God has a human face

It is important to realise that for Christianity the body is affirmed. After all, the Word became flesh. Jesus lived in a body, died in a body was raised in a body and ascended in a body. The Spirit descended on a body. Jesus healed bodies. Indeed, there is no life outside the body.

The gospel was never about how the soul can get to heaven. It was always about the promise of the heavenly kingdom here on earth in which God will dwell with His people as he did in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. This is a vision that holds the divine and the worldly together, that heals the separation between God and the world.

When the Church neglects either the divinity of Christ or His humanity the promise is distorted in our eyes. The coming kingdom will be understood to exist either as a spiritual reality hidden in the hearts of believers or as a totally material reality made in the world, in our case, by way of technological advances. Both of these options will distort the human person, who as Barth has said, is the creature suspended between heaven and earth.

If we are to have a meaningful conversation with Islam we have to become theologians because only then will we be able to understand what makes Christianity and Islam so different and the societies they engender so different. The time is past when we can, with a wave of the hand, lump the religions of the world together because we are afraid of a critical discussion that will produce religious intolerance.

Christians can have this discussion because we know that in the grace of God all people exist as human souls before God. Thus religious belief may be discussed without it leading to prejudice and persecution. The lesson that the Church learnt in the Middle Ages was that when you kill a heretic you kill a human being; you do not kill a belief. It is an understanding that we must relearn today.

People of other faiths are primarily human beings with the same hopes and fears and loves that all people of the world share. We are all neighbours; we are all recipients of the grace of God even though we know it not.

This is a better basis for tolerance than willed blindness to religious difference because it has the capacity to lead to real understanding.