128
34
fear. For example, I gave a speech commemorating the
beginning of the fifteenth Islamic century at a library in
Baltimore. It was a very constructive speech about how
monotheists can work together in a secular world to
achieve benefit and order for our communities. But in
the question and answer period I was almost assaulted by
questions from a young Muslim man from Egypt. He
started by wanting to know if I was a believer. I told him
that I was a believer and not just a nominal believer or a
believer because of my family background, but a believer
by conviction and participation. So I felt I understood
what it felt like to be a Muslim believer. But I was not a
Muslim, but a committed Christian believer.
I cannot remember what his further remarks and
questions were. I do remember he apologized to me
afterwards during the refreshment time. He said he was
not upset at what I was saying, but struggling with the
fact that he had been taught in secondary school in Egypt
that all Christians who studied Islam seriously became
Muslims. My presence and presentation called that
conviction into question. He was dealing with a certain
amount of bafflement. His faith was being contested.
A more relevant experience along these lines occurred
to my student, Jerry Page, while a missionary in an
Islamic village in West Africa. His mission board allowed
him to live and dress like the people of the village but
denied his request to wear the little kippa that all adult
men in his village wear. His board refused because they
felt it would identify him as a Muslim. He reluctantly
obeyed their directive. He discovered in the short run
that the villagers all assumed he was not a believer in God
because he did not wear the little head covering. The
little cap functioned for them as a symbol designating the
person wearing it as a male believer.
In the long run, however, having discovered that
Jerry was in fact a devout believer in God, they had to
change their understanding of the significance of the
little kippa. They could no longer consider it a symbol of
belief in God and of appropriate piety. From this and
similar experiences, Jerry developed the concept in inter-
cultural communication of the worldview wedge. Jerry
'
s
bare head represented a small challenge to their world
and identity, it suggested subtly that they may be wrong
about other things as well. As such it paves the way for
the kind of innovation it takes for the people to accept
the gospel. Jerry was gently contesting the viability of
their world. In a vast array of ways a people
'
s world is
being contested day in and day out by new things
requiring interpretation.
9
When people can no longer endure the suffering they
have to undergo, their world and identity suffer threat.
Suffering also contests a people
'
s world. One interesting
phenomenon about Muslims and the cross of Christ is
that, even though the orthodox Muslims of both Sunni
and Shiite traditions, reject our stories of Jesus
'
death on
a cross, contemporary Islamic poets in both Persian and
Arabic societies are affirming the crucifixion using Jesus
'
death on a cross as a symbol of authentic willingness to
suffer for the public social good.
10
This image of Jesus
does not occur in the Qur
'
an
11
or subsequent traditional
Muslim literature.
12
It contests the Islamic tradition.
Evidently their religious tradition did not supply them
with what they needed to endure the suffering of their
circumstances or to mount the commitment necessary to
carry out their public duty. Religious worlds are
contested at the point of human suffering.
The problem of evil emerges out of the problem of
suffering. It is not merely a threat to our ability to
endure, as is the problem of suffering, but to our ability
to make sound moral judgments. Judaism has a sound
doctrine of suffering and the Jewish people from early in
the existence of their tradition have suffered.
Y
et the
Holocaust was too major an event to explain in any
adequate way. It therefore has created a very large amount
of moral quandary--not only among Jews, I might add. I
heard of a Jew who became a Christian after reading
Martin Luther
'
s "Table Talk." Someone had given him
the book so he could see the anti-Semitic dimensions of
it. In addition to the anti-Semitic material, he also
encountered Luther
'
s theology of the cross. He found it
the only theology he had known that made any sense out
of the holocaust experience.
I can imagine there being individuals in Muslim
societies who question whether God has any concern for
them when their society has suffered so severely. These
closet atheists may respond almost immediately to the
conviction that God was in Christ suffering with us and
giving us hope and assurance--beyond our suffering--of
eternal life. Atheists reject the view of God their world
gives them. They have not rejected views of God they
have not yet known about. Hindus and Buddhists do not
seem to be bothered with the problem of evil as much as
Muslims, but it can challenge any person regardless of his
or her religious affiliation.
Lamin Sanneh, professor of Christian mission and
African studies at
Y
ale University, had an experience
related to this moral limit as a teenage heir to leadership
in a West African Islamic community, studying Islamic
disciplines. His deep conviction that there must be a God
of love was not rewarded by his Islamic studies. When he
ENCOUNTERING WORLD RELIGIONS: AN EVANGELICAL RESPONSE
