The Authentic Advent

The word authentic may not be the first one that comes to mind in this present season, yet it remains one upon which we do well to ponder at any time and perhaps especially so amidst all the bright lights and tinsel.  But it becomes more important still when we are confronted by such a terrible and harsh reality as the killings in Australia, where two gunmen shot dozens of bullets into crowds at Bondi Beach. This was done precisely as the Jewish community there was celebrating the start of Hanukkah. Fifteen people were killed and many more injured. The perpetrators were 24-year-old Naveed Akram and his father, the 50-year-old Sajid Akram. While their full background has yet to be established, Australian security services were reported to have recorded that Naveed Akram had been associating with Islamic extremists.

In our ever more secular culture, there are many curious aspects to the way religion is portrayed. It is often more or less overtly presumed that all religious believers must, by definition, partake of the irrational, since religion is deemed really to be about mere sentiment and feelings. 

It is common too to deny that acts of violence committed by perpetrators – even when they specifically invoke their religious beliefs when committing them – have any real connection to the religion they cite. There is certainly a deeply legitimate point to be made there – which is that it cannot be right somehow to associate all believers of a given religious tradition with the acts of violence committed by its extremists. This is clearly true for Muslims, just as it would be unfair to associate the wrongs perpetrated at the time of the Crusades with all Christians.  

But what may also be implied is that acts of violence and terrorism are not consistent with the authentic form of the religion in question. Putting aside the perhaps rash assumption that authentic religions never justify violence, it is certainly appealing to frame matters in this way. Yet the concept of authenticity raises questions which are actually quite challenging to address, namely how is the authentic in a particular religious tradition to be determined and by whom?

Determining authentic religious belief and practice has preoccupied the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam throughout the millennia and each tradition has developed distinctive institutional and textual mechanisms for establishing what constitutes genuine adherence to what each holds to be foundational revelation. Nonetheless, they all have faced profound internal disputes over the validity of the claims made and answers given. 

All three traditions assert that authentic religious belief and practice flow from uninterrupted transmission of foundational revelation which would be through, respectively:

• the mesorah of Judaism, which is the chain of transmission of Jewish religious tradition, which encompasses both the oral and written Torah (though emphases differ among different groups) which is held to have preserved and interpreted Jewish law and customs through the generations; 
• the institutions of the church, ecumenical councils and (according many but not all)  apostolic succession in the case of Christianity, and;
• the ijma, which is the scholarly consensus or agreement of the Islamic community on a point of Islamic law in Islam. 

In each case, institutionally recognised figures—rabbis, bishops and councils, or the ulama—have sought to exercise authority to determine which interpretations or practices constitute faithful continuity with the original revelation. Yet history evidences that all three traditions have experienced fundamental disputes about authenticity that proved at key moments effectively impossible to resolve through appeal to those traditional mechanisms themselves at each historic point. Multiple illustrations come to mind:

• Judaism’s Karaites and Sadducees, which were both sects that rejected the authority of the Oral Law. The Sadducees were active during the Second Temple period but died out after its destruction in 70 AD, whereas Karaism developed later, with roots traceable back to the eighth century, but continues down to the present.  
• Christianity faced the schism of East and West as well as the Reformation.
• In Islam, aside from the Sunni-Shia divide there was the doctrinal, hermeneutic and philosophical crisis of the Mihna (Islamic inquisition) from 833 to 851 under the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun, where scholars were persecuted for not conforming to the Mu’tazilite doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an only for this view itself to be suppressed after the accession of Caliph al-Mutawakkil. The legacy of this episode had enormous later impact on Islam and the place of reason within it, while other later movements claiming to seek reform in the name of recovering the authentic, include the recurring attempts at Salafi reform with further sub groups arising of moment such as the Wahabism, that began in the 18^th century. 

Each of these crises arose when movements contested a prior consensus and claimed warrant in primary texts, while questioning whether the then prevailing institutional authorities had adequately preserved the true content of the authentic faith. In response, the existing structures typically pointed to continuity, divine guidance, or scholarly expertise, as sustaining their historic claim to be authentic—but these justifications themselves invited interpretation and could be contested. Leaving, in the contemporary world – framed as it is, after the Reformation and Renaissance in the West – by a context of seemingly relentless scepticism, a hard reality of denominational pluralism. This is a hard reality since it is a constant challenge to the presumed ideal of universally recognized and coherent authenticity demanded by the truth claims normally made by each tradition.   

If all of this seems remote and academic, it is not at all when movements and individuals arise that commit murder and violence in the name of one or another religious tradition. At that point, when a particular religious tradition is invoked, its wider membership and structures must either assert effectively their authority to demonstrate that those committing violence in its name are illegitimate, or recognise the dire significance of being unable to do so.

In the wider secular culture, a religious tradition that cannot effectively delegitimise acts of terror, opens the door to the secular critique that would use the fact that religion is invoked by some aberrant proponents, as a warrant to exclude all religion itself – no matter how much that would deny the reality of what is essential to true human flourishing.

For Christians, standing as we do in the shadow of recent events and the violence committed  now is the time to look to the true meaning of the coming of Christ. The coming of Christ is the ultimate manifestation of the possibility of redemption and a world transformed and made good — a message of a metaphysically grounded hope and transformation, which could never be more timely….

…his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Isaiah, 9,6