This past week saw the Muslim world inflamed over cartoons that portrayed Mohammed in an unflattering light. This resulted in demonstrations, burned flags, a burned church, and dead bodies.
This spectacle raised the question of how Christians should respond to insults of Christ. Two diametrically opposite perspectives surfaced.
John Piper presented his thoughts in an article entitled: “Being Mocked: The Essence of Christ’s Work, Not Muhammad’s.” How should Christians respond to insults to Christ? Piper expressed the gist of his position as follows: “On the one hand, we are grieved and angered. On the other hand, we identify with Christ, and embrace his suffering, and rejoice in our afflictions, and say with the apostle Paul that vengeance belongs to the Lord, let us love our enemies and win them with the gospel. If Christ did his work by being insulted, we must do ours likewise.”
Dinesh D’Souza, in “Blasphemy,” an article on his website, wondered if we might not learn from the Muslim response. He lamented that as Americans we might take to the streets over racial issues, but American Christians tend be passive in their response to insults to Christ such as the depiction of Christ in a bottle of urine by Andres Serrano, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. D’Souza observes:
But what is striking about conservative Christians is how passive and invertebrate so many of them are when their deepest beliefs are violated. The distinguishing quality of the Christian seems to be niceness, and I don’t mean this as a compliment. When a man calls your wife a whore it is not a virtue to respond with niceness. When your religion is mocked and blasphemed, it is sign of cowardice to pretend not to notice….
When the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” came out several years ago, it was shown to critical acclaim throughout the West despite its blasphemous portrayal of Christ’s sexual fantasies at Calvary. The only countries that banned the movie were the Muslim countries. The reason is that Muslims consider Christ, like Moses, to be a prophet. Not only do Muslims protect the reputation of Muhammad, but apparently they also care about how Christ is portrayed as well. Whose reputation silent Christians are protecting is anybody’s guess.
Unfortunately, D’Souza does not tell us what we should do about such insults. It seems like the biblical response might be somewhere between doing nothing by way of protest as suggested by Piper, and the Muslim response cited (though not suggested) by D’Souza.
And we have done some things. For example, the American Family Association fights hard to keep anti-Christian programming off the air. Its work resulting in the cancellation of NBC’s anti-Christian series, The Book of Daniel provides an example. The power to achieve such results comes from activist believers.
Current Muslim outrage over insult to Muhammad and the resulting divergent Christian musings over how we should respond to similar insults of Christ would indicate that there is need for more dialogue on what the appropriate reaction to blasphemy of Christ should be. I welcome your comments on this issue.
On an aside, is this the same John Piper who calls himself a “Christian Hedonist?” (See Berean Call January 2006.
I think that another big difference between the motivation of Christians and Muslims is that Mohammed is dead and needs someone to defend his reputation. Jesus is alive and can defend himself. That does not absolve us from defending him but I think that we must to so in a way that furthers his kingdom and brings glory to him. He can and will in the end defend Himself.