Saying that not all Muslims – or Christians or Jews for that matter – believe their faith is the only way to God, the United Methodist Church's Claremont School of Theology has launched a program to train leaders for the often-conflicting faiths together.
-- From "Seminary introduces program of religious collaboration" by Michael Carl © 2010 WorldNetDaily 6/25/10
The unorthodox program was announced on the website for the school, and detailed in a statement released by school media-relations officer Claudia Pearce.
"Christians, Muslims and Jews will now have the opportunity to take classes together to learn about each other's religious traditions, to study topics that deal specifically with interfaith issues and to build bridges through coursework that assists them, our society’s future religious leaders, to act collaboratively in response to the various issues that face our society and world," the statement said.
. . . Christian cultural commentator and Cross Talk America radio host Ingrid Schlueter says the Claremont program is a clear compromise of the truth of the Gospel.
"Their new spiritual-blender approach to Christian theological education is to 'teach students to recognize the legitimacy and integrity' of other religious traditions. This, by definition, cannot be Christianity," Schlueter said.
"The founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ, declared himself to be the exclusive way to heaven in John 14:6. The founder of Christianity further described the spiritual way to eternal life as 'narrow' in Matthew 7:14," Schlueter explained.
"Clearly Claremont is still teaching theology. It is not, however, Christian theology. It is the new, popular brand of universalism that rejects outright the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ in Holy Scripture and ventures into rank spiritual rebellion in the name of tolerance and cooperation. God's unchanging Word tells us that it is at the name of Jesus that every knee will bow and confess His Lordship. Not Buddha, not Krishna, not Allah or some other god cobbled together in human imagination," Schlueter said.
Schlueter said Claremont is not representative of the doctrine taught by Methodism's founder John Wesley.
"If John Wesley were alive today to see what his heirs were teaching, one could only imagine his anger and grief. Claremont is setting the stage for persecution of biblical Christians who refuse this apostasy. They are casting themselves as Christians, but theirs is a faith that is alien to everything Christians have lived and died for in the last 2,000 years," Schlueter said.
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