Christianity and Islam

“The question to be asked, then, is whether, face to face with Islam, Christians will be able to sustain, rebuild, and create strong and resilient communities that provide institutional anchorage for the faith to endure and flourish. Will they have the imagination to form the spiritual architecture of the societies of which they are a part? This is a task for which Christianity is particularly well suited. It has a much longer lineage than Islam, it has taken many different cultural forms in the course of its history, and it has passed through the fires of modernity. It has a deeper and more coherent relation to its own tradition, including the cultural patrimony of classical antiquity. And it commands the intellectual resources to understand and engage other religious traditions as well as to provide moral inspiration for secular societies.

“Unlike Islam, Christianity began as a community distinct from the body politic, and for three hundred years it existed independently of political authority. This early history has never been forgotten. Even in the time of Christian hegemony in the West, during the age of Charlemagne, Abbot Wala of Corbie insisted that the Church constituted a parallel sovereignty. The king, he said, should have public properties for the maintenance of his army, and the Church should have ‘church properties, almost like a second public domain.’

“Augustine’s metaphor for the new life in Christ was not that of an individual’s being born again but that of becoming part of a city with its own form of governance. ‘Happy the people whose God us the Lord,’ wrote the psalmist. Though some may eschew the term, in the decades to come the great challenge for Christians will be to fashion, within the cultural and political conditions of the twenty-first century, a new kind of Christendom.”

-Robert Louis Wilken, “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,” First Things (Jan 2009), 26.

New Year, Old Year
We like to believe that January 1 brings new opportunities. So we make resolutions, or treat them as a game at New Year’s Eve gatherings. Most of us know, however, that there is nothing new under the sun, that the struggle to discard old burdens and create space for newness in 2008 will continue in 2009, and that we will likely fail, again. That too is old news for the Christian; dying to sin and rising to newness of life is our daily bread as Christ’s disciples.

As the years roll by, however, socio-political events and cultural undertows create patterns of thought and action that warrant change. Will any of the following resolutions find themselves on your list?

1. Ask for kneeling benches to be attached to the pews, if your church is redesigning its worship area.

2. Practice honest prayer through John Baillie’s A Litany of Daily Prayer in March and September.

3. Support or recommend one person for a position because she or he is qualified. Resist politically correct reasoning.

4. When leading the congregation in prayer, begin, “Let us pray,” not, “Please join ME in prayer.”

5. Read one book or article about Islam. Suggestions: Sinclair Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Perennial, 2002), or Robert Louis Wilken, “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,” First Things (Jan 2009), 19-26.

6. Practice Lent during Advent.

7. Answer the question: Can a post-modern, missional theology prepare the church to engage Islam?

8. Befriend a marginalized person in your church or community.

Please add your own suggestions in the comments.
ACL

Pentecost, the Incarnation, and Diversity

Although far apart on the liturgical calendar, Pentecost and Christmas belong together. On Pentecost the Word Incarnate, seated at the right hand of the Almighty, poured out the Holy Spirit on a handful of disciples. After that event, God’s people were never the same. For the first time in the history of God with his people, Gentiles–red, and yellow, black and white non-Jews–became the object of God’s special attention. Not that they were ever out of consideration. Remember Seth, Noah, Rahab, Ruth and Naaman? And then there was Abram, who was a Semite, but not “Jewish,” when God called him to abandon kith and kin.

From Babel to Pentecost

At Babel the nations sought to build the city that would use heaven to save them from the corruption that filled the earth. But God scattered the nations–red and yellow, black and white–over the earth and. He forced them to continue an aimless wandering begun by Adam, Eve, and Cain. In their wandering these nations achieved enormous knowledge in mathematics, urban and agrarian development, architecture, medicine, music, Babylon and Ur preserved this knowledge in great libraries. From this sophisticated culture God rescued Abram and Sarah to become the parents of a nation not born by human will (Gen. 5; 11:1-26), but by the power of God.

That special nation would become known as Jews (after Judah, Jacob’s [Israel] son), chosen by God to live apart from the nations (Gentiles). Nevertheless, from the very beginning God told Abram that “all the families of the earth” (Gentiles) would be blessed through “his seed.” Thus, wherever Abraham went, and whatever God did with his descendants, the Gentiles were never out of consideration. They were, so to speak, in Abraham’s back pocket, waiting for God’s time to deal with them.

That time, the apostle Paul said, came in Jesus Christ. He was the seed God spoke about to Abram (Gal. 3:16) who destroyed the wall between Jews and Gentiles (Eph. 2:11-22). He also poured out the Spirit at Pentecost so that the nations heard the Gospel proclaimed by Peter.

Pentecost, then, was not a move from a uni-cultural to multi-cultural people of God, nor from one ethnicity to many, not even from Jewishness to whiteness. Rather, it was a move from a focus on God’s Jewish people to an inclusion of the Gentiles into the root planted by God with Abram (Rom. 11:17-21). At Pentecost massive numbers of Gentiles began to be grafted onto this root. At Pentecost peoples from all nations were amazed to hear Peter’s sermon in their own languages, the very thing that divided them at Babel. It was not one language, but one Word that was understood by all nations–red and yellow, black and white–by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That Pentecost was not a move from one to many ethnicities, but from many into one ethnicity is clear from Paul’s declaration that Christian Gentiles would be engrafted into the root God planted through Abram. Abram’s descendants are not merely another ethnicity (Rom. 9:3-5) among many others. It is the only ethnicity whose Word saves the nations from the corruption that threatens. Abraham’s Gentiles descendants are not Jewish, but through Christ they inherit the promises of God to Abraham (Gal. 3:29). All Abraham’s descendants through Christ have a heavenly citizenship.

Christmas and diversity

Christ’s coming, then, is not a move into diversity, but a unifying by the Word, of all descendants of Adam and Eve the Spirit entices into the body of Christ, no matter their culture, language, or skin color.

For more than 2000 Advents and Christmases, the Gentile Christian Church has sung: “Oh come, oh come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.” Of whom do we sing? Who is the captive Israel? Gentile believers from Iraq and Darfur? Mega-church attenders in Southern California or Guatemala? Because Gentile believers have not yet arrived at home, and will only arrive when the heavenly Jerusalem descends on a new earth (Rev. 21), this truly is our song. James speaks to the believers scattered among the nations (James 1:1).

But what of the descendants of Esther and Mordecai in the Middle East, of the exiles who went to Egypt with Jeremiah, and of the descendants of the exiles who died by the millions in Hitler’s furnaces, and who are awaiting the Messiah as Gentiles no longer do? They still experience an exile no Gentile Christian can grasp.

Pentecost brought Gentiles of all kinds into the Jewish church. Today the Gentile Church is overflowing with ethnicities, cultures, and languages, all united by one Word. But few, very few Jews. Is it not time for the Gentile church to rediscover the biblical diversity that would bring Jews into the Gentile Church? Only so will all Israel be saved.

But how many Christian churches are involved in evangelism to Jews evangelism? How many churches have decided to call off evangelizing Jewish people as too politically insensitive.

We work so hard to escort Gentiles who are not “our own kind” into the Church. But we’ve got the “not our own kind” wrong. No matter the language, color or race, they are our own kind, for we are all Gentiles. Like the little Jewish girl who told the Gentile Naaman about the prophet who heals, maybe we Gentiles–red, and yellow, black, and white–should speak the Word with a Jewish neighbor. Then all will be precious in his sight.

ACL