Reason Versus Faith: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
According to Genesis Rabba, a Palestinian midrash edited sometime in the fifth or sixth century of the common era, Abraham’s father, Terach, was an idolater and an idol maker. One day he left Abraham in charge of his idol store. An old man came to buy an idol. Abraham looked at him incredulously and asked: “Why would you worship an idol that was made just yesterday?”
Later that day, a woman came to the store with an offering of grain to give to the idols. After she left, Abraham took a mallet and smashed all the idols save the largest one. When Terach returned he was understandably furious.
“What happened here?”
Abraham calmly explained that there was a fight over the offering that was brought to the idols and the largest idol smashed all the other idols. Terach was beside himself.
“These idols can’t move, let alone fight with each other!”
“If that’s the case,” Abraham replied, “why would you worship something that cannot do anything?”
Terach dragged Abraham to Nimrod, the king, and Nimrod and Abraham engaged in a religious disputation. Nimrod opened with “I worship fire.” Abraham countered with, “Why don’t you worship the water that can douse the fire?” Nimrod acquiesced. “Okay, I’ll worship the water.” “So then,” Abraham said, “you might as well worship the clouds, because obviously they are stronger than the water they carry.” Nimrod agreed and said, “Okay, let us worship the clouds.” Abraham suggested that he worship the wind that blows the clouds, and then, finally, a person who can withstand the wind.
Nimrod finally exploded, “You are just playing with words. I worship the fire. When I throw you into the fire, we’ll see whether your god is greater than the fire or whether you succumb to my god.”
Abraham was thrown into the fire, and like Shadrach, Mishach and Abendego in the time of Daniel, he emerged unscathed.
This story has very close parallels in the Qur’an. There, in Abraham’s debate with the pagans in Sura 26, the pagans argue that they do not expect the idols to answer their prayers or come to their salvation. Instead, they say, they pray to the idols to honor the tradition of their fathers. In Sura 21, Abraham again smashes their idols.
Both of these traditions, the Jewish and the Islamic, essentially argue that belief in God must make sense. The repetition that characterizes mindless tradition cannot stand up to inquiry. The idols must be smashed. The traditions themselves would say that the prejudices of the ancestors, their belief in a timeworn and hidebound tradition, must be broken apart and split open through the evidence of the heart and the mind.
The Christian Bible tells a different story.
Mark tells of Jesus preaching to his disciples when there is an unexpected disruption.
Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31-35).
Luke tells of Jesus on the road trying to attract new followers.
To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:59-62).
Jesus demands that the moment a person makes the commitment to “proclaim the kingdom of God” that commitment must not only be primary, it must be absolute. His or her family is no longer family. Family is reconfigured on the basis of belief. Even the fifth commandment is sacrificed in the face of the newly discovered relationship to God. There is no time to say goodbye. Redemption is nigh. There is work to do.
All these traditions – from the Christian Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an – argue that a radical break is necessary in order to proceed. There are, however, important differences among them. The Islamic and Jewish traditions portray Abraham as a rationalist who comes to belief in God through proofs and arguments. In the 12th century, Maimonides makes this clear with his portrait of Abraham synthesized from various midrashic sources and perhaps influenced by his Muslim neighbors.
When [Abraham] grew up, he began to think hard.… His mind wandered and sought understanding until he grasped the way of truth and understood the righteous path from his correct reasoning. He realized that there was one God who leads the planets and He had created all and there was no other god except Him … he began to dispute with the sons of Ur of the Chaldees and to polemicize with them and announce that “This was not the way of truth upon which you walk.” He smashed their images and began to tell the people that it was proper to worship only the Lord of the Universe…. When he had won them by his evidence the king sought to kill him...
Abraham reaches his conclusions through reasoning. At this point he cannot but destroy that which was standing in the way of others achieving true understanding. He had to smash the idols.
According to Mark and Luke, Jesus demands faith, a belief that is to define the believer’s world and supersede all other ties. (It is no surprise that in the theological world of the Danish Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Abraham is the “Knight of Faith.”) Paul took up this cry, arguing that it is faith and not works which leads to salvation.
Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274), the great Christian theologian and Aristotelian philosopher, who never missed an opportunity to quote and disagree with Maimonides, believed that reason could lead a person to the mind of God. Aquinas defended reason and believed that it is possible to use both faith and reason to discover truth.
On the other side of the transom, as it were, Yehudah Halevi (1085-1150), the Spanish Jewish poet and thinker, despised philosophy, as did Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the Iranian Muslim jurist and mystic. In 1095 al-Ghazali wrote a strong polemic against philosophy called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In The Kuzari (also known as The Book of Argument and Proof in Defense of the Despised Faith), Halevi dismissed philosophical religion as “religion based on logical speculation and system, arrived at through philosophical research, but open to many doubts. Now ask the philosophers, and you will find that they do not agree on one action or one principle, since some doctrines can be established by arguments, which are only partially satisfactory, and still much less capable of being proved.”
Instead, Halevi champions a Judaism based in belief: “I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who led the children of Israel out of Egypt with signs and miracles; who fed them in the desert and gave them the land, after having made them traverse the sea and the Jordan in a miraculous way; who sent Moses with His law, and subsequently thousands of prophets, who confirmed His law by promises to the observant, and threats to the disobedient.”
The three Abrahamic faiths are united in their individual disputes over the way to understand God, before we even get to the disputes over the nature of God and the way God works in the world. Each tradition has its mystics and philosophical rationalists, its jurists and its antinomians. The hallmark of belief in the God of Abraham is the struggle to figure out what that belief means and, subsequently, what it demands.
This still leaves a wide swath of religious thought about which Judaism, Christianity and Islam can disagree with each other – the status of law, of prophecy, of Jesus and Mohammad, of the sacred Scriptures, and so on.
Dr. Aryeh Cohen is associate professor of rabbinic literature at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the American Jewish University. He is a member of the scriptural reasoning university group, hosted by the faculty of divinity at Cambridge University, in which Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars study their sacred scriptures and traditions together.
