Credo in Unum Deum: A Challenge

And here are questions to consider for the those who speak of "Christian West" and "Islam and the West" and what not:

The Issue Today

We leave to Jews and Muslims to point out where synagogue and mosque fall shofrt of belief in One God of all. The issue here is whether Christianity can be redeemed, or whether it has become so exclusivist that it is lost in its hundreds of different views of its own identity, each claiming to be the right one. It may be that this is one of the reasons God raised up Islam and many other ancient religions, and has preserved Judaism, so that Christians may be reminded of what Jesus himself taught, especially about the One God of All.

Christians must ask themselves:

* Whether their claims to exclusivity do not belie belief in One God;

* Whether they understand the vast difference between henotheism and true monotheism;

* Whether any one view of Christ is the only true one;

* Why churches tend still to be the most segregated institutions in the culture;

* Why "the other" is often called evil;

* WHY Christians often find war and killing others noble;

* Why the churches tend to uphold whatever culture they find themselves in and sponsor the status quo even when it is oppressive and demonizes those the culture excludes.

Have Christians made distortions of Christ into an idol, in effect displacing God?

Indeed, would a theocentric Christology not be more responsible to Scripture and sound theology than the traditional Christocentric theology?

What would a One-God centered understanding of the Trinity, of Christ and the Holy Spirit truly mean?

The ancient cry, Credo in Unum Deum, has become largely meaningless to those who claim to be Christian today. These are a few of the questions that must be addressed if the church and the earth as we know them are to survive through the twenty-first century

-- James A. Sanders, Paul E. Capetz

Credo in Unum Deum: A Challenge

Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible and Theology, Vol. 39, No. 4, 204-213 (2009)

More Rock ~

So some say: it is the "Christian West" vs. "Islam."

Now leaving aside which and what "Islam" they're talking about, more to the fact they should say: it is the Duotheist Manichean "West" disguised as a Christian vs. "Islam" -- if not "the Rest" for that matter.

For one cannot claim being a Christian without being a Monotheist at the same time. And being a Monotheist, the "West" never was nor is.

The state of being dedicated to the One God as the origin and end of all, as the ultimate point of reference and value-center, the "West" never knew what that was/is all about.

So why bother calling it "Christian"? . . .

* * *

~ And,

Here is from H. R. Niebuhr:

There is a third form of human faith [beside Polytheism and Henotheism] with which we are acquainted in the West, more as hope than as datum, more perhaps as a possibility than as an actuality, yet also as an actuality that has modified at certain emergent periods our natural social faith and our polytheism.

In all the times and areas of our Western history this faith has struggled with its rivals, without becoming triumphant save in passing moments and in the clarified intervals of personal existence.

We look back longingly at times to some past age when, we think, confidence in the One God was the pervasive faith of men; for instance, to early Christianity, or to the church society of the Middle Ages, or to early Protestantism, or to Puritan New England, or to the pious nineteenth century.

But when we study these periods we invariably find in them a mixture of the faith in the One God with social faith [henotheism ] and polytheism; and when we examine our longings we often discover that what we yearn for is the security of the closed society with its social confidence and social loyalty.

It is very questionable, despite many protestations to the contrary, despite the prevalence of self-pity among some modern men because "God is dead," that anyone has ever yearned for radical faith in the One God.

Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, p. 31