Today I read an article from The London Times online about a new group starting on Facebook called Faithbook (did I lose anyone... k good). Here is the link to the article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4057686.ece
It is a discussion forum started by a group of Reformed Jews in England wanting to promote interfaith discussion. That's great and all, I feel we should discuss with our Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mormon, etc. friends the tenants of religion and in particular the distinctiveness of Christianity.
However, I fear the central premise under which Faithbook operates is yet another glorious step in the direction of religious ambiguity and the dissolution of the very concept of Truth. It is now no longer enough to not be exclusive, that it's bad to say that certain people genuine about a religious system will go to hell while others who are equally genuine about another will be rewarded with heaven. Now it's now just enough to say "don't be judgmental towards others," rather now the battle cry of the religious community is "there's nothing to be judgmental about!"
Think about it for a second, if all religious traditions are placed on equal ground with equal consideration with equal truth content, then there is no need to practice a certain kind of religion. Faith would be reduced to wearing a red hat one day and a blue hat another, the parts would be interchangeable and the distinctives of each would lose their meaning.
I believe that the imminent threat is there for the loss of the worldview that has prevailed for centuries that there is a definite right and wrong, and that things can not be any longer mutually exclusive. Language will now be the ultimate arbiter of truth, and if you choose to call the light darkness and the darkness light, good for you because you are using language to be the arbiter of truth. Truth by itself will cease to exist, there will be no need for an ontological necessity for Truth, everything will be relative.
What does this mean for religion? Well if the lines are blurred between the faiths, this means that the Christian will face hardship for quoting Christ when He said "No one comes to the Father but by me." It means the Jew will have a hard time in telling other people "The Lord is our God, the Lord is One." It means that the Muslim will no longer be able to say that Mohammed is the Chief Prophet of God.
Discuss faiths, discuss Christ, engage in conversation with those around you Christians. Do not do what we have typically done and retreated to our holy huddles. It is our fault for the loss of objective Truth, we have not stood firmly enough on the reality of a Source for Truth that must be in place in order for things to be true or not. Do not put different faiths on equal grounds, at the core of the major world religions is the fact that they are mutually exclusive. The Muslim is to look at the Christian, Jew, and anyone else not Muslim as an Infidel. The Jew is to look at the rest of the world as Gentile, not Jewish.
For us as Christians it means we see the world for what it is, a world inhabited of sinners lost and swimming in circles, and that the Cross of Christ is their only hope for salvation, forgiveness, purpose, reason, life, breath, and hope. Without that, we all blend into a blob of confused people chasing after the wind. Christians, read this and take heart, stand strong for the Faith, run the race boldly, and never compromise the Truth in Scripture for a sorry pluralism that gives everyone what they want but nothing what they need.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
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1 comment:
a blog post!!! YES!!
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