As the social scientist Professor Rodney Stark has observed, where the Qur’an confidently asserted itself to be ‘the Scripture whereof there is no doubt’, St Paul admitted that ‘our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect’. That meant that, in order to really understand what God wanted, we had to analyse and reanalyse and then argue about the disciples’ recollections. In the fifth century, St Augustine wrote that Christians should ‘approach together unto the words of Thy book, and seek in them Thy meaning’. The idea was that the truth was buried in there, somewhere, and that
...more
