BBC Radio 4 2016-01-12

BBC Radio 4 2016-01-12

Social media posts can become international incidents. Over the past month, Wheaton college, an evangelical Christian college in Illinois has become the centre of a major debate. During the season of advent a tenured professor Larycia Hawkins posted an image on her Facebook page declaring her decision to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslims. Her theological justification for this act was. “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

This comment about Christians and Muslims worshipping the same God is not some obscure debate confined to the academy but has found several column inches in the Washington Post, the wall street journal and Time magazine. Professor Hawkins has now been suspended from her academic position – she has earned both support and criticism, many claiming that their objection is not against her wearing the hijab and showing solidarity with Muslims but against her claims that Christian and Muslims worship the same God.

The same God or even the one God - this debate has been around for centuries. For too long Christians and Muslims have criticised even ridiculed each other’s understanding of God in the belief that they are defending the truth. It seems to me that we could carry on claiming that our truth is the only truth and at the same time pretend that theological statements carry no political, social or ethical consequences except that they do. Today, it can be easy to become complacent that we are safe in an enlightened secular environment, where religious fervour can only incur so much damage but it is naïve and dangerous to think like this. Whether it’s the doctrinal debates of the academy, the polarising religious rhetoric of political campaigns, or the conflict zones of the Middle East, we are living in a time when speaking of God can often lead as much to despair as it can to hope.

It has become so easy for whole communities to be suspicious of one another, recently manifest in Cologne where all the political and social complexities of gender and migration have been reduced to ugly images of ugly behaviour by some of the asylum seekers. It may well be that refugees struggle or refuse to integrate in Europe, that Isis continues to recruit young western Muslims, that far right groups increasingly campaign against Islam as the enemy of western civilisation. These are current realities, difficult and challenging for us all but which demand courage and vision. There is no single truth here and for me there is no single truth about God. Doctrines and creeds are important but good theology must also be good ethics. Otherwise it becomes all too easy to continue spreading hatred in the name of a loving God.