Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Islamic Modernists

Saint Paul preached to the Galatians, "But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed."

So whether such an angel comes to Joseph Smith or to Muhammad, as Christians we know that the "gospel" is to be rejected out of hand. No more revelation was given after the death of Saint John, and the Good News is borne forward through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Modernism, as we understand it, tinkers with the Gospel and tries to change the message of it from within, and the first question to ask a modernist is, "Do you believe that God revealed Himself to man?" Usually the initial answer is a waffly, well, sort of, maybe, not really, ahem, well ultimately no, man made it up. In that light, what an earlier generation of men made up, modern-day men can amend since there is nothing "sacred" about the deposit from the start.

In that light, there can be modernist Muslims as well, who believe that man misunderstood revelation from the outset (meaning Muhammad and his followers) so modern-day Muslims can tinker with the deposit and fine-tune it to contemporary sensibilities.

Read the rest of it at Femenine Genius

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