Jesus as the Word of God in the Qurʾan: Can the Divide Between Islamic and Christian Christologies be Narrowed?
Christ Pantocrator, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Türkiye (Image credit: Dianelos Georgoudis, Wikimedia Commons)
According to Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, in response to increased persecution by the polytheists of Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad instructed his earliest followers to seek sanctuary in Abyssinia, whose Christian ruler, the Negus, could be trusted to help them. Although the Muslims were well received by the African kingdom, their Meccan persecutors followed them there and told the Negus that Islam taught a “dreadful thing” about Jesus, namely, that he was but a creature, in the hopes that the pious monarch would hand the refugees over to them. When questioned by the Negus, the Prophet’s cousin Jaʿfar ibn Abi Talib responded, “[Jesus] is the slave of God, and his apostle, and his spirit, and his word, which he cast into Mary the blessed virgin.” While Jaʿfar could have perhaps simply said that Jesus had been a great prophet or that God had revealed the Gospel through him, it seems that he wanted to remove all doubt from the Negus’s mind regarding Islam’s reverence for the Messiah. Thus, Jaʿfar chose to provide a relatively full Qurʾanic definition of Jesus, commencing with a low Christology before speaking of his lofty status as God’s Spirit and, more importantly for the present article, God’s Word. Moved by the Muslim’s statement, the Negus promised to continue to protect the refugees.
The Qurʾan explicitly calls Jesus the Word of God, or Kalimat Allah, in two separate suras, Al ʿImran and al-Nisaʾ. In the former, the term is applied to him in connection with the Annunciation: “When the angels said, ‘O Mary, truly God gives thee glad tidings of a Word from Him, whose name is the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, high honored in this world and the Hereafter, and one of those brought nigh” (Q 3:45). While this passage sounds similar to the Lukan account of the same event, wherein the Archangel Gabriel informs the Virgin of the nature of her child (see Luke 1:26-38), its use of the term Word, particularly in the context of its corporealization, sounds rather Johannine. For we read in the prologue of the Gospel of John,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men […] And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (1:1-14).
Like Qurʾan 3:45, the biblical passage speaks of the enfleshing of the Word of God. However, it indicates a number of things about the Word, or Logos, that the Muslim scripture does not. For instance, John portrays the Word as divine, stating that it, or more precisely, he, “was God.” Moreover, since he who is God cannot have originated in time, it is also necessary to conclude from the passage that the Word was begotten of God the Father in eternity. That is to say, just as the Father has always existed, so also has his Word, Jesus Christ. Moreover, John makes clear that Jesus is God’s creative Word, for “All things were made through him.” Thus, for Christians, Jesus’s status as the Word of God is inextricably connected to belief in his divinity and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
In contrast, the Qurʾan invokes Jesus as God’s Word as part of what appears to be an anti-Trinitarian polemic:
O People of the Book! Do not exaggerate in your religion, nor utter anything concerning God save the truth. Verily the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of God, and His Word, which He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and say not “Three." Refrain! It is better for you. God is only one God; Glory be to Him that he should have a child (4:171).
Because the Qurʾan proclaims Jesus as the Word of God while also denying his divinity, Christian theologians have historically viewed Islamic Christology as self-contradictory. For instance, in his Third Letter to John the Stylite, St. Jacob of Edessa—who was born less than a decade after the Prophet’s death—states that while Muslims “in accord with the holy scriptures [i.e., the Bible]” call Jesus the Word of God, they still fail to recognize his divinity. Moreover, St. John Damascene argues in his eighth-century treatise Against the Heresy of the Ishmaelites that to believe Jesus to be both a creature and the Word of God is to deny that God possesses an eternal Word. On account of this, he calls Muslims “mutilators” of God, arguing that they have subtracted from the divine by rejecting Jesus’s true nature.
Russian Orthodox icon of the Apostle and Evangelist, St. John the Theologian (Image credit: Иконография восточно-христианского искусства)
But how do Muslims themselves interpret the Qurʾanic use of the term Word of God for Jesus? Historically, it has often been understood as simply a reference to the manner of his genesis. For the Qurʾan states, “Such was Jesus, son of Mary. [This is] a statement of the Truth about which they are in doubt: it would not befit God to have a child. He is far above that: when He decrees something, He says only, ‘Be,’ and it is” (19:34-5). Thus, many prominent Muslim commentators, such as al-Tabari, have argued that because Jesus was created, without father, through the divine utterance of a word, i.e., “Be,” he is called the Word of God. Unlike the Gospel of John, where Jesus is God’s creative Word, here he is portrayed as the result of God’s creative word. That being said, it is worth noting that the Qurʾan also states that Adam, who had neither father nor mother, was also spoken into existence by the word “Be,” even drawing a direct parallel between his creation and Jesus’s (3:59), but nowhere does it refer to Adam as the Word of God.
However, not all Muslim thinkers, especially those more familiar with Christian Christology, are satisfied with interpreting Jesus as God’s Word only in relation to his origins. For instance, in The Miracle of Jesus, the Islamic scholar Mahmoud Ayoub—who became a Protestant in his youth before eventually reverting to Shiʿism—comments the following on Qurʾan 3:45,
It is worth noting that the word kalimah is a feminine noun. The Qurʾan is here speaking not of a name but of an actual being, of the Word of God manifested in human life and history. Is all this merely metaphorical or even metaphysical? Or is there not a mystery far greater than we have been able to fathom for the last fourteen hundreds years?
As someone quite familiar with Christian doctrine, Ayoub seems convinced of the need for Muslims to reexamine what it means for Jesus to be the Word of God within an Islamic context.
In Jesus as Kalimat Allah, the Word of God, the Shiʿi philosopher Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen, who was raised Roman Catholic, does just that. After examining some of the more traditional Islamic exegetical explanations of Jesus as Word, specifically those found in the writings of Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaʾi, Legenhausen puts forward the argument that Jesus is perhaps called God’s Word by the Qurʾan because he is the embodiment of a divine revelation. While the Torah and the Qurʾan were revealed as books to their respective prophets, i.e., Moses and Muhammad, the Gospel, or Injil, was manifested not in text but in the words and deeds of Christ. In other words, Jesus is the Gospel. In Legenhausen’s opinion, this is perhaps why Jesus’s teachings were passed down through biographical accounts (e.g., the four canonical Gospels) and not, like in the cases of Moses and Muhammad, in a book originally revealed to him by God. Hence, he presents Jesus as the Word of God in the same sense as that of revealed scripture.
In The Islamic Jesus, the Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol engages with Legenhausen’s argument through a (relatively) Sunni lens. He states that if Jesus may be understood as God’s Word in the same way that revealed scripture is God’s Word, then it may be said that the former is also uncreated. This is because Sunnis, unlike the Shiʿa, believe the Qurʾan—and sometimes also the Torah and the Gospel, at least in their “original” forms—to be the uncreated and co-eternal Word of God. Akyol also references the Ashʿarite teaching that God’s attributes, including his Word, are “not He, [but] not other than He.” However, he points out that since Muslims do not believe the Qurʾan to be divine nor worthy of worship, an uncreated Jesus would still not be considered to be on the same level as God. Instead, Jesus would be situated in Islamic theology “somewhere between human beings and God,” perhaps on the angelic level.
Fr. Sergii Bulgakov (Image credit: Pemptousia)
Given the traditional Sunni view of the Qurʾan’s nature, it may be said that both Sunnism and Christianity believe God to possess a co-eternal and uncreated Word, with a major difference being that the former does not believe the Word to be divine. Of course, the Sunni position may sound rather paradoxical to many Christians. For how can something that is co-eternal and uncreated not also be divine? Yet, a sort of parallel to the Sunni view of God’s Word can perhaps be found in the thought of the Russian Orthodox theologian Fr. Sergii Bulgakov, namely, in his sophiological* definition of the world (not the Word). In The Bride of the Lamb, he writes,
God cannot fail to be the Creator, just as the Creator cannot fail to be God. The plan of the world’s creation is as co-eternal to God as is His own being in the Divine Sophia. In this sense (but only in this sense), God cannot do without the world, and the world is necessary for God’s very being. And to this extent the world must be included in God’s being in a certain sense.
Since God’s plan for the creation of the world is co-eternal with him, it is also part of his self-definition. In creating the world, God imparted the “the image of the Divine Sophia to creaturely Sophia.” To claim that God’s plan for the world’s creation is not co-eternal with him is to subject the divine to changeability. However, Bulgakov explicitly rejects pantheism, since the world also possesses a reality in time, in becoming. Therefore, he calls the world “uncreated-created.” It seems that this concept bears some of the characteristics found in the Sunni definition of the nature of the Qurʾan. For instance, similar to how Bulgakov sees the world as uncreated-created, possessing two modes, one in the Divine Sophia and the other in the creaturely Sophia, most Sunnis believe that while the Word of God, the Qurʾan, is uncreated, its many manifestations on earth, e.g., in text or recitation, are, in fact, created in time. Moreover, Bulgakov would not worship the world, just as no Sunni would worship the Qurʾan. Thus, in both Bulgakov and Sunnism, there exists the concept of something that is both co-eternal with God and distinct from him.
That some Muslim thinkers are beginning to reexamine what it means for the Qurʾan to call Jesus the Word of God seems quite promising for Muslim-Christian relations. While Christians have sometimes been quick to dismiss anything Islam has to say on the subject as simplistic and self-contradictory, Bulgakov’s sophiological definition of the world provides a Christian frame of reference for understanding both the Sunni concept of the Word of God and its potential role in a higher Islamic Christology. Of course, nothing will alter either religion’s definition of God, since it is impossible for a Muslim to believe Jesus to be divine and remain a Muslim, just as a Christian cannot reject Jesus’s divinity and still call themselves a Christian. However, Muslims rethinking Jesus as the Word of God in a fresh, but still deeply Islamic, light could transform what has long been one of the more divisive Christological issues between Islam and Christianity into a key source for building new bridges of understanding.
*For those unfamiliar with Bulgakov’s sophiology, the following excerpt from Troy A. Stefano’s Christology After Schleiermacher can perhaps provide some context for our present discussion,
Bulgakov concretizes the “in-between” of God and creation as Sophia, distinguishing between divine Sophia (equivalent with the divine nature, the richness of possibilities in God from which creation derives) and creaturely Sophia (the indestructible ‘imago Dei’ in creation.) The ontological gap, traditionally understood only apophatically and as a barrier, now bears positive content. It serves as ‘a mediation, an ontological bridge to effect this union—a ladder on which this ascent-descent can be accomplished’.