14 - TWC 8 'Followers of Jesus in Islamic Mosques'

Reading Quiz on Theology in the Context of World Christianity

Christianity can be deeply unpopular for potential Muslim converts because

of the association of Christianity with western cultural decadence and explicit sexual immorality.

The C-1 through C-6 Spectrum addresses

Christ-centered communities as defined by language of worship, cultural or religious forms, and self identity as Muslim or Christian.

C-1 through C-3 range from traditional church to contextual church where

Muslim background believers still call themselves Christians and avoid religious forms strongly associated with Islam.

C-4 differs from C-5 because, although both insider movements, in C-4

Muslim background believers would use Islamic terms for God, prayer, and Gospels, abstain from pork or alcohol, and fast during Ramadan, yet avoiding religious acts prohibited by Scripture in following Isa al-Masih.

C-6 is not considered to be an important category to theorize as

it refers to Muslim background believers under extreme persecution for whom we should pray, and who themselves would not wish to perpetuate their secret faith as a position.

C-5 refers to churchless Messianic Muslims in Jesus Mosques where the most important question to differentiate them from C-4 Muslim background believers is

about religious identity. C-5 Muslim believers understand themselves as Muslim even after accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior.

Appeal to Acts 15 to defend the practice of C-5 Muslim believers as an insider movement rests on

not requiring that Gentile believers assume the burden of the Jewish proselyte in order to follow Jesus and experience salvation.

Supposing that Acts 15 authorizes C-4 Muslim Background Believers (MBB) rather than C-5 Muslim Believers (MB) rests on the understanding that

Gentiles were required by the early church to surrender their religious identity while allowed to maintain their cultural identity.

Tennent imagines a fictitious Cairo Council where Gentile followers of Christ meet to decide how to make things the least difficult for Muslim believers, coming up with:

declining to say the Shahadah in daily prayer (salat) unless replacing the confession of Mohammad with one about Isa as the Eternal Word; acknowledging the Bible over the Qur’an; and adding Father of Lord Jesus, Holy Spirit, and Blessed Trinity to the 99 beautiful names of Allah.

Tennent imagines these restrictions would

fail to be considered by other Muslims or the believer themselves as a serious maintenance of Islamic religious identity.

Tennent suggests that 1 Cor 9:19-22 about ‘becoming all things to all people’ supports a reading that

isn’t relevant, according even to C-5 advocates, who restrict the category to Muslims born in Islamic cultures and not to incoming missionaries using deceptive ‘conversion’ stories.

Joshua Massey thinks Christians suspicious of Muslim believers as a C-5 insider movement are like

the first century Judaizers, requiring more of converts than the gospel demands, and Tennant agrees with him in regard to requiring C1 or C-2 cultural extractionism but not about C-5 religious identity maintenance.

Survey’s of C-5 Muslim ‘insiders’ seems to show strong adherence to salvation through Christ alone, but also subordination of the Bible to the Qu’ran and denial of the Trinity. Theological controversy around what it takes in terms of doctrine to be saved is partly distorted

by Protestant minimalist reduction of salvation to justification, with an individualist faith that sets personal against propositional.

When Tennent writes that ‘A new convert not only has faith, but he or she is brought into a common faith’, he is making the claim that

ecclesiology is required by soteriology.

Ethical integrity requires that

Muslim background believers need to be shown that their religious identity has changed in coming to Christ.