For some time, I have wanted to write an essay in response to the question, "Why do I call Muslims brothers and sisters?" This started years ago working at Chicagoland Home Depots as a lumber contractor, when I noticed that I was calling more and more people "brother" or "sister" on the job. Then this summer in Addis Ababa at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, an M.A. student working on inter-religious dialogue asked me why I call Muslims brothers and sisters, something which she initially seemed to find uncomfortable. Present controversies make this question more urgent and timely to address.
I have claimed over the years that the doctrine of "original sin" is often misunderstood and misleading and, at worst, outrightly unbiblical and heretical. Why? If we start with the claim that the one true God created all things "in the beginning" and that this creation was "very good," then there is something deeply misleading about calling sin "original." It accords a false sovereignty to human creatures, as if we in our finite, fallible, and *then* fallen state could have enough power to undo what God has made and called good - as if we could worm our way back to "the beginning" and act as God. In our most ruinous acts of evil, our sin is at worst UNoriginal, PENultimate, after-the-fact of goodness, contingent and parasitic.
I challenge the popularly understood notion of "original sin," because of a more radical respect for the sovereignty of God's goodness and a more radical estimation of human finitude and limitation. Humans can and do fabricate hellish horrors, but we are not omnipotent to fundamentally undo what God has done, to unsay what God has said, to revoke what God as initiated "in the beginning." The beginning and its pronouncements and precedents are God's alone. Goodness is original.
This is the foundation of why I sincerely and affectionately call Muslims "brothers and sisters." I, they, we are not sovereign and powerful enough to undo what God has done. We are all creatures of God; we are all children of God. That fact is what is most fundamental about us if I am to maintain the doctrine of creation, without which the entire architecture of Christian conviction falls to pieces. I call Muslims "brother" and "sister" not out of a belittled respect for the God I worship but out of a more maximal, more primal, more fundamental respect for the God I worship - the one who has created all of us. As Paul happily and forcefully argued when talking to non-Christians in Athens, "We are his offspring" (Acts 17). Paul was not embarrassed or scandalized to say *we*, a universal statement.
The implication of this claim - that God is the Father of us *all* - is borne out in the gritty realities of family life. My family, for example, has gone through conflicts and crises in which it seemed like our family was falling apart. My parents' requirements were rejected. Terrible choices were made. Siblings stopped talking to one another. Tears were shed. Grief and bitterness were sown. But, even in the worst times, my parents never stopped calling us "son" and "daughter," and we ourselves never stopped calling one another "brother" and "sister." This was simply the fact of who we were, for better or worse - family.
As a Christian theologian, who affirms "in the beginning" the doctrine of creation, I do not see how this does not apply to the human family, including Muslims. We are *all* rebellious children of our Father, including Christians. (Remember the prayer that Jesus praised: "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.") Our rebellions, divisions, and crises can initiate the catastrophes and horrors of which we are capable. Hell comes to earth through our hatred. But this does not change the sovereign fact - founded on the sovereign reality of God and God's goodness - that we are all the creatures of God, that we are all "his offspring," that we all have one source and origin in the Creator, without which all of us would be nothing and nobody.
Thus, when I call my Muslim neighbors "brothers and sisters," I am celebrating the sovereign fact and goodness of God's character and creation, in which human power is never powerful enough to undo what God has done - to step over the edge of the beginning and to give life to that which had no right or request to exist. We all inhabit this gift, this grace, this generosity which is the secret of every moment in which we see every face and speak with one another in the miracle of language.
Yes, I recognize that it is possible to use familial language in more technical or specialized - "exclusive" - senses. But, over the years, I have come to reject the metaphysical application of the principle, "Less is more." Our family is not diminished by being larger than ourselves. Goodness is not watered down by being shared. Sacredness is not profaned by being enlarged. When I say "brother" to you and *then* "brother" to *him too*, your and my brotherhood is not impoverished but enriched. I've come to learn that in God's economy, more is more - that *every* good and perfect gift comes from our Father (James 1).
This is why I feel the liberty, but more so, the honor and obligation of calling every human - Muslim or otherwise - "brother" or "sister." Among the other most sacred words like "yes" and "thank you" and "forgive me" and "I love you," I treasure the words "brother" and "sister" as holy. These - like the other most sacred words - are words that I can and do and must say to *everyone* if I am to remain a Christian who follows the God of Jesus Christ, Creator of heaven and earth. To say "brother" or "sister" is to invoke a silent covenant to also say "yes" and "thank you" and "forgive me" and "I love you" to the people around us, which are the words we must say to one another as God's children if we are not to become blasphemers and disgracers of God's gifts.
In the words "brother" and "sister," I celebrate the sovereignty of God's goodness and the gift of our finitude as little pieces of creation. This is the core of what the Oxford historian Larry Siedentop has called "the rhetoric of the Christian people."
