One of my Greyfriars students has written helpfully to me, pointing out yet another implication of the Federal Vision trajectory, to wit, my agreement with Pope Benedict on the fact that YHWH and Allah cannot both be the one true God.
He said this because this last Wednesday evening I did a presentation for Collegiate Reformed Fellowship at the University of Idaho, arguing that Allah (who has no Son by definition) and YHWH (who does by definition) cannot be the same. This was a “worldview forum,” designed to reach out to non-Christians, and there were a number of Muslims there. During the Q & A, I was accused of fomenting “hatred” because I was insisting that the true God is triune, and that unless we come to the Father through the Son, we cannot come at all. To the charge of “hatred,” I responded by saying a belief can be mistaken, and yet not be motivated by hatred. If I believed someone’s house to be on fire (mistakenly), and was pounding on their door to wake them up in time to escape, this error may be many things, but it is not hateful. The central theme of my talk was that, despite certain similarities (monotheism, people of a book, etc.), Muslims and Christians worship different gods.
Well, then along comes the pope (this was coordinated by some Jesuit moles, deep within the PCA) and says something very similar. He argued that the idea of jihad is fundamentally messed up, and that to the extent this idea is grounded in the conception that Muslims have of Allah (and it is), this means that Allah and YHWH are not the same. Of course, in response to the criticism that Muslims have a distorted view of violence as a problem-solving technique, the reaction has been to burn the pope in effigy. Teach him to be hateful. This is yet another walking incarnation of “not getting it.”