From BBC News:
A traditionalist Anglican has said he will continue with a campaign for the Church of England to work explicitly to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Paul Eddy, a lay member of the General Synod, has come under intense pressure from bishops to withdraw his plan.
But he has secured enough support for his motion to be debated at the next meeting of the Church's ruling body.
The motion calls on the Church to proclaim Christianity as the only route to ultimate salvation.
Mr Eddy, who is training to become a priest, has been denounced by some Muslims, but says the Church can no longer avoid hard questions about its beliefs.
He said he had received angry e-mails and telephone calls from senior figures in the Church denouncing his motion.
No-go areas
Mr Eddy claims to have the backing of at least 124 members of the synod, including the Bishops of Rochester, Carlisle and Chester.
Speaking to the Sunday programme on BBC Radio Four, he said that in an effort to be inclusive and inoffensive, the church had "lost its nerve" and was "not doing what the Bible says".
"Both Christianity and Islam are missionary faiths," he said. "For years, we have sent missionaries throughout the whole world, but when we have the privilege of people of all nations on our doorstep, we have a responsibility as the state church to share the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Mr Eddy claimed that 20% of parishes contained populations in which 60% of people were not Christian.
And he said that without a concerted effort, the church was in danger of creating "no-go areas for the gospel".
"Most Muslims that I've talked to say, 'I really wish that Christians would stop watering down their faith and expecting us to do the same.'
"Until we start really saying what we really believe in our faith, there will be no respect.
"Actually, to present to a Muslim that we believe Jesus is the only way to God, they'll say, 'We know that'.
"They will expect us - if we're true Christians - to try to evangelise them, in the same way they will expect us, if they're true Muslims, to adopt their faith."
Risk of alienation
Mr Eddy called for a code of good practice to be drawn up by bishops to give church members advice on how to evangelise.
It should also give advice, he said, on how to support Muslims who choose to convert and are then ostracised by their communities.
BBC News religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott says Mr Eddy's stance is likely to alienate many Muslims at a highly-sensitive time in the relationship between Islam and Christianity in the UK.
Our correspondent added that the motion is a sign of the conservative evangelical wing of the Church flexing its muscles to oppose what it warns is a watering down of Christian values in deference especially to Muslims.
13 comments:
Even those who don't necessarily like Christianity, but understand Islam, might support Christians converting Muslims.
Damien,
Good point. Christians don't kill, or even attempt to kill people by the tens of thousands.
No, never. That's why Spain converted peacefully to Christianity, and why North and South America are still dominated by native spirituality.
Muslims need to be converted away from their awful, false belief system. Christians, if they were far more aggressive, could convert muslims by the millions easily
Anonymous,
Christians have been guilty of some evil vile things, but they often had to look outside of scripture in order to justify their evil actions. Or if they did not look elsewhere, sometimes they had to take scripture out of context. Muslims never have to look outside of the their religious text to justify killing infidels. They never have to take them out of context to justify murdering those who disagree with them. Pat Robertson may have some dumb, even sometimes hateful ideas, but I have never heard him call for the murder of unbelievers or the violent overthrow of the US government. Also I haven't heard that kind of rhetoric from any remotely mainstream Christian leader. That kind of stuff is hardly mainstream, even for the religious right. Sure Christian Reconstructionists call for getting rid of the US constitution and replacing it with biblical law, but they are hardly mainstream, even for Christian fundamentalists.
I'm a fundamentalist Christian, and I don't know anyone who wants to replace the American Constitution with Biblical law.
I know people who would talk about in theory, but that "theory" includes Christ coming back and reigning as King of the New Jerusalem. There are verses in the book of Revelation which tell us that the New Jerusalem will descend to the Earth and there will be a new Heaven and Earth, and there will be no more tears. That's when Biblical law (God's Law) will replace man's law.
But, the thing is, no matter how perfect God's Law may be, as long as man is interpreting it, it will be unjust.
God separated the Priestly class from the Kings. He did so so that neither the King nor the Priest would have final word. In other words, they are a check and balance on each other, much like the Judicial and Executive branches of the government.
The Bible makes it clear that the King and the Priest will never be reconciled, until the Messiah returns as a Conquering King.
In other words, the Bible calls for separation of Church and State.
By the way, I am not denying that Christian Reconstructionism exists. Instead, I am saying that CR's are few and far between. I am a guy who has worked with Churches and has known more than my share of Pastors. I haven't heard any express the desire for this agenda to be forwarded.
Here's some info on Christian Reconstructionism (just for the record):
The movement, in its modern form, was founded in the United States of America popularized by Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony in his work, The Institutes of Biblical Law (published in 1973) the second half of the 20th century, though to an extent it had its beginnings in the colonial governments of early New England (especially that of the Massachusetts Bay colony). Other past and present Reconstructionist leaders include Gary North (Rushdoony's son-in-law), Howard Ahmanson, Jr., Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, Gary DeMar, Kenneth Gentry, and Andrew Sandlin.
The social structure advocated by Christian Reconstructionism would have the clergy, laity and government, individually and corporately, to be in ultimate submission to the moral principles of the Bible, including the Old Testament, while retaining their separate jurisdictional spheres of authority and roles in society as inferred from principles of biblical law, both Old and New Testaments. It is the claim of Christian Reconstructionism that even as under the Davidic administration of the Israelites, the Priests (Levitical line) and Kings (Davidic line) were distinguished by their scopes of authority (e.g., the King could not offer sacrifices for others and the Priests could not pass or enforce legislation) and their roles in society (e.g., the King maintained the social welfare and the Priests maintained personal welfare), so it should be in a modern Christian Reconstructionist society.
Christian Reconstructionists make no pretense of subscribing to the pluralistic ideals of religious tolerance (derided as "Political Polytheism", by author Gary North, in a book of that name), because this would require them to accept a non-Biblical source of ethical standards. They envision a future in which opponents to Jesus Christ will eventually be relatively few in number and surrender the public square to his rule. In principle they are opposed to bringing this about through martial or political means. Adherents of the movement are opposed to any institutional combination of Church and State, as in Erastianism and Caesaropapism.
They do not view politics as their primary, or even an important, instrument of change. Nevertheless, in political terms the ideal toward which they aim might be called "denominational tolerance", or "tolerance within the bounds of Christianity": in the predominantly Christian world they envision, this is the only kind of tolerance that will be necessary. Therefore, they use the Bible, in contrast to political documents like the Constitution of the United States, as their pattern and guide for envisioning the future. They are more in line with the theonomic Christian Commonwealths, such as that of Colonial Massachusetts under John Cotton, Geneva under John Calvin, or the Netherlands under Abraham Kuyper, even though Kuyper was a pluralist who governed in coalition with the Roman Catholic political party and was opposed to the freemarket economics that theonomists think Biblical law requires. Christian Reconstructionists cite the eventual failure of the English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell as evidence that only majority rule and consent can sustain a Theonomic Christian Commonwealth. They seek to pervade society from within, through the gradual spread and perfection of Christian belief and obedience; and they believe that this influence is ultimately inexorable, having no need for or benefit from top-down coercion of any kind, because it is carried out under the already established authority of Jesus Christ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism
So, as one can see, if this is an accurate description of Christian Reconstructionism, CR's believe this will happen naturally and gradually, and not through coercion.
It is my opinion that a lot of what we hear about CR comes from Leftists trying to minimize the truly horrific Islamic Jihad, which is established through physical violence.
That being said, I do not support the notion of Christian Reconstruction, as I understand it.
In his latest book, Religion of Peace?, Robert Spencer has a short portion about Rushdoony. Worth reading.
Christian Reconstructionism is not a large movement.
Always On Watch,
You said,
"Christian Reconstructionism is not a large movement"
Lets thank God for that. We have enough to worry about with the Jihadists!
Pastorius,
By the way I did find this one Reconstructionist website and it's host was just railing on and on about how evil the constitution is and how selfish and ungodly the founding fathers were. I am truly grateful that he's views aren't mainstream Christianity.
The American Constitution is "unGodly"?
That's funny.
This doesn't directly relate, but I was just thinking today about how Abraham Lincoln was like a modern times Prophet of God. But, he would have rejected that notion outright, seeing as how we was generally agnostic about a personal God.
That doesn't mean he didn't do the work of God, however.
I'd like to see any Christian Reconstructionist try to match his work beside that of Abraham Lincoln.
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