Loving God & Muslims
Bulletin of the Representation of the Russian Orthodox Church to the European Institutions, in Response to the Open Letter of 138 Muslim Theologians
by Patriarch Alexy of Moscow and All Russia
I would like to thank all the Muslim religious leaders and scholars who sent an open letter to representatives of Christian Churches and organizations including the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Christians and Muslims have many similar aims, and we can unite our efforts to achieve them. However, this unity will not occur if we fail to clarify our understanding of each other’s religious values. In this connection, I welcome the desire of the Muslim community to begin a sincere and open dialogue with representatives of Christians Churches on a serious scholarly and intellectual level.
Christianity and Islam are engaged today in a very important task in the world. They seek to remind humanity of the existence of God and of the spiritual dimension present both in man and the world. We bear witness to the interdependence of peace and justice, morality and law, truth and love.
As you rightly put in your letter, Christians and Muslims are drawn together first of all by the commandment of the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor. At the same time, I do not think it is worthwhile for us to identify a certain minimum that seems to fix our convergences in faith and to be theologically sufficient for the individual’s religious life. Any doctrinal affirmation in Christianity or Islam cannot be viewed in isolation from its unique place in the integral theological system. Otherwise, one’s religious identity will be obliterated to give rise to a danger of moving along the path of blending the faiths. It seems to be more fruitful, therefore, to study the integral faith of each side and to compare them.
God Is Love
In Christianity, a discourse about love of God and love of one’s neighbor is impossible without a discourse about God. According to the New Testament revelation, God is revealed to human beings as Love. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16). One cannot help seeing in this an indication that the Divine nature itself also has love as its most essential characteristic and important property.
A lonely isolated essence can love only itself: self-love is not love. Love always presupposes the existence of the other. Just as an individual cannot be aware of himself as personality but only through his communication with other personalities, there cannot be personal being in God but through love of another personal being. That is why the New Testament speaks of God as one Being in three Persons—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God is the unity of three Persons who have the same divine nature, which belongs to each of them in its fullness so that they are not three but one God.
God the Trinity is the fullness of love with each hypostatic Person bespeaking love towards the other two hypostatic Persons. The Persons of the Trinity are aware of themselves as “I and you”: “just as you are in me and I am in you,” Christ says to the Father (John 17:21). “He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you,” Christ says about the Holy Spirit (John 16:14). Therefore, every Hypostasis in the Trinity refers to the other Hypostasis, and, according to St. Maxim the Confessor, it is “eternal movement [of the Trinity] in love.”
It is only through the knowledge of God as love that the individual can come to the true knowledge of his being and his other properties. The love of God, not any other property of the Divine nature, is the main principle and the main driving force of Divine Providence for humanity in the cause of its salvation: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
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more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
Errands into the Moral Wilderness
Forms of Christian Family Witness & Renewal by Allan C. Carlson
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
30.3—May/June 2017
C. S. Lewis Assesses the Religion of Mohammed by Jacob Fareed Imam
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