Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

Terry Jones, the minister of a Florida church of about 50 members, had declared 9/11 (the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center) a day for burning the Koran. He’d asked Christians all over the United States to send Korans for a huge bonfire at his church but called off the event after a huge outcry within the US, and elsewhere, particularly Muslim countries.

Outcry or not, if there were biblical reasons for offending another person’s religion, by, for example, burning the Koran, it should happen. I searched the New Testament to find those reasons. Here’s what I found:

Nothing.*

* There is a “book” burning incident in Acts (19:17-20), but this is of new believers burning their own books on sorcery.

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

There’s this powerful series of promises in Ezekiel chapter 36, given by God to His people in captivity in Babylon. He’s about to bring them back to Palestine. Here’s some of what He says:

I will . . . come to help you because I have a concern for you (verse 9).

I will . . . bring you back, not because you deserve it, but to protect my holy name—the name you have dishonoured while scattered abroad (22).

I will . . . show how holy my name is when I reveal it through you before the eyes of the other nations (23).

I will . . . sprinkle you with clean water and you shall be clean, your filth will be washed away (25).

I will . . . “give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you a new, obedient heart. And I will put my Spirit in you so you will obey my laws and do whatever I command” (Ezekiel 36:26, 27, NLT).

I will . . . be your God and you will be my people (28).

I will . . . care for you with good crops, fields that can again be farmed, cities will be rebuilt, people will want to live in them (30-36).

I will . . . do this, not because you deserve it. In fact, you should be ashamed of what you have done, but I will cleanse you of your sins (32, 33).

I will . . . do it because I have promised. Everyone will know I am the Lord (36, 38).

God is always the initiator, we the recipients. Of course, we can choose to accept or reject His offers. Reject? How sad would that be?

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

In the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, one character, aptly named Kris Kringle, claims he’s Santa Claus. It’s a claim that gets him sent to a psychiatric institution and to court. The film is about those who have or don’t have faith in Santa Claus. Faith is described as “believing what you know is not so.”

An episode of All in the Family, the TV series that ran for nine years from 1971, has Archie Bunker say faith is “what you wouldn’t believe for your life if it wasn’t in the Bible.”

A 2006 CNN special entitled “What is a Christian” had a voiceover during the credits that said, “After all, if you’ve got the truth, it’s not really faith at all.”

Each of these comments—separated by decades—talk about faith as if it has no substance in reality, as if faith is something only irrational people take on board.

Dallas Willard, in Knowing Christ Today, says we’re in the midst of a “great historical struggle between what might be called ‘traditional’ knowledge, represented by the church, and modern knowledge represented by science” that has brought us to the place where so many see religion “as mere belief or commitment.”

This has made all traditional and religious “knowledge” as illusion and superstition, with real “knowledge” reserved for “subject matters of mathematics and the ‘natural’ sciences—and questionably, to that of the ‘social’ or ‘human’ sciences.”

The problem here is Christianity has uncovered the reality of a God who cares. There’s solid evidence of a Jesus, known as the Christ; and of an empty tomb that began a movement. It’s a movement not devoid of rational thinking, but that demonstrably helped establish scientific methodology.

Not all knowledge is found in the sciences. Never will be. To have real knowledge of love, for instance, you have to experience it.

Willard gives this challenge: “To know Christ in the contemporary world our opponents must see people and communities of people in which He lives today.”