By JIM CAMPBELL
It’s a rare and beautiful thing. It’s something you should treasure when you catch one of its kind, especially in the wild. It’s called an argument that proves too much. I spotted one some time ago during a stroll through the Islamic apologetics blogs, reading over a 2017 post that claimed for itself the accomplishment of “Refuting the ‘Divinity’ of Jesus [sic].”
It’s easy for those just beginning in the Church, and above all, the tech-natives among us, to see a title like this and feel an unpleasant rush in the stomach – something to do with an age-particular sense of information paranoia. What if there’s something, somewhere, that completely explodes my view of the world, and I’m just not aware of it? Catechists and clergy would do well to act in the knowledge that this great anxiety is there for our rising Catholics, the fresh confirmandi and just a few years upward. It’s the natural result of having access to staggeringly more hours of media than one is capable of consuming, and no filter for authority or reliability between the countless conflicting views expressed through them. There’s always something unwatched, unheard, and what if there’s some devastating evidence somewhere in there that levels everything I hold to be true?
The first necessary repair here is to remind our beginners that faith is not something acquired through the collection of just enough solid evidence and arguments. Chesterton said it memorably:
The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. “Why I am a Catholic”
We would find a question like “why do you believe you have two hands?” a strangely difficult one to answer without simply giving the most convincing reason of all – “Because I do have two hands.” A very good arguer, especially one who’s spent time at a liberal arts college, could probably mount a pretty decent defeater to your belief in this basic fact, in which case you would have to muster evidence and argument to defend it. But the belief itself – before, during, and after all argument – simply comes from its being fact. We do not have faith, then, in a doctrine like the Bodily Assumption of Mary because of the existence of supporting Biblical typology or witness from the Church Fathers (though those do both exist, with the latter still growing in quantity with new finds from the early Church). We believe in the Assumption because it is an event that happened, certain knowledge of which has been revealed through Christ and defined by his Church, to which we submit in divine and catholic faith. Compelling arguments one way or the other, interesting and even vital though they may be when defending our beliefs, are immaterial to the final question of the virtue of faith, which is a virtue from God, of God, and for God.
That said, my fellow faithful will be glad to know that support for our beliefs exists in heaps, and even comes sometimes from very unexpected places. The most unexpected of all places from which to receive support, I’d think, would be from one’s historic opponent. But, here we are. Let’s take this example of one of our Muslim brethren, who in so energetically “refuting” the divinity of Jesus, appears to have come around, if only accidentally, precisely to Jesus’ divinity by way of supporting a central component of the Church’s teaching on the Sacrament of Baptism. I point this out in order to reassure my fellow faithful who might encounter similar arguments that they may be bold in our faith, but also in the humble hopes that our Muslim brother’s happy stumble toward the Church might be a precursor to more purposeful steps.
Islam Reigns is an online platform that, in its own words, “answer[s] falsehoods and defend[s] the truth of ISLAM and much more.” While it lists “Christianity/Orientalists” as one of its most common tags, it seems also to have contributed amply to intra-Islam dialogue on various matters of religious law and, apparently, on the Bermuda Triangle, which the blog covers from the undeniably fascinating angle that it is the Seat of Satan.
I regret the inability to speak for the good intentions of this particular platform and its anonymous authors, not having dived too deeply into its whole range of contents. I can say that I have personally known more Muslims in my life than could be considered average for an American Roman Catholic, and those Muslims – especially the women – practiced many commendable natural virtues. It is, however, sadly true that the “refutation” in question would have benefited from more good faith in the hypothetical Christian opponent, not to mention far less blind confidence in itself. The argument reads like one daydreamed by the high school debate-club captain: the author, according to his own narrative, repeatedly strikes down the feeble arguments of the whimpering and sputtering Christian, who gradually devolves with each step of the obviously superior Islamic position until, by the end, he is “exploding.”
Permit my unexploded hands, now, to lay out for the reader why our Muslim brother believes we should throw out the divinity of Jesus. Before we arrive finally at the argument that proves too much, the reader will need to hear the author’s argument in its completeness and understand what he is trying, with no success, to prove:
The argument centers around the Lord’s “I am” statements in the gospels. A (sadly) quick explanation: In the Book of Exodus, when God from the burning bush calls Moses to serve as His messenger to Pharaoh, an awe-struck and hesitating Moses asks,
“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Ex. 3:13)
The Lord then privileges Moses to be the recipient of a very significant revelation – His greatest name: God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Ex. 3:14)
Moses – and through him, the whole nation of Israel and eventually the whole world – has just learned the name of the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe: ‘I AM.’ What you’ll need to know for the purposes of this article about these immensely important and endlessly deep verses is that this, the self-revealed holy name of God, has been handled with much fear and care by both Jews and Christians. Ultimately derived from this Hebrew phrase is the Tetragrammaton, or the unpronounceable Y-H-W-H, substituted in speech by both traditions with LORD. By the time that the Jews had returned from their Babylonian exile (6th century before Christ), no righteous person of the Old Covenant would have dared take the holy name on his own lips for any reason. Certainly, for someone not only to speak the name, but to dare to apply that name to himself, would be a blasphemy among blasphemies, and would thus be more than worthy as per Leviticus 24:16 of death by stoning, “the sojourner as well as the native.”
Imagine the scandal and fury when a 1st-century rabbi who, while traveling, teaching, healing, and casting out demons, began seemingly to adopt the name in various circumstances as his own. The gospels record Jesus applying the Greek equivalent of the holy name, Ego eimi, literally “I am,” to himself in several highly suggestive situations, all adding up to a plausible (almost undeniable) tacit claim to divinity.
The author at Islam Reigns now hastens to assure us that this use of the name is not a claim on the part of Jesus to divinity: “Saying ‘I am,’” he insists, “does not make a person God.” Instead, he argues by way of quoting C.K. Barrett that Jesus is using this phrase to “draw attention to him[self] in the strongest possible terms. ‘I am the one—the one you must look at, and listen to, if you would know God.’” The desire to conform this series of passages to such a reading is clearly an understandable one coming from a Muslim, who is obliged by his religion to see Jesus as a holy human prophet and nothing more.
The regrettable fact about Islam Reigns’ argument is that, in seeking to defend this reading, it engages at length with only one of the many instances of Jesus apparently using the divine name for himself, and it is the one most easily contorted into a ‘mortal-prophet-only’ understanding of our Lord – though, I’d rush to add, still not at all convincingly. We find our Lord, here in John’s gospel, arguing with the hypocritical Pharisees, who have just accused him of being demon-possessed for implying that he is greater than the prophet Abraham. He replies,
[“]Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad.” The Jews then said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:56-58, emphasis mine)
The Pharisees respond by picking up rocks and making to stone Jesus to death, a move he must avoid by leaving the temple.
Our Muslim author would suggest that there is nothing about this passage that implies a self-profession of divinity on the part of Jesus. Instead, Jesus is merely alluding to his own pre-existence in the foreknowledge of the true God. To show that this reading is one compatible with the biblical understanding of other prophets, the author invokes God’s famous words to the prophet Jeremiah:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)
In the logic of this explanation, it is not the use of the divine name that incites the Pharisees to murder, but rather Jesus’ identification with these other, merely human prophets whom, in their own times, the ancestors of these same Israelites rejected and attempted, sometimes successfully, to kill. Our friend reminds us that Jesus himself acknowledges this common lot of the prophets when elsewhere, overlooking Jerusalem and weeping, he laments, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!” (Luke 13:34)
It would seem that all the attempted stoning proves is that Jesus is claiming to be another one of these men sent by God, and by no means that he is claiming to be God himself. After all, the Muslim’s argument continues, it is not as though Jesus is the only one in the New Testament who uses the Greek phrase ego eimi. The Apostle St. Paul, in the Acts, says,
“Whether short or long, I would to God that not only you but also all who hear me this day might become such as I am (ego eimi). (Acts 26:29, emphasis mine)
Before arriving finally at our point, I would like to briefly respond to what’s been said: Nowhere in this exchange does Jesus specify that it is in foreknowledge only that he claims to have preceded Abraham. The author makes the well-worn appeal to a “careful reading of the context of the verse,” but he leaves the readers to discover this essential context for ourselves. In the absence of some specified textual support, this foreknowledge pushback simply appears to be eisegesis, or the reading of ideas into the text that are not native to them. In the case of Jeremiah, God is very clear in saying “I knew you” before he was formed, not “you existed.”
Nor does any of this explain why Jesus unnaturally switches the tense between “Abraham was” to the present “I am.” To strike a meaningful parallel with Jesus’ statement, the Jeremiah verse might better have read something like,
Before I formed you in the womb, I know you, and before you were born I consecrate you; I appoint you a prophet to the nations.
Of course, it doesn’t read this way. The temporality of the thought imparted to Jeremiah remains consistent throughout, because the Holy Spirit is not seeking here to make a point through the sacred author about Jeremiah’s pre-eternality.
I would suggest that Jesus has totally unrelated designs in shifting tense with the Pharisees. It cannot be coincidence that this imposition of choppy grammar specifically makes present the Greek rendering of the name of God in his speech, and that the immediate reaction by the pharisees is to take up stones and observe (so they thought) the above-cited penalty for blasphemy in Leviticus 24:16.
Neither does Jesus’ lament overlooking Jerusalem do the work that our friend seems to hope that it does. It is true that Jesus references the stoning of those “sent” to the Israelites, which has a clear similarity to the above-cited altercation with the Pharisees. But the words that immediately follow certainly seem out of place for a mere prophet:
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Matthew 23:37, emphasis mine)
What Old Testament prophet would have put himself figuratively in the position of a mother over the children of Jerusalem, gathering them together under her wings and not, rather, leading them into the arms of God? Further, it so happens that scripture elsewhere applies this very same image of a protecting bird shielding the faithful to none other than the “Almighty,” the “Most High”:
For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. (Psalms 91:3-4)
So far, then, from defeating Jesus’ divinity are his mournful words over Jerusalem that, in fact, they again put him by his own testimony awkwardly (for a Muslim) close to a self-identification with the Divinity of scripture.
I won’t say much about the quotation from St. Paul, because not as much needs to be said. Paul has used ego eimi as part of a longer, complete sentence (i.e., with a predicate nominative), in which context it fits grammatically and comes off as perfectly natural. Jesus, in contrast, has simply stated “I am.” It is, basically, the equivalent of trying to make it sound less unnatural that someone has uttered the incomplete sentence “I like” by bringing up the fact that some different person once said, in a different time and place, “I like corn.”
So much for the explosively confounding case against the “I am” statements. There is, however, one more piece to Islam Reigns’ polemic, and it’s here where we arrive finally at the reason for the hour, the argument that proves too much:
St. Paul, says our author friend, is not the only other person in the New Testament to say ego eimi. There is, at least, one other – and, to maximize the predicament for Christians, he uses it as Jesus does: as an incomplete sentence, without a predicate nominative. “I am,” and that’s it. That is the man healed of blindness by Jesus.
The incident is found in Chapter 9 of the Gospel of John. Jesus and the disciples are passing by a man “blind from his birth” (v. 1). The disciples, trying their hand at the problem of evil, ask Jesus whether it is the sins of the man or his parents that are to blame for the disability. Jesus answers,
“It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (vv. 3-4)
This ailment of blindness, Jesus insists, is not a consequence of any personal culpability of the blind man, nor even of his parents, but rather an evil permitted for a time in order that God, by bringing light to those darkened eyes, might show the nearness and gratuitous goodness of his Kingdom. We will return to the rest of Jesus’ answer very shortly.
Approaching the man, Jesus makes a mixture of mud out of dust and his own saliva and rubs the mixture into the man’s eyes, then telling him to “go” and “wash in the pool of Silo’am.” (v. 7). Upon returning, the man has sight.
St. John the Evangelist describes the scene as people begin to take notice:
The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar, said, “Is not this the man who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is he”; others said, “No, but he is like him.” He said, “[ego eimi].” (vv. 8-9)
Is this blind beggar claiming a one-to-one identification with God? No, and on this, we may agree with our Muslim friend. I will allow him to note the supposed difficulty for Christians in his own words: “the Greek” he correctly observes, “reads exactly like Jesus’ statement, i.e., ‘I am.’”
Let’s take a moment to thank our Muslim friend for bringing this text in front of us and, by the effort, raising a very fine point – albeit not the point he was anticipating.
This sequence of the blind man begins immediately after the episode related above which concludes in the Pharisees attempting to stone Jesus. While the attempted stoning closes John 8, the healing of the blind man opens John 9. Jesus’ utterance of “I am” is still ringing in the reader’s ears as he arrives at the blind man’s own utterance of the phrase only ten verses later. What’s more is that our chapter-verse divisions were not added to scripture until approximately the mid-to-late Middle Ages, so the feeling of breakage between the episodes is one imposed significantly after the Gospel’s composition. No Biblical scholar – not the conservative evangelical, not the Catholic in good standing, not the stone-hearted liberal critic – would suggest that the Johannine author was clumsy in his literary style. We cannot be expected to believe that the two utterances are so close for no reason at all.
So, why is there such an apparent echo between John 8 and 9? Why does the only person who uses the bare ego eimi aside from Jesus happen to use it so soon after Jesus himself has, and to such inflammatory effect?
“All of John 9,” says Dr. John Bergsma in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, “is a catechesis on Baptism.” How so? He continues:
Everyone is like the man born blind: we are born in the darkness of sin […] Later Christian theology will call this darkness “original sin.” But “original sin” is not a guilt – as Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” Rather, “original sin” is an absence, the absence of the Holy Spirit, who brings us “light” and “life.” (Bergsma, 63)
Let’s carefully examine this analogy of light and darkness as it appears in the episode of the blind man. The man – and by extension, all of us born into the loss that is original sin – suffers from an absence of light. He is trapped, by virtue of his ailment, in a perpetual darkness which he cannot escape through personal effort, even through natural virtue. So, Jesus, unsolicited, offers him the free gift of light. But this light is not anything external which Jesus wields. It is rather, in his own words, himself: “I am the light of the world.” This theme of Jesus as light is seen throughout John’s Gospel, from the very famous opening verses:
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (Jn 1:4-5)
But why must Jesus spit into this mixture before administering his divine medicine? We return to Dr. Bergsma. It is simply biblical that God fashioned Adam from dust (Gen 2:7). Bergsma cites selections from the Dead Sea Scrolls to show that there existed a complementary Jewish tradition contemporaneous to Jesus that God had spat in the dust before making it into the form of Adam. Two examples of references to such a tradition in the Scrolls are:
[Man] is so much spit, mere nipped-off clay (1QS 11:21).
And I was formed of spittle. I was molded [of clay] and [my] formation was in darkness (4Q511, 4). (Quoted in Bergsma, 61-62)
What is the conclusion for Bergsma? That the blind man is undergoing a reenactment of his own creation:
Jesus the Son is re-performing the very acts by which God the Father formed the first man! Jesus is re-creating this man, born in darkness, into a “son of the light”! (Bergsma, 63)
And finally, of course, the pool, and this hopefully speaks for itself. After “re-fashioning” the man, he sends him off to wash – to immerse himself – in the Pool of Sil’oam. Helpful here is the Greek for “immerse” or “wash in water” – baptizō. It is only on his return from immersion in this pool that the regenerative work bears its fruit, and the now-seeing man speaks the critical words: “I am.”
“How can this man use the same phrase?” Asks Bergsma, echoing the concerns of our Muslim friend, but now with an answer: “It is the theology of Baptism, which bestows the Spirit, which is divine life. Therefore, the baptized now shares God’s life, and can also say, ‘I AM’” (Bergsma, 64).
The Catholic sacrament of Baptism is not a theatrical or symbolic act. It is death to the old life, the life of darkness, and a true rebirth by water into the world of light. Thereby, the recipient of the sacrament becomes the “new creature” of St. Paul (2 Cor. 5:17) – not in some shallow sense of taking on a new membership or ideology, as though Catholicism were interchangeable with Libertarianism, but in the sense that the baptized has received the imprint of a new and ineffaceable character upon his soul. That character is the very character of Christ, light from light, true God from true God. “The person baptized,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “has been ‘enlightened,’ he becomes a “son of light,” indeed, he becomes ‘light’ himself” (CCC 1216).
The level of familiarity with God suggested by this theology will be foreign to Muslim readers, who count a servile fear toward the Almighty the end and not the beginning of wisdom.
To be sure, God is every bit as great, and every bit as terrible, as they imagine. And certainly, in the darkness of our fallen state, we are hopelessly unworthy of Him and unable to know, love, or please Him. But how happy is this truth that the God of love has found it good to stoop to our level and make us worthy of Him, to send shrieking away the scrupulous handwringing we find in the death of dark, and instead bring His own light to our eyes and His very own life and nature into our person, by the labors of His own human body.
This is my answer to the question of why John would connect the previous story of the near stoning with this miraculous healing, the “I am” of Jesus coming so nearly before the “I am” of the newly enlightened man. And it is perhaps a further credit to the intentional linkage of the two that the Pharisees are said immediately to reject both persons – for, as our Lord tells us in the very same Gospel, “if the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (Jn 15:18). So, yes, our friend at Islam Reigns has made a small argument that proves very much, and none of it is good news for his own case. There are claims to divinity all over this supposed defeater he has chosen to face up to our 2,000-year-old faith. They are embedded, at that, within strong textual support for the Church’s theology of Baptism, such that the former reinforces the latter and vice versa.
I would ask my brother at Islam Reigns to inspect his own conscience and ask himself whether his accounting for all the passages in question truly is a satisfying one, even to him. He may also ask why, in one of the examples he neglected to mention, we find Roman soldiers buckling to their knees at Jesus’ pronouncement of “I am” (John 18:6), and what relation this may have to the words of God in Isaiah:
By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall swear.’ (Is. 45:23, emphasis added)
…And whether, perhaps, this is something St. Paul had in mind when he sang,
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord. (Philippians 2:9-10, 11, emphasis added)
I hope our friend reads this and, if he is inclined, responds.
