The small city of Al-Suqaylabiyah has long been an indicator of Christian-Muslim relations in Syria. And two days ago, masked militants doused the northern Syrian city’s Christmas tree in petrol and set it alight....Read Full Article >>➤
The message is clear: Christians beware. Now, Christians all over Syria are nervously watching what happens next in Al-Suqaylabiyah; among other things, places like this are on the front line between two very different conceptions of God. If you ask Sunday school children to draw a picture of God, you often get two sorts of images.
The first is a cloudy scribble, generally pretty abstract and amorphous. It could be fire or a depiction of wind. This is God the unknowable. The second sort of image is of a kindly face, mostly a man with a beard. Sometimes a baby.
People have killed each other over this difference, and continue to do so right up to this day. It’s a difference that gets to the theological heart of why Christians in Syria are so nervous about the return of Islamism. This is a Christmas story set against the violence of world events.
Idolatry is probably the number one thought crime in the Hebrew scriptures. God alone is worthy of worship, and to imbue divine status to anything less than God Almighty is a capital offence. “Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them.
But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be the first against them to execute them. Stone them to death” as the book Deuteronomy puts it. Judaism and Islam share a profound hostility to any kind of depiction of the divine; for them, the real God is unrepresentable.
The second commandment prohibits the representation of God, and representational art is profoundly suspect. So, in many ways, Rothko is the archetypal Jewish artist. And Islam focuses a great deal of its visual aesthetic energy into calligraphy. At the extreme end of this scale are the fighters of Islamic State blowing up statues in Palmyra. ...Read Full Article >>➤
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