One step deeper into the Irreconcilable.
Two buildings stand next to each other in every city by now all the way through Europe.
In one, it is said every Sunday that God became Man.
In the other, it is said every Friday that God never became Man - and that whoever says so has committed the worst sin there is.
The two buildings often lie less than a hundred metres apart. And almost no Europeans think about what that actually means.
Because we have taught ourselves that it means nothing. That they are two interpretations of the same basic substance. That they are two paths to the same mountaintop, two names for the same God, two readings of a common foundation. And the Man on Television and his many Experts have taught us that we are bad people if we think differently about it.
It is a nice thought.
It is just not true.
And it is costing us more than most understand or will admit.
Let me try to unfold it, so it stands clear, and as many as possible can follow.
Christianity says a specific thing about Man. It says we are created in God's image. It does not mean this as a metaphor. But as reality. It says that Logos, the creative Word that carries all creation - the universe - has entered into flesh in Christ. And it says that Man can therefore be the place where the divine takes residence. We are not only creatures. We are channels. We are bearers. Athanasius, one of the early church fathers, said it simply and quite boldly -
God became man, so that man could become God.
That is not heresy. That is Christianity's centre. That is what Paul meant when he wrote - "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Human dignity in the West comes directly from this thought. The individual person as inviolable, as autonomous, as bearer of something holy and divine, comes from the fact that we took the Logos-doctrine seriously for a thousand years.
Islam says something else. It says that Allah is absolutely transcendent. That means totally separate from creation, and that any mixing between the Creator and the created is what they call 'shirk'.
Shirk is the only sin the Quran says Allah will never(!) forgive. So it is not some small obscure technical detail. It is the entire system's foundation.
Man in Islam is 'abd, Allah's slave or servant. The name Abdullah, carried as a name by multimillions, literally means Allah's slave - and is in a way the entire anthropology in one word. The relation is master-servant, not father-son. And the word Islam literally means 'submission' - again this is not a linguistic curiosity, it is the entire point. The highest honour for a human being is to be an obedient slave.
And the Quran is not vague about Christianity. It mentions it by name and rejects its core claims quite explicitly. In sura five verses 72 and 73 it says that they are infidels, who say that God is the Messiah, Mary's son. In sura four verse 171 they are warned against saying "three" about God. In sura nine verse 30 it states directly: "The Christians say the Messiah is Allah's son. Allah kill them, how deluded they are." None of this is later interpretation or reformulation. It is the text itself. It is the Quran, which for a Muslim is Allah's revealed infallible word, that identifies Christianity's centre as the worst form of shirk.
That means something.
Especially the more believing a person is.
It means that the two traditions cannot both be taken seriously and live fully realised side by side on top of each other. Because if a Christian believes what he says about Christ, he commits in the Muslim's eyes every single day the worst sin there is. If a Muslim believes what he says about Allah, he must see his Christian neighbour as walking in the deepest error a human can stand in. Not because he does not like his neighbour. It is not a question of ill will or lack of fellow humanity. It is the very architecture of faith. It is what it by necessity requires of him.
And it goes both ways, moreover. Orthodox Christianity has its own exclusivity. Jesus says "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me." For one who stands in his Christian tradition, Islam is also an aberration, one that denies Christ as what he is. Both traditions have absolute claims about Truth, which directly contradict each other at the core.
It is in another and fine word - a bilateral problem.
And one that has asymmetric civilisational consequences, because the two traditions have different structures for - and especially answers to - what follows from such an assessment.
The classical Islamic answer was the dhimmi system. Christians and Jews had a special status in Islamic law, because they had received revelation before Muhammad. They could live in Muslim societies, but not as equals. They paid jizya, a special tax. They subordinated themselves in public. They were not allowed to proselytise. They were not allowed to build new churches or repair old ones without permission. In strict periods they were required to wear special clothing that made them recognisable as second class. It is coexistence, but it is structural subordination. Muslim civilisation offered survival, but not equality.
Polytheists received no such gesture. They stood outside the system and were faced with the choice of converting or being killed. That applied to the idol worshippers on the Arabian Peninsula during the early conquests, and it applied to Hindus in the centuries when Muslim rulers moved into India.
That is what that order offers, when taken fully seriously.
And here we come to the core of what we stand in the middle of.
When two traditions make mutually exclusive absolute truth claims, there are basically only four possible ways forward.
ONE IS CONVERSION. This means one tradition gives up on its core claims and becomes the other.
THE SECOND IS SUBORDINATION. This means one tradition lives within the other's space as second class.
THE THIRD IS SEPARATION. This means two traditions live in different territories, as civilisations next to each other, not as an internal relation in one society.
THE FOURTH IS SECULARISATION. This means that AT LEAST one tradition gives up its core claims in practice, while retaining them on paper, and becomes a tradition one no longer takes quite seriously.
The West chose the fourth path.
I described and explained why, a few days ago, will link to it below.
We secularised our own tradition, which has meant we no longer quite believe in what we say we believe in. We might go to church at Christmas and weddings, but the vast majority have detached themselves from Christianity saying anything at all binding about reality.
That we did it created a huge negotiation advantage internally in our own tradition. It meant that we could live with people who believed something else, because our own faith was no longer an organising force. We invented what we call neutral public space. We invented what we call religion as a private matter. We invented what we call equality before the law, where law does not mean God's law, but a human-made legal construction one can change. And it worked as long as the foundation beneath us - whether we knew it or not - was rounded by Christianity's worldview and assumptions about Man and Reality.
And then in the last part of the last century, we assumed that Islam would follow the same trajectory when it arrived in larger numbers.
That is the delusion we stand in.
We assumed that Islam, when it came into Europe in multimillions, would secularise itself, because that was what we did, and because we confuse our own historical trajectory with a universal law of development.
That was a formidable confusion.
Because Islam is not constructed as private faith. It is constructed as complete civilisational model and social order. Law is not an appendix to Islam. Law IS Islam. And the modern Western assumption, that religion is a personal opinion that lives alongside a neutral juridical space, makes no sense within Islamic understanding. To imagine this is not merely a category error. It is to say to Islam - become a private faith.
And that is in its essence to ask it to cease being itself.
It naturally cannot. And the more Muslim a Muslim is, the less he can accept it. Not because it is a sign of radicalisation in the abstract sense, but because it is the tradition rediscovering itself. It is a return to what Islam says about itself, when it is allowed to say it.
And it is allowed more and more, the more demographic and institutional weight it gains.
We are now discovering, slowly, that our neutrality only functioned as long as everyone living in it accepted its premise. We are discovering that it is not a universal truth, but a historical negotiation, that rested on a Christian foundation beneath it. A foundation we have simultaneously detached ourselves from - and which many do not understand or do not acknowledge or acknowledge the connection to in their inner arrangement. They want the fruit from it - but preferably without the faith and origin.
We therefore stand in a vacuum, and are only now discovering that neutrality without foundation is nothing. And has no resistance or weight. What it is, is an opening and an invitation to takeover.
And openings are always filled.
And let it be quite clear that nothing I write here is something I write against Muslims.
It must be clear, and it must stand evident, that the vast majority of Muslims live peacefully with Christians every day. Many Muslims have embraced the Western liberal framework and interpret - in private - their tradition through it. Many Muslims are good neighbours, good colleagues, good people. None of that is what I am talking about.
I am talking about structure.
I am talking about what that order is, which Islam is, when it is allowed to be itself fully. And I am talking about what happens when a civilisation that has forgotten what it itself is, meets a civilisation that has not forgotten what it is.
And I am talking about a specific error. Not an error the Muslims have committed by coming here, but an error we have committed by assuming that our own secular model was something other than what it was.
It was not a universal truth. It was a Christian civilisation's late phase, which went over to forgetting its own root. And our misinterpretation now shows with all reasonable clarity that one cannot stand on a foundation one has forgotten exists. A foundation which at the time of writing is collapsing beneath us.
That leads me to say this.
The only way back, if one is the kind who wishes that the Western world and its particular arrangement, view of man and worldview should endure - is not through politics.
It is through remembrance. To remember what it was we stood in. What we stood on. Where it was we came from. What it was that once made it possible to say that Man has an inviolable dignity. Where it came from. Why it stood. And what it still means.
We MUST turn around and look at it again.
And we must do it without arrogance, and without fear. We must say - Our tradition says something specific about Man. We believe that what it says is True. And we will live in that Truth, and arrange society according to it, and defend it - not as enemies of others, but as people who have come home to where they always belonged.
The other tradition may stand next to us. But it must stand as what it is.
Not masked as a private religion among others. Not as a variant of the same. As what it is, with the claims it makes and has. So we can look each other in the eye as what we are, and find a form.
Perhaps we can find one.
Perhaps we cannot.
It will show itself.
What we cannot, as the Western world, is find a form where we pretend the problem does not exist.
Because it does.
And that fiction ends up costing us everything we have been handed down and inherited.
Because Man Believes.
And his Belief shapes everything else around it.
And those who believe most deeply are those who own the future.
❤️🔥🪽
