Response to Reuben Home

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Aug 10, 2006 at 09:32

I am all for an Evangelical revival, and have prayed my whole adult life for one to happen. I pray for a new generation of George Whitefields and John Witherspoons--not characters like Pat Robertson, who clearly falls under the definition of false prophet as laid down in Deuteronomy 18.

However, it is important to realize that while fundamentalist Christianity allows for self-defense and is as open to the just war doctrine of Augustine as it is to Quaker pacifism, it is not symmetric to radical Islamicism. The foundational texts read by Islam teach that the religion is to be spread by the sword; Christianity has to make do with Paul's admonition that the weapons of its warfare are spiritual rather than carnal. Hence, one cannot expect a renewed evangelical America to go into a head-to-head with radical Islamicism with as robust a conscience as its opponent.

Still, I do think that there is something redolent of the prophets going on today. In ancient Israel, the prophets warned that the Mesopotamian conquerors would come upon an Israel and Judah that had embraced to Canaanite abominations which God had ordered extirpated. Perhaps the once-Christian West, which had divine grace and truth all but heaped on a platter and handed to it, is having to face the furor isalmicus because of the proud relativism and anti-Christian unbelief of its leading classes.

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