Abstract
Christianity and Islam have long wrestled with how to conceptually relate God’s sovereignty with human freedom and moral responsibility. Emphasizing the one potentially undermines the other. This issue is crystalized in how to interpret divine warnings and promises found in both the Bible and the Qur’an. For these to be, respectively, deterring and incentivizing, human freedom is required. However, does not divine sovereignty govern human responses to God? If God determines human responses to divine warnings and promises, to what extent are those warnings and promises compromised? Moreover, how is God’s justice to be conceived? In early Islam this was debated by the Mutazilites and Asharites. That debate will be presented and critically evaluated. Christians have engaged in similar debate. Two Christian arguments on this same issue will be examined and assessed. The aim of this chapter is to advance inter-religious understanding of shared philosophical and theological issues that affect both Islam and Christianity.
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Notes
- 1.
All Qur’an quotations are from A. J. Droge translation.
- 2.
For present purposes I will, in general, treat Mutazilite theology as a cohesive whole, even though it was a broad school of thought containing important philosophical and theological differences.
- 3.
The orthodox agree with the Mutazila that the righteous will go to Paradise and the wicked to hell, but for them it is probable whereas for the Mutazila it is necessarily certain (Sheikh, 1982).
- 4.
There is an origin story of how this occurred, with al-Ash‘ari rebelling against his former master Mutazilite Abu ‘Ali al-Juba’i (d. 915), but its historicity is difficult to confirm (Fakhry, 2004, p. 210).
- 5.
Nasr describes a softer version of acquisition. Allah alone creates all that will come to pass, including human action. He does so by creating options, and human beings can “choose among the options that God has created and thus freely choose to engage in or play out the acts that God has created, thereby acquiring the acts” (Nasr et al., 2015, p. 1306). This interpretation appears at odds with Al-Ash‘ari’s belief that Allah can compel people to do certain actions, even unjust ones.
- 6.
The term ‘habit’ in this context continued to be disputed for centuries. In the twelfth century Averroes criticized al-Ghazali for using “the term ‘habit’ to explain our expectations of the regular connection between cause and effect” (Leaman, 2004, p. 105).
- 7.
Space precludes from given due consideration to other Islamic theological schools, such as the Maturidites, named after Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (d. circa 944), which is generally held to the be the second orthodox Sunni theological school after the Asharite (Madelung, 1987b). Maturidites theology accepts the Asharite theory of acquisition, but it also affirms that God grants human beings both the choice and the power to act (Saeed, 2006, p. 70). Al-Maturidi affirmed that in one sense Allah creates human acts, while in another sense they are really a person’s free choice and act (Madelung, 1987a).
- 8.
All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.
- 9.
The language was updated to be gender inclusive.
- 10.
Forster and Marston (2001, p. 296) show that, regarding the doctrine of ‘free will’, “Not a single church figure in the first 300 years rejected it and most of them stated it clearly in works still extant.” It was affirmed by leaders of all the main theological schools in diverse locations. Only with Augustine’s theology did that begin to change.
- 11.
The choice of this passage will be justified by the subsequent exegetical and theological reflections. As a Pharisee it is difficult to imagine that the apostle Paul did not have this passage in mind when writing Rom. 9:20–21 because it is by far the fullest portrayal and most lengthy interpretation of the potter-clay metaphor for God and Israel. (The other instances are Isa. 29:16, which Paul cites in Rom. 9:20, and Isa. 45:9.) This is ironic given that some Christian interpreters appeal to Romans 9 to uphold divine determinism. While the two Isaiah references state the plain meaning of the metaphor in a single verse, Jeremiah 18 offers a lengthy theological reflection and dramatic interpretation that goes beyond the metaphor’s plain meaning.
- 12.
In what follows I draw on my article (Dodds, 2022).
- 13.
The qur’anic account seems to follow the postbiblical Christian work Cave of Treasures, written in Syriac, which, like Genesis, has Adam naming the animals. The qur’anic accounts of Adam in many respects closely resemble the Cave of Treasures, but on this point it departs (Sinai, 2017, p. 146).
- 14.
Several times we read a variation of “Let the land produce” (Gen. 1:11, 20, 24, 28), which means God involves parts of his creation in the act of creating. God also shares rulership over creation. The heavenly bodies are to rule (mashal) over day and night (Gen. 1:16, 18), and human beings are to rule (radah) over the animal kingdom (Gen. 1:26, 28) (Fretheim, 1997, pp. 4–5).
- 15.
That God’s being is in communion was famously argued by Zizioulas (1985).
- 16.
Shumack (2014, p. 84 emphasis original) contrasts this with Islam’s “legislative model of divine/human interaction under which the knowledge of God’s legal requirements is the central concern of religious knowledge.”
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Dodds, A. (2023). How Can Human Beings Respond to Divine Warnings and Promises? Deciphering the Puzzle of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom in Christianity and Islam. In: Luetz, J.M., Austin, D.A., Duderija, A. (eds) Interfaith Engagement Beyond the Divide. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3862-9_6
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