The Peace Of Christ That All Understanding Passes

Mega megachurch angst reported today in Orange County. The Schuller family hopes to take part of the Crystal Cathedral congregation to a new church, while Saddleback Church is in the midst of a controversy sparked by this article in the Feb. 26 Orange County Register:

Abraham Meulenberg, a Saddleback pastor in charge of interfaith outreach, and Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at a mosque in Los Angeles, introduced King's Way as "a path to end the 1,400 years of misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians."

The men presented a document they co-authored outlining points of agreement between Islam and Christianity. The document affirms that Christians and Muslims believe in "one God" and share two central commandments: "love of God" and "love of neighbor." The document also commits both faiths to three goals: Making friends with one another, building peace and working on shared social service projects. The document quotes side-by-side verses from the Bible and the Koran to illustrate its claims.

"We agreed we wouldn't try to evangelize each other," said Turk. "We'd witness to each other but it would be out of 'Love Thy Neighbor,' not focused on conversion."

The Register follows up today:

An outreach effort to Muslims initiated by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest has sparked a national uproar among evangelical Christians, with some accusing the Rev. Rick Warren, Saddleback's pastor, of betraying core Christian principles and Warren responding that his beliefs and intentions have been misrepresented.

Since an Orange County Register article published Feb. 26 detailed the outreach effort, evangelicals across the country have taken to blogs, social media and Christian news outlets to debate whether and how Christians should forge relationships with people of other faiths.

Longtime critics of Warren have published lengthy online accusations that the influential pastor, who delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, has gone too far in seeking theological common ground with Muslims.

Warren's critics accuse him of sending cunning coded messages to Muslims in his inaugural prayer and of being more interested in feeding people, preventing HIV-AIDS infections, and promoting justice than bringing souls to Christ. It's an age-old, tiresome attack on faithful Christians who happen to be called to make life better for all those whom God loves.

Warren does dispute the assertion in the original Register article that he believed Christians and Muslims worshiped the same God. “We worship Jesus as God. Muslims don't,” he writes. “Our God is Jesus, not Allah." This is also a wearisome debate. If we insist, as Warren's critics do, that Muslims worship a different God, aren't we making the fantastic claim that there are more than one? It's a commonplace of interfaith dialogue that the Abrahamic faiths share historical and theological antecedents, especially the monotheistic God of Abraham, Issac, and Ishmael. Islam's critics are really saying that Muslims worship God the wrong way. Whenever tempted to think that may be true, I remind myself that I'd take a different view if I'd been born in Jordan to Muslim parents rather than in Detroit to a mother who happened to write the newsletter for the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. I proclaim Christ crucified and risen, but humbly enough, I hope, to allow for the diversity of God's infinite mind.

A Jerusalem Christmas

Jeffrey Goldberg (who's Jewish) describes Christmas Eve in multicultural Jerusalem. With Israeli friends, he went to services at the Church of the Redeemer (Lutheran) in the Old City and heard a German pastor read Luke's gospel in Hebrew. But that's not the half of it. Earlier in the day, he took one of his kids to see a doctor:

The clinic, called Terem, is well-known in Jerusalem in part because it was started by a physician named David Applebaum, who was killed in the September 9, 2003 terrorist bombing of a cafe in the Germany Colony neighborhood, along with his daughter Naava, who was scheduled to get married the next day. The physician who saw my son at Terem, like many of the clinic's physicians, is an Arab from East Jerusalem. In Terem, and at Hadassah Hospital, and the other hospitals in town, Jews treat Arabs, Arabs treat Jews, and no one thinks twice about it. No one who lives here, I mean. For visitors (even one, like myself, who once lived in Jerusalem), these sorts of commonplace facts of life -- Germans praying in Hebrew, Arab physicians treating Jews in a clinic founded by a terror victim, and on, and on -- can be astonishing.

It's hard to see clearly, but this photo, which I took in the Old City during a 2007 pilgrimage, shows a minaret on the left, a cross on the right (station #3 on the Via Dolorosa, "Jesus falls for the first time"), and (in the middle of the image, in the distance) a menorah.

A Boy Named Eboo

Eboo Patel, a 35-year-old social scientist and interfaith leader, is smooth, articulate, and, as a regular commentator on CNN and NPR, media savvy. And yet speaking this morning to 650 Episcopal educators gathered at a National Assn. of Episcopal Schools conference in San Antonio, he twice came close to losing his composure.

He almost choked up describing the day he ran into his old principal, nearly 20 years after being graduated from Glenbard South High School in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. To remind a breakfast plenary session full of teachers of their influence in young lives, he said he still remembered seeing Mr. Abrazo standing in the same spot in the hallway every day between classes and helping him form a new campus organization that others on campus had discouraged.

The second moment -- and here Patel evinced sheer astonishment -- was his description of how it felt last summer when Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, history professor, and putative authority on American values, compared him to a Nazi. Patel reminded us that in 1790, President George Washington had promised the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island that the U.S. government would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." But that kind of woolly-headed thinking went out the window once Gingrich and certain other Republicans discerned that political profit could be gained by scapegoating Muslims such as Patel and his family for the Sept. 11 attacks and by stoking an anxious public's confusion about the religious affiliation of their somewhat remote-seeming but thoroughly Christian president. Gingrich's own former House colleague Joe Scarborough called it "political hate speech."

During what Patel called our summer of intolerance over whether a Muslim cultural center should be built in lower Manhattan, his mother called and asked whether it might've been better for him and his wife to have given their children less Muslim-sounding names. That way, she was suggesting, they'd be safer.

A sad turn for an American family, brought about by their fellow Americans. "I was tempted to ask her, 'So why did you name me Eboo?'," he said. We Episcopalians laughed with relief. But our keynote speaker didn't let us off the hook. He said our diminutive denomination of churches and schools -- noted for its tolerance of ambiguity and, especially in our schools, promotion of religious pluralism in chapel and religion classes -- is destined to play a central role if our nation's complex religious mix is ever to become less flammable. "We're the most religiously diverse nation in history and the most devout in the West," he said, "living in a time of global religious conflict." Our diversity will only lead to a heightened sense of spiritual communion, he said, if we reacquire some religious and interfaith literacy, learn to talk about our shared religious values, and get to know one one another as individuals instead of stereotypes.

Instead, according to a recent study, a significant percentage of incoming Boston College students couldn't name the four gospels, identify Mother Teresa's denomination, or correctly associate the Koran with Islam. At the same time, Patel said, "the only ones who are willing to speak out out about religion in America are the ones who are comparing Muslims to Nazis." They, of course, as well as the neoatheists, who deftly throw us religious moderates out with the fundamentalist brimstone. Patel said that Episcopalians "are just about in the best place" to promote interfaith encounters based on the acceptance of God's heart for mercy, justice, righteousness, and love -- but to do so, our church will have to stop wringing our hands and start ringing our bell. Essentially, our speaker was calling us to re-embrace our Anglican heritage of prophetic pragmatism, loudly and proudly.

The Paradox Of Untrue Truths

Some say the key to fruitful interfaith dialogue is avoiding doctrinal questions while stressing points of convergence such as God's love and the imperative of serving others. According to the New York Times, a Jew, Christian, and Muslim in Nashville (all, admittedly, are theological liberals), thrive as friends by plunging into the good stuff:

What distinguishes the “amigos,” who live in Seattle but make presentations around the country, is a unique approach to what they call “the spirituality of interfaith relations.” At the church in Nashville, the three clergymen, dressed in dark blazers, stood up one by one and declared what they most valued as the core teachings of their tradition The minister said “unconditional love.” The sheik said “compassion.” And the rabbi said “oneness.”

The room then grew quiet as each stood and recited what he regarded as the “untruths” in his own faith. The minister said that one “untruth” for him was that “Christianity is the only way to God.” The rabbi said for him it was the notion of Jews as “the chosen people.” And the sheik said for him it was the “sword verses” in the Koran, like “kill the unbeliever.”

“It is a verse taken out of context,” Sheik Rahman said, pointing out that the previous verse says that God has no love for aggressors. “But we have to acknowledge that ‘kill the unbelievers’ is an awkward verse,’ ” the sheik said as the crowd laughed. “Some verses are literal, some are metaphorical, but the Koran doesn’t say which is which.”