34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Misunderstanding of Christianity, October 17, 2009
This review is from: A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide (Hardcover)
Mark D. Siljander's A Deadly Misunderstanding is the account of a congressman's discovery that the Christian-Muslim divide is not so wide after all. Indeed, Islam and Christianity in many ways share the same essential tenets. It has been linguistic mistranslations and centuries of misunderstandings between Islam and the West that have caused a wide chasm between the two faiths. If Christians and Muslims sincerely search for the central message of their respective faiths, they will find the major differences to dissipate.
Arriving at these points, the author has misunderstood the basic and central messages of Islam and Christianity and their incompatibility. He states, for example that nothing in Christianity "contraindicates acknowledging Muhammad as a prophet or `messenger of God'" (p. 115). That may be true, until Muhammad's prophecies are read. His writing on the question of salvation--perhaps the most important issue--is fundamentally different form the teachings of Christ as recorded in the Gospels. The Quran teaches that our salvation is secured through good works that are recorded in a "ledger (of their deeds)" (Qur'an 18:49), which Allah will use on Judgment Day. "Then you will see the sinners terrified at its contents." (Id.). The Bible, on the other hand, teaches that we are all sinners (Romans 3:23) deserving punishment. Yet a sacrificial Lamb (Christ) was offered for our sins (John 1:29), and all who put their faith in Him will be saved (Ephesians 2:8).
Within this context, all of the similarities that Mr. Siljander has highlighted become secondary and unimportant. For even if, as he says, Muslims have far more in common with Christians than we thought, the most important question of how we are saved is fundamentally different. Nonetheless, the commonalities that he highlights caused me to realize that there is more in common between the two faiths than I had known. For example, the Quran teaches that Jesus died (3:55, 4:159, 5:117, 19:33) and resurrected from the dead (2:72-73, 19:33) (p. 224).
However, Mr. Siljander makes several overstatements to support his points. On page 116, for example, after summarizing the pillars of Islam in five brief statements, the author asks, "what Christian ... could object to any of these five statements [of the five pillars]?" and boldly states that any good Christian, "adhering to his own faith in all ways and also following all five of these central tenets, could at the same time be considered a Muslim." Yet a Christian's adhering to his own faith in all ways while following the five pillars is an inherent contradiction. A Christian cannot at once proclaim that the Bible is God's Word while at the same time declaring, as required by the first pillar of Islam, that Muhammad is God's prophet. To do so would be to deny that Christ was slain for our sins, that he rose again on the third day, and that it is through faith in Him that we are saved. It is to deny that God became man, the very essence of Christianity that was affirmed and reaffirmed in the ecumenical councils that rejected the notion that he was a mere man or prophet, as Islam would hold. It is to deny the Bible as the inspired and uncorrupted Word of God. It is to reject the Eucharist in remembrance of the sacrifice of God's Son who was offered once and for all for their salvation, and to instead make sacrifices to Allah by slaying male goats, lamb, or other animals in a yearly ritual. Christ claimed to be both God (John 14:11, 10:31-33) and the Son of God (Mark 14:61b-62), thus fulfilling the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures. He also claimed to be the only way to God (John 14:6). Through His death, the sins of humankind were paid for, and through His resurrection, all who placed their faith in Him was given renewed life and salvation (Rom 3:26). To become a Muslim would be to profess that Muhammad is God's prophet and to deny these basic biblical teachings.
Mr. Siljander's effort is a valiant one and his desire to bridge the Muslim-Christian divide is noble. Yet he does it at the expense of truth and misses the mark of true Christianity. For fourteen centuries, Christians and Muslims have recognized that the teachings of their respective faiths were irreconcilable. This is why Christians have not accepted Mohammed as a prophet and why Muslims have not accepted the Christian Scriptures as the authentic Word of God. Muslims instead believe that the entire New Testament, which proclaims in each of its books that God became man for the salvation of the world, is a corruption of the original texts. The Christian Church, according to Muslims, for nearly two thousand years, has been able to hide the truth about Jesus: he was a great teacher and prophet who proclaimed God's Word, but he was not God and he did not die for the sins of the world, thus conquering sin and death. Christians who have had an encounter with the living, reigning Christ instead pledge allegiance to a different creed--Christ was who He is claimed to be in the Christian Scriptures, as best exemplified by the words of the Apostle Peter, who called Him "my Lord and my God!" (John 20:28).
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine-Sounding Argument, October 23, 2010
This review is from: A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide (Hardcover)
A Deadly Misunderstanding (by Mark D. Siljander, HarperOne, 2008) is the thread of a notion woven into an anecdotal, historical and autobiographical fabric.
From the Foreword, written by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, through pages populated by African and Middle Eastern potentates, to sober endorsements by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III on the back of the dust jacket, the reader is left a little giddy by the panoply of glitterati.
At the same time, few could help being charmed by the author's modest account of his extensive political career and startled by the amazing discovery that left these notables, along with an impressive array of scholars, so effusive in their praise.
The weight of the endorsements alone might convince the reader that the author's conclusions are valid and unprecedented. But even eye-witnesses, as every prosecuting attorney knows, can be and often are wrong. Agreement merely indicates consensus; it does not establish truth.
Among the book's conclusions are:
* that Islam and Christianity are "not simply overlapping ideas. They were not merely compatible. In the most central sense, they were one continuum. Muhammad had named his movement of total submission to God by identifying it with the core message of Jesus and his followers . . ." (emphasis his), p.122.
* that "The question of Jesus's nature is an utterly unique situation within our collective historical experience, and one that does not have a simple, clear-cut, yes-or-no answer," p.145
Its logic goes something like this:
1. "When Eastern thoughts are translated into Western languages, such as Greek, Latin, or English, there is enormous potential for mistranslation," p.29
2. "When [mistranslations] involve pivotal beliefs that entire civilizations are willing to die for--and kill for--it becomes quite serious," p.29
3. Aramaic is "the `secret' language of the Bible." Reading the Bible in Aramaic is "the only way to legitimately get a clear sense of what the authors of the New Testament were actually saying--in the words, phrases, and idioms they would have used," p.28
"I excitedly searched out a copy of the Peshitta," the author wrote, "the earliest known Aramaic New Testament (dating back to the third or fourth century), along with its 1933 translation into English by Dr. George Lamsa, a scholar of Iraqi origin himself. Armed with several Aramaic dictionaries and the Lamsa Peshitta, I began to dig in."
He began by comparing the New Testament with the Torah.
"Aramaic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages and are closely related. Was there a connection?"
Yes. Hebrew shalom, Aramaic shlama. Both mean peace. And the parsing continued through the author's new Aramaic filter.
By page 33, he had concluded that "It was crystal clear from the text that neither Jesus nor any of his followers ever advocated that anyone `convert' from one religion to another. . . . Our insidious concept of conversion was a linguistic error, a clear mistranslation. Pure and simple: a mistake. A deadly misunderstanding" (emphasis his).
With a few key strokes, the author invalidates the Great Commission, the Book of Acts and most of the other New Testament epistles, along with centuries of evangelism and missions.
Then a Christian friend tells him that he has read the Qur'an and that it "strengthened his faith," leading the author to examine "the other holy book." (That the Qur'an illuminates the Bible is a popular theme of what is known as the postmodern "emerging church," as well as proponents of "contextualization" in Muslim evangelism and the radical and amorphous "Insider Movement." More on that in another article.)
The Islamic Qur'an, whatever else can be said about it, is flush with passages cannibalized from the Bible. Yet, Christians always seem amazed to discover the frequent mention of Jesus (Isa, in Arabic).
The Isa of the Qur'an, however, is just a man and bears no other resemblance to the Jesus of Scripture. Islam, being a unitarian religion, adamantly rejects both the Trinity and the deity of Jesus. Nor is Allah the same as the God of the Bible, regardless of what biblical characteristics are attributed to him.
A Deadly Misunderstanding, nevertheless, pushes ahead in an ever-increasing frenzy of semantic gymnastics, ignoring both divine revelation and literary context, until it convinces itself--but hopefully not many readers--that it has discovered what millennia of Jewish, Christian and Islamic scholars and followers have overlooked.
But no matter what kind of shoehorn you use to try to stuff Islam into the shape of Christianity or Christianity into Islam, it will never fit. Christianity and Islam are oil and water, apples and oranges, toothpicks and totem poles.
"No one comes to the Father except through me," Jesus said in John 14:6. Or was that also mistranslated? And there is no way to misunderstand what he meant when he said, "I am the way and the truth and the life," which clearly excludes any way or truth that denies or rejects him.
A Deadly Misunderstanding is a laudable attempt "to bridge the Muslim-Christian divide." To make sense out of senseless hatred and violence. To resolve the planet's most ancient and obstinate feud.
I wanted it to succeed. But it does not.
It is an entertaining read and a fine-sounding argument. But therein lies the danger.
In its struggle to establish common ground through semantics, it succeeds only in diluting the uniqueness of the very religions it tries to harmonize. And it can raise doubts in those whose faith is not anchored in the Word of God.
As for bridge-building, few I think would disagree that it is better for people to focus on what we have in common than on what divides us. But might we not have sufficient commonality in our humanity, without trying to write a parallel version of the Torah, Qur'an and New Testament?
We are all sons and daughters, men and women, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. We share the same needs. We all are born, we live, suffer and die. We love and lust and battle with our dark sides. We want to be all that we can be and are frustrated when we are not. We live under the same sun, breathe the same air, sleep beneath the same stars. We all help one another and use one another.
If we cannot find common ground in who we are, how less likely are we to find it in what we believe?
* * * *
In the interest of full disclosure, I have known Mark Siljander for many years, having served on Capitol Hill as his press secretary during the Reagan Administration. I know no man of greater integrity. My critique is of the work, not the man.
A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide
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49 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Deadly Misinterpretation of Christianity, October 31, 2009
This review is from: A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide (Hardcover)
A Deadly Misunderstanding contains some good insights for dialogue and relationship building, and describes a wonderful change of attitude toward Muslims - from negative stereotypes to open-hearted bridge-building. However, it is very misleading as an overall approach to Islam and Christianity.
I would note nine major problems in Siljander's approach.
1. He presents a view of Christianity and "the core message of Jesus" that does not include a gospel of salvation by grace through faith alone: "Islam and Christianity were not simply overlapping ideas. They were not merely compatible. In the most central sense, they were one continuum. Muhammad had named his movement of total submission to God by identifying it with the core message of Jesus and his followers" (p 122). Siljander claims to focus (and agree with Muslims) on the essential teachings of Jesus, which strangely don't include his deity or salvation by grace through faith (p 66, 114, 122, 145, 179, 201, 203).
2. He treats the deity of Christ as a non-essential issue, diminishing it to unbiblical views that Muslims can accept. "We agree on what Jesus said and what he stood for, what he has to teach us and be for us today. Whether or not he died on the cross, or exactly how you frame the nature of his identity - while critical, those are separate issues" (p 203).
3. He writes: "Nothing in either Judaism or Christianity contraindicates acknowledging Muhammad as a prophet or "messenger of God" (p 115). He also views Muhammad's messages as "a very close parallel to the tradition of Jeremiah, Isaiah, John, and James" (p 116).
4. He overlooks all parts of Islam that deny the gospel (such as the 2nd half of the shahada), as in this claim: "The central profession of faith of all three great monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths...were not simply compatible - they were essentially identical" (p 119). He also tries to make Christianity compatible with all Islamic practices: "a good Christian or Jew, adhering to his own faith in all ways and also following all five of these central tenets" [Islam's 5 pillars]..." (p 116).
5. He ignores progressive revelation (NT interprets the OT, and the {later} Medinan suras of the Qur'an can abrogate the Meccan). He counts the number of violent verses in the OT in comparison with the number in the Qur'an (p 41-43), ignoring the fact that Jesus and the NT taught a new and different way, thus fulfilling and teaching an end to earthly violence in God's name. This contrasts sharply with the Qur'an's violent verses, which are generally the later ones, thus not abrogated by earlier verses.
6. He cites the Aramaic translation of the NT as a supposed key for correcting errors in the Greek version (p 28-29, 33, 46-47, 137, 199, 229-234), whereas the vast majority of scholars strongly agree that the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and believers in inerrancy and/or infallibility make this claim only for the original Greek manuscripts (not to be corrected by an Aramaic translation).
7. He offers weak logic and misses the biblical main point on some major issues (such as "conversion," (p 16-17, 32); and "begotten," (p 137, 143).
8. He strongly encourages Muslims who follow Jesus to remain Muslim (p 16-17, 87, 116, 122), a very dubious approach to discipleship.
9. He claims support for these ideas from scholars, not all of whom actually give the support claimed in the book. I asked two of the scholars cited as supportive (each more than once) what their opinion was about the book. Both gave substantially negative comments. One said "his scholarship is sloppy in places, and that leads him to make exegetical and theological statements which cannot actually be supported by the evidence," and the other wrote "The book I endorsed didn't end up being the book published. At best, the intention of the congressman is being misrepresented. At worst, his publisher has made some cataclysmic errors in the final product."
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