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The United Church of Canada (UCC) has sent a sycophantic letter to the Islamic Council of Imams apologising for the Mohammed cartoons. The full text of the letter, signed by the Rev. Dr. James Sinclair, General Secretary of the General Council, and the Rev. Dr. Bruce Gregersen, General Council Minister for Programs for Mission and Ministry, is posted here. As Colby Cosh points out, the letter attributes publication of the cartoons to "racial hatred" without even pausing to consider whether exercise of liberal freedoms may figure in this at all.
It should be emphasized that the UCC's letter leaves absolutely no room for the possibility that that reprinting of the cartoons by the [Western] Standard and the Calgary Jewish Free Press might have been a well-intended but misguided gesture on behalf of press freedom. The Church has declared categorically that the senior staffs of the magazines in question are motivated by racial hatred. Period.
Not only is this as uncharitable as it can possibly be, it's also potentially libelous.
As bad as that is, even worse in my view is that the UCC letter implicitly consents to Islam's rejection of Jesus the Messiah. For immediately following the salutation is written this:
Greetings in the name of Jesus, whom both Christians and Muslims honour.
Both Christianity and Islam claim to honour Jesus, but not at all in the same way. Christianity is based on the New Testament teaching about Jesus: He is the Son of God, born a man, the Saviour who came to shed his blood to atone for the sins of the world. That's why he came; that's why he suffered and died on the cross. In the words of the Nicene Creed,
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
Islam denies all this, as John Piper recently reminded us.
Most Muslims have been taught that Jesus was not crucified. One Sunni Muslim writes, "Muslims believe that Allah saved the Messiah from the ignominy of crucifixion." Another adds, "We honor [Jesus] more than you [Christians] do. . . . We refuse to believe that God would permit him to suffer death on the cross."
(Sources for the quotations can be found at the bottom of this page.)
Clearly, Christianity and Islam oppose each other in their understandings of Jesus. From a theological perspective, each would accuse the other of dishonouring the truth about him. To imply, as the UCC letter does, that Christianity and Islam "honour" Jesus in the same way is to deny one religion or the other. The two teachings about Jesus contradict each other; they cannot both be true. Doesn't the UCC understand that? Does the UCC think the Muslim imams the letter addresses don't know that?
The UCC may think it's getting some fatwa insurance, as Kathy Shaidle astutely puts it, but it's done so at the expense of compromising the Christian faith.
via Relapsed Catholic.
UPDATE (21 Feb.): For the benefit of foreign readers, I should have mentioned that the United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 by the union of almost all Methodists, Congregationalists, and most Presbyterians in Canada. I have two related posts here and here.
