Monday, September 04, 2006

Protestants and Muslims

Is there any difference between Protestant ecclesiology and Muslim "ecclesiology"? If there is, there are at least enough similarities when compared to Orthodox or Catholic ecclesiology to make one suspicious. This is certainly also the case when you look at, for example, treatments of scripture among some branches of Protestant [ie, being "people of the book"]. Also: anti-sacramentalism and iconoclasm.

Not that I'm trying to draw too many similarities between them, since Protestants usually baptize in the name of the Trinity, often are Trinitarians, and sometimes have an orthodox Christology. Insofar as they do these things, they are Christians, while Islam is at its best a Christian heresy like Marxism or Mormonism.

2 comments:

Karl said...

Fr. Daniel Byranto, a former Muslim from Indonesia and now an Orthodox priest there, told a group of us that Protestantism didn't hold water for him as it was too much like Islam. He felt that the iconoclasm, the divinity ascribed to "the book", as well as a this-world focused eschatology, made for a series of disturbing similarities.

Mr. G. Z. T. said...

One more reason to dig Fr. Daniel Byantoro! And the conversion process for Muslims and some types of Baptist are the same: simple public declaration of belief.