A year after “A Common Word” where many Christian leaders essentially renounced their faith by asking Allah for forgiveness and apologized for the fact that Muslims were not permitted to conquer Europe, the dhimmitude continues apace.
Students at Yale Divinity School were instructed to comply with Islamic standards in order to accommodate Muslim guests at a conference ironically titled “Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed: Implications for Christians and Muslims.” The implication for Christians is that we must subordinate our faith and ideals so that we don’t offend Muslims. The implications for Muslims seem to be that they must accept the fealty of Christians.
It’s time for some uncommon words – truthful ones. Let’s be clear: we do not worship the same God that Muslims worship. Muslims reject the deity of Jesus Christ. The Quran claims that God is “unknowable” yet our God has gone to great lengths to make Himself known – to the point of incarnation! There are many fundamental differences – this is not a level of disagreement akin to the Catholic/Protestant divide, which is large enough.
This does not prevent us from befriending Muslims. But it may well prevent them from befriending us, unless they are willing to abandon not just aspects of their culture, but of their faith. What’s missing from this relationship is honesty, and I’m sorry to say that the worst lies are coming from the Christians, by people pretending the differences between us are minor, that we’re worshiping the same God, and that if we just bend a bit more, Muslims will do the same. People who should know better are trying to build a relationship based on lies.
Here’s some pushback from a Yale Divinity School scholar:
The gathering included operatives from theocracies and Islamicist movements, whose backgrounds showed no striking interest in coexistence with Christianity, but rather in proselytizing, banning all media that “expose the movement of certain body parts which are sensual,” and advising the state on the enforcement of such laws. Christian participants, in their public statements, apologized for the Crusades but shied away from the human rights issues the people they purport to speak for consider crucial. The questions are unanswerable. If what’s going on is politics, and we’re all going to be subject to the results, then why can’t we select the participants or even listen in? If it’s theology, then what could the secrecy possibly be for?
I would have no way of knowing whether the actual followers, spiritual and political, of the Muslim leaders invited to “Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed” are satisfied. The Muslim guests’ presentation of themselves, however, was downright commendable in its forthrightness. Muslims never seem to fudge their identity; a devout Muslim wouldn’t take off her veil in public for any reason, and blood might spill if a Muslim pundit asked her to do so in order to make Westerners more “comfortable.” How else could I make them “comfortable,” she might ask—with sex or alcohol?
… The cost of a phony love-fest between Christian and Muslim leaders could be high. There is already a great imbalance in knowledge or respect, if not both. As part of our confirmation course, when I was a teenage Methodist in rural Ohio in the 1970s, we were taken not only to a synagogue but to a mosque and learned the basics of both faiths. But the Muslim cleric who lectured to us clearly disapproved of Christianity, and the minister misled him to keep the peace. We don’t want to be called Mohammedans, the Muslim huffed; we don’t worship Mohammed, who was a man. The minister jumped in to assure him that we were just the same—we didn’t call ourselves Jesus-ans or anything like that. I nearly gasped at the lie, but I wasn’t bold enough to challenge it.
I’m bolder now. (It’s amazing what a decade in Africa will do to you.) And truth in theology while theology approaches politics is worth a bold defense. Essential to Muslim extremism is the notion that the West is decadent and not attached to its professed values.
And we keep proving the extremists right by our efforts to accommodate Islam at the cost of what we claim to hold most dear. There isn’t going to be any reconciliation between Christians and Muslims as long as Christians are willing to lie about our beliefs in order to achieve “peace for our time.”
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