Intelligence under Attack II

Last updated on: April 20, 2016 at 5:29 am by Robert Hunt

Intelligence under Attack II 2016-04-20T05:29:39-06:00 Robert Hunt

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American Christians become so obsessed with the supposed attacks by secularists and humanists on their privileged position in American culture that they forget there are real attacks on Christianity taking place daily. Christians need to understand that apologetics are not just an evangelistic tool, they are a justice issue.

I am not talking about attacks on Christians and the rights of Christian minorities. The egregious violations of human rights by religiously motivated terrorists target Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike. The the vast majority of religious people are opposed to such attacks, and indeed Muslims are the worst sufferers from them.

I am talking about attacks on Christianity as a religion; attacks that are all to common in parts of the Muslim community. Attacks that are the mirror image of anti-Muslim polemics found in American politics.

I began thinking about Muslim polemic against Christianity when I received an email from an old friend in Malaysia about the recent visit of a Muslim polemicist attacking Christianity.

For decades Malaysian Muslim groups, like their compatriots across the Muslim world have both hosted and fostered Muslim attacks on Christian belief. Ahmad Deedat, a well know South African anti-Christian polemicist was a frequent and much lauded visitor when I lived in Malaysia. And most recently Zakir Naik, a well known Muslim apologist in the line of Deedat has been in Malaysia. Both Deedat and Naik are recipients of the King Faisal Prize, awarded by the Saudi Arabian Government, so they are not marginal figures.

Naik’s specific polemical agenda in Malaysia, as elsewhere, is a two pronged attack on Christianity. (He also attacks Hinduism, but I’ll leave that to Hindus.) He first attacks Christianity as out of touch and anti-scientific because of fundamentalist Christian objections to evolutionary theory. He also attacks the Christian scripture as both incoherent and largely fabricated by humans rather than being revealed by God.

Now Naik’s attack on Christianity in relation to science is simply hypocritical. His himself cannot accept evolutionary theory, and following the Qur’an offers a theory commonly called intelligent design, which isn’t science. And his argument that certain versus from the Qur’an describing a human being as developing from a “single blood clot” cannot be taken seriously. Taken literally they don’t even faintly resemble modern embryology, and if they are interpreted figuratively his whole theory of the authority of the Qur’an as a literal guide to both natural and theological truth falls apart.

But worse is his abuse of Christian scripture in order to show that Christian doctrine is false. One of his tricks is to insist that Christians show in scripture where Jesus claimed to be God. He knows that taking the words of Jesus literally no such claim can be found, something that is hardly news to Christians.

He fails to recognize, although he knows, that Christian claims about Jesus Christ were never rooted in Jesus making direct claims about his divinity. They are rooted in the entirety of Jesus ministry and the experience of Jesus’ disciples of his death and resurrection. They are apostolic claims arising from an encounter with the risen Christ, not any one particular word or action of Jesus.

This is why Christians always maintained that the Bible needed both four gospels and the apostolic witness found in the remaining New Testament. Indeed this is why the Jewish Scripture, the Old Testament for Christians, is part of the Bible. Because it is the whole of scripture together whose witness allows us to understand that Jesus is the Christ, Son of the Father who with the Holy Spirit is the One Triune God.

Zakir Naik is surely too intelligent to be unaware of this, and thus his polemical attacks, like those of Deedat and others of their ilk can only be attributed to a willingness to diminish human intelligence by attacking its foundation of a sincere desire to learn the facts about Christianity.

These anti-Christian polemicists are hypocrites of the worst kind; applying to Christian scripture a form of criticism which is not only inappropriate, since Christians never claimed that their scripture consisted of a set of factual metaphysical and scientific propositions, but of failing to apply it to the Qur’an, which interpreted with the literalism they insist upon is equally problematic. They conveniently forget that early Muslim scholars, the Mu’tazila, easily pointed out the logical contradictions found in Qur’an and sought a more rational interpretation, only to be politically suppressed by Hanbali literalists.

Now one might answer that this is all part of a long standing game in which different religions compete for “hearts and minds.” Christian evangelists and missionaries often launched harsh unfair polemical attacks on Islam for centuries, and some still do. But there are two problems here.

First and foremost his polemical approach diminishes the intelligence of the Muslim community. It takes very little effort to find real, deep, Islamic scholarship in our world. Muslims are fruitfully engaged in all the realms of human science, philosophy, and religious studies. There are Muslim scholars with a real knowledge of and engagement with Christianity. Their work is rooted in a deep appreciation of the complexities of religious authority and belief, and a willingness to engage in real dialogue so that people of different religions may truly understand and learn from one another.

Yet Naik and others offer, almost always to 99% Muslim audiences, a toxic mixture of half truths, distortions, and illogical inferences that have the patina of intelligence but never seriously go to the roots of how humans know and understand one another. And the result is that Muslims who hear him speak and read his books actually know less about Christianity than they knew before and become less capable of rational thought than they were before.

Secondly Naik and others outside the US launch these attacks for the very consequential purpose of further marginalizing and oppressing Christian minorities. In Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran, and the Middle East these are not academic debates. They are the public justification for continued oppression of religious minorities. They are the mirror of the work of Frank Gaffney and his crowd to oppress and marginalize Muslims.

Unfortunately in the Muslim world it is illegal for Christians to answer their attacks, much less publicly offer their own understanding of the truth of God. In most of the Muslim world when it comes to religion freedom of speech is only for Muslims, and indeed only for those Muslims who control the political establishment. (For a Muslim commentary on this particular hypocrisy in relation to Naik see http://m.themalaymailonline.com/opinion/shafiqah-othman-hamzah/article/the-hypocrisy-of-malay-muslims)

This is why the Marrakesh Declaration that I mentioned in an earlier blog is so critically important. It represents the first time in Islamic history that a broad, deep, body of Muslim leaders has actually suggested that non-Muslims be given equal rights as citizens in a Muslim Society, and thus the freedom to defend their religion against the continual onslaught of polemicists such as Naik. If only those scholars possessed the courage to denounce their colleagues who are actively working against human rights.

There are I think, two takeaways here:

Christians and Muslims (and Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists) in the United States must realize that authentic and equal inter-religious dialogue is a privilege given them by a secular society in which government gives no privilege to any religion. And we must preserve this. Any attempt whatsoever to limit the freedom of any of us diminishes the freedom of all of us.

That is why Christians in the US must defend the rights of Muslims rather than giving Muslims outside the US further justification for denying the rights of Christians. Islamophobia is the best friend of anti-Christian polemicists.

As importantly Christians should realize that our failure to defend the veracity of our religious beliefs directly causes harm to our fellow Christians around the world. Christians need to understand that apologetics are not just an evangelistic tool, they are a justice issue. Our failure in the US to robustly defend the truth of Christianity doesn’t merely lead to our comfortable decline. It leads directly to, and justifies the real oppression of Christians beyond our borders.

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Intelligence Under Attack Part I

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