479220

13
TRN30210.1177/0265378813479220TransformationGriggs

Article

Transformation
30(2) 128­–140
Beyond the polemics of Christian– © The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
Muslim Relations: Exploring a sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0265378813479220
Dialogical Approach trn.sagepub.com

Jennifer Griggs
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Abstract
Against the historical backdrop of early Christian–Muslim apologetics in the Middle East, an apologetics that
was overwhelmingly polemical in its scope, I consider the contribution of the mystics, in providing a dialogical
model that would overcome the state of impasse that inter-religious debate had reached. Dialogue moves
beyond the established polemical binaries of two rival belief systems, towards the clarification of defensible
difference, in which the other is allowed to speak in all its polyvocality and even to impinge on the truth
claims of one’s own tradition.

Keywords
apologetics, Christian-Muslim, dialogue, polemics

Introduction
In this paper I develop two aspects in my discussion of Christian–Muslim relations, both the phi-
losophy of dialogue and the substantive, the inter-religious dialogue of the Syrian Orthodox mystic
Barhebraeus (1226–1286), against the backdrop of five centuries of Christian–Muslim apologetics.
I will argue for Barhebraeus as a model of the dialogical approach, who informed by his ecumen-
ism, reached beyond the predominant trend of Christian polemicizing against Islam. The latter
approach I will exemplify, in a brief historical overview of polemical writing by Eastern Christians
living in the early Islamic period.
In the first part I discuss what is entailed in undertaking polemics, in that polemics, while it seems
to positively defend its univocal notion of truth, proceeds at the expense of one being wrong, the
other being right. In the second part, I argue for the overcoming of the polemical impasse through
dialogue, and finally, in the third part, I examine how inter-religious dialogue allows for recognition
of the truth claims of the religious other as well as introspection into one’s own tradition.

The Either/Or of Polemics

Polemics operates according to a binary structure, which may be represented as ‘either A or B’.
Indeed polemics posits as its basis, that if A is true, and B is non-A, then B must be false. The point

Corresponding author:
Jennifer Griggs, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London
WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: 216086@soas.ac.uk
Griggs 129

of polemical debate is to prove that one’s own position is true, in this case A is true, and thereby the
position of the other, which is different from one’s own, is false. This is done through rational logi-
cal argument. In polemics, the debate is not only about which position is true, but equally, to claim
that the other position is false, in light of one’s own position being true. However, if all sides
believe in the unequivocal correctness of their own position, then what kind of conversation can
there be, indeed is there any possibility of productive conversation? This leads to debates in which
all sides try to prove that the other is false, thus the focus of the debate is in proving that the other’s
position is false, which then eclipses an introspection of one’s own claims.
Furthermore, it inhibits one from offering any appreciation of the other’s position, as in general
the underlying purpose of polemic is concerned with proving the other’s as false. Indeed, particu-
larly if polemics is between religious traditions, then it can lead to violence, which not only acts as
a constraint on the discussion, but does not allow it to progress. This has been seen repeatedly in
Christian–Muslim polemics over the centuries.
Indeed, the binaries of polemics can entrench people only further into defensive and offensive
strategies to secure the values that they live by, because people don’t live only by debates, but abide
within cultural and religious communities, which are not directly open to being influenced by
polemical debate. In the context of a contemporary polemics, whether verbal or literary, there is an
assumption that its audience is made up of autonomous subjects, who have chosen their religion in
a marketplace of free religious choice. John Clayton argues that this is a western marketplace,
where religion has been privatized according to the Enlightenment paradigm of ‘free enquiry’ and
the liberal ‘canons of public rationality’.1 This paradigm needs to be reconsidered in the engage-
ment of the diverse rationalities embodied in religious communities. Richard King suggests that
alternatives to ‘the autonomous subject of Enlightenment humanism’ should be considered, such
as ‘the traditional Islamic notions of brotherhood’.2 Muslims, though they might live in a Western
society, would still belong to a network of relations, the ikhwān or ‘brotherhood’, representing
familial or social ties and moral guidance. If the binding nature of this type of religious community
is better appreciated, then perhaps the embodied nature of these traditions can be more fully recog-
nized. That is not to say that the polemical approach to religious or sectarian difference has only
operated within the Enlightenment paradigm, but that the appeal to a universal reason (of liberal-
ism) is a particularly western feature.
To sum up, three main points have been made concerning polemics:

i) If the aim of polemics is to prove the other false, then how does polemical debate help
anybody?
ii) Polemic eclipses retrospection on one’s own truth claims, because the focus is purely on
polemicizing.
iii) People follow traditions not because of polemical positions that prove a particular point is
true but rather because first and foremost, they belong to a religious tradition.

Thus it may be said from this brief introduction, that polemics, while it may shed light on the truth
claims of a particular tradition, is not necessarily helpful in furthering relationships between other
religious traditions.

Historical Overview of Polemics in Christian–Muslim Relations

In a brief overview of the Eastern Christian literature on Islam, one finds that for the most part
Christian polemics was meant for use within the Eastern Christian tradition. Polemics were
130 Transformation 30(2)

employed to counter the pressure to convert to Islam that became increasingly onerous from the
early eighth century onwards, with the reign of the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705).3 Tracts writ-
ten in Syriac or Greek by Christians about Islam, could be much freer and much more polemical,
because this tended to be intra-traditional writing, circulated amongst Christians, composed in
order to reinforce the views of their own Christian community, often as a defensive strategy. St
John of Damascus (d. 754), who was familiar with Arabic but wrote in Greek, and Theodore bar
Kônî (fl. C. 792), a Syriac writer, provide two such examples of Christian polemics in the eighth-
century Islamic Middle East. The emergence of Christian Arab theology, particularly in the ninth
century, with the Arabicization of Christian communities under Islam, develops along a slightly
different trajectory. This writing tends to be more influenced by its interaction with Muslims,
deploying a philosophical vocabulary that was recognizable to their Muslim counterparts, in order
to defend the two central issues of controversy with Muslims, Trinity and the Incarnation.4
St John of Damascus was a ‘Melkite’,5 part of the Christian community in Syria/Palestine that
upheld Byzantine Orthodoxy. Ordained as a priest in Jerusalem by Patriarch John V (705–735),
Sidney H Griffith comments that ‘he was destined to become the principal theological spokesman’
for this denomination of Christians under Islam.6 St John Damascene’s short apology against
Islam, portrays Islam as the ‘heresy of the Ishmaelites’, 101st in his list of Christian heresies; a list
which formed his second volume, De Haeresibus, in a much larger theological work On the Source
of Knowledge. His writing typifies the initial attitude of Eastern Christian communities, as they
came into contact with Muslims, that Islam was a heretical Christian group rather than a new reli-
gion altogether.7 Daniel J Sahas argues that Islam was treated as a heresy by the Byzantine writers,
precisely because they accepted Islam ‘as a religion that believes in the same God’.8 Kenneth
Cragg suggested that St John Damascene’s primary aim was ‘to alert and inform the Christian com-
munity’.9 Sahas suggests that while the text would seem to report a dialogue between Muslim and
Christian interlocuters, its dialectic of question and answer was a ‘typical Christian heresiological
technique’ in the exposition of heresy. Thus, the Christian theologian uses his customary resources
to judge Islam and thus he ‘treats the Muslim as a Christian’.10
Despite this, St John Damascene does make significant contribution to Christian understanding
of Islam, in pointing out the crucial divergencies in the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God;
divergencies that were to be reiterated in subsequent apologetics. Cragg states that John makes
direct reference to Sūra 112, to argue that the Qur’ānic denial of God ‘begetting’ or ‘being begot-
ten’, is a misconception of Christian theology.11 John appreciated that Muslim tradition understood
Christ’s sonship in the physiological terms of fatherhood rather than the trinitarian theology of
relationship. Cragg points out that John also criticizes the Qur’ān’s depiction of God, ‘in disallow-
ing the unity of God and His Word and His Spirit’, which effects a ‘reductionism’ of the triune God
of the Christian Scriptures.12 However, in drawing on the Qur’ānic references to Christ as God’s
Word and Spirit in Sūra 4:171, Mark Beaumont argues that John is thereby ‘making the assumption
here that the hypostases of Christ the Word and the Holy Spirit are actually meant’ and thus that the
Qur’ān contains ‘reflections of true belief’, as befitting a Christian heresy.13
Theodore bar Kônî belonged to the Church of the East, historically centred in Persia, with the
seat of the patriarchate in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the city which became known as Baghdad under the
Abbasids.14 Theodore’s principle work, the Scholion, written in Syriac, presents a systematized form
of traditional exegesis of biblical scripture.15 Erica C D Hunter argues that the final two chapters of
Theodore’s Scholion are both ‘an apology for Christianity against Muslim challenges to its credibil-
ity’, and ‘an account of all heresies from before and after Christ’.16 Accordingly, Islam is portrayed
as a Christian heresy in Chapter 10 of the Scholion, which comes prior to the final chapter – a list of
all heresies and heresiarchs.17 Sidney H Griffith makes this comment on the style of Theodore bar
Griggs 131

Kônî’s Scholion: ‘Theodore makes no attempt to state the tenets of the Muslims in their own
idiom’.18 Furthermore, Griffith says that Theodore was writing in a ‘catechical style’ for his Christian
community of the Church of the East, to help them respond to pressures to convert under eighth-
century Muslim rule.19 Amongst all the topics discussed by Theodore, such as the Eucharistic mys-
tery and the Son of God, ‘interwoven with all of them’ is, Griffith says, ‘the all-embracing doctrine
of the Trinity’.20 Christian doctrine is thus of central importance in the thematic thread of Theodore’s
‘apologetic dialogue’ against the standard Islamic objections.21
While this is hardly an exhaustive overview, these are pointed examples of representing the
other in one’s own terms for the purpose of internal consumption by the wider historical commu-
nity of the writer, but are therefore not especially helpful in furthering relationships between
Christians and Muslims. As reflected in the above two examples, and more generally in Christian–
Muslim literature, the central issue underlying polemics between Christians and Muslims is their
understanding of God. It is this fundamental difference in the understanding of God, which revolves
around the Christian idea of God as Trinity, the identity of Jesus, and the personhood of God, that
governs polemical debate in Christian–Muslim literature. I’d like therefore, in summary, to put
forward three central contentions that generally polarize the understanding of God in Christian–
Muslim polemical debates. However, that is not to state that all polemical debates can be reduced
to these points.

The Central Debates Concerning the Concept of God

The ‘Identity of Jesus debate’ may be characterized through the dichotomy of God as complete
Other in Islam and the God of the incarnation. The theology professor Gavin D’Costa, in his
paper for the 2012 Campion Hall, Oxford, Seminar for Theological Engagement with Islam,
suggests that the incarnation is traditionally seen as shirk by Muslims, that is, to associate with
God that which is other than God.22 The Muslim God as complete Other, can not have a son;
Beaumont argues that sonship within God is understood in the Qur’ān as associating other dei-
ties with Him, according to Sūra 72:3 ‘Our Lord has taken neither a wife nor a son’.23 The
identity of Jesus thus concerns whether God may be incarnated as man and still subsist in
Himself as God, how He can remain essentially God while being man. Indeed, the Christian
claim for the divine Lordship of Jesus as son of God seems to associate with God what can not
be God in the Islamic understanding.
The debate on Trinity in Christian–Muslim polemic is conducted through the polarities of the
Trinitarian God on the one hand, and Islamic monotheism on the other. D’Costa points out that the
Trinity is viewed by Muslims as making the one God, the tawhīd Allāh, into three; a somewhat
familiar accusation of tritheism from which Christianity has sought to defend itself throughout its
history, especially with Jews and Muslims.24 St John of Damascus for example, argues that the
Muslim doctrine of tawhīd defines the oneness of God by its negation of shirk or ‘associationism’,
but he counter-argues that this is not in fact the position of Christians in their doctrine of the
Trinity.25
The debate on the personhood of God concerns the distinction between the essential personhood
of the Christian God, and the divine attributes of Allāh, the s.ifāt Allāh, attributes which are com-
monly presented as extrinsic to the undivided essence of the Muslim God in Christian-Muslim
polemic. Following the formula of the Council of Constantinople in 381, the hypostatic Persons of
God have formed the basis for a triune theology of the Christian God. There have however, been
concerted attempts to overcome this dichotomy, particularly in Christian theology in Arabic, which
sought to communicate the being of God in terms more accessible to Muslims. Sandra Keating
132 Transformation 30(2)

notes that the apologetic aspect to this theology meant that argumentation was developed specifi-
cally from the principle ‘of God’s absolute oneness’.26
An early example of this attempt may be highlighted with attention to the writing of a
Christian apologist of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Abū Rā’itah al-Takrītī (d. c. 835). As
Syrian-Orthodox, Abū Rā’itah espoused a Miaphysite Christology, the third of the three cen-
tral Christological positions in the Middle East. As a Christian mutakallim, he was an early
apologist to defend the doctrines of Trinity and the Incarnation, in a way acceptable to Muslims,
mainly through the ‘appeal to reason and logical deduction’, along with some scriptural evi-
dence.27 Abū Rā’itah specifically addresses the arguments of Muslim ‘dialectical theology’,
the formal style of kalām,28 concerning the s.ifāt Allāh, the attributes of God, so that the con-
cept of divine attributes was used for the purpose of entering into debate about the persons and
essence of the triune God. This was to become a typical tactic in ninth-century Christian
Arabic polemic which attempted to redeploy the crucial issues of contemporary Muslim kalām
towards a Christian resolution in terms of the descriptive s.ifāt as Trinitarian persons. However,
this strategy, while it redeployed a Muslim Arabic terminology of divine attributes, could not
reconcile the distinctive differences between the Christian and Muslim understandings of God,
and nor could it overcome the suspicion that Christian Trinity advocated the notion of three
Gods.29

From the Polemical to the Dialogical

Overcoming the Polemical Impasse
If theology begins with faith and then deploys rational arguments for the exigencies of debate in
the liberal public sphere, then the failure of those arguments won’t necessarily mean the conversion
of others to one’s point of view. Neither does polemics help to reach a solution, if the argument is
the either/or of my claim or your claim as the most compelling, then whatever the outcome of the
argument no one party will respond by relinquishing their own claim. Kenneth Cragg remarks that
in matters of rival belief, ‘reason is arbitrarily employed to corroborate what continues to be at
odds’, and in the early Christian–Muslim encounter in the Middle East, this resulted in mutual
miscomprehension and polemic.30 Indeed, Cragg concludes that when Christians and Muslims can
only see each other ‘as a heretical distortion’ of themselves, the possibility of any ‘genuine percep-
tion’ is precluded.31
What Christian–Muslim polemics tends to preclude is that God can not be confined to either
side of the Either/Or, the God of biblical revelation is neither wholly Other nor incarnated in Christ.
This God is both ontologically distinct from the being of humanity, and yet extends His divinity to
humanity in the incarnation of the Word. We cannot reduce God to our own image, either physi-
cally or conceptually. Indeed, the Eastern tradition emphasizes the ultimate mystery of a God who
reveals Himself as both the Yahweh of the cloud that surrounds Moses in the giving of the divine
law and the Word made flesh and crucified.32
The aim should not therefore be to prove the distinction of one over the other, but to communi-
cate the fullness of revelation that the Bible communicates to Christians. The denial of the incarna-
tion narrative by the Qur’ān, and of Jesus as not dying and not being resurrected on the cross, stems
from the Muslim understanding of a God who could not suffer or be humiliated, who could not be
as man even as He was as God. How therefore can one move beyond this impasse of the impossi-
bility versus the actuality of God becoming man, when the proof texts of the two sides are in such
fundamental disagreement on these issues?
Griggs 133

Common Frameworks of Debate

There are therefore rival positions in the Christian and Muslim understandings of God that are
incompatible according to the polemical approach and that reach an impasse, but what if we move
beyond the either/or of polemics? Richard J Bernstein argues that the dialogical approach allows
for the incommensurability of traditions, ‘without denying that we can compare them with each
other’.33 That is not to say that we can make a ‘point by point comparison or translation’,34 or dis-
cover the generic sense of God to which these religious traditions contribute their own variants.
Bernstein argues that the recognition of the incommensurability of traditions, rather than enclosing
us within our own horizons and paradigms, should lead to the attitude of being constantly open to
the challenge of the other, which despite its foreignness ‘yet has sufficient affinity with us that we
can come to understand it’.35 There is sufficient affinity presupposed by these opposite views of
God, to state that these are contained within a common standard. This commonality is the deeper
philosophical agreement that there is ‘a God’, a commonality which underscores Christian-Muslim
polemics. Dialogue would capitalize upon the common framework of belief in God, to allow the
other to validate their truth-claims through argumentation, and in the process ‘opening ourselves to
the criticism of others’.36
Identifying common frameworks is not an agenda that seeks always to reach consensus, in
fact, John Clayton would argue that religious common ground can become a highly divisive
place. In an entirely literalist perspective, Clayton points out that the ‘common’ ground of
Jerusalem is bitterly divisive for Jews, Muslims and Christians, a ground which involves vio-
lence and subjugation. That these religions are in some sense ‘Abrahamic’ does not in this case
prove ‘unitive’, in fact it is the underlying cause of the conflict. The more constructive, in fact,
is what Clayton terms the ‘Clarification of defensible difference’ established within the com-
mon frameworks of a debate, which is not to pursue the identification of ‘common ground’ as
a solution to these problems.37 What for example does it mean to claim that these are Abrahamic
faiths? Each party has a contending view of what they mean by the Abrahamic God, and here
one may proceed with the clarification of defensible difference. This is not to compromise the
truth of one’s own tradition, the point is simply that one could not begin a discussion with
the presupposition of a ‘God’ with say a Buddhist, from whom theism would be an issue of
debate in itself.38
If the faith that Christians and Muslims have in the existence of a God who revealed Himself
as the Creator of all that is in the world, and in whom human creatures find their own image, then
the discussion can proceed through further stages radiating from this view of human life. For
example, on the theistic plane, Christians share with Muslims the understanding that there is a
God, that God exists, and that this may primarily be understood by the fact that we as humans
exist and have being; an argument that Thomas Aquinas inherits from Avicenna: ‘being [the ens]
is what is first conceived by the intellect, as Avicenna says’.39 With this ontological principle,
whereby the human mind, by virtue of its own being, is able to conceive of God as the first cause
of its being, intra- and inter- religious dialogue have crossed over in the realm of ontotheology,
to offer a framework from which dialogue might proceed. However, that is not to say that dia-
logue must progress in a linear fashion, such a philosophical principle may be recognized but
revised within schools of thought on both sides. Therefore, the common framework rather than
providing a decisive ground for possible debate, allows for the greater clarification of defensible
difference. Indeed, Clayton argues that tradition-based forms of reasoning construct themselves
through public argumentation, so that the boundaries of defensible difference between Self and
Other become clarified.40
134 Transformation 30(2)

The Dialogical Approach – Polyvocality of Self and Other

The dialogical approach involves understanding the religious other, that is, to invite and allow the
other to speak. This by consequence entails listening to the different voices of the other, Islam in
all its ‘polyvocality’. This requires engaging different types of Muslim communities as dialogue
partners, who will bring different perspectives and challenges to the arena for discussion. The
Anglican Communion affirms, in their proposal for The Way of Dialogue between Jews, Christians
and Muslims that an informed dialogue ‘can help both partners become aware of the some of the
riches of their own respective traditions’.41 Such a stance recognizes the notion of meaning as
developing within religious communities, of there having developed a variety of traditions of
meaning and religious histories stemming from one religious text. Polemics tends to ignore the
truth claims of diverse traditions within both religions. The dialogical approach invites the reli-
gious other to speak in all its differentiation, in order that this other may be met with more ade-
quate responses from within one’s own tradition, and equally allows for greater introspection into
one’s truth claims.
If one’s viewpoint is opened for questioning, as much by the other as by oneself, then it may be
recognized that a particular Christian denomination is part of a much wider Christian tradition, that
there may be valuable insights to be gained through ecumenical dialogue, especially with those
Christian groups whose encounter with Islam has developed and sustained itself over many centu-
ries of contact. The Muslim categorization of Christians (and Jews) as dhimmi, means of course
that they were allowed to exist under Muslim rule, subject to considerable restrictions. Bat Ye’or
has described this situation of dhimmi, or their ‘dhimmitude’, in terms of abject decline in her his-
torical survey of Eastern Christianity, From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Seventh to Twentieth Century.42
But this continued existence allowed Christians a history of interaction with their Muslim rulers
and neighbours, to provide perspectives for present-day encounter and dialogue. John Clayton
proposes that, ‘Religious groups in long-term contact with other religious groups typically develop
discourses for debate across their respective borders’.43
Clayton argues that the development of the kalām style of argument provided a common frame-
work for public debate in Arabic among Muslims, Christians and Jews, particularly in Persia.
Therefore, the ‘type of argument that had been used for intra-traditional debate was also adapted for
inter-traditional use’. Indeed, Clayton shows that by the tenth century, kalām had become a popular
form of public discourse, while it was also influential within the theology of these religious commu-
nities.44 With kalām arose a method of constructing inter-religious arguments, and Keating argues
that the science of kalām was connected to the dialectic of the munāzara, the public disputation.45
If we consider apologetical writing since the time of St John of Damascus, the Christian argu-
ments have developed in their scope. Both a Muslim as well as a Christian audience for Christian
apologetics may be anticipated, and indeed Muslim apologetics from the ninth-century provided
rebuttals of the arguments of the Christian mutakallim. David Taylor argues, in his survey of these
early Muslim responses, that the very involvement of the Arabophone Christians in the ‘specifi-
cally Islamic kalām’ meant that ‘they could be refuted according to the logic of this system’.46
While kalām allowed for a certain interchange of religious concepts, this was not a dialogue that
necessarily escaped the binaries of polemics, nor the incommensurability of these religious sys-
tems. Griffith suggests that the nature of constructing arguments in this sphere had a twofold effect,
the avoidance of ‘formulations which may fall victim to the other side’s polemics’ and the impetus
to create ‘a satisfying, opposing system of thought’.47 Neither did kalām provide a neutral medium
for the expression of such opposing conceptual thought; David Taylor argues that the two sides
were ‘employing very similar language to talk about entirely different realities’.48
Griggs 135

I would suggest that the polemical impasse so outlined in Christian–Muslim relations was not
overcome with the interactions of kalām; Trinity still appeared to Muslims as tritheism, and the
formulations of Christology, a logical impossibility. At the beginning of Christian Arabic theology,
the immediate Muslim context of Abū Rā’itah’s apologetic indicates the source of the impasse,
Muslim scholars were discussing the predication of God. Griffith summarizes the dilemma of the
time, that if the beautiful names of God in the Qur’ān, such as ‘knowing’ and ‘hearing’, were true
propositions, then how could they be affirmed without compromising God’s unity.49 If the contro-
versy provided Christian apologists with an opportunity to enter the debate with a rival solution, it
was not to prove sufficient. Griffith points out that Muslim philosophers such as Abū Yūsuf
al-Kindī (d. 873), continued to dismiss the logical absurdity of Trinitarian formulas.50 Abū Rā’itah
volunteered that the Christian God was unique in ‘being’, a being which is the divine hypostases
of life, knowledge and cause, but the concept of hypostases was foreign to Arabic metaphysics, and
it is significant that the Syriac qenômê had to be transliterated into Arabic as aqānīm, to express the
concept.51 Other Christian Arabic-speaking apologists may have preferred alternative Arabic ter-
minology to express Trinitarian dogma,52 but they remained unable to overcome the problem, that
Christian and Muslim metaphysics provided rival versions of the divine being that were incom-
mensurable. However, another solution was to be offered, one which did not come directly from
the polemical thrust of apologetics, nor try to conceive of God only in the predication of divine
being.

Inter-Religious Dialogue under Medieval Islam

In this section, it may be seen how the Islamic context informed the discourse of Eastern Christianity,
and in turn this highlights the significance of the new conclusions reached as a result of this inter-
religious dialogue. The writing of Barhebraeus provides a dialogical model from the thirteenth-
century Christian East. Barhebraeus was bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church, and Marphrain of
the East from 1264, over the area equivalent to modern-day Iran and Iraq. Barhebraeus overcame
the pre-dominant trend of his tradition, which had been to polemicize against Islam. His ecumeni-
cal attitude allowed him to overcome the Christological divisions between that of his tradition and
rival denominations in the Eastern churches, that is, the Church of the East and the Eastern
Orthodox. Barhebraeus states that he had become convinced, that ‘these quarrels of Christians
among themselves are not a matter of facts but rather of words and denominations’. Therefore, he
had come to see the Christological formulations of nature, person, hypostasis, that divided the
Christian communities, as ‘notwithstanding these differences, possessing a one unvarying equal-
ity’ in their confession of Christ as Lord, both God and man.53
This remarkable attitude to the conflicts that had beleaguered the Christian communities of the
East since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and prevented any unity under Muslim conquest and
rule, prompted him also to extend his dialogical perspective to the theological-philosophical
debates within Islam. His conclusions were not quite as benign, and Islam remained for him a
religion in profound error. However, he was able to appreciate certain commonalities, especially
philosophical problems that both religious traditions had encountered, and attempted to resolve in
different ways.
What Barhebraeus saw in the understanding of God within Syrian Christianity, was that it had
confused the philosophical ‘God’ with the God of revelation, and that these operated in two quite
different modes. Accordingly, it was the God of revelation that he was concerned to retrieve,
who revealed something of His essence in the dialectic between the divine mystery and the
divine disclosure. Barhebraeus, becoming disillusioned with the inter-confessional Christological
136 Transformation 30(2)

disputes, concerned as they were with differences of terminology that masked their common
ground, turned to the study of Greek wisdom, but after some years despaired to find the truth that
he was seeking after. In this, he follows a similar path to the Muslim theologian Abū H āmid
al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), whose autobiographical work ‘The Deliverance from Error’ (Al-Munqidh
54
min al-d  alāl) follows such a similar pattern, that it has been suggested that Barhebraeus’s
account of spiritual struggle in The Book of the Dove was modelled after it.55 In the Munqidh,
al-Ghazālī describes his own state of despair with the science of theology (‘ilm al-kalām) and
with the learning of speculative Muslim philosophy (falāsafa), an intellectual crisis from which
he is saved, by discovering the insights of Sufism (tasawwuf). Rather than speculate on the
divine being, in the manner of the philosophical sciences, al-Ghazālī understands that the true
knowledge of God ‘is attained only through Divine inspiration’.56 In the Munqidh, al-Ghazālī
shows how his own intellectual journey departed from the reasoning of the Islamic philosophical
sciences, towards the ‘illumination’ of prophetic revelation in the practice of the mystic way,
beyond which there is no higher recollection of God.57
From al-Ghazālī, Barhebraeus appreciates the different degrees of knowing God, in which
knowing the God of revelation comes above the rational understanding of God in His Being, the
‘God is’ of philosophy. Barhebraeus enjoins his readers to listen to the true God who will reward
trust in His Word with ‘the spirit of truth’, for by this belief, ‘he will bring all things to your remem-
brance and teech [sic] you all things’.58 Barhebraeus instructs his reader not to seek after the ‘cause’
of God by Aristotelian syllogisms, but to foster faithful belief in God, that in itself invites the spirit
of truth to communicate the gift of knowledge by revelation. Indeed he states that ‘All revealed
knowledge is of a prophetic nature’.59 For Barhebraeus, God may be known above all through His
given-ness in love for the world, and in the longing that this revelation invites from the soul of the
believer.60
Indeed, according to biblical revelation, before God is, He loves, that prior to any philosophical
reflection on God’s Being, God gives Himself in love in the creation of the world and in the send-
ing of the Word. If this insight of Barhebraeus may be applied more generally to Christian apolo-
getics, then communicating the truth claims of Christian tradition is to articulate the profundity of
God’s love.

Towards a Dialogical Apologetics

Dialogical apologetics means to begin with certain pre-given agreements, such as on the basic
level, ‘there is a God’, and bring these to a new level of agreement on what is the clarification of
those differences that define communities and the common frameworks through which there can
be engagement.
Striving to represent the other(s) in their own terms, is also a seeking to become, in a manner,
religiously bilingual, speakers of one’s own conceptual language and that of the other’s, to be able
to translate from one’s own religious concepts to theirs and vice versa. However, such bilinguality
requires recognition of the incommensurability of traditions. Alisdair MacIntyre argues that there
is always ‘the possibility of untranslatability’ of one’s alien rivals, which is ‘a condition of discov-
ering the inaccessible’ and allowing the hegemony of one’s own tradition to be put to question in
respect of ‘that in the alien tradition which it cannot as yet comprehend’.61 That means that the
understanding of Islam by Christian communities should not be limited to the stereotypes that they
inherit, but Christian apologetics must continue to inform themselves of Islamic intellectual and
cultural language(s). To state for example that Islam is a Christian heresy, as was much repeated in
early polemics from the time of St John of Damascus, is to reduce Islam to a subordinate status, not
Griggs 137

worthy of mutual recognition as another ‘religion’. And yet, how can one converse with the reli-
gious other if that other is denied a voice in such a fundamentally oppressive way?
The alternative approach, put forward in the Anglican document on dialogue, emphasizes the need
to understand the religious in their own terms, thus ‘Understanding others means allowing them to
define themselves in their terms rather than ours’.62 To follow the path of a dialogical apologetics is
to begin with one’s own tradition, recognizing the way it has been informed by intra-traditional
debates and informed discussion through its history, and to be prepared to discuss the polyvocality of
one’s own tradition in dialogue with that of the other. This equates to recognizing one’s own position
of historical contingency as much as having a critical awareness of that of the other’s.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued that while polemics reaches an inevitable impasse, the dialogical
approach proceeds from an introspection into the truth claims of one’s own tradition, and extends
by enquiry into that of another’s. Further, these two aspects form a reciprocal relationship, the
enquiry into the other returns to provide implications for one’s own tradition. In the case of
Barhebraeus, this process of dialogue brought him to the realization that true knowledge of God is
given through the insights of divine revelation, in contrast to the science of the Greeks who sought
after truth using their own systematized rationality. This claim reflected that of al-Ghazālī in the
Munqidh, who perceived the obfuscating legacy of Greek thought in the Islamic intellectual disci-
plines. For as al-Ghazālī states in his survey of the sciences of the Greeks, ‘Nothing in religion is
relevant to logic by way of denial or affirmation’, that is, religious thinking should not depend on
the logic of Aristotle, a rationality constructed by syllogism, proposition and conditions for
proofs.63 Thus the true understanding of divine revelation is not to be found through an appeal to
another authority.
The post-modern theologian Jean-Luc Marion poses the distinction between the exercise of
reason and the call of faith in Christian revelation. This distinction mirrors the insight of the Eastern
mystics, for whom the faith demanded by the New Testament, ran counter to the logic of reason.
Christian faith is founded not on ‘the truth of propositions’, the Principle of Ground that Leibniz
claimed for the nature for truth,64 but on the particular event of the incarnation. That Christ demon-
strates that God gives Himself in love comes prior to predication. Faith ‘receives and conceives’
the fact of the Crucified.65 Christian faith is thus grounded not in Leibniz’s principle, the ground of
sufficient reason, but as Marion argues, in the logic of charity or agapē.66 A faith-based logic is a
logic based on the given-ness of God in love, that is not contingent on the world, but the world is
contingent on the self-given in revelation. In the Holy Spirit, there is a continuous given-ness of
God, who reveals Himself in love.
Therefore, it remains to be considered what conclusions can be drawn from the mystics, for the
practice of dialogical apologetics. Dialogue can reveal what is lacking in one’s own tradition, and
can function within two modes, both intra-religious dialogue, that allows the Eastern and Western
churches to appreciate the contribution of other Christian confessions to their own tradition, and
inter-religious dialogue, which need not be conducted in an entirely different manner. Barhebraeus
affirms that the basis of Christian faith is God’s love, not the philosophical determination of what
can be predicated about God, in the logical reasoning of what constitutes the Being of God. From
the mystics, it can be surmised that polemical argument concerning the ‘what’ of God’s Being, is
not a productive or a faithful form of argument if it does not communicate that before God ‘is’, God
‘acts’ in love. God is the giver of the gift of love; that ‘God is love’ in 1John 4:8 affirms the divine
self-givenness of agapē.67
138 Transformation 30(2)

The gift of love thus establishes its own logic, a logic that calls to faith. This logic of divine love
forms the foundation of Christian dialogue with the religious other. The call to faith runs counter
to the funding to the world, is foolishness to the wisdom of the world and thus can not defer to the
logic of reason to argue its case.68 Christian-Muslim apologetic that seeks to represent faithfully
the given-ness of God’s love in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, dialogues on the basis of revelation.
The God who reveals Himself to humanity in love, bridges the distance of His mysterious other-
ness to Creation not with a language of uniform rationality, but with the loving act of the Cross,
which establishes the call of the God who gives life.69 The call to faith can make its claim on no
other basis, than the gift of divine love.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. Clayton J (2006) Religions, Reasons and Gods: Essays on Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 62–63.
2. King R (1999) Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’. London:
Routledge, p. 199.
3. Griffith SH (2000) Disputing with Islam in Syriac: The Case of the Monk of Bêt Ḥālê and a Muslim
Emir. Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 3(1): 29–54. See p. 31.
4. Keating ST (2006) Defending the ‘People of Truth’ in the Early Islamic Period: The Christian Apologetics
of Abū Rā’it.ah. Leiden: Brill. See pp. 7–8.
5. For the emergence of the term ‘Melkite’ after the ecumenical Council of Constantinople III in 681, see
Griffith SH (2011) John of Damascus and the Church in Syria in the Umayyad Era. Hugoye: Journal of
Syriac Studies 11(2): 207–237. See p. 218.
6. Griffith (2011: 215).
7. Sahas DJ (1990) The Art and Non-Art of Byzantine Polemics: Patterns of Refutations in Byzantine
Anti-Islamic Literature. In: Gervers M and Bikhazi RJ (eds.) Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous
Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Medieval Studies, pp. 55–73. See p. 57.
8. Sahas (1990: 63).
9. Cragg K (1992) The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East. London: Mowbray, p. 66.
10. Sahas (1990: 63).
11. Cragg (1992: 78).
12. Cragg (1992: 78).
13. Beaumont M (2012) Speaking of the Triune God: Christian Defence of the Trinity in the Early Islamic
Period. Transformation 29(2): 111–127, p. 113. Beaumont quotes Sūra 4:171, ‘Christ Jesus, son of Mary,
was the messenger of God, and His Word which He cast on Mary, and a Spirit from Him’.
14. Griffith (2011: 213).
15. Griffith (2000: 37).
16. Hunter ECD (2007) Interfaith Dialogues: The Church of the East and the Abbasids. In: Vashlamozide
SG and Greisgeger L (eds.) Der Christliche Orient und seine Umwelt. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,
289–302. See p. 300.
17. Griffith (2000: 37).
18. Griffith SH (1981) Chapter Ten of the Scholion: Theodore Bar Kônî’s Apology for Christianity.
Orientalia Christiana Periodica 47: 158–188. See p. 186.
19. Griffith, (2000: 37–39).
20. Griffith (2000: 38). See also Griffith (1981).
Griggs 139

21. Griffith SH (2002) The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic: Muslim-Christian Encounters in the
Early Islamic Period. Aldershot: Ashgatep. 63.
22. D’Costa G (2012) Do Christians and Muslims believe in the Same God? Reflections on Miroslav Volf’s
Allah: A Christian Response. In: Campion Hall Seminar Papers on Christian Theological Engagement
with Islam. Available at: http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/publications/campion-hall-seminar-
papers-on-christian-theological-engagement-with-islam (accessed 3 January 2013).
23. Beaumont (2012: 112).
24. D’Costa (2012).
25. Cragg (1992: 78).
26. Keating (2006: 11).
27. Keating (2006: 9).
28. Griffith (2002: 168).
29. Griffith (2002: 183–185).
30. Cragg (1992: 76–77).
31. Cragg (1992: 77).
32. A juxtaposition of these two themes is made in Sentence 33 of Bar Hebraeus GJ (1919) Bar Hebraeus’s
Book of the Dove: Together with some chapters from his Ethikon. Translated by Wensinck AJ. Leiden:
Brill, p. 67.
33. Bernstein RJ (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 107.
34. Bernstein (1983: 96).
35. Bernstein (1983: 141).
36. Bernstein (1983: 168).
37. Clayton (2006: 59).
38. Clayton discusses the challenge that the Buddhist engagement in the Indian vāda disputation, because
they posed such a divergent conception of the nature of reality, that differed even within the Buddhist
schools (Clayton, 2006: 69–70).
39. Marion J-L (1991) God Without Being: hors-texte. Translated from the French by Carlson TA. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 80.
40. Clayton (2006: 57).
41. The Anglican Communion, 1988 Lambeth Conference: Jews, Christians and Muslims: The Way of
Dialogue (Appendix 6 of the Report of the Lambeth Conference 1988), p. 301. Available at: http://nif-
con.anglicancommunion.org/resources/documents/lam88_ap6.pdf (accessed 4 December 2012).
42. Bat Ye’or popularised the term ‘dhimmitude’ in her book. See Ye’or B (1996) The Decline of Eastern
Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude. Seventh to Twentieth Century. Translated from the French by
Kochan M and Littman D. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.
43. Clayton (2006: 70).
44. Clayton (2006: 70).
45. Keating (2006: 25).
46. See page 235 in Taylor D (2003) Early Muslim Responses to Christianity. In: Taylor D (ed.) Christians
at the Heart of Islamic Rule: Church Life and Scholarship in ‘Abbasid Iraq. Leiden: Brill, pp. 231–254.
47. Griffith (2002: 81).
48. Taylor (2003: 239).
49. Griffith (2002: 176–177).
50. Griffith (2002: 175).
51. Griffith (2002: 180).
52. See further Beaumont (2012: 124).
53. Barhebraeus (1919: 60).
54. Al-Ghazālī’s Al-Munqidh min al-d.alāl is translated in Watt WM (1952) The Faith and Practice of
al-Ghazālī. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, pp. 19–85.
55. See Wensinck’s observations in the Introduction (xxv), and Chapter IV of Bar Hebraeus (1919: 60–71).
140 Transformation 30(2)

56. Watt (1952: 65).

57. Watt (1952: 60).
58. Bar Hebraeus (1919: 78).
59. Bar Hebraeus (1919: 70).
60. Bar Hebraeus (1919: 80–81).
61. MacIntyre A (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth, pp. 387–388.
62. The Anglican Communion, 1988 Lambeth Conference: The Way of Dialogue, p. 299.
63. Watt (1952: 35).
64. Caputo JD (1986) The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought. New York: Fordham University Press.
See p. 91.
65. Marion (1991: 65).
66. Marion (1991: 192).
67. Marion (1991: 74, 106).
68. Marion (1991: 93–95).
69. Marion (1991: 93).

Author biography
Jennifer Griggs is a PhD Candidate at SOAS working on Barhebraeus’s mysticism as love of God, and is also
a Research Associate with the Samvada Centre for Research Resources.
 License and Permissible Use Notice

These materials are provided to you by the American Theological Library Association, operating as Atla,
in accordance with the terms of Atla's agreements with the copyright holder or authorized distributor of
the materials, as applicable. In some cases, Atla may be the copyright holder of these materials.

You may do wnlo ad, print, and share these materials for your individual use as may be permitted by the
applicable agreements among the copyright holder, distributors, licensors, licensees, and users of these
materials (including, for example, any agreements entered into by the institution or other organization
from which you obtained these materials) and in accordance with the fair use principles of United States
and international copyright and other applicable laws. You may no t, for example, copy or email these
materials to multiple web sites or publicly po st, distribute for commercial purposes, modify, or create
derivative works of these materials without the copyright holder's express prior written permission.

Please contact the copyright holder if you would like to request permission to use these materials, or
any part of these materials, in any manner or for any use not permitted by the agreements described
above or the fair use provisions o f United States and international copyright and other applicable laws.
For information regarding the identity of the copyright holder, refer to the copyright information in
these materials, if available, or contact Atla using the Co ntact Us link at www.atla.com.

Except as otherwise specified, Copyright © 2023 Atla.