Mosab Hassan Yousef, now 32, was the son of a key Hamas leader, who he seems still to admire despite having secretly embraced Christianity and then becoming a spy for Israel’s Shin Bet:
He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim.
Living now around San Diego, Yousef
says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can’t be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
So much for his theories about terrorism and Islam, which I offer to introduce Yousef and to provoke thought about Islam if the reader be so inclined.
What’s really interesting to me is Yousef’s reason for embracing Christianity:
“I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about,” he says in “Son of Hamas.”
Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.
…
“I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn’t leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it’s a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.
“I’m not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can’t deny they came from Christianity as well.”
I have an enduring intuition that there are millions in the United States – Muslims, Jews, New Agers, Wiccans, Druids, self-declared Agnostics and Atheists, and even lapsed Christians – who are secretly drawn to Jesus Christ “as a character, as a personality,” and who love him, his wisdom, his unconditional love.
But they hear from some prominent Churches (or is it many? I’ve lost touch with that subculture, but I know it was around within my lifetime) a message that sounds too much like Jonathan Edwards’ “Angry God,” a staple of English lit classes when I was younger.
Or just as likely, they see in mainstream Christianity or in the Megachurches (the effete spiritual descendants of Edwards; “Entropy: It’s Not Just About Physics Any More”) a moralistic therapeutic deism that they can do quite well without, thank you. I have an often-oblivious, sometimes-perceptive friend who was frank and perceptive when he said that the sermons in his mainstream Church were such smarmy encouragement they weren’t worth his time. He could do better, quicker, elsewhere if he wanted a pep talk.
Or maybe they catch on that their emotions are being manipulated, not their spirit nourished, through the praise band and other hubbub. Or maybe pick up a total con man, who promises fabulous wealth in return for a “word of faith” backed up with a generous donation. That’s a massive turnoff.
So such Christ-admirers must choose, they think, between (1) the Jesus they see in the New Testament, or (2) the Churches they know. There’s something seriously wrong with that picture. Christ promised, after all, to build and preserve His Church, so how can it be in conflict with Him?
I have another enduring intuition that the heart-longing of such conflicted people will find its home in Orthodox Christianity, which is not like anything most people in America have ever seen. Contrary to what it connoted to me 15 years ago (forbidding ritualism of some sort coupled with doctrinal rigidity), is all about Jesus Christ (“it is sooooo not ‘about me’!” one visitor exclaimed) and becoming His worthy image and likeness by the healing of the human soul (Greek “nous”). (Matthew Gallatin coincidentally has a current podcast that vividly but fairly contrasts the Orthodox view of salvation from that typified by Jonathan Edwards. Orthodoxy’s different on the surface partly because it’s different deep down on such things.)
Do I dissemble? Didn’t I just tacitly fault “moralistic therapeutic deism”? How does Orthodox “healing of the soul” differ from MTD?
Well, first, it’s not moralistic. Really. (Once you really get the hang of it, you live far more by love than by rule.)
Second, it’s not deism.
Third, the therapy/healing in Orthodoxy starts not with faddish self-esteem and positive thinking, as in MTD, but with repentance.
John Romanides, in the posthumous collection of his Greek University Lectures on Patristic Theology, summarized Orthodox dogma:
- God became man. (No deism there!)
- There’s no repentance after death.
I don’t think either point is ever lost in any Orthodox Church, or could ever be lost if the cycle of services is maintained, though it can be obscured by human foibles.
Though repentance may sound grim (that presumably is why is has disappeared from Krustianity), it is a seed, and then a spiritual horticulture, that flowers into the glorious and all-laudable Saints. There’s no shortcut.
And ironically, that soul healing in the end really is about the worshipper, whose real, deepest needs are met, after years of worship and asceticism (that’s what deep repentance looks like), even if the Divine Liturgy does not immediately appear much of a balm for yesterday’s pink slip, dust-up with a lover or such. (I do recall, though, in addition to a riot of sensory impressions at my first Orthodox Liturgy, my first taste of Orthodoxy’s healing calm.)
I pray, too, that Yousef may find Orthodox Christianity, as I think he’ll find some real Krustian shortcomings in Southern California Evangelicalism. (Some of it in his vocabulary in the interview may foreshadow that, though he acknowledges that he’s “still learning about his new religion.”)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 