Christianity, Islam, and Hermeneutics

How you go from texts to application is a big issue, and it was recognized in the Islamic tradition as early as the 8th Century. The violent texts seem to presuppose a context of open battle where Islamic soldiers are fighting against pagan soldiers, as in the Battle of Mecca.To use those text to justify attacking a standing target like the World Trade Centers is to take those texts out of context. 

In the Christian tradition, people who get different messages from the same Scripture are operating with different hermeneutics. Let's take "Women should be silent in church." Most conservative Christians realize that the contingencies of the time and situation led Paul to make that statement, and that it would be a mistake to apply it literally to the church in the present day. But some are literal about it. Both of them can read, but they use different principles of application. 

To take another example, it can easily be argued that given the way homosexuality was practiced in the Greco-Roman world, Paul had ample reason to condemn what he saw going on around him. But Christian differ as to whether these condemnations should be applied to homosexuality in general in the present day, or whether they are bound to their time and place. 

There were four different schools of thought in the Sunni tradition as to how you apply the Qur'an to a different situation. One school, the Hanbalite school, was very strict and literal, but there were three others. Muslims lived in different places than Arabia, and some saw rules made for Arabia that they thought might not straightforwardly apply in, say Baghdad. But others thought this this freedom of application led to loose morals, and different Muslim came down in different places on this. But they weren't just uneducated about what their texts said.