A handful of quotes

John Piper's comments on Islam and the NPP have caused a mild stir in the blogosphere. Piper begins with identifying the key issue in Muslim-Christian dialogue:

Listening to an interview by Mark Dever with Thabiti Anyabwile, I heard Mark use an illustration that I found tremendously helpful. It relates to the question whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God under different names.

He said that we should picture two old classmates from college discussing a common friend from thirty years ago. They begin to wonder if they are talking about the same person. One of them is convinced they are, and the other keeps thinking this is not quite the way he remembers the friend. Finally, they decide to dig out an old yearbook and settle the issue. They open the book, and as soon as they see the picture of their classmate, one says, “No, that’s not who I am talking about.” So it was not the same person after all.

Mark said that Jesus, as he is revealed in the Bible, is the picture in the yearbook. When a Muslim and a Christian, who have been discussing whether they are worshiping the same God, look at God in the yearbook, it settles the matter: “No,” says the Muslim, “that’s not who I am talking about.”

Mark Horne has the most helpful post on the subject I have seen. By altering Piper's comments so they are about a mythical New Perspective on Moses rather than the NPP he shows how Piper's main concern that in interfaith dialogue the person of our God should be central actually demonstrates that the supposed side-lining of justification by faith in the NPP is not that big a deal after all. As Mark says: 'The Bible talks about the true religion v. false religion many times in the Bible without making that the key issue.' [note I've edited the above because of an embarrassing oversight earlier, see the comments]

The ever brilliant Peter Leithart comments that:

Unbelievers and pagans often understand the political import of Christianity more clearly than Christians. Jews persecuted the early Christians because they threatened to change Jewish customs, and thereby threatened the future of Israel. Romans persecuted Christians because they proclaimed that Jesus, not Caesar, was king. Innumerable modern believers have been slaughtered for the same reason. The gospel isn't "apolitical." It simply proclaims a different politics. Jesus called His disciples, as NT Wright puts it, to a "revolutionary way of being revolutionary."

Finally, my friend Steve Wenham pointed out a random commencement address which seems to have been banging around the web. The best bit is encapsulated in the following

So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

I will post something a bit better over the weekend.