Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God?: Four Views

Zondervan, Ronnie Campbell, Christopher Gnanakan, Stanley N. Gundry

• Editorial: Zondervan Academic
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780310538042
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Religion comparée

During a time of global conflict, the theological question of whether Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship the same God carries political baggage. Is the God of ISIS the same as the God of Israel? Do Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians pray to the same Creator and Sustainer of the universe?

In this Counterpoints volume, five leading scholars present the main religious perspectives on this question, demonstrating how to think carefully about an issue where opinions differ and confusion abounds.

• All Worship the Same God: Religious Pluralist View (Wm. Andrew Schwartz and John B. Cobb, Jr.)
• All Worship the Same God: Referring to the Same God View (Francis J. Beckwith)
• Jews and Christians Worship the Same God: Shared Revelation View (Gerald R. McDermott)
• None Worship the Same God: Different Conceptions View (Jerry L. Walls)

Contributors examine related subtopics such as:

• The difference between God being referentially the same and essentially the same
• What "the same" means when referring to God
• The significance of the Trinity in this discussion
• Whether religious inclusivism is inferred by certain understandings of God's sameness
• The appropriateness of interfaith worship.

Additional essays by Joseph Cumming and David W. Shenk explore the implications of this question specifically for Christians wanting to minister among, and build relationships with, Muslims. Insightful, gracious, and relevant, Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God? sheds light on one of the most important theological issues of our day.

The Counterpoints series presents a comparison and critique of scholarly views on topics important to Christians that are both fair-minded and respectful of the biblical text. Each volume is a one-stop reference that allows readers to evaluate the different positions on a specific issue and form their own, educated opinion.

CHAPTER ONE

ALL WORSHIP THE SAME GOD: RELIGIOUS PLURALIST VIEW

WM. ANDREW SCHWARTZ AND JOHN B. COBB JR.

Religious pluralism can be broadly understood as standing between absolutism (only one perspective is true) and relativism (all perspectives are true). As such, pluralism asserts that more than one perspective, more than one path, can be true or efficacious. In what follows, we argue for a pluralistic view of the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

A vast array of theories of religious pluralism exists—a plurality of pluralisms. One version of pluralism, emphasizing an underlying unity, might say that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all worship the same God though experienced and expressed in different ways. This type of pluralism, often affiliated with John Hick, is what David Ray Griffin has referred to as “identist.” As Griffin explains, “According to identist pluralism, all religions are oriented toward the same religious object (whether it be called ‘God,’ ‘Brahman,’ ‘Nirvana,’ ‘Sunyata,’ ‘Ultimate Reality,’ ‘the Transcendent,’ or ‘the Real’) and promote essentially the same end (the same type of ‘salvation’).” ¹ Alternatively, the tradition of deep pluralism, often affiliated with process theology and the work of one of the authors of this chapter, John Cobb, says that “religions promote different ends—different salvations—perhaps by virtue of being oriented toward different religious objects, perhaps thought of as different ultimates. Differential pluralism is, in other words, pluralistic soteriologically and perhaps also ontologically.” ² In this way, a deep pluralist might conclude that Christians, Muslims, and Jews do not worship the same “God,” yet all can be oriented toward very real ultimates, with paths that are more or less equally efficacious.³ This essay will present both the identist and deep pluralism perspectives.

One point of clarification up front: the ambiguity inherent in the question “Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship the same God?” requires that the best we can offer is a qualified yes, a yes from a certain perspective or in a certain sense. No doubt there are many ways in which it can be demonstrated that the three Abrahamic traditions do not worship the same God, just as it can be demonstrated that Christians don’t all worship the same God, or that no two people worship the same God.⁴ Therefore, much of what follows will be an attempt to clarify the conditions under which we believe the three Abrahamic traditions can rightly be said to be worshiping the same God. But before describing the conditions under which this qualified yes can be asserted, we wish to first unpack the core question of this book.

What Is Meant by “Christians,” “Muslims,” and “Jews”?

Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship the same God? The question itself begins with what could be considered a hasty generalization—namely, that there is some group called “Christians,” or some group called “Muslims,” or some group called “Jews” that can be easily identified and evaluated. This is far from the case.

Take Christianity: What is Christianity, and who are Christians? Is Christianity defined by a set of beliefs? If so, which beliefs? Perhaps we can make some broad assertions, such as belief in God, belief in the divinity of Christ, and so on. But the more detailed we get (e.g., what is meant by belief, what is meant by God, what is meant by belief in God, and so forth), the more difficult it becomes to parse out “Christian” from “non-Christian” beliefs. Undoubtedly, this is the very problem the church has been struggling with for nearly two thousand years. The pursuit of orthodoxy in contrast to heresy has been, among other things, an attempt to answer the question “What is Christianity, and who are Christians?” But who decides which beliefs are orthodox? The proliferation of Christian sects/denominations since the time of Martin Luther, as well as the distinctive branches of Christianity prior to Luther, is evidence of this struggle to identify Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps we could point to the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds as representative of orthodox Christian belief. But even then interpretations of creedal affirmations vary greatly. Using doctrine to identify “Christians” is problematic.

Does identifying Christians through practice rather than belief avoid this difficulty? Unfortunately not. The pursuit of orthopraxy is met with the same challenges as that of orthodoxy. Which practices should be identified with “true” Christianity, and who decides on them? We could point to something like the ritual of the Eucharist, but there remain great variations in method—one cup versus individual cups, bread versus wafers, dipping versus successive consumption, and so on. Not to mention the variations on beliefs related to core practices, such as transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and varying beliefs about the presence of Jesus’s body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine.

Since orthodoxy and orthopraxy fail to offer clear paths toward identifying “the Christians,” could we rely on history—historical affiliation and succession? In a sense, this is what the Catholic Church has attempted to do with apostolic succession, by which the authority of bishops comes from tracing the lineage of teaching back to the original apostles of Jesus. But historical succession doesn’t guarantee any degree of consistency in belief or practice. Furthermore, we have no reason to assume that the early church is a pure expression of “true” Christianity. In reading the Gospels, we witness story after story in which the apostles clearly didn’t understand Jesus’s core teachings.⁵

So what is Christianity, and who are Christians? In short, there is no single Christianity. In so far as we use the label Christianity to refer to a tradition, it must be understood as dynamic and diverse. Consider the development of Christian thought—from Origen and Irenaeus to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley to contemporary voices like Marjorie Suchocki, Thomas Jay Oord, and Catherine Keller. Each of these thinkers has been influential for specific groups of Christians, yet significant differences can be seen across their thought. Not only does the Christian tradition change, but the various manifestations are interconnected. Protestant Christians protested Catholic Christianity. The Five Articles of Remonstrance were developed to contrast the Five Points of Calvinism. The evolution of Christianity is not uniform or singular. There are many Christianities.⁶ Even if we were to examine a single thinker such as Martin Luther, we would need to be careful to recognize the dynamic development of his thought.⁷ Theology is not static. Theology is not uniform. Neither are the world’s wisdom traditions.

Because of the diverse expressions of each tradition, there are times when the differences within Christianity are greater than the differences between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers. For example, the Christian panentheism of Charles Hartshorne, a twentieth-century Christian thinker, is more similar to the Islamic panentheism of Ibn Arabi, a twelfth- to thirteenth-century Muslim thinker, than to the classical theism of Christian thinkers like Augustine.

Christianity is not alone in its diversity. There are also many Judaisms and many Islams. With the absence of singular unchanging subjects—Christian, Jew, and Muslim—to be compared, all conclusions regarding whether the three worship the same God should be made conditionally. We might even say it depends on which Christians, Jews, and Muslims we are talking about at any particular moment.

The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary and Problem of Sameness

In addition to recognizing the complexity around Jewish, Muslim, and Christian identity, we should take note of the ambiguity surrounding the words worship, same, and God. We should not be surprised, for all words have an element of ambiguity. We must be careful to avoid the fallacy of the perfect dictionary. As one of us has written elsewhere, “A perfect dictionary would be one in which some set of words was unambiguously defined and all the others were defined in terms of them. We would then have the possibility of communicating univocally, that is, without the possibility of diverse understanding of what we mean.”⁸ However, we believe this is impossible. It is important to remember that as we pursue more and more exact meanings for terms, we will never reach a final point where some set of words can be universally and unambiguously understood. There is no perfect definition of worship, same, or God, such that the terms could be understood unambiguously. The limits of language always require that communication involve some intuitive and imaginative leap.

Even if we get to a place where we are satisfied with an explanation of what is meant by the question “Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship the same God?” we are still met with the epistemic gap between ourselves and the subjects in question, particular Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In other words, how do we know what someone else believes? How do we know whom they worship? At best, through dialogue, we can come to make judgments about what the other has in mind; we do this all the time in daily life. Yet we must also recognize that these judgments are not always accurate. Language is symbolic. The words and concepts we use are always pointing beyond themselves.

To add to the difficult challenge at hand, addressing the question as to whether Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship the same God is a task that requires translation. Not simply linguistic translations (i.e., Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, etc.), but a translation of conceptual frameworks that vary across historical-cultural contexts. This is a major challenge of all comparative theological and philosophical work. It is more clearly a challenge in East-West comparisons like Christianity and Buddhism, for which assuming that nirvana is simply the Buddhist version of Christian heaven results in an imperialistic misappropriation of concepts. Yet there is also a risk of conceptual chauvinism when comparing and contrasting the Abrahamic traditions. We should be slow to assume that the YHWH of Judaism, Allah of Islam, and God of Christianity are different ways of referring to one and the same divine ultimate.

Finally, much of the current debate regarding whether or not the three Abrahamic traditions worship the same God hinges on what one means by the “same.” There is a sense in which Andrew Schwartz today is the same person as Andrew Schwartz twenty-five years ago. He has the same parents, the same siblings, the same origins. Yet there is a sense in which he is not the same person he was back then (there are pictures to prove it!). If the police were to put out an APB on thirty-three-year-old Andrew Schwartz but used the description of eight-year-old Andrew, they would have a difficult time tracking him down. Moreover, the cells in our bodies regenerate over and over to the point that the physical makeup that constituted Andrew’s eight-year-old body is not the same stuff that constitutes his body today. This conundrum is well documented in philosophical discourse on identity, with examples like the Ship of Theseus.

Imagine a ship that leaves from Los Angeles, arriving in Shanghai a month later. During the voyage the ship requires extensive repairs, such that by the time it arrives in Shanghai none of the parts that constitute the ship are the original parts that constituted the ship upon its departure from LA. There is a sense in which the ship that left Los Angeles is not the “same” ship that arrived in Shanghai—different deck, different sails, and so on. Yet there is another sense in which it is the same ship, albeit transformed. So, in one sense “same” can imply no difference, and in another sense it can incorporate difference. What then does it mean for Christians, Jews, and Muslims to worship the same God?

While we wish to acknowledge the ambiguity of language, the complexity of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish identities, and the difficulty of the notion of sameness, we won’t let this prevent us from attempting to say something positive about the main question of whether the three worship the same God. Sure enough, there are many ways in which it can be said that Christians, Jews, and Muslims do not worship the same God. Some examples are given above, and other examples will be discussed at length by other authors in this book. Our goal, however, is to identify how we can positively assert that all three groups do worship the same God.

The God of Abraham: A Historical Argument

Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God? From a historical perspective, absolutely! Muslims worship the God of Abraham, Christians worship the God of Abraham, and Jews worship the God of Abraham.

Perhaps you recall the Bible school song that declares that “Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you, so let’s just praise the Lord.” While not likely intended as a pluralistic affirmation of Jewish and Muslim expressions of faith being compatible with Christianity, there is something significant about the realization that all three traditions claim a similar origin.

Consider the above example of the ship that travels from LA to Shanghai. Imagine we knew nothing about the origins of the ship that arrives on the Shanghai shore, and that we know nothing about the destination of the ship at the LA harbor. Imagine a photo is taken of the ship before leaving LA and upon arriving at Shanghai, and that a detailed description of the ship’s makeup is provided before departure in LA and after arrival in Shanghai. If someone were asked, based on the disparate descriptions and photographic evidence, whether the LA ship and the Shanghai ship are the same ship, one would be justified in concluding that they are not. Yet when we know something about the origins of the Shanghai ship and the journey of the LA ship, we are inclined to overlook differences in appearance, material, location, and so forth and conclude that the two ships are one in the same. This is the power of history.

The same logic can be applied to the Abrahamic traditions. Despite any differences in description, nature, or expression, if we are able to trace the origins of the God of Christianity, Allah of Islam, and YHWH of ...