Two specific events fueled the idea for MTSU professor emeritus Ron Messier to write the book, Jesus: One Man, Two Faiths, a work designed to create dialogue about Christ between Christians and Muslims.
In the first case, the longtime professor of Islamic and Middle East studies was at the home a colleague whose son was a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic Studies at Harvard and also a practicing Church of Christ minister, when the young man said, "My study of Islam in this program at Harvard has helped me understand the trinity."
That statement blew Messier "up against the wall" and made him start to think about Jesus as the focus of conversation between people of the two faiths.
Shortly after that, he was teaching Introduction to Islam at
That further piqued his interest in pursuing the "line of inquiry" for a book focusing on shared beliefs between Christians and Muslims.
Messier sat down with The DNJ recently to discuss the writing of his book, which is undergoing final changes and editing and is expected to hit bookshelves in October.
Q: You've just written this book, Jesus: One Man, Two Faiths. A Dialogue Between Christians and Muslims. How did you decide to write it?
Messier: It was in large part a product of 9/11. After 9/11, people wanted to know something about Islam. I was a professor at MTSU teaching about Islam, so you can imagine that I was called pretty often to give talks. I gave at least one talk a week for two years. ... And religion always came up, and every time somebody asked a question that I didn't know the answer, I said well that's not going to happen again. So I really started looking at Islam as a religion compared to Christianity. As that process was moving forward, I, like most Americans, felt wounded by 9/11.
Messier: It was in large part a product of 9/11. After 9/11, people wanted to know something about Islam. I was a professor at MTSU teaching about Islam, so you can imagine that I was called pretty often to give talks. I gave at least one talk a week for two years. ... And religion always came up, and every time somebody asked a question that I didn't know the answer, I said well that's not going to happen again. So I really started looking at Islam as a religion compared to Christianity. As that process was moving forward, I, like most Americans, felt wounded by 9/11.
I don't know that I would describe myself as a very religious person at that point, but a good friend, Dr. Bob Dray, invited me to go to a Bible Study Fellowship International, and I started going to that and remained with that group for four years, discovering probably for the first time in my life, even though I grew up a Catholic, the beauty and power of Christian Scripture, Jewish Scripture, too, Old Testament, New Testament. So I'm thinking, OK, so people are asking me about Islam, how does Islam compare to Christianity while I'm learning about Christianity. And the idea occurred to me that Jesus would be a good focus for dialogue between these two faiths.Messier: Some things are easier to dialogue on than others. For example, first and maybe most importantly, all Muslims, or 99.9 percent, believe they worship the same God that we do, as Christians do. They identify their God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Old Testament. Beyond that, they believe Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. They have a whole chapter in the Qur'an describing the Christmas story, pretty much as we describe, born of the Virgin Mary, conceived by the power of the spirit of God, rather than the Holy Spirit, but they do use that term spirit of God. And that's how Jesus was born of a virgin, because God commanded her to be bearer of the Christ child. They believe Jesus performed miracles, he cured the sick, he raised people from the dead, and they believe that he himself was raised to heaven by the power of God and ... to lead us to judgment on the final day. So those are the easy topics.
Q: So what is the theme exactly?
Messier: The theme of the book is that Muslims and Christians have a lot to dialogue about in the person of Jesus, more than most Christians and most Muslims are aware of. And I've approached this from a number of standpoints. I've approached it from reading Christian Scripture as well as the Hebrew Bible and Qur'an and exegetical writings on both sides, that is the qur'anic side and biblical side.
And then I spent a lot of time talking to Christians and Muslims about this idea. As you can imagine, people have a lot of different views about the topic, so to take any particular point in the book, any particular concept, it would be inaccurate to say all Christians agree to this or all Muslims agree to it. So what I have looked for is overlaps in concepts that at least some Christians and Muslims would agree on.
Q: If, as your student wrote, Jesus is so important to the Islamic faith, why is that so off the charts? Nobody even talks about it. In our letters to the editor, guest columns, calls to the paper, nobody mentions this. It's all Mohammed is bad, nobody mentions Jesus at all.
Messier: It's a lack of information. It's not talked about a lot in the Muslim world because they take it for granted. They know that Jesus is important to them. It's downplayed somewhat for political reasons probably and because of history. I think the further back you go, the better the relationships were between Christians and Muslims. There were certain junctures where history was unfavorable to the relationship. For example, the Crusades. If you have two populations that begin to move apart, the longer that process is ongoing, the further apart they're going to be. And there has been relatively little in our recent history to move us in the opposite direction.
Q: A lot of people think that our Founding Fathers were only talking about Christianity when they spoke about religious freedom and the First Amendment. What's your take on that?
Messier: I certainly don't think Islam, specifically, was on their radar screen, one way or the other. I think if it had been they would have included it in their concept of religious freedom. But at the time of the
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Messier: I came prepared to talk about two concepts in the book. There are two that are not so easy. One is the concept of the Crucifixion, which most Muslims ... say didn't happen. They deny that Christ was crucified, so that's a pretty sticky issue. The other concept that's a difficult one is the Trinity. But I make the case in the book if you look at the texture of either of those beliefs, which are still going to end up being different, there is still going to be something to talk about that can enrich the Christian understanding of the Crucifixion or the trinity or the Muslim understanding of the Crucifixion and the trinity.