Christianity, Islam, Terrorism

[The following is a reflection I wrote many months ago, after a sermon with which someone took serious exception.]
What is so painful today, of course, is that some Muslims are making war against us and claiming divine justification. As Americans, we do not fight holy wars. We are a secular and free nation; to quote Bernard Shaw's professional soldier in Arms and the Man, "We fight when we have to and are very glad to get out of it when we don't have to." When one side believes it is on the side of God, obviously the other side is going to reject that out of hand. Who wants to fight against God? Naturally we think the other side is grievously mistaken. I say as much in the sermon. It is not hatred to believe that someone else is mistaken.

Remember that the United States is a free nation. Perhaps our freedom is sometimes taken as wishy-washiness in the Islamic world, that we are betraying our "Americanness" when some of us are as fixed and certain in our faith as the most serious Muslim. Faithful Muslims disagree with us; I suspect that these disagreements are daily asserted in Kuwait where, I understand, no Christian is free to refute them.

So I did in my pulpit what is commonly done by Imams in Mosques from the other side; I was clarifying to Christians that the gospel is not a hodge-podge of opinions from which you can choose your version. If it is true, that which contradicts it cannot be true. The point of my message was that serious Christians are as profoundly certain of their faith as Muslims are of theirs. That which is at the heart of the Christian Gospel, first and foremost the unambiguous declaration of the New Testament that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, is not an opinion that Christians may reject and remain Christians.