Mr. Auster’s comments on portable telephones, backpacks, and eating in public are priceless, and where else would you encounter such than at VFR? Certainly not in any of the mainstream conservative magazines.

On the other hand, some of us are more Kalbian on foreign policy and our assessments of this society’s prospects. Imagine a journal of cultural criticism, with LA writing on prevailing aesthetic and moral standards in the West, and JK analyzing our present predicament and prospects for the future.

WW

#3 is a more than a bit silly. The use of an SUV does not create inconveniencies for others anymore than the use of small cars creates inconveniencies for users of SUVs. It certainly does not bear comparison to speaking on a cellular phone in a movie theatre or wearing an oversized backpack on a city bus, because it is not a consumer choice that innately brings externalities for all other consumers.

Furthermore, the expanded use of SUVs is mostly the fault of the government itself. Station wagons used to be the preferred family cars, but when CAFE standards came into effect, the prohibitive restrictions on fuel economy reduced the sizes of those vehicles and forced consumers to seek out less-regulated alternatives for the high-capacity family automobile — namely SUVs. If SUVs are clamped down on by CAFE, you can count on a rush to vans or other trucks.

So I reject the notion that SUVs are a part of some negative cultural trend. They simply fill a need without hurting those who don’t seek offense at every blasted thing around them. And the idea that they work to the exclusion of God is silly — an SUV is no more self-serving than any other car or consumer choice.

Mr. Courrèges makes a useful distinction, so let me clarify. I did not mean to suggest that SUVs in and of themselves demonstrate the spiritual deterioration I describe. In many instances, SUVs are practical and even necessary. But in many other instances, as in large cities, they are neither, and in their ubiquitous use they are part and parcel of the whole phenomenon of self-inflation as represented by many things in our culture: grossly oversized cars, grossly oversized people, the “grunge” look, the intrusion of once-private behaviors into public spaces, transgressive television entertainment, and so on. All these things are of a piece, they all express the spirit of the age, which is (in Fr. Seraphim Rose’s specific sense of the term) nihilism.

Jesus preached the coming of the end. Pox on the environment, he would have drove a gas-guzzling Cadillac with a license plate that said:
GODS SON

Mr. Dickerson suggests that the son of God would have a vanity plate?

The notion offends my sensibilities and I not even a believer.

Mr. DeMent: it comes back to particulars. Mr. Dickson is a partisan of the religion of peace and so has a natural disdain for Christianity that can’t always remain hidden; nor should it, in my view, since in addition to being ultimately incompatible with liberalism Christendom is also ultimately incompatible with Islam. That is something we ought to just face up to, it seems to me.

The Cadillac thing seems like something of a cheap shot, though. I think that Islam was founded specifically as a blasphemy of the Eucharist, and specifically in order to try to make Arabs the chosen people rather than the Jews. I reached that tentative conclusion after reading a number of books quite sympathetic to Islam: the unsympathetic ones failed to communicate how Moslims actually thought about their practices themselves so they weren’t terribly useful. This Mohammedan blasphemy of the Eucharist that replaced the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine with the Real Presence of Allah in the recitation of the Book is the primary theological development that led to the protestant book-centric heresy a thousand years later, the political liberalism that developed from protestantism, and ultimately ideological liberalism as world view/replacement religion. Text-centric postmodernism is a further development of the same ideological seed that was planted by Mohammed 1500 years ago or so, and whether Moslems realize it or not Islam’s core ideas are now foundational to the entire civilized world. Father Rose’s nihilism is a natural outcome of replacing Christ with an empty text-in-itself. All this is my own opinion of course.

I’ll just say all of that outright rather than making some crack about what Mohammed might drive and what might be on his vanity plate, just to keep things as clear and in the open as possible, though.

I realize this all may seem terribly abstract, but when you think about the implications of replacing actual particular substantive things with formal text, and of making that ideologically foundational, you can see Mohammed’s handwriting all over history (pun intended). This includes our current replacement of particular peoples and traditions with empty self-contradictory propositions as a means of emancipation: it is quite parallel to Mohammed’s inversion of the Jews from chosen-tangible-actual-imperfect-mediators-of-God to oppressor-dogs-to-be-destroyed-along-with-the-infidel-Christians-who-see-the-Jews-as-chosen, through the means of replacing the tangible with the textual, the traditional with the propositional.

This all has a much more direct and important bearing on our current circumstances than most people appreciate, in my opinion. You can’t fully appreciate where you are without knowing how you got there.

No one can accuse Matt of not being an original thinker. He is saying that Islam is the source of Western liberalism.

While I don’t know enough about Islam to have a definite view on this, I suspect that Matt has noted certain philosophical parallels between the Islamic Koran-worship on one side and Protestantism on the other and then concludes that the former was the historical source of the latter. He is mistakenly construing an abstract philosophical similarity as a historical causative relationship.

The nihilism I was talking about in connection with cell phones and vehicles isn’t just symbolic. Look what happens when you combine the two.

Fatal crashes caused by cell phone use rising
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Los Angeles Times
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/1684519

WASHINGTON — The death toll from crashes caused by drivers talking on their wireless phones appears to be rising significantly as the devices become must-have accessories for many Americans.
A study released today by Harvard University’s Center for Risk Analysis estimates a rate of 2,600 deaths a year in such crashes, compared with the same researchers’ estimate of 1,000 two years ago.
The study also estimated that 570,000 injuries a year and 1.5 million crashes resulting in property damage can be blamed on wireless phone use.
Two federal agencies recently have stepped up efforts to understand how wireless phone use may contribute to accidents. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating wireless phones as a potential contributing factor in several recent serious crashes.

It is true that correlation does not imply causality. On the other hand, most of what we know of the Greek philosophers we know (or knew originally) through the Arabs who preserved it, for example.

Also it seems true that we can’t make the same _kind_ of cause and effect statements about ideas that we can about physical objects. The existence of a massive civilization/empire for a thousand years, adjacent to and competitive with Roman Christendom, taking propositional textualism as authoritative over tradition and as replacement of real presence, propogating the core secular intellectual ideas of the day primarily from the ancient Greeks, (insert other comments about the Moslem empire here), can’t have hurt Protestantism’s rise as rival to Catholicism on the back of finitist textual literalism as subversion of traditional authority.

I suppose we could come up with criteria for historical causative relationships and see if they apply, although those sorts of things are tricky even in physical science. David Hume and his followers didn’t think there was any such thing as cause and effect, and while imperfect he was not unintelligent. I am not a great historian by any means, but I think the core thesis is at least defensible and can’t be dismissed on the basis of some basic one-statement intellectual error. The question of the credibility of historical causality, once we’ve decided what that means, should reduce to a catalogue of historical evidence. At the very least it would seem wrong on its face to deny that Moslem textual canono-literalism gave aid and comfort to Protestant textual canono-literalism.

If I were a Protestant — I am not — I would almost certainly have a very difficult time taking today’s Catholic Church seriously. That pains me greatly, but it is quite true, and I don’t expect my little historical thesis to change that for anyone. Larry Auster’s characterization of post Vatican II Catholicism as neocon is painfully on target, I am forced to admit.

Finally, I’ll thank Mr. Auster for the complement. Often I am thought just nutty rather than original. Mr. Auster is a true gentleman as well as an important and lonely voice in the wilderness on issues most people would rather not talk about.

Once again, based on my strictly second-hand knowledge of Islam, I am not denying what appears to be an interesting correlation between certain aspects of Islam and certain aspects of Protestantism. This is a fascinating idea we ought to pursue further. At the same time, Matt has presented no evidence to support the idea that Protestantism was influenced by Islam in any way whatsoever. On the contrary, European Christians in the Middle Ages were largely ignorant of the actual teachings of Islam and tended to see that religion in clichéd, wildly a-historical terms, e.g., the characterization of Islam in The Song of Roland, and Dante’s portrayal of Muhammad in The Inferno.

And thanks to Matt for the nice words.

Well, I am not entirely sure that Dante got it wrong :-).

I wasn’t objecting to the assertion that I haven’t provided references, bibliography, parallel timelines, evidence of the propogation by Moslems specifically of the idea of canon and textual literalism along with the actual Greek works that Moslems preserved in Arabic, evidence that e.g. Calvin was influenced by that intellectual legacy, etc. If I were to do a thesis or write a book on this it would of course have to contain all of that and more, and it is true that I have not provided all that in this comment box. If my priorities were a bit different right now I might go write the book; and I may at some point do just that.

What I objected to was the notion that I made an intellectual error and that therefore the thesis is wrong. If Mr. Auster were to modify this comment:

“He is mistakenly construing an abstract philosophical similarity as a historical causative relationship.”

to say instead:

“He has shown an abstract philosophical similarity, the proper relation in time for cause and effect, and even a possible transmission path from the Moslem civilization to Christendom; but he has not provided the detailed empirical evidence necessary to show actual causality.”

or something along those lines, then my objection to his objection would evaporate.

I accept Matt’s correction. But at the same time, I was not requiring a Ph.d thesis from him, just one or two suggestive pieces of evidence!

Actually, Dante’s portrayal of Mohammed in Inferno would lend authenticity to the idea that Islam, under Mohammed’s teachings, could have been responsible for the division in the Christian church. I just studied the Divine Comedy last year, and Mohammed’s punishment was that he was forever torn in half again and again, an ironic punishment for the schism that he caused. According to the footnotes of the Penguin Classics version, Dante & Co. believed that Mohammed was originally a christian and ‘created’ Islam to compete with christianity. I guess there is no conclusive evidence here that Dante would have attributed the schism in the Catholic church to Mohammed.

No, there is no evidence, not even in the publisher’s extensive footnotes.

Well, it isn’t clear what would be taken as suggestive. On the notion that recitation from the Koran replaces the Christian Eucharist:

“It was similar to the Christian devotion to Jesus, since it saw the Quran as God’s uncreated Word, which had existed with him from all eternity, and which had, as it were, taken flesh and human form in the scripture revealed to Mohammed. Muslims could not see God, but they could hear him each time they listened to a recitation of the Quran, and felt that they had entered the divine presence.”

Karen Armstrong, _Islam_

On some other suggestive similarities to Protestantism:

“Mohammed had also been shocked to learn that the Jews and Christians (whom he had assumed to belong to a single faith) actually had serious theological differences… Muslims would direct themselves to God alone: it was idolatrous to bow before a human system or an established religion rather than before God himself… Muslims would no longer tag lamely behind those Jews and Christians who ridiculed their aspirations, but would take their own direct route to God.”

(Ibid)

And liberalism:

“Social justice was, therefore, the crucial virtue of Islam…

This was far more important than any doctrinal teaching about God. In fact the Quran has a negative view of theological speculation, which it calls _zannah_, self-indulgent whimsy about ineffable matters that nobody can ascertain one way or another.”

(Ibid)

As far as influence on the West in general and the reformers specifically goes, I am not the only person who thinks there is a connection. Islam preserved the Greek classics. In Spain the European Catholics and the Islamic Moors mingled culturally for centuries. While I don’t have a reference immediately at hand Martin Luther was accused by the Greek Orthodox of being too influenced by the Moslems; so some of his contemporaries certainly thought such influence was not only possible but had actually occurred.

Obviously I am not the only person who thinks these things, but I’ll acknowledge that doing a proper job of documenting it would take more effort than I have the time for right now.

Also I guess it is worth pointing out that Martin Luther specifically wrote several essays and articles on Islam and the Koran. One of them was even used as a preface in a Western translation of the Koran.

Now obviously there will be no quotes from Luther stating “Moslems treat the Koran in the same way as I treat the Bible. We have the same or very similar basic philosophies of sacred text specifically and religion in general; we just disagree as to which one is the genuine Word of God.”

He comes pretty close though. The following is from Martin Luther’s preface to the _Tract on the Religions and Customs of the Turks_, published in 1530:

“For this reason, therefore, we are publishing this book and thrusting it in the face of the opponents of the gospel, so that, confused as they are in their own foolish opinions, they might actually experience and feel with their own hands that what the gospel teaches is true. For the gospel teaches that the Christian religion is by far something other and more sublime than showy ceremonies, tonsures, hoods, pale countenances, fasts, feasts, canonical hours, and the entire show of the Roman church throughout the world. Indeed, in all these things the Turks are by far superior.”

So the notion that Protestantism is a heresy that takes much from Islam is supported by what Luther himself has to say about Islam.

That Luther quote is very interesting. It seems that, just as 19th and 20th century liberals used Islamic tolerance as a foil against Christian intolerance, the founder of Protestantism used Islamic austerity as a foil against Roman ritualism.

Also, the Armstrong quote is very provocative, though it seems to me that the description of Muslims listening to a recitation of the Quran and feeling that they had entered the divine presence sounds more like Catholicism than Protestantism. The liturgy and architecture of the medieval church created an experience of being in heaven, in God’s presence, whereas the Protestant experience is of the individual experiencing himself as being saved through faith, with the Word experienced as having divine and saving truth and authority, not as conveying God’s presence. The focus in Luther’s writings that I have read is on man’s self, on the question of whether one is saved. It’s the Mayor Koch question: “How am I doin’?” Luther even defines the eucharist as a sign that one believes and is saved. The primary focus is on the self and its salvation, not on God.

However, getting back to the issue of whether Islam had, as Matt believes, a historical influence on the development of Protestantism or just shared certain similarities with it, I’m not dismissing Matt’s thesis, but I think it still remains to be demonstrated. I tend to think that Protestantism, whether for good or evil, was the result of an internal development (or breakdown, if you prefer) within the soul of Western man, not something he picked up from without.

Sure, I agree that meeting a standard of proof would require more. All space and time permit at the moment is to satisfy “suggestive” criteria as opposed to “proof” criteria; the rest, as they say, is left as an exercise.

Lawrence Auster’s comments about SUVs and people who hold embarrassing personal conversations on cell phones in public (especially in grociery store checkout lines) is both amusing and refreshing. It’s certainly not a perspective found among most contemporary conservatives, as most of them are too busy building shrines to capitalism.

I would also add to his list grown men who wear baseball caps on backward.

Larry Auster wrote:
“…though it seems to me that the description of Muslims listening to a recitation of the Quran and feeling that they had entered the divine presence sounds more like Catholicism than Protestantism. The liturgy and architecture of the medieval church created an experience of being in heaven, in God’s presence, whereas the Protestant experience is of the individual experiencing himself as being saved through faith,”

I concur with all of that, by the way. My basic thesis goes something like this:

1) Islam was Mohammed’s attempt to recreate the Catholic religion but with Arabs as the Chosen People rather than the Jews. (In that sense Mohammed was the first textually subversive postmodern - he coopted and replaced the Catholic master narrative with his invented Koranic one in order to invert what he perceived as the inferior/superior Arab/Jew relation).

2) In order to accomplish this, Mohammed took Catholicism’s central sacrament - the sacrifice of the mass — and replaced it with recitation from the Koran. This substitution of formal written propositions for substance and ritual was Mohammed’s key theological innovation, and it was exactly this that Martin Luther imitated a thousand years later when he invented _sola scriptura_.

3) In January 624 Mohammed changed the Salat prayer ritual so that the congregation faced Mecca rather than Jerusalem, in order to complete his break with Catholicism/Judaism.

4) Martin Luther, like modern European liberals, despised the Jews and taught that the Moslems should not be resisted. He coopted many things from the Moslems; but the most important one was the _substitution_ of formal propositions (scripture) for tradition, sacrament, and Real Presence. Like Mohammed he lopped off two thirds of the Catholic religion and kept only formal text as authoritative, specifically because of the theological inconvenience and immanent imperfection of clerics and traditions — just like Mohammed.

So it is true to say that Islam lies somewhere in between Catholicism and Protestantism theologically, at least in the abstract if not with respect to content. But without _sola scriptura_ — the exhaltation of formal written textual propositions over and above tradition, ritual, magisterium, etc — there would be no Protestantism; and Luther got _sola scriptura_ from Islam.

That isn’t perfect, but it is a more detailed description of my thesis; and perhaps it helps clarify the transition from Eucharist to Koran to _sola scriptura_.

In addition to the other comments, I find Matt’s comments fascinating.

Perhaps Mr. Murgos and others will find another Luther excerpt interesting. I have to type it in by hand so it is necessarily brief.

Luther clearly found the _content_ of Islam objectionable — the authoritative part of Luther’s own abstract religion was restricted to formal text, but its _content_ (to the extent we can refer to formal text-in-itself as content) was the Christian creed and sacred scriptures. On the other hand Luther clearly found the _form_ of Islam far superior to the Christianity of his time. So I might characterize Martin Luther as substantively Christian but formally Islamic, to wit:

“From this book, accordingly, we see that the religion of the Turks or Muhammad is far more splendid in ceremonies — and, I might almost say, in customs — than ours, even including that of the religious or all the clerics. The modesty and simplicity of their food, clothing, dwellings, and everything else, as well as the fasts, prayers, and common gatherings of the people that this book reveals are nowhere seen among us — or rather it is impossible for our people to be persuaded to them. Furthermore, which of our monks, be it a Carthusian (they who wish to appear the best) or a Benedictine, is not put to shame by the miraculous and wondrous abstinence and discipline among their religious? Our religious are mere shadows when compared to them, and our people clearly profane when compared to theirs. Not even true Christians, not Christ himself, not the apostles or prophets ever exhibited so great a display. This is the reason why many persons so easily depart from faith in Christ for Muhammadanism and adhere to it so tenaciously. I sincerely believe that no papist, monk, or cleric or their equal in faith would be able to remain in their faith if they should spend three days among the Turks. Here I mean those who seriously desire the faith of the pope and who are the best among them.” — Martin Luther, preface to the _Tract on the Religions and Customs of the Turks_

Luther’s praise of Islam is very interesting. Keep the quotes coming. But, as I said before, what we seem to have here is the founder of Protestantism using Islamic austerity and piety as a _foil_ against the Catholic church, which is not the same thing as saying that Protestant austerity was _born_ or _inspired_ of Islamic austerity. Similarly, the fact that Western liberals have used Islamic tolerance as a foil against Christian intolerance does not prove that the liberal belief in tolerance was in any way a historical _product_ of Islamic tolerance.* Liberal tolerance was largely a response to the wars of religion, that is, it was a home-grown product of Western experience, not something copied from without.

(*Though Matt does seem to be saying that since Islam was the source of Protestantism, it is also the source of liberalism.)

I had heard that Luther was a radical hothead (and maybe mentally ill), but I am shocked to see the evidence provided in Matt’s latest posting. It appears Luther was implying that Christ behaved in an imperfect way when Luther said, “Not Christ himself…ever exhibited so great a display” and “Our religious are mere shadows when compared to them.” In other words, Luther implied that Christ’s performance was less than a perfectly designed and executed performance by the only perfect man ever to have existed. Luther presumes to tell Christ how He should have behaved. It appears he failed to stop and think (as all hotheads fail) that Christ wanted us to refrain from behaving as He refrained from behaving. Luther ignored the value of traditional practices and, most of all, ignored that Christ told us to be like Him.

It is a tragedy Luther did not work for reform within the Church by using intellect, knowledge, energy, patience, and enormous self-sacrifice. If he had acted coolly, he might have been sainted years later as Joan of Arc was sainted years after her death. There are other Catholic saints that were persecuted by some members of the Church. Similarly, it was a tragedy that some Southern hotheads bombarded Fort Sumter and energized the North into war. I have heard that if cooler heads had prevailed, there is a significant chance we would have ended up with no civil war and a) a division no worse than exists in Belgium today or b) a reunification with greater states’ rights than existed at the time.

I wonder if Luther practiced what he preached.

(My dearest first cousin is Lutheran.)

Well, as I mentioned before it depends on what one considers an historical “source” (and I say that not to be pedantic, but to allow room for others to use whatever words they find comfortable to describe the public effects of Islam’s obvious influence on Luther and Luther’s professed admiration for Islam).

I suppose that Mr. Auster may be suggesting that Luther’s clearly professed admiration for Islam (and corresponding hatred of Jews) was disingenuous, that he was publishing books saying he admired Islam and hated the Jews as dishonest propoganda rather than as what he genuinely thought. That is always a possibility but I don’t see why it would be relevant, since what is at issue is not Luther’s personal psychological states but rather the sources of Protestantism-qua-Protestantism as an historical matter. Mr. Auster thumped me soundly in an earlier discussion about the current Pope in the reverse direction — what is important is not the current Pope’s philosophical intentions when he uses the language of liberalism, but the actual public effects of his acts and use of the langauge of liberalism — what it is that he is _appealing to successfully_; and from that perspective this Pope is quite clearly a neocon.

I tend to think that people fall into the same misdirection when interpreting, for example, Hitler quotations. It is all well and good to argue over the psychological states and intentions of the speaker; but the (discursive) _causal_ relevance of dishonest propaganda is no less than the _causal_ relevance of honest statement of principle. So for example when Hitler argued that the volk should support the Reich and the Feurher not because liberal freedom and equality were wrong, but quite the contrary because they had been violated when dishonest power grubbing Jews had misused democracy by setting it up as a shield against criticism, and the Fuerher would restore freedom and equality to the volk; we have to take the argument seriously not because of what we think of Hitler’s personal psychological states, which are irrelevant, but because of the (public) effects that the propogation of a particular ideology among men cause.

“They used that as a dishonest means to grab at power” is rarely a relevant argument, despite how commonly it occurs on both the right and the left. What is relevant is what exactly it is that brings people in general to support a particular view of things: the transcendent public effects of ideology rather than the personal psychological states of ideologues.

“They do that because they are grabbing for power” is NEVER a sufficient explanation of a political principle, and in fact it represents an irrelevant _ad hominem_ that misdirects attention from the question as to why a particular leader has followers. “The followers were deceived” is never a sufficient answer, since without followers a leader is just talking to himself. “He was an honest Joe” represents the same error (or irrelevancy) made in the complimentory direction, although “he was widely seen as an honest Joe” is of course quite relevant.

So given the fact that Islam predated the reformation by 900 years or so; had obvious influence on its founders and was used specifically by its founders to argue for their point of view; was the source of the Greek classics, mathematics, and philosophy of the middle ages; was clearly a rival religion getting recruits from among disaffected Christians; etc etc etc I don’t know why the notion that Protestantism was caused in significant part by Islam should be controversial. Clearly the corruption of the Renaissance Popes was another cause, and obviously establishing the degree of cause would require more scholarly work. Maybe Mr. Auster doesn’t like one or more of the wordings that I have used to describe the relation, but clearly the important relation — however we describe it — exists and should not be existentially controversial.

Many thanks to Mr. Murgos for drawing our attention to the part of the Luther quote where he says: “Our religious are mere shadows when compared to them, and our people clearly profane when compared to theirs. Not even true Christians, not Christ himself, not the apostles or prophets ever exhibited so great a display. This is the reason why many persons so easily depart from faith in Christ for Muhammadanism and adhere to it so tenaciously.”

Luther’s unfavorable comparison of Christ to the Mohammadans is simply incredible. In fact, it’s exactly the sort of thing today’s liberal say regarding America, always making the Other (whoever the Other may be) superior to ourselves, more civilized, more inclusive, more “vital,” more compassionate, more human. That Luther could say such a thing suggests a deep alienation at work in him, an alienation that goes beyond his particular complaints about Church doctrine and practice.

As for Matt’s disagreement with me, he himself had said earlier that the idea of Islamic roots of Protestantism was a suggestive possibility that needs to be fleshed out, not something that has been definitely established. But now he is presenting that idea as a proven point that I must accede to. As I said, I’m not set against the idea, in fact I’m intrigued by it, but I hope Matt will respect my right not to be persuaded of something of which I am not yet persuaded.

If that is what I said then I overstated it. I would object if someone were to claim that there is no relationship whatsoever between Islam and Protestantism, since I think the current thread in itself establishes the existence of some relation. I believe I took pains to say that how that relation is characterized (e.g. as “roots”) is something for which I am attempting to leave plenty of room.

I have a sense of (without yet claiming to understand) what I think is Matt’s underlying point, that, apart from the question of “roots” or “sources,” Islam and Protestantism represent similar responses to (or deformations of) truth. His concern is with the similarity of the fundamental falsehood that he sees at work in both religions, not with the details of how one religion may have evolved out of or been influenced by the other.

By coincidence, a correspondent who had not been following this discussion wrote to me just now as follows:

“The study of Islam … has made me appreciate Christian orthodoxy more.

“For example, it is just so clear that a lot of Protestantism is, frankly, the Islamization of Christianity.

“To wit:

“1. Its logomania.
“2. Its iconoclasm.
“3. Predestination.

“This would seem to be no accident, as … much of Islam is made up of heresies and rejected doctrines from orthodox Christianity.”

I acknowledged there seemed to be something to this, and then added:

The more I think about it, I have trouble seeing any connection between Protestantism (ranging from low church Congregationalism to high church Anglo-Catholicism), which focusses on the individual’s relationship with God, and this conformist, authoritarian, non-rational, anti-individualist, mass religion where vast crowds of people get together in a huge empty space and stick their tushes up in the air. I just have trouble seeing any similarity there. Perhaps the two religions reacted against Catholicism in similar ways, and so they happen to have a few things in common. But those few commonalities exist in the midst of massive radical differences.

This type of thinking is very common. People see some resemblance between two utterly different phenomena, and on that basis they posit a fundamental similarity between two phenomena. Thus people say: “Muslims believe in monotheism. Christians believe in monotheism. Therefore there’s no reason why Christians and Muslims can’t get along.” In my pamphlet Huddled Clichés, I give examples of this false reasoning as it relates to the immigration debate.

One way to look at it is to say that within the prophetic traditions there are certain strains that are picked up by various factions at various times.

Typological similarity as opposed to similarity in specific content or methods of expression.

Well, I really do think that there is more to it than independently evolved similarity.

It is possible for two very similar things to have quite different origins, e.g. the eyes of octopi versus the eyes of humans, which are strikingly similar but are made of different classes of proteins. They can’t be causally related at all according to neodarwinian theory, because the taxonomy is such that our closest common ancestors were millions of years away from evolving eyes. This doesn’t mean that neodarwinian theory is right, it is just an example demonstrating the theoretical independence of form and origin. Clearly a striking similarity does not in itself require a common cause.

I think that Islam and Protestantism are causally connected, though. As the adjacent rival civilization to Christendom Islam engaged in inevitable cultural and intellectual exchange for 900 years before Luther. One of the things the reformers picked up in this exchange was _sola scriptura_. I don’t expect Mr. Auster or anyone else to just take my word for it of course, nor that the little bit of source material here will be apodictically convincing, but on the other hand I do think it is true myself and that my thinking it true cannot be reduced to an intellectual error such as the ones Mr. Auster has suggested in the thread.

I did not mean to reduce Matt’s views to the logical fallacy I described in my previous comment. His thinking is a good deal more complex than that. However, the particular fallacy I described is very common.

“To fight against the Turk is to sin against God, who visits our sin upon us with this rod.” - Martin Luther, _Explanations of the 95 Theses_, 1518

To add a little more theoretical flesh to the discussion of the connection between Islam and Luther: Luther was widely known to have sympathies for and to be influenced by the Bohemians. Bohemia was one of the most direct cultural conduits between Islam and Christianity. Bohemian Christians who had converted to Islam and then back to Catholicism in the 700’s were ordered to do extensive penance by Pope St. Paul I, for example. Extensive intellectual exchange between the Bohemians and the Oxford English in the 1300’s resulted in the heresies of John Hus and John Wyclif, often called “Bohemianism”. This heresy specifically exalted the Book — in this case the Christian Bible rather than the Koran — to status as the _sole_ norm for the faith. In the whole Diet of Worms incident (or really series of incidents) the Pope directly said “This Luther favors the Bohemians and the Turks”; it was not unknown to Luther’s contemporaries that _sola scriptura_ came from the Bohemians and that the Bohemians got it from Islam.

As they say in Hoboken, if you don’t believe me, look it up :)

From the Catholic Catechism:

841 The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
http://www.nccbuscc.org/catechism/text/pt1sect2chpt3art9p3.htm

He who lives in glass houses…

Scroll up. Nobody disputes (or certainly I do not dispute) that the post Vatican II Catholic Church is a liberal mess, nor even that the reformation as such is most directly attributable to the despicable behavior of the renaissance popes.

When was the version of the Catholic Catechism that Mr. Sleighback quotes written? 1963? Somehow I doubt it was written when Europe was being invaded by Moslem armies. Well, Europe has been invaded by Moslems again in our time, and this notion that Moslems are “just like us” is, under the circumstances, revealed as insanely dangerous.

The latest revision of the current Catechism was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1997, and the first edition I believe came out during the 1980’s under John Paul II. So I agree that its content is not relevant to the question of whether or not, as a matter of objective historical fact, Martin Luther took much of his philosophy of religion (and specifically sola scriptura) from Islam.

Matt: So was Vatican II not a duly appointed Council? Is JPII not Pope? Is the Roman Catholic Church — as it exists today in word and deed — not the Catholic Church? Are you endorsing some branch of Eastern Orthodoxy, an Anglo-Catholic comminion, what?

I don’t know what chains of reasoning Mr. Sleighback is following in order to get to his questions. Of course the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church. There have been no infallible statements whatsoever from the Vatican either during or since Vatican II, so I am not sure why anyone should be expected to take everything as if it were ex cathedra, or perfect in any sense of the word. Vatican II was a duly appointed council but it expressly disclaimed infallibility itself. Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Ratzinger among others have confirmed this disclaimer, and it can be read in the council document Lumen Gentium directly. I think that many people (Catholic and otherwise) have a peculiar, distorted, and factually incorrect view of authority in general and the authority of the Church in particular so it is tough to know where to even start the discussion Mr. Sleighback apparently wants to have.

Clearly if we were to undertake that discussion it would be completely orthogonal to understanding the historical sources of Luther’s philosophy of religion, though.

I thought one of the first tenants of Christian salvation was a belief that Jesus was God in the flesh, and lived a perfect life? How can Muslims believe that and be Muslims? It follows that if being Muslim by definition requires that you do not believe in Jesus Christ, you are not saved in Christianity. What’s going with the website that Mr. Sleighback posted written by the bishops?

For an interesting analysis of Vatican II from a reasonable (which is to say extreme right wing, when evaluated against today’s public standards) perspective you might try _The Great Facade_ by Christopher Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. :

http://www.booksforcatholics.com/listings/l0133.html

I hope that helps.

Oh, and this may help in getting some perspective on the traditionalist Catholic view of things without buying a book:

http://www.cathinsight.com/apologetics/ferrara2.htm

Matt continues to be a valuable asset to this Website.

Modern liberal historical revisionist practice is not restricted to college campuses or directed to narrowly defined secular avenues. It is currently running rampant in the seminaries, churches and synagogues of America.Revisionists define the language using linguistic tricks,set the debate by posing invalid questions and revisit well settled western ideas to destroy by inviting “discussion” of selected topics.
The modern liberal Jewish, Catholic and Protestant intellectual believes in and espouses many new age philosophies including the equality of all monotheistic perspectives before the Godhead.This is merely the same argument, albeit in a lesser known form, which supports multicuturalism in the secular world, i.e. every culture is equally valid.
These watered down, new age,feel good pronouncements tend to destroy the uniqeness that is inherent in our own individual religious beliefs.
EVERY “what would jesus do?” discussion is invalid by its very terms.Inviting man to play-act as God is arrogant.It redirects your discussions and energies to the invalid questions that arrogance poses.You can only successfully defeat such tactics by recognizing its invalidity from a a philosophical/eligious p.o.v. The asking that question invites the listener to arrogate himself into the person of Jesus and then to judge him as another equal God.When once you try to act as God you become party to the arrogance which besets modern man-the lack of absolute truths.
Martin Luther’s scathing reproach of the Roman Catholic church of his time by comparison to the perceived humility of then current Islamic worship was from the perspective of his fight against his church’s corrupt practices- and he was an ordained Roman Catholic priest, when he nailed his 47 theses on the Wittenburg church door an announced the protestant reformation.Taking his comparison out of context to “prove” that he defamed Christ is laughable and goes against the entire body of historical knowledge about his life.But today, even in the scripturally centered Lutheran Church that he founded there are splits and divisive feel good movements that have arisen by asking the fraudulent question of What would Jesus Do.

I don’t remember anyone in this discussion saying that Martin Luther “defamed Christ”. My own thesis is that _sola scriptura_ is an Islamic belief that was coopted by Luther, so that modern Protestant belief in _sola scriptura_ reflects Islamic roots rather than Christian roots. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Protestantism is theologically Islamic in its most critical core belief but with Christian content (the Bible) rather than Islamic content (the Koran). The reason Protestantism is theologically Islamic in this respect is because Luther (and the Hussites in general) swiped their theology from Islam as a mechanism for claiming that the Church had no authority. Under an authentic Christian theology Luther would have had to do the difficult work of humbly reforming from within, and since he found that unnaceptable he adopted an Islamic theology of the book.

That the Church herarchy in Luther’s time (or in our time, for that matter) had a great deal of scathing coming to it is not in dispute.

Sandysot is spot on on the “what would Jesus do” question, though. Trying to put onesself in God’s place is indeed one of the core aspects of modernism.

Matts comments and comparison of book vs tradition in Islam and Protestant Christianity is very provocative, and it made me think about texts and traditions.
My understanding is that when Islam was revealed to Mohammed in 570-620 A.D. his Arabic language was tribal and oral/personal with the few written elements being primitive and without grammatical rules and structural consistency.For that reason it was denominated by linguists as a “Scripta Defectiva”.Islamic theology deveoped only by oral trddition for another 200 to 300 years.Then the few extant writings were collected;the oral traditions were examined and a kind of winnowing out occured, which is when some oral teachings were discarded, some were kept and refined.Most of what went into the “book” (the suras of the Quran) came ONLY from oral traditions handed down after many generations.Much of it was designed as riposte to the Jews who, the oral tradition says,turned down Mohammed’s request to be named a prophet in the line of Abraham.Reliance upon the “book” IS no more than reliance upon accumulated oral tradition.

As to Christianity; The old testament may well be collected oral tradition too, but was in writing by at least 700 B.C. The four new testament gospels were written during the lifetime of the witnesses to the events they portray or closely thereafter, but in any event not later than 70 years after the death of Christ.The dead sea scrolls largely confirm the dating and accuracy of new testament written records.

So, to my point- Simply that Martin Luther may have picked up a pointer or two from muslims on the techniques of textual analysis, but he worked with reliable written material dating back a thousand years in unbroken line.Islam was “revealed” to the illiterate Muhammed and by him to the illiterate nomads he was of.None of what he got from God was written down for hundreds of years..And we all know what happens in the child’s game of telephone-you get in a circle and whisper a story in the ear of the child next to you and see what happens to it as it goes around the circle of whisperers.

At issue is not the content of the Koran text, nor its historical development. I am not personally an expert on the historic Koran, although what I have read seems somewhat at odds with Sandy’s presentation. But in any case a comparison of the Bible and Koran content, sources, antiquity, etc isn’t directly relevant to the present discussion.

At issue is the theology of the text, and the source of that theology. By the time the Bohemians and the Oxford English were comparing notes they had fully assimilated the idea of a complete self-sufficient authoritative text from their Moslem neighbors (and in the case of re-converted apostates, from themselves).

The intellectual viability of sola scriptura is a separate discussion with a number of facets. A simultaneous requirement for two-valued logic and completeness violates Godel’s Theorem, so if Luther had lived in the twentieth century he would have been refuted by mathematicians. But that is a different discussion.

My comment and criticism was on the source of the written materials presented by Matt which should have been evident by my introductory remark, “It made me.. etc. .

However, if one assumes that all textual material (Bible and Quran) are equally relevant (a modernist view and argument) then we are back to Matt’s discussion of whether Luther depended upon and used Islamic text or tradition in establishing his “radical” sola scriptura to overthrow or replace the original traditional faith of the church. (Does the reformation rest on an Islamic foundation? as Matt puts it.) One can discuss Islam and the Reformation at length but still not know what the heart of Christianity is or what sola scriptura was and accomplished. Discussion of Martin Luther’s sola scriptura might give some perspective and possibly shed light on what he did and why.

I respectfully disagree with Matt’s conclusion, except to say that Luther did know the Quran and the traditions of both religions. But so did most of the higher church authorities of his time, although the laity were still abysmally ignorant, illiterate and kept on a leash by the Church’s demand of obedience to its degenerate traditions. Tradition was used and grossly abused to subvert the faith and to maintain hierarchal power over the souls of the faithful. Catholic traditions varied from town to town, state to state and pope to pope. In the end, it was seen for what it was, a disgusting display of self aggrandizement that clouded the true gems of the original Bible based faith of Christianity.

It was against these degenerate, usurping traditions that the literati, like Martin Luther, acted to RESTORE the primacy of Bible-based faith already seven centuries old when Muhammed was still a camel jockey.

Sola scriptura is nothing more than a method of comparison of the earlier written Christian scriptural record to the later imposed church tradition.. Tradition that was added to, and which largely replaced, the original Bible-based faith. Luther’s sola scriptura reached back across the dark ages to its written Christian origins of about 70 A.D., not to the Johnny-come-lately camel jockey..

The written Word of God always was and always is available to every Christian but in the dark ages only the Nobles and the Clergy could read or write, so tradition was the Church’s way to impress and control the superstitious masses. The Inquisition and the Auto Da-Fe purification of the faith by fire occurred in both hemispheres and were a logical outcome of the Church’s reliance on tradition gone mad, the Western degeneracy of which wasn’t exceeded until Nazi Germany’s gassing of the Jews in WWII.

The renascent literati of Luthers’ time were schooled to accept written records as proof of authenticity over the oral traditions that were the hallmark of the “Dark” or Middle Ages (“Why do we do it that way? Because we’ve always it that way—that’s why”) Preference for a written record over oral tradition is the simple common sense notion that what has been preserved in writing is infinitely preferable to the incremental changes that the passage of time effects on oral tradition/legend. It is not original to the camel jockey. Writing stops the change in its tracks. Written history is so basic that it cuts across all cultures and is one of the first things ordinary people thirst for after they learn to read and write. Scholasticism at all levels, including college, requires written texts across the spectrum of subjects studied. The study of theology, one of the seven arts and sciences, basic curricula taught in all the schools and universities of the Renaissance period is no different. And Bible records tell Christians who we were and who we are.

It’s easy to construe an abstract philosophical similarity as historical causative relationship. Observing external similarities and drawing inferences can seem appealing, but to find a clear causal relationship it is preferable that the later text at least acknowledge, recognize or footnote the source text internally.

For confessional Lutherans, who fully accept the unreconstructed Augsberg confessions, sola scriptura restores the foundation stone of Christian faith, the Bible. However, sola scriptura is not in derogation of Christian tradition which Luther still supported as voluntary observances that would vary from place to place and from time to time. It simply says that some things are of earthly design, therefore voluntary,and some are from the Godhead and compulsory.

Well, if Sandy thinks that I have anywhere said that all textual material is equally relevant in some general sense it would be great to see where. I don’t get the sense that what I am actually saying here has gotten through, and as a result for the last several posts Sandy has not been addressing anything I’ve specifically said, as far as I can tell.

I will observe that Sandy’s statement:

“Sola scriptura is nothing more than a method of comparison of the earlier written Christian scriptural record to the later imposed church tradition”

is clearly false, or at the least it is certainly not how either I or Luther use the term. Sola scriptura is the requirement that a specific written canon must be the supreme rule of faith. Its history (e.g. that Luther took it from Islam) and its basic irrationalism (e.g. the fact that it violates Godel’s Theorem) are independent of the canon’s actual content, and the Moslems applied it to the Koran long before Luther coopted it and applied it to the Bible.

Discussion of the actual content of the canon (Moslem or Christian) is in fact a change of subject, and until Sandy understands that he won’t understand what I have said at all.

A Google search turns up a slightly different view of Islam by Luther:

http://www.lutheransonline.com/servlet/lo_ProcServ/dbpage=page&GID=01031013600972584326486620&PG=01223001361006780322797517

I believe I already mentioned that Luther objected to the content of Islam, but revered (and in the case of _sola scriptura_ copied) aspects of its theological form.

When I assert that Luther copied _sola scriptura_ as theology specifically from Islam (self consciously or not; I expect Luther though of himself as moderately leaning toward Huss), it is a nonsequitir to point out that Luther thought Islam was a false religion. Of course he thought it was a false religion: otherwise he would have been a Moslem.

Newton could stand on the shoulders of giants by using the heliocentrism of Galileo but still recognize that Galileo’s cosmology doesn’t work. Likewise, Luther ultimately got the exaltation of a specific text as the supreme rule of faith from Islam although he disagreed with Moslems as to which specific text was authentic.

In the article to which John links (and which I have read before), Luther’s second objection to Islam is that it substitutes the Koran for the Bible. His first objection is to Islam’s requirement for good works (an area of its _content_ in which it exhibits similarity to the Catholicism Luther despised).

So clearly this sample of Luther’s writing on Islam is coherent with the thesis that Luther swiped _sola scriptura_ as theology from Islam, but with the Bible compiled by the Catholic Church as the _sola_ text rather than the Koran.