Christian leaders begging forgiveness of Allah

[Ioannis]

Ellopos Blog: Greek - European Culture
Christian leaders begging forgiveness of Allah!
November 28th, 2007

Bruce Thornton (author of Greek Ways and Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide - Encounter Books) writes about a recent epistle of Western Christian leaders to Muslims (full text). Here are crucial excerpts about common-sense truths some of us despise:

On November 18, the New York Times ran a full-page ad entitled “Christian Response to A Common Word Between Us and You.” … Over 300 Christian theologians and church leaders signed the “Christian Response,” including the heads of some of the nation’s most prestigious seminaries and theological schools. But if it accurately represents the thinking of mainstream Christian leadership, then Christianity in America is in deep trouble.

The response opens on a familiar self-loathing note, in the therapeutic style that has convinced jihadists that Christianity in the West is an empty shell, a mere lifestyle choice. Noting that Muslim and Christian “relations have sometimes been tense, even characterized by outright hostility,” the letter professes “that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the ‘war on terror’) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors,” and so “we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.”

The groveling self-abasement of this language, particularly its begging forgiveness of Allah, is matched only by its remarkable historical ignorance.

“Outright hostility” has indeed existed between Muslims and Christians, for the simple reason that for 13 centuries Islam grew and spread by war, plunder, rapine, and enslavement throughout the Christian Middle East. Allah’s armies destroyed regions that were culturally Christian for centuries, variously slaughtering, enslaving, and converting their inhabitants, or allowing them to live as oppressed dhimmi, their lives and property dependent on a temporary “truce” that Muslim overlords could abrogate at any time.

And let’s not forget the seven-century-long Islamic occupation of Spain, the centuries of raids into southern Italy and southern France, the near-sack of Rome in 846, the occupation of Sicily and Greece, the four-century-long occupation of the Balkans, the destruction of Constantinople, the two sieges of Vienna, the kidnapping of Christian youths to serve as janissaries from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the continual raiding of the northern Mediterranean littoral for slaves from 1500 to 1800, and the current jihadist terrorist attacks against the West. …

For its part, ‘A Common Word’ makes no apologies for the violence that Islam has perpetrated against Christian people up to the present day. And the “Christian Response” repeats the “common ground” mantra, along with the usual calls to “interfaith dialogue,” and makes flattering references to the Muslim clerics’ “deep insight and courage” and their “generous letter.” This appeasing tone of the traditional dhimmi -an unreciprocated solicitude typical of the inferior when dealing with his superior - suggests once again that the West is spiritually dead, its Christian faith in the hands of those who will not defend it, even in print.

[Menydh]

“The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.”

This is masonic speak, not Christian.

I've searched for the letter to see who was involved in this nonesense. Vastly American, mostly Evangelical and also Mennonites and Baptists. But there is a "Catholic" presence.. or so one might believe. From the Catholic Theological Union, of Chicago. Apparently the largest Catholic institute in America, and a "thinktank" of masonic ultra-ecumenicalism. It is heavily involved not only in ecumenicalism with ultra-Protestants, but also with Muslims and Jews. I read that they even endorsed a committee formed with the ADL against Mel Gibson's film, The Passion (related).

This Catholic Theological Union looks to me as the seed of destruction from within The Church. American, what else?

They have no right to speak but for themselves.

[Marulus]

present (e.g. in excesses of the ‘war on terror’) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors,” and so “we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.

Note this subtle but not less monstruous manipulation. Actually, they view the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan as somehow related to Christianity and Christians. As if it were a "Christian" war, as if the American government were composed of Christians, as if America were quintessentially Christian, as if these wars were led in the name of "Christianity".

So all Christians in the world should feel somehow ashamed and repent because of the acts of these "Christian soldiers"! So this text seems to imply.

I for myself don't feel any spiritual closeness to the murderous US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor do I view them as Christians, nor do I think that I as Christian should ask forgiveness, in any sense, for their deeds. They are totally alien to me.

It seems that the authors of this letter confounded religion with politics too much, as if they didn't see any difference between the temporal (worldly) and the spiritual sphere...which makes them closer to Islam than to the Christianity.

And it reeeks of masonic twaddle, definitely.

But, another thing: the author who wrote the critique of the letter of these "Christians" is no-one else than a famed American neocon Bruce Thornton who writes for many neocon publications. I saw some of his articles in which he tends to identify Christianity with the modern West. This sort of thinking makes him very akin to the authors of this letter. So it is a family dispute.