Professor at CHristian college suspended for her outspoken support of Muslims

Great Debates
141

See post #91. Non-Christians often vastly overestimate Christians’ knowledge of their own doctrines, for several reasons:

– Most people speaking about Christianity in the news are ministers/priests/Popes, who presumably know more about the Bible than the average Christian (although I recall Jerry Falwell saying (during a denunciation of Islam) that Moses was a man of peace)

– Most of the non-clergy speaking about Christianity in the news are evangelicals, who necessarily take the Bible more seriously because they believe it to be literally true, but they comprise only about 13% of professed Christians

– Most people do not get into deep discussions of religion with acquaintances of different faiths, except online. And Christians who participate in online debates are self-selected for above-average knowledge and interest in the Bible

So most of a non-Christian’s encounters with a Christian speaking or writing about Christianity are not with the typical Christian. But as the survey showed, the typical Christian doesn’t know the first thing about the Bible, let alone the nuances of Biblical interpretation that separate denominations. And assuming participation in the survey was voluntary, even those dummies were self-selected for above-average interest in the subject.

On a personal note, my mother and grandmother were Catholics, and often lamented the fact that services were no longer in Latin. I asked them whether they understood anything the priests were saying, and they said no*, but it sounded so beautiful.

*Except for the demands for increased donations.

142

Agreed.

Christian can not on the one hand claim “Jews and Christians worship the same God” and then claim that Muslims and Christians don’t.

Frankly the Muslim belief that Jesus was born to a virgin woman, was the Messiah(AKA the Christ), and was a great prophet while denying his divinity is far closer to Christianity’s view of Jesus than Judaism’s.

143

I am not getting my experience of what the typical Christian knows about Christian theology from the news, from clergy or otherwise. Just from ordinary people. The town where I grew up is made up primarily of people of Christian heritage and has a church for roughly every 1,000 people, of just about every stripe of Catholicism and the major Protestant denominations (and even an Armenian Orthodox one), as well as two synagogues, and recently, even a mosque.

Other than my friends and family, who are rather self-selecting geeky, intellectual group for the most part who love to talk about ideas, religion came up in the classroom (primarily in History and English classes, sometimes in the upper-level Spanish classes as we began to read literature, and in choir, where we sang a fairly large chunk of religious music, overwhelmingly Christian). Religion also comes up at work a lot (I work in an immigration law practice, and among other things, we do asylum cases, which are sometimes based at least in part on religious persecution).

But the extent to which people who claim to be faithful practitioners of a religion often don’t even know the most elementary concepts of it, the kind that one would learn in a kindergarten Sunday school class, simply boggles me. I haven’t been a practitioner of any religion at all since I was 15, but I know more about some of these people’s religions than they do? And believe me, I am keenly aware that I am no expert even in the religion I was raised in, let alone any other.

(And I thought it was mind-boggling when I took an Eastern Religions class one summer at Loyola, a Jesuit university, to fulfill a liberal arts requirement. The professor was awesome, but the other students? “What do you mean, the Buddhists don’t believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?”)

How can anyone ever hope to have a basic comprehension of what goes on in large parts of the world, or even in a large city like Chicago, if one lives in such a bubble?

144

Boy howdy, am I coming in late to this party.

Anyhow, having read through the first 143 posts, some thoughts:

  1. As a number of posters have said, Wheaton’s not an intellectual dump like Liberty or Bob Jones. When I was a math professor at an evangelical college back in the 1990s, the faculty there regarded Wheaton as the intellectual flagship college of evangelical colleges and universities.

  2. Their college, their rules. They’re entitled to have a Statement of Faith that faculty have to be in accord with.

  3. But having set down what the rules are, faculty are entitled to a reasonable expectation that the institution will obey its own rules, and not just make up new ones on the fly in order to get rid of faculty who are in concord with the rules they signed on to, but have become inconvenient in other ways.

  4. Regardless of what Wheaton’s president and trustees may believe about whether Allah and YHWH are the same god, there’s nothing about it in the Statement of Faith. So if they’re going to discipline a faculty member for saying that Allah and YHWH are different names for the same divine entity (can we take it for granted that the president and trustees of Wheaton believe that their God is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses? They’re not a backwoods Bible school - they believe this much for sure), then they’re making up a new rule.

  5. IMHO it behooves them to be specific about just how Dr. Hawkins’ statement conflicts with Wheaton’s statement of faith, just as a matter of intellectual integrity. AFAICT, they have not done this.

  6. As Fred Clark notes, the alleged theological dispute is probably a sham, and the real problem is likely one of loud complaints from the rich old men who donate money to the college, who are upset about how this Muslim heathen Negress could be teaching at Wheaton, especially given that they see Islam as The Enemy of All Right-Thinking People.

  7. As Fred adds, the real sin here is that, even if they’re being honest and Wheaton’s real problem with Dr. Hawkins is some point of theological hairsplitting, that seems to be a lot more important to them than joining her in taking a stand against the wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that many on the right are encouraging, including evangelical bigwigs like Franklin Graham.

145

Christianity is founded upon the tenet that Jesus is God.
Islam, on average, rejects the tenet that Jesus is God.

Christians worship Jesus as God.
Islam considers the worship of Jesus as God to be blasphemy.

These diametrically opposed views may be enough for you to count them as the same God, but since such a view is in direct contradiction of Wheaton’s statement of faith (signed by all who teach there), apparently they can’t reach your contradictory conclusion as easily. :slight_smile:

146

Well; yes.
But I’m trying not to delve too far into defending make believe for logical consistency, so I’m using “Trinity” to contain the shorthand idea of the divinity of Christ (the Trinity being one mechanism by which to resolve Christ and Yahweh along with the Holy Spirit into monotheism).

147

I am not aware the Christians think (non-messianic) Jews worship Jesus as God. Christians do think the God of the Old Testament (Yahweh) is the same God the Father who is part of the Trinity.

I think you are trying to apply consistency to the world of make-believe, and it doesn’t work.

Jews owned Yahweh first. Christians gave him a fully-deified son Jesus. Muslims un-deified Jesus and had Yahweh give special standing to Mohammed.

So, Yahweh parts the sea. Everybody claims that original guy is their God.

Christians claim Jesus is God too (see theological discussions on how this can be, but this is the claim). Jews and Muslims reject that God.

Muslims claim Allah appointed Mohammed as the most current messenger of truth.
Jews and Christians reject that God.

Of course it’s all a word game for outsiders. But for believers (in the case at hand, conservative evangelicals) Christians do NOT worship the same God as do Muslims since Islam rejects the deity of Christ.

The easiest way to think of this is that the newest faith on the block can subsume the other guy’s God and make alterations, but for the original faith the alterations create a new God. So you might say Christians believe in the same Yahweh as do Jews, but Jews do not believe in the same triune God as do Christians.

etc etc blah blah blah

148

Do you have any names or inside information for this sort of mud-slinging?

From Wheaton’s statement of faith, above:
“WE BELIEVE that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, was true God and true man…”

If the rich old men donating money to their pet cause actually believe this, is it not more likely that the cause they are defending is their theology and not their racism?

I agree they probably think Muslim theology is at odds with Wheaton’s position on the deity of Jesus Christ. But you seem to be running with an unsupported proposition that they see Islam as an enemy in anything other than a theologic sense…

149

Nm

150

That was a pretty unconvincing essay. Clark just seems to feel all he has to do is assert racism and sexism and his claim is proven.

151

I think that’s more a problem with the medium than anything else. If you’re blogging, do you write every post as a stand-alone post, assuming nobody’s read a single word of anything you’ve written before? Or do you take it for granted that most of your readers are going to be familiar with things that you’ve discussed at length at different times?

152

And…?

Because as people have been pointing out for the length of this thread, if you’re saying that only people who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ are worshiping the same God that Christians do, then that’s saying that Jews and Christians worship different gods. Which is nonsense.

Well, they might be defending what they think is their theology, but again, there’s not a blessed thing in that Statement of Faith about whether YHWH and Allah are or aren’t the same entity.

If they want to add something about Allah =/= YHWH to their Statement of Faith, and give faculty who refuse to subscribe to that a reasonable period of time to find other employment, there’d be nothing wrong with that. But making up new rules on the fly, and then suspending a faculty member for her failure to be in concord with them, is double-secret-probation shit.

You’re right, I’m sure. The likelihood that they’re part of the bulk of the conservative demographic that’s gone off the rails in this country lately regarding Muslims is minimal. :rolleyes:

*Of course *Muslim theology is at odds with Wheaton’s position on the deity of Jesus. They are different religions. But that doesn’t imply that they believe in different gods.

153

As also amply discussed in this thread, adherents of a particular religion often are weak on the particulars of what that religion actually believes. (I’ve been a Christian for 45 years, and am surely more knowledgeable than the average Christian, but please don’t ask me to explain the Trinity.) But AFAIK, among Christian denominations, the notion that Allah = YHWH is not only generally accepted, but isn’t particularly controversial. Islam, Judaism, and the various varieties of Christianity have differing views of the nature of our shared deity, and vastly differing views on what we believe this whole crazy God business is all about, but that’s a whole 'nother thing. That’s why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are different religions.

Of course, the fastest-growing part of semi-organized Christianity over the past few decades has been non-denominational churches, and on a subject such as this, they may believe who knows what. As the term implies, they’re outside the ambit of any denomination, so there’s no larger entity whose theology they nominally accept. (IME, they generally say, “We believe the Bible,” as if that magically resolved everything.)

154

Not really? The New Testament leans pretty hard on “son of God” and “man exalted by God.” Strictly defined Trinitarianism is a later development, probably spinning out of one line in a Gospel where Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” There are Christians who interpret that line less than literally and reject an identity between Yeshua and the Almighty, and their interpretations of the identity of Jesus are not really that much more implausible than whatever orthodoxy insists that Jesus and the Father are somehow the same being.

(Note that it is fair to say that certain parts of, say, LDS teaching, are illogical, but Jesus being God’s biological son isn’t itself quite that big a wallbanger.)

155

Why is this nonsense?

If you ask a non-messianic Jew who believes in God if he believes Jesus is God, do you think he’d say yes? I don’t.

If you ask a Christian who believes in the Trinity (more or less standard Christian fare) if he believes Yahweh is God, he’s gonna say yes, and he’s going to also believe Jesus and the Holy Spirit are God.

So…regardless of what the two groups might say, it’s not the same God.

Wheaton, as an organization dedicated to defending these fine points of evangelical Christian belief, does not think Muslims believe in the same God as do Christians, nor does it think Jews believe in the same God as do Christians, even though it thinks that within the Trinity, God the Father is Yahweh, and that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit have existed eternally as part of a triune God.

I’m not trying to defend any of this theologically; I’m just telling you it’s a very mistaken impression to think Jews believe in the triune God of the Christians, or that Christians believe in the Allah of Islam.

Yes; Christians believe in the Yahweh of the OT, as do Muslims. But for Wheaton, God is always a triune God, so unless you accept all three, you are not believing in the same God.

156

Muslim theology is more than “at odds with Wheaton’s position on the deity of Jesus.”
Muslim theology denies the deity of Jesus.

Wheaton’s theology demands the deity of Jesus.

Wheaton’s triune God is not Islam’s Allah, even though both Islam and Wheaton would claim Yahweh as one of their own.

But hey; take it up with your mullah and Phil Ryken. Doesn’t look like I’ll convince you.

Bottom line: the OP spin is wrong, and this professor was disciplined for not understanding Wheaton’s theological party line. Nothing to do with sympathy for Muslims.

157

So you’re saying that Jews and Muslims don’t believe Jesus is God?

158

Emphasis added.

Have they actually said this or are you assuming it based on logical consistency? Because apparently they have never taken a formal stance on this issue before this controversy. There is nothing explicit in the Wheaton statement of faith that mentions Islam at all. It only follows if you accept that argument that a Triune God cannot be reconciled with other Abrahamic conceptions of the nature of God, which obviously is a philosophical debate - apparently Wheaton had invited a speaker who believes otherwise to give a guest lecture back in 2011.

If Wheaton applies that logic equally to Jews, Unitarian Christians and other like Baha’i, I guess they are at least being consistent. But again the question is do they or are you just assuming they do?

159

Here are a few others.

160

And as I, someone who was raised Evangelical Christian, have told you, you are wrong. I was always taught that Jewish people worship the same God I do. It is an important part of our belief system that Israel will eventually realize that Jesus is their Messiah and join us in Christ’s millennial reign.

There is, again, nothing in their statement of faith that requires one to deny that Muslims or Jewish people worship the same God. There is a requirement that you yourself believe they are wrong in their beliefs, but not one that says they are worshiping a false god.

I know because that statement of faith is not all that different from my own. I know that people from my church could work there. Wheaton college is designed to be multi-denominational. IT has a huge list of denominations that are allowed, and mine (Assemblies of God) is on it.

Could they twist the statements like you have, to say something they don’t actually say? Of course. It’s a time honored Christian tradition to do so. But I would argue that, by their claims of reconciling beliefs, they have a responsibility to do otherwise. If it is possible to interpret their statement of faith in a more lenient way, they are required to do so. That’s what reconciliation requires.

And, BTW, it is possible to conceive of some reason why Jewish people worship the same God, but Muslims don’t. One could argue that Israel and the Jewish covenant are in the Bible while Islam is not. One could argue that they reject the Jewish covenant due to the Isaac/Ishmael split.

My problem is not that it is impossible to make the argument that Islam worships a different God, just that the Wheaton Statement of Faith does not do so. Pointing to their inclusion of Jesus in the Godhead does not do so.

The best case scenario is that their motivations are based on something like this, and that they are twisting their Statement of Faith to mean this.