Evangelical speakers underscore Christian message.
On the final morning of the Muslim-Christian conversation held last week at Yale, Christian participants eagerly anticipated what Christian speakers would have to say. Several Christian speakers had grounded their messages in explicitly Christian teachings, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. But there was a general sense that Muslim speakers had more pointedly articulated their beliefs during the nearly three days of meetings. (See earlier reports here and here.)
Early in the conference, reports circulated that when Regent College theologian John Stackhouse had used the parable of the Good Samaritan to present a clearly Christian viewpoint during the closed-door pre-conference workshop, some Muslim leaders had complained that Stackhouse was trying to evangelize them. Perhaps other Christian speakers were instinctively treading more softly.
During coffee breaks, several Christian participants told me they felt the Muslim speakers had been more carefully chosen to represent Islamic views. A Wednesday morning session which featured two famous preachers intensified this feeling.
The Muslim preacher was Yemenite Al-Habib Ali Al-Jifri, known popularly as Habib Ali. He ranks as one of the ten most popular preachers in the Muslim world (not just the Arab world). He exuded youth and charisma as he winningly invited Christians and Muslims to make religion once again a solution to the world's problems rather than a part of its problems. Al-Jifri called us to form an alliance of virtuous persons.
Winsome though he was, Al-Jifri did not hesitate to stress the absolute transcendence of God and the absolute unity of God, in contrast to the way paradoxical way that Christians affirm these things. (For Christians God is both transcendent and immanent; God is both one and three.)
The Christian preacher was the 81-year-old Dr. Robert Schuller. He is without doubt one of Christianity's most widely heard preachers, and he has possessed popularity and influence for a very long time. Schuller matched Al-Jifri in winsomeness and charisma. There seems to be no limit to Schuller's generosity of spirit. But his presentation fell short of making any distinctions between Islam and Christianity. Instead, he spoke of the need for Christians to "reframe the gospel." He stressed his "profound respect for people who are sincere in their faith" and talked about how at age 81 he knows he doesn't know all the answers and, indeed, wants to know "which of his answers are wrong."
Epistemic humility can be a virtue in some contexts, but when devout moderate Muslims are trying to get to know their Christian counterparts, explicitly Christian affirmations are called for. Instead, Dr. Schuller repeated his long-standing message about the importance of self-esteem.
By Thursday morning, Christian conferees were placing their trust in two symbolic evangelical figures to represent them well: Geoff Tunnicliffe, International Director and CEO of the World Evangelical Alliance, and Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
In his brief panel presentation,Tunnicliffe talked about the importance of rebuilding the metaphorical bridges that recent social and political storms have destroyed. In that context, he asked Muslims to stop stereotyping Christians--especially evangelicals.
During this conference we have heard how Muslims feel they have been stereotyped and stigmatized in the media. As evangelical Christians we feel the same stereotyping.
I ... [serve] a global family of over 420 million evangelical Christians. We are a diverse community of Christians, yet we are often portrayed through the media as being tied to one political agenda, one view of eschatology, and intolerant of all others. That is simply not the case. While we have a shared commitment to some core biblical truths, we also have a diversity of views on many issues. The ... vast majority of evangelical Christians live in the Global South and ... that will become even more pronounced in the years to come.
Just as we promise to seek to move beyond the stereotyping of Muslims found in the media, can I ask you, my Muslim friends, to get to know us beyond what is reported in the newspapers and television programs?
If we are ... to build this new bridge, this must be a part of the architecture.
Tunnicliffe also touched on issues of religious freedom, human rights, and "mutual respect for the sharing of our faith."
Leith Anderson gave a plenary address, and thus had a bit more time than Tunifcliffe to develop his evangelical Christian response to the conference. Nevertheless, with so much that he and others felt had been unsaid or underemphasized, Anderson had to pack his message tightly.
Anderson talked about evangelicals as good news people who share classic Christian beliefs, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. In addition, we are characterized by a deep commitment to the authority of the Bible. We stress that we are all sinners in need of reconciliation with God and with each other. Most of all, he said, evangelical Christians are identified as those who experience a personal relationship with God through repentance and turning to God in faith. We are followers of Jesus by personal choice. We are not about politics or money or power. Evangelism, he said, is one of our "pillars" (as important to us as the five pillars of Islam are to Muslim believers). Love of God, he said, begins with God and not us, he said, and God's love is unconditional and unilateral.
Several speakers stressed the commonalities of commitment and parallels in belief that could allow Muslims and Christians to engage in common action.
Curiously, one topic that went almost unmentioned was the family. Dr. Mohamed Bechari, president of the Federal Society for Muslims in France, mentioned it in passing when he listed areas of common ground: The family is the core of society and the happiness of mankind, he said. He expressed surprise at some Christian clergy who accept "homosexual marriage," but he stopped short of calling for any kind of coordinated Christian and Muslim efforts on family issues.
The general silence on the family and the complete silence on potential common activity to strengthen the family puzzles me. While our traditional family systems and our understandings of gender relations differ (even as they differ within our respective communities), we do believe together that faithful, stable, two-sex marriage is essential to the well-being of society. Are there not ways to work together on family issues?
What was achieved in New Haven from July 28 to 31?
Christian and Muslim leaders have a better sense of each other as persons. We know whom to call when differences arise. We understand the pain and struggle of Christians in Muslim-dominant societies and of Muslims in Christian-dominant cultures--and if we don't understand, we no longer have any excuse for insensitivity.
Theological gaps which many of us knew only from books were underscored in new ways. The difference between Muslim and Christian understandings of love was significant. Christian love imitates divine love and is unconditional: We love not only our families and our neighbors but our enemies. Muslim love is more discriminating, taking the form of compassion on worthy persons in need (widows and orphans were used as an example). But they are not called to love unworthy persons (someone cited "the arrogant").
In practice, Christians often love only the worthy and fail to love their enemies. But the call to imitate God's love for us "while we were yet sinners" constantly tugs us toward loving more broadly.
I am grateful for the opportunity to meet, eat with, and listen to moderate Muslim leaders from near and far. I look forward to calling some them in order to work for the common good. And the next time I see a negative stereotype of Muslims, I plan to test its validity against some of the individuals I now know.
Posted by David Neff on August 3, 2008 6:48PM
Comments
Thanks for this report, David. I'm sorry I couldn't stay for the whole conference and I appreciate your take on it.
Regarding the reports you heard about some Muslims feeling I had attempted to evangelize them in the workshop, I'd be glad to hear from you--publically or privately--a little more about that. All I heard was that Price Ghazi himself, with whom I enjoyed a couple of conversations afterward, had said something like this as a joke, not seriously. And the other Muslims with whom I interacted after my speech--including an ayatollah from Iran, a sharia expert from Malaysia, the grand mufti of Bosnia, and several younger Muslim scholars educated in America seemed to take on board my remarks without any offense at all.
Readers may be particularly intrigued to know that while my speech did indeed feature Jesus much more than did some others, the other Christian speaker who more than once referred to Jesus and did so as God becoming human to save us was Harvard theologian Harvey Cox--nobody's idea of a Bible-thumping evangelical. So the conference had surprised all 'round!
Posted by: John Stackhouse at August 4, 2008
Sounds to me like a lot of compromising of the Truth in order to obtain "unity". Are we afraid to draw the obvious line in the sand when engaged with opposing views of God's clear Word!!?? I wonder how Paul the apostle would have addressed those present....especially those claiming to be in his camp. Robert Schuller !!!?? Give me a break!!!!!
Posted by: Ralph Gaily at August 4, 2008
Thanks for this further report, David, and for your comments, John. I imagine there are or will be various reports on the Internet that will summarize different aspects of the conference, but if you have opportunity via CT, I'd be interested in hearing more of the approach of Harvey Cox and other liberal-oriented Christian speakers. Along with that, whether you noticed much ability/tendency among the Muslims to discern the wide differences in Christian beliefs and worldviews. If so, which paradigm(s) did they seem to relate to easier or want to explore more?
Posted by: Howard Pepper at August 4, 2008
Nothing but disastrous conclusions and consequences could come out of a Conference based on the superficial aspects of the "Common Word".Had the Spirit of the Apostles been present, God's powerful weapons would have been produced to destroy indiscriminately all strongholds, false arguments and proud obstacles raised against the knowledge of God. Alas, we are in a time of general apostasy!
Posted by: Ephrem Hagos at August 5, 2008
I am going to try to take a reasonable and Biblical stance here: Have evangelicals given up on the idea of evangelism in favor of a weak compromise with the followers of a false prophet in order to try to achieve limited earthly good? I am concerned for the soul of evanglicalism, especially as it regards the content and necessity of the Gospel message. John Stackhouse himself has tried to steer Christian missions away from evangelism in a recent Books & Culture article. I am concerned that this conference is going to do more of the same. If my pastor said he was going to avoid ever saying anything negative about Muhammaed and would reserve one Sunday per year to preach good things about Islam, we would be right to fire him and look for someone who will preach God's word without compromise. Why is that so hard to find?
Posted by: Jason Van Bemmel at August 5, 2008
David, I am so glad that you have done such a thorough and thoughtful job reporting on last week's conference. I think that my father, Dr. Robert H. Schuller, would feel that he under-represented the Christian faith in terms of full breadth and scope. I feel, however, that he did one great service to the faith in modeling and talking about "humility and honesty". I think, in every encounter with another who does not share our faith, all of us feels as sense of inadequacy to condense something so HUGE into so little space and time and so we try our best, in all of our humanness, to do what it seems the Father is doing (as this was demonstrated, and taught us, by Jesus when he said, "I only do what I see the Father doing"). I think he also knows that he is not a theologian and he was reliant on others for that. I, for one, am thrilled to have been a part. I noticed your own enjoyment as we all laughed and loved at "The Farm". Such authentic engagement with "neighbor" invokes the Holy Spirit and I sensed the Lord's nearness again and again. I feel privileged and proud of my father, of you, of all the voices that can testify to the need of "Respect without Resignation". The "reframing of the gospel" reference my father made was too much to bite off in the moment and I am sorry it was misunderstood. Hopefully, he'll have the opportunity to expose more of his thoughts on this topic as they are wonderful and embody, deeply, our Christian faith. I am not one whom has been only at the Crystal Cathedral and I have spent much of my life focused on "evangelism" with groups that are evangelically based. I have also lived in a "pluralistic, anything-goes, universalist" environment (with mission in my heart) and such is not what any of us seek to emulate, but such is what we seek to love. That is not what this past week was about, however. Rather, it was about retaining self-faith-identity and still engaging in authentic "love of neighbor". I loved Anderson's insightful parallel that "evangelism is a Christian pillar, just as important as the Muslim's five pillars". Such statements are not combative, but helps foster understanding. I also love that you rightly point out that many of us are not the best at living up to that pillar. Blessings on ya! Carol
Posted by: Carol Schuller Milner at August 5, 2008
Just a quick note while on the road. Brother Van Bemmel needs to go back and read my "Books & Culture" article on mission again. It is scandalous to say that I am trying to "steer Christian mission away from evangelism." To say that Christian mission is more than evangelism is not to take anything away from evangelism.
And no one at that "A Common Word" meeting should have any doubts in his or her mind about who I believe is the one and only Lord and Saviour of the world. Indeed, the clarity of my confession is why David heard what he heard about my trying to convert them!
Posted by: John Stackhouse at August 5, 2008
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