{"id":272,"date":"2005-11-16T15:26:52","date_gmt":"2005-11-16T23:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=255"},"modified":"2005-11-16T15:26:52","modified_gmt":"2005-11-16T23:26:52","slug":"do-christians-jews-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2005\/11\/16\/do-christians-jews-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Christians, Jews, and Muslims Worship the Same God?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost<\/a> raises some interesting questions<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-4o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}