A defender of the faith – the Islamic faith
ONCE again Prince Charles has dismayed those who truly hold to Biblical Christianity. Recently, he championed Islam when he gave an address, on “Building Bridges Between Islam and the West”, to Middle Eastern experts at Steyning in West Sussex. He stressed that he was dealing with the spiritual values of Islam, and stated, “In the West we need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn once again with our hearts, as well as our heads.”
Would that he would see the utter impossibility of building a bridge between the spiritual values of Christianity and Islam. The recent answer given by a Cambridge scholar to the question, Why did Gibbon the historian admire Islam? is that Gibbon saw it as a religion “without doctrines which transcend human reason. There is no Trinity, no God-man… Muslims have never taught that human nature is fundamentally corrupt.” Quite so! How dishonouring it is to Christ, the King of kings, when anyone, whether prince or pauper, promotes a religion that denies His divinity and dishonours the true God. ☐
The way of salvation according to Inclusivism
WE are all familiar with the term “Pluralism” as a way of describing salvation as coming through all religions – that all roads, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and so on, lead to God. We are also familiar with “Exclusivism” which states that there is only one way to God, and that is by Jesus who says, “I am the way… No man cometh unto the Father but by me.”
A new term is gaining popularity, and that is “Inclusivism”. According to this view Christ is the only way of salvation but His grace may be mediated through other religions. Thus the faithful Hindu is indeed saved but unbeknown to him it is by the grace of Christ operating through his Hinduism.
This view is certainly allowed for in a recent Evangelical Alliance definition of an “evangelical”. (Evangelical Times, December 1996) It is reported (in a personal report from someone who attended) that at this year’s Evangelical Alliance Conference this matter was aired and it was evident that some delegates were inclined to consider Exclusivism seriously. This led an Indian convert from Hinduism to ask why he had gone through all the pain of alienation from family and friends when he turned to Christ and away from Hinduism, if the grace of Christ was in Hinduism all the time. Why indeed! J.R.T.
The EU tightens its hold on Britain
THE current debate about the nation’s relationship to Europe, and the fact that EU laws increasingly supersede British laws, some of them even without being debated in Parliament, show us the reality of our entanglement in Europe.
We take nothing to do with the politics or economics, as such, of the Union, but we are deeply concerned about the impinging of Europe’s authority upon the life of this nation. As we forecast in the 1950’s and since, our sovereignty is being steadily whittled away. Protestant Britain (for that is what Britain is yet) is being increasingly submerged in Roman Catholic Europe. The Vatican, although not a member state of the EU, continues to occupy a seat in its policy-forming bodies, and is exerting a powerful influence.
We have every reason to fear the evident endangering of the Protestant succession to the throne and of the safeguards enshrined in the 1707 Treaty of Union between England and Scotland. ☐
The appalling scandal of abortion
THE thirtieth anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act looms close. It is worth our while to pause and consider the fearful slaughter of unborn infants since then.
The total killed in the UK since 1968 is now much more than four million, and only a minute proportion of these abortions were justified by the medical condition of the mother. In a shorter period, since 1973, there have been around 30 million abortions in the USA.
This unspeakable wickedness shows no sign of abating. Indeed, for the first quarter of 1996, there was the unexpectedly large increase of 6.7 per cent in the number of abortions in England and Wales, and it is feared that a similar trend will be revealed by Scottish figures when they are released.
It is no wonder that society sees more and more disregard for the sanctity of life in other spheres – with a much higher murder rate than in the sixties, and increasing pressure for the introduction of euthanasia. K.D.M.
Police warnings about underage drinking
OUR concern expressed recently about the easy accessibility to children of alcopops, fruit drinks laced with alcohol, is increased by recent reports from Tayside and Strathclyde of children being drunk and coming to serious harm.
In Nairnshire a 13-year-old girl was found drunk and collapsed in a wood. A police inspector of Northern Constabulary said that their officers ‘are regularly having to take children as young as 13, considerably under the influence of drink, home to their parents, and in some cases, to hospital. He warned, “It is only a matter of time before someone is found dead.”
The Crime and Punishment (Scotland) Bill now before the Commons will give power to the police to confiscate alcohol from teenagers drinking in public, but it is imperative that further measures be taken to make it much more difficult for underage drinking to take place. ☐