I have just witnessed Bill O'Reilly of Fox News and Washington Post resident leftie Sally Quinn who edits WPs 'On Faith' section - I can't think of anyone intellectually less qualified on the issue of faith from what I have heard from her - over whether Anders Breivik would be called a Christian. Thus, as the New York Times would have it Breivik must be a "Christian Terrorist”, much as we feel able to use the term “Muslim Terrorist”.
Not so, and here’s why.
Here's the critical difference. The Bible, the source teaching for Christianity, specifically teaches that murder, indeed a number of key public acts, are powerful evidence that the individual does not hold any meaningful belief in practice, as the Bible demands. Thus, whatever 'title' one might assume to oneself is irrelevant if it is not matched by public evidence of private belief.
The fact is there is a key difference between that which determines what a Christian is - the teaching of the Bible, the source of Christian teaching - and that which teaches what it means to be a Muslim, the teachings of the Koran and Hadith. I have long taught the former, but have also read the latter. Many who like to comment publicly have often never done either. Islamic teachings do indeed specifically teach that violence, even murder, is divinely sanctioned on occasion, not least, when a Muslim converts to another faith. Equally, the lives of Jews and Christians can be threatened “in the name of Allah”. That is something which no one calling themselves Christian (or Jewish) can ever point to and suggest the God of the Bible asked the same of them. And that’s another reason why “God told me to do it” doesn’t cut the Christian intellectual ice. God never goes against his own Word.
Thus we CAN say that one man may be a "Muslim Terrorist", while there can be no such thing as a "Christian Terrorist"; an oxymoron when the very act of murder demonstrates the very opposite presenting plain evidence of unbelief.
Case closed – except for those who have an agenda, of course.
Peter C Glover, is the author, The Great Evangelical Disaster: Revisited, to be released in October as an e-book.
Peter C. Glover is an English writer & freelance journalist specializing in political, media and energy analysis (and is currently European Associate Editor for the US magazine Energy Tribune. He has been published extensively and is also the author of a number of books including The Politics of Faith: Essays on the Morality of Key Current Affairs which set out the moral case for the invasion of Iraq and a Judeo-Christian defence of the death penalty.
