Category: Faith & Ideology

Do Christians worship the same God?

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.

An attempt at realism

1

“There’s a number of pieces of evidence which has essentially pushed us off the cliff to say we are considering this an act of terrorism.” (David Bowdich, the F.B.I. assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles office.)

“Pushed us off the cliff.” How telling! Is there any remaining doubt that Obama FBI policy has been pusillanimous denial until denial becomes utterly untenable?

Few, probably, read this blog for real political insight, but here goes anyway: San Bernardino is our Alamo.

  • It exposes the delusion of our constant government pronouncements on the terrorist threat (Bush’s before Obama’s too. We can only hope that behind the stultifying and pacifying lies was a bit more realism).
  • It makes me doubt the efficacy of screening Syrian refugees (though I still tend to think that’s one of the hardest ways for a terrorist to enter the U.S.)
  • It makes me wonder if the many Koranic texts about violent Jihad aren’t themselves a sort of Islamist Terrorist “sleeper cell,” not in any way exegeted into oblivion.

It became much likelier Wednesday that the next President is going to be a Republican, if only because of Republican rhetorical toughness on terrorism and under-restrained immigration. When terror takes center stage, nobody’s paying attention to much else. My own distaste for the whole GOP field today feels more like “isn’t there a pony in this stable somewhere?”

2

We Christians can understand the frustration and anger that motivate such attacks, for the same secularizing forces have been attacking our faith as well.

…

We are a people who believe in human rights, yet are faced with a religious ideology that has no democratic tradition and a history of forcing submission upon others.

Like the struggle against fascism and communism, we will most likely be engaged in this battle of religious ideology for a generation or two. In all truth we can not claim to know God’s will in everything, so must patiently move forward, fighting for liberty and justice.

For Christians the knowledge that our own country has spread her culture of violence, secularism, greed and immodesty throughout the world, is cause to wonder if it is not God’s judgement that we are experiencing.

…

When Muslim theologian Ayatollah Baqer al-Sadr has said that, “The world as we know it today is how others shaped it. We have two choices: either to accept it with submission, which means letting Islam die, or to destroy it, so that we can construct a world as Islam requires”, we Christians must wonder what our response should be.

…

[T]he answer to these jihadist attacks around the world, as well as the ISIS threat to the Western World, begins with us. We must turn back to God as a nation, and repent as a people.

These radical Muslims see themselves as the righteous, charged by their god to purge the world of evildoers, because they do not distinguish between the paganism or the Christianity of the West, precisely because they believe the former to be part of the latter.

(Abbot Tryphon) The italics indicate the parts that are particularly challenging to me.

I’m starting to think there’s no alternative to fighting back physically, even though I know there’s going to be all kinds of innocent civilian casualties inflicted by both sides, deliberately or not, and even though I have so little respect for what we have become and what we will be defending. I just think that when terrorism is contained, in the dotage of my great-grandchildren, there may be some chance of cleaning up the great American cesspool. I’m not sure we’d ever cast off dhimmitude.

If only we would start that turning back to God, in repentance, as a nation, even as we fight. I see little sign of that, which was my hope after 9/11 but which quickly faded.

3

The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion, and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about — an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.

(Theodore White, The Making of the President 1972, via Pat Buchanan) Note that this is not the power to tell people what to think, but the power to tell what to think about. The very power to say “this is news,” tacitly excluding all else as topics of common discussion, is the awesome power and it seems to me that it largely remains. Fox and MSNBC may disagree about X, Y & Z, but they agree that X, Y & Z are the news.

The internet has some slight power to break that, and my own tacit motivation in much of what I write is “could we think and maybe talk about this important topic instead of the commercial crap, toxic entertainments and other ephemera mainstream media tell us are newsworthy? I’m not smart enough to figure it out on my own, but it seems to me that it’s important.” This blog installment is exactly that. 

I’d like us, for instance, to clean up our culture of violence, secularism, greed and immodesty, whereupon we will automatically cease spreading it throughout the world. But that is not the only gripe the traditionalists of the world, including Islamists, have with us.

The mainstream press seems to think that the problem with Islamic terrorism, now officially homegrown or immigrated legally to the U.S., is that someone will be mean (or worse) to one of the many innocent Muslims in the U.S. I’d like for us to return to the past sensible policy of considering religion in immigration policy, since there’s some reason to think that Muslims are not assimilating as well as other immigrants. They adhere to a religion that from its founding refused to co-exist peaceably and equally with other religions when it gains power to make the rules. It will gain power to make the rules if we admit as many highly-fertile Muslims as has Europe (to do the work of the children we’re not ourselves bearing).

I’m not very sanguine about revival of Christendom, either religious or demographic. I do indeed wonder if it is not God’s judgement that we are experiencing. Muslims are aware that American global hegemony is toxic to Islam and will kill it. American Christians — sincere-ish ones — haven’t even figured out that American public schools are toxic to Christianity and were designed to be, replacing it with America Civic Religion that has proven barely worth the pipe bombs to blow it up.

4

In the end, this is not “Hatfields verus McCoys,” with no clarity on “who started it.” Islamism was on the march for centuries before Christendom responded with the Crusades, trying to recover Christian holy sites like Jerusalem. Islamdom has been subdued for centuries, but not really pacified.

Traditional peoples, including those of Islamic countries, have much longer memories (and grudges) than amnesiac Americans, and I fear they’re starting to march again.

* * * * *

“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.