Bill Hybels, Founder and Senior Pastor, Willow Creek Community Church; Robert Schuller, Founder, Crystal Cathedral and Hour of Power; and Rick Warren, Founder and Senior Pastor, Saddleback Church, and author of The Purpose Driven Life have publicly renounced their faith.
I’m sure that is not how they see it. Doubtless they’re sitting back giving themselves an ecumenical high five. But when they signed on to this, with a lot of other useful idiots, they agreed that God and Allah are one and the same. How did they do that? They “ask[ed] forgiveness of the All-Merciful One” – an Islamic name for God. They purposely chose to call God “the All-Merciful One” instead of, say, Yahweh, because they were pandering to Muslims. But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so we can call God, Allah, Yahweh, or Great Spaghetti Monster and it’s all good, baby!
The choices, as I see them, are that they were either being sincere or they were telling pandering lies for political gain. If they were telling the truth and sincerely equating the God of the Bible with the Koran’s “All-Merciful One” that means a near-total ignorance of both Islam and of Christianity, of course, but if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt – and I do – then that’s what’s happened here. That puts them in good company with George Bush and the New York Times, but not with Tony Blair, Richard Land, and (I hate to list him, but it’s an old article, and on this point he is certainly correct…) Ted Haggard.
If Allah/the All-Merciful One is the same as God, then it comes down to a contest of which faith has the better scripture, because the God of the Bible and the god of the Koran are irreconcilably different. Muslims believe Allah is unknowable. God has gone to great lengths to make Himself known. That’s just one major, irreconcilable difference. And by asking the Muslim god by name for forgiveness, they made a choice. I’m quite sure that is not what they intended or what they intended to model for the flocks God has entrusted to their care. But that’s exactly what they did.
That was just brilliant, fellas. By asking Allah for forgiveness, you’re worshipping another god – well, in addition to yourselves and the kingdoms you created. This is where the post-modern, “seeker-sensitive” pandering (which Willow Creek recently gave up on) mindset leads you. You just publicly renounced your own faith. Hope the headlines and the propaganda coup you just gave radical Islamists were worth it to you.
Jeremiah 23:1: Woe unto the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD.
Yeah, I saw that too. These people know pretty much nothing about the Qur’an and Islam, except for John Esposito, who gets funded by Saudi to deliberately obfuscate. Like I said on my blog, I’m not going to impugn their motives…
According to the Qur’an, all Christians have committed shirk, (polytheism), which is the grossest of sins in Islam, for our belief in the Trinity. Moreover, the Qur’an does not contain commands to “love your neighbor,” only to love other Muslims.
There really is no common ground between the two faiths.