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THE WORD OFF THE STREET:

Divine Inspiration & Semantics in Christianity & Islam

Jonathan M. Watt

Geneva College, Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Beaver Falls and Pittsburgh, PA

For Presentation to the Evangelical Theological Society

at Toronto, Ontario Nov. 21, 2002

INTRODUCTION

Ideas have consequences. As tumultuous events of the new millennium churn

that shaky relationship between western cultures and the Islamic world, we must
remember that ideas have consequences. As we attempt to understand the impact of
worldviews in conflict, we must remain clear that ideas have consequences. As
theologians, politicians and mediacrats offer countless evaluations of Muslim beliefs,
family values and social strategies, we must return to the concept that ideas have
consequences.

That ideas have consequences was the implicit force behind a "new" book by

Benjamin Barber originally published in 1995, then re-issued last fall because of its
prescience -- entitled Jihad vs. McWorld. Using the title words emblematically, Barber
suggests that the modern world is seeing a collision of fundamentally antithetic ideas,
both of which can entail destructive consequences. One, which he labels Jihad, involves
a centripetal force of ethnic and religious identification coming into conflict with another
idea, McWorld, his designation for a centrifugal force of secular, popular culture
undergoing rampant, expansionist globalism. Barber proposes (1995:xi-xii) that "the
clash between Jihad and McWorld is again poignantly relevant in understanding why the
modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military or tactical, but rather must entail
a commitment to democracy and justice...." Inherent in each idea are both productive
and destructive potentials, says Barber. And either, if victorious, may undercut
democracy.

My own longstanding curiosity about the religion of Islam and some of the

cultures it has dominated, along with the tragedies of this past year, have prompted this
inquiry into a topic which, I believe, will contribute to an appropriate response which is
more than "tactical" and which extends beyond any commitment to democracy. I
wanted to know whether Islamic beliefs concerning the Koran's ostensible divine origins
the idea might offer a bridge or create a barrier for those who hold to a Judaeo-
Christian understanding of the origins of sacred scripture the consequence. When I
began this study last year, I was open to the possibility that the orthodox Islamic view of
the inspiration of the Koran might provide a bridge of the kind missiologist Don
Richardson has identified as "cultural compasses" or "redemptive analogies" fixed
points of a culture's knowledge base that can be used to "facilitate human understanding
of redemption" (1999:397 though I note that Richardson himself does not apply this
concept to the Islamic doctrine of inspiration).