News Alert

Los Angeles Times, 12/6/03: One of the nation’s leading evangelical Christian seminaries has launched a federally funded project for making peace with Muslims, featuring a proposed code of ethics that rejects offensive statements about each other’s faiths, affirms a mutual belief in one God and pledges not to proselytize.

The $1-million project, initiated by Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, is being hailed by both sides as a pioneering attempt to ease continuing conflict. But, in an illustration of sharp theological divides, some conservative evangelicals are challenging the ethics code and asserting that they do not believe in the same God as Muslims.

Tensions between Muslims and evangelical Christians have been aggravated by a series of negative remarks about Islam by national evangelical leaders since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those included the characterization of Islam by evangelist Franklin Graham as an evil religion, and assertions by the Rev. Jerry Falwell that the Prophet Muhammad was a terrorist, and by the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, that Muhammad was a “demon-possessed pedophile.”

The Fuller project, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice (news-web sites), is intended to develop practical peacemaking practices for Christians and Muslims, publish a book about them, and train local communities in their use. It is the latest of several efforts that Fuller has launched since Sept. 11 to build bridges with Muslims.

Excerpts from “The Two Jerusalems,” The SCP Journal, vol. 27:2-27:3, 2003, pp. 16, 17: In 740 AD, the Emperor of Khazaria, in the steppes of Russia, declared his subjects “Jewish” after his own conversion to Judaism. Genuine rabbis were summoned from Babylonia to teach his subjects Pharisaic Judaism in the Khazar kingdom that flourished from the sixth to tenth centuries. If one wonders about the ghettos of Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and throughout Eastern Europe being so far from Palestine, it is because their Jewish inhabitants never came from Palestine but were descendants from the mass conversion of the Khazar Empire.

What does this imply? That most of the Jews “returning” to Palestine never came from Palestine in the first place; that they are not even of the lineage of Shem. They are Gentile converts. This throws a massive curve ball, from an eschatological and theological standpoint at the prospect of Jews returning to the modern State of Israel under divine sanction.

In reality, upwards of 85 percent of today’s Jews are descended from the Khazars….

[TBC: This is a rather shocking example of the growing support among evangelicals for “replacement theology,” which teaches that God has completely rejected the nation of Israel in favor of the church. It is “shocking” because a.) the historical information presented and the conclusion drawn are erroneous, b.) O.T. end-time prophecies literally directed at Israel must now be fulfilled by the church, and c.) the Jewish author has unwittingly contributed to the new anti-Semitism developing in Christendom. This is a stunner coming from a normally, biblically sound apologetics ministry! (See TBC Nov. ’01; Jan., Apr. ’02; Q&A, Mar. ’96; Jan. ’03)]