Pursuing Veritas

While I was teaching a class on world religions at our local church, we began our examination of Islam with a simple question: ‘what is Islam?’ That is, how should American Christians think about Islam? We heard a variety of answers from the class, most of whom had no experience with Muslims or Islam outside of their exposure to commercial media.

Unsurprisingly, many people thought first of Islam as an alternative religion. Others thought of Islam as a political theory or as an enemy of those following Jesus. A veteran in the class noted that they conceived of Islam as ‘those people I met over in the Middle East.’ Still others thought of Islam as neighbors since a mosque was being constructed nearby.

What is Islam? How should American Christians think about Islam? As even a cursory examination of scholarship and popular experience demonstrates, are numerous and multifaceted ways to approach Islam, and it would be unwise and reductive to pretend otherwise. Yet most of these perspectives cast Islam as something innately foreign and other, which can make it difficult to really understand the worldview that an increasing number of our neighbors, coworkers, workout buddies, and friends inhabit.

Which brings us to one more framework through which our class looked at Islam: as a heresy. Not in a heresy in a pejorative sense, as people who have everything all wrong. But heresy as a distinct variation of a theological framework that shares much of the common understanding of the world while remaining at odds on certain questions of theological import.

Somewhat surprisingly, this was the viewpoint this class found most helpful for understanding Islam. Viewing Islam as heresy stressed both the similarities and the differences between familiar Christian faith and the viewpoints of their Muslim neighbors. While conversations about heresy are increasingly rare in interfaith dialogue today, this approach has a long history. In fact, seeing Islam as heresy was the lens by which the earliest Christian interactions made sense of Islam too.

One of the first Christians to encounter Islam and write about it was John of Damascus (AD 675-739/40), who lived at a time when Islam was rapidly spreading across the Mediterranean world. While John’s primary theological writings focused on defending Christian orthodoxy and addressing intra-Christian controversies, his treatises on Islam are crucial for understanding how early Christians perceived Islam: not as a distinct religious worldview, but as a heretical offshoot of orthodox Christianity.

While scholars such as Peter Schadler, Daniel Janosick, Daniel Sahas, and Sidney Griffith have undertaken thorough examinations of John’s perspective on Islam and interaction with the Qur’an, little has been said about resourcing or building from John’s approach today. This article builds from John of Damascus’s interaction with Islam a Christian heresy and explores how his approach of deploying accurate information and charitable engagement can inform contemporary Christian-Muslim dialogue today. To that end, this article will examine John of Damascus’s context and briefly introduce his writings in order to draw out his view on Islam before developing these concepts as tools for contemporary Muslim-Christian dialogue.