Thursday, August 25, 2005
Christianity and Islam - The Same God? One Roving Theologian’s Take
Hugh Hewitt today on his website asks whether Islam and Christianity do indeed worship the same God. He asked for theologians’ takes on this. So, here we go....
I want to add up front, that I am a great admirer or Islam and of Islamic culture, so this should in no way should be taken as in any way disrespectful of Islam. I base my statements solely on both Christian and Islamic theology and practicec.
The talk show Hugh Hewitt (http://www.hughhewitt.com) asks today on his website, in the light of Pope Benedict’s recent statement to Muslims, “The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God is a tricky one upon which Christians disagree,” is the understatement of the decade. I am no theologian. But I am interested in what the theologians have to say on this crucial issue.”
Well, as a theologian (the PhD is almost done) and a more than amateur student of Islam, I wonder whether the question can ever be answered fully. As a believer that there is no God but Yahweh, who exists as perpetual Trinity and is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the 2nd person, there is a fundamental belief that any prayer being offered to any God can only go to the one God. But that is the cheat way out of the argument.
Most people know that Islam is a sister-religion to Judaism and Christianity. The statement that Muslims worship the same God as Christians is in many ways a related question to that of “Do Christians worship the same God as the Jews?” As a Christian, clearly I believe the answer is yes. But for Jews who see Jesus as neither a prophet nor the Son of God, and certainly not as Messiah, they may well answer that question differently. As Martin Buber, the existential Jewish Theologian of the last century (whose book I-Thou should be required reading for any serious theology student), the fact that God’s kingdom did not come means that Jesus could not have been the Messiah. Buber had a great deal of respect for Jesus, but alas, he saw him as misguided. I think in many ways that sums up the response of Christian theology to Muslims.
Muslims deny God’s trinitarian nature (granted most Christians don’t know what to doctrine with the Trinity either), which means that God is reduced to a non-relational monad, rather than the living breathing, ever-relating, ontologically loving God that Christians worship in Jesus Christ. This is no small difference. Islam does not have the statement that “God is love” in part because God is not a dependent being, and if God was to be ontologically loving (loving in God’s very being), then God would have been incomplete without a “partner” to love. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, with the ever-being three persons understands God to be both a necessary being (without dependence) and at the same time relational and therefore loving. Augustine of Hippo, one of the early great Christian theologians, went so far as to call the Holy Spirit, the 3rd person of the Trinity, the bond of love. So because of the elimination of the threefold nature of God in Islamic understanding there exists two significant differences between the God of both religions – relationship and love.
Muslims affirm that God is merciful, but they define this in a far different manner than Christians. Christians believe that an individuals responds to the wooing of the Holy Spirit and thus embraces and is embraced by God. There can be no compulsion in faith (those instances of forced conversions throughout the Middle Ages are considered null and void by the vast majority of Christians, as only one who embraces Jesus as Lord and God is really in relationship with him). This not only means that conversion cannot be forced, but that faithful following is likewise not fit for coercion. Christians believe that God allows both the faithful and the unfaithful to live out their lives (see the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares) and that God in his mercy does not crush either before their life is over, in hopes of repentance. In Islam, as has been well documented, conversion from Islam is not only not allowed, it is punishable by death, including murder by the family. So the understanding of mercy, rooted in a relational versus a strictly legal formula, also provides a substantial difference between Islam and Christianity.
Finally there is the understanding of redemption/salvation in the two faiths. Islam rejects the idea that God would have allowed his son (or indeed any righteous man) to suffer on the cross for the sins of others. This violates God’s justice in the Islamic mind. Isa, (Jesus in the Arabic) is considered a righteous prophet and indeed sinless in Islam. He did not, however, die on the cross and did not die for the sins of the world. This represents the last major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam takes a perfectly rational view of the idea of justice – indeed it does not seem just that a righteous and sinless person would die for the sins of the world. Here though God, through the incarnation of the 2nd person of the Trinity, stands the understanding of justice that we as human creatures hold on its ear. The justice of God for the Christian is defined and understood only from the perspective of the crucifixion (and the resurrection). It can be understood no where else, and the character of God is best understood from the perspective of the Son’s willing acquiescence to death for the redemption of creation. To many Muslims I have spoken to and read of, this is a wonderful thing but too unimaginable. Their concept of God does not allow for justice to be rooted in love, but only in absolute righteousness.
So do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? This would be the understanding of the Muslim, though they would consider the Christian faith to have been superseded and corrupted, which means that we remain people of the book and not, properly, infidels. From the Christian perspective I wonder if, like the people of Jesus’ own time, whether or not the Muslim, in disallowing God’s Triune, relational, loving, merciful and redeeming nature as understood in the person of Jesus, would not recognize the God that Christians worship. And if they do not recognize him, can they properly said to be worshipping the same God?
Having said that, I will close with the famous character from C.S. Lewis’ final book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, The Last Battle. There, a soldier of the enemy, Calormene, is found to be greeted by Aslan, despite his worship of Tash (the satanic character in the tales). This soldier’s faith, if not its form or understanding, are honoured, and salvation comes. I think at least to some extent that Lewis, the old mediaevalistbb, must have been thinking about the faithful Muslim. Lewis seems to believe that those who, like the penitent (in Luke 19:1-8) who throw themselves on the mercy of God and realize their own sinfulness indeed have seen God’s face truly. There are doubtless many Muslims who have done so, though that is not my responsibility to determine. Instead, as a theologian, I would have to say that while Islam shares much in common with the Christian understanding of the person of God, that the differences cast serious doubts on whether Catholic dogma (and here I acknowledge my own low position and capacity compared to that of Pope Benedict) is correct in assuming that the Muslim and the Christian worship the same God. The differences in the two understandings are not small philosophical minutia, but represent significant character differences. For this reason I would repeat that the only God we know, and the only God we can worship, is the one revealed in Jesus Christ, and in him I see too many differences from the being at the center of worship in Islam.
Islam_and_Christianity_-_Worshipping_the_Same_God_or_not.doc
