Ergun Caner
Encyclopedia
Ergun Michael Caner also known as Ergun Mehmet Caner, is an evangelical
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...

 minister. He was born in Sweden to a Muslim Turkish immigrant and a Swedish mother,and claimed to have been raised as a Sunni Muslim
Sunni Islam
Sunni Islam is the largest branch of Islam. Sunni Muslims are referred to in Arabic as ʾAhl ūs-Sunnah wa āl-Ǧamāʿah or ʾAhl ūs-Sunnah for short; in English, they are known as Sunni Muslims, Sunnis or Sunnites....

. He immigrated with his family to the United States as a toddler. Later he became a Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

.

He is a former professor of theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

 and church history, as well as a former dean at the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and Graduate School of Liberty University
Liberty University
Liberty University is a private Christian university located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Liberty's annual enrollment is around 72,000 students, 12,000 of whom are residential students and 60,000+ studying through Liberty University Online...

. Caner has co-authored several books with his brother Emir, many of which are critical of Islam and have generated international controversy. In 2010 it emerged that he had made false claims about having been been raised as a Muslim and linked to Muslim terrorist groups as a young man. After assembling a panel to investigate the accusations, Liberty University chose not to renew Caner's contract as dean because of "factual statements that are self-contradictory."

In May 2011 it was announced that he was appointed professor of theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

 and church history, as well as the Provost and Vice President of Academics at Arlington Baptist College
Arlington Baptist College
Arlington Baptist College is a private, four-year Bible college in Arlington, Texas. The school was founded by J. Frank Norris in 1939 as Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute.In June 2011 it hired Ergun Caner, a former Muslim, as Provost and professor....

.

Early biography

Ergun Caner and his brother Erdem were born in Sweden, the sons of a Muslim Turkish father and a Swedish mother. Conflicting versions exist about his mother's religion. Some sources claim that his mother Monica Inez was a Muslim. She was an only child raised in Stockholm and educated all over Europe. By age 20, she had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. She had traveled the world. Divorce papers of June 8, 1978 show Caner's parents litigated about the religious education of their sons. Early in his career Caner claimed to have been born in Turkey, where he was "entrenched in Muslim extremism when he moved to the United States from Turkey as a teenager and found Jesus." His parents immigrated to Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

 and Caner began frequenting a Baptist church in Columbus
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...

 and in 1982 embraced Christianity. His two brothers, mother and grandmother were Christians but his father remained a Muslim; and was the architect who built a mosque in Columbus.

Sahih al-Bukhari Vol. 9, Book 84, Number 57 says:

Narrated 'Ikrima:
Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to 'Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event reached Ibn 'Abbas who said, "If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's Apostle forbade it, saying, 'Do not punish anybody with Allah's punishment (fire).' I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Apostle, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'"

According to Ergun's brother, Emir Caner, their father interpreted the above hadith
Hadith
The term Hadīth is used to denote a saying or an act or tacit approval or criticism ascribed either validly or invalidly to the Islamic prophet Muhammad....

 as an allegory rather than literally. They claim that after he had consulted with his imam and other Islamic leaders, their father made them figuratively dead by disowning them.

Caner studied at Criswell College
Criswell College
Criswell College is a Dispensationalist Christian college and divinity school in Dallas, Texas. It is known for training students to teach and preach the Bible with emphasis on evangelism, the original languages, and Biblical inerrancy.-History:...

 in Dallas with his brother Emir who went on to teach at Truett-McConnell College
Truett-McConnell College
Truett-McConnell College is a private, Christian, coeducational liberal arts college in Cleveland, Georgia, United States. It is operated under the auspices of the Georgia Baptist Convention, and controlled by a Board of Trustees elected by the Convention. The college was named to honor George W....

, a Baptist
Georgia Baptist Convention
The Georgia Baptist Convention is an autonomous association of Baptist churches in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is one of the state conventions associated with the Southern Baptist Convention...

 school in Cleveland, Georgia
Cleveland, Georgia
Cleveland is a city in White County, Georgia, United States. The population was 1,907 at the 2000 census. The city is the county seat of White County....

, and both attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary is a seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention , created to meet a need in the SBC's East Coast region. It was voted into existence on May 19, 1950 at the SBC annual meeting and began offering classes in the fall of 1951 on the original campus of Wake...

 in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...

 for postgraduate work.

After September 11th

In 2002, the brothers gained national notoriety after publishing Unveiling Islam, a critique of Islam; IslamOnline
IslamOnline
Islamonline is a global Islamic website on the Internet providing services to Muslims and non-Muslims in several languages. Its motto is "credibility and distinction." Sunni Muslim scholar....

s Ali Asadullah called it "a diatribe against Muslims and their faith." The book gained modest success, selling 100,000 copies in a year. In the years after the September 11 attacks, Caner became a well-known and popular speaker at evangelical schools and churches, helped by his charisma and conversion story, and after teaching at Criswell College for two years became a popular professor at Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Lamon Falwell, Sr. was an evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and a conservative commentator from the United States. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia...

's Liberty University. In February 2005, Falwell announced that Caner was to become dean of the college's seminary, a move criticized by Muslim groups. Caner's charisma and his humorous and sometimes politically incorrect style of teaching, however, proved very popular among students, and enrollment at the seminary tripled.

He ignited controversy largely due to the criticism and scrutiny of an alliance of Muslim and Christian bloggers which found numerous errors in Caner's lectures and books and glaring discrepancies in his biography; He had claimed to have been raised as a teenager in Turkey to become a Muslim extremist and only immigrated to the US in 1978. It was during these years that he claimed to have attended a Muslim extremist training center in Beirut
Beirut
Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

. However, court records show that he had actually immigrated to the United States in 1969 at age 3.

On April 25, 2005, he conducted two training sessions for the United States Marines in New River, North Carolina. During these sessions he was introduced as having moved to the United States from Turkey at the age of 14. He claimed that he did not know anything about America until he came to the country at age 14. He told the Marines that he did not learn English until after age 14. He said he watched American television in Turkey, but he had to watch it with Turkish captions.

"I knew nothing about America until I came here when I was fourteen years old. Everything I knew about American culture, I learned through American television. Whatever they allowed into the Turkish region so that they could broadcast for free and so for me America was anything I saw on television that came from American television that was allowed by the censors. Andy Griffith
Andy Griffith
Andy Samuel Griffith is an American actor, director, producer, Grammy Award-winning Southern-gospel singer, and writer. He gained prominence in the starring role in director Elia Kazan's epic film A Face in the Crowd before he became better known for his television roles, playing the lead...

 was one of them and I fell in love with Andy Griffith. Didn’t understand what they were saying, there was the captions beneath. But I thought all of America was like Mayberry
Mayberry
Mayberry is a fictional community in North Carolina that was the setting for two American television sitcoms, The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D. Mayberry was also the setting for a 1986 reunion television movie titled Return to Mayberry...

. I moved to Brooklyn, New York."


He claimed that he had been educated (before coming to America) in madrassas in both Istanbul, Turkey and Cairo, Egypt. The unedited videos of these sessions were obtained by a Freedom of Information Request in August 2010.

Moreover, in a statement released on his own website and reproduced by the Southern Baptist Convention
Southern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist Convention is a United States-based Christian denomination. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the United States, with over 16 million members...

, Caner stated in February 2010, that he had actually been born in Sweden, and that possible errors in his "pronunciation of Arabic" as he's from a Turkish background and other matters were not intended to mislead but were bound to happen in two decades of ministry and hundreds of sermons. The Associated Baptist Press
Associated Baptist Press
The Associated Baptist Press was founded in 1990 as an independent Baptist news agency. ABP has no headquarters office; its staff is located in various locations in four states with an office in Washington, DC housing the organization's Washington Bureau. ABP is a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship...

 reported in May 2010 that Liberty University backed Caner after having investigated the allegations of untruths, but a few days later the university announced that it would continue investigating. "Because of "factual statements that are self-contradictory", he was forced to step down from his position as dean in June 2010, though he was retained as a professor.

September 24, 2010, Ergun Caner was the keynote speaker for the Twin City's 12th Annual Community Prayer Breakfast in Bristol, Virginia. When interviewed about the controversy, the chairman of the local prayer breakfast committee said that members were aware of the controversy, but the invitation had been issued before the controversy became apparent. He also noted that the Community Prayer Breakfast does not delve into the backgrounds of their motivation/inspiration speakers. At the meeting, Caner claimed that he and his brother had seen the controversy coming for years. The bloggers were simply "frustrated people in their basements", he said. He claimed that it would take more than edited videos to take him down. All of his false statements explained by the fact that he has more than 200 hours of combined sermons which would yield random misstatements.

He left LU in June 2011 to become Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs for the Arlington Baptist College. The President of Arlington Baptist College, Dr. Dan Moody stated that Ergun Caner's controversy was in the past and the new Vice President had his full confidence. However, one anonymous faculty member told WFAA-TV
WFAA-TV
WFAA, channel 8, is an ABC-affiliated television station serving the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, one of the top ten media markets in North America. The station is the flagship of Belo Corporation and the largest ABC affiliate not owned and operated by the network...

: "I find it reprehensible that the leadership of the Arlington Baptist College would hire a man who is very clearly profiteering from the tragedy of September 11."

Teachings about Islam

During a 2005 Marine training session in New River, North Carolina, Ergun Caner taught that there were only three times in the history of Islam that all Shia, Sunni, and Sufi Muslims were united. The first was against the grandfather of Charlemagne
Charlemagne
Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...

, Charles Martel
Charles Martel
Charles Martel , also known as Charles the Hammer, was a Frankish military and political leader, who served as Mayor of the Palace under the Merovingian kings and ruled de facto during an interregnum at the end of his life, using the title Duke and Prince of the Franks. In 739 he was offered the...

 at the Battle of Tours
Battle of Tours
The Battle of Tours , also called the Battle of Poitiers and in Battle of the Court of the Martyrs, was fought in an area between the cities of Poitiers and Tours, located in north-central France, near the village of Moussais-la-Bataille, about northeast of Poitiers...

 in AD 732. The second was in the Third Crusade
Third Crusade
The Third Crusade , also known as the Kings' Crusade, was an attempt by European leaders to reconquer the Holy Land from Saladin...

 under Saladin
Saladin
Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb , better known in the Western world as Saladin, was an Arabized Kurdish Muslim, who became the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. He led Muslim and Arab opposition to the Franks and other European Crusaders in the Levant...

 from AD 1189–1192. The third was the signing of Al Qaeda's second fatwa by Osama Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...

 and Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian physician, Islamic theologian and current leader of al-Qaeda. He was previously the second and last "emir" of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, having succeeded Abbud al-Zumar in the latter role when Egyptian authorities sentenced al-Zumar to life...

 on February 23, 1998. He also claimed that during 1998 all forms of Islam were united behind Osama Bin Laden, a claim denied by mainstream scholars and news reports.

Liberty University

On May 10, 2010, Liberty University announced that it would launch a formal inquiry into allegations of discrepancies in the claimed background of Ergun Caner, the Dean and President of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and Graduate School. The move came in response to media allegations pointing to several factual discrepancies about Caner's supposed upbringing as a devout Sunni Muslim in Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, and his claims of debating several Muslim apologists. The divorce records of Caner's parents show that his family moved to Ohio when he was 3 or 4, contradicting Caner's claim of living as a teenager in Turkey. Ergun Caner has stated "I am thrilled that Liberty University is forming this committee, and I look forward to this entire process coming to a close." On June 25, 2010, Liberty University removed Caner from his position as Dean of the seminary after finding "discrepancies related to the matters such as dates, names and places of residence." However, Liberty University did decide to retain Caner as a full time faculty member of the seminary for the 2010-2011 school year. Liberty University released a statement on July 2, 2010, appointing Dr. Dan Mitchell as Interim Dean of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and Graduate School. On August 25, 2010, Liberty University announced that co-founder of Liberty University, Dr. Elmer Towns would take over as Dean of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary while maintaining his status as Dean of the B.R. Lakin School of Religion.

Books

  • Caner, Ergun, and Emir Fethi Caner. Unveiling Islam: An Insider's Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs. Updated and Expanded ed. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2009. ISBN 0825424283
  • Caner, Emir Fethi, and Ergun Mehmet Caner. More Than a Prophet: an Insider's Response to Muslim Beliefs About Jesus and Christianity. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2003. ISBN 0825424011
  • Caner Emir, and Ergun Caner. The Sacred Trust: Sketches of the Southern Baptist Convention Presidents. Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Academic, 2003. ISBN 080542668X
  • Caner, Ergun Mehmet, and Emir Fethi Caner, eds. The Sacred Desk: Sermons of the Southern Baptist Convention Presidents. Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Publishing Group, 2004. ISBN 0805430598
  • Caner, Ergun Mehmet, ed. Voices Behind the Veil: the World of Islam through the Eyes of Women. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2004. ISBN 082542402X
  • Caner, Ergun Mehmet, and Emir Fethi Caner. Christian Jihad: Two Former Muslims Look at the Crusades and Killing in the Name of Christ. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2004. ISBN 0825424038
  • Brunson, Mac & Caner, Ergun. Why Churches Die: Diagnosing Lethal Poisons in the Body of Christ. Nashville: B&H Books, 2005. ISBN 0805431810
  • Hoffman, Paul K., and Norman L. Geisler, eds. Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe. Rev. and expanded ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2006. ISBN 080106712X
  • Cabal, Ted, ed. The Apologetics Study Bible: Understand Why You Believe. Nashville, Tennessee: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007. ISBN 158640024X
  • Pollock, Forrest. The Last Sermon I Would Preach If Jesus Were Coming Tomorrow. Encouraging Word, 2007. ISBN 0615159400
  • Hindson, Ed, and Caner, Ergun, general editors. The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics. Eugene, Or.: Harvest House Publishers, 2008. ISBN 0736920846
  • Falwell, Jonathan, general editor. InnovateChurch. Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Books, 2008. ISBN 0805448268
  • Caner, Ergun Mehmet. Holier Than Thou: When Faith Becomes Toxic. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009. ISBN 0687658403
  • Allen, David L., and Steve W Lemke, eds. The Return of Christ: A Premillennial Perspective. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011. ISBN 1433669722

See also

  • Southern Baptist Convention
    Southern Baptist Convention
    The Southern Baptist Convention is a United States-based Christian denomination. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the United States, with over 16 million members...

  • List of Southern Baptist Convention affiliated people
  • World Baptist Fellowship
    World Baptist Fellowship
    The World Baptist Fellowship is a separatist, fundamentalist Baptist organization. The organization was founded by J. Frank Norris of Texas, a southern fundamentalist leader in the first half of the 20th century.-Background:...


External links

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