#446: Do Muslims and Christians Worship The Same God?

 As Christians attempt to celebrate the sacred season of Christmas amid a sea of consumer excess, the last thing we need to see is conflict among ourselves.  So it was sad last week to see a Christian college punish a professor for quoting Pope Francis. 

Administrators at Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading evangelical college, placed Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science, on administrative leave last Tuesday after she suggested that Christians and Muslims follow the same God. Her December 10 Facebook posting read: “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” The college offered this rationale:

"Dr. Hawkins’ administrative leave resulted from theological statements that seemed inconsistent with Wheaton College’s doctrinal convictions, and is in no way related to her race, gender or commitment to wear a hijab during Advent."

The Internet predictably exploded with sites asking “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” (google it!) The result is a flood of pseudo-academic gobbledygook detailing supposed differences between the “Christian God” and the “Muslim God.”

Many arrive at the same conclusion as Bryan Fischer, columnist for the American Family Association:

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? The answer is an unequivocal and unambiguous "No." Muslims themselves will confirm this to you if you know the questions to ask.

  Some of these commentaries argue about words: the origin of “Allah” and “Yahweh” and “Jehovah,” for example.  Some argue about whether Abraham sacrificed Isaac or Ishmael.  Some argue that Allah is not a loving father, or that Allah has no son.  Some finally, detail many differences in Christian and Islamic beliefs. 

All of which provides ample evidence that Christianity and Islam are not the same religion.  We do not share the same faith, which is why interactions between us are called “inter-faith” events.  But all these things are beside the point. 

All these arguments, however distinct, make the same basic error.  It is called a “category mistake”:

A category mistake is an error in logic in which one category of something thing is presented as belonging to another category. For example, to say "the rock is alive" assigns the category of life to that which is not alive. Another example would be to say that an idea is the color blue. It mistakenly applies the category of color to a concept in the mind.

https://carm.org/dictionary-category-mistake  

In short, the arguments above all waste our time by making the points that do not even apply to the question about the “same God.”

The category mistake here lies in thinking that talking about “the same God” is equivalent to talking about “the same concept of God” or “the same ideas of God”  or “beliefs about God” or even “names of God.”

These are all mistakes, because the question is not if we all believe the same things.  In fact the question is not about us (our ideas, concepts, beliefs, words) at all.  It is about God. It is not about our beliefs, but about the object of our beliefs. And as Saint Thomas wrote, the object of our faith is not an idea--it is a being, or even Being itself. 

Let me take an everyday example. I have three children.  Do they all acknowledge the same father?  Perhaps one thinks I am generous, another thinks I am wasteful, and a third thinks I am stingy.  They have very different ideas of me--but their ideas do not change me. I am still father to all three.  Do they all love the same father?  Perhaps one thinks she is my favorite child, another believes I have no favorites, and the third thinks I’m the best father in the world.  None of those things alters the main fact--I am still their father, and if they love their father then they all love me. 

My kids’ ideas may be right or wrong, of course.  But those ideas do not change who I am.  Different people’s ideas about God may also be right or wrong.  But they do not change God. 

So Muslims do not believe Allah has a son.  But then, Jews do not believe in the Son of God either.  Nor do Unitarians.  Nor did the 4th century Arians, who believed Jesus was only human.  Then there were the Docetists, who did not believe that God’s Son became human.  And the Jansenists, who believed that God’s grace destroyed our free will.  And the Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians, who do not believe, as we do, that “the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son.”

Are we to conclude that Jews, Unitarians, Arians, Docetists, Jansenists, and Othodox Christians all worship a different God?  Of course not.  That would make a mockery of Western monotheism, which began with the notion that the God of Abraham is the only God, that all others are frauds.  We may disagree with those others, or believe they are wrong in their beliefs.  We may even judge, as history does, that Arianism, Docetism, and Jansenism are heretical beliefs incompatible with true Christian faith.  But we cannot say they worship a different God.  We all share the same monotheism. 

By definition, monotheists acknowledge only one God.  If Jews worship a different God from Christians, then the God of Abraham cannot be God at all.  So why do we use their scriptures?  Why don’t we reject their God?  But of course, we do not--any more than Muslims reject our God. 

To repeat: the question is not whether we all believe all the same things about God.  The question is not about us at all.  The question is about God.  In short, the focus is not on our beliefs but on the object of our beliefs—and God is and remains the same God whether our beliefs are right or wrong. 

So how do we know we all worship the same God if our beliefs are so different?  The obvious way to consult our traditions. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

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.

--CCC 841, quoting the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 16, from Vatican Council II.

Vatican II's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, 3, makes the teaching of the Council perhaps even clearer:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even his inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.

And here is what the Quran says:

We believe in God and what has been sent down to us, and what had been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their progeny, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus, and to all other prophets by the Lord. We make no distinction among them, and we submit to Him.-- Quran 136:2

If we compare these statements, it is clear beyond doubt that both Catholicism and Islam claim to worship the same God--the God of Abraham.  So we share the same God, but we do not share the same beliefs about God--which should be obvious, since we belong to different religions. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all live by different belief systems, including different beliefs about God.  But we all claim the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the one true God.  “Yahweh,” “Allah,” “Trinity”--all these are different names for the same creator. 

This truth may threaten some Christians. Stating this truth may cost Larycia Hawkins her job.  But the reasons people use to deny this truth inevitably fall into that “category mistake” I explained above.  In fact, what they are really giving us are the reasons why Muslims are not Christians. 

Did anyone think they were?

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015

#445: “Ad Multos Annnos !” for Francis —and for HIS Council

The traditional Latin birthday toast “Ad Multos Annos !” (to many years!) had double (or even triple) meaning the last two weeks.

#444: To Defeat Terror, We Must Fight Islamophobia

 Fearing or blaming Islam for terrorism only cultivates more terror.

As the mass murders pile up, more people are tempted to blame and fear Islam. We hear Ted Cruz proposing we accept Christian refugees but not Muslims and Donald Trump calling to ban even Muslim tourists. And a poll shows New Hampshire voters' paranoia: 53% of Trump supporters favor a "Muslim database," and 49% want to shut down mosques.

Others, like Catholic columnist George Weigel, are more subtly paranoid. Weigel claims that attacks in Paris and elsewhere target “crusader nations” regarded as enemies of the true religion, Islam.  Terrorists killed those who embody “the West,” he thinks--even though many attacks have been in Africa and Asia and Russia. Weigel says terrorists attack due to “religiously-warranted convictions”--as if Islam justifies such attacks.  He says they kill innocents whom they considered “infidels”--even though many victims (even in Paris) have themselves been Muslims.  He asked for prayers for “the ultimate defeat of the evil that he is Jihadist terrorism” by every legitimate means.

Meanwhile, Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer argues that “terrorism and mass migration are bitter results of outside meddling” by colonial and neo-colonial powers--and he predicts they will intensify.  “Interventions multiply our enemies,” he writes, since every act “produces anti-western passion” that can be radicalized into the “thirst for bloody revenge.” Killing such militants backfires: “killing creates more, not fewer” of them.  So retaliation by European and American forces hands the terrorists what they want: to trap us in the quicksands of the Middle East.

So who’s right?  Is Islam to blame, and we must use “every legitimate means” to kill all the “jihadist murderers”? Or is colonial history behind this, and we must find another solution?

Faced with this urgent question, I find myself doing what, by now, has become a regular habit: I consult the global moral wisdom of Pope Francis.  In his view, the real blame for much of the world’s mass violence is fundamentalism, which has become “a disease of all religions.” "Fundamentalism,” he says, “is always a tragedy. It is not religious, it lacks God, it is idolatrous."

Let’s assume Francis is right--he usually is!  Then we must ask: what does this mean?  What is the connection between fundamentalism and terror?

Karen Armstrong’s landmark book The Battle For God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam supplies a clear and practical answer.  Based on her studies of fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Armstrong concludes that all fundamentalism follows a regular pattern that can lead to violence. Let me summarize:

Fear.  The pattern begins with discontent or fear.  Almost always it arises among people who live traditional lives and are confronted by “modernity.” This takes many forms: Christians who fears secular humanism, or the sexual revolution, or the theory of evolution; Jews alarmed by the growing Palestinian population in Israel--or even the growth of secular Jews; Muslims who fear the invasion of modern customs of dress, drinking, sexual openness, even feminism.  This fear creates a desire to escape or resist modernity.

Powerlessness.  Next comes a feeling of helplessness.  Such people want to avoid or resist modernity, but they feel its momentum is too powerful to stop.  Naturally, this feeling of powerlessness is strongest among the most desperate: people who are already poor, underprivileged, disadvantaged, or disenfranchised.  In other words, the initial fear of modernity is fueled by inequality.

“Tradition.”  Third, fundamentalism turns to “tradition” as a shield that can protect them from the overwhelming power of modernity.  Often, “tradition” means a specific religious tradition, although secular ideologies (white supremacy, neo-Nazism, etc.) are sometimes used. 

But using tradition as a shield faces an obstacle.  All "western"

religious traditions (including Islam) have a history of adapting to changing times--but fundamentalism needs a shield that is fixed, frozen in time.  This requires distorting the tradition, reshaping it into an immovable barrier against modernity.  Thus fundamentalist Christians insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis (a creation lasting seven 24-hour days) to reject the theory of evolution.  Fundamentalist Catholics pretend that priestly celibacy (and the lifelong virginity of Jesus) are absolute doctrines.  And fundamentalist Muslims twist “sharia” into an oppressive legal system and invoke “jihad” as a pretext for killing innocent people.

Violence. Left alone, fundamentalists may be content to survive sheltered behind the shield of their distorted tradition.  But   they may feel that modernity’s threat requires counterattack.  This can happen in two ways.  First, they may feel attacked from within their religion by those who reject the way they distort tradition.  Clearly, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all experience such internal conflicts.  Second, fundamentalists may feel attacked by outside forces representing modernity itself.  Thus the Russian invasion of Afghanistan brought “godless communism” to the fundamentalists’ doorstep.  And repeated intrusions by Western powers--especially the Western military presence in the sacred spaces of Saudi Arabia--threatened to pierce the shield across the Middle East.

Once they are thus cornered, fearful fundamentalists may then turn to violence.  It may be directed at Planned Parenthood (by Christians), at innocent concert-goers (by Muslims), or at Palestinian teens (by Jews).  And it finds a pretext for such violence by invoking “tradition”--even when those traditions do not, in reality, warrant such attacks.

Weaponizing religion.  The final stage comes when this newly violent version of the religious tradition is then wielded as propaganda to “inspire” other discontented people, who then become recruits to terrorism, even to suicidal violence.  Thus fundamentalism reveals itself as the “disease of all religions” whose cancerous expansion can finally metastasize into random outbreaks of terrorism whenever (1) people fear the culture around them and (2) can be converted to embracing the lie of “tradition as weapon.”

Since 9/11, we have learned that anything—a plane, shoes, underwear, a kitchen pot—can be weaponized. But perhaps the most powerful weapon comes when one mutilates faith into a form of hate.

Karen Armstrong’s convincing portrait of fundamentalism leads me to conclude that people like George Weigel have it backwards.  Terrorists are not actually motivated by their religious faith.  What moves them is their fear of the world around them, which breeds a desire for “revenge” so fierce that they hijack their own religion.  Islam does not justify terrorism, nor does it inspire terrorism.  Rather, some hate-and-fear-filled people exploit Islam as a handy “tool” they can use to rationalize the evil they do.  And this rationalization is not a “religious warrant” for terror—it is (like ANY rationalization) just an excuse. In short, Islam does not provoke terror; rather, those already committed to terror invoke Islam since it suits their purpose.

Thus the terrorists are not dangerous because they are Muslim.  They are dangerous because, since they’re so filled with hate, they reject Islam’s peaceful message and will use anything, even their own religion, as a weapon against those they hate. 

The truth is that almost all of us find that “modernity” is difficult at times.  The modern world is full of rapid change, diversity, even conflicts.  Few of us embrace these easily and naturally.  But most of us cope with the challenges of modern life and carry on.  For others, the challenges prove too much.  And whether the result is emotional disorder that leads to violent behavior, or even blind hatred that twists faith into lethal form, we must remember that they’re reacting against something that makes them afraid, helpless, and irrational.  Until we develop the means to eliminate that fear, that helplessness, and that irrationality, modernity will continue to inspire dangerous reactions. 

If we attack or blame their religion, we merely make modernity (which now “rejects” their faith) even more threatening to others who may be vulnerable to the terrorists’ propaganda. THEY may claim the battle is about “Islam vs. the West"—but we must not accept their version of events. We must not help them do their job. To defeat them, we must fight against their demonization of Islam.

The cancer of terror has reached the point where it seems out of control.  It is too late to undo the history that unleashed terror, but it is not too late to help terrorism’s potential recruits—the disenfranchised, disillusioned youth of the Middle East, Europe, and America--learn constructive ways to cope with the challenges of modern life. 

Of course, this would require, not military force, but a solution to the vast inequalities that leave millions afraid, powerless, and desperate.  And so far, we have been much better at producing guns than good will. Can we change?

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015