From our friends at Gen-X Rising: The Claremont School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary right across from Harvey Mudd on Foothill Blvd., has recently changed its mission statement:
An ecumenical and interfaith institution, Claremont School of Theology seeks to instill students with the ethical integrity, religious intelligence, and intercultural understanding necessary to become effective in thought and action as spiritual leaders in the increasingly diverse, multi-faith world of the 21st century.This piece of news catches my eye for several reasons.
First, it documents in our own back yard the further spread of cultural relativism, and along with it, the inherent contradiction in any relativist system: the Claremont School of Theology is "interfaith," presumably open to all--except their "all" excludes those faiths which reject the school's indifferentist premises. Though ostensibly a Methodist Christian institution, CST has excised any mention of God or Christ from its mission statement. Islam says, "There is no God but God"; the creed of CST is "There is no faith but interfaith indifferentism."Second, how effective as spiritual leaders can their graduates really be if their education is merely to marinate in a relativistic mushpot? What sort of spiritual direction can they minister to others if their own spirituality admits no objective truth, no established true path?
Finally, I find the school's mission to equip its students for "the increasingly diverse, multi-faith world of the 21st century" comically naive. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of contemporary demographics understands that the world of the 21st century will be less religiously diverse, not more. Those people with births at or above demographic replacement level are mainly Muslims, orthodox Christians, and orthodox Jews. Secularism and religious heterodoxy are suspiciously associated with cultural extinction.
