VIBRANT CHRISTIANITY IN MULTIFAITH
BRITAIN:
Equipping the church for a faithful engagement
with people of different faiths
By Andrew Smith
Bible Reading Fellowship. 120 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 0 857 465 719
This book was written to encourage and help ordinary believers to relate sensitively, confidently and in a Christ-honouring way to people in their community who follow a different faith.
It is gently, earnestly and engagingly written, and I found it immensely challenging and thought-provoking, living as I do in mosque-dominated Dewsbury.
Unconditional love?
It forced me to consider, and reconsider, many areas of my life in the light of clear and simple biblical injunctions. Do I truly love unconditionally and with a servant heart the Muslim men I meet? Am I in any sense a peacemaker in our often-fractured society? And, most searchingly of all, in my witness do I always treat others as I would wish them to treat me?
In all this I was grateful for the insight and straightforwardness of the author, a man with rich experience of seeking to befriend, serve and share the gospel with those whose lives are shaped by other faiths.
Saved without personal faith?
Does this mean that I can heartily recommend this slim volume? Sadly, that is not the case – far from it. Why is that? Well, although Andrew Smith believes absolutely that men and women can only be saved from God’s judgment by the blood of Christ, he nevertheless believes that many will be saved who never come to personal faith in him. Sure, he sees such faith as absolutely necessary both to assurance of salvation and to enjoyment of the abundant life that Jesus came to bring, and he believes passionately in winsomely sharing the gospel wherever he can. Yet he also believes that, in the Day of Judgment, many will be saved by Christ’s atoning death who either never heard of Christ or never came to realise that he was the God-sent Saviour. And he seeks to demonstrate that from a range of Scripture texts. That attempt left me unconvinced and deeply troubled.
Fatal failures
To my mind, Andrew Smith fails adequately to face up to many important statements, including the following:
1. Paul tells the Corinthians that God saves through the foolishness of the message he preached, and that none come to know him through the ‘wisdom of the world’ (1 Corinthians 1.21).
2. Paul constantly asserts that salvation is being united with Christ in his death and resurrection, and that personal faith is the bond of that union. It is alien to the NT and surely quite bizarre to suggest that one can be in such a union, but know nothing of Christ.
3. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul teaches that false religion is demonic. There is no indication that the forces of evil are only involved with crass forms of idol worship rather than the more sophisticated forms of false religion that still blind so many to the truth of the gospel today. Even Muslims recognise that Allah is a very different god from the Lord who is revealed in our New Testament – hence their insistence that the Bible has been changed – by which they mean totally and irreversibly corrupted. Incidentally, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing true at all in any religion except Christianity, let alone nothing to be commended in the lives of the adherents of those faiths. However, it does mean that there is no saving light anywhere else than in the Bible’s revelation of Christ.
4. In Athens, Paul asserted that God calls all, even the very religious, to repent of all foolish ideas of him and all inadequate worship and acknowledge the one he raised from the dead. He offered no hope at all without that radical repentance (Acts 17.22-31).
It is Andrew Smith’s failure to come to terms with these and similar cardinal tenets of the NT that make his book a dangerous read, notwithstanding its godly wisdom and insight on many matters of considerable practical importance.
