What I learned from going to Speaker's Corner

The following is a sanitised version of the ideas I shared at our home group on 2nd Feb 2011.
1. The Hermeneutical Key (Gen 3v8-9)
Jay gives a whole talk highlighting theological differences between Islam and Christianity starting with these verses. The key point in these verses is that God on the Earth directly interacting with humans, something which could never happen in Islam. Two of the theological differences Jay talks about are sin and heaven/paradise.
In Gen 3 we see Adam and Eve hiding from God that is their sin has put a barrier between them and God. If God had visited the garden before (it seems reasonable to me that he would have done) then Adam and Eve wouldn't have been hiding from him, coz there wouldn't have been any sin. In Islam though God and mankind are separated even before sin comes, it is not sin that creates that barrier so sin in Islam isn't anywhere near as serious.
If man and God can walk and talk at the start then at the other end of history in heaven it seems reasonable that they will be able to walk and talk again. Certainly we will be in God's presence and be able to worship him. In Islam that separation will continue, God will not be in paradise with those that make it there. (Jay's paper)
2. The story of Joseph.
The Koran only has two complete stories; one of these is the story of Joseph in Sura 12. The bible story goes into much more detail; however amongst the details that they both include there are two differences.
The first is the price Joseph is sold into slavery for. The bible says that Joseph brothers "... sold him for twenty shekels of silver ..." (Gen 37v28). Here a shekel is a weight and 20 shekels is about 8oz. There is historical evidence that this is the right ball park figure for the cost of a slave in that era. Now the Koran says: "Then they sold him for a paltry price, a handful of counted dirhams; for they set small store by him." (Sura 12:20) and is talking about coins - something you count, yet coins didn't exist until 1000 years after Joseph. Showing that the historical details contained in the bible are accurate, yet the Koran gets these wrong.
The other difference is to do with Joseph's dream, the eleven stars and the sun and moon all bow down to Joseph's star. According to the bible in Egypt Joseph's eleven brothers all bow down to him, but Jacob is not recorded as bowing down to him and Rachel is dead (Gen 35v19) before the dream occurs (Gen 37v9). Thus what do the sun and moon refer to? the dream doesn't appear to be fulfilled. In Sura 12v100 Joseph claims the dream is fulfilled: And he lifted his father and mother upon the throne; and the others fell down prostrate before him. 'See, father,' he said, 'this is the interpretation of my vision of long ago; my Lord has made it true." In fact the dream isn't fulfilled that much better as Jacob and Rebecca don't bow down to him.
3. Trinity
Gen 1v1 "... God created ..." Here God is Elohim, which is the plural form - in fact it is a 3 or more plural. While 'created' is singular, this is grammatically incorrect in the Hebrew. This grammatically error could be God way of indicating that there is something unusual about him like he is not a unity but a trinity.
Gen 19v24 NIV: "Then the LORD rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens." Lord in this verse is YHWH the personal name of God that is often pronounced Yahweh or Jehovah. If we read back from this verse then we will see that the first Lord has been on the earth talking to Abraham for previous couple of chapters. While the 2nd Lord is in the heavens. So there are 2 YHWH's working together to bring about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Today the best known bible (memory) verse is Jn3:16 and probably the most important doctrine is the love of God. In the early church the most important doctrine was the incarnation and this verse was the best known bible verse.
In Exodus 33 there are two verses which would be contradictory with one another if God is only a unity. In v10 we have "The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend." that is Moses looking into God's face. While in v20 Moses is not allowed to look into God's face and is only allowed to look at his back. The trinity explains this seeming contradiction, in v10 Moses was speaking with the 2nd person of the trinity, while latter in the chapter it is the 1st person of the trinity that he is not allowed to look into the face of.
Relationships between human beings are fundamental to the way the world works. Why would a Unitarian God put relationships at the centre of his creation, but since there are relationships within the Godhead it would be quite understandable for a Trinitarian God to do this. Further in the bible God is Love, while in the Koran one of the names of God is 'loving'. Now love requires an object. For a Trinitarian God this is not a problem because there can be love for the Son from the Father and love for the Spirit from the Son and love for the Father from the spirit. While for a Unitarian God this is a problem because it makes him dependant/contingent upon his creation. This argument can be extended to show that love requires God to be a trinity not just a duality, but my understanding of that part of the argument is much more woolly.
4. Contradictions.
Jay did 3 debates with a Canadian Muslim called Shabbiar Alley in the 1990's. In the first of these Shabbiar produce a list '101 clear contradictions in the bible'. In the next debate Jay produced a paper giving explanations for these so called contradictions. Two of these are as follows.
2Sam24v1: Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.”
1Chron21v1: Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.
So who was it that wanted the census? The result of the census was bad for the people of Israel. Satan wanted this as he always delights in people suffering, while God wanted it as a punishment on his people. So they both wanted it.
2Sam21v19: In another battle with the Philistines at Gob, Elhanan son of Jaare-Oregim the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite, ...
Now this contradicts the well known the Sunday school story in which David kills Goliath. However, in the Hebrew this verse doesn't scan it seems like there is a couple of words missing. In 1 Chron 20v5 it reads "... killed Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite ...". Which confirms that a couple of words have been lost, this could have happened as manuscripts were very fragile and if these words were at the edge they could have broken off.
5. Crucifixion
(We didn't get onto this issue due to lack of time.)
Sura 4v157 "... and for their saying, 'We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God' -- yet they did not slay him, neither crucified him, only a likeness of that was shown to them."The standard Muslim interpretation of this koranic verse is that the person on the cross looked like Jesus but was not Jesus. Allah played a big trick on everyone and changed the appearance of someone else to make them look like Jesus. When investigating a crime or other incident the police would want to speak to people who actually saw what happened. The gospel writers and other first century historians who also mention the crucifixion were writing a few years/decades after the event. The Koran comes 600 hundred years later and so is too late to give any credence with respect to first century events. Now Muslims might response to that by saying that Allah is a perfect witness and so we should accept his testimony over all other things (when the Queen spoke up in the Paul Bural trail it was found innocent straight away). But what does that say about Allah? It says he is a deceiver and 'the best of deceivers' at that. Would God really be a deceiver? And moreover there are 2 billion Christians in the world today who are still convinced of this deception.

creeds

In a previous meeting we had looked at the doctrine of the trinity, this led us on to looking at creeds and how the idea of the trinity developed and became fixed (to some extent) in the ancient creeds that we still say in church today.

We decided to follow on from this by looking at what is a modern example of a creed, and that is the Basis of faith of the Evangelical Alliance.

This had been revised in 2005, the previous version had been written in 1970. 

It was interesting both to look at the content of the latest statement but also to compare the two and think about what had caused the compilers to change their ideas.

There were many differences, not least in terms of language, the 1970 statement used language that was not even usual for it's time being very formal and legal. The 2005 version used far more ordinary language. The 2005 version was also more inclusive re. women and men, the 1970 version spoke entirely about 'man' and 'men'. The 2005 version was quite a bit longer and often, it seemed, more explicit. We thought that perhaps this was as some ideas had being challenged since the 1970 statement was drawn up. For example there was no mention of Jesus' virgin birth in the 1970 statement but in 2005 it was mentioned, is this because in the gap between these statements people had questioned the idea of the virgin birth? In addition to being more explicit it introduced ideas about how evangelical christians should act, ie. to have concern for creation, justice and love, the 1970 version was almost entirely concerned with what evangelicals believed (should believe?).

There was a feeling that as soon as you try and put belief into a statement like this you create problems of interpretation, that you are both forced to try and be very precise without ever actually being able to completely nail down a meaning.

Personally I think that by their very nature creeds & statements of faith have the effect of excluding certain people (those who cannot sign up for it) from the group that has produced it. They are about defining who is in and who is out, who is orthodox and who is not. Much like the issues we currently have in the Anglican Communion in which different groups find it impossible to accept that others believe different things about, for example, woman being bishops. 

Certainly there were some members of our group that would not have been able to sigh up for the whole of the Evangelical Alliance's Basis of Faith.

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Next meeting we'll be thinking about poverty, what is it and what can/should we do about it?

the trinity

At our meeting on the 2nd June we we looked at the Gospel reading from the previous Sunday (John 16.12-15), which was Trinity Sunday. We had an interesting discussion about the development of the doctrine of the trinity and how long this took to become the established view of the church, finally being decided at church councils 325 and 381.

This lead to a discussion of creeds and how and why they were formed. To some extent at least they were concerned with defining who was and was not an orthodox christian. This still happens today and we looked at an example of a modern day 'creed'. The Evangelical Alliances Basis of Faith Statement, which we look at in more detail next week.

Below are some thoughts of Katharine Jefferts Schori the Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Churtch in North America.

http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/004388.html

The willingness to live in tension is a hallmark of Anglicanism, beginning from its roots in Celtic Christianity pushing up against Roman Christianity in the centuries of the first millennium. That diversity in community was solidified in the Elizabethan Settlement, which really marks the beginning of Anglican Christianity as a distinct movement. Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come" (John 16:12-13).

Three ways to make sense of one God | Ekklesia

This is an interesting (and quite long) article about the Trinity.

Three ways to make sense of one God | Ekklesia: "For example, I once heard a well-known theologian wrily observe that grasping Trinitarian language is not too difficult... once you realize that ‘one’ and ‘three’ aren’t numbers in a sequence (but rather ways of speaking of a singularity embracing beyond the merely numerical); that ‘persons’ in the Trinity are not human persons (the Greek means something like dramaturgical ‘masks’ or ‘appearances’, and was deliberately chosen to avoid what we now denote by ‘personalness’); and that ‘substance’ applied to God doesn’t mean ‘stuff’ (but true essence beyond our knowledge of ‘thingness’)!"

...

All of which brings us to that remarkable and famous icon about the Trinity painted around 1410 by Andrei Rublev. If we are swimming intellectually, this image will, I hope, begin to make what is being said more approachable. First, let’s be clear, this isn’t (as the untrained modern eye might assume), a representation of ‘God in three figures’ - a sort of celestial tea-party. Absolutely not. An icon is something to look through, not at. You need to go beyond the immediate appearance to ‘see’ what is ‘hidden within and beyond it’, so to speak. In this case, the three gold-winged figures are the visitors encountered by Abraham as he camps by the oak of Mamre. As he talks with them he finds himself mysteriously in conversation with God through being drawn into their curious communion, symbolized by the chalice. This only works if the picture, like the doctrine, is figurative – the opposite of what our modern minds fear, thank God, which is naive ‘literalness’.