Anglicans Confront Challenge of Islam
By Jeffrey Walton, Juicy Ecumenism:
Christianity and Islam together comprise the world’s two largest faiths, each monotheistic and centered upon the importance of proselytization – and in many parts of the world, they are on a collision course.
“The prospects for religious war in the next decade are extremely high unless groups like Boko Haram and ISIS are uprooted,” warned Baylor University History Professor Philip Jenkins.
Jenkins, an Episcopalian, was one of seven speakers presenting at the annual Mere Anglicanism Conference January 28-30 at the Charleston Music Hall in Charleston, South Carolina. Mere Anglicanism is the kind of rare event that attracts a cross-section of participants from both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America, as well as overseas Anglicans and the local Diocese of South Carolina.
This year’s conference, themed “The Cross and the Crescent: The Gospel and the Challenge of Islam” featured academics, bishops and evangelists examining the Christian response to the fast-growing global faith.
Presenters spoke in hour-long segments, concluding with a panel discussion on the final day. The nearby Cathedral Church of St. Luke and St. Paul hosted two worship services with sermons by Anglican Frontier Missions Executive Director and former missionary to Turkey Rev. Christopher Royer.
Dr. William Lane Craig of Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, opened the conference speaking about the concept of God in Islam and Christianity. Noting that the question “do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?” had recently been in the news, Craig instead sought to examine what each faith understood about who God is. The God of Islam, Craig determined, was deficient in the Christian view because he lacked the ability to love those who did not love him in return. Effectively, a God who loves sinners and a God incapable of loving sinners – indeed, even declared their enemy in verses of the Qur’an – were at their core sharply different.
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