California’s Fuller Theological Seminary is known as a pretty conservative school. That’s why I was surprised to read this morning about their new outreach project to American Muslims. The LA Times reports:
One of the nation's leading evangelical Christian seminaries has launched a federally funded project for making peace with Muslims, featuring a proposed code of ethics that rejects offensive statements about each other's faiths, affirms a mutual belief in one God and pledges not to proselytize.
Just last week conservative evangelicals went nuts when George W. Bush told reporters that he believed Christians and Muslims believed in the same God.
The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, …issued a statement contradicting Bush."The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite. The personalities of each god are evident in the cultures, civilizations and dispositions of the peoples that serve them. Muhammad's central message was submission; Jesus' central message was love. They seem to be very different personalities," Haggard said.
Fuller is taking a different view about whom God is and Muslims are encouraged.
"We hope to lead a large portion of evangelical Christians into a better understanding of Islam," said Sherwood Lingenfelter, Fuller's provost and senior vice president. "After 9/11 there was a great deal of hostility in the Christian community toward Muslims. It is important for Christians to gain a respect for them and treat them with dignity and not assume they're all terrorists.""We are changing the course away from accusations and poisoning the well of relations to what can develop into a project in the service of God," said Yahia Abdul-Rahman, who began participating in the Fuller initiative last year when he headed the region's network of mosques, known as the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.
I’m encouraged too. One of my bad tendencies is to have little faith in conservative Christians on issues of interfaith dialog. Fuller is proving me wrong. Go Fuller!
