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.
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
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