Recently my friend Becky wrote me to say she’s heard that Christians and Muslims both belong to the family tree of Abraham. She’s also heard that Allah, the God of Muslims, is not the same God Christians worship. “Which is it?” she asked. “Same family, different gods? Same God, estranged family? Or something else all together? I read a bit, I go to church, I’ve been watching some of the presidential news coverage lately. Can you shed some light for me?” With no disrespect to the light, here is my response…
Dear Becky,
Off the cuff, I would have to ask a follow-up question to anyone who is asking your question. My question is: “What do you personally stand to gain or lose if the God of Muslims and the God of Christians is the same God?” Notice my question isn’t, “…the God of Islam and the God of Christianity…” Islam and Christianity are the names of religions, neither of which have gods. Religions have their traditions and customs and buildings, and to whatever degree we treat these like they are our gods, we give religion a god and even make religion our God. But religion has no god. And we know this is true because God has no religion. God has people. In the Old Testament of the Jews, in the Koran of the Muslims, and in the New Testament of Christians, God calls and claims a people, not a religion. In all our effort to get a hold of this God who has already taken hold of us, we form and fashion things that are more conceivable and manageable to us, things that will help us actually wrap our heads and hearts around God, things like buildings and hymnals and prayer rituals and holy meals, and we call these things…religion. These are not inherently wrong or unhelpful things. Quite to the contrary, they are some of my favorite things. The distinction between Christians and Christianity and between Muslims and Islam is an important distinction, however. It exists along a razor thin edge, because obviously the world would not have Islam without Muslims or Christianity without Christians. For me, the distinction is important for several reasons, not least of which is that to reject a religion is to reject an idea, or at best, an ideal. It is to get up from the table without taking a bite and to walk away still hungry. It may also be to reject those buildings and hymnals and prayer rituals. But to reject Christians or Muslims or Jews is to reject people. I’m not sure we ever think of ourselves as rejecting each other. Most of the time we simply think of ourselves as being one thing—Christian or Jewish or Muslim—and not something else—Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. We simply don’t know anyone who is both Christian and Muslim (at least I don’t), and so our choosing of one over another is a harmless distinction. But then comes your question asking if the God of Muslims is the same as the God of Christians and the line separating the two indeed becomes razor thin.
I don’t know much, and certainly not enough, about Islam. I don’t know in any definitive ways what the differences are between the God of Muslims who is called Allah and the God of Christians. Is Allah the only name Muslims use for God? As you and I refer to a Trinity and speak of one God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or speak of God as a human being named Jesus who was also called Teacher, Master, Lord, and Heretic, do Muslims call their God only Allah? I do know that the word “Elohim,” translated, Lord God, in the Old Testament is translated, “Allah,” in Arabic and that Arab Christians refer to God as Allah. And Wikipedia, which I don’t usually trust fully but in this instance am going to, says the top name Muslims give to their God is, The Compassionate. This little bit to say that name-calling never seems to be sufficient help for distinguishing between two things.
Biblically speaking, it’s hard to refute that in the beginning, as in the end, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all belong to the same God. Now this too is an important use of words—Christians, Jews, and Muslims all belong to the same God. This is not the same thing as saying that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all claim to believe in the same God or that we all treat each other like we were spawned by the same merciful and loving God or that we all think of ourselves as worshiping the same God. But, returning to my earlier point, God claims a people, because what God desires is love and what that requires is a people, particularly a people who love kindness, do justly, and walk humbly. It may be, and this is my greatest hope, that regardless of our acceptance of each other, in the end we will be surprised to discover that if God cares about how, where, and what we believe, our beliefs will be measured not by how well we defended them but by how gracious we were towards those who questioned and disagreed with them.
Abraham was a Hebrew. His firstborn son Ishmael, born through slave-woman Hagar, would later be claimed by Muslims. Isaac, though born second, took precedence over Ishmael. As Christians we trace the lineage of Jesus back to Abraham, passing not through Ishmael but through Isaac. That this is the way the Genealogy of Matthew 1 reads is what it is. What we as Christians in particular need to be aware of, however, is the possible implications involved with any genealogy—that they create in our minds pecking orders and competition. Do Christians think of themselves as being better than Muslims? Do Christians treat Muslims like they are better than them? I’m not necessarily speaking of all Christians in all times here. But the fact is, the Crusades were engineered by a deadly mixture between Christians and the law leading to the decimation of thousands of Jews and Muslims. History has argued, and will continue to do so, that Jews and Muslims provoked Christians to the Crusades. Whatever the cause and effect however, we ought to insist that the punishment far outweighed the crime. My point is this, regardless of what the history books say about the Crusades and who did what; regardless of what the media and politicians say today about the refugee crisis in Syria and whether the U.S. is less sympathetic towards those refugees because they are Muslim and we are a so-called “Christian” nation; regardless of any of this, nothing can light the path to peaceable and just relations between Christians and Muslims more than our own individual response to each other.
How different might Christian-Muslims relations look today—how different would our world look today?—if we let go of the premise that only one of us worships the one, true God? What if our starting block was that Christians and Muslims all belong to the same, one, true God, who in the end will claim us all in love and grace? How would we listen to each other and seek to understand each other even more now if we believed that in the end, God is going to sit us all down at the same family table anyway? This has never been easy for us to do. I know that I tend to put agreement and shared belief ahead of unity, and these are good and beautiful ideals, but I just can’t come to a point of saying that I believe God requires them for salvation. The Christian Gospel proclaims that we do not choose our own salvation, let alone the salvation of others. No unity that we can either formulate or enforce—be it the unity of a shared confession or a common church or religion—can be our salvation. Our salvation is in God who renews all creation and makes all things one. Our holy task is to participate in this renewal.
At the heart of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is the declaration: “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one,” from Deuteronomy 6. Second to this may be this declaration: “And Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness,” from Genesis 15. I always pause when I read this. I want to ask, how did Abraham believe? Was it easy for him to believe or nearly impossible? Did he have a lot of faith or a pitiful amount of it? Because we’re told that it was his believing that made him righteous. Apparently he didn’t have to answer any questions or recite any creeds or agree to abide by the polity and discipline of any synagogue or church. He believed God and God reckoned that made him righteous. I firmly believe that inherent to the Christian faith is the belief that all things come from one God and all things return to one God. On that day of great returning will God judge us? Yes, the Bible is pretty clear on this point. Biblical judgment, however, means most simply that God will set things straight again. Perhaps it also means then that on that day we will all show up at the Pearly Gates and looking around at who is there with us we’ll have to confess first and only all that we didn’t believe, all that we denied was ever possible, and God, who is a merciful judge, will set us straight not by turning us away but by asking us, “Do you believe me now?” And it won’t be too late for us to believe God and to be made righteous.
It has always been easier for us as Christians to accept that we and the Jews belong to and worship the same God. We have of course believed this despite our detestable treatment of the Jews during World War II. But I think we’ve found it easier to accept the premise that we belong to the same God as the Jews because we love our Bible so much and our Bible says clearer than clearly that God has not given up on his covenant with the Jews, that they were and are God’s first love. I don’t know if we think of it this way, but if we reject the Jews than we reject our Bible, and I think we are less prone sometimes to rejecting our Bible, and especially the New Testament part of it, than we are to rejecting our own Jewish brothers and sisters. What I can’t figure though is why—if we accept this particular truth regarding the Jews—why don’t we as Christians also accept it for the sake of Muslims? For again, Jews, Muslims, and Christians all fall like fruit from the same tree of Abraham. Put another way, what makes it so difficult, and even reprehensible to some Christians, to think that we belong to and worship the same God as Muslims? This is a theological grace we’re willing to extend to Jews. Why not stretch out the hand a little farther? For what we really must remember is that we were not the first twinkle in God’s eye, that truly the hand that reached out to pull us into the family of God was not a Christian one, but a Jewish one.
I can’t answer these questions for anyone but myself. Answering for myself, I need to remember that as a religion, Christianity wasn’t established as such until 313, some 300 years after Jesus had been born, lived, died, risen again, and been ascended. Christianity was established as an official religion by the Emperor Constantine, who took this action in order to protect Christians from what was at that time, an intense onslaught of persecution, slaughter, and death at the hands of the Romans. In doing this Constantine ostensibly legalized being a Christian, putting the full force of the law behind the church. My guess is, at that time Christians took a deep sigh of relief. In years to come, however, Constantine’s actions would prove to have an unintended consequence. As followers of Jesus Christians were never promised safety. Jesus himself was crucified at the hands of the law. He certainly wasn’t protected by it. There is an essential element of personal risk involved in following Jesus. In 313 Constantine gave this risk a massive safety net. Granted, in some parts of the world this risk still goes so far as to cost Christians their very lives. For you and I, though, the risk is probably going to require more of a deep rending of relationship both to ourselves and to others. (I’ve always felt a certain affinity for the disciples sitting around the table with Jesus on the night he was betrayed. After Jesus announces that he is going to be betrayed by one of them, they all start asking, “Is it me? Surely it’s not me? Jesus, is it me?” I mean, here is a person they have come to feel a deep allegiance to and yet they are not even self-aware enough to know what their own next move is going to be!) This is the type of risk I find myself having to take—admitting my own insecurities and fears because I have it in me to betray Jesus without knowing it. Did Isaac and Ishmael know each other as brothers? That a part of each of their story was wound up in the other person? Scripture tells us that allowing Isaac to play with Ishmael was a risk Sarah couldn’t afford to take. She couldn’t risk losing her stature as Abraham’s preferred wife. So she betrayed Hagar and Ishmael to the wilderness and thereby secured a safe keeping for herself and Isaac. She established social protocols, and drew lines in the sand that would make it forever clear who is who and who belongs where. But of course, God crossed the line and found Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness. God betrayed neither Sarah nor Hagar, neither Isaac nor Ishmael. It’s a story that begs me to ask, are there people I have written out of my own story? Are there people whose stories I have written myself out of because long ago, when I accepted the teaching of my elders, I didn’t know how deep and wide and long and high the love of God actually is?
I have written a lot here, and I’m not really sure I’ve answered your question. I know Muslims who say they do not worship the same God as me and I know Muslims who say that they do. To those who say they share the same God as me, I suppose I could ask, why then don’t we also share the same mosque or church, and why don’t we both confess Jesus? Except I know Christians who don’t all share the same church and whose following of Jesus seems to take them worlds away from mine. And to those who say they don’t share the same God as me, I suppose I could judge them on account it or accept it as judgment upon me, but what good will that do? St. Francis of Assisi once prayed, “Let me not so much seek to be understood as to understand…for in this is eternal life.” I must leave it at that for now. I welcome your thoughts and always your prayers.
Fondly –
David
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