Thursday, May 13, 2010

Biblical Missiology Interviews Carl Medearis

Read the interview here: Carl Medearis author of Muslims, Christians and Jesus.

Ten questions were asked.  Here are the topics:

  1. Islamic/Christian view of God
  2. Kingdom circles
  3. Gospel as “good news” only
  4. Ultimate goal in building relationships
  5. What constitutes saving belief
  6. The community of believers
  7. Do communities of MBBs exist
  8. Building bridges
  9. Danger of legitimizing extremes if overly positive
  10. The Book “Son of Hamas”

Biblical Missiology considers Carl “insider.”  But from what I’ve read of Carl, most of his practices/views would fall into C4 (Biblical Missiology is against C4 too).  Here are a couple of Carl’s comments:

That’s what we want – to be found in Christ. Not to be either Muslim or Christian.

So a Muslim may still be confused about the prophethood of Muhammad and the authority of the Qur’an or the divinity of Jesus and still be saved. But we don’t desire for him to stay there.

I imagine that Carl would wholeheartedly agree with Abdul Asad’s post on appropriate C5 (still the best chart out there on contextualization!).

Related: When should we focus on the cross?

3 comments:

Tim Herald said...

Awesome responses from Carl!

Peace.

Mark Stephan said...

Biblical Missiology is not against C4. Biblical Missiology is a consortium of many organizations and missiologists that have a spectrum of views.

C5/C4 are not set categories that accurately express the views of BM's members. While most would say C5 for the most part is Biblically unsound, C4 is more of a gray-zone where some things may be Biblical, others, gray.

The purposes of Biblical Missiology is to bring up issues, hash them out as much as possible, explain the reasoning, and give readers different perspectives on the issues.

Each article on Biblical Missiology is written by a person, whom may or may not have the full support of others in Biblical Missiology. Our views are diverse, but yes, do tend to fall along general lines of agreement.

I hope this helps clarify what our hopes and goals are. We are not against any person, but rather desire to bring all strategy and ministry into its proper place of flowing out of the Word of God remaining true to it, with proper hermeneutical use.

Our desire is to bring even those we disagree with together and have them give Biblical answers to the questions we have. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Warrick Farah said...

Thanks for your gentle correction, Mark. I apologize for unfairly portraying Biblical Missiology.