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What About Chrislam?

November 06, 2011     Time: 00:21:27
What About Chrislam?

Summary

Dr. Craig evaluates so-called "Chrislam" but also discusses the dilemma of Muslims who become Christians yet want to continue self-identifying as Muslims.

Transcript What About Chrislam?

 

Kevin Harris: Welcome. It's another Reasonable Faith podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. I'm your co-host Kevin Harris. I try to stay out of the way and ask intelligent questions, and, boy, do I bomb that sometimes. But, Bill, there's something in the news regarding so-called Chrislam. And you can tell from the name 'Chris-lam' that it is an attempted melding of Christianity and Islam. Now, I also want to dispel a rumor because it's also come up that Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church has embraced so-called Chrislam, and nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, he's written a reply on this and said it is 100% false, that he's a Christian pastor, he holds the Bible to be the infallible Word of God. [1] But, Bill, he says something that should get our attention. He says, “You cannot win your enemies to Christ, only your friends,” and that we must build bridges to people of other faiths based on the Gospel. And he says that's why Saddleback Church has had the privilege of baptizing so many because they build bridges to those who don't yet know Christ. And so I would encourage all of us to check things out before we spread false rumors, bear false witness against our neighbors, and so on.

Dr. Craig: Right, and what he emphasizes in that statement as well, I think, that's important to note is that in order to reach out in love to those who believe differently than you do you don't have to compromise your own beliefs. He says it doesn't mean giving up your own beliefs in order to reach out to them in love, and that's certainly correct.

Kevin Harris: He points out that,

Jesus was called “the friend of sinners” by the legalistic Pharisees because he hung out with (and clearly loved) unbelievers. I HOPE YOU will 1) Always believe that EVERYONE needs Jesus as their Lord & Savior. 2) Have the courage to associate with nonbelievers in order to love them and bring them to the Savior. 3) Consider being called “a friend of sinners” a Christ-like compliment. 4) Refuse to pass on rumors until you’ve checked for the truth with the person accused.

Dr. Craig: Yeah.

Kevin Harris: So there are several issues here. One is, of course, bearing false witness, passing along lies, and something that we should not do. Approach the person if you have a question about their character or what they believe.

Dr. Craig: Boy, that's so true. It does seem like some Christians are more focused upon attacking other Christians rather than interacting with a secular world and the challenges that we face from it. And the sort of fraternal infighting that goes on among Christians sometimes is really ugly.

Kevin Harris: A thing that I've noticed, Bill, is that whenever a person, a pastor, a movement, a book, and so on, becomes very popular, there's a certain segment of the Christian church that becomes suspicious. They have an underlining assumption that if it's very popular it can't be of God. That comes from, I guess, Bill, things like: it's a narrow way, and that you'll be persecuted, things like that. But Billy Graham is criticized all the time. People are suspicious of him and take him to task constantly because . . . he's such a world-wide phenomena. I heard commentators just railing against Promise Keepers when it became so popular. Now none of these men or these organizations are perfect but they were orthodox, and God in his grace apparently granted them some favor. And it occurs to me, Bill, as well, that if you want to hold that criticism consistently then you need to criticize Pentecost because that was real big at the time and what happened there was an amazing event.

Dr. Craig: I think the point that you made that I would resonate with is that you don't have to agree with someone on all the details. There are points of doctrine or maybe praxis that we can agree to disagree on, but that doesn’t mean that you write this person out of the evangelical movement or denounce them. That, I think, is just unnecessary.

Kevin Harris: So-called Chrislam – is there any way to jive the two? Can you embrace both?

Dr. Craig: Well, what is happening is that there is a huge debate among missiologists concerning the so-called Insider Movement in missions to Muslim countries. And the question this raises is: to what degree does a Muslim background believer in Christ have to disassociate himself from the Mosque and from Islam. [2] And the claim of the Insider Movement is that to be a Muslim technically means one submitted to God – that's what Islam is – to be submitted to God. Well, of course, as Christians we are submitted to God entirely. Paul calls on us in Romans 12:1-2 to submit our bodies and our minds to God as living sacrifices. So the claim is that you can say “Yes, I'm a Muslim” even though you're a follower of Jesus Christ. And you can even continue to go to the Mosque and pray in a sense secretly to Jesus being to all outward appearances a Muslim.

Now, the difficulty this raises is whether this doesn't begin to promote the kind of syncretism that you described. And, in fact, many in the Insider Movement have begun to suggest re-translations of the New Testament to remove terms which are offensive to believing Muslims. For example, in the Qur’an it says that anyone who says that Jesus is God's Son is an infidel and a blasphemer and will go to Hell. So these Insiders have suggested that we re-translate portions of the New Testament so that Jesus isn't referred to as the Son of God any longer, but use other terms that would be acceptable; like he is the King, or something of that sort, or the Messiah. That would be acceptable. And this worries me deeply, Kevin, because here it's not a matter simply of trying to build bridges. This is a matter of just mistranslation of the Greek text. The Greek text says uios theo, it's Son of God. So an accurate translation of the Greek needs to render it properly. And then one can explain that being a Son of God doesn’t mean, as the Qur’an seems to think, being the offspring of God the Father and Mary, as though there were some kind of a carnal relationship between the two that produced Jesus as their son. But you can't mistranslate the New Testament in an effort to avoid misunderstandings, I think.

So I'm very worried about this syncretistic movement, and not at all persuaded that this is wise to encourage Muslim background believers in effect to masquerade as practicing Muslims rather than to affirm their faith in Jesus Christ.

Kevin Harris: To what extent, I wonder then, can a Muslim who becomes a follow of Christ, who becomes a Christian, self-identify as a Muslim and yet be a follow of Christ? I guess that's the attempt being made?

Dr. Craig: That's exactly the problem.Typically it's been thought that when a person converts to following Christ as Savior and Lord that he will take the name Christian. He is a Christ-follower. And yet these people are claiming that you don't need to do that, you can still say that you're a Muslim even though you're secretly a Christ-follower. And from talking with missionaries in countries like Bangladesh, where there is a very robust Christian movement in this predominately Muslim country, there I have been told that the strength and the growth of the church has been directly the result of these people self-identifying as Christians, as having the courage and the boldness to come out and say “We are followers of Jesus Christ.” This has strengthened the church in Bangladesh and helped it to grow. And in a country where people are just masquerading as Muslims while secretly being believers in Jesus there may not be this kind of robust growth of the Christian movement that comes from, frankly, people being willing to risk persecution and perhaps even martyrdom for their faith in Christ.

Kevin Harris: It occurs to me, Bill, this is also an issue within the Jewish community. When a person of the Jewish faith becomes a Christian we refer to them as Messianic Jews.

Dr. Craig: This is a real problem, Kevin. Having recently been in Israel I have been made more acutely aware of the real difficulties attending Messianic Judaism. And it consists in this: these people do not think of themselves as Christians. [3] They are not Christians. I think for us we think they're really Christians but they are just sort of pretending to be Jews. They're really Christians but they pretend to be Messianic Jews. They're not; they're Jews. And therefore the Messianic Jewish community doesn't regard itself as heir to the great Christian traditions that are expressed in the creeds, like the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Creed. And therefore the Messianic movement has to face the question of where they derive their theology. They have no creedal basis for this young movement, and so they’re asking themselves “Are we committed to saying the Son is the same substance as the Father as it affirms at Nicaea? Are we committed to believing that Jesus is one person with two natures? Those are affirmations that were made by the Christians and the Christian church, but we're not part of that! We're not part of that movement or that church; we are Jews who have not embraced this tradition or have at least not yet done so.” And so there's a real question, theologically, as to the degree to which Messianic Judaism is going to align itself with the classic Christian creeds and regard itself as also heir to that heritage. And my real fear is that if they don't do this then in the next generation it's very easy to see how Messianic Judaism could just splinter into a hundred cults—some moving into adoptionism, say, where Jesus is a man adopted by God the Father to be the Savior, or others embracing other views like Arianism, for example. You can just imagine all these early church heresies replaying themselves in the next generation of Messianic Judaism because this moment has no unified theology. It has no unified creed on which it stands, and so it's easy to see how this can just splinter and drift in the next generation. So as enthusiastic as I am about Jews, particularly in Israel, who have come to Christ and follow Jesus as Messiah, I do worry theologically about the fact that these folks don't self-identify with the Christian tradition. And you can imagine how this would go in spades for this Insider Movement in Islam where you would get a Chrislam, as you've described it, that would be utterly divorced from the Christian creeds and that theological tradition. It could really get to be a mess, theologically.

Kevin Harris: It really could, and this isn't the first attempt. The Baha'i faith in many ways wants to syncretize all the world religions.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, that's one of these splinter movements of Islam that is regarded now by orthodox Muslims as a heresy. But you could see Chrislam easily developing into something like that because it's divorced from and not identified with the Christian church and it's heritage. It emphasizes, Kevin, the value of being self-identified with this great institution of the Christian church.

Kevin Harris: And some people are even more confused, Bill, when you have Western, American, suburban Christians who are obviously very much in love, rightly so, with the Old Testament as it points to Jesus and the symbolism of so many of the things in Judaism. So they will leave the Christian church and go to a Rabbinic or Jewish system and start calling themselves Rabbi and things like that, and they’re not even of Jewish heritage. So that's a confusion as well. I've met people in this rather small movement embracing the Old Testament and trying to retain this identity that Paul, quite frankly, said is not necessary.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, this is a big debate among Messianic Jews, particularly in Israel: the degree to which you have to keep the Torah and all the laws in the Old Testament for dietary purposes and observing the Sabbath. Many Messianic Jews are more relaxed about those, but others think that as Jews they need to obey all these laws. So this is really a very woolly situation where there's a lot of diversity that threatens to be a kind of centrifugal force without a center of gravity that pulls it all together again. [4]

Kevin Harris: I would suggest that everyone start, perhaps, with the book of Romans. Read through the book of Romans and go from there, if there is some confusion. But this goes beyond theology almost to a self-identify – doesn't it?

Dr. Craig: Very much so. Are these new believers Muslims? Do they self-identify as Muslims or do they think of themselves now as Christians? And I understand that Christian has all sorts of cultural overlay to it that these people don't need to accept and needn't and shouldn't accept in many cases. But I would hope that they could see ways or find ways to maintain Arab culture and music and art and calligraphy and cuisine, frankly, I mean all of the wonderful accoutrements that belong to Islamic culture, but theologically be Christian.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, and just saying the word 'Christian' to many, many, many Jews has got so much baggage in the term that they hear “Holocaust;” they hear the unfortunate things that Martin Luther said.

Dr. Craig: Yes, yes. And the Muslim hears “Crusades.”

Kevin Harris: Yeah.

Dr. Craig: The Jew hears “Holocaust;” the Muslim hears “Crusades.”

Kevin Harris: I don't know what to do about that baggage. I mean, many Christians – pastors – have kind of let the term Christian kind of fall to the wayside and they're starting to say “followers of Jesus.”

Dr. Craig: I don't have a problem with that. If they wanted to say “I'm going to identify myself as a Christ-follower.” I think that's what being a Christian is. And if the word Christian has all these cultural negative connotations perhaps they wouldn't need to use that word but they would say “I am a Christ-follower” and then, I think, if pressed they would need to self-identify with this great historic tradition that is represented in the church with its creeds and its history. They would think of Augustine and Gregory and Origin and Aquinas and Wesley and Luther as part of their heritage. They need to embrace this great Christian heritage even if they don't use the word Christian.

Kevin Harris: Fine. Because it goes all the way back to Antioch. And if pressed one can explain what the term Christian means and why followers of Christ were called that at Antioch – basically because they followed Jesus.

Dr. Craig: Yeah.

Kevin Harris: Boy, words carry great weight and terminology and baggage. We have to be tactful without compromise. One question that we got at Reasonable Faith that we'll conclude with, Bill, is a contrast of Islam, Islamic monotheism and Christian trinitarianism. Are there philosophical problems with the strictly monotheistic God?

Dr. Craig: Well, it's tough to give, I think, a philosophical argument for the Trinity, but I do think there is a good plausibility sort of argument that God needs to be more than just one person, that unitarianism isn't adequate. And it would be based on the essential loving character of God. God is the greatest conceivable being and therefore is essentially loving, he cannot be without love, he cannot be loveless. And yet the persons that God loves can't be created persons because then there was a time when they didn't exist, and there are certainly possible worlds in which there are no created beings and God alone exists. And so in those conditions God wouldn't be loving. He could have a kind of disposition to love if there were somebody else to love, but he wouldn't really be loving. Love by its very nature gives oneself away to another. And if there is no other to whom one can give oneself then one isn't really loving. And so given that God is essentially loving I think that gives good grounds for thinking that God must be not just a single person. There must be another to whom God can give himself away. And this is what the Scripture describes as the Father and the Son and the mutual love between them, and then the Holy Spirit, as well, as the third person of the Trinity. So I think that the Trinity makes better sense of God's being essentially loving than does a unitarianism which would think of God as this sort of single monad isolated all in himself and loving no one else but himself. [5]

Kevin Harris: Bill, it's important what you said in that we derive the Trinity by revelation from God, and not philosophically. Now, we can make philosophical arguments to show how there's nothing incompatible or inconsistent with this revelation. But the Trinity is one of those things that is revealed to us, correct?

Dr. Craig: Yes, traditionally the Trinity would be part of revealed theology and not natural theology. The way Thomas Aquinas put it would be that this is one of the doctrines that faith proposes rather than that reason discovers. And reason can show its, as you say, credibility or reasonableness, but this is something that is revealed to us by God through his Holy Scriptures.

Kevin Harris: Please everyone go to ReasonableFaith.org, click on Defenders. [6] We have an eight-part series on the Trinity. It is so thorough. Eight-part series on the Trinity. Bill, members of the Defenders class ask the tough questions about the Trinity and it is very thorough. So check that out when you go to Defenders at ReasonableFaith.org. And we'll see you next time on Reasonable Faith. [7]