BCC Watch: Hope, Atonement, and Islam

My goal to read BCC for a month continues. Here are three posts I liked.

SteveP writes a good post on not losing one’s faith because you don’t like some aspect of the Church.

Blair Hodges writes about the various ways Christians over the centuries have understood the atonement. I enjoyed his point that the atonement was about healing relationships (specifically with God, but also with others).

I also enjoyed this post by Michael Austin about Islam as a religion of peace.

On that last one, I wrote a Facebook post a while back on the same subject. My view is a bit different. I think this is not a religious problem, per se, so much as a political problem. Religions that control states are dangerous, but they aren’t the same as religions that don’t. “Islam” is a term we use for both types as if they aren’t really very different things.

11 thoughts on “BCC Watch: Hope, Atonement, and Islam

  1. Maybe they are breaking out all the sincere and thoughtful posts since they know you are watching and reporting on them!

  2. It is a religious problem for numerous reasons, but a big part is due to the fact that within Islam there is no allowance for separation of mosque and state.

  3. Yes, they do have some very good articles over at BCC. We do not have to agree on everything to be able to see that we agree on many things regarding the gospel and the world we live in.

  4. “Within Islam there is no allowance for separation of mosque and state.”

    That could have been said about Christianity 500 years ago. Heck, it was only a few years ago that Britain repealed its anti-blasphemy laws! I think that’s the BCC post’s point: there is another narrative, it just needs to be found and adopted.

  5. Bringing up Christian barbarity of five hundred years ago actually does very little to elucidate the problem of Islamic terror of the 21st century.

    By the way, I read the Qur’an in Arabic, so I’m more than acquainted with the essential contours of the faith. I have a nuanced view.

  6. “Bringing up Christian barbarity of five hundred years ago actually does very little to elucidate the problem of Islamic terror of the 21st century.”

    Why would this be?

  7. Bruce,

    Christianity goes to great lengths to showcase its fundamental detachment with political power. “My kingdom is not of this world.” “We seek a country, whose builder and maker is God.” (I could go on and on; many verses showcase the fact that Christians obey the law, submit to the powers that be, etc. etc..)

    Of course, that didn’t prevent folks from attempting to use Christianity to gain political power, nor does it prevent them from trying it today. But they have no doctrinal leg to stand on for their presumption.

    Islam has no doctrinal pronouncements that keep it bounded. Islam is political just as much as it is religious. You cannot separate the two spheres. That is why excesses performed by the State in the name of Christ were fundamentally abnormal: it didn’t comport with the nature of Christianity. It was an aberration of the highest order.

    Political crimes committed in the name of Allah/Islam are not bugs — they are features. Hence, it’s disingenuous to opine that Christianity’s crimes of half a millennium ago have anything to do with crimes committed by Islamic fundamentalists. Those who say it’s the same thing are completely ignorant of Islam’s essence. We Westerners take it for granted that we have separate spheres for our religion and our government and our culture. We place them in separate boxes. Islam does not. They are all the same.

    This is why when we pontificate about whether or not Islam is “peaceful” or not, we need to put aside our Western presumptions. This is, of course, hard to do. But the only way to really do it is to learn Arabic and read books written by the Islamists. This I have done, and lots of other folk.

    On another note, whatever lessons we might draw from Christian crimes of 1514 AD, it does nothing to equip the West with the Islamic crimes of 2014. The grounding, theology, politics, motives, etc., are not the same. That’s why I find essays like the one linked to at BCC and elsewhere to be very uninformed about what Islam really is. (Note: I have stated elsewhere that Islam is not a religion of hate/violence; yet it is completely mendacious to assert that Islam has *nothing* to do with Islamic extremism. It’s an issue that defies tweets and headlines.)

  8. Michael,

    Based on your argument, it seems like you’d have considerable concerns with Mormonism, which associated itself with political power both in doctrine and practice for a number of years.

    Also, doesn’t it seem a little strange, at least to call Christian political power ‘abnormal’ when in fact it represents the majority of its history still?

    Granted, as Mormons we can see that as the apostasy, but that just dissociates Christianity from Christendom, which seems religiously sound (from within a Mormon viewpoint) but seems rather doubtful for a political discussion. Its still unclear to me how we can say there is no fair analogy between Christianity (in historical Christendom) and Islam here. Why would we not feel that Islam can as easily move to seeing their kingdom as spiritual (as Mormons did, for example) without really giving up belief in their past political kingdom (as Mormons did, for example). It is still not clear to me why this represents a ‘feature’ of Islam any more so than Mormonism or for that matter ‘Christendom.’

  9. “It is still not clear to me why this represents a ‘feature’ of Islam any more so than Mormonism or for that matter ‘Christendom.’”

    That’s because you’re still looking at through a Western filter, Bruce. Muslims — by and large — simply don’t accept the notion that Islamic theology shouldn’t rule matters in the secular sphere. And it’s an explicit part of their doctrine. Secular Muslim states are rare, and in fact, are getting more rare — Turkey is abandoning its secular experiment as Erdogan shifts ever more towards combining mosque and state. Also, you haven’t read the primary sources in Arabic.

    Again, real scholarship on these issues show vast differences between Christianity and Islam with respect to political power.

    “it seems like you’d have considerable concerns with Mormonism, which associated itself with political power both in doctrine and practice for a number of years.”

    I’m not talking about Mormonism, I’m talking about the differences between Christianity and Islam. There is nothing in Christian doctrine that calls for Christians to rule the world with the sword and fist. I can find you explicit references for the latter in Islamic scripture and hermeneutical works. There is simply a huge ontological gulf between the two thought systems. Again, this isn’t to knock or disparage Islam, it’s simply laying out the facts. Islam separates the world into the Dar-el-Islam and the Dar-el-Harb, the “House of Peace” and the “House of War”. If you and your nation aren’t Muslim — “submitted [to Allah]” — then you are in the House of War, which means that you are Islam’s enemy.

    This is Jihad 101, Bruce. And it’s commonly believed and preached in just about every mosque in the Middle East.

    I can’t stress this point enough: I am not anti-Islam. It’s just simply part of my job to know and understand these things. My bread and butter. I’m not paranoid, and I’m not making this stuff up. This is the real deal. There simply is no comparison with Christian mistakes or Christian malfeasance because the doctrinal groundings are totally different.

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