Worshiping Jesus in the Mosque?

I received a comment on a previous post, "Insider Movement Introduction," from a supporter of insider movements in Muslim countries referring me to an article published in Christianity Today by Gene Daniels. While this fellow was basically trolling by posting links and not making arguments himself, I found the article extremely enlightening. Only our age of biblical illiteracy and theological decay would permit such an article to be printed in an evangelical publication.

I agreed with the commenter that Gene Daniel's article is very enlightening. The article is a structured interview which purports to be a discussion with a man who came to faith in Christ through a vision of multiplying macaroni and then sought out Christians.

After several years in the church and time in Bible college, the convert left the Christian church and returned to the mosque as a believer in "Isa" (the Koranic name for Jesus). He did so because Christians rejected the Islamic forms of address and greetings as well as Koranic religious terminology. He also seems to object to the refusal in organized Middle Eastern churches to recognize that the Allah of Islam is the God of Christianity. This man believes that the rejection of all of this is not a rejection of error, but of general revelation.

There is some irony that he uses such a term because he also rejects systematic theology, which gives us terms such as "general revelation," and the creeds of the church. Very enlightening indeed.

1) This "believer" is an apostate who has rejected most of what Christians in all cultures accept as what it means to be and live as a Christian. He isn't simply rejecting some kind of Western cultural practices, but Christianity itself. He rejects the creeds, symbols of our faith, crafted by people in the Near East, I might add. And he rejects the church. He is not a Christian.

2) In rejecting Christianity, he shows quite a bit of evidence that he is actually captured by the type of theology that we see quite a bit of in the West, the radical Emergent Church movement (I'm not indicting the entire movement, but the radical wing). Interestingly, this theological movement has made great inroads into missiology. Missiologists trained in anthropology and linguistics have been making the claim that theologians and biblical scholars cannot argue with their ideas because we're not linguists and anthropologists. Their dialogue is unethical and exclusive. I wonder if our "follower of Isa" has connections with these "progressive" missiologists?

3) The idea that the God of Muhammed is the Father of Jesus is dishonest or naive. The Koran explicitly rejects any plurality in God. It rejects Jesus as the Son of God. It rejects Christ's crucifixion. It rejects grace and atonement. A great deal of the Koran was written to dismantle Christianity. It is at its core an anti-Christian and anti-Jewish religion. Allah is no more Yahweh than Odin is - except that Odin's revelations were not geared at attacking the Bible. While many Christian communities use "Allah" as an Arabic word for the God of the Bible, many do not because of the associations with the Koranic deity. The interviewee's habit of referring to the Christian terms as "tribal," echos the Islamic habit of belittling Christian theology. Interestingly, many Muslim countries forbid Christians from using the word Allah because they understand that Allah cannot be the God of the Christians.

4) This interviewee speaks from both sides of his mouth in that he argues that Muslim converts first are Muslim, then are Muslim-Christian syncretists and then become fully Christian, implying that we should not expect Muslims to give up their culture at first. They will continue to talk and worship like Muslims and reject Christian theology. But where do they end up? Well, he ended up leaving the church and going back to the mosque and becoming for all intents and purposes a Muslim with some quirky ideas about Jesus and a mission to undermine Christianity in the Muslim world.

5) The argument that converts should not have to give up their culture is a dangerous one because some culture is created by religion and therefore whatever culture is bound up in a false religion should be rejected. He is arguing that because Islam is an all-encompassing religion which radically transforms culture (Muslims teach extensively on this) Muslim Christians should not give up Muslim practices. The more powerful the false religion, the more Christians should bow to it. I think the same argument was made in occupied Korea in the 1930s.

What Gene Daniels is promoting is evil. Middle Eastern Christians have enough suffering from Islamic persecution without Western liberals trying to subvert the Gospel from within.