For those of us who may be in a position to dialog with Muslim friends about our faith, here’s a series of thought-provoking videos that may be helpful.
Reasons To Believe scholar Fuz Rana, who had a Muslim father, interviews Abdu Murray, who converted from Islam to Christianity and now shares his faith with Muslims through several high-profile ministries.
Abdu has hard-won, firsthand insights about how to share the Christian faith with Muslims. Among his most powerful points are the value of respect for the individual and how bridges can be built in a positive way, without attacking the person or his worldview.
One of the best things on sale is the new NIV Zondervan Study Bible eBook, where the content was briefly reviewed a few months ago on Veracity. I have been wrestling with the idea of getting the new NIV Zondervan Study Bible, since it really looked to be a fantastic resource for digging into God’s Word. But Zondervan has it on sale this week for $4.99, so for less than the cost for lunch, you can have about a 3000 page, packed Bible study resource in eBook form (that is a steal compared to the $26.43 for the hardcover). So I gave up my lunch break yesterday and got it. Here is what I found….
So, I was in for a confusing shock as a young person in college at a Bible study meeting. An engineering student next to me, wearing blue jeans, flannel shirt, and an old pair of sneakers, was puzzled over a passage of the Bible. To find an answer, he began to read from the notes of his new Charles Ryrie Study Bible. Across from the engineer sat a young brunette woman, dressed to the “nines,” propped up in her high heels and adorned with plenty of makeup. Though evidently they were friends, she nevertheless visibly glared at the engineer, as he spoke for about five minutes. Suddenly, this woman, who later told me, she was the daughter of an executive at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), sat up straight in her chair and challenged the engineering student. “That is not what my Bible teaches! Who does this ,’Charles Ryrie,’ think he is?”
The atmosphere in the room had become so thick, you could cut it with a knife.
After a few minutes of rigorous back and forth, the casual engineering student and the dolled up brunette finally made peace with one another, but I sat there stunned. I had no idea what kind of mess I just found myself in. I had no clue what these folks were talking about. I had no idea who this ‘Charles Ryrie’ even was. But I was determined now to find out.
The Ryrie Study Bible. One of the most influential (and, at times, controversial) aids for understanding the English Bible for almost four decades.
In the twentieth century, Charles Ryrie was among the most influential conservative evangelical Bible scholars on the American scene. I would consider him to be one of the last, great classic dispensationalist theologians. Before Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novel series overtook the church by storm, there was the Ryrie Study Bible. Classic dispensationalism championed ideas still commonly taught in many evangelical circles today, particularly the importance of a literal, futuristic interpretation of Bible prophecy, and the distinction between Israel and the church, as one of the primary interpretive keys for understanding the unity of the Bible. Is there a common thread of logic that unites the Old and New Testaments together, and the Bible’s vision of the future? Ryrie sought to tackle these type of grand questions.
Among Charles Ryrie’s mentors, dispensationalists commonly held a hard and fast distinction between the term “kingdom of God” and the similar phrase used in the Gospel of Matthew, “kingdom of Heaven.” Some even refused to utter the Lord’s Prayer as a part of corporate worship, believing that the Lord’s Prayer belonged strictly to a future dispensation. Charles Ryrie began to question such rigid, hyper-systematic interpretations of the Bible, that were originally intended to combat the prevailing liberal Protestant theologies of the early 20th century. But classic dispensationalism also rubbed against the mindset of those older conservative evangelicals who embraced covenant theology. The “iron sharpening iron” effect of these different schools of theology eventually caused the more conciliatory Ryrie Study Bible to supersede (pun intended!) the older Scofield Reference Bible that dominated previous generations in many Bible-believing churches.
Young Millennial Christians have never heard of Charles Ryrie, and thus the Ryrie Study Bible has lost its popularity for the new generation. Nevertheless, the influence of this forceful and yet gentle scholar of the Bible remains within the evangelical church, his legacy encouraging believers today to grow in their knowledge, love, and obedience towards the Scriptures.
Roman Catholic Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill made history in February, 2016. (Photo credit: Edgar Jimenez / Flickr | Larry Koester / Flickr)
I recently attended a Roman Catholic funeral mass for a neighbor of mine. It had been years since I had attended a Catholic memorial service. Catholic worshipers genuflected, as the sanctuary filled up with smoke from the priest’s incense, an ancient practice of the church, things that you would never see in my Protestant Evangelical church. It reminded me of just how disconnected Protestant Evangelicals can become from other traditions within greater Christendom….
In my town, the two largest churches are made up of Protestant Evangelicals (my church) and the Roman Catholics, respectively. A number of decades ago, a group of families from Greece settled in the area, and opened up a bunch of restaurants. These families became the backbone of a relatively new Greek Orthodox church in town, opened just a few years ago.
Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants make up the three great wings of Christianity, and yet these traditions are often isolated from one another. In general, Protestant Evangelicals know about Roman Catholics, but their reactions to Catholicism are mixed. Some are curiously fascinated with the traditions associated with Catholicism, and they are drawn to certain aspects of Catholic piety. They read their Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and they like the idea of going off to a Catholic monastery once in awhile for a retreat. But they do not always understand the whole “transubstantiation” thing… much less the incense. On the other side are those who have run as far away as they can from Rome, ditching their rosary as an “instrument of Satan,” believing that not a lot has really changed since the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. But probably, most Evangelicals stand somewhere in the middle, curious… yet cautious… about the Roman pontiff and his followers, … and those funny looking hats the Pope wears.
Evangelicals know even less about the Eastern Orthodox, such as the Greeks who have those restaurants in town. The Orthodox have the funny hats, too. The Orthodox have their “smells and bells,” which for the typical Protestant Evangelical leads to great bemusement. “But are they really Christians?,” many perplexed Protestant Evangelicals will honestly ask. That is what you get when you rely on movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding for information about the Eastern church.
This sense of unfamiliarity is probably why last week’s meeting between Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill does not register on the typical Protestant Evangelical radar. But it really should.
When Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill embraced one another in Cuba, it was the first time in about 1,000 years since the chief leader of the Roman Catholic church met with one of the highest ranking leaders in Eastern Orthodoxy. In 1054, the Eastern and Western churches split, technically about a relatively obscure dispute over a line in the Nicene Creed, the filioque controversy, but mostly it was over who was really leading the church: was it the bishop of Rome, the Pope, or was it a college of bishops, as advocated by the great churches of the East?
It is difficult to say what might come of this meeting between the Pope and the Russian church leader. It was not like the Pope was meeting with all of the Eastern Orthodox leaders. The balance of influence wielded by the Greek, Russian, Antiochene, and various other Eastern churches is a sensitive matter. Both leaders made a joint plea for unity and a call to aid Syrian and other Christians, enduring hardship due to war, and the threat of terrible persecution.
Don McClanen was a young, college basketball coach when he persisted and persisted to have a meeting with Branch Rickey. Rickey, who is most known today as the Brooklyn Dodgers executive, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, by signing Jackie Robinson, finally met with McClanen for an historic five hour meeting. It was out of this meeting that the vision for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) was born in 1954.
I was not much of an athlete in college, but when the track and field coach of the local high school and a student called me to find out if I would play guitar at their local FCA meetings, I accepted. FCA meets in groups called “huddles,” and I was impressed by the fact that on many campuses, FCA was often the only interdenominational Christian fellowship group encouraging young people to grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ through prayer, Bible study and worship.
It is quite common now for professional athletes to make bold proclamations of their faith in public, but this would be hard to imagine if it had not been for Don McClanen’s commitment to reach young people for Jesus. McClanen’s personal vision for FCA was in response to reading that at least 17 million American youth in the early 1950s had no church experience or exposure to the Gospel.
Veracity 