S1315 Three Religions and their Defenders Old and New

The Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions have survived many challenges to their existence and relevance throughout their histories.  This course will examine the various challenges each of these religions has faced throughout history and how strong voices have brought renewed life to their religious communities through their forceful writings.

Each of these three prominent religions has had strong challenges that attempted to undermine them.  Talented believers in each of these traditions have met these challenges and have shown how these religions have in their basic resources the strength to meet these challenges.  Often these challenges were from outside philosophies or from inside misinterpretations of their fundamental principles.  The Jewish tradition will be represented by the most famous medieval Jewish author, Moses Maimonides, whose The Guide of the Perplexed responded to the challenges provided from the Jewish believers’ encounter with the philosophy of Aristotle which raised some doubts about the reasonableness of following the law of Yawheh.  The modern representative of the Jewish religion and its ability to sustain the deepest instincts of man is Abraham Heschel.  In Who is Man? Heschel reveals the resources of the Jewish Scriptures to go beyond Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” to “I am indebted, therefore I am.”  This book of Heschel  is a strong reflection on our indebtedness for existence and the talents and abilities we have been given and how much we are fulfilled in sharing them with others in respect and generosity.

Probably the greatest of the Christian authors is St. Augustine.  As Martin D’Arcy put it:  Augustine had the power “of making what is intensely personal pass into the universal.”  Augustine’s Confessions, though personal , is really as universal as Homer’s great poems and Virgil’s Aeneid.  Augustine in his many works faced the chief intellectual challenges that faced the Christian faith and attempted to show that the riches of God’s revelation in the Scriptures surpassed all human wisdom.   His writings were acts of thanksgiving for the blessings he received.   In the twentieth century, Karl Barth judged that many of his contemporary fellow theologians had sold out to what would be acceptable religious teachings in the present-day world.  His subsequent writings were dedicated to finding the ways in which his Christian religion had a higher kind of wisdom that could more richly benefit Christian believers and the world in which they lived.

The Muslim religion is also represented by a medieval religious thinker, al-Ghazali, who brings out the various levels of appreciating the Muslim sacred book, the Koran.  He is a person who has gone through all the stages that different Muslims have reached, from that of the simple follower of the law to the mystics who have achieved mystical union with God.  He indicates the lack some have felt at one stage that moved them on to further pursuit, but it is the Koran that has within its riches the stimulus that leads each seeker to the next stage.  Our modern Muslim author is Khaled Abou El Fadl, who attempts to rescue Islam from the image established by the extremists who distort the truths of the Koran, in his The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists.

The religious writers of these three religions have a great sense of the wisdom in their traditions and a strong spirit of gratitude that urges them to communicate these spiritual riches to the next generation.

The expectation from reading these authors is to introduce students to other religions than their own, presuming they are religious in some way, and to experience through the writings of great religious authors the way various cultural challenges force them to dig deeper into the understanding of the sources of their beliefs to find and share with fellow believers and all others who might benefit from their insights the faith they have received.  These authors also show that their religions have depths that usually are ignored and emotional and intellectual strengths that they want to share.