There’s a kerfuffle at Wheaton College, where a tenured professor has been suspended after (and apparently for) opining on Facebook that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. The Washington Post may have garbled the story; I’ve not tracked it to primary authorities.

I may be grabbing a third rail here, but I’m hoping it’s a teachable moment instead.

“Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” is an equivocal question that can be defensibly answered “yes” or “no.”

I’m well aware that Islam teaches that Allah has no son, which is unmistakably unChristian.

I’m also aware that a Bible teacher on WMBI spoke of Jesus and Mary as if Jesus was water and Mary a mere conduit — an aqueduct or pipe to get Godbaby to earth. Such a Jesus is not human any more than water is pipe. Jesus took His humanity from Mary. The teacher on WMBI was teaching heresy, a deep theological error about Christ and thus about the Triune God.

Do I worship the same God she worships? (I’m inclined to think so.)

I’ve further heard Gloria Osteen say that “Jesus was man until God touched him and put the spirit of of the living God on the inside of him.” That, too is serious Christological heresy and thus misrepresents the Triune God.

Do I worship the same God Gloria does? (Objection! Assumes matters not in evidence, namely that the Osteens worship anything other than money!)

Do WMBI teacher and Gloria worship the same God?

I’ve read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and sat under plenty of contemporary Protestant pastors who think God is fundamentally angry and vengeful — whence the bumper sticker “Jesus is coming again (and boy is He pissed!).” I personally professed belief that God consciously passed over some sinners because He would somehow be glorified by ~~their damnation~~ the contrast between their damnation and the glorious salvation of the elect.

I’m now, thank God, in a Church that truly (and correctly) believes that God is fundamentally gracious and loves mankind, and truly wills that all be saved (though few Orthodox believe all actually will be; we don’t, in Calvinist terms, think grace is irresistible).

Do I worship the same God today I worshipped as an infralapsarian predestinarian? To that last one I will venture to answer “Yes. But I badly misunderstood Him then, having been taught error and even eagerly sought out doctrines that would ‘make logical sense of things’.”

I am fully prepared to say that Islam is grossly mistaken about God. I’m fully prepared to admit that its error is even worse than predestinarian Calvinism, Nestorian (or is it Adoptionist?) Osteenism or Docetist WMBIism.

I’m not prepared to say that its error is off the scale, worse than beyond a notional scale of perfect truth to infinite error. I’m not prepared to say unequivocally that Islam and Christianity worship different Gods.

UPDATE (12/18/15): Not surprisingly, many have commented about Wheaton’s action and whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Many of those comments reminded me of my most glaring omission: Jews. Although the denial of the trinity and of Christ’s deity are not as central to Judaism, as it predates Christianity, Judaism is otherwise parallel to Islam in its view of the God of Abraham. Yet few deny that Christians and Jews worship the same God.

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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

I never heard the Gospel until …

While I was in the Christian Reformed Church, I recall hearing a son of that Church (now somewhat famous, living in the South and attending a large Baptist Church) say “I never heard the gospel until ….” I can’t recall how he finished that sentence, but I think it was something about a Baptist Church.

Although I was not a native son of the Christian Reformed Church, I took some umbrage at his remark. I knew something of the history of the local congregation. Never in its history had its pulpit been deprived of the gospel as mutually understood by it and its critical son.

So what this intelligent man was really saying was that the Gospel he was hearing every Sunday never penetrated until – until what? Someone must have put it differently. Knowing something of both Baptists and the Christian Reformed Church, I dare say that “differently” was a simplified Gospel (maybe 1-Point Calvinism instead of all 5: “Once saved, always saved” as a twice-removed cousin of “perseverance of the saints”) pitched with high emotion — and insistence that everything else was just a distraction.

A decade or so later, I was at a pro-life dinner fundraiser, sitting with a couple my age or a bit younger who attended the same Church as my father, then recently deceased. The wife was incredulous that I had become Orthodox. “My grandmother was Greek Orthodox, and she never heard the gospel until …” some Protestant preaching caught her fancy. That really gave me a rise in my gorge. What she had just said was utterly absurd. She couldn’t not hear the Gospel if she was in Church.

The Orthodox Divine Liturgy is what it is. It’s not a guideline. The priest can’t read and preach week after week on the same pet passages. In every Liturgy, there will be so many Old Testament allusions you can’t track them all. There will be proclaimed aloud an espistle reading and a gospel reading. The Priest (or a Deacon) will preach a homily on either the epistle or the Gospel appointed for that day.

There are some careerist priests and lazy homilists, and there are some Orthodox Churches that go through the liturgical motions before getting down to the real if unstated mission of the parish: to serve as an ethnic club. But even there, the liturgical motions themselves bear the gospel.

I began this blog sometime in the fairly remote past. It was brought back to mind by J. Budziszewski‘s analysis of what “I never heard the Gospel” might mean, which re-appeared on Facebook over the weekend.

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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Chronicles of Wasted Time

Got a uterus to spare?
Anniversary to make us all smile
Europe’s future: 1.4/2 = 0.7
Your mama must be so proud!
Non-carnal political collapse of the decade

Continue reading “Chronicles of Wasted Time” →

Monday, 11/16/15

Re-imagined, newly invented
A defect in our national character
The “top-down” English Reformation
Keeping Christmas out of Advent
Remembering many a grievous deed

Continue reading “Monday, 11/16/15” →

Wednesday, 11/11/15

Is this really worthy of a “Daily Briefing” slot?
Most Haunting Story of the last ten days?
Safe Places

Continue reading “Wednesday, 11/11/15” →

Submission or Joy?

The release of the English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” has brought a spate of new reviews, although Rod Dreher was all over it when the novel was still just in French — whence my uncharacteristic swerve into matters literary.

Houellebecq’s title is evocative and equivocal. “The word Islam means voluntary “Submission” or “Surrender” to the Will of God.” By one account, that of Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books,

Soumission is not the story some expected of a coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. It is about a man and a country who through indifference and exhaustion find themselves slouching toward Mecca. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever.

Lilla calls this a “dystopian conversion tale,” and the conversion is in his description more of resignation than enthusiasm.

Concurrently with all these reviews, I’m re-reading (from the perspective of a maturing Orthodox faith, whereas I was a rank novice at first reading) Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World:

The purpose of this book is a humble one. It is to remind its readers that in Christ, life—life in all its totality—was returned to man, given again as sacrament and communion, made Eucharist.

…

the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord. And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness to it in the world, is indeed the very calling of the Church, its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it “becomes what it is.”

Only in a world where dominant Christian traditions totally miss this mark, or the Evil One darkens our minds, could Christendom be ready to forsake the call to life, joy and communion — could be so exhausted that we’re ready to settle for a dystopian conversion to mere submission.

But dystopian novels are powerful only insofar as they’re plausible, and by all accounts, Submission is powerful.

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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.