Do
Muslims worship the same God as Christians? has quickly become the most viewed
post on my blog and by some distance. This is a re-written and abbreviated
version of the earlier post.
Some think
it “bizarre” to deny that Muslims worship the same God as Christians. Others
phrase the question differently and ask “Is the God of Muhammad the Father of
Jesus?” to which the answer is “Of course not.” What are some of the things we
should consider here?
“Allah” is
Arabic for “God” and has been used by Arabic speaking Christians from before
Muhammad was even born but “Allah” was also used by pagans to refer to the
moon-god worshipped in Mecca. Just because the same word is used to refer to
two entities does not mean that they are the same.
But, it
could be argued, “God” (capitalised, distinguished from “god”) refers to
someone unique, the Creator of heaven and earth, the only one to be worshipped
as God. Is not this the one whom we praise and to whom we direct our prayers
whether we are Christians or Muslims? It is certainly not possible that there
are two of this sort. God is one of a kind. “God” (capitalised) cannot take a
plural.
The
difficulty is that God is characterised in the Quran in ways which do not
merely diverge a little from the God worshipped by Christians but are
significantly different. The portrayals of “God” in Bible and Quran overlap but
there are also big contradictions that go to the heart of who God is. At best
only one of the portrayals can be true.
If their God
is the same, either Muslims or Christians (or both) bear false witness about him.
Those who affirm the truth of the Quran cannot but deny that the Christian
Scriptures accurately testify to the truth about God; those who affirm the
Christian faith cannot but question the characterisation of God in the Quran.
The question
is how significant these divergences are. Consider this:
Allah-who-does-not-beget and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot
be the same person. The God-who-became-human is not the God to which Muhammad
testifies. The God-who-lives-in-Christians-by-His-Spirit is not God as
recognised in the Quran. The God of which the Quran speaks is not tri-une and
therefore cannot be Love, Love-among-persons-from-all-eternity.
So the
question is whether these ways in which I have just described God are secondary
to a more basic idea of a Deity that is the grand architect of the universe or
whether they are fundamental to how we must speak about God.
In truth, I
believe God is essentially Love, essentially Trinitarian. It is the fact that he
created the universe which is secondary. If that is so, the Allah to which the
Quran bears witness may be better described as a fictional character (loosely)
based on a real person.
