Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

Do Muslims worship the same God as Christians?

It's a hot topic of debate online.

It's got many Christians asking the question sincerely, and the Second Vatican Council famously said yes to this question, which many Christians found controversial.

But believe it or not, that's actually the historic Christian understanding of Islam in both the East and in the West.

Now, today, you're gonna find many people, especially Evangelical Protestants, but even some Catholics and Orthodox, who think that's wrong, that Muslims don't worship the same God as Christians.

And some of these individuals go so far as to say that even Jews and Christians don't worship the same God.

So, do you think Judaism and Christianity have the same God?

No.

Judaism and Christianity do not have the same God.

Now, the biggest difference between Christianity and the other so-called Abrahamic religions is on the Trinity.

Christians believe in the Trinity, Muslims and Jews reject the Trinity.

But does that mean that we're disagreeing about the nature of the one true God?

Or does it mean that we're really talking about two or three different gods?

And we're gonna answer this question, but first, a huge thanks to those of you supporting this channel over at shamelessjoe.com.

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Okay, so regarding the Christian-Muslim debate, there are really two different questions.

Question one is, do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?

That is the question that we're asking.

Question two is, do Muslims and Christians have the same view of God, or the same theology?

That's basically a fake question.

What I mean by that is, Muslims and Christians know the answer to that is no.

We know that we disagree theologically.

Yet in preparing for this episode, I found that one after another Evangelical, when asked question one directly, would dodge it and insist on answering question two instead.

And it didn't seem like this was an accident, like they just misunderstood the question.

They would even announce what they were doing.

Now, I know that sounds weird, so let me give you a few examples of what I'm talking about.

Here's how William Lane Craig responds to question one when he's asked it directly in a Q&A.

Let me say that the way that question is phrased raises all sorts of difficult philosophical questions about what it means to refer to the same thing, because we can refer to something under a false description.

For example, I could say, uh, That man in the corner drinking a martini is, um, my uncle, but it turns out that he wasn't drinking a martini.

It was water.

And yet, I- I am referring to the same person under a false description.

And so, the claim is, well, maybe Muslims are worshiping the same God, but under a false description of who God is.

And that raises an all sorts of philosophical problems of what it means to refer to the same thing, and how do you successfully refer?

So, Craig acknowledges that question one raises some complicated philosophical questions, which is true, it does.

And he's a brilliant philosopher who's just been directly asked about this philosophical conundrum.

But he decides he's just going to reword the question by pretending that they were really asking question two instead.

I think the question is better reworded by saying, is the concept of God in Islam the same as the concept of God in Christianity?

Do we have the same understanding of God?

And there, I argue that they are worlds apart, that the concept of God in Islam and Christianity is very, very different.

So, Craig rewords the question by replacing the hard question with the easy question, and that's a clever move, I guess.

I mean, I kind of wish I'd thought of it back in school.

But the problem is, it's completely unhelpful in answering the actual question the person is struggling with.

Do we worship the same God or not?

If somebody asks you a hard question like, Why did God allow me to suffer?

it might be easier to reword it to something like, Do you know how much Jesus suffered for us?

'Cause that's easier to answer.

But I don't think it's going to help them, because it's not actually answering their question.

Nobody needs to go to a professional philosopher like William Lane Craig to ask question two.

It's an easy question.

You can ask ChatGPT, Do Muslims and Christians both believe in the Trinity?

But okay, fair enough.

Maybe audience members shouldn't be asking a philosopher like Craig.

Maybe they should be asking a theologian like R.C. Sproul.

But if you mean that the content of the theology of Islam with respect to the nature and, uh, being of God is the same as you find in the, uh, Christian view of the understanding of the being and character of God, I would say that those bear very little resemblance between the two.

And so, the simple answer would be, no, we don't worship the same God.

So, Sproul's answer essentially is, if by question one you actually mean question two, then no.

But this is the same bait and switch.

Okay, you say.

Those were both audience members' questions.

Maybe Sproul and Craig were just caught off guard.

Maybe we can find somebody else who will answer it, somebody who's addressing the question deliberately.

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

We're going to answer that question.

Great.

Finally, someone who isn't running from question one.

Let's see how they do.

A better question is, do Christians and Muslims both have a correct understanding of who God is?

So, instead of question one, you should have asked question two.

They literally scratch question one out with big red scribbles, and then decide to answer question two instead.

And then, if that's not enough, they have the audacity to say at the end

That answers the question, do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

No, it doesn't.

You asked yourself question one.

You told us you were gonna answer question one.

You then told us question one was actually a bad question.

You, uh, decided to answer question two that nobody was asking instead.

And then you told us that this answered question one .

but answering question two is absolutely a dodge.

The mere presence of theological disagreement does not automatically prove that we're worshiping different gods.

After all

Calvinist Arminians have different views of God, and yet they believe they worship the same god.

Mm-hmm.

Christians and Jews have very different views, and yet a lot of Christians would certainly say that they worship the same god as- Mm-hmm.

the Jews do.

Mm-hmm.

So let's try to actually answer question one.

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same god?

As I see it, there are three popular answers.

Number one, no, because Muslims reject the Trinity.

Number two, no, because it's not really God speaking in the Quran.

And number three, yes, because both Muslims and Christians are worshiping the God of Abraham.

Now on the surface, the first view makes a lot of sense.

The Trinity is essential to God's nature, so a denial of the Trinity is, at least in a certain way, a denial of God.

But here's the problem: Jews also don't believe in the Trinity.

Now, some Protestants are gonna simply bite the bullet here.

They're gonna just say, Fair enough, they don't worship God either.

This was actually one of the clearest answers I found from an Evangelical to question one, and he argued that because of our disagreements about the Trinity

We contradict each other on fundamental realities about God that we believe are true, and so at the end of the day, do we, do Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship the same god?

We don't.

We worship different gods.

Now, I admire his willingness to answer the question, but I think his answer is dangerously wrong.

After all, it's not just Jews today who don't believe in the Trinity.

The Israelites in the Old Testament had never heard of the Trinity.

Now, there might be individual exceptions to that.

People like Abraham may have had some glimmer of the triune nature of God, but certainly, the ordinary Israelite believer was not a Trinitarian.

By that reasoning, you would seemingly have to say that Christians don't believe in the same God believed in by the faithful of Israel in the Old Testament.

That's a huge problem because the New Testament is quite explicit that the god of the Old and the god of the New Testament are one and the same god.

So I think this is a theologically dangerous error.

So how do we avoid it?

Well, by recognizing that people can be wrong about theology.

You can say false things about the true God.

You can even say false things about the nature of God.

The philosopher Saul Kripke, in his book Naming and Necessity, gives us a helpful example.

So imagine you meet somebody celebrating Columbus Day, and you ask them, Oh, who's Christopher Columbus?

and they tell you, Oh, he's the first man to realize that the Earth was round, and he was the first European to land in the Western Hemisphere.

These are the only two facts that this person can remember about Christopher Columbus.

Now, you might know that both of those facts are actually false.

The ancient Greeks realized that the world was round, and the Norse seem to have been the first to arrive from Europe into the Western Hemisphere.

But does that mean that when this person you're talking to is talking about Columbus that they really are talking about somebody else, an ancient Greek or a Norseman?

It doesn't.

They're talking about the same guy that you and I know as Christopher Columbus.

They're just very wrong about all the details that they know or think they know about him.

So it's not just that you two might disagree about whether Columbus was a hero or a villain on a kind of qualitative value level.

The other person might literally be getting every fact wrong, and still they're talking about the same guy.

Okay, but what about the fact that the Trinity is the essence of who God is?

Well, bear in mind, we only know God's essence through his revelation.

So think about it like this.

I've never seen an H2O molecule.

I've never seen a water molecule.

I just trust that the textbooks and the scientists and teachers that I've learned from are accurately describing that molecule with, uh, two hydrogen and one oxygen.

So if you're sitting with your friend at the beach, and you apparently having run out of things to talk about say, Wow, that water is H2O, and your friend says, Yeah, I, I actually don't believe in all that H2O stuff, what follows from that?

Well, you probably need to find better beach conversation, and your friend has some weird views about science.

But it doesn't follow that the two of you are talking about different waters, or that one of you is talking about water and the other one is talking about something else.

No, one of you is just wrong about the nature of water, for the same reason that Muslims and Jews are wrong about the nature of God.

The essence, whether it's the H2O or the triune nature of God, isn't something immediately obvious, something visible to the eye, and so it requires taking it on some level of faith.

So that's why I don't think that the first position is theologically sound.

In making the case that Muslims and Christians worship separate gods, you end up seeming to have to make the heretical case that the god of the New Testament and the god of the Old Testament are separate gods, and that just won't do.

So the second position is that Muslims don't worship the same god as Christians because Allah in the Quran isn't the same god who's revealed himself in Jesus Christ and through the Bible.

Now, this position is better in one sense.

It lets you say we worship the same god as the faithful Israelites, since the Jews had and have real scriptures, unlike the Muslims, and it also points to something true.

The fact that somebody claims God has told them something doesn't mean that the voice they heard was really God.

It could be coming from God.

It could be coming from man, others from themselves.

It could even be coming from the devil.

Now, that's true across the board, whether we're talking about trying to hear the voice of God in prayer, whether we're talking about self-proclaimed prophets telling you what they claim God is telling them, or whether we're talking about Muhammad telling you what he claims God has revealed to him.

So what's the problem with this second position?

Well, for starters, think about the fact that the early Christians often had slight variations in which books were in their Bible.

Does that mean that they all worshiped separate gods?

I would certainly hope not.

Likewise, the Pharisees and Sadducees had radically different bibles.

The Sadducees seem to have only accepted the first five books of the Bible, while the Pharisees believed God was speaking to them through a number of other books.

But neither side accused the other one of worshiping a different god just because they disagreed about the nature of revelation.

On the contrary, even the question, Is it really God speaking to us in this book?

only makes sense if we're already talking about the same god.And that's true whether we're talking to Jews, to Christians, or to Muslims.

So that leaves us where we started, that Christians and Muslims both worship the same God.

Now I know that many of you are still gonna hear that as relativism, uh, but I think it's because we tend to get the question confused.

So let me offer a couple examples.

First, if you and I both see an object in the sky and you think it's a bird or it's a plane and I think it's Superman, we are talking about the same object, this is what's called the referent, even though we disagree about its identity.

When we debate whether the God of Abraham is one person or three persons, we're clearly agreeing on the referent.

But nevertheless, both sides can't be right, but that doesn't mean that we're talking about two separate referents.

To put it another way, when Muslims and Christians disagree, we're actually disagreeing, but we're disagreeing about God, not talking about two separate beings who both happen to be called God.

Now this might be even easier to see if you think about atheists.

If Sam Harris says, God doesn't exist, and I say, God does exist, are we talking about the same God?

Yes, we are, even though we're saying incompatible things about Him and about His essential nature.

Likewise, if a Muslim or a Jew says, God is not triune, and I say, Yes, He is, are we still talking about the same God?

We are, even though, again, we're saying incompatible things about Him and about His nature.

And this is how the New Testament speaks about this.

In Romans chapter 1, St. Paul warns against, The wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth.

And he talks about how what can be known about God is plain to them, to the wicked, because God has shown it to them.

Since God's invisible nature, namely His eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.

Now Paul even says of such men that, For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him.

So Paul does not say, Hey, these non-believers, they don't know about the Trinity, therefore they don't have the same God we do.

They don't know God at all.

No, he actually says they do know God even though they refuse to honor Him, and that's just the wicked.

What about those who don't have the full revelation, but are earnestly seeking God?

Well, listen to what St. Paul says to the Athenians.

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious, for as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown God.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

So Paul quickly explains that their worship is defective, because God doesn't actually live in shrines in the way that they were imagining.

But while these men were clearly getting something quite wrong about God, St. Paul can nevertheless speak of these non-Trinitarians as already worshiping the one true God.

Notice again, St. Paul doesn't say that because they're worshiping the one true God, therefore good enough, right?

He still sees a need to evangelize.

He tells them that, The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now He commands all men everywhere to repent.

And this should be our approach to Muslims as well.

Simultaneously recognizing that they are already offering worship to the one true God, and that we still need to be evangelizing them to bring them to the true faith.

This is how the early Christians like St. Augustine treated the Jews of their day.

Augustine explicitly says that, The Jews, it is true, worship the one true God.

And yet he still thinks that they need to be evangelized.

Similarly, once Islam rises up in the seventh century, the Christians in that period and into the Middle Ages and so on react to it likewise.

It's why Pope Gregory VII can write in the 11th century that, Christians and Muslims worship and confess the same God, though in diverse forms, and daily praise and adore Him as the creator and ruler of this world.

And it's why the great St. Robert Bellarmine could speak of both Muslims and Jews as worshiping the one God.

So the idea that Muslims and Christians worship separate God, or worse, that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all worship separate gods, is a pretty modern error, one that seems to have had its origins in some form of Protestantism.

But the position is not biblically, traditionally, or even logically sound.

Instead, we should recognize that these others do worship God, but they do so with an admixture of error, and so we should still share the Gospel.

And, of course, this raises a different question.

How do we know if the teachings of Islam are of God or not?

How do we know if its teachings are of divine origins?

And the Bible actually has an inerrant test for that, and you can try that test for yourself by clicking the video here.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.