Hosea 4:6 — Lack of knowledge is an understatement.

When I read the Old Tes­ta­ment two things strike me as imme­di­ately appar­ent. The first is that Israel was com­manded to wor­ship and keep the com­mand­ments of Yah­weh and Yah­weh only (Exo­dus 20, Deuteron­omy 5, Num­bers 33). The sec­ond is that by-and-large, they didn’t and as a result their nation was at first divided and then destroyed.

When Israel was on the verge of enter­ing the Promised Land God laid down a few rules. We read in Exo­dus 34:12–14 (NASB):

12 Watch your­self that you make no covenant with the inhab­i­tants of the land into which you are going, or it will become a snare in your midst.
13 But rather, you are to tear down their altars and smash their sacred pil­lars and cut down their Ash­erim
14 you shall not wor­ship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jeal­ous, is a jeal­ous God

Now what hap­pens is that if you read the Old Tes­ta­ment (i.e., 1 and 2 Kings; 1 and 2 Chron­i­cles) account of the kings of Israel there is one aspect of their rule that is almost always men­tioned: did they or did they not fol­low the decrees of their God (Yah­weh)? Some did evil in the eyes of the Lord (2 Kings 15:8); some fol­lowed the Lord but did not ‘smash their sacred pil­lars and cut down their Ash­erim poles’ (1 Kings 22:41–43); some fol­lowed the Lord and did ‘smash their sacred pil­lars and cut down their Ash­erim poles’ (2 Kings 18:1–8). Ulti­mately, the point being that if one is to fol­low God (Yah­weh) then one can­not, in either word or deed, fol­low any other gods — there is only one God (Deuteron­omy 6:4). The New Tes­ta­ment only goes to reaf­firm these teach­ings (i.e. John 14:6; John 3:16; Romans 10:9, Hebrews 10; Rev­e­la­tion 21:27).

I say all of this because there is a trend that wor­ries me within the emer­gent church. What wor­ries me is their will­ing­ness to par­tic­i­pate in the reli­gious rit­u­als of other reli­gions — specif­i­cally Islam — in hopes inter-faith respect, or dia­logue. Brian McLaren is quite pub­lic about this on his blog. Appeal­ing to Mus­lims, he  “humbly seeks to join Mus­lims in this obser­vance of Ramadan as a God-honoring expres­sion of peace, fel­low­ship, and neigh­bor­li­ness“¹. This is of course pref­aced quite clearly, “We will seek to avoid being dis­re­spect­ful or unfaith­ful to our own faith tra­di­tion in our desire to be respect­ful to the faith tra­di­tion of our friends“². How­ever, in this we have some­thing of a prob­lem. For Chris­tians, it is unfaith­ful to our own ‘faith tra­di­tion’ to be par­tic­i­pat­ing in the prac­tices of another faith tra­di­tion, no mat­ter the rea­son or inten­tion. The rea­son being — and quite clearly — is that such par­tic­i­pa­tion implies there is some valid­ity in ‘faith tra­di­tions’ that are not Chris­tian­ity (which would be con­sis­tent with emer­gent inclinations).

This is some­thing that as a pro­fessed Chris­t­ian, you (in a gen­eral sense) really don’t do. For all the praise McLaren and oth­ers are get­ting I’d feel very wor­ried about the future of the church in the West as an entity which actu­ally believes and knows ‘some­thing’. Hosea’s words weren’t just good for his day.

Related posts:

1. Apa­thy: Knowledge
2. Reli­gious Knowl­edge Test