Issues Facing Missions Today: 44. Do Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Traditional Africans Worship the Same God?
Issues
Facing Missions Today: 44. Do Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Traditional
Africans Worship the Same God?
As Islam receives increasing attention in
the news in the West, people have begun to explore what it is Muslims believe
and whether it might be said that they and Christians worship the same
God. The same might be asked of other
monotheistic religions, such as Judaism and traditional African religions. All these religions believe in a Creator and
deny that there are other gods. Some
fanfare around this question has popped up at Wheaton College, where Professor
Larycia Hawkins was recently suspended for advocating that Muslims and
Christians worship the same God. She
donned a hijab during Advent this season to affirm her affinity with Muslims. Some of the Wheaton students and alumni/ae
(one might say ‘predictably’) tossed in their support of the professor and criticized
the administration’s suspension of her.
While the Wheaton incident may have more
to do with inadequate vetting of faculty and a lax admissions policy, (now)
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf has, according to Christianity Today, weighed in on the matter.[1] Volf, a Croatian of German extraction, is
well-known for his timely Exclusion and
Embrace in the aftermath of the Balkan fighting in the 1990s.[2] His more recent Allah: A Christian Response (not surprisingly, a HarperOne
publication) argues that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.[3]
Is it so?
The following is not a direct response to Volf's book but some comments in
response to the notion itself. I am
opting here for brevity rather than a book-length response. I offer five points to consider.
First,
note that I have mentioned African traditional religions alongside Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism. Usually, the
discussion about worshiping the same God excludes African traditional religion—but
why? Pre-Christian (and pre-Islamic)
Africa was not typically polytheistic. African traditional religions most often confess belief in a single, Creator God, even if they believe he is distant and
less relevant than the more active spirits of the departed ancestors. Should we exclude African traditional
religions from the discussion on account of their not being part of a Biblical
faith? If so, then we need to note that
Jews do not accept the New Testament as part of their Scriptures, and Muslims insist
that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures bear some witness to the truth but
that they have been seriously corrupted.
Thus, there is actually no truly common witness between Muslims and
Christians from Scripture—what Muslims do not like in Scripture, they declare
to be corrupted texts. No encouragement
to read the Scripture is going to get anywhere, except by God’s grace, when
readers get to pick and choose the parts they like. On this ground, I would suggest that African
traditional religions should be included in the broad discussion. For that matter, we might include the
monolatry of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaten, who devoted himself to the sun
god, Aten. That is, we might ask, ‘Do
all monotheistic religions, or even religions devoted to a single deity (monolatry), entail worship of the same g/God?’
Phrasing the question in this way gets
around some of the inevitable political correctness swashing around university
campuses and society at large. The
matter is not, in such a case, to be handled in the context of heated
discussion about religions getting along with one another when wars are
breaking out. Pressure to put down the
lances and sabers might be worthwhile in the political arena, but it is hardly
a legitimate starting point for theological enquiry.
Second,
we need to ask, with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin in mind,
whether words have meaning apart from a context.[4] Both scholars' works insisted on the
importance of context for the meaning of words.
Narrative theology, moreover, has provided a necessary corrective to
liberal theology in claiming that theology cannot be abstracted from the
narrative that gives meaning to notions.
Thus, to say ‘God’ is to say essentially nothing at all until one
understands more of what one means, and that more is found precisely in the narrative one tells about God. To the
Israelites, God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—not merely a Creator
God and not at all the same god as Akhenaten's Aten.
Similarly, the Creator God of African traditional religions has so
little relevance to the actual form and practice of Animism, and one is at
pains to try to explain why any connection between such a distant God and the God of
Christian faith has any connection whatsoever.
Third,
we
need to ask what one religion is denying when it speaks of God. The case of Judaism and Christianity is
interesting here. Judaism as an
established religion in the 1st century AD was not a religion formed
in denial of Christianity. Christianity,
rather, made the claim that the God of Judaism—the God of the Old Testament—was
the same God revealed further by Jesus Christ.
There is, therefore, a significant relationship between the God of
Judaism and the God of Christianity—although we must qualify this by noting
that Judaism also refused, as a religion, to accept the claims of fulfillment
that Christians made. Islam, on the
other hand, came along some six hundred years later in conscious denial of Judaism
and Christianity. When Muslims state
their faith as ‘There is one God, and Muhammed is his prophet,’ they are
denying the Trinitarian faith of historic Christianity and replacing Jesus with
Muhammed.[5] Thus, with qualification, it may be said that
Jews and Christians worship the same God, but Islam has intentionally
positioned itself over against Judaism and Christianity, including in its view
of God.
Fourth,
we need to consider the gravity of a denial of who Jesus is and what He has
done when discussing God’s identity in religion. Jesus called for singular devotion to Himself
and warned of the consequences of denying Him, as we read in Matthew’s Gospel:
Matthew 10:32-42 "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me
before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; 33 but whoever denies me before
others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. 34 "Do not think that I have
come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a
sword. 35 For I have come to
set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
36 and one's foes will be members of one's own
household. 37 Whoever loves
father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or
daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is
not worthy of me. 39 Those
who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake
will find it. 40
"Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the
one who sent me. 41 Whoever
welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward;
and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will
receive the reward of the righteous; 42
and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the
name of a disciple-- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their
reward."
John, also, testifies to Jesus’ call for
singular devotion to Himself:
John 5:37-40 And the Father who sent me has himself
testified on my behalf. You have never heard his voice or seen his form, 38 and you do not have his word
abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent. 39 "You search the scriptures
because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that
testify on my behalf. 40 Yet
you refuse to come to me to have life.
Again, Jesus says,
John 14:9 Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
Jesus sees rejection
of Himself as a rejection of God the Father:
John 15:24 If I had not done among them the works that no
one else did, they would not have sin. But now they have seen and hated both me
and my Father.
Finally, Paul weeps over those Jews who
reject Jesus. Despite their
participation in God’s redemptive narrative, they have come to a point of
rejecting it’s fulfillment in Jesus Christ—for which they will be cut off and
accursed:
Romans 9:1-5 am speaking the truth in Christ-- I am not
lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit-- 2 I have great sorrow and
unceasing anguish in my heart. 3
For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the
sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them
belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the
worship, and the promises; 5
to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the
Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
Thus, denial of the revelation in Jesus
Christ, of His redemptive work, of His relation to God the Father, turns out to
be a denial of God—however we are to understand Him. One cannot be said to affirm the same God
while also rejecting Jesus as Messiah and Lord.
If this is so for Jews, who might boast in their relation to God as His
chosen people, how much more is it so for others outside this relationship who
also reject Jesus?
Fifth,
even specific things said about God in more than one religion, such as that He
is merciful, mean different things. For
Jews, God’s mercy and love were revealed in His acceptance of a sinful people
to be His people, His treasured possession, to guide and go with them into the
promised land, and to entrust to them His holy law (Ex. 33-34; especially Ex.
34.5-7). For Christians, God’s mercy and
love were revealed further in His provision of redemption in the sacrificial
death of Jesus Christ for sinners.[6] There is continuity in the identify of God
between the Old Testament and the New Testament (and would that more Jews and
Christians would see this). But what
narratives inform Islam of God’s mercy?
Or is this mercy more that of the warrior prince, who demonstrates his
sovereignty and power by showing mercy or not showing mercy?[7]
The conclusion is inevitable. Only by zooming to the outermost level of
abstraction, where no meaning of any worth will be found, can one claim that
the God of Islam is the same as the God of Christians. Nor is anything worthy of God to be gained
through such an abstraction, for it leaves no testimony to God’s true identity,
no devotion to Jesus, no real opportunity to witness, and no essential need (as
opposed to some argument for an added benefit) to know God through Jesus
Christ. Indeed, the revelation Jesus
gives to God’s identity is not the revelation of a prophet; it is a revelation
that is at the same time the effectual salvation God provides for sinners. Thus, no one comes to the Father except
through the Son, Jesus Christ. As Jesus
says in John’s Gospel,
John 14:6-7 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the
truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know my
Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."
[1] Bob
Smietana, ‘‘Same God’ Standoff: Wheaton College,
Suspended Professor Hold Ground, Miroslav Volf Weighs In,’ Christianity Today (Dec. 17,
2015); accessed online (Dec. 18, 2015): http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2015/december/same-god-standoff-wheaton-college-larycia-hawkins-hijab.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=7766624&utm_content=403622858&utm_campaign=2013.[2]
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A
Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
(Abingdon Press, 1996).
[3]
Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian
Response (New York: HarperOne, 2012).
[4]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, 4th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009; orig. 1953; J.
L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words,
2nd ed. (Oxford: University Press, 1975; orig. 1962).
[5] See the discussion in Part II’s
section on ‘Allah’ in Patrick Sookhdeo, Understanding
Islamic Theology (McLean, VA: Isaac Pub., 2013).
[7]
Cf. Rollin Grams, ‘God, the Beneficent--the Merciful, and Jesus’s Cross: From
Abstract to Concrete Theologising,’ in Jesus
and the Cross: Reflections of Christians from Islamic Contexts, ed. D.
Singh (Oxford: Regnum/Paternoster, 2008).
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