God, Allah and Rick Warren

ON RELIGION

By Terry Mattingly

At the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Tem­ple Mount, cen­turies of Islamic doc­trine have lit­er­ally been carved into the shrine’s walls.

Two quo­ta­tions on the north­west wall will be of spe­cial inter­est to any­one inter­ested in the lat­est whirl­wind of con­tro­versy linked to evan­gel­i­cal super­star Rick War­ren and his giant Sad­dle­back Church.

The outer face inscrip­tion states, in part: “Praise be to God who has not taken a son and who does not have any part­ner in domin­ion. …” On the inside, after a ref­er­ence to Jesus, is writ­ten: “Peace be upon the day he was born, the day he dies and the day he is raised up alive. That is Jesus, son of Mary. … It is not for God to take a son.”

In other words, Islam pro­claims a strict monothe­ism, while reject­ing the Chris­t­ian belief that God is One, yet has been revealed as God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Thus, it mat­ters that fun­da­men­tal­ist crit­ics are cir­cu­lat­ing excerpts from a recent Orange County Reg­is­ter report claim­ing that War­ren and his megachurch have joined with nearby mosques to pro­mote a “set of the­o­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples” — called the King’s Way — pro­claim­ing that “Chris­tians and Mus­lims wor­ship the same God.”

War­ren is never quoted affirm­ing these cru­cial claims and the arti­cle also reports that lead­ers on both sides have agreed to cease evan­ge­lis­tic efforts to con­vert mem­bers of each other’s flocks.

The preacher and best­selling author has attempted to dis­tance him­self from the online firestorm, which builds on long­stand­ing claims by reli­gious broad­caster Jack Van Impe that War­ren has become a pro­po­nent of “Chris­lam” — an alleged attempt to blend Islam and Christianity.

Warren’s defend­ers have, how­ever, posted an inter­view tran­script in which he has responded to these “Chris­lam” allegations.

“Chris­tians have a view of God that is unique,” stressed War­ren. “We believe God is a Trin­ity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not three sep­a­rate gods but one God. No other faith believes Jesus is God. The belief in God as a Trin­ity is the foun­da­tional dif­fer­ence between Chris­tians and every­one else.”

The Sad­dle­back leader also denied that King’s Way efforts to build a “bridge” of under­stand­ing and tol­er­ance rep­re­sents a change in his South­ern Bap­tist congregation’s com­mit­ment to evangelism.

“Build­ing a bridge” to the Mus­lim com­mu­nity, said War­ren, “has noth­ing to do with com­pro­mis­ing your beliefs. It’s all about your behav­ior and your atti­tude toward them. It’s about gen­uinely lov­ing peo­ple. … Before peo­ple trust Jesus they must trust you. You can­not win your ene­mies to Christ, only your friends. … Besides, it is Christ-like to treat all peo­ple with dig­nity and lis­ten to them with respect.”

Mean­while, the con­ser­v­a­tive “Appris­ing Min­istries” web­site has posted what it claims is a piece of a King’s Way doc­u­ment obtained by the Reg­is­ter from a source close to the inter­faith effort.

In its sec­tion on God, this report claims that both sides — backed with quo­ta­tions from the Bible and the Koran — agreed that “God is one,” “God is the Cre­ator,” “God is dif­fer­ent from the world,” “God is good,” “God loves,” “God is just” and that “God’s love encom­passes God’s judgment.”

The prob­lem, of course, is that Chris­tians and Mus­lims, as well as Jews, have for cen­turies pro­claimed that “God is one” — while dis­agree­ing on whether this one­ness can be rec­on­ciled with Christianity’s doc­trine of the Trinity.

Con­tacted by email, War­ren insisted that pub­lic dis­cus­sions of an offi­cial King’s Way doc­tri­nal state­ment — as opposed to a pro­gram by that name that pro­motes inter­faith under­stand­ing — caught him by sur­prise. “Nei­ther I, nor my staff had ever seen such a doc­u­ment UNTIL the arti­cle men­tioned it. It wasn’t cre­ated or even seen by us. … Sad­dle­back Church as a church was not involved,” he said.

How­ever, the bit­ter cyber-debates con­tinue, sim­i­lar to those sur­round­ing Warren’s efforts to pro­mote dia­logues with athe­ists, gay-rights lead­ers and Pres­i­dent Barack Obama and his sup­port­ers on the Chris­t­ian left.

Asked directly if he is “pro­mot­ing Chris­lam,” War­ren released this blunt reply.

“It’s the lie that won’t die,” he said. “Jesus is the ONLY way to sal­va­tion. Period. If I didn’t believe that, I’d get into a much eas­ier line of work! But I do believe that every­body needs Jesus and I am will­ing to put up with false state­ments and mis­un­der­stand­ings in order to get the Gospel out.”

(Terry Mat­tingly is the direc­tor of the Wash­ing­ton Jour­nal­ism Cen­ter at the Coun­cil for Chris­t­ian Col­leges and Uni­ver­si­ties and leads the GetReligion.org project to study reli­gion and the news.)

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Mar 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.