NAE’s Richard Cizik: God Works Through Other Faiths
Dec 05 by Ingrid Schlueter
This article by Berit Kjos features numerous alarming quotes from Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals:
Walter Russell Meade, in a piece I would recommend this month called God’s Country subtitled ‘The Evangelicals,’ says the most important dialogue that needs to occur is between evangelical Christians and Muslims. … The fundamentalists have a pessimistic view of future and they have this perception, unlike evangelicals and liberal Christians, that there’s an unbridgeable divide between the believer and the unbeliever. So you put together, you see, those two factors, no wonder the Left Behind series has the general secretary to the U.N. as the anti-Christ. That is really craziness, but you see that combination of pessimism and that unbridgeable divide between the fundamentalists is really what has disenfranchised, you see, evangelicals from the bigger conversation because people think we believe that. We don’t believe that. We believe… there’s a common ground that evangelicals have with the rest of the world, especially Muslims….
He is also quoted in a CNN interview calling on evangelicals to “go beyond tolerance, to go beyond even this principle pluralism…”
“I believe in principle pluralism. And from there, I would say one step even further, which is to say partnership, partnership which acknowledges that God can actually work through other people and other faiths to accomplish his purposes in the world and that is intentional on his part. But in face-to-face dialogue then and subsequently, I truly believe that we have a meeting of the minds.”
Richard Cizik is quoting, nearly verbatim, emerging church leaders such as Doug Pagitt who openly declare that God is working in pagan religions as well as Christianity. This is the cosmic christ of the New Spirituality, being flagrantly introduced by the leadership of the National Association of Evangelicals. Cizik’s error on moral issues such as abortion and gay rights flows from a core spiritual problem: he is in rebellion to the Word of God. The exclusive message of salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ is being replaced with a social gospel of inclusivism/universalism that is taking the church into a state of complete apostasy. It is that serious.
