National Review Online Bat Yeor December 4, 2006
Comparing the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God.
With the passing of time, hidden challenges, which for a long time had been growing unnoticed and unaddressed, can suddenly emerge into the full-blown light of current events with a force which seems quite overwhelming. Today the Western world, or Judeo-Christian civilization, shaken by jihadist terror, is being rudely awakened to theological realities blurred for decades. From clashes of civilizations to the jihad that is declaring to the planet its genocidal intentions, rational discourse concerning faith is becoming increasingly fraught.
It is within this tumult and confusion that Mark Durie, an Anglican minister, has written Revelation? Do We Worship the Same God?, in which he raises a couple of fundamental questions: Who is God? Is God Allah? Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?
To answer these questions, he analyzes Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God in Christianity and Islam. The reader is given a concise representation of Muslim and Christian arguments. Such an endeavor needs both solid scholarship and theological training. Mark Durie possesses both, being a theologian and a graduate in the language and culture of the Acehnese, a Muslim people from the north of Sumatra in Indonesia. In addition, the subjects he addresses, in the current context, request much intellectual integrity and courage.
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I don’t think Christian and Islam believe the same God.
Muslims believe that God revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad and
Muhammad is God’s final prophet. Christian rejects this and also Islam
rejects the Christian doctrine concerning the trinity of God.
Both are consider God as the only one , the eternal, and the absolute.
But Islam disbelieve that Jesus died on the cross for our sin. Also, Islam insists that Bible is not true but the Qur’an is True. Bible was inspired by God. But Islam believe that Bible is untruth.
That show that both religions not brlieve same God.
Certainly, there are very serious and important differences between the Christian and Muslim conception of God, salvation and the ethical imperatives arising from our respective faiths. No one disputes that or is saying that we shouldn’t vigorously defend our faith. But that doesn’t mean we don’t worship the same God.
Some claim that Muslims do not worship the same God because they rely on a separate revelation occuring after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So do Mormons. Like Muslims, Mormons believe that the Christian Church fell into corruption and alienation, and that an emissary was sent (the angel Moroni) to a prophet (Joseph Smith) to call humanity back to God. Despite all this do we say that Mormons do not worship the same God as we do?
Within Christianity there are very serious differences regarding salvation. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions value “good works” as a reflection of faith, while some Protestants believe that good works are meaningless and salvation is obtained “through faith alone”. A neighbor who belongs to a fundamentalist church angrily told my mother recently, “If that Mother Theresa, thought she could buy her way into heaven with good works, she was badly mistaken!”. It’s not unreasonable ro ask whther a theology that views Mother Theresa as a suspect and sinister figure might be somewhat inconsistent with our own.
Orthodox and Catholic Christians value the Sacraments as outward signs of God’s presence and grace, that “disclose and reveal God to us, but also serve to make us receptive to God.” http://www.goarch.org/en/ourfaith/articles/article7105.asp
Most of the Protestant churches do not believe in the sacraments or give them any role in their form of worship. Despite all these difference do we say that fundamentalist Christians do not believe in the same God?
I can’t think of a messsage more dangerous, irresponsible and damaging to the cause of peace in the world than the claim that Christians, Jews and Muslims do not worship the same God. The shared Abrahamaic tradition between the three faiths provide a bridge to peace, undertanding and reconciliation. The declaration that we worship “different Gods’, on the other hand places us into hostile, warring camps locked in permanent conflict, hating and killing each other in God’s name.
“Pope prays with cleric at Turkey mosque”, Thursday, November 30, 2006
Pope Benedict, by his powerful gesture of praying at the Blue Mosque has affirmed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God and need to work together towards peace and greater understanding.
Dean, if you have any inkling at all of actual Morman theology you’d not write what you do. They are quite up front that they do not worship the same God and really nothing that a Christian would call God at all. To begin with they separate each of the persons of the Trinity into separate gods. Further they claim that God the Father was once as we are now and evolved to where he is and we can get there one day too. (A number of Mormans with whom I used to work shared this with me as did the two Morman missonaries I invited to dinner one evening and what was preached at the funeral of a Morman friend). There is absolutely no foundation for the fallacy that Mormans worship the same God.
You are tragically wrong about Islam as well. Islam does not recognize Jesus as God Incarnate. If Jesus is not God Incarnate then he is nothing but a fallen human being who cannot save. God either incarnated or He did not. You can’t have the same God performing mutually exclusive actions.
Also, while I hesitate to bring it up again, because of the different God, Islam has a radically different anthropology.
. Bushwa!
Too bad the Pope does not have the moral consistency or courage to demand Muslim submission to him as he demands Orthodox submission. If the pope really believed the Muslm’s worshipped the same God, for whom he is Vicar, wouldn’t he do that? Wouldn’t he have at least made the sign of the Cross in Hagia Sophia? No, he chose instead the way of the dhimmi–submission to the followers of Mohammed because of their violence.
“If that Mother Theresa, thought she could buy her way into heaven with good works, she was badly mistaken!”. If she actually believed that, which I seriously dobut, she was badly mistaken. Even if she were so sadly mistaken, that does not mean she did not make it into heaven. She was obedient to Jesus commandment to serve the poor and did not rely on government to do it for her. So what’s your point?
The Orthodox and RC understanding of Sacrament is radically different even when we use similar words. Do you not understand that?
Many Protestants refuse to recognize genuine communion with God as possible falling into a static legalism even more restrictive than that which they condemn. That is why your Protestant neighbor is so incredibly wrong about holiness. For the Protestant to understand holiness it would be necessary for him to radically alter his idea of God, in effect to start believing in a different God than he does now.
Wake up Dean!! Peace is not possible built upon a lie. You can’t wish it into existence by denying real differences.
All that being said, it is possible for individuals on a personal level to transcend the differences because there is only one God, but to take that action of the Holy Spirit and use it to deny the over all lack of any real commonality is stupid.
You’re making Christopher look like a prophet. You seem to consistently deny the fundamental witness of the Church you claim as your own.
Michael: I didn’t mean to downplay or dispute any of these differences.
All I wanted to do was make the point that if differences in the conception of God amount to “worshipping a different God”, then not only do Muslims worship a different God than we do, but so do many Christian sects.
Secondly, while it is accurate to say that there are very serious and important differences between the Christian and Muslim conception of God, the accusation that Muslims’s worship a different God is excessive and inflammatory. One of the reasons we know there is a God, is that human beings all over the world, and throughout the ages, have intuitively perceived a divine presence. Since we believe there are not many gods by one God, then there could have been only one divine presence. Yes, the Zoroaster of the ancient Persians or the Great Spirit of the Lakota Sioux, for example, are radically different from the God described by Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean that they don’t share a far distant common origin.
For a fanatically monotheistic faith like Islam whose central tenet is “There is no God but God”, the accusation that Muslims worship a “different God” is tantamount to calling them pagans, the most extremely offensive and aggressively provacative attack on them imaginable. Given the current high level of international tensions I’m not sure what constructive prupose is served by lobbing theological hang-grenades at the Muslims.
Dean, There is only one God, but just because two people recognize that truth does not mean that they worship the real God.
I see only three possibilities when it comes to Islam, if you see another let me know:
1. The Revelation to Mohammed actually came from God, therefore all that Orthodox Christians believe and teach is false and we are the infidels the Koran says we are.
2. The Revelation to Mohammed was not real, he made it up to further his own power and political agenda
3. The Revelation to Mohammed actually came from a non-corporeal being masquerading as an angel, i.e., a demon, in which case Islam is a demonic delusion. Since the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church recognized paganism as a demonic delusion then it is possible for Islam to be pagan.
In two of the cases you are compromising faith in Jesus Christ, our Incarnate Savior for either a lie or a damned lie. For the sake of the mere possibility of worldly peace you throw away everything for which our Lord died and the martyrs suffered some of whom may well be your ancestors. I won’t do it. If you hold to the first precept then you really are a Muslim. If you are a Muslim then your politics are even less in accord with your faith than if one assumes you are a Christian.
Islam is not an Abrahamic faith. There are only two Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Christianity. Theologically, spiritually, logically and historically, Islam does not fit anywhere in the same continuity.
You accept lie after lie after lie after lie. Beliefs have consequences.
Orthodox, roughly translated means “right-believing”. The very name underscores why the accurate understanding, practice and comminication of the teachings of their faith is so important to orthodox Christians. Even during the darkest days of the Byzantine Empire, with enemies pressing down from all sides, the Orthodox Church refused to make accomodations with theologically divergent groups such as the Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites and even Roman Catholics when it would have been politically and strategically advantageous. Orthodox Christianity has always deemed salvation of the soul to be a higher consideration than political expediency.
Yet another spiritual imperative of the Orthodox Christian faith however is the need to work for peace and healing in the world, and to draw people to God with acts of kindness, charity and love. One spiritual imperative of faith shouldn’t eclipse and overide another, and we are challenged to find a way to accomodate both. So the question becomes, how can we reach out to people of other faiths to promote peace without compromising or diluting our own beliefs.
It seems to me that if we are sincerely intested in peace, than we must not make reckless comments that our adversaries will find offensive and which will terminate progres towards peace before it even has a chance to begin. Muslims believe that their faith is built directly upon the traditions of Judaism and Christianity. They trace their lineage to Abraham, a shared ancestor with the Jews and they revere Jesus and Mary as important spiritual figures. The fact that we consider their intepretations of Judiasm and Christianity to be deeply flawed is irrelavent, becuase the connection to Jewish and Christian antecedents is integral to their faith and very important to them.
Therefore, to tell Muslims they worship a “different God” would be very offensive to them and most likely the only conclusion they would draw is that is we have stopped believing in the right God. Instead of being viewed as a fellow “people of the book” the declaration that we worship different Gods would make us more of an enemy that they originally thought.
Some people seem to think that the exercise of a prudent restraint from making inflammatory comments represents a sort of weakness and surrender. It does not. In a world with nuclear weapons, clashes between civilizations have the potential to unleash unimaginable horror and suffering which as Christians have a duty to prevent. If we cannot bring ourselves to look for common ground with the Islamic faith which can serve as a basis upon which to seek peace and reconciliation, then the most prudent course of action is to maintain a judicious silence.
Dean, Not answering my question–which of the three options about the revelation to Mohammed to you accept or do you have a fourth?
In any case when Muslims say I believe in a corrupted scripture, that my Lord is not God, when they would not allow me to carry a Bible, a cross or any other Christian artifact into one of their countries, when they threaten riot if the Pope makes any sign of respect or worship in the Hagia Sophia, when they cut the heads off people who refuse to “convert” to Islam. When the teach children to hate enough that the children want to blow themselves up, when they attack schools and kill Orthodox children, when they kidnap children from their mothers in the west and make them prisoners of the “peaceful and holy” Islamic state. When they demand, DEMAND freedom of speech and religion in our country while absolutely denying it to anyone in their countries that offends me. I have not seen any Muslim organization or governemnt engage those offenses. They don’t want peace any more than Hitler did, they want to dominate, subjagate and exterminate. That is what they mean by peace. Be dhimmi or die!
Peace is not and cannot be built on a lie.
I hope your wife enjoys her Burka.
From the review of Mr. Durie’s book:
You, Dean, and so many others want to blur, disguise, and ignore the “profound contrasts..in the understaning of the identity of God” To negotiate with Islam requires a steadfast rejection of their understanding of God and the consequences in attitudes, ethics and politics that flow from that understanding. Otherwise means me might as well be Muslim.
Christian peacemaking is actually founded upon the prinicpal of evangelization, not appeasement. Especially not appeasement with demonic evil.
Michael: The only things I know about God for certain are what I have been told in the Old and New Testaments. Whether Muhammed had an actual revelation from God or ate moldy Pita bread with psychotropic properties and had some very interesting dreams is a question I am not equipped to answer. The lessons in the Christian Gospels about God’s love and our need to love our neighbor fit together and intuitively make sense to me. Nonsense about 70 virgins in heaven and killing infidels does not.
Let me restate a question for you: how can we reach out to people of other faiths to promote peace without compromising or diluting our own beliefs. Both are important.
Matthew 10:16 Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.
I would interptret “wise as serpents” to mean we should be wary not to let ourselves be manipulated or taken advantage of by Muslims. I would intepret “and harmless as doves” to mean we should avoid being unneccesarily provocative.
Note that Jesus did not say “be ye as offensive as a bull in a china shop, for then I shall know that you really believe”.
In other words as we seek peaceful relations with the Muslim world we should not compromise our own beliefs, but neither should we declare them in a manner which deliberately gives unnecessary insult and offense to those who don’t share them.
Dean, I’ll be glad to make a stab at your question if you will make a stab at mine:
Is Islam of God or is it not?
What is your understanding of the nature of man?
Well Dean, not even a faltering stab at even one of my questions?
Michael- Is Islam of God? I don’t know. As a belief system it seems under-developed and full of contradictory ideas. There are some admirable teachings regarding mercy and charity, but also directives to slaughter wrong-doers and unbelievers, teachings that are inconsistent with the notion of a loving God.
It’s almost as if the Islamic God shares more in common with the vengeful and pitiless God of early Old Testament, who directs the Israelites to slaughter and enslave their non-Jewish neighbors, than the more compassionate and mature God of the later Old Testament who weeps for the Israelites even as He warns them of the punishments that will results from their sinfulness.
Christianity benefited from the develoment over hundreds of years of Jewish ethical law (Torah) and tradition, as well as Greek philosophical concepts that early church leaders, like St. Paul, used to develop and articluate a more coherent theology. While Islam borrowed theological concepts from the nearby Jewish and Christian communities it still greatly reflected the primitive and tribal desert millieu from which it sprang. The Islamic view of the Christian Trinity as the worship of “multiple Gods” and a violation of monotheism, may relect the influence of the nearby Christian Nestorians in Syria who denied the dual nature of Christ as both human and divine, believing he was only human.
Throughout history, there has been a tension within various religions between their humanism and rationalism on one hand and mystical revelation and fundamentalism on the other. I’m reading the book Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World , by Colin Wells. Within Orthodoxy itself there were bitter disputes between those theologians who believed that God could be understood through rational inquiry (humanists) and those believed that God could only be understood through personal revelation (Hesychasts). There would be parrallel debates in Islam.
The few several centuries after the founding of Islam saw a great flowering of learning and inquiry in the great cities of the Muslim world. Eventually however there was a fundamentalist backlash. The hateful, xenophobic and intolerant theology that crushed humanism in the Muslim eventually became Wahabbism, the brand of Islam practiced and exported by Saudi Arabia today and which serves as an inspiration to al Qaeda. This is a religion I could never call “of God”, in any way, shape or form.
Muslims who practice acts of kindness, love and charity are behaving in a manner that is “of God”. However, because of its inconsistencies I see the Muslim religion as a less than optimal means of developing these God-like qualities.
Dean, thank you for your reply. It helps me understand the reason for some of our disagreements, but more on that when I have more time. I’d like to point you to another blog which I found recently that discusses matters of the Orthodox faith from a deep, non-confrontational, Gospel oriented, pastoral point of view. I have found it instructive and refreshing especially the latest series on atonement, salvation, and morality. I hope you check it out. http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/
Dean, you describe Islam as immature. If we are to engage them we have to deal with them as one deals with children. Set clear, realistic(for us) limits and enforce them with natural and logical consequences (based on our logic). In my mind the beginning of such an engagment would entail telling them unequivocably what we will not accept:
1. No Sharia Law outside Islamic countries
2. Any one in the United States who advocates Jihad is deported, if not a citizen, and put on trial for treason if a U.S. Citizen.
3. Any mosque who’s imams advocate Jihad will be closed and #2 enforced
4. No prison ministry that teaches jihad or the ideal of the Ummah as these are traitorous in nature.
5. Press for expansion of religious liberty in Islamic countries
6. Universal acceptance of Israel’s right to exist published in Arabic, announced through official government channels in Arabic
7. No Islamic state in Kosovo.
8. Tight restrictions place on any immigration from any Islamic country or anyone who is Muslim.
I’m sure there are more, but any aquiesence to their world view is at best like allowing children to rule one’s home, chaos and destruction ensue.
The best overall answer is still evangelization, but that will be quite difficult and will involve martyrdom for many who choose to try.
Once they understand these guidelines, the economic needs of Arabic countries can be addressed within normal, responsible methods.
As long as we are dependent upon their oil and/or think that Islam is a religion of peace we will not have the political or diplomatic will to do anything other than continue being dhimmis.
Institute a draft with few exemptions that the rich and powerful can use to elude service to their country but that has a non-military option. No CO status necessary then.
A constitutional amendment on the requirements of the office of President that increases the minimum age and requires prior service to one’s country of some sort.
Dean, while Islam may be a “belief system”, Orthodox Christianity is not. That you actually look at the Church and what she teaches as a “belief system” indicates why you find it so easy to substitute the human centered ideology of political parties for the revealed truth of the Church. Christianity did not “develop” out of Judaism. God Incarnated and formed a new covenant, but since it was the same God, there remains significant continuity. Orthodox Christianity is about salvation from sin through union with God—a feat made possible by the Incarnation. You really ought to read St. Athanasius, or at least look at Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog: Glory to God for All Things http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/
As I am sure you know, we Orthodox make the statement that the Church has or is the fullness of the Truth. Since the Truth is a person, Jesus Christ, not a philosophical percept sought and known with the mind, we can actually make the statement without any arrogance. The fullness of Jesus Christ can be known through the Orthodox Church. Since the fullness of the truth is in the Church it stands to reason any portion of the truth found elsewhere is derivative from the Church. Any thing that stands in direct contradiction to what the Church reveals about the nature and reality of God in earth and the associated nature of man is a lie—not of God.
Your statement:
is both a misstatement of the controversy and seems to assume that there was never any definitive understanding reached by the Church. That is not true. The teachings of St. Gregory of Palamas which were restatements of the mind of the Church throughout her life, were decisively up held in what many consider to be the equivalent of the 8th Ecumenical Council in the 1330’s. There the Orthodox understanding that God was absolutely unknowable in His essence but could be directly experienced by individuals in the Church through His energies was resoundingly upheld. It was a total repudiation of the rationalist heresy that God could only be thought about. There was never any question of one’s use of our rational faculty to approach God or any denial of reason per se.
I am appalled that you make use of a false dichotomy between reason and mysticism. True reason is an attribute of God, and actually is improved as we progress in Theosis, the error of elevating reason to the supreme faculty of man and denying our ability to commune with God directly is the problem.
“Dean, you describe Islam as immature. If we are to engage them we have to deal with them as one deals with children.”
Michael, you are buying into the progressive premise (religion and all human thought/action are set on a progressive continuum). Islam is neither “immature” and certainly is not to be dealt with “as children”…Unless you mean the Devil is “immature” and grown men with guns as “children…;)
Christopher: It must be nice to live in your world where we don’t need to study history, economics or sociology. In Christopher-world there are only “good” people and “bad” people and that’s all we need to know.
O Bethlehem, be prepared: Eden is opened to all; O Ephratha, be made ready, for in the cave the Tree of Life has blossomed forth from the Virgin; for her womb has been shown to be a spiritual paradise, in which is the divine plant, from which having eaten, we will live and not die as Adam did. Christ is born to raise the image that had fallen… You, O Saviour, have bought us from the curse of the Law by Your precious blood. Being nailed to the cross and pierced by a spear, You poured forth immortality to men…
Behold, the time of our salvation approaches; make you ready, O cave, for it is time for the Virgin to give birth, and you, Bethlehem of Judah, rejoice and be happy, for from you shall shine forth our Lord. Listen, O mountains and hills and the regions about Judah, for Christ comes to save man whom He did create, for He is the Lover of mankind…
Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and celebrate all you lovers of Zion, for the temporal bonds with which Adam was condemned have been loosened, paradise has been opened for us, and the serpent has been annihilated, having behld now that the one deceived by her of old has become a Mother to the Creator. Wherefore, O both the depth, the richness, the wisdom, and the knowledge of God, that the instrument of death which brought death to all flesh, has become the first-fruit of salvation to all the world… for the all-perfect God has been born as a babe… by His swaddling clothes He has loosened the chains of our sins… by His babyhood He has healed the pains and sorrows of Eve. Let all creation, therefore, exchange glad tidings and rejoice, for Christ has come to recall it and to save our souls!
(Great Vespers, Sunday of Genealogy)
From the blog Glory to God for All Things by Fr. Stephen Freeman:
The great climax of Christmas (now there’s something I’ve never thought of before) comes at the birth of Christ. Hell will shake at this triumphant entry. Even though the Holy Innocents will be slaughtered and the Holy Family will flee to Egypt, it is simply “ducking” the falling debris of a Kingdom that is crumbling.
Now God’s feet touch the earth, its air fills His lungs. He drinks deep from the milk that His mother gives. He will cry.
But even though he will cry like any baby, calling for human help, it is still the cry of God, a sound that will break the bonds of hell itself.
In one interpretation of the name Sheol, the implication of silence is heard. “Who can praise you from the grave?” Thus the voice of God crying in the night is a sound that must make every tree and rock tremble with anticipation.
It is in light of such that we ourselves must not forget to give alms, to lighten the burden of those around us, to make every effort to set captives free and give sight to the blind. Our King and Savior draws near.
Merry Christmas to all and may His mercy break the bonds of sin in all of us.