My friend Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost raises some interesting questions about whether Christians, Jews and Muslims worship the same God. Joe’s answer, in short, is that we do not worship the same God because of Christianity’s triune understanding of God and specifically because of our belief in the divinity of Christ. I’ve heard this argument periodically bandied about in Evangelical circles.
I don’t buy this line of argument. I think it mixes who God actually is (ontology) with what we know and believe about Him (epistemology) and what sort of belief in Him results in salvation (soteriology).
God is no less God, as an ontological being, if our understanding and knowledge of Him is imperfect. If we follow this line of reasoning all the way, no one would truly be worshipping God unless the worshipper has a perfect knowledge of God. Since no one can claim a perfect knowledge of God, we’d all be excluded as worshipers.
We certainly can cite many passages in the New Testament that speak of salvation being made available only in Christ. Clearly, the New Testament scripture teaches that saving faith is only faith in Christ; no one is saved apart from Christ; no one who rejects the divinity of Christ can claim to have saving faith.
This soteriological question, however, is a different question, than the whether Muslims and Jews have at least some degree of knowledge of and faith in the same God, as an ontological being, that we Christians worship. Scripture reveals God’s nature progressively. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob clearly is presented in scripture as the same God we Christians worship. We Christians believe we understand more of His triune nature than Abraham, Isaac or Jacob did because of God’s progressive revelation of Himself in scripture and in the person of Christ. The epistle to the Hebrews certainly confirms the continuity between genuine faith under the Old and New Covenants. God has not changed, but we now know more about Him through Christ and are offered a new covenant based on that deeper knowledge.
So, I think it is more accurate to make a distinctions based on progressive revelation and what constitutes saving faith under the new covenant rather than to define a non-triune understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as constituting a “different” ontological being than the God Christians worship.
This distinction between ontology, epistemology, and soteriology gives us Christians common ground with Muslims and Jews on many basic things relating to the nature of man, morality, and natural law, while leaving us free to differ on matters specific to soteriology without resorting to universalism.
6 replies on “Do Christians, Jews, and Muslims Worship the Same God?”
Excellent clarity in thinking here, David. I like it. You are right. We are able to discuss with Jews and Muslims the nature of God and find much common ground. I agree that we can then differ on particular matter of soteriology.
Hey David,
The primary point of my post was that the way we talk about this issue tends to obscure some essential differences. If we say that we worship the “same God” but that Christians just know more about “who God is” then we can say it is a matter of epistemology. This is the standard Christian belief because it seems (at least if you’re not a Jew) to be rather non-controversial. But saying this obscures the different claim’s we make about ontology.
We are saying that God is triune, while the Jews think this concept is nonsense. But God is either triune or he is not. We can’t say that he is triune in relation to Christians and unitarian in relation to the Jews because the two are contradictory. You also seem to imply that apart from salvation, the trinity makes no real difference.
The problem I have with the standard claim that the difference is merely a matter of epistemology is that we are essentially saying that the Jews are so religiously ignorant that they don’t even realize what they are worshipping. That they are, in essence, worshipping Christ even though they claim to reject his claims to be the Son of God. This claim is both condescending and confused. If we want to treat the modern Jew’s belief with the respect it deserves then we should have the courage to admit that their conception of God is so incomplete that we cannot even claim to be worshipping the same being.
Also, I’m rather concerned by the unintentional implications in your post that knowledge of Jesus (and the trinity) is only really important for soteriology. I think knowledge of Jesus shakes the very concept of God to its core and is essential for any claim to know God. It is one thing not to have ever heard of Jesus. But when someone who claims to be worshipping the God of the OT must change their conception when faced with the incarnation. I don’t see where Jesus leaves that open to dispute.
Joe,
Thanks for the interesting comments. A few thoughts:
we are essentially saying that the Jews are so religiously ignorant that they even when faced with revelation from God himself that that they don’t even realize what they are worshipping
What about passages like John 1:10-12:
There is a strong theme in the NT, I think, that both Jews and Gentiles don’t recognize Christ even though he has been revealed as God. The NT typically portrays this as a matter of willfullness and/or of being blinded by the devil, the flesh, and the world. I don’t see the NT anywhere claiming that Jews who do not accept Jesus believe in some other ontological being than Yahweh. The NT presents it, I think, more as an issue of not understanding and having faith in something new Yahweh is revealing about himself. Romans 11 is particularly compelling on this point. Israel’s initial rejection of Christ is presented in Romans 11 as a temporary disobedience to the revelation of God in Christ, not as the worship of some ontological being or false god other than Yahweh.
I think knowledge of Jesus shakes the very concept of God to its core and is essential for any claim to know God.
I do agree that, under the new covenant, knowledge (in the NT sense of an intimate relationship with) of Jesus is essential for any claim to have a relationship with God. But I don’t think it’s correct to say the knowledge of Jesus “shakes the very concept of God to its core.” The orthodox Christian view, I think, is that the revelation of God in Jesus is perfectly consistent with everything God revealed about Himself before the incarnation. Jesus doesn’t “shake” the OT concept of God. This sounds a bit too much like the heresy that there is a “bad” OT god and a “good” NT god. Jesus rather fullfills and completes God’s self-revelation prior to the incarnation. God’s nature remains ever the same.
Well…let me jump into the middle ground here 🙂
I have to disagree with Joe that Jews worship a different God. As David points out, there is simply no Scriptural evidence of this and every Scriptural point about unbelieving Jews is not that they don’t believe in God, but instead that they don’t believe in His Messiah. There is a fundamental difference there.
However, I also have real issue with stating that the Muslims worship the same God we do. This is a different problem. Though I would agree that on a technical basis, they begin in the same place as the Jews (substituting Ishmael for Isaac), their understanding of who God is – His nature, attributes, and actions – causes them to veer into an understanding of God that has only peripheral correlation to the God of Scripture. If you say that the Muslims worship the same God as we do, then you might as well say that Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons do as well…are we prepared to go that route?
On a completely different note – David, it’d be great if your blog included automatic e-mail updates when comments are posted. Of course, such a feature only feeds my laziness 😉
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Great conversation. Thanks as always David for starting it. Here are some tentative thoughts to which I would appreciate your response.
First, there are some Scriptures teaching that the Jews who do not recognize Jesus as God do so because they do not know the Father as God or do not know the Father because they do not know Jesus.
Joh 8:18 I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”
19 Then they asked him, “Where is your father?” “You do not know me or my Father,” Jesus replied. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”
Joh 16:2 They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.
3 They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me.
I think it is right to distinguish sense of knowledge. For example, we know from Romans 1 that there is a sense in which all men know God, but that knowledge is suppressed through sin. But this sense of suppressed “knowledge” is to be contrasted with the kind of true knowledge of God available through Him. All men know the God we worship but that knowledge is worthless in sin.
Therefore, the issue is not whether all men “know” the same God, but whether men worship Him or fall into the idolatry that pervades natural man.
In other words, the question to ask about the Jews or the Muslims or a professing Christian is not whether we know the same God. In some sense, all humans know the same God. The issue is whether or not the manner of approaching God suppresses the knowledge of God that we have and mutilates it into idolatry.
In other words, the Scriptural question is not whether this person worships the true God, but whether he does so in a manner that is idolatrous. There is no question that Jewish worship at various points in history was idolatrous in this sense despite including elements of truth, e.g. of the brazen serpent.
My conclusion would be that it scarcely matters whether you “identify”, i.e. know in the suppressed sense, God correctly in your worship. What matters is whether you worship Him non-idolatrously, know in the unsuppressed sense.
What is offensive about saying that Jews and Muslims (and why not Hindus and Buddhists and Deists) worship the same God, is that it implies there is some interesting significance to this — some spiritual family resemblance based on “knowing” the same God. But the spiritual gap is as wide between idolatrous and spiritual worship of the same God as that between Balaam and Moses, both of whom “knew” the one true God, but only one of them non-idolatrously. The idolatrous worship of Yahweh in the Northern Kingdom did not create spiritual unity with the Kingdom of David — the idolatrous method of worshipping was the fundamental ground of the antagonism.
This is true for Christians as well. Idolatrous worship of the same Triune God, idolatrous prayers offered in the name of Christ should not be a ground of spiritual familiarity. This is the great counterweight to ecumenism. Theologically speaking, churches may be very similar — they identify God by the same names, but where one approaches that God idolatrously and another approaches that God spiritually, there is no communion.
Regards,
Pensans