A Stand for the Episcopals?
The Episcopal church has taken a beating in recent years regarding the ordination of an open and practicing homosexual. Compounding this problem is the great amount of diversity inside the Episcopal church, which is causing great divisions. A new divide could be on the horizon with Episcopal priest Ann Holmes Redding and her recent conversion to Islam.
Perhaps conversion is too strong a word, it implies a turning from one stance to another, but according to her own statements she is both a Muslim and a Christian. She attends Saturday prayer services at a local mosque and then dons her priestly collar to offer Christian church services on Sunday mornings. While many are perplexed, her present Bishop Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner recently stated that, he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting. But I believe that there is still hope that the Episcopals may make a stand as the Bishop of Redding’s ordaining body has taken Redding’s collar for a year to evaluate this entire fiasco.
Christians aren’t the only ones evaluating this, recently on CNN a Muslim cleric was discussing how from his religion’s view you could not be both. How right he is! This is not an issue of openness or tolerance, to accept both is to reject both and become nothing. For if you accept both, you must reject their teachings on critical issues such as Christ. The Christian believes that salvation comes from the physical resurrection of Christ, while the Muslim holds that he was simply a great teacher. Muslims holds to essentially a works based religion, specifically the faithful attain salvation by adherence to the five pillars of Islam. Still another difference is the nature of God. Christians believe in the Trinity (or Triune God) while Islam vehemently rejects this as polytheism and worship Allah only.
It is time for the Episcopal church to take a stand. They need to reject the acceptance of both beliefs or join the modern unitarian church movement. If they can not stand as a church then they should change their name to the Episcopal Center for Spirituality and continue to explore the melding of opposing beliefs into nothing.-
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