John Piper, preacher, writer, and Calvinist extraordinaire, caused a bit of a stir when he weighed in on his blog about the recent burning of a Koran and the resulting violent riots that ensued.
As the Christian Post reports:
Piper…concluded that the parallel between Christianity and Islam is not of Christ to Muslim prophet Muhammad and the Koran to the Bible. Rather, the Koran parallels Christ.
“The giving of the Koran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity,” asserted Piper in a blog posting on the Desiring God website. “If this is so, then Koran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.”
I’ll agree that it makes a certain kind of sense to draw those parallels between the emphasis on The Word incarnate and the written words of the Koran as far as their value to the respective religions. That being said, I’m just not exactly sure what Piper is trying to demonstrate here. Is he giving a justification for the incredible overreaction of some Muslims who rioted and killed people because someone half a world away burned a copy of their sacred text?
I honestly think he isn’t really trying to assign an absolute moral equivalence to the burning of a Koran and the crucifixion of Christ. I suspect what he’s really doing here is pontificating in scholarly fashion over a theological comparison without really stopping to consider how his words sound to people in non-scholarly world.
However, even the pontification here is a little lacking. It would seem a little strange to say that after 1400 years of varying degrees of radical Islamic aggression that suddenly a reaction to an obscure guy burning a book suddenly explains “why the Muslims are so mad.” Simply put, Islamofascist fundamentalists are angry because their God is angry and they follow his example. Everything else is just grist to that mill. Cartoons of Allah, women who uncover their heads or dare to educate themselves, a teacher who names her teddy bear Muhammad, or a guy who lights a few pages on fire are all just excuses to lash out with an all-consuming anger.
Of course, a quick look around the world will show that not every Muslim is of this same angry stripe. Then again, the ones who aren’t lighting things on fire or beheading folks rarely make the news. And even the Islamic population that isn’t actively participating in acts of violence seems oddly reticent about condemning those acts when pushed to give an opinion. But that’s a different discussion altogether…
Back to the point, in my opinion, I don’t think Piper’s pontifications are particularly helpful. He sounds a lot like like he’s trying to pick up Falwell’s mantle of less-than-well-phrased public statements. Lord save us from your followers.