Things have been quiet here for some time; I can’t imagine anyone is left reading this. But in case there is anyone here … finishing up my Ph.D. thesis has drained much of my blogging initiative and creativity. In the interest of keeping things up, however, I took note of Alister McGrath’s Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth whilst browsing a local bookstore recently. The book is a modest contribution, but does make a wider audience of readers aware of bits of Christian history that they might not otherwise read.
I took special interest in his last chapter titled “Heresy and the Islamic View of Christianity.” The chapter is an honest and relatively helpful summary that includes a fair amount of history sketching out early Christian-Muslim theological interaction. McGrath discusses Islam’s early reliance and/or encounter with heretical forms of Christianity. Whilst this is a worthy notion to consider, there is a tendency within Western Christianity to use the schism between Church traditions as a scapegoat for heresy in general. In this view, Islam arose because of rampant heresy in the Christian East. In fact, some of the wider Church’s most informed engagement with Islam comes from these very traditions. In this light, readers must use caution when evaluating these early encounters and the role of, say, varying Christologies (I’m not suggesting McGrath errs here, but I’ve seen the mistaken argument in countless other places).
In any case, near the end of the chapter, a statement of greater significance stood out. McGrath closes off his study by urging readers to take note of medieval Christian-Muslim doctrinal discussion, for it is a field of study we could learn much from. McGrath leaves readers with the sense that nothing is currently being done in such a field and that there is a veritable gold mine of as yet untouched information. In fact, there is a strong number of scholars, including yours truly, engaged in just such a field of study and who are building on a strong heritage of scholarly work. Yet McGrath fails to adequately state this or point readers towards helpful studies in this regard. A simple sentence and a footnote could have taken care of this oversight.