St. John Studies

Here it is the 18^th and my last post was July 13^th.

When I decided to blog on a book about polarization I had no idea that our country would be as polarized as it is.

I have been writing about the idea that some people will not make it to heaven due to their different religious beliefs, and I have addressed the Jewish faith, the Hindu faith and have posted twice on the Muslim faith.

And then I stop and think.

I am not an idiot. Hundreds of people do not read this blog so why do I care about the tenor of my thoughts?

I care because in my own miniscule way I don’t want to pour any more gasoline on the fires that are burning today.

I have seen our country torn apart before; the 1968 democratic convention, the resignation of a sitting president, the assassinations of great leaders like John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the unrest of the Vietnam War era, and the riots of Watts in Los Angeles.

All tough times, scary times, times when a person could imagine that the fabric of our country was being torn apart. But it wasn’t torn apart permanently. We eventually came back together again.

We’ll get through these tough times again.

But I have to admit, we have challenges now that we did not have in those earlier crises.

The twenty-four hour news channels put so much “news” on the television. They expose every problem to the max.  They have their biases, despite their claim that they are not biased.  It is my fear that millions of people are watching these channels and swallowing the opinions that are presented as news and letting the bias become unexamined personal “factual” opinion.  This will not help with the divisiveness that we are experiencing in this country.

Today, due to technology, we have this attitude that what we say matters and it does, but sometimes people do not take time to temper their language.   They write comments online using language that is not appropriate for public consumption.  My guess is that it is very easy to hide behind a computer.  It is very different when you try to say some of these things face to face.  The problem is that divisive language is divisive language whether it is a comment on a Facebook post or a response to a You Tube video.

When people do come face-to-face, they struggle to find a way to express themselves in a manner that allows discussion. Instead of expressing ideas in a way that invites opposing opinions and those opinions allow for thorough civil discussion and learning to occur, the language is so strident that feelings are hurt, anger is expressed, hatred gets aired and sometimes all this results in violence.

We have been discussing conflict in my Sunday School class and I talked about one of the most disappointing places to be in the world, the return merchandise line at a “big box store.” I am so disappointed by the language that people use when they get to the counter and they express their dissatisfaction.  The first words that often come out are confrontational words [often curse words].   The poor returns clerk is going to take the product back and give the shopper a new product, a money refund or an instore credit card.  They want your future business.  That does not matter.  Impatient people resort to incendiary words as an initial communication anyhow.

As Christians, how do we function in this world?   We are called to function even though the world’s standard is not our standard.  We have problems like everyone else but our response to those problems is very important.  Other people look to us and judge our God by how we react.   If we spew some of the hatred we hear on 24 hour news channels, if we fire off a response to some media that is less than appropriate or engage another human being in a verbal fire fight, what are we representing?

The book that I have been using [Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White] as my springboard has been a wonderful starting point to discuss the divisiveness in society today, but I  just did not anticipate the divisiveness that we would experience before I picked the book.  I write a post and some radicalized Muslim kills 80 people in France with his truck.  I write a post and an extremely disgruntled African-American man kills three law enforcement officers.  I write a post and a politician ignites a fire-storm by expressing attention-getting extreme statements.

It is no wonder my dear mother warns me that I may be getting an angry phone call or an angry visitor to my door.

But if I do, it is for the wrong reason. My goal is not to divide people; I invite unity.

I take my words and ideas very seriously and even though they are not read by many, I want them to promote peace, learning and open discussion.

I was recently so pleased to hear the music director at my church select the hymn “Let There Be Peace of Earth” after one of our recent turbulent weeks. I quote the lyrics from this song and humbly ask that you read them, think about them, live them, for they are [in my opinion] the Christian response to what we see today in our world.

“Let There Be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me.

Let There Be Peace on Earth, the peace that was meant to be!

With God as our Father, brothers all are we.

Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment now.

With ev’ry breath I take, let this be my solemn vow;

To take each moment and live each moment in peace eternally!

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me!”

In my previous post entitled “Scriptural Connections” I attempted to write about how our Holy Bible has many references to the Muslim faith in its pages.

The connection does not go just one way. Jesus shows up in the holy book of Islam, the Quran.  Muslims have two major sources from which they derive their religious teachings. The first is a book known as “the Quran,” the direct Revelation of God to His last Prophet, the blessed Muhammad. The second source is the collected sayings and pronouncements of the Prophet which are complimentary to the Revelation. These are known as “the Hadith.”

About a year ago, a beautiful copy of the Quran showed up at St. John United Methodist, sent to our church from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. I commented on the book and my pastor said you can have it.   I took it home but I confess; I have barely touched it.  I am a steady reader of the Holy Bible and have little time to explore another book of faith.

So today as I comment on connections from the Holy Quran, I cannot say that I have researched them. I am relying on the knowledge of Amer Aziz and his website On Faith and I am relying on your kind consideration as I try to show that there is a real connection between Islam and Christianity.

Aziz says Christian apologists debate the meaning of references of Muhammad in the Bible but “there is no ambiguity about Jesus’ presence in the Holy Quran. Jesus is one of the most referenced Prophets in the Quran—mentioned by name 25 times.”

Jesus and mother Mary are mentioned in the lines “and we made her and her son a sign for all peoples.” In another verse, the Quran states “We gave Jesus, son of Mary, clear proofs and strengthened him with the Holy Spirit.”

The Quran is the only scripture outside of the Bible to reaffirm the righteousness and virginity of Mary at Jesus’ birth. The reference is, “how will I have a son? No man has touched me, and I am not unchaste. He (Gabriel) said — It is a matter decreed.”

Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in the Holy Quran. Muslims are of the view that Mary holds the highest honor and dignity among women, and they religiously follow the utterance of her name with the incantation “may Allah be pleased with her.”

Aziz cites a well-known historical incident during the early days of Islam; some Muslims sought to escape persecution in Mecca and went to the neighboring Christian nation of Abyssinia. “As Meccan authorities pursued to apprehend the party, they appealed to the King of Abyssinia who summoned the Muslim refugees to his court. However, upon listening to one of the refugees recite verses 19:19-21 of the Holy Quran in honor of Mary and Jesus, he felt unable to release the party to their persecutors even at risk of severing diplomatic ties.”

Muslims further believe that “God” sent prophets such as Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob (later called “Israel”), Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, John the Baptist and of course Muhammad.

It is important to know the Muslim attitude toward certain Christian ideas:

The Torah (Old Testament of the Bible) and the  Gospel (New Testament of the Bible) are holy scriptures.

Satan is evil; therefore, people should not follow Satan.

An Anti-Christ will appear on Earth before the Day of Judgment.

Jesus Christ will return to the Earth by descending from Heaven and will kill the Anti-Christ.

The Day of Judgment will occur and people will be judged.

There is hell and paradise.

Yes, perhaps the most fascinating commonality between the two religions is the belief that Jesus Christ will return during the end times. Both religions share prophecies that His return will be in part to address immorality, conflict, and injustices during the final epoch of human history. And both religions share a messianic creed that the Messiah will put an end to religious conflict and usher an era of world peace.

From Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: “There will be no persons in heaven who have not personally accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  No Jews, no Hindus, no Muslims will be in heaven.”  That’s roughly 2,616,000,000 people [two billion, six hundred and sixteen million].

Of that number, one billion six hundred million dedicate themselves to Islam. The Islamic faith is the second largest religion in the world, behind Christianity.

That’s still our central question. Now that we see the Biblical references to the Islamic faith and the Quran’s references to Jesus and other important Biblical figures, what are we supposed to believe about Muslims?

The world appears to be preoccupied with confrontation and conflict and Christians and other people of the western world focus on extreme actions of a few Islamic zealots. It is understandable.  When a small number of men inflict death on innocent bystanders, it is very frightening and it has happened again and again and again.  Terror catches your attention.  But are these acts representative of a whole religion?  Maybe we can draw inspiration and celebration from the common themes that bind Christianity and Islam as we work to foster an environment of peace and reconciliation which may occur sometime in our future.

Sadly in the minds of many, peace and reconciliation does not exist now.

From Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: “There will be no persons in heaven who have not personally accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  No Jews, no Hindus, no Muslims will be in heaven.”  That’s roughly 2,616,000,000 people [two billion, six hundred and sixteen million].

Of that number, one billion six hundred million dedicate themselves to Islam. The Islamic faith is the second largest religion in the world, behind Christianity.

In the next posts, I will attempt to explain some basic ideas about this faith and as I explain, I will be in constant prayer that my words create understanding of these people. With recent violent events from a small minority of Muslim extremists, they have fostered a lot of misunderstanding and to be truthful, just plain hatred.  As Christians I don’t think we want to have the word hate associated with us.

Today we will begin with how the Islamic faith originated and how it is related to Christianity scripturally. Some Christians know the Bible better than others; at the risk of telling you something you might already know, I am going to cover basic ground.

Although the Muslim faith is not directly mentioned in the Bible as the “Muslim Faith” or “Islam”, there is an outline of the origin of the Arabic people as the Children of Abraham who inhabited the “eastern country”. The history of the Muslim people begins in the Christian Bible with the prophet Abraham and his descendants through Ishmael, his firstborn son by the servant Hagar.

In Genesis 16: 15 it says “And Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.” Abraham was promised by God that the descendants of Ishmael would become a great nation:  “I will bless him and make him fruitful and multiply him exceedingly; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.”

Ishmael’s name came directly from God: “The angel of the Lord found her [Hagar] by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, ‘Hagar, maid of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’ She said, ‘I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.’ The angel of the Lord said to her, ‘Return to your mistress, and submit to her.’ The angel of the Lord also said to her, ‘I will so greatly multiply your descendants that they cannot be numbered for multitude.’ And the angel of the Lord said to her, ‘Behold, you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael; because the Lord has given heed to your affliction’” [Genesis 16: 7-11].

Again when Hagar and Ishmael were moving to Arabia the angel appeared to her. “And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast with your hand; for I will make him a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the lad a drink. And God was with the lad, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; [northern Arabia] and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt.” Genesis 21:17-21 the descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s maid, bore to Abraham.

Of course Ishmael had descendents; in the order of their birth: Nebaioth, the first-born of Ishmael; and Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. Ishmael lived to the age of one hundred and thirty-seven.

The connections go far beyond the birth of Ishmael to Hagar. For you that read your Bible closely, who buried Abraham?  It was Isaac and Ishmael.  Who rescued Joseph from the pit where his brothers tossed him?  It was the Ishmaelites.  After they rescued Joseph, they took him to Egypt, which was God’s plan as Joseph thrived no matter what his circumstances and in his high position, he prepared stores for a famine which kept the Israelites alive.  God’s remnant was preserved.

Other “eastern men” or Arabs play parts in the Bible. Jethro [a Midianite “eastern” child of Abraham] provides refuge for Moses as he escapes for his life.  Job [an “eastern” man] provides an example of patient submission to God as he endured his great sufferings. Caleb [an “eastern” man] partners with Joshua as they lead the Hebrews into the Promised Land.  The Prophet Jeremiah praises the Rechabites for the steadfastness of their faith when the Hebrew people were in a backslide.

Finally, we must remember those wise men from the east [from Persia] who brought gifts for the Baby Jesus.*

Amer Aziz is a Muslim who has dedicated his writings to building bridges between Muslims and Christians.   Of course there are many differences between the faiths, but we have several Scriptural connections.  He points to two major connections that need to be acknowledged:  both Christianity and Islam have the same patriarch—Abraham. God promised to make a great nation from the descendants of Ishmael and that certainly has come about.  Aziz writes “if there were a world rivalry of religions, few would hesitate to point to Islam versus Christianity. These religions, the two largest in the world, have a long history of locking swords — whether on the battlefield, through proselytizing, or during heated debates.  What tends to get buried under the dust, though, are some remarkable bonds shared by the two religions.”

What gets lost in today’s world are the actions by extremists that get attributed to a religion that has one billion six hundred million adherents. That’s hardly fair.

But that’s what has happened…in the minds of some Christians.

For much more detail on the Muslim connections to the Bible see the Bibleinfo.com website:

http://www.bibleinfo.com/en/questions/what-does-bible-say-about-muslimsislam

From Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: “There will be no persons in heaven who have not personally accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  No Jews, no Hindus, no Muslims will be in heaven.”  That’s roughly 2,616,000,000 people [two billion, six hundred and sixteen million].

Of that number, one billion practice the Hindu faith. Ninety-five percent of all Hindu adherents live in India but they are also scattered in various other Asian countries.

What will happen to a Hindu worshipper upon death according to our Christian concept of exclusivism?  If you truly believe that acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior is the criteria for admittance to heaven, then the billion Hindu worshippers will not make it into heaven.  Heaven is an exclusive location.  The sign on the pearly gates will read “Sorry, Christians Only”.

Many turn to the basics of the Hindu faith and say that it is so different that we cannot accept these people.

It is absurd to think I can summarize the Hindu faith in my post [I range from 700 to 800 words usually] but I will touch on some basic ideas just to illustrate differences. I also can confuse readers very easily as I begin to explain the Brahma, the universal spirit that is the supreme deity of the Hindu faith.  [Sorry about that].

The goal of the Hindu is to “become one” with the divine. Brahma is the ultimate “essence” of material phenomena (including the original identity of the human self) that cannot be seen or heard but whose nature can be known through the development of self-knowledge.

That’s a handful, but it essentially means that the divine is in all things, from the ink pen beside me to the dog that is running across my front yard.   Of course the divine can be connected to me, my personal identity.  All things are in a constant state of flux as they exist; they change forms throughout life and can even become other entities.  That includes people too.

According to the popular Hindu, Deepak Chopra: “In reality, we are divinity in disguise; the gods and goddesses in embryo that are contained within us seek to be fully materialized. True success is therefore the experience of the miraculous.  It is the unfolding of the divinity within us.”

Christians can struggle with Hindu concepts due the self-help nature of the faith.   For the Hindu, life is a progression through various stages of being from the simplest stages of worldly success with wealth, fame and power to higher levels of consciousness.  Needless to say, the ultimate goals of being, knowledge and joy are much harder to attain than basic worldly success.

Hindus are often described as a people who believe in reincarnation and that is a simple way of describing their belief but think of reincarnation as the end-of-life direction that someone accomplishes at death. The successful Hindu will “come back” as a “higher” life form if they follow the path toward Brahma.  They will take on a lower life form if life has not been an effort to take a divine path.

Whereas Christians can admit to having a dependence on a Lord and Savior for meeting our needs, the Hindu looks within and basically says “I can do it alone.” The goal of the higher life form is there and I can achieve it.  Thank you very much.

Christians admit that we have a hunger for our God, a deep spiritual hunger. We admit that we are a broken people in need of forgiveness and communion with our Lord.

But Hindus have a very amorphous relationship with Brahma and a system of religion that has been described as a “broad spectrum of beliefs and practices which on one hand are akin to paganism, pantheism and the like, and on the other very profound, abstract, metaphysical ideas. Moral ideals in Hinduism include non-violence, truthfulness, friendship, compassion, fortitude, self-control, purity and generosity” [Subhamoy Das, “The Main Tenets of Hinduism Website”]. Hinduism has its origins in a  remote past that cannot be traced to any one individual. Some scholars believe that Hinduism must have existed even in circa 10,000 B.C. and that the earliest of the Hindu scriptures was composed well before 6500 B.C.

This religion seems very strange from a Christian perspective but let’s return to our basic initial question: are all Hindu’s exempt from Heaven?

I suspect some of you would say, “Well yeah”. They are so different; how can anyone defend them going to heaven?

Unlike the Jewish people that I blogged on in my July 6^th post, they have very little in common with us.  At least we have the Old Testament in common with the Jews.

However Pastor Adam Hamilton feels that they may have a place and after I post on the Muslim faith in my next entry, we will explore his defense for inclusivity…yes, even for the Hindus.