Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Christian leaders withdraw support from Christian-Muslim Accord Document,

But is this enough?

Our friends at CitizenLink are reporting that three faculty members from Wheaton College have withdrawn their support from A Christian Response to 'A Common Word Between Us and You', a document led and produced by scholars at Yale Divinity School undermining basic Christian doctrine for the sake of establishing "common ground" between Christians and Muslims:

The president and two other administrators of prestigious Wheaton College have asked that their names be removed from a controversial statement staking out so-called common ground between Christians and Muslims.

While I applaud the actions taken by the Wheaton administrators in asking that their names be removed from the document, and while I hope their recent actions will lead to further defections among the ranks of Christian leaders who have also prematurely and ignorantly lent their names and their influence to this unorthodox Christian statement, I cannot help but note that their original support for this document and all it entails carried with it, as is always the case, the potential for causing untold damage to the cause of advancing the truth of genuine Christian orthodoxy, as well as lending credibility to the demonstrably false proposition that Islam can ever come to peaceful terms with Christianity short of Christians acting in a submissive role to Muslims and their religion.

It is simply amazing to me that any so-called Christian "leader" could ever lend his name, his authority, and his influence to a document which "leaves open for discussion" the question of Christ's deity, which is, if I may be so bold as to say it, the essential of all essentials of Christian theology.

To my mind, therefore, it is simply not enough that these individuals have asked that their names be removed from this document, but that they themselves write and publish a strong refutation of the non-Christian principles upon which this illegitimate document is established. After all, these individuals are prominent Christian scholars representing a prestigious school of higher learning, so they should have no trouble whatsoever putting their heads together and crafting such a document. Which to me seems the appropriate and next logical step in atoning for their "well-intentioned" mistake.

There is also the little matter of both the Muslim and Christian documents grossly overstating the need for peace between the two communities, and the agreement of the latter with the ominous prediction of the former concerning the future state of the world in the absence of such a "peace",

“Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world.”

We share the sentiment of the Muslim signatories expressed in these opening lines of their open letter. Peaceful relations between Muslims and Christians stand as one of the central challenges of this century, and perhaps of the whole present epoch. Though tensions, conflicts, and even wars in which Christians and Muslims stand against each other are not primarily religious in character, they possess an undeniable religious dimension. If we can achieve religious peace between these two religious communities, peace in the world will clearly be easier to attain. It is therefore no exaggeration to say, as you have in A Common Word Between Us and You, that “the future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.”

neither of which acknowledges that the main obstacle which has ever and continues to stand in the way of such peace and justice between these opposing religions is the centrality of jihad to the religion of Islam. But I beg to differ with the "Christian" writers here; Not only is this a gross exaggeration of the actuality of the situation, but as John Quincy Adams rightly noted, so long as there are people in the world who subscribe to the clear teachings of the Koran to make perpetual war on the infidels by whatever means necessity dictates, then there can never be peace and good will toward men. In other words, a genuine peace between Muslims and Christians being impossible, not a "daunting task", but impossible, the establishment of peace between the two communities is not and should not be the goal. The goal should rather be separation of the Western world from the Islamic world wherein we no longer provide avenues by which Muslims become more and more empowered to harm us, which negotiations of peace between us and them can only achieve at length. And this goal of separation, quite literally, must be achieved by Westerners resistant to all impulses to establishing "peaceful" relations between us and them. This is the true daunting task before us, not impossible, but daunting.

The only guarantee of peace between Christians and Muslims is that there is no guarantee of peace between Christians and Muslims. Indeed, quite to the contrary.

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