It's very common to find religious leaders claiming that they possess absolute truth and trying correct the errors of all those who disagree. Not all religious leaders feel that way, but it is pretty common and this sort of absolutism can be quite dangerous. When you are convinced that you possess absolute truth, it's not easy to allow others to wallow in error.

Charles Kimball and Bill Leonard spoke a couple of years ago at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship general assembly to say that the absolute truth claims we commonly hear are a sign of religion “gone awry” and a step on the path a religion takes when it becomes evil.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in absolute truth — they believe that that truth lies with God, not with humans. Whatever humans think of is likely to be some distance from the True Absolute Truth known by God.

[W]e have to be very, very careful as human beings when we begin to appropriate ... that notion that when we think we have God in our heart ... [we] know what God wants ... for everybody else. Then I think you can show historically that you have at least the potential for a disaster waiting to happen because you can literally justify almost anything at that point.

The two speakers were especially concerned about the various attacks made on Islam by evangelical Christians who claim that Muslims don’t believe in the same God, that Islam is a wicked religion, and so on. I’m not sure, though, that anything has changed among conservative evangelicals in the past couple of years — either in general or with respect to their comments on Islam in particular.

 

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