On the ‘People of the Book’

​I did not come to Unity, the denomination of New Thought religion I identify with, by way of Christianity, I was attracted to the byline “one God many paths”. Although I had been raised in a Christian home I had difficulty with many of the ideas and stories in the Bible from a very early age and left the church of my family by the time I was twelve. Most of the difficulties that I had with the Bible, came from the Old Testament with all of its smoting, vengeance and warfare and most especially with the book of Job. The idea that God could allow such suffering in pursuit of winning a bet with the Devil was mortifying. As I began to explore Unity, which describes itself as a school of “Practical Christianity” I focused on the New Testament, particularly the teachings of our way-shower Jesus. Five years ago I took an SEE (Spiritual Enrichment and Education) course on prayer which used as its text “How to Pray Without Talking To God” by Rev. Linda Martella-Whitsett and decided at that point to pursue becoming an LUT (Licensed Unity Teacher) which involved taking twenty-five, ten hour courses among other requirements. Last year I took the SEE course on the metaphysical interpretation of the Bible and I finished with a much deeper appreciation for this sacred text as well as a higher tolerance for those elements which on a literal level I found abhorrent. Just this past month I completed the last of those twenty-five course with the on the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
 
My teacher and guide in this course on the Hebrew Bible assigned as part of our learning materials a series of YouTube videos on the books of the Hebrew Bible that were simply astounding. In introducing what it was they had in mind doing their work on the Bible Project, the content creators made the point very clearly and reiterated it often, that the Bible forms a single book, a single story with many elements and is filled with a number of literary devices, symbols and teaching techniques. This was an eye-opener for me in that of course I knew that most Bible-based believers would make this claim but these folks backed it up with some very clear analysis. The reason this is so important to me is that through this lens I began to understand something which had perplexed me for a long time in my interfaith work regarding what Muslims would call “the People of the Book”. Certainly we understand that the Bible is shared in part by three religions. The first five books which comprise the Torah are the central Scriptures of the Jewish faith. The rest of the Old Testament is important in part or in whole to most if not all Jews. Part of the difficulty between Jews and Christians has been that the Jews often do not regard the New Testament as an extension of their sacred text. As I understand it some of them do accept Jesus as a prophet while not considering him the Messiah they had long been, and still are looking for.
 
All of this came into focus again for me while at a presentation by a Muslim on his faith as part of an Interfaith Harmony monthly series at Pastor Jack Bomar’s United Church in Beaufort, SC. I am not enough of an expert on Islam to be able to verify in any way the things he said but I was struck by a claim he made that Islam was not considered a new religion by Muslims, but rather an extension of and a re-focued approach to the Bible as a whole as Scripture. In his understanding the prophet Mohammed was just that, another prophet of God, and he was quick to point out that the Koran mentions Jesus, whom they revere as a Prophet, many more times than it mentions Mohammed himself. In fact Jesus has his own book in the Koran as does Jesus’ mother Mary. He pointed out that in almost all ways Muslims and Christians agree on who Jesus was and is, including that he had a miraculous birth. However as with their Jewish cousins, Muslims do not see Jesus as the Messiah and most specifically they do not see Jesus as God incarnated on earth.
 
I must confess that as a young hippie I was exposed to a lot of born-again Christians and their very clear-cut and dogmatic view of the world, particularly their notion of being “saved”. I found it deeply offensive. Fast-forward a number of years to where I am now, as a Truth Unity student, and also heavily involved in the interfaith movement. Through some life circumstance as well as my efforts to reach out I am now breaking bread with and trying to reach common ground, with my fundamentalist Christian brethren (correct choice of word in that this is primarily through a Men’s breakfast group). I’ve always seen fundamentalism as a reactionary movement, partly driven by fear and partly seen as a radical solution to the problem of evil we see in the world today.
 
One of the very great gifts I have received in this SEE course on the Hebrew Bible, particularly in reading the books of the prophets, is to see that this is a very old trend. Throughout the entire history of the sacred text we call the Bible there have been those who would see that the culture they were living in had divorced itself from the spiritual principles which it was taught and that the consequence of this split would inevitably be some kind of a disaster as punishment for these sins. As a side note Unity emphasizes the Latin root of the word “sin” as an archery term meaning merely “to miss the mark” and does not encourage people to fear bolts of lightning from an angry god for such transgressions.
 
The Old Testament prophets pointed out three ways in which “wickedness” was manifest, firstly the worship of false gods, and this included Mammon, my understanding of which was a God to whom you would appeal for money and power. Secondly was the abuse and exploitation of the poor, and thirdly the descent into unbridled sensuality including such things as drunkenness, and debauchery and the indulgence in feasts of rich and exotic foods, etc. All of these things lead humankind away from its spiritual roots, and as always there are consequences for losing sight of our true source and nature. After calling out the people on the ways in which they had moved away from their God they generally continued their prophecy with often very explicit out-picturings of the catastrophes coming, such things as being conquered by Babylon or plagues of disease and vermin. Seeing this so clearly in the Old Testament has helped me to understand the fundamentalist Christian in a way that’s not just dismissively seeing them as reactionaries, bound by fear, but in fact part of a long lineage of the visionaries and doomsayers who see themselves as continuing this tradition. This is related in a way to the Christian understanding of the New Testament being a continuation of the story of God’s relation with humankind in history.
 
This line of understanding I think is crucial in coming to grips with fundamentalist Islam. I want to be quick to note that the vast majority of the two billion Muslims that inhabit this earth are peaceful, have a desire to be good in the sight of God and to serve their fellow man. But just as fundamentalist Jews were behind the crucifixion of Jesus, and fundamentalist Christians were behind the Spanish Inquisition and the genocide of nine-tenths of the population of the New World, Islamic fundamentalists are capable of great violence in their quest to purify the world. Their mission is to deal with evil and violence in the world, no matter how paradoxical their methods may seem. Among the things that the prophets were concerned with was with the breaking of the covenants with their God and with the use of lying and cheating as means of amassing wealth and control. In just this way fundamentalist Islam sees Christianity as being a very hypocritical and evil outworking of the principles in “the Book”.

Many people do not know that on the opening page of the official ISIS website is mention of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret treaty entered into by France and Great Britain in 1916 to divide up all of the Islamic former territories of Turkey between themselves. The most explicit avowed goal of ISIS is to overturn Sykes-Picot. This crucial fact is something I never see mentioned in western media when talking about radical Islamic terroism. Anyone who has seen Peter O’Toole’s great film Lawrence of Arabia knows that this Colonel T. E. Lawrence had been charged by the British government to build an insurrection army to defeat the Turks (which he did most successfully) and that he had been authorized by his government to assure the Arabs that they would be rewarded with home rule in their various lands. From ISIS and Al Qaeda's perspectives, and even from those of non-radicalized Muslims, this great betrayal was clearly a ruse to gain control of and to exploit the peoples of these lands. Certainly the extraction and export of petroleum for almost the sole benefit of the West confirmed their darkest fears.
 
Many of those Islamic fundamentalist Imams see themselves as legitimate heirs to the tradition of the prophets of the Old Testament. Not only are they quick to point out the iniquities (in most cases the very same iniquities of those of Old Testament times) but to prophesy the inevitable outcome of the “wickedness” of the West. Beyond the grievances I’ve outlined is the outrage of the more conservative members of these cultures when confronted with the Western values that are portrayed in motion pictures and in advertisements for consumer products. This includes the blatant sexuality, the gratuitous violence, the un-tempered extravagances of the very wealthy, and in the clear, unmistakable exploitation of the poor and of the land, the Earth itself, for the profit of the very few. I have no doubt that this understanding they have of the continuity of the story of the peoples of “the Book” could go a long way towards fostering understanding between one another. It could be the basis of much needed dialogue amongst these peoples, who between them (Christian, Muslim and Jew) comprise nearly two-thirds of all the believers alive today on earth.
 
With my opening paragraph confession about my reservations and reluctance to invest time in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, it might seem as logical, perhaps inevitable that this class on the Hebrew Bible ended up being my last SEE course, and certainly that is a factor. But I have come to believe in the Divine manifesting in my life through perfect timing. I am deeply grateful that it was my last class in this course of study. Even as recently as a week before I heard that young man speak with such conviction about his Islamic faith, I would not have been ready for the great gifts that have come to me through this study. The term “The Peoples of the Book” came from the Prophet Mohammed and was used in part to justify special treatment, exclusion from taxes for one, not afforded to the Pagans which were a majority in these lands at that time.  My hope and prayer is that this understanding may become a basis for defusing the great dangers that radicalized monotheists pose for our shared world.