“Same God”? What does that even mean?

Allow me to be contrarian.

Per my prior post, and all over the internet, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins was suspended from her position for saying that Muslims and Christians worship the “same God.”  Now everyone’s rushing to her defense, and citing various Catholic documents asserting the fact.  But let’s back up.

From a Muslim point of view, there is a definite continuity.  When they say, “we worship the same God,” they mean, “we believe that God revealed himself to Jews such as Abraham, and we likewise believe that Jesus was a prophet, but his followers messed up and thought he was God, so God gave it a final, and successful, go with Muhammad.”  In fact, the expression “people of the book” that is generally used to characterize Islam’s view of Jews and Christians, The Muslim Next Door author Sumbul Ali-Karamali recasts as “people of an earlier revelation” to emphasize this continuity (and the fact that the connection between the three religions, to Muslims, is not that they all have books, since, after all, the Quran was originally not a book at all but the utterances of Muhammad, written down by his followers and only compiled into a book later on, unless, that is, you follow the theory that the Quran had its origins in pre-Islamic religious literature).

But from a Christian point of view?

To speak of continuity makes no sense.  Did God really speak to Muhammad in that cave, and afterwards, repeatedly, in words that, when compiled, became the Quran?  If you believe that, you have no business being a Christian.  Go say the Shahada instead.

We can say that Muhammad drew inspiration from the Jews and Christians around him, and we can acknowledge that Muslims believe in a continuity.  But is that enough to get us to the “same God” formulation?

Imagine we’re talking about castles in Europe that we want to visit.  “I want to visit the one that was the inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty Castle!”  “I want to visit the one that the Sun King built!”  We can identify where these two castles are and determine that, no, these are not the same locations, the former in Bavaria and the latter in France.  But what if we didn’t have that information available?  We’d be going around in circles.

This “same God” business is even more muddled.  Of course both Islam and Christianity believe there is one God — though Christians believe in the Trinity and Muslims believe that this belief is rank polytheism.  Now, imagine a Muslim dies and (by means of that whole “baptism of desire”/right intention bit) shows up at the Pearly Gates.  Will he say, “oh, I was worshipping the Wrong God after all!” or “my bad, sorry for rejecting the Trinity and denying the divinity of Jesus”?

It makes no sense, really, to speak in these terms.  It’s not as if there are multiple gods out there and the question is whether Christians and Muslims alike have chosen the right one, for instance, worshiping Zeus vs. Apollo.  To speak of the “Same God” really only makes sense if it’s shorthand for acknowledging that Muslims are monotheistic and that their conception of God is reasonably similar to our own” – that is, a God of mercy and compassion, rather than, say, the Greek gods who, the Greeks believed, were indifferent to human needs and used them as pawns in their disputes.

And in this sense Wheaton College also has a point, though they don’t spell it out directly in their official statement on the matter.  My guess is that their complaint is essentially that this strips away too much of what Christians believe about God.  If you say, “God is a trinity consisting of the three persons Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and at the same time say, “in all the essentials, Muslims believe as we do,” you’re relegating the divinity of Jesus to a non-essential.  Is this what Hawkins intends to say?  Probably not.  But it points to the need for more careful, more meaningful terminology.