In these dialogues so far, the question has often been asked from the Muslim side: your scriptures say such-and-such - so why don't you do it? Such a question sees scripture as a book of rules: you look up the right regulation, and then you know what to believe and how to behave. And I think I understand something of why Muslims approach Scripture in this way. The Quran was given to one man over a period of decades as instructions from God. I understand that some writers make a distinction between verses given in Mecca and those given in Medina, received in two different situations for the young Muslim community; I shall be interested to hear whether Dr Youcef agrees with this distinction, as to hear how he treats the question of abrogation of certain Quranic verses - for instance, about whether or not it is permissible to drink alcohol - and what he thinks of the current Turkish attempt to look again at the Hadiths. But basically the Quran arose in one particular situation and, if I have understood Dr Youcef correctly in our previous dialogues, even though the world has changed since then, Muslims are required to conform in their way of life and belief to the Quranic rules formulated at that time. And I believe it is right to say that the whole mode of the Quran is that of instruction: do this, but do not do that.
Some of the Bible is also written in this mode of instruction. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible, called Torah (which means doctrine or teaching), contain a detailed system of laws about daily life as well as about the worship of God, supplemented by the Talmud and other later commentaries by learned teachers called rabbis on how these laws should be obeyed under different circumstances. For both Jews and Muslims, obedience to God's law in the whole of life, sacred and secular, is the primary way of worshipping God. And Christians have taken the most famous of these law-codes, the Ten Commandments said to have been given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai, as a basis for morality within society.
Christians, like Jews, believe that keeping God's commandments, following God's laws, is the best way for people to live and flourish. Yet for Christians law is not the only form of Scripture, and not all our Scriptures should be read as laws, or they will be misunderstood and God's voice within them will not be heard. And that is because Christians believe that no one is capable of keeping all God's laws perfectly - no one, apart from Jesus. If laws were all God had given us, we believe that no one would ever have a relationship with God, for as the author of one of the psalms admits to God, ‘In your sight, no one living is justified.' In the New Testament, Paul, one of the greatest influences on Christianity after Jesus himself, started out as a keen student of the Jewish law under one of the greatest teachers of the time. He was so keen to keep God's law that he persecuted Christians who he thought were breaking that law. But he discovered that he had made a terrible mistake: for the people he was persecuting knew and served God in ways he had not recognised.
And when he made this discovery, he was finding out what Jesus' friends had found out before him. For Jesus made friends with tax-collectors, who collaborated with the Romans who occupied Israel. He made friends with women, some of them prostitutes. He made friends with people outside the law, people others looked down on because they had broken the law. And because Christians believe that Jesus is God, we must believe, as Paul came to believe, that God does not condemn sinners, people who have not kept the law, but loves them and forgives them. So as well as law, our Scriptures talk about grace: the love and forgiveness of God, freely offered to all, though we do not deserve it.
NB At this point I realised that the final version of this dialogue must have been deleted - apologies to anyone who is reading this - good thing Christians go in for forgiveness!