Submission to God is not a proper way to describe the Christian faith<\/span><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\nFor many Christians, each of these three points might seem 180 degrees backwards. Really? The Bible ISN\u2019T the Christian Holy Book? We AREN\u2019T \u201cpeople of the book?\u201d We DON\u2019T submit to God?<\/p>\n
But for Freeman, these claims are distortions of Christianity, and the Protestant Reformation is largely the reason why the modern church (read \u201cevangelicalism\u2019) has been \u201cIslamified.\u201d There\u2019s a conversation starter (or stopper) if I ever heard one.<\/p>\n
Personally, I\u2019m not sure how much is gained by this rhetoric, but he makes some points that, wholly on their own, are probably worth keeping in mind for those who claim to have a \u201chigh\u201d view of Scripture.<\/p>\n
Here are some choice quotes, but read the whole article for yourself:<\/p>\n
The Christian community predates its own texts (the New Testament) and is not described as in any way having a foundation on the Scriptures \u2013 the Apostles and Prophets are described as the foundation of the Church.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\nChristians are not baptized into the Bible. Jews were circumcised and made part of the Covenant people before ever a word of Scripture was written. God revealed Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob some hundreds of years before Moses ever wrote a line\u2026.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nThe movement from authoritative Church to authoritative book that occurs over the 15th and 16th centuries (the Protestant Reformation), should not be considered apart from the dialog with Islam in the two or three centuries that preceded it.\u00a0<\/span>It is worth noting that scholasticism in the West was largely begun in Andalusian Islam. It was not a natural development from within. Scholasticism was ultimately rejected in the Christian East\u2026.<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\nMartin Luther\u2019s, \u201cHier, stehe ich!\u201d (demanding that only a Scriptural argument would be an acceptable response to his position) would have been unimaginable four or five hundred years before.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nOn the face of it, denying that Christianity is submission to God seems ludicrous. Surely,\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>if God is truly God, then submission to Him is the only proper response. But\u00a0submission\u00a0is not a word that passes the lips of Christ. His invitation to become a child of the Father is not a demand to submit to the Supreme Being. It is why there can be no conversion at the point of a sword in Christianity\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\nThe question placed in Christian Baptism (Orthodox) is: \u201cDo you\u00a0unite\u00a0yourself to Christ?\u201d This is the language of\u00a0union, reflecting St. Paul\u2019s teaching that Baptism is\u00a0union\u00a0with the death and resurrection of Christ. The modern Evangelical phrase, \u201cDo you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?\u201d has more in common with Muslim submission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A friend sent me this post by Fr. Stephen Freeman, \u201cHas Your Bible Become a Quran?\u201d Freeman makes several points in his post, but what drew me in was his\u00a0provocative view that modern Christianity, especially in its view of the Bible, has more in common with Islam than with historic Christianity. I have to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11425"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}