The Center for Hebraic Thought Hosts a Talk on Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration

Dr. Matthew Kaemingk | Photo courtesy of The King’s College

Dr. Matthew Kaemingk, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, talked on Christian hospitality and Muslim immigration, demonstrating how Christians should respond to diversity last Wed., March 2.

Dr. Dru Johnson, Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at King’s and Director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, moderated the event. Kaemingk started the talk by introducing the question of pluralism: How do we live together with deep differences?

“One of the points of this lecture series is to develop a Christian tradition of political ethics that doesn’t draw from the secular politics of the right or the left but actually comes from our Christian faith,” Kaemingk said.

Kaemingk focused his discussion of pluralism on Muslim immigration in Europe and North America in the past 15 years and the issues that have arisen since.

“Issues of religion, culture, church and state,” Kaemingk said, “With every passing year, these [issues] seem to grow in their intensity and heat.”

Kaemingk explained that Christians often respond to issues of difference in five ways: domination, retreat, moderation, assimilation and syncretism. 

“The core thing with all of these five approaches is that they understand difference as a problem that needs to be solved,” Kaemingk said. “When we encounter differences, our shoulders come up, we clutch our fists and we want the difference to be resolved. We will often ask the state or the government to resolve that difference for us because that difference is making us uncomfortable.”

Kaemingk argued that there is another response to difference in the pluralist option, what he refers to as convicted civility or principled pluralism.

“By convicted civility, I mean being a person of deep conviction that you are not willing to budge on and yet being a person of profound civility and generosity to those with which you disagree,” Kaemingk said. “Out of your Christian convictions, you make generous space for those who don’t share those convictions.”

Kaemingk concluded his address by explaining that when Christians extend religious freedom to others, they are acknowledging that Christ is sovereign, not Christians.

“We might call it a special and a temporal freedom that basically Christ alone is sovereign over the mosque, and Christ alone is sovereign over where this nation is going in terms of history. So, Christ is sovereign over social spaces and Christ is sovereign over social time,” Kaemingk said. “Christ’s sovereignty demands freedom of others.”