FATHER FRNK'S RANTS - Divine Deceptions

Rant Number 356 22 July 2009

‘They said “We killed Jesus the Messiah, Son of Mary. The Messenger of Allah.” But they killed him not, nor crucified him. Only a likeness of that was shown to them.’ Quran 4:157
The Americans are coming! Or rather, they came. Last week. Here, in the Smoke. To participate in famed Muslim-Christian debates. Verily, a clash of titans. Evangelical Yanks versus Muslim Brits, of Sunni and Shia varieties. Great ding-dongs. All pretty stimulating, I must say. But the exchanges threw up real conundrums. Such as: is God a deceiver? Does he ever lie?
Human beings are often liars. Take Al Moqanna, ‘the Veiled One’. A self-proclaimed prophet in Khorassan, Eastern Iran. He wore a mask, he claimed, because otherwise the unendurable radiance of his face would blind his followers. As it turned out, Al Moqanna was a fraud. His veil hid not supernatural beauty but all too natural ugliness. Unmasked at last as bald and scar-faced, he was slain. Not curiosity, but vanity killed the cat.
Al Moqanna was no unarmed prophet. He had an army and fought, initially with success. What busted his revelation for good, however, was not defeat but falsehood. He lied. If a holy man shows himself capable of lying to his own votaries, even once, that isn’t just morally dodgy. It poisons the roots of his very credentials. What guarantee can they have he has not lied all along? About other matters, such as his inspired utterances? His key claim to be God’s voice?
When it comes to the Deity, it gets even more culpable. The Quranic passage above asserts, contrary to the Gospels, that Jesus did not die on the Cross. Only ‘a likeness’ of him hung upon the Cross. A view shared by an obscure Christian heresy called Docetism. Christ miraculously only ‘seemed’ to die. (Dokeo is Greek for ‘to seem’.) Now, a critic might argue the Muslim view implicitly turns God into a deceiver. If there was not Messiah agonising on the Cross but a phantasm or some unhappy fall guy, and God blinded the bystanders to that, didn’t that charade make God into an impostor? A big puppet master in the sky? A God whose character pious believers could never really trust?
I am not having a go at Muslims. A similar challenge crops up in the Bible. Concerning the future that awaits the Antichrist’s minions, 2 Thessalonians (2:11) warns that ‘for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie’. Though the writer is not God but St Paul, I fear that sounds very much like God intending to hoodwink the sods. Huh!
Yet, consider: who will be deceived? The good and the righteous? No, the Bible refers to ‘those who perish’. The vile votaries of ‘the man of sin’, ‘the son of perdition’. God will delude them to further his own good purposes. Unlike Al Muqanna, who bamboozled those who trusted him as a true prophet. The idea is that the wicked have no right to expect God to play fair with them. As sinners, they asked for it. Hmmm... Does that really let God off the hook? Perhaps.
A similar consideration might fit the Quran. It speaks explicitly of Jesus’ enemies. The unrighteous ones who stood and looked upon the crucifixion. The trick was on them. Again, you might say that is how it should be. ‘It serves them right’ sort of thing.
There are certain people, bad people, to whom ‘you do not owe the truth’, a subtle ethical doctrine teaches. Villains who are out to steal your goods and murder you, for instance. They have forsaken any moral right to your true statements. Maybe it is the same between God and the wicked.
A puzzle. On Golgotha, at the Crucifixion, witnessing the most tremendous sacred drama of all human history, there were all sorts of people. Roman soldiers, the chief priests of the Jews, scribes, elders, as well as relations and faithful friends of the Lord. Righteous men and women like St John, Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, other pious women and probably other disciples. (All of them Hebrews, of course.) Surely God did not intend to take in the righteous too? Otherwise we’d be back to square one - to God as deceiver, full stop. Doubtless Jesus’ true followers would not have been tricked, because God by hypothesis would have protected them from deception. Why then did they not tell afterwards? The apostolic traditions, the churches later founded by Apostles, like St John’s Ephesus, all unanimously affirmed the reality of the Crucifixion. The Docetists, the heretics who claimed the contrary, were few and far between – quattro gatti, as Italians say. Christianity itself – over a billion believers – would become nothing but the product of a divine imposture. Theologically a tad implausible. (The Church might have a similar problem with Islam.) Still, my Muslim friends will have an answer. That’s what apologetics is all about. It never ends – and it seldom satisfies.
Lying and Deity look like contradictories. Because lies and deceptions are faults, blemishes, imperfections. Inevitable in human beings, flawed and fallible and imperfect creatures as we are. Politicians of all parties lie. No big deal – they are human, all too human. But God is divine, not human. The divine nature contains no imperfections. Philosopher Descartes knew the necessary nature of God’s most perfect being when he argued for an absolutely perfect God needed to buttress the foundations of scientific knowledge. Foundations built on the unshakeable certainty of the self-consciousness: ‘I think, therefore I am’. However, he did briefly conceive the possibility of an all-powerful deceiver. An evil genius who could have tricked him into believing the false existence of an objective world outside his mind. Of course, Descartes’ evil genius isn’t God but the devil. The liar and the father of lies. That is why God’s veracity is intrinsic to him, as mendacity is to Satan.
Last month, strolling in Meshed, Khorassan’s green and leafy capital, I fancied – or I dreamt I fancied - that I recognised Al Moqanna. Wearing a huge black turban, the putative prophet had set up shop in the bazaar. And he did still wear his trademark veil, sure. His frame, I could perceive behind his silken cloak, seemed agile and athletic. The eyes were beautiful, large, dark and soulful. ‘What are you selling?’ I asked him. ‘Lies’, he responded. The tone of his voice was insinuating, seductive. I gritted my teeth. ‘Be off with you! Back to your dust!’ I told him. Guess he did, because he faded away, like a puff of smoke.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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