Monotheism and Its Complexities

Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Lucinda Mosher, David Marshall, Lucinda Mosher, David Marshall

• Editorial: Georgetown University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781626165854
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Vergleichende Religion

Conventional wisdom would have it that believing in one God is straightforward; that Muslims are expert at monotheism, but that Christians complicate it, weaken it, or perhaps even abandon it altogether by speaking of the Trinity. In this book, Muslim and Christian scholars challenge that opinion. Examining together scripture texts and theological reflections from both traditions, they show that the oneness of God is taken as axiomatic in both, and also that affirming God's unity has raised complex theological questions for both. The two faiths are not identical, but what divides them is not the number of gods they believe in.

The latest volume of proceedings of The Building Bridges Seminar—a gathering of scholar-practitioners of Islam and Christianity that meets annually for the purpose of deep study of scripture and other texts carefully selected for their pertinence to the year's chosen theme—this book begins with a retrospective on the seminar's first fifteen years and concludes with an account of deliberations and discussions among participants, thereby providing insight into the model of vigorous and respectful dialogue that characterizes this initiative.

Contributors include Richard Bauckham, Sidney Griffith, Christoph Schwöbel, Janet Soskice, Asma Afsaruddin, Maria Dakake, Martin Nguyen, and Sajjad Rizvi. To encourage further dialogical study, the volume includes those scripture passages and other texts on which their essays comment.A unique resource for scholars, students, and professors of Christianity and Islam.

PART I

The Oneness of God in the Biblical Witness

Complexities Surrounding God’s Oneness in Biblical Monotheism

RICHARD BAUCKHAM

“Monotheism” is a controversial topic among both scholars who work on the history of ancient Israel and scholars who study early Judaism (i.e., the Judaism that was the context of Jesus and the New Testament writers). Many of the former would argue that true monotheism emerged only late in the period from which the writings of the Hebrew Bible come. While many of the latter (including myself) would characterize early Judaism as strictly monotheistic, others would deny that it was truly monotheistic at all, since Jews believed in a plurality of “divine” beings.

We need some definitions and distinctions. I take monotheism to mean “belief in only one God.” God, in this sense, belongs to a class of which he is the only instance.¹ Although some scholars use the term “monotheism” (sometimes “inclusive monotheism”) for a widespread pattern of religious belief in the ancient world that envisaged a supreme god at the head of a hierarchy of many gods, I find this a misleading use of the term. Such a supreme god is merely the most eminent in the category of gods, not in a class of his own. On the other hand, monotheism does not rule out the existence of many “supernatural” or heavenly beings. Virtually all Jews, Christians, and Muslims before modern times took it for granted that there are vast numbers of such beings (angels and others), but since these were created by and are subject to God, their existence is no more a qualification of monotheism than is the existence of human and other earthly creatures. The key point is that, in true monotheism, a line of absolute ontological distinction is drawn between God and all other reality. In my view, this distinguishes early Judaism and early Christianity from all kinds of ancient polytheism.

No doubt, in ancient Israel, Israel’s God, YHWH, was at one time perceived to be one of a class of divine beings. There are linguistic remnants of this view in the Old Testament. For example, according to Psalm 95:3, “YHWH is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” The Old Testament does not usually deny the existence of the gods of the nations, but it does deny that they are truly gods. Once God is defined as the Creator of heaven and earth (and thus of all heavenly and all earthly beings), the absolute distinction between the Creator of all things and all created reality puts both the gods of the nations and the heavenly beings who worship and serve the one God firmly on the “creation” side of this distinction. What we have in the Old Testament is a collection of ancient Israelite literature selected and redacted to be the scriptures of a properly monotheistic religion. Where remnants of more polytheistic beliefs occasionally survive, they should be understood in the context of the monotheizing dynamic of the collection as a whole. For our purposes, it is not the religious history of ancient Israel that is really our concern but the way that these scriptures were understood in both Judaism and Christianity.

The debate about monotheism in early Judaism revolves around the so-called intermediary figures—angels or exalted humans in heaven who are portrayed in various Jewish texts as exceptionally glorious and powerful figures. In the context of a pagan pantheon, these figures would naturally be understood as occupying a very high place on a spectrum of divinity. But when the one God is understood as the Creator and Ruler of all things, as he was in early Judaism, they take their place as eminent creatures and servants of God. In such a context, there is no room for semidivine beings. However highly a figure may rank in the heavenly hierarchy of God’s servants, that figure is no closer to being God than the lowliest of creatures is. We must bear this point in mind when we consider the exalted status of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

The Shemaʿ: Israel’s Confession of the One God

Undoubtedly the most influential text within the Old Testament that states the Jewish and Christian belief in one God is the passage known as Shemaʿ, after its first Hebrew word. By the time of Jesus, this text was recited twice daily by devout Jews (following a literal interpretation of Deuteronomy 6:7). It begins, “Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one. You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5).² There are several theoretically possible translations of the crucial statement about God because there is no verb “is” in the Hebrew.³ But at least by the time of Jesus, it was commonly understood in the way I have just translated it. It is echoed frequently in Jewish literature in the simple form: “God is one.” This is also how it is understood and echoed in the New Testament (Mark 12:29, 32; Rom. 3:30; Gal. 3:20; James 2:19). In this reading, the text says that Israel’s God, YHWH, is unique. Consequently, what is required of this God’s people is the complete devotion of the whole self to him. If cultic worship is seen as the explicit expression of this devotion, then it is clear that monolatry (the worship of one God) is essential to it, as the first two commandments of the Decalogue were generally understood to require.

So, monotheism defined by this text is no mere intellectual belief that there is only one God. It is a relational matter of heart, mind, and strength. For this reason, some find the term “monotheism” inappropriate for the religion of the Shemaʿ. The term originated in the eighteenth century as a way of classifying religions from a disengaged, objective standpoint. Certainly, if we use the term “monotheism” to describe ancient Judaism and Christianity, we must make it clear that it means more than simply belief that there is only one God.⁴ On the other hand, such belief is included. The Shemaʿ says more than that YHWH is the only God for Israel, the only God Israel should worship and serve. It presupposes what is said earlier in Deuteronomy: “YHWH is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath: there is no other” (4:39).

The only echo of the Shemaʿ elsewhere in the Old Testament confirms this in an interesting way. Looking to the eschatological future, it foresees that “YHWH will become king over all the earth; on that day YHWH will be one and his name one” (Zech. 14:9). The point is that if, as the Shemaʿ states, YHWH is truly the only one worthy of unreserved devotion, then he cannot be so only for Israel. He must prove to be the only one for all the nations. In the end, his uniqueness will not be contested by the nations who call on their own gods by other names. This hope for the universal worship of YHWH as the one and only God is a key aspect of Jewish monotheism that was also of great importance to the early Christians.

The Unique Identity of Israel’s God

In what does the uniqueness of Israel’s God consist? I find it helpful to think of this primarily in terms of personal identity rather than of nature. Certainly, there are elements of what could be called “divine nature” (such as eternity and supreme power) that the Bible treats as unique to the one God and very importantly so. But the way the biblical writers speak of God relies heavily, though not exclusively, on the analogy of human personality. They are more concerned with who God is than with what divine nature is. This also means that God is understood primarily in terms of relationship—who he is and what he does in relation to the world. So, he is the God who brought Israel out of Egypt and made them his covenant people. As such, he has a unique personal name, YHWH, that he gives himself so that he may be known by name to his people. His character description (Exod. 34:6–7) lists qualities that indicate the way he relates to people (merciful, faithful, etc.). So far, however, this account of God’s uniqueness—as the God of the covenant with Israel—does not necessarily put this God in an ontological category of his own. There could be other gods similarly related to other peoples. So, especially when the uniqueness of Israel’s God is asserted against the claims made for other gods, the features that come to the fore are those that relate God to “all things.” God is said to be the only Creator of all things and the only sovereign Ruler of all things. These divine roles distinguish the one God from all other reality. He is the only Creator; all other things are created by him. He is the sole Sovereign; all other things are subject to his will. In these terms, the one God is unique not merely in the weak sense that every god in a pantheon is unique (just as every human is unique) but in the sense that he is in a class of his own. He is unique not merely in the way that a supreme god might be more powerful than other gods, but in a way that drives an absolute distinction between him and every other entity, however eminent. We could call this transcendent uniqueness. It is an account of the unique identity of God that I think is everywhere presupposed in the New Testament.

In the ancient world, monolatry was probably the most visible peculiarity of Jewish religion. It presupposes this understanding of the unique identity of the one God. In the ancient world, worship was generally understood to be a matter of degree. One paid appropriate degrees of honor to gods (and humans) of correspondingly differing rank. Early Judaism rejected this pattern and made worship the element of religious practice that represented most emphatically the distinction between the one God and all other reality. The heavenly bodies, for example, might be thought of as personal beings, but they were created and therefore were not to be worshipped. On the contrary, they along with all the heavenly host worship their Creator (Neh. 9:6).

Introduction to Monotheism in the New Testament

If we take the scope of the New Testament as a whole, the overall difference from the Old Testament that emerges is this.⁵ While monotheism is strongly reasserted, in all of the principal ways in which it was defined in the Jewish tradition, the texts speak of this one God in three different, though intimately related, ways: as God “the Father” (for whom the term “God” is generally used), Jesus Christ “the Son” (for whom the term “God” is only very occasionally used, but “the Lord” is frequently used), and the Spirit (described both as “the Spirit of God” and as “the Spirit of Christ”). In attempting to understand this novel version of Jewish monotheism, we should note that it is the inclusion of Jesus Christ that determines it. That God is called “the Father” means primarily that he is “the Father of Jesus Christ”; Jesus Christ is the Son of this Father; and the Spirit is defined in relation to him as well as to God the Father. What has changed are the events of the history of Jesus—his life, death, resurrection, and exaltation to heaven—and the consequent outpouring of the divine Spirit on those who believe in him. While God had been known to his people as the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, he is now known as the God of Jesu...