Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Vatican II, states that the Mohammedans â??profess their faith as the faith of Abraham, and with us they worship the one, merciful God who will judge men on the last dayâ? (par 16). At first sight, that statement appears friendly and matter-of-fact; the â??faithâ? of Muslims is evidently thought to be the same â??with usâ?. We â??agreeâ? about a last judgment and a merciful God who is one. This mutual understanding apparently comes from Abraham. This way of putting the issue argues to a common origin of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each of which â??appearedâ? in history at different timesâ??the New Testament some twelve hundred years after Abraham and Islam some seven hundred years after the time of Christ.
But when we examine what each tradition means by unity, worship, judgment, and mercy, we hesitate to affirm that they mean the same things by the same words. And the assumed agreement that God is one provides little basis for further agreement about what flows from it. Islam confronts religion and politics as we know them with questions of the true and the false, with questions of life and death. Seemingly both fascinated and paralyzed, we watch Christians and others killed or beheaded before our very eyes in the most brutal manner. The great Monastery of St. Elijah near Mosul in Iraq, dating from the 600s AD, was recently not just destroyed, but pulverized, not for any military reason but to erase any sign of historic Christian presence there. This is a foretaste of what will happen to other Christian churches and buildings if this Islamic expansion continues.
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