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Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

by Editor

Dr Andty Bannister PhotoModern Britain is increasingly pluralistic: many of us live in cities surrounded by hundreds of different faiths and belief systems. And that diversity raises lots of issues – not least how as Christians we relate to friends, neighbours and colleagues in other religions.
In the UK, the second biggest religion is Islam, one that is frequently on the front pages of the newspapers, often for all the wrong reasons. Now some people have suggested that one way to foster peace between moderate Muslims and Christians is to acknowledge that Allah, the God of the Qur’an, and Yahweh, the God of the Bible, are the same God — that Muslims, Christians (and Jews) can be pooled together under a label like “Abrahamic Faiths”.
I’ve been working among Muslims for over 20 years and I confess when I began sharing my faith with Muslims, that was my assumption — that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same God. But during those years of talking, sharing and studying, my views have changed. Let me explain why.
First, let’s acknowledge that Muslims and Christians do believe some things in common about God’s role. We all believe that God is the creator and ruler of all things, for instance. But notice that this description is fairly thin: it gives you a kind of distant, abstract God of the philosophers. In particular it says little about God’s identity — not so much who God is as what God is.
Now it’s possible to agree about somebody’s role but disagree about their identity. If I believe that the Prime Minister is Theresa May, you believe it’s Jeremy Corbyn, and the man in the pub believes it’s Donald Duck, we all believe in one Prime Minster, but we disagree about the PM’s identity. And surely that question is one that really matters.
When it comes to God, the Bible is deeply concerned with the identity question. Think about what Jesus asks his disciples in Mark 8:27: not what do you say I am, but who do you say that I am?
Now mistaken identity is a common problem. Suppose you say to me, “Andy, I met your friend Mike yesterday.” “My friend, Mike?” I query. “Yes, you know, the six foot tall bald guy.” I explain that the only Mike I know is five foot with dreadlocks. “No, it was definitely your friend,” you insist, “he’s got a small dog and plays the guitar”. I explain my friend Mike is allergic to dogs and tone deaf. And so it goes on. Now here’s the thing: how many differences would we need to discover before we were forced to conclude we were talking about two different people?
Sunset over dome and minaretsSomething like that is going on when it comes to the God of the Bible and the God of the Qur’an. As the Bible addresses the question of who God is, the Bible lays out a number of key characteristics of God’s identity. Four of the most important are that the God of the Bible is relational (walking and talking with Adam and Eve, stepping into history in the person of Jesus etc.). That he is knowable (the Bible claims we can not just know about God, but know him). That he is love — not just a God who acts lovingly, but who is love in his very being. And that God’s love has been primarily demonstrated through suffering on the cross, in Jesus, to deal with our sin and brokenness and offer us the possibility of forgiveness and new life. [note] There are many, many other differences between the god of the Qur’an and the God of the Bible. In his excellent book, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion, Mark Durie, PhD, undertakes an incredibly thorough analysis of the theology of the Qur’an and the Bible, showing that they are utterly different, especially in their conception of God. This is, Mark argues, because Islam is not related to Christianity and Judaism, but a thoroughly different religion with an entirely different conceptual grid. The book is expensive (academic pricing!) but it’s worth tracking down a copy in a library. You can also watch a lecture by Mark on some of this material.[/note]
Relational, knowable, love, suffering. And here’s the problem: the Qur’an either ignores or directly denies each of those core aspects of God’s identity. For example, Muslim scholar Shabbir Akhtar points out that in Islam, Allah cannot be known nor any kind of relationship had with him:
Muslims do not see God as their father … Men are servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any greater degree of intimacy with their creator. [note] Shabbir Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990) p180. [/note]
Whilst the Muslim academic Isma’il al Furuqi writes:
Allah does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. Allah reveals only his will … Allah does not reveal himself to anyone … that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam. [note] Isma’il al Furuqi, Christian Mission and Islamic Da’wah: Proceedings of the Chambésy Dialogue Consultation (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1982) p47-48.[/note]
Which means that the God of Islam, the Allah of the Qur’an, is a very different God indeed.
All that said, I do meet many Muslims who are yearning for a God of love, who when you ask them about the God they believe in, speak of characteristics like love. What’s going on here? Well, the Bible explains that we are designed for a relationship with God, created to be in loving communion with him, and so that desire bubbles up in Muslim hearts too. Thus when I meet a Muslim who talks of God and love, I often begin not by saying “you have the wrong God” but instead, by pivoting off Acts 17 as my model.
In Acts 17:16-34, when Paul is wandering around Athens and observing the myriad pagan altars he notices one inscribed: ‘To an Unknown God’. Later, in his sermon at the Areopagus, Paul doesn’t launch into an attack on the Athenians’ idolatry, rather he builds on the Unknown God idea, saying:
“Now what you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you.”
I believe that in some cases this approach can work with our Muslim friends. Yes, the Qur’an clearly describes a very different god to the God of the Bible: utterly, irreconcilably different. But many individual Muslims are yearning for a God like the God of the Bible. In that case, we should look at our Muslim friend and say: “Come on home, friend, come on home, to the God of the Bible, the God who has revealed himself so clearly, so powerfully, so compassionately in Jesus.”
Here in the West, immigration has brought and is bringing more Muslims to our countries. As well as welcoming them to our lands, let’s also introduce them to our Lord: a God who is relational, a God who can be known, a God who is love, and a God who has demonstrated that love in costly suffering in the cross of Christ.

If you enjoyed this short blog article and would like to dig deeper, you can watch the longer lecture I gave on this topic for the CS Lewis Institute in 2016. (And you can also watch the Q&A from the evening).

 

Given the legacy of the Church why should I take Christianity seriously?

by Solas

Many people are attracted to Jesus but put off by some of the historical failures of the Church and of Christians. Is there a way to clear away some of the baggage that sometimes prevents people seeing Jesus clearly? In this new Short Answers episode, Andy Bannister responds to this common stumbling block for many people.

 

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How Oxford and Peter Singer drove me from atheism to Jesus

by Editor 1 Comment

I grew up in Australia, in a loving, secular home, and arrived at Sydney University as a critic of “religion.” I didn’t need faith to ground my identity or my values. I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to study history at Cambridge and become a historian. My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths. As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my Ph.D. in History at King’s College, Cambridge. King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.
After Cambridge, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford. There, I attended three guest lectures by world-class philosopher and atheist public intellectual, Peter Singer. Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion; a premise which needs to be agreed upon before any conversation can take place.

Templeton_Peter&Andy_27
Peter Singer

I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo; I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism. But I knew from my own research in the history of European empires and their encounters with indigenous cultures, that societies have always had different conceptions of human worth, or lack thereof. The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent. I began to realise that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear.
One afternoon, I noticed that my usual desk in the college library was in front of the Theology section. With an awkward but humble reluctance, I opened a book of sermons by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. As I read, I was struck at how intellectually compelling, complex, and profound the gospel was. I was attracted, but I wasn’t convinced.
A few months later, near the end of my time at Oxford, I was invited to a dinner for the International Society for the Study of Science and Religion. I sat next to Professor Andrew Briggs, a Professor of Nanomaterials, who happened to be a Christian. During dinner, Briggs asked me whether I believed in God. I fumbled. Perhaps I was an agnostic? He responded, “Do you really want to sit on the fence forever?” That question made me realise that if issues about human value and ethics mattered to me, the response that perhaps there was a God, or perhaps there wasn’t, was unsatisfactory.
In the Summer of 2008, I began a new job as Assistant Professor at Florida State University, where I continued my research examining the relationship between the history of science, Christianity, and political thought. With the freedom of being an outsider to American culture, I was able to see an active Christianity in people who lived their lives guided by the gospel: feeding the homeless every week, running community centres, and housing and advocating for migrant farm labourers.
One Sunday, shortly before my 28th birthday, I walked into a church for the first time as someone earnestly seeking God. Before long I found myself overwhelmed. At last I was fully known and seen and, I realised, unconditionally loved – perhaps I had a sense of relief from no longer running from God. A friend gave me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and one night, after a couple months of attending church, I knelt in my closet in my apartment and asked Jesus to save me, and to become the Lord of my life.
From there, I started a rigorous diet of theology, reading the Bible and exploring theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and F.D. Maurice. Christianity, it turned out, looked nothing like the caricature I once held. I found the story of Jacob wrestling with God especially compelling: God wants anything but the unthinking faith I had once assumed characterised Christianity. God wants us to wrestle with Him; to struggle through doubt and faith, sorrow and hope. Moreover, God wants broken people, not self-righteous ones. And salvation is not about us earning our way to some place in the clouds through good works. On the contrary; there is nothing we can do to reconcile ourselves to God. As a historian, this made profound sense to me. I was too aware of the cycles of poverty, violence and injustice in human history to think that some utopian design of our own, scientific or otherwise, might save us.
Christianity was also, to my surprise, radical – far more radical than the leftist ideologies with which I had previously been enamoured. The love of God was unlike anything which I expected, or of which I could make sense. In becoming fully human in Jesus, God behaved decidedly unlike a god. Why deign to walk through death’s dark valley, or hold the weeping limbs of lepers, if you are God? Why submit to humiliation and death on a cross, in order to save those who hate you? God suffered punishment in our place because of a radical love. This sacrificial love is utterly opposed to the individualism, consumerism, exploitation, and objectification, of our culture.
Just as radical, I realised, was the new creation which Christ began to initiate. This turned on its head the sentimental caricature of ‘heaven’ I’d once held as an atheist. I learned that Jesus’ resurrection initiated the kingdom of God, which will “bring good news to the poor, release the captives, restore sight to the blind, free the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18) To live as a Christian is a call to be part of this new, radical, creation. I am not passively awaiting a place in the clouds. I am redeemed by Christ, so now I have work to do. With God’s grace, I’ve been elected to serve – in whatever way God sees fit – to build for His Kingdom. We have a sure hope that God is transforming this broken, unjust world, into Christ’s Kingdom, the New Creation.

IrvingFacultyProfile-e1495541720671aSarah Irving-Stonebraker

is a Senior Lecturer (with tenure) in Modern European History at Western Sydney University in Australia. This article was originally published by The Veritas Forum and is reposted with their permission. The Veritas Forum is found at www.veritas.org .

At Solas we have a long-standing interest in the thought of Peter Singer, and how it contrasts with a Christian world-view. Andy Bannister from Solas, engaged Peter Singer in a debate chaired by Justin Brierley, which you can watch here.

Equip – Youth Apologetics with Scripture Union Scotland

by Editor

It’s been really exciting to be involved with Scripture Union Scotland’s “Equip” programme. This is big event they hold regularly in Edinburgh, aimed at S4-6’s, which is 16-18year olds, roughly. Each night, they invite a speaker and take a ‘hot-topic’ that Christians in schools often face and then equip the kids on it. They’ve had everything from “How Can I Trust the Bible?” to how to respond to Atheist friends, to questions around sexuality – all the hot-button topics of today.
Solas has been heavily involved in “Equip”, which has been a huge privilege. My colleague David Robertson did an earlier session for them and then I spoke more recently on the question of “God and Suffering”. We will be involved in one of the forthcoming “Equip” sessions too, when myself and David Hutchings will be doing a ‘team-tag’ approach to the issues around God and Science. David is an amazing Christian speaker and writer, who is coming up from York for this.
Equip is a really great event! We get anywhere up to 100 really enthusiastic young people, who come because they really want to share their faith at school and know that they will face some of these questions. They are really, really keen to learn. I was hugely impressed by the quality of the questions I was asked when I led the evening on “God and Suffering“. One of the mistakes the church makes is that we ignore this age-group. We think all they need is pizza and videos, rather than realising that these guys really want to engage with serious issues and big questions. They are thinking, they are sharp, they are evangelising, and it was a real privilege to be a resource for them.
SU Scotland Equip event list

Is Evangelism Evil?

by Editor

There has been consternation, approaching alarm, in some Christian circles over the latest piece of research from The Barna Group into attitudes amongst younger believers. The research itself was detailed, nuanced and contained a wealth of insights into belief and practice across the church’s generations. It was however one headline-generating finding which has caused the furore: ‘Almost Half of Practicing Christian Millennials Say Evangelism Is Wrong’. [note]https://www.barna.com/research/millennials-oppose-evangelism/ [/note]  The implication seems to be that a whole generation of Christians see evangelism as a poisoned well, from which we are inviting people to drink.
The critical question was phrased like this: “Is it wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share those beliefs?” Intriguingly, while only around 20% of “elders” and “baby boomers” agreed with that statement, 27% of “Generation X’s” did, along with a whopping 47% of “millennials”. [note] ibid. [/note] What are we to make of these figures which seem to suggest that evangelism is generation limited; especially as so many of the responders said that evangelism wasn’t merely “awkward”, but actually sinful?
The first thing to note is the parallel findings along with that question. These include a staggering 94% of “millennials” saying that, “the best thing that can happen to a person is for them to come to know Jesus”. Then alongside that, 96% of the same group of younger Christians said that being a witness to Jesus is an essential part of their faith! The third deeply revealing finding is that while only 11% of “elders” believe that, “if someone disagrees with you it means they are judging you”, that figure rises to 40% for millennials.

Two things seem obvious from these findings then.

The first is that the post-modern notion that all claims to truth are powerplays has eaten deeply into the life of young Christians. While older believers seem content to be disagreed with, for many of the younger generation, accepting a person means not critiquing their beliefs. The second observation flows from that, which is that when evangelism is described in institutional or abstract terms (persuading someone else to agree with your beliefs), the young recoil. However, when the questions are focused on Jesus Christ himself (that is in relational categories); millennial believers are as keen, if not keener than their forebears to witness.

What can we learn?

While an older generation can remember a time when the church in the West was culturally central, the young are learning what it means to be faithful followers of Christ from the margins. While for many older people evangelism might still look justifiable when described in terms of winning people for the group or party-line; for the marginalised millennials, such language doesn’t resonate. What does seem to stir the young however, is the experience that when we share the gospel with others, we are actually offering them Jesus.
There is then a strong sense that the younger generation have seen the powerful, institutional forms of church with which the West has become familiar, and found them wanting. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent much time immersed in the gospel narratives about Christ himself. Powerful institutionalised religious forces didn’t fare well in Jesus’ estimation. He was more likely to turn the tables over on their industrial-scale religious activities than apply to join the Sanhedrin. To anyone who wants to build a religious empire, following or institution, Jesus remains a problematic figure: building one in his name looks plain weird.
What then should we say about evangelism in a context where institutionalism is dead, and where almost half of the younger believers think that trying to persuade others to your point of view is judgemental and wrong?
The first thing is that there is good evangelism and bad evangelism, and our whole business is to only ever engage in the former. Taking the gospel of Christ, the message of the self-emptying, life-giving God and using it to build an empire or institution is grotesque. The true evangelist is one who gives himself like Christ did, so that other people can live. Likewise, seeking to entice colonial ‘rice-Christians’, is as much a corrupt and bribery-led affair as the prosperity-gospel salesmen on satellite TV, promising miracles for cash. If the hearer is left with the impression that our main point is “join my group”, or “send in money”; or “buy my snake-oil” this is not evangelism. If it doesn’t sound like “look at Jesus”, doesn’t proclaim the death, resurrection, power and love of Jesus, and doesn’t leave the hearer knowing that the call of the gospel is to trust in Jesus; we are right to reject it. Evangelism is about introducing people to Jesus. Full stop. Period. End of.
The second thing is that those of us who have encountered Christ did so because somebody told us about him. The 97% of millennials who replied saying that the best thing a person could experience was to come to know Jesus, did so because they have heard the gospel, believed it, and in so doing encountered the risen Christ and been changed by him. Speaking personally, I have huge feelings of gratitude towards the people who were true evangelists to me. Obviously not to the sharks and charlatans trying to build a career on the back of Jesus’ drawing power, but those who told me about Jesus and demonstrated his gracious, transforming power to me through their lives. That gratitude should motivate us to engage in real evangelism, to make sure our lives are not merely recipients of grace and the cul-de-sac where it stops, but conduits of grace through whom it flows.
Third, there is something about the experience of becoming a Christian and living for Christ which requires us to speak about him to others, simply in order to maintain any sense of internal integrity. Christ gives us a new identity, a new purpose, and a new way of seeing the world, and we simply cannot live with any coherence if we don’t speak about it but keep it bottled up within us. Many years ago, when I was a postgraduate student, I attempted to do this: to enjoy the inner comfort of Christ in my life; while outwardly avoiding the subject of faith altogether. The tension of trying to live such a life became unbearable. I think it made me unwell in fact, because I wasn’t being true to my new-self nor living an existence which was inwardly and outwardly coherent. I created a dualism in which there was a tension between my inner-experience and outward life. Evangelism, by which I mean speaking of Jesus, is necessary for the wellbeing of the Christian.
Fourth, when we are tempted to consign evangelism to the “it is wrong” category, identified by some of the Barna Group respondents, we should listen carefully to the testimonies of other Christians and hear what Jesus has done for them. When I talk to one of my friends about the life of addiction he lived before coming to Christ, I am reminded of Jesus’ restoring power in our lives and how it brings such beauty. When I talk to another friend about his debased search for pleasure, before he came to Christ, I am reminded of the destructive power of sin which Jesus overcomes. Someone spoke to me last week about the shame of pornography that scarred his life before he became a Christian, and another about the despair he felt without meaning before he found Jesus. Our churches are full of people whose lives are being rebuilt in the power of God, whose brokenness is being pieced together, and who live lives of joyful gratitude to God for his grace. Rejection of evangelism would be to simply fail to invite others into the joy of what we have.
Fifth, we need to remember that the alternatives for which people are living are flawed and hopeless. Most people today are living for god-substitutes which only-ever let them down. The never-ending treadmill of the pursuit of money, the perfect mate, the ideal children, athletic prowess, and the personal-best can be all-consuming but hardly satisfying in the longer term. Good-looks eventually give way to wrinkles that the strongest Botox cannot inflate; athletic success becomes harder and harder to sustain, and the lover-of money becomes a slave to the next-deal. The pursuit of pleasure is superseded by the law of diminishing returns: the man’s first sexual conquest he will remember forever, but he can’t honestly remember the difference between the 78th and the 79th. The porn-addict was once happy with a tawdry magazine from the late-night garage but the same thrill now requires an escalating diet of hard-core online depravity. The proud-parent bases their identity, hopes, and aspirations on their idealised children and then collapses when the children rebel against the weight of expectation. The point is that people have at the centre of their lives things which are either dreadful, or just unworthy. In all these cases, evangelism isn’t ‘sinful’, it is simply the sharing of the experience that there is something better: someone worth living for. Evangelism is the offer of a saviour who will not disappoint, who gives more than he demands, and can carry the weight of the high-office of being the very centre of our lives.
Sixth, as anyone knows who has sought to get involved in genuine Jesus-focused evangelism, it draws us personally closer to Christ himself. Jesus is our life, and knowing him is really the point of it all. Strangely, it is in talking about him to others that we find ourselves spiritually nourished in him; more confident in him, and more aware of his presence. I once asked the missionary pioneer Simon Guillebaud why we don’t experience miracles in the church in the West like they do in Burundi. His reply was that they don’t experience the power of God in the church, it only happens when they go outside the church, on mission. Evangelism is challenging, it’s not easy, it makes us vulnerable, and it is in that Christ-dependent, prayer-focused space, that we encounter Christ afresh. The point really seems to be that Jesus is the great evangelist himself, and he isn’t interested in hanging around drinking comfortable cups of tea with Christians, but wants to go out on mission. So, if we want to encounter him, that is where he will be. That of course, fits perfectly with the parable he told of the lost sheep. The good shepherd leaves the 99 safe sheep to pursue the lost one. If you want to live closely with this shepherd, you can’t do so by lingering where it is safe: he will be out on costly mission.
Finally, we have all seen evangelism done badly. We have seen religion misused and corrupted, and we have seen ‘evangelism’ used as a tool to recruit the vulnerable to the causes of the unworthy. The World Health Organisation reports that 2 million preventable deaths occur every year, due to diarrhoeal illness transmitted by polluted water [note]https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/housing/health-risks/waterborne-disease/en/ [/note] . Is water then, the most dangerous substance in the world, responsible for the death of millions of people, especially vulnerable infants? Is drinking water wrong? After all, the statistics are overwhelming: drinking water is directly responsible for countless deaths. Or to put it in the terms with which we started; is water actually ‘evil’? Of course not, water is essential, life giving, tasty and essential! Likewise, when our culture pressures us to ascribe all manner of ills to evangelism, we must be careful to distinguish between the real-thing; the Jesus-centred thing, and any corrupted, dirtied or poisoned alternative. The corrupted version might very well be evil. But the gospel of Christ, the real thing: that’s living water.

Is there anything wrong with multi-faith events?

by Solas

In our increasingly divided world, some people think the way to bring people together is to promote multifaith events, which try to blend different religious traditions together. In this new SHORT ANSWERS video, Andy Bannister, himself a veteran of decades of Christian-Muslim dialogue, explores why this approach is profoundly unhelpful—and shows how there are far better ways to unite people without ignoring the major differences between them.

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‘The most effective tool for sharing the gospel is your home!’

by Editor
What is the greatest tool we have for sharing the gospel? Rosaria Butterfield says that it is our homes.

Are you busy? Are you important? Do you work on a tight schedule? Are your boundaries well-fortified?
Those are not, in and of themselves, bad things.  But they will become idols if you don’t add something: Christian hospitality—the scriptural command to regularly, transparently, and sacrificially come together in homes over a meal, gathering with neighbours and brothers and sisters from the church, and welcoming strangers.
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, a man with a dark secret moved in across the street. He was visibly fragile. We became friends slowly, by fits and starts. Then, one day, his dog Tank disappeared. My children made posters, I put an announcement on Nextdoor, and we all walked miles, searching for a one-hundred-pound pit bull that ran loose in the neighbourhood—to the terror an

 

d fury of neighbours. But Tank was gentle and kind and was needed by the man who loved him.
Where are the Christians to point out that the sin that will undo us is our own, not our neighbour’s?
After Tank was found, our friendship was sealed. We started walking our dogs together. He was generous to us, helping us with tasks that we couldn’t do on our own. He cut down dead trees in our woods, being sensitive to preserve the ones with nesting red-shouldered hawks when my son told him about the babies. My children drew him pictures for his refrigerator. He joined us for Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays (Hank and I were born on the same day in the same year). He came shyly and awkwardly at first, but eventually whole-heartedly. For years, we were his one, daily human contact.
And then one day his secret was exposed. Hank was making crystal meth in his basement. Yellow crime scene tape enveloped our neighbourhood. Neighbours wrung their hands in shame, and worried about plummeting housing value.
Soon, neighbours turned their suspicion to us. After all: we were his friends. How could we not know something of this epic magnitude? Jesus dined with sinners, and there is an edge to that statement when it arrives on the tip of a pointed finger.
Hank’s arrest and incarceration, the horror of crystal meth, its making and its meaning in a world that traffics sex and murder in meth addiction, created a need to gather daily with our neighbours with food and prayer. That need did not start with well-planned meals and carefully orchestrated invitations. It started with accusation. Pacing in my kitchen while polishing off the last of my coffee, another neighbour, Bill, nailed it. We were guilty by association. We were naive dupes. He put it boldly: “How could you be friends with him? You know the problem with you Christians? You are so open minded that your brains are falling out of your ears.”
We heard Bill loud and clear. And we saw the need to use our home and our privileges differently. We started practicing daily hospitality, welcoming church family and neighbours. We posted open invitations on the Nextdoor app. The routine was simple: eating together, listening to concerns, learning as Kent led in family devotions (where Kent teaches through the Bible, one chapter each night), and praying together. All kinds of people came. People were welcome to leave after eating and griping, but most didn’t. Most stayed for Bible and prayer.
We realized that our home wasn’t a castle. It was an incubator and a hospital.
As the children in the neighbourhood watched dumpsters of Hank’s stuff being thrown away, because everything in a house infected by the gaseous toxin of crystal meth must be destroyed, they grieved. Children are not insensitive in the ways that adults are. They feel the pain of losing a drum set and a dog and a toothbrush and your baby pictures and all of the important stuff held with magnetic clips on your refrigerator. Tank, the gentle giant dog, lived with us after Hank’s arrest. I watched children bury their tears in his enormous head as they watched the dumpsters fill, and witnessed the shame being caught. That “the wages of sin is death” is a palpable horror when you watch your neighbour disappear—one dumpster at a time. It took seven to erase him. The children kept count.
Christian truth and Christian hope is potentially transparent in neighbourhood tragedy, but only if Christians show up to interpret the meaning and purpose and even the grace of getting caught. Where are the Christians to point the way to the throne of grace? Where are the Christians to point out that the sin that will undo us is our own, not our neighbour’s? Are they hiding behind closed doors, grateful that they don’t really know their neighbours well enough to get involved?
Daily table fellowship may sound radical, but for us, it has become ordinary. This spiritual habit depends not only on hosts, but also on guests. These are permeable boundaries, as Christian community depends on brothers and sisters openly bringing both their resources and their needs. Our church family along with our neighbours come; it has been crucial to have many hands, many brothers and sisters offering prayer and Christian care. The singles in our church gather at our table almost daily. It is not unusual for me to still be finishing a math lesson with a child when people start to walk through the door. That’s ok. Everybody knows how to fold the laundry and set the Butterfield table.
Gathering daily with doors open is easier than micromanaging fussy guest lists. We imagine that this is what table fellowship looked like in the 1st century. Those were desperate times. These are desperate times. I enjoy leaning hard into our post-Christian world with prayer and potato-peeling. This is what spiritual warfare looks like in my kitchen in the dark, early mornings. I spend a few hours each day chopping vegetables and praying. Christ’s yoke is easy. I spend a few hours each night gathering with neighbours and family of God, and going to God in prayer. Christ’s burden is light. There are worse things to do with a few hours each day, of that I am sure.
What stops us from practicing hospitality is our plenty, not our lack. We have too much, and we love too much what we have.
Years have passed since my friend was arrested and incarcerated. He is serving a two-decade prison term. We write letters, send books, and pray for him. Staying connected through a long prison sentence is all part of Christian neighbouring. And now that this crisis is over, the former meth house revamped and resold to new people without this history of shame, we still practice ordinary, daily hospitality. It is how we bring Christ’s witness to bear in a world that despises Christ and Christians, a world that does not know what authentic Christianity looks like.
Over the years, we have come to learn this. What stops us from practicing hospitality is our plenty, not our lack. We have too much, and we love too much what we have. Statistics have borne out this truth: meagre homes and poor churches give and gather more; wealthy homes and upscale churches horde and micromanage more.
Daily ordinary hospitality, practiced for Christ’s glory, sanctifies your boundaries and fortifies your faith. It also exposes the idolatry in our hearts that falsely declare our homes our castles and our time our own. Hospitality combats the crushing loneliness that too many brothers and sisters in Christ bear by offering basic care: a meal, a hug, a prayer. When we share a rhythm of life, we know before anyone asks how we can help and what others need. Right before the eyes of this post-Christian world that dismisses orthodox Christianity as dangerous or useless, Christian hospitality seizes the power of Christ, grabs with our open hands the promises of heaven, and brings Christ’s love to bear on those in our arm’s embrace. With redeemed hearts and the promises of God, we have much to share with others. Hospitality is a lived theology that your unbelieving neighbours can taste and feel.
This is the way Christ always intended Christians to live. The Christian life is launched by loss. Peter says it to our Lord like this: “See, we have left everything to follow you!” Jesus responds with the promise that the body of Christ is a family, and inclusive membership is extended for his sake: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).
We see here the twin commitments of hospitality: to build up the body of Christ and to compel others to taste and see that the Lord is good. Christ makes it clear: the gospel comes with a house key. Start anywhere. But please start.

Rosaria Champagne ButterfieldRosaria Butterfield

(PhD, Ohio State University is an author, speaker, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and Openness Unhindered. Content adapted from The Gospel Comes with a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield. This article first appeared on Crossway.org; and used with permission.

Evangelism Training at St Silas, Glasgow

by Editor

David Hartnett and I recently went to St Silas’s Church in Glasgow to help them with a mini-evangelism and apologetics training conference for about 30-40 folks. A smaller group like this works quite well, because it facilitates more interactive learning than is possible with a large crowd. It was a really great group to spend a Sunday afternoon with, especially as they were so enthusiastic about wanting to get trained to reach their friends. They were a really, really keen bunch!
We went through some of the basic training we do, such as using questions in evangelism, and investigated one specific question; “What does it mean to be human?” I think that is one of the great questions of our age which pops up all over the place. That question lies behind debates about transgender, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and behind contemporary atheism.
It’s a good way into discussions for Christians too. You can ask a colleague at work: “Are we just atoms and particles, or is there something more to us as humans?” That’s a really interesting conversation—and it doesn’t look like a “God Conversation”. It leads quite naturally onto those “God Questions” though.
It’s also the question that lots of people are asking today. Take the dystopian writer Charlie Brooker for example. His Black Mirror TV series is constantly probing these questions, especially around issues of technology. Now obviously there is plenty in those shows that we wouldn’t endorse, but it serves to demonstrate that the most intelligent cultural critics are asking these profound questions about humanity. These commentators are actually raising evangelistic opportunities without realising it. Black Mirror really shows the horror of what a godless, technologically driven world looks like – and it is dystopian and hopeless. I’ve met many Christians who use TV and movies like this evangelistically, because when you observe this dark, hopeless contemporary culture alongside a non-Christian, it creates an opportunity to talk about hope. We can say, “it doesn’t have to be like that, there is hope, and I have a reason for that hope.”

Easter Evidence: Academics who Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus.

by Editor 1 Comment

If you were to lock a group of atheist philosophers who do not specialize in religion in a room with theist philosophers who do (don’t actually do this, but if you did) and listen to the ensuing debates, you “would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.” [note]Smith, Quentin. “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism.” Philo. 4.2 (2001): p. 197. [/note]
Those are not my words but the words of an atheist, and not just any atheist but an atheist who is a professional philosopher with 12 books and over 140 peer-reviewed articles to his name.
Despite his atheism, Quentin Smith draws the theism-friendly conclusion that “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”[note]ibid[/note]
God is alive. And not only in philosophy, but in sociology as well. Fifty years ago sociology was convinced that God was on the way out. The scholars had bought into secularization theory; you know the idea—the more modern and technological the world becomes, the more secular it becomes. Peter Berger was one of the leading proponents of this theory. Today he has abandoned it.
At an academic conference in Miami in 2011, Berger said that he and almost everyone in the field changed their minds simply because that is what the evidence demanded. He said that if you look at the contemporary world,

The real situation is that most of the world is as religious as it ever was. You have enormous explosions of religion in the world…In fact, you can say every major religious tradition has been going through a period of resurgence in the last 30, 40 years or so…anything but secularization. [note]Berger, Peter. “Six Decades as a Worldwide Religion Watcher: Observations & Lessons Learned.” Ethics & Public Policy Center. n.p., n.d., accessed online on July 22, 2014 at http://eppc.org/publications/berger/.[/note]

Probably the most influential British philosopher of religion of the last half century is longtime Oxford professor Richard Swinburne. In 2003 Swinburne published a book entitled The Resurrection of God Incarnate, and in that book he concludes that, on the available evidence today, it is 97% probable that Jesus truly—miraculously—rose from the dead, proving that he is the God he claimed to be.
Do all philosophers agree with Swinburne? Of course not. And even Swinburne recognizes that we shouldn’t take the exact percentage too seriously. He likes to work with probability theory so he plugs in numbers at each point in the argument; they are meant to provide only a rough estimate.
Still though, the fact that someone of Swinburne’s intellectual credibility can make that claim in print, have it published by Oxford University Press, and then ably defend it at top academic conferences all around the world speaks to the fact that the intellectual case for the Christian faith is strong.
A number of popular authors have suggested otherwise in recent years, but these New Atheists generally are not engaged with current philosophical scholarship. In fact, much of the New Atheism at the popular level can be traced directly back to old scholarship at the academic level.
Richard Dawkins denies the existence of a God who can ground good and evil, right and wrong. But criticism without alternative is empty. What is his alternative?: a world in which his disturbing response to being asked whether the wrongness of rape is as arbitrary as the fact that we’ve evolved five fingers rather than six is, “You could say that, yeah.”[note]Dawkins, Richard. Interview by Justin Brierley. “The John Lennox—Richard Dawkins Debate.” Bethinking.org, 2008. Web. 25 April 2014. <http://www.bethinking.org/atheism/the-john-lennox-richard-dawkins-debate>.[/note]
Quentin Smith denies the existence of a God who can raise the dead. What is his alternative?:
The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing… We should…acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvellous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.[note]Quentin Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. 1993. p. 135. Emphasis added. [/note]
Is this any less extraordinary than a resurrection from the dead? On second thought, is this not itself a resurrection from the dead? This Easter, as we reflect on the profundity of life, the question, perhaps, is not whether we believe in resurrection, but rather which resurrection we believe in.

If we think it is our minds that keep us from God, we may not be dealing with the arguments at the highest level. My own story is one of reasoning that if God really made me, and if he made me with my mind, then he would ensure that a sincere intellectual search would point in his direction. And, to my surprise, that is exactly what I found. Along the way I also found that the Bible itself praises people not for blind faith but for examining the evidence every day to determine if what they were being told was true. [note]Some of the ideas expressed in this article are also recorded in the following video: http://bit.ly/WC1rrg [/note]

So, why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something so finely-tuned for rational life that we can see, and hear, and think, all while sat on a rock that is rotating at a thousand miles an hour, flying around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, as part of a galaxy hurling through the universe at over a million miles an hour? We live in a miraculous world! Atheist, theist, or agnostic, there is no getting around that fact.

photo of Vince VitaleVince Vitale

Dr Vince Vitale was educated at Princeton University and the University of Oxford, and he taught philosophy of religion and served as a faculty member at both of these universities. During his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Princeton he took an unexpected journey from sceptic to evangelist. He then completed masters and PhD studies at Oxford, receiving a Daniel M. Sachs Graduating Scholarship  and a Clarendon Scholarship. 

Short Answers for Easter

by Solas

We have just begun filming the exciting new series of Short Answers videos and the first episodes will be released over the next few weeks right here and through our social media channels. In the meantime, two of our most popular ever Short Answers have been about Easter. As we approach the Easter season, enjoy these—but why not share them on social media, or show them to friends, colleagues and family as discussion starters?

 

Photo of Derek MacIntyre

"My resolute agnosticism crumbled under the weight of the evidence for Jesus" – Derek’s Story

by Editor 1 Comment

A Resolute Agnostic

I’m from a non-Christian background. None of my family were believers. However, like many people, I thought about and discussed religious matters with my friends in my teens – but never came to any clear conclusions. I suppose I parked the “big questions” on God and Jesus in a file in the back of my head with a view to thinking about them later – but never did.
So through my 20’s and 30’s, I guess I had the view of many people in the UK today that I really didn’t know what to think about God and Jesus. I suppose I thought that you probably needed to have some form of faith to be a Christian – and that this faith was for other people. Perhaps people who had been brought up Christians. Or perhaps, people who had experienced some form of life-changing spiritual experience. Neither situation applied to me.
I would never have called myself an atheist though. To me, there seemed insufficient evidence for the non-existence of God to come to such a definite conclusion. Equally, there also seemed to be insufficient evidence for the existence of God for me to conclude He definitely existed. I was therefore a resolute agnostic.

Another Look at the Big Questions

However, in my late 30’s I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting some of the questions I’d left unresolved in my teens. My thoughts were that there are plenty of capable and intelligent people who profess to have some form of belief in God. For example, scientists like Francis Collins (Head of the US National Genome Research Institute) and William D Phillips (Winner of the Nobel prize for Physics 1997) or world leaders like Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
I remember reading about a survey published in “Nature”, where four out of ten scientists said they believed in God. OK, just over 45% said they didn’t believe, and 14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. However, a figure of 40% surprised me. Why did they believe?
Also, if I looked at the religious leaders in this country, they were clearly intelligent men or women. If these people had some belief in God, then perhaps it was worthwhile looking at this again to find out why.

A Chance Encounter?

At this time I met a colleague on a business trip to the USA who also happened to be a Christian. I wasn’t aware of this until I asked him where he had been on holiday that year. He replied that he had been over to Oxford in the UK on missionary work. As you might imagine, this sparked my curiosity and the conversation turned to the spiritual questions I’d started to revisit. The result of the conversation was that he said that he’d send me a few books which might help with the questions I had. Sure enough, two weeks later I received a package containing a copy of “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel and a Bible.

Investigating Jesus

Now, did reading “The Case for Christ” turn me into a Christian? Well frankly, no it didn’t.
However, what it did do was act as the starting point for my own investigation into who Jesus is. I was amazed by what I found. I was amazed by my own ignorance of the evidence. How could I be living in a “Christian” country and not be aware of this stuff?
The more I looked, the more I found compelling historical and rational evidence for Jesus being the Son of God. However, I still wasn’t a follower. The reason was simple: I assumed there would be equally strong atheistic evidence and counter-arguments which would no doubt keep me in my resolutely agnostic state.
So I started to look (really look) for this atheistic evidence on Jesus. I trawled bookshops for books on atheism. I scoured atheist websites. I read detailed, hostile reviews of “The Case for Christ”. I listened to and read articles and interviews with well known atheists. I read the New Testament for myself. I read biographies and critiques of Jesus by non-Christians. I did this when I was an agnostic. I still do this today as a follower of Jesus.
What was the result of all this research? What surprised and challenged me was the strength of the evidence for Jesus versus the evidence against. This provided the greatest push for me make the step from agnosticism to becoming follower of Jesus.
As you might imagine, there were other key moments in my journey to faith in Jesus. Also, becoming a follower of Jesus transformed (and continues to transform) my life for the better. However it’s the compelling evidence for Jesus being who He said He was which reversed me out of my agnostic cul-de-sac and set me off on my journey to faith in Him.

Do Your Own Research

I have a science and engineering background. I’m the type of person who needs the facts to make up my mind on anything.
There are plenty of people in the world like me. Once I became a Christian, I remembered the time and effort it had taken to amass the evidence I’d found. I thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if this was collected in one place and in language a non-Christian could engage with?”
This is what prompted me to put together the Jesus: The Evidence materials, which are available on the web, and published in a booklet. I sometimes deliver these as a live presentation too.
I did all this to make it easier for non-Christians to engage with the evidence for Jesus. However, I always say to non-Christians: “Don’t take my word for it. Do your own research!” If you think what I’ve written is biased, or doesn’t fully answer your questions, find out for yourself. You owe it to yourself to do this and perhaps experience the type of positive transformation a relationship with Jesus brings.

Banner advert for Jesus the Evidence which reads; There is a historical and rational basis for Jesus being the Son of God. There is a wealth of evidence to support this.

New Speaker Opportunity

by Solas

Solas is excited to announce that we are actively searching for a gifted speaker to join our ministry. We need someone to work with the growing Solas team to help fulfill the speaking, writing and teaching obligations of Solas (both in terms of evangelism and evangelism training) throughout the country and, where required, further afield.
We are looking for someone with clear evangelistic and apologetic gifts, with a proven ability to engage both non-Christian and Christian audiences, as well as experience of public speaking, writing and teaching. If you or someone you know might be interested in this opportunity, please read or share the full Solas Speaker job description here.
This is a full-time, paid position based in Dundee, Scotland.
For more information, please contact our Chief Operating Officer, Alan Dunn, using the form below.

TV: Ricky Gervais’ After Life

by Editor

The creative output of comedian, writer, director and actor Ricky Gervais is always worthy of some consideration. His past successes with The Office and Extras were due in no small part to his ability to see the everyday banalities of modern life, the petty significance of people’s experiences, and to render them with starkness and a subtly belated pathos. His writing is uncomfortable and angular, he is willing to use silences and particles of speech which seldom reach a script, and the outrageousness of some of his characters is only ever a slight exaggeration. Precisely because of these factors, the release on Netflix of After Life still felt like an important ‘television’ moment. The trailers showed a taciturn Gervais evidently world-worn and life-weary, facing up to the reality of grief, of life after the life of a loved one.
The result is at once poignant and polemical, daring and disappointing. As one would expect, the writing and acting is of the first order with a steady naturalism in how things are phrased and delivered. Gervais manages to portray mourning without excessive moping, turning out a brilliantly realised widower who is genuinely struggling to re-order his life in the wake of horrendous loss. The issues of suicide and alcoholism are brutally but sympathetically handled, and the little inflections of frustration with modern life (his character Tony’s encounters with the postman for example) are clever and recognisable. The rest of the cast do a brilliant job, creating a group of people who are part of the main character’s world, but who have excellent and disarming back stories of their own. The pace of the drama is also spot-on, and Gervais’ willingness to plant seeds of his plot which germinate throughout the series is both ambitious and believable. Given Gervais’ status it would have been easy to turn out a comedy series which didn’t take the pains which After Life has done, but there is little sense that he is resting on past capital in the writing and production here.
The poignancy of the drama is, however, somewhat thrown out of balance by its polemical preoccupations. Gervais’ atheism is given ample air time (which, as a Christian, is fine by me) but only in environments where it can be affirmed rather than intelligently probed. There are a few easy bouts between Tony and a colleague whose apologetics are somewhat lacking, offering him paragraphs of room to ruminate on the place of Christianity in a pluralistic world and the feasibility of ethical living in the absence of absolutes. In one sense it is refreshing to engage with a drama which enters this territory, but the handling here is neither believable nor deft.
This is particularly disappointing given the conceit behind the drama. I would have loved to watch a drama in which an individual works through the realities of grief from the vantage point of an atheistic worldview, where there was some sense of tension or even a small degree of wrestling with what it means to lose someone if the only ‘after life’ is that lived by those who are bereaved. Instead we get a series of monologues straight from the outdated and philosophically unsophisticated playbook of Richard Dawkins.
That disappointment is also sustained by some of the context and conclusions which After Life offers. Far from portraying grief in grey or gritty terms, the series’ world is permanently sun-lit and serene. Tony lives in a fictional town which is lightly populated, he works a dead-end job but is obviously affluent, giving the whole sequence of events a dream-like, heavenly feel. This is undoubtedly intentional, but one has to question the creative ambition behind this. Are we being consoled that grieving without God and without future hope is hard but ultimately enlightened? Are we really probing the pain of personal loss by using utopia as a backdrop?
The conclusions of the drama are as sunny as the summer bleached pavements on which it unfolds. At the opening of After Life Tony is at war with the world, standing up to opportunist thieves, feeling irked by other people’s eating habits, threatening a school bully with being bludgeoned to death with a hammer, starkly rejecting a date, showing impatience with his elderly father, and knowingly helping someone else to commit suicide. So far, so fearless. But the gradual turn around in Tony’s life is hard to quantify against these earlier behaviours, his empathy for others seeming to be restored through conversations with an elderly widow and a feckless psychotherapist. The resolution to the drama is vacuously redemptive with Tony’s goodness turning around the lives of all who are in his orbit. He resolves to treat others well as a means of grace, reserving his ire only for those who deserve to be handled with contempt.
This is all too easy. It is such a shame that a programme which purports to probe grief, which interrogates God, which heralds humanism, is so lacking in self-awareness and auto-critique. Gervais writes as though Beckett never had, as though existential angst is a thing of the past, as though creation simply awaits its redemption through human good. This is desperately naive, and utterly insufficient to face the true realities of living in the rough stuff of a broken world. Gervais does not want God but he longs for good, he does not want absolutes but he does want altruism, he wants to talk about grief but only as a vehicle for humanistic grace. There are depths to loss which are not plumbed here, there are anxieties and contradictions and cross-pressures which plague our existence as human beings, there are deep wounds which cannot be healed lightly, and After Life does little to address or grapple with any of this.

af4pZZsA_400x400 Andrew Roycroft

is pastor of Millisle Baptist Church in Co. Down. N. Ireland, and blogs at www.thinkingpastorally.com

An Evening with Edinburgh University Islamic Society

by Editor

I recently had the privilege of speaking at Edinburgh University. This time though, it was not at any of the campus Christian groups, but at the Edinburgh University Islamic Society. The way that meeting came about is remarkable! One of my old Canadian colleagues was holidaying in Edinburgh and whilst there, went on a walking tour. The tour was led by a Muslim university student and my friend happened to remark to her that “My old colleague Andy Bannister is based here in Scotland now, and he’s unusual because he’s a Christian but his PhD is in Islamic Studies.” This woman was fascinated and said, “Maybe we should get Andy to come and speak to our Islamic Society at some point, because we are trying to do more events where we engage with people of other faiths” and they exchanged contact details. Four months later, an email landed on my desk from the Islamic Society saying, “We’re having an inter-faith week, and would I be interested in sharing and engaging with them?” And I said, “Of course!”
The talk I came and gave to the Muslim audience at the university was titled “Mutual Misunderstandings Between Christians and Muslims”. Over the course of 45 minutes, I took three common misunderstandings that Christians often have about Muslims, and then three misunderstandings that Muslims often have about Christians.

COMMON CHRISTIAN MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF ISLAM

First, we examined the fact that many Christians think that all Muslims are violent, which is not fair or accurate understanding of Islam. Yes, there are some jihadi groups in Islam, but they are not the only ones.
Second, I looked at the way that Christians misunderstand Islam and politics. In the West, we tend to separate religion and politics, religion and state; by contrast, Islam doesn’t tend to make those distinctions. Muhammad was both a political and a religious leader and so in Islam those two categories are combined and that confuses many Christians.
Third, I spoke about how Christians misunderstand the Muslim view of Muhammad; sometimes Christians mistakenly think that Muslims worship Muhammad, which of course they don’t. At the same time, Christians often don’t understand the huge respect and love for Muhammad that Muslims have, which is why they get so angry when he is attacked or insulted, or people draw cartoons of him.

COMMON MUSLIM MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF CHRISTIANITY

Having looked at ways Christians sometimes misunderstand Islam, I shifted to talking about the three major misunderstandings that many Muslims have about Christians, and I think these are deeper and more significant.
I began by tackling the fact that many Muslims tend assume that all Westerners are Christian. That means Muslims often look at the things that are wrong in the West (e.g. sexual immorality, violence etc.) and think that those things are ‘Christian.’ So we disentangled that a little bit. At the same time, many Muslims fail to appreciate that for Christians, conversion is a personal decision. You are not a Christian because you were born in a Christian country, or born to Christian parents; rather you have to have a personal point of deciding to follow Christ to be a Christian. So that gave me the opportunity to share what commitment to Christ looks like.
The second Muslim misunderstanding of Christianity is that they misunderstand the Bible. They frequently think that it has been corrupted and changed. However, I showed the Muslims in Edinburgh that that idea is not actually in the Qur’an (which strongly affirms the Bible in many verses)—rather  it is an idea that developed about 200 years later in Islam, arising  during the debates between Muslims and Christians in the 2nd century of Islam. In fact, if Muslims took their own Qur’an seriously, it would challenges them to take the Bible seriously. I also talked the audience through a lot of the recent critical work on the early manuscripts of the Qur’an, which reveal the many textual variants and scribal changes in the early text. Many Muslims assume they have a “perfect text” with no difficult textual issues—I gently deconstructed that assumption.
And third and finally, I spoke about how Muslims often misunderstand Jesus. Many Muslims think that Christians have taken a mere man and elevated him to a position of deity. I said that that actually fails to understand the words of Jesus himself: the reason that Christians believe what we do about Jesus because of his own words and actions. Many of Jesus’s words would have been blasphemous if he wasn’t God (such as forgiving sin, for example). All of Jesus’s claims about himself culminate in Jesus’s trial before Caiaphas the High Priest, where Jesus was outrightly accused of blasphemy and asked, “Are you the Son of God?” Rather than say, “no”, Jesus quoted Daniel chapter 7, about the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory, which is an incredible passage which claims divinity. When Caiaphas heard this, he tore his robe, and cried, “Blasphemy!” and sentenced Jesus to death. So, Jesus’s whole life and ministry was about this claim that he is more than a man, and of course the authorities knew what he was claiming and crucified him for it. Now if Jesus has stayed dead that would have been that, but he rose from the dead three days later, the divine vindication of the claims Jesus had made.

A LIVELY Q&A

It was an incredible privilege to be standing in front of an almost entirely Muslim audience, unpacking the scriptures and sharing about Jesus. After the talk, we launched straight into the Q&A and it was very friendly, but pretty lively! Many of the Muslim audience had never heard any of this stuff, more than one of them saying they’d never heard a Christian explain and defend what Christians believed.
Perhaps the topic that drew the most the questions were the critical issues on the Qur’an. Muslims are fond of pointing to textual variants in biblical manuscripts, but I simply pointed out that all ancient texts have variants in their manuscripts, including the Qur’an (I have 3,000 or more on my computer, easily accessible and browsable through the Qur’an Gateway software package). The question is not “does a text have variants?” but “has the scholarship been done to ensure we can trust the text we have today?” Christians have always been open and honest about our manuscripts and indeed it is Christians who have built the best tools for studying biblical manuscripts. By contrast, Muslims have tended to ignore or hide the issues in early Qur’an manuscripts, which is why we are only finally now seeing good computer databases of early Qur’an manuscript variants made available. When I put some of these textual variants up on PowerPoint slides in Edinburgh, there were at times almost audible gasps from the audience who had never seen these kind of problems in their earliest manuscripts.
Overall, the talk in Edinburgh was a wonderful opportunity to engage our Muslim friends. I have been dialoguing and engaging with Muslims for over 20 years now, and they are always wonderfully welcoming, friendly people—who often ask fantastically good questions. I’ve been asked to come and speak again for them and I look forward to that. Too often Christians avoid Muslims or are afraid of them, thus it’s hardly surprising that many Muslims have no idea what the Christian faith really is.

If you’d like to think about how you can share your faith and talk about Jesus with Muslim friends or colleagues, I can highly recommend the book Reaching Muslims: A One-Stop Guide for Christians by my friend Nick Chatrath.

Totali-shame-ism and the End of Mercy

by Editor 1 Comment

hannah-wei-84051-unsplash(1)Sometimes incidents cluster together and you realise you’re not just looking at a few coincidences, you’re not even looking at a trend, you’re looking at the new normal.
Complex though they are, a series of recent events crystallised this for me. There was the shame-hunt against Kevin Hart, hounded out of hosting 2019’s un-hosted Oscars for something that he said ten years ago, and has since apologised for. There were the social media attacks on the Superbowl’s half-time artists, and former civil rights marcher Gladys Knight, for singing the national anthem, both thereby apparently failing to take a stand against racism. And there was the cyber-shaming of Liam Neeson because he confessed that, after a close friend was raped by a black man 40 years ago, he’d wanted to kill a black man. He hadn’t done it, but admitted, to his own horror, he’d considered it.
Some would argue, including John Barnes, one of England’s first black professional footballers, that Neeson should be applauded for his honesty. After all, we won’t get anywhere by pretending that we never feel prejudice, that there is no smidgen of sulphur in our hearts. And we won’t get anywhere when every syllable in our public discourse is CAT-scanned and MRI-ed for any atom of possible prejudice. 34 years after Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four predicted, the thought police have arrived – they just don’t work for the state.
In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, reflecting on two mid-century fictional visions: Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley believed our addiction to pleasure would enslave us, Orwell that our fears would. Postman argued that Huxley was right. I doubt he’d argue that now. Today, the laudable commitment of liberal democracies to inclusion and diversity risks morphing from protest to no-platforming to illiberalism and totali-shame-ism.
And here’s the thing. There’s no forgiveness, no mercy, no forgetting. Just a relentless drive to judge and denounce.
All this serves to highlight the majestic, counter-cultural grace of the gospel. Yes, God is a God of justice, opposed to the degrading of any human on any grounds. Yes, he has seen our every furtive action, picked up every sly whisper, logged every darkling thought… yet his mercy flows from the cross like an ocean, drenching the universe. As today’s Pharisees rage, God’s offer is ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’ to all who would repent and receive him. And our watchwords: grace, truth, love, and courage.

MARK-220x220Mark Greene

Mark is the Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (www.licc.org.uk). This article was previously published as part of their weekly “Connecting with Culture” series, and is reproduced with their kind permission.