God of Jesus, god of Mohammed
Whilst driving yesterday it happened to be the time of day when the local radio talk show, The Phil Valentine Show, came on the air. The first item on Phil’s agenda was a statement by President Bush:

In a Thursday news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, the president was asked about his views on the subject. "I do say that freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person," the president responded. "I also condition it by saying freedom is not America's gift to the world. It's much greater than that, of course. And I believe we worship the same God."

There followed some musings by Phil and his show’s sidekick, Johnny B., about how we should all get along and aren’t we all trying to get to the same place and can’t we stop arguing over religion, etc. etc. etc.

So I called in. Phil gave me a respectful and reasonably lengthy hearing of several minutes on the air. Below is an expanded version of what I said about the question, "Are Allah and the God worshiped by Christians and Jews the same God?"

First, there is no way to argue that the God of Christians and the God of the Jews are not the same. Jesus was a Jew and he described God in Jewish terms. His religious offense in the minds of the Jewish High Council was not that he worshiped a false God, but that he claimed co-identity with the one God they all worshiped. Jesus cited the Hebrew and Jewish prophets to buttress his own case. Jesus read the Jewish Scriptures in synagogue and insisted that he did not intend to overturn "even an iota or a jot" of the Jewish law, all of which was concerned with God and the relationship of the people with God, and with one another in God’s name.

Judaism and Christianity have some things in common with Islam. Both Judaism-Christianity and Islam insist that there is one deity, and only one. (I won’t address the Muslim misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity here.) Both sides - Judaism-Christianity on the one and Islam on the other - understand the deity as the source of the moral order of human life. Both sides understand that their knowledge about the deity comes not from themselves, but from the deity through revelation.

Those things being so, the question is not, Is there a God? The question is: what kind of God is there? What is God’s essential nature and character, as God has chosen to reveal to us?

What I told Phil was that the overall concepts of deity between Judaism-Christianity and Islam are so divergent that both cannot be simultaneously true. I referred to comedian Jack Handy’s shtick that trees and dogs are just alike. They both have bark, after all. Of course, one is a small, furry, warm-blooded, mobile animal. The other is a large, leafy, coarse-surfaced, woody, motionless plant. But they really the same.

But if someone described his pet dog to you using terms such as leafy, woody, motionless and such, at some point you’d insist that he wasn’t talking about a dog at all. And no matter how stoutly he insisted he was, you would say no.

So it is with the way Islam presents Allah and the way Judaism-Christianity present YHWH/God. At some point, for those who study the subject, the light dawns that although both recognize there is only one deity, we are not talking about the same deity. If we alike insist, though, that there is still only one deity, then either Judaism-Christianity or Islam are false, even though there are occasional points of agreement.

The Islamic point of view

Islam insists that it is the primeval religion of humankind. Islam includes within its ranks such familiar figures to Jews and Christians as Abraham, Jacob and Jesus. But here is a critical point: Islam insists that Abraham, for example, was not a proto-Jewish patriarch, but a Muslim. Jesus was not the Son of God or the Jewish Messiah, he was a Muslim. Example: Submission.org explains,

The Quran, informs us that Jesus was a human messenger of God whose sole mission was to deliver God's message; he never possessed any power, and is now dead (4:171, 5:75, 117).

Obviously, Christian beliefs about Jesus - and what God was doing with and to Jesus - cannot be true if the Quran is true.

Islam claims that Allah revealed himself to the Jews and Christians in much the same way Allah revealed himself to Mohammed. But the record of revelation became corrupted and error-filled by human design or negligence. Hence neither the Jewish Scriptures nor the Christian New Testament are trustworthy revelations of Allah. Only the Quran is uncorrupted. It holds the literal and very words of Allah and is totally error-free. Islam for Today puts it this way:

In Muslim eyes, Mohammed completes a succession of prophets, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, each of whom refined and restated the message of God.

The Koran therefore corroborates, updates and expands the Old and New Testaments.

Muslims insist that to become a Muslim means abandoning all prior religious beliefs - with no change of mind allowed, for the Quran decrees death for apostate Muslims. A person who affirms the Sonship of Jesus, for example, cannot continue to do so while claiming Muslim identity.

Contra-distinctions

Yet for Christians, the identity of Christ is obviously of central importance. If one believes, as I do, that one’s eternal destiny is at stake in answering Jesus’ question, "Who do you say I am?" then the decision to affirm or deny that "in Jesus dwelled the godhead bodily" (Col. 2:9) and that Jesus was raised from the dead become utterly crucial. Pilate’s question to Jesus, "What is truth?" remains. C. S. Lewis wrote:

"One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience's mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape the issue 'True or False' into stuff about the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland - or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine...their belief that a certain amount of 'religion' is desirable but one mustn't carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important."

Central to both Judaism and Christianity is the concept of covenant. A covenant is the voluntary acceptance by a people to accept God and make God their only God, following God’s precepts and commandments. Covenants are not contracts and cannot be revoked, only abandoned. Both testaments teach that sinful human beings habitually abandon their commitment to covenants, but that God is always faithful to them, even in - or especially in - the presence of human sin.

In Judaism the foremost covenant is the Covenant at Sinai, which forms the heart of the Law of Moses. In Christianity the covenant is the New Covenant prophesied by the Jewish prophet Jeremiah and fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ (Christians also affirm Jesus himself was prophesied by Isaiah and other prophets).

In both Judaism and Christianity, the heart of the covenants is willing love (i.e., Deut. 7:12; John 3:16). In fact, "love is the fulfillment of the law" (Rom. 13:10). Absent love, the religious life is empty and indeed, noisome (1 Cor. 13:1). God acts to redeem the people from their human frailty, inability, inherent evil and victimization and sin because the very essence of God is that "God is love." Christianity teaches explicitly that out of love God became embodied as Jesus, teaching, healing, suffering, dying, resurrected, in order to prove that the promises God had made through and to the Jews were true promises.

Jewish religious figures of Jesus day, including Jesus, agreed that the foremost commandment of the Jewish law was love:

One of the [Jewish] scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked Jesus, "Which commandment is the first of all?"

Jesus answered, "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.'

The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Then the scribe said to him, "You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that 'he is one, and besides him there is no other'; and 'to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,' and 'to love one's neighbor as oneself,' --this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." (Mark 12:28-33)

Love marks the key distinction between the Allah of Islam and the God of Moses and Jesus. For in Islam, Allah does not demand love, but submission. Judaism and Christianity teach that one submits to the authority of God out of gratitude for the redeeming works God has already done and in trust that God will continue to redeem. Obedience springs from love. Submission is the result, not the cause, of the saving acts that God has already accomplished.

This is a critical point:

In Islam, Allah does no saving acts except to accept human submission.

In Christianity, submission follows salvation; true also in Judaism, in which the children of Israel decided to accept the Lord's precepts and commandments after they had been delivered from bondage in Egypt.

In Islam, salvation follows submission; salvation is a reward for human works. (It was explained that way to me by a Muslim university professor). But in Christianity, salvation is a pre-existing fact springing from the love-impelled work of God, to which all persons are invited to share by grace through faith, followed by good works done in thankfulness and trust.

Love is attributed to Allah in the Quran, but not frequently. The anonymous writer of the no-longer-active blog, Secular Islam, listed just eight verses which mentions the love of Allah (there are hundreds of such verses in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures). But in every verse listed, Allah’s love is conditional on human submission. Both Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, understand that God’s love precedes, not follows, human devotion back to God or obedience to God. In Islam Allah’s love is reactive while in Judaism-Christianity God’s love is proactive, to the point where Jesus even taught to love your enemies and do good to those who harm you. But this teaching is antithetical to Islam.

The Muslim writer of the site makes a case for the distinction excellently:

Allah seems more distant in Islam than in Judaism and Christianity; there is more of an emphasis on His might and His power, His inapproachability, the fact that He has no need of His creation and says, "I have only created Jinns and men, that they may serve Me." (51:56) Note the word serve, not love. In Islam one submits to Allah; in Judaism (repeated in Christianity) the Shema says, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might," a concept totally lacking in Islamic prayers. Men and women are slaves of Allah in Islam; in Christianity they are children of God. Children are a source of love and worry for their parents; slaves exist merely to serve. ... Islam means submission; this does not leave much in the way of personal interaction. Allah orders, you obey. No debating or bargaining, like when Abraham got God down from fifty to ten righteous people to save Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. Moses speaks directly with God; Allah communicates with Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, since "it is not fitting for a man that Allah should speak to him except by inspiration, or from behind a veil, or by the sending of a messenger to reveal, with Allah's permission, what Allah wills: for He is Most High, Most Wise." (42:51)

And certainly in Islam the idea that God would find it fitting to be born of woman and live as a human being, suffering all the indignities that Jesus suffered, even death on a cross - that entire notion is strongly rejected in Islam. Continuing:

The Qur'an mentions that Allah is closer to man than his jugular vein (50:16), and Allah is constantly referred to as the Most Merciful and All Forgiving, but I have to say that I don't feel much warmth in the relationship. Allah is usually angry with man for constantly disobeying Him and constantly mentions how those who disobey and disbelieve will burn in Hell (quite graphically, too.) ...

The heavy emphasis on rewards and punishments in the Qur'an and on fearing Allah and what He will do to you if you don't repent and submit to His will doesn't leave much room for really loving Him. The legalistic nature of Islam and the intricacies, even the often anal nit-picking of shari'ah, only serve to strengthen this idea of Allah as demanding slave-master, quick to punish. ...

There is just nothing similar to the writings of the Hebrew prophets of the Bible in Islamic literature, whether Qur'an, hadiths, or sirah (lives of Muhammad). These demonstrate a very close and affectionate relationship between Israel and its God, God the loving, often chastising parent who nevertheless mourned over His people and promised them redemption. There is nothing like Isaiah's, "When Israel was a child I loved him; out of Egypt I called my son," or "Come now, let us reason together," (which would suggest a level of closeness and intimacy with God that would never be permitted in Islam--Allah would never condescend to reason with His slaves). Instead Allah of the Qur'an simply literally blows away those who refuse His message and goes on to the next people.

Never could a Muslim proclaim in Islamic faith, as Martin Luther did in Christian faith, "Love God and do what you want." No such freedom is permitted in Islam. But in Christianity (and I think, Judaism, too) freedom is central to the religious life: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," said Jesus.

So, is the Allah of Islam and the God of Judaism-Christianity the same God? We agree that there is one deity, but what we each claim to have received in true revelation from the deity about himself diverges at utterly crucial points, so divergent and so crucial that both cannot be true. One picture is false, a portrait of a deity who in fact does not exist. I am not interested here in being "tolerant" and "accepting," I am intensely concerned with being correct. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord of Abraham, Jacob and Jesus, and reject that Allah exists at all.

Please understand I am certainly not renouncing the political right of Muslims to worship whom they wish to; freedom of worship is a fundamental human right which I enjoy and would not deny to others. I strive to be entirely tolerant and accepting of their socio-politicalright, but I reject their religious claims as having equal merit with those of historic Christianity. "Here stand, I can do no other."

Update: I now discover that Bill Hobbs and Michael Williams have addressed this topic - Bill before the president's remark and Michael after.

by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2003 04:16:52 PM. Permalink |