"The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith, but the confession of despair."
- J.B. Lightfoot
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
You will get different answers depending on who you talk to. An outsider to both religions will say, “Yes.” The reason they say that is because Christians and Jews and Muslims all believe that they are worshiping the God who spoke to Abraham. So historically, all three religions point back to the same God as the god they worship. Plus Muslims and Christians both call him "God". (“Allah” means “the God” in Arabic.)
Muslims say that they worship the same God that Christians do. It’s just that Christians are committing blasphemy when they associate any other being with God. So when Christians call the Holy Spirit or Jesus, “God”, it is seen as blasphemy. Muslims say that Jesus was a prophet who came to call the Jews back to faithfulness to Allah and that Christians who worship Jesus as God are wrong to do so.
However, most Christians deny that they worship the same God as Muslims. Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Christians believe that we can point to Jesus and say, “There’s God” and Muslims obviously disagree. Christians believe that God is triune, one God in three persons. (Muslims see this as polytheism.) Because Muslims reject the triune God, Christians will say that Muslims are not worshiping the God of the Bible. Another reason many Christians will say that "Allah" and "YHWH" are not the same God is because the attributes of the God who reveals himself in the Bible and the attributes of the God who reveals himself in the Koran are not the same.
Here’s an analogy: Let’s say you are talking to someone and find out that you both know the same person. Let’s call him, “Bob.” So you talk about that same person for a while, exchanging stories about Bob. Then someone walks in that you don’t recognize. And you say to your friend, “Who’s that?” and your friend says, “Oh, that’s Bob.” And you say, “That’s not the Bob I was talking about. I was talking about a different Bob.”
The God who speaks in the New Testament says very different things about himself than the God who speaks in the Koran. “While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’" (Matthew 17:5). The Muslim would read that and say, “No, that’s not God talking because Allah has no son.”
The Koran says,
“And they say, ‘Be Jews’ - or, ‘Christians’ – ‘and you shall be on the right path.’ Say: ‘Nay, but [ours is] the creed of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false, and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God’” (2:135).
Perhaps a better way phrase the question is “Do Christians and Muslims believe the same things about God?” And in that case, everyone can agree that the answer is clearly, “No.”
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Comments on "Do Muslims and Christians Worship The Same God?":
2. Dave
- 07/08/2010 1:10 am CDT
I don't know. I have thought about this a lot. I think of Paul in Athens at the Areios Pagus, telling the Greeks about the God they worship that is unknown. Then he goes on to explain what the true realities of this God are. What percentage of things can a person have wrong about God before the "God" they believe in isn't the real God? Paul said, "Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you." Paul didn't consider (apparently) all the pagan gods to be God. But he treated this unknown God as God. I can't say I have resolution on all this, but it seems to play into the issue on some level. I think of Muslims as Deists, I suppose. But Deism is not the Gospel, even if it's monotheistic (James 2:19).
3. papa
- 07/08/2010 6:48 am CDT
Having lived and worked with a Muslim people group for a little over 3 years this was a question that came up often. Even among followers of Jesus there would be disagreement.
So, yes "do we believe the same things about God?" is a much clearer question...
Good post.
5. DL
- 07/10/2010 7:29 pm CDT
I agree with the original post and think that John Ch. 8 clarifies it even further. Here are the final verses where Jesus is speaking to the Jewish leaders:
54b "My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. 55 Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and keep his word. 56 Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad."
57 "You are not yet fifty years old," the Jews said to him, "and you have seen Abraham!"
58"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am (YHWH)!"
59 At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
A few key points - Jesus is YHWH. If either a Jew or a Muslim does not acknowledge Jesus as God, then according to Jesus, then he does not know the Father either.
Also, I would agree that what Paul is appealing to in Athens is akin to deism/ general revelation. Neither Jews nor Muslims are deists, though. Allah is a name and he has supposedly revealed his will thru the Koran. That's not "an unknown god."
And Jews have been given the holy scriptures - the Law of God -- special revelation, so they are more accountable for what they know about God and worshipping him (see Romans 2). They cannot fall back on the crutch of deism.
One more quote to this point:
John 8:42 Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. 43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him."
Leave a Comment:
the thing I have more issues with discerning is how to phrase our differences with Judaism... given that Christianity is the fulfillment of Jewish law, Jesus was a Jew, etc - I would say that we worship the same God, but we have the full revelation of him (while they would say we worship a different one). I even knew someone that argued (fairly rightly IMO) that Lauren Winner's book "Girl Meets God" should have been named "Girl Meets Jesus" because she already knew God the father from being a Jew... But I can also see where saying we believe in the same God can cause problems...
It's a bigger issue with Islam because its not simply a matter of having more revelation on our part, but rather they don't agree with our revelation and they have their own - is much more complicated...
but yes "do we believe the same things about God?" is a much clearer question...