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Following up the question of the relations between Christianity and Islam, it ought to be noted that Christians have made great efforts to try to draw closer to Islam and to try to lessen the old gaps between the two faiths. But do we believe in the same God?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
841 The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
I hate to dissent, but Muslims do not believe in the Trinity, and how they can therefore believe in the same God we do escapes me. The relevant extracts from the Koran are:
- “They do blaspheme who say: Allah is one of three in a Trinity: for there is no god except One Allah. If they desist not from their word (of blasphemy), verily a grievous penalty will befall the blasphemers among them,” (Quran 5:73, Yusuf Ali).
- “They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allah is the third of three; when there is no Allah save the One Allah. If they desist not from so saying a painful doom will fall on those of them who disbelieve,” (Quran 5:73, Pickthal).
Nor do Muslims believe in the Divinity of Christ:
- “They indeed have disbelieved who say: Lo! Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary. Say: Who then can do aught against Allah, if He had willed to destroy the Messiah son of Mary, and his mother and everyone on earth? Allah’s is the Sovereignty of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them. He createth what He will. And Allah is Able to do all things,” (Quran 5:17, Pickthal)
- “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse are they!” (Quran 5:30, Pickthal)
I cannot think I can have understood the teaching of the Catholic Church here, but on my, no doubt, uninformed reading of the Catholic Catechism, this seems to be taking things further than we really can.
The way in which we deal with a religion which claims to be a ‘later revelation’ and which denies central tenets of the One True Faith matters. One of the things I respect most about Islam is the utter conviction of people like my convert friends that their faith is true and that it is the one way to salvation. When Christians seem to collude by maintaining that we ‘adore the one merciful God’, the Muslims I know are contemptuous of us. They do not think we worship the same God, and they see our insistence that we do really as a sign of weakness.
Perhaps our approach here reflects our lack of certainty about Truth, as a society. But there is only one way, one Truth and one Life, and that is Christ. However we, as Christians, may disagree about aspects of that Truth, if we are Trinitarians, we do believe in the same God, and to my way of thinking, it would be more fitting if the Catechism said that about all Christians who believe in the Trinity.
I give Islam the respect of believing it believes what it says and not what it would be nice for Christians to think it believes.
All Along the Watchtower 
If we look at the secular history of Arabia in that period, we will find that Mohammed was strongly influenced by Christians yes, but also by Jews as well as other local monotheists, and of course, the traditional paganism of the area. Some sources say that his visions were calculated to allow him to do whatever he wished.
Not exactly my definition of a religion.
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Nor mine – but we can perhaps think of later parallels?
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We can, of course, almost anything that any of our churches define as heresy could be defined so, except they were rarely base on personal aggrandizement but on differing interpretations, and I am including here both Luther and Henry VIII but, the ones we are referring to did not so disrupt the foundations of the faith as the ill-understood change of Mohammed, which went off in a completely opposite direction. This is an illustration of what could have happened in Christianity if interpretation had ceased in the 5th century and why it is important to keep revisiting the sources.
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Exactly, my dear friend – I wish I had expressed it so well, but yes, you make the point superbly.
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Thank you, without your article and guidance it would not have been spoken
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Thank you. You raise a really interesting point, as some of what is in the Koran reads like a kind of quasi-Nestorian version of Christianity.
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I got the impression in mine the other day that the local Christians were some of the milieu in which Nestorianism arose.
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Yes, that’s right.
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Whew, I was worried that I misremembered, and it certainly wouldn’t fly here 🙂
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Syria and places east were non-Chalcedonian, or at least there were lots of them in such places.
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That was my understanding as well but, my knowledge is quite superficial in this area.
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I asked C, who knows far more than I do, and he confirmed it. 🙂
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It’s so nice to have an in-house expert! 🙂
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Invaluable 🙂
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Very much so. 🙂
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Is this going thru
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Yes, it came through Bosco.
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The god of Islam is radically incompatible with God, in a way that Judaism avoids entirely.
Islam posits that God is entirely and perfectly immaterial. This philosophical notion, apart from being absurd, is both untrue and mendacious.
This is not only incompatible, and quite blatantly, with Christianity — but it also just straight out denies most of the Torah.
Christians and Jews worship the One God — Muslims pray to a philosophical construction.
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Thank you, Jabba,that certainly confirms my impression.
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//I hate to dissent, but Muslims do not believe in the Trinity, and how they can therefore believe in the same God we do escapes me. //
I understand the ‘spirit of the letter’ here, but I want to be a bit nit-picky to underscore some things:
Neither do the Jews. So following what you said, we wouldn’t find them to believe in the same God either, as they do not believe in the Trinity.
However as it belongs to the Jews “the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law” etcetc, and as Muslims say they hold the faith of Abraham, they are in a different ‘area’ of the plan of salvation as compared to other non-Christian religions. That is my understanding.
//[…]it would be more fitting if the Catechism said that about all Christians who believe in the Trinity.//
It does: 838 “The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter.” Those “who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church.”
“and have been properly baptized” <– Relates to "all Christians who believe in the Trinity"
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Thank you for that, my friend, I am glad the Catechism does say that. Yes, I do. It think the Jews have the same appreciation of who God as as they have rejected Christ.
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I see circlecitadel already posted about Judaism and I’m glad. That’s the first place my thoughts went when I saw your argument that Muslims don’t believe in the Trinity, therefore it’s a different deity. As to whether or not we truly worship a different deity, I can’t say I know for sure because I haven’t really studied this area. Perhaps the truth is as I mentioned in a blogpost the other day and it comes down to narrative. If a Muslim is granted salvation then I guess we’d have to take a retroactive view that said Muslim worshiped the one, true God (even if said Muslim didn’t have a full understanding of God). I’m remembering a scene from CS Lewis’ “Last Battle” here as well as the Orthodox idea that all who hunger and thirst for God will not in the end be denied (however, there are different understandings even within Orthodoxy). But I think it really comes down to what Bishop Willimon has said in “Who Will Be Saved?” Ultimately, salvation is God’s gift and God has a disturbing tendency to give it to people we think shouldn’t receive it. Or, to be a little more Catholic/Orthodox, we may be able to say where God’s Church is, but we cannot say for sure where God’s Church is NOT.
Although I’m sorry to be blunt here, but I fail to see what the point of your argument about Muslims holding us in contempt if we confess that we believe in the same God. My response is largely, “so what?” Simply because someone holds us in contempt for believing something does not make such a belief untrue. If that were the case, then we might as well go out and purchase Richard Dawkins entire oeuvre because we’re completely wrong. Maybe you were just making a rhetorical point, I’m not sure. But some people would have contempt for my belief that I should consider others better than myself and should not repay evil with evil. Well, let them have contempt if they will. I’d rather they didn’t and I’d pray for them, but I wouldn’t change what I believe simply because someone gets their knickers in a twist. I’d end up being incapable of believing in anything, but then I suppose even that might earn someone’s contempt!
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My point isn’t that we should reciprocate, far from it, that is not what we are called to do at all.
It is rather that we should beware a twofold risk. The first is that we patronise Muslims by assuming something of them which many of them simply do not accept – that we believe in the same God as they do. The second risk is that in any dialogue we assume they proceed from that point, and we end up sounding both patronising and really talking to a construct of our own devising.
I pray for my Muslim friends, but not that they become more faithful Muslims, but that they might see the light that is Christ. Christ is the One Way and the Only One, and from what we are taught, I cannot but believe that both Jews and Muslims do stand in need of Christ as much as the rest of us.
I do think it is a form of syncretism if we think that at some deep level we all believe the same thing. Of course God alone knows who follows Him and who will be saved, and it may well be that a Muslim who denounces the Trinity and who disbelieves in Christ being the Son of God can be saved – but we cannot, can we, as Christians, think that is likely?
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Okay, but you haven’t really answered my objection. You’ve merely substituted the word “patronising” for the word “contemptuous.” I could just as easily say that many Jews feel patronised by us when we insist that we worship the same God. What’s the difference? Should we change our doctrines because of how those outside the church feel about them? Some people see the idea of confession and absolution as being patronising, even within the Christian umbrella. What then?
And as to how many Muslims feel patronised, well that’s something that neither of us can likely quantify. I certainly don’t know which ones accept that we worship the same deity and which ones reject the idea. Although I have met a fair amount that believe it’s the same deity and don’t feel patronised. The problem then is that we’ve stepped into what is likely a theological debate within Islam itself where people can come down on either side and then we can only take our guiding light as what various individuals and sub-sets say and feel.
As far as your second risk goes, I would say that any decent dialogue would include a discussion on this issue. Any decent dialogue is an attempt to understand another’s worldview and so we should always be aware of our assumptions. But again, that leads us back to the fact that this issue is something that Muslims disagree about probably to the same extent that we Christians disagree about it.
I never denied that Jesus is the Way, nor that Muslims stand in need of Jesus just as much as the rest of us. Nor did I ever say that we believe the same thing. I simply claim that salvation is much broader and deeper than any of us can imagine so what I think is likely is in many ways irrelevant. In fact, the entire Bible testifies to the fact that God doesn’t much pay attention to what we think is likely. What is more important is what I hope for.
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You raise, as ever, some really interesting points, and they deserve a post, I think, so let me work on one 🙂
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I read your posting on Anti-Islamic and I could not sleep due to the path and trails my thoughts followed. The idea that the God of the Jewish world and the Christian world are the same as the God described by the Angel to the Islamic prophet can only be compared to apples and oranges. Since the God that the prophet describes predates the God of Abraham and the God of the prophet Isa then there are two distinct Gods. The God of Abraham and of the prophet of Islam do have some traits in common, but none at all with the God revealed by Jesus. Since God is the same today, tomorrow and forever, there can only one true God and the other one must be false. So in this world the conflict is which vision of God is true and since God is a life and death matter in all facets of existence we got a problem.
Lt Gen (three stars) Ronnie Hawkins has been marked for court martial for using the term God (the christian understanding of God) we in the west are in trouble.
Soldiers are the most superstitious men on the planet, they always have their lucky cup, soup can, towel, picture, icon, bible, underwear, shirt, ji-ji beads to protect them against small arms, artillery fire. So religion is always a strong weapon, but for it to exist it must exist. Stalin brought back the Russian Orthodox church on the battlefield when the commissars from the NKVD could no longer motivate the troops with words or 9 grams. The mathematics are too complex for reason to compute the chances of being killed, so men, civilizations require more then reason they require faith. And is where the hinge pin lays, what does our civilization believe is valuable the life of the body or the life of the soul. The byproduct of the atheist mindset is the material is all, and the life is the life we have. So what will you give up and what will you defend is the question. Are there more things important then your life? A civilization must have make these choices before, the battlefield is not the place to make them. We could by wrong and the Islamist could be right, but it is better to be wrong and alive then dead and right. The question is who are we? And who is God?
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My grandfather always said there were no atheists on the battlefield.
Those of us who confess Christ, and Him crucified and risen, have only our faith, as do Muslims. In the end, God will decide.
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