Previous article in this series – http://jmm.org.au/articles/26663.htm

Chapter 3: A Protestant Reformer and the God of the Turks

For Martin Luther, the question as to whether Christians and Muslims have a common God revolved around the understanding of God’s love and its utter gratuity. Can we say they have a common God if they differ about God’s love? Many Westerners think of the God of the Qu’ran as a fierce deity.

The Turkish threat loomed large across Europe (a system of ‘Turk bells’ was set up in central Europe to warn local troops of a Turkish attack and to remind Christians to pray for deliverance. Every day at noon Luther would have heard them… In 1530 Luther wrote ‘We now have the Turk and his religion at our very doorstep’). And while many derided Turkish lack of civilization, creative achievements in Islamic architecture, music, and literature were apparent to Christians in religiously pluralistic regions such as Spain and Sicily. Throughout Europe medieval Arab and Islamic treatises on algebra, medicine and chemistry influenced scientific endeavours for centuries.

So while Suleiman the Magnificent was preparing to lead at least 100,000 troops towards Vienna, Luther was writing his Large Catechism (1529). Only true Christians, Luther said, could be confident of God’s love towards them: others ‘remain in eternal wrath and condemnation’. Now, Luther believed ‘that monotheistic non-Christians and wayward Christians *do* believe in the one true God, but know that God mistakenly, and therefore do not worship the “right God”.’

In one of his last sermons (January 31, 1546) Luther said that just as Christ calmed the Sea of Galilee storm, so Christ will bring today’s church safely through the rough seas. But Luther remained a radical reformer, not an irenic ecumenist. Based on Romans 1:19-20 he asserted that all people – even polytheistic heathens, as well as monotheists like Muslims – have some share in the proper knowledge of God. In his Large Catechism, Luther says the Ten Commandments – the basic content of God’s law – are ‘written in the hearts of all people’, including Muslims. But Muslims destroy true religion by ‘denying Christ as God’s Son…’ and, among other errors, violate the estate of marriage by freely divorcing women etc.

But, surprisingly, Luther thought Muslims followed God’s law more closely than most Christians did: ‘The modesty and simplicity of their food, clothing, dwellings… as well as the feasts, prayers and common gatherings of the people… are nowhere to be seen among us.More significant, as far as ‘good customs and good works’ are concerned, ‘the Turks are far superior to our Christians’. In a sermon delivered in 1544, Luther commended the Turks for exceeding Christians in doing works of mercy… they ‘regard it the greatest unfaithfulness and most shameful vice not to share bread with a neighbor in times of hunger’.

But God-as-Trinity, and Christ’s death for the sin of the world are not known among Muslims, because ‘human reason cannot come to these convictions on their own’. For Luther, as with Nicholas, the unique singularity of God is not compromised if we say that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Any god different from this God is ‘no God at all’. And without God’s self-revelation, no one can know God properly: God is inaccessible to reason alone.

But Luther’s tone, with its vicious name-calling and negative stereotyping, is troubling. Not only are the Turks ‘enemies of God’ but the struggle against them is one against ‘the devil himself’. ‘Luther was an equal-opportunity name-caller… There is something deeply ironic about a person’s defending God’s unconditional love by using the same kind of brutal rhetoric violent extremists use’. So Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Anabaptists are all objects of God’s wrath. One can have all the right convictions about God – which the devils have as well – and be damned. (Erasmus, Luther’s contemporary, had a more irenic attitude: he wrote that ‘[the Turks] are human beings, and half-Christian’).

The main problem with Luther is that he did not see the incongruity of proclaiming a God of unconditional love but at the same time failing miserably in demonstrating that unconditional love to Muslims (and others).