Islam

During the advent season last year, a tenured African American professor at Wheaton College named Larycia Hawkins wore a scarf on her head as her own personal declaration of solidarity with Muslims. Dr. Hawkins explained her actions on FB: "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God."

Quickly, Provost Stan Jones met with Prof. Hawkins and she was put on administrative leave. Dr. Jones had served as provost since 1996, but his discipline of Prof. Hawkins's public heresy brought so much hostility from faculty members and students down on his head that he later announced he would resign as provost and return to teaching. After a couple months, Wheaton hired a woman as his replacement...

From Jeff Goldberg's 20,000 word piece on President Obama titled "The Obama Doctrine" just published in the Atlantic:

Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia. He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a way, a Hobbesian optimist.

(Note from TB: This post is by longtime contributor, Rev. David Wegener.)

Evil is real. It is in our hearts and families, our churches and synagogues, our city councils and state houses the world over. We’d like to pretend it doesn’t exist, but it still appears in all its horror from time to time, in ways we cannot ignore. Our attention is drawn to it when we read about …

• Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka, concentration camps where Jews were exterminated.
• Josef Stalin or Idi Amin or Pol Pot and their murderous reigns of terror.
• Genocide in Rwanda and Burundi and Bosnia in the 1990s.
• American dumpsters filled with unborn babies, killed just prior to their due date.
• The Chinese government’s one-child per family policy.
• ISIS and the atrocities they commit against Christians in Iraq and Syria.

This year, I read a book about evil. Peter Balakian, an Armenian-American historian, has written about the genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenians prior to, during and after World War I in The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. 24 April 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre. On that date in 1915, the Turks killed hundreds of Armenian leaders (poets and writers and priests and politicians and teachers).  

Sadly, talking about this massacre is difficult today since the Turkish government will still not admit that the massacres occurred...

I don't want to direct anyone to Darryl Hart's blog, but here's a short exchange Darrell Todd Maurina just had with Darryl Hart that is so typical of R2K men that I deposit it here for permanent reference. As always, they claim that any law that enforces any one of the Second Table of God's Moral Law requires the civil magistrate also to enforce the laws of the First Table of God's Moral Law. Thus they claim the man who wants the civil magistrate to prohibit the wholesale slaughter of the unborn (abortion) must also shutter every Islamic mosque, Roman Catholic cathedral, and Jewish synagogue...

This morning I read an article on CNN by Brian Mclaren calling Evangelicals to choose between allowing Islamophobia to spread further or seeking a "more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors." In the article he said, "Many sincere and good-hearted evangelicals have never yet had a real Muslim friend, and now they probably never will because their minds have been so prejudiced by Islamophobic broadcasts on so-called Christian television and radio." 

Let me start with a few facts:

1. I have had a "real Muslim friend." More than one, in fact. Hi **** and ****. How's your daughter ****? (Names withheld for their own safety.)
2. I'm no friend of Christian television and radio.
3. CNN doesn't claim to be Christian. Neither does BBC. Neither does The New York Times.

I've watched a number of news clips and read many articles in the last week that talk about Islam. In fact, I can't seem to get away from them. None of them have been from Christian news sources. Now maybe the news sources can't be trusted, but they are claiming that there has been a lot of violence and even an attack on a US Consulate that killed 4 US citizens. I must confess, Mr. Mclaren, I haven't checked their sources. It could all be a huge hoax. Maybe Christians and other non-Muslims are perfectly safe...

Today's New York Times contains a fascinating and troubling article on the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church over Russian policy in Syria.

Troubling, not in what it says about Russia or the Orthodox Church, but in what it says by implication about the Church in America where nary a voice is raised in defense of our persecuted brothers and sisters across the middle-east even as our nation goes about promoting Islamic governments dedicated to the eradication of Christianity from the region of the world in which God inaugurated His Kingdom.

When was the last time you preferred the religious commitments of the Russian president to those of the president of the United States? If not before, that day is now here. The money quote from the article:

The substance of this post is the text of a recent e-mail discussion I was copied on between two friends of Baylyblog--one a prof and the other an attorney employed as a civil magistrate. Note particularly this statement in the first half of the discussion: "our biggest worry is of a corrupt government whose police violate our civil rights."

There's no doubt this should be the greatest concern of believers, today.

Christians consistently have failed to recognize that every accretion of power and authority to the civil magistrate comes at the expense of the authority and freedom of the mediating institutions of the Church and family, not simply the freedom of the individual. Typically, political conservatives worry only about individual liberty, but the freedom to obey Scripture and exercise authority in the Christian home and Church is under sustained attack, also, and is every bit as serious a usurpation of authority as our loss of individual freedom.

God has ordained authority in the households of the home and Church, and the denial of freedom to those institutions to govern themselves according to Scripture is growing year by year and is a central part of the decline of the West we have experienced. Yet sadly, there has been almost no warning given by our church and home fathers.

The State is our Savior-Protector/Provider and the more dependent the State renders her citizens, the more those citizens will place their faith in the god of the state rather than their own personal gods. And so we arrive at the place where America's most popular gods, whether Mormon, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, pose no particular threat to the state's bipartisan and unilateral commitment to destroy any person or institution blocking the path to her glorious dominion...

Two posts from my son, Joseph Bayly, worth reading--the first on standing in the gap and the second on the assasination of Osama bin Laden.

Joseph and David Abu-Sara are leading a church plant in Indianapolis called ClearNote Church of Indianapolis. Listen to some of the sermons, here; I commend their ministry to you and your Indy friends and relatives.

(TB)

For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, was bringing no little business to the craftsmen; these he gathered together with the workmen of similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that our prosperity depends upon this business. You see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people, saying that gods made with hands are no gods at all. Not only is there danger that this trade of ours fall into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis be regarded as worthless and that she whom all of Asia and the world worship will even be dethroned from her magnificence.” When they heard this and were filled with rage, they began crying out, saying, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:24-28).

(Tim) The newly inaugurated governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, said this inside a Christian church from that church's pulpit during a worship service: "Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother." 

ABC reports:

A spokesman for the Anti Defamation League said the governor's comments were "stunning" and "distressing" and were tantamount to proselytizing.

"It is stunning to me that he'd make those remarks. It's distressing because of the suggestion that he feels that people who aren't Christian are not entitled to love and respect. On the day that he is sworn in as governor, he's sending a statement to the public saying if you're not Christian you can't be with me. From our point of view that is proselytizing for Christianity and coming very close to a violation of the First Amendment."

Let me keep reminding us that the much-ballyhooed separation of church and state that lulls a certain type of naive Christian man to sleep is a figment of our imagination and this becomes more clear each day. What was meant by freedom of religion by those who wrote and adopted our U.S. Constitution was freedom to acknowledge and worship the Only True God according to the leading of our own consciences. It was never meant to allow Islam or the fools of evolution who say there is no God the same protection as Christians. This is a simple historical fact and is avoided at all costs by those who live in a dream world and desperately want to believe secularism is a tolerant religion.

Exactly like the ancient Roman Empire, America's laws and civil magistrates and the schools they force us to fund are supremely religious and utterly intolerant. The religion is secularism and it's committed to outlawing true Christian faith. Those Christians who think they will be allowed to practice Biblical faith under secular civil magistrates are blind to the reality of their own lives as well as the lives being prepared for their children and grandchildren...