Is Allah the same God?

Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton
from her Facebook page

You may have heard of the controversy at Wheaton College over the professor who donned a hijab (head covering) in solidarity with peaceful Muslims who are currently an object of hatred.

Christianity Today's article
Miroslav Volf in the Washington Post
Roger Olson on his blog

1. Wheaton's response was mature and measured. They found no fault in her wearing the scarf to express Christ's command to love both our friends and enemies. Implicitly, I do not believe they found fault in her implicit point that carpet bombing the Middle East, relishing the thought of shooting Muslims, or some attitudes toward Muslim refugees entering the United States were not particularly good representations of Christian values.

Here's Wheaton's statement: "The College has no stated position on the wearing of headscarves as a gesture of care and concern for those in Muslim or other religious communities that may face discrimination or persecution. We support the protection of all Americans including the right to the free exercise of religion, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States" (Philip Ryken, President of Wheaton).

The college also stated, "Faculty and student expressions of concern about the treatment of Muslims have been grounded in a desire to live peaceably and respectfully with all people, including our neighbors of Islamic and other religious faith traditions. While these commitments are consistent with our Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, overtures of Christian friendship must be enacted with theological clarity as well as compassion."

2. What got Dr. Hawkins on suspension, pending review, is her comment that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. I've always found this statement ambiguous. It seems that it does not really say what it is trying to say. After all, there is only one true God out there.

Can we express the options in clearer, less ambiguous forms?

• Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have hold of different parts of the same elephant? In this case, they would all be right on some aspects and wrong on other aspects of the elephant.
• Does one of these groups have a more correct understanding of the one God than others, while the other two are at least trying to worship the same Being.
• Are Jews and Muslims really worshiping Satan, demons, or fantasies, even though they think they are worshiping the one true God?
• Are some Jews and Muslims seeking after the one true God genuinely in their hearts, while being mistaken in their thinking about God? Meanwhile, are some Jews, Christians, and Muslims not truly worshiping the one true God at all in their hearts?

Wheaton's response to her theology was, "While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation, and the life of prayer." Again, this statement is entirely accurate from a Christian perspective.

3. Personally, I feel sympathy as usual all the way around. I respect this faculty member's sense that America is a little out of whack right now in its values. I hope she passes muster in her review.

On the other hand, I would completely agree with the theological statement of Wheaton two paragraphs above. Islam is not an equally true religion to Christianity, at least not from a Christian point of view. Evangelical colleges do not espouse the elephant view above. As a pietist in the Wesleyan tradition, the fourth bullet point above is the one I hope is true. In that case, some Jews and Muslims would be seeking after the one true God of Christian faith, but they would not be understanding him correctly.

I of course feel sympathy for the administration of Wheaton too. Pesky faculty. :-) Always making statements without any consideration of the political implications or consequences, not to mention the impact on the donor base and potential students.

Academic freedom simply is not absolute, and it's foolish for any faculty member to think so. Having a teaching position at a university simply is not a license to say or do whatever you want to say or do.

But then again, her spirit does not seem to be contentious. She sent out a "holy kiss" to those who disagreed with her. :-)

Worthen: The Drive to Accreditation (6)

On to chapter 5 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Man, I wish I were a faster reader. Or maybe I shouldn't try to read too many things at once?

Reviews of previous chapters include:

Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)

Now chapter 5, "The Marks of Campus Conversion."  This chapter gives another angle on the collection of social groups and forces we might call fundamentalist and evangelical in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It's the evangelism and education angle.

If you look at some of the great revivalists of the late 1800s, the great evangelist D. L. Moody founded Moody Bible Institute (Chicago Bible Institute) in 1886. Pastor William Bell Riley started Northwestern in St. Paul in 1902. The first Dean of Biola was a revivalist (R. A. Torrey) in 1912. The radio evangelist Charles Fuller helped found Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947. Bible colleges had a way of being founded by evangelists, it seems, as places to train more evangelists and missionaries. These evangelists also had the people skills to attract the students that made such institutes and colleges financially viable.

As much as we may hate the stereotypical divide between the thinker and the doer, history has often played into the stereotype. So Fuller's goals and the goals of his Machen-trained elite faculty pulled against each other from time to time. In 1962, Sam Sutherland, president of Biola, was a "Bible Institute man" who may not have been interested in theologians like C. F. H. Henry or in engaging the public forum. Sutherland was not interested in academic prestige but training people to be evangelists.

But he needed students too. In the first part of the twentieth century, the institutes and Bible colleges of fundamentalism weren't interested in things like accreditation. Self-described professionals invented clubs that conferred on each other status, or so it seemed. Academic acknowledgement seekers like Wheaton were the outliers initially. "Early Bible college leaders were unimpressed by a self-policing, credentialed elite. They exalted the common sense of the layman whose faith was unmuddled by the mystifications of so-called experts" (102). So what else is new.

The fundamentalists had their own accrediting system of sorts. They invited each other to come speak at each other's campuses. They gave each other (unaccredited) honorary degrees.

Then came the GI Bill after World War 2. Expectations for standard of living increased--standards that couldn't be met as a typical pastor or missionary. As is almost always the case, money was the decider. And although the leaders of the Bible colleges and institutes bemoaned the fact that the church was losing its spirituality, they began to pursue accreditation and broaden into liberal arts colleges. Although they believed their students were becoming materialistic, they knew well enough that they needed students to survive.

They applied for secular accreditation so that students could receive aid from the federal government. They started offering more than just ministry and missionary majors.

But before that, a collection of Bible colleges set up their own accreditation organization, what is now called the Association for Biblical Higher Education. It would eventually drink from the same well of academic standards of the age. For example, it would turn down Columbia Bible College for accreditation renewal in the 1960s because of low standards, irregular grading, and not teaching much beyond Christian beliefs.

As much as they might disdain academia in general, Bible institutes also longed for outside recognition. They valued professors with PhDs. There were ways to get PhDs without being infected by secular research institutions, particularly if you worked on them while you were teaching at the Bible institute.

Academic freedom was a problem, as was the increase of students in the late 60s who were thinking outside the box. Sutherland, president of Biola, would try to defend Biola to donors as being 80% Republican and would first gently try to encourage students not to write articles opposing the Vietnam War or in favor of Bobby Kennedy.

Wheaton in particular seems to have pushed the limits of student freedom of expression. Worthen ends the chapter arguing more or less that every generation thinks the next is spiritually losing it and becoming more liberal. Every older generation, as young people grow up, clamors for revival to get back to the good old days, when we were a Christian nation and everyone was spiritual.

Rather, in her opinion, "the history of Christianity... is one long story of the mutual accommodation between sacred tradition and new cultural contexts, needs, and threats" (122). It is not secularization but the continual "reenchantment of earthly life" in the light of an ever changing world.

The chapter ends with the fascination of evangelicals and fundamentalists with C. S. Lewis. Even Bob Jones, puzzled by his pipe and liquor, had to conclude he was a Christian. C. S. Lewis was the patron saint of intellect for evangelicals, proof positive that you could be smart and be a believer. Colleges like Wheaton and Westmont treated his artifacts like medieval relics, and Taylor University reconstructed his favorite pub in the basement of its library--minus the alcohol of course.

Lewis proved that you could have an imagination and love the arts and still be a Christian, unlike A. W. Tozer, who suggested that fiction had nothing to do with Christianity. Similarly, Clyde Kilby of Wheaton could puzzle at the propositionalism of his long acquaintance C. F. H. Henry, "How can the Psalms be propositional?" he posed in disagreement with his ever rational, fellow alumnus.

The chapter also mentions Wheaton professor, Arthur Holmes, whose short, classic work, The Idea of a Christian College, remains to my mind an excellent model of the integration of faith with learning. He suggests levels of integration, ranging from the attitude of the professor to the element of ethics in applying a discipline to to foundations to worldview. It was Holmes who popularized the truism, "All truth is God's truth."

To my mind, Holmes was a giant when it comes to what it means to be a Christian liberal arts college, at least in terms of the principles. Obviously the person who knows the trick on how a liberal arts oriented college can thrive in the current climate will also be mentioned in the history of education. We are in a time of transformation in education not unlike that facilitated by the GI Bill, IMO.

Hays and Wright

Unfortunately I missed the Wheaton conference on N. T. Wright last week. There are some good reviews out there, particularly by Nijay Gupta and Michael Gorman. The key exchange was between Richard Hays and Tom Wright. Wright considers Hays too Barthian. Hays considers Wright too oriented around the historical.

Here is Gorman's summary.

Here is Gupta's summary.

Visit to Christianity Today

Wayne Schmidt and I had a nice visit today with the editorial and publishing staff of Christianity Today International. Very nice, creative, and faith-full people. We also managed a quick drive around the Wheaton campus. Very nice indeed.

P.S. "Faith-full" has become my way of describing Christians of orthodox and orthoprax faith (yes, I just made up that word too). I like "faith-full" because it transcends less helpful labels like "conservative" and "liberal."

"Whither Wheaton"

Scot McKnight (http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/) has drawn attention to this piece that was yanked from Books and Culture at the last minute. Scot McKnight has mentioned it in abbreviated form on his blog:

Wheaton 1
Wheaton 2

Virtually impossible to keep anything quiet or private these days. Don't wait to make your own announcements. Someone in the room will have Twittered it before you even leave the meeting. I don't know how to change our privacy laws, but I wonder if they will be to our detriment in the twenty-first century.