Posted on 05/24/2003 11:18:08 AM PDT by yonif
In postwar Iraq, urgent decisions need to be made about the Christian missionary groups that stand ready to rush supplies to Iraqis in need of water, food, and medicine. Islamic law makes conversion from Islam a capital offense; and many non-Muslim Americans share the concern that it is wrong to use food and drink as a medium for spreading the gospel. While these organizations insist they attach no strings to their aid, Muslims and others, including in our own government, are suspicious.
With U.S. efforts now having turned to feeding the Iraqi population and restoring civil life, it needs to be understood that missionary groups are simply following in the footsteps of a figure from the ancient past revered equally by Muslims, Christians, and Jews: the patriarch Abraham.
Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations states the case against the evangelists: "They hold a blanket in one hand and a Bible in the other and say you can't get one without the other…. It's the deceit I don't like."
Actually, this isn't the strategy at all. The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, a leading group, raises money from 42,000 congregations nationwide to send boxes of dried food to Iraqis. The boxes include no religious literature — which could cause the aid to be turned back at the border — but will bear a label quoting John 1:17 in Arabic: "For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ."
However even if the Christians, such as Rev. Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse, do link relief with religious instruction, a case can be made for this which no monotheist should easily dismiss. Christianity, Islam and Judaism equally acknowledge Abraham as the first exponent of monotheism — its first missionary.
The earliest account of his career is in the Hebrew Bible, a cryptic text full of ambiguities and ellipses — instances of crucial information that was apparently left out. Tradition, as in ancient Jewish works such as the Talmud, claims to fill in the blanks. One ambiguity is in the book of Genesis. It begins narrating Abraham's life with the strange statement that he left Harran (in today's southern Turkey) with an entourage including (literally) "the souls that he had made" (12:5). The Talmud offers the tradition that he converted them: He "took them in under the wings of the Divine Presence. Abraham would convert the men and [his wife] Sarah would convert the women. Scripture thus considers it as if they 'made' them."
Islam likewise pictures Abraham as an evangelist, calling all men to participate in the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. Muslim tradition portrays him as stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting at such a supernaturally enhanced volume that everyone in the world heard his voice.
Christianity and Islam both have long histories of evangelism. Judaism too, in theory at least, demands it as an obligation. In his great work the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides lays out the rather aggressive means by which Jews should seek converts — not to Judaism but to monotheism as the Torah conceives it.
Abraham was pretty aggressive. In another cryptic verse in Genesis, he's said to have planted an "eshel" in Beersheba (21:33). If that is just a kind of tree, as many translators say, who cares that he planted one? According to the Talmud, this eshel refers to an inn Abraham established in the wilderness, a hospice where he taught wayfarers to acknowledge God. The patriarch would give them food, then ask them to say grace.
Sound familiar? As Christian missionaries understand, food creates fellowship. We eat with our friends. And it is friendship that, more than food itself, leads to conversions.
How could any religious believer, who thinks his faith has the answers to ultimate questions, not share those answers with others? The patriarch operated in a free market of ideas, where he was able to share his conception of the One God. Part of his legacy is missionary work. Another part is the liberty to make friends by offering food, and then to tell them about your God.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews disagree about details of theology, but the basic point is beyond dispute: We are called to share our God. If Muslims deny Christians the right of a free hearing, and if other Christians and Jews go along with this, citing the need to "respect" other traditions, what's accomplished is in fact a betrayal of the legacy of monotheism on which all three faiths were founded.
David Klinghoffer's new book, The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, was just published by Doubleday.
Hm? What's that mean? It's not about "us sharing our God"; it's about God being glorified through (among other things) His people. The emphasis shouldn't be the humanistic "We"....
Anyway, that country does need the Lord. The people there are desperate to hear about a Savior. And like all of us who have been transformed by Him, they must humble themselves and acknowledge they have been wrong.
Let Franklin Graham spread the Gospel. It is their (and ours, in the long run) only hope.
Has welfare in the US created patriots who love the people who take care of them?
No, it's created an attitude of entitlement and resentment that they aren't getting more than they are. Saddam's Iraq seemed to be a vast welfare state woith a lot of people on the dole. I see the resentment and sense that "the government owes me a living mentality" is already well developed in Iraq.
I say let the religious organizations in and attach all the strings they want to the aid. Maybe even with matching funds from the US.
I agree, it's our only hope in the long run. Unfortunately, converting Muslims is notoriously difficult. Fr. James Schall, quoting Hillaire Belloc, noted that,
Islam would not look at any Christian missionary effort. The so-called Christian governments, in contact with it, it spiritually despised. The ardent and sincere Christian missionaries were received usually with courtesy, sometimes with fierce attack, but were never allowed to affect Islam. I think it true to say that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which Catholicism [or any other denomination or religioun] has found an impregnable fortress.
Its votaries are the one religious body conversions from which are insignificant. Belloc recognized that Islam flourished because it did have some basic truth about God, however that be interpreted. “Mohammedanism struck permanent roots, developing a life of its own, and became at last something like a new religion...,” Belloc wrote in The Great Heresies. “Like all heresies, Mohammedanism lived by the Catholic truths which it had retained. Its insistence on personal immortality, on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on His Justice and Mercy, its insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator – these were its strength” (128). Belloc saw the strength of Islam in its virtues. It is for this reason alone, the impregnability of Islam to Catholicism, however, that the Church needs to take more cognizance of what is this growing force in the world. It is not enough to condemn violence in the abstract. “Go forth and teach all nations” is not possible if the nations will not allow themselves to be preached to. The western theories of freedom of religion, whether secular or religious, have made no headway in Islam, and only rarely are they criticized for this lack. Those few who are Christians or members of other religions, in most Muslim lands, in practice must be content to remain second-class citizens and are constantly subject to the pressure to convert to Islam.
Fr. Schall's whole article can be read here.
He exists, he's in both the old and new testament, but you know him by his other name.
Lucifer.
These passages are reffered to as the "Satanic Verse's" of which Salmon Rushdie used the name for his book.
Many people believe that Mohammad was mearly mentally ill, since he does show all the signs of mental illness, I happen to believe that he was decieved, not once, as he believed, but the whole time.
I understand that we have to see things from there point of view, but how do you open the eyes of somone who has been, effectivley brainwashed and lied to there entire lives?
Religious fundamentalists (of any flavor) are not welcome in Iraq,
Ahh, more quality research from the National Review... Iraq doesn't now and never did have Islamic law and short of unprecedented incompetence and neglect on the part of the occupation force never will have Islamic law
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