Islamicization and individual rights

Tony Reinke Islam

“The Reformation brought about a renewed understanding of the importance of the individual based on the sanctity of life and the imago dei, that every individual is created in the divine image. In Islam, particularly in the Sharia, you have group rights. Rights are not based on the individual but rather on who you are on the basis of religion or on the basis of your sex (whether you are male) and this defines treatment.

And here is a real dilemma: If we institutionalize Islam, then at the end of the day, the very thing that had made you [America] so great and so important — which is your Judeo-Christian faith and your Judeo-Christian ethic which is at the very heart of the understanding of human beings — then [individual] rights will be removed. Now, you say ‘Is that possible?’ I point you to one issue that has just occurred.

Why is your government introducing Sharia-compliant mortgages? Now, some would say this is irrelevant. If Muslims are being prejudiced against in their fiscal arrangements in buying a house then why not allow them room for purchase of a home to function within their own religious/legal tradition? In the UK we have Sharia-compliant mortgages, Sharia-compliant pensions, we now have Sharia in schools, in prisons and a whole variety of ways from food to holidays. So what are individual rights?

When our government tried to introduce a bill on religious hatred in the UK, it was the Barnabas Fund that fought it initially (and I was the chairman). On two occasions we fought the government and we won both times. On the third occasion I just couldn’t cope with it anymore but thankfully we did win. Now, why was I so passionate in fighting against a religious hatred law? Because, as the Muslim community itself argued, this would have protected Mohammad. So if the law of the land protected Mohammad, what of Jesus? I would argue, protect Jesus as well. But every night on our television Jesus’ name is blasphemed but never once is Mohammad’s name to be blasphemed. At that point there would have been an inequality existing within our country, and Britain would have been equivalent to Pakistan on its blasphemy law. And it had to be fought.

So my fear is that de facto by degrees Islamic law and its position in society, through government action and others, is being established as a system. And if that happens then I fear for your [America’s] future. I think for the UK it is virtually hopeless to put it back and only a matter of time before we succumb.”

– Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, Henry Forum at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (Washington, D.C.) 1:03:00-1:06:33. Whether you agree or not, this is a thought-provoking address. Listen here.

Listen to the full audio here:

Review: Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands

Tony Reinke Biblical counseling, BR > P&R, Paul David Tripp, spurgeon

Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change by Paul David Tripp (P&R: 2002) is one of the best contemporary Christian books. For more information, read my review posted today at TakeUpAndRead.com. To celebrate, Monergism Books is running a special deal (50-percent off!). But it will not last long.

If you plan to attend the Banner of Truth Minister’s Conference next month, let me know (click here for more info).

Blessings! Tony

Atheism, the Cross and Revelation

Tony Reinke Atheism, Atheist, Cross of Christ, Culture, God

Many debates between a Christian and atheist go something like this:

Christian: “God exists because we see the influences of a Creator all around us. Only His existence can make sense of everything else.”

Atheist: “Okay, so God exists. Now why are you a Christian and not Jewish or Mormon or Islamic?”

Christian: “Ummm” (insert awkward relativism like: “For me Christianity makes the most sense”) …

If you don’t think this fumbling happens, I would encourage you to listen to the recent McGrath/Dawkins debate. When a Christian debates an atheist – as you hear in this and many other debates – there comes a moment when the debate takes an awkward turn. The question changes from the existence of God to why the Christian has chosen his/her religion over all the others. It’s an awkward moment because it reveals that the Christian was debating from rationalism, not pleading obedience to God’s revelation. This misunderstanding gets exposed with one simple question.

So you believe in God. What makes Jesus Christ your god of choice? It seems the only objective answer to this most pressing question is to say God is found in His Son as revealed in His Word. It’s here that the wisdom of God will get you laughed out of an academic debate. But Scripture makes this point clear in several places:

1 John 2:23 “No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.”

1 John 4:15 “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.”

1 John 5:1 “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.”

2 John 1:9 “Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.”

In other words, if you have not persuasively turned sinners toward Jesus Christ and the Cross you have not persuaded sinners to God! Even if you can prove God exists — if this is where you end — you have won nothing. When Christians dialogue with atheists/skeptics/agnostics, the discussion must move beyond the mere existence of a god (and the skeptic knows this!).

Attempts to prove the existence of God make it very easy to forget the message of the Cross of Christ. Keeping the Cross central in our conversations with atheists demands that we have a firm handle on the revelation of God that breaks into our hearts and is confirmed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I’m not supposing we should disengage the debates. Certainly not! The church must continue to engage culture (and atheism is a growing segment of our cultural fabric in America). I’m arguing that a successful debate cannot be defined as the persuading of others of the existence of God. Rather, God is here, He is angry towards sin every day and sinners must bow and repent from their sin. Especially when we enter the philosophical and academic centers of the world God calls us to follow in the footsteps of the Apostle Paul (Acts 17:30-31).

If we have not (by God’s grace) persuaded skeptics to the Cross, neither have we persuaded them to God. The Cross — not Deism — is the goal.

—————–

As I finished this post, Jon Bloom posted an excellent comment on another post that fits here. Thanks Jon!

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” – Christopher Hitchens.

“I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (Matt 11:25). “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3). – Jesus

We will always be the infants of our species. Thank you, Tony!

Indeed, Jon. Thank you!

Sermon Notes: The Atonement

Tony Reinke Atonement, Sermon notes, spurgeon

atonement.jpgSermon Notes: The Atonement

Last night I was graciously provided an opportunity to preach on the Atonement to a group of youth. I tried to make three overall points. First, a relationship with holy God demands perfect obedience to His Law (NPP debate). Thus, the Law silences every sinner in their guilt. Secondly, I tried to highlight the Old Testament atonement imagery in light of Christ’s work on the Cross. And third, I attempted to communicate the perfect sufficiency of the Atoning work of Christ. We see this sufficiency not only in being forgiven and “getting saved” but also in the Lamb Who is the source of the River of Life. The Atonement Lamb is both sufficient to cleanse from the guilt of sin AND sufficient to fill us with spiritual life, joy and hope! May the beauty of this Lamb soak our hearts!

The Atonement – 4/29/07 – Lesson Notes (pdf)
The Atonement – 4/29/07 – Lesson Handouts (pdf)
The Atonement – 4/29/07 – Lesson Audio (mp3) 19.6 MB

[see more sermon notes]

Atheism and Revelation

Tony Reinke Atheism, Atheist, Skepticism

What I appreciate from Christopher Hitchens (and other atheist/skeptics) is the utter impossibility of the human mind to wrap itself around God.

“The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the ‘meaning’ of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what ‘he’ demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude ‘belief’ from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.” [Slate mag]

All the more, this forces us back to the graciousness of God, that He discloses Himself. First, in the “theater” of creation and then more specifically in His Word — Jesus Christ (John 1) — and then confirms His revelation by the power of His Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:16). The answer is in Him, not my blog. As Tom Fluharty profoundly puts it, “I cannot be right and I’m never wrong because Christ is true!” Can the Church, following this revelation of God, be any less solipsistic?

1 John 5:9-10a says, “If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself …” The testimony of men will prove to be a mass of contradictions, an unstable foundation for our eternal hope. But this is all we have until and unless God speaks and seals!

English Puritans on Meditation

Tony Reinke Meditation, Nathanael Ranew, Puritans

My friend Amy Gant has a published new website devoted to the topic of English Puritan Meditation. The website complements her excellent MA thesis, “‘Beating a Path to Heaven’: Nathanael Ranew and the Puritan Art of Divine Meditation in the Seventeenth Century.” The thesis focused on Ranew’ book Solitude improved by divine meditation.

From the website:

“To the Puritans, divine meditation involved personal devotion and edification in the sense of thinking godly thoughts – thinking the type of thoughts that Jesus Christ Himself might think. Or, as Richard Baxter put it, “…meditation is but the reading over and repeating God’s reasons to our hearts, and so disputing with ourselves in his arguments and terms.” As scholar Richard Douglas Jordan has said, Baxter also “took a stand against enthusiasm in devotion and saw meditation as involved with reason and the written word. In his Christian Directory, Baxter spoke of the Christian’s delight in God as a ‘solid rational’ experience.” These understandings stemmed both from Scriptural examples such as those in the Psalms and from biblically-based doctrines of salvation, sanctification, and more, which provide motivation for many of the Christian disciplines.

It required a great amount of personal self-control to focus one’s mind upon unseen realities such as God and Heaven. The motivation for such intellectual pursuits was based, again, in Puritan doctrine: they were committed to meditation because they understood the Scriptures to teach that it was God’s will for them to practice it. Yet the great emphasis, earnestness and time commitment which they gave to this task is best understood in light of the Puritan sense of urgency in performing all the spiritual disciplines, and in living a godly life in general. Because of their focus on the shortness of life, Puritans tended to abhor unnecessary wasting of the time that God had given them, as servants, to perform their duties on earth. For this reason, mental discipline came to be very important for the Puritans – and meditation was a large part of that process.”

You will find a great deal of biblical and historical information on the art of divine meditation. I would encourage you to take some time this weekend to look around.