Christian “[r]evelation requires two parties, God and the people to whom He opens Himself. In a relationship of love, not only do we understand more fully Who God is, but we understand more fully who we are. For those who love must necessarily be both persons and free agents. Yes, they are mysteriously sustained in existence by God, but out of love, in a way that liberates from fatalism. We are real separate beings with our own freedom and our own purposes, not beings who are continually recreated as pawns in some theistic game of dice. It is precisely this stability and independence, in persons created in the image and likeness of God, which makes it possible for us to enter into relationships with each other and with God Himself.
“Again, for the Muslim, the idea of a personal relationship with Allah which can be nurtured to grow in a consistent way is extremely foreign. Whatever will be will be, as Allah wills it. Rosenzweig argues that this has enormous implications not only for personal spirituality (which, theoretically, should be reduced to desperate obedience) but for society and culture. He suggests that the pagan’s personality cannot be formed by personal growth with God and is therefore left to be merely an extension of race and state, locked in a struggle for racial or national survival, a struggle which in the end must always be doomed.
“Hence while the distinctive mark of Christian or Jewish culture is its concern for the weak and vulnerable, the distinctive mark of pagan culture is war, the extension of submission. Hence too the common emphasis on personal suicide in the service of the larger cause.
“What we saw in Japanese warfare in World War II, we now see in Islam, in spades.”
