture. In Jesus we see true humanity and the true God; in a related way, when we listen to the Bible we seek to hear within its truly human voices the voice of the God who inspired its authors and continues to speak through them.
Turning to another important feature of the Bible, what about the language we read or hear in it? The Bible was originally written in two main languages, Hebrew and Greek. Why don't we still read it in those languages, as Muslims do with the Qur'an, sticking to the original Arabic? Why didn't we hear John's Gospel read to us in Greek just now? And indeed, why did early Christians ever translate the words of Jesus from the original Aramaic into Greek? From the Muslim point of view, the Bible seems to be a long way from the source of revelation, at best a distant echo of the words God originally spoke.
Again, reflection on the Muslim perspective points us to something important. The disciples of Jesus did not hesitate to translate his words from Aramaic into Greek (because Greek was more widely understood), and then from the earliest days of the Church the Bible was translated into more and more languages as the faith spread. After 20 centuries, translations have been made into many, many different languages, and almost universally Christians read the Bible in their own languages, confident that they do not need to learn Hebrew or Greek to hear God's Word.
This is so familiar to us that we may miss how important it is that here we listen to the Bible in English while in most of Bern's churches it's heard in German, in Brazil in Portuguese, in Japan in Japanese, and so on. It is not the actual words themselves that are of ultimate importance, because the words can be translated; it is what the words point to that really matters.
That takes us to the heart of the matter. The Qur'an may be the central sacred reality of Islam, but the Bible, however vital it is for the life of the Church, is not the centre of the Christian faith. Another important contrast is that while the Qur'an constantly points to itself, the Bible points away from itself to something, or rather someone, infinitely greater than itself. It points to Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ, not the Bible, who is God's eternal word, bridging eternity and time, in himself our way back to God.
I slightly fear that what I've said today may be heard as playing down the place of the Bible. But that isn't at all my intention, which is to get the Bible in the right perspective, asking what kind of scripture God has given us and what it is for. However, it is slightly ironic that on this Bible Sunday I have hardly referred to today's passages from the Bible. That's because I felt it would be good this Sunday to step back and make some points about the Bible as a whole.
But we have heard some passages today which shed important light on our theme, so let me conclude with some brief reflections on our New Testament reading. Paul is here encouraging a younger church-leader, Timothy, to persevere in his ministry, despite difficulties and opposition. Paul points to the great asset Timothy has in having been taught the scriptures from his earliest days (2 Timothy 3:15). A deep knowledge of the Bible has always been an essential foundation for those who lead churches and teach the faith – which is underlined when the bishop presents a Bible to those who have just been ordained as priests.
In just a few lines Paul goes on to make one point about what the scriptures are in themselves, and then two points about what they do. As I mentioned earlier, Paul describes the scriptures as 'inspired' (3:16). Interestingly, he does not say what exactly this means or how this inspiration happened. Paul seems concerned to talk not so much about what the scriptures are, but what they do. What does God seek to achieve through the scriptures? What is their job? First, Paul says that they are able to instruct us 'for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus' (3:15). The fundamental purpose of the scriptures is to point to what God has done for the world in Jesus, what God has given us in him, and to urge us to receive this gift in faith. Whatever else it does, whatever else it is about, at its heart the Bible is about how God comes to us in Jesus and calls us to respond in faith.
Paul then goes on to speak about the place of the Bible in Timothy's ministry, and he uses a very practical word when he says that the scriptures are 'useful' (3:16) as the means for teaching people how they are to live as Christians. Elsewhere in his two letters to Timothy, Paul often warns against futile religious arguments that have no beneficial spiritual impact on people. Here, in contrast, he says that as well as pointing us to Jesus and calling us to faith in him, the scriptures have the essential practical purpose of teaching us how we should live as his followers, sometimes rebuking and correcting us, so that we may be trained, 'thoroughly equipped for every good work' (3:17). The scriptures are given to challenge us and to change us.
That's a good place to end on this Bible Sunday, as we thank God for the scriptures and pray that they will have the effects in our lives that God intends them to bring about. In our individual lives and in our life as a community, gathering Sunday by Sunday to be nourished by God's Word and at the Lord's table, some of us also gathering midweek for Lectio Divina or for Bible Study in house-groups, may we go deeper into the scriptures and may they take deeper root in us, pointing us to Jesus and the salvation that is in him, and challenging us to grow in faithfulness as his disciples.