Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Notable Quotable: Robert Wright on Christians Proselytizing Moslems

March 16, 2010, 10:00 pm
Christian Soldiers
By ROBERT WRIGHT

"[Some American Christians are fostering religious strife abroad. They mean well, but the damage they’re doing can be seen all the way from Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims are killing each other, to Malaysia, where Muslims are trying to keep Christians from using the term “Allah” for God."


This article from the New York Times caught my attention because it speaks to an (often unspoken) quesion that my fellow CF chaplains and I struggle with when we speak about interfaith dialogue, namely, "Do we pray to one God with different names, or to different gods with different names?"

Whether Christians proselytizing Moslems by suggesting that Allah is the Judeo-Christian God is disrespectful and an unhelpful (in geopolitical terms, since it can lead to violence between Christians and Moslems and deepen Moslem suspicions of American motives) development or whether it is an evangelical imperative required by Christ's Great Commission is a whole debate in itself. Wright ends his piece by noting that there are some Christian leaders and theologians who disagree with the premise that God and Allah are different names for the one God.

"One of them, Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., said in a recent podcast, “There’s nothing that the two gods — the god of the Koran and the god of scripture — have in common. Nothing.”

Well, to look at the bright side: Maybe that’s a basis for interfaith rapport; Caner can sit around with Malaysian Muslims and agree that they worship different gods.

Still, I like to think that their gods would beg to differ."

Which brings us back to interfaith dialogue. I'm defining dialogue here as a conversation whose goal is not proselytization, since I don't think (as we've all experienced on our doorsteps when religious salespeople visit us), a conversation intended to bring about conversion can really be called a dialogue. The Christian theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once said somewhere that if we can agree on nothing else, we should agree not to kill one another in the name of religion. I don't think it's setting the bar too low to say that if interfaith dialogue accomplishes nothing else, it is a success if it keeps us from killing one another.
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Snickering Corpses said...

Not killing each other in the name of religion I can definitely agree with.

I'm not sure the analysis of the situation regarding the name Allah is entirely accurate, though. My understanding has always been that the word was the Arabic word for god, in the generic sense, and then appropriated so to speak by the Muslims to be only their own deity. Because it is most commonly associated with Islam, I'd be inclined to lean away from its use to avoid confusion, but that does beg the question of whether there is another Arabic word applicable to identify the Christian God in an Arabic-speaking country.

Trying to say we pray to one god with different names is an entirely separate question, in my book. There I must agree with Caner. The god of Islam is clearly not the God of the Bible in many key points, among the chief of which is that the Koran emphatically states that Allah has no sun and any who say he does deserves death. That alone is enough to prove that Allah is not the same as God, and is only one of the areas in which the Koran clearly opposes and contradicts the Bible in both its view of deity and its view of Israel (which country and people group are pretty much the focus of the Bible throughout). From the Biblical perspective, Allah is a pagan god and cannot be treated otherwise.

March 29, 2010 at 11:07 a.m.

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Mad Padre

Mad Padre
Opinions expressed within are in no way the responsibility of anyone's employers or facilitating agencies and should by rights be taken as nothing more than one person's notional musings, attempted witticisms, and prayerful posturings.

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