No matter what you think I’m saying at any given point in this article. Please read to the very end. Wisdom dialogue takes time and makes turns in the hope of being thorough and fair.
Lewis & Tash
C. S. Lewis’s final Chronicles of Narnia book, The Last Battle, introduces quite a controversy. How do names, attributes, and earnest seeking affect the way God receives or rejects worship? Does God respond to the earnest heart that reaches out for true God, for the real creator, even when that reach is discolored by received traditions or bald ignorance?
Narnia is crumbling into non-existence and all of its creatures are driven through a stable door leading into either darkness or something gloriously akin to heaven. One of the worshippers of the pagan god Tash, a soldier by the name of Emeth, which means “Truth” in Hebrew, finds himself accepted into the glorious realm. Of it, he says:
“Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”
When pressed on the meaning of this, Lewis responds in a letter saying, “I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god, or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. In the parable of the Sheep and Goats those who are saved do not seem to know that they have served Christ.”
This seems to echo in some measure what the Apostle Paul himself has said in Romans 2:9-16. Read it carefully.
“There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek, but glory and honor and peace to every man who does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek… For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus.”
Paul is preaching neither salvation by works, nor universal salvation, nor a salvation that can be found apart from the work of Christ, but gives some suggestion that God responds to hearts that are seeking for Him, as is written in 2 Chronicles 16:9, “For the eyes of the LORD move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His.” God meets a searching heart whether that heart has perfectly tuned theology and spurs perfect behavior or not.
Personal testimonies abound in Islamic communities about manifestations of Jesus appearing to Muslims in shut off communities preaching the Gospel, even to those who have never heard about Christ.
In my 20s, I had a boss who was cheating on his wife, cheating in his business, struggling for meaning and longing for redemption. He came to me while I was working and said, “I give to charities, buy groceries for poor people, donate my time and money to help the homeless. Will God reward me?”
I told him about Cornelius, the Roman centurion from Caesarea, “a devout man, and one who feared God with all his household, and gave many alms to the Jewish people, and prayed to God continually.” The Jews called him, “a righteous and God-fearing man well-spoken of by the entire nation of the Jews.” An angel from God appeared to him and said, “Your prayers and alms have ascended as a memorial before God. 5 “And now dispatch some men to Joppa, and send for a man named Simon, who is also called Peter.” This man’s imperfect understanding of God is evident in his attempt to worship at Peter’s feet when he arrives. Even so, God heard his heart’s cry and responded. What was that response? He sent him Peter to bring a more perfect understanding, to give him a chance to respond to yet deeper truth.
I stopped my work and turned to my boss and said “The moral of the story is that I am your reward, and I’ve come to preach to you a gospel of repentance.” Didn’t I just make myself sound so gloriously prophet like there? It gave me chills, imagining how magnificent I was… and I had hair still.
My point here is to provide a qualification for what I am about to say as I wrestle with the question, “Do Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews?”
God responds to the heart. Even imperfect understandings, which, in truth, characterizes all human worship, do not nullify a hearts earnest and true desire to know the Creator. That said, our understanding of the Creator is as powerful a worldview foundation as whether or not we believe in a creator.
So… Do Muslims, Jews and Christians worship the same God?
Just nail me to the wall and crucify me now!
There is no easy answer that I can give that will not engender a great deal of impassioned rage and condemnation. Any attempt I make at a complex answer will be regarded as compromise and weakness of conviction.
If I say, “Yes,” I will be accused of bastardizing the gospel and legitimizing a violently anti-Christian, unbiblical, and darkly oppressive religion. No, Islam is NOT a religion of peace.
If I say, “No,” I will be accused of ignoring everything I just wrote in our last discussion and forsaking an exploitable connection with Muslims when seeking to win them to faith in Christ. And try to win them we must… Christ’s final earthly commission to us and all.
Doubt this unquellable ranker?
The internet almost melted into civil war over Pope Francis’ recent claims.
“The church also regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in himself, merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,” although “they do not acknowledge Jesus as God” and regard him as only a prophet. The subsequent Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise defines the belief that “together with us [Muslims] adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
Knowing what I do about the history, goals, and processes of Islam throughout its millennium and a half existence, this makes me splutter in indignation right along with other internet news junkies.
But we must also consider the thoughtful musings of Peter Geach, in his 1969 book, God and the Soul. He writes, “Only by turning to the true God can a man win grace and forgiveness,” but reminds that, “A sufficiently erroneous thought of a God will simply fail to relate to the true and living God at all. Where the line is to be drawn, God only knows…” That there is a line, he clearly states, saying, “For Christians, ‘God’ is not a proper name like “Woden,” but a descriptive term, true of the Blessed Trinity and not true of Woden.” He also declares, “We dare not accept a tolerant attitude towards errors concerning the Divine Nature because we are in no position to judge what level of error will entail that a man’s worship is wholly misdirected.”
Again, this is NOT universalism. It is a question concerning the exact line where variations in perceived attributes of God establish a different God in the heart of the worshipper. What degree of mislabeling in “what-the-creator-is-like” leaves one attributing creation to an utterly false god?
Few would say that Jews worship a false god, simply because they have failed to fully grasp a Trinitarian view of God, which while being resonant in the Tanakh (Old Testament) is more clearly defined in the New Testament, which they do not accept.
Just so, since, Muslims do worship a monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient, all wise, immutable, eternal, infinite creator of all, at what point in their biblically deviant understanding of this deity does He become something wholly other than the Creator in Scripture? Might we make similar claims of deviancy for many a Christian whose weak understanding of Scripture leaves them susceptible to a host of false imaginings about God? I think so.
Most Christians that I know adore the baby Jesus… he’s just sooooo cute, almost as good as YouTube videos of kittens playing with puppies. They love the Jesus cuddling a lamb around his neck as he blesses children. They are quite partial to the Jesus that dines with sinners, lets wayward women bathe his feet with tears, and forgives tax collectors. They have great hope in the Jesus that heals the sick, and raises the dead.
They have little tolerance, however, for the Jesus who cleanses the temple, insults his insulting family, ridicules his followers’ stupidity, turns away the rich young ruler, and openly denounces the Sadducees and Pharisees over their malicious hypocrisy. That “Woe unto you” Jesus just isn’t to our liking.
Almost all Christians have a passionate interest in God the Father from the New Testament who sends Jesus, the Christ, to redeem us from our sins… a God of love, mercy, grace and endless forgiveness. Far fewer want any truck with “the God of the Old Testament,” full of judgment and wrath, a drowner of worlds, a curser of creation. They are uncomfortable with the God of “Thou shalt not,” and “he who does this shall die.” People love the God whose plans are for welfare and not for evil, to give a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11) but pay little attention to the fact that these plans are to be accomplished through seventy years of tortured exile. Indeed, they’ve piled onto terms like justice and love like a rugby pack, twisting them into alignment with the modern atheist agenda in social Marxism, but have expunged the attributes of divine wrath and holiness from their vocabulary.
Is this not preaching another god?
If one merely reads the Ninety-nine names of God in Islam, he’d be hard pressed to figure out why calling the Creator Allah vs. YHWH is anything other than a linguistic preference. And, yet, the practice of Islamic service to God, the stories they tell of Allah in action, the processes they claim for advancing Allah’s kingdom on Earth are so far flung from those of YHWH in Scripture that one would be equally hard pressed to find the same deity hiding behind the name.
While YHWH creates a kingdom of priests to become a light to the nations, Allah creates a nation of warriors to oppress and destroy. Where YHWH calls for the power of influence over the lost, Allah calls for the influence of power to force conversion, and to justify any sin whose ultimate goal is the destruction of Allah’s enemies—false friendship, theft, Rape, drug trades, sex trafficking, torture are all permissible in the destruction of the infidel.
In his 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto takes a good deal of time to distinguish Islamic conceptions of the Holy from Jewish and Christian. He depicts Allah and YHWH as two fundamentally different expressions of holiness, leading to radically different kinds of religion.
Of YHWH as presented by Moses’ hand, “the numinous” (Energy of the Holy) “…is throughout rationalized and moralized, i.e. charged with ethical import, until it becomes the holy in the fullest sense of the word. The culmination of the process is found in the Prophets and in the Gospels. …Here is to be found its manifest superiority over, e.g., Islam in which Allah is mere numen.” Allah is, thus, pure divine power and force without stable discernable rationality. Nothing that he does, says, or requires needs to make sense according to any consistent measure. Like the pagan gods, there is a measure of whimsicality to him that is to be endured and replicated without investigation.
He goes on,
“…the special quality of Islam is just that in it, from its commencement onwards, the rational and specifically moral aspect of the idea of God was unable to acquire the firm and clear impress that it won, e.g., in Christianity and Judaism. In Allah, the numinous is absolutely preponderant over everything else. So that, when Islam is criticized for giving a merely fortuitous character to the claim of morality, as though the moral law were only valid through the chance caprice of the deity, the criticism is well justified… the numinous in Allah, nah, even his uncanny and daemonic character, outweighs what is rational in him. And this will account for what is commonly called the fanatical character of this religion. Strongly excited feeling of the numen, that runs to frenzy, untempered by the more rational elements of religious experience that is everywhere the essence of Fanaticism.”
Have I answered our initial question? Yes, and No.
Do Muslims, Jews and Christians worship the same God? Sort of, but not really.
All three propose to offer worship to the monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and infinite creator of all, but the expressions of that worship in relationship to human society are of a wholly different character and goal. To quote Aslan, “And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”
