I think that Bernie Sanders acquitted himself well upon hearing the news that one of his followers had opened fire upon a group of Republican senators and congressman harmlessly gathered for a baseball practice:
He said what he should have said, and he said it eloquently. And I have no doubt that he was and is sincere.
However, Senator Sanders didn’t do so well earlier in the week:
“Bernie Sanders Shows How Religious Ignorance Breeds Progressive Intolerance”
“Bernie Sanders Shows the Left’s Refusal to Coexist With Traditional Believers”
“‘They Reject Christ, They Stand Condemned’: What Sanders Probably Heard”
The article to which I link immediately above reminds me of an episode in my own life. Some years ago, there was a controversy in an online Jewish periodical somewhere about the Latter-day Saint practice of vicarious temple baptisms on behalf of the dead, which, in some cases, had involved Jews in general and victims of the Nazi holocaust in particular.
I entered into that controversy, making arguments that I still hold to in that regard. Somebody — I think it was a Jew, but it may have been an apostate ex-Mormon provocateur (one or two of whom had joined in the discussion, though not necessarily in order to further dispassionate clarity) — commented, with some sense of outrage, real or feigned, that I seemed to believe that Jews could not be saved without Christ.
I responded that I believed precisely that — not only with regard to Jews but with regard to everybody else, whether Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, or Christian — as have the vast majority of Christians over the past, oh, two thousand years or so.
Unjustly but quite unsurprisingly, I’ve been accused ever since then, on the basis of that comment, of being an anti-Semitic bigot. (I must have sinned horribly in the antemortal world to be cursed with the poor quality of critics that I enjoy, but so it goes.)
There is something of that kind of misplaced outrage in this case, as well. Or so it seems to me.
That said, I want to register publicly, as I’ve done on numerous occasions before — here, for example — my complete disagreement with the claim that Muslims worship a different God than Christians do.
I even responded with several posts to, and at the time of, the firing of Larycia Hawkins from Wheaton College over this issue. Here are a couple of those posts:
It would be inaccurate to say that my vote would count for nothing at Wheaton College, near Chicago. On the contrary: With regard to theology, my vote, coming from a Mormon, would almost certainly do substantial damage to anyone or anything receiving it.
But I do want to publicly say, for what it’s worth, that I stand with Larycia Hawkins: Muslims, Christians, and Jews do indeed worship the same God.
As it happens, I also seem to stand with Pope Francis, whose 30 November 2015 remarks at the Central Mosque of Koudoukou, in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, appear to presume that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. And, if that’s the case, he was simply reaffirming the 1964 “dogmatic constitution” Lumen Gentium, issued under Pope Paul VI, which said of Muslims that “together with us they adore the one, merciful God” (II.16).
And I seem to stand with such Protestant theologians and scholars as the late Montgomery Watt of the University of Edinburgh, the late Anglican thinker Kenneth Cragg, the late Annemarie Schimmel of Harvard, Yale’s Miroslav Volf, and too many others to name.
And I seem to stand with the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, in a 1978 statement regarding God’s love for all mankind, specifically mentioned Muhammad as one of “the great religious leaders of the world” who received “a portion of God’s light,” and affirmed that “moral truths were given to [these leaders] by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals.”
I’m in good company.
David French, for whom I have great respect and with whom I typically agree — he and his wife even headed up “Evangelicals for Mitt” during both the 2008 and 2012 primary and general election seasons — says “No”:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428763/christians-muslims-same-god-wheaton-college
He’s wrong.
Francis Beckwith, who has a lengthy history of sharp criticisms of Mormonism, says “Yes”:
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/12/17/do-muslims-and-christians-worship-the-same-god/
Professor Beckwith is right on this question. As is Pope Francis. As are many other theologians and scholars.
I’ll dispose of the most obviously false argument immediately, one that, to his credit, Mr. French doesn’t make: Some in the West mistakenly believe that Allah is the name of a foreign deity like Zeus or Apollo or Ahriman, peculiar to Muslims and definitely not referring to the God worshiped by Christians. I’ve written on this here and here.
I have to admit to being puzzled by David French’s citation of the Protestant theologian R. C. Sproul: “To Muslims, god ‘is a single person, transcendent. The God Christians worship, on the other hand, is the maker of heaven and earth. He is one being and transcendent.'”
But the Qur’an, too, portrays God as “the maker of heaven and earth.” I haven’t counted, but I’m guessing that he’s described that way at least a hundred times in the text. He did it in six days. He planted a garden and put Adam and Eve in it. And so forth. And, according to Islamic theology, God is every bit as “transcendent” as Christians have ever made him out to be, if not far more so.
But the difference that French and his sources take to be the crucial point is that, in Islam, God is “one,” whereas in mainstream Christianity he’s “triune” — somehow simultaneously one single God in the three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Well, of course, that is a difference, and no small one.
And deciding when two views of x, or two ways of doing y, have diverged widely enough to have created two distinct x’s or two separate y’s is always a judgment call. When, exactly, did the Latin of the Iberian Peninsula cease to be Latin? When did that subsequent language become Spanish and Portuguese? Precisely when, in evolutionary biology, does a new species emerge? Is Swiss German a different language than standard German, or is it just a dialect of (and within) German? On what date did Dutch cease to be a German dialect and become its own language? If John has a beard, does it cease to be a beard if Jane plucks out a hair? How about ten hairs? How about a hundred? A thousand? Exactly when can it be said that John no longer has a beard?
I contend, though — and I’m in excellent company — that the similarities between the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God are still far and away sufficient to view them as referring to the same being. And I might ask Mr. French whether he believes that Jews and Christians worship different Gods. Because Jews no more believe in a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit than Muslims do. (As a matter of fact, Muslims have a far, far more positive view of Jesus than Judaism has historically had.) “Hear, O Israel,” says the famous Hebrew shema. The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). I would be surprised to hear Mr. French say that Jews worship an altogether different God than Christians do, but perhaps that is his view.
Even with all that said, though, I thoroughly reject Senator Sanders’s effort to use what is, in the final analysis, a common (if in my view mistaken) Chrstian view as a litmus test for whether a citizen is worthy to hold public office.
Finally, a more balanced view:
“Bernie’s Attack on Christian Beliefs Was Wrong — But It Was for the Right Reasons”
I could quibble with this article. But, on the whole, I think the author has the matter just about right.
Posted from Grindelwald, Switzerland
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